opportunity because of illness, but Dreiser told her that the seventy-year-
old playwright had demonstrated the value of his vegetarian diet by sus-
pending himself between two chairs with “his legs out horizontally some
distance from the floor.”7
Just before he returned to New York on October 22, he was accused of
plagiarizing from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Probably because
Moods was initially a limited and signed edition, Dreiser had felt he could
publish some of the poems elsewhere. Thirteen of them were printed in
Vanity Fair, including “The Beautiful.”8 Writing in the New York World of
September 7, Franklin P. Adams juxtaposed the poem with a passage from
Anderson’s “Tandy,” a sketch about a neurotic man (typical of the charac-
ters in Winesburg, Ohio) who has “not found my thing to love” until he dis-
covers potential love in a child named “Tandy.” Although Adams had to
misquote at least two of the lines from Dreiser’s poem to make it more fully
parrot Anderson’s thought (“perhaps of all men I alone understand” is not
c e l e b r i t y
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in Dreiser’s poem), parts of “Tandy” and “The Beautiful” are in fact sim-
ilar, indeed almost identical. Both address the challenge of womanhood in
the age of Freud.
It makes no sense that Dreiser on the crest of his biggest literary coup felt
the need to steal lines from another writer. When Winesburg, Ohio appeared
in 1919, Dreiser was beginning to get interested in Freud. He may have writ-
ten “The Beautiful” about that time. He was never at a loss for words or de-
tails, having, as many suspect, a photographic memory. He had, of course,
been accused of stealing from George Ade’s “Fable of Two Mandolin Play-
ers” in Sister Carrie, but this, too, may have been the unconscious borrow-
ing of a photographic mind. At any rate, Anderson, whose career Dreiser
had long ago sought to assist, wasn’t troubled by the parallels, though he did
hint at the possibility of unintentional plagiarism, saying “It is one of the ac-
cidents that occur.”9 This was the price of celebrity—that even a poem by
the author of An American Tragedy would be so scrutinized by the hungry
press. Nor was this the last time Dreiser would face the charge of plagiarism.
Also that October, the play based on An American Tragedy began its suc-
cessful run on Broadway. Dreiser wept when the curtain came down on
Clyde’s death-cell scene. The handkerchief which he habitually folded and
unfolded was, according to one witness, “a limp and twisted thing” at the
end of the play. During the intermissions, the author remained in his seat
and spoke to no one. “The poor boy,” he finally said at the close of the per-
formance, “The poor bastard! What a shame!”10 One of the reasons that
the composition of the novel had drained him both artistically and emo-
tionally was his empathy and identification with Clyde as a kind of eco-
nomic Everyman. Like Whitey Sullivan, Clyde— or Chester Gillette—had
gone to the chair partly because he had been poor. Dreiser was now divided
about his story. Up until now he had bemoaned social conditions for the
laboring classes but insisted that man was chemically and cosmically pro-
grammed. Now he began to think more like a sociologist.
The next month— on November 17—Dreiser lost another name out of
a more recent past. George Sterling committed suicide in San Francisco.
–
Upon their return to New York, he and Helen had taken up their suite in
the Pasadena Hotel, and Dreiser rented an o‹ce in which to write in the
Manufacturers Trust Building on Columbus Circle. They soon signed a lease
c e l e b r i t y
3 2 9
for a two-story corner apartment— on the thirteenth and fourteenth
floors—in Rodin Studios at 200 West Fifty-Seventh Street, next to Carnegie
Hall. (This was Helen’s idea. She was surviving what amounted to an open
marriage, though open only for Dreiser, and sought fulfillment as the “wife”
of a literary celebrity.) The lower floor had a large reception hall that led
to Dreiser’s study, or studio, an enormous room with cathedral windows
looking north across Fifty-Seventh Street. Its high ceiling extended to both
floors in places. There was also on this level, along with a bathroom and
the dining room and kitchen, a maid’s room, soon occupied by a black
woman named Pearl. The second floor featured two large bedrooms sepa-
rated by a second bathroom. The living and reception rooms were gener-
ously lined with bookcases, and for the first time Dreiser had room for all
his books. (His personal library at the time of his death contained almost
two thousand volumes).11 Like his fictional Carrie twenty-five years earlier,
Dreiser had now arrived. The place was decorated with new furniture, a
Steinway piano, pictures of primitive types including a large canvas of a
naked woman, and a Russian wolfhound named Nicholas Romanoª, a gift
from one of Helen’s sisters. Not long after they occupied their new home
in February 1927, he and Helen began the practice of holding an open house
every Thursday evening between six and nine.
