Interesting Dreiser - its ouphe and barghest cry - the weirdness of it

Two pro-Dreiser notes.

First: roughly the first third of An American Tragedy is our hero Clyde as a rootless teen from an odd background, rooting around. In the second third, he becomes more settled, meets a nice girl, and begins to think hard about how to murder her.  The last third is briefly a detective novel, then a courtroom novel, then a prison novel – Death Row.  Dreiser, in a surprising bow to good taste, does not show us Clyde in the electric chair, but he gets as close as he dares.

Dreiser is working through a complex performance of novelistic sympathy, a fundamental task of the novel as a form.  Can I sympathize with Clyde’s various early troubles – presumably not with the idea of murder – and also with at least certain aspects of his time in prison?  Do I forget his victim?  Can I sympathize with this but not with that?  What if, more strongly, I spent the first part of the novel identifying with Clyde, whatever that means?  How shocked am I when his sociopathy emerges?  I hope I am shocked.

That first third has, by my standard, the most bad sentences per page, and is in some sense mostly background, and I wish Dreiser had cut a lot of it.  The last third, the trial and prison and so on, are presented in a strong plain style but are extremely detailed.  The entire prosecution is presented, for example.  A faithful film adaptation just of Clyde’s trial would take many hours.  A friendly commenter yesterday wanted much of this stuff to be cut – “he could not stop belaboring the point.”

But we are both wrong in that Dreiser can’t start with the crime if he wants to work on the possibility of sympathy.  I have to live with Clyde for a while to even to lose sympathy.  And then I have to grind through the tedium of his encounter with the courts and prison to build it back.  It is the difference between watching a two-hour film of the story, in one sitting, or a 22-episode season of television spread over nine months.

On the other hand, we are both right.  If we can’t stand the prose or the tedium, we are not reading with the intensity of the reader who is really gripped by poor dumb Clyde.

Here’s where I started reading with more intensity – I’m moving to my second point.  Look at this beauty (Clyde is in the woods in upstate New York, with murder on his mind):

And at one point it was that a weir weir, one of the solitary water-birds of this region, uttered its ouphe and barghest cry, flying from somewhere near into some darker recess within the woods.  (II.44)

Every word in that sentence is a legitimate English word, but this time the weird ones are not fussy Latinates but good Germanic antiques, known mostly to readers who owned the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual II (1983).  Now we’re right in the murder chapter:

[The lake] was black or dark like tar, and sentineled to the east and north by tall, dark pines – the serried spears of armed and watchful giants, as they now seemed to him – ogres almost – so gloomy, suspicious and fantastically erratic was his own mood in regard to all this.  But still there were too many people – as many as ten on the lake.

The weirdness of it.

The difficulty.  (II.47)

It’s those little floating sentences that I find especially weird.

Dreiser, looking for an expert on criminal psychology, has turned to Edgar Allan Poe and his Imp of the Perverse, which Dreiser turns into the clumsier “Efrit of his own darker self.”  I was tipped off by the word “tarn” for lake, since the most famous tarn in American literature is the one the House of Usher falls into.  It’s not just Poe’s psychology, but Poe’s language that is borrowed, as if the one is tangled in the other.

These elements –  the weir-weir bird and the Efrit and dark tarns and trees like spears – recur often and add some strange colors to the novel that are at least interesting if not good.  Maybe good is overrated.

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.

reading some famous U.S. novels of the 1920s - in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man

Not writing is a lot easier than writing, but I have some things I at least imagine I want to write, so I guess I will see if I remember how to write.  American books, Mimesis, British books, French books.  I am tired of being ignorant in private, so I will return, for a while, to being ignorant in public.

I feel that I do not know American literature especially well, but of course I know it better than any other; the feeling of not knowing it is an illusion caused by being surrounded by the stuff my whole life.  I also feel that I have recently immersed myself in American literature of, mostly, the first half of the 1920s, although when I add it up it is not really that many books.  Another illusion, caused by reading not just a pile of novels but also Langston Hughes’s great memoir of the ‘20s, The Big Sea (1940) and Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light (1952), like I am really digging in.

But many of the books – well, the fiction, not the poetry, whole ‘nother world there – are famous ones, sizable Humiliations that I have avoided for decades, so famous that they seemed all too familiar even if I did not really know exactly what was in them.  The Age of Innocence (1920), An American Tragedy (1925), Babbitt (1922) and F. Scott Fitzgerald, some Willa Cather novels – they seemed maybe a little dull.  They're not really so dull.

I am not used to reading such popular books.  They were big best-sellers, top 10 of the year, or close.  Cather was not in that game, although she sold pretty well, and Dreiser’s novel does not make the Top 10, but it made him instantly wealthy, allowing him to spend the rest of his life trying to write a “book of philosophy entitled The Formula Called Man” (Library of America timeline, 1935) and advocating for Stalinism.  Terrific.

Learning about Fitzgerald’s finances explained half of his life to me.  In 1919, he is almost unpublished; in 1920 he is selling stories, several of them, to the Saturday Evening Post for $3,000 a pop*. How much would that be today?  $39,291.61 – holy cow!  Plus he is getting movie money, options and so on, although at this point Fitzgerald and Dreiser and Wharton make as much money from selling books, not the rights to books.

Lewis was a hack writer who with Main Street (1920), which I have not read, hit on a perfect satirical comic formula, perfect for his audience but more importantly perfect for his talent.  Every couple of years he could write one on a new topic: business, religion, science, politics.  Let me fill out the magnificent quotation from Babbitt I put in the title:

“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!” (Ch. XIV.iii)

The irony goes a couple of different directions there, doesn't it?  Another irony is that this, or something like it, wins Lewis a Nobel Prize.  Dreiser was a real possibility for a Nobel, too, for that big clunker of all things.  Plenty of prizes, plenty of prestige, are attached to these books, along with the cash.

I’ll wander through American literature for a few days and see what I remember.  Then it will be back to the booze and spaghetti.

* I made a grotesque error of memory here, which I corrected in a later post. Fitzgerald quickly hopped to $900 per story, and pretty soon "Benjamin Button" earned $1,000 - but not $3,000. Still, the basic point, about the huge amount of money suddenly dropped on Fitzgerald, is intact. Just not so much per story