Judge — July 25, 1931 — page 26: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

\ \ 23 \ $a \\ \\ Ww AT AT \\ \\ \ \ \ \ \\ \\W \\\\ V BUSHMILLER, SUDGING | | Tueee are 589 pages in “Dawn,” old Dr. Dreiser's little memoir of his youth, and that only gets him up to age 19. By a rough calculation, this comes to 235,000 words, at least 35,000 of which could be eliminated by a conscientious blue-penciling of the word ‘‘chemism™ wherever it oc- curs. You could pick up another hun- dred thousand by cutting out phrases like “as I now recall” and “as it af terwards proved,” which would brin: the volume down to almost pocket s —but it wouldn't be Dreiser. It would still be a prett but not the insomr today, The old master has either got a marvelous memory or else he’s a ter- rible liar. He puts down, as clear as if it was yesterday, the fact that when he left Warsaw (Indiana) to seek his fortune in the Windy City (a good place for him to start, too), his mother packed into a shoe box a cold roast chicken, part of a pie, and some bread and apples. In Chicago, Drei- ser was later joined by his mother and his hordes of brothers and sisters. and in “Dawn” he records every job | held by each of them, as well as’ by mself, with the weekly wage of h, the reason each was fired after how long. But his sexual memor good soporific, destroyer it is is what will ader. “Theo,” as his mother called him, records the confound the average name and address of every moll that so much as smiled at him, from the age of puberty onward. When a school teacher would ask him to stay after school and hand out the old mallarkey about “you can do anything you set your mind to,” Theo stood there wondering if he was expected to kiss her, and he describes in detail the reluctance he saw in teacher's eyes when he finally trudged off with his speller under his arm. He passed up most of his opportunities—they seemed opportunities to him, at any rate, and he spends pages after each lost conquest mentally booting him- self in the autobiographical Annie Fay. Toward the end of the book, though, he begins to hit his strid vhich gives promise that the next in- stallment of his amours will make pretty juicy reading. As a matter of fact “Dawn” itself is interesting reading—in the same sense and for the same reason that “The President's Daughter” was interesting reading. Because, in other words, it gi a complete, if frequently unconscious, picture of the author. comicbooks.com