The Genius may be the most autobiographical of Dreiser’s works, but it bears many of the same themes that he has so far explored in his previous works. Indeed, at the end of my write-up on The Financier, I commented on how interesting it was that its protagonist, Frank Cowperwood, a man of business, would come to the conclusion that the pursuit of beauty was the most important thing in life.
What, after all, were life, wealth, fame, if you couldn’t have the woman you wanted -- love, that indefinable, unnamable coddling of the spirit which the strongest almost more than the weakest crave? At last he saw clearly, as within a chalicelike nimbus, that the ultimate end of fame, power, vigor was beauty, and that beauty was a compound of the taste, the emotion, the innate culture, passion, and creams of a woman like Berenice Fleming. That was it: that was IT. And beyond were nothing save crumbling age, darkness, silence.
And more interesting still, just as The Financier ends with this perspective, The Genius begins with it.
Beauty Was The Point
The artist is a blend of subtleties in emotion which can not be classified. No one woman could have satisfied all sides of Eugene’s character at that time. Beauty was the point with him. Any girl who was young, emotional or sympathetic to the right degree and beautiful would have attracted and held him for a while. He loved beauty -- not a plan of life. He was interested in an artistic career, not in the founding of a family. Girlhood -- the beauty of youth -- was artistic, hence he craved it.
Our protagonist here is Eugene Wilta, a young artist, a painter, more interested in beauty than anything else is life. And a large part of the novel has him struggling to reconcile his aesthetic pursuit of beauty with the natural sex instinct that dwells within him and with the cultural norms and taboos of his Victorian age.
This conflict of emotions was so characteristic of Eugene’s nature, that had he been soundly introspective, he would have seen that he was an idealist by temperament, in love with the aesthetic, in love with love, and that there was no permanent faith in him for anybody -- except the impossible she.
The impossible she. Eugene pursues her in different guises throughout the novel, one the first a young woman named Angela Blue, in whose parental home Eugene sees the strengths of his moral and ordered society -- both sees them and values them, but also finds them somewhat lacking.
They went out into the dooryard after a time and then Marietta [Angela’s sister] appeared again, and with her Mrs. Blue, a comfortable, round bodied mother of sixty, who greeted Eugene cordially. He could feel in her what he felt in his own mother -- in every good mother -- love of order and peace, love of the well being of her children, love of public respect and private honor and morality. All these things Eugene heartily respected in others. He was glad to see them, believed they had a place in society, but was uncertain whether they bore any fixed or important relationship to him. He was always thinking in his private conscience that life was somehow bigger and subtler and darker than any given theory or order of living. It might well be worth while for a man or woman to be honest and moral within a given condition or quality of society, but it did not matter at all in the ultimate substance and composition of the universe. Any form or order of society which hoped to endure must have individuals like Mrs. Blue, who would confirm to the highest standards and theories of that society, and when found they were admirable, but they meant nothing in the shifting, subtle forces of nature. They were just accident harmonies blossoming out of something which meant everything here to this order, nothing to the universe at large. At twenty-two years of age he was thinking these things, wondering what people would think of him if they actually knew what he did think; wondering if there was anything, anything, which was really stable -- a rock to cling to -- and not mere shifting shadow and unreality.
Here you can see Dreiser clearly playing with one of his great themes -- the artificial necessity of an ordered society versus the natural but largely unknowable forces that shaped both the universe and human nature. Eugene Wilta is an especially useful stone on which to sharpen this distinction as he, in his well-realized and understood pursuit of beauty above all else, is essentially amoral as measured by honor and morality of his environment.
Eugene and Angela will marry, but they do engage in a sexual relationship prior to that event. In this discussion between them shortly after their first encounter, one can really see the tensions that exist between the two worldviews.
When they met on the lawn again before breakfast, Angela was garbed in white linen. She looked waxen and delicate and her eyes showed dark rings as well as the dark thoughts that were troubling her. Eugene took her hand sympathetically.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “I know. It isn’t as bad as you think.” And he smiled tenderly.
“Oh, Eugene, I don’t understand myself now,” she said sorrowfully. “I thought I was better than that.”
“We’re none of us better than that,” he replied simply. “We just think we are sometimes. You are not any different to me. You just think you are.”
“Oh, are you sure?” she asked eagerly.
“Quite sure,” he replied. “Love isn’t a terrible thing between any two. It’s just lovely. Why should I think worse of you?”
“Oh, because good girls don’t do what I have done. I have been raised to know better -- to do better.”
“All a belief, my dear, which you get from what has been taught you. You think it wrong. Why? Because your father and mother told you so. Isn’t that it?”
“Oh, not that alone. Everybody thinks it’s wrong. The Bible teaches that it is. Everybody turns his back on you when he finds out.”
“Wait a minute,” pleaded Eugene argumentatively. He was trying to solve this puzzle for himself. “Let’s leave the Bible out of it, for I don’t believe in the Bible -- not as a law of action anyhow. The fact that everybody thinks it’s wrong wouldn’t necessarily make it so, would it?” He was ignoring completely the significance of everybody as a reflection of those principles which govern the universe.
“No-o-o,” ventured Angela doubtfully.
“Listen,” went on Eugene. “Everybody in Constantinople believes that Mahomet is the Prophet of God. That doesn’t make him so, does it?”
“No.”
“Well, then, everyone here might believe that what we did last night was wrong without making it so. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes,” replied Angela confusedly. She really did not know. She could not argue with him. He was too subtle, but her innate principles and instincts were speaking plainly enough, nevertheless.
“Now what you’re really thinking about is what people will do. They’ll turn their backs on you, you say. That is a practical matter. Your father might turn you out of doors---”
“I think he would,” replied Angela, little understanding the bigness of the heart of her father.
“I think he wouldn’t,” said Eugene, “but that’s neither here nor there. Men might refuse to marry you. Those are material considerations. You wouldn’t say they had anything to do with real right or wrong, would you?”
Eugene had no convincing end to his argument. He did not know any more than anyone else what was right or wrong in this matter. He was merely talking to convince himself, but he had enough logic to confuse Angela.
“I don’t know,” she said vaguely.
“Right,” he went on loftily, “is something which is supposed to be in accordance with a standard of truth. Now no one in all the world knows what truth is, no one. There is no way of telling. You can only act wisely or unwisely as regards your personal welfare. If that’s what you’re worrying about, and it is, I can tell you that you’re no worse off. There’s nothing the matter with your welfare. I think you’re better off, for I like you better.”
