Remembering Richard Mitchell, Part 2

Mitchell did his Masters thesis on Theodore Dreiser. One day he told us a little about his work.

He had gone so far as to visit Dreiser’s house (I guess it had been converted into a museum). When he was being examined, one of the teachers was so impressed with how much he knew about Dreiser that he asked, jokingly, whether or not the color of the wallpaper in the author’s living room played into any of his fiction. As he had just explained the significance of the plastic ornaments on Dreiser’s front lawn, he said, the wallpaper was no problem.

(I thought Mitchell was joking about this. Then I studied English in graduate school. I discovered that seemingly trivial pieces of information do in fact find their way into the essays and theses of students and professors.)

But the most interesting part of his Dreiser studies was what he called “The American Tragedy Experiment.” Mitchell wanted to see if it was possible for Clyde to really navigate through the woods in the dark like Dreiser describes in the book. So he tried it. He went to the lake in New York were the murder took place, waited until it got dark, and then took off in Clyde’s direction. He couldn’t have a flashlight, he told us, because Clyde didn’t have one.

After a few hours of walking, he was convinced that Clyde couldn’t have made that journey. He stopped and waited for daybreak.

When he arrived in the town the next morning, he struck up a conversation with one of the townsfolk. Mitchell explained what he had been doing and was surprised to find that the person he talked to, who seemed like an ordinary workingman, knew the novel and the story on which it was based.

Mitchell told the guy that Clyde’s journey was impossible, but as he was explaining himself, he told us, he had a revelation. He wasn’t able to complete his journey because he had no dead girl to run away from. What he had to do, he said, was take a girl to the lake, drown her, and then see if he could make it.

He never said if he tried the experiment a second time.