Volume 11, Number 12 · January 2, 1969
Eating Fables
By John Wain
The Carnal Myth A Search into Classical Sensuality
by Edward Dahlberg
Weybright and Talley, 121 pp., $6.50
The Leafless American
by Edward Dahlberg, edited with an Introduction by Harold Billings
Roger Beacham, 105 pp., $8.95
Edward Dahlberg: American Ishmael of Letters
edited with an Introduction by Harold Billings
Roger Beacham, 175 pp., $8.95
'Man must eat fables, or starve his soul to death.' So writes Edward Dahlberg, and he has a right to the oracular pronouncement, because it has been his consistent goal as an imaginative writer to transmute his own experience into fable. To this end he has taken his life, his misfortunes, his wanderings, his encounters and memories, and subjected them to the deep-heat treatment of creative meditation until they have yielded their essence. And if the result is not very much in quantity—one masterpiece, two or three near-misses, and a shelf of volumes whose interest is mainly ancillary—no one will carp except the enthusiastic tyro who has not yet learned that art, unlike commerce, does not reckon a pocketful of small change to be the equivalent of one gold coin.
Review, 2379 words
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