Confessions of Edward Dahlberg

by Edward Dahlberg

HARDBACK with dust jacket

Genres: Memoir

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

His first novel, Bottom Dogs, based on his childhood experiences at the orphanage and his travels in the American West, was published in London with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence. With his advance money, Dahlberg returned to New York City and resided in Greenwich Village. He visited Germany in 1933 and in reaction briefly joined the Communist Party, but left the Party by 1936. From the 1940s onwards, Dahlberg made his living as an author and also taught at various colleges and universities. In 1948, he taught briefly at the experimental Black Mountain College. He was replaced on the staff by his friend and fellow author, Charles Olson.

He was an expatriate writer of the 1920s, a proletarian novelist of the 1930s, a spokesman for a fundamental humanism in the 1940s. For a number of years, Dahlberg devoted himself to literary study. His extensive readings of the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Thoreau and many others resulted in a writing style quite different from the social realism that characterized his earlier writing.

He moved to the Danish island of Bornholm in 1955 while working on The Flea of Sodom. The Sorrows of Priapus was published in 1957, becoming his most successful book thus far. He later moved to Mallorca, while working on Because I Was Flesh, an autobiography which was published in 1964. During the 1960s and 1970s, he became quite prolific and further refined his unique style through the publication of poetry, autobiographical works, fiction and criticism.

Reviews

[Dionysius the Areopagite]

Slow, slow goings here - on my part. There is so much knowledge packed into a page, a paragraph, a passage, that there is no way I can sit down on a snowy, stormsullen morning like this, drink cranberry juice with vodka and coffee, and whiz through the pages as if this was some kind of straight autobiography. No wonder Dahlberg's reputation, when mentioned, is dickish - To write so well and receive so little in return! Some jump off of bridges, some give up, some take to imitation - in voice and appearance - others trudge through. If Moore said that The Recognitions was like Dostoyevsky writing The Wasteland, Nicolello says this is something like Robert Browne writing A Sentimental Education.

tbc

[Christopher]

"Having no confidence in my virtues, I proposed to make every defect of mine count. By now, a good deal of my hair is famished and whited as the spulchre, but I have never ceased to be the acolyte of the seminal Logoi."

"A decrepit doctor hobbled by, bent over to sow Dragon's teeth and two thousand textbooks were born."

"My whole existence was Sunday, my brain feeble as the cony, and no bread or marrow in my legs. I saw a parcel of naiads with uncovered, wrinkled breasts soured by a seminar in social studies. they were carrying textbooks bound with the skins of gnats, spiders and ants. Oppressed by these unkind volumes I beseeched the shades of literature to give me a book clothed in a hair shirt whose pages were wild honey and locusts."

"He realized he had made a boorish blunder, and was stupid, which is all the learning there is....Few are benumbed by their imbecility; the brother at least was startled."

"...my sleep, that sea of Sodom upon which every carcass floats."

"By now I was undone, and in my spleen I muttered: 'Nobody will victual a man unless he has a full stomach. What is more precious to those who possess everything than failure which they cannot achieve?'"

"O hungry ones, I am starved, and I drink the rains and the heavens. When I'm empty, and there are freeezing steppes in my spirit, I disgorge my Muse, the Void. What a constellation is Nothing. Still what have I gotten out of it? But everything matters. That's how it is with me."

"But if I hadn't been deceived could I possess what belongs to me?"

"He is in the ground now. I have grieved over him, and then again my soul has been dipped into the squalid marshes of wrath. I have taken the oath never to allow a stranger to cross the threshold of my fragile identity and call me friend."

"Delay is an impostume in the soul. He who does not whet his will every hour perishes of velleity. I have no clear or good purpose save in exercising my will, for nothing I do appears right to me, but I must do it. Unless I go to my table and work each day the stars disappear, the heavens go out, and the world vanishes. He who does nothing kills the sprouting bubbling plants; his foot is dead and his neck is froward."

"When she could flesh her pages she composed very sensual passages, and writing that is not physical is gibberish."

"I had fled from the universal theology of lucre but could not avoid the snare of politics. I had reached the end, which is another path to perception. My skies were sackcloth, my distempered lakes were dried up, my body a dead gully. The abyss is no-feeling, that is the ultimate despondency. When I'm cauterized, flea'd or bled, I want to feel it."

"Imagine I sought affection from people I never needed; they were senseless and droll enough to suppose I required them. That was the only hoax I was ever able to impose upon these average unfeeling noddles. Naturally I gather together a few persons now and then to decoy me. A man has to provide himself with a covey of Judases; that's what is called life."

"My own darkness, my wilderness, and the black Cain leaves crying in my breast, are Odysseus' apostrophe to his own nature: 'Endure, my soul, endure.'"

[Mike]

A well-read deep-thinking man and his laments. Keep a dictionary near at hand.
Notes:
9.. I employed words that gave joy to my ears, even if some are archaic.
20.. I live alone since I do not wish to mistreat anybody so much as I have myself.
48.. Rebuffed by crumpled jades to whom I had made no advances.
58.. I was to serve as a clerk in a public venereal clinic. I had never anticipated I would secure such a jovial position.
60.. Before I was familiar with Tolstoy, I dropped into the fatuous conceit that a book of mine might have a beneficial effect upon some torn and outcast reader.
67.. I scamped the advertisements: “Learn how to make a plain remark in 6 weeks “ “Chiropodist pares calluses on doctorate theses” “Nursing home for millionaires. Purses and large bank accounts fumigated every week.”
70… People venerate their cats and dogs. Bite the heels of passers-by, thus giving the hag or toothless jade jubilation. … To take up as much time as possible the crone catalogs her complaints: insomnia, trench mouth, ....
107.. Indian prince staying at the Y. I liked him since he was gifted enough to believe I was a superior person.
111.. Humble, from humus, earth, low, creeping
130… Her mustache … There are no explanations for human desires. Why hair in the wrong place diminishes venery is a subtle riddle. Why should massive hair on the head and murky eyelashes excite men, while what was only nature’s brushwork on an upper lip repel them.
138.. Sauntering is for cogitation, as the Aristotelian peripatetics inform us.
183… There’s something very lewd about an Adam’s apple. [God made a chunk of apple get stuck in Adam’s throat as a reminder of his sin.]
222.. I had nothing to say and was clever enough not to say it.
253.. Memory is a gathering of wounds. -Nietsche

[Jmignault]

Confessions of Edward Dahlberg ( Universal Library, Volume 12 ) by Edward Dahlberg (date?)