Jack Matthews & Edward Dahlberg

an excerpt from Letters, 1969‑71

            Notes for an introduction    Edward Dahlberg and I were both born on July 22, exactly one‑quarter of a century apart. Although I think of myself as a practicing rationalist, I nevertheless cherish certain superstitious beliefs in signs and portents that I regard as harmless, taking comfort in the fact that they don't cost anything. One of these superstitious indulgences is the remarkable coincidence of Dahlberg's and my shared birthdate being divided by so neat and precise a temporal interval. Conjoined with an admiration for Dahlberg's writing, and an instinctive sympathy with the man behind it, this astrological conjunction gave a special emphasis to our correspondence.

            In 1949, 1 had my horoscope cast by a woman on my Fuller Brush route in Columbus, Ohio. As I remember, she cast horoscopes professionally, but when she found out that I was born at about 8:00 am on July 22, she asked to do mine for nothing. She seemed so impressed by my chart that she called in a colleague‑a heavily‑perfumed, middle‑aged woman dressed all in blue, with blue eye‑shadow and blue feathers in her hat.

             These two women exclaimed and almost had the vapors over what they interpreted as the powerful signs of my future greatness. Looking back, I think it was only human of me to find their effusive interpretations possessed of a certain cogency‑especially in view of the fact that I had not paid to have my horoscope cast.

            Had Dahlberg received a similar blessing from the stars? Had he, too, been born at about 8 o'clock in the morning? I have no way of knowing, but if I were zodiacally inclined, I would say that, born under the same sign and upon the same date, we must have shared something of a mystical sympathy. And of course these letters reveal that we did, while remaining silent as to the cause.

July 9, 1970

Dear Mr. Dahlberg:

Please forgive my delay in answering your good letter. Of course, I understand your own delay, and understand perfectly about your not reading my novel, Beyond the Bridge. I am simply happy for you to have it. Harcourt, Brace will bring out another novel of mine next Feb. or March, and perhaps I can have them send you a copy, providing you will not feel guilty about not reading it if your eyesight has not improved.

It is indeed good of you to suggest that I send something to Prose; and of course it is good that they pay well: I have one daughter getting married and another graduating from college, so I seem to be chronically in need of money . . . like virtually everyone else, I suppose. Anyway, I have been thinking of several essays I have done, often simply as papers to be read at academic conferences, etc. I flatter myself to the extent that they are, I think, a little livelier than most such papers; but of course that would be for your editor friend to decide, should I send him something. I do have a paper titled "The Irrelevance of Relevance," in which I make the point that universities should be institutions of irrelevance ... where else can our freedom happen, except in the irrelevant? Also, I have a paper on "The Semantics of Environment Pollution," and another on "Education and the Word," in which I stand up for print‑culture values in challenge to the McLuhan “relevances” of oral/aural culture dominance. I think print is essential for certain kinds of honesty and certain values that are in turn essential to privacy, individual human dignity, etc.

If any of these ideas seem good to you, please let me know, and I will send them to whatever address you give me. And please accept my warm thanks for your kindness in remembering me in this connection.

The Zenobia play, alas, is not progressing. The fact is, I am shoulder‑deep in one novel, hip‑deep in another, and ankle‑deep in a third. What I believe in, of course, is the baptism of total immersion, and I hope to be purified soon, when I can shed the courses I am now teaching.

I do hope your eyesight is improving, and that London is good to you.

How long do you intend staying there?

My Warm Regards,

Jack Matthews

January 18, '71

Dear Mr. Matthews:

It is kind of you to send me In a Theater of Buildings, and I do appreciate your very generous inscription. You write extremely well; on those rare occasions when you risk a trope, and I think it is always a hazard, it seems to me to be just what it should be.

I have been thinking of you, and your prose style, and I went back in my mind to a talk I had with Ford Madox Ford, saying I thought there was no future in the novel except one that was an admixture of the picaresque and the tragic; you might add the comic sock of Ben Jonson. I recall that you were going to compose a novella, I think, grounded upon Porphyry, but I am unsure. You dropped that, and I feet you ought to take up something in fiction that is speculative. Consult a few seers of the past, and then write a novel. Does that sound as if I am offering you a dogma? I don't have one myself; but right or no, am of the opinion that's the only way to void our tawdry idol of today, The Fact.

The above may be a farrago of nonsense to you, but 1, too, have to take a chance, and make a suggestion.

The real is seldom the ideal, and I know that the latter can be abstract, exsanguious, and I don't care for that either. It's a predicament for both of us, and I've never been able to resolve the sphinx or to decipher it.

Anyway, you have my very warm thanks, and it's always very good to get something from you. In an era of impudicities, you're never gross or vulgar, or a scribbler, and that is a sovereign advantage.

My deep appreciation of you,

Edward Dahlberg

May 24, '71

My dear Matthews:

Who's pretentious? You were delightful. Like myself, you can't recall what you said five minutes ago. As for me, I wouldn't know how to patronize a maggot!

