SOURCE: "Theodore Dreiser's 'Nigger Jeff': The Development of an Aesthetic," in American Literature, Vol. XLI, No. 3, November, 1969, pp. 331-41.

[In the following essay, Pizer examines three versions of "Nigger Jeff" to illustrate how Dreiser's artistic emphasis in his writing moved from sentimentality toward moral polemics.]

Thanks to the work of Robert H. Elias and W. A. Swanberg, we are beginning to have an adequate sense of Dreiser's life. But many aspects of Dreiser the artist remain relatively obscure or unexplored—in particular his aesthetic beliefs and fictional techniques at various stages of his career. An excellent opportunity to study Dreiser's developing aesthetic lies in the existence of several versions of his short story "Nigger Jeff." The extant versions of this story reveal with considerable clarity and force Dreiser's changing beliefs concerning the nature of fiction.

Dreiser's first attempt to write a story about the lynching of a Missouri Negro is preserved in an unpublished University of Virginia manuscript called "A Victim of Justice." Although "A Victim of Justice" is clearly a work of the 1890's, it is difficult to date its composition precisely. The narrator of the story begins by noting that he has recently spent "a day in one of Missouri's pleasant villages." While visiting a Potter's Field, he recalls a rural Missouri lynching that he had witnessed "several years since." This opening situation is the product of a number of events of the mid-1890's. Dreiser was a reporter on the St. Louis Republic in the fall of 1893, and it was during this period that he observed the lynching on which the story is based. In addition, on July 23, 1894, Dreiser wrote for the Pittsburgh Dispatch an article entitled "With the Nameless Dead" in which he described an Allegheny County Potter's Field. A few weeks later he visited his fiancée, Sallie White, who lived in a small town near St. Louis. Dreiser's only attempts at fiction before the summer of 1899 occurred in the winter and spring of 1895 when he wrote several stories after leaving the New York World and before becoming editor of Ev'ry Month. In view of these facts, it is possible to speculate that Dreiser wrote "A Victim of Justice" in early 1895 and that he combined in the story his memory of the 1893 lynching, his July, 1894, article (from which he quoted several passages verbatim), and his visit to Missouri in the summer of 1894.

The next extant version of the story is a manuscript in the Los Angeles Public Library entitled "The Lynching of Nigger Jeff." This manuscript served, with minor changes, as the text for the November, 1901, publication of "Nigger Jeff" in Ainslee's Magazine. Encouraged by his friend Arthur Henry, Dreiser had begun writing stories in earnest during the summer of 1899, and he later recalled [in a letter to H.L. Mencken dated May 13, 1916] that "Nigger Jeff"—that is, the Los Angeles Public Library-Ainslee's version—dates from this period. The fourth version of the story is Dreiser's revision of the Ainslee's version for inclusion in his Free and Other Stories, published in August, 1918. Since the changes in this last version are primarily additions to the Ainslee's text, and since this added material is not in the Los Angeles Public Library manuscript, the revision can be attributed to the period shortly before the appearance of Free, when Dreiser collected and revised his stories for republication.

There are thus three major versions of "Nigger Jeff." Although none of these versions can be dated exactly, each can be associated with an important segment of Dreiser's career. The Virginia manuscript of the mid-1890's reflects the Dreiser depicted in A Book About Myself, the young journalist who was viewing much of the tragic complexity of life but understanding little of it. The Ainslee's publication represents the Dreiser of Sister Carrie. The story has been rewritten by an author with a characteristic vision of life and with a distinctive fictional style. The 1918 publication suggests a writer whose ideas have become increasingly self-conscious and polemical, the Dreiser of the essays of Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920) and the Dreiser who was eventually to devote a large portion of his later career to philosophical inquiries. The three versions, in short, span the principal periods of Dreiser's career, and their differences can tell us much about Dreiser's developing aesthetic.

