American Literary Naturalism: Late Essays 2020946153, 9781785275463, 1785275461

Citation preview

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

i

American Literary Naturalism

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

ii

iii

American Literary Naturalism Late Essays

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Donald Pizer

iv

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition frst published in UK and USA 2020 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–​76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © Donald Pizer 2020 The author asserts the moral right to be identifed as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946153 ISBN-​13: 978-​1-​78527-​546-​3  (Hbk) ISBN-​10: 1-​78527-​546-​1  (Hbk)

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

This title is also available as an e-​book.

v

CONTENTS Preface

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Part I.  General Essays 1. American Naturalism: A Primer 2. Critical Conceptions of American Realism and Naturalism, 1870–​1970

3 17

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Part II.  Specifc Writers and Works 3. Naturalism and the Visual Arts: Dreiser, Crane, and Steinbeck

35

4. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”: How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction

57

5. Norman Mailer, Theodore Dreiser, and the Politics of American Literary History

67

6. John Dos Passos and Harlan: Three Variations on a Theme

81

7. Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s Flapper Culture

101

8. Dreiser’s Relationships with Women

111

Part III.  Donald Pizer and the Study of American Naturalism 9. The Study of American Naturalism: A Personal Retrospective 10. Stephen C. Brennan: Interview with Donald Pizer

127 137

Index 149

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

vi

vi

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

PREFACE It was not uncommon during the early twentieth century for publishers to issue a volume by recently deceased authors, titled along the lines of “Last Words” or “A Final Gathering,” which collected the author’s late work, published and unpublished, that had not previously appeared in book form. (Both Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad, for example, had volumes of this kind appear not long after their deaths.) Although I am still alive as I write this preface, the present collection of my essays is intended to serve a similar purpose by issuing in convenient form a collection of my late and previously uncollected essays on both American literary naturalism in general and specifc naturalist authors. Over a long career (it began in the mid-​1950s), I  have published three previous collections of essays on American naturalists: Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-​Century American Literature (1966; 2nd rev. ed., 1984); The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (1993); and American Literary Naturalism:  Recent and Uncollected Essays (2002). In addition, I  have published during this past decade fve collections of my essays on individual naturalist writers:  Writer in Motion:  The Major Fiction of Stephen Crane (2009); Toward a Modernist Style:  John Dos Passos. A  Collection of Essays (2013); “The Game as It Is Played”:  Essays on Theodore Dreiser (2013); The Signifcant Hamlin Garland:  A Collection of Essays (2014); and Frank Norris and American Naturalism (2018). Of the ten essays collected in this volume, two were initially published in the 1990s, eight since the turn of the century, and none, with the exception of “The Study of American Naturalism,” which served as the introduction to my The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism, has appeared in any of my previous essay collections. As in my other essay collections on naturalism, the essays in this volume have been divided into sections consisting of those on naturalism in general and of those on specifc naturalist writers. It is not surprising that most of the latter section is devoted to essays on Theodore Dreiser. His career and work have been one of my principal concerns ever since I  began writing about him in the mid-​1960s. The third section consists of two personal essays—​my review of my career as a critic of American naturalism, which I published as

vi

viii

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

the introduction to The Theory and Practice of American Naturalism in 1993, and a 2010 interview of me by Stephen Brennan on the same subject. Essays of this kind may not be considered academic scholarship by some, but I  nevertheless believe that they cast considerable light on important areas of my thinking about the nature of American naturalism. In particular, the interview by Brennan renders some of these ideas more directly and emphatically than is commonly found in academic expression. As I  contemplate the full extent of my work as a scholar and critic of American literary naturalism, it occurs to me that much of the best of it—​in the senses of both cogency and quality of writing—​has been in the essay form. I make no apology for my books on a single topic, but I nevertheless believe that I found in the compressed form of the essay a form more congenial to my particular capabilities as a writer than that of a fully extended study. This may be related to the impatience I have always had with the typical academic monograph, a form in which the author has a single major point which is seemingly endlessly repeated in diferent contexts. Or it may derive from my own predilection for conciseness in all expression. But in any case, here is a fnal sampling of my work in that form. The essays are reprinted in the form of their original publication except for the correction of obvious errors, the occasional recasting of a poorly chosen term, and—​in a few instances—​the omission of material irrelevant to the present purpose of the essay. Such omissions are indicated by a line of asterisks in the text.

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the following journals and presses for permission to republish the essays contained in this volume. The essays are listed in the order of their appearance in the book. “American Literary Naturalism: A Primer” American History through Literature, ed. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Detroit: Scribner’s, 2006); 746–​53. Copyright 2006 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reprinted by permission of Cengage (Detroit, MI). “Critical Conceptions of American Realism and Naturalism, 1870–​1970” The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism:  Howells to London, ed. Donald Pizer (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–​18. Copyright 1995 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission. “Naturalism and the Visual Arts: Dreiser, Crane, and Steinbeck”

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, ed. Keith Newlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 463–​ 82. Copyright 2011 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission. “Jack London’s ‘To Build a Fire’: How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction” Philosophy and Literature 34 (April 2010):  218–​27. Copyright 2010 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. “Norman Mailer, Theodore Dreiser, and the Politics of American Literary History” Sewanee Review, 122 (Summer 2014):  459–​72. Copyright 2014 by Sewanee Review. Reprinted by permission.

x

newgenprepdf

x

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

“John Dos Passos and Harlan: Three Variations on a Theme” Arizona Quarterly 71 (Spring 2015):  1–​ 23. Copyright 2015 by the Arizona Quarterly. Reprinted by permission. “Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s Flapper Culture” Studies in American Naturalism 10 (Winter 2015): 123–​32. Copyright 2015 by the University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission. “Dreiser’s Relationships with Women” American Literary Realism 50 (Fall 2017): 63–​75. Reprinted by permission of the University of Illinois Press. “The Study of American Naturalism: A Personal Retrospective” Donald Pizer, The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993): 1–​10. Copyright 1993 by Southern Illinois University Press. Reprinted by permission. Stephen Brennan, “Literary Naturalism as a Humanism:  Donald Pizer on Defnitions of Naturalism”

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Studies in American Naturalism 5 (Summer 2010): 8–​20. Copyright 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

1

Part I

GENERAL ESSAYS

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

2

3

Chapter 1 AMERICAN NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

A PRIMER*

From its late nineteenth-​ century beginnings, critics of American literary naturalism have disagreed, often violently, about its nature and value. Was the movement an exotic ofshoot of a decadent French culture or was it a truthful response, after a quarter century of “lying” by an older generation of writers, to the actual conditions of late nineteenth-​century American life? Did naturalism posit a human condition in which the individual was a powerless cipher at the mercy of natural forces, including his own animal brutishness, or did it permit the individual to retain at least vestiges of both free will and human dignity? And fnally, was naturalism the last gasp of a naive nineteenth-​century belief that experience could be objectively represented or did it look forward, in its signifcant components of the impressionistic and the surreal, to the nonrepresentational aesthetic of twentieth-​century literary modernism? These issues have been in dispute for over a century. What is indisputable, however, is that a number of American writers, from approximately the early 1890s to the opening of the First World War, are conventionally identifed as “naturalists.” This identifcation began in their own time either because a writer openly expressed enthusiasm for the work of Emile Zola, the principal theoretician and exponent of French naturalism (Frank Norris, e.g., occasionally playfully signed letters “The Boy Zola”) or because a writer’s subject matter of alcoholism, sexual passion, and personal disintegration closely resembled that of Zola (as was true of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser). The term “naturalism,” whether broadly applied to the major new writing of 1890–​1910 or used more pointedly to designate the nature of particular works during this period, has stuck, despite the fact that for much of its history the term has also often served as a sign of disapproval and opprobrium. To describe a novel or play as naturalistic was to indirectly accuse its writer of sensationalistic intent, shallow thinking, and inept artistry. * American History through Literature, ed. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Detroit: Scribner’s, 2006), 746–​53.

4

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

4

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Nevertheless, when used with sufcient care and discrimination, the term still serves the useful purpose of suggesting that a group of writers participated in similar ways in a specifc cultural moment and that an attempt to describe these ways may cast light both upon their work and the moment. The leading American naturalists are traditionally held to be Frank Norris (1870–​1902), Stephen Crane (1871–​1900), and Theodore Dreiser (1871–​ 1945). Within the brief period from 1893 to 1901, these fgures wrote the seminal works of American literary naturalism: Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914; written 1894–​95), McTeague (1899), and The Octopus (1901); Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895); and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Jennie Gerhardt (1911; written principally 1901–​2). Of course, there were precursors—​writers, for example, such as Rebecca Harding Davis (1831–​ 1910), Harold Frederic (1856–​ 1898), and Hamlin Garland (1860–​1940)—​whose fction occasionally depicts the harsh and destructive conditions of the American farm or factory. But given the sporadic nature of these eforts, the movement does appear to arise suddenly in the early 1890s as a group of young writers born shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War come of age. And it seems just as suddenly to disappear around the turn of the century. Norris and Crane died tragically young, and Dreiser, dispirited by the reception of Sister Carrie (its own publisher in efect suppressed it), retreated from novel writing for over a decade. The early demise of the movement, however, is more appearance than reality. Dreiser did return with a number of major novels beginning with The Financier in 1912. The work of Jack London (1876–​1916) during the frst decade of the century, though earlier often dismissed as “popular,” is today receiving more and more serious attention, with his naturalism one phase of that interest. In addition, it is increasingly recognized that two of the major women writers of the period, Kate Chopin (1851–​1904) and Edith Wharton (1862–​1937), produced—​in Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905)—​novels with powerfully rendered naturalistic themes despite the disparity between the upper-​class worlds they portray and the conventional lower­class setting of a naturalistic novel. And fnally, though the subject lies outside the range of this discussion, naturalism continued as a major thread in American fction during the 1920s and 1930s—​in the 1920s in the early work of John Dos Passos (1896–​1970), Ernest Hemingway (1899–​1961), and William Faulkner (1897–​1962); and in the 1930s in the novels of James T.  Farrell (1904–​1979), John Steinbeck (1902–​1968), and Richard Wright (1908–​1960). Several characteristics of specifc works by Stephen Crane, one of the earliest American naturalists, can serve as a useful introduction to the late nineteenth-​century phase of the movement. Crane’s sketches “An Experiment in Misery” (1894) and “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” (1894) vividly dramatize the overwhelming impact of post-​Civil War industrialization and urbanization

5

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



AMERICAN NATURALISM

5

upon the nation’s material and psychic existence. In the frst, a young man undertakes an experiment in urban reconnaissance. In the guise of a penniless bum, he journeys to the Bowery (New York’s infamous skid row) in an efort to duplicate for one night (and thus understand the nature of) the lives of the human debris inhabiting the slums and ghettos of America’s greatest metropolis. In the second, Crane, in the role of reporter, descends to the depths of a Pennsylvania coal mine and encounters the backbreaking labor, darkness, and cold that characterize the dehumanizing and almost satanic industrial processes of the age. Both sketches are constructed in the form of a venture into an unknown world by a worldly young man who is nevertheless shocked by what he fnds—​shocked, that is, not that there are fophouses and mines but that their actual conditions, their vermin and cold, for example, bite deeply both into the body and mind of someone actually experiencing them. In these conditions, he realizes, human beings have no “higher” life—​no capacity for art, religion, or love; they exist almost entirely in response to the terrible physical demands of the moment. Humans have become, as in Edwin Markham’s famous poem of the period, “The Man with the Hoe” (1899), a kind of  brute. Crane’s major novels also participate in this naturalistic desire to make known to an unknowing, largely middle-​class audience the new and often ignored truths of life in post-​Civil War America. In Maggie the reader is immersed in the day-​to-​day struggle for existence of a Lower East Side Irish American family whose drinking, physical bullying, and moral blindness accompany their downward path—​a family for whom, as Crane wrote in several inscriptions to the novel, “environment shapes life regardless.” And in The Red Badge of Courage, Crane fctionalizes an actual Civil War battle not as a specifc historical event but as the permanent condition of youth encountering, and not entirely overcoming, such tests of mind and spirit as fear, frenzied anger, and self-​doubt. For Henry Fleming the battle often takes the shape of an opposition of huge, largely anonymous forces in which the powerless individual combatant feels himself to be—​as the powerless might feel in many late nineteenth-​century social contexts—​“in a moving box” bound by “iron laws of tradition and law.” The work of Frank Norris suggests another aspect of the naturalist writer as “truth teller” about contemporary American life. Whereas Crane principally uses metaphor and symbol to carry the burden of thematic expression, Norris, while he too relies on this device, wishes the reader to know more fully and openly the scientifc, philosophical, and social truths underlying his specifc portrayals. Emile Zola, in his essay on the scientifc origins of naturalism, “The Experimental Novel” (1880), maintained that the modern scientifc—​ that is, naturalistic—​novel not only depicts the actual conditions of life but does so, for the frst time in history, armed with a full and truthful—​that is, scientifc—​explanation of these conditions. And since contemporary science

6

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

6

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

had proclaimed that it was the combined forces of heredity and environment that determined any human condition, it was the function of the novelist to create a kind of scientifc experiment: characters would be provided with a specifc heredity and environment and the novelist would observe and record their response to these forces. Norris probably did not read “The Experimental Novel,” but he did read and admire two of Zola’s novels in which he adapted his stark theory into vivid fction—​L’Assommoir (1877) and Germinal (1885). In the frst, members of a working-​class Paris family are decimated by hereditary alcoholism; in the second, a miner and his family are destroyed while participating in a futile strike against all-​powerful mine owners. Norris’s McTeague portrays the San Francisco dentist McTeague and his wife, Trina, as they are brought low by hereditary defects—​alcoholism for him, greed for her. And in The Octopus, the frst novel in his incomplete Trilogy of the Wheat, a ruthless monopolistic railroad crushes the wheat farmers of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Norris in both novels is at pains to introduce themes that complicate and mitigate the stark naturalism of a belief that humankind is completely at the mercy of biological conditions or social power. Yet the naturalism present in his explicit commentary on these conditions, as well as in such climactic scenes as the drunken McTeague murdering his wife or wheat farmers shot down by railroad agents, is nevertheless central to each work. Inseparable in Norris’s mind from his conviction, expressed in his essay “The Responsibilities of the Novelist” (1903), that “the People” must receive from a novelist “not a lie, but the Truth” was his belief that the truth about life included human sexual experience. Of course, literary expression had always included sexual elements, though usually as an adjunct of themes of high romantic passion, burlesque humor, or moral purity. For Norris and other naturalists, however, sexual desire and the social pressures and consequences attendant on sexual expression—​these and other issues arising from sex as a principal arena of biological and social experience—​became major fctional strains in their own right. Maggie must sell herself on the streets to live, and Carrie learns that her sexual attractiveness can serve as a path to freedom and success. Hilma Tree (in Norris’s The Octopus) and Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt are feminine fecundity personifed, and though McTeague desires Trina, and Hurstwood desires Carrie sexually, neither man is condemned for this desire. Aided by a Darwinian climate of forthrightness (after all, Darwin had written a full book on the importance of sexual selection in evolution) and by a gradual loosening of Victorian proprieties, the naturalists now sought, as Dreiser noted in his 1903 essay “True Art Speaks Plainly,” to write within the broad claim that “the extent of all reality is the realm of the author’s pen, and a true picture of life, honestly and reverentially set down, is both moral and artistic whether it ofends the conventions or not.”

7

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



AMERICAN NATURALISM

7

Because of Dreiser’s long career (his last two novels appeared in the mid-​1940s) and the acknowledged greatness of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy (1925), his work has served for almost a century as a focal point in discussions of American literary naturalism. His fction is also especially signifcant because he introduces into American naturalism the theme of authenticity that was to play an important role in its twentieth-​century phase. Both Crane and Norris had middle-​class, Anglo-​Saxon Protestant roots. Their visits to slums, mines, and factories were in the form of “research” and their fction occasionally reveals in its irony and condescension their distance from their subject matter. Dreiser, however, stemmed from an immigrant, German Catholic background. During his youth he and his large family were poor and struggled to survive, whether in small Indiana towns, working-​class Chicago, or down-​and-​out New  York. Carrie’s and Jennie’s stories derive from those of his sisters Emma and Mame, who had worked in menial jobs, and had had afairs, and gotten pregnant, and they also refect his own experience of hardship, insecurity, and the fear of going under. When Dreiser wrote in “True Art Speaks Plainly” that the “the sum and substance of literary as well as social morality may be expressed in three words—​tell the truth” he was echoing Frank Norris’s belief that the novelist must be a truth teller. But for Dreiser the “truth” was not only the subject and themes of literary naturalism but also a deeply felt response to these conditions. It was this aspect of Dreiserian naturalism—​his demonstration that one did not have to “travel” to become a writer, that whatever the seeming poverty of one’s background one could explore it in detail and depth and fnd signifcant meaning—​that made naturalism so potent a force in twentieth-​ century American writing. During the 1930s this Dreiserian model is clearly refected in two “classics” of twentieth-​century American naturalism—​James T. Farrell’s portrayal of Chicago Irish life in his Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1932–​ 35) and Richard Wright’s account of African–​American South Side Chicago in Native Son (1940). Another signifcant aspect of Dreiserian naturalism is his confrmation of the tendency, already apparent in Norris’s novels, to make the naturalistic novel openly and heavily a vehicle of ideological expression. Norris, borrowing fully from contemporary evolutionary ideas, had constructed his frst two novels, Vandover and the Brute and McTeague, in relation to beliefs about the persistence of the animal in human kind, and his last two, The Octopus and The Pit (published posthumously in 1903) on complementary beliefs about the role of natural forces in human afairs. Dreiser, deeply infuenced by Herbert Spencer’s concept of social evolution, depicted urban life as a complex, heterogeneous, competitive maelstrom in which the strong swim and the weak sink—​as in the rise of Carrie and the fall of Hurstwood, for example. For

8

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

8

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

the two novels of the Cowperwood Trilogy that he fnished during his early career—​T he Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914)—​Cowperwood, who is an amoral Nietzschean manipulator of people and money, is portrayed as an inevitable end product of Spencer’s concept that all life is a struggle for existence. American naturalism thus ofered itself, as it emerged in the work of a group of brilliant young 1890s writers, as a fresh perception of a new world. Free from the restrictions of previous generations concerning both the proper subject matter of literature and the conclusions about life that could be drawn from that subject matter, they believed that they could and should depict the actualities of American experience—​not only the ways that most people lived in cities and farms and shops and factories but what they thought and felt as they lived their daily lives. This belief contained not only the assumption that there was value in rendering in detail and with precision, somewhat as a scientist might, the observed characteristics of American life but that there was a causal connection between these conditions and the nature and destiny of an individual life. Once said, however, this statement demands immediate qualifcation, since it appears to imply a “school” with some agreement as to method and purpose, as was indeed true to some degree of the group of French naturalists who gathered around Zola and his philosophy of literature in the 1870s. American naturalism, however, was from the frst leaderless, centerless, and without a governing body of belief. In responding to a common condition and a common felt need, the frst generation of naturalists often struck similar notes but seldom in any harmony. Despite this lack of cohesion among American naturalist writers, early critics often sought to identify a single controlling belief within the movement, one usually phrased as a form of “pessimistic determinism.” Vernon Louis Parrington, for example, in the third volume (1930) of his extremely infuential Main Currents in American Thought, wrote that “Naturalism is pessimistic realism, with a philosophy that sets man in a mechanical world and conceives of him as victimized by that world.” This belief—​whether stated fatly (as by Parrington) or metaphorically (as by Malcolm Cowley in the title of his widely read essay “ ‘Not Men’: A Natural History of American Naturalism” [1947])—​was almost universally accepted until the late 1950s. Its general efect on discussions of American naturalism was to suggest that the naturalism it described was a kind of taint in writers whom it had infected and was therefore responsible for whatever was superfcially sensationalistic, thinly realized, and inadequately thought out in their work. In 1956, however, Charles C. Walcutt published American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, a critical study that stimulated a fresh look at naturalism in America. Walcutt held that despite Zola’s acknowledged role in the origin of

9

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



AMERICAN NATURALISM

9

naturalism wherever it is found, the American phase of the movement also owes much to the persistence in American belief of earlier nineteenth-​century Romantic strains, especially that of transcendentalism. American writers of the 1890s and later, Walcutt argued, accepted much of Zola’s premise that humankind lived in a material universe in which it was controlled, often negatively, by the material conditions of existence. But, he went on, these writers also maintained an often contradictory (or at least paradoxical) belief, epitomized by Emersonian transcendentalism, in our capacity to direct the course of our own lives and in the social progress that can fow from that capacity. Walcutt then examined the work of American naturalists from Crane through the 1930s and concluded that there were few instances of “pure” naturalism. Rather, most putative naturalistic works comprised an uneasy mix of the two “streams” of early and late nineteenth-​century thought, in which the competing claims of each stream upon the themes and form of the work produced novels that were in efect failed eforts to write naturalistic fction. Walcutt’s reading of American naturalism represented several advances over previous eforts to interpret the movement as a whole. Rather than starting from the premise that naturalism in America was an intellectually thin and formulaic ofshoot of French naturalism, he introduced into his account of its origins a frm basis in American thought and thus provided a clearer understanding of the popularity and longevity of the movement in America. And in positing a central and unresolved confict in American naturalism between two competing systems of value, Walcutt helped promote the premise that specifc works of American naturalism were far more complex thematically than had been held and that it was necessary to accept complexity as an aspect of American literary naturalism if works in the movement were to be properly understood. It was no historical accident that Walcutt’s study appeared when the New Criticism was at its height of popularity as a form of literary analysis; Walcutt’s close reading of the interrelation of form and theme in specifc naturalistic novels owes much to that method. Indeed, over the next two decades Crane’s short stories and novels, because of their intricate interplay of irony and symbolism, received countless New Critical readings. The Red Badge of Courage became a kind of showpiece of the New Criticism applied to the novel form. Walcutt’s thesis was indirectly supported by criticism of this kind in that much of it posited a novel whose author appeared to be uncertain whether he was afrming a universe in which individuals were mechanistically controlled or self-​determining. By the late 1970s a number of critics, responding to Walcutt’s insights, had reexamined the basic naturalist texts for thematic strands related to earlier American beliefs and for their shaping of these into complex wholes. The

10

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

10

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

criticism of Donald Pizer, from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, also played a role in this critical reorientation. Although stimulated by Walcutt’s premise, Pizer, in books both on individual naturalists and on the movement as a whole, modifed it in two important ways. Walcutt had argued that American naturalists were hindered from reaching their naturalistic goals by vestiges of older ideas in their beliefs; Pizer, however, held that the various impulses present in a naturalistic novel were a source of thematic density and fctional strength, and that a defnition of American naturalism should therefore accommodate to the mixed nature of the movement. And unlike Walcutt, who had centered on early nineteenth-​century transcendentalism as the source of the “positive” element in American naturalism, Pizer found in specifc naturalistic texts aspects of humanistic belief that varied in nature from work to work. A third signifcant phase in the interpretation of American literary naturalism arose in the early 1980s, infuenced by the emergence of the New Historicism and cultural studies as major critical strategies. In reaction to the ahistoricism of much of the theoretical interpretation that had dominated academic literary studies since the 1960s, both the New Historicism and cultural studies stressed that expression of any kind was inseparable from the culture that produced it. The writer, in a sense, did not write but was rather written upon, in ways usually unknown to himself, by the beliefs, values, and social practices of his historical moment. This Marxist premise, which had been discredited in the 1930s by the crudity of its application, was now reinvigorated by the technique of an extremely close and sophisticated reading of the “cultural poetics” of a work—​that is, its involuntary expression, by means of the language used to engage a cultural moment, of the underlying systems of belief of that moment. Although this approach to the study of American naturalism has restimulated interest in the movement, it has also often had the less benefcial efect of returning its study to an emphasis on determinism. Earlier, during the frst half of the twentieth century, critics had almost universally held that naturalistic writers consciously sought to impose a Darwinian-​derived determinism on their material. The New Historicist or cultural critic modifes this notion to the belief that it is the culture itself that imposes its underlying values upon the naturalistic author and thus on the portrayal of characters. The weakness in this later conception as a critical strategy is that it usually has its origin in the critic’s belief about conditions of race, class, gender, and similar issues during the period the critic is examining. Finding the culture fawed in these areas and assuming that the novelist is equally fawed, the critic invariably demonstrates the ways in which the novel unconsciously endorses the cultural hegemony of its day. Thus, for example, Walter Benn Michaels, a New Historicist critic,

1

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



AMERICAN NATURALISM

11

believes that Dreiser unconsciously expresses his support for a capitalistic economics of acquisition in Sister Carrie because Carrie desires, early in the novel, the material things that capitalism has to ofer. But Carrie, later in the novel, after she has grown intellectually and emotionally, has desires beyond those for things and money, a complication in the interpretation of her character in its cultural setting that Michaels largely ignores. These various ways of interpreting late nineteenth-​ century American naturalism—​from explanations that depend largely on its origins in French naturalism or on its deep roots in earlier American intellectual history or on its immersion in the culture of its own moment—​suggest that the movement cannot be dealt with primarily on its own terms as a truthful representation of social reality. The naturalist, like all writers, is responsive to the literary conventions of the time—​in this instance those that claim the superiority of a literature that accurately renders contemporary experience. But in functioning within these conventions, writers introduce into their efort strands of personal belief, value, and experience that have little to do with their supposed aims. Their works are not a mirror in the roadway, as Stendhal said of the French realist novel, but rather, like any other art work, a product of the complex interaction between human intelligence and imagination and the specifc world in which these function. The naturalists in this sense are no more “truthful” than any other novelist, except perhaps in expending greater attention to closely rendered social detail and to probability of motive. Other than these, their “truths” lie in the ability of their novels to convey believably the response of a distinctive mind and temperament to a distinctive condition. Nevertheless, the major fction by the major new writers of the 1890s, while not as easily characterized as is implied by Dreiser’s and Norris’s admonition that the writer should simply tell the truth, does share several signifcant elements of theme and efect and thus can be construed as participating in a specifc literary movement. One such shared element is the one implied by the shock and outrage that greeted much of the new writing of this period, a response that arose from the writer’s dramatization of the disparity between the life led by most Americans and the conventional rhetoric of the American Dream. Whether Hamlin Garland depicting an exhausted, beaten-​ down midwestern farmer or Dreiser detailing the mechanical, empty existence of a factory girl or Norris portraying the ruination of workers and small landholders by a huge monopoly, American naturalists openly challenged the premise that the nation was a land of opportunity, equality, and freedom for all. Since this premise was so deeply held as to constitute, in the words of later historians, a “civil religion,” it is no wonder that those challenging it were accused of a form of heresy. Norris and Dreiser had their early novels delayed or suppressed, Crane had to publish Maggie privately, and cries of

12

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

12

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

dismay greeted almost all their work on its appearance. (“We must destroy this race of Norrises,” one reviewer cried after reading McTeague.) Much of this early negative criticism also stemmed, of course, from the naturalists’ violation of contemporary standards of what was proper in fction. But then as now standards of taste are often inseparable from ideals of decorum which are themselves based on deeply held social and political beliefs. Naturalistic fction shocked much of its middle-​class audience not merely because (as one critic complained) it portrayed characters one would not invite to dinner but because its depiction of a dysfunctional society was a threat to both the material and psychic well-​being of this audience. Another shared characteristic of the writing of this period is related to a major diference between French and American naturalists. With the notable exception of Norris in McTeague, American naturalists did not adopt Zola’s stress, as in his Rougon-​Macquart series, on hereditary causes of individual misery and failure. In American naturalistic fction, beleaguered farmers, beaten-​down workmen, girls from slums, and immigrant families—​average lower-​class fgures—​are trapped not by their unchangeable genes but by remediable social conditions. Almost all American naturalistic fction, in other words, is written in the spirit of William Dean Howells’s ideal of critical realism, in which the novelist’s depiction of social inadequacies, while it does not contain specifc proposals for their resolution, does imply a pressing need for action of some kind. Occasionally, as in Upton Sinclair’s sensationalistic exposé of the meat-​packing industry in The Jungle (1906), it is possible to draw a direct line between a novel and corrective legislation. But more often, as Amy Kaplan argues in her The Social Construction of American Realism (1988), the novelist is opening up and participating in a kind of debate in response to a large-​scale social issue in American life, a debate in which both writer and audience agree that the problem can be solved. American naturalists thus responded to the threatening social issues facing turn-​of-​the-​century America by simultaneously outraging their audience with the implication that the American Dream was inoperative for most Americans and yet placating this audience with the implication that these inequities within American life could be corrected. A fnal common element in much American naturalism is its afrmation of a major aspect of democratic idealism even while seeming to deny the principal thrust of this creed. In his classic study of the Western literary imagination, Mimesis (1946), Erich Auerbach traces the democratization of the tragic impulse from its inception in Greek drama to modern fction. With only a few exceptions, Auerbach points out, tragic protagonists in the long history of the form are drawn from the upper echelons of their societies. This convention begins to ease with the onset of mid-​nineteenth-​century French

13



AMERICAN NATURALISM

13

realism but collapses fully only in late nineteenth-​century naturalism. Thus, the central characters in most late nineteenth-​century American naturalistic fction—​McTeague and Trina, Carrie and Hurstwood, Maggie and Henry Fleming—​are not important or distinguished fgures in any sense. All are of common stock, and some are lower class. But all have a capacity to desire and therefore to sufer—​qualities that Dreiser in particular stressed as central to the human condition whatever its social circumstance. The pain of thwarted desire in these fgures, whether or not it leads to death, is the residue of the tragic impulse in modern literature. There is no doubt an unconscious irony in the naturalist’s substitution of an equality of pain for one of opportunity, an irony epitomized by Clyde Grifths, the sensitive but otherwise inadequate and unfulflled central fgure in Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. But as Dreiser’s late naturalistic classic suggests, the two themes in consort can serve as a powerful means of addressing the nature of American social life. The miseries and sufering of the average life are important, they appear to be announcing. Or, as is said in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) of a still later tragic protagonist who is a “lowman,” “Attention must be paid!”

Bibliography

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Primary Works Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1899. Crane, Stephen. “An Experiment in Misery.” New York Press, 22 April 1894, p. 2. Reprinted in Stephen Crane, Tales, Sketches, and Reports, vol. 8 of Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers, 283–​93. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973. —​—​—​. “In the Depths of a Coal Mine.” McClure’s Magazine 3 (August 1894): 195–​209. Reprinted in Crane, Tales, Sketches, and Reports, 590–​600. —​—​—​. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York). New York, 1893. —​—​—​. The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War. New York: Appleton,  1895. Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Life in the Iron-​Mills.” Atlantic Monthly 7 (April 1861). Reprinted in Life in the Iron-​Mills, ed. Cecelia Tichi. Boston: Bedford Books, 1898. Dreiser, Theodore. The Financier. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912. —​—​—​. Jennie Gerhardt: A Novel. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911. —​—​—​. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900. —​—​—​. The Titan. New York: John Lane, 1914. —​—​—​.“True Art Speaks Plainly.” Booklover’s Magazine 1 (February 1903):  29. Reprinted in Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose, ed. Donald Pizer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977, 155–​56. Frederic, Harold. The Damnation of Theron Ware. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1896. Garland, Hamlin. Main-​Travelled Roads: Six Mississippi Valley Stories. Boston: Arena, 1891. Markham, Edwin. The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems. 1899. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Norris, Frank. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899. —​—​—​ The Octopus: A Story of California. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901.

14

14

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

—​—​—​“The Responsibilities of the Novelist.” Critic 41 (December 1902): 537–​40. Reprinted in The Responsibilities of the Novelist and Other Literary Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1903, and in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964, 94–​98. —​—​—​. Vandover and the Brute. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1914. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Macmillan, 1905. Zola, Emile. “The Experimental Novel.” 1880. Reprinted in Documents of Modern Literary Realism, ed. George J. Becker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963, 162–​96.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Secondary Works Ahnebrink, Lars. The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. 1946. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953. Conder, John J. Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. Cowley, Malcolm. “ ‘Not Men’: A Natural History of American Naturalism.” Kenyon Review 9 (1947): 414–​35. Hakutani, Yoshinobu, and Lewis Fried, eds. American Literary Naturalism:  A Reassessment. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1975. Howard, June. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1988. Martin, Ronald E. American Literature and the Universe of Force. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Papke, Mary E., ed. Twisted from the Ordinary:  Essays on American Literary Naturalism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Parrington, Vernon Louis. “Naturalism in American Fiction.” In The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–​ 1920, vol. 3, Main Currents in American Thought. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. Pizer, Donald. The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. —​—​—​. ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. —​—​—​. ed. Documents of American Realism and Naturalism. Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Seltzer, Mark. Bodies and Machines. New York: Routledge, 1992. Shi, David. Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–​1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Sundquist, Eric J., ed. American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

15



AMERICAN NATURALISM

15

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America:  Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. Walcutt, Charles C. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

16

17

Chapter 2

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

CRITICAL CONCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN REALISM AND NATURALISM, 1870–​1970* Anyone seeking to write about American literature between the Civil War and World War I in relation to the literary movements known as realism and naturalism faces a twofold initial difculty. First, there exists a traditional suspicion, often arising from the very attempt to write literary history, of large-​scale classifying rubrics. Is there any advantage, one might ask, in conceptualizing the richly diverse expression of this period in terms of such inherent simplifcations as realism and naturalism? A second problem derives from the recent theorizing of literary study. The attraction, for many theorists, of a deconstructive stance has bred skepticism toward interpretive enterprises that posit such communities of belief and expression as those subsumed under the headings of realism and naturalism. And, from a somewhat diferent theoretical viewpoint, recent scholars of a New Historicist bent have tended to discount traditional historical divisions in the study of American literature on the ground that they obscure underlying ideological similarities present in all American writing since the Civil War. Yet the efort to describe and understand a historical phase of American writing in terms of major shared characteristics of that writing continues. At its deepest and probably most signifcant level of implication, this attempt derives from the same reservoir of humanistic faith which feeds the act of creative expression itself. The artist, putting pen to paper, is expressing a belief in the human capacity to overcome such obstacles to understanding as the existence in all communication acts of unconscious motive and value in both writer and reader, the inherent ambiguity of the symbolic expression which is language, and the often heartbreaking distinction in human utterance between intent and efect. He or she does so, despite these difculties, because of faith in the value of striving to create threads of shared experience and meaning * The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–​18.

18

18

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

out of the inchoate mix of life. The literary historian, in his or her own way, also functions within this charged feld of doubt and faith. Indeed, the literary historian can proft from the increased appreciation in recent decades of the difculties inherent in the efort to interpret. An awareness of the hazards and complexities of textual and historical analysis can lead, not to abandonment of the attempt to understand the past, but rather to a refning of that undertaking. A major problem inherent in the use of the terms realism and naturalism in discussions of literature is the fact that both words also have distinctive meanings in philosophical discourse that can spill over into literary analysis, with awkward consequences. For example, metaphysical and epistemological inquiries as to what is real, or the ethical implications of what is natural, can be used to undermine almost any act of literary historiography or criticism. This destabilization arises, not from the eforts of scholars who seek a meaningful engagement with the possible philosophical implications of a literary work, but rather from the attempts of various writers from the mid-​nineteenth century onward to ridicule the pretensions of works purporting to be realistic or naturalistic by noting the emptiness, in relation to philosophical usage, of any such claims. As a result of this conventional stance of critics instinctively hostile to realistic or naturalistic expression, it has become common to preface serious discussions of the literary dimensions of realism or naturalism with statements disclaiming any relationship between the literary and philosophical usages of the terms.1 Another, somewhat related problem is that the terms bear social and moral valences that are frequently attached to any work designated as realistic or naturalistic, whatever the specifc character of that work. The real and natural, on the one hand, suggest the genuine and actual shorn of pretension and subterfuge. The real, especially in America, has therefore also had a positive political infection, as is revealed by several generations of Howells scholars who have related his literary beliefs and practices to democratic values.2 On the other hand, realism and naturalism imply, through their association with the concrete immediacies of experience, a literature unmediated by the intellect or spirit, and therefore lacking in those qualities necessary to sustain the mind or soul of man. Naturalism in particular is thus held to be morally culpable because it appears to concentrate on the physical in man’s nature and experience.3 (Theodore Dreiser’s naturalism, Stuart P. Sherman stated in a famous pronouncement, derived from an animal theory of human conduct.4) Thus, it is assumed by critics seeking to exploit the negative associations conjured up by the terms realism and naturalism that any literature so designated proclaims the shallowness of mind and spirit of its creator.