Angela wondered at the subtlety of his brain. She was not sure but that what he said might be true. Could her fears be baseless? She felt sure she had lost some of the bloom of her youth anyhow.
“How can you?” she asked, referring to his saying that he liked her better.
“Easily enough,” he replied. “I know more about you. I admire your frankness. You’re lovely -- altogether so. You are sweet beyond compare.” He started to particularize.
“Don’t, Eugene,” she pleaded, putting her finger over her lips. The color was leaving her cheeks. “Please don’t, I can’t stand it.”
“All right,” he said, “I won’t. But you’re altogether lovely. Let’s go and sit in the hammock.”
“No. I’m going to get you your breakfast. It’s time you had something.”
He took comfort in his privileges, for the others had all gone. Jotham, Samuel, Benjamin and David were in the fields. Mrs. Blue was sewing and Marietta had gone to see a girl friend up the road. Angela, as Ruby before her, bestirred herself about the youth’s meal, mixing biscuit, broiling him some bacon, cleaning a basket of fresh dewberries for him.
Is Eugene a genius? Or at least ‘the’ genius of the book’s title? Or is he just an amoral monster? That will be one of the central criticisms of this book -- and one of the reasons it was evidently banned shortly after its publication. And in this scene you can see what these critics were on about.
A New Sex for Artists
It seems Dreiser really was playing with fire in the philosophical exploration that much of The Genius represents. As Eugene experiments with love affairs and sexual encounters with a variety of women, even after his marriage to Angela, he increasingly has difficulty squaring his in-born nature and predilections with the morals of his society. To a large degree, this conflict arises not just out of his all-consuming love of beauty, but in his desire to be a great artist.
“You have to give up a lot of things to be a good artist,” she said to Eugene one day. “You can’t have the ordinary life, and art too.”
“Just what do you mean, Chrissy?” he asked, petting her hand, for they were alone together.
“Why, you can’t get married very well and have children, and you can’t do much in a social way. Oh, I know they do get married, but sometimes I think it is a mistake. Most of the singers I know don’t do so very well tied down by marriage.”
“Don’t you intend to get married?” asked Eugene curiously.
“I don’t know,” she replied, realizing what he was driving at. “I’d want to think about that. A woman artist is in a d--- of a position anyway,” using the letter d only to indicate the word “devil.” She has so many things to think about.”
“For instance?”
“Oh, what people think and her family think, and I don’t know what all. They ought to get a new sex for artists -- like they have for worker bees.”
Eugene smiled. He knew what she was driving at. But he did not know how long she had been debating the problem of her virginity as conflicting with her love of distinction in art. She was nearly sure she did not want to complicate her art life with marriage. She was almost positive that success on the operatic stage -- particularly the great opportunity for the beginner abroad -- was complicated with some liaison. Some escaped, but it was not many. She was wondering in her own mind whether she owed it to current morality to remain absolutely pure. It was assumed generally that girls should remain virtuous and marry, but this did not necessarily apply to her -- should it apply to the artistic temperament? Her mother and her family troubled her. She was virtuous, but youth and desire had given her some bitter moments. And here was Eugene to emphasize it.
“It is a difficult problem,” he said sympathetically, wondering what she would eventually do. He felt keenly that her attitude in regard to marriage affected his relationship to her. Was she wedded to her art at the expense of love?
“It’s a big problem,” she said and went to the piano to sing.
He half suspected for a little while after this that she might be contemplating some radical step -- what, he did not care to say to himself, but he was intensely interested in her problem. This peculiar freedom of thought astonished him -- broadened his horizon. He wondered what his sister Myrtle would think of a girl discussing marriage this way -- the to be or not to be of it -- what Sylvia? He wondered if many girls did that. Most of the women he had known seemed to think more logically along these lines than he did. He remembered asking Ruby once whether she didn’t think illicit love was wrong and hearing her reply, “No. Some people thought it was wrong, but that didn’t make it so for her.” Here was another girl with another theory.
This encounter with Christina Channing, an opera singer willing to pursue her art instead of the traditional forms of love and marriage really has an effect on the still-young Eugene -- and goes a long way to help him set-up one of the central tensions of his life and the novel.
He concluded she was the most wonderful being he had ever known. No woman had ever revealed herself to him so unselfishly in love. No woman he had ever known appeared to have the courage and the insight to go thus simply and directly to what she desired. To hear an artist of her power, a girl of her beauty, discussing calmly whether she should sacrifice her virtue to love; whether marriage in the customary form was good for her art; whether she should take him now when they were young or bow to the conventions and let youth pass, was enough to shock his still trammelled soul. For after all, and despite his desire for personal freedom, his intellectual doubts and mental exceptions, he still had a profound reverence for a home such as that maintained by Jotham Blue and his wife, and for its results in the form of normal, healthy, dutiful children. Nature had no doubt attained to this standard through a long series of difficulties and experiments, and she would not readily relinquish it. Was it really necessary to abandon it entirely? Did he want to see a world in which a woman would take him for a little while as Christina was doing now, and then leave him? His experience here was making him think, throwing his theories and ideas up in the air, making a mess of all the notions he had ever formed about things. He racked his brain over the intricacies of sex and life, sitting on the great verandas of the hotel and wondering over and over just what the answer was, and why he could not like other men be faithful to one woman and be happy. He wondered whether this was really so, and whether he could not. It seemed to him then that he might. He knew that he did not understand himself very clearly; that he had no grasp on himself at all as yet -- his tendencies, his possibilities.
There is a lot of inner dialogue in this book -- and I think that this is one of its strengths, one of the prime reasons to wade through its 800 pages. And through all this inner dialogue we clearly see Eugene -- and of course Dreiser behind him -- wrestling with the essential conflict of his fiction, and evidently his life. Things indeed would be simpler for him -- and all artists -- if they were a third gender -- allowed by their society to conduct themselves in ways different than the other two.
As Eugene continues his relationships with both Angela and Christina, he is increasingly torn asunder by this conflict.
