American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  With Pound, a tireless promoter of others as well as of himself, installed as “foreign correspondent,” early numbers of Poetry included verses from across the Atlantic by the great Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Padraic Colum, and Richard Aldington. Pound extracted contributions from his fellow expatriates, including his Imagist protégée “H.D.” (Hilda Doolittle), and Robert Frost, who was establishing himself in England. The Poetry of June 1915 featured T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” From Boston came the verses of Brahmin Imagist Amy Lowell, from New Jersey those of William Carlos Williams. Closer to home, Poetry published two of the Chicago Movement’s seminal poems, Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” and Vachel Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” Pound himself was well represented, notably by his stunning “In a Station of the Metro.” In the March 1913 number, Pound set out the principles of Imagism: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” His “Image” he defined as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

  Many of Poetry’s offerings were mediocre, some bad, a few next to unreadable. But at a time when poetry was in an unstable state of transition, Monroe’s publication was supreme among literary journals. It maintained an unswerving seriousness of purpose; it was willing to take chances with untested poets and embryonic movements; above all, it resolutely “internationalized” American poetry, placing the work of domestic Americans in a context with the work of contemporary English and Irish poets and of American poets abroad, thus offering models and challenges to young poets groping for a voice.

  In 1907 the editor of the Delineator, a woman’s magazine, commissioned Mencken to ghostwrite a series of articles on the care and feeding of babies. The exchanges between the two men, both of whom were childless and fully intended to remain so, approached high comedy as the editor, Theodore Dreiser, instructed the cigar-chewing Baltimorean that babies informed their mothers of their various needs through subtly differing cries, and Mencken manfully responded with a piece on babies’ diverse cries of habit, pain, hunger, and temper. When, a year later, Mencken visited Dreiser in New York, the latter’s first impression was of a “spoiled and petted and possibly over-financed brewer’s or wholesale grower’s son who was out on a lark.”

  Doubtless Dreiser reflected on the difference between his own earlier life and that of the son of a rich Baltimore brewer. While Mencken’s background had made him provokingly cocky, Dreiser’s world could hardly have delivered more blows to his self-esteem. He was the son of German immigrants growing up in the nativist, provincial city of Terre Haute, Indiana. His parents were profoundly otherworldly, but in different ways—his father an obsessively puritanical Catholic, his mother a pagan who believed in fairies and sorcery. Misfortune racked the family. The father, once a self-confident businessman, had lost his woolen mill in a fire and was badly hurt by a falling beam while rebuilding it, after which he settled into despair and joblessness. Of thirteen children the three oldest boys died. His mother kept the conflict-ridden and poverty-stricken family together, but finally she took Theodore, then aged seven, and two of the other small children on what turned out to be a long search for a better life elsewhere. At sixteen Theodore headed off on his own for Chicago.

  Catapulted into the seething Chicago cauldron of the mid-1880s, Theodore searched desperately for a job that might give him a modicum of self-esteem. He was sacked again and again for incompetence and inattention. As both his status and his sex needs rose to fever heat, as he saw men fighting for jobs in the raw industrial and commercial worlds of Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other cities, he lied, cheated, and stole in vain attempts to advance himself. It was only with the help of others—a prosperous brother who gave him money and jobs, a high school teacher who financed a year for him at Indiana University, the odd editor who was impressed by him, the large number of women, including his wife, who loved and cared for him—and by dint of his own prodigious production of hack writing—that Dreiser survived.

  Later people marveled that a common hack could produce so ambitious, so moving, so “realistic” a story as Sister Carrie. It was no mystery to the few who knew his life. Many contemporary authors—especially the muckrakers—were writing of the havoc they had seen American industrial society wreak upon the vulnerable, but Dreiser had not merely seen it—he had lived it. He was the first important American writer, it was said, to come from a non-Anglo-Saxon, lower-class background. Many of his characters were not simply extensions of himself, they were himself, with all his psychological bruises, physical sufferings, degrading poverty, sexual frustrations, ferocious appetites, hopeless yearnings, fleeting successes. Later an English writer, Ford Madox Ford, praised Carrie as few American critics had done. The “difference between a supremely unreadable writer like Zola and a completely readable one like Dreiser,” he said, “is simply that if Zola had to write about a ride on a railway locomotive’s tender or a night in a brothel, Zola had to get it all out of a book. Dreiser has only to call on his undimmed memories….”

