• WRITING AND REVISING
• COLLABORATIVE REVISION
• NOTES

WRITING AND REVISING

The difficulties Dreiser encountered in attempting to publish his first novel, Sister Carrie, were symptomatic of those he faced throughout his career. One was the matter of length. Dreiser was the kind of author whom Thomas Wolfe, himself the author of extremely long novels, called a “putter-inner.”¹ Dreiser’s fictional roots were in the nineteenth-century novel, in a form, that is, in which multiple lines of action, the author’s willingness and indeed desire to comment at length on the fictional situation before him, and a compulsion to describe background and scene in detail produce quite long texts. (A draft of The Financier, for example, includes an extended paragraph, later cut by Dreiser, in which he describes the demeanor of the courtroom cat during Cowperwood’s trial.) Indeed, this habit of mind and style pervades all of Dreiser’s work, not just his novels. His autobiographies and travel books are similarly expansive, and even his short stories are fuller than is conventional. Although some critics of Dreiser’s fiction, notably Robert Penn Warren, have argued that the powerful sense of inevitability in his novels is inseparable from the full exposition of his characters’ lives, his publishers usually took the position that great length meant unsalability.

Another difficulty was the unsettling character of Dreiser’s material, including the presence of ideas antithetical to organized religion and conventional beliefs of all kinds. Most of all, his work was notable for its troubling depiction of the sexual in human nature. Not that there was anything of the obviously prurient in Dreiser’s subject matter. The human body and the physical act of sex are never present in his fiction. What is abundantly depicted, however, is the power of sexual desire in human nature and therefore the reality of men and women frequently acting out their desires, all within the context of an authorial presence unwilling to judge desire in conventional terms.

Thus, Sister Carrie, completed in the spring of 1900, was doubly handicapped. It was far too long, especially for a first novel by an

unknown author. Its account of a young girl who emerges unscathed and even triumphant from two illicit relationships challenged the dominant public moralism of the day, which held that illicit sexuality was not a proper subject for fiction, but that if it were indeed present, its depiction should always demonstrate the unequivocal operation of divine law in the punishment of the sinner. Anxious to have his novel published, Dreiser gave way to some degree in both areas of concern. On the advice of his friend Arthur Henry, he cut the novel extensively, giving his principal attention to the many passages early in the work in which he commented at length on his characters. And probably on the advice of his wife, Sallie, he cut or revised several passages that noted too openly the sexual underside of urban life—Hurst-wood’s habit of frequenting brothels, for example, or Carrie’s being subjected to a sexual pass by one of her employers.

The tension between Dreiser’s habitual mode of composition and early-nineteenth-century publishing conventions has led to a major controversy in the modern editing of his works. Dreiser seldom destroyed his early drafts or indeed any of the documents that constituted the prepublication history of a work. (With a few exceptions, all of this material is in the Dreiser Collection of the University of Pennsylvania Library.) It is usually possible, therefore, to construct a cradle-to-grave textual history of a Dreiser work. For Sister Carrie, for example, there exists Dreiser’s handwritten (or holo-graph) first draft and the typescript made from the draft (which was itself used to set type for the novel), both of which include significant revisions. Only the proof is missing. An editor can thus determine what was revised or cut from the novel and indeed can often determine who made the revisions or cuts. The issue presented by the availability of this material is whether in the preparation of a scholarly text of the novel the editor should stress its pre- or its postpublication form. This is more than an academic issue since scholarly editions often provide the texts that, in cheaper formats, are read by students and anyone else seeking a modern-reading version of a novel. To put the matter perhaps too simply, the argument for accepting the text written by Dreiser before revision and cutting is that in making alterations he was either consciously or subconsciously responding to a need to make his book more salable and that his early version of the novel, before this motive became operative, is thus the one truer to his artistic intentions. The arguments for adopting the published text as authoritative are that Dreiser, both for Sister Carrie and for all his subsequent novels, sought out and welcomed prepublication aid in the editing of his work, that it is usually impossible to determine his motive for accepting or rejecting editing suggestions made by others, and that, in any case, the cultural process by which a literary work reaches its audience is as much a part of the work as the author’s original intent and should not and cannot be separated from the work.

