“An American Tragedy” and “The Sound and the Fury”
“Dis long time, O Jesus,” she said, “Dis long time.”
FAULKNER, The Sound and the Fury
An American Tragedy, published in mid-December 1925 and Dreiser’s first novel since The “Genius” (suppressed for immorality a year after its publication in 1915), was Dreiser’s one commercial success. This much Dreiser, who had been thinking of a “murder novel” since 1901, owed the newly emancipated readers who in 1925 welcomed once-forbidden literature.
An American Tragedy was brought out by the smart new firm of Boni and Liveright. Horace Liveright, who was to take over (for a time) Dreiser’s scattered copyrights, was a famously vivid character and bon vivant, the model for Ben Hecht’s maliciously engaging film The Scoundrel. Like Alfred A. Knopf, Ben Huebsch, Thomas Seltzer, Albert and Charles Boni, Pascal Covici, Bennett Cerf, Donald Klopfer, Robert K. Haas, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, and Liveright was one of the new Jewish publishers in New York who had been among the first to publish dangerous books like Dubliners and Sons and Lovers. They were as eager to establish a “tradition of the new” as the H. L. Mencken, Eugene O’Neill, Sigmund Freud, and Theodore Dreiser they now promoted. In 1900 Frank Doubleday said of the Sister Carrie he reluctantly published and helped to kill: “It’s an immoral book; I don’t like it.” Carrie earned Dreiser $68.40.
An American Tragedy, brought out in two volumes at five dollars, had by the end of 1925 sold 13,378 copies and brought Dreiser $11,872. Not a best seller, it gave Dreiser his first substantial income from a book and a country house in Mt. Kisco. It was immediately bought by Paramount Pictures for a film to be directed by Josef von Sternberg. Dreiser rejected Samuel Hoffenstein’s script, which turned Clyde Griffiths into “a sex-starved smart aleck.” There was a long struggle between Dreiser and Paramount over this first film version, and the picture was not released until 1931. Patrick Kearny’s Broadway stage version was produced in 1926. Many foreign editions of An American Tragedy soon appeared. In 1927 Dreiser, taken up by the Soviets despite his indifference to socialism, proudly reported to a friend, “in Russia the Govt publishing house has just taken over all my books (6 already published) and Stanislavsky is taking An American Tragedy and The Hand of the Potter.” In May 1929 An American Tragedy was banned in Boston, an honor the book shared with The American Mercury and Voltaire’s Candide. The Mercury’s editor, H. L. Mencken, was arrested for selling it on the Common; the collector of customs of the port of Boston had just confiscated thirteen copies of Candide.
Nineteen twenty-five was a great year. It saw the publication of Ezra Pound’s first Cantos, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, and Robinson Jeffers’s Roan Stallion, and the founding of The New Yorker. Charlie Chaplin starred in The Gold Rush, Tennessee forbade the teaching of evolution, the Standard Oil Company adopted an eight-hour day, the electrocardiograph was invented, Vladimir Zworykin patented an electronic color television, and Clarence Birdseye improved the freezing of precooked foods. In Europe, Werner Heisenberg began his development of quantum mechanics. Franz Kafka’s The Trial—he had died the year before—was brought out in the same season as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In Russia, Sergei Eisenstein released Potemkin and Lev Davidovitch Trotsky was dismissed from his chairmanship of the Russian Revolutionary Military Council.
Modern literature, advanced technology, and police states (Italy, Russia, Turkey, most of Latin America) were in the ascendancy. The heroes of the intelligentsia (a term never before used for Americans conscious of their cultural superiority) were Freud, Picasso, Stravinsky, Joyce, Eliot. In just eight years bonfires and concentration camps in Germany would begin to obliterate “modernist degeneracy.” At the moment expressionism, Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, and the most brilliant theater in Europe thrived on Germany’s seeming recovery from defeat, inflation, the fanatics of left and right. America under the somnolent eye of President Calvin Coolidge was speculation-mad, but a great many people were newly prosperous enough to be smug. Innumerable new forms of entertainment were provided by Hollywood, Broadway, radio, tabloid newspapers, and the weekly news magazine Time, determined to be as clever in style as any new novelist. Many of the fashionable novelists and poets, fugitives from the Middle West, scorned the moralism and provincialism into which they, like Indiana’s Theodore Dreiser, had been born. He was strikingly older and supposedly an anachronism.
An American Tragedy could not have been composed and accepted before the 1920s. But Dreiser’s “maddeningly” patient, lumbering style of narration, his tendency to overwhelm the reader with relentless documentation, hardly reflect the anxious preoccupation with style that founded Time and The New Yorker and saw its most effective voice in Hemingway’s deceitfully simple sentences.
Edmund Wilson in his old age used to say: “I am a man of the twenties. I am still expecting something exciting: drinks, animated conversation, gaiety, brilliant writing, uninhibited exchange of ideas.” In An American Tragedy the principal industry in “Lycurgus” is devoted to something so prewar as detachable collars. The social doings among the town’s upper crust, to which Clyde Griffiths is fatally drawn, seem too innocent for the Prohibition years. No hard liquor is drunk by these leisured sons and daughters of local manufacturers. The lake parties are more athletic than sexy. There is total separation between the classes. Could a young workroom supervisor in 1925 have been prohibited from dating an employee? The nasty, snobbish Gilbert Griffiths addresses his father as “Sir,” speaks of him as “the Governor.” Samuel Griffiths, not knowing that the bellhop in Chicago’s Union League Club is his nephew, benevolently calls him “Son.” The punitive morality that brings about Clyde’s undoing seems unnaturally widespread for the twenties. Dreiser drew his plot from the 1906 case of Chester Gillette, who murdered his mistress, Grace Brown, in Moose Lake. Since the book was written almost two decades later and naturally absorbed details from the present, Dreiser was careful not to specify a period.
