DOROTHY DUDLEY
FORGOTTEH
FRONTI ERS
DREISER
AMD THE
LAM D OF THE FREE
•
For many years Theodore Dreiser has loomed,
a massive and enigmatic mountain, against
the American literary scene. However, though
his novels and short stories have been read
by hundreds of thousands of people, though
his work and personality have always caused
dissent and clamor, there is little actually
known to the public of the man himself, his
origin, his grim fight for freedom of expres-
sion and thought.
This remarkable book is not only about
Dreiser; it is about America, beginning with
thirty years ago when restless and creative
men and women were tearing themselves,
and the nation with them, away from the
tradition-encrusted soil not only of the Mid-
dle West but of the whole country. It recites
what Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Masters,
Floyd Dell, Lewis, Mencken, Sandburg, and
a host of other fighters against our senti-
mentality and prudery said and thought and
did. It records a movement that has for a
time liberated us, since it deals, sometimes
caustically, sometimes lyrically, with the
things of the spirit, the mind, creation, and
with suffering and battle. Of the several
splendid books written about America re-
cently, this is one of the most stimulating
and provocative. Dreiser himself says of the
author, "I can imagine no other American
I would rather see undertake this book";
and Carl Sandburg, after reading the manu-
script, wrote, "It is a grand treatment of the
American scene, with the analytical search
and the deliberate accuracy of a Henry
Adams — plus colors of style and occasional
sentences that send up little red and yellow
balloons."
$4.00
From the collection of the
n
•n «r m
o Prelinger
library
San Francisco, California
2006
TTEN
FRONTIER
DREISER AND THE LAND OF THE FREE
DUDLEY
YORK • 1932
HARRISON SMITH AND ROBERT HAAS
COPYRIGHT, 1932, BY DOROTHY DUDLEY
FIRST PRINTED, 1932
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Oh, the moon - light's fair to-night a -long the Wa-bash, From the
9 P I
fields there comes the breath of new mown hay.
Thro' the
P Y "0 P "'IT J =
- mores the can - die lights are gleam - Ing,
On the
banks of the Wa - bash, far a - way
The Banks of the Wabash — Paul Dresser
It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been
more wonderful to lose it.
Mark Twain writing to a friend
years ago today Columbus discovered America. What
made him do it. Except for Columbus I wouldn't have been
born in Illinois or Kansas.
Edgar Lee Masters talking to a friend
One is hounded by the thought that as with individuals so
with nations; some are born fools, live fools, and die fools.
And may not America perchance be one such?
One hopes not.
But —
Theodore Dreiser: " Hey-Rub-A-Dub-Dub "
PREFACE
The more specific the detail the more accurate the im-
mensity it projects.
In relation to the shifting parts of an undiscovered
whole the one part constantly betrays meaning.
". . . and every thing shall live whither
the river cometh" THE BOOK OF EZEKIEL
". . . / was punished like all who destroy
the past for the sake of the future"
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY
.he germ of this story had origin in a mood
of love of country that would celebrate every Ameri-
can quickened by savagery. Lacking this, people make
no monument of their country. They remain content
with provinces. Somewhat lacking this, Americans have
leaned toward being thin and shrill, since first they pushed
away the Indians, and built their own safer homesteads.
That is, until today, when, with influx of strangers, Jew
and Negro, Mongolian, Syrian, Slovak, Lithuanian, and
with pressure of machinery, we have arrived at a jungle
of our own. If we succeed in meeting it and creating out
of it a human order, or if it destroys us, depends, one
might guess, on the measure of primitive force left in us.
In the midst of a ruling tameness, or at least of a
tameness dictated by those ruling here toward the last
third of the last century, Dreiser was one of those born
outside the convention and living outside of it. His books,
made in the face of tameness, are touched with wilder-
ness — the way a sudden rain, an ice storm, April thun-
der shaking new small leaves in a city square, can strike
a dingy nerve-worn city with waywardness. With reason
people complain that not always words and syntax follow
him. He has let loose shoals of words, they say, some of
them to remain in the commonplace of 1880, 1890, 1910,
1920. Yet often detachments of them, and an electric
wiring of the structure, have found their way with him
into speech, which is drama. They create the shiver of
wilderness, the holy ghost of the realist, the wind of
reality, which like an aeroplane's whirr signals the near-
ness of its presence.
One could write of Poe, Whitman, Thoreau, Henry
James, Herman Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Henry
Adams; one could write of Stephen Crane, Sandburg,
Masters, Frost, Carnevali, Carlos Williams, Charlie
Chaplin; and of others named and nameless, if one knew
them; wherever and whenever the grace of unaccustomed
intellectual wildness, rare as radium in these States, has
descended on them.
Then there is another thing — the enterprise of
Dreiser. Enterprise of an engineer — no looking back-
wards, no regrets, except where like correctives they are
to be used in the new plans. This is tonic. It makes a
journey of inquiry for one more intimate with old worlds
than new, for one less ready than the true modern is, to
relinquish old loves until they have receded irrevocably
into distance. The speech of the past, tonal through
age, recalling ancient relations, elaborate and seasoned
through age — these I used to want back, and not in
museums, and libraries, but by some impossible alembic
distilled and then fused into American life. I could not
be on with the new for not knowing how to forget the old.
Discipline was futile. Years ago I tried to face the
oncoming scheme; I tried saying to myself: " Food, not
delectation ! Canned food, ham sandwiches, hard-boiled
eggs, soft drinks too sweet in drug stores, cup of coffee
counter-slung! Food and ice-water! . . . Clothing, not
elegance! Cloak and suit trade, ready-made novelties,
smart fashions ! Clothes, not impeccable fitting garments !
. . . Publicity, not privacy! Electric-lighted sleeping
porches, lawns, salvia, gladioli, roads and automobiles,
no doors, no fences, just vistas forever from publicity
into publicity! Not intrigue, not intimacy! . . . Radio,
victrolas, not music ! Extension, not intention ! . . . Sky-
scrapers, never arcades! Men without women, women
without anything! Segregation, not relations!
All this — new ways, new references — I wanted to
accept them; I wanted to junk the old like any other
native, to quit harking back. But the lists became lamenta-
tions. Even yet I find too little appetite for the new
worlds we are making and remaking; except indeed as in
quest of sunlight, we may at length be emerging from the
diseases generated by Christianity. Yet with machinery
we appear to be discarding a primitive color that the
Catholics carried along with them from ancient times —
a ritual that was sensual and first hand. So even this im-
provement might be another affliction.
Dreiser, on the contrary, has been one of the un-
afflicted : a modern without the doctrine of modernism. He
has been one of those engrossed in the new voyage that
science and machinery, enterprise and adventure, are tak-
ing us on. He has been swayed by the new uncharted seas,
so swiftly charted and old; he has been lured by the new
shores so heralded and perhaps never to be reached. Not
exactly dealing in terms of time and place, he has dealt in
the actual and recorded it and the lack of it, when and
where immediately it surrounded him. Without doctrine,
he is mineral and vegetable as well as human, and so has
moved ensconced in the changes. This book attempts to
follow him through to the new frontiers and to define
them in relation to the old.
People deeply in love with tone find him difficult to
read; he grates on them. Tone evolves out of intangible
relations, gaged by a scrupulous ear and eye for detail,
as the tonal message of a forest at a distance is concerned
with detail of each pine needle, each leaf. Dreiser is
without truth of language in relation to surface tone,
exactly the way that our cities and our streets and our
buildings are without it. Even today the modern sky-
scrapers have less intention of color, less accuracy of de-
tail than the unchanging fagade of a French boucherie,
or the mud village of a Pueblo Indian. Dreiser is some-
times a sprawling, sometimes a soaring block of buildings,
structural when seen as a whole; insensitive tonally when
considered close up.
He is an American high water-mark, capable of waves
that fall beyond. His story holds the story of Americans
as they appear today — big waves washing up on the
shores of history, in the years of their stupendous and
childlike success. We have deep wells, we have freshets
among writers, that have leapt higher with slenderer and
more special jets. A few are impeccable mimics, terser
poets. Artists concerned with intimacy; with the fibre of
our language, the transmutation of it into their own. But
Dreiser has been possessed by the circumference of our
life, eager to imagine it all, leaving nothing out, even
when there is only time for categories. His record more
largely than others has the taste of American waters,
by no means always agreeable — of that medium in which
float buildings, railroads, banks, soda fountains, suicides,
conquerors, murderers, joy-riders, evangelists, hypocrites
— the he-men and the victims, the jokers and the fakers.
To Dreiser these men and women are congenitally hu-
man, children of nature, while to the tamer writers who
preceded him they are pious and impious puppets, and
to the meaner writers, many of them his followers, they
are toys of the satirist. Is it because where the idealist
scarcely thinks at all, and the satirist thinks with his
nerves, he is, and exotically so, one thinking organically
— brain and other vitals not divorced?
The measure of his work is the measure of himself, as
good as the best of him, as bad as the worst. His story
reflects the story of Americans — big waves washing
high on the shores of history, and washing away some of
the old orchards and farms. The bulk of this life is in him,
the uncouth rhythms of this flood, which carries in its
wake the sea-weeds of other days, and is marked by hu-
man eager points and swift metallic counterpoints. He
suggests our hugeness faceted with its many faces, me-
chanically intricate, humanly simpler. He is to this day
a challenge to writers to sacrifice themselves as com-
pletely, and more intimately if they can, to our history.
He is large more than intimate. Yet he has passages, too,
of identity with the mood, moments of penetration, when
he goes over from being the historian into being the poet.
In him our disorderly order gleams with its mysteries.
He says of himself, " The riddle remains. I have solved
nothing."
More than a generation ago he started to excavate into
American life, singly and without orders, after a while
against orders. " All my life," he says, " some one, a
critic, a publisher, a friend has always been telling me not
4
to go so far, not to talk about this or that, to stay back,
to keep still." Yet he has managed to get down to the
floods underlying dirt and rock. They well up in his pages,
and reflect lights. They create that medium in which
fluctuate the structure and the wreckage known as
America in this day of her enormous and childlike success.
2
" They brought me ambrotypes
Of the old pioneers to enlarge . . .
When giant hands from the womb of the
world
Tore the republic.
What was it in their eyes? —
That mystical pathos of drooped eyelids,
And the serene sorrow of their eyes?"
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY: MASTERS
". . . They lack the passions that make
one enjoy life . . . Crystallization is made
impossible in the United States. . . . I
cherish far greater hopes for . . . South
America." DE L' AMOUR: STENDHAL
few people say Americans are cases of
arrested development. Machinery has shot ahead of
them. Most people are still content to say, " Americans
are young, are adolescent, are children." Europeans
say this indulgently — "Give them time." Chinese say
it less indulgently. American Indians think it, though
they have long since learned not to speak. Surprisingly
one of them lately was heard to release this much of
judgment, " The white man must learn to think with his
heart.'*
Isn't it true that we have not learned to think with our
hearts or with our loins; that we have not learned to
think, and are not grown up? To conceive of grown-up
people is to conceive of the shining reciprocal fact, sex,
without which adults are still children. To think long of
anything, it is necessary to speak of it, or to celebrate it
by symbol or image. Else the thought perishes in you,
becomes dead tissue, to be carried off if possible along
6
with other waste, or to remain there to become infection
later on in life.
At the birth of our nation, the parents, who were adult
British fanatics, it is written, middle-aged people by
temperament, determined to give birth to children who
should remain as much as possible adolescent. That is,
they should cross over into maturity not for their own
sake but only to make more children. So the image became
not the man, not the woman, but the child, the pure
impossible child, undefiled by its own nature. And the men
and women lost their heroic line and became just parents,
uncles, aunts, servants for children. Then as the years
went on, these young people ungratefully seemed to want
to know more. They became aware of their human her-
itage, which of course had to do with adventures into
articulation as distinguishing them from other animals.
Having little speech among themselves, few songs or
symbols or dances, they asked for books. And they were
given books, mostly English and German books, a few
Latin and Greek books. Deciphering these they tried
diligently to find out about those distant peaks of civiliza-
tion they suspected they had not reached. They were
bright children, some of them, and with these books as
models soon began writing a few adventurous pages of
their own ; though as yet they made almost no attempt to
celebrate with paint or music. Immediately the teachers
and governesses saw with sorrow that the children were
in danger of growing up. So the records from Europe had
to be expurgated or jailed, where only the least daring
of the children were allowed to look, a few academicians
and professors. The witches and wizards and dissenters
were burned and hung for fear they might be ruth-
less artists, people of magic. And censorship set in,
until at last completely the soul was separated from
the body, color from line, taste from food, lust from
love. And no one since has quite been able to bring these
sundered parts together again. Of course very few have
tried.
But the children had to have something to do. So they
knew they were allowed to work, and they got to work.
And they knew they were allowed to invent, and they fell
7
to inventing. And they knew they were allowed to laugh,
if their jokes were " clean enough for the kiddies," * as
they came to be called; so they fell to joking. And they
became delirious with work, and delirious with inventions,
and loud with laughter, even laughed in clubs and smok-
ing-cars at things they were not supposed to know about.
" Get to work," " Get out a patent," " Stop me if youVe
heard this one," became part of the language. After a
while these children invented objects much bigger than
they were themselves — fantastic exciting objects, which
the nurses and the teachers were too feeble to understand
or to learn how to run. So finally the young people of
America were left almost to themselves, became rude to
anyone over thirty and even to each other, though still
secretly fearful of European ghosts and phantoms. And
they proceeded to put up, tear down, build higher, tumble
over, shoot along giant mechanisms, mammoth electric
toys, which have made the United States into one
vast sublime Christmas toy department throughout the
year.
Here then is the new world the artist has had before
him to record, unless he preferred to be an exile or a
mystic. As, for example, Mark Twain ran away into
worlds of nonsense, Herman Melville to the sea, Poe to
islands of his own, Henry James and Whistler, T. S. Eliot
recently, to England and France, Gertrude Stein into a
philosophy of grammar and syntax, Carl Sandburg to
The Potato Face Blind Man saying, " Tomorrow will
never catch up with yesterday because yesterday started
sooner." And many shimmering artists escaped to cir-
cuses, comic strips, music halls, where they could be in-
violate performers. So performance came to be honored
above theme in this country. Only a few, a very few, have
dared to be lonely enough to stay by their theme.
In the meantime while the young people worked and
invented and joked, sometimes they would talk with the
peddlers grown-up people turned away from the door.
Children always find a way to talk with peddlers. So they
had fun with Italians and Jews — wops and sheenies as
* As real an artist as Ring Lardner once used this phrase to describe
to a producer the kind of show he would like to make for Broadway.
8
they learned to call them. And they showed them what
they were making, and the Jews especially out of the dust
of the many roads that had led them further and further
from their ancient mountain said, " Nice, nice, lend us
these things and we will sell them for you." So money
set in as never before, and was deified. And finance be-
came a ritual so intricate and tangled that many of the
young workers and inventors themselves were unable to
cope with it, and its secrets went into the hands of a few.
And sometimes the children talked with the servants
— children may always do that — and among others they
had fun with the Negroes. And the eyes of these dark
people were dazzled by the shine and speed of the things
the white children were making. And they said, " Give us
some of this shine for our songs and dances, and we will
teach you how to dance, and we will tell you our jokes."
So entertainment began. And everything went wildly well
— more money, more toys, more music, more money.
Never was there so untrammeled a racket. And indeed it
should continue to go as well, unless by chance, before
ever these young people have time to grow up, they grow
old and nervous trying to take care of this giant toy
civilization — the United States of America — which
today goes agreeably shrieking and blaring and reeling
and plundering and killing for more, more, more 1
If you say this is not true, is not still happening, read
then as official evidence President Hoover and his com-
mittee of American business leaders in their report on
Recent Economic Changes, published in May, 1929:
"The survey has proved conclusively . . . that wants
are almost insatiable. . . . The conclusion is that eco-
nomically we have a boundless field before us; that there
are new wants which will make way endlessly for newer
wants, as fast as they are satisfied."
So, completely the market gospel, speed and change, sales
and produce, appears to spangle the banner, cash in place
of the archaic stars. What chance yet for people who
would think with their hearts and follow the wild deep
wants of the heart ? Just a ghost of a far-off chance, maybe,
where the headlong committee slightly falters, qualifying
" insatiable " with " almost " !
" Old prejudices must always fall, and life
must always change ." DREISER
.gainst this background of want and change,
still clogged with European ghosts, in the early years
of this race of the new away from the old, of the young
away from the elders, of the raw away from the mellow,
Dreiser was one of the new-born. In a youthful coun-
try as elsewhere there are strong and weak children,
adrift in the argument of the few with the many as to
which are weak and which are strong. And there are
always, fixed in the tradition, the good and the bad —
those who somewhat conform to, and those who nearly
reject the ways of their parents. So it happens there are
the good and the bad strong children, to be praised and
denounced in accordance with the shifting conventions of
the years.
There are the Rockefellers and the Garys and the
Hearsts, some of them paying great fines of universities
and libraries and good works to appease their Victorian
parentage; some of them not even taking the trouble to
do this. There is Henry Ford, who in his strength can
junk millions of dollars of machinery in favor of abler
machinery, and in his arrested virtue preaches the old-
fashioned dances, and fills museums with the hoop skirts
of presidents' wives and their attendant psychology.
There is Thomas Edison in one and the same interview
seeking to suggest the chemical physical nature of im-
mortality and recommending Evangeline as his favorite
poem. These are the daring, cautious, yes-you-can, no-
you-can't Americans. These are the virtuous children,
who have opened doors on extravagant playgrounds,
where already grandchildren and their hoodlum friends
have forgotten that this country ever had a complacent
10
Yankee past, and have scarcely heard of a Cavalier Vir-
ginian past. Yet they have been careful always to observe
the signs put up by their elders in each new playground,
" These are new playgrounds, but you are Americans,
and you must be true to the past. You must not have any
fun here. No fun allowed here." And some of the young
bandits have been vicariously careful, too; they have paid
their fines in support of the churches and the various pro-
hibitions — no wine, no lust, no beauty, no fun.
Dreiser, one of these pioneers, was born to fit neither
the good nor the bad tradition. He was born nearly un-
conditioned by the past. If conditioned at all, it was more
by the decrees of the moment, by the American scene.
And if today conditioned, what prejudices have grown
into him, what unconscious native color has stained his
intellect? The story of this is the psychic story of recent
years. A man as highly conscious as Dreiser, and at the
same time as interlocked with the world about him, be-
comes a cylinder, a record not only of himself but of the
world about him. Yet, too, untouched by influences, he
has sometimes made his way into solitudes. It is this
nearly unconditioned quality of mind, which is live intel-
lect, and rare the world over, which is Dreiser's pioneer-
ing gift to this country.
He saw the signs put up by the guardians in the new
playgrounds. He could read them. But he saw also that
the children were practicing fun in spite of them, and
were almost forgetting the penalty — hell-fire. They
were at any rate lying, stealing, fornicating, and making
money; shrieking, laughing and destroying, which is fun
for children. And, he wondered, why not, if they knew
how, or if they didn't, if they were even awkward about
it, if they had to go to prison for it, or even be exe-
cuted for it? Why not if their new lawlessness was
stronger than the old law? Then it became fact. Then it
was interesting. Then it became law. Watch everything
in this shifting, changing United States, listen to every-
thing; make out what you can, what you have time for;
you won't make out much in the hurry. Forget the parents
and aunts and uncles, unless they still live and won't die
in the new child, unless perhaps they are younger than
ii
their own time, or possibly timeless — small chance of
that! Forget these people as such; keep the old photo-
graphs, give them a tear or a smile or even a caress, put
them away in a drawer or in storage. But don't confuse
them with the new, with the moment as you see it, which
is sure to be different, to be old tomorrow. Put things and
people down as you see them, hear them, feel them. Re-
member the new teachers science and change, science that
made machinery, change that makes hurry. That way you
will pass with high marks.
So this German-Slav from Terre Haute was to be one
to live through this period of transition from the States
into America, from British puritanism into material pa-
ganism ; to live through it and remain part of it. He is at
best both playwright and play; at worst, at least the
play, that is, American. If we take it from Barbereau, a
philosopher cited by Baudelaire as of his own mind:
'The great poets, the philosophers, the prophets, are
beings, who by the free and pure exercise of the will, ar-
rive at a state where they are at the same time cause and
effect, subject and object, magnetizer and somnambulist."
At times Dreiser fills the order. He is then both native
and stranger. He said one day, " Sometimes I see myself
as a hoop in an arc reaching over from one phase of
existence into another. What seemed unthinkable when I
was young is a commonplace now."
Who are some of the other hoops in this arc of articu-
late Americans? Where did they start?
12
To understand! It is — not to die!
You will be in the circle of joy forever"
AUGUSTE RODIN
Jin 1871 Dreiser was born in the Middle West,
in Indiana. In 1842 and 1857, Ambrose Bierce and
Clarence Darrow in Ohio. In 1833 Robert Ingersoll
and in 1843 Henry James in New York. In 1834 and
1830 and 1836 and 1838 Whistler, Emily Dickinson,
Winslow Homer, and Henry Adams in New England.
In 1835 Mark Twain in Missouri. Three years before
Dreiser, Edwin Robinson in Maine; a year before,
Frank Norris in Chicago; and in the same year Stephen
Crane in New Jersey. A few years before, Edgar Lee
Masters, and a few years after Carl Sandburg, Vachel
Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson were born in the Middle
West; Robert Frost in California; and Gertrude Stein in
Pennsylvania. Out of an overlapping background not far
behind, came Poe from Massachusetts, Lincoln from
Kentucky in 1809, Thoreau from New York in 1817, and
Melville and Whitman from New York and New Eng-
land in 1819. These are some of the people who have
taken something American through and over from a
previous era into one that is not yet characterized; and,
for all we know, what with wars to come, and free speech
again suspect, may never be deeply characterized before
the next change comes. A random list, you will say, and
one to disturb some of those listed, so that if dead they
might turn in their graves; if living, they might claim
damage to find themselves in each other's company even
for the space of a brief paragraph. It is true these names
are not closely related to one another. Some of them
scarcely touch each other in what they would ask to
stand for. Some stand for rudeness more than refinement,
13
some for document more than tone, some for drama more
than analysis, some for behavior more than philosophy.
And then besides, it is the American way, people bear rela-
tion to things and events more than they do to people.
These, as I see it, bear relation to that flood of change in
the United States, indeed in the Western World, that
has carried us away from the prophet to the scientist;
away from the hand to the machine; from goods to
money, from quality to quantity, from the fixed to the
shifting. They are cited here as bearing relation not to
one another but to a century of terrific transition. Some
of them have been causes or tools or symptoms of change,
at the same time standing out against it to crystallize
and arrest it in art. Others more simply have stood in the
face of it as you might in a storm, not celebrating it or
ignoring it. All have won because they have dealt in mo-
ments of their work with essential quality. They have been
electric people. They are not old-fashioned people.
5
The widest of our valleys
T
JLhe Prairie, the Middle West — if you go
by in a train or in a car, and you have never lived there,
you might say in winter, "Bleak monotonous country!
I don't care how many millions it is said to feed,"
or in summer, " Too flat, too green, too dusty, and
certainly trivial! Why don't they go through in the
night? " But if you have lived there, that is, known
people you have loved there, it is disturbing as you jog
through on a train or glide through in a car. Then the
checkered quilted plains, gold, black, indigo and green,
each sow with litter of pigs, each cow, each running horse,
each roost fluttering with white hens, the hedge rows and
the windbreaks, the foolish little houses beside the wise
red barns and concrete silos, the lilac bushes and wild
grape vines — these few visible creatures breathing or
inanimate, that play with and slightly break the flatness,
bring to memory a series of detailed patterns that used
to emerge from the flatness for you, and return into it.
You remember in winter long walks you have taken even
alone that seemed lonely and yet not lonely, over frozen
roads between frozen fields, where there was peremptory
and solemn order of the fields between the windbreaks,
put away by dogged patient arms for the three months of
ice and snow. And although you knew not a friend for
miles to speak with, hardly a face even in a farm house
window — the people seemed put away too — yet be-
cause of this peremptory and solemn order, a single man,
a single dark figure, fringe of coat and trousers velvety
with wear, going from his back door to the barnyard to
feed the pigs, followed by his collie, appeared to move
like a cipher of the race of men. And the sun, sharp
sphere of fire in the west would challenge the eye, until
15
looking into it and into that alone, you began to worship
not sunlight but the disc itself, which changed to orange
and then rose, as reaching the horizon it leaned for mo-
ments on the snow, and then leaving, chilled and deso-
lated near and far. That is, single facts like these, the
man, the sun, or a tree full of white leghorns were ecstatic
strokes on a clean canvas. They had to count for you.
You took them or nothing in a country where there was
nothing else to take. And years afterwards a memory of
force and of economy persisted. The prairie laid away
for winter — the railroad tracks carrying people from
dirty raw cities east or west to more elaborate landscape
— the little towns with today the bank, the drug store,
the ice-cream parlors and movie houses, with before the
general store and saloons, the few factories along the
rivers, the school house and the churches — not much
else to show, and all too light to disturb the sleeping
prairie.
Or memory is tapped back to April on the prairie, to
summer months and to the hazy opulent and nearly putrid
autumns, so much has grown to decay from lack of hands
to harvest. And the triple patterns of these seasons have
many planes both intersecting and never meeting, which
except for the birds and the clouds almost secretly con-
tradict the flatness — so close to earth they seem. Not
much of it is human; it is from spring to fall a parade
which human hands help to make, but not their hearts to
celebrate. People are stage-hands here on the prairie,
have been since first they got settled here. Sometimes they
make a rhythmic part of the scenery — rhythm of plow-
ing, harrowing, sowing, cultivating, mowing, picking,
harvesting, feeding, loading, unloading in railway sta-
tions, once by hand and horse, now by hand and machine.
But the big parts in the play are not taken by people. The
parts are taken by frogs and leaves, puddles, moons,
thunder in the first days of spring; and later by the storm
of petals, magenta to white, that fruit trees throw around
each triplicate of farm-house, barn, and silo; by the cob-
webbed dew on lawns before breakfast time in May, by
the feverish tearing of dandelions over pasture and lawn;
by hollyhock, dahlias, trumpet-vine, pumpkins; and all
16
the blights, that play the part of villains to prairie fruit
and vegetables. These gardens dating back eighty years
and more to the days of our wars, Mexican and Civil
wars, make drama through the summers more than peo-
ple do.
Then the fields, musical successions, theme on theme,
chord on chord. Crescendo of waving surfaces, emana-
tions of bronze and gold dust into white noon air, green
festoons of corn rows palpably ascending from earth to
blue air — the fields with eyes and flanks of goddesses,
large, lazy, shining, served by the hands of farmers, to
keep them forever fertile, ready, young. These are both
actors and drama, these make the fabulous ballets of
this land.
Or to put it this way: Those who can't live without
play of life to look at, have to find it on the Prairie in
classic drama of the fields, in romance of gardens; in
chamber music of birds, satire and burlesque going on
in insect worlds — tiny red bugs under hedges, spiders,
locusts, fireflies, the few ethereal butterflies; or orgies in
the world of reptiles and weeds — toads, garter snakes,
mullen, burdock, milkweed.
Why should the people take parts, or except for a few
of them be even hungry audience? The young, the daring
young, are not going to stay here. The fathers are not
going to have their help for long. They are going away
to " get on." The mothers for years have been telling
their favorite sons to study hard, and some day they will
be something in the great world. They will succeed; they
will " get on." The mothers feed the sons to the city. The
daughters jealously follow.
Of course in the shelter of little woods, or lost between
corn rows or up in the choir lofts of churches, or in some
darkened back room when the rest of the folks have gone
off for the day, there have been doings and plenty of them
in the century of pioneer prairie life — adultery, incest,
perversions, and occasional murder and dark disposal of
the bodies. And when these are brought to light and rest
perhaps for months in the undertaker's morgue, which is
apt to be also the furniture store for davenports and ice-
boxes and baby carriages, then the village gathers itself
into a little morbid knot of drama, and yields intensive
long-faced chatter, a sympathetic suicide, another murder
or two. But for the most, all vile and all delightful lechery
rests beneath the surface. Even today when in summer
months high-school lust fulfills itself, in closed sedans
along the roads between the radio and ice-cream parlors,
these pleasures are suppressed, don't get into village
chronicles. Nothing goes into speech; nearly everything
warped by silence is tolerated. Only when some young
high-school teacher begins candidly to mention evolution,
sex-hygiene, or comparative theology, does a cry escape
the elders. Then the teacher must pack his trunk and look
for another job.
Is it any wonder then that those born to speak out,
brilliant with the minerals of this soil, must leave the
small town? Only a genius for cryptograms and elusions
could quell loneliness with fulfillment in these unrelated
provinces. Carl Sandburg in Illinois has been doing this,
changing open secrets over into poems. Robert Frost in
the narrower valleys of New Hampshire has refined and
subtilized a set of ciphers that have movements of
watches to tell infinite time with. Emily Dickinson, a
woman, in Amherst in the sixties, Edwin Arlington
Robinson in New York, the greatest of our villages in
the nineties, have used this gift to lodge the theme in
word masks. Dreiser has none of this magic, has had to
manage without it, has not the narrow gift of language.
He is wilfully explicit; implicit, when he is, in spite of
himself, and by virtue of bringing into life a world so
actual that it in turn has implications of its own beyond
his control.
18
" Many good men come from Indiana;
the better they are the quicker they come"
GEORGE ADE
T
JLheodore Dreiser in 1871 was born in this
luxurious inhuman cradle, The Middle West; in Terre
Haute, Indiana, one of whose sons, as quoted above,
makes a dogmatic but famous axiom about men and
Hoosiers. Dreiser was born on the 2yth of August at
8.30 in the morning, the eleventh of thirteen children.
Terre Haute was well to the south in Indiana, and so
was a birthplace tinged with the warmer, lazier, more
indolent South of the United States. And this flavor of
the South spreading north in Indiana, he says, never met
the resistance that it met spreading north in other states.
The settlers of Indiana, though they were many of them
children of New England, were not like the settlers of
northern Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin — so often stub-
born and complacent, genitally warped, intellectually cal-
loused. Somehow the gentler people, he maintains, the
dreamier more whimsical men and women stopped here.
Perhaps they stopped in accordance with the grand old
saying of pioneer life as it travelled from east to west,
" The cowards never started and the weak ones fell by
the way." Perhaps they were the weak. Dreiser has de-
scribed them caressingly, with a moving almost tearful
voice, which has affected me the way delicate greenish
plants embodying life have affected me — those plants
strong and yet leisurely to grow with long idle stems
out of shadowy swamp: "Indiana is different among
Western States, just as people will tell you Connec-
ticut is different from other New England States. It is
a State apart. Anything could happen there. The people
are credulous, they like to believe anything, preposterous
things. You can't call them tolerant, they don't think in
19
terms of intolerance; they are just softer, dreamier peo-
ple. . . . Like life in warm bottom lands, deposits of
ancient rivers. Many of them failures, don't you know,
the kind that make good mediums and fortune tellers.
The successful people can't tell fortunes, they build walls
around themselves in order to succeed. They haven't
much imagination about the next man. ... A criminal
of the worst kind, or a charlatan can get away with it in
Indiana. The more irrational the story, the easier to get
these people to believe it. ... There's something fer-
tile, solacing in a way, about the place."
To bear him out were his own father and mother, who
believed in signs and auguries. When he was born, they
told him, an apparition of three graces attended her la-
bors. A few evenings before her marriage she saw thir-
teen will-o'-the-wisps dancing over a bog before her
house; they predicted the number of her children. After
the birth of the third child, and her rebellious wish one
night to be young and free again, three lights appearing
in the meadow and abruptly vanishing signified that her
wish would come true. Not long after the three children
died. Then she prayed to God that if only he would grant
her more babies, she would never be a rebel again; she
would dedicate her life to them. This she did to five sons
and five daughters. . . . Dreiser himself has carried
away from this credulous land a leaning toward the
regions of the occult. It deeply colors his realism. He is
willing to believe nothing and ready to believe anything.
Other gifted Hoosiers, though none so vigorous and
smouldering as Dreiser, none so eager to carry the bur-
dens of the whole country by recording them, are in them-
selves testimony to this mood of Indiana. James Whit-
comb Riley and Lew Wallace come logically from a
cradle of superstition and dreamy romance. George Ade,
Eugene Field, Booth Tarkington, Dreiser's own brother
Paul Dresser, John T. McCutcheon, seem like men who
would be at ease with fortune-tellers or story-tellers or
magicians or vaudeville sopranos or lion-tamers — with
any of those more irregular, informal, looser products of
the race. They can hypnotize and seduce lightly, and
believe in airy hypnotism and light seduction.
20
Inescapable cradles
nn
he human embryo living the life of creation
over from the moment of the first cell to the moment
of the complete child, knows how to unfold without help
from the outside. The American because of cleavage
from the parent has been forced to unfold in this same
way in going from the child to the man — without help
from the outside. And the Westerner, the Middle West-
erner, more than any other, has had to learn the lesson
of civilization over step by step or not at all, almost
without help from the outside. In doing this the embryo
has the advantage, repeating always an innate lesson
of the ages. Civilization is no such racial habit and still
requires teachers. And we threw away the teachers as
dangerous or exotic or out of key. So the American from
the point of view of human subtleties has developed grop-
ingly or sometimes with a rush, skipping essential steps.
He has been like an embryo who might forget to emerge
with eyelashes or with all five fingers on each hand, or
with the sense of three dimensions. Yet, to compensate,
he might have piercing eyesight, four grasping fingers
and a linear drive beyond all ancient calculations. In any
event he has been that United States fruit of heroism,
the self-made man. To begin at the bottom and work
up all in a brief lifetime — this together with a stifling
set of inhibitions and taboos preserved from the past,
has been the boasted inheritance of each American child.
And the phrase, " Get on, get on, push on," is scratched
deep, swift and sprawling in the various lingos of our
language.
Dreiser is a giant of this form of growth, one of the
self-made titans. Yet unlike many of them he appears to
himself a seed out of fertile soil, rich sediment, dramatic
21
with rocky deposit. He has faith in his beginning as in
himself. Out of it, as he tells of it, might logically develop
a fluid spirit shot with flame — a solitary temper, native
and yet new to the United States. He is a massive fluid
man, an intellect personifying the modern doctrine of
nature : Nothing fixed, even the rocks, even iron and steel
in a state of flux. He is possibly a prophecy of what may
yet be the American compensation — the gift of being
large and flexible evolving out of what was apparently
formless and vauntingly untraditional.
Here I am taking his word for it, from what he has
written and told of parents and childhood. His father
was born in Mayen, Germany, a small Catholic walled
town set among hills at the juncture of the Rhine and
the Moselle. Though escaping into Alsace, and then to
America, when a young man, in order to avoid being
drafted into the Prussian army, which had seized this
hamlet, only a few years before belonging to France, he
retained always a mediaeval nature. His mind was like
an ancient hamlet encircled by German Catholic walls
and hills. There must be something of the protestant in
every German as in every Anglo-Saxon. The Latin Catho-
lic reconciles the drama of church with ancient delights.
The confessional allows him to do this. The German
Catholic asks for no other fire or excitement than that
which may come out of Catholic lore and ritual. He is a
violent protestant against outside delights. He is in-
tensely, darkly Catholic and so is ready when he breaks
away to be as intense a Lutheran, or as intense a free
thinker. So Dreiser describes his father, who in no matter
what small village of Indiana, or in Chicago in his last
days, was a man filled with the lurid shapes of the Ger-
man Catholic night. With the unreal world of saints and
devils as the one reality he fought to surround his ten un-
willing children. Only one of them entirely succumbed,
Dreiser says, though for years each one lived in the
shadow of this volcano — the Church. The destructive
lava of it perhaps first printed in Dreiser his enormous
sense of doom.
His mother was an opposite temperament — Pennsyl-
vania-Dutch, that is Moravian, a Slavic race. Her people
22
were Mennonites — a faith refusing oaths, civic offices,
support of the State in war, and buttons and buttonholes,
hooks and eyes — everything must be tied. Largeness of
spirit, mobility might easily have been a gift from her.
She was, according to Dreiser, large, mobile, fertile. She
lives in his story of his childhood, A Hoosier Holiday,
like an embodiment for him of the soil of Indiana, just
as early people have imagined for themselves presiding
spirits of the groves and fields and mountains where they
lived, and have made shrines for these spirits. " An open,
uneducated, wondering, dreamy mind," he describes her,
" none of the customary conscious principles with which
so many conventional souls are afflicted." " A pagan," " a
poet," " great-hearted," who was " taken over into the
Catholic Church at marriage, because she loved a Catho-
lic and would follow love anywhere." She was imbued
with " the trees and the flowers and the clouds and the
sound of the wind "; with " fables and fairies and half
believed in them, and once saw the Virgin Mary standing
in our garden . . . blue robes, crown and all, and was
sure it was she! "; she liked " the ne'er do well a little
better than those staid favorites of society who keep
laws," and would laugh and cry with them. . . .
One night I heard Dreiser speaking of his mother. It
was a New York night on the East Side, cold as knives.
Frost-pictures on the plate-glass window panes were
fabulous etchings. Pine-clad precipices, deities above the
clouds, armies in conflict, cities on fire, bridges crowded
with people intoxicated for that night the passerby. Satin
quilts, pink, gold, scarlet, peacock blue, hung under white
store lights, to be bought, one knew, for the double beds
of tenements beside elevated tracks. Every block or so
men and boys were warming nervous hands at street bon-
fires, on to one of which a red-bearded Jew flung an old
mattress carried from some room above with a laugh and
a kind of cry, " Now will we have fire," and an invitation
to us to come and get warm. Glass, satin, lights and the
gestures of people sharpened senses and memory through
Sicilian, Syrian, Judean, Chinese streets. The mind made
distant analogies, skipped time and space to a variety
23
of scenes and legends. Under the oblong spangles of
Chinese chandeliers at the oblong table, it was easy to go
sharply here and there — Greek poets, Egyptian gods,
French women, Inca ornaments, and whatever one spoke
of to seem to find details and their essence. He described
Indiana, took it away from the map, put it into fable,
spoke of his beginning, the poverty of it and the luxuries.
He said of his mother a thing which, if parents could find
its secret, would mean more to them than much of the
learned advice that educators give at parents' meetings :
" She made our house seem to us like fairyland. . . . We
used to complain of her sometimes, and yet none of us,
not even those who were grown-up, could stay away from
her long. We were always coming back — she was potent
and alive."
Real fairy stories don't lie as to the horror and coarse-
ness of life. Only the faint and too sweet expurgated
echoes of fairy stories for modern children suppress the
truth in the optimist's ever-rising tone of voice. So I
imagine this fairyland did not lie to him. This first home,
changing from house to house, five different houses in
Terre Haute, one in Sullivan, one in Evansville, two in
Warsaw did not hide dark shapes from him. Surrounding
him were dragons and giants and their victims. His
family had to accept them. There was the Catholic Church
and the father under the spell of it. There was failure
after success for the father, and the dream of a woolen
mill which should some day be his, gone up in flames.
There were debts and not enough clothes, not enough
food, and the father under the spell of this misery. The
mother not subdued, but worn, tortured, by facing it, by
working out in other people's houses or washing for them
at home — work that countless women set out to do, but
she was meant to shine, and did, according to his legend,
shine in spite of it.
" Was she beautiful? " — "I don't know if she was
beautiful," Dreiser said. u She was plump, not very tall.
I remember one summer day in Terre Haute, I was play-
ing in our yard and I saw her from a little distance. She
was cooking in a kind of shed near the house, making
jelly, I think. I thought, ' My mother is very beautiful I ' "
24
" Was she really so alive, so ' pagan,' as you call her?
Was your father enough for her then, or did she find
others? " — " She did if she wanted to, I'm certain of
that. She had a way of doing what she wanted to do
without disturbing the rest of us. But I was too young,
I don't know about that." — " Well, maybe she did.
Maybe your father was not your father. How do you
know?" — "I don't know, but there is an access of
gloom, a brooding in me over long periods, so like him
that I feel a close relationship."
His answers to these questions, ready to explore re-
gions that to most people are closed precincts, testify
again to a detached intellect, that un-American gift. Even
his recent portraits of women — This Madness — dia-
betically published in the Cosmopolitan Magazine, have
something of this. They make romantic heroines of these
three ladies, come nearer than anything he has written to
what Rodin once called the cream-tart of the bourgeois
— the ideal. Yet they give you, as he goes the rounds by
way of a number of other girls and women less important
to him, an unashamed picture of himself, lonely and scat-
tered for having to know variety better than intimacy.
Out of this trait may have grown the untiring scope of
his work, and the long stretches we have to travel without
meeting intensity. Then, suddenly, to refute this, come
penetrating thrifty moments. Patience for variety, detail,
volume, and impatience to illumine with lightning, com-
bine his meaning.
D
8
Terre Haute: aura of houses and yards
reiser has made two records of Childhood,
A Hoosier Holiday, 1916, and Dawn, 1931. The first,
less literal than the second, has the advantage of be-
ing nearer to Indiana, nearer to his youth, and nearer
to a work of art. Dawn has the advantage of appear-
ing when, partly due to its author, prudery for the mo-
ment has been partially defeated. It packs away end-
less unremitting detail, some of it agreeably shocking to a
reader with the patience to uncover it. It is a breeding
place of innumerable novels, undesigned, inchoate. A
Hoosier Holiday is an annealment of these years as they
came back to him on a visit to Indiana in 1914. It is
charged with eager questioning and an air of candor, if
not with each shredded detail. To me it reveals more of
Dreiser alive and entire than does the explicit confes-
sional, Dawn, to which, notwithstanding, one is indebted
for many revealing facts.
He tells how in addition to the spectre of poverty, they
lived under a chimera of social disapproval. " We were
poor in the main, and worse yet because of certain early
errors of some of the children (how many have I com-
mitted since) ... we considered we were socially dis-
credited." After his father's failure in Terre Haute,
several of his sisters ran away to escape the tyranny at
home and had " gone to the bad," so the father said, and
gossips agreed; though later this decision was reversed,
whenever " the bad " turned into money or position. And
the favorite son, Paul, the song writer, the prince of the
family life, got into jail, " innocently," Dreiser thinks,
for having forged his father's name, and then for a time
was exiled by the father.
They lived under a cloud of poverty and disgrace. Yet
to his later mind it was like bright sun. With a mother
26
who made out of the home a fairyland, not to be respect-
able was to live in the open, and not in a stuffy room, of
now Catholic, now Puritan, now Victorian taboos and
decencies. Even at that time, life was opulent. It was a
fertile beginning, crossed by a father who could not be
pliant nor yet quite impotent, but streaked with a
mother's laughter and love. She could laugh, he told me,
at very rough, ribald stories; and, destitute as they were,
people came to her with their troubles.
Not that Dreiser's point of view has no traces of early
privation. From these times of hardship, often repeated
in later life, might date a hardness of mind, barbaric in
its indifference. Expect nothing. People owe you nothing;
you owe them nothing. Give if you like, take if you like,
there is no obligation. Vitality, strength alone counts.
The very doctrine of American finance! Then again I
have heard him say as coldly and without sentiment:
" Only beauty counts." Evidently for him beauty came to
be looked on as the ultimate cruelty, the oblivious force
from which there was no appeal, more difficult than
money, more difficult than fame! Hence his restless
searching!
Again if he has sentimentality, it is when he idealizes
the rich and worldly, as if from a distance he saw them
shining. Very nearly at moments he accepts their stand-
ards as desirable. This he does conspicuously in the case
of two heroes, Witla in The ' Genius,' and Cowperwood
in The Titan. He is large and powerful in making them,
but not quite cold enough toward them to attain always
the ruthlessness of art. At other moments he divests them
of externals, and they are naked enough, whether spirited
or pitiful. If there is ecstasy, it is concerned then with
the physical perfection of luxuries surrounding the rich.
Sometimes, as purely as a Frenchman, he loves the ma-
quillage of wealth ; and with how much less chance in the
United States, even in New York, to apprehend its ele-
gance of line and surface ! Compared to the European,
compared to the Oriental, we have been importers or
imitators. We have assembled the parts of luxury. Few of
us, millionaires less than any, have touched them with
our own experience.
27
What he saw in grown-up life, what fascinated him,
his eyes began to pick out in early years. . . . When he
went back to Terre Haute, where they lived until his
eighth year, he went back to an old red brick house, cor-
ner of Eighth and Chestnut, where his mother had once
tried keeping boarders :
" All I could recall of it ... there once was a little girl
in blue velvet, with yellow hair, the daughter of some
woman (it is a guess) of means . . . stopping with us, who
because of her blue velvet dress and her airs, seemed a
creature out of the skies. I remember standing at the head
of the stairs and looking into her room or her mother's, and
seeing a dresser loaded with silver bits and marvelling at
the excellence of such a life."
" Silver bits " on dressers run seductively in Dreiser's
brain to this moment. They recur in Dawn as symbols
of childhood glamour. Conversely another even younger
memory of Terre Haute:
" A hot day and a house with closed shutters and drawn
blinds, and in the center of a cool, still room, a woman
sitting in a loose negligee, and at her feet the child playing
with the loose worn slippers on her feet ... — ' See poor
Mama's shoes. Aren't you sorry for her? Think how hard
she has to work.' — 'Yes, poor shoes, poor Mummy.' —
' When you grow up are you going to get work and buy
poor mother a good pair? ' — ' Yes, work. Yes, I get
Mummy shoes.' — Suddenly something in the mother's
voice is too moving. Some mystic thread binding the two
operates to convey and enlarge a mood. The child bursts
into tears over the old pattens. He is gathered up close, wet-
eyed and the mother cries, too."
Again another memory to do with these contrasts and
the principal hotel, when he spent the night there thirty-
five years later:
" Here, . . . my brother Rome, at that time a seeking
boy like any of those we now saw pouring up and down
this well-lighted street . . . was in the habit of coming,
and, as my father described it, in his best suit of clothes and
his best shoes, a toothpick in his mouth, standing in the
doorway ... to give the impression he had just dined
there. . . . ' Loafers ! Idle good-for-nothings ! ' I can hear
my father exclaiming even now. Yet he was not a loafer
. . . just a hungry, thirsty, curious boy, all too eager for
the little life his limited experience would buy."
28
Of the ten children he was the fourth eldest, one of the
most interesting, Dreiser says, a railroad man, who fi-
nally died of drunkenness in a South Clark Street dive in
Chicago, about 1905. Here is instance of inordinate
faith in the high voltage of life, coupled with despair for
those too warped to be instinct with it or to let others be.
Anyone, no matter what they do or leave undone, who
insists on living is heroic to this writer — Carrie, Cowper-
wood, Clyde Griffiths, his own sisters and brothers when
they broke laws to escape suppression. Tolerance, not lazy
but electric, he offers as endowment to his country.
To the hotel in Terre Haute also his mother once in
her hardest days came to look for work and got it. And
years later his brother Paul went to a banquet there in
his honor, because of his song " On the Banks of the
Wabash," adopted as the State song. On the night of his
return, long after these three were dead, he writes, " I
thought of my mother — and Rome outside on the corner
and Paul at his sentimental banquet, and then I felt very
1 sad-like,' as we would say in Indiana."
In this way he treasures his childhood and the houses
belonging to it in " this lush Egyptian river country."
And with them his father's village, Mayen, at the junc-
ture of two rivers and two wines, Rhine and Moselle. To
have to seek to go back, by whatever threads there are, to
the roots of one's self is a patrician pastime. Communists
would call it bourgeois; nationalists would call it dis-
tinguished; Dreiser concerns himself with it.
What he records as having happened may every bit
of it have happened, or may have been selected to have
happened by later years of growth. This more likely
is the case; his two records of childhood for example
are not identical. They appear to vary according to
the separate moods of forty and of sixty years. But
both stories tell the artist's heritage, a genius for ex-
perience. He remembers distantly of Terre Haute, a
vital " seeking atmosphere." And distinctly he remembers
cellars, one where he was not allowed to go or the " Cat-
man " would get him, and even his dog was afraid to go
down there; and a basement in another house with a
swing in it, " where I used to swing all alone by the hour,
29
enjoying my own moods even at that time." He remem-
bers a watchman who whenever he passed the house had a
present for him, candy, peanuts or apples; and one day
being taken to see him, " where he was lying very still in a
little cottage in a black box with nickels on his eyes " —
and he wanted to take the nickels, too. He remembers
" old scenes and miseries " — picking coal off the tracks
with his brothers Ed and Al, because there was none at
home; losing the last fifty cents in the house, which had
been given him to go for a sack of cornmeal; carrying
dinner in a pail to his father at a woolen mill, and his
father explaining to him the functions of a carder, a
blower, a spinning jenny; of being taken at five to St. Jo-
seph's school (for which his father in prosperous days
had donated the ground) : u A nun in a flaring white bon-
net, black habit, rattling string of great beads pointed
at a blackboard with a stick and asked what certain sym-
bols stood for/' and he had trouble in giving the sounds
for the letters.
This perhaps persisted in him. His writings are acutely
conscious of situation and image, and of the atmosphere
surrounding them, but less apparently conscious of the
words. Words appear to be chosen like letters on a type-
writer under the touch system; incident, structure and
phrasing to be intentional; words to be ordered by re-
flexes, if that be possible. Yet I remember an argument
with Gertrude Stein who contended that real art was
never conscious, that the artist in creative moments was
in every sense unconscious. It may be I am attempting
impossible analysis of this novelist's style, which some-
times is an express train in the night, sometimes freight
cars shunting endlessly back and forth — both ways
notable for being of their own essence.
There was a bell in the church tower attached to the
school that would get turned over and wouldn't ring until
some boy climbed up and turned it back; to be chosen to
do this was wonderful. There was boating on boards on
a muddy pool, and once in a rowboat on the yellow
Wabash River with a brother who whipped him for
screaming when the boat rocked. There was a summer
rain storm at Twelfth and Walnut, and his mother un-
30
dressing him and telling him to run out naked — an ad-
venture which seemed " splendid and quite to my taste."
His brothers Paul and Rome seemed to him like men
when they were only boys, and his elder sisters, thirteen,
fifteen, seventeen, were " like great strong women." The
first band he ever heard marched up the streets in War-
saw, " red jackets, white straps, black Russian shakos " ;
he was frightened and cried.
Around these houses in Terre Haute is the memory
like an aura of big yards with trees, fruit trees, bushes,
gooseberries, currants and flowers. Near one of them a
lumber-yard and the smell of it; and the climbing and
hiding and jumping from pile to pile. Beyond, a train-
yard, where he used to go when most adventurous, and
once climbed into an engine and examined the machinery.
He felt around him the voices and tang of firemen, brake-
men, yardmen, engineers, the clangor of an outside world.
These are the common riches, if they know how to re-
member, of children of the old small-town America —
yards around the houses, yards beyond, leading children
away out of the family, rather than more deeply into it.
" Life," he says, u was a strange, colorful, kaleidoscopic
welter then. It has remained so ever since."
Each of these incidents is recalled with the enterprise
he gives to details of later life, or to the multiple incident
of the other lives he has invented or recreated. Dreiser
moves from minuteness to vastness, weaves and stitches
back and forth from the point to its extensions in the in-
finite. A trait of style with him. His words follow back
and forth, now swiftly, now stumbling and falling, to
keep up with him. People complain, and yet go in and
out of his books, moved and ravaged, sometimes suddenly
ravished. The balance of power is with him.
Alluvial lusters
is first years in Terre Haute had given
these few flecked threads of memory, vivid against a
background of gloom — movings from house to cheaper
house, sickness of one and another, quarrels between
mother and father for lack of means. Then, in his
eighth year, to save expenses, his mother had taken the
three youngest, Ed, Tillie and himself, to Sullivan,
twenty-five miles to the south of Terre Haute, in a wide
valley between two rivers, the White and the Wabash.
On the way they had stopped in Vincennes and visited a
friend, Sue Tinby, a wild creature, he remembers her, a
French woman, who in more prosperous days had sewed
for the family, and was married to the chief fireman of
the town. In the night once they had gone to a big fire,
and seen u their host disappear into a red glow and come
back alive." But this exciting visit in rooms over the fire-
house had to be broken off when his mother discovered
that the firemen's quarters were an improvised brothel
approved by their hostess. This, he says, brought about
" their sudden and moral departure." In spite of poverty
her children were not to be exposed to this. They had
stayed long enough however to give him a memory tran-
scribed fifty years later in words a little like Renoir paint;
" I myself, being a restless early-rising child, one morn-
ing saw one of these daughters of desire, a corn-haired
blond, her pink face buried in a curled arm, and lying
on a bed allotted to one of the firemen of the night
shift."
So they took up their bundles and went further into
this " steaming land of wheat, corn, timothy and melons,"
where towns, crossroads and streams were of French
origin or name, where autumn lasted into January, and
32
spring came early. Dreiser, driving back these years later,
felt the magic that had cradled him, " delicate, poetic,
generative." He wonders with his friend and host, Frank-
lin Booth, if the French temper had not tinged life in
these valleys. The women, he says, were plumper, the
men more solid than in the North, birds increased in
number and kind. He came again upon the u turtle doves
in beech and ash and hickory groves, the martins circling
in covies, the blue jay and scarlet tanager, wrens in the
eaves of cottages, the humming bird in the purple clema-
tis, buzzards, hawks, eagles high in air, and the black-
birds over the fields," and " could almost hear again the
pea fowls calling for rain " on Mr. Beach's opulent farm
near by. He is taken back to " three years of sensory
dreams and delights " — infancy gone, adolescence with
its " sharp inquiries " not yet entered on. Outside the
house in Sullivan had been a field of clover impeccable to
a boy's bare feet early summer mornings. He had the
luck, unknown to children brought up according to pre-
scribed regime, to get up when he liked in the first day-
light, and spend long days almost as he liked, ending in
" the after-supper grouping on the porch, the velvety
dusk descending, the bats, mosquitoes, tales of Indians
and battle chiefs, the stars, slumber. ... I can feel
my mother's hand as I lean against her knee and sleep."
Clocks were not tyrants over him, nor have ever seemed
to rule him; for which perhaps his writings lose precisions
and gain sometimes in freedom.
His mother took in washing; he and his sister carried
it back and forth. They slept at first on straw mattresses
on the floor. In winter they were cold, dismissed from
school for lack of shoes. With the money from the wash-
ing she bought enough furniture to progress to boarders
and beds. The boarders were railroad hands, traveling
peddlers, coal miners, one of whom was arrested for
murder in their house before their eyes. Their neighbors
he describes mostly as miserable people, the kind known
in the West as squatters, who quarreled and cursed
each other, or vegetated and died, often half demented
by squalor and ignorance. Twice the children assisted
at grim death beds and funerals; it was a country cus-
33
torn and their Samaritan mother's code to " help."
Among them she was loved and honored, but his sisters
were called " loose girls " and his brother Rome was wild
and roving. As a family they were shunned; once he heard
them called with the rest of their neighborhood " no
good, just trash."
Yet over and over he speaks of the sting, the mystic
luxury of life with his mother, brother and sister, and
sometimes others of the family, in their frame house in
Sullivan, painted white with roses, fruit trees, a truck
garden; a dog to run with, an elm tree to climb, great
branches to play under ; a gate to swing on ; and the Bus-
seron, where he and his brother used to fish, " a shallow
stream pooled in places, its banks sentinalled by tall trees
. . . ornamented by arrogant weeds and bushes bloom-
ing violently."
Did his mother ever tell him what he was like in these
years? Was he different from other boys? He remembers
her saying he was always listening, could dream and
listen by the hour. He remembers going a little beyond
the borders of their place, to where he could see the rail-
road yards, a turntable and a hay press, and listen end-
lessly to the switching and loading and unloading, for
the cadence of these noises. He remembers sitting by
streams and mud holes in this same hypnotic dreamy way.
He lived the life of alluvial things, felt their coming and
going.
If one were to read certain passages of this memory of
childhood, and knew nothing else of Dreiser, American
chronicler of doom, one would think of him as a boy about
to deepen into a poet, a sensualist; and one endowed to
match sensation and mood with speech equally sensitive.
One would hardly guess that finally he was to forget or
seldom realize the artist's pursuit of the physical word,
the ritual of language; in order to stalk like a scientist,
and record like a scrupulous interne, the restless human
story, the confusion of footsteps and voices, the wild
welter of symptoms. In these young years, in a land where
human beings were scarcely more than stage-hands, where
animals, plants and minerals took the big parts, a child
in love with living, he chose the lustier phases of it. If
34
one extricates them from their explicit network, names
identifying the land recur rhythmically in his records of
childhood. They become images :
" Warm bottom lands — ancient rivers — warm sudden
rains — quick heavy rains — green fog — round healthy
trees — fat river land — smooth green grass — wonders
and dreams — low alluvial soil — roundness of flesh and
body — stillness of the woods — steely blue and gauze of
wing — black and white silvery fish — dark wet silvery
cat-fish lovely and lustrous as porcelain — distant low of
cows — grunt of pigs ; deep-bodied green painted wagons
hauling melons — long hot yellow roads — boys and their
hungry restless ways; fat sheep — dams and rams —
astonishing hogs — sleek rolling animals; sting of life de-
liriously gay — tingle and response of a new body; bloom
and fragrance of the clover — mystery of flying."
He was a child obsessed with the luster of earth, care-
less of men and women, unless like his mother or the
French seamstress or the chief fireman, they too were
lustrous. The blighted people and things, " crazy Bowles, "
an ex-army man who used to come to their well for water,
dancing and muttering; Mrs. Hudson, a neighbor whom
they thought of as a witch; the disheveled butcher,
Spilky, " avid " to kill and sell, and his slaughter house
not far away, with " its yard of whitening bones " ; Tish
Herndon, called a bad woman, who drank and was in
love with her father; his own father who would come
" brooding from Terre Haute," and talk of hell more
than Heaven — these figures had not seemed to dominate
him. They are remembered more as one would the under
side of logs, degradations rather than the lighted facets.
Other life transcended them in the shape of dogs he
played with, birds he envied, a comet that appeared
at this date in summer skies, lizards and gophers.
. . . Years later many human failures are to occupy
him, and he relegates to an almost sinister background
the physical world surrounding them. This he has done
imperiously in An American Tragedy, where the gor-
geous earth turns a sickening grimace on the mimes and
actors.
A poem in Spoon River defines this change. A letter
from Masters in 1915 tells him: " I have you picked in
my Anthology as Theodore the Poet " :
35
" As a boy, Theodore, you sat for long hours
On the shore of the turbid Spoon
With deep-set eye staring at the door of the crawfish's
burrow,
Waiting for him to appear, pushing ahead,
But later your vision watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
10
" She must, like the man, marry ma-
chinery." HENRY ADAMS
et, if we believe Dreiser's picture of him-
self, it was not until long after he had left these villages
at the age of sixteen, and, like so many other sons
and daughters of farmers and mechanics, had begun to
wander from city to city in search of money, which could
alone mean power, that the human drama was to enter
in as a wedge, and finally become the first obsession.
Then, non-human nature, when kind, became scenery,
when cruel, a destructive force, as it is for most Ameri-
cans. That is, we have not made a marriage with our
portion of earth in the United States, in the way that
each European country, France above all, has reveled in
making, even in the cities ; in the way that the Indians be-
fore us succeeded in making, no matter how hostile their
mountains or deserts or glacial lands. In this Dreiser be-
came true to type, but with one innovation. Actively he
has refused the religions, catholic, protestant, liberal, on
the ground that they betray human nature, that is, sexual
nature and the wholeness of living. He has refused too
as insufficient the various compensations society offers and
religion permits in their struggle to curtail the inheritance
of nature. In this he has not been faithless to the teaching
of his senses in Indiana childhood.
Compensation through money and power, for example,
has been accepted as an American way of life. Money can
do anything, power anything. By a kind of hypnotic
magic, skyscrapers, giant dollar signs, numerous enough
now for one to stand for at least each rich man, have
become unintentional symbols of the American man —
erections rigid in air, in emptiness, in contact with nothing
fertile. And today almost consciously they cater to his
37
sense of completion. So he may appear to disdain sex in
human form, no need of men even, or of turning in upon
himself, by this holding of himself like a high building
forever potent, fixedly erect. If he gives way, if he yields,
if he forgets this posture of sublimed rigidity — except
on a Saturday night, or on occasional trips to Paris or
Havana, " Oh boy! " — then all is up. He may as well
consider himself done for, a failure, take his money off
to Europe, where there are paid attendants to voluptu-
aries, or look around for the nearest home for the in-
digent. Or for the rare and more powerful few, there
is, unintentionally yet actually, a transcendent symbol,
the wheel, the turbine, the impeccable power plant, in
contemplation of which the industrial giant feels himself
identical with planetary force, with the physical solar
concept of wholeness. Beyond these there is the fast
train hurling from coast to coast, the perfected and
lascivious elevator to the sixtieth story and down, the
one-man airplane to cater vicariously to the sense of
mastery.
And for women what has there been, what compensa-
tions, wrenched from and permitted by society and reli-
gion? Compensations less native, though possibly more
seductive than those discovered by men. No arcades, few
arches, to stand beside the indisputable towers as vicari-
ous emblems of their nature; few canopies, few fringed
or ruffled curtains in window or doorway; or if there
were, almost unfrequented by men. Women long have sat
together in the first cool, then cold shadow of their sex,
becoming clubwomen or intimates or lonely women. Or
they have compensated these three hundred years, when
rich, with importations — imported clothes, imported
houses, imported jewels, imported art, imported men.
When poorer, with romantic magazines, soft drinks and
candies. When very poor like Dreiser's family, they have
remained uncounted, and like the unknown soldier have
become, some of them, the unknown saviors.
If this grotesque picture of a house divided against
nature and practicing every subterfuge to simulate union
is not as true of the United States as it once was, Dreiser
in his refusal to celebrate the substitute for the real, in
38
his sense of people as primitive beings before they be-
come social puppets, is one of the first natives to correct
it. He is a liberating factor as far back as 1900, and per-
haps almost as potent as the automobile, the beauty par-
lor, or bootlegging, which unconsciously have followed in
his steps.
Two aspects interest Dreiser — grace which is bloom,
and the falling away from grace, which is withering. As
a child the first more than the second; as a grown man
the second chiefly. Yet even then the fallen are not pic-
tured as fallen until there is nothing else to say for them,
and then without censure. The murderer, the thief, the
drunkard, the glutton, the lecher, still denote the grace
of life, still display what he calls their u high blood
moods," until society in mask of religion has finally pulled
them down and drained them to the last drop of sap;
either jealously to confiscate it, or to use it to replenish
their own reduced vitality. To victims like Hurstwood,
Clyde Griffiths, Isadore in The Hand of the Potter,
Dreiser is true; he never deserts them. Such loyalty brings
tears to readers, and should bring compassion, which is
sunlight.
39
11
Venus on the Ohio and Catholic Evansville
.ouses, surroundings, individuals, ancestry,
countries — what relation have any of these to the
other? Much or little? Not knowing, we have to say
much, or else not count values at all. Three difficult years
in Sullivan, for all she could do, brought the mother
near despair. And then one winter afternoon, the minstrel
brother, the one so tenderly thought of by other Hoosiers
for giving them their song of gleaming candle lights, the
fatted prodigal son with the sweet almost untroubled
face, laughter and beauty of features, came with money
and put an end for a time to their hard days. He came
out of a snowstorm in a fur coat and high silk hat, with
three years of adventures to tell them since last they had
seen him. Almost I think Dreiser invented him, but I hope
not. Disowned by his father, for forgery and jail, a
runaway from a Catholic school where they had hoped to
make a priest of him, he had joined a traveling troupe
which advertised Hamlin's Wizard Oil. Progressing from
show to show he was now a favorite song writer and
comedian in the West, working at the moment in Evans-
ville, a town not far from Sullivan on the Kentucky
border. He was end-man in a black-face minstrel com-
pany, and ran a comic column in the Evansville Argus.
He went away, sending back groceries and clothes,
among them " a complete outfit " for Tillie, the youngest
sister, to accomplish her marriage to Christ, the first
communion. Paul was a good Catholic, without practice
but without challenge. Soon after there came another
visitor, his mistress, by the name of Annie Brace, the
first worldly beauty these children had looked on. In
Evansville she was Sallie Walker and kept a house of
prostitution. But his mother, Dreiser thinks, never knew
40
it, and was fond of her because she was beautiful with
" clear incisive black eyes and exaggerated whiteness of
face and hands," and appeared to really love her eldest
son. By summer these two had rented and furnished a
cottage for his mother, and under their auspices the
family moved to Evansville.
So at length they could leave their makeshift home in
Sullivan with its " seven or eight rooms, sparely and
poorly furnished," Dreiser supposes, " and yet with the
art there is in bareness and cleanliness." They went away
with mingled feelings. There had not been many friends
for these children to play with. For one thing, for which
they were happy, they had had to leave the Catholic
school, and they were not allowed to go to another. Then
he remembers himself as put upon by other boys, com-
manded to fight and he was afraid to; so he kept away as
much as he could. But to make up, there were his many
older brothers and sisters, more vital than the people
around them, coming back to visit, and the getting ready
of a room each time and the ceremony of a vase of flowers
placed in the guest room, and the tales they told of the
world outside.
It is impressive, this insistence with no matter how little
money on the making of a home, for just a year perhaps,
or two or three; his mother's courage to settle, as it is
called, as if forever, and then pull up stakes and settle
again. For Dreiser this gift of hers appears to have pro-
vided him through years of want and change, before he
resolved himself into the necessity of being a writer, with
a sense of background. Sullivan made part of it; he left
with a pang and yet elated too. Now they were going
to something better under the wing of their rich brother.
Here for a while life brightened. The chosen cottage
was in a " good neighborhood " in the center of a big,
fenced-in yard, and the new furniture included a piano.
There would be no washing now for others, and no
boarders. His mother was at ease at last; they had a
chance, she thought, to be respected. Here they lived
for two years before again they packed their trunks and
boxes and this time moved north. These are deep years
for Dreiser. They made more cavernous his hatred of the
Roman Catholic Church, his last days directly under its
influence — that Church which like a nightmare he de-
nounces hysterically to this moment as often as he can.
And they made deeper his passion for riches, riches of
earth and riches of human relations.
Since a man is made in youth, and is merely maintained
or destroyed by events that follow, these years are im-
portant in the analysis of an American fashioned out of
our isolation and our force. Dreiser is called slow and
plodding; yet he walked swiftly and a long way out of a
remote background hostile to his intelligence, sweet some-
times to his emotions. He had back of him a father who
once told him that " if a small bird were to come once
every trillion years and rub its bill on a rock as big as the
earth, the rock would be worn out before a man would see
the end of hell once he was in it. And then he would not
see the end of it, but merely the beginning." He remem-
bers his father's angry contempt when he asked if God
might not change his mind in all those years and let some-
one out.
The Catholic church and school in Evansville offered
the same tyranny. He learned nothing from them, and was
terrorized by the nuns and priests, and by the principal,
who had " black hair, black eyebrows, black beard, and
a dynamic stride sufficient to shake the earth." Here boys'
palms were crossed with red welts, ears pulled until the
victim cried, buttocks beaten with a short raw-hide whip.
These cruelties, I think, were Northern and pioneer rather
than Catholic. In fact, Dreiser's hatred of the Church
testifies to its failure when torn away from Mediterranean
sources and set down among Protestants in a Protestant
milieu. Of what avail absolution in a society ostracizing
people for their sins?
For books the school allowed only a Bible history and
a geography, though Diamond Dick or its equivalent was
read from under the desk. But he remembers finding
somewhere the Vicar of Wakefield, Anderson's Fairy
Tales, the Life of St. Francis Assisi and other secular
books; and there was a woman' magazine of his mother's
which, like so many children brought up far from the
centers, he cherished for the pictures of what must be the
42
great world. Then there was the school yard, a place of
leap frog, snap-the-whip, fights, all of which he says he
dreaded and had no prowess for. Once by mistake he laid
out his opponent and was cheered. Usually he was the
loser, and grew to be " shy and unpopular," and won-
dered why " life was so fierce."
Next to the school was the church which still blazes
in his memory with gilt altars, candles, statues, stations
of the cross, where wound the unending processions of
song, incense, banners, brocade and lace, crimson, white
and gold — work of master showmen whose road com-
panies were nearly as splendid as those in the cities. Here
a stern bishop, pale on a high throne in golden robes, he
remembers him so, anointed him and received him into
holy communion. The church was better than the school,
yet it frightened him. He talks of it thirty years after
with a shiver, as one would of evil things :
" Think of the dull functioning of dogma age after age.
How many millions have been led shunted along dogmatic
runways from the dark into the dark again. I am not rant-
ing against Catholicism alone. As much may be said of
(other religions) . . . Here they come, endless billions, and
at the gates, dogma, ignorance, vice, cruelty, seize them and
clamp this or that band about their brains, or their feet.
Then hobbled or hamstrung, they are turned loose, to think,
to grow if possible. As well ask of a eunuch to procreate or
of an ox to charge. The incentive to discover is gone."
Not strange that in 1929 a Catholic judge and jury in
Boston condemned a book of Dreiser's. Not strange that
Catholics can't enjoy this picture of a lonely child striking
out from their exacting shore toward whatever wilder
seas there are. His story repeats the figure of a man
who must leave home for the sea, prefers the freedom of
hopeless waves to the prudent lies of the shore. The
myth of him would be that of a swimmer become al-
most a fish who can't breathe for long on customary
land.
But Evansville had other phases that counteracted the
gloom of Holy Church. Fun of boys surrounded him
here, a gang of them, who liked his brother Ed and " at
least tolerated him." Whir of industries, a chair fac-
tory, a pottery and a foundry, engaged him. He liked to
43
watch and listen to what they were doing, through their
windows or at close range if invited in. His brother Al
worked in a chair factory and allowed him to help on
Saturdays, lacquering gold leaf designs on kitchen chairs.
He loved, too, the levee district of the Ohio River and the
darkies trailing over from Kentucky with song and dreams
and jokes.
In the midst of these initiations was one more myste-
rious than the rest, and more luminous. Sent once by his
mother to deliver a basket of preserves at the door of
Annie Brace, he was told that his brother would like to
see him, and then was conducted by a colored maid
through corridors to an apartment upstairs with big
windows and striped awnings on the Ohio River. Such
houses had a way of selecting, along with darkies, the
cool river banks in small towns, while the good citi-
zens fearing dampness, or was it beauty, dried to mum-
mies in the grit of their superior boulevards. At his
best as when he sets down tragedy, Dreiser describes
his first glimpse of dalliance, in " this semi-southern
world, hot and bright." Paul in light clothes, with
him " his Annie in a pink and white heavily beflounced
dressing gown, surveying me with an amused if not
very much interested eye"; the rooms — wicker, linen,
flowers, music, silver, mirrors, glass — to him a kind of
fairyland :
" But to reach this suite . . . that passage through the
house . . . several open doors. . . . Things so strange and
to me so exotically moving that I felt I must not acknowl-
edge them even to myself. . . . Segments of beds . . . odd
bits of furniture . . . tumbled bedding . . . garments
strewn about . . . and in one case a yellow-haired siren
half naked before her mirror. ... In a flash, and without
being told, a full appreciation of the utility of the male as
such had come to me ... I wished that I might stay and
see more. . . . Yet I also knew . . . that such things
were still in the dim distant future for me, if at all. But
these pink-meated sirens, however vulgar . . . wonderful
to me as forms . . ."
So his life in Evansville traced in him a triangle of his
grown mental pattern. Hatred of dogma, love of enter-
prise, faith in lust, however elementary. Surrounding
these last, not excluding them, the mysteries !
44
Paul apparently was unconcerned over this visit of an
eleven year old boy; but it seemed best to the boy to keep
what he had seen a secret, a door opened especially for
him into surprising volume. He shared it with no one, but
is sure that he valued it even at that age as news of some
center of life. It was a center news of which in his first
novel would be one of the shocks to jar the code of a
nation.
So the months passed in this town so remote and pro-
tected in a giant elbow of the Ohio River moving on its
way to a greater river, where always his own house and
yard, the streets and the river life were as agreeable to
him as the church and school were sinister. Then one day
Paul went away to New York and Broadway fame.
Without him his mother decided to try luck in Chicago
where some of the older children had gone. In the North
perhaps she would be allowed to give her three young-
est a u sensible free-school, non-Catholic education " — a
long-time dream of hers. It was their first entry into a big
city, a favorite theme in Dreiser novels. For a summer
they tried it, long enough to buy furniture on the instal-
ment plan ; long enough for Thee and Ed to learn to be
newsboys, and jump on and off of West Side cars, a
delicious early sport in the stories of many self-made
Americans. But the city was too cold and big for their
means, and the perpendicular noise of their neighbors up
and down the air shafts seemed more vulgar to his father
and mother than the wretchedness they had sometimes
overheard in Sullivan. Forfeiting their furniture, they
moved back to Indiana, but this time to Warsaw in the
north. There she would be nearer her own relatives
and nearer the few acres her father had left her when
he disowned her for marrying a Catholic. In Warsaw
they settled, and stayed there for the final years of
childhood.
And Dreiser, whose early intensities might have been
linked with the shiftless droning South, was definitely ex-
posed now to the money-making speed of the North. As
the years went on, he was to make his fight against its
Protestant meagerness and callouses, and find his joys
never entirely separate from its smug vulgarities. A few
45
hundred miles from southern border nearly to northern
would make this difference. At this age, twelve years,
he joined forces with conquering America, and though
often hated by it, and as often hating it, has never en-
tirely deserted it.
12
Protestant Warsaw
\l \i "V
w,,
arsaw was an idyllic town for a youth
of my temperament." Dreiser's picture of it in A
Hoosier Holiday is an idyll of a mid-Western town in
the eighties. He is not sentimental over it as other
Hoosiers, belonging to more acknowledged families, have
been over their small town, not bitter as Masters is with
his Spoon River. Life was pleasing to him, more than it
appears to have been to the lonely implacable Masters in
Illinois. He had loved the northwest corner of Center
and Buffalo Streets, its bookstore, oyster counter, pool
and billiard room, where met what he calls the free
masonry of generations. Here and in the post office, in
Peter's Shoe Repairing and Shine Parlor, in Moon's
and Thompson's Grocery Store, these boys ranging from
fourteen to seventeen exchanged " the little bit of money,
wit, gayety and schooling they had," which wonderfully
to him included secret talk of girls. Here he came, a
hanger-on almost as soon as they were settled in Warsaw,
almost the first night, in fact, and to his intense joy came
finally to feel himself one of a group of youths, " if not
of girls." He was " taken in." Here was Jud Morris,
hunchback son of the proprietor of the bookshop, Frank
Yaisley, brother of Dora, George Reed now a circuit
judge, Mick McConnel who died of lockjaw, Harry
Croxton, later a mining engineer who died in Mexico,
George and John Shouf, sons of the local miller and
grand-nephews of his mother, Rutger Miller, Orren Skiff.
. . . Then in Dreiser's unbiased way, he adds, " there
were still others of an older group who belonged to the
best families and somehow seemed to exchange courtesies
here " : transient evidence of how boys rebel against class
hierarchy, for depriving them of the range of life. What
47
boy u carefully " brought up has not envied the sidewalk
gang, and pulled along by nurse or parent, has not strained
back toward the dangers of it, before finally he gives in to
the vague rule of class !
Then there were the girls of the town — Augusta
Nueweiler, Maud Rutter, Ada Sanguiat who was killed
in a railroad wreck, Loretta Brown, Bertha Stillmeyer,
Dora Yaisley, so beautiful and rich and supercilious that
he used to dream about her. Their fathers were owners
of clothing, drug and drygoods stores ; one was a lumber
merchant. And there were the children of Harry Oram
who owned the wagon works and of Mr. Epstein, whose
Wool Hide and Tallow Exchange stood across from the
bookstore. Between him and the girls was always a dis-
tance. He was too shy to know them well and besides not
quite thought of as an equal by those he picked as beauti-
ful. Yet the public school, which he said was gracious to
one and all, " never binding or driving," did bring them
together, whom snobbery even in this village preferred
to separate. This is the first group of people in his life,
changing from grammar school to high school.* Perhaps
they are parents to the many others he has had vitality
to make live in his books. With them he went to his first
party, saw the girls in their best dresses, was face to face
with the shiver of that naive license permitted these chil-
dren of this period — the kissing game. The morning
after, a Saturday, he and his brother went off to a favorite
grove of ash trees to try and tell each other how wonder-
ful life had been. It is singularly Dreiser to remember
this callow indulgence and give it its distinction of young
lips and momentous blood; how soon to fade before less
vital games! His genius is to see value stripped of con-
ventional implications — value here of boys and girls
about to cross over into maturity. That few ever really
cross, or how stingily they cross before they die, makes
his refrain, that deepens into lamentation.
He defines himself at this period as :
" a dreamer . . . somewhat cowardly, but still adventur-
ous and willing to take a reasonable chance . . . enthusias-
tic about girls or beauty in the female form, and what was
* Named here as in A Hoosier Holiday.
more, about beauty in all forms, natural and otherwise.
... I tell you, in those days wonderful amazing moods
were generated in my blood. I felt and saw things which
have never come true — glories, gaieties, perfections — I
wanted, oh! I wanted all that nature can breed in her
wealth of stars and universe — and I found — what have I
found—?"
The town had rivers, the Wabash and the Tippecanoe,
and was on the main artery of the Pennsylvania railroad,
and around it were five small lakes.
They lived in two different houses. First, the Grant
house next to the school, where there was a swing and a
hammock under a pine tree. There he read Water Babies,
Westward Ho, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the
Seven Gables, Irving and Goldsmith. This was a town of
books, a town of the British classics, his first town with a
bookstore. He was coming into a heritage of books which
these Puritans allowed their children, as long as they
would think of them as classics and read none of their
own life into them. It was here in this hammock his father
found him reading The Alhambra, and said, " What is
all this trash, Dorsch? " He was old enough by then to
give the jeer of child to parent. A few days later as if to
prove himself a modern, too, the father bought the whole
set of Irving for seven dollars from a traveling book-
agent.
After a time they moved to the Thralls Mansion, red
brick, one of the first in the county, set back in a grove of
pines; and there were five chestnut trees and an orchard,
and below them a saw-mill pond where they used to jump
the logs and skate in winter. They made apple butter in
the yard over a fire of pine cones in an iron caldron. One
knows the kind of house, infrequent and haunting in the
West, built in the early nineteenth century, spacious and
romantic and melancholy, with windows like eyes, as if
its years were numbered and it had seen dark family joys,
and time were eating it away. " Life in this house," he
said, " gave and promised me more than it ever did
again." He talked once of a night he spent there, ap-
pointed to sit up with a sick sister, and give her medicine,
and go at two in the morning to get the doctor: " I re-
member it was the night of my first reading Macbeth. To
49
this day the eerie cadences of that play, mixed with the
sighing of the wind in the pine grove and the barking of
my dog are sounds stamped in my brain as in metal or
hot wax."
Here too in Warsaw girls became important to him,
and with them sex defined itself. It was in the air under
the shady trees and on the verandahs. The boys whispered
and giggled and spilled little rumors of sex. One of them
had paid fifty cents to go to a lecture with stereoptican
views of sex, and could diagram it for him. There were
village girls every so often " going wrong," and that
meant sex. The very night they arrived in Warsaw they
had nearly taken a house next to a house of bad name ;
the women who kept it were friendly to them ; and they
were only saved by the timely advice of the hardware
dealer. Sex beckoned to you and sex disgraced you. Girls
possessed him now like a fever. He knew he wanted them
and he knew that to fool with them might disgrace his
family, almost free of scandal here. Besides, it seemed
to him, the delirium of it might end him like lightning.
Then one day coming home from school, the baker's
daughter dared him to chase her, and, before he knew it,
they were down in a backyard of big packing cases and
she had initiated him into what stood in their young
bodies for sex. But she was too bold and like an animal,
different from the girls who ravished his senses ; he never
went back. Of the others there was one especially, pale
and spiritual, he thought, whom he had to adore at a dis-
tance like an angel or a saint. He frightened her, made
her faint, she told him ; it was the same with him. An un-
earthly poetic love burned him for months. Strength of
passion made a coward of him, he says, and kept him
ineffectual until nearly twenty.
Toward the end of their stay in Warsaw he was fur-
ther removed from these village beauties by the behavior
of his own sisters, who came home to visit and began to
keep loose company. One of them had to go away to
give birth to a child. He and his brother and sister were
not invited any more to the birthdays and hay rides and
skating parties. Again they were under the old cloud for
all his mother had tried to free them. So he tells of these
So
beginnings, typical of our evasive, careless civilization —
this half discovery of their own nature that children for
generations have been forced to make alone; and then
have kept like a secret the rest of their lives, to be spilled
only to other children as they progressed to smoking
rooms and petting parties.
Yet these were days of a new freedom; the public
school was giving zest to life. There were books, a pro-
fusion of books — Macaulay, Taine, Guizot, Dickens,
Scott, Thackeray, Fielding, DeFoe, Cooper, Lew Wal-
lace, Dryden, Pope, Herrick. He would learn and study
and find out about life; somebody would know, some-
body must know, knowledge would be the solution. Here
was the optimism of the nineteenth century; knowledge
was there to solve everything; with industry it was yours.
Who knows today after all the experiments, the pro-
gressive schools, the self-expression, if knowledge, proud
knowledge, peddler of " tidbits," is not the surer solace? *
To this child it seemed like paradise to study free of
Catholic spectres. He could ask questions about religion
and science here. There were classes in natural history,
botany and astronomy. He could ask about Robert In-
gersoll, who was not, it seemed, a fiend who would roast
in hell, as his enraged father and the priest used to say;
but a philosopher, mistaken perhaps, but brilliant. To his
amazement this school wanted to help him, not terrify
him. He was in love with liberalism, as if it were a girl
he had always wanted, met for the first time. One subject
alone he knew instinctively was taboo. Sex was never
mentioned except in relation to plant life, not to human
beings. The priest might perhaps forgive his sister for
her mortal sin, but that would not reestablish them with
the best families of Protestant Warsaw who directed this
school. That however had to do with equations yet beyond
him, not to be counted against these generous teachers.
There was Mae Calvert in the grammar school, nine-
teen or twenty, " vigorous and blond, entrancing," who
helped him and petted him, told him he read beautifully,
* Bertrand Russell, asked if he agreed with the induction of the moment
that there is no knowledge, said, " No, not quite, I think there are always
tidbits."
and not to mind if grammar was hard for him, it would
come to him in time — in which she, like her day, was
optimistic. Without mastery of grammar she passed him
on to the next class ; and from there into high school !
Here was Miss Fielding, the rhetoric teacher, an old
maid, with protruding teeth and no money to straighten
them until it was too late. She told him not to mind about
rhetoric either, that he would be someone, indeed that he
would go further without rhetoric than most people went
with it — an indulgence for which many a critic in the
thirty years to come would not thank her. They gave him
faith in himself, these two teachers, or strengthened a
faith instinctive in him that somehow he was to be part
of the panoply of earth. One day in the last term of high
school, for a rhetoric test none of whose questions he
could answer, he wrote a description of a stream near the
town, pattern of sunlight and shade, discord of a Jewish
peddler he and his brother had found dead on its banks
face down. The principal asked for him, praised him,
walked home with him, and gave him advice : His mind
had not formed itself yet, but it would; he would be some-
thing. " Take your life seriously. Don't listen to people
or rules. Read Macaulay's History of England, a history
of the United States, Shakespeare, Keats."
Fascinated by the miracle of this advice, both as given
and taken, I asked him how he had interpreted the idea
of being someone. Had he thought the principal meant he
would be a writer. No, he said, that had not occurred to
him, books were written by foreigners or by great people
in cities. He had once read in the Warsaw paper an
anecdote about Nietzsche, and wondered at a living
writer so great that he could be news in distant countries.
He could never have fame like that. He had thought that
he might become a superintendent of schools perhaps, the
head of something.
To jar brutally with his picture of Warsaw is a re-
membrance of Dreiser in a review of A Book About
Myself in Winder's Travel Magazine. First, complaining
that he had written more about himself than any bio-
grapher had about George Washington, the reviewer
says:
52
t( We knew Dreiser — it was spelled Dresser then — in
his high school days in Indiana. He was a gawk then; kept
to himself, had no dealings with the other boys; went along
the street with his head down as if afraid to look anyone in
the eye. We boys thought he was ' queer/ and in the main
were as ready to avoid him as he was to keep away from all
companionship, yet he is the only one in all the town that
has succeeded in getting his name before an admiring public
— even though that public be of a perverted mind. One of
the boys of those days became a great preacher; another a
millionaire broker, others famous travellers and merchants,
some got into the newspaper business, but they are all un-
known to the world at large."
This jerks you back to the human element surrounding
him, so nearly inhuman in its indifference. In this stalks
the loneliness of a young extremist, a child thought of as
" different " and called " queer " in the incalculable isola-
tion of the Middle West. Lincoln in Illinois was " queer "
too, and then like Dreiser forged through to an audience.
Their kind of force required an audience and of their
own people immediately surrounding them. What of the
even " queerer " ones who could not be bent to this
America? Perhaps they have lived and died in some
tragic desert, some devastating storm of the mind, which
when exciting enough as in the case of Poe finally brought
fame. And some of them have gone to Europe. Dreiser
walking with his head down as if afraid of being hurt,
must early have made some rule for himself which for-
bade him to be injured, forbade him to be the under-dog.
Today he says, " I was always lucky, I always got the
breaks."
He left high school before it was over with the
thought that he must earn money. And his family made
their last move to Chicago, where several of the older ones
still lived. He went first, alone, impatient for a job, and
after a while the others followed. So he left the hammock
and the lawn, the honeysuckle and dark trees, dimly reso-
nant with village kisses and wail of song — " My Bonnie
Lies over the Ocean," " The Spanish Cavalier " — and
went definitely into a bigger world of preachers and
brokers and newspapermen. Not many of them would be
very different from those who as boys had thought of him
as " queer." He went, he tells us, without saying goodbye
53
to his brother and sister, only to his mother — a detail
of a piece with genius, whose sudden, ruthless decisions
amaze the rest of us. We never get used to them. He
went with high hopes. Perhaps he remembered a prophecy
of his Aunt Susan's. Like his mother, a Mennonite, she
lived up on Silver Lake with her " vagrom " husband and
children " in company with a few cows and pigs." Silver
Lake was " set in high green hills," yellow-gold grain and
black woods. When he and his brother went to visit there
they slept with the others in one room, in tiers of beds in
each corner, scarcely curtained; where married daughter
and niece undressed, and they heard the muffled blandish-
ments of the ungainly husbands. These relatives both
shocked and fascinated him; the uncle a fiddler for the
local dances and a drunkard; the talk in the house loose
and coarse, trivial but wild compared to what he heard
in his own reverent hard-working family. And it was all
braided in with the noises and smells of barnyard and
near fields, pigs and crickets, whirr of reapers, calls to
horses — the bright dust and dew and night silence of a
farm. So he describes the visit — one of the hypnotic
passages in that book of too confiding title, Dawn.
" It was the time for taking in the grain; hot, clear
August weather." His Aunt Susan, who always " ap-
pealed " to him, " soft-spoken, dreamy, wistful," was tell-
ing his fortune in coffee grounds in the trumpet-vine shade
of the east porch :
" ' Now let's see what it says about you in your cup. . . .
Oh, I see cities, cities, cities, and great crowds, and bridges,
and chimneys. You are going to travel a long way — all
over the world perhaps. And there are girls in your cup!
I see their faces ! ' (I thrilled at that) ( You won't stay here
long. You will be going soon, out into the world.' . . . Her
face was grave . . . wrinkled, distant. ... I thought
nothing of her at the time, only of myself. How beautiful
would be that outside world! And I would be going to it
soon ! Walking up and down in it ! "
54
15
Chicago: The Windy City: The Prairie
Skunk: Independent as a hog on ice.
C
'hicago in 1887 was a mammoth village,
whose emigrants were profusely Irish and German,
and incipiently Italian, Jewish, Swedish, Negro, Chinese,
whose ruling class, naively called " best families/' was
chiefly New England, tough, shrewd Yankees — young
men who had once been told to go West, so they
did, taking with them their virtuous wives. Here in
Chicago they kept a British passion for class, or their
wives did, and out of the raw lake winds, they caught a
racy contempt for form of any kind. They loved to be
respectable and they loved to be shambling, what they
called " plain." They were complacent and brash; their
wives were snobbish even way out there. They loved to
have a European prince visit them, and equally they
relished telling how his millionaire host, Long John
Wentworth — they reveled in nicknames, they invented
lingo — made him feel at home in his " palatial resi-
dence " : " All right, Prince, when you've finished your
drink, we'll go on upstairs and wash up for supper." As
quick as they could they got to be millionaires and built
" palatial residences." Often their wives were ashamed
of them, but they didn't care, they were going to make
Chicago the greatest city in the world, second to none.
Already they called it " independent as a hog on ice ! " *
I don't know how Chicago looked in 1887, but I am not
far from being a witness. Miles and miles of homes, never
a wall, sometimes picket fences, occasionally hedges, most
often low stone beveled copings between yard and side-
walk; flowerbeds beginning in the front yard and running
back past chickens and a cow perhaps, or hammocks and
* Recorded by Carl Sandburg in The Windy City.
55
a tennis court, to the back yard and sheds of the poorer
houses, to the stables of the richer homes, and to the
alleys which I used to think were especially for burglars
to escape through and for dark deeds to happen in. Some-
times there were half blocks of white stone or brown
stone houses, like New York, people said, which estab-
lished meager form and color; but more often the lawn
divided houses each different in shape, in color, in ma-
terial. Miles and miles of toneless Eastlake fantasies,
north, south and west, lived happily together with the
older wooden shanties interspersed. These shanties were
like cottages in German fairy tales with ornate Victorian
detail around door and window and sometimes even bal-
conies. Some of them were painted white, but most of
them were painted grey or not painted at all, and grew to
be with the cinders of the railroad a rich disturbing black.
Some of them had no detail, were plain and dark and
clapboarded as houses could be, as if witches lived in
them.
All the houses had steps going up past the basement to
the parlor floor, and usually a porch, where people sat
summer afternoons. But in the evenings they sat —
mother, father, grandparents, children, aunts, uncles,
callers, on rugs and cushions on the steps, with two in
chairs on the wide top step before the door. Here they
watched the city growing in the night, smelled the stock-
yards, waited for a lake breeze, bought extras, and on
the Fourth of July felt the shiver and flight of Chinese
fireworks. Rich and poor seemed to improvise their sum-
mer evenings in this way. Behind them was forever the
mystery of Lake Michigan, impeccable and vast, but that
was given over to the birds and the railroads, the waste-
lands and the kitchens and stables, the hoboes and fisher-
men. They were afraid of the northeast winds in winter,
these people, afraid of the storms and the shifting sands;
afraid of mosquitoes and dampness in summer; they were
afraid of beauty. It was cozier, it was wiser for their
porches and their front steps and front yards to face the
smug, leafy streets of their booming city.
Like a heart of these homes was what they called
Downtown, later known as the Loop, because of the
56
elevated roads. There was the Board of Trade, Marshall
Field and Company, the Fair, the Palmer House, where
old-timers from the Far West, cow-boys, Mormons,
miners, and supercilious Easterners at least passed each
other in the majestic, marble lobbies, or sat on the same
red velvet divans; and where silver dollars intercepted
the white flags of the floor of the barber shop. And there
were innumerable stores and offices where hundreds of
young men were doing well, and a few were boosting the
city into being " the greatest commercial center the world
has ever known, second to none." Wasn't this the corn
market, the meat market, the railroad center, the lake
port of a great continent? If you woke up at night you
could hear the trains coming in from east, south, west,
north, and going out again. You could hear the foghorns
on the lakes and the whistles from the river. To a child,
to a boy or girl, maybe even to older people this was
wide, mournful, adventurous music — mingled whistles
of trains and boats and foghorns. The Thomas Concerts,
established about this time in the Armory on the lake
front, with its European symphonies never gave the city
wilder fugues than these trains of a continent and boats
of the Great Lakes.
The river cut in from the lake between the South and
North Side, and then turning divided again the South
and the West Side which straggled far toward the prairie.
Murky warehouses and wholesale houses were shadowed
in its dirty waters, rose out of them, entered into them
in a marriage of brick and smoke and river. The bridges
and the rigging, the tugs and scows were vaguely ani-
mated at night by gas lamps and oil flames, and in the
day by seagulls dipping, rising with their potent serrated
wings, black and white like the city. To walk in those
dim uncertain days of Chicago across the Rush Street
bridge or the Kinzie bridge, was to walk through air that
stabbed you with wings and lights and the loom of shapes.
There was a pledge in the air; older people told us so, we
believed them. A far off adventure was making itself, we
were part of something being made. If they lied to us, if
the promise has not yet come true, has even receded, they
were not quite to blame; there was something in the air
57
which the wet lake winds and the prairie winds wafted
about the street corners and river ways along with the
cinders and soot.
Out to the north on the Lake Shore Drive, looking like
something to eat was the German Castle-on-the-Rhine of
Mrs. Potter Palmer, the city's queen. And not far from
it a replica of Desdemona's palace and some isolated
French chateaux and Tudor mansions. To the south you
found them, too, on Michigan Avenue and Prairie Ave-
nue, correct in grey stone or shameless in green stone, or
brown with turquoise trimmings and Eastlake ornaments,
turrets, bay windows, cupolas. Often they looked like
something to eat, cake or ice cream, or they had faces,
they looked like the people. English butlers answered
doors, two men sat on the box of broughams and victorias,
tallyhos blew their way to the races in Washington Park,
and pleasant people drove about in their buggies and
phaetons. As often the sidewalks were of wood as of
stone, and you had to go up and down wooden steps be-
cause of the fast rising levels of the streets.
In wide patches over the city, especially along the west
branch of the river, a desolate seductive scenery was
evolving out of factories and railroad yards — out of
lonely wooden viaducts, drums of gas tanks, grain ele-
vators, chimneys, furnaces, derricks, grim board fences,
dredges and wagons, and always the scattered grey shan-
ties and the corner saloons on the corners of nothing. To
the southwest and northwest this giant village trailed the
flat borders of its skirts. And they were trimmed with row
on row of freight cars, empty lots, junk yards — from
the first there was passion for junking. Here and there a
goat rummaged, pigs wallowed in pools of mud; wooden
sidewalks led past the sparse wooden huts and the infre-
quent street lamps. In winter marvelous tonality bathed
these different districts. A stark gamut of blacks and
whites, hulking mysteries penetrated like lust and love.
It was aphrodisiac scenery. Near the center of the town
Custom House Place blazed with more literal venereal
meaning in the half-naked women of the red-light district.
Their rouge and peroxide, their satin and spangled
chemises, their frontier eyes, their assertive bodies tore
58
the air for a few blocks. Flaunting inept Venuses, they
challenged the smoke and purity.
In the summer the city grew in the dusty green light of
cotton-wood trees and willows. In the winter perhaps no-
where has there been such haunting velvet of black shapes
and white snow and drifting white vapor under the cano-
pies of smoke, shot with flame whenever the sky darkened
into daytime fog or into night. It is gone now, that first
low-flung improvised Chicago, with not one painter out
of it, shaken by its bleakness, to change it over into pig-
ment. But it did, I think, communicate its unintentional
magic to certain writers; to Frank Norris and to Dreiser,
to Masters and Sherwood Anderson; the tissue of whose
work at times, even when of other places, presents the
mournful racy haphazard lineaments of this city of smoke
and puddles; and directly to Carl Sandburg, who has
made poems identical with Chicago.
Fresh water learning
D
reiser in story and biography has told over
the mood of a boy or girl from the country entering a
big city alone, as if acutely he remembered this coming
to Chicago when he was sixteen. They went to live on
the West Side, on the corner of Ogden Avenue and
Robey Street, that West Side which before the fire was
sanctioned as a place to live in, and then gradually came
to give low visibility to the people who lived there. So,
dangerous labor leaders and specious cult leaders and
illicit lovers and self-effacing people went to live there.
If to any of them life was unendurable without attention,
they almost had to move far away to other cities. In
Chicago the taint of the West Side would follow them ;
for all its frontier pretense the town was inflexible, in-
human as that. Unconsciously for this reason Dreiser
may have left the place and not rested until finally he
reached New York. Yet traits of Chicago remain with
him.
He found a job as dishwasher in a dirty Greek restau-
rant. He was helper to a scene painter in love with his
sister. And then he went to work in the shipping depart-
ment of a big wholesale hardware house, Hibbard, Spen-
cer, Bartlett and Company, that backed on the river and
shipped goods from its docks into lake freight boats.
He hoped to become rapidly a successful merchant.
Mr. Hibbard is an item of this background known to
me. We used to play with his grandchildren in the open
yard of his enormous red brick house, which had a
stone fountain always dry and nice to play in. He was a
millionaire, and he and his wife were so good and pious
we felt sorry for his grandchildren for fear they would
have to be good and pious, too. They gave their money
60
to the Episcopal Church and St. Luke's Hospital near by,
situated in a block called " the patch," so dissolute we
were told never to walk there. We used to go into their
house for birthday parties or to get warm. Sometimes it
smelled of baking, but usually it was big and silent, and
nearly, but not quite — something was lacking, maybe
greed — gave the shiver of riches. The drawing room
was dressed in pale green and gold brocade, and there
were marble statues and black teakwood cabinets ; it was
always dark. The dining room was baronial and had elk
heads with branching antlers and mounted trout on the
walls. There were dark oil paintings everywhere — fruit
pieces, religious pieces, marshes, meadows and game; we
rarely saw anyone downstairs. Mr. Hibbard had a short,
white beard and no moustache which made him look espe-
cially good and kind. People said he was a man of ster-
ling character; his middle name was Gold. His one in-
congruous passion was fast and thoroughbred horses.
Though he and his partners, Mr. Bartlett and Mr.
Spencer, belonged among the self-made merchants
and club-men whom Dreiser later characterized skil-
fully in The Titan as respectable hypocrites, I think
he was not a hypocrite. I think he never wanted to
be, nor for his children or his grandchildren to be,
anything but God-fearing and charitable and solid and
prosperous; nor for his knives and scissors and fishing-
tackle and guns and saucepans to be anything but
solid and irreproachable. " O. V. B." — "Our Very
Best."
To his store on the river his shipping clerks, the War-
saw boy among them, came at seven in the morning and
worked till six at night, for $5 a week, unpacking and
storing and packing in a crowded loft under an Irish boss,
who quite rightly, Dreiser says, despised him. And he
dejectedly despised the work, felt like a " pointless un-
important bond slave." The one stimulant was " an ac-
quaintance there who exercised a great influence over
me ... a Dane, a drunkard and a lecher . . . but with
marvelous brains I thought. . . . He laughed Chris-
tianity off the boards," and made fun of high society in
Chicago, in fact in all of the United States. He gave him
61
his first lesson in sophistication. He would borrow money
and calmly not pay it back. " But I forgave him because
he was so valuable to me." *
One day the young shipping clerk was told to go down
to the office, someone wanted to see him. It was Miss
Fielding, his teacher from Warsaw, the old maid with the
upper false teeth and " a whimsical emotional smile."
She was now a school principal in Chicago. u Theodore,"
she said, " work of this kind isn't meant for you, really.
It will injure your spirit. I want you to let me help you
go to school again." He protested that his father would
never allow him to borrow money. He remembered how
any debt was to keep them all in purgatory, as they died.
She said she had kept track of him, that she had heard
he was not well, would break down in the city, that she
wanted to help him go to the State University in Bloom-
ington, Indiana, had even spoken to the president, David
Starr Jordan, about him. It was true, he said, that he was
sick, his lungs and stomach had gone back on him, but
there was no way for him to live in the country. She told
him she had some savings and she would rather he would
use them than use them herself; more would come of
it. She said she would talk to Mr. Hibbard whom she
seemed to know. As Dreiser told the incident, though his
memory differs in Dawn, the merchant's advice was like
hers : " You must listen to Miss Fielding and get an edu-
cation. It is best for you," he added, " you will never
make a business man." This seemed final. In a few
weeks, with his mother's consent he was back in the
warm hills of Indiana, entering his first and only year
of college, and getting well again. Life outdoors and
clean air saved him, he is sure, from perhaps a fatal
illness. The hardware job would have been the end of
him.
I like to believe the story as I heard it. A flash of how,
by such distant and indirect ties, people are joined some-
times for a second out of their lives ! The teacher and the
hardware merchant by good works, the high-school boy
and the teacher by some cry of the intellect, all three of
them by a second in fate. It is amusing, if true, that this
* Recorded by Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits.
62
churchman had a slight hand in saving for future years
an enemy of the code he lived by — a writer of books
that were to challenge a religion where chastity and hon-
esty and prosperity and charity attempted to go lovingly
arm in arm.
His version of his two semesters of college life is un-
sparing of himself. He went, he says, too unprepared for
academic learning to know how to learn. He failed, he
thinks, for lack of mathematics and grammar. What he
got out of it was a sense of how bewildering knowledge
stored in books could be, not much of the actual knowl-
edge. The fact of so many branches of learning, and so
many men and women living and dying at ease within
them, awed him and confused him. Though he almost
wanted to, it was not given him to make them intrinsic
with his life. None of the professors happened chemi-
cally to communicate a sense of life through learning
to him, as the Warsaw teachers had done a few years
before. Yet he says they were able and brainy and some
of them focally important to this fresh water culture —
David Starr Jordan, Rufus L. Green, Jeremiah Jenks,
Edward Howard Griggs, stark dissenters' names. . . .
None of them apparently had for him the warmth
of Miss Fielding, " her heavenly, irradiating smile "
urging him to go to college: "You may never learn
anything directly there, Theodore, but something will
come to you indirectly. You will see what education
means, what its aim is and that will be worth a great
deal."
What education did mean to him was just this — it
challenged him, made him jealous, perhaps as his father
had been when he bought the set of Irving for seven
dollars. In the midst of it he was not willing to admit he
was hopeless. " There must be some avenue of approach/'
he said, " to the intellectual life for me, too." He made
several friends, one of them a serious scholar, a mental
compass like Miss Fielding.
Another thing cheered him — he roomed by chance
with the most popular boy in his class, a football star.
They liked each other, shared the same bed, which
appeared natural to him — he had often slept with a
brother at home. Their room was filled with college life,
and although he never made a fraternity nor was thought
of as "popular," he " got on " well enough with the typi-
cal athlete and card player, and that pleased him. They
even included him in their parties with girls, but here as in
the studies he felt awkward, ill at ease. Two types again
emerged as in Warsaw, the one who scared him by pur-
suit and the one too rare to be pursued. They made him
miserable, he was a failure. He would never know what
life was, and he alone was to blame. Another friend, " a
kind of fox or wolf in his way," a card shark and a gam-
bler, took him on a holiday to Louisville with two girls,
one of whom was to be his. They took separate double
rooms for an afternoon and evening at a hotel, but he was
too shy or too self-conscious to make the expected use of
his, and said bitterly to himself when it was over: " No
girl will ever look at me. I am a fool, a dunce, homely,
pathetic, inadequate." And though technically he some-
how passed in his studies and could have gone back the
next year, he left in June not to return, " unhappy, dis-
trait, scarcely knowing which way to turn, but resolved to
be something more than a cog in a commercial machine."
He went away, bitter over u these youths and girls," the
most of whom " had ignored him." And yet he said to
himself, " They can all go to hell ! I will get along and be
somebody in spite of them."
