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The formation of Theodore Dreiser's critical reputation as a novelist

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The formation of Theodore Dreiser's critical reputation as a novelist

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Content THE FORMATION OF THEODORE DREISER«S GRITIGAL
REPUTATION AS A NOVELIST
A Thesis
Presented, to
the Faculty of the Department of English
The University of Southern California
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
by
William Eugene Mitchell
February 1951
UMI Number: EP44279
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presented to and accepted by the Council on
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..........
Date..
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T/J
TABLE OP CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION ................ 1
The significance of Dreiser in American
literature ........................ 1'
The scope of the present study ............. 3
Industrial expansion and literary trends . * 4>
Realism and naturalism . . ........... 7
II. THE LIFE OP DREISER AND FORMATIVE INFLUENCES . 12
Family background and early y o u t h .... 12
Job experiences and college days ..... 14
Newspaper work..... .................. 17
Dreiser1s reading and the formation of his
philosophical attitude .................. 19
Editorial experience and free-lance writing 21
Marriage and Sister Carrie . ............ 22
Street and Smith; Butterick; editorial
success ............... 24
Free lance writing and travels .......... 26
Politics, social conscience, "causes” . . . 28
Last years ..................... 29
H i . SISTER CARRIE AND JENNIE GERHARDT: NOTORIETY . 31
Synopsis of Sister Carrie ................. 31 ✓
Publication difficulties ................. . 32
iii
CHAPTER PAGE
American reaction to Sister Carrie ..... 34
English reaction 35
Synopsis of Jennie Gerhardt ............ 44
Critical opinion ................ ..... 46
Comparison of the two novels ........ 49
IV. THE CQWPERWOOD SAGA: "THE LAW OP THE JUNGLE” . 52
Publication of the trilogy ......... 52
Synopsis of The Financier............... 53
Synopsis of The Titan ............. 54‘
Critical opinion on The Financier.... 55
Critical opinion on The Titan ....... 59
Comparison of the two novels.............. 62
V. THE ’ GENIUS1: "BARBARIC NATURALISM” ........ 65
Synopsis of The 1 Genius* ........... 65
Revulsion of the newspaper critics '........ 67
Critical evaluation ...................... 68
Professor Sherman’s essay * 71
Suppression ..... 74
Struggle for publication ..... ........ 75
VI. AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY: "THE GREATEST NOVEL OF
OUR GENERATION” .......................... 79
Popularity of the n o v e l .................. 79
Synopsis............... 80
CHAPTER PAGE
Critical praise................... 83
Naturalistic concept of tragedy ........ . 87
l
Elements of romanticizing ......... 89
Justification of style................. . 90
Abandonment of "barbaric naturalism" .... 93
English opinion . ..................... 95
Reasons for favorable reception .......... 101
VII. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS.................... 102
Summary . * .............................. 102;
Conclusions.............................. 106
BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................... 110'
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The place of Theodore Dreiser in American fiction is
secure. Whatever his faults, however valid the criticisms
that have been leveled against him by critics both friendly
and hostile, his gigantic stature as a novelist and his sig
nificance as an indefatigable pioneer in the struggle for
the freedom of literary expression in America remain undis
puted. Considering his many obvious weaknesses--weaknesses
that would have been fatal in any lesser man--it is clear
that, Dreiser must have had enormous compensatory qualities.
As will be shown, his groping sincerity, his vast capacity
for emotion, and his powerful, primitive genius won for him
a growing reputation that reached its zenith in the mid-
’twenties.
But apart from all considerations of Dreiser as a
literary artist, the story of the man’s protracted struggle
for recognition and acceptance and the conditions under
which these goals were realized makes an illuminating study
of the intellectual currents, shifting mores, and trends in
literary criticism during the first quarter of the twentieth
century. These forces found a focus in Dreiser. Dreiser
was everyraan. As one of his interpreters has observed,
He was the lost, bewildered man of the turn of
the century, caught between science .and faith,
2
between city and tom, between the economics of
capitalism and the economics of small scale
competition.^-
Success did not come easily to Dreiser. Throughout
most of his career as a writer he had to contend with
financial insecurity, critical rebuff, and difficulties of
publication and censorship. Shortly after the appearance
of An American Tragedy, the most widely read and discussed
of his books, one reviewer commented: ’ ’ Surely no author
alive has encountered more dragons and hobgoblins and moral
poison gas on his way from obscurity to comparative
acceptance.”2^ A modern critic adds:
/As one things of his career, with its painful
* preparation for literature and its removal from
any literary tradition, it seems remarkable not
that he has been recognized slowly and dimly,
but that he has been recognized at all.3 ^
In the words of H. L. Mencken, Dreiser is ” ... a
phenomenon unescapably visible, but disconcertingly hard
to explain.”4 We may agree with the critics when they
assert that he is a poor craftsman and a muddy thinker.
Granville Hicks, ’ ’ Theodore Dreiser,” American
Mercury, LXII (June, 1946), 751.
2 C. R. Walker, ’ ’ How Big is Dreiser?” Bookman, LXIII ;
(April, 1926), 146.
5 Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal
and Hitchcock, 1947), p. 89.
4 H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces (New Yorkr A. A.
Knopf, 1917),-p.—67.---“ —~ ...--------------
3
His prose lacks felicity. His critical perceptivity ia
immature. His sense of humor is nil. His philosophy is
inconsistent and puerile. Yet when we read him we recognize
significance and even greatness. As one astutely prophetic
reviewer stated in 1926,
Dreiser is one of those writers who are said to have
historical importance, one of those trail-breakers,
that is, who make a deep impress on their own time
and who are known to later generations by reputation
. . . Dreiser’s force and originality— greatness ia
not too strong a word— must become only more obvious
with the passage of years • . /
/ J
In terms of literary trends, national history,
sociological evolution, and scientific and philosophical
influences, the present study will attempt to account for
Dreiser*s rise to success as America*s foremost naturalist.
It will trace Dreiser’s crescive reputation through the
critical reception of the six novels•published during his
i
lifetime, from Sister Carrie (1900) through An American
Tragedy (1925). Other writings by Dreiser, including
the two historically significant but relatively minor
posthumously published novels, will be dealt with
tangentially insofar as they illuminate important aspects
of Dreiser’s development and reputation. Dreiser wrote
I
jextensively in the fields of autobiography, travel,
5 T. K. Whipple, Review of An American Tragedy, New
Republic, XLVI (March 17, 1926), 115.
politics, sociology, and economics. He wrote short stories
plays, free verse, and novels. But, ! , To weigh the man as a
force in the period one must begin with his six novels; the
rest of his output is but chips and explanations and
excursions.1 *6
Before studying the novels and the reputation earned
by them, however, it is best to look briefly at their
.cultural matrix. Following the Civil War, a period of
rapid and radical change came to the United States. It
was a time of inventive fertility, industrial expansion,
urbanization and population increase. The phenomenal
growth of railroads was typical of the new expansion. In
1865 there were thirty-five thousand miles of track in the
land. By 1900 this mileage approached two hundred thousand
By 1884 the Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, and the Santa
:Fe lines had been united with the Pacific Coast with the
rj
assistance of huge governmental land grants. Unhampered
by government regulation, industry boomed, Enormous trusts
and monopolies were controlled by only a handful of men,
1 6 Fred Lewis Pattee, The New American Literature
(New York: The Century Company, 1930), p. 188.
7 Walter Blair, Theodore Hornberger, and Randall
'Stewart, The Literature of the United States (New York:
Scott, Foresman and Company, 194*/),"pp. 239-41.
the "robber barons,” who were frequently unscrupulous in
their business dealings//! Charles T. Yerkes, notorious
Chicago traction magnate of this period, was to become
the prototype of Frank Gowperwood in Dreiser’s "trilogy of
desire."
The rise of industrialism resulted in the sudden
l
growth of the cities, to which were lured thousands upon
thousands of European immigrants and previously rural
Americans•
In 1860 one sixth of our population was urban; in
1900, one third. Between 1880 and 1900 the population
of Chicago -grew from a half million to a million and a
half, and the number of American cities with a
population of one hundred thousand or more increased
from nineteen to thirty-six. City life gained, while
country life suffered, in prestige. It was supposed
by thousands of young Americans that a better life,
somehow, could be lived in the city than in the
country, and the bigger the city, the better the
life. Many novels of the time— especially those of
Theodore Dreiser— show the error of this supposition.
The sudden growth of great urban centers created new
social and economic problems. Municipal government
broke down under the strain. The evils of the slums
appeared for the first time in American life.8
The age was dedicated to money making and power
seeking. Corrupt alliance between big business and
politics was not uncommon. The working classes were
exploited. Imperialism and "manifest destiny"
8 Ikdd., pp. 241-2.
characterized foreign policy* Immaturity of taste was
displayed in the gewgaws and vulgar ornamentation of the
period.j
j Some of our writers rose in protest against the
/
avaricious, conscienceless materialism of the times. In
The Guilded Age (1873), Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
Warner ridiculed the national Zeitgeist, and gave the
period a descriptive name. Henry Adams' novel, Democracy
(1880), was a fictional expose of political corruption.
Hamlin Garland exposed midwestern agricultural injustices
in Main-Travelled Roads (1891). Maggie t A Girl of the
Streets (1893) by Stephen Crane brought to light the
sordid conditions of New York's Bowery. H. B. Puller's
Cliff-Dwellers (1893) and Robert Herrick's The Common Lot
(1904) showed the extent to which Chicago was dominated
by avarice and dishonesty in high civic circles./
"Muckraking" became a definite trend in American
literature, accompanying the "trust-busting" and pro-
gressivism of Theodore Roosevelt. In The Octopus (1901)
Prank Norris protested the ruthless exploitation of the
wheat farmer by the railroad. Lincoln Steffens exposed
political corruption in civic government in Shame of the
'Cities (1904). Upton Sinclair attacked the unspeakable
conditions in the Chicago stockyards in The Jungle (1906),
1
7
a novel -which contributed to the enactment of the Pure Pood
and Drugs Act,9
/ Realism was becoming an unmistakable movement in the
American novel. But the realists had to fight for a popular
hearing, because the new literature grated harshly on ears
accustomed to the circuitous style and Pollyanna-ish
philosophy of the rococo romance. The reception given
The Cliff Dwellers was typical:
When, in 1893, H. B. Puller attempted timidly to record
some of the less shocking truths about life in Chicago
in a novel entitled The Cliff Dwellers he was buried
beneath an avalanche of abuse to the offect that r , life
was not like that,1 1 He emerged two years later with a
book called With the Procession, and again was treated
like a pariah., this time so effectively that he turned
his talent to less noxious themes and did not write
anything worth reading until twenty-three years later
when he tried his luck again as a realist with On the
Stairs.1°
— y ’
./
More palatable had been the fiction of William Dean
Howells, whose realism was, observed Roderigo T. Peria,
” . . . selective, respectable, and restricted by the
1 * 1
conventions of his publishers and Boston,” Credit long
9 Ibid., p. 246,
Burton Rascoe, Theodore Dreiser (New York, 1925)#.*
p. 29' —
Roderigo T. Peria, Realism in the Minor
Imaginative Prose Works of Stephen Crane. "Unpublished
M.aT Thesis, University of Southern California, 1947),
■p, 33,
8
overdue must be given Howells, however. As Alfred Kazin
Our modern literature in America . . . was rooted in
that moving and perhaps inexpressible moral trans
formation of American life, thought, and manners under
the impact of industrial capitalism and science whose
first great recorder was not Dreiser, but Howells--the
Howells who, for all his prodigious limitations, was
so alive to the forces remaking society in his time
that he ”foresaw no literature for the twentieth
century except under Socialism, and said so”j the :
Howells who was so misinterpreted for my generation
by some of the light-bringers of 1920--they saw only
his prudery--that we have forgotten that for him, as
for Tolstoy, morality meant also the relation of man
to his society.12
^'Realism is a term which is subject to a latitude of
interpretations. The realistic school in American fiction
derived from the humorous writing and local color writing
popular earlier in the nineteenth century. In general, the ,
.realists devoted themselves to the portrayal of ' ’ actuality’ 1
and ’ ’ real life.” But in literature as in philosophy some
disagreement existed as to the nature of reality.
Where was the ’real* to be found— in the world
itself, in the inductively discovered scientific
truths about the nature of the world, in the impression :
" ' the observer*s mind, or in a 1
says,
One answer was naturalism, an extreme form of
0£. cit., viii-ix.
13 Blair, op. cit., p. 283.
9
realism adopted by Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, a method
and philosophy of literature most notoriously championed
by Emile Zola in France. Naturalism, in essence, was the
application of scientific methods to writing. Subjectivity
was, at least in theory, eliminated, and frank, exhaustive,
detached reporting was attempted. The naturalist saw men
as complicated and generally unfortunate animals within
the all-inclusive framework of nature. His philosophical
position was that of nineteenth century mechanistic
materialism. Consequently, men were seen as the helpless
victims of inexorable fate, since determinism was held to
be absolute. In practice, naturalistic fiction tended to
be sordid and pessimistic, for its practitioners drew most
of their material from the lower strata of society, where
poverty, brute suffering, and degradation were most
concentrated. Naturalism strove for completeness and
accuracy of presentation, piling fact upon fact, until
the effect of unselective reality was finally produced.
Theodore Dreiser, as we shall see, was singularly
qualified to write naturalistic fiction.
/ The following comparison between the methods of
/
■Howells and Dreiser provides an illuminating example,of one
aspect of the difference between realism and naturalism:
Whereas Howells, in describing the wreck of a ;
carriage, had contented himself with a single sentence, ,
10
Dreiser, in describing the wreck of a speeding
automobile, must relate just how the car strikes
an unpaved section of the street, how it caroms
upon a lumber pile, how it is thrown over on its
left side, in just what direction each of the eight
occupants is thrown, what positions they occupy in the
wrecked car, how six of them are got out, and how each
one reacts to the aceident.14
controversial, and to many minds smacked of cheap
sensationalism. ''Nice” people in innocuous situations
no longer engaged the attentions of serious young authors.
The new novelists believed that
The novel, a powerful modern agency for civilization,
must go deeper than it had gone in the United States,
must turn to the light various ugly realities which,
too long neglected, were growing more dangerous every
day. It must deal candidly with political corruption,
with economic injustice, with religious unrest, with
sexual irregularities, with greed and doubt and hate
and cruelty and blood, as well as with its standard
subjects. It must assert its rights, its obligation,
to speak of anything it chose, provided only the thing
were true. °
One factor that helped to displace the genteel
tradition” was the heterogeneity of the foreign elements
that came to comprise more and more of the urban
population. The immigrants brought fresh blood to a
- 1 - 4 Walter Puller Taylor, A History of American
Letters (Boston: American Book Company, 1936"), p. .
^ Carl Van Doren, The American Hovel (Hew York:
Macmillan and Company, 1921), pi 257^
Often, the subject matter of naturalism was bold,
I
11
literary tradition that had been conditioned mainly by the
poetry and prose of England. The young witers no longer
genuflected in blind adulation toward Albion*s shores.
Young Stephen Crane was even moved to refer to Tennyson* s
poetry as ’ ’ swill.** It was apparent that
. . . new forces were gathering. Gradually in the
book-lists appeared names uncouth and strange—
Bodehheim, Dreiser, Huneker, Mencken, Oppenheim,
Sandburg, Santayana, Kreymborg, Crapsey, Guiterman,
Orrick Johns, Giovannitti; and so on their works and
others began to be handled by new publishing houses
bearing such un-Puritanic names as Knopf, Boni &
Liveright, Covici, Sons and grandsons of immigrants
these men were for the most part, men who had borne
into American ideals and conceptions totally un-
Anglo-Saxon. 16
i
Pat tee, o£. cit., p. 17
CHAPTER II
THE LIFE OF DREISER AMD FORMATIVE INFLUENCES
Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, August 27, 1871,
Theodore Dreiser was the twelfth of thirteen children
born to John Paul and Sarah Dreiser, John Paul Dreiser
was a German immigrant who came to America in 1844 to
escape conscription. In this country he had earned his
livelihood as a weaver and become the proprietor of a
woolen mill in Terre Haute, but the burning of the un
insured mill left the family impoverished. John Dreiser
was unemployed and morose during most of Theodore Dreiser1s
early years. Until he was twenty, Theodore was to know
extreme poverty and the humiliations which accompany such
a s tate. He knew
. . . meals consisting of only fried potatoes or fried
mushj and learned to pick up coal from between the
railroad tracks, even to steal it from the cars, that
there might be some warmth at home and some heat to
cook what food there was.-*-
The sordidness of his early environment led him to over
value the goal of materialistic success, with the luxuries
and pleasures which money plainly made possible.
i
As a boy, Dreiser was sickly, diffident, and serious.
X
Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of
Nature (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1§48), p. 8.
13
He had a marked stutter, and became the target of bullies.
He had also a noticeable tendency toward withdrawal, which
led to reverie and introspection. His brooding was a life
long characteristic.
His father was a Catholic of extreme strictness,
and Preiser spoke of him as ”a narrow hide-bound
religionist.” John Paul Dreiser was usually petulant and
.inactive, given to lamenting the wildness of his offspring,
Dreiser*s mother, on the other hand, was practical,
earthy, and sympathetic toward her children. Dreiser
remembered her as a ’ ’ happy . . . pagan mother.” Dreiser’s
lifelong antipathy to organized religion in general and
Catholicism in particular was generated in part by the
bigotry he observed in his father and the terrors and
abuses he suffered in parochial school. But Dreiser’s
:attitude toward his father was neither callous nor
condemnatory. In many ways a portrait of Dreiser’s own
father, old Papa G-erhardt in Jennie G-erhardt is character
ized tenderly and sympathetically, with pity for the
superstitious, fiercely proud, unhappy, adamant, yet
wistful old man.
