Dreiser Reappraised

Two Dreisers.
by Ellen Moers.
Viking. 366 pp. $10.00.

Proponents of Theodore Dreiser’s work have always found themselves in a nervous position, one that is, in a way, peculiarly American. They are to him as the major figures on our 19th-century literary scene were to America—advocates of something gross, sprawling, even embarrassing. Overwhelmingly, American writing in the period of its great mid-century flowering was a literature with a mission, in some respects an anti-literary literature that hoped to call America directly into being as a work of myth and art—hence, its insistent rhetoricalness, its strain of pontification. Yet even the poetry of Whitman, despite its compulsive inventorying of American life, its attempt to let the details assert their own value, really turned its materials in an aesthetic direction, singing stridently in their celebration.

But Dreiser, with the appearance in 1900 of his first novel, Sister Carrie, seemed to be turning the literary image of America back into its raw stuff. As Alfred Kazin has written, “He has been for us not a writer like other writers, but a whole chapter of American life.” What characterized Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie was its terrible innocence, its departure from the missionary voice, its almost pure nakedness. (The “almost” is necessary, for Dreiser was constantly trying to get himself up in literary ruffles and lace.) More firmly than any prior American novel, it entered the bleak streets into which William Dean Howells had urged a generation of young writers in the 80’s and 90’s, and there seized upon the chunks and bits of American urban experience, turning them into words that were only at the slightest removed from facts.

Yet Howells, the proponent of realism, was able to ignore Sister Carrie throughout his life, though he gave his support to other novels of the city, among them Stephen Crane’s Maggie. May it not be that his telling silence—surely one of the first great blows struck against Dreiser’s work—was motivated by the same self-consciousness that lurks beneath much of our literature? For we are not only nouveau riche but nouveau littéraire as well. Though Crane had worked with the grimmest of materials in his tale of the slums, he did it at least with style, throwing over his pages a poetic coloration that identified it all as literature, whereas Dreiser, who has been called “the worst great writer who ever lived,” produced works that were like documents, works that showed not how sensational our hardest realities were but how ordinary, how common—merely “a chapter of American life.” To be sure, the most compelling of Dreiser’s detractors have fought their case on broader grounds—Lionel Trilling based his well-known denunciation on the contention that Dreiser was incapable of real thought—but it is likely that much of the negative reaction flows from a dedication to literary manners, to style.

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In any case, the assaults have had their inevitable effect. In the face of them, Dreiser has seemed a writer who cannot simply be appraised but must be defended—or, at best, “reappraised.” As Irving Howe suggests, “Dreiser has suffered the fate that often besets writers caught up in cultural dispute: their work comes to seem inseparable from what has been said about it, their passion gets frozen into history.” And it might be added that the effect on his defenders has been a unique form of literary paranoia, an affliction that has led to strange postures of counter-response, ranging from pure retributive bullying to the use of something like magic—or at least sleight of hand.

H. L. Mencken, back in 1917, in a brilliant back-alley polemic that may well have been the ancestor of this whole edgy tradition, hinted things about the virility of Dreiser’s depreciators by associating them with “the lady critics of the newspapers,” and their “shrill, falsetto clamor.” And in the 50’s John Berryman was able to assert on Dreiser’s behalf (perhaps with Trilling’s essay in mind) that “Stupidity is a weapon, for an artist, almost as powerful as intelligence. . . .” The point he led into is cogent, that Dreiser was incapable of changing his style and thus never fell into artifice. But stupidity? Finally, one of the most recent studies of Dreiser, John J. McAleer’s Theodore Dreiser, a work that contributes much of value to its subject, answers the earlier critics (and is conscious of doing this) by converting Dreiser into a super-subtle symbolist. Mencken would defend by transforming the critics into something reprehensible, boobs and sissies, Berryman by transforming the English language into something more flexible than it really is, McAleer by transforming the novels into something by James Joyce.

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In this context, Ellen Moers’s Two Dreisers seems a happy accident, for it treats Dreiser’s work as a fresh experience, as something so unexpected and striking that it nearly wipes away its own critical history. In a sense not intended by Miss Moers’s title, we are reminded that there are indeed two Dreisers: one “frozen into history,” the other smoldering on in the novels. This is not to suggest that Miss Moers is unaware of that history, but simply that she is never quite pushed into defensiveness; her closest move in that direction is a chapter called “Chemism and Freudianism,” where she acknowledges the raised eyebrows provoked by Dreiser’s notorious use of the word “chemism” to explain human behavior. But even here she attempts to do justice “less to Dreiser” than to the ideas that “shored up his naturalism.”

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Two Dreisers is organized around the best of Dreiser’s eight novels, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy, and concerns itself with the sources of Dreiser’s material, in his life and the life of his time, and with the passage of that material into his fiction. It is a book of literary genesis. Though the method, to be sure, is not unusual, Miss Moers’s use of it is. For this is not one of those conventional “reinterpretations” of old and dusty data, but an adventure into new and illuminating matter.

To begin with, Miss Moers does more than simply discover what Dreiser knew; she thoroughly adopts the same interests and acquires the same knowledge, a procedure that brings us flush against the consciousness of her subject. The effect is that we are able to see, and in a way to experience, what she means by suggesting that his work inhabited “two worlds of time.” Sister Carrie is perceived as the straddling novel, a work that progresses, in the assumptions underlying the narrative, from a 19th-century biology that spoke of human motives in terms of vague “instincts” to a 20th-century biology that began by interpreting motive as a chemical metabolic reaction. Whereas Dreiser’s “scientific” background has often been attributed casually to his interest in Darwin and Spencer, Miss Moers goes carefully into his relationships with such contemporary experimenters as Elmer Gates, Jacques Loeb, and Abraham Brill. The point, of course, is not that Dreiser was an accomplished scientific intellectual but that his work bears the deep impress of researches performed by these men.

Perhaps the most enlightening section of the book, as much for its penetration into a crucial moment in the formation of the American consciousness as for what it tells of the influences upon Dreiser, deals with the final decade of the 19th century, the period when much of the imagery and folklore of a newly urbanized nation was springing into being. Behind Dreiser’s extraordinarily visual renderings of the city lies a whole new way of response that was being fashioned in the 90’s, a way that grew from the brilliant photography of Alfred Steiglitz, the paintings of a generation of magazine illustrators, and the language sketches of feature journalists like Stephen Crane. To an unprecedented extent, through the impact of what we now call mass media, the eye was replacing the mind as an instrument of literary apprehension.

As Miss Moers puts it, this new journalism “brought to literature an emphasis on seeing rather than thinking and involved the writer in a collaboration with the artist.” And by broadening her commentary to include the world of music and theater, Miss Moers demonstrates one of the most striking aspects of the period (one which still echoes in our time)—the near convergence of popular and serious culture: “. . . it is difficult to separate the journalism from the literature . . . the illustration from the art . . . the hit tune from the formal composition. . . .” In this penetrating excursion, she throws further light upon a key element in modern American literature: its discovery of a starting point in the jungles of the public imagination, an ironic fulfillment of all those 19th-century calls for a national literature.

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There are shaky moments in Miss Moers’s direct treatment of the novels, as when she favorably compares the comic-ironic effects in the scene of Carrie’s theatrical debut with those of “Flaubert’s celebrated symphony of ‘la betise,’” or when she casually relieves Dreiser of one of his narrative barbarisms by placing it squarely in the consciousness of a character. But this is of small consequence in a work that is in itself, though in a smaller way than Dreiser’s, “a whole chapter of American life.”

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