Helen Richardson in Southern California, 1920. A reluctant Fortean by association.
Esther Helen Patges was born 2 May 1894 in Portland Oregon to Ida Violet Parks Patges and George A. Patges. (Other sources give his name as George Christian.) George was from Denmark. He was a musician, though the census from 1900 lists him as a janitor—plight of the artist. Helen (as she came to be called) was the youngest daughter, after Hazel (born 1890). In 1900, the family lived with Helen’s grand[[father]][update: mother], E. A. Dickerson, 60, a widow[[er]] and keeper of a rooming house, and [[his]][update: her] daughter (Ida’s sister), the 20 year-old Myrtle, a stenographer. Both the younger girls were in school. Ida did not work.
By 1910, the family had both lost and gained a Myrtle. Myrtle J—who seems to have gone by Josie—married and left the household while Ida gave birth to Myrtle R. in 1901. The family had also lost the grand[[father]][update: mother], E. A., making George the new head of household. He was still working as a janitor, and presumably trying to make a living as a musician. No one else in the house worked—at least not officially. Jerome Loving’s biography of Theodore Dreiser had Helen’s family operating a hotel that backed against a Vaudeville Theater, and there is some evidence to support that Ida was running the romminghouse as late as 1909: an article in The Oregon Daily Journal lists Ida Patges as the landlady of the hotel known as The Venata.
Esther Helen Patges was born 2 May 1894 in Portland Oregon to Ida Violet Parks Patges and George A. Patges. (Other sources give his name as George Christian.) George was from Denmark. He was a musician, though the census from 1900 lists him as a janitor—plight of the artist. Helen (as she came to be called) was the youngest daughter, after Hazel (born 1890). In 1900, the family lived with Helen’s grand[[father]][update: mother], E. A. Dickerson, 60, a widow[[er]] and keeper of a rooming house, and [[his]][update: her] daughter (Ida’s sister), the 20 year-old Myrtle, a stenographer. Both the younger girls were in school. Ida did not work.
By 1910, the family had both lost and gained a Myrtle. Myrtle J—who seems to have gone by Josie—married and left the household while Ida gave birth to Myrtle R. in 1901. The family had also lost the grand[[father]][update: mother], E. A., making George the new head of household. He was still working as a janitor, and presumably trying to make a living as a musician. No one else in the house worked—at least not officially. Jerome Loving’s biography of Theodore Dreiser had Helen’s family operating a hotel that backed against a Vaudeville Theater, and there is some evidence to support that Ida was running the romminghouse as late as 1909: an article in The Oregon Daily Journal lists Ida Patges as the landlady of the hotel known as The Venata.
Also according to Loving, Helen was starstruck; at least when it comes to Helen, though, Loving is not always reliable—he has Ida and George separating when Helen was young, which doesn’t seem to be true. And he has it that Ida and her mother ran the hotel, but the census tells another story—perhaps, after all, it is the census that is incorrect. At any rate, on the matter of Helen’s dramaturgical inclinations, he was right. The Oregon Daily Journal records that she performed before the Elk Club while in high school. Loving further has it that Helen, also while in high school, fell in love and married the actor Frank Richardson. And, indeed, there is a record of Helen Ester Patges marrying 11 June 1910.
The two struck out to make a name in entertainment in the West, but it she was, not they, who were getting the bookings. By all accounts, she was very attractive. The Richardsons eventually moved to Frank’s hometown, Charleston, South Carolina. Young and restless, Helen went against tradition and, even while married, got a job, working as a secretary for a family friend. (They also had a brief affair, according to Loving.) As it happened, the friend was a fan of Dreiser, and Helen mentioned that she was distantly related to the famous author—her grandmother had been sister to Dreiser’s mother. He encouraged her to get in touch with Dreiser, which she eventually did, tracking him down in New York, meeting him 13 September 1919.
“This day I met Helen,” he wrote in his diary. “Dont remember much about the morning. Was reading at 11 A.M. when door bell rang. Slipped on my blue Chinese coat & went out. Saw a young girl of about 19 or 20, I thought, hiding behind the door.” Introduced and invited in, the two seemed to be instantly attracted to each other. Dreiser was a notorious rake, and Helen had already had at least one affair, so they weren’t constrained by the Victorian morals then disappearing. Dreiser was awestruck at her beauty; Helen shook while she gave him her address. “I am tempted to take her in my arms and kiss her,” he wrote. She was 25, he forty eight. Within a week, they slept together.