Here in Bloomington must have become fixed two of
the outside whips to Dreiser's life. He must succeed ex-
travagantly. It was not success in the extreme to succeed
commercially. Beyond glitter of money and things there
were the keys to wisdom and sophistication. Without
these you were on the outside, money could not get you
in. Then he must have love, he must have beauty, he
must have women or at least one of them. Without that,
he was only half alive, he was beginning to be dead. Life
told him this and there was no time to lose. What he had
within him to meet these spurs was that intangible force,
sometimes called genius, though it might as well be called
appetite, curiosity, hard work, zest, concentration, en-
durance to an infinite degree. When a man has it, he is,
for all his drawbacks, a mountain that people have to
watch and talk about as it changes with the changing light
of day. A country without such monuments, whether, ac-
cording to the lay of the land, they are crude or subtle
or both, is almost not a country. We could do with a
greater number of them.
15
" They don't know me yet, but they will! "
AMERICAN FOLK TALE
V v hen this college student of nineteen got
back to Chicago he was careful to find outdoor jobs,
out of a talent he had for hygiene, out of a terrific
will to live. He drove a laundry wagon; looked up prop-
erty for a real estate agent; collected for easy-payment
instalment houses. In the first of these he tells in his ac-
count of his newspaper days, published in 1922, how he
held out twenty-five dollars of the company's money to
get a winter overcoat, and was caught unable to pay it
back. He tells of his terror because of the difficulty of
burying the disgrace and getting another job. It was his
first and last offense of the kind, out of fear, he explained,
more than out of remorse. It is typical of American
criticism of even eight years ago that so many reviews of
that book, especially those condemning him for lack of
style, condemn him for shamelessness in recalling a theft.
They- call it bravado or egotism, rather than the wish of
the scientist to present the facts even if they spoil the
picture or bore the reader. To confuse the issue and so
invalidate the criticism is still a favorite sport of ours —
an Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Whatever his vices of style,
Dreiser has among writers an enviable distinction which
in itself makes style — the enterprise to keep the issue
clear, and carry it to ultimates if he can, if not, into the
unknown.
The job of collecting was not unpleasant, he says. His
health was good; he worked and walked with such speed
that his afternoons were free, and he had a fierce love of
life in this raw lively city, said to be named by the Indians
after the prairie skunk, or some say the wild onion. He
loved the poor and rich districts, the scenery of manu-
66
facturing, the saloons, the churches, the wooden shanties,
and the quick contrasts of one to the other. He collected
payments for yellow plush albums and silk-shaded lamps
from women whose husbands on the bleak fringes of the
town were tanning hides. In the vice districts he was paid
for shoddy rugs by " plump naked girls striding from bed
to dresser to get a purse " and " offering certain favors for
a dollar " to be deducted from the contract slip. " Black
negresses leered at me from behind shuttered windows at
noon; plump wives drew me into risque situations; death-
bereaved weepers mourned over their late loss, and post-
poned paying me. But I liked the life. I was crazy about it.
Chicago was like a great orchestra in a tumult of noble
harmonies. I was like a guest at a feast eating and drinking
in a delirium of ecstasy." He was crazy about it, and not
because often he accepted the adventures proffered —
they were yet too strange — but because he loved the dis-
play of life. He is, I think, a man of an unrivalled appetite
for display, which is expression.
In this extravagance of living at nineteen and twenty,
this drunkenness at just the spectacle of life, he conceived
the idea that intoxicating to the senses as were these
rambles of a collector, he was meant for something more
related to the show. Always he was improvising his im-
pressions, humming them over to himself as he walked
and collected. He decided he would write them down, he
would write about life. Eugene Field wrote about life; he
was a newspaper man. He must do and be the same.
Once on a newspaper you climbed to u the top of fame
and wealth." So he began writing and in " a fever of self
advancement " sent a bundle of rhapsodies to the lank,
savage Eugene, a Hoosier of the vintage before. When
nothing came of that, undaunted he answered an ad in
the Chicago Tribune which read, " Wanted — a number
of bright young men to assist in the business department
Christmas holidays. Promotion possible." But though he
got the job of doling out cheap toys for ten days to the
poor " who had hoped for food and clothing," promotion
proved as intangible. Returning after Christmas he was
told there were no vacancies.
In the meantime for prestige with a girl, a friend of
67
his sister's, who had come to visit them on this Christmas
eve, he had called himself a newspaper man. There was
but one thing to do, if he was ever to succeed, become a
newspaper man. Besides in this year his mother had died,
she who alone seemed to understand his moods and am-
bitions. At birth, a child displays his special quality to a
mother like his. She had surely seen and felt it. And now
she was gone. Now the home was falling to pieces in
endless bickerings for lack of her presence, which had
made of it " a thing as sweet as dreams." He must, he
felt, strike out on his own, make a life outside for himself.
He had begun already to apprehend the culture evolv-
ing in Chicago — the Art Institute, the Thomas Con-
certs, the Ethical Societies. He went on Sundays to hear
Gunsaulus and Jenkin Lloyd Jones, and sometimes to see
visiting actors, Booth, Modjeska, Fanny Davenport,
Mary Anderson, Jefferson. He wanted to be part of it,
felt already he was " a man with a future " who belonged
among sophistications. He was too young to know how
imported, how little native, most of this culture was, and
therefore how foreign to him, whose force consisted in
part of being artlessly native; in other part of being
elemental. Also the world outside of Chicago began to
dawn on him, the fact of " five related and unrelated
hemispheres." He read Emerson, Carlyle, Froude, John
Stuart Mill, and he had heard of Nietzsche, Darwin,
Spencer, Wallace and Tyndall, and intended to explore
them. And at this age, he says, already the meaning be-
hind Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and behind
the Civil War, was apparent to him, and " the drift of
the nation to monopoly and so to oligarchy." This is hard
to believe, and yet who knows ? A man is made in his first
years; a man who was to have a giant's eye with which
to get a view of the world must have had that eye at
twenty, and may have made this use of it.
In any event he lunged toward the newspapers, feeling
that they by their nature encompassed the world.
68
16
"A mighty good Sausage Stuff er was
Spoiled when the Man became a Poet. He
would Look well Standing under a De-
scending Pile-driver." EUGENE FIELD
np
JLhere was in Chicago at this time an incipient
reflection of London and Paris sophistication, nearer
than the newspapers to the air of culture this Indiana
boy was eager for. There was beginning to be a timid
echo of various English art circles centered by Ros-
setti, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Meredith, Whis-
tler, George Moore, Yeats and others, and of French
circles created by Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, Manet,
Monet, Degas, Renoir, Courbet, Rodin. These various
intersecting spheres abroad made but one faint exotic
band in the Windy City. Yet it had a distinct personnel
of aesthetes — book-binders, jewellers, polite pederasts,
spinsters, professors' wives with jonquils in their bosoms.
And, to give reality, there were even a few hard-headed
poets, satirists and artists, who were indulged by their
prosperous conservative families and friends, and were
said to be making culture hum in this virgin city. Out of
its stir and friendliness came Hamlin Garland with his
Main Travelled Roads, William Vaughan Moody with
rebellious verse, Robert Herrick with what were called
sex-novels, John Dewey with his new program of educa-
tion, Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright with a native
architecture; and more coldly authentic and ironic than
any of the others, Henry Fuller with tenuous intricate
realism. At about this time Altgeld and Henry Lloyd
(whose father-in-law was part owner and editor of the
Chicago Tribune) and the young Clarence Darrow were
making a stand for freedom of political thought. The
city had creative life, and with it a shy naive faith that
they would catch up in art and in intellect as well as in
commerce.
It was an odd circle of aesthetes on this strip between
lake and prairie, joining hands more out of isolation than
out of personal coherence. They had their clubs, The
Whitechapel and The Little Room; they edited art
magazines. Eugene Klapp, later an engineer of impor-
tance, started The House Beautiful at about this time,
the first American magazine to deal specifically with
decoration as an art. Herbert Stone and Harrison Rhodes
edited for a few years a journal called The Chap Book,
which published Bliss Carman, Charles Lummis, Yone
Noguchi, George Ade, Eugene Field, Stephen Crane,
Le Gallienne, Clyde Fitch, Henry James and other Ameri-
cans who looked promising; and imported Henley, Wil-
liam Sharp, Edmund Gosse, Zangwill, H. G. Wells,
Hardy, Max Beerbohm, Stevenson, Barrie, Mallarme,
Verlaine, Rimbaud. Chicagoans were vaccinated in their
own town with these many names that stood for art or
near art in the nineties. But sadly enough Fitch, Le Galli-
enne, Stevenson and Barrie took better than the livelier
names in a frontier land doomed already to breed a race
of men which was to be shrewd about business and senti-
mental about everything else. Though wistfully these
devotees stained their walls a Morris brown or painted
them a Whistler grey, and made mission furniture and
green pottery, the intimacy of the life they read about,
in the fragile speech of Mallarme, in the fantastic satires
of Max Beerbohm, never came to play within their
houses. Culture, they came one by one to face it, was
something that could not be imported ready-made, or
filtered in from the top down. After this false dawn of
the Nineties, which broke into something nearer reality
twenty years later in the Poetry Magazine, in the Little
Theatre and the Arts Club perhaps, the movement died
of malnutrition. Its creative members broke away to the
East or the Far West for a breath of life before they
died. Two survivors, Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd
Wright, are scarcely natives; fame reached them from
abroad, not from Chicago. The real rebels today are
the gunmen, the gangsters and politicians. Art, another
70
word for expression, if ever it comes to Chicago, will
have to come through them among other elements;
through the people, high, low and mediocre, and because
their life is stained with it and requires it; will have to
come its own slow way up out of the dirt into the air.
Norris, Dreiser, Masters, Anderson, Darrow and Sand-
burg are prophets to this.
To Dreiser at twenty these doors of Chicago aesthetes
were not known. Had he been aware of them, it is not
likely they would have opened to him. He was green and
uncouth; he was a native, just what they were hoping to
escape from. A right instinct took him to the newspapers
in his search for a living and a training. The conquering
American, the genius for enterprise rather than art, was
helping to make Chicago through the daily press. Joseph
Medill of the Tribune, Victor F. Lawson of the Daily
News, Melville E. Stone, of the Associated Press, were
forecasting the Chicago of today. Theodore Dreiser, " a
dreamy cub of twenty-one," he describes himself, "long,
spindling, a pair of gold-framed spectacles on his nose,
his hair combed a la pompadour," having decided to be
a newspaper man, made straight for their various offices.
It was April, 1892; " in a new spring suit," he says,
. . . " light check trousers, bright blue coat and vest,
brown fedora hat, new yellow shoes," he started out to
force his way. He went the rounds, to be told each time
by the city editor that there was nothing. Finally he
decided that a small struggling paper might receive him.
He picked the Daily Globe. He planned to sit in the
outer office of that paper until someone noticed him. In
this, too, instinct was with him. In Chicago in those days
it was useful to be insistent like the Grand Canyon or
Niagara Falls. Bold initiative in boys, in the face of
rough repulses from their elders, was a virtue held high
above others in this job-hunting, career-mad country.
Stories of how the poor boy broke in and made good are
favorite folk tales. It is told of a boy who later became
a great financier, how, starting in one of the big packers'
offices and tired of obscurity, he wore a purple and yellow
striped sweater to business, until he was noticed and
scolded and promoted. Dreiser used patience to break
in. From twelve to two he sat in the outer office of the
Daily Globe, waiting for the city editor to go to lunch,
sometimes accosting him to hear the same words, " Noth-
ing today, not a thing in sight." Finally, the copy reader,
John Maxwell, with " hard, cynical and yet warm, grey
eyes " got curious about him. What was he there for?
How did he know he could write? Why did he pick the
Globe, it was the poorest paper in town? Yes, that was
why he had picked it. This got a laugh; he was told to
stay around, the Democratic convention was coming soon,
they might be able to use him. But it was a hell of a busi-
ness to be wanting to get into.
So he entered that most American school of writing —
the newspaper world. And Maxwell, because for some
reason he liked him, took the trouble to be his first
teacher, and his first cynic, being really in that day our
one accredited native brand of cynic, the newspaper man.
He cut and hacked to pieces his efforts with apparent glee,
and yet, as he explained, to be good to him. " News is
information," he would say, " people want it quick, sharp,
clear, do you hear?" Or, " This is awful stuff, might be
good for a book or something, but it's not news. You're
a reporter, not an editor, don't forget it. ... Who —
What — How — When — Where — that's what they
want!" Or he would grumble, "Life's a god-damned
stinking treacherous game and ninety-nine men out of
every hundred are bastards. I don't know why I do this
for you ... I don't expect to get anything back. . . .
Nobody home when I'm knocking. But I'm such a god-
damned fool that I like to do it. . . ." At this the wistful
student would feel sad and uneasy, and yet tried with all
courage to adjust himself to this life of his choice. " If
I had a real chance," he told him, " I would soon show
you."
The hazard came with the Democratic convention of
1892, and he slid through into a kind of success, an
acknowledged newspaper man at $15 a week. Wandering
" wretchedly " about the lobby of the Auditorium Hotel,
loafing at the bar, looking for news, by chance he hap-
pened to flatter a senator from South Carolina into tak-
ing a fancy to him, into handing him a tip by which he
72
made a scoop for his paper — the name of Cleveland,
to be nominated for president. " In a day," he says, " by
this small piece of news my stock had risen so that I was
looked upon as an extraordinarily bright boy sure to
carve out a future for himself, one to be made friends
with and helped." And the senator had added to his
sense of well-being by inviting him to drink a cocktail
with him at a small table on the balcony of the hotel,
grandly surveying the lake and the Michigan Avenue
crowds. The convention itself thrilled him, a " vortex of
national politics," and he was part of it, sitting in among
famous reporters, George Ade, Peter Dunne, Charlie
Seymour, Charles d'Almy. And soon he would be the
equal of any of them, might even surpass them, now that
he had gotten this far, why not?
73
I
17
" Here we have a Knife. It looks like a
Saw, but it is a knife. . . . It belongs to
an Editor. . . . There is Blood on the
Blade of the Knife, but the Editor will
Calmly Lick it off, and then the Blade will
be as clean and Bright as ever.''
EUGENE FIELD
.n A Book About Myself and in Twelve Men,
Dreiser has made portraits of the friends and encoun-
ters of his newspaper years, first in Chicago, then in St.
Louis, Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and New York.
Freed from the text they would place him as a skilled
cartoonist, quite as his memories of childhood suggest
the poet in him. They make his third series of groups
since Warsaw and college days, more shifting than the
others, but marked too by distinctive traits. These men
had the tang of newspaper ink. They made a kind of
brotherhood in the United States, with the same pass-
words, the same stories, the same code, the same pessi-
mism; lovers of the low-down, the dirt, printers of what
the public wants, what is fit to print; men leading double
mental lives; men laughing, jeering inwardly at what out-
wardly they gave, and most often anonymously, to a
world of breakfast eaters, and a world of families getting
through the long dull evenings by drug of the afternoon
papers.
A brotherhood and a double life, being marked with
the same mark of duplicate ink, as cowboys were marked
by life away from women, as labor leaders have been
marked by a look of exalted failure, and quite as men in
the trenches of the Great War feel the kinship of days
when they were ordered over the top and never knew
exactly why. These men were ordered out daily to get
their story at any cost, every cost sometimes, and over
74
the tears and frantic prayers of ravaged souls; ordered
to pry, detect, bribe, go to any length to get their story
before the other paper got it. Then when breathless they
brought it in, they were ordered to make it over into
what was fit to print; which in the case of the respectable
papers was to tame it or at least to twist it, so the nice
people might be still the heroes, and the rebels and profli-
gates might be still the villains; or in the case of the
yellow papers, to inflate it so that everyone might be
equally sensational. In either case it was surely to confuse
or deaden the issue so that the world might go along
about as it had gone before, or anyway without detecting
change, according to the politics, religion or commerce
of the capital behind the paper.
So the hunters brought in their bags of warm lively
stories, still breathing, wriggling, bodies not yet cold;
saw them skinned and quartered and served up to the
public as stews, the flavor cooked away under stereotype
sauce No. i or No. 2. Yet they were privileged — indeed
how prevent it — to save the blood and guts for them-
selves— who else wanted it? This, then, could be their
visceral diet in hours off. Give so much as a morsel of it
to the public, and they risked losing their jobs. They were
cooks, these newspaper men, serving the public with taste-
less meals, too watery, too sweet, too dry, too soggy;
and yet what the readers liked; while they lived off the
raw of what was left, no time to cook it, no time to make
a ceremony of these vital bits.
Some of them unable to stomach a life of double nour-
ishment, took to drink or dope, almost stopped eating.
Others came around to finding the public fare easier to
digest, cooked and served as it was after a fashion; and
they succeeded in becoming managing editors, or pub-
lishers perhaps. Some spent spare hours with the heart,
the kidneys, the nerves, the penis of these revelations of
their daily work, trying to become poets or satirists of
a high order. But there were snags. Forced to fool their
readers, it was hard to keep the magnet needle of judg-
ment and not to fool themselves. Then forced to speed
things up, to deliver bleeding, to cut and hack, or cover
up; no time to ripen impression or expression, they gained
75
in speed, and lost in quality. At that, in the Nineties the
newspapers beat the magazines for daring; adventurous
brains went into the making of them. But for lack of time
too much passed through them unresolved, putrefactive.
Possessed of the facts of life more than others, they were
yet prey to a miasma of class and mass opinion that
veiled the facts. It was seldom that the cliches of the
press did not block in their brains as definitely as they
did in the printing room, defeating tough flexible intel-
lect. They were men of irregular hours, irregular habits,
belonging not to them but to the city editors. They lived
and thought apart from others; more perceptive and
more shocking. They were vagabonds, nearly shunned by
others.
For one thing there was in each of these Western cities
a vague quantity already known as society, with its so-
ciety editors (the one woman on the staff except for
an old maid or two who supplied a few dead words on
literature and art). People struggled to be part of this
vague myth, society, yet always furtively. The desire to
enter, if revealed, would disqualify them, and the society
editor was the alternate victim of insults and favors.
So it was a joke among the irreverent reporters, this
" soc-ed-stuff," as they called it. They jeered at it and
yet it teased them too. It rankled. Who were these people
to put on airs ? The women dull beyond the dullest chorus
girl, the men big stiffs ! And yet they had something too ;
they had power, if nothing more than the right to be
dull, the power to be mean, maybe even meaner than
they themselves knew how to be. Christ ! A good reporter
could get in anywhere, into a hanging, a police court,
an accident, a death chamber, a president's private office,
an opera diva's dressing room; yet he couldn't get in
here, often not even on business! He had the brains,
the experience; he knew about life. What did these people
have, so inane, so ignorant, really? Money, of course,
but it was not only money. It was some divine right im-
ported from the East. When you came down to it, it was
cheek, nothing but cheek, the one thing these parents
taught their children that seemed sweet and enticing. And
it worked, they got away with it.
76
As they came in contact with this miracle, the news-
paper men, crusaders of the Fact, were first puzzled, then
irritated, then outwardly bored. What of it anyhow?
Yet toward it they remained always slightly curious and
resentful. Like education, like art, like the theatre, like
men and women in these new cities, the mirage of " high
society " by some puritan ineptness was doomed to segre-
gation and suspicion, and the newspaper men developed
a defensive mask toward it at the outset. They intensified
rudeness, bad manners, feet on the desk, spitting, chew-
ing, usually gum, going unshaven, wearing dirty clothes,
and not first because they had to, but because they liked
to. They gloried in it. Hell, it was a challenge to the
whole god-damn stinking hypocritical disorder of society,
with the nice pretty people at the top distilling the poison
of cleanliness, respectability, down through the rest of it.
Some of them got to be radicals, famous radicals;
some of them deepened into bums, tramps, hoboes, from
city to city, paper to paper, no town worth devotion,
suicide the best bet. There were those who had hobbies
of books, pornography or the classics — a sporting edi-
tor in Chicago collected and read avidly the more ob-
scene and obscure of the classics in Greek and Latin. But
if any gentle scholar of the town thought that might
make a bond between them, he could get to hell out of it
with his nice English tepid ways. The same John Max-
well who initiated Dreiser into journalism became a
student of the alleged Shakespeare ciphers. Years later
he had completed a learned treatise about them, for
which Dreiser, out of gratitude or out of interest, tried
to help him find a publisher.
Yet others traveled in the wake of whatever war there
was to far countries, and came back to their city editor,
the brighter for unprintable exotic stories, and yet in
slant and lingo unchanged. Some of them capitulated,
and with their picturesque background as a lure " made
good " with fashionable short stories and fashionable
novels, to please the very world which in their newspaper
days they loved to spit on. They graduated to that classier
sphere, the magazine world, and got rich and fashion-
able themselves — a long list of them — the Irwins,
77
Irvin Cobb, Ray Stannard Baker, David Graham Phil-
lips, are samples. Others, graduated through delicate
native invention into the feature columns, the condiments
of news — Eugene Field, George Ade, Peter Dunne,
John McCutcheon, R. H. Little, Percy Hammond,
among them. A few, a very few, have come all the way
out into real letters, have gone into our speech, so bent
they were on mulling over the heart, the nerves, the
kidneys, the liver, the spawn of their storied days. One
might say O. Henry has done this, and that Sinclair
Lewis has done this. Above others and for years to come,
I would say that Ring Lardner, Stephen Crane and Carl
Sandburg have done this; one with an ear for human
speech which is near to poetry; the other two with an ear
for the elemental, with the springs of language at the
source of their work.
Dreiser with an imperfect ear, imperfect sense of
touch, with a marvelous eye, and a patient impatience has
done this, come out into the world of letters, where not
the story but the passion counts. There are those who
say that he has not really left off chronicling, that he is
in fact a " super-journalist," but one who has had to
make and be his own newspaper in every department.
This is stretching the simile; he never was quite one of
them, his newspaper days amounting to but four years
of his life. In that time he outstripped them in distrust
of conventional morals ; and none of their violent preju-
dices clung to him — their bashful scorn of art and
learning as high-brow, and of fashionable society as the
bunk. In a most un-American way he has not been ashamed
of an interest in the fact of either realm, and has done
his utmost to fit them as they changed into the changing
puzzle of life. Perhaps he failed finally as a newspaper
man just for a lack of these bitter prejudices; or else in
order not to be hurried or directed; or because he was
told to be funny or cheerful or diplomatic, when he
wanted, or had to be, faithful. None the less he has
traits of this Mid-West schooling, not in its love of
brevity, but just in the way of a tang it gives of Ameri-
can newspaper ink.
Journalism had meaning a generation ago, and not
78
a trivial one : more than any other class its workmen
stimulated opposite tendencies in this country. On the
one hand they sidetracked readers to provincial sidings
of thought, encouraged them to be backward and senti-
mental. On the other they kept alive among themselves
the legendry of these states, low-down, dirty, sneering,
lighted with the masculine horse-laugh — poetry stripped
of sweetness, the meat and salt. It was a wild ferment
of song and story out of prisons, whore houses, political
rallies, salesmen's conferences, lonely ranches, lumber
camps, mining towns, sporting events. And this loose Iliad,
coarse in purpose, though often delicate in manner, was
extravagant beyond the invention of other countries, be-
cause outstripping them in the need to compensate for
repressions. It has been the undercurrent of comment,
racing beneath the respectable crust, thrust slyly above
in burlesque and vaudeville. It has kept the people alive.
But for this elixir of ribaldry passing from one to an-
other, I imagine that husbands and wives and business
partners as well, dreaming apart, yet chained together,
would long since have destroyed each other. Today a
mild hint of it appears in the daily papers and in the
books of the hour. When the last prude is dead, when
it is time for another birth of giants to remind us of
pioneers nearly gone, someone will piece these legends
together and we will have our own archaic epic. It will
not be a romance of the rose. It will be funny for dealing
with a vast hypocrisy; it will be tragic for carving out
chasms more lonely and immense than the canyon of the
Colorado. Already Dreiser has approached it on the side
of the horror involved, and Mark Twain on the side of
the absurdity, but Mark Twain with the help of many
more asterisks and blanks. Dreiser was the first, the pub-
lishers will tell you, to force them into the open.*
* A member of the firm of Harpers offered this as a fact: " Dreiser has
historical meaning. He is the one man to have first created an audience for
daring books."
79
18
The Chicago Globe: Maxwell, McEnnis,
and Alice.
e had not been long on the Globe before
he began to think of some quicker path to fame than
that of reporter. He had found himself a room on the
West Side in Ogden Place overlooking Union Square.
His walk from there to the office took him through a
district cheerfully known as slums. It occurred to him that
these neglected patches might be as novel from the point
of view of news as any foreign land where a star reporter
might be sent for stories. He submitted articles, and they
were run as Sunday specials under his name, with Theo-
dore changed to Carl — a disappointment to him, but it
was Maxwell's nickname for him.
" You know, Carl/' at length Maxwell was praising
him, " you have your faults, but you do know how to
observe. . . . Maybe you're cut out to be a writer after
all. ... I think you're nutty, but I believe you're a
writer." Then discussing further the aspects of the slums
of different cities : " Jesus Christ, a hell of a fine novel is
going to be written about these things one of these days."
After that, Dreiser said, " he treated me with equality,
and I thought I must indeed be a very remarkable man."
While they talked, Stephen Crane, in New York, might
have been writing Maggie A Girl of The Streets, and
Frank Norris, in San Francisco, McTeague, both hell
enough — young men of about Dreiser's age, but des-
tined to shorter journeys, which today have more of
value than of fame.
Carl Dreiser's Sunday specials featuring the Chicago
slums were prophetic of Theodore Dreiser's volumes.
They carried one of his burdens :
80
"Chicago's wretchedness," he explains, "was never
utterly tame ... or hang-dog . . . rather it was savage,
bitter and at times larkish and impish. . . . Saloon lights
and smells and lamps gleaming smokily from behind broken
lattices and from below wooden sidewalk levels, gave it a
shameless and dangerous color. Accordions, harmonicas,
Jew's harps, clattering tin-pan pianos and stringy violins
were forever going; paintless rotting shacks resounded with
a noisy blasphemous life between twelve and four; oaths,
foul phrases. ... In the face of such a scene, my mind,
reared on dogmatic religious and moral theory, invariably
paused in a question. . . . Why did nature, when left to
itself, devise such astounding . . . human muck-heaps?
. . . What had brought that about so soon in a new rich
healthy forceful land? God or devil or both working together
toward a common end? ... I could not solve it. This
matter of being with its differences . . ."
The query that perhaps this was not nature left to
herself doing all this, but nature under the influence of
St. Paul, Luther, Calvin, favoring passionless people, he
makes at other moments, but not here.
In his second month of work on the Globe, he came
under the influence of John T. McEnnis, managing editor :
". . . truly your Bret Harte gold-miner type, sloven, red-
eyed at times, reminding me not a little of my brother
Rome in his best hours ... a man of great sweetness
and sympathy ... his nose and cheeks tinted a fiery red
by much drinking . . . thought of as one of the most
brilliant newspaper editors in St. Louis . . . whose wife,
homely and pathetic, suffered anything to be allowed to
live with him." A story that Dreiser made of a girl who
had been kidnaped or had run away from the dreariest
home he had yet seen was too romantic for Maxwell:
" This will never do, Carl; read Schopenhauer, my boy,
read Schopenhauer." But McEnnis praised it: "... I
don't go much on this sort of thing . . . for a daily
paper, but the way you have handled it is fine. ... If
you just keep yourself well in hand you have a future."
After that he was given more important assignments
— among them, the showing up of a chain of fake auction
shops — a political move, though he didn't know it, on
behalf of the Irish politician and horse-racer back of the
Globe. He describes himself as " open-mouthed " in these
joints before the conspiracies of the auctioneers and their
81
accomplices, thieves, policemen and detectives. To be for
long periods an " open-mouthed " spectator, almost hum-
ble, and then suddenly to have to hit on some scheme that
would bring him into the action — this appears to have
made the repeated pattern of his history. In the handling
of this campaign he became a small hero, he says, " the
center of a hubbub of reform." He seemed to himself to
be " swimming in a delicious sea of life." Already at
twenty-one he could write; he would be famous.
The days of bickering with his father and sisters and
brothers had been pushed behind him. Sometimes he went
back to see them, but not often. Sometimes he remem-
bered his father's words the night he had broken with
the family home : " You're going, are you ? I'm sorry,
Dorsch. I done the best I could ... I try, but it don't
seem to do any good. I've prayed these last few days
... I hope you don't ever feel sorry." The tone of the
old German's voice, broken and with a kind of charm,
haunted him, but not acutely then. In later years it must
have recurred to him, when he was making the father of
Jennie, the father of Aileen and the father of Isadore.
At this time he was engaged in the prime American
pursuit, " getting on," and too in another quest, finding
a girl to love, perhaps to marry. With us, rich or poor,
distinguished or obscure, this creature a man finds for
himself. Neither parents, nor priest, nor guardian will
help him. Loveliness, then, is more often than not the
test. With surprising care through many pages of A Book
About Myself, Dreiser traces his first romance. It was
not that by this time, that trivial deed so simple in fact,
so direful in theory, that brief orgiastic moment for
which or lack of which men and women have been made
to pay with whole lives of ruin, had not already become
fact to him. That small ingenuous delightful act was
already among his memories. At fifteen, back in Warsaw
with the insistent baker's daughter it had happened; and
then afterwards in Bloomington and in Chicago with
girls who made it easy for him. But he had not gone
back to any of them, he had not " really cared for them."
If asked, he answers carefully: " People might not be-
lieve it, and it is strange, considering the name I have
82
when it comes to women; but I tell you, it's the truth,
there always had to be some romance about it, or it
meant nothing to me, some mental or chemic flare, some-
thing personal, spiritual you might say." — " And that
is hard to find," I said. — " I have never really found
it, nothing lasts, nothing is perfect."
At twenty-one he found romance in Alice, the girl of the
Christmas Eve party of the year before. She lived with a
foster father, a railroad watchman, in a second story flat
in a small cottage on the southwest fringe of the city. He
remembers the furnishings: red plush hangings in the
folding doors between the two rooms, lace curtains and
white shades at the windows, a piano, " a most soothing
luxury for me to contemplate," a red velvet settee, a
red plush rocker, and though not mentioned, it seems as
if there must have been a vase of bright paper flowers on
a painted stand — all out of the watchman's savings and
her taste. Beside the green and brown corduroys and
denims of the correct houses of the Nineties, lace, red
plush and velvet, Latin bequeathals, however degener-
ated, still lived among the middle classes and in sporting
houses — a faint perverted hint of Venus not prized in
the United States.
In Alice's flat on South 4yth Street, she used to play
the piano for her Hoosier lover, and on the red velvet
settee he held her and caressed her. Sometimes she
danced for him " a running overstep clog, sidewise to
and fro, her skirts lifted to her shoe tops." Or they met
for dinner in the downtown crowds. Or Sundays they
would go to a concert, or an Ethical Culture sermon,
and later to Jackson Park, where she would plan what
her wedding dress and slippers and veil were going to be,
and he would half wonder whether they would ever be
married. Once, he says, they threw some pillows on the
floor and she begged him to love her recklessly, almost
hoping perhaps that if a child came of it, that would bind
him ; but he thought it was wrong . . . " not quite fair."
Twenty-five years later he troubles to reason this back
and forth as if talking to himself. He supposes that had
he been " desperately in love," he would have been " will-
ing to starve her on twenty dollars a week." He never
83
saw her, he says among these recollections of editors,
politicians and reporters, " as anything but ... a deli-
cate almost perfect creature to love and cherish." It was
not that he thought less of Alice, but more of himself.
He was beginning to be fortunate. There was his victory
of the fake auctioneer war. And there was another girl,
of one of the " best " or anyway "better" families, he
had met on his reporter's rounds — " A little blonde, very
sleek and dreamy," not too snobbish to " go with him."
She was less compelling than Alice, " too lymphatic and
carefully reared," but she was " better dressed and better
placed." She was a hint of a world he might sometime
join if he kept himself unentangled — a world he had
so often envied from the outside, as he passed its pros-
perous lawns and houses, its " strutting youth in Eng-
lish suits," its " high-headed girls in flouncy lacy dresses,"
at their croquet and tennis games. " To me, in my life-
hungry, love-hungry state, this new rich prosperity with
its ease, its pretty women and its efforts at refinement
... set me to riotous dreaming and longing. . . ." To
this extent the young man of An American Tragedy is
Dreiser of the Nineties, just as, one imagines, Balzac re-
members himself in the hero of La Peau de Chagrin.
Many reviewers of A Book About Myself have cen-
sored him for " shameless confession," or laughed at
him for thinking that readers would be interested in
a boy and girl of so long before in so drab a setting. In
this they were ignoring his belief that there is no such
thing as common place or common time or common peo-
ple, if and when wired by drama. With the picture of Alice
herself, one imagines, this type of reviewer had no quarrel.
She is that forebearing, delicious, dependent creature that
has made The Saturday Evening Post a king of maga-
zines ; and a great nation of he-men, young and old, hurries
of a Thursday to the stands to get repeated news of her.
She is, as are variations of her in other stories of his, very
like the eternal nymph, whom movie favorites are yet reg-
istering for a public of tired business men. The shocking
difference is that Dreiser himself was not the one-hun-
dred-per-cent hero that would yield the happy ending for
Alice, and create the ideal story for a candy-eating public.
84
19
Going, with the go-getters.
I
.n November, five months after he had started
his newspaper training, McEnnis advised him to leave the
Globe. It was not a big enough field for him : " A great
paper like the St. Louis Globe Democrat or the New
York Sun starts a boy off right. I would like to see you
go first to St. Louis and then to New York." So the story
runs true to the fable of those picked for a race and a
fight. He was never quite without someone who cared
what happened to him. And, too, he worked fabulously.
These five months read like a year or more in compressed
achievement. McEnnis was true to his scheme. On a
Tuesday a telegram arrived from St. Louis: uYou may
have reportorial position on this paper at twenty dollars
a week, beginning next Monday. Wire reply."
What to do? There was Alice, there was Chicago now
familiar and dear to him. He asked McEnnis, whose
advice was : " Go? Of course go ! ... You will be work-
ing on one of the greatest papers and under one of the
greatest editors that ever lived. . . . Hand in your
resignation now. . . . And go Sunday. . . . I'll give
you some letters that will help you."
They called themselves sons-of-guns, these self-made
men. (The slogan was " Go "!) When they were young
they went; when they were older they coached others to
go. They were shot out to new jobs, new horizons, more
pay, more life. Or they shot out to new countries, new
victories, new deaths, like the last of these zealots, the
doughboys in the Great War, and Lindbergh and his fol-
lowers encircling the earth. Dreiser obeyed the contagion
of the time. He went. He wondered what to do about
Alice, left it till Saturday to say goodbye. Then after
dinner with McEnnis, he hurried to her house; she was
85
not there. The next morning speeding south toward St.
Louis through the " wide flat yards adjacent to her
home ... a driving rain outside ... I could see the
very windows and steps by which we had so often sat."
He thought he couldn't stand it. He would write to her
and beg her to come, " to be his mistress perhaps, if not
his wife." But he didn't write. Once in St. Louis, new
problems annihilated loneliness.
" One gloomy December afternoon," he records, " in
the reportorial room of the St. Louis Globe Democrat,"
a letter came from Alice asking for her letters back; he
wouldn't want them now. Then, a postscript : " I stood
by the window last night and looked out on the street.
The moon was shining and those dead trees over the way
were waving in the wind. I saw the moon on that little
pool of water in the field. It looked like silver. Oh, Theo,
I wish I were dead." Again, he says, he found himself on
the two horns of his ever recurring dilemma. To think he
could have left her. Of course she wished she were dead.
But could he support her and himself too as he must
now in his new position and with his new friends? Did he
love her enough to make the sacrifice? He wasn't sure.
And yet " this loss of honor and happiness! "
" I sat looking into the face of the tangle as one might
into the gathering front of a storm. Words moved in my
brain and then marshalled themselves into curious lines
and rhythms. . . . Presently I saw that I was writing a
poem but that it was rough. ... I was in a great fever
to change it ... but more eager to go on with my idea,
which was about this tangle of life." Could anyone de-
scribe better the drift and mood of Dreiser in relation to
language? He would like it to be perfectly related to the
thought, and yet is even more eager to be on with his
ideas, which are forever about this baffling and irresistible
tangle of life.
While he was writing, Bob Hazard, one of his new
friends, looked over his shoulder: "What you doing,
Dreiser, writing poetry? . . . There's no money in it.
. . . You can't sell 'em. I've written tons of 'em, but it
don't do any good. You'd better be putting your time on
a book or a play." — "I know it isn't profitable," Dreiser
86
persisted. " Still it might be if I wrote them well enough."
Hazard smiled. Yet newspaper men did write poetry.
Sullivan, the first managing editor on the Globe, had
showed him poems of his in the " Whittier-Longfellow
manner," and he had been sure he could do better and
would some day. But now the thought of a novel or play,
and for Hazard to suggest them as within his power,
was tonic. In this creative mood he had nearly forgotten
Alice. Finally he wrote her he still loved her and wanted
to keep her letters, and if later he was " better placed
financially," he would come back, but as he wrote the
fear haunted him that he would not keep his word. Some
months later a final letter came from Alice, saying she
would be married the next day at noon, " unless — unless
something happened." He let nothing happen. He knew,
he writes, that " Alice in spite of my great sadness and
affection for her was nothing more than a passing bit of
beauty. ... I was sad for her and for myself, saddest
because of that chief characteristic of mine and of life
which will not let anything endure permanently. ... I
was too restless, too changeful." So he was far from
being the ideal hero and has as ruthlessly confessed it for
himself as for other heroes of his stories. Ring Lardner,
alone, has managed to circulate in the popular maga-
zines as slippery a brand of hero, to disappoint and pique
a hard-drink, soft-drink public. But Lardner's salesmen,
prize fighters, base ball players and song writers, are less
crucial, being less conscious of themselves than was this
young reporter of A Book About Myself.
Dreiser, undoubtedly, would have it understood that
he for one is a savage, tenderly reminiscent, but with the
need to junk romance, or anyway to sacrifice one reality
to another in pursuit of power, and sometimes of mere
variety. Take it or leave it, this was his nature, and he
felt that he was not alone in it; there had always been
and always would be men and women of this necessity.
For himself he appears to have appeased tenderness
through tearful pity of the suffering around him and
through little souvenirs, like Alice's postscript, of the
quieter people he had felt forced to break with. His early
scribbled poems he has since destroyed, but has twice
87
preserved the memento of Alice standing by the window
and wishing she were dead. It is quoted in A Book About
Myself and before that it is used in The ' Genius ' at the
close of an incident in the life of Witla, similar in its
beginning to Dreiser's life.
88
20
" St Louis: A diamond in a dirty shirt "
ROBERT INGERSOLL
T
-ILhe managing editor of the St. Louis Globe
Democrat, John B. McCullagh, was for his new reporter
all that McEnnis had said — " a real force, a great man."
Through him he learned to feel the meaning of journal-
ism for good or evil in the life of the nation. He had
built up a paper in the easy-going indolent Southwest
that had significance both here and abroad. He was " a
kind of god " to his readers, natives of Texas, Iowa, Mis-
souri, Arkansas, Southern Illinois, as he was to his own
staff — a man to work for and up to. Dreiser makes a
vivid portrait of him in his book of newspaper days, which
revels in detail and moves like a novel :
". . . In that small office . . . waist-deep among his pa-
pers, his heavy head sunk on his pouter-like chest, his feet
encased in white socks and low slipper-like shoes. ... A
solitary or eccentric ... a few years later he leaped to his
death from the second story window of his home . . . out
of sheer weariness, I assume, tired of an inane world."
His paper was of necessity conventional — he liked
to have it referred to as " the great religious daily " —
and yet it had thrust and character. His own sentences
" cracked like a whip ; the paragraphs exploded at times,
burst like a torpedo." He reads like one of those com-
pensating tempers, who can make acceptable fairy stories,
that yet convey the sense of life. Indeed if ever the human
race struggles out into sunlight — no taboos, no supersti-
tions — the loss will be in the old cleverness of ciphers,
in the polite forms of whatever etiquette is in fashion to
veil the truth. We may then be homesick for the mas-
querades of the past. Yet this editor was bored enough
with them all to commit suicide. " Ursine rather than
leonine," Dreiser describes him, " with keen grey eyes
89
under bushy brows," and he had been a war correspondent
with Farragut on the Mississippi, with Sherman in the
Civil War.
Under his spell, which was the spell of American en-
terprise — the magic of new fantastic playgrounds of
commerce — Dreiser " made good " for a time, and
joined in the antics. At first, it was routine reporting, the
covering of " a murder, a failure, a defalcation, a wed-
ding, a banquet, a ball." Soon in addition he was given a
column to write, " Heard in the Corridors." The work
took him the rounds of the hotels and stations, gave him
license to write more as he liked, to invent interviews with
imaginary guests; and, too, it brought him in contact
with a range of celebrities and charlatans. To each
one, theosophists, spiritualists, mind readers, evangelists,
" quack novelists," statesmen, scientists or musicians he
would ask his favorite question — what did they think
about life? Often he knew little of their import, but then
Mitchell, the city editor, seemed to know less. With a
" height of six feet, one and one-half inches," weighing
only one hundred and thirty-seven pounds " with no par-
ticular blemish " except for " one eye turned slightly out-
ward," and crowded upper teeth and " a general home-
liness of feature"; his body "blazing with sex" and
desire for " supremacy," Dreiser describes himself at
twenty-one. This was the boy who made his way as best
he could to audiences with Annie Besant, the Reverend
Sam Jones, Eva Fay, John L. Sullivan, Hall Caine,
Henry Watterson, Paderewski, Nikola Tesla, asking al-
ways the same question — what do you think about life?
What fixed his standing on the paper, and not long
after he had come to it, was again as in Chicago a matter
of luck. Though dealing so often with the tragedy of
others, always he insists on his own good luck : " I al-
ways got the breaks." The breaks this time lay in the fact
of a big wreck on the road near Alton, reported to him
one morning before anyone else had come to the office :
" If you people get up there right away you can get a
big lead on this." With a note to the city editor and ad-
vice to send an artist after him, he went without waiting
for orders. He " had never seen a big wreck, it must be
90
wonderful." It did surpass all concepts of frightfulness.
It engulfed him in horror and yet it was his big chance
and he took it. McCullagh acknowledged the scoop with
a raise of five dollars and a twenty-dollar bill and the
words, " You have done a fine piece of work." He was a
real newspaper man at last, his Napoleonic dreams might
in fact come true. Soon after in the event of a vacancy he
asked boldly to be made dramatic editor, and McCullagh
said, "You're dramatic editor. Tell Mr. Mitchell (the
city editor) to let you be it." More than any other chroni-
cle of Dreiser's, this newspaper epic breathes the ro-
mance, nearly finished now, that went on for so many
years in this country, between older and younger men,
outstripping the romance that has gone on between men
and women here, because more sanctioned and better
understood.
In addition to being an apprentice in the business of
learning about life through the ludicrous, cruel, and yet
immediate method of journalism, he became too for the
first time an apprentice in Bohemia, or in such would-be
Bohemia as St. Louis afforded. This paper, unlike the
Chicago Globe, had an art department. The mere word
" art " had always beguiled him. The men here seemed to
him distinctive and unconventional, two of them espe-
cially— Dick Wood, with wrist watch, cabalistic scarf
pin, boutonniere of violets; and P. B. McCord, the
" Peter " of Twelve Men, cordial and virile, with
" tramp-like hair and whiskers." They had a studio to-
gether in an old quarter of the town into which exclusive
aura they admitted Dreiser, Wood indulgently, McCord
at once on equal terms. Their friendship, he says, lasted
for years until Peter's death and to him he owes u some
of his sanest views of life."
With these two and their circle of wayward souls, ad-
mitted because they burned with some fever of living dis-
reputably or creatively, he felt that he had entered on a
plane above poverty or wealth. They chattered till morn-
ing about art and artists, read their manuscripts to each
other, strolled about the dark quarters of the town with
mandolin, banjo and flute, or frequented the dives of
Chinatown and the underworld. Wood delighted in their
lingo and color, and was gathering notes to be made into
tales that would recreate the lilt of life among such out-
laws as thieves, pimps, dope fiends, murderers, and immi-
grants from the Orient. He had an eerie gift for making
friends with these strangers and could retell whole pas-
sages out of their lives. With more stability Dreiser
thinks he might have succeeded. I would almost say in
a different land he might have succeeded. In a land where
any race of another color becomes associated with u evil "
and " filth," as it is called, what chance is there to give
strangeness and dissolution their separate values? How-
ever silly and abortive Wood was, Dreiser records that
he owed to him " poignant moods " that revealed " the
beauty and romance of many strange places."
Then there were others on the paper, Jock Bellairs,
posted at the Four Courts with other reporters to give
first news of crime or accident — a bottle of whiskey in
his pocket, a game of cards going on; a girl or two of one
or the other reporters. And Rodenberger, whom Dreiser
virtuously saved one day from suicide by dope, after al-
cohol, and was not thanked for it.
And then Bob Hazard, who with another man had al-
ready completed a novel which " could never be pub-
lished in the United States " — "a direct outcome of
Zola and Balzac, the scene laid in France even," since
" such things as interested these two occurred only in
France ... or if done here were never spoken of."
Dreiser calls this first novel he ever read in manuscript
" the opening wedge for him into the realm of realism."
It went deep in him, both because of the freshness of
these boys who " burned to present life as they saw it,"
and because of their certainty that it was useless in 1892
to send the story to an American publisher. That struck
him as curious at the time, but as the years went on he
was to remember it as a tragic American fact. The book
was never published. Ten years later the gay irresistible
Hazard blew his brains out, leaving a brilliant newspaper
job and a wife and child in Washington. " The other
man," a friend writes him years later, " was killed in an
opium joint (his baby died the same night) ." So Dreiser's
pages gleam with fateful rockets.
92
His own desire to write something real, he says, was
fixed from this hour. He decided on a play as a form that
seemed easier to him (" and still did after thirty years ")
than a novel. His work as dramatic critic encouraged him
in this ; also his ever increasing desire for riches and lux-
ury, every trace of which he envied as he went on his
rounds and compared the grandeur of hotels and clubs
and mansions and commercial offices to the squalor of
districts where " the unsuccessful " lived. The plays that
came to St. Louis, the best of them from Jones, Pinero,
Augustus Thomas, were most of them saccharine and un-
real, filled with the cruel rich, honest working men, be-
trayed daughters, splendid reforms, happy moral endings.
But for him he confesses they had glamour — love made
insidiously romantic by boudoirs and drawing rooms and
expensively beautiful actresses. And he felt too that none
of this was to be had in St. Louis; the home of it was
New York or Paris or London. With McCord and Wood
he discussed his dreams. Comic opera was probably the
quickest and most gaudy path to success. He mapped out
a scenario — a cranky Indiana farmer by magic trans-
ported back among the Aztecs of Mexico, and becoming
a despot there. He wrote a rough draft of it, Peter made
designs for scenes and costumes, and acted out some of
the comedy for the other two. Dreiser was delirious with
imagined success. And yet too the thing seemed not quite
real to him. Others arrived by fantastic easy roads, but
more than likely nothing so sweet was meant for him.
93
21
Last years of apprenticeship: new alli-
ances.
he days passed now in bigger responsibili-
ties — the covering of an important murder trial, a flood,
a train robbery, and then the hurrying to his duties as
dramatic editor. McCullagh liked him and still fascinated
him. He was being sent out of town now, and might in
time, he believes, have become a star correspondent, once,
he had thought, a pinnacle of achievement. But newspaper
work began to seem insufficient. For one thing, what did it
have to do with art or with the kind of life he hoped some
time to lead? Take the mere matter of dramatic criticism.
McCullagh had small interest in it or he would not have
trusted it to a young reporter, and coupled it with other
work at that. Here Dreiser was the non-conformist; few
Americans would have put criticism ahead of news in im-
portance. It seemed to him, too, that Mitchell, the city
editor, resented him and purposely gave him assignments
that made the theatre work nearly impossible. One night
in April, sent out of town to cover a hold-up, he had
taken a chance and written notices beforehand of three
plays scheduled to open in St. Louis that night. But be-
cause of washouts on the road none of them had arrived.
The morning Globe printed his profuse praise of nothing,
and the afternoon papers delighted in laughing at their
eminent competitor.
The new dramatic critic, ashamed to face anyone, left
a note on McCullagh's desk of gratitude and regret, try-
ing to explain how it had happened, but taking the blame,
he says ; and then fled jobless to his rooms rather than wait
to be fired. Disgraced in St. Louis, he must, he supposed,
try his luck in another city, but first he had to make enough
money to go. This need landed him a job on the Republic
94
at eighteen dollars a week under another forceful editor,
H. B. Wandell, without the greatness of McCullagh, but
with a mania for the story, especially when it involved
horror or scandal. Zola first and Balzac and then Loti
were his models. Hugo and Dickens were invoked at
times. No commonplace rendering was permitted. The
paper must throb with human interest or with " cold hard
pictures." He exhorted his reporters to read Zola and
make " the drab and the gross and the horrible " drip
with life. It is interesting that Dreiser, who is often al-
leged to have derived from Zola, says here that he never
read him, not until after his own first novel, Sister Carrie.
But in WandelPs presence he dared not admit it. He be-
lieves the Republic was a better place for him than the
Globe Democrat. It gave him more scope for writing, in
fact taught him how to write. On this paper he became
important; Wandell often asked his advice as to engag-
ing new men, and would take him away from work just to
eat and drink and gossip about great literature, for which
he had " the strangest, fussiest, bossiest love."
In these days he obeyed orders. He was told to write
comedy for a summer charity drive which involved a fat-
lean baseball series — he, who had never written any-
thing funny in his life, nor even cared to make people
laugh. He managed to get away with it; for five weeks
or more he was a comic hit in the minds of Republic
readers. His stock rose to the point of his being sent to
Chicago as the paper's correspondent, with a party of
school teachers selected by a state voting contest to visit
the World's Fair of 1893 at tne Republic's expense.
For all his subversive power, Dreiser has not been
fatally disturbed by the flatulence of American methods
of money making — to which fact undoubtedly he owes
his chance of survival within it. Sensitive to its hypocrisy
and banality, but not quite to the vulgarity of it, even
in his proudest later days, he has not been a complete
exile. Often he has joined in, and for that knows our
commercial life from the inside more fairly than those
who have been defeated by it. He went off with the school
teachers in a holiday spirit, a trifle dampened by the
Methodist look of the agent who was to direct the party,
95
but rather fancying the superintendent of schools, acting
as chaperon, who had " big soft ruddy hands decorated
with several rings," and helped to put him at his ease
among the girls. Before they were far out in their special
Pullman, alive with " young buxom Missouri school
teachers ... as attractive as their profession would
permit," he had lost shyness and was captivated by so
many prize winners. " Look where I would I seemed
to find a new type of prettiness confronting me." And
why not? Here they were, sacrificed to making more
inane and more popular the columns of the Republic;
and yet how young, how blooming, not a wrinkle, gig-
gling, blushing, exuberant in their prettiest clothes on a
paid-f or vacation — and he the one young man among
them. A Greek goatherd never wrote of satyric dreams
more lustfully than Dreiser remembers his school teach-
ers in their plush and polished Pullman. A leading man
caught archly among chorus girls is not his equal in zest.
You may say his memory is gawky and ingenuous, but it
has a touch of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, before the
dancers turn their black garments of grief to the audience.
Out of the bouquet he picked five or six incidentally,
and two especially, Miss Ginnity and Miss W. to see the
Fair with by turns — again the reckless brunette and the
more aloof blonde, this time red-headed. Out of these,
the blonde remained with him through years of excita-
tion and then of marriage. She was his second romance,
more skilful and less forbearing than Alice. If in the end
she never turned the black coat of tragedy on him, it was
a grey drab mantle anyway that amounted to gloom —
a thing to escape from. Yet it was not really this dainty
creature with " stark red braids " to crown " a flower-
like face and almond eyes," whom in later years he came
to resent; it was what she stood for with rigid strength
— monotony, conformity, routine — when he had imag-
ined she stood only for something above him, more frag-
ile and exquisite than he was, and entirely personal. In
the Wooded Island of the exotic World's Fair, in the
light of fireworks around the Court of Honor, which cre-
ated, it is said, the splendor and elegance of older places
than Chicago, the young man dallied with his school
96
teachers, one so ardent and primitive, the other entan-
gling and difficult to reach. Being difficult enhanced her
value ; he must reach her, even marry her if possible. Then,
too, there was her sister Rose, who came to join them,
more lively than Sarah. She might suit him better. Cer-
tainly he must not lose track of these two.
The weight of deciphering, however, was not yet
heavy on him. Back in St. Louis he entered the race again
— getting ahead of the other reporter when he could,
desolate when he couldn't,* ferreting out secrets of lives
even to the ruin of them, when the news exacted it. And
he grew in prestige. In these days once out of the office
he wore, he says, to please romance, a long military coat,
a Stetson hat, gloves, a cane, soft pleated shirts; and
would go thus to court Sarah of the World's Fair, when
she came to visit her aunt from the place where she taught
in the country. He says of her :
" There was something of the wood or water nymph
about her, a seeking in her eyes, a breath of wild winds in
her hair, a scarlet glory to her mouth. ... St. Louis took
on a glamor which it had never before possessed. ... If
only this love affair could have gone on to a swift fruition
it would have been perfect, blinding. . . . But love as it
is in most places was a slow process. . . . There must be
many visits before I could even place an arm on her. . . .
Well, I reached the place where I could hold her hand, put
my arms about her, kiss her, but never could I induce her
to sit in my lap."
Instead she fanned in him an idolatrous passion, and
like a staunch servant of society held him off, secured
with the ring he had bought her. Over long months she
held him thus, straining toward an income sufficient to
pay for the hour when lust and love might be legally one.
In these days too there came to St. Louis other visitors,
his brothers E. and A. as he calls them, because he thought
that they should by now graduate from driving laundry
wagons and working in shoe stores. With his new prestige
he would find jobs for them in St. Louis. But they came
and had to go back to Chicago without jobs, tired, as they
said, of St. Louis, a " hell of a place, a third rate city."
* Chapter 64 of A Book About Myself and a Story of Stories in Free
and Other Stories repeat one climax of this.
97
And there came also his favorite brother Paul, the ballad
maker, " stout, gross, sensual," and yet a fountain of
delicacy; the one member of his family who, not under-
standing him, yet caught the drift of his aims. He saw
his face one day on a billboard, starring in a clap-trap
melodrama, The Danger Signal. Now after years of
absence he loved him anew not because he had to, not
because Paul knew more of life than he did — in fact he
decided rather less — but because " he reminded me a
great deal of my mother," like her, " wonderful and
tender." Speaking of him Dreiser reveals a novel basis
of values : ". . . he was full of simple middle class ten-
derness, and middle class grossness — all of which I am
free to say I admire. . . . After all, we cannot all be
artists, statesmen, generals, thieves or financiers."
It was a delight to have this brother to show off to
Wood, McCord, Hazard, and the others, and he took his
fiancee to meet him. Paul gave him a box for the show,
in which he was a comic switchman, and sang one of his
own songs, The Bowery, for which unquestionably he was
famous. He came back with the party to the younger
brother's rooms for supper, by now as much a center of
life as McCord's and Wood's. The week ended in what
he hoped would be a " glorious dinner at Faust's," in
honor of Paul, to which he had invited not only his more
Bohemian friends, but the executives of his office, Wan-
dell, Williams, indeed everyone he liked. He was bitterly
disappointed when these diverse elements, dear to him,
refused to blend; "it was all such a fizzle that I could
have wept," he remembers. That one's picked friends
should not be friends is one of the dreary discords on the
way up the ladder of sophistication.
During a week of breakfasts with the comedian, he
was to hear constantly of New York, the place for him
to go if he was to compete with equals. Chicago would
never do. Journalists from the East had told him the
same thing, but he like a true mid-Westerner had been
loyal to Chicago. Now his brother was weaving the
spell of New York. He began to believe. But what of
his fiancee? What did Paul think of her? " Well, she is
charming, but if I were in your place I wouldn't marry
98
anyone yet." At this time John Maxwell came from
Chicago looking for a job, and gave him rougher advice.
Looking at her picture he said : " ' Have you any idea how
old she is ? ' — 4 Oh, about my age.' — ' Oh hell, she's
older than that. . . . Along with this, she's one of these
mid- Western girls, all right for life out here, but no good
for the newspaper game or you. I've been through that
myself. . . . She belongs to some church, I suppose?'
— ' Methodist,' I replied ruefully — 'I knew it! But
I'm not knocking her; I'm not saying she isn't pretty and
virtuous, but . . . she's older and narrower. ... In
three or four years you will have children, and you'll get
a worried, irritated point of view. Take my advice. Run
with girls if you want to, but don't marry. . . .' " Drei-
ser for a second almost believed this rude tutor, and " yet
the delirious meetings went on and on." And the days
went on, crying to him the need of hurry, if he was to
count.
Marriage or not, he must make more money. With all
his progress he was getting only twenty-three dollars a
week and The Republic seemed in no mood to give more.
And then somehow he must be on to New York. At this
point there came a proposal from a young man for whom
he had little respect, to start with him a country weekly
in his town, Grand Rapids, Ohio ; there would be money
in it. Without confidence in the scheme, at least it would
be an escape for him. He would look the ground over, and
if there was nothing to it, push on from there, not back
to St. Louis. He gave up his position on the Republic,
finally to be offered a raise. But it was too late, he was
booked for a change. In a farewell meeting with Miss W.
he gave desperate pledges, that as soon as he could he
would live with her the life she dreamed of, " in a modest
home with children and money enough for a few needs
. . . eventually to die and to be buried respectably."
And yet at that moment a voice said to him that his
destiny would be different from that — not so sad maybe ;
and " that any beautiful woman would satisfy " him.
With a letter of endorsement from Wandell which, how-
ever, in the next years of wandering, quixotically he never
used — he was afraid he could not live up to it — he
99
packed his bags and said goodbye to what he thinks of
now as his years of apprenticeship.
He discusses their influence. When he came to St.
Louis already he was " not an ethically correct and moral
youth." Perhaps he would not have lied, at least in big
matters, or have stolen after his one experience in
Chicago, and would not today " under ordinary circum-
stances do this." But already he felt that there was and
could be no strict justice as between men and women.
He had noticed that the women often did not want it,
and that the world of youths at least was busy with
" libertinage." They boasted of it and got away with it.
He had no thought yet that he might be punished for it
or even censored; others were not. And yet from his
bringing up he was still " swashing around among the
idealistic maxims of Christ and . . . the religionists
generally, and contrasting them hourly . . . with the
selfish materialism of the day as [he] saw it." He
watched the poor and he watched the rich, and couldn't
help indicting society for the fierce differences between
them, and wishing he could " flail" the strong and com-
fort the weak with the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the
Mount. He calls himself at twenty-one u a poetic melan-
cholic crossed with a vivid materialistic lust for life."
When he left St. Louis a year and three months later,
hardened by a more factual philosophy, he was beginning
to think that there was a law of life which was never
to agree with the beautiful and " helpless " poetry of
Christ. The realism out of his newspaper schooling was
returning him this verdict, at variance with Christian
dogma, which had divided the world into enemy groups,
and had nicknamed them idealists and cynics, ignoring
the original Greek meaning of these terms. Dreiser be-
came accurately neither one nor the other, but rather
a believer in what his eyes dictated — belief in the irre-
pressible spring of life, which by moments lifted some
people and broke others.
100
The outside world: walking up and down
in it.
few days in the wintry triviality of an
Ohio village cured him of running a country paper.
He was not fitted for it. They told him that these small
towns were soon going to be lively manufacturing centers.
Many people would come, and they would get rich there.
He knew enough of the trend of industry to believe it;
America was on its way to " material triumphs." But then
as always the thought was like lead to him. What use in
these riches unless they could be translated into the
splendors of art and the wisdom of artists, as a way of
life? That might happen in New York, his brother had
said it was happening, but perhaps never in Ohio. Besides,
they told him, " We are a religious and hard working
people — any newspaper here has got to take that into
account." He was not the one to do it.
Here by " a charming river," he says, " I paused for a
few days, and took stock of my life." His youth was be-
hind him, and he could think of nothing ahead of him
more definite than the same vague poignant ambitions
that had always driven him. He then took his " first, free
and unaided flight into the unknown," which landed him in
Toledo. Strolling about this city, again he was stung by the
contrast between rich and poor districts — " The spacious
lawns, the shuttered and laced windows ! The wonder of
evening fires in winter! The open cool and shadowed
doors in summer! Swings and hammocks ... ! "
Children brought up in the smugness of such houses
with their shameless yards open to the world, with their
cruel plate-glass windows, their flaccid family life, or at
least those sensitive enough to curse these dwellings as
if they were prisons, will find it hard to understand the
101
part they had in the dreams of a boy shut out from it
all. He sings poems over the polish of the brass, the
cleanliness of the lace, the accuracy of each monstrous
cream-colored window shade pulled half way down, the
fragrance of sidewalks and stone steps hosed by gardeners
in June. He is the reminiscent poet of the " residences "
of the Nineties.
But it is not to laugh. They are lyrics that half tell
the story of the failure of our country to delight the soul,
psyche of the five senses. The rich achieved these pros-
perous shells. The poor, permitted nothing except a few
parks, where they had to keep off the grass, and saloons
for men and " bad women," too tough to give a sense of
ease, worked and slaved and schemed for what? For
these very mausoleums, brass, lace, glass, bushes, grass,
molasses-oaken doors and all, which they knew from the
outside alone. And if they had gotten in, there was noth-
ing more mysterious to know except further evidences of
prosperity. From that day to this, when a president was
hailed into office on the shoulders of that one word, Pros-
perity; exteriority of ever more shining surfaces has been
the Grail. Dreiser with his usual candor admits the lure
it had for him. Indeed, it was not until he had traveled
to Europe at forty and had seen for himself the scheme
of life in France and Italy, that he could be a colder
critic of our code. Then he noticed the open voids al-
most obscenely public beyond these exclusive doors.*
In Latin countries a beguiling program motivated all
grades of living, half mystic, half sensual, deriving from
the Virgin and Venus, tempered in France by a spirit
wrung from the revolution — every one Monsieur, Ma-
dame, Mademoiselle. And it varied not so much in de-
sign, chiefly in price. In houses humble and rich the same
form of dinner, accompanied by wine, from soup to black
* "(Ma! Ma! Have you got an undershirt in there for me? ' — I
looked out to see ... a man of sixty . . . intelligent and forceful look-
ing, a real American business chief. * Yes,' came the answer, f wait a
minute. I think there's one in Ida's satchel. Is Harry up yet ' — < Yes, he's
gone out.' This was six A.M. Here stood the American in the pretentious
hall, suspenders down, meekly importuning his wife through the closed
door." From a chapter called An American Summer Resort in A Hoosier
Holiday.
102
coffee and liqueur, was understood. Restaurants and cafes
served the different classes with nearly equal form and
mystery. This was balm to mind and body. There was an
order out of it animated by wit. But in the United States
we were forced to get prosperous or be damned. Ease
and enjoyment have been their virtues; ambition and
activity have had to be ours.
Dreiser, the native, instinctively knew them as required
virtues, and felt the dark bleak passageways where the
shuttle of ambition worked ceaselessly back and forth. I
think one can't understand the racial drift of his writ-
ings, without realizing how these " exclusive " districts
have affected the excluded. Nor understand intolerants
like Poe and Ambrose Bierce, without being faced with
these facts of cleavage of the high from the low, and
emptiness above. Now one hears it like a hymn of praise
— native radio, automobile, movie, frigidaire, clothes,
bungalows and apartments open at all prices to all
classes! But as in Toledo, Ohio, in 1894, isn't it the
same Divinity dictating this; and not Sex, not Art,* not
Learning, as the young wanderer from St. Louis was
hoping; not primarily Speed or Daring, as for a while it
promised to be ; but more and more firmly Respectability
measured by Money, ruling through Comfort? The whir
of life has not yet come to inhabit the " ideal home " fur-
nished with these products. It remains back in the offices,
and factories and power plants that produce them, and
will remain there until Americans frayed and jaded turn
from relations of people to things, to cultivate relations
with one another. An American Tragedy is a summary of
this.
Yet in these years Dreiser was still hopeful of a so-
ciety held together by pleasures of body and mind. And
in Toledo, applying for a job on the leading morning
paper, he found in the city editor who engaged him, one
of the " intellectual experiences " of his life — Arthur
Henry: " A small cherubic individual, with a complexion
of milk and cream, light brown hair and a serene blue
eye." At once they gossiped about Chicago of the White-
* Except as in native music, women's underwear, and machinery,
especially automobiles; hastily sex begins to rule in the first two, and art
in machinery.
103
chapel Club Days, where one had known and the other
known of Eugene Field, Peter Dunne, Ben King. They
were at the moment linked spiritually, would have mar-
ried, Dreiser says, if Henry had been a girl. Their friend-
ship lasted for years " through storm and disillusion-
ment." Arthur Henry was the spur to his first short
story, and then to his first novel, Sister Carrie. Today
Henry remembers their first meeting as vividly as he is
remembered :
" I am vague as to dates — but I was city editor of the
Toledo Blade when I first met Dreiser. I looked up from
my desk one hectic day and saw him beside me. He was
lank and tall. Nothing satirical in his eyes then — just a
burning eagerness. We were in the midst of violent street
car strikes. I had just received word that the company was
about to start a strike-breaking car over the route and I
had no one to send at the moment for so dangerous a con-
signment. The young man — gaunt, rugged, a little di-
shevelled and dusty from his travels, was asking for a job
and I dispatched him five minutes after his entrance. He
rode with the car and returned with a story. I read it,
rushed it to the composing room, hovered over it and read
the proof myself so that no loyal proof-reader could carry
it to the Owners of the paper and have it killed or changed.
It was a great story and nearly lost me my job. Dreiser
and I were about the same age — both young — all en-
quiring and fearless. What did the loss of a job amount to
compared to the birth of a great story and the finding of a
perfect friend?"
For a while, after long lunches and dinners together,
they were forced to separate, since there was no perma-
nent place to be had on the paper. Dreiser went on to
Cleveland, where again he was struck by the residences of
the rich — " wide lawns and iron or stone statues of stags
and dogs and deer." Here these were the homes of multi-
millionaires, John D. Rockefeller, Tom Johnson, Henry
M. Flagler. He got work on the Cleveland Leader doing
Sunday stories, about a new style of grain boat, turtle-
back, about a model chicken farm near the city. But at
three dollars a column this was inadequate. So on again,
this time to Buffalo, to find nothing to that except a trip
to Niagara. James Oppenheim tells in one of his poems
how he and Dreiser were looking one evening at an amaz-
ing sunset over the Hudson River, and Oppenheim said,
104
" Could you describe that, Dreiser? " The answer was,
" Yes, that or anything." Niagara here comes in for a
slight sketch, one paragraph, and it has with all his pic-
tures a quality of discovery, of news about it — a trait
of style with him.
After these weeks of wandering, finally Pittsburgh be-
came a home again for six months. The town excited him.
Set among mountains, which he saw for the first time,
threaded by three rivers of beautiful names, the Monon-
gahela, the Allegheny and the Ohio, under a mantle of
fiery smoke and cinders, it was the setting for a drama
going on between multimillionaire and wage earner, be-
tween success and failure — a theme he must have mulled
over from then on until he had to write The Financier
and The Titan, in which he decides upon the conqueror as
hero. The picture he makes of Pittsburgh in A Book
About Myself is among his best canvases — its steel
works, its hovels of anaemic laborers' families, its rolling
mills and power plants, and again its millionaires' houses.
It was likewise the setting for a drama that took place in
his own mind.
Pittsburgh in 1894 had come through two years of
bloody strikes. Carnegie and Phipps were still protecting
their properties with live-wire fences and an army of
Pinkerton detectives. It was a war to combine Carnegie
and Amalgamated Steel, to break the power of the single
laborer, to fix prices so that multimillionaires should go
over into the billionaire class. It was the first era of mam-
moth fortune-making in the United States, to be repeated
on the heels of the Great War. " Like huge ribbons of
fire these and other names of powerful steel men — the
Olivers, Thaws, Pricks, Thompsons — seemed to rise
and band the city." The least protest on the part of the
people, like the March of " General " Coxey's hobo army
on Washington, was played up by the press as a menace
to the nation, just as in 1930 similar disturbances in New
York have been treated. But nothing of the gigantic
schemes of the magnates to pervert democracy into plu-
tocracy, to take the country from the people without their
knowing it, was allowed to appear in the two Pittsburgh
papers — only the weddings and amusements of these
105
families. What the Dispatch, where Dreiser had found
a job at twenty-five dollars a week, valued most, aside
from ordinary reporting, were leisurely idle stories, the
lighter the better, nonsense if possible; since the real
news was too subversive to print. These he found he
could write to the satisfaction of the editor — his first
actual " excursion into creative work." He became an
accredited feature man, taken up as an original by the
editors of the paper; and the fashionable son of the pub-
lisher told him he " wished he could write like that," and
asked him to dine at his house. But he never went, though
it was one of the very houses he had so often envied from
the outside. Perhaps the difference in their clothes and
manners made him shy. He speaks of him as back from
Europe in " fine clothes."
Through this success he came to be an out of town cor-
respondent. His work was easy, gave him time to wander
about these precipitous terraces, to watch the city at all
times of day and night, from all angles, dominated al-
ways by its furnaces and their " enormous group of
stacks with red tongues waving in the wind." With a la-
bor agitator, a reporter on the paper, as friend, he went
among the families of the working men getting from
$1.65 to at most $4.00 a day. In Allegheny, across the
river, where he lived high up in a kind of cabin from
which the rivers and the lights of Pittsburgh were in-
spiration, he used to read in the Carnegie library, paid
for by the sweat and blood of the steel workers. He read
Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Thomas Hardy. And
especially he read Balzac, one novel after another, until
he came to confusing Pittsburgh and Paris, seemed really
to be living in the French city among the people of the
Human Comedy. And he thought, why shouldn't he learn
to make novels out of Pittsburgh as compelling and in-
volved as Balzac's? Surely life ran high among these
rivers and cliffs, veiled in cinders. And yet there was al-
ways New York. Perhaps that was the real city for him.
His brother Paul had told him so, had recently written
him to come for a visit, that their sister E. who had a
house in Fifteenth Street would be delighted if he came.
In July he induced the Dispatch to give him a vacation
106
and planned to see for himself. First, however, he felt
that he must go back to his fiancee waiting for him in
Missouri.
He went just as Eugene Witla, the " Genius," goes
back to his mid-Western sweetheart, and found her more
inflaming than ever, among the cool shadows, and wild
roses and crickets' chatter of her father's spacious farm.
His memory of this visit recalls the house, " old French
windows to the grass, graceful long rooms, verandahs
before it, so Southern in quality " ; and the other old
houses, scarcely a village " in a sea of corn " ; the dis-
tinction of the father and mother and brothers, all of
them living within American ideals. He felt there " the
spirit of rural America," the sentiment that made our
songs — Old Kentucky Home, Swanee River — and that
had made " the passion of a Brown, the patience and sad-
ness of a Lincoln, the dreams and courage of a Lee or a
Jackson." And yet he had seen the ferment in Pittsburgh
of Poles and Lithuanians struggling to be Americans too
against odds, and " had seen the girls of that city walk-
ing the streets at night." This gracious family with " their
profound faith in God ... in marriage ... in no wise
squared with the craft, the cruelty, the brutality, the envy
. . . everywhere else."
They seemed to him like people asleep. He longed to
wake their daughter up out of this, to seize her then and
there. She was delicious, they were both in a torment of
desire identified with the odors and noises of the fecund
fields around them; but they let the hour go by without
making it theirs. He went away, he says, the romance
ended. Though three years later he married her, desire
was gone; back in Missouri they had cheated life by hold-
ing it off. When he left on the train the world was already
greyer. This experience is enough to account for his life-
long exhortations to men and women to drink deep, and
instantly, not to wait and sip. All then would be better?
Perhaps and perhaps not. But he would like people to
try living that way. If he and his girl had at that moment
struck fire together, he believes an annealment of temper
between them would have taken place, and made a more
enduring bond.
107
25
" New York is a city of many cats. Some
say New York is Babylon. There is a rose
and gold mist New York."
CARL SANDBURG
A. N ew York in 1894 : I know the things it did
not have. Not automobiles, but broughams, victorias,
hansoms and tallyhos; not electric lights, but gas and oil
flames. No skyscrapers, unless the Tower Building, tech-
nically so because of steel construction. And it was still
an island as approached from Pittsburgh. Travelers got
out at Jersey City in a glass train-shed of a station, an
achievement of Victorian America, more truly aesthetic,
according to one difficult New York architect, John Oak-
man, than any modern skyscraper. And then by shambling
ferry-boats they arrived in New York. It had no radios,
no speakeasies, no jazz, no lighted billboards. But it had
the social climate out of which the creation which is to-
day New York and the decadence which is today New
York were to emanate. It had achieved in the Nineties
one phase of its exciting originality.
And these are the things it had that made this siren
atmosphere — the sea and boats drawn to it as by a mag-
net. The rivers and estuaries, the sea lagoons, have made
among three rocky islands an irresistible harbor through
which have come the importations of the human world.
Fabulous works of art, silks, foods, furs, laces, linens and
jewels, unexcelled, and the toys of the peasants of the
earth have docked through New York. And before they
have spread to blunted cities and country places, and their
flavor has vanished in houses half afraid of their sharp-
ness, and they have got lost in a seasick nightmare of im-
ported ineptitude — house decoration, exotic food and
clothes — these products, as they were taken off the ships
108
and stored in wholesale houses for a time, or displayed
in stores, at least as they passed through the city, gave it
an aroma that no other city has had. New York is the
port that has had to take care of a country making few
luxuries of its own. Then, too, strange people came with
these things, to sell or manufacture them — Jews and
Syrians, Italians and Armenians, Chinese, Spaniards, and
Portuguese who were not forced to become native at
once. They settled in the southeast portions of the city,
in neglected streets or along the waterways, and scarcely
changed their customs or language. Their life was like
music or perfume or love to Westerners after the sani-
tary and conforming Middle West. In spite of smells,
fleas and garbage heaps, these quarters have intoxicated
susceptible Americans until today, when now the immi-
grants begin to cater to the rule of cleanliness and cold-
ness, which is a matter of pride with New Yorkers.
Jean Cocteau was once quoted as citing in talk an
advantage that France had over more antiseptic coun-
tries: " C'est encore un fumier" (a dunghill). New
York in the Nineties, and for years after machinery ruled
it, had quarters that fertilized the rest of the city. They
were segregated districts; no proper person crossed into
them except a few " damn-fool " or would-be " damn-
fool artists." Yet a flavor of Eastern, Latin and Balkan
races hung over the city, however assimilated. Today,
tempered by British-Dutch precedent, it triumphs in Gug-
genheims, Lewisohns, Kahns, Roxys, Koblers, Ziegfelds,
Zukors, Liverights, if I may be allowed to pluralize these
names, now traditional. Some came from cultivated but
unloved families in Europe, some will tell you how it is
just " seventeen years from push-cart to Park avenue."
And then beyond the fact that in Avenue A large-
bodied and coarse-pored Jewesses with rich undulated
chevelures (who have produced a generation or more of
acceptable chorus girls and light-weight champions and
song-writers), have made street-counters of fresh eggs
look by contrast more fragile than French glassware,
and have made platters of exotic fish and pickles as in-
viting as Korean ornaments; and beyond the fact that
already Sicilians and Florentines and Bolognese had hung
109
their long sausages in pink, green, cobalt and lemon-
yellow tinsel in the windows of condiment shops, and had
placed their impeccable sugar tanagras on fete days in
the windows of their cake shops; and beyond the fact
that already in 1894 samovars and seven-branched candle-
sticks had undoubtedly given brass and copper orgasms
to Murray Hill old maids and bachelors — beyond all this,
illumined by the threadlike oil flames of innumerable push-
carts, beyond and slightly flavored by it, was New York
the gawdy respectable descendant of British-Dutch mer-
chants and trappers. It had like no other American
town a background of luxury. Engravings of the streets
of 1800 are as elegant as London streets of the same
period with painted coaches and rearing horses and
silver-trimmed harnesses. It was a town meant for
extravagance.
In 1894 under a corrupt political rule Dreiser de-
scribes it as badly cleaned and lighted compared to West-
ern cities, and then as bewildering to him in the sense of
social splendor. Already his brother had given him a hint
of this; and journals like Town Topics and The Stand-
ard, a pornographic theatre weekly; and the Pittsburgh
papers themselves, who catered to their steel colony in
its effort to connect with the Four Hundred and with
the peerage of Europe. The names of Astor, Goelet,
McAllister, Vanderbilt, Gould — at least Dreiser re-
members these as names, though a classicist might say
Astor, Stuyvesant, Lorillard, Spencer, Harriman, Wilson
— these appeared to him to be those of men and women
who held the city in their laps.
This German-Slavic Hoosier of twenty-three is like
one who in a dream has concentrically climbed a moun-
tain, on his way from city to city; and always at one
point on each plane finds this spot of gilt and glitter with
its antithesis of darkness and misery. Finally, at the top
of the table-land there is New York, where splendor is
beyond calculation, and squalor, too. " Nowhere before
had I seen such a lavish show of wealth and such bitter
poverty." It is said to be true by those who were part
of it, that New York in the nineties had reached, through
Yankee shrewdness and British snobbery, to a shallow
no
social brilliance not since equaled. For a few years it
maintained this equation. People talked of the menace of
the nouveaux-riches from the West, of the dangers of the
great melting-pot, of the submerged tenth and the army
of the unwashed, but they were not frightened yet. They
had managed a brittle aristocracy that extended to Phila-
delphia, Baltimore and Washington, and slightly to Bos-
ton, and met at Newport in summer. Edith Wharton was
their novelist, Stanford White their architect.
Yet Mrs. Wharton never apprehended them from the
inside as acutely as does Dreiser briefly from the outside.
For one thing she is Puritan, indicting them for the loos-
ening of their standards that came with power. In her
books the reader is not so much dazzled by the display
or effrontery of the Nineties, as irritated by a coldness
and cruelty this novelist is unable to analyze. One does
not meet there the Texan dandy from the East who,
naked, puts on his silk hat on New Year's day and steps
into a cab to make his rounds of the houses of pleasure, and
maybe ends life in one. One meets there the bewildered
lost lady, declassed and unloved, no one quite knows why,
on her way down to being governess in the very homes
where once she was a favorite. I supposed what happened
to this society was that cautious rather than adventurous
historians were integral to it. Mrs. Wharton (and later
Mrs. Atherton and Willa Gather) too often reads like
high-class society editors or feature writers for women.
And when geniuses were born within it they divorced
themselves as quick as they could and lent it none of their
strength. That is, although this class grew away from
Europe materially, intellectually it never grew at all; it
remained Colonial. Mrs. John Jacob Astor, queen of it,
was displeased with her son-in-law for dining with Mark
Twain, and is quoted as saying that to have friends among
artists and writers must be very unpleasant.* Ideas were
noxious to them as a class, and the people who had them
were shabby, untidy, impossible. The period died of the
Colonial germ. When Jews, cultivated or merely emi-
grant, when unpedigreed " poor whites " came out of the
melting-pot with their quick fortunes, the aristocrats had
* Thomas Beer: Stephen Crane.
Ill
nothing to fight them with that money could not buy,
except brief right of birth. With no program of the
spirit to justify this prerogative, it fell before the promis-
cuous billionaire. Today the story called The Four Hun-
dred is a dead romance, never recorded by a master.
In 1894 Dreiser saw a corner of its entertainment
world under the chaperonage of Paul Dresser. He tells
how his brother met him at seven in the morning in Jer-
sey City, and they made their way by ferry to Christopher
Street, and past houses which seemed to him of " an aged
and contemptible appearance," but Paul told him to wait,
that the charm of New York was its mingling of new and
old. In a narrow brown-stone house in Fifteenth Street,
they found his sister waiting. Once she had been the bad
heroine of the family, having eloped many years before
with a Chicago business man, who had left wife and chil-
dren and a good position to go with her. She was matronly
now, no longer " trim and beautiful," and the husband
somewhat fallen in fortune, but she welcomed him with
" much talking and laughing," and the breakfast of steak,
brown gravy and " creamy " biscuit was all that break-
fast should be to a member of this family. As he sat with
them, wondering if New York was going to be glamor-
ous after all, or only huge and cold, he heard " strange
moanings and blowings," and asked what they were:
" Boats, tugs, and vessels in the harbor. There's a fog on."
— " How far away are they? " — u Anywhere from one
to ten miles." Then he says, " Suddenly the full majesty
of the sea sweeping about this island at this point caught
me. ... Its great buildings and streets were all washed
about by that sea-green salty food. . . . And beyond
[was] the silence . . . the deadly earnestness of the sea."
Did they ever think, he asked them, how wonderful it was
to have the sea so close? No, his sister and husband said,
they couldn't say that they did. It seemed to him now that
he would like to live in New York. Paul agreed, " It's
wonderful, my boy, . . . Great subject, the sea. . . .
Didn't I tell you they all fall for it ! Now it's the ocean
vessels that get him. You take my advice . . . and move
down here. The quicker the better. . . ."
Then they went out to see the city. First his brother
112
took him to his office in Twentieth Street and Fifth Ave-
nue, Howley Haviland and Company — a song-publishing
house, which through Paul's prestige, and the shrewdness
of the two partners (one a hunchback, a luck-sign in In-
diana) was to make a small fortune for him and a year
or so later to give an opening to Theodore as an editor.
Then in a hansom cab he pointed out the stores, Lord and
Taylor, Altaian's at Eighteenth, Tiffany's at Fifteenth
and Broadway, Brentano's in Union Square; and very
lovingly the theatres, The Old Star, once Lester Wai-
lack's, and further uptown, Palmer's, Augustin Daly's,
The Manhattan, The Casino, and Koster and Bial's
Music Hall, managed by Oscar Hammerstein and pat-
ronized by the arrived originals of the town. His brother
went back to twenty years before, when the great theatres
were down below Union Square, Niblo's and The London
on The Bowery, and sighed for the talent of a day gone by.
Dreiser listened impatiently: " What had been had been.
... I was new and strange and wished to see only what
was new and wonderful."
So the brothers ambled and talked, slightly at odds,
one the future author of My Gal Sal, the other of Sister
Carrie, Paul gossiping about the big hotels, just which
kind of people went to this or that, and explaining that
the Waldorf and Delmonico's were " the last word for
the rich or fashionable." At Forty-second Street the limit
of the Rialto, they stopped, Paul saying, u Well here's
the end," and went into the Metropole for a drink. Here,
he says, his brother was at his best; everyone seemed to
know him — prize-fighters, thespians, vaudeville upstarts,
retired miners, and ranchmen. Both here and on their
way back along Broadway, there was much slapping of
backs, plucking of lapels, exchange of scandals and side-
splitting stories. That evening it was the same, when the
brothers met again, at the end of an afternoon in which
Theodore had explored the upper fifties and sixties, agog
as always before the " residences of the great." At a ren-
dezvous for players and singers, the Hotel Aulic, in a
" world of glittering spinning flies ... in showy clothes
. . . laughing, jesting, expectorating," his brother was a
favorite. One can see these men and women — enormous
sleeves that made their throats seem small and fragile,
moulded bosoms, tiny waists, spreading skirts and petti-
coats that diminished feet and ankles. One can see the
ruffles, flowers, plumes, curls and transformations; and
then the pompous side-burns of the generation before,
waistcoats, gold watch chains ; and the cutaways, slender
canes, striped and checkered trousers, derbies and long
curling moustaches of the younger dandies.
He basked in the sense it gave him of being actually
related for the moment to New York, through this mag-
net, who was not a power in the town, and yet was so
endearing and successful a play-boy.
Paul was thoughtful too of his younger brother; and
that first morning on their way from Union Square to
Forty-second Street, pointed out the Century Company,
and suggested that some day he might be connected with
it. He guessed that " Thee " was destined for an intel-
lectual field, without having to know what intellect is.
Like Maxwell and the newspaper men he inculcated a
germ : " Sometime you ought to write about these things,
Thee. They're the limit for extravagance and show. The
people out West don't know yet what's going on, but the
rich are getting control. They'll own the country pretty
soon. A writer like you could make 'em see that." Not ex-
perienced in literature, which along with all art was to be
called " high-brow " by the run of readers for years to
come, he could say this nai've thing, that his brother ought
to write about these extremes and that the Century Com-
pany— might print and sell the work. Had he read Scrib-
ner's, Century, Harper's and The Atlantic Monthly for
the year 1894, he might have known better.
114
" Change ' breech-clout.' It's a word that
you love and I abominate. I would take
that and ' offal ' out of the language." —
" You are steadily weakening the English
tongue, Livy." FROM A DIALOGUE BETWEEN
MARK TWAIN AND His WIFE
" Frankness is a jewel; only the young can
afford it." MARK TWAIN
owells was the arbiter, also from the Mid-
dle West, Ohio, but out of New England parents. From
the point of view of endurance and of nicety to native
fact — or was it incident? — I suppose Howells was a
writer. I am a reader who will never know. Try as I
will, I can't read him, neither his Easy Chair for Harper's
Magazine, nor his endless novels. He wrote for the gentry
of his times, and must have put to sleep the more restless
members, such as made the financial panics of the day and
conceived the trusts and railroads, or died disreputably,
or gave their fathers' money for European titles or
to the Prince of Monaco. He and his associates derived
from Hawthorne, Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes,
Whittier and Bryant. They never had taken much into
account the unlimited Americans, Poe, or Melville, Whit-
man, or even Thoreau, except as he belonged to the Con-
cord school. Emerson, a philosophic architect with a lucid
brain, at eighty confided to a friend that " pink ribbons "
were of greater importance than he had ever known how
to make them. That is, he hankered after something he
had been ashamed to take. And beyond that, though he
is praised as a champion of Walt Whitman, he wrote a
letter to Carlyle, in which he tells him he is sending him
poems of a crazy protege of his; possibly they will in-
terest him; if not he can use them " to light his pipe
with." His lucid brain was blocked with puritanism, and
so blocked the softening American critics immediately to
follow him. Hawthorne was a New England gentleman,
too, with neurotic fears. When Melville sought him out
in Liverpool after years of intimacy and then of separa-
tion, they walked together along the strand in Southport.
Melville told him he could not believe in Christianity;
that " there was no place for him in America, his best and
deepest work . . . was lightly tossed aside [there] ;
. . . [he] would not commit suicide; that was a weak
way out; but he might withdraw." * To this confession of
loneliness, and outcry for understanding, Mumford re-
cords that Hawthorne had nothing to say. Already he had
written into Ethan Brand a portrait of Melville where he
endowed him with intellect and no heart, thus like a
Christian dividing the two.
These sedate New Yorkers of the Nineties, William
Dean Howells, George William Curtis, Brander Mat-
thews, Robert Underwood Johnson, and their Boston
confreres, Barrett Wendell, George Woodberry, Thomas
Bailey Aldrich — a lyricist, nearly a poet — Charles
Dudley Warner, Charles Eliot Norton, were surely sons
of the New England legend where tameness triumphed
over origin and etiquette over meaning and three names
over two. Although the critical reviews of this decade made
references to foreign art — to Zola, Flaubert, Turgenieff,
Tolstoi, Hardy, Meredith; the issues they stood for are
evaded as French or Russian, peasant or perverse, never
faced as universal. And one looks in vain in these polite
literary columns for news of the more fragile prodigies
of that day — Yeats, Beerbohm, Rimbaud, Mallarme,
Verlaine, Adam, Baudelaire. And Anatole France, the
modern youth of them, was unknown to Americans. It
was a genteel record of life and letters, less fiercely ascetic
and therefore less dramatic than with its Concord parents,
but never quarreling with them; and in no way squaring
with the new greedy material splendor New York was
building for the country. Henry James alone apprehended
its advent; and he took it off to England to extract its
* Lewis Mumford : Herman Melville.
116
fangs, as far as he was concerned, by exposing it to
European worldliness.
At the same moment there was as compensation and
as panderer, Mark Twain, lively as the human race, indis-
putable as the Mississippi. To read him gives unmitigated
joy to one prepared for cold laughter and almost never
for tears. Toward the end he says to a friend, " At last the
luxury of writing for myself," and wrote The Mysterious
Stranger, not to be published until after his death; in
which he gives himself the luxury of sweeping away the
human race, as if too unreal and ephemeral to conserve
itself — a thing of pain and defeat. Mark Twain, the
great nihilist! And yet impotent to annihilate either his
wife or Howells as arbiters of what he should commit to
writing ! * Secretly and anonymously he at one time
printed a conversation between Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh,
Shakespeare, and others of an era he must have coveted,
where much is made of "f — ks " and "f — ts." t It
reads as if to Mark Twain, as to any good Christian,
sex was dirt, not that excrement was a perverse mystery.
It is probable that he never showed it to his wife or to
Howells.
There were others in his wake as in the wake of
Howells — Cable, Stockton, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Joel
Chandler Harris, who filled the magazines with very
charming stories of humor and adventure and local color,
as influenced by Twain. They were lightly seductive sto-
ries, bringing gentle tears, and in no sense confronting
their readers with fierce storms, or grey eternities or fatal
ecstasies. Yet Twain himself never wrote for humor or
color, but irresistibly for the meaning that was in him,
which was crossed by but one foreign element — diplo-
macy.
Although already Dreiser planned to be a writer, ap-
parently he asked little about the writers of the day.
* " Mrs. Clemens was the making of Mr. Clemens. He really had a
very vulgar streak. She went over everything he wrote and took out
everything he would not like to see published. He relied absolutely on her
judgement." Related to me by a friend of Mrs. Clemens, a lady of the
Nineties, type of the American dowager, now extinct.
f American wholesale distributors as late as 1931 still require the head
in the sand for a number of such words.
II/
It was not that aspect of the place that occupied him; it
was the spectacle of living in New York, which meant to
him American life at its highest voltage. And even if his
guide had taken him among writers and painters rather
than players and spendthrifts, he might have been dis-
appointed, puzzled by the way that life was Balzacian and
literature was moral. Even suppose he had had the luck
to talk with the masterly Mark Twain, perhaps he would
have met the mysterious stranger in a less generous mood
than when he disillusioned the two boys in the forest. Or
had he happened to fall among the rebels of his own age
at Allaire's in Seventeenth Street, at Koster and Dial's,
or the Lantern Club, or Mouquin's, where tradition says
they met in the Nineties, it might possibly have been that
he and Stephen Crane would have sparked as against
tameness. But more likely Crane, with less patience than
Dreiser and more prejudices, and with a head-start in
awareness, was already tired of trying to " make out " in
a raw and moral country, and was turned away from
natives and toward England, where, he said, " You can
have an idea without being sent to court for it." ... At
least in the company of Paul and his Rialto friends the
young pilgrim had the fun of jokes and comments as
ribald as Twain's Elizabethan dialogue, and more up-to-
date. Unselfconscious, not critical, life was and has been
Dreiser's chief medium of experience.
New York, he said to himself, was not beautiful, but
it had " the magnetism of large bodies over small ones,
..." a quality of zest and security and ease, cheek by
jowl with poverty and longing and sacrifice, which gives
to life everywhere its keenest most pathetic edge. . . .
It had the feeling of gross and blissful and parading self-
indulgence." He looked at the surfaces of everything, and
tried to guess the meanings. He crossed the Brooklyn
Bridge, walked in the Wall Street districts and through
the areas between them and Union Square, less haunted
by their miseries than a few months later when he came
back to stay — alone. The city had worked its enchant-
ment. But he needed money to enter. He would go back
to Pittsburgh and see if he could save enough dollars to
dare force an entrance.
118
25
Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, Balzac, and
Pulitzer.
our months more on the Pittsburgh Dispatch,
and Dreiser had managed to save two hundred and forty
dollars, but only by living on so little that he believes his
health suffered, and handicapped him when he did get
back to the " great city." In these four months he em-
barked on another drama of the mind. He came upon
Huxley, Tyndall and Spencer, read First Principles, Sci-
ence and Hebrew Tradition, Science and Christian Tradi-
tion, and they " blew me intellectually to bits." Now " the
last lingering filaments of Catholicism " were gone. And
more than that with them he says went his personal at-
titude toward life, his " blazing ambition to get on."
And he cut with old anchors completely like a disillu-
sioned Catholic; not like his British teachers, who trans-
ferred divinity to themselves and inaugurated the era
of the progressive individual, the age of the substantive:
" I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my
soul."
Suddenly for this Catholic boy if man were but an
infinitesimal speck in the solar system, and that in turn
but a speck in the infinite universe, really there was no
place to go. " One lived and had his being because he had
to, and ... it was of no importance." He ceased think-
ing of himself as a creature who must push up and on and
at the top of the ladder would receive rewards. Out of
this nightmare of magnitude and littleness that the scien-
tists gave him, perhaps Dreiser has never entirely awak-
ened. It colors him with nineteenth century radicalism, as
science forced thought away from the intimate miracles
of Jesus and Mary; and if it retained a shade of Biblical
119
teaching, it was in harmony with the bleakness of the Old
Testament — " Vanity of vanities; all is vanity."
Moreover, to measure by extensions in time and space
was native to him; his dream of success had been meas-
ured this way. A more sensuous artist, a less American
soul, would have been held within the seduction of inner
relations; haunted by quality to the ignoring of quantity;
infatuated with material for the particular crisis he could
bring out of it ; and would feel more kinship with the un-
hopeful inquirers of today than with these mastodons of
the last century. By the echo of recent science — con-
cerned with intricate arrangement — Dreiser, always
courting the scientists, is not yet beguiled. In the Forum,
November, 1930, he chants the aeons and the vastnesses
of the universe, and the insignificance of the human being,
to whom no answer at all is given.
Yet the change in thought that is called the present
has seeds in the change of thought which is called the
immediate past. And the giant of one mode of thought is
related more actually to giants of another, than he is to
the smaller people of his own mode. Labels are lost as
intensity increases. Dreiser has reached through his years
of achievement into a class where labels are indicative and
yet contradictory. The metaphysician in him, still seeking
a complete answer, presents a sea of data out of which
relations take form. And the artist in him in pursuit of
crisis recreates the data.
Alone in Pittsburgh at the age of twenty-three he was
however for the time being that new thing — an infinitesi-
mal atom, and so was everyone else. What to do about it?
Nothing, except to live the patient life of an atom accord-
ing to its properties. And what were his gifts as atom? To
observe and record, he hoped, as Balzac in France ob-
served and recorded and in ant fashion built a monument.
Yet his old dreams of individual splendor still begged not
to be forgotten. It might be, in fact now he was certain of
it, that New York would be the city where he could enter
into a combination more proper to him as atom. In No-
vember he resigned from the Dispatch, and with his two
hundred and forty dollars proceeded to his sister's house
in Fifteenth Street.
120
Again as four years before in Chicago, he went the
rounds of the great papers of the town, first the World,
then the Sun, then the Herald, and again met the answer
just as if he had entered into a new planet, " No vacan-
cies." Only here in this more elaborate city a company
of office boys, " supercilious, scoffing and ribald," pro-
tecting the city editor, would fling the news at him, " He
says to say no vacancies." If he asked to see him any-
way, " No, he don't want to see anybody, no vacancies."
At the end of the second day, he says, he looked at the
cold buildings fronting on City Hall Park and at the
loafers and bums and tramps on the benches chilled by
December weather, and then walking up Broadway to
Union Square past the Christmas throng at Tiffany's, com-
paring the excluded and the excluders, the idea of Hurst-
wood was born — that oblong triumph of the portrait of
a failure in Sister Carrie.
The next day he determined to break in past the boys,
and did, " brushed them off like flies," opened the " much-
guarded door " and stepped into the editorial room of
The New York World. Even then, he thinks he might
have been thrown out, had it not been for a quick young
man whom evidently curiosity led to ask what it was
he wanted. " I want a job." — " Where do you come
from? " — " The West." It was, as if in a modern fable,
Arthur Brisbane, inviting him to wait, stepping over to
the city editor, pointing to him and saying, " This young
man wants a job. I wish you would give him one." So
these two, not much associated afterwards, were joined
for a second in fate, undoubtedly by their fantastic na-
tive force, Brisbane recognizing this much of himself in
Dreiser.
He got the job on the World under Joseph Pulitzer,
" the Magyar Jew, a disease-demonized soul . . ."
he labels him, " who had taken the championship of jour-
nalism away from Dana and Bennett, as Hearst was later
to take it from him." Though on his yacht or in Europe
or Bar Harbor at the time, not often in New York these
days, Dreiser says the air " sizzled with the ionic rays
of this black star." His road to success lay through at-
tacking everything, social, political, financial, that he
121
could control. He had submitted to horse-whipping once
by a citizen he had libeled, and then had rushed to his
paper to use it as news for an extra. A managing editor,
without arrest or punishment, had shot and killed a man
come to his office to protest against exposure. Five secre-
taries and seven managing editors maintained a spy sys-
tem, one against the other and over all their subordinates,
and carried the news to Pulitzer. Everyone, Dreiser came
to think, had a " nervous, resentful terror in their eyes,
as have animals when they are tortured/' * To him, the
air of the place was vibrant as generated by a man who
had the unbridled ambition of his own dreams, and
was terrifying as if disaster hung in it. One wonders as
one reads if the cruel vitality of this atmosphere arose out
of something native to Manhattan, or if the Pulitzer
policy has not actually helped to lend1 these qualities to
the town, since then become native to it. Many West-
erners, like this reporter, have been stabbed by what they
call the heartlessness of New York, and what Europeans
call its frigidity. Anglo Saxons suffer from it; Latins de-
ride it; the Irish enjoy it; Jews thrive on it.
To Dreiser it meant failure for a time — his first
since he left the hardware business. He was given only
minor assignments and what was worse never permitted
to write them up. He was told he " couldn't write " —
a thing said to him by New Yorkers ever since. There
were men from St. Louis and their friends, reporters on
the World — " completely disillusioned," with whom he
used to sit about and talk. They came all of them to
the same conclusion: " New York was difficult and re-
volting," and yet challenging too. He would not go back
to the West, a failure — " not yet." He puzzles over his
defeat: Perhaps he was too green, callow, to be of use in
so " ruthless " and " subtle " a town: perhaps he was too
much in awe of the social brilliance of the place. Once by
chance a story of his appeared as he wrote it on the
first page, and the city editor had noticed it enough to
trust him with more important work. But unhappily the
assignment involved interviewing " a well-known youth
of great wealth," probably a scion of that so formidable
* From A Book About Myself.
122
" four hundred.'* His courage failed him, though if he
had been sent among thieves and cutthroats, he would
have gone and come back with a story. After that there
were no more favors. Yet he was only five years, he
reasons, from writing Sister Carrie; he should have been
worth something to these editors. But more and more
he came to feel their sense of his unimportance. One
day complaining of neglect, he resigned, and the city
editor said it was just as well, that he had not been of
much use to them. He had better try the Sun.
123
26
The cleavage from ancestry: Fuller, Gar-
land, Crane, N orris.
o ended his newspaper days in a swamp of
depression, out of which he says has come much of his
understanding of lonely destitute people. He tried half-
heartedly to get a job on another paper but no one
wanted him. By this time he had left his sister's house,
unable to pay for so good a room. He took a hall bedroom
on Fourth Street east of the Bowery at $1.50 a week in
what was called a bed house. The landlady was good to
him, gave him the room, he thought, as a screen against
the police. He ate at Childs' restaurants. For the rest, he
decided that though he had failed as a journalist, now was
the time to succeed as a fiction writer. Reports of how
Rudyard Kipling, R. H. Davis, David Graham Phillips,
Stephen Crane, like him starting on newspapers, were
now brilliant writers of fiction, embittered and spurred
him. His money was not gone, he was not done for
yet. He stalked the town to find stories to write about,
and was diligent in reading the important magazines
to see what kind of fiction sold best, or at all. He studied
Munsey's, Harper's, Century, Atlantic Monthly, dis-
couraged by the fact that " all their stories had the puri-
tan complex; the hero and heroine were always saved,
they ended just right in peace and sweetness." Yet back
in St. Louis days he had read Henry B. Fuller's With
the Procession and had felt in him a man seriously doing
what he would like to do — write about life as he saw
it. And he had read Hamlin Garland's Main Travelled
Roads, clumsier than Fuller and yet true to the Middle
West. The scene-painter he worked for in Chicago had
told him that Whitman's Leaves of Grass tallied with his
own talk and was great writing. The book was hard to
124
find, he was still looking for it. Now apparently none of
these men he had faith in were to be read in the journals
out of which a writer might make a living. True, Crane's
The Red Badge of Courage had been bought by Irving
Bacheller's syndicate in 1894, and sold serially to the
Philadelphia Press. But he felt that the book succeeded
not as realism but as a sensational story about war. Had it
been about everyday America, he questioned if its tragedy
would have suited the journals of that year.
In 1928 in an introduction to Frank Norris's McTeague
he dismisses Crane after this fashion:
" I find . . . H. G. Wells speaking of Crane as not only
the pioneer but the most brilliant of all of the early realists
of this generation. Stuff and nonsense ! Crane was not the
pioneer nor even the equal in any sense of the man who led
the van of realism in America. That honor . . . goes to
Henry B. Fuller of Chicago, who as early as 1886 published
With the Procession* as sound and agreeable a piece of
realism as that decade or any since produced. And in 1891
he wrote . . . The Cliff Dwellers which preceded by three
years Crane's The Red Badge of Courage . . . as did Main
Travelled Roads, by Hamlin Garland. . . ."
Crane has meant as little to him as that; something
rankled. Perhaps it was jealousy dating from that lonely
day, when he was an outcast from the World, and
Crane was known as a favorite of Howells and Garland,
and was being sent here and there on exciting assignments.
Yet that poet reads like the one man in New York at
that time with whom the potential author of The Girl in
the Coffin, In the Dark, The Hand of the Potter, might
logically have felt kinship. His struggle was fierce too,
and swifter; it killed him. His first novel, Maggie, A Girl
of the Streets, an attempt to record life as he saw it in the
Bowery district, was for years only obscurely published.
Though Howells admired it as " Crane's little tragedy,"
he could not sell it; Gilder disdained it; no one wanted
it. He got less than one hundred dollars from Bacheller
for The Red Badge of Courage, and when he published
Black Riders in 1894, the critics, except for two of them,
told the reading country Crane was mad, and that the
poems were " obscene drivel." Like Dreiser he saw the
* A too zealous statement: 1895 is the date of its publication; and
1893 of The Cliff Dwellers.
125
world as a rudderless ship " going ridiculous voyages,
making quaint progress, turning as with serious purpose
before stupid winds " ; marriage, he thought, was a base
trick on women, and there was no such thing as sin ex-
cept in Sunday schools. Little Lord Fauntleroy was
a crime against children; Mrs. Humphrey Ward an
idiot, and Stevenson insincere; sincerity was the first
requisite of an artist.* In fact, aside from Ambrose
Bierce, who does not figure to Dreiser at this time, and
Dreiser not to Bierce at any time — "he was too much
the pedant," Mencken says, "to like him" — Crane
was the one published intellect resembling his in its
ruthlessness, a thinker, one would say, after his own
heart; and Crane thought more with his heart than
Bierce.
This might be a trifling point to dwell on, were it not
for the long loneliness of American artists, so that the
maps of their histories have been those of scarcely
intersecting roads. Yet since there are records of bitter
enmities of man against man even in the wilderness in the
face of a common danger, it is illogical to ask for under-
standing among the susceptible few in this wide land.
Emily Dickinson in Amherst understood the need and the
lack when she wrote, ". . . Just the miles of stare —
That signalize a show's retreat — In North America."
If, however, nature had decreed an alliance of great tem-
peraments in North America, perhaps rotarians would
not have had their undisputed way.
