'A Small Knot of the Learned'

Even their admirers must admit that some writers are lost causes. We know in advance most readers will remain immune to their charms. To champion them with too much enthusiasm amounts to snobbery. I would never try to sell you Walter Savage Landor. A small party of explorers will discover and claim him on their own. Another is Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977), who started out in the Twenties as a writer of proletarian novels and transformed himself into a hectoring prophet with a fancy prose style:

“Unhouseled English is in the minds of a small knot of the learned. Thousands and thousands of words of good odor are sore decayed, and few have the bravery to re-edify them.”

This is from Chap. 18 of The Confessions of Edward Dahlberg (1971), and it tells us at least two things about its writer: “I’m smart and you probably aren’t. I like obscure words learned from books you haven’t read.” If Dahlberg’s language could be run through a de-ego-fier, more readers might find him palatable. I've been reading him since the mid-seventies but expect no one to follow my lead. I sympathize with Dahlberg's love of archaic language, much of it not in use since Robert Burton was a pup, though his prose can read like a visit to the Word Museum. No writer was touchier or held a grudge longer. Dahlberg never made a friend who didn’t leave him feeling betrayed. The late Hilton Kramer reviewed Dahlberg’s Confessions on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and wrote:

“The Confessions is a highly personal form of baroque sermonizing, a collage of sacred texts, lacerating aphorisms, dour prophecies and pitiless ruminations on the follies of the human species. There are, to be sure, some prickly and even malicious reminiscences of well‐known writers in this book; but to read The Confessions primarily for its small quotient of gossip or history—one of the pleasures, after all, in reading memoirs—would be about as rewarding as reading The Ambassadors as a book of etiquette. It can be done, I suppose, but it is bound to be disappointing.”

Here’s a characteristic sample of Dahlberg’s prose from the chapter quoted above: “I address the wretched brethren of letters who dwell in hapless kinless rooms; give the indigents a lusty meal of similes savory as truffles or gorbellied tunnies hard by Cadiz. A simple phrase that has died in George Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois is a balsam for hurt souls in asphaltic coffin towns. The monosyllable, swad, will heal the wounds of an entire hour.”

Swad [OED]: “A country bumpkin; a clodhopper; a loutish or clownish fellow; a common term of abuse.”

Dahlberg’s best books remain Do These Bones Live (1941; rev. 1960, retitled Can These Bones Live) and his masterpiece, Because I Was Flesh (1964).

[Will someone please collect Hilton Kramer's uncollected reviews and essays, particularly those devoted to literature?]