Dreiser Among the Critics: A Study of American Reactions to the Works of a Literary Naturalist 1900-1949 0841479615, 9780841479616

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• LD3907 •G7 Stepanchev, Stephen, 1915* 1950 Dreiser among the critics; a study of •335 American reactions to the work of a literary naturalist, 1900-1949. New York, 1950. also iv,309 typewritten leaves. 29cm. Film Thesis (Ph.D.) - New York University, T4517 Graduate School, 1950. Bibliography! p.269-309. I u iu j ;

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PLEASE NOTE: The negative m icro film copy of this dissertation was prepared and inspected by the school granting the degree. We are using this film without fu rth e r inspection o r change. If there are any questions about the film content, please w rite d ire c tly to the school.

UNIVERSITY MICROFILMS

DREISgR AMONG THE CRITICSs 1'

-L—

A Study of American Reactions t© the Work of a Literary Naturalist, 1900-1949

A* By Stephen Stepanchev

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy at New York University. January, 1950

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

The Changing Reputation of Sister Carrie------„----------1 1.

Sister Carrie In 1900---------------------------------- 1

2.

Sister Carrie In 1907--------------

3.

Sister Carrie After 1 9 0 7 --- : ------------------------- 26

IV

Jennie Gerhardt, Frank Cowperwood, and Eugene hltla---37 1. Jennie Gerhardt--------- •--------

38

2. The Financier--------- : ----------

46

3. A Traveler at Forty----------

53

4. The Titan--------- — ---------- .---:---------

58

5 . The wGenius*1-----------

64

Years of Versatility-----1.

— -------- , ---------- ^79.

Plays of the Natural andSupernatural---------------81

2. A Hoosier Holiday--------------- '--------------

84

3. Free and Other Storlee-----------

88

4. The Hand of the Potter-------------------------------92 5. Twelve Men------ • --- '■< --6. Hey Rub - a-Du br-pub IV:

96

------------

101

The High Point: An American Tragedy------------------- --107 1. A Book About Myself----- -- -------------------------114 2. The Color of a Grea t City - - ------3. An American Tragedy

--120

------ -------- — ----- 124

V.

Four Minor Works---------

142

1. Moods----------------------- •-------------------- -150 2. Cha 1n s-----------------------------------------

154

3. Dreiser Looks at Russia- -------------------------159 4. A Gallery of Women------------------

-165

V I • Through Depression and. Via ------------------------- --172 1. Dawn-------------2 •. Tragic America

169 ----- -■----— --

196

3. America Is Worth saving-----VII.

VIII.

204

Dreiser*s Mid-Century Reputation----------------

213

1 . The Bulwark------- — ------*---------------

222

2. The Stoic-------------------

-241

A Summing U p --------------------

252

Bibliography

--

----- --269

)

M

a

1 Preface:

Aims and Acknowledgements • '* F—

*

Tt is the aim of this dissertation to present the results of research into the -making of Theodore Dreiser's literary reoutation in the United States during the years 1900 to*1949.

That the history of the novelist's critical

reception in the United States was highly controversial has been common knowledge to all students of twentieth-century American literature, but no one has attempted hitherto to de.tormi n e ’ *p rec is e 1y what issues were raised, who the prin­ cipals in the battle were, and what trends in Dreiser's reputation become evident in the course of the decades. An attenmt to answer some of these questions in regard to early ohasas of Dreiser's career was made by Dorothy Dudley in her biography, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free (New York, 1932), by Marie Hadley Bower in her unpublished doctoral dissertation, Theodore Dreiser: The Man and His Times; His vvork and Its Reception (Ohio State University, 1941), and by Robert H. Elias in Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (New York, 1949), and to these studies the writer is deeply in debt; but neither «

Miss Dudley, Miss Bower, nor Mr. Elias— concerned as they wore with larger aspects of Dreiser's life and work— has made an investigation of the course of Dreiser's literary reputation over the entire span of his career, covering all of his books.

11 A secondary aim of the dissertation Is to orovide on insight into the operation of several American critical systems and.

In particular, ojf the sensibility of various

critics upon a body of work that has frequently been * charnotarized as revolutionary in philosophy and literary method.

The test of critical theory and sensibility Is

undoubtedly oractice, and In the exercise of critic upon author, and oartlcularly upon a new author presenting an unfamiliar or untraditional point of view,

one can learn

a great deal aboiit the scope and limitations of both.

Most

of the criticism of the half-cei:tury under consideration was unsystematic, but several fairly well formulated criti­ cal theories exercised a large, pervasive Influence on the n a ti on ’s book reviewers, most of whom made use of tag-erids of these systems to give objective notation to their subjective reactions.

Among the more influential streams

of ideas were those that Centered around the genteel, idealistic criticism of the school of Y.D. Howells;

the

humanism of Irving Babbitt, Stuart Sherman, and company; the psychoanalysis of Freud and his American disciples; 'v

Marxism; and the iconoclastic, anti-Puritan impressionism of such literary radicals as H.L. Mencken, Randoloh Bourne, and Burton Rascoe. Hfriile the generalizations of thl_s dissertation are the result of an analysis of hundreds of books, magazine »

-

*

articles, and newspaper reviews, the writer cannot claim completeness' for his research.

Only a small portion of

ill the nation's voluminous magazine and newspaper files were

„

available to him; moreover, the Library of the University of Pennsylvania, which has been.willed all the Dreiser papers, including a file of newspaper clippings which the author personally collected, has, in an access of that orooerty-consciousness with which institutions of higher learning often impede scholarly research, refused him oermisslon to examine relevant material.

However, a glance

at the bibliography will reveal that the sample of Prelserlan criticism with'which the writer has worked is so large that it is highly doubtful that any material that the University of Pennsylvania may possess can substantially alter the conclusions of the dissertation; if anything, it is likely to substantiate them.

In the case of early

newspaper reviews the writer has had indirect access to the Pennsylvania collection through the reports of Dorothy Dudley and Robert H. Elias. ^

Grateful acknowledgement for assistance in completing

this project is due the highly efficient staff of the New York Public Library, Mrs. Helen Crosby of Doubleday and Company, the Library of the School of Journalism of Columbia University, the editorial staff of Harper and Brothers, Publishers, and the reference library of the Hew York Herald-Tribune, the, files of which were made avail­ able to the. writer through the good offices of Mrs. Irita Van Doren. hr.

Help in locating material was also provided by

Arthur Pell of Horace Liveright^ Incorpora ted; » ■

iv Mrs. Theodore Dreiser; Mr, Robert H • Eiias of Cornell Uni­ versity; Miss Dorothy Dudley; and Mr. Leslie Katz.

A large

o

measure of gratitude is also due to professor Oscar Cargill, Chairman of the Department of English at New York University, who supplied the writer with the subject of the dissertation, acted as his research adviser,'and guided him in the organi­ zation and composition of the work.

a

’

I.

The Changing Reputation of Slater Carrie 1. Sister Carrie in 1900

The history of American letters can show no more astonishing reversal of critical opinion than that which occurred with regard to Theodore Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie

---- ----

■ ■■

■ ■ ■

i

p .

■—

■

(19b0).

Within a h alf century the tides of

literary taste changed so drastically that a work which in 1900 was called vulgar, immoral, and inartistic was by 1949 elevated to the position of a classic, esteemed so highly by mid-century critics that it was often listed as one of the two or three novels by Dreiser most likely to survive and as one^of the distinguished achievements of American letters in the twentieth century. This change in taste and in Sister Carrie's reputa­ tion was so profound that by 1949 the circumstances surround­ ing the novel’s first publication and reception had become legendary.

A strange compound of truth and misinformation

was dispensed b y critics and literary historians.

Accord­

ing to their often contradictory testimony, Slst.er Carrie was

(1) suppressed by censors,

(2) withdrawn from publication

by Doubleday, Page, and Company at the instance of Mrs. Prank Doubleday, an indefatigable Puritan and social worker, (3) locked up in the publisher’s cellars after it was read

by "an elderly maiden aunt of Doubleday Page and Comnany,”^ (4)

withdrawn from public sale on the insistence of

reviewers and an outraged public, or (5) issued privately to literary critics and on their advice buried in the Doubleday cellars.

The essential components of the legend

are (1) that Sister Carrie was virtually suppressed by its oublisher under pressure from "outside forces," and (2) that its critical reception in 1900 was unanimously hostile. In 1928, for example, Arthur St. John Adcock wrote that "When Slater Carrie was published... it was so fiercely attacked on moral grounds... that it was, promptly withdrawn from oublication."2

Regis Michaud, writing in tho same „

year, declared that "censors vetoed" the novel.

.

Grant C.

Knight’s version of the story in 1931 was that "the firm accepted the manuscript, published it, and then, worried by the objections of a lady reader, suppressed the issue with the exception of a few copies sent out to reviewers."

4


misery, but a s the a m e l i o r a ­ tion of h u m a n misery is u n c h r i s t i a n , and as America, and p a r t i c u l a r l y Mr. Co mstock's fri ends, are so very Christian, this has n a t u r a l l y g i v e n rise to some friction. Mr. Dreiser, contrary to the c u a t o m of serious Amer ican writers, has not yet left that country. Ultimately he will leave it.... A me r i c a has ceased to matter and there is no particular u s e in elaborating the e x p r e s s i o n of one's d i s g u s t w i t h her farcical atte mpts at what organized Cornsto c k l a n a call "moral ­ ity.” 120 In more formal

defense of Dr e is e r the Execut ive Committee

of the Atithors* League of Ame rica issued a statement d en y i n g that T h e

"Genius" was

"lewd, licenti o us

and c h a r a c t e r i z i n g the morality

or obscene"

tests of

the Sumner group

as so "narrow and unfair" as to "prevent

the sale of many

121 classics."

Joseph S. Auerbach,

ag ainst the s u p p r e s si o n of The

in h i s

oral argument

"Qenius" b e f o r e the Appellate

Di vision of th e New York S up r em e Court, described

the

r

novel

in these terms: It Is a b o o k of nearly seven hundred and fifty closely p r i n t e d pages. It is a study of met- and things, intense, somber and often g r ue s o m e - persisted In at times to the point o f tediousness-and n e i t h e r the principal character, Eugene Vvitla, nor any of its characters attracts t h e reader. That any one w o u l d turn to this bo o k to g l o a t over its l i c e n t i o u s n e s s ‘is unthinkable, for i t compels a t t e n t i o n a nd interests m e r e l y by r e a s o n of ita ^

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ezra Pound,

"Dreiser Protest," Eg o i s t ,

III

(October,

1916), 159. 121 - E x e c u t i v e Committee of the Authors' League of America, " T h e o d o r e Dreiser's The Genius," Reedy's Mirror,

XXV (September 22, 1916) , 605=BtJ6.

“

------------

almost epic breadth of view as to some phases of life, to which we may not wisely shut our eyes. 122 But the attacks on The "Qenlua" were not made on exclu­ sively moral and philosophical grounds.

as

in the case of

/

the four preceding novels and the autobiographical narrative A Traveler at Forty, the critics found much of the work objectionable for literary or esthetic reasons.

Stuart

Sherman, for example, argued that it was impossible to present a photographic or impersonal cross-section of life in a work of art: A real 1stio novel no more than any other kind of novel can escape being a composition involving preconcep­ tion, irnagimitiyon, and divination.... In the case of any specified novelist, the facts chosen and the pattern assumed ‘by them are determined by his central theory or ''philosophy of life”; and this is precisely criticism's justification for inquiring Into the adequacy of any novelist's general Ideas. 123 Dreiser's prolixity and other stylistic faults received the attention of his friend H.L. Mencken, who character­ ized his writing as *

mere dogged piling up of nouns, adjectl us, verbs, adverbs, pronoufts and participles, and as^ebpvoid of aesthetic quality as ah article in the Nation. 124 Riven more direct condemnation of The "Genius” Is to be found * in Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces, in which the critic said that the novel —

--- y g g ------- ; ------- ------------------------ ;------------------------------

Joseph S. Auerbach, "oral Argument Against the Sup­ pression of The 'Genius,*” Essays and Miscellanies (New York, 1922), III; 135. 123 Sherman, op. cit., pp. 351-352. 124 H.L. Mehoken, "A Literary Behemoth,” Smart set, XLVII (December, 1915), 153. ---------

marks the hightid© of his [preisor's] bad writing. There are-passages in it so clumsy, so inent, so 1‘rritating that they seem almost unbelievable; nothing worse is to be found in the newspapers. Nor is there any compensatory deftness In structure,'or solidity of design, to make up for this carelessness in detail. 125 Frederic Taber Cooper of the Bookman put hi a objection to Dreiser's lavishness of detail in these rather amusing terms; Mr. Dreiser gives us no chance for flights of fancy. All the women, and there are throngs of them, who figured in Eugene Witla's life are recorded with the fidelity of a dictograph; one affair endures for seventeen days, another for a specified number of weeks— passion reduced to the prose of daily entry bookkeeping. 126 - Claude Habberstad, writing about The "Genius” in the New Republic, spokeof the book's "unshapelines o . its lack of . 127 ' * technique,” and Addison Lewis of the Bellman objected to 128 the novel’s '’appalling length.” In a generally favorable review of the book, Lawrence Gilman of the North American Review conceded

that Dreiser had no taste, that he was

humorless, and that "in details of execution” he was 129 "naively crude and uncouth." Even Randolph Bourne,

in

his enthusiastic commentary on Dreiser, admitted that 1 5 5 ” --------: ------------------------------------------r-----------------

Mencken, op. cit., p. 1172. ----Frederic Taber Cooper, "Some Novels of the M o nt h, ” Bookman, XLII (November, 1915), 323. 126

rsv

Claude Habber.stad, n Is It?", New Republic, VI 4 February 19, 1916), 76. .128 ' Addison Lewis, "Dreiser's Genius," Bellman, XIX (November 6, 1915), 524. 129 Lawrence Gilman, "The Biography of an Amorist," North American Review, CCIII (February, 1916), 293.

