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.
Lorine Niedecker. Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. 1967. Courtesy photographer Gail Roub.
For Lorine Niedecker
Norma Cole
“Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou and I,
Could be by spells conveyed, as it were now,
Upon a barque, with all the winds that blow. … ”
Dante to Cavalcanti, trans. Rossetti1
“Robin, it would be a great thing if you, me, and Jack Spicer
Were taken up in a sorcery with our mortal head so turnd. … ”
Robert Duncan, “Sonnet 3, From Dante’s Sixth Sonnet”2
“I wish you and Louie and Celia and I could sit around a table.
Otherwise, poetry has to do it.”
Lorine Niedecker, letter to Cid Corman, October 19643
fly back to it each summer4
Tribute, from tribuere, to assign, give pay, eventually metaphorizes from actual payment in acknowledgement of submission, or in exchange for the promise of peace, to homage paid, or acknowledgement of esteem, affection. Edmund Spenser’s first line of the envoi “To His Booke” echoes Chaucer with affection and esteem:
“Goe little booke: thy selfe present”5
from
“Goe, litel bok, go litel myn tragedye”6
Old words make new worlds, place is idea. Think of the forms water takes: Spinoza, Burns, Xenophanes, Blake, Sappho, Dostoevsky, “the James Brothers,” William Carlos Williams, the Webbs, Jefferson, Pasternak, Engels, the Brontës, Dickinson, Ovid, Einstein, Pound, Gilbert White, Audubon, Duke Ellington, Reznikoff, Darwin, H. D., Langston Hughes, Plato, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and of course Zukofsky, and so on—a discreet selection of references describing Niedecker’s coordinates, her locus, her lost & found.
Without preliminaries, the meticulous unobserved observer enters in medias res (like New York photographer Helen Levitt, whose special camera fitted with a right-angle viewfinder permitted her to work unnoticed by those who show up in her work7), continues her speculations, her “reflections,” as she called them, beyond subjectivity. She speaks of the flood from its midst, for like Cézanne, she has the capacity for repeated defamiliarization of “what is there,” and is endlessly occupied by it. Mind, bird, war, sky, street, “ … a river, impersonally flowing. … ”8
Topologies, dichotomies: “I wonder what the mind will be capable of doing someday without danger to the body?”9 The structure of particularity whose sound mind names and verbs, notates intervals with tender color, sensuous, passionate intellection in a repertoire of motion, its timing and tension fully motivated, activating space.
Extending by re-membering, meaning surprises event. A life/work is shaped by the equation place = “there is nothing else.”10 The choice to live in one’s spot, to restrict one’s engagement with the social, is the choice to coexist atemporally with a selected cohort of makers and thinkers. This coexistence extends to Niedecker’s recuperative use of found materials imbricated with studied dexterity in the immediate, the vernacular of her present, a complex overlapping creating disjunctive order.
Niedecker’s choices are not separate from the form they take. “ … poetry has to do it.”11 Inexorability of the assumptive prerogatives of a dialogic inner speech shapes her acute attention to formal re(ve)lations, causality, chance, change, a strict complexity. The pivotal nature of apostrophe runs through it. Here is someone remembering someone’s remembering in the present. “The tone of the thing. And awareness of everything influencing everything.”12
Language is the body’s last symptom. “ … a rhythm of emergence and secrecy sets in, a kind of watermark of the imaginary.”13 The poet sits in the “anxious seat.”14 The hand gives up the writing. The person in the poem is someone else. Naming echoes. The nothing, like the magician’s hand, conducts the something lost in the flood. Puzzle rejects closure: prosody tells this story. Although words may refer, the poem, like the subject, has no referent, for it does not pre-exist itself. Rather, it predicts itself, calls itself into being by means of calling or being. Indivisible, it cannot be regional.
Lorine Niedecker was born 12 May 1903, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin. Except for a few brief excursions (to New York, and on driving trips to further her knowledge of Wisconsin and neighboring states) she lived mostly on Blackhawk Island, Jefferson County, Wisconsin. She died 31 December 1970 in a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin.
now live in music
now read in peace, Lorine15
1 Dante and his Circle, ed. & trans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London, 1874) 143.
2 Robert Duncan, Roots & Branches (NY, 1964) 124.
3 “Between Your House and Mine”: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970, ed. Lisa Pater Faranda (Durham, 1986) 48.
4 “Lorine Niedecker, My Life By Water: Collected Poems 1968 (UK, 1970) 41. This line is cited in Norma Cole, My Bird Book (LA, 1991) 28.
5 Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calendar (1579; in Norton Anthology, 1962) 530.
&nbs
p; 6 “Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1380; NY, 1987) 1.1786.
7 Sandra S. Phillips, “Helen Levitt’s New York,” in SFMOMA Catalogue HELEN LEVITT (SF, 1991) 16.
8 Jesse Redmon Fauset, Plum Bun, excerpted in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Indiana, 1990) 167.
9 Jenny Penberthy, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931-1970 (Cambridge, 1993) 198.
10. Ibid., 217.
11 Faranda, 48.
12 Lorine Niedecker, letter to Gail Roub, 1967, in “Getting to Know Lorine Niedecker,” Gail Roub. Lorine Niedecker: Woman and Poet, edited by Jenny Penberthy (Orono, 1996) 86.
13 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (NY, 1988) 33.
14 John Brinkerhoff Jackson, “The Sacred Grove in America,” in Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst, 1980) 85.
15 Norma Cole, MARS (Berkeley, 1994) 19.
James Agee. Long Island Beach, 1937. Photograph by Walker Evans. Harvard University Art Museums.
Now Let Us Praise James Agee
David Means
SOME WRITERS ARE HEROIC in their ability to write against the odds, in their struggle against the plight of what has been offered up to them in the form of life; others are heroic in their struggles against the word itself—the form and the content and the very gist of their creations. James Agee was both kinds of heroes. The loss of his father at an early age stands as the penultimate event of his early life, and the impetus, one has to suppose, for most of his artist endeavors—including the obvious connection to his great novel, A Death in the Family, which, although left unfinished at his death, was pieced together and won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously; his other great creation mirrors his other great heroic state, the battle of the artist with the material: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a great work of modernism, was his collaboration with photographer Walker Evans in attempting to “document” the plight, or lives, or whatever you want to call the existence of a few southern tenant farm families. After years of struggle (originally the piece was an assignment for Fortune magazine), the project ended up being partly a statement, a manifesto, a confession, of Agee’s own doubts and fears—a huge sprawling testament (a symphonic collage of brilliantly rendered depictions; some of the best lyric writing we have) to the limitations (in Agee’s terms) of art itself, in the examination of a few lives. It is the essence of this doubt, the great humility of the artist before his work—on both the technical front and the deeply probing personal front—that I love about Agee. Great humility. And humility—as the theologian Merton declares—is the only remedy against despair. Maybe it’s this humility that keeps Agee partly obscured, partly unsung. He built a bridge of doubt between his modernist sensibilities, which were bebop great, and his deep, profound, religious beliefs (which were always problematic). He drank hard and sinned with great profundity (see his biography by Laurence Bergreen for good juicy details of sexual/domestic escapades), but at the same time he knew that it was possible to hold both sides of his moral being in the same cup; he knew that duplicity and paradox rule contemporary life as they ruled ancient life; and that, like Whitman, one way to honest art is through a declaration of one’s self-contradiction. It was no fluke that Agee was picked by Luce to write the Time magazine story about the detonation of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima and the end of the war: a piece that slices into the moral complexities, dark and light, of the blast that ended the war.
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