Introduction
What does make a self-made man? In essence, it is a combination of perceptions and impressions that govern how the individual interacts with the world and how the world views the individual. In assessing an individual’s self-making based upon their autobiography, it becomes critical to keep in mind characteristics of the genre. Roger Porter stated those characteristics well:
The autobiographer seems to endow his life with a retrospective meaning, and finds an organizing principle—in the concept of the self, in the events, and in the literary structure—to answer his needs. The autobiographer may try out various roles and provisional identities; he may structure his work around certain unifying images and metaphors; he may expand or collapse time to emphasize particular aspects of experience. Autobiography, that is, may attempt to make the life into a work of art.1
Ludwig Hillquit Gerber clearly used his autobiography as a tool to try to shape the reader’s perception of who he was. Gerber presented himself as a self-made man, one who rose from economically difficult conditions to a certain degree of material comfort and one who traveled in circles of famous people. He also presented himself as a person whose life was shaped by being in the right place at the right time, what he termed “happenstance.” He attributed most of his career moves to happenstance; whether that was an accurate reflection of his professional life, or simply a convenient literary device that worked to integrate his experiences, it does provide us with an insight into his perceptions of his life.
Luddie Gerber in California, 1958
The text reveals much that would be missed by a casual, surface reading. He described certain jobs in terms that emphasized the importance of his work, then later dismissed those same jobs as merely clerical. He painted a picture of a man who achieved material success, with the house on a Hollywood hill in California and an apartment in New York City; he then later admitted that the apartment was not the product of his own efforts. He ostensibly revealed his life to us in his autobiography, and yet when discussing his poetry, told us that we would never see some of it for it revealed too much about him. Gerber perhaps hid a part of his identity as an instinctive, long-standing act of self-preservation.
Gerber’s autobiography revealed dueling facets: a sense of being important, and underlying insecurities and feelings of inadequacy. Gerber’s construction of self seems to be determined by his longing for acceptance.
Perceptions and impressions regarding self-making fall roughly into three main categories for Gerber: identity, money, and success. His perceptions of issues inherently shaped the impressions that he created. When examining his identity, we see issues relating to his name, his socialist beliefs and desire for success, and a possible hidden homosexual identity. Perceptions and impressions about money are also important in his story of self-making. Two key perceptions come from his childhood: he grew up without any money, though his family was not “poor” and he tasted the life of the wealthy, courtesy of his oldest sister. These perceptions led to two impressions that he created for the outside world about money: one relating to his early self-sufficiency, the other to possessing wealth that he may not have had. Finally, Gerber perceived his success and shaped impressions about his success by describing the famous people he met, his connections to Hollywood, and the importance of the positions that he held.
1 Roger J. Porter, "Gibbon's Autobiography: Filling up the Silent Vacancy," Eighteenth-Century Studies 8, no. 1 (1974): 2.