Theodore Dreiser: The American Diaries, 1902-1926 ed. by Thomas P. Riggio, James L. W. West III, and Neda M. Westlake. (review)

Reviews Theodore Dreiser: The American Diaries, 1902-1926. Edited by Thomas P. Riggio, James L. W. West III, and Neda M. Westlake. Philadelphia : Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. 471 pp. Cloth: $28.50. The American Diaries of Theodore Dreiser contains all of Dreiser's preserved diaries witii the exception of those of his European journeys of 1926 and 1927-28. The seven segments of Dreiser's life from 1902 to 1926 represented in the collection are Philadelphia, 1902-03; Savannah and the South, 1916; Greenwich Village, 1917-18; Home to Indiana, 1919; A Trip to the Jersey Shore, 1919; Helen, Hollywood, and the Tragedy, 1919-24; and Motoring to Florida, 1925-26. Of these, the longest and most revealing are the sections involving Dreiser's Greenwich Village years and his relationship with Helen to 1924. Thomas P. Riggio has supplied a helpful introduction to the volume and accurate and full notes. The textual editing by James L. W. West appears to be exemplary with the possible exception of the decision to preserve Dreiser's misspellings. Some aspects of Dreiser's diaries will probably come as a surprise to most readers both of his novels and his autobiographies. The brooding philosopher who is the authorial presence in these works is seldom present. Nor does Dreiser use his diaries as journals or commonplace books to store the ideas, anecdotes, and reflections he will later mine for his work. Rather, the diaries for tile most part record the specific concrete activities of his day-to-day life—whom he was seeing, where he was eating, what things cost, what he was writing, and—most of all—whom he was sleeping with. As a record both of Dreiser's extended love affairs and of his casual rutting between 1917 and 1927, the diaries have some biographical importance. We now know, for example, that Louise Campbell and Dreiser were indeed lovers and that Dreiser's relationship with Estelle Kubitz was a sustained and significant one in the years before he met Helen. And for Helen we now have a full awareness of the deep vein of sensuality in her nature and thus some qualification of the largely spiritualized self-portrait which emerges from her My Life with Dreiser. Much in the diaries, however, confirms what we already know about Dreiser from other sources—his superstition, his combination in any one relationship of heartfelt sympathy and casual cruelty, his sexual "varietism," and so on. Even the record of Dreiser's literary activity—when he was writing what—is for the most part available elsewhere. It could thus be advanced that since the diaries add little to our knowledge of Dreiser the artist or Dreiser the inner man, they might best have been maintained in unpublished form for the specialized use of future biographers. Extremely rare in the American Diaries is an entry, such as the following from Dreiser's 1902 diary, in which our sense of the quintessential Dreiser is refined and clarified: Somehow after a beautiful day of this kind their is always a revulsion. It is too beautiful. We dream to deeply. I came home, wondering as the twilight fell whether my dreams were to come true and then I found as I always do that I was expecting them too soon. Not now. Not now. Somehow now is almost always commonplace. We see when we return that we have to wait. To be alone, to live alone, to wait, wait, wait, that is the lot accorded us, and only the dreams are real. The substance of them is never with us—never attainable (p. 106). But this kind of passage, echoing in this instance the heart of Sister Carrie, seldom occurs. Instead, die Diaries are almost a parodie fulfillment in the representation of Dreiser's own life of Stuart P. Sherman's famous remark that the Cowperwood Trilogy is a huge club sandwich of alternating layers of sex and business. If one allows that Dreiser's business is his writing, a club sandwich is what his life seemed to be. A typical day will 116Reviews find him arranging and conducting a number of trysts while squeezing in several stints at writing and revision...