Although the three versions of "Nigger Jeff" differ in a number of important ways, all have the same basic outline. A young man is sent in early spring to investigate reports of a possible lynching in a rural Missouri community. He discovers that a farmer's daughter has been attacked by a Negro and that the farmer and his son are in pursuit of the Negro in order to lynch him. The Negro is apprehended by a local peace officer, however, and is taken to another village for safekeeping until the arrival of reinforcements. A mob gathers, overpowers the peace officer, and returns with the Negro to its own community, where he is hanged from a bridge. The following day the investigator visits the home of the Negro and views his body.

Dreiser's earliest version of this story, "A Victim of Justice," is told in the first person and uses a frame device. The story opens with the unidentified narrator visiting a Potter's Field near a small Missouri town. After much soulful lament over the "strange exigencies of life" that have brought the denizens of the graveyard to their mournful fate, the narrator is disturbed by the "grieving orisons" of an elderly woman. Before he can question her, she departs. But she has stimulated still further his moody reflections on the "wounding trials of life," and it is on this note that he introduces his recollections of the lynching. He begins by explaining that he was "commissioned to examine into the details" of the incident, but he does not identify himself as a reporter. Nor do we have a sense of his involvement in the action of the story. His narrative "voice" is principally an omniscient authorial voice, telling us about the lynching (often in summary form) but devoid of personal participation. The story concludes with the second half of the frame device. The narrator describes the Negro's lonely grave on a hillside, a burial place marked by a wooden cross. "Day after day it stands, bleak, gray, desolate, a fitting emblem of the barren life now forgotten, wasted as sparks are wasted on the night wind." Again the narrator broods over the vicissitudes of life, though his melancholy is lightened somewhat by the thought that nature is ever-beautiful even in this forsaken spot.

"A Victim of Justice" has three major themes. The first is suggested by the ironic title of the story and by several authorial comments. The Negro (named Jim in this version) is the victim of the "hasty illegalities" and "summary justice" of the mob. The second theme involves a more generalized sorrow over the fate of most men, a theme which arises out of the narrator's "mediations" in the graveyard. Dreiser's lugubrious exploitation of the conventional rhetoric of injustice and melancholy suggests that both themes have their source in the traditional literature of sentiment. Jim is a "poor varlet," and the graveyard scene echoes the diction and sentence structure of a Hawthorne or an Irving. Life is sad, Dreiser says, and he asks us to share this sentiment by imitating the prose of writers known for their ability to evoke melancholic moods. The third theme of the story is that of the powerful human emotions that arise out of the lynching itself—the quest for vengeance by the father, the resoluteness of the peace officer, the terror of the Negro. In a sense these emotions constitute a suppressed or unacknowledged theme, since they are extraneous to the explicit themes imposed upon the story by the narrator. The peace officer could have been a coward and Jim brave and unflinching, and the narrator would still have been able to enclose the story within his reflections on injustice and melancholy. These reflections may be apt responses to a lynching, but Dreiser's failure to integrate them into the account of the lynching itself implies that he has indeed imposed them on his response. His "true" response is "buried" within the narrative of the lynching, for Dreiser at this point was unable to articulate his response—that is, he was unable to recognize what moved him in the lynching. Thus, though he depicted the lynching as a moving event, he confused the nature of his response with those "deep" emotions readily available to him in traditional literary forms.

The Ainslee's version of "Nigger Jeff" omits the frame sections. The story, now told in the third person, focuses on the experiences of a young reporter, Eugene Davies, who has been sent to look into a possible lynching. It is a beautiful spring day and the insouciant, self-confident Davies undertakes his assignment with relish. Arriving in Pleasant Valley, he is drawn into the events of the lynching as he pursues his story. Davies is at first a passive observer of these events. But when the blubbering, terrified Jeff is seized by the mob, the reporter uncontrollably "clapped his hands over his mouth and worked his fingers convulsively." "Sick at heart," he accompanies the mob back to Pleasant Valley. The hanging itself stuns him into a deep torpor. By the close of the story, when he encounters Jeff's weeping mother, he has viewed a wide range of character and emotion—the competent, strong-willed sheriff, the cowardly mob, the father intent on vengeance, and above all the terrified Jeff and his heartbroken mother.

