BETWEEN TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST (by Richard Henry Dana, written while still an undergraduate at Harvard, after interrupting his studies for health reasons to spend, in fact, something over two years intermittently before the mast as a common seaman sailing from Boston to California and back) and Robert Creeley’s The Collected Prose (containing a piece called “Three Fate Tales” that includes a description of a mouse and its shadow moving across the snow under full moon into the storyteller’s shadow and thence onto the storyteller’s arm as a cat and its shadow wait), on the shelf there are three books together: Bottom Dogs (City Lights Books, 1930, 1961), The Edward Dahlberg Reader (New Directions, 1967) and The Leafless American (McPherson and Co., 1986). Another I thought I had (once I am reminded of it) is missing—where, where, where is it? (Because I Was Flesh.) Another shelf in the house? Upstairs? No. Another life, another apartment? See the spine clear as day—somewhere.
I am looking, because of a conversation last night over dinner in a restaurant sitting on a long side of the table across from Ursule Molinaro (whose entire novel Positions with White Roses is narrated by a woman who is sitting on a long side of the dinner table with her parents—this is the “normal daughter,” the “visiting daughter”), and U. M.’s publisher Bruce McPherson, and next to Matthew Stadler. Also present, but presently out of earshot at the far end of the long table full of people, is Lynne Tillman (Cast in Doubt, The Madame Realism Complex, The Broad Picture), who had invited Molinaro out from the city.
L. D. asks U. M. what she thinks of Dahlberg. But that is after she has asked about: Jane Bowles. U. M.: “I hate her.” (L. D. intensely surprised.) “I hate her work because I love Paul Bowles so much.” (L. D. wonders: is this necessary? obviously missing something here.) Well, what authors does she feel close to, has she felt close to? Buzzati, Giorgio Manganelli. But what Americans? (L. D. is persistent.) Well, Paul Bowles is American. Well, besides him? Stadler! (The Sex Offender, The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, Allan Stein in progress.) And Jaimy Gordon. She loves Jaimy Gordon. Gordon is also on McPherson & Co.’s list, and that is how Molinaro first met him, some twenty years ago: they both loved Jaimy Gordon and found themselves talking about her somewhere. (L. D. may not be remembering that quite right.)
Also on McPherson & Co.’s list: Frederick Ted Castle. How does U. M. feel about him, whose compendious suitcase of a book, the amazing Anticipation, L. D. admires? (U. M.’s answer inconclusive.) Though Castle himself may have been a bit rough-edged when met in a bar and addressed with admiring words by a fan some years ago, Anticipation is inviting in the way a journal or a letter is inviting—open, personal, giving the impression of easiness and flexibility and good humor in the writing—and in addition is vast, wide-ranging, informative, opinionated, humorously self-conscious, formally adventurous, exact and written with crystal clarity. In fact, it answers very well to a description of storytelling Creeley gives in his introduction to his Collected Prose, a description L. D. discovers when poking around in the book in search of the tale she remembers that included the mouse in moonlight: “that intimate, familiar, localizing, detailing, speculative, emotional, unending talking.” As usual, especially in the case of books she admires, L. D. did not finish reading Anticipation. One hundred and fifty pages or so, about twelve years ago. Enough to know, though, as in the case of Dahlberg, that it interested her very much.
Now, Molinaro herself is another that L. D. admires (e.g.: “A man with many wives and little money, or perhaps it was: a little wife and much money … ”—quoting from memory, may not have it quite right and not sure what story it is from). Does she not have certain things in common with Jane Bowles, in fact, as L. D. cautiously suggests, not saying all she is thinking, afraid of offending? But surely, surely not wrong about that? The dry humor. The ladylike characters—as for instance Molinaro’s Mrs. Feathergill—with hidden and sometimes criminal or potentially criminal depths. The pitiless eye with which she observes customs, behaviors, foibles. The clear style. The device of repeated epithets, as for instance Molinaro’s “the Hispanic-looking boy.” The keen irony. (“Just because she has inherited her mother’s aquiline nose, does this mean she smells the same rat her mother smells?” Quoting from memory again, from a story she heard Molinaro read out loud.)
