CC BY
26Jude DAVIES
THE OCCASIONS OF THEODORE DREISER'S LITERARY CRITICISM: A VIEW FROM THE THEODORE DREISER
EDITION
Abstract: Theodore Dreiser published over fifty items of literary criticism between 1900 and 1945 on a wide variety of subjects, while additional discussion of literary matters is scattered through his correspondence, memoirs, unpublished speeches, and cultural and philosophical essays. Hitherto this work has proved useful piecemeal, in its illumination of Dreiser's fiction, while a few outstanding pieces have served to define Dreiser's version of realism or literary naturalism. This essay takes the literary criticism seriously as a body of work in itself, sketching out some categories and topics, and providing detailed historical contexts for several items, which reveal under-appreciated nuances and engagements in even better-known pieces such as "True Art speaks Plainly" and "Life, Art and America."
The essay sees coherence across the diverse foci of Dreiser's literary criticism via the concept of the "occasions of literary criticism," by which is meant the historical and cultural contexts into which he was writing. It charts the roots of Dreiser's literary criticism in his need to respond to charges of "literary immorality," its growth through his very particular response to censorship, and its maturity in his suggestion, in a speech given as part of the peace conference in Paris in 1938, of an American literary tradition dedicated to social justice, taking in Mark Twain and H. D. Thoreau as well as the expected cohort of realists and naturalists. The essay concludes by relating these contexts and preoccupations to the history and practice of the Theodore Dreiser Edition.
Keywords: Theodore Dreiser Edition, modernism, literary naturalism, Theodore Dreiser, textual editions, literary criticism, censorship, American literature.
Information about the author: Jude Davies, PhD, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Winchester, Sparkford Rd., Winchester SO22 4NR, United Kingdom. OR-CID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3441-4335. E-mail: Jude.Davies@winchester.ac.uk.
For citation: Davies, Jude. "The Occasions of Theodore Dreiser's Literary Criticism: A View from the Theodore Dreiser Edition." Literature of the Americas, no. 11 (2021): 271-288. https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-11-271-288.
Acknowledgements: Thanks and acknowledgements are due to the University of Pennsylvania Library for its sponsorship of the Theodore Dreiser Edition and for permission to quote from archival material.
Литература двух Америк. 2021. № 11
Literature of the Americas, no. 11 (2021)
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Научная статья
https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-11-271-288 УДК 821.111
Джуд ДЭВИС
КОНТЕКСТЫ ЛИТЕРАТУРНОМ КРИТИКИ ТЕОДОРА ДРАЙЗЕРА С ТОЧКИ ЗРЕНИЯ ИЗДАТЕЛЬСКОЙ ПРАКТИКИ
Аннотация: В период с 1900 по 1945 гг. Теодор Драйзер опубликовал более пятидесяти критических работ на самые разные темы, а отдельные размышления о вопросах литературы разбросаны по его письмам, мемуарам, неизданным текстам речей, культурологическим и философским эссе. До сих пор его работы воспринимали как отдельные фрагменты, помогающие лучше понять художественную прозу писателя, а некоторые наиболее выдающиеся очерки позволили точнее определить понимание Драйзером реализма или литературного натурализма. В настоящей статье литературно-критические работы Драйзера рассматриваются в совокупности, как полноценный корпус текстов; обрисованы некоторые категории и темы, для нескольких работ даны подробные исторические контексты, раскрывающие недооцененные нюансы и пласты даже более известных эссе, таких как «Подлинное искусство говорит просто» (True Art speaks Plainly) и «Жизнь, искусство и Америка» (Life, Art and America). В статье сквозь призму концепции «контекстов литературной критики», то есть историко-культурных условий, к которым обращался Драйзер, прослеживается единство многообразных сюжетов критических очерков писателя. Автор видит истоки литературной критики Драйзера в вынужденной необходимости отвечать на предъявляемые его книгам обвинения в «безнравственности»; полемика между Драйзером и его обвинителями усилилась из-за специфической реакции романиста на цензуру и достигла кульминации в речи, произнесенной им на мирной конференции в Париже в 1938 г. и посвященной американской литературной традиции борьбы за социальную справедливость, к которой, по мысли Драйзера, наряду с его единомышленниками — реалистами и натуралистами, принадлежали Марк Твен и Генри Дэвид Торо. В заключение эти контексты и проблематика соотнесены с историей и практикой издания произведений Теодора Драйзера.
Ключевые слова: издание произведений Теодора Драйзера, модернизм, литературный натурализм, Теодор Драйзер, варианты текстов, литературная критика, цензура, американская литература.
