An American Tragedy (2 page)

The case most aptly tailored to his specifications turned out to be the 1906 murder of Grace (Billy) Brown by Chester Gillette, who had worked with her in a skirt factory in Cortland, New York. Chester had seduced Billy and made her pregnant. She demanded that he marry her but by then he was running with women in a higher social set; he regarded Billy as an obstacle to his rise and resolved to eliminate her. One July day he took her out in a rowboat on Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, struck her with an oar and overturned the boat, leaving her to drown.

The trial was a sensation—the O.J. Simpson case of its day without the racial angle or the international media attention, though it was lavishly covered by the New York tabloids. The dramatic high point came when the prosecutor read the poignant letters Grace Brown wrote to Gillette begging him to marry her; her simple words stirred universal sympathy and hatred of Gillette. A jury of conservative farmers and shopkeepers handed down a verdict of murder, and Gillette was duly electrocuted, despite serious irregularities in his trial. Shortly before his execution he confessed that he had indeed done in poor Billy.

Dreiser had clipped newspaper accounts of the Gillette-Brown murder and decided it was the “ideal” case he had been searching for. Also, Dreiser felt a deeper psychic kinship with Gillette than he had with the other murderers on his roster. He saw in the callow, aimless youth intimations of his own younger self, which he had described in his recently completed autobiography,
Newspaper Days
. There he paints his career as a young newspaper reporter, learning the grim facts of life as he roams various cities, tormented by sexual desire and dreams of success. There is a scene of himself standing on an avenue of wealthy homes in Cleveland, “envying the rich and wishing that I was famous or a member of a wealthy family, and that I might meet with one of the beautiful girls I imagined I saw there and have her fall in love with me.” Like Gillette, Dreiser had grown up in a poor family: Gillette’s parents were religious workers; Dreiser’s father was fanatically religious and repeatedly failed in business; his pretty sisters were in and out of trouble, seduced and abandoned by wealthy small-town sports or older rakes.

As a poor boy in his native Indiana Dreiser read avidly the Horatio Alger stories and other self-help books about success. Unlike Chester Gillette, however, he had the talent, intellect and drive to achieve it. But although he had climbed to journalistic and literary success in a manner that exemplified the American dream, he never forgot the hurts and humiliations, the ostracism and contempt he and his family endured in small-town Indiana. His skeptical mind also perceived a darker side of the Alger myth. He believed that it echoed a national obsession with money and social climbing, which promoted greed, pride and self-indulgence. It also bred unfairness: He saw worthy young men who rose in life but many more who failed because proper training and education were denied them by an accident of birth. The game was rigged to favor their wealthier peers.

In these emblematic American murder cases Dreiser studied, sexual desire was a motive force operating in tandem with ambition. The young man seduced “Miss Poor,” made her pregnant and killed her after “Miss Rich” came along. Dreiser regarded the dominant religious morality that condemned to disgrace a young woman who is pregnant out of wedlock as harsh and unnatural, a puritanical punishment for expressing normal and natural urges. And why force two young people who by then probably despise each other into marriage?

Dreiser had personal experience with the hurts and cruelties of sexual passion. He was a man with a strong erotic nature who had ditched a conventional small-town wife and sought sexual freedom in Greenwich Village. He engaged in a series of intense affairs with “liberated” young women drawn to his fame as the author of boldly realistic novels. Most of these “New Women,” however, sought to possess Dreiser, as his first wife had done; and he would resist their attempts to tie him down—resulting in fierce quarrels. He formulated the theory that in these affairs one party was the lover and the other the beloved, and the latter always has the upper hand. “Life is made for the strong,” he wrote in his diary. “There is no mercy in it for the weak—none. . . . Such is the tragedy of desire.”