The "Genius" had no distinction of style and that its -----------3.30 dialogue was bad* in this opinion he was seconded by 131 the reviewers of the Brooklyn Eagle* the Mentor , and numerous other newspapers and magazines* On the other hand, John Cowper Powys saw The "Gen i na " as the "Prose-Iliad of the American scene" and made a strong case for Dreiser’s style of writing when*he said: He has, as a matter of fact, a very definite and a very effective style* It is a style that lends itself to the huge Indifferent piling up of Indiacriminate materials, quite as admirably as that gracious poetical one of the old epic-makers lent Itself to their haughtier and more aristocratic purpose.... The carelessness of Dreiser's stjle, Its large Indolence, its contempt for epigramrnatic point, its relaxed strength, Is not really a defect at all when you regard his work from the epic view-point. 132 "The Scavenger" of the Little Review also found much to say in favor of the novelist's styles What Dreiser does do is tell a straight.forward story, tell it with all the painstaking genius of the Old Flemish painters**.. His style, shorn of pretentious reticence or rhetorical pomp, is the painstaking and poetical diction he revealed In Jennie Qerhardt. 133 On the subject of Dreiser's characterization there was far less agreement between friend and foe.

Negative

135 Randoloh Bourne, "Desire as Hero," New Hepubllc, V (November 20f 1915), Part II (Fall Literary fievlew), 6. 131 Brooklyn Eagle comment quoted in Anonymous, "The New Massive Novel by Theodore Dreiser," Current Opinion? LX (January, 1916), 47* See also Arthur B. Maurice, "Makers of Modern American Fiction (Men)", Mentor, VI (September 1, 1918), 6* 132 Powys, op; cit., pp. 10-12. 133 "The Scavenger," op. cit., pp. 10-11 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY Washington s q m s e • library •

76. commentary was concerned principally with TSUgene Witla and his. bad manners, offensive sexuality, and general commonness or vulgarity.

H.W. Boynton, for example, found

Wit la a cad and a bounder and a genius only'by sheer assertion; Often as, in the course of these seven hundred closely printed pages, we are assured of -Eugene Witla’s brilliant mind and charming manners;” thero Is nothing that he says or does which enlightens or fascinates ua In the smallest degree.... On the whole, his morals are less distressing than his manners, since he Is supposed to be a gentleman.... stripped of their patiently amassed and C h i e f l y meaningless details, these pages give a record of the paitry , business and sex adventures of a common little hero of amatory romance. 134 Joseph S. Auerbach, in his legal brief defending The "Gen­ ius" , remarked that the characters of the novel were not 135 attractive; Claude Habberstad of 6the ---------------New Republic felt 1 5 that they wero inconsistent;

and Addison lewis of the

Bellman objected that Dreiser’s Witla was not truly Ameri­ can: The hero is no more the average American'', or the average American artist, than the man in the moon. .. . The book is powerful and interesting, but very unpleasant, and will make most men who read it resentful that such an unworthy representative of their sex as its hero should creep into fiction. 137 Most of the critics, however, were Impressed by Dreiser’s ability to characterize, and in particular b.v

I3i----------------------------

— ---------------

H.tf. Boynton, "Varieties of Realism," Nation, Cl (October 14, 1915), 462. , 135 Auerbach, op. cit., p. 135. 136 -Habberstad, loc* cit. 137 _ “ : Lewis, loc. cit.

‘

77.

)

his psychological penetration'and his painstaking collec­ tion of precise detail to create an Illusion of density.* Berenice C- Skidelsky, commenting on the married life of Eugene Vltla and Angela Blue in the Book News Monthly, 138 said that '‘Dreiser has produced a masterpiece of psychology," and William 0. Lcngel of the International was especially 139 Impressed by the osychological study of Angela Blue. Frederic Taber Cooper said that Dreiser "has the gift of taking the human animal and turning him inside out piti140 lessly," and Mencken admired the lifelikeness of Dreiser's portrayals s The people in it /The "Genius"] have the fogginess and Impenetrability of reality; they stand before us In three dimensions; their sufferings at the hands of fate are genuinely poignant. 141 The realism of the character studies was de scribed by William Marion Heady in terms of a comparison:

The book is full of people, all of them vividly alive. Mr. Dreiser builds up character by indefin­ itely multiplied touches, like the p ointillists in painting. 142 Randolph Bourne related Dreiser's characterization to the new psychoanalytic movement of Freud and Jung, suggesting

-tsb

■ ---^ --- ■ ------- :----: -------- ; ----------

Berenice C. Skidelsky, "The Genius,'’ Book News Monthly, XXXIV (January, 1916), 218. William C. Lengel, "The ' G e n i u s , I n t e r n s t i o n a l , IX (December, 1915), 383. s 140 1 4 1 Cooper, "Some Novels of the Month," op. cit., . p. 322. Mencken, ".A Literary Behemoth," loc. cit. — ; ---William Marion Keedy, "The Genius of Theodore Dreiser," Reedy's Mirror, XXIV (October 8, 1915), 239. 142

78. that the excellence of his portrayals was due in large measure to his recognition of the importance of libido as a lelt-motlv 1° human living* His hero is really not Sister Carrie or the Titan or the Genius, hut the desire within us that pounds in manifold guise against the iron walls of exper­ ience. 143 In this, the first Freudian criticism in American letters, Randolph Bourne revealed himself as an advanced and extraordinari ly penetrating critic.

-------: -------- -----------------------------------T $ 5 ------- :

Bourne, "Desire as Hero," op. cit., p. 5.

III.

Years of Versatility

During the years 1916-1920 Theodore Dreiser published six comparatively minor works:

Plays of the Natural and

Supernatural, A Ho osier H o l i d a y , Free and other Stories, The Hand of the Potter, Twelve Men, and Hey Kub-a-Dub-pub. Since these were collections of plays, short stories, travel sketches,

and essays, forms of writing that the

American reading public tends to avoid when they appear inside book covers,

they were reviewed neither as widely

nor as sympathotiually as some of the earlier books had been. Moreover, they apoeared in the shadow of the con tro­ ver sy over the suppression of The "Genius" and while warengendered animosities were still raging. General commentary on Dreiser during the years under consideration fell in the familiar pattern of controversy over his philosophical commitments and his stature as an artist.

The influence of Stuart Sherman’s essay on

Drei se r’s naturalism was noticeable In much of the adverse criticism.

Helen and Wilson Follett, for exan$>le,

attacked Dreiser on essential ly Sherman's grounds in their critical

study, 3ome Modern Novelists.

Dreiser’s philo­

sophy, the Folletta said, is arrived at by a kind of brutally naturalistic biologizing; it is baaed almost altogether o n the

prodacio uan oBS of* the h u m a n finance, even in art. 1

animal,

in sex, in

Similarly humanistic was "the commentary of an anonymous \

editorial writer for the Bookman; Dreisjer represents in literature the nadir of the movement to biologize human aociety--a movement „that was the outcome of the discovery that jnan's physical endowment is the product.-a£rnfctttr&l law. The biologlzers have run amuck in attempting to carry over into human institutions and social conventions the "survival of the fittest" theory; just as Germany is running amuck now in its ruth­ less application of this one-sided conception of the relations of nations. We rebel; man has an instinctive insubordination, a divine quality if you will, that refuses to lie down and let the universe walk over him. 2 Less concerned with Dreiser1s philosophy than with his lack of artistry was Margaret Anderson, famous editor of the Little Review. v

Replying to H.L. Mencken's

.

repeated defense of the novelist,

she remarked:

A critic could no, more summarize Dreiser's limitations, as Mr. Mencken very ably does, and then call Dreiser an artist than he could call & n airship that didn't fly a successful airship. To prove that Dreiser gets h i s effects n ot by designing them but by living’-them, etc., etc., and then that he "manages" to produce works of art of unquestionable beauty and authority, is amusing. 3 -r But, however much aware the critics were of Dreiser's v

artistic deficiencies, they were becoming increasingly I “ Helen Thomas and Wilson Follett, Some Modern Novel­ ists: g Appreciations and Estimates (New York, iyiHTJ, p. 3bO Anonymous, "Dreiser en Passant," Bookman. XLVi (February, 1918), 655. 3 . Margaret Anderson, "Mr. Mencken's Truisms," Little Review, IV (January, 1918), 14.

81 c o n v i n c e d of tils historical' i m p o r t a n c e as a p i o n e e r o f realism.

Sherwood Anderson,

for example, w r o t e a g l o w i n g

tribute to Dreiser's pioneering for the Little Review which later became the preface to his Horses and M e m The fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of puri­ tan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone. 4 1. Plays of the natural and Supernatural The John Lane Company published Plays of the Natural and Supernatural in February, 1916.

The book contained

seven plays, only one of which, "'Old Ragpicker'", had not had earlier magazine publication. Smart S e t :

Four had appeared in

"The Girl in, the Coffin" (October, 1915),

"The Blue Sphere" (December, 1914), "Laughing Gas" (Febru­ ary, 1915), and "in the Dark" (January, 1915).

The Little

Review published "The Spring Recital" in December, 1915, and the International printed "The Light in the Window" in ------5-----January, 1916. Only one of the plays, "The Girl in the Coffin," was given stage production; it was performed by 4 Sherwood Anderson, "Dreiser," Little Review, m (April, 1916), 5. 5

Vrest Orton, Drelseranai A Book About His Books (New York, 1929) , p. £6, and Edward D« feeDon aid, a Blbl i oWritings of Theodore prelser (Philadelphia,

02. 6

the Washington Square Players In 1917.

Although a number

of favorable comments were made about Dreiser*a plays--

some of the reviewers called them "experlire ntal" In a 7 8 9 complimentary sense, "gripping,” "intense," "startling,” 10

and ’lartlstlc” whole,

--the reception accorded them was, on the •

negative.

T h e critics were concerned c h i e f l y with

what they called Dreiser’s philosophy of ugliness and the unsuitability of the playB for theatrical production. Unhappy about Dreiser’s avoidance of the ideal, the Nation reviewer remarked that n o ne of D r e i s e r ’s works the author

"understood

some of the g en u inely

sho wed

fi n e

that

products

of civlllzation--for instance, a'lady or a gentleman." He described Dreiser’s point of view In these skeptical and ironic terms: Mr. Dreiser does manage to express his curious gloomy bewilderment about the universe, his sense of the hollow hypocrisy of religion, his conviction of the impotence of ideas and omnipotence of animal and mechanistic forces, his somewhat sardonic satis­ faction in brutality, his aesthetic pleasure in what §

Dorothy Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free (New York7 1s 3k ), p. 309. Montrose J. Moses, "Plays by Theodore Dreiser," Book News Monthly, XXXIV (May, 1916), 415. Anonymous, "Plays and Pageants," American Review of Reviews. LIII (May, 1816), 634.

.

g

William Marlon Reedy, "Vifhat I ’ve Been Reading," Reedy’s Mirror, XXV (July 14, 1916), 463. 15

Anonymous, "New Books Received," Reedy’s Mirror, XXV (March 3, 1916),' 149. ------------ - a 1

he conceives to bo man's natural tendency to degradation. 11 *

*

The Independent1a reviewer, on the other hand, was much leas certain as to Dreiser's intentions in the plays. While conceding that the workmanship was "excellent," he asked rather plaintively, "But what is the author trying IS to do?n And JE1.L. Hencken seemed similarly unoertaln as to the fundamental meaning, for, while recognizing that the plays were "ingenious and some tins a extremely effective, 13 he found that their significance was "not great." But the chief topic of critical commentary was the theatrical ineffectivenesa of the plays.

Most of the

reviewers were of the opinion that, with the exoeptlon of "The Olrl in the Coffin," the plays were unsuitable for stage production.

Homer E. Woodbrldge, writing in the Dial,

said that "The Olrl in the Coffin" was the best play of the seven and would go admirably in the theater; he believed, too, that "'Old Hagpioker*" was actable.

The rest of them,

in his opinion, were closet drama, and he couched his objections to them in the following terms; The four plays of the supernatural ••.all make use of a device which, so far as I know, la new even ' in closet drama, and which is a source of,fatal weakness. From speech to speech, Mr. Dreiser 11Anonymous, "The Understanding of Mr. Dreiser," Hatlon, CIXI (October IB, 1916), 366. Ts

Anonymous, "Music and Drama,” Independent. LXXXVI (June 86, 1916), 664. ---------

1ST

■

„

H.L* Mencken, "Theodore Dreiser," The ghook of Recognition, edited by Edmund Wilson (Hew York, 1943),

84. shifts tils scene; with one speech we are in a comfortable drawing room; with the next on the street outside listening to the talk of passers-by. 14 Montrose J. Moses of the Book Mews Monthly agreed that only "The GUrl in the Coffin," possessing xinity of time and place, was suitable for stage production.

Ke believed

that Dreiser did not fully understand the technique of the theater and. that his plays were "moving pictures in dialogue form."

He cautioned that "the volume must not be taken 15 too serious ly as a contribution to the theatre.** 2.

A Hooaler Holiday

A Hoosier Holiday, published by John Lane in October, rs—

1916,

------------ **

is an account of an automobile trip that Dreiser i

took with Franklin Booth, the artist, to his native state of Indiana.

It is a compound of description, reminiscence,

and philosophy.

The critical notices of the book were short,

though generally favorable.

