Volume 2, Number 3 · March 19, 1964
Dahlberg's Wisdom
By R.W. Flint
Because I Was Flesh
The Autobiography of Edward Dahlberg
New Directions, 234 pp., $5.00
Truth Is More Sacred
by Edward Dahlberg, by Sir Herbert Read
Norizon, 222 pp., $4.95
Edward Dahlberg is one of the shrewdest, most rugged and interesting 'failures' in American letters. One might almost say that in publishing his new autobiography, Because I was Flesh, at a vigorous sixty-four, Dahlberg had exhausted the possibilities of failure in our time, the rhetorical possibilities anyway. Nothing much left for him now but success. Notwithstanding the evidence of his sensible, clean-cut features on book-jackets, or the striking portrait by James Kearns in Can These Bones Live, he never tires of spooking us with intimations of his lacerated Lazarus-face, his pariahhood, his Ishmaelic solitude in a machine-made wilderness. How awful to meet Mr. Dahlberg! The man who knew and appreciated Randolph Bourne, belonged tangentially to the Stieglitz circle, befriended Tate, Josephine Herbst, Herbert Read, and Charles Olson; was befriended by Lawrence and Ford and warmly received by Eliot despite a warning from F. S. Flint that 'Tom does not like Jews,' is clearly the victim of some demon of good sense that not only kept him working through three eras of changing tastes but guided him to the best compromise with those tastes. He anticipated Saul Bellow of Augie March in his serio-comic pilferings from the classics, he was way ahead of Fiedler in the love-and-homosexuality gambit about American literature, and he easily wins a prize as the loudest James-and-Eliot hater of them all, 'I blame Eliot for nothing except the books that he has written.' (Thanks a million—TSE.) And lastly, he has made as big a personal thing out of Wisdom as John Kennedy made of not wearing a hat. I say it with respect and admiration.
Review, 2139 words
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