And within a month, they left New York for Los Angeles, where she was to try her hand at acting, and Dreiser was trying to cash in on an offer to write for the motion pictures. Dreiser was still married, and Helen may have been, I’m not sure. They would spend three years in California. It was then that Dreiser met the poet George Sterling, conferenced with the future-Fortean John Cowper Powys, and became involved with the early Fortean mess surrounding the doctor—or quack—Albert Abrams and his Dynomizer. Both he and Helen claimed it cured them of various ailments, much to the chagrin of Dreiser’s skeptical friend and supporter H. L. Mencken.
The relationship between Helen and Theodore was tempestuous, to say the least. For most of their time together, Theodore remained married, but Helen was a regular companion, an out-in-the-open mistress. She wasn’t often happy about the arrangement, though, and their were fits and fights, separations and reconciliations. Helen would write a book about their love, My Life with Dreiser (1951). At this point, Dreiser’s life is so well-documented, one could, if so inclined, probably plot the various arguments, the splits and comings together. But that is beyond the scope of what I need to do here. Worth noting is that Helen’s career as a thespian failed, and the Dreisers returned to New York.
Meanwhile, as Helen threw Victorian mores to the side—as Dreiser did the same and forcefully wrote against them, tempting the ire of censors—Helen’s family seems to have curled back into the arms of conventional morality. George, who was a dozen years older than Ida, passed away in 1925 (or possibly 1922). The 1930 census has Ida and her youngest daughter, Myrtle—who had moved away from home for a time—living at a Catholic monastery, the divorced Myrtle working as a night attendant for an undertaker. Ida and Myrtle continued to live together through 1940, even as Myrtle remarried and they left the monastery. Ida would pass in 1950 and be buried with George.
Dreiser’s first wife, from whom he had separated in 1909, after nine years of marriage, died in 1942, and Helen harangued him evermore to marry her—a demand she had been making for decades. Dreiser eventually conceded, and they wed 13 June 1944. Their life together had been long and volatile; their marriage, pitifully short. Dreiser died 28 1945, barely a year and a half later. He was 74. Helen was fifty one. She got Theodore’s book The Stoic posthumously. After publishing her own memoir, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and moved back to Oregon, where her sister Myrtle cared for her. She died 22 September 1955, age 61.
It was Theodore Dreiser’s death that prompted the connection between Helen and the Fortean Society, although it is entirely possible—indeed, likely—that Helen had some ideas about Fort and Forteanism that long predated the existence of the Fortean Society. Dreiser had known Fort since the early part of the 20th century, long before he met Helen, and the friendship between the two men overlapped the romantic relationship between Helen and Theodore, with Theodore there at the birth of the Fortean Society in 1931 and struck hard by Fort’s death in 1932. Indeed, it seems that Dreiser was one of the few people that Fort actually visited. And Helen visited him just two weeks before he died. Her memoir makes a number of comments about him, all of them generally positive. She seems to have appreciated his acceptance of intuition, his iconoclastic views of science. Which makes sense with what we do know of Helen, for example how impressed she was with Dr. Abrams, never mind the popular condemnations. The memoir also suggests that she shared something of Dreiser’s mystical views.
Thayer, though, wasn’t interested in Helen’s perspectives on Forteanism, mysticism, or alternative medicine. He had more practical matters in mind. Since Fort’s death, he had been trying get ahold of Fort’s papers. As Secretary of the Society, he had taken possession of Fort’s notes—to Dreiser’s great irritation: so much so that when Thayer announced the resuscitation of the Fortean Society, after a hiatus from 1931 to 1937, Dreiser tried to stop him, tried to gain control of the notes himself, and eventually broke with Thayer altogether. That hurt Thayer, both because Dreiser had collected a great deal of material on Fort and his estate inherited material from Fort’s wife, Anna, after she died in 1937—which had prompted much of the legal wrangling.
While running the Fortean Society, Thayer played with the idea of publishing a biography of Fort, announcing imminent work on it to friends in correspondence a number of times. The closest he ever came was the introduction to the omnibus of Fort’s books. But as the idea percolated, he wanted to collect material for the biography and new that much of what he would need was owned by Dreiser—a Dreiser who hated him and insisted that his name not be used in connection with the revived Fortean Society. (And indeed he was not listed among the founders, although he was arguably the most important of the founders and the first so-called president of the original Society.)
But despite Dreiser’s distancing himself from the Fortean Society, Thayer announced his death—and would thereafter start mentioning him as a Founder. That announcement was noted with interest by member Jennie Selby Thomas. Thomas lived in southern California and was friends with Lorna Smith, who had done research for Dreiser. Thomas wrote to Helen and Helen made encouraging noises, which Thomas told Thayer about in May 1946: write to Dreiser’s widow, she said. Thayer did, near the end of the month:
“Our good member, Mrs. Jennie S. Thomas, has sent us a letter which you wrote to her on April 30, in which you suggest I address you, personally, with a view toward acquiring Mr. Dreiser’s Fort material for the Society.