Информация об авторе: Джуд Дэвис, PhD, профессор, Университет Уинчестера, Спаркфорд Роуд, SO22 4NR г. Уинчестер, Великобритания. ORCID ID: https:// orcid.org/0000-0003-3441-4335. E-mail: Jude.Davies@winchester.ac.uk.
Для цитирования: Дэвис Д. Контексты литературной критики Теодора Драйзера с точки зрения издательской практики // Литература двух Америк. 2021. № 11. С. 271-288. https://doi.org/10.22455/2541-7894-2021-11-271-288.
Автор выражает благодарность библиотеке Пенсильванского университета за поддержку издания произведений Теодора Драйзера и разрешение цитировать материалы из ее архива.
"A modern without the doctrine of modernism," Dorothy Dudley's epithet for Theodore Dreiser [Dudley 1933: 3],1 frames his work as a direct response to industrial, urban, consumer society. Laid out at length in Dudley's critical biography Forgotten Frontiers, this identification of Dreiser with modernity had been made earlier by friends and supporters such as Sherwood Anderson, and continues to be teased out and theorized, by for example Frederic Jameson, Jennifer Fleissner, Clare Eby, Bill Brown, and Paul Giles. As their work attests, Dreiser's depictions of human selfhood constituted by desire, consumption, and performance have remained salient through shifting forms and perspectives on modernity in the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first. (Though it is also important to recognise other contexts, especially Dreiser's intellectual formation through nineteenth-century science and philosophy, often signaled by his designation as a literary "naturalist"; and his capacity to evoke a strong feeling for the plight of his characters, not a quality particularly validated outside the work of Alfred Kazin, but one that surely underwrites what popularity Dreiser continues to enjoy outside the academy.)
In this essay though, I want to take up the second part of Dudley's comment, where she highlights Dreiser's apparent lack of an overt interest in the kinds of theorizing that she associates pejoratively with literary modernism. The perception that Dreiser was indifferent to, or naive about matters of literary form has shaped many facets of his literary reputation, from his dismissal by Stuart P. Sherman and Lionel Trilling, to affirmatory readings of Dreiser as a truth-teller impatient with literary and social conventions, such as Joseph Epstein's validation of Dreiser's fiction as "a good
1 Published in the USA as: Dorothy Dudley, Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1932).
boiled potato"; hearty and nourishing but lacking the sophistication of the caviar that is Henry James [Epstein 1991: 260]. A more balanced view emerges from a recent discussion of Dreiser's influence on modernist writers by Kiyohiko Murayama, who quotes from a 1958 lecture by William Faulkner: "I think," Faulkner said
that Dreiser knew exactly what he wanted to say, but he had a terrific difficulty in saying it, there was never any fun to him, any pleasure to him, he was convinced that he had a message, I don't mean an ideological message or political but he had to tell folks, This is what you are. That he wasn't writing for pleasure, he wasn't writing for fun, and he had a terrific time of it, which [Sherwood] Anderson didn't have, he loved the writing. It was his own confusion that troubled him but he never hated it, but I'm — I can imagine that Dreiser hated the sight of blank piece of paper... [Faulkner 1995: 234], quoted in [Murayama 2016: 49].
Faulkner's association of Dreiser with an idiosyncratic version of that modernist quality of "difficulty" responds to the habitual suspensive condition of Dreiser's narrators and protagonists; his continual evocation of forms of biological, chemical, historical, social, and other forms of knowledge, which never quite deliver a full explanation for human behavior. My aim in this essay is to introduce the occasions of Dreiser's literary criticism — some of its main topics, and the contexts to which he responded. A diverse and dispersed body of work, it is best understood, I argue, not as articulating a "doctrine," modernist or otherwise, but as a series of attempts to address that "difficulty" as Faulkner put it, in telling folks "this is what you are."
The following is a provisional list of the discrete works of literary criticism that Dreiser published after the beginning of his literary career in 1900. It is drawn from the Pizer et al. Dreiser Bibliography2 and from research in the Dreiser Papers at the University of Pennsylvania:
"True Art Speaks Plainly." Booklovers Magazine 1, February 1903,
129.
"At the Sign of the Lead Pencil: The Day of the Great Writer." Bohemian 17, October 1909, 426-427.
2 Pizer, Donald, Richard W. Dowell, and Frederic E. Rusch, Theodore Dreiser: A Primary Bibliography and Reference Guide, 2nd ed. (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991); online version at http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/dreiser/bibliography.pdf. Intellectual debts are owed to Donald Pizer and Thomas P. Riggio.
"At the Sign of the Lead Pencil: Our National literary Debt." Bohemian 17, December 1909, 705-707.
"Authors Dreiser and Brady Join in Hawthorne Plea." St. Louis Star, July 11, 1913, 2.
