Matthiessen on Dreiser

When Theodore Dreiser died, scarcely five years age, at the age of seventy-five, he left behind him a long, uneven, and controversial career that included thousands of pages of literary make shift and two or three books which made up for all the rest. In this new study of Dreiser, which was finished by Professor F. O. Matthiessen just before his death last spring and is now published posthumously, the details of Dreiser's life have been subordinated to an analysis of his important work--and the result is a thoroughly satisfying critical essay, though it cannot be called a real biography.

During Dreiser's life America progressed from post-Civil War attitudes of Individualism and stark economic competition to the social consciousness of the New Deal. At his death, he had barley finished a last novel trying to explain the needs of our own time; but his major contribution to American literature consists in his picture of an earlier era.

Born in Indiana in 1871, Dreiser grew up at the time when Genteel Tradition was giving way to a rising new movement called "realism." In the early chapters of the book, Matthiessen traces Dreiser's groping for a new expression of that movement, which search culminated in 1900 in the publication of "Sister Carrie."

This book was banned throughout the country for its frank treatment of the environmental forces which Dreiser, as an unsuccessful and errant journalist, observed about him. But Matthiessen points out that the writer, if anything, "somewhat softened the actuality" of the forces which shape the lives of Carrie Meeber and Hurstwood. With the tragic account of the latter figure, he adds, Dreiser "began his chief contribution to American literature."

This contribution was not complete until twenty-five years later, with the appearance of Dreiser's finest work, "An American Tragedy." Matthiessen traces the writer's career during that time in terms of his literary output. From the sympathetic portrait of the heroine of "Jennie Gerhardt"--based in some measure on the author's mother--Dreiser moved to a lengthy and only partly successful study of the "Merchant Prince" financiers who dominated the country during his youth, and by whom he was both attracted and repelled.

The portralt of Cowperwood as a typical "Robber Baron" partly fails, according to Matthiessen, as a result of the same flaw in the writer's attitude which Paul Elmer More later stiffly denied as "an oscillation between a theory of evolution which sees no progress save the survival of the rapaciously strong and a humanitarian feeling of solidarity with the masses who are exploited in the process."

This "humanitarian feeling," from which all of Dreiser's best work flowed, is an often incoherent sympathy--of Whitman-like proportions--for the poor and the weak. It reaches its fullest expression in his documentary account of the murder trial of Clyde Griffiths in "An American Tragedy." In the best chapter of the book, Matthiessen analyses this novel both in the light of its own time and in relation to the rest of American literature. He ends by agreeing with Joseph Wood Krutch's estimate that it is "the great American novel of our generation."

As a critic, Matthiessen was preoccupied with greatness. His books were addressed to the peaks of American literary achievement--to the work of Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Henry James, and T. S. Eliot. Whether or not Dreiser belongs in this group will depend, perhaps, on the events and attitudes of the future, but this study is an able statement of the case for the affirmative.