by Lydia Davis
Several things about the poem mystify me. One is that within such a very short span (sixteen words) it inclusively conveys so many contradictory emotions: pathos and humor, absurdity and seriousness, apparently frank and earnest statement, and obviously fictive storytelling. Part of the fiction is the narrator him- or herself: who is this “i”? Surely not the poet. Another part is the knitting of the red wool mittens—surely the poet did not knit them, and surely no one knit them, not even the fictional “i.” They are a fiction. (I may of course be wrong on all these counts. But then that would be another way in which we have been misled by the poet, teased into believing he is telling a tall tale.)
Then there is the fake monumentality of the project, as conveyed to us: it has taken a lifetime to knit these mittens; they were the project of a lifetime; there was an intention to knit them and it was carried out—though at what cost! That is the absurdity. The project was monumental, and absurd. But, importantly, the voice of this fictional narrator is not absurd. The voice is plain, earnest, direct, scared, alone at the end. There is nothing fictional about a life being over. Hollo’s own life is in fact over, though long after he translated the poem.
That the life is over is one part of what I find moving, in particular that it is over with just one thing, the poem implies, accomplished—those red wool mittens. One thing, it would seem, that consumed so much attention, that consumed so much of other things, perhaps—time, skill, devotion—that the life itself went by almost unnoticed. The one thing was accomplished, but the life is over. And the one thing was hardly monumental, really, in the end.
What mystifies me is also something I find profoundly satisfying. The question is: How can a three-line poem that is on the surface quite simple and direct—three plain, everyday statements—continue in some way to surprise me, each time I read it, not by its content, which I don’t forget, but by something else? I think I may have one possible answer to what that is: it may be the change of register within the poem. The opening statement is one that any of us has probably made over and over, in irritation or regret, about one thing or another—that we never should have started whatever it was. The second statement, too, is a familiar one, one we might make about the first, whatever the project was. We are tired, annoyed, impatient with ourselves—it’s done now, but we regret it. But the third statement is out of all proportion to what has gone before—huge, devastating, vastly greater and of a significance entirely different from that of the first two statements. The disproportion or incongruity is the source of the humor of the last line, but also of its pathos. It is comically disproportionate, but agonizingly true, as though, really, the poet is saying: I never should have started this life, because I have lived it but now it is over.
The poem may also continue to surprise me because it always slightly eludes me; try as I may, I can never quite assimilate it. I find this quality in the poem exemplary, because it is doing the rare thing that a good piece of writing strives to do and sometimes manages: it never dies, it never becomes stale and familiar, it perpetually renews itself; it is born and lives over and over; it begins, continues, and ends, without losing its freshness and surprise; it continues to have an impact. Smart and capacious though we readers are, the poem avoids being learned by us—it defies assimilation.
That is a lot to say about such a brief poem, but it seems to ask for it.
2015
In Search of Difficult Edward Dahlberg
Between Two Years Before the Mast (by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., published in 1840, written while he was 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 a 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 is it?—Because I Was Flesh. Is it on another shelf in the house, somewhere upstairs? No—another apartment, another life? I see the spine clear as day—somewhere.
I am looking because of a conversation last night over dinner in a restaurant sitting at a long table across from Ursule Molinaro (whose entire novel Positions with White Roses is narrated by a woman who is sitting on the long side of the dinner table with her parents—this is the “normal daughter,” the “visiting daughter”) and her 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, Madame Realism, The Broad Picture), who had invited Molinaro out from the city.
I ask Ursule what she thinks of Dahlberg. But that is after she has asked me, and the company in general, about Jane Bowles, whom she does not like, preferring Paul Bowles, as though one must choose between them. She likes Buzzati, Giorgio Manganelli, and one of our present company, Stadler, as well as Jaimy Gordon, also published by McPherson and Co.
Also on the list: Frederick Ted Castle, his startling and compendious suitcase of a book, Anticipation. Castle himself was a bit rough-edged when met coming up the stairs in a bar and addressed with admiring words by a fan descending the stairs some years ago, but Anticipation is inviting to read in the way of a journal or letter—open, personal, giving the impression of easiness and flexibility and good humor in the writing—and is, in addition, 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 that Creeley gives in the introduction to his Collected Prose, a description I discover when poking around in the book in search of the tale I remember, the one that included the mouse in moonlight: “that intimate, familiar, localizing, detailing, speculative, emotional, unending talking.” As often happens, perhaps especially in the case of a book I admire, I did not finish reading Anticipation. I progressed 150 pages or so into it, about twelve years ago. Enough to know, though, as in the case of Dahlberg, that it interested me very much, and should even be set on the shelf of “possible models”—in other words, I thought of trying something like it someday.
