SOURCE: "Dreiser's Later Sketches," in The Dreiser Newsletter, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall, 1985, pp. 1-13.

[In the following essay, Griffin surveys the character sketches collected in Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women, as well as the uncollected stories known as the "Black Sheep" series.]

In 1919 and 1929 respectively Theodore Dreiser published his two collections of character sketches Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women. Several months before the publication of the latter on November 30, 1929, his six-part serialization of "This Madness—An Honest Novel about Love" began appearing in Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan. Twelve Men and A Gallery of Women were constituted for the most part of pieces that had already appeared in periodicals; "This Madness," essentially a series of three sketches of women with whom Dreiser had intimate relationships in his early middle age, contained material not published before. Together these three collections comprised thirty character sketches. Their number suggests Dreiser's healthy interest in the genre; their generally favorable critical reception indicates that he had achieved considerable success with something of a bastard form. After 1929, however, Dreiser's output in the genre fell off radically. During the last fifteen years of his life he returned to the form only in two brief bursts of activity, and, with one notable exception, did not maintain his earlier standard. Between 1933 and 1945, nine sketches appeared under Dreiser's by-line: three during the thirties (two in the American Spectator and one in Esquire), and six, at least two of which were ghost-written, as an Esquire series in 1944-45.

It was the sketches in Twelve Men that established the genre, at least as Dreiser conceived of it, and against which his subsequent work would be measured. Characteristically, Dreiser's subjects here are men whom he had known personally or to whose personality he had been drawn by hearing about them through third persons. Patently biographical in orientation, the sketches are autobiographical—Dreiser invariably leaves himself in the picture—as well as fictional—he plays freely with time, place, and other detail so as to construct not so much portraits that are factually accurate as ones that, though recognizably modeled on men of his acquaintance, become new creations on the pages. In his choice and conception of subjects Dreiser is drawn by an enigmatic quality, which he renders and does not seek to solve. His attitude in the sketches is one of puzzlement and wonder at the human enigma: his is more than merely a narrative and observing presence, but an emotionally responsive and often philosophizing one as well.

Dreiser set a high standard in Twelve Men and reviews were generally laudatory. Some comments, such as H. L. Mencken's "rotund, brilliantly colored, absolutely alive," were especially flattering [review of Twelve Men, in New York Sun, April 13, 1919]. Reviews pointed explicitly to the variety of subjects presented: the fact that nearly all the sketches came in for special attention as the particular favorite or favorites of one or another reviewer attests to their broad appeal.

One is not struck as favorably by A Gallery of Women as a collection as by Twelve Men. Although several individual sketches equal or approach the high quality of Dreiser's male portraits, there is a sameness about the pieces, even though they picture women of different ages, backgrounds, avocations and occupations. Dreiser's frequently cited comment to Mencken in 1919 when the sketches for A Gallery of Women were in their preparatory stages suggests that he saw these pieces as being of a mold:

For years I have planned a volume to be entitled A Gallery of Women.

God, what a work! if I could do it truly—The ghosts of Puritans would rise and gibber in the streets.

[Letters of Theodore Dreiser, 1959]

Although the portraits turned out not to be nearly as sensational as Dreiser predicted, nevertheless their grounding in the central theme of the liberation of the American woman gives them a certain homogeneity. Observations by Yoshinobu Hakutani in his close study of A Gallery of Women encourage the notion that Dreiser sought more to startle than to portray unique women: "Despite his disclaimers to the contrary, Dreiser did not have the same intimate knowledge of his women as he did of his men. Undoubtedly Dreiser portrayed women he had come across in his career, but his portraits lack conviction" ["The Dream of Success in Dreiser's A Gallery of Women," Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Vol. 27, July, 1927]. "Dreiser . . . privately admitted that A Gallery of Women was clearly more fictional than otherwise and that at its planning stage it was not equated with Twelve Men."

Reviewers of A Gallery of Women commented on the similarity among Dreiser's subjects and on the fictional quality of the sketches, often labeling them "short stories." There was, also, frequent allusion to Dreiser's strong presence in his work: at least two publications, Vanity Fair and Book League Monthly, titled their reviews of the book "A Gallery of Dreiser." The reviewers, generally, were not as complimentary as they had been with Twelve Men, and according to Hakutani, Dreiser's readers, "who had expected as much authenticity in A Gallery of Women as in Twelve Men, . . . were disappointed."