Now, I had a nebulous impression of your plans. I thought you wished to publish a tale I had written. But I am unsure. I received genuine encomia in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, Paul Carroll's tribute to me in The Chicago Tribune; he was referred to as the authority on Edward Dahlberg's works. Then there was Thorpe Menn's glowing review in the Kansas City Star. Many I never saw, most, not because I am not vain; or slyly modest. I just didn't bother. I would consider it a signal favor if you would review The Confessions. You tell me you cared very much for the book, and like reviewing books you relish. The citation from De Bury is lovely; you have such fine taste and read and study; get it into your books. De Bury is or was a marvelous bibliomaniac, the genuine bacchic grape of letters. I told you in my previous epistle (Now you can really say I am bombasting it) you ought to return to the ideal in the real. You'll never exhaust or even begin to disintern your identity as long as you confine your flamy imagination to the mean limits of naturalism. One is real anyway, God forfend; you can I t hide, the best subterfuge is an artistic one, and one cannot be noble in a

Zolaesque vein. Neither will the juste mot get one Out of trouble. Go back, I petition you, to Porphyry, to orphic feeling, to DeBury, to Galen, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Parmenides, Pythagoras. Unless ' grossly err, that's where your power lies; pluck it up, remember Melville's caveat; don't fail in shoals.

I'll be delighted to be in The McGill Literary Annual, and thank Mr. Dayton Kohler for his kindness, and you too, by all means. Let me see your article in The Michigan Quarterly Review.

I can't say too passionately; do not be up to date; you'll reflect the times no matter what antique authors influence you. just spoke to Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights, and asked him for a copy of the late Charles Olson's book Call me Ishmael, which is the progeny of my own book, Can these Bones Live.. Did you ever see it, and the beautiful acknowledgment to me. I begged him not to forsake, as he did, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, Lear, and all the minions of literature, and I also ask you. I turned my back on the seers after two years of graduate work in philosophy at Columbia University, and became a ferine avant‑garde proser. You couldn't possibly have written as badly as I did. How could I have made such evil tropes? So this epistle to you is a parcel of my own penitence. Meantime, I must perforce be my own Cerberus, while thinking I can be useful to you. We all fall down; some of us never get up; all my books are mantled in dust, a sack dust.

My very warm thanks and feelings go with this to you.

I shall be back here within a few weeks, but won't very likely leave till June 6th, remain in New York at 57 West 75th Street, for about ten days, pack, and then my permanent address will be 201 Pearl Avenue, Sarasota, Florida.

It may be that nobody wants advice good or ill; so please don't be irked; I like the way you write very much, and lime to see a gift sink like a lost Atlantis.

                             Warmly,

                             Edward Dahlberg

December 21, 71

My dear Matthews:

I have your very kind reply; it is easy enough to tell an author of his faults, implying as it commonly does that one has none himself I must needs thank you for accepting with the intelligence of the heart words never meant to offend you or give you a sour, heavy day. Each one peacocks his own works, although I can truthfully assert that what I have done I no longer consider my quandary. In short, I am no Narcissus looking at his pooled pages. I just don't bother. To embrace one's works is as stupid as to be homesick for one's past. For myself I wouldn't care to repeat a single hour, moment, or instant of it. It's done with.

My sole purpose was, if I could prevail with you, as I told you so often and I am a bore in repeating it that the naturalistic novel has inordinate limits. I have been at work on a novel for about four years, and it's still a sphinx to me. Shall 1, without affection, fall into an Elizabethan vein, which I have done, or suppose I did, or follow in the footprints of Walton's The Complete Angler, Robert Burton, Jeremy Taylor, and so on, only divulging that when I go to the table with a void head, I take elaborate notes from the Masters, as one might in the desert, when cold with bitter caustic winds use camel's dung for fuel. I hate the cult of originality, and I loathe Joyce and Pound for breaking into pieces the English language. Now this is not the cicatrix on your soul, not at all. I speak not of any bad or mouldy writing in what I have read of yours. I think that one should write somehow or other in the picaresque‑ tragic veins, using satire, parable, legend, the pylons near the Cataracts at Karnak. And that otherwise, the two of us are in trouble. I tried three fictions, three muggish failures, filled with unimaginably stupid tropes, and wanton metaphors. As I told you, and without buttery, you write extremely well. You can get off a very simple line, without the vile Billingsgate of this age of impudicity. I beg you not to think me pompous (I just don't have that kind of wormwood talent), but I don't feel you are fathoming the deeps, those dark and dismal swamps in one's soul. That's what I have been attempting to convey to you. Without the aid of the Masters I am a bottlehead, and even after studying Sir Thomas Browne, or Rabelais or Vilion, I call still be a dunce. One is obtuse and empty most of one's days anyway. And I am frequently burnt up in the flames of safety which hinder my nature no less than Ilium was by the Argives.