In "A Victim of Justice" Dreiser mentioned the grieving mother early in the narrative but not afterward. In "Nigger Jeff" he reserved introducing her grief until the final, climactic scene of the story, a scene which is present only in brief summary form in the earlier version. As Davies views Jeff's body, he hears a noise in the room.

Greatly disturbed, he hesitated, and then as his eyes strained he caught the shadow of something. It was in the extreme corner, huddled up, dark, almost indistinguishable crouching against the cold walls.

"Oh, oh, oh," was repeated, even more plaintively than before.

Davies began to understand. He approached lightly. Then he made out an old black mammy, doubled up and weeping. She was in the very niche of the corner, her head sunk on her knees, her tears falling, her body rocking to and fro.

On leaving the cabin, Davies "swelled with feeling and pathos. . . . The night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw it all."

"I'll get that in,' he exclaimed, feelingly, 'I'll get it all in.'"

Dreiser has thus shifted the axis of the story. Unlike "A Victim of Justice," in which the narrator presents us with a response to a lynching, "Nigger Jeff" dramatizes a growth in emotional responsiveness by the principal viewer of the action. The narrative is now primarily an initiation story—the coming into knowledge of the tragic realities of life by the viewer. And since the viewer is a reporter who will attempt to "get it all in," the story is also the dramatization of the birth of an aesthetic.

Briefly, the conception of the theme and form of art symbolized by the "it" in the last sentence of "Nigger Jeff" contains three major elements, each rendered in dramatic form within the story. These are: a belief that two emotions in particular pervade all life; a belief that these emotions are often found in moral and social contexts which lend them a special poignancy; and a belief that these emotions adopt a certain pattern in life and therefore in art. Let me discuss each of these beliefs more fully, beginning with the central emotions of life as Dreiser depicts them in this story.

One such emotion is sexual desire. It is the first flush of spring, and Jeff, a poor, ignorant Negro, attacks a white girl—a girl who knows him and whom he meets in a lane. "Before God, boss, I didn't mean to. . . . I didn't go to do it,'" he cries to the mob. Although sexual desire may not lead to the destruction of such figures as Frank Cowperwood, it is nevertheless a dominant, uncontrollable force in almost all of Dreiser's principal male characters. Hurstwood, Lester Kane, Eugene Witla, and Clyde Griffiths are at its mercy. In addition, the "it" of the final sentence includes the unthinking love and loyalty which exists within a family and particularly between a mother and a child. When Davies arrives at Jeff's home after the lynching, he asks the Negro's sister why Jeff had returned to his cabin, where he had been captured by the waiting sheriff.

"To see us," said the girl.

"Well, did he want anything? He didn't come just to see you, did he?"

"Yes, suh," said the girl, "he come to say good-by."

Her voice wavered.

"Didn't he know he might get caught?" asked Davies.

"Yes, suh, I think he did."

She stood very quietly, holding the poor battered lamp up, and looking down.

"Well, what did he have to say?" asked Davies.

"He said he wanted tuh see motha'. He was a-goin' away."

The son come back to say good-by to the mother, the mother mourning over the son's body—here is emotion which in its over-powering intensity parallels the sex drive itself. It is the force which binds the Gerhardt family together, which is the final refuge of Clyde Griffiths, and which creates the tragic tension of Solon Barnes's loss of his children. In "Nigger Jeff" this force appears not only in the relationship between Jeff and his mother but also in the figure of the assaulted girl's father. Although Dreiser depicts the mob as cowardly and sensation-seeking, he respects the motives of the father. Both victim and revenger and caught up in the same inexplicable emotional oneness which is a family.

"Nigger Jeff" thus contains two of the most persistent themes in all of Dreiser's work—the power of desire and the power of family love and loyalty. Davies's awakening to their reality can be interpreted as Dreiser's declaration of belief in the dominance of these emotions in human affairs. Indeed, in his later autobiographies Dreiser depicted these emotions as two of the principal inner realities of his own youth. His ability to identify himself with these emotions as early as "Nigger Jeff" is revealed by a sentence omitted in Ainslee's but present in the Los Angeles Public Library manuscript of "The Lynching of Nigger Jeff." Immediately following "The night, the tragedy, the grief, he saw it all," there appears in "The Lynching of Nigger Jeff": "It was spring no less than sorrow that ran whispering in his blood." The sensuality of youth, the family love taking its shape in sorrow—these appear in Dreiser's work as complementary autobiographical themes until they coalesce most fully and powerfully both in Dawn and in An American Tragedy.

