Jennie Gerhardt - Theodore Dreiser Pine Street Books

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originally in 1901, when Hitchcock had been an editor at D. Appleton & Co. Hitchcock had been Stephen Crane’s editor at Appleton in the 1890s, and he admired Sister Carrie. He liked Jennie Gerhardt too, once he had read it in typescript, and he decided to add Dreiser to the Harpers list.

      Hitchcock knew, though, that this would be a difficult and risky move. Dreiser was then known only as the author of Sister Carrie, an off-color novel with a certain underground following. His work was thought to be unnecessarily frank and potentially offensive to genteel readers. If Harpers were to publish him, they would have to do so carefully. The firm therefore placed stipulations on the contract that they offered to Dreiser: He was told that he would have to allow Hitchcock to cut and revise the typescript of Jennie Gerhardt. The narrative, as it stood, was sexually candid and philosophically bleak; Jennie was not properly punished for her liaison with Lester, and Lester did not suffer (materially, at least) for his long dalliance with Jennie. As it stood, the novel was critical of organized religion, and it contained references to birth control and alcohol—taboo subjects in 1911.

      One must understand that the environment for literary publishing in America in 1911 was extremely circumscribed. The banning or suppression of books thought to be explicit or obscene was reasonably frequent. Unconventional or sexually candid works were often attacked by the Boston Watch and Ward Society and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice—active, powerful groups that were backed by a network of columnists and book reviewers poised to attack morally objectionable literature. Harper & Brothers in 1911 was in no position to challenge these do-gooders, nor was Hitchcock himself much inclined to try. He was no rebel; he was instead a New Englander of good pedigree who had a Harvard B.A., belonged to the Century Club, and thought of himself as a gentleman. He was not going to risk his reputation, or that of his publishing house, for Theodore Dreiser.

      By the same token, Hitchcock knew that Harpers was in financial trouble. The house had gone bankrupt in 1900 and been reorganized in 1901 under a new director. It had continued in the publishing trade but was still laboring under an enormous load of debt. Hitchcock, in fact, had been brought into the firm in 1906 to help put its finances back in order. He had a reputation for sniffing out bestsellers: He had brought Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus books to Appleton, and he had seen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage into print there. His greatest coup at Appleton, however, had been Edward Noyes Westcott’s now-forgotten novel David Harum, one of the great publishing successes of the 1890s. The manuscript of this book had come to Hitchcock in 1897 in a long and muddled state, but with his blue pencil he had transformed it into a quick-moving, clever tale with light touches of humor and romance. David Harum was published in September 1898 and became an immediate hit, selling as many as one thousand copies a day at the peak of its trade run and topping out, by 1904, with a total sale of over 700,000 copies.

      Hitchcock thought that a similar kind of commercial magic might be worked with Dreiser. The trick was to make Dreiser’s books walk the tightrope between what was improper and what was allowable. Novels that dealt with suspect material but struck at some point an obligatory note of piety could catch fire at the bookshops and sell quite briskly. Hitchcock had seen this happen in his own career with Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane’s tale of low life and prostitution in the New York slums. He seems to have believed that Dreiser, with editorial help from him, could have this same kind of success for Harpers.

      The contract offered to Dreiser guaranteed publication for Jennie Gerhardt and a reprinting of Sister Carrie, the copyright for which the author had reacquired. All Dreiser had to do was allow Hitchcock to rework the text of Jennie. Dreiser was in no position to refuse this offer. In the spring of 1911 he was an unemployed ex-editor and journalist whose reputation rested on one immoral novel issued over ten years before. Publication by Harper & Brothers, an established, respectable imprint despite its financial problems, would be of immense value to him both personally and professionally. He had waited more than a decade for a chance to finish and publish Jennie Gerhardt and to reissue Sister Carrie with a reputable firm. Both of these things were promised in the Harpers contract. Dreiser decided to accept.

      While he waited for the revising and cutting to begin, Dreiser sent a carbon typescript of his novel as it then stood to a feisty young Baltimore journalist named H. L. Mencken. Dreiser and Mencken had met during the former’s tenure at Butterick and had become good friends. This was an unlikely match—the dour, melancholy Dreiser and the impish, irreverent Mencken—but the two were drawn together by a shared skepticism about life and a mistrust of authority. Mencken read Jennie Gerhardt in typescript form and was floored by the gravity and power of the narrative. He wrote immediately to Dreiser:

      The story comes upon me with great force; it touches my own experience of life in a hundred places; it preaches (or perhaps I had better say exhibits) a philosophy of life that seems to me to be sound; altogether I get a powerful effect of reality, stark and unashamed. It is drab and gloomy, but so is the struggle for existence. It is without humor, but so are the jests of that great comedian who shoots at our heels and makes us do our grotesque dancing…. The two currents of interest, of spiritual unfolding, are very deftly managed. Even when they do not actually coalesce, they are parallel and close together. Jennie is never out of Kane’s life, and after their first meeting, [he] is never out of [hers]. The reaction of will upon will, of character upon character, is splendidly worked out.

      Mencken followed with two more paragraphs of praise, then added this admonition: “If anyone urges you to cut down the book bid that one be damned…. Let it stand as it is.” Dreiser must have read these words with a grimace, for he knew that Hitchcock and his assistants had already taken out their scalpels and gone to work on the ribbon copy of his typescript.

      By late June 1911 he could see what they had done. Some 25,000 words had been cut, and the prose had been rewritten extensively. Profanity had been removed; slang spoken by characters had been corrected; virtually all mention of sex had been muted or cut. Strictures against organized religion had been softened, and much of the detail about the social world of the Kane and Gerhardt families had been discarded. A new surface had been put on Dreiser’s prose: The original style had been blunt and direct, without flourish or adornment, but Hitchcock’s assistants had smoothed and conventionalized the language, producing a style typical of many popular, sentimental novels of the day. The net effect had been to turn a powerful piece of social realism into a touching love story isolated from much of its context.

      The most intriguing of the changes made at Harpers had to do with Jennie and Lester. In the original text (as Mencken recognized in his letter), these two characters had been balanced one against the other. Lester was the pragmatic cynic and pessimistic determinist, Jennie the instinctive romantic and unreasoning mystic. In cutting the novel, however, the Harpers editors had removed nearly all of the passages that presented Jennie’s way of thinking. As a result she appears, in the 1911 first edition, not to have a point of view and to be weak and compliant. Lester dominates the narrative with his forceful pessimism, and the dialectical balance of the novel is tipped strongly in his favor. Jennie Gerhardt, in consequence, appears to be a relatively uncomplicated work—a textbook case of philosophical determinism and literary naturalism.

      It is impossible to know today why Jennie’s point of view, her approach to the living of life, was edited from the novel at Harpers. Possibly a subtle sexism was at work. In 1911 women of Jennie’s status were not generally believed capable of serious thinking. Perhaps her meditations were viewed as a case of overcharacterization by Dreiser, an attempt to elevate and dignify a sympathetic heroine above her station in life. There is no evidence to guide us here: Hitchcock’s correspondence with Dreiser shows that the majority of the cutting and rewriting was done by editorial underlings at Harpers, but it does not say who they were or what their instructions from Hitchcock might have been. We do know a good deal about Hitchcock: He was conservative, courtly, genteel, quite patriotic, and deeply religious. We also know that he would have had final approval over the work of his editorial assistants. We can assume, then, that this cutting and rewriting satisfied him; certainly the blue-pencillings of profanity, slang, and sexual references must have been executed to his specifications, and the softening of the remarks about organized religion must have been done on his instructions.

      But

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