At the same time as he was preparing the contents of A Gallery of Women for publication, Dreiser was at work on his serialized novel, "This Madness"; indeed, there is evidence that one of the studies that became a major portion of "This Madness" was originally meant for A Gallery of Women. Louise Campbell, who was typing manuscripts for Dreiser in the summer of 1927, states that of the fifteen sketches that were to constitute the latter, "Sidonie" [which was published as installments 5 and 6 of "This Madness"] was to be one. Although "This Madness" was billed and presented as a novel by Hearst's International-Cosmopolitan, its contents and presentation have more in common with the sketches in A Gallery of Women than with an extended piece of Dreiser fiction. Dreiser had difficulty setting up "This Madness" "with the continuity it lacks now and which I am sure you realize it should have for present purposes," as William Lengel, an editor at Hearst's told him. "Each of these stories quite naturally winds up a complete episode and stands by themselves. Be a good fellow won't you, and at the end of Aglaia write a couple of paragraphs that will lead into Althea and do the same thing at the end of Althea leading into Sidonie," Lengel directed.

Dreiser did little to repair the seams in "This Madness," but what does give the serialization considerable cohesiveness despite this is the sustained presence of the autobiographical narrator. Early in Part IV, the second half of "Elizabeth," Dreiser writes "I could fill a volume with brief pictures of many, but they would be too much alike to be interesting." In fact, the problem with "This Madness" is that even the three women who are the major subjects are not very interesting—not so much because of what they are themselves as because of the use Dreiser puts them to. For Aglaia, Elizabeth, and Sidonie, and the minor women who fill the gaps in Dreiser's life, become little more than case examples of the work's underlying philosophy, "the knowledge that my nature was not given to a single affinity or fever. I could not hold fast to one only" ["This Madness"]. Hearst's played up the shock value of the series. Editor Ray B. Long wrote in a blurb promoting "This Madness" in the issue preceding its first episode: ". . . in it, Theodore Dreiser reveals the impulses and the results of love with a candor that will surprise you, may shock you, but will so impress you that you'll never forget it."

It is difficult to assess the reception of "This Madness" since there were no reviews. It would not be surprising to hear that, despite Long's enthusiasm, and Dreiser's own commendation, cited by the editors in a preamble to the fifth installment: "You people may not realize it, but in 'This Madness' you are publishing the most intimate and important work so far achieved by me," the series did not create the deep impression so ardently desired by its author and publishers. The flaws noted about A Gallery of Women were multiplied many times over in "This Madness," particularly the lack of variety, the grinding at a thesis and the too pronounced presence of the narrator, Dreiser himself. It is a fact that after he published "This Madness" and A Gallery of Women in 1929, Dreiser produced no sketches of women until 1944, and the one that appeared under his by-line then may not have been his own. While the reasons for Dreiser's virtual abandonment of sketches of women must remain speculative, it is possible that he was leery about returning to this form because of negative criticism of A Gallery of Women and "This Madness" and of himself as their author.

Dreiser's brief return to sketch-writing during the early thirties began with two appearances in the American Spectator, "a literary newspaper" of which he was one of the founding editors. According to its prospectus the American Spectator sought to publish "the type of critical reaction which ignores the conventionalist, the moralist, the religionist, and favors the unaccepted and the misunderstood as opposed to the accepted and understood" [Marguerite Tjader, Theodore Dreiser: A New Dimension, 1965]. It wanted articles of 1000 or 1200 words and paid contributors at the rate of a cent a word (although as an editor Dreiser was also eligible for ten per cent of the profits).

Dreiser's sketch "Townsend" appeared in the June 1933 American Spectator. Although far in excess of the 1200-word limit, "Townsend" is nevertheless too brief to develop a portrait in the tradition of the Twelve Men sketches. Walter Townsend, when Dreiser first meets him, is an ambitious young clerk who aspires to a high position in the world of finance, whose heroes are Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. For a time Townsend advances to better-paying jobs and more prestigious positions, but his progress is slow and, finally, very limited, and as Dreiser recalls his later contacts with him—which have been at intervals of several years—he records his subject's inevitable decline. Finally, he hears of Townsend's lonely death: victimized by the Depression, left a widower after his wife's premature death, and out of contact with his married daughter, he passes away in a rooming house, leaving a half-written note to Dreiser requesting that he call. Dreiser has recorded the limited rise, and fall of Townsend rather than rendered it. The sketch's length does not allow for that multiplication of anecdote that had given the Twelve Men pieces their vitality. "Townsend" is, finally, another example of that favorite Dreiser theme of the American victimized by the dream of success—this one not developed much beyond the type.

