Corresponding Stories: Dreiser's Red Typewriter in Russia, Ruth Epperson Kennell
2024; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 56; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19405103.56.2.01
ISSN1940-5103
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoOn November 11, 1927, Theodore Dreiser dined with Ruth Epperson Kennell at the Lux Hotel in Moscow and "listened to the story of her life."1 Kennell (1893–1977), at that time thirty-four and an aspiring author, served as Dreiser's private secretary during his tour of the Soviet Union in 1927–28; he was fifty-six and at the peak of his career. The tale Kennell told Dreiser that evening formed the basis of a sketch ("Ernita") that Dreiser wrote and published, without Kennell's consent, in A Gallery of Women (1929), a two-volume book with thinly-fictionalized portraits of women Dreiser had known, usually in the biblical sense. Kennell was furious when A Gallery of Women was published with the story she had explicitly told Dreiser not to include. Still, she had told "the great realist" the "story of her life." Indeed, without "Ernita," Kennell's fascinating history would mostly be lost to the record. Despite having written her own memoir detailing the same events, she ultimately asked Dreiser to drop "Ernita." Her own story of the events narrated in "Ernita"is still unpublished.Kennell's ambivalence about "Ernita" echoed a larger tension in her relationship with Dreiser, which was—and to some degree still is—paradigmatic of relationships between (older) male writers/artists and their (younger) female counterparts. Dreiser's decision to publish "Ernita" over Kennell's objections echoed his attitude toward her in the bedroom as well as his attitude toward her as a collaborator and as an author in her own right. On the one hand, not only did Dreiser appreciate Kennell's skill as an editor and even as a writer, he also recognized what made Kennell captivating as a character and as a storyteller. Indeed, he helped Kennell launch her career as an author. Like other men with whom Kennell worked, Dreiser accepted Kennell's assistance with his writing but never acknowledged her as a collaborator. And, not coincidentally, Dreiser, along with at least one other would-be male collaborator, encouraged Kennell to write for children. As it happened, her children's books were groundbreaking and critically acclaimed, especially in the early 1930s. But given their subject matter and pro-Soviet point of view, these books could not survive the Cold War and went out of print. Today she is largely forgotten.Dreiser and Kennell's negotiations over whether he could publish the "Ernita" sketch point to broader and gendered power relations around consent (both textual and sexual), professional ambition, collaboration, reputation, and self-realization. Reading "Ernita" alongside Dreiser and Kennell's correspondence, Kennell's memoirs, and a Russian journalist's portraits of Kennell published late in her life also points to the power dynamics around life stories in the era of literary realism and well beyond: whose stories get published and who gets to tell them?Thomas Riggio argues that "Dreiser exhibited intense curiosity about the ways women lived their lives in his time."2 Clare Eby, examining Dreiser's oeuvre as a whole, claims "it is unusual to find such repeated instances of female agency in the works of a male writer of Dreiser's generation."3 Indeed, Riggio asserts that "biographers eventually will have to explain why Dreiser, for all his unsavory reputation as a careless philanderer, has inspired more . . . reminiscences [by women who knew him] than any other American writer."4 Nearly all these "reminiscences," it must be said, were by former lovers who had also been his assistants, secretaries, or editors. Kennell was one among many women who were to play the "dual role of lover/editor" in Dreiser's life.5Kennell had a complicated relation both to her aspirations as a writer and her sexuality. By her own accounting, she was "born a little too soon to be completely emancipated by the World War from old moral traditions, but soon enough to become fired with the ideas of international social revolution."6 She claimed to have been "an abnormally undeveloped girl," possessing "the feeling of shame about sex common to my generation." However, "from adolescence, social idealism and ambition to accomplish great things, perhaps be a writer, an artist, an actress, or a leader of my downtrodden sex, took the place for me of interest in boys."7Kennell was among the hundreds of "American Girls in Red Russia," among them "stenographers, nurses, dancers, painters, teachers, sculptors and writers—serious maidens, determined to take part in the New life that is growing so swiftly"—who traveled to Soviet Russia shortly after the Bolshevik revolution.8 Members of the "Lost Generation" (typically gendered male) are remembered for escaping a culturally bankrupt American civilization by retreating to Paris but few today recall that