and as a delivery man for a laundry roughly parallel Dreiser’s Chicago ex-
periences as described in the autobiographies. Ruby Kenny of the novel,
for example, is Alice Kane in Newspaper Days and Lois Zahn in reality.24
After two years in Chicago, Eugene returns to visit his parents and meets
Sara White’s counterpart in Angela Blue, visiting from Wisconsin, also a
schoolteacher and older than her beau (by five years instead of Jug’s nearly
three). Soon following their mutual attraction, he proposes marriage, but
like Dreiser goes oª to pursue his career for several years, during which he
comes to regret (and undermine) his commitment. After working as an il-
lustrator in New York and developing into a realist of the Ashcan School,
Eugene returns to the Midwest to marry Angela when she threatens sui-
cide after having given into his sexual longings.
Book II takes up the next 300 pages of the 736-page novel and concerns
Eugene’s rise as a painter, his nervous breakdown, and his rise again as gen-
eral editor of a magazine conglomerate similar to Butterick Publications.
It follows Dreiser’s marriage so closely that he feared Jug would burn the
manuscript if she knew about it. Just as Dreiser was attracted to Jug’s sis-
ter, Eugene is attracted to Angela’s sister, but Jug would have been infuri-
ated to learn that the sister is made into an active flirt in The “Genius,” cer-
tainly not the case with Rose White or, for that matter, probably any of
Archibald White’s conservatively bred daughters. More than likely, how-
ever, Jug never read The “Genius.” 25 Book III covers the Thelma Cudlipp
episode from start to finish, even down to Dreiser’s echoing some of his
frantic love letters to the eighteen-year-old. This is Suzanne Dale, who is
put beyond Eugene’s reach by her irate mother; Mrs. Dale also causes him
to lose his job with the United States Magazines Corporation. In a last-
ditch eªort to keep her husband, Angela allows herself to become pregnant
but dies in childbirth. Like Jennie Gerhardt, The “Genius” first had a happy
ending in which Eugene and Suzanne find each other again, but Dreiser
switched it to one in which, when they meet, they pass each other, “never
to meet [again] in this world.” Instead, Eugene discovers Christian Science,
and the story ends on a philosophical note.26
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 5 5
The novel is too long for its story. It is tedious and melodramatic in too
many places, downright unrealistic in others (for example, in the depic-
tion of the near-nymphomaniacal Carlotta Wilson, with whom Eugene
trysts while working for the railroad). It was clearly an act of literary self-
indulgence, more of Dreiser’s fictional and nonfictional summing up of
himself as he struggled to make a living solely by his pen. But the novel is
also epical in its strength and scope, dramatizing impressively the art scene
in America in transition from New England gentility to the raw Whit-
manesque celebrations of the self. Mencken’s reviews of Dreiser’s novels and
of this one in particular in The Smart Set for December 1915 are usually
credited for making the central argument for Dreiser’s panoramic and epi-
cal qualities (“It is rambling, formless, chaotic—and yet there emerges out
of it . . .”).27 But in this case it was Dreiser’s recent friend John Cowper Powys
who not only articulated Dreiser’s new American strength but securely
linked it to Whitman’s.
The transplanted Englishman noted that like Whitman, Dreiser had
found his first “profoundly appreciative hearing in England”—as though
both writers were so large that one needs the perspective of the Atlantic “as
a modifying foreground.” Dreiser’s Balzacian details Powys compared to
Whitman’s long poetic catalogs. And in terms of style, or the lack of it,
Powys correctly pointed out that most of what comes under criticism with
Dreiser—as indeed it did with Whitman—was his use of the vernacular.
This and his attention to detail were part of the essential quality of an epic.
Yet readers and critics were misled by “certain outstanding details—the
sexual scenes, for instance, or the financial scenes” and so missed Dreiser’s
“proportionate vision.” With reference to The “Genius,” Powys might have
pointed to the very first scene in the book subsequently designated as “ob-
scene” by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the same watch-
and-ward alliance that had threatened Leaves of Grass in the 1880s. Here
Eugene kneels before his girlfriend Stella to tighten one of her skates:
She stood before him and he fell to his knees, undoing the twisted strap.
When he had the skate oª and ready for her foot he looked up, and she
looked down on him, smiling. He dropped the skate and flung his arms
around her hips, laying his head against her waist. “You’re a bad boy,” she
said.
Dreiser captures in this brief passage not only the passion but the entire
culture of sex and its taboos at the end of the American nineteenth cen-
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 5 6
tury. “To the European mind,” Powys wrote, “there is something incredi-
bly absurd in the notion that these Dreiser books are immoral.” Not only
were they not immoral, but they were religious. “It [Dreiser’s religious sen-
timent] is felt and felt very powerfully; but it is kept in its place. Like Walt
Whitman’s stellar constellations, it su‹ces for those who belong to it, it is
right enough where it is.” And it was balanced, he thought, by the body,
which was inexplicably tied in its urges to something spiritual. “If one is
interested in the ‘urge—urge—urge,’ as Whitman calls it, of the normal
lifestream as it goes upon its way, in these American States,” Powys con-
cluded, “one reads Dreiser with a strange pleasure.”28 Overall, Powys could
have chosen a greater Dreiser novel to celebrate this way, yet The “Genius”
in its swaggering disregard for the American ban on sex in literature was
the immediate successor to Whitman’s book, the first one to be “banned
in Boston.”
This was one of the favorable reviews, of course, and they divided almost
evenly between the positive and negative, few occupying any middle
ground. It took an academic to make the strongest negative review, and that
was Mrs. Peattie’s friend in Urbana, Professor Stuart Sherman of the Uni-
versity of Illinois. Just in case somebody wasn’t completely aware of it, Sher-
man noted that Dreiser was the first non-Anglican American to produce
major American literature. But he didn’t mean it as a compliment. It was
to remind his readers during the war that Dreiser was “born of German-
American parents” in Indiana. His five books constituted “a singularly ho-
mogeneous mass of fiction” in which Sherman found neither “moral value”
nor “memorable beauty.”29
This was the voice of Puritanism making its last cry in a new wilderness.
“College professors, alas, never learn anything,” Mencken later observed in
response to Sherman’s attack, but Sherman’s was also the voice of Realism
against the inroads of Naturalism.30 Sherman was the first academic critic
to assess Dreiser; the rest had largely ignored him and his fellow natural-
ists in favor of the great literary lights of the last century, not only realists
such as the (still living ) Howells and James but the antebellum romantics
who had inspired them. These were not the writers F. O. Matthiessen
identified in The American Renaissance (1941) for elevation in the mid-twen-
tieth century (Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman)
as much as such Schoolroom Poets as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James
Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—
the trinomial “gentleman” of the American Renaissance who were more
clearly linked to New England Brahmanism and middle-class conventions.
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
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“The real distinction between one generation and another is in the thing
which each takes for its master truth,” Sherman observed. Dreiser and his
fellow naturalists had simply come up with a new theory, the Darwinian
idea that all life is exclusively and selfishly devoted to its adaptation and
survival. In the cases of both Darwin and the naturalistic writers, once they
had formulated their general law, they looked exclusively for evidence to
support it. “Let us then,” Sherman wrote, “dismiss Mr. Dreiser’s untenable
claims to superior courage and veracity of intention, the photographic tran-
script, and the unbiased service of truth; and let us seek for his definition
in his general theory of life, in the order of facts which he records, and in
the pattern of his representations.” Dreiser’s theory presented men and
women not only with the will to survive but the will to pleasure wherever
they found it: “The male of the species is characterized by cupidity, pug-
nacity, and a simian inclination for the other sex. The female is a soft, vain,