An American Tragedy and Dreiser's Cousin, Mr. Poe

An American Tragedy and Dreiser's Cousin, Mr, Poe by Del G. Kehl* The critical homage accorded Theodore Dreiser in just the last decade1 would seem to suggest that Irving Howe's assertion, made thirteen years ago, that Dreiser has dropped out of the awareness of cultivated Americans is somewhat more than what he calls a "slight exaggeration."2 As Haskell M. Block points out in Naturalistic Triptych: The Fictive and the Real in Zola, Mann, and Dreiser, "only recently have readers begun to appreciate Dreiser as an artist."3 Unquestionably, it is more readily possible to appraise Dreiser as a serious artist today than it was even a decade ago. Such recent studies as Robert Penn Warren's Homage to Dreiser present the case for recognition of Dreiser's art—for example, what Warren calls "the language of the imagery of enactment" and "the peotry of destiny"4— and argue cogently for, and augur encouragingly of, a much-needed reassessment of Dreiser's fiction. Such a reassessment must consider both of Dreiser's two worlds, not just his meticulously documented world of Naturalism, which has been the primary focus of critical attention, but also his artistic world •D. C. Kehl is Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses in American literature. His publications include The Literary Style ofthe Old Bible and the New ( Bobbs-Merrill), Poetry and the Visual Arts (Wadsworth), and articles on such writers as Hawthorne, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Warren, Lagerkvist, Pynchon, et al., and on literature and the visual arts, literature and theology, literature and popular culture (advertisement, graffiti!, rhetoric and style in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Four Quarters. Cea Critic. Image, Dreiser Newsletter, Maledicta, College English, English Journal. Language Arts, et al. During the spring term, 1979, Professor Kehl is Visiting Scholar at Harvard and Research Fellow at Yale. A summer faculty grant-in-aid from Arizona State University enabled him to conduct the research and write this article. 'See, for example, John J. McAleer's Theodore Dreiser: An Introduction and Interpretation (N.Y.: Holt, 1968); Richard Lehan's Theodore Dreiser: His World and his Novels (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969); Ellen Moers' Two Dreisers (N.Y.: Viking, 1969); Robert Penn Warren's Homage to Dreiser. On the Centennial of His Birth (N.Y.: Random House, 1971); Donald Pizer's The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976). '"Afterword," An American Tragedy (N. Y.: New American Library, 1964), p. 815. 'Naturalistic Triptych: The Fictive and the Realm Zola, Mann, and Dreiser (N Y.: Random House, 1970), p. 76. 'Homage to Dreiser, p. 118. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW211 Dreiser's Cousin of the creative imagination. For as Gertrude Stein remarked, "Writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic; it is separate from themselves; it is not real but it is really there." The imaginative world of Dreiser has received considerably more critical attention of late, in comparisons of his work to that of Balzac, Dostoevski, de Maupassant, Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Menckin, and David Graham Phillips.5 But until recently no examination has been made of Dreiser vis-a-vis Edgar Allan Poe, a relationship more significant than may at first appear, especially in light of Dreiser's characterization of Poe in 1921 as America's "greatest literary genius."6 Even a cursory reading of the three volumes of Dreiser's letters impresses one with the novelist's pervasive admiration for and preoccupation with that "forlorn daemon," Mr. Poe. If Carrie Meeber had Balzac (Père Goriot) on her knees, Dreiser himself had Poe in his mind, as he expressed it in a letter to Sherwood Anderson in 1935.7 But even earlier, and especially when he was struggling with the raw material of An American Tragedy and throughout that novel's gestation period, the dominant figure in Dreiser's mind was apparently not Balzac, nor Dostoevski, nor even "that other Baltimore scoundrel, Henry L. Mencken,"8 but Poe. As early as 1916, Dreiser remarked in a letter to Mencken that he had read Poe, along with Dickens, Scott, Thackeray...