dreary, Dreiser stands up--a phenomenon unescapably visible, but
disconcertingly hard to explain. What forces combined to produce him in
the first place, and how has he managed to hold out so long against the
prevailing blasts--of disheartening misunderstanding and
misrepresentation, of Puritan suspicion and opposition, of artistic
isolation, of commercial seduction? There is something downright heroic
in the way the man has held his narrow and perilous ground, disdaining
all compromise, unmoved by the cheap success that lies so inviting
around the corner. He has faced, in his day, almost every form of attack
that a serious artist can conceivably encounter, and yet all of them
together have scarcely budged him an inch. He still plods along in the
laborious, cheerless way he first marked out for himself; he is quite as
undaunted by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant abuse; his later
novels are, if anything, more unyieldingly dreiserian than his
earliest. As one who has long sought to entice him in this direction or
that, fatuously presuming to instruct him in what would improve him and
profit him, I may well bear a reluctant and resigned sort of testimony
to his gigantic steadfastness. It is almost as if any change in his
manner, any concession to what is usual and esteemed, any amelioration
of his blind, relentless exercises of _force majeure_, were a physical
impossibility. One feels him at last to be authentically no more than a
helpless instrument (or victim) of that inchoate flow of forces which he
himself is so fond of depicting as at once the answer to the riddle of
life, and a riddle ten times more vexing and accursed.
And his origins, as I say, are quite as mysterious as his motive power.
To fit him into the unrolling chart of American, or even of English
fiction is extremely difficult. Save one thinks of H. B. Fuller (whose
"With the Procession" and "The Cliff-Dwellers" are still remembered by
Huneker, but by whom else?[16]), he seems to have had no fore-runner
among us, and for all the discussion of him that goes on, he has few
avowed disciples, and none of them gets within miles of him. One catches
echoes of him, perhaps, in Willa Sibert Cather, in Mary S. Watts, in
David Graham Phillips, in Sherwood Anderson and in Joseph Medill
Patterson, but, after all, they are no more than echoes. In Robert
Herrick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in imitators further
removed to sheer burlesque. All the latter-day American novelists of
consideration are vastly more facile than Dreiser in their philosophy,
as they are in their style. In the fact, perhaps, lies the measure of
their difference. What they lack, great and small, is the gesture of
pity, the note of awe, the profound sense of wonder--in a phrase, that
"soberness of mind" which William Lyon Phelps sees as the hallmark of
Conrad and Hardy, and which even the most stupid cannot escape in
Dreiser. The normal American novel, even in its most serious forms,
takes colour from the national cocksureness and superficiality. It runs
monotonously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness and
hopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable to terms of the not
worth knowing. What it cannot explain away with ready formulae, as in
the later Winston Churchill, it snickers over as scarcely worth
explaining at all, as in the later Howells. Such a brave and tragic
book as "Ethan Frome" is so rare as to be almost singular, even with
Mrs. Wharton. There is, I daresay, not much market for that sort of
thing. In the arts, as in the concerns of everyday, the American seeks
escape from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved. A comfortable
phrase is what he craves beyond all things--and comfortable phrases are
surely not to be sought in Dreiser's stock.
I have heard argument that he is a follower of Frank Norris, and two or
three facts lend it a specious probability. "McTeague" was printed in
1899; "Sister Carrie" a year later. Moreover, Norris was the first to
see the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant fight, as
literary advisor to Doubleday, Page & Co., against its suppression after
it was in type. But this theory runs aground upon two circumstances, the
first being that Dreiser did not actually read "McTeague," nor, indeed,
grow aware of Norris, until after "Sister Carrie" was completed, and the
other being that his development, once he began to write other books,
was along paths far distant from those pursued by Norris himself.