"My Uncompleted Trilogy." New York Evening Sun, May 30,
1914, 6.
Foreword to Life in a Garrison Town by Lieutenant Bilse, v-xiii. New York: John Lane Company; London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1914.
"The Saddest Story." Review of The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford. New Republic 3, June 12, 1915, 155-156. (A)
"Neither Devil Nor Angel." Review of One Man, by Robert Steele. New Republic 3, July 10, 1915, 262-263. (A)
"The Genius Not of a Trilogy." Reedy's Mirror 24, October 15,
1915, 265.
"As a Realist Sees It." Review of Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham. New Republic 5, December 25, 1915, 202-204. (A)
"Freedom for the Honest Writer." Cleveland Leader, March 12,
1916, 7.
"America's Foremost Author Protests against Suppression of Great Books and Art by Self-Constituted Moral Censors." Los Angeles Record, November 7, 1916, 4.
"Life, Art and America." Seven Arts 1, February 1917, 363-389. "Mister Bottom." Social War 1, April 1917, 2. Statement in: Reedy, William Marion. "To Make It Safe for Art." Reedy's Mirror 28, February 21, 1919, 101-102.
"Man and Romance." Reedy's Magazine 28, August 28, 1919, 585. "Why Not Tell Europe About Bertha M. Clay?" St. Paul Daily News, September 11, 1921, sec. 2, p. 6.
Letter to Thomas A. Boyd, dated 25 August 1921. Printed in: New York Call, October 24, 1921, 6.
Letter to Max J Herzberg, 2 November 1921. Printed as "A Letter About Stephen Crane."Michigan Daily (Ann Arbor), November 27, 1921, Sunday Magazine Section, 1.
"The Scope of Fiction." New Republic 30, April 12, 1922, Spring Literary Supplement, 8-9.
"A Letter from Vienna to Theo. Dreiser-And His Reply." Tempest (Ann Arbor) 1, April 2, 1923, 3.
Letter to Rex Beach, May 5, 1923 (a broadside on the Author's League of America).
Preface to Ebony and Ivory, by Llewelyn Powys, vii-ix. New York: American Library Service, 1923.
"Sombre Annals." Review of Undertow, by Henry K. Marks. New York Evening Post Literary Review, November 17, 1923, 255. (A)
"America and the Artist." Nation 120, April 15, 1925, 423-425.
Contribution to "Tributes from American and English Writers." In Thomas Hardy: Notes on His Life and Work, 15. New York; London: Harper & Brothers, 1925.
"Henry L. Mencken and Myself." In The Man Mencken: a Biographical and Critical Study, by Isaac Goldberg, 378-381. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1925.
"My Favorite Fiction Character." Bookman 63, April 1926, 175.
Introduction to Lilith: a Dramatic Poem, by George Sterling, vii-xii. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
Foreword to Poorhouse Sweeney: Life in a County Poorhouse, by Ed Sweeney. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927: v-xi.
"Introduction to the Sandgate Edition of H. G. Wells." Introduction to Tono-Bungay. The Sandgate Edition, by H. G. Wells, v-xi. New York: Duffield and Company, 1927.
Foreword to A Bibliography of the Writings of Theodore Dreiser, by Edward D. McDonald, 11-12. Philadelphia: The Centaur Book Shop, 1928.
Introduction to The Road to Buenos Ayres, by Albert Londres, v-xviii. London: Constable, 1928.
Introduction to The Crime of Dr. Garine, by Boris Sokoloff, vii-xii. New York: Covici Friede, 1928.
Introduction to McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, by Frank Norris, vii-xi. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
"Dreiser on Tolstoy." San Francisco Bulletin, September 29, 1928, 12.
Contribution to a symposium "Anatole France: A Post-Mortem Five Years Later." Tambour (Paris) 5, November 1929, 25-26.
"The New Humanism." Thinker 2, July 1930, 8-12.
"The Early Adventures of Sister Carrie." Colophon 5, March 1931, unpaginated.
Contribution to "Goethe as Viewed by American Writers and Scholars: A Symposium." Monatshefte für Deutschen Unterricht 24 (MarchApril 1932): 78-79.
"The Great American Novel." American Spectator 1, December 1932, 1-2.
"An Address to Caliban." Esquire 2, September 1934, 20-21, 158D.
"The Epic Sinclair. " Esquire 2, December 1934, 32-33, 178B-179.
Contribution to a collection of "Tributes to Gorky." Soviet Russia Today 5, July 1936, 7.
"Book Marks." Contribution to Carolyn Marks. New York World-Telegram, September 25, 1936, 23.
A letter dated 11 October 1932, recipient unnamed. International Literature, no. 1 (January 1933): 126.