The atmosphere of the house after this night seemed charged with reproach to Eugene, although it took on no semblance of reality in either look or word. When he awoke in the morning and looked through the half closed shutters to the green world outside he felt a sense of freshness and of shame. It was cruel to come into such a home as this and do a thing as mean as he had done. After all, philosophy or no philosophy, didn’t a fine old citizen like Jotham, honest, upright, genuine in his moral point of view and his observance of the golden rule, didn’t he deserve better from a man whom he so sincerely admired? Jotham had been so nice to him. Their conversations together were so kindly and sympathetic. Eugene felt that Jotham believed him to be an honest man. He knew he had that appearance. He was frank, genial, considerate, not willing to condemn anyone -- but this sex question -- that was where he was weak. And was not the whole world keyed to that? Did not the decencies and the sanities of life depend on right moral conduct? Was not the world dependent on how the homes were run? How could anyone be good if his mother and father had not been good before him? How could the children of the world expect to be anything if people rushed here and there holding illicit relations? Take his sister, Myrtle, now -- would he have wanted her rifled in this manner? In the face of this question he was not ready to say exactly what he wanted or was willing to countenance. Myrtle was a free agent, as was every other girl. She could do as she pleased. It might not please him exactly but -- he went round and round from one problem to another, trying to untie this Gordian knot. One thing, this home had appeared sweet and clean when he came into it; now it was just a little tarnished, and by him! Or was it? His mind was always asking this question. There was nothing that he was actually accepting as true any more. He was going round in a ring asking questions of this proposition and that. Are you true? And are you true? And are you true? And all the while he was apparently not getting anywhere. It puzzled him, this life. Sometimes it shamed him. The deed shamed him. And he asked himself whether he was wrong to be ashamed or not. Perhaps he was just foolish. Was not life made for living, not worrying? He had not created his passions and desires.
He is setting up this conflict. The natural and therefore true against the constructed and therefore good. Could something, anything, be both true and good?
But I Am Life
And into this moral storm Dreiser also plunges the reality of, and the role of reality in, art. Here is a famous art dealer, reacting to his first view of Eugene’s painted canvases.
He divested himself of his great coat and rubbed his hands before the fire. He tried, now that he had unbent so far, to be genial and considerate. If he and Eugene were to do any business in the future it must be so. Besides the picture on the easel before him, near the window, which for the time being he pretended not to see, was an astonishingly virile thing. Of whose work did it remind him -- anybody’s? He confessed to himself as he stirred around among his numerous art memories that he recalled nothing exactly like it. Raw reds, raw greens, dirty grey paving stones -- such faces! Why this thing fairly shouted its facts. It seemed to say: “I’m dirty, I am commonplace, I am grim, I am shabby, but I am life.” And there was no apologizing for anything in it, no glossing anything over. Bang! Smash! Crack! came the facts one after the another, with bitter, brutal insistence on their so-ness. Why, on moody days when he had felt sour and depressed he had seen somewhere a street that looked like this, and there it was -- dirty, sad, slovenly, immoral, drunken -- anything, everything, but here it was.
One would have to be an ignorant fool to not realize what Dreiser is doing here in this autobiographical novel -- so obviously drawing the parallel between the grim realism in Eugene’s paintings and the equally grim (and, for its time, scandalous) realism in Dreiser’s fiction.
Eugene was so cruel in his indictment of life. He seemed to lay on his details with a bitter lack of consideration. Like a slavedriver lashing a slave he spared no least shade of his cutting brush. “Thus, and thus and thus” (he seemed to say) “is it.” “What do you think of this? and this? and this?
Dreiser even makes sure to include the criticisms he received in the critical review of Eugene’s appearance on the artistic scene.
One art publication, connected with and representative of the conservative tendencies of a great publishing house, denied the merit of the collection as a whole, ridiculed the artist’s insistence on shabby details as having artistic merit, denied that he could draw accurately, denied that he was a love of our beauty, and accused him of having no higher ideal than that of desire to shock the current mass by painting brutal things brutally.
“Mr. Wilta,” wrote this critic, “would no doubt be flattered if he were referred to as an American Millet. The brutal exaggeration of that painter’s art would probably testify to him of his own merit. He is mistaken. The great Frenchman was a lover of humanity, a reformer in spirit, a master of drawing and composition. There was nothing of this cheap desire to startle and offend by what he did. If we are to have ash cans and engines and broken-down bus-horses thrust down our throats as art, Heaven preserve us. We had better turn to commonplace photography at once and be done with it. Broken window shutters, dirty pavements, half frozen ash cart drivers, overdrawn, heavily exaggerated figures of policemen, tenement harridans, beggars, panhandlers, sandwich men -- of such is Art according to Eugene Wilta.”
All of this, surely, was said about Dreiser’s fiction when it first arrived on the scene -- a leading part of the swelling “realism” that would soon take over the entire genre. And also like Dreiser, who certainly had these critics, Eugene also had a few who recognized some new kind of genius.
“A true sense of the pathetic, a true sense of the dramatic, the ability to endow color -- not with its photographic value, though to the current thought it may seem so -- but with its higher spiritual significance; the ability to indict life with its own grossness, to charge it prophetically with its own meanness and cruelty in order that mayhap it may heal itself; the ability to see wherein the beauty -- even in shame and pathos and degradation; of such is this man’s work. He comes from the soil apparently, fresh to a great task. There is no fear here, no bowing to traditions, no recognition of any of the accepted methods. It is probable that he may not know what the accepted methods are. So much the better. We have a new method. The world is richer for that. As we have said before, Mr. Wilta may have to wait for his recognition. It is certain that these pictures will not be quickly purchased and hung in parlors. The average art lover does not take to a new thing so readily. But if he persevere, if his art does not fail him, his turn will come. It cannot fail. He is a great artist. May he live to realize it consciously and in his own soul.”
It is fairly amazing to me how well Dreiser writes ostensibly about painting, but in fact, obviously and with necessity, is actually writing about fiction, obscuring only slightly his own art under the veneer of another form. The parallels practically leap off the page.
But oh, the cruelty, the insincerity, the unkindness, the brutality of it all.
The same words used to describe Eugene’s paintings have also been used to describe Dreiser’s fiction, and within the content of this novel are also being used to describe the lives of Eugene Wilta and Angela Blue. Like all great works of art, there are layers here -- the lives of the characters, the art that Eugene produces to represent it, the fiction that Dreiser writes to represent that -- everything is intertwined and majestic in both its intent and execution.