The boy Theodore was entranced by the tales told
!
| him by his two older brothers, Rome Dreiser and Paul
Dreiser (who wrote songs under the name of Paul Dresser). i
Rome was a nomadic adventurer, and his glittering accounts
of transcontinental high living fed the hungry imagination
■of Theodore. Paul had achieved a position of comparative
wealth through his songs (1 1 Just Tell Them That You Saw Me, ”
”My Gal Sal," "On the Banks of the Wabash"), and his world
of wine, women, and song-writing seemed idyllic to
Theodore*
Dreiser’s sisters were undergoing experiences that
were later to supply the young author with material for
fiction. The girls, also swept away by the materialistic
.dream, were more concerned with pleasure seeking and money
spending than with contributing to the family upkeep.
They behaved ’ ’shockingly" with men. Although John Dreiser
". . . was sometimes quite innocent of the real source of
a daughter’s hats and slippers, he so often suspected the
truth that his suspicions must now and then have coincided
t
with the facts."2 One of the girls eloped with a married
man. Another bore a child out of wedlock.
Dreiser entered public school for the first time in
,the seventh grade, and found the environment a welcome
Irelief from that of the parochial schools he had previously
2 Ibid., p. 13.
15
attended. His new teacher took a persons!interest in him,
praised his scholastic efforts and directed his reading to
the works of Irving, Hawthorne, and the New England poets.
When he was sixteen he went to Chicago to find work.
He secured menial jobs which were of brief duration. He
worked as busboy and dishwasher, stove polisher, coal
shoveler, and car-traeer with a railroad company.
Then, quite unexpectedly, he was approached by a
former high-school teacher, Mildred Fielding, with the
proposal that he attend the University of Indiana for the
following year at her expense. She argued that Dreiser
was deserving of further education. She felt that college
would help him find himself, and would stimulate him to
the intellectual accomplishments for which he had shown
capacity. Dreiser accepted her offer, and she arranged
for his admission despite his incomplete high-school
preparation.
Dreiser studied at the university during the 1889-90 :
academic year. He took elementary Latin, geometry,
philosophy, and ’ ’ Study of Words.” ”He wanted to know a
’little about everything, but not too much, and to read and
be admitted to the realm of pure knowledge.”5 But of
3 Ibid*. P« 26.
16
equal importance were the associations with fellow students,
who shared his curiosity about life and exchanged opinions
with him. The one year at Bloomington completed his formal
education, for he felt that the curriculum ’ ’did not concern
ordinary life at all.*’ The bulk of his education was
derived from his extensive later reading.
Returning to Chicago, Dreiser worked at a succession ,
of poorly paying jobs. He secured a position in a real-
estate office. He made laundry pick-ups and deliveries in
a wagon. He collected bills for a furniture company. He
was discharged from this latter position, however, for
withholding $25 to buy clothing, a sum which he had intended
to repay surreptitiously in amounts of thirty-five cents.
Dreiser had for some time been entertaining the idea
of becoming a newspaper reporter. The life of a reporter, i
he imagined, would be most congenial to his temperament.
It would offer him intellectual stimulation and would allow
him to comment sagely on life. He had long admired Eugene
Field’s column, ’ ’ Sharps and Flats,” in the Daily News, and
had even submitted some jottings to Field, though he
received no acknowledgement. !
After he had failed to secure immediately a position
•as a city reporter, Dreiser accepted a job with a second ;
:”easy-payment” firm and in his spare time he practiced
1?
writing news stories, real and imaginary. In June, 1892,
tie was employed as a reporter on the Chicago Daily Globe.
•He covered the Democratic Party convention that year, and
a fortuitous scoop predicting Cleveland’s nomination won
for him the approval of the Globe staff. During his
employment, seme of his colleagues expressed enthusiasm
for a ’ ’ slum romance” he had written, and told him that he
had the ability for something higher than mere reporting.
After six months, he was encouraged by newspaper
friends to accept a better job with the St. Louis Globe-
Democrat. He showed great competence as a reporter on
that paper, and was soon given an anonymous column, ’ ’ Heard
in the Corridors,” which consisted regularly of several
anecdotes supposedly ’ ’ overheard” in the hotels or the
station. His creative aspirations grew in St. Louis,
and friends encouraged him in his ambition to write
*
creatively. But for the time being, his energies were
absorbed by his various reportorial duties. He became
drama editor, and developed enthusiasm for the theatre.
He even outlined the plot of a comic opera of his own. 4
He resigned in embarrassment from the Globe-Democrat
^ Ibid., p. 29
18
after he had written and published a column supposedly
covering the opening of a new play on the basis of advance
notices, only to discover that the play had not opened,
after all, because inclement weather had delayed the
arrival of the theatrical company.
He accepted a position on the St. Louis Republic a
week later, and gained further reportorial experience. But
after some months on this paper he felt a growing restless-
ness, and decided to go east. His plan was to run a country;
newspaper near Grand Rapids, Ohio, in partnership with a
.friend from Chicago days. Upon arrival in Ohio, however,
Dreiser saw the futility of such a venture. The prospects
of success were poor, and he found country life dull and
stifling. He left for Toledo, where he secured a temporary ,
job with the Toledo Blade. He formed a close friendship
with Arthur Henry, city editor of the Blade, for the two
had common newspaper acquaintances in Chicago, and both had j
literary ambitions, Henry as a novelist and Dreiser as a
playwright. Dreiser soon left for Cleveland, in search of
a better job. He found little employment in that city, and ■
in April, 1894, he became a reporter for the Pittsburgh
Dispatch. Soon he was writing feature articles and
Assisting the drama editor. During his stay in Pittsburgh
he spent much of his time in the Carnegie Library, reading
19
Balzac, an author whom he had long heard praised. He was
entranced by the stories and speculations of the French
novelist, finding in him a man of his own temperament and
philosophy. He also read George Eliot, Bulwer-Lytton,
and Fielding.
Again restless, he decided to try his luck in Hew
York. He found the city to his liking, and planned to
.settle there. It seemed possible to realize one's dreams
of art and wealth in Hew York. The sophistication and
lavishness of Manhattan made him realize that he was not
yet ready for this life, however, and he went back to
Pittsburgh in order to accumulate enough money to provide
him with temporary security when he was to return. Again
on the Dispatch, he resumed his library reading, and it
was during the following months that his philosophy of -life
crystalized.
In Thomas Henry Huxley's Science and Hebrew
Tradition he found a brilliant consideration of Judao-
Christian morality and cosmogony in the light of Darwinism !
and 19th century science. He found that there was abundant
scientific and philosophic justification for rejecting the
i
Bible as unquestionable revelation from on high. His
doubts concerning organized religion were confirmed. When
he read Herbert Spencer, he was nblown to bits
20
intellectually,” as he later phrased it. Until then he had
retained the faith that absolute good existed, that it could
be determined, and that it was extricable from evil*5 Now
he was convinced that value judgments of "good” and ’ ’ evil”
were merely relative, subjective appraisals of an amoral
universe which was geared, through an Unknown Cause, to
the survival of the fittest. He concluded that men were
helpless to choose their own destinies. They operated
through “chemic compulsions.” Nature was indifferent.
■The new perspective finds epigrammatic expression in
Stephen Crane’s War is Kind:
A man said to the universe
’ ’ Sir, I exist I”
’ ’ However,” replied the universe,
’ ’ The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
The materialistic point of view ” ... might have
meant peace of mind for Dreiser . . . It relieved him of
the obligation to regard human beings as corrupt. Where
everything was as it must be, nothing could become what it
ought to be.” But Dreiser found no peace in the cold
consolation of materialism. In The Varieties of Religious
5 Ibid., p. 82.
6 Ibid.. pp. 82-83.
21
Experience Williara James noted that the purely naturalistic
view of life is sure to end in sadness. Certainly this
observation seems to describe the case of Dreiser. The
pessimistic insights of 19th century science and philosophy
left him depressed, and conditioned the dreary Weitans- :
chauung of his major novels.
Returning to Hew York, Dreiser briefly worked as a
reporter on the Hex? York World. Resigning this position
because of low pay and lack of recognition, he went to the
offices of Howley, Haviland & Company, Paul Dresser's
publishers. Dreiser learned that the company was con
templating the publication of a small magazine. He proposed
that he be made editor, and promised to produce a magazine
superior to that of the rival company, if he were hired.
Howley and Haviland accepted his proposal, and the new
publication, called Ev’ry Month, appeared on October 1,
1895, with Theodore Dreiser as ’ ’ The Editor and Arranger.’ 1
The central feature of each issue was to be three or four
songs, but the literary pages were of more interest to
Dreiser, and during his two years’ editorship considerable !
new fiction, including short stories by Bret Harte and j
Stephen Crane, appeared therein, as well as characteristic ;
t
ruminations and editorials by Dreiser.
In 1897 he became restless, feeling that his duties
22
with Ev*ry Month were too restrictive and that his creative
impulses would remain thwarted if he continued with the
magazine. Arthur Henry, his friend from Toledo days,
persuaded him to resign his editorship and undertake
free-lance writing. Dreiser did this, and enjoyed con
siderable success from the signed articles, essays, and
interviews which were published in national magazines.
In December, 1898, Dreiser married, after a long
engagement, Miss Sallie White, a schoolteacher whom he had
met back in Globe-Demoorat days, and with whom he had since
been corresponding. Then, in the summer of 1899, Dreiser
and his wife, at the urging of Henry, went to the Henry
home in Maumee, Ohio, for a protracted visit which would
provide the necessary leisure for creative writing.
Dreiser wrote a short story, ”The Shining Slave Makers,’ 1
and to his surprise it was purchased for seventy-five
dollars by Ainslee * s Magazine. He wrote four more stories
and sold them all. When he returned to New York in
.September, accompanied by Sallie and Henry, he had
determined to write a novel. The two words he wrote at
the top of the first page of his narrative were ’ ’Sister
Carrie.” Within six months his first novel was completed.
i
The vicissitudes attendant upon publication and the belated ,
popular recognition of this novel will be discussed in the
23
next chapter.
The disappointing American reception of Sister Carrie
caused Dreiser to resume writing magazine articles. Since
only a few hundred copies of the novel had been sold, with
royalties totaling less than one hundred dollars for the
author, it was small wonder that he returned to writing the
short periodical pieces that had average seventy-five
dollars each. Concurrently with this hack writing, however,
Dreiser worked tentatively on two novels, one of which was
to be published eventually as Jennie Gerhardt.
For three years Dreiser knew poverty again. He was
deeply discouraged over his failure in fiction. He felt
that his wife was not sympathetic toward his literary
ambitions, and he desired freedom. After several brief
;and unsatisfactory reunions, permanent separation occurred
in 1912, although Mrs. Dreiser's refusal to grant him a
divorce prevented his remarriage until her death in 1942.
Dreiser grew increasingly dejected and neurasthenic,
■falling deeper and deeper into poverty and confusion. A
quarrel with Paul prevented Dreiser from seeking his aid.
But finally, a chance encounter in the street made apparent
to Paul the desperate circumstances of his younger brother,
. and he immediately furnished him with a roll of bills and
,arranged for a brief convalescence in a private sanatarium.
\
24
When Dreiser emerged six weeks later he had begun to regain
his health and confidence, and once again undertook his
magazine writing, along with a six months* outdoor job with
the New York Central Railroad*
In 1904 Dreiser returned to newspaper work for a
time as assistant feature-section editor of the New York
Daily News. Later that year he applied to Street and
Smith, publishers of cheap fiction magazines, and secured
a job as fiction editor. He then became the editor of a
new illustrated monthly, Smith* s Magazine, for the same
company. Within one year Dreiser had doubled the
magazine’s circulation. In April, .1906, he moved on to
a better position as managing editor of the Broadway
Magazine. He was also successful in this job, and by June,
1907, Dreiser was invited to direct the Delineator, De
signer, and New Idea Woman* s Magazine for Butterick
Publications at a beginning salary of seven thousand
dollars. He accepted, and found himself a man of influence.
His story writers included Ludwig Lewisohn, Mary Stewart
Cutting, Zona Sale, Rupert Hughes, Ella Wheeler Wilcox,
P. Marion Crawford, and Honor/ Willsie.
In the meantime the reissue of Sister Carrie by
B. W. Dodge and Company at last brought Dreiser American
recognition as a novelist. Royalties began to flow in
25
moderately from this source. Dreiser was realizing his
early dream of material success.
While he was with the Delineator, Dreiser*s social
conscience asserted itself. Long troubled by the many
injustices of the society about him, he was finally in a
position to exert some influence as a propagandist for
reform. He wrote a series of articles on the pathetic
situation of orphaned children in institutions, and
crusaded for their placement in private homes. He
organized the National Child Rescue League for this
j
purpose, with James E. West as secretary. Dreiser also
.featured articles on factory reforms and women*s suffrage.
Eventually, Dreiser*s plans for the Delineator*s
content began to clash with those of the publishers. He
grew impatient with the effete romantic fiction they
demanded, devoid of all controversy and originality. His
editorial policy was criticized. While retaining his
Butterick position, he covertly edited the Bohemian. This
magazine endured for only four months— a financial failure,
.although it featured editorials by H. L. Mencken, fiction
'by Homer Croy and James L. Ford, and articles by Hereward
Carrington.
Dreiser*s relations with the Delineator were severed
:in 1910, following a scandal which involved a liaison with
26
the daughter of a Butterick employee, Mrs, Dreiser still
refused to divorce him, though he persisted in having
affairs. Resigning from Butterick*s, Dreiser was free to
devote himself entirely to fiction, for he was now
financially secure. He resumed work on Jennie G-erhardt,
begun ten years earlier, and shortly completed it. Harper
and Brothers accepted the novel, which appeared in 1911, ;
Jennie Gerhardt was the first of four new novels completed
within five years of Dreiser*s termination of duties with
Butterick*s. In 1912 The Financier was published, and in
1914 was followed by a sequel, The Titan. The nGenius”
was published in 1915. In 1912 he went to Europe under
contract to do a series of articles on his trip for the
Century Company. A Traveler at Forty was published in
1914.
)
During the next few years Dreiser lived in New York,
.wrote and published plays, short stories, free verse,
speculative essays, and autobiography. His controversial
.novels had won for him fame, notoriety, and the friendship ;
; and respect of many American writers. During these three
years his own investigations into literature, science, and > .
■philosophy continued. In 1920 he published a book of .
; assorted essays and plays. Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, subtitled !
A Book of the Mystery and Terror and Wonder of Life, was a j
27
peasant equivalent of The Waste Land. The following
passage, a frequently quoted on, is characteristic of
Dreiser’s bewildered, chronic agnosticism:
. . . I am one of those curious people who can not make
up their minds about anything. I read and read,
almost everything that I can lay hands on--history,
politics, philosophy, art. But I find that one history
contradicts another, one philosopher drives out another.
Essayists, in the main, point out flaws and paradoxes
in the current conception of things j novelists,
dramatists and biographers spread tales of endless
disasters, or silly illusions concerning life, duty,
love, opportunity and the like. .And I sit here and
read and read and read, when I have the time,
wondering.7
Prom 1920 to 1922 Dreiser resided leisurely in
California, partly to recuperate from the strain of the
preceding years, and partly to investigate the offers of
a moving-picture company. In Hollywood he met and fell
in love with a young actress, Helen Richardson, who
abandoned her plans for a movie career to remain with him
,for the rest of his years. The couple were married after
the death of Dreiser’s wife in 1942.
After the success of An American Tragedy (1925),
the novel that announced his unqualified arrival and
^consolidated his literary reputation, Dreiser was widely
7 Theodore Dreiser, Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub (New York,
1920), p. 2.
i
28
regarded as a man of influence, and his opinions were much
sought after by the press. In the summer of 1926 he made
a trip to Europe, consulting with his foreign publishers,
gathering further data on Yerkes, the model for the
Cowperwood trilogy, and visiting his father’s birthplace
in Germany. Late in 1927 he accepted an invitation from
the Soviet Union to observe communism in action. He found
communism no panacea, and objected to Russia's tyranny and
dogmatic theory, though he expressed admiration for many
of the social and economic reforms. His views were not
changed, for several years. They remained, ”. . . for the
most part, reiterations of his objections to middle-class
standards, of his hope for improved social conditions, and
of his rejection of formulas.”®
During the nineteen thirties, Dreiser allied himself 1
with a number of specific social causes. He attacked
economic injustice and religious obscurantism, and became
increasingly sympathetic toward the Russian experiment,
though he refused to follow the Communist Party line, and
preferred to call himself an ”equitist.” In 1931 he
formed and headed the national Committee for the Defense of ‘
8 Elias, op. cit., pp. 226-7.
29
Political Prisoners, with Lincoln Steffens as the
committee's treasurer. Prom 1932 to 1934 he helped edit
American Spectator, a literary newspaper with liberal
leanings. He resigned from this duty because he felt his
fellow editors were too-subservient to the opinions of the
advertisers.
Although he was sympathetic with the Roosevelt
administration in its early years, he grew hostile toward
it as the second World War approached. Dreiser, a violent
Anglophobe, resented bitterly the growing ties with England.
He supported Earl Browder in 1940. In 1945, the year of
his death, he was persuaded to join the Communist Party.
During his last years, Dreiser’s philosophy under
went significant changes. Though long an enemy of
religion, he now became something of a pantheist, seeing
'in all life the workings of an intrinsic Creative Force.
This point of view is apparent in The Bulwark. When
Dreiser started work on this novel, almost thirty years
previously, he had intended it to show the breakdown of
faith and the inadequacy of religions. As he resumed work
on the book in his last years, he changed the theme of the
novel. Prom an attack on religious faith his story became
a defense of it. The same mellow pantheism is to be found
in the closing chapters of The Stoic, completed in the days
i
before his death,
Theodore Dreiser died in Hollywood, California, on
December 28, 1945. He left his entire estate to his wife,
Helen Richardson Dreiser, with the provision that at her
death it would go to a home for Negro orphans*
CHAPTER III
SISTER CARRIE AMD JENHIE GERHARDT: NOTORIETY
I
f Carrie Heeber, an attractive girl of eighteen from
an impoverished midwestern farm family, goes to Chicago to
earn her own living and to board with her married sister.
