Valedictory

THE BULWARK -- Theodore Dreiser--Doubleday ($2.75).

Shortly before he died, the late, great Theodore Dreiser finished two novels, the first he had written in 20 years. The Stoic, which will not be published until fall, completes the towering trilogy on U.S. business which was begun with The Financier (1912) and continued in The Titan (1914).* The Bulwark, which he had meditated for some 30 years, is an unpretentious, fitting valedictory.

For years, Puritans attacked most of Dreiser's novels tooth & nail for their frankness and coarseness. The Bulwark is Dreiser's tender tribute to all that was good in the forces which most bitterly attacked him.

Religion v. Materialism. Solon Barnes is a Quaker, brought up in unworldliness. He marries (for love) into a richer family of Friends and becomes a Philadelphia banker. For many years he floats along on uneasy rationalizations about the sacred stewardship of wealth (which he honestly tries to live up to). When his associates mire themselves and their bank deeper & deeper in crooked, within-the-law self-interest, he can stay silent no longer. In part the novel is a study of the losing struggle between the moribund U.S. religious sense and proliferating U.S. materialism.

But Dreiser was far less a theorist than a humanist; essentially his novel is not a social thesis but the timeless story of family life. Of Solon's five children, one is set apart by her homeliness; one is a born Pharisee; one is a self-conscious beauty; one is an artist; one is a natural cavalier. Dreiser is interested mainly in the two latter, the arch-rebels. Against them Solon Barnes finds sternness and tolerance equally ineffective. His son and daughter, in the struggle to come to life as autonomous human beings, become thieves, and worse. The soberly beautiful family group grows rigid with reluctant tyranny, ugly with fear and deceit. The beloved and charming home becomes, for some members of the family, a place of captivity, distaste and boredom. Finally the crime and suicide of the youngest child brings the repentance and ultimate religious conversion of another.

The story has been told many times, and more dramatically, but seldom with more balanced compassion or gentler insight. The Bulwark's closing chapters, in which Solon Barnes realizes what his good intentions have wrought, and is battered into a simpler, humbler kind of religious understanding, are of a searching, level, melancholy beauty which cannot be expected of any living American writer.

Pure Principle. From first to last, self-schooled, slow-minded Theodore Dreiser was ridiculed as a turgid stylist and a ponderous craftsman. His critics will still find much to ridicule in this novel. Other readers may find that the slow, munching rhythm, the tone-deaf iteration, the lifelessness of epithet, are of a rocklike unity with the earnest intelligence, the upright and enduring heart, which even Dreiser's detractors give him credit for. They may also find that Dreiser was capable of a remarkable purity of communication whenever he was deeply moved. For in the words of the American Quaker, John Woolman, which he quotes, Dreiser at his best lived and wrote in faithfulness to "a principle placed. In the human mind, which in different places and ages hath had different names; it is, however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion nor excluded from any, when the heart stands in perfect sincerity. In whomsoever this takes root and grows, they become brethren."

* World Publishing Co. has issued a "Memorial Edition" of An American Tragedy, with an introduction by H. L. Mencken; will reissue all Dreiser's novels within the year.

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