Genius of the Ordinary

DREISER by W. A. Swanberg. 614 pages. Scribner. $10.

"No common man am I!" crowed Novelist Theodore Dreiser. Indeed he was not. He stood 6 ft. 1 and looked like a gangling Gargantua: lowering brows, a cast in one eye, rubbery sprawling lips, and a slide-away chin. Women fell all over him, and he returned the compliment. He attacked them in private, pawed them in public, on occasion bedded as many as three a day. He was a braggart, a plagiarist, a liar and a bully. He threw coffee in Publisher Horace Liveright's face and once challenged Sinclair Lewis to a duel. Maudlin music made him teary and flattery made him fatuous. He was a skinflint who haggled over cab fares, a spendthrift who swaggered in custom suits. He was a political idiot who backed the Nazis and the Communists at the same time. Furtive and suspicious, he suffered psychotic episodes and occasionally flirted with suicide. He tried heroin and hashish. For years, he once confessed, he was a compulsive masturbator. He wrote love letters in baby talk, named his women like horses (Babu Mio, My Golden Girl), and guzzled bromide by the bottle. He was a fiercely vocal champion of artistic integrity who forced publishers to print the works of half-baked eccentrics. He was a noisily relentless foe of vested interests and social injustice who admired Machiavelli and kept a wad of money in the stock market. He was a mystic. He was also a powerful and, for his time, persuasive novelist.

In this revealing readable book, the most densely detailed study of Dreiser yet to be published, Biographer W. A. Swanberg (Citizen Hearst) establishes beyond dispute that Dreiser's life was as grand and sorrowful an epic as anything he ever wrote.

Wild Side. Back in the 1870s, the destitute Dreiser family was the talk of Terre Haute. Father John Paul was a religious fanatic who rarely worked. Mother Sarah was a warm-blooded mystical pagan who rarely worried. There were ten Dreiser children, most of them on the wild side, one of them, Paul Dresser, destined for fame as a songwriter. Lonely, nervous Theodore clung to his mother's skirts and suckled himself on fantasies of success. Restless to realize them, he dropped out of high school after one year, worked sporadically, somehow got into Indiana State University--again dropped out after one year.

"I seethed to express myself," he said, and decided that newspaper work offered the expression he craved--and the chance to rub shoulders with "bankers, millionaires, artists, executives, leaders, the real rulers of the world." Hot on the trail of success, he crashed New York at 23, leaped into a job at the World, quickly leaped out again, a back-country boy flummoxed by big-city journalism. Pressed by a friend, he decided to try a novel. He jotted down a title at random--Sister Carrie. Then he started writing, without a plot, without a character in mind.

Carrie turned out to be the sudsy story of a fallen woman who rises to eventual eminence in the theater. The critics cut it to ribbons: "immoral," "dreary," "a philosophy of despair." The book sold 456 copies. Dreiser collapsed into paranoid delusions and contemplated suicide. For seven years he floundered through a series of odd jobs.

In 1907, Carrie was republished and acclaimed "a work of genius." Iconoclast Dreiser lapsed into respectability. He took over as top editor of Butterick's magazines (feminine fashions), snagged H. L. Mencken as a contributor, wrote perfervidly moral editorials --and lost his job when he tried to seduce the daughter of an assistant editor.

Destroyed by Success. In the next five years he toured Europe, juggled his love affairs, experimented with narcotics, pamphleteered against puritanism, fought with his publishers, lived off advances--and agonizingly, determinedly labored to produce Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, The Titan, and his autobiographical The "Genius." By 1916, Dreiser was the hero of the avant-garde and the pet peeve of the Nice Nellies, who denounced The "Genius" as literary sewage and got it banned by the censor. Crushed, Dreiser fell silent for ten years.

An American Tragedy, published in 1926, established him as everybody's hero. The story of a naive young man in a hurry who murders his pregnant mistress so he can marry the boss's daughter, it was acclaimed by Joseph Wood Krutch as "the greatest American novel of our generation." Within a year it made Dreiser $40,000 in royalties and $80,000 in film rights.

Success as a novelist destroyed him as a novelist. He abandoned fiction and busily set about to become a "real ruler of the world." He denounced the capitalists, denounced the Catholics, denounced the Jews, cheered the Nazis, cheered the Communists (eventually he joined the Communist Party as an act of spiritual affirmation), and wildly decried the Mann Act.

Insatiable Infant. "Sex," he once said, "is the principal business of life," and from his initiation at 15 to his death at 74, he lived in a jungle of erotic involvement. He endured eleven years with a wife and 26 years with a mistress, Helen Richardson, whom he eventually married just a year before his death, for the sake of the domestic comforts they provided, but conducted multiple affairs with college girls, actresses, housewives and heiresses. Always in search of new mistress-mothers, he devoured them all like an insatiable infant. He charmed them, lied to them and used them--as bedmates, social secretaries, editors, nurses and servants. The women seemed to like it, and Dreiser usually walked out on them before they got bored.

More than a search for mother, Dreiser's turbulent life was a search for meaning. Incapable of orderly, objective thought, he lumbered from howling superstition to scientific determinism, finally came to believe in an "intelligent creative force," which he sometimes called God. At the end of his life, he revised his old, unfinished novel, The Bulwark, to develop its religious significance and ramifications.

Dreiser's importance to the American novel lay in what seemed to be his "social realism." He imagined himself an American Zola, and set out to describe the ordinary lives of ordinary people in ordinary language. He stamped all over the parlor niceties of Victorian tradition and proclaimed in a booming voice that heroines are not often virgins heroes are not usually gentlemen. He did not necessarily punish the wicked. Indeed, in Dreiser's novels good and evil do not exist--there is only unheroic suffering and scrambling for success. In retrospect, his prose seems clotted, clumsy, pompous, prolix, humorless, flatulent and dull. An American Tragedy ran to 385,000 words ("250,000 of them unnecessary," snorted Mencken). Nevertheless, Dreiser's dogged honesty and ruthless candor opened the way for all the social realists of the '30s (many drearier than Dreiser) and also, in a way, for Hemingway and Faulkner, who quickly eclipsed him.

When he died in 1945, he was almost forgotten. His funeral was an American travesty, attended by all the preposterous contradictions of his unlikely life. Services were held in a Congregational church; a Communist delivered the eulogy; and Dreiser was interred with capitalistic splendor at Forest Lawn, in the plot next to Tom Mix.

* The 1951 film version, retitled, of Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

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