These two positions are not easily reconciled, and the publication of modern scholarly editions of Sister Carrie in 1981 and Jennie Gerhardt in 1992 in the ongoing University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition series, both of which relied heavily on Dreiser’s early drafts, occasioned much controversy. But though the issue remains unreconciled, peace of a kind has been achieved in that it is now generally accepted that each form of the novel has an independent role to play in any effort to understand Dreiser and his work fully.

The prepublication history of almost all of Dreiser’s novels, as well as most of his books in other genres, recapitulated that of Sister Carrie. With the exception of his last novel, The Stoic, each was cut extensively before publication—in the case of An American Tragedy, by more than half. Dreiser himself usually welcomed the early stage of this pruning—that is, the initial revision that friends performed on each of his novels. He was more resistant, however, with editors of the firm publishing the work, bringing to this stage of the process his lifelong suspicion of anyone having a commercial interest in his writing. As for sexual material, Dreiser was curiously ambivalent, depending on whether he was writing fiction or autobiography. Even the drafts of his novels contain few blatant sexual moments or descriptions, and he seems not to have resisted their early removal. His autobiographies and travel books, how-ever, are in their early versions far more explicit than his fiction in their depiction of sex, and he was angry that he was forced to cut almost all material of this kind from A Traveler at Forty. He held back the publication of Dawn for some fifteen years until changing times made his frankness in the book more acceptable.

Many major twentieth-century American authors remained loyal to a single publisher throughout their careers. This was not true of Dreiser, who brought to his relations with publishers the baggage of a suspicious nature and often impossible demands. But though his reputation after 1911 as a major author made him a desirable asset to a publishing firm, and many therefore pursued him, he was also often shabbily treated by his publishers, which helps to explain his prickly relations with them. The machinations of Walter H. Page and then Frank Doubleday himself as they attempted to evade the agreement of Doubleday, Page and Company to publish Sister Carrie triggered in Dreiser a lifelong anxiety about the honesty, motives, and artistic insight of publishers that he never over-came. These feelings were confirmed during the next decade when Harper’s, under pressure from its owners, withdrew at the last moment from the publication of The Titan and when John Lane withdrew The “Genius” from print because of fear of prosecution for obscenity. Dreiser’s anxiety over publishers continued even into the flush time following the great success of An American Tragedy, when he quarreled bitterly with Horace Liveright, the publisher of the novel, over the division of the proceeds from movie rights, despite the fact that Liveright had supported Dreiser through several lean years and had published several of his volumes of only marginal public interest.

COLLABORATIVE REVISION

Since Dreiser was never an adequate typist, he wrote all his novels initially by hand, composing swiftly and copiously. Often, however, as in the case of several of his novels, he realized that he had made a false start and discarded his opening chapters. This was especially apt to be true, as with Jennie Gerhardt and The Bulwark, if some years had elapsed between his first undertaking the novel and returning to it. In addition, he would frequently shift holograph sections within a novel in progress, as he did notably in The Financier. On the whole, however, Dreiser’s initial drafts are expansive, contain little close stylistic revision by himself, and reveal little or no revision by others.

The final holograph draft would then be put into typescript by a professional typist, after which an intensive and extended process of cutting and revision would be undertaken. Dreiser always acknowledged his weak command of English grammar and spelling, and some of the revision therefore consisted of conventional editorial cleaning up of solecisms and grammatical errors. (The typist would have already begun this process for more obvious errors.) In addition,

he frequently accepted suggestions for stylistic change, especially if they originated from readers, such as H. L. Mencken or Louise Campbell, whose taste he trusted. But a far more central concern for Dreiser was the fictional nuts and bolts of the novel, matters such as characterization, plotting, description, and even major themes. Here he pursued a uniqueprocess of collaborative production. The initial typescript or (later in his career) multiple copies of the initial typescript would be read by several close associates; Dreiser would then seriously consider their suggestions, which would range from major areas of theme and construction to sentence revision, and would accept some and reject others. Because the typescript would almost always be too lengthy for publication, he would particularly seek out recommendations for cutting.

