"He was in no place and no place was in him": Edward Dahlberg's autobiographical fictions as an epistemology of sites

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 ―HE WAS IN NO PLACE AND NO PLACE WAS IN HIM‖: EDWARD DAHLBERG‘S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTIONS AS AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF SITES 1 MARTÍN URDIALES-SHAW Universidad de Vigo [email protected] Received 31 July 2017 Accepted 27 November 2017 KEYWORDS Edward Dahlberg; autobiographical fictions; situatedness; spatiality; institutions; urban spaces; fake sites; literary styles PALABRAS CLAVE Edward Dahlberg; ficción autobiográfica; condición situacional; espacialidad; instituciones; espacios urbanos; lugares artificiales; estilos literarios ABSTRACT Edward Dahlberg‘s childhood, adolescence and youth, narratively fictionalized in two early autobiographical novels, Bottom Dogs (1930) and Flushing to Calvary (1932) is markedly and recurrently informed by the influence of urban sites and institutional spaces. As the article discusses, a number of these spaces are pivotal to the development of Dahlberg‘s autobiographical character Lorry, and can be productively read in terms of the Foucaldian heterotopia, while other sites, explicitly identified as metropolitan, are marginal to Lorry‘s autobiographical narrative, and yet serve to foreground the protagonist‘s absence from them in relevant ways. Finally, other spaces may epitomize a predominantly artificial nature, functioning as simulacra of experiences that Lorry undergoes but needs to cast out. Drawing on theoretical tenets related to space, site and place, as set out by Foucault, Baudrillard, Lefebvre, and others, in this article 1 This article is part of the research project ―Literatura y globalización: la literatura norteamericana desde una perspectiva transnacional‖ financed by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (code FFI 2015-66767-P, MINECO/FEDER, EU) and of the Xunta de Galicia ―Rede de Lingua e Literatura Inglesa e Identidade III‖ (code ED431D2017/17). 146 Martín Urdiales-Shaw Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 I will contend that a situated epistemological approach is essential in fruitfully reading Dahlberg‘s early fictions, and, ultimately, in understanding his quest for space in both biographical and artistic terms. RESUMEN La infancia, adolescencia y juventud de Edward Dahlberg, ficcionalizada a través de sus dos tempranas novelas autobiográficas, Bottom Dogs (1930) y Flushing to Calvary (1932), está muy determinada por la influencia de entornos urbanos y espacios institucionales. Algunos de estos espacios son esenciales para el desarrollo de Lorry, el protagonista autobiográfico de Dahlberg, y pueden ser interpretados en clave de heterotopia Foucaldiana. Otros lugares, expresamente identificados como espacios metropolitanos, marginales a la narrativa autobiográfica centrada en Lorry, resultan, sin embargo, extremadamente significativos para subrayar la ausencia del protagonista de los mismos. Además, otros entornos sirven para encarnar condiciones artificiales, proporcionando simulacros de vivencias que Lorry experimenta pero necesita luego desechar. Partiendo de nociones teóricas relativas a los conceptos de sitio y de espacialidad, desarrolladas por Foucault, Baudrillard y Lefebvre, entre otros, el presente artículo propone un análisis basado en una epistemología de ―situacionalidad‖ que permita una interpretación crítica fructífera de la obra iniciática de Dahlberg, y, en concreto, ilumine su obsesiva búsqueda de espacio(s), tanto en términos biográficos como literarios. If one were to choose the most itinerant, rootless, and yet strangely place-aware writer in the early twentieth century American scene, Edward Dahlberg would rank among the very first. In his ―Introduction‖ to an omnibus edition containing early novels, stories and autobiographical fictions, critic Harold Billings highlights the shifting America of Dahlberg‘s childhood and youth: he was born in a Boston charity hospital (1900), and raised singly by a Polish immigrant mother who rambled the South and the Midwest, until settling in Kansas City in 1905. At twelve, Edward was dispatched to the Cleveland Jewish Orphan Asylum. At seventeen he left the orphanage to work at odd jobs in the region. At 19, almost broke, he settled in the Los Angeles YMCA, where he depended on odd jobs and