An American Tragedy Read online

  In Lycurgus the name Griffiths gives Clyde a certain cachet, but his patron regard him as a poor relation, a potential embarrassment, and virtually ignore him. So he works in the factory and drifts into his affair with the one of the workers, Roberta, violating a company rule against fraternization with female employees.

  After seducing her, he is taken up by the monied Sondra, who feels sorry for him and also wants to get revenge on Clyde’s pompous overbearing cousin Gilbert Griffiths, who has slighted her. Through her good offices Clyde is accepted by Lycurgus’s upper-class younger set and Sondra eventually develops an infatuation for him. Yet his position remains tenuous; he must live by the standards of his new friends. He lies about his parents’ occupation, making them seem more important than they are so that he will not be seen as “a mere nobody seeking . . . to attach himself to his cousin’s family. . . .”

  Dreiser’s examples of the workings of class multiply through the novel. Even the collar factory where Clyde works is tied to social status. As Gilbert explains, the family business has a “social importance” because the cheap collars it turns out give “polish and manner to people who wouldn’t otherwise have them. . . .” Collars accord status to parvenus—poor boys seeking middle-class respectability like Clyde.

  Dreiser’s narrative method is to create characters who have their counterparts or “doubles” in the lower or higher class. To Roberta Clyde is upper class. She sees rich and poor in Lycurgus as “divided by a high wall.” Clyde is to her as Sondra is to him—an emissary of higher sphere. Gilbert resents Clyde as an upstart, yet their physical resemblance is so close they are nearly twins. Clyde is actually better looking and more charming (Sondra tells him that looks without money will not take him far). All that separates him from Gilbert, Dreiser implies, is the fate of birth, which makes Gilbert the arrogant heir to the Griffiths millions, and Clyde the outsider struggling to break in.

  Sondra is the upper-class counterpart of Hortense Briggs, the mercenary tease Clyde dated in Kansas City when he was a bellhop. Clyde’s sister Esta resembles Roberta in that she was seduced in Kansas City by an actor. Esta returns later to her family and subsequently marries, and Clyde snobbishly wonders why Roberta, with her dirt-poor farmer parents, should have the gall to worry about her reputation.

  Mason, the district attorney who prosecutes Clyde for the murder of Roberta, harbors a resentment of the rich; he sees Clyde as an upper class rake and attacks him on the stand with a zeal fired by personal animosity as well as political amibition. Clyde’s defense attorney Belknap is more sympathetic to the young man, because he had gotten into a similar scrape as in his youth. But he was extricated by his father’s wealth, which persuaded the family doctor to perform an abortion. Clyde, with his inexperience and lack of money, cannot avail himself of this escape route.

  Belknap’s partner, Jephson, drives home Dreiser’s moral of the powerful determining force of class. “After all, you didn’t make yourself,” he tells Clyde. And it is also Jephson who articulates Clyde’s helpless attraction to the unattainable. “A case of the Arabian Nights,” he tells him on the stand, using Dreiser’s recurrent Alladinish imagery to symbolize the dream of magically attained riches. When Clyde does not understand, Jephson explains: “A case of being bewitched, my poor boy—by beauty, love, wealth, by things that are we sometimes think we want very, very much and cannot ever have. . . .” Dreiser sympathizes with Clyde’s dream but pitilessly exposes it as a mirage. (“Mirage” was an early working title for the novel.)

  An American Tragedy is one of the greatest “social novels” produced in America, one that paints the fullest and deepest picture of American society. It is told without moralizing—though Dreiser regards religion as another mirage, which leads fanatic believers like Clyde’s parents into useless lives—yet it is a profoundly moral novel, harsh in its truth-telling, magnanimous in its sympathy for the failings and weakness of humankind. It is not an exculpation of Clyde’s crime but rather a profound meditation on the nature of guilt, viewed from all conceivable angles, psychological, legal, moral, social.

  It is also an psychologically acute (and gripping) murder story—on the high level of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. Like those authors, Dreiser’s patient attentiveness to detail, and his philosophical vision, transmute a sordid, tawdry murder into a tragedy (he said it was an “honor” to tell the story of ordinary people like Clyde and Roberta). Dreiser draws us through an emotional wringer, leaving the reader exhausted yet purged.

  Dreiser, of course, makes the murder itself ambigous. Clyde backs out of his plan to kill Roberta at the last moment. He cannot snuff out this beautiful soul for the shimmering mirage of Sondra. And yet, and yet . . . Clyde, commanded by the voice of the “Efrit,” the genie that Dreiser creates to symbolize the darker side of his nature, swims away as Roberta flounders in her final throes. He is morally, if not legally, guilty. But aren’t there extenuating circumstances?

  Let the reader debate this point, as Dreiser does in the mind of the Reverend Duncan McMillan, the minister who counsels Clyde on death row and who ultimately betrays him to the governor. The latter is looking for a way to justify commuting the death sentence. McMillan is driven by his own religious beliefs to tell him that Clyde was guilty in his heart. The governor allows the execution to go forward. (It might be noted that for all Dreiser’s antipathy toward religion the two most devout believers—McMillan and Clyde’s mother—are among his most sympathetic characters.)

