poetsquib.com

Matilda recommended this book by Theodore Dreiser and when it arrived from Amazon, all 856 thin grey pages of Signet Classic with what I consider to be an incredibly daggy painting by Henry LeBasque on the front and back cover, not to mention a blurb that talked about the dark side of the American Dream… I thought well the only tragedy is going to be the act of reading it

But now I take that all back because I’ve cleaned it all off in just over a week and despite the protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, being a despicable shallow scumbag, the final pages concerning his unhappy ending had me crying and it’s difficult to cry and read and wear glasses at the same time. I was sorry for the scoundrel and this surprised me but shows what a good writer Dreiser was

Did Clyde have any good qualities at all? The only thing I liked about him was his steadfast refusal to believe in God, despite every one’s best efforts to show him the light. Dreiser could have so easily ’saved’ Clyde’s ‘immortal soul’ at the end and given everyone a spiritually ‘uplifting’ ending. But Clyde remains irreligious to the bitter end. In the last pages Clyde he tells his mother

“Mama, you must believe that I die resigned and content. It won’t be hard. God has heard my prayers. He has given me strength and peace.’ But to himself adding: “Had he?”

This book was based on a real trial and it was also turned into two movies, An American Tragedy (1931) and A Place in the Sun (1951), the latter starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift

The story is carried by a beautiful rhythm which seems in part to be achieved by the refrain of certain words and phrases: ‘And yet! And yet!’, ‘But now - now!’, ‘The lake the lake’, ‘He must not - he must not’, ‘if only - if only’, ‘unless - unless’, ‘Could there? Could there?’

And he was still a bell-hop. And close to twenty-one. At times it made him very sad. He wished and wished that he could get into some work where he could rise and be somebody - not always a bell-hop, as at times he feared he might (Chapter 4, Dreiser)

In a way the book could be reduced to ‘And yet! And yet!’ because this phrase best sums up Clyde’s desire which is always driven by lack, a desire that can never be fulfilled because ‘And yet! And yet!’ there is always something more to *desire.

A good read, thanks Matilda!

*I bet there’s been a million Lacanian essays written on this novel