he has never yet been interpreted,” Dreiser predicted. “It’s a big theme, too
big for a little handling, too big to look at from any one angle . . .”. “All I’m after is the source of his inevitability – why he is what he is.”8
Plumbing the secret of the big man’s success was more than a matter of
individual psychology. The project also involved a recognition of exception-
ally American influences. “I’ve got an idea about America,” said Dreiser,
“that over here we’ve got a monopoly on the biggest ideals, and the largest
amount of raw material energy by which to execute them than any people
on earth.” Dreiser’s worship of energy for its own sake was characteristic
of his moment and milieu. And like other ideologues on both sides of the
Atlantic, he gave his reverence for “Force” a nationalistic inflection.9
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Dreiser and the history of American longing
But ultimately, for Dreiser, the millionaire’s “inevitability” arose from his
own, intensely focused longing to succeed. In Frank Cowperwood, Dreiser
created a pop-Darwinian übermensch who lives beyond conventional good
and evil, according to the motto “I satisfy myself.” Early on Dreiser stages
the justly famous recognition scene: as the young Cowperwood watches a
lobster slowly devouring a squid in a fish market window, he realizes that
“men live off other men” and dedicates his relentless energy to a life of
calculated self-assertion. “A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a
tool, or a gambler – acting for himself or for others – he must employ such,”
Cowperwood decides as he begins to rise in the business world. “A real man –
a financier – was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led.” This is
not leadership toward any goal larger than self-satisfaction: in the financier
(or at least this version of him) the sense of public duty is absent. With the
coming of the Civil War, Cowperwood “was concerned only to see what was
of vast advantage to him, and to devote all his attention to that.”10
What is of advantage to him is the explosive growth of northern cities –
including his home town, Philadelphia – that is touched off by the war. As
always in Dreiser, the city is the locus of longing, the place where the pro-
foundest desires have at least a shot at being satisfied. Seeing the city spilling over its boundaries, Cowperwood envisions the money to be made from
speculation in street railways and is quickly en route to becoming “one of
those early, daring manipulators who later were to seize upon other and ever
larger phases of American national development for their own aggrandize-
ment” ( Financier, 141). He perfects the art of trading street-railway stocks for huge profits, with money illegally provided to him by the Philadelphia
City Treasurer. Now he is in the deep part of the pool, swimming among the
sharks.
It’s a good life but Cowperwood is bored by its domestic interludes. As
his wife enters an early middle age, he craves “vitality and vivacity.” Even-
tually he satisfies himself in the arms of Aileen Butler, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Edward Butler, a canny inside dopester who has built a fortune
by hauling trash, paving streets, and cultivating cronies in city government.
Cowperwood’s affair with Aileen is of a piece with his pursuit of money: both
express his veneration of passionate experience as a primordial “Force.”
Contemplating the source of satisfaction in life, he decides “force was the
answer – great mental and physical force. Why, those giants of commerce
and money could do as they please in life, and did” ( Financier, 82, 121).
The hard side of this worship of force is its bent toward power and con-
trol. This required patience and a capacity for sublimating wayward desires.
The successful man, in Dreiser’s view, could organize his inchoate longings
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jac k s o n l e a rs
toward larger, long-term purposes: this is what distinguishes the financier’s
attitude toward money from that of most people. “Few people have the
sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what
it is to be a controller of wealth,” Dreiser announced in an aside. “They
want money, but not for money’s sake. They want it for what it will bring
in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it
will control – for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power”
( Financier, 182).
The affair with Aileen is also an expression of elemental Force. “When
he touched her hand at parting, it was as though he had received an electric
shock,” Dreiser wrote. And Aileen, for her part, was in awe of Cowper-
wood’s vitality: “this man would rise beyond anything he now dreamed of –
she felt it. There was in him, in some nebulous, unrecognizable form, a great
artistic reality which was finer than anything she could plan for herself.” She saw their affair through his “cold, direct ‘I satisfy myself’ attitude” – it was an opportunity for “innocent and delicious” sex, which must nevertheless
be concealed for social purposes ( Financier, 123, 146, 268). Concealment cannot last: the affair is exposed to Aileen’s father at about the same time
Chicago burns to the ground. This cataclysm sends the Eastern markets
plummeting, and with them Cowperwood’s fortunes. Brought to trial for his
illegal use of city money, he remains contemptuous of his prosecutors’ petty
moralism. “Life was war – particularly financial life, and strategy was its
keynote, its duty, its necessity. Why should he bother about petty, picayune
minds which could not understand?” ( Financier, 306). Ultimately even a
prison sentence falls short of dampening his desire; the novel concludes with
Cowperwood returning to the business fray, competently preparing his con-
quest of Chicago (and eventually its women) – a tale Dreiser told in The
Titan (1914).
The big man became an artist and corporate executive in Dreiser’s The
“Genius” (1915), his most directly autobiographical novel. It was a pastiche of the characters and scenes that composed his experience at The Delineator.
The protagonist and stand-in for Dreiser himself is Eugene Witla – a painter,
aesthete, and advertising man who begins as an adolescent bored with his
hick home town, lying listlessly abed, wondering “What was this thing, life?”
Eugene’s search for elemental force among the artistic, financial, and sexual
mysteries of the city collides with a wall of convention; the quest collapses
but ultimately revives under the influence of his implacable drive. Gradually
he realizes that art alone will never bring the sensuous luxury he craves. The
public is not ready for pulsating vitality in its drawing rooms, so Eugene must look for institutional employment, which he finds in the corporations that
are sustaining and stimulating consumer desire – the advertising agencies and
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Dreiser and the history of American longing
mass circulation magazines that packaged “this thing, Life” for mass con-
sumption. With his quivering lower lip, his lovesick mooning about, and his
endless self-absorption, Eugene may have been the most repellent protago-
nist Dreiser had created (or projected) up to that time – a warning of what
could happen if one embraced restless longing as one’s sole raison d’etre.11
But Clyde Griffiths of An American Tragedy (1925) makes Eugene look
like Marcus Aurelius. Young Clyde’s sense of inner self is virtually nonexis-
tent, defined only by his desire to escape his pathetic family of streetcorner
evangelists. He would never be able so settle for their otherworldly existence:
“He was too young, his mind too responsive to phases of beauty and plea-
sure which had little, if anything, to do with the remote and cloudy romance
which swayed the minds of his mother and father.” Beauty and pleasure
present themselves in the nouveau-riche splendors of the Green-Davison
hotel in downtown Kansas City. Dreiser’s choice of venues is significant:
for Clyde, money and status (or at least the appearance of it) are ultimately
more important than sensual pleasure. When Clyde takes a job as a bell-
hop at the Green-Davison, he becomes fixated on the gilded youth who play
there and consumed by longings for forbidden delights – all of which come
with a high price tag. Glimpsing the gaiety of the country club set through
half-open hotel doors, he feels he is “looking through the Gates of Paradise”
( American Tragedy, 3, 43).
Given the remote likelihood of ascent to that paradise, Clyde turns to
high-jinks among the bellhop fraternity. He piles into a roadster with a gang
of drunken boys and girls; when the driver hits and kills a child, the passen-
gers scatter. Clyde heads for Chicago, where he meets an old bellhop friend
who gets him a job at the Union League Club. It is an “Eveless Paradise,”
where successful men have transcended the longings of ordinary mortals and
achieved a state of sovereign serenity ( American Tragedy, 202). One of these Olympian figures is Clyde’s uncle Samuel Griffiths, who immediately recognizes the boy’s striking resemblance to his own son Gilbert and invites the