Mr. Trilling, Theodore Dreiser and Life in the U.S.

...Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing...

...Lions and Elks, Kiwanians, and Masons, not to say Oddfellows, all those peculiar totems of business civilization, are seen as vessels of social advancement...

...All this is quite marvelous...

...And he was equally acute at noticing all , the marks of invidious distinction between one class and another, as well as the finer gradations within each of them...

...Even today, with all our talk of the open class system, how little analysis there is of a case like this, and how common it nonetheless remains...

...All the same, America has achieved a degree of material satisfaction undreamedof fifty years ago...

...For all their show of purposeful activity, Chicago and New York drift, and so does the United States as a whole...

...His fingers bore several rings—one, the ever-enduring heavy seal— and from his vest dangled a neat gold chain, from which was suspended the secret insignia of the Order of the Elks...

...I tell you," another drummer advises Drouet, "it's a great thing...

...For Trilling, Flaubert's fools, Bouvard and Pecuchet, suffer one misfortune after another not because bourgeois society is what it is, but because "life is what it is...

...to the same extent, mutatis mutandis, that Oedipus cannot but drift, into slaying his father and marrying his mother...

...Dreiser relocates the Protestant Ethic and the Gospel of Work...

...The key to an understanding of money, said Georg Simmel in his cool disquisition on the subject, is its impersonality...

...This is a calculated emphasis which serves the purpose of differentiating one ideal type from another...

...they thicken the texture of his narratives...

...Dreiser's naturalism is of a special kind, anchored in the social and cultural realities of American life...

...Norms develop outside the individual consciousness and exist prior to it...

...Money is the medium that for good or bad, makes for a fluent society...

...It is their common opinion that when a serious breach of the rules occurs, it will be followed by predefined punishment...

...she suffers from "status panic," longing for advancement at least through her children...

...This judgment, I shall try to show, is perverse, but it is also opaque: for what kind of accuracy does the social fact need...

...Such objections are significant in a judgment of Dreiser's work...

...Carrie's view, if she had been able to articulate it, would simply have been that money is something everybody else has and she must get...

...In 1925 he explained that Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt were variations on the same somber theme...

...173 as they are exhibited in an American high school, but no more incisively than Dreiser did in delineating Jessica Hurstwood who at 17 attends a school in which most of the pupils enjoy a social position slightly higher than hers...

...As we enjoy our creature comforts, eat more, work less, and move relentlessly forward, what will become of us...

...Dreiser begins where the jungle ends, where sentience and not subsistence is the problem, where an ancient obstacle has been overcome and a greater one emerges...

...The elite and those who have achieved enough status to emulate it act like the arrivistes they are...

...Durkheim identified social facts, i.e., the existence of norms, precisely as Dreiser did: by asking what would happen if they were violated...

...And the poverty of the Don suggests that the novel is born with the appearance of money as a social element—money the great sol...

...At the very least, and consistently, he is concerned with organic flux...

...This specifically human situation applied to America is the only context in which Dreiser's naturalism unfolds...

...From Hurstwood, the symbol of downward mobility, a price heavy enough to destroy him is exacted...

...This is also Dreiser's theme, and to it he brings a sense of religious awe and wonder...

...Dreiser's sure touch is evident here for he locates a maximal anxiety precisely in the class that is just below the top...

...Yet, there still remains a magnificent fulfillment of precisely what Trilling says is necessary for the novel in its classic intention...

...Not even the bits of nineteenth century positivism that Dreiser soaked up impose such a vision upon him...

...And on that ground Dreiser stands very firmly...

...The normative determination of human conduct makes it obligatory to act in one way and to abstain from its opposite...

...her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it...

...These girls gave themselves the airs befitting the thriving domestic establishments from whence they issued...

...This is one way to assuage an enormous craving that has been artificially aroused in nearly all Americans...

...There are always badges of belonging, literally from rags to riches...

...For Dreiser tells us, with a power that hardly another 20th Century American novelist has matched, what it means to live in the country of the dollar...

...A famous chapter of Sister Carrie begins with the author's speculations about the true meaning of money which, he remarks, has yet to be popularly understood...

...One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast awayupon a desert island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value...

...Money, snobbery, the ideal of status, these become in themselves the objects of phantasy, the support of phantasiesof love, freedom, charm, power, as in Madame Bovary, whose heroine is the sister, at a three centuries' remove, of Don Quixote...

