Twelve Men

by Theodore Dreiser

  Naturally the thing was impossible, but 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 indeed he proceeded to make friends with all those with whom I had surrounded myself, to enter into long and even private discussions with them as to the proper conduct of the magazine, to hint quite broadly at a glorious future in which all, each one particularly to whom he talked, was to share. Curiously, this new and (as I would have thought) inimical personality of M---- seemed to appeal to L---- very much.

  I do not claim that the result was fatal. It may even, or at least might, have had value, combined with an older or slightly more balanced temperament. But it seemed to me that it offered too quickly what should have come, if at all, as the result of much effort. 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. During his earlier days there, L---- had more than once “cursed him out” (in his absence, of course), to use his own expressive phrase, for his middle-West trade views, as he described them, his shabby social and material ideals, and yet, as I could plainly see, even at that time the virus of his theories was working. For it must be remembered that L---- was very new to New York, very young, and never having had much of anything he was no doubt slightly envious of the man’s material facility, the sense of all-sufficiency, exclusiveness and even a kind of petty trade grandeur with which he tried to surround himself.

  Well, that might not have proved fatal either, only L---- needed some one to keep him true to himself, his individual capabilities, to constantly caution and if possible sober him to his very severe taste, and as it was he was all but surrounded by acolytes and servitors.

  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? To my sincere dissatisfaction, he began writing stories, some at least, which concerned (1), a young woman who successfully abandoned art dreams for advertising; (2), a middle-aged charmer, female, who attempted libertinage and was defeated, American style; (3), a Christmas picture with sweetness and light reigning on every hand (Dickens at his sentimentalest could have done no worse); (4), a Broadway press agent who, attempting to bring patronage to a great hotel via chic vice, accidentally and unintentionally mates an all-too-good young society man turned hotel manager to a grand heiress. And so on and so on, not ad infinitum but for a period at least—the ten years in which he managed to live and work.

  And, what was more, during this new period I heard and occasionally saw discouraging things in connection with him from time to time. True to his great promise, for I sincerely think M---- had a genuine fondness for his young protege, as much of a fondness as he could well have for anything, he guaranteed him perhaps as much as three thousand a year; sent him to Stockholm at the age of twenty-four or five to meet and greet the famous false pole discoverer, Doctor Cook; allowed him to go to Paris in connection with various articles; to Rome; sent him into the middle and far West; to Broadway for dramatic and social studies. Well and good, only he wanted always in what was done for him the “uplift” note, the happy ending-or at least one not vulgar or low—whereas my idea in connection with L----, gifted as he was, was that he should confine himself to fiction as an art and without any regard to theories or types of ending, believing, as I did, that he would definitely establish himself in that way in the long run. I had no objection of course to experiences of various kinds, his taking up with any line of work which might seem at the moment far removed from realistic writing, providing always that the star of his ideal was in sight. Whenever he wrote, be it early or late, it must be in the clear, incisive, uncompromising vein of these first stories and with that passion for revelation which characterized him at first, that same unbiased and unfettered non-moral viewpoint.

  But after meeting with and working for M---- under this new arrangement and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he seemed to me to gradually lose sight of his ideal, to be actually taken in by the plausible arguments which the latter could spin with the ease that a spider spins gossamer. In that respect I insist that M---- was a bad influence. Under his tutelage L---- gradually became, for instance, an habitue of a well-known and pseudo-bohemian chop-house, a most mawkish and naively imitative affair, intended frankly to be a copy or even the original, forsooth, of an old English inn, done, in so far as its woodwork was concerned, in smoked or dark-stained oak to represent an old English interior, its walls covered with long-stemmed pipes and pictures of English hunting and drinking scenes, its black-stained but unvarnished tables littered with riding, driving and country-life society papers, to give it that air of sans ceremonie with an upper world of which its habitues probably possessed no least inkling but most eagerly craved. 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. His clothes by now, for I saw him on occasion, had taken on a more lustrous if less convincing aspect than those he had worn when I first knew him. The small round hat or rakish cap, typical of his Western dreams, had now given way to a most pretentious square-topped derby, beloved, I believe, of undertakers and a certain severe type of banker as well as some clergymen, only it was a light brown. His suit and waistcoat were of a bright English tweed, reddish-brown or herring-bone gray by turns, his shoes box-toed perfections of the button type. He carried a heavy cane, often a bright leather manuscript case, and seemed intensely absorbed in the great and dramatic business of living and writing. “One must,” so I read him at this time, “take the pleasures as well as the labors of this world with the utmost severity.” Here, with a grand manner, he patronized the manager and the waiters, sent word to his friend the cook, who probably did not know him at all, that his chop or steak was to be done just so. These friends of his, or at least one of them (the poet) he met every day at five for an all-essential game of chess, after which an evening paper was read and the chop ordered. Ale—not beer—in a pewter mug was comme il faut, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of the name, to drink.

