Morris Dickstein: When I think of the American dream, I think of opportunity, I think of of families, people making tremendous leaps from generation to generation, going from the 18th century to the late 20th century and just a few years. I think of the I think of I think of a mixture of immigrants that we have in New York today, Pakistani news dealers and Asian green grocers. I think of my parents working 12, 14 hours a day and a small store so that my sister and I could be the first generation in our family to go to college. I think of what some of those college educations led people into that was so far from where they came from.
Interviewer: So would it be fair to say that the American dream is opportunity?
Morris Dickstein: It’s opportunity. It’s self transformation. It’s it’s some of it is misery. Initially, I you know, I think of of people packed into tenements on the Lower East Side. I think of people in ghettos that Harlem would just come up from the south. And and then I think of the opportunities that are available to some of their children. And I think also the failures of people who believed in the American dream. And it didn’t really work out for them.
Interviewer: So ask you keep. Yeah. Yes, you can. So is the American dream a lie?
Morris Dickstein: It’s not a lie, but it’s not. It doesn’t work for everyone. I there’s not long ago I had a conversation with a taxi driver from Bangladesh who turned out to be a pediatrician, and he was very unhappy. He had lived very well in Bangladesh on very little money. But he said and I wanted more and I made a terrible mistake. And now he’s driving a taxi 12, 14 hours a day. So. So the American dream was real to him at a distance. It seemed to be a bit of a lie to him up close when he was trying to live it.
Interviewer: What do you think?
Morris Dickstein: I think that this country has provided opportunities for people from all over the world. Not everyone has succeeded in grasping those opportunities, but it’s been a beacon to people who come from a world where there’s a ceiling on what they can do and where they can go.
Interviewer: I don’t want to get too much into immigration, but let me ask you this. Let’s go back for a second. Where where do you think you come from?
Morris Dickstein: The idea seems to be built in to the Puritans and others coming over here in the first place. It seems to be built in to the ideas of early American thinkers like Ben Franklin, who felt that you can tinker and you can be creative and you can make something of yourself that that you couldn’t have done elsewhere. And enough people, you know, live that dream so that if they pass that on the faith and and onto the next generation, what if the Puritans and the American dream of Puritans? Well, presumably many of them came here for religious freedom. It was not. So my question is not going to be used. Oh, by and large, the Puritans came to New England to get away from religious persecution in England. This was not the American dream in terms of economic advancement, but it was the American dream in terms of liberty and space and the opportunity to develop your own community. And so many American thinkers have followed from that in different ways, often in secular versions of that dream.
Interviewer: What is money to see? So, I mean, the American dream, I often think of as money as class social mobility.
Morris Dickstein: We have the funny thing about the Puritans is that they never thought that making money put them any further from God. And so there was an America. There’s always been a remarkable compatibility between spiritual success or spiritual freedom and economic success. In fact, that it’s often been thought that if you do well economically, this proves your spiritual value. So America definitely did or did not offer an ascetic culture to people, even people who came here for religious reasons.
Interviewer: A bit of a question here. So how does a race rather fit into the dream he created?
Morris Dickstein: Well, Horatio Alger popularizes the American dream because he provides a sort of handbook for small boys from the provinces, from all the small towns in America. America was becoming less of a small town country then in much more of an urban country. And Horatio Alger, it tells the story of boys who come from the country and are able to really make it in the city. And he and he tells them ways that they can make it. Now, in retrospect, a lot of it has lost. A lot of it is patronage. Not that much of it is their own pluck and effort, but that is a part of it. And so I think Horatio Alger came along at that at a time when there was a great deal of other success literature. For example, they were biographies of successful businessman. They were memoirs. They were sermons which told people that opportunity is available for them. It was the most famous part of a very large success literature of the late 19th century, which was part of the transformation of the country after the Civil War. This country had an economic explosion in terms of of of of industry and in terms of urbanization and the flow of immigrants into this country of migrants from within the country came partly because the jobs were created to offer economic opportunity to those people.
Interviewer: So what would you say, the formula of Horatio Alger? Is there a formula?
Morris Dickstein: The formula is the boy comes from the country, starts with nothing but a massive finish.
Interviewer: That sentence or that is that those elements are correct.
Morris Dickstein: And we aren’t yet in the Horatio Alger stories with hard work, with virtue, with patronage, with luck, with making the right contacts and with constant effort, never saying die, never turning pessimistic. You will become a gentleman. You will become respectable. You will become either wealthy or at least certainly comfortable. You will become you will go from being No. One to being as distinguished, well-to-do citizen of your community and you’ll be respected by others.
Interviewer: Before it dries. The last question about Elder is elder saying this, however, is only this formula. This scenario is only for a limited view. Not everybody is wrong. You’re saying that everyone in America.
Morris Dickstein: Alger is saying that that anyone can make it. He’s saying what all the other preachers of the gospel of success were saying at the time you can do it. It’s like today, self-help literature. In other words, if you only try if you make the effort, you can do it. The city seems like. A forest of anonymity, a forest of dangers and temptations. But if you go there, you will find your way. That’s wonderful.
Interviewer: All right, let’s shift over to Sister Carrie.. Growing a fairly languid, slow pace.
Morris Dickstein: Chicago in Dreiser’s time was a city exploding with industry and opportunity and growth. It was exploding with commerce. It was exploding with the new phenomenon. For example, the department stores of Chicago is exploding with new ways of doing business. And it became a magnet for young people from all over the Midwest. And Dreiser, the beginning of Sister Carrie is the classic example of how that drew people and what their impressions were. Very much like the impressions on Dreiser himself when he first came to Chicago.
Interviewer: Here he enters into Union Station, right?
Morris Dickstein: Well, even before she enters Union Station, even from the train, she begins to see the Hans’s change, you know. Chicago is a city built right at the edge of the prairie. The prairie almost goes to the city line. And and as she watches the houses change and as she’s just looking from the train, she feels in astonishment at things that she’s never seen. It seems that she’s moving through several generations, moving through the transformation of a country. Just in that train ride.
Interviewer: So, you know, let’s talk about what are the smells of Chicago. This is a city very much on the verge. Is it all money, are we seeing only people successful? Do you smell the stockyards at all?
Morris Dickstein: Well, you don’t smell the stockyards and Sister Carrie, but, you know, it’s a city with a lot of it, with a lot of tenements. It’s a city with a lot of crowds on the street. One of the things that fascinates Carrie most is just seeing people pass along the street because she initially lives in such a straight laced world. Her sister and her sister’s husband live in such a mean life that she can’t bear to stay in their apartment for too long. And so she goes down and stands at the foot of the steps just watching the people pass along the street. And her brother in law resents even that. It shows that she’s not really happy in that straitened environment that they’ve created.
Interviewer: So is she overwhelmed by the city then or excited by it? Is there fear?
Morris Dickstein: Well, there’s fear of not making it. There’s fear of being a country mouse and never being able to adjust, never really being able to get or hold a job. There has to be a self reflection and that seeing the finery on the women and seeing what’s available in the windows of the department stores. She suddenly looks at herself as being very primitive and very limited, and she wonders whether she could ever make that leap into what seems to her like a magical world.
Interviewer: So how does she make that leap? She got a great job. And then Burckhardt, a law looking block. Horatio Alger.
Morris Dickstein: Well, she gets a great she doesn’t get a great job. She gets she gets a job with difficulty and loses it. But hasn’t Horatio hours or she does. She has a patron. Unfortunately, for a young woman coming from the country to a city like Chicago, having a patron is a rather dicey business. And it turns out to be someone named Drew Away, whom she’s met on the train. And Carrie is not so innocent as to be unaware of his designs on her. But she is charmed by him and she’s charmed by the element of class and savoir faire that he represents. And. And she goes step by step into a relationship with him, which she understands is morally contrary to her values.
