Theodore Dreiser / A Picture and Criticism of Life: New Letters, Volume I, and: American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather (review)

A Picture and Criticism of Life, Donald Pizer's edited volume of new Dreiser letters, the first in some time, is a welcome installment in the Dreiser Edition and provides fresh perspectives on Dreiser's life and work. The letters range from 1888 to 1945, with more than half written after 1930. Because a second volume, Letters to Women (2008), focuses on Dreiser's female relationships, such letters do not appear here. Pizer's useful introduction identifies the letters' "single broad plot" of a writer moving from initial difficulty and self-absorption to wider concern for his fellow writers and conditions in the nation. While this plot unifies the diverse letters, its various themes reveal, as Pizer says, a portrait of Dreiser that is "sufficiently complex to border on the indefinable."

In presenting Dreiser's "picture and criticism of life" the letters further transform our picture of Dreiser himself. As magazine editor or critic of others' work, he dispensed advice which he himself might have resented about censoring offensive material or praised concision and structural economy which he rarely modeled. The often prickly Dreiser sometimes expressed appreciation for his male friendships in surprisingly poignant letters to Richard Duffy and Edgar Lee Masters. Some of these letters reveal Dreiser as unexpectedly quirky and approachable: he composed a 1938 letter to Masters as if he had been shanghaied to France to stump for peace for the American League Against War and Fascism. Even as the letters reveal more about Dreiser's social activism, they demonstrate his Anglophobia and anti-Catholic biases and, most significantly, his anti-Semitic views.

The letters also reveal Dreiser's often paranoid but always passionate efforts to protect his work and literary legacy. He repeatedly tried to secure a publisher for a uniform edition of his works and to acquire international copyrights. Believing that Universal Studios plagiarized Jennie Gerhardt in its film version of Fannie Hurst's novel Back Street, Dreiser penned a spectacularly indignant letter to Universal vice-president Robert Cochrane, in which he snarled, "What is needed is an apology from life itself for the existence of your type." Ultimately, the letters project Dreiser's eventual view of himself as a figure of importance whose life reflects his times. Dreiser believed that his biographical writing supplied a "running history" of both himself and America, and Pizer's editorial skill in assembling and providing an interpretive framework for this valuable edition underscores the significant role that personal correspondence plays in our understanding of writers and their cultural moment.

In his introduction to American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather, Pizer notes that his editing of Dreiser's letters and interviews inspired this examination of how and why anti-Semitism appears in the work of socially progressive writers who seem unaware of the contradiction between their progressivism and anti-Semitism. He explores how the writers' beliefs took shape in response to social circumstances, such as Populism and turn-of-the-century immigration and as a reflection of belief in the degenerate character of Jews and in the Anglo-Saxon origins of American culture.

Pizer begins with Garland's subtle anti-Semitism, largely revealed through omissions in his writing. Pizer's discussion of the anti-Semitic foundations of the Populist movement and its influence on Garland is illuminating. He argues that Garland's idealized portraits of Ida Wilbur in A Spoil of Office, based on Populist leader Mary Elizabeth Lease, and Henry Ford in Afternoon Neighbors reveal bias through the omission of Lease's and Ford's anti-Semitism. Pizer's contention that Garland sanctions the anti-Semitism of Lease and Ford by ignoring it feels tenuous without the prescient point...