SARAH GERTRUDE MILLIN ON THEODORE DREISER

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 72, Issue 291, 7 December 1929, Page 18 (Supplement)

SARAH GERTRUDE MILLIN ON THEODORE DREISER

“They s«y Theodore Dreiser has no style. He is a good enough novelist, they say, but why doesn’t the man try to write?

They mean he should take lessons from George Moore. They want him to b c a lovely fountain instead of a turbid river. They think how fitting if the bell-hops of An American Tragedy were made into nice little marble fauns, and stood beside thi s fountain whil c a stream of melodious words were sprayed from their dear little open mouths. Style. What is better style than appropriate style? I s Theodor c Dreiser writing about Abelard and Ileloise, or is he writing about the* Chicago Stock Exchange? ‘I do not know,’ ho says, ‘what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is. I do not believe any one absolutely, and I do not doubt any one absolutely. I think people are both evil and well-intentioned.’

In this pain of uncertainty, driven by *it, growing by it, he builds his books. He makes cities a s he sees the cities in wAieh he has lived: Philadelphia, Chicago, New York —teeming, noisy, vulgar, vicious, great, sorrowful and lovely. He models men and women in the imago of God. He piles on more and more explanations and descriptions, afraid to omit anything for fear that by an accident, by a hairbreadth, this thing he is after may be escaping him. ‘I have a feeling,’ he says, ‘that thc poor and th e ignorant and the savage arc somehow greater artistically.’ And so after the truth in them he goes, not shining and swift and piercing like a galloping cavalryman brandishing his lance* but cumbrous and patient and determined, like a war-tank —step, step, through everything, over everything, eating up opposition, indifferent to obstacles, irresistible, a conqueror. And thc reason ho cannot bear to get his work done is the greatest of all reasons. It keeps working in his mind, because his imagination will not stop feeding it. He is careless because he is full.

He isn’t a dainty writer, no. But if to create a world within a living world, to people it with a sentient humanity, to make the existence of that humanity a matter of urgent concern isn’t a greater thing than to carry aloft this style, thc banner of pretty men in gallant uniforms, what is divinity itself besides a calculated artifice ? ’ ’ *****

Perhaps, for thc sake of Mrs Millin’s brave words, some readers of “A Book About Myself” will console themselves when they reach its conclusive tantalising end, by thinking that his own life no less than the lives of others is still working in Dreiser’s mind, and that he cannot bear to continue his own life story while yet his imagination continues to feed it.

“A Book About Myself” tells the career of Theodore Dreiser during five and a-half years between boyhood and manhood. It starts at th c moment when, after his mother’s death, in Chicago, he gave up a job as collector for an instalment system furnishing house and left home to find newspaper work somewhere in the huge, and thrilling, vulgar city which he had come to know and love so well. It ends at the equally critical moment some five years later when he decided that thfc scnilities, impertinences, hypocrisies of ordinary newspaper life were unbearable, and that he would write books or starve in thc attempt. Between these limits not a detail of experience, ambition or emotion is omitted from a piece of self revelation than which none has ever been at once more vivid and more melancholy. Dreiser vis-a-vis his fellows and rivals; Dreiser vis-a-vis girls of every degree; Dreiser (most important) vis-a-vis himself —emerges huge, stubborn, occasionally bewildered, often angry—a figure pitiful and admirable. And the same uncanny genius which in the novels can make an absorbing narrative of stock-gambling or municipal graft or th 0 sour daily grind of poverty, ift this autobiography makes more engrossing than one could well believe possible thc struggles and everyday happenings of a hack reporter on newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburg and elsewhere. There is perhaps another reason, in addition to that noted by Mrs Millin, for the accumulated effectiveness of his merciless detail. Behind himself, behind thc women he loves, behind thc newspaper offices, behind the cities in which those offices stand, he is always conscious of thc slowly forming bulk of American civilisation. In consequence, “A Book About Myself” gives a portrait not only of an individual and his friends and enemies, not only of three or four great cities at a certain stage of their development, but also of th e United States during those years 1890-1895 — a portrait so convincing and so exciting as to be worth a dozen history books and half a million photographs. — Constable’s Monthly List.