19

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



CRITICAL CONCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN REALISM & NATURALISM 19

Realism and naturalism have therefore often served as shibboleths in social and literary controversy—​comparable to liberal and reactionary in present-​day political afairs—​at various moments in American cultural history. The terms played a central role during late nineteenth-​century debates on the value of the ideal versus the commonplace in experience, and they recurred in 1920s arguments about whether the writer should depict the rational or the irrational as central to human behavior. They reappeared in 1930s discussions about the need for literature to serve a social purpose rather than fulfll an aesthetic need, as well as in disputes during the 1960s and 1970s over whether or not the romance or novel is the distinctive form of American fction.5 Each of these controversies has usually cast more light on the polemical preoccupations of the moment than the literature under discussion. Of course, it can be maintained that the inseparability of subject from object, of the knower from what he wishes to know, is inherent in the act of seeking to know, and can therefore no more be avoided in the efort to “know” realism and naturalism than it can in any similar enterprise. The issue in this instance, however, is the blatant irrelevancy of much that has been imposed on realism and naturalism as terms by critics preoccupied with polemical ends. In other words, given this history in the use of the terms, can we have any faith in the possibility of a more “objective” use? A fnal major problem in the use of realism and naturalism as key terms in American literary historiography arises from several signifcant diferences in the way the terms have been used in European literary history. It has often been remarked that realism and naturalism occurred earlier in Europe than in America (from the late 1850s to the late 1880s in France); that they contained—​in the pronouncements of Flaubert and Zola, for example—​self-​ conscious and full-​scale ideologies; and that they functioned within a coherent network of personal relationships for much of their existence. In America, on the other hand, it is noted that the boundaries of the period are the Civil War and World War I, which suggests a substitution of historical event for ideology as the signifcant basis for understanding literary production; that critical discussion, as characterized by Howells’s defnition of realism as “the truthful treatment of material,”6 lacks depth; and that the movements also lacked a social base or center. For some critics, the inescapable conclusion to be drawn from these diferences is that it is inappropriate and poor criticism to attempt to apply terms with a body of specifc meaning derived from the specifc characteristics of their European origin to a very diferent set of circumstances in American literary history.7 George J. Becker, who took the lead during the 1960s in this efort to dismiss the credibility of realism and naturalism as terms in American literary history, also noted another troublesome issue in their varying European and American

20

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

20

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

usage. In Europe the terms were used interchangeably in the late nineteenth century and often still are, while in America they have served to distinguish between the fction of the generation of Howells and James (the 1870s and 1880s) and that of Norris and Dreiser (the 1890s). To Becker, a reliance on this distinction is further evidence that both terms have been distorted in their application to American literary conditions and should therefore be discarded by American literary historians.8 Becker’s objections, however, have not prevented the continued use of the terms realism and naturalism in American literary historiography. They are too deeply implanted to be dislodged, and their removal would leave unanswered the question of what would replace them. But Becker’s attempt, as well as those made by such scholars as Harry Levin and Rene Wellek,9 to describe Continental realism and naturalism as a body of belief and practice has clarifed both the diference between the movements in Europe and America and what is distinctive in the American movements. In short, it is now generally held that American realism and naturalism are not similar to the European varieties, but that the diferences between them should lead, not to a rejection of the use of the terms in America, but rather to studies that will exploit an understanding of these diferences in order to help us interpret the American literary phenomena designated by the terms. Thus, in the long debate on the advantages and disadvantages of using the terms realism and naturalism, a rough operative (rather than fully articulated) consensus has emerged. (Not to say that there are not vigorous dissenters to this consensus.) Eforts to discard the terms because of the various semantic confusions that have adhered to them over the last hundred years have been rejected. Whatever the philosophical, moral, and social baggage that encumbers them, they will have to do; including, indeed, this baggage itself as a proftable object of study. In addition, eforts to confne the meaning of the terms to normative defnitions derived from European expression have also been rejected. Rather, it is now generally accepted that the terms can be used to historical and critical advantage to designate a body of writing produced during a distinctive phase of American expression. Or, to put it another way, that the historian can accept the premise that whatever was being produced in fction during the 1870s and 1880s that was new, interesting, and roughly similar in a number of ways can be designated as realism, and that an equally new, interesting, and roughly similar body of writing produced at the turn of the century can be designated as naturalism. This is not, of course, an entirely satisfactory “solution” to the various problems inherent in the use of the terms realism and naturalism in American literary history. But when the evidence provided both by the texts themselves and by a complex cultural and intellectual history cannot itself produce precise and uniform defnitions, we must accept the fact that the defnitions must be adapted to the evidence, and that an

21



CRITICAL CONCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN REALISM & NATURALISM 21

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

amorphous, fexible, and ultimately “undefnable” terminology is in itself a contribution to the understanding of what occurred.10 Literary historians of the 1920s and 1930s, following the lead of V. L. Parrington, tended to describe realism as a new phenomenon unleashed upon the American scene during the 1870s and 1880s by the rapid industrialization and urbanization of America in the post-​Civil War period. But as Robert Falk and others have demonstrated, no such swift and complete rejection of earlier nineteenth-​century literary beliefs and practices occurred. In particular, critical pronouncements during the 1870s and 1880s about the new writing were frmly Victorian in their basic assumptions about life and literature.11 One of the most important of these assumptions is closely identifed with the critical views of W. D. Howells during the late 1880s, though it appears as well in the literary journalism of a number of other writers seeking to defend and promote the new fction. Literature, Howells argued in his “Editor’s Study” columns in Harper’s Monthly, ought to refect, and play a major role in encouraging, the social and political progress that characterized nineteenth-​century life, progress that had received its fullest expression in the American efort to unite scientifc inquiry and political democracy into a means for a better life for all men. Howells and such fgures as Hamlin Garland, T. S. Perry, and H. H. Boyesen thus accepted wholeheartedly the central evolutionary premise of much nineteenth-​century thought that loosely joined social, material, and intellectual life into a triumphant forward march.12 The function of literature in this universal progress was to reject the outworn values of the past in favor of those of the present. Or, in more literary terms, the writer was to reject the romantic material and formulas of earlier fction, since these derived from the limited beliefs and social life of their moment of origin, in favor of a realistic aesthetic which demanded that the subject matter of contemporary life be objectively depicted, no matter how “unliterary” the product of this aesthetic might seem to be. “Nothing is stable,” Garland wrote in 1882, “nothing absolute, all changes, all is relative. Poetry, painting, the drama, these too are always being modifed or left behind by the changes in society from which they spring.”13 Garland’s pronouncement, and many like it, appears to require a radical dismissal of traditional literary belief and practice. (The title of his 1894 collection of essays, Crumbling Idols, refects a similar radical aura.) But in fact, when separated from its polemic posturing and examined for its specifc proposals about fction, criticism of this kind discloses a far less revolutionary cast than its rhetoric suggests. Howells’s famous grasshopper analogy, in his 1891 collection of “Editor’s Study” columns, Criticism and Fiction, is revealing in this context. All is to be true and honest in fction, Howells states, within a realistic aesthetic in which the writer, like a scientist with democratic values,

2

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

22

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

discards the old heroic and ideal, and therefore false, cardboard model of a grasshopper and depicts the commonplace activities of a commonplace grasshopper. This engaging plea, however, disguises the tameness, and indeed often the superfciality, of much fction subsumed under the notion of the commonplace or realistic. For Howells and others, the “progressive realism of American fction” (to use H.  H. Boyesen’s language) lay principally in portraying “the widely divergent phases of our American civilization,”14 that is, a local-​color literature. In addition, these “phases” were to be depicted normatively in the negative sense of omitting areas of human nature and social life that were “barbaric” in nature. The new literature, Garland announced in Crumbling Idols, “will not deal with crime and abnormalities, nor with diseased persons. It will deal … with the wholesome love of honest men for honest women, with the heroism of labor …, a drama of average types of character.”15 In short, the underlying beliefs of this frst generation of critics of realism were frmly middle class. Literature had a job of work to do:  to make us known to each other in our common political and social progress (and also, in Howells’s later modifcation of his views, our defects in these areas). It was to serve social ends as these ends were defned by the socially responsible. It is therefore not surprising to fnd a disparity between the radical implications of the realists’ ideal of change and the actual themes and forms of the literature proposed as meeting this ideal. We have a realistic fction that “every year [grows] more virile, independent, and signifcant,” announced Boyesen, who cited as examples of this expression the work of such thin and pastiche local colorists as Thomas Nelson Page, H. C. Bunner, and Edgar Fawcett.16 To put this distinction between critical pronouncement and literary production in somewhat diferent terms, Howells, Garland, Boyesen, and others appeared to have confused the proliferation and acceptance of local color, a literature expressive above all of middle-​class taste and values, with their call for a fction refective of the radical changes occurring in American life. Something new and exciting was indeed happening in fction, but it was happening principally in the work of the major novelists of the day, Henry James, Twain, and Howells, who, except for Howells, were writing outside the parameters of the commonplace, as well as in the largely neglected work of women and minority authors. In slighting these forms of expression in favor of the “positive” social work performed by a normative local color, Howells and others were misfring in ways that had a permanent efect on the conception of American realism. Realism, because of Howells’s prominence as critic and novelist and because of its widespread public acceptance in the form of local color, attracted a considerable body of critical commentary during the late nineteenth century. But naturalism, as it emerged as a major new form of expression at the turn of

23

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



CRITICAL CONCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN REALISM & NATURALISM 23

the century, was often ignored, or, when not ignored, condemned out of hand. Socially and morally suspect because of its subject matter, and handicapped as well by the early deaths of Stephen Crane and Frank Norris and the long silence of Dreiser after the “suppression” of Sister Carrie in 1900, naturalism for the most part was slighted as a general topic except for Norris’s miscellaneous comments in various essays and reviews. Less a profound thinker than a defender of his own work and a popularizer of “ideas in the air,”17 Norris’s conception of naturalism is nevertheless signifcant both for what it contains and what it omits. Naturalism, Norris declares, must abjure the “teacup tragedies” of Howellsian realism and explore instead the irrational and primitive in human nature—​“the unplumbed depths of the human heart, and the mystery of sex, and the problems of life, and the black, unsearched penetralia of the soul of man,”18 and it should do so within the large canvas and allegorical framework that permit the expression of abstract ideas about the human condition. So far so good. Norris is here describing not only McTeague and The Octopus, his best novels, as two poles of naturalistic inquiry (a chaotic inner life and a panoramic social world) but also suggestively revealing the appeal of this conception of literature for a large number of twentieth-​century American writers ranging from Faulkner to Mailer. But Norris’s idea of naturalism is also remarkably silent in a key area. For despite his close familiarity with the work of Zola and other French naturalists, nowhere in his criticism does he identify naturalism with a deterministic ideology. Naturalism, to Norris, is a method and a product, but it does not prescribe a specifc philosophical base. Norris was thus identifying, in his criticism, the attraction of naturalism in its character as a sensationalistic novel of ideas fexible enough in ideology to absorb the specifc ideas of individual writers and doing so despite the eforts of several generations of later critics to attach an unyielding deterministic core to the movement. A basic paradox characterizes much of the criticism of late nineteenth-​ century realism produced between the two world wars. On the one hand, the writing of the period is often applauded for its depiction of the new actualities of post-​Civil War America. This celebratory stance is revealed most obviously in the metaphors of progress and success present in the sectional titles of literary histories containing accounts of the period—​“The Triumph of Realism” and the like.19 On the other, critics also wished to register their disapproval of the restraints in choice of subject matter and manner of treatment imposed on writers by the literary and social conventions of late Victorian American life. In this connection, the terms puritanism and genteel tradition were heavily employed. Writers of the time, in short, were described as seeking to be free but as still largely bound.

24

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

24

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

This view is closely related, of course, to the prevailing winds of 1920s and 1930s social and literary discourse. During the twenties, when the act of rejection of American cultural codes and economic values (a rejection most clearly enacted by the expatriates’ self-​exile) was almost a requirement for serious consideration as an artist, it is no wonder that those late nineteenth­century fgures who sought to live out roles of personal and literary alienation—​a Mark Twain at his bitterest or a Stephen Crane—​were centers of attention,20 while those who were seemingly willing to accept codes of gentility or cultural elitism, a Howells or a James, were often relegated, in general accounts of the period, to the role of symbolic refectors of these limitations. Thus, an entire generation of literary journalists, led by H. L. Mencken, but including such prominent and well-​respected fgures as John Macy, Van Wyck Brooks, Ludwig Lewisohn, Carl Van Doren, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, and Henry Seidel Canby, fed of the critical commonplace of a literature attempting to be free to depict American life fully and honestly but deeply fawed by the limitations placed upon this efort by its own time. This broad-​ based attitude, because it served contemporary polemic purposes, tended toward the absolute dichotomy as a critical tool. One such polarization, as noted earlier, was that of distinguishing sharply between ante-​and postbellum writing in order to dramatize the dramatic diferences between a pre-​and postindustrial America. Another, as in V. L. Parrington’s The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (1930), was to bifurcate American life into those forces contributing either to plutocracy or freedom. But despite the prevalence of these and a number of other widely shared beliefs and strategies, criticism of realism and naturalism during this period was neither monolithic nor static. A signifcant illustration of one of the shifting perspectives of the time is present in estimations of the work of Howells. To a Mencken, writing in the literary climate of the late teens and early twenties, Howellsian realism epitomized all that must be avoided by the writer seeking to be a meaningful critic of his own time and life.21 Mencken thus did not so much attempt to understand Howells as to use him as a negative touchstone. But as economic issues became paramount in the minds of many literary historians and critics, beginning in the late 1920s, Howells’s conversion to socialism served the very diferent role of dramatizing the response of a sensitive and thoughtful writer to the conditions of his day. For Parrington in 1930, and for Granville Hicks somewhat later, Howells assumed almost heroic stature. In Hicks’s militant terminology, he was one of those who “marched out upon the feld of battle” to struggle against the forces of economic oppression.22 Discussions of naturalism between the world wars, and especially of the work of Norris and the early Dreiser, were also deeply infuenced by the

25

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



CRITICAL CONCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN REALISM & NATURALISM 25

polemic dynamics of the age. Initially, it was the naturalists’ choice of material, in particular its more open sexuality, which led to their high standing as “trailblazers” of freedom. But gradually, with the greater prominence given to economic and social issues in the 1930s, the naturalists of the 1890s became less valued as exemplars of freedom of expression than as refectors of the closed and destructive mechanistic and Darwinian world of struggle in which it was assumed most Americans functioned.23 It was during this stage in the criticism of naturalism that it became obligatory for the critic to spell out the relationship of American naturalism to Zolaesque determinism and frmly to equate the two. Since it was believed that American life at the turn of the century imprisoned the average American in a “moving box” of economic and social deprivation, naturalism (with its deterministic center) was a writer’s appropriate, and indeed inevitable, response to this condition. Thus, while it might be acknowledged that Norris and Dreiser were often crude and formless and that their work appeared to be confned to the depiction of man as victim, it was believed as well that naturalism of this kind was an apt expression of late nineteenth-​century American social reality. From the end of World War II to the watershed years of the late 1960s and early 1970s, realism fared far better on the critical scene than did naturalism. Realistic fction, whatever its degree of social criticism, was more readily reconcilable than naturalistic writing to the postwar emphasis on the role of American literary expression in afrming democratic values. In addition, with the exception of the work of Stephen Crane, naturalistic fction, with its assumed defects of form and style, was largely ignored as a result of the New Criticism stress on close reading for stylistic complexity that dominated much criticism of the period. Both World War II and its Cold War aftermath generated a commitment on the part of most literary historians to demonstrate the vital presence of the American democratic tradition in all phases of American expression. Thus, the work of Howells and his contemporaries was discovered to be deeply impregnated with such democratic beliefs as trust in the common vision and in pragmatic values. In addition, as Henry Nash Smith put it in his chapter on realism in the Literary History of the United States, by identifying and dramatizing the “problem areas” of American social life, realists were playing a role in the solution of those problems.24 This point of view, with an emphasis on the importance of Howells’s beliefs and practices, characterizes Everett Carter’s Howells and the Age of Realism (1954) and E.  H. Cady’s work culminating in his The Light of Common Day (1971). Much criticism of the period, however, was also increasingly devoted to the fction of Twain and James, fnding in Huckleberry Finn and in James’s major novels a rich source of formalistic analysis. Striking patterns of symbolic imagery and structure and suggestive

26

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

26

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

currents of irony and ambiguity, it was discovered, could be found in these works as well as in those by Melville and Hawthorne.25 These two strains—​a stress on the functional value system underlying realistic portrayals and a revelation of the subtlety and complexity of realistic fctional aesthetics—​joined triumphantly in Harold H.  Kolb’s The Illusion of Life:  American Realism as a Literary Form (1969). Kolb accepted almost as proven the democratic underpinning of the three novels he concentrated on—​Huckleberry Finn, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and The Bostonians—​and devoted most of his attention to the ways in which such formal characteristics of the novels as point of view technique and imagery successfully express these foundations of belief. Everett Carter’s landmark study of Howells and his age, in addition to stressing Howells’s democratic beliefs, is also noteworthy for its delineation of various stages in his ideas. So, for example, Carter locates the sources of Howells’s concept of realism in Comte and Taine and then traces the permutations of the concept in Howells’s career and in those of his major contemporaries. Realism, in short, was not a static entity but rather consisted of ideas in motion.26 This appealing notion of the dynamic nature of the beliefs of the period—​of writers responding to changing ideas and social life by rethinking their own beliefs—​characterizes such major literary histories of the period as Robert Falk’s essay in Transitions in American Literary History (1953) and (as is suggested by their titles) Warner Berthof’s The Ferment of Realism (1965) and Jay Martin’s Harvests of Change (1967).27 These various threads of criticism—​the celebratory democratic, the New Critical, and the dynamic—​are related in their common afrmative view of realism as a signifcant moment in American literary history. No longer was the movement marginalized, as had been true of much criticism of the previous generation, because of its gentility or imperception. Its importance, centrality, and worth had, in the minds of most scholars, been frmly established. Naturalism, however, sufered either dismissal or critical neglect for much of the postwar period. The assumed crudity and stylistic incompetence of Norris or Dreiser of course rendered their work suspect within a critical climate deeply afected by New Critical beliefs and methods. Also telling as a negative factor in the estimation of naturalism was the disillusionment, beginning in the mid-​ 1930s, of American intellectuals with what they held to be the mindless authoritarianism of communist ideology. Many writers of the 1930s who had been identifed with a resurgence of naturalism—​John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell, for example—​were also on the Left, an association confrmed above all by Dreiser’s endorsement of the Communist party and its goals from the early 1930s to his death in 1945. Discussions of naturalism, because of the movement’s origins in Zola’s beliefs and practice, had always contained a tendency toward considering it a foreign incursion with little relationship to

27

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



CRITICAL CONCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN REALISM & NATURALISM 27

American values and experience. This tendency, as well as other threads in the negative conception of naturalism, received full and infuential expression in Oscar Cargill’s Intellectual America (1941), in which Cargill disposed of naturalism as a crude and thinly derivative fction with fascistic inclinations.28 By the postwar years, with the revulsion against communism deepened by the Cold War, a powerful anti-​naturalism stance characterized the criticism of such major voices of the day as Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Cowley, and Philip Rahv.29 As Irving Howe later noted, during the 1940s and 1950s Dreiser’s work was “a symbol of everything a superior intelligence was supposed to avoid.”30 Despite this hostile critical convention, a counterfow of more sympathetic inquiry into the nature of American naturalism also emerged during the 1950s and 1960s. Willard Thorp and Alfred Kazin, for example, asked the question begged by the rejection of naturalism:  If naturalism is inept, intellectually impoverished, and foreign to American values, why has it persisted as a major element in all phases of twentieth-​century American fction?31 A number of scholars accepted the challenge implicit in this question and began to examine the relationship between naturalism and American life on a deeper level than the obvious association between naturalistic factuality and American materialism. One infuential efort was that by Richard Chase, who in his The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) located naturalism within the American romance tradition because of its union of sensationalism and ideas. On the other hand, Charles C. Walcutt, in his American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (1956), rejected the notion that the naturalistic novel had achieved formal coherence in favor of the concept of naturalism’s unsuccessful search for an expressive form, a failure caused by its divided roots in transcendental faith and scientifc skepticism. And Donald Pizer, in his Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-​Century American Literature (1966), as well as in later works,32 sought not only to locate the American roots of naturalistic belief in a close reading of the works themselves (as had Walcutt) but also to establish the fctional complexity and worth of the naturalistic novel at its best. By the early 1970s, therefore, led by a number of major studies of Dreiser (Robert Penn Warren’s Homage to Theodore Dreiser [1971] is symptomatic), it had become possible to discuss the movement outside of the a priori assumptions of inadequacy established by the New Critical and anticommunist critical contexts of the previous generation. This more receptive critical climate for the study of naturalism has also contributed to the efort to describe its enduring presence in twentieth-­century American fction. While realism, as defned and practiced by Howells, has been confned in modern American fction to a relatively minor role, naturalism, in its various interests and strategies, has continued to fourish. This is not to say that naturalism has been the principal force in American fction

28

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

28

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

since the turn of the century. Since the 1920s, the novel of social realism has had as a constant complement a fction of the fantastic or fabulistic, whether as expressed by the sophisticated cleverness of a group of 1920s writers led by James Branch Cabell or by the more intellectualized allegories of such 1960s and 1970s fgures as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Donald Barthelme. Nor has American naturalism been static or monolithic in theme and form since its origin in the 1890s. Indeed, one of the striking characteristics of the movement has been its adaptability to fresh currents of idea and expression in each generation while maintaining a core of naturalistic preoccupations. The nature of this core is not easy to describe, given the dynamic fexibility and amorphousness of naturalism as a whole in America, but it appears to rest on the relationship between a restrictive social and intellectual environment and the consequent impoverishment both of social opportunity and of the inner life. This is the common theme of such major writers of the 1930s as Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Farrell, whether the theme is worked out in narratives of group defeat or of personal emptiness and collapse. It continues into the generation of the 1940s and 1950s in the early work of Saul Bellow, William Styron, and Norman Mailer, though now often combined with the existential theme of the need for a quest for meaning in the face of the inadequacy of social life and belief. And it persists in the partial recovery of the naturalistic themes of political constraint and urban blight in the work of such contemporary novelists as Robert Stone, Joyce Carol Oates (in her early novels), and William Kennedy. Naturalism thus seems to appeal to each generation of American writers as a means of dramatizing “hard times” in America—​hard times in the sense both of economic decline and of spiritual malaise, with each generation also incorporating into this continuing impulse or tradition of naturalism the social and intellectual concerns of that age: Freudianism and Marxism in the 1930s, for example, or the Vietnam War in more recent years.33 In addition to the writers already mentioned, it is also possible and useful to note the powerful naturalistic impulse in the fction of such literary giants as Hemingway and Faulkner, as well as in that of a large number of relatively minor fgures. Faulkner’s major theme of the burden of the past as expressed through regional and family destiny strikes a frm naturalistic note, as does Hemingway’s preoccupation with the behavioristic interplay between temperament and setting. Entire subgenres of modern American writing—​the novel of urban decay, for example (Richard Wright and Nelson Algren), or the fction of World War II (Norman Mailer and James Jones)—​lend themselves to analysis in relation to naturalistic themes. Even a fgure such as Edith Wharton is increasingly viewed in naturalistic terms, despite the upper-​class milieu of much of her fction, because of her central theme of the entrapment of women within social codes and taboos. Indeed, a great deal of fction by

29



CRITICAL CONCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN REALISM & NATURALISM 29

women about women, from Wharton and Kate Chopin onward, can be said to refect this naturalistic theme. Thus, as Willard Thorp has aptly summarized, naturalism has “refuse[d]‌to die” in America.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Notes 1 See, for example, René Wellek, “The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship,” Concepts of Criticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), 222–​55, and George Levine, “Realism Reconsidered,” The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halperin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 233–​56. 2 See Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia:  Lippincott, 1954), 265–​75, and Edwin H.  Cady, The Light of Common Day:  Realism in American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 3–​22. 3 Criticism refecting this position is too plentiful to cite fully. For some blatant examples, however, see Paul Elmer More, “Modern Currents in American Fiction,” The Demon of the Absolute (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1928); Floyd Stovall, American Idealism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943); and Randall Stewart, American Literature and Christian Doctrine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958). 4 Stuart P.  Sherman, “The Barbaric Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser,” On Contemporary Literature (New York: Holt, 1917), 93–​4. 5 These various critical attitudes are discussed later in this essay. 6 W. D.  Howells, Selected Literary Criticism, Vol. II:  1886–​ 1897, ed. Donald Pizer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 133. 7 This position is most fully expressed by George J.  Becker in his “Introduction: Modern Realism as a Literary Movement,” Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1963), 3–​38, and his Realism in Modern Literature (New  York:  Ungar, 1980), 179–​ 83. See also Lilian R.  Furst and Peter N. Skrine, Naturalism (London: Methuen, 1971),  33–​36. 8 See Becker’s “Introduction: Modern Realism as a Literary Movement,” pp. 35–​36, and his review of Donald Pizer’s Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth­ Century American Literature (1966), in Nineteenth-​Century Fiction 21 (1966): 196–​99. 9 Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn:  A Study of Five French Realists (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1963), 24–​83, and René Wellek, “The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship.” 10 Martin Kanes—​in a review of Yves Chevrel’s Le Naturalisme in Comparative Literature 36 (1984): 373—​notes Chevrel’s efort to resolve this dilemma by assuming “that naturalism [in France] is that series of texts perceived by contemporary readers as being naturalistic.” 11 See, in particular, Falk’s The Victorian Mode in American Fiction:  1865–​ 1885 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964). In his recent The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Michael Davitt Bell recapitulates much of Falk’s discussion of the Victorian character of American realism. 12 See Donald Pizer, “The Evolutionary Foundation of W.  D. Howells’s Criticism and Fiction” and “Evolutionary Ideas in Late Nineteenth-​Century English and American Literary Criticism,” Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-​Century American Literature, 2nd rev. ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 70–​95.

30

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

30

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

13 Garland’s unpublished essay “The Evolution of American Thought,” quoted in Donald Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), 17–​18. 14 Boyesen, “The Progressive Realism of American Fiction,” Literary and Social Silhouettes (New York: Harper’s, 1894), 73. 15 Garland, Crumbling Idols (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894), 28. 16 Boyesen, “Progressive Realism,” 78. 17 Norris, “Zola as a Romantic Writer” (1896), The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 72. 18 Norris, “A Plea for Romantic Fiction” (1901), in Pizer, Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, 78. 19 Russell Blankenship, “The Triumph of Realism,” American Literature as an Expression of the National Mind (New York: Holt, 1931). 20 Two characteristic biographies of the 1920s that stress the theme of alienation in late nineteenth-​century writers are Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) and Thomas Beer, Stephen Crane (1923). 21 Mencken, for example, tended to spice his attacks on American puritanism with ofhand potshots at Howells, as in A Book of Prefaces (New York: Knopf, 1917), 218: “Of the great questions that agitated the minds of men in Howells’ time one gets no more than a faint and far-​away echo in his novels. His investigations, one may say, are carried out in vacuo; his discoveries are not expressed in terms of passion, but in terms of giggles.” 22 Hicks, The Great Tradition:  An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1933), 301. A frequent corollary of this emphasis was the dismissal of James’s fction as irrelevant to an understanding of American life, as in V. L. Parrington’s brief comments on James in his The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930), 2:39–​41, under the heading “Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture.” 23 V. L.  Parrington states this position succinctly in notes for a lecture on naturalism (Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism, 3:27):  “Machine industrialism. The bigness of the economic machine dwarfs the individual and creates a sense of impotency.” 24 Smith, “The Second Discovery of America,” Literary History of the United States, ed. Robert E. Spiller et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 2:790. 25 Also refecting this shift in attitude is the fact that Jay Martin, in his Harvests of Change:  American Literature, 1865–​1914 (Englewood Clifs, NJ:  Prentice Hall, 1967), devotes his longest chapter to the work of Henry James. 26 Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism, 80–​169. 27 Falk, “The Rise of Realism,” Transitions in American Literary History, ed. Harry H. Clark (Durham: Duke University Press, 1953), 379–​442; Berthof, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–​1919 (New York: Free Press, 1965); Martin, Harvests of Change (1967). 28 Cargill, for example, remarks in Intellectual America:  Ideas on the March (New  York: Macmillan, 1941), 75, that “The only possibility of Fascism in this country lies, not in the popularity of the doctrines of Fascism, but rather in the debility of the public will through wide acceptance of the philosophy of Naturalism.” 29 The key documents are Trilling’s “Reality in America,” The Liberal Imagination (New York: Viking, 1950), 3–​21; Cowley’s “ ‘Not Men’: A Natural History of American

31



3 0 31

32

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

33

CRITICAL CONCEPTIONS OF AMERICAN REALISM & NATURALISM 31 Naturalism,” Kenyon Review 9 (1947):  4–​35; and Rahv’s “Notes on the Decline of Naturalism,” Image and Idea (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1949), 128–​38. Howe, “The Stature of Theodore Dreiser,” New Republic, July 25, 1964, 19. Thorp, “The Persistence of Naturalism in the Novel,” American Writing in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1960), 143–​ 95, and Kazin, “American Naturalism:  Refections from Another Era,” The American Writer and the European Tradition, ed. Margaret Denny and William H.  Gilman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 12–​13. See, in particular, the essays added to the second edition (1984) of this study and Pizer’s The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism: Selected Essays and Reviews (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Summarized here is the central argument in Donald Pizer, Twentieth-​Century American Literary Naturalism:  An Interpretation (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1982). Other signifcant attempts to describe twentieth-​century American naturalism are the chapters on Anderson, Farrell, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Dos Passos in Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (1956); Thorp, “The Persistence of Naturalism in the Novel,” American Writing in the Twentieth Century (1960); essays on Steinbeck, Wright, Farrell, and Algren in American Literary Naturalism: A Reassessment, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Lewis Fried (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1975); and Don Graham, “Naturalism in American Fiction: A Status Report,” Studies in American Fiction 10 (1982): 1–​16.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

32

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

3

Part II

SPECIFIC WRITERS AND WORKS

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

34

35

Chapter 3 NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

DREISER, CRANE, AND STEINBECK* 

By “naturalism” in my title, I mean American fction of the 1890s and 1930s that was committed to the depiction of hardship, poverty, and other forms of deprivation and of the inability both of the individual and of society to overcome these conditions. By “visual arts” I mean both the graphic arts of painting and various kinds of drawing and the more recently developed art of photography. I will devote my attention to two ways in which the visual arts and naturalistic expression are interrelated during the 1890s and 1930s. The frst stems from the immersion of both visual artists and writers in a similar social and artistic milieu, one which encouraged expression to take roughly parallel form and shape in both areas of expression. The second concerns a more specifc act of borrowing from a visual form by a writer. I will initially discuss the impact of an 1890s school of New York urban realism in photography and the graphic arts on Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and the relationship of Stephen Crane’s writing to photography and impressionism. I will then examine the infuence of 1930s documentary photography on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Almost all of these instances of a naturalist writer’s indebtedness to a visual art form confrm the truism that naturalists usually viewed themselves as playing a mediating role between social reality and need on the one hand and the reader on the other. There is a social condition—​for example, the slums or migrant exploitation—​and the naturalist writer seeking to represent it is almost inevitably drawn to parallel eforts by visual artists. The specifc instances of this attraction in the three writers I examine, however, should also demonstrate that the truism is useful only as far as it goes, which is not very far at all in comparison to the richness and variability of the specifc instance. Indeed, a realization of the full dimensions of these instances should cast far more light on each individual writer’s distinctive qualities of mind and art * The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism, ed. Keith Newlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 463–​82.

36

36

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

than that provided by the commonplace about a naturalist’s preference for visual arts with a social realism bias.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Theodore Dreiser Ellen Moers once noted that Dreiser’s lengthy article “Curious Shifts of the Poor,” published in November 1899, can scarcely be separated from his “frst contribution to the literature of realism, Sister Carrie” (57). Moers in part means by this remark that Dreiser’s extensive early career as a newspaper reporter, editor, and, magazine writer from 1892 to 1899 had revealed little inclination toward the kind of subject matter present initially in “Curious Shifts” and shortly thereafter in Carrie, which he began writing in the fall of 1899. True, he had expressed a conventional kind of dismay over the condition of the working poor of New York in several of his 1895–​1896 Ev’ry Month editorials, but these accounts lacked any element of the pictorial—​of the physical actuality of poverty and hardship. “Curious Shifts,” however, aside from a shift into Dreiser’s philosophical voice at its close, is very diferent. The article consists of four sketches describing in concrete detail the desperate eforts of New York’s down-​and-​out homeless to stay alive during the depths of a hard winter. The sketches are laced with tropes of coldness—​of snow and freezing temperatures—​and of men standing in line as they seek out the meager charities available to them. In this efort, the poor are herded as groups but are in isolation from each other, and every haven from the weather and starvation is clearly a temporary one. Dreiser was to use large sections of the article verbatim in the closing chapters of Sister Carrie, but, as I will point out, his entire account of the fnal phase of Hurstwood’s life is permeated with both its material actuality and emotional ethos. How did Dreiser, with little or no prior indication of an interest in or an ability for this kind of urban pictorial realism, “suddenly” (it would seem) blossom into “Curious Shifts”? For an answer to this question, it is necessary to turn to two signifcant developments in the New York art world during the 1890s, both stressing the art-​worthiness of the New York scene, that impinged on Dreiser’s consciousness in the closing years of the decade.1 The frst, chronologically speaking, was the photography of Alfred Stieglitz, the second the sketches and painting of the group of artists who came to be known as the Ash Can School.2 Stieglitz had from the early 1890s pioneered through his own work and that exhibited by the Camera Club, a photography cooperative led by him, a new kind of urban photography, one which ignored the conventional subjects of the grandiose and picturesque for commonplace scenes of New York life. There was nothing “candid” about his shots of either people or scenes; many were studies in composition and also frequently suggested the “poetic” in their

37

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

37

Figure 3.1  Alfred Stieglitz, “Winter on Fifth Avenue” (1893).

manipulation of light and focus. But they were nevertheless striking eforts to render quotidian New York as worthy of artistic representation. Stieglitz’s work was increasingly known throughout the decade after he achieved a notable success in 1893 when he exhibited “Winter on Fifth Avenue,” no doubt the best-​known photograph of this phase of his career (Figure  3.1).

38

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

38

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Dreiser published three articles between June 1899 and May 1902 about either Stieglitz or the Camera Club.3 Although these are conventional pieces of popular journalism and ofer little insight into Dreiser’s personal response to Stieglitz’s work, his article of October 1899 does contain a notable admiring brief comment on “Winter on Fifth Avenue.” “The driving sleet,” Dreiser wrote, “and the uncomfortable atmosphere issued out of the picture with uncomfortable persuasion” (“Camera Club” 85). Although many commentators on this phase of Dreiser’s career claim that Stieglitz’s New York scenes played a major role in the emergence of the urban realism of Sister Carrie, the more likely scenario is that his work served as a precursor for the more signifcant and extended role of the later-​to-​appear Ash Can artist group and especially of Everett Shinn. Most of the Eight (another term for the Ash Can School) were Philadelphia-​bred and trained newspaper illustrators who migrated to New York toward the end of the decade, where they drifted frst into magazine illustrating and then full-​fedged independent art careers. The fgures included Shinn, John Sloan, George Luks, George Bellows, and William Glackens. Dreiser came to know Shinn, Luks, and Glackens, but it was Shinn who played the major role in his thinking about urban realism. Even before Shinn’s appearance in New York in 1898, however, Dreiser had been exposed to the principal thrust of the Ash Can School by his acquaintance during the mid-​1890s, when he was editing Ev’ry Month, with the artist W. L. Sonntag, Jr. Sonntag, who died of illness while reporting the Spanish-​American War, was memorialized by Dreiser in a 1901 article called “The Color of To-​Day.” He recalled Sonntag showing him Greeley Square at night, a scene alive with crowds and lights, and Sonntag exclaiming. “It’s a great spectacle! … It’s got more fesh and blood in it than people usually think” (“Color” 177). “Spectacle” and “fesh and blood” and Dreiser’s own “color of to-​day”4 are the key terms connecting Sonntag’s beliefs and the ideas and practice of the Ash Can School. New York, from posh upper Fifth Avenue to the slums of the lower East Side, was a great spectacle, full of vibrant life of every kind. It is sometimes believed that the artists holding this belief concentrated on the poor and downtrodden, as is suggested by the term Ash Can School as a designation for the group. But in fact their work ranged over the full face of New  York life, from immigrants to the wealthy and from popular entertainments to street accidents, though they tended in all their eforts toward depicting groups of people in vibrant interaction. The point was to communicate the “color”—​the variety and richness—​of urban life whatever its social level or its lack of a traditional role in art representation. Dreiser probably came to know Shinn in 1898, when both he and Shinn were contributing regularly to Ainslee’s—​Dreiser poems and articles, Shinn covers. (The link between them may well have been Dreiser’s close friend

39



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

39

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Richard Dufy, who was then an editor at Ainslee’s.) Shinn’s frst one-​man show occurred during February and March 1900 when he exhibited 44 pastels of New York scenes at the Boussod-​Valadon Galleries (Wong 37–​38). A New York Times reviewer described the exhibition as consisting of “pastel colored drawings, for the most part scenes on Union and Madison Squares and Fifth Avenue on the afternoons and early evenings of Winter snowstorms …” (“Week”). Shinn’s “Fifth Avenue Coach, Winter” (1899) was among these pastels referred to by the reviewer (Deshazo 39), and there is considerable evidence from Dreiser’s The “Genius” (1915) that he saw the drawing at that time or perhaps even earlier when Shinn was preparing his work for the exhibition. Indeed, Shinn recalled much later in life that he immediately recognized, on reading The “Genius,” that Dreiser’s description of Eugene Witla’s frst New  York show contained descriptions of many of the pastels he had exhibited in February 1900 (Kwiat, “Dreiser’s The ‘Genius’” 17). Dreiser’s use of Shinn as a model for Witla’s career in The “Genius” is probably the best evidence of the signifcance of Shinn’s work in his own writing. (Witla, it should be clear, is based on Shinn only insofar as Witla’s work as an artist is concerned; the account of Witla’s personal experience in the novel stems from Dreiser’s own life.) Witla arrives in New York having worked as an illustrator but still unformed as an artist. He is soon drawn, however, to the vitality and richness of the New York world all around him and attempts to communicate these qualities in his work, concentrating during this early phase on industrial cityscapes and lower-​class street life. Among his various paintings of this period, two stand out in their connection both to Shinn and Dreiser. The bread line at Fleischmann’s Vienna Style Cafe is one of Witla’s subjects (232). Shinn himself did a notable pastel of this well-​known New York institution, also in 1899, and Dreiser devotes one of the sketches in “Curious Shifts” to its depiction.5 And Shinn’s pastel of “Fifth Avenue Coach, Winter” (Figure 3.2) is described in detail by M. Charles, the director of the gallery where Witla is having his frst show. He is “struck by the force” of the “team of lean, unkempt, bony horses.” He liked the delineation of swirling, wind-​driven snow. The emptiness of this thoroughfare, usually so crowded, the buttoned, huddled, hunched, withdrawn look of those who traveled it, the exceptional details of piles of snow sifted on to window sills and ledges and into doorways and on to the windows of the bus itself, attracted his attention. “An efective detail,” he said to Eugene, as one critic might say to another, pointing to a line of white snow on the window of one side of the bus. Another dash of snow on a man’s hat rim took his eye also. “I can feel the wind,” he added. (227–​28)

40

40

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.2  Everett Shinn, “Fifth Avenue Coach, Winter” (1899).

Most of M. Charles’s account is clearly related to Shinn’s pastel, which, as I have noted, was one of the New  York winter scenes shown at his February 1900 exhibition. The large vehicle dominating the drawing is a coach (the opening letters of the coach-​line’s name, METRO, can be made out on its side), and the matching lines of snow on the coach window and on the pedestrian’s bowler that Charles admired are also evident. But another element in the painting admired by Charles—​the emptiness of the street compared to its usual bustle—​ is perhaps better communicated by the wider focus of the Stieglitz photograph. In brief, Dreiser may well have blended aspects of the scene as portrayed by Stieglitz and Shinn into his own conception of how a pictorial work devoted to the scene might best serve his needs. Thus, when writing his account of Witla’s painting more than a decade after viewing Stieglitz’s photograph and Shinn’s pastel, Dreiser was describing in 1912 his later realization that work of this kind constituted the best tendencies both in the turn-​of-​the-​century New York art scene and his own emerging realistic aesthetic of the late 1890s.6 I am drawn to this interpretation both because it suggests how Dreiser, and how indeed most authors, are infuenced—​not by exact copying of a single

41



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

41

source but by a variety of sources feeding into a depiction—​and because it says something of value about the portrayal of Hurstwood’s New York decline in Sister Carrie. As several commentators have noted, whenever Dreiser shifts during the closing portion of the novel from accounts of Carrie’s rise to fame and fortune to Hurstwood’s drift toward complete physical and psychological collapse, the weather also shifts from spring or summer to winter. (An exception is our fnal glimpse of Carrie.) The Hurstwood depicted at this point in the novel is an approximation in prose narrative of the scenes portrayed by Stieglitz and Shinn, and especially by Shinn. Hurstwood is in a sense the man with the bowler in the Shin pastel: alone, insufciently dressed, struggling to make his way in the snow against a strong wind while the business of the city goes on around him. I of course do not mean a literal relationship between the two, but rather one of suggestive implications in the pictured scenes of how the writer might depict in his own fctional portrayal the often-​losing struggle to stay alive in the inhospitable environment of a great metropolis in the midst of a winter storm. Stieglitz’s and Shinn’s winter scenes are therefore refected in specifc passages describing New York in a snowstorm during Hurstwood’s fnal days in the city, as in the paragraph in ­chapter 47, which begins: It was truly a wintry evening … Already, at four o’clock, the sombre hue of night was thickening the air. A heavy snow was falling—​a fne picking, whipping snow, borne forward by a swift wind in long, thin lines. The streets were bedded with it—​six inches of cold, soft carpet, churned to a dirty brown by the crush of teams and the feet of men. Along Broadway men picked their way in ulsters and umbrellas. Along the Bowery, men slouched through it with collars and hats pulled over their ears. (348).