Take this scene as a prime example, where Angela finds some old love letters that Eugene kept from other women, from the time when he was engaged with and to Angela.
Eugene stared before him helplessly. Her bitterness and wrath surprised and irritated him. He did not know that she was capable of such an awful rage as showed itself in her face and words at this moment, and yet he did not know but that she was well justified. Why so bitter though -- so almost brutal? He was sick. Had she no consideration for him?
“I tell you it wasn’t as bad as you think,” he said stolidly, showing for the first time a trace of temper and opposition. “I wasn’t married then. I did like Christina Channing; I did like Ruby Kenny. What of it? I can’t help it now. What am I going to say about it? What do you want me to say? What do you want me to do?”
“Oh,” whimpered Angela, changing her tone at once from helpless accusing rage to pleading, self-commiserating misery. “And you can stand there and say to me ‘what of it’? What of it! What of it! What shall you say? What do you think you ought to say? And me believing that you were so honorable and faithful! Oh, if I had only known! If I had only known! I had better have drowned myself a hundred times over than have waked and found that I wasn’t loved. Oh, dear, oh, dear! I don’t know what I ought to do! I don’t know what I can do!”
“But I do love you,” protested Eugene soothingly, anxious to say or do anything which would quiet this terrific storm. He could not imagine how he could have been so foolish as to leave these letters lying around. Dear Heaven! What a mess he had made of this! If only he had put them safely outside the home or destroyed them. Still he had wanted to keep Christina’s letters; they were so charming.
“Yes, you love me!” flared Angela. “I see how you love me. Those letters show it! Oh, dear! oh, dear! I wish I were dead!”
“Listen to me, Angela,” replied Eugene desperately, “I know this correspondence looks bad. I did make love to Miss Kenny and to Christina Channing, but you see I didn’t care enough to marry either of them. If I had I would have. I cared for you. Believe it or not. I married you. Why did I marry you? Answer me that? I needn’t have married you. Why did I? Because I loved you, of course. What other reason could I have?”
“Because you couldn’t get Christina Channing,” snapped Angela, angrily, with the intuitive sense of one who reasons from one material fact to another, “that’s why. If you could have, you would have. I know it. Her letters show it.”
“Her letters don’t show anything of the sort,” returned Eugene angrily. “I couldn’t get her? I could have had her, easily enough. I didn’t want her. If I had wanted her, I would have married her -- you can bet on that.”
He hated himself for lying in this way, but he felt for the time being that he had to do it. He did not care to stand in the role of a jilted lover. He half-fancied that he could have married Christina if he had really tried.
“Anyhow,” he said, “I’m not going to argue that point with you. I didn’t marry her, so there you are; and I didn’t marry Ruby Kenny either. Well you can think all you want; but I know. I cared for them, but I didn’t marry them. I married you instead. I ought to get credit for something on that score. I married you because I loved you, I suppose. That’s perfectly plain, isn’t it?” he was half convincing himself that he had loved her -- in some degree.
“Yes, I see how you love me,” persisted Angela, cogitating this very peculiar fact which he was insisting on and which it was very hard intellectually to overcome. “You married me because you couldn’t very well get out of it, that’s why. Oh, I know. You didn’t want to marry me. That’s very plain. You wanted to marry someone else. Oh, dear! oh, dear!”
“Oh, how you talk!” replied Eugene defiantly. “Marry someone else! Who did I want to marry? I could have married often enough if I had wanted to. I didn’t want to marry, that’s all. Believe it or not. I wanted to marry you and I did. I don’t think you have any right to stand there and argue so. What you say isn’t so, and you know it.”
Angela cogitated this argument further. He had married her! Why had he? He might have cared for Christina and Ruby, but he must have cared for her too. Why hadn’t she thought of that? There was something in it -- something besides a mere desire to deceive her. Perhaps he did care for her a little. Anyway it was plain that she could not get very far by arguing with him -- he was getting stubborn, argumentative, contentious. She had not seen him that way before.
“Oh!” she sobbed, taking refuge from this very difficult realm of logic in the safer and more comfortable one of illogical tears. “I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to think!”
She was badly treated, no doubt of that. Her life was a failure, but even so there was some charm about him. As he stood there, looking aimlessly around, defiant at one moment, appealing at another, she could not help seeing that he was not wholly bad. He was just weak on this one point. He loved pretty women. They were always trying to win him to them. He was probably not wholly to blame. If he would only be repentant enough, this thing might be allowed to blow over. It couldn’t be forgiven. She never could forgive him for the way he had deceived her. Her ideal of him had been pretty hopelessly shattered -- but she might live with him on probation.
“Angela!” he said, while she was still sobbing, and feeling that he ought to apologize to her. “Won’t you believe me? Won’t you forgive me? I don’t like to hear you cry this way. There’s no use saying that I didn’t do anything. There’s no use my saying anything at all, really. You won’t believe me. I don’t want you to; but I’m sorry. Won’t you believe that? Won’t you forgive me?”
Angela listened to this curiously, her thoughts going around in a ring for she was at once despairing, regretful, revengeful, critical, sympathetic toward him. Desirous of retaining her state, desirous of obtaining and retaining his love, desirous of punishing him, desirous of doing any one of a hundred things. Oh, if he had only never done this! And he was sickly, too. He needed her sympathy.
“Won’t you forgive me, Angela?” he pleaded softly, laying his hand on her arm. “I’m not going to do anything like that any more. Won’t you believe me? Come on now. Quit crying, won’t you?”
Angela hesitated for a while, lingering dolefully. She did not know what to do, what to say. It might be that he would not sin against her any more. He had not thus far, in so far as she knew. Still this was a terrible revelation. All at once, because he maneuvered himself into a suitable position and because she herself was weary of fighting and crying, and because she was longing for sympathy, she allowed herself to be pulled into his arms, her head to his shoulder, and there she cried more copiously than ever. Eugene for the moment felt terribly grieved. He was really sorry for her. It wasn’t right. He ought to be ashamed of himself. He should never have done anything like that.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, “really I am. Won’t you forgive me?”
“Oh, I don’t know what to do! what to think!” moaned Angela after a time.
“Please do, Angela,” he urged, holding her questioningly.
