The Small Canvas: An Introduction to Dreiser's Short Stories by Joseph Griffin (review)

Studies in American Fiction123 Griffin, Joseph. The Small Canvas: An Introduction to Dreiser's Short Stories. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1985. 172 pp. Cloth: $24.50. Theodore Dreiser's primary creative energy, it is clear, was directed toward the novel , but he also wrote autobiographical sketches and autobiographies of great interest and power. Dreiser's efforts as poet, playwright, essayist, and short story writer were seldom successful, though an occasional work in these forms deserves close attention. One brings immediate reservations, therefore, to a full-length study of Dreiser as a short story writer. Is there enough of importance to be said about Dreiser's work in this form to justify more than cursory examination? Joseph Griffin makes a valiant try to answer this question affirmatively, but he does not succeed. He knows Dreiser and Dreiser scholarship well, and he seldom falters in placing each of the thirty-one stories Dreiser wrote during his lifetime in the context of Dreiser's career. But in the end he is defeated by the material itself. Dreiser never evolved a consistent and successful form as a writer of short stories (the epithet "Dreiserian" can be applied to only a few stories), and his short fiction lacks the density of his novels at their best. When a Dreiser story is short it tends toward the superficially anecdotal; when it is long it tends toward a dull repetitiousness. The major exception to this uniform mediocrity is the group of stories he wrote about marriage during the fertile period of his career between Jennie Gerhardt (1911) and An American Tragedy (1925), stories such as "Free," "Chains," and "The Old Neighborhood." These stories reveal both the technical skill and the exploration of the theme of human emptiness, of emotional exhaustion and personal failure, of some of Dreiser's best work. But these and a few other stories are but occasional oases in the desert of Dreiser's short fiction. Griffin might have made a more valuable contribution to Dreiser studies if he had adopted a different angle of approach to Dreiser's short stories. He chooses to proceed chronologically, telling us about the origin, nature, and quality of each story, a method that produces much information about work of little value. A potentially more useful approach would have been to ignore the analysis of each integral story and rather provide , out of an examination of the body of Dreiser's short fiction, a study of those aspects of form and theme which cast the most light on his mind and art in general and on his novels in particular. This method would have resulted in a less tidy but in a perhaps more significant book. Tulane UniversityDonald Pizer Landow, George P. Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Mailer. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968. 198 pp. Cloth: $17.50. George P. Landow has three chief goals in Elegant Jeremiahs: He attempts to show that the essential traits of much of the nonfiction of Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, D. H. Lawrence, and Henry David Thoreau derive from "the quadripartite pattern with which the [Old Testament] prophet usually presents his message" (p. 26); that these traits constitute a recognizable genre that deserves nomination and delineation ; and that this form is used, mutatis mutandis, by several twentieth century American writers, including Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and to a lesser extent, Tom Wolfe and John McPhee. Landow, a Victorian specialist who has published a number of books ...