I
Mr. Theodore Dreiser’s critical friends have always been ready to admit
his deficiencies as a literary artist, and these deficiencies are
really extraordinary. Nevertheless, by universal consent Mr. Dreiser
stands at the head of the realistic movement in American fiction, not
merely because he is its pioneer, and has endured obloquy and even
persecution for the Cause, but primarily on account of his seriousness
and singleness of purpose, his depth of keen feeling, and his earnest
reflectiveness. His work also anticipates in important respects
the efforts of the post-realists and super-realists, so-called,
and altogether has a present salience which insistently demands
consideration.
The work, however, cannot be assessed--cannot indeed be
understood--apart from the man; and fortunately Mr. Dreiser has written
much about himself.[42] He was born in 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana,
of German Catholic parents who struggled vainly against poverty.
In the schools of another Indiana town he received the elements of
an education, but apparently learned little of value to him beyond
reading and writing. In boyhood and youth, in school or out, he became
acquainted with a number of the better-known writers, chiefly of
fiction, of the nineteenth century, but without gaining from them
more than momentary entertainment. He has said that as a boy he “had
no slightest opportunity to get a correct or even partially correct
estimate of what might be called the mental A B abs of life.” [sic]
If the truth is to be told, one reason for this lay clearly within
himself. For he was, as his records show him, a stupid boy and young
man, lapped in vague reverie and hazy dreams of enjoyment, and roused
slowly to puzzled observation and thought. “No common man am I,” he
used to tell himself when he was scarcely out of his ’teens, with no
evident reason save that with adolescence came an intense craving for
freedom from the shackles of common life--freedom to indulge fully
his temperamental longing for sensuous and materialised delight. This
self-conceit helped to prevent him from learning what could have been
learned during his boyhood, and, as he grew older, aroused in him
bitter resentment against the limitations of his early environment.
Those limitations, at the same time, were extreme. The Dreiser
household was one combining almost unrelieved ignorance with perfect
tastelessness, presided over by a father whose consuming interest was
a Catholicism degraded into mere ceremonies and prohibitions. Mr.
Dreiser explicitly denotes the quality of the purifying influence
dominant in the home and community of his youth: “One should read only
good books ... from which any reference to sex had been eliminated,
and what followed ... was that all intelligent interpretation of
character and human nature was immediately discounted. A picture of a
nude or partially nude woman was sinful.... The dance in our home and
our town was taboo. The theatre was an institution which led to crime,
the saloon a centre of low, even bestial vices.... It was considered
good business, if you please, to be connected with some religious
organisation.... We were taught persistently to shun most human
experiences as either dangerous or degrading or destructive. The less
you knew about life the better; the more you knew about the fictional
heaven and hell ditto.... In my day there were apparently no really
bad men who were not known as such to all the world, ... and few if
any good men who were not sufficiently rewarded by the glorious fruits
of their good deeds here and now!... Positively, and I stake my solemn
word on this, until I was between seventeen and eighteen I had scarcely
begun to suspect any other human being of harbouring the erratic and
sinful thoughts which occasionally flashed through my own mind.”
By the time Mr. Dreiser had fairly formed the suspicion that, despite
appearances, other people might not be much better than himself, his
family had begun to break up, following the death of his mother, and he
himself had been thrust into the world--or rather into Chicago, where
the Dreisers by now lived--to earn his way. He did manage to spend one
year at Indiana University, to the great improvement of his health,
but with no positive intellectual benefit, so that he refused to waste
a second year, which he might have had there. He confesses this, it
should be said, in no boastful spirit. He was in fact made to realise
at Bloomington that there were elements of knowledge which it would be
useful to him to acquire--but he found the effort hopeless. His mind
could not be constrained, and, besides, the deficiencies of his earlier
schooling stood in his way. Hence he returned to Chicago, to become a
collector for an easy-payment furniture shop.
It was at this time that his feelings--scarcely yet his imagination or
his reason--were awakened by the spectacle of “America on the make.”
He found that spectacle intensely vital. At the same time, too, he was
doing the first reading that really came home to him:--he was reading a
daily column of Eugene Field’s in a Chicago newspaper. It gave him the
notion of doing something like that himself, and sent him hunting for a
post on a news-sheet. This he finally obtained, and at the reporter’s
desk achieved his real education, one not beyond his grasp. His first
instructor promptly informed him that “life was a God-damned stinking,
treacherous game, and that nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of
every thousand were bastards.” The truth of this generalisation Mr.