checks from his mother, while pursuing a literary education with an elder mentor at the Christian Association. He attended the University of California at Berkeley from 1921 to 1923, then transferred to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1925 (Billings xiv). “He was in no place and no place was in him”: Edward Dahlberg’s 147 Autobiographical Fictions as an Epistemology of Sites Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 In the late twenties, Dahlberg became a literary expatriate in France, Belgium and England, where he met the American and Anglo-Irish modernists, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and the playwright Seán O'Casey. Looking back across the Atlantic, Dahlberg composed much of his two early novels, Bottom Dogs (1930) and From Flushing to Calvary (1932) from the European continent, rendering the fluctuating scenes of his boyhood and youth, partly under the influence of a modernist aesthetics, but also partly within the paradigm of social fiction. After a brief period living in New York‘s Greenwich Village, Dahlberg visited Germany in 1933, working as a correspondent for the London Times. His explicit condemnations of the emerging Nazi regime entangled him in a fight with a German storm trooper in a Berlin café, an event that scaled into a diplomatic incident, and made the international news headlines, when Dahlberg lodged a complaint with the American Consulate, which the German authorities pressured him to withdraw (Jewish Daily Bulletin, 2). Back in the US, Dahlberg taught at Boston University from 1944 to 1948 and, briefly, at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the fifties, as he turned to autobiography and essay writing, he relocated to the Danish island of Bornholm, 2 and in the early sixties he moved to Soller, in Mallorca. For longer or shorter periods, other domiciles of Dahlberg‘s adult life included Dublin, Wicklow, London, Madrid, Malaga, Mexico City and the Seychelles. Dahlberg‘s early autobiographical fictions always employ place and geographical space as a key structural and narrative device. His autobiography Because I Was Flesh 3 (1959) is structured in twelve chapters, each of them signaling a new relocation across the American territory, from Boston to New York, via the South, the Midwest, and California. His first two novels Bottom Dogs and From Flushing to Calvary 4 which can be read in sequence as an uninterrupted Bildungsroman with differing narrative tempos, trace Dahlberg‘s childhood and youth (Lorry in the novels), through 2 Uncannily symbolic of the sense of placelessness that haunts Dahlberg and his autobiographical self, Bornholm is very far from Denmark, lying in the Baltic between Sweden and the north German coast. 3 Henceforth cited as Flesh. 4 In discussion, henceforth cited as Flushing. All parenthetical citations to either novel, or the unfinished novel Mimes, will refer to the omnibus edition of Dahlberg‘s early writing, cited simply as Works. 148 Martín Urdiales-Shaw Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 chapters that seem to structure these memories in terms of place. Bottom Dogs covers the first twenty years of Lorry‘s/Dahlberg‘s life, devoting the first two chapters to early childhood in Kansas City, three to the Cleveland Orphanage years, another three to his reunion with his mother in Kansas City, two to his wanderings across California and San Francisco, and the closing chapters to scenes of his YMCA years in Los Angeles. More attuned to the modernist concerns with the intensification of time, consciousness, memory and subjectivity, Flushing focuses on the brief New York period in the mid-1920s, but the actual material (and often marginal) sites of this metropolis intricately commingle with the childhood spaces of memory of its prequel: Kansas City, the Cleveland Orphanage and, again, the YMCA in Los Angeles. Dahlberg‘s itinerant childhood, adolescence and youth, a formative period that the writer narratively fictionalized in explicitly topographical terms in these two early novels, which closely mirror 5 the spatial structural division of the autobiography Flesh, is significantly and recurrently configured by the influence of certain spaces, akin or identical to sites designated by French philosopher Michel Foucault as heterotopias, ―something like counter-sites … [in which] all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted‖ (24). These ―counter-sites‖ are sometimes pivotal to the development of Dahlberg‘s autobiographical character Lorry, but they can also be notably marginal, that is, there to foreground Lorry‘s absence from them in relevant ways, or they may also embody a predominantly artificial nature, functioning as a simulacra of experiences that need to be cast out by Lorry. In the following pages, drawing on theoretical tenets related to spaces, sites and environments as set out by Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva, and Henri Lefebvre I will contend that a ―situated‖ epistemological approach is essential in productively reading Dahlberg‘s early autobiographical fictions, which are markedly informed by a keen awareness of how a sense of place modeled both his identity as an individual and as a writer. I will be using both the notions of place and site to refer to the diverse spaces of the building-institution, the urban neighborhood, or the amusement park. Thus, my principal concern is not so much with 5 Alfred Kazin aptly summarized ―[Dahlberg] published his own story several times in the form of fiction‖ (111). “He was in no place and no place was in him”: Edward Dahlberg’s 149 Autobiographical Fictions as an Epistemology of Sites Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 taxonomizing difference between these theoretical concepts, as to highlight the relevance of space/s for Lorry as autobiographical character and for Dahlberg as writer. CRISIS HETEROTOPIAS: THE CLEVELAND ORPHAN ASYLUM & THE LOS ANGELES YMCA. Two significant institutions presided over, and would largely determine, Dahlberg‘s unusual childhood and youth: the Jewish Orphan Asylum in Cleveland and the Young Men‘s Christian Association in Los Angeles. These, I will argue, conform a more authentic sense of home than that ever provided by his unstable and erratic mother (Lizzie Lewis in the novels) in the periods in-between, whether in Kansas City or in New York. In Bottom Dogs, Lorry‘s Orphanage life spans three chapters (3 to 5, pp. 175-217) but meaningful recollections of this site‘s residents intrude later in time, in the midst of the Los Angeles YMCA section (chapters 12 to 15), and, with even more vivid intensity, in Part Five of Flushing, the novel‘s sequel, as Lorry revisits the then derelict site. The orphanage experience in Bottom Dogs is initially traumatic, not least because behind the decision to dispatch Lorry was his mother‘s new partner, a manipulative and self-serving individual. 6 Further trauma arises when, on arrival, Lorry is predictably designated a ―newcumber‖ and his Southern Missouri drawl becomes a target for ridicule when he finally has to talk to other boys, after an obstinate initial reserve. Gradually, however, and in spite of the strictly regimented life, bad food, and a penalty-based pedagogy, Lorry grows into the orphanage system and earns respect when he unexpectedly prevails in a fight he had meant to avoid, an early rite of passage within this community of peers. The orphanage boys are collectively referred to as ―inmates,‖ and, individually, by nicknames. Dahlberg, in fact, titles two of the Orphanage chapters after two of its iconic rogues, Herman Mush Tate and Bonehead-Star-Wolfe, who meet tragic ends after being expelled or leaving the ―home,‖ as they all refer to the asylum. Foucault described the boarding school as an instance of a typically nineteenth century ―crisis heterotopia‖ a site ―reserved for 6 In Flesh, Dahlberg writes ―He had intimated that if she could get the boy out of the way [...] they might make plans together. At 38, she was positive that if Henry Smith did not marry her, she was as good as dead‖ (63-64). 150 Martín Urdiales-Shaw Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 individuals, who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis‖ (24). Subsequently, he argues that these sites have, in the twentieth century, been largely replaced by ―heterotopias of deviation,‖ such as psychiatric hospitals, rest homes, or prisons, which shelter individuals ―deviant in relation to the required norm‖ (25). In Dahlberg‘s experience, fictionally narrativized through the autobiographical Lorry, the Jewish Orphan Asylum shares traits from both these heterotopic sites, appearing simultaneously as a potentially educational and spiritually-forming environment, but also a repressive and deprived institution, as illustrated by the attempts of its inmates to escape temporarily into Cleveland to get better food or enjoy some freedom. 