Dreiser's second publication of a sketch in the American Spectator was in the December 1933 issue, a short time before he severed his editorial association with the newspaper out of dissatisfaction with its orientation. "Winterton" is more in the American Spectator spirit of "favor[ing] the unaccepted and misunderstood as opposed to the accepted and understood" than "Townsend" and, though not a great deal longer, is a more successfully achieved portrait than its predecessor. Here Dreiser has gone beyond the generalizations of "Townsend" and fleshed out his picture of Winterton with more anecdotal detail.

Dreiser's acquaintance with Stanley Winterton dated back to the time of his own attempts to make it in the newspaper business in New York in the 1890's. A newspaper columnist noted shortly after the sketch's appearance that "it brings up memories of events that tally with [Dreiser's] story and suggest that he has again written close to his material" [Harry Hansen, "The First Reader," New York World Telegram, Vol. 25, November, 1933]. Winterton is the Sunday editor of the New York Express Metropolitan Feature Section with whom Dreiser has attempted to place material. Dreiser becomes intrigued by the enigmatic personality of the man, on the one hand the professional "slowly but surely achieving a place for himself as a Sunday editor of real awareness and selective skill," on the other hand the human being not particularly favored by nature with physical attractiveness or ease of manner, unsure in his contacts with women, "marked for frustration" in fact. Winterton's frustrations become evident when Dreiser notices his penchant for collecting "French Follies posters by Cheret, Grasset and Willette, drawings and etchings by Rops, Beardsley and Boucher together with endless nudes, photographic as well as semi-pornographic, by various young Americans of the time," and for entertaining gullible juvenile girls in his studio. Quite possibly framed by someone about whom he has published unfavorable comments, Winterton becomes one of Cornstock's victims: "his quarters are raided, his books and pictures are seized, and he is accused of corrupting the morals of minors" and of "a statutory offense, third degree." The charges hold up, Winterton is jailed, and upon his release after a shortened sentence, escapes to anonymity in the west, his career ended.

Stanley Winterton is, like Walter Townsend, a pathetic figure. Dreiser grants him no stature; he is seen entirely as victim, first of an ungenerous Nature, then of Comstockery, and finally of the indifference and cowardice of the members of his own profession, who do or say nothing in his defense. Given the limitations of his subject, and the American Spectator word ceiling, Dreiser's portrayal of Winterton is effective enough. More importantly, it seems to have prepared the ground for "Mathewson," a much fuller study of another frustrated newspaperman, one Dreiser knew as a young journalist in St. Louis.

Rejected initially by Liberty, "Mathewson" was serialized in the May and June 1934 numbers of Esquire, a magazine in which Dreiser made several appearances during the first decade of its existence. Correspondence shows that Arnold Gingrich, Esquire's founder and editor, actively solicited manuscripts from Dreiser, and explained thoroughly why he made cuts and changes in accepted material. "Mathewson" benefited from Gingrich's editorial skill and generous word allowance, and Dreiser accepted Esquire's $200 for each part (although he had requested $300).

Dreiser's acquaintance with Wilson Mathewson was a brief but intense one: he had known him during the period between November 1892 and March 1894 when he worked in St. Louis for the Post-Democratic and Republic. Introduced to Mathewson in the course of his professional duties—as acting city editor, Mathewson gives Dreiser an assignment at one point—Dreiser is taken immediately with his "gentility, apprehension, sensitivity, speculation and more, brooding and very likely poetic thought. How different from the broad, solid, sullen, conventional, contentious" newspaper editors of his experience [Dreiser, "Mathewson"]. His fascination with Mathewson increases as he learns from his fellow journalists and then sees at first hand the squalor of his living conditions and life style: his lodgings in a rundown part of the city, and his drinking and drug addiction. Thus Mathewson has the stuff of which the best Dreiser sketches are made, the enigmatic quality, "the mystery of character," to use Robert II. Elias's term. Part of the Mathewson appeal is related to his writing, particularly to an essay about Zola that has appeared in one of the St. Louis dailies. The essay reinforces Dreiser's sense of the compelling ambivalence of Mathewson: "in the office . . . he had seemed so frail, so pale and retiring, whereas in this article, smooth and stylized to no small degree, he conveyed a genuinely stirring mental force and acumen." Yet the mystery about him remains unsolved.

