A Book About Myself

by Theodore Dreiser

In addition to this I was filled with an intense sympathy for the woes of others, life in all its helpless degradation and poverty, the unsatisfied dreams of people, their sweaty labors, the things they were compelled to endure—nameless impositions, curses, brutalities—the things they would never have, their hungers, thirsts, half-formed dreams of pleasure, their gibbering insanities and beaten resignations at the end. I have sobbed dry sobs looking into what I deemed to be broken faces and the eyes of human failures. A shabby tumbledown district or doorway, a drunken woman being arraigned before a magistrate, a child dying in a hospital, a man or woman injured in an accident—the times unbidden tears have leaped to my eyes and my throat has become parched and painful over scenes of the streets, the hospitals, the jails! I have cried so often that I have felt myself to be a weakling; at other times I have been proud of them and of my great rages against fate and the blundering, inept cruelty of life. If there is a God, conscious and personal, and He considers the state of man and the savagery of His laws and His indifferences, how He must smile at little insect man’s estimate of Him! It is so flattering, so fatuously unreasoning, that only a sardonic devil could enjoy it.

I was happy enough in my work although at times despondent lest all the pleasures that can come to youth from health, courage, wealth and opportunity should fail me while I was working and trying to get somewhere. I had health yet I imagined I had not because I was not a Sandow, an athlete, and my stomach, due to an undiscovered appendix, gave me some trouble. As to courage, when I examined myself in that direction I fancied that I had none at all. Would I slip out if a dangerous brawl were brewing anywhere? Certainly. Well, then, I was a coward. Could I stand up and defend myself against a man of my own height and weight? I doubted it, particularly if he were well-trained. In consequence, I was again a coward. There was no hope for me among decently courageous men. Could I play tennis, baseball, football? No; not successfully. Assuredly I was a weakling of the worst kind. Nearly everybody could do those things, and nearly all youths were far more proficient in all the niceties of life than was I: manners, dancing, knowledge of dress and occasions. Hence I was a fool. The dullest athlete of the least proficiency could overcome me; the most minute society man, if socially correct, was infinitely my superior. Hence what had I to hope for? And when it came to wealth and opportunity, how poor I seemed! No girl of real beauty and force would have anything to do with a man who was not a success; and so there I was, a complete failure to begin with.

The aches and pains that went with all this, the amazing depression, all but suicidal. How often have I looked into comfortable homes and wished that some kindly family would give me shelter! And yet half knowing that had it been offered I would have refused it. How often have I looked through the windows of some successful business firm and wished I had achieved ownership or stewardship, a position similar to that of any of the officers and managers inside! To be president or vice-president or secretary of something, some great thrashing business of some kind. Great God, how sublime it seemed! And yet if I had only known how centrally controlling the tool of journalism could be made! It mattered not then that I was doing fairly well, that most of my employers had been friendly and solicitous as to my welfare, that the few girls I had approached had responded freely enough—still I was a failure.

I rapidly became familiar with the city news department of the Globe-Democrat. Its needs, aside from great emergencies, were simple enough: interviews, the doings of conventions of various kinds (wholesale grocers, wholesale hardware men, wholesale druggists), the plans of city politicians when those could be discovered, the news of the courts, jails, city hospitals, police courts, the deaths of well-known people, the goings-on in society, special functions of one kind and another, fires, robberies, defalcations. For the first few weeks nothing of importance happened. I was given the task evenings of looking in at the North Seventh Street police station, a slow district, to see if anything had happened, and was naturally able to add to my depression by contemplating the life about there. Again, I attended various churches to hear sermons, interviewed the Irish boss of the city, Edward Butler, an amazing person with a head like that of a gnome or ogre, who immediately took a great fancy to me and wanted me to come and see him again (which I did once).

He has always stuck in my mind as one of the odd experiences of my life. He lived in a small red brick family dwelling just beyond the prostitution area of St. Louis, which stretched out along Chestnut Street between Twelfth and Twenty-second, and was the city’s sole garbage contractor (out of which he was supposed to have made countless thousands) as well as one of its principal horse-shoers, having many blacksmithing shops, and was incidentally its Democratic or Republican boss, I forget which, a position he retained until his death.

I first saw him at a political meeting during my first few weeks in St. Louis, and the manner in which he arose, the way in which he addressed his hearers, the way in which they listened to him, all impressed me. Subsequently, being sent to his house, I found him in his small front parlor, a yellow plush album on the marble-topped center table, horse-hair furniture about the room, a red carpet, crayon enlargements of photographs of his mother and father. But what force in the man! What innate gentility of manner and speech! He seemed like a prince disguised as a blacksmith.

“So ye’ve come to interview me,” he said soothingly. “Ye’re from the Globe-Democrat—well, that paper’s no particular friend of mine, but ye can’t help that, can ye?” and then he told me whatever it was I wanted to know, giving me no least true light, you may be sure. At the conclusion he offered me a drink, which I refused. As I was about to leave he surveyed me pleasantly and tolerantly.

“Ye’re a likely lad,” he said, laying an immense hand on one of my lean shoulders, “and ye’re jest startin’ out in life, I can see that. Well, be a good boy. Ye’re in the newspaper business, where ye can make friends or enemies just as ye choose, and if ye behave yerself right ye can just as well make friends. Come an’ see me some time. I like yer looks. I’m always here av an evenin’, when I’m not attendin’ a meetin’ av some kind, right here in this little front room, or in the kitchen with me wife. I might be able to do something fer ye sometime—remember that. I’ve a good dale av influence here. Ye’ll have to write what ye’re told, I know that, so I won’t be offended. So come an’ see me, an’ remember that I want nothin’ av ye,” and he gently ushered me out and closed the door behind me.

But I never went, at least not for anything for myself. The one time I asked him for a position for a friend who wanted to work on the local street-cars as a conductor he wrote across the letter: “Give this man what he wants.” It was wretchedly scrawled (the man brought it back to me before presenting it) and was signed “edward butler.” But the man was given the place at once.

Although Butler was an earnest Catholic, he was supposed to control and tax the vice of the city; which charge may or may not have been true. One of his sons owned and managed the leading vaudeville house in the city, a vulgar burlesque theater, at which the ticket taker was Frank James, brother of the amazing Jesse who terrorized Missouri and the Southwest as an outlaw at one time and enriched endless dime novel publishers afterward. As dramatic critic of the Globe-Democrat later I often saw him. Butler’s son, a more or less stodgy type of Tammany politician, popular with a certain element in St. Louis, was later elected to Congress.