Slippery, Protean Everything

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF THEODORE DREISER (349 pp.)--Edited with an introduction by Howard Fast--World ($2.75).

No U.S. writer has ever gone so far with so little talent as Indiana-born Theodore Dreiser. His famous novels (Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy) laid bare the seamy side of life with a bumbling crudity and literary formlessness that often alienated critics and readers alike. But he had the sincerity of a dedicated social worker and the naive, sentimental garrulousness of a kindly, troubled country neighbor. They brought him an audience and a place in U.S. literary history.

This collection of 14 of his short stories, published less than two years after his death, provides high-caliber ammunition for Dreiser's detractors. The homely virtues are still here: the worried kindliness with which he awkwardly embraces his characters, the groping for the why of inhuman behavior. Typical tales:

Phantom Gold: A dreary recital of the greed that consumes a Tobacco Road-like family when mineral deposits on their worn-out farm bring them big money.

Free: A study of a successful but convention-bound man too timid to leave the wife he has never loved.

The Old Neighborhood: About a man who left his good but commonplace wife and wound up with a guilty conscience.

Dreiser's brooding and bewilderment led him into the Communist Party at 73, a year before he died. (This present collection is edited by Novelist Howard Fast, one of the editors of the Communist New Masses.) In his writing Dreiser's bewilderment led him into confused and confusing passages like the following (from The Old Neighborhood):

"But the little boundaries of so-called health and decay, strength and weakness, as well as all alleged fixity or changelessness of things--how he had brooded on all that, at that time. And how all thought of fixity in anything had disappeared as a ridiculous illusion intended, maybe, by something to fool man into the belief that his world here, his physical and mental state, was real and enduring, a greater thing than anything else in the universe, when so plainly it was not. But not himself. A mere shadow--an illusion --nothing. ... It had all come to him, the evanescence of everything, its slippery, protean changefulness. Everything was alive, and everything was nothing, in so far as its seeming reality was concerned. And yet everything was everything but still capable of being undermined, changed, improved, or come at in some hitherto undreamed-of-way--even by so humble a creature as himself, an inventor--and used as a chained force, if only one knew how. ... He had become conscious of anterior as well as ulterior forces and immensities and fathomless wells of wisdom and energy, and had enslaved a minute portion of them, that was all. But not here! Oh, no. Later!"

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