Dreiser is a bad writer - or maybe he is good - those odd and mentally disturbed or distrait souls who are to be found in every place

I have a question.  When does bad writing become merely odd and then maybe interesting and perhaps even good?  Let’s stop at interesting.  Theodore Dreiser is a good test.  The Library of America edition of An American Tragedy (1925) is 930 pages of prose that is never good as such, and is often quite bad.  But those categories in between, how much of it lands there?

Dreiser may be, among great novelists, the worst prose writer.  I was surprised to see how little he had changed in the twenty-five years since Sister Carrie (1900).  Decades later, he is the same giant klutzo.  His virtues are the same, too.  As bad as he can be, in key scenes, the ones on which the novel succeeds or fails, his prose kind of snaps into place, turning into an intense, focused plain style.  The streetcar strike, or Hurstwood staring at the safe, are good examples from Sister Carrie.  An American Tragedy is, or turns into, a crime novel, so just about anything relating to the murder, the detective investigation, the trial, or prison qualifies.  That’s about half of the novel – the 900-page novel.  Which leaves a lot of pages.

If it possible to be a bad writer but a great novelist, Dreiser is that thing.  Even I can see that.

Critics have traditionally amused themselves by collecting the worst examples of Dreiser’s sentences.  I swore I would not do that, and I did not, but I will borrow one from Francis Ludlow's 1946 article “The Plodding Crusader” (The English Journal, Oct. 1946, pp. 419-25):

And yet hang it all, most of them did not live at home as he did, or if they did like Ratterer, they had parents who didn’t mind what they did.  (I.8)

What an ear for prose, and this is a line without any misshapen Latinisms, words like “tergiversation” or “staccatically” or Dreiser’s great favorite “distrait” – he often describes women as “distrait” – that are real English words, available for novelists to use, I guess, but sparingly, please.  “She grew tense and staccato” (II.38).  It is not as if I do not get what Dreiser means.  Bad, odd, interesting?

Here we see Jonathan Yardley, in 2003 in The Washington Post, argue, upon the publication of the Library of America edition of An American Tragedy, that the novel is so bad that it casts doubt on the value of the Library of America project!  “[A]ll this suggests that editorial judgment and discrimination no longer matter at the Library of America” – for publishing what I think of as a pretty solidly canonical novel.

I’ll do another day on this monster, arguing with myself about whether the first 300 pages or so should have been cut, and looking at some sentences that maybe move from “interesting” to “good.”  I had not known that Dreiser owed such a debt to Poe.

That title "distrait" is from Book 3, Chapter 2.  I said it is Dreiser's women who are "distrait," but Clyde becomes "distrait and gloomy" in prison.