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While Waiting

Those Who Perish. by Edward Dahlberg. The John Day Company

The New Republic, November 1934, 53

In Those Who Perish, Edward Dahlberg has written a novel that is forceful and poignant. A writer who approaches the contemporary disorders with a sensitiveness bordering on hyperesthesia, he is especially well equipped to picture the disintegration of individuals that is implicit in the disintegration of our economic structure. Dahlberg is adept at taking grotesque, harried and abysmal characters, and prodding them to become more and more themselves. The persons of his books whom he has selected for particular dislike, he pursues with a corrosive brand of comment which constantly crashes through their own concepts of their lives, like a heckler who breaks a debater’s sequence at every point by shouting out unwieldly questions. Dahlberg’s style is highly mannered, with a distinctiveness that can readily alienate whenever it ceases to attract. It builds an elaborate “superstructure” about his figures, somewhat as Cummings does in The Enormous Room, where he quickly gets from the object to a gigantesque projection—but in Dahlberg’s case this device seldom shows Cummings’ tendency toward pure playfulness; rather, it is pained and even vengeful. Dahlberg has obviously been under great strain in this ailing society, and in his writing he is settling a score.

In fluent and natural dialogue, Dahlberg gives us an important aspect of the grim interregnum that is now upon us, when the collapsing capitalist order can provide neither moral nor material security, and no alternative has been established. We see the grave unsettlement of the Jews in America, as the Nazi movement gains power and threatens to extend its doctrines to this country. We see them, when they would turn to communism as a solution, frightened by the thought that a frank allegiance to Marxism would make them members of two minorities instead of one, and this at our present stage could but multiply their risks. Dahlberg is not a sympathetic man: he tends to excoriation rather than to pity—and even while building up this dilemma he rigorously pursues the business men and Zionists who would tend toward a fascist compromise of their own instead of electing the communistic solution and welcoming a present danger in the interests of ultimate betterment. In this respect it is questionable whether his machinery of propaganda extends so far and includes so much as the needs of strategy may demand.

Stanley Burnshaw, writing on Dahlberg’s book in The New Masses, has noted that the earlier negativistic attitude exemplified in From Flushing to Calvary has here found its positive counterpart: Those Who Perish, he says, does not contain merely the rejection of capitalism, it contains also the positive election of communism. I can only say that, so far as I was concerned, this turn from the negation of capitalism to the affirmation of communism seemed but sketchily embodied. Dahlberg’s heroine, Regina Gordon, dies in a state of complete loneliness. A suicide, she swept out her arms toward “those who have the heart for tomorrow,” whereupon she “smoldered into yesterday.” The affirmation thus remains in the stage of the ideal, the prophetic, a vague and bewildered reaching out of hands toward the future as one sinks into oblivion. She salutes communism as a doctrine, but no character in this book has been pictured in connection with communism as an organization. As an isolated individual, Dahlberg’s heroine has “seen the light,” in much the old religious fashion of conversion. But to my mind the negation has not been imaginatively embodied as an affirmation until the artist gives us a positive picture of group cooperation and adjustment, shows us on the positive side what actual concrete solace and encouragement the Comrades can provide for one another. Meanwhile, we can proclaim Dahlberg as the possessor of a strong stylistic death-ray—and those characters upon whom his partisanship prompts him to train this ray wither before our very eyes.