SOURCE: "Later Stories: 1929-1938," in The Small Canvas: An Introduction to Dreiser's Short Stories, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985, pp. 111-27.

[In the following essay, Griffin discusses the stories that came after the publication of Chains: "Fine Furniture," "Solution," "Tabloid Tragedy," "A Start in Life," and "The Tithe of the Lord. "]

Two years after the publication of Chains, Dreiser's short fiction was in the magazines again with the two-part serialization of a story entitled "Fine Furniture" in Household Magazine, a Topeka, Kansas, monthly of excellent quality, according to [Frank Luther] Mott [in A History of American Magazines, 1938-68]. Available as early as 1923, this story was rejected by nine magazines between 1923 and the time of its acceptance. On 2 April 1929, Household's editor, Nelson Antrim Crawford, wrote Dreiser's agent, George T. Bye, expressing the hope that Dreiser would publish the story in his magazine. Crawford felt that a Dreiser appearance would give his small-town readership fiction of high quality, and apologized for the small stipends he was forced to pay in contrast to the big-city slicks. In fact, Household paid Dreiser $1,000 for "Fine Furniture." It gave him a new audience as well: Bye wrote Dreiser in 1931 relaying Crawford's enthusiasm about the positive response the story had received and his hope that Dreiser would submit another short story. The year after its publication by Household Magazine, "Fine Furniture" appeared again, this time as Number 6 in the Random House Prose Quarto series in a limited edition of 875 copies.

Although it shares with an early Dreiser story, "Old Rogaum and His Theresa," the use of a happy ending, "Fine Furniture" stands apart from the bulk of the short fiction in its preoccupation with a theme that, although serious, is without depressing or tragic implications. If Dreiser ever gave in to the demands of the slick magazine editors—and Household Magazine was a country slick—it was in this story of marital conflict resolved. "Fine Furniture" has a glibness not generally seen in Dreiser fiction. The story is told in a chatty—at times, even breezy—way that tends to impart a note of mock seriousness. The following passage, with its Greek chorus effect, expressing the collective view of Opal's fellow workers about her, illustrates the story's mock-serious tone:

But whether understood by Mr. Broderson or not, the other waitresses about the camp were not long in fathoming the mystery. Who was this upstart, anyway? Why the better clothes? the Renton airs? Upon our united words! Why hadn't she stayed at the Calico Cat? Up here to catch a man as sure as anything, because she couldn't get one down there! And that man, as it soon appeared, none other than Broderson, as fine and innocent a logger as was anywhere to be seen. And earning one hundred and fifty dollars a month. And this upstart now trying to steal him from the older (in point of service) waitresses who naturally had a prior claim on him.

In effect, then, the informality is more than simply that. With its overlay of mock seriousness it draws attention to the social pretentiousness that is the story's main concern.

At times the mock seriousness becomes parody. The following passage describes Opal's reaction to a suggestion by her husband that her fine furniture is something less than an asset in the lumber camp: "Boo-hoo! To think that she should have married a man that didn't want her to have anything nice around the house, an' just after she had married him, too! Boo-hoo! To think that she should have gone to all the trouble of trying to get the nicest things for him, an' that would make his dirty old camp pleasanter for him, an' then that he should tell her he wished she hadn't done it an' that she was not as good as that cheap little Mrs. Saxstrom because she happened to be the wife of the superintendent! Boo-hoo!" The passage is too exaggerated to be taken as a literal rendering of Opal's consciousness; it is rather the parody of her reflections. The purpose of the parody here is to draw attention to the pettiness of Opal's argument and thus to expose her pretentiousness as expressed in her overt striving for social position.

Opal's status seeking is seen in terms of her background, especially of those facets of her experience that suggest for her the possibility of transcending her prosaic world. In her response to two sets of places—two towns and two restaurants—she reveals her desire for upward mobility. Her contrasting views of Renton, a city of 25,000 and a railway junction, and MacCumber, "a dreary hole" of 800 people, "the central provisioning point for some four or five logging camps," establish her desire to escape drab surroundings and a demeaning existence. But within the framework of the Renton-MacCumber contrast is another contrast that more pointedly high-lights Opal's wish to transcend, that between the two restaurants where she has worked as a waitress—the Calico Cat in Renton and McSpeer's Restaurant in MacCumber. The latter was "nothing more than a long counter" run by "a fat greasy nobody . . . as greasy and odorous as his kitchen." On the other hand, the Calico Cat, like Renton itself, resonates in her mind with excitement, color, and glamour because of its appearance and associations. Here "the fine young men in Renton, with their hair oiled so nice and laid so flat" came "with their best girls to sip ice cream sodas and sundaes, talk of Spokane and Seattle. Yes, indeed, some of them had been to both places. And some of them had cars. After eating lunch or dinner, these boys and girls on occasion would leisurely make their way to a waiting roadster outside and buzz off. To what paradise? To what dreamland?" But it is the Calico Cat's interior that inspires her to attempt to take tangible hold of the world for which she years so deeply:

