The Disappointment Artist (4 page)

In his other work Dahlberg was only a bizarre, sometimes hypnotic stylist, and a writer who forgot to love anything better than his own failure. His literary and cultural criticism, in
Can These Bones Live?
,
The
Leafless American
, and elsewhere, is worse than useless, it’s corrupt—poisoned by his reeling distress. His parable of disenchantment with the left,
The Flea of Sodom
, is unreadably arcane—for a lucid portrait of the intelligentsia’s sad contortions in the 1930s, better turn to Lionel Trilling’s
The
Middle of the Journey
or Paula Fox’s
The Western Coast
. Beyond the autobiographical books, only
The Sorrows of Priapus
, a kooky diatribe against the human body and sexual desire, is worth a look, and that because it reveals a gift for comedy, a voice so overwrought with self-alienation it anticipates the morbid hilarity of Donald Antrim or Ben Marcus:

The phallus is a slovenly bag created without intellect or ontological purpose or design, and as long as the human being has this hanging worm appended to his middle, which is no good for anything except passing urine and getting a few, miserable irritations, for which he forsakes his mother, his father, and his friends, he will never comprehend the Cosmos.

The problem is that, apart from his childhood, Dahlberg has just two subjects: his own career’s undervaluation and the emptiness of existence. Since he was American, contemporary, and literary, it is largely contemporary American literary existence that is decried, but one quickly sniffs out how ready he is to spread the bad news to cover anything alerted to his gaze: home, travel, youth, age, company, loneliness, and girls, girls, girls. D. H. Lawrence, in a letter written out of exhaustion with the younger writer’s preening complaints: “for HEAVEN’S SAKE LEAVE OFF BEING UNLUCKY—you seem to ask for it.” Dahlberg reportedly quoted the line with pride. He recognized early on that despair was his gift, and he gave it freely—in fact he’d sling it at your departing back.

So despite the lasting beauty of the one towering book, the fame of Dahlberg’s terror campaign through literary culture is no mistake. His failure was greater than his greatness: Dahlberg was a disappointment artist. His virulence against professional glad-handing was only a matter of dynamiting fish in a barrel, as any easy joke 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 of this book is a commitment from people who love words and love to write. Wilma Yeo began a class for people who needed encouragement with writing . . . Lawyers, nurses, teachers, psychologists, editors, artists, chemical engineers—these are some of the professions in our group. But when we meet together, our real life is simply writing.

The dedication quotes Yeo’s credo: “In offering a critique, you must be honest and kind. To be dishonest is to be unkind. And, to be unkind is to be dishonest to yourself and your art.” Here is the sort of nurturance Edward Dahlberg resolutely denounced as false. Yet by his absolute rejection of her offer of discipleship, so excruciatingly detailed in the letter, Dahlberg authorized a forty-eight-year-old woman—instantly, it would appear—to declare herself the kind of writer, and writing teacher, she needed to be. My aunt had already “doubted the adjective” and “learned to discriminate in the varying shades of words,” and she didn’t need what Unamuno or Ruskin, not to mention “Chestov” or “Dostovsky” or Dahlberg had to tell her, in order to go forward. The woman could spot a boiled prune when she met one. Here’s the last poem from
Mrs.
Neverbody’s Recipes
:

Mrs. Neverbody’s Recipe for Making Crocodile Tears

To a slice of hanky-panky
Add some artificial cranky.
Moisten well with canned boo-hoo.
Flavor with a spoof or two.
Drip this slowly—as it falls
Roll it into little bawls.
If you’re careful, while they’re cooling
You can spread on only-fooling.
(This recipe is not worthwhile
Unless you are a crocodile.)

Do you feel the generosity, perhaps even forgiveness, in that last parenthetical couplet? I do. Let it be said: attending creative writing classes ennobles the brave dreamy souls who populate them, publication is a sweet and harmless church, and a minuscule handful of (presently unknown) persons will write something worth reading even during their lifetimes, let alone after. Edward Dahlberg, Worthwhile Crocodile, contributed one book readers may wish to retrieve from the bog of his disappointment, rage, sheer unpleasantness—or they may not wish to bother. His failure, though, is immortal.

