The Stoic by Theodore Dreiser

More railroads and romance with Frank Cowperwood, this time in London

Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Stoic, first published in 1947, is the third book in his Trilogy of Desire, preceded by The Financier and The Titan. Together, the three novels chart the life and career of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, a tycoon in the business of streetcars, subways, and urban railroads. In The Financier, Cowperwood built his career in Philadelphia. In The Titan, he suffered financial ruin and public disgrace through his unethical business practices. In The Stoic, Cowperwood has fled Chicago to find temporary solace in New York before deciding to venture to England and try monopolizing the London railways.

Although still married to his second wife Aileen, Cowperwood, now about 60, has commenced an affair with 20-year-old Berenice Fleming, whom he has groomed to be his mistress since he met her as a teenager. His relationship with Berenice is probably the closest he’s ever felt to love, but he wants to maintain his marriage to Aileen to keep up appearances, because scandal would hurt his business ventures. To keep Aileen occupied and to ease his philandering conscience, Frank clandestinely hires a boy toy to keep her company. While Aileen enjoys the young man’s attentions, she still has hopes of winning Frank’s heart back from the hated Berenice. This love triangle spends most of the novel shuttling back and forth from London to New York while Cowperwood schemes to keep the two women apart.

With books like Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and An American Tragedy, Dreiser earned a reputation as one of America’s great literary novelists, a virtuoso of sorts at crafting literature from real life. The characters of The Stoic, however, are hardly regular people, and their lives as written here often read more like soap opera than social realism. Cowperwood is not only a multi-millionaire but also a celebrity, in the way that William Randolph Hearst is depicted in Citizen Kane, or the way Donald Trump was famous before he entered politics. The fact that the characters are rich isn’t necessarily bad. The great French naturalist Emile Zola wrote several compelling novels about wealthy, high-society life, but luxury isn’t exactly Dreiser’s strong suit. On the one hand, you have Cowperwood’s railroad dealings, comprised of incredibly mundane discussions of financial and legal proceedings. On the other hand, you have his love life, which reads like some kind of sexless Danielle Steele potboiler. Most of the book feels somewhat like a repetitive rehashing of The Titan, except for the fact that in this book Frank and his ladies travel all over the globe. The novel does improve towards the end, however. The last several chapters take some unexpected turns, not so much plot twists but rather events and subject matter that make you think hmmm, I never would have expected Dreiser to write about that.

In addition to being Cowperwood’s final appearance, The Stoic was also Dreiser’s last book. He died while writing it. His wife Helen cobbled together his remaining notes into one final chapter, but the book was pretty much complete anyway and would have ended better without this posthumous addition. As a whole, Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire is an above-average work of American realism but hardly a masterpiece. An American Tragedy and Jennie Gerhardt are much better. If you’ve read those books and appreciate Dreiser’s brand of naturalism, however, then living through three volumes with Frank Cowperwood is not a bad way to spend one’s reading time.

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An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

A masterpiece of a story, but long-winded in the telling

An American Tragedy, a novel by Theodore Dreiser, was first published in 1925. Although these days Dreiser may best be remembered as the author of Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy, from its high-falutin title to its mammoth size, shows all the signs of having been his intended magnum opus. An early dust jacket for the book proclaims that this is “Dreiser’s first novel since 1915,” and judging by the sheer length of this tome, it’s not hard to believe it could have taken him a decade to write it. This novel has some shortcomings in its execution, but nonetheless it is arguably the most powerful story Dreiser ever wrote.

Clyde Griffiths is the son of devoutly religious parents who run a mission in Kansas City. The parents take the children out in the evenings to preach, sing, and collect donations in the streets. While his siblings don’t necessarily seem to mind this lifestyle so much, teenaged Clyde chafes under this enforced proselytizing and the relative poverty that comes with it. He wants to live like a regular young man, wear nice clothes, and date girls. He decides to get a job, both to raise money to help the family and to excuse himself from the street preaching. After a few brief stints at other work, he secures a position as a bellboy at the fancy Hotel Green-Davidson. Clyde starts hanging out with his more experienced coworkers and begins to get involved with alcohol and sex, all the while keeping his new sinful life a secret from his parents.