But aren’t there some shared qualities in Jane Bowles and Molinaro? For instance, the dry humor (Molinaro: “A man with many wives and little money, or perhaps it was: a little wife and much money”—I am quoting perhaps inaccurately from memory). And the characters who appear so ladylike—as for instance Molinaro’s Mrs. Feathergill—but conceal sometimes criminal or potentially criminal depths. The pitiless eye for behaviors, foibles, the clear style, and the device of repeated epithets, as for instance Molinaro’s “the Hispanic-looking boy.”
Now the two across the table become enthusiastic about Paul Bowles. I have a large place in my heart for Jane Bowles, but agree with them that Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky is admirable as a piece of writing, if horrifying, of course, as a tale. I continue to think of the McPherson list, and come to Dahlberg. I bring up his name, and the general opinion at the table goes against him.
* * *
I know Dahlberg interests me, though, again, I have 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, and keep it handy. I always intended to read more of it, the rest of it, and more of his other books, just as I always intended, and still intend, to read the rest of other books, the whole of many other books, on my shelves, later—as though, when I retire. But retire from what?
What about Dahlberg? Why do I not hear his name often? Was he surly, too, brusque in social exchanges, like the interesting stylist Ted Castle? Is that why
certain writers so emphatically do not like him? Will one be forgotten, no matter how fine a writer, if one is sufficiently unpleasant or offensive in company or in friendships? Did he suffer too much, and announce his suffering? Robert Creeley, I will later discover, called him “the necessary Job of our collective American letters.” Does McPherson publish only nice or at least civil women and cranky, crabby men? No, also on the list is David Matlin (How the Night Is Divided), perfectly civil, whom I encounter by chance some days later, in time to ask his view of Dahlberg. We are sitting at a picnic table by an old hotel. Matlin’s tempered response is that Dahlberg was an important influence on certain American poets, including perhaps Charles Olson. He mentions also how superb he finds Do These Bones Live, a series of essays on the social and spiritual isolation of American writers, first published in 1941.
I know little about Dahlberg, really, beyond, perhaps, that his handling of language, his vocabulary, entrance me, his directness, his frankness—this is enough for me to want to keep him on the shelf, even if I have seldom picked up the books. Over that dinner, which is already receding into the past, someone had remarked, in defense of Dahlberg perhaps, that he was an underappreciated writer. Here, again, I thought, this recurring question comes up, of underappreciation and, in fact, overappreciation of writers, also of other artists. (I have been thinking, lately, of the general underappreciation of Haydn and overappreciation of Mozart that seem beyond correction by now—though I, too, change my mind about that upon hearing some particular movement or melody.) Paul Bowles being also underappreciated, as is Jane Bowles. The American public may resent expatriate Americans and withhold appreciation from them. But then, though Dahlberg did sometimes live abroad, expatriatism is surely irrelevant in his case. The defender of Dahlberg had pointed out that his work might be underappreciated because the material is so harsh, so difficult or unpalatable, painful. Although … what about Céline? he had added.
I search around in what I have, to explore this further. Here is Bottom Dogs, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence. Dahlberg’s dedication reads: “For my Friend Jonathan Williams.” So he had, at the time, at least one friend. Dahlberg comments, in his preface, written in Spain in 1961, for a later edition: “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.” (By “failure” I think Lawrence must mean poverty and the labor of the poor at the very bottom of the social ladder.) Skimming further, I 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 … 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. A literature expressing physical repulsion.
To place Dahlberg, in one sense: he was an American realist or naturalist preceding the line that stretches from James T. Farrell to Jack Kerouac.
Inside the book, there is a biographical note, probably written by Dahlberg himself, describing his grim beginnings, then his wide experience of the more difficult working world, but also his sound education: “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, busboy, longshoreman, clerk. Education: the University of California and Columbia University—later, however, in Because I Was Flesh, he referred to what he encountered in these institutions as “canonized illiteracy” and remarked that “anybody who had read twelve good books knew more than a doctor of philosophy.”
A standard reference book enhances the early picture, describing him as “the illegitimate son of an itinerant woman-barber”—who is depicted still more particularly and colorfully, elsewhere, as “the Junoesque owner of the Star Lady Barbershop of Kansas City.”
In Dahlberg’s own words (Lorry is Dahlberg as a child):
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.
Paul Carroll, who edited and introduced The Dahlberg Reader, describes Lawrence’s introduction to Bottom Dogs as “shrill, chilly.” (I would add, following more or less Carroll’s rhyme scheme, that it also 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, lacking “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 grouped 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 of Dahlberg, and Alfred Kazin contributed a quote to the back cover that calls this “one o
f the few important American books published in our day.” I skim through.
Here is Dahlberg coming down hard on 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? Here is a partial list, from 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 tend to like, in the prose of others, the sort of thing he did himself? For one, 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 don’t immediately find any adjective, but I do find these nouns, which together give him the soft sensuousness of his metaphor: fledgling pigeon about four weeks old; short fat person; couch; cushion for chair or couch.