Yet even during these happiest of his years, when he most nearly achieved an unflawed integrity of mind and spirit, White remained profoundly selfdivided. The nature of his self-division (so typically American, so of the essence of what a philosophical historian might diagnose as the Middle American malaise) was clearly revealed to critical eyes in a novel he produced during this period.

A Certain Rich Man was published in 1909. It was commercially but not artistically successful. And the root cause of both the success and the failure (given White’s writing talent) was his refusal, perhaps his constitutional inability, to pay the price of basic consistency in dealing with his subject matter. His often brilliant intuitions and flashes of wisdom—psychological, historical, sociological, economic—were in the end merely tantalizing, even irritating, since he invariably drew back from their logical long-run implications whenever these might seriously shock what he conceived to be his immediate audience.

Consider the story of A Certain Rich Man . The novel’s central character, John Barclay, “son of a pioneer Kansas mother,” coming out of the Union army at the close of the Civil War, goes back to the Midwest where, through shrewd practice as corporation lawyer and stock manipulator, he rather more than grows up with the country. John Barclay is a liar, a cheat, a thief on a grand scale. He adulterates the prod- ucts of the companies he controls, he bribes legislators, he waters stock and employs other devices for fleecing the unwary and deceived. In general, he foully pollutes the democratic political process while preying ruthlessly, incessantly, upon his fellow man, thereby amassing one of the great American fortunes.

But what does it all add up to, as “social message,” in the end? Does it mean that a private-profit economy in the machine age is inherently corrupt and corrupting? Does it imply the need for a radical reordering of American economic institutions and procedures if, under the pressure of rapid technological advance, we are to maintain the essential human liberties “guaranteed” by the Bill of Rights? Not in novelist White’s conception. In the book’s closing pages we learn to our surprise that John Barclay, while gaining the whole world, or a goodly hunk of it, has not lost his own soul. He remains at heart a good man, susceptible to the Social Gospel animating the Progressivism of the new century. He has a profound religious experience. Conscience-stricken, he then turns from his evil ways into paths of righteousness, gives up to good causes his ill-gotten gains, and at last gives up his very life in a heroic attempt to save a drowning woman.

The sentimental absurdity of this conclusion contributed mightily to the novel’s commercial success (upwards of three hundred thousand copies of A Certain Rich Man were sold, twenty- five hundred of them in Emporia) in a time when much of the