unnecessary courtroom scene, Isadore Berchansky is clearly helpless in the
face of his criminal proclivities. “It’s their pretty mouths an’ hair an’ the
way they walk an’ them shirtwaists so fine” is the general refrain that defines
this victim of his hormones (“Did ye know, ayther ave ye,” says one of the
reporters on the case, “that there’s something they’ve called hormones
which . . . is poured into the blood streams of every waan ave us which ex-
cites us to the m’aning ave beauty an’ them things”). Dreiser’s argument in
the play, the one he had been elaborating since “Nigger Jeª,” is that when
it came to sexual desire there were certain people who simply couldn’t re-
strain themselves. The playwright was probably instructed not only by Freud
but even more so by the mechanistic theories of behavior of Jacques Loeb,
made popular over the previous ten or fifteen years. Dreiser later acknowl-
edged these twin influences during his Greenwich Village days in A Gallery
of Women. Overestimating what the public reaction might be, Mencken in-
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 6 4
Dreiser in front of his childhood home in Sullivan, Indiana, during the
1915 road trip described in A Hoosier Holiday. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Dreiser in his West Tenth Street apartment in
Greenwich Village. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
William and John Cowper Powys in 1934.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Estelle Bloom Kubitz and Marion Bloom in 1913 in
Houston, Texas—the “Redmond Sisters” in A Gallery
of Women. (Courtesy of Julia Roop Cairns)
Louise Campbell: “My friends all
seem to think I make a much better
fashion model than a writer.”
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Helen Richardson (eventually the
second Mrs. Dreiser) in Hollywood.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Dreiser, photographed for Vanity Fair following
the publication of An American Tragedy, 1925.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Caricature of Dreiser at the Ritz throwing coªee in
the face of Horace Liveright, by Edward Sorel.
( The New Yorker, December 25, 2000)
Iroki (roughly, Japanese for
“beauty”), Dreiser’s country
home in Mt. Kisco, New York.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Sister Mame and brother
Rome Dreiser at Iroki in 1931.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Clara Clark in the 1930s.
(Courtesy of Clara Clark Jaeger)
Yvette Székely at Iroki, about 1930.
(Courtesy of Yvette Székely Eastman)
Dreiser with Marguerite Tjader and an unidentified
young man, at Iroki. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Harriet Bissell, Edgar Lee Masters,
and Dreiser at Iroki in the mid-1930s.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Esther McCoy.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Dreiser on his sixtieth birthday in his West Fifty-Seventh Street
apartment, New York. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Dreiser in Paris in 1938. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Above left: Sherwood
Anderson, by Alfred Steiglitz,
1923. (Art Institute of Chicago).
Above right: Hazel Mack
Godwin. (Van Pelt–Dietrich
Library). Right: Sinclair Lewis
and Dorothy Thompson on
their wedding day in 1928.
(Syracuse University Library)
Dreiser with Marguerite Tjader, niece Vera, and brother
Ed Dreiser, New York, 1944. (Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
S. S. McClure, Willa Cather, Dreiser, and Paul Robeson in 1944.
(Van Pelt–Dietrich Library)
Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place
in the Sun (1951), the second film to be based on
An American Tragedy. (The Kobal Collection)
sisted that “Nothing is more abhorrent to the average man than sexual per-
version.” Equally exasperated, Dreiser could not understand his friend’s
“tirade” over the play. “Admittedly the idea may be badly worked out . . . ,”
he conceded. “But the subject! A poor weak pervert, defended or tolerated
and half concealed by a family for social reasons commits a sex crime—
not shown on the stage—and thereby entails a chain of disaster which de-
stroys the home and breaks the spirit of the father and mother.”52
“A raging, destroying bull, which insists on gormandizing all the females
of a herd,” Dreiser had recently written in A Hoosier Holiday, “is the prod-
uct of nature, not of man. Man did not make the bull or the stallion, nor
did they make themselves. Is nature to be controlled, made over, by man,
according to some secret theory which man, a product of nature, has dis-
covered?” As the tormented Isadore prepares to commit suicide rather than
give himself up to the police, he has little control of either muscle or mind.
