My dim sense of things is that the novels of Theodore Dreiser, which I reread once in awhile (like lately) just for the pleasure they give me, are not highly esteemed today by those who decide, for example, what college students ought to read. I think of a fork in the road, one path going to Dreiser and the other to Henry James, and James's stock is very high.
"It has not escaped attention," writes poet and critic John Berryman, "that Dreiser writes like a hippopotamus." Yes, that is true, but, as Berryman also recognizes, something about the awkwardness can be expressive and moving. I think it's true of all the arts. Would van Gogh's painting of the "Potato Eaters" be a masterpiece if it more clearly exhibited the effects of formal training? Dreiser's artless maundering somehow conveys his own tenderness and wonder.
But patches of even his best books are really awful. I think Dreiser exhibits the famous dictum concerning how authors should go back over their drafts and get rid of everything they are most proud of. One imagines, for instance, that Dreiser thought the opening to the penultimate chapter of Jennie Gerhardt quite the thing:
The days of man under the old dispensation, or, rather, according to that supposedly biblical formula, which persists, are threescore years and ten. It is so ingrained in the race-consciousness by mouth-to-mouth utterance that it seems the profoundest of truths. As a matter of fact, man, even under his mortal illusion, is organically built to live five times the period of his maturity, and would do so if he but knew that it is spirit which endures, that age is an illusion, and that there is no death. Yet the race-thought, gained from what dream of materialism we know not, persists, and the death of man under the mathematical formula so fearfully accepted is daily registered.
What is he talking about? Chapters often begin with these philosophical asides and as a reader I regret every one. When his reading shows through, instead of his experience of life, one proceeds with a grimace. The world of science, especially medical science, seems a special weakness. From Sister Carrie:
Not trained to reason or introspect himself, he could not analyze the change that was taking place in his mind, and hence his body, but he felt the depression of it. Constant comparisons between his old state and his new showed a balance for the worse, which produced a constant state of gloom or, at least, depression. Now, it has been shown experimentally that a constantly subdued frame of mind produces certain poisons in the blood, called katastates, just as virtuous feelings of pleasure and delight produce helpful chemicals called anastates. The poisons generated by remorse inveigh against the system, and eventually produce marked physical deterioration. To these Hurstwood was subject.
Do you not get the feeling that Dreiser thought we were to be grateful that he, unlike Hurstwood, had the gift "to introspect"? Notice the sentence beginning with the condescending "Now" followed by several recurrences of the drab "produce." It's the kind of verb you are obliged to deploy when you really do not understand how something works. Few great novelists are capable of such clunking nonsense.
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