On the Chicago-bound train she meets Drouet, a travelling
salesman, a "drummer," whose easy sophistication and
glittering affluence impress the country girl. In Chicago
she is unable to find satisfactory work, and is unhappy
in the dull and impecunious home of her sister. Drouet
calls on Carrie, takes an interest in her, encourages her
to move from her sister*s home Into a room of her own,
and ultimately persuades her to live with him. But the
arrangement is not entirely satisfactory for Carrie,
because the irresponsible Drouet continually postpones
the marriage ceremony he has promised.
In the meantime, Hurstwood, a friend of Drouet*s
and the manager of a "truly swell" uptown saloon, has
fallen in love with Carrie. Hurstwood is an ostensibly
respectable married man with a home and family, but his
infatuation for Carrie prompts him to abscond with his
establishment's funds, and the two lovers flee to the
I
.anonymity of New York. There, Hurstwood is unable to
establish himself in a successful job, and he gradually
32
descends into poverty, humiliation, and eventual suicide*
Carrie, on the other hand, obtains theatrical work, and
attains considerable success as an actress. She gains
security but not happiness.|
Dreiser completed Sister Carrie in the spring of
1900. He submitted it to Henry Mills Alden, the editor
of Harper*s Magazine, who had previously bought several
of his articles. Alden liked the novel but told its author
that he doubted if any publisher would take it. Alden
turned the manuscript over to the editorial readers of
Harper and Brothers, who returned it with no comment except
that they would not publish the book.
Dreiser then submitted it to Doubleday, Page and
Company, where Prank Morris was employed as a reader.
Norris perceived the merits of the novel immediately.
MIt must be published,” he kept repeating to his friends
■ and co-workers
Although Henry Lanier and Walter Hines Page, junior
partners in the firm, had some misgivings about publishing
Sister Carrie, the enthusiasm of Norris influenced them to
accept the novel. A contract was signed to publish it in
!
! .
Malcom Cowley, ”Slow Triumph of Sister Carrie,”
New Republic, CXVI (June 23, 1947), 25. ^
33
the fall of 1900* Then Prank Doubleday, the senior partner,
returned from Europe and took the proof sheets home to read
over a weekend. Mrs. Doubleday read the manuscript also,
and became indignant over what seemed to her a highly
immoral piece of fiction. Prank Doubleday arrived at a
similar evaluation. HHe detested the book and wanted
2
nothing to do with it as a publisher.r t
An argument between author and publisher ensued.
At the urging of Norris, Dreiser pointed to his contract
with the firm, and insisted upon publication. The company
was obligated.
It was a binding document and it was observed, to the
letter. Sister Carrie was printed, if only in an
edition of ro ughly a^Eho us and copies. It was bound,
if in cheap red-', cloth with dull black lettering. It
was listed in the Doubleday catalogue. It was even
submitted to the press for review, if only, in most
cases, through the Intervention of Prank Norris. When
orders came in for it, they were filled. It wasn’t
’supressed* or ’buried away in a cellar,’ as
Dreiser’s friends afterwards complained, but neither
was it displayed or advertised or urged on the book
sellers. . . . One couldn’t quite say that it was
killed; it was merely deprived of light and air and
left to die.3
The Doubleday records show the actual disposition of the
copies printed. Of the 1,008 bound copies, 129 were
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid
34
distributed for review and only 465 were actually sold.
Five years later the remaining 414 copies, together with
the plates from which they had been printed, were turned
over to a company specializing in publishers* remainders.
When Dreiser’s editorial work made him financially able
to do so, he bought these plates and the unsold copies
for $500. He induced the B. W. Dodge Company to reprint
\
the book in 1907. In 1908 Grosset and Dunlap bought the
book and published it."^
/The few early notices of the novel predicted no
great popularity for it, and tended to disparage the book’s
philosophy. Reviewing Sister Carrie, the Seattle Post-
Intelligencer (Jan. 20, 1901, U.P.) sees in it certain
weaknesses, but grants recognition of the book’s
significance and power:
The philosophy of the book is very clear and very
interesting. Its incidents, the squalid plane upon
which its development takes place, will naturally
prevent it from achieving .a marked popularity. Even
Mr. Dreiser’s antiseptic style cannot make it anything ;
but a most unpleasant tale, and you would never dream
of recommending /Tt"J to another person to read. Yet
the fact remains that as a work of literature and the
philosophy of human life it comes within sight of
greatness *
4 Ibid., p. 26.
5 Quoted by Elias, 0£. cit., p. 115.
35
But on the whole, the book met with the apathy or outright
hostility of reviewers. It received little notice and no
publicity. Dreiser was just another dreary realist. A
reviewer for the Book Buyer concludes that "Mr. Theodore
Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie, is a latter-day
realist with a vengeance. He sees neither from above nor
below; he stands on a level with average life, and his
stature is not a great one," As for philosophy, "Mr.
Dreiser’s realism is simply materialism. /
/
/ In 1901 Sister Carrie was published in England as
a selection in the Heinemann "Dollar Library." The
British critics were laudatory in their reviews, and the
book sold rather well./ The reviewer for the Athenaeum
/ '“ " 1 T . . 1" " " - r - ' - r - — it- — t
predicted that some of the novel’s readers "... will
find permanent place upon their shelves for the book beside
I
8
M. Zola’s ’Nana.’"j He appraises the novel as follows:
. . . The phrasing is of the streets and the bars —
colloquial, familiar, vivid, slangy, unlovely, but
intensely real. Of the manner of the book it is not
easy to speak favourably; it is strikingly unworthyy
A. Schade van Westrum, "The Decadence of Realism,"
Book Buyer, XXII (March, 1901), 137.
7
q ;
Anonymous, Review of Sister Carrie, The Athenaeum, j
(September 7, 1901), 313.
36
of the matter thereof.
It is a very plain tale of a plain though eventful
life. Between its covers no single note of unreality
is struck. It is untrammelled by any single concession
to convention or tradition, literary or social. It
is as compact of actuality as a police-court record,
and throughout its pages one feels pulsing the sturdy,
restless energy of a young people, a cosmopolitan
community, a nation busy upon the hither side of
maturity.^
r f
The English success of Sister Carrie naturally
if
aroused considerable American curiosity as to the nature
of the unavailable book, and when it was consequently
reissued in 1907 it received substantially more critical
attention than it had seven years earlier, /
In the May, 1907, issue of Bookman Frederic Taber
Cooper admits that "In America, it is no exaggeration to say
that the book never had a fair hearing. In England, its
merits were quickly recognized , . .”10 Cooper confesses
■ that on the first reading the book . gripped ^Eim/'
with a force unequalled by any other American novel that
'has appeared within five years of it . . . ”H
criticizes only the novel’s "colorless and misleading
9
10 pp©deric Taber Gooper, "The Fetich of Form and
Some Recent Novels," Bookman, XXV (May, 1907), 287.
11 Ibid
37
jtitle,” saying that he has grown weary of explaining to
friends that Carrie is not the member of a religious
order. Elsewhere Cooper suggests that the title was /
/
. . . selected for its symbolic sense, as a reminder
of the ties of blood between the Carries of this
world and their more fortunate sisters, a reminder
that we are our sisters1 as well as our brothers1
keepers
He denies the earlier charges of the novel*s indecency,
f
and commends its honesty: /
A strong book, yes. An unpleasant book, also, if
fearlessness and sincerity are unpleasant. But
surely in no conceivable sense an immoral book.
It ought to have a widespread hearing.13
c The novel is now considered .a moral book, whereas
the reviews of 1900 had charged it with immorality,^
Joseph Coates observes that:/
The conditions under which she /Carrie/ comes to
live are not justified, nor excused, By any acceptable
code. But they are not uncommon, and Mr. Dreiser
handles them with such delicacy of treatment and in
such a clean largeness of mental attitude, that they
simply enforce an impressive moral lesson.- * - 4
12 Frederic Taber Cooper, "The Fallacy of Tendencies
in Fiction,” Forum, XXXIX (July, 1907), 117.
- 1 - 3 Cooper, o£. cit., p. 287.
^ Joseph H. Coates, "Sister Carrie,” North American
Review, CLXXXVI (October, 1907), 289.
The reviewer recognizes Dreiser*s talent as a writer,
asserting that , f . • . rarely has a new novelist shown
so singular a power of virile earnestness and serious
purpose with unusual faculty of keenly analytic painting
of pictures.’ 1*^
He shows absolute sincerity, he plays you no tricksj
he is rigidly uncompromising, he scorns to tamper
with the truth as he knows it, he refuses any
subterfuges or weak dallying with what, to him at
least, are the crucial facts of life. One may not
always accept his philosophy fully and without reserve,
but he himself believes in it. That is the general
impression the book creates, and he possesses, there
fore, a compelling individuality which is bound to make
its mark.-1 -®/
The strengths of Sister Carrie are the strengths of
naturalism. Objectivity, honesty, inclusiveness, and
unsentimentality are there. Testimony to the successful
realism of Sister Carrie is given by Harrison Rhodes, ?/ho
says that Dreiser . . convinces us ^that he is showing
us the look of things as they are., , J -'f A further comment by
this reviewer indicates the naturalistic character of the
:book: _
A greater virtue is the calm, dispassionate, un
sentimental way in which he refuses to mould his
15 Ibid., p. 288.
16 Ibid.
1*7
Harrison Rhodes, "Mr. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie,n
Bookman, XXV (May, 1907), 299.
characters to any supposed exigencies of the plot or
of its ’human interest,’ to employ the current cant
phrase*-’ -®
I ' Dreiser’s strength was never style, although the
style of Sister Carrie is adequate for the subject matter*
Cooper finds it n. * .an unpretentious book, written
without any effort after style, but with a downright
sincerity that compels attention.Rhodes makes the
following observation:
Mr. Dreiser takes a number of what he might perhaps
call ’flush colourful’ liberties with the English
language, but on the whole his style is fairly
simple and serviceable. And though his book deals
with vulgar people, it is essentially never itself
vulgar. It is needlessly prolix, but it is a good
book, in some ways a remarkable one.^Qf
18 Ibid.
^ Cooper, op. cit., p. 117.
20
Rhodes, op. cit., p. 298. (Dreiser’s
.characteristic prolixity is already observed. However,
it is interesting to note that for the publication of
Sister Carrie it was necessary to excise 40,000 words
from the bulky original manuscript, leaving a meager
.557 pages. Thus, this "needlessly prolix" first novel
may even impress the reader as compendious if compared
with such enormous later novels as The "Genius" and
An American Tragedy).
40
Two decades after it was written, Sister Carrie was
recognized for the important achievement in American
literature that it was. When Random House established
its Modern Library series in 1924, it desired to publish
Sister Carrie as the first reissue, feeling that this
book, more than any other, was exemplary of the liberation
of modern American literature.2- * - I
Sister Carrie was an iconoclastic novel. It
illuminated a section of American life that had previously
been ignored.
Hitherto no one had dared present, in such a fashion,
such a story about American life. It was tacitly
held, despite all evidences to the contrary, that,
in America, all men were honest, industrious,
altruistic, faithful to one love and true to the
spirit of democracy; and that all women, potentially
or in fact, were either wives or prostitutes and that
the prostitutes were in a negligible minority soon to
be redeemed to society if the good work should go on
21 , f 0ne of the very first books mentioned for |
inclusion in the Modem Library series was Sister Carrie. :
This was back in 1918. This book, as much as any written
by an American, we felt, expressed the trend and spirit
of the literature we wanted in our series. Mr. Dreiser, ,
however, very reasonably kept one eye cocked on the royalty :
statements covering the two-fifty edition, and it was only !
in February, 1932, after more attempts than we care to
think about, that we persuaded him to let us do the book.
f , 'We are proud to have Sister Carrie on our list., f
■(Publisher’s Note to the Mo de r n Lxbr ar y e‘ di t i o n, p. vii ) . >
i
i
41
silently in literature and openly in newspapers and
America continued to advertise herself as the most
moral nation on the face of the "globe.
But Dreiser’s iconoclasm was not premeditated. As Alfred
Kazin says,
He had no desire to shock; he was not perhaps even
conscious that he would shock the few people who read
Sister Carrie in 1900 with consternation. It would ;
never have occurred to Dreiser that in writing the :
story of Hurstwood’s decline he was sapping the
foundations of the genteel. With his flash, his
loud talk and fine linen, his rings and his animal
intelligence, Hurstwood was such a man as Dreiser
had seen over and over again in Chicago. The sleek '
' and high-powered man of affairs automatically became
Dreiser’s favorite hero. To tell his story was to
match reality; and the grossness and poignance of
that reality Dreiser has known better than any other
novelist of our time. *
Prom the vantage point of 1947 George W. Snell had j
r
this to say of Dreiser’s initial venture into novel
; writing:
As a first book, Sister Carrie is surely one of the
most remarkable novels ever written by an American. ' <
; In many respects it is the best novel Dreiser wrote,
for it not only contains his most lucid prose, but a
minimum of the philosophizing with which he has a
tendency to burden his stories. It has a certain charm :
which none of the other Dreiser novels possess, and its
insights are always true. Carrie as a woman is revealed:
whole, and she is marvelously alive. Almost over
shadowing the story of Carrie herself is the wonderful
22
Burton Rascoe, Theodore Dreiser (New York: R. M.
McBride, 1925), pp. 28-9.
25 Kazin, op. cit., pp. 88-89.
42
narrative of Hurstwood— one of the most moving treat
ments of the theme of a man’s fall since it was
introduced by the Greek dramatists• ^
While critics have been markedly impressed with the
skillful, realistic portrayal of Hurstwood, H. L. Mencken
feels that Sister Carrie suffers from a major structural
defect because of the treatment of this character. In the
middle of the story, he contends, Dreiser shifts the ,
i
emphasis from Carrie to Hurstwood, thus muddling the
book’s artistic unity. In spite of the book’s faults,
Mencken finds much in it to praise:
Its outstanding merit is its simplicity, its un
affected 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# °
( While Sister Carrie is conceded to be the first |
truly naturalistic novel to be written in America, certain
critics have pointed out that the book has qualities that
■are not typical of naturalism. Malcom Cowley observes that
There is a personal and compulsive quality in the
novel that is not at all Naturalistic. The book is
£4 George W. Snell, The Shapers of American Fiction,
1798-1947 (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 194771
p. 238.
25 H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces (New York:
A. A. Knopf, 1917), p. 10^.
felt rather than observed from the outside.^6
The modern reader finds it rather difficult to
understand the early condemnation of Sister Carrie on
moralistic grounds. It is in no sense salacious or
blasphemous. There is almost no profanity. The early
objections were directed at the unconventional plot and
lack of overt moralizing. As Snell remarks,
It Is difficult to see why the Mrs. Doubledays of
that time could have found anything reprehensible in
Sister Carrie; but one reason for our emancipation
from that type of blindness is precisely because
Dreiser and his followers continued to write truth
fully of the life they had known and observed, and
foreswore the cheap romanticizing of the popular
novelists or the timid objectivity of Howells,^
Mencken applauds the book’s artful agnosticism:
The criticism which deals only with externals sees
’Sister Carrie* as no more than a deft adventure
into realism. Dreiser is praised, when he is
praised at all, for making Carrie so clegr, for
understanding her so well. But the truth is, of
course, that his achievement consists precisely in
making patent the impenetrable mystery of her, and
of the tangled complex of striving and aspiration of
which she is so helplessly a part. It is In this
sense that ’Sister Carrie’ Is a profound work. It
is not a book of glib explanations, of ready
formulae; it is, above all else, a book of wonder . .
26
Cowley, op. cit., p. 24*
^ Snell, o£, cit., p. 240.
po
Mencken, op. cit., p. 127.
44
,/ Dreiser’s second novel, Jennie Gerhardt, was
published in 1911 by Harper and Brothers. Like Sister
Carrie, this novel essayed to trace the story of a woman
who defied the conventional moral standards of her day.
It, too, was obviously suggested by incidents in the life
of one of Dreiser’s own sisters. One sister, like Carrie,
;eloped with a married man of superior station; the other, j
1 t
like Jennie, bore a child out of wedlock and left home to 1
'save the family’s reputation.
! The Gerhardt family, indigent but proud, lives in
Columbus, Ohio. Papa Gerhardt is unable to provide for
,the family because of an industrial accident that has
left him incapacitated for work. It is up to Mrs.
, Gerhardt and the eldest of the children, Jennie, to
I
t
,aupport the family. The two take in washings. Among
: their customers is an eminent United States Senator. An i
I
'aging bachelor, Senator Brander is fascinated by Jennie’s
youthful beauty, and strikes up a friendship with her.
'When he learns of the family's needy circumstances, he
makes contributions through Jennie. He becomes intimate
with her, sincerely promising marriage. However, he dies
unexpectedly, leaving Jennie pregnant, She moves to
Cleveland, where she bears Brander's child and secures
a position as maid to a wealthy woman of society. In
45
this employment she meets Lester Kane, the son of a rich
manufacturer, who falls in love with her. Leaving her baby,
Vesta, with her mother, Jennie elopes to New York with Kane,
who wants to marry her but fears the familial wrath he
would incur for a reckless, socially disadvantageous
marriage. He persuades; Jennie to live with him out of
iwedlock. Jennie conceals the existence of her child for
i
three years, fearing Kane’s reaction to the knowledge. ■
But when he does discover Vesta’s existence, and Vesta
;comes to live with them, his love is not diminished.
Kane’s family discovers the liaison, and strenuously but
;futilely objects. After the death of Kane’s father, a (
i
will provides only a small legacy for Kane 'unless he gives 1
up Jennie and marries according to his social position.
p
I
;After long deliberation, Kane decides to marry Letty
jGerald, a cultured, socially prominent widow whom he has '
long known, but he makes ample monetary provision for
I
Carrie and Vesta. Vesta dies, leaving Jennie alone in the :
.world. She adopts two orphans to fill the void in her ;
life. She still loves Lester Kane, but now doubts that he
'ever really loved her. When Kane falls mortally ill during ,
his wife’s absence in Europe, he summons Jennie to his
deathbed, where he confesses his true love for her.
