Flashback, December 1925: Dreiser’s ‘An American Tragedy’ Attacks Inequality

After a quarter-century of penury and pain, novelist Theodore Dreiser achieved greater critical acclaim and financial security than he’d ever known with An American Tragedy, published a century ago this month by Horace Liveright.

In his debut 25 years before, Sister Carrie (whose difficult birth I described in this post from last month) and four subsequent novels (Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and The “Genius”), Dreiser had helped lead the literary genre of naturalism in the United States. 

But with An American Tragedy, the 54-year-old author launched a monumental assault on American inequality and the ills it bred—corruption, media sensationalism, restricted life choices, and criminality.

This new novel came at the end of a year in which two others were similarly critical of American materialism at the height of the Roaring Twenties. All remain uniquely relevant a century later.

The Pulitzer Prize winner for that year, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, satirized how the pursuit of profit could corrode even the most seemingly pure of occupations: medicine. And, as I noted in this post from 17 years ago on the real-life crime that inspired An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s plot contained some of the same elements as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: a poor boy from the Midwest, stifled by his environment and longing for all that money can buy, meets the woman of his dreams, only to become emmeshed in a crime that leads to his death.

Reflecting his journalism background, Dreiser conducted extensive research, both on the 1908 trial and execution of Chester Gillette and two other sensational murder cases: Harry Thaw’s shooting of architect Stanford White and the poisoning of Roland Molineux  (which figured in a novel he ultimately put aside called The Rake). The latter two cases fed his interest in what has become ghoulish media fascination with true-crime stories.

For the Gillette case, Dreiser ended up touring with his mistress (and eventual second wife), Helen Patges Richardson, towns in upper New York state that figured in the tragedy, while he also drew on love letters (introduced as evidence at trial) by the defendant’s pregnant lover, factory girl Grace Brown. His narrative contains major parallels to the case, including:

*the same initials for Gillette and protagonist Clyde Griffiths;

*the accused’s background as a poor relation hoping to use his rich industrial uncle’s status to catapult into high society;

*Brown’s drowning death in a boat on a lake; and

*the ambiguity involving Gillette’s guilt (significant enough still to be debated a century later).

Dreiser told readers everything—and I mean everything—about what led Griffiths to his fateful date with Roberta Alden on the lake. More than a few readers have wished he had spared them all of this detail (and, in the 1926 parody “Compiling an American Tragedy: Suggestions as to How Theodore Dreiser Might Write His Next Human Document and Save Five Years’ Work,” humorist Robert Benchley had wicked fun with his incurable verbosity, too).

Actually, in one important chapter, Dreiser did decide to forego legwork. Only a month before publication, the novelist urged his friend and literary champion, the iconoclastic columnist and editor H.L. Mencken, to use his influence to get him a pass to death row on Sing Sing, so he could more realistically convey Griffith’s experience in awaiting execution.

Liveright was undoubtedly relieved when nothing came of the request and his much-put-upon author—who’d been battling censors, low funds, chronic nausea, and headaches as he struggled with the project—could put the manuscript to rest. Dreiser himself came to feel it all was a blessing in disguise, telling Mencken, “my imagination was better—(more true to the facts)—than what I saw.”

Much like John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, when it was brought to the big screen in the Fifties, An American Tragedy would be carefully condensed by an expert director-screenwriting team (in this case, George Stevens, Michael Wilson, and Harry Brown) as A Place in the Sun. But Dreiser’s sprawling novel could have benefited—as Steinbeck’s family saga eventually did in the early 1980s—with a mini-series that would have depicted how an upbringing shaped and misshaped a key character.

