Book Review: The Financier by Theodore Dreiser

I first picked up Theodore Dreiser's The Financier just after finishing his most celebrated work, An American Tragedy, precisely because that book had been so affecting.

Alas, I was less impressed with The Financier.

I remember that reading An American Tragedy I put the book down because of my experience of what David Walsh called its "frightening power."

By contrast I put down The Financier because it seemed to have no power at all--at least, not the power to hold a reader's interest, the proceedings in it seeming comparatively flat and lifeless.

Still, after reading Dreiser's memoir A Book About Myself and finding much to admire in it I decided to give The Financier a second chance. Alas, my initial impressions on my second attempt were not too different from those I had in my first--but thinking about the source of them had its own interest, not least the profound difference in the making of the protagonists of the two book. In creating both American Tragedy protagonist Clyde Griffiths and The Financier's Frank Cowperwood Dreiser did draw on real-life cases (Chester Gillette in the former case, Charles Yerkes in the latter), with his painstaking research entirely evident (even more so in The Financier than in An American Tragedy), but the stuff of Dreiser's own life mattered greatly in what he did with that material. As the striking parallels I saw again and again with the trajectory of Griffiths in Dreiser's memoir made clear, he had lived Griffiths' life to a great degree, and it has since seemed to me that this was why he was able to imagine the character so fully and richly. By contrast it is the opposite with Frank Cowperwood, considering whose life I see only contrasts with Dreiser.

Like Griffiths Dreiser was a Midwesterner, raised in a far from affluent urban household he was to recall as a scene of oppression and hardship under an ineffectual, religious father that he (like other siblings of his) less left than escaped as a young man. By contrast Cowperwood was born in Philadelphia the son of a prosperous and well-respected banker in a very comfortable home where he was used to getting his own way, with all that meant for his prospects. Where Dreiser was sensitive and romantic in his attitude toward life, lamenting that the circumstances of his life compelled him to participate in the "rat race" in spite of his having neither the taste for it, nor expectations of success, and in every fiber of his being feeling himself at odds with the social world in which he was forced to contend, Cowperwood never felt himself anything but perfectly adapted to the business world, and indeed reveled in participating in its struggles. Where Dreiser worried that he was unattractive to women physically and in other ways, Cowperwood had no problems there--in the world of women as in the world of business utterly self-confident, the more in as others all seemed to share his high opinion of himself.

Reading the book, in fact, I quickly got an impression of Cowperwood as, in contrast with the Griffiths he created on the basis of knowledge of himself, a fantasy of the man he would have liked to be--alas, a rather less substantial basis for a work of art such as this one. Moreover, where Clyde's story is a train of false hopes and rebuffs and disappointments and catastrophes which thwart and claustrophobically trap and ultimately destroy him, Frank scarcely seems to experience anything as an obstacle, the way forward always easy and smooth and obvious as he proceeds from victory to victory as he enjoys the admiration of everyone--the whole first third of The Financier a succession of such flattering triumphs for the protagonist. Of course, well before that point there is a hint of trouble ahead, but only a very small one, as it takes an extraordinary constellation of disasters to slow Cowperwood down in his progress--literally, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and the national panic it caused, combined with the precise timing of the revelation of an affair he is having with the daughter of a major power player in the city to whom he owed much by a jealous former schoolmate of that power player's daughter, and grubby municipal electoral politics involving corruption scandals and public opinion and an upcoming election, and even then it is a narrow thing. Of course, in its wake Cowperwood does fall very low--losing his fortune, suffering the final wreck of his marriage, getting locked up--but in two years he is free again, and rebuilds his fortune, and out of his former unsatisfactory marriage and wed to the mistress who, having stuck faithfully by Frank during his prison term, proceeds to still bigger things out west.

The result is that even though the story does eventually move past its sluggish start it never generates anywhere near the tension with which An American Tragedy crackled from the beginning to the end of its near thousand page length--and indeed proves rather dry stuff for long stretches (well past the point at which I put the book down the first time). Even so, the book did eventually acquire a measure of dramatic interest as Cowperwood actually found himself with a fight on his hands, in some of the characterizations (Edward Malia Butler, who plays so important a part in the narrative, was perhaps the liveliest creation Dreiser had to offer here), in its often Balzacian portrayal of the place and time and the "machinery of civilization" in it, and as the necessary first half of the story that Dreiser continued in what I found to be the much more engaging and rather richer second half of Cowperwood's story, The Titan.