itself.2
or inadequate. But once that admission has been made, his ideas are
To the extent that Dreiser's style is defensible, his thought is also
hustled out of sight while his "reality" and great brooding pity are
defensible. That is, when he thinks like a novelist, he is worth
spoken of. (His pity is to be questioned: pity is to be judged by kind,
following-when by means of his rough and ungainly but no doubt
not amount, and Dreiser's pity-f ennie Gerhardt provides the only
cumulatively effective style he creates rough, ungainly, but effective
exception-is either destructive of its object or it is self-pity.) Why
charact�rs and events. But when he thinks like, as we say, a philosohas no liberal critic ever brought Dreiser's ideas to the bar of politipher, he is likely to be not only foolish but vulgar. He thinks as the cal practicality, asking what use is to be made of Dreiser's dim, awkmodern crowd thinks when it decides to think: religion and morality ward speculation, of his self-justification, of his lust for "beauty"
are nonsense, "religionists" and moralists are fakes, tradition is a
and "sex" and "living" and "life itself," and of the showy nihilism
fraud, what is man but matter and impulses, mysterious "chemisms,"
which always seems to him so grand a gesture in the direction of
what value has life anyway? "What, cooking, eating, coition, job
profundity? We live, understandably enough, with the sense of
holding, growing, aging, losing, winning, in so changeful and pass-
urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire's, has had the hands removed
and bears the legend, "It is later than you think." But with us it is
2 The latest dcfcme of Dreiser's style, that in the chapter on Dreiser in the
Literary History of the United States, is worth noting: "Forgetful of the integrity
always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stuand power of Dreiser's whole work, many critics have been distracted into a conpidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for demnation of his style. He was, like Twain and Whitman, an organic artist; he
wrote what he knew-what he was. His many colloquialisms were part of the
righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too
coinage of his time, and his sentimental and romantic passages were written in the
late for na'ive moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest
language of the educational system and the popular literature of his formative years.
In his style, as in his material, he was a child of his time, of his class. Self-educated,
but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of
a type or model of the artist of plebeian origin in America, his language, like his
subject matter, is not marked by internal inconsistencies." No doubt Dreiser was an
time.
organic artist in the sense that he wrote what he knew and what he was, but so, I
But sometimes time is not quite so exigent as to justify all our
suppose, is every artist; the question for criticism comes down to what he knew and
what he was. That he was a child of his time and class is also true, but this can be
own exigency, and in the case of Dreiser time has allowed his desaid of everyone without exception; the question for criticism is how he transcended ficiencies to reach their logical, and fatal, conclusion. In The Bul
the imposed limitations of his time and class. As for the defense made on the ground
of his particular class, it can only be said that liberal thought has come to a strange
wark Dreiser's characteristic ideas come full circle, and the simple,
pass when it assumes that a plebeian origin is accountable for a writer's faults
through all his intellectual life.
didactic life history of Solon Barnes, a Quaker business man, affirms
18
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Reality in America
19
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a simple Christian faith, and a kind of practical mysticism, and the
tury a good many people un�er�tood its meaning. If it was Dreiser's
virtues of self-abnegation and self-restraint, and the belief in and
owri emotion at the end of his life, who would not be happy that he
submission to the hidden purposes of higher powers, those "suhad achieved it? I am not even sure that our civilization would not perior forces that bring it all about"-once, in Dreiser's opinion, so
be the better for more of us knowing and desiring this emotion of
brutally indifferent, now somehow benign. This is not the first ocrave felicity. Yet granting the personal validity of the emotion, casion on which Dreiser has shown a tenderness toward religion and
treiser's exposition of it fails, and is, moreover, offensive. Mr.
a responsiveness to mysticism. Jennie Gerhardt and the figure of the
Matthiessen has warned us of the attack that will be made on the
Reverend Duncan McMillan in An American Tragedy are forecasts
doctrine of The Bulwark by "those who believe that any renewal of
of the avowals of The Bulwark, and Dreiser's lively interest in
Christianity marks a new 'failure of nerve.'" But Dreiser'� religious
power of any sort led him to take account of the power implicit in
avowal is not a failure of nerve-it is a failure of mind and heart.