The tables and chairs of the Calico Cat were delicate-legged and grey-stained, scattered most gracefully about a room that was papered in grey. The walls were ornamented with candle-shaped electroliers supporting oval pink silk shades which glowed exactly like some bright, delicious candy. And there was a handsome grey rug on the floor. The front section held a really splashous candy counter on one side—all glass and gilt—and on the other side a fripperous soda fountain of grey marble, with leather-upholstered stools in front of it. Grandeur indeed! And the windows were graced with net curtains of a delicate, creamy hue, with a blue calico cat rampant.

"Fine Furniture" is really the story of Opal's attempt to transport the Calico Cat to a Washington lumber camp, of her attempt to transcend the drabness of the world she is used to by insulating herself with reminders of an enchanted world. In her bedroom will hang "blue chintz or lace curtains, a la the Calico Cat," and "the interior of the cabin was rehung with electroliers similar to those that adorned the walls of the Calico Cat." But her fantasy world collapses in the face of the exigencies of lumber camp existence and she realizes finally that her demands for a better life must be delayed somewhat. Marital tension is resolved and disaster averted. Fine furniture, ironically the cause of the upheaval, is put aside until a more appropriate time. Thus the happy ending, an important ingredient of the story's slickness.

What dictates the slickness of "Fine Furniture" is its subject matter. If Dreiser's style here is untypical it is because he is concerned with a less than gripping human problem. If Opal initially shares with her frustrated sisters, Madeleine Kinsella, Ida Zobel, and Shirley of "The Second Choice," and desire for a more colorful and meaningful existence, "Fine Furniture" is not primarily an analysis of this frustration as are "Sanctuary," "Typhoon," and "The Second Choice." The major concern of "Fine Furniture" is rather to examine certain repercussions of the dream achieved. Opal's problems are not ultimately debilitating but minor and solvable. The flippancy into which the informal tone often lapses is a sign of Dreiser's lack of real involvement in his story. [John J.] McAleer's mention of the fact that "Fine Furniture" is an exception to Dreiser's usual clumsiness with dialogue [in Theodore Dreiser: An Introduction and Interpretation, 1968] is perhaps significant in the context of these remarks. It might be interpreted to suggest that when confronted with trivial themes Dreiser is capable of embellishing his fiction with style and polish. Conversely, it may be legitimate to conclude that, when he is engrossed with examples of significant human misery, Dreiser's smoothness and slickness are set aside in favor of the more powerful, if clumsier, form that seems to derive directly from his forceful themes.

Dreiser continued his flirtation with the women's magazines in the story "Solution," published in the November 1933 issue of Woman's Home Companion, during the thirties an enormously successful monthly with a circulation of between two and three million. Among the usual women's features, this magazine carried four or five short stories in each issue. During the twenties and thirties, the fiction of many of the best American and British writers had appeared there, including the work of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Ellen Glasgow, Sinclair Lewis, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy. The publication of "Solution" by Woman's Home Companion was something of an honor accorded Dreiser, for the story appeared in a special anniversary number of the magazine.

With "Solution," Dreiser was again molding a story that seemed to suit the prescriptions of the popular magazines. While pursuing its author's investigation into the varieties of the man-woman association, an investigation that occupied so much attention in Free and Other Stories and Chains, "Solution" is without the ultimately tragic orientation of earlier Dreiser love stories. The boygirl relationship, thwarted so often in earlier stories by either callous or ambitious young men and women, and eventuating in either living or fatal tragedy, usually for the young women, here, after an extended period of severe stress, resolves itself satisfactorily for both the principals as well as for their loved ones. But it is not only the presence of a solution that qualifies the story as untypical of Dreiser, but the manner in which the solution is effected. "Solution" in fact, has closer affinities to Dreiser's last novel, The Bulwark, than it has to the body of his fiction as a whole.