Interviewer: Thank you so much for so much that you responded on your way. All right, so, Martha, let me ask let’s go back to his house, Carrie.
Morris Dickstein: Well, Carrie, fortunately or not, takes a shortcut to success, as in the Horatio Alger novels. She has a patron, but for a young woman just coming from the country to have a patron is a bit of a dicey business. And Carrie really understands but doesn’t understand what she’s getting into. She goes into the relationship with Drew, a who is a salesman who impresses her with his style and with his with his gallant attitude towards women. She goes into it step by step. And it’s only the moment when she actually takes two, then ten dollar bills from him that she realizes that she’s crossed the line. But the alternative for her is going back to that apartment and not getting a job and going back home to the small town. And that by that point, Chicago offers so much of what she wants, but that terrifies her. It terrifies her more than Chicago does.
Interviewer: So what’s Dreiser trying to do here? I mean, this is this is not non-fiction. This is a creation of some of the imagination.
Morris Dickstein: Sister Carrie is not non nonfiction, but it is in the sense that it really reproduces, drives his own emotions when he came as a young man to the city and experienced that sense of magic and possibility, the sense that the world was available to him and yet very, very difficult to reach. And he also understood the temptations for women in that situation because his sister had fallen into the kind of relationship that he describes and with with with Carrie. And and and he understood what it is to succeed at the cost of being in the eyes of society, a fallen woman. He also understood that to be a fallen woman in the city, in a large city, was not the same as being ostracized in a small town so that you could conceivably get away with it without the moral opprobrium of a very small society.
Interviewer: We’re going to talk about art just in terms of caring. What is driver saying about a woman’s access at that point to the dream?
Morris Dickstein: Since the jobs available to women were very limited, a woman’s access to the dream was largely through marriage and and unfortunately, the alternative to marriage was the kinds of relationships, the pseudo marriage, marital relationships that carry falls into. What caused such a shock to people is that Carrie succeeds. That way, she actually does move from one man to another, from one job to another, and becomes very successful by American terms, even though at the end she’s rather unhappy.
Interviewer: Hold off on the end just for a second. You know, how is it different than for Carrie?
Morris Dickstein: There’s a great difference because although both of them are limited in their options, Carrie, by being carried by coming from nowhere, it is she’s living in an open grib. More possibilities are available to her because socially, she’s she doesn’t represent anything. She’s not in anything. Whereas Lily Bart is in a in a very rigidly closed world who’s whose rules world of a New York society. It’s trained her. It’s created her. And it extremely limits her options in terms of what she can do. She can only marry. She has all the class and style that’s been bred into her by New York society. But she can only fulfill it through the marital route. There’s no other way for her to go.
Interviewer: But it’s interesting to me is that both Carrie and Lilly basically have to go through.
Morris Dickstein: Lily Bart has been trained to be ornamental. She’s been trained to have class and style and to be an adornment to any man who marries her. She will join her class in style and beauty to his money. That is the only route available to her. The one other possibility in that novel is for her to marry someone who is in that society, but not quite in it, who whose values are slightly independent of it. And the tragedy of that book is that she that she and that man do not succeed. They do not make it, man. The man is Lawrence Seldon.
Interviewer: OK, let’s go back to Dreiser.
Morris Dickstein: Carrie sees Hearst Wood, who is who runs a sort of high level Salau saloon resort, as they call it in the book, when she’s still withdraw away. And she initially she had stars in her eyes, withdrew, withdrew a represented the highest social possibility that she could imagine the whole book, a structure through layers, layers and layers of discovery and recognition that represent social layers seen through the eyes of an innocent person. And when Carrie first sees Hearst word, she sees another social level that she hadn’t dreamed of before. And inevitably, it makes Drew a look a little less attractive to her. She initially she’d been pleased by draws attention to her curse. What is much more stylish, she begins to see Drew weighs in attentions to her. And so another level of society becomes available and appealing to her that initially she never dreams of going to, but gradually it becomes something attractive to her.
Interviewer: So as Carrie just a gold digger. I mean, hers was a single man. Right.
Morris Dickstein: Hearst Wood is a married man with with with with with children on a lakefront house and so on. But not very happily married man has. He’s he’s his wife is rather domineering. He’s everything that he owns is really in her name. So he doesn’t quite realize how vulnerable he is if if he crosses her and he condescends to draw away and he doesn’t see why drew away should be with a chance at a charming creature like Harry Carrie. And he is drawn to her and he’s drawn to her at the expense of his whole social standing and in the entire life he has in Chicago.
Interviewer: So is Carrie this golddigger. She was kind of crass, money hungry chick.
Morris Dickstein: And one of the things that drives her carries off brilliantly is that he never gives us a level of appetite or volition on Carrie’s part. In other words, she angles into everything gradually and so far as in so far as any novel, any great novel really is preparation, any great novels, really incremental. We see Carrie’s moral and social progress very incrementally. And often the things that she does that could be discreditable are shown to be responses to other people’s either appeal to her, attraction to her or mistreatment of her. In case of Drew, I drew a toward the end is really not very nice to her, and that’s true of Hearst would in the later stages as well. So we’re meant to identify with Carrie, even against our own moral inclinations.
Interviewer: Dreiser always wanted to be a novelist. Is this just years and years of novel writing and training that brings them to these characters? He pops up from his imagination.
Morris Dickstein: One of the striking things about the careers of the realistic novels of that period of realistic novelists of that period is that they they they come from journalism. In other words, their interest often is less in writing, per say, or creative writing than it is in the social facts that they’re going to be writing about. And this is true from the 80s, 90s through the 1940s. Writers often write journalistic pieces about the things that they will subsequently turn into fiction. Dreiser will cover, for example, a trolley strike. Dreiser will write about the conditions of the poor in Chicago. He’ll write numbers of journalistic pieces that eventually will be transformed into the social texture and density that we get in. Sister Carrie, the extraordinarily generous amount of social information that we find in the book.
Interviewer: Is he drawing in any way from himself? You know, a very famous comic, Madame Bovary said. What do you think that’s true here as well?
Morris Dickstein: What gives Dreiser his power is the mixture of that social information, his powers of observation with his naive identification with his characters. There’s no question that he is Carrie. What Carrie wants, what carried his eyes, is what Dreiser wants or wanted, certainly when he was at Carrie stage. Dreiser, all of those rather vulgar desires for success, for position. Find things for merchandise, the appeal of a new consumer society all at Dreiser feels himself. He identifies with it.
Interviewer: Even as he moved to the city. Right.
Morris Dickstein: Right. Very close to the time that he himself. I’m sorry. Very. Dreiser moved. Carrie comes to Chicago fairly close to the time that Carrie. That Dreiser himself moved to the city of Chicago.
Interviewer: OK. That we can use that stuff. There’s an opportunity for her to break the rules she’s employing with her way to break away from what she’s been doing or simply.
Morris Dickstein: Well, we see in that acting scene, we see it both from Carrie’s point of view, but also from the point of view of the competing men who admire her. So they see something in her that they didn’t know. She had something quite charming, not brilliant acting talent, but some wonderful, naive, simple directness and charm comes through. And for Carrie, it creates possibilities that she didn’t dream of before, because after all, acting was one of the few professions that could take a woman towards success. Most other professions were close to them. Acting was not entirely respectable. And yet, as we see in both Sister Carrie and and in House of Mirth, acting was something that these writers believe could bring out, not a false version of the person, but the more authentic person, the feelings of the person, the charm, the simplicity. And what happens is that I think at that moment, Carrie thinks less about what other people think of her and actually becomes more of herself in that scene. And this charms everyone around her.
Interviewer: First, you guys are making this up. This was all his imagination or are long rights of.