This latter point may have been the entry point for Dreiser into Griffiths. Dreiser’s family was Roman Catholic rather than Protestant evangelical like Clyde’s, but the author and his character both chafed against what they regarded as their parents’ religious fanaticism and how it left children rootless and helpless in an increasingly secular modern America:

“Clyde's parents had proved impractical in the matter of the future of their children. They did not understand the importance or the essential necessity for some form of practical or professional training for each and every one of their young ones. Instead, being wrapped up in the notion of evangelizing the world, they had neglected to keep their children in school in any one place. They had moved here and there, sometimes in the very midst of an advantageous school season, because of a larger and better religious field in which to work. And there were times when, the work proving highly unprofitable and Asa being unable to make much money at the two things he most understood—gardening and canvassing for one invention or another—they were quite without sufficient food or decent clothes, and the children could not go to school. In the face of such situations as these, whatever the children might think, Asa and his wife remained as optimistic as ever, or they insisted to themselves that they were, and had unwavering faith in the Lord and His intention to provide.”

Much like Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Clyde is beset by a shallow imagination, leaving him prey to materialism and desire. Unlike the French novelist, Dreiser was incapable of compression or style.

Even so, An American Tragedy succeeds despite its graceless prose. In fact, George Orwell’s 1945 essay “Good Bad Books” insisted that, paradoxically, this grimly deterministic novel succeeded because of it, gaining something “from the clumsy long-winded manner in which it is written; detail is piled on detail, with almost no attempt at selection, and in the process an effect of terrible, grinding cruelty is slowly built up.”

For the remaining two decades of his life, Dreiser, a relentless critic of capitalism (indeed, he embraced Communism not long before he died), attempted what we would call “monetizing” or “leveraging” the novel that helped rescue him from a lifetime of grinding poverty, through stage and film adaptations. He did not see those efforts bear fruit in the classic A Place in the Sun. I will leave a discussion of that movie till 2026, in time for its 75^th anniversary.

Movie Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, As a Psychoanalyst Futilely Interacting With a Patient)

Psychoanalyst [played by Robert Benchley]: “Ah, you think both your father and mother were normal?”

Patient [played by John Butler]: “How should I know? They looked all right to me!”

Psychoanalyst: “Was either one of them ever psychoanalyzed?”

Patient: “No, of course not.”

Psychoanalyst: “Just how would you describe your phobia?”

Patient: “My what?”

Psychoanalyst: “Your phobia—this fear that you seem to have—uh, what it is you're afraid of.”

Patient: “Oh, I seem to be afraid of falling all the time, falling off things.”

Psychoanalyst: “You're afraid of falling off high places.”

Patient: “Huh? Uh, no—off of low places.”

Psychoanalyst: “Would you please explain that a little more fully?”

Patient: “Well, whenever I get on anything low like a milking stool or a suitcase—you know, [motioning toward his knee] about that high—I'm just afraid I’ll fall off, that's all.”

Psychoanalyst: “Well, it's a clear case of gluctophobia. Have you ever actually fallen off a milking stool or a suitcase?”

Patient: “Oh, sure—all the time.”

Psychoanalyst: “Very interesting, very interesting. When did you first notice this?”

Patient: “When I first fell off.”— Mental Poise (1938), film short written by American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945) and directed by Roy Rowland

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Surprise at Things Done Well by Others)

“We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born. We are constantly remarking on the fact that things are done well by people other than ourselves. The Japanese are a remarkable little people, we say, as if we were doing them a favor. He is an Arab, but you ought to hear him play the zither. Why but?” —American humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Isn't It Remarkable?”, in The Benchley Roundup: A Selection by Nathaniel Benchley of His Favorites (1954)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Traveling With a Baby)

“There is much to be said for those who maintain that rather should the race be allowed to die out than that babies should be taken from place to place along our national arteries of traffic. On the other hand, there are moments when babies are asleep. (Oh, yes, there are. There must be.) But it is practically a straight run of ten or a dozen hours for your child of four. You may have a little trouble in getting the infant to doze off, especially as the train newsboy waits crouching in the vestibule until he sees signs of slumber on the child's face and then rushes in to yell, ‘Copy of Life, out today!’ right by its pink, shell-like ear. But after it is asleep, your troubles are over except for wondering how you can shift your ossifying arm to a new position without disturbing its precious burden.”— American humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Kiddie-Kar Travel,” in Pluck and Luck (1925)

Okay, the passage of nearly 100 years means that, more likely than not, families will be taking planes instead of trains—and the barking newsboy, with his get-up-and-go energy and entrepreneurial vigor, is a thing of the post.