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

This composite recasting in prose of scenes rendered visually by Stieglitz and Shinn can be considered the backdrop setting of the stage on which is played out the entire sequence of Hurstwood’s decline in the period after he and Carrie part.

Stephen Crane Although both Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser responded to 1890s developments in photography and the graphic arts, the diference in the ways they did so illustrates the great variety in the kinds of impact that visual art can make upon written expression. Dreiser often seized upon specifc aspects of specifc artworks for inspiration, and it is thus possible, as I have attempted to do, to trace suggestive connections between particular photographs and drawings and particular moments in his fction. Crane’s relationship to the

42

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

42

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

visual arts, however, remains—​despite valiant eforts over the years by both art and literary historians—​amorphous and fuzzy. There is little doubt that there are links between his fction and contemporary visual art and that it is critically proftable to explore them, but it is also necessary to acknowledge that it is difcult if not impossible to tie down with any certainty their precise nature. I will discuss two aspects of the relationship of Crane’s work to the visual arts of his time: the connection between Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Jacob Riis’s photographs of the slums in his How the Other Half Lives (1890), and the relationship between The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and impressionism in painting. These are not the only ways of discussing Crane and the visual arts. There has been interest, for example, in the possible impact of Thomas Brady’s Civil War photographs on the Red Badge as well as in the relationship between Crane’s fction and later schools of pictorial surrealism and expressionism. But the two aspects of Crane’s connection with visual expression that I will be taking up have the advantage of engaging us both in central aspects of his fctional themes and method and in major art movements of his own time. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives was widely discussed on its appearance as a pioneering expose of New York slum conditions.7 It continues today to receive much attention, especially as one of the frst American works to exploit the possibilities of photojournalism and because of Riis’s problematical ethnic and racial beliefs. Riis’s distinction was that he not only engaged in a great deal of frsthand investigation of almost every aspect of slum life—​from horrendous housing and sweatshop working conditions to the neglect of the young, elderly, and sick—​but that he also did so with camera in hand and thus recorded both verbally and visually what he had found. He was aided in this breakthrough by developments in the mechanics of taking and reproducing photographs. The Eastman Kodak Company had recently produced a small camera which, since it was hand rather than tripod held and functioned with dry rather than wet plates, could easily be transported to almost any site. (Indeed, it was often informally given the name “detective camera.”) Most important for Riis’s purpose, a magnesium fash device had also recently been developed as a means of taking photographs in semidarkness—​that is, in the light available in most dwellings, workplaces, and similar enclosed settings. Along with these striking developments in facilitating the taking of photographs without the elaborate preparations and cumbersome equipment previously required, the halftone process for reproducing photographs in print mediums had been sufciently advanced to make possible the ready and cheap duplication of photographic images in newspapers, magazines, and books. There is little doubt that Crane knew of Riis’s book before undertaking Maggie, given its notoriety and Crane’s realization that he and Riis were

43

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

43

engaged in similar enterprises. In addition, Crane attended one of Riis’s lantern slide lectures on the slums during early July 1892. He was working that summer on the Jersey shore as a stringer for the New  York Tribune and wrote a brief account of the occasion for the Tribune, in which he commented on the nature of Riis’s lecture (Stallman 49; Crane, “Summer Dwellers” 514–​15).8 Writing about New York slum life before How the Other Half Lives tended toward either the sentimental and picturesque (slum types and conditions as a form of local color) or the moralistic (the fallen creatures of the slums require salvation). Riis, however, a former newspaper police reporter, sought to render the authentic in slum conditions—​what it was like to live and die in that world—​and he marshaled as irrefutable evidence of the realities of the slum his own frsthand explorations, a large body of statistics, and visual reproduction of specifc slum scenes. Roughly speaking, Crane was also attempting in Maggie to go beyond the usual conventions in the representation of the slum and to render truthfully its life, though his method—​unlike Riis’s—​ also included an ironic inversion of those conventions within the plot and themes of Maggie. The extent of Crane’s slum “feldwork” during his visits to New York in the early 1890s before undertaking the novel is not known. But it is known that somewhat later in his career, in 1894 when writing for New York newspapers, Crane appears to have modeled himself closely on Riis’s practice. In such sketches as his “An Experiment in Misery,” he consciously adopts, as did Riis, the role of an outsider who ventures into the often-​ignored depths of slum life to record accurately its conditions. Running through all of Riis’s close study of slum conditions is the thesis that those living in these conditions are its victims, that individual volition plays very little role in their fate. “To a certain extent,” Riis states fatly toward the close of How the Other Half Lives, “we are all creatures of the conditions that surround us, physically and morally” (265). Although Riis does not study slum prostitution at length—​the subject of prostitution was still largely unacceptable in books intended for the general public—​his occasional references to its widespread prevalence in the slums strongly echo Crane’s treatment of Maggie, a girl who “blossomed in a mud-​pile” morally pure, works in a sweatshop, is seduced and then abandoned by a lover who initially appears to ofer her a better life, becomes a prostitute, and dies a suicide in the East River. Riis, similarly, presents, as one of the “unfathomable mysteries of life,” the evidence that “it is not an uncommon thing to fnd [in the slums] sweet and innocent girls, singularly untouched by the evil round them …” (161). But, Riis writes at a later point, for most young women bred in the slum, the daily grind of sweatshop labor followed by a tenement existence almost guarantees their acceptance of prostitution as an alternative life.

4

44

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

To [the tenement after a day’s labor] come the young with their restless yearnings, perhaps to pass on the threshold one of the daughters of sin, driven to the tenement by police when they raided her den, sallying forth in silks and fne attire after her day of idleness. These in their coarse garments—​girls with the love of youth for beautiful things, with this hard life before them—​who shall save them from the tempter? (164) Indeed, Crane refected in several inscriptions to Maggie a conception of the novel’s subject matter and theme similar to Riis’s belief that it is the specifcs of a slum environment that cause its initially “pure” young girls to turn to prostitution. The novel, he wrote,

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

tries to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless. If one proves that theory, one makes room in Heaven for all sorts of souls (notably an occasional street girl) who are not confdently expected to be there by many excellent people. (Crane, Correspondence 1:53) However, despite these similarities in method and theme, anyone turning to the photographs of How the Other Half Lives expecting to fnd scenes resembling those depicted in Maggie will be disappointed.9 First, there are not that many photographs. Of the book’s 43 illustrations, just 16 are halftone photographs. The remainder are conventional drawings. Also, since the halftone process was still in its infancy, the photographs themselves, in the 1890 edition, are not clear and sharp. Finally, few come close to rendering specifc moments of the novel. Perhaps the ones that come nearest are shots of small street boys (“Didn’t Live Nowhere”) and of a group of youths consuming a large can of beer (“A Growler Gang in Session”). Both pertain to the street gangs that Jimmie belongs to, the frst as a boy, the second as a youth. But neither photograph refects anything specifc in the portrayal of any character or scene in the novel. What, then, is the connection between Riis’s photographs of New  York slum conditions in How the Other Half Lives and Crane’s depiction of similar circumstances in Maggie? I suggest that the photographs played the same role in Crane’s thinking about the slums that Riis wished them to play in the minds of all his readers. The photographs, amateurish by most standards and crudely reproduced in the form that Crane saw them, nevertheless catch the eye and the imagination. Yes, we instinctively feel, these are fesh and blood people—​ not statistical enumerations or verbal accounts—​and these are the miserable conditions they live in, the crowded and flthy tenements, dark alleyways, airless sweatshops, and noxious dives. Each face looking out at us is thus a

45

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

45

story to be told of a body wasted and hope blighted, of a life going nowhere but downward. Crane had a number of sources other than How the Other Half Lives for the subject matter of Maggie, and the novel of course also contains his own distinctive mix of irony and striking metaphor. But he appears to have found in Riis’s ideas about the slum as social reality and in the photographs enforcing the validity of these ideas a vivifying catalyst in his efort to bring to life his own vision of how the other half  lives. There has been a great deal written about Crane and impressionism, including James Nagel’s excellent 1980 study Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism as well as several frst-​rate essays by other critics. The notion that Crane’s style owes something to the impressionistic movement in painting has been present in Crane criticism from its onset, since there is a great deal of evidence in his career to suggest the validity of the idea. By the 1890s, French impressionism was having a major impact upon American artists, and Crane spent much of his time in New York during the early 1890s living and associating with young artists. In addition, Hamlin Garland, his literary mentor during that time, was a staunch proponent of impressionism in painting, and indeed in 1894 was to publish—​in the chapter “Impressionism” in his Crumbling Idols—​one of the frst extended explanations and defenses of the movement to appear in America. Finally, Crane’s extraordinary color sense—​ color both as metaphor and as literal rendering—​appears to suggest a direct link between his work and an art movement which revolutionized painting by emphasizing color as the principal vehicle of pictorial representation. Yet, as I suggested earlier, the impact of impressionism upon Crane is still unclear. The difculty in coming to grips with the subject lies in the fact that the relationship is one posited on a transference of ideas relating to how paint is applied to canvas to ideas about how words shape a narrative. Dreiser and Crane (in Maggie) in their response to pictorial representations of New York snowstorms and slums were undoubtedly drawn to these visual representations by their subject matter; they were engaged in writing about snowstorms and the slums, and the pictorial depiction of these scenes appears to have stimulated a greater realization of the possibilities for depiction of similar scenes in their own work. This kind of postulation cannot be ofered for Crane and impressionism, since there is little refection of conventional impressionistic themes in his writing. Rather, it is argued, it was the way the impressionists painted—​not their subject matter—​that stimulated him to seek an approximation of that painterly style in his own prose and narrative styles. This critical attempt to describe Crane’s impressionism has produced a great deal of absorbing and often valuable commentary. Such aspects of Crane’s style as his seeking to render the fux of a scene—​its basic instability rather than its static condition—​and his complementary efort to suggest

46

46

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

the immense difculties inherent in attempting to know what is occurring in experience—​these and several other important areas of Crane’s fctional center have been traced to similar concerns of impressionist painters.10 But in the end, these comparisons are just that. They may indeed usefully help explain Crane’s concerns as a writer by relating them to similar concerns by artists working with paint and canvas, but they do not explain the specifc source of these ideas—​what painter, what artworks?—​and thus leave the door open for the possibilities that Crane either derived these notions from other sources or that they were in large part sui generis. Nevertheless, I  believe that there is one aspect of Crane’s putative debt to impressionism that is both traceable to a specifc source and powerfully exemplifed in a major work—​that is, the way Crane uses Henry Fleming as a center of consciousness in The Red Badge of Courage. Let me begin with the issue of how Crane himself conceived of impressionism, since an understanding of this matter will provide a way into his possible use of an impressionistic method. Many writers about Crane and impressionism have quoted the passage in his late work “War Memories” in which he mentions “French impressionists,” since it is one of the few instances in which a specifc awareness of impressionism appears in his writing. The passage requires quoting at length, because if one cites merely the phrase in which “French Impressionists” occurs (as is usually the case), its full meaning is obscured. Crane is recalling a scene during the Spanish-​American War when he encountered a village church that had been transformed into a hospital for the Spanish wounded. The interior of the church was too cavelike in its gloom for the eyes of the operating surgeons, so they had the altar-​table carried to the doorway, where there was a bright light. Framed then in the black archway was the altar-​table with the fgure of a man upon it. He was naked save for a breech-​clout, and so close, so clear was the ecclesiastic suggestion, that one’s mind leaped to a fantasy that this thin pale fgure had just been torn down from a cross. The fash of the impression was like light, and for this instant it illumined all the dark recesses of one’s remotest idea of sacrifce, ghastly and wanton. I bring this to you merely as an efect—​an efect of mental light and shade, if you like; something done in thought similar to that which the French impressionists do in color; something meaningless and at the same time overwhelming, crushing, monstrous. (“War Memories” 254) The passage richly suggests not only the special meaning that “impressionism” held for Crane but also the heart of his own fctional method. First, it is clear

47

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

47

that Crane in this passage is not thinking of impressionism as a subject matter but as a technique. The technique itself consists of two components—​an initial act of visual perception and a complementary act of mental realization of the implications of the perception. In this instance, these resolve themselves into the narrator’s perception of the wounded man on the altar-​table and then his realization that this image can be related to the archetypal image of Christ’s sacrifce on the cross. The crucial aspect of this interaction between a perception of a visual image and the realization of its meaning is that the two are in ironic interplay. The church, a Christian sanctuary and place of worship, is in ruins; what remains has been transformed into a hospital to save those injured in warfare; and thus the visual perception and its intellectual conception interplay to produce an ironic commentary on the present status of the meaning of Christ’s sacrifce. This particular example of Crane’s ironic use of Christ’s sacrifce is of course not unique. One recalls especially Jim Conklin’s death in the Red Badge as a parallel instance. But the point I am making here is not that this form of irony is a common theme in Crane’s work but that its method of interlacing a striking visual moment with its ironic implication is central to Crane’s literary imagination, and that he here attaches this method to that of the French impressionists. It should also be noted that there is nothing in French impressionist painting which resembles what Crane seeks to render in this account. Not only did the impressionists avoid this kind of sensationalist subject matter, since it harkens back to what they considered the excesses of a previous generation of painters—​to Gericault, for example—​but their work usually also lacks the ironic dimension central to Crane’s depiction. So the frst question to be tackled in dealing with Crane’s idiosyncratic notion of impressionism is:  What is its source? A  possible answer to this question lies in his relationship to Hamlin Garland, a writer to whom Crane noted an intellectual debt on several occasions.11 The best source of Garland’s ideas on impressionism in the visual arts is the chapter in Crumbling Idols that I  previously noted, a chapter based on a lecture that Garland prepared in response to having seen a number of impressionistic paintings during the summer of 1893 at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.12 Crane and Garland, it will be recalled, saw a good deal of each other in New York during 1893 and 1894. Garland in his account of impressionism identifes its major characteristic as rendering a specifc scene from life as it appears to the artist at a specifc moment. But he is also at pains to place impressionism within his more inclusive category of “veritism,” his coined term for an art that commits all artists, whatever their medium, to the ideal of fdelity both to nature and to themselves. Thus, impressionists are not “delineating a scene; they are painting

48

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

48

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

a personal impression of a scene, which is vastly diferent” (133). As he also argued elsewhere in Crumbling Idols, “Impressionism, in its deeper sense, means the statement of one’s own individual impression of life and nature, guided by devotion to truth” (50). This notion, I would argue, is very close to Crane’s explanation at the close of the passage from “War Memories” that I  have quoted. Since literary expression functions in time rather than space, Crane frst presents us with the “fash of the impression” of the scene (the wounded man on the altar-​table), which is then followed by what it “illumined” (the Christ parallel), the two combining for “an efect of mental light and shade” (i.e., the prose equivalent of paint on a canvas). Of course, Garland himself did not conceive of his veritistic or impressionistic formula as a means toward the kind of irony which Crane exploits within the seemingly neutral idea of “efect.” But given Crane’s inherent inclination to adopt an ironic stance in interpreting experience, his introduction of an ironic dimension into Garland’s conception of impressionism was an almost inevitable step. The second question to be faced is:  How does this idiosyncratic idea of impressionism, one which in Garland’s version stresses personal vision and which in Crane’s version extends the personal in an ironic direction, fnd expression in the Red Badge? The answer lies in Crane’s deployment of Henry Fleming, the novel’s protagonist, as its center of consciousness. Within this role, Henry has an impressionistic eye for the scene before him and is especially brilliant in recording on his consciousness the vibrant variations in movement and color that characterize a battlefeld. But also embedded in his visual record are his thoughts and feelings about the scene before him and above all about his role in each central event of the two days of combat as the battle unfolds. And often, especially at moments either of crisis or of self-​ evaluation, there is clearly an ironic disconnect between the actuality of the moment and Henry’s conception of it. The irony present in the scene from “War Memories” that I have quoted arises from the narrator’s perception of the disparity between ancient and contemporary versions of Christ’s sacrifce, while that in the Red Badge stems from Henry’s failure to realize the frequent disparity between what he sees and records and what he thinks or feels. But both devices are similar in that they render a distinction between the raw actuality of a scene and its interpretation. Crane, while relying on Garland’s basic formulation, has also realized the ironic possibilities inherent in a perverse subjectivism. To Garland, there was no apparent problem in rendering an “individual impression” of a scene while being “guided by a devotion to truth.” To Crane, on the other hand, and especially in the Red Badge, in the instance of a soldier beset by demons of self-​doubt, the two goals are irreconcilable, and Crane’s dramatic rendering of this truth is one way to describe both the method and the theme of the novel. Henry seeks to be true both to

49



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

49

his impressions of the scene before him and to his role in it, but he lacks the maturity and the insight into his own motives to achieve this goal. Crane may have believed that he was using an impressionistic technique in his fction, but he also appears to have had grave doubts about the eforts by most men to rely on their understanding of the world around them.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

John Steinbeck The relationship between John Steinbeck’s 1930s fction and the documentary photography of the period—​and, more particularly, between The Grapes of Wrath and the work of Dorothea Lange—​is of great interest not only in its own right but because one of its most signifcant elements also characterizes a central aspect of 1930s American naturalistic fction in general. To be an artist, it was widely accepted during this period of social upheaval, was to document the social conditions of one’s own time. The most blatant version of this belief was the Soviet Union’s doctrine of socialist realism, in which the artist was required to render social reality in relation to the state’s political goals. Few 1930s American writers of importance shared this view, but few also failed to respond positively to the premise that it was a function of the writer to document objectively the deplorable conditions prevalent in many areas of American life. The inherent paradox in this premise was the tension between the ideal of documentary objectivity and the very nature of art, especially art produced during a period when art sought above all to afect belief and thus action. And nowhere was this tension played out more clearly than in the relationship between the seeming objectivity of the photograph and the social and political leanings that both a photographer and a writer relying upon photographic images can express through these images. Although both Lange and Steinbeck lived and worked in the San Francisco area during the late 1930s, and, indeed, though both were also deeply troubled by the condition of migrant farmers in California’s agricultural industry from the mid-​1930s onward, they did not in fact meet until after the publication of The Grapes of Wrath in early 1939. Nevertheless, there is considerable evidence that Steinbeck viewed signifcant examples of Lange’s extensive eforts to document in photographs the dire circumstances of California’s migrant farm population, and that his knowledge of her work enters into his portrayal of similar conditions in The Grapes of Wrath.13 Migrants from western prairie farms began to arrive in California in early 1935, driven out of their homes by drought, dust storms, and mechanized farming (“tractored over” was the common phrase). Their presence in large numbers and their powerlessness made them vulnerable to exploitation, and their conditions in the shanty and tent camps that sprang up throughout

50

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

50

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

the agricultural heartland of California quickly became deplorable. In the summer of 1936, Steinbeck was asked by the San Francisco News to write a series of articles about the migrants, and the seven articles he prepared appeared in October. He was sufciently stimulated by his frsthand study of the migrant problem to plan and begin work on a novel dealing with the phenomenon, but the project stalled. In the late summer of 1937, however, he determined to return to it. After additional frsthand research that fall and winter, he began writing The Grapes of Wrath in May 1938 and completed it in October of that year (Parini 192, 200–​2). Lange, who had begun her career in photography as a portraitist, became absorbed in the documentation of the consequences of the Depression, and by the early 1930s had already done major work in this area, including her well-​ known “White Angel Bread Line” of 1933 (Meltzer). She began photographing migrant conditions in early 1935, working with Paul Taylor, a Berkeley economics professor. For several years, beginning in mid-​1935, their eforts were sponsored by the Resettlement Administration, headed by Paul Stryker, which in 1937 became the Farm Security Agency. Stryker’s announced goal was to infuence social policy by the documentation of social misery, and to this end he enlisted a notable group of photographers, which included not only Lange but also such fgures as Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, and Arthur Rothstein (Hurley; Wilkinson). During this period, Lange’s photographs appeared in two signifcant publications. In early 1938, Archibald MacLeish published his book-​length poem about the efects of the Depression on American farm life, Land of the Free, which contained 88 photographs, 33 of which are by Lange. And in 1939, Lange and Taylor published An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, a volume consisting of Lange’s photographs and Taylor’s captions and introductory passages. Although An American Exodus appeared too late for Steinbeck to have examined it before he began writing The Grapes of Wrath, he had several other opportunities to study Lange’s migrant photographs while preparing and writing the novel. It is known that he consulted the Farm Security Administration’s extensive collection of photographs in mid-​1937 not long after he and his wife returned to the United States from a European holiday. Since he had decided to turn once again to a novel about California migrants, he stopped of in Washington on his way west after his European trip to get advice and aid from the Farm Security Administration on his plan to visit the government-​ run camps that were now helping California’s migrant farm labor. Taking advantage of the occasion, he also took several days to view the agency’s fle of photographs, a fle later deposited in the Library of Congress (Kehl 2; Hurley 140). In addition, during the summer of 1938, as he was engaged in writing The Grapes of Wrath, his earlier newspaper articles of mid-​1936 were collected

51



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

51

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.3  Dorothea Lange, untitled cover photograph from the pamphlet by John Steinbeck, “Their Blood Is Strong” (1938).

in a pamphlet, “Their Blood Is Strong,” which contains a number of Lange’s photographs. Finally, he may well have even examined Land of the Free, since it appeared in April 1938, just before he began writing The Grapes of Wrath. In the discussion which follows, I will focus on Lange’s untitled cover photograph for the “Their Blood Is Strong” (Figure 3.3), since it ofers a specifc and resonant example of the possible ways in which Steinbeck was infuenced by Lange’s work as he wrote the novel. Lange’s photographs of the “American Exodus” occupy episodes in what constitutes a full narrative of the 1930s migration westward of prairie farmers preserved in the photographs of the event commissioned by the Farm Security

52

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

52

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Administration (Ohrn). Each stage in the migration has its repetitive iconic images—​the tractored­over land, now emptied of farm houses; the displaced farmers sitting idly on their haunches in prairie towns; the jalopies transformed into overburdened trucks; the makeshift camps of tents and shanties—​that render both the story of these displaced farm families and the meaning of that story. The story is that of a western migration that reverses the expectations of the myth. Seeking a better life in the west, the migrants fnd only hardship and misery. The photographs not only document the stages in this ironic reversal but also interpret it. The farm families are almost always white and from the older strains of the American settlement. Their bodies give evidence of lives of hard labor, but they have little to show for their eforts and will soon be reduced to having nothing. Yet—​and this is an important “yet” for Lange’s photographs—​they have not given up all hope. There is some ineluctable source of inner strength that they continue to draw upon and that will see them through. As Robert Coles noted, Lange’s migrant photographs “attest to a vitality, a perseverance, a willfulness of purpose” (177) of their subjects. This quality of mind and spirit, however, needs nurturing, and it is the California government camps that complete the narrative in that they ofer some hope of recovery and perhaps eventual renewal. This is of course also Steinbeck’s narrative and theme in The Grapes of Wrath, and it is thus not surprising that scholars have identifed specifc Lange photographs with specifc portraits and scenes in the novel.14 The photograph I will discuss, that of a nursing mother and child on the cover of “Their Blood Is Strong,” is not the only such Lange image. Her 1936  “Migrant Mother”—​perhaps her most famous photograph other than “White Angel Bread Line”—​though similar in subject matter to the pamphlet cover, also difers signifcantly. Its mother is considerably older and more worn than the woman depicted on the cover, and there is less of what can be identifed as an enduring will in her countenance. She appears to be merely sufering. Both shots seem to be unposed photographs of opportunity—​we are viewing a bit of actuality caught on the run, as most actuality is encountered. But in fact here and elsewhere Lange was guided by a series of choices that comprise a powerful interpretive tool. Most prominent of these was the selection of a nursing mother in miserable surroundings as the subject of the portrait, a subject loaded with deep and powerful religious and natural allusive strains. We as a nation, photographs of this kind say, have travestied the fecundity we celebrate as a nation when we allow it to occur within settings of this kind.15 In addition, Lange almost always took a series of photographs of a particular scene (as she did for both “Migrant Mother” and the cover photograph), and then selected one for distribution that best suited her purpose. And fnally, she cropped a great many of her photographs as a form of editorial emphasis.

53



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

53

So, for example, the cover photograph is one of a series of the same nursing mother, a series that reveals that a man is lying next to her. Lange, however, has cropped that portion of the photograph for the cover (one can now only see the man’s feet to the right of the shot) in order to make the woman and child central to the image.16 The principal image of a nursing mother in The Grapes of Wrath occurs in the fnal scene of the novel. A food of Biblical proportions has enveloped the remnants of the Joad family just as Rose of Sharon gives birth to a stillborn child. The family takes refuge in a barn, where a man lies dying of starvation. Encouraged by her mother, the stalwart Ma Joad, Rose agrees to nurse the stranger, and the novel ends with her doing so. Rose and Ma Joad have had the instinctive wisdom and strength to realize the transcendent virtue of preserving life by whatever means this act requires, a realization that crystallizes our recognition both of what they are and of what we owe them. Just as the Lange cover photograph encapsulated the central thrust of what Steinbeck had to say about the migrant experience in the reportage of a pamphlet entitled “Their Blood Is Strong,” so it seems to have served a similar role in informing the fctional portrayal of a migrant mother in the fnal scene of The Grapes of  Wrath.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Notes 1 There has been considerable discussion about the possible infuence of Stephen Crane’s 1894 sketch “The Men in the Storm” on Dreiser’s depiction in “Curious Shifts of the Poor” of a similar scene involving men waiting in a snowstorm to be admitted to a lodging house (see, e.g.,, Moers 60–​68). I do not myself take up this possibility since my emphasis here is on the relationship of “Curious Shifts” and Carrie to visual expression. 2 For Dreiser and Stieglitz, see Greenough and Hamilton; Haines; Moers; Rabb; and Shloss. For Dreiser and the Ash Can School, see Kwiat (“Dreiser and the Graphic Artist” and “Dreiser’s The “Genius”); Moers; and Zurier (Metropolitan Lives and Picturing the City). 3 See Dreiser’s “A Master of Photography,” “The Camera Club of New York,” and “A Remarkable Art: Alfred Stieglitz.” 4 Dreiser was later to publish his own collection of New York sketches under the title The Color of a Great City (1923). 5 See Pizer, “The Bread Line,” which also contains a reproduction of the drawing. 6 It may be helpful to summarize the chronology that I have posited for the relationship of Stieglitz’s and Shinn’s New York work to Sister Carrie: • Stieglitz exhibits his New York-​based photographs in the mid-​1890s; Dreiser's frst article on Stieglitz appears in June 1899. Dreiser comments on Stieglitz's “Winter on Fifth Avenue” in an article published in October 1899. • Shinn and Dreiser meet in 1898. Most of Shinn’s New York street-​scene pastels are dated 1899 by him and are probably based on winter scenes of early 1899. Dreiser’s

54

54

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM “Curious Shifts of the Poor,” which is published in November 1899, was written in the spring or summer of 1899 and is thus no doubt also based on winter scenes of early 1899. Both Shinn’s work of this period and “Curious Shifts of the Poor” include sketches of Fleischmann’s bread line. Shinn’s show at the Boussod–​Valadon Galleries opens in late February 1900. •  Dreiser begins writing Sister Carrie in September 1899, but having stopped work on the novel several times, does not reach the portion devoted to Carrie and Hurstwood in New York until February 1900. He includes in this portion of the novel almost all of “Curious Shifts of the Poor.”

7 For Riis and Crane, see Gandal; Giamo; Hales; Leviatin 36–​37; and Orvell. 8 Gullason notes Crane’s report of the lecture and also cites several later occasions (after the publication of Maggie) when Crane and Riis met in New York. 9 It should be clear that there is a signifcant diference between the photographs reproduced in many modern editions and discussions of How the Other Half Lives (e.g., see Gandal and the 1996 Bedford edition of How) and those in the original 1890 edition. The former derive from prints preserved in the Museum of the City of New York and are much clearer and larger than the prints in the 1890 edition. 10 See especially Bergon and Nagel. 11 See, for example, Crane to Lucy Brandon Monroe. April 1894 (Correspondence 1:63). 12 See Pizer, Hamlin Garland’s Early Work 133–​43. 13 See Runge and Shloss for the fullest accounts of Lange’s infuence on Steinbeck. 14 See especially Kehl and Valenti. 15 Steinbeck himself discusses at some length in “Their Blood Is Strong” (8, 22–​23) the prevalence of stillbirths and infant mortality in the migrant camps. 16 An uncropped photograph from this same series (Dorothea Lange 35)  contains a man with his face to the camera in the foreground of the photograph, thus dominating it.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited Bergon, Frank. Stephen Crane’s Artistry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Bowers, Fredson, et  al., eds. The Works of Stephen Crane. Charlottesville:  University of Virginia Press. 10 vols. 1969–​75. Coles, Robert. Doing Documentary Work. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Crane, Stephen. The Correspondence of Stephen Crane. Edited by Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. —​—​—​. “Summer Dwellers at Asbury Park and Their Doings.” The Works of Stephen Crane, vol. 8. 514–​15. —​—​—​. “War Memories.” The Works of Stephen Crane, vol. 6. 222–​63. Deshazo, Edith. Everett Shinn 1876–​ 1953:  A Figure in His Time. New  York:  Clarkson S. Potter, 1974. Dorothea Lange. Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1981. Dreiser, Theodore. “The Camera Club of New York.” Ainslee’s 4 (October 1899): 324–​35; repr. in Hakutani, Theodore Dreiser 80–​92. —​—​—​. “The Color of To-​Day.” Harpers Weekly 45 (December 14, 1901): 1272–​73; repr. in Hakutani, Selected 267–​78. —​—​—​. “Curious Shifts of the Poor.” Demorest’s 36 (November 1899):  22–​26; repr. in Dreiser, Sister Carrie 403–​12 and Hakutani, Selected 170–​80.

5

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NATURALISM AND THE VISUAL ARTS

55

—​—​—​. The “Genius.” New York: John Lane, 1915. —​—​—​. “A Master of Photography.” Success 2 (June 10, 1899):  471; repr. in Hakutani, Selected 248–​53. —​—​—​. “A Remarkable Art: Alfred Stieglitz.” Great Round World 19 (May 3, 1902): 430–​34; repr. in Hakutani, Theodore Dreiser 112–​21. —​—​—​. Sister Carrie. Ed. Donald Pizer. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols. Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894. Giamo, Benedict. On the Bowery:  Confronting Homelessness in American Society. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. Greenough, Sarah, and Juan Hamilton, eds. Alfred Stieglitz, Photographs and Writings. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1999. Gullason, Thomas A. “The Sources of Stephen Crane’s Maggie.” Philological Quarterly 38 (1959): 497–​502. Haines, Robert E.  The Inner Eye of Alfred Stieglitz. Washington, DC:  University Press of America, 1982. Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Selected Magazine Articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life and Art in the American 1890s, vol. 1. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985. —​—​—​, ed. Theodore Dreiser:  Art, Music, and Literature, 1897–​1902. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2001. Hales, Peter B.  Silver Cities:  The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839–​ 1915. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Hurley, F. Jack. Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Kehl, D. G. “Steinbeck’s ‘String of Pictures’ in The Grapes of Wrath.” Image 17 (1974): 1–​10. Kwiat, Joseph J. “Dreiser and the Graphic Artist.” American Quarterly 3 (1951): 127–​41. —​—​—​. “Dreiser’s The ‘Genius’ and Everett Shinn, The ‘Ash-​Can’ Painter.” PMLA 67 (1952): 15–​31. Lange, Dorothea, and Paul S.  Taylor. An American Exodus:  A Record of Human Erosion. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939. Leviatin, David. “Framing the Poor:  The Irresistibility of How the Other Half Lives.” In How the Other Half Lives:  Studies among the Tenements of New  York. New  York:  Bedford, 1996.  1–​50. MacLeish, Archibald. Land of the Free. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. Meltzer, Milton. Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978. Moers, Ellen. Two Dreisers. New York: Viking, 1969. Nagel, James. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism. University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. Ohrn, Karin Becker. Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–​1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Pizer, Donald. “The Bread Line: An American Icon of Hard Times.” Studies in American Naturalism 2 (2007): 103–​28. —​—​—​. Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career. Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1960.

56

56

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Rabb, Jane M. Literature and Photography: Interactions, 1840–​1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives:  Studies among the Tenements of New  York. New  York: Scribner, 1890. Runge, Evelyn. John Steinbeck, Dorothy Lange, und die Grosse Depression. Munich:  Martin Meidenbaur, 2006. Shloss, Carol. In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840–​1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Stallman, Robert W. Stephen Crane: A Biography. New York: Braziller, 1968. Steinbeck, John. Their Blood Is Strong. San Francisco: Simon J. Lubin Society, 1938. Valenti, Peter. “Steinbeck’s Ecological Polemic: Human Sympathy and Visual Documentary in the Intercalary Chapters of The Grapes of Wrath.” In Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Ed. Susan F.  Beegel. Tuscaloosa:  University of Alabama Press, 1997. 92–​112. “The Week in Art.” New York Times, March 3, 1900, Book Section. Wilkinson, Sean. “The Story in Pictures: Ray Stryker and the Farm Security Administration Photography Project.” University of Dayton Review 23 (1995): 62–​79. Wong, Janay. Introduction. Everett Shinn:  The Spectacle of Life. New  York:  Berry-​Hill Galleries, 2000. Zurier, Rebecca. Picturing the City:  Urban Vision and the Ashcan School. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Zurier, Rebecca, et al. Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, 1995.

57

Chapter 4 JACK LONDON’S “TO BUILD A FIRE”

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

HOW NOT TO READ NATURALIST FICTION*

It has been roughly two decades since Lee Clark Mitchell published in his study Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism a chapter devoted to an interpretation of Jack London’s classic story “To Build a Fire,” a chapter which disturbed and irritated me when I read it at that time. In my review of the book in Nineteenth-​Century Fiction,1 I  dealt negatively with the study as a whole, but was not able in that format to discuss at length my specifc misgivings about the London chapter. I return to the subject after this long hiatus because of my greater understanding at this point of the full dimensions of Mitchell’s misreading. In the following account of my disagreement with his interpretation of the theme and technique of the story, my principal efort will be to correct a reading of a key naturalist text. But I will also seek to suggest at the close that his misinterpretation characterizes a broad spectrum of New Historicist and Cultural Studies accounts both of specifc naturalistic texts and of naturalism as a whole since American naturalism became a focus of interest of many critics within these movements. In brief, I will attempt in this chapter to demonstrate that there is no persuasive evidence in the story for Mitchell’s belief that it expresses man’s determined condition, and that his efort to demonstrate the presence of this theme by deconstructing the story’s style and technique also fails to convince. And it is my further contention that this mix of an ideology imposed on the fction and the use of a postmodem critical method to assert its presence, a mix which for the most part ignores what the text clearly and emphatically seeks to communicate, characterizes a good deal of recent discussion of American naturalism by New Historicist and Cultural Studies critics. Mitchell’s efort to prove the validity of his claim that “To Build a Fire” expresses the naturalistic premise that man lives in a conditioned universe which denies him agency rests on the idea that London’s key device for * Philosophy and Literature 34 (April 2010), 218–​27.

