Theodore Dreiser

“ A romping, stamping, irritable soul, with more the air of a young railroad brakeman or "hand," than an artist, and with so much coarse language at times and such brutality of thought as to bar him completely, one might say, from having anything to do with great fiction, great artistic conceptions, or the temple of art. What, sit with the mighty!—that coarse youth, with darkish-brown hair parted at one side and combed over one ear, in the manner of a grandiose barber ”

“ By this time, by the way, and as I should have said before, I had still further enlarged my staff by one art director of the most flamboyant and erratic character, a genius of sorts, volatile, restless, emotional, colorful, a veritable Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rops soul, who, not content to arrange and decorate the magazine each month, must needs wish to write, paint, compose verse and music and stage plays, as well as move in an upper social world, entrée to which was his by birth. ”

“ I believe. The reading of these two stories gave me as much of a start as though I had discovered a fully developed genius. They were so truly new or different in their point of view, so very clear, incisive, brief, with so much point in them (The Second Motive; The Right Man) . For by then having been struggling with the short-story problem in other magazine offices before this, I had become not a little pessimistic as to the trend of American short fiction, as well as long—the impossibility of finding any, even supposing it publishable once we had it. ”

“ You want to do something interesting, if you can, and get paid for it. I rather like you, and anyhow you look to me as though you might do the things I want, or some of them. Now, you want to do the least silly thing you can—something better than this. I want the least silly stuff I can get away with in this magazine—genuine color out of the life of New York, if such a thing can be published in an ordinary magazine. ”

“ He went over many things and people—M——; K——, the wonderful art-director, now insane and a wreck; the group of which he and I had once been a part; his youthful and unsophisticated viewpoint at the time. "You know," he confessed quite frankly finally, "my mother always told me then and afterwards that I made a mistake in leaving you. You were the better influence for me. She was right. I know it now. Still, a life's a life, and we have to work through it and ourselves somehow."
I agreed heartily.
He told me of his wife, children, farm, his health and his difficulties. ”

“ Holyoke-Bryn Mawr school of literary art and criticism, a most engagingly interesting intellectual maiden, who functioned as assistant editor and reader in an adjoining room, along with the art-director, the makeup editor and an office boy. This very valuable and in some respects remarkable young woman, who while holding me in proper contempt, I fear, for my rather loose and unliterary ways, was still, as I had suspected before employing her, as keen for something new and vital in fiction and every other phase of the scriptic art as any one well could be. ”

“ Holyoke assistant, who from the first had agreed with me that here indeed was a writer of promise, a genius really, he, as I have said, at first despised her. Later, by dint of exulting in his force, sincerity of purpose, his keen insight and all but braggart strength, she managed, probably on account of her looks and physical graces, to install herself in his confidence and to convince him that she was not only an honest admirer of his skill but one who had taste and judgment of no mean caliber. ”

“ Here, along with a goodly group of his latter-day friends, far different from those by whom he had first been surrounded—a pretentious society poet of no great merit but considerable self-emphasis, a Wall Street broker, posing as a club man, raconteur, "first-nighter" and what not, and several young and ambitious playwrights, all seeking the heaven of a Broadway success—he began to pose as one of the intimates of the great city, its bosom child as it were, the cynosure and favorite of its most glittering precincts—a most M——like proceeding. ”

“ Now it would be a new and hitherto unheard-of tenor who was to be brought from abroad and introduced with great noise to repute-loving Americans; a new sculptor or painter who had never been heard of in America; a great actor, perhaps, or poet or writer. ”

“ She was ever for culling, sorting, eliminating—repression carried to the N-th power. At first L——cordially hated her, calling her a "simp," a "bluff," a "la-de-da," and what not. In addition to these there was a constantly swelling band of writers, artists, poets, critics, dreamers of reforms social, and I know not what else, who, holding the hope of achieving their ends or aims through some really forceful magazine, were by now beginning to make our place a center. It fairly swarmed for a time with aspirants; an amusing, vivid, strident world. ”

“ Why not undertake something worth your time?"
"My time, hell!" he bristled, like a fighting sledge-dog, of which by the way he reminded me. "You show me a magazine in this town that would buy anything that I thought worthy of my time! You're like all the rest of them: you talk big, but you really don't want anything very important. You want little things probably, written to a theory or down to 'our policy.' I know. ”

“ Later she became a private detective! an insurance agent—God knows what—a kind of rough man-woman, as she turned out to be, but all the while clinging to this boy, her pet, no doubt her dream of perfection. She had by turns sent him to common and high school and to college, remitting him such sums of money as she might to pay his way. Later still (at that very time in fact) she was seeking to come to New York to keep house for him, only he would not have that, perhaps sensing the need of greater freedom. ”

“ For in regard to the very things L—— should have most guarded against—show and the shallow pleasures of social and night and material life in New York—M—— was most specious. I never knew a more intriguing and fascinating man in this respect nor one who cared less for those he used to obtain his unimportant ends. He had positive genius for making the gaudy and the unworthy seem worthy and even perfect. ”

“ A little later, having left M——'s and assumed another editorial position, and being compelled to follow the various current magazines more or less professionally, I was disturbed to note that there began to appear in various publications—especially M——'s, which was flourishing greatly for the moment—stories which while exhibiting much of the deftness and repression as well as an avidity for the true color of things, still showed what I had at first feared they might: a decided compromise. That curse of all American fiction, the necessarily happy ending, had been impressed on him—by whom? ”

“ At the same time, had he not been disturbed by so many of the things which in America, as elsewhere, ordinarily assail an ambitious and earnest writer—the prejudice against naturalness and sincerity in matters of the intellect and the facts of life, and the consequent difficulty of any one so gifted in obtaining funds at any time—he might have done much better sooner. ”