It is a dramatic chance meeting that he has with Mathewson that draws back the veil and allows Dreiser some glimpse into his subject's make-up. Mathewson's drunken outburst on this occasion startlingly expresses his concept of a senseless world and his confronting of it:

"Look at 'em!" (And once more waving a feeble hand.) "Ignorant! Dirty! Useless! Eating and drinking and loafing, and, and, reproducing themselves. For what? For what? So's there'll be more of 'em to eat and drink an' loaf an' reproduce. An' they're supposed to be sober. An' I'm drunk. An' everybody else that wants to eat and drink and . . . reproduce themselves in St. Louis an' everywhere. You're sober. An' I'm drunk. An' you want to reproduce. An' I don't. An' I want to think. An' they don't—or can't. An' they're sober. An' you're sober. An' I'm drunk. Ha! Ha!"

Dreiser's subsequent meetings with Mathewson—he becomes something of a confidant for Mathewson—reveal the tortured psyche, the brilliant mind capable of deep insight into the human predicament but without the resources, emotional or physical, to cope with the consequences of that insight. When Dreiser hears of his friend's suicide, he registers no surprise. Nor does the reader. The outcome is entirely credible given the nature of Mathewson's dilemma.

With "Mathewson" Dreiser repeats the early success of the best sketches in Twelve Men. The autobiographical element is kept in control and secondary to the biographical focus on the subject; the delineation of the subject is particularized by anecdotal and background detail. Most of all, the subject himself, especially in his embodiment of profoundly human tensions, engages the reader's sympathetic interest. It is this last element especially that distinguishes "Mathewson" from "Winterton." Whereas Stanley Winterton may elicit interest he remains a cause celebre. Wilson Mathewson, for all his apparent misanthropy, is a deeply caring person. His sensitive plea on behalf of the widow of the deceased engineer, his baby-sitting for his widowed landlady (so out of character for a hard-boiled newspaperman), and his feeding of the mouse in his room all establish his essential warmth.

Marguerite Tjader, who typed the "Mathewson" manuscript for Dreiser, was much taken by the sketch, in particular by the special revelation it made about the Dreiser she knew. As she recalled in 1965,

It was so different from the political, combative work he had been doing, that I was transported into another world—to the plane where Dreiser, the creative mystic, brooded over the fate of men. . . . This sketch was a sort of memorial dirge for [Mathewson] almost a tone-poem of the defeat of a human life through supersensitivity. It was what Dreiser . . . at times felt his own life might have been, had there not been that other side of his nature, the positive, materialistic, sensual side, loving the earth and violence. . . . This, was the first Dreiser I had known, the brooding philosophical mind partaking of the woes of humanity without the political violence, the constant fight that seemed to be in him. Now in all the welter of action, he had been writing this.

After "Mathewson" Dreiser did not return to sketch-writing for another ten years, and then only in a minor way. Taking advantage of his long-standing ties with Esquire he wrote Gingrich in October 1943:

This is to advise you that I have just thought of a series idea which may interest you. For, annoyed by the highly moral as well as spiritual characters and deeds of the most unforgettable characters in the Literary Digest [Dreiser meant the Reader's Digest] it suddenly occurred to me that your readers might be interested in a series of Unworthy Characters. . . . I do not mean criminal or wholly worthless or intentionally evil creatures—but rather men and women—young and old—who are mostly their own, not the public's worst enemies and who frequently serve to amuse one and another of us.

He went on to say that he had several subjects in mind that could be "arrestingly drawn in fifteen hundred or two thousand words" [Letters]. Gingrich promptly accepted the idea and the project was underway, but Dreiser was to go about producing the series in novel fashion.

Over a year before, in July and August of 1942, Dreiser had been visited in Los Angeles by an old friend from Canada, Sylvia Bradshaw. Learning that she had worked for a literary magazine during the thirties and had at one point entered a writing contest, Dreiser encouraged her to take up writing seriously. "He urged me," recalls Sylvia Bradshaw, "to begin writing some character sketches of persons I knew well in Maine. I managed to get several done" [Bradshaw, "Reunion," unpublished]. Now, with Esquire's order for six sketches, to be called Unworthy Characters or Baa! Baa! Black Sheep, he wrote Louise Campbell explaining the concept behind the series and wondering if she would contribute to it:

I've been thinking that you might have some characters, male or female, who as described by you might fit the series, only and also they have to be signed by me. And they can only be 2000 words long. The amount offered me is $300—and of that I would see that you get $100. And I would have to retain the privilege of editing the same.

[Letters]

Both Sylvia Bradshaw and Louise Campbell submitted more than one sketch for the series and at least one sketch written by each of them was published as part of it.