7 The asylum is a collective Home for outcasts and a ―counter-site‖ that ―re-present[s], contest[s] and invert[s]‖ (24) the real homes of children with one or both functional parents. Dahlberg‘s sense of belonging to the Jewish Orphan Asylum as an ingrained surrogate home is so strong, that the writer has this institution resurface in Part Five (―J.O.A. Ja Wohl, Das Ist Das Weisenhaus‖) 8 of the New York-set Flushing, when Lorry returns a decade later: Then something sank within him … He stood there gaping. He had come to the place. But the orphanage, like Wolkes, was in no place. There was no more orphan asylum. […] There was nowhere for him to go – and he felt as if there would never be any reason for him to go anywhere, to any place, because no place would ever be in him. (Works 454) Pursuing an experimental technique that he had adopted in this second novel, the narrative form of Part Five juxtaposes Lorry‘s wanderings through the all-too familiar buildings of the now derelict site with stream-of-consciousness sections, printed in smaller type and uncapitalized, in which memories of the last superintendent Simon Wolkes, are vividly cast, specially concerning Lorry‘s conflicted projection of love, admiration and desire for approval 7 Yet, once Lorry leaves the Orphanage, Cleveland becomes an irrelevant site, as the brief, transitional chapter ―Cedar Avenue Nights‖ reveals. On how several American cities remain alien for Lorry, refer to the conclusions. 8 This literally translates ―Jewish Orphan Asylum Indeed, This is the Orphan Home.‖ The marked influence of German tuition, including the lyrics of religious hymns, is patent in Dahlberg‘s orphanage memories. “He was in no place and no place was in him”: Edward Dahlberg’s 151 Autobiographical Fictions as an Epistemology of Sites Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 for/from a surrogate father figure who is essentially oblivious of him: ―he loved wolkes more than he loved his mother, he sang his prayers way out loud and with high-pitched devotion so that wolkes could see: he followed him all over‖ (450). Wolkes is significantly absent, perhaps purposefully repressed, from the orphanage chapters in Bottom Dogs, but emerges powerfully in this fragmented chapter of Flushing that also blends in snatches of nursery rhymes (humpty dumpty), the Jewish Passover song Chad Gadyo, and lines from the Orphanage confirmation hymn (father, see thy suppliant children). The overbearing nostalgia for a site vivid in Lorry‘s mind, but materially in ruins, permeates this section, which is at times evocative of the polyphonic nature of T.S. Eliot‘s Wasteland, in its fusion of texts, languages and registers. The childhood at Cleveland Orphanage projects itself fully into the second crisis site of Lorry‘s life, the Los Angeles YMCA, which, besides Foucault‘s actual usage of the term, embodies the concept in its Greek etymological sense, as a ―turning point‖ towards the inception of the artist as a young man, in the Joycean coinage. The brief Los Angeles YMCA era is a period of Dahlberg‘s life strongly coloured by his relationship with Max Lewis, a senior pal from Orphanage times, and already a YMCA boarder when the destitute Lorry arrived in Hope Street in downtown LA, at age 19. The influence of Max Lewis on Dahlberg as a young aspiring writer was so strong that Dahlberg adopted the surname for his own fictional autobiographical persona (Lorry Lewis) and dedicated Flushing to him, in acknowledgment of his literary indebtedness. 9 Tellingly, just as Bottom Dogs seems to introduce Lorry‘s life at the Los Angeles YMCA, the narrative instantly shifts back into a retrospective excursus of the tragically Faulknerian family account of the Maxwells/Lewises 10 leading to Max and his siblings being interned in the orphanage (Works 280-294), before resuming the present time frame two chapters later. In both the autobiography and the novels, Dahlberg recounts, with varying detail, Max‘s alternative lifestyle, his 9 In a vividly recalled and moving scene of Flesh, where the two young men finally part ways, the writer also reveres Lewis for having persuaded him to enrol at ―the university at Berkeley‖ (141). 10 The Lewises become the Maxwells in the novels, Max Lewis being Max Maxwell. Yet Max is referred to as Lao Tsu Ben in Flesh, his real alias during the Los Angeles period. 