thousands of Americans, among them significant numbers of educated, ambitious women, made their way to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, often without male chaperones. In the early 1920s, when entry was still restricted, Kennell and other women gained entry to the "new Russia" by offering their services at one of the agricultural or industrial collectives sponsored by the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia and primarily staffed by Americans. The Autonomous Industrial Colony, Kuzbas, located in a coal mining region in the Kuznetsk Basin of Siberia, was the largest and, in no small part thanks to Kennell (who published several stories about Kuzbas in the Nation), the most famous of these.9Women like Kennell were attracted to revolutionary Russia, in part, by a far-reaching effort to put women on equal footing with men. In "How Russia Handles the Sex Question" (1929), Dreiser hailed the new regime's eradication of the sexual double standard; changes to women's standing in the eyes of the law; state-subsidized laundries, dining halls and nurseries designed to relieve women of "domestic drudgery"; and the range of educational and professional opportunities available to women. "All this may explain, to some extent, why some American women can live more contentedly in Russia, under conditions of life amounting to almost physical hardship, than in their own rich and comfortable land," he wrote.10 Kennell, whose notes and experiences made it possible for Dreiser to publish articles like this one, believed she was a beneficiary of the new social mores and legal statutes inaugurated by the revolution and embraced by Americans drawn to the new, revolutionary ethos.Kennell's desire for a life not defined or confined by traditional gender roles led her to Russia initially in 1922 and to the Siberian commune that Dreiser describes in "Ernita." As she wrote in her own account of the same events, "from my earliest girlhood I had my own ideas of communal life which would free women from the slavery of the individual home and put their labor on the same basis as men's."11 This same desire influenced her decision to work for Dreiser and, quite possibly, her decision to have sex with him. But each of those choices came with risks and were enmeshed in structures over which Kennell had little control. Sleeping with Dreiser may have helped Kennell get hired as his secretary and Kennell may have taken that job because it seemed to offer a viable route to eventually becoming something other than someone else's mouthpiece. Her ultimate goal was to have an independent career as a writer. Dreiser did help her to achieve that goal. Ironically, it is primarily through Dreiser's writing about her and, to a lesser degree, her writing about Dreiser, that Kennell is remembered. The ways in which Dreiser's story of Kennell both immortalized her and also worked to diminish all she accomplished in her own career before and after that sketch was published, a sketch for which Kennell's true identity is not only inadequately hidden but, from Dreiser's perspective, irrelevant, point to what Judy Long describes as "the social production of obscurity," which works to "render women's lives invisible, unintelligible, and/or insignificant."12Kennell was no naïf when she was introduced to Dreiser. She had been in Russia for five years (and in that sense, the older but just-arrived Dreiser was the novice); she was recently divorced; and since coming to Russia, she'd had several lovers, both American and Russian. She was also a published writer, with at least three articles in the Nation. When they met in the fall of 1927, Dreiser discovered an attractive, intelligent woman who, he decided, might suit him well: as amanuensis, research assistant, muse, and lover. Although Kennell would, in fact, aid and interact with Dreiser in these traditionally gendered ways, she did not neatly fit the mold in any of them. Over the course of their relationship, from their seventy-seven days together in Russia in 1927–28 to their regular correspondence prior to the publication of "Ernita" in fall 1929, and then, after a five-year break, until Dreiser's death in 1945, Kennell recognized ways she could benefit from her relationship with Dreiser. But she also honored a "cosmic urge" to speak her mind about his ideas, writing, and behavior.13Dreiser solicited Kennell's opinions as well as her research. And—at least when it came to Russian subjects—he usually accepted Kennell's editorial advice.14 She was also able to exert an important influence on Dreiser, challenging his sexism and his commitment to capitalism and, most likely, influencing him to join the Communist Party at the end of his life. Dreiser may have been unusual in the number of intelligent younger women he knew intimately and also inspired creatively but not in enjoying such relationships. It may well be true that the relationships were "for many of these women . . . a defining moment in their lives."15 But it is also true that, in