But, with school out and the summer travel season upon us again (and the fear of COVID receding, though not yet entirely gone), parents (including two I can think of) are about to experience something like the sheer terror that Benchley is talking about.

Funny how that “ossifying arm” keeps being passed along from generation to generation…

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Standing in Line)

“For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.”— American humorist Robert Benchley (1889-1945), Benchley -- or Else! (1990)

Just wait till the Christmas season comes in earnest, people!

Movie Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, Explaining the Theory of the Income Tax)

Joe Doakes [played by Robert Benchley] [Holding up a larger-than-life diagram of a silver dollar]: “This here represents one dollar of your income. Of course, one dollar of your income isn’t as large as this, but we have to take a few liberties.” [Tearing off a piece] “According to the income tax law, 8% of your income comes right off from the start. But if you have another dollar like this [fumbling to catch a smaller piece], there is a penalty: an added 4%, or 12%.” [Tearing off another piece]: “Then comes the supplementary or surprise tax of 45%, which at compound interest, with time and a half for overtime, brings the total beginner’s surtax to a cool 78%. Now, figure on the basis of 3 and a half to 7, with a penalty…we have the supplementary or accrued income tax of 92%.” [Holding up a very thin slice of the original coin, then smiles]. “Now this, you remember, is your dollar.” [It accidentally flies out of his fingers into the air. Looking around but not finding it, he smiles sheepishly again.] “Well, easy come, easy go!”— How to Figure Income Tax (1938), MGM film short written by humorist-actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), directed by Felix E. Feist

A few weeks ago, when TCM was running one of its assorted distant and more contemporary time-fillers between major presentations on its schedule, I caught this amusing short. I knew instantly that not only would it be appropriate for income tax season, but also that it afforded me another opportunity to extol the virtues of Robert Benchley.

Daily readers of this blog know that I quote frequently from this legendary wit from the Algonquin Round Table. But in prior cases, I quoted from among the 600 of his essays eventually collected into 12 volumes.

This short gave me the chance to allude to—and comment on—some of the work he did in Hollywood.

Towards the end of his life, Benchley’s already considerable drinking intensified over his belief that he had forsaken reasonably creative outlets such as his reviewing at The New Yorker and a radio show for more remunerative work in Tinseltown as a supporting player in full-length films and a star in his own shorts of less than 10 minutes.

A few weeks before his death, his physical and mental health had deteriorated so much that he stopped writing altogether.

The Hollywood work that Benchley regarded with such loathing consisted of 48 short “how-to” videos. One, “How to Sleep,” won Best Short Subject at the 1935 Academy Awards. I don’t know the particular conditions under which he made them, but they can still provide laughs for anyone in need of one—and who doesn’t?

Some contemporary readers on Amazon, commenting on one of Benchley’s books, have been known to write that they are “dated.” This strikes me as an essentially meaningless complaint. The same could be said of almost any work not released in the present moment.

If you want a better evaluation of his work, remember this: Four of the leading humor columnists in the last half-century—Russell Baker, Art Buchwald, Erma Bombeck, and Dave Barry—looked to Benchley for inspiration, according to Neil Grauer's wonderful 1986 appreciation of the humorist in American Heritage Magazine.

“How refreshing to read a biography of a humorist who was not, in real life, a son of a bitch,” wrote another great humor writer, Christopher Buckley, in commenting on Billy Altman’s 1997 book, Laughter’s Gentle Soul: The Life of Robert Benchley. “The worst that could be said of Robert Benchley was that he was a bit of a bounder to his wife, an absentee father to his sons, and ultimately a disappointment to himself. But for all that, his wife and sons were devoted to him, as he in his way was to them. His friends, who were legion, adored him. As he lay in the hospital, hemorrhaging to death from cirrhosis, forty people showed up to volunteer to give blood. How many writers could make that posthumous boast?”