Before anything else, please let me say with all the sincerity any man ever felt, that I have regretted nothing in my life so much as the inability of Mr. Dreiser and myself to work together amicably in this effort which was so important to us both. I never ceased to hope that he would lose his resentment of me in view of what the Society was accomplishing for Charles Fort’s work and fame.
I sympathize with you deeply in your loss, and I hope that you are receiving some solace from the triumph of The Bulwark.
Immediately I knew of Mr. Dreiser’s death, I addressed Arthur Leonard Ross, formerly attorney for Mr. Dreiser [and the lawyer involved in the 1937 negotiations], asking him how to address you. He said he forwarded my letter to you, but it must have miscarried.
Surely you will agree with me that the place for the Dreiser-Fort correspondence is in the archives of the Fortean Society, which Mr. Dreiser helped to found. If, upon examination, the material appeared to be publishable, we should like to arrange that, with a division of royalties between yourself and the Society.
We could not concur with Mr. Dreiser’s attempt to turn over the Fort notes to a university. They would have been buried for all time. Charles Fort fought scholasticism all his life. He willed his notes to us, to keep them alive and active. This has been my trust and my responsibility and I have prosecuted it to the best of my ability, at great personal expense in time and money for sixteen years.
I do not know if Mr. Dreiser and you have kept abreast of our progress, but I should be happy to bring you up to date on all details if you wish.
Direct me in what I must do to win from you the confidence Mr. Dreiser never would give me. I hardly need tell you how greatly the Society desires the material you have, how greatly we respect it, how devotedly we should treasure it.”
I don’t have Helen’s response, but it must have been encouraging. In the next issue of Doubt—15, summer 1946—Thayer announced that she had accepted Honorary Life Membership. Negotiations, such as they were, must have continued for some time, although the evidence is conflicting and confusing. Helen excerpted a bit of Dreiser’s memoir of Fort in My Life with Dreiser, and Thayer called attention to the book, as well as its bits on Fort, in Doubt. As a service, the Society sold it to members for $3.75. Otherwise, Thayer was quiet about Mrs. Dreiser and the Dreiser material until the summer of 1955—and there was likely some reason for the nine year delay between the opening of the correspondence and Thayer’s triumphant note that the Dreiser estate had finally decided to do business with the Society. Perhaps it was Helen’s illness; perhaps he gave him some encouraging reports. At any rate, Thayer did report joyously that Mrs. Dreiser was willing to give up the material: “And bless your dear pure hear, Jennie, SHE DID. It wasn’t accomplished in a day. YS had to face Mecca and beat his forehead in the dust, but the Society obtained documents without which a biography of Fort never could have been completed. Now it can be--and soon it will be--and no one deserves a greater share of gratitude for that than Jennie Selby Doubting Thomas. I hereby dedicate the volume to her. That much, at least, is written.”
That certainly sounds like Thayer had his hands on the material, whatever it was. But it’s unclear that he actually did have it in his possession, versus just believing it would be coming to him. Because as of now, Thayer’s material, which is at the New York Public Library, and was only dug up by Damon Knight when he was finally writing the first biography of Fort, has none of the Dreiser-Fort material. Dreiser’s papers, however, at the University of Pennsylvania, does however, including the correspondence with Thayer himself. As Knight notes, Thayer’s concern that Fort’s material would disappear if given to a university was ill-founded, since that material has always been available, but Thayer’s own papers were hard to find, and if he did ever make a start on that biography, well that was lost after his death.
The last mention of Helen Dreiser in the pages of Doubt came the following month, Doubt 50 (1955). It was a brief announcement of her death.
Fittingly, then, the first two biographies of Fort were damned to never see the light of day.
The two struck out to make a name in entertainment in the West, but it she was, not they, who were getting the bookings. By all accounts, she was very attractive. The Richardsons eventually moved to Frank’s hometown, Charleston, South Carolina. Young and restless, Helen went against tradition and, even while married, got a job, working as a secretary for a family friend. (They also had a brief affair, according to Loving.) As it happened, the friend was a fan of Dreiser, and Helen mentioned that she was distantly related to the famous author—her grandmother had been sister to Dreiser’s mother. He encouraged her to get in touch with Dreiser, which she eventually did, tracking him down in New York, meeting him 13 September 1919.
