endeavoured to pump vitality into the _Bohemian Magazine_, in which he
had acquired a proprietary interest. But the _Bohemian_ soon departed
this life, carrying some of his savings with it, and he gave over his
enforced leisure to "Jennie Gerhardt," completing the book in 1911. Its
publication by the Harpers during the same year worked his final
emancipation from the editorial desk. It was praised, and what is more,
it sold, and royalties began to come in. A new edition of "Sister
Carrie" followed in 1912, with "The Financier" hard upon its heels.
Since then Dreiser has devoted himself wholly to serious work. "The
Financier" was put forth as the first volume of "a trilogy of desire";
the second volume, "The Titan," was published in 1914; the third is yet
to come. "The 'Genius'" appeared in 1915; "The Bulwark" is just
announced. In 1912, accompanied by Grant Richards, the London publisher,
Dreiser made his first trip abroad, visiting England, France, Italy and
Germany. His impressions were recorded in "A Traveler at Forty,"
published in 1913. In the summer of 1915, accompanied by Franklin Booth,
the illustrator, he made an automobile journey to his old haunts in
Indiana, and the record is in "A Hoosier Holiday," published in 1916.
His other writings include a volume of "Plays of the Natural and the
Supernatural" (1916); "Life, Art and America," a pamphlet against
Puritanism in letters (1917); a dozen or more short stories and
novelettes, a few poems, and a three-act drama, "The Hand of the
Potter."
Dreiser was born at Terre Haute, Indiana, on August 27, 1871, and, like
most of us, is of mongrel blood, with the German, perhaps,
predominating. He is a tall man, awkward in movement and nervous in
habit; the boon of beauty has been denied him. The history of his youth
is set forth in full in "A Hoosier Holiday." It is curious to note that
he is a brother to the late Paul Dresser, author of "The Banks of the
Wabash" and other popular songs, and that he himself, helping Paul over
a hard place, wrote the affecting chorus:
Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay;
Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming ...
But no doubt you know it.
§ 5
The work of Dreiser, considered as craftsmanship pure and simple, is
extremely uneven, and the distance separating his best from his worst is
almost infinite. It is difficult to believe that the novelist who wrote
certain extraordinarily vivid chapters in "Jennie Gerhardt," and "A
Hoosier Holiday," and, above all, in "The Titan," is the same who
achieved the unescapable dulness of parts of "The Financier" and the
general stupidity and stodginess of "The 'Genius.'" Moreover, the tide
of his writing does not rise or fall with any regularity; he neither
improves steadily nor grows worse steadily. Only half an eye is needed
to see the superiority of "Jennie Gerhardt," as a sheer piece of
writing, to "Sister Carrie," but on turning to "The Financier," which
followed "Jennie Gerhardt" by an interval of but one year, one observes
a falling off which, at its greatest, is almost indistinguishable from a
collapse. "Jennie Gerhardt" is suave, persuasive, well-ordered, solid in
structure, instinct with life. "The Financier," for all its merits in
detail, is loose, tedious, vapid, exasperating. But had any critic, in
the autumn of 1912, argued thereby that Dreiser was finished, that he
had shot his bolt, his discomfiture would have come swiftly, for "The
Titan," which followed in 1914, was almost as well done as "The
Financier" had been ill done, and there are parts of it which remain, to
this day, the very best writing that Dreiser has ever achieved. But "The
'Genius'"? Ay, in "The 'Genius'" the pendulum swings back again! It is
flaccid, elephantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sophomoric,
ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. One pities the jurisconsult who is
condemned, by Comstockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. In it
there is a sort of humourless _reductio ad absurdum_, not only of the
Dreiser manner, but even of certain salient tenets of the Dreiser
philosophy. At its best it has a moral flavour. At its worst it is
almost maudlin....
