Theodore Dreiser was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. His father was a German Catholic immigrant, embittered by hard luck in business. His mother, by contrast, had seemingly endless resources of courage and hope for her ten children despite the staggering burden of bearing and raising them in poverty. The family moved from one Indiana town to another as the father lost or found employment. In Volume 1 of Dreiser’s autobiography, Dawn, he remembers scavenging along the railroad tracks for coal for the family stove; but he testifies also to the joyful sensuality of his child’s feelings for life and the natural world around him.
At the age of fifteen, influenced by the accounts of some of his older brothers and sisters, Theodore went off alone to Chicago—the same sort of journey, and made for the same reason, as that undertaken by the heroine of Sister Carrie. He found work as a dishwasher and busboy and then as a shipping clerk. After an interval at Indiana University in Bloomington, financed by a former schoolteacher who believed in his potential, he returned to his romance with the city of Chicago as a bill collector, real estate clerk, and laundry-truck driver.
But he had vague ambitions of writing. He had delivered newspapers as a child and had come to associate with the life of a reporter all the drama and glory of the catastrophes of history and the doings of great men. His first newspaper job was at the Chicago Herald—dispensing toys for the needy at Christmas. But eventually he was hired as a cub reporter for the Chicago Globe and subsequently went on to St. Louis to become a feature writer for the Globe-Democrat. After reviewing in absentia a theatrical performance that turned out not to have occurred, he felt it wise to leave St. Louis. He found a job with the Dispatch in Pittsburgh, where, since it was the aftermath of the Homestead strike, in which armies of Pinkerton detectives and striking steelworkers had fought pitched battles, he began to appreciate some of the problems inherent in American economic life.
In the second volume of his autobiography, Newspaper Days, Dreiser acknowledges the formative influence of his fellow reporters and editors—cynics, boulevardiers, and drunks though many of them were. “They did not believe, as I still did, that there was a fixed moral order in the world which one contravened at his peril.” But while he absorbed their ideas and attitudes he seems to have been immune to their world-weary resources. Here is his description of the character of his young self: “Chronically nebulous, doubting, uncertain, I stared and stared at everything, only wondering, not solving.” This happens also to be a perfect description of the state of readiness in a novelist.
Yet it was not until he was working in New York as a magazine editor—by now married to Sara White, a schoolteacher he had met at the Chicago World’s Fair—that Dreiser even thought of writing fiction. A friend of his, Arthur Henry, an Ohio journalist, had encouraged him to write stories and then challenged him to write a novel. Henry, to his credit, had recognized in Dreiser’s work as a feature writer the capacity of the novelist. And so in 1899, Theodore Dreiser, age twenty-eight, wrote the title, “Sister Carrie” on a piece of paper, and having no idea what it meant, proceeded to compose the book to find out.
It is not difficult to find in Sister Carrie the circumstantial details that Dreiser brought to it from his own life: what it means to be in wonder and awe of a great city in which you’re looking for work, or to be desperately hungry and down on your luck and homeless, or to be on the way up the business ladder, a young man dressed in the latest fashion and knowing how to endear himself to young women. One of Dreiser’s sisters had run off to Toronto with a married man, just as Carrie does to Montreal, and the married man had turned out to have stolen money from his employer, just as Carrie’s lover George Hurstwood is made to do. The Chicago of the novel is the Chicago Dreiser knew in his youth and is painstakingly accurate in its references to streets, hotels, and restaurants. The New York where Carrie and Hurstwood play out their love affair is one you may trust down to the last streetlamp.
But none of this accounts for the composition—what the act of writing creates. We may hope to sense what this is by reflecting on F. O. Matthiessen’s statement, in his authoritative critical biography Theodore Dreiser, that Dreiser was “virtually the first major American writer whose family name was not English or Scotch-Irish.” An outsider because of his German background, his poverty, his limited parochial school education, Dreiser sprang to being as an artist independent of the prevailing literary and cultural values and tastes that might otherwise have formed him. He wrote about what he had seen as a working reporter—and he had seen a lot. He stood outside the governing New England influence that George Santayana called “the genteel tradition”—a tradition whose end result, according to Matthiessen, “is to make art an adornment rather than an organic expression of life, to confuse it with politeness and delicacy … and to think of literature as somehow dependent upon the better born groups of richer standing.”