Jennie, although left to face a lonely future, is greatly
consoled by his dying words.
As the second novel by a talented and notorious
author, Jennie Gerhardt was received with widespread
interest. The New York Times concluded that
Jennie Gerhardt* is not a ’gem.* It is, in reality,
a chunk cut out of life today, and the author cuts it
out with no pink, manicured hands. In spite of all
the broad, and sometimes rugged, portrayal it is
clothed with much art.29
: Reviewing Jennie Gerhardt in The Bookman, Calvin
( ,
[Winter states that Dreiser’s second novel provides an
i
janswer to a question raised by his first: H’What are the
i
•mental and moral measurements of this author? Has he
reached the limits of his powers, or is he destined to
go further, much further, into the higher altitudes of
fiction?’" Winter’s answer to this question is that
A careful reading of Jennie Gerhardt is consoling to
| this extent: it does away with the illusion that
Mr. Dreiser has or ever had much greater altitudes to
scale; it shows more fully than his earlier book the
whole gamut of his powers and his limitations; it is,
of the two, a more ambitious effort, a more complex
picture drawn on a wider canvas, — and its defects
1 are proportionately more numerous and more apparent.
Both books are stamped with a certain crudity, both
in literary style and in the specific things which
^0 Anonymous, uJennie Gerhardt," New York Times,
XXVI (November 19, 1911), 728. .
30 Calvin Winter, "Theodore Dreiser’s Jennie
Gerhardt,r i The Bookman, XXXIV (December, 191171 433.
47
certain characters say and do: over and over again the
reader finds himself involuntarily echoing Assessor
Brack1s familiar expostulation, ’But people don’t do
such things »’31
The reviews of Jennie Gerhardt show rather well the
impact of naturalism in American fiction upon the critics.
The initial response is bewilderment, followed by a dawning
comprehension of the aims and methods of the naturalists.
A reviewer for Current Literature notes that
The Chicago Tribune does not like the book, although
it finds in it a certain resemblance to a number of
I remarkable stories — ’Esther Waters,* by George
i Moore, ’Tess of the D’Urbervilles,’ by Thomas Hardy,
and ’Hilda Lessways,’ by Arnold Bennett. This paper
calls it *a tepid and completely modern version of the
Paust story.’ But there are two Fausts, ’neither of
them interesting, and the Gretchen remains sane and
thrifty and grows a trifle stout.’3* *
The reviewer for Independent finds
Jennie’s story of self-forgetful sacrifice . . . told
with the boldest simplicity, with no tragic
heightening of the situation. It is like a gray
day— all the landscape keyed low, and not a gleam
j of cheerful sunlight anywhere. It has the sort of
fatalism which grows out of character.®3
Calvin Winter evinces an appreciation of Dreiser’s
literary method:
31 Ibid.
Anonymous, ' * Jennie Gerhardt,”
Literature, LII (January, 1912 j, 114. . .
3® Anonymous, nJennie Gerhardt,1 1
LXXI (December 7, 1911), 12681
Current
Independent,
48
Pull knowledge means full sympathy, Mr. Dreiser would
seem to say,— and to this end he multiplies little
details unweariedly, endlessly, until there is at
least one character in the story whom we know with
something approaching the intimacy with which we know
ourselves. And since this particular character is
one foredoomed to be swept under in the current of
life, the pervading atmosphere of the book is, as in
Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, a wonderfully sustained
sense of greyness, a fatalistic acceptance of the
inevitability of human tragedy.34
Winter concludes that
Jennie G-erhardt is a rather big book, — not a great
book,'not a book worthy to stand, — as an enthusiastic
English reviewer once said of its predecessor, — on
a shelf between Madame Bo vary and liana; but a big book,
undeniably, full of a rugged sincerity, a fearless
devotion to the truth, and undisguised pity for the
impotence of human nature under its double handicap of
heredity and environment.35
The reviewer for Independent feels that Dreiser’s
omniscience as an author has a callous quality about it:
Two men make her Jennie/ the victim of her own pity
and generosity; yet tho they are admittedly evil, the
author sees each situated from their point of view,
I so calmly that he seems unduly cold-blooded. We miss
; the warm indignation that should fire his heart at
sight of their cruelty. ®
These critical comments on Jennie Gerhardt might also
have been applicable to other naturalistic novels with which
54 Winter,•op. cit., p. 433.
35 ibid.
36
Anonymous, op. cit., p. 72.
49
Dreiser’s were compared. The ’ ’Continental flavor” of
Dreiser’s novels suggested in particular the influence of
Zola. But Mencken contributes evidence that this
supposed influence was not actual:
Emile Zola is C * J 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 1
Zola manner, in ’Jennie Gerhardt’; there came from i
Dreiser the news that he had never read a line of i
, Zola, and knew nothing about his novels.3,7
There was, of course, the possibility of the indirecti
, influence of Zola through the pseudo-naturalism of Frank '
iNorris, Norris was deeply under the spell of the great
French naturalist, and wrote in a deliberately Zolaesque
atyle. But Mencken also excludes this as a likelihood on
^he following grounds;
. . . Dreiser did not actually read ’McTeague,’ nor, |
i indeed, grow aware of Norris, until after ’Sister !
Carrie’ was completed, and . . . his development, once
he began to write other books, v/as along paths far
distant from those pursued by Norris himself.3®
' i
' A comparison of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt
----------------------- i
was inevitable. The books belonged to the same period, ' •
having been written around the turn of the century. The
317 Mencken, op. cit., p. 72.
38 I*>id., p. 70.
50
subject matter of the two novels was similar; each dealt
with the life of an unconventional woman. Each exhibited
a rather bleak and comfortless view of life.
As for style, the two novels are undistinguished.
Mencken comments that
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,’ ’untotored mind,’ ’honest
j necessity,’ and half a dozen other stand-bys.of the
i second-rate newspaper reporter.
"The work of Dreiser," says Mr. Mencken again, "considered
as craftsmanship pure and simple, is extremely uneven, and
the distance separating his best from his worst is almost
■infinite.At bottom, Sister Carrie is
j ' - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
' ... no more than a first sketch, a rough piling up
; of observations and ideas, disordered and often in-
| coherent. In the midst of the story, as I have said,
i 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
1 Dreiser, it is extraordinarily adept and intelligent
in design; . . .41
Jennie Gerhardt has structural unity and a consistent
39 Ibid., p. 84,
40 Ibid., p. 107.
41 Ibid., pp. 111-12
perspective, for M. . . it is in Jennie's soul that every
scene is ultimately played out.1,42 But despite the superior
construction of Jennie G-erhardt, most critics would seem to
agree with Snell, who maintains that tr. . .it still does
not have the warmth and gusto of the first book., f 43
Dreiser's reputation as a novelist was initiated with
the reception of these two books. They were regarded with
interest, but were hardly best-sellers. The philosophy
underlying the stories was alien to the optimism of the
i
: popular fiction of the time, and found sympathetic response ,
only in certain critics, lead by Mencken, whose own '
'proclivities tended toward naturalism*
Prom the first the critics, including Dreiser’s most i
enthusiastic supporters, were dissatisfied with his style,
i :
!With its numerous and obvious defects, it offered— and
continued to offer throughout Dreiser's career— infinite
' i
!grist for the critical mill. In spite of a slipshod,
i
■dryly pretentious style, however, Dreiser succeeded in
writing powerful, deeply felt novels, and recent critics
have felt that Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt were the
finest of them*
42 Ibid., p. 112.
43 Snell, oja* cit., pp. 24-41
'chapter IV
THE COWPERWOOD SAGA: "The Law of the Jungle0
T
In 1912, one year after the publication of Jennie
Gerhardt, Harper and Brothers published The Financier, the
first novel in a ’ ’ Trilogy of Desire0 planned by Dreiser to
trace in minute detail the personal life and business
career of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, a capitalist superman
of America in the late nineteenth century.-*- The Titan, a
sequel to the first book, was halted in publication by
Harpers in March, 1914. Several factors were responsible
for this decision: there had been too many complaints
against the ' ‘ uncompromising realism” of the first volume;
the prototype of Berenice Fleming, one of Cowperwood*s many
:mistresses, was a friend of a prominent member in the
i
publishing firm; the big-business backers of Harpers were
offended by the Dreiserian interpretation of American
finance. As a result of this rebuff, Dreiser approached
Cowperwood*s prototype was Charles Tyson Yerkes
(1837-1905), an American capitalist. A reading of the
biographical sketch of Yerkes in The National Cyclopaedia of
American Biography, Vol. IX, (New York, 1907.) snows us that
in his trilogy Dreiser followed rather closely the business
career of Yerkes. Cowperwood*s private life, however,
appears to be of Dreiser’s invention. At least, the record
shows that Yerkes was not married until he was well into his
forties, and no mention of divorce or remarriage is made.
53
a British firm, the John Lane Company. John Lane published
The Titan the same year Harpers had abandoned the book,
The Stoic, the concluding volume of the trilogy, was
published as a fragment in 1947. This posthumous novel
falls beyond the scope of the present study.
The Financier traces the protagonist’s life from
boyhood through the panic of 1873. Born in Philadelphia i
in the 1850’s, Frank Cowperwood firmly constructs his
i
'personal philosophy early in life. After puzzling over
i
!the human situation, he concludes that the life of man is
rightfully as predatory as the life of the lower animals.
When the boy ¥/itnesses the brutal and dramatic death
struggle of a lobster and a squid in the civic aquarium,
his speculations are confirmed: just as the lobster preys
on the squid, reasons young Cowperwood, so do stronger men
I
live on weaker men, notably at the economic level. The boy
shows an uncanny business acumen in minor youthful business
'enterprises involving buying and selling. He is already
well established financially whe^i, at the age of twenty-one,
he marries a woman five years his senior. He has two
children by her. But his wife has neither brilliance nor
charm, and he soon forms the first of a life-long series
of liaisons with women whom he finds more attractive. He
gains control of a Philadelphia street-railway network and
becomes a millionaire. In 1871 the Chicago fire pre
cipitates a national financial panic which wipes out his
fortune. But the irrepressible Cowperwood immediately
draws the blueprint for a new career. Collaborating with
several other men of ambition in business and politics,
Cowperwood is involved in an irregular financial trans-
i
'action with the City Treasurer of Philadelphia. When this
|graft is exposed, one of the men involved {whose daughter,
.Aileen Butler, Gowperwood has taken as his mistress) makes
I
jCowperwood the scapegoat, mainly through a craving for
revenge. Cowperwood is convicted of graft, and spends a
year in prison. Upon completing his sentence, he divorces
his wife, provides financially for the future of his
|children, and marries Aileen Butler. He regains his
; fortune overnight by selling short in the panic of 1873.
* - * - n ' P * 16 Titan, Cowperwood, having married Aileen,
j
moves to Chicago. In this city he is not accepted in the
.higher social circles because his reputation has followed
him. Mone-the-less, he successfully gains control of the
street railways in Chicago, and acquires a tremendous
'fortune. His extramarital activities alienate the jealous
Aileen, whom he has found only transiently interesting.
Cowperwood is nearly at the point of controlling Chicago’s
entire transportation services when the citizenry rises
55
up against him and thwarts his further expansion. At the
end of the book, Berenice Fleming, cultured daughter of a
Louisville madame, comes to live with the lonely tycoon--
something of a recompense to Cowperwood, who has known
Berenice since she was fifteen, and has been unsuccessfully
wooing*her for years. The Titan, like The Financier,
traces in great detail Cowperwood*s business ventures and j
:his numerous love affairs. j
The reviews of The Financier promptly recognized it
as a big novel. The same reviews called attention to
certain features of Dreiser’s work that were less than
adequate. As a commentator for the Independent said;
It is the easiest thing in the world to point out
Theodore Dreiser’s shortcomings. His tedious
convolutions, his circuitous manner of telling a
story, his crudities of style, his inability to j
crystalize an emotion in a phrase or a scene in
; less than a chapter--these are the most obvious
; externals, and therefore need not detain us. For
there must be something indefinably powerful about
an author whose Complete Works consist of only three ■
painstaking novels and yet are reckoned ’a force and I
a fresh impetus’ wherever Literature is known.^ 1
In spite of Dreiser’s ”... ridiculous love of detail,”
his ”... much too careful eye for truth,” it seemed
! clear that
Q
Anonymous, ”Dreiser’s ’Financier,'” Independent,
LXXIV (February 27, 1913), 470. .
No living author has a sense of characterization more
keenly developed; possibly no one since Balzac has
drawn such amazing portraits as old man Gerhardt;
as the pathetic Jennie, . . . the pitiful spectacle
of Hurstwood . . . Carrie Meeber . . . and now, . . .
The 'Financier,*3
Speaking of the new novel in The Nation, another reviewer
commended Dreiser1s skill in characterization:
It is in his expose of character and relationships
and his constructive feeling for human drama that
Mr. Dreiser is distinguished.^
A reviewer in Current Literature noted that Dreiser
i". . . has the detachment which only great writers possess
he makes us feel that the events he describes transpire
5
sub specie eternitatis."
In evaluating The Financier, the critics took
Dreiser to task on two counts; style and philosophy. The
i
reviewer for Independent, while praising Dreiser's
."vigorous sincerity," asserted that "No craftsman living
•today, no matter what his art may be, has less of artifice
than Theodore Dreiser~«in fact, from a standpoint of
; outward beauty and esthetics, much of his work would be
5 ibid., 471.
^ Anonymous, "The Financier," Nation, XCV
(December 19, 1912), 589.
5
Anonymous, "Arriving Giant in American Fiction,"
Current Literature, LIII (December, 1912), 696.
improved by more 6f it.1 '® Because of Dreiser’s
. . insistance on the value of life’s minutiae,'*
his work is "so often powerful rather than final; big
without being great. A greater artist would choose from
this welter of facts, would eliminate, condense and give
7
us the essentials in a less tortuous manner."
One wishes at times for more sensuousness, more
refinement of expression and less baldness of
narrative, but once in the midst of the story one
feels that the charm of such prose as, say,
Meredith’s, Moore’s or Wells’s would be out of
place here; one is satisfied to find beauty in
what Mr. Dreiser says rather than in how he says
it. A gaunt beauty, perhaps, like a bronze of
Rodin’s or a wild tone poem of Richard Strauss--
but it is a moving beauty, even if it moves with
its power instead of its poetry. The Financier
must be ranked as one of the finest contemporary
novels, even tho Mr. Dreiser has the instincts of
a portrait painter rather than a novelist.8
Not all the critics perceived this "gaunt beauty." The
: Review of Reviews noted that
. . . Arnold Bennett has mentioned Mr. Dreiser as a
writer ’whose work truly reflects current literary
tendencies.’ And this comment is unfortunately true.
This book shows the effect of deliberately reflecting
’current literary tendencies,’ in its studied
sordidness and highly artificial eroticism. There
® Anonymous, "Dreiser’s ’Financier,*" Independent,
LXXIV (February 27, 1913), 470.
7 Ibid.* 471.
8 Ibid.
is a definite and unsuccessful attempt at realism in
the description of Cowperwood’s love affairs, an
attempt which in some places makes almost ridiculous
what might have been an admirable piece of work.9
Probably more disturbing than Dreiser’s solecisms
and tedious prolixity, however, was his rejection of
conventional moral judgments in his fiction. The reviewer
for the Independent observed that
He is no doctrinaire; he has no economic axe to grind;
no panacea to relieve the ills of the world; no mental
Balm of Gilead to smear unctuously over the perplexed
soul. He voices a frank but jubilant materialism;
he is concerned but little as to the justice of
things--whether they are good or bad interests him
less than whether they are.
/’ The outstanding feature of Theodore Dreiser’s portrayal,”
»
writes the critic in Current Literature, ”is a sense of
fate and futility. Whether we are ’good' or whether we
jare 'bad,' he intimates, we pay our price in suffering.”^
jThis suspension of judgment was alien to the tradition of
American fiction, and detracted from Dreiser’s potential
status with most of the magazine critics. Said the
reviewer in Nation:
9 Anonymous, ’ ’ The Financier,” Review of Reviews,
VIIL (February, 1913), 242.
10
Anonymous, op. cit., 470.
Anonymous, op. cit., 696.
59
To the best of our discernment, the three essays in
unconventional morality which he has already
accomplished in ’Sister Carrie,* ‘Jennie Gerhardt,*
and ’The Financier,* have not yielded one conclusion
that seems to him worth a whole-hearted defence.
Obviously, until his own convictions have clarified,
he can do little to inform our understanding of right
and wrong. 2
The reviews of The Titan reiterated the complaints
against Dreiser’s style and his suspension of judgment
toward his characters. The Independent stated that ”0n
the whole it Is a dull book, and the life of high-handed
'finance it depicts is heavy with comraonplaceness. There
is no life to the spirit anywhere in it, but a sodden and
sordid depression.Lucian Cary in the Dial said:
The story is always dangerously close to actual event;
dangerously close because Mr. Dreiser has depended
on this actuality to convey reality. He has so many
facts that he supposes he has done enough when he has
set them down. But outward facts are significant
only when they are the sign of an inward meaning,
i And Mr. Dreiser simply does not know the inward
me aning•^
iThe reviewer for the Atlantic Monthly voiced much the same
criticism, chiding Dreiser for refusing to draw moral
'Conclusions in his work:
12
Anonymous, op. cit., 589.
15 Anonymous, r , The Titan,” Independent, LXXX
(October 12, 1914), 63.
Lucian Cary, r , The Titan,” Dial, LVT (June 16,
1914), 504.
60
How, the artist must not be moralist first or chiefly;
nevertheless a failure in moral perception is
ultimately a failure in both psychology and art. Ho
writer, realist or not, can afford this.
Professor Stuart P. Sherman of the University of
Illinois was one of Dreiser’s severest critics. Sherman’s
indictment of Dreiser’s first five novels as ’ ’ barbaric
naturalism” will be discussed in connection with The
’Genius.’ It is sufficient to note here, however, that . !
