This questionable plan has now brought me to Dreiser’s third novel -- The Financier, published in 1912. It is, as I came to understand, actually only half of a longer novel that Dreiser wrote at the time, being split into two for publication -- The Financier in 1912 and The Titan in 1914.
The Lobster and the Squid
Unlike Dreiser’s previous two novels, the protagonist of The Financier is not a woman but a man; a man named Frank Algernon Cowperwood, and this is how we are first introduced to him -- not as a man, but as a ten-year-old boy.
Frank Cowperwood, even at ten, was a natural-born leader. At the day school he attended, and later at the Central High School, he was looked upon as one whose common sense could unquestionably be trusted in all cases. He was a sturdy youth, courageous and defiant. From the very start of his life, he wanted to know about economics and politics. He cared nothing for books. He was a clean, stalky, shapely boy, with a bright, clean-cut, incisive face; large, clear, gray eyes; a wide forehead; short, bristly, dark-brown hair. He had an incisive, quick-motioned, self-sufficient manner, and was forever asking questions with a keen desire for an intelligent reply. He never had an ache or pain, ate his food with gusto, and ruled his brothers with a rod of iron. “Come on, Joe!” “Hurry, Ed!” These commands were issued in no rough but always a sure way, and Joe and Ed came. They looked up to Frank from the first as a master, and what he had to say was listened to eagerly.
And then, as a way of demonstrating an essential element of young Frank’s character, Dreiser relays the following parable about a lobster and a squid.
He was forever pondering, pondering -- one fact astonishing him quite as much as another -- for he could not figure out how this thing he had come into -- this life -- was organized. How did all these people get into the world? What were they doing here? Who started things, anyhow? His mother told him the story of Adam and Eve, but he didn’t believe it. There was a fish-market not so very far from his home, and there, on his way to see his father at the bank, or conducting his brothers on after-school expeditions, he liked to look at a certain tank in front of one store where were kept odd specimens of sea-life brought in by the Delaware Bay fishermen. He saw once there a sea-horse -- just a queer little sea-animal that looked somewhat like a horse -- and another time he saw an electric eel which Benjamin Franklin’s discovery had explained. One day he saw a squid and a lobster put in the tank, and in connection with them was witness to a tragedy which stayed with him all his life and cleared things up considerably intellectually. The lobster, it appeared from the talk of the idle bystanders, was offered no food, as the squid was considered his rightful prey. He lay at the bottom of the clear glass tank on the yellow sand, apparently seeing nothing -- you could not tell in which way his beady, black buttons of eyes were looking -- but apparently they were never off the body of the squid. The latter, pale and waxy in texture, looking very much like pork fat or jade, moved about in torpedo fashion; but his movements were apparently never out of the eyes of his enemy, for by degrees small portions of his body began to disappear, snapped off by the relentless claws of his pursuer. The lobster would leap like a catapult to where the squid was apparently idly dreaming, and the squid, very alert, would dart away, shooting out at the same time a cloud of ink, behind which it would disappear. It was not always completely successful, however. Small portions of its body or its tail were frequently left in the claws of the monster below. Fascinated by the drama, young Cowperwood came daily to watch.
One morning he stood in front of the tank, his nose almost pressed to the glass. Only a portion of the squid remained, and his ink-bag was emptier than ever. In the corner of the tank sat the lobster, poised apparently for action.
The boy stayed as long as he could, the bitter struggle fascinating him. Now, maybe, or in an hour or a day, the squid might die, slain by the lobster, and the lobster would eat him. He looked again at the greenish-copperish engine of destruction in the corner and wondered when this would be. To-night, maybe. He would come back to-night.
He returned that night, and lo! the expected had happened. There was a little crowd around the tank. The lobster was in the corner. Before him was the squid cut in two and partially devoured.
“He got him at last,” observed one bystander. “I was standing right here an hour ago, and up he leaped and grabbed him. The squid was too tired. He wasn’t quick enough. He did back up, but the lobster he calculated on his doing that. He’s been figuring on his movements for a long time now. He got him to-day.”
Frank only stared. Too bad he had missed this. The least touch of sorrow for the squid came to him as he stared at it slain. Then he gazed at the victor.
