The Titan, published in 1914, is actually the second part of a longer novel that Dreiser wrote, and then subsequently split into the two separate titles -- The Financier and The Titan. Both, therefore, feature Frank Algernon Cowperwood as their protagonists, The Titan picking up just a few years after the end of The Financier, when Frank is released from the penitentiary where he was housed at the end of previous volume.
All Is Permitted
The Titan explores the same general theme as The Financier, with Frank as its very embodiment.
The impediments that can arise to baffle a great and swelling career are strange and various. In some instances all the cross waves of life must be cut by the strong swimmer. With other personalities there is a chance, or force, that happily allies itself with them; or they quite unconsciously ally themselves with it, and find that there is a tide that bears them on. Divine will? Not necessarily. There is no understanding of it. Guardian spirits? There are many who so believe, to their utter undoing. (Witness Macbeth.) An unconscious drift in the direction of right, virtue, duty? These are banners of mortal manufacture. Nothing is proved; all is permitted.
All is permitted. Frank is an amoral character, believing himself unbound by the religious, cultural, and social customs that constrain the others that he seeks to conquer in business and in love.
Especially in love, as much of The Titan is consumed by a series of Frank’s philandering affairs. Sex with women he desires is his right as one of the special men who are not bound by anything beyond their own ambition.
The difficulty with this situation, as with all such where an individual ventures thus buccaneeringly on the sea of sex, is the possibility of those storms which result from misplaced confidence, and from our built-up system of ethics relating to property in women. To Cowperwood, however, who was a law unto himself, who knew no law except such as might be imposed upon him by his lack of ability to think, this possibility of entanglement, wrath, rage, pain, offered no particular obstacle. It was not at all certain that any such thing would follow. Where the average man might have found one such liaison difficult to manage, Cowperwood, as we have seen, had previously entered on several such affairs almost simultaneously; and now he had ventured on yet another; in the last instance with a much greater feeling and enthusiasm.
A Girl of Sixteen
Throughout this long series of affairs he maintains his relationship with his wife Aileen, a woman he married only after beginning a long affair with her while married to yet someone else. In The Financier, I spent a lot of time trying to compare Aileen Cowperwood (nee Butler) to one of Dreiser’s previous female protagonists -- either Carrie Meeber or Jennie Gerhardt -- but the comparison never really stuck, and it sticks even less in The Titan. Carrie and Jennie were young women whom powerful men desired -- and Aileen was certainly this through much of The Financier. But in The Titan, her flower is dying in the garden of desires that Frank is tending, and she is not such a fool as to not realize it.
The psychology of the human animal, when confronted by these tangles, these ripping tides of the heart, has little to do with so-called reason or logic. It is amazing how in the face of passion and the affections and the changing face of life all plans and theories by which we guide ourselves fall to the ground. Here was Aileen talking bravely at the time she invaded Mrs. Lillian Cowperwood’s domain of the necessity of “her Frank” finding a woman suitable to his needs, tastes, abilities, but now that the possibility of another woman equally or possibly better suited to him was looming in the offing -- although she had no idea who it might be -- she could not reason in the same way. Her ox, God wot, was the one that was being gored. What if he should find someone whom he could want more than he did her? Dear heaven, how terrible that would be! What would she do? she asked herself thoughtfully. She lapsed into the blues one afternoon -- almost cried -- she could scarcely say why. Another time she thought of all the terrible things she would do, how difficult she would make it for any other women who invaded her preserves. However, she was not sure. Would she declare war if she discovered another? She knew she would eventually; and yet she knew, too, that if she did, and Cowperwood were set in his passion, thoroughly alienated, it would do no good. It would be terrible, but what could she do to win him back? That was the issue.
The small vignettes from Aileen’s perspective are fascinating, and worth further study. She knows “her Frank” quite well, after all, and knowing how he is, she is acutely aware of why he is always chasing, chasing, chasing what he desires. What, after all, and even recognizing the central role that his relationship to her plays in his success and happiness, is there to stop him?
Eventually, she does confront him, and his response is quite characteristic.
“Aileen,” he said finally, coming up behind her, “can’t you and I talk this thing over peacefully now? You don’t want to do anything that you’ll be sorry for. I don’t want you to. I’m sorry. You don’t really believe that I’ve ceased to love you, do you? I haven’t, you know. This thing isn’t as bad as it looks. I should think you would have a little more sympathy with me after all we have been through together. You haven’t any real evidence of wrongdoing on which to base any such outburst as this.”
“Oh, haven’t I?” she exclaimed, turning from the mirror, where, sorrowfully and bitterly, she was smoothing her red-gold hair. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes red. Just now she seemed as remarkable to him as she had seemed that first day, years ago, when in a red cape he had seen her, a girl of sixteen, running up the steps of her father’s house in Philadelphia. She was so wonderful then. It mellowed his mood toward her.