the cruder forms of mystical performance. Yet these rifts in his
We have only to set his book beside any work in which mind and
nearly monolithic materialism cannot quite prepare us for the blank
heart are made to serve religion to know this at once. Ivan Karapietism of The Bulwark, not after we have remembered how salient mazov's giving back his ticket of admission to the "harmony" of the
in Dreiser's work has been the long sudy rage against the "religionuniverse suggests that The Bulwark is not morally adequate, for we ists" and the "moralists," the men who have presumed to believe
dare not, as its hero does, blandly "accept" the suffering of others;
that life can be given any law at all and who have dared to suppose
and the Book of Job tells us that it does not include enough in its
that will or mind or faith can shape the savage and beautiful entity
exploration of the problem of evil, and is not stern enough. I have
that Dreiser liked to call "life itself." Now for Dreiser the law may
said that Dreiser's religious affirmation was offensive; the offense
indeed be given, and it is wholly simple-the safe conduct of the
lies in the vulgar ease of its formulation, as well as in the compersonal life requires only that we follow the Inner Light accordfortable untroubled way in which Dreiser moved from nihilism to ing to the regimen of the Society of Friends, or according to some
pietism.3
other godly rule. And now the smiling Aphrodite set abo.ve her
The Bulwark is the fruit of Dreiser's old age, but if we speak of
altars of porphyry, chalcedony, ivory, and gold is quite forgotten,
it as a failure of thought and feeling, we cannot suppose that with
and we are told that the sad joy of cosmic acceptance goes hand in
age Dreiser weakened in mind and heart. The weakness was always
hand with sexual abstinence.
there. And in a sense it is not Dreiser who failed but a whole way of
Dreiser's mood of "acceptance"
in the last years of his life is not,
dealing with ideas, a way in which we have all been in some degree
as a personal experience, to be submitted to the tests of intellectual
involved. Our liberal, progressive culture tolerated Dreiser's vulgar
validity. It consists of a sensation of cosmic understanding, of an
materialism with its huge negation, its simple cry of "Bunk!," feeloverarching sense of unity with the world in its apparent evil as ing that perhaps it was not quite intellectually adequate but cer-well as in its obvious good. It is no more to be quarreled with, or
reasoned with, than love itself-indeed, it is a kind of love, not so
3 This ease and comfortableness seem to mark contemporary religious conversions.
Religion nowadays has the appearance of what the ideal modern house has been
much of the world as of oneself in the world. Perhaps it is either the
called, "a machine for living," and seemingly one makes up one's mind to acquire
cessation of desire or the perfect balance of desires. It is what used
and use it not with spiritual struggle but only with a growing sense of its practicability and convenience. Compare The Seven Storey Mountain, which Monsignor often to be meant by "peace," and up through the nineteenth cen-Sheen calls "a twentieth-century form of the 'Confessions of St. Augustine," with the old, the as it were original, Confessions of St Augustine.
20
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
·-··-··-··-··-·-··-··-··-·-·--·-·-··-·-··-··-··-··-•-•11-·-··-··-··
tainly very strong, certainlr very real. And now, almost as a natural
consequence, it has been given, and is not unwilling to take,
Dreiser's pietistic religion in all its inadequacy.
Dreiser, of course, was firmer than the intellectual culture that
Sherwood Anderson
accepted him. He meant his ideas, at least so far as a man can mean
ideas who is incapable of following them to their consequences. But
we, when it came to his ideas, talked about his great broodi!}g pity
and shrugged the ideas off. We are still doing it. Robert Elias, the
biographer of Dreiser, tells us that "it is part of the logic of
[Dreiser's] life that he should have completed The Bulwark at the
same time that he joined the Communists." Just what kind of logic
this is we learn from Mr. Elias's further statement. "When he sup
IFIND it hard, and I think it would be false, to write about
Sherwood Anderson without speaking of him personally and
ported left-wing movements and finally, last year, joined the Comeven emotionally. I did not know him; I was in his company munist Party, he did so not because he had examined the details of
only twice and on neither occasion did I talk with him. The first
the party line and found them satisfactory, but because he agreed
time I saw him was when he was at the height of his fame; I had, I
with a general program that represented a means for establishing
recall, just been reading A Story-Teller's Story and Tar, and these
his cherished goal of greater equality among men." Whether or not
autobiographical works had made me fully aware of the change
Dreiser was following the logic of his own life, he was certainly
that had taken place in my feelings since a few years before when
following the logic of the liberal criticism that accepted him so unalmost anything that Anderson wrote had seemed a sort of reveladiscriminatingly as one of the great, significant expressions of its tion. The second time was about two years before his death; he had
spirit. This is the liberal criticism, in the direct line of Parrington,
by then not figured in my own thought about literature for many
which establishes the social responsibility of the writer and then
years, and I believe that most people were no longer aware of him
goes on to say that, apart from his duty of resembling reality as
as an immediate force in their lives. His last two novels (Beyond
much as possible, he is not really responsible for anything, not even
Desire in 1932 and Kit Brandon in 1936) had not been good; they
for his ideas. The scope of reality being what it is, ideas are held to
were all too clearly an attempt to catch up with the world, but the
be mere "details," and, what is more, to be details which, if attended
world had moved too fast; it was not that Anderson was not aware
to, have the effect of diminishing reality. But ideals are different
of the state of things but rather that he had suffered the fate of the
from ideas; in the liberal criticism which descends from Parrington
writer who at one short past moment has had a success with a
ideals consort happily with reality and they urge us to deal impasimple idea which he allowed to remain simple and to become fixed.