“That’s the way it has to be, I guess,” he commented to himself. “That squid wasn’t quick enough.” He figured it out.
“The squid couldn’t kill the lobster -- he had no weapon. The lobster could kill the squid -- he was heavily armed. There was nothing for the squid to feed on; the lobster had the squid as prey. What was the result to be? What else could it be? He didn’t have a chance,” he concluded finally, as he trotted on homeward.
The incident made a great impression on him. It answered in a rough way that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: “How is life organized?” Things lived on each other -- that was it. Lobsters lived on squid and other things. What lived on lobsters? Men, of course! Sure, that was it! And what lived on men? he asked himself. Was it other men? Wild animals lived on men. And there were Indians and cannibals. And some men were killed by storms and accidents. He wasn’t so sure about men living on men; but men did kill each other. How about wars and street fights and mobs? He had seen a mob once. It attacked the Public Ledger building as he was coming home from school. His father had explained why. It was about the slaves. That was it! Sure, men lived on men. Look at the slaves. They were men. That’s what all this excitement was about these days. Men killing other men -- negroes.
Dreiser is doing two important things here. First, he’s giving us a key to understand much of what is to come. Lobsters and squid. As we watch Frank Cowperwood grow into manhood and establish himself in business, this will be an underlying metaphor that we can come back to again and again. Who is the lobster and who is the squid? It is to be a foundational question that will help unlock many of Frank’s actions and decisions.
But the second thing is probably more revealing. Frank sees evidence of the natural order in his parable. Lobsters eat squid. Of course they do. What else could it be? But as his young mind maps that predator and prey relationship onto his understanding of the affairs of men, and especially onto the cultural structures of pre-Civil War American slavery, he will conflate them, and think one is just a natural as the other.
In both of his previous works, Dreiser emphasized the natural state of humans, and showed through the examples of Carrie Meeber and Jennie Gerhardt how that nature inevitably clashes with and must confront the cultural assumptions into which it is born. Here, Dreiser is setting up his third protagonist to come to a different understanding -- it is the culture that is natural, and that culture is the one that views men as lobsters and squid.
Frank begins his financial career in banking, and as he rises from one position to the next, each one more entrepreneurial than the last, we see Frank applying this “lobster and squid” analysis to the men and people that he meets along the way.
On the way home that evening he speculated as to the nature of this business. He knew he wasn’t going to stay there long, even in spite of this gift and promise of salary. They were grateful, of course; but why shouldn’t they be? He was efficient, he knew that; under him things moved smoothly. It never occurred to him that he belonged in the realm of clerkdom. Those people were the kind of beings who ought to work for him, and who would. There was nothing savage in his attitude, no rage against fate, no dark fear of failure. These two men he worked for were already nothing more than characters in his eyes -- their business significated itself. He could see their weaknesses and their shortcomings as a much older man might have viewed a boy’s.
He is a lobster. They are squid.
He is still a young man when the War Between the States begins, and in this conflagration his perspective will be cemented.
Cowperwood was only twenty-five at the time, a cool, determined youth, who thought the slave agitation might be well founded in human rights -- no doubt was -- but exceedingly dangerous to trade. He hoped the North would win; but it might go hard with him personally and other financiers. He did not care to fight. That seemed silly for the individual man to do. Others might -- there were many poor, thin-minded, half-baked creatures who would put themselves up to be shot; but they were only fit to be commanded or shot down. As for him, his life was sacred to himself and his family and his personal interests. He recalled seeing, one day, in one of the quiet side streets, as the working-men were coming home from their work, a small enlisting squad of soldiers in blue marching enthusiastically along, the Union flag flying, the drummers drumming, the fifes blowing, the idea being, of course, to so impress the hitherto indifferent or wavering citizen, to exalt him to such a pitch, that he would lose his sense of proportion, of self-interest, and, forgetting all -- wife, parents, home, children -- and seeing only the great need of the country, fall in behind and enlist. He saw one workingman swinging his pail, and evidently not contemplating any such denouement to his day’s work, pause, listen as the squad approached, hesitate as it drew close, and as it passed, with a peculiar look of uncertainty or wonder in his eyes, fall in behind and march solemnly away to the enlisting quarters. What was it that had caught this man, Frank asked himself. How was he overcome so easily? He had not intended to go. His face was streaked with the grease and dirt of his work -- he looked like a foundry man or machinist, say twenty-five years of age. Frank watched the little squad disappear at the end of the street round the corner under the trees.
