The serious modern reader does not have much use for Dreiser. Even people who waste hours every day on social media and other internet writing of dubious quality find his famously plodding style to be beyond endurance. In addition, these say, his books are far longer than they need to be, his characters are unsympathetic and frankly stupid, and he is not subtle enough for refined contemporary sensibilities. That anyone nowadays even bothers to read An American Tragedy, a book whose story, at least, held a fascination for some part of the American artistic and literary imagination for a half-century after its publication, seems to be mainly due to its being ranked #16 on the Modern Library top 100 of the 20th century list, which a fair number of people on the internet are making a project of reading through. A majority of these readers seem to detest the book with exceeding relish, and consider its ranking on this particular list a travesty (though there was one guy who did like Dreiser and reserved his vitriol for Anthony Powell, whose book came in at #43). Personally, I thought An American Tragedy was very, very good, for numerous reasons, some of which hopefully will become apparent as this posting works itself out.
To begin with the obvious, this is yet another great American book from the 1920s, which I am pretty sure is my favorite decade ever for American literature, and one that ranks at or near the top in most of the other areas I care about as well. Many commentators note that it came out the same year as The Great Gatsby, a factoid that I find interesting and mildly exciting but not significant in terms of connection, though I suppose both take a great interest in the privileges of the overclass, Dreiser more from the viewpoint of how cruel and unjust it all is, Fitzgerald from that of how to make oneself such a person (in case you were wondering who won the Pulitzer Prize that year, it was Edna Ferber for So Big. There is actually an Edna Ferber book on my list, but not that one). Dreiser was part of the older generation by 1925, his other book that has remained famous down to our day, Sister Carrie, having been published in 1900, and having spent close to a decade working on Tragedy, in terms of style and literary sensibility, it is decidedly a throwback to the pre-World War I era, and my sense in reading the book and trying to place it in time was that it felt more like the world of 1915 than the world of the 1920s as evoked by Fitzgerald and other of the younger writers and popular media of the time. On the other hand, I was impressed by how evolved and similar to our own police procedures and the practices and organization of the legal system seemed to be even by that early date. Or perhaps it is simply that earlier authors did not bother to depict these systems in such extensive and matter of fact detail, so that their literary incarnations did not give a wholly accurate picture of how they really operated. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I do not usually find much interest in movies and books about lawyers and court cases but, as with much of this book, I found the long section dedicated to the trial and the myriad lawyers and district attorneys and judges to be extremely vivid and absorbing. I also realize that I do not have a great sense of exactly when things like cars and the road system, the tourism industry, telephones, all of which play large roles in this book, for the better off people anyway--the identifiably poor, still the overwhelming majority of the population at this time, do not as yet have these things--developed to the point that they are used and experienced in something very like their contemporary forms, which they are in this book. Indeed, a good deal of the interest in the story is that while it very much belongs to an older America, it is an America whose institutions and habits are already in many respects surprisingly recognizable.
The badness of Dreiser's style has been remarked upon so often by literary people and teachers that it has the effect at this point almost of a disclaimer, that the critic or speaker bringing up the subject of this author feels compelled to assure his audience he is only too well aware of. Perhaps in my old age I am losing my ability to be discriminating in these matters, but I found this wretchedness of the prose to be overstated. Yes, once in a while I would run into an awkward mess of a sentence, and think, yes, this is the sort of thing everybody must be referring to, but this did not happen very often, and on a page by page basis I hardly found the style to be a hindrance, and indeed, as mentioned earlier, it has actually been a long time since I found myself so absorbed in a book of this length and type, which could hardly have been the case if the writing were as unskillful as everyone seems to think it is.
One oddity about this book that I do not recall ever happening with me before was that, especially at the beginning, I had a hard time getting used to the weirdness of the names that most of the characters had. The weirdness did not consist in their being absurd as in Dickens or Thomas Pynchon books, but in there being so many names that were fairly normal for young and active people at the time but that no one currently alive seems to have, like Clyde, Hortense, Titus, Orville, and the like. It was strange for a while, and then this wore off.
The extensive description of how Clyde and Roberta, neither of whom was in the broad sense wildly successful socially, came to be drawn to one another, their particular loneliness, the inevitability of nature taking its course in this particular instance at least, was one of the best parts of the book, very convincing and real, much more so than the interest that Sondra Finchley supposedly develops for Clyde later on in the story, as well as his general acceptance by the smart society in which she moves, in neither of which instances there being any evidence of his having done or uttered anything that would have earned him that esteem.
