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published more than a dozen other books, some of which, like Anthony in the Nude (1930) and Footsteps on the Stair (1950), also feature sympathetic gay characters. Earl Ganz’s The Taos Truth Game (2007) fictionalizes Brinig’s adult life in Taos, New Mexico, based in part on Brinig’s unpublished (and reportedly not-so-interesting) memoirs; it might be easier to find Ganz’s novel than Brinig’s books themselves, which—until they are reprinted—must be sought out at wellstocked libraries. Later Jewish novels that deal with homosexuality include Sanford Friedman’s Totempole (1965), Gene Horowitz’s Privates (1986), and David Sadownick’s Sacred Lips of the Bronx (1994); see also the work of Lev Raphael (including 1990’s Dancing on Tisha B’Av) and David Leavitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20pBottom Dogs By Edward Dahlberg PUTNAM, 1929. 269 PAGES. In selecting the subject matter of his first novel, Edward Dahlberg scraped the very bottom of the economic barrel, long before it was fashionable to do so— before novels of junkies and drifters, lunatics, and street children had become common literary fare. The panoramic view of American low life in orphanages and petty jobs and business scams that came to be called the proletarian novel as well as the modern American road novel (the most famous example of which is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road¸ published in 1957) both owe a great deal to the example Dahlberg provided in Bottom Dogs. In a supportive introduction for the novel’s first publication, D. H. Lawrence hoped that Dahlberg’s book was a “ne plus ultra,” an unsurpassable peak in the description of hopelessness and destitution, for, he wrote, “the next step is legal insanity.” If that’s the case, a great swath of American literature in the 1930s and afterward is fit for an asylum. Dahlberg’s autobiographical hero, Lorry Lewis, is raised by his mother, Lizzie, in Kansas City, Missouri. Lizzie—who shares a first name, a job, and many other characteristics with Dahlberg’s real-life mother—runs a barbershop near the train station and proceeds to entangle herself with any number of creeps. One of these sketchy characters convinces her to send Lorry off to an orphanage in Cleveland, a terrifying place where corporal punishment, hazing, and spoiled food are the regular amenities. Having survived this hostile environment and even managed to discover the pleasures of literature in the process, Lorry finds he can’t stay still or settle down back in Kansas City, or anywhere else. Learning the tricks of “boing” (not a sound effect, but a verb, shortened from “hoboing”), Lorry rides the rails and hitchhikes west to California, where he winds up at a Los Angeles YMCA filled with yet another set of outlandish characters, as loudmouthed and passionate as the orphans he has known. These experiences are related in a quick-moving, flat dialect studded with local expressions, slang terms, and occasional old-fashioned vulgarity—all of which Lawrence referred 37 Titles to as “sheer bottom-dog style, the bottom-dog mind expressing itself direct, almost as if it barked”; later on in a long career, Dahlberg disowned his early work as “dunghill fiction.” Bottom Dogs is essentially autobiographical, with Lorry standing in for the author—but Dahlberg edits his past with a free hand—removing many of the cues that would alert readers to the Jewish elements of his experiences. In real life, the institution Dahlberg grew up in was the Jewish Orphan Asylum of Cleveland. His father was a no-good Jewish barber, and his mother seems to have had a thing for dishonest Jews, as she was later scammed and mistreated by Harry Coen, a supposed baker and entrepreneur, the sort of guy who burns down a stable after heavily insuring his horses. Jewish elements do occasionally appear in the book: one of the drifters at the YMCA, for example, is Hyam Davidd, a British Jew to whom Lorry reaches out. Bottom Dogs isn’t a book about people connecting, though, but an influential exploration of a loner’s disaffection. Further reading: Dahlberg’s long career was marked by prolixity, a turn to a ponderous style, and his insistence on bad-mouthing his contemporaries. His third novel, Those Who Perish (1934) deals with the rise of Hitlerism and the passivity of American Jews. Those interested in the conjunction between Dahlberg’s life and his first novel can compare the stories in Bottom Dogs to Dahlberg’s highly praised autobiography, Because I Was...

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