sitions editor. His appointment kept T. R. Smith busy turning down book
manuscripts written by Dreiser’s friends and, in at least one case, a girl-
friend. He dismissed Ruth Kennell’s Vanya of the Streets as “a Russian story
of the third class.” (A children’s book, it was published elsewhere in 1931
and became the first of a successful series of such books by Kennell.) Any-
thing with Dreiser’s name on it, of course, was automatically published
by Liveright, including My City, a twenty-page prose and poetry celebra-
tion of New York’s rich and poor—in the words of Robert H. Elias, “of
tall towers and lowly slums, of riches and poverty-stricken tenements, of
the hoping and despairing as though each were an element in a glorious
symphony.”50
In February 1929, the glossy Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan began
the publication of three stories spread over six monthly installments under
the general title of “This Madness.” “You people may not realize it, but in
‘This Madness’ you are publishing the most intimate and important work
so far achieved by me,” Dreiser was quoted as saying at the beginning of
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3 4 7
the third story in the series, “Sidonie,” which was based on his love aªair
with Kirah Markham. They weren’t any more intimate than the stories based
on old romances he had published in Free and Chains, but they were oth-
erwise fairly accurate as to the facts. In literary quality, however, they fell
below those earlier sketches. Today such stories as “This Madness” would
be relegated to the tabloids found at the checkout counters of supermar-
kets, and in the International-Cosmopolitan the latest art from the pen of
the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy squeezed itself down
narrow columns of pages advertising Kotex, toilet bowl cleaners, and mints
for the relief of constipation. The other two stories in the series were drawn
from two very long-term relationships. “Aglaia” was based on Lillian Rosen-
thal, and “Elizabeth” on Anna Tatum—two women he had met around the
time he left Jug. Dreiser’s old concerns about the lack of free will were still
apparent, but the sketches were otherwise lugubrious in their sentimental
descriptions of “romance” gone awry.
At the same time he was finalizing for the press the sketches for A Gallery
of Women, which would appear that fall in two volumes. One of its initial
promotional problems, Dreiser feared, might be the public’s confusing the
“This Madness” stories with those from A Gallery. For they were indeed
similar. Their main interest lay in the fact that the women portrayed were
ultimately defeated after trying to defy convention and follow the exam-
ple of the New Woman. And “Sidonie” was also originally intended for A
Gallery. The Bloom sisters, or at least Estelle, could have fit into “This
Madness.” Instead, they went into A Gallery, but only as minor characters,
the Redmond sisters, in “Regina C——.” Dreiser also wrote a sketch called
“Gloom,” but this portrait of Estelle Kubitz does not appear in either
Gallery or “Madness.” In fact, Dreiser had begun many of these sketches
when he was still with Estelle. Although the idea for such a book proba-
bly solidified after the critical success of Twelve Men, he told Mencken in
1919 that he had planned such a book “for years.” He added: “God what a
work! if I could do it truly—The ghosts of Puritans would rise and gibber
in the streets.”51
When the book finally materialized in fall of 1929, nobody gibbered,
for by now—certainly after Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, if not An American
Tragedy—there was no longer anything shocking about Dreiser’s “philos-
ophy of atomic purposelessness.” Moreover, critics who had admired Twelve
Men were disappointed. Generally, Mencken, who had loved that book
and who was troubled over neither the question of free will nor—for that
matter—the status of women, wrote that A Gallery wasn’t as interesting
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3 4 8
as Twelve Men “because women themselves are considerably less interest-
ing than men.”52 To Dreiser, however, women were at least equally inter-
esting, and not just for their sexuality. The identities of most of the fe-
male characters are now either known for sure or suspected; only two
remain unidentified. “Reina” was based on Helen’s sister, Myrtle Patges.