...His wife has declared that he suffered from a "poverty complex" to the very end and we know this just as surely from the texts as from her testimony...

...Similarly, Hurstwood, when separated from his old cronies, disintegrates as if by a law of social physics...

...I tell you it's his degree...

...Scarcely anyone outside the lower depths who wishes to keep from slipping and must therefore keep climbing, relinquishes them...

...OURS IS A PECUNIARY CIVILIZATION...

...This peculiar obfuscation of the social novel (and Trilling admits of no other kind) which removes the sting and the pain from it, is deeply related to his incapacity to see the strength and the truth in Dreiser's novels...

...These men were Dreiser's contemporaries at the turn of the century, and his achievement seems all the greater when measured against their insignificance...

...This is the universal rule—contradicted chiefly in our dream life, in popular literature and in the cinema...

...Lacking the ability to manipulate symbols, infrahuman animals cannot create cultures which for man is the totality of everything he makes, his tools and his rules...

...Not that Dreiser is an animal psychologist who confuses the behavior of ants, bees, and termites with human conduct...

...The product, those massive and lapidary versions of American experience, does matter...

...asks Jennie...

...A kind of pecuniary passion moves Jennie and Carrie as they indulge the sexual passion of their lovers...

...Those who live in what Dreiser called "Convention's Own Tinder-Box" but flout no conventions, like the elder Gerhardt and Hurstwood's respectable family, never feel the whip hand that keeps them in line, since they are so entirely submissive to it...

...Thoughts of love and elegant individual establishments were running in her head...

...How much is 175 intuitive does not matter...

...America—as distinct from certain segments of its population—is not a nation of joiners...

...On the contrary, at its rare best, his early work achieves a kind of Sophoclean grandeur...

...When Henry Steele Commager writes of a later Dreiser novel that "it was not an American Tragedy that Dreiser told but the tragedy of life itself," he is throwing up a mist, somewhat like that which Trilling has recently thrown up with regard to Flaubert...

...These dumb quiescent creatures, by virtue of an archetypal ascent from the biological to the human sphere, are prepared, at the climax of each novel, for the real tragedy they must now confront...

...But the history of each is the history of the other...

...Hurstwood pins all her hopes on having them move into a higher sphere...

...A critic with a highly organized if not always explicit ideological bent, Trilling has apparently felt Dreiser to be a threat to his liberal equanimity and has several times returned to attacks upon him...

...So do Carrie and Jennie and everyone else...

...It is unthinkable that Jessica and her brother will marry beneath their station...

...Whoever had the gumption and the initiative could pull himself up by his bootstraps...

...Said the dog, "Why does he always use me for an analogy...

...These requirements Trilling states as follows: Cervantes sets for the novel the problem of appearance and reality...

...This is the question our arch-materialist implicitly raised in telling the story of Carrie and Jennie who achieved economic security and then began to suffer...

...Both carry their measure of pain with them...

...I wish to suggest that Dreiser's early work is especially pertinent at the present moment...

...Drouet remains relatively unchanged: we know this because his clothes are the same...

...They were the only ones of the school about whom Jessica concerned herself...

...With few exceptions, it may be safely predicted that a worker will marry the slaughter of a worker, a businessman the daughter of a business man...

...Jennie, like Carrie, is a rose grown from turnipseed...

...What historians like Beard have commonly regarded as a national- mania turns out to be mainly a middle-class necessity...

...But those who defy custom suffer ostracism, and having paid their penalty, see as no one else does the distance between appearance and reality...

...He's a way-up Mason, and that goes a long way...

...indeed, Mrs...

...Hurstwood's disorientation— he loses his moorings in the middle class while clinging desperately to its ethics—is scarcely more poignant than Carrie's rise...

...But it does not escape Dreiser...

...176 Part of Dreiser's genius lay in his recognition of both man's affinity with other animals and man's tremendous distance from them...

...And the truth of what he tells us cannot but be profoundly disquieting to the complacent liberals of our day...

...No longer required to scramble for a living, their minds are exposed to all the subtle tortures of life above the animal level...

...Most workers in a metropolitan area like New York, as the sociologist Mirra Komarovsky has demonstrated, belong only to unions, less often to churches and scarcely to anything else...

...For Balzac, these two passions, of approximately equal puissance, are the mainsprings of human action...

