Revisiting Edward Dahlbergs Because I Was Flesh

Context N21
Because I Was Flesh was the first book I owned by Edward Dahlberg. I bought it in the fall of
1964 from Gordon Cairnie, at the Grolier Book Shop on Plympton Street, in Cambridge,
shortly after it was published by New Directions. Until then I had not read anything by
Dahlberg, although I recognized his name from Charles Olsons dedication of the Christ
chapter in Call Me Ishmael to Edward Dahlberg, my other genius of the Cross and the
Windmill. But when I caught sight of the books distinctive dust jacket photograph of a
shoeprint in the sand, as I browsed among Gordons new arrivals on a small table near the
front of his cluttered but welcoming shop; and when I opened the beautiful red, cloth-bound
volume with its attractive type faces, laid paper, and letter press format to Dahlbergs first
sentenceKansas City is a vast inland city, and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the
senses.I knew I had not only to read but to posses this book.
Good choice, the ever-attentive Cairnie commented when I brought the book up to his desk
for payment. Just dont let Charlie know you bought it, he added, referring to the well
known rift between the two writers, who had been competitively close since they first met in
an East Gloucester boarding house, on August 9, 1936, while Dahlberg was on vacation from
New York and Olson was preparing to enter graduate school at Harvard. By the time I
acquired Because I Was Flesh, it had been nearly nine years since the former friends last
communicated, when Dahlberg, on November 24, 1955, had written a final letter to his
former disciple, a letter which concluded in a rebuke, in love and sorrow.
Naturally I said nothing to Olson, who never once referred to Dahlberg during the many years
of our friendship. But as soon as I returned home to Rocky Neck, I opened the book and
began excitedly to read. Having spent the previous several years immersed in Beat and Black
Mountain writing, I found Dahlbergs richly biblical and classically allusive prose a bracing
antidote to Kerouac, Ginsberg, and even Olson. As a young English teacher and graduate
student, I immediately recognized Dahlbergs absorption in the stately rhythms of
Elizabethan prose, particularly that of Sir Thomas Browne, echoes of
whoseHydriotaphia or Urne Buriall and Religio Medici I discovered on nearly every page,
along with allusions to both the imagery and diction of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster,
the Euphues of John Lyly, and Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy. But these allusions and
occasional direct quotations were no mere borrowings or decorative effects in an otherwise
highly original style. Dahlberg had internalized the major works of these canonical writers,
along with Homer in Chapmans translation, the pre-Socratics, and the Latin and Greek texts
of Alexandrian philosophy, not to speak of the theology of Origen and Augustine. And when
he came to write, what resulted was not affectation, as one might assume, given the range
and eclecticism of the texts Ive referred to, but a prose that was entirely uniquedirect,
resonant, and breathtakingly beautiful:
Would to God that my mother had not been a leaf scattered every-where and as the wind
listeth. Would to heaven that I could compose a different account of her flesh . . . Should I err
against her dear relics or trouble her sleep, may no one imagine that she has not always
been for me the three Marys of the New Testament. Moreover, whatever I imagine I know is
taken from my mothers body, and this is the memoir of her body.
It was this language, then, that held my attention, along with Dahlbergs acute sense of
place. Kansas City, where he grew up with his widowed mother Lizzie, a Lady Barber,
emerges in his pages not only as a quintessential American mid-western, riverine town in all
the specificity of its streets, drug stores, slaughter houses, tenements, and bordellos, but also
as one of the generative places of the earth:
Kansas City was my Tarsus; the Kaw and the Missouri Rivers were the washpots of joyous
Dianas from St. Joseph and Joplin. It was a young seminal town and the seed of its men was
strong. Homer sang of many sacred towns in Hellas which were no better than Kansas City,
as hilly as Eteonus and as stony as Aulis. The city wore a coat of rocks and grass. The bosom
of this town nursed men, mules and horses as famous as the asses of Arcadia and the steeds
of Diomedes . . . Kansas City was the city of my youth and the burial ground of my poor
mothers hopes; her blood, like Abels, cries out to me from every cobblestone, building, flat
and street.

Although I was moved by Dahlbergs account of his and his mothers many misfortunes in
this first readingthe eccentricities of her endless suitors, her struggle to retain what she felt
was a necessary respectability as a woman who cut the hair of cowboys and traveling
salesmenand though I found the story of young Edwards horrific incarceration in a Jewish
orphanage in Cleveland nearly impossible to bear, what riveted me especially was the
language Ive spoken of. And its music remained for many years in my head.
But now, forty-four years later, when I revisit the book, which critics Alfred Kazin and Allen
Tate both called one of the great American autobiographies, Im once again taken by
Dahlbergs language, especially in a time when our own has become increasingly debased
and trivialized. In this second reading, Im even more fascinated and delighted by Dahlbergs
clear mastery of authors and texts once so central to our own self-definition. But what
emerges in greater relief for me, though it was always resonant, is Dahlbergs stunning sense
of the social and the political. For when I first read Because I Was Flesh I was unaware of the
authors beginnings as one of our finest proletarian novelists; and it wasnt until I had
read Bottom Dogs, his first novel, published in 1930, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence,
who wrote that Dahlbergs directness, that unsentimental and non-dramatized thoroughness
of setting down the under-dog mind, surpasses anything I know, that I began to understand
the political underpinnings of Because I Was Flesh in Dalhbergs early radicalism.
What is Bottom Dogs but a first telling of the story of Edward and Lizzie in the most
extraordinary plain American English, so reminiscent of Sherwood Andersons? In 1964 I had
read little Anderson, perhaps in college only the deeply affectingWinesburg, Ohio, and I was
unaware of how important his novels and stories had been to the young Dahlberg, just as
they were to the youthful Faulkner and Hemingway. But when you come upon the opening
sentences of Bottom DogsShe moved from town to town, selling hair switches, giving
osteopathic treatments, going on again when she felt the place had been played out. In this
way she hoped to save a little money and establish herself in some thriving city. She had
taken Lorry with her wherever she went.the echoes of Andersons diction and narrative
mastery, especially in his masterpiece, Poor White, a stunning novel of small town failures
and broken dreams narrated against the backdrop of emerging industrialization, are
unmistakable, along with Dahlbergs sharp sense of outrage over the kinds of oppression that
he and his mother and so many others experienced as the country moved from a humanscale agrarian way of life to an alienating market economy.
So in revisiting Because I Was Flesh I find the echoes of Anderson along with Dahlbergs everpresent social consciousness, though perhaps less stridently expressed than in his first book.
Its as if the two sensibilities, the lovely, direct Andersonian voice of the middle-American
storyteller and the rueful, politically seasoned awareness of the mature Dahlberg, have
interpenetrated in the context of Dahlbergs exquisite late and more classical style, creating
a new dimension of understanding and a greater, more tragic depth to his narrative. Yet the
long-suffering figure of his mother Lizzie remains; and in dramatizing the story of their
painfully conflicted life together, Dahlberg has given us one of the great accounts in literature
of the relationship between a son and his mother:
When the image of her comes up on a suddenjust as my bad demons doand I see her
dyed henna hair, the eyes dwarfed by the electric lights in the Star Lady Barber Shop, 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. Selah.