“I hate Jane Bowles!” she says, though. “She is sentimental; I am not!” L. D. intends to mull this one over—she has never thought of J. Bowles as sentimental. At a deeper level? Something she has missed? And then more: “She is X … , I am not!” and again: “She is X … , I am not!”—two additional perfectly balanced statements, naming what Bowles is that Molinaro is not. (No one else present can remember what those other two statements were.) Now the two across the table become enthusiastic about Paul Bowles. L. D. has a large place in her heart for Jane Bowles, but agrees with them that P. Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky is quite admirable as a piece of writing, if horrifying, of course, as a tale. McPherson names other P. Bowles titles, among them (as best L. D. can remember) Up Above the World, “A Distant Episode,” A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard—and Molinaro concurs behind her dark glasses: “My favorite story is ‘He of the Assembly.’” She has called for an ashtray immediately, urgently. She smokes Gauloises before and after her plate of gray sliced steak, perhaps even during. (“The mother returns, carrying a second small bowl of Spanish cream. Which she places between the father & the visiting daughter, equidistant from their elbows on the dinner table.”—Positions with White Roses.) L. D. gives up promoting the case of J. Bowles, but thinks there is more to the story of U. M.’s feelings about J. Bowles: doesn’t one often emphatically deny in public what one secretly has to acknowledge?
L. D. continues to think of McP.’s list: what about Dahlberg? U. M. hates him. Can’t stand him! Unbearable! Words to that effect, if not exactly those words. McPherson more or less concurs, making exception of certain writings, becoming slightly apologetic—for publishing him?—in the face of her onslaught. (Perhaps merely out of courtesy toward Molinaro.)
L. D. knows Dahlberg interests her though, again, she has read only a little, a long time ago, a few passages from one book or two—that was enough at the time, enough to learn something from, and to know to keep that book, keep it handy. Always intending to read more of it, the rest of it, and more of his other books, as well as the rest of other books not by him, the whole of many other books, later, years later, she thinks, when she retires. (But—retires from what ?)
What about Dahlberg, then? Why does she not hear his name often? Was he a grouser also? Brusque in social exchanges like the daring stylist Mr. Castle? Is that why U. M. so emphatically does not like him? Will one be forgotten, no matter how fine a writer, if one is unpleasant or offensive in company? Does McP. publish only nice or at least civil women (though emphatic women—U. M. has spoken out against translating, also: a terrible bore! she says) and cranky, crabby men? No, there’s Robert Kelly (Queen of Terrors, Cat Scratch Fever) — not in the least a crab! Also on the list is David Matlin (How the Night Is Divided), perfectly civil, whom L. D. encounters by chance some days later, in time to ask his view of Dahlberg. What about Dahlberg? she asks Matlin from her seat on a long side of a picnic table by an old hotel, Matlin on the other long side? Matlin’s response concerns the importance of Dahlberg’s influence on certain American poets, including perhaps Charles Olson. He mentions also how much he admires Do These Bones Live (a series of essays on the social and spiritual isolation of American writers first published in 1941), calling it something like “superb.”
L. D. knows little about Dahlberg beyond, perhaps, that his handling of language is interesting, that he is an interesting stylist—this is enough for her to want to keep him available on the shelf, even if she has seldom picked up the books. Over dinner, McP. had remarked: underappreciated writer. Here, again. L. D. thinks, comes up this recurring question of underappreciation and, in fact, overappreciation of writers, also of other artists. (She has been thinking, lately, of the general underappreciation of Haydn and overappreciation of Mozart that seem beyond correction by now.) P. Bowles also underappreciated, as is J. Bowles. American public may resent expatriate Americans and withhold appreciation from them, as possibly in the case of J. Bowles and P. Bowles. But ex-patriatism irrelevant to case of Dahlberg, surely. McP. had continued: Dahlberg may be underappreciated because material is so harsh, so difficult. Or did he say: unpalatable. Or painful. But then there’s Céline, McP. added. (L. D. thinking, though, Céline is not American.)
