Theodore Dreiser has had the good fortune to evoke a peculiar quality
of pugnacious interest among the younger American intelligentsia
such as has been the lot of almost nobody else writing to-day unless
it be Miss Amy Lowell. We do not usually take literature seriously
enough to quarrel over it. Or else we take it so seriously that we
urbanely avoid squabbles. Certainly there are none of the vendettas
that rage in a culture like that of France. But Mr. Dreiser seems to
have made himself, particularly since the suppression of “The Genius,”
a veritable issue. Interesting and surprising are the reactions to
him. Edgar Lee Masters makes him a “soul-enrapt demi-urge, walking
the earth, stalking life”; Harris Merton Lyon saw in him a “seer of
inscrutable mien”; Arthur Davison Ficke sees him as master of a passing
throng of figures, “labored with immortal illusion, the terrible and
beautiful, cruel and wonder-laden illusion of life”; Mr. Powys makes
him an epic philosopher of the “life-tide”; H. L. Mencken puts him
ahead of Conrad, with “an agnosticism that has almost passed beyond
curiosity.” On the other hand, an unhappy critic in _The Nation_ last
year gave Mr. Dreiser his place for all time in a neat antithesis
between the realism that was based on a theory of human conduct and the
naturalism that reduced life to a mere animal behavior. For Dreiser
this last special hell was reserved, and the jungle-like and simian
activities of his characters were rather exhaustively outlined. At the
time this antithesis looked silly. With the appearance of Mr. Dreiser’s
latest book, “A Hoosier Holiday,” it becomes nonsensical. For that wise
and delightful book reveals him as a very human critic of very common
human life, romantically sensual and poetically realistic, with an
artist’s vision and a thick, warm feeling for American life.
This book gives the clue to Mr. Dreiser, to his insatiable curiosity
about people, about their sexual inclinations, about their dreams,
about the homely qualities that make them American. His memories give a
picture of the floundering young American that is so typical as to be
almost epic. No one has ever pictured this lower middle-class American
life so winningly, because no one has had the necessary literary skill
with the lack of self-consciousness. Mr. Dreiser is often sentimental,
but it is a sentimentality that captivates you with its candor. You
are seeing this vacuous, wistful, spiritually rootless, Middle-Western
life through the eyes of a naïve but very wise boy. Mr. Dreiser seems
queer only because he has carried along his youthful attitude in
unbroken continuity. He is fascinated with sex because youth is usually
obsessed with sex. He puzzles about the universe because youth usually
puzzles. He thrills to crudity and violence because sensitive youth
usually recoils from the savagery of the industrial world. Imagine
incorrigible, sensuous youth endowed with the brooding skepticism
of the philosopher who feels the vanity of life, and you have the
paradox of Mr. Dreiser. For these two attitudes in him support rather
than oppose each other. His spiritual evolution was out of a pious,
ascetic atmosphere into intellectual and personal freedom. He seems
to have found himself without losing himself. Of how many American
writers can this be said? And for this much shall be forgiven him,--his
slovenliness of style, his lack of _nuances_, his apathy to the finer
shades of beauty, his weakness for the mystical and the vague. Mr.
Dreiser suggests the over-sensitive temperament that protects itself
by an admiration for crudity and cruelty. His latest book reveals the
boyhood shyness and timidity of this Don Juan of novelists. Mr. Dreiser
is complicated, but he is complicated in a very understandable American
way, the product of the uncouth forces of small-town life and the vast
disorganization of the wider American world. As he reveals himself, it
is a revelation of a certain broad level of the American soul.
Mr. Dreiser seems uncommon only because he is more naïve than most
of us. It is not so much that his pages swarm with sexful figures
as that he rescues sex for the scheme of personal life. He feels a
holy mission to slay the American literary superstition that men and
women are not sensual beings. But he does not brush this fact in the
sniggering way of the popular magazines. He takes it very seriously,
so much so that some of his novels become caricatures of desire. It
is, however, a misfortune that it has been Brieux and Freud and not
native Theodore Dreiser who has saturated the sexual imagination of the
younger American intelligentsia. It would have been far healthier to
absorb Mr. Dreiser’s literary treatment of sex than to go hysterical
over its pathology. Sex has little significance unless it is treated
in personally artistic, novelistic terms. The American tradition had
tabooed the treatment of those infinite gradations and complexities of
love that fill the literary imagination of a sensitive people. When
curiosity became too strong and reticence was repealed in America,
we had no means of articulating ourselves except in a deplorable
pseudo-scientific jargon that has no more to do with the relevance
of sex than the chemical composition of orange paint has to do with
the artist’s vision. Dreiser has done a real service to the American
imagination in despising the underworld and going gravely to the
business of picturing sex as it is lived in the personal relations
of bungling, wistful, or masterful men and women. He seemed strange
and rowdy only because he made sex human, and American tradition had
never made it human. It had only made it either sacred or vulgar, and
when these categories no longer worked, we fell under the dubious and
perverting magic of the psycho-analysts.