The six sketches of the Black Sheep series, as it was finally called, appeared in consecutive issues of Esquire beginning in October 1944, each under Dreiser's by-line and each labelled "semi-fiction." The editorial caption "Introducing a series of unregenerate characters, each a bad piece of work, ranging from worthless to pernicious," appeared under the title of the first installment. Of the six sketches, "Black Sheep No. Three: Bill" and "Black Sheep No. Four: Ethelda" were written by Sylvia Bradshaw and Louise Campbell respectively: correspondence shows this clearly as does Sylvia Bradshaw's recollection of events. It has been suggested, as well, that "Of the other four sketches, the prose style of numbers one, five and six resembles Dreiser's while that of number two does not" [Pizer, et. al., Theodore Dreiser: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography], "Black Sheep No. Two: Otie," a one-page lacklustre account of a young Chicago woman whose purpose in life is to "spar with the law," in the words of the editorial caption, has nothing to recommend it; it is doubtful Dreiser would have turned out anything so irrelevant. Of the remaining three, the least remarkable is "Black Sheep Number One: Johnny," while "Black Sheep No. Five: Clarence" and "Black Sheep No. Six: Harrison Barr" have a certain appeal. None of the Black Sheep sketches reaches anywhere near the standard achieved in Twelve Men, A Gallery of Women and "Mathewson."

The subject in "Johnny" is the parasitical father of three sons who have achieved considerable success, and it is through information furnished by two of the sons that Dreiser constructs his sketch. Initially, "Johnny" lacks focus: much of the narrator's attention is given to the subject's father—and mother-in-law and sons. When Johnny is finally centered on, one wonders why, for the character is not made engrossing or even interesting. Dreiser's problem here was surely the concept behind the series: he was temperamentally unable to commit himself to the portrayal of a subject he could not take seriously.

The same criticism can be made of "Harrison Barr," although the fact that the sketch is firmly set in Greenwich Village during the twenties and that Dreiser observed and met the subject personally give it more vitality than "Johnny" has. Barr has struck Dreiser's attention because he manages to live off succeeding waves of aspiring writers by creating the grand hoax that a play has to be written for the magnificent set he, as a designer, will create. But if Harrison Barr has more potential for effective characterization than Johnny has, the possibility is not realized, no doubt because of a lack of commitment to the subject as well as to space constrictions.

"Clarence" is the most readable of the Black Sheep pieces. Dreiser has written not so much a character sketch as a modern morality or parable. What begins as an examination of Clarence McGaven, an over-confident young movie executive, develops into a contemporary exemplum of the pride-cometh-before-the-fall maxim. There is a directness and purposefulness about "Clarence" that is not found in the Black Sheep series generally. It is as if Dreiser, acknowledging his incompatibility with the underlying principle of the series and being unwilling to put himself through the motions any longer, redirected "Clarence" into something he could live with.

Dreiser's interest in producing sketches and in having others write about people they knew under his by-line did not end with the publication of the Black Sheep pieces, although he seems to have abandoned the idea of picturing disreputable characters. Writing Louise Campbell in September 1944, after the Esquire Black Sheep series had been arranged for, he proposed: "If you think of another character yarn, let me see it. My agent Duffy says that he could sell one that had a touch of pathos—something that would arouse a feeling of pity at the same time that it had the feeling of reality." Later he told her about his plans to publish a book called My Natal Health, in which writers would describe characters who "made or filled their lives between ages six and twelve" [Letters]. None of these projects saw print and effectively the Black Sheep sketches were the last Dreiser wrote in the genre.

Marguerite Tjader has told a fascinating story about Dreiser and the "Mathewson" manuscript. The following incident occurred after she had completed the typing and was turning over manuscript and typescript to Dreiser:

He put away his new script and carbons, and holding out the original, looked down at me: "Here—Do you want this? You can keep it—" He was looking at me with that intense gaze which had in it, unpredictably, a wild challenge.

"No, I don't particularly want it," I said. . . .

His eyes darkened like skies before a storm. Without a word, he savagely tore the thick pile of papers and threw them into the waste-basket.

Marguerite Tjader's story can serve as a dramatic symbol of what happened to Dreiser the sketch-writer in the middle of the thirties: he tore up the script. The symbol can also serve a larger purpose: the falling off in the quality of the sketches after "Mathewson" corresponds generally to a diminution in the quality of Dreiser's short stories written during the same period as well as to an abandonment of new work in the novel.