Bonaci_, and whose common name is Black Grouper, which is of
considerable value as an afterthought in this connection, and which
deserves much to be better known. It is a healthy creature, growing
quite regularly to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds, and
living a comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very
remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions....
Or this from his pamphlet, "Life, Art and America":[19]
Alas, alas! for art in America. It has a hard stubby row to hoe.
But I offer no more examples. Every reader of the Dreiser novels must
cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of
whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many
lumps of sodium hyposulphite. Here and there, as in parts of "The Titan"
and again in parts of "A Hoosier Holiday," an evil conscience seems to
haunt him and he gives hard striving to his manner, and more than once
there emerges something that is almost graceful. But a backsliding
always follows this phosphorescence of reform. "The 'Genius,'" coming
after "The Titan," marks the high tide of his bad writing. There are
passages in it so clumsy, so inept, so irritating that they seem almost
unbelievable; nothing worse is to be found in the newspapers. Nor is
there any compensatory deftness in structure, or solidity of design, to
make up for this carelessness in detail. The well-made novel, of course,
can be as hollow as the well-made play of Scribe--but let us at least
have a beginning, a middle and an end! Such a story as "The 'Genius'" is
as gross and shapeless as Brünnhilde. It billows and bulges out like a
cloud of smoke, and its internal organization is almost as vague. There
are episodes that, with a few chapters added, would make very
respectable novels. There are chapters that need but a touch or two to
be excellent short stories. The thing rambles, staggers, trips, heaves,
pitches, struggles, totters, wavers, halts, turns aside, trembles on the
edge of collapse. More than once it seems to be foundering, both in the
equine and in the maritime senses. The tale has been heard of a tree so
tall that it took two men to see to the top of it. Here is a novel so
brobdingnagian that a single reader can scarcely read his way through
it....
§ 3
Of the general ideas which lie at the bottom of all of Dreiser's work it
is impossible to be in ignorance, for he has exposed them at length in
"A Hoosier Holiday" and summarized them in "Life, Art and America." In
their main outlines they are not unlike the fundamental assumptions of
Joseph Conrad. Both novelists see human existence as a seeking without a
finding; both reject the prevailing interpretations of its meaning and
mechanism; both take refuge in "I do not know." Put "A Hoosier Holiday"
beside Conrad's "A Personal Record," and you will come upon parallels
from end to end. Or better still, put it beside Hugh Walpole's "Joseph
Conrad," in which the Conradean metaphysic is condensed from the novels
even better than Conrad has done it himself: at once you will see how
the two novelists, each a worker in the elemental emotions, each a rebel
against the current assurance and superficiality, each an alien to his
place and time, touch each other in a hundred ways.
"Conrad," says Walpole, "is of the firm and resolute conviction that
life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
men." And then, in amplification: "It is as though, from some high
window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose
security men were forever launching little cockleshell boats upon a
limitless and angry sea.... From his height he can follow their
fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very end. He
admires their courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his irony
springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end."...
Substitute the name of Dreiser for that of Conrad, and you will have to
change scarcely a word. Perhaps one, to wit, "clever." I suspect that
Dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be tempted to make it
"stupid," or, at all events, "unintelligible." The struggle of man, as
he sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purposeless.
There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no skilful adaptation of means
to end, no moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe.
He can get out of it only a sense of profound and inexplicable disorder.
The waves which batter the cockleshells change their direction at every
instant. Their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably
fortuitous and inept--a voyage without chart, compass, sun or stars....
So at bottom. But to look into the blackness steadily, of course, is
almost beyond the endurance of man. In the very moment that its
impenetrability is grasped the imagination begins attacking it with pale
beams of false light. All religions, I daresay, are thus projected from
the questioning soul of man, and not only all religious, but also all
great agnosticisms. Nietzsche, shrinking from the horror of that abyss
of negation, revived the Pythagorean concept of _der ewigen
Wiederkunft_--a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, after a
while, he added explanations almost Christian--a whole repertoire of
whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. The
late Mark Twain, in an unpublished work, toyed with an equally daring
idea: that men are to some unimaginably vast and incomprehensible Being
what the unicellular organisms of his body are to man, and so on _ad
infinitum_. Dreiser occasionally inclines to much the same hypothesis;
he likens the endless reactions going on in the world we know, the
myriadal creation, collision and destruction of entities, to the slow
accumulation and organization of cells _in utero_. He would make us
specks in the insentient embryo of some gigantic Presence whose form is
still unimaginable and whose birth must wait for Eons and Eons. Again,
he turns to something not easily distinguishable from philosophical
idealism, whether out of Berkeley or Fichte it is hard to make out--that
is, he would interpret the whole phenomenon of life as no more than an
appearance, a nightmare of some unseen sleeper or of men themselves, an
"uncanny blur of nothingness"--in Euripides' phrase, "a song sung by an
idiot, dancing down the wind." Yet again, he talks vaguely of the
intricate polyphony of a cosmic orchestra, cacophonous to our dull ears.
