she was busy seeking it. I maintain that it was useless and unfair to say to
Marcelle that she must work at some simple conventional employment until
she earned her way dollar by dollar to the heights which she could already
see. Convention might applaud her, but it would not give her more than
three or four dollars a week, and long before she earned enough to purchase
the beauty and pleasure which she saw, her capacity for enjoyment would
be gone.”17 In 1900 Dreiser could not editorialize about Carrie in exactly
these terms, but in more circumspect language he is preaching much the same
sermon on his American Marcelle.
Here was Carrie, in the beginning poor, unsophisticated, emotional; responding
with desire to everything most lovely in life, yet finding herself turned as by a wall. Laws to say: “Be allured, if you will, by everything lovely, but draw
not nigh unless by righteousness.” Convention to say: “You shall not better
your situation save by honest labour.” If honest labour be unremunerative and
difficult to endure; if it be the long, long road which never reaches beauty,
but wearies the feet and the heart; if the drag to follow beauty be such that
one abandons the admired way, taking rather the despised path leading to her
dreams quickly, who shall cast the first stone? Not evil, but longing for that
which is better, more often directs the steps of the erring.18
For Marcelle and later fallen sisters, Dreiser put aside the biblical allusions in this passage and argued in more naturalistic terms; but beneath the shifting
metaphors the defense remained steady and unfailing.
The resemblance of Marcelle and Carrie is not coincidental, nor is this
a matter of life imitating art or any simple intertextual merging of fiction
and biography. It is a collective product of Dreiser’s intense curiosity about
the ways women lived their lives in his time. Creation and documentation
were all of one piece for him. Though naturally circumscribed by the limits
of his personal vision and of the historical moment, the record he left of his
contemporary sisters – among many others, Carrie, Marcelle, Emma, Jennie,
Mame, Rona Mutha, Ernita – expanded the range of both biography and
fiction for an entire generation.
39
t h o m as p. r i g g i o
III
Dreiser’s second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (begun in 1901 but not published until 1911), is his closest attempt at a major fictional subset of biography,
the family chronicle. It depicts the relationships between two generations of
German and Irish Americans. Jennie’s development parallels the turbulent
youth of his sister Mame, particularly her long-term affair and marriage
to a businessman. In addition, there are recognizable portraits of Dreiser’s
parents and various siblings. Father Gerhardt is as sternly devoted to his
church as was the German-born Johann Dreiser, and Mrs. Gerhardt has
the same malleable and sympathetic personality as Dreiser’s mother. The
family is driven by the recurrent cycles of poverty, unemployment, and social
marginality that plagued the Dreisers in Indiana.
For all of these parallels, the novel is riddled with the sort of biographical
improvisations that we find in Sister Carrie. Motherhood is a large concern in Jennie Gerhardt, but Mame never had children with Austin Brennan,
the model for Lester Kane; father Gerhardt is a Lutheran, not a Catholic
like Dreiser’s father; unlike Kane, who abandons Jennie to marry another
woman, Brennan never left Mame. Most of us accept biographical license
of this kind in fiction more readily than in memoirs. But Henry Miller’s
dictum on the subject neatly addresses another element of Dreiser’s practice:
“Autobiography is the purest romance. Fiction is always closer to reality than
fact.”19 Put more mundanely, the biographical strategies Dreiser employed
in autobiography were not that different from those he used in fiction.
In his non-fiction about himself and his large clan, Dreiser displayed little
of the need for privacy that we find in writers such as T. S. Eliot, Henry
James, or J. D. Salinger. In large autobiographies [ Newspaper Days (1922) and Dawn (1931)], in travel books [ A Traveler at Forty, A Hoosier Holiday (1915)] and in a posthumously published record of the depression he suffered
in his early thirties [ An Amateur Laborer (1983)], Dreiser became his own most original biographer. In these informative and aggressively self-justifying documents, he offers a luminous, multi-layered script of his childhood and
young manhood. Since these works contain detailed portraits of others (many
of them historical figures), their biographical claims are not limited to Dreiser.