                        I am enclosing the original memorandum you sent me, and give you all my thanks for being so civil. A pigmy would have taken remarks of mine for bile or self‑love; you, whether you think me wrong or no, were entirely kind about it all. I don't want to feign that some scurrile fool who impugns me doesn't sting me, but for that cause I seldom read reviews. Hilton Kramer, who writes art trash said that I had to wheedle D. H. Lawrence onto writing the long introduction of Bottom Dogs. At the time I was starving in Paris, then London, had printed no­thing, did not know Lawrence, and said all this quite plainly yet Krarner, for what cause I cannot know, told this blatant lie. Even were I a blatant sharper, how could I coax a celebrated author, whom I had not met, even to attack me! as he did. I only made one request when galleys of his Introduction came into my hands, that a very malicious allusion to my mother be excised. But what happened is that Constant Huntington of Gordon, the publisher, pressed me hard to ask Lawrence, and I resisted and ultimately with a plethora of embarrassment, said that Huntington asked me to write to D. H. in this manner (very ashamed I was), and he graciously consented. About a brace of years ago I slubbered over one of the books on Lawrence (to which I had been invited to contribute, but declined) and what do you suppose Lawrence said: "Dahlberg asked me to write the Introduction to B.D. Nothing like asking!" I was utterly incensed.

If a man of letters writes about me I'm deeply interested, say, had you done a review, as you said you might, on The Confessions, I would deem that a boon. But I can say to you without cant that though The Confessions was heavily reviewed, called a classic, a masterpiece, and also eviled, I only bothered to look at no more than seven of them. What does a writer learn from a scribbler's encomium or for his philippics. Nothing; and my life is nothing anyway.

I hope that I have not been redundant, and that my exhortations are not didactic, or that I am the pedagogus who is not fit to wipe the nose of Gargantua. Anyway, my full‑hearted thanks for your sundry courtesies, and don't imagine I am not immensely pleased that you are including a cantle of The Confessions. Spite of all the reviews, good or ill, nobody mentioned the satires upon the universities. And oddly enough, it's a blazing question today; how to get a degree without having achieved a whit of learning. Easy.

 To be short, I am admonishing you whilst still endeavoring to find out how to write well, and I never start supposing I can be good, but fear I might be a thin, sham proser.

It is always a puzzle to m how to conclude a letter; I think best of luck commonly comes from people who wish you the worst, and that good wished dry as a shard, so I'll take the risk and sign myself, by your leave,

                                Your friend,

                                Edward Dahlberg

24 Briarwood Dr.

Athens, Ohio 45701

June 4, 1971

Dear Edward Dahlberg:

As always it was a most excellent pleasure finding your letter (May 24) in my mailbox. Forgive my delay in answering, please: our house in Athens is filled with boxes of books that I have accumulated during our Wichita year, and I go around stepping on my feet and elbows, with scarcely enough time to concentrate on the growth of my mustache or walk our 160‑pound Rottweiler (which is a dog—a marvelous beast with sedative, possibly soporific qualities . . . it's a joy simply to watch him lie on the floor and metabolize).

As you can see from this beginning, the state of my sanity is whimsical, if not questionable; but I'll try to be sensible. First, I would like to say that you must never apologize for giving advice. You must know that I have great esteem for you, and‑except for the brief pleasure of our telephone conversation‑this esteem derives totally from the signature behind the words you write . . . your style, your testimony, your profession. Although it happens that I agree with most of what you say, this is really secondary, in a sense . . . I learn from your witnessing, your signature .. . . the way you strive constantly to see life in anything but vulgar terms ("Man creates legends so that he will not have a mean existence "—forgive me if that quotation is awry). This isn't saying that reference and "content" are nothing; but abstractly, there are only a finite number of assertions one can make about truth, whereas there are seemingly infinite stances and encodings possible, which make us unique and, at best, martyrs of a conception or a myth.

All of this pontificating brings me to a more concrete issue: I learned that Harcourt did not send you a copy of A Tale of Asa Bean, but Hilda Lindley there assures me that one has now been sent. Part of the problem has to do with my editor's (Hiram Haydn) being more‑or‑less on leave this year, novelling at his place on Martha's Vineyard. Anyway, I'm glad the novel is being sent, and I do hope you like it, if you find the opportunity (I'm thinking of your problems with your vision) to read it. Actually, I fear that you may not like it; it's "rich" with crudities and vulgarities ... but not to arouse prurience on the part of the reader (of course this fact will not elude you), but rather to create a satiric web. I've been speaking of signatures: everyone in this book has his signature, and part of the comedy is the incongruity of these signatures existing together, under the pressure of community. Asa is an oxymoronic fool, when all is said and done‑and an important part of the satiric thesis of the novel is conveyed by the old Irish Triad, that "a man is an infant for twenty years, a madman (sex) for twenty years, a human being for twenty years, and then he is ready to die." (Given the enlarged life span of our time, these proportions are altered somewhat, but the sense of the saying is marvelous ... one you have celebrated again and again in your works, and one that is necessary for constant iteration.) Asa is fixated in this middle peri­od of madness, which prevents him (he himself glimpses this) from hearing the presbytic wisdom of the elders; he is aware of the ironies of his existence and of his folly, which fact does not significantly lessen either.