Morris Dickstein: Well, it echoes his own experience at the same time, it echoes the American experience. Dreiser was one of those writers whose own appetites and desires reflected the experience of a country in remarkably close ways. The move from Chicago to New York, for example, you know, Dreiser himself, you know, went away, went to New York. His initial experience of the great city was in Chicago. He came from a small town. His. He had a brother who had preceded him and who was kind of took care of him, which later became a famous songwriter. But the perception, the perception the Dreiser has that New York is a larger world and that a person like Hearst would who might really have mattered in Chicago could be nothing in New York. Depending on the resources that he brought to it. I mean, that is a wonderful perception because it’s not just about the country and the city. It’s about these various levels of city life from the various levels of social possibility.
Interviewer: That’s right. So what happens to carry on? Did they just stay good friends? And she she withdrew.
Morris Dickstein: The important thing is how they end up going to New York. They don’t just decide to migrate to New York, as in many Dreiser novels. There’s an act of transgression, an act, a terrible act that that that Hearst would commit a robbery. That is not quite intentional. It’s like in that other great novel of Dreiser, an American tragedy where a murder is committed that is willed but not really intentional. It’s sort of somewhere between an accident and deliberate. So what happens here? What happens here is that he is he is tempted to take money. His wife has treated him terribly. He is well, everything is in her name. He is desperate to go off with Carrie and he opens the safe, reaches in to take the money, decides against it, is hanging in the balance. And then this and he takes the money out and then the slight safe snap shot. And there is nothing that he could do or it seems like there’s nothing he can do. And so on a ruse, he gets Carrie to leave with him and they’re essentially fugitives. And that when they come to New York, they’re really he has committed a robbery and they’re they’re really a fugitive from justice.
Interviewer: And he spends time in jail.
Morris Dickstein: He finally, when he’s discovered he makes it good with his home, his employer, and pays them off, Dreiser makes it good with his employer and pay eventually pays them. I’m sorry, Hearst. What makes it good with his employer and pays them back. So he’s never actually apprehended for the crime. But they have to live fairly incognito for quite a while because he’s afraid of being recognized and he is recognized once or twice.
Interviewer: So he’s in New York now. This is a big city of Boston opportunity. He continues to provide for Carrie. Right.
Morris Dickstein: The money that he took, however, it doesn’t give him a very good stake in the way that he invests. It doesn’t really work out. And we’re shown not only that is New York a larger social world, but it’s a very cruel, even more anonymous social world. And his state doesn’t carry him very far. And without it, he begins to go downhill and his treatment of Carrie begins to go downhill and she begins to feel what drives what would call the chilling of the affectional atmosphere. And it’s remarkable, the wonderful details that Dreiser gives. As Hearst would go, it goes downhill. The fact that he in that he he loses his his job, he no longer shaves every day. He he begins to make economies. He stays at home in a kind of tatty bathrobe. These are the terrible stages of decline that Dreiser captures so well because he himself had experienced them.
Interviewer: So what do you think is trying to say here? Carrie and Hearst would continue their descent. And they’re both sort of poverty.
Morris Dickstein: What are the things he’s trying to say is that the American dream works in both directions. In other words, there’s a kind of seesaw between a Dreiser and Hearst, what we can carry. And Hearst would as Carrie rises, Hearst would decline. It’s not that it’s a zero sum game. On the other hand, the just as for Carrie drifts upward and upward, partly under the protection of men, partly accidentally, partly through her own rather limited talents, a dry Hearst, what goes into free fall? And and and that part of the story is really one of the great failure stories in American literature. Hearst with tale at the end of the at the end of Sister Carrie really is chilling the story of decline. That really shows us that with all the possibilities and opportune. These are the American dream. It’s also often without a safety net during this period, especially if you felt there was nothing to break your fall.
Interviewer: Is there any sense of sharing anything in common for you or the fact that they.
Morris Dickstein: Well the latter part of both novels is similar in that we see two people in inexorable decline and some of it seems like it didn’t really have to happen that way. Some of it seems accidental. Some of it seems by chance, if only I had done this instead of done that, if only there were a slight shift. If you haven’t seen me here instead of there and so on. And yet, because the kind of writers these are, they they really are very concerned to show that it’s not simply the individual will, but circumstances often create one’s destiny. And circumstances also involve a great deal of chance, as well as social cruelty and social malice. And society can be very, very unforgiving in both books in different ways.
Interviewer: And uncaring. We don’t care in this country.
Morris Dickstein: Well, because because of the values that emphasize success. Lily, Bart, nobody cares about Lily, Bart on the way down, a few people that she’s close to society has excluded her. One of the things that you have in the House of Mirth that you don’t have in Sister Carrie is a sense of society with a capital S.. In other words, a certain circle of people. If you’re inside it, you’re somebody. If you’re outside it, you don’t exist for them. And the problem with Lily, Bart, is that she was created by that society and that’s the world in which she shines. All of her values reflect that society, although unfortunately for her, she’s superior to it and there’s no way she can get free of it. One of the things that attracts her to this man, Lawrence Seldon, is that he’s in that society. But he’s ironic. He’s detached. He’s the kind of detached observer. So to a degree, he represents for her an escape, but it’s an escape that she can never take away.
Interviewer: So why have Carrie? Carrie doesn’t fall apart. She.
Morris Dickstein: Well, the novel caused the scandal because Carrie lived with two different men outside of wedlock and she’s never punished for it. She’s not that happy at the end. She’s rather gloomy and morose, but she’s achieved success in social terms, in material terms. Not all of it has been willed by her. A certain appetite, a certain desire led her to it. But to in many ways, she drifted through it under the accidents of her career and the protection of various men. And the book was a failure initially because everyone from the publisher and his wife on down felt morally outraged that Carrie is not punished for her derelictions. Well, Dreiser is showing that society procedes not along the lines of our moral wishes, that that that unlike the older literature of success, where where monetary success and social success was often identified with virtue, you could be a good person and still be a success. Dreiser shows Carrie to be really essentially a very ordinary person and a person who sort of drifts into the situation. We find her at the end. Oh, she’s not mean. She’s not particularly ambitious. That’s the striking thing about her.
Interviewer: All right. So why do you still read Sister Carrie, a hundred years old? I can’t think of anything.
Morris Dickstein: I read Sister Carrie partly because it it’s a wonderful portrayal of a historical moment in American culture of that moment when people. There was this great flow from the country to the city, a moment when American society was exploding and open, opening up. I also read it because it catches extraordinarily intense wishes to have what we have more of today. Consumer goods, faith and social standing. The desire to shine, living in the eyes of others more than in your own wishes and needs. Dreiser was one of the first to catch what David recent called in other directed society. The sense that you are what people see you as being and that becomes identified with social success. It’s not as with the old Puritans, your deeds and your and your achievements so much as what people think of you that makes it your success.
Interviewer: You seeing Joe moving in the back or.
Morris Dickstein: Carrie’s fate is to rise as the men that she with us. She’s with, especially Hearst, would decline. It’s sort of like the movie The Star is born. It’s like the fate of Americans in this world of the American dream is a kind of seesaw that other people, some people go up and almost at the same time, sometimes for the same reasons, other people go down and and there’s no there are choices involved, good choices and bad choices. There are accidents. There’s chance. But it’s also Dreiser is showing that success in America doesn’t go according to moral principles. But according to a great deal of chance and accident.
Interviewer: Great. The more they got started, translation the Grand Central represent the same thing for only part of that union.
Morris Dickstein: The wonderful scene at Grand Central at the beginning of the House of Mirth is is really has to do with taking a train to the country. And the world of the country has, of course, the epitome of the world of society that Lily has been trained to be part of. But, you know, and she has a delay. And in that delay, she meets the person who will possibly but will not save her in the end. Lauren Selden, someone who is part of that society, but not quite part of that society. He is the, you might say, the James the and detached observer who is in it, but also has an ironic relation to it. Well, it seems that the kind of society we’re talking about in the House of Mirth has room for people at the center, but also room for people at the periphery who are respected. It’s easier if they’re men and are self supporting, but who are allowed certain kinds of behavior. For example, this man, Lauren Seldon, has affair, as it’s known, that he has affairs. They don’t redan down to his discredit at all. It would if it were known that he had embarrassed a married woman. And that comes up in the novel. But he is someone who is on the periphery of a society which Liley at the moment is at the center of and which she dreams of that periphery she dreams of somehow escape all the forces of that society, telling her to marry well, to marry a dull person who can take care of her. But we know from very early on that her salvation would be to marry someone who, like her, has an ironic distance from that society. And the tragedy of the novel is that that fails. She can’t. They partly because of their assumptions. Probably because this is a very strange world in which so much is unspoken. There are so many rigid demands and rituals. So little of what people really feel can actually be said that there are so many scenes of attraction, but also some slight misunderstanding between them, that it makes the tragedy seemingly haphazard, but also inevitable. There’s one very revealing moment in one of these perfectly amicable scenes of misunderstanding where Warton says, you know, this could only work if there were a sudden explosion of feeling between them. In other words, if they broke through the proprieties. But both of them are trained not to do that. And it’s that training that is the source of the tragedy.
Interviewer: Let’s step back for a second so we don’t ever think twice about faster.
Morris Dickstein: And it really is obviously very beautiful. She also has wonderful class and style, a sense of dress, a sense of her appearance. Now, part of that is lovely. But part of it is quite sinister because Lily’s mother understands very early on that Lily’s beauty is the only marketable thing they have. They belong to this world, but they have no money. Therefore, they are inferior members of that world. And all that they have to sell is Lily’s beauty. There’s a poignant moment when Lily is had some troubled scenes and she looks in the mirror and she sees crow’s feet or she sees two wrinkles that she hasn’t seen before. And suddenly she sees herself on a downward slope where she’ll be less marketable than she was before. And so in some way, Wharton’s view, in my view of her, a very aesthetic in terms of beauty and charm, but also cruelly and brutally economic in terms of what you have to sell on the very limited marriage market of this very limited society.
Interviewer: So she’s a commodity.
Morris Dickstein: She’s a commodity. There’s no question about that. And Warton is brutal and emphasizing that,.
Interviewer: Right? Well, let’s look at her own.
Morris Dickstein: Wharton once. Wharton, of course, came from that world. She came from the world of the 400. She came from a world, the society in which for a woman to do anything, let alone write novels, was considered in very bad taste. 400. What do you do? Well, the New York society is sometimes called the 400 and and and representing the closed world. I mean, the term the 400 apparently came from the fact that some famous social hostess had a ballroom which could only hold 400 people. And so the people that she would invite to her annual ball were the 400 of New York society. But I like the term, but suggests the limitation on the closed quality of that upper crust society that Warton grew up in, that Warton rebelled against simply by writing about it, but also rebelled against more thoroughly by satirizing it viciously from the inside and showing the alien inhuman quality of its values. I mean, Warton once said that you could test a society not so much by what it did, but by what it sacrificed by the by the. By the by the. The harm the. Damage that it did to other people. And Lily, Bart is the story of how that society could unthinkingly damage someone whom that society created, who doesn’t deserve it.
Interviewer: Well, all right. So let’s let’s. Seems that this is very much unlike Dreiser leaves the country for the city warden. Never leave her world for another world. Right.
Morris Dickstein: Warton herself in her life does leave that world by moving to Paris and living abroad a great deal and becoming part of what sense you are the European literary scene. Warton leaves that world essentially by becoming a writer. She continues to live in it. She has a very famous name. She comes from well-to-do families that are long established in that society. But one grew interest that, especially later in anthropology. And she was fascinated by the idea of tribal rituals and mores.
Interviewer: I’m going to stop you first because one of the things you said at the Magic Circle is, is she like Dreiser and that she leaves the world and leaves the whole world behind.
Morris Dickstein: Almost all the writers of that period. Right. But people who had actually migrated from someone somewhere else, either from the small towns or from Europe or from the south for the country. And although Edith Wharton grew up in New York City and she didn’t migrate to the city, in a sense she did, because she left behind a very limited small part of that city, which is the society of this upper crust. And. And the paradox of most of those writers, Sinclair Lewis Dreiser, is after being desperate to leave that world behind. They found that that was their only material. That was the thing that they were continually obsessed about writing about. Of course, it was the world that they knew. But it was also the world that they hated and couldn’t put aside.
Interviewer: And the same is true for Wharton?
Morris Dickstein: The same is true for Wharton. Wharton was like someone who came from a small town and couldn’t get over writing. The main street of America came from me and from my Midwestern town, and her Midwestern town really was Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, that very small circuit of New York society.
Interviewer: Great. So, I mean, why doesn’t she just marry first eligible bachelor?
Morris Dickstein: At the beginning of the novel, it seems that Lily will marry the first eligible bachelor. He bores her to tears. He collects Americana. It’s not even his own collection originally. She her her hope at that time, with the hope of her friends for her, is that she will become his property very much like his collection, and that she will earn the right to be bought by him for the rest of her life. There’s something in Lily that is unable to do that. There’s something in Lily that resists that kind of limitation. She knows that in this and in economic terms, that’s her best interests. Her only interest. But she can’t bear the idea of being locked into that world.
Interviewer: So, Lily. Okay, Lily, that is unlike Carrie, because Carrie can’t make that she can’t sell herself to the boring.
Morris Dickstein: Carrie’s desire to escape comes from a small is from is from the small town world that we don’t see that she comes to at the beginning of a novel. Lily’s desire to escape is to have the good things of the society of the style, the money, the leisure, but at the same time not to be locked in forever with these incredibly boring people.
Interviewer: Stopping camera Cameron and Julie. What brings Wharton to write it? She’s somebody who she is unlike Dreiser or somebody who’s not a reporter who always yearns to write. Was it easy for her to be a novelist in her world?
Morris Dickstein: It was easy for her for four. It was easy for Edith Wharton to be a novelist in the sense that she had the leisure and the money to do so. It was not easy in the sense that it went against the norms of her society. And if she had just written harmless things, she had her. One of her first books was a book on the decoration of houses. That was one thing. But to write books that actually satirized all the families that she had grown up with and their mores. This was quite another thing. And I think that she did feel that she’d become something of a pariah and that society.
Interviewer: Well, let’s go back before she starts to write the House of Mirth because she has an unhappy marriage. And it is in some way you get the sense that writing affords her independence and it really doesn’t.
Morris Dickstein: Her writing was like her psychoanalysis, getting on top of it, understanding it, analyzing it, was her way of stepping outside of it and using all the knowledge she gained from the inside, all the painful knowledge, as well as some of the happy knowledge that she gained from being inside it. This this need to be this desire to be inside and outside at the same time is something that that that certainly that Lily Bart wishes and never can really achieve. Edith Wharton had something that Lily Bart didn’t have, which is Edith Wharton had an unhappy marriage, but she had the position of a married woman. She came from a wealthy family. She had the money. Her empathy was extended to this woman who had everything that that society could put into her except the money. And that was the tragedy, the tragedy of how this society expels and destroys someone that violates its own rules.
Interviewer: So how does Lily get into trouble? We see the beginning that she’s in debt. But how to her problems get?
Morris Dickstein: Lili makes a number of choices that are partly unthinking and partly from from her position as almost a kind of servant in that society when she is invited to a house party in the country. There’s no way for her not to do something like Gamble at Bridge. And she incurs debts. She trusts the husband of the her hostess to help her with her debts, thinking that he’s investing her own money. It turns out that he’s giving her money and he expects something in return.
Interviewer: What?
Morris Dickstein: He expects her to be nice to him just now. He probably expects a good deal more. But Wharton is not explicit about that, is she? Well, there’s a wonderful scene in which she comes to see her friend. And it turns out that the friend is not home. She’s off in the country and only the husband is there. And at that point, he really he becomes virtually a rapist. He is very on the edge of of of of using violence on her. And then all the air goes out of him. But she is very much in danger. And she can’t say that she still must negotiate it with all the niceties and proprieties of that society and also of her need for him. The fact that she’s indebted to him.
Interviewer: So let’s what what’s really what what is the course of action that really takes them to get out of this predicament?
Morris Dickstein: Everything that Lily does turns against her, it’s like a steel trap that gradually closes on her. All that she can do when she loses that one relationship, she wasn’t happy with any anyway is is look for another. She when when some friends, wealthy friends reject her, she falls into the orbit of other friends and it turns out and she moves down gradually down the social scale. The man that could save her judges her for this. He judges her for his values. He fails to see that she really has no choices. And so that’s seldom. Yeah. And and he is very harsh on on the choices that she makes, which he thinks the choices but are actually really imposed on her. And so we see her gradually declining from one social level to another until she is expelled from society completely. And how she must give up her apartment. She she lives in a furnished room. She becomes a secretary of a woman in a hotel, a woman who’s trying to get into society. She’s trying to use her knowledge to help people get into society. And Selden considers this in very bad taste. It considers it very despicably, doesn’t see that she has no choices. She falls on the charity of the only few. People will still talk to her friend Gerdy, who is poor but has just enough to live on who is a woman who is mean and DNG. Life is always the kind of thing that really wanted to avoid.
Interviewer: Lilly finally inherits enough money that just enough money to pay off her debts.
Morris Dickstein: Lily inherits just enough money to pay off her debts, but not enough to live on. So she she inherits enough money. She’s really disinherited. She’s disinherited because of gossip that’s passed to her aunt, who’s a very difficult woman, about about her debts and about a possible relationship she has with a married man. And there’s a wonderful scene in which she sits there as the as the will is read and she hears that all she’s gotten is ten thousand dollars, which is just enough to get her out of the scrape that she’s in, but not enough to sustain her.
Interviewer: What’s worth doing that? I mean, there’s the language of that scene. Was Hortense doing in that moment? Does it work for you? What Wharton is doing there is their beauty in the language and the writing.
Morris Dickstein: Well, the beauty of the language is the relation of what is said to what is unspoken. Lily Bart lives in a world in which most of what people think and feel cannot be uttered, that there’s an elaborate set of rituals for how to make your feelings known and how to express yourself so that when, for example, when Lily is shocked and almost shattered, to hear that she has been disinherited by an A will made only six weeks before her aunt’s death, she’s still got to do the right thing. She goes up to the woman who is responsible and says, Oh, how nice, how wonderful for you. And it’s that trap that’s the tragedy of Lily’s life that she can never say or be what she really feels, what she what what she really wants to be.
Interviewer: So does it surprise you? Stop for a second. Walk back to the content of the two novels. Does it surprise you that one succeeds and one fail for the reading of.
Morris Dickstein: Well, one of the reasons that House of Mirth may have succeeded is I think that there was a kind of gossip value in it. In other words, Edith Wharton was sort of a native informant. The anthropologist described native informants as people within a culture who tell an outsider what was really going on in that culture. And I think very few people had actually written from the inside of the social world of Edith Wharton.
Interviewer: But I guess what I’m trying to guess is Lily’s trajectory, as opposed to carry trajectory, speak in some ways to what people want of their literature and then ultimately that success.
Morris Dickstein: The success of House of Mirth may have come from the melodramatic element, in other words, it’s a tragic story. Many people wrote to Edith Wharton saying, oh, couldn’t she marry him at the end? Why did she have to die at the end? And so on. There was that kind of reader identification with Lily Bart, which I don’t think many readers had to that extent with carrier with any of the men in her life. And so I think Sister Carrie was a book that.
Interviewer: Sister Carrie sent people get a chance to read. I like that it was in the bookstores and it didn’t do well. Right.
Morris Dickstein: Sister Carrie caused a degree of moral outrage, even among it from the publisher who published it. It was it outraged a number of reviewers, House of Mirth by being about this upper crust world and by being so satirical about it. Both told people what’s going on and at the same time put that world down. It had a kind of National Enquirer quality at a very high level. And so people were fascinated by the inside information about that world. Yet at the same time, we’re not sorry to see that world satirized Richard different from us and Fitzgerald’s view, because the range of their choices and the texture of their lives are different. They they have a different sense of possibility. They have a different horizon from the rest of us.
Interviewer: So it’s not just that they have more money now.
Morris Dickstein: They they have different emotions. They have different needs, different desires, different expectations, different moral values.
Interviewer: So what do you think it is that Gatsby represents for Fitzgerald without jumping ahead? The book is Reinvention Possible?
Morris Dickstein: Fitzgerald himself, I think, felt very much like an outsider when he came to Princeton. He felt like one of those Midwestern boys who never quite fit in. He was trying to recreate that sense of being an outsider and what the world, the world looked like, the world of money, the world of class looked like this to someone like that. Paradoxically, he wasn’t all that interested in money himself. He was interested in the tech, the texture of their lives. He was interested in the beauty of their lives. He was interested in the range of possibility that their lives offered to make yourself a different person, to do the great American thing of reinventing yourself, which Emerson had said was every American’s birthright and possibility aspect. The most important thing about the technique of The Great Gatsby was that we we see Gatsby story through the eyes of other people, primarily the narrator Nick Carraway. Fitzgerald had learned that technique from a writer he very much admired. Conrad, who use the sea captain, named Marlowe as a kind of frame to tell many of his best stories. The effect of that is that we don’t see Gatsby from the inside. We see the spectacle of Gatsby and he preserves the mystery of Gatsby. Fitzgerald actually sent a copy to Edith Wharton, whom he greatly admired, and she said, well, she admired the book, but it’s not her way. She would have told all of Gatsby’s background, she said. But my way is not the way of your generation. His desire was to create that mystery so that so that Gatsby could be someone that we could reinterred, interpret and reinterpret in different ways. He actually cut a good deal of material explaining Gatsby’s actual background and saved the rest of it for the very end of the book.
Interviewer: What do you think worked my way out the way of your generation, the way of her kind of realistic novelist?
Morris Dickstein: We talked about it the way of Edith Wharton’s kind of realistic novelist was to build up a character, brick by brick, to explain their origins, their social position, their formation, so that everything we see about them ultimately is the inevitable product of all the influences that went into forming them. Fitzgerald’s technique is much more modern and modernist, as we say. That’s to say he wishes to present us with an element of mystery. He wishes to present us with a fully formed character and only later give us some intimations of how that mysterious character became who he was. This is partly because Edith Wharton is dealing with people that really were shaped by society, whereas Fitzgerald is dealing with someone who is essentially self created.
Interviewer: Right. What do you think, Daisy?
Morris Dickstein: Daisy is a dream. It’s an ideal. It’s something it’s a woman who once rejected him because he had no money. He had no future. He had no possibilities. And if we can believe it, he went out to to get the money simply to get Daisy. Daisy. Many people have read Daisy superficially as one of the great romantic heroines of the 1920s. This is not Fitzgerald’s view at all to Fitzgerald. Daisy is a false ideal. Daisy is something that that Gatsby has projected out of out of the fineness of his own sensibility and the ambitions and dreams that he himself has within himself. Daisy’s mercurial quality, her acceptance of him, her rejection of him. Show us in the end and her departure at the end of the book with her husband. Show us and show Nick Carraway that that she didn’t represent very much of what Gatsby thought she was.
