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.”
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