Eighty years later our literary history has absorbed the work of James T. Farrell, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow—to mention just those ethnic and lower-depth writers out of Chicago—and the immigrant impudence is itself part of the prevailing culture. But in 1900 the first publisher to see the manuscript of Sister Carrie, Harper Brothers, turned it down on the grounds that it was not “sufficiently delicate to depict without offense to the reader the continued illicit relations of the heroine.” And the publisher who accepted it, Doubleday, Page, published it with trepidation, and therefore badly. It came out in 1900, sold less than seven hundred copies, and created for Dreiser the reputation of naturalist-barbarian that followed him down the years.
What was the nature of the book’s offense? In what way did it lack sufficient delicacy? Sara White Dreiser felt the trouble lay partly in the references to the sexual lives of the characters. Dreiser struck all of these he could find before submitting the book to Doubleday. Literary scholars tell us that both Mrs. Dreiser and Arthur Henry were intimately involved in the editing of the manuscript after the Harper rejection. The commendable scholarship of the Dreiserians of the University of Pennsylvania Press, which in 1981 published a version of the uncut manuscript, makes it possible to see, however, that even the uncut Sister Carrie was never sexually explicit nor less than circumspect in its depictions of physical life.
But Dreiser’s wife and friend were closer to the mark when they urged him not to leave the reader at the end of the book with the impression that Carrie was to be rewarded for her life of illicit relation. Dreiser wrote according to the aesthetic principle of Realism, which proposes that the business of fiction is not to draw an idealized picture of human beings for the instruction or sentimental satisfaction of readers, but rather to portray life as it is really lived under specific circumstances of time and place, and to show how people actually think and feel and why they do what they do. But the young author had also chosen, consciously or unconsciously, to build his realistic novel on one of the oldest narrative conventions in literature—a convention, moreover, right off the shelf of literary gentility. Dreiser made the changes asked of him; but the structural parody of Sister Carrie is its pointed offense—one which no amount of judicious editing could soften.
Consider that in Chapter 1, before her train even reaches Chicago, the eighteen-year-old Carrie, a “half-equipped little knight … venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams,” is picked up by a traveling salesman who sits in the coach seat behind hers and, assuming theology’s favored position for the Devil, leans forward and whispers into her ear. The assault upon innocence is a staple of Christian melodrama; as a narrative convention it looks back at least as far as the first novel in English, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, whose heroine is exercised in defense of her virtue for well over three hundred pages. Our Carrie doesn’t make it past page 64. Unable to find a decent job, overwhelmed by the rude rush and merciless dazzle of an urban society, she moves in with the importunate salesman, Charlie Drouet, and improves her fortunes materially by her act. Furthermore, Drouet is shown to be not a bad fellow, only somewhat shallow and insensitive.
Living unwed with Drouet and then, in a somewhat more complicated situation, with the hero of the book, George Hurstwood, Carrie hardly suffers any of the standard fates the convention requires. Dreiser saw to it that she would not end up happy, but neither is she punished or repentant. What is more important, the author never suggests that her alternatives, had she been capable of choosing them, would have given her a finer life or made her a better person.
Of course Dreiser is not in spirit a parodist. He’s the least ironical of our major writers and there is reason to doubt from the evidence of Sister Carrie that he has even the hope of wit. What he has rather is a concern for the moral consequence of life that is so pervasive as to constitute a vision. But it is unmediated by piety. All God can do in Sister Carrie is provide a soup line for someone who’s down and out. He is not presumed by any of the characters to provide guidance, let alone redemption. He is not indicated by even one fully functioning conscience. And those characters who are wronged—Hurstwood’s wife and children, for example—are themselves motivated by material values; they are as single-mindedly ambitious, and governed by the same sensitivity to wealth and status, as everyone else.