"Solution" begins and ends in the house of the patriarchal Isaac Salter, small-town Greenville's "principal and certainly . . . most honest and helpful general storekeeper." And although Salter's physical presence is not frequent in the story, he is a dominant figure in terms of the fashion in which he exerts active influence on the lives of the principals as well as in the extent to which his philosophy of life permeates the story. Possessing some of the rigor and sense of convention that characterize other Dreiser short-story fathers—Rogaum of "Old Rogaum and His Theresa" and William Zobel of "Typhoon" come most quickly to mind—Salter tempers these qualities with sentiments of love and forgiveness which are allied in him to a sensitivity to the beauty and sense of mystery his motherless daughter Marjorie brings to his life. The arrival of his young daughter from school strikes him thus, for example: "What a mystic dreamful thrill it gave him in the midst of his weighing of butter and cutting of bacon and sacking of potatoes, to hear her voice, see her dancing gestures, her dainty dress! Carefully and prayerfully he watched her development, so beautiful to him, seeing her future as innocent, happy, virtuous, until some day she should marry some boy who must meet the approval of himself and Deborah and who because of his worthiness of Marjorie, would inherit Salter's store, his house and whatever possessions he should have at the end of his days or even earlier." At the same time Salter and his sister, Deborah, are conscious that Marjorie is "restless, curious, mischievous and headstrong" and are "at loss for diplomatic and at the same time effective control" of her. What distinguishes Salter from the likes of Rogaum and Zobel is the fact that his "effective control" is moderated by his diplomacy. Whereas the two earlier fathers lack flexibility in dealing with their willful daughters, his sense of Marjorie's intrinsic human worth and his pain at seeing her potential thwarted motivate him to bring his Christian principles to bear on her desperate situation.

Perhaps the character to whom Salter comes closest in all the Dreiser short fiction is Mother St. Bertha of "Sanctuary," the superior of the House of Good Shepherd, who offers Madeleine Kinsella unpatronizing and unqualified Christian love. A practicing Presbyterian, "one of seven vestrymen" of his church, Salter pays more than lip service to his religion. The story's early details of his honesty and helpfulness as a storekeeper are entirely consistent with the integrity and love with which he deals with his daughter's plight. It is he who initiates the restoration of peace between the Stone family and his own, thereby, literally, opening the door to his granddaughter's father and making possible the story's closing scene: "And so Walter and Marjorie married and living in the home of Isaac Salter. And in the evening when the day's work was over. Salter and Walter Stone returning to the old gray house. And then, when dinner was upon the table, Salter bowing his head and reciting: 'Oh, Lord, make us thankful for all Thy mercies and gifts, past, present and to come. We ask Thee in Jesus' name, Amen. Marjorie pass the bread. Walter, how is that new Ringold house coming along?'"

"Solution" dramatizes the conflict between Salter's Christian ideals and the pleasure-seeking preoccupations—centered largely in the sexual attraction—of the younger generation, as they are embodied in Marjorie and her friends. Marjorie, attempting to escape the drabness that characterizes her life in her father's house, engages in all of the frivolities her beauty and thoughtlessness make her heir to. Maturing in taste she eventually recognizes the charm of sober Walter Stone, "the archness of his smile, the unconscious droop of heavy lids and thick lashes over his deep-set contemplative slate-blue eyes; the thickness of his light brown hair; his trim figure and graceful hands; but, above all, his natural poise and courtesy which could not be shaken apparently either by beauty or by jest." Conscious after some time that Walter does not reciprocate her feelings for him, and aware of the power her beauty exerts, she very deliberately sets out to seduce him, with the intention of forcing love and marriage. Her seduction attempt is successful, and she becomes pregnant, but she learns that she has miscalculated Stone's willingness to absorb blame. Hence Marjorie's dilemma and the story's complicating circumstances.

The solution of Marjorie's plight and the resolution of the story bring sharply into focus the moral orientation of "Solution." That resolution is, in part at least, the result of a recognition and acceptance on the part of both Marjorie and Walter of past culpability. Whereas Marjorie had for a long time tended to see her seduction of Walter as unequivocally motivated by love, she ultimately recognizes it as inspired by "that fatal infatuation which had moved her to betray him." Whereas Walter has steadfastly denied responsibility for the impregnation of Marjorie on the basis that she herself had wholly inspired the occasion, moved by Marjorie's repeated and disinterested attempts to comfort him upon his return from the war an amputee, he finally realizes that he must share her guilt. At the same time, circumstances have a large part to play in the story's resolution: an obvious advantage accrues to each of the two young people—not to mention to old Salter—by virtue of the fact that they do take one another. Yet it does not appear to be Dreiser's intention to look upon the young couple's reconciliation with a cynical eye; rather, the emphasis is on the all-forgiving love that motivates Marjorie's attempts to revive the relationship. And Walter's acceptance is based on the realization that "without love, and above all and more than all, without such love as this, its fullness, strength, self-renunciation," his future is grim indeed.