tiently with ideas-a "cherished goal" forbids that we stop to con
On both occasions-the first being a gathering, after one of Andersider how we reach it, or if we may not destroy it in trying to reach son's lectures, of eager Wisconsin graduate students and of young
it the wrong way.
instructors who were a little worried that they would be thought
stuffy and academic by this Odysseus, the first famous man of letters
most of us had ever seen; the second being a crowded New York
22
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Sherwood Anderson
23
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party-I was much taken by Anderson's human quality, by a cer
. A derson was deeply concerned with the idea of justification;
1t. n
there was an odd, quirky, undisciplined religious strain in him that
hands with or talking to for a brief, formal moment, by a certain
took this form; and he expected that although Philistia might congraciousness or gracefulness which seemed to arise from an indemn him, he would have an eventual justification in the way of nocence of heart.
art and truth. He was justified in some personal way, as I have
I mention this very tenuous personal impression because it must
tried to say, and no doubt his great escape had something to do
really have arisen not at all from my observation of the moment but
with this, but it also had the effect of fatally fixing the character
rather have been projected from some unconscious residue of adof his artistic life.
miration I had for Anderson's books even after I had made all my
Anderson's greatest influence was probably upon those who read
adverse judgments upon them. It existed when I undertook this
him in adolescence, the age when we find the books we give up
notice of Anderson on the occasion of his death, or else I should
but do not get over. And it now needs a little fortitude to pick up
not have undertaken it. And now that I have gone back to his books
again, as many must have done upon the news of his death, t
_
�e
again and have found that I like them even less than I remembered,
one book of his we are all sure to have read, for Wznesburg, Ohto
I find too that the residue of admiration still remains; it is quite
is
not just a book, it is a personal souvenir. It is commonly owned
vague, yet it requires to be articulated with the clearer feelings of
in the Modern Library edition, very likely in the most primitive
dissatisfaction; and it needs to be spoken of, as it has been, first.
format of that series, even before it was tricked out with its vulgar
There is a special poignancy in the failure of Anderson's later
little ballet-Prometheus; and the brown oilcloth binding, the coarse
career. According to the artistic morality to which he and his
paper, the bold type crooked on the page, are dreadfully evocative.
friends subscribed-Robert Browning seems to have played a large
Even the introduction by Ernest Boyd is rank with the odor of the
if anonymous part in shaping it-Anderson should have been forpast, of the day when criticism existed in heroic practical simplicity, ever protected against artistic failure by the facts of his biography.
when it was all truth against hypocrisy, idealism against philistin
At the age of forty-five, as everyone knows, he found himself the
ism, and the opposite of "romanticism" was not "classicism" but
manager of a small paint factory in Elyria, Ohio; one day, in the
"realism," which-it now seems odd-negated both. As for the
very middle of a sentence he was dictating, he walked out of the
Winesburg stories themselves, they are as dangerous to read again,
factory and gave himself to literature and truth. From the wonder
as paining and as puzzling, as if they were old letters we had writof that escape he seems never to have recovered, and his continued ten or received.
pleasure in it did him harm, for it seems to have made him feel
It is not surprising that Anderson should have made his strongest
that the problem of the artist was defined wholly by the struggle
appeal, although by no means his only one, to adolescents. For one
between sincerity on the o.ne hand and commercialism and gentility
thing, he wrote of young people with a special tenderness; one of
on the other. He did indeed say that the artist needed not only
his best-known stories is called "I Want To Know Why": it is the
courage but craft, yet it was surely the courage by which he set the