The Disappointment Artist Read online

  The year of the letter is 1965, identifiable by Aunt Billie’s stated age and some family chatter on the last few pages. Wilma Yeo was forty-eight, still three years from placing Mrs. Neverbody’s Recipes , her first book, with Lippincott, when she had her bracing encounter with Dahlberg.

  Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977) was born, illegitimately, in Boston and raised in Kansas City (Dahlberg: “Let me admit it, I hate Kansas City”). His tormented coming-of-age, split between a Jewish orphanage and the home of his mother, the barber and adventuress described by Wilma Yeo, is the center of both his first novel, Bottom Dogs (1934), famously introduced by D. H. Lawrence (Dahlberg: “I wasn’t influenced by Lawrence at all! That’s a small, wanton, niggardly conjecture!”), and his late memoir, Because I Was Flesh (1964). Where Dahlberg is remembered, Because I Was Flesh is accounted his masterpiece. His career was split. There were three novels in the thirties, full of ancient slang and proto–Hubert Selby grubbiness, good enough to make him a signal figure in the largely forgotten—and, by Dahlberg, regretted—proletarian movement; then, some years of wandering, followed by reinvention as a crypto-classical mandarin stylist, no longer committed to fiction but to literary-historical essays, memoirs, mythological poetry, and fulmination. In this late phase, Dahlberg enjoyed (a uniquely inappropriate word) a reputation as an underground hero of American writing—an unwilling father to Beats (“I have no feeling about these boys. But they are doing what was done thirty years ago and they imagine they are avant-garde. You can be scatological in any century; it is not news. Or a dung-eater anytime; it is an old habit”), and a figure legendary for his auto-exile, his excoriating intolerance of other writers. Dahlberg routinely broadcast, on every channel open to him, a galactic disappointment with his own career and with the bad flavor living had left in his mouth. He died in 1977, his last jottings satires of the television commercials which had come to fascinate him.

  I’d known the name, faintly. Working in used bookshops, I’d fondled a few Dahlberg tomes before slashing their prices or consigning them to bins of the never-to-be-sold. I associated him with the agony of the rebuffed career, the refused book. In used bookselling one becomes a dowser of the underground river of refused books, and the dowsing rod twitches like the second hand of a clock. Expertise is knowing which few, of the thousands flung to posterity by their flap copy, anyone would ever actually pay to read. So, Dahlberg: a guilty association, another titan I’d dissed by thinking him a drag on the retail flow.

  Aunt Billie’s letter concentrated my attention. Dahlberg’s, it seemed, was a shrill, vibrant voice clinging to the edge of the collective literary consciousness—just. As I asked around, seeking to see how his name played among my best-read friends, the answer was always the one I’d have given myself: Dahlberg, oh yeah, always meant to find out what he was about. I located a biography, The Wages of Expectation, by Charles DeFanti, and Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute, a Festschrift assembled by Jonathan Williams; the most recent item was “Broaching Difficult Dahlberg,” by Lydia Davis, an essay, published in Conjunctions, which circles Dahlberg without actually plunging in. There, Davis interrogates older writers still bearing grudges against Dahlberg, confirming the testimony of the biography and of many of Dahlberg’s own ostensible supporters: this was a more than moderately difficult man. And Dahlberg’s tendency to be recalled but unread made him a bizarre discovery, a writer whose reputation was either blinking out of existence at the exact moment I’d located it, or, weirder, a writer whose reputation was somehow frozen in the act of blinking out of existence .

