The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y

3 1 4

to his uncle, that he surrender his dreams. This was not the Clyde, of course,

that was ever allowed in the movie versions of the novel, but it was the one

championed by the winner of an essay contest (“Was Clyde Gri‹ths guilty

of murder in the first degree?”) sponsored by Boni & Liveright to keep what

immediately became a best-seller in the public eye. The winner, a young

liberal law professor, Albert H. Lévitt of Washington and Lee University,

held that Clyde was morally guilty of Roberta’s death but legally and so-

cially innocent.34

As if to induce the dreamlike mood of the beginning of the book,

Dreiser’s epilogue, entitled “Souvenir,” opens with the same phrase, “Dusk,

of a summer night.” He returns to the itinerant street preachers, Clyde’s

parents, now in San Francisco. It follows the scene in which Clyde, dressed

for death in black trousers, a white shirt without a collar, and new felt slip-

pers, walks with a clergyman on either side to the electric chair. (One re-

viewer of the novel pronounced the death row scenes “something that every

believer in capital punishment ought to read.”) His parents and their grand-

son, Esta’s illegitimate son of eight years named Russell, set up the portable

organ on a busy street corner and sing hymns to passers-by who are crit-

ical of the activity because it involves one so young: “That gray and flabby

and ineªectual old man, in his worn and baggy blue suit. This robust and

yet uncouth and weary and white-haired woman; this fresh and unsoiled

and unspoiled and uncomprehending boy. What was he doing here?”

Dreiser, who habitually hummed camp meeting hymns to himself, often

as he sat dreamlike in a rocking chair, was thinking not only of his own

preadolescent youth but of young America in the same grand illusion that

seduces Clyde. Here, he is saying, is the perpetual recycling of another who,

like the sex-driven murderer in The Hand of the Potter, didn’t make him-

self. In the final lines of this story of crime and punishment almost as

haunting as Dostoyevsky’s great novel, which Dreiser may have reread

shortly before writing An American Tragedy, Mrs. Gri‹ths decides that she

must be kinder to her grandson, “more liberal with him, not restrain him

too much, as maybe, she had——. . . . For his sake.”35

–

Almost immediately upon finishing his novel, Dreiser got out of town to

wait for the reviews. Nine days before the o‹cial publication on Decem-

ber 17, 1925, he and Helen left by car for Florida. He gave up both his apart-

a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y

3 1 5

ment in Brooklyn and the o‹ce in the Guardian building, directing his

mail to the o‹ces of Boni & Liveright at 61 West Forty-Eighth Street. They

first went to Philadelphia, and from there Helen went ahead to Paoli, the

studio home of the artist Wharton Esherick, who worked in wood and

stone. On his extra day in Philadelphia, Dreiser enjoyed a rendezvous with

Louise Campbell.36 From Paoli, their next layover was Washington, but they

stopped on their way through Baltimore to see Mencken at 1524 Hollins

Street. It was, however, bad timing for a reunion. Mencken’s mother was

in the hospital, near death after an operation. Her son was sorely irked when

Dreiser failed to ask about her health. Then Mencken discovered that

Dreiser had left Helen out in the cold car while he first knocked to see

whether his friend was at home and in the ensuing conversation apparently

forgot about her. Finally, when Dreiser asked for a bottle of his bootleg

scotch and Mencken willingly provided it, Dreiser further oªended him by

insisting on paying for it.

In fairness to Dreiser, he was wrought up and exhausted after the com-

pletion of his novel. Later, after Dreiser’s death, Mencken reminded Helen

of the incident (“how I resented . . . his aloof indiªerence to my mother’s

illness”), saying while it was a long while afterward before he ever felt close

to Dreiser again, he should “have known him better. There was a curiously

inarticulate side to him, and it often showed up when he was most moved.”