A little known but telling example of Dreiser’s use of family biography is
the story of his nephew Carl. By all accounts Carl had an unhappy childhood.
His mother, Dreiser’s sister Sylvia, was nineteen and unmarried when she
gave birth to him in 1886. In Dawn Dreiser reports that Sylvia abandoned the infant to the care of her mother and afterwards had little to do with him.
In the book’s first draft Dreiser wrote that Carl was taken to the home of
another sister, “where he remained until he was sixteen, at which time he
40
Dreiser and the uses of biography
died. [He] was an extremely sensitive and ruminative child whose life was
darkened by an intense and almost pathologic desire for affection which he
never received . . . throughout his youth he was bereft of a mother love
which he appeared to need. And his mother, instead of being drawn to him
was actually repelled by him, a reaction which I have never been able to
understand.”20 Although Dreiser’s portrait of Carl in the published book
leaves out any mention of his untimely death, the manuscript version has
been for decades accepted without question.
The matter became more complicated after Dreiser’s most recent biogra-
pher, Richard Lingeman, reported that Carl committed suicide.21 Lingeman
notes that he learned of the suicide from Vera Dreiser, the novelist’s niece
and herself the author of a book about her uncle. When she responded to
this writer’s queries, however, she stated that she knew of no concrete evi-
dence for Carl’s suicide and that she had based her comments to Lingeman
on family rumors she had heard as a child. If Carl did kill himself, we must
assume that Dreiser, the only eye-witness to leave a written record of his
nephew’s life, decided to omit this crucial event. This seems unlikely, but it is not impossible. At this point, however, we can be certain of only one thing:
since Carl did not die at age sixteen, Dreiser buried him before his time.
This had to be intentional because Dreiser’s memory was prodigious and, in
any case, he would not have forgotten such an important event. Moreover,
he had preserved Carl’s correspondence. He had received letters from Carl
and heard news of him from other family members well beyond the boy’s
sixteenth year. In fact, in a letter dated 16 October 1908, Carl wrote to his
now relatively affluent uncle Theodore to remind him, among other things,
that “I am twenty-two years old today.”22
Dreiser’s decision to roll back the clock on Carl’s death is a darker vari-
ation on the blend of hard facts and wild imagining he displayed in his
St. Louis journalism. But to what end? This, after all, was not an anony-
mous lark for a newspaper audience. Part of the answer lies in the nature
of biographical writing, which offers greater imaginative possibilities than
modern scholarly standards usually allow. Even the most disinterested critic
might concede that the net cast by the biographer – the variety and shape
of experiences thought to be relevant – depends somewhat on the author’s
interests and preoccupations. And creativity. To give a recent example, Peter
Ackroyd’s biography of Charles Dickens invents scenes in which Dickens
meets and interacts with various characters in his novels; in other places,
he talks with future authors such as T. S. Eliot and Oscar Wilde – and even
with Ackroyd, who himself is a novelist. It would be beside the point to
fault this biographer for falsifying the record. In Dreiser’s portrait of Carl, as in Ackroyd’s Dickens, there is a biographical truth that doesn’t depend 41
t h o m as p. r i g g i o
on strict principles of historical accuracy. Dreiser made Carl’s life an icon
for one of the major concerns of his writing: the often tragic consequences
for the neglected child who experiences the absence of parental guidance. In
typical nineteenth-century fashion, early death in Dreiser is exemplary. Its
function is to illustrate an important truth. Until some assiduous biographer
uncovers new evidence, Carl will remain essentially what Dreiser made of
him: the abandoned son of a father who denied him and of a mother too
young and self-centered to understand the harm caused by her actions. The
biographical truth (that is to say, Dreiser’s truth) is that Carl died much
earlier than the dates on his gravestone may indicate.
IV