Second Mencken Chrestomathy (50 page)

I
F YOU MISS
reading “Jennie Gerhardt,” by Theodore Dreiser, you will miss the best American novel, all things considered, that has reached the book counters in a dozen years. On second thought, change “a dozen” into “twenty-five.” On third thought, strike out everything after “counters.” On fourth thought, strike out everything after “novel.” Why back and fill? Why evade and qualify? Hot from it, I am firmly convinced that “Jennie Gerhardt” is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of “Huckleberry Finn,” and so I may as well say it aloud and at once and have done with it. Am I forgetting “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Rise of Silas Lapham” and (to drag an exile
unwillingly home) “What Maisie Knew”? I am not. Am I forgetting “McTeague” and “The Pit”? I am not. Am I forgetting the stupendous masterpieces of James Fenimore Cooper, beloved of the pedagogues, or those of James Lane Allen, Mrs. Wharton and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, beloved of the women’s clubs and literary monthlies? No. Or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” or “Rob o’ the Bowl” or “Gates Ajar” or “Ben Hur” or “David Harum” or “Lewis Rand” or “Richard Carvel”? No. Or “The Hungry Heart” or Mr. Dreiser’s own “Sister Carrie”? No. I have all these good and bad books in mind. I have read them and survived them and in many cases enjoyed them. And yet in the face of them, and in the face of all the high authority, constituted and self-constituted, behind them, it seems to me at this moment that “Jennie Gerhardt” stands apart from all of them, and a bit above them. It lacks the grace of this one, the humor of that one, the perfect form of some other one; but taking it as it stands, grim, gaunt, mirthless, shapeless, it remains, and by long odds, the most impressive work of art that we have yet to show in prose-fiction—a tale not unrelated, in its stark simplicity, its profound sincerity, to “Germinal” and “Anna Karenina” and “Lord Jim”—a tale assertively American in its scene and its human material, and yet so European in its method, its point of view, its almost reverential seriousness, that one can scarcely imagine an American writing it. Its personages are few in number, and their progress is along a path that seldom widens, but the effect of that progress is ever one of large movements and large masses. One senses constantly the group behind the individual, the natural law behind the human act. The result is an indefinable impression of bigness, of epic dignity. The thing is not a mere story, not a novel in the ordinary American meaning of the word, but a criticism of and interpretation of life—and that interpretation loses nothing in validity by the fact that its burden is that doctrine that life is meaningless, a tragedy without a moral, a joke without a point. What else have Moore and Conrad and Hardy been telling us these many years? What else does all the new knowledge of a century teach us? One by one the old, ready answers have been disposed of. Today the one intelligible answer to the riddle of aspiration and sacrifice is that there is no answer at all.

“The power to tell the same story in two forms,” said George Moore not long ago, “is the sign of the true artist.” You will think of this when you read “Jennie Gerhardt,” for in its objective plan, and even in its scheme of subjective unfolding, it suggests “Sister Carrie” at every turn. Reduce it to a hundred words, and those same words would also describe that earlier study of a woman’s soul, with scarcely the change of a syllable. Jennie Gerhardt, like Carrie Meeber, is a rose grown from turnip seed. Over each, at the start, hangs poverty, ignorance, the dumb helplessness of the Shudra—and yet in each there is that indescribable something, that element of essential gentleness, that innate, inward beauty which levels all caste barriers and makes Esther a fit queen for Ahasuerus. And the history of each, reduced to its elements, is the history of the other. Jennie, like Carrie, escapes from the physical miseries of the struggle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of the struggle for happiness. Not, of course, that we have in either case a moral, maudlin fable of virtue’s fall; Mr. Dreiser, I need scarcely assure you, is too dignified an artist, too sane a man, for any such banality. Seduction, in point of fact, is not all tragedy for either Jennie or Carrie. The gain of each, until the actual event has been left behind and obliterated by experiences more salient and poignant, is rather greater than her loss, and that gain is to the soul as well as to the creature. With the rise from want to security, from fear to ease, comes an awakening of the finer perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a gradual unfolding of the delicate flower called personality, an increased capacity for loving and living. But with all this, and as a part of it, there comes, too, an increased capacity for suffering—and so in the end, when love slips away and the empty years stretch before, it is the awakened and supersentient woman that pays for the folly of the groping, bewildered girl. The tragedy of Carrie and Jennie, in brief, is not that they are degraded but that they are lifted up, not that they go to the gutter but that they escape the gutter.

