BOOKS
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And yet both men represented about equally for their time the
escape of American literature from mere taste and gentility, its apparent
emergence as a genuine expression of an American consciousness. And
in one way this judgment was right. "When I read
Winesburg, Ohio
in
my adolescence," says Mr. Howe, "I felt that a new world had been
opened to me, new possibilities of expression, new dimensions of emo–
tion.... later ... Anderson still meant more to me than other writers
of unquestionably greater achievement." Dreiser and Anderson both
did this for
us.
Dreiser comes as near as possible to being a man who reached
maturity without any environment at all; Anderson was brought up
in an environment that had disappeared before he could turn and look
back at it. Both men were thus products of the enormous cultural
destruction wrought by the American passion for change and novelty.
Both clutched at the value of novelty, though Anderson's novelty
was consciously intellectual while Dreiser's was a feeling that "the street–
cars were a song"; both men, like all the best of their contemporaries,
felt uneasy in this commitment and struggled to visualize a better life.
Unsupported by either inherited ideas or education, their efforts were
pathetic and heroic. Their resemblance is crucial and puzzling. The
man who worked himself up to a $lO,OOO-a-year editorship with But–
terick by sheer skill was not very remote from the president of the
Anderson Manufacturing Company and the chatty little advertisements
he wrote for his
Commercial Democracy.
And the man who quit But–
terick with the incomprehensible remark that "the big work was done
here" and produced
Jennie Gerhardt
is no easier to explain than the
Elyria businessman who had a "nervous breakdown" and became a
writer.
These two lives, taken together, make a kind of personal history
of the emergence of modern American literature. What shows most
vividly in that history is the intolerable strain, for Americans, between
the ambition to succeed according to the standards of the Elyria
Country Club and the demands of the life of the mind. Anderson
could have been speaking for them both when he called himself "a
good deal of a Babbitt ... but never completely that." This is not only
commonplace; it is unfashionable commonplace. But it is no com–
monplace when you can see it lived out in actual lives. How biograph–
ers are to make you see it is something of a problem.
Matthiessen's book was unrevised when he died. Still, its basic
method would hardly have been changed
in
revision. It consists
in
a
straight chronological account; normally Matthiessen sticks to the