“That’s all you know about it, you liar!” she declared. “It’s little you know what I know. I haven’t had detectives on your trail for weeks for nothing. You sneak! You’d like to smooth around now and find out what I know. Well, I know enough, let me tell you that. You won’t fool me any longer with your Rita Sohlbergs and your Antoinette Nowaks and your apartments and your houses of assignation. I know what you are, you brute! And after all your protestation of love for me! Ugh!”
She turned fiercely to her task while Cowperwood stared at her, touched by her passion, moved by her force. It was fine to see what a dramatic animal she was -- really worthy of him in many ways.
“Aileen,” he said softly, hoping still to ingratiate himself by degrees, “please don’t be so bitter toward me. Haven’t you any understanding of how life works -- any sympathy with it? I thought you were more generous, more tender. I’m not so bad.”
He eyed her thoughtfully, tenderly, hoping to move her through her love for him.
In the scene, it doesn’t work, Aileen raging at him more and more until she begins to throw things, throwing the jewels and necklaces he had given her back in his face, and then locking herself in the bedroom, out of his reach. And through it all, Frank is bemused, confused, and strangely aroused by her passion. Doesn’t she understand ‘how life works’?
A Poison Flower
But something does unmoor Frank. It begins when he discovers one of the women he seduces -- Stephanie Platow -- has in turn deceived him by carrying on another affair with an artist and poet -- Forbes Gurney. In a climactic scene, Frank discovers them in flagrante in the very apartment that Frank has rented for his own dalliances with Stephanie.
At his rough, firm cough they sprang up -- Gurney to a hiding position behind a curtain, Stephanie to one of concealment behind draperies on the couch. She could not speak, and could scarcely believe that her eyes did not deceive her. Gurney, masculine and defiant, but by no means well composed demanded: “Who are you? What do you want here?” Cowperwood replied very simply and smilingly: “Not very much. Perhaps Miss Platow there will tell you.” He nodded in her direction.
Stephanie, fixed by his cold, examining eye, shrank nervously, ignoring Gurney entirely. The latter perceived on the instant that he had a previous liaison to deal with -- an angry and outraged lover -- and he was not prepared to act either wisely or well.
“Mr. Gurney,” said Cowperwood complacently, after staring at Stephanie grimly and scorching her with his scorn, “I have no concern with you, and do not propose to do anything to disturb you or Miss Platow after a very few moments. I am not here without reason. This young woman has been steadily deceiving me. She has lied to me frequently, and pretended an innocence which I did not believe. Tonight she told me she was to be at a lawn party on the West Side. She has been my mistress for months. I have given her money, jewelry, whatever she wanted. Those jade earrings, by the way, are one of my gifts.” He nodded cheerfully in Stephanie’s direction. “I have come here simply to prove to her that she cannot lie to me anymore. Heretofore, every time I have accused her of things like this she has cried and lied. I do not know how much you know of her, or how fond you are of her. I merely wish her, not you, to know” -- and he turned and stared at Stephanie -- “that the day of her lying to me is over.”
He seems a man very much in control here, but the effect of her treachery on him is more evident moments later, when he is alone, outside the apartment, and fleeing.
Cowperwood paid no heed. Out he went through the dark hall and down the stairs. For once the lure of a beautiful, enigmatic, immoral, and promiscuous woman -- poison flower though she was -- was haunting him.
“D----- her!” he exclaimed. “D----- the little beast, anyhow! The -----! The -----!” He used terms so hard, so vile, so sad, all because he knew for once what it was to love and lose -- to want ardently in his way and not to have -- now or ever after. He was determined that his path and that of Stephanie Platow should never be allowed to cross again.
The tables have turned. For the first time in his life, Frank Algernon Cowperwood, is not the alpha in a sex relationship -- and it not just unmoors him, it forces him to re-evaluate his own compulsions and what is really at their root.
Just One Ideal Thing In This World
During this journey he redoubles his focus on the success of his business interests. It is apparent to both the reader and to Frank himself that his conquests in this area and his sex conquests are cut from the same amoral cloth. And it is in these financial schemes and pursuits -- again, like in The Financier, described by Dreiser in more detail than is needed -- that he approaches, but is frequently denied, the pinnacle of both ambitions.