...A literary critic would have every right to complain about Dreiser's structural clumsiness, his littlenoted sentimentality, his preposterous "chemisms," his tendency to stress chance factors while committed to a philosophy of remorseless determinism...

...The father said skeptically, "There's no more chance of our finding a witch than—of that dog talking...

...Look at Hazenstab...

...Yes, to some extent...

...we internalize them, and are fully aware of their grip upon us only when our behavior is deviant...

...Drouet, the drummer, is vividly characterized by his clothes: His suit was a striped and crossed pattern of brown wool, new at that time, but since become familiar as a business suit...

...Lester Kane fails to marry Jennie Gerhardt not merely because the relationship is taboo, but also because the genteel inheritor of wealth is unfitted, by a lifetime of conditioning, for any environment other than the one in which he was raised...

...Only the proletarian Puritans, Carrie's sister and brother-in-law and Jennie's father, with their Old World background, are fully exempt from it...

...Every stage in Hurstwood's decline, and in Carrie's rise, is marked 174 by sartorial manifestations...

...He isn't so deuced clever...

...These attacks, which are of more than literary interest, seem to me symptoms of what troubles the liberal intellectual in the America of the 1950's...

...They get away from poverty and the condition of emotional anaesthesia that attends it...

...The ideological commitment is virtually as strong here as in Russia, and almost as far removed from the truth...

...there is also much science and not a little pseudo-science in the art of Dreiser...

...More important, however, is the fact that in making this judgment he has forsaken the canons of art for those of sociology...

...She met girls at the high school whose parents were truly rich and whose fathers had standing locally as partners or owners of solid businesses...

...The whole suit was rather tight-fitting and was finished off with heavy-soled tan shoes, highly polished, and the grey fedora hat...

...As early as 1900 Dreiser knew a great deal about the density of class relations in the United States...

...Mencken's synopsis is perfectly accurate...

...From his coat sleeves protruded a pair of linen cuffs of the same pattern, fastened with large, gold-plate buttons, set with the common yellow agates known as "cat's eyes...

...H. L. Mencken understood this...

...ENDOGAMY IS AMONG THE MOST PROMINENT Signs of class...

...The restaurateur's wife is a pusher...

...A total tabulation of its uses would be staggering—which is precisely the effect he intended...

...It does not make for an equal society but for one in whichthere is a constant shifting of classes, a frequent change in the personnel of the dominant class...

...In 1916 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice objected to The Genius—and it could have similarly objected to Dreiser's first two novels—chiefly because that book contained "very vivid descriptions of the activities of certain female delinquents who do not, apparently, suffer any consequence from their misconduct but, in the language of the day, 'get away with it.'" Actually they get away with nothing...

...The insignia that dangles from Drouet's chain is extremely important for it signifies membership in what used to be called a voluntary association...

...Is it not because we are now undergoing as a culture what Carrie and Jennie lived through individually...

...My emphasis.—B.R...

...One must be a Kiwanian or run the risk of failure...

...lounged about, dressed in excellent suits of im ported goods, a solitaire ring, a fine blue diamond in his tie, a striking vest of some new pattern, and a watch-chain of solid gold, which held a charm of rich design, and a watch of the latest make and engraving...

...Sumner, Small, Giddings and Cooley were often interested in class, but they tended to find all virtue where it is still said to reside— in the middle class...

...Their stories form nothing less than an anatomization of American society...

...But, if the consequences of descent on the social scale go largely unstudied, those of upward mobility are mostly misunderstood...

...Money, then, occupies the center of Dreiser's stage, but it is mean' ingless apart from the quest for status, or secular salvation, which, in turn, implies a class system...

...If these are the elements of fiction, then they are nowhere more clearly present than in Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt—sisters, some decades removed, of Emma Bovary...

...Neither camaraderie nor likemindedness by itself motivates people to join churches, clubs, professional groups, or for that matter, trade associations and labor unions...

...If in-marriage gives us a fairly reliable index to class, attire provides another...

...Dreiser saw that it was no more voluntary than most other forms of association...

...Isn't 172 it fine to be rich...

...vent of the social fabric of the old society, the great generator of illusion 171...

...Durkheim illustrated this proposition—without which sociology has no reason for being—in a dozen different ways, and so did Dreiser...