58

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

58

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

communicating this belief is repetition—​the constant repetition in the story of almost every element in the telling, from sound, word, and syntax on the level of prose stylistics to that of event in the narrative. His contention is that “By precluding contingency and declaring that all that is happening will only happen again (or has itself already occurred), these repetitions evoke a realm in which human control seems irrelevant. Nothing can now be altered because everything has been so frmly set in place.”2 Or as he puts it elsewhere, “In much the same way that recurrences of plot seem to diminish a capacity for personal control (by suggesting the workings of involuntary repetition), so verbal reiterations more generally foreclose the prospects we normally assume in experience” (40). Mitchell realizes that throughout “To Build a Fire” the narrator ascribes blame to the man (the story’s central character, it will be recalled, is never named but simply called “the man”), an act which implies authorial acceptance of the man’s responsibility for his fate. He resolves this apparent confict by distinguishing between the narrative voice and the meaning of the story. The narrator, he believes, is the spokesman for the conventional but invalid folk assumption that anyone who fnds himself in the kind of dilemma faced by the man is responsible for whatever happens to him. Mitchell thus claims that “The narrator’s persistent efort to afx responsibility thus depends on a retrospective moralizing that is exposed as completely factitious” (47). Both of these claims are belied by the text itself. Repetition is used throughout by London not to express a belief in a deterministic universe but rather as an obvious tool of narrative irony to buttress the story’s emphasis on the man’s weaknesses and limitations and thus his responsibility for his fate. And the narrator speaks not for a false conventional moralism denied by the story itself but as an apt and believable commentator on the meaning of what has occurred within it. Perhaps the best way to begin to demonstrate the validity of this way of reading “To Build a Fire” is by closely examining its opening. The frst two paragraphs are devoted to the story’s setting and forthcoming action, the third to the person who will function within these. It is clear that it is mid-​winter in the Arctic during a cold snap, that the man is traveling alone, and that he is about to veer from the established route to his destination (“the main trail” along the Yukon) to take a seldom used but shorter trail across country. The narrator is clearly worried about this decision, as is revealed by his coloration of his account of the setting and the nature of the man. The day is clear, but at this latitude and season the sun remains below the horizon, and thus “there seemed an intangible pall over the face of things, a subtle gloom that made the day dark.”3 The man, however, “did not worry” (462) about the absence of the sun, since he knows that it will reappear in a

59

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JACK LONDON’S “TO BUILD A FIRE”

59

few days. But, we realize almost immediately, the man has only a superfcial knowledge of the Arctic. As he stands on a bank of the Yukon about to plunge into an almost absolute wilderness, he has little or no understanding either of his immense isolation relative to his surroundings or of the extreme danger posed by the cold snap. “But all of this,” the narrator comments at the beginning of the third paragraph—​“the mysterious, far-​reaching hair-​line trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it—​all made no impression on the man” (462).This is because, the narrator continues, he is “a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his frst winter” (462–​63). Thus, the man also knows, in addition to the fact that the sun will reappear, that it is ffty degrees below zero, but he does not know the meaning of this fact—​that it portends death for anyone who makes himself vulnerable to its ability to kill. “Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely ffty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head” (463). The opening contains the repetitions that Mitchell identifes as expressing a determinist theme. The fact that it is cold, for example, is repeated again and again in various forms by constant references to snow, ice, and frost and by such incidents as the man’s spittle freezing before it hits the ground. It may be argued, as it has been by some London critics, that this setting is London’s metaphoric equivalent of an extreme instance of the universal human condition:  We live in a cold, inhospitable world in which we must struggle to survive. But in addition to this possibility we also know with certainty that the specifc individual situated in this world by London in this story is not a universal fgure but rather a special type, that of the novice, and that he is thus especially vulnerable to the conditions he fnds himself in. The story provides no evidence that the narrator is not to be trusted in reporting this fact. He may be slightly hectoring here and elsewhere in describing the man’s misconceptions and errors, as a parent might be in telling a child to dress properly in bad weather. But this tone does not mean that the narrator is to be discounted as an evaluator of the man’s actions. Just as it is an “extended fact” (i.e., one that includes the efect of a specifc reality) that exposure to extreme cold can be fatal, it is also an “extended fact” that novices make many mistakes, sometimes serious ones. (See the statistics on fatal teenage automobile accidents.) And it is this theme articulated by the narrator—​that of the special case of the destruction of the individual by his environment when he is unprepared to cope with its danger—​which is London’s theme in “To Build a Fire,” not the theme of man’s universal lack of agency. Almost any experienced reader of fction realizes from the very opening of the story that London is not using an “unreliable narrator”—​that is, one whose errors in understanding what he describes is inseparable from the story’s theme—​but

60

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

60

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

rather one whose insight is inseparable from the meaning London intends to impart. And London accentuates the narrator’s s position—​that the man does not understand the danger inherent in extreme frost—​by constructing a fctional situation in which the constantly repeated fact that it is cold stands in ironic contrast to the man’s failure to grasp fully the nature of that reality. To make additionally certain that this meaning is understood, London introduces into the narrative two specifc ways in which the adverse conditions of the Arctic can be survived. One is represented by the dog (also unnamed) accompanying the man. “The animal,” we are told, “was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for travelling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment” (464). The dog, a native husky, in addition to knowing better than to be traveling in a cold snap, is better adapted to survive its rigors, and indeed does so. Although the man lacks both the dog’s instinct and its thick fur coat, he is provided with a distinctively human source of protective knowledge in the fgure of the “old-​ timer” from Sulphur Creek. The old-​timer enters the story after the man accidentally wets his feet and recollects the old-​timer’s advice about caring for this condition in extreme cold (469). He makes his role felt above all after the man successfully starts a fre to warm his lower body and to dry his wet clothing and in this act feels superior to the old-​timer’s cautionary admonition that “no man must travel alone in the Klondike after ffty below” (470). Very soon afterwards, however, the tree under which the man has built the fre drops a load of snow, extinguishing it. The man now realizes that his hands are beginning to freeze and that he desperately needs a companion to relight the fre that will save his life. “Perhaps the old-​timer on Sulphur Creek was right,” he ruefully thinks. “If he had only had a trail-​mate he would have been in no danger now” (471). The dog and the old-​timer schematize the survival resources that have been available over eons to all life—​instinct and adaptive protection on the one hand and racial knowledge on the other. Since man no longer possesses an animal’s survival instincts, however, he perforce must now attend to the wisdom of other humans who have survived and who thus know the means of avoiding disaster within difcult environmental conditions. In brief, he must pay heed to racial wisdom as preserved in the old-​timer. It is signifcant in this regard that the 1908 magazine publication of “To Build a Fire” contains an epigraph (not in its 1910 book republication) which reformulates the old-​ timer’s warning:  “He travels fastest who travels alone … but not after the frost has dropped below ffty degrees or more—​Yukon code” (997). Of course, the admonition about traveling alone when it is very cold is more dire in the story’s text, but the basic thrust remains that it not a good idea to do so. Both the source of this idea in experiential knowledge (the “Yukon Code” and the

61

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JACK LONDON’S “TO BUILD A FIRE”

61

old-​timer) and its presence in the text at the crucial moment when the man’s fate is sealed afrm its authority as operative racial wisdom. The man has chosen to challenge this wisdom. He feels that he knows the Klondike and can handle whatever difculty it ofers. London uses the principal repetitive event in the story—​the man’s three eforts to start a fre—​to hammer in the truth that the man lacks the knowledge necessary to survive in the conditions he faces and is therefore prone to fatal errors. At noon he stops to eat but his lack of experience causes him to neglect to build a fre initially to warm his hands and the food, and he manages to get one started only just in time. Later, confdent that he has mastered the problem presented by patches of water beneath apparently frm snow, he nevertheless falls through to a patch. Now his attempt to build a fre is thwarted by the fallen snow from a tree under which, in his inexperience, he has chosen to build it. His hands and feet quickly begin to freeze, and unable to restart the fre he soon dies. He has moved, in the three instances, from ignoring the warning implicit in his forgetfulness that he needs to be especially vigilant to stay warm and dry in these extreme conditions to the outright mistake, based on ignorance, involved in his choice of where to build a fre, to his inability to save himself by rebuilding the fre because his ignorance and errors have shifted control of his circumstances to his environment. The close of the story also involves a major instance of repetition. The man has accepted that he will freeze to death and lies in the snow awaiting this event. His last two thoughts are of the cold and of the old-​timer. “It certainly was cold, was his thought … He drifted on from this to a vision of the old-​ timer on Sulphur Creek. … ‘You were right, old boss, you were right,’ the man mumbled to the old-​timer of Sulphur Creek” (477). Whereas earlier repetition of the cold serves to reinforce the irony of the man’s failure to recognize its “extended” reality, this repetition now serves—​in conjunction with that of the role of the old-​timer—​to introduce a note of pathos into his death. He has at last come into a kind of racial maturity—​he now knows the role and value of the wisdom of the past in the struggle to survive in difcult circumstances—​ but it is too late for him to proft by that knowledge. London’s use of repetition in this fnal scene has little or nothing to do with the issue of agency and everything to do with his reintroduction of two major motifs which serve to end the story with a suggestion of tragic self-​recognition. London was fond of the parable and fable and constructed a good deal of his fction on their model of a single line of action, bold characterization, and a clear-​cut (and often openly stated) moral.4 “To Build a Fire” strongly refects this model. The world, under certain conditions, can be an extremely dangerous place. If through lack of knowledge, inexperience, false self-​confdence, and the ignoring of what others have learned and told us (all

62

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

62

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

weaknesses shared by the man) we challenge these conditions, we are apt to be destroyed by them. London even provides the explicit moral—​both in the epigraph and in the warning of the old-​timer. Mitchell’s misreading of “To Build a Fire” casts light both on the interpretation of late nineteenth-​century American naturalism in recent criticism and on the decline of undergraduate interest in the study of literature. First, if one accepts that the story’s theme does not revolve around determinism but rather the problem of survival in an inhospitable world, the story aligns itself with other major naturalistic texts with roughly similar themes. Both Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie also portray neophytes seeking to survive in an environment that threatens to engulf and destroy them. Crane’s correspondent, an inexperienced sailor, feels endangered and isolated on an open boat in rough and shark infested seas following a shipwreck. And Carrie, an untrained, seemingly untalented young woman just arrived in Chicago, is appalled by the alternatives it ofers of sweatshop labor or the dreary grind of a working-​class wife and mother. In her need she seizes upon a third alternative, to be a kept woman, unaware of the potential dangers of this path. Both fgures, in brief, are, like the man in London’s story, novices in inhospitable and threatening environments with apparently few weapons at hand with which to fght a battle for survival. Two passages from “The Open Boat” and Sister Carrie that strikingly echo motifs in London’s story also confrm this similarity. The correspondent, as he surveys his condition, fnds that “A high cold star on a winter’s night is the word that he feels [nature] says to him.”5 And in the well-​known passage opening Chapter VIII of Sister Carrie, Dreiser describes Carrie’s condition as arising from mankind’s distance in time from both the instinctive survival wisdom of the animal and man’s yet-​to-​come full control of his circumstances by the use of his reason. Of course, these two works difer signifcantly from “To Build a Fire” in that their protagonists survive their encounters with dangerous physical or social environments. The correspondent draws upon the strength of the oiler and the knowledge of the captain and at last fnds himself on shore not only safe but with the newfound capacity to be an “interpreter” of his experience. He now knows not only the dangers of the sea but a means of circumventing them through group efort, skill, and cooperation. And Carrie also grows in awareness and perception and thus in control of her destiny as the novel progresses. At the close of Sister Carrie, her environment, a great metropolis, no longer threatens her but instead will provide her with the means to advance further both materially and in spirit. But despite this diference, the three works share a basic preoccupation with a common question: Is it possible to prevail in a harsh and threatening environment? Although London’s protagonist learns too late how to do so, all three authors deal not only with the

63

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JACK LONDON’S “TO BUILD A FIRE”

63

problem presented by the dangerous yet indiferent worlds in which humans function but also with the ways they have devised to successfully deal with this condition. American naturalism of this period does indeed reveal a preoccupation with the role of environment. Individuals are often either irrevocably scarred or fatally shaped by the conditions they fnd themselves in; Crane’s Maggie is a conspicuous example of this kind of naturalistic novel. But in other naturalist works, though their protagonists struggle to survive in an inhospitable environment, and indeed almost go under, they do over time learn how to avoid its perils and to maneuver within it and thus to shape their destiny rather than have it shaped. Naturalism of this period is not a monolithic efort to deny human agency, as Mitchell’s readings of “To Build a Fire” and other naturalistic texts hold, but rather consists of a variety of strains of roughly similar expression, with considerable variation in theme from strain to strain. And the way to understand this characteristic of the movement as a whole is not to seek to fnd a universal element in signifcantly diferent works but to read each work for what it expresses and then to build interpretations from that realization. I would like to introduce the second major issue deriving from Mitchell’s misreading of “To Build a Fire” by noting that his failure to read the story adequately does not stem from a failure of intellect. He ofers evidence in Determined Fictions and elsewhere of both considerable knowledge and acute perception. It rather derives, as is true of many critics of his generation, from a failure of humility before the literary work he is seeking to understand. “To Build a Fire” is probably London’s best and most important work. It has a compelling compressed unity of form and theme seldom found in his longer works, and it also expresses within its brief compass an entire worldview. To mangle the story as Mitchell does in order to demonstrate that it expresses a particular philosophical position, and to do so by refusing to grant the story its own (and here successful) method and style, is to reveal that Mitchell has been held captive by the critical fetishes of our time rather than reading what is before him. I earlier identifed the New Historicism and Cultural Studies as the movements responsible for much of the misreading of American naturalism over the last generation. This is an extremely wide net indeed, and I cannot here discuss all the critical works involved or even discuss a few in detail. But I  can describe the general tendencies of these works and how these distort the nature of late nineteenth-​century American naturalism in ways similar to that found in Mitchell’s chapter on “To Build a Fire.” But frst let me cite a sampling of the books I  have in mind, since I  will not later be referring to specifc studies:  Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (1987); Mark Seltzer, Bodies

64

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

64

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

and Machines (1992); Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane and the Economies of Play (1996); Christophe den Tandt, The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism (1998); and Jennifer Fleissner, Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (2004). As a group, these works exhibit in various ways and degrees the two broad tendencies I have described in Mitchell’s chapter. First, they do not read naturalistic texts as literary documents in which the author is seeking to persuade us to accept a theme by the use of accepted literary means but rather as cultural expression in which the author is largely unaware of what the culture is expressing through the text. Second, because the text in efect is disguising its “true” or at least “truer” meaning, it is necessary to exploit critical tools that assume an unstable text, one in which many kinds of possible meaning are represented and in which therefore every aspect of the text can be read in multiple ways. The danger in the combination of these tendencies is the one I have described as present in Mitchell’s reading of “To Build a Fire.” The critic brings to a reading of the text a set of assumptions about a specifc area of late nineteenth-​century ideas, economics, class, social life, or gender. The critic then either openly or (more often) silently ignores the plain meaning of the text as a whole and instead constructs by means of forced readings of specifc narrow elements of the text a cultural or ideological meaning related to his or her cultural or ideological preoccupation. The sources of this critical method are readily apparent. As early as the late 1960s there was a demand by many younger critics and scholars that literary study be made more responsive to social imperatives deriving from a realization of both past and present social injustices. This state of mind coincided with the impact of French theory on American graduate studies, an impact felt especially in the pervasive appeal of a deconstructive attitude toward a text even when a full-​scale deconstructive method is not adopted. And American naturalism, since it is rich in social implication and since its authors appeared to be naively open in their themes, was ripe for a re-​examination along the lines of this new approach, one which initially was known as the New Historicism and later as Cultural Studies.6 The books in these schools that I note above have made some contributions to knowledge but almost always more to an understanding of previously neglected areas of late nineteenth-​century culture than to the texts that purportedly are their reason for being. Indeed, one of my principal points in this chapter is that they do harm both to our understanding of these texts and, in a larger sphere of repercussion, to the profession of English studies. A recent issue of the journal American Scholar contains an essay entitled “The Decline of the English Department” by William M. Chace, a former English professor and also former president of Wesleyan and Emory universities.7

65



JACK LONDON’S “TO BUILD A FIRE”

65

Chace discusses a number of reasons for the decline of English studies in academia, to which I will add a reason suggested by the decline of philosophy as an academic subject from the 1940s onward. As has been only half-​facetiously noted, philosophy departments were done in by Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.  E. Moore in the sense that these widely infuential fgures were largely responsible for popularizing methods of linguistic analysis that made the study of philosophy of little interest to even the intelligent and engaged student. We may have achieved a similar efect by indulging in approaches to literary texts which disengage students by directing their interpretation toward areas of cultural and ideological concern which appear to lack little sanction in what they are reading.

Notes

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

1 Pizer, Review of Lee Clark Mitchell, Determined Fictions. Nineteenth Century Fiction 45 (1990): 258–​60. 2 Mitchell, “Imposing (on) Events in London’s ‘To Build a Fire,’ ” Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 38. Further references to this work will appear in the text. 3 London, “To Build a Fire,” Novels and Stories, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Library of America, 1982), 462. Further references to this work will appear in the text. 4 See Donald Pizer, “Jack London and the Problem of Form,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 16 (1983): 107–​17. 5 Crane, “The Open Boat,” Prose and Poetry, ed. J. C. Levenson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 902. 6 Christophe Den Tandt recalls the origins of this state of mind in a recent essay: “Having been trained in the context of 1980s American neo-​Marxism and neo-​historicism, I initially tended to regard realist and naturalist works as fascinating objects for the deconstructive procedures derived from poststructuralism and postmodernism.” “Teaching American Naturalism to Western European Students,” American Literary Naturalism Newsletter 4 (2009): 2. 7 Chace, “The Decline of the English Department,” American Scholar (2009): 32–​42.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

6

67

Chapter 5

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

NORMAN MAILER, THEODORE DREISER, AND THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY* Norman Mailer’s essay “Modes and Mutations:  Quick Comments on the Modern American Novel” was initially read by Mailer at the December 1965 Modern Language Association meeting. It then appeared in Commentary (March 1966) and subsequently in Mailer’s collection of essays Cannibals and Christians (1966).1 Although the piece may strike the present-​day reader as lightweight—​ of interest principally as an example of Mailer in full fight in his role as the enfant terrible of mid-​twentieth-​century American cultural polemics—it is also a work of considerable historical density. That is, its central thesis reveals much more than is initially apparent about some of the major literary, social, and political currents of its moment as these feed into an efort to construct an overarching interpretation of American literary history. In addition, while ostensibly a defense of the importance of Dreiser’s fction within this history, the essay in fact misrepresents the central thrust of that fction in ways that helped perpetuate an inadequate understanding of its basic nature. Mailer’s thesis in “Modes and Mutations” rests on the commonplace that American novelists write poorly about members of a class other than their own. This position had earlier been refected in Marxist argument of the 1930s that middle-​class bred authors were incapable of writing truthfully about working-​ class experience; Mailer revives the idea in his essay in the form of a belief that the generation of early twentieth-​century American writers that had its roots in recent immigrant stock was almost uniformly unsuccessful in depicting upper-​class characters and their milieus. This communicative barrier between classes, Mailer believes, occurred despite the prevalent American mythology of a largely classless society, one in which a huge middle class subsumed and thus in efect eliminated the insuperable wall between classes characteristic of European society.

* Sewanee Review 122 (Summer 2014), 459–​72.

68

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

68

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Mailer ofers the fction of Theodore Dreiser in support of this position. The child of German-​speaking immigrants, Dreiser during his working-​class youth experienced a wide variety of ill-​paying and degrading jobs while living in the midst of a family collapsing under the pressures of poverty and of the need of its youngest members to escape its confnement. Dreiser had been indelibly imprinted by this immersion in “the game as it is played,” as he himself later described the social context of his fction.2 And it was from this frsthand experience, Mailer claims in “Modes and Mutations,” that Dreiser “came closer to understanding the social machine than any American writers who ever lived.” But Dreiser’s fction, Mailer goes on to explain, although it could serve as a guide for anyone seeking “to smash down doors now locked to him,” also revealed Dreiser’s inability to depict successfully social classes other than his own. Dreiser, he stated, “went blind climbing the mountains of society.” He had “no eye for the deadly important manners of the rich, he was obliged to call a rich girl ‘charming’; he could not make her charming when she spoke. … [T]‌actics—​the manners of the drawing room, the deaths and lifes of the drawing room, the cocktail party, the glorious tactics of the individual kill—​that was all beyond him.” Mailer’s reading of Dreiser as a leading instance of an American writer of lower-​class background who derives his social insights from that context but is unable to transcend its limitations is directly related to Lionel Trilling’s devastating critique of Dreiser’s work as a whole in his seminal essay in The Liberal Imagination (1950), “Reality in America.” Trilling, it will be recalled, viewed both V. L. Parrington and Dreiser as inadequate thinkers whose intellectual limitations were tolerated and even celebrated by leftist criticism because their writing seemingly derived from “the substantial stuf of life” rather than (as in Henry James) from “electric qualities of mind.” For both Parrington and Dreiser, especially for Dreiser, Trilling argues, this preference by critics for a literary work devoted to depicting the concretely “real” rather than for one displaying “a complex and rapid imagination” (again as in James) was closely related to a preference for working-​class solidities as opposed to an aristocratic play of intellect. In this critical preference for Dreiser over James, as Trilling melodramatically put it, in what is now a famous phrase, we reach “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” Trilling’s attack on supporters of left-​oriented writers drew much of its energy from a variety of political guilt. He and his generation had been on the left in the 1930s, had realized the tragic error of this position in the postwar years, and were now expiating their sins in various ways. Some turned to the Far Right, and some, such as Trilling and Philip Rahv, attacked those former darlings of the Left (such as Dreiser) who lacked the intelligence to see the emptiness of their earlier political beliefs. (Dreiser, as Trilling noted with a

69

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NORMAN MAILER, THEODORE DREISER

69

tone of amazement, had, in 1945, in fact joined—​rather than resigned from—​the communist party.) Mailer’s largely positive re-​examination of Dreiser in the context of his working-​class roots is a response to Trilling’s argument. Dreiser, in Mailer’s view, gained his insight into the great American theme of the desire to move upward in class from his experience both of lower-​class life and of the desperate struggle to escape its realities. This is what Mailer means in his comment that Dreiser understands the “machinery” of American social life. Dreiser’s reputation as a perceptive interpreter of this phase of American social reality, Mailer believes, was not the product of a critical conspiracy on behalf of the Left to celebrate one of their own but was rather intrinsic to the nature and impact of a signifcant phase of American experience on Dreiser and to his ability to transmute that phase into signifcant fction. Mailer’s description of the upper-​class milieu that Dreiser is not equipped to dramatize constitutes an additional phase of his response to Trilling’s argument. Mailer’s characterization of this milieu is a parody of what an unsympathetic reader might hold to be a typical Jamesian setting. Trilling in his essay ofers only a vague sense of the specifc social milieu in which James’s play of moral sensibilities occurs. Mailer, however, re-​creates the scene as a drawing room with a charming young girl at its center, a locus of “deadly important manners” in which the verbal “tactics” and “glorious kills” appropriate to that setting comprise the drama of upper-​class personal exchange. If this is the kind of social life that Dreiser either neglects or renders poorly, Mailer’s parody implies, readers miss little by its absence. Mailer’s response to Trilling’s attack on Dreiser also derives much of its historical resonance from its initial setting at an MLA meeting. Mailer, with his acute sensitivity to the literary culture and infghting of his day, no doubt grasped that in the 20 years since the end of the war in 1945 literary reputations increasingly depended on the academic community. Literary journals as an institution were, like the institution of the man of letters, in decline; on the other hand the immense captive audience of readers populating postwar college literature classes, in combination with the course anthology and the new quality paperback market, controlled much of the national taste for literature beyond the mediocre. Thus several generations of readers knew Moby Dick and “The Waste Land” not because they had been guided there by their own taste or by literary savants such as Trilling, but because their teachers assigned them as required texts. Indeed an application of Trilling’s general conception of the liberal imagination to the question of which specifc works within our national heritage we should be reading provides a rough guide to what books an average MLA member of the day might place on a national reading list. Two kinds of

70

70

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

works—​James’s subtle and complex dramas of consciousness and Melville’s and Hawthorne’s symbolic portrayals of man’s tragic nature—​would be high in the list; Dreiser—​ a narrow and shallow-​ minded documenter of social materialism—​would be omitted. The New Criticism, which in the early 1960s was still the principal pedagogical method in the university, would fully endorse this choice. (An important exception to this statement is provided by Robert Penn Warren, whose Homage to Theodore Dreiser [1971] is a major defense of Dreiser’s artistry.) In a notable discussion of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which appeared in the New Republic for July 26, 1964, Irving Howe summarized this specifc moment in the postwar evolution of American literary reputations:

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

The decline of Dreiser’s reputation has not been an isolated event. It has occurred in the context, and surely as a consequence, of the counter-​ revolution in American culture during the past few decades. For readers educated in these years, Dreiser often became a symbol of everything a superior intelligence was supposed to avoid. For the New Critics, for whom the very possibility of a social novel seemed disagreeable; for literary students trained in the fne but narrow school of the Jamesian sensibility; for liberals easing into a modest gentility and inclined to replace a belief in social commitment with a search for personal distinction; for intellectuals delighted with the values of ambiguity, irony, complexity and impatient with the pieties of radicalism—​for all such persons Dreiser became an object of disdain. Although Howe in this account does not openly place all these categories of readers in academia, it is obvious that it refers principally to teachers and students of American literature. And it was this academic sensibility that Mailer was also baiting as he characteristically used the opportunity aforded by his guest appearance at the MLA to celebrate Dreiser’s centrality and to imply James’s irrelevance in any account of the relationship of American writing to the American experience. Mailer’s “Modes and Mutations” bears on the issue of literary reputation in yet another way related both to its initial academic setting and to his conception of Dreiser’s signifcance. He begins the essay in this way: “Trust me for a time. Indulge me. Assume I am a lecturer in the felds of Fellowship and am trying to draw a grand design in twenty minutes. Knowing attention is iron for the blood of a lecturer, I will pick a title–​‘The Dynamic of American Literature’. … And for a frst sentence I would say: There has been a war at the center of American letters for a long time.” Mailer is here playfully engaging his MLA listeners in the rhetoric and assumptions of the then-​current myth school of American academic literary

71

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NORMAN MAILER, THEODORE DREISER

71

criticism. His announcement that he will seek to draw a “grand design,” his overarching title with its suggestion of national vitality, and his statement of an all-​encompassing theme are characteristic of the critical style associated with the postwar efort to write a national literary history commensurate in stature and meaning with our leadership in world afairs. (Two contemporary endeavors with roughly similar aims were the introduction of American Studies as an academic discipline and the establishment of the Fulbright lectureship program. The frst sought to legitimatize within the university the study of American culture, the second to provide a means to spread worldwide the news of the importance of the subject.) As refected in such infuential works of the time as Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) and R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), scholars within this school rejected as a means of examining the nation’s literary past the traditional device of period categorization, in which a work defned itself in relation to its literary period, in favor of interpreting the nation’s literature as an expression of an underlying mythic belief that constituted the source of both the strength and distinction of that expression. The initial impulse of literary historians within the school, as is suggested by Smith’s and Lewis’s works, was toward conceiving of this myth as one of man’s capacity toward constant renewal of faith and strength—​the American as the new Adam in a new Eden. But the desire to seek a single all-​enveloping means for the understanding of American culture and its literature could obviously be extended into positing other kinds of underlying themes, including that which Mailer ofers in his essay. For Mailer the dynamic at the center of American expression since the Civil War has not been renewal but confict—​the constant interaction, in the form of an unending dialectic without concluding synthesis, between the have-​nots and the haves of American life. This confict is epitomized in its early stage by the distinction between Dreiserian and Jamesian spheres of infuence (i.e., in the separate and isolated fctional worlds they create) and in its later stage both by the failure of fgures such as Saul Bellow to bridge the gap between these worlds and by the descent of American culture into opposing camps of Cannibals (the “sons of the immigrants” who plundered the nation while hating it for its prohibitions) and Christians (the unthinking mass of believers). Thus, despite Mailer’s vigorous defense of Dreiser while in the midst of the “enemy” camp, he has not advanced an understanding of Dreiser much beyond that evident in Trilling’s attack. Both Trilling and Mailer are limited in their perception of Dreiser’s work by the broadly similar dialectic in which they place him—​for Trilling a literature of crudity of thought and method versus one of subtlety, complexity, and sensibility, and for Mailer a “realistic impulse” versus an “aristocratic impulse.” For Trilling, Dreiser is a negative

72

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

72

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

pole in this dialectic, while for Mailer James occupies this position. But both writers have locked Dreiser into the category of a writer who can best be understood and appreciated in connection with his social origins and subject matter. Although the relationship stressed by both Trilling and Mailer of Dreiser’s work to his class is of course a legitimate and important subject, it provides too narrow a lens to describe and estimate his full achievement adequately. Whether in condemnation or in praise, it accepts that Dreiser’s interests and understanding do not transcend those of his class and that his principal concern is the mechanics of social interaction rather than the basic human qualities present in such transactions. Thus, because both Trilling’s and Mailer’s critical stances begin and end with the assumption that Dreiser can best be understood in relation to class, neither is prepared to pursue the possibility that Dreiser, in his fction as a whole, has in fact created a powerful portrayal of qualities of mind and spirit shared by many Americans, whatever their class origins or later experience—​that he has depicted within the often widely varying life histories of his characters a code of belief which, though seldom overtly articulated either by them or by Dreiser, nevertheless constitutes a unifying core of theme within his work, whatever the class conditions depicted. One way into describing the central thrust of Dreiser’s conception of the American experience is to begin with his portrayal of Frank Cowperwood, a fgure who serves this purpose well because of the fullness and clarity of his characterization. (In the discussion of Dreiser’s novels that follows, I omit any commentary on Jennie Gerhardt and The Bulwark. The central fgures in these works, Jennie and Solon Barnes, have an almost saint-​like ability either to abnegate self in response to the needs of others or to reach a belief in the reality of a transcendent spiritual force in all life. These quasi-​religious sentiments speak to a side of Dreiser other than the one I concentrate on in this chapter.) Class origins and aspirations are not a signifcant issue in Dreiser’s account of Cowperwood’s life. He is born into a comfortable middle-​class existence (his father is a minor bank ofcial); and, although his early imprisonment and later ruthless business practices afect his social reputation, his power and wealth ensure that for the most part he lives and dies a member of the upper class. Rather than exemplifying a fgure whose inner nature and social history are shaped by his social origin, Cowperwood is almost entirely a product of his own temperament. Early in life he realizes that he has the intellect and strength of mind to control events and men in order to gain his principal objective in life, one which he sums up in his oft-​repeated mantra—​“I satisfy myself.” And as he proceeds through life he discovers that to satisfy himself is to have the wealth and power to achieve the pleasures of owning great works of art and of possessing beautiful young women. One of Dreiser’s tentative titles

73

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NORMAN MAILER, THEODORE DREISER

73

for his three novels depicting Cowperwood’s life was “A Trilogy of Desire.”3 He meant by this not merely, as is sometimes claimed, Cowperwood’s sexual conquests but rather the totality of his nature and thereby a powerful though often suppressed or thwarted aspect of human nature in general. We are all creatures of desire, Dreiser states through his portrayal, and here is a man who has the rare capacity to act out successfully that central element in human existence.4 Dreiser divides what can be called his ethos of desire into three main currents—​money, for the power it provides to satisfy desire; the creation or possession of art; and sex. The three are interrelated and indeed often indivisible. It requires wealth to engage fully in the pleasures of art, art is often sensual in nature, and a beautiful woman is herself a work of art who is often drawn to power. Together, in some way not clearly defned by Dreiser, they constitute the attribute of mind and spirit which he calls “beauty” and which he attributes to Carrie in the epilogue of Sister Carrie:  “Oh, Carrie, Carrie! Oh, blind strivings of the human heart! Onward, onward, it saith, and where beauty leads, there it follows.” Cowperwood illustrates in an ideal confguration the three characteristics of a life dominated by a desire for beauty. There are obstacles to this fulfllment, but they are all overcome. Those opposed to his quest for wealth are outmaneuvered, women are pursued or seized in the face of all social and moral prohibitions, and the quest is renewed time and time again, with each renewal representing a refnement of aim. This last aspect of the desire for beauty—​that the seeker’s understanding of beauty deepens and matures over time—​is most apparent in Cowperwood’s relationship with women. Early in his career, his frst wife provides him with a convenient and conventional middle-​class identity, but his initial great love, the fery Aileen, introduces him to passion. After her there follow a large number of afairs that serve to maintain that fame until he meets Berenice, who is portrayed as a Pre-​Raphaelite mix of refned sexuality, pureness of spirit, and ethereal beauty. Like Carrie in the movement “upward” of her relationships from Drouet to Hurstwood to Ames, and like Eugene Witla in his relationships with his wife Angela and with Suzanne, Cowperwood fnally comes to understand that what he has been pursuing is not sex itself but rather the broader and almost ineluctable body of “higher” values that Dreiser has designated as beauty. The man of strength, Dreiser states through his portrayal of Cowperwood, lives out with dramatic clarity this essential characteristic of all life—​one obscured elsewhere because it is seldom acknowledged or achieved—​that we are all creatures of desire, and that what we desire are the complex and interwoven manifestations of the beautiful in existence. The world external to Cowperwood is thus principally a foil to his desires; the fears, hypocritical

74

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

74

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

morality, or stolid materialistic satisfactions of most of its denizens stand in stark contrast to his perception of a transcendent though socially transgressing truth that has frmly guided his way. Dreiser’s principal failure in expressing this theme in the trilogy lies in his accounts of Cowperwood’s business afairs. He occasionally openly introduces the role of beauty in Cowperwood’s inner nature, as in his comment that “Back of that solid, corrective brain, which stood like a mailed knight at the drawbridge of his fortune, was a vague, cloudy realm of beauty as sensuous as a summer landscape, as alluring as a tinted sea.” In this passage and in similar statements elsewhere Dreiser apparently wished to suggest that Cowperwood’s fnancial dealings contain an aspect of the aesthetic, one akin to the “elegance” and “fnesse” often ascribed to mathematics, and that Cowperwood’s brilliance in this area makes him akin to an artist, to a creator as well as an admirer of beauty. This theme is buttressed by the realization that Dreiser’s other major protagonists who are characterized by powerful desires are also either artists of one kind or another (Carrie and Eugene) or have an artistic temperament (Clyde). But, whatever his intent in expressing this theme in his depiction of Cowperwood’s fnancial dealings, it is only thinly achieved. Clyde Grifths is a negative counterpart to Frank Cowperwood. By this I mean that Dreiser attributes to Clyde the same intense desires he describes in Cowperwood, but devotes most of An American Tragedy to dramatizing Clyde’s inability to fulfll them. Where Cowperwood is strong in intelligence and will, Clyde is weak; where Cowperwood lays out a clear path for himself in all his endeavors, Clyde is habitually indecisive and inefectual. But both fgures are similar in their intense longing for material success, for the possession of women, and for an engagement with the intensity and richness of experience that bespeaks a sensibility similar to that of the artist’s. Dreiser throughout book one of An American Tragedy constantly stresses Clyde’s “sensitivity,” a quality present in his most distinctive physical characteristic, his “thin and sensitive and graceful hands”—​and one which links him with those Dreiser characters from Carrie through Eugene Witla and Cowperwood whose fnely tuned emotional natures make them responsive to the beauties of life. Like Carrie early in her Chicago experiences, however, the objects and events that Clyde seizes upon as beautiful are limited by the narrow range of his life. In Kansas City, in book one, this objectifcation includes his identifcation of the spurious luxuriousness of the Green-​Davidson Hotel with “paradise,” and in Lycurgus, in book two, his admiration for the fashy style of life of the well-​to-​do youths of the town. And eventually it settles on the single all-​ encompassing fgure of Sondra, whose youth, beauty, and wealth make her (from Clyde’s point of view) a “goddess.” If he has the skill and strength of mind, he believes, to solve the puzzle necessary to win her despite the obstacle

75

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NORMAN MAILER, THEODORE DREISER

75

presented by Roberta’s pregnancy, wealth, position, and an object of almost ethereal beauty (similar to that of Berenice in The Titan) would all be his. Of course, class plays an important role in An American Tragedy in shaping Clyde’s fate as he attempts to fulfll the American Dream of Success. On one hand the Dream appears to make possible, to all who accept it, the movement upward in class that constitutes success; on the other social reality itself contains barriers that preclude success for all except the strong and adept. Thus, it can be posited that if Cowperwood himself were presented with Clyde’s dilemma in book two of An American Tragedy, he would have readily found his way out of it (as he had in numerous difcult situations both in his business and amorous careers) without recourse to Clyde’s engagement in a violent crime, and thereby would have both won Sondra and established his position in Lycurgus. In other words, class is a key factor in the lives of those who lack the ability to transcend it, but nevertheless all kinds of men and women from all kinds of class backgrounds share in an intense desire to possess beauty in its various forms. It is thus desire itself that is the common denominator in Dreiser’s depiction of the otherwise widely diferent phases of the American experience. In The “Genius” Dreiser’s focus in dramatizing a desire for beauty as a central drive in life is not the artist manqué fgures of Cowperwood and Clyde but rather a character who is fully a creative artist, the painter Eugene Witla. The “Genius” is Dreiser’s most autobiographical novel, and Dreiser’s portrayal of Witla as a fgure who pursues both the possession and creation of beauty thus has a special signifcance for this theme in his work as a whole. By his early twenties, Witla has determined that he will devote his life to the experience of beauty in the physical form of women and in the vibrant everyday life of the city. The frst he will consummate by possession, the second by re-​creation on canvas. Both acts are radical in the context of his times in that the frst requires constant renewal through a variety of partners, the second a rejection of contemporary aesthetic beliefs and practices. Witla is thus Cowperwood on a smaller stage. Like the fnancier and titan he surmounts many obstacles in his efort to satisfy himself by the possession of beauty. The similarity is almost exact in the two fgures’ relationships with women. Both overcome early marital mismatches, go through a series of afairs, and later in life fnd apotheosis in the love of a very young woman; Suzanne, at the close of The “Genius” is Eugene’s version of Cowperwood’s Berenice. But since The “Genius,” is a form of autobiography, it refects not only its author’s central value system but also his stumbles and uncertainties as he attempts to live his own life by those values. Thus, in the frst version of the novel, completed in 1911, Witla and Suzanne are reunited (after her mother had succeeded in separating them), and the novel ends on this note

76

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

76

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

of triumph. When Dreiser in 1914 revised the novel for publication, he has Witla dismiss an opportunity to reunite with Suzanne in favor of a more contemplative existence devoted principally to his work. Dreiser, in other words, could portray the love of an artist for a muse as either a climax or as a way-​ stop in the journey toward fulfllment of a desire for beauty. This ambivalence in Dreiser’s belief was present as early as the close of Sister Carrie, when his frst draft suggests that Ames will play an important role both as a lover and mentor in Carrie’s seeking, while the revised conclusion omits any such later role for him in favor of her independent intellectual and artistic development. In a further ambivalence Eugene fnds that the sexual activity inseparable from his love of the feminine form is often depleting and a thus a hindrance to his artistic productivity even as it acts as a stimulus to expression. In this variance between Cowperwood’s thriving on sexual activity as a manifestation of desire for the beautiful and Witla’s ambivalent response to the seemingly inseparable nature of the sexual and the beautiful, Dreiser is apparently expressing a distinction arising from the diference between an idea whose source is a considerable distance from his own personal experience and one almost literally drawn from his experience. Sister Carrie ofers a special problem in any discussion of Dreiser’s engagement with the theme of the desire for beauty because its protagonist is a woman and Dreiser wrote the novel within a social and literary climate in which it was not possible to introduce the theme—​one present in his accounts of Cowperwood, Clyde, and Witla—​of the sexual as a major component in a quest for the beautiful.5 Carrie thus has relationships with two men in the novel—​Drouet and Hurstwood—​which are almost asexual in Dreiser’s depiction of them. She is less drawn to Drouet as a man than as a means to escape her sister’s world of working-​class hardship and poverty for the city’s promise of a more fruitful existence. Hurstwood makes more of an impact on her, but he, too, serves principally as a means of entering a fuller, richer vein of experience. Dreiser’s task in the novel was therefore to make clear the plausibility and vitality of Carrie’s search for beauty—​a theme he overtly expresses in the epilogue to the novel—​without recourse to the forbidden area of sexual desire and fulfllment. He announces in the epilogue how he has attempted to do this, when he describes the theme of Carrie’s quest that he has sought to dramatize throughout the novel by means of the concrete specifcity of her experiences in Chicago and New York. She is of an “emotional nature,” he tells us, and is at one with those who “feel” rather than “reason” and who are thus “dreamers—​ artists all.” Thus, though the context of her life is the changing social and physical worlds in which she functions, the permanent essence of her nature (“essence” is an unfashionable but proper term for Carrie’s inner being in

7

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



NORMAN MAILER, THEODORE DREISER

77

Dreiser’s depiction of her) is that of a quest—​inchoate initially, partially realized by her later—​or a fulfllment of an inner need. As Dreiser tells us in the epilogue, “Chicago, New York, Drouet, Hurstwood; the world of fashion, and the world of stage—​these were but incidents. Not them, but that which they represented she longed for. Time proved the representation false.” Dreiser has introduced what can be called a metaphysical theme into his epilogue. Carrie lives in two realities: a stable and permanent inner one of the quest for beauty, and an unstable, impermanent, and often false outer one of the “representations” of this search in her experience and environment. Again and again she fnds momentary contentment when she reaches some plateau of achievement—​from the new clothes she acquires while living with Drouet to her success on the New  York stage—​only to realize that these constitute a temporary “representation” and not the fnal achievement of her desire. Thus, at the close of the novel, “sitting alone, she was now an illustration of the devious ways by which one who feels, rather than reasons, may be led in the pursuit of beauty.” It is no wonder, then, that many readers have found Carrie problematical, and that some critics have completely mistaken her nature. Throughout the novel she is a character in search for fulfllment of her inner self who frequently mistakes glitter for gold without initially realizing her error except perhaps for a vague disappointment. Indeed, given its very nature, her quest will never be fulflled, though Dreiser does strongly imply that it remains a worthwhile and even noble search given the constantly upward intellectual and spiritual movement of its trajectory. Nevertheless, as Dreiser states toward the close of the epilogue, addressing Carrie directly, “Know, then, that for you is neither surfeit nor content.” The record of Theodore Dreiser’s place in American literary history often refects his usefulness at key moments in the nation’s past in serving as a means to endorse major currents of belief and value of these moments. During the 1920s, when the revolt against Victorian restraints and hypocrisies was at its peak, he often played the role of “pathfnder” to those celebrating a new honesty in recognizing the centrality of desire in human afairs. Dorothy Dudley, in her 1932 biography of Dreiser, summed up this role when she writes that “under [many of his characters] run primordial passions, struck to fame by the fact of sex, the wish to power, the desire to live.” For several post-​World War II decades, on the other hand, as Trilling’s concept of his work reveals and as Howe’s discussion makes strikingly clear, the naturalistic thread in Dreiser’s fction of the power of class to determine individual fates was often ofered as a signpost of his intellectual and artistic defciencies. Stated overbroadly, it was felt (without being overtly stated) that the nation depicted by Dreiser was not the free and powerful nation that had saved the world from totalitarianism.