“This day I met Helen,” he wrote in his diary. “Dont remember much about the morning. Was reading at 11 A.M. when door bell rang. Slipped on my blue Chinese coat & went out. Saw a young girl of about 19 or 20, I thought, hiding behind the door.” Introduced and invited in, the two seemed to be instantly attracted to each other. Dreiser was a notorious rake, and Helen had already had at least one affair, so they weren’t constrained by the Victorian morals then disappearing. Dreiser was awestruck at her beauty; Helen shook while she gave him her address. “I am tempted to take her in my arms and kiss her,” he wrote. She was 25, he forty eight. Within a week, they slept together.
And within a month, they left New York for Los Angeles, where she was to try her hand at acting, and Dreiser was trying to cash in on an offer to write for the motion pictures. Dreiser was still married, and Helen may have been, I’m not sure. They would spend three years in California. It was then that Dreiser met the poet George Sterling, conferenced with the future-Fortean John Cowper Powys, and became involved with the early Fortean mess surrounding the doctor—or quack—Albert Abrams and his Dynomizer. Both he and Helen claimed it cured them of various ailments, much to the chagrin of Dreiser’s skeptical friend and supporter H. L. Mencken.
The relationship between Helen and Theodore was tempestuous, to say the least. For most of their time together, Theodore remained married, but Helen was a regular companion, an out-in-the-open mistress. She wasn’t often happy about the arrangement, though, and their were fits and fights, separations and reconciliations. Helen would write a book about their love, My Life with Dreiser (1951). At this point, Dreiser’s life is so well-documented, one could, if so inclined, probably plot the various arguments, the splits and comings together. But that is beyond the scope of what I need to do here. Worth noting is that Helen’s career as a thespian failed, and the Dreisers returned to New York.
Meanwhile, as Helen threw Victorian mores to the side—as Dreiser did the same and forcefully wrote against them, tempting the ire of censors—Helen’s family seems to have curled back into the arms of conventional morality. George, who was a dozen years older than Ida, passed away in 1925 (or possibly 1922). The 1930 census has Ida and her youngest daughter, Myrtle—who had moved away from home for a time—living at a Catholic monastery, the divorced Myrtle working as a night attendant for an undertaker. Ida and Myrtle continued to live together through 1940, even as Myrtle remarried and they left the monastery. Ida would pass in 1950 and be buried with George.
Dreiser’s first wife, from whom he had separated in 1909, after nine years of marriage, died in 1942, and Helen harangued him evermore to marry her—a demand she had been making for decades. Dreiser eventually conceded, and they wed 13 June 1944. Their life together had been long and volatile; their marriage, pitifully short. Dreiser died 28 1945, barely a year and a half later. He was 74. Helen was fifty one. She got Theodore’s book The Stoic posthumously. After publishing her own memoir, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and moved back to Oregon, where her sister Myrtle cared for her. She died 22 September 1955, age 61.
It was Theodore Dreiser’s death that prompted the connection between Helen and the Fortean Society, although it is entirely possible—indeed, likely—that Helen had some ideas about Fort and Forteanism that long predated the existence of the Fortean Society. Dreiser had known Fort since the early part of the 20th century, long before he met Helen, and the friendship between the two men overlapped the romantic relationship between Helen and Theodore, with Theodore there at the birth of the Fortean Society in 1931 and struck hard by Fort’s death in 1932. Indeed, it seems that Dreiser was one of the few people that Fort actually visited. And Helen visited him just two weeks before he died. Her memoir makes a number of comments about him, all of them generally positive. She seems to have appreciated his acceptance of intuition, his iconoclastic views of science. Which makes sense with what we do know of Helen, for example how impressed she was with Dr. Abrams, never mind the popular condemnations. The memoir also suggests that she shared something of Dreiser’s mystical views.
Thayer, though, wasn’t interested in Helen’s perspectives on Forteanism, mysticism, or alternative medicine. He had more practical matters in mind. Since Fort’s death, he had been trying get ahold of Fort’s papers. As Secretary of the Society, he had taken possession of Fort’s notes—to Dreiser’s great irritation: so much so that when Thayer announced the resuscitation of the Fortean Society, after a hiatus from 1931 to 1937, Dreiser tried to stop him, tried to gain control of the notes himself, and eventually broke with Thayer altogether. That hurt Thayer, both because Dreiser had collected a great deal of material on Fort and his estate inherited material from Fort’s wife, Anna, after she died in 1937—which had prompted much of the legal wrangling.