Kennell's case, Dreiser's assistance was always predicated on an understanding that she would remain cooperative and subordinate. From Dreiser's initial seduction of Kennell, during which he failed—or perhaps refused—to wear a condom, to deciding to publish "Ernita" over Kennell's objections, he exerted his will over her in ways that presumed, upheld, and arguably abused patriarchal privilege.Historically, women were thought to be limited by the confines of their own experience and unable to see beyond it, hence everything they wrote was autobiographical. But women's own stories were rarely thought to be worthy of public consumption.16 Kennell's carefully preserved archive of her life, housed at the University of Oregon (comprising 365 folders of correspondence, diaries, and manuscripts, of published and unpublished works, including a 391-page unpublished memoir, plus a scrapbook of news clippings), suggests a belief in her own significance. Ironically, in deciding not to publish her memoir and in later publishing an account of her Russian days as they overlapped with Dreiser's, Kennell might seem to be confirming that her own story could only have value if told in connection with, or by, a prominent man.Kennell's role as Dreiser's private secretary, typing his Russian diary (and research notes she sent Dreiser after his departure from the Soviet Union), calls to mind Victoria Olwell's work on "typewriters" and political subjectivity in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when women came to dominate the field of clerical and secretarial work. A typewriter, Olwell notes, had a double meaning: it referred not only to the machine but also to the person, almost always female, who operated it, figured more often as tool than subject: The typewriter experiences her subordination across several hierarchies: man/woman, enfranchised/disenfranchised, speaking subject/laboring object, author/copyist. . . . Instead of speaking, she mediates documents, and she must seem to leave no human imprint on her work, no mark of labor. Yet she also undercuts the incorporated citizen's authority in the nation by noting, in her lethal parenthetical, that he participates vicariously, that is, the representative democracy is itself a mediating system whose promises of voice and dignity rest on carefully policed routes of transmission and symbolic acts of substitution.17Dreiser's Russian typewriter further complicates these dynamics, for she was never simply his stenographer. The claims of one Dreiser biographer notwithstanding, Kennell did more than jot down and then "type up" Dreiser's notes: she actually composed his diary, initially in her own voice. Then, following his instructions, she switched to writing "I" in the diary when she meant Dreiser's "I." Even then she occasionally inserted third-person asides from his "secretary."18 Moreover, in a marked demonstration of independence from her employer (and loyalty to the Soviet regime), Kennell also sent excerpts from Dreiser's diary, as she wrote them, to Soviet authorities.19 Dreiser later corrected and supplemented Kennell's version of the diary, but she kept her own copy. The latter and her correspondence with Dreiser and others formed the basis of her 1969 book on Dreiser and Russia.Here it is useful to consider the material that makes it possible to reconstruct Kennell and Dreiser's relationship. Kennell's book on Dreiser might seem the best place to start, but that book is an edited, and very partial, version of the documentary record. The most important source for tracking the changing dynamic between them, their correspondence, highlights the traces each left on the other's work and outlook. Although most collections of letters are one-sided, Kennell kept letters from Dreiser and (usually) copies of her own letters to him. But this unusually rich archive of material still has its limits. As Liz Stanley points out, "'life' goes on beyond the limits of letters, in the social and relational context from which they emanate and with which they are concerned."20 Furthermore, Stanley reminds us, correspondence is relational, the record of an unfolding dialogue that takes place in time and circumstances altered by the moments in which individual letters are written. Although correspondence between Kennell and Dreiser was private, today many of the letters between them are preserved in publicly accessible archives. A few have been published or excerpted, either by Kennell or by Dreiser scholars. But the available correspondence is incomplete. Even so, Kennell's archive reveals more details of their relationship than Dreiser's, a fact that is itself telling.Neither Dreiser nor Kennell ever wrote publicly of their intimate relationship. Still, that intimacy reverberated throughout their writing about the other. An entry in Dreiser's Russia diary—before Kennell began keeping it—offers the most direct evidence of their sexual interaction. Dreiser had written in his diary, "I complain of loneliness & she comes up. We finally reach an