I

The WSWS has published a series of articles observing the 100th anniversary of various achievements in fiction, film and music. A recurring theme has been the significance, in direct and myriad indirect ways, of the 1917 October Revolution to global art and culture.

The greatest artistic accomplishments in the 20th century came about as the result of the understanding, or more often the intuition, that “the new art,” as Trotsky suggested, “which will lay out new landmarks, and which will expand the channel of creative art,” could only be created by those who were “at one with their epoch,” the convulsive era ushered in by the Russian Revolution, the first stage of the world revolution. To one varied extent or another, the most serious artists in the 1920s and early 1930s, however they may have interpreted the process, anticipated or often even assumed that society was proceeding to a new and higher stage. Absorbing that atmosphere proved essential to the honest and aesthetically rich treatment of the contradictions of contemporary reality.

This conception of 20th century art animates our view of one of the most titanic works of fiction of the last century.

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy was published one hundred years ago, on December 17, 1925. The novel—inspired by a 1906 murder case—recounts the early life of Clyde Griffiths, from a lower middle class, religious family, and his subsequent pursuit of the American dream of success and status. When his pregnant, factory worker girlfriend, Roberta Alden, becomes an obstacle in that pursuit, he cold-bloodedly plans her murder. Her eventual death, on a deserted upstate New York lake, is one of the most chilling scenes in American and world literature.

A lengthy novel, at more than 800 pages, An American Tragedy was originally published in two volumes. Despite its size and price, it sold some 50,000 copies in the first year. It received wide critical acclaim and made Dreiser the leading American author of the day. Banned in Boston in 1927, later proscribed by the Nazis for “dealing with low love affairs,” the novel has been adapted several times for the theater and on film.

It is difficult to think of another novel that proceeds as An American Tragedy does. Dreiser painstakingly builds up piece by painful, intensely intimate piece his picture of a society, a town, a factory, several families and a “love triangle” as the terrible disaster looms.

Roberta becomes pregnant precisely as Clyde is introduced into the town’s better circles and a possible romance with a “golden girl,” Sondra Finchley, opens up unimagined possibilities of wealth, luxury and beauty. Eventually, Clyde begins to entertain in his own mind the possibility of murder. He calculates that “unless Roberta let him go it all spelled defeat for him.” He now “looked gloomily and even desperately upon [Sondra’s] face. The beauty of her! The completeness of this world! And yet not to be allowed to possess her or it, ever. And Roberta with her demand and his promise in the immediate background! And no way of escape save by flight! God!”

Clyde argues with himself:

“But I do not want to kill her [Roberta]. I do not want to kill her. I do not want to injure her in any way. If she will but let me go and she go her own way, I will be so glad and so happy never to see her more.”

“But she will not let you go or go her way unless you accompany her. And if you go yours, it will be without Sondra and all that she represents, as well as all this pleasant life here—your standing with your uncle, his friends, their cars, the dances, visits to the lodges on the lakes. And what then? A small job! Small pay! … Never another chance like this anywhere. Do you prefer that?”

The ultimately doomed efforts of Clyde and Roberta to extricate themselves from their predicament (including the search for a doctor willing to perform an abortion) are particularly heartrending. The chapters leading up to and including Roberta’s death by water are difficult to read or re-read.

II

Dreiser (1871-1945), born in Terre Haute, Indiana, is an immense figure in American literature. While An American Tragedy was his supreme achievement, he was also the author of at least four other brilliant novels of American life, Sister Carrie (1900), Jennie Gerhardt (1911), The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), as well as two fascinating, revealing volumes of autobiography, Newspaper Days (originally published as A Book About Myself in 1922, put out under the new title in 1931) and Dawn (1931). An Amateur Laborer (begun in 1904, but not published until decades later) is also a memoir, covering the three years of psychological crisis after the suppression of Sister Carrie, during which Dreiser worked as a rail worker.

