Dawson, Fielding 1930–

An American short story writer, essayist, and former painter, Dawson has been associated with the Black Mountain Review and Caterpillar.

Fielding Dawson's first collection of short stories [Krazy Kat], covering the past fifteen years, brings us all a dashing, volatile, multi-radial work: a continuous, fluid work in which, however, the best of the stories have the sharp linear focus, the crystalline acuteness, the expressive grace which only mobility, governed by awareness can bring. It is a joy to read these stories all together; the more so, because one's split impulse—to linger ruminatively over each story, and to keep zipping along—corresponds to the movement of the stories themselves: each one an attempt to see and render a life-movement, a vignette, a situation, a thought, with that intent muscular grace which is Fielding Dawson's style. Indeed, when these stories fail, it is because, emotionally, Dawson—too intent and too open to associations—brings conscious will too much to bear on perceiving; thus choking the emotional fluency, producing a strained and haranguing tone.

In this book, however, the best holds the majority: and what it brings us is, in a very certain sense, an art of the unfinished, a running chronicle of the unfinished: "unfinished" in the sense of unpossessable. The completeness of Cheever's fiction, or Updike's, it seems to me, too often makes of the reader an absentee landlord: the "owner" of an art-work which his ego has safely assimilated, without any sacrifice to the work's burden of understanding. The same may be said of many another, and worthier, western artist than Cheever or Updike. But Dawson's writing, with that of a relative few but shining contemporaries (among them, Harry Lewis, Edward Dorn, Hubert Selby) presents an art, the evolution of personal journalism (not that vinyl-surfaced parajournalism we hear so much about) which insists on the reader's participation, his willingness to follow the fusings and branchings of Dawson's map. Every story in this book can be taken as a man's effort to locate and articulate himself, to understand the boundaries, while sacrificing as little as possible of life's mobility. (pp. 34-5)

I have written that Dawson's failures seem to me failures of an over-determined consciousness, constantly seeking the correct name for both object and experience; thus, at times, losing the larger human reverberations, the reality, for the narrower actuality. This problem seems to me, in some of the later stories, compounded by his increased using of psychoanalytic terminology: categorical terms which he must try to impose on the crepuscular flow of his imagery, and the quick grace of encounter which marks his best work. These terms, handed from above, so to speak, repeatedly, at worst, thicken and slow down the movement of the work; and add to one's sense of emotions too strenuously summoned.

The use of this language and this perspective challenges the stresses of experience with the stasis of categories. But still, even in its sometimes unsatisfactory results, this formulation, too, belongs to the peculiarly heroic mode of Fielding Dawson's writings: heroic, in that he elects to write from the peak of his judgment and reflex. Heroic, too, in his perception that writing, as extension of life, comprises a series of decisions recorded as gestures. Taken successively, these gestures make up the action which provides his stories' tone, as well as their content. So any language which he has incorporated into his experience, which serves the active function—instant clarification—of language, is part of the equipment, and to be used accordingly, as appropriate.

So Dawson's writing, good or bad, can be called action writing in the most permeative...