As in the case of the writer's

earlier autobiographical narrative, A Traveler at Forty, the reviewers put heavy emphasis on Dreiser's qualities and deficiencies of person.

Many of the conservative

critics were outraged by what they regarded as the author's egoism, impudence, and vulgarity. 1?

The Literary Digest, for

:-----------------------------------

Homer E. ftoodbrldge, "Some Experiments In American Drama,” Dial, LXII (May .17, 1917), 440. 15~" . Moses, op. cit., pp. 414-415. 16 McDonald, op. olt., p. 47.

85. j

example, found the first half of the book "mildly enter­ taining,'’ but could not stomaoh the "strain of morbid

17 egoism" that appeared in the "reminiscent stage." The Dial objeoted to Dreiser»s^"contemptuous superiority' to the innocent and simple joys of human existence,"

18

and Stuart Sherman remarked that Dreiser»s autobiographical narratives "entitle him to dispute with Mr. Vlereck for the title of vulgarest voice yet heard in American litera­

ls ture."

The Nation, as uaual, made the severest strictures,

declaring that Dreiser is his own favorite hero. He has now, however, exposed the*badly soiled linen of his relatives and friends with a brassy impudence which we can only trust meets with their entire approval.... He is outside all the conventions and decent loyalties of the society which he professes to represent. Aoparently he has never been inside „them.... The whole truth about our traveller is that he was an ill-bred, undisciplined child, and that he has never grown up. 20 But an entirely different picture of Dreiser1a character is to be found in the comments of the self-styled literary radical, Randolph Bourne, who said that A Hooaler Holiday revealed Dreiser “

I

?

;

Anonymous, "other Books worth W h i l e L i t e r a r y

Digest, LVI (January 26, 1918), 36.

—

Anonymous, "Travel in America," Dial, LXI (November 30, 1916), 474. 7 19 Stuart Sherman, "The Barbaric Naturalism of Theo­ dore' Dreiser," in Contemporary Essays, edited by William Thomsen Hastings '(ttew York, 1928), p . 350. 20 Anonymous, "Mr. Dreiser*s Favorite Hero," Nation,

CIV (March 8, 1917), 269.

;

86.

as a very human critic of very common human life, romantioally sensual and poetically realistic, with an artist's vision and a thick, warm'feeling for American life. 21 » t

H.L. Mencken was entirely in"accord with Bourne's obBervations, and in his own review of A Hooaler Holiday gave Dreiser a warm character reference.

Attacking the reviewers

of the Nation and the Dial and, in particular, the "elderly virgins of the newspapers,* he spoke- favorably of Dreiser's capacity for photographic and relentless observation, his insatiable curiosity, his keen zest for life as a spectacle, his comprehension of and sympathy for the poor- striving of human folks, his endless mulling of insoluble problems. 22 The perennial issue of Dreiser's style was raised again by the reviewers*

Opinion on the subject ranged widely.

The Literary Digest was discontented with the book's "five 23 hundred large and prolix pages," and the Independent, though commenting favorably on the "verisimilitude of description" to be found in the work, disliked the prolixity of detail and suggested that Dreiser omit the "incidental 24 ^ bad eggs in Rahway." The Nation's acerb review stressed Dreiser's bad grammars s i ------------------------------------------- : ----------------------------

Randolph Bourne, "The Art of Theodore Dreiser," History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays (New York.

iraoy;22p. iw.: ---

—

H.L. Mencken, "The Creed of a Novelist," Smart set, L (October, 1916), 141-142. 23 Anonymous, "Other Books Worth While," loc. cit. 24 -------Anonymous, "Travel at Home," Independent, LXXXVXIX (December 4, 1916), 409. ----------- -

)

It is very much.like a Dreiser novel without a plot-the same slice of life, the same sense of cutaneous contacts, the same aspersion of law and morality and religion, the same barnyard notions of "love,11 the same sentimental Caliban philosophising* the same genuflections before the mysteries of physics and chemistry, and the same difficu ities with English grammar* 86 On the other hand, the Book News Monthly was of the opinion that "Mr. Dreiser always writes well and he is at his best 86

in this book,"

and H.L* Mencken wrote enthusiastically

that "Save for passages In The T i t a n , A Hooaler Holiday marks the hightide of Dreiser's writing— that is, as sheer 27 writing." A third major topic of the critical comment^yy^bn A Hoosler Holiday was the question of the accuracy and excellence of the work as a description of the Middle west* 9* 1

Except for the Nation reviewer, who denied that Dreiser . 28, ' understood the "significance of the Middle West;" ' the critics were generally agreed that the report was^pj^id, charming, and truthful*

The Literary Digest commented on

the "many charming descriptions of brooks ,and streams and . 29 bridges and smoky towns," and Reedy's Mirror of st* 'Louis S5-------------------------------- — ---------------------Anonymous, "Mr. Dreiser's Favorite Hero," loc. cit* 26 ----------Anonymous, "Books for Christmas diving," Book News Monthly, XXXV (December, 1916), 148. lffenc.ken, "The Creed of a Novelist," op. cit., p. 142. ----Anonymous, "Mr. Dreiser's Favorite H e ro ," loo. cit. 29 --------Anonymous, "Other Books worth While," loc. cit.

28

8 8 •

dubbed the book "a vivid picture of the Middle west."

30

The Independent found it so accurate and revealing a document that it ^recommended the work to Engl ishmen Interested in visiting the United States: 9

One fancies It is the sort of book an Englishman would find enlightening for it sets down with unadorned faithfulness the minutest details of life and conversation as these are in the Middle West. 31 3* Free and Other Stories Dreiser's first eleven short stories were issued under the title of Free and,Q-ther Stories by Boni and Liveright in August, 1918.

Eight

of them had already

received magazine publication,, three of them as early as 1901.

"When the Century Was New’' was printed in Pear son's

Magazine for January, 1901; "McEwen of the Shining slave Makers” was published as "The Shining slave Makers" in Alnalee's Magazine in June, 1901; and " O l d Rogaum nnd His Theresa" came out in Heedy's Mirror on December 12, 1901*

Eight years later one of Dreiser's best-liked

stories, "The Cruise of the IdlewjId ," made its first appearance in the October issue o f the Bohemian Magazin e , and in April, 1916, the author's most frequently reprinted story, "The Lost Phoebe," appeared in the Century Magazine* Jk-■«* The remaining three stories wore printed during the last r

3 0 ---------------------------------------------------- ------------------- -

Anonymous, "New Books Received," Reedy's Mirror, XXV (November 24, 1916), 760. 31 Anonymous, "Travel at Home, n loc. cit.

89. two years of World War Is '’Married” In tine September, 1917, issue of Cosmopolitan; "The "Second Choice” in the February, 1918, number of the same magazine; and "Free” in the Saturday Evening Post for March 16, 1918. The collection * *■ was reviewed favorably but not widely,; and there was a large dissenting minority.

The critical notices were brief

and, on the whole, routine. Dreiser's philosophy, point of view-, or attitude toward his subject matter received the attention of a number of reviewers.

They described it as a passion for

life and truth and a great pity for human _beings caught . in the' toils of Inexplicable, impersonal forces.

Marty of

them felt that the absence of formal b eauty in Dreiser's short stories was fully compensated for by their authen­ ticity.

As William Marion Reedy put it, Dreiser

may not strive for beauty as some interpret it, but he does strive for truth and— well, we all know what Keats said of truth and beauty. 33 H.L. Mencken described Dreiser1s truth more specifically as being concerned with subtle and gradual changes of character: The thing that interests him most Is not a* deftly articulate series-of*events but a gradual trans­ formation of personality, and particularly a transformation that Involves the decay of integrity. 34 =~g

_

_

Orton, op« cit., p. 43, and McDonald, op. cit., p. 51. ------William Marion Reedy, "Dreiser's Short Stories," Reedy1a Mirror, XXVII (December 13, 1918), 641. 34 H.L. Mencken, "Dithyrambs Against Learning," Smart --- Set, LVI (November, 1918), 144. 33

A negative comment on Dreiser’s attitude toward his material came from the Dial, which saw nothing but drab, 'w

“>

in* •"

dull commonplace in the truth of the short stories; Mr. Theodore Dreiser may always be depended upon to c»how his readers what an essentially commonplace and fatuous thing, life is...,. The fact is trjnt Mr. Dreiser, in this book, has committed the ultimate blunder; in his worship of the trivial he has taken up the position of supposing that the mere "presentation" of the insignificant is enough to render a story "vital." Accordingly he insists upon eliminating from his situations and characters every hint of those incalculable factors which lend dramatic power to the lives of even the sorriest peasant and charwoman, 35 Many critics found fault with the stories on technical, chiefly stylistic, grounds.

Some-of them, like the reviewer

for the New York Timea, were uncertain whether the pieces 36 were short stories at all and called them "sketches." That the work was technically inadequste"was the firm conviction of the Dial critic, who said emphatically that Dreiser would "never master the difficult, heart-breaking 37 technique of the short story." Mencken himself liked the olece8 that were most closely "novelistic," believing that "Those of the stories that are more properly short stories in form are less successful."

He also saw sloven­

liness and carelessness in the writing, remarking that ^

------------------

Anonymous, "Free and Other Stories," Dial.LXV (December 28, 1918), &56Z ---36 Anonymous, "Free," New York Times Book Review, XXIII (September 22, 1918), 398. 5 ~ 37 Anonymous, "Free and Other stories," op. cit., p. 632. -------------------- -----

91. 38 Dreiser had "no respect for words as words,"

on opinion

in w.h.1ch the New York Post reviewer concurred, c all ing 39 the style "cheep." The Dial critic found the w r i t i n g journalistic and referred to Dreiser's

"unpardonable

uncouthness of style," pointing loftily to James Joyce's superior handling of forraj As an example of what real genius might have d o n e with such material as this book contains read the Dubliners of James Joyce. 40 Several of the stories received individual attention, ’

"""

and n^ne more frequently than "The Lost Phoebe," which 41 even the Dial reviewer liked. The w o r k was praised chiefly for its pathos and beauty," the American Review of Reviews characterizing it in these terms: The idyll of "The Lost Phoebe" is one of the best stories Droiser has ever written. Beauty, pathos, the loneliness of the immortal residuum of h u m a n affection, and an ineffaceable lustre of -spring, lift the simple tale of an old man who went searching for his dend wife, into the niche of our permanent affections. 42 The New York Post found "The Cruise of the Idlewlld" "oleasant and amusing" because of Dreiser's

"hard-working

o

*

•ini faithful genre paintiig," and gave "Will You V. 143-144. 39 Anonymous, untitled, New York"Po3t, Reotcmber 4, 1918. 40 ---Anonymous, "P’ree and other Stories," op. cit., p. 632. 41 7 : Ibid. 42 Anonymous, "Novels and short Stories," American Review of Reviews, LVIII (October, 1918), 445.

98 • Into My Parlor?" a qualified compliment, saying that the ,

.

«*>

story endft by disarming resentment and boredom. Without a spark of originality of idea .or setting, yet, by its patient, if vulgar verisimilitude, It manages to do what a great many n'ore sensitive and intensely imagined nieces do not. 43 O t h r stories that received favorable notice were "The 44 45 Second Choice," "Old Rogaum and His Theresa," and 46 "Free." Dreiser’s story about a lynching, "Nigger 47 Jeff," was liked by the New York Times but disliked by the American Review of Reviews, -which saw in it an example 48 of Dreiser’s "sickening realism." 4. The Hand of the Potter Dreiser’s book-length, four-act play, The Hand of the Potter, made its appearance in April, 1919, thr.ugh the title page and the cooyright notice read ''191b." ^ 49 r^oni and Liver ight were the publishers. The work 33

: ; .... ■ — Anonymous, untitled, New York Post, September 4,

•

1913. 44 Anonymous, "Free and Other Stories," oo. cit., p. 632 “ *-- 1 -Reedy, "Dreiser’s Short Stories," loc. cit. 46 -------Mencken, "Dithyrambs Against Learning," op. cit., o. 143.-------------------------------------------- -----47 Anonymous, "Free," loc. cit. 48 --------Anonymous, "Novels and Short Stories," loc. cit. 49 -------McDonald, op. cit., p. 53, but Orton, op. cit., r>. 45, claims thnt the work was published on September 20, 1919, and copyrighted on September 27, 1919. 45

93. elicited a negative critical response, not because,of the daring of its lurid subJect--tho downfall

of a sex-

crazed men who liked to rape small girls--but -because of wh'at the critics regarded as serious faults of craftsmanship. On the subject of the theme there was, as a matter of fact, a great deal of positive commentary.

The Nation,

for examole, after years of belaboring Dreiser for his innornlit.v

and his mechanistic view of man, remarked,

astonishingly, ing before

that "ethical frontiers a r e . •.subtly shift­

our eyes,” and saw high significance in the

life oroblem of the criminal Berchansky as Dreiser presents

his struggle against his ghastly infirmity is not wholly ignoble; his guilt is merged into social and, in the last analysis, into cosmic forces; his importance is in his character as representative of the tra-gic consequences of ignorance, poverty, and oppression. 50 Reviewing the olay in 1921, when it was produced by the 51 Provincetown Players for a run of three weejcs, Ludwig Lewisohn likewise put the work in an ethical context, saw it as invalidating absolute moral judgments.

