Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire: The Financier as Artist

Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire: The Financier as Artist CARL S. SMITH Cowperwood was innately and primarily an egoist and intellectual, though blended strongly therewith was a humane and democratic spirit. We think of egoism and intellectualism as closely confined to the arts. Finance is an art. And it presents the operations of the subtlest of the intellectuals and of the egoists. Cowperwood was a financier. Instead of dwelling on the works of nature, its beauty and subtlety, to his material disadvantage, he found a happy mean, owing to the swiftness of his intellectual operations, whereby he could, intellectually and emotionally, rejoice in the beauty of life without interfering with his perpetual material and financial calculations .1 Most readers of Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire- The Financier,The Titan, and TheStoic - view the portrayal of Frank Cowperwood's life primarily in the light ofDarwin, Spencer, and Nietzsche, as an illustration of Dreiser's belief that lifeis defined by a struggle among forces. Cowperwood's career, an odd combination of self-portrait and wish-fulfillment on Dreiser's part, illustrates what happens to the strong and "successful" personality in this struggle. While this approach is unquestionably valid, it does not pay sufficient attention to the implications of Dreiser's assertion in the Trilogy that the viciously materialistic world of urban entrepreneur capitalism which Cowperwood rules is one of the most promising subjects for the novelist, and that the financier is the ultimate creative artist of this period. The Trilogy is in fact an important commentary on American culture. Dreiser's handling of his subject, however, is at times contradictory and uncertain, and the books require close examination in order to determine exactly what he is saying and what the Trilogy implies about business and art in America. What I propose to do here is clarify Dreiser's definition of the financier as artist and explore the links between the Trilogy and the rest of his career. I. THE FINANCIER AS ARTIST FrankCowperwood follows the most improbable of paths to his apotheosis as a figure of major cultural importance: questionable financial manipulations in THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 Philadelphia that send him to prison, a dozen or more adulterous liaisons, an unsuccessful attempt to crash society in late nineteenth century Chicago, and the construction of an empire based mainly on a series of over-valued streetcar companies. And yet, in the course of the Trilogy, he progresses from artist of finance to pure artist, from a sophisticated materialist who collects paintings asa means of displaying his wealth to a kind of aesthetic mystic. Dreiser's point is that all of Cowperwood's experiences, though not worth celebrating in and of themselves, are essential to Cowperwood's growth and to life and art in America, Throughout the TrilogyDreiser repeatedly calls Cowperwood an artist. Butjust what kind of "artist" is he? Dreiser's opinion about this seems to vary. In the passage cited above as epigraph, placed early in The Financier,Dreiser first states flatly that finance is an art, but he immediately distinguishes its world - that of the material - from the artistic world of nature, beauty, and subtlety. In other wnrds, he implicitly states that the artist as financier (or vice versa), if not exprP%ly anti-nature or beauty or subtlety, is not one with the artist as poet or painter. Cowperwood is a great businessman in spite of the fact that he is an ,1esthete; he must use his intelligence and self-control to keep the two worlds of business ;md art separate. At this point in the Trilogy, the most Dreiser claims is that the artist (by which he usually means the painter or writer) and the financier are symbiotically related, e;-ichdependent on and yet very different from the other. Although he clearly respects the business intellect, Dreiser never maintains that matters of high finance are the same as abstractions of philosophy and aesthetics; he never equates the problem of controlling a city's gas supply with the question of determining what is truth, or with the processes by which the artist creates beauty. On an early trip to Europe, for...