ing this section of his autobiography about the same time he was working
on this story, for in “The Old Neighborhood” the narrator of this melan-
choly interior monologue sees two such lights “dancing down the hill.” In
both cases, the mysterious lights signal the coming deaths of the children.
Soon after the death of his boys, the narrator abandons his wife and be-
c e l e b r i t y
3 3 1
comes a wealthy engineer and inventor. When he returns to his “old neigh-
borhood” twenty years later, now remarried with more children, he is deeply
remorseful about his past.
“St. Columba and the River,” developed into fiction from a newspaper
piece of 1904, ranks with the two just described as the best of the lot in
Chains. It was an old story in 1927, having been accepted and then returned
by the Saturday Evening Post ten years earlier because it favors the mecha-
nistic over the religious view of life. Based possibly on one of Dreiser’s “am-
ateur labors” at the turn of the century when he may have been a worker
on the construction of the Holland Tunnel, the story concerns an Irish-
Catholic laborer who credits his continued survival from close calls to the
protection of St. Columba, the patron saint of those who work near water.13
Dreiser on the other hand clearly implies that Dennis McGlathery is in the
clutches of an indiªerent river as well as an apathetic God: his survival from
repeated disasters in the dangerous tunnels is merely accidental. “St.
Columba and the River” was probably not completely representative of
Dreiser’s point of view in 1927. He was already beginning to drift toward
the mysticism and religiosity of his final novels. He was also on the verge
of a political conversion that would ultimately become a religious quest of
its own.
The title story “Chains” was originally called “Love” when it first appeared
in the Pictorial Review in 1919 after being rejected by ten other magazines,
including The Smart Set. And deservedly so. Its only interesting aspect, and
that only in light of Dreiser’s history, is that it is about a cuckold instead
of an unfaithful husband. The story also mocks the narrator for marrying
a woman half his age. He seems to deserve the neglect of the hedonist who
sleeps with younger men at every opportunity. In “Fulfillment,” the woman
is a faithful wife, but one who does not love her husband. In “Marriage—
for One” it is the unfaithful wife who does not love her husband. The wife
in “The Shadow” also dwells in a loveless marriage, but she ends her aªair
because she fears she will lose custody of her son. “Convention” mixes one
of the poisoning cases Dreiser studied for An American Tragedy with scenes
from his St. Louis days as a reporter. When the wife of a journalist tries to
frame her husband’s mistress with trying to kill her, the force of conven-
tion is so strong that the grand jury refuses to indict the wife. And the stray-
ing husband, now fearful of being exposed for his infidelity, promptly re-
turns to his (homely) wife and falsely denounces his girlfriend as a prostitute.
It is di‹cult to pin down a consistent or overarching theme in Chains,
but obviously Dreiser was still objecting to the institution of marriage and
c e l e b r i t y
3 3 2
perhaps trying to justify his continued flight from it with Helen. For Dreiser,
as for many novelists, this smaller canvas was his sketch book in which he
experimented with diªerent methods of narration and tried to answer re-
curring questions that nagged at him. “Sanctuary,” the lead story, is another
of Dreiser’s take-oªs on the work of Stephen Crane. Like Crane’s Maggie,
who “blossoms” in a mud puddle, Dreiser’s Madeleine flowers in a “dung-
heap.” (Interestingly for Dreiser, it presents Catholic nuns, who eventually
take the wayward Madeleine oª the streets, in a positive light.) “The Hand”
is a mere ghost story. Two of the weakest, “Khat” and “The Prince Who
Was a Thief,” borrow from exotics of The Arabian Nights and perhaps Mark
Twain. “Phantom Gold” is about a Rip Van Winkle who wakes up to find
his previously worthless land full of valuable zinc. But in trying to cheat
his irascible wife and indolent children out of the profits from its sale, he
accidentally sells the property for far less than it is worth. (Dreiser told
Mencken in 1916 that he was once “dippy over Washington Irving.”)14 In
“The Victor” the protagonist is likewise a hard-boiled financier who before
his death sought to disenfranchise his family and will his fortune to orphans’
homes. Heartless to all throughout his career, he had a weak spot for dis-
possessed children only because he was born an orphan himself. But like
the old man in “Phantom Gold,” age takes him out of action before he can
change his will.
By far the most interesting story in Chains in terms of Dreiser’s world-
view in the mid-twenties is “The ‘Mercy’ of God,” first published in
Mencken’s newly founded American Mercury in 1924.15 Like a Poe short
story, it opens with an epigraph that doesn’t immediately shed light on the
meaning of the story and a discussion of the problem, which is then dram-
atized with an anecdote. In the opening dialogue between a celebrated “in-
terpreter of Freud” and a mechanist in the style of Jacques Loeb, the psy-
chologist suggests that there is something else in nature, or behind it, “some
not as yet understood impulse, which seeks to arrange and right and bal-
ance things at times.” The mechanist, something of a Hindu, who is
indiªerent to action because the world is not responsive to human desires,
believes that the beauty of nature, like everything else in life, is merely the
result of a cosmic accident. The psychologist counters that man’s love for
beauty and goodness is proof of a plan, that man is a conduit of God’s
benevolent will.
He gives an example of nature’s attempt to relieve human suªering in
the story of Marguerite, the daughter of another of those staunchly reli-
gious fathers in the fiction of Theodore Dreiser. Marguerite is a homely
c e l e b r i t y
3 3 3
girl who misses out on the social opportunities enjoyed by her more at-
tractive siblings. She becomes bookish because of her plainness and even-
tually falls in love with a teacher who does not marry her. She finally goes
insane and comes to believe that she is a beauty men cannot resist. This is
nature’s way of protecting the woman from her loneliness. The story con-
cludes with the narrator speaking from the point of view of the mechanist
and wishing he could believe in the intervention of God in human aªairs.
Part of the epigraph is used to close the tale—to the eªect that in order to
believe, one must want that conversion as much as a drowning person de-
sires air. As Dreiser admitted in his poem “The Hidden God,” he had ar-
rived at “the place in my life / Where I must pray.” The story, with its back-
drop of the scientist “connected with one of the great experimental
laboratories of the world” devoted to explaining the nature of man, also
prefigures Dreiser’s formalized interest in science and his visit to Woods Hole
in 1928.16
–
Liveright, still eager because of the firm’s declining revenue to squeeze all
the money he could out of the success of An American Tragedy, published
two other books by Dreiser in 1927, both revised editions of earlier works.
One was the controversial play The Hand of the Potter, for which Dreiser
chopped oª three or four pages from the last act dealing with the reporters’
exchange over the abnormal psychology of a child molester.17 The second
was The Financier, now cut down, mainly by Louise Campbell, from its
780 pages of 1912 to just over 500; the revised version was also issued in
London in 1927 by Constable & Company. Even though Mencken was now
a stranger, Dreiser didn’t hesitate to allow his publisher to recycle the influen-
tial critic’s remark about Dreiser’s standing isolated today but still more likely
to endure than other writers. Boni & Liveright also claimed in advertise-
ments that the new version of The Financier was “completely revised,” even
stating, not altogether falsely, that Dreiser had originally been “unable to
give his manuscript the close revision that he gives all his books.”
One of the blurbs used in the promotion—from the Cincinnati
Enquirer—claimed rightly that the tempo had been increased, but wrongly
that the characterization had been clarified. The character of Cowperwood’s
father, for example, is altered to make him less plodding in his rise from
bank teller at the beginning of the novel and a little more like the financier