  The more I looked, the more it seemed Dahlberg’s compulsion for taking out his monstrous disappointment on any human within striking distance was the only reputation left, dragging the books distantly behind it. Dahlberg’s biographer, Charles DeFanti, in The Wages of Expectation details how Dahlberg denounced as unworthy, at various times, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Dreiser (“If I had reread his books, I would have had to assail him”), Robert Graves, Edmund Wilson, and dozens of others, all attempted friends or sponsors of Dahlberg’s career. Here’s Paul Carroll, in his Introduction to The Edward Dahlberg Reader, witnessing a Dahlberg performance at a cocktail party given in his honor: “What he said about Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, Wilson, Pound . . . was univocal, brilliant, sour, erudite, and unanswerable. Only the cadence of his sentences . . . seemed to keep Dahlberg’s words from becoming a scream.” The list can seem endless, but to eliminate any uncertainty, Dahlberg sweepingly denounced not only the whole twentieth century’s shelf, but the nineteenth century’s as well, locating the corruption of American literature well before Melville. As for his personal relations, he made himself famous for his cold shoulder, arranging elaborate fallingsout so persistently that William O’Rourke, a student and disciple, eulogized him this way: “Edward Dahlberg wrote 18 books and one masterpiece that will endure; at the end of his long life he had less than six people he would have called friend.” Perhaps my aunt Billie had had the privilege of having her head bitten off not by some average writing-class ogre but by the greatest head biter of all time, the Ozzy Osbourne of writing-teaching.

  When you listen to him talk—where do I, a woman of forty eight, with so little time (comparatively speaking) (and he answers— “there is not such thing as time”—Life is an error and death the only truth etc.)—Fit in this picture? His theory that only children are knowing—and that we innundate our minds with every passing minute and thus die with each experience—never able to change our life’s destiny one drop—never again able to attain what we lost through living—is near a parallel that I have long ago reached—and the reason that I want to write for children and believe that it is the hardest writing to do.

  She then adds,

  But when I try to discuss writing for children, he says there is no such thing—write what you have to say and pray to God that children will read it . . . Now this is fine—I go along—but how can I go when I have suddenly lost my way to anyplace at all? I write you this because, knowing how many classes you have sat through— where, undoubtedly this same kind of person, taught—I wonder if you can help me. I guess what I want you to say is Don’t Listen To Him, but it’s too late for that because I already have. How far should one go in deciding what one’s personal limitations are, and settling for less than perfection. If I read all of these things (I don’t literally mean every book, but read, say for a year or two) and quit writing (as I seem to have anyway) do you think I would be happier (ugh what a weak word—of course the only happiness is satisfaction or joy in work in progress—and the ability to move on to the next job without looking back with too many weakening day-dreams.) But just when I thought I was going along so great—I’ve stubbed my mental toe! On a rock! You know that for several years I’ve been reading deeper things—I can finally read poetry—a little—after years of trying to . . . I can recognize good passages—I’ve learned the effectiveness of small words—found the art in brevity—doubted the adjective—learned to discriminate in the varying shades of words . . . increased my sad little vocabulary some . . . but can one really know what is good unless one has long looked upon perfection until anything less seems shoddy and factory made.

  To attempt to read Dahlberg, as I began to do, is to find oneself reading about him instead. For a writer whose persistent epiphany was isolation (“All intelligent Americans are extremely alone”), and whose obsession it was to decry the charlatanism of comradeship among writers (“I am not looking for disciples. Jesus did not even know what to do with the apostles, and they had such dull auditory nerves that they could not hear what came from his soul”), Dahlberg is nevertheless one of the most introduced writers of all time. The parade of ushers begins, of course, with Bottom Dogs. It turns out that D. H. Lawrence’s essay was commissioned; Davis judges it “unwilling,” DeFanti “squeamish if not somewhat petulant.” Reasonable enough: Lawrence’s envoi to Dahlberg’s career concludes, “I don’t want to read any more books like this.”
r />   Lawrence there inaugurates a great tradition: Dahlberg is routinely assassinated by his own apologists. Here’s Gerald Burns, in an Afterword to The Leafless American and Other Writings (a book consisting of a hundred pages of Dahlberg, a Preface by Robert Creeley, and an Introduction by Harold Billings, on top of the Afterword!): “I have heard he was down on blacks, and the reason seems to be that they have made bastions of our apartments and robbed us of the parks . . . [he] says the faces of their children show why they do not yet have a civilization.” Karl Shapiro, from Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute: “His petulance and misunderstanding of the Modern are one thing; his disgust for . . . modern art and literature must be brushed aside; but his blind loyalty to himself as a poet, prophet, and l’inconnu—these are his birthright, by all means.” Jonathan Williams, in the same book, gratuitously disinters what may seem a too telling review by Alden Whitman in The New York Times: “Dahlberg is outrageous, a deliberate striver for shock value, a magpie who delights to show off his gleanings from the classics, a bombast on occasion, a writer of ponderous nonsense and almost insufferable ego.” Well, ahem.

