Clinton’s Flaws: The Revenge of Theodore Dreiser

Roughly 100 years ago, when naturalism emerged as an important literary force in American letters, Theodore Dreiser, taking his cue from the French writer Emile Zola, depicted his protagonists as victims of often sordid circumstances and their own irrepressible appetites.

Naturalist characters had no free will and invariably gave in to primal drives: money, power and sex. “Heroes” of such novels as Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” are pawns in a deterministic chess game. They behave like animals in a desperate, selfish bid for survival and physical gratification. A typical Dreiser protagonist risks his career and sacrifices his morality to win a fetching young woman. “Men are still led by instinct before they are regulated by knowledge,” Dreiser advised in “Sister Carrie,” but the author sometimes failed to get around to the knowledge part of that equation.

One of Dreiser’s favorite themes is unfair punishment. In his best-known novels, one mistake leads to a downward spiral of degradation. In “Sister Carrie,” George Hurstwood raids his employer’s safe, and though he later returns the cash he stole, that momentary slip leads to death in a flophouse. In “An American Tragedy,” Clyde Griffiths gets the chair merely for contemplating the murder of his pregnant girlfriend. Pretty downbeat fare, but Dreiser had great sympathy for his doomed characters--he tended to blame capitalist society for their troubles--even as they yielded to temptation.

At first blush, President Bill Clinton may be seen as a character in a Dreiser novel. He may remind some not only of Hurstwood, who, by reaching into that safe, chucked his career in order to satisfy his demanding young mistress, but also of Frank Cowperwood, the lusty protagonist of Dreiser’s “The Titan,” a financial giant with outsized ambition to match his voracious sexual appetite and considerable magnetism. To Dreiser, survival and pleasure-seeking at any cost inevitably led to disastrous choices, and he made no distinction between one’s behavior within the capitalist system and one’s personal behavior in private situations: It is all one morass of unavoidable selfishness.

With respect to the president, it is at this point that the Dreiser model fails: Many of Clinton’s public efforts--for example, his attempts to bring health care to the 41 million not covered in the nation and his defense of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo--reveal that a personally flawed man can make solid moral choices.

Clinton’s Cowperwood-like ambition has passed into legend, and his insatiable hunger--for women, for fast food, for contact with voters--has become a cliche, a caricature of neediness and immediate gratification. Anyone, when reduced solely to his Dreiserian behaviors, may well inspire derision and disgust. It is easy to distance oneself from an animal, which is what independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr was banking on, as his referral foisted on the nation the gratuitous image of our commander-in-chief servicing himself over a sink. To wit, Monica S. Lewinsky told the BBC that she was a victim of the president’s “animalistic stare.” But it was Starr, like Dreiser without the compassion, who depicted his protagonist as a bundle of bodily functions: nothing but selfish urges.

Dreiser-type characters populate the afternoon talk shows, those slugfests of basic instincts, reckless acts and callous conduct of all stripes. Satirical views of those in thrall to their biological processes appear in the films of Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz; a dark vision of sexual Darwinism, Solondz’s “Happiness” contains enough fluid to stain a horde of Gap dresses.

But for the most part, Dreiser’s subhumans are rare in the world, and the public has recognized that the president is not one of them. His public support in the face of his impeachment trial ensured that he would not fall, like Dreiser’s characters fell, as victims of unfair punishment. We have witnessed the fact that Clinton’s appetites have not interfered with his ability to steer the economy or work for peace in the Middle East.

Now he is using his moral authority to stop Yugoslav terror in Kosovo. His decisive action to halt what the State Department calls “crimes against humanity” may do a great deal to rebuild the boundary between private and public morality that Dreiser failed to see. History will show Clinton’s documented excesses as a component of his character, rather than the sum of it.

Human behavior is governed not just by mercenary Dreiserian impulses, but also by noble ones, and by others not so easy to classify. That the president is in the position to set the free world’s moral compass speaks to a reality of greater complexity, ambiguity--and mercy--than the author of “An American Tragedy” had envisioned.*