But if the two stories are thus variations upon the same sombre theme, if each starts from the same place and arrives at the same dark goal, if each shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and tortured by the same agonies, there is still a vast difference between them, and that difference is the measure of the author’s
progress in his art. “Sister Carrie” was a first sketch, a rough piling-up of observations and impressions, disordered and often incoherent. In the midst of the story of Carrie, Mr. Dreiser paused to tell the story of Hurstwood—an astonishingly vivid and tragic story, true enough, but still one that broke the back of the other. In “Jennie Gerhardt” he falls into no such overelaboration of episode. His narrative goes forward steadily from beginning to end. Episodes there are, of course, but they keep their proper place, their proper bulk. It is always Jennie that holds the attention; it is in Jennie’s soul that every scene is ultimately played out. Her father and mother, Senator Brander the god of her first worship, her daughter Vesta and Lester Kane, the man who makes and mars her—all these are drawn with infinite painstaking, and in every one of them there is the blood of life. But it is Jennie that dominates the drama from curtain to curtain. Not an event is unrelated to her; not a climax fails to make clearer the struggles going on in her mind and heart.

I have spoken of reducing “Jennie Gerhardt” to 100 words. The thing, I fancy, might be actually done. The machinery of the tale is not complex; it has no plot, as plots are understood in these days of “mystery” stories; no puzzles madden the reader. It is dull, unromantic poverty that sends Jennie into the world. Brander finds her there, lightly seduces her, and then discovers that, for some strange gentleness within her, he loves her. Lunacy—but he is willing to face it out. Death, however, steps in; Brander, stricken down without warning, leaves Jennie homeless and a mother. Now enters Lester Kane—not the villain of the book, but a normal, decent, cleanly American of the better class, well-to-do, level-headed, not too introspective, eager for the sweets of life. He and Jennie are drawn together; if love is not all of the spirit, then it is love that binds them. For half a dozen years the world lets them alone. A certain grave respectability settles over their relation; if they are not actually married, then it is only because marriage is a mere formality, to be put off until tomorrow. But bit by bit they are dragged into the light. Kane’s father, dying with millions, gives him two years to put Jennie away. The penalty is poverty; the reward is wealth—and not only wealth itself, but all the pleasant and well remembered things that will come with it; the lost friends of
other days, a sense of dignity and importance, an end of apologies and evasions, good society, the comradeship of decent women—particularly the comradeship of one decent woman. Kane hesitates, makes a brave defiance, thinks it over—and finally yields. Jennie does not flood him with tears. She has made progress in the world, has Jennie; the simple faith of the girl has given way to the pride and poise of the woman. Five years later Kane sends for her. He is dying. When it is over, Jennie goes back to her lonely home, and there, like Carrie Meeber before her, she faces the long years with dry eyes and an empty heart. “Days and days in endless reiteration, and then—”

A moral tale? Not at all. It has no more moral than a string quartette or the first book of Euclid. But a philosophy of life is in it, and that philosophy is the same profound pessimism which gives a dark color to the best that we have from Hardy, Moore, Zola and the great Russians—the pessimism of disillusion—not the jejune, Byronic thing, not the green sickness of youth, but that pessimism which comes with the discovery that the riddle of life, despite all the fine solutions offered by the learned doctors, is essentially insoluble. One can discern no intelligible sequence of cause and effect in the agonies of Jennie Gerhardt. She is, as human beings go, of the nobler, finer metal. There is within her a great capacity for service, a great capacity for love, a great capacity for happiness. And yet all that life has to offer her, in the end, is the mere license to live. The days stretch before her “in endless reiteration.” She is a prisoner doomed to perpetual punishment for some fanciful, incomprehensible crime against the gods who make their mirthless sport of us all. And to me, at least, she is more tragic thus than Lear on his wild heath or Prometheus on his rock.

