Portraits of Dreiser

Those who knew Dreiser well were often moved to attempt to explain the essential man—to render a pen portrait of him that would capture his basic nature from the perspective of someone who had experienced it fully. Running through these accounts is the common thread of the enigmas, contradictions, and paradoxes at the heart of Dreiser the man. Some writers, Dorothy Dudley and Edgar Lee Masters, for example, organize their overall interpretation as a series of fully examined contradictory characteristics. Others, such as Ralph Fabri and Edward H. Smith, compress these contradictions into a single extended statement. Fabri wrote to W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser's biographer, that Swanberg has “recreated Dreiser exactly as I knew him, with all his confusions, contradictions, superstitions, naiveté, talent, originality, intelligence.” And Smith stated, “To me, he is tall and ambling, tired, shy, timid, always tentative, absorbed and absorbing, hungry, searching, slow, inexhaustibly weary, pitying and pitiful.”Dreiser, as these commentators often noted, was “huge” and “ungainly” and often brusque and rude but also possessed a sympathetic understanding of the richness, complexity, and essential tragedy of life. There was thus a seeming contradiction between Dreiser as inept social being and Dreiser as the author of novels containing a keen understanding of experience. In addition, Dreiser's intellect appeared to be either nonexistent or capable of profound philosophical insight, depending on the perspectives of specific observers. Mencken, for example, held that Dreiser was “essentially a German peasant, oafish, dour, and distrustful of all mankind,” and Ernest Boyd and Waldo Frank stressed the primitivism and childishness of his mental apparatus. John Cowper Powys and Marguerite Tjader, however, found that he possessed a unique spiritual faculty capable of comprehending the underlying beauty of all existence.Dreiser, as these recollections reveal, was not a simple man, and his personal behavior often alienated many of those who knew him. But he also possessed an aura created both by the impact of his best work and by a compelling temperament, an aura that these accounts seek to document and explain.