78

78

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Mailer, in his defense of Dreiser as a portrayer of the importance of class in America, was pursuing his own agenda, but he did so in a way that anticipated a strong afrmation of the idea of the inseparability of literary expression from its cultural context, an idea that was to preoccupy much of the discussion of Dreiser’s role in American literary history over the next 40 years. During a period in which questions of identity and of social equity were primary in the minds of those engaged in promoting new areas of literary study and value, Dreiser’s concern for the nature of the American “social machine” placed his work in the forefront of interest and value. With some exceptions this food of renewed interest in Dreiser’s novels has been devoted to clarifying what his fction tells us about social belief and value in his own time principally as seen through the lens of our own social concerns. Dreiser’s novels, however, as I  have attempted to show in my cursory account of their basic character, resist at their core these various eforts to reinforce contemporary preoccupations and needs. Although they do contain elements of what diferent generations of critics and historians have found in them, they defy any neat packaging into a specifc category of literary theme serving a historian’s purpose because they above all were written to serve Dreiser’s purpose of attempting to solve the puzzle of what constitutes the various shapes and destinies of the human capacity to desire, especially to desire beauty. This is not a subject whose source and meaning are easily reducible to the impact of contemporary social conditions and beliefs, though it may indeed refect these conditions and beliefs. It is, however, the subject whose source and meaning constitute much of the foundation of Dreiser’s permanence as a novelist, and therefore that demands our fullest attention.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Notes 1 All citations from this essay are from its Commentary publication. 2 Notman, “Talks with Four Novelists,” in Rusch and Pizer, Theodore Dreiser: Interviews 6. 3 See Dreiser to Kirah Markham, February 8, 1914; in Riggio, Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women, 86. 4 Of Dreiser’s major critics, Richard Lehan devotes the most attention to the theme of desire in Dreiser’s novels, though he does so largely within the construct of the impossible struggle by Dreiser’s characters to fulfll desire in the face of a world of limitations. He writes in his Theodore Dreiser:  “Dreiser was unable to reconcile his own romantic aspirations with his belief in a world of physical limits, and this led in his fction to the displaced character—​the man whose desire for self-​fulfllment is in confict with his environment” (xii). 5 For an account of Carrie’s desire for beauty as a survival attribute within an evolutionary interpretation of the novel, see Pizer, “Evolution and American Fiction,” 214–​22.

79



NORMAN MAILER, THEODORE DREISER

79

Works Cited

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. Edited by Thomas P. Riggio. New York: Library of America, 2003. —​—​—​. The Financier. New York: Harper, 1912. —​—​—​. Sister Carrie. Edited by Donald Pizer. 3rd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Dudley, Dorothy. Forgotten Frontiers:  Dreiser and the Land of the Free. New  York:  Harrison Smith, 1932. Howe, Irving. “An American Tragedy.” New Republic 151 (July 26, 1964): 19–​21; repr. in Pizer, ed., Critical Essays 292–​93. Lehan, Richard. Theodore Dreiser:  His World and His Novels. Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Mailer, Norman. “Modes and Mutations:  Quick Comments on the Modern American Novel.” Commentary 41 (March 1966): 37–​40; repr. in Mailer, Cannibals 95–​103. —​—​—​. Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial Press, 1966. Notman, Otis. “Talks with Four Novelists.” New York Times Saturday Review of Books, June 15, 1907, 393. Pizer, Donald, ed. Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. —​—​—​. “Evolution and American Fiction: Three Paradigmatic Novels.” American Literary Realism 43 (Spring 2011): 204–​22. Riggio, Thomas P., ed. Theodore Dreiser:  Letters to Women. Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2009. Rusch, Frederic and Donald Pizer, eds. Theodore Dreiser: Interviews. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Trilling, Lionel. “Reality in America.” In The Liberal Imagination. New  York:  Viking, 1950.  3–​22.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

80

81

Chapter 6 JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN THREE VARIATIONS ON A THEME*

John Dos Passos’s brief but intense encounter in November 1931 with labor strife in Harlan County had a signifcant impact on his sensibility. His three literary representations of the occasion—​Harlan Miners Speak (1932), “Harlan:  Working under the Gun” (1931), and “The Camera Eye (51)” in The Big Money (1936)—​vibrantly envision this signifcant moment of Great Depression class warfare as marked by an impoverished working class, grasping capitalists, and uncaring or corrupt civil authorities. In addition, Dos Passos’s engagement with Harlan by means of three works employing strikingly diferent modernistic modes—​the documentary, reportage, and stream of consciousness—​reveals his response to the problem of the artistic method to be pursued by the engaged modernist writer. They reveal, that is, his suspicion of the documentary with an ideological agenda and confrm his greater faith in either an art object constructed out of the moment’s salient aspects (reportage) or a dramatic rendering of the deepest level of the writer’s personal response to the moment (stream of consciousness).

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

I Harlan and Bell are adjoining counties in southeastern Kentucky.1 Almost always on the edge of poverty because of the absence of arable land, they had benefted from the arrival of the coal-​mining industry in the late nineteenth century and had even experienced a period of relative prosperity during World War I. By the late 1920s, however, the area was sufering from the worldwide overproduction of coal. The onset of the Great Depression intensifed the dire economic condition of the coal industry and especially that of its miners. Coal mine operators, a group consisting of some small owners but dominated by the great capitalist families of the day—​the Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons, * Arizona Quarterly 71 (Spring 2015), 1–​23.

82

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

82

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

and the like—​responded to diminishing returns on investment by cutting wages. The miners themselves had in large numbers joined the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) during the war years, and during the late 1920s and early 1930s had engaged in several strikes, all of which were unsuccessful. The mine owners had as their principal weapon against the strike the fact that mining was the only industry in the area and that miners could thus be starved out—​that is, the owner could refuse to negotiate and either hire nonunion labor or temporarily close down, in either case leaving striking miners adrift without support. The UMW attempted at frst to aid its striking members, but its resources were insufcient, and it soon adopted a policy of encouraging miners to accept almost any terms ofered by the owners. In Harlan and Bell counties, for example, UMW miners went on strike in the spring of 1931 with the expectation that the national union would supply food and other assistance. When these were not forthcoming, the strike quickly collapsed, and many of the striking miners were either placed on blacklists or required to sign “yellow dog” contracts before being reemployed, an agreement in which they pledged not to join a union. Enter at this point the National Miners Union (NMU), a Communist Party-​ dominated union formed in 1928 with the aim of providing a radical alternative to the UMW. By the summer of 1931, the NMU had recruited agents and formed locals in several Harlan and Bell communities, and had begun imbuing their members not only with hope of faring better than they had with the UMW but also with appreciation of the class warfare in which they were engaged. The NMU faced two handicaps, however, in their eforts to succeed where the UMW had failed. First, most of their members were former UMW members who had been blacklisted and thus were unemployed; any strike by this group ofered little threat to the operation of mines already stafed by nonunion labor. Second, the mine operators enlisted the support of the area’s civil authorities, especially those of Harlan County, in suppressing all activities by NMU agents and members. These authorities—​the sherif, prosecuting attorney (county district attorney), and the county judge—​worked in consort to both legally and illegally harass, intimidate, and even beat and kill union members. They had as weapons in this warfare both their moral outrage at the presence of radical outsiders in their fefdom (comparable to the response of some Southerners a generation later to “freedom riders” seeking to racially integrate their area) and the criminal syndicalist laws common to many states during this period. These laws permitted state authorities to arrest and prosecute any individual or group seeking to form an organization committed to illegal activities. Since the laws were broadly written and interpreted, anyone advocating a strike—​an action that could be presumed to endorse the use of violence to prevent scabbing—​could be charged with criminal syndicalism.

83

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

83

Laws of this kind had arisen in response to turn-​of-​the-​century growth in union membership and, by the early 1930s, were employed throughout the country to suppress unionizing eforts. In Harlan County, for example, membership in the NMU or ownership of a copy of the Daily Worker (a New York-​ produced communist newspaper) was construed as prima facie evidence of criminal syndicalism. Thus, the county, through its sherif, used two principal measures to counter the eforts of the NMU to organize and radicalize miners of the area: deputized thugs and criminals, recruited from outside the county and paid for by mine operators, intimidated and physically abused NMU organizers and members; the sherif himself arrested and imprisoned without a formal charge anyone suspected of radical beliefs, as evidenced most of all by possession of a copy of the Daily Worker. Both of these devices were fully endorsed by the local prosecuting attorney and judge. Given the close connection between the NMU and the national Communist Party, these anti-​ union practices were widely publicized and condemned in both communist journals and other news outlets. In response to similar outrages elsewhere, the party in 1925 had played the primary role in forming the International Labor Defense (ILD), a group consisting principally of communist lawyers, to aid communists jailed for radical activities. Early in 1931, Joseph Pass, a party ofcial, took the lead in organizing an ofshoot of the ILD, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP).2 This group consisted principally of writers whose function was to publicize the imprisonment of radicals and others in violation of their civil rights. Theodore Dreiser, who later in the year requested permission to join the Communist Party, was asked to be its chairman, and a group of Left-​ leaning writers, including Dos Passos, were recruited as members.3 One of the initial tasks of the committee was to organize protests against the imminent execution of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Alabama blacks accused of raping two white women on a freight train. In the fall of 1931, worker–​employer tensions had escalated in southeastern Kentucky in the aftermath of what came to be known as the Battle of Evarts on May 5, 1931. With a strike under way, UMW members attempted to dissuade scabs from working a mine near Evarts, Harlan County, when two carloads of armed deputies appeared on the scene. In the ensuing gun battle, three deputies and one miner were killed, following which the local authorities indicted thirty miners for murder. (The miners, it might be noted, were mostly of mountaineer stock and knew how to handle weapons.) No deputy was charged with an ofense. During the summer, with the NMU’s presence increasing in the area, gun violence and imprisonment for criminal syndicalism rose sharply. In response, Dreiser was persuaded to lead an on-​site NCDPP investigation of conditions in the coalfelds of Harlan and Bell counties. (His brief visit a

84

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

84

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

few months earlier to western Pennsylvania to observe an NMU coal strike—​ an expedition Communist Party leader William Z. Foster had asked him to undertake—​was in a sense a trial run for the Harlan expedition.) He initially conceived of a group consisting of himself and a number of prominent national fgures in order to guarantee national coverage of the investigation, but when none of these fgures agreed to participate (undoubtedly disinclined because of the undisguised leftist origin and nature of the NCDPP), he turned to members of the NCDPP. Those writers accepting the invitation were Dos Passos, Lester Cohen, Samuel Ornitz, Melvin P. Levy, Bruce Crawford, and Charles and Adelaide Walker. (Of these, Cohen, Ornitz, and Levy appear to have been party members, but all the members of the committee were Left to extreme Left in orientation.) Accompanying the group were stenographer Celia Kuhn and Dreiser’s companion Marie Pergain.4 Once on the scene, they were joined by George Maurer, representing the ILD, and Harry Gannes, a Daily Worker reporter. The committee arrived in Pineville, the seat of Bell County, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 5. The investigating committee apparently had not settled on a precise schedule or modus operandi, but with a stenographer in the party, and a group of NMU ofcials and miners prepared to testify about area conditions awaiting their arrival in Pineville, committee members readily adopted a plan of interviewing as many miners and civic authorities as possible in a rough approximation of a trial procedure, including the verbatim preservation of testimony. After spending the remainder of November 5 conducting interviews with miners and other aggrieved fgures at the Continental Hotel in Pineville, the committee reconvened the next morning in Harlan, at the Llewellyn Hotel,5 where it conducted further interviews, including lengthy in-​ofce interviews with Sherif John H. Blair that evening and with County Prosecuting Attorney William Brock the following morning. Later, on November 7, the delegation journeyed to Straight Creek, Bell County, to visit miners’ cabins and attend a meeting at the local Baptist church. The NCDPP contingent concluded its visit on November 8, by going to an NMU meeting at a high school in Wallins Creek, where it heard several speeches, then left for New York on Monday, November 9. Two judicial events involving the committee occurred in Harlan not long after its departure. Dreiser and Pergain were indicted for adultery, and the committee as a whole (including its stenographer) was indicted for criminal syndicalism. The Dreiser indictment stemmed from the widely reported “toothpick caper”: toothpicks were placed against the door of Dreiser’s hotel room one evening after Miss Pergain had entered it and when the toothpicks were found undisturbed the next morning, adultery was assumed to have occurred. (Dreiser countered the charge with the obviously tongue-​in-​cheek claim that

85

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

85

since he was impotent, an adulterous act was impossible.)6 The criminal syndicalism charges were more signifcant, since as felonies they could be grounds for requests for extradition to Kentucky to stand trial. But nothing came of this possibility, Harlan authorities wishing, as in similar instances, to use the threat of further legal action to discourage activism rather than to bring cases to trial. Back in New York, the NCDPP and ILD quickly and emphatically capitalized on the publicity aforded the committee during its Harlan visit. A mass meeting was planned for December 6, with Dreiser to give the major speech, one he prepared under the title “Individualism and the Jungle.”7 When Dreiser was unable to appear at the meeting, Sherwood Anderson gave an address in his place. In addition, the NCDPP decided to publish a book devoted to an account of its committee’s visit to Harlan. The bulk of the book was to consist of miners’ testimony—​hence the title Harlan Miners Speak. But, as has been pointed out (Duke 32), the book contains a great deal of matter outside of its announced contents. Much important testimony is not by miners, many of the miners testifying were not residents of Harlan, and a considerable portion of the book consists of committee members’ brief essays about aspects of coal mining in the area, afdavits and speeches by miners, and even song lyrics. Most egregiously of all in relation to its title, the book closes—​following the events at Wallins Creek on November 8—​with the texts of Anderson’s speech and the testimony given before a Senate committee in early February 1932 concerning the prevention by force of another investigating committee, led by Waldo Frank, in its efort to visit Harlan. Harlan Miners Speak, published in late March, was put together in a remarkably brief period. No author or editor is named on its cover or title page; rather, these pages state that the book was “Prepared by Members of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners.” It is true that all of its formal essays are by members of the committee and that it was the committee (with Dreiser as chief interlocutor) which conducted the interviews that occupy much of the book. However, it was Dos Passos, not the committee as a whole, who edited the book, that is, who decided which material was to appear and in what order, and who wrote the continuity between its major segments.8 He would have been the obvious choice for the task once Dreiser himself, well known as cavalier about deadlines, had apparently been eliminated. Not only was Dos Passos the most prominent fgure other than Dreiser to participate in the visit, but he had also in 1927 undertaken a similar task involving a radical protest, when he edited Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen. (It was perhaps also Dos Passos who arranged for Harlan Miners Speak to be published by Harcourt, Brace. He had ended his relationship with Harper’s earlier that year, and Harcourt, Brace had recently become his

86

86

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

publisher.) Like Harlan Miners Speak, Facing the Chair assembles all sorts of miscellaneous material—​afdavits, court records, letters, essays, newspaper stories, and the like—​into a coherent review of a major social issue, in this instance, the imminent execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. However, it is also likely that while Dos Passos had primary responsibility for preparing Harlan Miners Speak, the decision to include Anderson’s address and the Senate hearing testimony as its concluding sections was undoubtedly made by others once he had completed his work. In Dos Passos’s version, the book probably concluded on page 297 with “Donaldson’s Speech,” a rousing call to radical unionism during the committee’s visit to Wallins Creek on its last full day in Kentucky. However, Anderson’s rambling and occasionally incoherent address follows (298–​312) and is itself followed by “A Hearing in Washington” (313–​ 48, in reduced type) before the book comes to a close. Since these sections are anticlimactic and bear only tangentially on the committee’s Harlan visit, it is difcult to accept that Dos Passos played any role in their inclusion.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

II William Stott states in his authoritative Documentary Expression and Thirties America (1973) that the “primary expression” of the decade is not, as might be supposed, fction but rather the “documentary” in its various forms (xi). The basis for this judgment lies in part in the close relationship between thirties leftish ideology and the documentary method. Documentary expression arose during the decade, it is argued, because of its nature as a group or collectivist enterprise in which a group condition (the plight of all miners or farmers, for example) is rendered by dramatically reproducing the speech and actions of the activity’s multiple participants. It was a form that, in terms appropriate to its ideology, placed its faith in the language and experience of the masses rather than in an author’s inherently suspect bourgeois imagination. (“U. S. A. is the speech of the people,” Dos Passos emphatically stated in the prologue to U. S. A. [1938].) Thus, in its purest form the documentary relied entirely on unedited frst-​person accounts by its working-​class subjects (“Informant Narratives” is Stott’s term), as is true of the testimony portion of Harlan Miners Speak. This ideal synthesis of ideology and form, however, was seldom achieved. The most permanent thirties documentaries, those by Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor (American Exodus [1939]) and James Agee and Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [1941]), consist not of unmediated working-​class prose but rather of artful photography and literary prose molded into sophisticated personal visions of thirties scenes. And the most famous and infuential thirties literary work, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), is not a

87

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

87

documentary (though it contains documentary elements) but a highly wrought work of fction. Dos Passos faced a challenging task in the preparation of Harlan Miners Speak. He had at hand not only the stenographic record of the testimony ofered by miners, their wives, and various county ofcials, but a group of seven short essays on the background of the Harlan “troubles” written by NCDPP members. These essays, given their precise carving up of the subject—​including the geography and history of the area, mine ownership, living conditions of miners, and the legal system in Harlan—​were probably assigned and written shortly after the committee’s return from Kentucky. He also had a body of miscellaneous material deriving from the committee’s two days of feldwork at Straight and Wallins Creeks. His solution to the dilemma presented by the mixed nature of his material was to order the pieces chronologically, roughly approximating the structure of a trial. Dreiser’s introduction to the volume and the essays by members of the NCDPP come frst (3–​100) and present in general terms the evidence for the prosecution’s charge that the Harlan County miners are the victims of terrorism. The lengthy middle section of the book (101–​276) is devoted principally to personal testimony that constitutes the specifc evidence in support of the charge. The short concluding account of the committee’s visits to Straight and Wallins Creeks (277–​ 97) represents, in its emotionally compelling scenes of extreme poverty and its brief but equally compelling evangelical-​like addresses by mine union leaders, a summing up of earlier evidence. This use of a documentary method within the structure of a case presented and then proven should have resulted in a more forceful and convincing book than Harlan Miners Speak in fact is. In pointing out both the strengths and weaknesses of the work, I will take up each large section individually. Dreiser’s introduction, aside from recounting the history of the committee’s formation, is largely nonfunctional in that he directs his argumentative energy toward his pet belief of the period in the need for greater “equity” in American life. He seems to mean by this amorphous term not a specifc political or social program but rather a greater sharing by all classes in the nation’s wealth. The rich are too rich, he believes, and oppress the poor in order to accumulate even greater riches. He does not make clear how the goal of greater equity can be achieved in Harlan County. This task, however, is pursued with a vengeance by the writers of the formal essays that follow his introduction. Since Harlan is in a remote area of Kentucky and coal mining is a specialized industry, the essays serve an informational purpose for the volume’s intended general audience. The complex history of the relationships between miners, owners, and unions benefts from clarifcation prior to the testimony about the particulars of their lives by miners with little sense of this background. The

8

88

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

essay writers approach this informational task, however, with an ideological slant that makes itself felt on almost every page. Sometimes this bias toward a Marxist-​based interpretation of “bloody Harlan” is strikingly evident, as in the opening of Arnold Johnson’s essay on “The Lawlessness of the Law in Harlan County”:

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Harlan County stands with Sacco-​Vanzetti, Mooney-​Billings, Centralia, Imperial Valley, Patterson, Lawrence, Scottsboro, and innumerable historic cases, revealing the so-​called due processes of law turned as tools against that portion of the working class which has revolted against the paternalistic dictatorship of the capitalists. This is evidenced in the personnel as well as in the activities of these so-​called duly constituted authorities. (59) More often, however, the essays reveal indirectly, in their authors’ choice of what to present and emphasize, a party interpretation of the story of Harlan. In this narrative, mine owners and managers have taken advantage of hard times to reduce the real producers of their wealth—​the miners—​into near slaves, aided in this process by an actively pro-​owner legal establishment and a compliant union, the UMW. The essays are replete with facts and fgures that are organized and function within the context of this narrative. Thus, for example, almost all the essays, whatever their subject, contain some reference to the perfdy of the UMW, a union that appeared to promise relief from oppression but then betrayed its members. This preoccupation with criticizing noncommunist unions is very much a party preoccupation, since one of the principal aims of the party during this period was to supplant older craft unions with new, party-​controlled unions. The large middle portion of Harlan Miners Speak devoted to the stenographic record of miner testimony would seem, because of its full adherence to a documentary method, to be immune to ideological control. Indeed, the impression that this section initially creates is of working men and women, with little education and no interest in politics, telling in detail the unvarnished truths of their miserable lives. These witnesses are also made believable by their almost painful reticence. Their testimony must be dragged out of them by the questioner. Nevertheless, with a widening of perspective, it becomes apparent that here, too, the documentary has been shaped and controlled by an agenda. The committee is met at Pineville by Mrs. Viola Grace, an NMU organizer and the wife of the NMU union leader Jim Grace, who had been beaten and run out of Harlan County. She has in tow a number of miners who, it is revealed in their testimony, are also either NMU ofcials or members. On the second day’s testimony, at Harlan, those testifying are for the most part

89

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

89

unemployed miners. The testimony by both groups of miners is often moving and disturbing. Even when a miner was working, he and his family lived marginal lives. Wages had been reduced over the years to a point which permitted no expenditure beyond that of the cheap food of an inadequate diet. Much of a miner’s salary was withheld to pay for company housing and mining supplies; the remainder was paid in scrip that had to be spent at a company store with artifcially high prices. Almost all those interviewed had been fred from their jobs for belonging to a union (even to the UMW). Members of the NMU had their homes searched without a warrant and if copies of the Daily Worker were found, miners were charged with criminal syndicalism. Heavily armed deputies harassed and intimidated any NMU group activity; the incident frequently referred to by many of those testifying was the killing by deputies of two NMU miners at a union soup kitchen. The miners’ testimony is often dull reading because of the slow process necessary to elicit information from instinctively taciturn witnesses. But the information itself persuades by means of the cumulative weight of its repetitive detail and occasionally by its pithy directness. Miner Caleb Powers testifes about having been arrested for helping run a soup kitchen:  “I said I couldn’t see any violation for a man to try to feed the starving children” (144). Nevertheless, an overview of the testimony as a whole suggests that though the miners were not coached in the sense of having rehearsed their testimony, they were undoubtedly encouraged as a group to include events supporting the factual basis for a charge of a systemic terrorism. Each individual was telling his or her own story, but that story always contained references to warrantless searches, to possession of the Daily Worker as evidence of criminal syndicalism, and to the beating and shooting of unarmed miners. (The “gun thugs are the law in this country now and not the judges and juries,” one witness testifes [206].) Leading questions often stimulated the introduction of these repetitive details, suggesting that the committee itself was briefed about which issues required full airing. Occasionally, when Dreiser appeared to falter in the role of prompter, Ornitz, perhaps the committee’s most dedicated party member, assumed that role for a brief period.9 After over a hundred pages of miner interviews, the interview portion of Harlan Miners Speak takes a sharp turn in substance and tone in two lengthy interviews (229–​ 76) with Sherif Blair and County Prosecuting Attorney Brock. That both men agreed to interviews by the committee suggests an attitude toward the investigation that was not defensive but aggressive: since they did not believe that they had violated anyone’s civil rights, they were confdent that they had nothing to fear in an interview; and since they believed that they were acting properly in defending the law, they were willing to aggressively point out their innocence to anyone who would listen. The interviews with

90

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

90

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

the two fgures are therefore adversarial rather than mutually supportive, as was true of the committee interviews with the miners. The two fgures vehemently and repeatedly proclaim their opposition not to unions but rather to the advocacy of violence by those supporting union activities. The obvious weakness in this argument—​that calling for union miners to resist scabbing or that possession of the Daily Worker constituted advocating violence—​is not apparent to them. Of course, any shooting of miners by deputies is in their view self-​defense. Blair and Brock serve the law in their county in relation to their own understanding of the law and how it should be enforced, and will not be told otherwise by any outsider “reds” (275). After over a hundred pages in which those testifying are in complete and probably coached agreement with their questioners, this open display of anger and hostility is refreshing and paradoxically strengthens the thrust of the miners’ testimony. With such obdurate closed-​mindedness enforcing the law, it is indeed believable that deputized armed thugs paid for by mine owners epitomized the legal code of Harlan County. The heightened dramatic vitality introduced into Harlan Miners Speak by the Blair and Brock interviews also characterizes the brief but intense closing section describing the committee’s visits to Straight and Wallins Creeks. During these visits, the committee is not in a hotel meeting room listening to stify presented formal testimony; rather, it is either encountering on site some of the actualities of miner hardships or listening to impassioned speakers seeking to move their audience to action. The section begins with Dos Passos’s narrative account of miners’ inadequate and broken-​down cabins at Straight Creek. For the frst time, a narrative voice attempts to engage the reader in the emotional reality of an observed action. “It wrings your heart,” he writes, “the way the scantily furnished rooms have been tidied up for the visitors” (278). While at the cabins, the committee interviews Molly Jackson, a local midwife, folksinger, and staunch NMU supporter who vividly recounts the hunger and disease characterizing life in Straight Creek. She reports: “The people in this country [Straight Creek] are destitute of anything that is really nourishing to the body. That is the truth. Even the babies have lost their lives, and we have buried from four to seven a week all along during the warm weather” (179). Following a brief interview with Calloway Hobbs, who also dwells on the impact of an impoverished diet on the area’s children, the committee speaks with Alex Napier, a miner severely injured in a mining accident. They learn upon their return to New York that he died a few days after the interview. The committee then makes its way to the local Baptist church, where there is to be an NMU meeting. As he observes the miners and their families attending the meeting, Dos Passos again makes a personal observation:

91



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

91

Stepping into the hall was going back a hundred years. … These were the gaunt faces, the slow elaborations of talk and courtesy, of the frontiersmen who voted for Jeferson and Jackson, and whose turns of speech were fanned on the oratory of Patrick Henry. I never felt the actuality of the American revolution so intensely as sitting in that church, listening to these mountaineers with their old time phrases, getting up on their feet and explaining why the time to fght for freedom had come again. (288) Dos Passos notes that a number of speeches were given at the meeting, but he presents only one, by Mistress “Sudsy” Gates. She briefy but movingly describes the labor and living conditions of Harlan miners and puts the union’s case for existence in powerfully direct terms: “The thing for every one is to unite and stick together and fght these conditions and fght for better wages and better food and more of it and milk and stuf for the children” (291). The next day, the committee visits Wallins Creek to attend a union meeting at the local high school. The only speech reported is that by a “tall blackhaired miner named Donaldson, who stalked up and down the platform pounding the table with his fst like an oldtime hellroaring evangelist” (294). In a brief and disjointed address, Donaldson touches almost every base in the miners’ litany of complaints but does so with an impassioned vehemence and bitterness that powerfully render the bedrock emotions of men and women pushed to the limit of their endurance. “I am going to feed my children,” he states. I am going to kill, murder, rob for my children because I won’t let my children starve. … Whatever you get you have to take from the capitalist. We beg and beg and tell them our starving conditions but it don’t do no good. …

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

We don’t want to get rich. We want to eat. If you put a man into poverty then you send him down to Hell and sin. Believe me, it would not take much for me to go down and steal a good square meal. (297) The Straight and Wallins Creek conclusion of Harlan Miners Speak continues to use a documentary method of the verbatim presentation of ideologically slanted material. All those interviewed or speaking are NMU members or ofcials, and the evidence ofered to the committee is ideologically loaded. The cabins at Straight Creek are in fact rundown remnants of housing associated with an abandoned mine, its occupants largely unemployed miners who are squatting (Hevener 65). But the concluding section contains other elements as well. The evidence arguing for the miners’ dire condition is not merely reported at a distance from the event but is experienced by the committee as living events—​by the condition of the cabins visited and by their dying and

92

92

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

undernourished residents, and by the impassioned conviction of those determined to use a union to remedy these and other oppressive conditions. In addition, Dos Passos’s continuity is now not neutrally descriptive; instead, it exhibits signs of his personal engagement, as if he were unconsciously seeking to escape the bind of seemingly disengaged documentation for the greater freedom of a mode that would permit the open presence of his own voice and feelings. He is thus moved by the pathos of attempting to tidy and pretty up a ramshackle cabin for strangers. And he ofers as an alternative to the Marxist rhetoric of NMU spokesmen his own brand of radicalism—​ freedom may lie not in pursuing fulfllment of the gospel according to Marx but in reactivating the sacred beliefs of the nation’s founders.10

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

III “Harlan:  Working under the Gun” is an example of reportage, a loosely defned literary form that arose in the late nineteenth century and that has since become a signifcant worldwide mode of expression.11 In reportage, a writer who is not a professional journalist reports on his journey to an area of special interest either because of its unique characteristics (a slum, a distant part of the world) or its troubled present situation (a war, a strike). He then produces a fnished essay about his experience of this area that contains both a factual account of what he has seen and heard and been told and his personal understanding of the meaning of what he has encountered. In this account, the writer has full opportunity to display his own distinctive qualities of literary style and form. Stephen Crane was perhaps the frst American writer to fully exploit the possibilities of the form in his 1890s Bowery and war accounts, and his contemporaries Frank Norris and Hamlin Garland also used it. Two notable collections of American reportage during the 1930s are Edmund Wilson’s The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932) and Dos Passos’s own In All Countries (1934), which collects his work in this form—​including an excerpt from “Harlan: Working under the Gun”—​from 1926 to early 1934. In our own time, the form has evolved into what is variously called literary journalism, the new journalism, or the nonfction novel, as practiced by such fgures as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, in which the personality and actions of the writer are given even greater prominence than in earlier reportage. “Harlan: Working under the Gun” contains in its brief compass the subject matter of Harlan Miners Speak but does so in highly compressed and sophisticated form. The piece consists of an introduction and initial section, which reprise the thrust of the opening seven discursive essays in Harlan Miners Speak, followed by three short sections that summarize the Dreiser Committee’s movements and the testimony it hears. All of the testimony fragments in the article and a good deal

93

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

93

of its narrative continuity also appear in verbatim form in Harlan Miners Speak.12 Yet the two accounts of the committee’s Harlan visit difer strikingly in structure and tone, and it is these diferences that constitute the distinction between the largely shapeless and toneless Harlan Miners Speak and the highly compressed but artfully structured and stylized “Harlan: Working under the Gun.” The two works’ diferent handling of a common efort to present the evidence of the miners’ oppression in their own voices exemplifes the diference between the documentary and reportage modes. Two kinds of “speech” are present in both works—​Molly Jackson’s lyrics for her song “Kentucky Miners’ Wives Ragged Hungry Blues” and the miners’ testimony. In Harlan Miners Speak, the lyrics appear in their entirety at the opening of the book (v–​vii), and except for a reprise of a few stanzas toward the close (277) play no functional role in the work. In “Harlan: Working under the Gun,” on the other hand, the song envelopes and pervades the essay. A stanza opens the essay, another closes it, and each of its four sections is introduced by an additional stanza. This technique not only provides symmetry but also “speaks” movingly again and again in lyric form to the misery of miners’ families. The miners’ verbatim testimony in Harlan Miners Speak is often drearily drawn out, with only occasional fashes of engaging substance. Dos Passos’s technique in the essay sharply curtails the verbatim testimony to four brief passages devoted to concise frsthand accounts of the miners’ chief complaints—​that they have been beaten and run out of the county in their attempts to form the NMU, that it is impossible to live on current wages, and that children are starving and dying because of inadequate diets and living conditions. Harlan Miners Speak never achieves a consistent or efective prose style; it contains too many diferent voices, ranging from those of each writer of the seven opening essays to those of the many fgures ofering testimony. In “Harlan: Working under the Gun,” however, Dos Passos’s distinctive voice is paramount. It is he who summarizes the gist of the essays and testimony and who describes the committee’s movements. The imposition of a single fresh voice on the account of the Harlan miners’ plight results in an interpretation of the history and proposed remedy of their condition at odds with the Marxist position permeating Harlan Miners Speak that returning power to the people will right all wrongs. Here are three brief passages from “Harlan: Working under the Gun” that render this new perspective. The fact that the exploited class in Harlan County is of old American pre-​Revolutionary stock … will perhaps win them more sympathy from the average American than he would waste on the wops and bohunks he is accustomed to see get the dirty end of the stick in labor troubles. (62)

94

94

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

The race for riches went to the heads of the operators. The fact of having a little cash every two weeks went to the heads of the miners. The union turned into a racket and lapsed. Financiers skimmed the cream of the coal companies and left them over­ capitalized and bankrupt. In the fat years no one thought of taking any measures of civic organization to help tide them over the lean years that were to follow—​a typical American situation. Headlong defation left the coal operators broke and the miners starving. (63)

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

In Evarts itself the I. W. W. [Industrial Workers of the World] seems to have had more infuence than the Communists. The thing is that the miners felt that they were fghting for their lives and were ready to join any organization that would give them back solidarity and support them in their struggle against intolerable conditions. I talked to men who had joined all three unions. (63) The pervasive voice in these passages is colored by an ironic perspective derived from a far-​ranging knowledge both of the history of human folly and of its many forms in contemporary life. The average American, it is observed, will bring his prejudices to bear on even the most obvious instances of human need; whether rich or poor, he will seldom provide for the future; and he will seize any chance to better his condition, whatever its ideology. This ironic voice, which is also the voice pervading most of Dos Passos’s best fction, is not one that will endorse apocalyptic solutions to social evil. Rather, it attempts to make clear that solid evidence about responsibility for the conditions observed is difcult to gather and that the best means of resolving these conditions are difcult to envision. In a more urgent sense, it also makes clear, some way of feeding the children must be found. Although an ironic voice of this kind is incapable of producing any heroes of the working class, it does fnd some fgures with the capacity to act for the common good. One is Molly Jackson, who in her blues renders movingly the realities of hunger and anger. Another is the town of Evarts, which, unlike other towns of the area, maintains its independence from mine operators and for its pains fnds its entire government indicted for conspiracy. The ironic voice, in brief, though doubtful about solutions, can still recognize the worth of artists who speak the truth and of communities that act courageously.

IV “Camera Eye (51)” (1207–​10) is the last Camera Eye segment in The Big Money and thus in the entire U. S. A. trilogy. In a tradition established by such nineteenth-​century poets as William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman and

95

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

95

solidifed as a modernistic convention by James Joyce, Dos Passos, by means of the Camera Eye mode, has embedded in a major literary work the story of the intellectual and emotional growth, and the complementary development of artistic capability, of the writer who has created the work we are reading. It is therefore of great interest that Dos Passos chooses to represent the climax of his growth as an artist by means of his Harlan experience. The implication is that some years after the event itself he has come to understand fully the nature of its impact on his conception of himself as a committed writer of “chronicles” of his time,13 and that he has therefore selected the moment of self­perception achieved at Harlan to serve as the climax of the extended self-​ portrait that the Camera Eye mode as a whole comprises. Dos Passos’s method in “Camera Eye (51)” is to strip down the entire Harlan experience to three iconic moments, during which, in accord with the modifed stream-​of-​consciousness technique of the Camera Eye mode, the “I” in the segment brings to expression the fragmentary remains in his consciousness of a signifcant event in its history. In selecting what Harlan events to include in “Camera Eye (51),” Dos Passos ignores the verbatim testimony that is the heart of Harlan Miners Speak and instead concentrates on three occasions in which he personally experienced specifc events. He writes in these three portions of “Camera Eye (51)” with a stark openness about his personal doubts and convictions that is far distant from the ironic indirection of “Harlan: Working under the Gun.” Of these three moments in “Camera Eye (51),” two—​ the visit to a dying Straight Creek miner and the interview with Sherif Blair—​appear in diferent form in Harlan Miners Speak. The third—​a trip to the Harlan prison to speak with jailed miners—​does not appear in either Harlan Miners Speak or “ Harlan: Working under the Gun.” Dos Passos’s choice and ordering of these three moments is not casual; they constitute as a whole an artfully constructed interior narrative in which the consciousness of the artist portrayed undergoes and then resolves a crisis of belief and mission. In the frst and briefest segment of “Camera Eye (51),” an injured miner lies dying in a “lurchedover” cabin. In the eyes of the miner and his family, those visiting him are “foreigners” even though the “I” comments, “my father died we know what it is like to see a man die.” The “I” and the miner are joined in their common humanity, the “I” realizes, but nevertheless separated by barriers of class, education, and experience that render him an outsider and thereby defect both communication and aid. In the face of such barriers, the implicit question posed by the segment is: How can the artist communicate with and help those like the miner who wait “in the valley hemmed by dark strike­silent hills”? The question is stated openly in the following segment in the county jail as the visitors talk to the imprisoned miners through the bars of their

96

96

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

cells—​“foreigners what can we say to the jailed?” This question is followed immediately by what “the representative of the political party” says, talking “fast through the bars join up with us [the NMU] and no other union we’ll send you tobacco candy solidarity … speakers will shout your names at meetings.” Here, too, however, there is no meaningful communication:  “The men in jail shrug their shoulders smile thinly.” And the “I” himself asks, “What can I say?” Just as he has experienced death, he also “in another continent [has] seen the faces looking out through the barred basement windows.” But, as before, this seemingly shared experience provides no access to communication, and the segment ends as it began: “What can we say to the jailed?” The third segment shifts scene from those oppressed to the oppressor, the county sherif, “a big man with eyes angry in a big pumpkin­face,” who is surrounded by armed deputies. Here, in the context of ruthless power, the “I” again views himself as a “foreigner,” now because he and other radicals have been deprived of their rights as Americans. In a fragmented and sharply compressed version of the evidence present in the testimony of Harlan Miners Speak, the sherif’s deputies “stand guard at the mines they blockade the miners’ soupkitchens they’ve cut of the road up the valley,” and by these and similar actions, “they have made us foreigners in the land where we were born.” There can be no meaningful exchange with the sherif: the law stares across the desk out of angry eyes his face reddens in splotches like a gobbler’s neck with the strut of the power of submachineguns sawedofshotguns teargas and vomitinggas the power that can feed you or leave you to starve

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

sits easy at his desk his back is covered he feels strong behind him he feels the prosecutingattomey the judge an owner himself the political boss the minesuperintendent the board of directors the president of the utility the manipulator of the holdingcompany he lifts his hands toward the telephone the deputies crowd in the door we have only words against The personal journey of the committed writer thus ends with the declaration “we have only words against,” a paradox that acknowledges that though he and other artists have been made speechless foreigners by the insurmountable barriers between themselves and both the oppressed and their oppressors, they nevertheless have as a means of communication with the world outside, and thus as a weapon against oppression, “words” themselves—​the written word of the art object.

97



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

97

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

V Dos Passos’s three eforts during the early 1930s to represent the meaning of Harlan cast some doubt on the validity of Stott’s claim that the documentary was the “primary” form of expression of the 1930s. The form no doubt came to prominence during this period, but for the major writer—​as evidenced by Dos Passos’s experience with Harlan Miners Speak—​its shapelessness and its susceptibility to ideological manipulation raise serious questions about its usefulness. Although Dos Passos’s two major experiences with the form—​in Facing the Chair and Harlan Miners Speak—​probably increased his awareness of the efects achievable through juxtaposing dissimilar expressive modes in a single work, his need to communicate his response to Harlan by means other than the documentary—​in the reportage mode of “Harlan: Working under the Gun” and in the stream-​of-​consciousness mode of “Camera Eye (51)”—​ confrms his dissatisfaction with the form. “Harlan:  Working under the Gun,”  —​unlike a documentary, ofered Dos Passos an opportunity to render the meaning of Harlan with an irony uniquely suited to his temperament while maintaining, in compressed form, the device of mixed modes that constituted his preferred means of expression at this phase of his career. Both the irony and the device of mixed modes had been brought to perfection in the frst two volumes of U. S. A. (He had just completed the second volume, 1919, when he left for Harlan.) Three of the four modes of the trilogy—​narrative, newsreel, and biography—​are each in its own way pervaded with an ironic vision that portrays the world at large as prone to error and limited in insight. But Dos Passos had also deployed in the Camera Eye device of U. S. A. the fresh and exciting way of viewing experience entirely through the perspective of his own inner being—​the “buried life” of Matthew Arnold’s poem that, unknowingly to us, directs our lives. By means of his depiction of the history of that stream in the Camera Eye mode in U. S. A., Dos Passos reached, in “Camera Eye (51),” a climactic moment of insight into his interior life as a writer. Although Harlan had not instructed him to undertake the work of the committed writer that U. S. A. represents, it did supply him with a concrete personal metaphor that permitted him to articulate—​both for himself and for the world—​a concise and moving explanation of the nature of that enterprise.