Dreiser,

he said, substitutes the concept of tragic guilt for that of sin; he sees that guilt arises out of the lifeprocess itself and selects its guilty but sinless victim.... It la Isadora Berchansky*8 undeserved punishment that he Is what he is. The tragic 5 0 ---------------------------------

: -----------

Aiionymous, rtTragedy and Trifles," Nation.CIX (Seotember 6, 1919), 340.. 51 Dudley, op. clt., p. 390.

guilt that he must bear Issues .from implacable ond anterior sources. Why should we strike at him because the hand of the potter slipped? 52 Less convinced of the adequacy of Dreiser*s handling of the ethical problem, however, was Jesse Lee Bennett of the New Republic, who saw great naivete in the drama and a ’’childish, incomplete skepticism."

he described Dreiser*

philosophical ambivalence in these perceptive terms: Mr. Dreiser depicts the incomplete skeptics who believe in nothing--very long. And--tru9ting and kindly hearted, hopeful and with bits of orthodoxy remaining— he cannot bring himself to believe that the Architect of the universe has died/ He insists that life must have a meaning, a meaning which we can understand. Since he cannot find the meaning, hie despairs in multitudinous oages. 53 r>*.

But the bluntest disapproval of the thematic materials of the play came from the reviewer for the Outlook, who said that It was a tragedy that any writer of Theodore Dxeiser*s technical attainments should be so warped in his outlook as to regard the theme of this olay as a fit subject for anything except a medical treatise. 54 Most ol the critics, however, disagreed with the Outlook reviewer as to Dreiser's "technical attainments." The biggest guns in their arsenal were fired at the structural deficiencies of The Hand of the Potter. m

The

:----------------------------------

Ludwig Lewisohn, "Year’s End," Nation, CXIII (December 28, 1921), 763. 53 Jesse Lee Bennett, "The Incomplete Skeptic," New Republic, XX (October 8, 1919), 297-298. — ; -----------Anonymous, "The Hand of the Potter," Outlook, CXXIII (October 1, 1919), 191.

play was badly organized, they aaid, and the fourth act, in particular, was inaptly handled and could be lopped off.

Moreover,

repetitious,

the numerous soliloquies were old-fashioned

and boring.

This was the opinion, for example

of George Jean Nathan, one of the more influential dramatic critics of the time.

He found the structure of the play

"disjointed and awkward" and the long monologues of Berchansky "repetitious and t i r e s o m e T h e r e

were so many

melodramatic, arbitrarily motivated scenes in the play that Nathan accused Dreiser of writing with the box-office in mind s For that Dreiser wrote the play with a Rolls-Royce in view seems to me as certain as that he writes his novels with nothing in view but the novels. 55 The Dial reviewer made similar strictures on Dreiser's mismanagement of plot structure, declaring that The Hand of the Potter should suffice, by its incredibly inept construction, to remove the last doubt whether its author is capable of mastering any existing technique... • Ch CJ has squandered his material in a sensational plot that is as clumsy melodrama as it is arbitrary tragedy. 56 In like fashion the Nation found the structure of the play "a little clumsy, a little awkward and helpless" and the ------- 5 S -----------: ---------------------------: ---------- : -------------------------

George Jean Nathan, "Dreiser's' Play--and Some Others," Smart Set, LX (October, i919), 152. 56 ; Anonymous, "The Hand of the Potter," Dial, LXVII (September 20, 1919), 276, ~ e

57

'fourth act "plainly unnecessary."

Jesse Lee Bennett of

the New Republic objected to the last act on the ground that the play falls of beipg an authentic work of art because the writer has to editorialize in his last act through the medium of two reporters who drag In Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebing and moralize in lengthydialogue. Any French writer of the first rank would have made the thing as impersonal as a death certificate, and so have enhanced the indictment of ll^e. 58 The general prolixity of the play received the attention of the reviewer of the New York Times, who, found The Hand of the Potter unsuitable for the theater because Dreiser had written it

-

with the spendthrift novelists ignorance of the dramatist *s enforced economy of means, relying lazily op long apd archaic soliloquies to make himself clear, and indulging in his last act in such a symposium of windy and antlclimactlc discussion as an ol'der and better playwright named Shaw would have carefully put first and called a preface. 59 5. Twelve Men Dreiser's next book, Twelve Men, is a collection

of character sketches, the most famous of which is the portrait of the author's song-wrltlng brother, Paul Dresser.

The work was published by Bonl and Liveright

in the same month as The Hand of the Potter— Aprll» 1919. ----------------

5*r--------------58

3

—

-----

n

"

---------------------------------------------

Anonymous, "Tragedy and Trifles," loc. clt. — r --Bennett, op. clt., p. 298.

59 Anonymous, "Hand of the potter," Hew York Times Book Review, October 26, 1919, p. 598. — —

I

97. Half of the sketches had already appeared in the pages of popular magazines, the earliest— "N.L.S.''”--in Harper 1s 'Weekly for Deoemher 14^ 1901.

Ainalee'a Magazine published.

"A Doer of the Word” in June. 1902; the Era Magazine printed 11A Mayor and His People” in June. 1903; McClure1a Magazine brought out "A True Patriarch” in December. 1907, and ”The Mighty Rourke” in May, 1911; and Harger*8 Magazine published "The Country Doctor" in July, 1918.

Critical opinion was

preponderantly in favor of the collection, but there was a large and emphatic minority which attacked the book on philosophical and formal grounds.

The reviewers singled 61

out the following sketches for praises "My Brother Paul," 62 "Culhane," "The Village Feudists," and "The Country 65 Doctor.” There was little controversy as to whether Dreiser saw clearly and accurately, whether his picture of Ameri­ cans and American life corresponded with the actuality. The critics were agreed that the author was honest and astonishingly accurate in his notations as to how Amerir

The Boston Transcript,

53-------------------------

1 : -,

-

cans talked, looked, and thought.

Orton, op. clt., p._46, and McDonald, op. clt., p. 55.

61 Anonymous, "A Baker's Dozen of Dreiserlan portraits,” Current Opinion. LXVI (June, 1919), 569i 6 ^ 1 •■ Anonymous, "Twelve Men," New York Times Book Review. * -- April 27, 1919, p. 254. : 65 Anonymous, "Novels, Foreign and American,” American Review of Reviews, LIX (June, 1919), 671•

98. for example, referred to Dreiser's "very keen •yes" and

64 "very alert mind,"

and the Nation spoke enthusiastically

of his equipment for realism:. His powers of observation and of. vicarious experience are of the first order..•• r%he sketched .give one a deep sense of American llfe--lts feverish energy, its crude force alternating With sentimentality, its kindliness and its hostility to distinction and veracity. 66 In a generally lukewarm review the New Republic compli­ mented Dreiser on being "a conscientious and competent 66 observer," and Floyd Dell, writing in the Liberator, nqted that the lives with which Dreiser was concerned in

67 his book were "recorded with impressive fidelity." Where the critics disagreed was chiefly in the matter of Dreiser's interpretation or lack of interpretation of the raw facts of American life,

some of them insisted that

Dreiser presented unvarnished reality, fact without gloss, and were pleased by his ability to d o so; others recog­ nized the author's competence in drawing naturally but were disturbed by the absence of point of view; and a third 8

group sav much interpretation in the pages of the book and complimented Dreiser on his avoidance of stark, unimagina----- 33--------- -------------------- ---------------------------

Quoted by Anonymous, "a Baker's Dozen of Drelserlan Portraits," loc. clt. 65 Anonymous, "American Types," Nation, CVIII (May 24, --- -1919), 838. 66

M.A., "Theodore Dreiser," New Republic, XIX (May 3, 1919), 30. — 67 Floyd Dell, "American Fiction," Liberator, II (September, 1919), 46. — —

tive realism.

To the first camp belonged the Puritan-

baiting H.L. Menc-ken, who said: fTwolye Merfl projects human existence as the moat brilliant or spectacles, thrilling, amazing, often downright appalling, but ne¥er hortatory, never a moral tale. 68 Mencken’s point of view was shared by Floyd Dell, who wrote Mr. Dreiser is a naturalist, but he is also a writer of extraordinary power. He does not arrange facts, he does not eveTn apparently select among them, except unconsciously•••. Whatever Mr. Dreiserto Intellectual convictions about the riddle of exls- ' tenoe may be, he is in love with life and his books reveal his profound unquestioning surrender to its dark allurement. 69 The Nation reviewer, too, found little interpretation or philosophy in the sketches and was not too unhappy over the discovery:

His personal philosophy may be negligible, but so was Balsac’s. His concrete subject-matter is marvelously varied and abundant. And the concrete, if it be adequately represented, points symbolically, as Qoethe said, to the totality and the meaning of things. 70 But the New Republic was disturbed by the ’’general and real, lack of philosophy" in the book and saw Dreiser assuffering for his loonoclastlcism, for his effort to aohiove full disbelief.

The reviewer described him as

an observer galled and limited in range by strands of old repressions, angered to find himself bound by an inculcated morality in an age when others 35----------------------------- : ------

;--------- -

H.L.Mencken, "Novels* Chiefly Bad," smart Set, LIX (August, 1919), 141. 69

70 »'

Dell, loo. clt. * Anonymous, "American Types," loo, clt.

100.

have fought free. He la constantly at war against his Puritanical instincts, with the result that he la never sure of his own boundaries. He can assume no consistent attitude, can put no coherence into the way. he says hia say about American life. 71 in direct contradiction to the views of all these critics, however, was the opinion of the North American Review, which found much meaningful interpretation in the sketches and liked it: And the stories are not-- thank Heaven I— realistic in the sense of being tediously and ngqges tlcally true to fact: they do not tell at merolless length what may be known just as well through epitome, through sample, or through suggestion. Nor do they contain mer ely a grain of imagination hidden away in a wagon-load, of hay, wood, atubble of experience. On the contrary in these tales Mr. Dreiser's imagination actively inter­ prets life, Interprets it with that reserve, that skepticism whlch--rather than delight in the raw material of human existence— is the mark of intelli­ gent realism. 72 There was much greater agreement, though negative In i

bearing, in regard to the author's technique.

As usual,

the reviewers castigated Dreiser for his overelaboration of detail, his addiction to verbiage, and ills stylistic gaucheries.

The New Republic noted the lack of finish and

style in the sketches and said that nA8 an experiment in 73 literary form the book is only- a passable success." The Nation seemed disturbed by the "masses of blunt and lumber­ ing verbiage" and remarked that "in the narrower sense" 7 r v

.----------------------------------

M.A. , loo. cit. 72 Anonymous, "Twelve Men," North American Review. GCXX (October; 1919), B6a. 73 U.A., loo. clt.

101. V* t

Dreiser "cannot write.

No man of equal power has ever

74

written so poorly."

Mencken, too, conceded that "The

75

workmanship, as always, is sometimes distressingly crude." And the New York Times found Dreiserlan amplification at the root of the failure bf Twelve Men: So far as, one oan discover, Mr. Dreiser’s predominat­ ing theory in writing these studies of Twelve Men . would seem to have been simply this: if it is well to say a thing once, it is better to say it twenty times. lie elaborates, and explains, and expounds, and describes every detail of every one of these twelve men, illustrating his explanations and descriptions .with anecdotes and more or less philosophical comments; ,-and when ho has finished, his characters have about ,ss much life as so many waxen figures set up in the showcase window of a department store. 76 6• Hey Hub-a-Pub-pub Bonl and Liveright published twenty essays by Dreiser under the title of Hey Rub-a-Dub-pub in December, 1919, but the year given on the title page and in the copyright notice is 1920.

The reviews, of course, appeared in 1920.

Five of the essays had been published previously, two of them in the Seven Arts Magazine in 1917* "Life, Art and America" in the February^lssue and "The Dream" in July.

The Nation printed the title essay on August 30, 1919, and Haldeman— Jtilius of Gtirard, Kansas, brought out "Home ------------------s -73 --------- !

:

Anonymous, "American Types," loc. clt. 75 Mencken, "Novels, Chiefly Bad," loo, olt. 76

'

Anonymous, "Twelve Men," New York Times Book Keview Aoril 27, 1919, p. 234.

102*

Aspects of the National Character" and "Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse" in Little Blue Book No. 661 (date 77 unspecified). The subtitle o f Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub reads "A Book of the Mystery and Terror and Wonder of Life," but the skeptical critics found very little of those qualities in the writing, for the reaction was overwhelm­ ingly negative.

The reviewers-characterized Dreiser's

ideas as dull, commonplace, and contradictory, and his style of presentation as insipid, humorless, and inarticu­ late.

Only two of the essays were singled out for special

mentions "The Court of progress" was praised by Benjamin 78 De Cas seres as a "tremendous piece of satiric buffoonery,” and "Some Aspects of the National Character" was described

79 as "brilliant" by Paul Elmer More in the Review.

The dull, platitudinous philosophizing of the essays was the butt of many critical attacks.

Benjamin De

Cas seres of the New York Times found the "endless common* Diaces of the book laughable because of Dreiser *s air "of having discovered something new" and characterized ‘*A,

77------------------------------------------- : -------McDonald, op. clt., p. 57, gives the date of publi­ cation of the collection as December, 1919, but Orton, op. clt., p. 47, says that the actual publication date was January 15, 1920. As the date of Little Blue Book No. 661 is not given, it may be that the two essays by Dreiser were reprinted from Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub and may not represent original publication. 78 Benjamin De Casseres, "Mr. Dreiser Talks of Many Things," New York Times Book Review, April 11. 1920. d . 167. 79 ' Paul Elmer More, "Theodore Dreiser, Philosopher," Review, II (April, 17, 1920), 380. .

103. the “eternal truths" of the essays in the*e amusing terms: ■

9

^Dreiser] finds that the reformer in all ages is a reaction against the status quo; that the American financier is necessary at his worst; that nothing is true but change; that nature and roan are necessarily hypocrites in the struggle for existence; that life is tragic; that the introspective being whoiapenda the whole day looking at the Woolworth Tower from his window in Bayonne will never get anywhere. 80 The Dial, too, objected to the "lengthy passages in w/.ich ^Dreiser] reiterates what every one concedes."

