Edward Dahlberg's Philosophical, Lyrical Autobiography

The dustjacket calls Edward Dahlberg's Because I Was Flesh an autobiography--but the inadequacy of this label constantly astounds the reader. For Dahlberg's autobiography is also biography, philosophy and lyric poetry.

Of course, his earlier works include these elements. Bottom Dogs, his first book, is an autobiographical novel so bitter that D.H. Lawrence's introduction hails it as "the last word in ... consciousness in a state of repulsion." Later books become more mellow, more lyrical. And, heavy with references to ancient peoples, to obscure Biblical figures, they reflect increasing erudition.

Do These Bones Live, a collection of critical essays published in 1941, laments that American authors refuse woman, deny the flesh. Twenty years later, Truth Is More Sacred, a collection of letters between Dahlberg and Sir Herbert Read, clarified many of the themes in the earlier critical work. In both books Dahlberg emphasizes the moral aim of literature, refuting Sir Herbert's arguments to the contrary. According to Dahlberg, the artist should maintain a "healthy" attitude towards life, should celebrate love with "abundant rejoicing" rather than scorning it as do many American writers. In fact, in The Sorrows of Priapus, "abundant rejoicing," brightens this bitterly humorous comparison of man's habits to those of obscure animals.

Tribute to a City

Dahlberg's autobiography also opens with a joyous tribute. As though he were beginning a rolling, sonorous poem, Dahlberg writes:

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.

But the heart of Dahlberg's autobiography is a biography of his mother, Lizzie. A lady barber, she searches throughout her life for customers for her shop, food for her kitchen and men for her bed.

Mother and Son

Towards the end of the book, we do read of Lizzie's son. In addition to reviewing the story of his orphanage days told in Bottom Dogs, the autobiography amplifies the tortuous relationship between son and mother. There is sacrifice and love and anger but no accusations about Lizzie's poverty or promiscuity--"unlike Hamlet, I cannot accuse the womb that begat me." In fact Dahlberg shares Lizzie's searches for love, for sex and for enough food to live and for enough peace to enjoy living. And these searches provide the constant goals--or mirages--in an otherwise rambling book.

Both mother and son are lonely, rootless people. Lizzie "was utterly separated from the whole race of mankind save when she was concupiscent." Quests for love and pleasure bring her only an unfaithful if swaggering lover and a dottering if well-meaning suitor.

Ishmael's Loneliness

Dahlberg's critical works explore the loneliness of the American author, this curse of Ishmael which he himself bears. But in his autobiography he records the loneliness of a boy who does not know his father's name, asking in his agony:

Had I no progenitor? Christ can revive mouldy Lazarus, but who can raise the living from the grave? I wanted to feel, but had no emotions, and is sighed for thoughts and had no conceptions.

Yet the main problem which mother and son share is not the loneliness of their spirits but rather the desires of their flesh. In long, detailed passages, Dahlberg reveals his own passion, his adolescent frustration and its eventual satisfaction. In theory, these pages should resemble the autobiographies of such authors as Lawrence, Mailer and even Rousseau, all of whom describe their own sex lives in minute detail. Yet such comparisons are singularly inadequate. And the reason for this, the difference between Dahlberg's book and other autobiographies, explains the power of Because I Was Flesh.

Missionary Zeal

Even as far back as St. Augustine, autobiographers who have written of passion have approached this task with missionary zeal. Frequently they feel they have discovered the Truth about sex. And frequently this Truth can be summarized in one of two ways: to such enlightened authors sex is either the symbol of all our society's problems or the answer to them. Thus Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer uses-sex to symbolize action in a world where all action is hopeless though despair must be avoided. On the other hand, in Women in Love D.H. Lawrence declares that only the rejuvenation represented by sex can revive our mechanical society.

But writing a polemic about the meaning of passion narrows the author's exploration of the subject. Once he sets up desire as a symbol of say, rejuvenation, he cannot examine aspects of desire inconsistent with that symbol. This problem naturally limits the autobiographer's reminiscences. Lawrence could not includes humorous reflections on passion in Women in Love without contradicting the tone he set.

But Dahlberg is not proselytizing in his autobiography. Rather than propounding a theory about desire, he is exploring the drives shared by all men, the drives which created and sustained and tormented his mother and himself. And Dahlberg brings to this exploration all the wisdom and all the erudition which he has acquired. Because he is not proselytizing, he does not share the limits of other autobiographers.

He describes the painfulness of desire with lyrical agony, recalling his cry in the Sorrows of Priepus-- "All flesh is trouble." Such passages inevitably echo Lawrence. Yet Dahlberg can write in a subsequent passage of Lizzie's troubles with her bladder. One can hardly imagine Ursula or Lady Chatterley, or Lawrence's own mother in See and Lovers, with such an ailment.

Writes of Sordidness

Detailing the promiscuous lives of Lizzie's assistants in the barbershop, Dahlberg emphasizes the sordidness of sex. Yet he can juxtapose such passages with lyrics full of awe about passion. In Truth Is More Sacred, he affirms that "emptied of awe ... the heart is a moldy fungus that poisons the whole earth."

To combine such divergent tones without antagonizing or unintentionally amusing the reader takes skill--and courage. In using so many obscure references Dahlerg again risks a very unfavorable reaction. Yet he succeeds in both cases because we understand his purpose in creating this beek.

In fact Dahlberg's autobiography fulfills one of the goals he once set for literature. His book "makes the reader stronger in intellect... and gives him arms and legs he did not have before.