The Edenic Impulse
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
WRITERS^WRITING The Edenic Impulse By Raymond Rosenthal Edward Dahlberg knows where paradise is located, though he doesn't inhabit it. His career in fact describes, with a consciousness seldom...
...His humor smacks of the Old Opera House and Captain Billy's Whizbang...
...When pain is absolute, or unbearable, it is similar to the most heightened pleasure...
...Dreiser is told that naturalism is cloacal...
...He points to a terra incognita of the American spirit which has yet to be discovered and developed...
...Dahlberg is content today to break the bad news gently...
...The garage proletariat will blow up the earth to make his existence less monotonous...
...I've always said," Dahlberg snorts, "that a painter can hang his works, but a writer can only hang himself...
...and Sir Herbert Read is excoriated for getting fat and successful and going about the world giving money awards to painters...
...Yet his intensity spends itself as readily on a chance remark made by William Carlos Williams as on the fate of our culture and civilization...
...Dahlberg refused to take that next step...
...His correspondents range all over the cultural landscape, past and present, and include Theodore Dreiser, Lewis Mumford, Sir Herbert Read, Allen Tate, Isabella Gardner, James Laughlin and Josephine Herbst...
...When the meals were the most repulsive, both Doc and Simon Wolkes told them to rejoice in their swill because of the famine in Armenia and the floods in China...
...and The Sorrows of Priapus...
...The orphaned boy grew up in an orphaned land and the terrible grief of that double loss, constantly merged and intertwined, sighs through all of Edward Dahlberg's writings...
...But in his recent preface to the reissue of that novel...
...And his sheer lyricism of indignant love is the most piercing and wonderful in our literature today: "When the image of her [his mother] comes up on a sudden????just as my bad demons do????and I see again her dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barbershop, and the dear, broken wing of her mouth, and when I regard her wild tatters, I know that not even Solomon in his lilied raiment was so glorious as my mother in her rags...
...The pressure never lets up...
...but in his youth he wrote harsh, satiric novels like From Flushing to Calvary and Tliose Who Perish, which deserve a place in any complete record of his career...
...Machinery, lathes, pistons, vibrating cars and subways constantly chafe his genital organs, and, O gods, Onan cannot fornicate...
...the maple, aider, elm and cherry trees with which the town abounds are songs of desire...
...Indeed, almost all of his subsequent works record his struggle to get out of hell and into paradise...
...The Edenic impulse, so long driven underground in American writing, re-flowers miraculously in his later books, such as Because I was Flesh and Can These Bones Live...
...Selah...
...nor did the intellectual, artistic life, and the results of that are his elegiac tirades...
...But it is not only language that must bend to his will...
...330 pp., $6.50), which dwells, unfortunately, on the paradisic goal of Edward Dahlberg's journey, instead of showing us the hard-won stages he had to pass through to attain it...
...and only the almonds of ancient Palestine can waken the hungry pores more deeply...
...Dahlberg is a formidable stylist...
...But members of the younger literary generation are appalled...
...Still, let us be satisfied with what we have...
...Who can satisfy this insistent, impossible, almost monstrous demand for love...
...Dahlberg is all of a piece, so the concomitant publication of his letters...
...Wc stink in each other's nostrils...
...Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago asks for advice and gets a list of the "dingy, soulless" phrases used by the professor and experts who write pamphlets for one of his foundations...
...All of America and Europe's literary past is combed, re-examined, held up to the light, judged with a merciless eye: "Style," Dahlberg says, "is the absolute limit of a man's character and bad writing shows a lack of love...
...The bosom of this town nursed men...
...Henry James postponed his periods as long as he could and Melville deferred action until the last few pages of Moby-Dick...
...the orphans dunged as a pastime...
...The Edward Dahlberg Reader (New Directions...
...His singing, wiry prose sounds a note of rural tenderness that goes straight back to Thoreau's "tawny grammar" and "early morning prescience...
...The sympathetic heart is broken," he cried...
...Now Paul Carroll has gathered them together in an anthology...
...And Dahlberg concentrates the prolixity of 500 pages of Mailer or Burroughs in four furious sentences: "He [modern man] furtively diets on prurient newspaper pictures of female legs until he has a priapic fit, and loses his seed in Onan's cinema pit...
...It seems to me that this mystique of passion does him a disservice, for the real mystic can separate the trivial from the crucial and expend his energies gracefully on whatever comes along...