understanding and she stays until two." He notes Kennell "fussed" with him for "not protecting her," but she did agree to return in a day or two.21 Their "understanding" was apparently mutual, but it was still the product of uneven power relations, which are repeatedly evoked in their correspondence. More overtly, letters demonstrate that while Kennell vacillated on whether Dreiser could publish her "life story," she finally said "no" very clearly.We might compare this epistolary tug of war, which mixed competing desires with a decision that the (more powerful) man did not abide by, to other, similarly fraught, intimate relations. In a discussion of the ways gendered power relations frame individuals' experiences of sex and the "gray areas" around what constitutes consent, Linda Alcoff recalls challenges to the idea that "power has no place in sexuality, no role in arousal" and observations about the oversimplified binary between "what is rape and what is not rape." Even in situations not categorizable as rape, it is not necessarily true "that the behavior of the male involved was blameless."22 Eby argues that the subjects of Dreiser's Gallery "use their creativity to establish themselves as independent agents . . . many of them also by asserting their sexual subjectivity."23 Kennell's response to Dreiser's rendering of her story in "Ernita" makes his narrative effects more suspect. Can a woman's self-disclosure, rendered into narrative by a man and published against her will, accurately portray a woman "establish[ing] [her]self as [an] independent agent"?In Dreiser's 1929 portrait of Kennell, one of fifteen in his A Gallery of Women, we see "Ernita's" life choices largely driven by the actions, decisions, and desires of men, starting with a move to California from Texas as a child (Kennell was actually from Oklahoma) following her father's death. Dreiser does note Ernita's "ambition to do something indefinitely wonderful," but in his account we see Ernita's aspirations repeatedly stymied by the limited opportunities available to women.24 First, Dreiser recalls, Ernita trained as a telephone operator. Then a stenography, typing, and bookkeeping class landed her a job at a real estate firm for eight dollars a week. There she was told that she might advance rapidly if she learned how to play the game: "It was McGillig who used to take her by the arm and tell her that there was everything in this game if only she would take an interest in it and, incidentally, him." Although Ernita did not play that game, Dreiser says another man's interest gave her the opportunity to become a librarian. Though Ernita (and Kennell, if we are to trust Dreiser's narration) interpreted the local librarian's attention as "mere friendly interest," readers might surmise that Ernita was beginning to understand something about sex and ambition and power: she rebuffed the librarian's overtures and instead followed up on his encouragement that she study to become a librarian.25Kennell later complained to Dreiser that sex seemed to be the driving force in Ernita's life, from feelings of shame about it as a younger woman to a sexually unsatisfying marriage to an affair in Russia and a series of intimate encounters, most of them disappointing.26 Kennell, as Dreiser accurately observes in the sketch, married the first intelligent man—a young divinity student named Frank Kennell (Leonard in "Ernita")—who paid attention to her. The couple married in secret because Frank could not afford to support a wife but did not want to postpone marital relations any longer. Thus their intimate life began shrouded both in secrecy and, for Ruth, in "shame and disgust," as she described it.27 Beyond what Ruth interpreted for years as sexual incompatibility between them, there were also religious and political differences: Though Ruth says this aspiring man of the cloth "did not let my bewildering unbelief daunt him,"28 political differences over the Great War (she was opposed, he was in favor) nearly prevented their marriage. Frank ultimately turned against the war as well, effectively ending his career as a minister. The couple joined forces as activists against the war, and against capitalism, and in favor of the Bolshevik Revolution.Amid increasing political activity in San Francisco with the People's Institute, "the center of anti-war, pro-Soviet Russia, socialist, anarchist, and I.W.W. elements," Ernita/Kennell became pregnant as, Kennell notes, had happened a year earlier.29 This time she was told she was too unhealthy to have another abortion, a turn of events Dreiser faithfully describes but with little sense of the trauma that comes through in Kennell's own account of an unwanted pregnancy that she was unable to terminate.30 Ernita/Kennell was devoted for a time to the son who was born, but when the opportunity came to assist the Russian revolution by joining an American colony in Siberia—and when Frank's mother volunteered to care for the child—Ernita/Kennell jumped at the opportunity: As Dreiser tells