Introduction to Magnificent Hadrian: A Biography of Hadrian Emperor of Rome, by Sulamith Ish-Kishor, 1 -5. New York: Minton, Balch, 1935.
Introduction to Waiting for Nothing, by Tom Kromer, xi-xix. London: Constable, 1935.
"Four Cases of Clyde Griffiths." New York Times, March 8, 1936, sec. 9, pp. 1-2.
Introduction to The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler, v-xxx. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1936.
Introduction to Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham, iii-xiv. New Haven: Yale University Press / Limited Editions Club, 1938.
"Presenting Thoreau." In The Living Thoughts of Thoreau, 1-32. The Living Thoughts Library. New York: Longmans, Green, 1939.
"Upton Sinclair." Clipper 1, ,September 1940, 3-4.
Introduction to More Dangerous Thoughts, by Mike Quin, 7-8. San Francisco: People's World, 1941.
"Sherwood Anderson." Clipper 2, May 1941, 5.
"Women Are the Realists." You 2, Fall 1944, 5, 48-49.
This diverse list is itself only part of a larger and still more heterogeneous series of writings on literary matters from across Dreiser's career-long engagement with culture and society. It does not include the magazine articles on American literary figures, and capsule book reviews, that Dreiser produced in the 1890s, before he began seriously writing fiction. It should also be supplemented by a further five discrete publications on drama, and seventeen on film, and by essays in the archives which seem to have remained unpublished, such as "A Modern Advance in the Novel," "The Professional Intellectual and His Present Place," "Literature and Journalism," and "Is There a Future for American Letters?". Moreover, Dreiser reflected on his own work and that of others in essays with more general themes — "Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse," in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1919) for example; in interviews and speeches; in his correspondence; and in memoirs and autobiographical writings. Also
relevant too, are Dreiser's discussions of visual art and painting, in novels such as The Titan (1912) and especially The "Genius" (1915) which explores his interest in representing the city through the painting career of the semi-autobiographical figure Eugene Witla.
Faced with this range of material, critics have tended either to use Dreiser's critical writing piecemeal, primarily as an aid to examining his literary output, or to read two outstanding pieces, "True Art speaks Plainly" (1903) and "Life, Art and America" (1917) doctrinally, as semi-abstract philosophies of literature, or manifestos of naturalism or (the term Dreiser used) realism. In what follows I try to consider Dreiser's literary criticism as a body of writing in its own right, which benefits from historical con-textualization as such. Therefore my approach is twofold: to sketch out some of his main topics and ongoing themes, and for a small selection of items, to offer a more detailed description of what occasioned them, in order to clarify nuances of Dreiser's thinking and engagements that might otherwise be missed.
Self Defense and Resistance to Censorship
The roots of Dreiser's literary criticism lay in the need to defend his own artistic practice and to contest powerful expressions of taste which often stigmatized, censored, or threatened the legal suppression of his work. Both of his best-known pieces of literary criticism had their genesis as defensive responses. "True Art speaks Plainly" appeared in the wake of Dreiser's troubles with publishing house Doubleday, Page, who having accepted his first novel, Sister Carrie, had a change of heart and did almost all they could to disassociate themselves from it. The 447-word essay opens with a strong polemical statement:
The sum and substance of literary as well as social morality may be expressed in three words — tell the truth. It matters not how the tongues of the critics may wag, or the voices of a partially developed and highly conventionalized society may complain, the business of the author, as well as of other workers upon this earth, is to say what he knows to be true, and, having said as much, to abide the result with patience.3
3 Theodore Dreiser, "True Art speaks Plainly," Booklovers Magazine (Philadelphia) 1, January 1903, 129.
This has resonated with generations of readers and critics, and has helped to substantiate Dreiser's reputation for fearless realism. However the apparent simplicity of its message is belied by its immediate historical and cultural context. A direct response to charges of "Literary Immorality" (the title of an earlier draft),4 the piece was evidently called into being by either the pre-publication wrangling over Sister Carrie, or critics who had called the published book "squalid," "unpleasant" and a depiction of "vice [as] triumphant"; or by both. But some further contextualization of what was being defined as "immoral" and what the repression of sexual matters implied, is in order.
