Dreiser Reconsidered
by HOWARD MUMFORD JONES
THE publishers of The Bulwark (Doubleday, $2.75) announce with truth that this posthumous work is the first novel by Theodore Dreiser to appear in twenty years. As one toils through its cumbrous pages, they do, indeed, take one back to the twenties, when the wine of the puritans was being spilled on the ground. Any estimate of Dreiser must be based upon the revolt of which he was the embodiment and which conditions even his latest fiction. But first, The Bulwark itself.
The fable is standard. Solon Barnes, scion of a Quaker family, sober, industrious, inflexible, a child of the nineteenth century, marries a sober Quaker wife and rises by industry and frugality to being a minor personage in the banking world of Philadelphia. He rears a family. Convinced that God prospers the righteous, he is troubled by the contemporaneous prosperity of the wicked in the Gilded Age, a doubt that makes him stick more closely to Victorian values as the materialism of capital and the worldliness of Philadelphia society increase.
His children cannot accept the restrictions of the old ways, but their rebellion is disastrous. One daughter goes to live with an artist in Greenwich Village, a son turns out to be a prig, and another son kills himself because, on a wild party, he is involved in the death of a girl. Solon resigns from the bank in protest against shady practice. His death closes the book. One is reminded of the despairing cry of the father in Hebbel’s Maria Magdalena, “I understand the world no more.” Readers of Dreiser will recognize echoes of his earlier books in this plot.
The manuscript might have been written at almost any time in this writer’s career. It retains all his peculiarities. A fecund author, he never mastered a style, so that the strength and weakness of Sister Carrie, which dates from 1900, are in this regard the strength and weakness of An American Tragedy, published in 1925. I open this vast novel at random, find myself in the middle of the Roberta-Clyde love affair, and read: —
And this, in spile of the present indifference of the Griffiths, caused him to walk with even more of an air than had hitherto characterized him. Even though neither they nor any of those connected with them recognized him, still he looked at himself in his mirror from time to time with an assurance and admiration which before this he had never possessed. For now Roberta, feeling that her future was really dependent on his will and whim, had set herself to flatter him almost constantly, to be as obliging and convenient to him as possible. Indeed, according to her notion of the proper order of life, she was now his and his only, as much as any wife is ever to a husband, to do with as he wished.
This is the average level of Dreiser’s prose. Can writing be more gray, featureless, lacking in cogency? An American Tragedy is impressive for other reasons, but The Bulwark, lacking weight and onset, is not. The style is unaltered. The characters all talk alike. If it is possible to lug in a cliché, Dreiser is led as by enchantment to prefer it to something simpler and more direct. Indeed, The Bulwark in theme and style has the air of being a reprint for classes in the history of fiction; one almost expects some scholar to provide an introduction, glossary, and notes.
But the book is not insignificant, and Dreiser cannot be ignored. His clumsy, yet sympathetic, spirit embodies a phase of American thought. He is a characteristic product of our revolt against the nineteenth century. The publishers’ instinct is therefore right in calling the attention of buyers to the fact that twenty years have elapsed since An American Tragedy was published.
The twenties were the triumph of the revolution against. During the previous ten years young and ardent writers, assembling for a crusade against tradition, began the attack; by the mid-twenties Jerusalem had been conquered. Jerusalem had been somewhat unhistorically defended by an army of “puritans,” albeit “puritanism” had no connection with the seventeenth century, a moment of history the attackers never studied. “Puritanism” was a misnomer. The attack was upon the nineteenth century, and its timing simply marked a cultural lag between the United States and Europe, particularly Great Britain.
In England the last third of the last century had seen revolt, the record of which is the writings of Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall, the biographical and historical studies of Leslie Stephen, Andrew Lang, and their kind, and the literary productions of writers as various as Stevenson, Wilde, G.B.S., and Samuel Butler. The Protestant God had been an oppressor (see Gosse’s Father and Son); everybody therefore argued that if you could get rid of him, you would be happy (as in Butler’s The Way of All Flesh). The assumption that literature should elucidate poetic justice (as in Tennyson and George Eliot) was so palpably absurd, it was comforting to discover there was no cosmic court of equity (for example, the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles). Experimental science was obviously progressive; therefore theology was obviously wrong (as in Robert Elsmere). The practice of art and the freedom of the human instinct were better guides than philosophy or social custom (Studies in the Renaissance, The Critic as Artist, An Unsocial Socialist).
In the United States the next century saw a parallel revolt, but the name was different — the “revolt from the village.”In 1913 John Macy complained that American literature was “idealistic, sweet, delicate, nicely finished” — that is, devoted to a village concept of poetic justice. It was therefore immature. “Any child,” he wrote, “can read American literature, and if it does not make a man of him, it at least will not lead him into forbidden realms.” American books “too seldom come to grips with the problems of life.”
Dreiser was the heir, not merely of determinism and the revolt from the village, but of the whole antiVictorian movement. To him Spencer was a dazzling mind. Oppressed by a Catholic God as Gosse had been oppressed by a Protestant Deity, he adopted the agnostic axioms of Tyndall, Stephen, and the Victorian monists. The passage in The Financier in which Frank Cowperwood watches the lobster devour the squid shows how delightedly Dreiser substituted the crudest form of Darwinism for theology. If literary idealism had sophisticated the facts of life, Dreiser proposed to substitute brute fact for literary idealism. Whether his novels can survive the passing of these simple and primitive epistemological assumptions is a nice problem of literary history.
Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy seem destined to endure, whereas The Financier, The Titan,The “Genius,” and, as I think, Jennie Gerhardt have already faded. The difficulty with these lesser novels is that they illustrate the formula of the revolt they spring from. They exist only as documents. Life in them is merely aimless, merely the product of mechanical and chemical forces. Sexuality, which Dreiser valued highly, is tedious in these books, because it is simple and repetitive. Who now remembers the procession of women in and out of Frank Cowperwood’s beds? Or the endless inamorata of Eugene Witla? The paradox of Dreiser’s theory that sexual passion is a driving force is that his books lack sexual passion. They only catalogue, they do not participate. These females are mere objects in space like the paintings Cowperwood buys, the furniture he acquires, the clothing of his mistresses, and all that vague, vulgar, gilt accumulation that, despite his affectation of scorn, really titillated Dreiser’s imagination.
One can, I suppose, write a novel without believing in God, in art, or in idealism, but one cannot very well write a novel without believing in personality. Cowperwood, Witla, and Jennie Gerhardt are not personalities, but the products of force, themselves metamorphosed into force. The squid and the lobster would do as well. The result is not fiction but algebra. The Bulwark suffers from this fallacy. Solon Barnes is as he is because he is. His children are drawn after the same formula, and the climax is not conflict, but collision.
Usually what survives of a literary artist has little to do with his philosophy of the universe. We do not now care for Chaucer’s astrological lore, Bunyan’s theology, or George Eliot’s positivism; but for the Wife of Bath, Apollyon, and Maggie Tulliver. Imaginative vision, the sympathetic presentation of character, it is commonplace, outlast general ideas. There were, I am convinced, two persons in Dreiser: the rebel against nineteenth-century moralism, dogged, brooding, an evangelist of agnosticism; and the reporter, sensitive, sympathetic, curious, all things to all men, who, at certain levels of society (for example, the lower middle class), forgetting that in theory all men are blobs of random cells, took to humanity with Chaucerian delight.
Where in American prose is there better portraiture than that of Paul Dresser in Twelve Men! In the same volume consider the flexibility of temperament that gives you both “The Mighty Rourke” and “A Doer of the Word.” There are equally vivid passages in the other autobiographical books. If this reporting sometimes failed (as it miserably did in A Gallery of Women), delight in experience informs the opening third of An American Tragedy, wherein, not yet hag-ridden by a social thesis, we experience the life of a street evangelist and the life of hotels. The same delight makes Drouet and Hurstwood credible in Sister Carrie. Cowperwood is lath and plaster by comparison.
Take from Dreiser his naturalistic philosophy, and what you have left curiously resembles Dickens — for it is thus the despised nineteenth century brings in its revenge. Like Dickens, Dreiser never comprehended and could not portray cultivated life. But like Dickens he moved sympathetically among the lower middle class, the poor, and the shabbygenteel denizens of that half world between the slums and success where Hurstwood runs saloons that Dick Swiveller would have liked, and Caroline Meeber’s career as an actress so oddly suggests The Infant Phenomenon in Nickleby. For both writers, happiness was endless vitality, hearty vulgarity; and this sense of well-being could be increased by a Christmas philosophy of gifts. Thus Paul Dresser scatters vagabond kindness as if he were employed by the Cheeryble brothers.
Moreover, Dreiser’s delight in melodrama is Dickens’s delight; for example, the immense court scene in An American Tragedy — one can almost overhear Boz applauding in the wings. Finally, Dreiserian delicacy is like that of Dickens, who never says openly that Edith Dombey is Carker’s mistress. So, despite the foolish censors, Dreiser dropped a Victorian curtain over Cowperwood’s harem and extracts all the sensuality from The “Genius.” But The Bulwark is without delight; the thesis (as my outline hints) has swallowed up the book.
It is these scattered scenes of imaginative vigor and real warmth that constitute Dreiser’s chief claim to immortality. In them the style is still bad, but its badness is venial (like that of Dickens), it does not ruin achievement. Not here but elsewhere does Dreiser fail. The more he reflects, the worse he writes, except that when he tries to penetrate psychology and paint for us motive and impulse, he becomes still more dreadful. But where his problem is one of description and movement ; where, as in the case of the biographical sketches and the autobiographical scenes, his purpose is principally to record, not to interpret, then his faulty grasp of medium is less disastrous. For he had the reporter’s memory for spoken phrase, though he seems mainly to have interviewed powerful uneducated persons; just as he has the quick, reportorial eye for random detail.
The stolid, coarse-grained thesis novels, the naïve cosmology, the bad writing, the uneasy political radicalism — these are not essential and fine; what is fine is those parts of his books which are, as it were, reportorial, it being understood that the reporter was a genius whose sympathy contradicted the deterministic philosophy he seemed to accept.
Dreiser saw, felt, tasted, smelled, handled, and loved the visible world, a world with many goodly creatures in it, many weak men, some fools, no devil, much chemistry, and no God. In both senses of the word the invisible world was beyond him. He can therefore move us to pity (as in An American Tragedy) but he cannot move us to terror. His laughter was both gentle and Gargantuan, but as a satirist he is feeble and opaque. What he might have become in any other epoch is an open question: for us, he is the incarnation of our anti-Victorian mood.