Matthiessen on Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser. by F. 0. Matthiessen. (Methuen. ca.) THE terms of literary criticism should never be taken too seriously. Novelists, for example, who concern themselves with squalor and vice are called " realists." But it would be absurd to suppose that squalor and vice are more real than civilised living and order, although they may be more interesting. Even so, for the reputation of some it is lucky that certain critical fallacies should flourish, for how otherwise would Theodore Dreiser be commemorated in the present book by a writer vastly greater than he was himself? This is the last book Professor Matthiessen wrote before his suicide, and it would have been consoling to have seen it as his best. Alas, it is by no means so. Elsewhere, Matthiessen the critic was a different man from Matthiessen the Fellow Traveller, and at least once (in his book on Eliot) he specifically repudiated the Marxist aesthetic. Here we see the fellow traveller at work, and the private taste of a considerable critic almost paralysed by the promptings of a socialistic dogma.
Dreiser, we are invited to believe, was a great American novelist because he was n6 mere " realist " but a "social realist," which -is to say that his novels add to the squalor and vice descriptions of the boss-class grinding the faces of the, poor. Hence their claim to Marxist approbation and derivatively to Matthiessen's. By ILO other standards Dreiser was a pretty indifferent novelist, which Matthiessen comes near to admitting. He does not dispute another critic's verdict on a typical Dreiser novel as "a sort of huge club sandwich composed of slices of business alternating with erotic episodes." Even Wells, not the world's best judge, though a great admirer of Dreiser, said that his work "gets the large harsh super- ficial truth that it has to tell with a force that no grammatical precision and no correctitude could attain." Matthiessen notes the word superficial, and accepts it. As a literary critic bred on Henry James the " superficial " was not of much interest to him, but as a votary of "social realism," Matthiessen realised he had to swallow it. He believed that the forces which controlled Dreiser's writing were the forces which controlled history.
Dreiser's own story is one of the standard literary lines. He was born (Matthiessen tells us) of Catholic German immigrant parents in Indiana in 1871. His home was very poor, and his mother loved him to excess. At fifteen he went to work as a shipping clerk in Chicago, but two years later an ageing educated spinster paid for him to go to a university. It was the greatest service ever done to him, but when he left his college he could find no better jobs than selling real estate, driving a laundry-van and collecting instalments on furniture in working-class homes. Then the Chicago Globe offered him a job as a reporter. Dreiser had found his métier. Writing newspaper stories about the Chicago slums set him writing novels about them too, and the one sort of " reportage " differed little from the other. Sister Carrie came out in 1900, and was suppressed as immoral. Dreiser could hardly have foreseen that having written a banned book would have been the best possible recommendation of a novelist to the American public after 1918. Yet by then he had written two. The suppression of The "Genius" in 1916 brought the author the maximum publicity without the book being widely read, a circumstance doubly fortunate since it was exceedingly badly written. Dreiser had in the meantime made his critical reputation with a much better novel, Jennie Gerhardt, which came out when he was nearly forty. Fame brought money, and Dreiser in his flashy clothes was at one time noticeably new rich, even in New York. He cultivated (though Matthiessen says he was sterile) the reputation of a Don Juan, and towards the end of his life he became, when richer than ever, a Communist.
Matthiessen, who innocently served the Party ends rather better, though never of its number, had clearly little confidence in Dreiser's Communism. Dreiser was far too much the individualist to be a reliable Party man. He thought inconsistently, and he thought for himself. Other readers are likely to be less severe on him for this. But to forgive the faults which Matthiessen discerns is not to acknow- ledge the virtues which Matthiessen assumes. Granted Dreiser was a knowledgeable underworld reporter and a likeable muddle-headed Marxist, on neither sore does he become a great moralist, still less, as Matthiessen wanted (or thought he ought to want) to tell us,
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