for years now, and another unidentified woman listed only as “Ch——”
in the diary. He spent one of his last evenings with Esther, who wanted to
know “if she can’t come to London and return with me!”28 B—— also
wanted to meet Dreiser in Europe on his way home from Russia. Helen,
he probably noted with a smile, was kept busy and “all agog” with the finan-
cial responsibilities she would have to shoulder in Dreiser’s absence.
On October 19, Dreiser sailed on the Mauretania, the sister ship of the
ill-fated Lusitania and the same one he had taken to Europe in 1912. He
was armed with letters of introduction to, among many others, the Russian
filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Trotsky’s sister Olga Davidovna Kameneva,
the Russian critic Sergei Dinamov, who was already familiar with Dreiser’s
work, and Big Bill Haywood, the labor leader on whom Dreiser had based
the character of John Ferguson in “The Girl in the Co‹n.” Haywood had
fled the United States in 1920 while awaiting retrial for violating the Sedi-
tion Act and was now dying in Moscow. There was a send-oª dinner for
Dreiser at a restaurant in the Village attended by many of his friends, in-
cluding T. R. Smith, Ernest Boyd, and Floyd Dell. One of the guests was
Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, who was on his way to Russia in the
hope of devoting his art to the cause of Soviet propaganda. Like a good so-
cialist, he went third-class on the same ship on which Dreiser was billeted
in first. It didn’t keep them apart; nor did their lack of a common language,
thanks to an interpreter who was traveling with Dreiser’s party. Dreiser was
enormously impressed with this artist and the story of his “artistic history.”
After seeing samples of his paintings one evening, he took a bottle of whiskey
and his interpreter down to third class and talked through half the night
with Rivera.29
Their ship docked in Cherbourg on October 25, and Dreiser, traveling
with the publisher Ben Huebsch and another companion, took the train
down to Paris, where they spent the night at the Hotel Terminus near Gare
de l’Est. On the train he fell for the smile of a beggar girl around thirteen.
All the rest of the next day he found it impossible to shake oª the image
of her “natural beauty and a most moving smile.” France, he thought, had
fairly well recovered from the Great War. They saw the usual Parisian sights,
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the Palais de Justice, the shops along Boulevard St. Michel, the book stalls
on the Seine, the Jardin de Luxembourg. He encountered Victor Llona, the
French translator of An American Tragedy, and a young writer named Ernest
Hemingway. Dreiser noted in his diary that he was the author of The Sun
Also Rises (1926), but he had nothing else to record about this rising star.
They sat at a sidewalk cafe, as the “talk, talk, talk” finally turned to James
Joyce.30
The next day, October 27, Dreiser and his party caught the overnight
train to Berlin. As the train crossed Germany the following morning, he
admired its cleanliness—“the lovely, carefully gardened fields.” In Berlin he
came down with bronchitis “worse than ever.” He was subsequently warned
by several doctors that his illness was too serious to chance a trip into sub-
freezing Russia. An X-ray falsely revealed a heart problem, but Dreiser boldly
pushed ahead, telling two of the physicians, “I do not happen to be afraid
of death.” This rings true when we consider how severely his bronchitis, a
life-long malady, had flared up this time. Dorothy Thompson, a foreign
correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening
Post living in Berlin, was planning to cover the tenth anniversary in Rus-
sia. She tried to minister to Dreiser’s health problems, to “mother” him, as
she put it. Her fiancé of only a few weeks, Sinclair Lewis, was also in Berlin.
Lewis, whose fame from Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), and other suc-
cessful novels overshadowed Dreiser’s (even after An American Tragedy),
thought Dreiser liked him. But Dreiser’s diary for that evening tells another
story. Lewis had failed to review An American Tragedy. “I never could like
the man,” Dreiser recorded. “He proceeds—and at once, to explain why
he did not review.” He suspected that Lewis himself was concealing his own
dislike, “but some how feels it his duty to pay attention to me.”31 It was
Dorothy that Dreiser liked—too much, of course.
The train for Moscow departed on November 2. Crossing the plains of
Poland, he noted that they resembled those of Kansas. Once at the Rus-
sian border and across it, he felt “a change at once. Something softer—more
emotional, less iron.” Thompson, traveling on the same train, told Lewis,
who had delayed his visit to Moscow to work on a new book, that there
loomed over the tracks at the border “a huge, glowing red star.”32 As they
changed trains, the guests were treated to a reception at the depot. Once
in Moscow Dreiser and the other visitors invited to the celebration of the
October Revolution were put up at the Grand Hotel in view of the Krem-
lin. At the hotel Thompson was still trying to “mother” Dreiser, even after
he had transformed himself into “quite a gay dog” in Moscow as his bron-
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3 3 9
chitis improved. Dreiser imagined she was flirting with him, and on the
evening of the big day, November 7, following an endless parade past the
Kremlin, he made his move. “After a supper with the American delegation,”
he noted in his diary, “she comes to my room with me to discuss commu-
nism & we find we agree on many of its present lacks as well as its hope-
ful possibilities. I ask her to stay but she will not—tonight.”33
Dreiser was apparently unru›ed by the rejection, thinking it a mere
prelude. At any rate, he had already realized Helen’s fears and become entan-
gled with “one of those Russian girls.” Actually, she was an American expa-
triate by the name of Ruth Kennell, who after their first sexual encounter
complained that he had worn no “protection.” A native of Hobart, Okla-
homa, she was the thirty-two-year-old divorced mother of one son, who
was now living with his father in England. The couple had become involved
with I.W.W. politics in Berkeley, California. They left the United States for
Siberia in 1922 with an American engineering group that had been con-
tracted by the Soviets to run mining and manufacturing projects there. Ken-
nell eventually took a Russian lover and later came to Moscow, where she
worked as a librarian. She was enthusiastic about the Soviet program, and
it seems she was ultimately instrumental in converting Dreiser to believe
in the New Russia—though they quarreled repeatedly over these issues while
together there. Kennell was the basis for “Ernita” in A Gallery of Women
and one of possibly two characters in the book with whom Dreiser actu-
ally had an aªair.
Like Dreiser, her radicalism had its origins in an impoverished back-
ground. Ernita (or Ruth) in Gallery tells the narrator, “Long before Com-
munism flashed into being in Russia, I felt there should be some change
somewhere—a new social order in which war would be obviated by social
justice—some world union of the workers or the oppressed.” In 1969, with-
out revealing the full extent of her relationship with Dreiser, Kennell pub-
lished her own account of his travels there. Twenty-two years and the Cold
War had not changed her mind. She gladly quoted Dreiser’s prediction that
the United States would “eventually be sovietized.” Since coming to Moscow
she had been living in a small room in the Lux, described in “Ernita,” as “a
large rambling hotelly sort of an aªair with communal kitchens and baths
on every floor—the Communist International Headquarters.”34 Without
Kennell, Dreiser might have cut short his visit to Russia and returned home
with most of the other invited dignitaries after November 10. He had taken
to drinking vodka and brooding in his hotel suite because he wasn’t being
given enough attention or freedom to see what he wanted. Scott Nearing,
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another American expatriate working for VOKS, the Soviet agency for Cul-
tural Relations with Foreigners, arranged for Kennell to become his per-
sonal secretary and to accompany Dreiser on his inspection of some of the
Russian provinces.35
Evidently, Dreiser soon afterward decided definitely to write another
travel book, for he began gathering notes and having Kennell type up his
daily diary entries. They show him trying to fathom the Russian mind. Af-
ter the Revolution, it might be true that Russian waiters served food, not
people, but the Russian people were also sluggish and slovenly before the