The most successful of the Dreiser novels, judged by sales, is "Sister
Carrie," and the causes thereof are not far to seek. On the one hand,
its suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that was converted into
a public celebrity when it was republished in 1907, and on the other
hand it shares with "Jennie Gerhardt" the capital advantage of having a
young and appealing woman for its chief figure. The sentimentalists thus
have a heroine to cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole;
Carrie becomes a sort of Pollyanna. More, it is, at bottom, a tale of
love--the one theme of permanent interest to the average American
novel-reader, the chief stuffing of all our best-selling romances. True
enough, it is vastly more than this--there is in it, for example, the
astounding portrait of Hurstwood--, but it seems to me plain that its
relative popularity is by no means a test of its relative merit, and
that the causes of that popularity must be sought in other directions.
Its defect, as a work of art, is a defect of structure. Like Norris'
"McTeague" it has a broken back. In the midst of the story of Carrie,
Dreiser pauses to tell the story of Hurstwood--a memorably vivid and
tragic story, to be sure, but still one that, considering artistic form
and organization, does damage to the main business of the book. Its
outstanding merit is its simplicity, its unaffected seriousness and
fervour, the spirit of youth that is in it. One feels that it was
written, not by a novelist conscious of his tricks, but by a novice
carried away by his own flaming eagerness, his own high sense of the
interest of what he was doing. In this aspect, it is perhaps more
typically Dreiserian than any of its successors. And maybe we may seek
here for a good deal of its popular appeal, for there is a contagion in
naïveté as in enthusiasm, and the simple novel-reader may recognize the
kinship of a simple mind in the novelist.
But it is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser first shows his true
mettle.... "The power to tell the same story in two forms," said George
Moore, "is the sign of the true artist." Here Dreiser sets himself that
difficult task, and here he carries it off with almost complete success.
Reduce the story to a hundred words, and the same words would also
describe "Sister Carrie." Jennie, like Carrie, is a rose grown from
turnip-seed. Over each, at the start, hangs poverty, ignorance, the dumb
helplessness of the Shudra, and yet in each there is that indescribable
something, that element of essential gentleness, that innate inward
beauty which levels all barriers of caste, and makes Esther a fit queen
for Ahasuerus. Some Frenchman has put it into a phrase: "_Une âme grande
dans un petit destin_"--a great soul in a small destiny. Jennie has some
touch of that greatness; Dreiser is forever calling her "a big woman";
it is a refrain almost as irritating as the "trig" of "The Titan."
Carrie, one feels, is of baser metal; her dignity never rises to
anything approaching nobility. But the history of each is the history of
the other. Jennie, like Carrie, escapes from the physical miseries of
the struggle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of the
struggle for happiness. Don't mistake me; we have here no maudlin tales
of seduced maidens. Seduction, in truth, is far from tragedy for either
Jennie or Carrie. The gain of each, until the actual event has been left
behind and obliterated by experiences more salient and poignant, is
greater than her loss, and that gain is to the soul as well as to the
creature. With the rise from want to security, from fear to ease, comes
an awakening of the finer perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a
gradual unfolding of the delicate flower called personality, an
increased capacity for loving and living. But with all this, and as a
part of it, there comes, too, an increased capacity for suffering--and
so in the end, when love slips away and the empty years stretch before,
it is the awakened and supersentient woman that pays for the folly of
the groping, bewildered girl. The tragedy of Carrie and Jennie, in
brief, is not that they are degraded, but that they are lifted up, not
that they go to the gutter, but that they escape the gutter and glimpse
the stars.
But if the two stories are thus variations upon the same sombre theme,
if each starts from the same place and arrives at the same dark goal, if
each shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and tortured by the same
agonies, there is still a vast difference between them, and that
difference is the measure of the author's progress in his craft during
the eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "Sister Carrie," at bottom, is
no more than a first sketch, a rough piling up of observations and
ideas, disordered and often incoherent. In the midst of the story, as I
have said, the author forgets it, and starts off upon another. In
"Jennie Gerhardt" there is no such flaccidity of structure, no such
vacillation in aim, no such proliferation of episode. Considering that
it is by Dreiser, it is extraordinarily adept and intelligent in design;
only in "The Titan" has he ever done so well. From beginning to end the
narrative flows logically, steadily, congruously. Episodes there are, of
course, but they keep their proper place and bulk. It is always Jennie
that stands at the centre of the traffic; it is in Jennie's soul that
every scene is ultimately played out. Her father and mother; Senator
Brander, the god of her first worship; her daughter Vesta, and Lester
Kane, the man who makes and mars her--all these are drawn with infinite
painstaking, and in every one of them there is the blood of life. But it
is Jennie that dominates the drama from curtain to curtain. Not an event
is unrelated to her; not a climax fails to make clearer the struggles
going on in her mind and heart.