His shoulder jerks as he swats the air and proclaims, “It’s the red ones all
the time, not the blacks. They won’t let me alone—always followin’ me
around. G’wan!” His last words of hopelessness echo Hurstwood’s final
frustration.53
–
By the time Dreiser wrote The Hand of the Potter in the fall of 1916, he had
changed steady girlfriends. Kirah had finally bolted in the spring to become
a member of the Provincetown Players. There seems to be a consensus among
Dreiser scholars that she was the only woman he ever truly loved. Certainly,
it is clear that Kirah loved him— one witness noted that she was so “strongly
drawn to him” that before she left town for good she would walk nostalgi-
cally past 165 West Tenth Street—but she would not stay with him on his
terms.54 And whatever Dreiser’s deepest feelings, he would not change his
ways. That summer Mencken, who worked for the Baltimore Sun and came
to New York weekly in conjunction with his editorial duties on The Smart
Set, introduced Dreiser to Estelle Bloom Kubitz, the twenty-nine-year-old
sister of Marion Bloom, who had been Mencken’s lover for the last three
years. Estelle and Marion, six years younger, hailed from New Windsor,
Maryland, farm country of rolling hills forty miles northwest of Baltimore.
The sisters had escaped small-town America to make their way in the world
as prototypes of the “New Woman” of the early twentieth century. They
appear as minor characters in one of the fifteen sketches in A Gallery of
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 6 5
Women (1929), where Dreiser dubbed them the Redmond Sisters—“young
adventurers, without background or means, as are so many of the thousands
who reconnoiter the great cities and without many, if indeed any, severe or
wholly unyielding moral scruples.”55
Their past in rural Maryland sounds like something out of Winesburg,
Ohio. Their father, a dairy farmer and former teacher, committed suicide in
1898 over his imagined sins after the descent on New Windsor of a female
evangelist. Their mother, a cripple, was left at age thirty-eight with six chil-
dren to raise and no money. Estelle ran away at eighteen with a German-
born soldier named Hans Kubitz, whom she eventually married and accom-
panied to Germany. They moved back to the States and settled in Houston;
in 1912 Kubitz deserted her for Mexico. Marion had also left home and
established herself in Washington, D.C., where Estelle joined her. The sis-
ters moved to New York in the winter of 1916. After Estelle linked up with
Dreiser that summer, she slept over at his place occasionally but kept an
apartment with her sister at 274 West Nineteenth Street. The two couples,
Dreiser and Estelle and Mencken and Marion, frequently double-dated,
dining at such restaurants as Lüchow’s on Fourteenth Street, the Brevoort,
and the Lafayette Hotel.
Estelle, a brunette whose dreamy eyes gave her appearance a certain
poignance, became Dreiser’s “secretary” with minimal recompense, having
started by copying out reviews of The “Genius.” 56 She was nicknamed
“Gloom” because of her fondness for Russian novels, but the sobriquet also
reflected her pessimistic state of mind. Like her sister (who dated Mencken
into the 1920s, before he married a younger woman), she was a masochist
when it came to men. Estelle complained bitterly to her sister (who was in-
structed to respond with dual letters, one for her eyes only) about evidence
of Dreiser’s infidelities. Even though he spent most of his leisure time with
Estelle, he continued to engage in casual love aªairs with other women. In
a characteristic diary entry (for May 24, 1917), Dreiser writes: “Lill [Lillian
Rosenthal] comes. Can’t stay long, but we go to bed for a little while. A
heavy screw. Return to my book [The Bulwark]. Finish chapter 16 and 17.
Call up Bert [another nickname for Estelle] at 5 to know about dinner. . . .
Up to Bert’s. We have fine meal. . . . Take a hot bath and go to bed there.
One hour or so of wonderful copulation, then to sleep.”57
They make love in “fierce rounds,” fight, make up. Estelle cries and cries.
All this is described in his diary, which, incredibly, she later typed out and
gave to Mencken, possibly as a form of revenge.58 Mencken became her
confidant during the late teens and often counseled her against becoming
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 6 6
Dreiser’s “doormat”—yet all the while, he exploited her sister Marion in
the same way, if not as nonchalantly. “God in heaven,” Estelle exclaimed