The Financier: Dreiser's Marriage of Heaven and Hell

THE FINANCIER: DREISER'S MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL Stephen C. Brennan Louisiana State University in Shreveport "How is life organized?" asks twelve-year-old Frank Cowperwood in the first chapter of The Financier. He thinks he finds the answer in a fishmonger's window display, where, over several days, a lobster devours a squid: "Things lived on each other—that was it."1 This famous passage seems to announce the theme of the book. "Life is combat," Richard Lehan puts it. "The battle is to the cunning and strong, and Christian morality and Puritan conventions are a distortion of man's very nature."2 Despite its frequent animal metaphors, however, The Financier does not support a purely Darwinian reading . The lobster incident, like Frank's earlier battles with street toughs, does less to explain life than to dramatize how a particular temperament responds to environmental forces. New experiences bring new explanations as well as aesthetic and spiritual yearnings irrelevant to financial combat. Cowperwood never figures out how life is organized , but through him Theodore Dreiser intimates a moral order grounded in what he elsewhere calls "the mystery and wonder and terror of life."3 Although by his own account Herbert Spencer's First Principles had blown his faith and intellectual conceptions "to bits" in 1894, Dreiser eventually found religious comfort in the new evolutionary science and philosophy. In the epilogue to the autobiographical novel The "Genius," written shortly before The Financier but not published until 1915, he dismisses religion as a temporary "bandage" for those bloodied by circumstance, yet his alter ego, Eugene Witla, still needs the consolation of Spencer's "unknowable," a universe "eternal , uncreated" and characterized by "transcendent mysteries."4 Another of Dreiser's favorite writers was Ernst Haeckel, whose The Riddle of the Universe he considered a "brilliant synthesis" proving the unity of animal and man, body and spirit. Haeckel defined science as a new pantheistic religion, monism, based on the "Law of Substance," the persistence of matter and force. Realizing that scientific facts lack emotional appeal, Haeckel called for a new mythology that would employ Christianity's existing forms to embody "the real trinity of the nineteenth century" (the true, the good, and the beautiful) much as "the ancient Greeks incarnated their ideals of virtue in divine shapes."5 Though he questioned Haeckel's ethical idealism, Dreiser was, in his own way, trying to answer this call. 56Stephen C. Brennan The evidence appears in A Traveler at Forty. In late 1911, when he was about three-fifths through the first draft of The Financier, Dreiser undertook a European tour so he could complete his research for the Cowperwood trilogy and write a travel book. Though largely a collection of superficial impressions, A Traveler at Forty explores at least one profoundly troubling issue, the contrast between modern Christianity's dead formalism and the primitive faith that raised Europe's cathedrals. Echoing Haeckel, Dreiser admits that faith is justifiable because science has "not as yet solved the riddle of the universe," and he worries that ruthless materialism has destroyed the power of "religious legend." What the world needs, however, is not a return to old beliefs but a new emphasis on the "thought of divinity in the individual."6 For some time, the revelation of that individual divinity had been one of his goals as a writer. In the autobiographical An Amateur Laborer and "The Mighty Burke," both written in 1904, he gave Christ-like and Jehovah-like qualities to men of compassion and personal force, though those men—a songwriter (his brother Paul Dresser), an ex-wrestler and sanatarium director, a construction boss— could not bear much mythological weight. In the robber baron Charles Tyson Yerkes, however, Dreiser found a more adequate subject. Recasting Yerkes' Philadelphia career in The Financier, he produced a deeply researched and massively detailed account of American financial life that was also a personal myth embodying what M. H. Abrams terms a "displaced and reconstituted theology."7 Central to Dreiser's notion of divinity was the instability and apparent duality of a monistic universe. Sometime between 1911 and 1914, while working on The Financier and The Titan, Dreiser wrote "A Confession of...