It’s difficult to summarize the plot of An American Tragedy without spoiling it, because no events of import really occur until halfway through the book. The first half of the novel is mostly overly protracted character development. Dreiser is celebrated for his realism, and he has certainly succeeded here in crafting authentic characters and a realistic narrative. When reading about Clyde’s youth, I felt like I had lived most of his experiences myself as a young man (minus the prostitutes), which speaks to the book’s authenticity, but the familiarity of such scenes also lessens some of the dramatic impact. Readers of Dreiser’s day might have been shocked at Clyde’s teenaged adventures, but today’s audience not so much. If you make it through the rather lethargic first half, the second half of the novel is far superior. Dreiser’s frank and multifaceted depiction of small-town life calls to mind Truman Capote’s creative nonfiction masterpiece In Cold Blood. Dreiser is to be commended for his honest and forthright discussions of premarital sex, birth control, and other matters that would have offended the propriety of many readers of the 1920s. .

The story of Clyde Griffiths may be one of the most compelling and memorable in American literature, one worthy of the illusive “Great American Novel” label. It’s in the telling of the tale, however, that the book has its faults. Even at the height of its tension and suspense, the text is very repetitive, often recounting the same scenes over and over again. Chapters often seem to proceed sluggishly in real time, when some summarization could have sufficed. As one of America’s preeminent literary naturalists, Dreiser’s strength is illuminating the epic dramas that take place in real American lives. At times, however, he seems to forget that this isn’t real life but a novel, and as such should be written as a novel, with a little less procedural tone and a little more poetic license in the storytelling. 

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Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural by Theodore Dreiser

Should have stuck to the real world

Theodore Dreiser is best known for his novels, but he also wrote a dozen plays over the course of his career. All but one of his dramatic works are of the brief, one-act variety. The collection Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural, first published in 1916, contains seven of Dreiser’s one-act plays. As the title indicates, some of these plays are a departure from Dreiser’s typical area of expertise. In his novels, Dreiser is perhaps the realest of American realists; his books are so realistic that at times they venture into the mundane. In more than half of the plays included here, however, Dreiser introduces paranormal phenomena. The results of his supernatural experimentation are far from successful, and he would have been better off sticking to social realism.

Of the seven plays in this volume, three of them can be considered “Natural,” meaning they deal with realistic subjects typical of Dreiser’s works: labor strikes, urban poverty, marital troubles. The first selection, The Girl in the Coffin, is the volume’s best entry. A strike organizer wants a local labor leader to appear at a rally, but the latter man is grieving beside the coffin of his recently deceased daughter. The plot is rather predictable, but Dreiser delivers high drama, authentic dialogue, and sharp insight into the labor struggles of the era. “Old Ragpicker” is another play in which Dreiser deals with the reality of his times. The title character is a homeless man, reduced to destitution by a stock market crash, who collects bottles and cans to survive. Though low on plot, it is a fine character study. The last of the realistic plays, The Light in the Window, deals with a wealthy couple on the verge of divorce. As they argue, passers-by imagine how happy life must be inside such an attractive and luxurious home. Dreiser plays up this contrast between expectation and reality rather heavy-handedly, but the marital drama is passable.

The remaining four plays fall into the “Supernatural” category. Of these, The Blue Sphere is the only one that rises to mediocre, while the rest are unilaterally terrible. Each of these plays has a real-world plot taking place while, invisible to the human characters, various supernatural entities, spirits of the dead, or mythical dryads flutter around providing commentary. In the Dark, for example, shows police chasing down a murderer while spirits circle in the air shouting “Murder!” and “Blood!” Laughing Gas is based on the hypothesis that people anesthetized by nitrous oxide are capable of experiencing visions in which they ascend to higher planes of existence and commune with the rhythm of the universe. The Spring Recital, depicting a church concert with ghostly spectators, is pointless.

