The Rise of David Levinsky Read Online Free PDF Page A

its focus on “making it”—rising in the world in material terms whatever the price—and appeals to the national fascination with success stories. The title consciously echoes Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, and like that novel, Cahan’s raises too the inevitable question of the moral price to be paid for success in those terms. Is it worth it? Can money buy happiness? These cliches, and the myth of the unhappy millionaire, are a staple of popular culture. 14
    There is much in Levinsky, a great egoist, that is self-serving as well as deluded, so he may not be an entirely reliable narrator. When he asks in the final chapter “Am I happy?” and answers predictably in the negative, we could regard it as an only half-sincere gesture in the direction of those myths, the feeling that he should have chosen a more spiritually satisfying path—science or literature, say—than business an unctious rationalization. This may be a final jab by Cahan at Levinsky, since Cahan had, as he says elsewhere, spent all his life in reading books, study, and writing: Cahan had chosen a life morally superior to this rich man’s. Or there maybe, despite that, an unconscious identification by Cahan with Levinsky’s sense of the unbridgeable disparities in his life, because Levinsky’s final words, however much we may regard them as mere self-dramatization, have the “thrill of truth” that Cahan the writer always sought. Something in Cahan may have felt the strength of these words as well, as he contemplated the varieties and discrepancies and dashed hopes in his own life:
     
    I can never forget the days of my misery. I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher’s Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak manufacturer.
     
     
    Levinsky’s sense of disjunction when confronted with the incredible changes in his life is understandable. The sense of loss that hovers over it is comprehensible, too: the loss of his mother’s warmth (and her language and culture) and the loss of values embodied in the religion of his spiritual father, Reb Sander, who had warned him that the rewards of this world are ephemeral (“only good deeds and holy learning have tangible worth.... Beware of Satan, Davie.”) are irreplaceable in Levinsky’s present condition. His pursuit of success and wealth in the new land may be an extreme case of abandoning everything in his embrace of Satan. After all, many others accommodated or integrated their old values with the new. But there is a broadly relevant Americanness to this recognition of disjunction between one’s past and present.
    American literature is full of the clash of cultures: city boys and girls in the country, country boys and girls in the city, Westerners in the East, Easterners in the West. In a pluralistic society like our own, many racial, ethnic, and culturally diverse groups struggle for a coherent and secure identity as they relate to each other and to a dominant ethos that may often seem foreign and hostile to their own.
    The American life Levinsky and others confront has its hopeful side—indeed, meaningful work and the free development of human potential is held out as a promise, a legitimate goal for the immigrant, the newly arrived, the “marginal.” Yet the green light of an ultimately fulfilling future tends to recede even as we reach for it, as Nick Carraway observes in The Great Gatsby, “and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Cahan and Levinsky both make the journey, and we are borne along with them.
    In the eighteenth century Crevecoeur wondered what “the new man,” the American, would become, having left “behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners” in order to embrace new ones. Cahan too spent a lifetime wondering and reporting his findings. In David