or, as she eventually did in Sullivan, Indiana, running a boardinghouse,
Sarah Dreiser evidently toyed with the feelings of her children in order to
command the obedience and allegiance that their father never received. One
evening, young Theo came upon his mother wearing “a white dressing-
sacque” with “a pair of worn slippers on her feet.” When the boy ran his
hand over her toes, which extended from the slippers, she asked the ques-
tion that rang in the author’s memory for the rest of his life: “See poor
mother’s shoes? Aren’t you sorry she has to wear such torn shoes?” As he
burst into tears, he remembered, “she took me up on her lap and held me
against her soft breasts and smoothed my head. Then I felt even more help-
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
3
less and pitiful than before, for it was within the power of my mother’s voice
to make me cry at any time.”6 Dreiser’s lifelong sympathy and tenderness for
the poor, certainly grounded in the hard-luck existence of his youth and ulti-
mately leading him to the religion of socialism, was probably born that day.
Sarah’s histrionic ways may also have helped lead three of the boys in the
family to the stage: Theo, whose first literary ambition was to be a play-
wright; Paul, the eldest, who composed sentimental songs in the Gay Nineties
era of Broadway; and Ed, the youngest, who became an actor of some prom-
inence in New York. One of his mother’s “tricks,” Dreiser remembered, was
to threaten to leave the children when they were misbehaving—sometimes
even leaving the house and hiding outside. “If no contrition on our part
was visible, she would produce her shawl and Mennonite bonnet, and pack-
ing a small basket, would hang it on her arm and start to go.” This raised
“a storm of wails and tears” from the children until she relented. When
finally she did leave them by death’s door in her mid-fifties, Dreiser con-
tinued to fear her loss in dreams for the rest of his life. “I can see her now,”
wandering about their humble home, he wrote in Dawn, with “shreds of
slippers on her feet, at times the typical Mennonite bonnet pulled over her
face, her eyes wide and expressive, bestirring herself about the things which
concerned her home and family.”7 Dreiser never found a woman’s love to
fill the void his mother left, although his quest for that mother-lover led
him through a lifelong series of aªairs.
–
What his mother thought of her own marital relationship cannot be told,
although his parents evidently remained loyal to one another for thirty-eight
years, despite hardships and long separations. Certainly from his children’s
perspective John Paul Dreiser was not always an easy man to love or ad-
mire. At twenty-three he had fled Mayen, a small town near Coblentz in
Germany, in order to avoid conscription into the Prussian army. John Paul’s
memories of his youth seem to have been mixed. In A Traveler at Forty (1913),
Dreiser recalled that he had heard of Mayen ever since he was three or four
and “dandled on my father’s knee.” With typical German pride in the fa-
therland, John Paul Dreiser spoke of his native village’s loveliness—“how
the hills rose about it, how grape-growing was its principal industry, how
there were castles there and grafs [counts] and rich burghers, and how there
was a wall about the city which in his day constituted it an armed fortress,
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
4
and how often as a little child [his father] had been taken out through some
one of its great gates seated on the saddle of some kindly minded cavalry-
man and galloped about the drill-ground.” But other memories were less
pleasant. The senior Dreiser, who left behind twenty-one siblings and half-
siblings, had lost his mother early on and became an unwelcome stepson
when his father remarried. Once, he told Theo, he was whipped for steal-
ing cherries from the overhanging branches of a tree belonging to a neigh-
boring priest. While he was secretly feasting on his forbidden fruit, his step-
mother had informed on him. ( Years later, when Dreiser visited Mayen in
1912, it reminded him of Terre Haute: “Now I can see why my father and
so many other Germans from this region settled in southern Indiana. It is
like their old home. The wide, flat fields are the same.”)8
After he left Mayen, John Paul spent some time in Paris, then sailed for
New York City, where he arrived in 1844. He worked in woolen mills in
New York and Connecticut before moving west to Dayton, Ohio, where
he met Sarah and eloped with her to Fort Wayne, Indiana. He worked in
a small woolen mill there, and by 1858 the couple had moved to Terre Haute,
where their fortunes seemed to improve. By this time, they had had their
first child after the loss of the three boys, and John Paul was a mill super-
visor. Sometime in the 1860s, Dreiser’s father prospered even more, be-
coming a mill owner in the nearby coal-mining town of Sullivan. There he
made enough money to aªord to donate the land for St. Joseph’s, the town’s
first Catholic Church. But fate, which so often intervenes in the lives of
Dreiser’s fictional characters, intervened here. The woolen mill burned down
in 1865, and John Paul was seriously injured by a falling beam during its re-
building a year later. Although he invested in another Sullivan mill in 1870,
his proprietorship did not last long, either because of economic conditions
or as the result of the head injury he had suªered in 1866. By 1871, when
Dreiser was born, the now chronically unemployed John Paul was fifty years
old and the father of nine living children. Ed, the youngest, would arrive
two years later.9
John Paul frequently spoke German at home, relied heavily on the
German-American community wherever the family lived, and was pro-
foundly religious. Like the withered patriarch in Jennie Gerhardt (1911), he
feared any and all gossip about his children. And like Gerhardt, he believed
he would be punished for their sins. Dreiser, along with his brothers and
sisters, probably knew enough German to comprehend their father, but,
again like the Gerhardts, he and the others no doubt responded in English.10
We can fairly trust this second novel for a general view of Dreiser’s home
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
5
life, for he drew directly upon his life in his early fiction—and not so in-
directly afterward. Indeed, he seems to have found almost nothing more
interesting than his own life and his encounters with the world. This obses-
sion with himself shows very much in Dawn, where no detail, it seems, is
treated routinely. The picture of Gerhardt as a doddering old man who took
odd jobs and worked as night watchman parallels roughly the depiction of
Dreiser’s father in Dawn.
–
By the time Dreiser entered school, the family had moved several times
within Terre Haute, mainly out of economic necessity: from Ninth Street
to Twelfth, Fourteenth, and Thirteenth streets. On Fourteenth Street, near
Walnut, they occupied rooms in a boardinghouse. There the shy Theo mar-
veled at “a certain woman—a vulgar showy creature, probably—who moved
about this place in silks, satins and laces, a jeweled and perfumed lady with
a wealth of light yellow hair.”11 Possibly she was a prostitute, for the Dreiser
family soon chose to move to a smaller house on Thirteenth, and Sarah be-
gan to take in washing. Whatever the case, the peripatetic family was to en-
counter more than its share of prostitutes living next door or even under
its very roof.
One of Dreiser’s most galling memories of childhood was having to at-
tend Catholic schools, whose pupils, he later thought, were routinely brain-
washed with “psychopathic balderdash.” But John Paul insisted— over the
muted objections of his wife and in spite of the family’s lack of money—
that all his children be educated in parochial schools, which charged tuition
while the public schools were free. Dreiser and the youngest of his siblings,
Claire and Ed, were enrolled in the German adjunct of Terre Haute’s St.
Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on Ninth Street. “I often think,” he wrote
in bitter reflection of the experience, “of the hundreds of thousands of chil-
dren turned out of the Catholic schools at twelve or thirteen years of age,
with not a glimmer of true history or logic.” The classrooms were austere:
their bare floors and hard wooden desks much scarred by knives and stained
with ink. Worse yet, the classes were packed with as many as fifty students.
On a dais before them sat a seemingly ancient nun in black, her oval face