I am pleased for you to have the book, and I hope you haven't fallen asleep somewhere in that last paragraph. Also, I want to emphasize that I will definitely include something from your work for my anthology Archetypal Themes in the Modern Story. I really haven't had time to go back to The Confessions, or to do anything else on the book within the past week or so. Tomorrow, there'll be another delay: I'm flying to Kalamazoo, Michigan to appraise a library. Although I'm not a book dealer (as I explained when asked), I finally consented ... it sounds like an adventure; it's something I haven't done, although I've done it in bits and pieces through the years (that is, I've given advice about disbursing of books to many people).

The review of Confessions is still very much in my mind, and I will be working on it, too, this summer. Along with painting the house, finishing two novels (I hope), and doing other things that will not be, I trust, darkened by the heavy shadow of Zola.

My Warm Regards,

Jack Matthews

August 8, 1971

My dear Matthews:

It is well‑nigh impossible to find a shipper who would convey my library and furniture to Sarasota. Shelves had to be built to hold 5000 books, and only yesterday did I find your novel, Beyond the Bridge, and what with an ailing tooth, and general intellectual numbness, I may not be able to read your book even with a tithe of feeling, as I must.

Just now I noticed that I had marked passages here and there, but am sure I did not peruse it going from one page to another in the proper order.

Please forgive me for being so tardy. I know nobody will take advice, particularly if it is good. I told you I could not tell you how to write well, since I am always endeavoring to find out how that is done. I must needs re‑read the Masters, for the brain, mine, is frail, and I forget, as you can readily see, what I did two months ago in New York. But that is a braggart's remark, for after I have sent you this scrawl, I shall probably ask myself if I have written to you. A paltry and caitiff question, but there it is. Not morose by nature, I grow more melancholy, finding nothing except doom, sickness among the intellectual rabble, dead cities, and a doomsday future in our country. I say our, but it don't belong to me, and I can't imagine what parcel of it is yours.

Be sure, though, one of these days I shall again pick Lip the volume, and see what you are doing and feeling. We have plenty of people with talent, but what do they do with it? I go to a book for understanding, at the same time plainly alleging that I shall always be stupid, and that I have nothing to offer but on occasion well­-arranged words which entertain me, but what do they do for others?

            You are lucky, maybe? that you can remain in our gross Academe, but then what else could you do? I would never tell any one else to acquaint himself with Denury, a god, about as treacherous as Hades, and that is his sole viaticum. You write one book, and what's left, nothing except to scribble another, and for whom? Could I with a groat of felicity resolve that enigma, I would not have those seizures of desolation, and even nihilism, though I am no man who would advocate arson or revolt as our purblind youths are engaged in, for they are courting a dictatorship. As evil as our commonweal is, the mortal bane is a totalitarian state. So now, we have no‑man Nixon, going to China, and can you imagine such a president outwitting the Chinese? It would be droll were it not so perfidious. The reactionary is no less of a threat to the nation as the senseless Marxists. I recall the Yalta conference with Stalin; almost every juvenile newspaper editor thought the messianic age of peace was here, and I groaned, what are these ninnies shouting about, can't they see. Would that they were blind as Tiresias, for then they might have sight! Don't you loathe our rabble boys who prattle about peace, when we've had an uninterrupted war since 1914, and I see no end to the plague. So Nixon, the anti‑communist goes to Peking to negotiate with communist China, and what will lie earn, another flinty foe. So in the disunited nations, America will have two enemies whose one purpose is to destroy the United States. I have no political shibboleths, so don't suppose I have any overt or subterranean connections with people on the right or left. If you want to learn about Soviet culture you'll have to go to Siberia and speak to wretched authors in labor camps.

My warmest regards,

Edward Dahlberg

August 30, '71

My dearest Matthews:

When I last wrote to you I had not realized I had read your book, and endeavored to offer you a scrap of counsel. I know nobody wants advice, but one gives it because one is a fool knowing the other is deaf. I cannot leach you how to write; I am always learning myself, and I find each book a Burden of Babylon. One book, should it be good, will not enable you to compose another one that might have some useful human thoughts in it. And one should, without being didactic, or falling into bathos, try to write loving lines. You mold your sentences with skill, and they flow in an artless vein, as if you had never made the attempt to do so. And that is the way an artist should make a volume. Your difficulty, as I see it, is that your theme is not an epical one. Allowing that we live in a century of pismires, the author should not just reflect his age, but act upon it. Otherwise, he is a mime, and not Aristophanes, lIctronius Arbiter, or Apuleius.

I was immensely interested in the task you long since abandoned. No one really cares about the humdrun days of a waitress or what goes in a lunchroom. Unless, I must perforce add, that her mishaps are glutted up with the wisdom of the  author. When Flaubert was asked who was Emma Bovary, he replied: "I am Emma Bovary."                

You wanted to use some parcel or other work of mine, and I told you to make your own selection, and with my deep thanks.

It is always a pleasure to receive an epistle from you, and be sure of my very kind and warmest regards.

