Fielding Dawson's "Certain Overflow Willingness"

Abstract

Call me Fee, he might have said, for he stood like Melville's Ishmael, strange to the overcast dusk of E. 19th Street where he has lived many of his Manhattan years. His head was not thrown back and he was not laughing, as in a photograph he once seemed to like for book jackets. Fielding Dawson was taller and grayer than I had expected; his looming figure seemed almost generative of the side walk's splotchy chiaroscuro. It was misting a little. No one had umbrellas. Instead of the Melville opener (and he is a Melville man), Fielding spoke my name and led me through the wrought iron street gate, up stairs to the loft where he and Barbara live. There was my friend, his wife Barbara, darkly beau tiful in an aroma of simmering borscht, with a bouquet of onions, parsley, and salad greens on the kitchen table before her. It was the beginning of a night I remember as high key, like the reds and cadmiums of Fielding's paintings and collages hung around the room. It had come about because Seymour Krim introduced me to Barbara Dawson some months before, or at least had her look me up when she was on a temporary child-psychology consultant's job in Ala bama. She invited me to visit them in their loft, to meet Fielding, to see their Franz Kline memorabilia the next time I was in New York City. This was it, but not one of those set-up interviews with tape recorder and questions stem ming from the interviewer's having done the usual homework. We had no trouble conversing, Fielding and I; in fact, we were not as thought ful of Barbara as we might have been in our duet for hours over wine and a wonderful dinner and after-dinner drinks until dawn at Max's Kansas City. At the time I had read only two Dawson works: An Emotional Memoir of Franz Kline (Pantheon, 1967) and The Black Mountain Book (Crot?n Press, 1970). At least I had read two, which is more than most Kline devotees could say of the first published book, not to mention the New York literary vigilantes who missed in both works the onslaught of an intrepid newcomer to American letters. The Kline Memoir, now lamentably out of print, is filled with youthful homo sexual anxieties for the late painter and all kinds of sublimated searching for a father figure. It also offers close-up after close-up of Kline: at Black Mountain College (where he taught and where Fielding Dawson was a student from 1949 53), at the old Cedar Bar in Manhattan, in the company of his wife, among his peers of that most exciting period in American painting (the late 50's/early 60's era of Kline, deKooning, Pollock, Tworkov, Guston, Motherwell, et al. ). Further, Memoir is one of those unabashed pieces of writing which are supposed to have died out with Thomas Wolfe (an admitted early influence, still evident in the crescendo passages in Dawson's fiction). There is something indeed intrepid about a writer who dared to refer to himself as a jeun Telemachus. Perhaps Dawson anticipated a current generation which feels akin to the jeun Tele