Though written as plays, most of these dramas could never have been staged because they require sets and perspectives that would have been impossible to produce. They read more like mini-screenplays, but this was before they age of talkies, and they wouldn’t have worked well as silent films either. Laughing Gas, for example, describes both microscopic details of surgery and macroscopic views of extraterrestrial planes of existence. Nevertheless, somehow the play was produced once, in 1916. The most manageable work, The Girl in the Coffin, has been staged a half dozen times and “Old Ragpicker” twice. Other than that, these dramas have never seen the inside of a theatre. For the most part, they are no treat to read on the printed page, either. I’ve always admired Dreiser for his unflinching realism, but the fact that he would go in for this spiritualist nonsense has actually lessened my opinion of the man. To make matters worse, unlike Arthur Conan Doyle or Edgar Allan Poe, he can’t even manage to make the paranormal fun.

Plays in this collection

The Girl in the Coffin

The Blue Sphere

Laughing Gas

In the Dark

The Spring Recital 

The Light in the Window 

“Old Ragpicker”

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The Titan by Theodore Dreiser

A head for business and a body for sin
The Titan, published in 1914, is the sequel to Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Financier and the second book in his Trilogy of Desire. Those who have read The Financier and are considering taking on this follow-up should ask themselves if they really want to devote a great deal of time to a mammoth novel centered around two unlikable characters. In The Financier, Frank Cowperwood proved himself an unethical egotist while his mistress Aileen came across as an immature, narcissistic floozy. Here they do little to discourage those first impressions. Also, while The Financier was a rags-to-riches story, The Titan is simply a riches-to-riches story, which can never be as compelling. For these reasons and others, The Titan makes an inferior sequel to the book that preceded it.

After the trouble he had in Philadelphia in The Financier, Cowperwood decides to head west and try his hand in Chicago. He manages to free himself from his wife so he can marry Aileen. Despite Cowperwood’s smooth facade and his facility for making advantageous connections in the business world, the couple’s past follows them to their new home. It’s easy for Frank to make money, but with his history of jail time and her reputation as a homewrecker, he and Aileen will never be accepted into Chicago society. Instead, they each find their social outlet in extramarital affairs. While Aileen is hurt by their ostracism from high society, Cowperwood doesn’t seem to care as long as he’s making money. He knows that one day, once he realizes his grand financial schemes, Chicago’s high and mighty will all bend to his will.

Dreiser is one of America’s great literary naturalists, which is one of the reasons why I like his work. Of the four novels I’ve read by him, however, The Titan is easily the least realistic. While The Financier educated the reader about significant events in America’s financial history, The Titan mostly concentrates on fictional dealings that evoke the general atmosphere of corruption and collusion that was rife during the late 19th century. Compared to the stock market chicanery that took place in the first book, Cowperwood’s business transactions in this volume are harder to follow and harder to find interesting. Never at any time did I find myself caring about his street railway empire. The money he makes in his ventures only serves the narrative purpose of financing his expensive love life, which makes up the other half of the book. In this area, Dreiser goes beyond melodrama and into sexual soap opera. Cowperwood juggles so many mistresses, it’s hard to believe he could conduct any business at all. Meanwhile, Aileen disappears from the story for several chapters at a time whenever it’s convenient for her to do so. New characters are introduced in every chapter, and each one gets a detailed biographical sketch, regardless of how insignificant he is to the narrative. Cowperwood himself isn’t even present for the climactic scene in the novel, which is viewed through the perspective of some of these minor characters.

The Titan is a mediocre work by a great writer. Sometimes, in order to fully appreciate the latter you’ve got to put up with the former. On the bright side, even a bad book by Dreiser is probably better than 90 percent of the other American novels published during this era. Frank Cowperwood’s life story continues in the Trilogy of Desire’s third and final installment, The Stoic. Even though I was disappointed by this volume, I’ve already invested so much time in this humdrum epic, I will likely see it through to the end. 

