The Freedom of the Poet by John Berryman

Author:John Berryman [Berryman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466808003
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Cowperwood is not a villain, in his master’s view. Let’s begin with that. Nor is there anything tragic about his defeats. One does not even suffer them. His second marriage is a horror. The wife claws his current mistress (a very good scene) in his own house, and there is a problem of propriety, since the mistress may die. His bought men in politics do not stay bought—Kerrigan and Tiernan, I would say in passing, are the most effective ward leaders in American literature, handled with something rare in Dreiser, humour, as well as complete understanding. He is finally wrinkled out even of the street-railways scene, and heads for New York and Europe, refreshed. With a larger fortune.

When Silas Lapham’s paint is to be replaced by one equally good that costs less, one’s heart hurts. Not in The Titan.

And yet Dreiser looms a far more formidable novelist than Howells. The general rage that went up when Lewis won the Nobel Prize—that overrated literary encomium—instead of Dreiser, I am happy to echo. (I am also glad that Dreiser cuffed Lewis physically—although any reader of Mark Schorer’s biography of Lewis must feel intermittent sympathy with him—on a famous and absurd occasion in New York.) Dreiser remains one of the commanding writers we have had, for the readers who can bear him.

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