The second major aspect of Dreiser's aesthetic contained in the final "it" involves the moral and social context in which these emotions are found. Like most of Dreiser's characters, the principal figures in "Nigger Jeff" have little of the heroic about them. Even the sheriff loses his potential for such a role once he is easily tricked by the mob and complacently accepts its victory. Jeff himself is described at the moment of his capture by the mob as a "groveling, foaming brute." But the major figures in "Nigger Jeff," despite their often grotesque inadequacies, feel and suffer, and the young reporter comes to realize the "tragedy" of their fate. To Dreiser, tragedy arises out of the realities that nature is beautiful, that man can desire, and that a mother or father can mourn. These realities do not lend "nobility" to Dreiser's figures; like Jeff, they are often weak and contemptible despite their fate. But their capacity to feel combined with their incapacity to act wisely or well is to Dreiser the very stuff of man's tragic nature. The realization which the young reporter must "get in" thus involves not only the truths of lust and of mother love but also the truth that the experience of these emotions gives meaning and poignancy to every class and condition of man.

The third aspect of the aesthetic symbolized by the final "it" concerns the pattern assumed by the two principal emotions of the story. Most of Dreiser's novels involve a seeker or quester—sometimes driven by desire, sometimes by other motives—who finds at the end of the novel that he has returned to where he started: Carrie still seeking beauty and happiness; Jennie once again alone despite her immense capacity to love; Cowperwood's millions gone; Clyde still walled in; Solon returning to the simplicity of faith. It is possible to visualize Dreiser's novels as a graphic irony—the characters believe they are pushing forward but they are really moving in a circle. Dreiser occasionally makes this structural principle explicit by a consciously circular symbol, such as the rocking chair in Sister Carrie and the street scene in An American Tragedy. "Nigger Jeff contains a rough approximation of this pattern. The passions which have driven the narrative forward in its sequence of crime and punishment are dissipated, and Jeff returns to where he has started both physically and emotionally. That is, the bleak room in which he rests and his mother keening over his body represent the permanent realities of his life and his death. He, too, has come full circle.

Despite his reputation as stylistically inept, Dreiser was capable of a provocative and moving verbal symbolism. This quality appears in his use of "beauty" in connection with Carrie at the close of Sister Carrie and in his use of "life" in the next to last paragraph of The Bulwark ("'I am crying for life'"). These otherwise banal abstractions represent the complexity and depth of experience depicted in the novels concerned, and they are therefore powerfully evocative. The word "it" at the close of "Nigger Jeff has some of the same quality. The word symbolizes a deeply felt aesthetic which Dreiser never explained as well elsewhere, just as he never discussed "beauty" and "life" in his philosophical writings as well as he dramatized their meaning for him in his novels.

The Free version of "Nigger Jeff" omits almost nothing from the Ainslee's text. Aside from stylistic revisions, the changes in the Free version consist of additions, many of which merely flesh out particular scenes. Some of the additions, however, extend the themes of the story in two significant ways.

One such extension is revealed in Dreiser's addition to the first sentence of the story (here and elsewhere the added material appears in brackets):

The city editor was waiting for one of his best reporters, Elmer Davies [by name, a vain and rather self-sufficient youth who was inclined to be of that turn of mind which sees in life only a fixed and ordered process of rewards and punishments. If one did not do exactly right, one did not get along well. On the contrary, if one did, one did. Only the so-called evil were really punished, only the good truly rewarded-or Mr. Davies had heard this so long in his youth that he had come nearly to believe it.]