...the perfect picture of the infernal, affcctless, uprooted world of tomorrow...
...His mother didn't, and the artistic result is his great, broken-hearted, eloquent Because 1 Was Flesh...
...Epitaphs of Our Times (Braziller, 308 pp., $6.95) only enlarges and emphasizes what has already been expressed more eloquently in his anthology...
...Dahlberg is as hard on his correspondents as he is on himself, which may seem just but really isn't...
...He would be forgetting that this waste land of orphanages, of derelict, wandering young men without emotional ties of any kind, seemed to Lawrence, who always had his own family behind him...
...But nothing really exists, for nobody can handle his memories, or take hold of a single sensation, no matter how immense it was when he had it...
...Lawrence considered Bottom Dogs an end-point in psychic disintegration...
...The next step, he felt and said, would be legal insanity or crime...
...An American, looking at the novel today, after all that has been written in the same vein, might wonder why Lawrence was so deeply repelled...
...It is a wild, concupiscent city, and few there are troubled about death until they age or arc sick...
...From this standpoint, Dahlberg is our one truly rebel writer, capable of shocking the supposedly unshockable...
...and he rejects in toto all the ways and products of our technological civilization...
...it seems to them illogical, even diabolic...
...He can of course prattle about the small change of life, random women and love affairs, curious people met in his travels, odd scenes and events, but one always feels that he deems all this beneath or, rather, beside him...
...Dahlberg brings the strength of Hercules to bear on pushing a pea or lifting a tea-cup...
...Leslie Fiedler's book-length thesis is put in a few pungent words: "American literature is exceedingly poor in victuals and in amours...
...The greatest profligacy comes from tedium...
...mules and horses as famous as the asses of Arcadia and the steeds of Diomedes...
...He is intense, inflamed, never indifferent or unconcerned...
...Bottom Dogs, his first novel, depicted hell, and D. H. Lawrence in his 1929 preface to the original edition was quick to recognize it...
...They feel more at ease with the writers who carp and grumble but do not point to so drastic an alternative...
...I felt strangled and choked by the close atmosphere of literary confabulation and sore feelings...
...No character has been adequately fed or loved in an American novel for a hundred and twenty-five years...
...The first relates to his philosophy of personal comportment, which I would call the mystique of passion...
...Can These Bones Live...
...Kansas City...
...What Bloy said of Huysmans can be said of Dahl-berg's style, for he is "continually dragging Mother Image by the hair or feet down the wormeaten staircase of terrified Syntax...
...Dahlberg repudiates the "rude American vernacular" in which it is written and admits that he had "deliberately expunged some of the joys of this globe, sun, grass, river" in order not to write "a slavish book about a society which concealed its filth and cruelty...
...His career in fact describes, with a consciousness seldom encountered in contemporary American writing, a movement of descent into hell and of ascent to a privately imagined Eden—composed from classic wisdom, earthy Elizabethan speech and the sweet savor of rustic America's lost pastoral freshness...
...Only in his letters to Josephine Herbst does the tender, untroubled, unhounded man behind the lyrical prose show himself...
...his autobiographical novel Because I Was Flesh begins, "is a vast inland city, and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the senses...
...For example: "Human beings eat to defecate...
...Dahlberg's vision combines the mysticism of Saint Teresa of Avila with the protest of the philosophical anarchists: "All acute moments are the same...
...This awkwardness is perhaps inevitable in an American prophetic writer who feels hemmed in by the void...
...But Dahlberg does not change to suit his recipient...
...Well, I know," he says in one of his letters to her, "you are a wondrous nature, filled with the same passionate despair as I, fumbling from one book to another as we do, praying for affections, flowers, and even tombs, human closeness, vegetation which makes us smile and rejoice, and for that rest from people who tire us because we are no longer accustomed to see them...
...Their poverty was so equally distributed among all the orphans that no waif, unless he coveted the indigence, had any cause for envy...
...Moreover, Dahlberg is also a mystic of the wild natural life which has been covered up by the ugly crust of our cement cities...
...There are two things one can learn from reading Dahlberg's correspondence...
...Dahlberg refuses to approach anyone with neutral feelings...
...Sir Herbert Read, Lewis Mumford and Allen Tate, all wise men in their respective spheres, agree with him in this crucial matter...
Vol. 50 • January 1967 • No. 2
