Edward Dahlberg: writer not much looked into

Re-arranging books on our bookshelves, I see there are books I own I haven't looked into ever, or if not never, so seldom that they're almost new books to me.

Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute (David Lewis, Inc., 1970) is now out of print. I paid $4.50 at some used bookshop in the mid-1970's. Paying tribute to Dahlberg are Kay Boyle, Allen Tate, Karl Shapiro, Hugh Kenner, James Laughlin, Cid Corman, Muriel Rukeyser, Thomas Merton, and Jack Kerouac, among others.

I'd first became interested in Dahlberg after looking into his autobiography, Because I Was Flesh, at some other used bookshop, and coming across a sentence that stayed with me ever since: "Graveled by many nebulous purposes I traveled north." (Go ahead writers out there, try to beat that!)

From that point forward I bought everything Dahlberg I could find, including Can These Bones Live (New Directions, 1960) the edition with the preface by Sir Herbert Read, in which Sir Herbert with the great name of Read), says of Dahlberg, "There is not a page which lacks vivid imagery, or memorable phrase. It is not the slick prose of the smart journalist, nor the careful prose of the timid intellectual, and least of all the intricate jewelry of the aesthete. It is the crystalline vein of the English Bible, of Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne, running through the torpid substance of modern life. It is not writing for writing's sake..." I paid $6.50 for this book, as Read offered such high praise of Dahlberg, and then read little else of the book.

I'd read enough Dahlberg by then to know I was interested in his writing, believing he had something to say to me, remembering the sentence he written in his autobiography in a way I'd never forget, but I didn't read much of him after that, I never looked into him the way I've looked into other writers, I quit reading his books, only looking into his books when moving them from one bookshelf to another.

So why didn't I read more Dahlberg the way I read Beckett or before Beckett, Flaubert, reading their books one right after another?

Because there's something in Dahlberg's character that's not in mine.