I can almost read their forthcoming reviews as I close my eyes.
“A sensually depraved and degenerate type.”
“Striking at the bed rock of public solidarity, of home happiness, of everything decent and worth while.”
And America’s reading public—“Horrible, filthy.”
Howl, you who have stultified your artists and buried them under the gingerbread morality of your own monotonous lives. Dreiser is the one novelist being published in America today who doesn’t listen to you, who describes you at your various bests, who wrings the pathos and joys out of your little worlds; who paints in with the brush of a universal art what you and I are doing in Alexandria and Chicago and New York and all the milk-station stops between.
I am not a disciple of the Dreiserian Gospel. I would like to argue with him the certain superiorities of monogamy for the artist. But he has limned a hero who is not a sugar-coated moralizer. He has ignored superbly the mob-begotten mandates of literary excellence. Whatever his faults of composition or construction, and there are not so many as his friends endeavor to make out there are, he has magnificently booted the reading public, the morally subsidized critics and the very publishers in the coarsest regions of their bodies—their souls.
And for these things I hail him as the greatest novelist in the country. I acclaim him as the only real, uncontaminated genius of these States and pray to God that my friend Sherwood Anderson will hurry up and get published so that there will be two of them.
The Scavenger.
Leather Lane
Three restless gas-jets