In spite of his looseness of literary gait and heaviness of style
Dreiser seems a sincere groper after beauty. It is natural enough
that this should so largely be the beauty of sex. For where would a
sensitive boy, brought up in Indiana and in the big American cities,
get beauty expressed for him except in women? What does Mid-Western
America offer to the starving except its personal beauty? A few
landscapes, an occasional picture in a museum, a book of verse perhaps!
Would not all the rest be one long, flaunting offense of ugliness and
depression? “The ‘Genius,’” instead of being that mass of pornographic
horror which the Vice Societies repute it to be, is the story of a
groping artist whose love of beauty runs obsessingly upon the charm
of girlhood. Through different social planes, through business and
manual labor and the feverish world of artists, he pursues this lure.
Dreiser is refreshing in his air of the moral democrat, who sees life
impassively, neither praising nor blaming, at the same time that he
realizes how much more terrible and beautiful and incalculable life
is than any of us are willing to admit. It may be all _apologia_, but
it comes with the grave air of a mind that wants us to understand just
how it all happened. “Sister Carrie” will always retain the fresh
charm of a spontaneous working-out of mediocre, and yet elemental and
significant, lives. A good novelist catches hold of the thread of human
desire. Dreiser does this, and that is why his admirers forgive him so
many faults.
If you like to speculate about personal and literary qualities that are
specifically American, Dreiser should be as interesting as any one now
writing in America. This becomes clearer as he writes more about his
youth. His hopelessly unorientated, half-educated boyhood is so typical
of the uncritical and careless society in which wistful American talent
has had to grope. He had to be spiritually a self-made man, work out
a philosophy of life, discover his own sincerity. Talent in America
outside of the ruling class flowers very late, because it takes so
long to find its bearings. It has had almost to create its own soil,
before it could put in its roots and grow. It is born shivering into
an inhospitable and irrelevant group. It has to find its own kind of
people and piece together its links of comprehension. It is a gruelling
and tedious task, but those who come through it contribute, like Vachel
Lindsay, creative work that is both novel and indigenous. The process
can be more easily traced in Dreiser than in almost anybody else. “A
Hoosier Holiday” not only traces the personal process, but it gives the
social background. The common life, as seen throughout the countryside,
is touched off quizzically, and yet sympathetically, with an artist’s
vision. Dreiser sees the American masses in their commonness and at
their pleasure as brisk, rather vacuous people, a little pathetic in
their innocence of the possibilities of life and their optimistic
trustfulness. He sees them ruled by great barons of industry, and yet
unconscious of their serfdom. He seems to love this countryside, and he
makes you love it.
Dreiser loves, too, the ugly violent bursts of American industry,--the
flaming steel-mills and gaunt lakesides. “The Titan” and “The
Financier” are unattractive novels, but they are human documents of the
brawn of a passing American era. Those stenographic conversations, webs
of financial intrigue, bare bones of enterprise, insult our artistic
sense. There is too much raw beef, and yet it all has the taste and
smell of the primitive business-jungle it deals with. These crude and
greedy captains of finance with their wars and their amours had to be
given some kind of literary embodiment, and Dreiser has hammered a sort
of raw epic out of their lives.
It is not only his feeling for these themes of crude power and sex and
the American common life that makes Dreiser interesting. His emphases
are those of a new America which is latently expressive and which must
develop its art before we shall really have become articulate. For
Dreiser is a true hyphenate, a product of that conglomerate Americanism
that springs from other roots than the English tradition. Do we realize
how rare it is to find a talent that is thoroughly American and wholly
un-English? Culturally we have somehow suppressed the hyphenate.
Only recently has he forced his way through the unofficial literary
censorship. The vers-librists teem with him, but Dreiser is almost the
first to achieve a largeness of utterance. His outlook, it is true,
flouts the American canons of optimism and redemption, but these
were never anything but conventions. There stirs in Dreiser’s books
a new American quality. It is not at all German. It is an authentic
attempt to make something artistic out of the chaotic materials that
lie around us in American life. Dreiser interests because we can watch
him grope and feel his clumsiness. He has the artist’s vision without
the sureness of the artist’s technique. That is one of the tragedies of
America. But his faults are those of his material and of uncouth bulk,
and not of shoddiness. He expresses an America that is in process of
forming. The interest he evokes is part of the eager interest we feel
in that growth.