Classics Book Group

The Salon Classics Book Group: Garrison Keillor on the 'scandalous' -- and mediocre -- 'Sister Carrie.'

By Garrison Keillor

Oct 13, 1997 | For many reasons, "Sister Carrie" was a big book to us English majors who studied it in the Modern American Novel course 30 years ago at the University of Minnesota. For one thing, it was the first M.A.N. in the course ---- Melville was considered 19th century and he went into a different file drawer --- and so, we were led to believe, Lewis and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner all leaped to the fore over Dreiser's shoulders and benefited from his having fought the good fight before them. Published in 1900, "Sister Carrie" stood at the gateway to our century, the opening salvo in the struggle of American fiction writers to portray the life of our time honestly, over the harassment of prudes and philistines. We English majors were drawn to "Sister Carrie" as well by the sweet story about its origins: In 1883, Dreiser's sister Emma had fled to Canada with a married man who had stolen money from his employer, the clear basis for the novel, an attempt by the author to redeem his family from its shame and suffering by creating a great work of art from the tale. "Sister Carrie," our professor told us, had been bowdlerized by the author's wife (much as Mark Twain's wife had taken a blue pencil to "Huckleberry Finn") and then was suppressed by its own publisher, Doubleday, when it appeared, and sold less than 500 copies. We were prepared to admire the book for that reason alone.

The later triumvirate of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner were admired by us not only for the books they made but also for the beauty of their prose. They were elegant stylists, and you could profitably imitate them. Dreiser was another sort of author altogether. He was, the professor explained, one of those Great Authors who was, ahem, not that good an author, if you know what I mean. His prose was, uh, maybe a little clunky. Even embarrassing in places. But he nevertheless was a true Artist.

This, of course, appealed to us undergraduates enormously, especially as we weren't too confident of our own prose styles. The thought that one could attain greatness, despite some weakness in the basics, made perfect sense to us.

I remember liking "Sister Carrie" very much 30 years ago and writing a learned term paper on it (which I will not trouble you with now, thank you very much) and earning a B in The Modern American Novel, and with all that in mind, I've plunged back into the novel ---- the new "unexpurgated" version --- with great interest for this Salon Magazine online discussion. It's fascinating to revisit a book that was important to me once, and to see how, over the years, my memory of it has misrepresented it. I honestly can't see what I thought I saw in it.

I'd be glad to discuss with my fellow Salonites any of the aspects of "Sister Carrie" that one might write a term paper about -- its metaphorical structure, its inner voices, its thematic unity. I seem to recall using "thematic unity" many times to great effect in my term paper of long ago, but we can also talk about any of the interesting larger questions that are raised by this book and its history.

One interesting question to me is that of censorship.

Since Dreiser, writers have fought against censorship, even when there was practically none of it to be found. Writers long to have enemies, to be opposed by powerful forces, to rise up and wield our bright pens against them. The thought of enemies is a great relief from the drudgery of writing and it quickens our creative energy to feel ourselves writing for a cause: wonderful sharp satiric work has been created by people who were blessed with good enemies.

As we approach the 21st century, however, there seems to be a sort of moral torpor that renders people immune to imaginative literature. Books are sold, and presumably they are read, but nobody cares about them enough to bother to be outraged by them, surely not to censor them. One has to wonder if it's still possible for a book to cause the sort of delicious public uproars that Ginsberg or Nabokov or Henry Miller caused only a few decades ago. In the late '30s, working in Hollywood, Fitzgerald worried that the movies would put prose fiction in the shade and perhaps we are seeing that.

"Sister Carrie," a cause cilhbre in American letters, is not that great a book, it must be said. Even if you pass over Dreiser's clunky Darwinian lectures, his schoolmarmish asides about psychology and morals, you have to conclude that this is no "Anna Karenina." Nobody would confuse this with Dickens. It isn't even James T. Farrell. It is a work of historical interest, like "Winesburg, Ohio," but I'd find it hard to assign these works to students -- there simply are so few moments when these dreary figures show flickers of life.

Dreiser was honored for this book, especially by the great Baltimore iconoclast H.L. Mencken, not so much for its worth as for Doubleday's suppression of it. (Today, they wouldn't bother.) The uproar in 1900 over "Sister Carrie" and its rather decorous depictions of adultery is actually a testimonial to the power of words at that time to quicken people's imagination: We haven't progressed at all; we have declined. We have a surfeit of stories and amusements today, and we can't remember ones that we saw or read a week ago; none of them makes enough impression on us to excite either opposition or anger, only a sort of bovine calm.

Go into your local book emporium and see the banned books of yesteryear piled on the floor in the Bargain section, remaindered off for less than it cost to print them, and yet nobody cares enough to read them at any price. Most of the heroes of those old battles are faded figures today, like Dreiser. Had their censors been victorious and wiped their work from the map, we would not miss them so much today, not nearly so much as we would miss certain other writers whom nobody ever thought of suppressing, whose gifts were far more innocent. The humorists, for example. You could lose Dreiser, the great brooding giant of unreadable fiction, and we wouldn't be much poorer for it, but if we hadn't had Thurber, I don't know where we'd be.

I look forward to seeing you online.

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