Dreiser proceeded to establish for himself, by observation of those
of life’s realities which constitute news, and by intercourse with
fellow-journalists. He discovered that practically all men, high or
low, were lying hypocrites, outwardly professing a fine morality, but
privately violating this without hesitation whenever it would serve
their turn in the pursuit of gain or in the satisfaction of lust.
This was the reality, at any rate, which the young reporter saw, and
which, as he says, broadened considerably his viewpoint, finally
liberating him “from moralistic and religionistic qualms.” So
liberated was he, indeed, that he came to judge men “thoroughly sound
intellectually” in proportion as he found them “quite free from the
narrow, cramping conventions of their day.” So liberated was he that he
came to see the “religionist” for what he was: “a swallower of romance
or a masquerader looking to profit and preferment.” He came also to see
behind “the blatherings of thin-minded, thin-blooded, thin-experienced
religionists” only “a brainless theory.” Nor was this the limit of
his discoveries. He came further to see that life was not simply a
ruthless struggle for material advantages, because, howsoever ruthless
and intelligent one’s struggle, still, one might be defrauded by sheer
accident. Chance seemed, at times, the final ruler of all things--many
of the reporter’s assignments combining “to prove that life is
haphazard and casual and cruel; to some lavish, to others niggardly.”
Mr. Dreiser, it is fair to say, was the more ready to learn these
lessons of experience because, as he plainly tells his readers,
he himself was lustful and passionately eager for the material
satisfactions of life. He longed to join in the antics of the rich, who
alone, as he judged, were bathed in happiness. He felt, as he gazed
enviously upon the gilded sons and daughters of earth, that, from no
fault of his, life was tragically cheating him. And this sense of
grievance, feeding upon itself, passed easily through a sentimental
phase into bitterness, as his reminiscences show: “Whenever I returned
to any place in which I had once lived and found things changed, as
they always were, I was fairly transfixed by the oppressive sense of
the evanescence of everything; a mood so hurtful and dark and yet
with so rich if sullen a lustre that I was left wordless with pain. I
was all but crucified at realising how unimportant I was, how nothing
stayed but all changed.... Life was so brief, ... and so soon, whatever
its miserable amount or character, it would be gone.... But I, poor
waif, with no definite or arresting skill of any kind, not even that of
commerce, must go fumbling about looking in upon life from the outside,
as it were. Beautiful women, or so I argued, were drawn to any but
me.... I should never have a fraction of the means to do as I wished or
to share in the life that I most craved. I was an Ishmael.”
Not always, of course, was Mr. Dreiser sunk in a bitterness induced
by self-pity and sentimental regret. Often in moments of successful
work or of flattering companionship he was quickly lifted up into a
mood of expansive self-satisfaction, equally unbalanced. Then he would
say to himself: “I must be an exceptional man.... Life itself was
not so bad; it was just higgledy-piggledy, catch-as-catch-can, that
was all. If one were clever, like myself, it was all right.” It was
indeed magnificent, so long as the slave of temperament could dream
of his heroic future as something assured. But dreams, like life, were
unstable, and the fever for self-advancement, becoming intolerable
from its intensity, would transmute itself--not every time into frank
self-pity--but sometimes into tearful “sympathy for the woes of others,
life in all its helpless degradation and poverty, the unsatisfied
dreams of people.” And from the downtrodden for whom he wept he also
drew a lesson. The hideous inequalities both of fortune and of capacity
which he saw, proved to him that democracy, like morality, was a sham,
a hollow convention, irrelevant, indeed opposed, to the facts of life
and practice.
Mr. Dreiser’s journalistic career took him from Chicago to St. Louis,
and thence, with several stops on the way, to Pittsburgh, during a
period of rather more than three years. In these years, he says,
speaking of his “blood-moods or so-called spiritual aspirations,” he
was “what might be called a poetic melancholiac, crossed with a vivid
materialistic lust of life.” His body, he adds, “was blazing with sex,
as well as with a desire for material and social supremacy.” It is
not surprising, consequently, that he found himself able to entertain
carnal desires for several women at the same time--though this at first
surprised him, and troubled him also, until his day of liberation from
“moralistic qualms.” It is not surprising either that he presently
was captivated by a charming country girl, several years older than
himself, who had no single idea and only one desire in common with
him. He had welcomed his liberation from “moralistic and religionistic
qualms” the more complacently because of the simplification of thought
and conduct to which it pointed. From this time the conduct of life
was to be straightforward as well as simple, in accordance with the
brutish yet vital law of following your dominant impulse regardlessly,
ruthlessly, slavishly. But now this liberation itself was mainly
instrumental in plunging him into a new, long-continued, and grievous
difficulty. For his simple country maiden, though she was drawn to
him as he was drawn to her, was nevertheless rigidly conventional,
immovably “moralistic,” one of the predestined pillars of an ordered
society and a stable family. She steadfastly refused to yield him her
body without marriage, and he, alas, was not only unable to support her
but deeply unwilling to marry her even if he could.
