The Disappointment Artist Read online

  We’re all of us, students and teachers, stranded in the breach between the violently solitary and elitist necessities of High Art—exemplified, in our time, by professional Bartlebys of the William Gass or Cynthia Ozick type—and the Horatio Alger wishfulness of so much writing advice, the self-actualizing egalitarianism of Writer’s Digest . Yet faced with this ubiquitous hunger even to be allowed the attempt to make oneself a writer— so human and poignant, so profoundly benign—what does it mean to install a Dahlberg in a classroom and permit him to maul a Yeo? What’s the value of the dissident writer, one who exiles himself from contemporaries, audience, and apprentices, in the cultural marketplace? Why do we—why did my aunt—seem to cherish our brushes with Dahlbergs, even as we encourage their victims to complain them out of the profession?

  Edward Dahlberg—for I’ve finally begun to read him—was a genius, sure. Having penetrated the haze of remorse around his career, I’ve joined the tinny chorus: Because I Was Flesh, his memoir of Kansas City childhood and orphanhood, but most of all a portrait of his disreputable, unbearable, and resolutely life-embracing mother, is a great book. Great in the saddest and simplest way, for Dahlberg has arrayed an armor of rhetoric to fend off his pain, and everywhere the armor proves inadequate. Because I Was Flesh is a catalogue of defenseless defenses, of feeble snarling assaults on implacable, if erratic, love. It shows Dahlberg’s baroque scalpel turned inward, for once. Dahlberg would certainly have loathed our contemporary culture of brandished trauma. Yet brandished trauma is his legacy:

  She did not know what to do with her life or with her feelings. She toiled because she was afraid to starve, and because she had nothing else to do; but her will was too sick to love the child of her lust. He was so skinny and yellow that his nose seemed to cover his face; and all the obduracy that was in her short, round neck had passed over to him. If he saw a speck on the wall, he imagined that it was the ordure of flies. When he looked at the greasy, rotten oil-cloth on the table, he would not touch his scummy soup. His mind gave him intolerable pain when he thought of the back alley that lay between 8th and 7th where he had seen gross rodents. On occasion, when he heard the chirruping of rats in the basement of the building or in the rear of the shop, his face grew more peaked and rancid, and he buried his head in his arms and retched. Lizzie was unable to comprehend his nausea, for like most people of her class in the Midwest she found a certain amount of rapture in looking at vermin. Often the lady barbers spoke at great length about loathsome creatures, and the boy listened and could not leave off hearing what made him green and sick for weeks.

  All that Lizzie could understand was that the child of her profligacy vomited and that he would grow up ugly . . .

  Because I Was Flesh is all the more moving for how late it comes, for the sense that Dahlberg had had to taunt himself into writing a masterpiece by declaring himself a neglected master for thirty years before he’d written one. And how fascinating, how instructive, that his first pass at the material of his great book is rehearsed in such different form in his first, Bottom Dogs. All the “proletarian” moves of Bottom Dogs—the wallowing sociology, the overemphatic slang, now so quaint—serve to show how useless the consolation of any sort of crowd, or movement, or fraternity with his fellow man would ever be to Dahlberg in the long run. Though Because I Was Flesh may seem to be written in a more “pretentious” style, compared to the ostensible street authenticity of Bottom Dogs, it is the latter book which wrecks the earlier’s pretensions. Screw the proles, Flesh says: I want my mama—except my mama, and my yearning for her, are beneath my respect.

  In his other work Dahlberg was only a bizarre, sometimes hypnotic stylist, and a writer who forgot to love anything better than his own failure. His literary and cultural criticism, in Can These Bones Live?, The Leafless American, and elsewhere, is worse than useless, it’s corrupt—poisoned by his reeling distress. His parable of disenchantment with the left, The Flea of Sodom, is unreadably arcane—for a lucid portrait of the intelligentsia’s sad contortions in the 1930s, better turn to Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of the Journey or Paula Fox’s The Western Coast. Beyond the autobiographical books, only The Sorrows of Priapus, a kooky diatribe against the human body and sexual desire, is worth a look, and that because it reveals a gift for comedy, a voice so overwrought with self-alienation it anticipates the morbid hilarity of Donald Antrim or Ben Marcus:

  The phallus is a slovenly bag created without intellect or ontological purpose or design, and as long as the human being has this hanging worm appended to his middle, which is no good for anything except passing urine and getting a few, miserable irritations, for which he forsakes his mother, his father, and his friends, he will never comprehend the Cosmos.