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The Financier by Theodore Dreiser

As real as life itself, and sometimes just as dull
As the title suggests, Theodore Dreiser’s 1912 novel The Financier is a story of stocks and bonds, banking, and business, but it’s also a very human tale of dreams, desires, and defeats. In 1837, Frank Cowperwood is born the son of a bank clerk in Philadelphia. At a young age, he demonstrates notable intelligence, initiative, and a precocious talent for finance. Through perspicacity and hard work, he gradually builds a career from small-time deals to ever greater heights of financial influence and commercial reputation. Cowperwood’s opportunistic streak gets the better of him, however, and he engages in dealings that are less than ethical. This becomes trouble when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 plays havoc with the stock market. Cowperwood has spread himself too thin, and when creditors start calling in their loans, he must scramble to scrape up any dollar he can in order to save his business and his reputation.

As is typical of Dreiser, Cowperwood’s story is told in a naturalistic style that is about as real as realism gets. Dreiser’s detailed, matter-of-fact prose vividly immerses the reader in the time, place, and social environment of the narrative. When the novel focuses on the human drama surrounding the money matters, it can be very emotionally involving. Even though the protagonist is a somewhat despicable human being whose self-centeredness clouds his judgment of right and wrong, the reader can’t help but root for Cowperwood because Dreiser has drawn him as a complex human being with identifiable faults. At times, Dreiser delves deeper into the financial machinations than I cared to go, and he assumes a fair amount of stock-market knowledge on the part of the reader. If you like novels about hypothecated shares and sinking funds, this is the book for you. Today’s financial world is difficult enough to understand, much less the system that was in place before and immediately after the Civil War. The deals and manipulations taking place in The Financier are more difficult to decipher than similar goings-on in other financially themed naturalist novels like Frank Norris’s The Pit or Emile Zola’s Money.

Any confusion, however, is not due to lack of exposition. The main problem with The Financier is that it is too long-winded and repetitive, particularly in its flabby mid-section. The same conversations seem to take place over and over again. Is it really necessary to include the complete text of the closing arguments of a court case, after the several preceding chapters have already outlined both sides of the argument? Some summarizing would have been appreciated. Dreiser is so thorough in his description, his narrative so protracted, that most of the time I felt like I was experiencing the action of the novel in real time. That’s fine when interesting things are happening, but not when you’re sitting through another meeting in which Cowperwood repeats what he told someone else the day before. While the story as a whole is too drawn-out, the ending feels rushed and too convenient. Then Dreiser caps the work off with two brief epilogues; one unnecessary, the other vague.

The Financier is the first novel in Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire, followed by The Titan and The Stoic. Honestly, The Financier might have been a better book if it were a stand-alone novel. Perhaps then the conclusion would have been more satisfying. Nevertheless, despite my reservations about this novel, I will probably follow the trilogy through to its end. The Financier may be flawed, but Dreiser is an exceptional author whose work is essential to the history of American literary realism. Even his less successful books are worth reading.
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Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser

Beats the heck out of Sister Carrie
Jennie Gerhardt is a young woman of eighteen years of age, the daughter of a poor family living in Columbus, Ohio. Her father scrapes by with a series of odd jobs, but he can’t support seven children by himself, so Jennie and her mother call at a downtown hotel looking for housekeeping work. While cleaning at the hotel, they meet Senator Brander, a resident there, who hires the mother and daughter to do his washing. Brander, a charming and attractive man in his fifties who has never married, is immediately taken by Jennie’s unassuming but uncommon beauty. He takes an interest in her family and helps them out financially from time to time. Over the course of regular laundry deliveries, Jennie and Brander become more closely acquainted, and it soon becomes clear that, despite their difference in age and class, his interest in her is more than platonic. Jennie is a good girl, but how can she resist this attractive, charming, older man?