All of this suggests a new Dreiser; "Solution" represents an about-face from the anticonvention position Dreiser invariably took. Here, Salter's, and Greenville's, values are vindicated: unbridled behaviour is seen to be disruptive and peace is restored when conventional moral values are applied. However, there are disquieting elements about "Solution" that raise legitimate questions concerning Dreiser's commitment to his new stance and indeed, about his intentions with the story. "Solution" is suffused with a joylessness that persists to the end—even after things come to a satisfactory conclusion. Some of this joylessness is the result of the emphasis on grayness. Grayness frames the story and recurs within as well. Thus "The old gray faded gabled wooden house," rendered sad as the story begins because of the death of its chatelaine, is the same "old gray house" to which Salter and his new son-in-law return after their daily work. Marjorie first approaches Walter "in the windy grayness of a raw March Saturday morning" later, she ceases her pleas that he marry her on a day of "cold gray fading dusk" and after his departure for the war lives "an almost nun-like existance within the walls of the old gray covered house."

Then, too, there is the story's narrative tone. Told retrospectively, "Solution," especially from the time of Walter's return from the war, is characterized by a sort of grand inevitability, as if, given the circumstance of Walter's visible physical handicap, things must irrevocably move towards a foregone conclusion. Such a paragraph as the following, describing a visit to Walter by Wanda, his one-time fiancée, carries this note of inevitability:

And so more strange days in which anxious and curious people thought and acted variously. Wanda, for instance, calling on Walter in a dubious mood and recoiling at the sight of his empty sleeve in his right-hand pocket, his emaciated body, and so alienating Stone at once and forever. And after her none other than old Salter, only not directly to Walter but to his father.

In this paragraph, composed entirely of sentence fragments, either present or past participles are substituted for verbs. The effect is as of events perceived as having moved swiftly along as if everything were fait accompli. Enhancing the effect of paragraphs similar to the sample is the frequent use of such paragraph openings as "And so," "And then," "And after that." The joint impact of these devices is what gives the closing portions, especially, of "Solution" their particular flavor.

What significance is to be placed on these apparent contrarieties in "Solution"? Is it possible that Dreiser was writing for two audiences at once? Was he deliberately giving the Woman's Home Companion readership what it wanted while imposing on the story a suggestive dimension that would cause at least perceptive readers to question his pat solution? Do the ambiguities in the story reflect Dreiser's inability or unwillingness to commit himself unreservedly to a revised vision of life? Clearly, given the context of "Solution," these and similar questions are relevant ones, if not easily answered. On balance, however, it must be said that the major thrust of "Solution" is towards an affirmation of conventional American moral values.

The month following the appearance of "Solution" saw the publication of another Dreiser short story; "Tabloid Tragedy" was carried in the December 1933 issue of Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan, the magazine that had published "The Wages of Sin" nearly a decade before. The prepublication correspondence regarding this story—it had borne in manuscript form the enigmatic title "It Is Parallels That Are Deadly"—is of considerable interest for it brings into focus the question of Dreiser's apparently changing attitude about resisting the requirements of magazine editors. A dramatization of the tension within a married man caught up between his duty to divulge the truth about a murder to which he has been witness and the pressure on him to protect his own reputation and that of his girl friend, "Tabloid Tragedy," as published, ends with the man cut adrift by both wife and paramour—hardly the stuff of slick magazine fiction. Hearst's editor, William Lengel, apparently told Dreiser's agent, Bye, that he would have preferred a happier ending, for Bye's letter of 17 March 1932 informed the editor that he had talked to Dreiser about changing the ending and felt confident that he could persuade him to do so. Dreiser's penciled addendum on a copy of this letter appears to confirm Bye's assumption that Dreiser might be prevailed upon to change the ending: "Dear Will: This is silly. Bye asked if the ending could be changed. It could in two ways—by returning to his wife, by reconciliation with the girl. In final book form the story will stay as written." Then on June 13, Dreiser wrote from El Paso to an aide: "Airmailed Lengel to-day new ending for "It Is Parallels That Are Deadly," also wired him. If he is not quite satisfied have him change it to suit himself, and mail me through you, final copy of revision."

It is reasonable to assume that "Tabloid Tragedy" "[stayed] as written" even in its magazine form. If Lengel ultimately did prevail on Dreiser to change the ending, one staggers to think what the original ending must have been. As it is, it is dark indeed:

[Thompson's] one inescapable and painful thought was: "I tried to do good, didn't I? And just see how I am rewarded. Just see! That little difference in time that I couldn't explain has made this enormous difference in my life. Whatever else I am, I am no murderer, and these other people are. I was trying to do good. And they, by lying, have got away with evil. If I reestablish myself it is going to be a long, slow fight. These people murder and yet here is Tony in his garden and Frank in his restaurant." Thompson walked on confused, irritated, disillusioned, toward the new life he was going to try to make.

