Time and again, young women from around the country would read one of Dreiser’s books and find themselves writing the author a letter. They would share a bit of themselves with him: their questions, their responses to his work, their thoughts on literature, their ideas. And he would write back. Often he would invite them to visit him. And many did. What drew these young women to Dreiser was a thirst for intellectual stimulation and sympathy that he seemed exceptionally willing to provide.
One such woman, Clara Jaeger, was lured to New York to work for Dreiser by a letter that began, “Clara, Clara — intense, aesthetic, poetic, your letter speaks to me … from Philadelphia, where, once, for a time, I dwelt … would you come to see me here in New York, and we can talk? …”55 (It was always the promise of talk that lured women to him, the sense that he understood their questions, hopes, dreams — and that he had the knowledge and experience to stimulate their thinking as no
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one else they had ever met could. ‘‘We talked easily,” Clara Jaeger recalled thinking, soon after she and Dreiser met, “I felt completely at home with him. … I knew we would never have to make conversation.” Over a “seven-course dinner and a bottle of red wine,” Jaeger remembers, “on and on we talked. We talked of Plato and Greek art, of astronomy, of Leonardo da Vinci, and we talked about Dreiser. …”56 And Marguerite Tjader Harris recalled, “From the beginning our friendship was based on a love of things outside of ourselves [the work of John Cowper] Powys, Russian literature, a probing into the mysteries beyond life; an impersonal element, sometimes chilling — like the thought of interplanetary space.”57)
Swanberg, puzzling over the roots of women’s attraction to Dreiser, concludes that “his magnetic power over women was composed of something more than sex attraction. For as long as his interest lasted, it was often intense, kindly, flattering, truly sympathetic and wonderfully understanding — indeed, perhaps too powerful to last very long.”58 Marguerite Harris called him “super-sensitive, a doctor of souls, knowing them and seeing their secrets.”59 Lawrence Hussman, borrowing a phrase Molly Haskell used to describe Woody Allen, recently called Dreiser a “Casanova of conversational empathy.”60
Dreiser’s empathy and rapport certainly played a key role in many young women’s responses to him, but his willingness to talk about books and ideas, to point them towards new intellectual adventures, to take them seriously as thinking human beings, was as seductive as his attentive listening. “Dreiser keeps giving me books to read,” Clara Jaeger writes. “He is certainly determined to educate me. I have now read Dostoyevsky thoroughly: The Idiot, adored by T. D., The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment. Then Thomas Hardy, Somerset Maugham, especially Of Human Bondage, Zola’s Nana and Madame Bovary, and John Cowper Powys.”61
As they struggled to make a place for themselves in a literary market that was unfamiliar and somewhat frightening to them, a number of ambitious, bright young women found in Dreiser a supportive and encouraging ally. The correspondence might begin with comments about one of Dreiser’s books; the woman might send some work of her own; in the end she would ask for Dreiser’s help in marketing her writing.62 Dreiser would urge colleagues to be on the lookout for jobs for some of these young women.63 For others he would offer to write “blurb.”64 For some who went to work for him, the experience of being taken seriously as a person who could think, write, edit, and be of help
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to a great writer, was intoxicating.65 “I have found a wonderful friend and champion,” Clara Jaeger wrote, “ … And to top it all, I have a job and a salary, doing work that can only be intensely interesting. I am confident that I can edit those long sentences.”66
Dreiser placed Jaeger’s novel with an agent, and she was thrilled to be offered a $300 advance. But her mentor gave her some cautionary advice: “He suggests that I hold the novel, not necessarily accept this offer which has come so easily, and aim to give the book more ‘social’ emphasis. After I have polished it, I can try one of the really first-class publishing houses; he says he will help me with the revision.”67 Although Dreiser was a literary and intellectual mentor for many women, he was, in turn, dependent on their professional competence. Yet he was also known to exploit and betray bright, talented women who made the mistake of trusting him, thereby revealing a curiously ambivalent attitude towards their professional role.
As Thomas Riggio has observed,
women came to be his major prepublication readers. … The diaries find Dreiser constantly submitting his writing to the scrutiny of one or another of his close female friends. Many of his intimate and long-term relations — with Louise Campbell, Anna Tatum, Lillian Rosenthal, to name a few — began with letters that soundly criticized one of his books. The best part of the large correspondence he maintained with women, often for years without meeting them or for decades after their intimacies ended, revolves around their consideration of his work. As his writing became less accessible to old friends like Arthur Henry and Mencken, he came to rely more on the talented women he knew to judge his initial drafts.”68
Did Dreiser view the advice he was getting from these women as a professional service that deserved compensation? The women on whose advice he relied most — such as Anna Tatum and Marguerite Tjader Harris — may have sometimes worked for him as unpaid editors and secretaries.”69 On those occasions when Dreiser did pay a woman a salary to work as his secretary, he often assumed that her sexual favors were part of the bargain.70 (Clara Jaeger does not seem to have objected; at least her memoir treats the episode without resentment, and with equanimity. Without questioning her right or ability to make her own choices, one might nonetheless underline the power differential that obtained between the middle-aged, confident, established man of letters and the vulnerable, insecure, confused young woman. This asymmetry, combined
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with the fact that the intimacies were treated — along with the bottle of wine and seven-course dinner — as part and parcel of the unwritten contract whereby Dreiser had just that day secured her services as a secretary, give one pause. Her choice may have been her own, but its context may have been somewhat coercive.71)
The professionally competent, ambitious, and bright women who connected themselves to Dreiser found that there were other risks as well. Clara Jaeger made a note of the fact, for example, that Helen Dreiser had “dropped everything, given up her career as an actress, to follow him.’’72 While he was attracted to ambitious women who took their work seriously, they had to be willing single-mindedly to put him first.
The loyalty Dreiser demanded from the professional women on whose literary and editorial judgment he relied seems to have been rather one-sided. Dreiser wrote a secretary connected with the Little Theatre whom he had met in Chicago, “to arrange for her to come to New York and serve as his helpmate and literary assistant.” When she did, he “dropped her cold.” His friend Floyd Dell was shocked by his brutal abandonment of her.73 The literary agent Flora Mai Holly was another victim of Dreiser’s double standard. After persuading her to take a cut in her commission, Dreiser summarily discharged her. It was an ungrateful blow to the woman who had persuaded B. W. Dodge and Co. to reissue Sister Carrie.74
Exploitation and abandonment were not the only risks a woman undertook by working for Dreiser; there was always the chance that he would plagiarize from her as well. As Swanberg notes:
He was apt to steal ideas without realizing it, or indeed caring very much. Miss [Sally] Kussell had written a short story about a poor dressmaker who fell in love with a struggling artist, which she showed him. He shrugged, saying it was not bad. Later, he wrote a story on that identical theme, giving it to her to edit. He was surprised when she pointed out that it was her idea, having forgotten that entirely.75
What did Dreiser think of the idea that women had sexual drives not unlike those of men? He thought it was terrific — if it drove them into his bed. If it did not, however, he could be shamelessly insulting about — what else? — their commitment to literature!76 “Forceful women who kept their distance,” Swanberg notes, “could reduce him to erotic frenzy,”77 for Dreiser’s own sexual drive was uncontrollable. While Swanberg’s prudery has discredited some of his judgments of Dreiser,78 no one has ac-
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cused him of putting words in the mouths of the friends and family members he interviewed in his biography. Dreiser’s wife Jug commented to a male lawyer and friend who visited her bedside when she was sick,