  The problem is that, apart from his childhood, Dahlberg has just two subjects: his own career’s undervaluation and the emptiness of existence. Since he was American, contemporary, and literary, it is largely contemporary American literary existence that is decried, but one quickly sniffs out how ready he is to spread the bad news to cover anything alerted to his gaze: home, travel, youth, age, company, loneliness, and girls, girls, girls. D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written out of exhaustion with the younger writer’s preening complaints: “for HEAVEN’S SAKE LEAVE OFF BEING UNLUCKY—you seem to ask for it.” Dahlberg reportedly quoted the line with pride. He recognized early on that despair was his gift, and he gave it freely—in fact he’d sling it at your departing back.

  So despite the lasting beauty of the one towering book, the fame of Dahlberg’s terror campaign through literary culture is no mistake. His failure was greater than his greatness: Dahlberg was a disappointment artist. His virulence against professional glad-handing was only a matter of dynamiting fish in a barrel, as any easy joke about logrolling blurbists has by now more than demonstrated. Dahlberg’s deeper dissidence was against reassurance and consolation, even in their purest forms. That when he considered Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams and Theodore Dreiser he saw only their failure was a confession of pain; the deepest he could afford to offer as to how little writing a masterpiece could assuage the howling loneliness of that needless stint in the Kansas City orphanage. If only a handful of readers, or garlands, was too few, a million readers, or ten million, could never have been enough.

  Dahlberg’s special achievement was to take this rage and leave it raw, refuse to professionalize it. Gilbert Sorrentino wrote:

  Dahlberg’s bitterness and sourness are familiar to many readers, as is his scornful treatment of writers who offend his sensibilities. His near to comic reactionary positions on anything and everything are equally well known. But what does it matter after all? . . . You can find no meaning in Dahlberg, none that you can’t get from a thousand lesser writers. Mailer is a titanic thinker next to him; your mailman or boss has more enlightened or informed ideas. There is nothing in Dahlberg except his greatness; he is the real thing . . . The only thing you can do with Dahlberg is read him.

  Again, as everywhere, the objections come first: the “comic reactionary positions.”

  Dahlberg wed the kill-the-father imperative, the famous anxiety of influence, to the truism that a man is only as big as his enemies. Therefore: if one wished to be the greatest writer of the twentieth century, simply make an enemy of the whole of contemporary literature. Dahlberg spent the first two-thirds of his life measuring his fellows by Melville and finding them not only wanting but bankrupt. Then, in his late fifties, in an act of almost majestic inconsistency, he turned on Melville, declaring his “failure” as well. By doing so, Dahlberg comically exposed the faulty premises in that whole rigged game: to exalt himself he’d forged the obligation to hate greatness. Relishing literature’s variety of methods and discourse—watching a thousand flowers bloom—simply wasn’t an option. Dahlberg left himself no margin to consider that Faulkner, Beckett, Joyce, and so many rejected others might be his life’s companions, his colleagues, his company. Not to mention his masters.

  Novelists pin their
disgust to straw men every day, in this or that review. Others weep for the Death of the Novel. The Herculean instinct to clear the stables prospers in us all from time to time. Loathing other writers, whether they be one’s teachers or students or colleagues, is likely as basic as Freud’s “narcissism of minor difference,” which explains that we are obliged to denounce those most similar to us because the resemblances are too telling of our vulnerabilities, our wants. Only Dahlberg did us the favor of tipping his narcissism of minor difference into the realm of absurdist tantrum-art, sustained for a lifetime. And what he did in burning down the veil of diffident fraternity, he did for the writing classroom as well. Other Famous Monsters of Creative-Writing Land have been known to craft their intolerance into seductive S&M ritual, binding apprentices to grueling discipleships invariably destined for wrenching betrayal. Not Dahlberg. He was as revolted by the students who were turned on by his abuse as he was by those who resisted. Every head had to come off, every supplicant cast into the wilderness. If all of us writing teachers are emperors with no clothes, it was Dahlberg who railed in starkest agony of that fact, rending his invisible garments to tatters until his constituency was forced to bellow at him that he was naked.

