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3.0 out of 5 stars
In Memory of Krazy Kat Author Fielding Dawson, January 17, 2002
This review is from: Krazy Kat and Seventy-Six More, Collected Stories Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Thru Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Six (Hardcover)
Fielding Dawson, American writer and painter (1930-1/5/2002)
Obituary by Wally Dobelis
A prominent book editor stopped me on the street to comment, bitterly, that no one in the big press had seen fit to remark on the passing of Fielding Dawson, a local NYC resident and one of the last survivors of the literary era that is associated with Black Mountain, the Beats, and their contemporaries in other forms of art, Pop, Shaped Canvas, as well as early Rock.
I knew Fielding as one of the stalwarts of Max's Kansas City, the legendary artists' hangout from 1965 to 1974, as a short story writer and baseball fan. He was the pitcher for Max's softball team, and he had a pitch for me too, to support The Shortstop, a literary journal he was trying to resuscitate. Fielding knew small press publishing; he had written and drawn illustrations for such literary journals of the era as Jonathan Williams's Jargon, Sparrow, Kulchur, Caterpillar, El Corno Emplumado, Joglars, Rockbottom, Mulch and The Zealot. The names bring back the flavor of the era. We talked a lot, in the company of the Old Curmudgeon, a prominent lawyer friend. OC fondly remembers traveling with Fielding to the Cedar Bar on University, and to Lion's Head on Christopher Street, two prominent watering places for artists and writers.
In 1930, after the birth of a son in New York, the Dawson family moved to the mother's home town, Kirkwood, Mo, near St. Louis, where dad found a job in journalism, and young Fielding acquired a taste for drawing and writing. In 1949 he joined the legendary Black Mountain College in Lake Eden, NC, to study painting under Franz Kline and writing under Charles Olson.
Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 as a community of students and teachers, to live and work together, by John Andrew Rice of Florida. It gained strength with the arrival of Joseph and Anni Albers, fleeing Germany after the Bauhaus was closed. Poet Charles Olson mentored a group of students later known as the Black Mountain Writers that included Charles Creeley, Robert Duncan, Joel Oppenheimer, Ed Dorn and Fielding Dawson, several of whom came back to teach. Among the 300 people who taught at BMC before the school closed in 1956 were also John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller.
The school experience shaped Dawson's life. After being drafted in the Army in 1953, as a conscientious objector, and experiencing military service in Heidelberg, Germany, where he was a cook, he came to New York. Here Franz Kline was setting the world of art on fire. The old (before the fire) Cedar Bar on University Avenue was home to Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and, occasionally Jackson Pollock, and Dawson wrote about them all. The recognition gained with his memoir of Kline, published in 1967 (the artist died in 1962), freed him of the drudgery of a service manager's job at Bon Marche on 6th Ave, and he could concentrate on writing and design (he created collages and artwork for a number of magazines), and teaching. And he wrote and continued to publish short stories.
Fielding Dawson taught writing to prisoners at Sing-Sing and Attica, near Buffalo, the site of the bloody 1971 uprising. His first creative writing class in 1984 changed his life and gave him a purpose, a commitment to facilitate self-discovery for convicts. Not an easy thing, violent men came to his classes with an attitude, and he had to learn how to criticize, all over again, in an environment of threat.
Recognizing his commitment, Larry McMurtry, then president of the American PEN, appointed Dawson to chair their languishing Prison Writing effort, with volunteers helping. He also had a radio program on WBAI, 1996-2000, reading prison inmates' writings on the air.
Of Dawson's recent books, "No Man's Land," (Dec. 2000) was a fictionalized account of his teaching, and "Land of Milk and Honey" (Fall 2001) was a collection of short stories. A review in the New York Times, described his style as loose, almost bebop. That was the way his generation wrote. Creeley and other reviewers have described it as fast shifts, doubling back and reversing, a way of telling a story that immediately convinces.
Of the historiographers of Black Mountain College, Fielding Dawson was the only one who actually studied there, and his eponymous 1970 book, revised and reissued in 1990, is in print. .
His 22 books were written over a nearly 50 year period, on a range of subject matter. Most are collections of short stories ( his mother bought him a typewriter at 15, remarking " we could use a new Saroyan.") There are also biographies, criticism, poems and novels. The title of the novel Penny Lane gave birth to Two and Three Penny Lane.
Black Sparrow Press, a recognized publishing house of many important poets of the era, took him on in 1969, with "Krazy Kat," a collection of short stories. This press was organized in 1966 by businessman John Martin to print the poems of Charles Bukowski, and took on a life of its own, as the flagship venue for Diane Wakoski, Clayton Eshleman, also Paul Bowles, Ed Sanders, William Everson and Tom Clarke.
Fielding Dawson had lived in this East Midtown- Gramercy neighborhood for 38 years, in the same house, sharing it for the past 25 with his wife, Susan Maldovan, a free-lance editor, and frequently traveling to prisons and universities to lecture on writing and on the literary period of which he was an integral part.
He was a periodic visitor at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO, and lectured at the University of Alabama in Montgomery and Wayne University in Indiana. They were active locally, as members of the Union Square Community Coalition and the Samuel J. Tilden Democratic Club. He died suddenly, on January 5, 20002, after returning home from a stay in the Beth Israel Hospital, where he had been fitted with a pace maker.
The survivors include a sister, Cara Fisher, of Canyon City CO. There will be a memorial service on Sunday, March 3, 3-7 PM, in the Parish Hall of St. Mark's Church In The Bowery.
Distributed with permission from Town & Village weekly newspaper (Hagedorn Communications).
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