Dahlberg (time to go to the shelf, the books—back covers, front matter, back matter; then some reference books): Bottom Dogs, introduction by—D. H. Lawrence. Dedication: “For my Friend Jonathan Williams.” At least one friend. From Dahlberg’s preface, written in Spain, 1961: “When I finished Bottom Dogs in Brussels and returned to America, I was quite ill in the hospital at Peterborough, New Hampshire. … I was slow in recovering. The real malady was Bottom Dogs.”
Lawrence’s introduction begins: “When we think of America, and of her huge success, we never realize how many failures have gone, and still go to build up that success. It is not till you live in America, and go a little under the surface, that you begin to see how terrible and brutal is the mass of failure that nourishes the roots of the gigantic tree of dollars.” Skimming further, see the word “America” or “American” repeated many times: “savage America … American pioneers … American position today … position of the Red Indian … American soil … deep psychic change … old sympathetic glow … The American senses other people by their sweat and their kitchens … their repulsive effluvia … American ‘plumbing,’ American sanitation, and American kitchens … American nausea … American townships … repulsion from the physical neighbour … Manhattan Transfer … Point Counter Point … They stink! My God, they stink! … Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson … ” Still nothing about Dahlberg himself. What will Lawrence say? Ah: something about Dahlberg’s main character, Lorry, and then the conclusion: “The style seems to me excellent, fitting the matter. It is sheer bottom-dog style, the bottom-dog mind expressing itself direct, almost as if it barked. That directness, that unsentimental and non-dramatized thoroughness of setting down the under-dog mind surpasses anything I know. I don’t want to read any more books like this. But I am glad to have read this one, just to know what is the last word in repulsive consciousness, consciousness in a state of repulsion. It helps one to understand the world, and saves one the necessity of having to follow out the phenomenon of physical repulsion any further, for the time being.” Bandol, 1929. He has also said: “The book is perfectly sane: yet two more strides and it is criminal insanity.” That was enough for Lawrence, who was, however, Dahlberg’s friend. Repulsion: I think of Céline again.
Dahlberg: an American realist or naturalist preceding the line that stretches from James T. Farrell to Jack Kerouac.
Inside, a biographical note probably written by Dahlberg himself: “Dahlberg was born in 1900 in a charity maternity hospital in Boston and at the age of five committed to a Catholic orphanage. Before reaching his twelfth year he was an inmate of a Jewish orphan asylum, where he remained until he was seventeen.” Occupations, after that: Western Union messenger boy, trucker, driver of a laundry wagon, cattle drover, dishwasher, potato peeler, bus-boy, longshoreman, clerk. Education: the University of California and Columbia University. (Though he later, in Because I Was Flesh, referred to what he encountered there as “canonized illiteracy” and remarked that “anybody who had read twelve good books knew more than a doctor of philosophy.”)
A standard reference book describes him slightly differently, as “the illegitimate son of an itinerant woman-barber”—who is referred to in yet another reference work as “the Junoesque owner of the Star Lady Barbershop of Kansas City.”
She moved from town to town, selling hair switches, giving osteopathic treatments, going on again when she felt the place had been played out. In this way she hoped to save a little money and establish herself in some thriving city. She had taken Lorry with her wherever she went.
—Bottom Dogs
Paul Carroll, who edited and introduced the contents of The Dahlberg Reader, describes Lawrence’s introduction to Bottom Dogs as “shrill, chilly.” (I would add, keeping more or less to the rhyme scheme, that it seems “unwilling.”) In his own introduction he announces: “Three major themes distinguish Mr. Dahlberg’s writings: his dialogue with the body; his criticism of other writers; and his condemnation of the modern world.”