In any event, Dreiser the pathmaker of the realistic novel, the “Hindenburg of the novel,” as his supporter Mencken derisively praised him (Melville’s great-grandson Paul Metcalf called Dreiser “caretaker and janitor to the new century”), seems to have conceived his novel about a murderer soon after Sister Carrie appeared. Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was Dreiser’s favorite character in fiction. Raskolnikov (excruciatingly an intellectual, utterly different from the wistful, dreaming, easily baffled Clyde Griffiths) murders an old pawnbroker in order to demonstrate his emancipation from conventional society. Such self-sufficiency was meant to show Raskolnikov up as a “schismatic,” a terrible egotist. He murders to demonstrate the triumph of his will.
The “hero” of An American Tragedy was to be doomed by a craving for society that kept him from having any ideas of his own. He plots murder when his pregnant working-class girl friend insists on a marriage that would bar him from the upper-class girl he has fallen in love with. Of course he will never know whether he is in love with Sondra Finchley or only spellbound by her money and “glamour.” Dreiser knew from earliest childhood that poverty does not improve the character. It certainly did not improve his. Only when the seemingly passive and bewildered “Theo” became a writer did he display aggressiveness. His early circumstances had almost crushed him. A vicious elder brother, “Rome,” had once “playfully” tried to drown him when they were in a rowboat. But Rome, an incorrigible savage, fascinated the timid young Dreiser, whose early wistfulness and passion for “dreaming” were incorporated in Clyde Griffiths’s submissiveness to everyone above him. Rome acted out the lawlessness that appealed to the eternal hater and outsider in Dreiser.
Dreiser created many trapped, “shuffling,” unrebellious men, many sweetly suffering women drawn from his mother and sisters in Terre Haute. Dreiser himself was primitive in his passions, vehement in his scorn of the conventions. Just as the dirty little secret behind Hurstwood’s fall and Carrie’s rise is commonplace but was forbidden to tell, so the idea behind An American Tragedy (still not acceptable to many people) is that you do not have to be clever in order to plan murder. By a single act that may astonish them more than it does anyone else, some people will think to free themselves from life as one long defeat. Dreiser lived long enough (he died in 1945) to see that murder had become as open as sex.
When the Russians took him up after the success of An American Tragedy, Dreiser was tickled by this evidence of world fame. But before the depression of the thirties, when he was struggling with the bad novels that were published only after his death—The Bulwark (1946) and The Stoic (1947)—and was grateful to the American Communists for making him a figurehead, it was clear that he identified with ruthless capitalists like Frank Algernon Cowperwood in The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). He thought “the system” as unalterable as life itself. Cowperwood’s proud motto is, I satisfy myself. In The Titan Dreiser rhapsodized over his “villain”: “How wonderful it is that men grow until, like colossi, they bestride the world, or like Banyan-trees, they drop roots from every branch and are themselves a forest—a forest of intricate commercial life, of which a thousand material aspects are the evidence.”
Dreiser’s unattractive diaries of the period between Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy scorn Jews, blacks, and every casualty he saw in the big city. They are a record of daily fornication interrupted by complaints about current prices. He boasted that he was outside himself and his feelings. This was not really true. Breaking down after the failure of Sister Carrie, he had been advised by a Philadelphia physician to keep a medical record. He kept it as if Theodore Dreiser, like the society around him, was all conditioned reflex and personal gratification.
Greenwich Village, November, 1917: Go to corner and mail letters. Take 6th Avenue L to 53d and 8th and get off and walk to 518 West 52d (Day and Company). They sell me one gallon cider for 50¢. Take 10th Avenue car to 42d and 10th and walk over to 9th and 42d. Take 9th Avenue to 14th. Get off and carry jug to Petronelle at 303 West 4th. She is out. Stop in saloon and have one more gin rickey (25¢). Come here. Find note in mailbox from Lewisohn saying he’s been here. Write him and say I couldn’t be here.
None of the writers who made the American novel dominant in the 1920s was below the surface such a savage as Dreiser. All his writing life his anarchic temperament exposed him to ridicule but also aroused an amazement that anyone so crude could carry out a narrative line with such devastating power. One of his many publishers called him “an abnormal American.” After 1927 it pleased this exception to the national consensus to be welcomed by Soviet writers, film and stage people officially contemptuous of the face Americans put on things. The background of all his work—from the degradation of Hurstwood to his sympathy with the “fallen” Jennie Gerhardt to his fascination with the corrupt and domineering magnate type, Cowperwood—was his sense that injustice makes society possible. It was another form of the carnage that sustains nature. To understand this is to respect fact. The thing-in-itself may save you. In the unremitting trivialities he recorded in his diaries, he demonstrated the fascination with fact that kept him from drowning in his greedy appetites and endless complaints. This was the professional habit of avid observation that fostered endless patience in carrying out a narrative. He would not stop where others did. What was not inevitable and “total” to himself alone he could not see at all.
Nothing Dreiser retained from his early life, nothing he shared with his rambunctious “outlaw” brothers and sisters, was ever to be softened or effaced. Mencken, despite his championship of Dreiser’s work up to An American Tragedy, never understood the primitive levels (like a blind man making his way from object to object) on which a novelist must operate. Mencken, a splendid and highly comic satirist just when America needed one, was easily pleased with himself. After years of tolerating Dreiser’s bětises, he turned on An American Tragedy. In a characteristically jocular preface to a “memorial” edition of the novel (1946), Mencken noted that once the plot had been worked out by Dreiser, he proceeded on “reminiscence.”
The wistful, doomed Clyde Griffiths was hardly the double of Theodore Dreiser. But it is typical of Dreiser’s revengeful memories that he recovered from the failure of Sister Carrie to brood over images of ambition and murder. At first Dreiser had gone into a decline that paralleled Hurstwood’s slide and came near killing him. Rescued by brother Paul the songwriter and restored at Muldoon’s health farm, Dreiser suddenly became a success in the magazine business. In 1904 he joined Street & Smith, the dime-novel house; as editor of Smith’s Magazine, he achieved a circulation of one hundred twenty-five thousand. He moved from his “moderately comfortable and autocratic position” at Smith’s to Broadway Magazine, where he used his position and his new income to back a second edition of Sister Carrie (1907), brought out by B. W. Dodge. This sold well enough to demonstrate that there was a new public ready to welcome Dreiser’s realism.