81

But the

chief attack was made on the ground that the novelist’s philosophy was confused and contradictory,

that it was a

melange .of irreconcilable points of view which only a person extremely innocent of dialectic could hold, together in the same head.

The strongest attack was delivered by

the humanist Paul Elmer More, who took the trouble to read the book carefully, analyzed its argument, and emerged with a significant set of contradictions: This, I should say, is the distinguishing note of the book, this oscillation between a theory of evolution which sees no progress save by the survival of the rapaciously strong and a humanitarian feeling of solidarity with the masses who are exploited in the process.••• Mr. Dreiser never seems to guess that the f&bunderlngs of democracy--as democracy now is— are the sure result of just this polarization of the 'popular temperament between Nietzscheanism and humanitarianism of which he himnelf is a conspicuous example. Nor does he see that this swaying from one extreme of emotion to the other follows naturally on the denial of all those laws of moral accountability ^ Q1

,

—

De Casseres, loc. clt.

Anonymous, "Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub," Dial, LXIX (Septem­ ber, 1920), 320. --------------- -----

104, -✓and the abrogation of all those spiritual values which we sum up under the name of religion. 82 A less carefully considered but equally emohatic conviction as

to D r e i s e r ’s philosophical

confusion w a s voiced by

Francis Hackett in the Hew Republic, who saw Dreiser's contradictions as illustrative of the “after-effects of

**

Catholicism" :

The truth seeras to be that Theodore preiser 's mind is formless, chaotic, bewildered.... In short, our leading novelist is intellectually in serious con­ fusion, and .needs a deeper philosophy than— hey rub-a-dub-dub. 83 V a n Wyck Brooks,

reviewing the

bo*ek for t h e

Nation,

described D r e i s e r as "a p e r p l e x e d and w e a r y by

the kaleidoscope in which h e

child, dazzled

is able t o discern no

thread of meaning." and saw a purely emotional basis for a l l of the novelist's

ideas,

v e r y much as i f Dreiser’s

soul were Jennie Gerhardt's: One thing is certain: he is fnr more interesting as the painter of Jennie’s life than as the recorder of Jennie’s views. 84 H.L. Mencken, writing his first wholly negative review of a book by Dreiser, was as dissatisfied as his reviewing colleagues w i t h the novelist's handling of

ideas*

My feeling is that Dreiser is no more fitted to do a book of speculation than Joseph Conrad, say, is g2

------------------

More,

83

loc.

^

cit.

.

Francis Hnekett,

"Mystery, Terror a n d

Confusion,"

New Republic, XXII (May 26, 1920), 423-424.

51--—

Van wyck Brooks,"rtocording to Dreiser, H Nation, CX (May 1, 1920), 595-596, ------

104, and tihe abrogation of all those spiritual\ a l u e s which we sum up under the name of religion. 82 A

less carefully considered but equally emohatic conviction

as to Dreiser’s philosophical confusion.was voiced by Francis Hackett in the Hew Republic, who saw Dreiser's contradictions as illustrative of the “after-effects of Catholi oiam"s The truth seems to be that Theodore Dreiser’s mind is formless, chaotic, bewildered.... In short, our leading novelist is Intellectually in serious con­ fusion, and needs a deeper philosophy than— h e y rub-a-dub-dub. 83 Van Wyck Brooks, reviewing the book for the Nation, described Dreiser as "a perplexed and weary child, dazzled /

by the kaleidoscope in which he is able to discern no thread of_meaning." and saw a purely emotional basis for all of the novelist's ideas, very much as If Dreiser’s soul were Jennie Gerhardt'ss One thing is certains he is for more interesting as the painter of Jennie’s life than as the recorder of Jennie's views. 84 H.L. Mencken, writing his first wholly negative review of a book by Dreiser, was as dissatisfied as his reviewing colleagues with the novelist’s handling of ideas; My feeling is that Dreiser is no more fitted to do a book of speculation than Joseph Conrad, say, Is

55------------- ; ------------------------------------More, loc. clt. 83 Francis Hackett, "Mystery, Terror and Confusion," »aw Republic, XXII (May 26, 1920), 423-424.

51----

Van Wyck Brooks,"According to Dreiser," Nation, CX (May 1, 1920j, 595-596.-------------------------- ------

106. V

fitted to do a college yell. His talents simply do not lie in that direction. He lacks tjne mental agility, the Insinuating suavity, the necessary capacity for romanticizing a syllogism. 85 The Catholic World dismissed the collection of essays and its heretical views in much more forthright fashion;

it

characterized Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub as "this awful book" in which Dreiser "states so many things that are not so, and he states them so arrogantly and cocksuredly •" *

B

■

J

Vhat the

e

reviewer for the Catholic world found particularly objection able was that Dreiser "denies the existence of ood tne Creator," maligns Christians as hypocrites, questions the Ten, Commandments, and considers American democracy a 86 failure. Pew reviewers had anything favorable to say about Dreiser’s ideas, but on© should mention the critics for the Freeman and Reedy’s Mirror, both liberal papers.

The

anonymous reviewer for Reedy’s Mirror characterized the essays as "caustic expressions" of Dreiser’s "mature beliefs and theories about life in general and Americans 87 in particular," and th© Freeman called the collection "the first summing up of Dreiser lan philosophy" and said that it "tremendously confirms the interest of ['the]

55------ : -----------

: -------------- : ---

H.L. Mencken, "More Notes from a Diary," Smart Set, LXII (May, 1920), 1-39. 86 Anonymous, "Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dut>,** Catholic World, CXI (May, 1920), 2 6 0 - 2 6 " ------------------ -------------87 Anonymous, "Hew Books Received," Reedy’s Mirror, XXrX (May 27, 1920), 422. --------------

ioe. novels."

The d b per observed that

Here we have the wenry Titan at rest, and the spectacle is an impressive one; his depth of feeling, his air of ptizzled detachment, his brooding determination, his instructive tenderness, his Inexhaustible lust of life find a so'Tt of rationale in these pages. 88 The Dreiserian style received the customary brickbats, many of them sharply aimed.

The comment of Benjamin D©

Casaeres was the^ittiest of the lot:

"[Dreiser]

Inarticulate Walt W h i t m a n . ... He Is a va3t, clumsy

is an shadow

89 moving in words unrealized."

Francis Hackett noted 90 that the writing was graceless and humorless, and the

reviewer for the Dial remarked, impatiently, that Dreiser - seta down his findings with all a greengrocer’s assiduity, and not a little of a greengrocer’s unimaginative painstaking. 91 Mencken conceded that the book was solemn stuff, with never a leer of beauty in it.... Once or twice It grows a bit lyrical; 6nce or twice it rises to the imaginatively grotesque. 92 And the Catholic World found the whole work "dull and drab

93 In the extreme" and without a "saving sense of humor." ;----------Anonymous, "some New Books," Freeman, I (March 17, 1920), 23.---------------------------- ------89 De Casseres, loc. cit. 90 Hackett, op. cit., p. 423. Bg

91

Anonymous, "Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” Dial, LXIX (Septem­ ber, 1920), 320. -----------------92 * ^ Mencken, "More Notes from a Diary," loc. cit. 93 -------- Anonymous, "Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub,” Catholic world. CXI (May, 1920), 26tM?61.----7---------------

107*

IV.

The High points An American Tragedy

During the early years of the Jazz Age, 1921-1926, Theodore Dreiser’s literary reputation was established at its high point; the prevailing opinion was that the mid-Westerner was one of the few outstanding novelists of the time, and possibly the best*

With five important if

controversial novels and seven collections of short stories, sketches, plays, and essays already to his credit, Dreiser published three more works during the period under considers tion which contributed notably to the fixing of favorable critical attitudes toward him:

A Book About Myself, an

autobiographical narrative of Dreiser's years as a news­ paperman; The Color of a Great City, a collection of sketches about New York City; and An American Tragedy, his brooding, powerful, and complex study of a young murderer whose crime Is set In a carefully explored context of conflicting social ideals and realities.

The novel

produced so marked an impression on critics and public alike that for years afterward Dreiser was spoken of with respect even by hia dnemies*

It was the first novel by

Dreiser to hit the best-seller lists; it appeared In Bookman postings in 1926, 1927, and 1928*

One of D r e i s e r ’s

loa, most

outspoken detractors,

Stua rt Sherman,

reversed h i s

judgment of the novelist In an Important review of An A m e r i ­ can .Tragedy that appeared In 1926 In the New Y o r k HeraIdTribune. )

But the making of Dreiser*s reputation during these years was not wholly a matter of intrinsic merits finally recognized; it was In large part the result of changes in national literary taste and, more irnportantly, in social and ethical standards.

These changes, noticeable as early

as 1907, were tremendously accelerated by the disillusion­ ment a of World War I, which led to increasing skepticism with regard to established values in all fields.

The newly

"lost" generation contributed to the development of a national self-consciousness whose chief preoccupation became the obvious discrepancy between social pretension and social fact, of which Prohibition was the principal sign. talk

In an atmosphere of bath-tub gin and hard-boiled borrowed

from Chicago gangsters the flappers and

vamps of the early 1920*s broke through the sexual taboos that had hemmed in Sister Carrie and became the subject of a freer-fictional portraiture without customary genu­ flections to moral authority.

The clergy was rapidly losing

its prestige, while science and technology were assuming increasing control over the imagination of the average —

—

-

j

------------------------ .----------------------- .---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Stuart Sherman, "Mr. Dreiser in.Tragic Realism," New York Herald-Tribune Books J January 3, 1926, p. 1. Reprinted In a u t h o r ^ The Main Stream (New York, 1927), on. 134-144.

V

j

American, with the result that fundamental questioning of ethical and social assumptions was more generally within the scope of the common reader than ever before. Generally speaking, the university professors of litera­ ture and the humanists were still violently antl-Dreiserian. Conservative in taste and in social and political commit­ ments, they were offended by Dreiser's style and by his mechanistic ohllosophy.

Their attitude was best expressed

by the silence of William Lyon Phelps, who failed to make of

mention of the writer in his critical study of contemporary 2 American letters* When the historians and text-book writers did make reference to Dreiser, they attacked him for his crudity of style, his psychology of violence, and the indelicacy of his taste.

For example, T.E. Rankin

of the University of Michigan declared that Dreiser violated "reticences" in his "Jennie Gebhardt" ^sicj ~ ~ and -------- 3 -----------

should go to school to George Eliot.

Illustrative of the

prevailing academic boycott of Dreiser was the fact that in 1921 the Cambridge History of American Literature omitted all reference to him as a novelist, giving him

4 brief mention as the writer of a one-act play. ----- g---------------------“ T--------- -- --------------------Commented on by H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Second Series (New York, 1920), p. 23. ----------------------3 „ T.E. Rankin, American writers of the Present Day. 1890 to 1920 (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 10£o), p. 61. ;

4 The Cambridge History of American Literature, edited by William P. Trere and others (New York, 1921), III, . 298. ^

And there was some war-engendered racist criticism of Dreiser, still.

The proponents of the old^ American way of

life, predicated’on Puritan and Anglo-Saxon mod.es of behavior, found Dreiser's way of looking at America unbearably foreign. Mary Austin expressed this attitude in the Bookman,as follows i That our Baltic and Slavic stock will have another way than the English of experiencing love, and possibly a more limited way, is inevitable... • All of Theodore Dreiser's people love like the peasants in a novel by Bojer or Knut Hamsun. His women have a cowlike complaisance such as can be found only in peoples who have lived for generations close to the soil; his men in their amours resemble those savages who can. count five only, on the fingers of one hand.... So "tho Genius” and "the Financier" pass from Susan to Jane and from Jane to Maria, and so to Edith and ISnily, by nearly identical progressions, learning nothing at all and teaching their author very little. 5 Equally racist in character was the criticism of Gertrude Atherton, a novelist in her own right, who felt that American 1iterature was being debased by round-headed Eurooeans of Alpine stock: The Alpine influence in American letters has never been so signally demonstrated as in the large and increasing number of mldwestern novels that have achieved so remarkable a notoriety during the last year and a half.... Every character in them all is a round-head, brachycephallc, Alpine. Not a real American could be found among them with a magnify­ ing g l a s s . ... For all I know everyone of these writers may be of the feest American stock, Nordics (although I have my doubts). But they have been democratized and debased by their round-head environment. Their Nordic mental inheritance, if not their physical Mary Austin, "Sex.in American Literature," Bookmanj LVII (June, 1985), 388. i ------

6 attribute, has been f,bred out*” The only c r i t i c who felt t h a t this s o r t of a t t a c k on D r e i s e r

and o t h e r w r i t e r s needed a r e p l y wa s H.L. M e n c k e n , who, both in h i s

Prejudicess

"Nordic B l o n d

S e c o n d Series a n d

Art" for S m a r t

Set, t o o k

in a n article

on

issue w i t h racist

.7 criticism. But the opinions of t h e conservative university men, the humanists,

and the racists represented the point of

view of a diminishing, if influential, minority.

General

commentary on Dreiser during 1921-1925 was favorable, and there were many positive revaluations of earlier works by the author, either in connection with new books reviewed or as part of critiques on the contemporary American novel. Apart from Slater Carrie, w h o s e reputation was high, as has already been pointed out in Section I

of this disserta­

tion, the works that received, warmest notice in the early 1 9 2 0 *s were Jennie Gerhardt, Twelve M o n , The Financier, and The T i t a n .