"Tabloid Tragedy"'s concluding paragraph suggests a familiar Dreiserian dilemma. Thompson, having found himself in a predicament in which each of the two obvious solutions he might choose will produce its own distasteful repercussions, attempts to extricate himself by inventing an alibi and finds not only his life ruined as a result but his attempt at seeing justice done thwarted as well. It is the delineation of Thompson's dilemma that is clearly intended to be the raison d'être of "Tabloid Tragedy." The editor's preamble on the title page bears this out:

Suppose you saw a murder committed?

Suppose you were a married man, and with you was a young woman not your wife?

Should you permit the perpetrators of that crime to go free so as to protect the name of that young woman? Or should you go to the authorities and tell what you saw?

That was the problem confronting the man in this powerful story.

What he did and what happened to him truly make another "American Tragedy."

However, the American tragedy of Thompson vies for attention with the sensational tragedy that is conventionally the fare of the tabloid newspapers. The examination of the protagonist's inner turmoil is forced to share attention with the story of the murder of Luigi Del Papa, the ensuing investigation and trial of Frank and Tony Palmeri, and their subsequent release. As in his early "A Story of Stories," where he is taken up with reporting interesting factual detail, Dreiser becomes so absorbed with describing the mildly lurid details of Rosie Palmeri's extramarital antics, Tony's—and his brother Frank's—response to her carryings-on, and the precourt and courtroom examination and cross-examination, that he loses sight of his major subject over extended portions of the story. At least in retrospect, Dreiser seems to have been conscious of the double impact "Tabloid Tragedy" had. His secretary, answering an inquiry about Dreiser's source, wrote, two months after the story's appearance: "TABLOID TRAGEDY really combines two cases which were matters of newspaper comment—the married man and the girl, and the Italian family's difficulties. It simply occurred to Mr. Dreiser that both phases might very easily have been involved, in real life, in one tragedy, and he wrote TABLOID TRAGEDY which combines the two." As for the Hearst's editors, their presentation of the story highlighted its more spectacular features. The title is spread across the top of two pages in large type and framed by cuts of first pages of tabloid newspapers carrying such blaring headlines as MURDER, KILLERS, and SLAYING.

Assuredly the diffusion of interest detracts from the overall effectiveness of "Tabloid Tragedy" as a psychological study. And there are other, and more serious, problems as well. Clearly, the narrator is in sympathy with Thompson and praises his refusal to deny his role in the process of justice. Compared to Marcella, who is "hard," "cold and calculating," he is "impulsive and generous"; compared to the townspeople, who first applaud his act of heroism and then condemn his tactlessness, he is a model of persistence and single-mindedness. But at the same time Thompson is a man whose faults cannot easily be glossed over. If he can excuse his philandering by "[believing] the whole trouble of his life sprang from his wife, who was so cross and faultfinding that he couldn't enjoy himself around his home," the facts remain that he is a liar and a perjurer and that he has induced Marcella to lie and to perjure herself—facts which he seems never consciously to acknowledge as faults. And although his "Whatever else I am, I am not a murderer" betrays a certain vague acknowledgment of his human foibles, he is completely blind to the implications, for himself, of his statement, "And they by lying have got away with evil." Dreiser's discarded title for the story, "It Is Parallels That Are Deadly," has particular application here. The parallels that are fatal to Thompson are those that are unperceived by him; the kind of blindness that renders Thompson unaware of his own lies reveals a soul hardened to deception. To the end Thompson remains "thoroughly convinced that he had been betrayed by his life's finest impulse." It is clear that Dreiser wishes to make this point of Thompson's self-deceit; it is questionable that he renders it altogether effectively. The side of Thompson that is "generous" and courageous is not reconciled with the side of him that is unprincipled and deceitful. We are not sure how he is to be seen—in the same way that we are not sure whether the story is to be seen as a study of interior tension or a feature story from a tabloid newspaper.

There is, furthermore, in "Tabloid Tragedy," a narrative fuzziness characteristic of much Dreiser short fiction. For one thing, the omniscient narrator speaks in many voices, and one is not always certain which voice is meant to predominate in a given instance. A case in point is the narrator as a morally conscious voice who attempts to enlist the reader's sympathy by making him a confidant. The story begins with its direct appeal to the reader, phrased in the imperative mood ("First think of moonlight, romance, illicit love"), pursues a chatty tone in many places ("And so now what of Rosie Palmeri and Tony Palmeri and Frank Palmeri and the late departed Luigi Del Papa? Well, just this") and reverts occasionally to the direct address of the reader ("The reader may guess how feverish and really fatal it all was . . ."). This voice is strongest in the following paragraphs when, having described the lovers' witnessing of the murder, it obtrudes with a sort of "voice over" effect on the action:

But with what thoughts! That murder! Their indifference! For was not Thompson strong, and still young? And might he not have prevented this? But no! There had been this social thing, this social fear, the prospect of their own characters jeopardized that had held them dumb and numb.

