Matthew Brennan

Theodore Dreiser: Recalling a Letter Sent to Terre Haute in 1922

Matthew Brennan

When I wrote to Eugene Debs, he was a broken man, imprisoned in the South till Warren Harding fully pardoned him on Christmas Day. I told him I was glad he's back on native grass, both his and mine. But I remember it as he recalls the jail. My father labored in a woolens mill, which made him hard and kept us poor but didn't keep him off our mom at night and drunken grunts from thundering into the crowded rooms we tried to sleep in.

Before we moved, I studied at St. Ben's. During Masses there, I feasted on the frescoed walls and ceiling, vaulted high above both apse and altar, stained-glass windows, and arches bearing all that weighted wealth. Religion taught me how the fat cats live. Later, excess stirred the sparks that Debs fed like a bellows, and led me to travel like a wildfire to Stalin's Russian fount. Even Gene never went to this extreme, although I'd told him, "I am one of many who voted 'Debs' "—because I liked his stand.

And yet, in '12, about to end a tour and leave for home from Cherbourg, France, I planned to take the grand Titanic, lured again by lavish luxury, as when St. Ben's extravagance conveyed the essence of The Gilded Age. But hard-knock lessons held: I paid my passage on a cheaper ship instead, and it delivered me from evil.

A Photograph, Circa 1935

MatthewBrennan

There's a photo in a book called Lost Treasures of St. Louis, coffee-table in size and never opened after Christmas. This picture centers on an eatery, the downtown Orient on Seventh, the camera angled from across the road and halfway down the block, tilted upward to include buildings rising in the background.

The restaurant's sign is dim against the shadows of the black-and-gray façade, and so the eye is drawn at first into the lower left, then lingers there on letters stretching across a van's back doors, below its window:

BROADWAY LAUNDRY CO. Though incidental, this image resurrects a family anecdote: the truck was owned by Rudolph Weinert, husband to my grandmother's mom, who always bragged she never cleaned her spouse's clothes—but then he died and a dark lady called the house to drop off Uncle Rudy's dirty linen, as if she'd stripped it from the bed they'd slept in.

Matthew Brennan has published six books of poetry, most recently Snow in New York (Lamar U. Literary Press, 2021). He has recently published poems in Amsterdam Quarterly, THINK, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Concho River Review. After teaching at Indiana State University for 32 years, he relocated to Columbus, Ohio.