152 Martín Urdiales-Shaw Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 Masonic membership, his risky entrepreneurial ventures, and his many sexual exploits. But Max is, above all, essential in initiating Lorry/Dahlberg in literary classics and philosophical inquiry, as the writer recalls in Flesh: This man […] liked to call himself Lao Tsu Ben, and he was to be my mentor. From him I learned of Gissing‘s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, Samuel Butler‘s Erewhon, The Upanishads, Daudet‘s Sappho, Gautier‘s The Golden Fleece, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Wilde‘s De Profundis—books which I bought in the secondhand shops by selling my overcoat. (127) While the autobiography focuses very exclusively on Lewis/Lao Tsu Ben, Lorry‘s own prospects at the time are more clearly featured in some pages of the ―Bensonhurst‖ section of Flushing (Works 359-364), which, as it did with the orphanage period, again functions retrospectively to encapsulate the Los Angeles-YMCA era. Here, Lorry reminisces on how he ―decided to be a writer‖ (Works 359), reciting literary lines from Emerson and from Wilde‘s ―The Ballad of Reading Gaol,‖ while struggling to get a movie script accepted at a Hollywood studio. It is in this context that Lewis resurfaces as an intellectual mentor: ―Maxwell first started to guide Lorry in his readings‖ (Works 361). Beyond the extraordinary influence of Lewis/Maxwell, the YMCA itself is also reminiscent of the Cleveland Orphanage, as both a surrogate home and a crisis heterotopia in Foucauldian terms. In Bottom Dogs, Lorry‘s first contact with the institution involves hanging around the lobby with a number of ―bums,‖ looking for shelter or a free meal, who are regularly expelled (Works 275-6; 295). Having no money for the membership fee, Lorry himself is taken for a vagrant, until Maxwell appears and vouches for him before the desk clerk (276). Although only one chapter of Bottom Dogs details later life at the ―Y‖ (playing poker, drinking, and being rowdy), the sense of a disciplined life with rules of decorum and a religious education involving prayers and hymns, which also relates to an all-male community, mirrors, in various ways, the Jewish Orphanage background. MARGINAL SITES, LIFELESS PLACES: BENSONHURST, BROOKLYN AND CALVARY, QUEENS. “He was in no place and no place was in him”: Edward Dahlberg’s 153 Autobiographical Fictions as an Epistemology of Sites Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 Whereas the Orphanage and the YMCA become key central sites in Lorry‘s formation, often recurring and intruding through memory into later periods of the individual‘s life, in sharp contrast, two urban areas of his youth emerge as marginal, unlived or lifeless. These New York districts, Bensonhurst and Calvary, appear in Flushing, a work where Dahlberg employed a distinct New York cartography to entitle three of its six constituent parts (1. Bensonhurst; 2. Flushing to Calvary; 4. Coney Island Angelus Bells), which are not always consistently relevant to Lorry‘s life-story. Revealingly, unlike the earlier formative sites discussed above, both Bensonhurst and Calvary correspond to one of the periods of Lorry‘s life shared with his mother Lizzie, who often becomes the focalizer of the narrative in this novel. The first four chapters of the Bensonhurst section, prefaced by the quoted epigram ―Cheap Peoples Live Here!‖ (Works 325), function to foreground several modes of exclusion from the American success ethic, the neighborhood becoming metonymic for paralysis, economic failure, and unrealized dreams. Dahlberg does this by focusing on the inset stories of several characters (Lizzie Lewis, Willy Huppert, and Jerry Calefonia) while sidetracking Lorry‘s central autobiographical narrative. Conversely, when Lorry‘s narrative is resumed in chapter 6 of Bensonhurst, it is through a retrospective section, encapsulating parts of Bottom Dogs dealing with his earlier Los Angeles life, unrelated to the materiality of this neighborhood. Dahlberg‘s concern in this part of the novel –oddly discordant with the aestheticized sections featuring Lorry as center of consciousness— is to show alienated characters struggling to find a sense for their lives in Bensonhurst. Two of these are recent immigrants to the US, the German-Dutch Willy Huppert, who becomes a boarder with the