Notes 1 See Draper, Duke 28–​34, Hennen iii–​ix, and Hevener 63–​70 for the Harlan County’s mine wars, including discussions of the Dreiser Committee’s visit. 2 Wald 56–​64 ofers the fullest account of the NCDPP’s organization and composition. 3 For Dreiser and Harlan, see Landsberg 163–​ 70, Lingeman 348–​ 61 passim, and Swanberg 383–​89. For Dos Passos, see Carr 287–​90, Ludington 297–​301, and Dos Passos, The Best Times 206–​209.

98

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

98

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

4 Hevener identifes Celia Kuhn as the pseudonym of Julia Parker, who later played an active role in Communist Party eforts to recruit women (63, 78–​79). Since Hevener provides no source for this identifcation, and since no other writer dealing with the Dreiser Committee has made a similar identifcation, I tend to discount it. 5 The committee’s stenographer mistakenly cites the name of the hotel as the Lewallen, an error that appears both in Harlan Miners Speak and Swanberg 385, but one that is corrected in later accounts by other writers. 6 Miss Pergain’s identity has been a mystery, with many commentators on Dreiser’s Harlan experience holding that since she doesn’t seem to exist outside of that occasion, her name is probably a pseudonym. The mystery has been cleared up with the publication in 2007 of Bazanna’s biography of the Hungarian American pianist Ervin Nyiregyhazi (152–​60 passim). A platinum-​blonde Hollywood bit player in the late 1920s who was also a serious student of the piano, Marie Pergain (1911–​51) was Nyiregyhazi’s mistress in Los Angeles for several years. She met Dreiser in New York in 1930 and began a relationship with him that lasted until early 1932. 7 Dreiser also published a portion of this introduction, under the same title, in the New Masses 7 (January 1932): 1–​2, which noted his previous delivery of it as an address before the Group Forum in New York on December 15, 1931. 8 When Dos Passos reprinted the continuity passages in The Theme Is Freedom (1956; 74–​87), he noted that after the committee’s return to New York, he “went to work to edit the testimony Dreiser’s committee had collected” (87). 9 Ornitz later became a Hollywood screen writer and in 1947 was a member of the “Hollywood 10,” a group of writers and directors indicted for refusing to testify before the congressional committee investigating communist activity in Hollywood. 10 Dos Passos’s ambivalence toward the communist presence in Harlan during the early 1930s is even more pronounced in his 1939 novel Adventures of a Young Man, in which Harlan plays a major role. Although he portrays in detail the wretched conditions of miners’ lives and the oppressive role of local law enforcement, he is much more openly critical of the party’s role than he was in Harlan Miners Speak. 11 For both a historical survey and an interpretation of the signifcance of reportage, see Hartsock. 12 I have been unable to determine defnitively whether Dos Passos wrote the continuity for Harlan Miners Speak and then excerpted it for use in “Harlan: Working under the Gun” or whether he wrote the article frst and then expanded portions of it for the book. Nevertheless, A probable rough chronology for the prepublication history of Harlan Miners Speak is:  The Dreiser Committee returns from Kentucky in early November 1931; copies of testimony are prepared by early December; Dos Passos completes his portion of the book by late December; Dos Passos leaves New  York on February 2 for a lengthy trip to Havana, Key West, and Mexico (Ludington 301); the sections containing Anderson’s December 6 speech and the February 12, 1932, Senate hearing testimony are added in late February; the book is published (according to David Sanders, Dos Passos’s bibliographer; 102) on March 31, 1932. Since “Harlan: Working under the Gun” appeared on December 2, 1931, this chronology suggests that the article was prepared either prior to or simultaneously with his work on the book. 13 Toward the close of his career, Dos Passos often termed his novels “chronicles” in order to emphasize their signifcance as records of his own time.

9



JOHN DOS PASSOS AND HARLAN

99

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton, Mifin, 1941. Arnold, Matthew. “The Buried Life.” The Poems of Matthew Arnold, 1840–​1867. London: Oxford University Press, 1930. 168–​71. Bazanna, Kevin. Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007. Carr, Virginia Spencer. Dos Passos: A Life. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984. Dos Passos, John. Adventures of a Young Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. —​—​—​. The Best Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: New American Library, 1966. —​—​—​. “The Camera Eye (51).” The Big Money. 1936. U. S. A. 1207–​10. —​—​—​. Facing the Chair: Story of the Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen. Boston: Sacco Vanzetti Defense Committee, 1927. —​—​—​. “Harlan: Working under the Gun.” New Republic 69 (2 Dec. 1931): 62–​67. —​—​—​. In All Countries. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. —​—​—​. The Theme Is Freedom. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956. —​—​—​. “U. S. A.” Prologue to U. S. A.  1–​3. —​—​—​. U. S. A. New York: Library of America, 1996. Contains Prologue, “U. S. A.” and the novels The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. Draper, Theodore. “Communists and Miners, 1928–​1933.” Dissent 19 (Spring 1972): 371–​92. Dreiser, Theodore. “Individualism and the Jungle.” New Masses 7 (January 1932): 1–​2. Duke, David C. Writers and Miners: Activism and Imagery in America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Hartsock, John C.  A History of American Literary Journalism. Amherst:  University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. Hennen, John W. Introduction to 2008 edition of National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, Harlan Miners Speak  5–​24. Hevener, John W. Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–​39. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Landsberg, Melvin. Dos Passos’ Path to “U. S. A.”: A Political Biography, 1912–​1936. Boulder: Associated University Press, 1972. Lange, Dorothea, and Paul S. Taylor. American Exodus. New York: Reynal, 1939. Lingeman, Richard R. An American Journey, 1908–​1945. New York: Putnam, 1990. Vol. 2 of Theodore Dreiser. New York: Putnam, 1986–​90. Ludington, Townsend. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey. New York: Dutton, 1970. National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. 1932. Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields. New ed., Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Sanders, David. John Dos Passos: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1987. Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1973. Swanberg, W. A. Dreiser. New York: Scribner’s, 1965. Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-​Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Wilson, Edmund. The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump. New York: Scribner’s, 1932.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

10

10

Chapter 7

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

THEODORE DREISER’S AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY AND 1920S FLAPPER CULTURE*  Throughout the great length of An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser does not mention a specifc year in which its action occurs. It is nevertheless clear from many incidental details in the setting, especially the prominence of the automobile, that he wishes his readers to understand that they are encountering contemporary events of roughly the early to mid-​1920s. (The novel was written during 1923–​25 and published in late 1925.) One of the signifcant characteristics of this post-​war period was the rise and prominence of the liberated young woman, commonly known as the fapper. In this chapter, I will examine Dreiser’s use of the fapper fgure in An American Tragedy in relation both to his attempt to authenticate the contemporaneousness of the “American tragedy” theme at the center of the novel and to dramatize a striking cultural irony present in the prominence of the type during this period. An American Tragedy is based on the Grace Brown–​Chester Gillette murder case of 1906–​1908.1 Grace Brown, a resident of the upstate New York town of Cortland, was found pregnant, bruised, and drowned in an Adirondack lake in July 1906. Her lover, Chester Gillette, was convicted of murdering her after a sensational and widely reported trial in Herkimer in late 1906 and was executed at Auburn prison in March 1908. Dreiser was in his late thirties during the period of Grace Brown’s murder and the trial and execution of Chester Gillette. He had grown up in small Indiana towns and had by 1906 worked as a newspaperman in several major Midwestern cities and had lived as well in Chicago and New York. In addition to this personal familiarity with turn-​of-​the-​century America, Dreiser’s documentary sources for the crime, principally the New York World reports of the trial, were of course also those of 1906–​1908. Yet he chose to set the novel not in that period but in the mid-​1920s.

* Studies in American Naturalism 10 (Winter 2015): 123–​32.

102

102

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Dreiser’s decision had its roots in his conviction that the conditions underlying the Gillette case were not unique to the frst decade of the twentieth century but rather characterized the entire period from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. Little had changed in American society during this period, he believed, except the public misconception that the present was distinguished by a lessening of older social restrictions. Dreiser wrote bluntly on this subject in 1921, just as the notion of the 1920s as a distinctive new epoch was beginning to take shape: I can truthfully say that I  cannot detect, in the post-​war activities or interests, social, intellectual, or otherwise, of the younger or other generations of Americans, poor, rich, or middle class, any least indication of the breaking of hampering shackles of any kind—​intellectual, social, monetary or what you will. The American as I encounter him, young or old, is the same old American, thin lipped, narrow-​minded, money­centered, interested in the Ten Commandments as they apply to the other fellow, and absolutely blind to everything that would tend to enlarge, let  alone vastly extend his world outlook. (Dreiser, “Americans” 230) Dreiser placed a similar emphasis on the continuity of American culture since the Civil War in his frequent discourses on the pernicious efect of the Dream of Success on American youth. In account after account in which he explained the sources and inspiration for An American Tragedy, Dreiser emphasized that the Gillette–​Brown case was only one of a long series of crimes with a similar confguration. For example, in a late 1926 interview, he stated that

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

[The novel depicts] a typical American tragedy. There have been scores of cases like it. … It happens time and again in America. I considered this case and the other but the one I chose seemed to me to embody most clearly the elements which made these crimes typically American. A young man starts out after a career, untrained, unqualifed, uneducated—​with a high school education or even less. He is flled with the common dope of success that is injected into all classes and conditions of people in this country. What he means by building a career is a sort of undefned hopefulness. … What he means by building a career, I suppose, is chiefy luck. Of all the kinds of luck, the kind most favored by romance is luck in love. The poor young man loves and is beloved by the boss’ daughter; he marries her; he makes good in his father-​in-​law’s business. … That’s the frst of it. The young man gets entangled with some girl and then he fnds some

103



THEODORE DREISER’S AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

103

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

way to help his chances by an opportune marriage. That’s the rest of it. In that situation young men do various things. Sometimes they kill the girl. That’s why you can fnd ffty—​a hundred cases, precisely identical in their main phases, in American criminal history. (Stong 140–​41) To demonstrate the continuity of this kind of crime, Dreiser usually cited instances dating from the Carlyle Harris case of 1890 to the Hall–​Mills case of 1922.2 Although these various crimes difer considerably in detail, they contain the basic Miss Rich–​Miss Poor paradigm closely related to Dreiser’s premise that their common source is the American Dream of Success. A young man, led to believe that wealth and position were available to any American with “gumption,” translated this belief into the killing of a poor girl he was involved with for the promise of greater social or economic advancement embodied in a rich or socially prominent girl who had recently appeared on the scene. Indeed, Dreiser’s later great interest in the Robert Edwards case of 1934, one which replicated the Gillette–​Brown and American Tragedy paradigm, derived from its further corroboration of the permanence of the paradigm. Dreiser’s belief that American society, despite appearances to the contrary, had changed little in its underlying narrowness and materialism over the past half century is played out in the principal events of An American Tragedy. On the one hand, Clyde and Roberta exist in a social world still ruled by late Victorian proprieties and restrictions in which religious convictions and sexual taboos control much behavior. This is the world they unsuccessfully test, he by attempting to live out the Alger myth, she by seeking romantic fulfllment. On the other hand, Clyde also functions in a 1920s social climate that in the highly visible instance of the fapper appears to permit great personal freedom, a freedom symbolized most of all by the automobile and its access to mobility but comprising as well a range of places and activities providing new means for the fulfllment of a desire for pleasure. This aura of achievable greater freedom and of opportunities for ease and luxury, however, constitutes one of Dreiser’s major ironies in An American Tragedy. Sondra Finchley (the “Miss Rich” of An American Tragedy) and the 1920s world in which she appears are in truth as inaccessible to Clyde as they have always been to a questing fgure of his background and capabilities. It is no wonder that one of Dreiser’s early titles for the novel was Mirage3 and that one of the novel’s principal eforts is to demonstrate the deceptive character of the belief that 1920s fapper culture provided greater individual freedom and opportunity than was true of earlier eras. Book Two of An American Tragedy begins with a chapter introducing us, through an account of the Grifths family, to the culture of the small Mohawk Valley manufacturing town of Lycurgus. In a passage in which Mrs. Grifths

104

104

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

expresses her concern about her unmarried daughters, Myra and Bella, Dreiser clearly delineates the code of behavior that will shape Clyde’s condition and fate in the town. Myra is withdrawn and unattractive and is on her way to being an old maid, while her younger sister Bella belongs to the town’s “fast set.”

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

In Mrs. Grifths’ opinion, there was too much dancing, cabareting, automobiling to one city and another, without due social supervision. Yet as a contrast to her sister, Myra, what a relief. It was only from the point of view of proper surveillance, or until she was safely and religiously married, that Mrs. Grifths troubled or even objected to most of her present contacts and yearnings and gayeties. She desired to protect her. (169) Mrs. Grifths’ musings about her daughter refect a 1920s world in which young men and women appear to have found a new freedom by means of the amusements and behavior permitted them in the post-​war loosening of Victorian constraints. The extraordinary physical mobility provided by the automobile combined with a permissiveness in personal behavior signaled by the end of the chaperone convention seems to have turned the world upside down between Mrs. Grifths’ own youth and that of her daughters insofar as social and moral conventions are concerned. Yet, as Dreiser is also quick to point out in the passage, Mrs. Grifths is not greatly worried by Bella’s behavior. With “proper surveillance” the traditional older conventions of the previous generation will prevail and Bella will eventually be “safely and religiously married.” Dreiser’s portrayal of early 1920s youth culture in An American Tragedy closely tracks the characteristics usually attributed to the fapper.4 Dreiser was in his ffties during this time and thus had little direct association with the principally upper-​class young men and women who established and faunted the convention-​defying fapper practices of bobbed hair and short skirts for young women and a preoccupation with dancing, alcohol, and sex for the group as a whole. But his companion from 1919 onwards, Helen Richardson, was over twenty years younger. Helen aspired to be a movie actress, and she and Dreiser lived in Hollywood for three years, from 1919 to 1922, while she played minor roles in various flms.5 This was the period when movies depicting the fapper began to become popular (Jacobs 219–​22), and indeed Helen appears to have acted in several “faming youth” stories, an alternate name for romantic comedies featuring fapper fgures. Dreiser, for example, recorded in his diary for July 10, 1920, that Helen had a role in a flm in which she “is to dance on a table in a café—​a society girl—​who gets a little wild with excitement” (Dreiser,

105

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



THEODORE DREISER’S AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

105

American Diaries 328). By the time Dreiser and Helen returned to New York, and Dreiser, in mid-​1923, turned fully to the writing of An American Tragedy, the fapper flm had become a major movie form of the period. By the close of the decade, at least 60 such movies had been made (Landay 245n9). The automobile, because it epitomized the new freedom from restraint, constituted the thread connecting various fapper activities and enthusiasms. Dreiser himself, though he was uncomfortable behind the wheel and in later years gave up driving entirely, was always fascinated by and derived great pleasure from the speed and freedom of personal movement provided by the automobile. (See especially his account in A Hoosier Holiday [1916] of an automobile trip to Indiana during the summer of 1915.) With a car, a young person could easily escape the home, go where he or she wanted to at any time of day or night with companions, and have privacy as well. It is no wonder that Dreiser makes the automobile the center of the two fapper cultures he depicts—​those involving the Green–​Davidson bellhops and their girlfriends in Book One and the upper-​class social world of Sondra Finchley in Book Two. It is the large Packard “borrowed” by one of the bellhops’ friends from a wealthy employer which permits Clyde and the group to make their expedition, in the climactic event of Book One, to a country roadhouse where they can drink, dance, and neck. And it is the easy availability of cars which permits Sondra and her set to engage in the “cabareting” and dancing which Mrs. Grifths fnds troublesome in regard to her daughter Bella. Sondra has her own automobile (a small open car known as a “roadster” and popular among young people), though it is when she is being driven by a chaufeur in the family car, “a closed car of great size and solidity” (349), that she mistakes Clyde for his cousin Gilbert and their relationship begins. As with Clyde’s experience of the fapper reliance on the car as a means for the pursuit of entertainment, his engagement with the activity of dancing and the attractions of the resort also follows a trajectory of an introduction to the excitement of these lively centers of fapper existence in Book One and his tragic failure to fulfll his desire to become part of this life in Book Two. Clyde is envious of the young fappers who rent rooms at the plush Green–​Davidson Hotel in which to drink and dance. He is then taught to dance by Hortense and they do so at the roadhouse before the car accident. And it is his skill in dancing which initially impresses Sondra and which the two pursue in various places, including the Adirondack summer resorts which are the setting both of Roberta’s death at Big Bittern Lake and Clyde’s arrest at a posh Twelfth Lake camp where he joins Sondra after that event. These two fapper worlds of Books One and Two refect the class extremes of the 1920s fapper craze. Although the fapper type had upper-​middle-​class origins—​as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s portrayals in his short stories of the early

106

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

106

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

1920s—​its modes of behavior were quickly imitated in often exaggerated forms by other groups. The bellhops and their girlfriends are working class on the edge of criminality. The bellhops are part of the apparatus of kickbacks at the Green–​Davidson Hotel and they spend their money on lavish dinners and visits to brothels. The visit to the roadhouse, in an illegally taken car, where they and their girlfriends drink and carouse, followed by a fatal accident on their return, mimics a mix of the fapper and crime flm of the day. Hortense is an appropriate star of this flm in that it is within this rather seedy and overblown version of fapper activities that she faunts her sexuality and her desire for a good time while acting out her principal role of gold digger. Clyde himself, on frst meeting Hortense, notes that she was “a little coarse and vulgar” (79). She has little interest in Clyde other than to milk him for a fur jacket, and she expects to discard him once that goal is reached. Hortense, in short, plays to the hilt a working-​class version of the vamp element also frequently found in the fapper flm (Higashi 71–​78), in which a woman uses her sexuality to gain power over a vulnerable man. Clyde’s relationship to Sondra is very diferent. She, too, has fapper characteristics of dress and behavior, but she is so certain of her status and power in her own world that these seem to be merely minor elements in her makeup. She is a princess in her realm, and Clyde, desiring above all to enter this realm, wants her not for sex—​the principal element in his desire for Hortense—​but rather to share in her wealth and status. Her wealth and class are similar to those of the “faming youth” flm stereotype, and, as in that source, she is, despite her love of a good time, “at heart” a good girl whose ultimate goal is marriage and a family.6 The key similarity between these two versions of the 1920s fapper flm in Books One and Two of the novel is that in both Clyde fails to achieve his goal. In each, the fapper attribute of great freedom of activity, seemingly promising the fulfllment of desire, disguises basic truths that hinder that aim. A naive and inexperienced youth will be easy prey for a ruthless gold digger, and an inept seeker of access to higher economic and social position will also fail to achieve his goal. The 1920s fapper culture is indeed a “mirage” of freedom masking the permanent truth that the strong still prevail and the weak still perish. It is the crisis of Roberta’s pregnancy that provides the novel with its most signifcant and powerfully rendered depiction of the distinction between Clyde’s illusion that he can fulfll desire by means of Sondra’s fapper world and the imprisoning social environment in which he actually functions. Although contraceptive devices of all kinds were available by the 1920s, it was still illegal in many areas either to provide information about or sell such devices, and of course abortion was legally proscribed throughout the country. Nevertheless, contraception was widely practiced by the middle class (Fass

107

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



THEODORE DREISER’S AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

107

70, 77) and most communities had doctors who would perform abortions for those either able to pay for them or well­connected in the community. In short, the ability to avoid an unwanted pregnancy was very much determined by wealth and class.7 Clyde and Roberta, however, possess neither. Both fgures come from backgrounds—​one religious, the other rural—​of poverty and ignorance. They apparently never consider using contraception, and when Roberta becomes pregnant they go about seeking an abortion clumsily and in the end unsuccessfully.8 As far as is known, Dreiser’s personal association with attempted abortions was limited to occasions during his teens when at least two of his sisters had sufered unwanted pregnancies and had sought abortions. In his autobiography Dawn (written between 1916 and 1920), Dreiser described the experience of his sister Sylvia, who, as a young girl in a small Indiana town, had been made pregnant by the son of a prominent local family. Sylvia consults a local lawyer, who sends her to a doctor, but both fgures are friends of the young man’s family. The doctor “lectured on about duty and virtue” (Dawn 262) but refused to take any action, and Sylvia eventually was forced to bear the illegitimate child. In An American Tragedy, Dreiser amplifes his recollection of his sister’s experience with a local doctor into one of the novel’s longest scenes. Dr. Glenn is initially sympathetic to Roberta, but as he begins to realize her condition and need—​that she is to become an unwed mother and wishes an abortion—​ he hardens. He is opposed to procedures of this kind not only because of their illegality but also because his “local world was all against them” (461). Nevertheless, Dreiser is quick to note, Dr. Glenn, despite his misgivings, “in several cases in the past ten years where family and other neighborhood and religious considerations had made it seem quite advisable, … had assisted in extricating from the consequences of their folly several young girls of good family who had fallen from grace and could not otherwise be rescued” (461). But of course Roberta is not of “good family” and so Dr. Glenn provides her with a homily and sends her on her way. Thus, though Dreiser sets An American Tragedy in the 1920s, he obviously felt no incongruity in using a crucial incident drawn from the 1880s because he believed that the moral and social realities of the two moments for most Americans outside of well-​to-​do metropolitan areas were essentially similar. In brief, these are that sexual behavior requires strict supervision, with violations of prescribed codes sufering inevitable consequences—​except for those of wealth and position. He no doubt accepted that these beliefs were more strictly observed in small, tight-​knit communities—​the small towns of Dreiser’s teens and the Mohawk Valley towns of the 1920s. His theme, however, was not that conventional moral ideas functioned as a restrictive force within the

108

108

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

distinctive world of the small town but rather that their presence in this setting also indicated their continuing presence in the nation as a whole despite the widely reported behavior of the fapper generation which seemed to promise otherwise. Dreiser’s sister Sylvia in the 1880s and Roberta and Clyde in the early 1920s are imprisoned within destructive sexual codes by their lower social and economic status, while Sylvia’s seducer and Sondra (whose family position ensures that she is not identifed at Clyde’s trial) remain untouched because their class provides them the power to escape the consequences of the situations they fnd themselves in. An American Tragedy depicts a society which has seemingly rejected the conservative social and moral conventions of the past but is nevertheless still frmly in their grasp. In Book One, Clyde is introduced to the exciting and appealing wealth and freedom associated with the spirit of the age in the form of the Green–​ Davidson Hotel and the young crowd of bellhops and their girlfriends present in that setting. In Book Two, this fapper ethos reappears, but now on a higher social level, with Sondra and her group and with the Adirondack resorts they frequent. In both settings, the freedom­loving fapper and a car assuring mobility are inextricably linked. And in both settings, it is the conventional moral and social code that Mrs. Grifths expresses for family life which in the end shapes and controls the outcome of Clyde’s eforts to enter into a more desirable existence, an access seemingly promised by the era’s aura of freedom and mobility.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Notes 1 For full accounts of Dreiser’s use of the Gillette case in his writing of An American Tragedy, see Pizer, Novels 215–​27, and Fishkin 115–​34. 2 Kathryn M. Plank surveys the various murders Dreiser usually cited in her “Dreiser’s Real American Tragedy.” 3 See Dreiser to Kirah Markham, July 13, 1921 (Letters to Women 145). 4 Dreiser was of course familiar with the term and used it elsewhere as early as 1917. See his April 19, 1917, letter to Kirah Markham (Letters to Women 124). His one use of the term in An American Tragedy occurs in Book One, when he describes the Green–​ Davidson Hotel tearoom as an “ideal rendezvous” for “eager fappers” (50). 5 Although Dreiser wrote two articles about Hollywood during his stay—​“Hollywood: Its Morals and Manners” and “Hollywood Now”—​they are confned almost entirely to the difculties of pursuing a career in Hollywood rather than to the kinds of flms then being made. 6 For the “good heart” and ultimately middle-​class goals of the flm fapper, see Prigozy 148 and Fischer 78. 7 For the availability of contraceptive devices and of abortion during the early 1920s, see (in addition to Fass) Reagan 14–​15; Gordon 249; and Reed 33–​45. 8 Gillette’s efort to procure an abortion for Grace Brown was briefy mentioned during his trial. But since the doctor involved refused to testify, the matter was not fully presented in court. See Pizer, Novels 366n43.

109



THEODORE DREISER’S AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

109

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited Dreiser, Theodore. The American Diaries, 1902–​1926. Ed. Thomas P. Riggio. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. —​—​—​. An American Tragedy. Ed. Thomas P. Riggio. New York: Library of America, 2003. —​—​—​. “Americans Are Still Interested in Ten Commandments.—​For the Other Fellow, Says Dreiser.” New  York Call, March 13, 1911, Call Magazine 7.  Pizer, Theodore Dreiser 230–​32. —​—​—​. Dawn. New York: Liveright, 1931. —​—​—​. “Hollywood: Its Morals and Manners.” Shadowland 5 (November 1921): 37, 61–​63; (December 1921): 51, 61; (January 1921): 43, 67; (February 1922): 53, 66. —​—​—​. “Hollywood Now.” McCall’s 48 (September 1921): 8, 18, 54. —​—​—​. Letters to Women: New Letters. Vol. II. Ed. Thomas P. Riggio. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Fass, Paula S. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the I920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Fischer, Lucy, ed. American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. From Fact to Fiction:  Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Gordon, Linda. Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right:  A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman, 1976. Higashi, Sumiko. Vixens, Vamps, and Flappers:  The American Silent Movie Heroine. St. Albans, Vermont: Eden Press, 1978. Jacobs, Lea. The Decline of Sentiment:  American Film in the I920s. Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2008. Landay, Lori. “The Flapper Film:  Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics.” A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 221–​48. Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser:  A Critical Study. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1976. —​—​—​, ed. Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977. Plank, Kathryn M. “Dreiser’s Real American Tragedy.” Papers on Language and Literature 27 (1991): 268–​87. Prigozy, Ruth. “Fitzgerald’s Flappers and Flapper Films of the Jazz Age:  Behind the Morality.” A Historical Guide to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Kirk Curnutt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 129–​61. Reagan, Leslie J.  When Abortion Was a Crime:  Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–​1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Reed, James. The Birth Control Movement and American Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Rusch, Frederic E., and Donald Pizer, eds. Theodore Dreiser: Interviews. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Stong, Phil D. “Dreiser Says Jury Systems Fail in ‘Knife Edge’ Criminal Cases.” Denver Post, November 28, 1926: 24. Rusch and Pizer, Theodore Dreiser 140–​41.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

10

1

Chapter 8

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

DREISER’S RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN*  The widespread perception of the role of women in Dreiser’s life is that he had an unquenchable desire for short-​lived sexual relationships which on the whole distracted him from his work. As H. L. Mencken pointedly remarked in his memoirs, “I soon learned that women occupied an enormous place in his life—​a place, indeed, that seemed to me, and to many others, to be inordinate. I sometime wondered how, with four or fve intrigues going on at once, he found time for his really heavy stint of daily writing.”1 Although biographical accounts of Dreiser published before the mid-​1960s occasionally noted his penchant for female companionship, the subject was generally avoided, given the conventions of the day regarding the reporting of the private lives of public fgures—​this despite the revelations provided by Helen Dreiser’s My Life with Dreiser (1951). But with the publication in 1965 of W. A. Swanberg’s Dreiser the lid came of. Swanberg, a diligent researcher, uncovered and recounted scores of relationships. Because some of the women involved were still alive, he occasionally used pseudonyms or only hinted at the full nature of a relationship, but the overwhelming impact of his relentless enumeration of Dreiser’s seemingly countless relationships with women—​ from one-​night stands to afairs of many years—​was to establish Dreiser as a fgure whose goal of sexual satisfaction both preoccupied him to an extraordinary degree and frequently led to the exploitation of the many women in his life. Other Dreiser biographies since Swanberg’s have dealt less fulsomely with this aspect of Dreiser’s life, but the pall cast by Swanberg’s account still hangs over Dreiser’s reputation. In one sense, this reputation was well-​earned. There is no denying the large number of women Dreiser was sexually involved with (often several simultaneously) over the last 35 years of his life, from his breakup with Sara Dreiser in 1910 until his death. But in another sense, there is far more to the story than sheer numbers.

* American Literary Realism 50 (Fall 2017), 63–​75.

12

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

112

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

The basis for a fuller and more accurate perception of the nature and meaning of Dreiser’s relationships with women has been greatly enhanced since Swanberg’s biography. Dreiser’s American Diaries (1982) and his Letters to Women (2009), both superbly edited by Thomas Riggio, ofer a richer appreciation than earlier available of his self-​conception as a lover.2 And four of the signifcant women in Dreiser’s life—​Helen Dreiser, Marguerite Tjader, Yvette Szekely Eastman, and Clara Clark Jaeger—​have published book-​length accounts of their relationships with him, with only Helen Dreiser’s having appeared before Swanberg’s Dreiser.3 These accounts from a woman’s perspective help to provide a foundation for achieving a more rounded sense of the nature of Dreiser’s relationships with women. Dreiser courted Sara White from the summer of 1893 until their marriage in late 1898. They separated in 1910, though, in an unusual arrangement for that period, they continued to live together sporadically until Dreiser acquired a Greenwich Village apartment in 1914. They never divorced, the marriage ending only with Sara’s death in 1942. The marriage was a mismatch. As Arthur Henry’s frst wife, Maude Wood Henry, noted in 1945, in a letter to Robert H. Elias, Sara’s “solid foundation of country life and religious upbringing, her single-​mindedness and one man idea” ran counter to the beliefs and values of the author of Sister Carrie.4 On their marriage, they both joined eagerly in the satisfaction of previously unfulflled sexual desire, but Dreiser soon grew suspicious of sex alone as the foundation of a permanent bond. During his 1901–​2 breakdown he even occasionally attributed his health problems to marital sexual “over-​indulgence.”5 Although Dreiser appears to have had several afairs before separating from Sara, extensive knowledge exists only about those with Lillian Rosenthal and Thelma Cudlipp. Cudlipp in 1910 was the 17-​year-​old daughter of a fellow employee at Butterick’s, where Dreiser was editor of the frm’s highly popular magazine The Delineator. In a confguration that was to be repeated frequently throughout Dreiser’s life, he was drawn by her youth and artistic temperament and interests (later in life she became a noted graphic artist) while she was attracted by his importance and his idealized conception of her nature.6 The relationship difers markedly, however, from those following of a similar kind in that Dreiser did not demand sexual completion. As Cudlipp wrote Robert H. Elias in 1953, Dreiser “touched my life … without harm. … He might have harmed me—​but did not.”7 It was during the eventful fall of 1910, during which Dreiser was fred from Butterick’s because of his relationship with Cudlipp, was separated from Sara, and had determined to renew his career as a novelist, that he also began a sexual relationship with Rosenthal, a young aspiring singer/​actress who lived with her parents on Riverside Drive. When Dreiser completed a draft of Jennie Gerhardt in early 1911, she read it

13

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



DREISER’S RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN

113

and ofered a trenchant critique which led him to signifcantly revise its conclusion,8 thus confrming the dual role of lover/​editor that Sara had inaugurated in 1900 in relation to Sister Carrie, and which many other women were to play in his life. Theirs was also one of those frequent Dreiser afairs which waxed and waned and took various forms over the years. It reached a peak during 1916–​19, when he saw her often in the Village, resumed occasionally during the early 1920s, and then became a friendship (lasting until his death) when Dreiser moved to Los Angeles in 1938 and found Rosenthal (now married to an attorney and called Lillian Rosedale Goodman) working as a Hollywood voice coach. With the publication of Jennie in 1911, Dreiser, whose Sister Carrie was by now well known, was frequently cited as a “women’s writer.” By this was meant his deeply sympathetic (rather than merely sentimental) portrayal of women whose inner natures lead them to seek a higher plane of both spiritual and material existence than society usually aforded women at the turn of the century. Women in their late teens and twenties reading these novels appear to have sensed a “soulmate” in the writer producing them and frequently wrote to Dreiser to tell him about their own heretofore unarticulated aspirations. Anna Tatum, a Wellesley graduate, wrote Dreiser soon after reading Jennie. She came to New York to meet him, and in the fall of 1912 she became the frst in the long series of women who initially corresponded with Dreiser, were then invited by him to visit, and who soon afterwards acquired the occupation of secretary/​editor/​lover. Dreiser lived in Greenwich Village between July 1914 and October 1919. Mencken held that Dreiser during this period fell into the pernicious hands of the phony artistes and weak-​minded radicals characteristic of Village bohemianism.9 Dreiser, however, found that the Village provided him with a cultural environment in which the rejection of the middle-​class trap of marriage and the celebration of free love matched his own “varietistic” predilections, and he made the most of the occasion. Nevertheless, for the frst several years of his Village phase, he found himself involved in a version of the “faithfulness” issue, one ensuing from his relationship with Kirah Markham. He met Markham in January 1913 in Chicago, where he had gone for research on The Titan and where she was acting in a production of the Chicago Little Theater. She was then 21 and had already worked with some success in a number of art forms. They soon became lovers, and for the next year and a half were often together, both briefy and for longer periods, in various cities, until July 1914, when they took an apartment at 165 West 10th St. in the Village, where they lived until the spring of  1916. Markham was one of the great loves of Dreiser’s life, perhaps matched in intensity only by the early phase of his relationship with Helen Richardson.

14

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

114

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

At one point, in a letter of April 1913, he even openly raised with her the possibility of marriage.10 Markham, however, demanded not a legal bond but fdelity, and after experiencing a number of instances of Dreiser’s inability to live by that standard, she left him in mid-​1916. Dreiser knew innumerable women during his Village years—​most drawn from the entertainment and literary world—​but he maintained the most persistent relationships with Estelle Kubitz, his secretary for much of this period, Lillian Rosenthal, who was now a successful vaudeville entertainer, and Louise Campbell, a Philadelphia journalist. Campbell had written him in February 1917, and after visiting him in New York became a lover and an editor of his work—​the frst for several years, the second ending only with Dreiser’s death. Kubitz he saw almost daily, Rosenthal when she was in town between tours, and Campbell sporadically when she came up from Philadelphia or he visited her there. Occasionally, however, all three women were on the scene simultaneously, and Dreiser’s eforts to keep them apart—​as recorded in detail in his diary for 1917—​read like a Feydeau sexual farce: not quite one woman out the window while another is at the door, but sometimes close to it.11 Then, in September 1919, Helen Richardson, a distant cousin, knocked on Dreiser’s door in order to introduce herself. The two were immediately smitten with each other, and within a few weeks Dreiser, though by now a confrmed New Yorker, moved with Richardson to Los Angeles, where she was to seek a career as a flm actress. By the time they returned to New York in October 1922, the afair’s initial fre had cooled but was not entirely extinguished. Over the years a pattern of a kind formed in their relationship. They would establish a home—​an apartment or, after Dreiser’s great success with An American Tragedy, a house—​which they would occupy except for the occasions—​sometimes brief, sometimes lengthy—​when he would leave to be with another woman. During the years they occupied Iroki, their house in Westchester County, Dreiser would occasionally bring a woman home with him. Often they quarreled bitterly, but she never left him, and he always returned to her. In June 1944, two years after Sara Dreiser’s death freed him from the need to acquire a divorce to remarry, and 18 months before his own death, they were married. Dreiser’s work on An American Tragedy during 1924–​25 required a full time secretary, and the subsequent success of the novel and Dreiser’s projection into the role of America’s greatest novelist required a succession of secretaries. (On one occasion in the early 1930s, he had four working simultaneously for him, though not all full-​time.) Many of these workplace arrangements also evolved into sexual relationships, the most signifcant of which were with Sally Kusell (1923–​25), Esther McCoy (1926–​29), Evelyn Light (1931–​34), Cora Clark (1931–​34), and Harriet Bissell (1935–​38). Almost all of these relationships involved college women who wrote Dreiser or who answered an ad and were

15

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



DREISER’S RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN

115

hired as secretary/​editors and who soon also became lovers. Their average tenure was about three years, at which point they either quarreled with Dreiser and he let them go or they had enough of him and his ways and left him. Dreiser had other major afairs during his 13 years of residence in New York between the publication of An American Tragedy and his departure for California in 1938. During his tour of the Soviet Union between November 1927 and January 1928, he and his Russian-​speaking American guide, Ruth Kennell, became lovers. She later wrote an account of the experience—​T heodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union (1969)—​which omits their personal intimacy.12 Dreiser met Marguerite Tjader Harris in 1928, when she was still married. He enlisted her aid in several editorial projects, and during the early 1930s they became lovers. She reappeared as a major player in Dreiser’s life in mid-​1944, when he recruited her to move to Los Angeles to help him complete The Bulwark. The early 1930s were one of Dreiser’s most active periods for simultaneous multiple relationships. In September 1931, he and Helen gave up their duplex apartment on 57th St. and during the following three and a half years Dreiser occupied a suite at the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway while Helen lived principally at Iroki, with Dreiser frequently joining her there at weekends. This arrangement permitted Dreiser a freedom of action similar to the life he had enjoyed in the Village after his breakup with Kirah Markham. While living at the Ansonia, Dreiser had ongoing relationships with three secretaries/​aides—​ Evelyn Light, Clara Clark, and (more sporadically) Marguerite Tjader—​as well as with Marie Pergain and Yvette Szekely. He had met Pergain, a young Hollywood bit player and aspiring pianist, through the Hungarian concert pianist Ervin Nyiregyhazi, who had been her lover on the West Coast. It was she who was the mysterious young woman who accompanied Dreiser when he and his committee of leftist writers journeyed to Harlan, Kentucky, in November 1931 to investigate labor conditions in the Kentucky coal felds.13 (It was during this occasion that Dreiser was charged with adultery for occupying a hotel room with Pergain and famously rejected the charge on the grounds that he was impotent.) Yvette Szekely, who was Hungarian-​born and lived with her mother on West 91st St., was 16 when Dreiser met her in 1931. Pert and clever and absorbed in testing experience, she was impressed by Dreiser’s interest in her and accepted him as a lover in the fall of 1932, when she was 17 and Dreiser was 61. In consummating a sexual relationship with her he in a sense brought to conclusion his thwarted relationship with another idealized 17-​year-​old, Thelma Cudlipp, in 1910. As frequently occurred in Dreiser’s relations with women, after the sexual element in their relationship waned Szekely and Dreiser maintained a friendship for many years. In 1958 she married the distinguished journalist Max Eastman.