There was general agreement that Hey Rub-

a-Dub-Dub was a dismal failure; Matthews Manly,

in the words of John

the work revealed Dreiser*a "failure to

think out a point of view,-which is a fundamental weakness." g

-

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

G e r t r u d e Atherton, "The A l p i n e s c h o o l B o o k m a n , LV (March, 1922), 31. ij-

of

Fiction,"

H.L. Mencken, "Nordic Bl ond Art," Smart Set, LXXI (May, 1923), 138-144. © 8 John Matthews Manly and Bdlth Rickert, Contemporary American Literature (New York, 1922), p. 43.

a

112. Other works that.wero reduced in stature and importance wer© The "Genius", The Hand of the po t t e r , Free .and Other Stories, and the non-fictional narratives, A lloosier holiday

L

Titan, ~ Sister Jennie Gerhardt were ’’faithful I2 - Carrie, and --------------mirrors." He liked The, Titan better than The Financier and called The "genius" vivid and dramatic.

Though he spoke

favorably of Twelve Men, his attitude toward Free and Other Storlea was lukewarm, and he disliked the fourth act of The Hand of the Potter, calling it unnecessary.

lie felt

that moralizing comments detracted from the effectiveness of much of Dreiser’s work, including The Financier and Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub, and Bporoved of Dreiser's biologizing on the ground that, after all, the biological view of man was correct.

His considered opinion was that Dreiser was "one 13

of the authentic geniuses American literature has produced." A Book About Myself The first new work by Dreiser to make its appearance during the period under consideration was A Book About Myself, an autobiographical narrative covering Dreiser's experiences as a newspaper reporter, when he was nineteen ------- 1 5 --------------------- ------------------------------------------- -

Burton Rascoe, Theodore Dreiser (New York, 1925). p. 7.

'

13 / Ibid., p. 68.

V* \

to twenty-four years old* •0

The book was to .form part of a

i

four-volume autobiographical work to be entitled A History of Myself, but.only one other segment of the project, pawn. was ever completed.

A Book About Myself was published in

14

—

November, 1922, by Boni and Liveright reasonably warm critical response*

and achieved a

Most of the favorable

commentary stressed Dreiser's accurate descriptions of a reoorter's life and the excellent presentation of American realities and the forces that constellated them.

Edmund

Lester Pearson, writing in the Independent, emphasized the fact that a clear nicture of New York in 1893 emerges 15 from the narrative. The New York Times described the work as realistic and remarked that autobiography of Drei­ ser's sort was justified if it clarified one’s understand­ ing of national forces and national needs,

while conced­

ing that the book was perhaps too minute in its reporting of five years of the author's life, the Times reviewer nevertheless recognized that the work was "important," for "in it is seen in the making a novelist who has brought 16. Americans face to face with vital facta and vital forces." One of the best reviews of the book, written for the New

York Evening Post Literary Review by Joseph wood Krutch, n

-----------

Edward D. McDonald, A Bibliography of the Writings of Theodore Dreiser (Philadel&hia, 1928}, p • bW. 15 Edmund Lester Pearson, "New Books and Old," Indepen­ dent, CX CJanuary 6, 1923), 25. 16 : ^ Anonymous, "Theodore Dreiser Looking Backward," New York Times Book Review, December 24, 1922, p. 14.

/

•

116.

described the work as a stirring account of a young reporter's life; more generally, it is ah Intensely real picture of the progress of a rather brutal man through a brutal world. 17 At tacking Stuart Sherman's objection to Dreiser's sion that man was

conolu-

"a p re d atory animal,'* Krutch remarked:

w>

Your average man believes it and Dreiser believes it. The difference between the two is simply that ..one recognizes the incompatibility between what may be called the editorial and news columns of daily life and the other does not. 18 Being an autobiographical work, A Book About Myself inevitably elicited considerable comment on Dreiser’s ft personal qualities, both favorable and unfavorable.

One

of the pastimes of the critics was to attempt to chart the range of the author's mind and genius from whatever evidence they could discover in the words of the text. Kdith Leighton of the Bookman saw insight and understand­ ing in the work and declared that Dreiser's "is a b i g personality, and so, by the laws of literary equation, 19 his is a big book." Ludwig Lewisohn was struck by Dreiser's originality, called him a "maker,“ and described his vision in these flattering terms; He sees the world and the universe for himself. He is detached and fearless and^terribly honest and. T r ---------------------------------------7 Joseph Wood Krutch, "Dreiser’s Vtander jahre," New York Evening Post Literary Rev ie w, January 20, 1923, p. 396 18

...

Ibid. 19* ’ Edith Leighton, "Literary Confessions," Bookman, LVI (December, 1982), 498. --------

117. terribly unyielding. He mokes no compromises. There is his vision. This vision is himself. 20 r ' • .i Theodore Medowsky, a reviewer for the Forum, was impressed by Dreiser's modesty: Unlike the autobiography of a distinguished dramatic writer published recently, Dreiser does not take the attitude, “Well, now I am a great wan, and if any­ thing I did in my youth seems menial, you should remember it was necessary as a step to the heights." fie is genuinely modest and so does not have to apologize for overy incident he relates. 21 But Richard Le Gallienne, writing in the Literary, Digest International Book Review, questioned whether Dreiser was "important enough as a novelist to justify him in thinking that the world has 'awaited* froni him such confessions as these,“ and saw in his autobiography a symbol of the outof-hand brashness and vulgarity of the democratized lower classes: If this be regarded as egotism in Mr. Dreiser, it must be advanced on his behalf that he is nowise singular in this respect. In an age which has so democratized the nvanity-boxH that servant girls "makeup" in public, and powder their noses as they wearily hand round our plates at dinner, anything like personal reticence suggests poorness of spirit. 22 A similarly supercilious review of the book was'written for the Independent by L.W. Boynton, who nevertheless complimented Dreiser on the excellence of his eyesight: -------------------------------gff------------------------------------:

Ludwig Lewisohn, "Portrait of an Artist," Nation, GXVI (April 4, 1923), 394. 21 Theodore Madowsky, **A Book About Myself," Forum, LXIX (April, 1923), 1473-1474. ----22 Richard Le Gallienne, "Certain Literary sins of Theodore Dreiser," Literary Digest International Book Review, I (February'; T ^ T , 16-11. ------- -----

Dreiser’s great powers of observation and description are of course fully shown in these pages. His slow and not always distinct drone is broken by moments of extra ordinary brilliancy; and now and then the Herr Doktor fairly bursts into song. 23 *

**4

The Dial reviewer saw Dreiser as motivated largely by his

emotions and was skeptical of the effectiveness of the emotional approach to aiitobiographyr CDreiseri feels deeply;-too deeply to seem quite mature intellectually. This may be just as well when , he is purely the creative artist; when, however, he is reviewing his own life in' the capacity of inter­ preter and, ideally at least, of critic, it is decidedly detrimental. 24 Anr’ the Catholic world boggled at D r e i s e r ’s truth-tellin^j

There are certain things which, under certain circum­ stances, (the literary artist^ must not say. Authori­ ties differ as to the point at which the line is to be drawn, but the principle holds.... Mr. Dreiser has certainly been conspicuous in the past among those who h ave pressed on most Industriously toward the goal of absolute truth-telling, very little hampered from within, and seemingly very little deterred from without. It is a comfort to record, therefore, that his candor does but small damage in this volume. 25 On the matter of Dreiser's

stylistic offenses the

critics had much to say, as usual.

They found the sentences

graceless, awkward, and lacking in rhythm;

they found an

objectionable prolixity of detail on every page; and they condemned the triteness of Dreiser's handling of the J------ T — ---------------: ---------- ----- ; ----H.W. Boynton, "Der Arme Theodor," Independent, CX (February 3, 1923), 100. 24 Anonymous, "Briefer M e n t i o n , ” Dial, LXXIV (June, 1923), 634.----------------------------------- ---25 Anonymous, "A Book About Myself," Catholic world, CXVI (March, 1923), 856. i “ ““

119 problems of adolescence.

The last-mentioned objection was

the burden of the Modern Review’s comment on the book: Dreiser’s dreams and themes of adolescence have been worked over so often; his experiences are so patently counterparts of what every,self-aware youth has gone through and are recounted In so Indlstingulshed a manner that it is difficult to conceive of the artist in Dreiser having permitted the merchant to peddle about this product as an authentic work. 26 The Dial reviewer, on the other hand, stressed the over­ abundance of meaningless, humorless detail and complained that Dreiser had a "childish belief" in the Importance of 27 his adolescent "throes.” . While recognizing the redundancy of much of the writing, H.L. Mencken nevertheless found the work impressive for its eloquence: I need not add that absolutely nothing is left out. We have meticulous reports of conversations carried on 30 year8 ago; voluminous discussions of ob.scure and forgotten personalities; laborious accounts of banal love affairs. It is, on the surface, obvious, unimportant, dull; it is, underneath, full of a strange eloquence. 28 But the warmest commentary on Dreiser’s writing came from Ludwig Lewisohn, who was of the opinion that the novelist’s power compensated for his laokr of grace: It is notorious by this time that Dreiser has no style, that, in the narrower sense, he oannot write, that his language has neither eloquence nor grace nor beautiful rhythm.... Yet i* is equally certain that he first and foremost saved our American literature Anonymous, ”A Book About Myself," Modern Review, I (April, 1923), 129. : ; ’ / 27 'y ' H.L. Mencken, "Adventures Among Books,” Smart set, LXX (March, 1923), 144.

120. from continuing wholly In a state of feeble Alexandrianlsm and that he has been the source of abundant strength and inspiration to writers who possess the felicity, the grace, the eloquence in vfhich he is wanting. 29 2. The Color of a Great City In Deoember, 1923, Boni and Liveright published The 30 Color of a Great City, a collection of thirty-eight sketches of New York as it had been in the years 1899 to t•

1915.

Ten of the sketches had already been published in

popular magazines, the earliest, “The Log of a Harbor Pilot,1' In the JUly, 1899, issue of Alnslee’s Magazine. Harper *8 Weekly published "’Whence the Song" on December 8, 1900, and "Christmas in the Tenements" on December 6, 1902; Tom Watson’s Magazine printed "The Rivers of the Nameless Dead," "The Cradle of Tears," "The Realization of an Ideal," and "The Track Walker" in 1905; the Bohemian published "The Plight of Pigeons" in October, 1909; the anthology 1910 appeared with "six O'clock"; and the American Magazine printed "The Men in the Dark" in February, 1912.

The

work received short, rather perfunctory, but on the whole favorable notices in newspapers and magazines; however, it was not reviewed as widely as a Book About My3elf.

The

83--------- : ------- : --: ---------- :--------Lewisohn, loc. cit. 30-----------------McDonald, op. cit., p. 61. 31 “-----Vrest Orton, Dreiserana: A Book About His Books (New York, 1929), p.“49. ” '

'

critics were chiefly conoerned with three matters: the authenticity of the picture of New Y o r k as it emerges from

the sketches, the author's qualities of mind and personality, and the stylistic excellences and deficiencies of the work. None of the reviewers questioned the a ccu rac y of Dr eiser's reporting as such, but a number of them felt that the sketches were somewhat one-sided, a little

too insistently

concerned with poverty, squalor, and low life in general. The reviewer of the New York Times expressed the objection

in these words: No writer has as yet done justice to New York; probably none ever will.... For the moat part the author walked familiar ground and Interpreted what he saw with authenticity and emotional appeal.... It may be that many readers--sinoe the book is a picture and not a tract--will find that the author concerns himself too much with the bread line, the unemployed, the puahoart peddlers, the frequenters of the park benches. 32 Outlook, too, was disturbed by the fact that the sketches "seldom touch on the higher or more aesthetic 33 aspects o f the m e t r o p o l i s , ”

and M a l c o l m Cowley,

writing

for the New York Post Literary Review, objected that. Instead of "color," one finds violent contrasts of black

and white in the book, descriptions of the rich and the 34 poor, with large emphasis on the poor.

as----------

:

Anonymous, "Aa the Uncommercial Traveler," New York Times Book Review. Deoember 23, 1923, p. 7. S&

*"

Anonymops, "The Color of a Oreat City," Outlook,CXXXVI (January 9,* 195*77 W , “ 1 ----- 34 Malcolm-Cowley, "Black an.4 White," New York Post Literary Review, February 16, 1924, p. 620.

122. Many of the critics treated The Color of a Great City almost as autobiography or personal confession, for their commentary stressed the author’s heart, head, eye, and hand.

Generally speaking, their criticism in the genetic

mode was casual rather than conscious or systematic, butr Henry B. Puller of the Hew Republic seems to have worked in terms of a carefully conceived critical programs A book, really, is to be Judged less by itself than by the sum of its author’s past performance. What, essentially, is the man himself ?— such should be the question. What his aims? What his motives? 36 In line with this formulation of critical procedure. Puller commented on Dreiser’s personal qualities as follows; As to his heart, one may say that it is in the right place-*-far too much so for his own joy and comfort. As to his head, it is not quite equal to the pussies and anomalies of today’s life— but whose head is? As to his eye, it plays with a rapid accuracy over the whole scene, and renders It with a reportorial adequacy and decisiveness. As for his hand— well, that is another matter. The Drelserian hand still remains a good deal of a fist— as strong and vigorous as you like, yet often cramped and maladroit. 36 With similar awareness of the author behind the text, the. Hew York Times reviewer called the book "immensely humane,"

37

and the Outlook spoke of Dreiser as "a real lover of the city." Malcolm Cowley remarked that the author felt the misfortunes 5 5 ------------- —

------- : ------------------

—

-------

Henry B. Puller, "The Color of a Great City," New Republic, XXXVII (January 30, 1024), 263. --36

Ibid. 37 58

Anonymous, "As the Uncommercial Traveler," loo. cit. -------Anonymous, "The Color of a vGreat City." loo, cit.

