This, in summary form, is the story of Mr. Dreiser’s preparation for
a novelist’s career. His first novel was published in 1900, and his
sixth in 1925. Though from an early time he has had warm friends
amongst the critics, still, even the most devoted of these have harshly
condemned some of his books; and, in general, critical opinion, when
not predominantly hostile, has been sharply divided. Nevertheless,
in the face of whatever difficulties, Mr. Dreiser has slowly won a
leading position in the world of fiction, for reasons which I began by
mentioning. And his sixth novel, _An American Tragedy_, was, upon its
appearance, widely proclaimed a masterpiece.
Certainly, moreover, _An American Tragedy_ is by all odds the best of
Mr. Dreiser’s novels, though perhaps not the most _interesting_. In
it his language is still faulty, as in his earlier books; the quality
of his style is mediocre, when not worse; his narrative is badly
proportioned;--but, nevertheless, the novel also has excellences which
its author had not previously achieved, and which are seldom to be
found save in works of a serious and mature artistry. It has a sombre
inevitableness, a self-contained adequacy, a restraint, dignity, and
detachment which bespeak not merely the experienced craftsman, but also
the workman’s sure grasp of his theme united with a deeply emotional
confidence in its truth and importance. A far higher intelligence is
exhibited in its execution than in Mr. Dreiser’s play, _The Hand of
the Potter_ (1918), whose theme is similar in several respects. If one
should name a single change indicative of the intelligent masterliness
of _An American Tragedy_, perhaps the most significant is the fact
that in this book, for the first time, Mr. Dreiser has permitted his
characters and events to speak entirely for themselves.
But though _An American Tragedy_ marks a really notable advance in
technique, and a heightened plausibility thus attained, partly through
restraint, still, it exhibits Mr. Dreiser’s thought and the essential
quality of his realism entirely unchanged. How Mr. Dreiser reached
a mechanistic naturalism has above been shown, and how he became
conscious of the fact. The appropriate result was that all his novels
became tales of human irresponsibility, constructed to illustrate
life’s contradiction of the hollow conventions of society, and life’s
obedience to blind laws which make the individual’s experience a
chaos with an end unrelated to desert. This is the theme of _An
American Tragedy_, as of the earlier novels. It is a tale of human
irresponsibility, supported by youthful prejudices never relinquished,
built up on false antitheses, and capped by a merely circumstantial
realism calculated to give the narrative a deceptive air of importance.
Youthful prejudice, for example, transparently dictates the important
part played by religion in this novel. Religion is represented as an
illusion capable of deceiving only those blind to life’s realities--the
hopelessly incompetent and unintelligent, those whose advocacy would
itself discredit any doctrine. Religion’s illusory nature is said to
be self-evident, indeed, since it has much to say of Providence, yet
manifestly bestows on the convert no worldly rewards, in satisfaction
of the real needs and desires with which he is endowed, not by his
own design or wish. Convention, too, is represented as a force which
sways only the stupid and lethargic, which makes no demands entitling
it to respect, and which the intelligent disregard deliberately, the
temperamental wilfully. Intelligence itself is pictured as merely an
instrument useful for devising methods of self-advancement;--in other
words, as the servant of inborn temperament. And temperament is the one
irresistible, compelling force in life, to which all else is ultimately
obedient. Hence no one is really responsible for anything;--save,
perhaps, the novelist who sees this important truth, at length, and by
careful selection of appropriate matter is able to picture it for us.
Not even Mr. Dreiser’s expert care and long practice, however, are
sufficient to enable him to evade a difficulty inherent in the nature
of his theme. For the predicament of Roberta Alden is infinitely sad,
and her creator narrates her history and murder with an exemplary
truthfulness which emphasises that sadness to the full. Nevertheless,
the reader’s sympathy is not invoked. The girl, on the contrary, is
presented as the inevitable resultant of inheritance, environment,
and sex, and she lives as an embodied energy rather than as a person.
Extraordinary pains are taken, with all the multitudinous details
of her story, to balance causes against effects, and she emerges a
plausible creature. There is nothing incredible in her being just
conventional enough and unwary enough and love-sick enough to suit
the story’s purpose; but, too, there is nothing in her nature or her
history to render either important. Indeed, her grievous distress,
leading up to her murder, takes on, under Mr. Dreiser’s hand, the
same significance as the squirming of an angleworm, impaled by some
mischievous boy--no less, but certainly no more.
“Chemic compulsion” draws Roberta Alden as it draws other substances.
