BY CARL L. BANKSTON III
Edward Dahlberg was a difficult character, a perennial misfit and a touchy misanthrope. Born out of wedlock to an itinerant lady barber, Dahlberg’s mother left him in an orphanage when he was 12. He left this hard life for another one five years later, drifting around the western part of the U.S. before going into the army at the end of World War I. Back in America again, he enrolled first in U.C. Berkeley and then took a degree in philosophy from Columbia University. His extensive reading and his university studies bought him into a world apart from that of his hardscrabble childhood and youth.
Having no voc
ation but literature, Dahlberg made his way to Paris in the 1920s where he became part of a generation of expatriate writers. He joined the Communist Party, making his mark as a “proletarian” writer in Bottom Dogs, a novel based on the orphanage and his early bumming around his native country. Even then he was no party line conformist. D.H. Lawrence, a writer whose distinctive brand of politics aligned with no socialist agenda, wrote the foreword to this novel. Lawrence also recognized Dahlberg’s legendary pessimism, reportedly exclaiming, “For God’s sake, Dahlberg, cheer up!”
The conventions and shibboleth of Communism accorded ill with Dahlberg’s independent personality and his growing intellectual elitism. By 1936, perhaps disgusted by Stalin’s purges as well as by his rejection of ideological regimentation, Dahlberg denounced Communism as “necrophilic” and left the Party. He began to develop a unique style of writing, an elaborate and carefully wrought epigrammatic prose.
I found Dahl
berg’s two masterpieces when I was rambling through the shelves of the old San Francisco public library, attempting to make up for the deficiencies of a late-twentieth century university education. The essays he first published under the title Do These Bones Live? (later re-titled Can These Bones Live?) scrutinized European and American writers from the perspective of a despairing Hebrew prophet. His autobiography, Because I Was Flesh, unsparingly examined his tawdry upbringing and his crotchety nature, but it managed to transmute these into visionary writing and to find in literature a justification for his existence. Dahlberg was certainly no saint, but Because I Was Flesh is one of the great works of confessional literature, a descendant of the Confessions of St. Augustine.
The Moral Liberal Sociology Editor, Carl L. Bankston III is Professor of Sociology at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA. He is the author and co-author of a number of books and numerous articles published in academic journals. An incomplete list of his books includes: Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (with Min Zhou, 1998), Blue Collar Bayou: Louisiana Cajuns in the New Economy of Ethnicity (with Jacques Henry, 2002), and A Troubled Dream: The Promise and Failure of School Desegregation in Louisiana (2002), Forced to Fail: The Paradox of School Desegregation (hardback, 2005; paperback, 2007), and Public Education – America’s Civil Religion: A Social History (2009) (all with Stephen J. Caldas). View Professor Bankston’s full bio, here. He blogs at Can These Bones Live?
Copyright © 2011 Carl L. Bankston III.
