PARTISAN REVIEW
pleasure only to the Philistine and to draw the mind and heart of no
one, not even of the Philistine.
Lionel Trilling
FICTION CHRONICLE
THE STOIC. By Theodore Dreiser. Doubledoy. $3.00.
THE REPRIEVE. By Jeon-Poul Sortre. Tronsloted by Eric Sutton. Knopf.
$3.00.
THE SURE HAND OF GOD. By Erskine Coldw&ll. Duell, Sloone, ond
PMrce. $2.75.
THE VICTIM. By Saul Bellow. Vonguord. $2.75.
The Stoic,
Dreiser's last words on his great character, Frank
Cowperwood, does not add much to this legendary man, but it is satis–
fying to have the full portrait. Fortunately, the most important part of
the novel was finished before Dreiser's death and only the epilogue,
adequately suggested in a condensation of his notes on the final chapter,
is incomplete.
The Stoic
takes Cowperwood to London with ideas of
building a subway system, continues the love affair with Berenice Fleming
begun in
The Titan,
and ends with Cowperwood's death and the death
of his second wife, Aileen Butler. The general plan of
The Financier
and
The Titan
is maintained, and again Dreiser has divided his novel between
detailed accounts of Cowperwood's business schemes and an equally full
report on his fantastic private life. The financial adventures, at the very
center of the character as they are, providing the external symbol of
Cowperwood's incredible energy and establishing his position in the
world, are certainly necessary to the picture, but they seem somehow
less fabulous than his love affairs, which are among the most bewildering
in fiction. There is nobody quite like this man. His vitality, success,
intelligence, and unfailing self-esteem are shared by James's Christopher
Newman, and both are convincingly masculine and American, but there
the similarity ends. Needless to say, Christopher Newman would not be
caught dead with Cowperwood's women.
Surely there is more to Cowperwood's private life than appears on
the surface. His promiscuity, as a mere fact of his existence, can be
accepted very much as Dreiser accepts it, as the natural appetite of a
powerful man, "too passionate, too radiant, too individual and complex
to belong to any single individual alone." Dreiser defends Cowper–
wood's egoism against the common charges of moralists, but he does
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