His relatively unflattering, although generally sympathetic portrait of the Soviet Union, Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), and his scathing indictment of US capitalism during the first years of the Great Depression, Tragic America (1931), when read critically, still make illuminating reading. There are also short story collections (e.g., Chains, 1927) and various volumes of letters (edited by Robert H. Elias, Thomas P. Riggio and Donald Pizer).

Dreiser corresponded with notable figures such as Eugene V. Debs, Diego Rivera, John Barrymore, John Ford, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, Paul Robeson, Edgar Lee Masters, Edmund Wilson, James T. Farrell, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, Emma Goldman, H. G. Wells, Max Eastman, Sergei Eisenstein, Edward G. Robinson, William Randolph Hearst and Franklin D. Roosevelt, as well as countless readers, lovers and friends.

Dreiser had his share of personal failings and foibles, prejudices and backwardness. He was susceptible, like many American intellectuals, to pragmatic quick fixes, philosophical charlatanry and worse. He was given on occasion to extreme impressionism about events and people. His lengthy association with Stalinism, although it can be explained from a historical point of view, did him no credit. Despite knowing better, Dreiser declined, in response to the urging of Eastman in 1933, from publicly coming to the defense of Trotsky’s persecuted “adherents” in the USSR, claiming “the victory of Russia is all-important. I hold with Lincoln: Never swap horses while crossing a stream.”

David North has commented on the American liberal intelligentsia in the early part of the 20th century, an “amorphous” grouping, with little more than “a vague commitment to the gradual improvement of social conditions.” The Depression, however, “produced within this social milieu a certain sense of urgency, a heightened interest in social problems and even a degree of sympathy for radical politics.”

Against the backdrop of the American crisis, the apparent successes of the Soviet economy, the “excesses” of collectivization notwithstanding, generated respect and even admiration for the concept of economic planning. It appeared to many liberal intellectuals that the world had something to learn from the Soviet Union.

In so far as Dreiser was a far more substantial artist and intellectual than the “run of the mill,” his concern with “social problems” and his “sympathy for radical politics” took on a more serious, intense character. He keenly felt the widespread misery and suffering produced by American capitalism during the Depression and wrote movingly about it. Dreiser genuinely stuck his neck out, in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, coal miners in Kentucky and class war prisoners such as Tom Mooney, and brought the wrath of the authorities down upon himself on numerous occasions.

As noted, he condemned US capitalism in Tragic America as unredeemable and backed up his judgment with a plethora of facts and figures. Moreover, Dreiser denounced the class-collaborationist American Federation of Labor (AFL), asserting in a 1931 open letter to its president William L. Green, that the organization:

apart from its continuous aid to capital since 1900, is not so much a failure as a menace to labor in general, its economic, political and social and educational welfare. It offers no breadth or enlightenment. Under the A. F. of L. leadership and guidance as it is today and has been for years, the worker is in no least way encouraged let alone trained in economic, social and political ideas. And why? Because his leaders have none.

Dreiser did not lack courage or principle.

Nonetheless, as he acknowledged in a 1932 letter, Dreiser’s “Marxism” was “a very liberal thing.” In a letter the following year, he set out his concern that “the immense gulf between wealth and poverty in America and throughout the world should be narrowed” and that “government should truly emphasize and, in so far as humanly possible, effect the welfare of all of the people—not that of a given class.” This helps explain his accommodation with Stalinism and its national-reformist program.

Dreiser was most a revolutionist in his examinations of social and personal relationships and their mutual, reciprocal interconnection. He frankly and objectively demystified important thoughts and feelings, desires and ambitions, tracing them to what he viewed as uncontrollable, unconscious external forces. He never entirely overcame his belief in the workings of “blind and accidental physical and chemical” determinism, which he derived from pseudo-scientific Social Darwinism and other late 19th century trends, with traces of Nietzsche mixed in, but the experience of life and socialist analyses of social laws and structures improved and sharpened his focus. His ability to translate his understanding of why people act as they do in modern class society into fictional-dramatic situations was surpassed by few.