And then Thompson seated at the wheel of his car, its lights still dark, listening, and then backing swiftly out and into the main road, but turning in the opposite direction. And without one wish on the part of either to see the body. Whose was it? In what condition now? How mangled? Or was there yet life? And they were running away. God! Both were running away. Yet it was Marcella who first said: "Oh, I hope we don't meet anyone. Think! Think! Oh, how terrible!"

Here one is aware of the moral voice but not always sure when it begins or ends and gives way to the conscience-stricken inner voices of Marcella or Thompson.

The imprecision and diffusion of "Tabloid Tragedy" militate against its effectiveness. If "What [Thompson] did and what happened to him truly make another 'American Tragedy,'" as the editorial preamble claims, "Tabloid Tragedy" is a far cry from Dreiser's 1925 novel in terms of both emotional intensity and artistic execution.

"Start in Life," a piece that appeared a year after "Tabloid Tragedy," is reflective of Dreiser's tendency, especially toward the end of his career, to blur the distinction between the short story and the personal sketch. Carried in the October 1934 issue of Scribner's, one of the quality group of magazines in which Dreiser had long sought to place his fiction, "A Start in Life" had been through hard times. It had been rejected by Cosmopolitarty Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Woman's Home Companion (despite the editor's previously stated request for a story), American Magazine, Delineator, and Pictorial Review. Collier's rejected the story, wrote Dreiser's agent, Maxim Lieber, because it lacked mass magazine appeal. And despite Dreiser's insistence that he would not take less than $500 for it, he had to accept the Scribner's offer of $275.

"A Start in Life" is structured as the first-person narration of one not directly involved in the action he is describing but intrigued by the nature of certain developments in his protagonist-subject's life. It is less a dramatic presentation than a recapitulation, given at such intervals as the paths of subject and narrator cross, of segments of the subject's life. Direct discourse is kept to a minimum; when it does occur it is usually to render brief parts of conversations held between the narrator and his subject or the subject's wife, and it projects more a tone of scientific interest than a feeling of personal involvement in the subject's extremely painful predicament. As such, it most closely resembles Dreiser's earlier story "Marriage—for One," and is in sharp contrast to other stories of first-person narration, notably "Convention," for example, where the narrators are not merely listeners and recounters but become dramatically involved, either actively or psychologically, in the events they detail. "A Start in Life" is the examination of a character that intrigues Dreiser and what strongly suggests that it is more fact than fiction—despite the label on the Scribner's cover and the editorial caption, "A Story by the Author of 'An American Tragedy'" on the title page—is the identification of the narrator as "Mr. Dreiser" by one of the characters.

Dreiser's subject in "A Start in Life" is Nelson Peterson, a Swedish American from "the Dakotas" who comes to New York to fulfill a "very considerable and . . . arresting ambition" to write. The story is the history of how that ambition is brought to fruition. That history is related in the words of the narrator who, although not passionately taken up in the plight of his subject, is nevertheless fascinated by a life that provides insight into the nature of artistic development. The detached stance of the narrator is frequently reflected by a choice of word and phrase that is calculated to play down the potential involvement in his subject's dilemma and resolution of it. At one point he remarks of Peterson: "Curiously enough, as I noted, he was not so much pained and irritated at any time by the difficulties of life as he was by a gnawing doubt as to his own talent for creative writing." Later, commenting on Peterson's girl friend, he says: "What came to the surface, and soon, was the interesting psychological fact that Amalie also was a writer . . .". And, referring to the new Peterson, he says: "My conclusion was that I was facing a man who was facing a second choice and doing his best to make himself like it." Words and expressions such as "curiously enough," "noted," "the interesting psychological fact," "my conclusion," in the context, give the narrator's recapitulation the tone of an intriguing case history.

Beyond this, certain facets of descriptive detail seem calculated to impose more of an atmosphere of reality than would normally be found in a piece of fiction. The following description of the contents of a country school library is a case in point: "There were books there, also the village, as well as an occasional Minneapolis or St. Paul paper, and these, plus some magazines and weeklies—Cosmopolitan, Saturday Evening Post, Collier's—all had made him conscious of the great world without." Here the mention of three magazines places a documentary note on the passage and one recalls Dreiser's earlier practice of fictionalizing even the most patently autobiographical stories—"A Story of Stories," for example, his short fiction version of three chapters from A Book about Myself, where he changes the names not only of the two reporters competing for a news story but of their two newspapers as well. Because of such documentary touches and because of the tone of scientific interest, the reader is not altogether surprised to find, in the third last paragraph of "A Start in Life," the hitherto unnamed narrator referred to as "Mr. Dreiser."