...Jennie, like Carrie, escapes from the physical miseries of the struggle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of the struggle for happiness . The tragedy .. of Carrie and .Jennie, in brief, is not that they are degraded, but that they are lifted up, not that they go to the gutter, but that they escape the gutter and glimpse the stars...

...One of the critics who has been most effective in depreciating Dreiser has been Lionel Trilling, author of The Liberal Imagination...

...We drift, but there are powerful undertows and cross-currents which determine our course...

...Reduce the story to a hundred words, and the same words would alsodescribe Sister Carrie...

...Who among the novelists, besides Balzac, understood this better than Dreiser...

...No matter how secured, money can be used to buy much the same goods and services...

...Dreiser was so fascinated with clothes that he probably devoted more space to them than to nature...

...It differs from the naturalism of Zola who endowed many of his key characters with hereditary stigmata, and from that of Jack London who depicted a primal battle between man and brutish, inscrutable nature...

...Elmtown's Youth, a study completed not long ago, focuses upon class differences *Robert Maclver recently pointed out that, except for the United States and the Soviet Union, no civilization has ever laid claim to being classless...

...He finds them in the most submerged classes where thrift is practiced because nothing else can be...

...and the shifting and conflict of social classes becomes the field of the problem of knowledge, of how we know and of how reliable our knowledge is, which at that very moment of history is vexing the philosophers and scientists...

...Are they just so much animated driftwood, now and then miraculously but temporarily resisting the torrents that crush them...

...His version of the American experience— which cuts to its heart and moves us to pity and indignation —is not essentially different from Veblen's or Robert Lynd's...

...No doubt all the wasps, chickens, pigeons, rats, and chimps who have been studied with so much care in a futile attempt to teach us about ourselves, would ask this question if only they had the articulatory appartus and cranial capacity to do so...

...Of course, he's got a good house behind him, but that won't do alone...

...In one short story, "McEwen and the Slave Makers," he does attempt an entomological analogy of sorts, anthropomorphizing ants who, like men, occupy: worlds within worlds, all apparently full of necessity, contention, binding emotions and unities—all, all with sorrow, their sorrow—a vague, sad something out of far-off things which had been there, and was here in this strong bright city day, had been there and would be here until this odd strange thing called life had ended...

...Once, Barnaby, a comic-strip character, was walking through the forest with his father and his dog in search of a witch...

...Dreiser could picture the class struggle in all its magnitude, as toward the end of Sister Carrie...

...Emile Durkheim had suggested in Dreiser's day that when men speak of a force external to themselves which they are powerless to control, their subject is not God but social organization...

...One often hears that there is much art in science...

...Beard, the sophisticated materialist who homogenizes the population when it should be separated into different strata, misses this point...

...Theirs is a boundless appetite for that triple goal—wealth, place, and fame—which the Hurstwoods never really relinquish...

...This does not mean that man is to be treated as inanimate matter...

...How status really affects us goes largely unanalyzed in their writings...

...The gods are dethroned, but powers outside man still determine his fate...

...Ever since the United States reached national self-consciousness, its people have boasted that their land provided the opportunity for eradicating poverty...

...He will lovingly describe a dress while failing to portray the features of the woman who wears it...

...But Dreiser charts a transvaluation of values such that sex becomes a means and money an end whose adequacy is never really doubted...

...178...

...Social stratification is a fact modern Americans have always been loathe to accept.* Early American sociologists paid so little heed to class or viewed it so superficially that their thoughts on the subject do not materially differ from those of the layman...

...I propose to discuss Trilling's comments on Dreiser not primarily in literary terms but rather in the social terms that are his fundamental, if unacknowledged, interest...

...So well defined is the sphere of social activity that he who departs from it is doomed...

...Nearly all of us have our bellies full and 177 in another decade starvation in this land may be totally eliminated...

...It is in his natural medium, as an artist, that Dreiser compresses, symbolically, what weightier theoreticians and empiricists took whole books to say...

...These are the tremendous atmospheric pressures Dreiser was able to recreate...

...As a result: She liked nice clothes and urged for them constantly...

...Hurstwood before his fall: For the most part...

...THE WORD DREISER FAVORED above any other was "drift...

...Trilling does not say...

...This apercu of social science is at the heart of Dreiser's fiction...

...Much of this is still more myth than reality...

...Whatever the virtues of Dreiser may be," writes Trilling, "he could not report the social fact with the kind of accuracy it needs...