For example, there is his treatment of “the mystery of love,” as he somewhat sardonically termed it. Dreiser is one of the most acute writers in demonstrating that emotion and, above all, love, are the product of a complex set of social and psychological circumstances. Without moralizing, Dreiser shows that love is not accidental or arbitrary, not something that swoops down on human beings from above. In all his stories men and women fall for particular people for very real reasons, physical, emotional, social and economic.

In a 1913 letter, Dreiser observed:

The whole test of a book—to me—is—is it true, revealing, at once a picture and a criticism of life. If it measure up in these respects we can dismiss sympathy, decency, even the utmost shame and pain of it all.

In very few circumstances, it must be said, did Dreiser entirely “dismiss sympathy.” A profound compassion for human beings and their countless difficulties in contemporary class society pervades nearly everything he wrote.

III

One mid-20th century survey of US literary history asserted that Dreiser “reveals the very nerves of American society” and “has exerted a more profound, a more lasting influence than any other novelist on twentieth century realistic fiction in America.”

Decades of political and cultural reaction, however, have their consequences. Already in 1991, we argued “that Dreiser is treated like a ‘dead dog’ by the literary establishment in this country. On the whole, the professors, critics and journalists who make up what is called the intelligentsia want no part of Dreiser and no part of An American Tragedy.”

That dismal situation has not apparently changed. There has been no “resurgence” of interest, report various sources, in teaching Dreiser’s works.

His commitment to social truth, to historical and psychological reality, his tireless building up of his characters’ situations and dilemmas, his engagement with towering questions, including many of the essential facts of class society, his relentless critique of American illusions and delusions, his refusal to flatter his readers, all this continues to fly in the face of contemporary academic pettiness and subjectivism, lazy, irrationalist postmodernism and political timidity.

Dreiser, we are informed, is ponderous, “dark,” an awkward and clumsy stylist, his books too long for modern readers with their supposedly short attention span, he is too heavy-handed and socially explicit, too deterministic by far ... In response, one might refer to the comment by another “crude” artistic figure Vincent van Gogh that “precisely when I become stronger in what I’ll call power of expression than I am at this moment, people will say, not less but in fact even more than now, that I have no technique.”

Feminist critics have complained that Dreiser “reinforces gender stereotypes,” his books focus on what “men think women should be” and objectify women via the male gaze. No one jumps out of his skin, of course, but the novelist, in fact, demonstrated obviously strong and angry determination to expose the plight of his female characters, to the extent of titling two of his major and most moving works, Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, after such protagonists.

Dreiser urged a correspondent: “Observe life directly as much as possible and prepare yourself to write by reading the really worth-while things that have been written by others and then look upon your writing as the most important thing in the world—to you—and the petty annoyances that now seem to color your whole life will quite naturally fall into their proper perspective.”

One of the main aims of this article is to encourage the reading of Dreiser’s work, all of his major novels and nonfiction efforts.

IV

To return to An American Tragedy. Dreiser created (or discovered) in the book a series of indelible, truthful social types, “types” but also highly individuated, concretely existing men and women—the young man on the make, shallow youths hankering for amusement or even for meaning in their lives, the sensitive young woman factory worker, the religiously infused, impoverished mother (how often we still see her today in the poorest neighborhoods of the US!), the grasping, politically motivated district attorney ready to lie on impulse.

Here is Dreiser’s description, late in the novel, of the Governor of New York when Clyde’s lawyers and mother petition him for a pardon. They stand before

a tall, sober and somewhat somber man who, never in all his life had even so much as sensed the fevers or fires that Clyde had known, yet who, being a decidedly affectionate father and husband, could very well sense what Mrs. Griffiths’ present emotions must be. Yet greatly exercised by the compulsion which the facts, as he understood them, as well as a deep-seated and unchangeable submission to law and order, thrust upon him.

A sympathetic, highly objective depiction of a limited individual with enormous power, and, in the circumstances of the novel, a cold man, inadequate and morally prostrate before forces larger than himself.