  Dreiser was not merely a reporter, however; he embellished, dramatized, romanticized, philosophized, sentimentalized. But, hopelessly immersed in the turbulence of his existence, he lacked the distance necessary for a unitary vision. Rather, his fiction tended to display all his ambivalences— his irresistible sensual instincts versus the residue of his Catholic upbringing, the fatalist who saw life turning on luck and chance versus the individualist bound to determine his own fate; his compassionate feelings about humanity in general versus his selfish, mean treatment of rivals, friends, and lovers; his skepticism that often edged into cynicism versus a romanticism that often oozed into sentimentality; a Social Darwinian view of life as an industrial jungle versus his abject dependence on others for help at home and on the job.

  Dreiser was frustrated to the point of acute depression by the reception of Sister Carrie, though he could have expected difficulties. Frank Norris, the reader for Doubleday, Page, had given the manuscript his warm endorsement, and Walter Page, acting head of the firm during Frank Doubleday’s absence abroad, had told Dreiser they would publish Carrie; but when Doubleday returned to New York, he read the proofs, gave them to his wife to read, and together they agreed: Carrie was evil—sin had not been punished. After a stiff legal stand by Dreiser, Doubleday reluctantly published and even promoted the book, but with wan enthusiasm. Sales lagged badly compared to the author’s wild hopes. Some of the early newspaper reviews were remarkably perceptive and fair-minded, but many of the established journals consigned it to the gutter for its sexual frankness and refusal to moralize. As an author Dreiser was in the most annoying position of all—Carrie was controversial enough to be kept off library shelves but not spectacularly controversial enough to cause a run on the bookstores.

  A good part of the Carrie controversy centered on the simple question, Can he write? Of Dreiser’s prose style, one critic wrote, “Mr. Dreiser can not punctuate. He knows nothing of sentence and paragraph structure…. He flouts [details] and lumbers over them, disdainful, with an uncouth grandeur.... The art of suggestion is unknown to him.” Carrie was uneven, unsophisticated, in dire need of editing. Yet this critic and others found much to praise in Dreiser’s vitality and suggestive treatment of reality. “Even if he is not a Balzac or a Dickens or a Dostoevsky,” wrote Julian Markels, “the whole of Dreiser’s substance is frequently rich and moving and powerful.” But those prepared to find Carrie morally reprehensible were quick to seize upon Dreiser’s callow and cumbersome prose—“Evil and badly written”—as though bad writing were the handmaiden of evil intentions.

  Against this controversy stands the book itself, with, as Dreiser wrote in another context, “a bitter, brutal insistence on [its] so-ness.” In many ways, Carrie is a conventional story of a young w
oman who, coming—as Dreiser had—from a small town to Chicago, is animated by keen yearnings for money, fine clothes, pleasure. She graduates from an affair with a natty but socially limited traveling salesman to a bigamous marriage with Hurstwood, a well-to-do saloon manager. Smitten with Carrie, Hurstwood abandons his wife and children to escape—it is more an abduction—with her to New York. From this point Carrie’s fortunes rise as Hurstwood’s decline. He loses his money, resorts to begging, and ends a suicide, while Carrie meets with mounting success on the stage. And yet, at the height of her fame, she longs for more; she is still “the old, mournful Carrie— the desireful Carrie,—unsatisfied.”

