Norman Mailer, Theodore Dreiser, and the Politics of American Literary History

Norman Mailer’s essay “Modes and Mutations: Quick Comments on the Modern American Novel” was first read by Mailer at the December 1965 Modern Language Association meeting. It then appeared in Commentary (March 1966) and subsequently in Mailer’s collection of essays Cannibals and Christians (1966). Although the piece may strike the present-day reader as lightweight—of interest principally as an example of Mailer in full flight in his role as the enfant terrible of mid-twentieth century American cultural polemics—it is also a work of considerable historical density. Its central thesis reveals much more than is initially apparent about some of the major literary, social, and political currents of the day as these feed into an effort to construct an overarching interpretation of American literary history. In addition, while ostensibly a defense of the importance of Dreiser’s fiction within this history, the essay misrepresents the central thrust of Dreiser’s fiction in ways that helped perpetuate an inadequate understanding of its basic nature.

Mailer’s thesis in “Modes and Mutations” rests on the common-place that American novelists write poorly about members of a class other than their own. This position had earlier been reflected in Marxist arguments of the 1930s that middle class–bred authors were incapable of writing truthfully about working-class experience. Mailer revives the idea in his essay by positing that the generation of early twentieth-century American writers that had its roots in recent immigrant stock was almost uniformly unsuccessful in depicting upper-class characters and their milieus. This communicative barrier between classes, Mailer believes, occurred despite the prevalent American mythology of a largely classless society in the United States, one in which a huge middle class subsumed and thus in effect eliminated the insuperable wall between classes characteristic of European society.

Mailer offers the fiction of Theodore Dreiser to support his position. The child of German-speaking immigrants, Dreiser during his working-class youth experienced a wide variety of ill-paying and degrading jobs while living in the midst of a family collapsing under the pressures of poverty and the need of its youngest members to escape. Dreiser had been imprinted indelibly by this immersion in “the game as it is played,” as he himself later described the social context of his fiction. And it was from this firsthand experience, Mailer claims in “Modes and Mutations,” that Dreiser “came closer to understanding the social machine than any American writer who ever lived.” But Dreiser’s fiction, Mailer goes on to explain, although it could serve as a guide for anyone seeking “to smash down doors now locked to him,” also revealed Dreiser’s inability to depict successfully social classes other than his own. Dreiser, he stated, “went blind climbing the mountains of society.” He had “no eye for the deadly important manners of the rich—he was obliged to call a rich girl ‘charming’; he could not make her charming when she spoke. . . . Tactics—the manners of the drawing room, the deaths and lives of the drawing room, the cocktail party, the glorious tactics of the individual kill—that was all beyond him.”

Mailer’s reading of Dreiser as a leading instance of an American writer of lower-class background, who derives his social insights from that context but is unable to transcend its limitations, is directly related to Lionel Trilling’s devastating critique of Dreiser’s work as a whole in “Reality in America” in The Liberal Imagination (1950). Trilling viewed both V. L. Parrington and Dreiser as inadequate thinkers whose intellectual limitations were tolerated and even celebrated by leftist critics because their writing seemingly derived from “the substantial stuff of life” rather than (as in Henry James) from “electric qualities of mind.” For both Parrington and Dreiser—especially for Dreiser, Trilling argues—this preference by critics for a literary work devoted to depicting the concretely “real” rather than for one displaying “a complex and rapid imagination” (again as in James) was closely related to a preference for working-class solidities as opposed to an aristocratic play of intellect. In this...