“Chemic compulsion” epitomises the book. It “just happens”--and this is
all--that “chemic compulsion” entangles Roberta with the squid--Clyde
Griffiths, the defeated squid. For readers of Mr. Dreiser’s “epic”
tale, _The Financier_, who recall the apologue of the lobster and the
squid cannot fail to recognise Clyde Griffiths as the embodiment of
the latter--and his cousin Gilbert as the patient, triumphant lobster.
The squid, it need scarcely be said, commands no more sympathy than
Roberta;--indeed, most readers inevitably must sympathise with the
spirit of the “irate woodsman’s” brutal question during the trial. This
undefiled son of the forest asked: “Why don’t they kill the God-damned
bastard and be done with him?” But, just for this reason, it has to be
remembered that Mr. Dreiser exhausts every possible means so to account
for Clyde as to preserve him from all blame. The squid is the complete
plaything of “chemic compulsion,” the paragon of irresponsibility, the
perfect exemplar of the truth as the truth has been revealed to his
creator.
This being so, it is little less than a miracle that Mr. Dreiser has
contrived--through the infinite detail of a merely circumstantial
realism--to save Clyde Griffiths’ humanity sufficiently to maintain
the reader’s “suspension of disbelief” until the end of the book.
Undoubtedly he has done so, though he has not succeeded in making all
readers feel that patience has been adequately rewarded. They have
been impressed, as is fitting before so monumental a composition; they
have been troubled; they have not been recompensed. Eight hundred
and forty pages devoted to the unconscionable prolongation of a mere
sensational newspaper story! Remarks to this effect I have heard
more than once; and they roughly indicate the real difficulty--the
inevitably self-destroying effect of such an effort as Mr. Dreiser’s,
in proportion as it is successful.
This difficulty, however, does not actually lie in the plot of _An
American Tragedy_, as the remark just cited implies. The bare plot of
the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus might equally well form the basis of a
mere sensational newspaper story, and Clytemnestra in that play and
in the _Choephori_ makes for herself, not without seeming justice,
the plea that is made for Clyde Griffiths. Not she, but Destiny, she
says, through her its helpless instrument slew Agamemnon; and she also
pleads that she did not make herself, yet can only act out her inborn
nature. But it is not for his plots, nor because he was well acquainted
with Mr. Dreiser’s view of life, that Æschylus lives on still amongst
us. His dramas have a perennial and deep value for mankind because,
rejecting the plausible notion of “chemic compulsion,” he struggled
with profound conviction to convey a very different meaning through
their form, characters, and action. Without evading any of its
difficulty, he asserted his faith that Moral Law uncompromisingly
governs the life of man, making for an order which is divine, in
the face of a chaos intrinsically evil, and that men are fully, if
tragically, responsible for the consequences of their acts, whatever
their motives or compulsions, so that ignorance and self-conceit are
equally as criminal as violence.
This is not to say all, of course, but it may suffice to show how
Æschylus and, more clear-sightedly, Sophocles cut straight through to
the centre of the human problem and propounded a solution which, if
not the only one, nor by itself a complete one, is still, strictly
speaking, irrefutable, being founded directly upon facts of experience
which have not changed with the passing generations;--an unassailable
solution, moreover, which gives weight and meaning to every individual
and to all of his acts. And hence it is that the bloody and sensational
fables of Æschylus and Sophocles, triumphantly formed in full harmony
with their meaning, have an interest and value for men which time does
not exhaust.
Mr. Dreiser’s difficulty is not that he has different facts of
experience to interpret;--he has precisely the same facts concerning
an essentially unchanged human nature. His difficulty is that his
mechanistic naturalism compels him so to select and manipulate facts of
experience as to deny, through his narrative, that human life has any
meaning or value. The attempt is suicidal, and the more consistently
it is carried out the more completely is Mr. Dreiser forced to divest
his creatures and their actions of any distinctively human quality and
meaning. The more successful he is the more insignificant his work
becomes. _An American Tragedy_, as I have said, is more skilfully,
faithfully, and consistently executed on the naturalistic level than
any of its author’s earlier novels, and precisely for this reason it
contains no single element of tragedy in any legitimate sense of
the word, and it impresses thoughtful readers as a mere sensational
newspaper story long drawn out. In other words, in proportion as Mr.
Dreiser contrives to accomplish his self-imposed task he has nothing to
tell us except that there is nothing to tell about life until it can be
reduced even below the apparent level of animal existence, to the point
where it becomes a meaningless chaos of blind energies.
