D. paced into the living room about ten minutes into the running of the video, and my heart sank. I hadn’t known he was home. When he joined us I hastily, despairingly sketched the start of the film’s plot to bring him up to speed. D. couldn’t keep still, but between mysterious time-outs behind his bedroom door he gave the film what he could of his slipshod attention. I went back to watching as hard as I could, hell-bent on preserving the sacredness of the moment, feeding my girlfriend just as many interpretations as I thought she’d bear. We both pretended D. wasn’t listening.
D. was smart enough to detect my near-hysterical reverence, and it irritated him. The veneer of civility between us was thin by then. Seizing an advantage, he began picking at the film.
“Come on, Jonathan. It’s a Hollywood Western.”
I wanted to reply that any film became generic if you reduced it to a series of disconnected scenes by flitting in and out of the room. Instead I bit my tongue.
“You’re giving it too much credit.”
What
The Searchers
requires is focus, patience, commitment, I thought. Things you’re now incapable of giving.
“You don’t really think John Ford was conscious—”
A thousand times more conscious than you, I thought. My heart was beating fast.
Then he burst out laughing. We’d come to the first battle scene, where Indians forgo a chance to ambush Wayne and his party from behind, only to be slaughtered in a face-off across a riverbank. For D. the scene was gross and malicious, calculated to make the Comanche look like tactical morons. The film had become contemptible to him, and he let me know. He’d missed the contextualizing moments that make the scene ambiguous—the other characters’ dismay at Wayne’s murderous fury, the bullets Wayne fires at departing braves as they carry off their dead. Nor would he happen to be in the room for the scene half an hour later when Wayne is elaborately censured for shooting an opponent in the back.
I began a defense and immediately contradicted myself, first insisting that the Indians weren’t important as real presences, only as emblems of Wayne’s psychic torment. The film, I tried to suggest, was a psychological epic, a diagnosis of racism through character and archetype. The Indians served as Wayne’s unheeded mirror. Then, unable to leave my research on the shelf, I cited Ford’s renowned accuracy. Maybe he knew a few things about Comanche battle ethics—
D. scoffed. For him it was impossible to honor Indians by showing them mowed down in a senseless slaughter (never mind that senseless slaughter was historical fact). He paced away, leaving me in a kind of hot daze, mouth dry, eyes locked on the screen, still grasping at my dream of a sanctified viewing of
The Searchers
, not seeing that it had already slipped away, that I’d again failed to defend the film, this time with an audience of just two.
D. returned, and now his trembling effort to appear casual had as much to do with the freight between us as with any junkie symptom. Rightly—he knew me well enough to sense what was coming.
“How can you expect to understand
anything
when you’re too fucking distracted to give it more than a passing glance?”
“Relax, Jonathan. I only said I thought the movie wasn’t very good—”
I couldn’t stop. “How do you decide so easily that you’re superior to a work of art? Ever worry that cheap irony won’t carry you through every situation?”
“I’ve got eyes. It’s a fifties Western.”
“That’s what’s so pathetic about people our age—” I silenced myself before I’d widened his crimes to cover our whole generation. Still, the damage was done. D. stalked off. I wouldn’t speak with him for five years from that day. Under the astonished eyes of my girlfriend I’d burst the bubble of silence in the apartment. Anger stemmed for months had risen and found a conduit. In D.’s underestimation of the film’s makers I saw his underestimation of his friends, we who weren’t fooled by his dissembling but indulged him, maintaining guilty silence as though we were fooled. D. had been an ambitious and generous soul when I first met him, and a champion of artistic greatness. In his sniping at
The
Searchers
—at the film itself and at my galactic openness to it—I saw the slow-motion embittering of that soul condensed to one sour-grapes snapshot.
What may have astonished my girlfriend more, and shames me in retrospect, is the Nietzschean chilliness of my actions. As in a priest-and-doctor-in-a-lifeboat puzzle, two things cried for saving and I could save just one. Seeing a friend spiral into desolation I reserved my protective sympathy instead for a work of art, for John Ford and John Wayne, remote, dead, and indifferent though they might be. Again my cards were on the table. Greatness above all.
