336 Making It New: 1900–1945first to bring “the Muse” into the country of her formative years. She was and is,
however, among the finest. It is difficult, maybe impossible, to think of anyone who
has told a truer tale of the American West, its vast landscapes and little rural
communities, its mixing of many races and cultures – and its strange, sometimes
dreamlike blend of progress and return, the forward vision and the backward glance,
desire and memory.Critiques of American provincial life
“Too much detail,” Cather once observed, “is apt, like any form of extravagance, to
become slightly vulgar.” Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) would scarcely have agreed.
Of man, Dreiser once declared, “his feet are in the trap of circumstance; his eyes are
on an illusion.” And in order to capture his vision of a world governed by the forces
of determinism, blind chance, and change, and human beings moved by a need for
personal affirmation, a desire they can neither articulate nor suppress, he forged a
style that is simultaneously cluttered and opulent. There is a wealth of circumstantial
detail, an accumulation of notes about the surfaces of social life and behavior that
sometimes appears indiscriminate, unselective, even elephantine. At the same time,
there is a constant striving toward the ornately poetic: a pursuit of the ineffable that
is as awkward and perhaps as unsuccessful as that of his characters. All Dreiser’s
major protagonists suffer from a need that their lives should assume dramatic form;
and they suffer, not so much because they cannot fulfill this need, but because they
do not really understand it. Wealth, worldly success, sexual gratification are the only
aims they can know or name, but none of these reassures them or curbs their
restlessness. They grapple for money, they wound themselves trying to climb to
fame and fortune, yet they remain outcasts, existential orphans, sullen and
bewildered, always hopeful for some sign that will release them from their craving
for a state of grace or, at least, illumination. In his emphasis on man as the naturalistic
victim of circumstance, Dreiser bears a close resemblance to such early contemporaries
as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris. It was Norris, in fact, who recommended that
Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie (1900), should be accepted for publication. “As I
see him,” Dreiser once declared, “the utterly infinitesimal individual weaves among
mysteries a floss-like and utterly meaningless course – if course it be. I catch no
meaning from what I have seen, and pass quite as I came, confused and dismayed.”
In his interest in human yearning, however, the need for some principle of value to
overcome the meanness, the littleness of life – and the tendency to confuse the
fulfillment of that need with the accumulation of material power – Dreiser more
nearly resembles his later contemporaries, like F. Scott Fitzgerald. His other major
book besides Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy (1925), was actually published in
the same year as The Great Gatsby, although Dreiser had been preparing for it for
nearly twenty years. And, in its own stubborn, clumsy, and dreamy way, it charts, just
as Fitzgerald’s novel does, the strange energies that can flow from the ingrained
American belief that the absolute can be found, immaculately preserved, at the very
top of the ladder of success.GGray_c04.indd 336ray_c 04 .indd 336 8 8/1/2011 7:53:48 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 48 AM