Carroll goes on to say: “Certainly there is no prose like Dahlberg’s prose in all of American literature. At its best, the Dahlberg style is monumental and astonishing,” evolving from “hard-bitten, bony, slangy” to “supple, bizarre, a weapon of rage and authority,” and peaking after decades with “cadence and dignity … and … rich, queer erudition.” Dahlberg was also described—by Sir Herbert Read, an English poet and champion of the importance of the arts to education and industry—as “a lord of the language, the heir of Sir Thomas Browne, Burton, and the Milton of the great polemical pamphlets.” Yet he spent most of his years in poverty, lack of “respectable” recognition. …
He despised contemporary America, rigorously hated it and condemned it, hated all that was mechanized and sophisticated that separated people from the natural world. “As for myself,” he said in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, “I’m a medievalist, a horse and buggy American, a barbarian, anything, that can bring me back to the communal song of labor, sky, star, field, love.”
His circle, at various times, included Anderson, Ford Madox Ford (whom he described, before he knew him well, as a “Falstaffian bag of heaving clothes”), Josephine Herbst, Karl Shapiro, Isabella Gardner, Jonathan Williams, Allen Tate, e. e. cummings, William Carlos Williams—the last two of whom Ford wrote about together with Dahlberg as three “neglected” authors. He was also supported by Williams, by Archibald MacLeish and by Robert Duncan.
The Reader includes literary essays, personal letters, portions of the novel The Sorrows of Priapus and chapters from the autobiographical Because I Was Flesh. Jonathan Williams took the cover photograph, and Alfred Kazin contributed a quote to the back cover that calls this “one of the few important American books published in our day.” I skim through.
Here is Dahlberg being curmudgeonly about Melville. “Moby-Dick, a verbose, tractarian fable on whaling, is a book of monotonous and unrelenting gloom … , Moby-Dick is gigantology, a tract about a gibbous whale and fifteen or more lawless seamen. … In a book of half a millennium of pages, the adjectives alone are heavy enough to sink the Theban Towers … ‘moody,’ ‘mad,’ ‘demonic,’ ‘mystic,’ ‘brooding,’ ‘crazy, ‘lunatic,’ ‘insane,’ and ‘malicious’. … Melville was as luckless with his metaphors. … His solecisms and hyperboles are mock fury. … This huffing treatise is glutted. … Melville’s jadish vocabulary is swollen into the Three Furies. … ”
Who else did he vilify? Where is the list? Here is a partial one, from Paul Carroll’s introduction—“What he said (at a party given for him by Isabella Gardner) about Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, Edmund Wilson, Pound, and, I believe, the New Critics was univocal, brilliant, sour, erudite, and unanswerable.” One of the reference works adds to that list: Fitzgerald. Among the few whom he praised were Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson and Dreiser.
Did he like, in prose, what he did himself? He employed a stout, pungent Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, including unfamiliar words, with beautiful sound: “A low, squab mist hovers over the bay which damps the job-lot stucco houses.”—Because I Was Flesh. (I look up “squab” to understand this curious way he is using it. I find no adjective form but: fledgling pigeon about four weeks old; short, fat person; couch; cushion for chair or couch.)
Literary and classical allusions combined in vivid descriptions: “The playgrounds in back resembled Milton’s sooty flag of Acheron. They extended to the brow of the stiff, cindered gully that bent sheer downwards toward a boggy Tophet overrun with humpback bushes and skinny, sour berries.” I enjoy “boggy Tophet” and make a halfhearted attempt to find Milton’s sooty flag of Acheron. I find only Acheron—meaning one of the rivers in the infernal region; and Hades itself. As for Tophet, it is a shrine south of ancient Jerusalem where human sacrifices were performed to Moloch.
Opening here and there, I also find an irony, a careful, self-conscious word choice with an edge of humor, that remind me again of J. Bowles. “The sight of the poultry seemed to make him listless.”