  These same supporters compensate by overstatement. In this, they have encouragement from Dahlberg’s style itself. His absolutism is recapitulated every place he’s remembered. Paul Carroll: “Is there any author living who is even in the same country as Edward Dahlberg in the moral grandeur and violence of his writings?” Ronald Johnson: “I sometimes wonder whether we deserve an Edward Dahlberg to reprimand and cajole us.” August Derleth: “He is as much a genius as anyone of whom I can think, past or present . . .” To invest in Dahlberg is to adopt scorchedearthism.

  In a letter dated September 2, 1964, anticipating his departure from Ireland for Kansas City, to teach my aunt’s class, Dahlberg wrote:

  “Good teaching is apocalyptic talking.”

  Again, Wilma Yeo:

  There is a young man in the class who looks so much like you, Dick, that when I watch his eyes as he reads (as he made the grave mistake of doing) one of his poems—I am where you are! Drivel! Says the old prof! Pure drivel! You don’t even know that you don’t know anything—read, read, read!!!! I, of course, had thought it quite good. He will say, “Did you bring a paper? On what book—”

  “It’s a creative paper.”

  “How do you know it is creative? Oh well, read it.”

  Then he interrupts about the second word and says, “Forgive me, I don’t want to be rude but that is asinine and puerile and we don’t have time to waste on it.” or “that word makes me want to vomit.” I know you say, why listen? but he has something to say. His book is good—his soul is bitter. A boiled prune without hope or belief. Since I can’t write, I have been drawing. This is something I understand why I can’t do well, and so I can enjoy it.

  My aunt then describes some other published writers at Dahlberg’s mercy, including Alice Winter, author of The Velvet Bubble, and Frankie Wu, a poet who had already placed work with The New Yorker:

  He doesn’t know any of the three of us have ever sold anything and wouldn’t care if he did, for he believes that writing to sell is as morbid as you feel that commercial art is—and that could easily be true, but writing is of so little use in a file cabinet . . . anyway, Frankie typed off this same poem and handed it in—a non-poem, he said, with three good lines in it—but he is interested in Frankie—partly because he likes Orientals and thinks America would be better off if we had let them in—and maybe a little because of that poem, but he was so intense in his criticism of it, in front of the class that she was ill afterward—Frankie has a rare disease and spent four years in an iron lung—her husband Dr. Wu is a quite famous brain surgeon or she would probably not be alive. It is a disease of the nerve endings and sometimes affects her as if she had been drinking. If he is too cruel to her, Alice or I shall probably tell him to go to hell. Kindly—for he is easily hurt, as people so often are who persist in brutal frankness.

  There! It was out and said, though only scrawled between margins at the last moment, as though Wilma Yeo could no more bring herself to omit her diagnosis than she could bear to judge her teacher: a boiled prune, easily hurt. Or, in the words of Josephine Herbst: “There is so much that is paradoxical, quixotic, contrary about Edward Dahlberg . . . is it possible always to agree with him? Or to share his exclusive literary tastes? But there is consistency in his inconsistency . . . what writer is less afraid of absurdities or willing to show himself as ridiculous?” What compelled my aunt Billie, then, beyond her necessary rejection of what he told her—evidently, “quit writing”—was Dahlberg’s vulnerability. Wasn’t that right, and couldn’t it be enough? Wasn’t Edward Dahlberg not-so-secretly tender, and didn’t his genius spring from that pained source, in a very Wound and the Bow sort of way? Perhaps I could forgive him, and begin to read him.

  Perhaps I was about to do so. But then I found the next two pieces of evidence in my search. First, a letter from Piers Paul Read, who studied with Dahlberg at Columbia in 1967 and whose father, Sir Herbert Read, was one of Dahlberg’s staunch supporters:

  My misgivings about Dahlberg as a teacher were amply fulfilled. He had a bullying manner and a total intolerance of any writing but his own. He had read my first novel . . . which had already been published by this time and rejected it as worthless in front of the class . . . We more or less made up the quarrel . . . he was not, however, a man to be ignored and he continued to bully me—saying, at one time, in front of the class, that I was responsible for my father’s cancer because I had been married in Strasbourg!

