The Left Bank of the Wabash

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF THEODORE DREISER (349 pp.)--World ($3).

Theodore Dreiser wrote like a man with a toothache, and his work has all the painful sincerity of a groan. Few American writers of the first rank are in such a condition of neglect by literary fashion, and no other American writer of the first rank is known to have joined the Communist Party. These facts are related, though not directly.

Toward the end of his life (he died in 1945), Dreiser often seemed far gone in alcohol, and he spoke about Russia with an undergraduate's defensive truculence. "Oh, you can't beat that system . . . a whole country belonging to the people," he told an interviewer in 1941. Power and pity were his themes, and things called corporations--which in his view brutalized those who controlled them and crushed those who did not--were his enemies. All his life, says Novelist James Farrell in an introduction to these stories,* Dreiser was on a quest for "a theory of existence.''

What he found was a simple-minded materialism--human beings were atoms in a cruel and incomprehensible cosmic scheme. There was always, as he ends one story called Free, "the innate cruelty of life, its blazing ironic indifference." The same theme runs through other stories:

P: St. Columba and the River details how a quirk of hydrodynamics blows a sand hog unharmed from a collapsing tunnel to the surface of a river. With leaden humor, Dreiser jeers at the man's belief that the saints had preserved him.

P: Nigger Jeff tells with blind pity the story of a lynching, which ends with a mother's moans in a darkened cabin and the resolve of a newspaperman to "get it all in."

P: My Brother Paul gives an autobiographical account of Dreiser's love for his composer-brother Paul Dresser (he changed his name), and how Dreiser came to write the opening lines for his brother's best-remembered composition, now the state song of Indiana:

Oh the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash,

From the field there comes the breath of new-mown hay.

P: The Lost Phoebe probably comes closest to expressing the essence of Dreiser's drab vision of life. An old farmer becomes convinced that his dead wife is actually lost in the woods and wanders year after year in search of her. He is granted one happy hallucination, blunders toward the apparition, and falls to his death at the foot of a cliff.

"Indiana Peasant." A world revolution in taste and manners has come and gone since Dreiser wrote Sister Carrie in 1900. By 1916, H. L. Mencken had hailed this "Indiana peasant" as an ally in his war against sentimental fiction at the same time that he made a whole chrestomathy of Dreiser's woebegone phraseology and chapfallen cliches.

Mencken's shrewd assessment suggests a clue to Dreiser's loneliness and the ursine indignation that set him on the path toward his final intellectual disaster. The man had a hankering after general ideas, but no talent for them. Dreiser had juggled with New Thought--a heresy from common sense fashionable before World War I--as well as with antiSemitism. Yet his was the genuine voice of a man who has lost his bearings in industrial society. His sense of pity and tragedy never left him, and for men of such temperament who retain a materialist philosophy, there "lies in wait," as Whittaker Chambers testified, "the evil thing--Communism."

Blank Sense of Pain. Dreiser the secular tragedian lurched toward the apocalypse of revolution like a blind bear shambling to its cave. When he joined the Communist Party, he wrote William Z. Foster that it was the "logic of my life."

In a time of hope and full employment, Dreiser's philosophy of poverty is in eclipse. Few today will respect his ultimate decision, but it must be conceded that his fiction came from deep in American life. Dreiser could not bear a world in which beloved brothers could die friendless, in which foreign aristocrats could sneer, wax rich and make wars, in which women--as in An American Tragedy--could be murdered because they became pregnant at socially inappropriate times.

This glum and clumsy man, who sometimes seemed to be making animal noises rather than writing prose, is still able to make the reader share his blank sense of pain. The U.S. has never been patient with its pessimists, but to square accounts with a Dreiser, mere optimism is not enough.

* Published previously, in 1947, with an introduction by Communist Author Howard Fast.

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