The preface to The Leafless American is by Robert Creeley (written 1986, in Waldoboro, Maine). “The immense loneliness of this country’s people. … It may be that there is truly no hope for any one of us until we remember, literally, this scarified and dislocated place we presume humanly to come from, whether the body of ground we claim as home or the physical body itself, which we have also all but lost. Dahlberg has made this determined gesture of renewal and recognition again and again in his work, and if he is, as some feel, the necessary fob of our collective American letters, he is also a resourceful friend to any who would attempt their own instruction and survival in the bedlam of contemporary life. … Because we have neither a history simply available to us nor the resource of a community underlying our acts, no matter their individual supposition or nature, we work in singular isolation as writers in this country. Unlike our European counterparts who work in modes and with words long established by a communal practice and habit, we have had to invent a syntax and address appropriate to the nature of our situation. … Therefore the extraordinary rhetorical resources of Dahlberg’s writing are intensively American in nature … ”
Americans are the subject of the first essay in The Leafless American. The other short pieces concern: the decline of souls in America (“May no one assume that these granitic negations comfort me”—I relish the word “granitic”); Kansas City (“a smutty and religious town … Homer detested Ithaca, and let me admit, I hate Kansas City”); Spain; Rome and America (“The difference between the Roman and the American empire is that we are now adopting the licentious habits of a Poppaea, or a Commodus, or a Domitian, without having first acquired stable customs, deities, or a civilization”); an unfavorable review; literature’s place of low esteem in American culture at the time of writing (but I can find no dates of first publications of these pieces); Stephen Crane; Sherwood Anderson (“We are now in the long, cold night of literature, and most of the poems are composed in the Barren Grounds”—“Barren Grounds”: I suspect the reference is to The Pilgrim’s Progress, and I look through the book, another I have on the shelf and will someday read, but I cannot find the phrase); Oscar Wilde (more or less unsympathetic, which disappoints me); Nietzsche (sympathetic); cats and dogs in what appears to be a parable set in Biblical times; “The Garment of Rā” in a poem of many pages; the problem of governing, or not governing, one’s desire.
At the book’s end, there is a portrait of Dahlberg consisting of diary entries reporting encounters with him by Gerald Burns. (Who is Gerald Burns? There are few notes in this book, little editorial comment, little explanation of items that are not self-evident, few dates or provenances.) “[1.8.73] … His outerworks were hard to breach, but I got through them twice without harm.” “[12.29.73] … He said a wonderful thing about people who don’t like Ruskin.” Burns reports that Dahlberg’s favorite Pascal quote is: no man fears himself enough. His second favorite: men are always surprised by their characters. “I had heard he was down on blacks,” says Burns, and goes on to give some evidence of this. A bigot? Céline again. Hamsun. And that other old question again: Willing to admire the work of a racist or a misogynist? Willing even to read it? How bad does the bigotry have to be before one has to stop reading it? How good does the writing have to be for one to consent to read it?
A few months ago I read a survey of writers organized and written up by an intelligent-seeming academic named Alice Kaplan on the question of Céline and his standing among writers now. Of the sixty-five writers who responded to the survey, thirteen said that Céline’s political views had no effect on their reading of him. At the other end of the spectrum some (number not specified) refused to read him at all. Among these, in fact, was Paul Bowles, who said, “I have avoided him for five decades.” (Other writers mentioned in the article who have been spurned for political reasons—their work not read because of ideologically unacceptable positions in text or author’s life—were: Paul Eluard, Pound, Heidegger, Paul de Man.) One writer who did read Céline, and was excited by the style, the urgency of Céline’s writing, felt that the effects of the politics were part of the complexity of the work. He says the politics “deepens an appreciation of the dystopian and repulsive character of this work.” In the article, in passing, Edward Dahlberg is mentioned, being defined—along with early James Farrell, Dos Passos and William Saroyan—as a “proletarian lyric writer.”
As I explore the question of Dahlberg, I find I am doing my own limited, informal survey in casual conversations as I encounter other writers. Two poets more or less my age (born mid to late forties) did read Dahlberg, but many years ago, in college, and have very remote memories of his work, no particular impression. One essayist and translator my age was very excited about Dahlberg in college, but would not read him now, now reacts against the “eighteenth-century” style. He also says that whereas he used to think Dahlberg was a sweet man who turned into a monster only when he wrote, he later came to believe that Dahlberg was in fact always a monster.
