The Disappointment Artist (3 page)

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?

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 8
^th
and 7
^th
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.