The Disappointment Artist Read Online Free PDF

thus die with each experience—never able to change our life’s destiny one drop—never again able to attain what we lost through living—is near a parallel that I have long ago reached—and the reason that I want to write for children and believe that it is the hardest writing to do.
    She then adds,
    But when I try to discuss writing for children, he says there is no such thing—write what you have to say and pray to God that children will read it . . . Now this is fine—I go along—but how can I go when I have suddenly lost my way to anyplace at all? I write
you
this because, knowing how many classes you have sat through— where, undoubtedly this same kind of person, taught—I wonder if you can help me. I guess what I want you to say is Don’t Listen To Him, but it’s too late for that because I already have. How far should one go in deciding what one’s personal limitations are, and settling for less than perfection. If I read all of these things (I don’t literally mean every book, but read, say for a year or two) and quit writing (as I seem to have anyway) do you think I would be happier (ugh what a weak word—of course the only happiness is satisfaction or joy in work in progress—and the ability to move on to the next job without looking back with too many weakening day-dreams.) But just when I thought I was going along so great—I’ve stubbed my mental toe! On a rock! You know that for several years I’ve been reading deeper things—I can finally read poetry—a little—after years of trying to . . . I can recognize good passages—I’ve learned the effectiveness of small words—found the art in brevity—doubted the adjective—learned to discriminate in the varying shades of words . . . increased my sad little vocabulary some . . . but can one really know what is good unless one has long looked upon perfection until anything less seems shoddy and factory made.
    To attempt to read Dahlberg, as I began to do, is to find oneself reading about him instead. For a writer whose persistent epiphany was isolation (“All intelligent Americans are extremely alone”), and whose obsession it was to decry the charlatanism of comradeship among writers (“I am not looking for disciples. Jesus did not even know what to do with the apostles, and they had such dull auditory nerves that they could not hear what came from his soul”), Dahlberg is nevertheless one of the
most introduced
writers of all time. The parade of ushers begins, of course, with
Bottom
Dogs
. It turns out that D. H. Lawrence’s essay was commissioned; Davis judges it “unwilling,” DeFanti “squeamish if not somewhat petulant.” Reasonable enough: Lawrence’s envoi to Dahlberg’s career concludes, “I don’t want to read any more books like this.”
    Lawrence there inaugurates a great tradition: Dahlberg is routinely assassinated by his own apologists. Here’s Gerald Burns, in an Afterword to
The Leafless American and Other Writings
(a book consisting of a hundred pages of Dahlberg, a Preface by Robert Creeley, and an Introduction by Harold Billings, on top of the Afterword!): “I have heard he was down on blacks, and the reason seems to be that they have made bastions of our apartments and robbed us of the parks . . . [he] says the faces of their children show why they do not yet have a civilization.” Karl Shapiro, from Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute: “His petulance and misunderstanding of the Modern are one thing; his disgust for . . . modern art and literature must be brushed aside; but his blind loyalty to himself as a poet, prophet, and
l’inconnu
—these are his birthright, by all means.” Jonathan Williams, in the same book, gratuitously disinters what may seem a too telling review by Alden Whitman in
The New York Times
: “Dahlberg is outrageous, a deliberate striver for shock value, a magpie who delights to show off his gleanings from the classics, a bombast on occasion, a writer of ponderous nonsense and almost