The Dionysian Dreiser
TheodoreDreiser is the greatest novelist in America. It is not a distinction. He has written poor novels. His latest novel, The “Genius” published by John Lane Company is loose in parts. It limps. It loses its breath. It grows thin. But it is a novel of sweep and magnitude, of sledge hammer blows and fine chiseling. In the caramel chorus of America’s chirping fictionists Dreiser raises the smooth, virile voice of an artist. And there is no voice like his in America.
I prefer to write of what Dreiser has done in The “Genius” than to tell in detail of what it is about. Calmly, aloofly with a consummate dispassion Dreiser has thrust his magic pen home into the heart of American Puritanism. God forgive him. God forgive the publishers. God forgive everybody who reads the book and forgive me who write about it. For American Puritanism is a sacred thing, as sacred as the gilt on the cathedral altar places, as hallowed as the bathroom in a bawdy house. And Dreiser has peeled off the gilt and ruthlessly thrust open the door. May he be cursed with the wrath of an avenging public conscience. May he be made to wither under the distinction of being amaniacal sensualist, a libidinous ruffian, a lascivious distiller of corrupting langours. Amen.
Against the gray-dirt background, the shallow-hued smears of his many contemporaries, Dreiser’s book stands forth like a red cry of truth. It is not the book of a man enraged with the narrowness of a country, sputtering against the insipidity of its composite ideals. Dreiser never descends to the punitive hectoring of a Robert Herrick. Nor does he join the plaintive assaults upon the pusillanimous conventions which characterize the “advanced” fiction of the country. He does not make his men and women vehicles for the antiquated day dream of brotherhood bosh. He does not prostitute his work in dramatizing the current quibbles, marketing asinine public convulsions in the literary capsules so commonly compounded by our quack “creators.” All these things he does not do and if the reading public of today will not reward him, the God of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Huysmanns, Shakespeare and Ambrose Bierce will.
What Dreiser does do is tell a straightforward story, tell it with all the painstaking genius of the old Flemish painters. And he uses for his background not the isolated strata of any single calling, but a country—your world and mine and our neighbor’s. Life is greater than any of its truths, sings Theodore Dreiser. There are many kinds of good, many kinds of standards and many kinds of virtue. There is the virtue of farmer Blue, the solid, masculine, clear and open virtue rooted in the laws of the land and the rigmarole of society; thriving on the long, brown roads, the ploughed fields and the homely beauties of existence. And there is the virtue of Eugene Witla, the aesthetic, vibrating pursuit of beauty rooted inthe soul of the artist, thriving on the illusive lust of women, the intangible urge of inspiration; spitting in the face of laws unnatural to it and the fallacies that would be its fetters. Yes, says Dreiser, (I do not quote him), life is a wide field bearing on its bosom beautiful flowers that do not resemble each other and that require widely different care and nourishment. To think that such commonplaces should be distinctive notes in the art of a country! But they are. If you have read these things into novels before you have not read them into American novels. I do not recall a single hero in American fiction, who is not a Puritan, who does not suffer when he sins, whom the indulgence of his desire for women does not inspire to repentance and “reform” and success as the blue literary laws of America demand. For further particulars on this general subject see Mr. Mencken’s fulmination in last month’s Smart Set.
On this broad canvas of thought it is that Dreiser works. In his new novel he begins in a little town in Illinois. Out of the midst of a mediocre family living in the concentric provincialism of the middle west he launches his young hero Witla—a lad suffering from dreams and stomach trouble and a vague distinguishing unrest. His types are masterpieces. His style, shorn of pretentious reticence or rhetorical pomp, is the painstaking and poetical diction he revealed in Jennie Gerhardt. But he is not infallible. There are sentences, paragraphs which jar. Although his strokes in delineating character and situation are swift and certain, his language often seems lame, his words watery, his phrases trite. But these are as the flaws of a panoramic pen crowded at moments to a point of impatience and not the faults of a weak writer. The effect is untouched. His people breathe out of the pages. They are personalities. From beginning to end Dreiser reveals a psychology of character amazing in its range and detachment. Witla as a boy lives in Alexandria, Illinois. Dreiser traces the development of his soul and sex and struggle out of the blanketing bourgois of his birthplace. The young ’Gene answers the call of beauty, without knowing what it is that calls him. He comes to Chicago. He is a laundry wagon driver, a collector for an installment furniture house, a student of the old Art Institute, a worker in the art department of a newspaper. Dreiser traces him out of the half way stratas of Chicago to New York, to success, and then through a labyrinth of incidents all interesting and big. He follows him through one development after another until Witla, the painter, realizes himself. I cannot begin to tell what the book is about. It is partially a depiction of the struggle between an artist husband and a “good woman” who is his wife, partly the struggle between the flesh and the spirit of the same husband and the tale of their final adjustment. It is an Odyssey of a type of man in whom the future of the arts rest as they always have rested. In the 736 pages there are persons of every type. You will meet everyone you have known and many you have dreamed of knowing. Every shade of womanhood flashes between the covers. It is as a novel should be—complete.It tingles with the quick spasmodic life of the city, of the country, the factory, the field, the drawing room. And above all, it breathes the atmosphere of America’s art life, the lively, struggling workers of the studio.