Sherman characterized the Cowperwood books as ”— a sort
of huge club-sandwich composed of slices of business
alternating with erotic episodes — .” Of Dreiser, he says:
He has just two things to tell us about Cowperwood:
that he has a rapacious appetite for money; and that
he has a rapacious appetite for women. In The
Financier he 'documents’ these truths about Cowperwood
in seventy-four chapters, in each of which he shows us
how his hero made money or how he captivated women in
: Philadelphia. Not satisfied with the demonstration,
! he returns to the same thesis In The Titan, and shows
; us in sixty chapters how the same hero made money and
captivated women in Chicago and New York.l®
!
This ’ ’ barbaric naturalism, ” with which Sherman found j
fault, raises the question of Dreiser’s purpose in the use
of the naturalistic Idiom. It may perhaps be rightfully
Anonymous, ”Recent Reflections of a Novel-
Reader,” Atlantic Monthly, CXIV (October, 1914), 523.
lg Stuart Pratt Sherman, On Contemporary Literature
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1917),98.
61
argued that complete moral neutrality in literature is an
impossibility. Naturalism, however, strives to give a
picture of ’ ’ reality” untouched by the particular
sentiments of an author. The clew to the author’s
sympathies and antipathies must lie therefore in a
consideration of his choice of subject matter,
i What was Dreiser’s own attitude toward his
protagonist, whom Burton Rascoe called ”a corporation-
; breaking, vote-corrupting, jury bribing, non-ethical,
, non-moral buccaneer of American finance”? Was Dreiser’s
purpose in writing The Financier and The Titan the
f fl
arraignment of the type of economic ubermensoh represented
by Cowperwood? Probably not. Recent critics have tended
to share the view of G. C. Walcutt, who feels that the
; Cowperwood novels are na celebration rather than an
^indictment of him.”17 The same sentiments are expressed
jby Ben Ray Redman, who claims that success was Dreiser’s
early god, not zeal for reform:
| And how did he feel about Cowperwood, the piratical
| financier and .traction magnate, the very type and
symbol of a lawless era? Did he make this character
the protagonist of a trilogy of protest— a horrible
example? Hardly. . . . Far from demanding that
^ C. C. Walcutt, ’ ’Three Stages of Theodore Dreiser’s
Naturalism,” PMLA, L7 (March, 1940), 279.
Cowperwood’s Chicago be altered, he celebrated the
free-for-all as it was, and cried: ’Leave things be;
the wilder the better for those who are strong enough
to survive . . Dreiser demanded the right to set
forth the truth not because he wanted to use words
in a battle of social protest, but because he found
existing social truth an artistically exciting
experience.18
Dreiser was not particularly interested in
evaluating his characters’ behavior; he was interested in
observing it. As Burton Rascoe points out,
. . . novels like The Financier, The Titan, Sister
Carrie, and Jennie G-erhardt were fal th-ful' mirrors
of the national soulduring the development of the
first phase of American industrialism.19
Dreiser is a romantic naturalist who found an epic
quality in the rise of individuals to merciless
and remorseless power through the adaptation of their
combative instincts to the peculiar conditions of the
American struggle for existence.20
A comparative evaluation of The Financier and The
Titan is given in retrospect by Oscar Cargill, who
presents a typical contemporary opinion of the novels:
Our condemnation of The Titan is on the score of
tedium and not of morals. Perhaps had The Financier
never been written, we should care more for The Titan,
but facts that can be discerned on the face of a
penny gain nothing at all by being magnified a
thousand times. The Titan is merely The Financier
^ Ben Ray Redman, ’ ’From Dreiser to Farrell,”
American Mercury (July, 1949), 116-17.
19
Rascoe, op. cit., 7-8.
20 Ibid.
63
written in capital letters. Cowperwood, furthermore,
in possession of a fixed view of life, is a far less
dramatic figure than the boy and young man arriving
at that view, and being punished for the first time
for holding it. There is in The Titan, moreover, no
characterization to compare with that of the abject
Stener and the outraged Butler of the earlier book.
'Whatever drama there is in nefarious political and
financial chicanery is quite worked out in The
Financier. While Cowperwood is thwarted inThe Titan,
he is never actually defeated— his biggest setbackIn
finance is accompanied by his greatest fortune in |
love, an altogether adequate compensation for his p, f
nature; in The Titan he never knows complete despair. 1 ‘
The Financier and The Titan, then, were seen as
repetitious and prolix. They were marred by heavy
documentation and irrelevancies. The writing was un
distinguished, and continued to be criticized. However,
the critics were impressed with Dreiser's elemental honesty,,
(
t
his ability to create convincing characterization, and his
Jrugged persistence in continuing on his own graceless
.literary path.
; They were less happy about Dreiser's inability to
( perceive the "inner meaning" of his work, which is to say
|they were dissatisfied with Dreiser as a moralist.
i
Professor Sherman ridiculed the meaningless animality of
Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America; Ideas on
the March (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941),
pp. I20-1.
Cowperwood, and deplored the limitations of Dreiser’s
literary and philosophic naturalism as actually unrealistic
and biased, rather than true and objective*
CHAPTER V
THE 1 GENIUS1 "Barbaric Naturalism"
Artistically, The 1 Genius * is, by common consent,
the weakest of DreiserTs novels. As will be shown, it was
given a distinctly unfavorable reception by the critics.
Historically, hof/ever, The 1 Genius1 is one of the most
’important books in the Dreiser canon. The story of the
banning of this book and the literary controversy that
I followed forms one of the most interesting episodes in
.the annals of American letters.
The diffusely written pages of The 1Genius1 trace
the life of a fictional American artist. Eugene Witla,
the sensitive, precocious son of middle-class mid-western
parents, leaves high school and goes to Chicago to make his
jway in the world, having been disappointed in his first
love affair. In Chicago he works at menial occupations for
'a time, scraping together from his pay enough money to cover
.his enrollment in an evening art school, for he cherishes
dreams of becoming a great painter. He shows genuine
talent, and receives the commendation of his instructors*
After some art training he secures several positions as
staff artist on New York newspapers, and his financial
state improves steadily. Ultimately he is secure enough
to devote his time to serious painting. He is recognized
66'
as a unique talent in American art, and receives critical
and popular acclaim. In the meantime he has married Angela
Blue, an attractive school-teacher friend of his sister.
During a long engagement his original passion for Angela
has cooled, however, and he has conducted two intense but
short-lived affairs on the side. His marriage is not
markedly unhappy, but he feels sufficiently attracted to !
other women to continue to conduct ecstatic but passing
affairs with them. Angela becomes furious when she dis
covers her husband*s dual life, but Eugene, indifferent to
conventional concepts of morality, persists in occasional
adulterous relationships while he remains with Angela, who ;
refuses to consider divorce.
Eugene has made a name for himself in the art
t i
‘ world, but seeking greater luxury than his modest income 1
from painting can yield, he accepts a very lucrative offer
i
jfrom a publisher who wants Eugene to act as his staff art
director. Eugene^ supervisory ability, and his vast fund
of fresh and happy ideas, make him a man much sought after
by the country!s leading publishers. He becomes wealthy,
earning as much as #25,000 per year. But he has abandoned
art.
He falls madly in love with the eighteen-year-old
daughter of a friend and they decide to live together in
spite of Eugene *s married state and society*s disapproval.
But the mother of the girl, who is thought to he
sophisticated and "advanced” in her concepts of morality,
is outraged at the application of her own abstract
theories to her daughter Suzanne. The girl is persuaded
by her mother to wait a year before living with Eugene.
If, at the end of that time, Suzanne still wants Eugene,
her mother will accede.
Angela, whose physical condition has heretofore
'prevented her from having a child, decides to risk her own
i
life in motherhood in a last desperate effort to save
.Eugene for herself. The knowledge of Angela*s pregnancy
enrages Eugene. Angela .dies in childbirth, with an
anguished and recalcitrant Eugene at her bedside. Eugene
,now despises Suzanne. In his spiritual crisis, he has a
|brief flirtation with Christian Science, but returns to
the agnosticism and paganism of his former years, though
I
somewhat mellowed and chastened by life. He returns
'successfully to painting and to the rearing of his little
;daughter, who survived the birth trauma.
According to Edgar Kemler, when The ’Genius* was
published in October, 1915, Dreiser received a flood of
calumny. 1
The newspaper critics descended upon him like hounds
upon a wild beast. The Chicago Tribune called him
68'
'the tom-cat of American letters'; the New York World
admonished him for continuing 'world without end,
filling thick volumes with the emptyings of his
passion.' - * •
A reviewer for the New York Times wrote:
If the author's aim has been to make his readers
despise Eugene, he has succeeded thoroughly. . . .
When it is all over a bad taste remains in the mouth
of the reader, and he closes the volume wondering
whether so despicable a character was worth portraying
with such infinite care.2 i
!
Mr. Dreiser Is one of the few significant American j
novelists who cling to the European methods of
realism. His work reminds one at times of Zola,
of Balzac, and of Tolstoy; but he lacks the> reticences ,
and the deep moral convictions of the Russians, and
the artistic deftness of the Frenchmen. In 'Sister
Carrie' he did a memorable piece of work, but his !
later novels, like Zola's, are rendered unwieldy by
excessive masses of philosophic and material detail. ;
He gets powerful effects, but heavily, unpleasantly. j
'The G-enius* has about the same degree of force as
'The Financier.' In its moral effects, however, it
is much more deleterious.^
'F. T. Cooper, evaluating The 'Genius,' wrote:
He ^Dreiser^ has the gift of taking the human animal
and turning him inside out pitilessly, and then seeming ;
to say sardonically, 'There, whether you like it or
not, that is what men and women are really like i' He
can do this sort of thing with such unblushing
thoroughness that there are times when the reader has !
a sense of physical discomfort in the presence of
• * * Edgar Kemler, The Irreverent Mr. Mencken (Boston:
Little, Brown and Company, 1950), p." 77.
^ Anonymous, "The 'Genius,'" New York Times Book
Review, October 10, 1915, 562.
5 Ibid.
69
humanity stripped so bare. The tendency to depict this
side of life seems to have grown upon him, reaching,
let us hope, its culmination in The f G-enius .’ ^
Laurence Gilman, in his review of the novel, declared of
its author that ”. . • no more honest fictionist is
writing today in English.1 1 But Gilman was not unaware of
Dreiser’s shortcomings:
i He has no taste; he is grotesquely humorless; his
; style is amazingly bad; in details of execution he
is naively crude and uncouth. And yet, despite his
pitiless prolixity, his frequent sentimentality, his
stylistic vulgarities and platitudes, his commission
j of a thousand unforgivable offenses as~~a literary
; workman— despite all this, it is hard to read him
; without being engrossed, and persuaded, and deeply
; moved. . . He gives you a sense of actuality; but
, he gives you more than that:: out of the vast welter
! and surge, the plethoric irrelevancies of this
' cyelopean novel, emerges a sense of the infinite
sadness and mystery of human life.5
Randolph Bourne’s review finds ’ ’desire*’ as the
i
.’ ’ hero” of Dreiser’s novel:
■ The insistent theme of Mr. Dreiser’s work is desire,
perennial, unquenchable. The critic who would
; discuss him takes his life in his hands. He must
■ either be denounced as an advocate of prostitution,
| or an admirer of that second-rate pseudo-passion
which Mr. Hearst and his able fictional lieutenants
have made it their business to introduce to out
: 4 P. T. Cooper, ’ ’ Six Novels of the Month,” Bookman,
XLII (November, 1915), 323. „
5 Lawrence Gilman, ’ ’The Biography of an Amorist,”
North Ameri can Review, CCIII (February, 1916), 293.
70
American consciousness.®
Bourne registers the usual complaints against Dreiser’s
faults, but adds that "He is saved by a plodding
sincerity." "And,” continues this critic, "the book
is set in a light of youthful idealism. Nobody but Jar.
Dreiser could manage this fusion, but it is there.
,. . .Of sordid realists Mr. Dreiser is certainly the most j
7
idealistic." As far as Witla as a character is concerned, ;
IBourne trusts that
. . . the quotation marks in the title indicate Mr.
Dreiser’s realization that he has created only a
second-rate personality, that he never, indeed,
creates any but second-rate personalities. In
The ’Genius’ he has made, however, a grandiose
caricature of the masculine soul. And his real
hero, anyway, is not his second-rate personality,
but the desire of life.8
lEven Mencken characterized The »G-enius’ as "flaccid,
ielephantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent,
sophomoric, ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome . . . the
! Q
nadir of Dreiser’s accomplishment ..."
; Such $ story as The ’Genius’ is as gross and shapeless
i as Brunnhilde. It billows' and bulges out like a cloud
of smoke, and its internal organization is almost as
vague . . . The thing rambles, staggers, trips, heaves,
Randolph Bourne, "Desire as Hero," New Republic, V
(November 20, 1915), 5.
7 It)id. , 6.
8 Ibid.
^ Mencken, o£. cit., 107.
71
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,-*-®
Professor Sherman*s essay, "The Barbaric Naturalism
of Theodore Dreiser,t f exposed what its author believed to
be the moral inadequacy of Dreiser’s novels, and, in
addition, the inadequacy of all literary naturalism.
!Intelligently written, provocative, and extremely ;
irritating to the more ardent of Dreiser’s early champions,
i
this essay deserves to be quoted at length, for it
irepresents a type of opposition, not of the Comstocks
who succeeded in banning The ’Genius,* but of informed
literary opinion.
Sherman begins his essay with a presentation of the
, basic assumptions of the young naturalists:
j The elder generation was in love with illusion, and
looked at truth through a-glass darkly: and timorously.
The artist, tongue-tied by authority and trammeled by I
aesthetic and moral conventions, selected, suppressed,
and rearranged the data of experience and observation.
The critic, ’morally subsidized,’ regularly professed
his disdain for a work of art in„which no light
glimmered above ’the good and the beautiful.’ *
The present age is fearless and is freeing itself from
illusions. Now, for the first time in history, men are
facing unabashed the facts of life. 'Death or life,’
10 Ibid., 87.
72
we cry, 'give us only reality t* Now, for the first
time in the history of English literature, fiction is
becoming a flawless mirror held up to the living
world. Rejecting nothing, altering nothing, it
presents to us— let us take our terms from the bright
lexicon of the reviewer--a 'transcript,* a 'cross-
section,* a 'slice,* a ‘photographic’ or
’cinematographic’ reproduction of life; The critic
who keeps pace with the movement no longer asks
whether the artist has created beauty or glorified
goodness, but merely whether he has told the truth.H
Sherman denies the validity of these assumptions. He
asserts that ”A realistic novel no more than any other
I ;
■kind of novel can escape being a composition, involving !
i
preconception, imagination, and divination.”- * - ^ Novel
writing cannot be, as some of the new realists suppose,
”. . .a process analogous to photographing wild animals
in their habitat by trap and flashlight.”- * - ® In short,
I
In the case of any specified novelist, the facts chosen
i and the pattern assumed by them are determined by his
j central theory or ’philosophy of life’; and this is
i precisely criticism’s justification for inquiring into
the adequacy of any novelist’s general ideas. . . . He 1
cannot observe without a theory, nor compose and record '
: his observations without betraying his theory to any
critical eye,-*-4
- * - • * - Sherman, op. cit., 85-6.
12 Ibid., 89.
13 - j - - , , j
Ibid.
14 Ibid.
A
73
In Sherman’s opinion,
. . . the realistic novel is a representation based
upon a theory of human conduct. If the theory of
human conduct is adequate, the representation
constitutes an addition to literature and to social
history. A naturalistic novel is a representation
based upon a theory of animal behavior. Since a
theory of animal behavior can never be an adequate
basis for a representation of the life of man in
contemporary society, such a representation is an
artistic blunder.I5
Par from being purely objective, Dreiser, according
i
to Sherman, sifts and selects his materials to substantiate ;
: a preconceived philosophy: ”The idea that civilization is
a sham, Mr. Dreiser sometimes sets forth explicity, and
sometimes he conveys it by the process known among
journalists as ’coloring the news.’’ * - * - ® To explain complex
: human behavior, he . . sinks supinely back upon the law ■
'of the jungle or mutters his mystical gibberish about an ■
IV
, alteration of the chemical formula.” Thus, says Sherman:
; I find myself unable to go with those who admire the
powerful reality of his art while deploring the ;
; puerility of his philosophy. His philosophy quite '
excludes him from the field in which the great realist
j must work. He has deliberately rejected the novelist’s
supreme task--understanding and presenting the
15 Ibid.. 101.
16 Ibid., 92.
17 Ibid., 65.
74
development of character; he has chosen only to
illustrate the unrestricted flow of temperament.
He has evaded the enterprise of representing human
conduct; he has confined himself to a representation
of animal behavior.18
It was not criticism of this caliber, however, that
was responsible for the suppression of The * G-enius.’
Shortly after publication, it fell under the ban of the
;New York Vice Society, which forced the book to be with
drawn from circulation. Dreiser, highly Indignant because
his attempt at serious fiction had been denigrated by a
law designed to suppress cheap pornography, appealed to
his friend Mencken to conduct a fierce literary counter
attack. Mencken’s initial response was refusal— the
Puritans ’ ’ held all the cards.” Anti-German sentiment was
rising (the year was 1915). He recommended compliance
i
.with the censors. As Kemler tells it,
; After all, Mencken said, the passages in The 1Genius’
that the censor had complained about were trivial in
the extreme: seventy-four ’lewd* scenes of kissing,
hugging, and seduction, one essay on the female
breast, and eight profane oaths, such as ’Jesus
Christ’ and ’God damn.’ Dreiser could cut some or
all of these; the book would again be circulated, and
nobody would knoiv the difference. At the same time,
he assured the novelist that this period of compromise
and humiliation would not last forever.
18 Ibid., 94-5.
Kemler, op. cit., 79.
75
Nevertheless, Dreiser belligerently rejected the suggestion
of compromise and insisted upon a showdown.