38

125. 30 of people deeply and bed the power of tragic pity,

while

Joseph Wood Krutoh described Dreiserfa honesty and ourloslty in these ^perceptive terms i Whereas most writers begin with a love of words— -with the desire to say something rather than with something which they desire to say--the reverse was true with f him. Life Interested, pus sled, and sbopked him so Intensely that he oould think of no way of unburden­ ing himself of his emotion save by setting it down, and he set it down In so olunisy and unlloked a form that only those whose love of truth was great enough to overcome their aestheticsensibilities obuld stomach him.... To some he is merely ooaroe and repulsive, but to others, as to me, there is not a little of the pathetic about his personality and the way in whleh he has wandered up and down America.... The sketches.•.are interesting. • .for the evidence they afford of the persistent curiosity which is both the mother and the father of his muse.... As a result of years of this sort of slow-moving ourloslty he has a grasp of the actualities in tide lives of his people whloh few writers can equal. 40 Hot all of the reviewers oastlgated Dreiser for his stylistic lapses.

The New fork Times, in fact, though

^recognising that the book was "uneven," said that The color of a Great City was "written throughout in the easy, . 4 1 reportorlal manner that makes for pleasure in reading," and the Outlook remarked that the sketches were done in 4g

"a reminiscent style that la wholly attraotlce."

On

the other hand, the Bookman reviewer described the work as —

88

■

:

:

:----------------

Cowley, loo. olt.

40

!

Joseph good Krutch, "Plain and Colored," Nation, CXVIII (February 13, 1924), 176. — --

41

cit.

Anonymous, * As the Uncommercial Traveler," loo. — 42 Anonymous, "The Color of a great City." loo, olt.

t

5 43 '’sombre in tons and sometimes labored (as to style," and Malcolm Cowley condemned Dreiser for using the cliches 1

v

of the newspaper offices. He does not live, but ’’resides" in Hell's Kitchen. He-hears "a babel of voices,n sees "great restaurants a gleam with light and merriment,” calls on Heaven only to ’•forfend." And his style has other faults: the piling up of details without significdhde, care* leas repetitions, pronouns which tangle lii'elr feet. No sophomore could write more awkwardly than Dreiser at his worst and in the present volume he attains it often, 44 But the most amusing description of Dreiser's style in The Color of a great City was provided by the English writer, Hugh Walpole, as quoted in a New York Times editorials His prose style is possibly the worst ever possessed by an American writer of the first rank. Many pages of tlxls book read as though they had first been written in German, then translated into English, then translated back Into aerrnan, and then flung, as a last despairing gesture, into current American. 45 3.

An American Tragedy

Dreiser's masterpiece, An American Tragedy, made its

appearance in a

840-page edition under the Boni 46 and Liverlght imprint on December 14, 1925.. It was reviewed widely and, for the most part, enthusiastically. 3 0 - -------- : ----------------------------------------- ------ -

Anonymous, "Recent Books in Brief Review," Bookman, LIX (May, 1984), 365. * 44 Cowley, loo, cit. 45 Anonymous, * 'Capturing' New York," New York Times, August 15, 1930. 46 Orton, op. cit., p. 52.

^

1S 5 *

Some of the most discriminating critics of the’time, among them Joseph Wood Krutch, T.K. Whipple, Stuart ShermAn, and John Cowper Pdwys, recognized it for Dreiser's best novel and characterized it as an outstanding contribution to American letters.

The dissenting minority, consisting of

Irving Babbitt, William Lyon Phelps, and Llewellyn Jones, among others, attacked the novel on customary stylistic and philosophical grounds*

it was badly written, they said,

and its mechanistic or naturalistic philosophy represented an obvious distortion of trxith.

The majority, on the other

hand, lavished superlatives on the wo r k that no earlier Dreiserian novel had ever received.

R.N. Linscott of

the Atlantic Monthly, for example, referred, to it as "Dreiser's greatest novel, and an impressive achievement 47 to be reckoned with in afiy history of American literature." 48 John Cowper Powys spoke of "the greatness of this work," and Joseph Wood Krutch declared that An American Tragedy is, in fine, the greatest of its autnor^s works, ana that can hardly mean less than that It is the greatest American novel of our genera­ tion. 49 Writing for the independent, Charles R. Walker remarked v r —

R.N. Linscott, "An CXXXVII (March, 1986), 10 48 John Cowper Powys, LXXX (April, 1926), 532. 49 Joseph Wood Krutch, CXXII (February 10, 1926),

—

----------------

American Tragedy," Atlantic Monthly, (fron t advertising sec'tTbn). "An*American Tragedy," Dial, *---"Crime and Punishment," Nation, 162.

t

126.' that Dreiser had "built up a great novel that la profoundly 60 tragic and Intensely American," and Sherwood Anderson £’

said categorically that the novel isfc was "to my mind the 51 biggest, most Important American of our times." T.K. Whipple of the New Republic was similarly impressed; Dreiser's force and originality— greatness is not too strong a word--raust become only more obvious with the passage of years. 62 And S t u a r t Sherman, who h a d made his

re p u t a t i o n by a t t a c k i n g

D r e i s e r ' s "barbaric naturalism," n o w he ld that An A m e r i c a n T r a g e d y was "the worst w r l t t e n g r e a t novel

in the w orl d"

and described the author's performance in these flattering if somewhat grudging terms: And now with his familiar huge plantigrade tread he comes lumbering down the trail with a massive 800page American tragedy which makes the performance of most of his rivals and successors look like capering accomplishments of rabbits and squirrels. 53 But there was considerable disagreement among the critics, even among those most sympathetic to Dreiser, as to the significance or philosophy of the new work.

Some

of them saw in it an abandonment of Dreiser's earlier naturalistic position and a reassertion of traditional moral values; others, saw the work as an amoral study of the /

5J3T

! -------: ----

: ------ — -- : ---- --------

Charles K. Walker,."Dreiser Moves Upward," indepen­ dent, CXVI (February 6, 1926), 166. -“ " 51 - Sherwood Anderson, "Dreiser," Saturday Review of Literature, II (January 9, 1926), 475. T.K. Whipple, "Theodore Dreiser," New Republic, XLVI (March 17, 1926), 113. ------------53 ' Sherman, l o c . cit.

127. social and hereditary factors that condition crime; still others described it as an unfortunate restatement of the Drelserisn thesis that man's behavior is explicable in terms of mechanistic and biological postulates.

Stuart

Sherman, making a valiant effort to Justify his change of attitude toward Dreiser, asserted that Dreiser had largely abandoned hiB earlier mechanistic view of man* Mr. Dreiser has either renounced or effectually sup­ pressed the naive naturalism of his previous npyels,._.. There are no interspersed philosophical dissertations’ ' here. There is no special pleading, ho coloring of the- news, no studied continuous aspersion of the .customs and habits of men in civil or religious societies from the point of view of "barbaric naturalism",... I do not know where else in American fiction one can find the situation here presented dealt with so fearlessly, so intelligently, so exhaustively, so voraciously, and therefore with such unexceptionable moral effect. 54 The Catholic ma g a z i n e America was equally certain that the novel had a moral lesson to teach:

"Whether the author

meant it or not, he has taught the great lesson that the 55 wages of sin is death." In similar fashion William Lyon Phelps, writing in Scribner's Magaslne, saw much uninten­ tional moralizing in the novel”* The last thing Mr. Dreiser would wish to be celled is a moralist or a preacher; yet this vast book resembles not a "little the obvious sermon of Hogarth's Idle Apprentice. 56 • 54

'

: —

--------------- 1 ----

Anonymous, "Books and Authors," America; A Catholic Review of th* W e e k . JtXXIV (March 6, 1925 J'v ’BOS’* --------3d 1 William Lyon Phelps, "As I Like It," Scribner's Magazine, LXXIX (April, 1926), 43*. "

'

128

But in direct contradiction of this point of view was the opinion -of Irving Babbitt, who, unlike his recanting i

*

humanistic colleague, Stuart Sherman, saw only animal

%

behavior i n the reactions, of Dreiser's characters: £jjreiser] has succeeded In producing in this work something genuinely harrowing; but one Is harrowed to no purpose* One has In more than full measure the tragic qualm but without the final relief and enlargement of spirit that true tragedy succeeds some­ how I n giving, and that without resort to explicit moralizing* It Is hardly worth while to struggle through eight hundred and'more very pedestrian pages to be left tt the end with a feeling of sheer oppression* The explanation of this Is that Mr* Dreiser does not rise sufficiently above the level of "rearranging chemisms,1' in other words, of animal behavior* 57 Joseph Wood Krutch similarly recognized the amorality of the work, but found nothing objectionable in it, since Dreiser did. not deny the existence and motive power of "delicate feelings and moral restraints* ** Krutch was, in fact, impressed by Dreiser's understanding of the complex interplay of heredity and environment in the making of men's destinies: Given a .man strong enough, the lust for power will lead him, if chance happens to favor, through the career of The Financier; given a man as weak as the hero ot An American Tragedy and, fortune against him, he will end with murder and the electric chair. 58 In an enthusiastic review for the Dial,

John Cowper Powys

commented on the Dreiser Ian amoral ity in these highly favorable terms: .

-

-

■

—

1

Irving Babbitt, "The Critic and American Life," Forum, LXXIX (February, 1928), 168. ---58 Krutch,

"Crime and punishment," loc. cit*

129* «\

*

.

TSmlly^Newell Bl«Ir, “Some Books Worth While,” Good Housekeeping, LXXXIII (October, 1926), 159. Arthur Davison Fioke, "Dreiser as Artist," Saturday Review of Literature, II (April 17, 1926), 724.

\

134. searing impressions,” this muddle made out of formal, old-fashioned phrasing, cant terms from popular1 journalism and modes in popular psychology, side by side with impressionistic effects, scientific and naturalistic effects and effects of ingenious suspense in phrasing and details, through all this the convic­ tion emerges of Dreiser's observation and deep knowledge of his people and of life, and of patience, warmth and a kind of vast and cumulative intensity. The impression that lasts in your mind and life after finishing the book is of a work of art that is large and grave, profound and free. 75 H.L. Mencken described the book negatively as Ha heaping cartload of raw materials for a novel, with rubbish of all sorts intermingled--a vast, sloppy, chaotic thing of 385,000 words--at least 250,000 of them unnecessary I", b\it recognized that Dreiser "can write, on occasion, with great 76 clarity, and even with a certain grace.” A number of the reviewers defended the style as appropriate to its subject matter; the Literary Digest, for example, remarked 77 that a better style would be out of harmony with the theme, and T.K. Whipple was convinced that Dreiser's writing was wholly adequate for describing a tawdry, planless, jungle­ like world;

"Dreiser's books are the stammering utterance " 78 of this pathetic and flashy disorder trying to speak." But.the most unequivocal defense of the Dreisorian style ------------ : ----------- : ----------75--------------- : Stark Young, "An American Tragedy," Hew Republic,, XLVIII (November 3, 1926), 297. ” ' 76 H.L. Mencken, "Dreiser in 84(5 Pages," American Mer­ cury, VII (March, 1926), 379-380. 77 Anonymojs, "When Mr. Dreiser Droot into Church," Literary Digest, LXXXVIII (March 27, 1926), 52. Whipple, op. clt., p. 114.

135, • » 1 ” cam© from Joseoh Wood Krutch and John Cowper Powys, bo th of them astute critics with a highly developed sense of form.

Krutch approved of Dreiser’s style because, as he

f

said, it does not intjvude between the reader and the events 79 described, and Powys said it was wholly justified by the •••a

esthetic results: It is out of this appalling reciprocity of raw with raw," that the ras3s and weight and volume of the book proceed and this accumulated weight--so terribly mortis’d and tenon’d by its creator’s genius--has its own unparalleled beauty, as pure an aesthetic beauty (almost mathematical in the rigidity of its pattern) as the most purged and exacting taste could demand. 80 In discussing the characterization of An American Tragedy the reviewers were sometimes blinded to the excel­ lence of Dreiser’s portraiture by their diallke of Clyde Griffiths and the class from which he sprang. Clyde was *> v a lower class “nincompoop,” no self-respecting person would be seen in his conroany in real life, and thereforehis sufferings could excite only the mildest sort of Interest In a discriminating reader.

Such, at any rate,

was the opinion of William Lyon Phelps, who wrote patroniz­ ingly of the people in -Dreiser ’s world: And If the novelist chooses to select from life a hero without brains or backbone or charm, and depicts his unimportant career with patient microscopy, and brings In hosts of other characters none of whom one would ever wish to know in real life, that Is his own affair. There are plenty of such persons and i “79— -- : --- 1 ---- ---------------- 1 -------- — ---------Krutch, "Crime and Punishment," loc. cit. 80 Powys, op. cit., p. 338. % f

_ 136. suppose' they spend their days in the manner herein described.... The very comaionplaceness of the vast number of characters in this story makes their representative quality more depressingly lmoreagiveT They are, alas, samples. 81 (r "N

T.K. Whlople of the Mew Republic was also dissatisfied with the characterization, but his objection was quite different:

he felt that the people in the novel were

obscured by what h© called excessive Dreiserian verbiage. Pointing out that Dreiser’s heroes are often described as brilliant and irresistible but appear as "vulgar dullards, Whipple remarked that Dreiser's language conceals Clyde and Robert* and prevents them from assuming their full 88 tragic stature. Llewellyn Jones had a similar opinion as to the negative effect' of excessive .detail on character izationj

"Clyde Griffiths is not a big enough figure to

lend himself to the process--nor is he even a complex « 83 enough figure." * On the other hand, Stuart Sherman spolfe of the "masterly

exhaustiveness" of Dreiser’s character­

ization and said that the novelist1s,analysis of the psychology of Clyd® and Roberta was both complete and 84 convincing. John Farrar of the Bookman was similarly impressed by "the cumulative effect of small incident and .

g

j

■

:

Phelps, op . cit., pp. 433—434. 82 83

Whipple. op. cit., p. 114. ' Jones, op. cit., p. 203.