There was more of this pleading and emotional badgering until finally out of sheer exhaustion Angela said yes. Eugene’s nerves were worn to a thread by the encounter. He was pale, exhausted, distraught. Many scenes like this, he thought, would set him crazy; and still he had to go through a world of petting and love-making even now. It was not easy to bring her back to her normal self. It was bad business, this philandering, he thought. It seemed to lead to all sorts of misery for him, and Angela was jealous. Dear Heaven! what a wrathful, vicious, contentious nature she had when she was aroused. He had never suspected that. How could he truly love her when she acted like that? How could he sympathize with her? He recalled how she sneered at him -- how she taunted him with Christina’s having discarded him. He was weary, excited, desirous of rest and sleep, but now he must make more love. He fondled her, and by degrees she came out of her blackest mood; but he was not really forgiven even then. He was just understood better. And she was not truly happy again but only hopeful -- and watchful.
It is emblematic of the marriage between Eugene’s “real” world, the “real” world in his art, and the “real” world of Dreiser’s fiction -- all of it brutal and unflinching. No wonder this book was banned.
Deeper Than Human Will
One gets a glimpse of Eugene’s analysis of compulsion in this scene, but it really comes out as one of his major fascinations and one of the major themes of the book. Indeed, it clearly seems to drive Dreiser as much (if not more) that it drives his alter ego Eugene Wilta. Here, the author seems to break into the narrative to give us one of the keys to unlocking the entire story.
It is a question whether the human will, of itself alone, ever has cured or ever can cure any human weakness. Tendencies are subtle things. They are involved in the chemistry of one’s being, and those who delve in the mysteries of biology frequently find that curious anomaly, a form of minute animal life born to be the prey of another form of animal life -- chemically and physically attracted to its own disaster. Thus, to quote Calkins, “some protozoa are apparently limited to special kinds of food. The ‘slipper-animal’ (Paramecium) and the ‘bell-animal’ (Vorticella) live on certain kinds of bacteria, and many others, which live upon smaller protozoa, seem to have a marked affinity for certain kinds. I have watched one of these creatures (Actinobolus) lie perfectly quiet while hundreds of bacteria and smaller kinds of protozoa bumped against it, until a certain variety (Halteria grandinella) came near, when a minute dart, or ‘trochocyst,’ attached to a relatively long thread, was launched. The victim was invariably hit, and after a short struggle was drawn in and devoured. The results of many experiments indicate that the apparently willful selection in these cases is the inevitable action of definite chemical and physical laws which the individual organism can no more change than it can change the course of gravitation. The killing dart mentioned above is called out by the particular kind of prey with the irresistible attraction of an iron filing for a magnet.”
It really reminds me of the short essay “Concerning Mycteroperca Bonaci” which Dreiser includes at the end of The Financier, where he connects a biological adaptation (in that case, camouflage) to the actions and motivations of his protagonist (in that case, Frank Cowperwood). Here, the biological adaptation is more esoteric (actions determined by chemistry and physics), but the connection to Eugene’s actions and motivations are perhaps made clearer than anywhere else.
Eugene did not know of these curious biologic experiments at this time, but he suspected that these attractions were deeper than human will. He thought at times that he ought to resist his impulses. At other times he asked himself why. If his treasure was in this and he lost it by resistance, what had he? A sense of personal purity? It did not appeal to him. The respect of his fellow-citizens? He believed that most of his fellow-citizens were whited sepulchres. What good did their hypocritical respect do him? Justice to others? Others were not concerned, or should not be in the natural affinity which might manifest itself between two people. That was for him to settle. Besides, there was very little justice in the world. As for his wife -- well, he had given her his word, but he had not done so willingly. Might one swear eternal fealty and abide by it when the very essence of nature was lack of fealty, inconsiderateness, destruction, change? A gloomy Hamlet to be sure, asking “can honor set a leg?” -- a subtle Machiavelli believing that might made right, sure that it was a matter of careful planning, not ethics which brought success in this world, and yet one of the poorest planners in it. An anarchistic manifestation of selfishness surely; but his additional plea was that he did not make his own mind, nor his emotions, nor anything else. And worst of all, he counselled himself that he was not seizing anything ruthlessly. He was merely accepting that which was thrust temptingly before him by fate.
This seems to me the very crux of Dreiser’s work. This examination of compulsion and what portion of it -- if any -- humans have control over.
A Constant Condition of Readjustment
There is also interesting commentary in the middle of the novel on the business side of the art world, and the competing ways in which men of business use others as the tools of their trade.
Eugene first experiences this when he gets a job as an art director for a magazine, and he likens it to a kind of slavery.
The art director, whoever he was, having been by degrees initiated into the brutalities of the situation, and having -- by reason of the time he had been employed and the privileges he had permitted himself on account of his comfortable and probably never before experienced salary -- sold himself into bondage to his now fancied necessities, was usually humble and tractable under the most galling fire. Where could he go and get five thousand dollars a year for his services? How could he live at the rate he was living if he lost this place? Art directorships were not numerous. Men who could fill them fairly acceptably were not impossible to find. If he thought at all and was not a heaven-born genius serene in the knowledge of his God-given powers, he was very apt to hesitate, to worry, to be humble and to endure a good deal. Most men under similar circumstances do the same thing. They think before they fling back into the teeth of their oppressors some of the slurs and brutal characterizations which so frequently issues therefrom. Most men do. Besides there is almost always a high percentage of truth in the charges made. Usually the storm is for the betterment of mankind.
Dreiser is describing a kind of rarified wage slavery here -- a phenomena even the well-to-do can experience -- compelled to compete in a humanless system in order to maintain the high salary and the quality of life it has afforded and one has grown used to. It seems to be a world that Dreiser knows well, as he describes it in great detail, and presents two competing visions for how one should conduct oneself in that reality.
The first takes the form of Eugene’s first boss, Mr. Summerfield.
Mr. Summerfield knew this. He knew also the yoke of poverty and the bondage of fear which most if not all his men were under. He had no compunctions about using these weapons, much as a strong man might use a club. He had had a hard life himself. No one had sympathized with him very much. Besides you couldn’t sympathize and succeed. Better look the facts in the face, deal only with infinite capacity, roughly weed out the incompetents and proceed along the line of least resistance, in so far as your powerful enemies were concerned. Men might theorize and theorize until the crack of doom, but this was the way the thing had to be done and this was the way he preferred to do it.