  In 1965, the year of the letter, Wilma Yeo founded the Kansas City Writers’ Group, who dedicated their 1994 anthology, Beginning from the Middle, to Yeo, just before her death. The Foreword explains:

  Every piece of this book is a commitment from people who love words and love to write. Wilma Yeo began a class for people who needed encouragement with writing . . . Lawyers, nurses, teachers, psychologists, editors, artists, chemical engineers—these are some of the professions in our group. But when we meet together, our real life is simply writing.

  The dedication quotes Yeo’s credo: “In offering a critique, you must be honest and kind. To be dishonest is to be unkind. And, to be unkind is to be dishonest to yourself and your art.” Here is the sort of nurturance Edward Dahlberg resolutely denounced as false. Yet by his absolute rejection of her offer of discipleship, so excruciatingly detailed in the letter, Dahlberg authorized a forty-eight-year-old woman—instantly, it would appear—to declare herself the kind of writer, and writing teacher, she needed to be. My aunt had already “doubted the adjective” and “learned to discriminate in the varying shades of words,” and she didn’t need what Unamuno or Ruskin, not to mention “Chestov” or “Dostovsky” or Dahlberg had to tell her, in order to go forward. The woman could spot a boiled prune when she met one. Here’s the last poem from Mrs. Neverbody’s Recipes:

  Mrs. Neverbody’s Recipe for Making Crocodile Tears

  To a slice of hanky-panky

  Add some artificial cranky.

  Moisten well with canned boo-hoo.

  Flavor with a spoof or two.

  Drip this slowly—as it falls

  Roll it into little bawls.

  If you’re careful, while they’re cooling

  You can spread on only-fooling.

  (This recipe is not worthwhile

  Unless you are a crocodile.)

  Do you feel the generosity, perhaps even forgiveness, in that last parenthetical couplet? I do. Let it be said: attending creative writing classes ennobles the brave dreamy souls who populate them, publication is a sweet and harmless church, and a minuscule handful of (presently unknown) persons will write something worth reading even during their lifetimes, let alone after. Edward Dahlberg, Worthwhile Crocodile, contributed one book readers may wish to retrieve from the bog of his disappointment, rage, sheer unpleasantness—or they may not wish to bother. His failure, though, is immortal.

  13, 1977, 21

  In the summer of 1977 I saw Star Wars—the original, which is all I want to discuss here—twenty-one times. Better to blurt this at the start so I’m less tempted to retreat from what still seems to me a sort of raw, howling confession, one I’ve long hidden in shame. Again, to pin myself like a Nabokovian butterfly (no high-lit reference is going to bail me out here, I know) to my page in geek history: I watched Star Wars twenty-one times in the space of four months. I was that kid alone in the ticket line, slipping past ushers who’d begun to recognize me, muttering in impatience at a urinal before finding my favorite seat. That was me, occult as a porn customer, yes, though I’ve sometimes denied it. Now, a quarter-century later, I’m ready for my close-up. Sort of.

  That year I was thirteen, and likely as ideal an audience member as any mogul could have drooled for. Say every kid in the United States with even the passingest fondness for comic books or adventure fiction, any kid with a television, even, had bought a ticket for the same film in a single summer: blah, blah, right, that’s what happened. So figure that for every hundred kids who traveled an ordinary path (Cool movie, wouldn’t mind seeing it again with my friends) there might be one who’d make himself ill returning to the cookie jar five or six times (It’s really still good the fourth time, I swear! ) before copping to a tummy ache. Next figure that for each five hundred, one or two would slip into some brain-warped identificatory obsession (I am Star Wars, Star Wars am me, goo goo ga joob) and return to the primal site often enough to push into the realm of trance and memorization. That’s me, with my gaudy twenty-one , like DiMaggio’s fifty-six. But what actually occurred within the secret brackets of that experience? What emotions lurk within that ludicrous temple of hours? What the fuck was I thinking?

