A Hard Perdurable Life
MELLOW, JAMES R.
A Hard Perdurable Life BECAUSE I WAS FLESH By Edward Dahlberg New Directions. 234 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by JAMES R. MELLOW Executive Editor, "Arts Magazine" PICTURE, IF you will, Henry...
...Picture next, Edward Dahlberg standing before the same closed door...
...But Lizzie survived...
...being gulled into business ad-ventures in which she invariably was the loser...
...Down-to-earth but aspiring, she was a woman of natural responses: relieving herself in darkened doorways on the trek homeward from the barbershop while the embarrassed boy stood watch...
...Emma Moneysmith was awarded a thousand dollars in "heart balm" from a flatiron salesman...
...Dahlberg has found James "an exquisite mediocrity" with "the vibrant soul of an upholsterer or a delicate seamstress...
...At the age of 11, he was packed off to the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland in the hopes that his absence would bring about a marriage between his mother and the reluctant Captain Henry Smith, a stingy retired steamboat captain who was living with her at the time...
...A hard perdurable life...
...or marshalling up her forces to act as a character witness for one of her girls involved in a breach of promise suit...
...Your Honor, nobody can speak against my good name," Lizzie told the judge and handed him her business cards...
...It is no secret that Dahlberg despises the work of Henry James and all that it has stood for in the course of American literature...
...But the dominating figure of Dahlberg's autobiography and of his life is Lizzie Dahlberg, Proprietress of the Star Lady Barber-shop, a squat body of poor, sad, persevering and indomitable flesh...
...His blunt emotions and Biblical incantations roll over her short, squinting person decked out in rags and tatters...
...Occasionally, She took arms against the trifling affections of men...
...cheating them on their customers' tab just as they cheated her in re-turn...
...for Dahlberg is concerned, primarily, with the health of literature-for its sweet breath, its firm flesh, its clean bowels-just as his mother, equating good health with good fortune, examined herself in the mirror each day for a pink tongue and firm paps and, taking a cold bath, rubbed herself down with a rough towel...
...He died, leaving his fortune to an invalid brother and sister, be-fore the marriage settlements were thrashed out...
...Poor Emma came to a bad end: shot while leaving a hotel room carrying her luggage and a cowboy's money-belt...
...Finally, she came to New York, first to live with her son and then, to die alone, her body lying on a cot for five days before it was discovered by a neighbor...
...demanding a cottage from Captain Henry Smith for seven years board and non-marital bed...
...Her dream of the finer things was "cut glass, solid oak rocking chairs and a front lawn...
...Reviewed by JAMES R. MELLOW Executive Editor, "Arts Magazine" PICTURE, IF you will, Henry James before the closed door of an apartment or a room, contemplating the activities of its occupants...
...Yet Dahlberg's quarrel with James is not mere literary jealousy...
...itinerant, until his mother established herself as the proprietress of a barbershop in Kansas City...
...Eventually she started a chicken farm in North-moor, Missouri, and placed an ad in a "matrimonial gazette...
...There he stands, the master of refinements, guessing at the quality of the situation within and in his mind he conjures up a transatlantic fantasy, involving a radiant, but dying, heiress from New York and an ambitious young bounder from Lon-don...
...The son's shame, exasperation, remorse thread through the entire narrative...
...Yet never, in all this, does he stoop so low as the keyhole, grandly proffering itself...
...At the Asylum, surviving the home-sickness, the brutality, the slops for food and the pious indifference of the supervisors, he came of age-a Jewish Oliver Twist, stripped bare of any maudlin platitudes...
...A Hard Perdurable Life BECAUSE I WAS FLESH By Edward Dahlberg New Directions...
...taking the girls from the barbershop in when necessary or administering home-made abortion remedies to them when advisable...
...Fatherless, except for the stray welchers and sports who took his mother's heart, her hopes and-more often than not-her purse...
...As usual, she drew a blank: a suspicious and eccentric septuagenarian who arrived for their first interview wearing a heavy coat, muffler, and rubbers, carrying an umbrella picked up at the Salvation Army, although the weather was warm and dry...
...squeamish to the point of fits of vomiting over his mother's slovenly habits-Dahlberg gives us the impression that the price for survival in his hard world was the death of a sensitivity as marked as Henry James's...
...Bent upon literature, he became a vagabond, living from hand-to-mouth...
...Neither does he bend to the keyhole: He knows from brute ex-perience that in a seedy room be-hind the door, a graying chippy with plump buttocks and a light step, is offering her services to a sweating bull-necked brakeman from the Burlington Railroad...
...Their encounters bring out a woeful self-knowledge in him until he cries out: "All my life I have committed one of the worst of the seven cardinal sins: I had not the strength to overcome the average in myself" Had he come to terms with her, it might have been a happier life for both of them: It would not have been so honest a book...
...Seldom has the claim for experience against imagination been so sharply drawn...
...The end of it marks the end of Dahlberg's autobiography as well...
...sighing for a better life and for the sensitive sickly boy beside her...
...The striking feature of Because I Was Flesh, Dahlberg's painfully candid autobiography, is the ex-ample it gives of the process of growing up by sheer grit...
...bumming in Needles, California, boning up on literature and life in the Christian Science Reading Room in Los Angeles, teaching in New York and eventually writing a series of books-among them Bottom Dogs, The Sorrows of Priapus, The Flea of Sodom-which have established him as something like the salt of contemporary American literature...
...James was brought up to respect and pry gently into all of the more refined mysteries of human behavior: Dahl-berg has earned, with painful under-standing, a knowledge of all the basic realities of the human condition...
...The book never comes to terms with Lizzie...
...A profitable and popular activity among women in the early years of the century...
Vol. 48 • January 1965 • No. 2