Sept. 8, 1971

Dear Edward Dahlberg:

Thank you for that good letter of August 30. Yes, I would indeed like to use a very small chapter from your Confessions for my book, Archetypal Themes in the Modern Story. I am thinking of Chapter 21, pp. 1159‑169, to use under the rubric "Trickster". Would you like to title it, or would something simple and direct‑like "I Enroll at Rabble U."—be suitable? (That title sounds all right to me, if it meets with your approval.)

Our budget, as seems to be the case with textbooks these days, is not strapping and lusty; however, I would like to offer you the maximum we will be paying for reprint) or very nearly the maximum, for we may have to go over it somewhat for a 13,000 word story): $100.00. 1 hope this will prove satisfactory to you. I would have liked to use a longer piece, but this didn't seem possible, in view of the book's conception. It is meant to be a book of short stories‑fiction‑and of course I'm stretching things a little to include a chapter from your work .... but I hasten to add that I do so happily, because I very much want your work represented in t'‑‑ book. Anyway, please let me know. And if you will, in giving me assignment for copyright (non‑exclusive, United States rights), please mention the pages, chapter number, and title of the book (as is usual). (And title from the story, as you would like it.)

            Did a copy of my novel, The Tales of Asa Bean, reach you? I've asked Hilda Lindley to send you one, but a great deal seems to get lost in the machinery. The New York Times gave the novel a long rave review in the Aug. 22 issue, but since the book came out in March, this won't help a bit (I'm told), and the book—mostly because of not being reviewed—is virtually dead. That is frustrating, indeed; but I suppose it can't be helped.

I think you would esteem this book more than you did Beyond tile Bridge. Your comments regarding the latter were of course welcome, and I understand how you might think it suffers for not possessing an epical theme. Your statement that no one really cares about humdrum days of a waitress or what goes on in a lunch­room [unless] ... her mishaps are glutted up with the wisdom of the author" is a cogent one, indeed. But I hope I can disagree with you, without sounding testy or narcissistic, and point out that tile novel really isn't about the waitress at all, nor is it about what goes on in the lunchroom . . . it is about a man constructing a reality for himself, a man who has been pushed to the very edge, and is confronted by the intransigence of his own obsessively determined past . . . his signature, that will continue writing his own name upon the future in the old terrible and awesome way.

If I failed in communicating this massiveness of' theme, and fixated only reader in the drab surroundings of the lunchroom and the impoverished sensibilities of those among whom my protagonist tried to articulate his fate . . . that is one thing: but I must protest that my theme is an epical one, vast and profound beyond our ability ever to understand in all its implications. I hope you are not embarrassed by such an ardent defense (it's a little like defending one’s children from misunderstanding or neglect), but since it is an honest one, I do not hesitate to make it.

Nor am I at all disturbed by the criticism implicit in your comments, for obviously you can't buy friendship or esteem at the price of total agreement. Without patronizing either, you call understand how dismayed Henry James and Mark Twain would be at having to sit beside each other at a dinner party, and how totally they would fail to communicate with each other. I think it quite possible that I should write something that you would not regard highly, and that this fact would lessen neither the potential value of the work nor your critical acumen. Literary values don't work in such a crudely quantitative way, of course.

I am enclosing a Xerox of my review of your Confessions, which I've had to make fit the format of the McGill Literary Annual. I hope you like the review; it's a good one, I think . . . and I don't say this immodestly, because its Virtues are greatly  those of the book itself, radiating throughout the comments thereon.

                                  Cordially,

                                  Jack Matthews

P.S. Forgive the Twain/James reference in that penultimate paragraph: it sounds as if I'm trying to (or implicitly) aligning you and me in such relationship; of course, this isn't so—the enthusiasm of my typewriter simply took over for a few lines.

                       JM

September 10, '71

My dear Matthews:

I have your very kind epistle, and your comments upon your own book. Naturally, you must needs defend your work, and it may be that I have been a dunderhead, and misconceived its epical theme. One with the greatest assiduity, and self‑love, alas will thinks he is reading a work, but his mind, for one cause or another strays, and he consequently has been slobbering over pages that he imagined he perceived. If I have done you harm in writing you as I have about it, please forgive me. I think the quandary is: that I don't care a straw about contemporary fiction, and hence come to a book, even by a man I like and think is an honest and very good prose stylist, with a pachydermatous bias. That is indeed unfortunate. Fact is the Baal Peor of our costermonger age. And you understand this; for I have just read your very discerning review for which you have my deepest thanks. Gramercy to you, and a thousand times, you are no witling. The Confessions were reviewed from coast to coast, some calling it a "classic,” “a masterpiece." There are always the assaults, the billingsgate, and you've got to forget them without feigning I'm the meek man (who inherits the earth), I scarce look at a review, be it a panyegric or a mawky insult. Let it be; there's always another book to write, and commonly one is eulogized for his last volume, as if he had never written any others. Believe me, I don't want to impugn you for faults that you don't have and may be my own. So if I have erred against you, I ask your pardon. A rationalist is likely to he your basilisk; a man of the past, may unwittingly maim you. God knows, I have never wished to hurt anybody, and I have ample cause to eulogize you. Oftentimes, I have related that you are a very skillful prose stylist. I'll just have to go back to the book, not to prove you're wrong but to find out what a clod I've been. I never had any victories anyway, and am not looking for any tawdry or pinchbeck triumphs over you. Writers should be friends, but we have such a shoal of sharpers in our literary agora, that I simply eschew the body lot of poseurs and pocketbook prosers.