Nothing could dissuade him . . . not even the
possibility of a jail sentence; and in lieu of
Mencken, a group of Dreiser*s radical friends
organized a Committee of One Hundred for the defense.
Outmaneuvered, Mencken promptly changed his tune*
1 It goes without saying,1 he declared, ’that I shall
be delighted to join,1 and on his next trip to New
York he completely forgot the inhibitions of the week
! before.20 j
: A cable from England, signed by a distinguished
group of novelists, including Arnold Bennett, H. G-, ?/ells, ;
;W. L. George, and Hugh Walpole, announced support of
Dreiser’s stand in upholding The ’Genius’ against
suppression. With this encouragement, Mencken and the 1
John Lane Company, Dreiser’s publishers, asked the support
'of the Authors’ League of America. Gooperation was
forthcoming. As Dorothy Dudley recounts it, |
i !
I On the 24th of August they called a special meeting :
of their Executive Committee. The sense of it was
that The ’Genius’ was ’not lewd, licentious or
! obscene’ and that the Vice Society may, if not '
checked, ’prevent the sale of many classics and of !
much of the serious work which is now being offered,’ !
; and that ’the League take such action as may be i
[ possible to prevent the suppression of the work
complained of.’21
20 Ibid.
21
Dorothy Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and
the Land of the Free (New York: Harrison Smith and. Robert'
Haas, 1932T, p. 352*
Later on, an official protest was drafted and circulated
among members of the Authors’ League for signature:
We, the undersigned, American writers, observe with
deep regret the efforts now being made to destroy the
work of Theodore Dreiser. Some of us may differ
from Mr. Dreiser in our aims and methods, and some
of us may be out of sympathy with his point of view,
but we believe that an attack by irresponsible and
arbitrary persons upon the writings of an author of
sueh manifest sincerity and such high accomplishments
must inevitably do great damage to the freedom of
letters in the United States, and bring down upon
the American people the ridicule and contempt of
other nations. The method of the attack, with its
attempt to ferret out blasphemy and indecency where
; they are not, and to condemn a serious artist under
a law aimed at common rogues is •unjust and absurd.
We join in this public protest against the proceeding
in the belief that the art of letters, as carried on
by men of serious purpose and with the co-operation
of reputable publishers, should be free from inter
ference by persons who, by their own statement, judge
all books by narrow and impossible standards; and we
advocate such amendments of the existing laws as will
prevent such persecutions in the future.22
I
,The protest was circulated- among members of the Authors1
League, and by October 18, when the list was closed, four
( hundred signatures had been affixed, including those of
Prank Harris, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost,
! Winston Churchill, Booth Tarkington, Gertrude Atherton,
Ida Tarbell, Ellery Sedgwick, Glayton Hamilton, Lawrence
2a Ibid., 353.
Gilman, Percy MacKaye, James Lane Allen, and James Huneker.
But some of tlie most eminent members of the npolite school1 *
were missing; W. D. Howells, William Lyon Phelps, Joyce
Kilmer, Edith Wharton, and Hamlin Garland.23
Wrote Mr. Mencken:
Among my literary lumber is all the correspondence
relating to this protest, not forgetting the letters
of those who refused to sign, and some day I hope to
publish it, that posterity may not lose the joy of
an extremely diverting episode,24
Despite the encouraging support given Dreiser by
American and English writers, the ban on The ’ Genius *
'remained in force until the year 1923, when a compromise
was reached between Dreiser and the Vice Society. At the
cost of a few minor changes, the society waived most of
its original objections, and Dreiser’s book was in print
!
one© more.
Thus, The * Genius * proved the most controversial of
i
all Dreiser’s novels. No critic contended that this book
marked the zenith of Dreiser’s literary efforts. In many
respects it, was the least distinguished, artistically, of
all his books. Its suppression caused a veritable literary
23 Kemler, op. cit., p. 82.
PA
Mencken, o£. cit., p. 143.
78
furor. Many writers and critics who did not consider The
1 Genius1 deserving of literary praise nevertheless came to
the support of Dreiser when his book was attacked by
Puritan critics and censors. Dreiser at least could no
longer be ignored. He had to be recognized and dealt with
by all who undertook to discuss modern American literature.
t
CHAPTER VI
AH AMERICAN TRAGEDY: "TIE GREATEST NOVEL OP OUR GENERATION"
The publication of An American Tragedy and the wide
spread critical and popular interest attendant upon its
appearance unquestionably marked the recognition of Dreiser
as one of America’s foremost living novelists. The book
;was an immediate success, undergoing seven printings
ibetween December, 1925, and December, 1926, and continuing
,to undergo further printings in the years following. Soon
i
the story appeared in a popular stage version. Jesse L.
Lasky bought the screen rights for Universal Studios.
Never before had Dreiser received comparable fame and
remuneration from any of his books.
! The time was ripe for Dreiser’s popularity.
.According to Walter Puller Taylor,
The general acceptance of Dreiser as a significant
novelist dates back to the years immediately following
the World War, by which time a larger public were
prepared to accept his frank, amoral attitude toward
sex, his scientific materialism, and his disillusion.
By 1925 the importance of his work was generally
recognized. His readers had come to understand, if
not altogether to adopt, his interpretation of life,
and hence were ready to receive An American Tragedy
as the impressive work which it Ts.-*-’
Walter Puller Taylor, A History of American
Letters (Boston: American Book Company, 1936), p." 5^2•
80
An American Tragedy is a two-volume novel that
painstakingly reports the unfortunate life of Clyde
Griffiths. Clyde is the eldest of the four children
.of Asa and Elvira Griffiths, itinerant evangelists who
are operating a "rescue mission** in Kansas City at the
time the story opens. Clyde's parents are impractical,
strict, and pious, and as he enters adolescence the
narrowness and impoverishment of the family life become
intolerable to him. -Of—a-naturalfLy-earthy-but- sensitive
disposition, he desires to e scape_f rom the limitations
Of—his •fundamentai-ist environment. He wants money,
independence, and popularity with the girls he wistfully
admires from a distance. When he secures a job as bell
boy in one of Kansas City’s better hotels, Clyde seems
within reach of these goals. The money he makes in
salary and tips at the Green-Davidson is much greater than
his previous pay as part-time soda clerk in a drug store,
and he is able now to buy some of the clothes that he has i
heeded. His fellow workers introduce him to girls and
gaiety for the first time. Soon, however, this not
unpleasant life as a bell-boy comes to an abrupt end:
Clyde, together with a girl friend and two other couples,
are involved in a hit-and-run automobile accident in which
an eleven-year-old girl is killed. Although he had not
been driving, Clyde flees the city in panic, taking refuge
in Chicago and obtaining hotel work there. A chance
encounter with a wealthy uncle results in his being
offered a job in the uncler s Lycurgus, New York, collar
factory. Clyde accepts asjnah^gerT^ position in Lycurgus.
In his loneliness he enters into an affair with one of the
working girls in his department. Roberta Alden i&,young,
naive, inexperienced, and soon yields to him. Clyde,
> O '
ambitious and restless, is not content with his humble
social position and--ckandes-ti-ne^a'ffair with Roberta. Her*
longs 'Toar^the^extravagant~glamorous—1-if e—of—Lycurgus. _
s.Q-cle-ty-*-'' When he is introduced to Sondra Finchley, a
young pampered beauty of the town’s smart set, he is
completely taken by her But at this very time when
he decides to sever his affair with Roberts, she confides
that she is pregnant. Terrified, angry, unwilling to marry
her, Clyde argues abortion as the only feasible solution
to their problem. As the weeks roll by and the couple are
unable to secure the services of an abortionist, Clyde
contrives a scheme to escape from the predicament in which
he finds himself. One weekend he takes Roberta rowing on a
lonely mountain lake. Knowing that she cannot swim, he
plans to upset the boat and let her drown. Once he has
maneuvered the boat into the middle of the lake, however,
he is paralyzed by fear, and cannot bring himself to
capsize it. Roberta, perceiving Clyde’s inner distress,
rises in the boat and advanced to comfort him. The boat
rocks perilously, and Clyde instinctively thrusts out his
hand to steady Roberta, But he is gripping a camera at
the time, and strikes her unintentionally in the face. The .
boat overturns, hitting Roberta on the head as it does so*
Clyde quells the impulse to rescue the struggling girl
and swims ashore alone, persuading himself that he did not
commit murder— that the death was pre^emiaantly^ accidental.
He feels he is now free to devote himself to Sondra.
Roberta’s body is found, however, and an extensive
investigation ensues. At length, Clyde is implicated in
the apparent crime, and is indicted. After an extensive,
involved trial, he is convicted of murder. He has no way
of proving that the blows on Roberta’s face and head were
not purposefully administered— circumstantial evidence is
too incriminating. Despite the plea of his
■lawyer that Clyde was the victim of a sequence of
unfortunate circumstances and social injustice, the jury
t
; remains unconvinced. Clyde is sentenced to die in the
electric chair. gnes~~1r3—hdrS-^£e-e^t-ion7—the^vxcti-ra
.qf^an-Amer-ican—tragedy—l-o-ok-s—back—©ver-h-i-s—li-fe~wrth
f ee lings—o f—b e wi-lderment—and_he In le s snas s.
The reviews of An American Tragedy naturally
differed in their estimates of the novel1s quality and
stature, but a common denominator seemed to be an
unhesitant recognition of the book*s greatness, Mencken,
for example, finds An American Tragedy ”A simple tale . .
Hardly more, in fact, thah the plot of a three page story
p
in True Confessions.” He calls the book a
. . . shapeless and forbidding monster— a heaping
cartload of raw materials for a novel, with rubbish
of all sorts intermixed— a vast, sloppy, chaotic
thing of 385.000 words— at least 250,000 of them
unnecessary.^
Mencken repeats the familiar indictment of Dreiser*s
writing qua writing: all the familiar Dreiserian defects
are present, including harrowing cliches, bad grammar,
interminable exposition of insignificant detail, and an
excruciating style. However, he recognizes in An American
Tragedy, despite its faults, an element of greatness:
”The thing somehow has the effect of a tolling of bells.
It is clumsy. It lacks all grace. But it is tremendously
*
movxng.”
p
H. L. Mencken, ’ ’ Dreiser in 840 Pages.” American
Mercury, VII (April, 1926), 379.
1 3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
84
I
A reviewer for the Mew Republic finds Dreiser’s
ineptitude with language a nearly lethal flaw: f , If Clyde
and Roberta were not half concealed by a deluge of inept
verbiage, An American Tragedy might well be one of the
5
world’s great novels.” The reviewer concludes that
Most of Dreiser’s warmest champions . . . grant that he
cannot write, grant that he has no narrative sense and
no sense of words or of style, that he is prolix and
irrelevent, that his sentences are worse than chaotic,
that he violates English and even American idiom;;
these foibles, however, they regard as but petty
irritations which must be overlooked. But how can
such writing be negligible? Dreiser could not write
as he does, mixing slang with poetic archaisms,
reveling in the cheap, trite and florid, if there
were not in himself something correspondingly
muddled, banal and tawdry. Furthermore, since a
writer works through words alone and words are his
only means of communication, a failure in writing is
necessarily a failure in communication— and of Dreiser’s
failure the best that can be said is that it is
incomplete. Somehow he contrives to give a sense of
reality and veracity, as of a tremendous story which
actually happened told by an inept, loquacious
stutterer,-himself deeply stirred, who sometimes
unintentionally misrepresents the facts.®
Yet this reviewer admits that ”An American Tragedy could
have been written only by a man of unusual power and
magnitude. Even on the harshest critic Dreiser’s novels
must leave an impression that the author has a kind of
T. K. Whipple, Review of An American Tragedy.
Mew Republic ;XLVI (March 17, 1926), 114.
6 Ibid
85
7
greatness#” This impression is formed by the ' ’tremendous,
steady, unfailing flood of feeling” in his work* Dreiser’s
vast passion shows itself principally in ”, . . his
profound consciousness of the tragedy inherent in all
existence, in the very scheme of things— tragedy in
escapable, essential, universal, perceived by many, but
by very few so overwhelmingly felt.”
An anonymous reviewer, discussing the novel in the
Saturday Review of Literature describes Dreiser as
. . . an honest man, though no artist, driven into a
fury of determined realism by the cheap and fluent
sentimentalists who sold a cosmetic called American
life by quantity production.®
The critic speaks of his ”dulness,” ”rude power,” ’ ’sticky
humanitarianism,” but cannot deny that ”... his place in
American literary history is secure, and you must admire
him, even if it is impossible to read, without skipping,
in his books.He finds An American Tragedy to be
7 Ibid., 113.
8 Ibid.
9 Anonymous, ”An American Tragedy.” Saturday Review
of Literature, II (February 20, 1926), 559.
>
10 Ibid., p. 570.
86
. . . a work occasionally poignant, occasionally
intense in its realism, often deadly dull, usually
a monotonous narrative of everything that happened
in the course of Clyde Griffith’s short, worthless,
and almost meaningless life. Dreiser could not
endure the thought of all the true things happening
every day in factories and homes with no record of
them, and his plodding German honesty drove him to
write and write ahout a poor feeble boy who never had
an idea in his head except to get ’classy clothes’
and a girl, as if he had a Hamlet on his hands, or
at least a Martin Arrowsmith*-^
The above is a criticism that is often leveled at
Dreiser by those critics who adhere to the classical
definition of tragedy. Great tragedy, they assert,
demands great tragic heroes— men of great intelligence,
great emotions, great responsibilities, coming to grief
through some f , tragic fault** in their character. The
assumptions of the naturalistic writer make these pre
requisites no longer possible.
Reviewing An American Tragedy in the Dial, John
Cowper Powys points out that readers cannot regard Clyde
Griffiths as a ’ ’tragic hero:”
Clyde is pitiable, if we renounce all craving for
mental and moral subtleties, but we pity him as we
would pity a helpless vicious animal driven to the
slaughter-house, not as we pity a fully conscious
human intellect wrestling with an untoward fate*
11 Ibid
87
And. yet the book produces a sense of awe, of sad
humility, of troubled wonder. ^
In the universe as interpreted by the naturalist, there is
no underlying moral order, no cosmic support for mankind,
no indication of teleology. Humanity is of no importance
in a world of senseless creation and destruction. Men are
the victims of heredity and environment, and they suffer
in vain. Powys reduces Dreiser’s philosophy, as reflected
in An American Tragedy, to the following points;
His vision of things blames no one, lets no one off,
reduces all 'benevolence and righteousness’ to
sorrowful humility; pitiful, patient, dumb. For
at the back of the world, as he sees it, is neither
a Devil nor a Redeemer; only a featureless mulungu,
that murmers forever ’OmI 0m|
In An American Tragedy Dreiser tells the truth as
he sees it, and in a manner adequate— perhaps even
admirably suited— to his intent. Joseph Wood Krutch finds
Mr. Dreiser’s new novel . . . the crowning achievement
of the work which he began a quarter of a century ago.
To him it seemed then that novelists had lost
themselves in their own refinement, that, enamored
of moral delicacy and psychological subtleties, they
had forgotten the simple motives by which the vast
majority of mankind are moved; so with a single shrug
he sloughed off once and for all the implications of
the theory that man is primarily a moral animal and
John Cowper Powys, Review of An American Tragedy.
Dial, LXXX (April, 1926), 335.
13 Ibid., p. 338.
88
he did this much as the behaviorists in psychology
sloughed off the soul,14
In an introduction to a 1946 edition of An American
Tragedy, H, L. Mencken opens his remarks with a statement
on the literalness of Dreiser’s stories:
The prototype of Clyde Griffiths was a young man
named Ghester E* Gillette who drowned a girl named
Grace Brown in a lake In Herkimer county on July 11,
1906, and was electrocuted for it on March 20, 1908.
This may seem a strange way to Introduce a work
presumably of the imagination, but I suspect that
the nascent Ph.D.’s who labor Dreiser and his novels
hereafter will have to resort to it pretty often,
for all of those novels are based upon things
actually seen, heard or heard of, and not a few of
them come close to the literal reporting of the last
chapters of An American Tragedy. Dreiser, indeed,
was probably’ The most matter-of-fact novelist ever
known on earth. It was seldom that he departed from
what he understood to be the record, and he never did
so willingly.15
The testimony of Marlin Pew, however, somewhat offsets
Mencken’s opinions, which are rather widely shared:
Having ’covered’ the Gillette case as a reporter in
the Summer and Fall of 1906, interviewing all the
principals including the weak-eyed prisoner in the
county jail at Herkimer, and the pathetic farmer
parents of Grace (Billy) Brown, victim of the tragedy
on Big Moose Lake, I should be a fairly competent
critic of Mr. Dreiser’s work as a history. High
pressure imagination without stint went into the
book and picture, and it is my feeling that it brings
no strength to the plot, rather weakens it..........
14 Joseph Wood Krutch, Review of An American
Trage dy. Nation, CXII (February 10, 192677 152.
H. L. Mencken, Introduction to An American
Tragedy. (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1926),
p. ix.
89
Stripped of the fiction and Dreiser romancing,
however, the case of Chester Gillette really carried
no significant indictment of society. The
circumstances were quite special. The trial was
not disorderly and as I remember the prosecutor
and defense lawyers they were straightforward men,
not bloodthirsty and publicity seeking shysters.1®
According to Pew, Gillette was ' ’ Unmoved by the testimony,
chewing gum most of the time." Pew feels that "... no
thing but the charm of Billy Brown’s sensitive, high-
minded, selfless nature lifted the case from the plane of
17
many murder mysteries."
Revealing as this may be in its illumination of
Dreiser's method of creation, it does not detract from
his reputation; rather, it exposes a common misconception
of his approach to writing. Whether or not Dreiser took
liberties with the facts is relatively insignificant: he
was, after all, a novelist, not a biographer. And, as
Clarence Darrow, the renowned trial lawyer, asserts of
An Arnerican Tragedy, "... one cannot get away from the
fact that it is a true story of countless victims of
fate."1® Although it is depressing to read his novels,
Marlin Pew, "Shop Talk at Thirty." Editor and
Publisher (October 10, ,1931), 48.