Clyde Griffiths is brilliantly drawn. He begins life—and, in a different way, ends it—sunk in religious claptrap deeply felt by those around him, but not by himself, and yearns for escape, of almost any kind, into a brighter, more fulfilling world. Intelligent but weak-willed, good-looking, not physically lazy but too easy on himself, Clyde can sense an opening to more money or pleasure when he sees it. At one point, he works as a bellhop at a fancy St. Louis hotel and is mesmerized by the wealth around him, a small portion of which he manages to obtain. He spends it on clothes and manages an outward, surface transformation.

And both Dreiser and his wealthy relatives, when he meets them in an manufacturing town in upstate New York, are on to this. His cousin Gilbert says after meeting him at the family mansion:

He thinks clothes are the whole thing, I guess. He had on a light brown suit and a brown tie and hat to match and brown shoes. His tie was too bright and he had on one of those bright pink striped shirts like they used to wear three or four years ago. Besides his clothes aren’t cut right. I didn’t want to say anything because he’s just come on, and we don’t know whether he’ll hold out or not. But if he does, and he’s going to pose around as a relative of ours, he’d better tone down, or I’d advise the governor [i.e., Gilbert’s father, Clyde’s uncle] to have a few words with him.

The way in which the need for achievement, status and income distort human relationships in the novel developed out of Dreiser’s observations of his time and the people of his time, but there is obviously a continuity and a strong resonance in our own day. The Clyde Griffiths have only multiplied.

As Clyde maneuvers desperately, hiding his budding relationship with the glamorous Sondra, and Roberta grows terrified about her pregnancy becoming public knowledge, everything that was kind and tender between the former lovers turns to bitterness and resentment, right up to the moment Clyde kills Roberta, or allows her to die:

More poignantly than ever now she [Roberta] was identifying him [Clyde] with that gay life of which he, but not she, was a part. And yet she hesitated even now to let him know how sharp were the twinges of jealousy that were beginning to assail her. They had such a good time in that fine world—he and those he knew—and she had so little.

There is a profound ambiguity about the killing itself. Roberta, who more or less accidentally falls from their rowboat, dies as the result of Clyde’s inaction. She is flailing about in the water, she could be saved. Passivity has a social component. “Going with the flow,” “Doing what comes naturally” is a form of acceptance of the status quo and has a reactionary, submissive content.

The death scene is terrible, but it is one of the most human moments in the book. As Dreiser spins it out, although the action lasts only a matter of seconds, he brings to bear the accumulated effect of Clyde’s upbringing, his longings and frustrations, his absorption of the society’s values and methods. Clyde is never more surrounded by powerful social forces then he is when alone on that secluded lake. A killing like this, semi-accidental but devoutly wished for, is not motivated primarily by hate but by some internalized need that mirrors society’s demands.

Yet, even after this, Dreiser allows us to remain sympathetic to someone who has venal and base motives, regardless of whether he was fully able to act on them at the last instant. Without ever needing to say so, the book proves conclusively that Clyde is not the villain, the social organism is. The attentive reader will be drawn to the conclusion that such a social order, which demoralizes, tears apart and exterminates human beings, human beings who believe in it, who worship it, must itself be done away with.

But even if Clyde were more of an outright villain, one of the moral triumphs of the novel, so necessary for our own times, is the sympathy generated for the condemned man, the compassion for the prisoner, the victim of a media hysteria, the friendless person cast out by society, locked up and prosecuted to divert attention from its own culpability. “I pity the individual when he is weak, defeated, put upon,” wrote Dreiser in a letter. “But I also cease to pity him when I find him strong, selfish, vain, cruel or brutal.”

In the aftermath of Roberta’s killing, a highly dramatic and distressing scene, Dreiser inflicts on Clyde—and the reader—a series of psychically harsh blows, the blows delivered one after the other by official society, characteristic of it to this day:

Newspaper frenzy: The moment Clyde is identified as suspect, the press descends upon him. In a phenomenon so common today, the newspapers immediately pre-judge him as a cold-blooded killer, and whip up public anger, destroying any chance of a fair, impartial trial.

