Book Review: A Book About Myself, by Theodore Dreiser

Presented with a book by Theodore Dreiser titled A Book About Myself published in 1922 one may, especially given its running to over five hundred pages in hardback, expect to read of Dreiser's life up to that point. One may regard that book as thus failing to cover much of what many of those likely to be interested in Dreiser's life might want to read about--the publication of his most important novel, An American Tragedy, still three years away, all as such episodes as his trip to the Soviet Union, investigation of the events of the Harlan County war, and much, much else all came after this time. Still, one might expect the first half century of Dreiser's life (1871-1945) that saw him become established as an important literary figure long before 1922.

Instead the book actually deals with just a very few years of Dreiser's youth--those few years in the early 1890s during which he pursued a career as a journalist, and not incidentally ends at a point at which his literary efforts were still very nascent. I was initially disappointed to find this out, and wondered whether Dreiser could really have to say so very much about his relatively brief journalistic career as to justify the book's length. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dreiser did, that the book indeed had a great deal of interest as a "portrait of the artist as a young man" and of his times precisely because he was a junior reporter in the emergent urban, industrialized, America of the Gilded Age, all as the media world was well on its way to taking on something like the shape we know. The young Dreiser may not have broken or covered any stories of world-historical importance, but reading this book after The Brass Check I was fascinated by just how much his personal story bore out what Sinclair had to say about the newspaper business in that day--how people got into the business that seems astonishingly casual today in our era of pompously "professionalized" journalism, the cynical outlook reporters quickly acquired in part because of the ugliness of what they saw on a day to day basis and in part because of the contrast between what they saw and what got put into the paper, the pettiness of the rivalries between competing papers, the general texture of life inside such an operation. Reporters just plain made things up as a matter of course, and for the most trivial reasons, with the fact quite significant in the author's story when Dreiser, who had taken the job of drama critic at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, finding himself in an untenable position after the reviews of three plays he made up got published--after the performances were canceled, giving the game away! And what the reporters did not simply "make up" was often no better, Dreiser learning early on "the subservience of newspapers to financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists, their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he could possibly be betrayed," as even the public spirited-seeming exposes of genuine corruption proved part of some sleazy agenda. (Thus did it go with Dreiser's experience on Chicago's Globe, owned by a politician and businessman whose business, significantly, was vice--who used a campaign by that paper against the fake "auction houses" in the city to settle a political score.)

Fascinating, too, was what Dreiser's book revealed about Dreiser's outlook on life in his youth, precisely because of how surprising much of it was at first glance--and then not so very surprising after all. The great naturalist who gave the world An American Tragedy was quite the romantic in his earlier days, looking at the scenes that were to inspire Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and in spite of the undeniable depravity and ugliness in them being taken with the color and vibrancy of the panorama of which they were part (writing of the squalor and luxury, misery and pleasure together as "a great orchestra in a tumult of noble harmonies" that left him "like a guest at a feast, eating and drinking in a delirium of ecstasy.") Still, as he tells us, exposed to the poverty and social ills around him, even before becoming a newspaperman, "the miseries of the poor, the scandals, corruptions and physical deteriorations which trail folly, weakness, uncontrolled passion fascinated me." If "Darwin, Spencer, Wallace" were only "within the verge of [his] intuition" rather than his "exact knowledge," what little he knew of them may nonetheless have helped him to the view "that man is the victim of forces over which he has no control." Later Dreiser got to know the work of Spencer (among many, many others) rather more deeply, persuading him the more fully of that in ways that seem to have been increasingly critical to his thinking as time went on.

Striking, too, was how much of the stuff of his life seemed to anticipate the path his characters would walk. Here we have an image of a young man who had a stern, narrow, none too comfortable upbringing under a religious yet ineffectual father amid the luxuries and pleasures of a great modern metropolis, fascinated by and drawn to them and frustrated by his inability to do more than look upon them as others enjoyed them--all while learning how compromising of oneself just getting through the day can be. We see that young man, who had already seen a sister run off with a lover, find his family life increasingly burdensome and oppressive and leave it to pursue his own path as he is tormented by a great yet vague ambition for those things not given to him, and find himself all alone in a different city, and lonely. We see him dream of the company of desirable women, and fancy himself meeting "some gorgeous maiden, rich, beautiful, socially elect, who was to solve all his troubles for him," but also become infatuated with a girl of humbler background and rather conventional views who will not let him have her favors outside of marriage, and find himself losing interest in her but not altogether able to escape the entanglement. We even see him depart one of the great cities of Missouri where it seems to him he can no longer stay for a journey by stages north and east toward New York, where a relative has made good and may be able to help him.

Thus was it all to go with Clyde Griffiths in his most famous tale--though besides the details of his life something else seemed very important, namely how much he wrote of his youthful desires and hopes, his frustrations and even his envies-- with great frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy. ("Other men had money; they need not thus go jerking about the world seeking a career . . . fret about the making of a bare living," he writes at one point, and that "[t]he ugly favoritism of life which piles comforts in the laps of some while snatching the smallest crumb of satisfaction from the lips of others" left him "in a black despair.") Indeed, he admits that when he finally got round to reading Balzac for himself that he could identify with a Eugene de Rastignac, think how very like himself a Lucien de Rubempre.

Such frankness and sympathy and lack of hypocrisy are even rarer now than then in a culture in which not only the apologists and admirers of injustice, misery, and brutality are more legion and intolerant than ever, never failing to accuse the have-nots of every moral failing of which they can think when they express the most mild discontent with their lot in a highly unequal order, but those who pretend to be progressive snarl accusations of "entitlement" and "privilege" at every utterance of frustration (the more in as their thoughts, like Dreiser's, are not always chaste in the ways demanded by what that great admirer of Dreiser, David Walsh, has called the "New Puritanism" of our day).

It seems to me that it was all connected. Having early on had his mind broadened by his experiences and what he was able to gain from the intellectual currents of his time Dreiser had something more, much more, than the conventionalities of his upbringing and his culture by which to make sense of the world around him and his life in it--allowing him to be frank and sympathetic and lacking in hypocrisy as he looked at the less pleasant aspects of his world and his life in it. And that, in turn, was what enabled him to make of the stuff of the world around him and his life in it the masterpieces that, in spite of the sneers of orthodoxy-propounding critics, endure as important works a century later, all as those who responded to his truths with moralizing have been deservedly forgotten--as, one may imagine, their heirs too will be another century from now on.