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him, and begin to read him.
    Perhaps I was about to do so. But then I found the next two pieces of evidence in my search. First, a letter from Piers Paul Read, who studied with Dahlberg at Columbia in 1967 and whose father, Sir Herbert Read, was one of Dahlberg’s staunch supporters:
    My misgivings about Dahlberg as a teacher were amply fulfilled. He had a bullying manner and a total intolerance of any writing but his own. He had read my first novel . . . which had already been published by this time and rejected it as worthless in front of the class . . . We more or less made up the quarrel . . . he was not, however, a man to be ignored and he continued to bully me—saying, at one time, in front of the class, that I was responsible for my father’s cancer because I had been married in Strasbourg!
    My second discovery was a memoir by William O’Rourke, who, incredibly, had been part of the Kansas City class my aunt attended. O’Rourke paints the scene in Dahlbergian tones: “Women filled his classes. Cameoed dowagers with roughed jowls and red velvet capes, young brittle-lipped girls whose pens took notes nodding like steadfast crochet needles.” Women, it needs to be noted, are the ultimate Dahlbergian sore point. Dahlberg’s greatest subject was his mother, and his great lifelong Waterloo was his own sexual appetite—his seven marriages, various imputations of harassment and physical abuse, and his whole raging ambivalence about sex:
    A man may want to study Mark or Paracelsus, or go on an errand to do a kindness to an aging woman, but this tyrant [the penis] wants to discharge itself either because the etesian gales are acerb or a wench has just stooped over to gather her laundry . . . the head is so obtuse as to go absolutely crazy over a pair of hunkers, which is no more than a chine of beef.
    And, as elsewhere, his admirers eagerly hoist him to the heavens on this petard. Thus, O’Rourke continues:
    The writing class had decomposed to a half dozen. Another male, a speech teacher . . . and an assortment of female poets. Dahlberg sat with his legs crossed with gray exhaustion over his face . . . when a woman volunteered to read a children’s book she had written. He had spoken against the children’s dilution of the Classics before, but consented with alarm for there were no other offerings during the period. She began:
    “Winnie was a puppy who looked like a mop and rode the elevators of downtown Kansas City until everybody knew his name . . .”
    Edward Dahlberg, American Artist, sat with his head shrouded by his hands.
    She continued:
    “He would walk around the Plaza, for he lived with his master in an apartment . . .”
    “Stop,” he said, hardly audible. “Stop. Please.”
    Stop, please!
indeed. What was this compulsion? What did the letter mean to me? In my exaggerated relish and mock horror at uncovering Dahlberg’s heroic monstrosity I was becoming a student of Dahlberg myself, another slave pining for his lash. Worse, in my compulsion to vengeance on my aunt’s behalf, I resembled not a follower but old grudge-nurturing, injury-cherishing Dahlberg himself.
    That the writing workshop, the sort led by an established writer and populated by aspirants, is a site of human longing and despair is undeniable. Fear and loathing, the grosser undercurrents of hostility, fratricidal and patri- or matri-cidal impulses, fox-in-the-henhouse-ish preying on one’s own potential successors, those are more like secret poxes—venereal flare-ups, to use a comparison beloved by Dahlberg. The famous teacher who steals from his students—that’s a story going around. Alternately, one hears of the writer with the former protégé, one extensively favored with opportunities, opened doors, who’s now, after publication, brushed his mentor off—but only after making an unacknowledged appropriation of signature aspects of the elder writer’s live-performance shtick. Typically, in our correct, passive-aggressive era,