The history of the revision of Sister Carrie offers a rough model of the editorial method that Dreiser followed throughout his career. The principal readers offering suggestions for change were his wife, Sallie, and his close friend Arthur Henry. In this instance, unlike in the case of Dreiser’s later novels, Sallie played a role in the composition ofthe holograph itself, questioning Dreiser’s historical accuracy and making stylistic changes here and there. She was especially active in Dreiser’s important revision in holograph of the conclusion of the novel. Together they worked toward changing the direction of Carrie’s final condition: instead of facing romantic prospects with the young engineer Ames, she faces a life of continuous search for happiness. When the novel was putinto typescript, Henry, a writer well in touch with the contemporary market in fiction, made many suggestions for cuts, most of which Dreiser accepted. Dreiser, in short, sought out two kinds of help in the shaping of his draft into publishable form: first, frank and honest assistance in questioning some of the basic assumptions of the work and viable suggestions for change in these doubtful areas; and, second, assistance in identifying material that could profitably be cut.

Dreiser’s varied and complex relationships with women throughout his life, as wellas his capacity to generate great loyalty among his close friends, are well known. It is one of the striking distinctions of his career as a writer that he was able to effect a kind of practical economy between these aspects of his personal life and his writing. Woman after woman, most of them lovers, and man after man, most of them professional writers who were close friends at the time, served him as readers and editors, as had his wife, Sallie, and Henry. Some ofthe women, such as Sally Kusell and Estelle Kubitz in the 1920s, were initially typists who evolved into the dual role of editor-lover. Others, such as Louise Campbell, who played majorroles in the evolution of several of Dreiser’s novels, began as lovers and then assumedthe editorial role. Some left their mark principally on one novel—Lillian Goodman on Jennie Gerhardt, for example, or Marguerite Tjader on The Bulwark— while others contributed to several. But always there was a woman, and often more than one, who occupied the role of both lover and aide. As far as men are concerned, Mencken is the preeminent example of the editor-friend. During the seminal decade of the 1910s, when Dreiser was furiously producing work after work, Mencken served as his principal editorial resource, especially for cutting. As Dreiser’s career proceeded, his dependence on editorial aid increased. For An American Tragedy, for example, major roles were played by Kusell, by Campbell, to whom he sent the manuscript, and by T. R. Smith, a Liveright editor.

Aside from a desire for suggestions for cutting, Dreiser was particularly eager for responses to the conclusions of his novels. It is perhaps a characteristic of his nonteleological mindset—of a temperament that saw little direction in life, whether divinely inspired or humanly controlled—that Dreiser often had a problem with endings and frequently made late and significant changes in the conclusion of his novels, usually in response to readers’ criticism and suggestions. Sister Carrie was revised both to eliminate Ames as a “matrimonial possibility” and to close the novel with an epilogue on Carrie rather than with (as in the holograph) Hurstwood’s death. For Jennie Gerhardt Dreiser recast much of the last third of the novel; in the revised version Jennie and her lover Lester Kane do not marry, and Jennie is left empty and alone at the end of the work. Similarly, the initial version of The “Genius,” which concluded with Eugene and Suzanne’s union, was revised to an ending in which Eugene is contented in his single life.

Whereas Dreiser sought out and usually welcomed suggestions made by lovers and friends, he brought a quite different attitude to publishers’ requests for revision. Doubleday, for example, asked that he

change the names of many prominent people and places identified in Sister Carrie, arequest Dreiser responded to grudgingly and only in part. Harper’s cut Jennie Gerhardt and also revised its style extensively; Dreiser, angry at what the publisherhad done, fought a rear-guard action, revising a great deal to restore the original text. The Bulwark was so extensively revised by Campbell and Doubleday’s Donald Elder that it does not resemble Dreiser’s usual fictional method and prose style. In one notable instance, however, Dreiser regretted strongly that one of his novels had not been sufficiently edited by his publisher. On his return from Europe in the spring of 1912, he was so anxious to complete and publish his first novel of The Cowperwood Trilogy, The Financier, that both he and Harper’s had little opportunity to undertake the major cutting that the more than 750 printed pages of the novel demanded. After its publication Dreiser came to consider this failure a serious error, and in 1926, bolstered by the cash and prominence provided by the success of An American Tragedy, he resolved to publish a revised cut version of The Financier. Louise Campbell undertook the job, and, as usual, the process involved her making initial suggestions that Dreiser then acted on, often making additional changes himself. As a result of these revisions, the 1926 version of The Financier was approximately one-third shorter than the original.

NOTES

1. Thomas Wolfe, “A Letter from Thomas Wolfe,” in F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), p. 314.