16

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

116

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Dreiser moved to Los Angeles in 1938 to join Helen, and aside from a few trips East remained there until his death. This signifcant shift in his base of operations resulted in the closing down of ongoing relationships—​principally with Harriet Bissell—​and the beginning of new ones. But perhaps because he was now increasingly ill with a variety of ailments, fresh relationships were less numerous than in the past. One was with Elizabeth Kearney Coakley, whose brother Patrick Kearney in 1926 had successfully dramatized An American Tragedy for the New York stage. Dreiser and Coakley, who was divorced and had children, collaborated on several screenplays and also became lovers. But she was more interested in a husband than a lover, and when Dreiser proved unresponsive she broke of the sexual aspect of the afair though not the friendship. Dreiser’s fnal relationship was with Hazel Godwin, who lived in Toronto with her Canadian husband. She wrote Dreiser, and after exchanging letters over two years, she came to Los Angeles in July 1942 to spend a week with him in a hotel, and in September 1942 he traveled to Toronto ostensibly to lecture but also to meet with her there. Dreiser’s death at his home in West Los Angeles in late December 1945 was similar to most other deaths in that it brought together for the occasion friends and family. What is remarkable in Dreiser’s death is that this gathering refects the importance of women in his life. On the day of his death and for several days afterwards those present constituted a kind of selective resume of his major relationships. The two central players were Helen Dreiser and Marguerite Tjader, who had in a sense maintained competing Dreiser-​centered households over the last year and a half of his life. At Kings Road, Dreiser and Helen Dreiser had a home, but on almost every weekday Dreiser was driven a few miles to the cottage occupied by Tjader, where they would work together on completing The Bulwark. But present as well on the scene were two additional echoes of Dreiser’s life with women—​Lillian Rosedale Goodman from the 1910s and Esther McCoy from the 1920s. (McCoy was an architectural assistant and was married to a Hollywood screenwriter.) It was they who were at Kings Road to aid and comfort Helen on the day after Dreiser’s death. Dreiser’s great appeal to women seems anomalous in the light of his physical appearance. Mencken, for example, describes him in 1916 as “built like a longshoreman or a farm-​hand, with clumsiness in his every gesture, huge teeth, and a cast in one of his eyes.”14 Yvette Eastman is no kinder in describing Dreiser, on her frst encounter with him in 1929, as “a tall, bulky man whose ruddy cheeks hung loose, making jowls where they reached his chin, under which there bunched a wad of skin, which gave him a long, feshy face.”15 His gruf and abrupt manner, often bordering on rudeness, and his lifelong habit of folding and unfolding a large handkerchief while conversing,

17



DREISER’S RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN

117

also contributed to creating an initial impression of Dreiser as someone with whom it would be difcult to establish a friendship, let alone accept as a lover. Yet a large number of women did fnd him attractive and did accept him as a lover. Running through these women’s accounts of their relations with Dreiser are a number of similar threads, paramount among which was Dreiser’s capacity to sympathetically and supportively absorb himself in the inner life of the women he wished to have a relationship with. Each such woman became a Carrie or Jennie—​a woman who longed to experience the beauty and richness of life—​whose nature Dreiser both explored and made expressive in word and action. Marguerite Tjader, Yvette Eastman, and Clara Clark, among others, described the efect that Dreiser’s deep engagement with their inner lives had upon them. Tjader, writing of her frst meeting with Dreiser in 1928, when she was a married woman with a child, noted that “Here was a human being, super-​sensitive; a doctor of souls, knowing them and seeing their secrets.”16 She goes on to comment on the efect that this aspect of Dreiser’s nature had on women:

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Women’s characters and experiences interested Dreiser endlessly. He loved to question them about themselves, their impressions, their reactions to this and that. He was never tired of studying the likes and dislikes that made up, what was to him, the mystery of feminine behavior. It was fun to answer him, because he was so understanding—​a strange confessor who did not blame but encouraged any sincere emotion. Women were tremendously stimulated by him, because he always wanted to build them up to whatever superior qualities they might have, wanted them to be their best, most daring, selves.17 Yvette Eastman, though writing from the diferent perspective of a girl of 17, echoes Tjader’ s emphasis on Dreiser’s role as a “strange confessor” whose nonjudgmental reading of human nature and of her own life in particular deeply afected her. As I listened to him wonder about the mystery and fortunes of life and marveled at his detached, nonjudgmental, yet compassionate acceptance of the fact of good and evil and weak and strong and as I gratefully responded to his fatherly interest in my young life and aspirations and his confdent, cheering encouragement about meeting it, he became intensely, desperately important to me. It was the frst time a commanding someone had focused exclusively on me; how did I feel,

18

118

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

what did I think, what did I want, where was I going. He became for me a support to lean my back against.18 And Clara Clark, writing about the period shortly after she met Dreiser and became his lover, explained:

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

I have found a wonderful friend and companion, almost a champion, who has vindicated what I have so often felt in the strangeness of my personality. … He is consumed with the same passionate quest—​the search for meaning and fulfllment, the pursuit of the mystery of existence, a refusal to come to terms with the second-​rate and mediocre and drab.19 Although Louise Campbell echoed these sentiments in recalling her relationship with Dreiser, she also added an important corollary element in Dreiser’s appeal to women as a guide in the discovery and expression of their deepest natures. After noting that his “attraction for women” was “that he made one feel important and capable of realizing one’s dreams and ambitions,” she adds that despite her later recognition of his defects, “nothing ever changed my feeling that I was associated with a literary giant, a fantastic example of what goes into the making of a genius.”20 By “associated with a literary giant,” Campbell means the important role she played in editing Dreiser’s work, from his autobiographies in the late 1910s to his posthumously published The Bulwark (1946). To cite the women who played a similar (though usually briefer) role in Dreiser’s career would be to name almost all the women in his life. On some occasions, he hired a young, intelligent, and attractive woman as secretary, editor, and researcher, and the working relationships became a love afair. In other instances, a woman, after the onset of a relationship, would be drawn into aiding him in his work. Marguerite Tjader (who wrote perceptively about several aspects of Dreiser’s relationship with women) expresses clearly the underlying connection between working for Dreiser and being his lover. Soon after the beginning of their afair in 1928, she became active in several of Dreiser’s projects. She notes of her association with him that he “taught me to work, and we were working together for something bigger than ourselves. This had given my life a meaning, a sense of completion I had never had before.”21 Working for Dreiser, in other words, was a means toward achieving in concrete terms the goals of self-​expression and self-​fulfllment which a woman was seeking in her personal relationship with him. Dreiser’s genius and the love and labor of both partners were joined in the act of producing important work. Dreiser’s afairs followed a roughly similar pattern. In some instances, an exchange of correspondence would precede an initial meeting (as with

19

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



DREISER’S RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN

119

Campbell, McCoy, and Clark), while in others the relationship stemmed from an unplanned encounter (as with Markham, Helen Dreiser, and Tjader). In either instance, the crucial occasion was the frst private moment between Dreiser and the woman, when he expressed his deep interest in her, with the sexual element in that interest an unexpressed but obvious component, and the woman either responded positively or negatively to the moment. (The principal exception to this pattern was when the woman was very young, as with Cudlipp and Szekely, and the moment was extended over time to something resembling a conventional courtship.) Both Markham and Helen Dreiser describe Dreiser’s powerful sexual presence in terms that suggest the nature and signifcance of that frst occasion, a moment which Dreiser himself renders in Jennie Gerhardt in the initial meeting of Lester Kane and Jennie.22 Markham noted in a 1964 letter to W. A. Swanberg that Dreiser had no “charm” in the conventional sense of the term. “He had what I am unable to describe as anything but animal magnetism and his will, but these were powerful.”23 And Helen describes her deeply emotional frst meeting with Dreiser as a “combination of chemicals” and a “combustion of two forces.”24 Of course, not all women were responsive to Dreiser’s “magnetism” and not all who did respond were able or willing to undertake a full-​scale afair. But for the considerable number who were responsive, there followed a brief period of total commitment on Dreiser’s part—​brief because even with the most passionate relationship Dreiser’s interest in other women soon manifested itself. With Markham, for example, he sought out other relationships when they were temporarily separated.25 And with Helen he was within a year of the onset of their relationship engaged in pursuing other women.26 Some women could not accept Dreiser’s habitual infdelity, as was true of Markham and perhaps also of Anna Tatum and Sally Kusell. Others, such as Helen and Estelle Kubitz, accepted it but were made miserable by it. And still others, Marguerite Tjader, Clara Clark, and Harriet Bissell, for example, accepted it not blithely but with a realization that it was an unavoidable condition of a relationship they wished to maintain. Dreiser, on the other hand, was extremely possessive toward any woman he had a relationship with, even while he himself was engaged in pursuing other women. Markham recalled that during the years they lived together in Greenwich Village “if a man so much as sat by the fre with me while he was of of an evening with another woman there were horrible scenes the next morning.”27 Helen, in her loneliness and bitterness during the early 1930s when Dreiser was engaged in several simultaneous afairs, found consolation in companionship with a young Hungarian pianist, a relationship which probably was also sexual. She decided to be honest with Dreiser and to “tell him all about it.” She explains to him, “I am asking you if, in view of the way you live,

120

120

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

you would understand my forming a constructive emotional relationship to help me live through the time you leave me so much alone.” Dreiser’s response was, “Do as you please. … But when you do, I’m out!”28 Although Dreiser’s refusal to accept a single standard of sexual behavior for men and women was not an uncommon masculine attitude in the early twentieth century, it does nevertheless suggest an insensitivity to the pain of others. A passage in Dreiser’s diary for June 7, 1917, however, reveals that he was in fact responsive to the anguish he caused by his infdelities but had also found an explanation for this seeming failure of sympathy. He was engaged in a difcult relationship with his secretary/​editor Estelle Kubitz, a woman who sufered greatly (Dreiser’s nickname for her was “Gloom”) both because of Dreiser’s other relationships and because he would not promise to maintain theirs. He comments: “I must be very calloused. [Kubitz’s] love moods torture me at the moment, yet a little while later I forget them. And I believe that it would almost kill me—​be absolutely impossible for me to be faithful to one woman. At this date it would be almost the severest strain I have yet endured.”29 He is, in short, conscious of the pain that his sexual temperament causes in his partners, but he cannot change his temperament—​it “would almost kill me.” He had expanded earlier on his temperamental inability to remain faithful in a letter to Markham in early 1916, when their afair was beginning to fray at the edges because of his infdelities. He wrote: I have concluded that never anymore must I put myself in the position of having my movements controlled by a domestic arrangement, however wonderful that may be, for the simple reason that it does not accord with the way my mind works. I see that now clearly and once and for all. I love you. You command not only my physical but my spiritual respect but if I must lose you in preference to this other then you must go. Not that I am a libertine. I deny it. But there is something in connection with me which seems to smother and decay unless I  feel absolutely free to come and go as I choose.30 It is possible to argue that in both his diary passage about Kubitz and his letter to Markham, Dreiser is honestly facing the dilemma of his temperament—​ a condition of mind that both Eugene Witla in The “Genius” and Frank Cowperwood in the Cowperwood trilogy also exhibit in their pursuit of beauty through a series of relationships, despite the pain that these ultimately cause their partners. Dreiser, both in his life and fction, was expressing a code of life in which the acceptance of the full consequences of one’s inner nature was a necessary condition of being human.

12



DREISER’S RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN

121

Nevertheless, whatever the eventual outcome of a relationship, Dreiser almost always insisted that sexual fulfllment was not the principal goal of his pursuit of a specifc woman. During both the courtship itself and throughout his most intense afairs he invariably linked his desire for a woman with a desire to fulfll a need for beauty in his life by sharing in both the physical and spiritual beauty of the woman he wished to possess. He attempted at one point during the high point of his love of Markham to explain this aspect of his nature. He wrote her in May 1913, I wonder sometime why it is—​what chemic riddle is back of my craving for afection—​or perhaps I  had better say the smile & sympathy of beauty, the loveliness of soul in a given woman. Then I ask myself what is beauty and loveliness of soul in a woman & I do not know except as I fnd it expressed by some one—​actualized. You, for instance.31 His early relationship with Helen had a similar character. In June 1936 he recalled in a letter to Esther McCoy what had drawn him to Helen: I care for her truly although often enough we don’t get along. But the drift of her temperament is truly lovely and she sufers keenly through her reactions to the beautiful and the dreams and ideals evoked in her by the illusive phantom of beauty in life. So often I wish, I wish I could make her wholly happy.32

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Writing some years after Dreiser’s death, Marguerite Tjader ofered a reading of this aspect of Dreiser as a lover which gave it an emphasis related to Dreiser’s own turn toward religiosity in his last years. A psychic longing for the beauty of the past, lost and beckoning ahead, wanting to be found again. All this seemed to be implied in Dreiser’s love of woman. She, too, must be made to sense these undertones and overtones, to feel the urgency of wanting something more than bodily joy. He wanted to be loved and also to create a love which, through physical unity, could approach or even touch the current of Divine Energy. That is why he was such a creative lover, one whom a woman could not easily forget.33 Dreiser’s fctional seekers of beauty and happiness in human relationships often mirror his own dilemma in this search. Men and women in his novels search for beauty in their relationships with others but are thwarted by their own natures or the natures of others or the conditions of their lives. So, of his

12

122

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

most active seekers of this kind, at the end of their stories Carrie rocks alone by her window and a solitary Eugene gazes at the stars. Only Cowperwood fnds in Berenice a complete and lasting union with a woman of physical and spiritual beauty at the close of The Titan and in The Stoic, a relationship so thinly realized and unbelievable in the fction as to be almost risible. The extraordinary history of Dreiser’s relationships with women is thus less extraordinary than it appears when it is merely summarized arithmetically. Like many men and women throughout the ages Dreiser sought to fnd a soul mate in a relationship—​in his case, someone who shared his response to beauty in various phases of human existence. Occasionally this search appeared to be fulflled. But always there were impossible conditions to overcome—​principally his own desire for absolute freedom, but also the discovery of faws in the other’s nature and the impact of contemporary social prejudices and conditions. And so, as is implied with Carrie at the close of Sister Carrie, the search continued endlessly.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Notes 1 H. L. Mencken, My Life as Author and Editor, ed. Jonathan Yardley (New York: Knopf, 1993), 134. 2 Theodore Dreiser:  American Diaries 1902–​1926, ed. Thomas P.  Riggio (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Theodore Dreiser. Letters to Women: New Letters, vol. 2, ed. Thomas P.  Riggio (Urbana:  University of Illinois Press, 2009). See also Riggio’s valuable “Dreiser and Kirah Markham:  The Play’s the Thing,” Studies in American Naturalism 1 (Summer–​Winter 2006): 109–​27. 3 Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser (Cleveland:  World, 1951); Louise Campbell, Letters to Louise:  Theodore Dreiser’s Letters to Louise Campbell (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959); Marguerite Tjader, Theodore Dreiser:  A New Dimension (Norwalk: Silvermine, 1965) and Love that Will Not Let Me Go: My Time with Theodore Dreiser, ed. Lawrence E.  Hussman (New  York:  Peter Lang, 1998); Clara [Clark] Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel:  The Education of a Bourgeoise (Richmond, VA:  Grosvenor, 1988); Yvette [Szekely] Eastman, Dearest Wilding:  A Memoir, ed. Thomas P.  Riggio (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 4 Maude Wood Henry to Robert H.  Elias, May 2, 1945, in the Theodore Dreiser Collection, Kroch Library, Cornell University. I wish to thank the Kroch Library for making this and other letters in its Dreiser Collection available. 5 See, for example, the entry for November 12, 1902, in Dreiser, American Diaries, 62. 6 Dreiser of course drew upon the afair for his portrait of the Eugene Witla–​Suzanne Dale relationship in The “Genius” (1915). 7 Thelma Cudlipp Whitman to Robert H. Elias, April 2, 1953, in the Theodore Dreiser Collection, Kroch Library, Cornell University. 8 See Donald Pizer, The Novels of Theodore Dreiser (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 104. 9 See Mencken, My Life, 139–​41. 10 Dreiser to Markham, April 27, 1913, in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women, 71.

123



DREISER’S RELATIONSHIPS WITH WOMEN

123

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

1 1 Dreiser, Theodore Dreiser: American Diaries, entry for May 27, 1917, 154–​55. 12 Ruth E. Kennell, Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union 1927–​1945: A First-​Hand Chronicle (New York: International, 1969). 13 For Dreiser and Pergain in Harlan, see Donald Pizer, “John Dos Passos and Harlan: Three Variations on a Theme,” Arizona Quarterly 71 (Spring 2015): 5. 14 Mencken, My Life, 140. 15 Eastman, Dearest Wilding, 26. 16 Tjader, Theodore Dreiser, 1. 17 Tjader, Theodore Dreiser, 12. 18 Eastman, Dearest Wilding,  44–​45. 19 Jaeger, Philadelphia Rebel,  78–​79. 20 Campbell to W.  A. Swanberg, April 22, 1965, in the Swanberg Papers, University of Pennsylvania Library. I wish to thank the University of Pennsylvania Library for making this and other letters in the Swanberg Papers available. 21 Tjader, Theodore Dreiser, 61. 22 See Chapter XIV of Jennie Gerhardt. 23 Markham to W. A. Swanberg, February 29, 1964, in the Swanberg Papers, University of Pennsylvania Library. 24 Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser, 4, 26. 25 See Riggio’s headnotes to Dreiser early 1915 letters to Markham, Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women, 97, 101. 26 See Dreiser to Margaret Johnson, in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women, 134–​36. 27 Markham to W. A. Swanberg, October 26, 1963, in the Swanberg Papers, University of Pennsylvania Library. 28 Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser, 146. 29 Dreiser, American Diaries, entry for June 6, 1917, 165. 30 Dreiser to Markham, February 2, 1916, in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women, 110. 31 Dreiser to Markham, May 1, 1913, in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women, 75. 32 Dreiser to Esther McCoy, June 22, 1936, in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women, 259. 33 Tjader, Love That Will Not Let Me Go, 45.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

124

125

Part III

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

DONALD PIZER AND THE STUDY OF AMERICAN NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

126

127

Chapter 9 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

A PERSONAL RETROSPECTIVE*

I did not begin graduate work at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1950s intending to concentrate on late nineteenth-​century American literature. For one thing, the doctoral examinations at UCLA at that time permitted only one exam out of the required four to be in American literature, which meant that a good deal of my attention was necessarily focused on English literature. For another, Leon Howard, who directed almost all graduate work in American literature at UCLA during this period, was interested primarily in colonial and antebellum literature. Nevertheless, from my earliest seminar in American literature, during my frst year as a graduate student, in 1951–​52, I was deeply drawn to the writers of the 1890s and especially to the work of Stephen Crane and Frank Norris. (I was later to write my dissertation on the early work and career of Hamlin Garland, another 1890s author, chiefy because of the availability of his manuscripts at the nearby University of Southern California.) I did not know why I was attracted to these writers, but in hindsight I believe that it was because the world they depicted in their fction was closer to my own experience than any other writing I was permitted to work on. At that time, I should note, and especially so in a conservative English department, as UCLA then was, very few dissertations were written on post-​1900 literature, and “Modern” was not a fully recognized feld within the discipline. But in the fction of Crane and Norris, and later in that of Dreiser, I found subjects and themes that were “modern” in the sense that they touched upon experiences and concerns that had been part of my own life. I had not sufered, growing up in a New  York working-​class family during the 1930s and early 1940s, anything like the poverty of a Maggie or a McTeague. Nor had I, as a youth * Donald Pizer, The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 1–​10.

128

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

128

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

of 10 when the Depression ended and as too young by several years to serve in the Second World War, undergone the depth of soul-​searching that social chaos and war had brought to a Presley or a Henry Fleming. But nevertheless, as someone who had been raised in a totally urban civilization and who had lived through depression and war, I instinctively sensed the relevance of the lives depicted in this fction to my own life. I therefore read the fction of Norris and Crane initially not because it was required for a course but because it interested me. I did not read it, to put the matter somewhat diferently, because it illustrated a body of ideas about this phase of American literature, ideas which I was supposed to learn, but because it gave me pleasure to read it. But I also soon discovered, frst through conventional survey courses in American literature and then through my reading of criticism bearing on this period, that a fully developed interpretation of the period was indeed already in place and was almost universally accepted. The novels of Crane, Norris, and Dreiser, I read and was told, were examples of literary naturalism. They therefore derived their essential nature and purpose from the theories and practice of Emile Zola, the foremost spokesman of the movement, and were characterized above all by a desire to demonstrate through fctional characterization and event the thesis that all experience was determined by heredity and environment. The novels of such naturalists as Norris, Crane, and Dreiser could thus best be understood in relation to the ways in which their fctional characters were shaped, conditioned, and usually destroyed by social and biological forces beyond their control. Moreover, as I was assured by such standard historical and critical studies of the period as Oscar Cargill’s Intellectual America (1941) and Malcolm Cowley’s “ ‘Not Men’:  A Natural History of American Naturalism” (1947), the naturalists had failed in this efort to apply a scientifc accuracy and detachment to fctional representation. The early naturalists had not only falsely degraded the human condition because of their commitment to materialistic precepts but had also been hopelessly confused in their eforts to dramatize a fully deterministic universe. Their novels were therefore both untrue and inept. Aside from “having opened up American expression to new kinds of experience” (as the critical platitude was usually put), naturalism was in efect a regrettable false step in the “development” of American literature. In general, like most graduate students—​at least those of my generation—​I did not quarrel with received opinion. I was, after all, in graduate school to absorb a body of wisdom, wisdom which I was then expected, with additional “contributions to knowledge” of my own, to help perpetuate. But I  nevertheless had considerable difculty with this particular wisdom. It seemed to me, for example, that far more was “going on” in a McTeague or a Red Badge of Courage or a Sister Carrie than the demonstration of a pseudo-​philosophical theory of human behavior. The characters in these novels are weak and inept,

129

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



THE STUDY OF AMERICAN NATURALISM

129

and some of them die in “unpleasant” circumstances, but I did not feel that life was cheapened or degraded by these conditions and events or that it had been simplistically and one-​dimensionally depicted. More was occurring in these portrayals than had been allowed, and I found myself deeply interested in attempting to discover what this “more” was. In addition, it seemed to me that these novels were far more successful as fction than they had been given credit for. The stories they told—​of McTeague’s decline, of Henry’s battlefeld wandering, of Carrie fumbling her way toward happiness—​held and absorbed me more than they were supposed to. So here, too, I wished to discover the basis for this “more.” My frst major attempt to confront these two interrelated discrepancies between conventional belief about American literary naturalism and my own response to specifc naturalistic texts took the form of a seminar paper on Frank Norris’s The Octopus that I wrote for Leon Howard. My training at UCLA had been almost entirely in history-​of-​ideas criticism, in which a literary work was studied principally as a refection of the philosophical, political, or social ideas of its time. But I had also, through the infuence of a few wayward younger instructors and some undirected critical reading, come into contact with the New Criticism, and especially with issues relating to fctional form and technique. (Mark Schorer’s essay “Technique as Discovery,” I  remember, was a revelation.) So when l said to Howard that I had found many of Norris’s ideas about nature and about human perception in The Octopus familiar to me from my reading in the American transcendentalists, he encouraged me in this line of inquiry because as a history-​of-​ideas man he was instinctively in sympathy with an approach of this kind. And when I then said to Howard that I believed that a good many misconceptions about the novel as naturalistic fction (The Octopus was conventionally thought to be completely confused and contradictory in its themes) stemmed from a failure to understand Norris’s narrative methods—​or, more precisely, his point of view technique—​Howard had the good sense not to dismiss this angle of approach because it was foreign to his own methods but rather to recommend a number of useful books on fctional form, books which I then read. The result was a seminar paper, and later an article, called “Another Look at The Octopus” (it appeared in 1955 in the journal Nineteenth Century Fiction), which represented my frst and therefore a tentative yet nevertheless characteristic efort to describe a work of naturalistic fction as I  had found it rather than as I was supposed to fnd it. What I discovered was that Norris had not been intellectually confused in The Octopus and that he had created a largely successful fctional expression of his ideas. His beliefs comprised a late nineteenth-​century blend of old and new concepts about nature. Nature was an immense and uncontrollable force, but it was also, when properly

130

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

130

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

understood and responded to, a benevolent force, and man had the capacity to intuit this truth about nature and to order his life in accord with this insight. The thematic confusion attributed to Norris in The Octopus was, I argued, the product both of a critical disposition to seek out only “naturalistic” themes in the novel and thus to view any productive or benevolent role of nature and any afrmative view of man’s capacities as anomalies, and of a failure to grant Norris, because he was a naturalist, any technical sophistication. Thus, for example, almost all readings of the novel had failed to recognize that Norris’s dramatic rendering of the principal refector in the novel, Presley, permitted Presley the integrity of his own beliefs and therefore did not at all times represent Norris’s ideas. It was Presley who was fumbling his way toward insight rather than Norris who was confused. In this reading of The Octopus I had, in a sense, found a critical mission, though it was to be a decade or so before I began to pursue it fully. Norris’s themes in the novel, I  had discovered, were far more afrmative than any attempt to interpret them in conventional naturalistic terms could hope to understand, and his means of rendering his themes were far more complicated than could be accommodated within a conventional notion of the heavy-​handedness of the naturalistic novelist. When looked at closely as a fctional representation of beliefs about human nature and experience, the naturalistic novel, in short, was far more complex than it was believed to be within any traditional defnition of the form and the movement. I was not, however, at this time interested in developing the underlying method and thesis of my essay on The Octopus into a full-​blown re-​examination of the theory and practice of literary naturalism in America. Rather, for the next decade or so I  engaged in the close study of the work of specifc late nineteenth-​century authors, with little discussion of naturalism in general, as in my books on Hamlin Garland in 1960 and Frank Norris in 1966. But I was nevertheless also building toward a more theoretical criticism of the fction of the period in several ways. One was in my interest in making sense of Norris’s literary criticism—​another aspect of his work which was thought to be hopelessly confused—​much of which bore on the issue of what was naturalism in America. (This concern led to my 1964 edition of Norris’s criticism.) Another was in my increasing involvement in the work of the other important late nineteenth-​century American naturalists, Crane and Dreiser. By the mid-​ 1960s I had given enough thought to all the major naturalistic fction of the period to come to two related decisions. I would devote a great deal of specifc attention to Dreiser because his work, more than any other writer’s, characterized and defned naturalism in America, and I would also seek in a series of essays to describe and thus to redefne American naturalism as a whole during the late nineteenth century. Both of these eforts were pursued simultaneously

13

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



THE STUDY OF AMERICAN NATURALISM

131

over the next 10 years. The frst resulted in several books about and editions of Dreiser, culminating in The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (1975). The second was expressed in a number of articles, perhaps the most central of which were “Nineteenth-​Century American Naturalism:  An Essay in Defnition” (1965) and “Nineteenth-​Century American Naturalism:  An Approach Through Form” (1976). Both concerns—​my interest in Dreiser and my interest in naturalism as a whole—​joined in “American Literary Naturalism: The Example of Dreiser” (1977). Several common themes run through these essays of the late 1960s and 1970s in which I attempted to describe the general character of late nineteenth-​ century American naturalism. One was my desire to wipe the slate clean for a fresh look at the fction of the period by analyzing the reasons—​most of them extraneous to the fction itself—​for the critical disfavor of naturalism. The various “cases” against naturalism, I  argued, derived largely from religious, philosophical, and political issues of the critic’s moment, from the 1890s to the present, rather than from a close examination of the fction itself. And the fction itself, I then sought to demonstrate, was not antithetical to traditional humanistic and tragic values. (This, indeed, was the principal thrust of my 1978 Mellon Lecture, “American Literary Naturalism and the Humanistic Tradition.”) These writers, I believed, were expressing a sense of the worth of the human enterprise whatever the limitations placed on human volition by the immediacies of social reality. Rather than a mindless adoption and crude dramatization of deterministic formulas, I found in their fction instance after instance of an author’s struggle to confront the confict between old values and new experience in his time, a struggle which usually resulted in a vital thematic ambivalence. And, I concluded, it was this very ambivalence, rather than the certainties of the convinced determinist, which was the source of the fctional strength of the naturalistic novel of the period. My attempts to describe the general characteristics of American naturalism by an examination of specifc novels of Norris, Crane, and Dreiser resulted in my recognition not only of large-​scale similarities in this fction but also of major diferences in each writer’s response to the central drift of ideas in his time. There was indeed a drift, one derived from the inevitable awareness pressed upon writers coming of age in post–​Civil War America that the conditions of urban and industrial life as well as the new understanding of man’s animal origin seemed irreconcilable to the concepts of human dignity and freedom inherent in traditional religious, philosophical, and political belief. But each writer, I also discovered, was responding in his own distinctive way—​in subject matter, in theme, and in form—​to this large undercurrent of his age. Indeed, as a kind of key to this variability, I  had noted as early as 1962, in “Frank Norris’s Defnition of Naturalism,” the

132

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

132

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

remarkable absence of a philosophical center in Norris’s concept of naturalism, despite his debt to Zola, who had insisted on a materialistic and mechanistic foundation to his own conception. This lacuna in Norris, I  argued then and later found confrmed in my close reading of individual naturalists, characterized naturalism as a whole in America and was in part responsible for the great freedom of response (and hence variety) by writers to naturalistic tendencies. Naturalism in America, I  was coming to see, was not a “school” and was perhaps not even a “movement.” Rather—​and I soon came to adopt these terms—​it could best be described as an “impulse” to which there gradually accrued a “tradition.” Dreiser was of course the only major naturalist of his generation to have a career extending fully into the twentieth century, and my study of his work thus brought me into closer involvement with modern American writing. Indeed, from the mid-​1970s to the present much of my work on naturalism has been devoted to the examination of its continuing presence in the twentieth century. As with my writing on naturalism in the 1890s, this criticism is of two kinds—​book-​length studies of individual authors, in which I seldom discuss their relationship with naturalism, as in my study of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1988), and essays on specifc works or groups of works, in which I  seek to raise issues about twentieth-​century American naturalism in general, as in the introductions and essays of my Twentieth-​Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation (1982) and in such separately published articles as “Contemporary American Naturalism” (1985) and “American Naturalism in Its ‘Perfected’ State” (1991). Much of this writing about twentieth-​century naturalism has sought to establish the two interrelated points that naturalism, contrary to conventional critical belief, did continue as a signifcant and powerful tendency into contemporary American expression, and that this tendency has taken the form of a variable impulse—​that each new generation of writers attracted to naturalism has expressed itself in ways that both echo traditional naturalistic concerns and introduce the preoccupations and fctional methods of that generation. My discussions of twentieth-​century American naturalism thus promote the idea of “phases” in the continuity of naturalism in America. Specifc social conditions and intellectual movements, in other words, encourage the reemergence of naturalistic modes of expression, but this reemergence occurs not as a pastiche imitation but rather as a form in which the naturalistic impulse speaks to a historical moment in the voice of that moment. At frst, in my Twentieth-​Century American Literary Naturalism, I identifed three such phases—​the 1890s, the 1930s, and late 1940s and early 1950s—​but in my “Contemporary American Naturalism” I attempted to describe yet a fourth phase beginning in the late 1960s.

13

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



THE STUDY OF AMERICAN NATURALISM

133

In addition to stressing the idea of variable phases, much of my writing about modern American literary naturalism has sought to demonstrate the related premise that naturalism has matured in the course of its presence in American expression. I had initially claimed, in my discussions of naturalism of the 1890s, that this naturalism was more sophisticated in theme and technique than was commonly believed, but this claim was of course made in relation to the common belief. There were, however, notable weaknesses in this fction, just as there were—​I later argued—​in the opening stages of any new form of expression. But in its later phases, I came to believe—​and stated in my “American Naturalism in Its ‘Perfected’ State” and in “Dreiser and the Naturalistic Drama of Consciousness” (1991)—​ naturalistic writers joined in the post-​Jamesian drift toward greater complexity and indirection in the expression of theme. In particular, naturalistic writers from the 1930s onward rendered the interaction between social reality and the felt inner life with far great subtlety and depth than had been true of earlier naturalists. Both my eforts to break the hold of the criterion of an absolute determinism in the defnition of American naturalism and to claim the persistence of naturalistic strains into twentieth­century American writing have been criticized for resulting in a defnition of naturalism so loose and fexible that it is no longer a useful critical and historical construct. This criticism, it seems to me, returns the discussion of naturalism to an earlier phase of critical examination, when works in the movement were examined principally in relation to their adherence to Zolaesque beliefs. There always has been, and, it appears, there always will be, a desire to attach naturalism to a fully deterministic and thus a pessimistic core of belief. To be naturalistic, a novel must adhere to this core, otherwise it either is not naturalism or is confused naturalism. A fexible concept of naturalism as a tendency or impulse refecting the various ways in which human freedom is limited or circumscribed and the various ways in which this truth is made palatable by combining it with traditional notions of human worth therefore won’t do. But it will have to do, I believe, and can also serve an important critical and historical purpose, if the confict between new truths and old beliefs, and the inevitable lack of a clear philosophical and tonal center which is the product of this confict, are indeed the essential characteristics of the naturalistic impulse and tradition in American writing. There has been much recent (i.e. in the 1990s) interest in the American naturalist movement and its texts. This is all to the good, I believe. Nevertheless, much of this criticism appears to confrm my belief that the study of naturalism is often still bedeviled by the incubus of determinism. Thus, the efort to return the texts of The Red Badge of Courage and Sister Carrie to discarded early states is posited in part on the critical preconception that an absolute determinism is central to naturalistic fction. In addition, some recent criticism, such

134

134

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

as Harold Kaplan’s Power and Order and John J. Conder’s Naturalism in American Fiction, continues to overstress, as in much criticism of the 1930s and 1940, either the baleful political consequences of deterministic belief or the pseudo-​ philosophical character of the naturalistic novel. And in other critical studies, such as Walter Benn Michaels’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism and Lee Clark Mitchell’s Determined Fictions, recent theoretical approaches to literary study—​a tendency toward revisionist deconstructive analysis in Mitchell, a reliance on New Historicist assumptions about an author’s vulnerability to contemporary ideology in Michaels—​result in a confrmation yet again of the deterministic center of American naturalism. A major and common diffculty with these various readings is that they tend to delimit strictly and thus to diminish both the individual work of naturalistic fction and the American naturalistic tradition as a whole and thus fail to account for the vitality and continuity of that tradition. Willard Thorp commented in 1960 that naturalism somehow refuses to die in America. Thorp was in part bemused by this insight because the long and seemingly indestructible life of American naturalism owed little to critical understanding or support. Yet, it seems, as long as American writers respond deeply to the disparity between the ideal and the actual in our national experience, naturalism will remain one of the major means for the registering of this shock of discovery.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America: Ideas on the March. New York: Macmillan, 1941. Conder, John J. Naturalism in American Fiction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984. Cowley, Malcolm. “ ‘Not Men’: A Natural History of American Naturalism.” Kenyon Review 9 (Summer 1947): 414–​35; repr. Evolutionary Thought in America, ed. Stow Persons, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. New York, 1893. —​—​—​. The Red Badge of Courage. New York: Appleton, 1895. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900. Kaplan, Harold. Power and Order: Henry Adams and the Naturalist Tradition in American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Mitchell, Lee Clark. Determined Fictions:  American Literary Naturalism. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1989. Norris, Frank. McTeague. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1899. —​—​—​. The Octopus. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901. Pizer, Donald. “American Literary Naturalism: The Example of Dreiser.” Studies in American Fiction 5 (May 1977): 51–​63; repr. Pizer, Theory and Practice, 1993. —​ —​ —​ . “American Literary Naturalism and the Humanistic Tradition.” Andrew W. Mellon Lecture. New Orleans: Graduate School of Tulane University, 1978; repr. Pizer, Theory and Practice, 1993.

135



THE STUDY OF AMERICAN NATURALISM

135

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

—​—​—​. “American Naturalism in Its ‘Perfected’ State.” Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. Ed. Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit. New York: Garland, 1985. 27–​41; repr. Pizer, Theory and Practice, 1993. —​—​—​. “Another Look at The Octopus.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 10 (Dec. 1955): 217–​24; repr. Pizer, Frank Norris and American Naturalism. New York: Anthem Press, 2018. —​—​—​. “Contemporary American Naturalism.” Myth and Enlightenment in American Literature: In Honor of Hans-​Joachim Lang. Ed. Dieter Meindl. Erlangen: Erlangen University, 1985. 415–​32; repr. Pizer, Theory and Practice, 1993. —​—​—​. Dreiser and the Naturalistic Drama of Consciousness.” Journal of Narrative Technique 21 (Spring 1991): 202–​211; repr Pizer, Theory and Practice, 1993. —​—​—​. “Frank Norris’s Defnition of Naturalism.” Modern Fiction Studies 8 (Winter 1962–​ 63): 408–​10; repr Pizer, Theory and Practice, 1993. —​—​—​. Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1960. —​—​—​. John Dos Passos’s “U. S.  A.”:  A Critical Study. Charlottesville:  University Press of Virginia, 1988. —​—​—​, ed. The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Austin: University of Texas Press 1964. —​—​—​. “Nineteenth-​Century American Naturalism: An Approach through Form.” Forum (Houston) 13 (Winter 1976): 43–​46. Repr. Pizer, Theory and Practice, 1993. —​—​—​. “Nineteenth-​Century American Naturalism:  An Essay in Defnition.” Bucknell Review 13 (December 1965): 1–​18; repr. Pizer, Theory and Practice, 1993. —​—​—​. The Novels of Frank Norris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. —​—​—​. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. —​—​—​. The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. —​—​—​. Twentieth-​Century American Naturalism: An Interpretation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Schorer, Mark. “Technique as Discovery.” Hudson Review 1 (Spring 1948): 67–​87. Thorp, Willard. American Writing in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1960. Zola, Emile. Le Roman Expérimental (1880); repr. The Experimental Novel, trans. Belle M. Sherman. New York: Cassell, 1893.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

136

137

Chapter 10 STEPHEN C. BRENNAN

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

INTERVIEW WITH DONALD PIZER*

In the preface to his recent edition of Hamlin Garland, Prairie Radical: Writings from the 1890s, Donald Pizer notes that while Garland made little money from his early work he did win considerable renown “for his pioneering eforts to replace depictions of his region as a land of bucolic bliss with truthful accounts of its hardship, poverty, and cultural isolation, conditions that he knew frsthand” (vii). Since Pizer began his scholarly career in the mid-​1950s with a series of articles on Garland that culminated in the seminal study Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career (1960), this new collection gives his fve and a half decades of scholarship a kind of symmetry. There is also symmetry between Pizer’s scholarly project and Garland’s early work, for Pizer too has been a pioneer in a career-​long efort to replace misconceptions, in his case about American literary naturalism, with more truthful accounts derived from frsthand experiences of the texts themselves. At this point, an overview of Pizer’s career would be in order. But since the lead essay in the inaugural issue of Studies in American Naturalism provides such an overview (Brennan), it seems appropriate to focus here instead on Pizer’s own commentary—​in his published work, in recent interviews, and in personal correspondence—​though some overlap with the earlier essay is inevitable. It would be impossible to capture in a brief essay the range of thought in Pizer’s eleven books, sixty-​odd articles, and dozens of reviews, lectures, and introductions to editions and collections. Still, one can discern in his more theoretical statements two central beliefs: that American literary naturalism is best understood when read as literature rather than as philosophy or ideology, and that it is a species of humanism. In casual conversations at recent conventions and in the interview I conducted on December 26, 2009, in his Tulane ofce,1 Pizer several times expressed regret at the recent tendency among critics to treat American * Studies in American Naturalism 5 (Summer 2010), 8–​20.

