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PARTISAN REVIEW
minimum of observation ("He was more excited by the violently growing
city than by anything in his life so far...."). But then, at widely
spaced intervals, he inserts consistently imprecise generalizations. A man
seduces Dreiser's sister and then gets Dreiser out of jail; this "taught
Dreiser early that there is no easy separation into evil and good"–
which is at once obvious and implausible, even if Dreiser himself thought
it: Beside this kind of thing, Matthiessen gives us regularly spaced liter–
ary comparisons which seem to rest on no better ground than that both
writers involved were Americans. "In his detachment [Dreiser] was un–
like Jack London, five years his junior, who...." Or, when Dreiser
notices the "gulf between rich and poor" in New York, "keenly aware
of these things, . . . Henry George would run for mayor
in
the next
campaign. . . ."
Exactly the same kind of ambiguity runs through the account of
Dreiser's relations with the Communist Party, to which Matthiessen de–
votes a whole chapter. It is not easy to know how to take people who
talk about writers' "affirming their adherence to international solidarity
by the symbolic act of joining the Communist Party." There is no need
to pry into the political confusion of Matthiessen's own mind suggested
by such remarks: he is dead, perhaps partly as a result of it. Still, as his
main effort to explain the meaning of Dreiser's career, it leaves some–
thing to be desired.
Mr. Howe's effort to explain Anderson is far more serious. From
his very first sentence-"in the economy of late-19th-century America,
Ohio was unique among the states"-he is seeking an order of mean–
ing. But before he knows it he finds himself with half a dozen highly
abstract and differing systems on his hands. That first sentence, for
example, is followed up by an application of "'the law of combined
development'" to Ohio. The "pertinence" of Anderson's work "to the
development of American industrial society"-"whether Anderson was
aware of [it] ... hardly matters:
it
is there and it is right"-is a main
concern. As an account of Anderson's work that development seems
curiously remote. Mr. Howe is also interested in anthropology and
psychology. "Here [Anderson] had dipped into the unconscious re–
sources of the race, for the archetypal caress is a collective datum as
well as an individual experience." Of the unquotable documents Ander–
son produced during his famous breakdown, Mr. Howe tells us that
they show "a general confusion as to sex role which is manifested
in
symbols indicating a retreat from masculinity, etc." Of Anderson's use
of a narrator, he tells us that "sensing that story-telling had once been
a ceremony
in
which the listener expected the narrator . . . [to] fulfill