Clearly this pair did not understand all that divided them in spirit,
but, still, Mr. Dreiser knew from the first some portion of the truth.
For he knew what love really was: it was a mere “blood-mood”; it was a
vivid lust crossed with poetic fires; it was irresistible, of course,
but it was like everything else, transient, shifting, evanescent. He
already suspected, as he later concluded, that monogamy--marriage
indeed of any kind--was a debasing institution which not only killed
the love that brought men to it, but also deformed and dwarfed their
personalities. It might not harm stupid and lethargic men, but the man
of individuality, at least, the highest type of citizen, required utter
freedom to follow his vital impulses--required the joys of the sexual
act “without any of the hindrances or binding chains of convention.”
He knew, in fine, that “the tug of his immense physical desire for his
beloved” might easily have been satisfied, despite his poverty, without
compromising the future, and without doing a hurt to society, had there
only been “any such thing as sanity in life,” outside of himself. He
even knew, after the first raptures of idyllic feeling had passed,
that any other beautiful woman would have served his need as well;
but, nevertheless, he clung to this one, because in fact no beautiful
woman whom he found accessible did keep alive in him the same fever of
desire. Yet his beloved remained immovable, and so drew him on, through
several years of miserably divided feeling, into a marriage finally
accomplished after his carnal fires had cooled, owing to the passage
of time and the casual ministrations of certain other fair creatures,
more pliant, but unsatisfying.
I dwell upon this painful episode, following Mr. Dreiser’s own example,
because it tells so much. It was the crucial event of his early life,
and it left an ineffaceable scar. The fact is, indeed, that without
definite knowledge of this miserable union, it would not be easy to
understand how Mr. Dreiser became so obstinately fixed in those notions
of life which journalism and its associations gave him and which he was
eager to accept. Without definite knowledge of this marriage, further,
it would be impossible fully to understand his novels; for none of them
could have been written quite as it stands save in the light of this
afflictive experience of his, and several, it is extremely likely,
could not otherwise have been written at all.[43]
Some knowledge of another side of Mr. Dreiser’s life, however, during
his years of work for the news-sheets, is also necessary for those who
would understand his novels. He has told us that in St. Louis the great
literary idol of his associates was Zola, and after Zola, Balzac. These
novelists, and especially the former, were constantly held up to him as
models by one of his assignment-editors, who made it abundantly clear
what Zola stood for. Mr. Dreiser read none of the Frenchman’s books
at this time, but he did read an unpublished novel by two St. Louis
newspaper men which made a deep and lasting impression upon him and
which, as he later discovered, was wholly inspired by Zola and Balzac.
This was “the opening wedge for him into the realm of realism,” and,
too, “it fixed his mind definitely on this matter of writing,” firing
him with a desire to create something of the sort himself. He thought
the novel “intensely beautiful,” “with its frank pictures of raw,
greedy, sensual human nature, and its open pictures of self-indulgence
and vice.” In these indirect ways, evidently, Zola exerted upon the
young reporter an influence real and significant. It was, indeed,
probably much more important than the direct influence exerted by
Balzac not long thereafter; though the accident which brought Mr.
Dreiser to a fevered and ecstatic reading of many of Balzac’s novels,
while he was in Pittsburgh, marked what was for him “a literary
revolution.”
The crowning stage of Mr. Dreiser’s education, however, was now to
come, while he was still in Pittsburgh, with his discovery of certain
of the writings of Huxley, Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer. Huxley, Mr.
Dreiser credits with finally dispelling the “lingering filaments” of
Christianity still trailing about him; and Huxley’s work of dispersion
was completed by Spencer’s _First Principles_. This book wholly
“threw him down in his conceptions or non-conceptions of life” by its
“questioning or dissolving into other and less understandable things”
all that he had deemed substantial. “Up to this time,” he says,
“there had been in me a blazing and unchecked desire to get on and
the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its place
was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that
there was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because one
had to, and that it was of no importance. Of one’s ideals, struggles,
deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were
chemic compulsions.... Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated,
and a badly and carelessly driven one at that.”