Nothing of the art of the literary lapidary is visible in this novel. Its form is the simple one of a panorama unrolled. Its style is unstudied to the verge of barrenness. There is no painful groping for the exquisite, inevitable word; Mr. Dreiser seems content to use the common, even the commonplace coin of speech. On the very first page one encounters “frank, open countenance,” “diffident manner,” “helpless poor,” “untutored mind,” “honest necessity” and half a dozen other such ancients. And yet in the long run it is this very
naïveté
which gives the story much of its impressiveness.
The narrative, in places, has the effect of a series of unisons in music—an effect which, given a solemn theme, vastly exceeds that of the most ornate polyphony. One cannot imagine “Jennie Gerhardt” done in the gipsy phrases of Meredith, the fugal manner of James. One cannot imagine that stark, stenographic dialogue adorned with the brilliants of speech. The thing could have been done only in the way that it has been done. As it stands, it is a work of art from which I for one would not care to take anything away—not even its gross crudities, its incessant returns to C major. It is a novel that depicts the life we Americans are living with extreme accuracy and criticises that life with extraordinary sight. It is a novel, I am convinced, of the very first consideration.

From the
Smart Set
, March, 1923, p. 51

The truth has a horrible sweat to survive in this world, but a piece of nonsense, however absurd on its face, always seems to prosper. I come at once to an example: the notion that I “discovered,” as the phrase has it, Theodore Dreiser, the novelist. This imbecility is constantly cropping up in the newspapers; it costs me a large sum annually to buy it from the clipping bureaux. There is no more truth in it than in the notion that the botanical name of the whale is
blatta orientalis.
Dreiser wrote “Sister Carrie” in 1899, and it got into type in 1900. I first heard of it in 1902, when I was handed a copy of the suppressed and rare first edition by the late George Bronson-Howard, a man of very sound taste in letters. It was not until 1906 that I ever enjoyed the honor of witnessing Dreiser personally; it was not until 1907 that I ever had any traffic with him, and then it was as a contributor to the
Delineator
, of which he was editor; it was not until 1908 that I even wrote a line about him. Long before this he was a very well-known man.…

A trivial matter, to be sure. But why is it that such puerile nonsense always shows such tenacity of life? When “Sister Carrie” was published I was precisely 20 years old. In these days, of course,
with the Foetal School in full flower, that is mature age for an American critic of the arts, but in my time it was generally believed, and I think with some show of plausibility, that a youth short of his majority was fit only for writing poetry. To that banal art, in fact, I then devoted myself, and connoisseurs of adolescent glycosuria are familiar with the result, “Ventures into Verse.”
^*
Nothing, I need not add, would give me greater joy than to be able to say truthfully that I had discovered Dreiser. He retains, after all these years, a rare and peculiar eminence. He has had a larger influence upon the development of the serious American novel than any other man, living or dead. He is a
Kopf
of the first rank among us. But long before I wrote my first dithyrambs upon him, he had been praised lavishly by various distinguished English critics, and even a few advanced American professors had heard of him.

So much for the simple facts. But will they dispose of the contrary nonsense? They will not. When Dreiser is hanged at last, at least three-fourths of the morons who write obituaries of him in the newspapers will say that I discovered him, and perhaps half of them will add that it is a good reason for hanging me with the same rope.

From the
Smart Set
, Jan., 1921, pp. 138–40. A review of M
AIN
S
TREET
, by Sinclair Lewis; New York, 1920. One evening in the latter part of 1920 George Jean Nathan and I went to a party in New York where I met Lewis. He had published nothing, up to that time, save a few light novels that had been
Saturday Evening Post
serials, and I had never
reviewed any of them, nor read them. He was, as always in society, far gone in liquor, and when he fastened upon me with a drunkard’s zeal, declaring that he had lately finished a novel of vast and singular merits full worthy of my most careful and critical attention, I tried hard to shake him off. Long before the usual time for departing I got hold of Nathan and proposed to him that we clear out. The next day I returned to Baltimore, and before leaving the
Smart Set
office gathered up an armful of review books to examine on the train. I took up one as the train plunged into the Pennsylvania tunnel. By the time it got to Newark I was interested, and by the time it got to Trenton I was fascinated. At Philadelphia I called a Western Union boy and sent a telegram to Nathan. I forget the exact text, but it read substantially: “That idiot has written a masterpiece.” The book was Main Street