  I am sorry to write so, for after all youth must have its fling. Still, I had expected better of L----, and I was a little disappointed to see that earlier dream of simplicity and privation giving way to an absolutely worthless show. Besides, twenty or thirty such stories as “The Right Man,” “Sweet Dreams,” “The Man With the Broken Fingers,” “The Second Motive,” would outweigh a thousand of the things he was getting published and the profits of which permitted him these airs.

  Again, during the early days of his success with M----, he had married—a young nurse who had previously been a clerk in a store, a serious, earnest and from one point of view helpful person, seeing that she could keep his domestic affairs in order and bear him children, which she did, but she had no understanding of, or flair for, the type
of thing he was called upon to do. She had no instinct for literature or the arts, and aside from her domestic capacities little skill or taste for “socializing.” And, naturally, he was neglecting her. His head was probably surging with great ideas of art and hence a social supremacy which might well carry him anywhere. He had bought a farm some distance from New York, where in a community supposedly inhabited by successful and superior men of letters he posed as a farmer at times, mowing and cocking hay as became a Western plow-boy; and also, as the mood moved him, and as became a great and secluded writer, working in a den entirely surrounded by books in fine leather bindings (!) and being visited by those odd satellites of the scriptic art who see in genius of this type the summum bonum of life. It was the thing to do at that time, for a writer to own a farm and work it. Horace had. One individual in particular, a man of genuine literary and critical ability and great taste in the matter of all the arts but with no least interest in or tolerance for the simplicities of effort, came here occasionally, as I heard, to help him pile hay, and this in a silk shirt and a monocle; a second—and a most fascinating intellectual flaneur, who, however, had no vision or the gift of dreams—came to eat, drink, talk of many things to be done, to steal a few ideas, borrow a little money perhaps or consume a little morphine, and depart; a third came to spout of his success in connection with plays, or his proposed successes; a fourth to paint a picture, urged on by L----; a fifth to compose rural verse; a sixth, a broker or race-track tout or city bar-tender (for color, this last), to marvel that one of L----‘s sense, or any one indeed, should live in the country at all. There were drinking bouts, absolute drunkenness, in which, according to the Johnsonian tradition and that of Messieurs Rabelais and Moliere, the weary intellect and one’s guiding genius were immersed in a comforting Lethe of rye.

  Such things cost money, however. In addition, my young friend, due to a desire no doubt to share in the material splendors of his age (a doctrine M---- was ever fond of spouting—and as a duty, if you please), had saddled himself, for a time at least, with an apartment in an exclusive square on the East Side, the rent of which was a severe drain. Before this there had been, and after it were still, others, obligations too much for him to bear financially, all in the main taken for show, that he might be considered a literary success. Now and again (so I was told by several of his intimates), confronted by a sudden exhaustion of his bank balance, he would leave some excellent apartment house or neighborhood, where for a few months he had been living in grand style, extracting his furniture as best he might, or leaving it and various debts beside, and would take refuge in some shabby tenement, or rear rooms even, and where, touched by remorse or encouraged by the great literary and art traditions (Balzac, Baudelaire, Johnson, Goldsmith, Verlaine) he would toil unendingly at definite money-yielding manuscripts, the results of which carried to some well-paying successful magazine would yield him sufficient to return to the white lights—often even to take a better apartment than that which last had been his. By now, however, one of the two children he eventually left behind him had been born. 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.

