orbis quintus

Edward Dahlberg, whose obscurity (unjust as it is) is (and was) matched only by his imperiousness, was as acerbic a judge of literature in his letters as I’ve read.  Nabokov somewhat famoulsy dismissed several canonical writers.  In his view, Dostoevsky was a peasant scribbler, Faulkner a spinner of “corncobby” grotesques, and the late Gogol a pious fraud.  Dahlberg, whose Sorrows of Priapus is probably the funniest attack on the phallus I’ve read, was no less harsh in his judgments.  One wonders whether or not, had he had the sort of platform Nabokov enjoyed, a more public airing of his distaste for writers like Kafka, Melville, Cummings, etc would have given him the visibility he believed he deserved.

His own prose is faux-archaic, eccentrically punctuated, and liberally seeded with classical allusions.  He began as a novelist in the realist tradition (Bottom Dogs) and was well regarded by D.H. Lawrence and Ford Maddox Ford.  He later disowned this early style and began to write “in the style of Thomas Browne or Burton.”  I think it reads more like early Alexander Theroux, with shades of Fr. Rolfe here and there.  Temperamentally, he would have certainly found a kindred spirit in Baron Corvo, friendship with whom was said to be “an excercise in minor demonology”.  At any rate, one would have to search to find most of his books.  He was a late master of the somewhat awkward vitriolic bon mot.  A smattering, from Epitaphs of our Times, a collection of his letters (which is out of print):

On Books:

“I have human fervor, and whenever I meet anybody I do all I can to drive him to a sage book.”

On Life:

“I have only one trade, and that is to try to be Human, Ecce Homo, and to talk to other people as flesh speaks to flesh, as worm touches worm.”

On Baudelaire:

“Do not imagine that I read all of Baudelaire with cold eyes, or that I have not been affected by him.  He taught me to use adjectives clearly, to exaggerate the possibilities of wit, to simper a little at male whoring in syntax, and to be a misogynist.”

On Kafka:

“If I may gently remind you, Kafka is not great.  He has all the scatophagous faults of the unlearned.  The mongrels, poodles, and canine phantasms in Kafka’s dreams are symbols of ordure.”

On Joyce:

“At the instant, I am rereading Ulysses; this book is the principal assassin of our century, for the Greeks, returning from Troy,were no greater beggars than the readers after leaving Ulysses.  Adopting an epic title, the novel is entirely anti-Homeric; Joyce can do no more than thinly veil his banal writing by inverting his sentences, and cataloguing old names which he does not know how to use.  Lawrence was clean compared with Joyce, who has the miserable lust for the repulsive found in the lower middle classes.”

On D. H. Lawrence:

“…an unfinished foot by Michelangelo has more power than an entire book by Lawrence.”

On writing:

“I must write to oppose the Void, for in the beginning was Nothing, the enemy of God and human dust.”

On Nathaniel West:

“The late West, like so many of our little singing cicadas, was more than a three-fouth shut man.  On a page he could chant and then as though he had plucked his honey, die altogether.”

On Melville:

“Poor Melville, he had not the least idea what he was doing; I don’t read a novel to prepare to be a whaleman…His book is a pathetic cento, the refuse of other men’s knowledge, information, done for the most part by him in bombast which is supposed to be Elizabethan blank verse.”

On William Carlos Williams:

“I have the smallest patience with his lubricious lines, and I think his Paterson in which he includes a letter I wrote to him, without my permission, and under somebody else’s initials, is a fraud.  the man is very spongy, and imagines by repeating the word rock about a hundred and thirty-five times that he can become hard or give the effect of having ophidian intellect.”

On Paris:

“I found Paris loathly and all the bourgeois dithyrambs over this city is fit for the cloaca.  Pederasts everywhere; witlings imagine they are avant-garde by reading de Sade, an unusual bore who knew very little about the exceptional sensations of Gomorrah.”

On himself:

“I have all the faults of the flesh; all flesh is grass, says Isaiah, and also weeds, guile, the droppings of thrushes, skulking, ambition, cheating.”

On America:

“The whole American spectacle is nihilism and Dada suicide.”

On erudition:

“I don’t care a straw for learning.  I read to pass the time, and to find out whether what I am saying is stale or foolish, or good because it has been said by somebody else in another century.”

On literature:

“What I would say to you is very simple: shun modern books.  Go back to Beginnings.  Ritual will heal a line, a stanza, your whole head; you need symbols, Isis, Hathor, Typhon, the Cabala for your image and vision.”

On Wallace Stevens:

“I read Harmonium in ’29 or ’30, and did not find it the kind of viaticum I look for in poetry.  I have never had any interest since then in this deceased vice president of an insurance company.”

On e.e. cummings:

“As for Cummings, I find him a tedious urchin and steet gamin of versification.  I never liked him personally, because he is a shallowpate, with a little nose stuck up in the air like a puffed-up weasel of Parnassus.”

Tags: Dahlberg, vitriol

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