It is curious how that first and most potent tendency of the human mind, ambition, becomes finally dominating. Here was Cowperwood at fifty-seven, rich beyond the wildest dream of the average man, celebrated in a local and in some respects a national way, who was nevertheless feeling that by no means had his true aims been achieved. He was not yet all-powerful as were divers eastern magnates, or even these four or five magnificently moneyed men here in Chicago, who, by plodding thought and labor in many dreary fields such as Cowperwood himself frequently scorned, had reaped tremendous and uncontended profits. How was it, he asked himself, that his path had almost constantly been strewn with stormy opposition and threatened calamity? Was it due to his private immorality? Other men were immoral; the mass, despite religious dogma and folderol theory imposed from the top, was generally so. Was it not rather due to his inability to control without dominating personally -- without standing out fully and clearly in the sight of all men? Sometimes he thought so. The humdrum conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance, his constant desire to call a spade a spade. His genial sufficiency was taunt and a mockery to many. The hard implication of his eye was dreaded by the weaker as fire is feared by a burned child. Dissembling enough, he was not sufficiently oily and make-believe. Well, come what might, he did not need to be or mean to be so, and there the game must lie; but he had not by any means attained the height of his ambition. He was not looked upon as a money prince. He could not rank as yet with the magnates of the East -- the serried Sequoias of Wall Street. Until he could stand with these men, until he could have a magnificent mansion, acknowledged as such by all, until he could have a world-famous gallery, Berenice, millions -- what did it avail?
Berenice is Berenice Fleming, the adult but much younger-than-Frank daughter of a socialite with whom Frank grows close in his travels and business dealings. And it is his quest for her, for her ideal beauty, that he begins to build these monuments in New York City and begins to measure himself against the fame and fortunes of that island empire. In the above passage we see Frank examining both himself and his ambition, trying desperately to understand what it is and what it is that will allow him to attain it.
And he is growing increasingly aware of the large number of years that have passed and the smaller number that are still yet to come. He is jealous of Berenice’s younger paramours, including one named Braxmar.
Berenice was so beautiful in a storm of diaphanous, clinging garments. He stared at them from an adjacent room, where he pretended to be reading, and sighed. Alas, how were his cunning and foresight -- even his -- to overcome the drift of life itself? How was he to make himself appealing to youth? Braxmar had the years, the color, the bearing. Berenice seemed tonight, as she prepared to leave, to be fairly seething with youth, hope, gaiety. He arose after a few moments, and giving business as an excuse, hurried away. But it was only to sit in his own rooms in a neighboring hotel and meditate. The logic of the ordinary man under such circumstances, compounded of the age-old notions of chivalry, self-sacrifice, duty to higher impulses, and the like, would have been to step aside in favor of youth, to give convention its day, and retire in favor of morality and virtue. Cowperwood saw things in no such moralistic or altruistic light. “I satisfy myself,” had ever been his motto, and under that, however much he might sympathize with Berenice in love or with love itself, he was not content to withdraw until he was sure that the end of hope for him had really come.
Frank is more introspective here than almost ever before, really digging into what it is he desires and, more importantly, why. At one point, he tries to explain himself to Berenice, using his series of serious relationships with women as his pretext.
“Let me tell you a little something about my life, will you? It won’t take long. I was born in Philadelphia. My family had always belonged there. I have been in the banking and street-railway business all my life. My first wife was a Presbyterian girl, religious, conventional. She was older than I by six or seven years. I was happy for a while -- five or six years. We had two children -- both still living. Then I met my present wife. She was younger than myself -- at least ten years, and very good-looking. She was in some respects more intelligent than my first wife -- at least less conventional, more generous, I thought. I fell in love with her, and when I eventually left Philadelphia I got a divorce and married her. I was greatly in love with her at the time. I thought she was an ideal mate for me, and I still think she has many qualities which make her attractive. But my own ideals in regard to women have all the time been slowly changing. I have come to see, through various experiments, that she is not the ideal woman for me at all. She does not understand me. I don’t pretend to understand myself, but it has occurred to me that there might be a woman somewhere who would understand me better than I understand myself, who would see the things that I don’t see about myself, and would like me, anyhow. I might as well tell you that I have been a lover of women always. There is just one ideal thing in this world to me, and that is the woman that I would like to have.”
But it’s not really women that Frank desires. It is only something that they represent. There is one moment of clarity where he comes to understand the real object of his seemingly unquenchable desire.
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.
It is crazy interesting to me that Frank Cowperwood should come to this final conclusion at the end of The Titan. There is a third book in the Cowperwood trilogy, what is sometimes called the Trilogy of Desire. It is called The Stoic, but it is not the next novel that Dreiser wrote. The Stoic was written late in Dreiser’s life, and would not be published until after his death in 1945. No, Dreiser’s next novel after The Titan was called The Genius. At the time of writing this blog post, I have not yet read The Stoic, but I have read The Genius, and I know that it is all about the pursuit of beauty -- of female beauty, of artistic beauty, of platonic beauty itself -- almost to the exclusion of all else.
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment