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As soon as I finished Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, written in astonishing detail, I knew that the book waiting to be read next would be no less written by Theodore Dreiser’s novel The American Tragedy. That is, the version published in 1964, translated by Klára Szőllősy. Dreiser’s novel was published in 1925 and has been published several times in Hungary. The first three editions were translated by Andor Németh.
I admit it, while reading the novel, I had to stop several times to look for the meaning of certain words. So today I know what pain is (end of the workday), and what you do when someone hangs up (you spend your time wasting time or resting while waiting for someone. Kálmán Mikszáth used this word several times in his novels at that time). I know that we are writing 2020 today, I know that according to many the pain, the dangubal and the few old Hungarian terms that Szőllősy allowed in this work are obsolete, unknown avas. I think it’s brilliant, but we really don’t have to agree on that. What is certain, however, is that by reading these, one will only get more, by no means less.
Dreiser’s work is a crime, a developmental novel, a social and systems critique, and a moral education. The book was based on a 1906 murder: a man named Chester Gillette killed his lover, Grace Brown. Once again, I’ll be honest: the half sentence “The American tragedy comes after the executioner’s song” in the introduction was hiding a bit more fighting than the reader would expect. . Then I switched to the e-reader to see if things would go easier there. I gave up here twice. Nothing happens in the first chapter of Dreiser’s work, although there may be those who say that not much happens in the next almost 900 pages.
Of course, no. The American tragedy is full of puzzles, while the real questions will soon be answered by the reader. An interesting controversy over when the Clyde Griffiths story actually occurs? Since the year of the original publication of the work is 1925, it is known much before that, but not before 1906. The streetcars and cars circulate through the main places of the novel, in Kansas, Denver or simply Lycurgus, invented in Dreiser’s mind. But even in the Griffiths court ruling, the figures for half the years are omitted. All that can be read is that the sentence will be executed on January 19 … It is an interesting puzzle, not so important, in a work whose writer has been required by critics to throw half of the original work in the trash. Now imagine: we could have read this shocking, moving and thought-provoking story, which is not fundamentally special, on pages 900 but at 900. There was a boy from a poor family, Clyde, who already decided as a child that he did not want to live the life his parents wanted him to. (The writer, Dreiser, was also born into a family of ten, without many, and her later life was heavily influenced by her confusing female affairs.) In Clyde, as a teenager and later as an adult, she grows in ambition because women of good family (I mean, young ladies) almost got drunk.
Clyde knows that normally these women don’t stand a chance, yet he clings to them in some crazy way because he thinks it’s the only way he has a chance to escape the shackles of a deeply religious family environment. The first love he finds in Denver, also ends in tragedy: a girl dies under the wheels of the car in which Clyde is sitting. He will not lead, he will simply be an unfortunate and cowardly by-product of the tragedy. Here’s how it gets from the prairie capital, Kansas, first to Denver and then to Lycurgus. There he has another chance at life, thanks to the rich kinship of the Griffiths family. You can enter a necklace factory shortly after landing a department head job where you only work with women. And among the many, many women is Clyde’s true destiny, Roberta.
At this point a beautiful love story unfolds that could make Clyde Griffiths happy for the rest of his life. But that’s not the writer’s goal, and Clyde knows he could only give the innocent-looking Roberta exactly what her own mother told her father: Immeasurable poverty and modesty, few children, deprivation and eternal misery. But Clyde doesn’t ask for it, because suddenly Sondra Finchley appears on stage. The rich girl, who may not be prettier than Roberta, may not be smarter than her. But in Clyde’s eyes, only the wealth that characterizes Sondra’s environment, money, constant evenings and invitations, dance order, stolen touches, and secret kisses now exist. Clyde would throw away Roberta, who had previously thought of the love of his life, with a loose gesture, he does, he does not care about one thing: Roberta is expecting a child from Clyde.
Here the wind can already be felt against the real tragedy, as the reader places almost all the figures, which are superbly characterized and represented in precise detail, on their own literary chessboard. It is difficult to get out of the course of the expected tragedy, while these really serious internal and external conflicts in today’s world would hardly reach the threshold of man. Okay, murder does it, but how many and how many girls does an old friend leave, lover anyway? How many and how many dates combined with lies fall in the life of a young man? We don’t even notice these conflicts today But in America in the 1910s and 1920s, deviations from life were treated differently. It is no coincidence that abandoned Roberta, who also comes from a religious family, is also considering suicide, is so ashamed of the sin, I mean of getting pregnant. But Clyde thinks otherwise. For a boating accident staged on a secluded lake where it can give the impression that the mother of her unborn child is accidentally being a tragedy, even though nothing more than a premeditated genius is happening in Clyde’s imagination, but very killer.
The American Tragedy is a great novel (Time has chosen it as one of the 100 best works in the English language of all time), an important work in world literature by a writer who, in addition, has not given us many memorable things. Yet the saying is very true about Dreiser’s life: if he hadn’t written anything but this novel, he wouldn’t have lived in vain. Because the last third of the book is already being read by one who would fold the pages forward who wants to know: will the defense of a lawyer based on lies leave the life of a man who extinguished the life of a man who never lied, who always was honest, you really believed in the blue bird of happiness.
I’m not making that joke when I describe how what the title suggests is happening in the end: tragedy. The question is: whose tragedy? To this we can easily point out that Roberta Aldené, who had to die because she loved with true love a man who threw her out for the first time. But not Clyde Griffiths, the handsome young man who plunged himself into a world where he had nothing to gain? Perhaps Sondra Finchley, who, after capturing Clyde, disappears from the novel and the writer’s imagination as if she were not even there? Since Dreiser doesn’t even describe her name from there, we have to be content with the name Miss X. A few days before Sondra Clyde’s death, she reappears in letter form – the few lines that surprise Griffiths that her days they are actually numbered.
In this novel, Dreiser deals with his own society, America at the beginning of the last century, with relentless criticism. It is clear that he hid his own fear between each line: all this could have happened to him. Only the very strong can endure an easy life that comes to life. If there is a lesson to be learned from the American tragedy, this is one. No one is born a murderer, but very easily they become one if they are not strong enough to overcome their own fears and demons. Clyde Griffiths wasn’t strong enough to keep her savage out of her desires. At the same time, it would be a lie to write that he was corrupt to the core. But he couldn’t take responsibility either. He lived as an excessively one-way man, in which morality and reason only blinked, he could not turn on. Ultimately this led to his destruction, his fate almost doomed.
In the usual vacuum after the completion of the work, can the reader think for a moment whether the best judgment has been made? However, Clyde Griffiths will not be John Coffey. In Stephen King’s genius death row (Death Row), Coffey, blessed with extraordinary esoteric abilities, is innocently sent to an electric chair because he never killed. Tears also soaked the book and movie screen as the current passed through the bound Coffey’s body. At the time Clyde Griffiths was executed, no one but his family should cry. Yet we can easily fall into Dreiser’s trap for us: a strange mix of horror, pity, and contempt can turn the souls of stone-hearted people built from stones into a raging sea. And the waves wash over Clyde, Robert, Sondra and everyone who reads this book, The American Tragedy.
Theodore Dreiser: an American tragedy. Year of original publication: 1925. The 1964 edition was translated by Klára Szőllősy.
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