Witla, however, remains Dreiser’s calm, masterful argument against the one-sided perversions of the Puritan. Witla is a genius. What are you going to do with him, you proselyting blue stocking? Such a detached study in perfidious polygamy is enough to damn the very printers who set the type for the book. Here is a man of strong ideals, great productive talent, an indispensable contributor to life, who naively considers setting up an establishment for his pretty model just after he has proposed matrimony to the woman he loves at the time with all the finest desires of his nature; a miserable fellow who ruins and ravishes without compunction every shapely creature who crosses his path. He is without even unconscious morality, innate morality. Woman is beauty when she is anything and to possess beauty is the motive force in his life. His eye possesses the beauty of the city’s filth and dirt, the beauty of landscape, his mind possesses the beauty of books and talk and other minds, and his body the beauty of passion wherever he encounters it. Logical, natural, primitive and entirely artistic. But immoral? God, yes. No one woman can satisfy a man unless he deliberately stunts himself, is the Dreiserian Gospel. A man needs blonde women, brunette women, short ones and tall ones, radical ladies and conservative creatures—that is, a man like Witla does. And is Witla a supreme type, a distinctive Sanine sort of fellow? Not a bit of it. Whether Dreiser thought he is, I don’t know. He doesn’t say. But he isn’t. He is man and not artist in his “sins.”
There is naturally more color to his escapades, to his “pursuit of beauty,” for he is the “genius” with an eye to shades and a soul for nuances not possessed by his more hum drum brothers. To him matrimony is naturally a pit, a degradation, a series of cages, for he is the eternal masculine. But how many men are there who have always been faithful to their wives? What? I do not know of a single one. In his high lighted type of Witla, Dreiser tells of this rudely, brutally and beautifully—with the indifference of a Juggernaut and the cunning of a magician.
Really, you of the firm-fireside-faith, what is there to be done? Here is the Dionysian dastard who dares proclaim that life is a decent, orderly routine and that life is also a wild, warm passionate thing; that it is also a flame in which there is only one color, the red, golden color of youth.
And the answer is—howl. A howl will go up, I swear it. It will start from the critics.
I can almost read their forthcoming reviews as I close my eyes.
“A sensually depraved and degenerate type.”
“Striking at the bed rock of public solidarity, of home happiness, of everything decent and worth while.”
And America’s reading public—“Horrible, filthy.”
Howl, you who have stultified your artists and buried them under the gingerbread morality of your own monotonous lives. Dreiser is the one novelist being published in America today who doesn’t listen to you, who describes you at your various bests, who wrings the pathos and joys out of your little worlds; who paints in with the brush of a universal art what you and I are doing in Alexandria and Chicago and New York and all the milk-station stops between.
I am not a disciple of the Dreiserian Gospel. I would like to argue with him the certain superiorities of monogamy for the artist. But he has limned a hero who is not a sugar-coated moralizer. He has ignored superbly the mob-begotten mandates of literary excellence. Whatever his faults of composition or construction, and there are not so many as his friends endeavor to make out there are, he has magnificently booted the reading public, the morally subsidized critics and the very publishers in the coarsest regions of their bodies—their souls.
And for these things I hail him as the greatest novelist in the country. I acclaim him as the only real, uncontaminated genius of these States and pray to God that my friend Sherwood Anderson will hurry up and get published so that there will be two of them.
The Scavenger.