What kept Dreiser from valuing Crane might be a
difference of temperament outside of intellect. Crane had
a gift that led him hastily into sharp-shooting metaphors
— " The sun was pasted on the sky like a red wafer " —
into parabolic metaphors, joy-riding jokes and slang;
and so away from what Dreiser would call the issue. And
he had a gift for excitement that took him running
into it as if on a spree — to New Mexico, Texas,
Nevada, where a whole story could be made out of a
hotel because it was painted a strange blue; took him
back to New York to surround himself with what kindred
* As reported by Thomas Beer in his life of Crane, and proved by
reading Crane.
126
people there were — the showman, Elbert Hubbard, the
pioneer, Hamlin Garland, the charming Richard Harding
Davis, the looser Huneker and Clyde Fitch, the deep
Albert Ryder; and with others who jealously made him a
victim, and tarred him with the name of dope-fiend,
drunkard, sex-degenerate. Though he was none of this,
it is agreed, New York had no use for a man with that
legend; and he no use for New York, and he went to Eng-
land, again as if on a spree; and it was a spree, what with
Conrad, Henry James, Yeats, H. G. Wells, Harold
Frederic, and many other live men and women in his
house and he in theirs. In this spirit, it is said, as much as
to verify The Red Badge of Courage he went to the
Spanish-American War. He was a runaway, and Dreiser,
though likewise a stranger to the code of the day, and
likewise victimized through three times as many years,
has remained a native.
Crane was a snob, too, slightly; delighted in talking of
the peasantry of America to describe such a family as
Dreiser came from. And Dreiser also is snobbish enough
or else accurate enough for that to have prejudiced him,
if he has heard of it. He, not Crane, is right — there are
boobs, hicks, rubes and hayseeds as in no other country,
but not a peasantry. Jefferson more than Lincoln has had
his wish ; socially, not politically, democracy has succeeded
in the United States.
So this young poet among realists ran through twenty-
nine years on a brilliant spree of life and work, and
ended it just as the author of Sister Carrie, with more
patience and no more resignation, was beginning that
epochal novel. They are the two writers of that date, as
I read intellect, least hampered by puritan prejudice, and
most impregnated with life. Henry Fuller was less im-
petuous; Hamlin Garland was " corn-fed " ; Frank Norris
had a flaw that could give birth to romance for money;
O. Henry reveled in the color of life but gave no thought
to its structure; Jack London was a propagandist for
the under-dog, and later a magazine prostitute. Out of
this group Crane and Dreiser are the ruthless youth and
the ruthless adult of the country. Crane's first product,
Maggie, has the youthful trait of marching adjectives;
127
Sister Carrie was delivered mature without adolescent
blemish. I think they are comparable, one to fireworks,
the other to a powerful car, taking its time, and the whirr
of the motor is low. What Dreiser accurately valued in
Fuller and later in Norris was the measure and restraint
not to explode, but to store their energy for a long journey
and a long residence in a land that often seemed all too
alien — a policy akin to his own.
And for the most part he was right in his survey of
the fiction market. The magazines made a dull small mir-
ror to look into, to find the reflection of a life which he
knew was terrific and changing throughout the western
world. There was a journal of the day by the inconse-
quent name of Mile. New York, written mostly by James
Huneker and Vance Thompson, which was flashing the
same indictment. If he read it he found there his own
verdict on nearly every page, in Thompson's fine critical
editorials, forgotten today and yet more potent and shaft-
like than the remembered Huneker :
"I do not wish to rage against [Howells] as though he
were the beast of the Apocalypse, but he and Gilder and
that ilk are the chief defect of American literature. While
Mr. Howells merits one's habitual indignation, Mr. Gilder
is undoubtedly the worse of the two. I have never known a
man so uniformly mil."
And: "The painters, since they have begun to live like
other folk and love their own wives to the neglect of their
neighbors' wives, have given up all concern for art."
And: " New York, this malignantly respectable city."
And bitterly, but fairly then and perhaps even now:
"The man who lives in America and pretends to be any-
thing but a philistine is also ridiculous. We are all philis-
tines. We may be incoherent philistines. That is the best
we can be."
On the other hand Thompson was the older American,
tired of being called the new raw child. He was less of a
child, I should think, than whatever spirit guides a de-
scendant of Mile. New York — The New Yorker of to-
day. He had known in Paris Verlaine, Mallarme, Rim-
baud, Paul Fort, Villiers de L'Isle Adam, La Forge,
Charles Cros, Heredia — the last two, Negro poets —
then an undreamed of luxury in New York. He had heard
the music of the modern Russians, already established in
128
Europe, but " the impossible Damrosch " never gave it
to New York. He had a theory that the incentive to
modern art would come from America; in fact that al-
ready from Poe and Whitman had stemmed the two
streams of new French poetry.* And yet this connoisseur
in perfections strained toward France, more homesick for
it than the Chicago aesthetes were for London with its
reflections of Paris. It was time after all these years for
Americans to be grown-up, and, I imagine, he despaired
of its happening. He was impatient of the very men
and women who were trying to make their country less
respectable and more real in art: " Dull melancholiacs in
the grey provinces, lean pessimists of Kansas and the
West, neurotic criminals of the New England country
side." He diagnosed the disease, but had no systemic
cure for it, unless a European tonic beyond the capacity
of the patient. Dreiser, had he read him, would have been
alternately excited by his destructive disdain and dis-
heartened by his flaunting of the superiority of European
art. More visionary than satirist, though he has made
labels and pronounced judgments on American life, they
are loose and easy-going. Often he dismisses them with
an " Or so it seems " or " Or nearly so." He appears to
revel in uncertainty and therefore is at times purposely
diffuse.
It is right here in the middle Nineties, from the end of
which decade Dreiser was to take off as a writer com-
elling attention, that the cleavage between an art of
ritish parentage and a native art might first have been
apparent, had there been analysts to make note of it. It is
here that a prediction made by John Quincy Adams, and
an aesthetic-democratic dream of Thomas Jefferson began
to come intellectually true, as for years it had been politi-
cally true. Adams felt that with Jackson's election in
1828 the country would go down grade from all the
culture it had known, which meant imported European
culture, and that barbarism would definitely set in. To
* I have lately heard Fernand Leger and Constantin Brancusi suggest
the same debt: Out of the newness of the United States France has drawn
new aesthetic life.
129
Jefferson on the other hand, up through the people out
of the soil, the art of civilization would have to bloom in
pioneer America, or not bloom at all. In a sense the
change was imported from Europe and the Orient,
though not in the way Adams craved, through their
philosophy and their art, but more as Jefferson had
pledged himself to welcome it through the "irresponsi-
ble " blood of emigrants streaming for more than
a century into these states under democratic protec-
tion. Whitman had been the wedge among poets — the
first poet on the reception committee for " the new
people; the young strangers, coming, always coming." *
And now they had come. No use any more for the
aesthetes of the Chap Book or Mile. New York, or
for any one of us in love with elaborate far-off back-
grounds, to think they might, if we advertised them
enough, become our own foregrounds. Mark Twain had
popularly sneered Europe in The Court of King Arthur
and Innocents Abroad, and had given confidence to
" philistines."
The Yankees were getting their way in language, man-
ners, buildings, clothes, food — every form of expression.
And the real artist knew that he now had to vaccinate
himself and his audience with this cleavage from ancestry,
if he were to stay at home. The young Stephen Crane felt
this ; seduced by England, he kept there American slang
and a native's sense of his country. He was according to
Beer " vastly pleased by the startling McTeague of
Frank Norris [though he] pronounced the book " too
moral," at the distance he kept from the elders on the one
hand and the money makers on the other of his United
States, who were enough to make an evangelist out of a
serious poet. He begged William Heineman to buy the
next novel of Norris. That author at the time was plan-
ning a long work of vital interest, and it was morally
to be about the people, for the people, " who caricatured
and villified, are after all and in the main, the real seekers
after truth." So, already fine intellects were beginning to
sentimentalize over the importance of the common people
as common, rather than as people.
* Carl Sandburg: Broken-Face Gargoyles.
130
This period of cleavage, the mid-years of the American
Nineties corresponds culturally to one phase of the mid-
years of the British nineteenth century. That is, excluding
always individual rebels, and the definite and spontaneous
popular arts — vaudeville, comic papers, horse-racing,
minstrel shows, which in any one time are often ahead in
freedom of the esoteric arts. But it corresponds to only
one phase — since in England, though the genteel ruled
in the person of Victoria, the libertine, antedating Crom-
well, ruled out of older roots. Shakespeare, Elizabeth,
Dryden, Pope, Charles I, Swift, Fielding, Blake, Ho-
garth, Keats, Shelley, Byron had not lived for nothing.
Not all of the English peerage, not all of the rich com-
post of the lower classes could be turned away from
extravagance into prudes and puritans. The middle classes
alone succumbed completely to Protestant supremacy. In
the United States, however, the middle classes inundat-
ing high and low, one psychology had by now prevailed
— that of respectability. Any other code was looked
upon as evil or foreign. And few could have seen that a
hidden ferment was at work to turn the country away
from its decorums toward unimagined excesses. It is like
a platform, this mid-year of the Nineties, from which to
look backward and forward. Looking back, we see a quilt
pieced out of Puritanism, not without warmth and quality,
strength and sensibility, which might be typified by a verse
of Emerson's, commemorating James Russell Lowell, in
the January number of Harper's, 1 894 : u Man of sorrow,
man of mark — Virtue lodged in sinew stark . . ." and
the word noble appears in the poem.
The imperishable artists of that early mark were not
Emerson, not Hawthorne, not Lowell, but Lincoln,
Thoreau and Emily Dickinson. As artists one cannot dis-
pute them. Then looking forward through the native
channels of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, and the
lesser more local channels of writers like James Whitcomb
Riley and Bret Harte,* we come upon a lessening of stark-
* Twain, it is known, resented the linking of his name with Harte's as
kindred writers. As new and limber a judge as Scott Fitzgerald disputes
Harte as a native. " Pure Dickens," he says. But to me he reads like an
old-timer, one of the homesteaders, who has turned countless others toward
the staking of literary claims in these unsettled states.
ness and an increase of response to the immediate scene.
And finally by the turn of the century there arrives that
period marked by naturalness and curiosity rather than
by antique background, for which many have made Theo-
dore Dreiser sponsor.
132
" The school of literature to which Poe
belongs . . . is one we thoroughly dis-
like. . . . It mercilessly exposes the se-
crets of the heart. . . . What we want is
not darkness but light; not thorns in our
path, but roses and everywhere dew and
freshness. The literature which . . . does
not make us happier and better is not true
and good" R. H. STODDARD
,t this date in the winter of 1895 in his
twenty-fourth year this sponsoring giant cut a sorry
figure, or so he says. His great schemes were checked
for the moment — a long, fearful moment of walking
the unwelcoming streets of Manhattan, money decreas-
ing, hopes not rising. As I hear him tell his history, he
seems to this date like a boy who, since his mother's death,
has always been walking from city to city, west and east,
to find another home. But these wanderings about New
York in the winter of '95 sound like the loneliest he had
yet known. Kicked out of the one profession he had
learned — journalism, he wanted, if possible, to enter
upon another — fiction. In a way he was glad to be
forced out of the newspaper world, " since as I even then
saw it, it was a boy's game, and I was slowly but surely
passing out of the boy-stage."
Like Rousseau, who hoped to paint in the accepted way
to suit the Paris Salon, and was too real to know how,
he made his effort to suit the editors of the day, and
failed. On his walks he passed plenty of stories to write,
plenty of rude teeming life of slums and business dis-
tricts, and cold enviable life of the rich streets. He should
be able to take these and with them make a flying
133
machine, and go up a space above the earth into mastery
of it through understanding. Balzac did this, and went
above the Paris streets and houses; why not he above
Manhattan sidewalks. But try as he would he could not
make his material fit into any of the several moulds
of the stories accepted by the magazines. There were no
" magazines to represent the realistic grip on life. How-
ells and Twain were the outermost outposts of a new
era." As he studied the idylls of the sons of biblical stark-
ness and marrow, he felt a weakening of the old fibre, and
no new hardness in keeping with new orders of living.
He wrote many stories in the hall bedroom, after the
recipes he had studied. They must, he saw, be " all sweet-
ness and gaiety and humor. We must discuss only our
better selves and arrive at a happy ending. Marriage was
a serene and delicate affair. Love was made in heaven and
lasted forever. ... If a man did an evil thing it was due
to his low^r nature, which really had nothing to do with
his higher. . . ."
But these precepts were useless; life was not like that;
he found it impossible to go so far afield. Always his
stories came back to him — failures, he knew it himself,
being neither insipid, charming romances, nor studies of
the life he was miserably immersed in.* 150,000 people,
as he tells it, were in the depths of poverty in New York
that winter, many of them with no work at all, no place to
sleep but over gratings or in doorways. They wandered in
the Bowery and the streets off of it " in the depths of
poverty " " a whorl of bums and failures," and he with
them. More than ever he was haunted by the giant de-
ductions of the scientists he had read in Pittsburgh : " Man
was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and a badly
and carelessly driven one at that. Then to embitter him
there was always like an evil and enviable presence Ward
McAllister and his gilded Four Hundred. " Life was
* In the field of verse sometimes, it seems, he was able to suit conven-
tional taste. Spanish- American War Songs contains a poem signed Theodore
Dreiser. The pathetic theme may well have been his, but the format betrays
a need of acceptance : " Lo, no pain can thwart the holy — Nor yet fear
retard the free j — Right makes giants of the lowly, . . . Losing fury to
their plea. . . ." Occasional acceptable verse, however, was not enough
to support him.
134
desolate, inexplicable, unbelievably accidental — luck or
disaster." None the less, perhaps because of its desperate
balance sheets, there was " zest " to the city, "something
secret and thrilling." Four years later out of the ledger
of these days came the setting and the figure of Hurst-
wood in Sister Carrie, going down out of prosperous
glitter into the whorl of disaster and silence of suicide.
And sketches now collected in The Color of a Great City
— The Bowery Mission, The Water Front, The Cradle
of Tears — were tapped from these memories. Often
he has drawn on the mood that shrouded him then. It be-
came part of him, a new base. In adversity his father was
growing into him, superseding, undermining the u pagan "
mother, so much adored. But at the time he never thought
that melancholy could be changed over into words that
readers would thank him for. Instead, he says, as the
weeks went by offering nothing, " I got terribly depressed.
My money was dwindling, I thought, my gosh, I would
have to go back to newspaper work."
Today Dreiser is known and described as three differ-
ent men contradicting one another. One is a brusque
churlish fellow, who frightens people when he answers
them on the telephone, and appears hard when accused of
unfairness or indifference, who frequently is accused with-
out troubling to defend himself. " The most disagreeable
man I ever met, no manners at all ! " " Utterly unscrupu-
lous, an S-of-a-B ! " they say of him and shudder. " A
handsome dog, but the manners of a railway boarding
house," Mencken writes him was the impression of a lady
he had asked him to call on. Then there is the man people
love to be with. They say that no one is better company
than Dreiser to walk with, drink with, eat with, talk
with (and there are women who have said to live with).
His appetite is boundless for the human and the non-
human, his five senses alert. Before joys and sorrows he is
humble not arrogant. He tells fabulous stories and listens
to them; laughs until he cries at funny things and prepos-
terous things, and when the joke is on himself. He will
go anywhere in talk, asking where he can't tell. He will go
anywhere on walks ; no limit placed on adventures, except
time and the need to achieve. His books which are a
135
weave of monotony shot with extravagance, offering im-
moderate and homely characters, and rare men and
women as well, bear witness to the second man.
Then there is the solitary man, loose-jointed, wonder-
ing and wandering; eyes with worlds in them, aristocrat's
nose, voluptuous mouth, and yet scornful, not snarling or
jeering, but nearly ready to snarl or jeer if a heart full of
tears and struggle would let him. This is the lonely intel-
lect, the spontaneously conscious man, who over a period is
spectator, and then suddenly is actor, good for the center
of the stage. At times he has the look of a tough careless
weed, burdock or mullen or of a giant radish — the
Hoosier look magnified. Sometimes he has the magnitude
of a river image, moulded out of clay, not yet in bronze,
what with a potentate's hands, and a look of distances
between the parts of him, as if it might be dogmatic, not
leisurely enough, to bring them together into single pur-
pose, unless that action were crucial — a birth out of
headwaters, the descent over rapids, the fall over preci-
pices, the wide delivery to the sea. Dreiser, the creator of
disturbing chronicles and inquiries, is this man of the
earth, mineral and vegetable as well as animal. He is a
logical derivative out of the little boy who was looked on
as " queer " in Warsaw. Today in New York, acknowl-
edged and successful, in a crowd as at one of his own cock-
tail parties of editors, agents, celebrities and hangers-on,
and their many preening girls, he has the look of ancient
river-lands, of the clay and flow of rivers, remembering
equally canyons and lowlands and cities, pine forests and
weeds and tin cans. He looks solitary more than he does
metropolitan.
I have met with no one but himself to describe him at
this period, but I imagine Dreiser at twenty-four to have
been solely this third man, the creative dreamer, luck-
less and puzzled as to how to get on. I imagine him
to have been stained by the sea-voices and sea-odors of
Manhattan and by the lurid extremes of life in that city,
just as inoculated with beauty at birth by his mother,
he had been drenched in the seduction of Indiana valleys
up to the age of sixteen. I think he was not yet the wary
ungracious Dreiser, nor for the moment the gregarious
136
high-spirited Dreiser of five years before or even a year
before, who alone but not lonely had found friends and
patrons to be linked with — Maxwell, McEnnis, McCul-
lagh, McCord, Hazard, Alice, Arthur Henry, his fiancee,
Paul and others. I imagine that here in New York he
was sharply alone, walking among these ghosts of the
great city in a mournful luxury of contemplating them —
phantoms of greed and failure.
Already he knew that when a man asked to succeed,
the implicit questions were : " Are you a mixer, a good fel-
low? Are you a red-blooded he-man, rude and shrewd?
Can you wear these clothes? No promotion for a man
who can't wear American business clothes." And what was
their purpose? To pander and to fight, to cheat and to
pander, these business clothes were planned. To mix,
to smirk, to join in with the right crowd — meet the wife,
have another drink, send for a couple of floozies; and,
of equal importance, to intimidate, to sneer, to snarl at
the wrong crowd — to put something over, let someone
out, give someone the merry ha-ha : these were the ways
to come home with the goods. If a man knew how, the
job was his; if not, he was the under-dog, the humble
clerk or the derelict. Already he had learned this from
the New York World, where he had been told he did not
fit the clothes, which had to be smarter and slicker than
what men wore with success in the Middle West. In a
way he was glad; the artist in him disdained these juvenile
uniforms. But now that he was nearing his last cent
and getting nowhere, he would have to wake up and join
in the fight; get in or go under; there was no middle way.
To go under apparently was not to be his role. Mark
Twain must have set himself the same problem — how
to succeed in his own country. He solved it by posing
as the respectable mixer, as least alien to his gift of
genius; the merciless but ingratiating "king of humor-
ists." Dreiser met it by wrapping himself, how consciously
one can't know, in a kind of cave-man legend, cousin to the
mammoth, as least alien to him, and became the fearful
" realist." It may have been exactly in these months of
lonely poverty that he began to evolve the formidable
front of a conquering American, at variance with the poet
137
in him, and yet well known now to those who stand in
his way or try his patience or cut into his time.
Emily Dickinson wrote : " I took my power in my hand
— And went against the world. ... I aimed my pebble,
but myself — was all the one that fell. . . ." Dreiser
took his power in his hand too, but with it at this date,
or another, he learned to couple some of the world's
power. If he could help it, he would not be the only one
to fall. For this undoubtedly he has allowed his texture to
be loose. Having found the world's weapons useful to
fight with, he has let the world into his weave of words
too ; takes from the outside where it suits him, yet without
enough respect for it to acknowledge the debt ; and with-
out the agony that such help would cause a scrupulously
intrinsic artist. The three men in him, competitor, com-
panion, recluse, grow together and overlap in the artist.
He is gold to be assayed and washed into purity by each
new admirer, not found in sheer nuggets. He is an iron
vein, not often tempered steel.
Like an iron prospect, he is impressive at twenty-four,
immersed in a dream of realism, postponing the hour of
expediency nearly to the moment of starving. A story he
told me in another connection recreates these days. Once
while planning this book, I had said that it would be one-
sided unless it suggested the scope of his life with women.
They were half of the legend surrounding him. To ex-
clude them would make but another evasion, like most
biographies. I wished he would catalogue them — the
different blondes, brunettes, redheads, towheads, large
ones and slim ones, susceptible and cold. . . . Their
differences would help to paint his changing life. He said
he didn't know; it was true there was no real story with-
out them. He would have to think about it, perhaps he
had told enough already. I would find them in A Book
About Myself, in some of his short stories, A Gallery of
Women, This Madness, The ' Genius/ which was not a
portrait of himself but a composite picture, and yet he had
drawn on his own life to make it. ... Then an idea oc-
curred to me : Why not tell of the days and nights he had
lived alone, and leave the rest to the indiscretion of the
reader? That way my book would not grow too long. His
138
answer was simple and serious : " But that would be only
the first year in New York when I was thrown off the
World. I was down and out. Sometimes I had hardly
enough to eat. The rest of my life I have been pretty well
taken care of. ... And even then . . ."
He had pawned his watch, that last talisman of a man's
distinction; the imprint of spirit on eyes, nose, mouth
never having yet constituted a passport recognized by
hotel clerks or policemen. It was a twenty-five-dollar
watch, he had had ten dollars for it, and they were nearly
gone. . . . He was walking in Carmine Street or Houston
Street. A young Italian girl stopped him and asked him if
he wouldn't come with her. He said he had no money. She
insisted money made no difference, she liked him. She was
the daughter of a restaurant keeper, who rented rooms
above the restaurant. They went to hers. Afterwards she
told him that her parents would like to give him a room
for nothing next to hers ; they liked him too. He imagined
they hoped he would marry her. She was pretty and
gracious and direct like a Latin of any class, though at
the time he did not know how to account for her charm.
But, he said, after he had left her, undecided whether
to accept her offer and thus escape from misery and soli-
tude : " I began thinking of that grand destiny of mine.
Bad as things were, I could not get it out of my mind, and
I never went back. For one thing these people were Catho-
lics; already the Church had about done for me. I knew I
must keep away from it. ... Then they were too simple,
too far from life." — " Too much out of the fight, you
mean, too foreign? " I suggested. — " Well, perhaps."
As we talked I wondered how this story would have
differed, had it been natural to him to apprentice himself
to these frankly sensuous strangers, less simple, more
highly seasoned probably than his fiancee's people in
Missouri. Almost any Italian would understand better
than a Methodist in Missouri the quest of a " grand
destiny." But such an alliance was not for him. Always
this writer has flirted with the exotic in himself : always
curious, never for a moment scornful of it like Whitman
and Twain and Sandburg, and even the melancholy Mas-
ters and the pliant Robert Frost. But for deepest penetra-
139
tion he has kept to the image of the native in himself, the
Nordic American. What he knows of the universal, so
often profoundly gauged, he knows first in native garb.
What he has revealed of it is revealed because he has been
tempted to strip it of its Butterick patterns, seduced first
in spite of these patterns ; and so has known the creature
naked; and has attained to centers.
140
". . . / do count my syllables. But ob-
serve: my left hand lacks a finger — bitten
off by a critic" " . . . Unfortunate man! "
exclaimed the sympathetic monarch. " We
must make your limitations and disabilities
immaterial. You shall write for the maga-
zines." AMBROSE BIERCE
I,
.n May or June of this forlorn winter his
brother Paul came back from the road. In the meantime
he had been noticing on the stands a musical magazine
published by Ditson, made up of popular songs, " semi-
classical stories and pictures." At the same time he used
to look at the foreign magazines — more " snappy," he
thought, than any published in New York. The English
Sketch, for instance, printed " really intelligent comments
beneath the pictures." He told Paul that if Howley Havi-
land would let him edit a magazine, he could make an
improvement on Ditson's. They agreed that he should
try it at ten dollars a week to begin with, but not until
autumn. He wonders now how he got through the sum-
mer, but October came and found him alive, ready to edit
Every Month, ready to compete once more in the battle
for food. So he went running like a fish from dark pools
to pleasanter shallows, in search of a small living. He ran
the paper for a year and a half, and made it a paying en-
terprise for new popular ideas. He remembers feature
articles, suggested by his newspaper experience, about
compositors, electrotypers and printers. He became at
once an " idea-man." " Curiously enough," he says with
pride, almost more than he shows at the vast response to
his books : u I had numerous letters and contributions
from all kinds of people." Then, gratefully: " I never
141
made much money out of it, stayed on in my hall bed-
room, but I got it through my skull what a magazine was."
One day it occurred to him that he was wasting his
time " fixing up other fellows* articles." Why not market
his own? He could see that magazine readers were ask-
ing for lively stories about real people and things. They
would take him nearer to his heart's desire — to write
about life as he saw it. Or at least it seemed to him
that such articles would in a literal sense be true, while
the fiction of the day must be false in every sense. He
chose as his first subject American women harpists, of
the sort eminent enough to play in Carnegie Hall. He
interviewed them and made the article " a study in per-
sonalities." The editor of Munsey's bought it for $75 for
the pictures and the idea; the writing, he was told, was
worth nothing. His next article was a picture of New
England society women, inspired by pictures he found
of them at Sarony's, a fashionable New York photogra-
pher of the Nineties.
It is probable that they fascinated Dreiser. Though
known as a literary roughneck, what is delicate and re-
fined exercises fascination over him. Some of them were
doubtless rational Unitarian matrons, proud to be " sen-
sible," but others may have been quite exquisite flowers —
sumptuous hair, billowy sleeves, suppressed bosoms, frag-
ile waists, dainty hands; and all had an air of meticulous
breeding, or else they would not have been listed as New
England society women. One could know that their
handkerchiefs were sheerest linen hemstitched with in-
finitesimal stitches, indeed that all their apparel was
sewed with scrupulous stitches and faintly scented with
lavender. When they traveled they wore at their waists
silver chatelaines, which included little bottles of smelling
salts. They were still such ladies, such yield of " virtue
lodged in sinew stark," these leaders of New England
propriety — one could not say fashion — since with them
it was vulgar to be fashionable ! The mystery of their re-
finement may have even gone like an arrow to the young
journalist's sense of the exquisite and the unattainable.
It was something of this he hoped he had found in his
Missouri school teacher, and something of this he has
142
cultivated in his way of living, which has a puritan order
and precision, contradicting other phases of him.
He sold the article to the New York Sunday Journal
at $125. The modern " idea-man " was developing in
him. To various magazines he served articles about
painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, financiers, inven-
tors, always with photographs, etchings or drawings.
Howells furnished him with material for a portrait, and
liked it so well that he invited him to come and see him.
After the visit he wrote a second article, calling him a
" nobleman of literature." Today he says of him: " Yes,
I know his books are pewky and damn-fool enough, but he
did one fine piece of work, Their Wedding Journey, not
a sentimental passage in it, quarrels from beginning to
end, just the way it would be, don't you know, really
beautiful and true." They drank tea together quietly this
afternoon in 1897, a servant or so around, no one else.
Howells was never to make much of him, nor invite him
to a literary evening and read the poets to him, as he did
for the more aesthetic " new people coming, coming."
A boundless curiosity in the eyes of this boy coupled
with a looseness of manner and ignorance of etiquette
were doubtless alarming to the older Westerner, who
cared so little for life and so much for New England
deportment in the guise of letters. They talked agree-
ably without much in common. Dreiser remembers him
as kindly.
These articles, between 1897 and 1901 covered ground,
went out of New York, now and then out of the coun-
try. Musicians first, especially women, were served up,
the step nearest to the musical Every Month. Then
artists, financiers, inventors and statesmen — Anthony
Hope, the real Zangwill, MacMonnies, Bayard Taylor,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells twice,
Frank W. Gunsaulus, Paul Bartlett, Theodore Thomas,
John Burroughs twice, Edmund Clarence Stedman, asso-
ciate of Mark Twain, Alfred Stieglitz, Mrs. Kenyon Cox,
Philip D. Armour, Marshall Field, Andrew Carnegie,
Chauncey M. Depew, John H. Patterson, cash register
magnate, Thomas Edison, Joseph Choate, Champ Clark,
" so crooked," the wise-crack went, " he could not lie
H3
straight in bed " ; and a quantity of painters and sculptors,
now forgotten. Dreiser in picking essential names seems
not to have made a mistake in the future eminence of a
writer or financier, while today among painters and sculp-
tors only Stieglitz and Paul Bartlett remain as names.
His eye for the visual arts was more optimistic than it
was educated. He lets his wish for them in American life
stand for the deed. It is none the less a sign of a more
eager world, that young and obscure artists could interest
readers of Truth Magazine, Metropolitan, Cosmopoli-
tan, Demorest's, The Family Magazine, Everybody's,
Ainslee's, Pearson's. The American magazine was enter-
ing its last innocent decade, 1900 to 1910.
Further articles of his suggest the palate of that day:
The Museum of Natural History, The Packing Indus-
try, Craze for a New Disease, Brandywine the Pic-
turesque, The Making of Small Arms, Carrier Pigeons
in War Time, Historic Tarry town, Artistic Studios, The
Making of Stained Glass Windows, The Home of
William Cullen Bryant, Our Government and Our Food,
Human Documents from Old Rome, New York's Un-
derground Railroad, The Railroad and The People, The
History of the Horse, The Trade of the Mississippi, The
Apple Industry, The Rural Free Delivery, Plant Life
Underground, Why the Indian Paints his Face. Sight-
seeing for others was very soon for Dreiser profitable
and unpalatable. In a year he had written some fifty
articles at $100 to $150 a piece, and was not any more
a dreaming pauper. But not one of them could be intensive
or crucial. He could only skim the surfaces for magazine
display. The deep reactions he got from these excursions
he had to check for later use.
In the meantime he worked at terrific speed spurred on
by new money, new friends, new prestige. There is a
solemn fashion among critics to deplore worldly success
for geniuses, to applaud them most when starved and
persecuted. Van Wyck Brooks, for example, scolds Mark
Twain incessantly through 267 pages, because he liked
money and fame. He scolds him for his jokes even, about
as Aunt Polly scolds Tom Sullivan, only in radical rather
than Methodist language: " Can Mark Twain keep the
144
golden thread in his hands long enough? . . . No, and
the time is up. Circumstance steps in and cuts the golden
thread, and all is lost." * And yet is it true that all was
lost? Take a plunge into the wide promiscuous river,
Mark Twain, and you will bathe in living language of
which his virtuous critic is incapable. Sad of course that
this giant of earlier days could not have coupled with his
splendor the faith of Whitman, the purity of Poe or
Jesus or Modigliani, but not quite so tearful as Mr.
Brooks would have us think.
Dreiser too has been invoked as a paragon, and then
assailed by earnest critics for lapses into money making
which have lost him integrity of style, as they lost Twain
integrity of theme. Yet those who blame him lack his
talent for extremes — his appetite for glory, his compas-
sion in the face of misery. To look at it quite simply, it is
not in them to imagine the sheer delight of changing from
a hall bedroom to a writer's u studio," of buying a whole
meal and paying for it — the intoxication of being sought,
not always seeking. Within a year these refreshments
came to Dreiser and he had two years of comfort before
again he forsook it for the unknown dangers of Sister
Carrie.
His work for Every Month had already taken him
among young people of his own interests, as in St. Louis,
with the difference that here there were as many girls as
men. Some of them had come away to escape the mo-
notony of Western homes; some had already been to
Paris and Munich, as much to learn how to live like
artists, Dreiser noticed, as to be artists. Bohemian New
York was in full swing. Once he had gone to solicit a
double page center from a young painter later known
for his Spanish-American war pictures, Louis Sontag,
W. L. S. of Twelve Men. He was an inventor as well,
made and played with models of war ships and railroad
trains. His toy engine was " strong, heavy, silent running,
with the fineness and grace of the perfect sewing ma-
chine," so Dreiser describes it. He devised a scheme that
was a forerunner of moving pictures; was an expert
* The Ordeal of Mark Twain: A shrewd analysis of the great humorist,
wherein it is forbidden to laugh.
145
fencer, bicyclist, trick-rider, photographer, and tenor.
Dreiser who venerates skill and versatility in another
became one of his friends and audience. He was equipped
to do rapidly just what he himself in the old days had
dreamed he must do — " succeed." Soon Sontag was
illustrating Kipling! He reminded him of Kipling, facile
and brilliant. And he had business sense; used to explain
how he always put " a good stiff price on his drawings;
it encouraged respect for them." Of course the studio,
with Turkish corners, of so tense and volatile a creature
was filled with friends. He " lived close " to them, Drei-
ser says, and u never neglected " them. One feels that
this man was tonic to him, gave him a sense of aptitude
and fitness he had not met before, that went almost for
absolute values. Then one day he died of fever at Tampa ;
and left him with the feeling that he " had been looking
at a beautiful lamp, lighted and warm . . . and then
suddenly it had been puffed out before my eyes, as if a
hundred bubbles of irridescent hues had been shattered
by a breath. We toil so much, we dream so richly, we
hasten so fast, and lo ! the green door is opened. We are
through it, and its grassy surface has sealed us forever
from all which . . . we . . . crave — even as, breath-
lessly, we are still running." *
There were others too, who did not go through the
green door — an alluring group to him, avid for a
nascence of the arts and of the libertine ways of artists.
He was in and out of their studios. They made a fourth
group to bring later into his storied world. Some of
them already were going through the swinging door of
the saloon into disaster, and some of them through
seductive doors of social prestige into worldliness. But
they were young and hopeful then, and had before them
the democratic ideal, the cream tart — Success. His ac-
quaintance with Crowninshield, that American priest of
the arts and of fashion, dates from this time. He admired
him then and now, for talents important to the health and
bloom of a city. Dreiser is the one American radical
frankly obsessed with the need of social gaiety and luster.
He loves New York for being Babylon, wishes it might
* Twelve Men.
146
be even more so; not for himself personally but for the
splendor of the town. If unwittingly Emerson has helped
to make and dessicate old Boston, Dreiser has helped to
make and infect modern New York; by giving it his carnal
blessing.
Three years now since his last delirious thwarted week
with his fiancee. It was getting harder and harder to write
to her. Her image was fading with time and distance.
There were other intimacies. One of these, a beautiful
creature with a voice and a career before her surprised
him with the gift of a summer of romance in Virginia
mountains. She was the first girl of distinction he had
ever met, who unlike the Missouri school teacher,
wanted to give and take freely; indeed who arranged it
as one would a sumptuous party, and then withdrew
to the pursuit of her career, explaining that they had
known the best of each other, that the rest would be
commonplace. She appears in The " Genius" the image
of a peony.
Another in this year 1897 to 1898 seemed so essential
to him that he would have broken his engagement in
Missouri, if only she had relinquished her ambition to be
a writer. She came from a family of importance in Wash-
ington and was already engaged to be married, but felt
that she belonged to Dreiser. Together as writers they
would reach the promised land of fame. They needed
each other, she told him. But he " couldn't see it that
way." No household could succeed with more than one
egotist in it. Perhaps he had learned to believe this from
the Blue Ridge peony. Anyway again he thought of " his
grand destiny " and again regretfully broke with proffered
and accepted love.
Soon his means of earning a living became like saw-
dust to him. " There was nothing to it." If he had had an
intellectual Aunt Polly to admonish him, he would have
been quick to agree. The affluent magazine world, he felt,
was " a closed door " to live work, to " art," which had
been his unfound bride. " I did not want to fritter life
away over magazine articles. The best a publicist could
hope to become would be an Ida Tarbell, a Ray Stannard
Baker, a Lincoln Steffens," he explains, looking back on
H7
that time; whereas he had pledged himself to intensive
freedom of the mind. But how to live outside of maga-
zines? How to use his own temperament and make it
count ?
Again he thought of his first ambition — a play. Today
he says wistfully: " That form has always seemed most
natural to me. Shakespeare was right, u the play's the
thing." He wishes now he had kept to it. " A man is
gloriously articulate in a great play; he is a voice; his
words are no longer thoughts, they are acts, a challenge
direct to an audience." I spoke of Frost's definition of
poetry: "Words that have become deeds." "Yes," he
said, " a poem is a play, it moves and speaks." He thinks
it was chance, not preference that made a novelist of
him.
Perhaps it was pioneer instinct that has kept him a
novelist. Masters, Frost and Ring Lardner,* have like-
wise written plays and hoped for production. But what
chance for any one of quick vision when Protestant code
had for some centuries destroyed drama by prohibiting
passion. We have had leading men and leading ladies and
their able troupes all in the English tradition. But how
could we have a vital theatre out of a people, the action of
whose bodies had been locked by two centuries of pro-
testing, until negation had been reached. Mitchio Ito,
the Japanese dancer once said: " You will notice that
your actors act with their faces ; the Latin races act with
face and body; the Japanese wear masks, they express the
meaning with bodies only, like acrobats, like dancers, like
soldiers."
If now we are about to become a dramatic people it
will be as adopted children of the Negro music-hall and
the Jewish theatre, set free by a lawlessness, which, fol-
lowing the law of change, will begin to seek a new order
more in keeping with freedom of body and mind. The
Nineties yielded a few stars and a nation of spectators
and story-tellers; among them flawless mimics. There
have always been clowns, and there begin to be dancers
and athletes who might make actors for a playwright able
* Ring Lardner has appeared twice as playwright on Broadway but
both times propped by collaborators alien to his genius.
148
to galvanize us into native speech. If ever this hero ap-
pears, I think it will not be fantastic to say that first
Whitman, then Dreiser, then Masters among writers will
have opened the way for him into the jungle of human
passions.
149
9.9
" Arthur Henry blew in."
T
JLoward the spring of 1897 there came to
New York the chance which according to Dreiser made a
novelist of him. He came as advance agent for Hermann,
the magician, bent on a career of fiction and pleasure.
Their friendship, begun in Toledo days, put to sea again.
They complemented each other, the light and the heavy,
ballast and sails. Henry was certain that they could
write fiction, and that he himself could write it only in
company with Dreiser. In the same room, at the same
time, at the same table they were to work out their sepa-
rate short stories, advising and encouraging each other.
Henry had what he called u a doctrine of happiness,"
hypnotic to the heavier more sceptical realist: " Money?
Pooh ! It was for those who no longer had the capacity
to enjoy life. Mind was the key to every secret and every
delight." * He appears to have administered just the
elixir necessary to start this gloomy uncertain young man
on the road to being what is now called both in and out of
the market " our foremost novelist." He was his second
teacher in aesthetics; McCord the first one, to whose flute
the black girls in the St. Louis bagnio used to " dance in
some weird savage way that took one instanter to the
wilds of Central Africa." t Henry taught him to trust
himself and go the limit without thought of censor. And
I imagine he awoke in him too a sense of style for the
sake of style, most apparent in his early writings. He was
a messenger from the gods to guarantee the way. Too
bad that the lonely Melville found no friend like this; but
only the morbid illustrious Hawthorne who grew to fear
more than love the gist of Melville. A pity too that
Clemens had no one to advise him more kindred than the
* Rhona in A Gallery of Women. f Peter in Twelve Men.
ISO
eminent Howells, who was forever coaching him to be fit
for the company of Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, etc.,
where he felt, he said, like a " bar-keeper in heaven."
Whitman according to biography was luckier than these
two, and like Dreiser, had a gift for friendships with men.
When Emerson " saluted him on the threshold of a great
career," and Whitman in modern style used the words to
advertise his censured Leaves of Grass, Emerson was
scandalized, and when they met, did his utmost to get him
to suppress " offensive passages." But Walt with his sea-
captains and bus-drivers, and intellectual cronies at Pf aff's
on Bleeker Street, found it easy to do without famous
patronage.* The ingredients of achievement defy analysis.
But perhaps lucky friendships and fortunate love, when
changed often enough, contribute to a hero's fidelity to
theme.
Of Henry, Dreiser writes : " Because I liked him much
... I was inclined to let him have his way. He was too
delightful and interesting not to humor. . . . Every-
thing he did and said and thought was right with me,
even though I knew at times it was really quite wrong."
And so, certain that no story of his could sell, he was
swept into this literary partnership, which kept the two
for a time inseparable. Then, he says, Henry became more
sybarite than artist and gradually they drifted to their
separate roads. Also, he complains, the sybarite had a
" vaulting egotism " and " loved to direct and control as
well as argue," which may have had more to do with the
case. Knowing that Dreiser has a gift for estrangement
nearly equal to the gift for engagement, I wondered what
would be Henry's version of their friendship. Without
it the history of the author of Sister Carrie was incom-
plete. I wrote him, saying that Dreiser had sanctioned
the book I was making, indeed that he appeared to pre-
fer pre-mortems to post-mortems, out of egotism some
people said, but I thought more out of the wish of the
scientist to establish facts; and that I hoped for his story.
After some months in which he maintained a silence per-
haps in Hollywood, perhaps in heaven — no one seemed
to know — an answer came from Rhode Island, of which
* Walt Whitman: Le Grand Flaneur, by Cameron Rogers.
already I have quoted passages. It is so refreshing a tri-
bute to a man as much defamed as he is exalted, that I
give the rest of it here :
" Dreiser's chronicle of our association is correct. He is
generous toward me but I who know him better than any-
one know that he is the most generous — the least self
interested of men. You are right as to his impelling desire
of analysis and corresponding lack of egotism. . . . Unlike
the scientist, however, his vision is obscured or rather
colored by a profound tenderness which unfortunately he
has learned to mistrust — by a compassion that torments
him with a magnified idea of the misfortunes of others. He
gives his coat to a beggar in rags, just as he seeks to clothe
in virtue all the tattered characters of the world. I know
no one more sensitive to beauty or ... luxury and con-
venience, but he is at the same time more conscious than
anyone I know, of the multitude who are deprived of these.
He seems to feel responsible for all the misery of the world
and for every unqualified wretch or abortive scoundrel born
into it. ...
" For many years I fished and hunted and played with
Dreiser in a World of Thought and found him always a true
sportsman. The ideas I caught seemed to him larger than
his own. ... If I inspired him it was because I insisted on
his looking at and appreciating His Own. Dreiser will not
have fulfilled his mission in the world until he sits down to
a novel in the mood in which he composes a poem — and
sustains that mood with all his people, rich and powerful
and poor and weak, until he finishes it."
" When I cast off all restraints and went to New York
with nothing but a pad and a pencil, I found Dreiser editor
of a magazine. We lived and worked together — often
finishing each other's articles. If I read them today I could
not tell what was his or mine. Our stories were more our
own. We talked them over together but wrote them with
less collaboration. He helped me most with The Unwritten
Law — picking me up when it had me down.
" Wonderful years — a forecast I hope of an eternal re-
lationship in the spiritual life hereafter."
And finally the version of their separations, more deli-
cate than Dreiser's; possibly less honest, as if being a
negative matter, it were of small importance thirty years
after, beside the reality of their life together :
" In answer to your question.
We drifted apart and drifted together again as the tide
comes and goes. The moon controls such things — and must
be held responsible."
152
At first reading, one would say that Henry remem-
bered his friend only at his best, but the tribute contains
two reservations — " His vision is colored by profound
tenderness, which unfortunately he has learned to mis-
trust." And: " Dreiser will not have fulfilled his mission
in the world until he sits down to a novel in the mood in
which he composes a poem . . ." Perhaps more sensi-
tive than creative, he hoped for his stronger partner
to create for him according to his program, like a wife
who is ambitious for her husband and alienates him that
way.
Impossible to know the exact nature of the bond and
the break between the two, only that success came to them
together. The first story of Dreiser's to issue from their
workroom he called The Shining Slave Makers. It is
published now unchanged except for title, in Free and
Other Stories * A man goes to sleep in the grass under a
shady tree among ant-hills; he dreams of joining ant
life in a time of famine and war between black and red
ants. The irony of Dreiser's own struggle of the last
ten years is in this allegory. The cruelty of enemy against
enemy fighting for bread, fighting for life, blindly fight-
ing, and the satirical tenderness of ally for ally aligned
against an arbitrary enemy, is here — a full-fledged Drei-
serian equation : A and B and C, which we know, equal X,
the unknown. He seems to be thinking aloud, exposing
what he had heard for many a year: Join the tribe, fight
for the tribe, die for the tribe; that way alone lies safety.
Death alone is safe.
Robert Frost, the most astute of our critics, though
with him criticism is implicit in his poems or revealed in
talk, once said in a lecture, that a man would strike his
gait in poem or story or any other work of art in his
early twenties, if he were ever to do it; that then there
might be years of falling short of it, but once there in his
youth, he had a chance to come back. I have read none of
Dreiser's earlier writings, but I imagine that sometimes
they held promise of this mature story written in his
twenty-seventh year. It has in it the iron of his special
temperament and little of the slag :
* McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers.
153
" McEwen, in a strange daze and lust of death seemed
to think nothing of it. He was alone now — lost in a tossing
sea of war, and terror seemed to have forsaken him. It was
wonderful, he thought, mysterious — . . . Enemy after
enemy assailed him, he fought as he best knew, an old
method to him, apparently, and as they died, he wished
them to die — broken, poisoned, sawed in two. He began
to count and exult in the number he had slain. It was at
last as though he were dreaming, and all around was a vain,
dark, surging mass of enemies."
Their separate stories finished, he sent his to the
Century Magazine. He had written the fable lightly
enough, and he insists, chiefly because whenever he
stopped, Henry stopped too, unable to go on. It is in
keeping with his drama that with these first few pages,
and unintentionally, he had then and there challenged the
enemy he was destined to fight through so many years —
Orthodoxy. The way a ring follows the pressing of a
button, the emissary stepped out in the person of Robert
Underwood Johnson, understudy to Howells, editor of
the august Century, and resident then and now of Murray
Hill.
50
" We like Boston. . . . Their hotels are
bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious.
Their poetry is not so good. . . . Their
Common is no common thing — and the
duck pond might answer — if its answer
could be heard for the frogs. . . . But
with all these good qualities the Bostonians
have no soul." EDGAR ALLAN POE
HP
JLo understand this emissary it is necessary
to go back again a generation. When the young pilgrim,
William Dean Howells (who appears to be one of the
subordinate villains in this narrative of facts) came East
in 1 86 1 from his Ohio village to find the great world, he
went first to Boston and Concord. There he talked in the
Parker House over a bottle of Medoc with Holmes and
Lowell, on the hillside with Hawthorne, in his garden
with Thoreau, in their studies with Emerson and Long-
fellow. They welcomed him as a messenger out of the
West, romantic to their cultivated nerves much as the
United States has recently been to cerebral Europeans.
They were disappointed to hear that he did not want to be
a Lochinvar, that the West was cold and hostile to the
Arts, that he had come to learn from them to be an East-
erner. At the same time they were grateful for his faith
in their culture made of their life's blood and juices. Truth
was, with their sages' minds and spinsters' bodies, as the
years piled up, secretly they began to be assailed by
doubts. A tiny fear was creeping in that perhaps not
they, but their victims, some of whom had asked to be
their friends — the lost Melville, the erotic Margaret
Fuller, " Poor Margaret " they called her, or even the
drunken Poe, "that jingler" * — all successfully disposed
* Emerson to the young Howells in their first talk.
155
of, might return and be the heroes in their stead in the
days to come. Whitman's " barbaric yawp " impervious
and mocking had unsettled these gentle intellects, gossip-
ing over the hedges between their yards around supper-
time. The young Ohian's praise came as balm to them.
Howells on his side venerated them as high priests dis-
pensing culture with which he might help to civilize the
rest of the country, perhaps even, given time, the Middle
West. He pledged himself to follow in their ways. Then
he journeyed on to mundane New York, whose literary
figures, Artemus Ward and others, seemed rough and
cynical compared to the exquisite New Englanders. Ac-
cording to his memoirs they drank too much, told " ob-
jectionable " stories, swore and laughed and were venal
about literature. Really in these memoirs Howells in-
dicts himself — academician and parson. He is ring-
leader, self-confessed, of henchmen, who dedicated them-
selves to the task of diluting native expression in the name
of " ennobling " it. Without their set-back, verbal Am-
erica, already vivid with Melville, Poe and Whitman,
might have come into its own a generation sooner. And its
products would have been richer, because less hampered,
and more coherent with the tragedies and victories of
the centuries.
Howells fancied himself a realist and a native, but
beneath surfaces certainly he and his friends were agents
of Royalist ghosts who still knew how to make Yankees
feel inferior for having cut loose in the eighteenth cen-
tury. They catered to a reactionary mood constant in us,
and periodically ascendant. Our rhythm has been in re-
curring overlapping waves of independence and humility.
Always we have been breaking with the old countries and
always straining back toward them hoping for a kind
word, which they never give. No people so brash and none
so deprecating as we are! In 1861 Howells shuddered at
our vulgarity. He had not left Ohio to brook so shallow
an attitude toward the arts. He established himself in the
Murray Hill district of New York which connected with
Beacon Hill if not with Concord. He accepted a position
on the Atlantic Monthly which took him in person to
Boston; and later another as consul to Venice, which was
156
quite as proper, since it was correct for these bachelors
to " transfer " to Italy. He wanted the impossible to hap-
pen — he wanted experienced artists, living without ex-
perience. His code triumphed into the new century, and
then when the intellectual revolution came, out of pro-
miscuous America, drenched in all races, all classes, it
was a good one, a brute for a time, like drinking after
prohibition, like machine guns in an atrophied city.
And always the arch-enemies, hidden and outspoken, of
this new culture were bred in the Howells-Harpers-Cen-
tury-Murray Hill tradition. Though for money they often
had to let the newly rich into their offices and drawing-
rooms, the newly intellectual they vowed to fight to the
last ditch, and much as if they were gangsters, for daring
to trespass on their ground, that of the spirit. The some-
times awkward, sometimes crucial Dreiser was among
the first to suffer. Repeatedly he has taken punishment at
their gentlemanly hands, perhaps more than anyone else.
Fighting his way to their sacred printing presses, it is
now traditional that he cleared the passage for the rebels
who were to follow. After a while they came to be wel-
comed. Today they are treated as equals; some of them
like it. One of them receives the Nobel prize. In fact for
the time being genteel America persists in little more
than politics; and yet has been strong enough to give
distinguished sanction to the murder of Sacco and Van-
zetti and to the entombment of Mooney and Billings.
Robert Underwood Johnson was made in this dignified
mould, and has been true to it, having later been ap-
pointed ambassador to Italy. . . . When in 1897 he had
read the few pages of Dreiser's fable of war, faithfully
he returned the manuscript to its author with a " per-
sonal " letter protesting its " despicable philosophy." If
that was the way this young man thought about life, the
less he said about it the better. The young man wrote
back defending himself. Again the answer came that Mr.
Johnson seriously argued the right to express such ideas
in print; he could not agree with them.
So now with this encounter the lonely changing back-
grounds in which Dreiser had been merged recede slightly,
and he begins to loom. Soon they will disappear placenta-
157
wise. And in various shifting foregrounds of the next
thirty years the detached child, delivered now to the
scene, will engage with its actors. Among them will be
friends and champions, jealous followers, and enemies
bitterly despising him. From time to time there will re-
appear the type of the editor of the Century to protest
his philosophy. He will be the purveyor of one-hundred-
per-cent-literature, the kind allowed presidents and
school children. He comes in the guise of the Vigilantes
at the time of the Great War. He reappears at this
very moment along with the lengthening of skirts, the
" Humanist " of 1929 to 1930. Always his attempt has
been to be a detractor of the sun.
I wonder at this type of mind. What is it that frightens
these people? Take for example this allegory: The
Shining Slave Makers. It was not, I think, that the
editor was disputing the truth of it, convinced that war
is kind and kindness always disinterested. It must be
that he and his sort deny the right to perceive outside of
strict limits. And invariably they confuse the one per-
ceiving with his perceptions. " Aha ! " they say, " this
writer tells us men are cruel and deceptive just as nature
is. That proves he enjoys these qualities — the brute,
the liar, traitor to the human race, social menace, dan-
gerous citizen ! " And they hound him for telling tales
on them — and on himself, it may be, or it may not be.
So all at once and suddenly Dreiser, who has a consuming
passion for society, was yet lined up against it, for having
shocked one of its timid ambassadors. Soon he will be
forced to learn the role of enemy.
In the meantime, having sold his wicked fable for
$125 to the unsophisticated Ainslee's, a ten-cent maga-
zine already pleased with his wares, he wrote five or
six new stories to Henry's five or six, and sold them to
the popular magazines. Among them are Nigger Jeff and
The Butcher Rogaum and His Door, now collected in
Free and Other Stories. These perhaps were never ex-
posed to the frown of any pillar of society, and if they
had been, might have passed. Their only possible offense
could have been an inborn interest in low life — a tender-
ness toward the mother of a negro lynched for assault,
158
and toward a too Calvin-like German butcher who suf-
fered tortures for locking the door on his wayward
daughter one night. He was writing as if the characters
were himself. He was writing about the life of men and
women and boys and girls and babies, quite nonchalantly
now, as one might write about the life of bees or ants
or mosquitoes, if one knew it. He was recording the
buzzing and the humming, now loud, now low, now joy-
ful, now frantic, and then silenced, as he heard it. And he
might have continued to write like this for some years,
peacefully and reflectively, recording both detail and
structure of life, and selling his wares to the less carping
magazines — for to his surprise he was selling them, and
even his feature articles could be more like himself now
— except that again the effervescent Henry interfered.
They had written short stories and succeeded — some
of them out in Ohio under the trees on the lawn of
Henry's village home. They were both in a fever of crea-
tion from delight in the country and each other. Henry in-
sisted, they must embark at once, each one of them, on a
novel. Dreiser protested; the struggle for life was too
fierce; he couldn't afford a novel yet; no novel of his
would be accepted. But the sybarite prevailed. They were
back in New York now. One day in October, 1899, Drei-
ser, according to legend, found himself writing two words
on a clean sheet of paper out of a detached brain. Two
words that have become a part of his history and ours :
Sister Carrie. They rank in prevalence with The Scarlet
Letter, Moby Dick, The Raven, Leaves of Grass,
Huckleberry Finn, Ethan Frame, Spoon River Anthol-
ogy, Winesburg Ohio, Babbitt, etc.
159
I
51
" Our civilization is still in a middle stage,
scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly
guided by instinct, scarcely human, in that
it is not yet wholly guided by reason"
DREISER: SISTER CARRIE
asked Dreiser if really it were true that the
name came first and the characters and theme afterwards.
" Yes, actually ! My mind was a blank except for the
name. I had no idea who or what she was to be. I have
often thought there was something mystic about it, as if
I were being used, like a medium." Curiously I remember
hearing Masters speak of his Spoon River in the same
way: "Sometimes I think I didn't write it. It passed
through me, I was only the medium for it." So the two
first imageries of the two Americans most native and
subversive to their period were conceived mysteriously,
out of the unknown, if we take their word for it. Though
labeled realism, they bear in truth the footprints of the
inevitable, the signature of Nature.
With Dreiser, the identity of Sister Carrie coming
alone from her small country town to Chicago, to sink or
swim in that " sea of life," and the identity of the other
lives as they were linked with hers and unlinked — these,
he said, followed as if out of a dream, whole and alive.
He began at once to weave them into their story in Oc-
tober, 1899. He worked with ease until some time in
December. Then something interfered, he doesn't know
what, but he had to quit for a while. He and Henry
were at work separately now, although they still advised
and consulted.
Henry was writing a romance, The Princess of Arcady,
and at the same time was engaged in Arcadian pursuits.
A young woman whom Dreiser had found to copy
160
their manuscripts, the owner of a successful typing
office, had fallen in love with this blue-eyed, fair-skinned
friend. She was ready to pay for his time by catering to
every whim, chief of which was that the close partnership
of these two men should not dissolve. She was generous
and self-effacing to the proverbial fault. When summer
came, she even rented an island near Nantucket and a sail-
boat, where they used to go luxuriously to play and work.*
But none the less her entry broke the spell of friendship
for Dreiser. Besides, so much romance and dalliance did
not mix with his more desperate plans. Henry had pro-
vided the spark; he was beginning not to feed the flame.
A year before, another complication had entered in. He
was called upon to face an almost forgotten bond — his
engagement in Missouri. The note had come due, and
must be paid now or never. If never, the flower-like face,
the stark red braids, the passionate body not yet his,
might not be alive to him or another. So he read in a
letter from her sister, who feared for her health and
¥jrhaps for her life if this long waiting had to go on.
he bond between them was tougher than with Alice
of his first romance, or else the need for marriage was
greater. And then, too, he loved the sister, he remem-
bers in a kind of guilty after-thought. But what more
natural? Sisters have often been loved in pairs, trios
or even quartets. . . . On Christmas day the two
daughters of the Missouri patriarch, bringing with them
the fragrance of fields and hedges, met him in Washing-
ton. And Sarah White and Theodore Dreiser were joined
in what she believed to be holy wedlock.
The book of newspaper days ends with an elegy
and no song of praise to this event, which took
place " after the first flare of love had thinned down
to the pale flame of duty." Yet there are chapters in The
" Genius " given over to the hero's early days of marriage,
drawn from his own marriage, he says, which give a less
dreary account of it. There are oblivious nights, fol-
lowed by breakfasts which, besides making the mouth
water, read like flawless erotic favors, hand-made and
hand-served by his wife. Yet too there is a sense of
* Rhona: A Gallery of Women.
161
defeat, of being cheated, as if he were saying, " Is this
all, wasn't there to be more? " Possibly this half-way
exciting, half-way disappointing marriage interfered with
the progress of Sister Carrie. Or it may have been the
temporary loss of the magical Henry, by temperament a
magician's advance-agent. Or else the enterprise itself
was carrying him into problems yet beyond him — this
lonely making of a novel without American precedent in
theme or treatment.
Something blocked the way. He says of these months,
December and January: " I had to quit, it seemed to me
the thing was a failure, a total frost. ... I think I ex-
perienced a defeat in the face of Hurstwood's defeat as
to Carrie. I took it up again once or twice but had to quit.
I tried writing stories; thought I had better go back to
articles. ... I had reached the place where Hurstwood
robs the safe. I didn't know where I was going; I had
lost the thread. . . . Then in February, Arthur Henry,
off flirting with some girl, came back and read it. He
thought there was nothing wrong with it, told me I must
go on. ... I managed to solve the problem and for a
while it went pretty good, until I came to the question of
Hurstwood's decline, which took me back to the World
days. Then I had to stop again. Somehow I felt unworthy
to write all that. It seemed too big, too baffling, don't you
know? . . . But after a month I managed to get the
thread, and finished it up in May. . . . Henry read it
and said ' Don't change a word.' But I spent some weeks
revising it; he helped me. In May or June 1900 I sent it
to Harper's. I knew one of the editors. They refused it.
Then I took it down to Doubleday's. In November it
was out."
I quote this as he told it to me in July 1930, wishing
I could get his tone of voice into the words, like loose
earth, and into the memory like roots of trees, as if he
were digging them up to transplant them. " I felt un-
worthy to write all that, you know," came like a surprise.
I did not know. I think that I have not heard elsewhere
such abject reverence in the face of misery as suddenly
sounded in this man's voice. If genius is caring for human
beings more than others know how to care, then Dreiser
162
has genius. Or if it is true that the great Don Juans are
also the greatly religious men, then Dreiser is proved to
be a voluptuary.*
So in November 1900 Sister Carrie was out. Not easily
or happily, though in a sense gloriously, a new birth in
the history of our books, and a perilous delivery. The two
friends believed they had stripped it to form by cuts
amounting to about 40,000 words. Henry, the acknowl-
edged stylist of the two, was sure that now there was
nothing to be changed. There is a story that Mrs. Dreiser
helped with the revision, in fact that with her school-
teacher's training he studied English under her, but this
he denies emphatically: " Oh, no, all she ever wanted to
do was to cut out what she called * the bad parts/ and she
hadn't a chance at that. If I learned anything about style
from another at this time, I owe it to Henry." The legend
is that he has learned nothing about style at this time or
another, generated at the outset by the jeers of the coun-
try's critics, that followed like so many pebbles and rotten
eggs on the heels of publication.
As usual, the critics were wrong. A man's style is a
man's self. As much as he had learned about himself, he
had learned about style. In reality, Sister Carrie is flexible
prose suited to subtle and trenchant meanings, passing at
charged moments over into poetry, in the manner of all
prose designed to the pulse of life. More than that,
the book has few of the archaic trimmings and no trace
of the diffuseness which Dreiser seems to have wished to
make part of his style in later years. In fact it was a
skilful package, made in America with a key to the uni-
versal, that went to the house of Harpers asking to be
published.
They sent it back without a word — no flattering pro-
test, this time, no invitation to try again. Ten years later,
after British approval, it was offered once more and they
accepted it. Dreiser says they were ethically shocked. I
think perhaps also they were verbally and syntactically
scandalized. It was one thing, though tough, to accept the
conscious lingo of Whitman, Crane, and certain famous
humorists. But for gentlemen of the Harvard Club and
* Don Juan: Joseph Delteil.
163
Century Club to fall for the guileless vernacular in which
Sister Carrie often progresses, was another thing. For
their eyes to encounter, outside of any quotation marks,
spiritual or actual, nice, swell, palavering, vest, grip,
valise, flashy, influential, showy, nobby, fancy, truly swell
saloon, exclusive circles, lovely home atmosphere, elegant
mansions, dress-suit affair, laced in and out of the uncere-
monial speech of the Middle West and classes — this was
hard on their eyes. Useless to have reminded them that
Shakespeare did it and Chaucer and Villon, and Mistral
would! They liked the pure welded speeches of those
countries and those times better than they did poly-
glot American derived from many incongruous floating
sources. But this author did not; he liked his own speech
and country as well or well enough. He wrote apparently
as he talked and thought. When the idiom he had always
heard and used seemed too meager to convey his mean-
ing, he trimmed it sometimes with grace-notes from high-
school days : lightsome, halcyon, prancing pair of bays,
airy grace, fine feather. These too were part of that
Prairie language; the girls sang them to sweet tunes
and people used them for special occasions, letters and
speeches. Perhaps they seemed ultra-innocent to the in-
nocent editors who first refused Sister Carrie. It is true,
they make a curious blend with the text book language —
formative, afectional, actualities — in which the story
also moves, just as American talk moves in impersonali-
ties, so as not to feel the accusation of neglected personal
values.
But, as they must have read early in the book, if they
read it at all : ". . . words are but the vague shadows of
the volumes we mean. Little audible links . . . chaining
together great inaudible feelings and purposes." Here
Dreiser detects a secret of language. It must be that not
the words but the current connecting them, dictated not
by the theme even, but by something more intangible, is
what counts. Whitman and his disciple Traubel used the
same words and the same theme, and yet Whitman re-
sembles Homer more than he does Traubel and Traubel
Whittier more than he does Whitman. And so with
Sister Carrie. With commonplace humdrum words and
phrases, as well as choice ones, the life of the delicious
Carrie and the lusterless death of Hurstwood, like two
crossed sails in a boat, reared themselves out of the com-
monplace of middle-class Chicago and transient New
York — a sudden creation, an event like April weather.
That the Harper editors could not feel the rain in their
faces was a pity for them. Probably Dreiser was right,
the " shameless " theme, rendered electrically so that it
shocked them, was too much for them, and the shameless
diction gave them their alibi.
52
" He was a quivering personality."
HENRY LANIER OF FRANK NORRIS
A. N ow the novel becomes a hinge on which
hangs an incident like luck in an Homeric legend. In the
publishing company of Doubleday, Page & Co. there
worked as proof-reader and adviser, when he was not off
bass-fishing with his blonde, the one man to whom Sister
Carrie would be like sudden rain, like frogs in March, a
matter for elation. The man was Frank Norris, a young
San Franciscan, already heroic as a novelist. He came
from a more sophisticated family than Dreiser's. He had
been educated in the University of California, and then
had gone to Harvard to study writing, and then back to
the Golden Gate. There he had been one of the editors of
The Wave, a magazine of strugglers for art in the Far
West, akin to the Chicago Chap Book, but fanned by
winds from both East and West, France, England, and
the Orient too. Water is a carrier of atmosphere. Land
stops it. Though three times as far from Japan to San
Francisco as from Paris to New York, the flavor of the
Far East reached that coast as actually as Europe ever
reached New York. Perhaps the California Indians with
their excessively bright feather-masked ceremonies helped
to intensify their ancestral spirit wafted across the Pacific
from an ancient home, and kept it doubly floating for the
sons of gold-seekers and fruit-growers who had come
upon them. And there were other riches out there —
long summers, phosphorescent ocean, redwood forest
and a background of Spain and Mexico to fertilize the
spirit. However it happened, these Westerners were at
this date more untrammeled and inventive than the other
groups back East, preoccupied with making America real,
that is, a land of the spirit. An eight year old child learns
166
in a public school that Greece had something Phoenicia
lacked. A halo attaches to Athens and an infamy of trade
to Carthage in the child's mind, for all of Dido's beauty.
And so why not to his own United States, unless heroes
joined together to change all that? . . . That they
failed in California, was surely not Frank Norris's fault,
nor George Sterling's, nor the fault of Charles Lummis
nor of Ambrose Bierce, nor of Edward Sills. They were
a halcyon lot, witty and enraptured, worthy of the men
and women who crossed Death Valley on foot to get
there. They called themselves Bohemians, and they called
San Francisco " the cool grey city of love." They made
one more adventure with their various journals and festi-
vals, perhaps the most resourceful one, to fall before the
wheels of finance, as each adventure of the kind has fallen
in the history of our culture, that is up to date — before
the wheels of the Southern Pacific Railway in their case.
Out of it before its collapse, Norris went East. There
used to be a saying, ideas travel West, stories travel East.
Like Jack London, Norris was a great story-teller and
traveled East. He went to meet ideas nearer their source
with which to find his bearings. More than London, he
looked on writing as an art, never as propaganda, and on
the novel as a sacred obligation: " Each age speaks with
its own peculiar organ. . . . Today is the day of the
novel. . . . By no other vehicle is contemporaneous life
so adequately expressed." To be vital, the novel must
grow out of real life, and not out of the idea of realism.
Howells was a realist, he said, Zola a romanticist, since
life beneath surfaces, taken in all its phases, sordid, un-
lovely, abnormal, was romance. " Realism stultifies itself,
it notes only the surfaces." * With this faith in his heart,
he had written stories of San Francisco for The Wave,
and one novel, Moran of the Lady Letty, and two
unpublished novels, handover and The Brute and
McTeague. He was twenty-seven years of age.
This was the story-teller who in 1898 joined the house
of Doubleday, McClure as reader and literary adviser,
invited by Samuel McClure, who saw journalistic virtue
in the serial novel appearing in The Wave. It was dated
* " Responsibilities of the Novelist," Frank Norris.
167
with a current event, the sinking of the Maine and the
outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Doubleday pub-
lished the novel, a fair success, and then the great
McTeague, written three years before — a success of
scandal at first and then ignored in our country until long
after Norris's death in 1907. With Moby Dick and An
American Tragedy it shares that quality most praised by
moderns — sense of volume. Dreiser writes of it :
" In the days of its first circulation there was considerable
complaint as to McTeague's vulgarity, the ignorance and
brutality of its principals and their associates. For that was
the day of transcendental perfection (on paper) throughout
America ! ... To me when I first read it in 1900, it brought
the thrill of realism as related to America. And what a thrill !
At that time I was but twenty-nine and had just concluded
Sister Carrie . . . my own work about Chicago and New
York. Who was this man? ... I inquired of my literary
friends and . . . learned it was a first book by a young man
out in San Francisco."
Unknown then to Dreiser, Frank Norris was already
in New York; and Sister Carrie fell to him as part of the
day's work of manuscript reading. It made an instantane-
ous appeal, which Yeats has called the test of art. He
talked of it to everyone : " It is the best novel I have
read since I have been reading for the firm, and it pleases
me as well as any novel I have ever read, published or
otherwise." Morgan Robertson, a writer of sea-stories,
told how one morning happening to call on Norris in his
office, he was met with the news : " I have found a master-
piece. The man's name is Theodore Dreiser." When Rob-
ertson said he knew him, he said : " Tell him what I think
of it. I am writing him to call. I hope the house publishes
it. It's a wonder." With the notation that it must be pub-
lished, he gave the manuscript over to Henry Lanier, the
junior partner, born in Georgia, brought up in Baltimore
(son of the poet Sidney Lanier and a friend as well as
associate of Norris).
" It hit him hard," Mr. Lanier said, who graciously
had consented to think back for me to this spring of 1900.
I said : " Perhaps it hit him especially hard, because wasn't
Norris going back on himself at this period — that is, on
the quality you find in McTeague? Had they made him
feel in New York the pressure of commerce, when he
168
wrote The Octopus and The Pit? " — " No, I wouldn't
say that," was the answer of the more temperate
Mr. Lanier. " Of course he was disappointed by the re-
ception given McTeague; I think he could hardly believe
it. But I wouldn't say he compromised to money in his
later works. As I recollect his feelings at that time he
merely thought McTeague must be too lonely and aloof
to be reasonable. He was the kind of man who had to be
acknowledged, and then he believed in * the people ' more
than the rest of us do. I remember he came in one day
full of his ' big idea/ a Wheat Cycle in three parts, of
which he finished two before his death, The Octopus and
The Pit. He was like a fanatic, ablaze with it. * He would
knock 'em cold this time,' I remember he said. ... I
don't think he was pandering, he was too much in earnest,
but he got to intellectualizing over the situation, so that
perhaps there is not the first-hand quality, if you like,
that there is in McTeague. The later work approaches
journalism, possibly ... I don't know. They were all
big books. ... Of course he liked luxury, clothes, res-
taurants, wine, the bright lights you might say, though
not in a greedy way. . . . Then he had to have his girl,
and he got her, married her. . . ." — " Was she at-
tractive?" I asked. — "Really I can't say ... not to
me especially, but then I am old-fashioned. He liked her,
she was a blonde, rather a large woman. . . . He liked
fishing, was crazy about bass-fishing. I found him a cabin
up on Greenwood Lake near Greenwich where he used
to stay a good deal of the time. If I'm not mistaken he
read Dreiser's Carrie up there. Yes, I seem to remember
his bringing it down from the country one morning ter-
ribly excited about it. ... No, I don't think Norris ever
thought of money in connection with writing. Of course
he was under a good deal of pressure at this time, but he
was too much the artist. . . . We all loved him. . . .
He was a quivering personality."
So between a dynamic personality, Dreiser, and a quiv-
ering personality, Norris, there blazed for a minute the
fire-brand truth, luxury, art, whatever you prefer to call
it — that element from which over and over again people
fly. Truth like love is a luxury. We don't want luxury.
Today we fly from it in an aeroplane. But this new frac-
tion of it, Sister Carrie, got this time by luck a running
start. " It must be published," Norris said. Lanier read
it and hated it, and agreed that they must publish it. For
him, he explains, a man loving old mellow things, it was
hateful. " It had no background " : the characters were
treated as of equal importance with the most cultivated
delightful men and women: whereas " people are not of
equal significance " in his opinion. Nevertheless it was
powerful, unavoidable. Norris was right, it had to be
published. Then Walter Hines Page read it, later am-
bassador to England, at this time partner of Frank
Doubleday in the stead of S. S. McClure who had by now
gravitated back to his magazine. He agreed with the
younger men that it was a book to publish, " a natural,"
he called it. A contract was drawn up and signed by the
author and these two gentlemen. Sister Carrie was on the
way to the printing press.
170
55
Famous Women of literature: Mrs.
Grundy, otherwise Mrs. Samuel Clemens,
otherwise Mrs. Frank Doubleday.
.he legend goes,* and Mr. Lanier partly
corroborates it, that at this moment Mr. and Mrs. Frank
Doubleday, who had been traveling in Europe, returned
to New York; and Mr. Doubleday, the senior partner,
arriving at his offices in 25th Street, among other matters
was confronted with this initial novel of an unknown
Hoosier. Since it was Saturday he took it to his home in
Oyster Bay, a suburb of Murray Hill and Washington
Square, to read it over the week-end. And then . . . and
then, according to fable, again enters the villain, Pro-
priety — this time, if you have not guessed it, in the
refined and engaging dress of Mrs. Frank Doubleday.
And here since no one can or will recollect this particular
week-end, there is nothing to do but to imagine the scene.
First, however, it is possible to identify the enemy — ac-
cording to her friends, an almost perfect woman, wife,
mother, church member, hostess, in this well-fed, well-bred
apex of New York in 1900. Mr. Charles P. Everitt, who
with his brother Sam worked also at Doubleday, Page &
Co., gave me a dilated picture : " She was beautiful, she
was a lovely woman, she was stately. In fact, not long
before he died, I met Walter Hines Page on the street,
and I said to him, ' Walter, I don't believe there ever was
such a woman as Mrs. Frank Doubleday.' And he said to
me with tears in his eyes : ' Charlie, I have never known
the equal of Mrs. Frank Doubleday.' '
Wrapt in such an aura, I imagine her now entering the
study where Mr. Frank Doubleday was busy reading and
* H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces; Burton Rascoe, Theodore
Dreiser; Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits.
171
possibly enjoying Sister Carrie. This might have been
what she read over her husband's shoulder, as he turned
the pages and her virtuous eyes easily picked the " in-
decencies " after the first note of them:
" A dainty self-conscious swaying of the hips by a woman
was to him as alluring as the glint of rare wine to the toper.
He would thrill as a child with the unhindered passion that
was in him. . . ."
"He appeared to great advantage behind the white
napery and silver platters. ... As he cut the meat his
rings almost spoke. ... He helped Carrie to a rousing
plateful. . . . That little soldier of fortune took her good
turn in an easy way. . . . Even then in her commonplace
garb her figure was evidently not bad, and her eyes were
large and gentle. Drouet looked at her and his thoughts
reached home. . . . She felt that she liked him . . . there
was something even richer than that running as a hidden
strain in her mind. . . ."
" The jackets were the greatest attraction. When she en-
tered the store she already had her heart fixed upon the
peculiar little tan jacket with large mother-of-pearl but-
tons ... all the rage that fall. . . ."
". . . ' I'll tell you what you do/ he said, ' you come with
me and I'll take care of you. . . . Why don't you get your-
self a nice little jacket. . . . I'll loan you the money. . . .
Now why don't you let me get you a nice room? ... I
won't hurt you. . . . Aw, come Carrie. . . . What can you
do alone?' . . ."
". . . She followed whither her craving led. She was as
yet more drawn than she drew. . . . He would need to de-
light himself with Carrie as surely as he would need to eat
his heavy breakfast. . . ."
"... * I wish I could get something to do,' she said. —
* You'll get that all right. . . . Get yourself fixed up, see the
city. ... I won't hurt you. . . . Got on the new shoes?
. . . Stick 'em out. . . . George, they look fine. . . . Put
on your jacket. . . . Say that fits like a T, don't it?' he
remarked feeling the set of it at the waist and eyeing it from
a few paces with real pleasure. ... At Carson Pirie's he
bought her a nice skirt and shirtwaist. . . . She was pretty,
yes, indeed. . . . She caught her little red lip with her teeth
and felt her first thrill of power. . . ."
In those days the more valiant New York matrons were
occupied among their good works with purity leagues for
the suppression of vice, for the lapsed and lost, for the
social evil. Indeed at about this time they were making
a pleasant sanitary prison where wayward girls too tender
172
in years for the jail might be agreeably locked up — the
Florence Crittendon Home. And here was Doubleday,
Page about to publish a book about vulgar people, a Chi-
cago drummer and a factory girl from the country, which
apparently recommended prostitution as a way of life in
little tan jackets with large pearl buttons. At least as she
read Mrs. Doubleday could find no hint of condemnation.
She looked into it again. Now there was a change of
names, a new seducer, a saloon-manager if you please, and
yet described as a handsome, well-dressed dependable
citizen! It must have been she was mortified as she went
from lewd facet to facet lighted by her orthodox mind :
"He drew near this lily, which had sucked its waxen
beauty from a depth of waters which he had never pene-
trated, and out of ooze and mould which he could not un-
derstand. He drew near because it was waxen and fresh.
It lighted his feelings for him. It made the morning worth
while."
"Finally when the long flush of delight had subsided,
he said: 'When is Charlie going away? . . . Come away
and leave him. ... I can't live without you. . . .' — ...
'Well perhaps we can arrange to go somewhere.' — 'Sup-
pose we didn't have time to get married here.' — 'If we
got married as soon as we got to the other end of the jour-
ney it would be all right.' — ' I meant that,' he said. . . .
She was extremely happy now. ... As for him the mar-
riage clause did not dwell in his mind."
Then if she read on she followed them to New York
with the stolen money from the safe of the gorgeous
saloon, and followed him satisfactorily enough to penury
and suicide, but Carrie disgracefully to being a stage
favorite and to heartless success. But I think she did not
read so far without exclaiming: " But, Frank, this is im-
moral, disgusting! You mean to say that Mr. Page and
that nice young Lanier are going to publish it? You must
all be out of your minds ! If you publish that book, I, for
one shall be ashamed to face society. I would sooner go
down on my knees and scrub floors than derive income
from such filth." So slamming to the door of her mind, and
locking it, what difference whether she read the rest of it
or not. If she did, she read with eyes which never felt the
fine distinctions and the cruel sorrows of these passages
nor of others that could neither shock nor graze a literal
mind : Did she, for example, get the adventure of the big
first theme — the creeping out from a rural fringe of ac-
tivity to a center of it, Chicago? Chicago of all places!
That pork-packers' village, that no-man's land :
". . . To the child, the genius with imagination, or the
wholly untravelled, the approach to a great city for the first
time is a wonderful thing. Particularly if it be evening —
that mystic period between the glare and gloom. . . . Ah,
the promise of night! . . . What old illusion of hope is
not here forever repeated ! Though all humanity be still en-
closed in the shops, the thrill runs abroad. It is in the air.
The dullest feel something which they may not always ex-
press or describe. ... It is the lifting of the burden of
toil. . . ."
". . . The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective
as the light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the un-
doing of the . . . natural mind is accomplished by sources
wholly inhuman."
Or, was she aware of the theme of winter, maintained
as she was at an even temperature of 68 ?
". . . Not poets alone, nor artists, nor that superior order
of mind which arrogates to itself all refinement, feel this,
but dogs and all men. The sparrow upon the wire, the cat
in the doorway, the dray-horse tugging his weary load, feel
the long keen breaths of winter. It strikes to the heart of
all life, animate and inanimate. . . ."
Or the melody of money, having never known the lack
of it?
". . . Money: ' something everybody else has and I must
get,' would have expressed [Carrie's] understanding of it
thoroughly. Some of it she now held in her hand — two
soft green ten dollar bills — and she felt that she was im-
mensely better off for the having of them. . . ."
Did she see in the deathly drabness of Carrie's sister
and brother-in-law in their West Side flat some of the
seeds of American crime, now become so renowned? I
think she called them virtuous lower middle-class people
— the backbone of the nation. Nor could she have been
expected to see in her own decorous mind other seeds of
our crimes :
"Minnie was no companion for her sister — she was too
old. Her thoughts were staid and solemnly adapted to a
condition. . . ."
"When Hanson came home at seven o'clock he was
inclined to be a little crusty. . . . This never showed in
174
anything he said so much as in a certain solemnity of coun-
tenance and the silent manner in which he slopped about.
He had a pair of yellow carpet slippers ... he would im-
mediately substitute for his solid pair of shoes. This and
washing his face with the aid of common washing soap un-
til it glowed a shiny red, would constitute his only prepa-
ration for the evening meal. He would then get his evening
paper and read in silence. . . . For a young man this was
rather a morbid turn of character and so affected Carrie.
. . . She felt the drag of a lean and narrow life. . . ."
" He was as still as a deserted chamber. . . . Carrie on
the other hand had the blood of youth."
Nor can you blame her that she could not see in the
nonentity of Carrie the seeds of u that sympathetic and
impressionable nature which, ever in its most developed
form has been the glory of the drama " ; nor gifts of
allurement very like those of famous courtesans of his-
tory who likewise had been of humble origin, and yet
never from Wisconsin! What right had this callow
Hoosier to endow his trivial heroine with talents which
certainly neither she nor any other Eastern woman
of influence intended to permit in the country of their
forefathers?
". . . Something delicate and lonely in her voice, but
[Drouet] could not hear it. He had not the poetry in him
that would seek a woman out under such circumstances and
console her for the tragedy of life. Instead he struck a
match and lighted the gas. . . ."
". . . How was it that in so little a while the narrow life
of the country had fallen from her, and the city with all its
mystery taken its place? . . ."
". . . Her little shoes now fitted her smartly and had
high heels. She had learned much about laces and those
little neck-pieces. . . ."
"... She looked in the mirror and pursed up her lips
. . . with a little toss of the head, as she had seen the rail-
road treasurer's daughter do from Evansville, Indiana.
She caught up her skirts with an easy swing. . . . She used
her feet less heavily. . . ."
". . . The mouth had the expression at times, in talk-
ing and in repose of one who might be upon the verge of
tears. . . . The pronunciation of certain syllables gave to
her lips this peculiarity of formation ... as suggestive
and moving as pathos itself. . . ."
And how could a Murray Hill matron, who was what
she wanted to be, wife, mother, influential citizen, charm-
175
ing hostess, have felt with Carrie the sadness of her lot,
equipped now, and yet for what?
". . . When she came to her own rooms, Carrie saw
their comparative insignificance. . . . What after all was
Drouet? What was she? At her window she thought it
over, rocking to and fro and gazing out across the lamp-lit
park. . . . Some old tunes crept to her lips, and as she sang
them, her heart sank. . . . She was sad beyond measure,
and yet uncertain, wishing, fancying. . . . Now for the old
cottage room in Columbia City, now for the mansion upon
the Shore Drive, now for the fine dress of some lady, now
the elegance of some scene. . . . Finally it seemed as if all
her state were one of loneliness and forsakenness. . . . She
hummed and hummed, sitting in the shadow by the win-
dow, and was therein as happy, though she did not perceive
it, as she ever would be."
Nor could an authority on manners and morals be
asked to find interest in the emotions and pretensions of
the "deep-feeling" saloon-manager or in his shallow
family or equivocal " social prestige." Yet here they were
brilliantly set down :
". . . He read the paper, which was heightened in in-
terest by the shallowness of the themes discussed by his son
and daughter. Between his wife and himself ran a river of
indifference. . . ."
". . . True love she [Carrie] had never felt for him.
. . . This was due to a lack of power on his part, a lack
of that majesty of passion that sweeps the mind from its
seat, fuses and melts all arguments and theories. . . ."
". . . These gentlemen Elks knew the standing of one
another. They had regard for the ability which could amass
a small fortune, own a nice home, keep a barouche or car-
riage, perhaps, wear fine clothes, and maintain a good mer-
cantile position. . . . Hurstwood^ who was a little above
the order of mind who could accept this standard as perfect
. . . was quite a figure. . . . Look at him any time within
the half hour before the curtain was up, he was a member
of ... a rounded company of five or more whose stout
figures, large white bosoms and shining pins, bespoke the
character of their success. . . . The gentlemen who brought
their wives called him out to shake hands with them. He
was evidently a light among them. ... It was greatness
in a small way, small as it was. . . ."
The greatness of America today, small as it is, hated
and satirized by Sinclair Lewis throughout a book, is
noted impartially here in passing from one turn of the
drama to another. But Dreiser making his way so easily
among values apparently could not beguile the cultured
wife of his publisher. Not even when he defined travel
alluringly :
" Thus lovers are forgotten, sorrows laid aside, death hid-
den from view. There is a world of accumulated feeling back
of the trite dramatic expression — CI am going away/"
Nor when with a single casual character, a young man
met at a party, realms are revealed to Carrie before un-
suspected, beyond those which money could buy: and
never to be known to either of her lovers, drummer or
saloon manager, nor to any of her stray friends. So he
constructs the immensities of consciousness which the
childlike mind gets glimpses of through holes in the
roof, holes in the floor, cracks in the wall of her simple
dwelling:
". . . ' He dosn't amount to much,' said Ames. . . .
' Nearly as bad as Dora Thome/ . . . Carrie felt this as a
personal reproof. She read Dora Thorne, or had a good deal
in the past. . . . Now this clear-eyed, fine-headed youth
made fun of it. ... She looked down and for the first time
felt the pain of not understanding. . . . [She] wondered
what else was right, according to him. . . . ' Don't you
think it rather fine to be an actor?" she asked once. —
1 Yes I do ... to be a good one.' . . . Just this little ap-
proval set Carrie's heart bounding. Ah, if she could only be
an actress — a good one! . . . such men as he would ap-
prove of her. . . . She said good-bye with feigned indif-
ference. . . . Still, the coach seemed lorn. . . . She did
not know whether she would ever see this man any more.
What difference could it make? What difference could it
make? . . . Hurstwood had returned, and was already in
bed. His clothes were scattered loosely about. Carrie came
to the door and saw him, then retreated. . . . Back in the
dining-room she sat in her chair and rocked. Her little
hands were folded tightly as she thought. Through a fog
of longing and conflicting desire she was beginning to see.
. . . She was rocking and beginning to see."
Dreiser at twenty-nine could tell poignantly these
chasms between the different strata of American society
— bleak separations, almost peculiar to us, which are
enough to account for our despair today. And too he
knew that it was need of money that drove most people
from one class into another. It was want, fear of cold and
hunger, wedded to ambition that drove Carrie out of the
177
humdrum classes into the special one of the theatre. And
it was, I am afraid, the fact of these chasms that kept
Mrs. Doubleday from crossing over into the lives of
this book, either to follow Carrie toward the bright lights,
or the " liberal opulent " Hurstwood into the dark velvet
ways of poverty and death. The long slide downward,
after he had taken the money, and his fine name, breath
of life to him, had gone; the rich disintegration, punctu-
ated by looking for jobs, then by ceasing to look for jobs,
the days of sitting in hotel lobbies, then of rocking by the
radiator to the reading of innumerable newspapers; the
one pitiful climb up into activity, when as a scab he runs a
car in a street-car strike; the metallic cruelty of jeers,
stones, wounds, and the careering of the cable car under
his ignorant touch over all humanity, that is, over all but
the rich; then the final descent alone without Carrie, in
this year when 80,000 men were out of work in New York
City, into the ways of odd-job men, beggars, bums; and
then nothing, not even a memory. ... In a masterly
way, the way of Nature, Dreiser weaves this descent into
the design of the book, and as with Carrie's good fortune,
into the changing sea of life in which the two of them
floated for a while :
". . . Constant comparison between his old state and
his new showed a balance for the worse. . . . The poisons
generated by remorse inveigh against the system. ... To
these Hurstwood was subject. ... In the course of time it
told upon his temper. . . . His step was not as sharp and
firm. . . . He was given to thinking, thinking. . . . The
new friends he made were not celebrities. ... He was left
to brood. . . .
". . . If one thinks that such thoughts do not come to
so common a type of mind ... I would urge for their con-
sideration that it is the higher mental development . . .
which refuses to dwell upon such things. . . . The un-
intellectual miser sweats blood at the loss of a hundred
dollars. . . . The Epictetus smiles when the last vestige
of physical welfare is removed. . . ."
Step by step, little by little, until his brain, in solitude
cold and hunger, is not the same brain. He dreams wak-
ing dreams of the old bright respectable days, and these
blurred delusions are all the life left to him on park
benches and in night lodgings. Then the final animate
step:
178
"'Give me a little something, will you, Mister?' he
said to the last one. 'For God's sake, do, I'm starving.' —
' Aw, get out,' said the man, who happened to be a common
type himself. ' You're no good.' . . . Hurstwood put his
hands red from cold, down in his pockets. Tears came into
his eyes. ' That's right. . . . I'm no good now. I was all
right. I had money. I'm going to quit this,' and with death
in his heart he started down toward the Bowery. He re-
membered a lodging-house where there were little close
rooms with gas jets in them, almost pre-arranged, he thought
. . . which rented for fifteen cents ... he had no fifteen
cents. . . . On the way he met a comfortable looking
gentleman . . . the gentleman looked him over and fished
for a dime. Nothing but quarters were in his pockets.
' Here/ he said, handing him one to be rid of him. . . .
With this the idea of death passed for a little out of his
mind. . . ."
With a skilful suggestion of the wife and daughter and
rich son-in-law of Chicago days, now like Carrie oblivious
of him, who at the moment were whirling into New York
in a fast Pullman on their way to Rome, through what
will be Hurstwood's last blizzard, there follows the ac-
count of the final flop in a side street off the Bowery — a
passage that may surprise critics who say that Dreiser is
a writer who can't write :
"It was push and jam for a minute, with grim beast
silence to prove its quality and then it melted inward, like
logs floating, and disappeared. There were wet hats and wet
shoulders, a cold, shrunken, disgruntled mass, pouring in
between bleak walls. It was just six o'clock and there was
supper in every pedestrian's face. . . . And yet no supper
was provided here, nothing but beds. . . . His old wet
cracked hat he laid softly upon the table. Then he pulled
off his shoes and lay down. ... It seemed as if he thought
a while, for now he arose and turned the gas out, standing
calmly in the blackness, hidden from view. After a few
moments in which he reviewed nothing, but merely hesi-
tated, he turned the gas on again, but applied no match.
Even then he stood there, hidden wholly in that kindness
which is night, while the uprising fumes filled the room.
When the odor reached his nostrils, he quit his attitude and
fumbled for the bed. . . . 'What's the use?' he said
weakly, as he stretched himself to rest. . . ."
" Of Hurstwood's death she was not even aware. A slow
black boat setting out from the pier at Twenty-seventh
Street upon its weekly errand bore, with many others, his
nameless body to the Potter's Field. . . ."
179
The debut and burial of Sister Carrie.
o in this story everything is told just as it hap-
pened, with now the pathos of a bar-room ballad, now a
ruthlessness of intellect. And why the editor's wife did
not cry or even feel a pain around her heart to think that
men are made for ends like this, is hard to know. Or why
she did not feel that a precious record of the grim life on
top of which she ate and slept and dressed and had her
being, was in her hands, is hard to say. On Monday morn-
ing her husband took the proof sheets back to his office
with instructions that the contract be broken. So do those
without feeling and without much intelligence decree that
life shall not be heightened or purified by understanding.
Is it for fear that then it will leave them behind? At this
particular period in this country of banks, Bibles and
candy, the decree of such unofficial censors held singular
sway.
There is an inclination, perhaps unconscious, among
the men connected in that day with this publishing com-
pany to belittle the importance of Mrs. Doubleday in the
suppression of a now historic book, which the firm itself
can hardly repudiate. It is as if to protect her name from
taint of prudery, now become unfashionable. The pellucid
Mr. Lanier, for one, is not sure that she ever read the
book: " It was Frank," he said, " who made the trouble.
He hated it enough without other influence, called it * in-
decent,' and begged us at once to break the contract. If
we went ahead with it, although he couldn't stop us, he
warned us he would do all in his power to ruin the sale."
At the same time he volunteered that the publisher's wife
was one of those deceptively beautiful characters who
loved to dominate in the name of virtue. Mr. C. P.
1 80
Everitt, however, remembers the affair more in accord-
ance with the legend.
He remembers a dinner at the house of Mrs. Doubleday,
" A most distinguished gathering," where she had said:
" Frank, I would rather get down and scrub floors than
have you publish that book." But he added protectively:
" Don't say I said she was referring to Sister Carrie. I
got into trouble once telling that. As a matter of fact she
may have been referring to Tom Dickson's Leopard's
Spots, a libel on the Negro race. In fact I think she was.
She felt just as strong against race prejudice as against
the social evil — she was a woman of very high prin-
ciples." . . . These high-principled American matrons!
How naively ignorant they have been in their pursuit
of good works ! And how their men have deferred to
them, hoping thereby to concoct some sort of social sta-
bility in a hit-or-miss land ! What fine institutions they
have gathered money to build up, to house the victims of
their bloodless code ! And what bright human hopes they
have helped to tear down ! . . . " But did they publish
Leopard's Spots f " I ventured to ask — u Oh, yes, it went
into the hundred thousand class : we made a pile of money
out of it." — " And did she get down and scrub floors? "
— " No." — " Then don't you think it must have been
Sister Carrie she was speaking of ? " — No, my reasoning
was specious. He was not prepared to indict his glamor-
ous hostess for a deed which since that time has become
an embarrassment to the " fine and reputable house of
Doubleday."
Yet I believe the myth has legs to stand on — a symbol
of the way Americans have always entrusted to women
the matter of art along with the matter of society, as un-
worthy of their important lives. It was the story told
Dreiser in a letter from Frank Norris cursing the com-
pany for planning to withdraw the book: " In her ab-
surd opinion it was ' vulgar and immoral.' " And some
years later Thomas H. McKee, lawyer for Doubleday,
gossiping over the affair with Dreiser, spoke of Mrs.
Doubleday as the original censor, and wondered why
with so good a cause against his publishers he had not
brought suit: expecting it, he had at once prepared a
181
defence. In 1903 William Heinemann too, the English
publisher of Sister Carrie, had confided to him : " I fear
my admiration for your book has cost me the friendship,
not only of Mrs. Doubleday, but of Doubleday himself."
At another dinner-party — Page and Norris were present
— she had asked him how he could have published so
" vulgar and disgraceful " a book: his answer had been
that it was " a distinguished privilege " to have done so,
which the husband had taken as insulting to his wife.
Whether husband or wife or both were to blame, the
undisputed fact is that not long after the fatal week-end
Dreiser had a letter from his publishers asking him to
come in for a talk. Mr. Lanier remembers " acutely the
unhappy fifteen minutes " spent in this talk. He and Page
had felt that with Doubleday against it, publication would
be unfair to Dreiser, that the book was too good to be
smothered in that way. He was prepared, he said, to ex-
plain to the young writer how deeply he admired his novel,
" a fine piece of work," and how he wanted to do all in
his power to help him sell it successfully elsewhere. And he
is quite sure he could have succeeded. He hoped to make
him see how little it would mean to merely print and
catalogue : how easy it was for a publisher to kill a book
just by hinting to his salesmen not to push it, just by fail-
ing to advertise it. A heart-rending picture, but he was
given no chance to paint it. He had calculated without
the usually agreeable author of a first book. Dreiser, the
terribly social savage after wistful years of neglect at the
hands of society would not listen; had no use for Lanier's
urbanities. He had been swimming against surf in the
open sea long enough. This time he had his hands on the
edge of the boat of acknowledgment. Whether they liked
it or not he was going to climb in. " Crushed and tragically
pathetic," Lanier remembers him, doggedly he repeated
they had made a contract with him ; they would have to go
ahead; that was the end of the matter. And the tall,
loose-jointed dreamer, less loose and dreamy than usual,
gave his intense ultimatum and walked out of the office.
That day the enemy in him must have taken a leap ahead,
and have grown to almost full size, if not yet to full
efficiency.
182
The office of Doubleday Page & Company was now"
hard put to it. How to placate young Hoosier and older
Episcopalian, the rugged new artist and the shrewd
middle-aged merchant, who was not going to promote a
questionable book unless (like The Leopard's Spots) he
was convinced it would sell a hundred thousand copies.
Mr. Lanier with his civilized impartiality is quick to
admit that then their business chief would have felt it
his " artistic " duty to waive morals and promote Sis-
ter Carrie. But the literary partners could not honestly
assure him of this degree of popularity. McKee, their
lawyer, was called in; nothing to do but fulfill the con-
tract, he told them; anything else might be disastrous to
a new ambitious firm. So on November 8, 1900, Sister
Carrie had her humble debut — an edition of 1000
or so copies in what later reviewers agreed to call
a " dull, cheap, red binding, with the name in small,
dull, black lettering"; an assassin's edition in a country
where books have to look expensive in order to be well
thought of.
Then again the story of the disposition of these copies
varies. It would be my instinct to believe the version re-
peated again and again in almost the same words in the
reviews of the later Dodge and Harper editions, which
must have been taken from these publishers' advertise-
ments and from hearsay — that is, Dreiser's own version.
According to him, and he had it from Frank Norris, the
book was never marketed at all, but thrown into the cellar
where anyone who felt like reading a " dirty book "
helped himself. Norris, bitterly disappointed, salvaged
as many copies as he could, and sent them to various book
editors, and even after that continued dispensing them.
Grant Richards, an English publisher, in a letter to Drei-
ser tells of Norris giving him a copy of Sister Carrie in
1901 with the hope that he would publish it in England.
And then the legend divides again. Some say that after
a while the remaining volumes of the disgraced Carrie
were burned in the furnace of that cellar, and some that
they merely lay there under the dust of years and that if
one wrote enclosing a money-order for the amount, the
book could be had. Mr. Lanier inclines toward the latter
183
version, but probably a less dramatic account of the affair
will in the end be held as fact.
In 1929 Mr. Vrest Orton published a bibliography of
Dreiser's work, in which he gives a spirited account of
his pains over several years to unearth the facts of this
incident through the Doubleday office. At length Mr.
S. A. Everitt answered that they had no records except
the record of date, but that as he remembered, " the
edition of from 1000 to 2000 copies was sold to the trade
in the regular way, the same as any other novel published
at the time. . . ." With this to encourage him he now
wrote to Mr. Doubleday himself for a transcript of the
sales-records, who doubted that they were " available/'
but would see what he could do; he did not believe that
any copies had ever been " destroyed, burned, or re-
maindered." A day or so later a letter came from his
secretary which for Mr. Orton contained " the whole
story in a nutshell" as revealed by the analysis card:
" The first edition consisted of 1008 copies, of which 129
were sent out for review, 465 were sold, and the balance
of 423 copies was turned over to J. F. Taylor & Com-
pany," a remainder house now out of business. Yet an
analysis card presented thirty years after the event is less
convincing than a human memory recorded at the moment
of it, and is as easy to fabricate. To support Dreiser's and
Lanier's memory is the sensitive attitude today of the firm,
as of people ridiculed beyond composure for a literary and
commercial error. Two things are sure — their sense of
propriety had its way for a time, and as certainly Dreiser
has had his revenge, but it was to be a distant and ex-
pensive one.
55
" Not elevating mental food."
American press
" At last a master-piece out of America"
English press
he historic meaning of some men is aloof-
ness, the virtue of hermits or of gods or stars. They shine
impregnably from afar. Dreiser's meaning has in it the
virtue of mingling, of engaging in spite of himself; in
fact, of proving how the world is small. Here were the
Doubledays introducing his obscure name into the circle
of their sacrosanct dinner-parties. Here was Frank Nor-
ris, become a voice in the wilderness for this stranger,
who, he felt, was writing according to his gospel. He loves
him as a kind of miracle, an oriflamme in the windy dusty
American skies. I. F. Marcosson writes to Dreiser in
1910: " Your name always brings to my mind the unfor-
fettable picture of Frank Norris thrilled with admiration
or Sister Carrie." Mr. Grant Richards, asked to de-
scribe Norris, said, " I don't know; what struck me for-
cibly about him was that apparently he was more eager
for Dreiser's Carrie to be read than for his own novels."
Then there were the critics to whom Norris sent the 129
salvaged copies. Their reviews, some thirty of them
which Dreiser has kept, mirror naively our intelligentsia
in 1900; so directly had he challenged their likes and
dislikes, awaking pleasure in but two or three, and irri-
tation or disdain in the rest. With few exceptions these
scolding critics, even those who felt the power of the
book, discuss it as a social or antisocial tract, not as a
would-be work of art. The more sophisticated day of
literary supplements and book guilds was not yet at hand.
Quaint utilitarians still guarded the manners and morals
of a hustling young people :
185
Life, New York, 1900: " Such girls, however, as imagine
they can follow in [Carrie's] footsteps will probably end
their days on the Island or in the gutter. . . ."
Advertiser and Union, New York, 1900: "... Not ele-
vating mental food for all. . . . Peculiar and masterly
written novel. . . ."
New York Tribune, 1900: "A realistic story of Chicago
life might easily miss being a pleasant story. . . ."
Chicago Tribune, Feb. 25, 1901: "Needless to say the
book is not a pleasant one to read if one is to maintain a
cheerful optimism, but the author is right in assuming that
America needs enlightenment rather than . . . flattery, if
the present rate of advance is to be maintained. ... In
each case it is felt this fate is of the man's own making,
that self discipline and well-grounded morals would have
avoided every evil . . . that man is still the captain of his
destiny, the master of his fate. . . . Not once does the
name of the deity appear . . . except ... as ... pro-
fanity. Sister Carrie transgresses the literary morality of the
average American novel to a point that is almost Zola-
esque. . . ."
Newark Sunday News, Sept. I, 1901: "... The reader
longs for some relief from . . . these very real people.
. . . There is no strong or noble nature in the book;
neither is there any lady or gentleman. . . . This is the
most serious criticism of the book, this and an utter lack
... of a literary manner of diction. . . . The style is in
many ways excellent, at times even nervous. . . . But one
does not wish to have a writer express himself in the same
way as do his somewhat uncultivated characters. ... If
only Carrie could be more like Trilby ! "
Minneapolis Journal, 1901: "Carrie had a better fate
than most pretty country girls who go to a large city, and
become the mistresses of unprincipled men. . . . The story
leaves a very unpleasant impression."
Louisville Times: "There is little sunshine ... it is
plain realism. . . . Mr. Dreiser can't expect success . . .
but like Mr. Norris he is an artist. . . ."
Seattle Post Intelligencer: " You would never dream of
recommending to another person to read it. ... Yet it
comes within sight of greatness. . . ."
The Book Buyer, March, 1901: "Mr. Dreiser ... is
the chronicler of materialism in its basest forms. . . . But
the leaven of the higher life remains, nowhere stronger
than with us. Of all this Mr. Dreiser betrays no cog-
nizance. . . .
All too fairly, these excerpts reflect American men-
tality in 1900, or rather the lack of it. Almost there was
1 86
none. Nearly three centuries of Europeans in North
America had produced from time to time prize-intellects
and ace-adventurers; and yet how few critics of thought
and adventure, without which society drifts ! The result
had to be reviews like these. Reading them one wonders
what had been the use of our original heroes — the bawdy
Washington and Franklin, the aesthetic Jefferson, the
savory Daniel Boone, Johnny Appleseed, John Audubon,
Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and all the others
who had labored for hard glory more than easy money.
What real use were independence and new inventions,
and an exquisite democratic elegance as in Monticello and
the University of Virginia; what use were new lands and
apple trees and birds and native flowers, if they had
established no traditions of enjoyment? Most of all, what
use a house not divided against itself, if not to be divided
meant that pious money-maniacs, the hands and stomach,
were to rule the house in the stead of heart and brains
and loins? And verbally speaking, what use Melville,
Poe, Twain and Whitman, the first three become gift-
books for children, the fourth jailed as lewd and mad,
if these heroes had succeeded in establishing no standards
of art by which to judge the prophets yet to come? It is
not that the reviewers of Sister Carrie saw nothing in
its author. They did in fact feebly praise him as their
predecessors had feebly praised his predecessors. But it is
the moribund nature of their refusals and acceptances as
of men and women scarcely alive that is shocking. And
especially it is shocking considered in relation to the
boundless energy of the merchants and inventors who had
hired these students to keep track of the intellectual
growth of the nation. They seem like craven employees re-
clining on their jobs. And yet of course, had they not been,
they would have lost their jobs.
It is interesting to analyse them in relation to this
provocative book. Clearly for some hidden reason they
are uneasy before some of the facts of life, and most
uneasy of all before the agreeable fact of its pleasures.
Even those who rather liked the book took refuge in ad-
miring Hurstwood's tragedy, ignoring, if they felt it, that
Dreiser's wisdom lay in a balanced awareness of bloom as
coincident with decay. Some of them, to exonerate them-
selves, laughed indulgently at this upstart for imagining he
could interest readers with " the plain unvarnished truth."
A curious repellent psychology comes to light in these re-
views, a fear of statement which Americans hide beneath
a smirk. Dreiser, I think, more directly than any other
writer had been born to challenge it. Unfailingly each one
of his books inclusive of An American Tragedy (since that
date perhaps he is less engaged) breathes its unequivocal
statements for and against us, against which his opponents
have felt coerced to make their one faltering statement,
in brief this : Don't tell the truth, it doesn't pay. He has
the distinction of having forced as best he could the issue,
of having probed, perhaps even solved the mystery of a
People Afraid of Statement.