The seeming ill logic of some of these remarks--the sudden concern
over spiritual things felt by one who had hitherto devoted himself
whole-heartedly to the world by sensuous appearances--is not
unimportant. Clearly Spencer’s book left an abiding mark on Mr. Dreiser
because it represented in a general way the abstract conclusion towards
which his own observations had been pointing. Without knowing it, and
without any attempt to set his intellectual house in order, he had
himself been drifting towards a mechanistic naturalism. Spencer made
him aware of this, and if, as he thought, that awareness left him
crushed and hopeless, it at least seemed to clear his mind of rubbish,
and to give his view-point self-consistency and finality. Nevertheless,
he did not come forth a Spencerian; and, indeed, his debt to the
_Synthetic Philosophy_ may easily be exaggerated--the more easily
because it really is important.
Mr. Dreiser emphasises the fact that his reading of the _First
Principles_ was followed by an emotional revulsion--a revulsion which
the Synthetic Philosopher can scarcely alone have caused. And in
truth just at the time when he stumbled upon Spencer his feelings
were strained to the breaking-point. He had just returned from a last
desperate, yet unsuccessful, effort to seduce his country maiden,
which left him crushed, not only by that defeat itself, but by the
consciousness that the gratification he was bound to secure was now
driving him towards a marriage for which he had no capacity, no desire,
and no prospect of sufficient means. Moreover, immediately after his
Western visit he had gone, for the first time, to New York, where he
had received an extraordinarily vivid impression of all the glories
and delights of that worldly success, with its attendant wealth, which
he so intensely craved. The sight had fired him to renew his efforts
after so grand a reward, but, at the same time, had made him gloomily
feel his distance from it, lodging in his mind a stubborn doubt if it
could, after all, ever be attained by him. The combined weight of these
experiences had intensified his already bitter sense of the world’s
indifference to his desires and aims, of the world’s unconscious
cruelty, and of its brutal injustice. He had eagerly embraced the world
at his earliest opportunity, had reviled those who opposed themselves
to it--and what was the world doing for him, what was it not blindly
and carelessly doing against him? He was brought to the point of
sheer despair, and was ready to turn upon the world--yet not ready to
turn his back upon it. For he had not the slightest conception of any
other than sensuous and worldly values, of any other than material
gratifications which might bring to him fulness of life. Years ago he
had defiantly closed _that_ door, without in the least knowing what
he was doing, and it was never to be opened to him. He was miserably
exasperated by defeat, but the world’s appeal was still insistent and
compelling, and would be heard and obeyed for many a year, whether or
not it became suspect for a siren’s call.
In these circumstances the _First Principles_ came really as a
god-send. The book had the impressive appearance of being the voice
of science itself uttering at last the Truth. Yet its weight and
authority left undisturbed Mr. Dreiser’s worldliness and some of his
dear prejudices. It left, indeed, everything as it was with him; but
it did appear to rob everything of value, and so, as he thought, left
him crushed and hopeless. Actually, however, it offered him a species
of consolation for the crushed and hopeless state into which he had
already been plunged by his efforts after a “realistic” way of life.
A species of consolation;--because, though the dehumanised conception
of the world and life presented by naturalism was “cold comfort,”
still, it did enable one who felt badly used to turn upon the universe
and _say_, if not feel, that life was a meaningless and unimportant
phenomenon anyhow.
The _Synthetic Philosophy_, Mr. Dreiser tells the world, “eternally
verified” his “gravest fears as to the unsolvable disorder and
brutality of life.” Precisely; as these turns of phrase show, it left
his feelings what they had been, likewise his desires and aims, and
his sentimental humanitarianism and more. What Spencer gave him was
something to fall back upon and _say_ in hopeless or disillusioned
moments, but something which, leaving him otherwise where he was,
even helped to preserve him inviolate from self-criticism or
self-discipline. Following the guidance of temperament and mood, he
took from Spencer what he wanted, and nothing else; and it so happened
that this included little or nothing specifically characteristic of
Spencer as against various other naturalistic thinkers. The tone,
indeed, of Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism, as well as its emphasis upon
accident and chaotic disorder, is not only more sophisticated than that
of Spencer’s, but abruptly contradictory of the Synthetic gentleman’s
grandiose fancy of one eternal, universal law infallibly working to
bring about perfection in all things earthly.
His dark emotional naturalism--and, it may be added, several of the
contradictions it has involved him in--bring Mr. Dreiser, as some of
his readers have perceived, close to Thomas Hardy, in proportion as
he is far from Spencer. He does not mention Hardy in the record of
his development which I have been following, but he is said to have
confessed to “an enchanted discovery” of that novelist in 1896, and his
delight is what was to be expected. As far as one can see, however, his
indebtedness to Hardy, though real, is not important.