Edward Dahlberg
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Español
March 23, 2025
by Philip Gambone
In 1966, the American writer Edward Dahlberg summed up the past twenty-five years of his life in a letter to his editor, Edwin Seaver. "Madness, follies, dissimulation, turbulent and incoherent thoughts and peevish and dour moods," he wrote. Dahlberg's tone of harsh self-criticism—"unsure of everything," he added—was unusual for this quirky, talented, angry and erudite writer, who frequently lashed out at critics and reviewers who had failed to recognize his genius.
"Would that I were born in another season," he continued, "and could listen to Socrates in the agora and meet Euripides and Aristippus…. Our diseased haste sorely troubles me. Though our lives are often briefer than the oak or conifer, everybody is in a hurry. Who can walk or think, which is what Aristotle meant by peripatetic, without being killed by an automobile. Should you meet a passer-by on the pavement, he is too nervous to stand for three minutes; he squirms in his trousers as though he has to pass water, and informs you he is busy."
Here we find so much of what was most characteristic of Dahlberg's work as a whole: the admiration for classical antiquity, the impatience with contemporary society, the hunger for friendship, and the ready deployment of high-toned language.
Much of Dahlberg's literary output "turned on the premise that a writer's strengths lay in his or her grasp of the past, with its store of insights and perfected forms ready for use in new writing," writes Paul Christensen, who edited a collection of Dahlberg's letters. "Dahlberg rejected Anglo-American writing as a provincial and derivative exclusion of all the rest of European and classical art.
Dahlberg is not a writer known to many English-speaking readers. (He certainly was not a writer I knew of until I began searching for authors who had been to Mexico and written about this country.) Yet for those who love his work, he was "one of our few literary originals" and an "American Ismael of letters," according to Harold Billings, who edited a collection of critical essays about Dahlberg.
Kansas City 1905
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Born 1900 in a charity hospital in Boston, Dahlberg led an unstable early life. His mother, who had been deserted by his father, moved around a lot, finally settling in Kansas City in 1905. In grammar school, boys picked on Dahlberg and beat him because he was a Jew. Poverty, lack of success in romance, and various ailments left his mother unable to raise her son, whom she eventually placed in orphanages in Kansas City and Cleveland. By his late teens, Dahlberg—"a boy who needed a father," he wrote in his magnificent autobiography, Because I Was Flesh—was working odd jobs and riding the rails out West
For a while, Dahlberg attended the University of California at Berkeley and later Columbia, where he earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy. In 1926, he began a self-imposed exile in Europe, hanging out with American and British expatriate writers. Increasingly alarmed by the rise of fascism, Dahlberg became a contributor to various left-leaning periodicals. In the thirties, he helped organize the American Writers' Congress.
Sure that he was born to write, he published his first novel, Bottom Dogs, in 1930, and followed this two years later with another novel, From Flushing to Calvary. The next year saw the publication of his third novel, the anti-Nazi Those Who Perish. All three books are in the vein of proletarian novels of the thirties. Years later, he reflected that he was aiming "to clean out the Augean Stables of society."
Ford Madox Ford
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For several years, Dahlberg fell into a period of neglect. No publishers were interested in him. "It was to take me many years," he wrote in his autobiography, "to realize that one has to be very lucky to write one intelligent sentence. Since whatever falls out, ill or good, is the result of an accident, I have always had the most hopeless feelings whenever I commenced a book." In 1937, Ford Madox Ford named Dahlberg, William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings as the three most neglected writers in America.
That same year, Dahlberg went to Mexico. On August 9, he wrote to Theodore Dreiser, one of the grand old men of American literature. "Cato took to his sword, and I took to Mexico; Cato was the good deal the wiser. For here I am, alone, sitting in a room in that cash-register monastery, the YMCA. I have been here two months and now I want to get away. Whatever Mexico is, it is not for me."
When he first arrived, Dahlberg had been enthralled by Mexico City. "Here was a city in the clouds, built on a mountaintop," he told Dreiser. "Here was the city for the poet." He rented a servant's room on the roof of a squat, functional building. "There on lines hung beautifully pigmented drawers, rectangles of sheets; there desolately pecked rooster and hen; there old Indian women made tortillas, spanking the sour dough between the palms of their hands."