That same year Dreiser went to the Butterick Company, the firm founded on paper sewing patterns. He ran three women’s magazines that specialized in “fiction, uplift, fashion.” He made the impressive salary of five thousand dollars a year, and as editor of The Delineator announced, “We like sentiment, we like humor, we like realism, but it must be tinged with sufficient idealism to make it all of a truly uplifting character.” He met Mencken when that cheerfully cynical pro was ghosting a baby-care series for Dreiser. By 1909 Dreiser was secretly editing The Bohemian as a diversion from his days at Butterick. Mencken, his collaborator, was warned: “no tainted fiction or cheap sex-struck articles.” As always, Dreiser’s real diversion, the one constant in his restless life, was women. A member of the Butterick staff, the father of a seventeen-year-old Dreiser was chasing, got him fired. Dreiser left without regret; “the big work was done here.”
Sex and religion were still antagonists; Dreiser was absorbed by both. His father’s harsh immigrant Catholicism had left him with a bitter hatred of the Church. When An American Tragedy was banned in Boston, Claude Bowers congratulated him in a New York World editorial. Dreiser was sure that the ban had been instigated by the Church. “I have stated over and over that the chief menace to the world today is the Catholic Church because it is a world wide organization and because chiefly it attacks intelligence—the development of the human mind in every country in the world—since for its own prosperity’s sake it believes in mass stupidity.” Dreiser’s mother, of Pennsylvania Dutch background, had been brought up a Mennonite. She converted to her husband’s Catholicism, but her pietism contributed to Dreiser’s fascination with every form of radical Protestantism as he grew older.
In the 1920s nothing was more expected of literary men than a contempt for Victorian morality. Morality seemed the residue of religion, and as the only creed left to the unenlightened “booboisie,” it became an easy mark for the emancipated. In presenting Clyde Griffiths as the victim of an evangelical upbringing, Dreiser in 1925 was, as usual, the Great Exception. Supercilious academics, then and later, called him a Neanderthal because he was unconscious of literary fashion.
The roots of An American Tragedy lie below the urban world that becomes Clyde’s undoing. The book opens (no date given) on a pair of drab evangelists in Kansas City whose twelve-year-old boy is the prisoner of parents “determined upon spiritualizing the world as much as possible.” The family enters the novel between the “walls” of a big city. Clyde Griffiths grows up so innocent that his first experience of the money-obsessed, pleasure-mad world in the great hotel where he finds employment as a bellhop intoxicates and deranges him.
From now on nothing will exist for him except his need to replace his freakishly religious childhood with the standard American life of external success. He runs away after a car in which he is riding with drunken friends kills a little girl, and eventually he finds employment in the collar factory in upstate New York owned by his pompous uncle, Samuel Griffiths. He is first assigned to the “shrinking” room. The coldly superior Griffiths family in Lycurgus shuns him. He becomes a supervisor in the “stamping” room but is too lonely to stay away from the help, as ordered. In the evenings he meets with the poignant, all-loving and all-trusting Roberta Alden at the deserted end of her street. Roberta is the daughter of a hopelessly impoverished farmer from “Biltz” (Dreiser’s names for some characters and places are wonderfully ugly). Since Clyde is related to the important Griffiths family, his pale handsomeness and appealing eyes (his most noteworthy feature) attract the interest of sprightly Sondra Finchley, whose wealthy father manufactures vacuum cleaners. Clyde’s desire for Sondra, indistinguishable from his need to be accepted by her set, becomes overwhelming. When Roberta becomes pregnant and insists that he marry her, he discovers that there is no way out for him and (to his amazement) that he wishes to kill her.
Clyde accomplishes Roberta’s death without actually killing her. He takes her rowing on Big Bittern Lake and is so torn by fear of the crime he wishes to commit that he allows her to drown when she falls out of the boat after he has “accidentally” struck her with his camera. He has left so many indications of his intent to commit murder that the law easily catches up with him. The local district attorney is ambitious for higher office; he is personally disfigured, grew up poor as Clyde, hates Clyde for destroying a poor girl in order to join Sondra Finchley’s class. A jury of hard-faced country folk clearly takes satisfaction in sending Clyde to the chair. After almost a thousand driving pages of closeknit narrative have demonstrated to the point of pain that Clyde Griffiths never had a chance to think, dream, and be other than he is, he is executed. At the end Dreiser brings us back to the drab, beaten family of evangelists trudging away from still another forlorn prayer service. The scene is now San Francisco. A little boy—the son of Clyde’s sister Esta—has replaced Clyde in the family circle. He may be another victim.
Dreiser’s first and last emphasis is on enclosure. There is the dark beginning within “the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants—such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable”; the dark epilogue within “the tall walls of the commercial heart of the city of San Francisco—tall and gray in the evening shade.” Enclosure is fundamental to the social logic behind An American Tragedy. It is a logic that Dreiser’s method forces us to accept though we have abstract reasons to offer against the method and our acceptance. Even when we argue that the circle that closes around Clyde Griffiths is not necessarily an American tragedy, we cannot claim that the circle is not there and is not complete. Dreiser does not leave anything out of his almost one thousand pages, never leaves blank the tiniest corner of his canvas. The compulsion behind Clyde’s life has transferred itself to the narrative. The inevitability that Dreiser brings to every detail is like Clyde’s progress to the chair. The reader feels as trapped as Clyde.
Dreiser’s reasoning is that a man has no escape from the social net if he totally accepts its values. Clyde incorporates everything meretricious and fatal to himself because, as in his evangelical youth, he has never been anything but obedient, a creature of other people’s ideas. He may seem to transfer his loyalties from his parents’ God to the idolatry of Sondra Finchley and everything money-wise, hedonistic, and sexy that she represents. But he still has no mind of his own. He never puts up a single value of his own against everything he dumbly embodies. He is engulfed by ambitions and fancies that personify the society he has never thought to question. Dreiser’s hatred of organized religion is the key. Religion no longer has anything to do with individual promptings of faith, has become just social convention.
