Preface to The Leafless American

by Edward Dahlberg

The immense loneliness of this country's people has been an insistent preoccupation of its most articulate and characteristic writers. One thinks of the various heroes of Edward Dahlberg's imagination, Melville, Dickinson, Poe, and Thoreau among them. Even Whitman's great "epic" is the self's cry de profundis for an annealing company.

In his introduction to Dahlberg's initial book, Bottom Dogs (1930), D. H. Lawrence emphasized the great price Americans had had to pay for the settling of "the New World": "America was not colonized and 'civilized' until the heart was broken in the American pioneers. It was the price that was paid. The heart was broken. But the will, the determination to conquer the land and make it submit to productivity, this was not broken. The will-to-success and the will-to-produce become clean and indomitable once the sympathetic heart was broken." The very title of this present book and the poem from which it is taken make the same emphasis: "Homeless, denatured ghost of many/ leafy races, where do you blow? who/will gather you up?"

It may be that there is truly no hope for any one of us until we remember, literally, this scarified and dislocated place we presume humanly to come from, whether the body of ground we claim as home or the physical body itself, which we have also all but lost. Dahlberg has made this determined gesture of renewal and recog-

nition again and again in his work, and if he is, as some feel, the necessary Job of our collective American letters, he is also a resourceful friend to any who would attempt their own instruction and survival in the bedlam of contemporary life.

Because we have neither a history simply available to us nor the resource of a community underlying our acts, no matter their individual supposition or nature, we work in singular isolation as writers in this country. Unlike our European counterparts who work in modes and with words long established by a communal practice and habit, we have had to invent a syntax and address appropriate to the nature of our situation as "the last first people," in Charles Olson's phrase from his work on Melville, Call Me Ishmael , a text with which Dahlberg was much involved as it happens. Therefore the extraordinary rhetorical resources of Dahlberg's writing are intensively American in nature and uniquely willed by the needs of the writer himself to fashion a world of significant human value and practice.

In like sense his irritation with and attacks on this country's binding Puritanism are focussed upon the loss of a physical life, an ability to respond sexually without guilt or confusion, to admit the body itself as actual. When he proposes "Our history is the tragedy of separation," it is "separation" in all respects, from place, from person, but most of all from one's own self.

But I presume far too much upon the eloquence of this writer's genius, and it is far better that one read him directly, much as one might a friend's significant experience and advice, rather than as my point of view, however admiring. He has much to say to us.

Waldoboro, Maine
July 16, 1986