Dreiser, Balzac and the Businessman: A Note on Frank Cowperwood

In reading Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood novels, especially after having read his memoir A Book About Myself, I instantly found myself, in light of Dreiser's theme and avowed admiration for the great Honoré de Balzac, comparing and contrasting the two authors--not least in respect of their attitudes toward the kind of figure they so often wrote about, the businessman.

As it happens the contrasts are the more striking than any points of similarity in their writing here. After all, if Balzac treats the retired pasta-maker Jean-Joachim Goriot or the printer David Sechard or the iron-monger Claude-Joseph Pillerault with sympathy and respect, Balzac is not unjustly notorious for his disrespect for the bourgeois generally and the businessman particularly, as we see when he presents a mediocrity like César Birotteau, a self-indulgent old fool like Célestin Crevel, a miser like Félix Grandet--the flaws with which such figures were riddled the source of a good deal of the drama (and a good deal of the ample fun to be had amid it).

By contrast it is the opposite with Dreiser. If (like Balzac) Dreiser was sincerely and deeply critical of the social world he saw around him, in significant part because he was critical of the capitalist social system, his attitude toward those who rose high within that system was another matter. Dreiser was genuinely in awe of the successful businessman, an utter believer in the propaganda with which we were ceaselessly beaten over the head in his day, and with which we are ceaselessly beaten over the head now for their superiority to the rest of humanity--in acuity and practical vision, in energy and personal force, in charisma, before which others cannot but bow, with all this evident from the earliest beginnings of their lives, with childhood anecdotes to match. (Thus does Dreiser have the young Frank Cowperwood making sixty-two dollars, minus the bank's discount on the money he borrowed to make it happen, in his first business deal at the age of thirteen in an early chapter of The Financier.) Meanwhile, for all his business success Cowperwood as Dreiser presents him cannot be dismissed as "a mere money-grabber," the "brisk, dynamic, seemingly unromantic" figure "conceal[ing] . . . under [the] very forceful exterior . . . a deep underlying element of romance and fire," such that "in spite of his activity" he was "an introspective man, and art, drama and the pathos of broken ideals [were] not beyond him." Indeed, Frank possesses a philosophical bent that strengthens his mental grip on "how the world works" so helpful to him in his endeavors (a philosopher-businessman!), and the broader living of his life--while he displays not just a refined aesthetic sensibility but deep appreciation of beauty that his wealth permits him to indulge in the design of his homes and choice of the objets d'art with which he fills them, as the underlying romance and fire also manifest themselves in his effect on the ladies (of whom there are many in his life), the women responding not merely to his looks and his wealth and his "forceful exterior," but those same inner qualities as well.

In Dreiser's tale Cowperwood is the most formidable of such creatures, but all the same in his depiction of Cowperwood's allies and rivals Dreiser does make clear a respect for the class as a whole on that level--with this respect underlined by the disrespect that Dreiser displays for men of other types, not least the sort of man that Dreiser actually was, an artist, as we see in particular in The Titan. Cowperwood was not likely to encounter any such persons in the course of his business affairs--but more than once he did encounter them as rivals in his love affairs. Thus is the husband of one of his mistresses, the violinist Harold Sohlberg, a man who, suffering the artistic temperament ("'I am an arteest,' he was fond of saying" Dreiser actually writes) without being a great artist, "stormed, dreamed, wept" but was getting nowhere and never would, with the contrast between him and Cowperwood underlined when, as Cowperwood's enraged wife violently attacks his mistress and Harold's wife, the "innate coward" Harold freezes while Cowperwood, the "man of action" physically as in business, breaks down a door to stop her and save the woman's life. (After the episode, to hush things up, Frank pays Harold five thousand dollars a year to get out of town and never come back, something the man does in, again, innately cowardly fashion.)