It is in "Jennie Gerhardt" that Dreiser's view of life begins to take on
coherence and to show a general tendency. In "Sister Carrie" the thing
is still chiefly representation and no more; the image is undoubtedly
vivid, but its significance, in the main, is left undisplayed. In
"Jennie Gerhardt" this pictorial achievement is reinforced by
interpretation; one carries away an impression that something has been
said; it is not so much a visual image of Jennie that remains as a sense
of the implacable tragedy that engulfs her. The book is full of artistic
passion. It lives and glows. It awakens recognition and feeling. Its
lucid ideational structure, even more than the artless gusto of "Sister
Carrie," produces a penetrating and powerful effect. Jennie is no mere
individual; she is a type of the national character, almost the
archetype of the muddled, aspiring, tragic, fate-flogged mass. And the
scene in which she is set is brilliantly national too. The Chicago of
those great days of feverish money-grabbing and crazy aspiration may
well stand as the epitome of America, and it is made clearer here than
in any other American novel--clearer than in "The Pit" or "The
Cliff-Dwellers"--clearer than in any book by an Easterner--almost as
clear as the Paris of Balzac and Zola. Finally, the style of the story
is indissolubly wedded to its matter. The narrative, in places, has an
almost scriptural solemnity; in its very harshness and baldness there is
something subtly meet and fitting. One cannot imagine such a history
done in the strained phrases of Meredith or the fugal manner of Henry
James. One cannot imagine that stark, stenographic dialogue adorned with
the tinsel of pretty words. The thing, to reach the heights it touches,
could have been done only in the way it has been done. As it stands, I
would not take anything away from it, not even its journalistic
banalities, its lack of humour, its incessant returns to C major. A
primitive and touching poetry is in it. It is a novel, I am convinced,
of the first consideration....
In "The Financier" this poetry is almost absent, and that fact is
largely to blame for the book's lack of charm. By the time we see him in
"The Titan" Frank Cowperwood has taken on heroic proportions and the
romance of great adventure is in him, but in "The Financier" he is still
little more than an extra-pertinacious money-grubber, and not unrelated
to the average stock broker or corner grocer. True enough, Dreiser says
specifically that he is more, that the thing he craves is not money but
power--power to force lesser men to execute his commands, power to
surround himself with beautiful and splendid things, power to amuse
himself with women, power to defy and nullify the laws made for the
timorous and unimaginative. But the intent of the author never really
gets into his picture. His Cowperwood in this first stage is hard,
commonplace, unimaginative. In "The Titan" he flowers out as a blend of
revolutionist and voluptuary, a highly civilized Lorenzo the
Magnificent, an immoralist who would not hesitate two minutes about
seducing a saint, but would turn sick at the thought of harming a child.
But in "The Financier" he is still in the larval state, and a repellent
sordidness hangs about him.
Moreover, the story of his rise is burdened by two defects which still
further corrupt its effect. One lies in the fact that Dreiser is quite
unable to get the feel, so to speak, of Philadelphia, just as he is
unable to get the feel of New York in "The 'Genius.'" The other is that
the style of the writing in the book reduces the dreiserian manner to
absurdity, and almost to impossibility. The incredibly lazy, involved
and unintelligent description of the trial of Cowperwood I have already
mentioned. We get, in this lumbering chronicle, not a cohesive and
luminous picture, but a dull, photographic representation of the whole
tedious process, beginning with an account of the political obligations
of the judge and district attorney, proceeding to a consideration of the
habits of mind of each of the twelve jurymen, and ending with a summary
of the majority and minority opinions of the court of appeals, and a
discussion of the motives, ideals, traditions, prejudices, sympathies
and chicaneries behind them, each and severally. When Cowperwood goes
into the market, his operations are set forth in their last detail; we
are told how many shares he buys, how much he pays for them, what the
commission is, what his profit comes to. When he comes into chance
contact with a politician, we hear all about that politician, including
his family affairs. When he builds and furnishes a house, the chief
rooms in it are inventoried with such care that not a chair or a rug or
a picture on the wall is overlooked. The endless piling up of such
non-essentials cripples and incommodes the story; its drama is too
copiously swathed in words to achieve a sting; the Dreiser manner
devours and defeats itself.