Interviewer: Right.
Morris Dickstein: Daisy’s voice is musical. Daisy’s voice is the voice of someone who didn’t have to work to become who she was.
Interviewer: Full of money. And one voice is full of money. What does that what does the voice full of money sounds like?
Morris Dickstein: To me, a voice full of money is a voice that is velvety, musical, smooth, effortless, but not necessarily the voice of the person herself. It’s the voice of of the of the life that she’s come to live. That she didn’t really have to work for. It’s the voice of the money that really created her. It’s the voice of the social class that she represents.
Interviewer: Do you think it’s interesting? It’s not the narrative not telling you that it’s the way it’s Fitzgerald. It’s it’s Gatsby. Yes, right. What does it mean? Gatsby says her voice is full of money for Gatsby.
Morris Dickstein: Beauty and money are intertwined. Gatsby not only makes money in order to get to Daisy, but Daisy represents a romantic ideal that is available to people with money. But much more difficult to achieve for people without money.
Interviewer: OK, we want economics. I’m talking emotion like the depression, of course, did hit people.
Morris Dickstein: The Depression, the depression hit people economically, but it also hit them psychologically. It caused a lot of depression with a small day. One of the reasons was that the American dream suggested that there was always an upward progress from generation to generation, that everything was open and available if you tried hard enough. And the general economic crisis really challenged that. Suddenly the whole mythology of the abundance created by American capitalism seemed to be collapsing and capitalism itself seemed to be collapsing. And this this was seen not simply as a general economic crisis, but as individual failures, since the whole American dream was something that was so individualized. You can do it as an individual. And therefore, despite the social failure. People blame themselves as individuals for the larger social conditions of the depression.
Interviewer: Do you think that with 25 percent unemployment at different moments, do you think that you’re impacting people’s lives in practical ways, stalking me? Well, how is your father? How is your family affected by the Depression? Did he lose his job?
Morris Dickstein: My father had a a job that didn’t pay very well. All through the Depression, he only married towards the end of the decade in 1938. But he he was like a shipping clerk in a clothing company. And he told me that he would get his paycheck every Friday. And there was not one week throughout the entire 1930s that he didn’t look into that envelope with his paycheck in it and and expect or the slip. That would tell him that he was laid off. In other words, the for the middle class and even the lower middle class, during that period, there was a tremendous fear of falling, a fear of falling into the ranks of poverty. A tremendous sense of insecurity that that created huge psychological anxiety.
Interviewer: So then the Joads fit into a family that fails because they don’t work hard enough because they give up.
Morris Dickstein: The Joads are people that have actually been wiped out. They’ve been tracted out. Their land has been run over. They’ve been forced to move. It was hard for them before because of the drought. But that then becomes impossible for them. The problem for the geodes, as Steinbeck sees it, is that they feel an American peasant individualism. They feel that it’s their responsibility to support their families, to make good in America. What were The Grapes of Wrath is trying to show is that this is a larger condition in which people have to hang together. They cannot each deal with a tractor separately. They cannot deal with a distant thanks and the distant mortgage holders unless they see that they’re all in the same boat. They’ll never be able to deal with it. And partly the story is partly of a story of them learning to hang together. But it’s also the story of under these pressures, how the family falls apart. And so it’s a if it’s a tragic story and it’s a hopeful story after this very specific question, if you can keep it in the novel, do the job. For the Joads, the American dream is not some fantastic idea of success, but it’s simply survival. The jode simply want to be able to carry on as they have been doing. They are not rich. They are not even comfortable, are certainly not secure. But the depression wiped out the base, the foundation, the supports of people who had lived even a meager life before. And for the Johs, its survival. That’s the issue.
Interviewer: Roll please. Cut it please. I just wanted to start with. Help me find a structure. The book is this just all of the Joads. Right. Like a regular novel would be.
Morris Dickstein: The most important thing about the book is that they had been many so-called proletarian novels in the 30s dealing with the poor and miserable and so on. Very few of them had had many readers or had any commercial success. The brilliance of what Steinbeck did was to make the hero not a working class figure, a worker going on strike or something like that, but a family, something that middle class readers could identify with and to give that family’s life an epic resonance. He the the language has biblical overtones. Are on a trek across the desert. They are going to the promised land. It’s it’s it feels like exodus. It feels like something in the Bible. At the same time, many people know Grapes of Wrath through the movie. And one thing that, of course, they couldn’t do in the movie was put in those chapters in between that are not about the geodes, but are really about the general conditions of the depression. That or they are symbolic, like a turtle trying to cross the road. And that’s compared to the to the problems facing the geodes and just getting anything done or getting anywhere. Or or or of chapters that are like little essays that put the story of the geodes in the context of the entire depression. And so that was, I think, part of the impact of the book. People could identify with the Joes as individuals, as with a family. But Steinbeck gave it an epic quality by making it resonant as one of the key stories of the entire depression. Certainly Vicki’s story of the rural depression and the drought and the Dust Bowl.
Interviewer: Does The Grapes of Wrath then have any impact? And may you say that it actually is read by the middle class? Does it read by a few number of people? Quite a number, many people. Does literature matter?
Morris Dickstein: Steinbeck is one of the most widely read writers. Steinbeck is someone whose work is readable to high school students. His his books sell in the millions of copies. Probably because he has a very accessible style. Steinbeck was no great intellectual, 39 40.
Interviewer: The book comes out of my high school now. Does the book matter?
Morris Dickstein: The book had an instant.
Interviewer: OK. Does the book matter?
Morris Dickstein: The Grapes of Wrath had an instant success, people. It gave people a sense of the social situation as they hadn’t seen it before. Urban people, for example, would not have known intimately what was going on in the Dust Bowl. They would have not known all that much about farm foreclosures and so on. They would have known would not have known about what Route 66 or California might represent to those migrants. The book and then the film version personalize that in a way that made it palatable and touching for a large number of Americans.
Interviewer: Compare it to nonfiction to report to being a reporter. What is the power of the novel that you see? The Grapes of Wrath?
Morris Dickstein: The power of a novel is to take an abstract social condition and give it concrete human form with physical description, with people’s needs and emotions. Steinbeck does something that is in literary terms, questionable. The jobs or the jobs are not really that personalized as individuals. They are somewhat generalized as these epic figures. But he does that mainly because he wants their story to be the story of many other people as well. The story of a whole generation.
Interviewer: OK, ok, ok.
Morris Dickstein: The Grapes of Wrath is a road novel in California is the end of the road. It’s also the promised land. In a way that America had been for generations of Puritans and immigrants and so on. California is also the fruitful land than one. When they when the family does pass over, grandma and grandpa die because the older generation cannot really pass over. But most of the family does get there. And what they see is fruits hanging on the vines. They see a land of plenty. But a land of plenty. Controlled by private property. Controlled by people who don’t want them in their backyard. And so it’s it’s sitting there on the trees and it’s not available to them that they’re being kept out. Nevertheless. Nevertheless.
Interviewer: So it’s a false the American dream is dead.
Morris Dickstein: It’s a promised land. American capitalism was seen as the system, as the instrument for making the American dream available to everyone. Capitalism in California. Private property in California becomes little monopolistic. Groups of growers and townspeople all turned in upon themselves who see the migrants as invaders, as intruders, and are determined not to make it available to them. Capitalism is what keeps them out. Rather than making it available to them.
Interviewer: I’m sorry. That’s a big change. It’s not a big change from where we were before.
Morris Dickstein: A depression book like Grapes of Wrath is much more critical of the American economic system than any than most previous American novels. Yes, it is a big change.
Interviewer: Let’s shift now. And Vello concerned with the same things that feed authorizer.