An involuntary confession: The police exhaust and terrify Clyde by relentlessly interrogating him, forcing him to reconstruct the scene repeatedly. He is psychologically broken. He finally weaves a narrative that, while containing the truth, is legally damning. This “confession” is one of the chief pieces of evidence against him.

The calculations of his wealthy relatives: His uncle Samuel Griffiths, who represents the social class Clyde so desperately wished to join, is motivated only by the desire to protect the family name.

Emotional isolation: Clyde receives no genuine empathy from his mother or family until he is already in jail. He has pushed away and let die the one person who loved him, Roberta. The other woman who might have loved him, Sondra, is immediately whisked away by her family and disappears from his life. He is alone.

The district attorney’s lies and manipulation: District Attorney Mason manipulates not just the evidence but Clyde’s own weak character to paint him as a predatory seducer and a coldblooded killer. Mason transforms the pathetic, confused act into a coherent, premeditated plan, solidifying the narrative of Clyde as a vicious murderer.

The guilty verdict: Despite the efforts of his defense attorneys (funded by his uncle), the jury, swayed by public opinion and Mason’s skillful arguments, finds Clyde guilty of first-degree murder.

Denial of the appeal and clemency: After the conviction, the long, agonizing wait for the appeal. Anticipating the final decision on clemency is torture. When the appeal is denied, it confirms society’s bloodthirsty desire for revenge.

Religious fear: In the final moments, Clyde is subjected to the chaplain’s efforts to have him repent. It is also cold, essentially unfeeling and pro forma. In any case, Clyde waffles, and it brings him as much terror as comfort.

And, of course, most horrifying of all, the death penalty itself...

In a 1931 letter, Dreiser outlined his plan for the novel. The first part, he said, was intended to set forth

such social miseries as might naturally depress, inhibit and frustrate, and therefore exaggerate, the emotions and desires of a very sensitive and almost sensually exotic boy most poorly equipped for the great life struggle which confronts all youth.

In the second portion, the author aimed to show how such an unprepared youth might

be brought face to face with a much more fortunate world which would intensify all his deepest desires for luxury and love, and to show how, in the usual unequal contest between poverty and ignorance and desire and the world’s great toys, he might readily and really through no real willing of his own, find himself defeated and even charged with murder.

And the novel’s final section would reveal how such a youth might be treated 

by an ignorant, conventional and revengeful background of rural souls who would … be the last to understand and comprehend the palliatives that might have, but did not, attend the life of such a boy, and therefore judge him far more harshly than would individuals of deeper insight and better mental fortune.

V

What made this remarkable work possible in 1925? There is the matter of Dreiser’s individual genius, his sensitivity to and exhaustive working through of social and psychological conditions and problems. His generally impoverished and unstable childhood, his battles with the puritanical American establishment and his keen observations of wealth accumulation by some along with bitter class warfare rendered him open to a frank consideration of the American Dream and related matters. He undoubtedly saw something of Clyde Griffiths in himself, and in many others.

This genius itself was a historical and social product.

“It was in 1892, at a time I began work as a newspaper man,” Dreiser wrote in 1934, “that I first began to observe a certain type of crime in the United States. It seemed to spring from the fact that almost every young person was possessed of an ingrowing ambition to be somebody financially and socially. … I was witnessing the upbuilding of the great American fortunes. And once these fortunes and the families which controlled them were established, there began to develop our ‘leisure class,’ the Four Hundred [families] of New York..., plus their imitators in the remainder of the states.”

The reference to the decade of the 1890s is significant. Despite falling prices and profit rates from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s, American capitalism continued to experience explosive growth. Between the end of the Civil War and 1890, industrial output had risen 296 percent. Steel production in the US surpassed the combined totals of Britain, France and Germany by the end of the century. New technologies in oil, electric power and communications facilitated growth.