One fiction writer about five years younger knows the name but has never read him, has no impression of him, associates him with the thirties but confesses she may be mixing him up with another writer who writes about cats (possibly in verse form). Another fiction writer ten years younger has or may have (he is away from home and cannot check) a book of Dahlberg’s on his shelf, not read, acquired close to ten years ago on the recommendation of another writer he admires, perhaps James Purdy but perhaps another writer, this book being one of the two hundred to three hundred books not yet read that he keeps because they promise to be of value to him eventually. His strong impression, though he has not read Dahlberg, is of a vigorous playfulness in forms both short and long. Another writer still younger has no sense of Dahlberg at all, associates nothing with the name, though he knows the name. He asks when Dahlberg died. In the early eighties, I say incorrectly—the actual date is 1977. The younger writer suggests that age may be a factor—the younger the writer, the less well acquainted with Dahlberg. (And it is true that those City Lights and New Directions books on my shelf appeared before and during the years when I and those two poets were in college.)
There may be something in that, or there may not, but in fact when I question the last writer, who is also the oldest, born in the first decade of the century, she becomes animated. Dahlberg? Oh yes, he was delighted to meet her husband, a literary critic. They met Dahlberg in the midforties on Cape Cod. He offered some sort of practical help to them where they were staying in Wellfleet, which resulted in a misunderstanding concerning some dirty laundry left in front of Dahlberg’s door. “He was highly insulted!” she says. “I wish I still had his letter!” She goes on to say more generally: “Crazy fellow, crazy guy!” About his work, however, she is, like the others, vague. “Offbeat, not mainstream, anyway,” she says.
One evening I saw her staggering about in the room, jostling against the sink and the steamer trunk. She turned to me, throwing out her hands; the tears hung upon her sagging face, and I saw there all the rivers of sorrow which are of as many colors as there are precious stones in paradise. She said to me, “I am going to die, Edward. Let me sign over to you what I still have left.”
I stood there, incapable of moving. Had it come, the void, the awful and irrevocable chasm between us? What should I do? Instead of taking this shrunken heap of suffering into my arms, I only shook my head. I had already stolen too much from her; I had not the strength either to lift up my guilt or to say more.
Every night after that when she lay on the cot, she continued to grease her face and arms and neck with her lotions, and before going to sleep, I came to her and knelt on the floor beside her cot and kissed her, and then I arose and went to my own bed.
With the money she had given me I purchased an old house on Cape Cod and a secondhand car, and one night my wife and I sat in the car outside the flat saying good-bye to my mother. Then I watched this shamble of loneliness, less than five feet of it, covered with a begrimed and nibbled coat, walk away from me.
—Because I Was Flesh
I take a random look at some of the critical works I happen to have on the shelf. In Harry Levin’s The Power of Blackness, there is no mention of Dahlberg, but Richard Henry Dana is mentioned three times. According to Levin, Melville linked himself with Dana, as he linked Ishmael with Queequeg, by the metaphor of Siamese twins. Melville praised Dana’s contribution as a sincere and sympathetic witness to the sailor’s way of life—“a voice from the forecastle.” Melville admitted to Dana that it was hard to get poetry out of blubber. In this and another book, one about Melville, Dana’s “flogging scene” is described as being more forceful, more moving, than Melville’s. (I also learn that Melville asked, “Are the green fields gone?”—lamenting that the mystery of unexplored America was vanished—in a spirit not unlike Dahlberg’s.)
Dahlberg is not mentioned by contemporary theorists like Terry Eagleton. In a memoir by Alfred Kazin, I am in the right decades, but there is nothing about Dahlberg. I learn, though, that the critic Edmund Wilson (one of those reviled by Dahlberg) saw nothing in Kafka, as he saw nothing in Dickinson or Frost.