In contrast to them two or three men had the force
to speak out. They, like Dreiser, are remnants of a pio-
neer past. That is, they were attempting to carry greedy
America, still recovering from civil war, and still inun-
dated by the inchoate flood of immigrants, into the un-
explored fields of the imagination and intellect. The axe
had won, the railroads had won, the factories had won,
the banking-houses had won, and, it seemed to them, the
human spirit would have to win in commercial America,
or these few would die of malnutrition of nerves and
senses. There were at this time but five or six names for
radicals to champion — Fuller, Garland, Norris, London,
and then possibly Will Payne, Robert Herrick, Brand
Whitlock, Hervey White, Vaughan Moody; and now
there was Dreiser. Mark Twain had not yet published
The Myterious Stranger upsetting every bit of smug
laughter he had generated. Stephen Crane was dead, and
his friend Harold Frederic too, with his sardonic novel of
Methodist insanity and class arrogance.* There was Rob-
inson, a poet in New York, and Ambrose Bierce, a wit in
San Francisco, too resentful toward their country to be
the hope of anyone, who preserved the virtue of aloofness,
and made a tiny dual aristocracy — two isolated drops of
elegance of mind. Considering the outlook, it was not
strange that the two or three live hopeful critics should
* The Damnation of T her on Ware.
188
have been almost evangelical in their praise of Sister
Carrie. Their eagerness for creation to go on helps to
compensate for the almost unendurably dull eyes and ears
of the others. It is an eagerness, nearly gone from the
Western World today, and seems to have lived over from
the era of our discovery and to have carried forward the
tradition we still cling to of a strong new race bound to
create something to express, and to express itself.
One of these champions was William Marion Reedy,
who for some years in St. Louis had edited a magazine of
politics, science and art, as he and his friends knew them,
designed to increase flavor and quality, and to counter-
act the cruel sentimentality of the times. If Norris was a
voice in the wilderness, Reedy was an innkeeper in the
desert to give hospitality to kindred wayfarers. He is
remembered as a kind of tearful, laughing Rabelaisian,
one of the last to fight for the integrity of individu-
als as opposed to brute industrial will. Mencken has
called him a fool, but the more human and more original
Middle Westerners, Dreiser, Masters and Sandburg, for
example, separated now by bleak differences, would agree,
I believe, to the end of time about " Bill Reedy," so much
they loved him for himself and for the oasis he created
out in God's country. He was a man's man, even to the
point — or so I have heard it told with pride — of hav-
ing taken for wife a man's woman, one-time mistress of a
house of pleasure in St. Louis, that one approach to
Bacchic priestess the country has known. Her money, it is
said, made possible his Mirror, and her delectable table
his enormous girth, noted as one of his charms. I have
heard him described in words near to song; his appetite
for food, drink, night-long talk, his ribaldry, his warmth,
rare books and restless scholastic mind. Apparently one
of the few men of his time who consciously wanted to
bring the sundered parts of the Puritan soul together
again. A recent newspaper jingle celebrates him: " O, the
days of Diamond Brady, — Marion Reedy, Steevie
Brody, — Great Teddy, Col. Cody, — and the rowdy
rodeos! "
He writes Dreiser in December, 1900, at once, with al-
most a sob of pleasure over his novel : " It is damned
189
good, I shall say as emphatically as this in The Mirror,"
which he does; and then in January writes again evidently
in answer to a discouraged letter from Dreiser:
" You say you have not much hope for Sister Carrie.
I want to tell you that it is a tip-top novel. An elderly lady
denounced it to me at dinner the other evening simply be-
cause she had seen just such drummers . . . doing just
such things ... on the trains running in and out of
Chicago. ... I am sure the thing will be a ' go.' " In
another letter he names his rule of conduct: "My un-
idealism in our little talk seems to have hit you hard. . . .
Well, I have an ideal: it is to be cheerful and between
you'n me it isn't always easy in the face of the facts. . . ."
George Horton too, a timid Chicago novelist, recom-
mends the book to his readers, but its tragic rather than
its idyllic passages. Perhaps only Reedy among Ameri-
cans treats it as independent of plot. Horton writes for
the Chicago Record Herald, January, 1901 :
" The characters are so genuine they produce that queer
feeling . . . one sometimes gets from listening to a phono-
graph. You are certain that the human beings must lie just
a little back of the talk. . . . Why a firm who can get hold
of such literature must expend their resources in push-
ing . . . clap-trap ... is a puzzle to everyone not in the
publishing business."
And to Arthur Henry he writes virulently the kind of
opinion which unluckily the critic, except for an infre-
quent Vance Thompson or H. L. Mencken, never dares
to publish :
" I had fancied something of the kind . . . Doubleday
belongs to that species of long-eared animals which are not
hares. Had he lived in Christ's time he might have attained
to the supreme distinction of bringing the Saviour of the
World into Jerusalem. That is the one crowning glory of
the ass. Otherwise such fat-witted prigs as Doubleday have
tried in all ages to pull down men of genius. . . ."
In addition there were a number of grateful letters,
although most of them contained moral reservations:
" I think there are a few objectionable features to the
book, objectively speaking, though I know it is all true
to life," one friend wrote. And another: " To sit fifteen
minutes in a bar-room and hear the talk is interesting;
but to spend a whole evening there might prove tiresome."
So over the country little messages awoke on the wires
190
of human thought and were flashed from the readers of
the book back to its author. But they would have soon
died on unpopular lips, had it not been for stimulation
from the outside. Norris finally had his way, not at home
but in England. William Heinemann, perhaps through
Norris, perhaps through George Brett of the Macmillan
Company, had seen a copy of Sister Carrie. In May,
1901, he published it, abridged for the sake of brevity
not morals, in his Dollar Library of American novelists,
which included Norris's Octopus, Payne's Story of Eva,
Crane's Monster, James's Sacred Fount, Garland's Rose
of Dutcher's Coolly. Without exception the English re-
views of this edition are extravagant in praise. Their cer-
tainty is refreshing. Not one of them deplores the " dan-
gerous morals " of the book, nor makes an issue of its
diction.
The Daily Mail, London, 1901, exclaims: "At last a
really strong novel has come from America, almost great
because of its relentless purpose, its marvellous simplicity.
. . . Mr. Dreiser has contrived a masterpiece."
The Daily Chronicle comparing Sister Carrie and The
Story of Eva, both about village heroines adrift in Chicago,
finds it interesting but hard to understand " that passion
for social getting-on, which forms so often the mainspring
of American lives," and the theme of Payne's novel. He
concludes that though " more pleasant reading, its lan-
guage always good," The Story of Eva is less " artistic,
less relentlessly true to life," than Sister Carrie. . . .
" Dreiser . . . draws no moral . . . simply a grimly grey
story of life and life near the bone. In this lies the powerful
attraction it holds, and it proves Mr. Dreiser an author to
be reckoned with and never to be overlooked — a true
artist."
The Academy is " impressed by the subtlety of descrip-
tion," is " startled into interest," has " never met such a
description of an American heroine before," and then
couples it with The Octopus : " The movement in them is
large, racial; the vision poetic and comprehensive; the
sentiment is never sentimentality. They exercise the high-
est function of the modern novel. . . . Mr. Dreiser is be-
yond question one of the most promising novelists writing
in English."
Manchester Guardian, 1901: "Rarely even in modern
work have we met with characters so little idealised, so
patiently presented. They might seem to have something
in common with the unchanging heroes of adventure. . . .
191
His work is faithful, accurate, unprejudiced, and it
should belong to the veritable documents of American
history. . . ."
The Athenaeum, London, September 7, 1901: "The
sixth of the volumes ... in Mr. Heinemann's Dollar Li-
brary and . . . the most important. . . . Between its
covers no single note of unreality is struck. ... It is un-
trammeled by any concession to convention or tradition,
literary or social. . . . Throughout its pages one feels
pulsing the sturdy restless energy of a young people, a na-
tion busy upon the hither side of maturity. ... It strikes
a key-note and is typical, both in the faults of its manner
and in the wealth and diversity of its matter, of the great
country which gave it birth. Readers there are who will
find permanent place for Sister Carrie on their shelves
beside M. Zola's Nana. . . ."
Within these English and American reviews lies a
paradox: The young Americans far from exhibiting " the
sturdy restless energy of a young people " are like im-
potent dyspeptics as critics; that is, except for an oc-
casional rebel who is too busy fighting for art to enjoy it.
The adult Englishmen on the other hand exclaim with
delight at the discovery of a new work of genius as a
child is supposed to at a delectable surprise. Spontaneity
associated with youth marks the older race ; f earfulness,
a trait of senility, the new. This faint-heartedness follows
us today. Though an army of would-be sophisticates led
by Wilson, Rosenfeld, Frank, Brooks and Krutch, con-
siders itself embarked on definition and analysis, a residue
of that same grudge and hatred against both artist and
audience corrodes their enjoyment — a snob's uneasy
seriousness in the face of basic immaturity.
The notion of the infallibility of the child, invented by
Jesus Christ, supported by the disappointed Pilgrims,
stylized by John Dewey out of his wealth of inexperience,
having actually been put to practice in the United States,
turns out to be a sentimental fallacy. The fiasco of Ameri-
can society is proof of this. Epidermically a child is indis-
putable; muscularly a child is promising; from every
other point of view a child is an embryo and will soon
become abortive, when not, as in the past, forcibly ex-
posed to maturity. All the vitality in the world will only
enable the child to cry unless this high voltage meets with
narrower and inflicted exercise. It is the same racially.
192
Superficially — as from the point of view of surfaces now
well outside the human being like buildings, airplanes and
railroads — we have proved that a new race may be
supreme. But intrinsically, as from the core outward to
toes and finger tips, a new race is handicapped unless
critically exposed to its own past, which takes it traveling
back into other pasts and from them into other presents.
Impossible to know the present except on a road that
leads from the past. From a full-grown branch the ripe
fruit falls, and the branch remains to bear again. What
we think of as youth is a property of civilization wrested
from the new-born by terribly patient and spirited elders.
It is marked by ease and liberality.
These English journalists in 1901 displayed a young
mind at the advent of Dreiser, just as previous English-
men had been quick to recognize Melville and Whitman,
and later critics would recognize Robert Frost before we
did, and the French through Baudelaire would give their
love and tears to Poe before we gave ours. It almost
seems that with few exceptions we have waited for Euro-
pean sanction before daring to enjoy our own originals.
Whitman could not admit this; it contradicted his de-
lusion of our independence. By implication he threw the
glory our way : " To have great poets, we must have great
audiences." And yet in admiring him, Emerson and Bur-
roughs solicited and welcomed British support. And, to
go back of that, who but Carlyle had given Emerson his
passport to security? Fight a revolution so that you won't
have to live with your parents or pay them taxes, but you
are not even then and never will be quite rid of them.
Dreiser, for all his rhapsodies a clear thinker, in which
lies his strength, was frankly elated by English approval.
It was refreshing to be praised because he had drawn no
moral. Payne had made a moral issue of " social success,"
and had wed his Eva to the scion of an " old Chicago
family," wealth rewarding beauty, position the spirit, to
make a happy ending. Perhaps the reviewer felt too the
way the vernacular of the one novel conveys the uneven
shiftless rhythms of American life in that day; whereas
Payne's quite sensitive English, for all its painstaking,
never once flashes Chicago streets or smells or noises or
193
shapes or tones to the reader. He was a Chicagoan, writ-
ing about Chicago, but in terms of some older city.
Harold Frederic, writing about America in England,
falls into the same falsely correct ways. Dreiser on the
other hand walked with the gait and spoke with the voice
of his own streets. He acted and reacted from surfaces
to depths and depths to surfaces. The people of his book
in their Chicago clothes were human animals of whatever
place or time. The critics of the older city preferred him.
What was best of all, they were praising him for his
consuming passion, more urgent even than the wish for
luxury and grandeur — the necessity u to write about life
as it is," just as Balzac, Hardy, Turgeniev, all of his
favorites, had written about life as it is. Moreover, they
spoke as if it were the thing to do, whereas in the United
States even his friends decried it as the one thing not to
do. To understand our unfortunate literary fortunes it
is necessary to accept as an axiom this initial refusal of
Fact among us. It was well for Dreiser that he had not
the hypocrisy which pretends to scorn foreign patronage;
he needed all that he could get. It was to be a long five
years before Sister Carrie would emerge from the
Doubleday cellar to be read as if just discovered by " the
great country that gave it birth; " and ten years before
Harper's decided to advertise it, with a word from
Arnold Bennett, as u perhaps the great American novel."
As slowly as that did ideas take hold in a land where
industry galloped at breakneck speed.
194
56
Life near the bone:
" Life seemed an endless chain
Without meaning " DREISER
T
JLhrough the winter and spring and summer
of 1901 the new novelist lived on with his devoted wife
in their small apartment near Riverside Drive. He began
work on a second novel and together they watched the
progress of the first. She felt that on the whole he was get-
ting a good deal of notice in his own country, where every
child was taught that repeated enterprise and long en-
durance in the teeth of neglect were necessary virtures;
that to be noticed at all was risky and would spoil the
child. Then of course they could share elation over the
English reviews. There were kill-joys who pretended that
these held but the irresponsible praise of grandparents.
But that in itself was delightful, since evidently the re-
viewers looked on him as a legitimate American, whereas
since early Warsaw days his native land looked upon him
and his parents and sisters and brothers as not much more
than immigrant waifs, scarcely to be tolerated, except
that immigrants kept wages down. Sarah Osborne White
a truly British great-grandchild whose parents had been
pioneers in the obscure Southwest, at length was justified
in having married beneath her. A clipping bureau sent
them news of fame, which they pasted with the letters
into a careful scrap-book. He praises her as a fine house-
keeper; he had never been so comfortable before. She
could cook, wash and iron, trim her hats, make over her
clothes, mend his. . . If they were frugal and saved
enough, some day her folded dream of family life might
come true. She wanted love too, wanted to fulfil her
dreams of youth. So do women, and men as well, pin their
all to belief in a close partnership, when in reality the
195
cracks of chasms greater than canyons are already there
to separate them.
So she counted without real knowledge of her moody,
cyclonic husband. Ancestry meant little to him, except
to indicate what stuff he was made of. Class meant noth-
ing to him, except as it meant to be on top commanding
the scene, and not part of the dust to be swept up from
the pavement. Adventure and supremacy meant every-
thing to him — " Yes, pretty much from the first I
thought I was a marked guy," was his answer as to
whether he had always been conscious of his power. Per-
haps for this the United States piqued him more than
England; it had still to be conquered. " At times," he
said, " I was afraid the English didn't know. Perhaps
they were rather garrulous." Anyway he wanted his own
people to acknowledge him. He was too thoroughly na-
tive to think of leaving them. Sometimes descendants of
earliest settlers, English, French or Spanish have been
throwbacks to the Old Country and forever homesick for
it. But this child out of recent German-Slavic blood was
one of the throw-forwards, one of the new Americans.
Like them he had no nostalgia for the past, though unlike
most of them he was endowed with a memory of it. An
unseduced English protege, by preference he remained at
home to fight it out.
For some months it seemed that victory might come
soon. His book was not selling, was scarcely on the mar-
ket, but now surely with English publication, if Double-
day continued to suppress it, some other house would take
it over. He was writing stories again and articles, and
planning two novels, The Rake and Jennie Gerhardt.
Since 1900 he had written thirty chapters of one and ten
or twelve of the other. He wrote abundantly out of the
momentum Sister Carrie had given him. Gradually, how-
ever, he began to notice a change in the attitude of pub-
lishers and editors. By the fall of 1901 he found it use-
less to present his wares. Almost as if because of foreign
favor a stubborn resistance seemed to be growing against
him — a manner of saying, " I guess we'll do our own
thinking, without a lot of English snobs mixing in, who
pick an upstart one generation from the steerage to rep-
196
resent our culture. " Not that I have heard Dreiser ana-
lyse their attitude to that extent; in fact he appears
never to give himself the indulgence of expressing re-
sentment. But he recalls with a kind of relish phrases that
escaped the editors in the next few difficult years, and
that followed him even into success, which suggest such
an interpretation. With the chapters and synopses of
the two novels he approached McClure, Phillips & Co.,
and asked for an advance, to give him time to write them.
They dismissed him, he remembers, in words that said:
" If this is your slant on life, quit, get out, it's rotten."
Successively Macmillan, Appleton's and Harper's coldly
turned him down. Nor would anyone take over that
" masterpiece " by an artist whom, according to the Eng-
lish press, " no one could afford to neglect."
Now it appeared that the very magazines which before
had published him were refusing even stones and articles.
He was banned, " a disgrace to America," one editor
told him. Once coming out of Harper's he met William
Dean Howells, who since the day of the interviews had
been always friendly; but this time he passed him hur-
riedly with the words, " You know, I don't like Sister
Carrie." In the orthodox market he was shunned as if
infected. Finally the commercial house of J. F. Taylor,
the same that relieved Doubleday of the last traces of
their unloved venture, consented to give him fifty dollars
a month until he had finished one or both of the novels,
and they made an advance of $300. This together with a
few savings would last longer on a visit to his wife's
parents in Missouri than it could in New York. An article
about him in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 26,
1902, gives this news item:
" Theodore Dreiser, a former St. Louisian, who has
newly gained fame as a novelist, was in the city last week
on his way to Montgomery City, Mo., to visit the relatives
of his wife. ... It is a first novel . . . which has brought
him into prominence. The British literary reviews, in par-
ticular, give it high praise, ranking it with The Octopus
by Frank Norris, at the top of a list of novels for the last
year."
The reporter, perhaps impressed, lists and quotes from
these reviews, after which I imagine Dreiser put them
197
back in his pocket, where you could not blame him for
keeping them as an amulet against " the great country
that had given him birth," and so far little else. Then the
reporter interviewed the new celebrity, just as ten years
before for the same paper he had interviewed important
visitors. If it was fun for the tables to be turned in the
same city where with McCord and Wood he used to
dream his grandest dreams of grandeur, he betrays no
juvenile exhilaration, merely answers questions soberly
as for one who really wanted to know :
" . . . ' I have not tried to gloss over any evil any
more than I have stopped to dwell upon it. Life is too
short; its phases are too numerous. What I desired to do
was to show two little human beings, or more, playing in
and out of the giant legs of circumstance. Personally I see
nothing immoral in discussing with a clean purpose any
phase of life. ... If life is to be made better or more
interesting its conditions must be understood.' . . . Mr.
Dreiser is well remembered by St. Louis newspaper men
and other citizens. He is still a young man."
I suppose, too, he spent an evening with the endearing
Reedy to discuss hilariously " the sad vicissitudes of
things," while perhaps their wives sat apart in the parlor
finding less to say to each other. At least that was apt
to be the way among the random wives of random ge-
niuses in that decade. Then they were off to the Missouri
village and to the dignified relatives, proud now of their
son-in-law; to the good smells of animals and barns, to
the winter fields, steaming under a Southwestern sun.
Alone with his wife among all but strangers to his
new world of performance and audience, and again under
the seduction of odorous, spacious days and nights on the
distant prairie, this sojourn spelled a crisis for him —
the realization that marriage after only three years al-
ready meant defeat. And was he to submit to it, to the
" harsh compulsions of society and the State, which in-
variably seek to preserve themselves at the expense of the
individual?" or somehow, some way, could he still be
free to create and explore? Many of his stories, nearly
all of them, are concerned with the muffled struggle that
goes on between the people of intense desire for life and
those content to be slowly put to death by custom. Carrie,
198
Cowperwood, Dreiser himself manage to come out with
partial victory. Hurstwood, Jennie, Aileen, Witla,
emerge defeated. So obsessed is Dreiser with this prob-
lem as it first victimised him, that he has made two stories
out of it, attributed to other sets of characters; the sharp-
ness of confessional is in them. One is an episode in The
" Genius " which takes the depleted Witla back to visit
his wife's relatives. There, " if it had not been for the
lurking hope of some fresh exciting experience with a
woman, he would have been unconsciously lonely . . .
This thought . . . quite as the confirmed drunkard's
thought of whiskey — buoyed him up." The essential
tonic appears, a girl of eighteen in splendid bloom, out of
these lowlands; and is denied him by his devoted wife and
by society. Dreiser computes the disastrous pressure
from either side, as if he remembered a moment of his
own;
" The world said one life, one love. . . . Could any one
woman satisfy him? Could Freida, if he had her? He did not
know. He did not care to think about it. Only this walking
in a garden of flowers — how delicious it was.
" No one here interested him save this girl . . . secretly
he already cursed the day he had married. . . . That
blossoming of life at eighteen ... he could not be faith-
less to that. ... It haunted him. ... It remained clear
and demanding. ... He could not deny it ... the beauty
of youth . . . that was the standard, and the history of
the world proved it."
The history of the world does not quite prove it, and
yet it tells us that the famous haeteras have been those
who prolonged into the years the despotism of youth, if
finally by no more than emblem or spirit. In the sexually
naive United States, most of all in its distant provinces,
he was right, there was no one to exert this magic except
the young. Out of such simplicity have come the Zieg-
feld Follies, and the schoolgirl complexion and school-
girl mentality, for the tired business man. The native
Dreiser answered to the rule of youth in company with
the business men; but the foreigner in him rebelled
against its early death decreed by custom. Again in Rella,
a story written in 1923, told to him " one evening in
Greenwich village by an American poet who has since
199
died," he repeats an almost identical episode, " innately
truthful and self-revealing " :
". . . the mere proximity of this girl was proving toxic.
... A feeling of languor alternated with one of intense
depression ... a deadly drug could not have acted with
greater power. . . . Married, married! The words were as
a tolled bell. And yet, in truth, I was not interested (even
in her case) in a long enduring marriage . . . darkly I
speculated as to why love should necessarily pass into this
more formalistic and irksome relationship, only later to
end in death. . . .
. . . rows of corn whispered and chaffered of life. ...
The wood-perfumed air and wet grass under foot gave me
a sense ... of life dreamily and beautifully lived. A surg-
ing sense of the newness ... of the world was upon me.
. . . But . . . how much, if any, of this eternal newness
for me.?
The stark, merciless, unheeding nature of love was being
brought home to me with a greater force than ever before."
Poisons like these invaded Dreiser. It was not exactly
his wife, he says : " There was no compulsion there by that
time. She was all right," except that she had no under-
standing of adventure and no need of it herself. It was
the lambent earth on the one hand and the dullness of
Missouri custom on the other that ate into him. He
wanted new brilliance, he wanted variety, which Rodin
has called passion. Melancholy like a blanket was cover-
ing him; his nerves beginning to falter, and then sleep
and then digestion to give way. Now it was impossible
for him to make progress with either novel, the very
thing he was there for. He read over the thirty chapters
of The Rake, and destroyed them. Jennie Gerhardt he
kept but could not write it. So now he was living on a
false advance. (Later when he could he paid it back to
the publishers.) He thought perhaps if they traveled to
the South he could write, but the white sands and the
salt breezes of the Gulf did nothing for him. Again, as
seven years before, money and hopes were dwindling.
This time health was failing. There was nothing to do,
it seemed, but for him to go to New York alone, un-
trammeled, and once more assail the market for any
kind of a writing job. She returned to her parents to wait
once more until he could support her. He lived in Brook-
200
lyn in a room not much better than the hall bedroom of
other lean years, and tried to sell his stories and articles.
Those who remembered him still shunned him; the
Atlantic Monthly wrote him that he was " morally bank-
rupt and could not publish there." No one had to tell him
that soon he would be physically and financially bankrupt.
Soon he would be too miserable to invite confidence when
he went the rounds of job hunting. Soon the pawnshops
would do their meager bit for him again. He contem-
plated suicide. It was that condition so glibly called a
nervous breakdown. Asked to look back for the cause
of it, he does not blame his wife, nor marriage, nor even
the suppression of Sister Carrie, nor any outside agent.
It was his own moodiness, he thinks, that got him. So he
analyses it in talk :
' The book wasn't selling, there was no money coming
in, but I got plenty of praise for it from people I cared
about. I knew enough by this time not to want it from the
general run of people ; the country was too backward intel-
lectually; I knew that. . . . Frank Norris liked it, Heine-
mann wanted it. ... When he got here in 1903 he gave
a lunch for me at Martin's restaurant, and asked some
people, the editor of Harper's, the editor of Scribner's,
some smart women — you know, the kind that counted.
That gave me confidence. There was always something,
someone to give me confidence — friends really after
Sister Carrie, even before, who wanted me to write, made
me feel that I was important. ... I don't know, I think
it was one of those periods when I got to meditating. It
happened to me once before in 1894 in Pittsburgh, after
reading Huxley, Spencer, Schopenhauer. . . . Here was
this immense system about us, chaotic, meaningless as
far as we could find out, even the best of us, and you per-
sonally, were nothing. Or, if you were, what were you?
I got to thinking that there was no answer and that de-
pressed me. It was the same thing now in 1902. The book
was suppressed; I couldn't get accepted where I had been
before. No one would touch my stuff. I was hard up, and
I got to meditating — everything seemed futile, not so
much myself but the whole field of effort. Life seemed an
endless chain without meaning. I think it was that."
201
So he meditated — chaos, futility, suicide. From pride
he shunned the friends who would have liked to surround
him. It was best to see no one. And then quite by chance
one day walking in the Broadway district he met his
brother Paul. He had met him a few years before not
long after he had left Every Month, and there had been a
coolness between them for that reason. Paul was at the
height of his success — gold-headed cane, silk shirt, smart
suit, and a fine apartment in the Marlborough — out of
royalties from many national successes — The Letter
That Never Came, I Believe It, For My Mother Told Me
So, The Convict And The Bird, The Pardon Came Too
Late, Just Tell Them That You Saw Me, The Blue And
The Gray, The Bowery, On The Banks Of The W abash.
The last song had been his suggestion. Paul had said
one summer Sunday morning at the Howley, Haviland
office : " Why don't you give me an idea once in a while ? "
The younger brother's answer had been: " Me? ... I
can't write those things. Why don't you write something
about a state or a river . . . something that suggests a
part of America? People like that. Take Indiana . . .
the Wabash river? It's as good as any other . . . and
you were raised by it." — " Not a bad idea," Paul
thought, but Thee must write the words. " Rather shame-
facedly," he says, he did produce the first verse and
chorus, almost as it was published; and not long after the
coolness between them ; his own fault, he thinks — " I
was very difficult to deal with."
One night, " young, lonely, wistful," he heard a quar-
tet of boys singing it, passing under his window — his
words :
" Round my Indiana homestead wave the cornfields.
In the distance loom the woodlands clear and cool.
Often times my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood,
Where I first received my lessons, nature's school.
But one thing there is missing in the picture,
Without her face it seems so incomplete.
I long to see my mother in the doorway,
As she stood there years ago, her boy to greet!
Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of new mown hay.
Thro' the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming,
On the Banks of the Wabash, far away."
202
Soon it was everywhere, in the papers, on the stage, on
the hand-organs and whistled in the streets. And when
they met he had felt a kind of unreasoning resentment
against his brother over a success which he had scorned
to be part of. " On the banks, I see," he had said. And
Paul had answered, " On the banks. . . . You turned the
trick for me, Thee, that time. Why don't you ever come
and see me? I'm still your brother. ... A part of that
is really yours." — " Cut that, the words are nothing,"
and he had passed on brusquely. Now again they met after
Thee's own success and failure. This time the ballad-
maker would not let him go, he was shocked by his
appearance, insisted on his address, horrified because the
number in Brooklyn contained a thirteen. The next morn-
ing he was there with a cab to bear him off to the affluent
Marlborough:
" I was so morose and despondent that I resented it,
resented myself, my state, life. ... * I can't,' I said finally.
. . . ' I don't need your help. You don't owe me any-
thing ' — ' Owe, Hell ! ' he retorted. ' Who's talking about
owe. . . . For that matter I owe you half of On The Banks.
. . . You can't go on living like this. . . . Why, Thee,
you're a big man. Damn it — don't you see — don't make
me ' — and he took out his handkerchief and wiped his
eyes. . . . ' Get your things . . . you've got to come, that's
all. I won't go without you.' . . ."
He prevailed with " such tenderness and concern as
[one pictures] existing between parents and children, but
rarely between brothers — and he a man of years and
some affairs, and I an irritable, distrait and peevish soul."
So Dreiser tells it, remembering how he took him into the
luxury of a good hotel, into new clothes, and then in a
day or so in his car to a sanitarium kept by a friend of
Paul's, an ex-wrestler, the famous Muldoon, whose for-
tunes were made by rich American wrecks seeking youth
again. His portraits of his brother make him a cipher of
that infectious American charm, belonging more to the
men than to the women, which has kept us going. It is met
in rich and poor, mechanics, salesmen, entertainers, even
in bankers and lawyers. It pervades and persuades those
who meet it, colors our songs and jokes and manners, and
lack of manners, and is, so far, more specially than
203
Pullmans or bathrooms or office buildings, the spiritual
flower of the United States — blend of the humor of
many nations.
He was six weeks at Muldoon's in training under a
ruder sample of American wizardry, whom he describes
without sparing himself in Culhane the Solid Man.* Then
he returned to New York u fairly well restored in nerves
if not in health." His brother's act of love and this strong
Irishman's contempt of weakness seemed to have com-
bined urgently with Dreiser. From this moment a new
condition of mind and body appeared to direct his dreams
and desires. He was on the way to the outside of them,
and came to rule them more from the outside. He would
not abandon them ever, but he would teach himself to
fight for them and make them count — that is, sell the
dreams and fulfil the desires. Not again would he permit
meditations to let him down into something " lymphatic
and flabby as oysters." He had seen too many magnates
without their clothes at Muldoon's, and had heard that
trainer's roar of scorn. Times would come when the fight
would have equal savor for him with that of dreams
and desires.
If he were really to regain strength, an indoor job
would be fatal. He looked for something in the open air
and through influence hired himself to the New York
Central Railroad at twelve cents an hour and ten hours
a day with a construction gang, and was glad to get even
this. When he went to solicit the job he had left his lunch,
a loaf of bread, on a window-sill outside the superintend-
ent's office, and had come out to find that a neat porter
had thrown it into a garbage bin — the end of food for
him that day. His money was as low as that, and his
decision to take no more from his brother as firm. For six
months he worked as a day laborer, for a few days carry-
ing and piling lumber. Then finding that too hard, under
a wild Irish boss he ran errands, signing for shipments
of bolts, sand, cement, putty, and carrying O.K. blanks
to the main office for materials needed in the construction
of concrete platforms, culverts, coal bins, sidewalks,
bridge and building piers. t
* Twelve Men. f The Mighty O'Rourke: Twelve Men.
204
So passing from magnetic Irishman to Irishman, cured
by fresh air, and by contact with the unintellectual world
of day laborers and contractors, he went back into the
market of books and journals, equipped to seek and find
a job. He had been refreshed too by what was denied him
on the Missouri farm — " a new exciting experience with
a woman," or maybe with several of them. He is an
example of a man who has catered to his necessities in
spite of conventions, thereby suffering, if you like, a
loss in sensibility, and yet exposing himself equally to a
wilder and less habitual sea of the senses than most people
swim in.
Rehabilitated he sought and finally received a position.
He found it in a sheerly commercial publishing house,
Street, Smith & Company. It was the fall of 1904; he was
thirty-three years old. The head of the firm was nick-
named Million Dollar Ormond Smith, since he thought
and talked only in terms of huge profits. " The worse the
swill the better you can sell it," was his slogan. Dreiser
calls his experience there " a riot, a scream." It was ir-
responsible editing, one of the first of the book rackets.
He went in at fifteen dollars a week as editor of Fiction.
His wife returned from Missouri to live with him and
serve and save again. Soon he conceived the idea of
starting a magazine, modeled on Munsey's, the most
successful of the ice to I5c variety. With a Scotch-
Irishman, Charles Agnew McLean, whom he got to know
and enjoy, and who was a great favorite with Ormond
Smith, two new thrill-journals were evolved, Smith's and
The Popular Magazine. Dreiser took charge of the first.
In one year Smith's reached a circulation of 125,000.
In addition to these, he had a hand in Street & Smith's
5c libraries which had published for years such classics as
Diamond Dick, Luck and Pluck, Brave and Bold, Nick
Carter, to secretly regale the boys of the United States
and the men whose minds could not grow up. They catered
to that thirst for adventure and sheer marvels of which
boys and men are never allowed to find enough around
the corner or across the street, or next door, or in their
own houses, or in their own selves. Perhaps there never
could be enough of it for anyone this side of paradise,
205
unless perchance for those born into gangland or among
trappers, hunters, Mexicans or Indians. It was Dreiser's
job to take whatever manuscripts of promise arrived,
and bring them up to the standard of Street & Smith
technique. This, he says, he usually accomplished by cut-
ting them in two and tacking an end to the first half and a
beginning to the second, thereby doubling the output for
the firm.
In this carefree editorial atmosphere Dreiser pro-
gressed from $15 to $35 a week. At the same time he and
McLean formed a project to make a publishing firm to-
f ether, with an eye on his part to the re-publication of
ister Carrie. Doubleday, however, incredible as it seems,
refused to give up the plates. McLean's advice was to go
and buy them ; he would help him. The publisher at length
agreed to sell for $500, with which transaction his firm
goes out of this story. In later years Mencken takes one
last fling at them :
" For his high services to American letters, Walter H. Page
had been made ambassador to England, where Sister Carrie
is regarded ... as c The best story on the whole that has
yet come out of America,' . . . another proof, perhaps of
that cosmic imbecility upon which Dreiser himself is so
fond of discoursing."
The plates were secured, but the publishing scheme fell
through; Dreiser later paid the sum himself. McLean got
jealous of his success as an editor. His fault it may have
been, since as he confesses, " I was always difficult to deal
with." Yet some such fact appears to have been accepted
by the gossips. The Standard, New York, January 2nd,
1908, reviewing his career, says:
" So Dreiser came back, but this time with a purpose to
climb to the seats of the mighty. . . . New York is not the
most affectionate corner of the world to carry out ideas of
this character. ... He did break through in one spot
where tons of printed matter are tobogganed to that class
which revels in the . . . romantic, but before the news
could reach the heads of the establishment that the house
had acquired the asset of a brain, the lesser organs . . .
combined to prevent the disruption of the nincompoops'
206
5J
Further from the bone: Broadway Maga-
zine; " The great American novel, per-
haps."
reiser himself does not think of McLean
as a nincompoop ; he liked him, but he succeeded in fore-
stalling him. He had heard that The Broadway Maga-
zine, belonging to Ben Hampton, was looking for an
editor. In the spring of 1905 he solicited the job and got
it, and so could resign from the pulp-thrill factory
to one of higher pretensions. He was by now in good
trim for the battle called success, and not scornful of the
ease it would give him. For this new position he needed to
be " fit." Hampton, himself, like every other would-be
live wire in New York, was a success fiend. The town
teemed with young men mostly from the villages who
intended no longer to be village nobodies.
It is formidable — this period of our development.
Out of their high schools and fresh-water colleges what
of the past were schoolboys remembering? Almost noth-
ing it would seem, but the myth of Xerxes, Hannibal,
Alexander, Caesar, Attila, Napoleon, who in their days
and countries came singly and were paragons. But now in
this land of machinery every boy was a potential con-
queror, or he was a nobody. Why was it that the old
maids and sad young men, who had to teach or starve,
stressed so exclusively these mighty brutes of history to
boys and girls eager to learn about the world outside of
their provinces? Was it that in this way they satisfied
their need of rape and violence? Certainly they taught
that temper called Roman to American children, many of
whom must have been born childlike enough — little new
bushes in April, where birds chattered. They fast became
Roman, and have made a two-faced empire, half puritan,
207
half sybarite, and wholly material, even if less sophisti-
cated than the Roman Empire. The school teachers have
had their revenge.
But it is necessary to return to commencement day.
Some of the pupils, slightly intrigued by intellectual
prowess, were not quite ready to abandon it when they
came out into the world face to face with the problem
of "making good." These quite naturally veered toward
newspapers or magazines with the vague hope that some
day they could be writers or artists. Mr. Hampton, when
he left Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois, confesses
to being one of them. S. S. McClure, John and Rob
Findley, Brady, Phillips, had graduated not long before
him and already shone in journalism in the East. He
ran a paper in Galesburg for a while, and then with the
money went on to New York in 1898 to make a fortune,
preferably as a " serious " writer. But as S. S. McClure
pointed out there was no money in it; "the highest
price novelist we had, W. D. Howells, only made $4,000
a year." The magazine field looked more promising. He
appraised it in terms of circulation and advertising.
McClure's to be sure, had only a small circulation, 400,-
ooo; Munsey's introducing half-tone illustrations, 600,-
ooo perhaps; Youth's Companion 800,000. Century, the
best of the literary magazines, with a mere forty or fifty
thousand, was not to be considered. But the Saturday
Evening Post had reached already a million and a half
and had swept up the country's advertising, such as it
was. In connection with it Charles Austin Bates, a pioneer
in advertising, had organized a ready-made ad-service.
This gave Hampton an inspiration; national advertising
was the gateway to the future. Literature and business
could yet be married, or at any rate they could be made to
lie down in the same bed together. So, always slightly
leaning toward the arts, he bought the remnants of the
Irving Batcheller Literary Syndicate, which, he said, was
buying a mere name, though in the past it had handled
some big literary merchandise. The Red Badge of Cour-
age had been one of its minor purchases.
Into this obsolete business he introduced the modern
pulmotor — an advertising service. Soon he was supply-
208
ing R. & G. Corsets, Wesson's Oil, American Tobacco.
With money from that he went on to his particular
dream of a magazine. He bought the old Broadway, and
in an office on 22nd Street, began pumping life into it to
make it a vehicle of New York, as The Strand was of
London. He employed, he says, about twenty-five artists
and writers, paying as much as $18 to $25 a week for
reporters and $100 for ad-writers, with the result that
" newspaper men fairly beseiged his office." He lacked a
good literary editor and advertised for one. Among those
who applied was Dreiser. He remembers him well the
day he came into his office, u a heavy-set, lunky fellow,
obviously a newspaper man, singularly unattractive." It
is certain neither caught the other's quality. They saw
each other in terms of value, not of charm. " The minute
I set eyes on him," Hampton said, " I figured the man
was a genius. I said to myself, ' Jesus, here's a wow,' and
hired him on the spot." He worked for $60 a week with
a promise of $100 if the circulation went up to 75,000.
It went fast to above a hundred thousand. The previ-
ously quoted New York Standard tells of his success :
" Then he tackled the Broadway magazine, a publication
of odorous memory, started by that celebrated adaptor of
other people's ideas, Roland Burke Hennesy. Later on
Broadway fell into the hands of the Hamptons, in class A
as advertising experts, but nothing much on magazine
editing. The job was an Augean one ... for Dreiser. . . .
He turned in a river of good literature and snappy special
articles, changing the magazine completely, except in name.
People began to sit up and take notice. . . . Instead of
sneaking round the corner to read it they carried it in the
sunlight and were proud of it. Circulation began to grow,
and advertisers gave up real money for its pages. It was
the prettiest piece of transformation work seen in New
York for many a day. . . ."
So Dreiser made the magazines. He was on the inside
now among the money makers. He could exclude as he
had often been excluded. He was a procurer among the
prostitutes of literature. He had left to one side the
lonely realm of art, and behind him the vagabond news-
paper men and fantastic song-writers and 5-cent thrill-
makers, and was crossing over to that paradise of irri-
descent shaded lamps, perpetual palms and oriental rugs,
209
shared by magazine and advertising agencies. Though all
of journalism compromised to a lie, the newspaper lie
ran nearer to the turf than the magazine lie. The offices
of one as compared to the other had the look of stables
as compared to parlors of the newly arrived. Newspapers
disguised facts; magazines fabricated fiction. Their edi-
tors had the look of facial massages, and the sound of
massaged manners. They never spat or swore, or put
their feet on the desk like the newspaper men. They
frightened elegantly, not gruffly. Sometimes their habit of
polite pretence so emptied their faces of human expres-
sion that they began to look like dressed up animals —
the great ones like foxes or cats or spiders; the smaller
ones like weasels, ants and beavers, and beneath these
were the chipmunks and mice.
Broadway Magazine was not properly in this grand
powerful inane shiny-paper class. Under Mr. Hampton
it was a compromise between the live and the static.
Compared to the great whoring periodicals dominant
today, it was not much more than a frontier bagnio. This
was a period and a publisher still believing that vital
news could be made to pay. He conceived the idea
of increasing circulation by telling on the great and
powerful. His success came partly through muck-raking.
It was the day for it. The Interests already ruled con-
structively, but not yet defensively. Thomas Lawson
could write and publish his American epic, Frenzied
Finance, hoping thereby to change the course of the
real Niagara, Big Business. Ida Tarbell had already
slightly stirred the complacent nation, and stimulated
the circulation of McClure's with her disclosures as to
Standard Oil. Pearson's magazine, February 1914, prints
a review of Hampton's progress, as Broadway came to
be called — a story which appears in detail in Upton
Sinclair's Brass Check:
". . . He never indulged in personal attacks and was
painstakingly accurate; but it was every month a steady
hammering at conditions as they really are. . . . There
was not one great and powerful interest in America that
he had not antagonised. ... In four years the circulation
increased from 12,000 to 440,000 — on the strength of the
boldest muck-raking that had ever been done."
210
Initially also, according to Hampton and others, success
was due to Dreiser's editorial talents. He slipped over
every possible clever short story and article that came to
him, like Hampton unwilling to believe that people pre-
ferred to be bored, much as their ideas differed as to
what was boring. They were both right, it seemed; cir-
culation soared. But Hampton was his own assassin; in
the end advertising fell. In 1911, four years after Dreiser
had left the paper, the game was up. The Interests had
put an end to muck-raking, and on the best security
Hampton found himself unable to get money at any bank.
" Some of the banks," Pearson's says, " admitted that
they had been instructed not to lend him anything." The
magazine was stabbed, and died at the special hands of
The New Haven Road, a Morgan property, and the
object of Hampton's last exposure. Mr. Hampton re-
tired to the position of advertising manager of American
Tobacco, whose president of twenty years later has con-
vinced the public that they will avoid laryngitis and won't
get fat if they smoke Lucky Strikes. As fast as that did
advertising travel beyond the dreams of men in 1905.
From the spring of 1905 to the autumn of 1907 in the
last decade of rational magazines, and rational advertis-
ing Hampton and Dreiser worked together, one to build
his paper into a great periodical, the other to secure his
future, that sometime he might be a writer again.
Mr. Hampton says of him, that he made a professional
success; acquired a standing with other editors; that he
had " a marvellous objective mind " but that above that
was an even more remarkable " subjective mind," which
drove him to the necessity of writing, and kept him from
ever attaining the editorial speed of a Ray Long, for
example. Such an editor, unhampered by the substantive
" was an objective genius pure and simple." A very inter-
esting distinction, unless the object in Mr. Hampton's
mind could be boiled down to as pure and simple a thing
as money. But I think there is more to it than that: an
effort to define the impersonal conquering mind, unre-
lated to other people, or to oneself or to nature, related
to things, to objects — the mind which at its best makes
money; in distinction to the personal, reflective, creative
211
mind — the mind which at its best makes art. . . .
u Christ in Hell/' he ended abruptly, and with intense ad-
miration for his ex-editor, " Dreiser could no more keep
from writing as he saw life than he could keep from
breathing. Read him describing department stores or
street railways and you know them to the life, physically,
legally, socially." He himself had hated Comstockery,
and was so moved by Sister Carrie that he would have
liked to publish it for him.
Dreiser, on the other hand, perhaps unfairly, does not
reciprocate. Almost, it would seem, an antagonism, which
Hampton ignores, operated between them. In De Mau-
passant Junior he describes him with more bias than I
have noticed elsewhere in his portraits :
" Our publisher and owner was a small, energetic, vibrant
and colorful soul, all egotism and middle-class conviction
as to the need of ' push,' ambition, ' closeness to life/
* punch,' and what not else American to the core, . . .
hourly as it were, demanding the * hows ' and ' whyfores '
of the dream which the little group I was swiftly gathering
about me was seeking to make real."
Since he was the publisher and owner one can't quite
blame him for this demand, nor does Dreiser blame any
other individual for being American to the core. He goes
on to demolish him :
". . . While he wanted something new in fiction, some-
thing more virile and lifelike than that ' mush ' ... to be
found in the current magazines, still it must have a strong
appeal for the general reader (!); and be very compelling
in fact and clean — a solid little pair of millstones which
would . . . end in mascerating everything vital out of any
good story.
... He had a facile and specious method of arguing, a
most gay and in some respects magnetic personality, far
from stodgy or gross, which for a time attracted many to
him. Very briskly then, he proceeded to make friends with
all those with whom I had surrounded myself. ... In ad-
dition to these there was a constantly swelling band of
writers, artists, poets, critics, dreamers of social reform,
who were now beginning to make our place a center; an
amusing vivid strident world."
Again can you blame the publisher even if his editor had
been a magnet for this circle, in wanting to be " artistic "
too. Perhaps an antipathy grew between them because
212
Hampton had not the thick-skinned " objective mind " of
the ideal editor; whereas Dreiser has found most intri-
guing those who don't know how to compromise. " Noth-
ing by halves," is his preference. If a magnate, then be
a ruthless one like Yerkes ! If a hypocrite, a terrible one
like Rockefeller! If a reformer, then a creator like Hay-
wood or Lenin! If an artist, then one strong enough to
stay lonely and isolated as he himself would soon find was
his necessity. He held the artist's prejudice against an
expedient reformer like Hampton — that is, one not co-
erced by anger. He besides was too much fascinated by
the spectacle of unscrupulous finance to want to interfere
with it, supposing that he could. He wanted to watch it
and make people more, not less lustful, if he influenced
them at all. For twenty-five years since that time he has
watched it, until in 1930, he has denounced its greed as
loudly as could any reformer, but too late. Better perhaps
had he thrown some of his force of mind against it
earlier. But, as in every other sphere of our life, different
literary elements rarely mingled. Writers separated by
so much as a slight prejudice kept away from each other.
Dreiser, for example, never liked Jack London, because
he called him and everyone " comrade."
He made two friendships important to him in these
years on Broadway. One was a young man from the
Southwest, Texas and Missouri, a writer after his own
heart in the reckless line of descent of Poe and Stephen
Crane — Harris Merton Lyon, whom he included on his
staff and helped all that he could. He saw in him an un-
compromising, scornful writer. But according to his por-
trait of him in Twelve Men* he lost him to luxury and
dissipation and an early death, because of this publisher's
influence over him, whom he represents as the villain of
the story. I asked him if he had not been unfair to Hamp-
ton in the picture. His answer was: "Well, perhaps, in
some of the details, but just the same I know he killed
Lyon." — " How? " I said — " He made him put happy
endings to his stories, I know he did." — " That curse
of all American fiction, the necessarily happy ending! "
It went hand in hand with " the uplift note " on Hamp-
* De Maupassant Jr.
213
ton's magazine, and he abhorred the liaison. He speaks
of Lyon as a proud father or teacher might. Once after
a long time of not seeing him, he came to dinner, " bring-
ing of all things a great armful of red roses." An incon-
gruous gift, it seemed, from the ex-railroad boy to the
ex-Hoosier. Neither exactly knew how to give or receive
it. The memory is none the less dear to Dreiser. And he
likes to remember too that Lyon left when he died
enough manuscript to make " two small volumes of short
tales ... in the clear, incisive, uncompromising vein
. . . and with that passion for revelation which charac-
terized him at first, that same unbiased and unfettered
non-moral viewpoint. " It was u wonderful and hopeful "
that New York contained this new intellect in the midst
of so much pretension, and monstrous that America
should have killed it.
Also while with Broadway he met B. W. Dodge, " a
most lovable alcoholic " and an editor with imagination.
He was " crazy about him." Together they carried
through the publishing scheme he had planned with
McLean. Plots were thickening fast at this time. On
May 1 8, 1907, B. W. Dodge & Co., that is, Dodge and
Dreiser, republished Sister Carrie, though not before one
more protest out of Chaos. The box containing the plates
and sheets, for which five hundred hard earned dollars
had been paid, went through a storage fire. Half of them,
too charred to use, had to be made over again. But finally
the book was really out in the light of the public, the first
edition gone in less than two weeks.
214
58
The New Enemy, Sophistication
HP
Jl he reviewers, educated by British opinion,
did better this time, with three times as many notices,
almost all of them flattering either in anger or praise.
In seven years the country had undergone a change of
temper. Chiefly in those years there had come about a
fever, an agony, among young people to force the United
States to be habitable for men and women of imagination.
Lone figures like Thompson and Reedy, and the several
little magazines and theatres, and exiled professors in
callow universities had sown seeds of envy. Young people
were tired of vicarious romance. They must have experi-
ence themselves which is romance, and have it quick.
There began that optimistic flowering, that nascence of
the spirit, of which people ask today, is it over? Or swear
today that it has just begun, or else that it is anomolous
and can never be. Sister Carrie was welcomed on its
merits — a strong plant out of our soil and despite our
dust, the real thing. It satisfied many of the new Ameri-
cans. Yet too, there would be those impatient of its crudi-
ties who could not stand it. They saw in it their own
crudities, the flatness of American life, which at heart
they knew would be the death of their aesthetic dreams.
And yet how hard to admit defeat ! There must be short
cuts to quality by a process of transfusion, even in quanti-
tative North America ! They would make a forced growth
of the art of living and the art of celebrating living, to
enjoy the fruits before they died. Whistler and Henry
James had done this by becoming European. They would
do it at home. Such crusaders sometimes resented Sister
Carrie as bitterly as did the moralists. A new enemy was
entering the scene for the native Dreiser — the importer
of more than fashion, the importer of sophistication.
215
The reviews of the book in 1907 are slides of Ameri-
can life in that year. You will find there the old style
moralist to whom talk of sex was quite simply taboo ; the
new style moralist to whom talk of sex was entirely
proper, if, and don't misunderstand them, sex brought
unhappiness or taught an economic lesson. You will find
there the old style high-brow, jealous of the English
language, hugging Pater, Arnold, and possibly Swin-
burne; the new style intellectual, homesick for maturity
in a senile juvenile land, and what difference the manner
as long as the matter was a telegram out of reality? And
then you will find already the new antagonist, the sophisti-
cate, the fly in the ointment. This first novel of this first
American Realist was a storm center :
Boston Transcript: "A matter for regret that he should
have deliberately chosen to devote his creative talent to a
woman and two men who never quicken our nobler im-
pulses. . . ."
Ohio Journal: " Such books are to be shunned . . . there
is so much in the world that is fresh and clean, elevating
little stones . . . that are well worth telling. . . ."
The Club Fellow: New York: " The modern writer should
not make vice seem attractive. . . . But it is not immoral
to describe the allurements that await the young girl in our
over-crowded cities, so long as it shows that no breach of
the moral law ever can result in happiness. . . . Sister
Carrie shows bitterness and disillusion at the end of the
path."
Advance, Chicago: "No better sermon could be preached
... on the necessity of leaving other people's money
alone. . . ."
New York Sun: " Mr. Dreiser should take a course in read-
ing, Flaubert, Defoe, etc. . . . After such a course [his]
gents will give up wearing pants, vests, Prince Alberts, and
tuxedos of the slop shops. . . ."
Philadelphia Ledger, Agnes Repplier: " [He] has the
faculty of picturing his scenes so vividly in clear-cut Eng-
lish that they compel instant and abiding interest."
Texas Post, Houston, Harris Merton Lyon: " I see in
Sister Carrie one more evidence of a broader, American
intellectual freedom. . . . Possibly the day will come when
George Moore's Memoirs of My Dead Life will not have
to be expurgated as if for children when . . . issued in
the United States."
And then the opinion of the man of the world, deriv-
ing from Europe, the new enemy. Mr. Harrison Rhodes,
216
a fashionable critic of that time, reflects the type. Writ-
ing for The Bookman, languorously he reminds his read-
ers that Mr. Dreiser as realist and immoralist is like
all good natives, somehow lacking. What had he told of
lasciviousness, what really of gaiety?
" The intelligent foreigner will find her amazingly typical
of the chill in our . . . blood. No one need avoid Sister
Carrie as an ' improper book/ When Miss Meeber yields to
the blandishments of her drummer, there was unques-
tionably, from the point of view of the intelligent foreigner
a ' scene a faire.' That Mr. Dreiser avoids it is proof equally
of his innate refinement and of the American sense that
love involves many things besides physical passion. Indeed
one is tempted ... to the reflection that Miss Meeber con-
sidered that physical feature of life too unimportant to be
worth even avoiding."
Here is the pessimist who despairs of celebrating life
where there is so little to celebrate. Here is the self-exiled
American with a small audience now to reinforce him.
Perhaps, I am not sure, looking forward out of the strug-
gle for authentic imagination in our country, from Poe
and Whitman to the originals of the near past — perhaps
we shall find, looking beyond them into the present, this
type, the exile, self-deported to Europe spiritually or
actually or both, to be the sole one among our artists
enough nourished to survive. The intervening fifteen
years, however, belong more to us than to Europe. They
are years of vigor and revelation, years of artists, espe-
cially writers, who worked like tillers of the soil, or who
worked like engineers, building bridges and viaducts and
always roads.
Dreiser was one of them, unaware perhaps of the
existence of an entering wedge of connoisseurs preoccu-
pied with values alien to his foreground. He made no
effort to cope with them. Instead seriously he answered
the now familiar critics of his diction. He said to them :
" To sit up and criticize me for saying ' vest ' instead of
1 waistcoat ' ; to talk about my splitting the infinitive and
using vulgar commonplaces here and there, when the
tragedy of a man's life is being displayed, is silly. More,
it is ridiculous. It makes me feel that American criticism
is the joke that English authorities maintain it to be."
And to the moralists he took the trouble to say: " The
217
mere living of your daily life is drastic drama. Today
there may be some disease lurking in your veins that will
end your life tomorrow. . . . Life is a tragedy. ... I
simply want to tell about life as it is. Every human life is
intensely interesting . . . even when there are no ideals,
when there is only a personal desire to survive, the fight
to win, the stretching out of the fingers to grasp — these
are the things I want to write about — the facts as they
exist, the game as it is played. ... I said I was pointing
out no moral. Well, I am not, unless this is a moral —
that all humanity must stand together and war against
and overcome the forces of nature. I think a time will
come when personal gain will rarely be sought at the ex-
pense of someone else.*'
But with words and thoughts like these, he turned his
back on the whole literary field, moralists, aesthetes and
admirers, to enter with fellow natives into the fight
against some of the forces of nature — hunger and desti-
tution. At the same time his English champions, with
nothing to gain and nothing to lose, were always being
loyal to him — Frank Harris, William Locke, Arnold
Bennett. The narrative must leave them, however, to
follow the author of their favorite American novel into
American commerce.
218
59
Life far from the bone
Butterick Patterns
I
,n the same spring of 1907, John O'Hara Cos-
grave came into the picture, an editorial friend, who
under Ridgeway edited Munsey's which superseded
Everybody's. Guessing that Hampton and Dreiser were
destined to separate, he recommended him to George W.
Wilder of the Butterick Publications. He had recently
lost his combined editor and art-editor — " a young fel-
low," as Dreiser tells it, who killed himself over an affair
with " some society girl," discovered and denied him by
society. He was one of a number to enter into his medita-
tions at this time as somehow related to him, men who
came up and went under. A composite of them emerged
later as his " Genius."
Impressed by his Broadway record Wilder offered
Dreiser the position, at $7,000 a year and a bonus as
the circulation mounted. So in the summer of 1907 he
entered the Butterick Publishing Co., whose large fac-
tory building already stood at Spring and MacDougal
Streets. He was at once managing editor of five fashion
magazines, the Delineator, the Designer, the New Idea,
the South American Delineator, and the German from
which they imported material. Chief of this was the De-
lineator. He was a long way now from Indiana valleys,
further than his brother Paul with his sentimental bal-
lads which swept the country-lanes and parlors, and yet
of course, he too was catering to the villages. New York
was and is a vast explosion, made out of the dreams of
villages, clasping in a distorted ecstasy the patterns of
the older cities.
As five-fold Butterick editor and art editor, he came as
near to big business as any periodical in that day could
219
bring him. He had a staff of thirty-two people, whom he
had selected each for his or her special value. He con-
trolled the editorial policy of these journals — his condi-
tion so that Broadway difficulties might not be repeated.
He was an " idea-man " and canvassed the country for
men and women with ideas. Pretty soon, he says, " Any
one who had any idea about the United States ran down to
The Delineator." Forty-two thousand manuscripts came
in to them in a year. He fulfilled a wish of his, an office
painted green and bronze and hangings and furnishings
to go with green and bronze ; people came there Saturday
afternoons for tea and talk; he held a kind of " salon."
Circulation mounted, as it had in his previous ventures. In
fact, this time, with stipulated freedom, he sent it soaring
in four years from 400,000 to 1,200,000. Newspaperdom,
October 24, 1927, writes about him:
" Perhaps the most nervous man ... I ever saw in an
editorial chair is Theodore Dreiser ... of that nervous,
ever-active, never still nature; tall, but not broad-
shouldered, generous of feature and alert ... a typical
Westerner, and there are few who would not pause on the
street to look back at the tall man. . . .
In the [six months] in which he has been editing The
Delineator he has injected much new life . . . into it.
[He] says: 'Get personality into your work. ... I be-
lieve the average person likes best to read about people
and their accomplishments and to know . . . something
of the king-pin of the combination. . . .' "
Leaders interested him when he was editor of a woman's
fashion magazine as acutely as at any other time. Luckily
for him, he happened to be editor in the last decade of
" personality." Soon it would be forbidden by Big Busi-
ness, except as an empty slogan, along with alcohol and
free speech.
The Butterick Publications (I tell it for those too
young to remember life before the cloak and suit trade)
like The Ladies' Home Journal had for years been pro-
viding dress patterns for virtuous women of moderate
means, to make up at home spring and fall. The models
originated in the clothes that Queen Victoria and her
dowagers wore. Butterick subtracted some of the fullness
but none of the goodness and diagrammed them for home
220
use. Coming into New York in those days BUTTERICK
in electric letters commanded the harbor. Butterick pat-
terns were the grief of daughters who hoped to disobey
their frugal mothers in the matter of dress. Advice was
that they could be realized to good advantage in domestic
materials, every thread by no means wool or silk or
linen. And pitifully they were devoid of " sex-appeal,"
which at about this date was beginning to creep in. Here
paradoxically was a flagrant libertine of American letters
appointed to be purveyor of " safe fashions for home
people." It is amusing to think that perhaps Whitman
gave the first American impulse toward nudity, and
Dreiser toward clothes. He was too innocent, how-
ever, and too politic to make any radical change away
from domestic styles. That remained for more mundane
importers to do with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. He
attacked from another angle. His friends laughed to think
of him in this low-brow guise of fashion-dictator, but with
characteristic seriousness and without shame he studied
the problem — how to reach the ladies. He stimulated
with ideas; ideas gave birth to longings, and longings to
the need of new clothes. Women over the country felt that
somehow a friend of theirs was breathing a tiny wind of
danger into Butterick standards. New invitations ap-
peared between the lines. Or if he did not calculate quite
so nicely, anyway it was his policy to wake the women up.
He would be the one to give them a " high-brow maga-
zine," and they would like it.
When I asked Mr. William Lengel, at first secretary,
and then editor under Dreiser, today assistant editor of
Cosmopolitan, to tell me what he remembered of Deline-
ator days, his exclamation was : " I hope you will do
justice to Dreiser as editor; a book could be written
about it." Too ignorant of American business to write
this book, I can only submit what notes I took for it on my
visit to Mr. Lengel, and to others who had worked on his
staff. It was a hot July day in 1930 when I made the pil-
grimage to the new Hearst temple of journalism at 59th
Street and Eighth Avenue, which succeeds in being a dis-
tillation in concrete of all religious architecture, Greek,
Gothic, Egyptian, Aztec, Assyrian, Christian Science.
221
Ascending in the aphrodisiac elevator, I reached the outer
halls of the editorial offices where an impeccable Ziegfeld
beauty nineteen years distant from Butterick patterns
lisped telephone numbers and took down names. Mine
was handed to a boy who could have adorned pages of
Petronius. Soon with courtesy beyond belief for New
York City or any city, I was told that Mr. Lengel was
talking to England; if I could wait . . . ?
I waited, studying originals of International-Cosmo-
politan illustrations and covers, which hung like treasures
on the walls, and symptomized the various appeals —
the mother appeal; the infant appeal, the virility appeal,
the adventure appeal, the juvenile sex-appeal. Babies
there were digging in sand piles, splashed with sunlight;
Arabians descending on chargers over cliffs; American
Indians glad that their friends the white men had come ;
bankers with tall glasses on golf-club verandahs; the
American girl with translucent nostrils exquisitely
equipped for the slightly pouting clean-jawed Young
American. ... I thought in these twenty years Mr.
Lengel would have surely forgotten the amateur days on
Spring and MacDougal Streets, but no ! With scarcely a
flash of the first manner of the magnate receiving no one,
he recalled that the appointment related to Theodore
Dreiser. Sitting across from me at his vast fumed-oak
desk, imperial with bronze cigar and cigarette boxes,
lighter and tray, blotter and paper holder, and the spe-
cially designed telephone instrument recently vibrant with
London, he looked like a late Roman wish come true. In
fine-striped lavender shirt and cool brown summer clothes
he had been evolved, mouth, nose, eyes, hair and smile in
crisp Dionysian curves. Yet in this interview he was an
apprentice remembering his favorite master.
At twenty he was a drop in the stream that came from
the Middle-West. Already having practiced law in a small
lowan town, he came wishing to be an actor in New York,
or a writer. Knowing next to nothing about stenography,
he said, but with " plenty of pep " and only twenty-five
cents in his pocket, he had answered an advertisement
which took him to the Butterick offices to apply for posi-
tion as secretary to the editor in chief. He was told by
222
the fiction editor, Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, that his
boss would be the most disagreeable man in the world to
work for; never praised anyone, found fault with every-
one. . . . He had fired the last man because he had lost
a book of clippings. . . . But somehow Lengel got on
with him, not as secretary — he discharged him as that,
but retained him as one of the sub-editors. He thinks
Dreiser liked him because he was " brash, " while most
editorial minds were timid. One day he came upon Sister
Carrie on a shelf in his chiefs office. After a look at it he
went out and bought it. It was Saturday; he read it in
Central Park until nightfall, and the next day on the
sands at Coney Island : " Dreiser was big, ungainly,
homely, but after that I would have done anything he
asked of me. . . ." In later days he has done all that he
could for him, to the extent of recently publishing a
Hearstian version of This Madness which even then, it
is rumored, lost for the magazine all the advertising that
articles by Mr. Coolidge gained.
I asked him exactly why he thought of Dreiser as a
good editor: " He made people think. He had the biggest
correspondence department of any periodical up to date.
A lot of men got magazine training under him — Dr.
Crane, Homer Croy, Charles Hanson Towne, Lee
Harriman, George Creel, James E. West. They may
not like to admit it but they learned a lot down there.
That child-rescue campaign — West owed his position
as secretary of the Boy Scouts to that. . . . He got
up a rediscussion of spiritualism — Are the dead alive?
— it made a lot of talk; some of the churches wanted to
stop subscriptions. He made a strong virile magazine
for women." — Here I interrupted: "I should think
then commercially he must have failed. " No, it suited
them all right. The trouble was, he put on so much cir-
culation, the advertising couldn't equal it; I guess they're
still trying to catch up. . . . The bigger the circulation,
you know, the more expensive it is to publish. It's the
advertising end that's got to pay for it." — " Then,
the trouble was, he suited a large feminine audience,
but not their husbands, the advertisers?" — "No, it
wasn't that. The advertising department just didn't
223
hustle around like he did to meet his circulation. It was
the day for a lively publication; he knew it." — "And
it's not the day now? " — " Perhaps not, psychology has
changed." — " But didn't they think Dreiser was getting
a little too interesting? " — "I don't know. There was a
man came over from The Woman's Home Companion.
He said, * Make Delineator softer.' Dreiser said, ( Send
a letter to all our readers, and ask them if they want a
namby-pamby magazine.' He won out. He was a great
editor."
Miss Katherine Leckie, another of his staff, a Chicago
newspaper woman, the first, she thinks, to go as a reporter
on a par with men, gave him almost the same testimonial :
" The greatest editor I ever worked under ! . . . A very
fine mind ! . . . And he always gave the woman the same
chance as the man. . . . One of the few who considered
women as workers, and that sex did not enter into the
situation." Not long ago she met him by chance in a
vegetarian restaurant on 56th Street, and they remi-
nisced. She had said, " Those were great days." And his
answer had been, " Yes, if they had lasted. They ought
to have gone on for years. . . ."
Mary Field Parton, one of his contributors, was as
zealous in praise. She describes Dreiser as seeming to her
formidable in those days, and above all, sophisticated,
already a man of the cities, but then as she says, she had
come from Chicago and the Far West, and felt shy and
young. She had come with a word of introduction from
Clarence Darrow, whom he admired. She liked Dreiser
enormously; he was always so ready to welcome a new
idea, and so interested in writing for its own sake. She,
too, attributes to him a disinterested intellect where
women were concerned, which contradicts his legend. She
remembers an article she made for him about Emma
Goldman, The Dynamiter, whom he considered the most
important American woman of that time because u she
dared to stand alone." He told her how to write it to
conform to Butterick standards. She was to make them
think she was pointing a finger of scorn at the anarchist:
"Emma Goldman dares to talk of free love; the true
woman should never dream of freedom. . . . Emma
224
Goldman thinks human beings are good enough to govern
themselves ; ridiculous ! " . . .
So here is a fourth group of people that came to sur-
round this visionary who loved society so well that he was
willing to fight it to be part of it — the magazine group.
This time he figured as a nucleus. It took him among
the arrived illustrators, litterateurs, musicians, and
decorators of the city, to their parties in town and
country, on to yachts and into expensive motors and house-
parties. He never made the estuary that had now widened
out of the original baffling Four Hundred, so much in
his thoughts when he was young, but he met people rich
and successful enough to skirt the banks of it, and he got
a nearer sense of its place in the American scheme. What
was more, he had the luxury now of requited love in more
expensive dress than he had known it before. More than
one woman, who seemed to him desirable, wanted him,
and was willing to pay in money and grief if necessary.
Women were part of these town and country excursions.
He on his side was determined not to pay too much in
any medium. Ambition carried him like a fast horse a
good rider.
Wilder, the publisher, he says, got excited as he
watched circulation soaring, and jumped his salary from
seven to ten, and then to twelve thousand; and in 1908,
four years from the time he was getting fifteen dollars
a week, to fourteen thousand. This with the bonus
mounted into money, $25,000 a year in the end, to be
saved so that he could be free to write about life
as he saw it. He and his wife lived now in a comfortable
apartment on Morningside Drive, but even so, he says:
" I was a very simple person with no money to spend on
luxuries. " They worked and saved. His will to choose
the forces that would best serve him is in full action
now. He began to write Jennie Gerhardt again, and
completed twenty chapters of it, which in 1908 he sent
on urgent request to the English publisher, Grant
Richards. With a few reservations as to diction, hoping
that he could perhaps reform him as to such words as
afectional, and pronunciamento, Richards wrote him
that it was " a very fine piece of work, a fit and worthy
225
successor to Sister Carrie/' and " would healthily depress
everyone of its intelligent readers." He exhorts him to
finish the book quickly, telling him he has " no right to
hide his talent year after year," and hopes to be his
publisher.
226
Breaking with unbroken traditions
JJLn 1909 in accordance with this trait which
forced selection and action, Dreiser and his wife sepa-
rated, never to live together again. I have asked
friends of his who knew them both what impelled the
break. One of them, an illustrator of sensitive fibre, said :
" I don't know, she would have irritated me. One night I
went to see them up on Morningside Drive. There they
were in the dining room. She was sprinkling clothes on
the same table where he was correcting proof. I felt a
lack of understanding in that. Perhaps Dreiser didn't
mind. He, on the other hand, was subject to fits of terrible
depression, impossible to live with, I should think." An-
other friend imagined that, though she tried, she could
not stand his " varietism " as to women, and that he could
not stand her melancholy over it. He had sympathy for
both of them, for her tears and for his " wandering forth
to others." Also he thought that she was jealous of
Dreiser creatively, had always wanted to be a writer
herself. Still another insists that it was because she re-
wrote at his request the first chapters of Jennie Gerhardt,
and that he returned them to their original state, that
they quarreled and separated. He himself cannot re-
member that it was any one thing. They separated because
he had one code and she another too alien to maintain
together. So Dreiser broke the American tradition that
the artist should live like any other citizen with, for, and
of the family and the home — that nucleus for radiator,
telephone, refrigerator, kiddy-car, automobile, player
piano, and radio to come. He departed from the wisdom
of Howells and Mark Twain more flagrantly than other
men of genius in the United States were known to do.
Even the radical architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, mar-
227
ried oftener and quicker than Dreiser. He was about to
embark at this date on twenty years free of matrimony.
No longer would the letters he received end with the in-
variable. " My wife and I join in the season's best wishes
for you and yours."
In another year he made his second break with native
custom. He broke with his last job under an employer
other than himself. Erman J. Ridgeway, so successful
with Munsey's, joined forces with Wilder. He was a
strict Methodist and out of sympathy with the author of
Sister Carrie. One rumor has it that Dreiser was tired of
journalism and let himself out. Another that Ridgeway
said, " Make the magazine as harmless as the Ladies'
Home Journal or quit." Still another, that, contrary to
Miss Leckie's belief, he did allow sex to enter ever so
slightly into journalism with a young stenographer, in
the beauty-correspondence department, and that Mr.
Ridgeway was properly indignant and fired him. Dreiser
himself says that these may have been contributing causes,
but that no American publisher would let morals stand
in the way of business. Circulation, he points out, was still
mounting. He left of his own accord, not exactly that he
was bored with editing but that he was no longer a free
agent; and besides there was trouble about the bonus.
Back of personal causes, was the economic fact that
the Interests had begun to fear the magazines. In May
1909 John Kenneth Turner in the American Magazine
had gone too far, in articles sympathetic to Mexican
radicals and to an uprising of slaves in Yucatan. Presi-
dent Taft at the bidding of Finance had had to " hotfoot
it to the border to stage a love-fest with Diaz," in the
words of Lemuel Parton, an ace newspaper man who
thus dates the death-blow to a liberal press in the United
States. In that year the American Magazine changed its
policy, and soon after McClure's and Hampton's col-
lapsed. Thomas Lawson and Ida Tarbell had been al-
lowed to talk too ably. Just as once the Yankee religion-
ists had persecuted the nonconforming children of their
day, their successors, the financiers, were about to exe-
cute the new brand of wizards, the newswriters, who
were leading their readers off to forbidden fields, away
228
from the modern churches — Office, Factory and Store.
From now on controlled syndicate news was to become
the only orthodox news. The American press was about
to divide into right and left wings. The right would grow
fat and windy and prosperous. The left would grow lean,
and self-righteous and unremunerative ; would live on
the sneers of rotarians and the money given by rotarians'
wives; and would finally after two decades find itself
narrowed to the Nation and the New Republic and a
few art journals published in Paris.
I asked Dreiser if he thought he would have stayed
on as editor of Butterick, if all had gone well, just for
the chance of making a fortune. He couldn't say, but he
thought not: "No man could stand it indefinitely; it
would make a hack out of him. . . . Besides/' he added,
" I am a writer, not an editor." Even on the Delineator
people featured him as a writer after the reappearance
of Sister Carrie. He is sure that many contributions from
important writers in England and America came to him
as author of that novel. Letters he has kept bear him
out — letters from Edgar Jepson, Albert Kinross, W. B.
Trites, hoping to contribute to his journal and mentioning
that friends of theirs, Zangwill, Frank Harris, Richard
Middleton, Charles Flandrau admired the book. And
letters from Gustavus Myers, Albert Bigelow Paine,
Brand Whitlock, Fremont Rider, Edwin Markham, I. F.
Marcosson, Adele Marie Shaw, Louise Closser Hale,
Grace McGowan Cook, James Huneker, all pay homage
to him as novelist. Usually they compare him to Zola,
" even Balzac," sometimes to Flaubert, once to Strind-
berg, and quite wildly to de Goncourt and George Moore.
One man, however, the Yankee John Kendrick Bangs
balks at the idea of Butterick contamination. He writes :
"What is the matter with you anyway? .Do you really
think that I could be such an ass as to submit those Nature
Fakir stones to you as editor of the Delineator? . . . The
tales were sent in response to your repeated requests to let
you see something that might do for B. W. Dodge and
Company. . . .
" It will perhaps please you to hear that at least upou
three occasions I was asked questions as to ... the author
of Sister Carrie. ... I told the inquisitive Westerners that
229
you had served six terms in Sing Sing, were regarded as in-
corrigible and all the other nice things I happen to know
about you, even going so far as to boom the Delineator."
In these years he had those who hated, as well as those
who loved. He was a man among the men, a fox among
the foxes, carving a destiny, making off with some of the
spoils. He was at the same time in the strange position of
being shepherd to the flock. It was in accordance with his
three selves, the conqueror, the solitary, the good fellow,
impeding and helping one another. What he had made in
solitude followed him into the market. A woman on his
staff writes to one of his associates, John Cosgrave :
"... I am so thrilled because he told me Dreiser is the
Sister Carrie Dreiser. I didn't like him a bit; he never is
nice like you and says, ' That's bully.' I have been think-
ing of trying to get out of the Delineator, it was only busi-
ness anyway. Now I feel just as loyal to him as I do to you.
I can't tell you how good work affects me. ... I feel
to Dreiser like one feels to a chief. ... I don't care
two cents about the money part now. . . . It's the one
big serious true American novel with blood in it — not
ink. . . ."
How long will it continue in the modern world — this
personal need for mind, for intellect really, which human
beings hold to, however vacant the outlook? On his side
this hero remembers his trials, how for example, his
fiction editor signed all acceptances with his own name
and all refusals with Dreiser's, which in itself marked
him as a very carping, formidable official.
230
" All the most valuable things are useless
. . . to those who understand that life is
not lived at all if not lived for contempla-
tion or excitement . . . that we can do
almost what we will if we do it gaily, and
think that freedom is but a trifling with
the world.'' W. B. YEATS
t length the days in the market were over.
Dreiser had done, in a sense, the impossible, what so
many would-be artists start out to do and abandon. He
had gained independence through hiring himself out for
a space of years — in his case six years. Friends write to
him now as one might to a champion fighter, among
them James Huneker: "I'm sorry for the Delineator's
sake that you are leaving it and I hope you have some-
thing better. But — if you, Theodore Dreiser, could or
would return to your old field, the gain for our litera-
ture would be something worthwhile. We have but one
Sister Carrie, despite the army of imitators." As it hap-
pened Dreiser set about to fulfil this hope, since even
more passionately it was his own desire, and at last he
felt able and equipped.
He had enough money for a while and plenty of the
honey of esteem. Sex received him variously. A various
world was beginning to tell him he was important. Love
and self-love were being fed; lust and vanity, the
two forever intermingled insatiates, which when fed
become relaxation and strength. He was thirty-nine
years old after all these preparations, but now, he was
convinced, not yet too old " to write about life as it
was," as he saw it. And the restless way that he saw
it, he was certain was not far from the way that
231
it was. He set about completing Jennie Gerhardt in
earnest.
He brought to it a brain and heart toughened by the
parades he had witnessed and taken part in. He had
watched finance like a dragon get possession of the minds
and bodies of Americans. He had lived in the narrow
rooms of wedlock and found their comforts irksome.
Friends had gone in these years. He knew the agony of
separations. One had been a love who had jilted him, his
dream of all that he wanted. u Peter," the wonderful
McCord,* cartoonist, writer, collector, was dead in a
flash of pneumonia — he who had taught him to " love
life's every facet," whether pollination or decay. With
him he had traveled back to ancient ornaments and
scripts, and equally he had given him a keener appetite
for the modern world, no matter how vulgar or cruel —
for anything, anyone that entered into crises. In these
years too, his brother Paul, who meant to him his mother
and Indiana and the lights and jokes of Broadway, had
died of a broken spirit when his song business failed him,
and with it his bright guests and friends. He was fifty-five :
' With a slightly more rugged quality of mind he might
have lasted till seventy," so the younger brother mourns
him.
Frank Norris, his intellectual brother, was gone.
O. Henry was dead, who after he had served in the peni-
tentiary, he thinks, had come to know life and how to
write about it. Jack London had compromised with re-
ality, had confided to him once in a saloon on 2jrd Street :
" I'd like to write the real thing, but I can't sell 'em."
And there were others, Harold Frederic, Hamlin Gar-
land, Hervey White, Will Payne, Robert W. Chambers,
who had started brilliantly with one or two first novels,
and had not known how to endure. They were dead or
they had given up. " They were too sensitive," he sup-
poses, " to stand the face of reality; and fell by the way
or leaned against the bar." In these years, it seemed to
him as if a storm or a war had swept over the men of
his age and interests, and knocked them all out, himself
included. When it had cleared away the others were miss-
* Twelve Men.
232
ing; somehow, he doesn't know why, he was still there.
He would try to tell the story of the storm in a novel. It
would be called The " Genius."
At the same time new friends were coming in. In the
first year with Butterick, he conceived and edited on the
side a journal called The Bohemian, in company with
some others, chief of whom was, " Billy Smith, a fasci-
nating character, an architect, who built extravagant
houses for Long Islanders." There were also Fritz Krog
and Phil Goodman, a producer, who later liked to boast
that Dreiser had fired him, and who is known today for
having first put the side-splitting W. C. Fields into musical
comedy. The houses of some people have many sides, one
side opening on one of the finite or infinite sides of an-
other house. If you walk around the conglomerate house
where Dreiser has lived, you will find a side touching on
a side of nearly all the houses of his period, which, like
any one period, comprises an untold number of periods.
Into The Bohemian could go material too racy for the
" highbrow " Delineator. As one of its contributors, so
crucial a figure as H. L. Mencken drops casually into
this biography. Willard Huntington Wright, who started
as a novelist and excellent critic, and ended as the rich
Van Dine of detective story fame ; George Bronson How-
ard, a precocious writer of popular novels, who finally
committed himself to morphine and suicide; Andre Tri-
don, acid pro-German translator of French and German
novelties, who, later a war suspect, committed himself to
the practice of psychoanalysis and died obscurely; George
Jean Nathan, carefree critic and humorist, Mencken's
future partner in journalism — these and other young
men came to be friends of Dreiser's in these years
through their admiration for Sister Carrie or through
The Bohemian, or through Mencken's genius for bring-
ing people together. They pooled some of the same sym-
pathies about the need of a libertine life and a libertine
art in America. " We used to take our girls to the same
restaurants, and drink together — it was before prohi-
bition— in other words we had a grand time! " is the
way that Mencken remembers it with an exquisite lilt of
reminiscence in his voice. It must have been that they
233
made that slide of life known as " men about town " —
that shifting, glancing, joking plane which, introduced
into soberer living, lends courage to the gloomiest pessi-
mist.
In 1908, one of Dreiser's English admirers, William
J. Locke, whose Beloved Fagabond was a mad success in
the United States, landed in New York with an appropri-
ate number of reporters to get his advance impressions
of the country. One of his first questions was : " And
what is your Mr. Dreiser doing these days?" —
" Dreiser? " they had not heard of him — " The author
of Sister Carrie! " — They did not know it. " Americans
do not know," he said, " that England looks on Sister
Carrie as the finest American novel sent over in the last
twenty years, and to Dreiser as the biggest American nov-
elist who has sent us anything, and is waiting for Carrie's
successor? " One of the interviewers hazarded the
information: "A recent French critic characterized
Mrs. Wharton's House of Mirth as the greatest Ameri-
can novel" — " Really? dear me! I would hardly con-
sider that a just characterization ... a charming
writer, a poet, a fine novelist . . . but I should scarcely
think she had as yet reached the stature of Hawthorne."
In the midst of these occurrences, dark and light,
Dreiser gave himself to the completion of Jennie Ger-
hardt. In the spring of 1911 through the agency of Mae
Holly, he sold it to Harper's, the firm which eleven years
before had refused his first novel without a word. . . .
In November they published it with the agreement that
they would take over that book from the defunct house
of B. W. Dodge. They agreed, too, to bring out the next
novel, already more than half completed, The Financier,
which appeared in 1912. And Sister Carrie in 1913.
These three years make the keystone of his success.
At length after the long struggle, Dreiser had arrived
in his own country, sanctioned by a leading firm, presented
with a public. No longer a novice, he was heralded as a
pioneer who had reached a difficult frontier. " The first
American to force American publishers into the handling
of mature literature without expurgating it," Mr. Wells
of Harper's says today, in that manner of the parent who
234
has accorded to the child the privilege to stay up till, say,
twelve o'clock. " More than any one writer, the first to
turn the current of public taste into new channels, so that
there is small fear of censorship! " A militant modern,
in fact, in the eyes of Mr. Wells, forcing the elders to
get out of the old wagon and get into the new train! If
you put the question to other students of our books, they
agree, often regretfully, that, yes, they suppose " Dreiser
deserved the title."
He was, in fact, the entering wedge. Whitman, though
purer, had not accomplished this. He was too pure, or he
came too early, to mingle in a conflict with the past. He
was a dawn breaking in the busy afternoon of an elderly
but not ancient day; a dawn breaking when the prudery
of the Scarlet Letter seemed like a faint ray of sunlight to
people who kept their blinds closed and had no way to
know when it was morning noon or dusk in their airless
best parlors. It was not Whitman, it was this diffuse
realist who had finally forced the issue. It was a double
triumph of newness — a step toward free thought and a
step toward illiteracy, which this combative son of an
immigrant, this nonentity, had wrenched from the genteel
house of Harper.
Having gotten thus far, what did he say and think
about it? He did not say in approved blase style, " now
that I have it, it isn't much." In fact, now that he had
it, it was food and wine to him. He worked and played
as never before, and seems not to have doubted his fought-
for and paid-for right to take from the elders the reins
of thought and conduct. To the attic or the graveyard
with their puny colonial sophistication! It was time for
immigrants to be natives, for the vulgarians to rule. For
the parlors to know what the stables and kitchens and
sheds and streets and saloons and offices and factories
were doing and thinking. For all the American realities to
step abroad and see the world, and be seen by the world.
It was time for promiscuity to stalk in and through the
parlors, since they held nothing strong enough to en-
force awe.
" Old prejudices must always fall and life must always
change," is an axiom he has made. He would be found
235
among the changes, he would never be static. Recollecting
this vantage point in his story, he pauses : " Well, that's
about all. The rest was easy enough. I had risen against
the wind."
Yet to most people, the fifteen years until the appear-
ance of An American Tragedy would not be looked upon
as easy enough. He had risen against the wind of custom
up to where there were other conflicting wind currents
that would bear him on and help him in the struggle. The
opposing wind had chiefly been that of American morality,
which, as a condition dictated a dead temperature of
seventy, windows doors and cracks closed for the victims
within, but which could blow up quite a cold gale for
the nonconformists outside. Dreiser had long felt its
hostility, and, though fortified now by other friendly
winds, still had it to resist as best he could. He tells how
Ben Dodge had taken him one day into Putnam's and
Dutton's bookstore to introduce him to the manager, a
friend of his. He had left him in the front of the store for
a few minutes to ask this favor, but had come back alone,
embarrassed: "Well, I know you'll be able to laugh it
off, he doesn't want to meet you."
In the Harpers' office there was the same cold shoulder.
Not on the part of Ripley Hitchcock or F. A. Duneka, the
literary editors. Though they were Century Club gentle-
men, they had acquired the letter paper and handwriting
and indulgence of English liberals. It was Mr. Hitchcock
who had first seen fit to publish Stephen Crane, expur-
gating him, however, for the Nineties. Nor did the man-
aging editor, Major Leigh, a Virginian democrat, not
especially of the first families, function as a cold shoulder.
He was " wonderful, hospitable," Dreiser thought. In
the old Knickerbocker bar he remembers the Major,
"pretty well loaded," proclaiming him to one and all:
" the only author I have ever loved! " He had said to
him early in his connection with the Harpers : " I am go-
ing to back you for a long race, and I want you to meet
Colonel Harvey." But the Colonel, one of the partners
in the firm and later Ambassador to England, refused to
meet him. Ambassadors, it seemed, were inevitably so-
236
ciety meat and Dreiser poison. Another genteel editor,
who in his luckless days had turned him down, now hailed
him equivocally: " Well, for your sake I'm glad of your
success. Times have changed, literary standards have
lowered." So it went. He was in all these years until he
made money from An American Tragedy to be looked
upon as an outcast, almost an ogre. For one to speak
of him in the presence of conventional people, at a
dinner-party for instance, even if they were writers and
supposedly interested in our literature, was received as im-
proper; the subject was instantly changed.
In a sense it is possible to analyse the prejudice against
him. Here was a giant who had carried since childhood
scars of ostracism, for being first the child of a German
Catholic, an always unpopular settler, and then for being
one of an unforgivably poor family which had more
than once outraged the Indiana code. Fortifying scars
like these could not be becoming to anyone. A timid soul
would get deprecating; a fearless sensitive temper would
get ungracious, whenever exposed anew to the enemy.
And then besides, why should these men like him, when
without their manners and advantages, he did more ex-
actly as he pleased than they did? They had wives they
could not shake, they had jobs which kept them at their
distinguished desks, slaves to clock and calender. They
had homes in town and country which they had to report
to, every evening, every night. He on the other hand, as
he was, without office, servant or telephone, almost with-
out address, " wallowed," so it came to be said, unpun-
ished, in what? " In sex," of course ! What else? Therein
lay his frightful legend; though what women saw in him,
homely, boorish, God only knew ! He was irritating, that
was all. The exhilarating ankles, disturbing knees, the
arch of unfamiliar thighs, the eternal flicker and fire of
these, they had to catch as best they could from the front
rows of music halls; while these same delights, it was
said, walked voluntarily into the lair of this uncouth
realist. . . . More than he needed, more than he wanted,
so grew the fable. You can't blame them for being
jealous. You will have to blame the country where
morals had been honored beyond love and art, and where
237
strangeness was always suspect, and nature had become
strange. The forces of nature were to be segregated
in engines and power plants. Men were to be dena-
tured. Genius, the digit of human nature, was to be
dethroned.
238
New monuments for old
o Dreiser was a high powered car, which
women nearly always like, forced into the paradox of
running a race with the brakes on. If you ask him what
he thinks of these handicaps, his answer is that he is glad
of them: "A career needs hardship." But does it? And
how much hardship does it need? Sister Carrie had
weathered handicaps. What of its successor Jennie Ger-
hardtf The soil hostile to creation differed in the mak-
ing of it. The first novel is a figment of the cold streets
and highways, up and down which Dreiser had had to
travel often alone and hungry. The second had its start
in adversity but its completion in a more alien sediment,
that of commercial success, at the end of the period of
magazine editing. The drama came through with sym-
metry and bloom, but with a fractional loss of wildness.
It is irrefutable in its first chapters, written before his
prosperity, in its tragic moments, and in the theme of
class over individual :
" The world into which Jennie was thus duly thrust forth
was that in which virtue has always vainly struggled since
time immemorial; for virtue is the wishing well and doing
well unto others. Virtue is that quality of generosity which
offers itself willingly for another's service, and being this,
it is held by society to be nearly worthless."
And yet in the face of all the expert praise this book has
had, until it has become a near classic, I read it with the
sense that Butterick has brushed its surfaces. They are
slightly and unconsciously tamed as if to suit immature
indoor eyes and judgments, parlors and offices. To have
been excluded any longer from these precincts would have
been for this novelist to die altogether. And yet to
have been included had for the moment tempered his
239
original quality. How to be that paradox, a primal suc-
cessful artist in America? — Always the unanswered
question !
Jennie, his favorite heroine, he has called her, is the
flower of a family like his own, and seems to resemble
his mother more than any of his sisters. Her father is to
the last inflection the picture of his father, except as he
is bigoted Lutheran instead of Catholic:
" Father and grandfather before him were sturdy German
artisans, who had never cheated anyone out of a dollar, and
this honesty of intention came into his veins undiminished."
There is not in our writings a more flawless cinema of a
poor family of foreigners set down in the midst of our
freedom to get ahead a little if they can. Jennie not far
removed from German soil, removed only to the cottages
and sidewalks of immigrants fringing a strident indus-
trial city, Columbus, Ohio, is as whole a creature as
Hardy's Tess in her Devonshire. Successfully Dreiser
moves her into relation with a United States senator, who
lives in the principal hotel of the town, like a palace to
Jennie. He gives her dignified presents and caresses, be-
friends her family, and then, one night when she has gone
to ask his help to get her brother out of jail for stealing
coal, the fairy story takes a quick realistic turn. His
" senatorial quality " vanishes, her beauty and his pleas-
ure make a bridge between low life and high life more
rapid than those to be found in romances that travel to
happy endings. Dreiser sees reality in this way — drab-
ness shot with brilliants for one or another, and then
drabness again. High life moving in the sky like a bright
ball touches someone below with its fire and draws him or
her up into ease and luxury, until this very realm close-up
grows drab in turn. He is chronicler of the fierce differ-
ences in the scale of civilized society more than he is of
the subtle conflicts between different temperaments.
The story develops with broad strokes not new to melo-
drama — the sudden death of the senator, the birth of
the child, the anger and collapse of the religious father;
Jennie and her more patient mother moving the family
and baby to another city, Cleveland, to escape the talk
of their neighbors, whom, just as it would be in the raw
240
West, they scarcely knew. The son of a rich carriage-
manufacturer in Cincinnati, a guest in the house where
Jennie works as maid, takes her out of her own class into
no class, preferring her to the meager women of his
world. " There was something about her which suggested
the luxury of love." He installs her illicitly in Chicago,
where he directs a branch of the family business. She on
her side had been growing as she watched the people she
served:
" She began to get a faint suggestion of hierarchies and
powers. They were not for her perhaps, but they were in
the world, and if fortune were kind one might better one's
state. . . . [Yet] Who would have her to wife knowing her
history? . . . Her child, her child, the one transcendent
gripping theme of joy and fear. If she could only do some-
thing for it — sometime, somehow! "
So far Dreiser's handling of this melodrama in major
key changes melodrama into realism. The story unfolds
in the actual glare of these fresh-water cities. Jennie is
real. The carriage-prince is real, and their eventual idyllic
home on the Chicago South Side with its lawn and flower-
beds and shady trees, where after a while he allows the
old father and Jennie's child to live with them. Especially
to the life is this type of business man who makes anti-
social laws for himself without losing commercial effi-
ciency. Likewise his father, the solid conservative, and
his brother, the hard bloodless executive, are precisely
set down in relation to American business and to the awk-
ward human event of unmarried love. The fate of Jen-
nie, unAmerican in her devotion to the man she lives
with, breaks with logic out of the conflicting wills of
these three manufacturers, united in one aim, the car-
riage-industry. They embody the optimism and enterprise
and starkness of the towns that were being whistled into
shape on the shores of the Great Lakes in the Eighties
and Nineties. Dreiser knew and remembered the ground,
and had interviewed just such men for more than one of
his special articles about business leaders.
But somewhere here the author falls short of his ma-
terial. Whenever he takes these men into what stands
for their social fabric, among their wives and children
241
and would-be fashionable friends, he is inexperienced.
He sets down his hero, Lester Kane as :
"thirty-six years of age ... an essentially animal man,
pleasantly veneered by education and environment . . .
like the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who in his
father's day had worked on the railroad track, dug in the
mines, picked and shovelled in ditches, and carried up brick
and mortar on the endless structures of a new land . . .
strong, hairy, axiomatic, and witty."
This is specific, but besides this the Kanes were " socially
prominent " ; Lester was " raised a member of the so-
cially elect " ; Mrs. Gerald, who takes him away from
Jennie, is " the picturesque center of a group of admirers
recruited from every capital of the civilized world." She
captures him by telling him he is " too much of a social
figure to drift," and he feels that she is too much of " a
social opportunity " to refuse. The scope of the task
Dreiser has set himself is remarkable, covering the
gamut of the respectable midwestern world, as it reached
toward New York and Europe. It covers the class he
himself came from of hard-working artisans, brought
into relation with the sphere of those great homes
founded often by sons of that class — stags on the lawn,
Duchess lace and Holland shades at the windows —
which piqued him as he worked his way toward New York
in the Nineties. His plans are good, but his high-life char-
acters are imperfectly developed and even fall back on
newspaper cliches for definition.
He is right in his major premise that this super-
structure in the West, which he calls the " socially elect,"
did include the families of manufacturers of carriages,
soap, harvesting machines, bathroom fixtures, sleeping
cars, as well as dry goods merchants, wholesale grocers
and fabulous butchers. This always happened whenever
the self-made millionaire married into the Colonial tra-
dition of aristocracy. His Eastern wife then dictated a
formula more utterly refined and circumspect than per-
haps has ever been put into practice in any other land or
time. So fearful they were of being considered " typical
Westerners " that they succeeded in creating a vacuum,
which segregated them from the ungainly life that
242
swirled around them. They became humorous, never seri-
ous, decorous, never decorative. Intimacy was vulgar;
love and hate were unmentionable ; crises were improper.
Art was something to be endowed in museums or sym-
phony concerts, never to be met with in the person of the
artist. Beauty was melodramatic and belonged to the
stage and opera. " Good taste " and " a sense of humor "
were the requirements. A fear of life inconceivable to the
greedy powerful Dreiser stalked among these socially
elect, and terrified the lustier nouveau-riches who waited
outside their doors, hoping some day to qualify. They
held hideous sway over the growth of new red-blooded
cities, these elect; they paralysed the senses and froze
the spirit. But they existed. You could tell them, not by
any fine web of relations they had woven; they scarcely
touched each other physically or mentally. You could tell
them by their Things — their embroidered linen, their
antique furniture, their restrained dinner-parties, their
quiet carriages, conservative clothes, and by the thin
well-bred inflections of their voices into which almost no
vulgarity and no fire ever entered. Go to the museum in
Columbus, Ohio; you will find there the elaborate im-
ported Things of these western aristocrats. Or read the
lives of Mark Hanna or Nicholas Longworth. Sons and
daughters too sensitive for their fathers, who reverted
to human type and rebelled against this anemia of their
mothers, escaped to Europe or lost their minds. Many of
them, more than has been written, went crazy, got queer.
Apparently Dreiser did not know his material well
enough to define the irony and drama inherent in it, as he
did throughout Sister Carrie. His socially elect would
have been despised from above almost as much as they
despised the Gerhardts. The women tweak the men's ears,
use cosmetics unheard of then in the West, are pert and
familiar; and falsest of all, men and women lack face-
tiousness, what was called "a sense of humor" — that
weapon of polite society with which to kill emotions, and
ridicule a thing as vulgar as illicit love. They, like Jennie,
would have been insecure in their relation to the " socially
elect." Jennie's lonely end is real, but the Kanes' victory
without her for their class is at moments conventionally
243
designed. There are mortal agonies in the book when
death makes separations for Jennie. Five times the bell is
rung, twice fatally, when her child dies and then Lester,
who calls her back to say goodbye. It is a novel presided
over by funerals. But in the latter chapters of her defeat,
where there is neither love, nor birth nor funeral, the
hierarchy that rears itself above her lovely head is not as
real and flexible as Dreiser wished to make it. Even, he
had to resort to the society column to suggest it :
" There was a simple cottage where she lived in retire-
ment. . . . Mr. and Mrs. Lester Kane when resident in
Chicago were the occupants of a handsome mansion on the
Lakeshore Drive, where parties, balls, receptions, dinners,
were given in rapid and at times almost pyrotechnic suc-
244
Interlude: " Americans are infinitely repel-
lant particles." EMERSON
great novelists of modern times, Dos-
toevsky, Turgenieff, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Meredith,
Proust, have not been content to create their monuments
to human living without an effort to define the entire
conflicting scale from low to high materially, from ordi-
nary to rare spiritually. Was it Shakespeare who first gave
them the idea? Dreiser, isolated in America, valiantly
assumed the same problem, and tried first in Jennie Ger-
hardt to encompass it. More than that, he was, so far,
the only big intellect except for Henry James and pos-
sibly Robinson in difficult narrative poems, to have at-
tempted this synthesis. His guess at the whole scheme is
in fact a proof of intellect. It is terribly significant that
he failed in details, and that afterwards he never quite
set out to define except by implication our uppermost
classes, from the point of view of social values. And
why was it that he had to fail, just as Edgar Lee Masters
later was to try and fail? Because for some reason
fashionable people in America have never had any curi-
osity about their artists as artists. Mrs. Astor is re-
membered for having scolded her son-in-law because he
dined with so vulgar a fellow as Mark Twain. The tradi-
tion had not changed, in fact is scarcely changed today.
One wonders why. First, I suppose, the Colonists were
afraid of creative minds, much as the old Jews were; they
made images. And then as time went on American busi-
ness men, I imagine, were afraid to let writer, painter,
or musician into their houses, since dangerously they
could come around in the afternoon or even in the morn-
ing, and amuse their wives. They on the other hand had
245
to stay in their offices until six o'clock or more. It was,
in contrast to Europe, a country where men and women
never lunched together until recently, never met from
breakfast till the dinner hour. Then there was another
thing; a man with " ideas " was a menace to business. He
might be a radical, he probably was. Somehow they
trained their wives to fear an artist or poet as they would
a beggar. One reason perhaps why writers from among
them, Henry James, Henry Adams, for example, went to
Europe. There could be no one to talk to in their own
houses. And now that the floodgates were loosed, that
the lower classes were getting into print, to admit a man
of genius was all the more precarious. Probably they
wouldn't wear clean collars or have good table manners.
It was a thing not to be risked.
It was different of course, with foreign celebrities. It
would be inhospitable to exclude them. They were ac-
cepted in Europe and were distinguished, and besides they
wouldn't stay long. Even so, Europeans have had curious
impressions of American hospitality. The composer Stra-
vinsky, recently feted at lunch, dinner and cocktail hour
in Chicago, is said to have complained to a friend: " My
trip has been a failure, I am not appreciated in America.
I have met no one." She remonstrated with him : " How
can you say that, no composer has ever been lionized as
you have." — " Yes, among these nice people, metis ou
sont les cervelles? " And an English philosopher tells
how, lecturing in a fashionable women's club in a Western
city, he was given a dinner at the house of his hostess
and one of the men at the dinner began a speech of wel-
come with the facetious threat that American business
men had " quite as much sex-appeal as their distinguished
guest, even if they were not pacifists ! "
The chasms were deep in 1910 that separated " high
society " from ideas, just as they were deep that di-
vided business from art, and remain deep today except
that now class mysteries are breaking down before
the various rackets. A writer might make a fortune out
of the movie rights of a book and become a pillar of
society. A debutante might turn into a chorus girl, a
billionaire's son into a song writer, and everyone into
246
aviators or aviator's wives. The words " socially
elect " perhaps are following " Mrs. Grundy " into
antiquity.
But that is going far ahead of the story whose hero,
unknown to fashion, was one of those innocently to effect
the change. Prosperous editor though he was, his excur-
sions to Long Island house parties could not have taken
him among the Eastern equivalents of the people he
wanted to set down in Jennie Gerhardt. Or, with his rapid
eye, subtracting the arrogance of New York over the
Middle West, he would have known how to define them,
and his book would have gained in value. These comfort-
able people, for one thing, discovering themselves in the
book, would have then found him authentic, and would
have been less comfortable and more alive to realities.
As it was, a spiral of estrangement instead of a spiral of
understanding was working up through the various
classes.
Possibly this has come near to being the defeat of both
manners and art in America — the fact that the two
have been insoluble, one in the other. An anecdote about
Dreiser in 1911 illustrates the cleavage. It was Arnold
Bennett's turn to visit the great United States. Curiously
he is quoted as asking the same question asked by Locke
a few years before : " And what is your Mr. Dreiser
doing these days? " The scene was a banquet given him
by distinguished publishers and authors, most of them
socially experienced. The story was told me by Floyd
Dell, then a young Chicago critic, who had been an in-
stant admirer of Dreiser. Delighted that this English
novelist shared his enthusiasm, he listened with all his
ears. But no one seemed to know precisely what Dreiser
was doing or appeared to care, and yet the company con-
tained members of the firm of Harper, contracted at
that moment to publish three of his books. But they were
not proud of it, would not talk about him; in fact the
subject was changed. In the face of their indifference
Bennett was then said to have declared: " Dreiser is the
most significant figure among your writers. Oddly enough,
I spend most of my time asking people if they have read
Sister Carrie, and find they haven't. I always say, ' Well,
247
get it.' " There was a slight well-bred stir at such in-
sistence and at such evident disparity of opinion between
England and her lost Colony. Perhaps some of the guests
went home and thought it over. Several newspaper arti-
cles of the time quote Bennett as always with the same
obsession: "I can't read American authors in general,
they write for money. ... I like Theodore Dreiser
best. . . . Then there is another, David Graham Phil-
lips, but whenever I mention his name people shrug their
shoulders and say : ' Yes, no, I don't know — well, any-
way he is very crude.' '
The American Review dug up an article, The Future of
the American Novel which Bennett had written for the
Atlantic Monthly in 1903, but that journal had sup-
pressed it as a piece of British perversity. It was printed
now in 1912. There, he had prophesied that Norris and
Dreiser would be the forerunners of a new literature,
" big and romantic like American landscapes and for-
tunes." Balzac, he was sure, confronted with " Pitts-
burgh, the sixteen hour express between New York and
Chicago, Wall Street, Mr. Pierpont Morgan, the wheat
growing states . . . would have said, ' This country is
steeped in romance; it lies about in heaps. Give me a
pen quick, for Heaven's sake.' " At last there were
native writers who realized this for themselves, was the
burden of the article. But these words of hope had been
withheld for nine years from whatever American Bal-
zacs were languishing on the heaps of romance. And
now that Mr. Bennett had come to see for himself, he
found the number reduced to the one mysterious Dreiser,
and possibly Phillips. And it seemed that they lived in-
cognito. He must have learned, however, that Phillips
had been shot and killed not long before by a mad-
man who mistook him for another. And he managed
to discover that Harper had had the enterprise
to publish after ten years one more American can-
vas from his favorite candidate. He would get it at
once, and really he would like to meet the man. On
October 26, 1911, Major Leigh dictated a social gem
to his secretary who mailed it to the socially unelected
Hoosier:
248
" Dear Mr. Dreiser:
Mr. Arnold Bennett leaves today for Boston to stay over
there till next Monday. It has been in our minds to bring
you two gentlemen together and next week we will try to
fix it up as speedily as possible.
Mr. Duneka and Mr. Wells have both had considerable
conversation with him about you and Jennie Gerhardt,
and of course we have given him a copy of the book. It is
hoped that we may have whatever benefit there may be in
having the book praised by Mr. Bennett. Mr. Bennett is so
much in the public eye and ear at the present time, that I
suppose we would all agree aside from all other considera-
tions, that Mr. Bennett's good opinion of Jennie Gerhardt
would be desirable.
... I will immediately look up the Kansas City Journal
and see what can be done with the fine send-off they gave
Jennie that you told me about. . . ."
Very little, I suppose, could be done in the opinion of
Major Leigh with praise from Kansas, and yet Dreiser
always banked on the support of the whole United
States, in which there must be exceptions like himself,
hungry to read about life as it was. As for Arnold Ben-
nett, he would like to know him of course, but he was shy
about it under his publishers' auspices. It was evident
from the letter that they were not to meet as equals
for pleasure, but merely as a business concession. He man-
aged to evade the invitation; he could be aloof and sensi-
tive too on his side. Besides, perhaps people were right,
he did not know exactly how to get in and out of a room.