Morris Dickstein: Many people felt that America would fall back into depression after the war. That didn’t happen. Instead, there was the beginnings of an extraordinary period of affluence, and the effect of that affluence was to make some of the social issues, especially dealing with the poor and the dispossessed. Less fashionable or sometimes completely unfashionable, but for writers and more. The malaise of people with money, the malaise of the malaise of affluence, the malaise of the middle class became a dominant subject of the post-war novel.
Interviewer: What do you mean by. You.
Morris Dickstein: The post-war novel in America becomes much more introspective, much more psychological. The the Thirties novel is really more about social and economic conditions and to a much lesser degree, about the psychological effects of those difficult conditions in the post-war novel. The opposite happens. We still get social conditions. We still get economic problems in an bellow concerned. And how it with elephants, I say 30 something different superficially Tommy Willhelm and seize the day as losing the last of his money. He’s gambling it with a man and on the commodity exchange and he’s losing it. He’s going down to his last penny. That on the surface, that’s what seems the book seems to be, that in actuality it’s the spiritual malaise, the feeling. His relationship to his father, the fact that he feels so hemmed in by his wife, the fact that he’s failed in his attempt to have a career in Hollywood, that these things that it’s it’s the kind of spiritual hollowness and depression that becomes the major subject of the post-war treatments of the American dream.
Interviewer: Sharp dresser. How do you imagine tell me what?
Morris Dickstein: His father calls Tommy Wilhelm a slob. There’s a way in which Tommy Wilhelm is both attractive blonde, he’s attractive enough to have tried to make it in Hollywood. And yet the camera there was something that the camera didn’t really like about me as something about him. That was not studio suitable to the star system in Hollywood. Tommy Wilhelm is someone who isn’t physically as well as psychologically in the process of going going to peace. I see. I see. Tommy Wilhelm is someone who, in terms of his clothes, in terms of his body, is barely holding it together.
Interviewer: Is he a drowning?
Morris Dickstein: Sometimes he talks about himself as a drowning man. More often he talks about himself as someone who’s suffocating, who can’t breathe, who feels a tightness in his chest. And this is a very good metaphor for the kinds of things that hem him in. It’s not just his ability to pay the next bill. It’s not just his ability to pay alimony. It’s his ability to breathe freely. He’s a very stoppered up person. He we’re meant to believe that he has a complex in a world of emotion, which he cannot express. His father puts him that. He can’t deal with his father. He can’t say what he feels about his father.
Interviewer: And what to do with his father. Let’s talk about the book as it opens up. What are Tommy’s problems? This is not the slow character that we’ve been talking about it. I mean, this is a short book you get, right?
Morris Dickstein: And we get it right in the first paragraph. He’s coming down in the elevator and he’s coming down the aisle. Right. And he’s descending. And this will be his descent throughout the entire novel. He’s not quite sure of how he looks. He’s not quite sure of the impression he’s gonna make. He’s not quite sure why a man in his 40s should still be living in a resident’s hotel where his own father lives and still, in a sense, be so desperately needy of his father’s approval and of other people’s approval.
Interviewer: What are his physical problems? What are his economic problems? What’s going on? A lot of cash in the bank.
Morris Dickstein: He’s down to his last few hundred dollars. His. He’s he’s behind on his alimony and child support. His wife is pressing him. He. There are flashbacks which show us earlier failures on his part, such as this sojourn in Hollywood where he got involved with somebody who seemed to be an agent but turned out actually to be a pimp. And. And he’s what we see the last 24 hours in the life of a man who is down to his last book, but also who is that? Who has depleted his spiritual resources.
Interviewer: So we’ve got to he’s got alimony. And what’s he done with that lifestyle? And what’s he done with that lifestyle?
Morris Dickstein: He’s given his last few hundred dollars to a man named Temkin, who is a sort of magical figure that has mysterious powers. He’s the kind of wisdom figure that has a view of life that’s very positive. Tamplin is the figure who really represents the older idea of the American dream. He even writes a poem that says you can do whatever you want to do. Seize the Day. The title of the book is about the American Dream. Seize the day means you just grab for it and you’ll get it. And this is Temkin social philosophy. What Tankan actually is, is we don’t know. Temkin actually just loses these last few hundred dollars.
Interviewer: It says the day it sees the day is really the American dream. So, Morris, you were just saying that Tacon is the American dream. Seize the day and seize the American dream. What does that mean? This book.
Morris Dickstein: Tommy Wilhelm is someone who, at least at some point in the past, believes in the American ideas, that if you wanted enough, if you try hard enough, you can do it. You can get it all. His Hollywood experience, which was a classic experience of a man trying to reinvent himself as typified by the fact that he changed his name. It was a failure and he is on a downhill slide, unlike books like Sister Carrie and House of Mirth, where we only see that downhill slide in the second half of the book where the book portrays the possibilities. Seize the Day is really a short novel, only a novella. Well, we see only the downhill trajectory. It all takes place within a 24 hour period. Seize the day means go for it. And the problem is that Tommy Wilhelm is essentially a character doomed to failure.
Interviewer: Why does. That name by the by whom success?
Morris Dickstein: Tommy Wilhelm once went to Hollywood and changed his name as many Hollywood would be stars did. And it did not buy him success. In other words, he thought that if you changed your name, you changed your fate and all that it has succeeded in doing. He realizes, is lose his father’s goodwill, which was not very great to begin with. He’s alienated. He’s alienate his father, who is of who is a very judgmental character. Anyway, his father represents the older American dream. His father was a doctor. His father succeeded. His father’s father was US clothing, a dry goods merchant, and his father has done the American thing, pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He is disappointed in his son, and Tommy senses his disappointment. And there seems to be nothing that he could do to get his father’s goodwill back.
Interviewer: Was always going to be a huge hit.
Morris Dickstein: There’s something in the novel that is hard to find in any other novel about success and failure. There are touches in which Tommy Wilhelms seems to feel that he has a destiny and his destiny is to fail, and that in that failure, somehow he’ll achieve some kind of spiritual success. Now, you could say that on a superficial level, his choices are simply luckless. But you can also say that his choices are willed. We’re told in one of the most interesting phrases in the novel that he knew he shouldn’t invest money with time and he knew. But the moment the possibility is offered to him, he feels that flavor of fatality and he can’t resist. He is someone who always goes against his best judgment.
Interviewer: What is the value of doing that? Why create this character?
Morris Dickstein: I think Balow is trying to take the American success and failure novel to another level. And this comes through most clearly in the final page of the book. What happens is that Tommy Wilhelm has absolutely reached bottom. He’s wandering about around. He’s completely wiped out. He’s been rejected by everyone. It seems like he’s a natural candidate for suicide at that point. He wanders into a funeral home and somehow the the funeral of someone he doesn’t even know is taking place. And suddenly, all the things that have been suffocating him before, all the things that have been completely stoppered up in him suddenly come pouring out. And he has this extraordinary release that takes him to another level. And I think that what Bellow Bellow means to give us something that very few modern novels even try for a kind of transcendent moment, not simply a self liberation, but an idea of of moving away from the economic problem, moving away from the problem of just your interactions with other people, your father, your wife, your children, and moving to another level in which you’re you’re you’re something deep inside of you that has been held back for years and years, suddenly comes pouring out and you feel a sort of release.
Interviewer: Is hemaking a connection. Is that what this is about? Well, there’s something that is not able to do.
Morris Dickstein: Yes, he let’s go for the first time when his father is tearing him a party, can’t even answer him back when his wife is tearing him apart. All he can do is beg her for more time. But at that moment, standing over the coffin of someone he doesn’t even know, he suddenly is able to let go. Whether it’s for this person or for himself or for life in general, there are some wonderful comments there. The people there say, oh, he must have been very close. He must been very close to the deceased. And of course, the point there is that human beings are potentially close to each other, even if they don’t know each other, that we’re all in the same boat. Death puts us all in the same boat. Failure puts us all in the same boat.