Clyde and Roberta are luckless lovers who know nothing of the easy freedom that a later generation would regard as an elementary right. It was typical of Dreiser’s concern with everything proscribed that the pair have their first date—forbidden by company rules—meeting in embarrassment and fear at the end of the street where Roberta has her room. When Roberta discovers herself pregnant, a necessarily illegal abortion is such a terror that the pharmacist who sells them a fake remedy is outraged when, the pills having failed, Clyde begs for the name of a doctor willing to perform an abortion. When Clyde is in jail awaiting trial, his lawyer lights a cigarette but warns that it would look “immoral” for Clyde to smoke. In the last scenes pushing Clyde to the chair, an unaffiliated young preacher, hysterical in his piety as if to convince himself, is able to pressure Clyde to make a pitiful contrition. This preacher can do anything with Clyde; everyone has abandoned him. But he can work Clyde up to his last abjectness only because Clyde has all his life been subject to something and someone.
Did the emancipated readers of An American Tragedy in 1925 accept the tragedy because it mirrored a world already past? Samuel Griffiths’s authority over his business is as total as his domination of his family. Once their unfortunate relative is in jail, they let him rot; once he is sentenced, they refuse to support an appeal. This cuts off his one chance. And it was still possible in this novel for the name of Clyde’s young “society beauty” to be kept out of the testimony. Clyde, whom his rich relatives rejected from the first, is a victim of the class he yearned for.
The proprieties, everything pertaining to social control, finally lock Clyde in. Dreiser has not the slightest doubt of his case. The book is an extended, monumental demonstration (not a defense) of a man who had no choice because he had never made a choice. What makes the demonstration so convincing is Dreiser’s peculiar inability, as with Hurstwood and Carrie, to imagine alternatives. Every detail performs because Dreiser cannot be distracted. He was awed by his material. Beginning the book, he said, “It seems simple. The right procession & selection of incidents should be as nothing but it just chances to be everything.”
Dreiser’s style is easily ridiculed, but it never gets in the way of the story. His laboriousness, his grinding repetitions, assist his aim—to lock the reader in with Clyde. He is so intent on leaving nothing blank that in describing Roberta’s background, he more than fully describes Titus Alden’s broken-down farm, then goes on: “the interior of the house corresponded with the exterior.” Dreiser usually finds the right word, but only after scrabbling for it in full view of the reader. Yet his ability to light on some external feature as a mirror of human feeling can arrest the reader by its accidental, perhaps unconscious symbolism. The reader overlooks Dreiser’s clumsiness when he provides crucial details.
In chapter 18 the isolated furtive lovers, forced to take their few pleasures away from respectable society in Lycurgus, have a few hours together near a little city strange to both of them.
For outside of Fonda a few miles they came to a pleasure park called Starlight where, in addition to a few clap-trap pleasure concessions such as a ring of captive aeroplanes, a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, an old mill and a dance floor, was a small lake with boats. It was after its fashion an idyllic spot with a little bandstand out on an island near the center of the lake and on the shore a grave and captive bear in a cage.
This is the first presentiment of the role that a lake will play in the story. The “pleasure park called Starlight” is one of the “rougher” resorts, only less “strident” than others. Clyde leads Roberta “to the stand of a man who sold frankfurters.” A merry-go-round is “in full blast, nothing would do but that Roberta should ride with him.” He seats her on a zebra, “then stood close in order that he might keep his arm about her, and both try to catch the brass ring.” The scene is “commonplace and noisy and gaudy.” They are both in “a kind of ecstasy which was all out of proportion to the fragile, gimcrack scene.” Every detail is as commonplace as can be. The shabby scene evokes a kind of ecstasy in the lovers because there is sudden freedom, yet it moves the reader because it is so pitiful in relation to the facts. We may smile at “It was after its fashion an idyllic spot,” but we are hemmed in when “a little bandstand out on an island near the center of the lake” is immediately followed by “and on the shore a grave and captive bear in a cage.”
And now the terror toward which Dreiser has been working all along is instilled in us—Clyde searches for a lake in which to drown Roberta. The whole second volume, four hundred solidly packed pages, is given over to the planning of the crime, the essential scene of Roberta’s death, the unravelling of Clyde’s original plan by local authorities who are quick to exploit his defenselessness, and his undoing. Melville described his last work as an “inside narrative.” An American Tragedy is all outside narrative, and now it moves with the inevitableness of tragedy to the doom that has been waiting for Clyde all along.
Clyde, debating with himself the necessity of murdering Roberta, must still join Sondra Finchley at a lake full of “bright blue waters,” a lake bounded by “small and large, white and pink and green and brown lodges on every hand, with their boathouses.” But “the tall, dark, spear pines that sentineled the shores on either side … gave to the waters at the west a band of black shadow where the trees were mirrored so clearly.” When Clyde and Sondra “motor” from one lake party of her friends to another, en route Clyde is most “strangely impressed”
by the desolate and for the most part lonely character of the region. The narrow and rain-washed and even rutted nature of the dirt roads that wound between tall, silent and darksome trees—forests in the largest sense of the word—that extended for miles and miles on apparently either hand. The decadent and weird nature of some of the bogs and tarns on either side … dirt roads which here and there were festooned with funereal or viperous vines,… strewn with soggy and decayed piles of fallen and criss-crossed logs … in the green slime that an undrained depression in the earth had accumulated.
Dreiser has been timing the approach to Roberta’s death by accumulating images of emptiness, darkness, decay. The “voice” of the evil genie that Clyde hears, counselling him to go through with his projected crime, is the voice Hurstwood hears counselling him to take the money when the safe clicks shut before he can put the money back. This voice is effective because it is so elemental; Dreiser believes that we are faithless at heart. The dreaded act is what we are dying for—and will die for. Despite his terror at even thinking Roberta dead, everything in Clyde’s mind is pushing him to act. Totally at odds with himself, he steadily rows the boat into more and more remote corners of Big Bittern Lake. It is the sign of his agonized debate with himself that finally alarms Roberta and hastens her death. She moves toward him. And he, “angry and confused and glowering,” moving entirely within confusion and anger with himself, wanting nothing but to be free, “flings out at her,” pushes at her with the camera she tries to put down, injures her so that she screams. Whereupon he gets up, “half to apologize for the unintended blow,” capsizes the boat, and, seeing her helpless in the water, lets her drown.