Whether or not any real sense of the self-destroying character of
this effort, to create a literature as valueless and insignificant
as possible, will ever strike Mr. Dreiser’s consciousness, I should
not venture to guess. But only an obstinate self-conceit, or an
invincible stupidity, one imagines, could have kept him from seeing the
absurdities into which he was forced, in the course of half-a-dozen
sentences, when he recently attempted to draw up a brief statement of
his present belief. He wrote: “I can make no comment on my work or my
life that holds either interest or import for me. Nor can I imagine
any explanation or interpretation of any life, my own included, that
would be either true--or important, if true. Life is to me too much a
welter and play of inscrutable forces to permit, in my case at least,
any significant comment. One may paint for one’s own entertainment,
and that of others--perhaps. As I see him the utterly infinitesimal
individual weaves among the mysteries a floss-like and wholly
meaningless course--if course it be. In short I catch no meaning from
all I have seen, and pass quite as I came, confused and dismayed.”[44]
To this point has Mr. Dreiser’s naturalism driven him. If the general
sense of this awkward yet mannered statement comprised the truth about
him and his work, he would, of course, never have been asked to make
it. He would, in all probability, have been confined long ago to an
asylum; and he would certainly never have written any of his books.
Those books, moreover, have manifestly not been written just for his
own entertainment. They have been written because he felt he had
something to say--because of his certainty that he had come to know the
truth, as men in general knew it not. And with singular faithfulness
of purpose and of industry, involving what for him must have been
almost superhuman effort, because of his defects of mind and training,
he has devoted himself to the struggle to express the truth as he
conceived it--that is, to reduce it to consistency and give it coherent
form. He has also neglected nothing, within his limits, to make it
impressive. He has thus lived a rationally purposive life, reducing at
least to symptoms of order the welter of his impressions and impulses,
controlling at least fitfully his rebellious temperament, and mastering
(or “sublimating”) at least partially his almost pathological obsession
by sex. For the sake of self-expression--or, as I shall presently
suggest, of self-justification--he has thus achieved an appreciably
disciplined life, and so has in his own person, against his own
literary aim, furnished a convincing refutation of his philosophy. He
has effectively proved that _An American Tragedy_ gives form to a view
of life as gratuitous as it is unmeaning.
Fortunately it is now realised by an increasing number of people that
naturalistic philosophies are merely speculative ventures, which derive
no valid support from “modern science.” And it has, besides, been
shown above how little “science” had to do with the formation of Mr.
Dreiser’s naturalistic prejudice. Mr. Dreiser, on his own showing, was
first awakened to a sense of life as a problem to be solved by his
discovery of the radical contrast between the ethical standards of his
father and his church (as he understood its teaching), and his own
spontaneous impulses and desires. His haphazard, undirected education
gave him an unexcelled opportunity to learn that there were many
others like himself, that they seemed to be the most vigorous members
of their communities, and that they never hesitated to transgress every
ethical standard, when they could get away with it, in their struggle
for self-advancement and self-gratification. He treasured every
impression which seemed to be on his side against ethical standards
by which he stood condemned. His self-esteem had been gravely shocked
by the discordance he had discovered, and he now found the means to
restore it and, indeed, to strengthen it, by appeal from home and
church to the larger world. Not he was in the wrong of it, but the
“senseless,” “impossible” theories which would have convicted him of
shameful tendencies. “In shame there is no comfort, but to be beyond
all bounds of shame,” says one of Sidney’s Arcadians, and this Mr.
Dreiser might thenceforth have taken for his motto.
Governed by this apolaustic prejudice, he has since continued his
transparent course of seeing only what he has desired to see, or
rather of admitting the reality of only what has suited him, while
setting down all else as either hypocrisy or delusion. And while it is
true that no one escapes the necessity of bringing only a selective
attention to bear upon the outer world, it by no means follows that we
are all alike cut off from “reality.” On the contrary, it does mean
that the basis of our selective attention, the interests and purposes
served by it, are of fundamental importance. And the disastrous effect
of Mr. Dreiser’s apolaustic prejudice is that it encouraged him in
slavery to mere temperament, in helpless surrender to the chaotic flow
of “natural” impulses, while it brought to his attention from the
outer world only what fed itself, the antics of complicated beasts
with strange illusions. The trouble with what he thus saw is not that
it was non-existent, some gross trick of the fevered imagination;--it
was there to be seen--it is there, in grievous plenty. No, the
trouble is that none of it has positive significance. The naturalism
which it fathers lights up the animal in man, but tells man nothing
of that which positively distinguishes him from the beast--more, it
vindictively denies that anything save hypocrisy and delusion does so
distinguish him. And while it seeks to dissolve our humanity, it ends,
as it ends in Mr. Dreiser, in a bottomless morass of misrepresentation
and despair. This is the American tragedy of our confused age which
constitutes the real import of Mr. Dreiser’s masterpiece.
Note--For permission to quote from the writings of Mr. Dreiser, I
am indebted both to him and to his publisher, Mr. Horace Liveright.