It was against the psychosexual background that Dreiser interpreted the facts of the Gillette-Brown murder, when he started writing
An American Tragedy
. In it he would describe the awakening sexual desire of Roberta Alden—Grace Brown’s counterpart—for Clyde Griffiths, who is Chester Gillette, as the “blinding, bleeding stab of love.” And when Clyde is first mesmerized by the spoiled, wealthy Sondra Finchley (vaguely inspired by one of Chester’s upper-class girl friends, though there was really no single “Miss Rich” in his life) because she embodies his dreams of wealth and beauty, he feels the “stinging sense of what it was to want and not to have.”
An American Tragedy
is a tragedy of desire, as well as a tragedy of ambition.

 

Until he launched the
Tragedy
, Dreiser had been mired in a creative slough, unable to finish another long-planned novel,
The Bulwark
. At this nadir an unlikely savior appeared, a former manufacturer of paper goods turned publisher. His name was Horace Liveright, and he would become one of the most influential and gaudiest bookmen of the 1920s. Liveright believed in “advanced” literature and sought out Dreiser as the leader in the fight for a more mature American fiction. He offered Dreiser enough money to live on for a year in order to finish
The Bulwark
and Dreiser accepted.

Money in hand, Dreiser and his mistress, Helen Richardson, an aspiring actress, clandestinely departed—both of them were still married to others—for Hollywood. The town was humming with the explosive expansion of the silent film industry, the balmy air laden with sensuality, the studios grinding out steamy fantasies of sin and luxury—a “mining camp in Lotus Land,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase. Helen made the rounds and landed small roles while Dreiser attempted to write screenplays with no success. He worked sporadically on
The Bulwark
, but his attitude toward the central character had changed, and he gave it up. Back in New York City, Horace Liveright kept yelling, where is the novel? Dreiser’s answer was
An American Tragedy
.

Neither Liveright nor Dreiser could know that it would be another five years before the novel was completed. Dreiser hit a dead end in Hollywood and returned to New York where he toured sites associated with the Gillette-Brown murder and poured over accounts of the trial in the files of the New York
World
. Then he began again. The book would become “a terrible thing,” an “unholy task,” he complained.

Finally, on November 25, 1925, it was done. He had curbed some of his stylistic excesses to focus on his tale, and the result seemed almost foreign to him, “a monumental failure.” Yet deep down he knew that he had achieved something big. What the public and the critics would think was another matter, however. He had experienced too many setbacks over the course of his career to place his expectations too high.

 

An American Tragedy
is a novel about a murder that not only illuminates the dark regions of the criminal mind, but plays a searchlight across the landscape of American society. Dreiser assembles a variegated yet representative gallery of American types to tell his tale—male, female, rich, poor, working-class and rural, urban sophisticates and magnates of industry, delinquents and officers of the law, unbelievers and sincere religious folks—all sketched with insight and sympathy.

If
An American Tragedy
has an underlying social theme it is the powerful hold of status and social ambition on Americans in all levels of society and the cruelities and injuries the class system can inflict. In Dreiser’s novel this system is viewed mainly from the underside, through the eyes of Clyde Griffiths, who is lifted out of lonely obscurity and almost magically given a chance to dwell in the “splendiforous” sphere of the wealthy—if he will but murder the sweet and good Roberta Alden, whom he once loved.

Dreiser probes with a concealed stiletto of irony the permutations of class distinctions in a society founded, after all, on the principle that “all men are created equal.” Clyde’s course has been determined at birth, in Dreiser’s view. Brought up in a family of penniless and unworldly religious workers, he hungers for the comforts and pleasures others have and finally rebels, going to work in a Kansas City hotel where he is introduced to the forbidden pleasures of sex and gains a keyhole view of the rich and near-rich off guard and at play. Clyde lacks the knowledge and guidance that might have directed his mind to a trade or profession that would have enabled him to rise in life. Instead, he caroms from one situation to another, an aimless pinball, anonymous, soulless, pleasure-seeking, vaguely dreaming of a finer life, hoping for some boost from fortune that will enable him to rise. His wish is granted when he is befriended by a wealthy uncle, Samuel Griffiths, who owns a collar and shirt factory in Lycurgus, New York.

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?