He has murdered her without committing murder. He has also saved himself in the way most calculated to expose his original plan. He has arranged his own fate, though it is the one thing in his life that he alone has arranged. When he is caught and is ground down by everyone eager to take advantage of his self-exposure, he is still naive enough to wonder why it is all happening to him. “He had never imagined that it was going to be like this; that he was going to suffer so.” He is the unconscious prisoner—of other people—to the last. Just once in his life he deliberated long enough—to plan a crime; now he goes to the chair.
And what were the alternatives? Dreiser’s logic, given the irresistible context he built up, makes the story irrefutable. He was in fact so consumed by the story that he never disputed the varying interpretations of An American Tragedy, not even the sophistries of the time that saw Clyde Griffiths, who had allowed Roberta to drown, as technically “innocent.” Typically, Dreiser also refused to condemn capital punishment. He was a novelist, and this was his last good novel, his supreme novel. People preoccupied with Dreiser’s famous clumsiness and crushingly old-fashioned technique missed the irony behind Dreiser’s unexpected success. An American Tragedy was a triumph of method. The method succeeded through its total projection of a distinct point of view. Society was now everything. Hence man as man, the soul of man, man in his freedom, was still to be understood by a society just as steeped in materialism as Clyde. Man as the dupe of society is outside himself—like Clyde Griffiths, who went to his death still not knowing who he was and what he had done.
Dreiser was a novelist Faulkner once praised. He may have found Dreiser easier to praise than he did his contemporary and rival Hemingway, like himself a product of the modern literary revolution.* But he found Hemingway narrow. When Faulkner, to his great surprise, became a world figure in the 1950s, he told an interviewer in Japan:
I thought that he [Hemingway] found out early what he could do and stayed inside of that. He never did try to get outside the boundary of what he really could do and risk failure. He did what he really could do marvellously well, first rate, but to me that is not success but failure … failure to me is the best. To try something you can’t do, because it’s too much [to hope for] but still to try it and fail, then try it again. That to me is success.
“Failure” was a condition that Faulkner, the descendant of “governors and generals” (the embittered Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury is always throwing the past at his sorry family), was used to. He made failure a condition of the South in his fiction and of the human condition—despite all ready-made American propaganda to the contrary. “Count no ’account,” folks called the young Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi.
Failure was more habitual in the South than elsewhere for most of the eighty years (1865–1945) before “the old unreconstructed had died off.” This was the period that Faulkner (born in 1897) shared with survivors and memories of the Confederacy. In his long chronicle, it ended only with the Second World War and the rascally poor white Snopeses taking over from the once high and mighty Compsons, Sartorises—and Faulkners. Those eighty years were also continuous in Faulkner’s mind with the Highlander who with just his tartan and claymore had barely escaped to the South from the English hunting down of survivors of the last Jacobite campaign. His descendant crossed the Appalachians to the last Southern frontier—the delta country owned by Chickasaws. The Compsons acquired their land from Indians who kept Negro slaves (and buried them with their master when the master died). In his “appendix” to The Sound and the Fury, written seventeen years after the novel in an effort to clear away Compson history over three centuries, Faulkner introduced the Chickasaw chief Ikkemotubbe, “A dispossessed American king,” who merrily changed what the French called him, “de l’homme,” to “Doom,”
who granted out of his vast lost domain a solid square mile of virgin North Mississippi dirt as truly angled as the four corners of a cardtable top (forested then because these were the old days before 1833 when the stars fell and Jefferson Mississippi was one long rambling onestorey mudchinked log building housing the Chickasaw Agent and his tradingpost store) to the grandson of a Scottish refugee who had lost his own birthright by casting his lot with a king who himself had been dispossessed.
The Chickasaws went on “to the wild western land presently to be called Oklahoma; not knowing then about the oil.” In one compendious sentence Faulkner filled up two and a half centuries. Since he was a bit of Southern history himself, one who traced “my own little postage stamp of native soil” from the Chickasaws to the Snopeses, that period (vast for an American) belonged to him. The crucial eighty years marked the last time when the South could claim to be separate in culture and memory.
Given his South, his family, his class, the breaking down that coincided with Faulkner’s life and became his life, it is evident that history opened up to Faulkner with his name. “Whether he wanted it or not,” Faulkner liked to say. He was steeped in legends of the Highlanders, reports by old hunters of the original wilderness, the primitive isolation of Mississippi before “the Wawh,” the violent separation of the races ordained by God. The “old forces” were part of him. From his earliest days Faulkner still lived the heroic and defiant past—though its decay mocked the oratory with which Southerners celebrated it. Faulkner lived with sacred history like a character in the Bible. Yet God’s promise to His people had been withdrawn. Forced to live in the past, Southerners were kept from prolonging it. What remained was the “imperishable” story, one that Faulkner felt condemned and privileged to write. Only by writing could he save his awareness and extend it. Among so many failed and desperate Southerners in the “silent South,” he was isolated by being a writer. He was to project his menaced sensibility onto many defeated and violent Southerners. Oxford did not like his stubborn refusal to be absorbed elsewhere.
Faulkner’s sharpest characteristic as a person and as a “poet,” as he first called himself, was his concealment of his idiosyncrasy, his protection of his privacy. He was one with the South in its history, but he knew it well enough to be afraid. Many a writer emerging in the twenties was glad to escape his established family. Faulkner, growing up in the poorest state in the Union, in a regressive family and an impoverished culture, started cutting ties as soon as he could. He hated school, left high school without graduating, enjoyed being a roustabout and playing the local eccentric. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Flying Corps in 1918 but never flew. He was a special student at the University of Mississippi because of his interest in French; he worked at a bookstore in New York, where he met Elizabeth Prall, Sherwood Anderson’s future wife. Anderson’s slovenly independence from literary convention was a decided influence when Faulkner lived near Anderson in New Orleans’s French Quarter and wrote sketches for The Double Dealer and other publications that were meant to deliver the South from Mencken’s “cultural swamp.”† Anderson said he would get Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), published as long as he did not have to read it himself, and he was as good as his word.