  The novel is distinguished by the relentless detail of Carrie’s rise and Hurstwood’s fall, but above all by Dreiser’s steady refusal to judge his characters, nor even to hold them fully responsible for their actions. Carrie is borne by ever-ascending ideals and yearnings, the source and meaning of which she has no comprehension. Dreiser’s stance is that of an observer of a human field, in which external and impersonal pressures, accidental circumstances, indistinct impulses and desires play upon and often determine behavior and destiny and in which Christian categories of good and evil, sin and redemption, have no part. With one bold book, Dreiser knocked down and trampled those “rubber-stamp formulae,” as Mencken called them, which had extorted from authors pieties and platitudes, decorum and parsable sentences. Sister Carrie brought American fiction within the gates of American industrial society and face to face with its realities.

  In 1862, nine years before Dreiser was born, George Frederick and Lucretia Jones of Gramercy Park and Newport announced the birth of their daughter Edith. The child grew up in a world that was bounded geographically by Washington Square, lower Fifth Avenue, and the approaches to Central Park, socially by a circle of Schermerhorns, Rhinelanders, and other rich, mainly “old Dutch” families. Culturally it was a world that sponsored museums and libraries but had little interest in serious art or learning. Edith came to comprehend this world, through her imagination, family travel in Europe, and her father’s library, full of Plutarch and Parkman, Dante and Milton and Pope, Scott and Irving and Thackeray.

  At the age of eleven, Edith Jones produced her first literary effort, a novel. It began: “ ‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?’ said Mrs. Tompkins. ‘If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room.’ ” Edith showed her work to her mother, who dismissed it. “Drawing-rooms,” she said, “are always tidy.”

  By the time Dreiser was eleven, he had attended parochial and public schools, lived the meanest kind of peripatetic life with his family, gotten fired five times. By that age, Edith Jones had been schooled only by private tutors. At eighteen, Dreiser attended Indiana University for a year. Edith had hardly dreamed of going to college, knowing that it was the young men in her social set who would attend Harvard or Columbia, Oxford or Cambridge. In his twenties, Dreiser was drifting from job to job; Edith Jones was drifting from New York to Europe to Newport to Bar Harbor.

  What Edith did come to learn—to see and touch and feel—was the richly upholstered and intellectually barren world of her set. First she learned about their houses: the huge brownstones, with their ballrooms that might be used one day a year; the drafty drawing rooms; the quiet libraries where the man of the house took refuge; the silk-stockinged footmen, the platoons of servants. About their cultural pursuits: the Academy of Music, where society gathered primarily to show itself; the Century Association, where young men—and men only, of course—took further refuge from their families; other clubs, where the waiting period for membership might be ten years. They traveled at home and abroad, always within the tight little cocoon of their social class.

  Unblinkingly she observed the phenomenon that by the early 1880s dominated the talk of New York’s old moneyed class day after day—the insidious infiltration into established society of the philistines; of the bumptious, even vulgar, capitalists whose industrial wealth vastly surpassed the landed capital of the old families. Ultimately the old class could not stop the new, for money in that environment eventually meant power. But they could slow it down by a rigid adherence to protocol—the proper manners, clothes, decoration, watering places, decorum, taste. Old wealth shunned ostentation, loud voices, innovation. It never discussed money; it simply assumed it. “Fortified as she was in her own class,” Diana Trilling said of the struggling writer, “she knew the reality of class as no theoretical Marxist or social egalitarian can know it: not speculatively but in her bones.”

  Above all, Edith Jones observed the relations between the sexes. If gentility barred women from every function save the “cultivation of the home,” as Alfred Kazin noted, the older married women were the arbiters of the protocol of established wealth. Guarding access to society’s inner sanctum and policing its behavior, however, was a role that could turn some of these women inward and away from broader social responsibilities. This was still an era when the gentlemen, after dinner, stayed together to smoke their cigars and discuss weighty matters, while the ladies moved off for decorous, gossipy talk.

  Such talk did not include the subject of sex. A formidable double standard prevailed here too: men learned about sex and pursued extramarital affairs with little penalty from the matriarchs except mild tut-tutting. Women were not supposed to talk or even think sex. The result was a profound ignorance, in which Edith Jones shared. Shortly before her wedding, as her biographer tells the story, she plucked up her courage, her heart beating wildly, to ask her mother “what marriage was really like.” Her mother looked at her with icy disapproval, exclaiming, “I never heard such a ridiculous question!”