. . . Later in London, however, where he found himself
feted as an equal, Dreiser and Bennett met and enjoyed
each other.
249
". . . Then I asked again
Why Cato Braden died at fifty-one,
And Will said: ' Winston Prairie, Illinois
Killed Cato Braden.' " E. L. MASTERS
Jl stress these rifts because they appear to me
to have made half of our difficulties, and to have
been ignored by most of the experts who have at-
tempted to analyse the temper of the country. While on
the productive side business men and politicians and
crooks were always cementing their common interests
just as in other countries; on the side of enjoyment,
which is the side of life, there was no trust, no loyalty,
no cohesion between the different elements. Arnold Ben-
nett's amazement at the one fact of Dreiser's obscurity
in 1911, ten years after the publication of Sister Carrie,
is a tiny etching of the whole scheme.
The scheme differed in Europe. In England, a civiliza-
tion based on class arrogance, always there have been
aristocrats who sought to enliven their lot with people of
genius; if, that is, they could induce them to be guests.
They were curious about them, needed their wits if they
could capture them for occasions. Bennett himself, out
of the " lower middle class," after his first success was
forced into knowing everyone, was forced into being a
writer, as he tells in a burlesque called The Great Man.
Perhaps he was never completely at ease in the new circles
where his talents were taking him, but at least he had
witnessed the program of manners from peers to com-
moners, and knew them first hand. He knew also that
personal distinction, genius if possible, was the element
that welded into some kind of meaning the various parts
of society.
Take another example, D. H. Lawrence, son of a coal
250
miner, as Dreiser was son of a foreman in a woollen mill,
and Sandburg of a blacksmith, and Anderson of a house
painter. In Lady Chatterly's Lover sex seems awkward,
even inexperienced, but English manners are authentic
enough to create the illusion of society. And why? Be-
cause Lawrence found himself dragged into drawing
rooms, whether he liked it or not — a tribute to a new
poet in their great tradition of poetry. It was the same
with Hardy, and Meredith whose father was a tailor, and
today with James Joyce wherever he writes openly enough
to betray the tones of voice. Existing hierarchies are ac-
curately implicit in their novels, so that each character
has the special weave in the design ordained by the fabric.
This sophistication is even truer of French writers, the
products of a long legend which has deified the intelli-
gence as we have deified money. To the artist, whether
originally peasant, vagabond, bourgeois or aristocrat,
white, yellow or black, doors open in proportion to the
degree of talent the critics allot to him. To a genius in
fashion no important door is closed. He may exclude what
he now calls bourgeois society or run away from it, but
he is not excluded from its calculations as long as his
day of glory lasts. It is no wonder then that we feel a cool
ease of surface in the works of the French giants and in
those of smaller writers. From Proust in deliberate de-
tail, from Appollinaire involuntarily, to take two Jews,
we get a sense of the subtleties, intricacies, distances, in-
timacies, which together create that suspended, miasmic,
varied, welded state of mind — the city of Paris. Yet if
these same men had lived in New York or Chicago, being
Jews, they would have been excluded from all but Jewish
society and would have had to guess at what went on in
other leisure classes, which very possibly was almost
nothing at all. There are countless examples. To select at
random, among the projects of the sculptor Brancusi, run-
away child of Roumanian farmers, a princess was origi-
nally a subject in company with a bird, a fish, a newborn
child, a sorceress, a negress. Joseph Delteil, the son of
a woodcutter and wine-maker in the Midi, knows the
types of his country and of other countries as if by heart,
no matter what the class. He serves them like tennis balls,
251
hardly counting them — kings, heroes, peasants. Ele-
gance, an aesthetic principle, permeates classes and races.
Art penetrates in Europe to the honor of artists.
Comedians and music hall favorites are feted officially.
The negro singer, Paul Robeson, was given a lunch in the
House of Parliament; Charlie Chaplin, a child of Eng-
lish slums, was guest of honor of Briand, Foreign Min-
ister of France; while in our exciting democracy whom
does official Washington select to invite to the White
House for ice cream and tea? Explorers, inventors and
boy scouts! A good start, but a meager sense of plot; we
complicate nothing. In Europe in a measure dreams like
Dreiser's have come true — art reflecting and deepening
reality through the alembic of special temperament.
Contrastingly, " America's most powerful novelist,"
as the newspapers now call him, wrote his first and his
second and his third novel, all of his works in fact, until
after An American Tragedy, unknown to the ruling class
in the city where he lived. It was the same in Chicago
when that town produced a few years later a crop of
modern men of letters. They were known far before they
were known near. Edgar Lee Masters, much as he coveted
" luxury and refinement," being after all the son of a
country lawyer who was a friend of Lincoln and partner
of Herndon, and for all that the heroic Harriet Monroe
could do for him in Poetry, was never known among the
" socially elect " of Chicago until he got into the papers
for his cruel sonnets to his wife, and felt that he was ostra-
cized. He moved to New York where he joined as many
clubs as he could and became a recluse and a Victorian.
Meanwhile, sophisticated people in London were praising
his Spoon River Anthology as fifteen years before they
had seized upon Sister Carrie as important. And the
" great Carl Sandburg," as he has been called, Chicago's
poet, who never has deserted the city, what of him?
I think if any one of the " socially elect " had confessed
to knowing him in the days of Cornhuskers and Smoke
and Steel, they would have been suspected of leading
a double life — that is, until his biography of Lincoln
became a best seller, and he had a chance to be respectable,
had it pleased him. He had, however, the reporter's scorn
252
and the socialist's hatred of upper classes: (perhaps the
poet's hatred) and assumed a kind of burglar's disguise,
which made a formidable defence against what overtures
Chicago might have offered him.
In old countries there are walls, everywhere walls,
through which, however, beauty and genius sometimes
penetrate like radium. To escape walls emigrants have
come to these shores, only to meet barriers worse than
walls — intangible chasms which insulated even that vola-
tile element creative genius. What made the chasms?
Stupid religions? Money? Machinery? Yet money and
machinery were beautiful and new, not mouldy like old
Europe; the poor and hungry came to enjoy them. Per-
haps paradoxically it was democracy that made the
chasms ; that star they watched from the steerage as they
crossed. It was hard to say, except that there were these
barriers.
To go to the end of this decade, 1910-1920, there was
the example of a young Italian, known only to a few,
but who figured in this period of letters.* He is a symbol
of the disillusioned emigrant, and of the many moderns
who wanted to make America see how modern she is
and failed. He came with the Latin faith that a poet
would count in a new country, especially in Chicago ; and
succumbed to these chasms across which intelligence could
not jump. He was tough, but not tough enough for this
glacier, Western society, where in precise fact a poet was
held in no more favor than a " kept woman," if as much.
He screamed a challenge among the whistles and sirens
which reads like revenge for its victims. t A poem to a
young lady of the " socially elect " places a curse on
them :
..." I wrote insults,
Called you a liar for saying:
( Sex and life are two different things.'
* " Emanuel Carnevali, the black poet, the empty man, the New York
which does not exist ... I celebrate your arrival." Carlos Williams.
"... one of the two contemporary poets in America whose work at-
tained an international standard." Regis Michaud.
" He seemed sometimes to be throwing- himself at the sun." Carl
Sandburg.
f The Hurried Man.
253
... I said
( If God intervenes you will be a poet/
But God never intervened."
He went away to Italy and wrote back :
..." I arrive in the land of wine —
Wine for the soul. . . .
. . . You are young and hurried; what threatens you
That you rush so, America?
... I have feared for you
The revenge of Love, 0 America ! "
Dreiser all these years was a counterpart of his two
heroines, patient like Jennie, adventurous like Carrie. He
could not and would not run away from " that oblivion
of hurry," America, or be oblivious to it. He knew there
were doors closed to him, forbidden thresholds, for all
his appetite to understand. He would have to measure
life beyond them from the outside. Somehow he would
manage to apprehend it. Perhaps even, unlike Jennie, in
the end he would dictate to it. He was one of the older
stronger natives ready to fight intangible chasms. Sand-
burg, Masters and Anderson were others. Now and then
in company, but most often singly, they watched the
crevices deepening between art and society, and between
art and commerce, and watched the cracks filling up be-
tween society and commerce, that is, between manners
and money. What they and others have made of Ameri-
can life, on their side of the great gap, launched its most
productive period in the arts — the years between 1910
and 1925 or 1926. Almost, it seems, such writers may
have been the antecedents of a new kind of American
society. I think it is not too pompous to say that, although
they wrote to create and not to reform, each of them in
his separate way hoped fervently for change.
254
Jennie and her lovers
J.
ennie Gerhardt, published in October, 1911,
and Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, published in 1909,
head the list in these creative years. Three Lives would
in the end effect a revolution in method. Dreiser's
novel was at once producing a change of theme. It was an
immediate success in modern red-blooded America. Con-
sidering it aside from its permanent value as language,
the story had three merits as story. In newspaper lingo,
the forsaken Jennie, unlike Carrie, was made to pay for
her sins against society; that pleased everybody. Then
the presentation was called " clean "; that is, her hours
of flagrant delight with both senator and carriage-manu-
facturer are silent chapters. An advantage, since the
men could imagine them anyway, and their virtuous
wives, reading the book, would remain unenlightened.
Above all, Jennie was an ideal woman for American
business men, who had no time for romance and great
need of comfort ; she gave everything and asked nothing.
It is colossal how Dreiser has written their poetry for
them, not verses about their mothers and wives and chil-
dren, but about their secret sweethearts — the little
girls, the swell babies, news of whom was winked from
one to another. And it must have gratified them too be-
cause he drew them and their girls with the dignity of
vital organs, in true relation to the rest of the world of
human beings. He never made fun of them. With tears
in their words, the newspaper men, spokesmen for
American manhood, cheated so long of the luxuries, pro-
claimed him their writer. I believe a railroad conductor
or a brakeman, or a railroad president, had he read Jen-
me Gerhardt y would have said, " This guy [or this fellow]
255
knows his stuff." But in 1912 these valiant animals rarely
read. Returns had to come in from their understudies,
the newspaper men. They came from many cities and
states. New York, Brooklyn, Chicago, Detroit, St. Paul,
Los Angeles, Utica, Hartford, Washington, Alabama,
New Orleans, Oshkosh, Kansas, Boston, St. Louis, Pitts-
burgh, Cleveland, Kentucky, San Francisco, Indianapolis,
Baltimore — these and more received the author of Car-
rie and Jennie (but Jennie chaperoned Carrie for them)
with high praise or if by chance the reviewer was an old
maid or oldf ashioned, with traditional censure :
Chicago Record Herald: "... Jennie was sinning against
society . . . while she yet remained unspoiled in heart.
. . . Not suitable for immature readers. . . . The story
of a young woman gone wrong . . . European rather than
American. — Almost as perfect as Balzac or Flaubert."
Philadelphia Telegraph: ". . . Jennie is the type of woman
really too unselfish to be virtuous. . . ."
Evening Star, Washington: " In 10,000 years from now,
Mr. Dreiser, when the animosities of sex, mayhap, are
somewhat mollified should put out this book again. Then
we shall see what can be done for the Jennie Gerhardts."
New York Times: ". . . Panku chopped out the sun, the
moon and the rest of the universe with a sledgehammer.
. . . Both the Chinese author of the Universe and the
author of Jennie went at their jobs with about an equal
absence of false modesty, with an equal amount of courage."
Philadelphia Inquirer: ". . . Not to be mentioned in the
presence of Mrs. Grundy. We have gotten so far along that
we no longer ignore real life in literature. . . ."
Cleveland Town Topics: "Jennie Gerhardt in all except
the one essential, seemed purity itself."
Post, Covington, Kentucky: " If one were to guess the liter-
ary parentage of Theodore Dreiser, one would say . . .
Dostoevsky. . . ."
And then the warier, more expedient reviews. The now
dying moralists wrote :
New York American: "Jennie is no model for any girl
who sees life on all sides. Every girl should put a high price
upon herself; the price of the woman is the man. ... Is a
woman ever justified in smirching her womanhood, in stain-
ing her virtue, in order to help her relatives — even to save
them from starvation? This must be answered with an
iron ' NO/ . . . There are misfortunes worse than star-
vation."
256
Morning Telegram, New York: "He ought to choose a
bigger theme than the story of a kept woman."
San Francisco Chronicle: " The fact that she accepts money
from both her lovers may be taken ... as against the
heroine, but . . . she should be credited with spending
the coin on her poor relations."
These reviews are most of them naive, in that they
consider a novel as incident rather than as drama, or
style. But historically they indicate how the critics have
shifted ground since 1900. Many more in 1912 enjoy
a story of life as it is, and because of the vulgarity they
read into it; and those who denounce it already begin
to sound antiquated. It is evident that an old system
of morals is beginning to crumble, and that the iron of
Dreiser's realism was like a drill heading into the
decay.
Two writers especially loved the book for itself, both
of them men who were to count in this most lively period
of our letters. One was the young Chicago critic, Floyd
Dell, who had taken the place of Francis Hackett on the
Evening Post, that inventor of the " literary supplement."
At about this time Floyd Dell had almost lost his job be-
cause someone had told the publisher there was a drawing
of himself and his wife in the nude on the walls of their
flat; and soon after he did lose it for a review which be-
gan, " Have a cocktail ! No. . . ." But the No was neg-
ligible ; in those days a family paper should not mention
cocktails even to disparage them. Jennie Gerhardt was
for him promise of a heaven of our own, not English, not
French, not Russian. He was one of those who wanted to
make the country a land of the free and brave in spite of
graveyards and academies, and did do his share until re-
cently, when life in capitalist America appears to have
made him reactionary. In 1911 he wrote in his literary
review :
"W. B. Yeats has put the case against professors and
manuals of literature ... in the current Forum: ' They
come between a man and literature,' he says, ' substituting
arguments and hesitations for the excitement at the first
reading of the great poets which should be a sort of violent,
imaginative puberty.' '
And of Jennie Gerhardt, he wrote :
257
" The melting mood ... the sign of great art, is what this
book continually evokes in the reader. . . . Dreiser writes
of meetings and partings, festivities and funerals, as though
no one had ever written of them before. The life of Lester
and Jennie together is as familiar as a sunset, and as per-
petually interesting. He sees everything eagerly, clearly,
without prejudice."
The other is H. L. Mencken, German-American cham-
pion of a native speech, sophisticated and free. And yet
for Mencken it must be authoritative speech : That is, free
speech must be the orthodox ritual for a land of the free.
For a number of years he was to be an advisor, almost a
confessor to Dreiser, the most adventurous and authentic
writer he could find to champion. He wrote what would
make a small book in unreserved praise of Jennie Ger-
hardt publishing it in various journals and newspapers,
The Smart Set, The Free Lance, The Baltimore Evening
Sun, The Los Angeles Times. Here is an abridgment
of it:
" If you miss reading Jennie Gerhardt . . . you will miss
the best American novel that has reached the book counters
in a dozen years. On second thought change ' a dozen ' into
' twenty-five.' On third thought, strike out everything after
counters. On fourth thought, strike out everything after
novel. ... I am firmly convinced that Jennie Gerhardt
is the best American novel I have ever read with the lone-
some but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn . . .
[which is] not a boy's story, not a comic story, but a mer-
ciless picture of the decay and break-up of a civilization.
... A canto in the epic of the Old South. . . .
". . . Once again Dreiser's heroine is a woman whose
gentleness is her undoing. Once again he is in the midst of a
tragedy whose moral it is that all the stock morals are
untrue. Once again he sets forth like Conrad and Moore
and the great Russians, the eternal meaninglessness of
life. . . .
" The thing is done with superb assurance. . . . Not
one eyelash is out of place. . . ."
This was a time, and Dreiser and Mencken prime fac-
tors in it, bent on a new discovery of America, the chance
of intellectual exchange, the event of ideas circulating
from one to another. In the preceding century, intellect
was a provincial thing fermenting chiefly in New Eng-
land. Or else, when rebellious, it was a terribly lonely
258
thing, which doomed Poe to death, and Whitman and
Thoreau, and Dickinson, to hermitages, and Melville to
silence. Now rebellious thought was beginning to be a
game and a pastime. It would have its censors, its um-
pires, its champions. Marriages of minds were giving
birth to an intelligentsia. Mencken appointed himself one
of its guardians in all three capacities, champion, umpire
and censor. This story is incomplete without attempting
his portrait.
259
" The volume will be a slaughter house.
Positively no guilty man will escape . . .
/ shall even denounce myself."
H. L. MENCKEN
"y temperament more than by immediate
birth, Mencken was a child of the German stream that
had flowed toward America to commit a Protestant para-
dox — enforce freedom. The country, initially settled
by perhaps the worst of the English and the best of the
Germans and Dutch, and always a sprinkling of master
Swiss minds, had long ago pushed the Indians on to
their reservations and pueblos, the French into New
Orleans, Detroit and Canada, the Spaniards into South-
western deserts too hot and strange for northern races.
Into this initial mould had flowed and overflowed more
English and Germans, and then Irish, Italians, Scandina-
vians, Jews, Balkans, Orientals. All of them were still
trying to fight it out and become a race. Mencken was
the first to assume the care of their common language,
American.
Bill Nye distinguishes George Washington as the only
one of our great men rich enough to support a French
nurse in his youth. Mencken appears to be the one writer of
his day with the luxury of a pedigree, which, however,
being German, has not afforded him its proper prestige.
His grandfather came to the United States in 1848 and
settled in Baltimore. Back of him was a Saxon-Friesian
family of merchants and scholars, some of whom de-
lighted in agnosticism and music — faithfully traced by
his biographer to the i6th century.* In the I7th century
Otto Mencken, professor of ethics at Leipzig, founded
the first learned German review, Acta Eruditorum with
* The Man Mencken by Isaac Goldberg.
260
which to attack the pedantry of the day. His son Johann
was famous for a satire, De Charlataneria Eruditorum,
an exposure of sham and fraud.* The portrait of Otto
has the sceptical sensitive mouth of H. L. Mencken, and
Johann wrote a phrase in his book characteristic of his
American nephew of three centuries later : " So great,
oh listeners, is the power of impudence, even in serious
matters." Add to this inheritance an ancestral aunt who
was the mother of Bismarck,* and you will find Mencken
is an amazingly logical scion of his family, with his two
contradictory passions, liberty and order, freedom and
authority. Into the bargain he is a verbal buffoon, a genius
for joke and paradox. The result has been our first scho-
lastic statesman of masculine proportions, our first modern
encyclopaedist, an American Diderot, though more cau-
tious and less voluptuous than that I7th century French-
man. Beginning with Mencken, American letters began to
be noticed by men and to be feared by women's clubs and
neuters. He brought literature into the field of action. In
America that was to bring it shorn of some of its rightful
subtleties.
To meet him professionally in the cause of letters was
at first like meeting a busy politician with no time for
frivolous exchange, his face a round mask, decorous, un-
revealing, voice cold, manner formidable. But, which was
engaging, at first flicker of something indiscreet, divert-
ing or essential, his eyes, locked behind the mask, seemed
to turn a kind of somersault, and were green and alive,
and his voice took on timbre. Beneath the politician you
saw then the buffoon and the crusader — buffoon for sake
of enjoyment, but diplomat for the sake of a cause. His
enemies are the well-known puritan and bourgeois, the
last known now as Babbitt: "As you say yourself," he
writes to Dreiser, " it is quite impossible to trust any
American. Scratch him and you will find a puritan." And
he calls them names enough, moralists, uplift ers, Peck-
sniffians, Comstockians, virtuosi of virtue, donkeys, ver-
min, degraded swine: " Let them squeal. We can stand
the noise if they can stand what's coming to them." But to
satisfy his need of authority the enemy may be also the
* The Man Mencken by Isaac Goldberg.
26l
extreme aesthete when he is free and rebellious. He dis-
trusts anarchical poets; and beauty where it is dangerous
to reason ; he distrusts madness. " Poetry lies," he has writ-
ten repeatedly. For beauty he resorts to classical music.
Most of all, and paradoxically, he distrusts sex. Talking
recently about Dreiser he called him opprobriously a
" professional sexologist " : " The importance of sex is
much over-rated. If all the women were shot at five today
the men would go on just about the same." Yet there was
a question mark in the statement which allowed me to sug-
gest: " Well, perhaps, in a country where really there are
no women, just wives and secretaries ! " He had not
thought of that. He had not, it seemed, thought of women
or of artists to the extent of their powers. Was it that he
was determined to function as critic in a society hostile to
sex and art, and so for years had drawn arbitrary lines ?
Perhaps his gift of writing would have gained in sub-
tlety, had his grandfather never emigrated. To champion
the cause he loved was to fight the moralists, loud and in-
cessantly. His diatribes in spite of brilliance have caught
from the enemy the moral voice of the scold and the elder.
Yet sometimes, as in his great work The American Lan-
guage it is modulated — a voice of learning and relish.
And his letters to friends, to judge by those I have been
privileged to read, unite judgment with ribaldry, and
create speech enviable as a freshet. That Mencken's pub-
lished writings have not the spontaneity and depth that
belong to him, indicates our tragedy — a background of
separations and irrelations disjointed almost beyond hope,
even today. They have prohibited except in a few rare
cases — Whitman and Dreiser sometimes are two of
them — the artlessness without which art is pompous.
This American figure, a deliberate instrument of
change for fifteen years, as it happened, became a close
ally of Dreiser's, just as Arthur Henry had once been.
Only where the more feminine Henry was concerned with
the intimate task of his writing as art, Mencken pro-
claimed him to the public, and exhorted him to fight to be
a public character. The spirit of the day was with him;
publicity counted more than intimacy.
Isaac Goldberg prints in his Mencken biography Drei-
262
ser's earliest impression of him. In the summer of 1908
Mencken had come to the office of The Delineator about
some articles on the care of children he had written with
a Dr. Hirschberg of Baltimore :
"... a taut, ruddy, blue-eyed, snub-nosed youth . . .
yellow shoes and bright tie ... enormously intriguing and
amusing . . . reminding me of nothing so much as a rich
brewer's son. . . . With the sang-froid of a Caesar or a
Napoleon he made himself comfortable in an almost arch-
episcopal chair, designed ... to reduce the over confi-
dence of the average beginner. . . . From that . . . unin-
tended vantage point he beamed on me with the confidence
of a smirking fox about to devour a chicken. So I was the
editor of the Butterick publications. * He had been told
about me/ "
What he had been told was especially the fact of Sister
Carrie, which his friend, George Bronson Howard, had
given him to read in Baltimore in 1902, when they were
both in their early twenties. He had treasured it ever
since, and laughed to find its author editor of The De-
lineator. Dreiser perhaps on the defensive laughed back :
" ' Well, well,' I said, ' if it isn't Anheuser's own brightest
boy out to see the town.' " Having thus in true American
fashion exchanged insults, they could proceed at once to
being friends, forgetting the original purpose of the visit
in a riotous exchange of ideas and prejudices. (Mark
Twain describes these required preliminaries exquisitely
in Tom Sawyer; Tom and a new village boy must first
knock each other down before there can be friendship.)
" From then on," Dreiser says, " I counted him among
them whom I most prize ... he visited me in New
York and I in turn, repaired to Baltimore. We multiplied
noisy and roystering parties. . . ." Some months later he
recommended him to Fred Splint, a new editor of Smart
Set, previously one of his sub-editors, who had come to
ask for advice as to policy and style. Dreiser suggested
that " as intriguing as anything else would be a book de-
partment, with a really brilliant and illuminating re-
viewer " — in fact, Mencken. So in a sense was launched
a critic who for many years would be dominant in form-
ing American opinion.
Although Mencken likes to disown it, being today
263
estranged from Dreiser, at this period he worked like
the trainer of a champion for him. Jennie Gerhardt had
convinced him. Dreiser had sent it to him a month or two
before it was published, as also he had sent it to other
friends for their expert judgments, perhaps not wishing
to run the risk again of suppression. He had had various
advices. He sent it to his wife, who gave amusing advice :
" . . . I also cut several dozen ' Jennie was charming,'
and ' Lester was a big man in his way.' You won't mind
if I laugh a little, will you? The book is so much bigger
than these little things. ..." A Delineator contribu-
tor, Vera Simonson, who gave illustrated lectures on
Africa, " never knew that men made such sudden bold
proposals to women." However she resigns herself: " I
had rather the theme would have been a more pleasant
one, but life of today breathes sex. We've got to accept
the truth. . . . " C. B. Decamp wants him to dispense
with the funeral scene; it is too " gloomy." James Hune-
ker calls it " a big book eloquent in its humanity " ; it
made him " happy because it attempted to prove noth-
ing." But his style is still too "literary"; his "fashion-
able women are not well realized " ; and he begs him
to cut out the epilogue that follows his " superb ending
on what musicians would call a suspended harmony " :
" I take off my hat to you, Theodore Dreiser ! That
funeral scene and the last few paragraphs . . . are
those of a master. Don't spoil [it] for the sake of mor-
alizing." This last advice Dreiser took. These and other
varying advices are almost antiques, even the astute ver-
dict of Huneker, in their leisure and seriousness. Today
there is such haste to publish that I doubt if even the
publisher, and rarely the writer, has time to read each
word of the book before it is executed in print.
So these different friends had their reservations, but
Mencken, except for noting a few technical errors, had
none. He writes :
"... it is probable that more than one reviewer will object
to its length . . . detail . . . painstaking — but rest as-
sured that Heinrich Ludwig von Mencken will not be in the
gang. ... I get a powerful effect of reality, stark and
unashamed. It is drab and gloomy but so is the struggle
264
for existence. It is without humor but so are the jests of
that great comedian who shoots at our heels and makes us
do our grotesque dancing.
... If anyone urges you to cut down the book bid that
one be damned. And if anyone urges that it is over-gloomy
call the police. ... It is at once an accurate picture of life
and a searching criticism of life . . . my definition of a
good novel.
. . . David Phillips might have done such a good story,
had he lived, but his best . . . The Hungry Heart, goes to
pieces beside ' Jennie/ "
Mencken was right; Phillips never equaled Dreiser
in calibre, nor perhaps could have. He was a hope be-
cause he talked candidly of sex, a virtue in itself twenty
years ago to the impatient few like Mencken. But his
romantic heroines, who had to be rewarded, blinded him
to irony. When Sinclair Lewis appeared ten years later,
he suffered from the same bias, though with him it was
he, Lewis, for whom life must somehow be agreeable, if
not in Minnesota, then in England perhaps or in Italy.
The result, though not exactly romantic, is not irony
in the grave sense of the word; it is sarcasm. What
Mencken felt in Dreiser, underlying the unmoral tone,
was what Cezanne has called the dark line — and
Mencken, too, by coincidence * — the line of doom which
can relate the merest lyric or brush mark, or can relate
diffuseness like Dreiser's to inevitable equations. For
Mencken he " stems directly . . . not from Zola, Flau-
bert . . . but from the Greeks. ... A motto to his
books . . . might be : * Oh ye deathward going tribes of
men, what do your lives mean except that they go to noth-
ingness.' " In Jennie Gerhardt he finds " a primitive and
touching poetry." In fact, perhaps he comes about as near
to poetry as he permits himself to travel when he grazes
this dark line in Dreiser, which, he says, reveals " the
life of man, not as a simple theorem in Calvinism, but
as a vast adventure, an enchantment, a mystery." This
fellow German-American excited Mencken's emotions.
For him as for Conrad and Nietzsche, he abandoned pru-
dence. He suggested him in terms of his favorite ances-
tral art — music: " After the Fifth Symphony or any of
* A Book of Prefaces: H. L. Mencken.
265
the Nine ... it is not easy to listen to a Chopin noc-
turne, and after Mr. Dreiser's story, by the same token,
you will not find it easy to read the common novels of the
month." So started an allegiance of one mind to another
which it would take some years to defeat.
266
A Traveler at Forty:
" I accept now no creeds. I do not know
what truth is, what beauty is, what love is,
what hope is." DREISER
JS reiser is not a modern but a belated Vic-
torian " was the idea of an English reviewer of 1911,
thus varying the verdict of that day. u No doubt," he adds
" this is due to his nationality ... he is dealing with a
society that is at least thirty years behind Europe." It hap-
pens that once I heard him say the same thing of himself
throwing the emphasis differently, and in company with
an idea startling enough to stay with me. It was late
afternoon some time in 1918 on a walk along the Hudson.
The sun was over-brimming the river with light as it
might have done for the first Hollanders on the after-
noon of their invasion. The Hudson had the look it
knows how to wear of being a gateway to new amazing
victories. Dreiser in the face of it said dryly: " This turn
of the century — you know I believe it's the end of some-
thing not the beginning of anything."
It seemed to me perverse of him or old-fashioned.
Wasn't it after all a period of ferment in our culture,
a birth of new elements, a revival of old? For four
years the war had thrown talented Europeans our way
who preferred not to fight, or were sent on missions.
New York shimmered with different and eager eyes.
There was as yet no prohibition to flatten and dull our
features beyond recognition. The war was a ghastly but
exciting fact across the seas, in the face of which it was
dangerous but daring to maintain an unbiased intellect.
The daring counted. People cared. The war was a heart-
rending nightmare, but to one like myself not visited by
267
personal deaths, it did not seem like a catastrophe that
would mean unhealing wounds for years to come, it might
be for the rest of any of our lives. Instead perhaps the
war would be more like a storm, which when spent would
bring brighter skies. The anemic Christian formula for
one thing might be going out in death, leaving survivors
with a degree of actinic life not acknowledged in ages. I
said something of this to Dreiser, naming new American
poets and new enterprises, live forms and live ideas of
our own — a revival in which certainly he was a factor.
And in France modern art played like a fountain, like
fireworks for the dead from the living — " Ancient pre-
Christian principles and new shapes ! " I said.
" Well, perhaps, but I don't see it that way " was his
answer. " Whatever we have came out of the last century,
and it's about over. We're the tag-end of it, the grand
finale. Look at it any way you like, who are the new giants
in art or science or philosophy? Rodin, Anatole France,
Einstein, Freud — the end of a long line of giants, not
the beginning. And who else? " — More glib in art than
in science I gave a list, Matisse, Picasso, Cocteau, Stra-
vinsky, Satie, Brancusi, Diaghileff, and a number of
others were high-geared, and they were moderns. Life
would be newer and more brilliant because of them. —
" Well, if they're any good," was his rejoinder, " they
belong to the past. What's more I believe the big radicals
came too soon for their time. We're in for a reaction. A
few more years and an idea outside of business won't get
a show anywhere."
So much for this belated Victorian, who in 1911 went
to Europe for the first time. Today the fact of his going
brings to mind our conversation of five years later, and
is evidence on his side of the argument. In 1911 for this
self-made intellectual to go to Europe for the first time
was as distinct an event in his life as for Columbus to sail
to America or Lindbergh to fly to Paris. Today it might
be an event for a European to cross to the United States
to study for himself our contagious code of money-making
as the sole index of power. Or an event for any philoso-
pher to visit Soviet Russia and study its proposed tyranny
of brotherly love. But it is not any more a like event for
268
an American of like calibre to go to Europe. Twenty
years have made that difference. An intellectual epoch has
ended. It is doubtful that another has begun. Today an
American writes or paints as a matter of course from
Paris. Unknown to the French it is his aesthetic suburb,
where he can live in what is left of the demoded modern-
ism of the past. Twenty years ago Europe was the fron-
tier and the background of thought, without knowledge
of which a man remained the boob that an American was
supposed to be and still may be for aught I know. Today
the new epoch is dropping Europe from curriculums as
the old dropped Latin and Greek.
Dreiser owed his adventure to an English friend and
would-be publisher, Grant Richards. After Heinemann's
success with Sister Carrie and Norris's praise he had
sought him out in New York. " I knew no American
whose friendship I enjoyed more . . . for the five years
it lasted," Richards said. Perhaps it delighted him to
know a prodigy from the people scorned by our polite
society, which in turn used to be scorned by Englishmen
as a mere imitation of their own. Anyway the English
have never stopped discovering America, while we have
chiefly discovered other things, not often ourselves.
Dreiser wrote of Richards : " I have always liked him.
. . . He wears a monocle in his right eye and I like him
for that. . . ." One morning in the month of the debut
of Jennie Gerhardt, this personage appeared for break-
fast, and proposed England, the Riviera, Rome and
Paris, and a book of notes to be published on his return.
Dreiser's answer was, " If it can be arranged." Richards
arranged it with an advance on the travel book from the
Century Company. With Mencken at home as it happened
as a willing custodian to send him clippings and proclaim
him to his public, with the urbane Richards to tell him
what to wear, where to tip and what and whom to see, in
November 1911 the author of Carrie and Jennie set sail
for the headquarters of western imagination — Europe.
To Baldwin Macy, interviewing for the Chicago Eve-
ning Post, he gave his reasons for going. He wanted to
know the cities where the Financier, the hero of his next
novel, a trilogy, would be going. And then he had an idea
269
about America as the coming world-power, and yet he
had his doubts. He was going to see for himself "how
we rank in our chances for the future among the rest of
the nations." Here he was in truth at forty a belated
titan, inquirer more than cynic, and a true American —
world-power a personal dream. He writes of himself at
this moment: " I accept now no creeds. I do not know
what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is."
And yet he sailed to observe and discover Europe. He
sailed looking for creeds, truth, beauty, love and hope.
He belonged with the giants of the past who were one
after another arriving after long travail at the same im-
passe : in a hypothetical universe there can be no ultimate
answer. But he had not joined with immediate posterity
which was soon to say: " Then why bother to ask any
questions?" He sailed to Europe looking for questions
and answers.
And then besides he sailed for fun: ". . . a host of
gulls — an air of delicious adventure ... at the foot
of Thirteenth Street. Did ever a boy thrill over a ship as
I over this monster of the seas? " There were two ac-
tresses, friends of Richards, who gave them their per-
fumed time; one sang coon songs with him; there were
the machinery and the stokers of the Mauretania por-
tentous to him; and in the nocturnal " all's well " from
the crow's nest " an echo of old journeys and old seas
when life was not safe " ; and when they landed in Fish-
guard, gulls again, " their little feet coral red, their beaks
jade grey, their bodies snowy white or sober grey, wheel-
ing and crying — * My heart remembers how.' " He was
a traveler at forty hard to define — a cold realist, a
somber mystic, or at times as high-keyed as a nigger with
a watermelon or a diamond or a bar of jazz.*
Grant Richards was in his way quite as belated. He
liked to believe in genius as well as money. In an inter-
view I asked him how he had come to take Dreiser to
Europe : " I liked him, I suppose, and valued him. He
was an American who would be remembered after his
death. Why not give him a chance while he was living. I
knew that friends of mine would be interested to meet
* A Traveler at Forty.
270
him." — " And you didn't think of him as socially crude
or inexperienced the way New Yorkers did? " I was im-
pelled to ask in pursuit of one of the themes this book was
bringing me. — "Why should I?" he answered with
logical surprise. " A man is interesting or he isn't. Dreiser
was delightful, a great man, an original."
So here he was admitted, not excluded, for the first
time, where he imagined he belonged, among people who
valued social relations. Here from November until April
he would be enjoying life, making notes with the lust pe-
culiar to him, untroubled, perhaps stimulated, by the
thought of the thousands who had been over the ground
before him. Whether it was an English drawing room or
village or prostitute, a painting by Degas or Picasso, a
cathedral, the casino at Monte Carlo, a cafe, a castle,
the pope, a cocotte, a new friend or ancient background,
he sought to define it as he did Niagara Falls — a pris-
tine experience. It is a time to leave him pondering the
distinctions between European nations, and between all
of Europe and America, to review the literary scene into
which he had entered as a wedge signifying change.
271
" He proposed the religion of World's
Fairs. The chaos of education approached
a dream" HENRY ADAMS
V V hat were some of the other symptoms
of change and birth? Chief among them was the fact
that education was coming to an exotic crisis, the germs
of which dated back some years and figure in previous
pages of this book. " Be native " was beginning to be
written in people's minds, but " be native exotically "
was a concurrent demand. Now that that fondling, par-
entage undefined, the American language, had surely
drifted out of the streets and offices and railways and
riverways and music halls into its own idiom, own ca-
dences, diction and spelling; now that a number of writers
from Whitman to Dreiser were lending the creature their
names; and that Mencken and others would soon grow
learned over it; this young language turned about im-
patiently. Used now to convey what culture we had, our
speech grew suddenly conscious of our lack of literate
and aesthetic experience. At last a real minority, more
than a handful, became dissatisfied. We looked jealously
toward Europe again, and Europe met us with exports,
especially if we would pay for them.
But now the escape was no longer to England or Ger-
many or Scandinavia. Matthew Arnold and Pater and
Swinburne were scrapped. Opinion turned away from
Ibsen; too moral and fog-bound. And away from Wag-
ner; too heavy and Teutonic. Everything a-Nordic was
coming into fashion, Gaelic, Iberian, Latin, Gallic, and
Slavic. And French culture was forwarding applicants
to the near and far East, Africa and South America,
especially to the art of primitive peoples, even back to
272
American Redskins. What Kipling had called heathen
was growing sacred now. So while the business man ad-
vanced creating our relentless destiny, the intelligentsia
was undergoing a foreign transfusion. As many races con-
tributed to our culture as to our population. People's
minds got dressed in these importations. They wore them
like charms and amulets as if to be cured forever of their
past. A violent phase began of that difficulty from which
we have suffered — our sense of inferiority contradicting
our independence. Costumes kept arriving at our ports,
causing countless costume parties. Were they ever grafted
into our habits of living, and become more than mental
trinkets? Henry Adams asked himself this question,
when he visited the Chicago World's Fair of 1893:
" Was it real or only apparent? One's personal universe
hung on the answer ... if the rupture was real and the
new American world could take this sharp and conscious
twist. . . ." But his friends who made the Fair, Hunt and
Richardson, La Farge and St. Gaudens, Burnham,
McKim and Stanford White " talked as though they
worked only for themselves, as though art to the western
people was a stage decoration; a diamond shirt-stud; a
paper collar." Today it is as difficult to know if it is real;
though easy to say, " Not yet perceptibly, but perhaps."
There would at least be one profit to this fever to be
foreign — the country's treasures from all over the
earth, stored in private and public collections. The in-
dustrial billionaire was doing his contradictory part to
perpetuate the memory of civilizations he was busy de-
stroying. Foreigners coming with their wares to a mar-
ket not yet closed to them were lending us vitality. Na-
tives were giving their strength in behalf of old splendors
and of new ones soon to be old. What dividends have
come of this, or will come, let other accountants compute.
Although it was as much his idea to define our own
present and future as to travel elsewhere, one of the im-
porters in this period was Henry Adams. The grandson
of the president who died heart-broken to see Washing-
ton's paternal program fail, Adams was educated from
childhood to feel the vague failure of New England as
the cradle of a nation. Born in the shadow of the Boston
273
State House yet he never felt that he belonged there, but
rather with his grandmother and her Louis Seize chairs
and 1 8th century house in Quincy. Nor as the son of
an ambassador to England, where he was for a time a iQth
century European, did he feel that he belonged there.
Always he was in search of polarization. Finally at
sixty he made two books, a kind of hammock between
;i Thirteenth Century Unity " and " Twentieth Century
Multiplicity." And it happened that these volumes printed
privately in 1904 and 1905, radiated beyond the 100
friends to whom he sent them, and, before they were
printed publicly, had turned a sensitive minority into being
world-wise. They gave Americans, if they cared to take it,
at last a related point of view:
". . . as the unit by which to measure motion down to
his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue
except relation . . . [Adams] began a volume which he
mentally knew as Saint-Michel and Chartres. . . . From
that point he proposed to fix a position for himself which
he could label The Education of Henry Adams. . . . With
the help of these two points of relation he hoped to project
his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to cor-
rection from anyone who should know better."
Had his readers followed him forward they would
have found close predictions as to the war of 1914, the
crash of 1929, and the " new social mind of today." But
rather than an appetite for the future presided over by
the machine, whose headquarters would be the United
States, they caught from him a nostalgia for the past
presided over by the Virgin, identified with Venus, whose
headquarters were France. He gave the gist of Catholic
Mediterranean Europe, whose centuries had perpetuated
the gist of Pagan Antiquity in a threefold Latin Culture
— the Virgin behind screen of chastity secretly inspiring
the rites of ancient goddesses. And this he gave in terms
of America, and America in terms of Europe.
Then there was another pagan yeast, likewise presided
over by the Virgin. It came from the south of Ireland,
brought by Yeats and Lady Gregory and the players of
the Abbey Theatre. They assisted at a miracle of birth
here. They gave an impulse to a choral of poets who com-
bined like birds in the early morning to startle a people
274
who thought that poetry had been dropped in favor of
the machine forever. Celtic wit had long run in our blood
and exploded in laughter; it made part of limber, racy,
coarse American. But Gaelic music and imagery had been
left behind or confiscated when the emigrant landed. Now
spoken by Yeats and these players in 1911, if they did not
enter our common speech, the germ of them operated
esoterically in the birth of poetry about to occur. Yeats
said that a poem was " passionate speech/' not a literary
ornament; poetry was idiom violent with emotion; " the
muses love violence."
In this year 1911 the hopeful and somewhat fragile
Harriet Monroe went unashamed from door to door of
bankers and packers and public-utility magnates, para-
phrasing the words of Yeats. Poetry, she told them, was
as real and vital a force as industry; Chicago was as in-
stinct with poets as any other city, if only there might be
the money to buy their wares. Perhaps they did not be-
lieve her, though some of them wrote verse secretly. But
flattered to see Chicago in this new light, flattered to be
valued instead of sneered by a high-brow, they gave her
a little of their money and then, I suppose, turned to their
next deal, and then a highball and a blonde at the College
Inn, perchance. The Poetry Magazine printed its first
number in November 1912.
I think Miss Monroe was as brave as Joan of Arc and
almost as successful. Poets sprang into action over night,
natives, exiles and strangers. The Chicago post office be-
came a station through which traveled the verse of many
peoples. Hindoo and Chinese appeared translated in her
pages, deepening the sense of Eastern forms which years
before Lafcadio Hearn and Yoni Noguchi had proposed
to us. The lowan Ezra Pound, self-deported to London,
was foreign editor, sending her paraphrases from the
Chinese, old French and Italian, and with them much
scornful advice as to how to wake Americans up from
their long provincial sleep. When she sometimes returned
them to him as insulting to the noble bankers who had
listened to her prayer, he dissented, and from across the
sea launched an independent aggressive campaign; as
indignant a critic as Mencken and a hundred times more
275
exacting. He did his best to ram up-to-date culture down
domestic throats and even introduced modernism into
England. Yeats admits to revising his poems, making
them less " poetic " at Pound's suggestion. The great
Bostonian, Amy Lowell, untiring prosodist, connoisseur
and salesman, joined both camps and spread the propa-
ganda of free verse and imagism on the French plan
and the Japanese. Transfusion flourished in the art of
verse. Under its sway two overlapping methods emerged,
one free and native, informal and tough like American
life; the other precious, even snobbish, bent on refining
the technique of verse, however alien to our shiftless talk
and manners. And true to native precedent new chasms
appeared to separate these new poets.
There were other importers. Alfred Stieglitz, a Jew
born in New Jersey, with the fervor of his race for re-
ligion and propaganda had a dream of converting New
York, perhaps the whole country to Art. He believed
apparently that if he could effect a mystic union between
Art and the Camera, then Art would get a passport
into the machine age. He brought to this faith a mastery
of the camera and a flair for the work of the great mod-
erns in Europe at a time when few other Americans had
the eye to see them. In 1905 with Edward Steichen he
established a gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, Photo-Seces-
sion, and a journal called Camera Work. " 291 " came to
be thought of as a temple, and Stieglitz a high priest, a
god, just as later Georgia O'Keefe, his favorite painter,
became a goddess, to some of the devotees. One of them,
Waldo Frank, composed a rhapsody to 291 : *
" 291 is a religious fact ... an altar where ... no lie
or compromise could live. . . . New York was a lying and
destroying storm; 291 was a candle that did not go out,
since it alone was truth."
Frank believed too that 291 was a kind of high-class
factory for painters, a group " more brilliant, self-
conscious, hardy, radical than any on earth," he calls
them.* An exaggeration of which two retrospective ex-
hibitions, European and American, in the fall of 1930
were proof. But these same shows testified to the exotic
* Our America: Waldo Frank.
virus to which artists had succumbed in the last genera-
tion. And Stieglitz was one of those to administer it not
only to his own small sect but to an uncounted clientele
throughout the country. Perhaps the infection took more
crucially among writers than painters. Carlos Williams,
Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, I imagine, would
pay their tribute to this brilliant teacher as having in-
directly deepened their education. He was a voice in the
wilderness preceding the famous Armory exhibition, of
1915, after which the United States was inculcated with
modern art.
First Rodin back in 1905, then Cezanne, VanGogh,
Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Bracques, Derain, Pascin,
Brancusi, Modigliani, Leger, Duchamps, Picabia — all
of the innovators, realists and surrealists — were
preached by turns at 291. Their fame spread and with
it the fame of some of the writers and musicians who in
that most conscious of centers, Paris, were collaborators
with the painters toward an art that would match the
new age, and its fabulous discoveries in science and
machinery. Appolinaire, Cocteau, Jacob, Cendras, Satie,
Stravinsky, Milhaud, would as the years went on become
vague terms in New York.
o
In 1909 Gertrude Stein, a Jewess born in Alleghany,
Pennsylvania, brought up to the age of five in Paris and
Vienna, and then in California, had published a volume
of three stories, Three Lives, a sheerly original work in
which one could detect no foreign influence. At Radcliffe
she had been a favorite student of William James, with
the wish to become a psychologist. Her excursions among
states of mind carried her into incursions into language.
Three Lives, the stories of three servant girls in terms of
their hidden minds, initiated a method of writing as new
and real as Dreiser's themes were real and startling.
Later she became a part of the education of Sherwood
Anderson and later still of Ernest Hemingway and of no
one knows how many others. She went with this small
volume literally into the language. Had she been content
to stay there we might have had an essential novelist
defining the conflicts of states of mind as revealed
by American speech. But soon she followed the line
277
of exiles to Paris, where under the influence of Picasso
she came to use words disassociated from ideas as if they
were paint. She set a style of writing exotic to letters,
which sought to give the color and tone of thought rather
than the thought itself. In this way she has produced some
alluring poems, and perhaps has liberated her own soul.
But I think that so far she has enslaved the minds of her
many disciples in a blind attempt to emulate her, and
has helped to stunt the growth of our articulate talent.
In 1925 however, toward the end of this fruitful era of
letters, she published The Making of Americans, in lan-
guage open to all, an epic which ought to be required in
courses of American literature.
In these years too translations from the Russian,
Tchekov and Dosteovsky, for example, were set up like
altars to an alien divinity: Tragedy.* " America has al-
ways taken tragedy lightly," according to Henry Adams.
And Frost in his malicious way has scanned the thought
" — How are we to write — The Russian novel in
America — As long as life goes so unterribly? " Had he
said, " is supposed to go," Dreiser could have told him it
was next to impossible. Soon, as a bright accompaniment
to sorrow, the Russian ballet, Pavlova, Nijinsky and the
Moscow Art Theatre and Opera and the Habima Players
would come and play their ultra violet rays upon us. And
American drab greens and browns would try to get dyed,
quite ineptly, with the spectrum of Southeastern Europe.
People who had never danced or noticed tragedy would
buy vermilion, tyrian and turquoise scarfs and flirt with
flexibility and intensity. At this time too the mysticism of
Maeterlinck, in the whole tone scale of Debussy, and the
musical innovations of Satie, Stravinsky, Ravel, Milhaud
and the other five of Les Six surprised the ears of the
United states.
Then there was another seduction nearest home out of
the Negroes by the Jews — ragtime, syncopation, and
toward the end of the decade, jazz! The Castles were
* Macmillan published the translations of Constance Garnett: The
Brothers Karamazoff, 1912, Crime and Punishment, 19145 House of the
Dead., 1915, The Idiot, 1913, Possessed, 1914) R<*™ Youth, 1916,
White Nights, 1918.
278
teaching the debutantes to dance as only the half world
had danced before. French dressmakers were teaching the
girls to dress as only their half world dressed in Paris.
Cocktails were teaching them to talk and carry on far
away from the sacred institution, Home. " Out " * was
suddenly " wonderful " to all the young and some of the
elders of this moral land. Here perhaps would be the one
real fusion of exotic and native. An intimation of sex
was finally claiming the young as its subjects. On this one
frivolous plane, intricate technique, grew angular flowers,
not deeply rooted, but rooted, in American soil — So-
phistication of shoulders, wrists, ankles, buttocks, of
piano and trombones and nasal song became a ritual of
speed, to unconsciously celebrate fast trains, rapid build-
ing, fast workers, racing motors — the one ritual Euro-
peans so far have imported from us.
So all these bright and distinguished packages kept
arriving and spoke to us of life lived deeply elsewhere.
Always in love with externals, each time we saved the
wrappings and imitated them as best we could. Did we put
our own essential content into them, or are they now
empty wrappings ? It is not easy to know. The most we
can say is that these imports stimulated us and took us
to a different plane; and that with individual artists a
new culture occurred.
* Adventures in a Perambulator: John Carpenter.
279
" / doubt whether the world is ever . . .
inclined to face its darker phases any more
than it is capable of . . . acknowledging
its most exquisite pleasures. . . . In the
main the vast majority are comparable to
spindling underbrush or grass. Here and
there in this jungle . . . are giant trees,
sequoias, banyans, and some lives are no
longer comparable to trees. They soar like
vast and lonely uplifts of rock, not only in
thought but in action." DREISER
JLnto this changing America, Dreiser came back
from Europe, not changed but immeasurably strength-
ened, he says. He had been, for a minute, part of liaisons
not just between himself and one other man or woman as
at home, but between a number of men and women who
joined for the surprising purpose of personal exchange.
He felt in the houses where Richards had taken him in
London, and in the cafes on the continent, and from de-
lightful people he met on his way, an intimation of liaisons
between infinite numbers, intangible and valuable to life;
not to be known to Americans yet or perhaps ever. And
how can they be known to us when leaders among us
appear to praise above all loneliness, and have made a
cult of silences and solitudes — a perversion out of the
"great open spaces"? So that perhaps exaltation, in-
creases, but wit as certainly decreases. In Europe Dreiser
felt precisely the values which Henry James asked of his
novels to define — the values of human relations. And
now he knew for himself " the wine-like air, the net-like
movements . . . the dancing lights . . . that indescrib-
able tension . . . sense of life at the topmost level of
nervous strength," which is Paris. He had felt the " great
280
artistic impulse of Italy " which had made " perfect
things," and the appetite for extremes which had made
murderers like the Borgias into the patrons of " perfec-
tion." He felt Germany like a " forge or workshop " and
"its blazing force or defiance"; and "in England the
distinction of the fireside, the family heirloom " ; London
" more fatalistic and therefore less hopeful than New
York" but at the same time "not so hard or foreign."
Neither had his voracious sensibility missed in Holland
" that delicate refinement of soul " which had allowed
the Dutch painters canvasses in which " life is revealed
static, quiescent, undisturbed, innocently gay, naively
beautiful."
The book, A Traveler at Forty, is like the Ho osier
Holiday a book of young rapture and old questioning —
the two most lyric records Dreiser has made; in both
cases as if a child with adult brain were entering the
world for the first time. But toward the end of the trip
there was something to kill joy: money gave out. In
" Madame G's Bar " they talked it over, and their two
tempers, one suave the other foreboding, clashed.
Richards who had managed the finances had to admit the
money was gone. " But," he said, " why not stay in
England and write this summer and draw on your future."
" No," was the realist's answer, " I've got to buckle
down to work at once at anything that will make me
ready money " ; best " to drop the writing end . . . and
return to the editorial desk." — " ' Really,' [Richards]
said with a grand air. ' You discourage me. . . . Here
you are a man of forty. . . . Your work is all indicated
and before you. Public faith such as my own should have
some weight with you and yet after a tour of Europe,
such as you would not reasonably have contemplated a
year ago, you sink down supinely and talk of quitting.
Truly it is too much. . . . You must cultivate some in-
tellectual stability around which your emotions can center
and settle to anchor.' " *
Much seemed to have happened in this Hoosier's mind
while he sat with the Londoner in Madame G's Bar.
For one thing he thought of New York — " The subway
: * A Traveler at Forty.
281
like my library table — it is so much of an intimate.
Broadway . . . the one idling show place. . . . The
pull of the city overseas was on me — and that in the
spring I I wanted to go home. . . . All in all the Atlantic
metropolis [was] the first city in the world to me ...
richer and freer in its spirit than London or Paris, though
so often more gauche, more tawdry, more shamblingly
inexperienced. ... It was definitely settled at this con-
ference that ... I was to take a boat sailing from
Dover about the middle of April. . . . This agreed, we
returned to our pleasures and spent three or four very
delightful days together."
" When the day came to sail I was really glad to be
going home, although on the way I had quarreled so much
with my land for the things which it lacks and Europe ap-
parently has.
Our boasted democracy has resulted in little more than
the privilege every . . . American has of being rude and
brutal to every other. Our early revolt against sham civility
has, in so far as I can see, resulted in nothing save the
abolition of all civility. . . . Life, I am sure, will shame
us out of it eventually."
So the American went home where one had to be more
gauche, more shamblingly inexperienced than in Lon-
don or Paris, or be different. Though never shambling,
he belonged there, perhaps, and not with Richards
of the monocle. Now, in the way of genius of whatever
birth, resenting criticism, he deserted the critic, and used
the criticism. Once home, with an advance from Harper's
of $1000 to get there, he did not go back to editing, but
went to work to finish The Financier. But he compromised
this much to " ready money." He let it go at the cost of
style and brevity to please his publishers. Mr. Duneka
writes him :
" I have just finished re-reading The Financier. I was
really shaken by it. It does not seem possible for you to
keep up the sense of power the book gives one. I am trem-
bling for the rest of it. Not that I doubt you, but because of
the greatness of it all. The book promises to be unhumanly
big."
Then in the way of publishers he stopped trembling to
say:
282
" We are very keen to publish The Financier in August if
that is humanly possible. It would stand a much better
chance to get a running start of the other fall books. This
is important."
Dreiser got back in April; the book was published under
pressure in October.
And he worked for money in other ways. He coached
Harper's as to how to advertise, and they made use of his
Suite modern suggestions. He had not boosted circulation
or Smith, Hampton, Butterick for nothing. The other
concession to trade was to let the breach widen between
himself and his European host. He too may not have been
above reproach, but then we expect more of artist than of
publisher in the way of delicate precision; the artist has
come to be thought of as the natural martyr. Apparently
Richards imagined that the English rights of his guest's
four books belonged to him. Already he had taken over
" a few copies " of Sister Carrie from the former pub-
lisher, Heinemann, whom evidently Dreiser was under no
compulsion to see in spite of that luncheon at Martin's in
1903 which had given him so much courage. Heinemann
writes with distant reproach as if some courtesy may have
been dispensed with: uAs one of the first admirers of
Sister Carrie I shall be very sorry not to see you before
you go." Certainly Dreiser had flirted with Richards; but
now threw him down casually in favor of Harper's who
told him they would not think of handling his books at
home if another firm was to dispense them in England;
" unless of course very substantial payment were made
for the right." A Traveler at Forty dedicated to Bar-
fleur, alias Richards, is the one book confided to the
house of Richards. In December 1912 he writes to Drei-
ser from the Hotel Knickerbocker in New York :
" I make friends with too much reluctance to surrender
them with anything but great unwillingness and regret, but
your letter . . . left me no choice. With regard to your
books I write not as a disappointed publisher . . . but as
a wounded admirer [of your work] to whom you had made
almost extravagant promises of association. . . .You speak
of business reasons for our meeting. I cannot imagine what
they are . . . but all the same ... I will say that I shall
be here, with intervals, from 2:30 till 3:45 when I go down
to the boat."
281
They met for the last time " for just fifteen minutes " ;
and I imagine " Barfleur " went down to the boat in
sadness, perhaps in anger. In 1914 however he had re-
covered himself enough to remind Dreiser, " though it
goes very much against the grain," of a debt of £3,
175, 6d. He " sees no reason why it should run on from
year to year." Lately, when interviewed this urbane Lon-
doner of the old school upset the delightful image of two
friends on a spree in Europe, which Dreiser makes in his
travel book. He said: "Theodore Dreiser, your dis-
tinguished novelist? But really I can't help you; I don't
remember any voyage we took together. I never knew
him." Dreiser on the other hand says wistfully: " I would
give anything not to have quarreled with him, and over
money too ! I owe him so much ; that trip to Europe ! It
was like a tonic that lasted me for years; it was new life
to me. I shall never forget it."
The incident is slight and not important as gossip, but
it is enough to stand as sign of the kind of temper which,
with perhaps less remorse than the business man can take
personally all that it wants and give nothing back, unless
publicly in the integrity of art. Or put it this way; the
man of affairs often makes no personal relations at all,
only rotarian connections, while the artist excels in the
personal. With few exceptions creative genius has been
known to be blind to friendship, and at the same time to
be more alive than others to the need of friends. De-
votees of beauty think of genius as heroic; other men, in-
cluding most psychologists, think of it as abnormal, mad,
insane. One thing is sure, there can be no consistent pleas-
ure in contemplating it unless we begin by accepting its
cruelty as hand in hand with its tenderness — cruelty to
the one left behind; tenderness to the one about to be
embraced, as it travels its road to the happy ending, Fame.
No synchronization except in the annealment of the mo-
ment of Art. There may be a current of giving too, as
always in the case of Dreiser to unknown writers, un-
commercial journals, friends in need; but these are gifts
not for gain or duty but for luxury of giving. Genius
chooses and rejects associates, and so the drama is main-
tained. Take for example a man at opposite poles in most
284
ways from Dreiser, Edgar Allan Poe. Griswold writes
of him:
" There seemed to him no moral susceptibility; and what
was more remarkable in a proud nature, little or nothing of
the true point of honor. He had to a morbid excess, that
desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no
wish for the esteem or love of his species; only the hard
wish to succeed — not shine, not serve, — succeed, that
he might have the right to despise the world which galled
his conceit."
And Poe says of himself:
" I love fame — I dote on it — I idolize it — I would drink
to the very dregs the glorious intoxication; I would have
incense arise in my honor from every hill and hamlet, from
every town and city on this earth; Fame! Glory! — they
are life-giving breath, and living blood; no man lives, unless
he is famous; how bitterly I belied my nature and my
aspirations, when I said I did not desire fame and that I
despised it! "
One might say that Dreiser was not this man wild to
conquer, but merely the burned child, who would not
again find himself reduced to a loaf of bread and a job
at i$ an hour. But I don't think so. I believe that like
Hurstwood it would have been quite possible for him to
lie down in a flop and inhale the gas at 15^ a night; if,
and it is a mammoth if, he had not had some of that de-
sire for fame that links him with other differing aesthetic
geniuses, Whitman, Poe, Bierce, Mark Twain; and links
them all with the business geniuses, Rockefeller, Yerkes,
Hearst, Al Capone, on the one token of desire for power.
Dreiser knew the link when he wrote : " After all we can-
not all be artists, statesmen, generals, thieves or finan-
ciers." If you asked such a temperament, especially when
bent on art or wisdom, " Do you think you are God? ",
and he were honest, he would say, " Yes, that's my busi-
ness."
Despite the wide differences between the most word-
wise and the least word-wise of our poets, there is, beside
the wish to dominate, a more special likeness between Poe
and Dreiser. An exquisite among critics, Jean Cocteau,
asked the question : " What is it in America in the climate
285
or in the soil that can have made Poe turn entirely toward
horror and mystery? To find that out I would be curious
to visit your country. It excites me." The Americans
he questioned said: " You are wrong, there is nothing;
Poe was an accident; the country is the most cheerful in
the world, depressingly cheerful, and the most open, a
literally ingenuous land." But Cocteau guessed right;
there is something. Poe and Dreiser are two writers
whose speech bear witness to an element of horror and
mystery special to the United States. Melville, Haw-
thorne in his neurotic way, Bierce, and Masters are others.
The humorist Ring Lardner is another. Back of each
laugh in which he is as lucky and fantastic as a player
with four aces, are hatred and frustration.
Poe expressed his sense of it by completely defying
it. He painted it as the decay of beauty, the rule of evil;
he made himself an exile with " the few who love me and
whom I love . . . those who feel rather than those who
think " in the valleys and islands of his spirit, never free
however from the terror of the American world in which
he knew he lived : " Of my country and of my family I
have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have
driven me from the one and estranged me from the
other." And yet he said much about his country by in-
version in each poem and story. He turned the horror
about and made the victims not the victors shine. Baude-
laire lucidly points out that Poe's flight was not from him-
self but from his country, " that barbarous land lighted
by gas."
And Dreiser has felt the horror of our optimistic land
and the mystery of it; but has expressed it by marry-
ing with it and celebrating its enormity. He has made the
conqueror shine. And what could it be that would triumph
over these vast spaces; a wilderness much of it for years
not even lighted by gas, but only by stars ; which cast their
spell of beauty and thereby complicated the question?
What could these great children take with them across the
country as they traveled in their covered wagons? Not
love, not beauty, as civilizing forces to a land dedicated
to " life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Their
tolerant religions could not tolerate those twin lodestars.
286
They traveled in covered wagons with covered souls.
But to bridge the chasms that remained chasms for neglect
of old human principles, there could be other new power;
executive, mechanical, numerical, mineral, and finally
electrical — lucrative power pursued into excesses. It
was and is as cold as it is brilliant, white to some, black
to others according to their senses. It is never colored.
Only conquerors from Tamburlaine to the American
billionaire have known that certain rich coldness, black
or white as you will. The American has heated it with
speed, steam, electricity, money, booze and blondes; the
moon, sun and stars and what they naturally brought
being inadequate. That is, they have wandered far from
nature which perhaps seemed too much of a vast problem
to cope with. And yet before them the Indian and the
Spaniard managed to make their bow to nature and make
a living too.
Henry Adams puts it dryly :
" Even Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould lacked
social charm. Doubtless the country needed ornament and
needed it badly — but it needed energy still more, and
capital most of all. . . . To fit out an entire continent with
roads and with the decencies of life would exhaust the
credit of an entire planet. . . . Such an estimate seemed
outrageous to a Texan member of Congress who loved the
simplicity of nature's noblemen; but the mere suggestion
that a sun existed above him would outrage the self-respect
of a deep-sea fish that carried a lantern on the end of his
nose. From the moment that the railroads were introduced,
life took on extravagance."
"For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the
American people hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and
back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other
capitalistic, centralizing and mechanical. In 1893, the issue
came on the single gold standard, and the majority de-
clared itself, once and for all, in favor of the capitalistic
system with all its necessary machinery. . . . The whole
mechanical consolidation of force . . . ruthlessly stamped
out the life into which Adams was born, but created
monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that
America adored. . . . After this vigorous impulse nothing
remained for an historian to ask — but how long and
how far!"
Nothing indeed, except that perhaps an historian might
take a step further back to a basis of earlier days — in
287
fact to the birth of the nation. He might perhaps see
that an American became a " deep-sea fish/' with a need
of energy more than ornament, just because his religion
forbade him to obey the sun and wear the ornaments of
the sun. And perhaps it was not " the majority " that
declared itself for the new order, but the craftier deep-
sea fish who forced the new order, to outwit a religion that
belonged to incongruous pastures, and had nothing to do
with the giant waves of the sea of American life. Certain
it is that Dreiser with no more censure than Adams
plunged in among the deep-sea fish and planned an Ameri-
can Odyssey to be known as A Trilogy of Desire, where
the burden of the action depends upon the conqueror
more than upon the conquered masses. The first volume
of it, The Financier, was in fact so American a bolt that
it almost lifted him from the literary columns to the
financial. And just as he identified himself with his two
heroines, Carrie and Jennie, in their need for life and
love and ornament, now he writes himself into the char-
acter of the financier in his need of conquest.
In Rome, a Mrs. Q. had told him the story of the
Borgia family, which seemed to him so important a notch
in the measure of possibility that he incorporated it in his
travel book in all its extravagance, and naively as if it
were news.* He liked Mrs. Q. " She was not in the least
morbid. The horror and cruelties of lust and ambition
held no terrors for her. She liked life as a spectacle." She
was of his own kind. Once at a party there was a discussion
between Dreiser and the pacifist John Dos Passos, who
had spoken of an accident too terrible to look at, he
thought. Dreiser couldn't understand it; he could look
at anything. Why not? Some time after in the course of
talk I submitted the anecdote as instance of both the
older and younger realist to the impartial Robert Frost,
* " Once, riding in the subway, Dreiser opened a copy of the Evening
World and showed me the line : ' Let us introduce you to the work of Rud-
yard Kipling.' I scoffed, saying people already knew that work. Dreiser said,
4 No, they don't 5 they have to be introduced to everything.' To believe that,
and yet to write novels, requires infinite patience. It also lays the ghost of
c style ' j for perhaps one-half of style is repression. The stylist is the man
who withholds his pen." WJwt Manner of Man He Is: Harris Merton
Lyon.
288
who in chance encounters has seemed almost uniquely a
mind exhilarated by evidence. His disposal of it was :
" Well, I suppose that when you get so you can look at
anything your eyes run the danger of hardening so you
don't see things." But do they? Isn't it possible that they
might then get strong, not hard. For myself I should
think of this quality of Dreiser's as a rare asset for an
artist in search of perfection. And if he failed it would
not be because of the brain's command to the senses to
face experience, but more because of an imperfect set of
senses.
In any event Dreiser may well have been glancing back
at the Borgias when he wrote the story of the more
metallic but not less cruel Yerkes, whom he called Cow-
perwood. And assuredly he remembered the Romans too,
remains of whom in Rome were like —
" the glistening shell of an extinct beetle or the sugges-
tion in rocks of a prehistoric world. . . . Mind was theirs
— vast, ardent imagination. . . . They were the great ones
— the Romans. We must learn from them."
" Since the making of the Roman Empire the world has
held no men so great as the business overlords of America.
They were men who thought in terms of a continent."
Except for these analogies to Latins, ancient and modern,
there is no exotic ingredient in The Financier or in the
second volume of the trilogy, The Titan, published a year
and a half later, May 1914. Nor is there in The Traveler
at Forty, which appeared in November 1913. Foreign
lands excited his imagination, but never influenced his
manner which, for all the sophistication that was at
length going the rounds of our villages, has remained
notoriously Dreiserian.
289
50
" Whilst others have struggled in vain you
have scaled the difficult cliffs."
Masters to Dreiser in 1912
o Dreiser shot his bolt for Harper's in double-
quick time. The Financier came to 800 pages and yet made
a powerful effect. Fifteen years later he rewrote it. In
its present form it is as economical as Sister Carrie, and
a more ambitious though not more tender undertaking.
Following on Carrie and Jennie it made him another
friend, the poet Edgar Lee Masters. They lasted each
other for a number of years. Dreiser regrets his loss,
and not more than many of his readers. Where has he
gone, this poet? Did the poet in him die and the lawyer
with the dead poet's equipment step out of the old skin
to write today Lincoln The Man, where he indicts Lincoln
for not being God. The book might have been called
" Case of the States Against Abraham Lincoln." Why
this should have happened to a poet belongs not here
but toward the end of a baffling book repeatedly at-
tempted and not yet written : " The Rise and Fall of
Spiritual America." Dreiser to this day believes in him
and perhaps in his country too. His voice values Masters
when he speaks of him: " He knows absolute fatality;
that life alters and affects man; that man can't alter life.
His poems have the deathless ring that there is to great
work."
In fact for him Masters was for years the American
poet of our day in the sense of the old story of the
Western village : " Aint you got no amusements round
this town?" — " Why, yes, at six o'clock the whore
walks." For the novelist the poet walked and the poet
was Masters. As late as 1917 he reviewed in Life, Art
and America, printed in The Seven Arts, the village tem-
290
per of the country, nominating Masters as poet. And this
at a date when there was beginning, it seemed to others, a
galaxy of poets: Robinson, Lindsay, Sandburg, Frost,
T. S. Eliot among them.* He admired Sandburg, except
that he feared he was a reformer. And today it is Dreiser
who is the reformer. Of these other poets he did not catch
their " deathless ring." Masters on his side in 1912 had
some reservations mingled with reverence. After the first
three novels he praised Dreiser for his understanding of
American fact, his scepticism, his daring, his rendering of
life as if it were a circus parade, both tawdry and entic-
ing. . . . But he said to him and of him that if he found
a theme to wholly focus his powers and come forth " fused
and molten," then he would add to his work that quality
that makes art. The comment diversifies the two men —
the emotional Dreiser, who yet wished not to lose the
parts in the whole; the finely cynical Masters, who seems
sometimes overcome by rhythm and loses the sparkle of
various voices in a too insistent blank verse.
But Mencken and Reedy for example were not so ex-
acting as to ask of him to be an epic poet in the final sense.
They liked him the way he was. And there were many,
many others who were grateful to this writer for encom-
passing the world they lived in and at the same time tak-
ing such direct dives into it. Their world, they knew, hung
on the kind of financier portrayed with amazing vitality
in these two volumes.
One thing is sure — of his books as works of art both
praise and censure are plausible. A favorite query with
Dreiser, repeated in his writings, used to be : " Why don't
you take hold of life? Why are you content to sip it? Why
don't you live to the utmost? " A fair enough question,
apt to be resented by the victim. On inquiry he was even
willing that living to the utmost should be construed
as meaning adornment, travel, possession, adulation,
* " To me it is a thing for laughter, if not for tears 5 one hundred and
twenty million Americans . . . one hundred and forty years ... a rich
soil . . . silver and precious and useful metals ... a land amazing in its
mountains, its streams, its valley prospects ... its tremendous cities and
far-flung facilities . . . and yet contemplate it. Artists, poets, thinkers,
where are they? . . . Since Whitman, one poet: Edgar Lee Masters. . . ."
291
grabbed or stolen if need be — in other words tangible
high voltage. I remember the question put to me and I
tried to answer with a counterquestion : " Why don't you
go in for quality? There is more intensity in quality, per-
haps more drama even." He seemed to be living under
the spell of his own hero of that time, the Titan, nearly
a victim of the American delusion, size and numbers. Yet
he had, to contradict me, the air of a man imbued pre-
cisely with quality; and his answer opened a door to it:
"I know — you're right — but the country is big; you
can't write about it in a small peckish way; there's not
time to polish. Later on I intend to rewrite my books,
condense them. Just now I have too much to do, too much
to put forth. People need it. They need to know things."
The Financier is the one rewritten book, and yet The
Titan as if to support his point is the more bewildering
canvas. Where the pulse beats there is flesh, and where
there is flesh there is quality, whether beautiful or not.
Until recently deliberate beauty in a woman was a chal-
lenge, almost an impropriety; and in a man forbidden; and
native poems and pictures were antique notions. As a
nation we have used noise and action, songs and dances,
not poems or paintings. We have used motion. If a writer
has translated this motion into language, impossible to
deny him quality or success, however leisurely his form !
In The Financier and more so in The Titan the pulse
beats. With the men we see their pores, moustaches, their
hands, stomachs and neckties, their ways of walking and
talking and cringing and of being brave, and nearly always
their eyes. With the women we get their bloom, or their
wrinkles, their fragrance or absence of fragrance, their
rosettes and ruffles and petticoats and corsets — it was
the day of many clothes. And then we get the cross cur-
rents and radio messages set up between them, which, in
spite of the often explicit, literal language, make actual
worlds in the two books. It must be that structural quan-
tity makes quality in its own right, and that size has its
seductions, and that mass of detail, when zealous and in-
tegral, creates at moments currents of reality by which
one leaps the uncharged spaces, the way an electric car
leaps crossings. Perhaps Dreiser is the triumph of subject
292
matter. He wrote about what mattered, letting alone the
manner, and what mattered mattered enough to him to
create manner.
The story of Cowperwood is near to being the history
of Charles T. Yerkes, a traction magnate, operating first
in Philadelphia and then in Chicago, New York and Lon-
don. He is nearer to the temper of Yerkes than Clyde
in An American Tragedy is to the young man of the mur-
der case from which Dreiser drew the framework of
that story. Yerkes began life toward the end of the rule
of Andrew Jackson, so distasteful to the grandfather
of Henry Adams, when it became the federal policy to
confide the property of the people to the care of the
States, and the policy of the separate States to confide it
to the care of brilliant and more often than not unscru-
pulous individuals. Yerkes became one of these. Dreiser
conceives him in the person of Frank Cowperwood as
having taken his cue for behavior from a drama he wit-
nessed at the age of ten. In a fish market window near
his home in Philadelphia he had watched a lobster in a
tank day by day slowly eating a squid, until it was dead.
The theme runs through the two books :
1 That's the way it has to be, I guess. . . . That squid
wasn't quick enough/ ... he figured it out. . . . Things
lived on each other — that was it. Lobsters lived on squids.
. . . What lived on lobsters? Men of course! . . . And
what lived on men? Was it other men? Wild animals lived on
men. And there were Indians and cannibals. And some men
were killed by storms and accidents. He wasn't so sure
about men living on men; but men did kill each other.
How about wars and street fights and mobs? He had seen
a mob once. It attacked the Public Ledger building as he
was coming home from school. . . . It was about the slaves.
. . . Sure, men lived on men. Look at the slaves. They
were men. . . . Men killing other men — negroes. . . .
For days and days Frank thought of this and of the life
that he was tossed into. . . ."
" From seeing his father count money, he was sure he
would like banking; and Third Street where his father's
office was, seemed to him the most fascinating street in the
world. . . . This medium of exchange, gold, interested
him intensely. . . ."
So he described a boy's mind, always an easy task for
Dreiser. And he accepted the equation of squid and lob-
293
ster as the law of life. Surely it was and is prominent in
the United States where there has been small time or
wisdom or too vast spaces to cultivate the delicate re-
lations between people and people and their things, which
in other countries have disguised the crudities of battle.
Dreiser was at home in the career of Yerkes. Where
writers like Upton Sinclair, Thomas Lawson and Ida Tar-
bell wanted to scare their squid-like readers into seeing
what was being taken away from them day by day by the
armed lobsters, he wanted most of all to set it down as
the dominant fable of our life, which had for virtues lust
and enterprise, and for vices cruelty and greed. He seems
to say: u Do what you like about it; my job is to make
you feel the drama, and the men and women and children
involved in it to their marrows."
Particularly, Yerkes began his career at the moment
when street railways came into being in the United States.
That might in itself have endeared him to the Hoosier,
who far from feeling the discord and shrillness of
street cars seems to have loved them about as some poets
have loved ships or railroads or airplanes. Sister Car-
rie loved street cars when she came to Chicago; she
loved the tinkle of them. And of Cowperwood's predilec-
tion Dreiser makes in his succinct way a prose poem :
" Chicago was growing fast, and these little horse cars
on certain streets were crowded night and morning —
fairly bulging with people at the rush hours. If he could
only secure an octopus-grip on one or all of them; if he
could combine and control them all ! What a fortune ! That,
if nothing else, might salve him for some of his woes — a
tremendous fortune — nothing else. He forever busied
himself with various aspects of the scene quite as a poet
might . . . with rocks and rills. To own these street rail-
ways ! To own these street railways ! So rang the song in
his mind."
So this novelist, sensitive but not quite a sensualist, is
yet an objectivist. He felt the objective song of American
merchants' lives, whether it were cars, cement, gas, plumb-
ing, talcum powder, magazines or deodorants. — That
song allowed them by their chaste acquisitive ancestors
which has made objects instead of states of mind. And he
felt the frequent need of the executive of all races and
294
times to acquire as collector the objects of the one power
beyond him — creative art. He knew too the necessity of
the conqueror for his many, many vanquished women — a
trait of Cowperwood's which most critics call exagger-
ated. But on the contrary it may be that Dreiser has dealt
him a conservative number for a magnate of that huge
day and temper. I remember a story told me by a Chicago
advertising man some ten years ago, who off duck-
shooting with a friend of his, president of a great industry
whose goods he advertised, said: " Well, Bill, how many
women have you got now?" — "Why, Vick, not so
many since the war, rents are too high. I can remember
the time when I kept twenty or thirty; I don't suppose I
got more than twelve or fifteen now and two of them are
pals, they share the same room." Call that an exaggera-
tion, outstripping the Titan's score, but it serves to sug-
gest that force is force in the face or behind the back of
every code, gratified by number or by arrangement as the
talent runs. There is in fact the whispered legend of one
of our powerful financiers, supposed to have found his
pleasures with choir singers behind organ pipes — a di-
version, whether true or not, far more to his credit, I
would think, than the mere bleating of religious emotion
without earthly outlet. Yet doubtless there will be those
to dispute me.
But what distinguishes Dreiser's hero from the other
pioneers is a quality of his own, a daring, a candor, a
vanity that defies the accepted code. " In every one of
his novels he has tried to break the lockstep of society,"
one critic says of him. I think rather without trying he
has run counter to it. Cowperwood was the same kind of
man. He takes in his youth for mistress the high-spirited
ostentatious child of a business associate, speculator and
city-boss, an Irish Catholic only a life-time from the
steerage; and he goes to prison not so much for having
speculated with city funds as because this Irishman re-
senting the use he has made of his daughter withdraws
his support in the panic following the Chicago fire. Then,
when in later years in Chicago Cowperwood grows into
something more complicated and exacting, and she re-
mains the same inexperienced exuberant beauty, he de-
295
serts her for a long line of women, who perhaps will
each one tell him something new and reward him for his
fabulous gift of money-making. It is this boldness with
women in company with his boldness in bribing city coun-
cils and his boldness in taking luck away from other more
cautious, more conventional but quite as unscrupulous
leading citizens, that finally defeats him. It defeats him
in Chicago just as it would have saved him in Paris, Berlin
or St. Petersburg. In Chicago they said, " This man is
a monster; in addition to other atrocities he seduces
women." In Europe they would have said: "This man
is a monster, but perhaps we forgive him; he is so pictur-
esque and women love him."
In Chicago they did not want so extravagant a con-
queror. The community accepted his gift of a great
observatory with which to study and perhaps exploit
other planets than the earth; employed his methods to
get rid of him, and dispensed with him as a citizen. He
is an electron dropping out of the atomic sphere, Chicago,
taking his immoderateness with him, and leaving the place
the more careful, stingy, colder town that it cared to be.
If Dreiser had continued to live there the same fate
would have been in store for him, just as it was to be for
the town's most distinguished architect, Frank Lloyd
Wright, and as it would be for the town's most creative
lawyer, Clarence Darrow — both without extraordinary
honor in their own city. Chicago is a market place at the
heart of a nation, river-threaded, lake-bound, prairie-
winded, where gulls fly and pigeons flutter, generating
extravagant dreamers; and then killing them.*
To this extent of daring Cowperwood is identified with
Dreiser himself. But there is a lock-step element in the
street car magnate's life belonging to the common not the
uncommon American which makes native the theme of
the novel. Where was it that Cowperwood wanted his
money and his wife and his house and art collection to
take him? Not into really great pursuits and among
great friends, but into exactly that chimera which was the
* Read if you can find them Henry Fuller's finely ironic pictures of
his day as evidence, With the Procession, The Cliff Dwellers, Chicago,
1895 and 1893.
296
undoing of Jennie Gerhardt — Chicago society. And
when that was denied him, into New York society; and
when that became impossible, into London society. The
theme is the tragic one of emptiness, empty houses, empty
prestige. " Residential homes " figure like handsome vil-
lains in these two novels, and increasingly in The Titan,
and figure still, in spite of the hero's acquired riches, from
the outside looking in. First the mansion in Chicago
was futile, then the palace on Fifth Avenue. The rumor
of Aileen, mistress before she was wife, and besides
" too rich in her entourage, too showy," added to the
rumor of a prison term in Philadelphia, defeated him
in Chicago, and then in New York. With Aileen " he
knew it was useless to try." The young girl who succeeds
her, whom Dreiser himself loves, his one heroine except
for his mother, but made out of dreams instead of mem-
ories, is described as with a high-bred litheness — " She
had the air, the grace, the lineage, the blood — that was
why. . . ." And although her Kentucky mother had kept
a house of assignation in Louisville, the inference is that
in the third volume, never yet published, she would accom-
plish for him social distinction in London. In the story
of the Chicago magnate, this happened in the end. A
later mistress, it is said, became a friend of the king and
queen of England. That is, mistress she was called; al-
though an old-timer, a wheat speculator, impatient at the
refinements of Dreiser's Titan, is quoted as exclaiming:
" Hell, she wasn't his mistress; she was his daughter! "
After that rude myth by one of the Titan's enemies,
I thought how perhaps " the great American novel "
could not yet have been written, since the extreme Ameri-
can possibility is scarcely ever rumored. Shelley could
write The Cenci, Coleridge Christabel, Gide The Coun-
terfeiters, Delteil The Five Senses, and Poe long ago The
House of Usher and Ligeia, to cite at random. But per-
haps now the American cult of " being nice " has defi-
nitely tongue-tied without their knowing it even the most
adventurous of our writers. Too late now to sink shafts
as deep as the lowest level of the veins of American possi-
bility? We are brave and bold, but ignorant.
297
51
" / want to chip off one little piece, if I can,
of the leaden weight that keeps men's eyes
closed to the truth. And yet I shall be only
roundly scored for my pains." DREISER
Iways in these books Dreiser was doing
his utmost to make live the mingled drama of some
national characters — Financier, Politician, Journalist,
Merchant, Madam, Mistress, Wife, Leading Citizen,
Society Queen, Handsome Office, Palatial Mansion. How
well did he succeed? Experts contradict each other.
Frederic Chapman, English reader for The John Lane
Co. who finally published The Titan writes high praise
of the book as a powerful document, but criticizes his
" knowledge of minutiae, that tell in the matter of truth
to period ":
". . . So as not to render you uneasy I will say that the
trifling anachronisms I detected are concerned only with
the clothing of the actors . . . the furnishings of some of
their rooms."
James Huneker on the other hand does not detect them :
" I confess The Financier which I read in Berlin bowled
me over. Where and when did you get all the color, the
facts, the old streets of Philadelphia where I was born,
where I played in Buttonwood Street as a boy! . . .
C. T. Y. I knew well, and his wife (No. 2). I'm curious,
I confess, to follow their fortunes."
A member of the Chicago Board of Trade writes him ask-
ing if he has not served in a broker's office; his knowledge
of finance is so accurate. Masters, the academician, re-
bukes him for the title, and also for the names of the
characters. He notes the deliberate scope of the book, and
then again some flaw which he gropes to analyse. Although
Cowperwood, he thinks, is more valuable and dramatic
298
than Rockefeller or Morgan, he is equally a demi-gorgon,
not a Titan acting against the gods for a racial purpose.
With an acute ear for names himself, he wonders why
Dreiser does not keep a note-book of real names to resort
to. ... He will do greater work, he tells him. . . .
Dreiser it is said never has kept a notebook, secreting
his masses of detail in the cells of his mind. His answer to
these critics might be as in an interview about Jennie
Gerhardt: " My one ambition is to conform to the large
truthful lines of life. If I do that, no matter if my char-
acters live in Columbus, Ohio, or not, I will be true
everywhere." He is in fact an approximatist, qualifying
repeatedly with an " or nearly so." But his approxima-
tions give the idea in more ample relation to life as life
than do some of the more exact imitations of other
Americans.
Take for example the fashionable men and women who
finally succeed in ostracizing the Cowperwoods from
Chicago. They do not always have just the tone of voice
or idiom that belonged to them, but they suggest the
singular meagerness of what passed for society in that
windy city. As in Jennie Gerhardt the superstructure is
not completed, but here the drift is uncannily real. As for
the low-life characters, if first-hand evidence is of value,
I had it at an early age as to two who might have served
as models. One August evening in the trout season a pair
of Chicago aldermen, the famous Bathhouse John and
Hinky Dink, appeared at our camp on Lake Superior.
They were going to consult the mayor of Chicago who
summered at the snobbish hunting and fishing club be-
yond, and stopped to ask for the trail. Any strangers so
far away from the one wagon road to civilization would
have surprised us. But these two were city birds, street
birds, an apparition in a primeval forest. They admired
the beauty of the place, like Mackenty in The Titan when
he showed Cowperwood to the door after a half bargain
between millionaire and boss: " ' A nice moon, that! ' he
added. A sickle moon was in the sky. * Good night.1 '
Their derby hats, diamond scarf pins, city shoes, " Yes-
Mam " and " No-Sir " struck illiterately on the ele-
gance of Norway pines, and afterwards we were told
299
they were " very unscrupulous men " ; but we liked them,
they were an event. They seemed to belong in the midst
of affairs, to tell in a flash more news than some of
the members of the mayor's club, who were exactly of
that element in Chicago hostile to the unorthodox cor-
ruption Dreiser pictures in his epic of Big Business. The
mayor himself was accepted there, and yet a little squeam-
ishly; he was not a Republican; he was a Southerner; he
was not a snob. Reading The Titan today I get the same
sudden sense of life I got that evening between Salmon
Trout River and Bay — life of raw cities, coarse, inept,
dangerous, but without which the West of America was
not settled. This phase of the settlement, the much praised
Willa Gather consistently ignores or misconstrues, in
her nice, heartbreaking, humorless elegies for the old
days; and so, I think disqualifies herself as authentic. The
less polished Dreiser proceeds to the gist of things — to
the red yellow and blue which whirling make gray.
Take again the values he knew how to establish in the
slight encounters of Cowperwood with two men who
might be thought of as titans rather than demi-gorgons.
The first of these takes place in The Financier in Phila-
delphia in his twenties :
" One day he saw Lincoln — a tall, shambling man, long,
bony, gawky ... as he issued from the doorway of Inde-
pendence Hall. . . . For days the face of Lincoln haunted
him, and very often during the war his mind reverted to
that singular figure. It seemed to him unquestionable that
fortuitously he had been permitted to look upon one of
the world's really great men. War and statesmanship were
not for him; but he knew how important those things were
— at times."
Perhaps Dreiser meant that vaguely Cowperwood felt
the importance of this particular war in relation to his
own ambitions. It would be a war which under Republican
indulgence would gather back into a centralized power
of corporations, though never again into a central federal
power, the rights of the people, let out to promiscuous
individuals under previous Democratic indulgence.* The
* That is, if one shakes together Adams' temperate Degradation of
The Democratic Dogma and Masters' virulent Lincoln The Many one has
a right to imagine some such reciprocal American deal occurring in the
300
second meeting occurred years later with Altgeld in
Chicago, the governor with socialist dreams, who, much
as he needed money, refused a bribe of $100,000 to give
Cowperwood a free hand in his street car schemes. Drei-
ser describes Altgeld poignantly; Swanson he calls him:
" primarily soft-hearted, sweet-minded, fiery, a brilliant
orator, a dynamic presence. In addition . . . woman-
hungry — a phrase which sex-starved intellectuals the world
over will understand, to the shame of a lying age, that be-
cause of quixotic dogma belies its greatest desire, its great-
est sorrow, its greatest joy. ... In a vague way he sensed
the dreams of Cowperwood. The charge of seducing women
... so shocking to the yoked conventionalists, did not
disturb him at all. Back of the onward sweep of the genera-
tions he himself sensed the mystic Aphrodite."
[Cowperwood defines the situation] " ' The men, as you
must know, who are fighting you are fighting me. I am a
scoundrel because I am selfish and ambitious — a material-
ist. You are not a scoundrel but a dangerous person because
you are an idealist/
[And then Dreiser appraises Altgeld's refusal of the
bribe] Life rises to a high plane whenever and wherever
in the conflict regarding material possession there enters a
conception of the ideal."
Here perhaps is an instance of the value and of the dis-
junction Masters feels — a teasing statement but made
not quite out of elements. The conflict cannot be between
the material and the ideal — these are but artificial terms
— but must be between the finite and the infinite, the
unrelated and the related intellect or vision. Here were
meetings and then tremendous separations, between the
financier and the dreamer in action, of which this Cowper-
wood on the one hand and Lincoln and Altgeld are fair
symbols. The meetings are rarer now and the separations
have so deepened that today we have scarcely an adult
statesman to keep house for us, and are further than ever
from a department of art or of letters in Washington,
which might help to fuse the life of a people by officially
acknowledging creative unbiased statement — in other
words, Art. Dreiser felt the isolation that existed be-
tween these big men, but did not here bridge the chasm
in words.
course of the nineteenth century j or in fact if one but looks about without
reading history.
301
What if anything hampered him in this epic he had
planned? Possibly a shade of idealism in the painting of
his hero. Not that there is any glossing over of monstrous
deeds. He tells without sparing his hero of the destruc-
tion of a building overnight, which stood in the way of
the magnate's cable-car ambitions, whose owner would
not sell at his price. Also of the snaring of a virtu-
ous mayor with a woman hired to seduce him and turn
his love letters over to the Financier. And blaming no
one, he tells of the revenge of one of the reputable citi-
zens, whose wife had played with the demi-gorgon, and
who raised $300,000 to buy Republican victory to de-
feat " the monster " in the city council. Mencken pro-
nounces Cowperwood " the best picture of an immoralist
in all modern fiction — at least since Thackeray's Harry
Lyndon." Reedy writes in The Mirror :
" Cowperwood is large-looming ... an artist in evil. In
The Titan there is something mellower than in any of its
predecessors. It is a more urbane, more cultured book. . . .
Every page shows the effect ... of those experiences he
told us about in ... A Traveler at Forty."
These two were themselves men of affairs immersed in
the American drama, like Dreiser, almost enjoying it. But
from across the seas came an outcry of English pain from
Ford Madox Hueffer, something of an immoralist him-
self, and a poet, and collaborator with the great Conrad;
too amusing not to include, though by length it makes a
slight digression:
" This is the most revolting book I have ever read, the
most horrible, the most demoralizing, the most, perhaps
immoral. ... A book is horrible when it can reveal depths
of cynical ill-doing such as the reader had never before
conceived to live in human nature. . . . Demoralizing, be-
cause the book . . . renders vice so attractive and en-
grossing that it may well damage forever its readers' sense
of proportion. . . .
" I do not know how many seductions there are in this
book. I have counted eleven to the credit of the hero; and
I see there are some more seductions toward the end.
I have not been able to finish the book, it makes me feel
sick. . . .
" It is indeed characteristic of the topsy-turvy morality
of the impossible book that the ends for which the hero
302
employs his disgusting means are comparatively decent
ends ... to give the public better lighting system, better
trams. . . . Perhaps Mr. Dreiser is really an Ironist, since
all the comparatively reputable figures . . . are . . . with
their obsolete methods . . . upholders of obstructive
vested interests . . . forced to employ exactly the same
disreputable tactics as the hero ... to cleanse the city of
his evil influence.
". . . All I can say is that if the whole of American life
is such a thing as is depicted in The Titan I would rather
see this country ten times subjected to Prussia than allied
for ten minutes with, and victorious by aid of the U. S.
But I comfort myself . . . the majority of Americans are
quite decent people. Yet somewhere in the interior of that
vast continent must be lurking a disease ... or there
never could have appeared on the surface such a running
sore as the book called The Titan.
" Mr. Dreiser is comparatively illiterate, he is sometimes
unable to spell, even in the American fashion . . . [but]
I have done him an injustice if I have not given the idea
that he does present his narrative with at least the skill
and raciness of a reporter. It is a pity that he cannot em-
ploy his pen upon relatively decent and heroic subjects —
say descriptions of Prussians cutting women's throats.
That would leave a comparatively pleasant taste in the
mouth, but Heavens ! here I am writing in favor of ac-
cepted Morality! I never thought to do it. There must
be something miraculous about The Titan"
The book shocked Mr. Hueffer, now Ford Madox
Ford, into forgetting some active epochs of history where
lucrative " cynical ill doing " and " attractive and engross-
ing vice " have equaled anything practised by this Chicago
demon. Or he was being an advance English alarm-
ist over the growing menace of the Lost Colonies, and in
a British way forgetting that his Empire merely preferred
to commit crime in heathen colonies, that they might keep
their island home intensively decorous and decorative. But
also one feels that, like Masters, he was groping for the
reason of aesthetic annoyance with the book.
Is it this ? Dreiser's plan is miraculously true and strong
— a synecdoche of the American empire in the making. It
brought a howl of approval and denunciation in critical
reviews, not for or against the defeat of democracy, but
for or against Dreiser for uncovering a corner of it. It
proved that people could read of the financial parabolas
303
that would result in today's tyranny, without the wish or
without the power to fight the progress of them. And the
moral of the book has the splendor of honesty; it proposes
that honesty is not necessarily the best policy for any one
man. It would have been the best policy for Hurstwood in
Sister Carrie. His theft haunted him to suicide, whereas
Cowperwood's crimes carried him through to victories
agreeable enough to him. Dreiser sees with a terribly clear
eye the inevitable differing paths of different tempers.
Carrie triumphed; Jennie kept a brave balance; Aileen
went down before thwarted passions, before " separations
too hard to bear." All this he knew unswervingly. And
yet if the book falls short, so that experts like Masters and
Ford ask why, isn't it in the choice of colors with which he
paints the hero? The matching of tones is not inevitable.
Especially he exalts or illumines in Cowperwood two at-
tributes, love of daring and of beauty, thus obscuring the
Titan's callousness. Out of his own love for these traits, he
treats him a little the way Marlowe treated Tamburlaine,
with awe. Take the attitude of this man to the women who
love him. Here, I think, Dreiser, camera-like, has fol-
lowed native truth, but as if satisfied with it has failed to
relate it to the rest of life. How could the conqueror have
time for elaborate ecstasies? Another less amorous mag-
nate might steal his cherished deal, should he dally too
long lasciviously with a woman as the full moon dallies
summer nights above earth. Coldness, if not continence,
was a superstition among us; with it men were told they
would attain a speed and a skill beyond other nations in
business or in sports. Whether truth or not, it has served
to hold the winner to a youth of sacrifice to victory and to
an old age of atrophied senses, or of unstrung nerves.
Dreiser knew his hero — " business first." People of high
capacity need many things at once, or one thing in many
phases. The more sensitized the artist the more he will
try to know one thing in many phases, though it be but
common language, paint, stone, wood or clay.
Cowperwood going toward circumferences rather than
to centers, and cheating himself, since after all the center
is the most exclusive point of the circle, is then given a
meaning beyond him. At moments Dreiser nearly con-
304
fuses him with himself at his best, as if this magnate were
a rebel defying the world for an exciting lucid cause,
instead of for a mere fortune and entrance into estab-
lished society. He gives him words he would not have
said : " All of us are in the grip of a great creative im-
pulse." Or had he said them, he would not have under-
stood them, since in spite of his collection of jewels, paint-
ings and ladies, he was not curious enough to analyse
creation. Creation is that state in life or art, which being
original and primitive, new-born, needs few stage proper-
ties earned or stolen. Creation is a state of mind or state
of energy. To borrow an enticing phrase from physics, the
electron jumping to a different orbit, " the atom gives out
energy in the form of light."
As if hypnotized by Cowperwood, here he emphasizes
certain values at the expense of others, which elsewhere he
has been quick to balance. Cowperwood we are told never
read; but we are not told that of course he never read be-
cause books might bring him face to face with apparitions
that would shake his faith in himself. Safer were his
cameos and coins and Bouguereaus and Rembrandts, high-
priced and silent. None the less here, so far, is the one por-
trait of an American financier resembling in grandeur a
Rembrandt or Titian or Tintoretto. We see him in vol-
ume as Chicagoans of that day remember him, a costly
enigma and magnet, driving with his red-headed Aileen
south on Michigan Avenue toward the palatial home,
everyone turning to say: " Look, there is Yerkes," almost
no one bowing or waving.
Moreover to be synchronous it is important to say that
in the very years of making The Titan Dreiser was writ-
ing The Girl in the Coffin, The Blue Sphere, In the Dark;
and would a few years later write The Hand of the Potter,
where the edge of misery and poverty appears like tat-
tered velvet. Out of this period too come stories of people
neither rich nor poor in relation to the theme ; Free, Mar-
ried, The Lost Phoebe, Chains, Fulfilment owe their
drama not to an extreme of outward circumstance but to
inner moods. And, as if this novelist were himself sated
with terrifying display, he follows The Titan with The
" Genius " — an heroic project to relate a character, high-
305
powered and sensitive, to the welter of unrelated elements
that compose American society. Once to the question:
" Did you ever know a self-made Croesus whom you liked
as well as anyone," his answer was : " No, I don't think so.
I love delicacy too well. The making and holding of great
wealth destroys delicacy." And again he said of a short
story written at this date : " Of all my stories for me
The Old Neighborhood comes nearest to art — a thing
of mist, which art should be."
We have lived with three religions in our time: the
Christian religion going on in churches; the religion of
Money going on in banks; the religion of Communism
going on in Soviet Council halls. Dreiser, " incurable in-
dividualist," he has called himself, repelled in child-
hood by the Catholic religion, learned to repudiate it and
all substitutes for it. Then he imagined he walked alone,
and he has more than most people. Yet at some point,
perhaps almost unconsciously did he feel too lonely? Or
else fighting the enemy, did germs of the enemy enter
into him, so that he veered slightly toward the impersonal
religion of Money ? Today, it is said, repelled by excessive
Capitalism, he is veering toward the still more impersonal
religion of Communism. If that is true he has ceased for
the moment to walk the lonely way of art. When he left
Sister Carrie, to live at all, he was forced away from an
intensely fresh, personal, detached point of view into
public issues. The cold fingers of impersonality sometimes
operate in the language of later works as they operate in
American streets and houses. Then as often he has gone
back to an intimacy with himself; tenderly in Jennie Ger-
hardt, thriftily in the rewritten Financier, nervously and
like fire in The Hand of the Potter, terribly in An Ameri-
can Tragedy. His later life has been a traveling back and
forth between cloisters and forums. The restlessness of
this commuting marks his work, without yet defeating
him; as it has defeated American society. Some strange-
ness in him has swung the balance his way.
306
" Art is the stored honey of the human soul,
gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Shall the dull and the self-seeking and the
self -adverting close this store on the grop-
ing mind." DREISER
Y
et this travel back and forth between mar-
ket and home was not entirely his choice. He wanted
fame, but he wanted it through his works, not through
having to fight for them. The same thing may be true
of many apparently forensic men; of Mencken and Ezra
Pound possibly. The effort to adjust themselves to their
environment, Pound to the one he left behind him, re-
sulted in an effort to adjust the environment to them.
Or perhaps their case is suggested in a boy's defence of
a friend, denied him because he taught him " dirty
words, " the kind prevailing in Twain's Elizabethan dia-
logue. The defence was: " I don't think he's really bad;
you don't understand him ; he's just shy."
Maybe these great rebels have been " just shy," and
trying to make themselves at home in a too cold environ-
ment. To Dreiser's shyness, if he had it, was added re-
curring hostility from the outside, and from those of
whom he might have expected support, his publishers.
More times than any other contemporary, in his thirty
years of writing, he is on record as having to turn from
creative work to battle with publishers rather than com-
promise ; the last war was as late as 193 1 with Hollywood
producers. In 1914 at the date of completing The Titan,
had it not been for obstruction from the outside, he ap-
peared to be on the road to an ease which might have
tempered and seasoned him as it has some European
giants. He was fast writing about " life as it is," and with
307
success of esteem. Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, A
Traveler at Forty, were bringing fame more than no-
toriety, and were helping to change the minds of editors
and reviewers. The Financier still caused anger of the old
kind: "A work marred by the representation of sexual
passion! " " Such things be ... their contemplation is
unprofitable and unpleasant." But, for example, after the
reviews of the travel book, one scarcely ever hears any
more of Mrs. Grundy or of " immature readers " as fac-
tors in the publishing game. Mrs. Grundy watching over
her brood of young people was being relegated to the
church magazines; that is, until the male of her, John
Sumner and his vice society, came along to revive her
fights and make a last stand for polite hypocrisy.
The appearance of The Titan released a new outcry
against " liaisons " outside of marriage. Axiomatically
they were said to be " gross, sordid, ugly, unpleasant " ;
while those within marriage, one infers, thought of as
nearly divested of " sexual passion," were equally refined
and spiritual. And reviewers too were still scandalized by
the offers of American truth as reading matter. Russian,
Swedish, German, French was acceptable; but the truth
must not be American. Yet now those most outraged fell
under the spell of realism; the book was " masterly, fear-
less, colossal " ; they were left " gasping " : " He never
spares the truth, but nevertheless it is a great work," one
of them said.
And in other ways fertilization came to Dreiser. Never
really without women as This Madness and A Gallery of
Women suggest, now in Chicago hunting the material of
The Titan, he found a girl to live with for longer, he says,
than any other woman between the days of his first wife
and his last. She appears in This Madness as Sidonie and
perhaps in The Titan as Stephanie. The child of a Jewish
father and New England mother, she had beauty and
talent, and was pliant and stimulating. After she was gone
" there was no one woman," he says. " There might have
been one housekeeper one day and a different one the next.
I lived alone, really." Together they made the apart-
ment at 165 West Tenth Street, his address for four or
five years. Two long rooms, tall windows from ceiling
308
to floor, finely divided so that they offered the rare light
of a century ago ; a pair of marble fireplaces where coal
burned; a bare grey floor wide-planked, again as of a cen-
tury ago, and an air of order and space — this house is
not forgotten today by those who went there to talk of
life and art in America and other countries, and propose
schemes, journals, and societies to promote life and art, or
to promote themselves or Dreiser, or by those who rang
at the door to thank him for The " Genius " or it might be
for Plays Natural and Supernatural, A Hoosier Holiday,
Free and Other Stories, The Hand of the Potter, Twelve
Men, Hey-Rub- A -Dub-Dub — books belonging to this
period. The place was not, I imagine, a temple like Stie-
glitz' 291 Fifth Avenue. James Oppenheim tells how
Dreiser said to him: " Every age has its great man; I am
the one of this age." But I think he is rarely as confiding
as that. And besides there were too many in those days to
dispute him, to make unreserved satellites. Perhaps too he
attracted sceptics. But that Tenth Street could be on
occasion a lodge for talk is traditional; Dreiser folding
and unfolding his handkerchief, and talking when he
wanted to luminously without a sign of the diffuseness
that readers find in his books. The first picture I ever had
of this novelist was from Masters in perhaps 1916, who
back from New York described an afternoon there: A
bottle of gin between them, snow outside, coals inside,
that peculiar light through the Victorian windows, and
a world of talk and laughter.
And to this address came like bonuses, enviable letters.
It is rare to see so many addressed to one man. They had
come before, and would come afterwards when he moved
to California, and then back to New York to various
addresses, and finally after An American Tragedy to
the more cathedral Rodin Studios in upper New York.
Dreiser is fastidious in his own letters, as he is in some of
his poems. Brevity and design mark them. And apparently
the magnet of fertile mind operated especially in these
years between him and those who wrote to him.
