The Disappointment Artist Read Online Free Page B

autobiography now BECAUSE I WAS FLESH, and have a little more comprehension of this individual who emerged from a poverty stricken childhood in Kansas City where his whore-mother was a Star Lady Barber and he had no father—his book is the story of Lizzie Dahlberg—his mother—whom he loved with revulsion. This man, an intellectual Alexander King—in both looks and attitude—bitter, bitter sweet (and I don’t use the term intellectual in the bannal method of today) has verbally crucified every member of the class who dared open his mouth—and to read a work of ones own! Sheer folly. He is a man of letters and so well acquainted with Dreiser, Swift, Mather, Taylor, Stendhal, DeBalzac, Unamuno, Dryden, Gissing, Ruskin, Morris, Ford, Coleridge, Anderson, Baudouin, Flaubert, Keats, Gill, Read, Chestov, Thoreau, Rozanov, Merjkowski, Tolstoi Swinburne, Hulme, Williams, Heywood, Jastrow, (all of the bible) though he disclaims religion Weaver, Meyers, Garland, Berkman, Goldman, Delacroix, Dostovsky etc but not many more—that he is astonishingly like a walking library—He calls James and Brecht scribblers—says nothing worth reading has been written ’en contemporary . . . no doubt it would seem to be a mistake to sit two hours twice a week in the mezermizing world he weaves for I can no longer write a word— should my life depend on it.
    That’s the whole text of the first, unparagraphed page. There are six more. The letter—it is still in my possession—is on onionskin, letters carved in ink by a manual’s keys. Rich with delirious typos and misspellings (Dostovsky and Chestov!), and hasty cursive annotations, as well as a torrent of weirdly antique name-drops (Alexander King, Jastrow), but above all eloquently desperate, the letter radiates human intellectual panic like pheromones. Each time I read it I feel the thrill of unsealing a time capsule, and of awakening my aunt from her deservedly peaceful slumber.
    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