a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 1 4
to his uncle, that he surrender his dreams. This was not the Clyde, of course,
that was ever allowed in the movie versions of the novel, but it was the one
championed by the winner of an essay contest (“Was Clyde Gri‹ths guilty
of murder in the first degree?”) sponsored by Boni & Liveright to keep what
immediately became a best-seller in the public eye. The winner, a young
liberal law professor, Albert H. Lévitt of Washington and Lee University,
held that Clyde was morally guilty of Roberta’s death but legally and so-
cially innocent.34
As if to induce the dreamlike mood of the beginning of the book,
Dreiser’s epilogue, entitled “Souvenir,” opens with the same phrase, “Dusk,
of a summer night.” He returns to the itinerant street preachers, Clyde’s
parents, now in San Francisco. It follows the scene in which Clyde, dressed
for death in black trousers, a white shirt without a collar, and new felt slip-
pers, walks with a clergyman on either side to the electric chair. (One re-
viewer of the novel pronounced the death row scenes “something that every
believer in capital punishment ought to read.”) His parents and their grand-
son, Esta’s illegitimate son of eight years named Russell, set up the portable
organ on a busy street corner and sing hymns to passers-by who are crit-
ical of the activity because it involves one so young: “That gray and flabby
and ineªectual old man, in his worn and baggy blue suit. This robust and
yet uncouth and weary and white-haired woman; this fresh and unsoiled
and unspoiled and uncomprehending boy. What was he doing here?”
Dreiser, who habitually hummed camp meeting hymns to himself, often
as he sat dreamlike in a rocking chair, was thinking not only of his own
preadolescent youth but of young America in the same grand illusion that
seduces Clyde. Here, he is saying, is the perpetual recycling of another who,
like the sex-driven murderer in The Hand of the Potter, didn’t make him-
self. In the final lines of this story of crime and punishment almost as
haunting as Dostoyevsky’s great novel, which Dreiser may have reread
shortly before writing An American Tragedy, Mrs. Gri‹ths decides that she
must be kinder to her grandson, “more liberal with him, not restrain him
too much, as maybe, she had——. . . . For his sake.”35
–
Almost immediately upon finishing his novel, Dreiser got out of town to
wait for the reviews. Nine days before the o‹cial publication on Decem-
ber 17, 1925, he and Helen left by car for Florida. He gave up both his apart-
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 1 5
ment in Brooklyn and the o‹ce in the Guardian building, directing his
mail to the o‹ces of Boni & Liveright at 61 West Forty-Eighth Street. They
first went to Philadelphia, and from there Helen went ahead to Paoli, the
studio home of the artist Wharton Esherick, who worked in wood and
stone. On his extra day in Philadelphia, Dreiser enjoyed a rendezvous with
Louise Campbell.36 From Paoli, their next layover was Washington, but they
stopped on their way through Baltimore to see Mencken at 1524 Hollins
Street. It was, however, bad timing for a reunion. Mencken’s mother was
in the hospital, near death after an operation. Her son was sorely irked when
Dreiser failed to ask about her health. Then Mencken discovered that
Dreiser had left Helen out in the cold car while he first knocked to see
whether his friend was at home and in the ensuing conversation apparently
forgot about her. Finally, when Dreiser asked for a bottle of his bootleg
scotch and Mencken willingly provided it, Dreiser further oªended him by
insisting on paying for it.
In fairness to Dreiser, he was wrought up and exhausted after the com-
pletion of his novel. Later, after Dreiser’s death, Mencken reminded Helen
of the incident (“how I resented . . . his aloof indiªerence to my mother’s
illness”), saying while it was a long while afterward before he ever felt close
to Dreiser again, he should “have known him better. There was a curiously
inarticulate side to him, and it often showed up when he was most moved.”
Dreiser had merely forgotten to oªer his condolences, but he recorded the
fact of Anna Mencken’s illness in his diary for that day. A few weeks later
he asked Mencken the neglected question and was informed without any
word of forgiveness that she had died the day after his visit.37 The iron had
entered Mencken’s soul.
By then Dreiser was already ecstatic about the sales of his book, whose
two volumes at the expensive price of five dollars did nothing to limit its
commercial success. “The reviews are amazing, enthusiastic and dignified,”
wired T. R. Smith to him in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Your position is rec-
ognized. The sales are excellent.”38 One of the most surprising was written
by Dreiser’s old nemesis, Stuart P. Sherman, who was now reviewing full
time for the New York Herald Tribune and whom Dreiser and Liveright had
expected to “hand out the grand slam of his life” against An American
Tragedy. Actually, they shouldn’t have been so surprised. Since meting out
“The Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser” in 1915 (reprinted as “The Barbaric Nat-
uralism of Theodore Dreiser”), in which he had summed up Dreiser’s books
from Sister Carrie to The “Genius” as arguments for a crude “jungle” phi-
losophy, Sherman—whom Mencken had long ago designated as the most
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 1 6
intelligent of Dreiser’s detractors—had moved away from the Arnoldian
idea of literature embraced by his mentors, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer
More. In his review of An American Tragedy, he first qualified his new opin-
ion by stating that Dreiser “has either renounced or eªectually suppressed
the naïve naturalism of his previous novels.” There were “no interspersed
philosophical dissertations here . . . no special pleading, no coloring of the
news” he had found especially in the Cowperwood books and The “Genius.”
But after covering his old tracks, Sherman applauded almost the same Dreis-
erian picture of man as relatively helpless against the forces of (his) nature.
Now Sherman encountered only “detachment,” “impartiality,” and “objec-
tivity” in An American Tragedy. Possibly, changes in Sherman’s personal life
had helped him in this conversion about Dreiser as well as in his newfound
philosophy. Ironically, he drowned that summer in a boating accident rem-
iniscent of the one in An American Tragedy. 39
On the matter of Dreiser’s style, however, Sherman did not convert but
followed the line of other reviewers, whose complaints on this issue had
become commonplace and indeed almost de rigueur in the assessment of
any Dreiser novel since Sister Carrie. Admittedly, Dreiser’s style is crude,
but there is no getting around the fact that at his best he tells an irresistible
story. Joseph Wood Krutch, who considered An American Tragedy “the great-
est novel of our generation,” noted that its 840 pages were “continuously
interesting and continuously terrible, [marching ] forward with a resistless
energy.”40 Dreiser’s sentence structure is often contorted and his content
occasionally redundant (though his repetitions serve to underscore the
drama he is building detail by detail), but some of what Sherman and oth-
ers credit as slovenly style seems unexceptionable today. Much of what was
in Dreiser’s prose then considered slang has become part of what we now
call standard English. Dreiser had learned to write as a newspaper reporter
and magazinist for whom triteness was—and is—not a sin. Moreover, this
realist knew best the common man and woman—for whom the spoken
word was both spontaneous and visceral. The most outspoken critic on the
matter of style was T. K. Whipple in the New Republic. He wrote that
Dreiser violated not only English but American idiom. “This is all very true
when the thing to be communicated is an abstract idea or philosophy,” an-
swered Henry Miller, who would extend the master’s realism in his own
works. “The novel, however, is eªective because of images and emotions
and not because of its abstract ideas.” Comparing Dreiser to James Joyce,
Miller argued that Dreiser’s novels succeed not in spite of but because of
his style which enabled him “to present a world which a more elegant and
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 1 7
precise style could only hint at. . . . He identifies his language with the con-
sciousness of his characters.”41
Dreiser, who claimed over and again that he never paid attention to re-
views, obviously gave no heed to them when they touched on style. Oth-
erwise, he was no doubt paying attention now, for they were radiant with