it, ostensibly quoting Ernita, "And whether it was motherly of me or not, in this crisis it seemed to me that this was my opportunity, not only to escape from an unsatisfactory existence as a housewife but to satisfy my passion for service—to prove that a mother could do the world's work and still be a mother." Dreiser adds, never explaining how or why it is that he knows Ernita's story: "At this point it was that I called her attention to the fact that by her own admission she was not proving very much of a mother."31This was true, as were the basic details of Dreiser's sketch. Even so, his interpretation of those details did not always match Kennell's. In Russia, Ruth Kennell did not miss her son very much, though it had been difficult to leave him.32 In Siberia (at the Autonomous Industrial Colony of Kuzbas) Ernita/Kennell worked "at one and the same time [as] secretary, typist, librarian, postmistress, timekeeper, assistant bookkeeper, etc., etc. and liked it."33 Kennell also fell in love with Sam Shipman, a Communist, Jewish, Cornell-trained engineer from the United States (identified only as "the engineer" in Dreiser's portrait). When a conflict between Wobblies and Communists prompted Ruth's husband Frank to leave the colony, she, though sympathizing with the Wobblies, told Frank she wanted to fulfill her two-year contract.34 But she revealed the truth in her diary: "I want to stay here—to be free, free!"35 Dreiser puts it differently: "And since in [the engineer's] mind as well as in his curly hair and blue eyes Ernita saw beauty, devotion, practicality, she could not help but feel that the Communists were right, the I.W.W.'s wrong. And enchanted by the prospects of this different life, she saw only, or at least too much, the value of what was being achieved here. Life at last was perfect. And in Siberia!"36Dreiser seems to imply that Kennell was blinded by love. But the portrait of colony life that Kennell published in the American Mercury (edited, probably not coincidentally, by Dreiser's friend H. L. Mencken, one of several literary contacts Dreiser may have helped her establish) makes clear that she was not the only woman whose experience in Siberia changed their outlook on love and marriage as well as politics. She writes, "In the spring of 1925 more than one matrimonial partnership melted, usually on the wife's initiative. The colony women found in Siberia the freedom their souls craved."37At the close of Ernita's story, she was living in Moscow after suffering both disappointment and horror on the sexual front, beginning with the departure of her "prince charming" after his two-year contract had finished, and ending with her rape by a Kuzbas official to whom she'd gone to recover money owed to her. Dreiser never mentioned that "Ernita" was a published writer nor that he was a beneficiary of her overcoming an "abnormal dislike of sex."38 Perhaps he assumed a savvy reader, knowing his reputation, would glean as much.But Dreiser did endow Ernita with some agency. In Moscow, he says, she was "a man of all work—typist, librarian, reader, translator, even lecturer on occasion."39 Can it be accidental that he calls her a "man" here, his "even" reminding us that she was an unlikely authority? Kennell worked in Moscow as a typist for several Comintern plenums and then became a Comintern librarian. After nearly two years away, her husband returned to Russia in hopes of rekindling relations, only to learn she was in love with another man ("the engineer" Shipman).40 Eventually reconnecting at the Kuzbas colony, Ruth and Frank traveled amicably together to a small Siberian village for a divorce. Ruth temporarily regained custody of their son, but by the time Dreiser arrived in Moscow—invited for the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution—the boy was back in Siberia with Frank and Frank's mother.In addition to her library job in Moscow, Kennell worked for the State Publishing House, Gosizdat, editing and writing prefaces for Soviet editions of books by American novelists, including Dreiser.41 Sergey Dinamov, head of Gosizdat's Anglo-American section, introduced Kennell to Dreiser. The day after responding positively to Dreiser's infamously insistent sexual overtures, Kennell had a job offer. When the American radical Scott Nearing suggested that Kennell serve as Dreiser's private secretary, Dreiser mused, "since she talks both Russian & English—and since we are already so close it strikes me as almost an ideal choice."42Dreiser refers to Kennell in this part of his diary as "Ruth Cornell," an oversight relevant for considering the power dynamics at play: Both of them knew Kennell's name would never be as significant as Dreiser's. She could "fuss with" him for not "protecting her" from pregnancy but otherwise she had very little power. Obviously, this situation is different from the rape Kennell experienced, but both sexual encounters involved a power play.Months before meeting Dreiser, Kennell wrote her mother, whose stunted desires and ambitions formed the