Dreiser repeated the first-person narrative structure he used in "A Start in Life," but in much more sophisticated fashion, in his last published story, "The Tithe of the Lord." Available as early as 1934, this story appeared in the July 1938 issue of Esquire, the new but immediately successful men's magazine which sought "a breadth of editorial pattern" and published the very top rung of contemporary writers, including Thomas Mann, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald [Theodore Bernard Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 1956]. Once again Dreiser's hopes for remuneration were far in excess of what he actually received. In 1934 he wanted Liberty to pay $1,500; four years later he accepted Esquire's $300 stipend.

If the appearance of a religious story in Esquire seems inconsistent with that magazine's hedonistic reputation—Esquire actively sought from other magazine editors manuscripts by well known writers "that seemed too daring or too different for them to use"—it can be attributed both to the appeal of the Dreiser byline and to editor Arnold Gingrich's stated editorial policy: "We wanted always to feel that the reader could never feel sure, as he turned from one page to the next and from one issue to the next, of what might be coming up" [Peterson]. "The Tithe of the Lord" must surely have surprised Esquire's fashionable clientele. Although superficially a "man's" story, with it combines, trusts, big businessmen, and bankers, it articulates themes that are essentially philosophical, moral, and religious rather than entrepreneurial and financial.

The central situation of "The Tithe of the Lord" is described in a two-paragraph preamble to the story, printed on the title page and probably written by an editor:

Sitting there, cold and helpless, on a park bench, the thought intrigued Benziger. "Suppose I do just that. . . make a bargain with the Lord? Supposing, here and now, I should try to make such a contract? Would it work?" Would the Lord, for instance, prosper him as He had prospered his father, he who was now so miserable, so at odds with the world? Assuming there was a Lord, and that He really acted in behalf of those who, like him, had sinned, would He forgive him his early errors? Restore him to a decent social position; make him as well off as he was before? Would He?

Then and there he decided he was going to try it. He was going to make a deal with God, or whoever it was that ran the world, just as he would make a deal with anyone in the business world. If God would help him to get over this despair so that he could get work and get on his feet again, he would, from then on until his death, devote ten per cent of everything he should gain to helping those who needed help worse than he did. Furthermore, he would leave women alone. Or better yet, get married, and be helpful—and faithful—to one woman.

The story is, in fact, the account of the cause of Benziger's decision, as indicated in this preamble, and of its aftermath: with the exception of a few passages in which the narrator, Lamborn, a man who is "identified with shipping interests," refers to his own contacts with Benziger, "The Tithe of the Lord" is told via the direct words of Lamborn's two informants, Kelsey, an architect, and Henneberry, a banker. Lamborn is almost exclusively listener, "allowing" first Kelsey and then Henneberry to inform him about the two significant periods of the subject's life and then reproducing their respective stories largely verbatim.

Kelsey's function in the story is almost exclusively a narrative one. His recounting of Benziger's life is chronological and in summary form up to the critical time of Benziger's conversion. After cursory description of Benziger's family background, his rise to business success and leadership, his wife's suicide, and his subsequent personal deterioration and business failure, Kelsey engages in a detailed account of the circumstances surrounding his friend's change of heart. It is clear from the emphasis given by Kelsey to Benziger's conversion—and by Lamborn as well, for it is he who ultimately "selects" what will constitute the story—that it is this event that particularly intrigues them. And if after his account of Benziger's conversion Kelsey vanishes, except in the memory of Lamborn, he has set the state for ensuing events.

Years later, as Lamborn listens to the rendering of the second half of Benziger's life history by Henneberry, he thinks: "Like Kelsey before him [Henneberry] seemed to me to be talking in order to solve something for himself." One senses that Lamborn's interest in Benziger is motivated by the need "to solve something for himself" as well. Henneberry's recounting of the details of Benziger's second deterioration and of his death is much more interpretive than Kelsey's and as such impels a dialogue between himself and Lamborn, the nature of which is at the heart of the significance of "The Tithe of the Lord." Henneberry, characterized by Lamborn as "in the main . . . your typical conservative, cautious, semi-religious banker," tends to interpret Benziger's fall as evidence of Divine retribution. He says to Lamborn: "While I am not a member of any faith, I do belive in a God and in His control in some mysterious way of the affairs of the world. While I cannot personally say whether Benziger deliberately broke this agreement or whether the breaking of it was, as you seem to think, forced upon him, I still believe if he did break it and did believe deeply in the significance of it, it is probable that it might have affected him in some way." Lamborn's view, similarly, reflects his philosophy of life. He says of Benziger: "While he did not very much believe there was a God, he kept fulfilling his agreement just in the event there should be one, and of course his conscience was clear as long as he did. But not being sure of this mysterious Thing, as soon as he stopped fulfilling the agreement he was haunted by the whisperings of his conscience." However, the dialogue, and the story, ends in an accommodation, as the closing paragraphs indicate:

"In other words," said Henneberry, "you are not a religious man."