A blatant and rather brutal caricature, Harold is not the only one, while the self-flagellation involved in Dreiser's presentation of such personages seems the more apparent in the case of a lover of another of Frank's mistresses, Forbes Gurney--and significantly so. Described as a "tall, melancholy youth" who is "touched by an atmosphere of wistfulness, or, let us say, life-hunger," who was "very poor" but "between a penchant for journalism, verse-writing, and some dramatic work, was somewhat undecided as to his future," presently "instalment collector for a furniture company," and "trying, in a mooning way, to identify himself with the Chicago newspaper world," he seems all too obviously the tall, life-hungry, poor, vaguely literary, instalment collecting, newspaper work-aspiring Dreiser describes to us in A Book About Myself (a portrait of this artist as a young man). When a suspicious Frank discovers Stephanie Platow with him and he confronts her with the evidence of her betrayal of him with Forbes right there in the room Frank and Stephanie have it out as if Forbes is nothing at all, as Stephanie thinks to herself that "the pale poet" had been "a mere breath of romance" next to the "grim, wonderful man" Frank was, and her loss of Frank all she can think of after he has stormed out. (Indeed, it could seem that Dreiser shows the artist less respect here than Cowperwood does, to go by Dreiser's remark that, as befit a truly appreciative art collector, "[o]f all individuals [Cowperwood] respected, indeed revered, the sincere artist," who "touched . . . with a vision," "set themselves to quiet tasks of beauty.")

The difference between Dreiser and Balzac is accentuated again when we look at how Balzac, for his part, treated the artist--by and large, much more admiring, to the point of the famously acid Balzac defending them against the tendency of so many to treat them with contempt. Thus do we see in The Two Brothers Joseph Rouget a painter of pictures, yes, but also a model of diligence and responsibility whose earnings from his very painting are what support his profoundly ungrateful brother and mother--whose mind is so narrow that only when she is at death's door is her priest and confessor able to make her realize what has been obvious to him as well as the reader this whole time, that she had never appreciated Joseph as she ought to have done. (Indeed, Joseph even proves to be superior in business acumen to those "practical" relatives who so look down on him at at least one point in the tale as the only one who recognizes the financial value of a cache of paintings they discover and determining upon selling them for the money they need.)

Still, if Dreiser's treatment of businessmen like Cowperwood, and Cowperwood in particular, can seem a testament to Dreiser's credulousness before the conventionalities prevailing in America (again, to a self-flagellating degree), Dreiser also broke with the American mythology of the businessman in a significant respect. This is the tendency to, whenever possible, present businessmen as saintly pillars of personal and commercial virtue who triumphed playing by the rules of a tough but fair game, and in doing so blessed society first with the direct results of their entrepreneurship--giving employment to the worker, goods to the consumer, taxes to the state--and then a second time as "philanthropists" who share some of what they have won for themselves, in every respect "pillars of the community." Indeed, in contrast with the presentation of the businessman as a benefactor to society epitomized by the inventor-entrepreneur who as the General Electric slogan had it "brings good things to life"--and one might add, in line with Cowperwood's survival-of-the-fittest view of the world and its sanction for his unapologetic selfishness ("'I satisfy myself' had ever been his motto")--Cowperwood is a plain old rent-seeking financier whose modus operandi is scheming to gain monopolistic control of some public utility (street-cars, gas, street-cars again) for what it will bring in to him personally and no other reason, and without hesitating at a resort to corrupt and criminal methods to do it. (Thus faced with someone charging a higher price than he wants to pay for a key piece of real estate he hopes to use as an entrance for a street-car tunnel Cowperwood arranges to have the building on that property torn down and the excavation of the tunnel begun on a Sunday because of the difficulties of getting an injunction to stop it, claim a judge had given permission in a now nonexistent document, and count on the cost and duration of the inevitable legal battle to let him in the end get away with his crime.) At the same time "philanthropy" is unlikely to be anything but when it comes from Mr. Cowperwood (pointedly undertaking his principal such act in The Titan for the sake of forwarding his business agenda.)

Indeed, it is in this side of the story--the understanding of "the game" as actually played--that one sees Dreiser's critical intelligence, Dreiser's social vision, at work, and rather powerfully at that. One may see a contradiction between his utter conventionality in his admiration for the successful businessman and his far more critical view of just what it is that businessmen do. Indeed, one may see this as the contradiction in his outlook and his work, torn as Dreiser was between an amoral and brutally Darwinistic view of his life and his rebellion against what such Darwinism was being used to justify in actual society that had the author who was to not very many years later pen the greatest literary denunciation of "the American Dream" grasping after the Dream all the same. It is a contradiction that, I suspect, runs through many, many more of us than we realize, let alone admit.