Forging an Art

 ”Clyde had a soul that was not destined to grow up.”

It has been nearly 85 years since Theodore Dreiser’s greatest success was published, but the infantile and selfish motives behind Clyde Griffiths’ behavior have run rampant since the beginning of time, so An American Tragedy will always carry an appeal to those of us interested in psychological drama.  Much like the title character of the author’s rather boring Sister Carrie, Clyde is incapable of considering others within his view of the world.  When his deeds carry harm to those around him, in particular those who trust and care about him, he shrugs and thinks, why should he care?  The young woman he seduces, sweet-talking her into actions she would never consider on her own, is discarded like dirty laundry when he discovers something, or someone better – Sondra, who is like “a bright colored bird.”  Her father’s fortune and the family’s carefree, expensive lifestyle are a large part of the attraction.  Clyde is one of those people who want something, everything, for nothing, and feels a sense of entitlement to it.  Why him and not others?  Who knows. 

Raised by street evangelists, he hates poverty and labor and begrudges the insinuation that he should work for his supper.  An unwanted pregnancy leads him to contemplate the unthinkable – but for Clyde, there is no unthinkable.  He can and does rationalize every sort of behavior in the name of serving his own desires. 

The book, which is long but riveting, is considerably different from the pretty 1951 Hollywood film, A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Shelley Winters.   The movie is heavy on the second half of the book, obviously due to time constraints, but there are details that change characters and relationships to an almost unrecognizable extent.  Clyde is not so cold in person, the handsome face of Montgomery Clift not so easily condemned as the Clyde of the vast explication at the hands of Dreiser.  He is immature, but murderous?  It isn’t so clear; and neither is the vapid nature of Sondra, who is called Angela in the film, and carried regally by the glorious Taylor.  Angela visits Clyde in prison, where he awaits his death, while in the book, Sondra and Clyde never see each other again after his arrest.  Angela takes pains to have access to her love and to reassure him of her affections; Sondra never would have compromised herself in such a way. 

There is a disturbing Oedipal situation between Clyde and his mother in the film, while Dresier alludes to nothing of the sort.  If, in my close reading, I have missed it, then it is so carefully hidden as to not attract the attention it does in the film.  Clyde’s mother is strangely nervous during phone conversations, admonishing him to be good, which she does in the book but still seems bizarrely unnatural doing so in the film.  Before Clyde kisses Angela for the first time, Taylor gazes lovingly, obsessively at Clift and croons, “Tell Mama all.”   This brief moment was a huge shift in tone from the book, and what I would assume, Dreiser’s intent.  That aside, it is shocking and strange. 

Winters, who does not have a glamorous part, absolutely steals the show from Taylor and Clift with her fussy, annoying Alice.  Yes, Roberta is a crabby creature in the novel, but understandably so.  Roberta is a girl true to her principles and her family, and her fall from grace and concern for her future lead her to badger Clyde for help and fulfillment of promises made and ignored.  Alice, the Roberta of the film, is dull and whiny, and one can imagine how Clyde could wish her harm, although not necessarily how he could perpetuate murder on the girl and his unborn child.  The camera angled from Clyde’s point of view as she harasses him, focusing on her monotonous, perpetual questions (“You wish I was dead, don’t you?”) is enough to make the audience scream in frustration, but one doesn’t deserve a death sentence for annoying behavior.

Forget Sister Carrie; readers turned off by Miss Meeber will find a meaty scandal in the pages of Tragedy and lustrous color wash of Sun.  Read first, watch second – the details make interesting detective work for discerning readers and viewers.

“They too had something in their hearts that made every thought, every movement, a danger.”

Hugh Walpole had a fan in Henry James, who pointed me toward The Duchess of Wrexe with a kind review published in The Bookman long ago.  Duchess concerns the affects of social and political change, as well as war, on a once and somewhat still powerful family and their circle.  This is psychological drama on a James scale, grand and full and real.  The younger generation, which, for the most part, fears and detests the older, is considered sentimental and shameless to the old.  Even those employed by the Duchess become entangled in the family drama, as the steadfast secretary discovers that she is not as heartless as she once believed:

“The room, dark as pitch before her, was filled now with a red glow – Her hands, clenched, were ice in a world that was all of an overpowering heat.”

Everyone is waiting for the old Duchess to die; of course, she stands for the old world, old ways, and she refuses to leave any sooner than her time.  Feared, revered, emulated – she knows her value and intends to leave her mark. She has tormented those she should have held close, her own grandchildren, holding them in contempt for thinking beyond the world she has drawn for her family.  

Like James’ The Sense of the Past and Besant’s Beyond the Dreams of Avarice, Duchess is infused with the affects of an eerily authentic painting.  There is something to this device during this era, hinting towards Dorian Gray.

Dr. Christopher, trusted family physician, holds his own somewhere between the two classes and insists on the one truth he holds close:

“Simply that I believe in an age when a man’s neighbour will matter to a man more than himself, when it won’t be priggish or weak to help someone in worse plight than yourself, when it will simply be the obvious thing . . . when, above all, there’ll be no jealousy, no getting in a man’s way because he does better than you, no knocking a man down because he sees the world – this world and the next – differently.”  

Some of us are not so removed in time as to disagree with him.

This graphic novel from Minx, which is a fresh and fun take on high school drama set in my high school era (1987), tackles some big issues in such a small volume.  Author Alisa Kwitney and illustrator Joelle Jones make a great team, combining Kwitney’s sarcasm with Jones’ simple but expressive art.  Fifteen/sixteen year old Shira doesn’t fit in with the other students at her Jewish school, but at least she has her dad and her grandma for support, along with her grandmother’s friend Minerva.  Unfortunately, her dad starts to date his secretary (how prime time soap opera is that?) and the world stops turning.  Shira is the odd man out but finds solace in the arms of bad boy Rafael, who teaches her the finer arts of shoplifing and kissing.  I wish I had this to read when I was in high school.

Ellen Hopkins’s Identical should appeal to her entourage of teen fans because of the edgy (that might be putting it too mildly) subject matter and trademark verse format.  Dramatic is one thing, but this is really over the top.  An exploration of family dynamics and a potentially interesting protagonist are suffocated by the multitude of problems this poor girl carries.  She is a surviving twin, an incest victim, a drug and alcohol abuser, sex addict, bulimic – I’m not sure I covered it all, but I might be close.  A couple of the issues/situations would be plenty.  Some of the poetry is trite, but there are lines every few pages that speak to the author’s ability to turn a phrase, albeit inconsistently.  I just finished reading Girl, Interrupted for the high school book discussion group next week, so this was an appropriate companion piece that took me under two hours to read, which was not too much of an investment – still, it kept me from moving on to the McCullers essays I’ve been craving and picked up as soon as I put Hopkins in the ‘library return’ pile on the kitchen table.