Though Theodore Dreiser is best known for his debut novel Sister Carrie, his second novel Jennie Gerhardt, published in 1911, is superior in almost every way. It’s surprising how similar these two consecutive novels are in terms of subject matter. Both feature a female protagonist born of a lower class who attracts a man from a higher station in life. Both women are thus elevated above their humble breeding into a higher social sphere, but never quite find comfort or safety in their new situation. In the eleven years between the two novels, it appears that Dreiser learned a lot about women. Jennie is a much more complex, realistic, and likeable character than Carrie Meeber. The male leads in each novel are quite similar also—men with established and prestigious positions in the business world who endanger their reputations by taking up with a woman socially beneath them. The one area where Sister Carrie surpasses Jennie Gerhardt is in its depiction of the social and economic conditions of its time, particularly in its scenes of labor unrest. Jennie Gerhardt does explore poverty to some extent, but mostly its an examination of the constricting social conventions and hypocritical moral righteousness rampant in the stratified social structure of the era. It was a time when one instance of premarital sex would brand a woman as a harlot, and anyone who strove to mingle with those financially above them would be firmly reminded of their proper place. Dreiser takes a feminist stance in pointing out the absurdity of such restrictions. Given such a rigid moral code, it’s a wonder how anyone ever got together to make babies.

The most compelling quality of Dreiser’s novel is its authenticity. Jennie is an exceptional girl, by some real-world standards, but she’s no idealized heroine. She makes some stupid mistakes in this book, but they’re real-life mistakes, the kind that you or I or the people we know make every day. Dreiser finds drama in the choices and tribulations of common people and elevates their everyday lives to the level of Greek tragedy. Stylistically, his prose is very much in the vein of Emile Zola’s naturalism. His descriptive passages are marked by an unflinching, almost microscopic realism, yet he goes off into eloquent philosophical asides that ponder the very nature of humanity itself. He’s kinder and gentler than Zola, though. Nothing feels forced or overwrought. I kept expecting that the next turn of the page would bring some monumental tragedy, but it never came. Dreiser shows us realistic people dealing with real-world troubles, yet it’s never dull, sappy, or melodramatic. Though not without its flaws, this novel is an exemplary work of American realism and a compelling read for anyone who enjoys the classic literature of the early 20th century.
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Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

Speckled with moments of brilliance
Carrie Meeber leaves her small-town home in Wisconsin to try to make a life in Chicago. After unsuccessfully searching for steady employment, she gives up and becomes the “kept woman” of a male acquaintance, Charles Drouet. She finds her life with Drouet satisfactory for a while, but when she meets his friend George Hurstwood, a wealthier and more sophisticated gentleman, she begins a secret love affair with this older, married man.

I’m a big fan of the naturalist novel, and Dreiser is renowned as one of the best American practitioners of this literary style. Even so, I was disappointed with this book. Though Dreiser, like an exemplary naturalist, brilliantly captures the naked reality of social conditions and human behavior, that alone doesn’t make a great novel. A great novel requires characters that the reader actually cares about, and that’s what I felt was lacking from this book. It’s unfortunate that Dreiser chose a female protagonist, because he doesn’t display a whole lot of insight into the feminine mind. Based on this book alone, one would think his conception of womankind could be summed up in the phrase, “They like shiny things.” Carrie comes across as shallow and stupid from chapter one. She continually makes life-changing decisions based on her desire for fancier clothing. In the second half of the book we gain more respect for her as she shows some competence in her chosen vocation, but it’s too little too late, and her basic nature doesn’t change. Hurstwood is a far more sympathetic character, but he exhibits his own frustrating assortment of unforgivable faults.

The best portions of the book succeed in spite of the characters and plot, rather than because of them. The expository comments Dreiser makes on human nature are far more insightful than anything being acted out by the book’s cast. The more documentary portions of the book are brilliantly drawn, for example an account of a transit workers’ strike, or the portrayal of the plight of the homeless. Unfortunately it’s difficult to feel much pathos for the one poor character in the book because his fall from riches to rags is brought about by extraordinarily bad decisions. Instead of a “this could happen to anyone” feeling toward poverty, the tragic downfall of the character leaves the reader with the attitude of “that would never happen to me” and “serves him right.”

Sister Carrie is to be commended for its groundbreaking lack of sentimentality and its disregard for the puritanical morality of its day. Its liberating influence on American literature is unquestionable. Enough moments of brilliance shine through this flawed book to show me that Dreiser did have the great American novel within him, and I’m going to keep reading his work until I find it.
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