  My second discovery was a memoir by William O’Rourke, who, incredibly, had been part of the Kansas City class my aunt attended. O’Rourke paints the scene in Dahlbergian tones: “Women filled his classes. Cameoed dowagers with roughed jowls and red velvet capes, young brittle-lipped girls whose pens took notes nodding like steadfast crochet needles.” Women, it needs to be noted, are the ultimate Dahlbergian sore point. Dahlberg’s greatest subject was his mother, and his great lifelong Waterloo was his own sexual appetite—his seven marriages, various imputations of harassment and physical abuse, and his whole raging ambivalence about sex:

  A man may want to study Mark or Paracelsus, or go on an errand to do a kindness to an aging woman, but this tyrant [the penis] wants to discharge itself either because the etesian gales are acerb or a wench has just stooped over to gather her laundry . . . the head is so obtuse as to go absolutely crazy over a pair of hunkers, which is no more than a chine of beef.

  And, as elsewhere, his admirers eagerly hoist him to the heavens on this petard. Thus, O’Rourke continues:

  The writing class had decomposed to a half dozen. Another male, a speech teacher . . . and an assortment of female poets. Dahlberg sat with his legs crossed with gray exhaustion over his face . . . when a woman volunteered to read a children’s book she had written. He had spoken against the children’s dilution of the Classics before, but consented with alarm for there were no other offerings during the period. She began:

  “Winnie was a puppy who looked like a mop and rode the elevators of downtown Kansas City until everybody knew his name . . .”

  Edward Dahlberg, American Artist, sat with his head shrouded by his hands.

  She continued:

  “He would walk around the Plaza, for he lived with his master in an apartment . . .”

  “Stop,” he said, hardly audible. “Stop. Please.”

  Stop, please! indeed. What was this compulsion? What did the letter mean to me? In my exaggerated relish and mock horror at uncovering Dahlberg’s heroic monstrosity I was becoming a student of Dahlberg myself, another slave pining for his lash. Worse, in my compulsion to vengeance on my aunt’s behalf, I resembled not a follower but old grudge-nurturing, injury-cherishing Dahlberg himself.

  That the writing workshop, the sort led by an established writer and populated by aspirants, is a site of human longing and despair is undeniable. Fear and loathing, the grosser undercurrents of hostility, fratricidal
and patri- or matri-cidal impulses, fox-in-the-henhouse-ish preying on one’s own potential successors, those are more like secret poxes—venereal flare-ups, to use a comparison beloved by Dahlberg. The famous teacher who steals from his students—that’s a story going around. Alternately, one hears of the writer with the former protégé, one extensively favored with opportunities, opened doors, who’s now, after publication, brushed his mentor off—but only after making an unacknowledged appropriation of signature aspects of the elder writer’s live-performance shtick. Typically, in our correct, passive-aggressive era, hostility has gone underground. The last remaining interrupters, ranters, tantrum artists—and a handful do still roam the creative-writing landscape—are mentioned with the tittering that disguises our uneasy awe. No one approximately my own age will tell even his or her worst student, as Dahlberg often apparently told his very best, that they are simply not a writer, that they ought to give it up. And every one of us feels a queasy guilt at this hesitation: Are we perhaps only leaving that job to be done by some subsequent disenchanter—an editor, or a series of rejection slips, a teacher braver than ourselves? Are we like bogus farmers, raising crops already scheduled to be destroyed in some government buyout?

  So we smile in the classroom and work out murkier feelings among ourselves. Tongues scarred with bite marks, then loosened by a little red wine, wag in late-night gripe sessions. A few teachers circulate excerpts from the laughably inept, others memorize the unforgettable lines. A prizewinning poet shocked me years ago, explaining casually, almost sweetly, that the majority of her students could be shown how to write an adequate, competent poem—the problem was few of these poems would ever be anything but too “boring” to read. The ferocity and finality of that modifier wasn’t lost on me. A cheery type (at least by Dahlbergian standards), I like many of my students personally. Their striving mostly stirs me, often inspires me, sporadically breaks my heart. Yet I participate in the venting too, and in the whispered framing of guilty questions: Is it for anything but the paycheck that we go on propagating this farce?