By the next to last paragraph of the story, Davies has come to realize that "[it was not always exact justice that was meted out to all and that it was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret]." In these and similar additions Dreiser has extended the nature of Davies's initiation. In the Ainslee's version, Davies's growth is above all that of his awakening to the tragic nature of human experience. The Free version associates this awakening with his conscious awareness that moral absolutes are based on naïveté or inexperience and are inapplicable to the complex realities of life. In a sense even "A Victim of Justice" contains an aspect of this theme, since Dreiser in that version noted the injustice of the "summary justice" of mob rule. But in the Free "Nigger Jeff" this theme is both more overt and more central. Its presence in this enlarged and emphatic form suggests Dreiser's increasing tendency throughout the later stages of his career (beginning about 1911) to associate the function of art with the explicit inversion of conventional moral and social beliefs. It is during this period that Dreiser the polemicist (as revealed in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub) and Dreiser the novelist combine to produce An American Tragedy, in which the putative reader is placed in the position or Davies. Like the naïve beliefs of Davies, the reader's faith in the American dream of success and in the workings of justice is destroyed by encountering the reality of a tragedy.

A second major extension of theme in the Free "Nigger Jeff" occurs in the scenes following the capture of Jeff by the mob. As Davies accompanies the mob on its way to hang Jeff, he reflects that

[both father and son now seemed brutal, the injury to the daughter and sister not so vital as all this. Still, also, custom seemed to require death in this way for this. It was like some axiomatic, mathematic law-hard, but custom. The silent company, an articulated, mechanical and therefore terrible thing, moved on. It also was axiomatic, mathematic]

After the hanging, Davies sits near the bridge and muses: "[Life seemed so sad, so strange, so mysterious, so inexplicable]." These additions reflect two of the principal areas of Dreiser's philosophical speculation during the last half of his career. On the one hand, he believed that every phase of life is governed by law. During the period from approximately 1910 to the late 1920's he often, as in the Free "Nigger Jeff," associated this law with the harsh extermination of the weak. Dreiser the mechanist called this law an "equation inevitable" in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub. But by the end of his career Dreiser the quasi-pantheist had come to call it "design" in The Bulwark and to associate it primarily with beauty and with cosmic benevolence. His particular conception of law at various stages of his later career, however, is perhaps less important than his enduring search for a principle of meaning which would encompass the cruelty and the beauty, the destructiveness and the continuity, which he found in life. On the other hand, Dreiser affirmed throughout his later career a belief in the essential mystery at the heart of life. Both attitudes-the search for meaning and the belief in mystery-are present in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub, in which the often doctrinaire mechanistic philosophizing is counterbalanced by the subtitle of the work: "A Book of the Mystery and Terror and Wonder of Life." And both are present in The Bulwark, in which Solon's discovery of the principle of design is inseparable from his discovery of the mystery of life. In his Free version of "Nigger Jeff" Dreiser has thus expanded his aesthetic to include not only an explicit ironic reversal of moral certainties but also a dramatization of the vast philosophical paradoxes underlying all life. Davies's discovery of what art must do—"[to interpret]"—now has a conscious philosophical element which was to play an ever increasing role in Dreiser's career.

The various versions of "Nigger Jeff which I have been discussing incorporate Dreiser's principal beliefs about the nature of art. From the imposed sentimentality of "A Victim of Justice" to the moral polemicism and incipient philosophizing of the Free "Nigger Jeff," the three versions reflect much that is central in Dreiser's thought and in his practice as a writer. No doubt there is room for qualification of some of the generalizations about Dreiser's developing aesthetic which I have drawn from this study of the three versions of "Nigger Jeff." Nevertheless, there is much to be said for the attempt to deduce a writer's beliefs about art directly from a creative work dealing with the nature of art rather than from his literary criticism. For Dreiser, there is a special need for this kind of attempt, since most of his overt comments about art are either vague or overpolemical. Moreover, we are coming to realize that Dreiser is not only a writer of stature (as Alfred Kazin has maintained [in The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, 1955]) but also of finesse (as Ellen Moers believes [according to "The Finesse of Dreiser," American Scholar XXXIII, Winter, 1963-1964]). He is a writer, in other words, whose stories and novels in their various revisions can often be explored for the complex intertwining of permanence and change characteristic of the creative work of a major literary figure.