  Every one of those twenty-one viewings took place at the Loew’s Astor Plaza on Forty-fourth Street, just off Times Square. I’d never seen a movie there before (and unless you count The Empire Strikes Back, I didn’t again until 1999—The Matrix). And I’ve still never seen Star Wars anywhere else. The Astor Plaza was a low, deep-stretched hall with a massive screen and state-of-the-art sound, and newly enough renovated to be free of too much soda-rotted carpet, a plague among New York theaters those days. Though architecturally undistinguished, it was a superior place to see anything, I suppose. But for me it was a shrine meant for just one purpose—I took it as weirdly significant that “Astor” could be rearranged into “astro”—and in a very New Yorker –coverish way I believed it to be the only real and right place to see Star Wars, the very ground zero of the phenomenon. I felt a definite but not at all urgent pity for any benighted fools stuck watching it elsewhere. I think I associated the Astor Plaza with the Death Star, in a way. Getting in always felt like an accomplishment, both elevating and slightly dangerous.

  Along those lines I should say it was vaguely unnerving to be a white kid in spectacles routinely visiting Times Square by subway in the middle of the 1970s. Nobody ever said anything clearly about what was wrong or fascinating about that part of the city we lived in—the information was absorbed in hints and mutterings from a polyphony of sources. In fact, though I was conscious of a certain seamy energy in those acres of sex shows and drug dealers and their furtive sidewalk customers, I was never once hassled (and this was a time when my home neighborhood, in Brooklyn, was a minefield for me personally). But the zone’s reputation ensured I’d always plan my visits to fall wholly within summer’s long daylight hours.

  Problem: it doesn’t seem at all likely that I went to the movie alone the first time, but I can’t remember who I was with. I’ve polled a few of my likeliest friends from that period, but they’re unable to help. In truth I can’t recall a “first time” in any real sense, though I do retain a flash memory of the moment the prologue first began to crawl in tilted perspective up the screen, an Alice-in-Wonderland doorway to dream. I’d been so primed, so attuned and ready to love it (I remember mocking my friend Evan for his thinking that the title meant it was going to be some kind of all-star cavalcade of a comedy, like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World or Smokey and the Bandit) that my first time was gulped impatiently, then covered quickly in the memory of return visits. From the first I was “seeing it again.” I think this memory glitch is significant. I associate it with my practice of bluffing familiarity with various drug experiences, later (not much later). My refusal
to recall or admit to a first time was an assertion of maturity: I was always already a Star Wars fanatic.

  I didn’t buy twenty-one tickets. My count was amassed by seeing the movie twice in a day over and over again. And one famous day (famous to myself) I sat through it three times. That practice of seeing a film twice through originated earlier. Somebody—my mother?—had floated the idea that it wasn’t important to be on time for a movie, or even to check the screening times before going. Instead, moviegoing in Brooklyn Heights or on Fulton Street with my brother or with friends, we’d pop in at any point in the story, watch to the end, then sit through the break and watch the beginning. Which led naturally, if the film was any good, to staying past the original point of entry to see the end twice. Which itself led to routinely twice-watching a movie we liked, even if we hadn’t been late. This was encouraged, partly according to a general Steal This Book–ish anticapitalist imperative for taking freebies in my parents’ circle in the seventies. Of course somebody—my mother?—had also figured out a convenient way to get the kids out of the house for long stretches.

  I hate arriving late for movies now and would never watch one in this broken fashion. (It seems to me, though, that I probably learned something about the construction of narratives from the practice.) The lifelong moviegoing habit which does originate for me with Star Wars is that of sitting in movie theaters alone. I probably only had company in the Loew’s Astor Plaza four or five times. The rest of my visits were solitary, which is certainly central to any guesses I’d make about the emotional meaning of the ritual viewings.