  “I’m afraid, Mamma—I want to know what will happen to me,” Edith persisted.

  “You’ve seen enough pictures and statues in your life,” her mother said impatiently. “Haven’t you noticed that men are … made differently from women?” “Yes,” said Edith falteringly.

  “Well, then ...” But her mother broke off as she observed Edith’s blank, uncomprehending expression. “Then for heaven’s sake don’t ask me any more silly questions. You can’t be as stupid as you pretend.”

  After her barely consummated marriage to Teddy Wharton, a Boston socialite, Edith Jones Wharton spent another dozen years making the social rounds and storing up impressions, recollections, reflections; then she burst forth in a small flood of stories, novels, travel articles, even a book on the decoration of houses. Her most important works dealt with high society’s victims, especially women. In her 1905 novel The House of Mirth she portrayed a spirited young woman who lacks the one thing—money, or a husband who could provide it—that would secure her social status; Lily Bart gambles for success, but, lacking the necessary cards and caught between her head and her heart, she is inexorably drawn by society’s conventions into poverty, social ostracism, suicide. Fifteen years later, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence presented Ellen Olenska, who could have enjoyed status and riches if she had stayed with her unbearable husband, a Polish count; as it is, Countess Olenska flees to her relatives in New York, seeks to establish a foothold there despite her distaste for their culturally empty lives, and flees again to a lonely life in Europe after her family rejects her.

  These were powerful portraits, as were other novels such as Ethan Frome and The Custom of the Country. Yet they rarely rose above the pathos of individuals caught in a social web to the level of real tragedy. Wharton herself seemed fixed in the social environment she knew so well. She seldom portrayed with much credibility the lives of the poor or lower middle class. She ignored the larger ideas that might have aroused old society, new plutocracy, or rising proletariat. Society put enormous constraints on people’s liberties, but Wharton was not about to expand on the implications of this for a nation that extolled liberty (or freedom) at every opportunity. “There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free,” says Newland Archer, Countess Olenska’s would-be lover, of
his pliant mate. Wharton leaves Archer’s wife caught in a benign web of restraints to which society allowed no alternative. A superb critic of manners, the author was content with this role.

  Nor did Wharton pursue a political alternative. Her gentlemen had nothing but disdain for “risking their clean linen” in the politics of Manhattan. In The Age of Innocence, Governor Theodore Roosevelt, after dining with Archer in the latter’s home, turns to his host and says, “banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses: ‘Hang the professional politician! You’re the kind of man the country wants, Archer. If the stable’s ever to be cleaned out, men like you have got to lend a hand in the cleaning.’ ” Glowing over the phrase “men like you,” Archer wins election as state assemblyman, serves a year, then fails of reelection—and Wharton leaves him back in obscure though useful municipal reform. Theodore Roosevelt, who became a personal friend of Wharton, went into “dirty politics” to stay. Why didn’t Archer?

  Along with the lack of noblesse oblige in high society, there was contempt for the tastes of popular democracy. By turn of century, the middle and even lower-income classes were devouring books from the best-seller lists: Alice Hegan Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch; John Fox, Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come; Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; Gene Stratton Porter, Freckles; Zane Grey, The Spirit of the Border; Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase; and such robust tales as Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf.

  Edith Wharton did not need to lower her literary standards for her novels and stories to achieve impressive sales; The Age of Innocence sold 66,000 copies in its first six months and was still selling steadily two years later. She emphasized the pathos of individuals while her own class was eroding away. Both Wharton and Dreiser kept their distance from the rising philistines—she by sticking ultimately with her own class, he by entering and exploiting the crass commercial world even as he hated and derided it. “It was wonderful to discover America,” Dreiser said, “but it would have been more wonderful to lose it.” Cries Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth, “Why do we call our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?” Readers were left with these haunting questions, but with little understanding of their implications for culture in a democratic republic and a capitalistic economy.