Ensconced in his success that winter, Dreiser recommended a collection
of short stories by Arthur Henry to Boni & Liveright. This probably wasn’t
the only friendly interlude to their estrangement after the publication of
An Island Cabin in 1902. Henry and his daughter Dorothy from his first
marriage were occasional guests at Dreiser’s Thursday night soirees. Also,
Henry owed Dreiser a debt for helping him with The Unwritten Law, a 1905
novel that includes a dishonest financier as well as an Old School German
named Karl Fischer, the father of two daughters. (The real “Carl” Fischer
and Dreiser’s father had fled the German draft together in the 1840s.) Liv-
eright’s chief editor, T. R. Smith, declined the opportunity of publishing
Henry’s manuscript, telling Dreiser that while his latest stories were “pleas-
antly readable,” they had “no variation to speak of ” and were in fact “fairly
monotonous throughout.”12
Between March 25 and April 11, 1927, Dreiser embarked on a solitary
walking tour from Elizabeth, New Jersey, through Pennsylvania, Maryland,
West Virginia, and Virginia. Years before, back in 1902, he had hit the trail
for his health following the Sister Carrie debacle, and now at age fifty-five
he sought to get back some of that health he might have squandered on
the struggle with his other masterpiece. Meanwhile, that spring his pub-
c e l e b r i t y
3 3 0
lishers issued his second collection of short stories, Chains. Unfortunately, it was subtitled Lesser Stories and Novels. Some critics thought the pieces
were “less” in terms of quality, and they found no “novels” in the book,
only very long stories. All but two of the fifteen stories had been previously
published in magazines and newspapers, though many of them had first
been rejected multiple times. Reviewers naturally compared Chains unfa-
vorably to An American Tragedy, though more than a few of the situations
or plots of his latest batch of stories could have been the seed for such a
novel.
Chains consisted of more of Dreiser’s marriage stories. In Free, his first
collection, the theme had been the male quest to be free from the “chains”
of matrimony and monogamous sexual relationships. The marriage sto-
ries in Chains, however, describe these eternal conflicts from the other side
of the bed, or at least allow the woman more say than she has in Free. The
strongest tale is “Typhoon,” originally published in Hearst’s International-
Cosmopolitan the previous October under the title of “The Wages of Sin.”
With the plot and the zest of “Butcher Rogaum’s Door” and Jennie Ger-
hardt, Dreiser tells the familiar tale of the daughter of the morally rigid
immigrant German father. It also borrows from An American Tragedy in
dramatizing the shame of the daughter, who is swiftly impregnated and
abandoned by the first boy her father allows her to date. But this unwed
mother-to-be strikes back. After a period of Roberta-like whining and
pleading, Ida Zobel fatally shoots her seducer and is acquitted by a sym-
pathetic jury. She has the child, which, like Old Gerhardt, her father comes
to love, but Ida ultimately commits suicide because of her love for the boy
she killed. The impact of the story is strengthened by Dreiser’s putting the
reader in the place of such unfortunate young women before the advent
of legal birth control.
In “The Old Neighborhood,” published as early as 1918 in the Metropol-
itan, the unnamed protagonist is a married man who wishes his children
dead in a moment of carefree fantasy reminiscent of Sarah Dreiser’s death-
wish for her children. As already noted, Dreiser relates in chapter 1 of Dawn
how his mother saw three lights bobbing in the woods after making the
wish to be free of her husband and first three sons. He may have been writ-