In the first place, while some reviewers had found Sister Carrie morally problematic, many contemporary reviews were positive, showing no signs of finding the novel scandalous, and Dreiser would go on to deplore the more direct depictions of sex in literature in "Freedom for the Honest Writer" (1916). The main issue here was not explicitness, as such, but rather Dreiser's refusal to moralize over Carrie's extra-marital sexual activity or to narratively punish her for it. Nevertheless, Dreiser's demand for the freedom to treat sexual matters with more openness decisively expanded the argument being made since the late 1880s by Hamlin Garland, and most prominently William Dean Howells, who called for a literature that represented "commonplace" experience rather than the ideals and conventions of a social élite, and thereby was committed to democracy and social justice. Moreover, concern about the far-reaching and invidious results of sexual repression is a keynote of Dreiser's cultural criticism, further elaborated in later work such as "Life, Art and America" and "Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse." It is worth noting two aspects of his argument here. First, that for Dreiser sexual repression is the primary and characteristic repression in American culture, a root and a paradigm for other conventions, mystifications and repressions. Second, that in "True Art speaks Plainly" Dreiser views literature in directly ethical and social terms, grounded like all art in the honest observation of historical conditions, and attacks the appeal to supposedly "immutable forms" which he sees as bolstering the social status quo.
Having noted the specifics of Dreiser's argument here, it is also worth considering the situation of the essay as initially published. It was one of the "short, pungent, vigorous, signed editorials by men and women
4 T. Dreiser and S. W. Dreiser, "Literary Immorality," holograph manuscript, folder 121270, Dreiser Collection, University of Pennsylvania.
who have things to say and who want to say them 'hard'" in the first issue of what would become Appleton'sMagazine. Dreiser's statement followed contributions by Hamlin Garland, Brander Matthews, and others, and was succeeded by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on the importance of disobeying tyranny. On republication in The Modernist in 1919 it appeared above a paragraph by Randolph Bourne commending virtue over duty. In other words, while Dreiser was a pioneer, he was not alone in his views and practice, but rather could be grouped with others who, unlike Dreiser at this point, crossed the boundary between literary and political radicalism.
"Life, Art and America" (1917), published in the little magazine Seven Arts, associated with Greenwich Village bohemia, was the culmination of a long campaign against censorship, most recently affecting his novel The "Genius". Of all Dreiser's non-fiction, this essay has had the longest range, perhaps due to the continued relevance of its critique of a longstanding national refusal to come to terms with its own obsession with the material. Again though, it was called into being by, and needs still to be read against, very historically specific fears that the progressive social and cultural trends of the early nineteen-teens, growing support for women's suffrage and trades unions, and the hobohemian synthesis of avant-garde art and progressive politics in Greenwich Village itself, were about to be put at stake by a nationalistic reaction rising alongside the US's path to involvement in the First World War. Not that Dreiser foresaw the "Red Scare" repressions of the 1918-1919, during which his friend Emma Goldman was deported, but this time he did attempt to take his cultural critique of American nationalism into the realm of politics. In the wake of "Life, Art and America" Dreiser composed a parallel essay entitled "American Idealism and German Frightfulness" (both epithets were used ironically), also intended for Seven Arts. In 1917 the formal declaration of war, and the passing of the Espionage Act, made it unpublishable. It is only recently that it has become possible to read the pair of essays together.5
Censorship then for Dreiser was not a narrowly literary issue, but at various social, psychological and political levels, a symptom of national "neurosis." In interviews and in short written pieces, he was consistent in his approach to the topic, which had been formed through his experiences as a newspaperman in the 1890s and in reaction to Doubleday, Page's embarrassment over Sister Carrie, and hardened by the subsequent struggle to include mild sexual content in The "Genius" and to address sex
5 See "American Idealism and German Frightfulness," in [Dreiser 2011: 56-82].
280
crimes in the play The Hand of the Potter. Dreiser did not see censorship in rights-based terms, as a free-speech issue. In fact, and particularly with Hollywood in mind, he explicitly accepted the need to censor unscrupulous and exploitative cultural production. What Dreiser wanted was, as he made clear in the title of that 1916 essay, "Freedom for the Honest Writer." For him, the censorship issue folded directly into the sense of a writer's obligation to depict real lives truthfully. This was both a moral and, he increasingly came to see, a political obligation, in order to explode mystifying conventions and promote his core social value of "equity."
Validating Friends and Allies
Quite a large proportion of Dreiser's literary criticism was devoted to the validation of work or of writers with which he felt some kind of affiliation. Here, various occasions intersected. Naturally, he responded to questions about his literary influences, consistently citing Honoré de Balzac as the most important. In addition, no doubt for reasons of solidarity and to try to build collective cultural capital, Dreiser frequently cited American realist precursors such as Henry Blake Fuller, Ignatius Donnelly, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane, as pioneers of the kind of writing he aimed to practice.