Finally, he puts the observed into the ordered, reading a purpose in the
displayed event: "life was intended to sting and hurt".... But these are
only gropings, and not to be read too critically. From speculations and
explanations he always returns, Conrad-like, to the bald fact: to "the
spectacle and stress of life." All he can make out clearly is "a vast
compulsion which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes
or impulses of individuals." That compulsion springs "from the settling
processes of forces which we do not in the least understand, over which
we have no control, and in whose grip we are as grains of dust or sand,
blown hither and thither, for what purpose we cannot even suspect."[20]
Man is not only doomed to defeat, but denied any glimpse or
understanding of his antagonist. Here we come upon an agnosticism that
has almost got beyond curiosity. What good would it do us, asks Dreiser,
to know? In our ignorance and helplessness, we may at least get a
slave's consolation out of cursing the unknown gods. Suppose we saw them
striving blindly, too, and pitied them?...
But, as I say, this scepticism is often tempered by guesses at a
possibly hidden truth, and the confession that this truth may exist
reveals the practical unworkableness of the unconditioned system, at
least for Dreiser. Conrad is far more resolute, and it is easy to see
why. He is, by birth and training, an aristocrat. He has the gift of
emotional detachment. The lures of facile doctrine do not move him. In
his irony there is a disdain which plays about even the ironist himself.
Dreiser is a product of far different forces and traditions, and is
capable of no such escapement. Struggle as he may, and fume and protest
as he may, he can no more shake off the chains of his intellectual and
cultural heritage than he can change the shape of his nose. What that
heritage is you may find out in detail by reading "A Hoosier Holiday,"
or in summary by glancing at the first few pages of "Life, Art and
America." Briefly described, it is the burden of a believing mind, a
moral attitude, a lingering superstition. One-half of the man's brain,
so to speak, wars with the other half. He is intelligent, he is
thoughtful, he is a sound artist--but there come moments when a dead
hand falls upon him, and he is once more the Indiana peasant, snuffing
absurdly over imbecile sentimentalities, giving a grave ear to
quackeries, snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them. One
generation spans too short a time to free the soul of man. Nietzsche, to
the end of his days, remained a Prussian pastor's son, and hence
two-thirds a Puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end,
into a sort of holy war. Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher,
reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its
ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals. And that
other English novelist who springs from the servants' hall--let us not
be surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes like a bounder.
The truth about Dreiser is that he is still in the transition stage
between Christian Endeavour and civilization, between Warsaw, Indiana
and the Socratic grove, between being a good American and being a free
man, and so he sometimes vacillates perilously between a moral
sentimentalism and a somewhat extravagant revolt. "The 'Genius,'" on
the one hand, is almost a tract for rectitude, a Warning to the Young;
its motto might be _Scheut die Dirnen_! And on the other hand, it is
full of a laborious truculence that can only be explained by imagining
the author as heroically determined to prove that he is a plain-spoken
fellow and his own man, let the chips fall where they may. So, in spots,
in "The Financier" and "The Titan," both of them far better books. There
is an almost moral frenzy to expose and riddle what passes for morality
among the stupid. The isolation of irony is never reached; the man is
still evangelical; his ideas are still novelties to him; he is as
solemnly absurd in some of his floutings of the Code Américain as he is
in his respect for Bouguereau, or in his flirtings with the New Thought,
or in his naïve belief in the importance of novel-writing. Somewhere or
other I have called all this the Greenwich Village complex. It is not
genuine artists, serving beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in
those cockroached cellars and bawl for art; it is a mob of half-educated
yokels and cockneys to whom the very idea of art is still novel, and
intoxicating--and more than a little bawdy.
Not that Dreiser actually belongs to this ragamuffin company. Far from
it, indeed. There is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive
artist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. In his muddled way,
held back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps made
uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own
comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of art of unquestionable
beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant
and illuminating. There is vastly more intuition in him than
intellectualism; his talent is essentially feminine, as Conrad's is
masculine; his ideas always seem to be deduced from his feelings. The
view of life that got into "Sister Carrie," his first book, was not the
product of a conscious thinking out of Carrie's problems. It simply got
itself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its
coherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. The
thing began as a vision, not as a syllogism. Here the name of Franz
Schubert inevitably comes up. Schubert was an ignoramus, even in music;
he knew less about polyphony, which is the mother of harmony, which is
the mother of music, than the average conservatory professor. But
nevertheless he had such a vast instinctive sensitiveness to musical
values, such a profound and accurate feeling for beauty in tone, that he
not only arrived at the truth in tonal relations, but even went beyond
what, in his day, was known to be the truth, and so led an advance.