138

138

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

naturalism mostly in light of some current theory of discourse rather than as literature. As I began this essay, it struck me that I didn’t know precisely what he meant by literature. Drawing upon my reading of most of his work, I inferred a defnition and asked him in an email whether I had it right. Below is the key passage in his reply: I think my sense of what is literature is probably more oppositional in origin than the product of a fully thought out conception. I was responding to the tendency that I frst encountered in theory-​based criticism and then in the New Historicism and Cultural Studies to reduce all writing to “discourse”–​that is, to a form of communication little diferent from any other, to which could be applied universal means of analysis. This to my mind eliminated almost all that is distinctive both in particular literary works and in the special appeal and permanent hold of literature as a whole within the human experience. I was especially appalled by the efect of this conception of the literary work on the young person who is drawn co literature because he or she loves to read novels or poems and who then discovers that this response is considered simple-​minded and extraneous. I realize that there is danger in my mode of thinking–​that it raised the specter of the high school teacher half-​comically and ineptly rapturous over a Keats sonnet. But that’s the way the issue played out for me.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Although I  think you are correct in locating some of the roots of this antagonism in my early experience of intellectual history and the New Criticism, I  also sense that part of the lasting impact of these critical methods on me was their common stress on what can be called the “individuality” of each work of literature. The literary works of an era may deal with the same body of ideas, but they often do so in strikingly diferent ways. And specifc works within a period difer strikingly in their success in moving us to an experience and possible acceptance of these ideas. That literature is less about ideas than about men and women is a conception Pizer absorbed in graduate school from his mentor Leon Howard, best known for his biography of Herman Melville: I think what attracted me to him as a dissertation director was that he was preoccupied with the human element in literary expression. And because he was essentially a biographer, he began any study of a literary work with the author, who, with all his extraordinary individuality of experience and idiosyncrasy of mind, had produced this work. And until you understood those aspects of the work’s origin, you were not going to understand the work.

139



STEPHEN C. BRENNAN: INTERVIEW WITH DONALD PIZER

139

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Today, a scholar like Howard, whose main interest lay in pre-​Civil War authors, would not likely be considered qualifed to direct a dissertation on a later author such as Garland, but the feld in the 1950s did not demand the narrow specialization we see today. “People worked throughout the feld,” Pizer remarked with a chuckle. “It didn’t seem unusual to me that he was willing to direct my work. There wasn’t that density of production then, and you weren’t expected to know that much, and so you were freer.” Responding to the “human element” in Garland, Pizer was the frst to explore Garland’s papers at the University of Southern California, papers that only then were being organized. Anyone who has worked on archives under the watchful eye of a modern curator will envy the young scholar’s situation: “I was allowed access to the room and was given a key. I would go in the evening, alone, and do my work and lock up when I was fnished.” When asked about any Eureka! moments he may have had then and later in other archives, Pizer said, “I think I had a lot of those. When you read an author’s biography and works, and then examine his notebooks and drafts, you make connections and discoveries as a result of pulling it all together.” The year after Pizer received his doctorate from UCLA, Charles Child Walcutt’s American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream verifed that he was not alone in his reevaluation of the mode. As Pizer recalls the event, he found that Walcutt’s book was so well done and contained such serious-​minded deep probing, that even though I disagree with a good deal of what Walcutt had to say about specifc works, and to some degree have difculty with what he does with his basic thesis of the divided stream, I think he was taking the right tack, principally by emphasizing the American roots of naturalism. It was not simply a manipulation of a foreign idea inappropriate to the American scene, which was the commonplace notion of it at that time but had rather a signifcant role in American thought and signifcant roots in various phases of American thinking and experience. So it was really a trail blazing book to my mind, and I think almost everyone who wrote after it was indebted to it. And I told him that once. In fact, about ten years ago, I tried to persuade a publisher to reissue the book and let me write an introduction, because it was out of print and hard to acquire, but I was unsuccessful. It would be some years before Pizer’s immersion in the life, times, and work of specifc authors resulted in the general conceptions about literary naturalism that have informed his more theoretical writings: In connecting what I  wrote in my books to the area of naturalism in general, I  think I  started our diferently from most people who wrote

140

140

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

later about naturalism. They came to it with a conception of the area and then tested it out with individual writers. I started with an interest in the writer and his total career, with Garland and the other major fgures I  worked on. The writing I  did on naturalism as a movement came out of an awareness of the full range of the writer’s work and thought. I think it was extremely important that I had that background, which helped me avoid some of the pitfalls of much criticism about the movement. Pizer’s publications from the mid-​1950s to the mid-​1960s reveal a gradual movement from his exploration of particular biographical subjects (“Hamlin Garland in the Standard” [1954]) and close readings of single works (“Another Look at The Octopus” [1955]) to more general issues (“Romantic Individualism in Garland, Norris, and Crane” [1958] and “Evolutionary Ideas in Late Nineteenth-​Century English and American Literary Criticism” [1961]). The year 1965 saw the appearance of Pizer’s landmark essay “American Naturalism: An Essay in Defnition,” in which he laid out fully the “oppositional” view of naturalism that has guided much of his work to the present. In the 1950s, a common conception was that, as Pizer phrases it, naturalism is “essentially realism infused with a pessimistic determinism” (85). Those who approach naturalistic fction with this narrow defnition in mind will discover a “sensationalism” and “moral ambiguity’’ that makes virtually all naturalistic works seem to be “fawed specimens of the mode” (86). However, the critic who takes these works on their own terms is likely, as Pizer does, to realize that these supposed faws are not signs of the author’s confusion but rather distinguishing characteristics of American naturalism. Drawing on the terminology of the then-​dominant New Criticism, he demonstrates in McTeague, Sister Carrie, and The Red Badge of Courage the presence of two “tensions or contradictions” that constitute “both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience.” The frst tension relates to naturalistic characters who on the one hand are often poor and ignorant and on the other possessed of “qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous.” The second tension is between the theme of determinism and the efort to fnd “a new basis for man’s sense of his own dignity and importance,” an efort that yields “an afrmative ethical conception of life” (87). As Jeanne Campbell Reesman has recently shown in an analysis of Jack London’s “Mauki,” even “one of the most gruesome and sensational of naturalistic stories” (44) yields an unexpectedly complex view of human nature when read in light of Pizer’s defnition of naturalism as ethical at its core. In 1993, Pizer collected this essay and several of his other most important pronouncements on the mode in The Theory and Practice of American Literary

14

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.



STEPHEN C. BRENNAN: INTERVIEW WITH DONALD PIZER

141

Naturalism: Selected Essays and Reviews, which he dedicated to Leon Howard and ofered in his preface as a “full-​scale and coherent interpretation of naturalism in America” (vii). Two essays seem particularly representative of his continuing project of opposing reductionist treatments of naturalism. In the frst, “Nineteenth-​Century American Naturalism: An Approach Through Form,” originally published in 1972, he ofers a reading of naturalism from “the angle of vision of a sophisticated innocence,” that is, from the perspective of one who has read many novels but no critical theory and who thus understands the form of a novel as a sequence of “physical or psychological events.” Such a reader would fnd in English and American novels written before the 1890s a “progressive” pattern in “the physical, intellectual, or spiritual movement of characters through time” but would fnd in naturalistic works “a profound doubt or perplexity about what happens in the course of time” (104). To support this contention, Pizer demonstrates how key symbols in three naturalistic novels—​gold in McTeague, the rocking chair in Sister Carrie, and Henry’s wound in The Red Badge of Courage—​defne the protagonists’ “journeys through time” as “essentially circular” (106). Typically, however, he is not content with a theoretical point. He qualifes his conclusion that the “major impact” of naturalistic fction is “that of the inefcacy of time” by emphasizing the humanity of the novels’ protagonists: “So the Carrie who rocks, the Fleming who is proud of his red badge, and the McTeague who stands clutching his gold in the empty desert represent both the pathetic and perhaps tragic worth of the seeking, feeling mind and the inability of experience to supply a meaningful answer to the question that is human need” (107). The imperative Pizer took from Howard to understand the human element in literature fnds perhaps its most concerted expression in his 1978 Mellon Lecture, “American Literary Naturalism and the Humanistic Tradition.” Opposing the mistaken notion that naturalism, with its emphasis on the bestial and irrational in humans, was a unique expression of the age’s scientifc materialism, Pizer considers naturalism as but another version of the relatively “bleak” view of humankind held in the past by such fgures as St. Augustine, John Calvin, and Thomas Hobbes. Naturalism, in short, is one of the “metaphors in a huge and endless historical poem in which the poetic mood wavers continually from doubt and skepticism to celebration and faith” (37). Asserting that Zola’s infuence derived more from his novelistic practice than from his theory of environmental and hereditary determinism, Pizer sees the American naturalist not as a “dispassionate observer of a scientifc process but instead an imaginative presence infusing meaning and dignity and a sense of tragic potential into what he observes” (40). What follows is Pizer’s typically lucid exposition of this thesis in readings of Crane’s Maggie, Farrell’s Gas-​House McGinty, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. In Maggie’s need for love and

142

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

142

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

beauty in the midst of urban squalor, McGinty’s delight in the “beauty” of applied mathematics, and Sgt. Croft’s Ahab-​like quest to conquer a mountain in the center of a Japanese-​held island, the three writers have each “made a central humanistic concern integral to his naturalism in ways that suggest the dynamic responsiveness of naturalism to the changing nature of the American experience” (53). Pizer would fully explore this dynamic four years later in Twentieth-​Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation, in which he relates naturalists of the 1930s and of the late 1940s and early 1950s to changes in American experience since the 1890s. He fnds in Depression-​era naturalism a recurring theme of “hope from out of the ruins” (16) and in post-​World War II naturalism a concern with “fundamental philosophical questions about the nature and condition of man” (88), the same sort of questions being asked by the French existentialists. He considers American writing of the period only “analogous” to European existentialism, so when he fnds in the work of Mailer, Styron, and Bellow a depiction of “the individual seeking meaning in his own immediate experience” (87), he is not proposing a direct infuence. Yet since at least the 1960s, Pizer has been defning American literary naturalism in terms resembling those employed by the existentialists in defense of their own worldview. Jean-​Paul Sartre’s important essay “Existentialism Is a Humanism” is a case in point. According to some critics, Sartre writes, existentialists emphasize “all that is ignominious in the human situation” and portray “what is mean, sordid or base to the neglect of … the brighter side of human nature” (287), thereby promoting a “naturalistic” worldview of an especially nauseating strain: “Those who can quite well keep down a novel by Zola such as La Terre are sickened as soon as they read an existential novel” (288). Sartre counters this and similar charges with an extended argument for the optimism underlying existentialism. In a Godless universe in which “existence precedes essence” (290), he asserts, human beings are free to create the world and supply its essence by the actions they choose from moment to moment, actions for which they alone are responsible. Sartre, however, anticipates no apocalyptic transformation of the world such as the American transcendentalists promised. There is no progress, Sartre believes: “Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation” (306). Pizer’s humanistic naturalist, described above as “an imaginative presence infusing meaning and dignity and a sense of tragic potential into what he observes,” resembles the existentialist who believes that in the absence of God “there must be somebody to invent values. … Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose” (Sartre 309). Sartre certainly emphasizes freedom far more

143



STEPHEN C. BRENNAN: INTERVIEW WITH DONALD PIZER

143

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

than any American naturalist, but this freedom is exercised in a world of limits that changes while going nowhere, the kind of world defned by the circularity Pizer identifes as the formal principle of much naturalistic fction. In fact, Pizer argues that at least on occasion naturalists would have agreed with Sartre that determinism is a fight from responsibility. “Those who hide from this total freedom, in a guise of solemnity or with deterministic excuses,” Sartre proclaims, “I shall call cowards” (308). In his 1970 essay “The Problem of Philosophy in the Naturalistic Novel,” Pizer makes a similar point about a well-​known passage from Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute describing “Life” as an “enormous machine … driving before it the infnite herd of humanity” and “crushing out inexorably all those who lagged behind” (112). While many readers take such expressions of determinism in Vandover for Norris’s own “philosophy,” Pizer argues persuasively that they are “principally an image of fear” that enables Norris to “dramatize the emotion” of characters within the context of the novel (113). None of this means that the early American literary naturalists were proto-​existentialists or that their successors were of the full-​ blown variety; it does suggest Pizer’s recognition that American naturalists did not, as earlier readers supposed, wander of the main traveled road of Western thinking about the human condition. The larger part of Pizer’s critical writing is much less theoretical than the essays considered thus far. In his single-​author books, he usually addresses literary naturalism only in passing (there are only three entries under the term in the index to his Novels of Theodore Dreiser for instance, none at all in his book on Dos Passos’s U. S. A.). What he has attempted to do throughout his career, he recently explained, is to bring back to the study of these works some of the devices of the New Criticism which sought to examine the work for its sources of power—​why it holds us, why it interests us—​and to seek in the works … irony, paradox, symbolism, all functioning to create a powerful mix, holding our imagination. It’s not that one should limit oneself to the interior workings of the novel, as the New Critic in his heyday might have claimed. You have to bring in all that you know about the work and the author, but the text as literary text is still something that is not entirely understood in this body of expression. … This might be something we might want to return to, with the careful caveat that we don’t buy into the extremes and limitations of the New Criticism. In fact, perhaps that’s a bad term to use in relation to what I’m saying. … [We need] close readings but with an awareness that extends beyond the text. A good example would be Sister Carrie, where reading the novel is one thing, but to understand how Dreiser revised the novel and what might

14

144

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

have led him to that revision, what led him to accept [Arthur] Henry’s changes, that would play a role, it seems to me, in your understanding of what you have in the end. It is, in fact, one of the pleasures of reading Pizer’s books to see how much he knows about the work and the author when he sets about a close reading of a major naturalistic text. In the inaugural issue of Studies in American Naturalism, I described Pizer’s critical method at some length as illustrated by his The Novels of Frank Norris (1966), and I  ofered the opinion that The Novels of Theodore Dreiser was his most accomplished extended close reading of the sort he calls for. Since then, I  have read his Dos Passos’s U.  S. A. (1988) for the frst time cover to cover and am almost persuaded to revise my estimate. Moving systematically from an examination of the trilogy’s roots in Dos Passos’s life, early works, and literary, cultural, and political environment, to an overview of the trilogy’s themes and techniques, to an analysis of how the four modes—​Camera Eye, Newsreels, biographies, and narratives—​function separately and in complex “interlacings,” and fnally to an exposition of the unique qualities of the three individual novels, Pizer has accomplished a remarkable feat that will be the starting point for Dos Passos scholars for decades. What will endure longer than his criticism, he believes, is his editorial work, not the several Norton Critical Editions, volumes in the Library of America, and collections of essays that have come his way owing to his stature in the feld, but those volumes resulting from his “total immersion in the career and writing of a specifc author in preparation for a critical study” (“Ten Questions” 30). Under this category fall The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (1964), Hamlin Garland’s Diaries (1968), Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose (1977), and John Dos Passos: The Major Non-​Fictional Prose (1988), among other volumes, including the recent edition of Garland’s radical writings mentioned above. While some consider this sort of work to be “dryasdust plodding,” Pizer feels otherwise: “I like the detective element in it and I also take satisfaction from the sense that I’m producing something that will be used long after my criticism is considered irrelevant.” His only regret about his editorial work is the damage it did to several friendships following his involvement during the 1980s and 1990s in the “disputatious scholarly area” of textual editing (“Ten Questions” 30), as in the extended debates occasioned by Henry Binder’s edition of Red Badge and James L. W. West Ill’s Pennsylvania Edition of Sister Carrie, both of which take early manuscripts as copytext. A scholar whose critical stance is admittedly “oppositional” is bound to rufe some feathers, though an oppositional stance might be the only one a scholar can take in the face of a literary establishment that relegates naturalism to the

145



STEPHEN C. BRENNAN: INTERVIEW WITH DONALD PIZER

145

status of the subliterary or the culturally symptomatic. “[N]‌aturalism has low status in the literary feld,” Pizer remarked in the interview, “so that you have to struggle against the lack of interest and lack of concern of publishers and editors.” He then ofered this illustrative anecdote: I once submitted a book to Princeton University, which I thought was one of my better books. I  eventually got back a letter saying, “Well, we got very strong letters of recommendation from our readers, but when we submitted it to our board one of the members popped up with, “Why are we bothering with books on American Naturalism?” I took it to another publisher, but that illustrates the problem of low esteem of the feld in general.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Certainly books on naturalism have issued from major university presses in recent years to much critical acclaim, one instance being Jennifer L. Fleissner’s Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism (2004). Pizer fnds the book interesting and sometimes “pyrotechnical” but not ultimately very illuminating:  “Fleissner’s book is probably a fne example of its kind, which is why it attracts interest and praise—​people fnd confrmed in it what they are doing … but it’s not about literature as an institution or as a form of communication. It’s about the society in which literature may have been produced.” The shift in interest from literary to social concerns has not, in Pizer’s view, beneftted either critical practice or the teaching of literature, as the following anecdote indicates: [M]‌y reaction to what’s going on now … started, I think, about twenty years ago when Blanche Gelfant had the misfortune to organize a session at the MLA on recent criticism of naturalism. … And because she knew both of us, she asked Dick Lehan and me to speak. She also asked Mark Seltzer, who had previously published a book [Bodies and Machines], to speak. Dick and I, independently of each other, had been reading what had been coming out, including [Walter Benn] Michaels’s book [The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism], and we both wrote somewhat nasty-​minded attacks on what was going on. (I think Michaels was in the audience.) The heart of my attack was based on the obscurity of their arguments, and I read some passages that drew gasps of astonishment from the audience. When you read this stuf aloud, its basic incomprehensibility shouts at you. Then Seltzer got up and began a vigorous defense of this recent criticism because he was part of it. In his preparatory remarks before he began reading his paper, he had the misfortune

146

146

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

to say, “To my mind there is nothing obscure about these writings. They are perfectly comprehensible.” And then he started reading his own paper and it was obscurer than the other passages. As the audience began catching on, it got a little hilarious.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Lehan and I were very much of a mind that much contemporary criticism was characterized by just what you shouldn’t do in criticism as a manner of common sense and awareness of your function as a critic. And that is, you don’t come to a body of writing with preconceptions of what it’s going to do and where it comes from. You try to examine a body of writing and see where it’s coming from and what it’s trying to do. The New Historicism—​this is Dick’s bugbear—​is actually ahistoric. It cries to impose a contemporary set of analytical tools on a body of work which is not receptive to that, and it therefore produces a reading which mirrors our own preoccupation while distorting the work. As I myself have pointed out, it is not dissimilar to what was done by Marxist critics in the thirties, when they would entirely misunderstand aspects of previous writings because they were trying to read them in Marxist terms. This need imposed by recent critical practice for all criticism to have a broad cultural perspective, Pizer believes, also accounts for the virtual disappearance from graduate programs of the single-​author dissertation and the decline among undergraduate majors in literature. The way forward, Pizer argues, is for English departments to return to doing what they do best, which is engage students in particular literary works. Pizer spent his entire teaching career at Tulane, where he discovered that almost all his undergraduate students were “overeager for the crutch of simplifed controlling ideas” as a means of stabilizing their response to specifc literary texts (“Ten Questions” 28). He tried instead to recreate in them something of his own excitement and pleasure in his frst encounter with naturalist fction. “Students are choosing to major in more practical subjects,” he said in the interview. “I think the way we teach the subject as a representation of social and cultural currents—​basically as an abstraction—​tends to turn students away.” They will perhaps return if teachers give them what they want: They want to talk about why so-​and-​so loves so-​and-​so and why it doesn’t work out, and what happens next and why does it happen? These are reasonable questions:  What happens in the novel, and what are its themes, and how does the writer go about achieving those themes? It’s the same with poetry, of course, which has even less interest for students. So I think one thing we might do is return to teaching the best works of naturalism as literary works.

147



STEPHEN C. BRENNAN: INTERVIEW WITH DONALD PIZER

147

Graduate students, of course, need the thorough grounding Pizer provided in literary theory and the critical history of the works under study, but who among those of us who have devoted our careers to the study of literary naturalism didn’t come to the feld because we found The Call of the Wild or The Red Badge of Courage just a damn good read? What should be clear from all this is that Pizer’s oppositional strategy has never been simply a negation of what others believe but has always meant an afrmation of the human connection we feel with characters in naturalistic fction when we come to them without preconceptions. Pizer found his “critical mission” in the 1950s when he recognized transcendentalist ideas in The Octopus, and in good transcendentalist fashion he later exorcised his own hobgoblins to take an oppositional attitude even toward his own earlier work. His thinking “has evolved in two ways,” he has recently observed. While he once set out to defne “precise characteristics” of naturalism, he now thinks in terms of “a looser conception of the movement—​one that stresses ‘strains’ and ‘tendencies’ as well as ‘formal characteristics’ ”—​and he now also gives increased attention to the social themes of naturalist fction, as in his recent American Naturalism and the Jews (2009) (“Ten Questions” 31). This openness to new ways of thinking about the subject that has absorbed his energies for more than fve decades is an appropriate note to end on. “What questions must we ask about the subject now that have not been asked before?” I queried last December. The reply: “I don’t know. (laughter) … That’s for the next generation.”

Note 1 All quotations not cited from other sources are from this interview.

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Works Cited Binder, Henry, ed. The Red Badge of Courage. By Stephen Crane. New York: Norton, 1979. Brennan, Stephen C.  “Donald Pizer and the Study of American Literary Naturalism.” Studies in American Naturalism 1 (2006): 3–​14. Fleissner, Jennifer L.  Women, Compulsion, Modernity:  The Moment of American Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pizer, Donald. “American Literary Naturalism and the Humanistic Tradition.” Mellon Lecture. New Orleans:  Graduate School of Tulane University, 1978; repr. in Pizer, Theory, 36–​53. —​—​—​. American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. —​—​—​. “Another Look at The Octopus.” Nineteenth-​Century Fiction 10 (1955): 217–​24. —​—​—​. Dos Passos’ “U.S.A”: A Critical Study. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,  1988. —​—​—​. Email to Stephen C. Brennan, July 31, 2010.

148

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

148

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

—​—​—​. “Evolutionary Ideas in Late Nineteenth Century English and American Literary Criticism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 14 (1961): 305–​10. —​—​—​. “Hamlin Garland in the Standard.” American Literature 26 (1954): 401–​15. —​—​—​, ed. Hamlin Garland’s Diaries. San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1968. —​—​—​, ed. John Dos Passos: The Major Non-​Fictional Prose. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. —​—​—​, ed. The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. —​ —​ —​ . “Nineteenth-​ Century American Naturalism:  An Approach Through Form.” Forum 13 (1976): 43–​46; repr. in Pizer, Theory, 102–​109. —​—​—​. “Nineteenth-​Century American Naturalism:  An Essay in Defnition.” Bucknell Review 13 (1965): 1–​18; repr. in Pizer, Theory, 85–​101. —​—​—​. The Novels of Frank Norris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. —​—​—​. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. —​—​—​. Personal Interview. December 26, 2009. —​—​—​. Preface. Hamlin Garland, Prairie Radical: Writings from the 1890s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. vii–​ix. —​—​—​. Preface. Pizer, Theory, vii–​viii. —​ —​ —​ . “The Problem of Philosophy in the Naturalistic Novel.” Bucknell Review 18 (1970): 53–​62; repr. in Pizer, Theory, 110–​19. —​—​—​. “Romantic Individualism in Garland, Norris, and Crane.” American Quarterly 10 (1958): 463–​75. —​ —​ —​ . “The Study of American Literary Naturalism:  A Retrospective Overview.” Introduction. Pizer, Theory,  1–​10. —​—​—​, ed. Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977. —​—​—​. The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism:  Selected Essays and Reviews. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. 1–​10. —​—​—​. Twentieth-​Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. “Rough Justice in Jack London’s ‘Mauki.’ ” Studies in American Naturalism 1 (2006): 42–​69. Sartre, Jean-​Paul. “Existentialism Is a Humanism.” Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Ed., intro., and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: World, 1956. 287–​311. Shorer, Mark. “Technique as Discovery.” Hudson Review 1 (Spring 1948): 67–​87. “Ten Questions with Donald Pizer.” American Literary Naturalism 3 (2009): 28–​31. Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. West, James L. W. III, ed. Sister Carrie. By Theodore Dreiser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

149

INDEX

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Agee, James 26; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 26 Ainslee’s 38 Alger, Horatio 103 Algren, Nelson 28 American Dream 12, 75, 102 American Scholar 64 American Studies 71 Anderson, Sherwood 85, 86 Arnold, Matthew 97 Ash Can School 36–​39 Auerbach, Erich 12–​13; Mimesis 12–​13 Barth, John 28 Barthelme, Donald 28 Becker, George J. 19 Bellow, Saul 28, 71, 142 Bellows, George 38 Berthof, Warner 26; The Ferment of Realism 26 Binder, Henry 144 Bissell, Harriet 114, 116, 119 Blair, John H. 84, 89–​90, 95 Bourne, Randolph 24 Boussod-​Valadon Galleries  39 Boyesen, H. H. 21, 22 Brennan, Stephen C. 137–​47 Brock, William 84, 89–​90 Brooks, Van Wyck 24 Brown, Bill 64; The Material Unconscious 64 Brown, Grace 101, 102, 103 Bunner, H. C. 22 Butterick Publishing Co. 112 Cabell, James Branch 28 Cady, E. H. 25; The Light of Common Day 25 Calvin, John 141 Campbell, Louise 114, 118, 119

Canby, Henry Seidel 24 Capote, Truman 92 Cargill, Oscar 27, 128; Intellectual America 27, 128 Carter, Everett 25–​28; Howells and the Age of Realism 25–​28 Chace, William M. 64–​65; “The Decline of the English Department” 64 Chase, Richard 27; The American Novel and Its Tradition 27 Chicago Little Theater 113 Chopin, Kate 4, 29; The Awakening 4 Christ, Jesus 47–​48 Clark, Clara. See Jaeger, Cora Clark Coakley, Elizabeth 116 Cohen, Lester 84 Coles, Richard 52 Commentary 67 Communist Party 42, 82, 83, 84, 88, 89, 94 Comte, Auguste 26 Conder, John 134; Naturalism in American Fiction 134 Cowley, Malcolm 8, 27, 128; “’Not Men’” 8, 128 Crane, Stephen 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 22, 23, 24, 25, 35, 41–​49, 62, 92, 127, 128, 130, 131; “An Experiment in Misery” 5, 43; “In the Depths of a Coal Mine” 5; Maggie 4, 5, 11, 42–​45, 63, 141 “The Open Boat” 62 The Red Badge of Courage 4, 5, 42, 45, 48–​49, 128, 133, 140, 141, 144, 147; “War Memories” 46–​48 Crawford, Bruce 84 critical realism 12 Cudlipp, Thelma 112, 115, 119 cultural studies 10, 57, 63–​65, 138

150

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

150

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Daily Worker 83, 84, 89, 92 Darwin, Charles 6 Darwinism 10, 24 Davis, Rebecca Harding 4 deconstruction 64, 134 Delineator 112 Den Tandt, Christophe 64; The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism 64 documentary method 81, 86–​87, 88, 91, 97 Donaldson 91 Dos Passos, John 4, 26, 28, 81–​97, 144; The Big Money 81, 84; “Camera Eye (51)” 81, 94–​96, 97; Facing the Chair 85, 97; Harlan Miners Speak 81, 85–​93, 95, 96, 97; “Harlan: Working under the Gun” 81, 91–​94, 95, 96, 97; In All Countries 92; 1919 97; U.S.A. 86, 94, 97 Dreiser, Emma 7 Dreiser, Helen 104–​5, 111–​22 passim; My Life with Dreiser 111 Dreiser, Mame 7 Dreiser, Sara 111, 112, 114 Dreiser, Theodore 3, 4, 7–​8, 11, 18, 19, 22, 24, 26, 27, 35, 36–​41, 45, 62, 67–​78, 83–​85, 101–​8, 111–​22, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132 American Diaries 112; An American Tragedy 7, 12, 70, 74–​75, 101–​8, 114, 115, 116; The Bulwark 71, 115, 116, 118; The Color of To-​Day 38;The Cowperwood Trilogy 8, 72–​74, 120; “Curious Shifts of the Poor” 36, 39; Dawn 107; The Financier 4, 8; The “Genius” 39, 75–​76, 120; A Hoosier Holiday 105; “Individualism and the Jungle” 85; Jennie Gerhardt 4, 72, 112, 113, 119; Letters to Women 112; Sister Carrie 4, 7, 11, 22, 23, 35, 36, 38, 41, 62, 73, 76–​77, 112, 113, 122, 128, 133, 140, 141, 142, 144; The Stoic 122; The Titan 75, 113, 122; “True Art Speaks Plainly” 6, 7 Dudley, Dorothy 77 Dufy, Richard 38

Eastman, Max 115 Eastman, Yvette Szekely 112, 115–​18 passim Eastman Kodak Company 42 Edwards, Robert 103 Elias, Robert H. 112 Eliot, T. S.: “The Waste Land” 69 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 9 Evans, Walker 50, 86; Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 86 Ev’ry Month 36, 38 existentialism 28, 142–​43 Falk, Robert 21, 26 Farm Security Agency 50, 51 Farrell, James T. 4, 7, 26, 28, 141; Gas-​ House McGinty 141; Studs Lonigan Trilogy 7 Faulkner, William 4, 23, 28 Fawcett, Edgar 22 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 105 Flaubert, Gustave 19 Fleissner, Jennifer 64, 145; Women, Compulsion, Modernity 64, 145 Foster, William Z. 84 Frank, Waldo 85 Frederic, Harold 4 Freudianism, 28 Gannes, Harry 84 Garland, Hamlin 4, 11, 21, 45, 47–​48, 92, 127, 130, 137, 139, 149, 144; Crumbling Idols 21, 22, 45, 47–​48 Gates, “Sudsy” 91 Gelfant, Blanche 145 Géricault, Théodore 47 Gillette, Chester 101, 102, 103 Glackens, William 38 Godwin, Hazel 116 Goodman, Lillian. Rosedale. See Rosenthal, Lillian Grace, Jim 88 Grace, Viola 88 Hall-​Mills Case  103 Harcourt Brace & Co. 85 Harlan County coal strike 81–​97 Harper & Brothers 85 Harper’s Monthly 21

15

INDEX 151 Harris, Carlyle 103 Harris, Marguerite Tjader 112, 115–​22 passim Hawthorne, Nathaniel 26, 70 Hemingway, Ernest 4, 28 Henry, Arthur 112, 144 Henry, Maude Wood 112 Hicks, Granville 221 Hobbes, Thomas 141 Hobbs, Calloway 126 Howard, Leon 127, 129, 138–​39, 141 Howe, Irving 27, 70, 77 Howells, William Dean 12, 18–​27 passim; Criticism and Fiction 21; “Editor’s Study” 21; The Rise of Silas Lapham 26

Lange, Dorothea 49–​53, 86; American Exodus 53, 86; “Migrant Mother” 53; “White Angel Bread Line” 50, 52 Lehan, Richard 145–​46 Levin, Harry 19 Levy, Melvin P. 84 Lewis, R. W. B. 71; The American Adam 71 Lewisohn, Ludwig 24 Library of America 144 Library of Congress 50 Light, Evelyn 114, 115 Literary History of the United States 25 London, Jack 4, 57–​65, 140; The Call of the Wild 147; “Mauki” 140; “To Build a Fire” 57–​65 Luks, George 38

impressionism 35, 42, 45–​49 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) 94 International Labor Defense 83, 84, 85

Macy, John 24 MacLeish, Archibald 50; Land of the Free 50 Mailer, Norman 23, 28, 67–​72, 78, 92, 141, 142; Cannibals and Christians 67; “Modes and Mutations” 67–​68; The Naked and the Dead 141 Markham, Edwin 5; “The Man with the Hoe” 5 Markham, Kirah 113–​14, 115, 119, 120–​21 Martin, Jay 26; Harvests of Change 26 Marxism 10, 28, 67, 92, 93, 146 Mauer, George 84 McCoy, Esther 114, 116, 119, 120 Mellon, Andrew W. 81 Melville, Herman 26, 70, 138; Moby Dick 69 Mencken, H. L. 24, 111, 113, 116 Michaels, Walter Benn 10–​11, 63, 134, 145; The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism 63, 134, 145 Miller, Arthur 12; The Death of a Salesman 12 Mitchell, Lee Clark 57–​65, 134; Determined Fictions 57, 63, 134 Modern Language Association 67, 69, 70, 145 Moers, Ellen 36 Moore, G. E. 63 Morgan, J. P., Jr. 81

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Jackson, Molly 90, 93, 94; “Kentucky Miners Wives Ragged Hungry Blues” 93 Jaeger, Clara Clark 112, 114–​19 passim James, Henry 19, 22, 24, 25, 68–​70, 71, 133; The Bostonians 26 Johnson, Arnold 88; “The Lawlessness of the Law in Harlan County” 88 Jones, James 28 Joyce, James 95 Kaplan, Amy 12; The Social Construction of American Realism 12 Kaplan, Harold 134; Power and Order 134 Kazin, Alfred 27 Kearney, Patrick 116 Keats, John 128 Kennedy, William 28 Kennell, Ruth 115; Dreiser and the Soviet Union 115 Kolb, Harold H. 26; The Illusion of Life 26 Kubitz, Estelle 114, 119, 120 Kuhn, Celia 84 Kusell, Sally 114, 119

152

152

AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM

Mumford, Lewis 24 Mydans, Carl 50 myth criticism 71 Nagel, James 45; Stephen Crane and Impressionism 45 Napier, Alex 90 National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners 83, 84, 85, 86 National Miners Union, 82, 83–​84, 85, 88, 89–​93 passim, 96 naturalism 3–​13, 17–​29, 35–​35, 49, 67, 62–​64, 67–​68, 127–​34, 137–​47 New Criticism 9, 25, 26, 27, 70, 128, 138, 140, 143 New Historicism 10–​11, 57, 63–​65, 134, 137, 146 New Republic 70 New York Times 39 New York Tribune 43 New York World 101 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7 Nineteenth Century Fiction 57, 129 Norris, Frank 3, 4–​6, 7, 11, 12, 23, 24, 26, 92, 127, 128, 129–​30, 131–​32, 143; McTeague 4, 6, 7, 12, 22, 128, 140, 141, 143; The Octopus 4, 6, 7, 22, 129–​30, 147 The Pit 7; “The Responsibilities of the Novelist” 6; Vandover and the Brute 4, 7, 143 Norton Critical Editions 144 Nyiregyhaze, Ervin 115

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Oates, Joyce Carol 28 Ornitz, Samuel 84, 89 Page, Thomas Nelson 23 Parrington, Vernon Lewis 8, 21, 24, 68; The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America 24; Main Currents in American Thought 8 Pass, Joseph 83 Pergain, Marie 84, 85, 115 Perry, T. S. 21 Pizer, Donald 10, 27, 127–​34, 137–​47; “American Literary Naturalism in Its ‘Perfected’ State 132, 133; “American Literary Naturalism and the Humanistic Tradition” 131, 141–​42; “American Literary Naturalism: The

Example of Dreiser” 131; American Naturalism and the Jews 137; “Another Look at The Octopus” 129–​30, 40; “Contemporary American Naturalism” 131, 132; Dos Psssos’s “U.S.A.” 132, 143; “Dreiser and the Naturalistic Drama of Consciousness” 133; “Evolutionary Ideas in Late Nineteenth-​Century English and American Literary Criticism” 140; “Frank Norris’s Defnition of Naturalism” 131; Hamlin Garland’s Diaries 144; Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career 137; “Hamlin Garland in the Standard” 140; Hamlin Garland: Prairie Radical 137; John Dos Passos: The Major Non-​Fictional Prose 144; The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris 144; “Nineteenth-​Century American Naturalism: An Approach Through Form” 131, 140, 141; “Nineteenth-​ Century American Naturalism: An Essay in Defnition” 131; The Novels of Frank Norris 144; The Novels of Theodore Dreiser 131, 143; “The Problem of Philosophy in the Naturalist Novel” 143; Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-​Century American Literature 27; “Romantic Individualism in Garland, Norris, and Crane” 140; Theodore Dreiser: A Selection of Uncollected Prose 144; The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism 140; Twentieth Century American Literary Naturalism 132, 142 Powers, Caleb 99 popular culture 101–​8 Princeton University 144 Pynchon, Thomas 28 Rahv, Philip 27, 68 Realism 21–​24 Reesman, Jeanne Campbell 140 reportage 84, 92–​94, 97 Richardson, Helen. See Dreiser, Helen Riis, Jacob 42–​45; How the Other Half Lives 42–​45 Rockefeller, John D. 81 Rosenthal, Lillian 112–​13, 114, 116 Rothstein, Arthur 50

153

INDEX 153

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

Sacco, Nicola 85 San Francisco News 50 Sartre, Jean-​Paul 142–​43; “Existentialism Is a Humanism” 142–​43 Schorer, Mark 129; “Technique as Discovery” 129 Scottsboro Boys 83 Seltzer, Mark 63, 145; Bodies and Machines 63, 145 Sherman, Stuart P. 18 Shinn, Everett 38–​41; “Fifth Avenue Coach, Winter” 39, 40 Sinclair, Upton 12; The Jungle 12 Sloan, John 38 Smith, Henry Nash 25, 71; Virgin Land 71 Sonntag, W. L. 38 Spencer, Herbert 7 St. Augustine 141 Steinbeck, John 4, 26, 28, 35, 48–​53; The Grapes of Wrath 35, 49–​53; “Their Blood Is Strong” 49–​53 Stendhal 11 Stieglitz, Alfred 36–​40; “Winter on Fifth Avenue” 37–​38, 40–​41 Stone, Robert 28 Stott, William 86, 97; Documentary Expression and Thirties America 86 stream of consciousness 81, 94–​96 Stryker, Paul 53 Studies in American Naturalism 137, 144 Styron, William 28, 142 surrealism 42 Swanberg, W. A. 111–​12, 119; Dreiser 111, 112 Szekely, Yvette. See Eastman, Yvette Szekely Taine, Hippolyte 26 Tatum, Anna 113, 119 Taylor, Paul 50, 86; American Exodus 50, 86 Thorp, Willard 27, 29, 134 Tjader, Marguerite. See Harris, Marguerite Tjader

transcendentalism 9, 142, 147 Transitions in American Literary History 26 Trilling, Lionel 27, 68–​69, 71–​72, 77; The Liberal Imagination 68, 71, 77; “Reality in America” 68 Tulane University 146 Twain, Mark 22, 24, 25; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 25, 26 United Mine Workers of America 82, 85, 88 University of California, Berkeley 50 University of California, Los Angeles 127, 129, 139 University of Southern California 127, 139 Van Doren, Carl 24 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo 85 veritism 47–​48 Walcutt, Charles C. 8–​10, 27, 139; American Literary Naturalism 8–​9, 27, 139 Walker, Adelaide 84 Walker, Charles 84 Warren, Robert Penn 27, 70; Homage to Theodore Dreiser 27, 70 Wellek, René 19 Wellesley College 113 West, James L. W., III 144 Wharton, Edith 4, 29; The House of Mirth 4 White, Sara. See Dreiser, Sara Whitman, Walt 94 Wilson, Edmund 92; The American Jitters 92 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 65 Wordsworth, William 94 World’s Columbian Exposition 47 Wright, Richard 4, 7, 28; Native Son 4 Zola, Emile 3, 5, 8, 9, 12, 19, 23, 24, 26, 128, 132, 133, 142; L’Assommoir 5; “The Experimental Novel” 5; Germinal 5; Rougon-​Macquart novels 12; La Terre 142

Copyright © 2020. Anthem Press. All rights reserved.

154