Mexico City 1937
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He assured Dreiser that he was not looking "on the sour side of life too much; for my heart was overflowing with nobler feelings. True, I loathed the mestizo, the half-breed barber culture of Mexico; but I also loved the Indian. So as I strolled along the Alameda, the trees laden with reminiscently graduated fragrances, I never let pass an Indian without smiling, even if the smile was more often inscribed on my brain rather than on my lips.... On one occasion I paused to contemplate the supple and cadenced carriage of a young Aztecan dressed in rough blue shirt and workmen's overalls, thinking how subtle it was for that cosmogonal bête noire to have made so many different peoples and temperaments. As my eyes dropped perpendicularly to his shirt I saw pinned to it: POPEYE THE SAILOR CLUB! Which leads me to say, my dear Dreiser, that History will accuse not Hitler or Mussolini as the great vulgarizers of the world, but the Paramount and Fox Film Corporations."
After three weeks, Dahlberg "could no longer bear the great scavenger city in the mountains immersed in dirty blankets of clouds. I couldn't stand Diego Rivera's cafeteria serape murals. Nor Sanborn's, that monster House of the Tiles, where tired and seamy virgin schoolteachers go to get their American ice-cream sodas, and which looks like the Elizabethan Room in the Paramount Moving Picture Theater." He was "bored to death with folklorismus, with the cult of the sombrero and the white drawers, with the Mexican Revolution which was nonexistent. And with myself."
Taxco
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Off he went to Taxco, "hoping to leave myself there, while I remained elsewhere and looked on." His letter to Dreiser goes on to describe Taxco as "one of those quaint poster pueblos, with travelogue cobblestones where browse pigs, burros, and tourists. It has the thick stable smell of an old Bible manger. Overlaid with New World jazz. On the balcony of the bar is a five-piece orchestra which plays together in complete disunion, a xylophone, a violin, a trap drum, a cornet accompanied by a small boy who scrapes the guts of a gourd with a toothbrush."
He visited the largest church in Taxco, which "looks like a stale moldering Hershey chocolate. The interior is no less satisfying. At one end is an emaciated Christ. From his bony wooden brow steams the shellacked mists of suffering and crucifixion. His ribs are skeletally barreled, the knees and thighs bedripped with the rusted coagulations of blood, and the upper loins are swathed in delicate white sexual panties." Dahlberg's sour mood continued: "Taxco is colonized by Americans. They do nothing, read nothing, and only defecate, I am certain, when afflicted with dysentery." Soon after, he returned to the United States.
By the 40s, Dahlberg was moving away from his angry Leftist politics toward a critique of the classless society, which he saw as stifling human fulfillment and individual worth. His later works, as he himself said of his 1957 book, The Sorrows of Priapus, was "for brave readers and poets."
In 1966, he published his only book of poetry, Cipango's Hinder Door. The collection includes two long poems on pre-Columbian history and myth. The title poem refers to Cipango, Marco Polo's name for Japan, the land Columbus thought he was sailing toward. The poem examines the interrelationship between European and Indigenous American civilizations. An ominous tone pervades the sections where the poet narrates (in prose) the arrival of Columbus:
When Colon's ship was aground a native arrived with a gourd of tears his king had shed. Women, carrying hake, dory, gilt head, accompanied by men, trembling for no hurt but affection, approached the carracks in the river. The air, mild with aloes, arbutus, cedar, sweet reeds, and cane of Española, so affected Cristobal Colon that he named the harbor Puerto de la Concepcion.
As the poem continues, the sailors fill their casks with water, but find little gold or spices. They bring back to Queen Isabella twelve Indians, "in stoles embroidered with owls."
Columbus presenting Indians to Isabella
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The other long poem in Cipango's Hinder Door is more explicit about the depravity of the European conquerors, what Frank MacShane, in a review of the book, called "a dissatisfied people given to violence and vulgarity." Several critics have noted the many allusions in Cipango's Hinder Door to the Cain and Abel story, Cain being Dahlberg's symbol for humankind's failure to live peaceably, in harmony with the whole.
At the beginning of this difficult, abstruse poem, Dahlberg references Mesoamerican mythology: "Tlaloc / Water-deity dear to the infant pod"; "the turquoise placed between dead Mayan lips"; "the curried crocodile [that] softly woos Tixzula." We are brought into a pre-European land alive with artisans, blood-gatherers, planters, incense burners, embalmers, weavers, traders, grinders of corn. A civilization both strange and utterly beguiling.
Tlaloc
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The American poet Alan Tate praised Dahlberg's style as one of "great eloquence and enormous range which permits him to see ‘eternity in a grain of sand.'" If Dahlberg is the inheritor of William Blake's mystic vision, he is also a child of Walt Whitman's Biblical, orotund style. It's a style full of what one critic has called "learning heavily won." As such, the long, pre-Columbian poems are not immediately pleasing—"calculated to instruct rather than entertain," writes Fred Moramarco, Dahlberg's biographer—but the cumulative effect is incantatory. For Dahlberg, there was a sacred aspect to pre-Columbian civilization, which had been sadly, tragically lost.
