A Proper Post on Theodore Dreiser, or, An American Tragedy Turns 100

With his greatest literary work reaching the century mark later this year, this seemed the best time for a proper nod to Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945). Theatre (vaudeville in particular) having been the original content stream on Travalanche, our existing 2013 post on the great author was strictly about Sister Carrie (1900), with a nod to the author’s brother, the Tin Pan Alley songwriter Paul Dresser.

The Dreisers were from German immigrant stock on both sides. A native Indianan, Dreiser attended the state university at Bloomington for about a year before finding employment at several midwestern newspapers as a drama critic and beat reporter. By 1895 he was landing articles with national magazines, including interviews with major figures like Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, and studies of literary figures like Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Dean Howells. Ere long, he would join their ranks! At the same time, through the auspices of his brother, Dreiser was entrusted with the editorship of a magazine called Ev’ry Month. I was accustomed to believing for some reason that Theodore was the big wheel and Paul was the hanger on. It went in the other direction. Paul was a popular songwriter first, and it was he who gave Theodore the leg up.

Sister Carrie emerged in 1900. Dreiser continued publishing shorts stories and articles over the ensuing years. In 1907 he became the editor of a woman’s magazine called The Delineator. (Is it wrong of me to wish the women’s magazine was called Ev’ry Month?). His second novel Jennie Gerhardt arrived in 1911. It was perhaps too close in subject matter to Sister Carrie.

Then came the first two books of Dreiser’s so-called Trilogy of Desire, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). (The third, The Stoic, was published posthumously in 1947). I explored these with my book club a good many years ago. The other guys in the club were mostly finance bros, and had quite a different perspective on the books than I did. By now, Dreiser was a socialist of long-standing, and the financial themes of these books mirrors the efforts of Frank Norris’ The Pit and “A Deal in Wheat” (both 1903), and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1904).

Regarding works like these publisher Rupert Hart-Davis had this to say: “Dreiser’s books are enough to stop me in my tracks…that slovenly turgid style describing endless business deals, with a seduction every hundred pages as light relief. If he’s the great American novelist, give me the Marx Brothers every time.”

If anything, Dreiser’s next novel The Genius (1915) compensated in the other direction, a story about the sexual peccadillos of a painter modeled on some of his acquaintances of the Ash Can School such as Everett Shinn. It sold briskly but critics and legal authorities carped about the obscenity, and it was withdrawn from circulation for a time.

Edgar Lee Masters paid tribute to Dreiser’s powers of observation in “Theodore the Poet” circa 1915:

As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours On the shore of the turbid Spoon With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish’s burrow, Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead, First his waving antennae, like straws of hay, And soon his body, colored like soap-stone, Gemmed with eyes of jet. And you wondered in a trance of thought What he knew, what he desired, and why he lived at all. But later your vision watched for men and women Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities, Looking for the souls of them to come out, So that you could see How they lived, and for what, And why they kept crawling so busily Along the sandy way where water fails As the summer wanes.

In 1928, Sherwood Anderson dedicated his collection Horses and Men to Dreiser, and wrote a two page essay on him for the book. His fellow German-American H.L. Mencken was also a huge contemporary fan.

In 1925, An American Tragedy was published. It’s a book I’ve always found extremely powerful, and I’ve read it three or four times, long as it is. To reduce it to its simplest essence: a kid of modest means and fairly weak character meets a rich uncle, who throws him a bone by giving him an okay job at his factory. There are not tons of perks that go with the situation but he is able to leverage the relation to his uncle to a new circle of acquaintances including a serious romance with a deb whom he can plausibly marry. Unfortunately, in the meantime he has also knocked up one of the factory girls. She needs his help very badly and is most insistent that he not neglect his responsibility to her. In the end he makes an expedient choice involving a rowboat, a lake, and a pregnant young lady who cannot swim.

It would give the wrong impression to claim that I identify with the shifty murderer Clyde Griffiths, but as a young man I was frequently the working class kid trying to hold his own socially among well-heeled sophisticates. Any sympathy we have for Clyde, and at 800 pages we’d better have some, stems from this, from the class issues and compromises and hard choices the young man has to make. This is why it is called a “tragedy” and not just a story about a pitiless killer. (The event was based on a real event btw, the murder of a woman named Grace Brown by Chester Gillette in 1906). Insomuch as Clyde is a striver, and proves to be a bad egg, Clyde also fits the profile of a soulless capitalist. He makes a cold, hard choice based on greed and selfishness rather than humanity. In the end, he’s executed, which is appropriate, but also sad and regrettable, for it all could have gone another way. Somehow in America, we’ve created an entire society where the bottom line takes precedence over kindness and compassion. It’s thought provoking unless you’re a predator or a lunkhead, or both.

There are other kinds of lunkheads too, though. Dreiser went to the Soviet Union in 1927, and published a book about it the following year. He swallowed the vodka and became a full-bore communist, an apologist for the U.S.S.R. and fan of Stalin. This is taking things way too far. Stalin killed millions of his own citizens. And if Dreiser had actually moved to Russia he’d have quickly discovered just how delightful life was for writers and artists there. Dreiser died in late 1945, before the Cold War started in earnest. If he’d lived to the end of the decade and into the 1950s, he likely would have encountered a certain measure of homegrown displeasure as well, though nothing like the firing squads and jail cells free thinkers experienced in the Soviet bloc. That, of course, is a Russian tragedy. But we all have our blind spots. Now perhaps more than ever.

Publisher and producer Horace Liveright first brought An American Tragedy to the Broadway stage in 1926. This version was revived in 1931. Erwin Piscator also premiered his own stage adaptation in 1932 in Vienna, which made its U.S. debut in 1935, and was revived by Lee Strasberg and the Group Theatre as The Case of Clyde Griffiths in 1936.

Erich Von Stroheim, whose masterpiece was the similar Greed (1924), contemplated a screen version of An American Tragedy. Sergei Eisenstein went so far as to write an entire screenplay which he hoped to sell to Hollywood in 1930. But the studio heads wouldn’t sign off on the Marxist orientation he brought to his interpretation, so he bowed out. As it happens, Josef Von Sternberg brought it to the screen the following year with a cast that included Philips Holmes, Sylvia Sidney, and Frances Dee (playing the role that Miriam Hopkins had played on Broadway, the rich girl). Two decades after that came George Stevens‘ rendition A Place in the Sun (1951), with the remarkable cast of Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters. This one was much better received by critics and the public than its predecessor. Charlie Chaplin called it “the greatest movie ever made about America”, which speaks to the fact that Chaplin left a year later and spent the rest of his life in Switzerland. (But I also note there is an unmistakable homage to it in Monsieur Verdoux).

As to why that was the last major adaptation, nearly 75 years ago? The book is a bit melodramatic maybe, a bit by the Marxist numbers. The sixties might have been a good time for an adaptation. But materialism having been the sole American religion at least since the ’80s, I wouldn’t put it past contemporary Hollywood to make a new version and tack on a happy ending. They could call it Clyde Gets His Cookies. Incidentally, Charles Strouse worked up a musical that made it as far as a backers’ audition in 1995. He tabled it when one of his main collaborators David Shaber passed away. I hope it sees the light of day at some point!