17 Ibid.
18
Glarence Darrow, Review of An American Tragedy.
New York Evening Post Literary ReviewTJanuary 16, 19£5, 2.
90
MMr. Dreiser will not lie. He will not use his marvelous,
19
powers to trick, deceive and please.”
In his review of the new Dreiser novel, John Cowper
Powys undertakes a justification of Dreiser’s provocative
style:
. . . Just as Whitman took ordinary human words and
made them porous to his transcendent exultations, so
Dreiser has invented a style of his own, for this
monody over the misbegotten, which is like nothing
else in literature. I think it is a critical mistake
to treat this Dreiserian style as if it were a kind of
unconscious blundering. If it is unconscious it
certainly could find a very sophisticated defense;
for who is not aware to-day of many recondite craftsmen
who make use of the non-grammatical, the non-rational,
and even of the nonsensical, to most refined aesthetic
results?
It is much easier to call Dreiser naive than to sound
the depths of the sly, huge, subterranean impulses
that shape his unpolished runes. The rough scales and
horny excrescences of the style of An American Trage dy
may turn out to be quite as integral!""'a part of its
author’s spiritual skin as are the stripes and spots
and feathered crests of his more ingratiating
contemporaries. 0
Agreeing with the contention of Powys that Dreiser’s
style in An American Tragedy is no insuperable barrier to
greatness, Joseph Wood Krutch comments as follows:
19 Ifrld.
20 Powys, op. cit., pp. 334-5.
91
Incident is piled upon incident and fact upon fact,
but never— and this distinguishes the present from
all the other long novels of the author— does the
structure grow unwieldy or the interest falter. Nor,
it must be added, do the much-advertised faults of
Mr. Dreiser's style come between the reader and the
events which he is following; for so absorbing are the
things communicated that one forgets completely the
manner in which they are communicated— a fact which
must mean, I take it, that Mr. Dreiser’s style is, for
hi® own purpose, perfect. 'An American Tragedy’ is, in
fine, the greatest of its author’s works, and that can
hardly mean less than that it is the greatest American
novel of our generation.21
Writing in the Independent, G. R. Walker notices
an improvement in Dreiser’s style, which, he observes, has
been fully as much the target of critical attack as his
allegedly immoral episodes:
'An American Tragedy’ is unmistakably Dreiser, but it
is written in a smoother style than any of his previous
novels; the structure is done in closer mesh; there is
a tendency to oil the ways with participial con
structions in the long passages of emotional conflict
and transition. He still keeps his old cacophonies,
his abominable cliches, his newspaper manner. But,
sometimes beeause of these, sometimes in spite of them,
he has built up a great novel that is profoundly tragic
and intensely A m e r i c a n .22
Sherwood Anderson has high praise for An American
Tragedy and its controversial author. In the Saturday
Review of Literature he observes that there are
Krutch, ojd. cit., p. 152.
G. R. Walker, "Dreiser Moves Upward."
Independent, CXVI (February 6, 1926), 166.
92
Plenty of word lovers in the world, loving words,
slinging ink. But Dreiser isn’t one of them. If you
look for word-love in his book.you*11 get left. Love
of human beings you*11 find. It’s a finer attribute
in the end. Lay your Dreiser book over against the
book of any of the modem ’smarties’ among our writers
and you’ll understand. You’ll understand also why all
men here who care about writing care so much for
Dreiser,
All that Dreiser misses in feeling for words,
sentences, the page of the book, he pours out into
tenderness for people. He goes with his people into
every little detail of their lives. The drama grows
slowly bigger and bigger. A Dreiser book— Dreiser’s
people— -you never forget. That’s a lot. That’s
everything. That’s what makes Dreiser what he is—
the most important man writing English.23
Even Professor Sherman, leader of the critical
opposition to Dreiser’s earlier novels, is favorably
impressed with An American Trage dy. In a review appearing
originally in the New York Herald and Tribune Books
(January 3, 1926), Sherman prefaces his words of praise
with the qualification that he ". . . shall not quarrel
with anyone who contends that ’An American Tragedy1 is
the worst written great novel in the world. There are
few forms of bad writing which it does not copiously
illustrate."24 He is prepared to withhold, however, from
23 Sherwood Anderson, "Anderson Reviews An American
Tragedy." Saturday Review of Literature, II (January 9,
1926), 475.
P A
Stuart Pratt Sherman, Main Stream. (New York:
Scribner and Sons, 1927), p. 134.
93
this novel, his earlier condemnation of Dreiser’s writing
as ’ ’ barbaric n a t u r a l i s m ,”25 for Dreiser’s ” ... large,
stolid, literary ambition . . ..his most salient and
admirable moral characteristic . . . has led to the
production of an opus of major proportions. Writes Sherman:
Somehow--astonishing to relate--I feel as if this
book had been very expressly left on my critical
doorstep. I am not at liberty to think that Mr.
Dreiser wrote it to please me. But in more than one
way it does please and encourage me. It cheers me
especially by demonstrating that a novelist need not
stop growing at forty-four and work thenceforward
on a formula which he adopted at thirty. Mr. Dreiser
is taller and broader than when he wrote ’The
’ ’ Genius.”’ This new book marks a long stride toward
a genuine and adequate realism.2
A shift in philosophical attitude and literary method is
visible to Sherman in An American Tragedy, which enables
the critic to regard Dreiser with new respect:
Mr. Dreiser has either renounced or effectually
suppressed the naive naturalism of his previous
novels. There are no interspersed philosophical
dissertations here. There is no special pleading,
no coloring of the news, no studied continuous
aspersion of the customs and habits of men in civil
or religious societies from the untenable point of
view of ’barbaric naturalism.’
Ho; Mr. Dreiser has changed both his method and his
25 ££• Chapter V, pp. 71-74
p
Sherman, o£. cit., p. 134.
27 Ibid., pp. 135-6.
94
point of view. He has withdrawn to a position of far
more complete artistic ’detachment.* He gives me now
for the first time in his fiction to he seeking
sincerely and pretty successfully to tell the truth,
all the relevant truth and nothing but the truth—
and with such proportion and emphasis that every
interest involved shall feel itself adequately
represented.
As for the structure and content of the book, Sherman has
commendation, not condemnation, as in previous dissections
of Dreiser’s novels:
In its larger features the construction of ’An American
Tragedy’ is as solid as a bank building. It is very
long, to be sure, but there is little in it which is
not functional, not a part of Mr. Dreiser’s ponderous
design. I ' , was very nervous for fear the roof would
fall during a couple of sagging chapters early in
the second volume; but, no he slowly swung his heavy
timbers into place, restored his tension and maintained
it to the end. The structure of a novel he has
mastered.29
In short, Sherman has considerable regard for An American
Tragedy:
I do not know where else in American fiction one can
find the situation here presented dealt with so fear
lessly, so intelligently, so exhaustively, so
veraciously, and therefore with such unexceptionable
moral effect.30
In 1926, when An American Tragedy was published in
28 Ibid., P. 140.
29 Ibid.. p. 144.
95
London, its reception by the English critics was almost
entirely favorable. The Spectator minimized the often
controverted stylistic objections:
Almost everyone in England had heard of Mr. Dreiser’s
great novel, considered to be the finest work of
fiction yet produced in the United States5 but the
difficulty of obtaining it in this country has only
now been solved by the present publication of this
huge volume.
Many have heard, too, that while An American Tragedy
was impressive, it was full of faults, ciumsiriesses
and stodgy passages. Examination proved a surprise,
consequently. A novel stands or falls no more by the
prettiness or ease of its phrases than it does by the
number of copies it sells. To be great a novelist
needs neither sweetness nor grace. The essential
properties— wholeness, breadth, penetration, truth,
vitality— are here. An Ame rican Tragedy is a very
great and very portentious novel indeed. It is a
sudden and even staggering vision of men in the grip
of industrial civilization.31
Edwin Muir, in the hation and Athenaeum, appraised
Dreiser as ”. . . obviously . . . not only the most
remarkable of the American novelists, but one of the most
32
remarkable writers of our time.” Furthermore, ”’An
American Tragedy’ can only be compared with the great
achievements in fiction. It is less than the greatest,
31 Anonymous, Review of An American Tragedy. The
Spectator, CXXXVII (October 9, 1926), 602.
3^ Edwin Muir, Review of An American Tragedy.
Ration and Athenaeum, XL (October 16^ 1926), 88-9.
96
yet in reading it one thinks of Balzac or Tolstoy rather
than Mr. Bennett or Mr. Galsworthy.M33 While Muir admits
that the Style of the book lacks ”grace and economy,” it
is . . often more interesting than styles which possess
both.”34 The style is
. . . full of character, it says pretty much what the
author xvishes to make it say, and there is never in it
that vulgarity which arises from the desire to be more
smooth and eloquent than the situation permits. In
spite of superficial appearances, it is a far better
style than Mr. Cabell’s or Mr. Anderson’s. . . . He
^Dreiser~ J is an extraordinary rather than an
accomplished writer; but in the main he communicates
his vision of life effectually and with exactitude.35
H. G. Wells mentions wide European interest in the
book, and offers his personal observations upon reading it:
An American novel of outstanding power which is being
read all over Europe with great curiosity and
admiration is Dreiser’s ’An American Tragedy.’
Dreiser is in the extreme sense,of the word a genius.
He seems to work by some rare and inexplicable impulse,
enormously, without self-criticism or any fun or fatigue
in the writing. Long ago I admired his ’Sister
Carrie’ and rebelled against his long novel, ’The
Genius,’ surely the dullest piece of ineptitude that
has ever been produced by a first-class writer.
His ’American Tragedy,’ still vaster, is, I agree
with Bennett, one of the very greatest novels of this
century, . . . But I would disagree with Bennett’s
33 Ibid., p. 8 8.
34 Ibid.. P- 89*
35 Ibid.» P. 88.
97
condemnation of its style. It is raw, full of barbaric
locutions, but it never fatigues; it keeps the reader
reading, it gets the large, harsh, superficial truth
that it has to tell with a force that no grammatical
precision and no correctitude could attain.36
G. R. S. Taylor, reviewing An American Tragedy in
‘ kke Nineteenth Gentury and After, suspects that the book
has far wider intent than to portray the unfortunate life
of one doomed American boy:
What surely interested Mr. Dreiser in Clyde Griffiths
was that he was a figure behind which to draw the
gigantic background of a great part of the life of the
United States of America. For example, the author
takes Clyde to Lycurgus, one of the smaller
manufacturing towns. He uses him to focus his
literary light on the factory--an anthill of moving
figures without the intelligence of the ants.S"?
Taylor admits that Clyde himself is, ". . . in the
foreground of this vast picture, . . . like a speck of
dust being danced in the sunlight and shadow." It would
have taken but a few words from Dreiser’s pen to delineate
the character of Clyde. But, the critic adds,
. . . that great background of the United States of
America— that vast set of circumstances that created
Clyde--is one of the most gigantic things in
literature. That picture needed every word of the
800 pages, and only a genius could have accomplished
it in less than 8000. The book is called An American
36 H. G. Wells, "Wells Assays the Culture of
America." New York Times Magazine (May 15, 1927), 3.
^ G. R. S. Taylor, "United States as Seen by an
American Writer." Nineteenth Century and After, C
(December, 1926), 807.
98
Tragedy, but one has an insistent suspicion that Mr,
Dreiser means us to understand that it is the
tragedy of America, and if the downfall of Clyde
could have been got into 75,000 words, if needs
far more to tell of the tragedy of over 100,000,000,
Following the trend of the critics who review An American
Tragedy, Taylor offers an apology for the style of this
particular Dreiser novel:
The man who wrote the murder scene in An American
Tragedy has clearly a command of his pen which! "can
only be measured with the exquisite skill of an
Australian in throwing his boomerang— it is unerring.
There is scarcely a line in the book which does not
explain a character or an event with complete clarity.
Is there anything else to be asked of style; or are
we to have a ’style for style’s sake’ added to the
cant about the objects of art?
Where so many of the critics have gone astray is
in imagining that Mr, Dreiser could have told the
tale of a degenerate youth, of of an American business
city, in the language of an idyl.39
The Times Literary Supplement (London) calls An
American Tragedy
. . . a strange book, painstaking, honest, full of
pity for human weaknesses, thoughtful and moving—
and awkward. When Dreiser writes, for instance, of
the ’anomalies of psychic and social reflex and
motivation’ he inspires little attention. But the
things like Clyde’s aching curiosity about the dreadful
little Hortense, his ingenuous adoration of Sondra’s
cocksureness, his queer humility and distrust of
38 Ibid., p. 808.
39 Ibid., p. 814.
99
himself, his very zest for living--these, however
badly expressed, are real and disturbing. And their
cumulative effect does a great deal to justify Mr,
Dreiser's plodding, graceless manner,40
Writing in the London Bookman, R. Ellis Roberts
makes no attempt to justify Dreiser's style, summarily
dismissing it as !t. . . simply the bad style of a man who
has never taken the trouble to learn the relation of words
to a sentence, or of the sentence to a paragraph. **41
Roberts laments, also, the fact of Dreiser's chronic
philosphical confusion:
Somewhere Mr, Dreiser said once:: 'For myself I do not
know what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what
hope is,' It is an unfortunate position for a creative
artist, and it explains the extraordinary character of
Mr, Dreiser's books.42
It is Dreiser's infinite capacity for pity that lends his
books their depth and power. If he knows not what is
truth, beauty, love, or hope, at least "He knows what
pity is, and he knows what cruelty is.** It is, then,
* ’ This instinctive sense of pity . . , makes
40 Anonymous, Review of An American Tragedy. London
Times Literary Supplement (October 7, 1926) ~ t 672.
^ R. Ellis Roberts, **An American Tragedy.*1 Bookman
(London), LXXI (December, 1926), 158.
42 Ibid.
100
Dreiser’s books most noteworthy. It has no patronage,
and it has no philoso phy. ”43
John Freeman, in the London Mercury, sees the
Dreiser of An American Tragedy as a gargantuan reporter
in the modem world:
Mr. Dreiser . . . is . . . very much like a whale for
vastness among contemporary figures. In the aquarium
of the world he is large, melancholy, slow-moving,
seemingly idle in his progression from sea to sea,
but beholding whatever sails within the orbit of his
vision with a remembering eye.44
Thus ran the reviews of An Amo?ican Tragedy in
America and England. Dreiser’s magnum opus was received
by a public already acquainted with its author’s con
troversial reputation. It was received by critics who
were divided in their appraisals of Dreiser’s ability
and literary significance. On the one hand there were
those who, like Mencken, were vigorous Dreiser supporters
and devotees, whose only reservations concerned the
crudity and triteness of Dreiser’s style. On the other
hand there were those who, like Sherman, had felt that the
atrocious style of Dreiser’s novels was a minor con
43 ££id*
44 John Freeman, ”An American Tragedy.” London
Mercury, XVI (October, 1927), 614.
sideration in comparison to the major faults in Dreiser's
philosophy and moral confusion.
An American Tragedy appeared at a time that was
favorable, for the post-war world was acquainted with
disillusion and less certain of answers than were the
first two decades of the twentieth century. The book
was "modern”— it appealed to the pessimism of what Krutch
was to describe as the "modern temper" in its determinism,
its stultifying interpretation of men’s motives, and its
moral abdication. Despite its depressing impact it was
widely read and frequently acclaimed as "great," and as
reflective of the spirit of an age.
It was a huge novel, and it covered much more than
just the story of one ill-fated youth; it encompassed
society in industrial America. As John Cowper Powys
comments:
The greatness of this work lies in the fact, among
other things, that it covers so much ground. . . . No
one except Dreiser seems strong enough to swallow the
whole chaotic spectacle and to disgorge it into some
form of digested brain-stuff*45
CHAPTER VII
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
As Oscar Cargill observes, f , Theodore Dreiser’s
career as a novelist is, in one sense, a history of the
struggle for freedom of discussion in America, His first
novel, Sister1 Carrie, did not even reach the censor,"^
The book was not widely read in its first American printing
because that printing consisted only of a limited edition
to satisfy the minimum terms of a contract. The few
reviews it received granted the book’s merits, but without
full realization of the book’s significance• And no
reviewer acclaimed it as a potential best seller, which,
of course, it never was. When Sister Carrie was published
in England, the reviewers 'were much more receptive to the
book, comparing it to the works of the better continental
realists and naturalists, A reissue of the book in America
was received more hospitably because of its foreign
reputation.
Sister Carrie was labelled a ' ’ realistic’ * novel, and
its content was deplored because of its unconventionality
and sordidness. However, Dreiser’s sincerity was readily
Cargill, op. cit., p. 110.
103
admitted by the very critics who took him to task for his
choice of subject matter. Here was a new novelist who
wrote with the utmost honeslyof some of the less pleasant
aspects of American life.
When Jennie G-erhardt was published in 1911, it was
received with a certain degree of interest merely because
it had been preceded by the controversial Sister Carrie.
Because of a certain parallel between the two books in
subject matter and treatment, some critics assumed that
Dreiser had shown the full scope of his talent, and felt
a decisive judgment of his status in American fiction to
be possible at that time* The critics noted his plethora
of detail, his crude journalese, and his utter indifference
to the tabus and literary niceties of the period. His
underlying philosophy was seen to be a frank materialism,
and the temperament reflected in his pages was plainly
melancholy. His ability to draw convincing characteriza
tions was praised, but he was censured for refusing to
condemn explicitly his characters for their transgressions.
The English received Jennie G-erhardt, like Sister Carrie,
with greater enthusiasm than the Americans, because
Dreiser was plainly closer to the European realists and
naturalists than to the American realists of social
protest and aristocratic life.
104
The first two novels of the Cowperwood trilogy were
severely criticized on the counts of style and morality.