Lewises, and the Argentinian Jerry Calefonia, who meets Lizzie Lewis and has hopes of seducing her. Both Huppert and Calefonia feel linguistically and culturally marginal, lacking fluency in English and the capacity to engage with American social norms or entrepreneurship. Initially spellbound by the New York sights of the Battery, the Statue of Liberty and the island ferries, Willy Huppert desperately seeks a manager to pursue his boxing dream, but his life is determined by a 12-hour job in a store and a persistent solitude: ―on late afternoons, he liked to sprawl on a parkbench and talk to Americans‖ (Works 339). More symbolically relevant to this section, however, is the Argentinian Jerry Calefonia, the character used by Dahlberg to focalize the 160 Martín Urdiales-Shaw Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 simultaneously memorialized and materialized, through an ongoing juxtaposition of past and present narrative time frames. Flushing draws to a close in Part Six, as Lorry finally abandons their tenement after selling the furniture. Now factually orphaned and homeless, he gets ―caught up in a Communist Riot at Union Square‖ (Williams ―Lazarus‖ 31) violently dispersed by police. Through a defamiliarized perspective, the starving Lorry is shown picking a peanut from the sidewalk in Union Square, and suddenly finding himself amidst ―a parade‖ he thinks is chanting ―a marchtime hymnal procession‖ (Works 472-3), as ingrained memories of orphanage times take over yet again. Hurt by the mounted police who are breaking up the rally and unaware of its political significance, Lorry continues walking toward Washington Square, chewing on the peanut and singing an orphanage hymn. Resuming an experimental narrative mode, Dahlberg even has the hymn‘s music sheet printed on the page. The novel ends with Lorry chanting this hymn, musing Treading along, his thin soles, callousburns against his feet, he thought he would go somewhere, but he didn‘t know where […] Vaguely, he believed, going, going somewhere, would be more possible for him than doing. But what could he push himself into, where could he drive himself? Cleveland, Chi, Frisco, L.A., they made him mutter with cold. They were the nastywet sears-roebuck catalogue sheets of a leaky outhouse up against him. (Works 474-5) This last mental image, obscurely outdated today, juxtaposes the tragic allure of consumer culture to the grim certainties of Lorry‘s homelessness and poverty. Counterpart to today‘s online Amazon, the Sears-Roebuck, an early century mail order catalogue which famously advertised, among other goods, homes and cabins to be set up on one‘s property, was typically recycled for toilet paper sheets in the ―outhouse,‖ itself also advertised within these pages (―The Sears Catalog‖). As Lorry wanders central New York aimlessly, these American cities are imaged as ―nastywet sears-roebuck catalogue sheets,‖ discarded sites of his childhood and adolescence, merging in his memory as almost indistinguishable places. This final sequence, with its bringing together of American metropolises, the nationwide bible of consumer capitalism, and the homelessness of the urban wanderer, becomes markedly informed by a discourse of spatiality which significantly performs the Lefebvrian paradigm of the “He was in no place and no place was in him”: Edward Dahlberg’s 161 Autobiographical Fictions as an Epistemology of Sites Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 ―production of space,‖ as ―[both] a precondition and a result of social superstructures [of] the State‖ (qtd. in Tally 117). Indeed, Dahlberg highlighted ―the inevitability of failure of the dollarless American trapped in a capitalistic society‖ (qtd. in Williams ―Lazarus‖ 30) as a significant theme of Flushing. Read together, the two early autobiographical fictions Bottom Dogs and Flushing chart the complex interrelatedness of place in Lorry‘s formative years, shaping a very distinct approach to the narrative of Dahlberg‘s life, one that enacts Foucault‘s premise on the ‗spatial turn‘ of the twentieth century. The ways in which the orphanage and the LA YMCA intrude nostalgically into later New York life, the fact that Lorry‘s autobiographical story-line recedes from the Calvary and Bensonhurst sections, the particular re/presentation of Coney Island as supplier of simulacra, and the open-endedness of Flushing, showing a homeless Lorry mechanically