  A word about Dreiser’s style; it is slow, ponderous, almost archaic at times, sprinkled with solecisms. The first part of the novel, describing Clyde’s childhood and young manhood, would benefit from cutting. Dreiser will make a point and then repeat it twice over—often in the next sentences. But the novel gathers power like a thunder storm, and the reader is slowly sucked into the tale’s emotional vortex. Who can deny the symbolic power of the death scene—those ultimate moments in the rowboat on the lake “looking like a huge black pearl cast by some mighty hand,” as two small figures act out under a relentless sun a drama of fate and free will? And then the trial, with its ritualized jousts between attorneys but also its fresh analysis of Clyde’s guilt or innocence from the perspective of the law. And then the surreal scenes on death row as Clyde is caught up in the Kafkaesque machinery of execution. Here Dreiser’s crude prose mimics the system’s banal inhumanity: “The ‘death house’ in this particular prison was one of those crass erections and maintenance of human insensitiveness and stupidity principally for which no one primarily was really responsible.”

  Dreiser’s power originates in such raw, sincere eloquence; in his great humanity and deep sympathy with the lowly, and in his patient accretion of facts—and not only the facts themselves but the psychological resonances behind them. He drags the reader beneath the social surface into black depths of terror and desire where swim like prehistoric beings our primal fears. He shows us the American dream transformed into the American nightmare.

  —Richard Lingeman

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  DUSK—of a summer night.

  And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants—such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable.

  And up the broad street, now comparatively hushed, a little band of six,—a man of about fifty, short, stout, with bushy hair protruding from under a round black felt hat, a most unimportant-looking person, who carried a small portable organ such as is customarily used by street preachers and singers. And with him a woman perhaps five years his junior, taller, not so broad, but solid of frame and vigorous, very plain in face and dress, and yet not homely, leading with one hand a small boy of seven and in the other carrying a Bible and several hymn books. With these three, but walking independently behind, was a girl of fifteen, a boy of twelve and another girl of nine, all following obediently, but not too enthusiastically, in the wake of the others.


  It was hot, yet with a sweet languor about it all.

  Crossing at right angles the great thoroughfare on which they walked, was a second canyon-like way, threaded by throngs and vehicles and various lines of cars which clanged their bells and made such progress as they might amid swiftly moving streams of traffic. Yet the little group seemed unconscious of anything save a set purpose to make its way between the contending lines of traffic and pedestrians which flowed by them.

  Having reached an intersection this side of the second principal thoroughfare—really just an alley between two tall structures—now quite bare of life of any kind, the man put down the organ, which the woman immediately opened, setting up a music rack upon which she placed a wide flat hymn book. Then handing the Bible to the man, she fell back in line with him, while the twelve-year-old boy put down a small camp-stool in front of the organ. The man—the father, as he chanced to be—looked about him with seeming wide-eyed assurance, and announced, without appearing to care whether he had any auditors or not:

  “We will first sing a hymn of praise, so that any who may wish to acknowledge the Lord may join us. Will you oblige, Hester?”

  At this the eldest girl, who until now had attempted to appear as unconscious and unaffected as possible, bestowed her rather slim and as yet undeveloped figure upon the camp chair and turned the leaves of the hymn book, pumping the organ while her mother observed:

  “I should think it might be nice to sing twenty-seven tonight—‘How Sweet the Balm of Jesus’ Love.’ ”

  By this time various homeward-bound individuals of diverse grades and walks of life, noticing the small group disposing itself in this fashion, hesitated for a moment to eye them askance or paused to ascertain the character of their work. This hesitancy, construed by the man apparently to constitute attention, however mobile, was seized upon by him and he began addressing them as though they were specifically here to hear him.

  “Let us all sing twenty-seven, then—‘How Sweet the Balm of Jesus’ Love.’ ”

  At this the young girl began to interpret the melody upon the organ, emitting a thin though correct strain, at the same time joining her rather high soprano with that of her mother, together with the rather dubious baritone of the father. The other children piped weakly along, the boy and girl having taken hymn books from the small pile stacked upon the organ. As they sang, this nondescript and indifferent street audience gazed, held by the peculiarity of such an unimportant-looking family publicly raising its collective voice against the vast skepticism and apathy of life. Some were interested or moved sympathetically by the rather tame and inadequate figure of the girl at the organ, others by the impractical and materially inefficient texture of the father, whose weak blue eyes and rather flabby but poorly-clothed figure bespoke more of failure than anything else. Of the group the mother alone stood out as having that force and determination which, however blind or erroneous, makes for self-preservation, if not success in life. She, more than any of the others, stood up with an ignorant, yet somehow repsectable air of conviction. If you had watched her, her hymn book dropped to her side, her glance directed straight before her into space, you would have said: “Well, here is one who, whatever her defects, probably does what she believes as nearly as possible.” A kind of hard, fighting faith in the wisdom and mercy of that definite overruling and watchful power which she proclaimed, was written in her every feature and gesture.

  “The love of Jesus saves me whole,

  The love of God my steps control,”

  she sang resonantly, if slightly nasally, between the towering walls of the adjacent buildings.