Dreiser had merely forgotten to oªer his condolences, but he recorded the

fact of Anna Mencken’s illness in his diary for that day. A few weeks later

he asked Mencken the neglected question and was informed without any

word of forgiveness that she had died the day after his visit.37 The iron had

entered Mencken’s soul.

By then Dreiser was already ecstatic about the sales of his book, whose

two volumes at the expensive price of five dollars did nothing to limit its

commercial success. “The reviews are amazing, enthusiastic and dignified,”

wired T. R. Smith to him in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Your position is rec-

ognized. The sales are excellent.”38 One of the most surprising was written

by Dreiser’s old nemesis, Stuart P. Sherman, who was now reviewing full

time for the New York Herald Tribune and whom Dreiser and Liveright had

expected to “hand out the grand slam of his life” against An American

Tragedy. Actually, they shouldn’t have been so surprised. Since meting out

“The Naturalism of Mr. Dreiser” in 1915 (reprinted as “The Barbaric Nat-

uralism of Theodore Dreiser”), in which he had summed up Dreiser’s books

from Sister Carrie to The “Genius” as arguments for a crude “jungle” phi-

losophy, Sherman—whom Mencken had long ago designated as the most

a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y

3 1 6

intelligent of Dreiser’s detractors—had moved away from the Arnoldian

idea of literature embraced by his mentors, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer

More. In his review of An American Tragedy, he first qualified his new opin-

ion by stating that Dreiser “has either renounced or eªectually suppressed

the naïve naturalism of his previous novels.” There were “no interspersed

philosophical dissertations here . . . no special pleading, no coloring of the

news” he had found especially in the Cowperwood books and The “Genius.”

But after covering his old tracks, Sherman applauded almost the same Dreis-

erian picture of man as relatively helpless against the forces of (his) nature.

Now Sherman encountered only “detachment,” “impartiality,” and “objec-

tivity” in An American Tragedy. Possibly, changes in Sherman’s personal life

had helped him in this conversion about Dreiser as well as in his newfound

philosophy. Ironically, he drowned that summer in a boating accident rem-

iniscent of the one in An American Tragedy. 39

On the matter of Dreiser’s style, however, Sherman did not convert but

followed the line of other reviewers, whose complaints on this issue had

become commonplace and indeed almost de rigueur in the assessment of

any Dreiser novel since Sister Carrie. Admittedly, Dreiser’s style is crude,

but there is no getting around the fact that at his best he tells an irresistible

story. Joseph Wood Krutch, who considered An American Tragedy “the great-

est novel of our generation,” noted that its 840 pages were “continuously

interesting and continuously terrible, [marching ] forward with a resistless

energy.”40 Dreiser’s sentence structure is often contorted and his content

occasionally redundant (though his repetitions serve to underscore the

drama he is building detail by detail), but some of what Sherman and oth-

ers credit as slovenly style seems unexceptionable today. Much of what was

in Dreiser’s prose then considered slang has become part of what we now

call standard English. Dreiser had learned to write as a newspaper reporter

and magazinist for whom triteness was—and is—not a sin. Moreover, this

realist knew best the common man and woman—for whom the spoken

word was both spontaneous and visceral. The most outspoken critic on the

matter of style was T. K. Whipple in the New Republic. He wrote that

Dreiser violated not only English but American idiom. “This is all very true

when the thing to be communicated is an abstract idea or philosophy,” an-

swered Henry Miller, who would extend the master’s realism in his own

works. “The novel, however, is eªective because of images and emotions

and not because of its abstract ideas.” Comparing Dreiser to James Joyce,

Miller argued that Dreiser’s novels succeed not in spite of but because of

his style which enabled him “to present a world which a more elegant and

a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y

3 1 7

precise style could only hint at. . . . He identifies his language with the con-

sciousness of his characters.”41

Dreiser, who claimed over and again that he never paid attention to re-

views, obviously gave no heed to them when they touched on style. Oth-

erwise, he was no doubt paying attention now, for they were radiant with