"Autobiographical books are plain, honest perjury," [Dahlberg] remarks in Alms for Oblivion. The present is an absolute sphinx and the past an equally grim riddle: "We never learn anything, but simply call old errors by new names." Doomed to repetition, "we only do what we are," and what we are is hopelessly duplicitous. Man's nature is vicious, "politics mutilates the individual," and knowledge is intellectual pride, a deluded comfort, since it does not influence our behavior. Above all, we are the miserable prey of our erotic furies.

Character, Dahlberg insists like a hanging judge, is intransigently fixed; devious, murderous, guilty of eating his own nature, a Cain bearing the stigma of his separation, man seeks atonement in vain. This blunt determinism, gleefully condemning all explanations of motive as corrupt self-interest, is hardly an inducement for composing a memoir. Not surprisingly, Dahlberg calls Because I Was Flesh "an autobiography...