The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

praise. Heywood Broun in the New York World called An American Tragedy

“the Mount Everest of American fiction.” Clarence Darrow, the “Attorney

for the Damned,” thought it seemed more real than fiction: “the feeling is

rather that of a series of terrible physical impacts that have relentlessly

shocked every sensitive nerve in the body.” Carl Van Doren in Century ad-

mired its steady massing of detail leading up to the climax and beyond.

“Only ‘Moby Dick’ among American novels with the same fateful tread,

carrying all its documents on its back, and yet never seriously delaying”

could be compared to it. Its “measured, implacable tracing of a disinte-

grating personality” was compared to Hurstwood’s decline in Sister Car-

rie. Another critic refused to say which was the superior novel. But the

reading public had no doubt, helped along this time, of course, by favor-

able publicity and a publisher friendlier than Doubleday. By the end of

December, only two weeks after the date of publication, the two-volume

set had sold 13,914 copies and earned its author $11,872.02. By the end of

1926 it had sold over fifty thousand copies and earned Dreiser a total

$45,887.54 in direct royalties.42

The dust jacket carried a blurb from Mencken that spoke only generally

of Dreiser as one of America’s great novelists. He had promised to review

his friend’s “vasty double-header” in “a höflich [polite] and able manner,”

but this was before their December reunion. Still simmering in the juices

of Dreiser’s imagined slight to his dying mother, their “misunderstanding”

over the arrangement with the World, and the republication of The “Ge-

nius” uncut in 1923, he wrote a doubleheader of his own in which he first

excoriated the novel, then praised it. “As a work of art,” he said, it was “a

colossal botch, but as a human document it is searching and full of a solemn

dignity. . . . The first volume heaves and pitches, and the second, until the

actual murder, is full of psychologizing that usually fails to come oª.” It

was only in Book III that the old Dreiserian genius fully comes to life. What

he particularly admired was the disintegration of Clyde, which he, too, com-

pared with the fall of Hurstwood. It was clearly less than even a mixed re-

view, with positive comments cast only in terms of Dreiser’s general

strengths as a novelist, and not for his particular achievement in An Amer-

ican Tragedy.

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

3 1 8

“I have taken a dreadful hack at the book in the Merkur for March,”

Mencken had warned him, “but there is also some very sweet stuª in the

notice.” Yet no amount of sweetness could erase or mitigate the insults that

laced the review. Dreiser was “wholly devoid of what may be called liter-

ary tact.” He was a maudlin moralizer, deaf to his “dreadful cacophony,”

who seemingly taunted his well-meaning critics by throwing out “the present

and forbidding monster—a heaping cartload of raw materials for a novel,

with rubbish of all sorts intermixed—a vast, sloppy, chaotic thing of 385,000

words—at least 250,000 of them unnecessary!” Dreiser may have sensed

this coming when he and Helen left Hollins Street that December after-

noon. “It doesn’t matter what he ever says about me or does to me,” he told

her, “he is a great guy and a great friend and I will always love him.” Perhaps

the inscribed copy of An American Tragedy he sent Mencken in January

was intended to soften any bad feeling that might bleed into his review for

the American Mercury. More than likely, it was a true act of friendship and

perhaps a way of apologizing for his failure to ask about Mencken’s mother.

Perhaps in a small way, Mencken retaliated against Dreiser’s presumed in-

sensitivity when he referred to Elvira Gri‹ths, Clyde’s mother so obviously

based on Dreiser’s own, as a “pathetic, drab wife” in spite of her valiant and

touching eªorts to save her son from the electric chair. When Dreiser finally

read an advance copy of Mencken’s review sent to Boni & Liveright, he was

outraged. “As for your critical predilections, animosities, inhibitions,—et. cet.

