What kind of people were they -- our parents, I
mean; what sort of lives did they lead when not busily tending to the needs of
oh-so important little you and me? The contrast between one reality and another
generates dramatic tension, the stuff from which books are made, ranging from
“as told to” celebrity ghost jobs to the happy discovery of an outstanding
writer who just happens to have a parent worth reading about. The example that
pops immediately to mind is Yael Dayan’s memoir of her father, the one-eyed
Israeli general. A parent-child relationship may not be the only shortcut to
biographical insight, but it sure doesn’t hurt: Samuel Johnson is obviously a
surrogate father to Boswell; I think the two of them even comment on it at some
point.
Familial biographies range from payback of
the”Mommie, Dearest” variety, where the author does a Menendez brothers job on
his or her progenitors, to sappy home movies in grainy 8mm. Somewhere in
between comes the account written to “put the record straight.” One of the
oddest I’ve read is Anthony West’s life of his father, H.G. Wells, which is
really a point-by-point refutation of everything that his mother, Rebecca
West, said about him. (I find the son’s
version convincing. Dame Rebecca ensured that her residual vindictiveness would
be imprinted on the canon by American academics thrilled to death at being
taken into the confidence of one of feminism’s founding mothers.)
Resolving a posthumous enigma is another off-the-shelf premise for parental portraits. Who was that girl in the frock and ringlets and why did Dad keep her picture stashed away all these years? Off we go on a quest in which the biographical narrative emerges as a function of the unraveling riddle, which is likely a secret, or even a surprise, only to the subject’s children.
There is, however, one book I know of that
breaks with all of these conventions in making the leap from the biography
shelf to Literature with a capital L. No quest, no revelations, no case to be
made for the prosecution or the defense. A book in which a souped-up,
custom-louvered version of the English language is needed to carry the
high-voltage charge that comes from the fact that Edward Dahlberg was his
mother’s son, which is the only thing, really, that Because I Was Flesh wants to tell us.
That book is currently out of print, though I
suspect it may not be for much longer since novelist Jonathan Lethem has
written it up in the trenchant lead essay of his new collection “The
Disappointment Artist.” In the late 1960s, Lethem’s Aunt Billie wrote her
fanily a series of letters detailing the abuse she and her fellow students were
subjected to in the Kansas City creative writing class that provided the
ogre-ish Dahlberg with more of a living than he ever made from literature.
Lethem predicts that Dahlberg will someday be
remembered on the strength of “the
lasting beauty of one towering book.” That’s correct, I think. He opens
grandly:
Kansas City is a vast inland city,
and its marvelous river, the Missouri, heats the senses; the maple, alder, elm and cherry trees with
which the town abounds are songs of desire, and only the almonds of ancient
Palestine can awaken the hungry pores more deeply. It is a wild, concupiscent
city, and few there are troubled about death until they age or are sick. Only
those who know the ocean ponder death as they behold it, whereas those bound
closely to the ground are more sensual.
The pipe organ from which Dahlberg coaxes this
high Baroque prose swells in the opening cadences introducing the reader to
Lizzie, a woman whose life was spent trimming men’s hair and massaging their
scalps in a business that could have been lucrative, though it never would have
been considered respectable by polite KC society. Lizzie sidelined as a de facto
madam and abortionist for her stable of lady barbers, who did not see
themselves as whoring for their codger customers so much as offering them an
upfront sample of what they would be delighted to deliver to anyone improvident
enough to ask for their hand in marriage.
And if not, breach of promise suits were pretty common in that day and
age.Lizzie was just as luckless in her affections. Her penchant for worthless rats did not exhaust itself when the future author’s possible father decamped with their savings, the first of many chasers of chippies and four-flushers to whom she gave her heart. Fruit peddlers found she would much rather believe their solemn pledges of freshness than finger the squishy produce. Her girls knew that she knew that they were stealing from the cash register. Lizzie was Jewish, no small deal for that time and place, and kept her “telltale nose” behind a barbering chair set far from the door.
She did not know what to do with her
life or with her feelings. She toiled because she was afraid to starve and
because she had nothing else to do, but her will was too sick to love the child
of her lust. He was so skinny and yellow that his nose seemed to cover his
face; and all the obduracy that was in her short, round neck had passed over to
him. All that Lizzie could understand is that the child of her profligacy
vomited and would grow up ugly.
When the
son is eleven, he gets packed off to an orphanage in Cleveland at the
insistence of Lizzie’s latest dirtbag paramour. The six years he languishes
there battling the Irish Micks from Kinsman Road and the slums of Superior
Avenue and eating green-pea hash on Thursdays are compressed into a single
narrative stream, like Thoreau in
Walden, without any wringing of the
reader’s hanky to enhance its dramatic effect. When Dahlberg returns home, the
character who until now has been written about in the third person as “Lizzie’s
boy” or “the adhesive child” or just “the boy” has become a person, has become
an “I.”
In the
harrowing bits about the Jewish Orphan Asylum, the florid prose interspersed
with Biblical tropes that Dahlberg slathers throughout the book is mostly kept
to a trickle When it does leak out, it can stain a beautifully wrought
paragraph like this:
They were a separate race of stunted
children who were clad in famine. Swollen heads lay on top of ashy uniformed
orphans. Some had oval or oblong skulls, others gigantic watery occiputs that
resembled the Cynecephali described by Hesiod and Pliny. The palsied and the
lame were cured in the pool of Bethesda, but who had enough human spittle to
heal the orphans’ sore eyes and granulated lids? How little love, or hot sperm,
had gone into the making of their gray-maimed bodies.
It would have meant a great deal to me if he
could have done without the Cynecephali, but what can you expect from a writer
who throws around words like “limbeck” and “lorn” to keep us on our toes. And
how much of the erudition is for effect when he talks about a “kabbalistical
staircase” and later a “kabbalistical black suit”? In what, if any, sense can
they be said to be so? Still and all, I’ll go to bat for any writer who
apostrophizes the city of Los Angeles as “the sewer of Sodom.”
By the way, the last of Lizzie’s great
deceivers, Tobias Emeritch, is -- so
go ahead, sue me, kill me, I’ll say it anyway
-- as good a Dickensian character as Dickens ever came up with. And all
stylistic affectation is forgiven when you run into a passage that makes your
hair stand on end, like this one about Lizzie sinking into old age:
Despite her resolution to remain
alive, every new day was a terror to her. By two o’clock in the afternoon she
had gained part of her battle against the morning; then she would snatch the
remnant of a petticoat from the floor of the clothes closet and wipe the scum
of lotion from her cheeks, If she happened to step upon an old corset cover she
would pick it up and clean her shoes with it. She could not part with anything;
she hoarded buttons, a piece of chemise, a smutty chamois or powder puff, a
hair switch, half a razorstrop. They represented her life, which was over.
Unevenness of accomplishment is the least of
the sins that Dahlberg may be expunging in whichever afterlife he has been
confined since 1977. Lethem got his Dahlberg horror stories from his aunt; I
heard a couple of good ones in Mallorca, where Dahlberg he lived in the 1960s
and left behind a blaze of stink in the memories of a not inconsiderable number
of people living there. All accounts depict a ferocious hater of the human race
who despised its attempts at writing literature, a man seven times married who couldn’t stop
ranting against the sexuality that enslaved him. Insofar as they were both
brilliant misfits and incredible pains in the ass, Edward Dahlberg is a lot
like Frederick Rolfe, a.k.a. Baron Corvo, who was granted posthumous absolution
in a book that is still the gold standard for modern biography. If Dahlberg
ever gets the biography he deserves, it will also be on the strength of a
single book.