Faulkner, always hard up, was an assistant postmaster at the university, where he was fired because he neglected the customers. (He did not want to be at the mercy of every son of a bitch who needed a two-cent stamp.) After publishing a first book of poems, The Marble Faun (1924), Soldiers’ Pay, and Mosquitoes (1927), he worked as a carpenter, a painter, a paperhanger, and was a coal heaver in Oxford’s power plant. From 1932, the year he published one of his greatest novels, Light in August, to 1946, the year he was finally “recognized,” he spent half of every year writing film scripts in Hollywood in order to be able to devote himself to his own work the rest of the year.
In the twenties the New South (as it was optimistically called) saw the emergence of a typically American middle class. Local businessmen and lawyers were not displeased by the descent from glory of proud families like the Faulkners. Faulkner was disliked for rejecting all virtuous paths to prosperity, mocked for drinking himself (sometimes literally) into the gutter. The tensions that racked him were not easily relieved by whiskey, but whiskey helped to relieve them in passionately inclusive one-sentence paragraphs. In The Sound and the Fury (originally called Twilight) the Compsons have come down to a father who died of drink, a self-pitying mother who has given up on everything to become a professional invalid, a sister cast off by her husband for marrying him when she was pregnant by another man, a brother who commits suicide because he is hopelessly in love with his sister. The baby of the family is an idiot who has been castrated after frightening a little girl. Jason Lycurgus Compson IV, who has blackmailed his sister and stolen the money sent for her daughter’s care, says bitterly (after he has had his idiot brother, Benjy, sent to the state asylum in Jackson), “Blood, I says, governors and generals. It’s a damn good thing we never had any kings and presidents; we’d all be down there at Jackson chasing butterflies.”
In one respect Faulkner in Oxford was beyond censure. A writer was generally ignored. This may have been his good fortune. Faulkner agreed with critics that his style might have been less fervid if he had had other writers around for him to talk to and compare notes with; he described his writing as “oratory out of solitude.” But there was no way for Faulkner to develop except on his own lines—and Mississippi made this easy. The South even in its palmiest days before the Civil War had never seen any use for local writers. William Gilmore Simms of South Carolina, though eager to espouse the “code,” was told by the plantation owners who alone could afford to buy books that they were satisfied to get their reading matter from England. Their favorite author was Sir Walter Scott. Romance consoled the defeated South until the 1920s. The premature realist George Washington Cable had had to flee to Massachusetts because of his outlandish views on the “Negro Question.”
Faulkner was an exception even among Southern writers in the twenties, when the affected style and giggly double entendres of Jurgen passed for naughtiness from James Branch Cabell’s Virginia. In some way that can be accounted for only by instinct, Faulkner (as Ezra Pound was to say of the young T. S. Eliot) had modernized himself on his own. Eliot had enjoyed “advantages” in St. Louis, had studied at Harvard, Marburg, Oxford. Faulkner did not find his stride even with his third novel, Sartoris (1929), though it took up the waiting theme of the failed “aristocracy.” Its working title was Flags in the Dust, it was rejected by twelve publishers, and the published text was carved out of an enormous manuscript that everyone thought hopeless. Yet astonishingly, Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, was published the same year. Looking back from it, one can see in all Faulkner’s early work, not least in the New Orleans sketches, a jaunty need to make experiments, a wish to try himself to the limit, that prepare one for the imaginative abandon of The Sound and the Fury. He felt bound to certain themes but was always shifting his point of view.
Faulkner’s deep sense of locale and his total involvement in its history often suggest Hawthorne. But his constant growth within himself and his particular gift for locating every narrative within the rush and beat of some embattled single voice have only one analogue in American writing. Melville was a self-educated wanderer who first wandered within each book, then from book to book. He constantly shifted and transformed himself; the motion of the sea became his image of truth. Faulkner did not continue to experiment after the extraordinary series—Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom! Absalom!—was produced in just seven years, 1929–36. In the 1950s, when he had become a world figure, Faulkner recalled of this time:
I think there’s a period in a writer’s life when he, well, simply for lack of any word, is fertile and he just produces. Later on, his blood slows, his bones get a little more brittle, his muscles get a little stiff, he gets perhaps other interests, but I think there’s one time in his life when he writes at the top of his talent plus his speed, too. Later the speed slows; the talent doesn’t necessarily have to fade at the same time. But there’s a time in his life, one matchless time, when they are matched completely. The speed, and the power and the talent, they’re all there and then he is … “hot.”
The Sound and the Fury is certainly hot. Something like Melville’s incessancy of thought and commanding rhetoric, marking the proud wanderer (within his own mind) who despises the progress of society, stamps The Sound and the Fury with Faulkner’s fundamental image—life as a perpetual breaking down. In Benjy’s mind, the bottommost layer and residue of Compson family history with which the novel opens, the world is all phenomenon, things-are-just-happening. In this beginning Benjy is incapable of explaining why they are happening. He just reverberates to every call of “Caddy!” from the golf course (the land once belonged to the Compsons but was sold to send Quentin to Harvard) and every glint from the fireplace that brings back the memory of his absent sister, Candace (“Caddy”), warming him in winter.
Only as we ascend from Benjy’s mind to Quentin’s monologue on the day of his death, recounting his love for his sister; from Quentin to Jason, the maddened survivor spewing out all his bitterness; from Jason to Faulkner himself, taking over the last section, are we put into the light. We are given every why and when that have produced the downfall of the Compsons, interlocked by so much passion and rage. The novel ends in the light of Easter Sunday and the unspoken triumph (if that is the word for those who merely “endured”) of Dilsey, still a slave to these degenerate whites whom she and her family will survive. But the last word and the last cry out of the book belong not only to Benjy, who bellows in protest when Dilsey’s grandson drives him the “wrong” way around the Confederate monument in the center of town, but to Faulkner’s wonderfully sustaining style. The whole book recounts in the most passionate detail life as phenomenon, a descent into breakdown. In the end we are saved and exhilarated by Faulkner’s reconstituting all this in the speed and heat of his art.
