The Wages of Expectation: A Biography of Edward Dahlberg (review)

246Reviews "Isaac Bashevis Singer, Old Love (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979). x*Isaac Bashevis Singer: On Literature and Life, ed. Paul Rosenblatt and Gene Koppel (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1979). "Daniel Fuchs, The Apathetic Bookie Joint (New York: Methuen, 1979). ''Diana Trilling has admirably explained "what it meant to be a Jew in the American academy" in her recent memoir about her husband, "Lionel Trilling, A Jew at Columbia" (Commentary [March, 1979], pp. 40-46). This essay explains a good deal about the Jewish preoccupations in the early stories. 17An outstanding book in the area I have been discussing in this essay is Nathan A. Scott's Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1973). University of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeMelvin J. Friedman DeFanti, Charles. The Wages of Expectation: A Biography of Edward Dahlberg. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1979. 272 pp. Cloth: $15.00. "Whatever one has done he will do; that is his character, and he can neither improve nor escape it," Edward Dahlberg tells us in his Confessions. In reading Charles DeFanti's penetrating account of Dahlberg's life and works, we realize how accurate this fatalistic pronouncement is for beginning to fathom Dahlberg's perplexing personality. DeFanti's very readable book is about a character, perhaps the most famous curmudgeon on the recent American literary scene. Dahlberg (who died in 1976) has been dubbed an American "Job of letters" and a prophetic "Ishmael" of American literature, but within a number of circles he is also recognized as someone who "has buried the hatchet in more writer's skulls more often than anyone else." Through DeFanti's portrait of him we see both of these sides as well as someone trapped and pulled apart by the paradoxes of his own nature and circumstances , someone in a bind which leads both to his genius and his undoing. Dahlberg had the kind of life (particularly his childhood) that often translates into art. It could also as easily have led to jail or an insane asylum had there not been factors in Dahlberg's childhood, like his mother's pushing him in intellectual, "cultured" directions, that would give outlet to the early "hurts" Dahlberg later said all of his books were based on. Dahlberg was born in a Boston charity hospital in 1900, the illegitimate son of a lady barber who had been forced to leave her husband (and two other children) in New York because she was carrying another man's child. Dahlberg spent a deeply lonely, impoverished boyhood being tugged from town to town, dodging bullies, "being sick," and trying to cope with the steady stream of "suitors" Lizzie, his mother, brought home from the Star Lady Barber Shop which she ran in Kansas City where she and her son finally settled in 1905. Lizzie, an immigrant Polish Jew, was a fantastical figure, a "mater dolorosa of rags and grief (as Dahlberg later described her) with wild, henna-dyed hair, an almost irresistable habit for shady business deals, and an obsession with finding a husband and becoming respectable. When a riverboat captain, whom she thought might marry her, appeared, and when her clinging, 12-year-old son seemed to be interfering with the progress of the relationship, she shipped him off to an orphanage in Cleveland, where Studies in American Fiction247 Dahlberg became one of what he later called that "separate race of stunted children who were clad in famine." He survived and returned to Kansas City five years later, a gawky young man with a high-school degree, a bookish loner with an eccentric (and still unmarried ) mother. Dahlberg soon left and found himself, an intellectual hobo, wandering west, perhaps to write. Dahlberg's youthful experiences affected him powerfully and led to a number of autobiographical stories and several novels, the first of which, Bottom Dogs (1929), was published with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence, who had been persuaded to do so by F. S. Flint, whom an expatriated Dahlberg had met in England in the late Twenties. The book launched Dahlberg's career, and he soon became known as a proletarian novelist. Later, the Beats would make Bottom...