The Non-Conformist in the Conformist Crowd: Some Thoughts on Theodore Dreiser's Youth

As Theodore Dreiser's memoir A Book About Myself draws to its close Dreiser remarks "the professional optimists and yea-sayers, chorus-like in character" who were "constantly engaged in the pleasing task of emphasizing the possibilities of success, progress, strength . . . for all, in America and elsewhere," all while "humbly and sycophantically genuflecting before the strong, the lucky, the prosperous," and how he felt himself constantly oppressed by a sense of being surrounded by apparent believers in that propaganda in which he could not bring himself to believe. Instead of throwing himself into the "fierce contest" of success-striving with the cheer and gusto society demanded of its young men he saw it as a hateful thing and regarded his participation as an unfortunate necessity for which he had no enthusiasm, and fewer hopes, never feeling very good about his chances. Considering the difference he speculated that "certain fortunate circumstances attending their youth and upbringing" made for optimism about the contest and their likely outcome in it--many of them having had more privileged backgrounds than he ("at least a dozen" of his peers at the newspaper where he was working "swaggering about in the best of clothes, their manners those of a graduate of Yale or Harvard or Princeton," which made it the easier for "their minds [to be] stuffed with all the noble maxims of the uplifters"). If with less evident confidence, he wondered, too, if part of the difference lay not in a lack in himself but in a lack in those others, particularly a lack of insight into realities of the world of which he already knew something.

It seems to me that there is a great deal of truth in Dreiser's view--those who have been less privileged less likely than others to "succeed," and generally knowing it; while those who have been less sheltered from life's vicissitudes, and who are the more introspective and questioning of the world around them, are likely to have a harder time accommodating themselves to "the battle" by which the preachers of get-ahead conformism set such great store, the more in as they know the odds are terrible for anyone, and against them that much more. They may have a harder time accommodating themselves to it, too, because they have a clearer idea of what they really want out of life, as against what society tells them to want, and requires them to say to themselves and others they want (the more in as the fittingly named "Rat Race" is such a dehumanizing and ugly thing for all involved). Dreiser knew that he had none of the taste for the contest itself that so many hypocritically affect (again, to themselves as to others), and really desired only the rewards of really grand success in the contest, the attainment of which he knew were an extreme longshot for everyone, but especially someone like him without any head start in the race--position, status, wealth, security, ease.

For such persons that propaganda that, as Lawrence's Willie Struthers had it, endeavors to instill in every donkey the faith that he will be the one donkey in the five thousand to actually get the carrot with which they are all being made to pull capitalism's big cart, that, as Upton Sinclair had it, tells every one of the little fish they will be the one to grow into a pike, does not satisfy and fails to take--making the endurance of the contest that much less bearable. And as it happened, even if Dreiser tells us that as he thought these thoughts he was "not in the mood of one who runs away from a grueling contest," the reality was that he was not long for the newspaper game, his involvement with which terminated just a few pages later. Just as the book begins with the start of Dreiser's career as a journalist, it closes with the end of that career--but also the earliest beginning of that other career for which we really remember him, as a novelist who produced some of the greatest novels of American literary history, above all the justly celebrated An American Tragedy. It seems to me that Dreiser's self-knowledge here, which made his continuing in the path of a newspaperman so difficult, was an enormous asset there, without which he could never have given the world his masterpiece--all as his insights into his own condition seem to me all too relevant in a society where the chorus of the professional optimists and yea-sayers and sycophants of what society so euphemistically calls the "successful" dominate popular thinking as much as ever they did, the more in as, in this era, so many young people seem to be challenging that "conventional wisdom" in a way they have not done in a long time.