And here we may begin to hope to locate the achievement of this novel. There is a remarkable moment of transition when it becomes clear that Carrie will lose her virginity. We are immediately taken into the mind of her older sister Minnie, a drab, spiritless woman, married to an immigrant who cleans refrigerator cars at the stockyards for a living. Minnie has not been particularly generous or supportive to her younger sister—families and, by implication, the values of family life do not come out well in Sister Carrie—but she is concerned enough about Carrie’s fate to have a troubled dream as she falls asleep. In her dream she sees Carrie disappear forever into the dark pit of some sort of water-ridden coal mine. Characteristically, Dreiser chooses the right direction for Hell, but his metaphor has a superseding value. The black coal mine is perdition in its industrial form. And it is solely in the modern industrial world, without reference to any other state of existence than the material, that Dreiser finds the government of our moral being.
The Dreiserian universe is composed of merchants, workers, club men, managers, actors, salesmen, doormen, cops, derelicts—a Balzacian population unified by the rules of commerce and the ideals of property and social position. “The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended,” Dreiser says at the beginning of Chapter 7, and proceeds, with Sister Carrie, to give us the best explanation we have had. It is not merely that his characters must display it if they have it, work for it, steal, or beg for it if they haven’t: their very beings are contingent upon it—who they are in the character of their souls.
When we first meet George Hurstwood he is a virile man of the world, with a cosmopolitan charm and an intelligence competent to all the demands that his life might place on him—exactly the characteristics that attract Carrie. But after he wins her—having to go to great lengths to get her away from Drouet—and is living with her in New York, his powers fade and he enters into a slow, terrible decline of spirit. In the material world, the stature of a man is in his exterior supports. His passion for Carrie has removed Hurstwood from his job, from the respect of his peers, and from the accoutrements of position—house, family, bank account. Without these he is without will. He is simply not the same man. His love for Carrie cannot sustain him—indeed, it collapses along with his income.
Carrie, for her part, is emphasized to be a passive individual who comes into animation under the attentions of others. She never thinks about anything she hasn’t seen. She is a heroine who goes through her story without an idea in her head. If Dreiser is telling here of a sentimental education, Carrie’s teachers are not primarily the men who keep her but other women—the succession of neighbors and friends who instruct her in the longing for clothes, jewels, apartments, and in all the emblems of taste and fashion. It is these things that arouse her passion and delineate her possibilities. And when, under the pressure of circumstance, she discovers her talent for acting, it will be seen that her success springs not from any force of creativity, innate and substantive, but from the fact that her face and demeanor so well represent “the world’s longing.” It is Carrie as representation of all desire, a poignant reflection of the entire society, that makes her a star and causes people to pay money to see her. Dreiser gives this crucial observation to the one person in the book who is capable of standing in judgment of the culture he lives in, the remote Mr. Ames, a character said to have been modeled on Thomas Alva Edison. “The world is always struggling to express itself,” Ames tells Carrie. “Your face … [is] a thing the world likes to see because it’s a natural expression of its longing.”
Longing, the hope for fulfillment, is the one unwavering passion of the world’s commerce. Dreiser is of two minds about this passion. To a populace firmly in the grip of material existence, the desire for something more is a destructive energy that can never be exhausted; it is doom. Hurstwood, whose success as manager of a high-class drinking establishment is not sufficient, fixes his further ambition on Carrie, and is ruined. But the desire for something more, the longing for fulfillment, is also hope, and therefore innocence, a sort of redemption. Carrie, at the top of her profession, is left looking for something more, and though we understand she will never find it—no more than Hurstwood has—her recognition that she is unfulfilled is the closest thing to grace in the Dreiser theology.
H. L. Mencken, although a great friend and champion of Dreiser’s, felt the author had made a serious compositional error by giving so much space, in a novel about Carrie, to the fate of Hurstwood. Mencken believed this ruined the organic unity of the book. It is true there are no more graphic and stunning scenes than those that follow Hurstwood down to dereliction. But the case is overstated. Dreiser’s panoptic vision encompasses more than the story of one or another individual. George Hurstwood’s fall propels Carrie Meeber’s rise. As Einstein taught, the energy of the universe is never exhausted, only transformed and recycled. Carrie discovers her ability to earn money because Hurstwood has lost his. Together they describe all the possibilities of material fate, lonely death, enormous success, and in a world in which everyone is alone with his own ambition, the moral consequence is the same.
