Introduction to Krazy Kat/The Unveiling & Other Stories

by Fielding Dawson

An instant motion—as when the road twists, suddenly, or else, dropped in the river, you see the ball float out, then, caught in the current, go on, round the bend. Perhaps Fielding Dawson is in fact incarnation of some wild Steamboat Captain, and certainly Mark Twain—in that both make words a literal condition of experience—is part of him too.

A few days ago, in Leavenworth, Kansas (which has four prisons and old-time spade bar with blackjack dealer practicing, at the table back of us white boys)—a man comes up, to talk, who is using a crazy vocabulary of midwest forties cliché, he's a good joe, I know the ropes —all like that, with sort of a sad smile too, just that his friends had faded off and the incredibly bulging blonde he'd picked up had gone too, while we were talking.

It's like that language, like an old album of pictures, one could make a collage of, but not a 'description'—rather, an enactment, of what that language continued to carry as its own condition. Movietone , in this sense, is a fantastic Cultural History—like they say—of a whole era.

But again, movement —I have never seen a writer capable of such fast shifts, so instantly, nervously, exact. Think of what's got to, with such unobtrusive statement, in Early in the Morning , i.e., how it's always there, in your eyes, and yet the hand is quicker than the eye, as usual.

Worte sind auch Taten  . . . It's funny it should be a German, Witt-

genstein, who tells us that—Americans, who always used language like an axe. From the twenties, people like Ring Lardner, from the thirties, Hammett and especially Chandler—who make of words a literal texture of place and person. I value Fielding Dawson as the present Champ of said possibility.

He also likes baseball. I'm sure it's as much the language as the game. He loves anything, where it really is. He's a deeply gifted writer. He's a very lovely man. Open the goddamn door and say hello.

May 9, 1969