The Last of Dreiser

THE STOIC (310 pp.)--Theodore Dreiser--Doubleday ($3).

Among the thousands of words the late Theodore Dreiser left behind are the 134,000 that went into this novel, which his publishers say is to be the last. He never quite finished it, though he certainly worked long at it. The Stoic completes a trilogy he began in 1912 with The Financier, and continued in The Titan (1914). Like all Dreiser's novels, it is much chewed but badly digested: the product of his slow brooding on the injustices of life, clotted with unassimilated gobbets of ideas and massive lumps of earnest social purpose. The Stoic is as dated as a three-day-old cake.

Passion for Power. Frank Algernon Cowperwood, the central character of the trilogy, is a Chicago traction magnate and stock manipulator, an obnoxious example of greed, he is socially snubbed and politically hobbled during a reform movement. The Stoic depicts his attempts to muscle in on the underground transportation system of London --a move which is thwarted by his death. Cowperwood's career, as Dreiser editorializes on it, is an indictment of both the social environment which permits unlicensed power, and the compulsions (what he calls "chemisms") which drive men to seek power.

The book is an improvement on its forerunners: Dreiser is no longer content to draw a caricature with his fist; he attempts to paint a portrait, and regards his villain with some compassion. Cowperwood is loyal to the wife he does not love, and sincerely devoted to his mistress. He never repents his deeds, or sees a need to, but he makes a futile attempt at good works by endowing, in his will, a charity hospital. This escape-hatch from hell is closed, however, when the ill-gained wealth is dissipated by executors, lawyers and heirs.

Hankering for Meaning. The Stoic closes on the same note of spiritual hankering which pervaded The Bulwark (TIME, March 25, 1946). After Cowperwood's death his mistress travels to India, seeks a religious meaning in life by studying Yoga. But she cannot reconcile spiritual claims with the poverty she sees around her, and is condemned to the old Dreiserian materialist world. In notes for a final chapter, which he did not live to write, Dreiser indicates that the mistress, with the money left her by Cowperwood, realizes his dream of subsidizing a hospital. Seldom has Dreiser allowed himself such a positive affirmation.

A whole generation of socially conscious writers have walked through the door which Dreiser opened with Sister Carrie and The Financier. In The Stoic, Dreiser is at the end of the corridor, looking backwards. A blazer of trails, he was nevertheless a poor guide; his limitations as a thinker were summed up in his autobiography: "Chronically nebulous, doubting, uncertain, I stared at everything, only wondering, not solving."

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