Less well-known is the range of writers for whose works Dreiser agreed to write prefaces or introductions. Some of these were personal friends as well as literary allies (George Sterling, Ed Sweeney, and Su-lamith Ish-Kishor, for example); some were sympathetic writers with whom Dreiser shared a publisher (Albert Londres), some were political allies who shared Dreiser's 1930s and 1940s affiliation with American communism (Mike Quin). Dreiser also responded enthusiastically to requests from the USSR to write about Pushkin and Gorky, and he seems to have felt a particular affinity with Dostoyevsky. Others were from further afield geographically, ideologically and in terms of literary style. Dreiser wrote introductions for reprints of British writers H. G. Wells, Samuel Butler, and W. Somerset Maugham, and defended Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, against that old charge of "literary immorality."6
A National Literature, an International Audience, and Mark Twain
While there was always a potential for canon-building in Dreiser's validation of the writers he regarded as fellow realists, it was only compara-
6 Theodore Dreiser, "The Saddest Story," New Republic 3, June 12, 1915, 155-156.
281
tively late in his career that his interest in the specificity of American culture was developed into anything like a detailed literary history. Emphasizing what he saw as the general hostility to America's best writers, — "Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau, each in turn was the butt and jibe of unintelligent Americans..."7 — for most of his career Dreiser seems to have regarded the idea of a national literary tradition as a contradiction in terms.
After a period when his literary credentials had been established in the wake of the critical and popular success of 1925's An American Tragedy, two new developments are visible. Dreiser expanded his field of reference beyond the realists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, engaging with Mark Twain and with Henry David Thoreau in detail,8 and, in specific circumstances, for the right audience, he began to try to piece together a historical account of American literature and its interaction with social justice.
From the mid-1930s, Dreiser wrote about Mark Twain with the deepest admiration, seeing Twain as the first American writer to combine true literary achievement with popular success, and thereby a token of the maturity of American letters, albeit that Twain was obliged to split his literary persona in two in order to accomplish this. In a 1938 speech Dreiser constructed an argument that read American literary history alongside its political history, linking Twain and canonical American writers with a turn to social justice, the "novel of protest in America," of which Twain's The Gilded Age was "almost the first."9 The occasion was an international peace conference in Paris. The International Association of Writers in Defense of Culture brought together socialists, communists and others concerned at the rise of fascist dictatorships in the 1930s, and inspired by a belief that culture, shared internationally, could help build resistance and overcome fascism. It was founded at a Congress in Paris in June 1935, attended by writers such as Louis Aragon, Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, André Gide, André Malraux, Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Robert Musil, Ernst Toller, Anna Seghers, E.M. Forster,
7 Theodore Dreiser, "Life, Art and America," Seven Arts 1, February 1917, 363-389.
8 Theodore Dreiser, "Mark the Double Twain," English Journal 24, October 1935, 615-627; Theodore Dreiser, "Mark Twain: Three Contacts," Esquire 4, October 1935, 22, 162, 162A-B; Theodore Dreiser, "Presenting Thoreau," in The Living Thoughts of Thoreau (New York: Longmans, Green, 1939), 1-32.
9 Theodore Dreiser, "Address to the International Association of Writers in Defense of Culture, Paris, 25 July 1938," typescript, folder 13379, Dreiser Papers, University of Pennsylvania Library. Subsequent references are to the same text.
John Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Ilya Ehrenburg, Michael Koltzov, Aleksei Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak. After a second Congress held in war-torn Spain in July 1937, the third took place in Paris in July 1938, immediately following the World Conference for Action on the Bombardment of Open Towns and the Restoration of Peace, at which Dreiser also spoke. Both took place in the shadow of increasingly visible political violence: the emergence of fascist regimes in Germany and Italy and their bombing of civilian populations in Spain; Japanese bombing of the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Chongqing; and Stalinist repression within the USSR and in Spain.
In his "Address" to the conference on 25 July 1938, Dreiser outlined a political history of American literature for his international audience, that can best be understood by comparing it with the much more fully realized conception worked out in V. L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927-1930). Like Parrington, Dreiser described an opposition between realist and romantic tendencies, the former progressive and the latter reactionary. Unlike Parrington, Dreiser read canonical writers such as Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Walt Whitman not as partisans for one side or the other, but as humanitarians who "despite their sympathy and their understanding" were "environed by a moral and religious opposition to reality which characterized American life practically up to 1920." Here Dreiser differed from Parrington both conceptually, in granting the field of literature some independence from essential political struggle, and historically, in that he saw the decisive political split in American literature as emerging not from essential tensions that went back beyond the nation's foundation, but rather from the social changes attendant upon industrialization, and triggered by the dislocations of World War I and the widened political horizon created by the Russian Revolution. What these made possible, Dreiser argued, was the "novel of protest" based on authors' ability to see individual misery in relation to social-economic conditions. Here then the familiar cohort of realists appear; Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Henry Blake Fuller, William Allan White (a comparatively new addition) and Upton Sinclair (Dreiser included his own Sister Carrie too, but this time Norris was not mentioned) — configured not in terms of a break with their precursors but as developing further what Twain had started with The Gilded Age.