Eugene is inspired by him, taken in by the brutal efficiency of his approach, seeing the mechanics of business success at first as something foreign, but then as something essential to the elevation of his art.
Was there ever such a man, so hard, so cold, so practical! It was a new note to him. He was simply astonished, largely because he was inexperienced. He had not yet gone up against the business world as those who try to do anything in a big way commercially must. This man was getting on his nerves already, making him feel that he had a tremendous problem before him, making him think that the quiet realms of art were merely the backwaters of oblivion. Those who did anything, who were out in the front row of effort, were fighters such as this man was, raw products of the soil, ruthless, superior, indifferent. If only he could be that way, he thought. If he could be strong, defiant, commanding, what a thing it would be. Not to wince, not to quail, but to stand up firm, square to the world and make people obey. Oh, what a splendid vision of empire was here before him.
He embraces this approach and begins to excel.
He had already caught by contact with Summerfield some of that eager personage’s ruthlessness and began to manifest it in his own attitude. He was most impressionable to things advantageous to himself, and this chance to rise to a higher level out of the slough of poverty in which he had so greatly suffered nerved him to the utmost effort.
But at the same time he is disillusioned by some of its aspects, seeing how cutthroat it was and yearning for something more human, more restorative.
“Remember, you are the last word here, Wilta,” Summerfield had told him on one occasion. “If anything goes wrong here, you’re to blame. Don’t make any mistakes. Don’t let anyone accuse you falsely. Don’t run to me. I won’t help you.”
It was such a ruthless attitude that it shocked Eugene into an attitude of defiance. In time he thought he had become a hardened and a changed man -- aggressive, contentious, bitter.
“They can all go to hell!” he said one day to Summerfield, after a terrific row about some delayed pictures, in which one man who was animated by personal animosity more than anything else had said hard things about him. “The thing that’s been stated here isn’t so. My work is up to and beyond the mark. This individual here” -- pointed to the man in question -- “simply doesn’t like me. The next time he comes into my room nosing about I’ll throw him out. He’s a damned fakir, and you know it. He lied here today, and you know that.”
“Good for you, Wilta!” exclaimed Summerfield joyously. The idea of a fighting attitude on Eugene’s part pleased him. “You’re coming to life. You’ll get somewhere now. You’ve got the ideas, but if you let these wolves run over you they’ll do it, and they’ll eat you. I can’t help it. They’re all no good. I wouldn’t trust a single God-damned man in the place!”
So it went. Eugene smiled. Could he ever get used to such a life? Could he ever learn to live with such cheap, inconsiderate, indecent little pups? Summerfield might like them, but he didn’t. This might be a marvelous business policy, but he couldn’t see it. Somehow it seemed to reflect the mental attitude and temperament of Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield and nothing more. Human nature ought to be better than that.
And despite his artistic soul, this environment and Summerfield’s influence begins to change Eugene.
Angela noted it. Summerfield also. The latter felt that Eugene was beginning to show his artistic superiority in a way which was not entirely pleasant. He was coming to have a direct, insistent, sometimes dictatorial manner. All the driving Summerfield had done had not succeeded in breaking his spirit. Instead, it had developed him. From a lean, pale, artistic soul, wearing a soft hat, he had straightened up and filled out until now he looked more like a business man than an artist, with a derby hat, clothes of the latest cut, a ring of oriental design on his middle finger, and pins and ties which reflected the prevailing modes.
This tension, between art and business, is a fight that the artistic side of Eugene is losing, until he meets, is recruited by, and goes to work for Summerfield’s antipode -- Mr. Obidiah Kalvin.
“I’ve watched your work for a year now and I’m going to keep my word and raise your salary. You’re a good man. You have many excellent qualities which I want and need in the man who sits at that desk; but you have also some failings. I don’t want you to get offended. A man in my position is always like a father who sits at the head of a family, and my lieutenants are like my sons. I have to take an interest in them because they take an interest in me. Now you’ve done your work well -- very well, but you are subject to one fault which may sometime lead into trouble. You’re a little too enthusiastic. I don’t think you stop to think enough. You have a lot of ideas. They swarm in your head like bees, and sometimes you let them all out at once and they buzz around you and confuse you and everyone else connected with you. You would really be a better man if you had, not less ideas -- I wouldn’t say that -- but better control of them. You want to do too many things at once. Go slow. Take your time. You have lots of time. You’re young yet. Think! If you’re in doubt, come down and consult with me. I’m older in this business than you are, and I’ll help you all I can.”
Eugene smiled and said: “I think that’s true.”
To Summerfield, men are either tools to use or obstacles to work around -- and all of that in service to his own will. But to Kalvin, men are something different. They are agents on their own journeys, and success comes when he is able to align their development with his own objectives.
“It is true,” said Kalvin; “and now I want to speak of another thing which is a little more of a personal matter, and I don’t want you to take offence, for I’m saying it for your benefit. If I’m any judge of men, and I flatter myself sometimes that I am, you’re a man whose greatest weakness lies -- and, mind you, I have no actual evidence to go upon, not one scrap -- your greatest weakness lies perhaps not so much in the direction of women as in a love of luxury generally, of which women might become, and usually are, a very conspicuous part.”
Eugene flushed the least bit nervously and resentfully, for he thought he had conducted himself in the most circumspect manner here -- in fact, everywhere since the days he had begun to put the Riverwood incident behind him.
“Now I suppose you wonder why I say that. Well, I raised two boys, both dead now, and one was just a little like you. You have so much imagination that it runs not only to ideas in business, but ideas in dress and comfort and friends and entertainment. Be careful of the kind of people you get in with. Stick to the conservative element. It may be hard for you, but it’s best for you, materially speaking. You’re the kind of man, if my observations and intuitions are correct, who is apt to be carried away by his ideals of anything -- beauty, women, show. Now I have no ascetic objections to women, but to you they are dangerous, as yet. At bottom, I don’t think you have the making of a real cold business man in you, but you’re a splendid lieutenant. I’ll tell you frankly I don’t think a better man than you has ever sat, or could sit, in that chair. You are very exceptional, but your very ability makes you an uncertain quantity. You’re just on the threshold of your career. This additional two thousand dollars is going to open up new opportunities to you. Keep cool. Keep out of the hands of clever people. Don’t let subtle women come near. You’re married, and for your sake I hope you love your wife. If you don’t, pretend to, and stay within the bounds of convention. Don’t let any scandal ever attach to you. If you do it will be absolutely fatal so far as I am concerned. I have had to part with a number of excellent men in my time because a little money turned their heads and they went wild over some one woman, or many women. Don’t you be that way. I like you. I’d like to see you get along. Be cold if you can. Be careful. Think. That’s the best advice I can give you, and I wish you luck.”