But none the less the book has compensatory merits. Its character
sketches, for all the cloud of words, are lucid and vigorous. Out of
that enormous complex of crooked politics and crookeder finance,
Cowperwood himself stands out in the round, comprehensible and alive.
And all the others, in their lesser measures, are done almost as
well--Cowperwood's pale wife, whimpering in her empty house; Aileen
Butler, his mistress; his doddering and eternally amazed old father; his
old-fashioned, stupid, sentimental mother; Stener, the City Treasurer, a
dish-rag in the face of danger; old Edward Malia Butler, that barbarian
in a boiled shirt, with his Homeric hatred and his broken heart.
Particularly old Butler. The years pass and he must be killed and put
away, but not many readers of the book, I take it, will soon forget
him. Dreiser is at his best, indeed, when he deals with old men. In
their tragic helplessness they stand as symbols of that unfathomable
cosmic cruelty which he sees as the motive power of life itself. More,
even, than his women, he makes them poignant, vivid, memorable. The
picture of old Gerhardt is full of a subtle brightness, though he is
always in the background, as cautious and penny-wise as an ancient crow,
trotting to his Lutheran church, pathetically ill-used by the world he
never understands. Butler is another such, different in externals, but
at bottom the same dismayed, questioning, pathetic old man....
In "The Titan" there is a tightening of the screws, a clarifying of the
action, an infinite improvement in the manner. The book, in truth, has
the air of a new and clearer thinking out of "The Financier," as "Jennie
Gerhardt" is a new thinking out of "Sister Carrie." With almost the same
materials, the thing is given a new harmony and unity, a new
plausibility, a new passion and purpose. In "The Financier" the artistic
voluptuary is almost completely overshadowed by the dollar-chaser; in
"The Titan" we begin to see clearly that grand battle between artist and
man of money, idealist and materialist, spirit and flesh, which is the
informing theme of the whole trilogy. The conflict that makes the drama,
once chiefly external, now becomes more and more internal; it is played
out within the soul of the man himself. The result is a character sketch
of the highest colour and brilliance, a superb portrait of a complex and
extremely fascinating man. Of all the personages in the Dreiser books,
the Cowperwood of "The Titan" is perhaps the most radiantly real. He is
accounted for in every detail, and yet, in the end, he is not accounted
for at all; there hangs about him, to the last, that baffling
mysteriousness which hangs about those we know most intimately. There is
in him a complete and indubitable masculinity, as the eternal feminine
is in Jennie. His struggle with the inexorable forces that urge him on
as with whips, and lure him with false lights, and bring him to
disillusion and dismay, is as typical as hers is, and as tragic. In his
ultimate disaster, so plainly foreshadowed at the close, there is the
clearest of all projections of the ideas that lie at the bottom of all
Dreiser's work. Cowperwood, above any of them, is his protagonist.
The story, in its plan, is as transparent as in its burden. It has an
austere simplicity in the telling that fits the directness of the thing
told. Dreiser, as if to clear decks, throws over all the immemorial
baggage of the novelist, making short shrift of "heart interest,"
conventional "sympathy," and even what ordinarily passes for romance. In
"Sister Carrie," as I have pointed out, there is still a sweet dish for
the sentimentalists; if they don't like the history of Carrie as a work
of art they may still wallow in it as a sad, sad love story. Carrie is
appealing, melting; she moves, like Marguerite Gautier, in an atmosphere
of romantic depression. And Jennie Gerhardt, in this aspect, is merely
Carrie done over--a Carrie more carefully and objectively drawn,
perhaps, but still conceivably to be mistaken for a "sympathetic"
heroine in a best-seller. A lady eating chocolates might jump from
"Laddie" to "Jennie Gerhardt" without knowing that she was jumping ten
thousand miles. The tear jugs are there to cry into. Even in "The
Financier" there is still a hint of familiar things. The first Mrs.