In the correspondence of James Laughlin and William Carlos Williams there is a little more: that Dahlberg was a member of the “Friends of William Carlos Williams” formed by Ford Madox Ford in 1939; that Williams thought well enough of Dahlberg’s The Flea of Sodom, published by New Directions in 1950, to write something about it for the press, saying to Laughlin: “its a unique & valuable book even tho’ overpacked with wild metaphor” (Creeley, though, I learn later, found it at the time “dismal … unreadable, [a] sick, sick book”); and that New Directions also published Dahlberg’s The Sorrows of Priapus in 1957 with drawings by Ben Shahn. I also learn that both Dahlberg and Shahn appear in Book 5 of Williams’s Paterson. Dahlberg’s appearance takes the form of a longish letter by him apparently written from Spain. (“Plato took three journeys to Dionysius, the Tyrant of Syracuse, and once was almost killed and on another occasion was nearly sold into slavery because he imagined that he influenced a devil to model his tyranny upon The Republic,” he tells “Bill,” before talking about his morning shopping excursions with his wife to the “panadería” and “lechería.”) At one stage, before the final revision of Book 5, there was, instead of the letter from Dahlberg, a letter from Cid Corman. Other letters included in Book 5 are from Josephine Herbst, Allen Ginsberg (“I mean to say Paterson is not a task like Milton going down to hell, it’s a flower to the mind too”) and Ezra Pound. I learn also, since I continue to read backwards and forwards in the letters, that New Directions published Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky in 1949 and that it sold twenty-five thousand copies, and that such successes (along with successes in the sales of Tennessee Williams and Thomas Merton) made it possible for Laughlin to publish, as he says (in 1950), “kids like Hawkes.” Born very close to the same year as Dahlberg were: Ben Shahn, Bennett Cerf (founder of Random House), Josephine Herbst, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald. …
I suppose I have been trying to answer the question of why, though Dahlberg seems to be considered worth writing about as an American author (his name appears often enough on certain lists), he is so rarely talked about now, his work so unknown to American writers writing today. Is an answer taking shape having to do with: his cantankerous, difficult personality (his “sensitive, touchy and bitter temperament regarded even by friends as somewhere between difficult and impossible,” according to Tom Clark’s Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life); his isolation (“Blessed and burdened with one of the great voices in American literature he has long likened himself to Ishmael and Job and lived an eremitic life of writing, caring only to please himself”—introduction to the Reader); his offensive degree of bigotry or narrowness (“he dwelt in agreement with Homer and Euripides, neither of whom ‘regarded woman as a moral animal’”—Clark’s Olson); his glorification of rusticity and American roots and landscape, not particularly in fashion nowadays (“Perhaps no American writer since Thoreau has been so enamoured of our natural history, our woodlands, meadows, rivers, and their creatures. These are the gardens we left for lucre’s apple … ”—introduction to the Reader); his strong identification in subject matter and to some degree in style with a proletarian literature very identified with its time and thus, perhaps, feeling dated to us; stylistically his heavy use of literary and classical allusion, also not fashionable now?
There are five trash towns in greater New York, five garbage heaps of Tofeth. A foul, thick wafer of iron and cement covers primeval America, beneath which cry the ghosts of the crane, the mallard, the gray and white brants, the elk and the fallow deer. A broken obelisk at Crocodopolis has stood in one position for thousands of years, but the United States is a transient Golgotha.
—Because I Was Flesh
It occurs to me, before I settle in to read one of Dahlberg’s own books, to follow up on what Matlin said about Olson. I read around in a biography I have by Tom Clark and discover that indeed Dahlberg was a father-figure to Olson in the beginning of their relationship, in the midthirties, a Bloom to his Stephen Dedalus, that Dahlberg influenced him in his education, his reading and stylistically. Interestingly, I discover as I browse how Melville was involved in their relationship at every turn—Dahlberg encouraging and helping Olson in the beginnings of the Melville project that resulted eventually in Call Me Ishmael; the severing of their relationship being ostensibly caused by jealousies over certain of what Olson felt were his own ideas about Melville that appeared in a Dahlberg essay on Melville; their partial or temporary reconciliation coming about over the publication of Olson’s book. …
As I read about Olson, glimpses of Dahlberg’s personal and professional life keep appearing, most often dark ones, filled with difficulties: divorce, child-custody suits, a thankless job teaching freshman composition at a Brooklyn college; lastly, as Clark puts it, “latterly descended to the meanest of free-lance wastelands.”