He waved him a dismissal, and Eugene rose. He wondered how this man had seen so clearly into his character. It was the truth, and he knew it was. His inmost thoughts and feelings were evidently written where this man could see them. Fittingly was he president of a great company. He could read men.
Indeed he can, and as Eugene observes, he reads Eugene Wilta like an open book -- which makes one think about how common he actually is, how common his story actually is, and perhaps that this Obidiah Kalvin is not so much a character in a novel, but a kind of conscience speaking to both Eugene and to Dreiser.
As Eugene begins to pursue another opportunity, he decides to deal forthrightly with Kalvin, taking him into his confidence and expressing his interests and his concerns in the new position -- and Kalvin, like a conscience, helps him think through the pros and cons.
Eugene arose. “I see,” he said. “You are one of the best men I have ever known, Mr. Kalvin. You have constantly treated me with more consideration than I ever expected to receive anywhere. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to work for you. If I stay, it will be because I want to because I value your friendship.”
“Well,” said Kalvin quietly, “that’s very nice, I’m sure, and I appreciate it. But don’t let your friendship for me or your sense of gratitude stop you from doing something you think you ought to do. Go ahead if you feel like it. I won’t feel the least bit angry with you. I’ll feel sorry, but that’s neither here nor there. Life is a constant condition of readjustment, and every good business man knows it.”
This might be the most important lesson of them all in this section of the book. Life is a constant condition of readjustment.
The Blue Bird
Eugene does leave Kalvin’s employment, and soon finds himself distracted and a bit obsessed with the teenage daughter of a woman who works in his new office. His affair with her illustrates the power that illusion has over will.
In the first place Eugene now began to neglect his office work thoroughly, for he could not fix his mind upon it any more than he could upon the affairs of the Sea Island Company, or upon his own home and Angela’s illness. The morning after his South Beach experience with Suzanne and her curious reticence, he saw her for a little while upon the veranda of Daleview. She was not seemingly depressed, or at least, not noticeably so, and yet there was a gravity about her which indicated that a marked impression of some kind had been made upon her soul. She looked at him with wide frank eyes as she came out to him purposely to tell him that she was going with her mother and some friends to Tarrytown for the day.
“I have to go,” she said. “Mama has arranged it by phone.”
“Then I won’t see you any more here?”
“No.”
“Do you love me, Suzanne.”
“Oh, yes, yes,” she declared, and walked wearily to an angle of the wall where they could not be seen.
He followed her quickly, cautiously.
“Kiss me,” he said, and she put her lips to his in a distraught frightened way. Then she turned and walked briskly off and he admired the robust swinging of her body. She was not tall, like himself, or small like Angela, but middle sized, full bodied, vigorous. He imagined now that she had a powerful soul in her, capable of great things, full of courage and strength. Once she was a little older, she would be very forceful and full of strong, direct thought.
She is none of these things. But that is how Eugene chooses to see her -- how, in a way, he has to see her, if he is going to justify his compulsion for her. Her reaction to the revelations about his past, and about his present, about his pregnant wife that he has all but abandoned, only serve to secure her even more firmly in his mind.
“But you heard what she said about me, Suzanne, and about her condition?”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve thought about it. I don’t see that it makes so very much difference. You can take care of her.”
“You love me just as much?”
“Yes.”
“Even if all she says is true?”
“Yes.”
“Why, Suzanne?”
“Well, all her charges concerned years gone by, and that isn’t now. And I know you love me now. I don’t care about the past. You know, Eugene, I don’t care anything about the future, either. I want you to love me only so long as you want to love me. When you are tired of me, I want you to leave me. I wouldn’t want you to live with me if you didn’t love me. I wouldn’t want to live with you if I didn’t love you.”
Eugene looked into her face, astonished, pleased, invigorated, and heartened by the philosophy. It was so like Suzanne, he thought. She seemed to have reached definite and effective conclusions so early. Her young mind seemed a solvent for all life’s difficulties.
“Oh, you wonderful girl!” he said. “You know you are wiser than I am, stronger. I draw to you, Suzanne, like a cold man to a fire. You are so kindly, so temperate, so understanding!”
Of course Suzanne is like this. She is a teenager, and her “philosophy” is little more than the impetuousness of youth. It says something profound about Eugene that he is unable to discern this, too tempted, evidently, to drown in that same pool with her.
Suzanne is little more than a fool.
The day passed in assurances of affection. Suzanne told Eugene of a book she had read in French, “The Blue Bird.” The allegory touched Eugene to the quick -- its quest for happiness, and he named Suzanne then and there “The Blue Bird.” She made him stop the car and go back to get her an exquisite lavender-hued blossom growing wild on a tall stalk which she saw in a field as they sped by. Eugene objected genially, because it was beyond a wire fence and set among thorns, but she said, “Yes, now, you must. You know you must obey me now. I am going to begin to train you now. You’ve been spoiled. You’re a bad boy. Mama says that. I am going to reform you.”
“A sweet time you’ll have, Flower Face! I’m a bad lot. Have you noticed that?”
“A little.”
“And you still like me?”
“I don’t mind. I think I can change you by loving you.”
She is a child -- with a child’s view of adult relationships. Indeed, the French book she refers to is evidently The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck -- as near as I can tell a kind of fairy tale for children. She is almost youth and innocence personified, and the idea that she can reform Eugene by loving him is, somewhat obviously, the most childish idea of them all.
If You Fail to Plan…
The last section of the novel has Eugene wavering in his infatuation with Suzanne and his desire to be with her permanently, and in his fidelity to his martial and professional obligations. The two of them, Eugene and Suzanne, are peas in the same pod, each of them incapable of deciding and taking action.
Eventually, Suzanne’s mother conspires with one of Eugene’s co-workers, Marshall Colfax, to have him fired from his latest job in the publishing and advertising business, and to destroy other aspects of his professional and personal life. In this downward spiral, it is Colfax who perhaps sees Eugene the clearest.