They are definitely squid, and now Frank is working to understand how they are moved -- and how they can be manipulated. Just like the lobster he saw in that fish market tank as a young boy.
A New Morality
As Frank grows in business success, as he grows in his own personal power and influence, he begins to see what is possible at the very pinnacle of the mountain he is climbing.
Why, these giants of commerce and money could do as they pleased in this life, and did. He had already had ample local evidence of it in more than one direction. Worse -- the little guardians of so-called law and morality, the newspapers, the preachers, the police, and the public moralists generally, so loud in their denunciation of evil in humble places, were cowards all when it came to corruption in high ones. They did not dare to utter a feeble squeak until some giant had accidentally fallen and they could do so without danger to themselves. Then, O Heavens, the palaver! What beatings of tom-toms! What mouthings of pharisaical moralities -- platitudes! Run now, good people, for you may see clearly how evil is dealt with in high places! It made him smile. Such hypocrisy! Such cant! Still, so the world was organized, and it was not for him to set it right. Let it wag as it would. The thing for him to do was to get rich and hold his own -- to build up a seeming of virtue and dignity which would pass muster for the genuine thing. Force would do that. Quickness of wit. And he had these. “I satisfy myself,” was his motto; and it might well have been emblazoned upon any coat of arms which he could have contrived to set forth his claim to intellectual and social nobility.
For Cowperwood, it is a new morality -- one premised not on humility, but on the pretense of it. Powered by wealth and influence, it is essentially Satan’s creed -- do what thou wilt -- writ large, and not just across a single man’s life, but across the upper crust of man’s very culture and society -- as true as any innate virtue or dignity that a poorer man might have.
With this as his credo and aspiration, Cowperwood will cut bigger and bigger deals, and take bigger and bigger risks, parlaying first small amounts of money into large ones, and then large amounts of money into enormous ones.
At the sight of Stires the thought in regard to the sixty thousand dollars’ worth of city loan certificates, previously referred to, flashed suddenly through his mind. He had not deposited them in the sinking-fund, and did not intend to for the present -- could not, unless considerable free money were to reach him shortly -- for he had used them to satisfy other pressing demands, and had no free money to buy them back -- or, in other words, release them. And he did not want to just at this moment. Under the law governing transactions of this kind with the city treasurer, he was supposed to deposit them at once to the credit of the city, and not to draw his pay therefor from the city treasurer until he had. To be very exact, the city treasurer, under the law, was not supposed to pay him for any transaction of this kind until he or his agents presented a voucher from the bank or other organization carrying the sinking-fund for the city showing that the certificates so purchased had actually been deposited there. As a matter of fact, under the custom which had grown up between him and Stener, the law had long been ignored in this respect. He could buy certificates of city loan for the sinking-fund up to any reasonable amount, hypothecate them where he pleased, and draw his pay from the city without presenting a voucher. At the end of the month sufficient certificates of city loan could usually be gathered from one source and another to make up the deficiency, or the deficiency could actually be ignored, as had been done on more than one occasion, for long periods of time, while he used money secured by hypothecating the shares for speculative purposes. This was actually illegal; but neither Cowperwood nor Stener saw it in that light or cared.
One complaint I have about this book is that there is too much of this in it, too much detail about the inner workings of Frank’s actual schemes, but it is passages like this that eventually underline the key point. Laws did not apply to men like Frank Cowperwood. And as this theme developed into a plot line I found myself beginning to wonder: Will Cowperwood pay a price? Is he the hero or the villain of this story?
For Frank Cowperwood is an interesting kind of protagonist, especially when contrasted with Dreiser’s previous two heroines. As he comes to embrace this new morality, Dreiser gives us frequent glimpses into his state of mind, and the conclusions one must draw from those glimpses become more and more obvious and inevitable.