Dreiser, in truth, was a bigger man than Norris from the start; it is to
the latter's unending honour that he recognized the fact instanter, and
yet did all he could to help his rival. It is imaginable, of course,
that Norris, living fifteen years longer, might have overtaken Dreiser,
and even surpassed him; one finds an arrow pointing that way in
"Vandover and the Brute" (not printed until 1914). But it swings sharply
around in "The Epic of the Wheat." In the second volume of that
incomplete trilogy, "The Pit," there is an obvious concession to the
popular taste in romance; the thing is so frankly written down, indeed,
that a play has been made of it, and Broadway has applauded it. And in
"The Octopus," despite some excellent writing, there is a descent to a
mysticism so fantastic and preposterous that it quickly passes beyond
serious consideration. Norris, in his day, swung even lower--for
example, in "A Man's Woman" and in some of his short stories. He was a
pioneer, perhaps only half sure of the way he wanted to go, and the evil
lures of popular success lay all about him. It is no wonder that he
sometimes seemed to lose his direction.
Émile Zola is another literary father whose paternity grows dubious on
examination. I once printed an article exposing what seemed to me to be
a Zolaesque attitude of mind, and even some trace of the actual Zola
manner, in "Jennie Gerhardt"; there came from Dreiser the news that he
had never read a line of Zola, and knew nothing about his novels. Not a
complete answer, of course; the influence might have been exerted at
second hand. But through whom? I confess that I am unable to name a
likely medium. The effects of Zola upon Anglo-Saxon fiction have been
almost _nil_; his only avowed disciple, George Moore, has long since
recanted and reformed; he has scarcely rippled the prevailing
romanticism.... Thomas Hardy? Here, I daresay, we strike a better scent.
There are many obvious likenesses between "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"
and "Jennie Gerhardt" and again between "Jude the Obscure" and "Sister
Carrie." All four stories deal penetratingly and poignantly with the
essential tragedy of women; all disdain the petty, specious explanations
of popular fiction; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy beauty.
Moreover, Dreiser himself confesses to an enchanted discovery of Hardy
in 1896, three years before "Sister Carrie" was begun. But it is easy to
push such a fact too hard, and to search for likenesses and parallels
that are really not there. The truth is that Dreiser's points of contact
with Hardy might be easily matched by many striking points of
difference, and that the fundamental ideas in their novels, despite a
common sympathy, are anything but identical. Nor does one apprehend any
ponderable result of Dreiser's youthful enthusiasm for Balzac, which
antedated his discovery of Hardy by two years. He got from both men a
sense of the scope and dignity of the novel; they taught him that a
story might be a good one, and yet considerably more than a story; they
showed him the essential drama of the commonplace. But that they had
more influence in forming his point of view, or even in shaping his
technique, than any one of half a dozen other gods of those young
days--this I scarcely find. In the structure of his novels, and in their
manner of approach to life no less, they call up the work of Dostoyevsky
and Turgenev far more than the work of either of these men--but of all
the Russians save Tolstoi (as of Flaubert) Dreiser himself tells us that
he was ignorant until ten years after "Sister Carrie." In his days of
preparation, indeed, his reading was so copious and so disorderly that
antagonistic influences must have well-nigh neutralized one another, and
so left the curious youngster to work out his own method and his own
philosophy. Stevenson went down with Balzac, Poe with Hardy, Dumas
_fils_ with Tolstoi. There were even months of delight in Sienkiewicz,
Lew Wallace and E. P. Roe! The whole repertory of the pedagogues had
been fought through in school and college: Dickens, Thackeray,
Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Kingsley, Scott. Only Irving and
Hawthorne seem to have made deep impressions. "I used to lie under a
tree," says Dreiser, "and read 'Twice Told Tales' by the hour. I thought
'The Alhambra' was a perfect creation, and I still have a lingering
affection for it." Add Bret Harte, George Ebers, William Dean Howells,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, and you have a literary stew indeed!... But for
all its bubbling I see a far more potent influence in the chance
discovery of Spencer and Huxley at twenty-three--the year of choosing!
