An American Tragedy
by . New York: Boni and Liveright. 1925. 12mo. 2 vols. x + 431 +409 pp. $5.00.
DREISER’S method of creation resembles that of the oyster. The flashing and predatory career of Yerkes. the traction magnate, was the hard, sharp grain of fact about which grew The Financier and The Titan. From certain episodes of his own life were evolved The Genius. And now a forgotten murder of the last generation, smoothed, agglutinated, worked over for a decade, has been transformed into the two imposing volumes of An American Tragedy.
It was Clyde Griffiths’ childhood environment that set the scene for the tragedy. His father, an itinerant evangelist, ‘leaned on the Lord, while Clyde, unhappily assisting at street-corner preachings, dreamed of a more glittering and gracious world, A job as hotel bell-boy confirmed his belief that only wealth could make life endurable; but, lacking strength to achieve it, he drifted and dreamed through bitter years of poverty until in an Eastern city he found and attached himself to a rich uncle. Launched in a sustaining element, welcomed by local society, loved by a young heiress, the door at last seemed open to the bright world of his dreams, when a liaison with a working girl resulted in disaster, and he was faced with the alternative of flight or immediate marriage. Characteristically he temporized, until, harried by fear, bedeviled by passion, he sought in murder the solution of a problem that had outgrown his feeble capacity for adjustment.
For the telling of this story, Dreiser has taken 840 closely printed pages. He has included a more detailed, absorbing, realistic account of a murder trial than has hitherto found its way into fiction. He has documented the tale with even greater thoroughness than the career of Copperswood in The Financier and The Titan, omitting no incident, no thought even, relevant to a full and precise understanding of the case that he puts before the reader. And by making his protagonist a typical American youth, and his opponent the complex and unconquerable forces of heredity and environment (the modern equivalent to the Fates of Greek tragedy), he has translated this story of a weak and commonplace boy into an American epic comparable in power and understanding to Jude the Obscure or The Brothers Karamazov.
Too much pity, too little style — these are the barriers that have stood between Dreiser and a place among the world’s greatest novelists. These barriers he shows signs of surmounting. His passages of exposition are still clumsy, but his narrative is now, for the most part, simple and straightforward, a competent piece of honest reporting that interposes no verbal window between the reader and the scene described. And, what is more important, he no longer turns aside from the course of his story to give tongue to those cries of compassion or despair which so often, in his earlier novels, were evoked by the sufferings of his characters. The result is Dreiser’s greatest novel, and an impressive achievement to be reckoned with in any history of American literature. R. N. LINSCOTT