13, 1977, 21

In the summer of 1977 I saw
Star Wars
—the original, which is all I want to discuss here—twenty-one times. Better to blurt this at the start so I’m less tempted to retreat from what still seems to me a sort of raw, howling confession, one I’ve long hidden in shame. Again, to pin myself like a Nabokovian butterfly (no high-lit reference is going to bail me out here, I know) to my page in geek history: I watched
Star Wars
twenty-one times in the space of four months. I was that kid alone in the ticket line, slipping past ushers who’d begun to recognize me, muttering in impatience at a urinal before finding my favorite seat. That was me, occult as a porn customer, yes, though I’ve sometimes denied it. Now, a quarter-century later, I’m ready for my close-up. Sort of.

That year I was thirteen, and likely as ideal an audience member as any mogul could have drooled for. Say every kid in the United States with even the passingest fondness for comic books or adventure fiction,
any
kid with a television, even
, had bought a ticket for the same film in a single summer: blah, blah, right, that’s what happened. So figure that for every hundred kids who traveled an ordinary path (
Cool movie, wouldn’t
mind seeing it again with my friends
) there might be one who’d make himself ill returning to the cookie jar five or six times (
It’s really still good
the fourth time, I swear!
) before copping to a tummy ache. Next figure that for each
five
hundred, one or two would slip into some brain-warped identificatory obsession (
I am
Star Wars
,
Star Wars
am me, goo goo ga
joob
) and return to the primal site often enough to push into the realm of trance and memorization. That’s me, with my gaudy
twenty-one
, like DiMaggio’s
fifty-six
. But what actually occurred within the secret brackets of that experience? What emotions lurk within that ludicrous temple of hours?
What the fuck was I thinking?

Every one of those twenty-one viewings took place at the Loew’s Astor Plaza on Forty-fourth Street, just off Times Square. I’d never seen a movie there before (and unless you count
The Empire Strikes Back
, I didn’t again until 1999—
The Matrix
). And I’ve still never seen
Star Wars
anywhere else. The Astor Plaza was a low, deep-stretched hall with a massive screen and state-of-the-art sound, and newly enough renovated to be free of too much soda-rotted carpet, a plague among New York theaters those days. Though architecturally undistinguished, it was a superior place to see anything, I suppose. But for me it was a shrine meant for just one purpose—I took it as weirdly significant that “Astor” could be rearranged into “astro”—and in a very
New Yorker
–coverish way I believed it to be the only real and right place to see
Star Wars
, the very ground zero of the phenomenon. I felt a definite but not at all urgent pity for any benighted fools stuck watching it elsewhere. I think I associated the Astor Plaza with the Death Star, in a way. Getting in always felt like an accomplishment, both elevating and slightly dangerous.

Along those lines I should say it was vaguely unnerving to be a white kid in spectacles routinely visiting Times Square by subway in the middle of the 1970s. Nobody ever said anything clearly about what was wrong or fascinating about that part of the city we lived in—the information was absorbed in hints and mutterings from a polyphony of sources. In fact, though I was conscious of a certain seamy energy in those acres of sex shows and drug dealers and their furtive sidewalk customers, I was never once hassled (and this was a time when my home neighborhood, in Brooklyn, was a minefield for me personally). But the zone’s reputation ensured I’d always plan my visits to fall wholly within summer’s long daylight hours.

Problem: it doesn’t seem at all likely that I went to the movie alone the first time, but I can’t remember who I was with. I’ve polled a few of my likeliest friends from that period, but they’re unable to help. In truth I can’t recall a “first time” in any real sense, though I do retain a flash memory of the moment the prologue first began to crawl in tilted perspective up the screen, an Alice-in-Wonderland doorway to dream. I’d been so primed, so attuned and ready to love it (I remember mocking my friend Evan for his thinking that the title meant it was going to be some kind of all-star cavalcade of a comedy, like
It’s a Mad Mad Mad
Mad World
or
Smokey and the Bandit
) that my first time was gulped impatiently, then covered quickly in the memory of return visits. From the first I was “seeing it again.” I think this memory glitch is significant. I associate it with my practice of bluffing familiarity with various drug experiences, later (not much later). My refusal to recall or admit to a first time was an assertion of maturity: I was
always already
a
Star Wars
fanatic.

