Engaging Dreiser (review)

A retrospective collection, spanning forty years of scholarship, Engaging Dreiser brings together selected works by Renate von Bardeleben. Serving as a festschrift, the volume begins with an impressive bibliography that marks Bardeleben as leading the Dreiser Renaissance in Europe: she first published a monograph on Dreiser and New York in 1967. Focusing predominately on Dreiser's nonfiction (his travel and autobiographical writings), the volume contains works that were published previously but that were not widely circulated or that are no longer readily available; thus, this collection serves as a valuable resource for Dreiser scholars. Throughout, Bardeleben's scholarship presents Dreiser as an innovative writer who blended travel experiences, autobiography, sociology, and philosophy.

Divided into four parts, Engaging Dreiser begins with two essays that connect Dreiser to his German roots and that introduce Dreiser as a traveler in search of himself, others, and truth. In "Dreiser on the European Continent" (1971), Bardeleben demonstrates the extent to which Dreiser associated Germany with his father, a troubled, emotional connection that he only partially understood. The second essay, "Personal, Ethnic, and National Identity" (1991), further explores Dreiser's German heritage, noting the dedication of the Mayen library site to Theodore Dreiser. Although Bardeleben suggests that Dreiser never fully identified with Germany or the German people, that Dreiser felt a stranger in Germany, and that the German temperament remained for him an elusive mystery, she also finds that he came to appreciate what he considered Germanic traits (honesty, love of order, sobriety, thrift, and industry), traits that he associated with his father. Thinking of Germany as similar to the U.S., more so than other European countries, Dreiser's connection to Germany was strong but emotional, shaped by his troubled relationship with his father.

In Part II, the six essays introduce leitmotifs and stylistic methods that characterize Dreiser's travel writing. The first essay, "Dreiser's English Virgil," analyzes A Traveler of Forty, finding Dreiser's travel literature to be frank, honest, reflective and critical. Grant Richards, the publisher who served as Dreiser's Virgil, guiding him through Europe, becomes a symbol of England. In "Central Europe in Travelogues," Bardeleben again analyzes A Traveler at Forty but also explores Dreiser's 1926 European diary, focusing on his representations of Germany and Austria, showing that, for Dreiser, travel involved a movement inward and outward, an exploration of the self and of the world around him. Contrasting A Traveler at Forty, which is structured as a quest narrative and the 1926 European diary, which is far more fragmented, Bardeleben notes similarities—Dreiser consistently exhibits curiosity, empathy, and balance. In "Theodore Dreiser's European Encounters," Bardeleben contrasts Dreiser with other American travel writers—Thomas Jefferson, Washington Irving, and Henry James—focusing on Dreiser's representation of Oxford in A Traveler at Forty. Here she explores Dreiser's style and narrative technique, showing how Dreiser ironically employs a low colloquial style to compensate for his feelings of alienation and to bridge the distance between himself and his reader. Writing from both the perspective of an educated traveler and from the vantage of a naive tourist, Dreiser creates an irony that informs and entertains.

In an essay analyzing the Russian travel writing of Dreiser and Henry Adams, Bardeleben further reveals travel writing as autobiography and as intellectual exploration. In the Soviet Union, Dreiser was looking for societal innovations, recording all he found, but balancing Soviet advances with failings. Finding Russia to be a brooding hulk, like himself, Dreiser is left with as many questions as answers. In a comparison of Dreiser's Traveler at Forty and Cynthia Ozick's novel The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), Bardeleben finds two authors who are "orphaned by the American dominant culture" and who look to "an old home and its ghosts." But in traveling east, Dreiser finds shame, failure, death, and a family in decline—he actually discovers his name on the German grave of an uncle. In the final essay of Part II, Bardeleben probes Dreiser's...