In an almost Lardneresque tone, Dreiser describes her descent on them in
Hollywood in the early twenties. The woman in “Olive Brand,” as already
noted, is Edith DeLong Jarmuth, who married Edward H. Smith, Dreiser’s
friend at the New York World. Dreiser probably first drafted these two sto-
ries while in California. Another initially drafted there was “Ernestine,”
based on the Hollywood actress Florence Deshon, the mistress of Max East-
man and Charlie Chaplin, both of whom appear in the story under pseu-
donyms. It was initially published as “Portrait of a Woman” in Bookman. 53
“Giª ” is based on Jessie Spaªord, a fortune-teller Dreiser, Mencken, and
the Bloom sisters consulted, generally for laughs.
In “Ernita” Dreiser may have been thinking vaguely of the American rev-
olutionary Emma Goldman, whom he had recently seen in a low state in
Paris, but this story, as already noted, is specifically based on the life of Ruth
Kennell. It was one of the last written, suggesting the lingering impact of
his time in Russia. Ruth “edited” the story for facts, and lamented that the
tale didn’t extend to her having “met a certain great man and [come] to
know him very intimately and with deep, almost maternal, aªection.” Oth-
erwise, she asked him, “Does Ernita get anywhere with her life? I’m afraid
that is the reason you like the story—it just proves your philosophy, that
puny man always is defeated.”54 “Regina C——” refers to Miriam Taylor,
a friend of the Bloom (“Redmond”) sisters and a nurse who became a mor-
phine addict. Dreiser had used his father-in-law, Arch White, in Twelve Men.
In A Gallery he returned to Jug’s family in “Rella” to write about sister Rose
and his attraction to her. “Rona Murtha” stems from Anna Mallon, Arthur
Henry’s second wife. “Emanuela” is either about Thelma Cudlipp (whose
aªair with Dreiser was never sexually consummated) or a literary agent
named Ann Watkins. Since the narrator is frustrated in never bedding
down Emanuela because of her repressed sexuality, it is more likely about
Thelma—who was now on her second marriage. “Esther Norn” is Mary
Pyne, a young artist who became first the wife of Harry Kemp, a Green-
wich Village poet and ne’er-do-well, and then the lover of the writer Hut-
chins Hapgood. Dreiser writes somewhat disparagingly about both men,
but he is particularly hard on Hapgood, who allegedly abandoned Pyne as
she was dying at twenty-five from tuberculosis. Hapgood got revenge a
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3 4 9
couple of years later, leading to Dreiser’s dubious reputation today as an
anti-Semite.
“Ellen Adams Wrynn” is based on the artist Anne Estelle Rice, whom
Dreiser first met in 1912 in Paris.55 Wrynn divorces her rich husband from
the West, who had underwritten her art studies at Columbia University,
for a Scottish artist who ultimately leaves her. The story’s main strength is
to suggest the moral ambivalence of the art world in the postwar years in
New York and Paris, when the impressionists were giving way to the post-
impressionists. Dreiser had already written about this world in its earlier
manifestation in The “Genius, ” where the Ashcan School of realistic art grew
out of the work of magazine illustrators in New York. Now, on the inter-
national level, such impressionists as Monet, Manet, Degas, and Renoir were
being challenged by Matisse, Picasso, and others. “Lucia” is possibly based
on Marguerite Tjader Harris, whose European background may have been
changed in the story. Dreiser had met her as he was finishing the Gallery
sketches.56 This one focuses on a painter who never becomes fully aware
of her limited talent as an artist. (Dreiser had felt, for example, that Kirah
Markham of “Sidonie” lacked the necessary artistic acuteness to succeed as
an actress.) The story is also interesting as a gauge or marker to Dreiser’s
growing hatred of the British and love of the Russians, for Lucia is the prod-
uct of an English mother (cold and conventional) and a Russian father
(warm, the one love of Lucia’s life).
In addition to the unpublished “Gloom,” “Albertine” may also be based
on Estelle Kubitz. The story is about the wife of an art importer who ig-
nores her for his career. After Estelle broke up with Dreiser in 1919, she
married Arthur Williams, a wealthy wine importer. The name “Albertine,”
of course, contains “Bert,” one of Estelle’s nicknames with Dreiser. In the
story she is seduced by the narrator and has a child whom he thinks is his,
pure fantasy on Dreiser’s part since, as we have seen, he was probably ster-
ile. An architect then enters the picture to have an aªair with her. The nar-