Notes on Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” (Fiction Literature/ 1925)

Theodore’s Dreiser’s An American Tragedy was published in 1925, a crowded year for novels about the decadence and moral ambiguity of the early Twentieth Century. That same year Dos Passos achieved his first commercial success with Manhattan Transfer, Hemingway broke ground on his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises (though it wouldn’t be published until 1926), and a guy named F. Scott Fitzgerald slipped in a really long short-story called The Great Gatsby. It might be fair to say that An American Tragedy, though ambitious in length at 866 pages (the Signet Classic version), is the least talked-about of the aforementioned works. Its legacy has mostly been sustained by two film adaptations, the second of which, A Place in the Sun (1951), is a cinematic masterpiece featuring Liz Taylor and Monty Clift (You should watch it the first chance you get and then ponder the lunacy of the voters who conspired to remove it from the American Film Institute’s updated list of the 100 greatest movies of all time).

The reason for the book’s relative obscurity is pretty simple; much of it is badly written. That’s not just my opinion either. It’s a sort of consensus among critics, with the exception of Dreiser’s close friend, H.L. Mencken. It doesn’t take a huge literary mind to notice that An American Tragedy, especially the first 300 pages, is ostentatious, redundant, muddled, just plain overwritten. Passages like this one aren’t confusing, they’re dizzying:

For following the evening at the Shuman home, and because, in spite of Clyde’s hesitation at the time, all three including Rita herself, were still convinced that he must or would be smitten with her charms, there had been various hints, as well as finally a direct invitation or proposition on the part of Dillard to the effect that because of the camaraderie which had been established between himself and Clyde and these two girls, they make a weekend trip somewhere — preferably to Utica or Albany.

And this sort of writing abounds.

Dreiser’s style throughout much of the book is a cheap Victorianism. The problem with this, aside from the fact that he sounds like a poor man’s Dickens, is that the story of Clyde Griffiths, the attractive youth of humble origins who’s seduced by the prospect of wealth and kills his pregnant girlfriend to make room for the rich and beautiful Sondra Finchley, is a thoroughly modern one. Down to Dreiser’s word choice, this conflict between the author’s edgy subject matter and his old-fashioned parlance is evident. In one passage the author describes the atmosphere as “caloric” (he means hot and stuffy), a term derived from a theory of heat production that was disproven by the beginning of the 19th century. A voluptuous woman is said, with unbelievable prudishness, to have a “fleshy solidity and foreign flavor” and her friend to possess “French shoulders.” And maybe worst of all, Dreiser uses “tergiversation” more than once to characterize Clyde’s habit of evading his forsaken lover. Why can’t Clyde evade or equivocate? Why must he tergiversate? For that matter, when was the last time any character in American literature tergiversated?

If you don’t see it yourself just yet, hold Dreiser’s stuffiness up against Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. In a lot of instances they’re treading on very similar themes. Their characters are defined by selfishness and a general lack of regard for the consequences of their behavior. Dreiser, making this point about Clyde, writes boringly:

His was a disposition which did not tend to load itself with more than the most immediate cares.

Now take that famous line of Fitzgerald’s about Daisy and Tom:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made.

Fitzgerald’s prose reflects the coolness, the fluidity, the obliviousness of his characters and, more broadly, the social circles in which they travel. It’s easy to see why Gatsby got a modern silver screen remake featuring Leo DiCaprio. No, I don’t think Gatsby is timeless, as its diminishing returns with young people today seem to show, but it is readable, digestible, relatable today. The same can’t be said so confidently about An American Tragedy.

But this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t read it. The constant tension between old and new in Dreiser’s voice, frustrating as it may be for his readers, is actually inseparable from his theme. Whereas Gatsby picks up after the “lost generation” has largely rewritten the social contracts of American culture, rejecting Prohibition and the rural Puritanism that inspired it, Dreiser tells the story of a country not fully given over, one still caught in between the forces of traditionalism and modernity. This story is told through the personal and institutional conflicts that drive the plot; the conflict between Clyde and his devoutly Christian family, between poor farmers and rich city dwellers, between moral justice and legal justice, and between a Governor who would spare Clyde’s life and a religious confidante who can persuade him to do so, but whose faith won’t allow it.

You can even sense a progression in Dreiser’s style when these conflicts come into greater focus, and especially when the author himself clashes with tradition. His description of death row is harrowing and betrays his true feelings about the age old practice of electrocuting criminals. He discards the gaudiness of the early chapters in favor of something plainer and more literal — more modern, you might even say:

So this was what death was like here; men cried, prayed, they lost their minds — yet the deadly process was in no way halted, for all their terror. Instead at ten o’clock and in order to quiet all those who were left, a cold lunch was brought in and offered — but with none eating save the Chinaman over the way.

Notice the men weren’t “dispossessed of their mental faculties” or “relieved of their sanity.” Rather, the author who gives us “tergiversate” a half dozen times in the same book prefers in this instance that they simply “lost their minds.”

To be sure, many have come to Dreiser’s defense over the years, arguing that he’s a naturalist and his peculiar style reflects the moral ambiguity and confusion of his characters. I agree with this assessment. In fact I don’t think it goes far enough. In An American Tragedy Dreiser embodies the fluctuating and competing values of early Twentieth Century America in a way that maybe no other author of his time could have. It’s worth the read, even if you pull some hair out in the process.

Originally published at https://evanwriting.wordpress.com on September 17, 2018.