Having finished Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, I've started in on An American Tragedy, the 800-plus page novel usually considered Dreiser's masterpiece. The afterword to my Signet classic paperback edition was written by Irving Howe in 1964 and begins: "Do I exaggerate in saying that Theodore Dreiser has dropped out of the awareness of cultivated Americans?" He concludes that he is not exaggerating, and, as I indicated here, it seems to me that Dreiser's stock has fallen even farther in the last half century. An American Tragedy was published in 1925, the same year as Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby and the year before Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, two slim and highly wrought novels in which no one ever looks for work or worries about money. If you are aware of Dreiser, however dimly, you probably do not think of him as being a contemporary of these current cornerstones of the American literature curriculum.
Dreiser is widely condemned for his ponderous style. Here is a specimen, from early on in An American Tragedy, when the central character, Clyde Griffiths, accompanied by friends, is on his way to a Kansas City brothel for his first sexual experience:
Even as they talked, they had reached a certain house in a dark and rather wide street, the curbs of which for a block or more on either side were sprinkled with cabs and cars. And at the corner, only a little distance away, were some young men standing and talking. And over the way, more men. And not a half block farther on, they passed two policemen, idling and conversing. And although there was no light visible in any window, nor over any transom, still, curiously, there was a sense of vivid, radiant life. One could feel it in this dark street. Taxis spun and honked and two old-time closed carriages still in use rolled here and there, their curtains drawn. And doors slammed or opened and closed. And now and then a segment of bright inward light pierced the outward gloom and then disappeared again. Overhead on this night were many stars.
Around half the sentences in An American Tragedy seem to begin, "And." And then this and then that and yet another thing and also this too. There is to it a sort of artless rush that not everyone, certainly not literature professors or instructors of creative writing, deems worthy of attention. If however you're on Dreiser's side it is as if his head and heart are so full that the prose just gushes out, unconsidered, and that the result of the long flow is a complete and satisfying representation of American urban life at the beginning of the twentieth century. A genteel tradition is thus overthrown. How much that happens in the world is on account of people trying to get money and sex? This rather large topic had not been a subject of American fiction before Dreiser.
A quick note about Jennie Gerhardt, the novel Dreiser wrote after Sister Carrie. The situation is that the title character, who is from an impoverished background, becomes the "kept woman" of an able man whose father had founded an extremely successful business. There is a great deal of genuine affection between the two, but the man's family objects to Jennie, and he is himself conflicted in his feeling for her. She asks for nothing, and he is sufficiently unconventional to live openly with her for many years. Eventually the father dies. The will leaves to him the sum of ten thousand dollars per year for three years. If at the end of that time he persists in living with Jennie, he receives nothing more--unless he marries her, in which case the ten thousand per year continues till his death. If he leaves her, he comes into his full inheritance, a very large fortune: the ten thousand per year is generated by dividends on just one large holding.
In the end, he leaves Jennie. She thinks this is the right thing for him to do, but when he finally does it, she realizes that she wishes he would keep her instead of his fortune. His own feelings are similarly jumbled and he comes to regret his action. For a lot of readers the question will arise: Just how much money was ten thousand dollars in around 1900, the approximate date of the father's death? The answer, near as I can tell, is about a quarter of a million dollars.
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