(For a fine look at Benchley that focuses on his film work, see Stephen Mears' 2017 "TCM Diary" blog post for Film Comment Magazine.)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on a Christmas Pageant in the Vestry Starring Kids)

“Twenty-five seconds too early little Flora Rochester will prance out from the wings, uttering the first shrill notes of a song, and will have to be grabbed by eager hands and pulled back. Twenty-four seconds later the piano will begin ‘The Return of the Reindeer’ with a powerful accent on the first note of each bar, and Flora Rochester, Lillian McNulty, Gertrude Hamingham and Martha Wrist will swirl on, dressed in white, and advance heavily into the footlights, which will go out.

“There will then be an interlude while Mr. Neff, the sexton, adjusts the connection, during which the four little girls stand undecided whether to brave it out or cry. As a compromise they giggle and are herded back into the wings by Mrs. Drury, amid applause. When the lights go on again, the applause becomes deafening, and as Mr. Neff walks triumphantly away, the little boys in the audience will whistle: ‘There she goes, there she goes, all dressed up in her Sunday clothes”!”— American humorist and actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “A Christmas Spectacle,” in Love Conquers All (1922)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, Anticipating the Back-to-School Season)

"Although it hardly seems credible, it is almost time to begin packing the kiddies off to school again. Here they have been all summer, the rascals, tracking sand into the dining room, rolling Grandma about, and bringing in little playmates who have been exposed to mumps (when Daddy himself hasn't had mumps yet, and mumps for Daddy would be no fun), and in all kinds of ways cheering up the Old Manse to the point of bursting it asunder.”—American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Ding-Dong, School Bells,” in Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949)

Benchley wrote this piece originally for Liberty Magazine in 1930. The back-to-school situation today is far more dire than it was then, but Benchley’s humor is so droll, so amiable that I couldn’t help including it here.

Besides, it’s not like darkness wasn’t present in Benchley’s time, too. Twelve years before publication of this article, the so-called “Spanish Flu” had wreaked damage worldwide, not unlike COVID-19 now. Several European nations, if they hadn’t yet fallen under the shadow of totalitarianism, were veering dangerously in this direction. And America itself was a year into a Great Depression from which it would not truly emerge for another decade.

So I hope you’ll chuckle when you read that first paragraph—either in recognition of past times (would that it was only mumps that we were exposed to now!) or from whatever reminders you can find of them in the present. Goodness knows, we can all use the laughs.

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Living the Lives of His Characters)

“When I am writing a novel I must actually live the lives of my characters. If, for instance, my hero is a gambler on the French Riviera, I make myself pack up and go to Cannes or Nice, willy-nilly, and there throw myself into the gay life of the gambling set until I really feel that I am Paul De Lacroix, Ed Whelan, or whatever my hero's name is. Of course this runs into money, and I am quite likely to have to change my ideas about my hero entirely and make him a bum on a tramp steamer working his way back to America, or a young college boy out of funds who lives by his wits until his friends at home send him a hundred and ten dollars.”— American humorist and actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “How I Create,” in The Best of Robert Benchley: 72 Timeless Stories of Wit, Wisdom and Whimsy (1983)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Hating to Ask Questions of Strangers)

“I can't quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who...believe it to be the solution to most of this world's problems. The man's dread is probably that of making himself appear a pest or ridiculously uninformed. The woman's insistence is based probably on experience which has taught her that anyone, no matter who, knows more about things in general than her husband.”—American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), "Ask That Man," in Pluck and Luck (1925)

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, Robert Benchley died, triggering ennui among his old Algonquin Round Table friends about an end of an era. But before that, the chief emotion aroused by the last medical crisis of this talented, gentle, alcoholic humorist sadly disappointed in himself was an overwhelming, desperate desire to help.

Christopher Buckley noted, in reviewing a 1997 biography of the man sometimes confused with his grandson, Jaws novelist Peter Benchley: “As he lay in the hospital, hemorrhaging to death from cirrhosis, forty people showed up to volunteer to give blood. How many writers could make that posthumous boast?”