It is astonishing to consider how—in this big realistic novel, which takes us into three cities and effectively portrays most of the classes of American society, a novel in which we are witness to physical degradation, homelessness, unremitting labor, and violent strikes at the one extreme, and fine living, glamorous well-being, and wealth at the other, and through which a seemingly endless cast of characters appear fully animated in their surroundings of streets, tenements, saloons, office buildings, trains, hotels, theaters—it is astounding how hermetic this novel is. What a closed and suffocating America Dreiser seals us in! The self-educated immigrant’s son, a naïf who stared and wondered at everything, managed to connect it all in as unitary a vision as has been produced by American literature. He is said to be a clumsy, cumbersome writer, but the clarity and consistency of his vision is a function of his craft. It comes of a control of recurrent imagery and reiterated observation. It comes of a narrative voice that is older, wiser, and more compassionate than we have any right to expect from a first novelist in his twenties. It is a result of the rate of stately progress of the events of the story, and of the attention given to every phase of growth in the feelings of the major characters—which brilliantly exceeds, in its patience, the magnitude of their minds or the originality of their problems. There is nothing clumsy about any of this, nor anything but genius in the vision that comes off the pages of Sister Carrie and into each and every one of us.
(1983)
As an artist, Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) struggled with two distinct centuries. His younger contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed there were no second acts in American lives, but Sister Carrie was written in 1899 and An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s other masterpiece, in 1926. These towers rise from a structure of sturdy novels, volumes of autobiography, studies of representative men and women, polemical works, plays, poems, stories, and innumerable newspaper and magazine pieces, an early example of which is an account of the working life of New York harbor pilots as they go out under sail to meet the transatlantic steamers. Yet Dreiser was still alive to read of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima.
His full and tempestuous life seems almost to have run backward. One of the astonishing things about Sister Carrie, written by a twenty-eight-year-old, is the voice of the book, which is that of a septuagenarian. Where did this first novelist find the wisdom and voice of an elder to detect the insatiable longing that characterizes the American soul?
Apparently Dreiser’s advantage, as one of ten children of an impoverished German immigrant, was in being born old. As he matured, he became younger and more disorderly. He had married early but soon separated from his wife. Because his novel had sold under five hundred copies, he was aware of his painful obscurity as the younger brother of Paul Dresser, a popular songwriter celebrated to this day in Terre Haute as the composer of the Indiana state song. Dreiser suffered deeply from the provincialism that found Sister Carrie the unforgivable work of a barbarian naturalist; but he took a job as editor of Butterick’s, a slick magazine, where he energetically enforced just those editorial strictures of mindless gentility he had outraged as a writer. He was to lose this job because of his too assiduous pursuit of the seventeen-year-old daughter of a colleague—an affection that foretold his middle age, when he was a rampant satyr deviously conducting several affairs simultaneously. His appetite for food, for drink, for fame, grew equally voracious.
Dreiser was a Spencerian mechanist but found in the godless universe of the surviving fittest the reason for transports of mystical conviction. The sight of a pretty sunset made him weep. In the 1930s he went to Russia and detested what he found there—which, according to the retrogressive direction of his life, meant, inevitably, he would join the Communist party. The more he wrote, and the wealthier his writings made him, the more insecure both he and his reputation became. He was as self-obsessed as any writer but could never work through his own disorder to compose himself properly in the public eye. A large, horse-faced man with a misaligned gaze, he lacked glamour. He could not make a creation of himself, as Hemingway did, as Fitzgerald did—his younger competitors who surpassed him also in irony and the modish literature of the unsaid. Dreiser’s heavyweight novels were the literature of the everything said.
By the last decade of his life he was making public pronouncements on subjects of which he had little or no understanding. He was winging off telegrams to the president of the United States on matters of national policy. He had expended himself on radical causes, which America will suffer in its students but not in its writers. He stooped now to expressing his bigotries—his dislike of Jews, though it was by then widely known what anti-Semitism was doing to Jews in Europe, or his hatred of the British upper classes, for whose retribution he hoped Hitler would invade England.
Toward the end, not only was he talking about all the big questions of the nineteenth century—Science versus Religion, Whither the Universe?—but talking as if he were the first and only one who had ever thought of these things, a sophomore at seventy. And in his final days he felt misunderstood, unloved, and abandoned, like a child who lives in a comfortable home and is doted on by its parents. Adored by his longtime companion and second wife, Helen Richardson, he said to yet another lady a few days before he died, “I am the loneliest man in the world.”