The character of Gilbert Griffiths should have appeared more often in the story. I winced and shriveled in terror myself every time he came on the scene, even though he was a fictional character in a story set a hundred years ago. This probably indicates that he was a well-drawn character in the sense of hitting a nerve, however, and it would have done me good to have had to endure more of him. He is obviously representative of a type of person with whom I have never learned how to cope, the completely vicious and disdainful rich guy who is visibly disgusted at the sight of you and pissed off that you presume the right to occupy the same physical space with him unless employed in a servile position.
It is always my aim to go as light as possible on quotations/excerpts, but there were a few that hit so close to home for me that I had to include them.
The second chapter of the whole book, an introduction to Clyde, the famously weak, foolish, pleasure-loving and easily overwhelmed main character, is basically a description of me even now, and certainly as a youth:
"For Clyde was as vain as he was poor. He was one of those interesting individuals who looked upon himself as a thing apart--never quite wholly and indissolubly merged with the family of which he was a member...he was never quite able...to formulate any policy in regard to himself, and then only in a rather fumbling and tentative way...What a wretched thing it was to be born poor and not to have any one to do anything for you and not to be able to do so very much for yourself!"
Moving on to Book Two, and Clyde's momentary insight while working as a bellboy at the Union League Club in Chicago--a haunt of the 'mentally and socially worldly elect'--that control over one's sensualism was the key to rising in the world:
"Here also, a fact which impressed and even startled his sense of curiosity and awe, even--there was no faintest trace of that sex element which had characterized most of the phases of life...he had thus far contacted...Probably one could not attain to or retain one's place in so remarkable a world as this unless one were indifferent to sex, a disgraceful passion, of course...to say the truth, Clyde had a soul that was not destined to grow up. He lacked decidedly that mental clarity and inner directing application that in so many permits them to sort out from the facts and avenues of life the particular thing or things that make for their direct advancement."
Maybe my favorite paragraph in the entire book, a summation of the successful Griffithses' social theories, though I probably find the overly explicit contempt and hauteur towards the lower rungs of society that are expressed in them too comforting for them to be an accurate picture. There must necessarily be a sharper sting to be that:
"As both saw it, there had to be higher and higher social orders to which the lower social classes could aspire. One had to have castes. One was foolishly interfering with and disrupting necessary and unavoidable social standards when one tried to unduly favor any one...It was necessary when dealing with the classes and intelligences below one, commercially or financially, to handle them according to the standards to which they were accustomed. And the best of these standards were those which held these lower individuals to a clear realization of how difficult it was to come by money..."
More descriptions of me, now in the person of the doomed Roberta's hapless father:
"...they were excellent examples of that native type of Americanism which resists facts and reveres illusion. Titus Alden was one of that vast company of individuals who are born, pass through and die out of the world without ever quite getting any one thing straight. They appear, blunder, and end in a fog."
The psychological impact on Clyde of finally getting some sexual release is nothing we haven't read or seen a thousand times, but Dreiser's description of it came off to me at least as humorous, which is a rare effect in him:
"'Behold, I am no longer the inexperienced, neglected simpleton of but a few weeks ago, but an individual of import now--someone who knows something about life.'"
"This college chatter relating to Cornell and shared by Harriet, Cranston and others, Clyde could not understand. He had scarcely heard of the various colleges with which this group was all too familiar." I thought this almost total ignorance of colleges--later on in this section he recalls having vaguely heard of three during his youth in the midwest, the state universities of Kansas and Missouri, and the University of Chicago, and wonders whether he should claim to have attended one of these if anyone asks him about it--was kind of fascinating, since the psychological idea of College, especially if one is of a sensitive disposition with the kinds of social longings that usually accompanies that state, has so thoroughly penetrated the common experience of anyone who consumes even the middling-intelligent mass media. College-themed movies, for example, have been quite popular going all the way back to the silent era, when less than 5% of the U.S. population would ever have been enrolled on any college campus.
The thoughts of Clyde's uncle upon receiving the news of his arrest:
"The wretchedness of such a mind as that--the ungoverned and carnal desires."
The only reason my teachers (and I always say my teachers because they are the socially highest people who had to bother to evaluate me in any kind of depth) never said this about me was that by our era mental deficiency of this sort had come to be regarded more as a consequence of a lack of innate general intelligence than a lack of proper moral and behavioral upbringing.
