The Bookshelf

Unless Theodore Dreiser's editors have fooled us again, "The Stoic" will take its place in American literature courses as his last novel. The course reading list will be the proper place for it, since--like Dreiser's other posthumous novel "The Bulwark"-- "The Stoic's" chief importance is historical rather than literary. The jacket blurb to the contrary, "The Stoic" simply does not reach the stature of "The Financier" or "The Titan," its predecessors in "The Trilogy of Desire." In concluding what Parrington called "a colossal study of the American businessman," Dreiser tells those familiar with the earlier volumes little they do not already know about Frank Algernon Cowperwood, his hero. As for the reader with a casual interest in the business mind, he would do better to sample "The Financier" or "The Titan."

All this does not deny "The Stoic" its merits. As a story it is often good Dreiser, which is very good fiction indeed. Marked by the vitality and massive documentation typical of Dreiser, this extension of Cowperwood's activities into the London financial world at times hits with undeniable power. Although Dreiser never completed "The Stoic" he did live long enough to polish it far beyond the raggedness of "The Bulwark." This superiority inheres in the book's construction. Cowperwood--his business and his philanderings--occupies the stage at all times; hence there is none of the diffusion of energy that mars the treatment of Solon Barnes and his splintering family in "The Bulwark." Until his death, Cowperwood carries the novel, and although his machinations with the control of the London "underground" approach fantasy, the weight of his personality inevitably overrides the reader's doubts. It is this same brutal personal force which stands Cowperwood by himself as the most suavely terrifying example of the business type in American literature.

Despite the concentration on Cowperwood, "The Stoic" paradoxically achieves its major significance only after Dreiser has interred him in his lavish mausoleum. Strictly speaking, the closing section is extraneous both to this novel and to the trilogy as a whole. But as an epitaph to Cowperwood-and in fact to Dreiser himself--the long search into Brahmanism by Cowperwood's last mistress Berenice assumes a weight completely disproportionate to its length. In her study of the Yoga discipline Dreiser furnishes an acute insight into his own final outlook on life.

Written shortly before his death, when Dreiser had forsaken institutionalized religion for a Communist party membership card, the thorough and obviously sympathetic discussion of Berenice's training in Yogi lore reveals that Dreiser has finally found solutions to problems long troubling him. Always religious in nature and temperament, Dreiser devoted a good deal of his life to a search for earthly realization of the values of Christ. Rejecting Church dogma as sterile and oppressive, he ultimately found his personal Christ in Communism. Yet Dreiser's moving desire to explain the life force in other than material terms demanded a religious justification of his views. Not until "The Bulwark" did he discover one. Then, he saw a possible solution in the Quaker doctrine of "the inner light" which animated the life of Solon Banes, and which moved his daughter Etta to realize "the love and peace involved in consideration for others." In this frame, the study of Brahmanism becomes merely another buttress to the synthesis of religion and communism. When Dreiser has Berenice declare that "One must live for something outside one's self, something ... to answer the needs of the many as opposed to the vanities and comforts of the few," he is not only talking for his heroine. He also speaks for Theodore Dreiser.