So it is the young Dreiser who necessarily interests us most, the fully formed author, the pre-matured genius. His early life had taught him that in America wealth displays itself obsessionally in the eyes of the poor, the golden glitter of the inside transfixes the outsider. In no subsequent work was he to use this ingenuous vision to greater effect, or to see more deeply into the Republic, than in Sister Carrie.
What did this book cost him? What were the consequences to his life? Now we have the most authoritative answer, Dreiser’s own. A manuscript long alluded to by his biographers, it was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press under the title An Amateur Laborer some eighty years after it was written. Incomplete, but bolstered by fragments of chapters and unincorporated passages, it is Dreiser’s frank account of his life in Brooklyn and New York in the year 1903, the aftermath of Carrie’s disastrous publication, when he had lost his ability to write and to earn a living, and thought seriously of suicide.
“Mine was a serious case of neurasthenia—or nervous prostration,” he tells us, writing in 1904, the year of his recovery. “It had begun with the conclusion of a novel which I had written three years before and which exhausted me greatly.… I was morbid, had fearful dreams, slept very little.… I was constantly most gloomy and depressed—almost to a state of tears.… My nerves began to hurt me, particularly in the ends of my fingers in which I felt genuine pain.… I began to have the idea, or the almost irresistible impulse to turn around in a ring. That is, if I were sitting in a chair, I would want to keep turning to the right—an involuntary nervous discharge of will … almost making it impossible for me not to do so. Then too my eyes began to hurt me and I felt as if the columns of the paper or book I was reading were crooked.”
But, characteristically, Dreiser is less interested in the psychological than in the material terms of the problem—how life appears to and is understood by one who has dropped out of it. Picture him, age thirty-one, well over six feet tall and weighing under one hundred forty pounds. He has given up on his second novel, “Jennie Gerhardt,” after three years of stymied effort and of fitful drifting up and down the Eastern Seaboard. He and his wife have separated. He has taken a room in a shabby boardinghouse in a slum of Brooklyn. With just a few dollars left to his name, he begins to resort to the strategies of poverty, subsisting on bread and milk, tramping the pavement to save carfare as he looks for work, even scavenging food from the garbage of the street. He suffers bitterly when a gust of raw February wind blows his hat away and he can’t retrieve it from the subway construction site in which it has disappeared. This is Dreiser, the once-successful young newspaperman and the author of a novel mighty enough to have secured his reputation among such literary lights as Frank Norris.
There is something eerily familiar in this torment. Having decided his only chance for survival is to get work as a laborer of some sort, to work with his hands since he can no longer use his brain, Dreiser applies for a position with the Metropolitan Street Railway system as a motorman or conductor. Didn’t Hurstwood, the doomed descending hero of his novel, work at just such a job? Dreiser is turned down by the street railway people, thus suffering as well the experience of Carrie, who early in the novel is humiliated when she applies for an unskilled job and is turned down for lack of qualification. Time and time again throughout An Amateur Laborer Dreiser seems to discover with a shock what he has already invented or known in Sister Carrie. “What kind of a world is it,” he wonders, “wherein one is always struggling to keep his head above water.” And watching a procession of motorists out for a drive and feeling toward them a scornful sense of superiority, he says, “Rail as I would, the differences of life were largely based on materials, and [those] who had them could afford to let the beggars down.”
F. O. Matthiessen points out in his critical biography of Dreiser that the picture of society invoked by this author is one “in which there are no real equals, and no equilibrium but only people moving up and down.” That he is enacting with his life just these cycles of his fiction, Dreiser seems to be quite unaware in this autobiography. Here is, possibly, one of the great literary revelations of writer’s block, that unable to find justice, or mercy, for his book, the writer will turn language into his own flesh and perform its events. Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor. All his life Dreiser produced books from the war with himself, and even after the successful surmounting of his trials in An Amateur Laborer, his self-punishment continued: Up he rose to the precise position of success, a slick-magazine editor at Butterick’s, that reproached and denied his belief in himself as a writer.