Dreiser went on to list twentieth-century American writers that he regarded as the most important practitioners of this widely-defined "protest
novel," many of whom certainly did not align themselves, as Dreiser did, with the left. Abraham Cahan, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, and later Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, depicted conditions "under an alleged democracy." After another bifurcation when the historically existing example of Russian Communism forced writers to take sides, depictions of "economic and social conditions as they are" included Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre and William Faulkner's Sanctuary, and plays by Marc Blitzstein and Paul Peters. The speech moves to its end with a typically Dreiserian confession of the limits of his own knowledge, here concretized by reference to his international audience; and something quite unusual in Dreiser's writing; a self-deprecating joke. "I do not know how literature stands in most of the countries that are represented here," he said, "I am not able to understand any but my own language, and scarcely that..."
The Irreducibility of the Specific
If there is a quality in Dreiser's novels that carries through directly to his literary criticism, it is his concern with the irreducible specificity of individual lives. Manifested in his painstaking care to detail the thinking, feeling, suffering, and (sometimes) resilience, of his best-known protagonists, Carrie Meeber, Jennie Gerhardt, Frank Cowperwood, and Clyde Griffiths, this mirrored, we learn from an obscure cinema program note, what Dreiser most valued in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and that he was moved to find honored in German director Robert Wiene's 1923 expressionist film version of the novel. "How achieve the moods of man in art" Dreiser's note on the film began,
— his deeper and deepest psychologic reactions and approaches. His subtlest responses, whether pleasurable or the reverse, to the various stimuli of life — his deepest fears, elations, suspicions, hatreds — his most abstruse and in some cases completely, if not permanently, veiled motivations.10
Just as he honored the irreducible specificity of people, in another realm Dreiser's literary criticism, considered as a body of work, is characterized not by polemic and generalization but by its attention to specifics.
10 "Theodore Dreiser Says," W8 Street Film Guide, Fifteenth Program, June 29 to July 5, 1929, n.p.
One final example shows Dreiser applying this distinction in favor of Frank Norris over Stephen Crane.
In 1928 Dreiser, we might surmise, was particularly keen to write an introduction to a new edition of Norris's McTeague, since Norris was not only one of his cohort of fellow realists, but had — as Dreiser makes clear in the piece — played an essential role in his career (Norris had made the initial decision to accept Sister Carrie while working as an editor for Doubleday, Page). But for Dreiser the introduction is also occasioned by something else — the British writer H. G. Wells's claims on behalf of Stephen Crane as the most important pioneer of literary realism. He contests that claim by comparing invidiously Crane's universalism and what he portrays as Norris's interest in the local. While The Red Badge of Courage concerns itself with "the psychology of war in general" it says nothing of the specifically American psychology of the Civil War. By contrast McTeague is a better example of American realism because "this work of Norris's concerns San Francisco and the everyday life of a certain element of that city."11 He closes with extravagant praise:
I know of no book, before or since, out of America, France, Germany, Russia, Scandinavia, or England, that is essentially more correct as to milieu and situations, or artistically and socially more illuminating and valuable.12
Dreiser's implication being that social and artistic illumination and value are intimately connected with being "correct as to milieu and situations."
In anticipation of the publication of the Critical Writings in the Dreiser Edition, I would like to close by briefly considering an echo of this preoccupation with specificity in the Dreiser Edition's practices. Since its inception in 1981, the Dreiser Edition has published five novels, Sister Carrie (1981), Jennie Gerhardt (1992), The Genius (2008), The Financier (2010), and The Titan (2016), the memoirs An Amateur Laborer (1983) and Newspaper Days (1991), one travel book, A Traveler at Forty (2004), the collection of biographies and character sketches Twelve Men (1998), the American Diaries 1902-1926 (1982), the Interviews (2004), the Political
11 Theodore Dreiser, Introduction to McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, by Frank Norris, vii-x, ix, x. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
12 Ibid., xi.
Writings (2011), and four volumes of letters. Volumes of the Plays, the Critical Writings, the European Diaries, and The Stoic are currently in preparation. Aside from the letters and the parallel pairs of The Financier and The Titan (initially conceptualized and drafted as a single work, and published within an eighteen-month period), and the selections Political and Critical Writings, no two of these volumes share exactly the same editorial procedures. For comparison, the editors of the ongoing Oxford University Press's Complete Works of Edith Wharton,13 dealing with an equally diverse and more extensive corpus, aspire to apply as far as possible a single detailed editorial policy to each of thirty volumes.