I didn’t buy twenty-one tickets. My count was amassed by seeing the movie twice in a day over and over again. And one famous day (famous to myself) I sat through it three times. That practice of seeing a film twice through originated earlier. Somebody—my mother?—had floated the idea that it wasn’t important to be on time for a movie, or even to check the screening times before going. Instead, moviegoing in Brooklyn Heights or on Fulton Street with my brother or with friends, we’d pop in at any point in the story, watch to the end, then sit through the break and watch the beginning. Which led naturally, if the film was any good, to staying past the original point of entry to see the end twice. Which itself led to routinely twice-watching a movie we liked, even if we hadn’t been late. This was encouraged, partly according to a general
Steal This
Book
–ish anticapitalist imperative for taking freebies in my parents’ circle in the seventies. Of course somebody—my mother?—had also figured out a convenient way to get the kids out of the house for long stretches.

I hate arriving late for movies now and would never watch one in this broken fashion. (It seems to me, though, that I probably learned something about the construction of narratives from the practice.) The lifelong moviegoing habit which does originate for me with
Star Wars
is that of sitting in movie theaters alone. I probably only had company in the Loew’s Astor Plaza four or five times. The rest of my visits were solitary, which is certainly central to any guesses I’d make about the emotional meaning of the ritual viewings.

I still go to the movies alone, all the time. In the absenting of self which results—so different from the quality of solitude at my writing desk—this seems to me as near as I come in my life to any reverent or worshipful or meditational practice. That’s not to say it isn’t also indulgent, with a frisson of guilt, of stolen privilege, every time. I’m acutely conscious of this joyous guilt in the fact that when as a solitary moviegoer I take a break to go to the bathroom
I can return to another part of
the theater and watch from a different seat
. I first discovered this thrill during my
Star Wars
summer, and it’s one which never diminishes. The rupture of the spectator’s contract with perspective feels as transgressive as wife-swapping.

The function or dysfunction of my
Star Wars
obsession was paradoxical. I was using the movie as a place to hide, sure. That’s obvious. At the same time, this activity of hiding inside the Loew’s Astor Plaza, and inside my private,
deeper-than-yours
,
deeper-than-anyone’s
communion with the film itself, was something I boasted widely about. By building my lamebrain World Record for screenings (fat chance, I learned later) I was teaching myself to package my own craving for solitude, and my own obsessive tendencies, as something to be admired.
You can’t join me inside
this box where I hide
, I was saying,
but you sure can praise the box. You’re
permitted to marvel at me for going inside.

What I was hiding from is easy, though. My parents had separated a couple of years earlier. Then my mother had begun having seizures, been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and had had the first of two surgeries. The summer of
Star Wars
she was five or six months from the second, unsuccessful surgery, and a year from dying.

I took my brother, and he stayed through it twice. We may have done that together more than once—neither of us clearly remembers. I took a girl, on a quasi-date: Alissa, the sister of my best friend, Joel. I took my mother. I tried to take my grandmother.

That same summer I once followed Alissa to a ballet class at Carnegie Hall and hung around the studio, expressing a polite curiosity which was cover for another, less polite curiosity. The instructor was misled or chose to misunderstand—a thirteen-year-old boy willing to set foot inside a ballet studio was a commodity, a raw material. I was offered free classes, and the teacher called my house and strong-armed my parents. I remember vividly my mother’s pleasure in refusing on my behalf—I was too much of a coward—and how strongly she fastened on the fact that my visit had had nothing to do with any interest in ballet. For years this seemed to me an inexplicable cruelty in my mother toward the ballet teacher. Later I understood that in those first years of adolescence I was giving off a lot of signals to my parents that I might be gay. I was a delicate, obedient, and bookish kid, a constant teacher’s pet. Earlier that year my father had questioned me regarding a series of distended cartoon noses I’d drawn in ballpoint on my loose-leaf binder—they had come out looking a lot like penises. And my proclaimed favorite
Star Wars
character was the tweaking English robot, C-3PO.