Mencken's envelopes are rarely dated, but they appear
to have flowed between 1910 and 1925. Many of them if
opened in the morning might have seemed as ethereal as
309
champagne for breakfast or a cocktail before noon, or
if they came in the afternoon as agreeable as beer in
Munich or Rhine wine on the Rhine between Cologne
and Heidelberg. Whether he hopes all Englishmen will
roast in hell, or declares he will name his next child
Hindenberg, whether boy or girl, or proposes that since
suffragettes are enlisting for the war and this will lead
to immorality, he and Dreiser should go as midwives, or
congratulates Dreiser on his dying words — " Pontius
Pilate, I come " — and submits his own last words, too
Saxon to pass the censor even today, which Dreiser is to
run to the window with before closing his eyes; or begs
him to be more diplomatic and not consort with dirty-
haired villagers, tin-pot revolutionaries, sophomore ad-
vanced thinkers, jitney socialists and other vermin, thus
ruining his chances with serious citizens ; or tells him the
prophecy of the most gifted colored psychic in Maryland
that Dreiser will live to a great old age, heart, lungs,
kidneys, brain intact, senile changes visible in but one
respect; or implores him not to use general delivery, it
is a pickpocket's address ; or asks why in hell he does not
sign his letters, he sells his autographs at 50^ apiece;
or suspects he is a kept man from his stationery; or tells
him that every tourist coming back from the Coast has
some tale about his Roman levities — " Yesterday I
heard that you have gone over to the Theosophists, and
are living at Point Loma in a yellow robe, with hasheesh
blossoms in your hair . . ." ; or asks him to do an article
for his new journal, wherein he may call the Methodists
by name and call the Baptists the sewer-rats of God; or
deplores The Hand of the Potter as beyond the pale of
production and a poor play at that; or corrects his spelling
" the prize is spelled * Nobel ' not ' Noble ' " ; or tells him
not to worry over his future, that the ground is solid
under him; or gives the news that he heard Billy Sunday
the other night, that it was in brief " a convention of
masturbators — of such is the kingdom of heaven " ; or
assures him he will go after his enemies in his next : —
" That old bitch is forever at the bat " — "I shall come to
the case of the old cow, she is a dirty old slut " — "I will
take up the professors as they come along." — " On with
310
the shrapnel, ahead with the machine guns ! " — These let-
ters usually signed " yours in Christ/' on occasion " Alloy-
sius Hohenzollern " or " Gustav of Magdala," or " Jesus
Baumgartner," are sparkling, wicked, hilarious and seri-
ous. Under them runs a current which always is grave and
therefore crucial, of two conflicting tempers: Mencken,
scholar, wit, protestant, the man of the library in his cor-
rect house in Baltimore, of the editorial battle field in
New York, of drinking bouts at Luchow's, Knickerbocker,
Astor, Algonquin : and Dreiser, the prowler in dark, curi-
ous, wilder places, and lighted centers as well; mystic
and catholic, boorish and compassionate, approximate and
precise by turns. They met at cross roads of realism and
enterprise, and kindled bonfires there for fun. In later
years perhaps the novelist got tired of having to laugh at
himself and the critic of having always to praise another.
Masters' letters in the years 1912 to 1919 were more
reverent, often like wine in praise and phrase. It is a loss
that, possibly out of a sense of the sacredness of personal
relations, he has refused permission to cite from these let-
ters. They possess a devotion to art, and friendship, frag-
ments of which would give solace to lonely readers in a
chaotic land. He writes as his friends of those years have
heard him speak, exhorting the few heroic spirits to go on
even " in the contempt of men," that is of other Ameri-
cans. Among heroes Dreiser in those days was important
to him. He bemoans the country as a dusty chaos of Sun-
day schools and evangelists. Only great art or great wit
can change it, and perhaps not that. As for Chicago, it was
a city of despair, as it has been for others too sensitive, too
uprooted to endure it without a diminution of creative
strength. Some have kept still or even whistled for cour-
age ; some like Henry Fuller have spoken in a clear but
scarcely audible voice. Others like Masters have cried out
in talk and in poems or novels, and then have abandoned
their city for other more hopeful lands.
He brightens when he writes that people come around
since Spoon River, interesting people, but Masters never
brightens for long; bores come too and women who want
to be refitted. Masters is a poet of rain and fog, dreaming
of sun-bright objects across hills. He exhorts Dreiser to
keep his blasphemous edge, assuring him he has 'em all
beat " and rejoices like a true son of Belial thereat." Of
these almost tearful instructions, up to date Dreiser has
followed a fragment. In 1931 certainly " in the contempt
of men " he will be seen fighting the lowbrow hardboiled
decree of Hollywood magnates as to what they cared to
make of An American Tragedy, his book, not theirs;
going on, that is, before the jeers and snickers of the
New York movie critics, who appear to champion the
Jesuits of Paramount. Or at least they go on record as
totally indifferent to an issue concerning them as much as
Dreiser — the integrity of American letters.
Then from 1911 until 1920, the year of his death, there
are from time to time whimsical serious notes from Wil-
liam Marion Reedy in St. Louis — a flavor to them.
They had in common as friends Masters and the young
Harris Merton Lyon. Spoon River Anthology first ap-
peared in Reedy's Mirror, and was first praised in New
York by Dreiser. In 1915 at 165 West Tenth Street
Masters read these village epitaphs to a company of
literati, New Yorkers who had to credit Chicago with a
real poet, indifferent as that city was to the glory of it.
Reedy writes of Masters from the heights of near old age :
" I hear from Masters every two or three days and
he is still conjugating the verb amare with the usual con-
junctive calamities that are the accompaniment of such
grammatical exercises. It's fine to be beyond Good and
Evil. Behold me! I'm 57 and immune to temptation."
"A letter from Masters this morning [he had gone to
New York " to participate poetically in the Lowell cen-
tenary exercises "] . Little about Lowell, lots about lovely
ladies. That man should adopt for his middle name that
of the mythical husband of Sappho — Penifer. But this is
the voice of envious senectitude."
Then intense letters about Lyon after his death in
1916, with pity for unfulfilment, and praise to Dreiser
for trying to collect and get published Lyon's stones and
essays. After devoted work on their part it appears the
manuscript was snatched back by Lyon's wife, advised not
to trust these friends : they might be self-seeking. So the
burial perhaps in oblivion of another young American,
who came and went too soon, killed by America. Or that
312
is the verdict of those who have read his two books
Graphics and Sardonics, published at Reedy's expense.
In fact Reedy appears to have always published in this
way; his famous Mirror never soaring into dollars. Here
are fragments from different letters :
". . . Back from the wilds of Wisconsin ... I am in
hearty sympathy with you on the proposal to print Lyon's
best work. I tried to help him with some of the publishers.
... I don't blame them much however. I printed 1000
copies of Graphics and I think I have sold less than fifty.
... I think the trouble is with the public and its ten-reel
mind."
"... I was exceedingly fond of that boy and admired
his work this side of idolatry — a great man — all too
early dead."
". . . Poor Lyon — my God how he burned for fame . . .
based on excellence; how he scorned the idea of working
for the market. . . . Our last meeting was poisoned by a
clash between two women over something the nature of
which I was never able to make out. Lyon and his wife de-
camped from my house — Lyon with his doom on him (as
I knew from the doctors). . . . Damn women. . . . But
what are we going to do without them? "
". . . It hurt me to read those things — reviving the man
— the boy — himself. . . . His very soul bared. . . . And
mostly he's in agony. ... I think there is too much mor-
bidity in the stories. . . ."
"... I have read Twelve Men. . . . Your study of Lyon
is wonderful. I was interested also in your study of poor
Dick Wood. . . . You know Dick went all to pieces and
died as a morphine fiend. . . ."
[and the last letter] " Your phone is a damned delusion.
Eleventeen times I've tried to get you in two weeks. . . .
Now I hope you don't think I'm going away without see-
ing you for I'm not. . . . I'm damned tired, stale, flat and
unprofitable. ... I was thrice at the village in to see my
protege Barney Galant, and had some drinks, but drinks
don't help."
Like poems that don't lie these letters follow the arch
of lives and fall into sadness with the passing of youth
and hope. There is one from Lyon himself, still young
but tired, thanking him for trying to get him a publisher :
" It is serious with me. I would write long books if I
could [with] the encouragement of a publisher of weight.
313
It seems to me we are all that way. Balzac, the man of
* incomparable power ' would never have kept so assidu-
ously at the grind if his head had not also been filled with
the sound of fame ringing in his ears. . . . Some men are
blessedly narrow enough to be devoted to their Art; some
are silly enough to be able to warm up an affection for
Posterity. A common strain in me prevents the possibility
of such amours. . . . Not having [a publisher] I some-
times even cease to think at all and drift with the days, let-
ting a pagan materialism suffice me. Even though I itch
with longing and disdain, I say, ' After all enough has been
written.'
. . . Reedy is sending you at my request his St. Louis
Mirror. The Farmhouse series, unsigned, is mine."
Masters and Reedy and this little known young man
seem like three of the many advance messengers of the
war that wages now between nature and machinery, in
which letters are not burned as at Alexandria but are lost
in a great oblivion. Impossible for example to get today
more than a rumor of works of Lyon,* Reedy is a for-
gotten Samaritan. Masters is incompletely published and
his poems are elegies of such death. The New York
Tribune in 1931 speaks of him as " an unknown lawyer
from Springfield, Illinois."
Then there were other friends who were gayer. There
was George Sterling, the California poet and libertine,
who committed suicide in 1927 — a mind enough in the
major key, one would think, to be conserved by pub-
lishers. He belongs in the end of this book, a friend be-
tween 1920 and 1927, but he belongs too in this chapter
which is partly designed as a profile of how concentrative
American genius can be, and how almost wholly dissi-
pated it has been by its public. As if they were careless
children emptying into sand fine pitchers of elixir and then
smashing the jugs or deserting them to the weather of
beaches or of vacant lots. Sterling was the last and long-
time friend of that intolerant wit, Ambrose Bierce, al-
though Bierce cursed him in a letter before he went to be
* It is the same with many others who unlike Lyon achieved fame.
Most of the novels of Henry Fuller, for example, are out of print. Quick-
sand, by Hervey White, is out of print, a book which Dreiser puts among
the great books of the world. Bierce and Crane are hard to get. — The list
of lost artists is long.
lost in Mexico in 1916. Equally it seems his heart included
so opposite a soul as Dreiser's, and then as different tem-
pers as Edwin Markham, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin,
Gertrude Atherton, Witter Bynner, Arthur Ficke, Upton
Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Mencken and Masters, many
of whom would clash if they met in the same room. Ster-
ling apparently went to the last barriers of his nature in
pursuit of pleasure and pain, so that wherever the heart
beat he was at home. He was an extravagant, and loved
Dreiser for extravagant devotion to life. He writes him
first in 1920 to Los Angeles, where he lived three years, to
invite him to his " cool grey city of love," u not quite the
city it was, but the daughter of the vine, though shy, can
still be found by the faithful. And there are other daugh-
ters." Then follow letters addressing him as Theodore,
Beloved Mastodon, Dear Megatherium, Beloved Bronte-
saurus, Dear Titanosaurus, praising his work, telling of
escapades, discussing ultimate answers to chaos; asking
and thanking him for a preface to his Lilith, and for help
to a friend, a young novelist ; sending him a ballad, son-
nets, satires; in the end thanking him for a gift of money
— he lived as he could. Here are extracts :
". . . I've been rereading The Titan, Sister Carrie, and
The Hand of The Potter. . . . How you tower above the
snipes and the tirmites. Mencken though he puts up a
good fight for you, doesn't give you justice by a long shot.
One has to think in centuries to do that." . . .
" I was in the lily pond again, last month, this time with
a beautiful blonde. The police arrested us, but fortunately
we got our clothes on before they appeared. . . . They
took us, at my request, to the old superintendent of the
Park, who though in bed, had us released. But it got in the
papers. If I'd had a clipping I'd enclose it."
"... I am eager that Lilith should have a good sale,
not for any monetary reasons, but to justify faith in it.
... A foreword from you would ' make ' it and me. . . .
" It takes real nerve to praise a man and then ask a great
favor. . . ."
". . . The * Tragedy ' came back safely with your in-
scription. . . . Heart does not often accompany head to
the degree it does with you . . . wish you were with me
today by this blue bay.
" I am here with Red Lewis, who like me is in the front
3IS
rank of your admirers. But he is upstairs sleeping off last
night's jag, and is oblivious to all this pure beauty."
". . . Thanks, a million of them! I knew you'd not fail
me. . . .
" As to the philosophy of the poem ... so keen a mind
as yours can discern that Lilith . . . has utterly the better
of the argument ( . . . the crux of the poem), yet I have
put into the mouth of Trancred the best that can be said
for the optimist, and many readers will believe that is right.
I think that is the better way as denoting the eternal bal-
ance between good and evil (pleasure and pain).
". . . Schopenhauer claims that pain is the only reality,
and it is indeed the greatest one. Nevertheless, pleasure is
more than the mere absence of pain, as witness the violence
and individuality of the sex-ecstasy, for instance."
". . . You and Mencken are my sole inducements to a
trip to New York. Next year I may make it. ... Here are
fine bright minds in this sex-mad city and I have to waste
most of my creative energy on 4th rate short stories under
a nom-de-plume. . . ."
" Next year " he was gone by his own hand from sex-
mad cities to where u Unheard but of the spiritual ear,
— Endures the challenge of the timeless foe — . . . An
icy music, mercilessly clear." Two other verses sent
Dreiser bridge the country from West to East, or crudely
so. One is a jingle; a lumber-jack in the wilderness yearns
for civilization, " For a little jazz on the vie," " a jolt of
rot-gut rye " and a " whore in her perfumed bed." The
other is addressed to a New York critic, modern ten
years ago:
"O diligent small Jew! Behold in me
That sluggard once commended to the ant . . .
(Now why the ant? the flea is busier),
Yet marvelling is in me, as I gaze and note
Your lore in magazine and book
Revealing how you love some brother bard
In terms that men are very joyous for.
I, haply sitting on the poor-house porch
Shall see you pass in your swift limousine,
And weeping, cry: O diligent small Jew! "
The reader may object that now I am far afield of my
theme, but it is not so. The diligent critic had undoubtedly
dismissed Sterling as out of date. Yet these letters show
him as timeless in the possession of faith and lust, whereas
the selfsame critic, now out-dated, may very possibly have
316
crumbled to pieces out of diplomacy. The moral of it is
that fashions like all the devil's decrees are salutary, if
revolt is allowed to follow them. If the various fleas and
poets of the day had really exchanged goading, the blade
of Irony might at length have appeared, and have given
edge to the national temper. It was the time for Ameri-
cans to fuse, and they let the moment pass. Now we must
wait again for no one knows how many years for Civili-
zation.
Other personalities appear out of a profusion of letters
from vivid men. John Maxwell, dating from the Chicago
Globe days writes from time to time salty news ; once on
receipt of the manuscript of A Book About Myself:
" I also took the liberty to cross out about four lines in
which I was made to inveigh against the virtue of women
and the honor of men. . . . There is no chance to live on
earth and express our sentiments publicly. However I have
let the sentiment stand that I consider 999 men out of a
thousand bastards. I won't renig on that. But a fellow just
can't lambast womanhood generally. . . .
" Did you know that the nation is trembling in the throes
of a ... political revolution. ... It will never win except
through bloodshed. What we are hearing now is preliminary
tremors of the mighty quake that will end in the destruction
of our present government. Yet they are so blind they can-
not see. Instead of cooperating, they advise killing and im-
prisonment, physical torture of one kind or another. But
it has always been so."
After the same book came many reminiscences from
journalists, rich, failures, venerable and middle-aged.
They had known these St. Louis characters, and testified
jubilantly to Dreiser's accuracy. One of them tells of a
night spent wandering with Reedy about the resorts of
St. Louis, when his wife was dying, a Catholic married
after divorce; and he was denied their house so that she
might receive sacrament and enter heaven. " The things
Reedy said to me that night I shall never forget," ran
the letter. These men contradict critics who have called
Dreiser authentic as novelist but loose as biographer.
Their anecdotes are sometimes epitaphs, so many of these
figures dying violent, dissolute or strange deaths. They
are letters that have, as in some of Masters' poems, that
almost toneless monotone and twang of Western voices,
trained to be afraid of intimate statement, and lowering
the voice for scandal, even in letters. The voices take you
to sentiment and jokes and sudden cackle on village
porches summer nights, to leaves of trumpet vines and
wild grape vines, to big yards and Main Streets back West,
even where the writers have graduated to cities.
Thomas B. Mosher, the first American publisher of
physically aesthetic books, usually small reprints of the
classics, is one of these and comes as an unexpected find in
Dreiser files. In a letter to Reedy his voice is mellow and
rustic and breaks the monotone. He speaks of a Mirror
review of The Financier:
" It is certainly, Bill, beyond me to express the admira-
tion I feel for a cuss like yourself who can take up his pen
and sling liquid lightning. . . . This you have done, my
son, and ... I have only to say you struck it to the heart.
I greatly admired Clayhanger and yet Arnold Bennett is
not in it with Theodore Dreiser. Old man your head for
once is bigger than your heart and it would be hard to chase
that fat fantastic heart of yours into all the holes and cor-
ners it has probably crept since the days when you were a
newspaper boy and I was a damned poor clerk in St. Louis
in '79."
Then there are just as many letters with a literary tone
of voice; naturally cultured among the older men; fash-
ionably rough-neck among the younger. Among them are
Alexander Harvey, George P. Jenks, W. E. Williams of
Kansas City, W. H. Wright (S. S. VanDine), Charles
Yost, Thomas Boyd of St. Paul, Charles Fort, Max East-
man, Edward Smith, John Barry, Fremont Older out in
San Francisco, Sherwood Anderson, Frank Harris, John
Powys, Ben Hecht, Jim Tully, Burton Rascoe, Matthew
Josephson, David Karsner, Dudley Nichols, Sol P. Car-
son and Claude Bowers who writes :
" Have just read your opinion of the intelligentsia . . .
of our delectable city in the World. I have long known there
was something miserably wrong with our Best Minds for
the most part. . . . You have hit the nail on the head. They
are men in petticoats."
" Spinsters in trousers " might have driven the nail out
of sight. But the intellectuals of this correspondence are
not in this class. In fact a marvelous vigor operates in
these letters back and forth between Dreiser and their
318
writers — some of these men so grateful, they insist, for
his books and for his " blasphemous," fearless integrity.
It gives them courage to go on. Perhaps only Ben Hecht
writes with tongue slightly in cheek, a little patronizing,
more inquisitive than sincere — a harbinger of today's
attitude toward seriousness. Dreiser on his side appears in
this correspondence as one repeatedly solicited to find an
editorial job or to find a publisher or to write a preface or
to inscribe a book for friend or stranger. Almost always
a later letter discloses that he has done his utmost; or
sometimes it is he who offers help on his own initiative.
Sherwood Anderson writes him in 1916 :
" Some one once told me of the difficulty you have had
with publishers so perhaps you will sympathize with me
... I want you to read one of my novels. . . .
" I have written four long novels and none of them have
been published ... I am nearly forty years of age. . . ."
"... I must personally thank you for your . . . article
in Seven Arts Magazine. It sets forth as nothing I have ever
read . . . the complete and terrible fact of the wall in the
shadow of which American artists must work.
" To any of us here in America the one really hopeful
note of our times is your own stout figure pounding at the
wall.
" Our hats off to you, captain."
And Charles Fort repays Dreiser's find of a publisher
for him with fantastic letters out of pools of friendship,
and the invention of a " heathen cocktail " which he
names after Dreiser. To some laymen he appears to make
fiction out of scientific lore and rumor, and appears to
believe in a land above the earth, complementary to it,
from which rain frogs, blood, meteors and other phe-
nomena, and occasionally ambassadors in the likeness of
men. Perhaps Dreiser is related to him on the side that
seeks to surround the network of facts with explicit mys-
teries. Though " realist " he has paid homage to a num-
ber of miraculous doctrines — Christian Science, mental
telepathy, spiritualism. Have they been the more plausible
to this child from " credulous " Indiana because of that
background of Pagan-Catholic ghouls, saints and devils?
Or has it been quite simply his wish to propose imagina-
tively that u anything may be true," — a proposal, isn't
319
it, that Arthur Eddington, the physicist, makes mathe-
matically. . . . And then from that premise does he
sometimes favor, again like Eddington, unproved se-
quences . . . ? The cocktail is made after this recipe :
" You take a glass of beer and put a live goldfish in it —
instead of a cherry or olive or such things that occur to a
commonplace mind.
:< You gulp.
" The sensation of enclosing a live organism is delight-
fully revolting. I think it's immoral. I have named it the
Dreiser cocktail."
320
55
" The pains lie among the pleasures like
sand in rice, not only bad in themselves but
spoiling the good." HERMAN MELVILLE
T
JLhese letters tell of time crowded but unhur-
ried, of moments of fulfilment. Then in most cases the
liaison ends, not always by death; often by that " change-
fulness " which, he says, " is mine and life's," and we get
imitations of the final change death. Today on his six-
tieth birthday an interviewer quotes him in words that
chill the blood, perhaps to shock her and yet palpably his
words: "I have never wanted friends, and have never
been in a position where I didn't have to fence myself in."
One wonders from signs like this if his " changefulness "
is not in part another word for fear of criticism. Fact is,
the years have cut him off from some of these finest inti-
macies. Is that why he disdains them now? Mencken
explains it casually: " Oh well, New York is a washer-out
of friendships." And it used to be repeated, " He stands
weather-beaten and lonely . . ."; yet then and always
as these letters show, and friends and ex-friends bear wit-
ness, he was living many lives and nearly as many deaths,
their number dependent on changefulness — a chain-
stitch life of people. The fire and ashes of them appear
in his pages.
In five years, 1914 to 1919 Dreiser published eight
books * all of them luminous, that is, giving forth light,
if read faithfully; each of them deeply concerned with
why and how we live. And less concerned with how to say
it. In the same years, however " weather-beaten and
* The Titan, 1914$ The "Genius," 19155 Plays of The Natural And
The Supernatural, 1916} A Booster Holiday, 1916; Free And Other
Stories, 19185 The Hand Of The Potter, 1919; Twelve Men, 19195 Hey
Rub- A -Dub-Dub, 1919.
321
lonely," requests came to him for articles from people as
various as Ray Long of The Cosmopolitan, Max East-
man of the New Masses, David Karsner of The Call,
and on special cross-roads James Oppenheim and Waldo
Frank of Seven Arts, Frank Harris owner of Pearson's,
and on a main cross-road Mencken and Nathan of The
Smart Set and The American Mercury. He is in these
years a terrific lesson in energy; a nucleus for people so
foreign one to the other that it is fabulous to believe they
all wanted him. He responded with story or article, some-
times to be turned down even by solicitors, who had their
public to think of. But nothing deterred him. A wraith of
a story, The Lost Phoebe * was sent out a dozen times
through two agents from 1912 to 1915 before finally The
Century accepted it, and later Famous Short Stories re-
printed it. Its first agent wrote that in his opinion it was
useless to send it to The Saturday Evening Post — the
mere sketch of an insane tottering old man, who can't
believe his wife is dead; and he wanders calling her until
he dies. The Post, Mr. Reynolds reminds him, and it
could not have been news, " prefers stories of youth and
happiness or of action." But Dreiser insists that the
Pollyanna temple shall have its chance of refusal, which
it takes. In 1918 however this same journal prints Free*
more gloomy and harsher than The Lost Phoebe. William
Griffiths of The National Sunday Magazine would like
" mighty well " to have something from Dreiser, but if
it is u sad " he doubts that he wants it; he would like one
of his " strong stories " like the one about a railroad
section-boss he had seen in McClure's. Colliers begs him
to put " plot " and " emotional interest " into his work.
Douglas Z. Doty of Century, accepting The Lost Phoebe,
warns him they can't publish it at once on account of war
news being " rather grim "; their " only chance for light-
ness is in the fiction." So the spectres of the Howells days,
Sweetness and Gladness join now with " Pep " and con-
tinue to pronounce their rancid curse upon our letters.
In 1916 however the Cosmopolitan pays $600 for Mar-
ried * — a brief contrast of city and village, and of how
life is cruel, turned to light in two people's hearts. In 1918
* Free And Other Stories.
322
they print The Second Choice * as desolating as Tchekov
at his greyest. Sewell Haggard accepts an article for
Hearst's for $500. The Sunday New York Tribune prints
a story called Love which loses the editor his job. So,
patiently Dreiser places his wares for money or for next
to nothing, $30 once from The New Republic for a story.
He submits short plays, but editors high-brow and low-
brow feel that " dramatic material is not available for
magazine use," or that the plays are too " psychologic "
to be dramatic.
He had to count on the lively editors of Smart Set
and the Little Review to see these plays in print and on
a future life to see most of them on the stage. f Mencken
and Nathan regret repeatedly they can't pay him more;
they are involved in a battle themselves to " put some
genuine intelligence into that decrepit and maudlin sheet."
They submit to months without salary in the cause of
national exhilaration, and finally give up in favor of a
fresh start, their Mercury. The Smart Set remains for all
their effort " as righteous as a decrepit and converted
Madame," Mencken writes. Yet not before they have
published a number of novelties including the first stories
of James Joyce to be printed in America.
So it went, this battle for lively letters; a formidable
lesson in endurance, for which men appear too tired to-
day or spineless. In addition, with Dreiser sales were
crucial ; he lived by what he wrote, counting nickels, riding
in subways and street-cars; even the 5th Avenue bus was a
luxury. Today he praises hardship, a spur to good work,
he says. But sometimes perhaps the repeated melancholy
of it dulls the sharpest " blasphemous edge." His record
is the more grilling when one considers the handicap of
at least three major battles with his publishers in these
few years, in one of which Mencken was a devoted ally.
The first engagement came in the winter of 1915.
Harper's had accepted and printed The Titan. It was all
* Free And Other Stories.
f In 1917 The Girl In The Coffin was skilfully produced by the
Washington Square Players and in 1921 The Hand Of The Potter was
execrably played for only two weeks by the Provincetown Players. Other-
wise Dreiser's plays have never reached the commercial footlights.
323
but bound. Then out of a cloudless sky, the Doubleday
incident repeated itself. Over the telephone the book was
withdrawn, and with no new reason given; " a bit too
strong" was all they could say — Messrs Duneka, Hitch-
cock and Leigh, now dead. The remaining editors of that
day, Mr. Wells and Mr. Hoyns, can remember nothing
of the affair. Mr. Hoyns, when asked, agrees that it was
curious for a firm to go so far and then retract; he can
remember no other incident of the kind in his connection
with Harper's. Mr. Thomas Wells thinks it was due to
the typesetters, one of whom, he remembers, came to Mr.
Duneka's desk next to his, with some of the proof sheets,
and the advice not to publish The Titan. His colleagues
in the printing room had all agreed that the book was
obscene and objectionable. Apparently then some $2,000
(or at least that is what Dreiser says he eventually had
to give them for the plates) was jeopardized to save the
delicate feelings of the typesetters. Rumor however had
it differently at the time. It was hinted that a would-be
ambassador to England blocked the way — the very
Colonel Harvey who back in 1910 " did not want to
meet " the author of Jennie Gerhardt. The last mistress
of the great Yerkes, now fashionable in London, or at
least with king and queen, could, it seemed, be more valu-
able to the Colonel than a great novel could be to his
publishing house. Others said that a Chicago newspaper
might sue for a libelous rendering of one of its founders.
So two years' work fell like a card house. Nothing to do
but to send the book elsewhere. Mitchell Kennedy like-
wise would not touch it. It seemed that he too wished to
stand in well with the favorite of the traction magnate,
who, it was thought, resembled the young and beguiling
Berenice, last in the list of the Titan's loves. A legend
had it that Dreiser himself was infatuated with this
princess of American subversive royalty. This he dis-
claims: " I admired her, she had that mysterious trait —
style. If she gave a dinner or a luncheon it was staged like
a play, but there was no chance to know her ; she was too
much the diplomat and wrapped herself in importance.
She received from a green onyx couch covered with furs
and brocades."
324
Letters and telegrams fly between Dreiser and friends
of his on the one hand and the publishers on the other,
most of them interested but scared. The " lovable " B. W.
Dodge tries to help him, with the suggestion of Dodd,
Mead & Co., but takes it back:
". . . if . . . too strong for Harper's it would surely be
too rich for D. M. and Co. . . . The entire family are very
pious Presby's. There is not a black sheep in the entire
flock which is a large one. The only book they ever pub-
lished which shaded the Ten Commandments was " Pam "
. . . and they have regretted it ever since.
Also, Dodge writes, he " is strictly sober " now and would
like the novelist to go back into the publishing business
with him. Dreiser does this with the loan of some money.
Not many years after Dodge died, owing him some
thousands of dollars dating back to the Sister Carrie
returns, the loss of which he says he never regretted, so
much he loved him. D. Z. Doty of The Century, pub-
lisher of A Traveler at Forty, is sorry that his house is
afraid of The Titan. Mr. Charles Scribner writes squeam-
ishly from the Century Club he is certain of refusing the
book before reading it, but that no doubt it will make a
financial success and there are " publishers who would
jump at the chance." Doran decides after a careful read-
ing he " would not publish Dreiser if he were the last
author on earth." Mencken writes:
"An eternal pox upon the Harpers. And Doran be
damned for his flight. God knows this country needs that
weekly, once planned. . . .
" It is high time you stopped listening to the vapid criti-
cisms of publishing donkeys. Such vermin over-estimate
their own sagacity and what is more their own importance.
Imagine Kennedy objecting to a book of yours. . . ."
Finally at Lengel's instigation John Lane and Co. show
a spark of interest. Their American editor however,
J. Jefferson Jones, was about to turn the book down, when
again an Englishman as with Sister Carrie came to the
rescue. Lane's English advisor, Frederic Chapman, also
translator of Anatole France, happened on the scene. He
made this report :
" I have not the slightest doubt that as far as John Lane
Co. is concerned this is the most important chance that
325
has come its way since the establishment of the New York
business, and while I should not anticipate in England any-
thing like the sales which may be counted on in America,
the book is certain to rouse a good deal of discussion and
to be treated with unqualified respect by the more serious
reviewers.
"The ostensible causes upon which Harper's have with-
drawn the book are quite negligible. . . . Mr. Dreiser
records his hero's fluttering from one flame to another with
entire passivity. He hardly commends and certainly never
condemns, but he has handled his episodes in so masterly a
fashion that I do not think there is the least chance of the
prurient public getting flustered. A ready retort to any-
body . . . would be to refer them to Mr. Galsworthy's
. . . Dark Flower . . . which is infinitely more immoral
(supposing immorality to exist in either) . . ."
So now all is well; even the English publication of
The Titan went through, to the regret of Mr. Mitchell
Kennedy, two of whose letters to Alexander Harvey are
almost proof of the rumor that he was the poison in
Dreiser's candy, and all for fear of treason to majesty.
The novel, he thought, should never have been published
in America and could not possibly be published in Eng-
land without incurring legal liability. He had written
John Lane to that effect. He presumed he would not wish
to bring the book out on account of " his friendship of
many years' standing with Miss Grigsby." That publisher
must have looked on style and story as separate issues.
The Titan appeared in England, apparently without detri-
ment to himself or his friend, the American heiress.
Yet it looks as if quite surely " High Society " had the
importance which Dreiser, for one, never afraid of ridi-
cule, has had the intellect to give it. And in the drama of
our letters the socially elect and the socially aspiring ap-
pear to have played the part of Villain not of Friend
to Art.
326
" Whatever his faults of composition or
construction, and there are not so many as
his friends endeavor to make out, he has
magnificently booted the reading public, the
morally subsidized critics and the very pub-
lishers in the coarsest regions of their
bodies — their souls. And for this . . . /
acclaim him as the only real, uncontami-
nated genius of these States and pray to
God that my friend Sherwood Anderson
will hurry up and get published so that
there will be two of them."
The Scavenger, Little Review, October, 1916
low Dreiser again unconsciously was setting
the stage for a second and more spectacular engage-
ment. This time it would be a storm center about which
would flare for a while the forces of Methodism and
Conservatism, and the scattered amateurs of free
speech; an incongruous clash of people never meant to
meet even in battle, the kind of grim play that our de-
mocracy is addicted to. On the plateau of achievement
to which the largeness of The Titan had taken him, he
completed another tome of life, The " Genius" and
ma'de a contract for publication with Lane in July 1914
— the book was published in September 1915. He has
said, perhaps it is his favorite work. By implication, not
by dogma, The " Genius " indicts American society for
the destruction of treasure it ought to prize, just as his
Tragedy accuses it for the failure of a common man to
be a healthy animal.
The hero, Eugene Witla, a painter, stands for all those
he had known and heard of, possessed by beauty, who
were constantly dying in suicide or drink or insanity or
327
worldly success, defeated by a raw industrial disorder.
He had four men in mind when he wrote it, his young
predecessor of the Delineator; the erotic illustrator,
Everett Shinn; himself, especially as to outward circum-
stance; and a fourth unnamed. The composite stood in
his mind for the artists who could not propose asceticism
like Emerson, Thoreau, Sandburg or Frost; who had to
surround themselves with the luxuries, and yet had to be
haunted by that small silver clarion voice calling to un-
explored mysteries. It would not let them rest or be
complacent. The voice for which men immolate them-
selves in isolated workrooms in agony of birth. For
Dreiser tolerant and hopeful, these men were not in-
frequent, and if they had any of the sheen of genius at
all they were sacred. People complaining that his hero
from Alexandria, Illinois, is not the real article malign
the portrait. Illinois could give birth to genius; though
it might repudiate it; Dreiser knew this. Quite clearly
he has endowed him with that something of Endymion,
devastating to women, envied by other men, a prowess, a
u deathful glee," which does not always lead to mastery
in art. Dreiser has made him lovingly, the kind of hero he
himself used to wish he could be among the village girls
and boys back in Indiana :
" Why, I have been ... a lord
Of flowers, garlands, love-knots, silly posies,
Groves, meadows, melodies, and arbour-roses . . ."
So endowed out of a kinder childhood than his own,
Dreiser exposes him step by step to the very life he him-
self had been through, exchanging writing for painting.
Out of it grows a different ending. His hero's gifted sensu-
ality finally exiles him from the American market, whereas
a greater ruggedness and enforced austerity has kept
Dreiser there, too big for it and yet within it.
Conversely to the Titan, the nature of the Genius is
true, and not the masterpieces attributed to him. No use
to deny that here the book leans on a mistaken premise.
The hero, both voluptuary and " great painter," ac-
claimed in Paris as Dreiser had been in London, was im-
possible to the United States. He could not have hap-
pened here in that day or yet today. One way or another
328
provincialism follows us, try as we do to escape in air-
planes and through dollars. Winslow Homer and Albert
Ryder could paint, but they were stoics, willing to live
apart, unknown certainly to France; Whistler emaciated
his exacting art by taking it to Europe, and it would have
died had he stayed at home. Nor has there been a
painter of self-tutored power equal to Dreiser's own or
to Masters' or Frank Norris'. Being a country blind to
color how could we be a country of painters? Pascin knew
it when he said " It takes twice as much genius to paint
in America as it does in France and no one has that much."
Dreiser's innocence of this, and of the art of painting,
discolors the truth of his hero.
No use either to deny Dreiserian lapses into language
too sweet or banal, giving delight to detractors. Never-
theless The " Genius " is greater than its faults — a new
undertaking not to be scorned by true snobs. As he
wrote it, Masters' words might have sounded for him,
" to be fused and molten," and his own words, " to
have a canvas as big as the back of a church." It is bigger
than that, appearing out of a tumult of life, and a convul-
sive knowledge of death. The wistful green village like
Warsaw; youth in fabulous Chicago; Bohemia in amateur
New York; the dreamy midwest farmland of the fiancee
too binding to forget; robust drive of day-laborers, sweat
and salt; rich varnished magazine world to which the
Genius is diverted; native excursion into Christian Sci-
ence; and then the solitudes of the heart or resonance or
conflict of two hearts together — all is made as if ex-
perienced.
In the erotic theme of village and farmland, and in
the last act, describing a circle of birth, surgery and
death, the phrasing is that of a master. Especially the
climax in a New York hospital reads like more than a
play; it reads like an opera whose finale orchestrally
binds the themes of the book. You feel the earth revolving
in its haze of mimetic cries, quick acts and gestures of
human beings — here of surgeons, nurses, a new child,
and the bond broken between two people who had tried
life together and failed. Magnificence brings to mind
the Homeric hymn where birth and the turn of the gen-
329
erations is chanted. Mencken's claim is supported here —
" Dreiser derives from the Greeks." Style is maintained
as in the decline of Hurstwood in Sister Carrie, and in the
drowning and death-house scenes of the Tragedy — evi-
dence that Dreiser might always have disciplined words
to obey his will had he not been distracted by other
pastimes. In 1915 and again when the book reappeared
in 1923 he was strangely censured for this feat of lan-
guage; childbirth, a Caesarian operation, were " impos-
sible subject matter." Even admirers merely tolerated it
for the skill of it. Yet the next decade of critics, fash-
ions changing, would tumble into praise of the same
theme more selfishly treated in Hemingway's Farewell to
Arms.
The influence of this ending alone should have given
Dreiser a passport to victory, " fused and molten," but
Masters, that severest critic, could not quite confer it.
He says to him intimately in letters, and more elaborately
in a review in the Chicago Evening Post that he is greater
than the book :
" [Dreiser] understands what a man almost a genius
must contend with in this disorderly land of rhetorical free-
dom and societal tyranny and banality. . . . Over the book
one can hear sometimes Gargantuan laughter; at other
times a trembling sensitiveness seems to vibrate through
the pages. . . . He seems to me our greatest novelist now
writing. . . . Dreiser has recorded the definite figure of a
man moving through an America that required strength of
the first order to overcome, if any strength could do that.
... He can be glad . . . that he revolutionized American
fiction. It can never return to the old standards of reticence
about life. But he has not reached the climax whither his
genius inevitably tends. That climax must come . . . that
book, when it shall be written will be ... more quint-
essential than this one."
Reedy, who confessed he once turned down a story
of Lyon's because a hat-pin was specified as an instru-
ment of abortion, did not like The " Genius" " the mul-
tiplication of amours." And even Mencken was unex-
pectedly prudish. His review of The " Genius " is called
A Literary Behemoth. He was glad of its Greek quality,
but found lapses of taste, not always lingual either, but
as to topic — one where, as he phrases it, " the young
330
man runs his hand up under the girl's skirts — unneces-
sary! " in his opinion. As written, the episode, surely not
unknown to erotic traffic, is lascivious and grave; part of
" a transport of agony and delight " broken by the girl's
fears. With it is told the grief of conflict between puritan
and pagan, a theme of the book; and the hero asks
Dreiser's choral question: " What is life? . . . What is
the human body? What produces passion? Here we are
surging with a fever of longing and then we burn out
and die." Another time, succumbing to him, the girl
makes the ancient threat of death or marriage :
" He thought of her with her beautiful body, her mass of
soft hair all tarnished in death. . . .
1 You wouldn't do that? ' he asked.
' Yes, I would/ she said sadly. . . . ' You know that
little lake, I'd drown myself! . . .'
". . . Thus he stood by the bank of this still lake mar-
velling at the subtleties of reflected radiance, twining and
intertwining it all with love, death, failure, fame. ... It
was romantic to think that in such a lake, if he were un-
kind, Angela would be found. By such a darkness as was
now descending would all her bright dreams be submerged.
... It would be as beautiful as romance. ... He stared
at the fading surface . . . silver, lavender, leaden gray.
Overhead a vivid star already was shining. How would it
be with her if she were really below those still waters?
How would it be with him? It would be too desperate, too
regretful. No, he must marry her. It was in this mood that
he returned to the city, the ache of life in his heart."
For libertines like Mencken, like Reedy, to turn prude;
not to take glee and grief together as Dreiser knew how
to weave them, must have bewildered him. Perhaps in
part it accounts for his habit of repetition and emphasis.
He had to tell people until they understood, in what
language he could find and in euphuisms like bosom and
quivering limbs if necessary. In 1915 American prose
held no precedent for erotic event. When approached it
was by way of asterisks or snickers. Mencken, however,
was soon to waive prejudice and give months of time to
the defense of The " Genius."
There were others under the complete spell of the
book. The poet and aesthete, Arthur Ficke, overseas
now — the war is on for Americans — far from his dis-
tinguished collection of Japanese prints picked up The
" Genius " and wrote a poem to Dreiser :
" Tonight I am alone,
A long way from that Chinese restaurant,
I have just turned the last page
Of a book of yours —
Now there are passing before me
Interminable figures in tangled procession —
Proud or cringing, starved with desire, or icy,
Hastening toward a dream of triumph; fleeing
from a dream of doom, —
Through a chaotic and meaningless anarchy,
Under heavy clouds of terrific gloom
Or through ravishing flashes of knife-edged
sunlight —
Their heads haloed with immortal illusion, —
The terrible and beautiful, cruel and wonder-
laden illusion of life."
Jim Tully, ex-pugilist, wrote him : " There are two men
I have always wanted to meet, Thomas Hardy and Theo-
dore Dreiser . . . it is a vast piece [ The " Genius "] —
and as long as you can turn out a book like that — you can
tell old lady Frank Harris to go to hell. . . . Just think
if I get a book over it will be the first one by an ex-
pugilist . . ." Frank Harris, admiring Dreiser, had felt
" forced to admit " that Sister Carrie was his best book.
The critics and the public were to blame as well as the
writer, but " no explanation/' he decreed, " can justify
such a fact." He accused the " German paste " in him
for blindness to " beauty of words." In the same article
Harris gave himself away preferring the softer and preju-
diced David Graham Phillips. Phillips' " Susan nodded
delightedly " and " sneered he at Wright," as synonyms
for " she said " and " he said " are insensibilities typical of
Phillips to which I for one prefer Dreiser's " he looked
into her eyes, the same were filled with tears." Why not
admit that as a people we are not " language-minded,"
except in jokes?
F. Scott Fitzgerald at the end of the decade freshly
delivered from Princeton and into his own creation, the
Jazz Age, was another to pay tribute. Especially The
" Genius " got him. Perhaps he found himself there.
Though a more frivolous and more moral version of that
332
hero, he too, judging from his stories, conceived of life
as impossible without the luxuries, and has not succumbed
to their market price for the moment without authentic
work to his name. Sometimes lyrical to the point of
strangeness, a kind of youthful, syncopated, crystal-
gazing! One evening he made a pilgrimage to Tenth
Street. He arrived presenting a bottle of champagne,
which Dreiser put in the ice box. A circle of owl-like faces
were drinking near beer. Very little was said. It seemed
impossible to talk. So ended his gallant effort to do what
with the exception of Howells and the Concord School,
no one has done in these States — talk and bridge a gen-
eration. " Americans are infinitely repellent particles."
The Gaelic Ernest Boyd in a portrait of Fitzgerald de-
scribes the same visit between " the master and his young-
est disciple " with foreign glee over our disconnected
history and scattered genius, all for lack of medium of ex-
change. The picture, he says, is " testimony to the sur-
vival in Scott Fitzgerald of respect for honorable achieve-
ment, under difficulties certainly unknown to him or his
contemporaries." * Perhaps not entirely unknown; yet his
friends for a fact had already gone over to Proust, Ger-
trude Stein and James Joyce, who did not particularly
want them.
John Cowper Powys and Randolph Bourne were other
important actors in Dreiser's behalf at this time. Powys,
novelist and poet, came to the United States early in the
decade of The " Genius" and became for some years an
evangelist of culture, bearing rumor of art to the villages.
He was loved by many women's clubs for his Greek head
and fire of mind, and lived through it to achieve less pro-
miscuous days. To him goes the distinction as foreigner
of having preached our living writers to us — among
them Dreiser and Masters, hot from the iron. Between
him and Dreiser exists a friendship violated by neither:
" A man derived out of Emily Bronte, Hardy and Dosto-
evsky," Dreiser says in his most caressing voice, " lack-
* Portraits: Real and Imaginary, 1924. "Being Memories and Im-
pressions of Friends and Contemporaries 5 with Appreciations of Divers
Singularities and Characteristics of Certain Phases of Life and Letters
Among North Americans as Seen, Heard and Divined by Ernest Boyd."
333
ing Hardy's terrible fatality, but possessed like all of
them by a sense of inanity and cruelty. He really believes
in devilishness. I can't see it that way. Most people are too
busy to be possessed by devils. Take a butcher cutting
meat all day or a factory hand or clerk, they haven't the
time. . . . Powys is amorphous, wonderful, I count on
him."
For Englishmen more than for most Americans Dreiser
has had an aesthetic appeal. Powys knows him that way.
He first heard of him some fifteen years ago on a train
coming out of Toledo; the Toledo Blade opened at a
double page interview called, perhaps, " Apostle Of
Chaos." The headline caught him, and when he read, " I
have no hope, yet I do not despair, life drifts," he thought
can there be such an American? He first met him at
Maurice Browne's Little Theater in Chicago. After-
wards he knew him well in New York: " I always had
the impression of someone hard and firm, aristocratic
hands, Nordic, athletic, countrified. He wore tweeds and
had the European fashion of carrying a stick . . ." To
Powys " there are two kinds of force, one from the sun,
the other from the cold, beyond the stars' rays. A man
touched by force of cold can draw on it at will as through
a long thin pipe. Dreiser is such a man; endowed with a
planetary consciousness; possessed of brains that create
an order." Once on a walk in California he told Powys
that his critics wanted to make him into a materialist: " I
am not one, I have never taken life at its face value." —
u He is superstitious like an old Roman, believes in signs,
and that a certain type of person seen at a certain time
will bring good luck or bad. ... At one time when I was
an invalid of all the people who came to see me Dreiser
was as considerate as a woman ; he alone went off promptly
at ten o'clock. . . . He lives in no middle distance be-
tween himself and others and when there is not serious
exchange, attempts approach through sportive badinage
difficult to answer verbally. . . . He has no cold malice,
is non-human, and morbidly sensitive." So this friend de-
scribed him.
In 1914, the year before the publication of The
" Genius," Margaret Anderson's left-wing Little Review
334
had been born in accordance with the vigorous enter-
prise of these days both for the exotic and the native.
She was a young woman according to her memoirs who
liked chocolates and disliked reality, that of sex included *
— " My greatest enemy is reality ... I have fought it
successfully for thirty years ... I have always held
myself aloof from natural laws." In which of course she
was a native, also in a genius for selling. For thirty years
she sold Art not as a merchandise but as a luxury, and
with high spirits made the most seriously lively journal
yet published in these States. Before she fled reality and
took her journal off to flirt with Europe, and in American
fashion marry manners which had little to do with
American matters, the Little Review was perhaps the
only conveyance remarkable for native prose and poetry
we have had, that is, of any duration. In November 1915
she published an article by Powys who was traveling in
the opposite direction, away from Europe and toward
America — a review of The " Genius." For him Dreiser
bridged the gulf between the old countries and this new
one. Over his bridge where sex and tragedy finally walked,
might now come other American prophets of reality,
and a language might be established that would purge us
of provincialism. The Little Review followed this with
The Dlonysian Dreiser, the outburst of one of those en-
gaging youths of this period who thought the wilderness
was this time just about to bloom with life and genius,
calling himself Scavenger:
" Really, you of the firm-fireside-faith, what is there to
be done? Here is the Dionysian dastard who dares proclaim
that life is a decent, orderly routine and that life is also a
wild, warm passionate thing; that it is also a flame in which
there is only one color, the red, golden color of youth.
And the answer is — howl. A howl will go up I swear it.
It will start from the critics.
I can almost read their forthcoming reviews as I close
my eyes.
* " Dick was one of those civilized men to be found exclusively in
America it seems, who are more interested in an idea than in a woman."
"... Bauer being enormously interested in Duncan's dancing as art, I
being totally uninterested in it as sex."
From My Thirty Years War
by Margaret Anderson.
335
e A sensually depraved and degenerate type.
' Striking at the bed rock of public solidarity, of home
happiness, of everything decent and worth while. . . .'
Howl, you who have stultified your artists and buried
them under the gingerbread morality of your own monoto-
nous lives. Dreiser is the one novelist being published in
America today who doesn't listen to you, who describes you
at your various bests, who wrings the pathos and joys out
of your little worlds; who paints in with the brush of a
universal art what you and I are doing in Alexandria and
Chicago and New York and all the milk-station stops be-
tween. . . ."
And Randolph Bourne in older prose salutes Dreiser
as an equal of European novelists in an article for the
New Republic called Desire as Hero; as the opposite of
" Booth Tarkington who makes business the master mo-
tive of life to which religion and sex are incidental " :
" Of course no great Continental novelist ever believed
this, Holland or Dostoevsky or Tolstoi or Frenssen or Nexo.
The major motives of these continentals is almost always
the inexorable desire of life ... a desire which consists of
walking in the mud with the face toward the stars. . . .
No matter how badly Mr. Dreiser does his work, he would
be significant as the American novelist who has most felt
this subterranean current of life . . . our only novelist who
has tried to plumb far below. . . .
His hero is really not Sister Carrie or the Titan or the
Genius, but that desire within us that pounds in manifold
guise against the walls of experience."
Here was an American critic, it was said, who should
not have died. The War killed him. For such a critic to
publish and live in New York in war time was out of the
question. He appeared to his friends to burn with that
impartial mind sometimes called Greek, to which democ-
racies used to dedicate themselves when they were born.
Mind, creative not destructive, living in the moment,
seduced more by the future than by the past, but scarcely
more. Whitman dreamed of it for his new clean United
States with his one forgetfulness that grass grows best out
of mould.
In the midst of this decade in 1916 on the eve of our
entry into the Great War, a number of fairly young
optimists, James Oppenheim, Louis Untermeyer, Van
Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank, founded
336
a magazine called The Seven Arts to meet the renais-
sance they conceived to be u bursting in the sky over the
heads of an amazed people." Dreiser, though " lumber-
ing," Sandburg, Masters, Frost, Mencken, Amy Lowell
were like " rockets from unconnected quarters." u The
Seven Arts would be a channel for the flow of these new
tendencies." " We were wild enough," Oppenheim says,
" to believe that while Europe was cutting its own throat
the artists and critics could dominate America." Randolph
Bourne joining with them, though certain that the war
would put a stop to this brief bright awakening, fought
for it to the last moment. Especially he fought the in-
tellectuals who in sentimental numbers (among them his
own teacher, John Dewey, and Van Wyck Brooks too),
were going over into the war hysteria, and enlisting what
wits they had on the side of this " fashionable war." Mind
should not be drafted like this without his caustic dissent.
In the meantime, in a year and a half The Seven Arts
published besides these first rockets, newer writers, Sher-
wood Anderson, Bodenheim, Padraic Colum, Dos Passes,
Jack Reed, Van Loon, John Dewey, Carl Van Vechten,
Eugene O'Neill, Spingarn, and " stacks of others " in-
cluding " all the poets from Frost to Sandburg." Then
Bourne's articles about the war killed The Seven Arts. In
1917 endowment was withdrawn. With no place to pub-
lish, the blow killed him. " Had he lived," his friends
say, " the Twenties might have been more sparkling than
they were." Bourne was " deformed, humped-back, a
longish medieval face, sewed-up mouth, and ear awry, but
his speech held you spell-bound and you looked into eyes
as young as a spring dawn," so Oppenheim described
him; and also a visit to him after he had died: " I lifted
the sheet from his face. He seemed to mean all that had
been stopped." Dreiser, as deeply moved, speaks of him
as " a beautiful monstrosity, the one gem-like critical mind
of that day." Perhaps they exaggerated and idealized him
as critic, feeling the crying need of a critic, where all that
was alive was reeling and shifting. But if not, it is a
strange symbol of these States, that when the mind ar-
rived it was lodged in a warped and twisted body, and
that they killed it as quick as they could.
337
Here exactly is the moment, 1916 to 1917, the hour of
this fruition and this death, when, with the stage set as
described, the principal battle of Dreiser's story was
waged over freedom of letters. Who gained and who
lost seems yet to be hanging in the balance. " The howl "
over The " Genius" prophesied by the young enthusiast
of The Little Review, broke loose. Since its publication
in 1915 along with the acclaim had sounded little shrill
shrieks, venomous enough, from posthumous Mrs.
Grundys. One of them signing herself N. P. D., literary
taster for the New York Globe and Commercial Adver-
tiser,, had always shivered at Dreiser as at a snake or a
bedbug. Now she despised him more than ever. He was a
" pro-German," a friend of Mencken, of Hun extrac-
tion and from low steerage people at that. Against The
" Genius" whose hero she confuses with Cowperwood
of The Titan, she launched her prettiest sarcasm. First
quoting the letter of a correspondent which she said
" should dispose of Dreiser for all time as without humor,
without pity, and without the least love of art or nature,"
then she lightly amused herself :
" The f Genius ' is probably Mr. Dreiser's most sub-
jective work and it is the ugliest. What interest it has is
pathological. One may be sorry for a man who sees nothing
in life but girls, an unending procession of girls, hardly
more to be differentiated than the Pink Leg and Blue Leg
of the chorus. . . . When Zola (Mr. William Lyon Phelps
points out) saw a dunghill he saw nothing else. . . . Ros-
tand looking at the same unlovely object, beheld the vision
of Chantecler. But Dreiser would never see Chantecler;
only the dung and the hens. . . . We understand that the
Tauchnitz publications are about to be resumed. . . . We
hope that The ' Genius ' will appear in a German transla-
tion. That's how kindly we feel toward the Germans."
This lady in the same column discloses with her scorn
of legs a love of anthologies, Home Book of Verse,
Treasury of Irish Verse; a tenderness for humorists,
Stephen Leacock, " our own Dooley and George Ade ";
and for romanticists, E. Temple Thurston and Lord
Dunsany. She betrays a fear of Jews and their miraculous
Art Theatre — Pinsky's The Treasure is facetiously dis-
paraged; and a passion for Women's Suffrage. When
338
Dreiser had previously complained of her, Mencken had
tried to soothe him : u Who in hell is N. P. D., some lousy
old maid? No one reads the Globe anyway." Instinctively
the realist divined that these very no-ones who read the
Globe were among those who would support legislation
for war, prohibition and censorship; in fact that by force
of their respectable numbers they were the acquiescent
chorus that would make possible our gloomy plutocracy.
And Mencken himself was this time aroused :
" The secret of the Globe braying lies in the last para-
graph: the grand crime in these days is to bear a German
name. Who is this N. P. D? I have a little list. There must
never be any compromise [with] the common run of ' good,
right-thinking Americans ' ... we must stand against
them forever, and do what damage we can to them and their
tin pot democracy. ... I am waiting patiently for her to
write a book. The Lord God Jehovah, soon or late, always
delivers them into my hands."
From Chicago Mrs. Elia Peattie, literary editor of the
Chicago Tribune, also an advocate of votes for women,
makes a more passionate onslaught, dated December 4,
1915. Perhaps there was danger in giving American
women the vote who had had from their men so little
else. Mrs. Peattie was vehement:
" John Cowper Powys refers to The ( Genius ' as * the
American prose epic ' . . . I will never admit such a thing
until I am ready to see the American flag trailing in the
dust dark with the stains of my sons . . . and the Germans
completing their world rule by placing their governor
general in the White House at Washington. . . . An epic
as I understand it is a narrative of elevated characters de-
scribing the exploits of heroes. ... If this is an epic it is
the epic of a human Tom-cat. It is a back fence narrative.
... I repudiate it as the American prose epic. . . ."
This she does in the name of Ibsen, Whitman and Lin-
coln, who knew " love and temptation " too, but who like
her had never had such low feline thoughts as Theodore
Dreiser. Mencken was jubilant:
" This Peattie stuff is a scream. The fair wench is a
novelist herself sweetly praised by Hildegarde Hawthorne.
By all means let me have this masterpiece of the ovarian
school when the time comes to write the review of reviews."
And now an eminent college professor joined the ladies
against the Tomcat. College professors, as Mencken has
339
scrupulously computed in his Book of Prefaces, 1917, had
always expressed their disapproval of serious contem-
porary native genius by ignoring it in favor of minor
celebrities. The 1892 edition of Richardson's American
Literature disposed of Mark Twain . . . u with less
than four lines/' ranking him " below Irving, Holmes,
Lowell . . . below Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, and
Petroleum Nasby." By the year 1910 Professor William
Lyon Phelps could chide Richardson for this; and then
in 1916 in his Advance of the English Novel could dis-
miss Dreiser completely by not a single mention of him.*
And this was true, according to Mencken's vigorous sta-
tistics, of the other " heavyweights of the craft, the new
Dunciad," he labels them — the Pancoasts, Hallecks,
Babbitts, Brownells, Pattees. In their tomes and treatises
on modern American writers of that day he has discov-
ered praise of O. Henry, Sydnor Harrison, Owen Wister,
Hopkinson Smith, R. H. Davis, R. W. Chambers, but
never a word for or against the author of Sister Carrie,
Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and The
" Genius."
The jocular N. P. D. apparently owed her witticism
destroying Zola and Dreiser to Professor Phelps, but for
the most part he kept still about this Hoosier cock and
tomcat. And it is certain he never advised him as read-
ing matter for his young charges at Yale. It took a pro-
fessor from Dreiser's own land, the more zealous Mid-
dle West, to celebrate him by actively denouncing him.
Out in the golden fields of Illinois Professor Stuart P.
Sherman held the chair of English in the State univer-
sity. There he devoted his life to cultivating the nerves
of the sons of farmers and mechanics. Also from the
midst of that vast culture of rye, corn and wheat he was
able to sell now and again his wisdom to friends and edi-
tors back East. He was with other professors a mission-
ary trying to perpetuate the Colonial tradition, in his case
to the far reaches of the plough and the McCormick
reaper. Together these scholars held the trenches against
the new America. In the Nation of December 2, 1915,
Professor Sherman launched his offensive at what he con-
* A Book of Prefaces, pp. 131 to 134.
340
ceived to be the enemy of the moment, the tomcat author
of The " Genius." He was too wary to admit him among
the " realists," knowing that what with Balzac, Hardy,
Flaubert, and the lately translated Russians, as well as
the popular Bennett and Wells, the term had taken a
favorable meaning. Instead he coined for him a new epi-
thet, " naturalist," and hoped he had packed its mean-
ing with verbal poison. Dreiser's crime lay in treating
men and women as if they were animals. To many of the
poets and priests of history this would have been to flat-
ter them, but to a temper like that of Sherman it was an
irreverent sphere from which to draw analogies. Con-
densed, the indictment runs like this :
" In his books the male of the species is characterized
by cupidity, pugnacity and a Simian inclination for the
other sex; the female is a soft, vain, pleasure-seeking crea-
ture devoted to personal adornment and quite helplessly
susceptible to the flattery of the male. . . . His people have
cat-like eyes, feline grace, sinuous strides, eyes and jaws
which vary from those of the tiger, lynx and bear to the
tolerant mastiff and the surly bull dog. ... In his Finan-
cier two lovers run together like leopards. . . . Raising
human stock in America evidently includes for Dreiser
feeding and clothing but not the most elementary moral
ideas of conduct. Routine is dull, moralists are asses, re-
spectability is unctuous, teachers are owl-like conventional-
ists, faithful parents lead an apple pie order of existence.
. . . We turn with relief from The ' Genius ' to the scan-
dals in the news sheets."
So this professor perversely paraphrased Dreiser and
strengthened the Dreiserian myth, so welcome to his stu-
dents, the new generation. Therein a man given over to
difficult achievement, and darkly wondering what is right,
what wrong, was construed as a wicked sensualist, leading
women and children astray. The myth grew, and perhaps
drove the real Dreiser in an effort to be understood into
exploring regions as dreary and forbidding as the mind
of the Jewish moron in The Hand of The Potter, and the
mind of Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy. Against
the ignorance of a typical scholar like Sherman, who had
nicely digested Emerson's serene philosophy, perhaps
Dreiser began to feel that he had been born to fight, al-
most alone and single handed. Darkness contradicting
light, evil contradicting good — was it his mission to fer-
tilize American minds with the luxury of these contrasts ?
At length he may have thought so, and let the enemy in
him crystallize.
The professor as if to prophesy battle and revolution
ended his Nation article with a threat: u This theory of
animal behaviour cannot be an adequate basis on which
to study human nature. . . . And when one half of the
world attempts to assert such a theory, the other half
rises in battle."
And so in the course of time " the other half " did.
The article pays Dreiser the curious compliment of being
a whole uhalf." No other rebel or scientist, not Zola or
Rodin or Anatole France, not H. G. Wells or Pavlow,
not even Whitman is lined up with the offending Hoosier.
In July, 1916, The "Genius" came to the notice of a
Society belonging to Sherman's " half of the world," the
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which at
length begins to be remembered as a quaint antique. And
yet American " vice " today takes its color from the sup-
pression of yesterday, and is accordingly simple.
342
55
". . . What I hate
Is that crude Demos which shouts down
the minds,
Outvotes them, takes those silly lies that
move
The populace and makes them into laws,
And makes a village of a great Re-
public." EDGAR LEE MASTERS
" No ship of all that under sail or steam
Has gathered people to us more and
more
But Pilgrim-manned the Mayflower in a
dream
Has been their anxious convoy in to
shore." ROBERT FROST
JJLt was a fanatic from the backwoods of Connecti-
cut, Anthony Comstock, who invented this fine society
which, aiming to suppress vice, succeeded rather in sup-
pressing wit, wisdom and beauty. He inaugurated it in
the autumn of 1873 in the rooms of the Young Men's
Christian Association, with the help of Morris K. Jessup,
William E. Dodge, J. Pierpont Morgan, Robert R.
McBurney and other eminent citizens in whom sense of
poetry and satire must have run low. Exclusive Circles
again were dictators in matters which they did not prize.
The tragedy of American Art has always so consistent
a plot that it falls naturally into one's hands. These rich
men like Comstock were rooted spiritually if not actually
in the hardships of our Puritan past; and on the crest of
Northern fortunes made secure by the Civil War, they
were launching the pious merchant plutocracy supreme a
generation later.
343
There are critics today tired of blaming the Mayflower
Puritans for our puritanism. They like to find a less hack-
neyed cause. Is it that they dislike to admit that victory
for Cromwell's Dissenters has run to its dreariest meas-
ure in our States, although at the same time to glittering
heights ? Some of them blame machinery and they may be
right. Morris L. Ernst and William Seagle in their study,
Obscenity and the Censor * accuse democracy for thwart-
ing sex and therefore art :
" If the age of faith adopted the index of heresy, the age
of Divine Right, the index of treason, it was inevitable for
the age of democracy to adopt the index of sex. ... It is
one of the penalties of civilization."
This might be all very well, and we could settle down to
the alternative, sexlessness or tyranny, perhaps choosing
tyranny, if it were not for the precedent of the French
Republic, where pleasures of sex and art appear to have
survived not only democracy but machinery. Mr. Ernst
and Mr. Seagle however may be among those who dis-
pute the axiom that France is civilized. They go to great
pains to ferret out examples of suppression in France,
and of course in England, as absurd as any we have com-
mitted— curious as incident, misleading as evidence.
Even England, its cradle, has survived censorship intel-
lectually. The truth appears to be that censoring societies
in these older countries have ruled the minds of their
members but have not colored the life of a whole nation
as with us. Compare our letters and images with theirs,
compare the faces in our streets and subways, stores and
homes, with the faces in theirs, and a vast difference in-
vades the senses, for which a prohibition of reality would
be enough to account. Or for those who can't trust their
own senses, the story was expertly compressed in 1917
into one chapter, ready to swallow, Puritanism, a Liter-
ary Force by H. L. Mencken. He tells there how after the
Civil War it became fashionable to be a millionaire, and
the millionaires were expediently churchmen. Therefore
it became fashionable to be pious. The Puritan doctrine
armed with money grew militant and aggressive. And,
he might have added, it tinged even the temper of the
* To the Pure . . . A Study of Obscenity and the Censor.
344
Catholic Church in America. St. Paul, inventor of chas-
tity, could finally see his strictest dreams come true. Go
from St. Paul to Calvin and Cromwell, from them to
Emerson and Longfellow, from them to Rockefeller, Edi-
son and Ford, and you will tumble into a typical American
home of the early 2Oth century not quite extinct today.
To protect this cherished institution from turbulent
changing America, Anthony Comstock conceived laws
and corporations. Perhaps as a young man among the
birches and maple trees of Connecticut, intoxicating him-
self each Sunday with ecstasy of virtue in the cool white
meeting house he was a rustic poet like Bunyan, evolving
a vision of purity. For this one can understand him. Who
has not had moods imagining a world without vice or mis-
ery? Perhaps tortured by rumor of the great cities he had
said, " I, single handed, by the grace of God, shall go up
and eradicate sin from the market places." It may have
been with him at the start that same expensive Christian
dream conceived for charity and health, ending in cruelty
and disease. He was a rustic with simple faith perhaps;
although Mencken who has studied him does not think so.
But for worldlings like Jessup, Dodge, and Morgan, es-
pecially Morgan with his art collection and library, to
endorse him, and for no one of their world to oppose
them or to laugh at them, places American society of the
Seventies almost outside of history and untouched by it.
Long before this elsewhere occasional aristocrats and
originals, that is, those without fear, had begun to tire
of Christian idealism, and had developed a protective
irony against it. And now it was the very age of scepti-
cism and adventure. To a friend who had shuddered at
an Egyptian image, Baudelaire had said: " Best to be-
ware when you call that god ugly, perhaps he is the true
God." In America a genius, Whitman, was passionately
proposing the mysteries of reality. But the lords of
American finance as a body apparently still preferred the
ignorant Comstock, and his musty parlors of Christian
endeavor. In any event they joined with him to fight the
reaffirmation of nature.
First of all they had to create legal precedent, not to
be found in the original Constitution, celebrated for pro-
345
posing free speech and religious tolerance. In 1842 how-
ever a Federal statute had been passed to exclude the im-
portation of obscenity, giving custom officers the right
to confiscate at the port "indecent and obscene prints,
paintings, lithographs, engravings and transparencies.'*
Under the heading of prints fell some of the more sala-
cious classics, so that for example it is likely that Emer-
son had the privilege to be exposed to a less fecund past
than say Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. But until 1868
no one had felt the need of a statute to curb native inde-
cency. People were too pure to require it. If ever heresy
was committed the inherited English Common Law was
enough to take care of that. But now in 1868 the Con-
necticut Yankee Comstock took it upon himself to pro-
pose and put through a New York state law, entitled " An
Act for the Suppression of the Trade in, and Circulation
of Obscene Literature, Illustrations, Advertisements"
and so forth. American children, he found, were growing
up again, out of the dirt of their own soil this time, and
must be restrained once again from growing up.
Five years passed in prayer and lobbying, and Com-
stock saw his further scheme of a society to enforce this
law come true, and himself secretary. It was incorporated
under a special act of the legislature of New York — the
Empire State — with the right of search, seizure and ar-
rest. In the same year, 1873, this untiring crusader with
his churchly friends put through the first Federal statute
to hamper native imagination and intellect. Now all " ob-
scene, lewd, lascivious, disgusting, filthy, indecent mat-
ter " was to be barred from the mails. And now the
couriers whom " neither snow nor rain nor heat nor
gloom of night " can stay in " their appointed rounds "
could be stayed by vice commissioners from carrying read-
able reading matter to Americans. Soon after this the
Western Society for the Suppression of Vice was born in
Cincinnati, and the Watch and Ward Society in Boston.
Almost coincident with these, other extra official bodies
grew in power licensed by the Government to do their
work for them — the Y.M.C.A., the Order of Gideon,
the Christian Endeavor, the Anti-Saloon League, the Pur-
ity League, with back of them quite certainly the magnates
346
of gas, railroads, steel, copper, gold. And the fun began
for the reformers, favored by an incipient Oligarchy
which would in the end banish Democracy, like a worn-
out wife, to a comfortable Home in Washington.
So now the germ was fertilized by which Indecency
grew with weeds and skyscrapers to such rank propor-
tions as the tabloids, and movies, and speakeasies, and
other rackets of today. This happened in the decade of
Whitman's full fame and in the years that gave birth to
Crane, Norris, Dreiser, Masters, Sandburg, Anderson
and Mencken, as if cure should follow cause in a not yet
ended circle of cause and cure, cure and cause. These new
men grew up with the birth and growth of militant Puri-
tan reform in America, invented to thwart them as best
it could.
At first the temper of the day was with the reformers
— day of the old Concord school and the young Howells;
and there was not much native cleansing to do. When
once trivial commercial pornography had been stemmed,
though certainly not choked, the crusaders turned their
attention to expurgating importations, ancient and mod-
ern — Rabelais, Casanova, Boccaccio, Shakespeare,
Swift, Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Zola, Daudet, Hardy
and even Du Maurier. Jude the Obscure was banned,
Trilby attacked. A frenzy of purging came over the coun-
try. Librarians, district attorneys and ministers turned
censor. A minister in Boston undertook to issue a pure
version of the Bible. Heretofore seriously daring books
used to die of neglect; now they were made notorious.
This happened to Leaves of Grass twenty-six years after
it was first published, and brought it new fame, but also
shelved it among forbidden volumes in places of learning.
At length in the Nineties as polite a story as Frederic's
The Damnation of Theron Ware was banned and Gar-
land's virtuous Rose of Dutcher's Coolly was threatened.
Any native writer concerned with real experience was
suspect. Recently D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow had
been banned. The work of scientists was prohibited —
The Sexual Question, Forel, and Psycopathia Sexu-
alis, Krafft-Ebing. Comstock grew strong and smug. He
boasted that his percentage of convictions in forty years
347
ran to 98.5 ; and that he had destroyed " enough books,
stereotype plates, photographic negatives, and photo-
graphs to fill sixteen cars, fifteen loaded with ten tons
each, and the other nearly full." * But the names of these
many criminals and their works were always withheld
from a free people. Write today to his successor, John S.
Sumner, for statistics and his reply is : " . . . we know of
no prepared list of suppressed books in this country. There
are obvious reasons why such a list should not be pub-
lished." Comstock's printed slogan, preserved by Mencken
was : " MORALS, Not Art or Literature." And he might
have added not honesty, or laughter either.
In their fifty years these societies enacted many un-
conscious farces dear now to satirists : Benjamin Franklin,
father of the Post Office and the Saturday Evening Post,
was barred from the mails when it came to his Advice to
Young Men on the Proper Choosing of a Mistress.^ To
this moment it is difficult to find it in libraries or book-
stores; young men have had to get on without it. In 1912
the report of the Chicago Vice Commission was pro-
hibited the mails. In 1923 President Warren G. Harding
accepted the honorary chairmanship of the Founder's
Committee of the New York Society; and in 1927, to
protect their dead chairman, Mr. Sumner with six police-
men had to invade a printing plant and carry off the plates
and sheets of what was said to be the story of an illicit
love of Gamaliel and the natural daughter thereof. §
These reformers never allowed themselves to laugh; and
their opponents got to laughing too easily. The jokes be-
came simple and in terms of one syllable — prude, or at
most of two — prison. The huge crime of the reformers
was in excluding people from human experience; the more
baffling crime was in barring them from subtleties. What
chance to refine tone or gesture of speech and image, when
by dull moralists intellect is driven to consider merely
subject matter, the facts of living, which should be basic
to art? What chance for impeccable manner out of a
* Puritanism — A Literary Force.
f To the Pure by Ernst and Seagle.
§ The book is called The President's Daughter. The incident is re-
corded in To the Pure.
348
moral background which murdered mystery quite as a
radio announcer can murder silence?
In 1915 Anthony Comstock died, rich, ridiculed and
respected, leaving an organization so efficient as to carry
on without his initial fervor, as long as the millionaires
would pay the salaries of its officers. He died in the year
of The " Genius " appearance. Eleven months passed and
the message of that book with its beauties and imperfec-
tions had gone to thousands of people. " In July 1916,"
as Mr. F. L. Rowe, secretary of the Cincinnati society,
told it at the time, " Rev. John Herget of the Ninth
Street Baptist Church became acquainted with the book,
when he was called to a telephone by an unidentified per-
son who complained. Immediately," Mr. Rowe assured
his interviewer from the Cincinnati Inquirer, " we pro-
cured a copy of the present issue, and find that it is filled
with obscenity and blasphemy. We have succeeded in hav-
ing it removed from practically every book store in the
city." But this was not enough. Ecstatic over new-found
treasure the Society appealed to the Post Office Depart-
ment in Washington, which took no action because the
complaint " had not been presented in the proper form."
Sumner, however, was not squeamish about " form "
and leaped to the challenge with the advantage of living
near the very source of the evil, the John Lane Com-
pany. His appetite was further whetted by the receipt in
his mail of pages furiously torn from a copy of The
" Genius " belonging to the New York Public Library.
Naming " 75 lewd and 17 profane passages," Sumner
confronted the publisher and ordered them deleted or the
book withdrawn and the plates destroyed. Lane's Ameri-
can representative, Mr. J. Jefferson Jones, withdrew the
book, awaiting " further action " on someone's part. But
he took the precaution to ask Dreiser's permission before
destroying the plates. Dreiser got possession of them and
stored them in a warehouse in New Jersey. As formidable
as that did Sumner and his public seem to Mr. Jones,
who yet with English support in the case of The Titan
had dared where Harper's feared to tread. Frederic Chap-
man, who had constituted the support, was no longer
Lane's literary advisor in London. Soon after he died.
349
On August zoth, 1916 the New York Tribune featured
Sumner and Dreiser on the same page with headlines of
the Great War :
"Allies Strike 155 Mile Line in Balkans — Drive to Win
Back Serbia Closes Ring of Gunfire — Enemy Routed in
Macedonia — Offensive on Fourth Front Opens Wedge
Along Salonica Railroad — Vice Society Works Out New
Method of Censoring Literature — Plan Tried Out on
Dreiser's 'Genius:'
" The essential feature of the new method is to get rid of
objectionable publications without giving authors and pub-
lishers the benefit of free advertising, such as followed Corn-
stock's attack on the picture ' September Morn ' and the
novel ' Hagar Revelly.' '
The " Genius " was the first powerful American novel
threatened by the vice crusaders. Garland, Harold Fred-
eric, David Phillips, Upton Sinclair had less cavernous
visions and a less unswerving hold on them. They had not
the austere talent to secrete and display worlds of life in
three dimensions as Dreiser could. So in attacking him
these moralists were attacking the very volume of new-
ness which threatened them, in the hope of purging it of
all but commercial and industrial currents. Perhaps for
this or because a ferment was at work in the country on
the verge of war and yet so newly awakened to a sense of
itself, The " Genius " case became a rallying point for
rebels. The wine of consciousness was in the air out of a
double crisis — birth and death, the agony of final arrival
and the despair of sudden going. A few men and women
like some of those back of the Seven Arts, the Little
Review, the Poetry Magazine, and others in scattered
positions wanted to hold on to what had finally been won
by scientists and poets and critics for native intellect. By
virtue of being American some of them still dreamed with
Jefferson and Whitman that a new society would emerge
into history with a freedom of its own, a progression in
the spirit, like that of Athens or of France or of England.
Coincident with this moment in any event, if not out of
it, came a fruition of impulses which had been trying to
survive since the difficult days of Melville, Poe, Thoreau,
and Whitman.
In this year 1916 and in the next years Dreiser grew
350
to full strength as an opposing force. And as different and
startling crusaders as Mencken, Frank Harris and Ezra
Pound came to the defence of The " Genius," or rather
to the attack of censorship. Not one of the three was
much interested, as it happened, in the work itself, but
they were passionately aggressive against that too " crude
demos " which was making United Villages out of the
only land of their birth. And then there were others, Har-
vey O'Higgins, Felix Shay, Alexander Harvey, George
Keating, Elias Rosenthal, Joseph Auerbach, Sherwood
Anderson, Randolph Bourne, who admired The
" Genius " as well. The case brought many names asso-
ciated with quite different phases of thought into rela-
tion with one another, and all into relation with the single
name of Dreiser. It seemed as if the country might con-
clude a moment of fusion. Some of these men valued pre-
cisely Dreiser; the balance of power was with him what-
ever his sins. Others like Mencken and Harris valued
Dreiser but deplored The " Genius," a decline from lit-
erary grace. Still others like Ezra Pound, already in Eng-
land teaching Yeats to be modern and himself to be
ancient, had not much use for author or book. Dreiser
was not brief enough or fused enough to please them. He
was too American. Yet they must all have felt " a formid-
able integrity " * at issue, or it is not likely they would
have made this incident of censorship into a nucleus
around which to fight from freedom of art.
* Sallie Kussel, who typed most of An American Tragedy said of
Dreiser: " I shall never forget his formidable integrity."
351
56
" MORALS— not An or Literature."
ANTHONY COMSTOCK
" The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated
book." WALT WHITMAN
" A man mounts toward the height of
Olympus . . . he is already half trans-
ported to the sky ; but a wretched jailor's
hand drags him back into the gutter. If you
hold converse with the Muse they take you
for a debaucher of girls. And they will
make you stand, my friend, at the bar with
thieves. . . . Earth has its boundaries
but human stupidity is limitless."
FLAUBERT TO DE MAUPASSANT
T
JLhe counter move on the part of the John
Lane Company was to ask the support of the Authors'
League of America, of which Dreiser was not a member.*
On the 24th of August they called a special meeting of
their Executive Committee. The sense of it was that The
"Genius" was " not lewd, licentious or obscene" and
that the Vice Society may, if not checked, " prevent the
sale of many classics and of much of the serious work
which is now being offered," and that " the League take
such action as may be possible to prevent the suppression
of the work complained of." The resolution concluded
with the typed signatures of the Executive Committee,
George Barr Baker, Rex Beach, Thompson Buchanan,
Ellis Parker Butler, George Creel, Arthur I. Keller,
Leroy Scott, Louis Joseph Vance, Kate Jordan, Helen S.
Woodruff. But of these the names of Butler, Baker, Keller,
* According to Dreiser he was invited to join the Authors' League two
or three years after its start. But when he asked them what they did " for
the average author, they took umbrage "; and he never joined.
352
Scott, Jordan and Woodruff were absent from the formal
protest drawn up some days later, and finally distributed
under the auspices of the League. As one goes over the
files of this curious battle it becomes clear that the Au-
thors as a body found " action " impossible. Too many
of their members recoiled from Dreiser, the naturalist, the
pro-German, the crude craftsman. And " sex " and "the
dark side of things " were too " unpleasant." Yet they
allowed the protest to go, framed by the bolder members :
"We, the undersigned, American writers, observe with
deep regret the efforts now being made to destroy the work
of Theodore Dreiser. Some of us may differ from Mr.
Dreiser in our aims and methods, and some of us may be
out of sympathy with his point of view, but we believe that
an attack by irresponsible and arbitrary persons upon the
writings of an author of such manifest sincerity and such
high accomplishments must inevitably do great damage to
the freedom of letters in the United States, and bring down
upon the American people the ridicule and contempt of
other nations. The method of the attack, with its attempt
to ferret out blasphemy and indecency where they are not,
and to condemn a serious artist under a law aimed at com-
mon rogues is unjust and absurd. We join in this public
protest against the proceeding in the belief that the art of
letters, as carried on by men of serious purpose and with
the co-operation of reputable publishers, should be free
from interference by persons who, by their own statement,
judge all books by narrow and impossible standards; and
we advocate such amendments of the existing laws as will
prevent such persecutions in future."
The Secretary of the League, Eric Schuler, contributed
the further service of a talk in October with Mr. Suther-
land of the Post Office Department in Washington, who
thought that in all probability the Department would
" take no action in the matter of The ' Genius.' " A later
letter from U. S. Attorney H. Snowden Marshall to
Dreiser's lawyer, on November 2, 1916 confirmed him
" that it was not a case in which prosecution was war-
ranted." At this point the Authors' fervor for freedom
of American letters appears to have waned. Also The
John Lane Company, who at first talked of bringing the
matter into the courts at their expense, were afraid to
fight for Dreiser. Mr. Jones generously advised him " to
let his attorney, Mr. Stanchfield, loosen the dogs of war
353
on Sumner and his crowd at once." Mencken thinks that
the publishers lacked the money, and were failing in New
York; but Dreiser must have had less money than they.
Now once more it was up to him to wrench from conserva-
tives the right to tell about life as he saw it, and survive
the telling in the United States. The Comstocks had al-
ready cut off his income from The " Genius," $2,400 in less
than a year, and could impose a fine or prison sentence, or
both, if upheld by the courts. In the event of this they
planned the suppression of all of his books. Some years
later he is quoted in an interview as having " fought the
' Genius ' battle single-handed." Perhaps at the time he
felt isolated enough, and as the years passed looked back
on the persecution as that of many against one. But the
records disclose that he had in energy and money the sup-
port of a few devoted allies, and offers from others. It
may be they quarreled among themselves and with Dreiser
as to the best method to defeat the Comstocks, so that
he felt the loneliness of opposition, never acceptable to
genius. In any event he fought with a vigor which had
grown out of sleek alluvial valleys and Catholic and Men-
nonite discipline. His first exclamation to reporters was
in their own " that's-telling-'em " language : " If my name
were Dreiserevsky and I said I came from Moscow I'd
have no trouble. But I come from Indiana — so good-
night ! " But he did not go to sleep. For two years he gave
out interviews which went into news columns as if ideas
were events. To the New York Sun he said :
" I look on this interference with myself or any other
serious writer as an outrage and I fear for the ultimate
intelligence of America. A band of wasp-like censors has
appeared and is attempting to put the quietus on our litera-
ture, which is at least showing signs of breaking the bonds
of puritanism, under which it has so long struggled in vain.
Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman and Thoreau have in turn been
the butt and gibe of unintelligent persons, until by now we
are well-nigh the laughing stock of the world. When will
we lay aside the swaddling clothes forced on us by ...
antiquated moralists and their uneducated followers ? . . ."
And to the New York Tribune :
" To me the issue is a contest that goes to the very roots
of thought in this country. Are we going to succumb to
354
Puritan thought, or is it possible for the United States to
accept a world standard of thinking? . . . We are always
talking about the great American novel. How, I want to
ask intelligent men, are we going to produce that? By
adopting the standard of criticism which has permitted the
publication of Flaubert, Balzac, and others in France;
Tolstoi in Russia; Moore and Bennett and others in Eng-
land, Strindberg and Ibsen in Sweden and Norway? Or
are we going to let Major Funkhauser, who obtained the
withdrawal of Anthony and Cleopatra in Chicago . . . and
Sumner to read and decide how far our minds shall go?
" Is this a free country? Is an artist to be allowed to in-
terpret life as he sees it, or is he to conform to a car-
conductor standard of literature? There is something sickly
about the whole mental attitude of this country. . . ."
To the Chicago Herald-Examiner :
" No mythical Heaven about which no one knows any-
thing ... is going to serve any longer. Man should unite
and make war on the other forces of nature that now
oppress him, reorganize his religious conceptions, as well
as the theories of the state under which he lives, until he
has brought all of them into tune with his own great needs."
To the Brooklyn Eagle :
" It is dreadful to think of shackles being forged which
are going to hold the mind ... in a vise-like grip of
timidity utterly precluding initiative. There's little enough
courage as it is. ... I have my following, and that is all
anyone could expect ... all anyone could possibly want.
It would be absurd to desire unanimous approval. It isn't
necessary. But ... if something doesn't happen to break
down the . . . hide-bound tradition, which is the enemy
of the race, man will go to seed."
He asked the public to remember " the incident of Gorki's
reception, to whom even Mark Twain had been afraid to
extend the hand of welcome. And Gorki, the head of an
important paper in Russia was using his power to spread
his distrust of America." A few weeks before he had seen
in a newspaper " a rabid attack on Edgar Allan Poe,
which summed him up as a failure, Poe the most pre-
cious heritage of the land 1 A failure ! "
His friends fought with him for his and their " great
needs." A defence committee was formed with a secre-
tary, Harold Hersey, who set to work to send the
League's protest to authors all over the country for
355
their signatures. Among them Mencken gives to Harvey
O'Higgins the chief credit for this work. But according
to the documents Mencken himself appears to have la-
bored for signatures until they reached the number of
478. " Perhaps," he said, " it was as much my secretary
in Baltimore as anyone else; she worked untiringly for
all of two months. . . ." As for himself, he added, the
affair engaged him because it gave him a chance to can-
vass the intelligence of the country. Especially he de-
lighted in following up refusals or failures to answer with
a personal letter. Sometimes in the case of an important
signature he wrote and replied three or four times. The
files show on Mencken's side a devotion to making history
and keeping its records. He is a creative statistician.
When I interviewed him fifteen years after these events
he volunteered to send me, a stranger to him, all of the
papers, protest, lists of names, clippings and letters, a
heavy package. They might provide my book, he thought,
with an amusing paragraph or two about this phase of
Dreiser's career. They could do more than that; they
could make a novel of ideas, a kaleidoscope of the Ameri-
can point of view in 1916. Mencken himself once prom-
ised his public to write this novel,* but may have wearied
of the issue. When I returned the material to his office he
pronounced its epitaph, as if the cause of wit had been
foredoomed to failure : " Well, this will go back into my
files now, where it will gather dust, I suppose until my
death, and then be sold at auction, knocked down for
thirty cents — article 517. ... And that's what will
happen to Dreiser some day, too. And to you as well," he
added, as if the idea delighted him. A dreary verdict! I
could not resist anticipating a livelier death — That some-
thing of our past might remain, if only a theorem, sur-
viving annihilation, to amuse or challenge or give back-
ground to the future !
In the first autumn of The " Genius " battle Mencken
was hopeful. He was like a hunter bagging his game at
* Prefaces: Theodore Dreiser, page 143: "Among my literary lum-
ber is all the correspondence relating to this protest, and some day I mean
to publish it that posterity may not lose the joy of an extremely diverting
episode."
356
each new important signature or absurd refusal. Unlike
Dreiser he could enjoy the affair as a sport, a contest. He
exhorted in warlike vocatives, " On with the machine
guns ! Forward the Zeppelins ! I am planning a general
offensive. ... I am full of hope that shrapnel will play
a part." And yet it was his policy to try and convert
Puritans. Constantly he coached the novelist not to alien-
ate them. In one letter he scolds him for flirting with
" tenth-rate geniuses "; in another he warns him that the
best way to get signatures is to " besiege the leading au-
thors of the country : by leading authors of course I mean
those best known to the public. The signature of such an
old ass as Brander Matthews would be worth a great
deal." Hersey writes Mencken that he is much disturbed
by Dreiser's excursion into the " red ink crowd." * Specifi-
cally that seemed to refer to a visit on Mitchell Ken-
nerly's advice to the office of John Quinn, who, it was
known, had a collection of modern paintings, sculptures
and writings, still thought of in America as " crazy,
insane, lunatic." t John B. Stanchfield, an admirer of
Dreiser, and a collector of exciting classics, rather than
moderns, had been chosen by right-wing friends as the
safer legal advice. Dreiser, who antagonized easily but
seldom harbored resentment, perhaps never, apparently
could value the advice of one like Kennerley who had at-
tempted to block him. In his impartial way he computed
that loyalty did not necessarily mean judgment. On the
same afternoon he paid a visit to both lawyers to see
which one he liked best. Mr. Hersey was in despair, but
as it turned out Stanchfield was more suited to Dreiser's
taste. John Quinn belonged among Americans who were
already emigres to older lands. It may be that the author
of The " Genius " felt the cleavage — a not unfriendly
but critical sophistication. Mr. Stanchfield offered to de-
fend him at his own expense, just as John Quinn a few
years later did in the case of Joyce's Ulysses for the Little
Review.
None the less it was Dreiser's bolder method to mus-
* " Red ink " denoted red wine of Italian restaurants, where the intel-
ligentsia liked to go to escape from Home.
f Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Brancusi, Duchamps, James Joyce.
357
ter all the rebels, exotic, disreputable, dangerous, obscure
or snobbish, in the manner of Paul Revere on his mid-
night ride ; to make a new start for adult America. One
cannot compute which was the wiser instinct, his or
Mencken's. The nature of their separate ways indicates a
society too backward to embark on complicated journeys.
A Brooklyn newspaper covering the event vindicates
Mencken :
" The protest contained some well-known names. . . .
But on this same list is that of Rose Pastor Stokes, recently
sentenced to ten years in a Federal prison, and Max East-
man who has figured in the courts quite frequently." *
On the other hand Mencken did not make converts of
many of the " old asses." Such dignitaries as Brander
Matthews, Shakespeare authority, Nicholas Murray But-
ler, president of Columbia, William Lyon Phelps and
Bliss Perry, Yale and Harvard professors, William Dean
Howells, Hamlin Garland, Agnes Repplier, Arthur Pier
of Youth's Companion, Paul Elmer More would not fall
into his trap. They evaded the issue by pleading igno-
rance of Dreiser's work; or else they wished the cause of
freedom had a better case; or like Garland, Matthews,
and Perry they chose to " suspect that the movement
was being pushed by his publishers for advertising pur-
poses " — " a piece of very shrewd advertising," ac-
cording to Hamlin Garland. Howells wrote to Francis
Hackett :
" I have no doubt that half literature, prose and poetry,
could as reasonably be suppressed as Mr. Dreiser's
book. . . ."
Yet not having read it, this venerable dean of letters pre-
ferred to imperil half of literature than take a chance.
He felt quite secure about his own half.
There were other incurables more honest and confid-
ing. Writers like Ellis Parker Butler, Louis Pendleton,
Mark Sullivan, Thomas A. Jenkins, Clara Louise Burn-
ham, seemed to turn hysterical at the first hint of sex or
tragedy. An occasional one of them would sign out of
respect for Mencken. He was a scholar; it is the habit
of prudes to go for sensation to remote cultures. Here
* Both for so-called political offences.
358
are some of their responses to the merciless sleuth of
Baltimore :
". . . Some books can be so rotten that they should be
destroyed. . . . Private censorship is the best way. . . .
Things are not necessarily truthful because they stink, or
strong because they smell. ... A man is not more manly
for going about without pants or underwear."
"... I don't know what's the matter with me — per-
haps I am just hopelessly middle-class or middle-aged be-
fore my time, but t the frank discussion of sex ' in fiction
has always given me the feeling of distinct nausea. . . .
There are a few honest men like Dreiser . . . but also . . .
there are many of the Cosmopolitan school — nasty little
fellows who are willing to do a little tickling in this line for
the cash. ... I am going to sign the protest not enthu-
siastically, but because I have just as much contempt for
the paid smut-hounds as I have for the dishonest smut
purveyors. . . ."
". . . Is it merely putting his books in library Hocked
cases ' ? If that is all, I don't think it calls for a protest, as
it is well to keep such literature from very young persons of
both sexes. ... I am now reading The ' Genius ' . . .
taken from a locked case in the Philadelphia library. His
insight into beauty in all nature appeals to me, but his
sexual stuff is not very convincing and leaves me cold."
" This author should be hanged for his breaches of good
taste ... if not for writing . . . the most pernicious book.
I'm no prude. I have read Zola and much of Balzac . . .
Tom Jones . . . Boccaccio . . . even parts of Rabelais
. . . Burton's Arabian Nights. The classics named do not
offend . . . partly because oceans and ages roll between,
but . . . Dreiser knows no restraint. What other writer
living or dead would have staged a childbirth scene and
given details of the horrible Caesarian operation? ... I
am opposed to the fettering of genius, but . . . Mr. Dreiser
delves in the revolting and the filthy. ... I have no desire
to protest against an effort to check the flow of literary
ditchwater."
These comments accorded with Comstock and Sumner.
Felix Shay, editor of The Fra, East Aurora, New York, a
disciple of Elbert Hubbard, baited Sumner by letter, and
got the same kind of answer from headquarters :
" This is a matter of almost ancient history. We received
serious complaints against the book . . . and it was very
apparent that its circulation was a violation of the law.
359
. . . You say, ' I think you make a serious error in annoy-
ing a man of unquestionable character and accomplish-
ment.' . . . What possible difference can this make? The
law makes no distinction as to social, literary or other
standing of the offender; nor is any consideration given as
to the intent of the author. . . . What the law seeks to pre-
vent is the harmful effect produced on the immature mind
by a certain class of book. ... I think it is well understood
in the book trade that any publisher who makes a practice
of putting objectionable literature on the market soon goes
out of business. . . . We are looking at this particular book
from the standpoint of its harmful effect on female read-
ers of immature mind, and by this we do not necessarily
mean youthful readers."
From this rigid, unrelenting stand, jump ahead a dozen
years and contemplate the riches acquired by the very
kind of publisher there referred to, and you will tremble
for the tranquillity of Mr. Sumner's latter years. I asked
Mencken to describe Sumner. " A Sunday-school scholar,"
he said, " A feeble fellow compared to Comstock or
Chase of the Boston Watch & Ward Society. Chase was
a bombastic Methodist teacher, sadistic." Back in the days
of tyrannical " purity " Shay having hooked his Sumner,
played him for all he was worth, perhaps more; and
prophesied the change about to take place in the temper
of American public and publishers :
" There is a difference in men. . . . There is a difference
in the intent of men sufficient to change the entire applica-
tion of your laws. Whether his ' Genius } is one of the great
novels . . . neither you nor I are qualified to judge. But
both of us should have the good taste to leave it to fame
or to oblivion.
" If you are sincere, and I wish to think you are, I warn
you beware a misuse of power! Beware of false zeal! . . .
To tear down a man and build up a theory! Beware in
your attempt to protect ' the immature female mind —
not necessarily youthful ' from the ' harmful effect ' of this
book. Offhand it seems to me gentlemen of your persuasion
more than Dreiser, have insisted that female minds not
necessarily youthful remain immature !
" Why not open the windows of their minds in the blessed
sunshine of knowledge. . . . Give the immature female
mind a chance to grow through exercise!
". . . Come Sumner, we don't want to drown the in-
tellect, stop the tongue in a pail of sanctimonious whitewash,
do we?
360
". . . Last night I read Genesis, Chap. Xyi, verses 2
to 5. ... Why don't you suppress the Bible if only your
Maw' is supreme? I ask sincerely . . . and anticipate a
logical action. No, not really a logical action ! I don't want
you to suppress the Bible."
One point in Sumner's letter not challenged by Shay,
especially shocks the innocent democratic mind: Sum-
ner's word was law; the question was " ancient history "
before it was tried.
Beside the moralists of the old school another class of
writers was loath to sign. They were talented craftsmen,
some of them at the start, who had found their best work
too costly. Now they were filling orders for romance, ac-
ceptable to the magazines, and were jealous of Dreiser.
They knew how to write and how to invent; why should
" a mere plagiarist from life " get more fame than they?
And they were uneasy that out of his momentum might
come a change of fashion in fiction to displace them. A
letter to Mencken from Henry Sydnor Harrison, author
of Queed and V . V .' s Eyes slyly reflects their fear of en-
croaching realism. Mencken, he says, has " set his founda-
tions to rocking in a review of a book of his own "; yet
he is unwilling to sign :
"... I cannot say whether The ( Genius ' is decent or in-
decent until I have read it ... something I am unable or
unwilling to do. But I can say there is such a thing as in-
decency in art, and . . . Sumner was exactly right when he
said that authors as a class were no better judges of in-
decency . . . than any other class. . . .
" I can't see the necessity of this protest . . . the Ameri-
can philistine is precisely the person, I supposed, that Mr.
Dreiser holds in particular contempt. ... It is hardly
conceivable . . . that the most resolute of our naturalists
should turn now to care for the approbation of these per-
sons with the sale that it carries. As an offset to the annoy-
ance of persecution ... he has the memory of the dis-
tinguished example of Flaubert . . . and he possesses a
standing as an artist hardly matched by any other living
American writer.
" You see I am saying that it seems to me Mr. Dreiser
has fared very well."
To this snobbery which invited Dreiser to starve on
the memory of Flaubert, Mencken, sensing jealousy, re-
plied that though his own point of view was " almost un-
brokenly literal," he admired Harrison as the best of our
craftsmen, and begged again for his name :
" I leave it to your own blushful remorse. . . . Imagine
Brahms refusing to hear ' Die Walkiire '! ... As for your
second objection it pains me even more. Who is better fitted
to judge novels . . . men of letters, or a small clique of
filthy minded Puritans? Have you ever read Comstock's
pamphlets, — the Bible of the smut-hounds? Read it and
weep! . . .
" Third, what you forget is that the Comstocks are try-
ing to pillory Dreiser before the world as a merchant of
mere pornography, a low and lewd fellow . . . and to send
him to a Federal prison for five years. ... Is this the sort
of thing that should go unchallenged in a free Republic?
" Personally I don't care for The ' Genius.3 But I know
that Dreiser is a serious artist. ... If we put his failure
to meet our personal notions . . . above the principle that
every artist should be free, then we plainly hand over letters
to a crowd of snooping and abominable Methodists, and say
goodby to all we have struggled for. . . .
" The one aim of the protest is to enter a caveat against
such . . . intolerable proceedings, and to give public notice
that the authors of the United States ... are united
against the common enemy as the authors of France were
in the Zola case."
Flaubert, Mencken might have added, was acquitted be-
fore the tribunal of Paris of the charge against Madame
Bovary. But for all his righteous eloquence this critic did
not make a convert of his craftsman, nor unite the authors
of America. Harrison, whose implicative style sometimes
recalled George Meredith, wrote back that " critics and
artists should live, not like brokers in unity, but aloof and
apart." In this he had his way. Isolations continued to pre-
vent exchange of ideas among them. They continued to
seek relations with ideals ; the conformists with decorum
and prosperity, the radicals with license and martyrdom.
Out of the cleavages grew snobs in both camps. By the one
kind Dreiser was firmly put down as " a lewd and low
fellow " ; Sumner was upheld. By the other, as the years
went on, and lewdness and lowness became fashionable, he
was condemned anew as old-fashioned and serious. Out of
the upheaval one common thing continued to triumph,
brought over on the Mayflower — intellectual frivolity.
362
Whether practised by moralists or immoralists we do not
yet escape from it.
In the autumn of 1916, the very month of the Genius
controversy, I first met Dreiser — not in the least uncouth,
on the contrary, distinguished by eyes and mouth that re-
lated him to Yeats and Henry James, not long before on
exhibition in the United States. Visionary and workman
in him had recreated loose Indiana features. He spoke of
his battle with the Vice Society but not at length, or as if it
much concerned him. He agreed that common controversy
was the death of art, the murder of mystery. But how any-
way was there to be art when there were no vital women
as women, except those of the streets or music halls, and
they unconsciously so? American colleges were neutraliz-
ing women. Men too, I said. No, he thought there was
more appetite left in men. Look at our cities, power
plants and railroads, the work of wonderful imaginations.
But what intellectual women of passion did we have? —
Mary Garden and Emma Goldman, that was all. Jane
Addams was as sad as a whipped animal. Isadora Duncan?
Perhaps. Where had I been educated? Bryn Mawr? He
had just written an article, Life and Art in America,
where he had asked his readers to name one woman of
any distinction or achievement out of the twenty-five years
of that institution. Perhaps he would amend it.* So we
talked. . . .
But if in what was called society one ventured to speak
of Dreiser as a figure important to New York, it was
soon to find that his name if recognized at all was dis-
missed with a shudder. As in earlier days he was improper.
I remember once an author who after the subject had been
changed murmured, " Do you know what woman Drei-
ser's living with now? " Upon my ignorance as to that,
the first and last spark of interest in " America's fore-
most novelist " died.
* This he did not do : " There is not a chemist, a physiologist, a
botanist, a biologist, an historian, a philosopher, an artist of any kind or
repute among them. They are curators, directors, keepers. They are not in-
dividuals in the true sense of the word. They are not free. . . ." Hey-Rub-
A -Dub-Dub, pages 260-261.
363
Now the story flows out of these narrow corridors of
conventional thought. Born within or escaped to the
greater world beyond correctness, there existed an enter-
prising minority. Their responses, to Hersey and Mencken
in The " Genius " case, follow along the gullies of change.
They fall like rain on the arid soil of conventional opin-
ion. They make rifts in the clouds; they have about them
the stir and breath and lights of dramatic America, as of
theatre signs reflected on wet pavements or of stars in
city puddles blown toward unknown goals :
" I take great pleasure in signing . . . when any Ameri-
can writer succeeds in getting anything except Sunday
school optimism past our first two trenches — the maga-
zine editors and the book publishers — he should not be
forced to endure any additional trials of censorship. . . ."
Robert Wason, Norwalk, Connecticut.
" Ye Gods! Are we reverting to the Stone Age? Like to
sign it a dozen times." Frederick Isham, Detroit.
" Anything I can do submerge the prurient puritanism of
the Comstock castrati will be done with all the energy I
possess." William Lee Havery.
" I hope that what you say, that the case is already won,
is true, and that I will have an opportunity in a very short
time to rejoice with you." E. W. Howe, Potato Hill Farm,
Atchison, Kansas.
"... I am very glad to add my name to the names of
those who are fighting the powers of narrow-minded dark-
ness." Amelie Troubetzkoy.
" For Dreiser personally I have a strong feeling of affec-
tion, ... for he is one of the few men who tried once upon
a time to do me a distinct service. . . . Had I listened to
Dreiser, perhaps I would now be dead, but I would not have
suffered the pangs of such slavery as is now imposed on me.
" He is not a craftsman, or I am — well, write me down
as an ass.
" But to the point, if you are serious in that lowly I affix
the signature that has sent many a good man to the chin-
gow, I do hereby do it. ... I have less use for moralists
than I have for Dreiser. . . ." Leo Crane, Moqui Indian
Agency, Keams Canyon, Ariz.
"I ... should have regretted not being able to throw
what weight I have in the scale of Liberty and Freedom for
the arts to develop themselves as they think fit. Nothing
could be more pernicious to the future of literature in
America than to have it in the hands of a few bigoted and
364
fanatic people. . . . No country can hope to develop itself
unless its authors are permitted to educate it. . . ." Amy
Lowell, Dublin, N. H.
" Willingly I sign the protest. Let 'em look to the sex-rot
of the movie." Opie Read, Chicago.
"... You'll be shocked by my colossal ignorance. You
see I am only a Bostonian ... all the same I am curious
to know what more appalling enormity poor Mr. Dreiser
has perpetrated than the rest!
[In answer to Mencken's reply to this] : " I suspect that
Mr. Dreiser's work belongs wholly or in part to the order
of fiction I should never glance at. ... Yet I do not believe
in any personal literary censorship . . . and we are all in
this world to help, not to hinder one another. ... I am
signing the petition." Lilian Whiting, Boston, Massa-
chusetts.
"... Shades of John Milton! What are we coming to
in this country! Not long since I used the awful words
' eunuch ' and ' seminal ' in some verses, and they were
returned to me with a shocked and grieved letter by one of
our leading editors. ... A trivial instance, but, I fear,
typical. . . ." Lee Wilson Dodd, New Haven, Conn.
" Let me thank you for calling my attention to the
Dreiser protest. . . . Curiously enough, I lunched with
Wells and Bennett in London last summer, and they spoke
of it with great feeling." Isaac F. Marcosson, New York.
" Thank you for the opportunity to sign. ... It is, as
you say, a matter which should appeal vitally to all Ameri-
can writers; both in justice to Mr. Dreiser and in the name
of saneness and honesty in all literary art." Mary Mac-
Lane, Butte, Montana.
". . . We must unite, all of us, to do away with this
hideous . . . early Victorian provincialism which has been
brought to light by Dreiser — to the intense astonishment
of the world of letters. . . ." Cosmo Hamilton, New York.
". . . As a man he is impossible, but as an artist he is
entitled to every pound of energy and every dollar we can
spare to protect his work. ... I confess it with shame, I
am so buried in the movie business trying to earn a huge
salary . . . that I did not know, until I picked up Pearsons
last week. . . . Count on me in every way, financial and
otherwise." Forrest Halsey, Fredericksburg, Virginia.
" If I can be of any assistance, financially or morally,
in having the law amended, please call on me." George T.
Keating, New York.
Then there were four replies from Frank Harris, Ezra
Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Robert Frost, the first
365
three from the social point of view; Frost's from an inner
mind which refused to be delayed by public thought, and
yet was more related than the others to Dreiser's con-
viction: "Life is not reasonable — reason has but little
influence over us compared to chance."
Harris wrote to Hersey:
" I have signed your protest and I have withdrawn from
the Author's League of America because they have not
taken energetic action in the Dreiser matter, which I de-
sired and expected. I think any decent Author's League
would have got up a defense fund to stand the cost of the
whole case for Mr. Dreiser. It is a disgraceful prosecution,
lower even than would be tolerated in England. ... I re-
fused to join the Author's League in England because I
regarded myself as an American. I joined the League here
because I thought it would make itself felt, but such an
opportunity having passed unnoticed I withdraw my name.
... To any movement by authors to defend Dreiser I will
cheerfully contribute."
