The Brother

THEODORE DREISER: APOSTLE OF NATURE (354 pp.)--Robert H. Ellas--Knopf ($4).

When a friend read Theodore Dreiser's first novel, Sister Carrie, he asked him where he could have picked up so much knowledge about life. Said 39-year-old Author Dreiser: "Genius, I suppose." As Robert Elias' biography shows, it was a lot more complicated, and more painful, than that.

Strictly as an account of Dreiser's bitter early years, this is one of the best biographies of an American literary figure since Israfel, Hervey Allen's life of Poe. Its report of Dreiser's last years is perfunctory and its criticism of his work is so noncommittal that the reader has trouble in fathoming Author Elias' own opinion. But Dreiser's youth in the gaslit underworld of Terre Haute, his work in the rowdy newspaper and music publishing houses of the turn of the century, and above all, the gaudy entrances & exits of his extraordinary sisters, make it a kind of nonfiction Tom Jones or Moll Flanders; it evokes a period of tragicomic misunderstandings, petty thefts, solemn philosophizing and dissipated mandolin players.

The author of An American Tragedy was like one of those characters in an old-fashioned farce who is always being mistaken for someone else: he is overwhelmed with embraces by the landlady when he merely wants to rent a room, or he is treated like a lawbreaker when he simply wants a job. Dreiser stuttered for a while before he was seven years old. He had a cast in one eye. He was bullied by older boys and overawed by his brother Paul, a successful songwriter (My Gal Sal), with his fur coat, silk hat and smart cane.

Freedom from Jokes. His father was a Roman Catholic who struggled to remain respectable in the midst of deepening poverty--but the Dreisers once had to thank the benevolent mistress of an Evansville sporting house for furnishing them "a comfortable home." When their father was trying to get established in some new town, Dreiser's sisters would suddenly appear with young men of tainted reputation, parading down the streets in flashy finery, with spit curls, rouged cheeks, patent-leather shoes and broad-brimmed hats with ostrich plumes.

Author Elias, like most of Dreiser's critics, makes much of his determination to gain wealth in order to achieve a respectable life. But this record makes it clear that by respectability Dreiser meant simply a freedom from cruel underworld jokes, or the appalling misrepresentation of his simplest actions. When he wrote of poverty he was not writing of ordinary working-class life, but of something highly specialized existing within it, with its own codes and manners, disciplines, hardships and horrors.

He had the utmost difficulty in evoking a clear picture of feminine psychology in his writing. Elias' biography shows in part why. When he first became interested in girls, the baker's daughter cordially offered "to show him the mysteries which he had hitherto dared only to dream about." At another point, when he was worried about his sexual adequacy, a college girl enticed him into intimate relations. In the depths of his despair and humiliation women suddenly appeared from nowhere--they were his for the asking, and no one he had the courage to approach seems to have refused him. When he was growing seriously ill in Chicago, a former high-school teacher "unaccountably appeared with the proposal that he spend the following year at Indiana University at her expense." When he was nearly starving in New York City, he was picked up by another of these extraordinary creatures, who was providentially the daughter of a restaurant owner.

The Pursuit of Bread. It was another part of the pattern of his life that he seldom had trouble getting jobs, seldom kept them very long. Between 1895 and 1897 he built up Ev'ry Month, which his brother Paul's publishers backed, to a circulation of 65,000, and he was an enterprising, ambitious editor of Delineator from 1907 to 1910, when an office scandal forced him out. In 1932, he helped Ernest Boyd, George Jean Nathan, James Branch Cabell and Eugene O'Neill to launch the short-lived American Spectator (which the "tired" editors closed down in 1935).

But his efforts at writing fiction gave him years of discouragement. When his publishers suppressed the first printing of Sister Carrie as "immoral" in 1900 he began a period of despair, ending in such poverty that he rented a $1.25-a-week room, lived on a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread a day. "A strange half-wakefulness soon came over him, during which he wandered about confused and uncertain as to what he actually was. He sometimes regarded himself as two persons ... At night, frequently, he imagined there was an intruder creeping about the room ..." Down to his last dollar, he went to the East River to drown himself. A drunken Scotsman danced around him singing. A canal boatman offered him a ride to Tonawanda. He gave up suicide, set out the next day to pawn his watch. On the way he met brother Paul, who tearfully pressed a roll of bills into his hand and sent him to a sanatorium for rest.

There were always in the background of his life his sisters, as there was always in the back of his mind his bitter youth to direct his imagination. So influential do the sisters seem to have been that one of the greatest weaknesses of Author Elias' biography is that he does not tell considerably more about them. The best of Dreiser's writing, Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, surely reflected their lives as much as his own.

Triumph of Kinship. Author Elias, a member of the Cornell English department, got most of the fresh material for his book from Dreiser himself between 1937 and the novelist's death in 1945. Since this was the case, it is disappointing that the book does not go into greater detail on Dreiser's political activities, his adherence to Communism before his death, or into the bumbling and fumbling of the writing of his later years. The deeper loss that his approach involves is the loss of emotion that would give meaning to the facts so carefully presented.

Dreiser wrote out of a body of experience more highly charged than that of any American novelist of his time, and the triumph of his career was that he was able to stand off from the world in which Sister Carrie lived, while still remaining a part of it. His comprehension of its dullness and its misery never destroyed his sense of human kinship with the people to whom it was the norm of life.

* American Spectator colleagues Richard R. Smith (publisher), Ernest Boyd, George Jean Nathan.

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