The Disappointment Artist Read Online Free PDF Page A

satires of the television commercials which had come to fascinate him.
    I’d known the name, faintly. Working in used bookshops, I’d fondled a few Dahlberg tomes before slashing their prices or consigning them to bins of the never-to-be-sold. I associated him with the agony of the rebuffed career, the refused book. In used bookselling one becomes a dowser of the underground river of refused books, and the dowsing rod twitches like the second hand of a clock. Expertise is knowing which few, of the thousands flung to posterity by their flap copy, anyone would ever actually pay to read. So, Dahlberg: a guilty association, another titan I’d dissed by thinking him a drag on the retail flow.
    Aunt Billie’s letter concentrated my attention. Dahlberg’s, it seemed, was a shrill, vibrant voice clinging to the edge of the collective literary consciousness—just. As I asked around, seeking to see how his name played among my best-read friends, the answer was always the one I’d have given myself: Dahlberg, oh yeah, always meant to find out what he was about. I located a biography,
The Wages of Expectation
, by Charles DeFanti, and
Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute
, a Festschrift assembled by Jonathan Williams; the most recent item was “Broaching Difficult Dahlberg,” by Lydia Davis, an essay, published in
Conjunctions
, which circles Dahlberg without actually plunging in. There, Davis interrogates older writers still bearing grudges against Dahlberg, confirming the testimony of the biography and of many of Dahlberg’s own ostensible supporters: this was a more than moderately difficult man. And Dahlberg’s tendency to be recalled but unread made him a bizarre discovery, a writer whose reputation was either blinking out of existence at the exact moment I’d located it, or, weirder, a writer whose reputation was somehow
frozen in the act of blinking out of existence
.
    The more I looked, the more it seemed Dahlberg’s compulsion for taking out his monstrous disappointment on any human within striking distance was the only reputation left, dragging the books distantly behind it. Dahlberg’s biographer, Charles DeFanti, in
The Wages of Expectation
details how Dahlberg denounced as unworthy, at various times, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Dreiser (“If I had reread his books, I would have had to assail him”), Robert Graves, Edmund Wilson, and dozens of others, all attempted friends or sponsors of Dahlberg’s career. Here’s Paul Carroll, in his Introduction to
The Edward Dahlberg Reader
, witnessing a Dahlberg performance at a cocktail party given in his honor: “What he said about Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, Wilson, Pound . . . was univocal, brilliant, sour, erudite, and unanswerable. Only the cadence of his sentences . . . seemed to keep Dahlberg’s words from becoming a scream.” The list can seem endless, but to eliminate any uncertainty, Dahlberg sweepingly denounced not only the whole twentieth century’s shelf, but the nineteenth century’s as well, locating the corruption of American literature well before Melville. As for his personal relations, he made himself famous for his cold shoulder, arranging elaborate fallingsout so persistently that William O’Rourke, a student and disciple, eulogized him this way: “Edward Dahlberg wrote 18 books and one masterpiece that will endure; at the end of his long life he had less than six people he would have called friend.” Perhaps my aunt Billie had had the privilege of having her head bitten off not by some average writing-class ogre but by the greatest head biter of all time, the Ozzy Osbourne of writing-teaching.
    When you listen to him talk—where do I, a woman of forty eight, with so little time (comparatively speaking) (and he answers— “there is not such thing as time”—Life is an error and death the only truth etc.)—Fit in this picture? His theory that only children are knowing—and that we innundate our minds with every passing minute and