What the novel owed to the Freudian emphasis on the interior consciousness and to the already inescapable influence of Ulysses (1922) is obvious. Theodore Dreiser was so awed studying the case histories in an early book explaining psychoanalysis that he exclaimed: “I feel as though I were walking in great halls and witnessing tremendous scenes.” But Clyde Griffiths’s tormented dialogues with himself, though they go to the bottom of his character, could have come out of a novel by Zola or Hardy. Dreiser’s strength lay in the all-or-nothing determinism of the nineteenth century.
James Joyce was a great originator. Ulysses, like the classical epic it absorbs into a single day, is by now a fundamental reference to our civilization. But as a great epic will be, it is a labored synthesis, more demonstrative of Joyce’s fabulous powers than of the Dublin that remains a project in Joyce’s mind. The Sound and the Fury is a greater novel, more dramatic, more universally representative through the interior life of everyone in it. We do not know just what Faulkner owed Joyce. Joyce in the twenties affected other writers like the weather. Eliot heralded Ulysses: “Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.” Faulkner was not that interested in becoming a founder. It is a mistake to assume that in scrambling so many different periods of time (especially in the “Benjy” section) Faulkner wished to mystify and even to “test” his readers. Joyce joked that Ulysses would make him immortal because it provided endless work for professors. But Faulkner was telling the truth when he said that he had originally written a lot and even sent it off before he realized that people would actually read it. He was certainly having his joke when he explained that there were four different voices in his book because each of the first three had proved insufficient. What rings true to readers of The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s admission that the novel began as a story in a vision. Faulkner “saw” a little girl with muddied drawers sitting in a tree, reporting to her brothers below what she could see through a window of their grandmother’s funeral in the house across the way.
In another report of how the novel had begun, Faulkner said that the little girl had muddied her drawers when she had sneaked under the barbed wire dividing the Compson property. The little girl became Candace, “Caddy.” The land on the other side of the fence, the future golf course, was sold to send Quentin Compson to Harvard. A fence separates the Compsons from their past.
Intimate family details lock together in the novel so that every repetition is heard in a different register, widening and deepening its effect on the reader as it does on the Compsons themselves. We share every flicker of their minds. In the concluding section, “The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself; after a while it whirred and cleared its throat six times.” Everything belonging to this family makes itself heard, over and over, like the sound of that clock. Not only is there soon no “mystery” to the book, no pedantry of the kind that makes Ulysses so formidable; we get so caught up by the Compsons that one of the many pleasures of the book is that everything long stored up in everyone is intoned by a different character so as to advance the action. Caddy, not directly present for most of the book, is so intensely visualized by her brothers that she dominates their lives. Every sensation in Benjy’s fractured mind reminds him of her. Her brother Quentin, preparing to drown himself in the Charles River, walks about Cambridge reliving every precipitous scene that he (more than she) botched at the last minute. Jason is magnetized by her, but his resentment of her freedom will not permit him to admit that he is jealous.
The charming but usually sodden father of this tumultuously incestuous family, Jason Lycurgus Compson III, a classical scholar, had long before given up and retired to his dog-eared Horace and his whiskey decanter. When his son Quentin departed for Harvard, he gave him (as cynical farewell) his ancient watch. Quentin twists its hands off in the morning of the day that will end with his suicide. But like the dead son, the idiot son, the absent daughter, the father is a constant infliction to his son and namesake, Jason. Nothing that ever happened in this family is forgotten; every offense, anything appropriated by one Compson at the expense of another, everything taken by the world to the shame of the Compsons in general, is endlessly (but variously) repeated. Finally, because their history has ended, the novel can begin—in the splintered, hopelessly yearning mind of Benjy.
Many novelists have claimed that any family can become a novel. This novel succeeds beyond all others of its time and place because the Compsons live time, they do not just live in it, which makes them as real as our family makes time real to us. Time is entirely fluid in the book, not an external measure against which people move. It assumes so many shapes because the force of memory plays on many people.
Any action—Quentin buying weights to keep his body down after he has jumped into the river, or Jason hysterically running after his niece Quentin after she has stolen the money that he had stolen from her care—interrupts a dream scene of reminiscence. The daughter’s name “Quentin”—the departing sister’s salute to the self-lacerating brother who died for love of her—itself reflects the sameness and repetition that are a constant in every family. The rapid shifts in time that Benjy lives successively, and that at first are bewildering to the reader, are soon enjoyed as the fragments that surprise our waiting consciousness. What makes Benjy so poignant is that he experiences nothing but sensations—Caddy shielding him from the cold, Caddy bringing him to the fire, Caddy crying “Stomp, Benjy! Stomp!” when they put on his galoshes. This family is in decay, but everything we see of them is bright with life, thrilling in its actuality. Dilsey near the end intones, “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.” That refers to the Compsons themselves, over whom she waits in judgment without knowing that she does. But for the reader hypnotized by so much life on the page, nothing has ended. As it never ended for Faulkner, who when asked to supply an appendix clearing up the difficulties, went back to 1699 and forward to 1945 to fill in the Compson history. He spilled the book out in such ecstasy and freedom that he rewrote it as if he could not bear to leave it. He said that the book “caused me the most grief and anguish, as the mother loves the child who became the thief or murderer more than the one who became the priest. I wrote it five separate times, trying to tell the story which would continue to anguish me until I did.”
Because of the war and the uncertainty of everything in sight, the twenties lived with a sharp, baleful sense of time. Secular man had supposedly triumphed, since he was ready to pay the cost of an existence totally without illusion. The hero of Dreiser’s anachronistic novel had nothing to say about the circumstances that drew him down. The “sentinel” trees around the lake were still the old gods. The brave new world entre les deux guerres gave a demonstrative radiance to style in Ulysses, In Our Time, Voyage au bout de la nuit, The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway. Style was heightened consciousness, the only defense against the fatal ordering of things, our true Prometheus. Style now proclaimed the Everlasting No. In The Sound and the Fury, consciousness never stops addressing itself or the absent loves and foes of one’s own household. Sharpened to a scream—to a murder that is never accomplished, except by brother Quentin against himself—Jason curses the world as he frantically chases after his niece, then cries, “And damn You, too. See if You can stop me.” Benjy without knowing it has become nothing but “style,” in the voice he cannot hear as his own. Quentin is so full of his moony, overburdened style that he cannot get relief from it or from himself (he is all too conscious of his style) this side of the river. Jason’s hatred is so expressive that, terrible as he is, we come to love his fluency (certainly not him) for never letting up.