But that was in retrospect. At the time my concern was for my relationship with
The Searchers
. How ill-fated, how aggrieved, it had become. What was it with this film? Would I ever get to watch it without yelling at someone?
Berkeley
I snuck into the Pacific Film Archive on the heels of a crowd of perhaps fifty students, then sat with them in the theater, waiting—for what I didn’t know. The screening room there is a lot like Bennington’s Tishman, an austere, whisper-absorbing little hall, only built into a large museum in the center of a city instead of standing free in the Vermont woods. It was two years since my argument with D., and I was two years into the first draft of my quasi-Western. A grad-student friend, appraised of my need to refurbish my mind’s eye with a constant stream of imagery, had tipped me off to the existence of an undergraduate course on the Western, mentioning that the professor who taught it had once written about
The Searchers
. So I was there that afternoon to see a screening and hear a lecture, without any clue as to what was on the syllabus.
The lights dimmed. The Warner Bros. logo, a strum of acoustic guitar, the familiar credit sequence—today’s movie was
The Searchers
. Sure, why not? Sitting there anonymous among the murmuring, notebook-rustling students, I stifled a laugh. I’d been watching the movie regularly on video, in private trysts. This would be the first time in the company of others since my early disasters.
Other films can live in the tunnel-vision light of video, but
The
Searchers
aches for the air of a screen large enough so that Wayne can loom like those distant towers of rock, and for the air of an audience. A ragged slice of American
something
, it wants to be met by another slice— to be projected, ideally, on a canyon wall, for a crowd of millions. The Cal freshmen at the Pacific Film Archive that afternoon were just forty or fifty shapeless new minds, there half willingly, dreaming of dates or Frisbees, yet they gave the film the air it needed. Or maybe after five or six watchings I was ready to respond to every frame of
The Searchers
, to meet it completely. Maybe there was something freeing about my place there as an official ghost, voiceless. As the lights came up I wept discreetly.
I stayed for the professor’s talk. In his lecture he gestured at the film’s deep ambiguities without ever reaching, apparently with nothing to prove. He might have seemed a bit perfunctory, enclosed in a bubble of weariness, but if I noticed I blamed the bubble on the students. They were slightly interested, slightly more vague and restless. The vibrant ridicule of the Bennington students had been replaced here by automatic, spaced-out respect—sure it’s an important film: It’s
assigned
, isn’t it? In the professor I grokked a fellow obsessive. But I mistook him for an unfulfilled obsessive, instead of the vanquished one he turned out to be.
The next day I tried not to be self-conscious, waiting in the English Department corridor behind a couple of his students. When my turn came I apologized for sneaking into his class, described the book I was writing, praised his lecture, then fished—he’d written about
The
Searchers
somewhere, yes?
What I caught was an old boot of pride lodged at the bottom of a stagnant lake of academic ennui, that reflexive self-censorship of real enthusiasms. I dragged the boot up to the surface, if only for a second. “My article’s about the iconography of Monument Valley,” he said, with unguarded brightness. “I only published an excerpt. The long version’s much more—I’m still working on it, actually—”
“I’d love to see it.” I scribbled my address.
“Yes, yes . . .” But he was already slipping back into those opaque depths. He’d noticed that he ought to be bewildered to have me in his office, that he didn’t really need a wild-eyed autodidact tugging his obsessions into the light. By then I was familiar with how so many grad students, hunkered down inside their terrifying careers, spoke of
teaching loads
,
job postings
, anything but the original passions at the cramped secret center of their work. Now I saw it was the same for the professor. Or worse. Armies of yawning undergraduates had killed that part of him. Long or short, published or unfinished, I never saw any version of that essay.