One of the most devastating passages of the book, noted by several other commentators on the internet, is the one in which Clyde's lawyer is introduced (that in itself was also good by the way: "For Belknap was inclined to carry himself with an air which all were inclined to respect. He was a college graduate, and in his youth because of his looks, his means, and his local social position...he had seen so much of what might be called near-city life that all those gaucheries as well as sex-inhibitions and sex-longings which still so greatly troubled and motivated and even marked a man like Mason [ed--the district attorney and prosecutor in the case] had long since been covered with an easy manner and social understanding..." etc) and it is revealed that in his youth he had once played with a girl for a time whom he had no intention of doing the right thing by, and had found himself in a situation similar to that Clyde had been in. However, in his case, "...laying the matter before his father, by whom he was advised to take a vacation, during which time the services of the family doctor were engaged with the result that for a thousand dollars and expenses necessary to house the pregnant girl in Utica, the father had finally extricated his son..." Clyde had most pointedly not been able, due to his lack both of savvy & funds, to find any doctor willing to "help" him in his distress.
I have some troubling gauging exactly how much sympathy Dreiser expects his ideal reader to feel for Clyde. At times I think probably more than most contemporary readers, trained in the mores of our time, will be capable of giving him--he is even kind of a hard sell for me, and I am temperamentally and intellectually practically his twin. But the ludicrously blatant injustice and hypocrisy that is seemingly endemic to American society, and that of at least all Western countries for that matter, is still effectively impressed upon the reader in spite of the questionable appeal of his main character.
"Mental and moral cowardice...had affected his 'perhaps too pliable and sensual and impractical and dreamy mind'". This is from Clyde's lawyer during the closing statements. Now just me, but probably a sizable mass of the modern male population could be described in such terms if anyone cared enough to bother calling them out.
Last excerpt, from the prison, the point of view of the priest who attends to Clyde. This pretty much sums up my mental and moral state when I was in college, and should have been devoting care to learning and study:
"In those dark days...he was little more than a compound of selfishness and unhallowed desire and fornication against the evil of which Paul had thundered."
I got to read much of this on my porch, which, being old-fashioned and evocative of the period from roughly 1895-1945, is a great place to get into the spirit of books from the America of that time, as I also found last summer with Ah Wilderness!. Due to the climate, the porch is however only really usable from May to around October 20. Most years I put the sweaters on and try to tough it out until Halloween, but by the last week of October it is inevitably quite chilly and the leaves are long gone, and once it rains and puts a three day cold wet on everything, I have to put my chairs away and pack it in for the winter. But it was 93 degrees today and that sad moment is still a couple of months off. There won't be any more old American books coming up before that happens though.
I took this to the beach as well, though I can never get much reading done on the beach in my current situation. My wife thought it looked pretentious but this is actually quite wrong if you know the book, it is an excellent book for the beach, the length and pace of the episodes, combined with the relative ease of following the language and story make it rather ideal almost.
There have been at least two major film versions of the book, the most famous being the 1951 classic A Place in the Sun starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, in which the basic story was updated to the then present time and the names of the characters changed. I saw this a few years ago and wrote about it on the parent blog. It is a very well-done movie and over the years since seeing it images and other things about it often come back to me, much more so than with other movies, which doubtless says something about what a powerful impression the story makes on certain people, though as an adaptation of the book the casting is not great. Elizabeth Taylor I guess is the least problematic of the three main characters, because Sondra in the book is kind of a cipher for Clyde to project his desires onto, and Elizabeth Taylor at this point in her career did not emote or give off very much personality on screen, which I suppose gave her an elusive quality. Montgomery Clift was not very good in this role--I would have said until recently that he was never very good in any role, but I liked him in The Search--as Clyde, who as a character strikes me as about as little amenable to a 50s Method interpretation as can be imagined. He is a passive guy who is overwhelmed by what is presented in the book as an infantile, embarrassing, and even unmanly romantic interest in girls and wealth and leisure that he has done nothing to merit. That said, his full energies are misdirected with a kind of intensity on these subjects of his interest, which Clift--who was also of course famously gay--does not succeed in conveying. Shelley Winters as the Roberta character was even worse. Roberta as depicted in the book was rather sweet, but with a straightforward intelligence and moral depth that I recognize in some of the real dyed-in-the-wool Yankee girls and women I know even today. Partly no doubt her character was written that way for the movie, but Shelley Winters played her as a bitter harpy more interested in ruining Clyde's life out of spite and dragging him down into a life of domestic hell than trying to make him happy, which was not what the Roberta in the book was like at all (though that may have been the 1950s interpretation of what she was like). There was also a 1931 adaptation directed by Josef Von Sternberg, who is a well-regarded director of the silent and early sound era, which I had never heard of, though I notice the entire movie has been put up on Youtube. I haven't had time to watch yet, though it looks like the kind of thing that I will like.