Tush,” he told Mencken on February 8, 1926, “Who reads you? Bums and

loafers. No goods. We were friends before ever you were a critic of mine,

if I recall.”43

–

Dreiser and Helen shipped their car back by rail and returned to New York

that winter on the Kroonland, the same ship that had brought him back

from Europe in 1912 instead of the Titanic and now on one of its final voy-

ages itself. Florida was in the midst of a real estate boom, which may have

been the reason for their trip there. Dreiser lost $4,000 on beachfront prop-

erty in Fort Lauderdale when it later washed into the sea during a hurri-

cane. No doubt, the investment came from the royalties of The “Genius.”

“Millions of realtors and all hick-dom from Wyoming & Texas to Maine—

moving in,” he told Louise Campbell. He had already witnessed one such

“real-estate madhouse” in Los Angeles when he had had no money to in-

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

3 1 9

vest and now probably thought it foolish to pass up the same opportunity

in Florida, where the entire state was swarming with realtors “shouting about

their subdivisions.”44 Back in New York, he and Helen rented a suite in the

Pasadena Hotel on Sixty-Eighth Street, just west of Broadway.

Dreiser could aªord to live in swankier accommodations now. In March,

to expand the profits of An American Tragedy, Liveright arranged to have

the novel dramatized for the stage. The play ran successfully at the Long-

acre Theater on Broadway for 216 performances that year and the next,

grossing over $30,000 a week. The book was adapted by Patrick Kearney,

a former actor who had written the successful A Man’s Man. He agreed to

only 45 percent (instead of the usual 50 percent) of the royalties and to give

Dreiser an advance on the production of $1,500.45 That same month a big-

ger avalanche of cash came his way—$80,000, the most money then ever

paid by Hollywood for film rights to a novel—but it also cost Dreiser some-

thing in terms of his personal reputation, even to this day.

On March 19, 1926, during lunch at the Ritz, Dreiser hurled a cup of

coªee (“The coªee wasn’t cold,” one witness recalled) into the face of his

publisher Horace Liveright.46 The events leading up to this spectacle are

not altogether clear, but the following picture emerges. Once the idea of

the play version became a contractual reality in March, Dreiser became in-

terested in selling the novel, born in Hollywood, to the movies. Jesse Lasky,

president of the Famous Players–Lasky Corporation (later Paramount), was

one obvious buyer since Dreiser had had brief dealings with him in Cali-

fornia. Liveright, however, told Dreiser he did not think that a story about

unwed pregnancy would pass the Hays Code of voluntary censorship. While

Dreiser had been in Hollywood, the film industry came under severe crit-

icism from politicians and the public for its raciness. Will Hays (interest-

ingly born in Sullivan, Indiana, where Dreiser had spent some of his form-

ative years) left his job as postmaster general to become the president of

the self-censoring organization that resulted, the Motion Picture Producers

and Distributors of America. In fact, in writing the novel, Dreiser him-

self had engaged in a certain amount of self-cleansing, especially in the

much-revised scenes in which Clyde seeks to be alone with Roberta in her

newly rented room.47

Liveright, whose cash flow was worrying him, may not have been alto-

gether candid with Dreiser, perhaps hoping to get as high as 30 percent of

the movie royalties since he had commissioned the play on which he thought

the movie would most likely be based. It was true, as Liveright possibly

hinted to Dreiser, that Lasky had already considered An American Tragedy

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

3 2 0

for the screen and rejected it because of the Hays restrictions. Yet Lasky

and his assistant, Walter Wanger, had apparently changed their minds af-

ter reading Quinn Martin’s article in the New York World of March 7, which

argued that the book could be made into “the greatest film yet produced”

without violating the decency code. Almost overnight, the view in Holly-

wood changed from negative to positive. Lasky tried in vain to get in touch

with Dreiser directly, thinking (as Dreiser was already thinking ) that the

stage play was no necessary part of a movie deal, but Liveright apparently

tried to delay the contact until he could secure his own agreement with

Dreiser about his share.48 According to the general contract with Liveright