Robert Stone’s sobered-up appraisal of his ‘sixties youth appears in a New York Times appreciation – Stone has died, age 77 – of his terrific novels and short stories. His story “Helping,” which UD teaches whenever she teaches The Short Story, is a hilarious toxic gem, told from the point of view of a cosmically, confusedly embittered Vietnam vet. It’s not really Elliot’s war experience that’s “undermining” him (both the main character and his wife use this word to describe their general condition); life itself, that sickening mystery, is eroding his capacity to survive. His wife channels her fundamental misery, her disgust with the awfulness of human beings and human fate, into social work (they’re both social workers), but if you push her she’ll “[shudder] with loathing” for some of her clients:

“You can’t imagine! The woman munching Twinkies. The kid smelling of shit. They’re high morning noon and night… The Vopotik child will die, I think… Of course, sometimes you wonder whether it makes any difference. That’s the big question, isn’t it… You wonder. Ought they to live at all? To continue the cycle?”

Elliot, a mean drunk, viciously calls her “the friend of the unfortunate… the Christian Queen of Calvary.”

Art and alcohol, with their shared promise of desubliminated emotion and clarified perception, constantly attract and then repel this spiritually congested, bitterly disillusioned man, and Stone has the short story writer’s gift of condensing this attraction/repulsion business into sharp small moments:

Elliot’s cubicle in the social-services department was windowless and lined with bookshelves. When he found himself unable to concentrate on the magazine and without any heart for his paperwork, he ran his eye over the row of books beside his chair. There were volumes by Heinrich Muller and Carlos Castaneda, Jones’s life of Freud, and The Golden Bough. The books aroused a revulsion in Elliot. Their present uselessness repelled him…. There seemed to be nothing but whirl inside him… He could not control the headlong promiscuity of his thoughts.

Later, driving home:

When the engine turned over, Jussi Bjorling’s recording of the Handel Largo filled the car interior. He snapped it off at once…

After he goes to a bar and gets drunk (he’s had his alcoholism under control for awhile, but now that’s gone), he drives home and sits parked there for awhile.

For five minutes or so, Elliot sat in his car in the barn with the engine running and his Handel tape on full volume. He had driven over from East Ilford in a baroque ecstasy, swinging and swaying and singing along.

That mania quickly crashes into rageful despair, which again he understands in terms of art:

As he drank, a fragment from old Music’s translation of Medea came into his mind. “Old friend, I have to weep. The gods and I went mad together and made things as they are.”

Back in the house, the phone rings. One of his wife’s clients, a violent and disturbed man, calls to threaten the couple, and Elliot, drunk beyond caring, tells the guy to come on over. “You know where we live… Come on over… Bring your fat wife and your beat-up kid. Don’t be embarrassed if your head’s a little small.” He puts the phone down and happily grabs one of his guns and tells his wife: “Most of the time… I’m helpless in the face of human misery. Tonight I’m ready to reach out.”

Getting drunk was an insurrection, a revolution – a bad one. There would be outsize bogus emotions. There would be petty moral blackmail and cheap remorse.

The story ends with Elliot encountering his tall blond handsome professor neighbor (married to a tall blond beautiful woman, with two beautiful brilliant blond children – Elliot and his wife have so far been unable to have children) in the snowy woods around his house. Elliot’s envy of this pleasant enlightened compassionate man is homicidally total, and both men realize (Elliot is still holding his gun) they’re in a very dicey situation.

But the moment passes, and Elliot trudges on, sunk in the lower depths…