And Ezra Pound wrote to Hersey from London :
" I hasten to return signed Dreiser's protest. Will have it
printed in The Egoist as soon as possible. Am glad the
Author's League has been at last aroused to do some-
thing. Can you inform me if it has ever before attempted
to do anything for the freedom of American letters? Or
whether it has not until the present date been typically
'American' after the fashion of ... the general religious
dinginess of American 'associations'? Is there really an
Author's League? And what is the Academy of Arts and
Letters? And are there two men in the country, or are they
all Comstock's dogs and pot lickers?"
And the romantic Anderson to Mencken, from Taylor
Critchfield & Co., an advertising agency in Chicago, in a
frenzy of reason :
"I am with you in believing that the preservation of
Dreiser's right to print books and sell them is the most
important matter that has ever come up in America. Jesus
Mariar, the question of whether America goes to war or
not is secondary. Will you accept my thanks for the big
part you are taking in fighting this morality monster. If
Dreiser wins it will give us all more breathing space."
And the fastidious Frost in New Hampshire, whose
poems had not been published until 1914, and then first
in England, wrote to Mencken :
366
"With all my heart — on general principles — though
I don't know much about Dreiser's books beyond that
they are honest, and though I don't care a hang for 'the
ridicule and contempt of other nations ' . . . I had not
heard that the Comstockians were after Dreiser. . . .
These fools should consider where H. G. Wells has come
safely out in his latest by being left entirely alone to think
things out for himself. The way our wildest attempts to
think free always end in the same conclusion is the sad-
dest proof that no other conclusions are possible."
Seven august Englishmen cabled their joint signatures
to the protest, and there was great rejoicing at their
voluntary support: Arnold Bennett, W. L. George,
William J. Locke, E. Temple Thurston, Hugh Walpole,
H. G. Wells and Lewis Wilkinson. Signatures and
promises came and went like sparks. But " these fools "
did not " consider." The John Lane Company never got
back its courage to sell The "Genius." And yet it hap-
pened that these " wild attempts to think free " did not
end in quite the " same conclusions." They went into the
making of another formula, maybe as sorry as the old
one, but not as rigid. By its nature Puritans were soon
to admit that the last word was no longer theirs. There
were other words to come.
Frank Harris in Pearson's, Ezra Pound in The Egoist,
Mencken in The Smart Set and the newspapers, Alex-
ander Harvey, editor of Current Opinion, and Dreiser
in numerous interviews and articles fought for the issue
violently. Randolph Bourne and Mencken made analyses
of his work such as could not have been elicited by " lewd
and profane writing." * And although he did not become
innocent in the eyes of the courts or of respectable people,
he became a kind of dark pool or cavern that stood to
many others for mystery and reality — an element of
wonder. All of those who could not dare but wished they
might, found solace in Dreiser. And those born to dare
found precedent in him. He became a source of thought
and of action.
In the fusion of the moment on January 5, 1917 "at
* Bourne: The Art of Theodore Dreiser. The Dial, June 1917.
Mencken: The Dreiser Bugaboo , The Seven Arts, 1917.
367
the home of Mr. Frank Harris, 3 Washington Square,
Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. Harold Hersey, Mr. Frank
Harris, Mr. Karl Karsten, Mr. Theodore Schroeder,"
according to the minutes of the meeting, "met to discuss
the foundation of an author's aid society." It should
operate to counteract the Societies for the Suppression of
Vice, and be potent where the Authors' League was inert.
Dreiser suggested " propaganda to develop more whole-
some public opinion," and " an attack upon the censor
for the protection of books perhaps once in five years."
Harris proposed " lobbying in the Legislature to shift
the burden of censorship from private societies to the
Attorney General, and then only after expert advice; the
discovery and exposure to ridicule of the people who
supported the Comstocks; and the issue of a periodical."
The lawyer, Schroeder, an authority on laws pertaining
to obscenity * proposed an attack " on Comstock and his
successors for alleged violation of trust funds." They de-
cided to hold a founders' dinner. Frank Harris agreed to
arrange it and to invite among others :
"Otto Kahn, Samuel Untermyer, Ida Tarbell, Edgar
Lee Masters, Percy Stickney Grant, John Dewey, Jacques
Loeb, Marcella Sembrich, Mary Garden, Senator Borah,
Princess Troubetzkoy, Francis Hackett, Felix Warburg,
Frederick MacMonnies, John Quinn, William Marion
Reedy, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, Stephen S. Wise,
D. W. Griffiths, Carrie Chapman Catt, Gertrude Atherton,
Finley Peter Dunne, Arthur B. Davies, Gutzon Borglum,
Frank A. Vanderlip, Arthur Brisbane, Elizabeth Marbury,
and perhaps Booth Tarkington, B. W. Huebsch, Amos
Pinchot, Max Eastman, William Randolph Hearst and
Mitchell Kennedy."
A shining project ! And who knows, history might have
been made if these financiers, opera singers, suffragettes,
movie magnates, ministers, statesmen, fashionable
women, politicians, scientists, educators, painters, pub-
licists, poets and novelists had dined together in the name
of art. It was before Prohibition. But study the various
biographies of these celebrities and you will see that the
solar planets could sooner have met in one room. Tough
as they were, Dreiser, Harris and Schroeder appear to
* Author of Obscene Literature and Constitutional Law.
368
have believed in miracles. There was never another meet-
ing toward an author's aid society " to aid indigent au-
thors of approved merit and their dependants as well as
to defend ably and freely censored authors in need. . . ."
Capital was not ready yet to shift its support from morals
to art. Is it seriously ready today? Is there yet a depart-
ment of art and letters in Washington or in any State capi-
tal in pursuit of the aims proposed at this meeting of
optimists? In the sense of private enterprise the Guggen-
heim scholarship foundation at length acknowledges na-
tive artists and scientists; but have helped them to leave
the country, not to stay in it.
In March 1917, through the firm of Stanchfield & Levy,
Dreiser brought suit against his publishers for failure to
fulfil their contract with him. A " friendly suit," they
agreed — the court was to decide. In May 1918 the case
was argued before the Appellate Division of the Supreme
Court. Joseph S. Auerbach in his brief for Dreiser made
a distinguished summary of the novel,* save for throwing
its emphasis, as I suppose lawyers must, in the direction
of accepted morality: The hero, he told the court, a
painter in a country which had no use for art, forced to
marry a girl he was tired of, sought to deepen life and
marriage with " sexual excesses." These led to the defeat
of his painting and to excursions elsewhere, both financial
and amorous. And these in turn led to financial ruin
after fabulous success in the advertising game. The moral
to be drawn was as clear as water; the five judges must
see it: go the narrow road, disobey your senses, and you
will be rich and successful. That the book discloses the
cruel reaches of such a code over natures alien to it, that
the hero's environment as well as his own " excesses "
combined against him — this, Auerbach was careful not
to say. He proved beyond a reasonable doubt that The
" Genius " was a moral work of genius. With this he sub-
mitted that according to precedent serious contemporary
art should be immune to censorship, or else the works of
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Laurence Sterne, the playwrights
* J. S. Auerbach, " Authorship and Liberty," North American Review,
June 1918.
369
of the Restoration, and many parts of Old Testament
Scripture would be imperiled. As examples of books less
reticent than Dreiser's novel, and acquitted by the courts,
he offered The Triumph of Death by D'Annunzio, the
works of Voltaire, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Moore's
Memoirs of My Dead Life, and he lightened his argu-
ment with the opinions of New York judges Seabury,
Hiscock, Cullen, Werner and O'Brien: " It is no part of
the duty of courts to exercise a censorship over literary
productions," Judge Seabury had ruled. " To condemn
a standard work because of a few of its episodes, would
compel the exclusion from circulation of a very large
proportion of the works of the most famous writers of
the English language," Judge O'Brien had once said.
". . . There is no ... precise test by which to deter-
mine what constitutes decency or indecency either of
words or acts. . . . The question . . . must ... be
tested by the prevailing common judgment and moral
sense of the community . . ." was the opinion of Judge
Hiscock, in sustaining the dismissal of an indictment for
indecent speech at a public meeting.
The five judges, Clark, Laughlin, Smith, Page and
Shearn, presiding at the trial, despite the 478 signatures
of protesting American writers and of seven English
writers, perhaps felt that the prevailing moral sense of
the community was against The " Genius." Or they were
?ersuaded by the argument of the defendant's attorney,
ohn J. Kirby. He asserted first that " good intent . . .
did not enter as a factor in the defense of cases brought
under Section 1141 of the penal law of the state of New
York." Second, that even if " good intent were a factor,"
there was nothing in this case " to indicate that any intent
existed in the mind of the author or in the plan of the
publisher other than to reap financial benefit from . . .
this book." It had been agreed between author and pub-
lisher that the loss to Dreiser, if the contract were not
carried out, would be not less than $50,000. But since con-
tinued publication constituted a violation of the penal law,
the publisher was guilty of no breach of contract; and
the plaintiff was not entitled to damages or " to any other
relief whatever." Thus the friendly Kirby. He had proved
370
that the book was " obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent,
filthy, or disgusting," because, although the hero suf-
fered punishment for his immoralities, the women, in-
cluding his wife, whom he had seduced before marriage,
" had these experiences without apparent harm to them-
selves or their position in society." Mr. Sumner had said
as much at the outset : " The book is demoralizing be-
cause its women characters apparently suffer no harm in
their social standing."
In the week preceding the decision the Brooklyn Daily
Eagle condensed the issue into an appropriate headline:
" Five Judges Will Decide if The ' Genius ' is Genius,
Tommyrot, or Plain Filth." And other papers over the
country had a sly laugh at the "highbrows " so that all
good citizens could titter with them. The five judges pos-
sibly influenced by journalistic mockery sided with the
plain people : They found themselves without jurisdiction
of the action. Immature minds were thus protected from
further corruption. American writers had legal warning
that their characters could " sin " unpunished only at the
risk of search, seizure and arrest of their books.
It was open to Dreiser to appeal the decision. But with-
out money from his most sensational book there was not
the means. Those who had vowed support out of the lapse
of time lost interest. Stanchfield died. It seemed less futile
to turn from legal action to his own profession, writing.
He published among other books Hey-Rub-A-Dub-Dub,
A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life,
an answer and a challenge in terms of his philosophy to
the moralists who had not left him alone to think things
out for himself. For five years The " Genius " rested in
the dark of the warehouse across the Hudson. Again, as
eighteen years before with Sister Carrie, Dreiser waited.
" Art walks into Nature the source, and
comes out with Form the aim — of every
thing."
" What really is caviar, nightingale
tongues, de foie gras, cheese — if not
cruelty, indecency and relish?"
" Snow flakes fall voluptuously. High-noon
sea and leaves, shells and insects, rapture
ended, turn obscene; afternoon is censor.
A moon, a fruit, a joke, a drunkard, a lily
and an orchid might be lewd. Filth a luxury
to fertilize a fern"
" Art, an acrobat, a juggler, balances far
out where others are afraid to go."
DOROTHY DUDLEY
o with these thousands of words over The
" Genius," all the great abstractions had been popularly
invoked in newspapers, meetings and journals. Out of
the welter it is clear that in one sense the American spirit
was united. At this date except for a few originals, con-
servatives and radicals used the same tone of voice. Even
the originals suffered at moments from righteousness.
Both Comstocks and Intellectuals were zealots in the
face of an exaggerated condition.
For human beings in America, Sex, it is clear, had been
crystallized into one of two fictions. Sex had become a
vague abstraction, a hidden necessity by which children
slipped invisibly into the world. Or Sex had become an
exalted luxury, a forbidden drug, beyond the hopes of a
race who believed they were foredoomed to prose. Put
down the cash, buy a woman — by a curious impersonal
name men called the purchase. Or save your dollars, marry
372
the nearest approach to the girl of magazine romance;
and spend a life wondering why she gave you nothing,
nothing at all promised in the unexpurgated Arabian
Nights. Sue for breach of promise. Such was the fate of
conquerors.
None the less we had come over on the Mayflower pro-
claiming independence, for ourselves. We had cheated
the Redskins, burned the witches, got rid of French and
Spaniards, cast off the English, freed the slaves, and
would enter the World War, singing the battle cry of
freedom. As Christ died to make men holy, we lived and
died to make men free. The song caught the throat in a
sob. Immigrants the earth over heard the song and joined
us. We had behind us no organic I3th Century art and
order to offer them; no radiant renaissance bearing a
foliated i8th Century to proceed from — to romanti-
cism, to realism, and then to modernism. But we had for
background and future our own invention, Freedom, dis-
tant god of a people who got up in the morning to work,
and went to bed early to get up still earlier in the morning
to work — for liberty. It was our pursuit of happiness.
Science, machinery and money were bringing us victory.
Now by this second decade of the new century, the
snake, Time, not measured by clocks so much as by
change, had really and truly shifted its position in the
grass. Hygiene, plumbing, the telephone, electric lights,
steel construction, automobiles, electric power, phono-
graphs and movies had come to stay. They were classic
achievements to make men free and happy, north, south,
east and west. To an orchestra of steam shovels, pile-
drivers and riveters, to banners of smoke and confetti of
advertising, a nation proclaimed jubilees and festivals.
And yet freedom evaded us. We were rich in things, sud-
denly poor in spirit, so the critics said. Mind and imagina-
tion were imprisoned. The radicals protested now with
fervor equal to that of the Puritans this hoax of wealth
which the pioneers had foisted on them in the name of
liberty. Of such were the defenders of Dreiser, impres-
sive, righteous, and sometimes rigid like his enemies.
These critics of art did not say " ' Bawdy, indecorous,
licentious, gay, ribald, equivocal, obscene ! ' — you accuse
373
us and we are ; just as we are * orderly, delicate, painstak-
ing, compassionate and undefiled/ we who venerate life
and seek to celebrate it." They made no defence of por-
nography in the sense that on one side of art is always a
church, on the other side a bordel, and that art is the
proposal of daring in a problem of balance. A crisis had
been evoked and had to be evaded, for lack of critical intel-
lect experienced enough to design it. It was a moment aris-
ing out of the times and dealing with them, and yet as unre-
lated aid unimplicated as an alien child with its parents.
If there was a challenge out of Dreiser and now out of
Masters, and a year or so later from Sandburg, Carlos
Williams, Sherwood Anderson, it was for the critics to
say to the churchmen: " We repudiate your Anglo-Saxon
code. We are mixed from all the races of the earth, and
claim a mingled standard of whim and conduct." Or else
to say to the conservatives : " We accept your hypocrisy
because we have to. This ghost of yours who crossed on
the Mayflower and goes back on the Mauretania continues
to rule our great melting pot, with its law of separations
and right of property. But since happily you permit the
lowbrows, the rotarians and their girls, their lewdness of
shows and newspapers and nation-wide conventions, we
shall take our pleasures too in the pursuit of understand-
ing, and read what we like, write what we like, say what
we like." But the editors and critics made together no such
bold stand. In this day they were like the timid children of
explorers, admiring their fathers, Whitman, Dreiser, or
Masters, say, but afraid of their mothers, Mrs. Clemens,
Mrs. Doubleday, Miss N. P. D., Mrs. Peattie.
In the case of Dreiser his supporters either disciplined
him or sanctified him. Floyd Dell complained because
neither Titan nor Genius was a political rebel leading the
nation out of capitalism to freedom. Burton Rascoe a few
years later made Dreiser into a respectable saint and his
detractors like Professor Sherman into liars. Mr. Rascoe
sees no " sex thrills, no pornography, no immoralism, no
destruction of standards ... in the general tone of
Mr. Dreiser's work. . . . Contrary to the current opin-
ion Mr. Dreiser does not undermine moral foundations."
In fact except for the passages which he quotes from his
374
books he makes him out a very dull prophet. This was a
portrait published in 1925, but it is typical of the right-
eousness of the intelligentsia of 1916 to 1918, that mo-
ment of popular controversy between radical and con-
servative elements. Somehow the radicals missed their
chance and went over to the moralists. They liked to say
that Art was serious and free, and therefore virtuous.
Dreiser, they thought, was an emancipator and therefore
harmless. With serious artists and uncompromising art
journals we should be emancipated. Even they went so far
as to invite Sumner and his cohorts to attack, censor and
ban the music shows, the dance halls, the movies and the
tabloids. His legitimate field, they said. And yet wasn't it
the field out of which expression was growing? Happily
such censorship was impossible ; popular art paid too well.
Or else we might never have had Bert Williams, Ed
Wynn, Marilyn Miller, Frank Tinney, Joe Cook, Al Jol-
son, the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Ring Lardner,
Anita Loos, and a hundred others, often not in the least
Puritan and sometimes lascivious lewd or obscene, in-
tricate and subtle. At least they remained unmolested to
exhilarate the Land of the Free; and to be the darlings of
a later set of cognoscenti, who, piously too, felt they must
have their folk lore. But that is the epilogue to this story.
Out of such a carnal, ribald, vulgar and limber back-
ground Dreiser had come. He tells it himself in A Hoosier
Holiday, in A Book About Myself, in Dawn, in each book
he writes. He was one of the immoral, indecorous, con-
quering Americans, allowed to live when they dealt in
the medium of money, but apt to be censored when they
worked with words. " It is you who have put aside Puri-
tanism and gone straight to the heart of life," one disci-
ple wrote. But this was an inverted compliment. He had
not gone to, he had come from the heart of life, which
has always put aside Puritanism and every other incon-
venient code. " You are the one man in the country whose
productions can hold a man's attention. Our literature
until you arrived was made up of books by females, for
females, the females having in some cases . . . the ex-
ternal aspects of masculinity," wrote another victim to
our segregations. To him evidently men and nature were
375
worthy, women and pederasts negligible. Yet his hero
had written five novels, and several plays recreating the
fierce chasms men and women were trying to cross to find
each other again after Christianity and after Puritanism.
Still another moralist wrote a poem elevating Dreiser to
a lofty mountain; Sumner had followed. The writer had
given " a great round laugh " at which the reformer had
fallen off the mountain to ignoble lowlands. Yet this Ger-
man-Slav's distinction was not one of exalted isolation
but of mingling with crowds low and high, of tunneling
and excavating through muck, dirt and rock, in search of
" the mystery and terror and wonder of life."
Five years later when The " Genius " appeared again,
the Jewish publisher took the precaution to introduce it
with a preface from so earnest a radical it is a pity to
betray him. It is done only in fastidious pursuit of my
plot. He said that it was not the kind of " an immoral
book that appealed to the baser passions." It was a book
for " safe and sane readers." It was a work of art. A
work of art " appealed to the aesthetic feeling." This
feeling was to be gained " from reading a great book,
from hearing great music, viewing great paintings, going
into a great cathedral, or looking at Niagara Falls, or the
Grand Canyon of the Colorado." Almost pointedly great
women or small ones were left out of the category. I
know little about Niagara Falls, but it is certain that the
Grand Canyon of the Colorado appeals, if at all, to the
baser passions, and anyone viewing for long this master-
piece of an arch-fiend might become dangerous and in-
sane.
In that stupendous chasm, obscene perpendicular gran-
ites contradict and deride the precise order of soaring,
fluted mountains — colossal pomp and mockery, propos-
ing death to human beings. Nothing crosses the vermilion,
purple, saffron miles on miles of formal battlements and
uncouth obelisks, unless a crow or raven. Nothing lives
there unless unseen and unknown presences. Even tourists
have been known to perish in this mineral despotism. If
typhoons, paranoics, massacres, volcanoes in their mobile
violences appeal to the aesthetic feeling, then the Canyon
makes that appeal in its monstrous indifference. If what is
376
at once terrifying, salacious, decorative, implacable, ap-
peals, then invoke this king of chasms.
In as far as American civilization, forgetting New Eng-
land hills and streams, has run parallel to that far-flung
precipitous scenery which, after the long slopes from the
Atlantic, after the Prairies, after the Rockies, drops more
abruptly to the Pacific — to this extent Dreiser's novels,
in the sense of being American digits, do bear analogy to
the Grand Canyon and the Yellowstone Geysers, the
Great Divide, Death Valley and the Badlands. The In-
dians of the Southwest had propitiated with ceremonial
this extravagance in which they found themselves. Their
way was to celebrate the color and order with impeccable
song, dance and image. Ours was not to propitiate but to
conquer, to outrival the magnitude and cruelty. Dreiser's
characters, for example, are men and women forced out
upon perilous voyages, some of them so spirited or re-
silient they cannot quite perish in a wilderness; many of
them not strong enough to live there except in masses.
In a new transitional migratory age Dreiser's problem
as an artist was as different from that of Pueblo Indians as
festivals are from storms. After centuries of migration
from Asia perhaps to South America and back to New
Mexico and Arizona, the Redskins had established an
order by which to live, large enough, they thought, to
conciliate the elements, narrow enough to take care of
their needs. The new American on the other hand was
recording life in the process of violent changes. While
the artist dreamed and planned, the newspapers and the
advertising men at an unscrupulous rate of speed ran off
with his inventions, and made the language and made the
decor of a people. Dreiser worked so fast he hoped to
get ahead of them, and in the hurry he lost some of the
plans he was capable of. None the less spontaneously he
initiated one phase essential to art, by which his calcula-
tions resembled Indian ceremonial more than our own up
to that date. He invoked profaneness to correct exalta-
tion. He was one of the first to do this.
In the Pueblo corn ceremonials the Koshari are clowns
performing against the rhythm, as if to say the other side
of grief is gaiety, the other side of refinement is vulgarity.
377
At variance with the music, with obscene joke and ges-
ture, they ridicule the other dancers, who impervious to
the clowns step ecstatically to the chant and drums, throb
of the earth, pulse of time. Nothing grows, the Indians
say, without mockery. The Koshari, privileged in the
tribe, provide the scandal without which art becomes
tame ; the others the solemnity, without which it is trivial.
In their understanding elements are mingled not separate.
With them it is impossible to unravel the lewd from the
chaste, the noble from the ignoble. Their dances are not
safe or perilous, they are critical; not mad or sane; they
are balanced.
It was like this with Dreiser as near as he could come
to it. His enemies were proposing safety, his friends free-
dom. With what ceremony he had at his command he was
proposing, like primitive races and like the great individu-
als of all time, the forces of nature together, as often
scandalous and tyrannical as they were orderly or exalted.
Life, human or inhuman, was seductive, revolting, dirty,
clean, lyrical, discordant, delicious and desolate by moods,
years and moments, no matter what the epoch. Art was
accordingly dangerous. But in an era of transition with no
one phase subordinated to another, except all to the ele-
ment of change, danger above everything rode the air. He
supposed he was in the vanguard of this giant migration
from old times to new. So friends and enemies seemed to
think. He had not yet become old fashioned. Yet he had
not, like many moderns, forgotten the uprooted souls
struggling in the rear to carry the burden of tradition
along with them over ruts and cracks. He was one of the
few modern Americans who valued venerable culture;
" Life is to be learned as much from books and art as from
life itself, almost more so in my opinion," he wrote in 1 9 1 6.
By this token he could understand reformers like Corn-
stock and Sumner, professors like Sherman and Phelps.
They were right, The " Genius " might easily lead people
to fornication, adultery, failure, despair; and The Titan
to greed, enterprise, robbery, murder and conquest; and
so might the European classics and moderns which these
church people had censored. They were trying to save
old American customs from the new wilderness; he was
378
hoping somehow to save more primitive elaborate cul-
tures than those dreamed of in New England philosophy.
That was the one difference. Except that it might very
well be that everything would get junked in the wilderness,
and while the moralists would accordingly lament, what-
ever happened, it was his one certain code to be prepared
for change.*
For a time, however, it looked perhaps as if Method-
ists and Presbyterians would get junked first. In 1919
Jurgen, a book more salacious than The " Genius" recall-
ing the realism of I3th Century Provence, the work of
an amateur libertine at that,t was banned; but reinstated
in less than two years and at the expense of publisher and
censors. This was an advance over Dreiser's experience.
He had been one of those to prepare the way. In 1917
Gauthier's Mademoiselle de Maupin had been attacked
by Sumner, and at once acquitted — by theme and style
so insidiously erotic that a child, reading it in Chicago
or New York, might defy father mother and democracy
to attempt as elegant and luxurious a solution in the
United States. In every way an inexpedient book, cor-
rupting accepted morals, causing nostalgia for days never
known in America and long since gone from France. Yet,
though repeatedly attacked by the censors, Mademoiselle
de Maupin was always upheld by the courts. Clearly the
vice societies were losing ground. It was the same with
books of science which like works of art led to experiment
in sex rather than to prohibition. They were attacked as
often, but less often convicted. Sumner and his friends
were beginning to be behind the times. Every value was in
a state of flux, changing into undefined values. Dreiser
was ahead of the times, or preferably outside of them like
all lovers of beauty. Most of his friends were at least
abreast of the times. Together they had helped to bring
about this change of sentiment. Yet really he himself had
not asked for change, as much as for the right to record
customs and changes and their interrelations. He was an
American interested in balance.
Nor did he, like his admirers, claim for his books ex-
* Hey Rub- A -Dub-Dub: Change.
f James Branch Cabell, wistful scholarly Virginian.
379
emption from censorship on the ground that they were
great achievements. Among the timorous fictions of the
day they were as bold and faithful as he could make them ;
how near to art he could not say. Except he was certain
that beauty had never been timid, and that no one had
reached it without honesty. Nor did he have contempt for
all puritans. They might be important actors in the drama
at hand, who suffered and inflicted suffering. He had suf-
fered with them when he created the fathers of Jennie
and of Aileen, and his own father for example. Often
they meant more to him than some of the radicals who
might be merely colorless spectators or weak actors.
He told me once of two unintentional converts of his,
and he was not especially proud of them. One was an
editor he had known, who hated his novels — u uncouth,
vulgar, impossible ! " One day he became insane. A mutual
friend went to visit him where he lived in the country.
There he was sitting on his front porch, believing himself
to be the " Genius," Eugene Witla, and boasting of his
amorous exploits. In the telling, Dreiser let his carefully
pleated handkerchief unfold without emphasis, and
laughed a little. A grim joke, but there it was ! And then
there was the professor out in Illinois, Sherman, who
somehow regretted his scholarly life, and resigning from
the cornfields, had come East to find reality before it was
too late. Spoon River Anthology, Sandburg's poems, An
American Tragedy, all the moderns he had abused, had
jarred him out of sleep. And he had done " the naturalist "
a wrong, he wrote in the New York Tribune. A novelist
who could drown his heroine in a lonely lake and send his
pitiful hero to the chair for their sins, was a great and
good philosopher after all. His own life had been spent
in futile security, it seemed to him. Not many years later
by some caprice of nature, Sherman's own end came by
drowning in a lake. . . . And yet Dreiser wanted to be
neither reformer nor rebel. On the arc of a flood of
change he was only trying to tell about human beings, and
relate their hidden passions to the old and new values
which preyed on them. If on such an expedition of un-
derstanding some of those who chose to join fell by the
way, it was by malice of nature, not by his choice.
380
58
" To the artist there is never anything
ugly in nature. . . . A big gross woman
might be ugly, but tell her once that her
son has died and you will see how beautiful
she is. It is the same with character. There
are no vices, there are only phases. . . .
// a man sets himself to the making of bad
sculpture, that is evil. . . . Art is only
the truth, but the truth is scattered. One
must have the gift of scenting it. . . .
One arrives at that through taste."
Rodin to a critic
"Life is not reasonable, it is dramatic.
. . . The beggar sitting by the roadside is
dramatic. . . . It is thrilling to see the
way he ekes out a living. Besides being
dramatic life is beautiful. . . . The beg-
gar just mentioned is beautiful. His dirt
and his rags, his bandaged feet and his
sores are all beautiful to me. They may not
be pleasant but they are artistic. . . .
" When it comes to immorality in books
the so-called ' best seller' type of fiction is
vicious in the extreme. . . ."
Dreiser to a reporter
T
JLwo men in our time have been possessed by
an engrossing passion for observing, that is, a prodigious
appetite, Rodin and Dreiser, Parisian and Hoosier. And
of course there have been others in accordance with
the greedy character of the epoch now closed. Both
these men, as it happened, so far apart, were hated for
this appetite. Rodin living in a country whose villages,
cathedrals, farms, women and meals have been designed
381
by Taste felt the force of program. The man washed
out of ancient river deposits known to us as the valleys
of the Wabash, Ohio, Missouri, Tippecanoe, to float
as best he could on the haphazard streams of our big
cities, felt the force of Accident. Rodin had the greater
talent for his craft, or more leisure or more background
in which to learn it. Both of them desired and found ex-
treme intimacy and variety in women, and were called
immoral. And both thought of themselves primarily as
workmen, not as innovators, and of Nature as their one
teacher. Both were labeled in their day pioneer, realist,
revolutionist, and neither of them cared to be labeled or
to found schools or movements — nor did they care to
be disputed. They felt authentic.
In the years following the Genius controversy, titles
did not interest Dreiser. He laughed at being called a
modern, a saviour to put us on the map, to save us from
provincialism : " I am not an instrument, that is only
silly, I am a symptom of change. " Instinctively he wanted
to be judged outside of time and place, of a new century
and a new country. The success of acclaim was not strange
to him, but more like refound parents who gave him at
length a house and security. He joined no societies and
did not change his way of life. On the contrary, in the
same apartment on Tenth Street he appears to have gone
back in these years to the directness of youth. He began
to write poems that recall the boy that used to rock by
the south window of the house in Sullivan, his dog in his
arms, dreaming of alliance with clouds, lizards, fish and
wings : " My early poems were no good, but I struck a
measure just before the Great War, and wrote five poems
printed in Moods. I did them out of a mystic despair," he
said. Then the other poems came along in the next few
years.*
He wanted the strength of dreams for his books. He
wanted to count as a primal force, feeling in himself an
ancestry back of tribes, back of mammals, back of cells,
back of suns, leading yet no one knew where, or leading
nowhere unless into an unofficial intimacy with life. His
novels unfolding in Chicago, New York, Missouri, In-
* Moods, Cadenced And Declaimed, June 1926.
382
diana, Tennessee, Wisconsin and tourist Europe, should
for all their detail, or really because of it, lead from leaf
to branch, branch to trunk and trunk to root. What, after
all, did Carrie's need of food and lights, jackets, lace ties
and little shoes have to do with time or place? And what
did Jennie's need of love and loving have to do with
them? Or Cowperwood's need of conquest, verve and
beauty? Was a Corsican, were the Borgias not precedent
for like passions? Had Roman, Macedonian, Persian,
Egyptian, Peruvian not been possessed like Cowperwood
by the necessity of magnificence? His " Genius " Eugene
Witla, was he so different from genius of other nations,
always endowed beyond the understanding of orderly
obedient men and women? It was not the man, it was his
story which Dreiser had designed to differ sharply. His
talents came to grief sooner in the United States, or
rather were diverted from art to finance, in which field
alone Americans were allowed to break rules and make
new ones. That was the one difference he could see. For
him it spelled failure if the crux of his meaning was lost
to readers in the detail of the vast chaotic settings to
which his characters belonged — the only settings he was
sure of, the only characters he knew well.
In these years, 1910 to 1920, this writer, often called
the world's worst great writer, was ambitious and humble
about words and their magic. As he wrote he knew very
well he " would like to go back and polish and condense."
Yet always as in St. Louis over his first poem, he was
" eager to be on with his meaning which had to do with
this tangle of life." Both Mencken and Masters wrote
him that they need not remind him of his fault of pro-
lixity; he was aware of it himself and would correct it
in time. This was true, he was so anxious to conquer it that
he went to school for style with friends he trusted.
Mencken read The Financier, The Titan, A Hoosier Holi-
day in manuscript, and suggested cuts and contractions.
He wrote him once in these days, " I have read about
75,000 words of A Hoosier Holiday and I am proceeding
forward steadily at twenty-five miles an hour . . . the
best writing you have ever done. A genuine feeling for
style is in it. But I am constantly outraged by banalities
383
due to wordiness, and it seems to me they should come
out."
The novelist did not resent this criticism, even felt that
he deserved it. But when Mencken ridiculed him publicly
for lack of style, then apparently he protested. The critic
replied suavely, rather mockingly: " Many of those arti-
cles in the Smart Set were forgeries. English spies wrote
them. Nothing issuing from my actual hand has ever
failed to make three things plain : that you have an adept
and lascivious style, that you are a baptized man and that
you are the handsomest man in the Republic."
He turned then to Floyd Dell and asked him to read
and edit The " Genius " for him. Dreiser thinks now that
he accepted the cuts to the extent of about 35,000 words,
but Mr. Dell believes that for the most part Dreiser did
the work himself. At least he said: " I remember going
to see him one day and there he was at his desk erasing
my blue pencilling." Another friend, he tells it himself,
strengthened passages by deleting repetitions and connec-
tives, without changing a word. " I need an editor, I know
it, but one who will understand my intention and change
nothing from a sense of propriety," I have heard him say.
Mencken, he thought, sometimes confused the issue with
diplomacy: " Some of your discussions of women in the
college chapter \Hoosier Holiday] seem to me to be very
unwise. Also the D. A. W. episode had better be changed.
He is now a highly respectable Baltimorean. . . . The
slightest suspicion that he ever engaged in so carnal
an enterprise . . . would cause his expulsion from the
Unitarian Church and probably would lose him his
home."
He had then a veneration for style, condensation he
called it, and used to be humble over his weakness for
explicit repeated detail. He amazed me once in these years
by an invitation to condense the writing of Twelve Men.
I was young and a snob about manner, and imagined that
a writer even in America would want to decide upon each
comma and semicolon; and that quality transcended quan-
tity, and that haste was vulgar. I asked him why not?
Again he said in effect that mere quality was lost in the
United States, there was no audience for it; it was of
384
course the aim of art, but left to itself in our country it
could only end in anaemia. American writers still had too
much to do in putting out genuine material. If the plans
were true and the work had movement that was all that
could be expected of them in this early moment of our
civilization.
It seemed to me he had not the least egotism about
his writings. He appeared to look upon them much like
an architect or a mural painter of old times designing
for the sake of the city, who left detail to apprentices;
that is if any one would acknowledge him as master by
consenting to be apprenticed. He seemed not to be quite
sure that they would. He admitted that he asked of them
a wisdom of detail in relation to his plan he himself pre-
tended not to have mastered. Yes, he knew that a para-
dox was involved here, but what of it? Yet I imagine that
perhaps no one ever refused to help him if they could.
He had an importance of being, not to be withstood.
Afraid to tamper with another's record of himself, I
did very cautiously cut from six of the portraits in Twelve
Men what seemed to be gratuitous phrases and connec-
tives, and excessive repetitions of the same words. And
too, I think I allowed myself the frivolous delight of de-
leting sex-life, love-life, enthuse, colorful, to sense, to
glimpse, feeling a little guilty for fear that then Dreiser
would not be Dreiser. And I may have divided into their
parts some of his suspended sentences wound up like tops,
if I thought that finally they would not spin. Always he
agreed gratefully to the changes, but in the midst of the
work he made an excuse of my slowness and finished the
revision himself. It was better so. Dreiser lives and has
his being in a tangle of qualitative phrases and parentheses,
which perhaps an intimate, but no outsider, could change
for the better. They are introduced or excused by to the
contrary notwithstanding, which latter, which same, and
the like, I could not help but think, at the same time, in
other words — a quantity of cliches apparently agreeable
to him. It is his nature to offer other words, a clustered
choice of them for any one link in his thought, and to sub-
ordinate these to a larger cluster of choices. And it is
his nature to use the careless diction of his own people,
385
Americans. In that way, he seems to say, they will under-
stand me and my idiom will be telltale and pantomimic.
Ford Madox Ford tells of lunching with him not long
ago. Always the talk turned on style. He was amazed at
Dreiser's knowledge of the theory of style. He seemed
to have read every authority (perhaps like a novice who
studies methods and positions of loving). " Why then,"
Ford asked him, " when you know so much, do you use
a phrase like * He looked into her eyes, the same were
suffused with tears ' ? " The answer was immediate : " I
live in a country of business men, my characters are col-
ored by business, love or hatred of it. I imagine by using
that language I get nearer to them." This may be true,
but almost I believe that Dreiser like all spontaneous
workmen invented first and excused afterwards. Over and
over he recalls the douanier Henri Rousseau. Wishing
for the salons, studying the ways of the salon, aiming
beyond the provinces, he had nevertheless to use the man-
ner at hand, the manner of his own villages ; and yet made
thereby universal images.
Walt Whitman has the name of deliberate intention,
but perhaps he too created first and analysed afterwards.
Fact has it that he wrote but one book of poems, and
spent years making them more deliberate. Consider the
long lists, the alternatives and co-ordinates in Whitman.
They bring to mind the leisurely lists occurring with
Dreiser, and occurring in American talk. We step lively,
but we take our time talking, if we talk at all ; some Ameri-
cans have never finished a sentence. Also consider the in-
evitable participial dependent clauses, loose, rangy, hap-
hazard, and at the same time expressive like American
workmen and mechanics, like our cities and villages, used
both by Whitman and Dreiser. Graphically they pro-
claim the uncertain conditional planes on which we shift
from phase to phase, as if living with us were a suspension
without roots or foundation, a world in the air, one thing
today, another tomorrow.
There however the likeness ends. Whitman is a poet
of " must " and " must not," declaring health. People
must not ask to know or be sophisticated, but like ani-
mals in the forest, like fish in the sea, like birds along riv-
386
ers, they must try to find their human balance again.
Dreiser is a writer pursued by fatality and doom, in the
sense that men have made cities, hierarchies, perfumes,
music, perversions and refinements beyond their mastery.
Simplicity and nature seduced Whitman. Complication
and artifice concern Dreiser. Yet if he could not relate
these through language to the unknown forces out of
which they spring, he would rather not have written.
His need of language was imperative. He worked
prodigiously for mastery. Out of this intensity came his
novels with moments of precision and passages of ap-
proximation. At the same time practice produced, as if
easily, short stories, plays, poems and essays, many of
them possessing a virtue for which he is too little known
— economy of form. They have the shove and push, grief
and success of America in them. They mingle the jokes
of day laborers building railroads, the terror of work-
men digging a tunnel when barriers give way and the
river rushes back on them; the curses of reporters who
have lost to more brutal reporters; the glee of politicians
and magnates when the weak are framed and they shoot
into power; the voices of trainmen in moments of acci-
dent; the drop of a murderer behind box cars and over a
dark river pier, the police upon him ; and the muffled voices
of human hearts asking for the death of one, the presence
of another; the sharp cry of futility when the death
comes. The obsession of one for money, of another for
excitement, of another for love or beauty, of another
merely not to die ; and above all the scarcely ever concord-
ant aims and whims of human beings — these preside like
apparitions in his short stories and plays.
Under them run primordial passions, struck to flame
by the fact of sex, the wish for power, the desire to live;
and frustration or fulfilment is always at the expense of
one or another. The Second Choice, St. Colomba and the
River, Chains, Typhoon, nearly all of the stories ring
the bell of fate. Stitching back and forth with the aid of
his many connectives, always to the amusement and horror
of critics — yet they write their logic the way the stock
ticker prints the rise and fall of prices, or the electric pen-
cil in railway stations tells the arrival of trains. No other
387
letter file of Dreiser's contains so many testimonials from
strangers, because he has guessed their secrets, as the
responses to his two volumes of short stories. " How
could you have guessed ?" they keep saying. Many so-
called stylists have not written with hands so supple and
alive to mystery. A man's style is a man's self. Style is
direction.
Tonally the plays go beyond the stories. They have the
truth of distinct language dictated by the characters, and
no less of form. The Girl in the Coffin, The Blue Sphere, In
the Dark, Laughing Gas, Old Ragpicker* The Dream,^
are exclamation points or question marks. The one long
play, The Hand of the Potter, is a deep perforation from
life. The plays multiply skilfully the ghosts and voices
of the past and the subconscious, in whose intangible
atmosphere any one wave of events gathers and breaks.
It is the size of the longer books, and the lack of time
in America to encompass it, that has given Dreiser the
title of " the worst great writer in the world," " crude,"
" clumsy." A selection could be made which would give
him the opposite name. To those who say, " what does it
matter ? " these plays answer : " To see crisis, to verbalize
essence, matters." They turn everyday life into mimic
events. Death, love, jealousy, murder, deformity, acci-
dent, dreams, destitution — these commonplaces, over
which we stretch the tight smooth skin of convention, here
spring to view like inner organs after the surgeon's in-
cision.
* Plays of the Natural and the Supernatural, February 1916.
f Hey Rub- A -Dub-Dub, December 1919.
388
59
" /'// have grounds
More relative than this: the play's the
thing,
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of a
king." SHAKESPEARE
ad Dreiser's plays been produced on the
American stage, had he turned his strength from books
to the theatre, I think he would have impelled a progres-
sion in our drama, which in turn would have helped in-
tensify our direction as a people. Kings and subjects who
never read or never exchange their views about books,
sometimes find themselves in the same theatre, and for a
minute united by the same message.
The Girl in the Coffin, as produced by the Washington
Square Players in 1917, went for verity of tissue beyond
the plays of Eugene O'Neill. For all his facility and effort
our national dramatist remains, like the hotel in a Western
town : " It ain't the best, it's the only one." Dreiser's play,
merely an atom of drama, was American fibre in speech
and action. O'Neill's plays, especially the late ones, are his
fears and fantasies speaking to people of like fears and
fantasies about the life they have to lead. They have not
the power to recreate American flesh and blood the way
that Tchekov could Russian, or Synge Irish, or the actor
Grasso could Sicilian, or the actress Sadda Yacco once
could Japanese. This transmission of our own life through
speech and gesture is a miracle that rarely happens over
our footlights. We have received real records of nearly
every other people on earth, and but few of our own.
The Hand of the Potter was played with no great skill
by the Provincetown Theatre and for only three weeks in
1921, two years after it was published. Even so, like the
shorter play, this tragedy transmitted a quality so rare
389
with us as to be shocking — the sense of life conceived in
cubic volume. I remember the middle act of The Love
Nest by Ring Lardner as giving also the acute shock of
life; the first and third acts having been tacked to the
drama by others to make a Broadway evening. The Moon
is a Gong by John Dos Passos; The Racket by a Chicago
writer; and to some extent The Great Gatsby from Scott
Fitzgerald's novel — from these plays too came the direct
sense of American reality. They were plays, not recipes for
plays, not confections like The Front Page, Broadway,
and Kearney's dramatization of An American Tragedy .*
They were plays, not personal vagaries like nearly every-
thing from O'Neill and his followers.
Though few may agree with me I have a suspicion that
if our theatre had acknowledged and presented first rate
talent like Dreiser's, Frost's, Ring Lardner's, and prob-
ably Masters', who have all been ambitious to use the
medium of the stage, our culture would have gained in
body and precision. Or, rather, had we not been the kind
of people who for example prefer drugstore and speak-
easy drinks to real wine and liquor, such writers might
have become stage favorites.
As it is even in love and money-making, we are ex-
pected to use our faculties to evade the issue; we call
money-making " service " to others. We call women pros-
titutes, debutantes, secretaries or wives. Finally we may
become the most synthetic and successful liars of history.
Our lies may achieve such virtuosity as to invent truth.
Chaplin's films, some of the best music shows, the Marx
Brothers today, suggest what truth of manner may after
a while come out of American indirectness when handled
by artists.
There are other brilliant examples. A devoted artist,
Edward Steichen photographer, and an American phi-
losopher John B. Watson, who has influenced popular
knowledge more than any other since William James,
have gone over to the vast hyperbole, Advertising, quite
like Dreiser's " Genius." Steichen justifies his desertion
by an analogy between our business world and other great
* Kearney's own play A Man's Man belonged more truly to the first
class of plays, those that transmitted the current of reality.
390
periods of commercial art, Athenian, Gothic, Venetian.*
Watson's change of front supports one of his own prem-
ises: Knowledge is action out of response to stimuli; a
man who cannot respond properly is a failure; the proper
response to American stimuli is to make money; he, Wat-
son, will not be a failure; so he acts to sell Pond's facial
creams and becomes vice-president of one of the greatest
advertising companies in the world. " In a store, and
doing well." . . .
But why is it that whereas in truth Phidias, Praxiteles,
Michelangelo and Titian worked for the big business
men of their time, neither Matisse nor Picasso nor Stei-
chen's own preceptor, Stieglitz, nor Einstein nor Pavlow
have permitted their art or science to be harnessed to com-
merce or to communism? They remain, to borrow Wat-
son's term apparently " unconditioned " by expedience.
If we knew why they have preferred this to popular suc-
cess, some modern sophisms might be dissolved.
Dreiser is one of the few Americans who has preferred
disgrace to success, although capable of both. Repeatedly
he has made " improper responses to stimuli." In the
realm of intelligence he is an American high-water mark,
not British, not exotic, and yet achieving waves that fall
beyond. The Hand of the Potter is one of the waves. The
theme and substance is native, but the fact of its declara-
tion is still as foreign to us as it was once for Whitman
to say, " I sing the body electric " ; or as it is for Whitman
today to say, " To the States or any one of them, or any
city of the States — resist much, obey little." This tragedy
discloses secrets never elsewhere spoken of with us, in
dispassionate detail and with passionate relation of de-
tail to whole. The play has two superficial flaws. The oc-
casional Irish characters speak with a brogue inaccurately
recorded; a good actor could have changed this. And
in the last act for a few pages discussion outbalances ac-
tion. For the Provincetown Players Dreiser cut and con-
densed this discourse. The second edition of the play is
thus revised. Had he turned into a playwright he might
have come to sacrifice leisure altogether to form.
Otherwise The Hand of the Potter in contradiction to
* Steichen: The Photographer by Carl Sandburg.
391
his other big works gives the excitement of tone as dic-
tated by detail, exactly in the sense that the tonal mes-
sage of trees at a distance is concerned with each leaf and
pine needle. The play was written in the fall of 1916
directly after the attack on The " Genius" It seems to
say: if you object to the havoc of sex and the sordidness
of business and the subterfuge of Christian Science and
the fatality of childbirth, all of which goes on around you
in your own class as well as in every other, I will give you
something more terrible, more basic, more inexorable to
contemplate. He selects for the stage as the mainspring of
the action that same force most feared in America, sex,
but this time acting through the soul of a pervert, and
therefore uncontrollable. He is the son of an East Side
Jewish family, the father a peddler of thread and needles ;
and he has been two years in prison for assault on a child,
and is out on parole. Thus the tragedy originates on what
would be conventionally thought of as the lowest plane of
life ; and from that shocking premise branches into drama.
The action takes place on the road between the old and
new worlds. The parents and the lame sister speak the
rich mournful memory of Odessa. The younger boy and
the other daughters, one a manicure, the other married
to a smart Jew on the way possibly to Park Avenue gran-
deur, are already new Americans, cheerful, strident and
practical. On the one side is the family under their hot tin
roof; on the other side, the neighbors, passers-by, work-
men and shop keepers, Irish, German, Jewish — the Euro-
pean world, hot with conflicting languages and customs.
On a July Saturday afternoon, when the rest of the family
are gone to the park or on joy rides, the encounter with
rape and murder of the crazed youth and the little girl
with pink face and red braids from an Irish family in a
tenement below, joins violently for a moment these two
elements — the family and the streets outside. Together
now they in turn are poured, like a sudden flood from pipes
bursting, into the bigger New York world of courts and
newspapers, into official violence and indifference. The pri-
vate paths of human minds, the public thoroughfares of a
big city are crossed here in accuracy of drama. A clock tick-
ing noisily when other sounds cease, the mother's box of
392
rags, a yellow oilcloth on the family table with which the
young man wraps the child's body, a vacant lot outside
seem like other characters in the first two acts, as do the
city newspapers in the fourth act. When hunted into a hall
bedroom the murderer with what mind is left him decides
to lie down and die by gas, the newspapers swarm around
him, speaking of him and to him of his crime, crying ex-
tras in the street below " All about Isadore Berchansky ! "
and on edges torn from newspapers he scribbles last notes
to his family and the world, which pieced together make
poetic sense of insane discord — a requiem of the acts
before and the last scene to come.
" ' I'm guilty and insane caused by the beautiful make-
ups of girls that has set me very passionate. Don't cry. . . .
' I want to say if I don't die this way I'll take my
medicine just the same. Fields, carnages, four trees.
'. . . Poor mom! You think I'm innocent, even yet,
don't you? Mothers is wonders! Great! I am too, only I
ain't made right. ... It don't do things right always. Can
you blame a man when he ain't right?"
The play enters into the very nerve cells of a criminal,
an imperfect organism ; yet a kind of symbol of many of
us, and of what happens to people suppressed by tin roofs
and churches — a revelation as intimate as with Hurst-
wood in Sister Carrie, as with Clyde Griffiths in An
American Tragedy. After death the gates of intimacy
are down. Reporters, police, the landlord enter in: " Ach,
my house ! My gas ! "
Here Dreiser has been severely criticized. While the
reporters wait for the police inspector and the father to
arrive, they ask each other what should be done about
such pitiful mishaps as the dead murderer under the sheet
before them. One of them speaking as if he might be the
Hoosier of twenty years before on the night service of
the World, advocates the study by state officials of Have-
lock Ellis, Freud and Krafft-Ebing. Critics said that re-
porters were not learned enough to invoke such authori-
ties, or to give a damn; and that the discourse was too
long. It is true that length here originally broke the sus-
pense. But that American reporters who have had as
fare for years the unpopular vitals of our life, while they
served the roasts to the public, disguised in stereotyped
393
sauces, would be incapable of scientific thought, given such
a half hour of grim leisure, is to underrate them. The
critics forgot that Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane,
O. Henry, Sandburg, Dreiser have all of them been re-
porters doing police court service. In fact if we have ever
had popular ballad makers and philosophers, they have
been the newspaper men. It is part of Dreiser's logic that
he gives them in this tragedy the role of the detached
chorus discussing the ways of the gods and of fate.
The choral debate yields to the entrance of the police
inspector and later of the father, to identify the body.
He speaks " heavily and sadly," and the landlord in
shrill retort. They make the final discord on which the
tragedy ends:
"' Yes, dat's my son. Dat's my boy. . . . Gas? Veil, it's
better den de oder. . . . Dat he should end so! It is
strange. Four years ago ve lived next door.'
* So he vuz your son, vuz he? Such a scoundrel ! He owes
for t'ree veeks rent, yet. And he should come by my
house! ... I should lose two t'ousand dollars [the re-
ward]. If I know, he vouldn't 'a' been here long. I t'ought
he acted strange.'
* I vill pay ! I vill pay ! — only not today, please. I heven't
so much/
'An' you! Vy shouldn't you bring up your children
right? If you should bring him up right — if you should
keep him off de streets, den he vouldn't do such a ting!'
' My friend, hev' you children? '
' Yes!'
' Den you should know. Vy pull at de walls of my house?
Dey are already down ! ' '
So the play ends in a sorrowful mean give-and-take of
words between the two eternal factors of life, tenant and
landlord. This time both Jews, both poor, both fathers
of families, that so-boasted unit in the Land of the Free.
And the quarrel is over a room too miserable for anyone,
even a crazy pervert to die in. ... Everything is told
just as it happened, not exaggerated or underrated.
Yet the play was derided and cursed by some of Drei-
ser's own friends. They had begged him all these years
to be economical with language, " fused and molten." At
length he was. And now they complained more than ever.
He could not be negligible and yet he could not please, it
394
seemed. ... It was not until he had written An Ameri-
can Tragedy nine years later, 840 pages to these 209, deal-
ing with a like theme, that u America's foremost novelist "
was honored as such. Strange that one must say a thing
over and over and at such great length before finally it en-
gages. I asked Dreiser once soon after the publication of
the play, why he did not write again as close to his subject
as in The Hand of the Potter. His answer was : " No one
can touch always the exposed nerve of life. It would kill
him or people would kill him for it." He waited some
years before he went as close to heart beats and nerve re-
actions again. Then for a brief moment he was at length
acclaimed as heroic.
In 1916 he took his play to Arthur Hopkins, a coura-
geous producer in New York. In December of that year
Mr. Hopkins accepted it and gave him an advance of one
thousand dollars. In April 1917 he abandoned the project
and the advance to the author: " It is the best American
play that has been submitted to me, and I would eagerly
have produced it had not Dreiser imposed on me so
many bulls, caveats, and salvos," he was quoted as say-
ing. The bulls, caveats, and salvos, according to their
author, were merely his refusal to change the play in
order to lessen the horror. According to Nathan a fash-
ionable theatre critic of that day: "That Dreiser wrote
The Hand of the Potter with a Rolls-Royce in view
seems to me as certain as that he writes novels with noth-
ing in view but the novels." Mencken begged him fran-
tically to destroy the play, burn it or put it behind the
clock and forget it :
" I say the subject is forbidden on the stage . . . banned
by that convention on which the whole of civilized order
depends. ... If the thing were possible Pd advocate ab-
solutely unlimited freedom in speech. I think the world
would be better off ... if the stage could be used to set up
a more human attitude towards sexual perverts ... if
novels could describe the precise process of reproduction
from the first hand shake to lactation, and so show the
young what a bore it is. But these things are forbidden. . . .
The play is a piece of pish — clumsy, banal, unnatural,
almost idiotic. Its publication would lose you the respect
of all intelligent persons, and make every man who labored
on the protest look like an ass."
395
For some years the two men continued to be intimates,
but it may be that here was the first serious wedge to
separate them. For one thing the critic now placed
himself on record as bored by the processes of nature,
always enthralling to Dreiser. Not nature but argu-
ment and document amused Mencken, and they must
not be too identical with reality. Then they became
poetry, and poetry shocked him. Moreover he truly be-
lieved that this play was treacherous to the cause they
had fought for side by side, the freedom of letters.
The moralists would be right this time; it was " plain
dirt."
Three years later another disagreement widened the
distance between them. Dreiser was living in California;
Mencken wrote him generously that he would " go to
the mat with Sumner," and persuade him to compromise
so that The " Genius " could be reissued. Or else possibly
he rather hoped to see it abridged; often he had urged
him u to cut a lot of stuff " in the novel which seemed to
him over erotic. The meeting and the compromise were
accomplished, Mencken thought rather to the advantage
of The " Genius." Dreiser's refusal of the compromise
seems easy to understand. The passages which the editor
was willing to sacrifice, I should think, were among the
most engaging and important in the novel. But what went
hard on friendship was that this book was finally reissued
without any cuts in July 1923, and without a word of ex-
planation or of thanks to Mencken — an unfairness, a
lack of manners, he could not help thinking, both to him
and Sumner.
Mencken is a man of code and etiquette. He believes in
fair rules and then in keeping them. Dreiser says of him-
self, as if pleased with the idea, " Sometimes I think
I am a wild animal." And of Mencken, " All you have
to say to him is the one word, ' mysticism/ he leaps up
in the air." A few years more and a few more disagree-
ments and the stimulant of banter and advice and schemes
between these two undoubtedly ceased. Perhaps each re-
grets at moments the loss of the other. When I asked
Mencken the cause of the estrangement one of his answers
was: " Well, we have different customers now." Then he
396
added, " Besides, what fun is it to defend a man who no
longer needs defence? . . ."
But to return to The Hand of the Potter its author
would need defense for a long time yet. Denounced by
" his most faithful critical mount," and the play reviewed
as an interesting but venal enterprise by Nathan, it was,
one would know, ill-fated from the first. Mencken had
insisted that " no intelligent publisher," let alone theatri-
cal manager, would touch it. And Dreiser himself began
to wonder. Since The " Genius " John Lane had brought
out two more of his books, the short plays and A Hoosier
Holiday, February and October 1916, neither one of
them storm-centers, but both increasing his fame. Now
in the face of Mencken's entreaties to burn it, he offered
Lane The Hand of the Potter. They refused it point-
blank, and were no longer fighting Sumner in his behalf,
in fact " had never spent a cent on that fight." He had no
other big work to offer them. It came over him of a sud-
den, he says, that in spite of his reputation, really he
had no publisher. Living as he was on advances, he was
perilously near to destitution once again. Moreover his
German descent was against him at this time, also his
name as a libertine in this most moral moment of our
history. It was just before the disillusioned young men
came back from France, those who did, to make jazz and
whoopee, and jeer at pretentiousness and hypocrisy.
What to do? Dreiser was at a loss. Then one day in
May 1917 he saw advertised in a catalogue that Sister
Carrie was to be published by Liveright & Seltzer — the
first he had heard of it. Previously out of friendship he
had given permission to Frank Shay, owner of a Green-
wich Village bookstore, to make one special edition of
Sister Carrie, no more. Otherwise the book still belonged
to Harper's. Immediately he says he telephoned to Hor-
ace Liveright, then an unknown beginner, who came to
Tenth Street to explain. His story was that Shay, who
had gone into the army, had sold him Sister Carrie. " On
whose authority? " Dreiser asked. Liveright did not
know, but made a sweeping offer. If he would let him go
ahead he would publish every Dreiser book he could get
hold of, past, present and future. He and his partner, he
397
said, were moderns as against timid conservative publish-
ers, and were out to go the limit and see the fun. " Did
they have enough money? " They could get it, Liveright
was sure. The act of advertising Sister Carrie had been
not too fastidious. On the other hand Dreiser had instinc-
tive faith in enterprise and youth. Here was a young man
who insisted that he would publish him no matter what
the censor did and said. The luxury of this idea appealed
to one who had been bandied about for seventeen years
from publisher to publisher. A contract was made
whereby Liveright and Seltzer should acquire his books
as fast as they could.
The first manuscript he gave them was his own favor-
ite, The Hand of the Potter. They read it. As Dreiser
remembers it, Liveright telephoned : " I'm advised it's too
strong. Why not wait and give us something else first?
Seltzer says it's too strong." The answer to this was:
u No, I'm through with publishers who quibble with my
stuff. Send back everything," and he hung up. Within a
half hour Liveright was back on the telephone announcing
their decision to publish the play. At last, at the age of
forty-six this fighter against odds had earned the power
to dictate. From then until 1931 when Hollywood pirates
got the best of him, he has had liberty almost to present
" life as he sees it."
The first new book however to be issued by the new
firm was Free and Other Stories in August 1918. Publica-
tion of the play was delayed by the Coburns, who in the
same month had accepted it for production. In Decem-
ber they lost courage and abandoned the scheme, like
Hopkins giving and forfeiting an advance. At length in
April 1919 The Hand of the Potter appeared in book
form; and in the same month Twelve Men, which book
of portraits went a long way to regain for its author the
confidence of Mencken and other friends. They are keen
and tender biographs. Many faces and hands, voices,
shoulders and mouths are in them. But they do not make
the acute victory over tone volume and intensity made by
the unpopular Hand of the Potter.
398
60
" Deep below deep lie the mysteries, and
theories flourish like weeds in a garden —
or let us call them flowers, for at times
they are so artistic. Arts spring out of the
mysteries, but the arts . . . grow stale if
left to themselves. . . . Life will have
none of anything forever. . . . We build
up rules wherewith life is to be governed,
and behold! — some fine day the charac-
ter of life itself changes and our rules are
worthless."
" But speaking for a nation that wishes
to stand forth . . . among those that
lead, must not thought — intelligent, artis-
tic, accurate vision — be among its pri-
mary characteristics? . . . Then why are
we so bent . . . upon more money, and
when not that, upon idealistically misinter-
preting life. [Owr] few genuine thinkers
thus far are taboo: Poe, Whitman, Twain.
Only in one field, finance — not in war,
politics, the arts and sheer intellect — do
our essential individuals compare favor-
ably with those of other lands. . . . And
is it not possible . . . that . . . where
the power to think is lacking failure fol-
lows? " DREISER: Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub
the alliance with Liveright once again
Dreiser made part of an historical moment. And at this
time he had not had to force it altogether; he had been
invited to join. When he wrote Sister Carrie he had raped
an unwilling moment; publication was a tour de force.
When unwittingly he had enlisted English understanding
399
which permitted the appearance of The Titan, it was tak-
ing advantage of another phase of our history. It was
the day when England still counted with us, and when due
to Whitman, Poe, Norris, Crane, Dreiser and Frost we
were beginning to count with England. Now when it
looked as if he might have to lose out again, a new ele-
ment had begun to make its appearance, which would as
much as Dreiser himself change the tenor of American
thought. It was the advent of Jewish intelligence, about
to seize new moral and aesthetic values, and turn the
moderns from martyrs into money-makers.
Under their direction not only intellect for its own sake
and art for its own sake, but also " books that tend to
corrupt morals " for their own sake, would begin to pay.
Prosperity was at hand. A kind of crude artistic licentious-
ness soon would blaze, extrinsic to great art, but perhaps
a prerequisite with us before we could grow up and be
mature. A more subtle complicated state of license would
have been proof that already we were grown up. The
contract between Dreiser and Liveright in May 1917,
between Middle West and Near East, was an unconscious
symptom of rough change.
The battle with publishers was finally won, so much so
that except for Boston the battle with the public was also
won. And Boston indeed had come hardly to count, so
wholesale its disapproval of the melting pot, and so cruel
and thoughtless its disapproval of the new country, the
enormous child, to which New England had once contrib-
uted not birth but anyway conception. The Boston book
massacre of 1927 by which An American Tragedy was
banned along with nearly every other readable book in the
world, curiously enough happened to be the year of the
execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.* In that black year, Bos-
ton the cradle of the nation, utterly disowning its own
progeny, though perhaps with some reason, was discred-
ited and had to take a sorry back seat, very far back.
Parents have never been eminent in the United States.
* In the suppression of An American Tragedy, the Protestant vice
society had the support of a Catholic judge and jury, who banned the
novel, according1 to Arthur Garfield Hays, chiefly because of a passing
reference to birth control.
400
These parents did not want to be. They kept saying to
themselves, " Why couldn't it remain like in the old days
of Emerson and Lowell? "
The new trustees of the Melting Pot, self-made like
everything truly American, with their genius for presenta-
tion were finally putting the country on the map. St. Paul
had had to wait for his dreary dream of chastity and
hypocrisy to be fulfilled in North America. Likewise the
ancient Jews wandering for centuries had to wait for their
promised revenge to come true in the same United States,
who had most disdained them together with other for-
eigners, Indian, French, Spanish and Negro.
Revenge for what? Possibly for having been the one
race of Earth seeking at once poignant emotional and
intellectual unity — that is, the one race untouched by
cynicism. In other words the most ambitious of the sons
of men. Wasn't it probably for this difficult program that
they were originally punished by surrounding tribes and
by their own pragmatic prophets? Early in their history
they had of their own accord reached an impasse. They
had invented a God who commanded of them a contradic-
tion in behavior: " He that is wounded in the stones or
who hath his privy member cut off shall not enter into
the congregation of the Lord." Yet ignoring the hardship
which might thereby be inflicted on those qualified to enter
into his congregation, the Lord synchronously decreed :
a Thou shalt not commit adultery." Also in taboo of art
and celebration which follow out of sexual passion, " The
Lord spake . . . lest ye corrupt yourselves and make you
a graven image ... or when thou seest the sun and the
moon and the stars . . . shouldst be driven to worship
them."
Such a worship of knowledge coincident with such a
prohibition of living undoubtedly reduced them to a state
of neurasthenia, so that they succumbed to other less
highly sensitized peoples. And as it was prophesied they
were scattered among the nations, and entered the house
of bondmen; though not before " one of their boys," as
they like to call him, had been first executed and then
deified by the Romans, the last conquerors of their land
before the day of their dispersal. And then it came to
401
pass in the course of two thousand years that they found
their way to America, taking always the statutes and
commandments of the Lord along with them, keeping
them all the days of their lives, teaching them diligently
unto their children. And their children became bond sales-
men, so that the word of God was fulfilled : u They be-
came blessed above all people " with money. And they
did begin to conquer some of their enemies who had been
mightier than they, as God little by little delivered them
up unto them.*
Coincidently these wanderers achieved a second re-
venge, this time against their own Deity — a revenge for
that day thousands of years ago when in Mohab he
spoiled their fun; broke in on their dance and song, and
forbade them to worship the calf of gold, made for them
by their artist Aaron, out of the earrings and ornaments
of their wives. A number of them began again the wor-
ship of gold with song and dance, usually Negro, in open
defiance of the covenant with their God. And they coined
some of the gold out of the wisdom of whatever artists
and scientists they could find around them — out of that
sacred abstract flame for which once they built the taber-
nacle ; that word of God, that inspiration which more than
any other people they had been trained to worship. Their
intellect condensed through passion, their avid wish to
hold concourse with Deity in rich clothes worthy of Him,
to wring from Him his last secret, their sheer curiosity
coupled with the need of revenge for centuries of perse-
cution — this combined Jewish element finally arrived
to take over Yankee Anglo-Saxon America, that country
most hostile to them.
Dreiser lent himself to this Oriental holiday. So, for
example, did Frost and Sandburg when the critic Louis
Untermeyer appointed himself advertising agent for all
the new poets. It was really the most irresistible thing
that had yet happened in America, the control by
* " And the Lord thy God will put out these nations before thee by
little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the beasts
of the field increase upon thee. But the Lord thy God shall deliver them
unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they
be destroyed." Deuteronomy.
402
Jewish intellect of Gentile invention all out of the great
melting pot. And yet what was wrong with it? Was it too
late perhaps for the two elements to know how to mingle ?
Or were the first years of mingling inevitably naive? The
alliance was in the case of Dreiser naive. He had too much
plain Indiana sense and dreaminess, too earthen a temper
to know how to join with these Eastern cerebral volup-
tuaries. He did not fit quite with the champagne by cases,
Shebas from the Follies, and shimmying from Harlem,
with which the new-style publisher liked to overwhelm
such favorite authors as Dreiser, Anderson, and Ber-
trand Russell, say, by way of bonus. And yet of course it
was " hopeful," Dreiser thought, to see a kind of liberty
and color and luxury invading the Home of the Brave.
Hadn't he hoped for it all these years?
Once walking through a park, he had deplored to his
companion the fact of a policeman who was separating
two lovers, and his friend had laughed: "I suppose to
you the policeman is the criminal? You would like to see
public pavilions in parks for love-making?" — "Cer-
tainly, why not? " was his answer. " That's what this city
needs ! " At that date he was sure of it. Yet a number of
years later in 1930 he was not so sure. He said sadly:
" If I have had any influence it seems to me it has been
merely to turn people upside down." — " What in child-
birth is called the breech-presentation? " — " Yes, that's
about all ... when what I wanted was to see mind and
body united again ! " — "I know — an equal develop-
ment of intellect and senses?" — " Why not? Nothing
counts without mind and taste." — " But mind and taste
come only with background. Americans are a people de-
tached in a foreground. You can't blame them if they are
merely tumbled upside down." — " No, you can't blame
them. We might start a club to cultivate background."
In this talk I remember Dreiser as with eyes looking
backward through generations and forward, shaping im-
ages of people brilliantly engaged, despite the wreckage
and seaweed around American moorings. He looked the
intention of his books — that they should be potent and
inclusive, even if they could not be hopeful.
403
In 1917, 1918, 1919, when the summary of his philoso-
phy, Hey-Rub-A-Dub-Dub, was published, he availed him-
self little of the new society which the editors and pro-
ducers, his publisher among them, were forming in New
York, and which promised to be a triumph of what the
excluded could do when once they had collected them-
selves to exclude. Who were his hosts after all? Procurers
not creators! And he more than they had consumed
energy and time to dig canals from life itself into pub-
lishers' offices, through which now other streams from
kindred geniuses were more easily released into print.
Creation at last filled the air contagiously. He felt that,
whether they acknowledged him or not, he belonged if
anywhere among the craftsmen of no matter what race;
not among the editors and propagandists.
Impatiently as Dreiser talked with others in this day
he pleated and repleated his handkerchief — that singu-
lar habit of his. What else was there to do with people
who reckoned by clocks and bank accounts ? Sometimes he
flung the handkerchief out like a challenge in case anyone
would like to reckon by intensity. What other gesture
was there to make among companions who were either
poor in emotion or poor in intellect? When would there
ever be in the United States a merger of the two, which
alone produced great art in individuals or in races? In a
lonely way he was certain of the need and the lack of this
merger. His intention had not in the least changed since
the days of Sister Carrie — "Art was life seen through
a temperament." But one had to be by temperament at
once realist and mystic to see life the way it was.
Even his great friend Mencken, he was beginning to
feel, perhaps unfairly, was " interested only in the visible
face of life," not at all " in the invisible mechanism with
which science is always concerned." Yet judged by his
writings this critic was devoting himself to the pursuit of
technique, by which intangible route alone one can proceed
surely to frontiers. But he approached technique more
diffidently than the novelist, in fact meticulously step by
step along paths of language trod by others. And some-
times he got detained by the others. Dreiser on the other
hand took tremendous strides by way of underbrush and
404
swamps and over deserts and precipices, any plunging
way he could find to arrive at the barriers of the unknown.
His book of philosophy with the plaintive title was a
paraphrase of his intellectual journey up to this time.
Though Mencken had begged him to write it, now that
it was completed he let him down : " It is not so much un-
intelligible as unintelligent," that is, " uneducated . . .
I don't think you argue well." Dreiser's answer was that
he didn't care. He was sure he had " blazed a chemical
trail " in the book, and someone would come along who
would get it and " make it very clear." The essays, he
said, contained " the sub-stone of a new philosophy, on
which could be reared a sounder approach to life than is
now voiced." The soundness of the approach, the book
implied, was in direct ratio to the attitude of uncertainty,
of vagueness really, with which a philosopher was willing
to go, seeking his way into the mysteries. A voice in the
play Laughing Gas expresses the floating pier on which
the positives and negatives of his philosophy rest :
" No high, no low ! No low, no high ! Time without measure,
measure without time. A rising, a sinking! An endless ris-
ing, an endless sinking. . . ."
" Behind, before, beneath, above, presence without reality,
reality without presence. . . ."
" A rising, a sinking! An endless rising! An endless sinking!
Outward without inward ! Inward without outward ! "
As for certainties he was certain only of his desire to
present enigmas, and given health he would find all of
them worth the effort. Two interviews to newspapers,
one in 1911, the other in 1921, show how consistent and
flexible his attitude was in these ten years. In 1911 before
sailing for Europe he confided to a reporter:
" I can see no intelligent sequence of cause and effect in
life. . . . No, I don't feel any less happy on account of
that. . . . Life interests me intensely for that very rea-
son. ... It is more thrilling than the most gorgeous spec-
tacle that man ever planned. . . . Besides being dramatic,
it is beautiful, and I believe that beauty is eternal. . . .
That would be the reason for life, if there were any. . . .
" No, I don't think there is such a thing as progress in
the sense that we use the word. It is merely a change. Who
can say that it is better to worship the home as we do today
than it was in the old times to worship a bull or a spider?
405
. . . Who can say that the teachings of Jesus Christ have
really held for two thousand years? Certainly it isn't true
today that one should turn the other cheek."
And in 1921, in the high tide of " realism/' as if to
repudiate his title of pioneer realist, another interview
seems to say, " I refuse to be named or labeled. Expect
anything from me except lack of instinct " :
" Today in America the realistic novel is at its climac-
teric . . . ' Main Street/ ' Zell,' ' Moon Calf ' . . . < Erik
Dorn/ ' Brass/ ' The Narrow House ' and others. . . . We
are growing a crop of rugged, hard-hitting, outspoken
novelists and this is not a matter to be deplored. . . .
But ...
" What we miss in American fiction is power of imagina-
tion. . . . Perhaps it is not out of place to speak of this
at the time of the centenary of ... Dante. If there are
all the chain cigar stores, chain drug stores, haberdash-
eries, movie theatres, and big hotels in Manhattan to de-
scribe, here are also Hell, Heaven and Purgatory of the
soul, which Dante would have found. It is that he would
have gone beyond mere realistic description and shown
us the half-monstrous proportions of our city like a giant
sphinx with wings. The power of such imagination would
lift a modern book into glorious fantasy.
"... The mechanical miracle around us ... keen
works of science and philosophy ... it would seem that
men should be stimulated as never before. Yet . . . vigor
our novelists possess, but little exaltation. . . . They are
content to examine the inside of a boarding house or
chronicle the mere number of windows in the colossal
stone and steel shells of our buildings. They stick close to
the curbstone. They rarely climb any such heights as Dante
climbed to look out over the tremendous waste of lives. . . .
The true epic of a modern city has never been written.
It is no longer a theme for poetry. It demands an epic
treatment in prose. . . .
" The modern city is as mystical a thing ... as a para-
diso. It is so crowded with grotesque, ironic, evilly fan-
tastic things. . . . Nothing is too terrible, absurd or sub-
lime to happen here and now. The palette is prepared with
every conceivable color for a master painter."
So Dreiser gave to the newspapers his own plans in the
name of the great Florentine. He had tried but apparently
he had not realized them yet. There must have been mo-
ments in The Titan, The " Genius/' The Hand of the
Potter, where his intention was clear? But perhaps not.
406
Anyway it was proved that the play was not the thing. He
had done his utmost to make a potent play. " First and
last " he had wanted to do that. And yet apparently it
scarcely counted in current calculations. It was the same
with his essays. Daring as they were, they went almost
unchallenged. Younger Americans took the trail he had
blazed, but as yet they have not made it clearer. In fact
so far they have let windfalls block the way.
At length however he had a publisher who promised
to let him live and write as he saw fit. And it must be said
for Liveright of the copper mask that as nearly as he
knew how he kept that clause of the contract. By this time
it was an almost unpopular thing to do; since in spite
of achievement for others as well as himself, America's
" outstanding " novelist was beginning to be demoded.
There were new writers, whose freedom he had partly
made possible, who for some years were dressing in more
alluring clothes than he. Indeed they were more fashion-
able. They were moderns in manner. Yet Liveright with
Hebraic instinct for the inner flame of the temple, in
other words for the truth or the search for truth, be-
lieved in his Hoosier. In the end he was repaid in fame
and gold; and could afford to be as rude as he liked,
and have offices fitted with a near Gothic-Jacobean music
room.
In 1919 the Hoosier took himself off to California
far from his favorite city, New York. There for three
years he lived — a kind of vacation. Yet there too he
completed his second volume of autobiography, News-
paper Days.* And under the title The Color of a Great
City he collected his sketches of that earlier New York
which was already changing into a new premise from
which to compute reality. And always he played with the
idea of the new Inferno, which was to make a " mystical
drama " out of modern life as dictated by the city, and
which would perhaps place him among the poets. The
tenacious Mencken wrote him repeatedly:
"Why don't you come back? Younger men have taken
your place. You are being forgotten. What in hell are you
doing in Los Angeles? The town must be unspeakable, a
* Called A Book About Myself and published in November 1922.
407
huge den of Baptists. . . . Every tourist coming back from
the Coast has some tale about your Roman levities. Yes-
terday I heard that you had gone over to the Theosophists,
and are living at Point Loma in a yellow robe, with hash-
eesh blossoms in your hair. . . ."
As part of the luxury of this period he planted a gar-
den, made vegetables grow the way they used to in Sul-
livan. And he initiated what seems to have been the most
coherent of his many relations with women since his
first marriage. She was a young and beautiful Hollywood
novice, who, it is said, abandoned her career as a screen
actress in favor of Dreiser. At last his wishes had come
almost true. He had a liberal publisher, enough money
to live on and write, and would have more when The
" Genius " was republished in July 1923 and sold at once
50,000 copies. And now he had the American, perhaps
universal necessity, " the beauty of youth " without which
" life was a joke . . . yes, the beauty of eighteen [or
not far from it]. It was the standard, and the history
of the world proved it." This he had written for his
" Genius " to say as if the words were his own, and he
has written it in autobiography. He had this now without
complications ; with no pledge, as with his first wife, that
she must be all he would ever have. There were other
relations that still concerned him; there might be new
adventures. He has recorded himself as exercising the
right of these. It was a part of his code as conqueror and
logician. Why other men did not make it part of theirs
he had often wondered. On these terms life was luxurious
in Los Angeles. He would not have come East again, he
thinks, except that he was forgetting to work and he had
work to do. Perhaps too he was homesick for the more
nervous air of New York, nearer to Europe and to old
cultures which he valued as shamelessly as he did youth
and beauty.
Dreiser has said that he pondered over the tragedy of
Americans from 1918 to 1923. One climax of tragedy
was murder. Franklin Booth the illustrator, whose guest
he had been on his Hoosier holiday, remembers a con-
versation one night in New York, back in 1907, one of
those impersonal exchanges that happen only between in-
408
timates, and in the detached clarity of night. They had
both wondered if murder was not the most dramatic act
a man could commit. Dreiser said that to be entirely ex-
perienced perhaps a man would have had to commit mur-
der. But lacking that, a novelist to realize the gamut of
life would have to be brave enough to imagine himself in
the clothes and skin of a murderer. He was incompetent
yet to write such a book, but some time vicariously he
would get there. . . .
The Hand of the Potter was the first fugue on this
theme. The play scarcely reached an audience, but always
the theme engrossed him. He would pose the problem in
a different more exhaustive form. He would take a man
nearer to normal, supposedly responsible for his actions,
and show how he too could get caught, and precisely how
in accordance with the aimless inchoate American world,
or rather where the one social aim was exteriority —
money, fun and show. A letter dated July 1916 from a
writer on the New York World to Jack Pratt, lawyer
or librarian, reveals Dreiser as always busy with the
problem :
"Just a line to introduce America's greatest novelist —
Theodore Dreiser — who would like to read the Orket
clippings — Will you fix it for him and oblige. . . ."
The book like all his books must be drawn from reality
— a weakness according to his detractors (who like to
say that he is only a reporter, a plagiarist from life) . His
answer might have been that by that last token so then
was Homer, so was Balzac, so is Andre Gide a plagiarist
from life. But Dreiser has never taken the trouble to
answer for himself unless directly challenged by the law.
He read and discarded, he says, five American tragedies,
before he came on an actuality whose circumstances pro-
vided him with the frame he wanted. And then he varied
the tangle of events slightly, in order, so he told me, to
pose a criminal problem which no one could answer. In
such a way his masterpiece, as it is called, grew through
years in his changing mind. An interviewer quotes him
as saying:
" I never make notes. I carry my plots around with me
year after year before setting pen to paper. By the time I
409
am ready to write I see the book as plainly as if it were a
tree rising up before my eyes. Root, trunk, branches, twigs,
so to speak, are all there; it is only the leaves that require
to be sketched in."
In 1922 he came back from California to work at
sketching in the leaves. By November 1925 the leafage
of An American Tragedy was completed, and a cycle
turned for Dreiser.
410
61
" Pigeons on the grass alas.
Pigeons on the grass alas.
Short longer longer shorter yellow grass
Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter
longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the
grass
If they were not pigeons what were they.
If they were not pigeons on the grass alas
what were they." GERTRUDE STEIN
JLhis plaintive and precise succession of words,
meaning I know not what in relation to its context, de-
scribes to my liking these ten to fifteen years of awakened
consciousness at which the United States had arrived. And
William James has somewhere analysed such a period —
the throb and defeat :
" Sporadic great men come everywhere. But for a com-
munity to get vibrating through and through with intensely
active life, many geniuses coming together and in rapid
succession are required. This is why great epochs are so
rare — why the sudden bloom of a Greece, an early Rome,
a Renaissance, is such a mystery. Then the mass of a
nation grows incandescent, and may continue to glow long
after the originators . . . have passed away. We often hear
surprise expressed that in these high tides ... not only
the people should be filled with stronger life, but that in-
dividual geniuses should seem to be so extraordinarily
abundant. This mystery is just about as deep as ... why
great rivers flow by great towns. It is true that great public
fermentations awaken and adopt many geniuses, who in
more torpid times would have had no chance to work.
But over and above this there must be an exceptional con-
course of genius about a time, to make the fermentation
begin at all. The unlikeliness of the concourse is far greater
than the unlikeliness of any particular genius. . . . Why,
the very laws of physics are conditional, and deal with ifs.
The physicist does not say the water will boil anyhow; he
only says the water will boil if a fire be kindled under it."
411
Of course there was the water, there was the fire;
there were many geniuses and some steam and a brief
boiling point. But how much incandescence, that is the
question? There was the grass, longer, shorter, grass;
there were the pigeons, large enough, but how much
concourse ?
After Dreiser's Titan, of books of genius easily re-
membered Spoon River Anthology came first, published
in book form in 1915, composed between 1909 and 1914,*
and first printed in Reedy's Mirror and Poetry. This
pigeon came from the iambic, dactylic, trochaic, ana-
paestic, but chiefly iambic Masters, the lawyer in Chi-
cago with village birth and city hopes and universal
brain. He could say in lightest talk to Edward Sheldon,
a romantic dramatist of that day, at a luncheon from
whose table Masters had removed the arrangement of
Venetian glass flowers — they were in his way: " Poetry?
You think of it as romantic? A lyric has to be authentic
as a drop of dew."
And he wrote lyrics authentic in the sense of dew, to-
gether with poems authentic like a drought. But in this
period of reaction from romance his bleak Anthology so
gratified his readers that afterwards few would notice
any other book he published. In the years to come per-
haps they will discover his Toward the Gulf, The Great
Valley, Domesday Book. They will find in them the same
^ authentic brain of the Anthology, but creation more
elaborate, more provocative, and perhaps not quite so
free. Radical Americans almost always end by going
back to Europe. Masters went back through rhetoric and
prosody, unwilling to survive in the cadences and idiom
of his own land which were too brutal or too leisurely.
He went back into British metrical conventions, the way
a lady from Kalamazoo would buy a seignorial castle on
the summit of a Maritime Alp. Among them he lived
estranged.
Yet in 1915 what confidence Americans had in Edgar
Lee Masters, with intellect equal to Dreiser's and a
greater verbal wisdom ! His brief conclusive epitaphs
* As Masters tells it in his dedication of Toward The Gulf to William
Marion Reedy.
412
spoke to them of life and death truly American, not
British, not metropolitan. They voiced the forgotten talk
of a whole segment of the country, from which the rest
of it could be reconstructed — of poor relatives, of dis-
reputable people, of nonentities unknown to High So-
ciety. And they spoke their irony from the heart, not in
thin staccato of Main Street.
Some years before the Anthology was published or
heard of, Dreiser first met Masters, a lawyer in Clar-
ence Darrow's office. And he told the young newspaper-
men, who hung by eyelashes to culture at Maurice
Browne's Little Theatre, that here was an American
poet; they must watch for him. They laughed at Dreiser,
a mere stupid genius they said, but two years later mar-
veled at his foresight. These two, novelist and poet, thus
flagged each other in the new American dawn, both desir-
ing civilization; and then in later years abandoned hope
of it for their country in their time ; and in time the poet
abandoned the novelist.
Out of Illinois too in this day came Nicholas Vachel
Lindsay, revivalist poet, the nearest to evangelism that
letters have come. Poetry, A Magazine of Verse was
sponsor for him; the assistant editor, Alice Corbin, had
found him. General Booth Enters Heaven, The Congo,
The Chinese Nightingale took Americans white, black,
yellow, reformed hoboes, Negroes, laundrymen back to
where they thought they came from — Heaven, Africa,
Nanking. Lindsay's father had been a missionary in
China. He himself believed in opposites, lewdness and
chastity, god and devil, flesh and spirit. His poems filled
with precepts were sure of himself, sure of America, sure
of his home-town, Springfield, Illinois. He had a gift
direct from William Blake.
In 1913 William Butler Yeats praised him at a ban-
quet in Chicago designed to celebrate Miss Monroe's
new magazine and to honor the Irish poet. He said that
given this poet, the only modern he had read, there must
be others. He was right, there were. First after Yeats
had spoken, Edgar Lee Masters read a poem Silence,
that thing more praised than song by most Americans,
perhaps because we have more noise than song. Then
Lindsay, who had the charm of preferring song to silence,
rose and, eyes and forehead rolling, read for the first
time his Congo, tobogganing up and down, back and
forth over the cadences of the poem. Yeats, who had
just been preaching native art to the banqueters, was yet
horrified by the oratory of this missionary voice — voice
akin to William J. Bryan's, an American free-silver voice
capable of drums, lutes, calliopes, a band of instruments.
" Can't someone tell him that a poem is a matter of
art, not of self-abuse?" Mr. Yeats murmured to him-
self. But the Illinois dancing poet did not care, did not
notice. The praise or censure of a master meant nothing
to him.
A banquet however was a banquet, and this banquet,
Lindsay told the wife of the toastmaster, who had tried
the best he could to combine culture and creation in the
hog butchers' city, had been a gala evening: " I've had a
real good time " were his words in the down-state lingo
he affected. And he added, " Now I'm not one to be car-
nally minded — I wouldn't want you to think so, ma'am,
but you've got some pretty fine looking young women at
this barbecue, dressed up in what looks to me like genuine
Parisian rags. I wouldn't care if I met two or three of
them again." A dinner party followed. I appeared to fig-
ure in the number, but soon to fall from favor. Sitting
next to the new poet I felicitated him on praise from
Yeats. His reply was meant to annihilate :
" Well, lady, where have you been? It looks like you've
led a pretty sheltered life. . . . Now I want to tell you
something. I don't care what an Irishman or an English-
man or a Chinese or an Australian has to say about me."
— " What do you care about then?" I hazarded, and
found out — " I care what the people of Springfield, Illi-
nois have to say about my poems, and that's about all."
I asked out of mere bravado if the people of Springfield,
Illinois were not sheltered too, but in reality I was fright-
ened. I knew then at that party following the Poetry ban-
quet that the old world was over; a spirit back of nations
had cut the rope that tethered us. The new world was
on its way, and the people would not care for Nicholas
Vachel Lindsay for very long or for any other poet or
414
artist at all. His own indifference was a prophecy of the
flood of forgetfulness soon to come.
He went however on his way " exchanging rhymes
for bread " south, east, north, and west. Sometimes peo-
ple gave him bread and listened to the rhymes, especially
in Chicago, New York and London. But in Kansas, Mis-
souri and Tennessee, he tells it himself, sometimes they
gave him the bread at once so they would not have to
listen to his often impeccable ballads and lyrics. Yet be-
fore the waters closed over on this period, the militant
localism which Lindsay preached and sang bore fruit in
the United States. He was one of the sporadic geniuses.
His poems were pigeons out of which came other lonely
pigeons to adorn the blue green yellow grass. . . . Eight-
een years later a chance remark of his betrayed that he
too must have been more cynic than optimist. It was not
many weeks before his death that he happened to say:
" I have been the world over looking for another such
audience as I found in Chicago in 1913. 1 have not found
it." It must have been that the people of Springfield,
Illinois had disappointed him after all, and that he longed
for the shelter of experienced judgment. He like the rest
of us apparently felt the stir of creation in that day and,
though loath to admit it, knew finally that it had come
out of America by way of Europe — both immigrant and
patrician Europe.
And that was not all — the banquet in honor of Yeats
was again a forecast of books to come. A newspaper man,
Carl Sandburg, born of Swedish parents in Galesburg,
Illinois, spoke for the first time to a poetry audience.
He said these words, phrased like a song:
" I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling aross the prairie into blue haze and dark air go
fifteen all steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the diner where he is going and he answers:
' Omaha.' '
After the last three syllables O-ma-ha, which sounded
and isolated the value of an American name for almost
the first time in a line of poetry, there was a murmur and
a sigh in the hall. Yeats could not complain of oratory.
Here was another deliberate poet, knowing that " the
muses love violence " and love delicacy too. And certain
that a poem comes to the poet from everyday speech and
action.
For him how different the source from that of the Irish
poet ! For him it would be Milwaukee, Chicago, Cicero
home of gangsters and machine-guns, Maywood or Elm-
hurst where he lived, or any station between, from which
poems would come to him u asking to be written." It
would be the office of the Chicago Daily News or Wabash
Avenue and State Street scene of race riots, or the Stock
Yards or the rolling mills at Gary and South Chicago;
or the frog-puddles along railroads in April, or the utter
fire of rye and wheat fields west of Maywood — it would
be wherever he went that " deliberate speech " would
come to him and give him " letters telegrams and radios."
They were messages that chose to ignore "what love
is, what beauty is, what truth is, what art is," or to
dismiss them as worn-out words. Decoded, these mes-
sages speak the song of blood and muscles, glands and
bones, in animals, laborers and strugglers, akin to the
song in stars, sea and mountains. They tell how when
men get very rich or want to get very rich, they pay
the price of having lost that song. They speak of travel-
ers and natives met by the way, but they speak ellipti-
cally and in the chosen free verse of their special free
forms.
While Whitman chanted monumentally intending to
inspire; while Dreiser wrote humbly and hugely wishing
always to elucidate; and Masters wrote tearfully and bit-
terly to lament; and Lindsay sang lustfully to uplift;
Sandburg picked his way elegantly, an aristocrat of our
slang and idiom. Like the others he went directly into
nature and came out with as much love ; and with a more
precise ear for poetic form as related to promiscuous
America than anyone before or perhaps since. Lindsay
borrowed older cadences with which to celebrate his coun-
try. Sandburg was the first intentional poet to set America
to its own music, the way that the anonymous songs of
416
mountaineers, prisoners, Darkies, ranchmen, railroad
hands had unintentionally set the country to music. Such
a kinship he felt with American folk song that in 1927
he published a volume assembling every example of this
art; and he has been inspiration for others to do this.
Such a kinship he felt that he has feared to go in thought
too far beyond the psyche of these native singers. He has
preferred to tell them that much is better lost in silence,
sleep, solitude and mist, than to force issues too painful
for them to face.
Three years after the prophetic banquet his Chicago
Poems appeared, and then in successive years Corn-
huskers, Smoke and Steel, Slabs of the Sunburnt West,
Rootabaga Stones, Rootabaga Pigeons, Lincoln The
Prairie Years, Good Morning America! He translated
America into speech selected from it, but chosen with
more preciousness than is yet native to us. Like Dreiser
he was both native and stranger.
And both were pioneers. That is, they were instru-
ments or symptoms of change ; the one whereby American
thought became freer, the other whereby American lan-
guage and gestures became more flexible. Dreiser forced
terrific issues which, fought for, yielded more confidence
in sex, in art, and in science destructive to old dogmas.
Mencken had preached the American language, others
before had used it. Sandburg made it resonant, the speech
of the learned and unlearned, of outcasts and working
men inclusive. Dreiser had the virtue of not changing the
subject, Sandburg of not changing the diction or the
decor for the sake of propriety.
These two strong natives, both passionate over their
new country, belonged to a wedge of change that was of
itself yielding a new style of thought, a new style of so-
ciety. Some of their own desires could be more effective
in an epoch when fortunes were changing hands over
night, or were paper-born out of inflated moments. There
had to be a break-down of old class barriers. With that
had to come the downfall of Colonial morality and of the
King's English and the courtiers' clothes. For a few years
High Society became almost unfashionable, not destroyed
as in Russia, but neglected. The new plutocracy today es-
417
tablished speaks American and has a new set of morals or
no morals at all.
Suppose that in these years of flux originators like
Dreiser and Sandburg and the few others who heightened
the chance of a creative society, had all of them ex-
changed ideas. Wouldn't American letters have better
fulfilled the hopes of each of them? But " the unlikeliness
of the concourse is greater than the unlikeliness of any
particular genius." Of the others the one equal in vigor
to these two was the Californian, Robert Frost. Dreiser,
Sandburg and Frost were three of the elements essential
to a great fermentation in this time. But they never made
a triangle, never made a constellation. Probably they had
friends in common who sometimes spoke of one to the
other, but without arousing curiosity, or barely so. They
remained like separate sources from whom many younger
writers separately depend. They remain the three creators
with one thing in common — strength to survive, though
by a narrow margin, a country and a period hostile to
art and friendly to extrinsic creation.
Once I had in my house a yellow Chinese chow and
a black Persian cat, both pedigreed. One day in the spring
the cat went out into the shrubs of the backyard and
brought back a transient thrush. The pacific chow, whose
hope it was always to find a bird in that Chicago yard,
rushed to the Persian to felicitate her, one might think, to
be repulsed by an arch of back, a hissing and snarling
through jaw and whiskers, a superb protection of her
game, terrifying to mere human beings. Dreiser's admira-
tion of Sandburg's accomplished poems, met by the poet's
disdain of the " varietist's clumsy efforts," has reminded
me of that encounter between friendly dog and proud cat.
In 1914 Masters showed Sandburg's poems to his
friend the novelist in New York. True to his veneration
for art Dreiser tried to sell them to his own publisher.
Although the poems found a publisher through other
friends, they continued to have his support. He recom-
mended them to Mencken and to all other unconventional
editors of his acquaintance. He said explicitly they were
wonderful. In return he got no thanks from their author
who had vowed hatred against everything explicit, The
Titan for one; and especially perhaps against explicit
statement as to sexual and religious discords in American
life. He was inclined to say that such statement was
" gratuitous, cocksure, garrulous." . . . " Art was im-
plicit " :
" Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite
sound to the infinite points of its echoes.
" Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in
a deliberate prism of words."
Subtle definitions for fastidious ears and eyes ! Yet on
the other side of this poet was the important unimported
cat, Frost, with a meaner verbal creed; almost ungracious
if taken narrowly in relation to each word :
" Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether, and
I ask myself what is the place of them? They are worse
than nothing unless they do something, unless they amount
to deeds, as in ultimatums or battle-cries. They must be
flat and final, like the show-down in poker, from which
there is no appeal."
If Frost did not arch, he has been known to stretch
slightly at what he seemed to think was vocal ornateness
in the Manchurian Sandburg, who undoubtedly ages ago
derived from the wealthier East through Mongol and
Finn on the way to Sweden and Illinois. The Chicago
poet and the New Hampshire poet have met, it is said,
and are friends. But American letters show no record of
their crossing each other's intellectual path; no record
of their having sifted out together their relations to the
craft of poetry, of having agreed or disagreed. In fact
there is no record, unless Sandburg's later poems by their
greater subtlety and restraint indicate an effect on him of
that most exacting critic, Robert Frost. In the early days
of their renown it was said by eavesdroppers that, except
for the lyrics which Frost admired, and maybe envied
for a sensuousness he lacked, to him Sandburg was often
farfetched; just as to Sandburg, it is rumored, Dreiser is
nearly always rambling.
In fact, each in his way felt indifferent to the other.
The author of Smoke and Steel disdained " the artifice "
of rhyme and regular metre in Frost's poems. He heard
them always as extrinsic to poetic meaning, and there-
fore not of the first elegance. Each poem should be like
419
a new shape out of wild wood or driftwood. And Dreiser
had his scorns too. He grew to think of Sandburg as a
reformer, and of both these poets as " probably afraid of
sex," or why didn't they come out in the open and speak
of it? Of marriage, birth, death, sleep, work and crime,
of trees, birds, flowers and stones, they spoke plainly
enough, but when it came to the exciting fact of sex, he
complained, they invented codes and puzzles to hide it in.
What was wrong with it? Didn't it have its place too in
" this rigmarole called life " ?
Here then were the three tough creative spirits of the
new country producing at the same moment. Masters
made a fourth for a time. Like Dreiser he thought of
personal relations as essential, and at first they paid each
other tributes of acknowledgment. But for the most part
the four scarcely took note of one another. Each was
too busy with his own work, and besides who cared? If
ever they had had it out together as to literature in jour-
nals or saloons or parlors, distinctions might have re-
sulted to tighten American thought. The more reticent
Sandburg and Frost might have said that in their opinion
poetry could name by name only things that people spoke
of naturally. For unspoken facts and emotions, diction-
ary words and borrowed words were clumsy. Symbols,
even asterisks were better. Or they might have said : Sex
is a mystery; each line a poem writes has in it the tones
and overtones of that mystery. Dreiser could have an-
swered back: But death and birth are mysterious too, and
you speak of them without disguise? And they might
have conceded to him his daring as to theme, their own
as to manner. But nothing like this took place. Much as
Dreiser set store by exchange among equals, perhaps
these others thought he was an inferior. He was too
" metropolitan " Sandburg used to say. And Frost always
kept away from strangers ; they had to come to him.
Unconscious of each other they had moments of es-
sential agreement. Frost's definition of poetry has a de-
pendant clause : " All poetry is a reproduction of the
tones of actual speech." Sister Carrie and An American
Tragedy agree to this basically if not always in detail.
Chicago Poems and Good Morning America agree to
420
this aesthetically and often impeccably. Yet Frost, if he
were candid, and he might be, would have a right to
say that among American high-brows he has the record
for cracking clay pipes and clay ducks in the shooting
gallery of the tones of actual speech. An expert like Ring
Lardner has not beaten him at that game. On the
other hand which extends far into wilderness, Frost has
not, like Dreiser or Sandburg, attempted to recreate the
speech of the whole melting pot, in a kind of superb com-
passion for the newcomers to the Home of the Brave.
Frost, returning from California at the age of ten to
his grandfather's home in Massachusetts, has lived almost
always since in that State or in New Hampshire or Ver-
mont. Being a poet he had need of a language and chose
New England speech. None of his verse is influenced by
the voices of Sussex, England, where he went in 1912 to
sell his poems, scorned at home. In three years he came
back with enough fame to get an American publisher, and
just enough money to buy a farm in New Hampshire,
and to publish three more books of verse. So the legend
goes. Nor are his poems affected by the voices of Michi-
gan students, to whose university he went in later years
to advise young Western poets. He had chosen as the
honey-comb in which to secrete his moods New England
. ,. J . i ... &
idiom, without ever patronizing it.
Surely it had its faults of cadence — a mean cadence :
It is a speech spoken flatly and finally, not in the nose
as out West, but in the front of the mouth as if it were
dangerous to go back into the throat in the direction
of visceral and then genital emotions and acts. Frost ac-
cepted it, not especially because he liked it, but because
he lived within range of its statement of life. It was as
good for his purpose as another speech, since as long as
there was life there were tones of voice, and in that case
could be poetry, given poets to make it. Besides, New
England speech had its compensations. It was thin but
delicate, sounding most of the letters. And the voices un-
derstated rather than overstated — a virtue for Frost
whose verse is an unlabelled challenge to American adver-
tisers, the verbal teachers of the greater part of the
nation. In contrast his poems identify themselves to a
421
far decimal point with knowledge, the way the last
cricket sings sharply of the summer when the others have
gone.
Dreiser's books use figures of speech, most often
similes; and are sometimes identical with nature or else
tell about nature. Sandburg's poems and stories some-
times use and sometimes are figures of speech, mostly
metaphors. They create equations in the algebra of life,
or they are letters to people sorrowful or joyful over
bad or good fortune. Frost's poems are figures of speech,
synecdoches he calls them: " a synecdoche is a figure of
speech whereby a part is made to stand for the whole."
Probably every visionary who writes would say he was
a synecdochist, but each one would differently define the
specifications.
Frost might say: For a passage of words to describe
the whole of which a single birch leaf is a part the words
have to be aware of the shape, the veins, the color, the
weight and position in space, according to the moment
of the season of the birch leaf. Then the words convey
the relation, dramatic or lyrical, of leaf to tree, tree to
forest, forest to region, region to the universe. . . .
Sandburg might say: There are likenesses and differences
between osage leaves in Illinois, palm leaves in India,
cactus leaves in Arizona which a poet apprehends. In
thinking of a single leaf he creates a symbol, an image, a
flash of words to convey the leaves of many trees, and
of life analogous to trees, or by differences opposed to
trees, from which initial symbol secrets of life and death
will invade you, provided you have ears to hear, eyes
to see. . . . Dreiser says to himself and others : Shucks,
no one leaf is enough to even suggest the multiplicity of
nature, shrouded in a mist no one has penetrated. For
me I must make leaves, leaves, leaves. The more I make,
no matter how imperfectly in a harried lifetime, the more
multiple facts there will be from which others may try
to guess the evasive riddle.
Being of similar strength they were not so different in
scope. The universe was not too big for them. They have
a flair for the infinite. Compare three statements from
the three :
422
Dreiser, when asked in 1929 what people he liked to talk
to in New York, answered : " The scientists dealing with
reality and mystery. Front line trench of an army facing
wild nature. On the firing line where I want to be." Then
a year later: " I am through with scientists. They don't
see mysticism. . . ."
Frost when confronted in conversation with new marvels
of science, less gullible than Dreiser, said: " Isn't science
just an extended metaphor; its aim to describe the un-
known in terms of the known? Isn't it a kind of poetry, to
be treated as plausible material, not as cold facts?" When
reminded of Einstein's theory of relativity he is quoted as
saying: "Wonderful, yes, wonderful but no better as a
metaphor than you or I might make for ourselves before
five o'clock." *
Sandburg too might make such metaphors before morn-
ing. Here may be one of them:
" History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse.
History is a wind blowing where it listeth.
History is a box of tricks with a lost key.
History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book
of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Sargossa Sea."
Three views of knowledge possessing similar gravity and
an immense difference of manner. No one would have
expected or wanted these writers to go arm in arm. But it
is surprising that they have never even challenged each
other. It must have been that so vast and scattered is the
United States, so brutal the gaps between races and
classes, and then between individuals of any one class,
that men with original work to do felt the futility and
even the danger of personal relations.
Then minds with less to create or lose read them and
ran and interpreted them. In this way American thought
was placed on a plane suitable to universal upper medioc-
rity. Thereby for example Europeans scarcely know that
we have had original vintages of more body to give
them than the second drawings from the mash, like Sin-
clair Lewis, Ezra Pound, or Ernest Hemingway. The
last two are from both native and exotic fermentation.
They are tourists, Hemingway a gifted youth, writing to
the folks back home in words of one syllable easy for
them to understand. Such men have come to be a sudden
unexplained background for new America.
* Reported by Genevieve Taggurd.
423
Is this owing to a complex in the more adult American
minds, without whom these adolescents would not have
existed — the unwillingness to analyse or explain? What-
ever the reason, criticism after Poe and the Concord
school went out of fashion, and has been handled by
inferiors. Walt Whitman led the fashion against critical
distinctions, for all his talk of growth and savor :
" To elaborate is no avail, learn'd and unlearn'd feel that
it is so."
" Encompass worlds but never try to encompass me.
I charge you forever reject those who would expound me."
Undeniably he spoke here in keeping with a pioneer
sentiment that action was better than thought; and that
the act of a critic was not action. Nor did it help mat-
ters when the behaviorist Watson came along proving
that what had been named thought was merely action.
This discovery served all the more to exalt action. There
is the fable of the general at headquarters who wrote to
the officer at the front, " Here are the specifications for
the bridge"; and the answer: "Thanks, the bridge is
already constructed." A story that pleases every hundred-
percent American! . . . " Don't criticize your country,"
a well-known New York painter said to me, " Leave it
alone, do your own work." — " But," I asked, " what if
my work is that of a critic? "
Americans abominate criticism, as much as a room
without a bath. Poe was the one high-geared critic of the
past, the one ancestral precedent for any stray moderns
still believing that analysis is a civilizing force. Whitman
contradicted him. In the next generation Ambrose Bierce,
by temper a live critic, cherished such a hatred for his
country that he used his talent to destroy American
writers. Once however someone brought him Crane's
Red Badge of Courage, thinking that surely Bierce, a
veteran in war and letters, would demolish the book:
" This young man," Bierce said, " has the power to
feel. . . . He knows nothing of war but he is drenched
in blood. . . . Most beginners . . . spatter themselves
merely with ink." * Of A Farewell to Arms I think of
Bierce as saying: " Here is a writer who knows something
* Bitter Bierce: Hartley Grattan.
424
of war, but the typewriter separates him from blood-
shed." Three Soldiers and The Enormous Room seem
to care less for chic and more for grief.
Of course always the country contained critics in spite
of themselves. No great work is ever done without the
frace of judgment watching over it like a holy ghost.
y this token Melville, Thoreau, Whitman and Mark
Twain, contemporary with Bierce, were critics. From
Mark Twain finally came an anonymous work and a post-
humous work, fearfully critical — What is Man? and The
Mysterious Stranger, though they analysed society more
than art. A generation later, overlapping the life of
Bierce, Edwin Arlington Robinson burned with selective
fire, turned in toward his own poems, as if he were a good
Christian and preferred not to suffer hell-fire. Over his
work he maintained a close discipline, not even released,
it is said, in talk.
