after his literary interests). Dreiser ultimately agreed to pay her $200 a month
for the rest of her life as long as she remained unmarried.53 Jug couldn’t
have remarried, of course, without giving Dreiser a divorce, but there was
no mention of it. Earlier, in order to placate Helen, he had tried (not too
seriously) to get a divorce. His “married” state had ironically kept him “free”
for many years. Now his old tie to Jug also kept him just out of matrimo-
nial reach of every other woman, including Helen.
The fame from An American Tragedy would not come without its aes-
thetic costs either—as it cast Dreiser into a kind of literary never-never land,
a blur of his creative aims from which the muse would soon decamp.
a n a m e r i c a n t r a g e d y
3 2 4
f o u r t e e n
Celebrity
–
Before he had talked more than five minutes
I realized that his trip to Russia had converted him to Communism.
W. E. WOODWARD
dreiser had been writing poems and publishing them occasionally in
magazines since the 1890s, when he supposedly had a book of them in press
somewhere. In 1926 Boni & Liveright brought out Moods: Cadenced and
Declaimed. The idea behind the title came, indirectly at least, from Dreiser’s
early reading of Emerson. “Life is a train of moods like a string of beads,”
the transcendentalist wrote in the essay “Experience,” “and as we pass
through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world
their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.” In other words,
one’s view of the world, or nature in all its harmony as an emblem of God,
depended on temperament. Like Emerson, Dreiser also saw more than na-
ture in nature, but up to this point he couldn’t say that it revealed the be-
nign emanation of God. For him the isolated and often contrary moods,
the beads on that iron wire, too often compelled bewilderment along with
wonderment. Moreover, such mood swings were the consequence of the
moodiness of God. In “The Little God”—reflecting the idea expressed in
Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub that God Himself may be a victim of a higher god—
Dreiser compares man’s treatment of lower nature to the capricious way
God deals with man.1
Ultimately, Dreiser was of two minds when it came to naturalism and
transcendentalism. It is his naturalism that most readily meets the eye, but
the other is always somewhere in the background. In his poems the mysti-
3 2 5
cism is more apparent—there he seems to ride the horses of naturalism and
transcendentalism in tandem. Yet this ambivalence is also found in his
fiction, and it is what makes him so much more interesting than a pure nat-
uralist like Norris or even Zola. Even the skeptical Mencken conceded that
Dreiser, though he describes life minutely, “never forgets the dream that is
behind it.” And as early as 1909 he had insisted to Mencken that even sci-
entific inquiry is a “form of prayer.”2 He may have spent his life denying
his father’s Catholicism, but he never dismissed the Emersonian conviction
that nature’s beauty had a spiritual element. Carrie rocks in her chair and
wonders what is missing from her new life of opulence and fame. The Ital-
ian on death row who precedes Clyde in the electric chair soon finds out
what’s on the other side. In “The Hidden God,” Dreiser sounds the same
note of frustration if not anger that we find in Stephen Crane’s poetry. He
finds it necessary to pray, but he knows not to whom:
I have known many gods
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
They have dreamed
Or beamed
Upon me,—
Been threatening
Or indiªerent.
But they have all gone,—
All.
Yet in “The Great Blossom,” he reminds us of Thoreau sitting in the en-
trance to his cabin at Walden Pond, utterly transfixed by the beauty of na-
ture. Dreiser is also mesmerized before its charms:
I sit in my doorway
From dawn until sunrise,
From sunrise until noon,
From noon until night,
The bloom of the present moment,
The gorgeous life-bloom itself,
Forever before me.
The “great blossom” is nature itself, forever recycling death back into life
in the beauty of the natural landscape.
When exercising his mystic tendencies in verse, however, he is often overly
c e l e b r i t y
3 2 6
abstract— or even banal as in “The Little Flowers of Love and Wonder,”
which “peep and dream, / and quickly die.”3 Generally, many of the poems
are fragments or random thoughts, not only about nature but society. Be-
cause the first Moods appeared in a limited edition of only 550 copies, the
book was not widely reviewed until its second, more commercial edition
of 1928. This reprint had fifty-eight additional pages featuring twenty-nine
new poems, including one of his best, “The Road I Came.” Masters, who
wrote a biography of Whitman, had called Dreiser “Theodore the Poet” in
his Spoon River Anthology, but Dreiser’s free-verse style wasn’t even as force-
ful as Masters’s. Nevertheless, the Brooklyn Eagle, once edited by Whitman,
said it was constrained to deal gently with Dreiser’s “work upon the lyre”—
even though his first two editions often dropped fugitive thoughts in the
reader’s lap without explanation.4
Dreiser might not have had these publications without the success of An
American Tragedy. Liveright even published The Songs of Paul Dresser that
year with an introduction by Dreiser, which essentially reworked parts of
“My Brother Paul.” It was a rushed production job as well: “My Gal Sal”
is listed in the table of contents as beginning on page 271, but it is found
on page 263, and its musical score is completely missing. The collection,
which wasn’t complete, has nevertheless helped to keep Paul’s memory alive.
By the 1920s his reputation had faded and was yet to be revived, even in
Indiana, where today he is better known (and liked) than his little brother
because he didn’t write the truth about Hoosiers he knew.
–
Dreiser and Helen left New York for Europe on June 22, 1926, for a tour
of what turned out to be nine countries. The ostensible reason was to con-
duct business with his European publishers and to continue his research on
Yerkes for the last volume of his trilogy of desire. ( With the federal income
tax now in place and the mounting wealth from An American Tragedy,
Dreiser was becoming almost as financially conscious as Cowperwood, even
forming his own corporation.) The real reason was to reward himself for
his success, which continued to yield opportunities as well as royalties and
advances. It may also have been to stir the waters for the Nobel Prize. They
first sailed to Scandinavia, visiting Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. From
Oslo, they sailed along Norway’s rugged coast in mail boats instead of lin-
ers, and toured the famous and seemingly endless fjords. “We cruised for
c e l e b r i t y
3 2 7
miles,” Helen later recorded, “through deep and narrow waterways bordered
on both sides by high mountainous slopes, so steep and dangerous that one
would think only a mountain goat could venture there.” In Stockholm they
spent an afternoon with one of Dreiser’s publishers, Norstedt and Soner.
In Copenhagen they were charmed by the autoless streets filled instead with
thousands of bicycles. It was restful after the New York of the Roaring Twen-
ties. Here they met the critic Georg Brandes, who had known Ibsen and
Strindberg. Brandes had visited the United States in 1914 and wondered
whether there was anything such as sex in American literature. Dreiser and
Helen were amused to hear that he had been advised to read Dreiser.5
They visited Germany, especially the smaller towns, but Dreiser proba-
bly didn’t go to Mayen again.6 The villages soothed him, but in Berlin he
felt an old uneasiness. Just as in 1912 he had sensed the militarism of the
Germans before World War I, he now complained about the Prussian tem-
perament. “The Prussians are too drastic,” he told Helen. “They should mix
and mingle with the milder Germans.” They visited Hamburg, Prague, Vi-
enna, Budapest, Munich, Salzburg, Paris, and finally London, where Dreiser
met another of his foreign publishers, Otto Kyllmann of Constable and
Company. He had failed to meet Freud in Vienna, but he had a brief re-
union with Emma Goldman in Paris. Having left the United States for Rus-
sia during the mass deportation of anarchists in 1919, she was now in exile
from the Soviet Union, where she had even disagreed with the Bolsheviks.
In London he lunched with George Bernard Shaw, whose quick wit re-
minded him of his old and almost ex-friend Mencken. Helen missed this