Yet the struggle he describes in this account is valiant and even cunning. Turned down again and again for every job he can think of, too proud to accept charity or get help from any of his brothers or sisters, he goes to see the general passenger agent of the New York Central and, presenting himself as a gentleman, he asks for a laborer’s job on the railroad for its therapeutic value. As someone recovering his health, he thinks some form of outdoor work will do him good. He has intuited that the way to find employment is to seem not to need it.
The ruse is successful, but before he can take up his new job (at fifteen cents an hour) he happens to run into his older brother Paul in front of the Imperial Hotel on Broadway. The famous songwriter sizes things up rather quickly, takes charge of his cadaverous but proud sibling, feeds him a good dinner, gives him money, buys him a new suit of clothes, and books him for an all-paid residency at Muldoon’s Sanitarium in Westchester, just north of White Plains, a health resort for wealthy men. We begin at this point in the narrative to perceive the key coordinates of Dreiser’s up-and-down universe. Previously, he has stayed a few nights at the Mills Hotel on Bleecker Street (the structure still stands, under a different name), where some fifteen hundred men down on their luck idle their time away in musty cell-like rooms whose walls do not touch the ceiling or floor as a preventive measure against suicide. This is the depth of social dereliction (rent: twenty cents a day) from which Dreiser is suddenly, and fantastically, passed to Muldoon’s spa, a rustic retreat of the idle rich.
The young author undergoes Muldoon’s treatment, a vigorous regimen of early-morning showers, throwing and catching medicine balls, hiking, riding, accompanied by a relentless program of verbal abuse at the hands of Mr. Muldoon himself, a former champion wrestler who has perceived that the public browbeating of successful men who pay for the privilege is actually good for their characters—an early form of est, perhaps, and one which Dreiser both resents and comes to appreciate. As for his fellow residents in this odd place, he seems to find them, at least by implication, no more estimable or interesting or brilliant than the miserable wretches lying about the precincts of the Mills Hotel.
The large middle world, neither destitute nor privileged, is of course that of the ordinary working man, and once Dreiser leaves the spa, a few pounds heavier and somewhat less insomniac, he belatedly takes up his day job working in the carpentry shop of the Central, along the Hudson at Spuyten Duyvil. He works hard hauling lumber and cleaning the wood shavings off the floor and comes to study the various men he works with—the manly foreman Mike Burke, John the engineer, Henry the watchman—but if he hopes for a romantic affirmation of the honest working man, he does not find it so that he can believe it. The railroad men are generally unimaginative, unaspiring, terribly reduced in liveliness by the deadly and repetitive rituals of their work; they seem content with too little, and they lack wonder for “the mystery of life.”
It is perhaps inevitable that as he identifies, finally, with none of the representative societies in which he has found himself, Dreiser should recover his own functioning identity as an artist. In all his surroundings, he has kept his critical distance, and this, at least, even in the depths of his mental terrors and impoverishment, has remained his undulled writer’s faculty. Belonging not to Mills, not to Muldoon’s, and not to the world between, he has used himself scientifically, as explorer in the ideas and experiences they have to offer. By 1904, when he is writing this account, he is physically and mentally restored and capable of turning out some really beautiful descriptions of New York at the turn of the century—the Hudson River at Spuyten Duyvil, the village of Kingsbridge, the view of Manhattan from Fort Lee, the hills of Westchester looking the broad way down to Long Island Sound.
But he does not finish the book—we have only the first twenty-four chapters—and the good editors of the volume, Richard W. Dowell, James L. W. West, and Neda M. Westlake, do not hazard a guess as to why. But I will. Along about Chapter 20, the transitions begin to thicken, blur the story, and turn it into that bane of biographers, unsignified experiences whose only narrative justification is that they happened. We are at the point when the outcome of the tale is assured. Dreiser has touched upon all the shock points of his sensibility, and now ordinary working men, a landlady, and, most especially, a good-looking landlady’s daughter have moved in and taken possession of the mind that in the depths of illness was filled only with itself. There was no tragedy waiting at the end of this book, no loss, only, possibly, discretion.
But Dreiser was to mine the materials of An Amateur Laborer for many of his subsequent works—as the editors take pains to document in their wonderful enterprise. Here, recovered, is Dreiser’s first fall from the heights of Sister Carrie, and his standing up and his dusting himself off. Young Dreiser, whose life of hazard is just beginning.
(1983)