  It was during this period, if I may interpolate an incident, that I was waiting one night in a Broadway theater lobby for a friend to appear, when who should arrive on the scene but L----, most outlandishly dressed in what I took to be a reductio ad absurdum of his first pose, as I now half-feared it to be: that of the uncouth and rugged young American, disclaiming style in dress at least, and content to be a clod in looks so long as he was a Shelley in brains. His suit was of that coarse ill-fitting character described as Store, and shelf-worn; his shoes all but dusty brogans, his headgear a long-visored yellowish-and-brown cross-barred cap. He had on a short, badly-cut frieze overcoat, his hands stuck defiantly in his trousers pockets, forcing its lapels wide open. And he appeared to be partially if not entirely drunk, and very insolent. I had the idea that the drunkenness and the dress were a pose, or else that he had been in some neighborhood in search of copy which required such an outfit. Charitably let us accept the last. He was accompanied by two satellic souls who were doing their best to restrain him.

  “Come, now! Don’t make a scene. We’ll see the show all right!”

  “Sure we’ll see the show!” he returned contentiously. “Where’s the manager?”

  A smug mannikin whose uniform was a dress suit, the business manager himself, eyed him in no friendly spirit from a nearby corner.

  “This is Mr. L----,” one of the satellites now approached and explained to the manager. “He’s connected with M----‘s Magazine. He does short stories and dramatics occasionally.”

  The manager bowed. After all, M----‘s Magazine had come to have some significance on Broadway. It was as well to be civil. Courtesy was extended for three, and they went in.

  As for myself, I resented the mood and the change. It was in no way my affair—his life was his own—and still I resented it. I did not believe that he was as bad as he seemed. He had too much genuine sense. It was just boyish swagger and show, and still it was time that he was getting over that and settling down. I really hoped that time would modify all this.

  One thing that made me hope for the best was that very shortly after this M----‘s Magazine blew completely up, leaving him without that semi-financial protection which I felt was doing him so much harm. The next favorable sign that I observed was that a small volume of short stories, some sixteen in number, and containing the cream of his work up to that time, was brought to a publishing house with which I was financially identified at the time, and although no word was said to me (I really think he took great care not to see me), still it was left and on my advice eventually published (it sold, I believe, a little under five hundred copies). But the thing that cheered me was that it contained not one story which could be looked upon as a compromise with his first views. And better, it had been brought to the concern with which I was connected—intentionally, I am sure. I was glad to have had a hand in its publication. “At least,” I said, “he has not lost sight of his first ideal. He may go on now.”

  And thereafter, in one magazine and another, excellent enough to have but a small circulation, I saw something of his which had genuine merit. A Western critical journal began to publish a series of essays by him, for which I am sure he received nothing at all. 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. His eyes were also turning toward the stage, as one completed manuscript and several “starts” turned over to me after his death proved. One day some one who knew him and me quite well assured me that L----, having sent out many excellent stories only to have them returned, had one day cried and then raged, cursing America for its attitude toward serious letters—an excellent sign, I thought, good medicine for one who must eventually forsake his hope of material grandeur and find himself. “In time, in time,” 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 conce
rn, 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. I felt that he was moving along the right line, although they earned him nothing. Then one week, very much to my surprise, there was a very glowing and extended commentary on myself, concerning which for the time being I decided to make no comment; and a little later, perhaps three weeks, a telephone call. Did I recall him? (!) Could he come and see me? (!) I invited him to dinner, and he came, carrying, of all things—and for him, the ex-railroad boy—a great armful of red roses. This touched me.

  “What’s the idea?” I inquired jovially, laughing at him.

  He blushed like a girl, a little irritably too, I thought, for he found me (as perhaps he had hoped not to) examining and critical, and he may have felt that I was laughing at him, which I wasn’t. “I wished to give them to you, and I brought ‘em. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “You know you should bring them if you want me to have them, and I’m only too glad to get them, anyway. Don’t think I’m criticizing.”

  He smiled and began at once on the “old days,” as he now called them, a sad commentary on our drifting days. Indeed he seemed able to talk of little else or fast enough or with too much enthusiasm. 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.”