WALL STREET IN THE AMERICAN NOVEL Wayne W. Westbrook A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 1972 p © 1972 WAYNE WILLIAM WESTBROOK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED IH ABSTRACT Wall Street is construed to represent the American financial center, La Salle Street in Chicago, State StreetiinbBoston and Third Street in Philadelphia as well as New York's lower Manhattan district. The novels and stories considered are those in which the financial center serves a primary function, either in influencing plot, character or in providing the background and atmosphere for the main action, Both archetypal and textual analysis are applied in seeing the recurrent motifs in the novel of high finance, patterns and themes which are fully articulated and developed in the late nineteenth-century version, yet which are not found to bear an influence on later financial fiction. The reason for this is that the American literary artist has had a prejudicial view of high finance and speculation which is rooted in his cultural heritage of the Puritan opposition to playing or gaming as a way to wealth and success. The writer's attitude, therefore, is largely con­ demnatory, regarding an individual's involvement with the financial marketplace as a form of personal corruption, profligacy and degen­ eracy. Further, the idea of the sin and evil of Wall Street has as its probable historical source the volatile course that American finance has traced since the post-Civil War industrial age, in the highly cyclical and repetitive pattern of boom and bust periods. The Christian pattern of the Fall of Man and the theme of salvation and damnation, and the archetypes of Faust, Adam, Satan and the Garden of Eden are the enduring characteristics of the American financial novel. The Adam-Faust figure is the innocent and naive businessman who comes to the city from the country, is seduced by the Devil or clever financier into buying securities, and falls as a result of his involvement with the machinery of the market place. The themes of death, degeneracy and waste and the pattern of the struggle between Good and Evil are also dominant. The death and evil principle is profoundly at the heart of the American novelist's interpretation of aggression in the financial market place, money-making and success and yields a dark and fore­ boding tone to the novel of high finance. (5/ CONTENTS Chapter Page I Introduction................ ....................... 1 II The Beginnings: Eden After the War ...... 16 HI Twain, James and Howells: Humor, Innocence and Censure • 28 17 Norris, Payne and LeFevre: Romance and Conservatism . 58 7 Phillips, Sinclair and London: From Progressivism to Naturalism ........................................... 89 71 Wall Street and the Genteel Vision................ ... 113 VII Dreiser and Faulkner: The Devil and the Dollar . 1U9 7HI Bellow and Auchincloss: Futile as Regret .... 172 Conclusion ........................................ 196 NOTES ,................ 199 BIBLIOGRAPHY.................... ....................... 22l* V Time was when his half million drew The breath of six per cent; But soon the worm of what-was-not Fed hard on his content; And something crumbled in his brain When his half million went. Time passed, and filled along with his The place of many more; Time came, and hardly one of us Had credence to restore, From what appeared one day, the man Whom we had known before. The broken voice, the withered neck, The coat worn out with care, The cleanliness of indigence, The brilliance of despair, The fond imponderable dreams Of affluence,—all were there. Poor Finzer, with his dreams and schemes, Fares hard now in the race, With heart and eye that have a task When he looks in the face Of one who might so easily Have been in Finzer's place. He comes unfailing for the loan We give and then forget; He comes, and probably for years Will he be coming yet,— Familiar as an old mistake, And futile as regret. "Bewick Finzer" Edwin Arlington Robinson I Introduction National Woolens 33 up Apex Consolidation 18, down 1/8; Ward Valley Copper 3h 7/8» down 2 Jg; Transcontinental Common 63 up 6—stocks on the Big Board? In a way, yes. That is, they are securities listed on the New York Stock Exchange; but they are not companies whose symbols you will find moving across the ticker tape in tomorrow's market or might request a research bulletin on from your broker. They are stocks whose prices were reported on imaginary ticker tapes and that obsessed fictional speculators in American novels in which Wall Street and the stock market served a decisive function; issues that brought on financial destruction and suicide, incited anger and revenge, or led to a hurriedly and sometimes dishonestly made for­ tune. Wall Street as a financial center in actual history has been manipulated by robber-barons, exploited by huge industrial trusts and effectively used by capitalists and financiers to provide the means for the growth of American business. However, in the history of Amer­ ican fiction it has been a rich literary quarry, mined by muckrakers, Populists, Progressivists, Utopian reformists and novelists of manners. The critic and scholar, with his head frequently in the clouds or peering up at the lofty peaks of Parnassus, has largely ignored Wall Street as a social institution influential on American fiction, while the novelist, his feet firmly planted at the corner of Broad and Wall, has paid close and scrutinizing attention to it. The nearest the critic has deigned to approach the financial marketplace is through the facile chit-chat and market-report which makes the reputations of authors boom and crash in an imaginary literary stock exchange, all of which Northrop Frye in 2 Anatomy of Criticism calls pseudo-criticism. Wall Street, and other financial centers such as La Salle Street in Chicago, State Street in Boston and Third Street in Philadelphia, are situated in the foreground of some of the most important and well-known and also some of the less significant and forgotten novels that have been produced in this country. Not understanding the meaning that the marketplace carries in the American literary mind is to miss seeing a basic attitude that is ingrained in the modem American ethos toward money and finance and to miss reading these novels of high finance on the allegorical or symbolic levels on which they were conceived. To demonstrate just how blunting, de-sensitizing and mis-leading criticism has been on the subject, consider this opinion on Frank Norris' The Pit (1902) by a leading American critic. But for the reader who wants to understand the mind of the business man, and wants to see how speculative operations actually affect human lives, for the reader who asks that this novel should help him to understand the forces it deals with and to realize their expression in credible characters and events, for such a reader there is little but disappointment—some stirring des­ criptions of the Pit, some insight into the lust of the gambler, a few pictures of Chicago society, and not much more.' The critic here makes the mistake of demanding a psychological novel and faulting Norris for not giving what the critic expects. However, the American novel which deals with businessmen such as Curtis Jadwin in The Pit and his financial operations is patently not a psychological novel that helpfully opens up the complex mind of the financier for all to view and for all to take instruction from. The effects of speculation on the mind in the novel of high finance is not nearly as studied as the effects of speculation on the heart and soul. The mind of the fictional financier suffers only in so far as the conscience is pained or distressed The effects of sin and guilt, which result from involvement with stocks 3 or commodities, are manifested in the stock figure of the financier, not as mental anguish or psychological despair, but as loss of physical health, as deterioration of vitality and energy and, if there is no moral transformation, as actual death. When a businessman suffers in real life, it is often from a, lack or recent loss of capital. But in fiction, when a financier suffers, it is from sin and guilt, or a dearth of spiritual capital. The anguish is moral, not material. Also, the novel of high finance, in its most significant level of interpretation, is not a realistic study of the businessman; rather, it is clearly anti- realistic or allegorical. Neither the characters nor the events, although they may be intended by the author to be realistic, are always credible. The characters generally are personifications or embodiments of abstract qualities, and the action and the setting representative of the relation­ ship among the characters. If there is realism, it is merely close to the surface and an inadequate foundation or criterion on which to base substantive and meaningful analysis. Neither pyschological nor realistic, the American novel in which high finance or the financial marketplace becomes a major motif is abstract and allegorical, presenting basic themes on speculation and attitudes toward money which are indigenous in the American literary mind and which are re-capitulated with notable consist­ ency in the so-called novel of high finance. There is a more serious view of money and success in the American novel of high finance than that of the ancient Cinderella theme which is re-cast into the popular Horatio Alger formula. Silas Lapham is not a Ragged Dick, for instance, or even an anti-Ragged Dick which Edwin Cady 2 presumes W.