The thickly documented story of this financial wizard was
even more flagrantly 1 1 immoral," in the eyes of the Puritan
critics, than Sister Carrie or Jennie G-erhardt, and
Cowperwood’s interminable affairs were ridiculed when they
were not reviled. The Titan carried forward the narrative
of The Financier with more of the same tedious documentation
of Cowperwood1s career and enterprising love life that had
filled the first book, The reviewers did commend, however,
Dreiser’s boundless determination, his persistence, his
talent for dramatic situation, and his success in managing
to make his characters live.
The ’Genius,’ published one year after The Titan,
was given a lukewarm reception by the critics. It was
unquestionably inferior to Dreiser's preceding works,
suffering from a diffuse plot, unsympathetic characters,
and tasteless style. This novel, however, soon came under
the ban of the New York Society for the Suppression of
Vice because of its sexual frankness and its occasional
neglect of speech tabus. The banning of The ’Genius’
brought forth a vociferous protest from a large
representative group of American and English authors
who, although frequently personally deploring it as a
105
literary attempt, nevertheless rallied to its quick defense
when it was attacked unfairly on grounds that endangered
the freedom of expression of all sincere artists. Dreiser
received much notoriety from this controversy. He was
heartened by the support of his fellow craftsmen, and
doggedly refused to make any major revision in his novel
in order to get it published again. When, in 1923, The
*G-enius * was released from the ban, a victory for free
expression had been won.
The eventual recognition of The 1 Genius* also
brought much wider recognition of Dreiser as an important
p
and influential American novelist. Mencken points out
that Dreiser was not even recognized by several supposedly
authoritative critics and historians of American literature
even after the publication of his first four novels.
William L. Phelps, in his "latest" volume of "The Advance
of the English Novel," says Mencken in 1917, does not
mention Dreiser even in passing, although he hails 0. Henry
as a genius who will have "abiding fame." Henry S.
Pancoast, in "An Introduction to American Literature," in
1912, does not mention Dreiser, though he praised Richard
Harding Davis, Amelie Rives, and Will N. Harben. In his
2 Mencken, A Book of Prefaces, pp. 131-4*
1 0 6
”A history of American Literature,” Reuben Post HaL leek
in 1911 mentions Lew Wallace, Marietta Holley, Owen
Wister, but not Dreiser. And Fred Lewis Pattee, in
'"A History of American Literature Since 1870,” in 1916
praises Marion Crawford, Margaret Deland, Richard Harding
Davis, and Robert W. Chambers, but in this ”fat tome” no
mention is made of Dreiser. After The ’Genius * and the
literary furor that it precipitated, it was no longer
possible to ignore Dreiser.
An American Tragedy was well received both in
America and abroad. Not only was this novel by far
Dreiser’s outstanding popular success, but it also won
for Dreiser wide critical acclaim, and with far fewer
reservations than at any previous time. ’ ’ The greatest
novel of our generation,” as Krutch called it, was not
without faults, but they were considered minor in comparison
to the book’s merits, and often they were rationalized away
by some sympathetic critics.
Dreiser’s mature reputation rested on An American
Tragedy. The critics took the opportunity of its public
ation to look back over the first twenty-five years of
Dreiser’s career as novelist and to evaluate his achieve
ment. He was seen to have been a pioneer of modern
fiction, and an inspiration to the younger writers• As
Milton Waldman writes:
: 107
I Sine© the appearance of Mr. Dreiser’s first novel in
1900 his position in the United States has been
constantly growing in importance, until of recent
years he has been accepted by many, if not most, of
the younger rebels responsible for the post-war
intellectual ferment in that country as its principal
novelist.
That Dreiser lacked literary polish, it was
admitted. As Randolph Bourne expresses it,
Dreiser interests because we can watch him grope and
feel his clumsiness. He has the artist’s vision
without the artist’s technique. That is one of the
tragedies of America. But his faults are those of
his material and of uncouth bulk, and not of
shoddiness. He expresses an America that is in
process of forming. The interest he evokes is part
of the eager interest we feel in that growth.^
'Clifton Fadiman offers a defense of Dreiser’s manner of
writing:
Dreiser’s defects, like a warrior’s wounds, are
eloquent of struggle. To hack a path through the
thick jungle of American life as it appeared, let
us say, at the turn of the century, was no job for
a thin-skinned or 'cultivated’ writer. Broad axes,
not razors, clear forests.5
In 1923 Mencken wrote the following summary of
Dreiser’s place in American fiction:
rz
Milton Waldman, , T A G-erman-American Insurgent.f t
Living Age, CCCXXXI (October 1, 1926), 43.
^ Randolph Bourne, "The Art of Theodore Dreiser.1 1
Dial, LXII (June 14, 1917), 509.
^ Clifton Fadiman, ' ’ Dreiser and the American
Dream." Nation. CXXXV (October 19, 1932), 365.
108
The man himself was solid, granitic, without nerves.
Very little cunning was in him and not much bellicose
enterprise, but he showed a truly appalling tenacity.
The pedagogues tried to scare him to death, they
tried to put him into Coventry and get him forgotten,
but they failed every time. The more he ¥>ras reviled,
sneered at, neglected, the more resolutely he stuck
to his formula. That formula is now every serious
American novelist's formula. They all try to write
better than Dreiser, and not a few of them succeed,
but they all follow him in his fundamental purpose —
to make the novel true. Dreiser added something,
and here following him is harder: he tried to make
the novel poignant— to add sympathy, feeling,
imagination to understanding.®
An American Tragedy was the last Dreiser novel
published during the author's lifetime. Two posthumous
novels, The Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947), added
nothing to his reputation— a reputation that was already
in a state of transformation. A discussion of that
transformation and an analysis of the critical response
to these terminal novels wPSfe not within the scope of this
thesis. However, the decline of Dreiser's reputation
and the significance of The Bulwark and The Stoic present
interesting problems for some future investigator.
Dreiser's niche in American fiction is described
very precisely by George Snell:
® H. L. Mencken, Pre .judices. Fourth Series.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), pp. 268-^
109
When Theodore Dreiser died in 1946 his enormous
reputation had already suffered considerable diminution
from what it had been in the 1920’s. In the literary
weeklies and reviews dutiful appreciations appeared,
but they were on the whole temperate; and Dreiser had
evidently outlived the heyday of his fame. The frame
of America's postwar literary mind was alienated from
the heavy naturalism which had been Dreiser's forte,
and while due aeknowledgment was made to his
pioneering of forbidden trails in the novel, the
assessment of his art was severe. It repeated the
hoary strictures of his stumbling prose, reiterated
the old diatribes against his groping philosophy, and
held up to ridicule the mechanistic concept of the
universe which Dreiser had from his youthful reading
of Huxley and Darwin.
And yet it was impossible- for the honest critic
to deny that. Dreiser., more than any other twentieth-
century American, novelist, had worked greatly in the
tradition of novelists of other times and lands*
Perhaps we have never had a novelist who came nearer
to Tolstoy, Fielding and Balzac as the chronicler
of Life. For him the novel was a vast crucible into
which could be poured everything— his observation
of manners, characterization of men and women, thoughts
on issues of the day, his entire reading of the
meaning of existence.7
7
Snell, op. clt., p. 233.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A. BOOKS
Angoff, Charles, A Literary History of the American People.
New York:: A. A. Knopf, 1931.
Blair, Walter, Theodore Hornberger, and Randall Stewart,
The Literature of the United States. New York: Scott,
Foresman and Company, 194?.
Blankenship, Russell, American Literature as an Expression i
of the National Mind. New York: H. HoTF and Company,
T 9 3 1 . :
■Boynton, Percy H., Some Contemporary Americans. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, I921•
Brosin, Isadore G., Certain Trends in the Critical Analysis
of American Li terature si nee the WorTd~~War, 1519 -19 4 D1
Unpublished' Master’s Thesis, University of Southern
California, 1942.
Calverton, Victor Francis, The Liberation of American
Literature. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1932.
^Cargill, Oscar, Intel He ctual America; Ideas on the March.
New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941.
Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday,
Page, and Company, 191)0.
, Jennie Gerhardt. New York: Harper and Brothers,
T9 111
_____, The Financier. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912.
_____, The Titan. New York: John Lane Company, 1914.
_____, The ’Genius.’ New York: John Lane Company, 1915.
_____, Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub; A Book of the Mystery and Wonder
and Terror of Life. New York: Boni and Liver'ightl 1920.
, An American Tragedy. (2 volumes). New York: Boni
and“Ti veright, 1925.
Ill
_, The Bulwark. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1946,
, The Stoic, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1947,
Dudley, Dorothy, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land
of the Free, hew York: Harrison Smith and Robert
Haas, 1932.
/Elias, Robert H., Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature.
New York: A, A.' Knopf, 1948•
Feria, Rodrigo T,, Realism in the Minor Imaginative Prose
Works of Stephen Crane« Unpublished Master’s Thesis,
hhiversTty of Southern' Califcrnia, 1927.
Foerster, Norman, editor, Humanism and America. New York:
Farrar and Rinehart, 1930.
Goldberg, Isaac, The Man Mencken: A Biographical and
Critical Survey. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1925.
^/Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds, an Interpretation of
Modern American Pro se"~Li terature. New York: Reynal
and Hitchcock, 1947.
Kemler, Edgar, The Irreverent Mr. Mencken. Boston:
Little, Brown anh Company, ~"T950.
Manly, John Matthews, and Edith Rickert, Contemporary
American Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
Company, 1922.
^Mencken, Henry L., A Book of Prefaces. New York: A. A.
Knopf, 1917.
_, Prejudices. Fourth Series. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1924.
_, Introduction to Memorial Edition of An American
Tragedy. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, T9%6.
Michaud, Regis, The American Novel of To-Day; a Social and
Psychological Study. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1928.
/•Pattee, Fred Lewis, The New American Literature. New York:
The Century Company, 1930^
112
;Rascoe, Burton, Theodore Dreiser. . New York; R. M. McBride
and Company,' 1925.
Sherman, Stuart Pratt, On Contemporary Literature. New
York; Henry Holt and Company, 19l7.
Sherman, Stuart Pratt, Main Stream. New York; Charles
Scribner*s Sons, 1927.
Snell, George, The Shapers of Ameri can Fiction, 1798-1947.
New York: E. 'P. Dutton and Company, 1947.
^Taylor, Walter Fuller, A History of American Letters.
Boston: American Book Company, 1936.
Van Doren, Carl, Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-
1920. New York: MacMillan and Company, 1922.
, The American Novel. New York: Macmillan and Company,
T92TT “
B. ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
/Anonymous, Review of Sister Carrie, The Athenaeum,
(September 7, 1901), 3l'2-13.
, 1 1 Story of a Book, " Bookman, XXXIV (Nofember, 1911),
221-5.
, "Jennie Gerhardt," Independent, LXXI (December 7,
T911), 1267-8.
, "Jennie Gerhardt," Current Literature, LII
TJanuary, 1912), 114.
,"Arriving Giant in American Fiction," Current
Literature, LIII (December, 1912), 696-7.
, "The Financier," Nation, XCV (December 19, 1912),
589-90.
, Review of The Financier, Review of Reviews, XLVII
T F e b r u a r y , 1913), 242.
, "Dreiser’s ’Financier,*" Independent, LXXIV
“(February 27, 1913), 470-1.
113
, Review of The Titan, Atlantic Monthly, CXIV
TOctober, 191TJ7 B'g'S-f. ------"-------
, Review of The Titan, Independent, XXC (October 12,
1914), 80,
Anonymous, Review of The 'Genius, ' New York Times Book
Review, October 10, 1§15.
, "Dreiser's Arraignment of Our Intellectual Aridity,1 1
LXII (May, 1917), 334-5.
_____, ’ 'Dreiser's Novels as a Revelation of the American
Soul," Current Opinion, LXIII (September, 1917), 191.
_____, "Secret of Personality as Theodore Dreiser Reveals
■^»f t Opinion, LXVI (March, 1919), 175—6.
, "An American Tragedy," Saturday Review of Literature,
II (February 20, 1926), 569.
, Review of An American Tragedy, London Times Literary
Supplement, October 7, T926.
, Review of An American Tragedy, Spectator, CXXXVII
("October 9, 1^26), 602.
Anderson, Sherwood, Review of An American Tragedy,
Saturday Review of Literature^ IT (January9, 1926),
475,"' ' '
Auerbach, J. S., "Authorship and Liberty; argument before
the appellate division of the Supreme Court (first
department), In the suppression of 'The Genius,' by
Theodore Dreiser," North American Review, CCVII
(June, 1918), 207.
Brooks, Van Wyck, "According to Dreiser," Nation, CX
(May 1, 1920), 595-6.
Bourne, R. S., "Novels of Theodore Dreiser," New Republic,
II (April 17, 1915), sup. 7-8.
, "Desire as Hero," New Republic, V (November 20,
1915), 5.
, "Art of Theodore Dreiser," Dial, LXII (June 14,
T917), 507-9.
!Cary, Lucian, Review of The Titan, Dial, LVI (June 16,
1914), 504.
Coates, Joseph H., ’ ’ Sister Carrie,’ 1 North American Review,
CLXXXVI (October, 1907), 288-91.
Cooper, Frederic T., ’ ’ The Fetich of Form and Some Recent
Novels,Bookman, XXV (May, 1907), 287.
, ’ ’ The Fallacy of Tendencies in Fiction,” Forum,
XXXIX (July, 1907),. 110-20.
, “Six Novels of the Month,” Bookman, XLII (November,
1915), 522-3.
/Cowley, Malcom, ”Slow Triumph of Sister Carrie,” New
Republic, CXVI (June 23, 1947), 24-7.
Dreiser, Theodore, ’ ’ America and the Artist,” Nation,
CXX (April 15, 1925), 423-5.
Duff us, R. L., ’ ’ Dreiser,” American Mercury, VII (January,
1926), 71-6.
_____, Review of An American Tragedy, New York Times
Book Review, January 10, 1926.
Darrow, Clarence, Review of An American Tragedy, New York
Evening Post Literary RevTew7 January 16, ±926.
”E. F. E.,” Review of The Titan, New York Times Book Review,
May 24, 1914.
Fadiman, Clifton, ’ ’ Dreiser and the American Dream,” Nation,
CXXXV (October 19, 1932), 364-5.
xFreeman, J., ”An American Tragedy,” London Mercury, XVI
(October, 1927), 607-14.
Gilman, Lawrence, ”The Biography of an Amorist,” North
American Review, CCIII (February, 1916), 290-3.
Hale, E. E., Review of The ’Genius, 1 Dial, LIX (November
11, 1915), 422.
^Hicks, Granville, ’ ’ Theodore Dreiser,” American Mercury,
LXII (June, 19)46), 751-6.
11 5
Horwill, H. W., Special Article on the English Opinions of
An American Tragedy, New York Times Book Review,
January 9, 1927.
Xrutch, Joseph Wood, Review of An American Tragedy, Nation,
CXXII (February 10, 1926), TF2.
Mencken, Henry L,, Review of The Financier, New York
Times, XYII (November 10,"~Y§1.2), 654 .
, "Dreiser in 840 Pages," American Mercury, VII
fApril, 1926), 379.
Muir, Edwin, Review of An Ameri can Tragedy, Nation and
Athenaeum, XL (OctoBer 16, 192671 88-9.
Norris, G. 0., "My Favorite Character in Fiction;
Hurstwood," Bookman, LXII (December, 1925), 410-11.
Pew, Marlen, "Shop Talk at Thirty," Editor and Publisher,
(October 10, 1931), 48.
Powys, John Gowper, Review of An American Tragedy, Dial,
LXXX (April, 1926), 330-38.
Redman, Ben Ray, "From Dreiser to Farrell,* American
Mercury, (July, 1949), 113-21.
Rhodes, Harrison, "Mr. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie," Bookman,
XXV (May, 1907), 298-9.
Roberts, R.E., "An Amaican Tragedy," Bookman (London),
LXXI (December, 1926), 158-9.
Sherman, Stuart P., "Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser," Nation,
Cl (December 2, 1915), 648-50.
_____, Review of An American Tragedy, New York Herald and
Tribune Books, January 3, 1926.
Smith, E. H., "Dreiser, after Twenty Years," Bookman, LIII
(March, 1921), 27-39.
Taylor, G. R. S., "United States as Seen by an American
Writer," Nineteenth Century and After, C (December,
1926), 803-15.
, "Theodore Dreiser," Outlook (London), LVIII
(^December, 1926), 607-8.
116
,Tjader, Marguerite, "Dreiser’s Last Year . . . ’The Bulwark’
in the Making," Book Find News, II (March, 1946),
6-7*
Van Doren, Carl, "Contemporary American Novelists," Nation
CXII (March 16, 1921), 400-1.
, "American Realism,"New Republic, XXXIV (March 21,
T923), 107-8.
/Van Westrum, A. S., "The Decadence of Realism," Book
Buyer, XXII (March, 1901), 136.
Walcutt, C. C., "Three Stages of Theodore Dreiser’s
Naturalism," PMLA, LV (March, 1940), 266-89.
^Waldman, M., "German-Ame rL can Insurgent," Living Age,
CCCXXXI (October 1, 1926), 43-50.
^.Walker, C. R., "Dreiser Moves Upward," Independent,
CXVI (February 6, 1926), 166.
, "How Big is Dreiser?" Bookman, LXIII (April, 1926),
146-9.
Wells, H. G., Discussion of An American Tragedy, New York
Times Magazine, May 15, T92TI
Winter, C., "Theodore Dreiser’s ’Jennie Gerhardt,’"
Bookman, XXXIV (December, 1911), 432-4.
^Whipple, T. K., Review of An American Tragedy, New Republic,
XLVI (March 17, 1926),"Tl3^ST
C. ENCYCLOPEDIA ARTICLES
Biography of Charles T. Yerkes, The National Cyclopaedia of
American Biography, Vol. IX TNew York: James T. White &
Co., 1907j '"462-3';

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Creator Mitchell, William Eugene (author)

Core Title The formation of Theodore Dreiser's critical reputation as a novelist

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag literature, American,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Lecky, Eleazer (committee chair), McElderry, Bruce R., Jr. (committee member), Trecker, Harleigh B. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c20-408491

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