To repeat, I can make as many mistakes as anybody else. And perhaps more, for spite of my constant study of the Greeks, Latins, Medievalists, and Elizabethans, I'm just as foolish as I was when I was an incoherent boy of 20; now sometimes I can compose an eloquent error.

I want to go back to what I did not finish; only about three reviewers in the whole country recognized the humor in The Confessions, and I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you for seeing it.

It is my feeling that a man who can't avow that he's wrong will never be right; and so if I have misread your book, and I opine I continually misunderstand The Alchemist, The Duchess of Malfi, the Fasti of Ovid, Suetonius, and so on. Or at best I only recollect a small particle of my perusals. So not depending upon that most frail faculty, the Memory, the living Waters of Mnemosyne, I take elaborate notes, and then when I go back to Martial or Horace or Lucretius, I wonder where my mind was when I was under the calvish impression that I had understood certain passages. The truth is, I had not perceived them at all. Where was I, or where am I'll never know.

Of course, I am extremely delighted that you wish to print a portion of The Confessions; why not just call it Rabble University. An author who feigns to be phlegmatic when a writer offers to print or reprint a cantle of his work is a liar, a fool, and ultimately a feeble and scullion proser.

Only one matter concerns me: I've had much woe with publishers over copyright; and how can I give you that when I already own the book, if all author ever is really the proprietor of' his mouldy heart. Otherwise, I am exceedingly pleased; just please clear this up for me; I'm no meddler, and don't bother a man who is publishing me. But now after lustra of follies I must protect myself as best I can, and usually I do it in the worst manner.

I  didn't get The Tale of Asa Bean. I think it's all right, now that I've looked over your letter again; you can have copyright of that particular part, Rabble University in England, where I rejected a contract for The Confessions because I felt the publisher is a low‑born person, but is being translated by Einaudi in Italy who have done two other books of mine, and I imagine it will be translated into German, that is, if I may speak so, the German that is on our side of the infamous Berlin Wall. Otherwise, I'm no finical man, and don't want to be complex; and so if you say, you don't demand copyright in the United States, why go ahead with it, and that pleasures me.

My friendliest regards, and appreciation, I have the like difficulties getting books from my sundry publishers. There was a time when I was a mendicant scribe going from one firm to another for contracts. Of course, I'll never be heavily guerdoned for my work, but I don't want to scrawl, if that is the sole way of gaining the favours of St. Lucre, for at my age to fall down and scribble a novella or a number of feuilletons would be best. It's bad at any time, and I'd rather give over that fell occupation, authorship, which is really nobody's business, since it is almost axiomatic that a writer who reaps a harvest of gold for his books is the foe of literature.

Again my full thanks for your signal kindness, and your patience with me.

Edward Dahlberg

209 Pearl Avenue

Sarasota, Florida 33580

December 5, '71

My dear Matthews:

You never replied to my last letter mailed to you above three months ago. Had I vexed you? Let me be plain. First, I have no reason to impugn you as a prose stylist. I simply don't care for pure and simple naturalism. You appear to abide by a traditional English, and I opine that he who breaks a long tradition of a language we inherited and are supposed to speak with some coherence is also breaking the soul of the people.

You had my admiration when you thought of going back to the Neo‑Platon­ists and composing a speculative novella, or if you will, a picaresque one a la Quevedo.

I will not be your dissembler, or pick a thank with you. I like you, feel you have talent, but you must learn, if you can, to eschew the mistakes of a brace of generations of writers who have offered us nothing but a scrawl which neither whets the appetite of the soul or the head.

It has always been my pleasure to write to you. Remember, I too dropped into every pitfall, I wrote naturalistic novels, three profane debacles. I have tried as best I call to mend my mountainous faults; it is hard, and I am never sure. My sole criterion is that I can be wrong; but as a human animal with hands, legs, and arms, really our heads, I know, if I know nothing (also possible) that a book that is not a whetstone for my faculties is just a pile of waste and inanition for me. No affront implied, but just tile desire to be useful though I may irk you. I have grown white as the sepulcher writing books, some maybe good, or mayhap memorable, others fustian. One must perforce be prepared to be inexorable with oneself.

What else. Prices have so soared that in three weeks my wife and I have been unable to secure a small frugal flat containing one room for work, a bedroom, a kitchen, a bath, and first a good‑sized table for books and notes.

If we can be friends spite of my suggestions and positively not hostile or scullion criticism, let us be that, and it will be a delight to call you Friend. Commonly I sow dragon's teeth because I cannot laurel some of my adherents (and a writer requires appreciation, being poorly guerdoned otherwise), not that Bill Jovanovich is not a very generous man, and a highly civilized one, but as it is a writer gets less for his brain than a garbage collector, now titled a sanitary engineer, a wry euphemism. We are producing a rabble people, a squalid literati, utterly venal trimmers withal. And some one must have the bravery to cry out as Miguel de Unamuno says in the wilderness even though only the leaves hear him.