In the fourth section, where Faulkner takes over to conclude the novel, there is a good deal of charged writing, as there is in Quentin’s reveries. (Quentin is grandiloquent enough to be a parody of Edgar Allan Poe on his last day in Baltimore.) Faulkner compares the little black preacher at the Easter morning service to “a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice.
With his body he seemed to feed the voice that, succubus like, had fleshed its teeth in him. And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment, a long moaning expulsion of breath rose from them, and a woman’s single soprano: “Yes, Jesus!”
The blacks in The Sound and the Fury do not speak for themselves. The Compsons live in such echoing transmission from one mind to another that by the time we get to see them on stage in the final section, we are helping to complete the design. They have been in our ears all along; now we see them. But Dilsey must be seen first, and nothing in the prose fiction of our time could be more satisfying than her entrance, it is so much the proof of what is already in our minds.
The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of grey light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. She wore a stiff black straw hat perched upon her turban, and a maroon velvet cape with a border of mangy and anonymous fur above a dress of purple silk, and she stood in the door for awhile with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather, and one gaunt hand flac-soled as the belly of a fish, then she moved the cape aside and examined the bosom of her gown.
We never feel in these charged-up passages, as we do in Faulkner’s later writing, that he is elaborating his text and even commenting on it. In The Sound and the Fury everything about this family—especially those whose servitude makes them a part of it—already fits together, so that when Faulkner comes to describe them, the inherent design is rounded out in words as charged as these lives. Faulkner also needed to take over at the end and to put his particular stamp on the book. He liked to say that his ambition was to put everything, “the world,” into one sentence. Our extraordinary view of Dilsey was composed under that spell. There was a stunning contractedness that followed from Faulkner’s calling himself a failed poet. “Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form of poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.”
It was nice of Faulkner to say that “every novelist” was like him. He could be generous to the competition, for they never got in his way. His need to pile everything on his “little postage stamp of native soil” was his tribute to style. “Art is simpler than people think because there is so little to write about.” The material is all so elemental, obvious, and foreclosed that one has constantly to bring a different perspective to it, which is style. But Faulkner liked to add, “I’m still trying to put it all on one pinhead. I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep trying in a new way.”
The “trying” was central to Faulkner’s style; he saw the novelist not as an artist capable of finishing anything but as a gambler playing for higher and higher stakes. The Compsons, he said in his appendix to The Sound and the Fury, were gamblers; they were wrecked as a family, out of the running in the South (except for Jason, who, as Faulkner admitted with astonished admiration, was still running). Their claim on the past was like their ancestor’s claim on the future when he entered the Mississippi wilderness. Man’s desire was always in inverse proportion to himself. He had to gamble everything he had—little enough—against time’s closing in on him. There was “one anonymous chance to perform something passionate and brave and austere not just in but into man’s enduring chronicle … in gratitude for the gift of time in it.”
Life to Faulkner was “this pointless chronicle.” “Though the one I know is probably as good as another, life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.” We are moved about by what Faulkner in both The Sound and the Fury and Light in August called “the Player.” We seem to be without help when matched against this figure. Faulkner’s “Christ figures” are an idiot castrated in The Sound and the Fury because he frightened some little girls (and had a sadistic brother), and the murderer Joe Christmas in Light in August, pursued all his life because he may be a “nigger.” (He is finally run to earth, castrated, and bled to death by a Ku Kluxer.) In A Fable (1954) the illiterate French corporal who leads the mutiny against the war obviously represents Christ; he has twelve followers. After rejecting the temptation offered by the “Supreme Commander,” he is shot and falls into barbed wire that crowns his head with thorns.
A Fable is more allegory than fiction. By the 1950s Faulkner was editorializing over “fables” written in his “one matchless time.” Faulkner’s “Christ figures” are such only in their power of suffering. One of the most wonderful touches in the conclusion of The Sound and the Fury shows blond Benjy with eyes the color of sunflowers sitting next to Dilsey in the Negro church. “In the midst of the voices and the hands Ben sat, rapt in his sweet blue gaze.” What Faulkner evidently wanted to say in A Fable was that his corporal was for the salvation of the world gambling his own life against the greater power represented by Satan, the “Supreme Commander.” He lost. The essence of Christ for Faulkner in the twenties, that period of great scepticism, was that we are not savable.
The potent and redemptive figure in Faulkner’s mythology is the novelist. The novelist gambles his talent against the silence surrounding us. He pits himself against vacancy and unreality, replacing the silence with a world organized by himself alone. Words must somehow exceed themselves through an effort that ultimately becomes the writer’s signature, his style. The failure of a class, a tradition, a way of life, was the haunting subject. Failure entered the writer’s attempted grasp of a comédie humaine often beyond language. “I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep trying in a new way.”
Faulkner liked the word “immortality.” He meant the novel that lasts, Ezra Pound’s “literature is news that stays news.” It was an ambition still fundamental to writers of the twenties, who could not conceive of immortality anywhere else. Faulkner was amazing. The novelist was his hero. He meant the novelist, not himself.
*Dreiser wrote as if there were no other novelists. In the bleak period following Sister Carrie, he told himself in his diary to read some current novels, for he might want to write another novel some day.
†One of these sketches describes a local bootlegger’s brother: “and his eyes were clear and blue as cornflowers, and utterly vacant of thought … and gripping tightly in one fist was a narcissus.” After the broken narcissus is splinted, “His eyes were like two scraps of April sky after a rain, and his drooling face was moonlike in ecstasy.” In the concluding section of The Sound and the Fury, Benjy has eyes this color and holds a broken flower held together with a twig and two bits of string.