Photo: The cover of The Bulwark.
The Bulwark
By Theodore Dreiser
Two boys are wandering in the forest. One of them, Solon Barnes, uses his catapult to kill a small bird. His companion tells him that, now that their mother is dead, her chicks will have to be killed too, to save them from starving to death. The second boy takes the nest and the dead bird home, to feed to his pet cat. Barnes, raised a Quaker, goes home alone, weighed down with unbearable remorse.
The story will be both familiar and unfamiliar to readers of the journal of the eighteenth-century Quaker saint, John Woolman. Near the start of his journal, Woolman relates how, as a small boy, he killed a robin and then felt compelled to kill all her chicks. But this happened early in the eighteenth century, whereas Barnes killed his bird towards the end of the nineteenth. And while Woolman killed a robin, Solon killed a North American grey catbird.
We have no reason to doubt the veracity of Woolman’s famous robin story, but Solon’s crime, and even Barnes himself, are entirely fictional. They both feature in this novel, first published in 1946. It was released a year after the death of the author, and it came out of copyright in 2015, but there does not seem to have been a great rush to bring Dreiser out in cheap new editions. It has an old-fashioned feel, with a reliance on god-like third-person narration – a determination to tell rather than show. Readers might find Dreiser reminiscent of John Galsworthy, of The Forsyte Saga.
As a teenager, Solon discovers an edition of Woolman’s journal in the home of his future wife, the violet-eyed Benecia Wallin. As life’s challenges threaten to push Solon off course, he tries to use his knowledge of the book as a sort of rudder to help him steer. The currents that threaten to divert him are not failure, poverty, or rejection, but the more challenging currents of success, wealth, acceptance and respect.
As well as trying to follow Woolman’s example, Solon is like him in some respects. After killing his bird, he too leaves home young, for work, and is soon doing well in both his paid employment and in his local Quaker Meeting. But whereas Woolman ‘downsized’ before he reached thirty, abandoning his thriving business for a humble farm, Solon Barnes pushes ahead, becoming a rich man.
Many people have found beauty in Woolman’s plain lifestyle, but beauty and plainness are sometimes opposites, and beauty causes all kinds of problems for the Barnes family. As they grow richer, the elegance of a fine house tempts them to move in, and the striking good looks of three of Solon’s children allows them to enter worlds that Solon struggles to understand. Describing Solon’s handsome son Stewart and his attraction to a ‘fast’ girl called Ada Maurer, Dreiser writes about ‘beauty, the mystic formula which expresses itself in line and form and colour, that strange cabalistic formula’.
As tragedy strikes the family, and Solon is gripped by a terminal illness, the journal of John Woolman reasserts itself. Solon’s erring daughter Etta, returned like the prodigal son of the parable, reads Woolman aloud to her father. This brings him great comfort, and incidentally helps her see for the first time the special beauty of Woolman’s life and message.
