Why are people so eager to debase themselves, fling themselves like used rugs at the feet of somebody who has artistic genius? Theodore Dreiser, one of the greatest American writers, was an irredeemably nasty human being. Petty, whiny, self-pitying, antisemitic, plagiarizing, dishonest, incapable of a tiniest gesture of kindness or loyalty, he abused every friend and repaid every favor with meanness. He wasn’t a grand evildoer. Just a petty little bastard.
But women and men let him walk all over them long before he had any money because the temptation of standing close to greatness was impossible to overcome. Fear of death makes people desperate to appear even just as a footnote in the life of somebody who will not be instantly forgotten.
Swanberg wrote a great biography of Dreiser back in the 1960s. The biography is almost as long as Dreiser’s interminable novels but it never bores. I had no idea, for instance, that Dreiser was not into reading and wrote with atrocious spelling mistakes (your for you’re and to for too). It’s incredible how great works of literature spill out of somebody who is superficial, dumb, ignorant and very boring as a human being.
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