Flea of Sodom

by Edward Dahlberg

An examination of the occidental mind in poetry and literature written in essay-poem-parable form with an introduction by the eminent English philosopher Sir Herbert Read.

Genres: Fiction

123 pages, Library Binding

First published June 1, 1974

About the author

His first novel, Bottom Dogs, based on his childhood experiences at the orphanage and his travels in the American West, was published in London with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence. With his advance money, Dahlberg returned to New York City and resided in Greenwich Village. He visited Germany in 1933 and in reaction briefly joined the Communist Party, but left the Party by 1936. From the 1940s onwards, Dahlberg made his living as an author and also taught at various colleges and universities. In 1948, he taught briefly at the experimental Black Mountain College. He was replaced on the staff by his friend and fellow author, Charles Olson.

He was an expatriate writer of the 1920s, a proletarian novelist of the 1930s, a spokesman for a fundamental humanism in the 1940s. For a number of years, Dahlberg devoted himself to literary study. His extensive readings of the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Thoreau and many others resulted in a writing style quite different from the social realism that characterized his earlier writing.

He moved to the Danish island of Bornholm in 1955 while working on The Flea of Sodom. The Sorrows of Priapus was published in 1957, becoming his most successful book thus far. He later moved to Mallorca, while working on Because I Was Flesh, an autobiography which was published in 1964. During the 1960s and 1970s, he became quite prolific and further refined his unique style through the publication of poetry, autobiographical works, fiction and criticism.

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could write in this style - cutting quick through weeds of history, religion, and myth to mine out carts full of small unifying details. For instance, the RATIONAL TREE, the second part of Dahlberg's book, focuses on chipping around the grandiose tedium of The Old Testament and Greek myth to construct a small theory of Eden's forbidden trees - wisdom and knowledge - by synthesizing the two in Judgment. Focusing his paragraphs on the meaning of bread, the act of sitting, and the power of the muse, Dahlberg crinkles the essay form into a poetic exercise. The real power of the book comes at the end as we follow the trials and experiments of Beliar the Demon. Beliar drags along the underside of knowledge, love, and prophecy. Beliar failures and successes are cosmically comedic. But structurally, Beliar is a cipher that Dahlberg uses to tell us his thoughts on such things as lust, wisdom, and Charles Olsen. The first section of the book is an autobiographical sketch of New York City Marxists and the silly in-fighting and notorious bickering. This might mean more to someone familiar with the specific mileu, but I was somewhat unimpressed by the attempts at dislocation of parlor parties and sex fights into grand Hebrewic myth.

“The garage proletariat will blow up the earth to makes his existence less monotonous.”

"The seer was he who sat. God's cow-herds were sedentary prophets."

"Old customs are the weights and measures of the gods. No one can invent a sane habit or one good deity. Man guesses, and comes to judgement, after a study of saws and gnomes."

"Pascal said, 'It is a rare thing for any one to fear himself enough."

"The Book of Job is the scripture if reason for Uz means to counsel, and Lucifer is the fallen planet of time and the unquiet demon of ennui that afflicts Israel whose only Godly receipt is to Sit."

"Beliar gnawed at knowledge and at space as the worms nourish themselves upon cadavers. For Beliar is sick, idiot matter in motion, and all his learning is for going somewhere else, since the place he is in is affliction."

"The vilest liars are those who sleep like the boar of the caitiff porcupine. The difference between the busy and the idle churls is that they who are hasty void with pain which is as agreeable to them as wounds, quarrels, malice, while the idle who defecate at will, that the basest pleasure in doing so. the idle and the busy lie because it is so carnal."

"I own, I'm tongueless, unsighing beggar, and stumble to put two words together without some tavern, tankard roguery. I require Plato's Dolphin to draw me out of the mean shoals. But I have a poor stomach for the imcombustible syntax-boys, who steal your worst lines, O natal spite of the grammar-Castrato, and make you remembered an Immortal Bore, and then teach you the aspic, empiric, unlyric punctuato, the impecunical, eunnuchal Comma, and the dithyrambic Caesura. Do you know syntax, my Friend? How do you cajole a book? Can you tremble with God of Shakespeare of Constanza?"