That thing conscience, which obsesses and rides some people to destruction, did not trouble him at all. He had no consciousness of what is currently known as sin. There were just two faces to the shield of life from the point of view of his peculiar mind -- strength and weakness. Right and wrong? He did not know about those. They were bound up in metaphysical abstrusities about which he did not care to bother. Good and evil? Those were toys of clerics, by which they made money. And as for social favor or social ostracism which, on occasion, so quickly followed upon the heels of disaster of any kind, well, what was social ostracism? Had either he or his parents been of the best society as yet? And since not, and despite this present mix-up, might not the future hold social restoration and position for him? It might. Morality and immorality? He never considered them. But strength and weakness -- oh, yes! If you had strength you could protect yourself always and be something. If you were weak -- pass quickly to the rear and get out of the range of the guns. He was strong, and he knew it, and somehow he always believed in his star. Something -- he could not say what -- it was the only metaphysics he bothered about -- was doing something for him. It had always helped him. It made things come out right at times. It put excellent opportunities in his way. Why had he been given so fine a mind? Why always favored financially, personally? He had not deserved it -- earned it. Accident, perhaps, but somehow the thought that he would always be protected -- these institutions, the “hunches” to act which he frequently had -- could not be so easily explained. Life was a dark, insoluble mystery, but whatever it was, strength and weakness were its two constituents. Strength would win -- weakness lose. He must rely on swiftness of thought, accuracy, his judgment, and on nothing else. He was really a brilliant picture of courage and energy -- moving about briskly in a jaunty, dapper way, his mustaches curled, his clothes pressed, his nails manicured, his face clean-shaven and tinted with health.
He is, in a word, a psychopath. A person without empathy, without morality, hyperfocused on himself and the aggrandizement of his own ego, and who seems convinced that the universe, if it cares at all, cares only about him and his “strength.”
Aileen Butler is No Jennie Gerhardt
As a young man, Cowperwood marries an older woman, and soon grows tired of her. He then begins a long affair with a young woman named Aileen Butler, who becomes slavishly devoted to him -- even to a degree that frightens and scandalizes her family.
“I’ve been thinkin’ about ye, Aileen, and what ought to be done in this case,” began her father without preliminaries of any kind once they were in his “office room” in the house together. “You’re on the road to ruin if any one ever was. I tremble when I think of your immortal soul. I want to do somethin’ for ye, my child, before it’s too late. I’ve been reproachin’ myself for the last month and more, thinkin’, perhaps, it was somethin’ I had done, or maybe had failed to do, aither me or your mother, that has brought ye to the place where ye are to-day. Needless to say, it’s on me conscious, me child. It’s a heartbroken man you’re lookin’ at this day. I’ll never be able to hold me head up again. Oh, the shame -- the shame! That I should have lived to see it!”
Here is all the cultural baggage of Dreiser’s first two novels, about to come crashing down on a young woman who, like Carrie Meeber and Jennie Gerhardt before her, finds herself the infatuated object of a rich and powerful man. And how does Aileen Butler react?
“But father,” protested Aileen, who was a little distraught at the thought of having to listen to a long preachment which would relate to her duty to God and the Church and her family and her mother and him. She realized that all these were important in their way; but Cowperwood and his point of view had given her another outlook on life. They had discussed this matter of families -- parents, children, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters -- from almost every point of view. Cowperwood’s laissez-faire attitude had permeated and colored her mind completely. She saw things through his cold, direct “I satisfy myself” attitude. He was sorry for all the little differences of personality that sprang up between people, causing quarrels, bickerings, oppositions, and separation; but they could not be helped. People outgrew each other. Their points of view altered at varying ratios -- hence changes. Morals -- those who had them had them; those who hadn’t, hadn’t. There was no explaining. As for him, he saw nothing wrong in the sex relationship. Between those who were mutually compatible it was innocent and delicious. Aileen in his arms, unmarried, but loved by him, and he by her, was as good and pure as any living woman -- a great deal purer than most. One found oneself in a given social order, theory, or scheme of things. For purposes of social success, in order not to offend, to smooth one’s path, make things easy, avoid useless criticism, and the like, it was necessary to create an outward seeming -- ostensibly conform. Beyond that it was not necessary to do anything. Never fail, never get caught. If you did, fight your way out silently and say nothing. That was what he was doing in connection with his present financial troubles; that was what he had been ready to do the other day when they were caught. It was something of all this that was coloring Aileen’s mood as she listened at present.