drifting in the city, reveal an ongoing concern with the pursuit of situatedness that always intrigued Dahlberg, as much as it eluded him. In the absence of a stable home, the familiar spaces of Lorry‘s/Dahlberg‘s youth remain heterotopic sites, in themselves surrogate homes, while the cities beyond –Cleveland, Los Angeles, New York— pass in quick succession and become for him ―alienated cities,‖ in the terms set out by Kevin Lynch, and later espoused by Fredric Jameson (Jameson 51; Lynch qtd. in Tally 71): spaces which are unmappable, ungraspable in their urban totality. Another way in which the question of situatedness becomes central to these early novels has been mentioned early on in this essay, and deserves further comment. This involves Dahlberg‘s ―position‖ and ―wayfinding‖ as a young writer, composing these American novels about American spaces from European places (France, Belgium, England) and under the influence of Anglo-Irish modernism. Although both novels trace Lorry‘s youth chronologically and are appropriately read in sequence (the latter, as has been discussed, often evoking the spaces of the former), they nevertheless chart a significant shift in terms of genre. The rather consistent narrative linearity of Bottom Dogs, broken only by two chapters towards the novel‘s end, gives way to the aesthetic experimentation of Flushing, with its polyphonic Part 4, its stream of consciousness memory sections, the juxtaposition of time-frames, and the collagingin of musical notation. Critics have often labelled these works, particularly Bottom Dogs, as ―classic(s) of proletarian literature,‖ tending to focus on the underlying themes of penury and economic 162 Martín Urdiales-Shaw Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 struggle which underlie the narrative. But it is hard to reconcile Dahlberg‘s style, even in Bottom Dogs, with the realism and naturalism that characterized the social novels of the period, 17 while Flushing very clearly switches into a modernist aesthetics that clearly outweighs a sense of social critique. Ultimately, Dahlberg‘s literary space in the late twenties and early thirties becomes shifting ground, a complex crossroads that blends working-class consciousness with modernist form, under the competing influences of the ideological 18 and the artistic. In the 1940s and 1950s, as the writer turned away from autobiographical fiction to essay writing, philosophical and anthropological enquiry, and the revision of literary myths, the notions of absent sites, homelessness or inner exile remained a leitmotiv of his writings, as various commentators observed. Commenting on one of these later, better known books, The Carnal Myth, Anthony Burgess interprets Dahlberg‘s vision of American identity in the New World: ―The American has been dwarfed by a continent so large it cannot ever be a home‖ (Williams Tribute 62). On her part, critic Kay Boyle refers to Dahlberg as a ―man in the wilderness,‖ who knew ―he was destined, both as man and writer, to be an exile in the land of his birth‖ (Williams Tribute 68). But, perhaps, one of the most insightful assessments of Dahlberg‘s individual and artistic struggle with a sense of place is recorded by Arno Karlen, himself a rare intellectual who straddled the fields of literary creation, as a poet and short story writer, with his medical specialization in sexuality and psychoanalysis: 17 In this era, an interesting counterpoint to Dahlberg‘s early work is Daniel Fuchs‘ Summer in Williamsburg (1934) a naturalistic fiction which prominently textualizes, in socioeconomic, psychological and ethnic terms, the influence of New York districts (Williamsburg, Manhattan, and others) on the characters‘ destinies. 18 Dahlberg joined the Communist Party in 1934 and published his third novel, Those Who Perish, that same year. At the time, a commentator of the Marxist journal New Masses, attempting to situate Dahlberg politically through a review of the new novel, wrote: ―[after Bottom Dogs and Flushing] there has been uncertainty as to Dahlberg‘s position as a writer‖ (Burnshaw 26). This reviewer goes on to celebrate Dahlberg‘s progress from ―the pictures of decay‖ (i.e., Flushing) but is hard put to label Those Who Perish as ―revolutionary fiction,‖ as it concerns ―complex middle-class individuals‖ (Burnshaw 27). Today, this work is chiefly remembered as the first American anti-Nazi novel, written in the wake