by Lydia Davis
Another feature of his style is his manner of combining this punchy Anglo-Saxon vocabulary with literary and classical allusions 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 the way “boggy Tophet” rolls off the (squab) tongue and make a halfhearted attempt to find Milton’s sooty flag of Acheron.
As I sample his prose, here and there, another quality I find is the moment of irony and the glint of humor in the careful, self-conscious word choice that remind me again of Jane Bowles: “The sight of the poultry seemed to make him listless.”
The preface to The Leafless American by Robert Creeley (written in 1986, in Waldoboro, Maine) refers us back to the subject of America again, and “the immense loneliness of this country’s people,” particularly the isolation of American writers:
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 Job 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 (I can find no dates of first publications of these pieces—but certainly just now the place of literature is not one of high esteem here); 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 will someday read—but I cannot find the phrase); Oscar Wilde (to whom Dahlberg is more or less unsympathetic, which disappoints); Nietzsche (sympathetic); cats and dogs, in what appears to be a parable set in biblical times; “The Garment of Ra” 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 the American poet and artist Gerald Burns: “[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, and Knut Hamsun. And that other old question again: Are we willing to admire the artistic work of a racist, a misogynist, or an anti-Semite? Are we willing even to read it? How bad does the bigotry have to be before one has to stop reading? How good does the writing have to be for one to consent to read it?
* * *
A few months ago I took part in, and then later read the results of, a survey organized and written up by the French literature professor and literary critic 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 was, in fact, 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 their texts or their lives—were Paul Eluard, Pound, Heidegger, and Paul de Man.) One writer who did read Céline, and was excited by the style, and the urgency, of Céline’s writing, felt that the effects of the politics were part of the complexity of the work. He said the politics “deepen[ed] an appreciation of the dystopian and repulsive character of this work.” In the article, Edward Dahlberg is mentioned in passing, being defined—along with the early James T. 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, when I encounter other writers. Two poets more or less my age (born in the mid to late 1940s) did read Dahlberg, but many years ago, in college, and have only 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, reacting now against what he sees as the “eighteenth-century” style. (I don’t agree about that characterization.) 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 ten years ago on the recommendation of another writer he admires, perhaps James Purdy but perhaps another, this book being one of the two 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 in his own case—the younger the writer I ask, the less well acquainted he or she is 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 one last writer, who is also the oldest, born in the first decade of the century, just a few years after Dahlberg, she becomes animated. Dahlberg? Oh yes—he was delighted to meet her husband, a literary critic. She and her husband met him in the mid-1940s on Cape Cod. He offered some sort of practical help to them, where they were staying in Wellfleet, which resulted in a misunderstanding concerning a bag of 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,” she says, “not mainstream, anyway.”
Cape Cod comes into the following, which I don’t think is at all eighteenth-century. It is quite plainspoken and contemporary sounding, with just a touch of formality her
e and there (“I arose”), with a Hemingwayesque string of ands, and brandishing one ornate, pleasingly hyperbolic metaphor:
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 goodbye 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 have kept on the shelf, more from a sense of duty, or caution, than eagerness to read. In Harry Levin’s The Power of Blackness, there is no mention of Dahlberg. (But Richard Henry Dana, Jr., comes up three times. According to Levin, Melville associated himself with Dana, as he associated Ishmael with Queequeg, through 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 once asked—lamenting, in a spirit not unlike Dahlberg’s, that the mystery of unexplored America had vanished—“Are the green fields gone?”)
Dahlberg is not mentioned by contemporary theorists like Terry Eagleton, in the books I have. In a memoir by Alfred Kazin, I am in the right decades, but there is nothing about Dahlberg. (I learn, though, somewhat to my surprise, 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 panaderia and lecheria.) 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 backward and forward in the letters, that New Directions published Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky in 1949 and that the book sold twenty-five thousand copies, and that such successes (as, also, the sales of Tennessee Williams and Thomas Merton) made it possible for Laughlin to publish, as he says (in 1950), “kids like Hawkes.” Born close to the same year as Dahlberg (1900) were Ben Shahn, Bennett Cerf (founder of Random House), Josephine Herbst, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald.
He was of his time in America, he had the support and admiration of other writers contemporary to him, he was published by good and forward-looking presses, his writing was and sometimes still is acknowledged by other good writers to be very good, he was an important influence on certain younger writers; his subject matter was not only luscious, rhapsodic, touching, but also often sad, sordid, discouraging, something that some readers preferred to avoid; and his own nature was not only generous and passionate but also curmudgeonly.
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 mentioned now, his work so unknown to American writers writing today. Is an answer taking shape having to do with his cantankerous, thorny 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”—Paul Carroll’s 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, though his dismay over environmental degradation is very much of our times (“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”—Carroll in 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—how often do we even use the word proletarian?; 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 Charles Olson. I read around in the 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 mid-1930s, a Bloom to his Stephen Dedalus, that Dahlberg influenced him in his education, his reading, and his style. 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 Dahlberg’s 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 unhappiness: divorce; child-custody suits; a thankless job teaching freshman composition at a Brooklyn college; and “latterly,” in Clark’s words, Dahlberg having “descended to the meanest of free-lance wastelands.”
I am eventually led to Olson’s essay “Proj
ective 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.”
Having situated Dahlberg sufficiently for my purposes, for the time being anyway, I will go on to read at least Bottom Dogs, meanwhile looking for a copy of Because I Was Flesh. It will be interesting, as I will now be on the lookout, to see which, if any, Dahlberg titles turn up in secondhand bookstores. One friend has told me that Dahlberg’s own library was sold, after his death, to a secondhand bookstore now in turn 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 yet read its neighbor on the bookshelf, Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, either—a title that turns up regularly in library sales—and I like the prospect of a good adventure book, especially one with such an immediate 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 some language I will not necessarily understand.