The period witnessed a dramatic concentration of wealth, social inequality and widespread poverty. In 1890, the wealthiest one percent of the population owned a quarter of the country’s assets, while 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families earned less than $1,200 per year.

The class struggle erupted in ferocious battles. The fight for the eight-hour day led to the Haymarket Affair in May 1886 and the eventual execution of four anarchists. The Homestead strike of 1892 against Carnegie Steel, the Pullman strike of 1894 and coal miners’ strikes in 1894 and 1898 were particularly intense inflection points. Dreiser lived through this period and absorbed its social drama into “the very marrow of his bones.”

As he describes it in his Newspaper Days, Dreiser discovered the French novelist Balzac while living in Pittsburgh and working as a journalist (two years after the Homestead strike) and subsequently devoured his works. At first dismayed at finding himself in the Pennsylvania city rather than Paris, it dawned on Dreiser that the convulsive conditions of industrial America and “the immense money magnates” of the Andrew Carnegie type also might lend themselves to fictional treatment.

Their [the “money magnates”’] ease, luxury, power,—or at least the possibilities of the same which they possessed—were duplicated here, and theirs were scarcely superior. Great books might be written here—and of these men … If ever one writer impressed another, and that violently, it was Balzac.”

Other favorite authors apparently included Tolstoy, Fielding, Thackeray, Hugo, Dickens, George Eliot, Flaubert and Zola.

Not only did wealth and economic inequality have a strong impact on Dreiser, however, but also the politics and policies they engendered. In addition to its savage attacks on strikers at home, America became an imperialist bully in the 1890s, proclaiming its mission to be the liberation of oppressed peoples. The US celebrated its victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 “by subjugating Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean and the Philippines in the Pacific. The ‘liberation’ of that Pacific archipelago required the brutal suppression of a national democratic insurgency, at the cost of over 200,000 Philippine lives.”

The tremendous fortunes of the Rockefellers, Morgans, Carnegies and Vanderbilts and their flaunting of it through mansions, lavish spending and “conspicuous consumption” engendered anger, and also envy. For Clyde, who “felt himself very much of a nobody,” the path to the world of “roses, perfumes, lights and music” leads through violence and murder. How else is he to attain it? His “betters” among the Robber Barons and the general staffs in World War I have shown him the way. In the immortal words of the Wall Street Journal editorial board in our own day, what Clyde and others learned, and Dreiser had to sort through a trove of murder cases to find the one that most closely mirrored his concerns, was that “Force works.”

Dreiser gives artistic, sensual flesh and bone to the mercenary and socially narcissistic ambition to succeed over the bodies of others pursued by the American ruling class in its own delusion that it has arrived, and perhaps even outsmarted history.

VI

Last, but not least, there is the matter of the impact of the Russian Revolution and the advent of a revolutionary epoch generally on the artists. This is hardly the first or last word on what is a crucial and many-sided issue.

One should not idealize matters. What Trotsky said about the October Revolution’s impact on the Russian intelligentsia in 1917, “including its literary left wing,” applies in large measure to the artistic and intellectual milieu worldwide. It appeared, he wrote, “as a complete destruction of its [the intelligentsia’s] known world, of that very world from which it broke away from time to time, for the purpose of creating new schools, and to which it invariably returned.”

As has been well documented, artistic circles in the pre-World War I period were not generally sympathetic to Marxism and the struggle of Marxists to build parties in the working class. They were far more influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and various forms of irrationalism and subjectivism.

Nietzscheanism, with its promise of “hyper-revolutionary” “spiritual” transformation (and aristocratic superiority), was more tempting to many artists than facing up to life as it was in a period of rapid transformation, and it was certainly more alluring and apparently “poetic” than looking at the difficult, harsh conditions of the working class.

Nonetheless, the ferocious struggles of the Russian working class and oppressed, led by the Bolsheviks, their willingness and ability to take on and defeat all enemies, in combination with uprisings in Germany, Italy and Hungary and mass strikes in Britain, North America and elsewhere, cut their way into the consciousness of honest artists.