"Not in the accepted sense of the words, no."

"Well, I am," he said. "You call it conscience, but to me conscience is God, or the only thing we know of as God, our guide. And when we go against that, we go against Him."

"So be it," I said. "And it may be that both of us are talking ofone and the same power."

"I think we are," he said.

Whatever philosophical differences they suggest, both the positions expressed here reflect acknowledgement of and allegiance to a transcendent force that makes moral demands on men. Benziger, by virtue of his early home training, has been schooled in the Protestant work ethic, has repudiated it, accepted it again out of expediency, and, unable to live up to its prescriptions, has failed. Unlike other Dreiser entrepreneur-subjects, notably the Frank Cowperwood of The Financier and The Titan, Benziger bends to the requirements of conventional morality, however tenuous they are for him at times. More significantly, the story's three narrators, all members of the business establishment themselves, judge Benziger according to norms of conventional morality. What is more, they leaven their judgement with understanding and sympathy. Even Henneberry, the most orthodox of them, is more impressed with Benziger's charitable accomplishments than he is disenchanted with his misdemeanors.

The narrative method in "The Tithe of the Lord"—the most complex in the Dreiser fiction canon—is entirely consistent with the story's desired emphasis. If Benziger is in a sense the subject of "The Tithe of the Lord," the story is not primarily about him but about the response he creates in Lamborn and Henneberry and, to a lesser extent, in Kelsey. Lamborn sees Benziger only rarely; most of his knowledge of the man comes at second hand. Moreover, the crucial discussion of Benziger between Lamborn and Henneberry takes place some years after his death. Thus, a distance is maintained assuring an impartial view, a view that recreates Benziger less as a person than as an object lesson. Then, too, the reader sees Benziger, for the most part, two persons removed; he is effectively far away in time and, in a sense, in place, the subject of the narrator's curiosity and conversations more than an entity in himself.

In fact, Benziger serves to vindicate the transcendent view of life held by Lamborn and Henneberry. He serves also as an exemplum of a morality that is essentially Christian. The circumstances of his life and of the lives of those who are associated with him familially and entrepreneurially, implicitly and explicitly illustrate the validity of integrity, forgiveness, love, and service. Thus, the reconciliation of Benziger with his father is seen in the light of the parable of the Prodigal Son, the destructive effects of adultery are recognized, and the integrity of the family unit is upheld. Affirmed also are honesty in business dealings, the care of down-and-outers, the adoption of children, the selflessness of a wife who hurries to the deathbed of an unfaithful husband. A far cry all this is from Cowperwood's dictum, "I satisfy myself."

"The Tithe of the Lord" is reminiscent of Dreiser's earlier story, "The 'Mercy' of God." There, two friends engage in dialogue about the plight of a young woman who, unable to attract men, has slipped into a state of fantasy in which, mercifully, she is assuaged from her anguish. And although the account of the woman's life takes up the greater length of the story, as does the Benziger account in "The Tithe of the Lord," "The 'Mercy' of God" is, again like "The Tithe of the Lord," a story in which a potentially dramatic series of episodes becomes merely the launching pad for a philosophical/ religious discussion. But if Dreiser's narrative method is essentially the same in the two stories there has been a considerable evolution in the nature of the resolution of the dialogue. Against the wistful skepticism of the narrator's closing lines in "The 'Mercy' of God," "Truly, truly . . . I wish I might believe," Dreiser now gives us the agreement of his two conversers as to the existence of a benevolent transcendent force.

Unquestionably the cluster of stories Dreiser published after Chains reflects a consistent change of attitude toward a more reconciled view of the human predicament: this is revealed in the substance of "Fine Furniture," "Solution," "A Start in Life" and "The Tithe of the Lord" as well as in the tone of each of them with the exception of "Solution." As for "Tabloid Tragedy," if it is a more traditional Dreiserian tale, there is surely significance in the fact that its author was not unwilling to allow changes to his story that would give it a more optimistic coloration. However, these five stories do not show Dreiser the short fictionist at his best. Like that portion of E Scott Fitzgerald's fiction written after the Jazz Age or of the fiction of John Steinbeck written after the Great Depression, Dreiser's later stories lack the spark of the best earlier ones; they are generally competent and interesting but no longer passionate and engrossing.