Scene from the 1931 movie. The episode where the identical boat from the murder scene was brought into the courtroom and Clyde was made to get into it must have captured the imagination of the visual artists of the time. It is depicted in one of the illustrations in the edition I saw referenced below.
I got an old Modern Library edition of the book, since I like to collect those anyway (it was one of the 'giants'). It came with a simple but elegant dust jacket, black with the title in bright red capital letters. I was in used book store a couple of weeks ago when I was in Maine and there was essentially an identical, though non-Modern Library edition from the 40s or early 50s there, the same number of pages and all, but with illustrations, which I kind of wish I had bought now, because I liked the illustrations, which were pen and ink drawings, straightforward depictions of the episodes in the book, but they had some whimsy about them and evoked the period. And the drawings of Clyde in his prison cell and garb and with his head shaved at the end I actually found quite startling and powerful, because that was the one part of the book I had pictured in my mind entirely differently from what the illustrations were. I cannot find any examples of these illustrations online, or I would put one up.
To go back to the Modern Library top 100 list that I referred to earlier, I do not attach a lot of importance to the particular order or even the particular books that happened to make the list, but I think it is interesting that they put it out, especially in light of American Tragedy's being #16 on it. The committee that made the list has been endlessly called out for being too old, too male, and too white, but looking at the composition of the list the 'old' is what really stands out--the books chosen are heavily skewed towards the types of things that would have been considered good literature by a generally well-educated person in 1950. The post-modern geniuses, who are the whitest and malest writers of them all--Pynchon, Gass/Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, et al, didn't even make the list. All that said, and for all my enjoyment of the book, I am not sure I believe American Tragedy was the 16th best English language novel of the 20th century. Top 100 I would not consider controversial, and I am even comfortable with the idea of its being top 50, on my personal list maybe even top 30, at least that I have read. One thing I think worth noting is that Invisible Man (Ellison's, not H. G. Wells's) was #19 on the list, yet if you tried to go into any kind of self-consciously literary crowd today that I am aware of and argue that Dreiser's was the better book, your intellect and literary acumen, and probably your character would be shredded into morsels and you be would contemptuously and unceremoniously dismissed from that particularly company henceforward. Even the old white guys on the committee would probably explain away Dreiser's higher ranking by claiming they had inexplicably forgotten about Ellison. While I experienced American Tragedy as a more successfully and thoroughly accomplished and complete work than I did Invisible Man, I do believe this must be due to some flaw in me, that I really am missing the vital thing in Invisible Man that elevates it to that rank occupied by only the very highest books. Other people, vital, mentally potent people have felt, have sensed it, so I don't believe my impression can be the correct one. In fact I know it cannot be.
This is not only the last of the series of books with "American" in the title, but it is the last literary work featured in the supplement of Volume 1 of the encyclopedia. As I began doing this list in September 2013 we see it has taken slightly less than two years to read through the books (and plays, etc--20 in all, I think) featured in the first volume. Given that there are twenty volumes altogether, I am looking at needing 38 or 39 years to get through this entire project, which will take me to when I am 81 or 82 years old. That will be pushing it, to say the least. I assume that once my children get somewhat older I will be able to pick up the pace a little, but at the same time it is my impression that Volume 1 had an above average number of very short books to get through, and a below average number of long books, American Tragedy being about the only one approaching monster status. But as we proceed to the later volumes, there starts to be massive book after massive book after massive book, and most of them long forgotten too. It is not that I won't enjoy reading them, I am just worried that I am going to die before I can finish the list.
The Challenge
This one was heavily taken over by movies. However, as only eleven reviews were required to qualify for the tournament any of the books edged out would have been pretty obscure and difficult to find anyway.