As Trotsky suggested in Literature and Revolution, a more favorable relationship now existed in 1923 between the working class and socialism, on the one hand, and the intelligentsia, on the other.

The law of social attraction (towards the ruling class) which, in the last analysis, determines the creative work of the intelligentsia, is now operating to our advantage. One has to keep this fact in mind when shaping a political attitude toward art.

Victor Serge described the process, pointing out that “little by little,” the “literary people” in Russia, those who remained after the revolution, “came around: hunger gripped their stomachs and doubts and reservations ravaged their minds. They condemned the terror, but admired the Bolsheviks’ will to survive. Comparing the Whites with the Reds, they came to the conclusion that the Reds were better–and stronger.”

Writing about an older generation of Russian writers, Aleksandr Voronsky commented in 1923 as well that they

reconcile themselves to the revolution only at the expense of the greatest exertion, but they are reconciling themselves. The disintegration of bourgeois civilization, the indisputability of the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the old intelligentsia’s ideology, the first fresh sprouts of new Russian activity in the soil which has been richly ploughed by the revolution—all this and much more compels these writers, each in his own way, to go along with the Russian Revolution and not against it.

In his comment, Trotsky was referring to a “law” operating in the USSR, but the power and example of the October Revolution, and, as noted, the thrusting forward of workers in many parts of the planet, had worldwide implications and ramifications.

Isn’t that the significance, in its own fashion, of Dreiser’s December 1920 letter to American socialist David Karsner, the editor of the New York Call and a regular correspondent? (Interestingly, Karsner’s first wife, Rose Greenberg, after their divorce, married James P. Cannon.)

These sniffy intellectuals give me a pain. They spend their days in sniffing and die sniffing. They are pointless—mere gum on the axles. A man like Lenin or another like Trotsky are worth 8,000,000,000 Wells or Wallings [Fabian socialist novelist H.G. Wells and American liberal journalist William Walling]. They [Lenin and Trotsky] act instead of carefully weighing unimportant thoughts and words all their days. And they have the courage of their convictions, which is more than most penman and parlor reasoners have. I respect them. I wish, and have all along, that I might help in some decisive way.

It is a large and contradictory problem, but, as concretely as possible, by what means did the October Revolution influence artists?

Trotsky provides an important insight in his essay “Art and Politics in Our Epoch” (1938), while discussing Mexican artist Diego Rivera. “In the field of painting, the October Revolution has found her greatest interpreter,” wrote Trotsky, not among the toadies of “Socialist Realism” in the USSR, but in the person of Rivera. The artist “has remained Mexican,” but that which inspired him in his

magnificent frescoes, which lifted him up above the artistic tradition, above contemporary art in a certain sense, above himself, is the mighty blast of the proletarian revolution. Without October, his power of creative penetration into the epic of work, oppression and insurrection, would never have attained such breadth and profundity.

Of course, Rivera, at the time a member of the Fourth International, exemplified this process at a high level, but the truth of Trotsky’s observation is more wide-ranging.

This notion, that the “blast of the proletarian revolution” amplifies or augments the artist’s “power of creative penetration” into the secrets of the social and historical process (“the epic of work, oppression and insurrection”), is key. The revolution cracked open the existing social organism, laying it bare to the most observant and sensitive eyes. It created the basis for a new and more objective, firmer and more piercing vantage-point from which to examine the entirety of human activity.

Further, a revolution demonstrates that life in its critical dimensions is alterable, it holds out the prospect of humanity perfecting itself. It dramatically expands the notion of what is possible in every sphere, encouraging experimentation and innovation. The Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin contended that a “revolution strengthens the impulse of invention.” The best youthful forces of art were “touched to the quick,” Trotsky wrote. Describing the experience of the Russian Revolution, he insisted that during “those first years, rich in hope and daring,” the popular masses thought “aloud for the first time in a thousand years.”