of Dahlberg‘s fateful visit to Germany in 1933. “He was in no place and no place was in him”: Edward Dahlberg’s 163 Autobiographical Fictions as an Epistemology of Sites Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 [Dahlberg] bounces as he walks the earth, without the ballast of inherited myth, longing for even the memory of a homeland and ancestral house. But even the memory is forgotten … so it cries for recreation every day in his work. The recreation is part guess, part invention, part the memory of remembering. So it is never right. The best success fails and makes him try again. So he remains an artist. And in his art he proves that an American, an artist, a Jew, a fatherless son lives out the myth of mythlessness, itself a Sargasso homeland. (Williams Tribute 73) Looking back from early old age at his beginnings as a writer in the late twenties, Dahlberg still reflected on both the place and the dislocation of his early fiction. In 1961, living in the mediterranean island town of Soller, in Majorca, Dahlberg composed a brief preface to Bottom Dogs at the renewal of the work‘s copyright. Thirty years after the novel‘s first and largely unsuccessful publication, in this preface the writer reminisces on what he now perceives as the novel‘s central flaw, the ―rough, bleak idiom‖ (Works 145) that materialized from his early attempts to produce ―a vernacular American Ulysses‖ (Billings, Works xvi) which would bring together modernist aesthetics, social fiction and the American scene. So Dahlberg lingers, finally, both in ―no place‖ and in too many places, one of the most fascinatingly interstitial writers in the American twentieth century. WORKS CITED BAUDRILLARD, Jean. Selected Writings. Edited by Mark Poster, Stanford UP, 1988. BILLINGS, Harold. Introduction. Dahlberg 1976, pp. xiii-xx. ---. Edward Dahlberg. American Ishmael of Letters, Roger Beacham, 1968. BOYLE, Kay. ―A Man in the Wilderness.‖ Williams, pp. 66-69. BURGESS, Anthony ―Honoring a Prophet in His Own Country.‖ Williams, pp. 60-62. BURNSHAW, Stanley. ―Dahlberg‘s New Novel.‖ New Masses, 11 Sept. 1934, pp. 26-27. UNZ.org –Periodicals, Books, and Authors, www.unz.org/Pub/DahlbergEdward-1934. Accessed 16 November 2017. 164 Martín Urdiales-Shaw Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 Calvary Cemetery home page, www.calvarycemeteryqueens.com/default.asp. Accessed 19 July 2017. DAHLBERG, Edward. Bottom Dogs, Flushing to Calvary, Those Who Perish and hitherto unpublished and uncollected works by Edward Dahlberg, Edited and introduced by Harold Billings, Minerva Press, 1976. DAHLBERG, Edward. Because I Was Flesh. The Autobiography of Edward Dahlberg. New Directions, 1959. ―European Press Devotes Great Space to Disturbed Conditions in Germany.‖ Jewish Daily Bulletin, 15 March 1933, p. 2. FOUCAULT, Michel and Jay Miskowiec. ―Of Other Spaces,‖ Diacritics vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 1986, pp. 22-27. JAMESON, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991. KARLEN, Arno. Williams, pp. 72-73. KASSON, John F. Amusing the Million. Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. Hill & Wang, 1978. KAZIN, Alfred. ―The Eloquence of Failure.‖ Billings 1968, pp. 111-15. KRISTEVA, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia UP, 1984. LEFEBVRE, Henri. The Production of Space, translated by Donald NicholsonSmith. Blackwell, 1991. LYNCH, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT Press, 1960. NASAW, David. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusments. Harvard UP, 1993. ―The Sears Catalog – Hallmark of the American Outhouse.‖ Prawn Tail, 14 July 2009, prawntail.com/the-sears-catalog-hallmark-of-theamerican-outhouse. Accessed 19 July 2017. SOLOMON, William. Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression. Cambridge UP, 2002. “He was in no place and no place was in him”: Edward Dahlberg’s 165 Autobiographical Fictions as an Epistemology of Sites Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 21 (2017), Seville, Spain. ISSN 1133-309-X. pp. 145-165 ---. ―Disinterring Edward Dahlberg.‖ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 43, no. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 389-417. TALLY, Robert T. Spatiality. Routledge, 2013. WILLIAMS, Jonathan. Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute, Northwestern UP, 1970. ---. ―Edward Dahlberg‘s Book of Lazarus.‖ Billings 1968, pp. 17-42.