I can’t think of all the times that I have posted quotes from Benchley. But I would do it countless times more if I could get even one of my readers to hunt down one of his humor collections from a library, an antiquarian bookstore, or Amazon. I can think of few better ways to raise a chuckle during a year when we all need it so badly.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Major and the Minor,’ With an Unexpected Come-on)

Mr. Osborne (played by Robert Benchley) (to Ginger Rogers, dripping wet from a rainstorm): “Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”— The Major and the Minor (1942), screenplay by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, directed by Billy Wilder

For many years, I had been under the impression that this famous witticism from humorist Robert Benchley had originated from an incident when he was thrown into a pool fully dressed, only to emerge, with admirable aplomb, with this uproarious response. 

That would have been a spectacular example of having presence of mind, particularly from the famously inebriated Benchley, but who knows? Maybe he could have done it.

Only now, all this time, I may have been wrong.

At one point, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations misattributed the line to Alexander Woolcott, Benchley’s fellow Algonquin Table wit. But over the years popular opinion swung toward Benchley, who in the 1930s largely turned away from the extended wry essays that had gained his reputation to more remunerative appearances in Hollywood shorts or (as here, in Wilder’s first directorial effort) featured roles in major films.

When I caught The Major and the Minor again, after too many years to count, on Turner Classic Movies, I thought that Wilder and collaborator Charles Brackett had fed Benchley’s words to him, knowing that those familiar with the humorist would guffaw when they encountered the line again in a different context. 

Well, not quite. In a note quoted in a 1985 article by Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times, Wilder recalled:

“We gave the joke to Robert Benchley . . . under the impression that he had originated it. When it came to the shooting, he modestly disclaimed credit for this now classic line, informing me that it had actually, indubitably and in fact been said by his friend [actor] Charles Butterworth.”

There’s more to the story than that. Maybe…

Butterworth did indeed say a slight variation on the line, onscreen—like Benchley—while playing a kind of butler, to Charles Winninger, his employer, in a comparatively little-remembered 1937 comedy called Every Day’s a Holiday. And it likely would have been even less remembered had its screenwriter not been Mae West. 

The movie’s failure—and its subsequent lack of TV viewings over the years—would account for why most film aficionados would recall Benchley rather than Butterworth saying the line. But did West come up with it on her own?

The jury’s still out. Ralph Keyes, for instance, responding to that possibility raised by Barnaby Conrad, told the author of The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic that the saucy female star was “a notorious credit hog who hated to share billing with anyone, no matter how many of her lines they may have written.”

There you have it, for now. But whenever you hear that line, just remember: what remains lost in the mists of memory remains clear and bright on celluloid, where it exists to cheer future comedy fans just as much as those who needed to hear the merry line so badly in wartime America.

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on Acting Shakespearean Comedy)

“An actor, in order to get Shakespeare's comedy across, has got to roll his eyes, rub his stomach, kick his father in the seat, make his voice crack, and place his finger against the side of his nose. There is a great deal of talk about the vulgarity and slap-stick humor of the movies. If the movies ever tried to put anything over as horsy and crass as the scene in which young Gobbo kids his blind father, or Falstaff hides in the laundry hamper, there would be sermons preached on it in pulpits all over the country. It is impossible for a good actor, as we know good actors today, to handle a Shakespearean low comedy part, for it demands mugging and tricks which no good actor would permit himself to do. If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner in the Mack Sennett studios. What he couldn't do with a cross-eyed man!”—American humorist and actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Looking Shakespeare Over,” in Pluck and Luck (1925)

(The image accompanying this post is of 14-year-old Mickey Rooney as Puck in the all-star 1935 Warner Brothers adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The young sprite—Rooney, that is—made the most of his opportunity to ham it up, much like Benchley envisioned.)

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on His Morning Torture by Pigeons)

“Although I live in the middle of a very large city, I am awakened every morning by a low gurgling sound which turns out to be the result of one, two, or three pigeons walking in at my window and sneering at me. Granted that I am a fit subject for sneering as I lie there, possibly with one shoe on or an unattractive expression on my face, but there is something more than just a passing criticism in these birds making remarks about me. They have some ugly scheme on foot against me, and I know it. Sooner or later it will come out, and then I can sue.”—American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Down with Pigeons,” in The Best of Robert Benchley (1983)