The Disappointment Artist Read Online Free PDF Page B

insufferable ego.” Well, ahem.
    These same supporters compensate by overstatement. In this, they have encouragement from Dahlberg’s style itself. His absolutism is recapitulated every place he’s remembered. Paul Carroll: “Is there any author living who is even in the same country as Edward Dahlberg in the moral grandeur and violence of his writings?” Ronald Johnson: “I sometimes wonder whether we deserve an Edward Dahlberg to reprimand and cajole us.” August Derleth: “He is as much a genius as anyone of whom I can think, past or present . . .” To invest in Dahlberg is to adopt scorchedearthism.
    In a letter dated September 2, 1964, anticipating his departure from Ireland for Kansas City, to teach my aunt’s class, Dahlberg wrote:
    “Good teaching is apocalyptic talking.”
    Again, Wilma Yeo:
    There is a young man in the class who looks so much like you, Dick, that when I watch his eyes as he reads (as he made the grave mistake of doing) one of his poems—I am where you are! Drivel! Says the old prof! Pure drivel! You don’t even know that you don’t know anything—read, read, read!!!! I, of course, had thought it quite good. He will say, “Did you bring a paper? On what book—”
    “It’s a creative paper.”
    “How do you know it is creative? Oh well, read it.”
    Then he interrupts about the second word and says, “Forgive me, I don’t want to be rude but that is asinine and puerile and we don’t have time to waste on it.” or “that word makes me want to vomit.” I know you say, why listen? but he has something to say. His book is good—his soul is bitter. A boiled prune without hope or belief. Since I can’t write, I have been drawing. This is something I understand why I can’t do well, and so I can enjoy it.
    My aunt then describes some other published writers at Dahlberg’s mercy, including Alice Winter, author of
The Velvet Bubble
, and Frankie Wu, a poet who had already placed work with The New Yorker:
    He doesn’t know any of the three of us have ever sold anything and wouldn’t care if he did, for he believes that writing to sell is as morbid as you feel that commercial art is—and that could easily be true, but writing is of so little use in a file cabinet . . . anyway, Frankie typed off this same poem and handed it in—a non-poem, he said, with three good lines in it—but he is interested in Frankie—partly because he likes Orientals and thinks America would be better off if we had let them in—and maybe a little because of that poem, but he was so intense in his criticism of it, in front of the class that she was ill afterward—Frankie has a rare disease and spent four years in an iron lung—her husband Dr. Wu is a quite famous brain surgeon or she would probably not be alive. It is a disease of the nerve endings and sometimes affects her as if she had been drinking. If he is too cruel to her, Alice or I shall probably tell him to go to hell. Kindly—for he is easily hurt, as people so often are who persist in brutal frankness.
    There! It was out and said, though only scrawled between margins at the last moment, as though Wilma Yeo could no more bring herself to omit her diagnosis than she could bear to judge her teacher:
a boiled prune
,
easily hurt
. Or, in the words of Josephine Herbst: “There is so much that is paradoxical, quixotic, contrary about Edward Dahlberg . . . is it possible always to agree with him? Or to share his exclusive literary tastes? But there is consistency in his inconsistency . . . what writer is less afraid of absurdities or willing to show himself as ridiculous?” What compelled my aunt Billie, then, beyond her necessary rejection of what he told her—evidently, “quit writing”—was Dahlberg’s vulnerability. Wasn’t that right, and couldn’t it be enough? Wasn’t Edward Dahlberg not-so-secretly tender, and didn’t his genius spring from that pained source, in a very
Wound and the Bow
sort of way? Perhaps I could forgive