THEODORE DREISER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21326, 29 October 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

THEODORE DREISER

A GREAT AMERICAN

BY WINIFRED M. PONDER

Quietly, unobtrusively, and without any great fanfare of trumpets, America has, within the last generation or so, produced some very fine literature. We are just beginning to wake up to this fact; to rub our eyes, blink and look very surprised. Somehow or other we had supinely accepted the dictum that those " benighted stales " expended all their energy, time and thought in pursuit of the almighty dollar; that to them culture was something spelt with a capital C and purchased at a university; and that as a people they could produce only that which was cheap, common and vulgar. Then one day we stumbled by chance, as it were, on the works of Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, Sinclair Lewis (" Martin Arrowsmith," not " Babbitt "), Edna Ferber, Joseph Hergesheimer, or Theodore Dreiser. And the greatest of these is Dreiser. In many respects Dreiser can be likened to Conrad: both at all times paint a vivid and striking picture; both use strong colours and heavy brushes; both indulge in high lights and blackest shadows—but whereas Conrad the artist never comes into his picture, Dreiser cannot keep out. By some this may be considered a fault; maybe it is. But Dreiser never abides by any of the recognised rules. He is a law unto himself, sets his own standards, and tells of life as he sees it. He is no craftsman. His work is crude, rough and clumsy; but it is so real, so honest, and so palpitatingly alive that to cavil at the poor workmanship seems petty and childish. It is like finding fault with a beautiful building because a new and unorthodox kind of scaffolding has been used. No one sees quite clearly—for the vision is always coloured to a greater or lesser degree by the personality of the individual —but Dreiser has the gift of seeing more clearly than most; and he has the ability to relate that which he sees honestly and forcefully, even if he lacks the structural skill of the technician. His characters are not puppets on a stage, worked by a series of strings, but real flesh and blood people, who live and love and suffer. His heroes are not always heroic, his villains villainous, nor his heroines virtuous; but they are always human and ever lovable. " An American Tragedy " " An American Tragedy " is probably the best of Dreiser's novels; it is certainly the one that caused the greatest stir. That a man could corrupt one girl, fall in love with another, work out an elaborate scheme for drowning the first, and yet be the hero of the book and not the villain, is without doubt a reversal of orthodoxy. Herein lies the secret of Dreiser. He passes by all the stereotyped heroes of fiction and takes a very ordinary person, like the man-next-door, puts him under a magnifying glass, dissects him for our entertainment, uses some potent magic to enable us to see into the fellow's mind—and, lo and behold! we find him uncannily like ourselves, with the same little secret vices and the same very public virtues. Some writers we may respect but not like. We may read them, admire them, close the book and forget them. But Dreiser we cannot forget. After reading "An American Tragedy"—or any other of his books, for that matter—the thing that is Dreiser lingers. The book is ended, the story finished, but the characters refuse to be disposed of. They rise and haunt you. You cannot get away from them; you cannot reconcile yourself to the fact that Clyde Griffiths has been electrocuted: the sheer tragedy grips you as you feel that somehow he was doomed from the beginning. To Dreiser the good and the bad are hopelessly intermingled: neither predominating, neither triumphing, but each maintaining a more or less even balance. " Dawn " Dreiser is now in the midst of the tremendous task of an autobiographical work in four volumes—and those who know his " volumes " will have some conception of what this means. He usually runs to anything up to, or even over, one thousand pages.

The first of the series, entitled " Dawn," was published toward the end of last year; the second has already been published under the title of " A Book About Myself," and is to be re-christened " Newspaper Days;" the third and fourth are still to come, and will be eagerly .".waited by those who have grown to know him and to rank him among the very highest. When Dreiser becomes autobiographical the result is staggering. So much candid self-revelation is almost unbelievable. That many men share his emotions, desires and thoughts is no doubt true: that one man should " tell the world " in the imperishable form of literature is well-nigh incredible. Himself frank regarding sex, almost to the point of what some might term indecency, he is puzzled by the obstinate hypocrisy which he finds on every hand. He says: The thought that comes to me now is that by reason of criticism on the part of others—taboos and the like—and however generally evaded and ignored—we do not prefer to contemplate these youthful sex variations, either in real life or in literature. And yet, how common! You may measure the thinness of literature and of moral dogma and religious control by your own observations and experiences. Look back over your own life and see! Not only does he write of himself, but also of all those with whom he has come in contact—not the petty externals to be found in most biographies, but the deeper things, good and bad, noble and ignoble, grand and sordid, that make up that complex unity we call character. His early life was coloured and influenced by abject poverty, so that while still a boy of tender years and negligible education he was forced to tramp the streets day after day in a seemingly endless search for work of any description. And this boy had the soul of a poet and the imagination of an artist! Alternating with periods of intense depression, he experienced moments of wonderful exaltation when he felt that 110 must in some way riso and make a name for himself. The Man Bashful and shy by nature, ho was mutely attracted to every pretty face and shapely figure. He Bays of himself: By now the beauty of girls had become a kind of fetish with me. Round that ever-moving line of beauty I wandered, thrilled by a seeming subtlety which was not unlike that which veils the chalice to a Greek or Roman believer. Never was Aphrodite more Klitteringly or inviolably enshrined than by me, and yet I was wildly longing to tear the chalice from its shrine and put it on my dresser. In his early youth a relative, by the mysterious process of " reading " the dregs of his coffee cup, foretold that his life would be full of great cities, large crowds and many women, but that he would not have much money and would never be very happy. The cities, crowds and women have certainly come to pass; whether ho has much money is a matter for conjecture and comparison; that he has never been very happy is only too true. He has not the temperament for great happiness, which is possible only to those with a certain childlikeness, a sublime faith in the ultimate—if not immediate — good. Dreiser has not this faith: lie must pay the price of seeing too clearly.