1. Side Effects (movie).........................................................................746
2. The Butterfly Effect (movie).............................................................614
3. The Lazarus Effect (movie)..............................................................490
4. Miss Congeniality 2 (movie)............................................................207
5. Year One (movie).............................................................................197
6. The Athena Effect--Derrolyn Anderson............................................120
7. Showboat (movie--1936)..................................................................113
8. Brandon Flowers--The Desired Effect (record)................................105
9. The Impatient Lord--Michelle M. Pillow...........................................92
10. I Think I am in Friend Love With You--Yumi Sakugawa.................45
11. Lost Ancient Technology of Peru & Bolivia--Brien Foerster...........38
12. Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves--P. G. Wodehouse.......................................32
13. Exit Speed (movie)............................................................................22
14. The Right Side of Wrong--Reavis C.Wortham..................................19
15. The Shiva Syndrome--Alan Joshua...................................................19
16. Employees' Entrance (movie)...........................................................11
17. Up Ghost River--Metatawabin & Shimo..........................................11
Play-in round
#17 Metatawabin over #16 Employees' Entrance
Sweet 16
#17 Metatawabin over #1 Side Effects
#15 Joshua over #2 Butterfly Effect
#14 Wortham over #3 Lazarus Effect
#4 Miss Congeniality 2 over #13 Exit Speed
I have less interest in generic guns and explosions movies than I do in generic/bad romantic comedy sequels.
#12 Wodehouse over #5 Year One
#11 Foerster over #6 Anderson
The Anderson books appears to belong to a genre aimed at the lower end of the reading public
#10 Sakugawa over #7 Showboat
#9 Pillow over #8 Flowers
Given that so few records qualify for the tournaments (hardly anyone reviews even well-known records anymore), I feel like I should play a sample from it.
Elite 8
#17 Metatawabin over #4 Miss Congeniality 2
#15 Joshua over #9 Pillow
Pulp take on eastern religion gets the edge over another book about lords having their way with girls who only thought they were boring and nice when they were stuck surrounded by boring and nice men.
#10 Sakugawa over #14 Wortham
The Sakugawa book is of the moment I guess, foreign, not about white people, and part of a trend considered important enough to translate and intrude upon a publishing world that is famously not any of those things.
#12 Wodehouse over #11 Foerster
It seems like Wodehouse kind of has to win here, though I feel shaky about him. He is a celebrated name, though right in the vein of what I read too much of already. The Foerster book did not really excite me too much, however, and it was not available in any libraries anyway, making the point moot.
Final Four
#17 Metatawabin over #10 Sakuwaga
Metatawabin has coasted into the Final Four by beating up on movies. He is a Native American, or First Nations person as the expression is in Canada, and his book is a memoir of the terrible and presumably deliberate and racially motivated abuses that were inflicted on him as a boy in the 1960s in what I presume to be a school administered by the Canadian government. The book has not received much attention in the United States, but the (white) Canadian intelligentsia has lapped it right up, and it was a finalist for "The Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction", though how big of a deal that is I don't know. In any case it sounds like exactly the kind of book that half of the serious people would agree I definitely need to read more of (the other half would argue that I need to read more in the direction of economics, serious history and political theory, and any reasonable science as I might be capable of following). So it gets the slight nod over the intriguingly equally non-white and foreign (not to mention less grim-sounding) but ultimately too juvenile Sakugawa.
#12 Wodehouse over #15 Joshua
This was a more comfortable win for Wodehouse. I am distrustful of books about eastern philosophy marketed in a genre format.
Championship
This was by far the most controversial and ultimately unsatisfying championship match the Challenge has yet produced. I determined, based on literary reputation, availability, length, age, and a few other factors, that Wodehouse was the nominal winner. However, as Metawatabin's book had turned up twice during the qualifying process he was entitled to one upset during the tournament, and as he had not had that upset yet, it was tentatively awarded to him in this final round. However, his book had not made it into any of the libraries in my network, and as it is a relatively new book there were no very cheap used copies to be found and I did not feel like spending $15 or so to read it I fudged my rules and ended up reading the Wodehouse instead. Mass outrage ensued (in my imagination). Even I know that I need to read more books about non-European people's sufferings under direct white domination, and less outdated piffle about a fantasy English ruling class whose way of life is deader than my palate when presented with a morsel of food containing actual flavor. But I needed to read some book to satisfy the demands of my system and the Wodehouse happened to be the most convenient to hand. But I read it with a heavy, guilty heart and in a most languid fashion.
Metatawatabin is not amused by my excuses, though he expected little better from me.
Wodehouse got the last laugh, as was usually the case with him.
Stiff Upper Lip is the second Jeeves book I have read, and while occasionally amusing and comfortable (but isn't too much comfort in one's reading the greatest of literary evils?), I have yet to grasp what is the cause of the almost insane devotion these books have among their generally very highly sophisticated and well-read legions of fans. This particular one was rather late in the series, being published in 1963 when the author was 82 years old, and the formula feels a little canned and stale to me. Certainly there was nothing in it that would cause me to think I had stumbled upon a high point of 20th century English literature.
This qualifies as cheesecake for me--I can easily block out the children.
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