Likewise, Giorgione da Castelfranco and Masaccio come to mind: painters
of the first rank, but untutored, unsophisticated, uncouth. Dreiser,
within his limits, belongs to this sabot-shod company of the elect. One
thinks of Conrad, not as artist first, but as savant. There is something
of the icy aloofness of the laboratory in him, even when the images he
conjures up pulsate with the very glow of life. He is almost as
self-conscious as the Beethoven of the last quartets. In Dreiser the
thing is more intimate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure feeling.
He gets his effects, one might almost say, not by designing them, but by
living them.
But whatever the process, the power of the image evoked is not to be
gainsaid. It is not only brilliant on the surface, but mysterious and
appealing in its depths. One swiftly forgets his intolerable writing,
his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner, in the face of the Athenian
tragedy he instils into his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, his
barbaric pirates of finances, his conquered and hamstrung supermen, his
wives who sit and wait. He has, like Conrad, a sure talent for depicting
the spirit in disintegration. Old Gerhardt, in "Jennie Gerhardt," is
alone worth all the _dramatis personae_ of popular American fiction
since the days of "Rob o' the Bowl"; Howells could no more have created
him, in his Rodinesque impudence of outline, than he could have created
Tartuffe or Gargantua. Such a novel as "Sister Carrie" stands quite
outside the brief traffic of the customary stage. It leaves behind it an
unescapable impression of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. It is not
a mere story, not a novel in the customary American meaning of the word;
it is at once a psalm of life and a criticism of life--and that
criticism loses nothing by the fact that its burden is despair. Here,
precisely, is the point of Dreiser's departure from his fellows. He puts
into his novels a touch of the eternal _Weltschmerz_. They get below the
drama that is of the moment and reveal the greater drama that is without
end. They arouse those deep and lasting emotions which grow out of the
recognition of elemental and universal tragedy. His aim is not merely to
tell a tale; his aim is to show the vast ebb and flow of forces which
sway and condition human destiny. One cannot imagine him consenting to
Conan Doyle's statement of the purpose of fiction, quoted with
characteristic approval by the New York _Times_: "to amuse mankind, to
help the sick and the dull and the weary." Nor is his purpose to
instruct; if he is a pedagogue it is only incidentally and as a
weakness. The thing he seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to move. One
does not arise from such a book as "Sister Carrie" with a smirk of
satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched.
§ 4
It is, indeed, a truly amazing first book, and one marvels to hear that
it was begun lightly. Dreiser in those days (_circa_ 1899), had seven or
eight years of newspaper work behind him, in Chicago, St. Louis, Toledo,
Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and New York, and was beginning to feel
that reaction of disgust which attacks all newspaper men when the
enthusiasm of youth wears out. He had been successful, but he saw how
hollow that success was, and how little surety it held out for the
future. The theatre was what chiefly lured him; he had written plays in
his nonage, and he now proposed to do them on a large scale, and so get
some of the easy dollars of Broadway. It was an old friend from Toledo,
Arthur Henry, who turned him toward story-writing. The two had met while
Henry was city editor of the _Blade_, and Dreiser a reporter looking for
a job.[21] A firm friendship sprang up, and Henry conceived a high
opinion of Dreiser's ability, and urged him to try a short story.
Dreiser was distrustful of his own skill, but Henry kept at him, and
finally, during a holiday the two spent together at Maumee, Ohio, he
made the attempt. Henry had the manuscript typewritten and sent it to
_Ainslee's Magazine_. A week or so later there came a cheque for $75.
This was in 1898. Dreiser wrote four more stories during the year
following, and sold them all. Henry now urged him to attempt a novel,
but again his distrust of himself held him back. Henry finally tried a
rather unusual argument: he had a novel of his own on the stocks,[22]
and he represented that he was in difficulties with it and in need of
company. One day, in September, 1899, Dreiser took a sheet of yellow
paper and wrote a title at random. That title was "Sister Carrie," and
with no more definite plan than the mere name offered the book began. It
went ahead steadily enough until the middle of October, and had come by
then to the place where Carrie meets Hurstwood. At that point Dreiser
left it in disgust. It seemed pitifully dull and inconsequential, and
for two months he put the manuscript away. Then, under renewed urgings
by Henry, he resumed the writing, and kept on to the place where
Hurstwood steals the money. Here he went aground upon a comparatively
simple problem; he couldn't devise a way to manage the robbery. Late in
January he gave it up. But the faithful Henry kept urging him, and in
March he resumed work, and soon had the story finished. The latter part,
despite many distractions, went quickly. Once the manuscript was
complete, Henry suggested various cuts, and in all about 40,000 words
came out. The fair copy went to the Harpers. They refused it without
ceremony and soon afterward Dreiser carried the manuscript to Doubleday,
Page & Co. He left it with Frank Doubleday, and before long there came
notice of its acceptance, and, what is more, a contract. But after the
story was in type it fell into the hands of the wife of one of the
members of the firm, and she conceived so strong a notion of its
immorality that she soon convinced her husband and his associates. There
followed a series of acrimonious negotiations, with Dreiser holding
resolutely to the letter of his contract. It was at this point that
Frank Norris entered the combat--bravely but in vain. The pious
Barabbases, confronted by their signature, found it impossible to throw
up the book entirely, but there was no nomination in the bond regarding
either the style of binding or the number of copies to be issued, and
so they evaded further dispute by bringing out the book in a very small
edition and with modest unstamped covers. Copies of this edition are now
eagerly sought by book-collectors, and one in good condition fetches $25
or more in the auction rooms. Even the second edition (1907), bearing
the imprint of B. W. Dodge & Co., carries an increasing premium.
The passing years work strange farces. The Harpers, who had refused
"Sister Carrie" with a spirit bordering upon indignation in 1900, took
over the rights of publication from B. W. Dodge & Co., in 1912, and
reissued the book in a new (and extremely hideous) format, with a
publisher's note containing smug quotations from the encomiums of the
_Fortnightly Review_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Spectator_, the _Academy_
and other London critical journals. More, they contrived humorously to
push the date of their copyright back to 1900. But this new enthusiasm
for artistic freedom did not last long. They had published "Jennie
Gerhardt" in 1911 and they did "The Financier" in 1912, but when "The
Titan" followed, in 1914, they were seized with qualms, and suppressed
the book after it had got into type. In this emergency the English firm
of John Lane came to the rescue, only to seek cover itself when the
Comstocks attacked "The 'Genius,'" two years later.... For his high
services to American letters, Walter H. Page, of Doubleday, Page & Co.,
was made ambassador to England, where "Sister Carrie" is regarded
(according to the Harpers), as "the best story, on the whole, that has
yet come out of America." A curious series of episodes. Another proof,
perhaps, of that cosmic imbecility upon which Dreiser is so fond of
discoursing....
But of all this I shall say more later on, when I come to discuss the
critical reception of the Dreiser novels, and the efforts made by the
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to stop their sale. The
thing to notice here is that the author's difficulties with "Sister
Carrie" came within an ace of turning him from novel-writing completely.
Stray copies of the suppressed first edition, true enough, fell into the
hands of critics who saw the story's value, and during the first year or
two of the century it enjoyed a sort of esoteric vogue, and
encouragement came from unexpected sources. Moreover, a somewhat
bowdlerized English edition, published by William Heinemann in 1901,
made a fair success, and even provoked a certain mild controversy. But
the author's income from the book remained almost _nil_, and so he was
forced to seek a livelihood in other directions. His history during the
next ten years belongs to the tragicomedy of letters. For five of them
he was a Grub Street hack, turning his hand to any literary job that
offered. He wrote short stories for the popular magazines, or special
articles, or poems, according as their needs varied. He concocted
fabulous tales for the illustrated supplements of the Sunday newspapers.
He rewrote the bad stuff of other men. He returned to reporting. He did
odd pieces of editing. He tried his hand at one-act plays. He even
ventured upon advertisement writing. And all the while, the best that he
could get out of his industry was a meagre living.
In 1905, tiring of the uncertainties of this life, he accepted a post on
the staff of Street & Smith, the millionaire publishers of cheap
magazines, servant-girl romances and dime-novels, and here, in the very
slums of letters, he laboured with tongue in cheek until the next year.
The tale of his duties will fill, I daresay, a volume or two in the
autobiography on which he is said to be working; it is a chronicle full
of achieved impossibilities. One of his jobs, for example, was to reduce
a whole series of dime-novels, each 60,000 words in length, to 30,000
words apiece. He accomplished it by cutting each one into halves, and
writing a new ending for the first half and a new beginning for the
second, with new titles for both. This doubling of their property
aroused the admiration of his employers; they promised him an assured
and easy future in the dime-novel business. But he tired of it, despite
this revelation of a gift for it, and in 1906 he became managing editor
of the _Broadway Magazine_, then struggling into public notice. A year
later he transferred his flag to the Butterick Building, and became
chief editor of the _Delineator_, the _Designer_ and other such gospels
for the fair. Here, of course, he was as much out of water as in the
dime-novel foundry of Street & Smith, but at all events the pay was
good, and there was a certain leisure at the end of the day's work. In
1907, as part of his duties, he organized the National Child Rescue
Campaign, which still rages as the _Delineator's_ contribution to the
Uplift. At about the same time he began "Jennie Gerhardt." It is curious
to note that, during these same years, Arnold Bennett was slaving in
London as the editor of _Woman_.