  The boy moved restlessly from one foot to the other, keeping his eyes down, and for the most part only half singing. A tall and as yet slight figure, surmounted by an interesting head and face—white skin, dark hair—he seemed more keenly observant and decidedly more sensitive than most of the others—appeared indeed to resent and even to suffer from the position in which he found himself. Plainly pagan rather than religious, life interested him, although as yet he was not fully aware of this. All that could be truly said of him now was that there was no definite appeal in all this for him. he was too young, his mind much too responsive to phases of beauty and pleasure which had little, if anything, to do with the remote and cloudy romance which swayed the minds of his mother and father.

  Indeed the home life of which this boy found himself a part and the various contacts, material and psychic, which thus far had been his, did not tend to convince him of the reality and force of all that his mother and father seemed so certainly to believe and say. Rather, they seemed more or less troubled in their lives, at least materially. His father was always reading the Bible and speaking in meeting at different places, especially in the “mission,” which he and his mother conducted not so far from this corner. At the same time, as he understood it, they collected money from various interested or charitably inclined business men here and there who appeared to believe in such philanthropic work. Yet the family was always “hard up,” never very well clothed, and deprived of many comforts and pleasures which seemed common enough to others. And his father and mother were constantly proclaiming the love and mercy and care of God for him and for all. Plainly there was something wrong somewhere. He could not get it all straight, but still he could not help respecting his mother, a woman whose force and earnestness, as well as her sweetness, appealed to him. Despite much mission work and family cares, she managed to be fairly cheerful, or at least sustaining, often declaring most emphatically “God will provide” or “God will show the way,” especially in times of too great stress about food or clothes. Yet apparently, in spite of this, as he and all the other children could see, God did not show any very clear way, even though there was always an extreme necessity for His favorable intervention in their affairs.

  To-night, walking up the great street with his sisters and brother, he wished that they need not do this any more, or at least that he need not be a part of it. Other boys did not do such things, and besides, somehow it seemed shabby and even degrading. On more than one occasion, before he had been taken on the street in this fashion, other boys had called to him and made fun of his father, because he was always publicly emphasizing his religious beliefs or convictions. Thus in one neighborhood in which they had lived, when he was but a child of seven, his father, having always preluded every conversation with “Praise the Lord,” he heard boys call “Here comes the old Praise-the-Lord Griffiths.” Or they would call out after him “Hey, you’re the fellow whose sister plays the organ. Is there anything else she can play?”

  “What does he always want to go around saying, ‘Praise the Lord’ for? Other people don’t do it.”

  It was that old mass yearning for a likeness in all things that troubled them, and him. Neither his father nor his mother was like other people, because they were always making so much of religion, and now at last they were making a business of it.

  On this night in this great street with its cars and crowds and tall buildings, he felt ashamed, dragged out of normal life, to be made a show and jest of. The handsome automobiles that sped by, the loitering pedestrians moving off to what interests and comforts he could only surmise; the gay pairs of young people, laughing and jesting and the “kids” staring, all troubled him with a sense of something different, better, more beautiful than his, or rather their life.

  And now units of this vagrom and unstable street throng, which was forever shifting and changing about them, seemed to sense the psychologic error of all this in so far as these children were concerned, for they would nudge one another, the more sophisticated and indifferent lifting an eyebrow and smiling contemptuously, the more sympathetic or experienced commenting on the useless presence of these children.

  “I see these people around here nearly every night now—two or three times a week, anyhow,” this from a young clerk who had just met his girl and was escorting her toward a restaurant. “They’re just working some religious dod
ge or other, I guess.”

  “That oldest boy don’t wanta be here. He feels outa place, I can see that. It ain’t right to make a kid like that come out unless he wants to. He can’t understand all this stuff, anyhow.” This from an idler and loafer of about forty, one of those odd hangers-on about the commercial heart of a city, addressing a pausing and seemingly amiable stranger.

  “Yeh, I guess that’s so,” the other assented, taking in the peculiar cast of the boy’s head and face. In view of the uneasy and self-conscious expression upon the face whenever it was lifted, one might have intelligently suggested that it was a little unkind as well as idle to thus publicly force upon a temperament as yet unfitted to absorb their import, religious and psychic services best suited to reflective temperaments of maturer years.

  Yet so it was.

  As for the remainder of the family, both the youngest girl and boy were too small to really understand much of what it was all about or to care. The eldest girl at the organ appeared not so much to mind, as to enjoy the attention and comment her presence and singing evoked, for more than once, not only strangers, but her mother and father, had assured her that she had an appealing and compelling voice, which was only partially true. It was not a good voice. They did not really understand music. Physically, she was of a pale, emasculate and unimportant structure, with no real mental force or depth, and was easily made to feel that this was an excellent field in which to distinguish herself and attract a little attention. As for the parents, they were determined upon spiritualizing the world as much as possible, and, once the hymn was concluded, the father launched into one of those hackneyed descriptions of the delights of a release, via self-realization of the mercy of God and the love of Christ and the will of God toward sinners, from the burdensome cares of an evil conscience.