Defending The Searchers
I surrounded
The Searchers
, ambushed it at every pass, told it to reach for the sky. In my pursuit I watched hundreds of other Westerns, studying
the tradition
, looking for glimpses. I studied Ford, learned his language, first in good films, then in rotten ones. I watched Scorsese’s
Taxi Driver
, Paul Schrader’s
Hardcore
, those unofficial remakes, wanting to triangulate my obsession or feel the pulse of someone else’s. I read biographies of Wayne: What made him ready to play the part? Did he understand or was he Ford’s tool? I mowed through scholarship, hoping to assemble a framework that would free me to understand all I felt. And I wrote my novel; like a child with dollhouse figures I manipulated my versions of the characters and crises that had overpowered me, trying to decant
The
Searchers
, unmake it, consume it. I watched the film and thought about it and talked about it too much, and when I eventually became a bore,
The Searchers
shot me in the back and walked away.
I diminished the film, I think. By overestimating it, then claiming myself as its defender, I’d invented another, more pretentious way of underestimating it. My wish to control its reception was a wish to control my own guilt and regret, not anything the film needed from me, or from anyone. If the case for
The Searchers
could be made airtight then my dropping out of Bennington was justified. My cruelty to D. excused. My own isolating intensity pined for some tidy story of struggle and triumph. But there might not actually be anything to struggle with, no triumph to claim, nobody to rescue. Wasn’t it possible that John Wayne should have left Natalie Wood in the tepee—that she was happier there? Weren’t he and I a couple of asses?
For years I’d chastised the crowd at Tishman in my fantasies, my words ever-more blistering, my argument ever-more seamless. Now I concocted a balm for the burning ears of my imaginary schoolmates:
I
can forgive your resistance to this film.
The Searchers
is a thing I seem
doomed to spend a lifetime trying to fathom, and how often do you have a
lifetime to spend?
Then I’d add,
Can you forgive me my absurd responsiveness?
Oh, I’ve perfected my defense of the film. It’s hinged on the notion that in certain Hollywood films a major star can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms, a “problematic site,” and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter. James Stewart in
Vertigo
, say, or Humphrey Bogart in
In a Lonely Place
. Refuse the notion and
The Searchers
becomes unwatchable, an explosion in the void. Grant it and the rest falls into place. The weird stuff, the racist stuff, the hysterical stuff: it all serves to split Wayne from fellow characters and from the viewer’s sympathies, to foreground his lonely rage. It’s very, ah,
Brechtian
. If you liked, I could chart how even the most distractingly unfunny pratfall contributes to my thesis. Imagine a DVD with my commentary, my filibuster of articulations, covering every frame.
Snore. Who’d listen? Detractors of
The Searchers
are casual snipers, not dedicated enemies—like D., or the audience at Tishman, they take a potshot and wander off, interest evaporated. Those who care like I do cherish their own interpretations, and don’t need mine. I know this because as a minor consolation I’ve collected these people. The rock critic who screens a 16 mm print of
The Searchers
in his living room. The biographer who scoured Monument Valley to find the charred remains of the burned cabin, chunks of which he hoards at his home in L.A. Others . . . among fellow cultists the title’s enough, passed like a talisman.
A new friend remarks he’s surprised to learn I rate
The Searchers
as an influence.
“Have you seen it?” I ask, falsely casual.
“Long time ago. I just remember how racist it was.”
“
The Searchers
is racist the way
Huckleberry Finn
is racist,” I say, of course. But it’s cant, and stale in my mouth. He’ll watch again and understand, or not.
The Searchers
is my private club, and if you don’t join you’ll never know you’ve been rejected. I’m like the Cal professor—caring has worn me out.
The Searchers
is too gristly to be digested in my novel, too willful to be bounded in my theories. I watch or don’t, doesn’t matter:
The Searchers
strides on, maddened, through broken landscapes incapable of containing it—Ford’s oeuvre, and Wayne’s, the “Studio-Era Film,” and my own defeated imagination—everywhere shrugging off categories, refusing the petitions of embarrassment and taste, defying explanation or defense as only great art or great abomination ever could.
The Disappointment Artist
Mrs. Neverbody vs. Edward Dahlberg
My aunt Billie—Wilma Yeo (1918–1994) to her readers, to the world, to you—was among the first human beings I remember. Her Kansas City apartment is the site of one of my earliest, murkiest memories: seated on a carpet, I wept at seeing, on television, a depiction of a forest fire, one that routed a herd of panicked baby animals. Aunt Billie’s twin daughters, then young teenagers, laughed at me for weeping. In the memory, which plays like a length of corroded celluloid—grainy, broken at both ends, but reliably identical each time—Aunt Billie sweeps in, rescues and consoles me, lightly chastises her daughters.
I lived with my parents in Kansas City, on the campus of the Kansas City Art Institute, from 1965, when I was two, until 1968, when my parents returned to New York City, and each of three or four of my earliest memories takes place there. Another involves television: taking shelter during a tornado warning, with my parents and a couple of their friends, in the basement of our stone house. George Burk, another painter on the faculty then at KCAI and my father’s best friend, brought for entertainment a six-pack of beer and a portable black-and-white, on which we watched
The Monkees
while the storm harmlessly passed. Yet another Kansas City memory is of seeing my first film in a theater:
Yellow
Submarine
. Counterfeit Beatles, animated Beatles, forest fires seen but unreal, tornados real but unseen—may one plead, Your Honor, post-modernism as an involuntary condition?
That’s Kansas City’s whole place in my life: a small, strange place. Aunt Billie’s place in my life is larger. She was my first writer. And, though my father was a painter and I was trained for a career in his footsteps, as a visual artist, I somehow knew from the first to sit at the feet of any writer I encountered. Aunt Billie was primarily an author of children’s books, but her résumé boasted articles in
The Reader’s Digest
and
The
Saturday Evening Post
, and a biography of Thomas Hart Benton,
Maverick
with a Paintbrush
, which, though written simply enough for young readers, is solidly researched and a contribution to Benton studies. Her
Mrs. Neverbody’s Recipes
(J. B. Lippincott, 1968; the title page notes: “The following poems were first published in
Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine
”) was the first autographed book in my collection, which before I was even out of my teenage years had grown to include inscriptions from Allen Ginsberg, Robert Heinlein, Norton Juster, and Anthony Burgess. I was a nerdish and sycophantic kid, let me be the first to say. I revered writers, and still do. I loved my aunt Billie.
So did my father, who’s still around. Sibling bonds were strong among my father and his two sisters and three brothers. They grew up together in Depression-era towns in Missouri and Iowa. But Aunt Billie (the second oldest) and my father (the runt) enjoyed a particular lifelong kinship as the two “creative” types. Their closeness defied and outlasted my father’s repeatedly throwing over the Midwest for, in turn, Columbia University, the army, Paris (on a painter’s Fulbright), and New York again.
On the telephone my father still shouts, gives only rudimentary news, and suspects all he hears, feeling, perhaps rightly, that long-distance calls are a sham apparatus. He and Aunt Billie maintained their intimacy by writing letters. One day not long ago my father asked if I’d ever heard of Edward Dahlberg. I had some familiarity with that name, but I couldn’t imagine why he wanted to know.
“Have a look at this,” he said, and handed me the letter.
Dearest Brother—first of all I should say that I write this in an ego-centered search for an identity that I lost in a class at UMKC taught by Edward Dahlberg, a writer in residence for this semester. To describe him is impossible—I’ve read most of his autobiography now BECAUSE I WAS FLESH, and have a little more comprehension of this individual who emerged from a poverty stricken childhood in Kansas City where his whore-mother was a Star Lady Barber and he had no father—his book is the story of Lizzie Dahlberg—his mother—whom he loved with revulsion. This man, an intellectual Alexander King—in both looks and attitude—bitter, bitter sweet (and I don’t use the term intellectual in the bannal method of today) has verbally crucified every member of the class who dared open his mouth—and to read a work of ones own! Sheer folly. He is a man of letters and so well acquainted with Dreiser, Swift, Mather, Taylor, Stendhal, DeBalzac, Unamuno, Dryden, Gissing, Ruskin, Morris, Ford, Coleridge, Anderson, Baudouin, Flaubert, Keats, Gill, Read, Chestov, Thoreau, Rozanov, Merjkowski, Tolstoi Swinburne, Hulme, Williams, Heywood, Jastrow, (all of the bible) though he disclaims religion Weaver, Meyers, Garland, Berkman, Goldman, Delacroix, Dostovsky etc but not many more—that he is astonishingly like a walking library—He calls James and Brecht scribblers—says nothing worth reading has been written ’en contemporary . . . no doubt it would seem to be a mistake to sit two hours twice a week in the mezermizing world he weaves for I can no longer write a word— should my life depend on it.
That’s the whole text of the first, unparagraphed page. There are six more. The letter—it is still in my possession—is on onionskin, letters carved in ink by a manual’s keys. Rich with delirious typos and misspellings (Dostovsky and Chestov!), and hasty cursive annotations, as well as a torrent of weirdly antique name-drops (Alexander King, Jastrow), but above all eloquently desperate, the letter radiates human intellectual panic like pheromones. Each time I read it I feel the thrill of unsealing a time capsule, and of awakening my aunt from her deservedly peaceful slumber.
The year of the letter is 1965, identifiable by Aunt Billie’s stated age and some family chatter on the last few pages. Wilma Yeo was forty-eight, still three years from placing
Mrs. Neverbody’s Recipes
, her first book, with Lippincott, when she had her bracing encounter with Dahlberg.
Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977) was born, illegitimately, in Boston and raised in Kansas City (Dahlberg: “Let me admit it, I hate Kansas City”). His tormented coming-of-age, split between a Jewish orphanage and the home of his mother, the barber and adventuress described by Wilma Yeo, is the center of both his first novel,
Bottom Dogs
(1934), famously introduced by D. H. Lawrence (Dahlberg: “I wasn’t influenced by Lawrence at all! That’s a small, wanton, niggardly conjecture!”), and his late memoir,
Because I Was Flesh
(1964). Where Dahlberg is remembered,
Because
I Was Flesh
is accounted his masterpiece. His career was split. There were three novels in the thirties, full of ancient slang and proto–Hubert Selby grubbiness, good enough to make him a signal figure in the largely forgotten—and, by Dahlberg, regretted—proletarian movement; then, some years of wandering, followed by reinvention as a crypto-classical mandarin stylist, no longer committed to fiction but to literary-historical essays, memoirs, mythological poetry, and fulmination. In this late phase, Dahlberg enjoyed (a uniquely inappropriate word) a reputation as an underground hero of American writing—an unwilling father to Beats (“I have no feeling about these boys. But they are doing what was done thirty years ago and they imagine they are avant-garde. You can be scatological in any century; it is not news. Or a dung-eater anytime; it is an old habit”), and a figure legendary for his auto-exile, his excoriating intolerance of other writers. Dahlberg routinely broadcast, on every channel open to him, a galactic disappointment with his own career and with the bad flavor living had left in his mouth. He died in 1977, his last jottings satires of the television commercials which had come to fascinate him.
I’d known the name, faintly. Working in used bookshops, I’d fondled a few Dahlberg tomes before slashing their prices or consigning them to bins of the never-to-be-sold. I associated him with the agony of the rebuffed career, the refused book. In used bookselling one becomes a dowser of the underground river of refused books, and the dowsing rod twitches like the second hand of a clock. Expertise is knowing which few, of the thousands flung to posterity by their flap copy, anyone would ever actually pay to read. So, Dahlberg: a guilty association, another titan I’d dissed by thinking him a drag on the retail flow.
Aunt Billie’s letter concentrated my attention. Dahlberg’s, it seemed, was a shrill, vibrant voice clinging to the edge of the collective literary consciousness—just. As I asked around, seeking to see how his name played among my best-read friends, the answer was always the one I’d have given myself: Dahlberg, oh yeah, always meant to find out what he was about. I located a biography,
The Wages of Expectation
, by Charles DeFanti, and
Edward Dahlberg: A Tribute
, a Festschrift assembled by Jonathan Williams; the most recent item was “Broaching Difficult Dahlberg,” by Lydia Davis, an essay, published in
Conjunctions
, which circles Dahlberg without actually plunging in. There, Davis interrogates older writers still bearing grudges against Dahlberg, confirming the testimony of the biography and of many of Dahlberg’s own ostensible supporters: this was a more than moderately difficult man. And Dahlberg’s tendency to be recalled but unread made him a bizarre discovery, a writer whose reputation was either blinking out of existence at the exact moment I’d located it, or, weirder, a writer whose reputation was somehow
frozen in the act of blinking out of existence
.
The more I looked, the more it seemed Dahlberg’s compulsion for taking out his monstrous disappointment on any human within striking distance was the only reputation left, dragging the books distantly behind it. Dahlberg’s biographer, Charles DeFanti, in
The Wages of Expectation
details how Dahlberg denounced as unworthy, at various times, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Dreiser (“If I had reread his books, I would have had to assail him”), Robert Graves, Edmund Wilson, and dozens of others, all attempted friends or sponsors of Dahlberg’s career. Here’s Paul Carroll, in his Introduction to
The Edward Dahlberg Reader
, witnessing a Dahlberg performance at a cocktail party given in his honor: “What he said about Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, Wilson, Pound . . . was univocal, brilliant, sour, erudite, and unanswerable. Only the cadence of his sentences . . . seemed to keep Dahlberg’s words from becoming a scream.” The list can seem endless, but to eliminate any uncertainty, Dahlberg sweepingly denounced not only the whole twentieth century’s shelf, but the nineteenth century’s as well, locating the corruption of American literature well before Melville. As for his personal relations, he made himself famous for his cold shoulder, arranging elaborate fallingsout so persistently that William O’Rourke, a student and disciple, eulogized him this way: “Edward Dahlberg wrote 18 books and one masterpiece that will endure; at the end of his long life he had less than six people he would have called friend.” Perhaps my aunt Billie had had the privilege of having her head bitten off not by some average writing-class ogre but by the greatest head biter of all time, the Ozzy Osbourne of writing-teaching.
When you listen to him talk—where do I, a woman of forty eight, with so little time (comparatively speaking) (and he answers— “there is not such thing as time”—Life is an error and death the only truth etc.)—Fit in this picture? His theory that only children are knowing—and that we innundate our minds with every passing minute and thus die with each experience—never able to change our life’s destiny one drop—never again able to attain what we lost through living—is near a parallel that I have long ago reached—and the reason that I want to write for children and believe that it is the hardest writing to do.
She then adds,
But when I try to discuss writing for children, he says there is no such thing—write what you have to say and pray to God that children will read it . . . Now this is fine—I go along—but how can I go when I have suddenly lost my way to anyplace at all? I write
you
this because, knowing how many classes you have sat through— where, undoubtedly this same kind of person, taught—I wonder if you can help me. I guess what I want you to say is Don’t Listen To Him, but it’s too late for that because I already have. How far should one go in deciding what one’s personal limitations are, and settling for less than perfection. If I read all of these things (I don’t literally mean every book, but read, say for a year or two) and quit writing (as I seem to have anyway) do you think I would be happier (ugh what a weak word—of course the only happiness is satisfaction or joy in work in progress—and the ability to move on to the next job without looking back with too many weakening day-dreams.) But just when I thought I was going along so great—I’ve stubbed my mental toe! On a rock! You know that for several years I’ve been reading deeper things—I can finally read poetry—a little—after years of trying to . . . I can recognize good passages—I’ve learned the effectiveness of small words—found the art in brevity—doubted the adjective—learned to discriminate in the varying shades of words . . . increased my sad little vocabulary some . . . but can one really know what is good unless one has long looked upon perfection until anything less seems shoddy and factory made.
To attempt to read Dahlberg, as I began to do, is to find oneself reading about him instead. For a writer whose persistent epiphany was isolation (“All intelligent Americans are extremely alone”), and whose obsession it was to decry the charlatanism of comradeship among writers (“I am not looking for disciples. Jesus did not even know what to do with the apostles, and they had such dull auditory nerves that they could not hear what came from his soul”), Dahlberg is nevertheless one of the
most introduced
writers of all time. The parade of ushers begins, of course, with
Bottom
Dogs
. It turns out that D. H. Lawrence’s essay was commissioned; Davis judges it “unwilling,” DeFanti “squeamish if not somewhat petulant.” Reasonable enough: Lawrence’s envoi to Dahlberg’s career concludes, “I don’t want to read any more books like this.”