Can These Bones Live

by Edward Dahlberg, James Kearns (Illustrator), Herbert Read (Preface)

This book is a work of criticism and exposition. Shakespeare, Dostoevski, Cervantes, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Rilke, Randolph Bourne (of whom we are so regrettably ignorant in England)--these are the prophets to be expounded, related, excoriated (stripped of accretions of platitude and misunderstanding). But behind them are the original prophets, the great Hebrew prophets, and the greatest prophet of them all, the Galilean.

Genres: Criticism, Essays, Nonfiction, American

179 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 1941

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

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” --Ezekiel

How quickly were the voices of Melville, Poe, Dickinson and Whitman entombed. --Dahlberg

Ezekiel and Dahlberg are friends of The BURIED Book Club. These dry bones can live because readers shall prophesy and breathe life into them; we shall lay sinew upon our books, put breath into them, cause flesh to encase their dry bones. And they shall live.

I don’t understand everything Dahlberg says in Can These Bones Live; his argument is dense. He does know our books. He does know what it is to write within an American landscape deaf to words. He wrestles directly with the giants of the word and refuses to reduce them to rabblish terms. I do not know at each turn whether he is praising or condemning.

He is an anarchist: “The penultimate superstition of mankind is the State”; but who in their right mind isn’t? And in the age of State superstition, isn’t Thoreau BURIED? Are not our greatest minds neutralized through misreading? And to simplify and make oneself clear under the regime of such a superstition, isn’t that to kowtow to what is already endorsed by the State? I don’t know at every turn what he is saying. But he is saying it only as clearly and simply as is possible while maintaining an allegiance to the truth of our literature.

I have some suspicion that he gets some things wrong, as one must, but I would be struck silent for the moment to cite a single case, being as his dialectical movement within and among his literary equals requires enormous attention in order to trace exactly where he stands. This is nuance, reading and writing with attention. There is high praise and deep condemnation, but of which and what exactly? The clue to being on the right track of understanding is that your thought, your reading, your understanding, is not simple.

Please read Dahlberg. Can These Bones Live recommends itself for its profundity of prose and for its love of our literature, of our Great Literature. Dahlberg writes from out of his immense reading, his having lived with the greatest books, minds, myths, characters, thoughts.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edward Dahlberg is an unparalleled stylist among twentieth century writers. The chief reason to read his 1941 book of essays on literature, Can These Bones Live, or any Dahlberg book, is to see this style on display. He writes with the muscular certitude of Sir Thomas Browne or Herman Melville, casting off aphorisms as easily a normal writer does commas. Randomly flipping through pages, I come across gems such as these:

"Good and evil are inseparable; beast and man are sewn together with threads of heaven."

"Our artists are American Ishmaels doomed to be cut away from the human vineyard. "Call me Ishmael," prophetically utters Herman Melville in the first line of Moby Dick. We are brute, giant pathfinders, without a remembrance of the past or tradition, discoverers of brand-new nostrums for sex, life, science, art and religion."

"There are planetary reaches and saturnine chasms in man unknown to the hedonist and the naturalistic Preacher of Pity. Spikenard, cypress and the myrrh of Lebanon dilate the nostrils and free the aching pores: sated, the Epicure sheds tears but has no ashy, cindery grief."

"Thoreau's life is a half parable: to be pure he cast out the devils, but entered the swine."

Writers of this kind of lean, unflinching prose are a nearly extinct breed, and a breed that has been dying since the late 19th century. Today, the dominant style is either conversational and informal, or else abstract and scientific. The former involves much hand-wringing, geniality, and the sense of "taking the reader on a journey," while the latter abounds in abstruse jargon and passive constructions. We all could learn a few lessons from Dahlberg.

As to the content, Dahlberg takes on the realm of literature, focusing especially on America. He continually returns to Herman Melville, Sherwood Anderson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Don Quixote, William Shakespeare, and Jesus Christ. He also makes forays into social realism, singling out Randolph Bourne for praise. Dahlberg's positions on these writers are contradictory, overblown, and frequently insidious. For example, his equation of Christ and Quixote in "The Cross and the Windmills" is one of the most spiritually vile anti-Christian polemics dressed in the garments of piety. Dahlberg is also a well-known misanthrope, hating woman for her nature, and man for his enthrallment to woman.

Nonetheless, good literary criticism is made of such villainy. Strong statements made in unrelentingly powerful prose - such is the stuff of which legends are made.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A surprisingly dark and apocalyptic work of criticism. Primarily focused on American authors - Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Norris, Anderson - his reach is still voracious, pulling in Russians and Spaniards and Greeks (and of course Shakespeare - the book begins and nearly ends with Hamlet); much of the criticism is filtered through the lens of Christianity, but the swampy death drenched dogma of that old time religion, Christianity so dark it feels occultic in its prophetic ravings.

The opening couple sections feel more like a clearing of the throat, light warmups leading to the main event; but from the titular section forward (and, for me, peaking spectacularly with "Women") the book picks up increasing momentum, rapid fire dropping quotes and references while frantically suturing it all together into a dizzying critique of literature and, eventually, society (its important to bear in mind the time this was written; in '41 Hitler was still at the height of his power).

Probably worth spending more time re-going through this; but time is sparse and I'll have to come back to it at some future time.

[Graychin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fever dream essays on American literature, frequently quotable but exhausting.

[Dionysius the Areopagite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will provide a thorough o'erchur at a distant point in time. We will see how bad my anus hurts from excessive denimcycling.