Twelve Men

Twelve Men, by Theodore
Dreiser

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Title: Twelve Men
Author: Theodore Dreiser
Release Date: January 17, 2005 [EBook #14717]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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TWELVE MEN
BY

Theodore Dreiser
1919

Contents
I Peter
II A Doer of the Word
III My Brother Paul
IV The Country Doctor
V Culhane, the Solid Man
VI A True Patriarch
VII De Maupassant, Jr.
VIII The Village Feudists
IX Vanity, Vanity
X The Mighty Rourke
XI A Mayor and His People
XII W.L.S.

Peter
In any group of men I have ever known, speaking from the point of
view of character and not that of physical appearance, Peter would
stand out as deliciously and irrefutably different. In the great waste of
American intellectual dreariness he was an oasis, a veritable spring in

the desert. He understood life. He knew men. He was free--spiritually,
morally, in a thousand ways, it seemed to me.
As one drags along through this inexplicable existence one realizes
how such qualities stand out; not the pseudo freedom of strong men,
financially or physically, but the real, internal, spiritual freedom, where
the mind, as it were, stands up and looks at itself, faces Nature unafraid,
is aware of its own weaknesses, its strengths; examines its own and the
creative impulses of the universe and of men with a kindly and
non-dogmatic eye, in fact kicks dogma out of doors, and yet
deliberately and of choice holds fast to many, many simple and human
things, and rounds out life, or would, in a natural, normal, courageous,
healthy way.
The first time I ever saw Peter was in St. Louis in 1892; I had come
down from Chicago to work on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and he
was a part of the art department force of that paper. At that time--and
he never seemed to change later even so much as a hair's worth until he
died in 1908--he was short, stocky and yet quick and even jerky in his
manner, with a bushy, tramp-like "get-up" of hair and beard, most
swiftly and astonishingly disposed of at times only to be regrown at
others, and always, and intentionally, I am sure, most amusing to
contemplate. In addition to all this he had an air of well-being, force
and alertness which belied the other surface characteristics as anything
more than a genial pose or bit of idle gayety.
Plainly he took himself seriously and yet lightly, usually with an air of
suppressed gayety, as though saying, "This whole business of living is
a great joke." He always wore good and yet exceedingly mussy clothes,
at times bespattered with ink or, worse yet, even soup--an amazing
grotesquery that was the dismay of all who knew him, friends and
relatives especially. In addition he was nearly always liberally
besprinkled with tobacco dust, the source of which he used in all forms:
in pipe, cigar and plug, even cigarettes when he could obtain nothing
more substantial. One of the things about him which most impressed
me at that time and later was this love of the ridiculous or the grotesque,
in himself or others, which would not let him take anything in a dull or

conventional mood, would not even permit him to appear normal at
times but urged him on to all sorts of nonsense, in an effort, I suppose,
to entertain himself and make life seem less commonplace.
And yet he loved life, in all its multiform and multiplex aspects and
with no desire or tendency to sniff, reform or improve anything. It was
good just as he found it, excellent. Life to Peter was indeed so splendid
that he was always very much wrought up about it, eager to live, to
study, to do a thousand things. For him it was a workshop for the artist,
the thinker, as well as the mere grubber, and without really criticizing
any one he was "for" the individual who is able to understand, to
portray or to create life, either feelingly and artistically or with
accuracy and discrimination. To him, as I saw then and see even more
clearly now, there was no high and no low. All things were only
relatively so. A thief was a thief, but he had his place. Ditto the
murderer. Ditto the saint. Not man but Nature was planning, or at least
doing,