84 Sherman, loc. cit.

.

*

137

.

small character in achieving drama and character in the

85 large,"

,

.

and the American. Review of Reviews deolared that j

Dreiser's novel "depicts character weakness and strength 86

with a care and penetration unmatohable in American letters." The study of Clyde's fall, as conditioned by hereditary and environmental-factors, impressed John V i . Crawford of the New York World, ,who wrote that Dreiser

clearly demonstrates his mastery of the measured, implacable tracing of a disintegrating personality which was earlier indicated compellingly in the . . portrait of Hurstwood in Si3ter Carrie. 87 The obvious importance of An American Tragedy and its predominantly favorable reception by both reading public

and critics led quickly and inevitably to its dramatiza­ tion and filming.

In October, 1926, Patrick Kearney’s 88

version of Clyde Griffith's tragedy appeared on Broadway,

and in 1931 paramount 'a cinematic adaotation was shown _ 89 on all the main streets of the nation. By 1936 there had n

m

:

:

---------------------------

John Farrar, "The Fiction Reader in the New Season," Bookman, LJCIII (April, 1926), 202.

-- 55

Anonymous, "Nhat Fiction Reviewers Are Saying,"

American Review of Reviews, LXXIII (June, 1926), 672.

57

|

-

John W. Crawford, "Slow, irresistible Movement of a Tameless Energy," New York World, January 10, 1926. 88 Alexander Woolcott, "An American Tragedy," The Ameri­ can Theatre As Seen by Its Critics: 1752-1934, edited by Montrose J. Moses and John Mason Brown (New "ifork, 1934), p. 247. Reorinted from the New York world of October 26, 1926. Also to be found in The Portable Woolcott, edited by Joseph Hennessey (New York, 1948), pp. 433-436. 89 Richard Watts, Jr., "Dreiser Overestimates His Novel} . Paramount Under estimates It," New York Herald-Trlbune, August 16, 1931.

. ‘

>

138.-

been, in addition, three foreign stage productions of considerable dramatic merit;

Erwin Piscator's German

version, a French adaptation on which Georges Jamln and Jean Servais collaborated, and H. Basilevsky's Russian 90 translation. The heavily didactic German version of Erwin Piscator wns later rendered into English and produced / at the Lenox Hill Theater in New York City under Equity Library Theater auspices during the 1948-1949 theatrical season. The critical reaction to the 1926 stage adaptation by Patrick Kearney was largely negative, all the reviewers orofessing great admiration for Dreiser»3 novel and very little for the stage production.

The warmest response was

that of Stark Young in the New Republic, who pointed out that though the play was "on the whole a murder play of the general family of murder plays” one could see over it "the shadow of its deeper source and the sting of the book*3 large and poignant reality."

Young also complimented

Kearney on his "excellent ear for dialogue, far more fluent 91 than Mr. Dreiser*s, though it may be less biting at times#" A more typical reaction, howsver, was that of Richard Vatta, Jr., in the New York Herald-Tribune, who referred to the pla> 92 as Kearney's ’’inept stage adaptation.” But the most

«r

-----------------------------

^ Theodore DreTsejp, ’’Four Cases of Clyde Griffiths,” New York Times, March, 8; 1936. 91 Young, op. cit., pp. 297-298. 92 Watts, loc. cit.

outspokenly negative review was that of Alexander Vvoolcott in the New York World, who called the actor playing- the part of Clyde Griffiths "a museum piece" and fourd the _ play as a whole markedly Inferior to the novel: I do not know how perceptive a playgoer .Theodore Dreiser is, but I should think the mess the theater has made of An American Tragedy would permanently impair his health. It seems to me a .gauche, spasmodic, almost childishly concocted melodrama, preposterous iy miscast. 93 Even as early as 1926 there was talk of the cinematic * possibilities of An American Tragedy; for example, q u i n n Martin wrote an article for the New York World to urge oroducers to make a film of the book, predicting for it an extraordinary success artistically and financially: I am going to submit the opinion that this very relentlessneas in tragic realism would serve to produce a dramatic effect so profound and so really beautiful in its truthfulness that no theatre in America would be large enough to handle the crowds which would be attracted by it. 94 But when the film was finally made and shown in New York in 19^1 neither Dreiser nor the critics were pleased by the result.

The reaction of the New Republic's Matthew

, Josephaon, who found the mbving picture far inferior to the novel, was characteristic.

Josephson was particularly

disturbed by the absence of all social significance in the Hollywood version of Clyde Griffith’s fall: gar— ; ---- : — : --------: -------------- : ------- * Wooloott, op* cit., pp.— 247-249. 04 ------ ; Quinn Martin, "A Book That Would Make a Great Film," New York World, March 7, 1926.

t. 140.

\

The brief film piny, as produced by Josef von Stern­ berg, was well above the'average of gangster talkies now selling on Main Street; but it was no more an intended indictment of society than the common tabloid serial.... The talking picture gallops immediately into the heart of the action. 95

Jo.seph.son also found the photography mediae re and the role of Clyde Griffiths, as played by Phillip holmes, ’’too lethargic and unconvincing, too wanting in progression of 96 any kind." Richard Watts, Jr., of the New York HeraldTribune agreed with Josephson’s over-all condemnation of the films It is, I think^ an interesting enough court-room melodrama, but it certainly is not the impressive achievement in the cinema that it was in the novel. 97 Watts found Dreisdr’s titanic, brooding power wholly missing in the film and remarked that only Erich Von Stroheim 98 could do justice to the book— in three hundred reels. An additional event of significance in the public history of An American Tragedy was its suppression- in Boston In 1927 and its public trial in 1929.

Sale of the

work was prohibited in the New England city on the ground that it contained "obscene matter," and in order to test the legality of the prohibition Donald S. Frlede of New York sold a copy of the novel to a Boston police lieutenant. 55-------‘.................. ... ........................ Matthew Josephson, "Dreiser, Reluctant, In the Films," New Republic, LXVIII (August 19, 1931), 21-22. 36 Ibid., p. 22. * 98

Watts, loc. cit. “ Ibid.

pried© was immediately arrested, and the case was tried before the Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston, where on April 17, 1929, Clarence Darrow attempted to persuade „ the judge and jury that a book should be Judged by its theme and its total import and effect rather than by twenty-three selected passages of "obscenity.”

Darrow 99

failed in his attempt, however, and Frlede was fined $300. News of the suppression of the novel was carried all over the country and aroused both'amusement and angry comment in literary circles.

Some of the more liberal newspapers

and journals, such as the New Republic, carried editorials and signed articles attacking Boston and its irresponsible 100 censorship.

--------------------------------------------5 S ---------------------- '

See Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (New York, 1949), p. 2 2 ? , a nd Karl Schrifffcgiesser,

"boston Stays Pure,“ New Republic, &VIII (May 8, 1929), 327-329. ----- ----100 Example: Anonymous, "Enemies of society," New Repub­ lic, LVIII (May 8, 1929), 318-320. ------ --

V.

Pour Minor Works

During the years 1926-1930, while the Jazz Age anc3 the Coolidge Era of Endless Prosperity were taking on the charac­ teristics of a national spree and as, ironically enough, An ^American Tragedy was making its somber way into the oopular consciousness, Theodore Dreiser published four new full-length books:

Moods, his first collection of

ooems; Chains, a group of fifteen short stories and "lesser novels”; Dreiser Looks at Russia, an account of the author*s A'

vi3it to the Soviet Union on the invitation of the Russian Government; and A Gallery of women, fifteen fictional

studies of women.

These books did nothing to enhance

Dreiser's literary reputation, which had gone sky-rocketing ji

with'the publication of An American Tragedy; in fact, the reception was lukewarm even in the case of A Qallery of Women, which seemed to please the critics most.

The

markedly adverse criticism of Moods, Chains, and Dreiser Looks at Russia showed that Dreiser's towering position in the literary world was not enough, in itself, to Influence . the reviewers into making kindly judgments of work that they really disliked.

However, in mitigation of the

severity of their comments, the reviewers sometimes praised

143. *

the author's genius and remarked sadly on the Inferiority

He is attracted to anythingvthat exhibits size, power, sexual lust; believing in these things alone, he is critical of any institution or idea that stands In their way.... His novels are human documents; so is a pair of shoe-strings, a torn glove, a footprint. H P

-----------------------------------------------’-------- :

More, op^.cit., p. 3. 19 ~" Ibid., pp. 68-69.

l0,,°

J

'

150. But the chief thing they give evidence of is the total evaporation of values In the modern industrial environment, the feebleness of the protestant morality, which was all that kept the social bond from breaking entirely in the old days; and the total lack, in this crass new life, of any meanings or relationships beyond the raw fact. 20 Clearly the university critics and scholars had finally found Dreiser important enough to study him.’ As a result,, in 1928 and 1929 the first bibliographies in a

aid of their researches came off the presses.

Edward D. ’

McDonald’s A Bibliography of the Writings of Theodore Dreiser appeared in 1928, and in the same year a supplement to the work was published by Vrest Orton under the title Notes to Add to a Bibliography of Theodore prelser.

The

following year Orton published his Dreiserana: A Book About His Books, which proved to be a valuable compilation of materials unknown to McDonald. 1. Moods Dreiser’s book of poems, Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed, was published by Boni and Liveright on June 24, 1926, and again in September, 1928, for which edition the writer produced twenty-nine new poems and revised some of the 21 older work. The book was revised radically for still ^ ------------------------------------------------------------------

Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Tbtoerience and Culture (New ¥ork, , pp. 251, £53. w

**“51-----------

' Vrest Orton, Dreiserana: A Book About His Books (New York, 1929), p. 5&, and Edward t?_. M c D o n a l d A Blbllography of the Wrlfelngs of Theodore Dreiser (Philadelphia, ISM); p T ’dfi.------------------ ’

151.

i

another edition, under the Simon and Schuster imprint, in 1933, when ita title became Moods; Philosophic and Emotional: Cadenced and Declaimed.

That Dreiser had a

continuing interest in bringing his poetry to the public was also evident in the fact that he published The Aspirant (1929) in the Random House pamphlet series, Pdetry Quartos. Horace Liverlght published My City, a poem, in November, 1929, with illustrations by Max Poliak, and the Heron press printed Epitaph, another poem, in the same year. 22 Epitaph was reprinted by Horace Liveright in 1930. r" " '

Dreiser’s interest in poetry could not have come too much as a surprise to the reviewers of the period, since poems by him had been making their appearance in the maga­ zines ever since May, 1916, when smart Set published four of them: "For a Moment the-Wind Died," “Wood Note," “Ye Ages, Ye Tribes," and "They Shall Fall as Striped Garments."

Other poems had made their way into the pages

of the New York Evening Post Literary Review, the American __ _ w

-

Mercury, Vanity Fair, and Leonardo.

But* the critical

response was nearly unanimously negative; most of the reviewers were doubtful that the book contained poetry at all.

Even some of the sympathetic reviews, such as

that of Harry Hansen in the New York world, said that Dreiser’s “free verse" had "little relation to poetry;"

gar

:------- :--------------;---------------■ — -------■ — -

Orton, op. clt., pp. 60*61. 23 Ibid., p. 53.

r 152, Hansen described the poems as expressions of mood in which the poet raises questions and philosophizes; he saw autobiographical rather than litersry significance in the 24 , volume. The Dial was equally certain that the work had ' little literary va-lue; A number of ragged and ravelled vignettes of the American hurly-burly unroll themselves here in fluctua ,ting procession. The negligent laxity of the form precludes approach to any A*a Poetica, whether new or old; but the massive, sombrely cheerful mind of the great Realist, pondering on the Passing Show, can be felt throughout these tuneless "Tom-Tom" drummings, giving the book its own curious, though hardly .^esthetic, interest* 25 Louis Untarmeyer dismissed the novelist fs poetry as 26 "staccato prose." On the other hand, Dreiser’s perennial champion. Burton Rascoe, spoke of the poems enthusiasti­ cally in his A Bookman’s Daybook; these strange pieces had life and heart in them, like his plodding, cumbrous novels, and moreover, they have the Impress of authentic poetic emotion. Here was ineluctable sadness with a poignancy in no way rhetorical, glimpses of beauty caught in images from life in a city street. 27 The revised, 1935 edition of Moods fared no better among the critics.

William Rose Benet, writing for the : .-----

Harry Hansen, "Theodore Dreiser’s Moods," Mew York World, August 9, 1928. 25 Anonymous, "Moods, Cadenoed and Declaimed," Dial, LXXXVI (January, 1924), T7. 26 Louis Untarmeyer, "Mew Poetry,v Saturday Review of Literature, V (July 13, 1929), 1174. 5T ~

Burton Rascoe, A Bookman’s Daybook (New York, 1929), p. 55.

153. Saturday Review of Literature, found Dreiser's free verse sophoraoric in its curses at an anthropomorphic God and described the phrasing as Inferior to Stephen crane's: ' *»

I read as much as I could of the book, and then I thought of Stephen Crane, and how much better he did this sort of thing, and how much more briefly— how the phrase counted, and was memorable— in Stephen Crane. 28 Like Benet, an anonymous reviewer for the New York Heraid-Tribune stressed the immaturity of the Dreiserian poems:

•4 .