Theodore Dreiser: The Genius (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theodore Dreiser: The Genius Jerome Loving Theodore Dreiser: The Genius. Ed. Clare Virginia Eby. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2008. xiii + 922 pp. Cloth, $95.00. At the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Theodore Dreiser came back from the literary dead with a burst of productivity. Beginning with Jennie Gerhardt in 1911, he wrote and published four other books, including The Financier (1912), A Traveler at Forty (1913), The Titan (1914), and The "Genius" (1915). It was exhaustive work, especially the digging he had to do for the first two volumes of his "Trilogy of Desire." They also marked Dreiser's shift away from drawing upon his personal past to basing his fictions on historical facts, in this case the career of traction king Charles Yerkes, who as Frank Cowperwood epitomizes the robber baron of that day. Jennie Gerhardt had been based on the life of his eldest sister Mame, while The "Genius" was generally based on his own life. In fact, in the accompanying essay about The "Genius," Clare Eby argues that it wasn't as autobiographical as we have thought. As a consequence of viewing the [End Page 84] novel as a thinly veiled autobiography, she implies, we have tended to regard the literary achievement as somewhat diminished. What Dreiser came back from, of course, was the tragedy of his novel Sister Carrie (1900), based primarily on the life of another wayward sister. That book changed the course of American literature as it entered the next century—from plots based on the hopes of the Social Darwinists to those based on the Darwinian notion that we are simply victims of heredity and environment, blown this way or that, as circumstance dictates. Between that book and his return to serious authorship a decade later lay homelessness, a nervous breakdown, the break-up of his first marriage, magazine work, and a botched emotional affair with an eighteen-year-old woman. Most of these things are recorded in The "Genius"—now called The Genius to distinguish the text based on the 1911 composition of the novel from its publication in 1915 and again—after a long battle with the censors—in 1923. The 1915 and 1923 editions of The "Genius" are identical, and its second printing marked the general demise of puritanical censorship in literary America. In a way, this novel did for American literature what Sister Carrie had done—loosened the stranglehold of American moralists. In what began back in the 1980s with the scholarly reissue of Dreiser's works based on original holographs or typescripts in the University of Pennsylvania library collection, The Genius is slightly longer than its originally published version: it has 104 chapters plus the "Envoi," whereas the 1915 edition has 101 chapters as well as the "Envoi" divided into three books, "Youth," "Struggle," and "Revolt"—similar to the divisions in An American Tragedy (1925). Dreiser always needed an editor, so a case has to be made for publishing the original, longer text, even though this one is not that much longer. The Jennie Gerhardt edition in this series is certainly more useful to scholars, but it isn't necessarily a better story. In the case of The Genius without the quotation marks (we're not exactly sure just why Dreiser used them in his 1915 title), the argument for its superiority may be slightly stretched as well. Eby claims that the two versions diverge in structure, characterization, and thematic emphasis, and that the Eugene Witla of the 1911 version "reveals a Dreiser whose mature ideas of self, masculinity, artistic achievement, and worldly success were still in the process of formation." This may have been Dreiser as he naively approached Sister Carrie in 1900, but is it the Dreiser of Jennie Gerhardt and The Genius in 1911, the writer who had been through the American wringer with his story about seduction, theft, and poverty and who was entering his fifth decade of life? If anything, the second Dreiser had learned his lesson about crossing the critics. He allowed Harper and Brothers to tone down Jennie [End Page 85] Gerhardt considerably, and he held back The "Genius" for fear that its...