                                    My friendliest feelings,

                                    Edward Dahlberg

Thomas Cook & Son Grafton Street

Dublin 2, Ireland.

Dec.15,1971

Dear Edward Dalhberg:

Out latest letters crossed, in a manner of speaking. That is, just a few days ago I finally got off a letter to you, addressed to your place in Florida, and then just now I've gotten your good letter from Dublin, obviously written without receipt of my letter. So please forgive some repetition, rather duplication in the two letters.

It was shameful of me to delay so long in answering you, and it's no wonder that it occurred to you that I might be sulking and licking wounds to my ego. Believe me, this isn't the case; I took your comments as an honest statement of opinion by a man who possesses nothing but good will toward me. My delay resulted from a combination of things: a sincere impulse to draft a letter (that is, to take time and leisure to do so) that would convey clearly, not my forgiveness (since there is nothing to forgive), but my innocence of anything like resentment of your candid letter; an incredible accumulation of petty (and some not‑so‑petty) tasks that nibbled fiercely at my conscience in off‑moments; immersion in a novel that has bent my bones with (what I believe is) its mass of theme . . . but all excuses weaken, especially good ones; so I will relieve you of reading them, and bid you good health and splendid spirits for the holidays, and get to the most urgent (if surely not the most important) business at hand. (I will also try to contain my typewriter and write shorter sentences.)

As you see, I am enclosing a permission form, asking that I can have permission to reprint "St. Pragma University" (pp. 159‑169, Chapt. 21) for a fee of $150.00. This is a little more than the $10.00 per page my editor at St. Martin's suggested as a going g rate, but it still isn't inspiring; indeed, I wish it were more, but the book is Ring up with longer pieces that are there not because I honor them more than your work, but because they in all honesty fit my particular "archetypal themes" more neatly than sections I considered from Confessions.

Anyway, I hope this is all right with you. If you should decline for sonic reason, of course I will understand. The book's deadline is approaching with alarming speed, so I hope you can let me know Soon.

In my other letter, I lamented the fact that it would have to serve in lieu of a better, more gratifying one: I fear I must repeat the sorry excuse in this.

                        Warm Regards and Cordial Holiday Wishes,

                                    Jack Matthews

P.S. When are you returning to Florida? I have a small book coming out that I believe will please you; it is surely more in your vein, I believe, and I want to send you a copy

Jan. 3, 1972

Dear Edward Dahlberg:

I'm in my office at Ellis Hall, now (at the university), with a few minutes of leisure to try to get a letter off to you in thanks for your good one of Dec. 21, which arrived shortly after Christmas. I hope the letter is reasonably coherent, although recent confusions and blitherings don't justify much hope in the hope, or much substance in the shadow. (And that sentence is a living Q.E.D.)

Let me thank you for Your prompt return of the permission form. I am very pleased indeed that I can include "Rabble University" in my book. Even though I teach in a university, I can see that viewed in one very clear and important perspective, we are a writhing nest of tricksters. And yet, I keep telling myself that all this ore is veined with honor: I've known colleagues who have taught at a loss in salary merely for the sake of a better library; and I've experienced the warm pleasure of having a student learn visibly, suddenly‑a whole new coloration of idea floating into his mind. Granted, this doesn't happen often, but it can happen, and does upon occasion; and these moments help compensate for the hours of perfunctory labor, the sad tangles of miscommunication, the scramble for grades, hours and "credits," the miasma of cynicism that floats in the air by the quarter's end. Maybe most of the students would be better off working in a shoe factory or pumping gas into a car, but if they would, I don't know which ones they are, and have no way of knowing. So I suppose the only honorable, or at least decent, thing to do is to profess as best I can, and speak clearly and honestly (or as nearly as I can), and try to say things that seem important and interesting and urgent to me, with the hope that if they are deeply or simply true for me, they'll prove somewhat relevant (beastly word, that), either now or eventually to some of my students. To bear witness, that is—to profess. (Which of course means that sometimes I'm talking to the forty‑ or fifty‑year‑old person this student will become, but the only medium for my message is the head of this bewildered or insouciant or skeptical Barbarian or Innocent or Spy in one of the chairs before me.)

Enough of this. I'm pleased to include your eloquently satiric tale in my book, and thank you for letting me use it.

I have a small hardbound book coming out this month, titled Book Collecting and the Search for Reality. I believe you might find this attempt more congenial than some of my others, and I would like very much to give you a copy (no obligation to comment, of course . . . but I do think you'll like it somewhat; I quote DeBury in it, who I know is one of your pantheon). My primary reason for asking is to find out if you plan to return to Florida soon. I'd much rather send it to you there than risk a transatlantic voyage via the mails; but if your return will be delayed, of course I'll airmail it to you in Ireland.

Has your book of three novellas come out with the U. of Texas press yet? You kindly mentioned that you wanted a copy to be sent to me, but as yet I haven't received it . . . and probably it hasn't been published yet.

It was most kind of you to send me The Confessions, and as a matter of fact I did write a review of it for The McGill Literary Annual, and would have sworn that I sent you a copy of the review. If you find that I did not, please let me know and I'll have another Xeroxed, and mailed to you. It was a good review, if I do say so myself—much of its excellence deriving from the richness of the book itself, so this is not altogether an egotistical claim.

I hope your Christmas and New Year's were most pleasant, and that the forthcoming year is a full and happy one.

                         Cordially,

                         Jack Matthews

P.S. Duane Schneider wrote to me early in Dec., asking for your address, so I gave him your Dublin address. You mentioned getting a letter from him, but I thought it wouldn't hurt for him to have your latest address, so he could write to you.

April 20, '73

My dear Matthews:

It was very generous of you to offer to write about some books of mine, and you have my warmest thanks.

            I only have one copy of The Bibliography, and that is in one of 1140 boxes. My own plans are so precarious that I have not wished to go to the expense of having shelves built and then abandoning them as I have done elsewhere.

            Am still toiling over the novel, and after my own forked counsel to you about this genre, you can, if I fall in the dust, tell me that I am the worst Mayworm in the earth and withal a prodigious simpleton.

            A number of my books are on the table (but be sure I'm no Narcissus turning their leaves with dithyrambic vacuity), and I can furnish you with the information you so graciously asked me to give you.

            I notice that I have here a volume of my correspondence: The Epitaphs of our Times, Braziller, 1967, New York; The Leafless American 1967, Roger Beacham; The Confessions (and I wish to proffer you all my gramercies for writing about that) of Edward Dahlberg , 1971, Braziller; The Sorrows of Priapus, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972; The Gold of Ophir, Dutton, 1972. 1 earnestly hope that Bill Jovanovich did far more for you in promoting your fiction than he did for the The Sorrows, just about nothing. I like him enormously, and he's the most entertaining companion, but we fell out over literary judgments, always very vapory and thin, but as you well know a man can be extremely intelligent and scarcely be a Rhadarnanthus of letters. This I endeavoured to explain to Jovanovich, but with a plethora of misluck. He was on that depraved committee that determines what books are the best of the year, and stated how difficult it was to distribute and sell belles lettres. I still think there are myriads of readers in America who never hear of the few memorable works that are published.

            Do please let me know whether you've received my epistolary thanks; other­wise, you will be extremely piqued with me, and consider I have a scurrile nature.

            The meanwhile, you have my friendliest greetings. Ultimately one has to accept Turgniev's remark: "I write for my six unknown readers."

24 Briarwood Dr.                                                                                      2

Athens, Ohio 45701

April 26, 1973

Dear Edward Dahlberg:

It was good receiving another letter from you. And thanks for the brief listing of your more recent books; the only one there that I have not read is The Gold of Ophir. I have written to Dutton asking for a review copy, with the hope that I can write a review for The Ohio Review, for which I am an advisory editor. I recall that

years ago I wrote to you in connection with its predecessor, The Ohio University Review, asking if you might have something you would be willing for us to publish. While my connection with the current magazine is a more tenuous one, the request still obtains; my admiration for your work has increased rather than diminished with familiarity. And now we pay for contributions‑not handsomely, but somewhat in line with other univ. periodicals' honorifically‑termed "hon­oraria." (And that is a horrifically‑honed sentence, but even a monstrous sentence is preferable to a vapid one.)

            You responded handsomely to my review of Confessions, a copy of which I sent to you; and I thank you for your thanks. It is a fine, antic quiddity of a book, and it holds a place of honor on my shelves.

            Harcourt has not promoted my books (as you say they have not yours), but they have kept them in print, which is something. My latest, Pictures of the Journey Back, received a vicious review in the New York Times Book Reivew, and  wasn't reviewed at all in the other (LA) Times (Herbert Gold reviewed my next to last

book in that, and did it favorably). The chaos of the publishing world is truly incredible. Undoubtedly, there are too many books, as there are too many people in the world; but who wants to stop having books or babies? I think of those splendid idealistic young women who've forsworn babies, and lament the fact that in their intelligence and sensitivity they should be precisely the ones to help populate the earth, while the ignorant and stupid and unwashed pullulate like grubs and flies, untroubled by thoughts of consequence. But such thinking makes me feel unclean and uneasy, because who's to say? Who's to judge? Da Vinci came out of a sixteen‑year‑old servant girl; and the batting average of the unwashed is probably a hell of a lot better than that of the aristocracy. Anyway, I've gotten far from books (although the paradox is the same). Writing is a cruel undertaking, as you once said in a letter. And damned if it isn't true. But then, I suppose most undertakings are bitter eventually, or at least now and then. And there is, after all, a virgin grace to an empty page; and a fine clarity in a good sentence.

            With which pious platitude I'll end this note, with the hope I'll hear from you soon. And the additional hope that you are thriving and well.

                                                                                    Cordially,

                                                                                    Jack Matthews.