Trotsky urged the artists to consider revolutionary Russia as “a gigantic canvas which it would take centuries to paint in. From here, from the summits of our revolutionary ranges, begin the sources of a new art, of a new point of view, of a new union of feelings, of a new rhythm of thoughts, of a new striving for the word.”

The overthrow of all existing authority, with its attendant institutions, economic structures and ruling ideology, and the “prejudices, habits and learned behavior built up over decades, even centuries,” has a liberating influence, in the short or long run, on serious intellectuals.

October proved that the working class was the social force, as Marxists had foreseen, that could carry out the social overturn. It focused artistic attention on the working class and working class individuals and groups as protagonists, it placed them at the center of things in a new way, as subjects.

It showed that opposition and resistance was not futile or utopian, that the ruling classes were not omnipotent. It established that half-measures were ineffective, that forces and trends (in all fields) that went all the way to the bottom of things were not only possible, but desirable. A successful revolution also exposes in retrospect the nature of its state and the plans, schemes and ruthlessness of the elites, their defense of everything backward and oppressive.

As importantly as anything else, the October Revolution buoyed the spirits of those who believed in and fought for human progress, it gave confidence to the progressive elements in society, it encouraged their belief in themselves and others. Wordsworth’s enthusiastic response to the French Revolution in 1789, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!,” was echoed in the best, most advanced circles following October 1917, if not immediately in most cases. Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s “Ode to Revolution” came out in 1918. Visual artists Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich both prepared texts for a multilingual journal entitled Art International, which unfortunately was never published.

The revolution encouraged optimism and a trust in humanity, and more generally, an interest in life and all aspects of “succulent” reality. It scattered “the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism.” Encountering heartening developments in the objective world, the artists turn outward toward that world, shed some of their self-centeredness, stop shrinking from reality as it is and develop their interest “in the concrete stability and mobility of life.”

This complex process can be established positively by the development of art itself in the 1920s and early 1930s, when the example of the revolution was still vibrant and appealing, and in the negative by the subsequent pulling away of artists from socialism and the working class as the betrayals, defeats and demoralization above all attributable to Stalinism accumulated and delivered blow after blow.

In the first place, the October Revolution gave a magnificent impetus to all types of Russian-Soviet art. Before long, Moscow became an epicenter of advanced work in the visual arts, music, photography, film and theater.

Whether consciously left-wing or not, European and global artistic trends in the 1920s emerged in the conditions created by the collapse of the old order in the aftermath of World War I, the successful revolution in Russia and the promise of the extension of that revolution.

Various trends, individuals and works, in addition to Dreiser’s, are unthinkable outside of that historical context and the intellectual-ideological processes it set in motion: the Bauhaus in Germany, André Breton and surrealism in France, Bertolt Brecht, Erwin Piscator and the German theater, Chaplin’s silent films, the novels of Alfred Döblin, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann and Jaroslav Hasek, the photography of Man Ray and others, music as varied as that of Berg, Schoenberg, Bartok and Gershwin, Paul Nizan’s Aden Arabie, B. Traven’s Jungle Novels, etc., etc.

American literature reached its high point to date in the mid-1920s with the publication of An American Tragedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith also appeared in 1925, as did John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer. Upton Sinclair’s uneven Oil! was published two years later. The Harlem Renaissance, a number of whose leading figures were strongly drawn to the October Revolution and the Communist International as the antidote to oppression, flourished during this same period, in such works as Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Langston Hughes’ Weary Blues (1926) and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928).

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The last word goes to Dreiser. In April 1927 he described his motives in writing An American Tragedy:

I had long brooded upon the story, for it seemed to me not only to include every phase of our national life—politics, society, religion, business, sex—but it was a story so common to every boy reared in the smaller towns of America. It seemed so truly a story of what life does to the individual—and how impotent the individual is against such forces. My purpose was not to moralize—God forbid—but to give, if possible, a background and a psychology of reality which would somehow explain, if not condone, how such murders happen—and they have happened with surprising frequency in America as long as I can remember.