American Literature as Black Mass: Edward Dahlberg

Abstract

Although by the end of the nineteenth century the existence of an American literature distinctive in idiom, temper, and cultural implications was generally recognized, after the First World War a number of major American authors sought further to define and project what they believed to be the authentic national strains of American life and letters. Notably among these were Stein, Pound, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, and, somewhat later, Edward Dahlberg. Some sought to ground American writing in post-Revolutionary or ante-bellum codes and attitudes: some found roots in agrarianism, in regionalism, or in an aboriginal past: some argued for a subtler authorial integrity in shaping a style that would reflect the pragmatic and technological emphases so pronounced in the ambient American scene. Dahlberg, with the stance of an Old Testament prophet, castigated Puritan asceticism and diabolism as well as nineteenth-century pessimism and ambiguity. Wrestling zealously for a generation with the issues of a national style and values, he seems to have placed his deepest confidence in a literature which would issue from what he termed the moral intellect, the carnal heart, and a rapport with the American earth. If indeed Edward Dahlberg was the most hated man in American literature, as he himself maintained in a letter to Lewis Mumford in the early 1950s, he apparently accepted his status with pride as well as resentment.' Consistently over the years he conceived of himself as a