While running the Fortean Society, Thayer played with the idea of publishing a biography of Fort, announcing imminent work on it to friends in correspondence a number of times. The closest he ever came was the introduction to the omnibus of Fort’s books. But as the idea percolated, he wanted to collect material for the biography and new that much of what he would need was owned by Dreiser—a Dreiser who hated him and insisted that his name not be used in connection with the revived Fortean Society. (And indeed he was not listed among the founders, although he was arguably the most important of the founders and the first so-called president of the original Society.)
But despite Dreiser’s distancing himself from the Fortean Society, Thayer announced his death—and would thereafter start mentioning him as a Founder. That announcement was noted with interest by member Jennie Selby Thomas. Thomas lived in southern California and was friends with Lorna Smith, who had done research for Dreiser. Thomas wrote to Helen and Helen made encouraging noises, which Thomas told Thayer about in May 1946: write to Dreiser’s widow, she said. Thayer did, near the end of the month:
“Our good member, Mrs. Jennie S. Thomas, has sent us a letter which you wrote to her on April 30, in which you suggest I address you, personally, with a view toward acquiring Mr. Dreiser’s Fort material for the Society.
Before anything else, please let me say with all the sincerity any man ever felt, that I have regretted nothing in my life so much as the inability of Mr. Dreiser and myself to work together amicably in this effort which was so important to us both. I never ceased to hope that he would lose his resentment of me in view of what the Society was accomplishing for Charles Fort’s work and fame.
I sympathize with you deeply in your loss, and I hope that you are receiving some solace from the triumph of The Bulwark.
Immediately I knew of Mr. Dreiser’s death, I addressed Arthur Leonard Ross, formerly attorney for Mr. Dreiser [and the lawyer involved in the 1937 negotiations], asking him how to address you. He said he forwarded my letter to you, but it must have miscarried.
Surely you will agree with me that the place for the Dreiser-Fort correspondence is in the archives of the Fortean Society, which Mr. Dreiser helped to found. If, upon examination, the material appeared to be publishable, we should like to arrange that, with a division of royalties between yourself and the Society.
We could not concur with Mr. Dreiser’s attempt to turn over the Fort notes to a university. They would have been buried for all time. Charles Fort fought scholasticism all his life. He willed his notes to us, to keep them alive and active. This has been my trust and my responsibility and I have prosecuted it to the best of my ability, at great personal expense in time and money for sixteen years.
I do not know if Mr. Dreiser and you have kept abreast of our progress, but I should be happy to bring you up to date on all details if you wish.
Direct me in what I must do to win from you the confidence Mr. Dreiser never would give me. I hardly need tell you how greatly the Society desires the material you have, how greatly we respect it, how devotedly we should treasure it.”
I don’t have Helen’s response, but it must have been encouraging. In the next issue of Doubt—15, summer 1946—Thayer announced that she had accepted Honorary Life Membership. Negotiations, such as they were, must have continued for some time, although the evidence is conflicting and confusing. Helen excerpted a bit of Dreiser’s memoir of Fort in My Life with Dreiser, and Thayer called attention to the book, as well as its bits on Fort, in Doubt. As a service, the Society sold it to members for $3.75. Otherwise, Thayer was quiet about Mrs. Dreiser and the Dreiser material until the summer of 1955—and there was likely some reason for the nine year delay between the opening of the correspondence and Thayer’s triumphant note that the Dreiser estate had finally decided to do business with the Society. Perhaps it was Helen’s illness; perhaps he gave him some encouraging reports. At any rate, Thayer did report joyously that Mrs. Dreiser was willing to give up the material: “And bless your dear pure hear, Jennie, SHE DID. It wasn’t accomplished in a day. YS had to face Mecca and beat his forehead in the dust, but the Society obtained documents without which a biography of Fort never could have been completed. Now it can be--and soon it will be--and no one deserves a greater share of gratitude for that than Jennie Selby Doubting Thomas. I hereby dedicate the volume to her. That much, at least, is written.”
That certainly sounds like Thayer had his hands on the material, whatever it was. But it’s unclear that he actually did have it in his possession, versus just believing it would be coming to him. Because as of now, Thayer’s material, which is at the New York Public Library, and was only dug up by Damon Knight when he was finally writing the first biography of Fort, has none of the Dreiser-Fort material. Dreiser’s papers, however, at the University of Pennsylvania, does however, including the correspondence with Thayer himself. As Knight notes, Thayer’s concern that Fort’s material would disappear if given to a university was ill-founded, since that material has always been available, but Thayer’s own papers were hard to find, and if he did ever make a start on that biography, well that was lost after his death.
The last mention of Helen Dreiser in the pages of Doubt came the following month, Doubt 50 (1955). It was a brief announcement of her death.
Fittingly, then, the first two biographies of Fort were damned to never see the light of day.