“ He hadn't the least taste for drink, lived in a small hall-bedroom somewhere—Eighth Avenue, I believe—and took his meals in those shabby little quick-lunch rooms where the characters were more important to him than the food. (My hat—my hat is in my hand!) Intellectually he was so stern and ambitious that I all but stood in awe of and reverence before him. Here, I said to myself, is one who will really do; let him be as savage as he pleases. In America he probably needs to be.
And during this short time, what scraps of his early life he revealed! ”

“ One dared not "talk out loud," one dared not report life as it was, as one lived it. And one of the primary warnings I had received from the president of this very organization—a most eager and ambitious and distressing example of that American pseudo-morality which combines a pirate-like acquisitiveness with an inward and absolute conviction of righteousness—was that while he wanted something new in fiction, something more virile and life-like than that "mush," as he characterized it, to be found in the current magazines, still (1) , it must have a strong appeal for the general reader (!) ”

“ He was so vigorous, so avid of life, so anxious to picture the very atmosphere which this magazine was now seeking to portray. I felt stronger, better for having him around. The growth of the city, the character and atmosphere of a given neighborhood, the facts concerning some great social fortune, event, condition, crime interested him intensely ”

“ Little Italy, the region below Delancey and north of Worth Street on the East Side; Chinatown; Washington Street (Syria in America) ; the Greeks in Twenty-seventh and -eighth Streets, West Side. All these and many more phases of New York's multiplex life took his full and restless attention. Once he said to me quite excitedly, walking up Eighth Avenue at two in the morning—I was showing him some rear tenement slums in the summertime—"God, how I hate to go to bed in this town! I'm afraid something will happen while I'm asleep and I won't see it!" ”

“ Again, three or four years later, a second volume of stories, almost if not quite as good as his first, was issued by this same Western paper. He was trying to do serious work; but he still sought and apparently craved those grand scenes on the farm or in some New York restaurant or an expensive apartment, and when he could no longer afford it. He still wrote happy-ending, or compromise, stories for any such magazine as would receive him, and was apparently building up a reasonably secure market for them. In the meantime the moving-picture scenario market had developed, and he wrote for it. ”

“ He had studied the works as well as the temperaments and experiences (more especially the latter, I fear) of such writers as de Maupassant, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Balzac, de Musset, Sand, Daudet, Dumas junior, and Zola, as well as a number of the more recent writers: Hervieu, Bourget, Louys and their contemporaries. Most of all, though, he was impressed, and deeply, by the life and art of de Maupassant, his method of approach, his unbiased outlook on life, his freedom from moral and religious and even sentimental predisposition. ”

“ But above all he was affronted by M——, the publisher of the paper, concerning whom he could find no words equal to his contemptuous thoughts of him. The publisher, as L—— made quite bold to say to me, was little more than a "dodging, rat-like financial ferret," a "financial stool-pigeon for some trust or other," a "shrewd, material little shopkeeper." ”

“ The doctor, he meant. "He looks like an advertisement for an undertaker. I do believe he was trying to discover whether he could kill somebody by the power of suggestion, and he met L—— in the nick of time. You know how really sensitive he was. Well, that medic killed him, the same as you would kill a bird with a bullet. He said 'You're already dead,' and he was."
And—oh yes—M——, his former patron. At the time of L——'s sickness and death he was still owing him $1100 for services rendered during the last days of that unfortunate magazine. ”

“ Money was by no means plentiful, and in consequence there was endless borrowing and "paying up" among them. Among the most enthusiastic members of this circle, as I had begun to note, and finally rather nervously, were my art-director, a valiant knight in Bohemia if ever there was one, and she of Bryn Mawr-Wellesley standards. My makeup editor, as well as various contributors who had since become more or less closely identified with the magazine, were also following him up all the time. ”

“ His domestic cares were multiplying, the marriage idea dull. Still he did not hesitate to continue those dinners given to his friends, the above-mentioned group or its spiritual kin, either in his apartment or in a bohemian restaurant of great show in New York. In short, he was a fairly successful short-story writer and critic in whom still persisted a feeling that he would yet triumph in the adjacent if somewhat more difficult field of popular fiction. ”

“ Or he would send for one of his hirelings, wherever he chanced to be—club, restaurant, his home—midnight if necessary, to confer with him on some subject of great moment, and the hireling was supposed to call a taxi and come post haste in order that he might not be kept waiting.
"God!" L—— once remarked in my presence. "To think that a thinking being has to be beholden to a thing like that for his weekly income! Somebody ought to tap him with a feather-duster and kill him!" ”

“ Roughly, here's the kind of thing I want," and I outlined to him the probable policy of the magazine under my direction. I had taken an anæmic "white-light" monthly known as The Broadway (!) and was attempting to recast it into a national or international metropolitan picture. He thawed slightly.
"Well, maybe with that sort of idea behind it, it might come to something. I don't know. It's possible that you may be the one to do it." He emphasized the "possible." "At any rate, it's worth trying. Judging by the snide editors and publications in this town, no one in America wants anything decent." ”

“ I said to myself, "here is a young cub who certainly has talent, is crowded with it, and yet owing to the kind of thing he is starting out to do and the fact that life will give him slaps and to spare before he is many years older, he needs to be encouraged. ”

“ I said, "he will eat through the husks of these other things, the 'M—— complex,' and do something splendid. He can't help it. But this fantastic dream of grandeur, of being a popular success, will have to be lived down."
For a time now I heard but little more save once that he was connected with a moving-picture concern, suggesting plots and making some money. Then I saw a second series of essays in the same Western critical paper—that of the editor who had published his book—and some of them were excellent, very searching and sincere. ”