Who, indeed, will ever measure the effect of those two giants upon the
young men of that era--Spencer with his inordinate meticulousness, his
relentless pursuit of facts, his overpowering syllogisms, and Huxley
with his devastating agnosticism, his insatiable questionings of the old
axioms, above all, his brilliant style? Huxley, it would appear, has
been condemned to the scientific hulks, along with bores innumerable and
unspeakable; one looks in vain for any appreciation of him in treatises
on beautiful letters.[17] And yet the man was a superb artist in works,
a master-writer even more than a master-biologist, one of the few truly
great stylists that England has produced since the time of Anne. One can
easily imagine the effect of two such vigorous and intriguing minds upon
a youth groping about for self-understanding and self-expression. They
swept him clean, he tells us, of the lingering faith of his boyhood--a
mediaeval, Rhenish Catholicism;--more, they filled him with a new and
eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life that lay about him, a
desire to seek out its hidden workings and underlying causes. A young
man set afire by Huxley might perhaps make a very bad novelist, but it
is a certainty that he could never make a sentimental and superficial
one. There is no need to go further than this single moving adventure to
find the genesis of Dreiser's disdain of the current platitudes, his
sense of life as a complex biological phenomenon, only dimly
comprehended, and his tenacious way of thinking things out, and of
holding to what he finds good. Ah, that he had learned from Huxley, not
only how to inquire, but also how to report! That he had picked up a
talent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so damnably
persuasive, so crystal-clear!
But the more one examines Dreiser, either as writer or as theorist of
man, the more his essential isolation becomes apparent. He got a habit
of mind from Huxley, but he completely missed Huxley's habit of writing.
He got a view of woman from Hardy, but he soon changed it out of all
resemblance. He got a certain fine ambition and gusto out of Balzac, but
all that was French and characteristic he left behind. So with Zola,
Howells, Tolstoi and the rest. The tracing of likenesses quickly becomes
rabbinism, almost cabalism. The differences are huge and sprout up in
all directions. Nor do I see anything save a flaming up of colonial
passion in the current efforts to fit him into a German frame, and make
him an agent of Prussian frightfulness in letters. Such childish gabble
one looks for in the New York _Times_, and there is where one actually
finds it. Even the literary monthlies have stood clear of it; it is
important only as material for that treatise upon the patrioteer and his
bawling which remains to be written. The name of the man, true enough,
is obviously Germanic, and he has told us himself, in "A Traveler at
Forty," how he sought out and found the tombs of his ancestors in some
little town of the Rhine country. There are more of these genealogical
revelations in "A Hoosier Holiday," but they show a Rhenish strain that
was already running thin in boyhood. No one, indeed, who reads a
Dreiser novel can fail to see the gap separating the author from these
half-forgotten forbears. He shows even less of German influence than of
English influence.
There is, as a matter of fact, little in modern German fiction that is
intelligibly comparable to "Jennie Gerhardt" and "The Titan," either as
a study of man or as a work of art. The naturalistic movement of the
eighties was launched by men whose eyes were upon the theatre, and it is
in that field that nine-tenths of its force has been spent. "German
naturalism," says George Madison Priest, quoting Gotthold Klee's
"Grunzüge der deutschen Literaturgeschichte" "created a new type only in
the drama."[18] True enough, it has also produced occasional novels, and
some of them are respectable. Gustav Frenssen's "Jörn Uhl" is a
specimen: it has been done into English. Another is Clara Viebig's "Das
tägliche Brot," which Ludwig Lewisohn compares to George Moore's "Esther
Waters." Yet another is Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks." But it would be
absurd to cite these works as evidences of a national quality, and
doubly absurd to think of them as inspiring such books as "Jennie
Gerhardt" and "The Titan," which excel them in everything save
workmanship. The case of Mann reveals a tendency that is visible in
nearly all of his contemporaries. Starting out as an agnostic realist
not unlike the Arnold Bennett of "The Old Wives' Tale," he has gradually
taken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his later
books, "Königliche Hoheit" (in English, "Royal Highness") he ends upon a
note of sentimentalism borrowed from Wagner's "Ring." Fräulein Viebig
has also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. Her "Die Wacht
am Rhein," for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than an
eloquent hymn to patriotism--a theme which almost always baffles
novelists. As for Frenssen, he is a parson by trade, and carries over
into the novel a good deal of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. All of
these German naturalists--and they are the only German novelists worth
considering--share the weakness of Zola, their _Stammvater_. They, too,
fall into the morass that engulfed "Fécondité," and make sentimental
propaganda.
