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Updated: June 8, 2025
This volume should be read in connection with "Twelve Men," by Theodore Dreiser. Where Mr. Dreiser identifies himself with his subjects, Mr. O'Higgins stands apart in the most strict detachment. These nine studies in contemporary American life take as their point of departure in each case some tiny and apparently insignificant happening which altered the whole course of a life.
Strictly speaking, however, they are not short stories, but discursive causeries on friends of Mr. Dreiser. They answer to no usual concepts of literary form, but have necessitated the creation of a new form. They reflect a gallic irony compact of pity and understanding. The brief limitations of his form prevent Mr.
To the cosmic philosopher what does it matter whether this or that human male mates with this or that human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the passionate moment? Viewing such matters thus Mr. Dreiser constantly underestimates the forces which in civil society actually do restrain the expansive moods of sex. At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its vagrant hours.
"Dreiser," he growled as he related the case to me, "it serves me right. I ought to know better. I know the kind of woman I need. This one has handed me a damned good wallop, and I deserve it. I might have guessed that she wasn't suited to me. She was really too free a life-lover more than a wife. That home stuff! She was just stringing me because she liked me.
The "churl," the "hind," the "peasant," the "first servant" and "second countryman," who were the mere transitions of earlier stories now are central in literature. They come with a challenge, and when we read Galsworthy, Wells, Sinclair, Dreiser, Hardy's "The Dynasts," Bennett we are conscious of criticizing life as we read. The pale cast of thought has sicklied modern pages.
Come on, Dreiser, I know just the place for us " and then descanting on a steak or fish planked, or some new method of serving corn or sweet potatoes or tomatoes, he would lead the way somewhere to a favorite "rat's killer," as he used to say, or grill or Chinese den, and order enough for four or five, unless stopped.
Dreiser conceives them all as blind energies with no goal except self-realization. So conceiving them he tends to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in their earthly progress by the resistance of statute and habit. Particularly is this true of his representation of the careers of artists.
In this respect the novels which celebrate him stand close to the more popular Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, both of them annals of women who fall as easily as Cowperwood's many mistresses into the hand of the conquering male. If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold his approbation from the lawless financier, he withholds it even less from the lawless lover.
And yet these guesses perhaps come nearer to the truth than they might have come were either the typical financier or Mr. Dreiser more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a financier and be at all sure of the prize. Cowperwood's lighter hours are devoted to pursuits almost as polygamous as those of the leader of some four-footed herd.
"Dreiser, Dreiser," he chortled, "there's nothing like it. You should not scoff. I am a public benefactor. I am really a creator. I have created a being as distinct as any that ever lived. He is in many minds mine, yours. You know that you believe in him really. There he was peeking out from between those bushes only fifteen minutes ago.
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