Cowperwood is sorely put upon; old Butler has the markings of an irate
father; Cowperwood himself suffers the orthodox injustice and languishes
in a cell. But no one, I venture, will ever fall into any such mistake
in identity in approaching "The Titan." Not a single appeal to facile
sentiment is in it. It proceeds from beginning to end in a forthright,
uncompromising, confident manner. It is an almost purely objective
account, as devoid of cheap heroics as a death certificate, of a strong
man's contest with incontestable powers without and no less
incontestable powers within. There is nothing of the conventional outlaw
about him; he does not wear a red sash and bellow for liberty; fate
wrings from him no melodramatic defiances. In the midst of the battle he
views it with a sort of ironical detachment, as if lifted above himself
by the sheer aesthetic spectacle. Even in disaster he asks for no
quarter, no generosity, no compassion. Up or down, he keeps his zest for
the game that is being played, and is sufficient unto himself.
Such a man as this Cowperwood of the Chicago days, described
romantically, would be indistinguishable from the wicked earls and
seven-foot guardsmen of Ouida, Robert W. Chambers and The Duchess. But
described realistically and coldbloodedly, with all that wealth of
minute and apparently inconsequential detail which Dreiser piles up so
amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly vivid, lifelike and
engrossing. He fits into no _a priori_ theory of conduct or scheme of
rewards and punishments; he proves nothing and teaches nothing; the
forces which move him are never obvious and frequently unintelligible.
But in the end he seems genuinely a man--a man of the sort we see about
us in the real world--not a patent and automatic fellow, reacting
docilely and according to a formula, but a bundle of complexities and
contradictions, a creature oscillating between the light and the
shadow--at bottom, for all his typical representation of a race and a
civilization, a unique and inexplicable personality. More, he is a man
of the first class, an Achilles of his world; and here the achievement
of Dreiser is most striking, for he succeeds where all fore-runners
failed. It is easy enough to explain how John Smith courted his wife,
and even how William Brown fought and died for his country, but it is
inordinately difficult to give plausibility to the motives, feelings and
processes of mind of a man whose salient character is that they
transcend all ordinary experience. Too often, even when made by the
highest creative and interpretative talent, the effort has resolved
itself into a begging of the question. Shakespeare made Hamlet
comprehensible to the groundlings by diluting that half of him which was
Shakespeare with a half which was a college sophomore. In the same way
he saved Lear by making him, in large part, a tedious and obscene old
donkey--the blood brother of any average ancient of any average English
tap-room. Tackling Caesar, he was rescued by Brutus' knife. George
Bernard Shaw, facing the same difficulty, resolved it by drawing a
composite portrait of two or three London actor-managers and half a
dozen English politicians. But Dreiser makes no such compromise. He
bangs into the difficulties of his problem head on, and if he does not
solve it absolutely, he at least makes an extraordinarily close approach
to a solution. In "The Financier" a certain incredulity still hangs
about Cowperwood; in "The Titan" he suddenly comes unquestionably real.
If you want to get the true measure of this feat, put it beside the
failure of Frank Norris with Curtis Jadwin in "The Pit."...
"The 'Genius,'" which interrupted the "trilogy of desire," marks the
nadir of Dreiser's accomplishment, as "The Titan" marks its apogee. The
plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that Dreiser, at
his best, might have carried out with undoubted success. What he is
trying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of
every man of active mind between the desire for self-expression and the
desire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity. It is,
in a sense, the story of Cowperwood told over again, but with an
important difference, for Eugene Witla is a much less self-reliant and
powerful fellow than Cowperwood, and so he is unable to muster up the
vast resolution of spirits that he needs to attain happiness. "The
Titan" is the history of a strong man. "The 'Genius'" is the history of
a man essentially weak. Eugene Witla can never quite choose his route in
life. He goes on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to ease
to the end of the chapter. He vacillates abominably and forever between
two irreconcilable desires. Even when, at the close, he sinks into a
whining sort of resignation, the proud courage of Cowperwood is not in
him; he is always a bit despicable in his pathos.