I go into this matter in detail, not because it is intrinsically of any
moment, but because the effort to depict Dreiser as a secret agent of
the Wilhelmstrasse, told off to inject subtle doses of _Kultur_ into a
naïve and pious people, has taken on the proportions of an organized
movement. The same critical imbecility which detects naught save a Tom
cat in Frank Cowperwood can find naught save an abhorrent foreigner in
Cowperwood's creator. The truth is that the trembling patriots of
letters, male and female, are simply at their old game of seeing a man
under the bed. Dreiser, in fact, is densely ignorant of German
literature, as he is of the better part of French literature, and of
much of English literature. He did not even read Hauptmann until after
"Jennie Gerhardt" had been written, and such typical German moderns as
Ludwig Thoma, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Richard Dehmel remain as strange
to him as Heliogabalus.
§ 2
In his manner, as opposed to his matter, he is more the Teuton, for he
shows all of the racial patience and pertinacity and all of the racial
lack of humour. Writing a novel is as solemn a business to him as
trimming a beard is to a German barber. He blasts his way through his
interminable stories by something not unlike main strength; his writing,
one feels, often takes on the character of an actual siege operation,
with tunnellings, drum fire, assaults in close order and hand-to-hand
fighting. Once, seeking an analogy, I called him the Hindenburg of the
novel. If it holds, then "The 'Genius'" is his Poland. The field of
action bears the aspect, at the end, of a hostile province meticulously
brought under the yoke, with every road and lane explored to its
beginning, and every crossroads village laboriously taken, inventoried
and policed. Here is the very negation of Gallic lightness and
intuition, and of all other forms of impressionism as well. Here is no
series of illuminating flashes, but a gradual bathing of the whole scene
with white light, so that every detail stands out.
And many of those details, of course, are trivial; even irritating. They
do not help the picture; they muddle and obscure it; one wonders
impatiently what their meaning is, and what the purpose may be of
revealing them with such a precise, portentous air.... Turn to page 703
of "The 'Genius.'" By the time one gets there, one has hewn and hacked
one's way through 702 large pages of fine print--97 long chapters, more
than 250,000 words. And yet, at this hurried and impatient point, with
the _coda_ already begun, Dreiser halts the whole narrative to explain
the origin, nature and inner meaning of Christian Science, and to make
us privy to a lot of chatty stuff about Mrs. Althea Jones, a
professional healer, and to supply us with detailed plans and
specifications of the apartment house in which she lives, works her
tawdry miracles, and has her being. Here, in sober summary, are the
particulars:
1. That the house is "of conventional design."
2. That there is "a spacious areaway" between its two wings.
3. That these wings are "of cream-coloured pressed brick."
4. That the entrance between them is "protected by a handsome
wrought-iron door."
5. That to either side of this door is "an electric lamp support of
handsome design."
6. That in each of these lamp supports there are "lovely
cream-coloured globes, shedding a soft lustre."
7. That inside is "the usual lobby."
8. That in the lobby is "the usual elevator."
9. That in the elevator is the usual "uniformed negro elevator
man."
10. That this negro elevator man (name not given) is "indifferent
and impertinent."
11. That a telephone switchboard is also in the lobby.
12. That the building is seven stories in height.
In "The Financier" there is the same exasperating rolling up of
irrelevant facts. The court proceedings in the trial of Cowperwood are
given with all the exactness of a parliamentary report in the London
_Times_. The speeches of the opposing counsel are set down nearly in
full, and with them the remarks of the judge, and after that the opinion
of the Appellate Court on appeal, with the dissenting opinions as a sort
of appendix. In "Sister Carrie" the thing is less savagely carried out,
but that is not Dreiser's fault, for the manuscript was revised by some
anonymous hand, and the printed version is but little more than half the
length of the original. In "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt" no such
brake upon exuberance is visible; both books are crammed with details
that serve no purpose, and are as flat as ditch-water. Even in the two
volumes of personal record, "A Traveler at Forty" and "A Hoosier
Holiday," there is the same furious accumulation of trivialities.
