Book Review: The Titan, by Theodore Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser, after having begun the story of Frank Cowperwood in 1912's The Financier, continued it in 1914's The Titan--originally merely the second half of one long book, later split in two for publication. Unsurprisingly they are structured quite differently. The way The Financier is structured has the first third tracing Cowperwood's development from childhood to his position as a man of some wealth and power in post-Civil War Philadelphia in a process that simply has him rolling on from one win to another until, pursuing his grand ambition in the streetcar business, he encounters the crisis that brings him down. The minute detailing of that crisis, his failed legal defense and his incarceration accounting for almost all of the remaining two-thirds, with at the very end Cowperwood managing to rebuild his life--returning to business, getting a divorce from a wife with whom he can no longer be happy, marrying his mistress Aileen, and departing Philadelphia for a new life out west, the outlines of which Dreiser presents in the book's coda (presented as what the witches from Macbeth might have said to Frank about his destiny out there).

There are important parallels with all this in The Titan. Once again Frank Cowperwood makes his grand business goal pursuit of control of the streetcar system of a major American city. Once again Frank's marriage palls, he pursues other women, and his marriage never recovers. Once again Frank's business project ultimately fails--but at the tale's end he finds comfort in a new love, while a coda hints at the events to follow as, once more, in a new place, with a new woman, he pursues a new venture. However, the differences are hugely important. If Frank's upward path was almost frictionless in the first third of Financier, and the rest dealt with his response to calamity, The Titan, following Frank's foray into the gas business almost as soon as he arrives in Chicago, focuses on his long struggle to build his streetcar system and make it profitable (final failure coming only in the last pages of the book). In line with this Dreiser, in contrast with the journalistic hacks of our time who in their eagerness to glorify rather than to account for or explain treat the founding of businesses as a single-handed act of conjuring by magicians (just as they do the invention of technologies), takes a deep interest in how such things are actually made to happen. The development of social contacts and sniffing out of opportunity that others may equally well see but lack the means to seize, the searching after know-how and capital, the management of relations with backers and partners and creditors and the press and government amid the inevitable emergence of such rivals as there must always be when big money is at stake (often, through methods more mobster-like than those who make a culture hero of the businessman care to have associated with the Frank Cowperwoods of the world)--if Cowperwood as a character often seems a wish-fulfilling fantasy for Dreiser, Dreiser works out the mechanics of all this very meticulously and credibly, while finding color and drama in it as few others have ever done. (Even such a critic of Dreiser's as Upton Sinclair in Money Writes! paid tribute to Dreiser's long observation of "'the local street scenes, institutions, characters, functions' of America," and weaving together his patterns from what seem to him "millions" of their details--words which mean all the more coming from the writer of The Jungle.)

In the process Dreiser also gives us a rather wider and fuller view of the life of Chicago than The Financier afforded of the life of Philadelphia (where in the prior book machine politics loomed importantly in the background, here we see the "machines" with which his and his enemies' endeavors are bound up at work in a crucial election, down into the saloons and slums), combined with a longer time span. Where the bulk of that first book treated the events of a mere two years (the period between the Great Chicago Fire of October 1871 and the Panic of 1873 that provides Frank with his opportunity to make his comeback), The Titan spans almost the whole the rest of the century (down to 1897), and progresses over that span in relatively steady, even, fashion, reinforced by the way Frank's first dealings make him enemies who will carry on their fight against him down to the end.

Adding to the sense of scope, variety, depth of the drama is the parallel development of Frank's personal life, taking in the heights of social snobbery, those paths of Bohemia to be found along the shores of Lake Michigan, and even something of the wider world as he ventured further from home looking not only for backing for his project but traveling for pleasure with Aileen, collecting art--and of course, his extramarital affairs. The more in as Dreiser displays what C. Wright Mills called "the sociological imagination"--tying Cowperwood's "biography" to the history of his era, with this specifically including the birth of the modern, electrified city, the ascent of the Social Question as seen by this businessman in the very city where the Haymarket riot happened, the consolidation of the "trusts" that saw a handful of oligarchs openly control the American economy, the Populist revolt that so panicked the business elite of the country during the election of 1896, with all this not just part of the background but figuring importantly in Frank's own story--the result is an epic of business in the Gilded Age.

One can also credit The Titan with being an epic of life as Dreiser understood it more broadly, dominated by natural and social forces that make a mockery out of what the "professional moralist" ("at best but a manufacturer of shoddy wares" Dreiser remarks) says about standards of personal behavior and "free will." This is certainly in the titular "the titan" ultimately being overwhelmed by hostile forces in business, but arguably more sharply in Frank's successive affairs--where Frank's continuation in dalliances that cost him dearly powerfully dramatizes not merely Dreiser's moral views, but his conception of the biochemical springs of human behavior, all as they also force Frank to reckon with the reality of his aging (the more in as the gap in years between himself and the women he chases, and the men rivaling him for those women's affections, keeps growing).

In giving us that epic, as one might guess from the sweep of the narrative and its density with interconnected conflict and incident, The Titan benefits from a briskness of pace, from Dreiser's display of a lot more humor than he is ever given credit for (at times evident in rather broad caricature, at times rather subtle, and consistently a world apart from the dryness that so often afflicted The Financier). Indeed, where reading The Financier it was all too easy to put the book down and forget it, The Titan flows smoothly and easily, and much, much more entertainingly, such that the harder thing was actually pausing in my reading--and not just as Literature with Something to Say of the world but a plain and simple read The Titan made my getting through the slog The Financier so often was seem to have been well worth the while.