1. For an excellent discussion of the philosophical problems that attended hedonism, see Yvor Winter’s chapter on Wallace Stevens in his book, In Defense of Reason (Denver: The University of Denver Press, 1943).

2. For example, in The Financier Dreiser predicts that Cowperwood will find great fame, but “sorrow, sorrow, sorrow . . . for in the glory was also the ashes of Dead Sea fruit—an understanding that could neither be inflamed by desire nor satisfied by luxury; a heart that was long since wearied by experience; a soul that was bereft of illusion as a windless moon.” Again, in The Titan he has Cowperwood comment that beyond beauty there is nothing save “crumbling age, darkness, silence.” And in The “Genius” Eugene’s “hedonistic tendencies” lead to the view that “life was nothing save dark forces moving aimlessly.” In pursuing beauty, also, the problem of death becomes magnified, for life and happiness depend on health and success; disease and weakness bring death, and death is nothingness: “The abyss of death! When he looked into that after all of life and hope, how it shocked him, how it hurt! Here was life and happiness and love in health—there was death and nothingness—aeons and aeons of nothingness.”

3. Helen Dreiser, My Life with Dreiser (New York: The World Publishing Co., 1951), pp. 71–72.

4. Robert H. Elias, Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 304.

5. Theodore Dreiser, The Bulwark (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1946), p. 18.

6. Ibid., p. 113.

7. Ibid., p. 120.

8. Ibid., p. 121.

9. Ibid., p. 127.

10. Ibid., p. 128.

11. Ibid., p. 317.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., pp. 318–319.

14. Ibid., p. 331.

15. Theodore Dreiser, The Stoic (New York: The World Publishing Co., 1947), p. 306.

16. The size of this article naturally precludes any lengthy proof of this point; however, there is a wealth of evidence awaiting the reader who goes back over Dreiser’s early works in search of this theistic influence. My master’s thesis at Stanford University was devoted to such a search, and my main problem lay not in finding the material, but in screening the overabundance of examples. Even in his two most deliberately naturalistic novels, The Financier and The Titan, in which God has been carefully ignored except for occasional jibes, Dreiser closes the novels with epilogues that rail against God, as if the object of a deliberate snub must be made cognizant of the dimensions of the snub. As T. S. Eliot says, “It is only the irreligious who are shocked by blasphemy. Blasphemy is a sign of Faith.” (See his “Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry” in his Selected Essays, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1950.)

17. H. L. Mencken, for example, was a close friend of Dreiser’s and wrote as far back as 1917 in The Seven Arts that Dreiser should not be classified as a naturalist or realist, for “he is really something quite different, and, in his moments, something far more stately.” Mencken, however, deplored the obviously “believing attitude of mind” that Dreiser displayed and considered it a “heritage of the Indiana hinterland.”

18. See Charles Child Walcutt, American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

Dustin Heuston

BYU Studies Publications