Interviewer: So is that a failure? There’s some kind of perverse hope. I mean, is it a hopeful ending in the way you read it.
Morris Dickstein: After and a whole novel that it’s a. That is a bad as downbeat and claustrophobic as any other work in American fiction. We have a single page at the end that is hopeful, liberating, and seems to be saying somehow all of this this experience can mean something at the end. Something can come out that actually gets us out of ourselves. At this one moment. He achieves what a successful psychoanalysis is supposed to achieve in six years, which is somehow getting in touch with himself and letting it all come out great.
Interviewer: OK. I’m going to ask. I mean, QTIP.
Morris Dickstein: Tommy falls for Temkin for many reasons. One is that he’s the father that he doesn’t really have. He’s the surrogate father, the man who seems to have his interests at heart and want to take care of him. Tommy also falls for him because Travkin is this cockeyed optimist. And with all of his failures and reverses, there’s still a residue. You in, Tommy, of the idea that you can solve all your problems by making a bundle of money and tacking seems to offer that possibility and a quick bundle of money. But finally, in the end, in a way that Tommy is not aware of, he falls for Temkin probably because his choices are, well, luckless. They all go against his intuitions, but partly because from the point of view of the author, he needs to fail totally before he can begin again. And Temkin is his instrument for failing completely. It’s that flavor of fatality that he feels and Thomkins and Tamplin that draws him to him for his final roll of the dice.
Interviewer: You mean. You mean lose every.
Morris Dickstein: Wipe that wipe, wipe yourself out to the last penny.
Interviewer: Yeah, but doesn’t isn’t there a sense that Tommy, can you think for the whole superficially, yes.
Morris Dickstein: Temkin seems to care about him. Tom Kean offers hope of making this quick bundle of money. But at another level and level, it’s only a sort of nimbus in the book. That’s only a kind of. Or in the book. I think that he falls for Temkin because he knows it’s not the route to success, but it’s the root of failure.
Interviewer: Great. How about Dr. Adler? Do you sympathize with him? I mean, it’s got to be a pretty big disappointment.
Morris Dickstein: Dr. Adler is an unusual character in American literature, especially in the Jewish American novel, because family and family loyalty are so important in that kind of writing. So to this portrayal of a harsh, patriarchal, unbending rejecting father is very, very powerful because it goes against all of our expectations of what American and especially Jewish families are like.
Interviewer: So do you find it false? No. I mean, I read it myself. Is it a Adler then? A false note for you?
Morris Dickstein: Adler is a true character because he is portrayed so harshly, the harshness of Dr. Adler is of a man who’s making it, who has has made it. Who’s respected in the community and who is. Who has nothing but contempt for people, including his own family, that can’t use the same bootstrap method that he used and that America promised him.
Interviewer: So you think Adler sees his son? What do you think about their relationship?
Morris Dickstein: Adler sees his son simply as a shame and an embarrassment because he’s not a success. But also, he sees them as a potential drain on him when he says, I don’t carry anyone on my back. He’s showing us the method by which he succeeds, which is also the method by which he steps on someone who is in any way dependent on him.
Interviewer: And it doesn’t it also say, look, you’ve got no family. I mean, what is it? What is the other thing that helped me get off my back?
Morris Dickstein: He’s saying I made it myself. And you have to make it yourself. Also, you can’t count on me. I can’t have anyone counting on me. He’s also resentful of the fact that his son is younger than him and will probably outlive him. He feels that he is the distinguished person. He is the success he is. He is genuinely bitter that he will probably predecease his son. He’s a monster. Yes, well, he is an absolute. Dr. Adler is the portrait of a monster. Later, a number of years later. Fourteen, fifteen years later, Saul Bellow published a book called Mr. Zamora’s Planet, which is about a much more elegant and distinguished version of a highly judgmental older gentleman. And people said this is a book being told from Dr. Adler’s point of view. This is amazing.
Interviewer: But tell me about Adler and seize the day, because we can’t do that. OK. Adler is a mouse. What do you mean by a monster?
Morris Dickstein: He’s a monster because social status.
Interviewer: Who’s a monster?
Morris Dickstein: Dr. Adler is a monster because social status and self-reliance and selfishness are everything to him. The values of the book or elsewhere, the values of the book lie in our kinship with other human beings, whether they are family or whether they are people who don’t other know. We don’t even know. And this is the ethic of a novel that Dr. Adler violates, that we all are implicated in each other’s fate.
Interviewer: It’s so interesting the way you’re talking about these things. Sounds a bit like Steinbeck.
Morris Dickstein: It is. You know, it’s it’s a psychological and almost metaphysical version of the same theme that we all have to pull together. I really think it’s very similar.
Interviewer: Because my question is not. Okay, let’s. So what do you think Fellow’s vision is here? What do you think the question I was asking about Why.
Morris Dickstein: Seize the Day is a book about cruelty. It’s a book about Tommy Wilhelms wife’s cruelty, his father’s cruelty. And it’s a failure. A story, a book about a man going downhill. But by implication, there are another set of values that are different from those in the character and of the characters in the book. At the end of another novel, Bello talks about the importance of meeting the terms of one’s contract of paying one’s dues. Bello has fundamentally a moral vision. There are plenty of individual isolated characters and balance books. But what he really believes is that there is a kind of human kinship that in order to be truly human, we have to acknowledge and act on. And this is what Tommy Wilhelm reaches on the last page. And this is what he fails to find from the people in his life or through the rest of the novel. He only finds a kind of caricature of it from his con man figure Temkin.
Interviewer: Do you think are echoes the sense of the need for community reading? How is Bella’s vision? I mean, Isabel is asking, are we alone?
Morris Dickstein: Right, insofar as many of these books are about failure. The authors often ask, what is it that could have been done to prevent that failure? If Lawrence Seldon had been there a few hours earlier, if he had been not been so prone to misunderstood misunderstanding, he might have saved the Lebar it. If the people in The Grapes of Wrath had pulled together a little more. There’s a sense of community in The Grapes of Wrath, for example. The idea that people have to understand that it’s not I, that it’s we it’s not every individual isolated, every individual in his own boat. But we all have to understand that we’re in the same situation. Belo is doing the same thing. But in post-war terms, which are moral and metaphysical and spiritual, rather than in terms of a social and economic understanding of life.
Interviewer: You make the American dream and real success.
Morris Dickstein: The American dream tells us that we can change our fate. We can change identity. We can go from poverty to wealth. We can be anyone that we really want to be if we try hard enough. Many of these books are devoted to the opposite idea. The idea that that America is not exactly the way this dream pretends. It portrays it as it it. Yes, these opportunities are available. They are wonderful possibilities available to people. But there but these taking these opportunities or missing them, can both of them dehumanize can separate us from other people, can put us in competition with other people, can make us cruel to each other or for example, us at the end of the book, typical American just project on a larger canvas. Our own personal limitations.
Interviewer: So I can ask you this. We did not to a sound bite. What are these novels? What are these novels saying about the dream, about its possibilities and its reality?
Morris Dickstein: The dream is something that’s there. The dream also can be a delusion. The dream allows us an upward mobility. But if we fail in that upward mobility, there can be a terrible downward mobility. The dream also gives us the potential for material success. That also can be a terrible spiritual and moral failure. Like Dr. Adler. And Seize the day. In every sense of the dream, he is a success. The point of view of the book is that morally and familial terms in human terms, he’s a terrible failure.
Interviewer: And so what matters?
Morris Dickstein: What matters is fundamental humanity more than, you know, the respect of society and it has in the suburbs.
Interviewer: Thanks.