While this striking difference echoes distinctions between Dreiser's and Wharton's literary conceptions, it perhaps more significantly corresponds to the conditions under which they wrote and were and are published. Coincidence is a product of historical continuity. It has remained as financially difficult to produce a posthumous "uniform edition" of Dreiser's work in English as it was when he was alive, and part of the reason for the shifting editorial polices applied by the Dreiser Edition to his novels, is accounted for by shifts in the theory and practice of textual editing, and the advent of digitization, during the forty-plus years that the Dreiser Edition has been in process. The first volume in the Dreiser Edition, 1981's Sister Carrie attracted controversy for its apparent intent on purging the text of its social and historical influences, affiliating itself explicitly with the Gregg-Bowers tradition of textual editing and espousing a particularly narrow definition of Dreiser's authorship which rejected even his own process of revision. On the face of it, the current rationale for the Edition could hardly be more different, situating itself instead in the tradition of "versioning" and engaging with notions of the "social text." Here for example is part of the general statement of editorial principles, prepared by Thomas P. Riggio and myself for the 2016 Dreiser Edition of The Titan:
Dreiser Edition volumes are not based on any fixed theory or school of thought, and editors assume that every text presents unique issues that shape critical practice. [...] The Dreiser Edition advocates an approach that avoids the pitfalls of eclecticism and ontologies of definitiveness, while also seeking as much as possible to replicate the historical presentation of a clean text to readers. Accordingly, all texts are presented as one of a
13 "About the Edition," Complete Works ofEdith Wharton (blog), Oxford University Press, accessed October 15, 2021, https://whartoncompleteworks.org/about.
number of possible versions in a continuum of composition. In this regard the Dreiser Edition has evolved from the original formulations published in 1981 to take into account the central ideas common to diverse modern textual critics (among others, Philip Gaskell, Jerome J. McGann, and Donald H. Reiman) [Davies, Riggio 2016: xiv-xv].
However, this apparent tectonic shift in editorial practice elides major continuities. The 1981 Sister Carrie practiced a form of eclectic textual editing and its detailed apparatus and subsequent publication history enabled what I have termed a form of textual versioning "by the backdoor" [Davies 2016: 3-8]. But the real point here is that the circumstances under which Dreiser wrote generated a textual history that defies a universal approach. James L. W. West, textual editor of several significant Dreiser Edition volumes, has remarked that his editorial choice of Dreiser's revised holograph manuscript of Sister Carrie as copy-text would not even have been possible for the later novels, for the simple reason that a finished fully Dreiserian text had never existed for them.14 After 1911 not a single one of Dreiser's novels was submitted to the publisher in the form of what might be considered a completed final draft, whether due to his increasing confidence in trusted editors, his growing familiarity with an editorial process of dialogue between writers, publishers, and editors that would bring the work to completion, because he delivered typescripts incomplete due to time and financial pressures, because he was too ill to oversee the completed work, or because he had died.
This brief sketching-out makes no pretense to completeness, and it should be clear by now that a commitment to understand the occasions of Dreiser's literary criticism is, in some senses, at loggerheads with a wish to abstract its most "important" aspects. There are other Dreisers, and there are other stories to be told about his literary criticism. This then is not a Conclusion.
14 See "Fair Copy, Authorial Intention, and Versioning," in [West 2011: 29-30, 36-37].
REFERENCES
Davies 2016 — Davies, Jude. "Method and Judgment in the Theodore Dreiser Edition: From Sister Carrie to The Titan." Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing 37 (2016): 1-18.
Davies, Riggio 2016 — Davies, Jude, and Thomas P. Riggio. "Editorial Procedures." In The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser, edited by Roark Mulligan, i-xviii. Winchester: Winchester University Press, 2016.
Dreiser 2011 — Dreiser, Theodore. Political Writings. Edited by Jude Davies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011.
Dudley 1933 — Dudley, Dorothy. Dreiser and the Land of the Free: A Novel of Facts. London: Wishart, 1933.
Epstein 1991 — Epstein, Joseph. Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives. New York: Norton, 1991.
Faulkner 1995 — Faulkner, W. Faulkner in the University. Edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Bonner. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.
Murayama 2016 — Murayama, Kiyohiko. "Theodore Dreiser and the Modernists." Studies in American Naturalism 11, no. 2 (Winter 2016): 38-55.
West 2011 — West, James L. W. Making the Archives Talk: New and Selected Essays in Bibliography, Editing, and Book History. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.
© 2021, Д. Дэвис
Дата поступления в редакцию: 16.10.2021 Дата одобрения рецензентами: 25.10.2021 Дата публикации: 25.11.2021
© 2021, Jude Davies Received: 16 Oct. 2021 Approved after reviewing: 25 Oct. 2021 Date ofpublication: 25 Nov. 2021