I am eventually led to Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” and Dahlberg’s appearance in it: “Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.”
Before I desist from my exploration of Dahlberg, under pressure of time, I am left with a thought about his possible importance being, for one thing at least, his influence on Olson’s development as a writer and particularly on Call Me Ishmael: for Olson, Do These Bones Live, along with William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain and Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature served as models of, as Clark says, “a loosely constellated associative structure from which an unstated central thesis might be allowed to emerge as a strong cumulative pattern or sense.”
Now, an unexpected, eleventh-hour source of opinion: I open Gilbert Sorrentino’s book of essays, Something Said (North Point Press, 1984), looking for something having nothing to do with Dahlberg, and find three short pieces on Dahlberg, reviews that were originally published in 1964, 1970 and 1973. Running through these pieces is a robust indignation: “The neglect accorded him by the world of fashionable or frivolous criticism is infamous”—and also an unmitigated admiration. In Sorrentino’s opinion, Dahlberg was shunned because he never “smile[d] at the correct suits and ties … chat[ted] amicably with the proper dentures at the proper cocktail parties”—he was “not for sale.” And he continues: “Let’s get it said immediately: Edward Dahlberg is a great writer … His prose is as sublime as Donne’s gold beaten to ‘ayery thinnesse’ … As with great writers generally, Dahlberg’s basic unit is the phrase. When he has that, he goes on to the next, until the sentence is fashioned.” An interesting question is raised by Sorrentino, one that I will link to something Beckett once said about style: he posits that great writing is all in the style, and that “writers have only a fistful of ideas”—his examples being Joyce, Pound and Beckett, for three. He concludes his 1973 essay by saying, about Dahlberg, “The only thing you can do with him is read him. He will repay your least attention with his best, i.e., perfection.”
Having situated Dahlberg sufficiently for my purposes, I will go on to read at least Bottom Dogs, meanwhile looking for a copy of Because I Was Flesh. (And it will be interesting to see what, if any, Dahlberg titles turn up in secondhand bookstores. One friend tells me that Dahlberg’s own library was sold, after his death, to a secondhand bookstore now defunct and that my friend bought there Dahlberg’s own copy of Ford Madox Ford’s Selected Letters in which Dahlberg had underlined, he says, every “perfect Dahlberg sentence.”)
Then again, I haven’t read Two Years Before the Mast either, and I like the idea of reading a good adventure book (opening, “The fourteenth of August was the day fixed upon for the sailing of the brig Pilgrim on her voyage from Boston round Cape Horn to the western coast of North America. As she was to get under weigh early in the afternoon, I made my appearance on board at twelve o’clock, in full sea-rig, and with my chest, containing an outfit for a two or three years’ voyage … ”). Especially an adventure book that includes language I will not necessarily understand. (Dana says in his preface: “There may be in some parts a good deal that is unintelligible to the general reader; but I have found from my own experience, and from what I have heard from others, that plain matters of fact in relation to customs and habits of life new to us, and descriptions of life under new aspects, act upon the inexperienced through the imagination, so that we are hardly aware of our want of technical knowledge. Thousands read the escape of the American frigate through the British channel, and the chase and wreck of the Bristol trader in the Red Rover, and follow the minute nautical manoeuvres with breathless interest, who do not know the name of a rope in the ship.”) William Cullen Bryant helped to get this book published. Dana went on to become a lawyer, and appeared in important cases defending fugitive slaves (that was around 1848). Late in life he said, “rather sadly”: “My great success—my book—was a boy’s work … ” He died in Rome and is buried there in the Protestant cemetery near Shelley and Keats.