“But father,” she protested, “I love Mr. Cowperwood. It’s almost the same as if I were married to him. He will marry me some day when he gets a divorce from Mrs. Cowperwood. You don’t understand how it is. He’s very fond of me, and I love him. He needs me.”
Indeed he does need her. His needs are about all that seems to matter in this passage, with Aileen, even in her own thoughts, completely subsumed by Cowperwood and his amoral understanding of the world.
What Is and What Appears to Be
Frank Cowperwood is a difficult protagonist to root for -- and that makes The Financier a difficult novel to get through. In the end -- and remember, it is not really the end, since The Financier is really just the first half of a longer work that Dreiser created -- Cowperwood is unable to stay one step ahead of his schemes and he is convicted of his financial crimes and sent to the state penitentiary for a term of four years and three months. But even in this desperate situation, Cowperwood’s understanding of himself and the world around him is unchanged.
Cowperwood stood there while the water ran, meditating on his fate. It was strange how life had dealt with him of late -- so severely. Unlike most men in his position, he was not suffering from a consciousness of evil. He did not think he was evil. As he saw it, he was merely unfortunate. To think that he should be actually in this great, silent penitentiary, a convict, waiting here beside this cheap iron bathtub, not very sweet or hygienic to contemplate, with this crackbrained criminal to watch over him!
And it was perhaps here that I came to decide that Cowperwood is indeed the villain of this story -- not the hero -- and likely one of the most complex and interesting villains in fiction. He is the evil man who does not think of himself as evil. This is, of course, how evil operates in the real world -- buried, as it is in The Financier, under so many layers of human culture and self-deception, that it is not even clear that it exists at all.
Dreiser actually ends this work, oddly to my way of thinking, with a seemingly unrelated short essay titled, “Concerning Mycteroperca Bonaci.” In it, he describes that species of fish, more commonly called the Black Grouper, and its ability to camouflage itself in its surroundings.
Lying at the bottom of a bay, it can simulate the mud by which it is surrounded. Hidden in the folds of glorious leaves, it is of the same markings. Lurking in a flaw of light, it is like the light itself shining dimly in water. Its power to elude or strike unseen is of the greatest.
Why does Dreiser do this?
What would you say was the intention of the overruling, intelligent, constructive force which gives to Mycteroperca this ability? To fit it to be truthful? To permit it to present an unvarying appearance which all honest life-seeking fish may know? Or would you say that subtlety, chicanery, trickery, were here at work? An implement of illusion one might readily suspect it to be, a living lie, a creature whose business is to appear what it is not, to simulate that with which it has nothing in common, to get its living by great subtlety, the power of its enemies to forefend against which is little. The indictment is fair.
This is Dreiser’s great theme -- made fully manifest in The Financier but present still in its proto-form in both Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt. There is “what is” -- what nature made -- and “what appears to be” -- what humans pretend in service of their own culture or their base desire -- and they are NOT the same, yet we pretend that they are, and it is through that deception that some rise and others fall.
But here, in his closing paragraph, Dreiser takes that theme one step farther -- asking a question absolutely meta in its implications.
Would you say, in the face of this, that a beatific, beneficent creative, overruling power never wills that which is either tricky or deceptive? Or would you say that this material seeming in which we dwell is itself an illusion? If not, whence then the Ten Commandments and the illusion of justice? Why were the Beatitudes dreamed of and how do they avail?
Why? Why are things like this? Why are “what is” and “what appears to be” not the same? And what does that say about any “beatific, beneficent creative, overruling power” (i.e., God) that may or may not exist? Is this disconnect designed? And, if so, for what purpose?
Really subversive stuff, Ted. And to think people were scandalized by your depictions of women acting in opposition to the moral standards of your day.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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