Consider the former. It is without structure, without selection, without
reticence. One arises from it as from a great babbling, half drunken. On
the one hand the author fills a long and gloomy chapter with the story
of the Borgias, apparently under the impression that it is news, and on
the other hand he enters into intimate and inconsequential confidences
about all the persons he meets en route, sparing neither the innocent
nor the obscure. The children of his English host at Bridgely Level
strike him as fantastic little creatures, even as a bit uncanny--and he
duly sets it down. He meets an Englishman on a French train who pleases
him much, and the two become good friends and see Rome together, but the
fellow's wife is "obstreperous" and "haughty in her manner" and so
"loud-spoken in her opinions" that she is "really offensive"--and down
it goes. He makes an impression on a Mlle. Marcelle in Paris, and she
accompanies him from Monte Carlo to Ventimiglia, and there gives him a
parting kiss and whispers, "_Avril-Fontainebleau_"--and lo, this sweet
one is duly spread upon the minutes. He permits himself to be arrested
by a fair privateer in Piccadilly, and goes with her to one of the dens
of sin that suffragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines her
at length regarding her ancestry, her professional ethics and ideals,
and her earnings at her dismal craft--and into the book goes a full
report of the proceedings. He is entertained by an eminent Dutch jurist
in Amsterdam--and upon the pages of the chronicle it appears that the
gentleman is "waxy" and "a little pedantic," and that he is probably the
sort of "thin, delicate, well barbered" professor that Ibsen had in mind
when he cast about for a husband for the daughter of General Gabler.
Such is the art of writing as Dreiser understands it and practises
it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down
of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it
all. One is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by
his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers. A Dreiser novel,
at least of the later canon, cannot be read as other novels are read--on
a winter evening or summer afternoon, between meal and meal, travelling
from New York to Boston. It demands the attention for almost a week, and
uses up the faculties for a month. If, reading "The 'Genius,'" one were
to become engrossed in the fabulous manner described in the publishers'
advertisements, and so find oneself unable to put it down and go to bed
before the end, one would get no sleep for three days and three nights.
Worse, there are no charms of style to mitigate the rigours of these
vast steppes and pampas of narration. Joseph Joubert's saying that
"words should stand out well from the paper" is quite incomprehensible
to Dreiser; he never imitates Flaubert by writing for "_la respiration
et l'oreille_." There is no painful groping for the inevitable word, or
for what Walter Pater called "the gipsy phrase"; the common, even the
commonplace, coin of speech is good enough. On the first page of "Jennie
Gerhardt" one encounters "frank, open countenance," "diffident manner,"
"helpless poor," "untutored mind," "honest necessity," and half a dozen
other stand-bys of the second-rate newspaper reporter. In "Sister
Carrie" one finds "high noon," "hurrying throng," "unassuming
restaurant," "dainty slippers," "high-strung nature," and "cool,
calculating world"--all on a few pages. Carrie's sister, Minnie Hanson,
"gets" the supper. Hanson himself is "wrapped up" in his child. Carrie
decides to enter Storm and King's office, "no matter what." In "The
Titan" the word "trig" is worked to death; it takes on, toward the end,
the character of a banal and preposterous refrain. In the other books
one encounters mates for it--words made to do duty in as many senses as
the American verb "to fix" or the journalistic "to secure."...
I often wonder if Dreiser gets anything properly describable as pleasure
out of this dogged accumulation of threadbare, undistinguished,
uninspiring nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles and
conjunctions. To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies--the man who
searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a
thing above the thing said--there is in writing the constant joy of
sudden discovery, of happy accident. A phrase springs up full blown,
sweet and caressing. But what joy can there be in rolling up sentences
that have no more life and beauty in them, intrinsically, than so many
election bulletins? Where is the thrill in the manufacture of such a
paragraph as that in which Mrs. Althea Jones' sordid habitat is
described with such inexorable particularity? Or in the laborious
confection of such stuff as this, from Book I, Chapter IV, of "The
'Genius'"?:
The city of Chicago--who shall portray it! This vast ruck of life
that had sprung suddenly into existence upon the dank marshes of a
lake shore!
Or this from the epilogue to "The Financier":