Word: writings
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...American Tragedy"--what a book what a needlessly long tour-de-force. And we don't mean maybe! Mr. Dreiser, laborious hind of realism, was disgusted by the sickly romantic breed of best sellers. "Mein Gott!" he belched. (This was way back before Prohibition.) "I shall write a book--oh, such a book." He has. It gripes the romanticists, it wearies the amoral. Mr. Dreiser has forgotten nothing; he has taken a "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable" hero (the big gun, Willie Shakspere spouted all those adjectives) and put him through hours and hours of representative paces...
...pretty near it. Oh yes, Dreiser wrote almost half a million. If anybody else and done it--but, of course, nobody would have--but if anybody else had, the publishers would have said, yawning. "Well, cut that in half, throw away half of that, re-write the remainder four times, looking sharply for split infinitives and dangling participles, and then perhaps, perhaps we shall take a chance...
...cronies playfully call him), spill a bib-full. And what a bib-full! His hero spent pages and pages in a brothel. Yes, boys, he tells you everything about a brothel. And what he doesn't tell you won't matter. But that's nothing! He can write just as much about other things. Sure he can. You forget Ted was a rewrite man for a New York paper. After the hero lets drown his pregnant sweetheart, not wife, whom he wanted to drown anyway, Dreiser gets legalistic and re-vamps a dusty case in the New York State murder...
...book sparkles with quotable lines. Apropos of the statement that Irving Berlin can neither read nor write music, Dr. Collins observes: "Some who have heard his compositions will say 'I knew it!'" And then he adds: "Homer could neither read nor write and his poetry has stirred the hearts of thousands of generations...
...despite the vagaries of varied mood mottled memoirs of the arts, poetry, after all, is poetry. And Gerald, though an excellent gunman and a fairly creditable crook, has yet to write poetry. Indeed his muse is not sufficiently--to use his own words--distillate. In fact one might even believe murder detrimental to that divine something which breeds noble rime. But then again there is Francois Villon. Modernity lacks savoir faire even the rogues are prosaic...