Twelve Men. Theodore Dreiser
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Paul Dresser, to Charlie Potter, the good minister who rejects religious dogma, to the earthy construction foreman, Rourke, who values his men more than the corporate powers that profit from their labor. An ongoing dialogue exists between these figures and the narrative voice that Dreiser places at the center of their stories. As a result, these pages offer a vivid sense of Dreiser, as well as of the twelve American originals who had crossed his path.
Twelve Men had a special appeal for the younger American writers of the postwar generation of the 1920s. Among other things, it offered them a less daunting model than Dreiser’s large-canvased novels. The book’s innovative structure and its colorful cast of characters had a measurable impact on the work of writers as different as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Henry Miller. These authors appear to have found in Dreiser’s portraits a democratic and pertinent version of Emerson’s “Representative Men” for their time. Nearly eight decades later, the book still retains its place among the best collections of character treatments written in this century.
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This edition of Twelve Men is one of a projected series of books in the Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition. These editions are the products of cooperative efforts. The general editor assigns the volume editor. The general editor and the textual editor conceive each volume and establish the project within the frame of current editorial theory. They locate the relevant documents, devise the historical and textual principles for the edition, and work with the volume editor in determining the copy-text. The general editor and textual editor supervise the transcription of the copy-text and assist the volume editor in gathering the textual, historical, and bibliographical documents pertinent to the edition. At each stage of preparation, they proofread the text and verify its contents.
Twelve Men continues the Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition’s tradition of publishing texts that are not easily accessible, either to the specialist or to the general reader. Such an undertaking would be unimaginable without the goodwill of the administration and the special training of the staff at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Paul H. Mosher, Director of Libraries at the university, has provided continuing support to the project. Michael T. Ryan, Director of Special Collections at the library, has generously devoted his own time and the resources of his staff to facilitating the work of the Dreiser Edition. Equally important has been the commitment of the University of Pennsylvania Press. Director Eric Halpern has had the imagination and strength of conviction to continue the work of his predecessors in providing strong backing for this project. Associate Editor William D. Faulhaber made many valuable suggestions about the text.
Thomas P. Riggio
General Editor
University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Edition
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am most grateful to James L. W. West III for the continued help and encouragement that he has provided to me since the beginning of this project in the summer of 1987. My most critical and demanding reader (and steadfast supporter), however, has been my wife, Loretta, who has also now become a Dreiser expert whether she wanted to or not.
Other scholars whose helpful suggestions contributed to this project include Robert D. Hume, Charles W. Mann, Jr., and Bruce A. Murphy of Pennsylvania State University, as well as my friend and unofficial reader Robert Bravard of Lock Haven University.
This project could not have been completed without the invaluable help of several librarians, the foremost being Daniel Traister and Nancy Shawcross of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Others who assisted me include William J. Dane of the Newark, New Jersey, Public Library, Jack Rossi of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, and Joni Brookins of the Warsaw, Indiana, Community Public Library.
Numerous Dreiser scholars have very generously responded to my inquiries with helpful information. These include Richard Lingeman, Richard Dowell, Thomas Riggio, and T. D. Nostwich. The most memorable assistance, however, was provided by Noanks own Dreiser expert, the man who rowed me out to that very small rock on which Arthur Henry and Dreiser had lived in an island cabin, Stephen Jones of Mystic, Connecticut.
I am also grateful to the Library of America for allowing me to use their collations of the Twelve Men sketches. Others who assisted me include Kathleen Zimmerman of the American Watercolor Society and Marjorie M. Miller of the Montgomery County, Missouri, Historical Society.
TWELVE MEN
PETER
IN any group of men I have ever known, speaking from the point of view of character and not that of physical appearance, Peter would stand out as deliciously and irrefutably different. In the great waste of American intellectual dreariness he was an oasis, a veritable spring in the desert. He understood life. He knew men. He was free—spiritually, morally, in a thousand ways, it seemed to me.
As one drags along through this inexplicable existence one realizes how such qualities stand out; not the pseudo freedom of strong men, financially or physically, but the real, internal, spiritual freedom, where the mind, as it were, stands up and looks at itself, faces Nature unafraid, is aware of its own weaknesses, its strengths; examines its own and the creative impulses of the universe and of men with a kindly and non-dogmatic eye, in fact kicks dogma out of doors, and yet deliberately and of choice holds fast to many, many simple and human things, and rounds out life, or would, in a natural, normal, courageous, healthy way.
The first time I ever saw Peter was in St. Louis in 1892; I had come down from Chicago to work on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and he was a part of the art department force of that paper. At that time—and he never seemed to change later even so much as a hair’s worth until he died in 1908—he was short, stocky and yet quick and even jerky in his manner, with a bushy, tramp-like “get-up” of hair and beard, most swiftly and astonishingly disposed of at times only to be regrown at others, and always, and intentionally, I am sure, most amusing to contemplate. In addition to all this he had an air of well-being, force and alertness which belied the other surface characteristics as anything more than a genial pose or bit of idle gayety.
Plainly he took himself seriously and yet lightly, usually with an air of suppressed gayety, as though saying, “This whole business of living is a great joke.” He always wore good and yet exceedingly mussy clothes, at times bespattered with ink or, worse yet, even soup—an amazing grotesquery that was the dismay of all who knew him, friends and relatives especially. In addition he was nearly always liberally besprinkled with tobacco dust, the source of which he used in all forms: in pipe, cigar and plug, even cigarettes when he could obtain nothing more substantial. One of the things about him which most impressed me at that time and later was this love of the ridiculous or the grotesque, in himself or others, which would not let him take anything in a dull or conventional mood, would not even permit him to appear normal at times but urged him on to all sorts of nonsense, in an effort, I suppose, to entertain himself and make life seem less commonplace.
And yet he loved life, in all its multiform and multiplex aspects and with no desire or tendency to sniff, reform or improve anything. It was good just as he found it, excellent. Life to Peter was indeed so splendid that he was always very much wrought up about it, eager to live, to study, to do a thousand things. For him it was a workshop for the artist, the thinker, as well as the mere grubber, and without really criticizing any one he was “for” the individual who is able to understand, to portray or to create life, either feelingly and artistically or with accuracy and discrimination. To him, as I saw then and see even more clearly now, there was no high and no low. All things were only relatively so. A thief was a thief, but he had his place. Ditto the murderer. Ditto the saint. Not man but Nature was planning, or at least doing, something which man could not understand, of which very likely he was a mere tool. Peter was as much thrilled and entendered by the brawling strumpet in the street or the bagnio as by the virgin with her starry crown. The rich were rich and the poor poor, but all were in the grip of imperial forces whose ruthless purposes or lack of them made all men ridiculous, pathetic or magnificent, as you choose. He pitied ignorance and necessity, and despised vanity and cruelty for cruelty’s sake, and the miserly hoarding of