context through which she narrated her own experiences, that men were "the same everywhere; those who take a real interest in me are usually clever enough to try to help me in my career, rather than using the old-fashioned bait of support, promise of freedom from work and worry, etc. But it is all to the same end."43 After ending her affair with Shipman ("the engineer," aka "prince charming") and before meeting Dreiser, Kennell was involved with Dinamov and with Ossip Beskin, a novelist and director of the foreign department of the State Publishing House (or possibly Ossip Brik, a leading member of the Soviet avant garde).44 But it was the affair with Shipman—and its sharp contrast to her unsatisfying marriage—that captured Dreiser's imagination, making Kennell's story worth telling (in his mind), though in a way she felt diminished the import of that love affair.Kennell was torn about many aspects of the Ernita sketch and was uncertain whether Dreiser should publish it. Though attracted by the idea of having a great author tell her story, she might have preferred to tell it herself. But out of respect for Frank, with whom she ultimately reconciled, Kennell never submitted for publication her account of the same events. As with "Ernita," it would be nearly impossible to disguise the main players' identities. And in any case, by fictionalizing her account (however thinly), Kennell relinquished the truth claims that made her memoir significant.45 Notably, Kennell's "Kuzbas, A Romantic Chronicle," not only covers much of the same material as Dreiser's "Ernita," it also often echoes its style. That "Ernita" may have inspired Kennell to write her own story renders more tragic her decision not to publish it. For Dreiser simply ignored her wishes about his piece.After enduring months of Dreiser's crotchety and vocal complaining during their travels in Russia, Kennell was pleasantly surprised when he began publishing pieces based on his trip. Writing Dreiser from England (on her way back to the U.S. from Russia in spring 1928), Kennell responded enthusiastically to several of his articles she'd read, claiming that VOKS (the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries) ought to "feel ashamed of the way they treated you" and adding that the Comintern should likewise feel bad for having sacked her. She flirtatiously praised him for an article in Vanity Fair ("I wish I could give you a close and intimate demonstration of my appreciation").46Kennell was much less happy with his book, Dreiser Looks at Russia. Dreiser would not have been able to write this book without Kennell's assistance in Russia or the notes she sent at his request after he returned home. When he sent her the manuscript of Dreiser Looks at Russia for review, she was critical, later claiming it was haphazardly put together (he had asked for her notes in a telegram that was waiting for her when she arrived at her mother's farm in California, exhausted from months of travel).47 Although Dreiser mostly accepted Kennell's edits, he could tell she was annoyed, suggesting in his note of thanks, "what I really fear though is that my writing the book has crossed you in some way."48What may have upset Kennell was her absence from the book. In the letter she sent Dreiser with her corrections for Dreiser Looks at Russia, she noted his boast that he "had a horde of 'secretaries' at your heels, all of them Communists assigned you by the Soviet government" who were "constantly at your service" protecting "you from baneful influences and fill[ing] you with propaganda." She concedes that perhaps he was trying to protect her from publicity "by multiplying me and thus hiding my identity. But, as I say, it reflects on me in another way."49 In response, Dreiser recalled the various functionaries who'd accompanied him at different points, referring also to his relationship with Helen Richardson (whom he would eventually marry) as "a possible situation here in America (a personal one I mean) which might (sympathetically, let us say) dictate silence in regard to any particular female secretary."50 By removing Kennell from his account, "Dreiser not only concealed further Kennell's personal and professional contribution to the Soviet tour (and to his published accounts of it), but also erased her from the diary that—at least textually—had brought them together," as Arthur Casciato concludes.51Dreiser may have edited Kennell out of his published reporting on Russia but she was not erased from his diary, and it does not seem that Dreiser wanted her to be. A letter that she sent him after he left Russia attests to the deep connection she felt to him. Kennell remarks on how ingrained the habit of keeping notes for Dreiser had become and her deep sorrow at their parting: As they moved into separate coaches and the coaches uncoupled, his heading toward Berlin and hers toward Moscow, "it seemed as if it were a physical separation of just us two, as if you were cut away from me,
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