I did and do find C-3PO sexy. It’s as if a strand of DNA from Fritz Lang’s fetishized girl robot in
Metropolis
has carried forward to the bland world of
Star Wars
. Also, whereas Carrie Fisher’s robes went to her ankles, C-3PO is obviously naked, and ashamed of it.

Alissa thought the movie was okay (my overstated claims generally cued a compensating shrug in others) and that was our last date, if it was a date. We’re friends now.

I don’t know how much of an effort it was for my mother to travel by subway to a movie theater in Manhattan by the summer of ’77, but I do know it was unusual, and that she was certainly doing it to oblige me. It might have been one of our last ventures out together, before it was impossible for her. I remember fussing over rituals inside the theater, showing her my favorite seat, and straining not to watch her watch it throughout, not to hang on her every reaction. Afterward she too found the movie just okay. It wasn’t her kind of thing, but she could understand why I liked it so much. Those were pretty close to her exact words. Maybe with her characteristic Queens hard-boiled tone:
I see why
you like it, kiddo.
Then, in a turn I find painful to relate, she left me there to watch it a second time, and took the subway home alone. What a heartbreaking rehearsal! I was saying, in effect:
Come and see my future,
post-mom self. Enact with me your parting from it. Here’s the world of cinema and stories and obsessive identification I’m using to survive your
going—now go.
How generous of her to play in this masquerade, if she knew.

I spent a certain amount of time that year trying hopelessly to distract my grandmother from the coming loss of her only child—it would mostly wreck her—by pushing my new enthusiasms at her. For instance she and I had a recurrent argument about rock and roll, one which it now strikes me was probably a faint echo, for her, of struggles over my mother’s dropping out of Queens College in favor of a Greenwich Village beatnik-folk lifestyle. I worked to find a hit song she couldn’t quibble with, and thought I’d found one in Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre,” which is really just a strummy faux–Irish folk song. I played it for her at top volume and she grimaced, her displeasure not at the music but at the apparent trump card I’d played. Then, on the fade, Paul McCartney gave out a kind
of whoop-whoop
holler and my grandmother seized on this, with relish: “You hear that? He had to go and scream. It wasn’t good enough just to sing, he had to scream like an animal!” Her will was too much for me. So when she resisted being dragged to
Star Wars
I probably didn’t mind, being uninterested in having her trample on my secret sand castle. She and I were ultimately in a kind of argument about whether or not our family was a site of tragedy, and I probably sensed I was on the losing end of that one.

My father lived in a commune for part of that summer, though my mother’s illness sometimes drew him back into the house. There was a man in the commune—call him George Lucas—whose married life, which included two young children, was coming apart. George Lucas was the person I knew who’d seen
Star Wars
the most times, apart from me, and we had a ritualized bond over it. He’d ask me how many times I’d seen the film and I’d report, like an emissary with good news from the front. George Lucas had a copy of the soundtrack and we’d sit in the commune’s living room and play it on the stereo, which I seem to remember being somewhat unpopular with the commune’s larger membership. George Lucas, who played piano and had some classical training, would always proclaim that the score was
really pretty good symphonic
composition
—he’d also play me Gustav Holst’s
Planets Suite
as a kind of primer, and to show me how the Death Star theme came from Holst’s Jupiter—and I would dutifully parrot this for my friends, with great severity: John Williams’s score was
really pretty good symphonic composition
.

The movie itself, right: of course, I must have enjoyed it immensely the first few times. That’s what I least recall. Instead I recall now how as I memorized scenes I fought my impatience, and yet fought not to know I was fighting impatience—all that mattered were the winnowed satisfactions of crucial moments occurring once again, like stations of the cross: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope,” “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” “If you strike me down, I’ll become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” and the dunk shot of Luke’s missiles entering the Death Star’s duct. I hated, absolutely, the scene in the Death Star’s sewers. I hated Han Solo and Princess Leia’s flirtation, after a while, feeling I was being manipulated, that it was too mannered and rote: of course they’re grumbling now, that’s how it
always
goes. I hated the triumphalist ceremony at the end, though the spiffing-up of the robots was a consolation, a necessary relief. I think I came to hate a lot of the film, but I couldn’t permit myself to know it. I even came, within a year or so, to hate the fact that I’d seen the movie twenty-one times.