The Disappointment Artist by Jonathan Lethem Read Free Book Online

about logrolling blurbists has by now more than demonstrated. Dahlberg’s deeper dissidence was against reassurance and consolation, even in their purest forms. That when he considered Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams and Theodore Dreiser he saw only their failure was a confession of pain; the deepest he could afford to offer as to how little writing a masterpiece could assuage the howling loneliness of that needless stint in the Kansas City orphanage. If only a handful of readers, or garlands, was too few, a million readers, or ten million, could never have been enough.
    Dahlberg’s special achievement was to take this rage and leave it raw, refuse to professionalize it. Gilbert Sorrentino wrote:
    Dahlberg’s bitterness and sourness are familiar to many readers, as is his scornful treatment of writers who offend his sensibilities. His near to comic reactionary positions on anything and everything are equally well known. But what does it matter after all? . . . You can find no meaning in Dahlberg, none that you can’t get from a thousand lesser writers. Mailer is a titanic thinker next to him; your mailman or boss has more enlightened or informed ideas. There is nothing in Dahlberg except his greatness; he is the real thing . . . The only thing you can do with Dahlberg is read him.
    Again, as everywhere, the objections come first: the “comic reactionary positions.”
    Dahlberg wed the kill-the-father imperative, the famous anxiety of influence, to the truism that a man is only as big as his enemies. Therefore: if one wished to be the greatest writer of the twentieth century, simply make an enemy of the whole of contemporary literature. Dahlberg spent the first two-thirds of his life measuring his fellows by Melville and finding them not only wanting but bankrupt. Then, in his late fifties, in an act of almost majestic inconsistency, he turned on Melville, declaring his “failure” as well. By doing so, Dahlberg comically exposed the faulty premises in that whole rigged game: to exalt himself he’d forged the obligation to
hate greatness
. Relishing literature’s variety of methods and discourse—watching a thousand flowers bloom—simply wasn’t an option. Dahlberg left himself no margin to consider that Faulkner, Beckett, Joyce, and so many rejected others might be his life’s companions, his colleagues, his company. Not to mention his masters.
    Novelists pin their disgust to straw men every day, in this or that review. Others weep for the Death of the Novel. The Herculean instinct to clear the stables prospers in us all from time to time. Loathing other writers, whether they be one’s teachers or students or colleagues, is likely as basic as Freud’s “narcissism of minor difference,” which explains that we are obliged to denounce those most similar to us because the resemblances are too telling of our vulnerabilities, our wants. Only Dahlberg did us the favor of tipping
his
narcissism of minor difference into the realm of absurdist tantrum-art, sustained for a lifetime. And what he did in burning down the veil of diffident fraternity, he did for the writing classroom as well. Other Famous Monsters of Creative-Writing Land have been known to craft their intolerance into seductive S&M ritual, binding apprentices to grueling discipleships invariably destined for wrenching betrayal. Not Dahlberg. He was as revolted by the students who were turned on by his abuse as he was by those who resisted. Every head had to come off, every supplicant cast into the wilderness. If all of us writing teachers are emperors with no clothes, it was Dahlberg who railed in starkest agony of that fact, rending his invisible garments to tatters until his constituency was forced to bellow at him that he was naked.
    In 1965, the year of the letter, Wilma Yeo founded the Kansas City Writers’ Group, who dedicated their 1994 anthology,
Beginning from the
Middle
, to Yeo, just before her death. The Foreword explains:
    Every piece