Always interested in experts and heroes I have some-
times asked what Robinson talks about when he talks.
I have not heard from anyone that he talks outside of
his poems. He is enveloped in the legend of a recluse.
Once, it is said, he lived with another poet, but got tired
of him and left. Years later he rang the doorbell; his
friend answered the ring and asked, " What do you
want? " — "I thought," said Robinson, " that I wanted
to come back, but now that I see you again I don't be-
lieve I do." No chance of concourse from this poet ! Yet
he is one of the few Americans to explore human minds
more than external events. In his poems he uses for
themes the tangle of thoughts of the heart. His themes
issue from Americans with enough leisure to think at all;
and the tangle of psychic events takes place in the dead
wood and underbrush and new growth in which unwit-
tingly his characters have come to live. Robinson, the
hermit thrush of cerebral thickets and swamps !
Suppose however that our history had been slightly
different. It might have been a shade different with fewer
English and Germans, more French, Spanish and Indians
surviving. Every if is a big if. Imagine just enough dif-
ference so that these mineral " moderns " of fifteen years
425
ago had felt a native relation one to the other, and to writ-
ers producing before them and around them. If they had
felt the background of Bierce, Mark Twain, Henry James,
and Robinson (who though younger was yet related to
the past in point of view), they would then have made a
figure denoting creation; the parts held together as
much by repulsion as by attraction, the way of all units
in conjunction. To such a constellation might have been
joined Masters and Lindsay, and then Sherwood Ander-
son, Carlos Williams, the unknown Carnevali. Out of
such a figure, changing from year to year, dropping one
unit attracting another, out of the antagonisms and agree-
ments of such brains, if even for brief moments they had
crossed to agree or disagree, civilization in the United
States might recently have had more iron of thought, and
more specifically the steel needle of direction. I use these
names of writers as not the most widely known, but as
those most tinctured with the salts and phosphates of life,
as those nearest in speech to the earth.
To imagine such concourse in the United States is so
unreal as to be laughable. Yet a human geometry like
this has happened in the creative epochs of other coun-
tries. Take France in the time just preceding the War:
the critic Apollinaire is said to have brought men of
different ages and of different styles and races into re-
lation; as different as Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, and Bran-
cusi. And this period hung upon a previous period,
through recognition expressing differences — Zola, Ana-
tole France, Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Degas,
Cezanne, none of them unacknowledged by the other.
Back of this was the epoch of Baudelaire. ... Or take
a vast country like Russia. Consider what intimate re-
lations and savage contradictions would come to play
their part, if one should evoke the story of Dostoevsky.
In the recent United States one does not find evidence of
such complicated engagements.
I have not heard that those most actuated by faith in
art ever met except in twos, scarcely ever in threes, never
in fours. " Americans are infinitely repellent particles."
Dreiser and Masters for a time, Masters and Sandburg
for a while, Lindsay and Sandburg for a minute, Frost
426
and Sandburg for a walk or two in the country, Williams
and Sandburg for a second, and the two of them together
with Anderson taking note of Carnevali until he left the
scene for Italy! Few others knew or cared; yet, since
Poe, Carnevali was the first intimation of a critic in
America who did not separate poetry and criticism :
"Art theories are ages old . . . the only newness that
can be brought into such topics may be the weight of a
personally suffered tragedy, or a golden gift of song, torn
out of a man's own heart, his heart of today, of today's
sorrow and today's laughter. . . . Only a very personal
emotion validates and differentiates a man's art theories.
Then ... it matters little that similar things have been
said by someone else before; then indeed one may rejoice
that they have been said by someone else; then one no
longer strives for originality, but for a communion . . .
for the frenzy of the extreme loneliness of being together
with the great. . . . Such loneliness is perhaps what is
meant by originality. . . . Only eyes of fire may look at
the sun. . . ."
Belief in such timeless communion was not shared by his
colder friends, Waldo Frank, Kreymborg, Bodenheim, or
even Carlos Williams, who especially was seeking a new
fresh language and technique by which to save America.
There remained only the democratic Sherwood Ander-
son with a sense of communion. His Latin blood — Ital-
ian, he thinks — mingled with Northern, appeared to
value human beings, as if they might be friends and would
like to know each other. He too was after the " Splendid
Commonplace " proclaimed by Carnevali, but without
the ardor and the hurry. He was an American with more
patience. He could stand delays. In fact he derived from
other natives, Dreiser, Sandburg, and Gertrude Stein, as
well as from Freud and, one would think, Tchekov. Keep-
ing always his own voice, a new voice, as derivatives do in
civilized countries, he felt for a time a kind of debt to
those to whom he bore this relation. In 1923 one of his
finest books, Horses and Men, is dedicated to " Theo-
dore Dreiser in whose presence I have sometimes had
the same refreshed feeling as when in the presence of a
thoroughbred horse." And this book of an Ohioan who
had known race horses, Ohioans, Chicagoans and many
people, makes reference to Masters, Sandburg and
427
Mencken. A foreigner reading the stories might think that
already thought and imagination as well as oil were go-
ing the rounds of the United States. The foreword called
Dreiser belongs in this history.
Edgar Lee Masters had paid as great a tribute before
in a poem published in The Great Valley, 1916:
"One eye set higher than the other,
Mouth cut like a scallop in a pie,
Aslant showing powerful teeth.
Swaying above the heads of others.
Jubilant with fixed eyes scarcely sparkling.
m Moving about rhythmically, exploding in laughter.
And the eyes burn like a flame at the end of a funnel.
' Or else a gargoyle of bronze
Turning suddenly to life
* Full of questions, objections,
Distinctions, instances.
Contemptuous, ironical, remote,
Cloudy, irreverent, ferocious,
Fearless, grim, compassionate, yet hateful,
Old, yet young, wise but virginal.
To whom every thing is new and strange;
Whence he stares and wonders,
Laughs, mocks, curses.
Disordered, yet with a passion for order
and classification — hence the habitual
Folding into squares of a handkerchief.
Or else a well cultivated and fruitful valley,
t But behind it unexplored fastnesses,
] . . Gorges, precipices, and heights
Stirring up terrible shapes of prey
That slink about in the blackness.
. The silence of it is terrifying
t The look of his eyes makes tubes of the air
He needs nothing of you and wants nothing.
Self-mastered, but beyond friendship,
You could not hurt him.
If he would allow himself to have a friend
He could part from that friend forever
And in a moment be lost in wonder
Staring at a carved rooster on a doorstep,
Or at an Italian woman
Giving suck to a child
On a seat in Washington Square.
Soul enwrapped demi-urge
Walking the earth,
Stalking Life!
428
A year or so before on the threshold of modern times,
Harris Merton Lyon made an equally violent tribute, au-
thentic by its wording :
" In many ways . . . the one man writing in this coun-
try today . . . worth the lot of them. . . . The Tarking-
tons, Beaches, Londons and the rest may play their little
light-hearted game and fare on into the dusk. . . . They
are for the most part dead before they die, and so no
mystery. But here is a fellow who now shows as if he may
never die at all. . . . This man is mysterious. . . .
"A huge rootabaga; a colossal, pith-stricken radish. In
this body dwells this amazingly fascinating mind. ... He
sits articulating with a drone . . . folding a pocket hand-
kerchief eternally into a strip, folding the strip, accordion-
wise.
"For such a writer we may well concoct a paradox:
everything is really so unimportant that it might well be
treated as important. . . . Every hour in a day is so im-
portant to every character that [he] must feel like a clock
with a conscience.
" Yet patience alone does not explain him. . . . What
does this recluse keep from us, behind those lolling, un-
initiated eyes? . . .
" That he keeps poetry is one thing sure. ... To a man
who, in the backward-running holes of his mind, keeps
caves for poetry any inappropriateness of genius is credi-
ble. . . .
" He was the first man who taught me to think. He
would . . . make some comment ... so clear and arrest-
ing that I used to gasp. But . . . there was no sustained
flow. . . . From him too I learned that there are always
two, and possibly three or a dozen sides to everything.
This is enough to make anybody tongue-tied. . . .
" Dreiser is important. There is no American writing to-
day the condition of whose health, vigor and spirits is more
important. . . ."
Here is the kind of statement presupposing a premise
from which life may become " intensely active. " The
premise is a simple one, very shocking to Americans : The
arts are important. Ten years later Sherwood Anderson's
foreword to his Horses and Men gave the same kind of
importance to the same man in relation to the arts and in
their same shocking relation to life — retrospective now as
to Dreiser and roseate concerning the American future.
"Theodore Dreiser is old. ... I do not know how
many years he has lived, perhaps forty, perhaps fifty, but
429
he is very old. Something grey and bleak and hurtful, that
has been in the world perhaps forever, is personified in
him.
" When Dreiser is gone men shall write books . . . and
in the books . . . there will be so many of the qualities
Dreiser lacks ... a sense of humor. . . . More than that
. . . grace, lightness of touch, a dream of beauty breaking
through the husks.
". . . That is a part of the wonder and beauty of Dreiser,
the things that others shall have because of him. . . .
" Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick
some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much
of his heavy prose.
"The feet of Theodore are making a path, the heavy
brutal feet. They are tramping through the wilderness of
lies. . . . Presently the path will be a street, with great
arches overhead and delicately carved spires piercing the
sky. Along the street will run children shouting, " Look at
me. See what I and my fellows of the new day have done "
— forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.
". . . the prose writers in America will have much to do
that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of
him, those who follow will never have to face the road
through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that
Dreiser had to face alone."
430
Interval of departures more than arrivals
JLt looks now as if " those who followed " have
merely a desert to face made out of their parents' in-
experience and out of their own indifference — that
Wasteland which the first of them, T. S. Eliot, lifted into
a sound film. " Those who followed," were no longer
denied ; but as much because they found themselves with-
out desire as that the way was free. Or they only fol-
lowed with the faint desire of being snobs, of getting to
Europe and into " New Composition, World Lore To-
tality, Magic Synthesism." * Or else the desire was to get
religion and join with Soviet Russia in a world revolu-
tion, an equally cabalistic motive. The desire today is to
join, not to be free. Those who followed were like chil-
dren whose parents were too busy fighting for liberty to
teach them what to do with it. Or they were like the
family who saved for years and bought a piano, but for-
got they had not learned to play. Take the Puritanic lid
off the kettle of American Desire, easily removable now,
and you will find that ambrosia for the moment boiled
away. The fire is out.
Appetite is gone. Nothing new to eat, nothing fit to
drink. They drink whatever is brought to them from
over their frontiers. A nation drinks without appetite
to cook a meal. They smoke cigarettes made out of list-
lessness and indifference. They should care ! Is that why
in time we might cease to be a world power? " Where the
power to think is lacking ... ? " And the power to
love . . . ?
What Sherwood Anderson prophesied in 1923 came
partly true. The younger men of any creative spirit who
* Bywords of the journal transition published in Paris from 1927 to
1930.
431
followed, not beneath his arches and delicate spires, but
beneath innumerable sky-scrapers and elevated tracks,
hurrying in and out of taxis, subways, publishers' and
speak-easies, did forget the heavy feet of Dreiser; forgot
the catlike step of Sandburg and Frost as well, forgot
Lindsay, Masters, Robinson, forgot their past (although
some of them still imitated these writers). They remem-
bered only Anderson. Enough to laugh at him. His books
like Dreiser's are easy to laugh at, though not for care-
lessness of diction. But while Dreiser is ruthless, un-
sparing, formidable, Anderson is so tender, so sorry for
everyone of his countrymen warped by repression, that
sometimes his words seem to keep a nursing home for
nervous cases. It is easy to laugh at his records of in-
sanity and death, especially for those who have gone far
from it into World Lore Totality, Magic Synthesism,
Montparnasse and other cures. None the less the com-
mitments and the funerals go on, Sherwood Anderson
the last near relative to mourn.
It is often said that Dreiser as much as anyone blocked
intellectual exchange in the years of its promise. His
victorious battles had defeated him. He had become the
veteran general not the equal he could have been. I have
heard, for example, that he resented Anderson's tribute.
To be called old, very old, heavy and humorless dis-
pleased him. He could laugh and did, and he was not so
old or clumsy either. He would show them . . . and did
with An American Tragedy coming two years after An-
derson's epitaph. Yet consciously as much as anyone he
had hoped and worked for tone and flavor as essential to
America. In 1919 after The Seven Arts was killed by
the War he started to create a similar magazine, but
found that no one wanted it as coming from him. The
Little Review, Contact, Others, and still others were un-
der way in a new direction, seeking an exotic sophistica-
tion. For the rest Mencken was already planning his
Mercury, about as much as unsociable natives would be
able to swallow. There would be plenty of kidding and
snickering in it; it would be manly.
Failing that project Dreiser tried again in the same
year, 1919, to inaugurate a society endowed to help
432
those too daring or too subtle to arrive through regular
channels. He wanted, he said, to make it less possible
for genius to be lost or prostituted in the United States.
He thought of a long list of artists he had known through
the years back of him, too sensitive to stand up against
commercialism. The uncommercial Reedy's Mirror in
St. Louis was apparently the one vehicle he could find
to advertise his scheme, and only two writers, one un-
known, responded publicly. He gave up " concourse " for
a time and went to California. Ten years later I asked
him what had become of this society : " Nothing," he said.
" We had a meeting. But no one seemed to care what
happened to the other fellow. Each one was out for
himself."
America's foremost novelist for a time after the War
was strangely lacking in prestige. Or was it magnetism?
Had a life of neglect, of attacks and reprisals destroyed
the original talent he had for mingling with others? In
truth he had long had a name for boorishness, although
he prized above everything, outside of his right to live
and create, the hope of a social fabric, backed by learning
and imagination — what he called " artistic vision." To
this end he would talk to anyone, known or unknown, who
professed an interest in expression, whether reporters,
editors, beginners or arrivists, if they wanted to talk. He
gave in these years many interviews, made many articles,
wrote a number of prefaces for books he liked. He was
near to becoming a publicist, not so much for money or
publicity, I think, as out of hunger for society. A book of
his prefaces would show him as a critic who has made
subtle and vigorous distinctions, hastily written but the
outcome of difficult contemplation.
No, it was not merely bad manners that destroyed pres-
tige for this giant. It was a question of changing fashions.
The mere fact of poets bent on the just word as well as
the just theme convinced the new Americans that a fused
native art was at hand, as bold as Dreiser's and more
choice in manner. First Frost, then Masters, then Sand-
burg, then Anderson and Eliot in turn seemed to shine for
sophisticated eyes. Now Dos Passos, Jack Lawson, E. E.
Cummings, Hemingway were swinging into view, and
433
probably others.* As each light was turned on, the one be-
fore was dimmed a little more. By the year 1923 all the
earlier lights were nearly extinguished. Disgraceful to
speak of them! They were dark; save for the constant
glow of Frost's poems like particles of radium easily lost
but potent, the unacknowledged mazda lamp of Carlos
Williams, and the night-light of Sherwood Anderson.
Those who followed were ashamed of those who had led
the way. Did the leaders care, as they went out of momen-
tary fashion — Masters with his rhythmic sensitive
Domesday Book, Sandburg not long after his great work
Lincoln, the Prairie Years? The Spoon River anthologist,
who kept count more than the others, must have cared and
dwelt in bitterness, which culminated in Lincoln the Man.
Was it a revenge against Sandburg's greater love of Lin-
coln and wider popularity?
Did Dreiser the initial voice know or care? Difficult
to guess. Outside of his books he is a man of secrets, and
in native fashion rarely personal. Asked once what he
thought of his apostle Anderson, who had somewhat taken
his place as pioneer, his answer may have been a kind of
reprisal, or else was it truly critical? " I admire him/' he
said, " but there's one thing I don't get about him. He
harps too much on one subject." — " Sex, you mean? " —
" No, that would be impossible. He glorifies day laborers
and mechanics to the exclusion of all other classes. I can't
see it that way. There must be something to the intellect,
to the upper classes. If not, we're done for."
What made these quick changes of fashion? Stars ex-
tinguished almost before they had been signalled in Ameri-
can skies? Quite true that in France in these years Anatole
France and Rodin were dethroned the minute they died,
but not before they had led long lives correcting the ages
before them, clearing the way less for children than for
great-grandchildren. Moreover in their day and in epochs
before them, going back to the time of Voltaire and
Diderot, such leaders knew each other as individuals, not
as movements or schools. Personal distinction ruled.
Whereas in the United States there was not save by mo-
ments any faith at all in the leaders of this period.
* Let the reader supply the others* names.
434
It was, I think, because when the road was finally
cleared for younger people to think for themselves, they
were faced with a contradiction made poignant to them
by recent letters. The tragic isolation of Americans and
their living language shaped now out of their own soil
were two phases of the country difficult for them to recon-
cile. It was something to cry over — the prodigal beauties
discovered by the new poets, and always wasted and lost
through the return to American dogma, banks, offices, and
Christian Endeavor. In the meantime some of them had
through world's fairs and then through the War, the
greatest world's fair of all, crossed the ocean to Europe,
the Near East, Russia, the Orient. They could not ever
again go the impervious way of American pioneers. They
were young and impatient. They asked themselves what
was it that separated their country from other countries?
Unconsciously they knew it was lack of manner. We had
no wisdom of manner. This must be corrected at once
from the outside, if necessary. The new generation in-
voluntarily became snobs in pursuit of fashion. It was
then that Manner or Style was set up as a god to worship,
just as theme or statement ten years before had been the
refreshing distant goal, not yet fully realized. To this
new end a number of writers seemed to pledge themselves,
Bodenheim, Kreymborg, Marianne Moore. ... It must
have been however that William Carlos Williams, the one
vital creative brain among them, was their chief stimulus.
To their crusade he contributed his lingual metaphysics.
As much as Dreiser he lamented the absence of women
in the United States, and more than that novelist the
vacuum between men and women; since Dreiser had
managed to cross over and explore and exult. Williams'
poems rarely exult. He is partly Spanish, partly Virginian,
partly Puritan, or why has he protested so much? Or why
been so wistful, as if at odds with himself? Or why pinned
such faith to doctrine? He practises medicine in Ruther-
ford, New Jersey, apparently against his wishes. Asked
by the Little Review to answer their dying questionnaire
in 1929 as to his likes and dislikes, he writes : " I'd like to
be able to give up the practice of medicine and write all
day and all night." In an article published in This Quarter
435
1925 his fears for America equal Dreiser's and Masters',
and go beyond them in swifter hatred and scorn :
" We believe that life in America is compact of violence
and the shock of immediacy. This is not so. Were it so,
there would be a corresponding beauty of the spirit — to
bear it witness; a great flowering, simple and ungovern-
able as the configuration of the rose — that should stand
with the gifts of the spirit of other times and other nations
as a standard to humanity. There is none. . . .
"Here through terror, there is no direct touch; all is
cold, little and discreet: — save just under the hide.
"' Don't let's have any poor,' is our slogan. . . . Cults
are built to abolish them, as if they were cockroaches, and
not human beings who may not want what we have in
such abundance. . . . Let everybody be rich and so equal.
But what a farce! What a tragedy! It rests upon false
values and the fear to discover them. Do not serve another
for you might have to touch him and he might be a Jew
or a Nigger.
" Machines were not so much to save time as to save
dignity that fears the animate touch. . . .
" We fear simplicity as the plague. Never to allow touch.
What are we but poor doomed carcasses, anyone of us?
Why then all this fury, this multiplicity we push between
ourselves and our desires. . . .
" It is the women above all — there never have been
women, save pioneer Katies; not one in flower save some
moonflower Poe may have seen. . . . Emily Dickinson
starving of passion in her father's garden, is the very
nearest we have ever been — starving.
" Never a woman: never a poet. That's an axiom. Never
a poet saw sun here . . .
" We have no feeling for the tragic " [just what Henry
Adams knew and Frost and Dreiser]. " Let the sucker who
fails get his. What's tragic in that? It's funny. ... He
didn't make good that's all. . . ."
The cry of all the rebels since Herman Melville who
have tried to write in and about America. In this sense he
belongs among them; he has their mineral quality.
But what after all is Carlos Williams' solution? In one
of these years between 1915 and 1921 he published a
journal called CONTACT. Was it like the old-time Ro-
tarian — " Mr. Sims, Mr. Jones, touch flesh " ? No, it
was not a fleshly way out. He pointed to another road:
We have gone so far away from elements through cliches
and public language, we shall never get back unless we are
436
willing to search for ourselves, however ugly we are, and
for our immediate equivalents in words, however surpris-
ing they are. He was an apostle of the stark, immediate
word. He preached immediacy as a cure for American
delay. In the name of contact he broke with everyone
found guilty of a cliche, except Ezra Pound, in whom he
chose to ignore years of exhorting freshness in stale lan-
guage. Williams' idea was to revive and reform language
and then morals would take care of themselves, and come
up-to-date.
What happened? In a land of advertising this adver-
tisement to end advertising could not sell. To ask people
to use a naked live language, free of euphemism, free of
optimism, was to indict the texture of American society.
A publisher advertising such a pure scheme would have no
selling talk at all, no ready stereotypes. What to do, pub-
lish with Les Imagistes under Pound and Amy Lowell,
until that journal became stale? With Others, until that
became affected? With The Dial through Marianne
Moore, until it died? Make a journal of his own with his
friend McAlmon, until there was no money to make it?
Publish in the Little Review? But the girls had gone to
Europe. Go to Europe, that was the thing to do for publi-
cation. " The struggle to get the principle of modern
writing accepted in America is too difficult, especially
when the tools are only a spoon handle," Williams wrote
to a wondering admirer.
Off to Europe they must go, all the purists in the wake
of this poet and the few who shared his belief. Off to
Europe, to Broom, to This Quarter, to Transition, to
McAlmon's Contact Editions. There was an exodus in the
name of modern writing. There at least the devotees
would be in touch with moderns, with the founders, James
Joyce and Gertrude Stein, who had little in common, with
Ezra Pound, the propounder. And all around them would
be the modern French, oblivious of them. But no matter !
They went, and have finished by making a very exclu-
sive order of mystics with pass-words, codes and signs, a
certain etiquette in writing, an academic correctness. They
have become a school, careful of their verbal manners
in print. Williams himself remained in America one
437
of the solitary peaks, one of the exclamation points de-
noting separation. If he is not so high or wide as the others
it may be because he has had to write immediate poems
and prose between office hours; and like Dreiser has spent
much of his time fighting for a native speech. Only unlike
Dreiser he was too proud to make a contact, except with
emigrants to Europe.
It was a curious departure — this return of young
Americans to the old country. They have accomplished a
group, but has the group accomplished fusion? Are they
" vibrating through and through with intensely active
life? " Or were they so bent on the wrappings of their art,
as first inspired by Matisse, Picasso, Brancusi, Joyce and
Gertrude Stein, that they came to forget the contents.
Like children with Christmas presents do they still hold
on to the bright wrappings — new and newer esoteric
papers, mottoes and strings? Today one gets the uneasy
feeling that the presents have some of them slipped out
of the covers and disappeared. In the revolution of the
written word could it be that exteriority, the old American
vice, has come to the top of the wheel again? Between
theories and technique have these younger writers like
their Victorian ancestors forgotten what they want to
say? An outcome, never proposed by the mordant Carlos
Williams, hunting herbs, roots, tinctures, and hot-house
flowers 1
On a New York afternoon in May, ten years ago, I
happened to invite a situation which caught the crossing
of these two periods. Something which had seemed new-
born, strong and eager and not completely grown was
passing. Another cleavage was on its way, a break from
individual thought, a return to group thought. The scene
was a still older Victorian room on Twelfth Street, high
cornices, marble mantels; tea, cocktails and jokes; plane
trees through the backyard windows — a twilight propi-
tious to a frivolous meeting of libertines. They included
Dreiser and a formation of newer writers. Several of
them Communists, one or two of them aesthetes, none of
them " bourgeois," most of them novelists, nostalgic for
Europe, protesting the superiority of America. . . . Like
the moralists of the Nineties they did not want to meet
438
the youthful, boisterous Dreiser. They shied away from
him; he was literary, they said; at the moment laughing
immoderately at a quaint story told by Carl Van Vechten.
They had no glimmer of curiosity to bestow on the ep-
ochal Dreiser. Curiosity was indelicate.
If however Sandburg ever came to town they would
not mind meeting him — he was old-fashioned now, sub-
jective, but he knew moulders, type-setters, dishwashers,
he knew the working men of America. A flood of sym-
pathy had just spread from Russia to New York and had
become confused with art. Frost? No. He knew nothing
about Freud or sex or communism. Psycho-analysis had
likewise spread to New York and been confused with art.
Robinson? He was a back-number belonging to a bour-
geois society. Carlos Williams? Perhaps — he believed in
sex, in contact, in modern technique. Did he believe in
communism ? They were not sure, but he believed in James
Joyce. What of Sherwood Anderson? He was all right,
but why pursue the subject? Chiefly they hated to meet
celebrities ; they liked ordinary people " !
It seemed to me that these talented young men were as
loose as that in their talk. No thread to the screw. They
were like boys out on a raft on the Atlantic vaguely pad-
dling toward Europe. Not very old myself, yet I felt the
futility of effort in the United States as if it were a drug
whose fumes invaded the room, the city, the country. It
was effort without complication or contrast. Numerical!
Inorganic! Moreover if in 1923 these not-ordinary be-
ginners disdained to meet extraordinary predecessors, that
in itself divorced them from their immediate past. The
heroes of that date were excused. The period of the un-
known hero was begun.
439
65
" I am an enormous commonplace roll-
ing over your delicate miniatures, I'm an
enormous lady with large feet, such large
feet that she can't help but step over your
little flowers. I am the same enormous lady
crying as sincerely as she can over the beau-
tiful flowers that her feet destroyed"
CARNEVALI
" To be shut of from beauty entirely is
what makes us suffer most poignantly.
Even a scrubwoman finds beauty in the pot
of geraniums on the fire escape. This alone
will penetrate her dreams as nothing else
she meets all day" DREISER
.ad the oldest actor in this American renais-
sance of letters ever dramatized himself, he might like the
youngest one have done it in the name of " the shattered
enormous truth of which sophistication is only the chips."
But without theatrical ease, such as belonged to Whitman,
Sandburg and Lindsay, Dreiser was too American to
dramatize himself. He was audience as much as actor.
Carnevali, young by years, old by race, came from a coun-
try where sophistication and vanity were in the air. Every-
one, obscure or important, was capable of drama in his
peninsula. He was an immigrant at sixteen looking for
a new wilderness of people to whom he might be prophet
and poet, in the company he hoped of a few others to be
discovered on the way, who would be his friends. It would
make an adventurous voyage from periphery to center.
Dreiser, on the contrary, at the age of sixteen had come
from the center of American village life, and had fought
his way gradually to the periphery in search of electric
individuals, men and women to make the years important
440
to him. He found a few, but not enough. In the last of his
novels I imagine him as deliberately going back into the
depths of the Commonplace. He would discover if he
could the whole substructure of ordinary American life,
which above ground could be beautiful, and dramatic, but
was for such far distances humdrum and banal. He would
find the wide dark pools of tragedy in which the founda-
tions stood.
Unlike the young writers, he wanted as much as ever
to meet extraordinary people, if there were any. But,
it seemed to him, for the most part Americans were re-
markable only in one sense — the power to make money.
The pioneers like Yerkes had come and gone; had flung
their railroads and lighting systems, their bridges and
skyscrapers into air, across deserts — an old story. Time
was when he had celebrated their creative use in history.
The rulers were different now. They were bankers con-
serving in terms of dollars the dreams of pioneers, or they
were speculators imitating them; shooting higher and
higher buildings, multiplying the machinery of motion pic-
tures, deluging the market with cars, chewing-gum, tooth-
paste, radios, victrolas, cigarettes, not for use or for art,
but for more and more easy money. Greed, not adventure,
controlled the country. Dreiser, on the watch for drama,
saw it now in the masses preyed upon by capital. Obscure
individuals were in turn the strugglers and dreamers, just
as before the financiers had been fighters and dreamers.
The tremendous Commonplace so betrayed by money had
become heroic to this novelist. He could see the hungry
story in individual eyes, in restless shoulders and hands
and legs that would not be still. He could see it in any
subway, any street; and could hear it in the voices. After
years of contemplation, in three years' time he wrote their
story, 840 pages — An American Tragedy, standing
really for rich as well as for poor.
Sister Carrie, The Hand of the Potter, and this great
structure appear to me the most intense and intimate of
Dreiser's list of powerful works. The three share to a
high degree that particular style, that personal distilla-
tion, by which one has to call a work of art perfect, since
one is without the wish or the skill to improve it. This last
441
novel concerned with basic America however shifting and
uncertain, is yet not a repudiation of art. It is made for
the sake of absolute verities. By structure, by balance, by
intensity it will stand with great documents of other mod-
ern nations, which cause in a few readers the desire for
revolution; but in most, cause only nostalgia for reality.
In the very days in Los Angeles when Dreiser was first
shaping his Tragedy, to reporters who interviewed him,
to whom habitually he talked freely as if to intimates, he
was always proclaiming his one aim, Art:
" I want to be back where there is struggle ... I like to
wander around the quarters of New York where the toilers
are. . . . That's health. I don't care about idlers or tour-
ists, or the humdrum, or artistic pretenders that flock out
here, or the rich who tell you — and that is all they have
to tell — how they did it. They would have interested me
when they were struggling. . . .
" There is no art in Los Angeles and Hollywood. And
never will be. ...
" We are not an artistic nation. All we care about is to be
rich and powerful. . . . The one aim of existence is the
ease of life. . . .
" There is no place for the artist. Mention anyone from
Sappho to Shakespeare. . . . They would have a lovely
scramble to get a meal ticket. . . .
" It is wrong and it can't be righted. When you know that
the unalterableness isn't going to cause you any tears.
I don't worry about it. One could lose his mind if he took
it to heart.
" I don't care a damn about the masses. It is the indi-
vidual that concerns me."
When he got back to New York the trip across country
had not cut the connection of his thoughts. He said to
another reporter and friend, David Karsener, in answer
to an editorial question:
" The task of leading minds in this crisis is to stop aim-
less population . . . and to organize mankind so that the
intelligent shall survive."
So after all he did worry. What individuals there might
be among the masses haunted him. He must have been
sometimes near to losing his mind not over himself now
but over his country. Eagerly he watched every sign of
" letters of a liberal and artistic character," toward which
he said " the same slick Americans who can build a moving-
442
picture concern, a great popular magazine, a bank, a real
estate concern, are as dull as oxen." He found hope in
the very young who did not want to meet so " literary and
old-fashioned a leader." Asked by a reporter in 1923 what
he thought of contemporary writing, what he thought of
Willa Gather, for example, he conveyed in a flash what
he thought :
"Enormously clever. . . . Material, which done in an-
other way would be significant. As it stands it is ... full
of things intended to comfort the average American. James
Branch Cabell? His method, his style is fascinating to me.
Mencken? I think he's a great force. For what God only
knows. A force to cause people to revalue what values they
happen to be conscious of. ... Sherwood Anderson? Es-
sentially a great poet. He would like to be a novelist; he
will never escape being a poet. . . .
" One thing astonishes me ... the score of little publi-
cations like Broom and The Double Dealer ... in almost
every town, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New Orleans . . .
always written by a group, not just by one man. . . .
Way back from 1894 to l%97 there was just such a burst
of publications, only they were individual efforts . . . El-
bert Hubbard, Vance Thompson, William Marion Reedy.
It seems to me that this present burst is more sincere . . .
and more determined. ... If even a percentage of these
people find themselves in the next fifteen years we can
look forward to a literature. . . .
" I think the movement is too forced, too radical and too
obvious an attempt to be different, but that radicalism
will freshen the traditional methods of writing. It might
even develop a new form of writing, just as free verse
is ... the one thing that this generation has given to
literature. . . .
" Perhaps it is a manifestation of a new spirit arising in
America."
Two years later, to a reporter again, he says pondering
over new writers : " Literally thousands of people have an
amazing desire to write realistic books. The odd thing is
that most of them want to indict life, not picture it in its
ordinary beauty. . . . What is lacking in the experience
of these young writers to make them think there is no
beauty? " So we see Dreiser already isolated from the
new intelligentsia, though some of them were near to
his own age. Of course he had satellites, mostly from the
newspaper world, from which he has never estranged
443
himself. The rest were sceptical. For one thing, here was
a man who could see beauty in the midst of stupidity and
monotony. Such a stubborn appetite tried the patience of
the moderns.
Ezra Pound, their European trustee, never in twenty
years returning but always corresponding with his country
from London, Paris, and Rapello, said of Dreiser in an
interview: " If he is so eager for expression, for culture
in America, why has he never given a cent to an uncom-
mercial journal? " — " How do you know he hasn't? "
I said. — " Well, never a penny to any known to me ! "
— " You mean your Exile, or This Quarter or Transi-
tion? But would the editors have accepted any of his
writings? " — " Probably not. Why should they? " was
Mr. Pound's honest enough reply, by which he answered
his own query.
Dreiser in truth was cut off from those who followed
him, those for whom he had blazed a trail into publishers'
offices. He spoke of them as hopeful strangers. He himself
was one of the three or four Americans able to live in the
United States and turn it into words, without the stimulus
of indicting it, without the cocktail of sophistication. To
do this he divorced himself from everything fashionable,
even from his own friend, Mencken. He was like a man
who had taken the United States for wife. However much
he fought with her and hated her, he felt forced to be true.
Again he was like a man who had taken as mistress a
stranger to his country, Art, Creation. He would not
abandon her either.
As I see it An American Tragedy is the mournful
changeful building he made for himself to live in among
his own people. The various walls of this book separated
him sufficiently from the streets of America to give him
peace, and yet connected him enough to give him excite-
ment as none of his previous books had succeeded in doing.
Other epic novels, being those of Melville or James,
or else of Europeans, are different. The Idiot, The Broth-
ers Karamazof lead from mansions in stately parks, or
from apartments on sophisticated streets, to forests, to
deserts, to mountains, and then to precipices of the mind,
where the characters we have come intimately to know
444
topple and are lost. La Peau de Chagrin is a brilliant
wilderness in the midst of civilization, which was Paris.
Madame Bovary is a small town whose lime tree shaded
avenues lead to the country and to the unknown; the
design of a landscape gardener turned undertaker. Moby
Dick, back in the Fifties, is an inhuman world shifting
from deep oceans to the decks and holds of ships, whose
human beings have deserted mankind, finding nothing on
earth to arrest them. Dreiser's novels, An American
Tragedy in particular, are structures each composed of a
number of structures, now poor, now rich, now private,
now public, doors leading to doors through the corridors
of his close imagination. When you enter, you enter in-
teriors never quite personal, since the country aims to be
impersonal. Except that you enter solitary rooms and
closets of the hero's mind, where his secrets speak, as if
Dreiser wrote from within that mind.
Reading this book, I think of the incessant construction
in America during my lifetime, the insane wish to destroy
wilderness ; the constant chorus of saw and hammer, and
in the cities of pile-driver, cement-mixer, riveter, and of
machinery to create machinery. Such tools have made
the wooden shanties, the drug stores, the grand hotels,
the whore-houses, the freight cars, the exclusive clubs, the
factories, the wealthy residences, the pleasant homes,
the boarding-house, the churches and church parlors,
the amusement park, the summer homes, the summer ho-
tel, the farm-houses. They have made the camps, the side-
walks, street cars, railroads, depots and jails; the court
houses, the prisons and death cells, the politicians' offices,
the haberdasheries and laundries, the automobile roads,
and the older lumber roads, the governor's mansion —
which altogether spell America and which figure in the
drama of this book. How encompass it in less than 800
pages? Here Dreiser has practised economy.
Or rather only a novelist, a man of creative imagina-
tion, who comes once in ages, could make the likeness of
so vast a nation, sounding the casual trivial voices and the
momentous trivial voices with whom the story is con-
cerned, in that space of pages. By selecting a single atom,
Clyde Griffiths, and going with him, not detached but
445
always surrounded by young and old, from the age of
twelve to the age of twenty-three, the extent of his life,
Dreiser has synechdochized America. " How are we to
write the Russian novel in America — As long as life goes
so unterribly? " Frost asks. We are not, is Dreiser's
answer in this book, unless we take it between twelve and
twenty-three years or thereabouts, the span of life for
genuine natives; and then take it unprotected by privi-
leges of money. Up to a certain age such embryos follow
the path of the oldest highways. And then curiously they
are forced to lose their way. The way is lost in guilt and
fears for failure to keep the impossible contract of Ameri-
can society. The tragedy is a young and humble one ; since
desires are sterilized at an early age throughout the na-
tion. Except possibly among the very poor who sometimes
escape to Gangland, or perhaps for the inordinately rich,
who, it is said, escape to Speed. Yet is not speed a form of
sterilization?
With such a child from a street one evening in Kansas
City Dreiser goes through the door of an old time mission
house where the boy's parents save the souls they have
corralled with prayers and hymns. The boy and his sisters
and brother perhaps are innocent and powerful, since who
knows what may come of children. Only, Dreiser makes it
certain, the blight of a fusty religion is already on them.
Unkindly germs are in the faltering air. This is the begin-
ning. The end is that the boy, Clyde Griffiths, well-made
as to body, alluring enough as to soul, slips through the
last door, death, strapped to the electric chair.
Between the doors of the mission house in Kansas City
and the death room in Sing Sing what trivial front doors
and momentous back doors and secret front doors are
imagined by this mystical realist, once upon a time born
in Terre Haute, Indiana! Through the brightly-lighted
revolving door of a great hotel, the boy escapes from his
religious parents to the bell-hops' bench. Therein were
doors and doors. Go in at one or another with the bag-
gage of a guest from Europe, the Orient, New York,
Honolulu, and a bell-boy learned about life, grandeur, sex.
Then out of the back door of hours-off what picnics of
bell-boys with their girls, what joy rides in borrowed cars !
446
At length one night in the hurry to get back, the killing of
a child on the outskirts of the city, the wrecking of the
stolen car! Then the getaway of the still innocent but
implicated hero of the Commonplace, by the back door of
freight cars. In at the employees' door of the Union
League Club in Chicago — a respectable oasis of wealth
dating back to the time of Jennie Gerhardt's carriage
manufacturer, to the day of the Titan, Yerkes, who was
never quite welcome there. A transient millionaire uncle
proves that melodrama is occasionally realism. He is a
white-collar manufacturer of Lycurgus, or Syracuse, New
York. Like a chip on far-off rivulets the son of his dis-
owned brother is carried down stream into markets nearer
the sea.
In Lycurgus two doors confront him, one into the collar
factory, the other into his uncle's residence on the main
boulevard of the city. Of joys within the house the Kansas
nephew gets a brief view. The aunt and cousins ignore
him. In the factory, where he is foreman over twenty-five
women who stamp the size and trade mark of collars,
a rule forbids him to be seen outside with any of these
girls. One of them a farmer's daughter is so alluring he
commits this business crime.
Not to lose him she lets him in at the door of her
room. Here Dreiser more lyrically than before leaves
the hustling world and enters with two lovers into their
isolation — as ecstatic in upper New York state as else-
where in history. Here circles and ovals of lakes and poetry
begin to interrupt the rectangles of buildings and prose.
The foreman and the girl had first met by chance, one
Sunday afternoon, on a lake where " from certain marshy
spots, to be reached by venturing out a score of feet or
more, it was possible to reach and take white lilies with
their delicate yellow hearts."
An American Tragedy is a geometry of conflicting
circles, ovals and rectangles, expanded into figures of
three dimensions, crossed and re-crossed by the wiry paths
of delicious desires and grievous decisions. The book
possesses that cubic volume which modern European art
has insisted on, and has achieved in the case of a few great
artists. Each character, and there is a stream, a host of
447
characters, is made with his or her difference of being;
and made in the round or angularly, according to age and
charm. Years are the deciding factor in the American
Commonplace. So veritable is the result that one can
walk around and among all these men and women and
children in the air of the United States.
Finally and by chance the hero goes in at the doors of
the rich houses — those hierarchies so longed for. He
is taken up by a fashionable beauty in the same set with
his cousins, and through his talent for romance becomes
her favorite. What more natural then than for him to
wish to forget the factory girl who could never take him
to a plane above his beginning. Suppose she has conceived
a child, and by him. Why should that destroy his whole
chance of success according to his popular theory as to
what life should be?
Doors of drug stores, doors of doctors1 offices, with
the hopes of contraceptive means ! Nothing to be done 1
In an insane frenzy for dreams to come true and not be
thwarted by mere circumstances, slowly, hypnotically he
half plans her death, suggested by a double drowning he
has read about in the newspapers. With a promise of mar-
riage to " see her through " he takes her from her father's
dilapidated farm to a lake again, eerie and wild in the
Adirondacks, loses courage to drown her, but when in a
quarrel the boat capsizes, he lacks courage or will to re-
verse the reflex of his schemes utterly enough to save her.
Here Dreiser, called lumbering, follows like a flexible
wire the baffling tangle of thought-prints of the mind.
To the society girFs summer camp, darting with canoes,
riding horses, speed boats, dancing, tennis, and all the
costumes that go with these, the pallid young man makes
his escape for what he hopes will be his reward. But never
after the drowning able to decide whether swimming away
meant that he was a murderer, and shaken by the fear of
pursuit, there was no reward. Afterwards forced away
through the back door of the camp by the revolvers of
sheriff and district attorney he enters the door of fame
and the county jail. Then there were successively the doors
of court houses — the trial in the Adirondacks, the appeal
in New York. And the doors through which his attorneys,
448
hired by his uncle's millions, will climb to importance as
criminal lawyers ; and by which sheriff and district attor-
ney reach high political prestige in the county of Big Bit-
tern Lake. Beyond that all the little farm houses pour out
their citizens to exhort judge and jury to drive the mur-
derer to his death.
Now the door of the mission house removed to Denver
is flung wide open by newspapers. Out of it his mother
walks, determined to prove his innocence. She goes even
to the governor of New York imploring pardon. Obscure
Evangelism meets high officialdom in vain. She sends a
minister of the faith to lead her son through the last door
to Christ. Convinced at length of his own guilt, since he
swam away, he makes his final effort to count in a letter
to young men urging them to follow the narrow way, his
mother's way, through Jesus to Heaven.
The waters close over. The newspaper magnates, the
lawyers and politicians, are the richer for this tragedy.
The country is the poorer in spirit, whose code has made
life impossible for two young people. If for them, for
how many others ! Impossible to read the book without
tears ! In one passage Dreiser describes the temperament
of this boy as " fluid and unstable as water." Yet he seems
to readers not more unstable than any other element
acutely sensitive to the vivid world outside. He seems not
more unstable than Romeo or Hamlet, merely less dis-
tinguished, less developed. The conclusion is that human
beings endowed with full senses are as fluid and unstable
as water. Sometimes, dammed up, they acquire the force
of torrents. They become instruments of drama and de-
struction.
Here then is An American Tragedy — the apex of the
experience meeting between Dreiser and his country.
What did it do for America, what did it do for Dreiser?
As for the public the book went into seven printings be-
tween December 1925 and December 1926, and then on
through other years. Thousands of people read it; debu-
tantes and news-stand dealers — I have seen them. Yet
just for sensation they did not have to read the book.
They had always the tabloids, which every day superfici-
449
ally, but more and more, copied Dreiser's method of pre-
senting crime; just as blurbs and advertisements imitated
Sandburg's and Anderson's ways of presenting pleasures.
Great Americans are often accused of journalism in their
art. I think it is the other way around. The journalists
and copy writers have imitated the poets, being them-
selves would-be artists. Wasn't Dreiser in newspaper days
exhorted to study Zola, Loti, Kipling? And then there
were men like Eugene Field, George Ade, O. Henry, Ring
Lardner. Hard to know which they were, poets or jour-
nalists. But one thing is sure, they left their mark on
American journalism more than they were branded by it.
The populace did not have to read this tragedy for
mere excitement. Dreiser himself was amazed at the sales
and the reclame. He had built the work to please himself,
and as he says in a letter to a friend had begun it with
" the damnedest qualms and struggles " :
"I have written and written — and at last I hope, if I
don't change it again, gotten a fair start. . . . When I set
out to write a novel I worry so over the sure even progress
of it. What I ought to have is someone who could decide
for me when I have the right start, when I am going ahead,
or one who would take all the phases I pen down and
piece them together into the true story as I see it. That
is eventually what I do for myself. But oh, the struggles
and the flounderings ! "
Two and a half solitary years more of these, and the work
pleased him — he called it complete. But why should it
please anyone else, save for a few adherents? It was more
drab, more grim, more tragic, more salacious in material
than The " Genius" The Titan, The Financier, Jennie or
Carrie. If those novels were questionable, this one surely
would be hateful to Americans. It was long and uncom-
promising!
Yet An American Tragedy sold and sold. Almost as
much as an electric refrigerator, or a radio set. It was
deluged with praise by both simple and sophisticated
critics; by the very young who used to think that Dreiser
was old-fashioned; by his old enemy, Professor Stuart
Sherman, who enlisted the interest of churches and col-
leges and good people in behalf of the " naturalist." In
some universities the novel became part of required read-
450
ing. Why? Its author, an authority on his country, himself
did not know. He thought perhaps that the book was
popular, " not because it is a tragedy, but because it is
American " :
"The type of life that produced it has not changed.
For years I have been arrested in stones and plays by the
poor young man who marries the rich man's daughter.
I have had many letters from people who wrote: ' Clyde
Griffiths might have been me/"
For myself I think the interest cut deeper than that.
The year was turning into 1926. There had been fifteen
years of superfine and less fine intellects saying to
America, the child of the melting pot : " Look at yourself.
See how beautiful and promising you are," or: " See how
ugly and adolescent you are." The United States, the most
spiritually ambitious nation of earth in modern times, but
busy with this invention or that, this improvement or
that, finally acquired enough curiosity between " business
deals " to look at itself, as portrayed by the high-brow.
Already they had looked at negatives within the covers
of Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, Red Lewis — with that
nickname he might be a football player. But he wasn't.
They found out that all he had to say to virile America
was what their mothers and sisters had been exhorting for
years: " Get culture, get culture, we're ridiculous without
it." The masculine, sometimes weary, answer had been :
" Okay, go and get culture ! Here's a letter of credit and
a ticket to Europe. Bring it back if you can."
Or some night when they couldn't sleep at some
goddamn house party they might have picked up the
plaintive poems of Edna Millay : " Sure they were beauti-
ful, as good as Keats or Shelley or maybe Shakespeare or
Marlowe, remembered from college days. Good old col-
lege days I " What were the women nagging them about
anyway? We had culture ... we had this dame who
could write poems as good as anyone, and " sleep with
them " probably, if they wanted her. Yet after all there
were plenty of girls who would do that — next week in
fact, when the wife was in Europe and the kiddies! Or
instead of an Edgar Wallace, they might pick up a Joseph
Hergesheimer, maybe a Jew but a good fellow, and to
their consternation, by gosh, he seemed to think their
wives were attractive. Even those over forty, even those
over fifty. Really, the man knew no age limit. Hell, it
wasn't the wife, come to think of it, this kike fell for.
It was that French perfume, those clothes which he had
paid for, bought last year in Paris. . . . Heigho, the
money went out as fast as it came in. ... Just the same
better give the little woman a look. . . . Anyhow she
was refined. Yet how did he know? Hergesheimer made
a man think.
But now on the guest room table another book. God
help us, wouldn't Americans ever stop printing books no
one had time to read? An American Tragedy! by a fel-
low who wrote about Yerkes. He knew a thing or two
about finance anyway. . . . Christ, it was long. . . .
But the boy in it was pretty well done . . . exactly like
himself thirty years ago, only he went to the chair.
Why? It didn't seem quite right, a nice enough boy just
about like himself twenty years ago. What seemed to
be the matter? He got into trouble with one girl be-
neath him socially, and wanted to marry another above
him. Both beauties! He himself had done nothing like
that. Never in his life ! Not so weak, or else could it be
that he was not so strong? . . . Long ago there had
been a girl he wanted, beneath him. He dreamed of her
still sometimes. He had run away from her : there would
have been hell to pay. He would have lost his friends, his
job. And didn't he use to dream too about millionaires'
daughters ? But he knew enough to marry a nice girl from
his own set, not very exciting . . . but there had been
banquets and conventions ; he had had his fun. And now
that he and the Missus both had money they went where
the liked ; they met millionaires' wives by the dozen, too
old of course to have a good time with. But it wouldn't be
long before they got into that class themselves, if the
boom lasted, and it would. . . . On the whole a pretty
fair book this American Tragedy! The same cities, the
same hotels, the same people he came in contact with daily.
Everything the same except for the lake and the electric
chair I Pretty tough on the girl even if she did go wrong,
and on the young fellow too. A hell of a note! A god-
452
damned country ! Well, he himself would change all that
after he had made a couple of million.
It is for this that I imagine Dreiser's tragedy made a
mad success. It was like your own fortune told by a
wizard, your own photograph taken by a master camera.
And the overtones produced were irresistible to serious
Americans. The author was not a reformer, but the book
made them wish for the world to be different. The book
was not ironic, and yet the effect of it stabbed them with
that indescribable torment called the irony of fate. After
years of evasion finally Americans wanted to look at
themselves.
453
" A work of art reuniting the qualities
of freshness and of emphasis risks being
too round, and rolling at all speed toward
the black hole of the great public."
JEAN COCTEAU: Le Mystere Laic
.n American Tragedy rolled into the maw
of the public. For some days readers congratulated them-
selves on this work of genius, which made them im-
portant even if it seemed to prove them part of a great
catastrophe. What on the other hand did " the Mount
Everest of American fiction " do for Dreiser? He be-
came with incredible swiftness " the outstanding literary
figure of America." Since the Colonial days of Emerson,
and then Howells, we had always wanted a " national
man of letters " but had been unable to find one suited
to our needs. Mark Twain was u outstanding," but as
a clown, not a sage. Dreiser came back from Florida
where he had gone to rest after the labors of his book,
to find himself wrapped in editorial superlatives. This
ogre, vulgarian, behemoth, lobscause, pachyderm, viola-
tor of American womanhood, slaughterer of the King's
English, dangerous citizen, hated genius, found himself
" great " like Edison, Rockefeller or Ford. His publishers
saw to it that now he should be dressed from head to
foot in illustrious adjectives. Reviews of his book were
broadcast over the country in that synthetic voice of the
radio announcer, abasing himself before some miracle of
pancake flour, bedtime story or washing machine. Royal-
ties came in as never before. The book was made into a
play by Patrick Kearney, to be produced by Liveright.
It was a chain on which were strung like beads the more
salacious and terrifying episodes, and it kept none of the
architecture of the original. Yet Dreiser, now a little way
454
down the public throat, after thirty years of struggle to
be read at all, to live at all, in this moment of success
was too tired or too dizzy to protest. Presented to packed
houses, while he was in Europe, the play brought in more
royalties and more prestige. Although retaining some of
the iron of the novel, it counted as Dreiser's initial and
unintentional sacrifice in exchange for the " public pour-
boire." He was being turned as if blindfolded from a
great writer into a public character.
There is no blame attached to Dreiser or the public.
It was not his fault or theirs that he went now among
prosperous inferiors, rather than among his own kind.
There was no society of equals to engage him, and he
craved society — a sign of being civilized! The men of
like voltage were the solitary peaks of the last chapter
of these computations. Puritanism in truth had been de-
feated, but the reward of victory was promiscuousness,
not distinction! There was but rarely as on Dreiser's
part, a desire for distinction; and probably for the simple
reason that most people were too humble to wish for the
moon. For one thing the women who came out of the
melting pot — and on women, too, civilization depends
— were as incapable of projecting any far-reaching com-
plications as those before them. There were no women,
except always for the wives and business agents, stage
favorites and Harlem yellows, as yet insoluble elements.
Dreiser himself knew it, and yet reached for the moon.
He knew too that already he had lost friends most
eager for civilization, for whom in other days his Tenth
Street apartment had made a meeting place. Yet he could
not believe this crazy truth of his country — that it was
too numerical for personal relations. He rented a large
apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, somewhat Jacobean
according to the naive taste of New York architects and
decorators, yet beautiful with a big window framing
theatre signs and skyscrapers in snow, rain or blue night
sky. There surely he could realize his lifelong dream —
an intellectual artistic society in his own city. For five
winters on many Thursday nights there poured into this
studio intelligent and expensive New York; novelists,
poets, singers, dancers, scientists, actresses, editors, crit-
455
ics, publishers, and a painter or two; once Nigerian
dancers bearing with them a mask of their crocodile god.
But it seemed that the procurers of the arts dominated
his room with their tactile eyes and hands and inhuman
silences, exactly as they dominated New York City. If
one looked hard there might be a poet from the Argen-
tine or Mexico or a turbaned friend of Ghandi, or a
scientist from the Rockefeller Institute, or one or two
old friends of Dreiser's, genuine and native. But they
were lost among the owl-like dealers who silently drank
and petted, coming up to breathe now and then in mo-
ments of literary politics. The difficulty was that this
cherished scheme lacked any kind of medium of exchange.
Not even that violent current of excitement between men
and women when the work of day is over could unite
them. Scarcely a look passed between one and another
save that of New York hatred and distrust. The engineer
of these parties was wonderfully alive and real among
his guests with an air of earthly experience; as if some
day with enough rehearsals these figures would perform
together as he had seen it done years before in London
drawing rooms and again recently in Europe. He seemed
to be saying to himself: You can't get all these interesting
people together for an evening without some kind of a
plot evolving from it. He did not yet know how mentally
aseptic and timid the intelligentsia of New York could
be.
Also in January 1926 a meeting took place which en-
gulfed him further in publicity. Since their advent he
had had his eye on the movies, and yet had been afraid
of their happy endings and their ignorant liberties with
authors. Now Liveright told him that Famous Players
was after his Tragedy, just as it stood. By this his pub-
lisher, according to a contract dating from 1923, would
get IQ% of the transaction. The idea was exciting to
both of them. Yet on the same day when he signed away
the theatrical rights to his novel, Liveright had corrected
this news : after all Lasky was not interested until the
play had been produced; and his offer would not be more
than $35,000, if that much. In that hour Dreiser's in-
stinct for business, so remarkable in Delineator days,
456
which for fifteen years he had neglected in order to write
about life as it is, came to the front. He negotiated a
clause in his contract by which the publisher should get
nothing at all in the event of his selling the movie rights
for $30,000 or more, before the play was produced.
Then they ambled out together to lunch at the Ritz with
Mr. Lasky and Mr. Wanger. How much did Dreiser
intend to ask? Liveright inquired on the way — $100,
000 — He would never get it ! — Perhaps not, but that
or nothing! Well, whatever he got over $60,000 would
he give it to Liveright, since he had opened negotiations
with the movie kings? Certainly not? But would he take
care of him in spite of the new clause? Yes, he'd take
care of him.
According to Dreiser the lunch at the Ritz was not
smooth. After the hors d'oeuvres Lasky said: "Liv-
eright tells me you'll sell for $35,000." If that was the
idea, the author replied, the party was agreeable but in
no sense a business affair. " How much then ? " — " $ 100,-
ooo." — At this point Liveright left the room so that
the others might talk " unconstrainedly."
When he came back the deal had gone through:
" Then," he said, " I get everything over $60,000? " —
"No," said the novelist, "you get your io%." — "I
knew you'd throw me — you said you'd take care of me,"
he remembers Liveright's anguished words. — "I said
I'd take care of you up to our original agreement, and
1 don't even have to do that." — " You're a liar! " was
what he heard from his liberal publisher. And then it was
that Dreiser fulfilled one of those legends that have
grown up about him. He threw his cup of coffee, some
say hot, and some say cold, in his benefactor's face. That
is the story according to Dreiser and according to
Liveright in his own repentant letters to his star author.
Such was high finance in literary circles in the United
States. The sequel to it is the still more terrible rumor
that Liveright in revenge shot Dreiser's cow in the coun-
try place he had bought in Mt. Kisco. . . . But Dreiser
says no, he has never at any time owned a cow.
There were, however, intrinsic rewards out of An
American Tragedy. There were reviews and letters from
457
extraordinary men and women; prisoners, business mag-
nates, crusaders and artists. Of these he resented Stuart
Sherman's praise which made him into a moralist. But
two notices especially must have pleased him, one from
Clarence Darrow, another from H. G. Wells. Darrow,
ten years older, had a philosophy not identical to
Dreiser's, but parallel! He had always said: No one is
guilty, unless the hypocrite, and I doubt if he is guilty.
Dreiser had always said: Everyone is important and even
beautiful unless it be the hypocrite, and sometimes, curi-
ously he appears to be the most important of all. So these
two men threw pebbles into the wide American sea which
made ripples. It is silently believed that we have gotten
rid of their influence and gone back to older ethics, but
I doubt it. It is more likely that their national visions will
come to life in younger genius, just as the visions of
Lovejoy and John Brown were finally lyricised by
Lincoln.
Wells, visiting America in 1926, selected Dreiser for
praise the way that Heinemann and Bennett had done
twenty years before. He wrote a review of An American
Tragedy less poetic than Darrow's, and yet the certificate
of one giant to another:
" Dreiser is in the extreme sense of the word a genius. He
seems to work by some rare and inexplicable impulse enor-
mously. . . . His American Tragedy is, I agree with Ben-
nett, one of the very greatest novels of this century. It is a
far more than life-size rendering of a poor little representa-
tive corner of American existence, lighted up by a flash of
miserable tragedy . . . but I would disagree with Ben-
nett's condemnation of its style. It is raw, full of barbaric
locutions, but it never fatigues ... it gets the large, harsh
superficial truth that it has to tell with a force that no
grammatical precision and no correctitude could at-
tain. . . ."
Here the great Englishman himself forgot precision.
How can truth be large, harsh and superficial? Isn't it
agreed that truth is the most delicate, profound and
evasive of all abstractions? Of course in a mere news-
paper article it is only fair to interpret Wells as meaning
that, after his trip across the American continent, our life
appeared to him large, harsh and superficial, exactly as in
458
Dreiser's Tragedy. His review betrays also a racial dif-
ference between the two men. I imagine that to Dreiser
" one little corner " of existence is not necessarily
" poorer " than another, when lighted by tragedy or
emotion. Yet beyond these British words Wells proves
himself here a great spirit, one who understands foreign
values better than most natives, better than most English
intellectuals choose to do. A letter of his to Dreiser in
1929, championing the importance of the individual,
contradicts some of his own books which propose " group
consciousness." He writes in answer to a question of
Dreiser's:
" To hell with editors ! . . . I don't know whether your
phrase is true ... or actionable. But I'm whole-heartedly
for your resolve to say what you damn please about it!
" You are a great man, Dreiser, and I send you a twenty-
one gun salute, my homage, and all the best wishes in the
world."
In the second year of Dreiser's splendor the Soviet
Government, in the same sense agreeably inconsistent,
acknowledged him. They invited him to come to Russia
and see for himself if theirs was not the one right way to
conduct society. Here is something which few govern-
ments, certainly not the United States in recent years,
ever ask of any intellect, known as such. Especially,
American intellectuals and governors do not meet. For-
merly gentlemen were used abroad and business men at
home to take the place of brains in government positions.
Recently business men only need apply.
Dreiser in Russia was both repelled and attracted;
delighted to find a country whose newspapers were free
of scandals about sex and money; desolate to be told that
Tchekhov, Shakespeare's tragedies and his own Hand of
the Potter could not be played in Moscow. The proleta-
rians, they explained, would be over-sensitized by such
portrayal of reality. The senses for a time had to be
atrophied. How else to make a Communist government?
That sounded to Dreiser tragically like home. He did not
know what to think. He sent back his articles as he wrote
them to the North American Newspaper Alliance, like
any other reporter. He was fascinated by this crossing
459
of most ancient and most modern thought and custom.
But on his return, March 1928, he hesitated to make a
book about Soviet Russia. Why should he? It was too
soon; it was an experiment; and what could he know in
eleven weeks ? His articles in the World and other news-
papers were merely letters; a book would be pretentious.
Yet somehow in October 1928, between publishers and
publicity his papers did appear in book form, called by
the hackneyed title of Dreiser Looks At Russia, an out-
sider's title.
In due time it was discovered that passages in this
book were identical with parts of another book about
Russia by Mrs. Sinclair Lewis (Dorothy Thompson).
Her cries of plagiarism made headlines. She filed a com-
plaint with Dreiser's lawyers asking that the book be
withdrawn. They replied they were ready at any time for
her to bring suit. The novelist himself made no explana-
tion to friends or reporters except to deny plagiarism.
Cryptically he said that gallantry forbade explanation; he
thought it was a case of persecution. It was a rule of his
never to explain except in court. He said they had met
in the same hotel in Moscow and in lazy journalist fash-
ion had exchanged and used common sources of material.
Miss Thompson to avoid publicity, she said, never actu-
ally brought suit. The passages remain identical; the
matter remains as much a mystery to her, she insists, as
to the public. It is curious, however, to discover among
files that one of Dreiser's articles sent in February to
the syndicate while he was still in Europe, published in
March on his immediate return, contains one of the of-
fending passages, published likewise by Miss Thompson
a few weeks before in the New York Evening Post. One
wonders exactly how Dreiser had access to that news-
paper while still travelling in Europe ?
Here was the first break imputed to Dreiser after he
had become " foremost and outstanding." There would
be more to follow. The newspapers, which could some-
times tolerate him as a martyr, began to hate him as a
conqueror, especially with his fortune out of the movies,
for which apparently he had not sold his integrity. Other
eminent writers joined in this wave of jealousy. Critics
460
and columnists combed his books for specimens of pla-
giarism. They found three. The drummer in Sister Carrie
had been suggested by one of George Ade's Fables in
Slang. Certainly, Dreiser admitted it. George Ade told
the papers he was flattered:
" While some of us have been building chicken coops, or
possibly bungalows, Mr. Dreiser has been erecting sky-
scrapers."
Then they found a " lively parallel " between a poem in
Moods and the description of a woman in Winesburg,
Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Again Dreiser did not
explain, but Anderson telegraphed from his farm in
Virginia :
" Mr. Dreiser is not the kind of man who needs to take
lines from me or anyone else. It is one of those accidents
that occur. The thought expressed, I am sure, has come to
a great many men. If Mr. Dreiser has expressed it beauti-
fully it is enough."
These last two transgressions appear to me natural
for two reasons. First, Dreiser's originality is not that
of language, but of structure; of emphasis and relations,
not between words but between events, both psychic and
external events. Second, perhaps no novelist has ever had
a more prodigious memory than this American. Ask him
the names and dates of hotels and towns where he has
stayed, and of people he has met up with in fifty years;
his answers are immediate and have the ring of precision.
His books contain the exact names of things belonging
to an endless variety of life; and always, he says, he
remembers without the aid of note books. Such a ware-
house of words and phrases and rhythmic images can-
not always know if the source is his or another's; and
will be too hypnotized by the work of the moment to
care.
But the enemies of this great somnambulist among
words, who wakes up at the right moments to bring them
into action, into an engagement with life, were not
through yet. They looked again and found the final proof
of his duplicity in An American Tragedy. They accused
him of piecing his novel together from excerpts of the
court records of the tragedy that happened in 1906 in
461
Herkimer County, New York, and from the accounts of
this story as reported in the New York World.
This on the face of it was absurd. It was like saying
that Rodin's Age of Bronze was a cast from a living
model. Or that Shakespeare's plays were plagiarisms from
older Italian stories, or that Gide's or Proust's novels
contained men and women who have actually lived. It
was accusing Dreiser of the inaccusable; unless to write
about life as it is constitutes a crime. In such an event
only a fantasy like Alice in Wonderland or the myth of
the Trinity could be a work of art, and these might be
plagiarisms from the dreams of children who have really
lived.
Dreiser according to custom never protested or ex-
plained. Yet insidiously this rumor began to destroy the
bloom of his last big work. It was the fashion to say,
even among intellectuals : " Mere journalism ! Any star
reporter could have done a better job; he would have
made it briefer." In 1928 Morris Ernst and William
Seagle printed in their study Obscenity and the Censor,
often quoted as authority, the following libelous informa-
tion, which Mr. Ernst admitted referred to Theodore
Dreiser:
" The Elizabethan tragedies based upon contemporary
murders set a fashion which has been continued to our day.
Only nowadays the reports of the press need no rewriting.
... A great American novelist ... took the newspaper
account of an actual sexual crime as the basis of his trag-
edy. The reviewers praised particularly the remarkable
realism of a series of letters in the novel . . . supposed to
have passed between the lover and his mistress. The truth
was that the letters had not only been copied almost ver-
batim from the newspaper columns but had been made up
by the reporter to tide over the public craving for news in
the dull days when nothing happened on the assignment."
Interviewing Mr. Ernst I was told that he could not
remember where he had heard this story. It might have
been Franklin Adams, it might have been Joe Anthony;
he thought it was the latter. Mr. Anthony however dis-
claimed knowledge of the incident and of the reporter,
except that it was one of those rumors floating about
town, emanating he supposed from the Algonquin or the
462
Coffee House. He thought it was a mere yarn of what
might have happened or might happen to any writer.
Dreiser himself said that it was sheer fiction; the book
was his, quite his, but what difference! If An American
Tragedy survived him and became a remembered book,
then such stories would fade from memory. If not, again
what difference! But since I was attempting not merely
a biography, but the analysis of the relation of a re-
markable figure to his country and his time, the value of
the rumor interested me. Within it, at least, there seemed
to grin that flippancy toward all serious artistic work,
which is singularly typical of American history. In pur-
suit of accuracy I read the court records of the People of
New York State vs. Chester Gillette, and also the briefer,
less absorbing sob-stories in the New York World of the
year of that trial. In both newspaper and court records
the love letters were identical, except as abridged by
newspaper delicacy. The letters had not been invented by
the World reporter.
Dreiser on the other hand had copied nothing " verba-
tim " from either newspapers or courts into this book.
In fact to have done so would only have impeded the
progress of his drama. A perusal of these three chronicles
concerning what Mr. Wells calls " one poor little corner
of American life," proves once for all how differently
court stenographers, newspaper reporters, and creative
minds work — that is, when working as such. A court
stenographer, a newspaper reporter outside of hours
might yet be a great artist. But while on the job the
stenographer has got to be a formal droning musician
at best, about like a bee; in fact abrupt, trivial, elo-
quent, endless as nature through a dictaphone. A news-
paper man has got to be as coherent, optimistic, evasive,
inventive as the politician who dictates the policy of his
paper. The poet or novelist has no obligations; except
that the tradition of art demands a personal selection
of material toward a more terrific understanding of
reality.
The letters between Dreiser's characters, Roberta
Alden and Clyde Griffiths, do borrow phrases from the
letters of Grace Brown to Chester Gillette, buried now in
463
dusty files or perhaps in the hearts of a sister or brother
still living. There are phrases like: "I have cried my
eyes out — it never rains but it pours — please write me
even though you don't want to — I'm so blue, I need
somebody to talk to and I can't tell anybody — If you
don't come I don't know what I shall do — I wish I could
die — I have been bidding goodbye to some places today
— I feel as though I were never going to see my home
again — And Mamma ... I love her so. Sometimes I
think if I could tell her but I can't. She has had enough
trouble. . . ." The phrases that many girls in despair and
solitude must still use to distant, unprotecting lovers!
The phrases of so many popular songs ! But the drift and
the weight of Dreiser's letters are as different from the
court records as the tempers of his American boy and
girl are different from those of the actual tragedy in
Herkimer County in 1906. The difference lies in the in-
tention and deliberation of the book as contrasted with
the haphazard incident of everyday life. Sometimes the
biographies of great people read like works of art, though
Lytton Strachey persuades that even the great in crucial
moments fail of what they hoped to be. But An American
Tragedy is drama selected out of the commonplace.
There is no better proof of Dreiser's mastery of speech
than to compare the inchoate photographic court records
and the newspaper romancing of this tragedy with his
novel; all three of which are concerned with the same
framework of circumstances — that is, up to the event of
the drowning. Within this frame Dreiser enlarges his
characters so that they become universal. Especially the
drowned girl and electrocuted boy for Dreiser's purposes
are less scatterbrain, less trivial than those revealed by
courts and newspapers. The young man he has created
could not flippantly " get rid " of his girl, as if life were
nothing. They are more like Dreiser himself, more eager,
determined lovers of life. The court records of this
case are like an endless menu card or the time-table of a
vast railroad. Different authors going to them could come
away with different meals or different journeys according
to their various palates or tickets. One can imagine
O. Henry or Ring Lardner, had they ever been coura-
464
geous enough to engage with tragedy, coming away with
stories nearer to what happened in Herkimer County.
Their genius in fact is American surfaces ! As for the
newspapers, artists have sacrificed themselves to their
columns, but these columns have not the structure of art.
465
65
" Each spirit acclaimed as powerful be-
gins by the fault that makes him known.
In exchange for the public pourboire he
gives up enough of his time to make him
perceptible — dissipated energy in order
to transmit himself and to prepare gratifi-
cation among strangers. I have dreamed
that the strongest people, the wisest in-
ventors, the most exact connoisseurs of
thought, would be misers, men who die
without confession"
PAUL VALERY: Monsieur Teste
Jl he reels turned over and over. Within them
Dreiser published Moods Cadenced and Declaimed,
1926; Chains, a book of short stories, 1927; his book
about Russia, 1928; A Gallery of Women, 1929; Dawn,
an autobiography of early youth, 1931. Most of these
had been written through the years before, many of them
already printed in magazines. They belong to his intellec-
tual life of the period preceding An American Tragedy.
Many of the poems and stories represent him at his best,
having his own economy of direction, his thrust, his in-
timacy with his project. But A Gallery of Women as a
whole is more remote. The details and episodes are in-
viting but colder. They have not that intense desire for
verbal creation which marks most of Dreiser's previous
work. One would have expected the maker of Sister
Carrie, The Titan, the Tragedy, to have keyed these en-
terprising stories into a closer relation with himself, be-
fore they went into book form. What else in truth height-
ens style but a concise intimacy between speaker and
speech?
A Gallery of Women tells about fifteen women worth
noticing, but does not contain that many live figures. Ida
Hauchawout, Olive Brand, Ellen Adams Wrynn are im-
mediate living creatures, but not all the others. Ellen
Adams was a painter who went to France in the early
days of Matisse and Picasso. It was she apparently who,
on his first trip to Europe in 1912 not only cured the
Hoosier of Bouguereau but unintentionally, it seems, made
him discover his own relation to other moderns, whether
writers or painters — a relation still ignored by critics :
" After a while I asked myself: What about these things?
Are they not somewhat in step with what I actually see
here and there in life? Not all is as Ingres would do it, say,
or Vermeer. There are strange, trying, gloomy, rancid ef-
fects on every hand . . . what is it that I am personally
trying to do? A smooth countess with a white book in a long
green lap? A lady absorbed by a Persian bowl rilled with
orchids? Not at all! By degrees I came to see that however
offensive, (like war, say,) here was something new, vigor-
ous, tonic. . . . These things, I said, are destined to blow
the breath of life into older forms. They will have a great
effect."
Over this painter, when I asked about her, Dreiser re-
vealed something of himself: " She was one of those
women where I lost out. She didn't want me, that is, not
until years later, and then I wouldn't have her." —
" Why not ; was she old and unattractive ? " — " No, she
was just the same. But it's a rule with me not to moon
around over anyone. Besides I don't want a woman who
has known a lot of men. I felt the same way about Olive
Brand." — " Isn't that unreasonable, considering your
own code," surprise forced me to ask — " I suppose so. I
know it's illogical, but it's a rule with me. Without it I
should have been destroyed long ago by this or that
woman " — " It must be an easy rule for you or you would
have often broken it? " — " No, it hasn't always been so
easy." — " Have you yourself ever been possessed, anni-
hilated, like your own * Genius ' by the girl who ruined his
career? " I asked, expecting not to be answered. — " Yes,
four times," was Dreiser's quick reply. — " How long did
it take you to get over it? A year or two each time? " —
" I have never gotten over it, not in any of those cases. I
still feel the scars. There is a certain discoloration, don't
467
you know, after being knocked out by a woman. . . . Per-
haps to be happily in love is even more unfortunate; it
makes you ignorant. In failure there is always under-
standing. . . . But that particular kind of failure is one
of the deadliest things that can happen to a man. . . .
Once it just about swallowed me up, devitalized me. I
made it a rule then to break at once before I was done
for! A clean break! How could I have done any work
otherwise? "
This, it appeared to me, though said to a mere biog-
rapher, to be written down if I wanted to, was more like
the Dreiser of other days, so close to life that he could
touch it. To this conversation he added: " Love requires
as well as emotion a mental flare — at least for me, just
as it does in art. There has to be some beauty of the mind,
some personal appeal; otherwise I care almost nothing
for it. It is in fact repellent. Beauty is not enough ; there
has to be the gift of passion which in some sense is related
to wit. ... I remember a young girl in Pittsburgh
when I was a reporter and starved for friends, as beauti-
ful as any Greek figure. She lived near me in a cabin
up in the hills . . . the daughter of working people,
not conventional; she seemed to like me. But she didn't
know what it was about. To take hold of her was no
more than to take hold of this glass. ... I moved
away."
It was the same with books : " Most people can't write ;
they lack the magnetism that draws readers. Christ Al-
mighty, it's insane, the number of useless novels written
today. Mary Squeaks from Indiana finds life difficult and
that's supposed to make a novel. Or all this talk about
style, what does it amount to ? Just so much straw ! There
must be something wrong with the publishers' minds to
put these books on the market, and with the readers'
minds to stand for them." Yet when asked, he has never
dared to refuse to read a book or get some competent
judge to read it for him, for fear that genius might get
lost in the shuffle.
So Dreiser in talk still returns into his strong clear
mind, but in action lately goes out into the market place.
Even lets his publisher surround his books with an atmos-
468
phere belying them, as he did with A Gallery of Women.
During the winter of 1929 an almost nauseating blow to
the eye was the Liveright delivery car on which were
papered fifteen Miss Americas, supposedly the novelist's
favorites, and above, an ecstatic appeal to read Theodore
Dreiser who " bares the heart and mind of womanhood " 1
One was a morphine addict, another a maundering for-
tune teller, another a blowsy Irish cleaning woman, an-
other a stark Missouri farm woman. But Liveright repre-
sented them all as bonbons! Nor was there a hint of
passages as delicate as this :
" It was the thing that was never flatly characterized by
either of us, yet was always present, as real as any floor or
door; in short the absolute thing out of which floors and
doors are made and from which primarily they take their
rise. And it was the jeopardy of this relationship which was
now causing us this thought and worry."
Success was making Dreiser the victim of modern ad-
vertising, instead of the novelist of human relationships.
He was in the market place now, almost the property
of others. After years of working at a desk to create
worlds of people, or prowling the streets to find them,
perhaps it was a relief to become part of the actual world;
if always he might be a useful part. For one thing he
wanted to import the official Ballet and Pantomime of the
Soviet Government to the United States — an old and
new form of art, he believed, which would renew the life
of our opera and theatre ; bring the two most modern peo-
ples into relation, exchanging their specialties, art and in-
dustry. He organized the project on a grand scale as if to
unite art, money and fashion — his lifelong belief in a
fused society. Among other potentates he solicited Henry
Ford in a letter synthesizing the relation of Ford to Rus-
sia, and of Russia to art. But he was soon to know that this
financier was not Cowperwood, craving aesthetic and so-
cial victories. Nor did it evidently interest Ford to be told
by Dreiser that he, Henry Ford, was enormously in the
minds of the poorest Russians : that his name like Lenin
was part of their religion. The River Rouge king did not
answer his letter. I doubt whether he or Edison or Harvey
Firestone had ever read The Titan or the Tragedy, or
469
heard of any American writer of importance younger than
Mark Twain.
Whether brilliant or not, this project failing, Dreiser
was persuaded to organize the Film Art Guild, whose
black glass and steel circular theatre on Eighth Street in
New York had been especially constructed to give pictures
as modern as in Berlin or Moscow. It would rival commer-
cial Hollywood with silent movies. Much of the propa-
ganda for this theatre Dreiser wrote. He shared the mod-
ern dream that the movie camera would become an
instrument of the imagination in the United States ; that
the silver sheet would say what could not be said otherwise
and create a new form of art; just as before the theatre
and then the novel had come into being to make life more
vivid. All these public works were turned toward what he
hoped would be the refinement of America ; none of them
purely selfish any more than his books. The film project
failed, probably for lack of genius in that medium. I do not
know then how many outside enterprises seduced this
writer ; all his life caught half-way between what was inti-
mate and what was extensive. I feel certain that his exit
into the world was not one of mere self-importance, like
that of the great French romanticist, as according to Coc-
teau: " Victor Hugo was a madman who believed he was
Victor Hugo." Dreiser did not perfectly believe in his di-
vinity. He had hoped for it certainly, but had never been
allowed the assurance of it. Just recently an eminent
wag, Chesterton, had reviled him in print, in revenge,
it might be, for the Hoosier's hatred of the Catholic
Church :
" Exponent of a philosophy not bright enough to be
called a nightmare . . . without wit, without will, without
laughter or uplifting of the heart; too old to die; too deaf
to leave off talking; too blind to stop, too stupid to start
afresh, top dead to be killed, and incapable of being
damned, since in all its weary centuries it has never reached
the age of reason."
Ring Lardner, asked by a producer to serve with
Dreiser and Robert Frost as one of three founders of an
American theatre for only American plays, refused on the
ground that Dreiser was both ridiculous and immoral.
470
Frost on the other hand appeared to be seriously amused
by the scheme, and would give his name and a play, if he
could finish it without being hurried, on one condition:
The policy of the theatre must be " daring." The plan
remained only a plan.
There were plenty of others to whom Dreiser was
ludicrous, nearly any sophisticated New Yorker, especially
one with a humorous column to conduct, loved to say so.
After these many years of ridicule the novelist had
learned to laugh at himself or else take small notice of
his deriders. Sometimes he excused them: "Well, they
are jealous of me, or they can't stand my morals. What
difference, I have my following." Or again he might say:
" In a measure they are right; I am vulgar and uncouth."
It was not, then, for the fanfare due a great man that he
neglected creative work and became a publicist. It was,
I think, in search of space and action, even of under-
standing.
In May 1930 he went on a vacation. He was tired, he
said, of the trespasses on his time; of his apartment and
his Thursday nights. . . . Money was nothing, vitality
everything. Taste was all that counted. He would as soon
go back to a hall bedroom, give up his quarters on Fifty-
seventh Street. They oppressed him. . . . During this
vacation, traveling west to San Francisco by El Paso and
Santa Fe, north to Seattle, and back to New York by way
of Dakota, this man, who over and over had written that
he was never certain of anything, took sides. And the
sides he took were those of the now dwindling army out
to fight Capitalism. As he traveled he became delirious
over the physical beauty of the United States, and after
thirty years of suspicion, increasingly sure of its ruin
at the hands of the great corporations and the ignorant
moralists. This double hypocrisy was more than the
country could stand. He said this to any reporter who
would listen:
" Modern business has made American citizens into
nothing but trudging asses. There is no great contemporary
literature. If there is to be any in the future it will have to
take the form of satire or expressions of despair. . . . Big
business movements are making it impossible for men to
express themselves as individuals. Because they cannot
471
hope to succeed in small enterprises they have lost their
initiative and their power to think.
" There is hardly any such thing as an individual left in
America. Just name a single great writer. Supposing there
were one, what chance would he have of becoming popu-
lar? . . .
" And why do we have all this legislation of morals, all
this snooping? Movies, radios and newspapers contribute
their share of setting millions of plastic minds in a mold
which produces the same sort of figurative marbles run-
ning down a trough — until they fall off. . . .
" All that financiers think about is money. They get so
much they don't know what to do with it. ...
" The government has ceased to function . . . the corpo-
rations are the government. . . .
"The difference between the four Wall Street banking
houses that run this country and the Soviet Central Control
Committee is the difference between Tweedledum and
Tweedledee. The breakdown of individual enterprise is
pointing the way to communism, no matter what we call
it."
With such denunciations and many of them Dreiser
made newspapers ring for the two or three months dur-
ing his survey of the country, and after his return. His
words screamed sometimes the way that Debs and Hay-
wood must have wanted to yell, had they thought it wise
or possible ; and the way Upton Sinclair would have done,
had God given him so reckless a voice. But no one was
afraid of Dreiser. He was only our national man of
letters.
Why was it that he allowed himself this blowout? He
who continually had said: " I want only to write about
life as it is; it is not the place of an artist to judge or to
fight, except for the right to publish unabridged, unde-
leted." Did he become in this fashion forensic because it
was easier to be a public character than to concentrate on
a great project — his Bulwark, a novel, partially written,
for example, or the last volume of his Trilogy of Desire
concerning the Financier after he had taken his millions
from New York to Europe ? Or was it sheerly in accord-
ance with the sudden conviction, after thirty years of
optimism, that there were no readers in the United
States? How could there be readers where there were
almost no individuals, none with " the initiative or the
472
power to think?" From Sister Carrie to An American
Tragedy, through books of short stories, poems, philoso-
phy, portraits, plays and novels, had he not described
substantially the same thing — tragic America ; yet with
its compensations, bright hopes, great moments for indi-
vidual actors, as became an artist occupied with the par-
ticular as opposed to the general? Had anyone effectively
noticed these creations, or those of other authentic minds
in his lifetime? Wasn't the country less civilized today
than ever before? What was there now to do but gener-
alize, to go to war, which is a form of generalization?
Two episodes belonging to this date support such a
theory as to why he should turn publicist. In the summer
and fall of 1930 the boy who was born in Terre Haute,
and had gone to school in Warsaw, then on to Chicago
with various mean jobs to keep him going, with a year of
college in Bloomington — this boy, now acclaimed a
great writer, completed the first volume of his autobiog-
raphy. It was a review of the country and of himself in
these early days. He made the book out of a number of
previous efforts to think back, and he honestly saw to it
that now he should reap the reward of years of battle
with censors. The account is full and unashamed as to his
family and bringing up; and gives in detail his initial
knowledge of the act of sex, and other experiences of the
kind in these years. It contains a structural account of his
mother, the one heroic woman of Dreiser's larger novels;
and it contains events delightful as to the manner of tell-
ing them. But, and there is a but, the record as a whole
lacks complexion. Almost the book lacks skin to hold the
separate items and organs together. One keeps thinking:
here is an enormous tract to the cultivation of which a
writer, freed from the pressure of making a living, should
have devoted further months. He let it go too soon to that
realm of publicity where authors abandon their works.
Why? Was he so much interested in his tragic country,
which he thought he could help to save, that he had no
time to complete his book? Or was it merely that style
such as he could achieve did not seem to matter any more?
In the great cataclysm which was taking place after
many migrations from the old to the new, from this land
473
to that, from Christianity to Science, did readers today
care only for one aspect of a book, that it should release
secrets, especially those of sex, and those against inept
religion? There seemed to be truth in the last premise.
A New York writer, known as a connoisseur of art for
art's sake, spoke of Dreiser's Dawn as his greatest work.
" But," I objected, " manner is so neglected there that
for once the meaning really suffers." — " Oh, I don't
know," was the aesthete's delicate rejoinder, " the man
can't write anyway, but he found adequate words to tell
about several engagements of his from the age of four-
teen to twenty-one — every variation, every afterthought
of girl and boy — his most important book by all
means ! " What really did drama, what did style mean
to this reader who was yet by name more than most expe-
rienced in matters of art: yet less than most, apparently,
in matters of sex !
Again in the fall of 1931 a talking film was finally
made from An American Tragedy, produced by Para-
mount under the direction of the imported Von Stern-
berg, through the scenario of a friend of Dreiser's,
Samuel Hoffenstein. The picture lied so patently as to
the meaning of the novel, was certainly no more pro-
found than any other " murder film," that Dreiser after
futile protests in Hollywood appealed to the courts to
prevent its release. What was the answer of the lawyer
for Paramount, and of a judge of the Supreme Court of
New York State? The lawyer smirkingly argued that the
book was just a lot of crap, taken from court records;
the novelist had written it to get himself on the front
page. The judge in his final decision seemed to accept
this opinion and further ruled against the author, since
Paramount pitifully had spent so many thousands of
dollars on its production. Arthur Garfield Hays, at-
torney for Dreiser, pointedly wondered in court why
Paramount had not gone direct to the records of the
'* The State vs. Gillette," rather than pay a large sum
for the rights of the novel. But no one, least of all the
newspapers, wondered with him. More than usual they
laughed at their foremost novelist. What was he kicking
about now? Didn't he have the dough? Paramount was
474
paramount. Authors dead and living had no rights against
their millions. ... I read the story in the papers with-
out much wonder that Dreiser had deferred writing as
an art and was out to fight the great corporations of
America, so hostile to civilization — that is, to civiliza-
tion as it has ever been known or described before.
The journey, then, for an outsider, from the obscure
beginning in Terre Haute to this stage of triumph in New
York reveals heroism, substance, gaiety and power as
belonging to the United States. But no use to deny that
along with these assets the journey symbolizes the trag-
edy of America; in truth explains the reasons why
Americans leave home. It suggests to those who worship
intimacy, which is art or love, that there are two paths,
one into isolation and neglect; the other into publicity.
Take the first and a genius is victim to loneliness; take
the second and he is victim to that very condition he most
abhors — impersonality.
Hot summer of 1931 in New York: one's thoughts
had to wander from the flatness of the bodies on benches
in Washington Square, Bryant Park, Central Park, to
the sharpness of towers of lighted skyscrapers the length
of Manhattan, spilling over into Brooklyn. There was
no other path for thoughts to take. One wondered as to
the world of people between these extremes. Were they
sensitized, were they rotarian, were they gangsters? What
were they? Surely they were impotent or they would
never allow this contrast between lighted skyscrapers,
reaching to eighty stories, and bags of bodies like dead
men without song or laughter on the benches of city
parks — without jobs and without women as well. Times
were hard, the crash was brutal; but not too hard or too
brutal for officials to observe American segregation,
American chasms. For the matter of that the buildings
seemed septic too. Each indecent tower, indecent because
excessive, seemed lighted with the unfulfilled desires of
some magnate, maybe Jew, maybe German, Syrian or
Yankee, who, having in his lifetime in spite of millions
been definitely excluded from the socially-elect of his
475
home town, out West, down South, up State, had built
his bungalow on the roof of his business building. There,
by God, he could be king, he could exclude whom he
pleased. So I used to imagine in the summer of 1931 the
life of terraced towers and of lowly bodies on park
benches.
Certainly it seemed to me that we knew nothing of
ourselves unless by words, voices, gestures; and these
were lost in the explosion of traffic. We knew nothing of
actual life from earth to stars, from gutter to skyscraper.
It might even be that the gutters went up some nights in
the elevator to the drunken, lonely isolation of the twen-
tieth story or more. I wished for writers to give us the
voices and gestures of the country. Where had they
gone? To their retreats in the country, to the sand dunes
of Michigan, the hills of New Hampshire, a village in
Rhode Island or Virginia, and always Paris or St.
Tropez?
To make matters worse I knew that if one entered the
great market place from New Jersey or Long Island,
day or night, mammoth painted or electric signs proved
that the American language had gone over from im-
plication into declaration and command:
Take the Golden Trail Tour; Richfield Oil! Get a
Home in Rego Park! Eat More Vitamines: Sunkist
Oranges! Shift for Freedom: Royal Typewriter!
Use Paragon Paints for Economy! Buy Wrigley's
Juicy Fruit! Buy Chrysler Eights with Dual High
Gears ! Mother Says Use Quaker Oats.
Why should eyes used to words performing like these
read any others, unless the super-narratives of crime in
fiction or tabloids? Entering the Subway, headlines told
you that " Baby Bandits Must Go To Chair," or that
" 24 Miners in Harlan County Face Chair for Crime
They Claim They Did Not Commit! " or that Gangsters
two hours before had shot down innocent bystanders, in-
cluding Children, in Booze War.
With the Land of the Free thus printed on my mind
one afternoon I had a final call from Theodore Dreiser
as to my account of this experience meeting between him
and his country, to which he had once agreed to lend
476
himself. His first question was like that of a ship-news
reporter to one returned from Europe : " Well, what
do you really think of this city now that you are back? "
— " For me, I think of it as sinister, but since everyone
else seems to think of it as brilliant and beautiful, I don't
suppose I count." To my surprise the man who had
written volumes over the seduction New York had for
him, who had boasted he could look at anything, and
always proposed the acceptance of change as the one
sure virtue, said quite simply: " I think it is sinister too.
More than that I think it's ugly. I'm through with it.
I'm going to give up my apartment and leave it. ... I
used to love to walk these streets, but now they are too
miserable. They are meaningless. I can't bear the brick
or the cement or the color or lack of color that goes to
make up the city. New York is a handsome woman with
a cruel mouth. The people are like sawdust; there can be
only impact from the outside, none from them toward
anyone else."
Here finally seemed to be the divorce between these
two, Dreiser and his city, which was a symbol of the
country. Amazed, I said, " But is it so much worse than
it used to be in the Nineties? What about your own
character Hurstwood carried down stream to suicide on
a wave of greed and misery? " — u Yes, it's much worse
today, and I ought to know. Then, I was one of the
starving myself, and yet I felt something adventurous
and exciting about New York, about the whole country;
if not for me then for others luckier than me. There was
a hope for individuals. Today I have plenty to live on,
and I see no hope anywhere. For one thing in the Nine-
ties, and really up to a few years ago, there were great
personalities in New York. Mark Twain meant some-
thing to this city. There were young men like Norris,
Crane, O. Henry. There was a promise of competition,
of wit and understanding. And for that matter we have
had a few years of it. Today I don't see it, unless it is in
the youngsters who want to change the whole face of the
country and follow Russia." — " What good would that
do? " I asked. — " It would make a change at any rate,
like a change of woman for a man, or lover for a
477
woman." — " A change of government would be nothing
without a change of heart, a change of mind, and you if
anyone must know it." — Yes, he supposed he knew it.
Then he added: "I would do anything if the moment
came and asked for it, an important moment, one that
asked for sacrifice." — "I thought every moment was an
important moment? " — " For what? " — " For expres-
sion, of course ! In your case, for the books that only you
could make. I think we need intellect more than Com-
munism in the United States. I think we need to become
sensitive, critical, in the sense of the word crisis. Critical
judgment is rooted in the senses, isn't it? " Dreiser's an-
swer was : " I can't see it that way. It has gone so far that
there can be no change except a violent one from the out-
side. People have forgotten how to read. Besides how
can a man write or read with thousands of people starv-
ing both mentally and physically? "
Unanswerable question for an outsider! Yet some day
it may be that what with war and starvation and read-
justments, possibly communism, Americans will again
escape the miserable extremes of poverty and wealth.
New America, finally born, may become an organized
society. Dreiser in the meantime might retire from in-
vestigations of, and framings by, the " Interests " and
might turn again to the even more difficult task of de-
scribing the inner circles of human lives. If he does, it is
my belief that he will not fall short of the far limits of
thought he reached in the years before. He might in fact,
having, pioneer-like, prepared the way, broken barriers
and made roads, become an indisputable libertine, savage,
aristocrat, artist.
478
INCONCLUSIVELY
JLhe strongest desire known to human life is to
continue living. The next strongest is to use the instrument
by which life is generated for its own rewards, not for the
sake of generation. The third potent desire is to excel and
be acknowledged. In Western countries the first of these
has become an abstract virtue. Suicide is looked down on
as a feeble way out. The third likewise has been placed
among the virtues, provided always that one man's excel-
lence does not interfere with that of another endowed
with greater strength. Then the dogged pursuit of fame
becomes a crime or at least a nuisance. The motive second
in degree of force arising out of sex, has mysteriously
turned through Christian centuries into a hated, secret
vice, and nowhere more so than in liberal America. The
very words to describe it, whether popular or technical,
used to be forbidden in print and are as yet awkward.
Spoken words as common as daylight — fine crisp words
among them — are just beginning to be printed and then
out of bravado by impatient or discourteous writers. And
the technical terms for these pleasures and instruments
are equally out of place in art. Those who seriously have
tried to give back to the English language rightful speech
fall sometimes into diffidence. D. H. Lawrence has re-
sorted to the third person he, and Ernest Hemingway to
the neuter it, to avoid two simple terms. In truth IT is the
American equivalent for all that is seductive in man or
woman. The French use plenty of other words to describe
what to us is indescribable. Their Catholicism has not
subdued them and shamed them, as the Church has done
to people more Northern in their wit. The French con-
tinue to be a nation with a frontage on the Mediterra-
nean. They keep facets which correspond with facets of
ancient races.
This journey from 1870 to 1930 is lined with evidence
that we are in the extreme a people afraid of the two
479
elements of being, male and female. And any other rec-
ord could return the same evidence. Our literature is
cramped with this fear. Walt Whitman is dyed with the
fear of this fear. Mark Twain is permeated with the
forced approval of this fear. This fascinating enigma,
fear of sex, has brought about among Americans fear of
mystery of every kind, and therefore fear of union; has
brought about our now accepted separations. Henry
James in an early novel lets one of his characters define
the fear of mystery :
"I like the beginning — I delight in the approach of it —
I revel in the prospect. . . . But now the thing has come
I don't revel. To be fascinated is to be mystified. Damn
it, I like my liberty — I like my judgment."
The historian, Henry Adams, wrote in 1905 :
"Without understanding movement of sex history
seemed to him [Adams] mere pedantry."
"Neither of them [St. Gaudens or Matthew Arnold]
felt goddesses as power. . . . They felt railway train as
power; yet . . . they complained ... all the steam in
the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres."
"Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he
knew of any American authors who had insisted on the
power of sex, as every classic had done; but he could think
only of Walt Whitman. . . ."
When sometimes a writer, harnessed though he was to
American prose, let his five senses take him back to
primal experience it might be that initial strength leaped
free in him. Out of words came shapes that symbolized
the meaning of building and door, of lock and key, of
explorer and wilderness, of horse train ship airplane and
the destination in space — the meaning of man and
woman. Then this occasional poet frightened nearly
every one. Poe was such a poet, and it is said was
" thrown out of the houses of gentlewomen for making
obscene advances." * He was the image of a stranger in
his own country.
Take on the other hand a native lingual genius,
O. Henry. Consider what he says of himself:
" If I could have a thousand years — just one little thou-
sand years — more of life, I might in that time draw near
enough to true Romance to touch the hem of her robe."
* Krutch: Edgar Allan Poe.
480
And then to belie his own ambition:
" I have been called the American Maupassant. Well, I
never wrote a filthy word in my life, and don't like to be
compared to a filthy writer."
What then was all his brilliant American idiom worth
if he thought the hem of true Romance was eternally
clean; if to him no "filthy" word ever came up from
" men on ships, waste places, forest, road, garret, and
cellar " ? Or Eugene O'Neill — what of the philosophy
of his famous play, Strange Interlude, whose heroine
says, as if he approved of her:
" Let you and me forget the whole degrading episode,
regard it as an interlude ... in which our souls have been
scraped clean of impure flesh and made worthy to bleach
in peace."
The more modern Dos Passes in a late novel says of
two lovers, " There was something tight and electric and
uncomfortable in the way their thighs ground against
each other as they walked." The italics are mine to de-
note surprise.
It is a prime refreshment in the works of Theodore
Dreiser that he is free of the mysterious sense of degra-
dation, of filth and discomfort into which most Ameri-
cans and many Europeans have translated one of the
three elements of desire. Life then in his books is free to
assert its own volume, where the huge desire to live, the
wild desire to love, the insane desire to excel, variously
mingled, produce various action. And they disclose the
special chasms that have come about because in some hid-
den way we have sacrificed the second to the first and
third of these angles. But without dogma : " They can't
put me down as a liberal or free thinker," he insists. " I
don't know, I wouldn't say I knew. I know nothing."
Perhaps it required an America to make souls as un-
trammeled by custom as this. The same trait of mind
cnce sparked American financiers, inventors and politi-
cians, and made our restless informality, and the by-
words, " Let's go," " Push on." Before we forget them,
if their boldness were to take root and branch in the field
of the intellect, projects more exciting than mechanical
playthings might come to life here. Dreiser's story gives
481
and takes away this hope. There are chapters that hint at
a reason for the long distrust of sex and slow dying of the
senses. And between the lines one wonders, may not
nerves and muscles follow this death? Is it Nature on its
way to destroy human nature — a revenge on Thought,
and that last child of thought, Machinery?
Dreiser by moments denies and affirms the chance of
this, according to opposite moods out of his doctrine of
acceptance of change. When thereby fortified he projects
a brave concept of life, which once in talk he described :
" Men and women get to living as if in a cave like crimi-
nals, outcasts, mad people. A crust has formed about
them. Then waters well up, the crust gives way, the cave
is gone. You see them alive again in a new medium. I be-
lieve life holds such revaluations, a breaking down, a
welling up of strange waters. "
When disheartened by sordidness of change, he re-
tracts, and leans like a native toward confusing what is
American or modern with universal values. In his Credo
denying all belief, published in the Forum 1930, he de-
scribes New York today as if it stood for all cities and all
time:
" For here we have what? Bricks, stone, glass, wood,
plaster, paints of the surrounding buildings. . . . But rep-
resenting what? "
In older cities often representing beauty, balance, under-
standing— his own concern. It is certain that neither he
nor any modern of the machine age has yet forced the is-
sue here involved — the new victory of ignorant material
over the ancient skilful investment of material with spirit.
The newest of modern problems, it is but dimly recog-
nized as a terrifying phase of history. Or it is recognized
to be ignored.*
But of issues known to him he has evaded none, and of
limits accepted none ; which adventure places him outside
of criticism for his forms of speech. A mimic may imitate
another who has that something called style, and critics
will say, " Superb writing." A pioneer or an original is
committed to his own style with exactly his faults and
* A matter even of persecution, as in the case of Georges Duhamel
following his analysis of American civilization.
482
exactly his virtues. Dreiser's fault is a careless over-bur-
dened ear : his virtue a careful triumphant brain or im-
agination. There is in him a gross precision; foreign mat-
ter surrounds it. There is in Poe, for one, a fine precision.
Dreiser has pith, Poe is pith. Many writers acclaimed as
stylists have not center and are not centers. They have
color, shape, line, but not that force.
American speech, when engaged with song or talk of
railroad men, teamsters, taxi-drivers, base-ball players,
salesmen, chorus girls, bartenders, song writers and rack-
eteers, is alive and sufficient. But here is a writer who has
sought to describe analyses, formulas, infinite relations, in
brief the drama of civilization. Without the ear to con-
trive loans, he has had to use for these intricacies Ameri-
can as he knows it — a medley of English archaisms,
technical terms, newspaper cliches and slang. The coun-
try, an expanse with small philosophic or critical inter-
course, has yet to perfect a language for philosophers and
critics. Our wisdom will not be native until it finds native
expression.
With our vagrant speech as guide he has looked back
into a remote past, days of dinosaurs, glaciers, savages,
through the centuries of pagans, mystics and puritans,
and forward to modern days of physicists and metaphysi-
cists; out of which have come the man and the brain, the
woman and the child of human history. Facts and fabrica-
tions, those that came his way, he has handled and re-
handled hoping to discover which were which. For solace
he has been ruled by a compassion that might help to
make fertile some of the chasms between our peaks and
precipices. A number of years ago I remember saying to
Dreiser : " I imagine tragic art would not have been ex-
cept for maladies like indigestion and unrequited love? "
His reply was unforgettable: " How can you say that?
Neither one nor the other has anything to do with trag-
edy. Grief comes from separations too hard to bear."
Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore
Dreiser are the three Americans who to me have made
most unbearable the sense of separations dividing Ameri-
cans one from the other. Equally Poe, Masters and
Dreiser, Whitman, Frost, Mark Twain and Sandburg are
483
Americans who have given me the opposite sense, that by
only a narrow margin these separations have occurred.
That by the lifting of a hand all might be different.
Old surfaces have cracked, floods enveloped bewil-
dered nations. In the United States we are at sea on our
own new strange ocean. There are those who think that a
second revaluation has recently occurred — a return to
the safer past, except that the leaders will battle as never
before for the separation of body and mind; as against the
spirit. But it is difficult to believe that this reaction will
have its way at once. It is unnatural that creative minds,
such as have lately appeared in the one realm of Ameri-
can writing, should be lost before their word has had time
to mature. Their enterprise has been too real and too
verdant to run out so soon.
History deposes that roots are not in vain.
484
SOURCES
Fact and Document, origin of which is not each time
cited in the body of the book, derived from talks with
Dreiser and with people who have known him, or who
have been concerned with the same literary drama. Or
they derived from his files, which through his generosity
were open to me, dating from 1900 to 1931, containing
reviews, interviews and letters. Beside these A Hoosier
Holiday and Dawn furnished sources for the years 1871
to about 1890; Newspaper Days, formerly called A Book
About Myself, Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women
for the Nineties; the last two books and A Traveler at
Forty for later years. All other sources are acknowledged
in text or footnote.
To every one who gave me time in pursuit of this story
I am deeply grateful; and perhaps especially to those who
shared my belief that the salvage of yesterday is essen-
tial to the flowering of tomorrow.
D. D.
Paris, 1932
485
The Three Pelicans
Archbishop Cranmer
and the Tudor Juggernaut
Here is a superior book, — an imaginative
biography of that enigmatic and powerful
figure of Tudor England, Thomas Cran-
mer, Henry the Eighth's famous Arch-
bishop. The author has treated his narra-
tive somewhat as Merezhkovsky treated his
historical novel of Da Vinci, with much the
same fullness of canvas and meticulous ac-
curacy of details. The subject is an excel-
lent one for the purpose. Cranmer's life was
full of drama from the time that Henry
VIII, wishing to divorce Katherine of
Aragon in favor of Anne Boleyn, heard of
the plan suggested by the obscure young
churchman and sent for him with the re-
mark that "he has got the right sow by the
ear"; it covered three reigns, Henry's, Ed-
ward's and Bloody Mary's j and it came to
a fine climax in his heroic death at the
stake.
Provocative and stimulating, the book is
likely to be attacked as pro-Catholic, as pro-
Protestant, and as cynical, but the truth is
that it is neither; it is satirical, but satirical
in the best literary sense. The reader will
discover in Mr. Styron gifts of an unusual
kind — imagination, power of animated nar-
rative, descriptive ability, and the power to
write interesting and truthful dialogue.
That the author also knows his subject is
evident, for he writes not merely with a
surface knowledge, but as one long inter-
ested and widely read in the history of
England and the Church. The Three Pell-
cans is a compelling book which will at-
tract wide attention for its gripping story, its
study of a character unusual in both its
strength and weakness, and its detailed pic-
ture of Tudor life. $4.00
To many good people Dreiser seems to be a Nihilist, a No-sayer rather
than a Yes-sayer to life. As he himself indicates, he is neither. He is a
figure frozen in mist and muck half way between Yes-yes and No-no.
Ask him if he wants to live and he answers like the ancient Anglo-Saxon
witness, "I stands mute." Ask him whether he wants to die and you get
the same answer — nothing. He was born, as he says, "confused and
dismayed," and will leave the scene likewise— tongue-tied. As Dorothy
Dudley sees him he is a type and embodiment of this country in certain
phases— huge, living, groping, lugging deep and inarticulate hopes —
sudden, changeful, treacherous. The riddle of Dreiser is a good deal the
riddle of the U. S. A., of "the American Experiment," of the heavy
two-word inquiry, "Whither America?" For he has the resources, the
raw materials, the stuff and the stature to make something— but what,
when and how? Thus she questions and attempts some answers. It is a
grand treatment of the American scene, with the analytical research of
a Henry Adams— plus colors of style, occasional sentences that send up
little red and yellow balloons. For those who find Dreiser's volumes
lumbering and lugubrious, this book is a godsend.
-CARL SANDBURG