“You have always been an interesting study to me, Wilta, ever since I first met you,” he went on after a time. “You’re a genius, I fancy, if there ever was one, but like all geniuses you are afflicted with tendencies which are erratic. I used to think for a little while that maybe you sat down and planned the things which you have carried through so successfully, but I have since concluded that you don’t. You attract some forms of force and order. Also, I think you have various other faculties -- it would be hard for me to say just what they are. One is vision. I know you have that. Another is appreciation of ability. I know you have that. I have seen you pick some exceptional people. You plan in a way, but you don’t plan logically or deliberately, unless I am greatly mistaken.”
Eugene does indeed fail to plan, constantly, and when one fails to plan, they plan to fail. When the cards start tumbling around him, Eugene grows desperate. Here he receives news that Suzanne’s mother has convinced Suzanne to separate from him and put off their engagement for another year.
An inexpressible sense of despair fell upon Eugene at the sound of this, a sadness so deep that he could scarcely speak. He could not believe that it was really Suzanne who was saying that to him. Willing to wait a year! She who had declared so defiantly that she would not. It would do no harm? To think that life, fate, her mother were triumphing over him in this fashion, after all. What then was the significance of the black-bearded men he had seen so often of late? Why had he been finding horseshoes? Was fate such a liar? Did life in its dark, subtle chambers lay lures and traps for men? His position gone, his Blue Sea venture involved in an indefinite delay out of which might come nothing, Suzanne going for a whole year, perhaps for ever, most likely so, for what could not her mother do with her in a whole year, having her alone? Angela alienated -- a child approaching. What a climax!
“Is this really your decision, Suzanne?” he asked, sadly, a mist of woe clouding his whole being.
“I think it ought to be, perhaps, Eugene,” she replied, still evasively. “It’s very trying. I will be faithful to you, though. I promise you that I will not change. Don’t you think we can wait a year? We can, can’t we?”
“A whole year without seeing you, Suzanne?”
“Yes, it will pass, Eugene.”
“A whole year?”
“Yes, Eugene.”
“I have nothing more to say, Mrs. Dale,” he said, turning to her mother solemnly, a sombre, gloomy light in his eye, his heart hardening towards Suzanne for the moment. To think she should treat him so -- throw him down, as he phrased it. Well, such was life. “You win,” he added. “It has been a terrible experience for me. A terrible passion. I love this girl. I love her with my whole heart. Sometimes I have vaguely suspected that she might not know.”
He turned to Suzanne, and for the first time he thought that he did not see there that true understanding which he had fancied had been there all this time. Could fate have been lying to him also in this? Was he mistaken in this, and had he been following a phantom lure of beauty? Was Suzanne but another trap to drag him down to his old nothingness? God!
He is, in essence, a victim of circumstance, a person of artistic temperament, drawn irresistibly to beauty, but unable to protect that compulsion against the buffeting winds of his society and the mechanistic forces of the external world that shapes it.
The Real Spirituality of Things
In the end, he loses Suzanne, returns to Angela and is with her when she dies in childbirth, and then retreats from life with his motherless infant to the warm household of his sister Myrtle, now married with her own family. There, he becomes philosophic.
During a period of nearly three years all the vagaries and alterations which can possibly afflict groping and morbid mind were his. He went from what might be described as almost a belief in Christian Science to almost a belief that a devil ruled the world, a Gargantuan Brobdingnagian Mountebank, who plotted tragedy for all ideals and rejoiced in swine and dullards and a grunting, sweating, beefy immorality. By degrees his God, if he could have been said to have had one in his consciousness, sank back into a dual personality or a compound of good and evil -- the most ideal and ascetic good, as well as the most fanatics and swinish evil. His God, for a time at least, was a God of storms and horrors as well as of serenities and perfections. He then reached a state not of abnegation, but of philosophic open-mindedness or agnosticism. He came to know that he did not know what to believe. All apparently was permitted, nothing fixed. Perhaps life loved only change, equation, drama, laughter. When in moments of private speculation or social argument he was prone to condemn it loudest, he realized that at worst and at best it was beautiful, artistic, gay, that, however, he might age, groan, complain, withdraw, wither, still, in spite of him, this large thing which he at once loved and detested was sparkling on. He might quarrel, but it did not care; he might fail or die, but it could not. He was negligible -- but, oh, the string and delight of its inner shrines and favorable illusions.
There he re-engages with an earlier exposure to Christian Science, and in it he begins to find a frame of mind in which he can better understand himself and his place in the world.
And curiously, for a time, even while he was changing in this way, he went back to see Mrs. Johns, principally because he liked her. She seemed to be a motherly soul to him, contributing some of the old atmosphere he had enjoyed in his own home in Alexandria. This woman, from working constantly in the esoteric depths, which Mrs. Eddy’s book suggests, demonstrating for herself, as she thought, through her belief in or understanding of, the oneness of the universe (its non-malicious, affectionate control, the non-existence of fear, pain, disease, and death itself), had become so grounded in her faith that evil positively did not exist save in the belief of mortals, that at times she almost convinced Eugene that it was so. He speculated long and deeply along these lines with her. He had come to lean on her in his misery quite as a boy might on his mother.
The universe to her was, as Mrs. Eddy said, spiritual, not material, and no wretched condition, however seemingly powerful, could hold against the truth -- could gainsay divine harmony. God was good. All that is, is God. Hence all that is, is good or it is an illusion. It could not be otherwise. She looked at Eugene’s case, as she had at many a similar one, being sure, in her earnest way, that she, by realizing his ultimate fundamental spirituality, could bring him out of his illusions, and make him see the real spirituality of things, in which the world of flesh and desire had no part.
In this, perhaps Eugene’s final realization about the nature of reality -- that the true is also the good -- we see the roots of Dreiser the artist, as this Christian Science ethos at least echoes if not drives the very roots of Dreiser’s naturalistic fiction. Both seem to say, “Here is what is. Look upon it without judgment, for if it exists, then it is good, regardless of what illusions society tries to weave around it.” Both Carrie Meeber and Jennie Gerhardt had this simple understanding of the world, while both Frank Cowperwood and Eugene Wilta seem to slowly come to this understanding as their narratives unfold.
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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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