The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

rather die in the United States than live here.” He left Russia on January 13

in a foul mood, but the departure was otherwise poignant because he and

Ruth had finally to say goodbye. As they boarded their separate trains, hers

bound for Moscow, she recorded in a letter to him the following day, “it

seemed as if [the uncoupling of their railroad cars] were a physical separa-

tion of just us two, as if you were cut away from me, or worse, that only a

part of me had been cut away from you and the rest had gone on with you

in the darkness in that other coach.” She sat in her coach feeling desolate,

not wanting to “pick up the threads” of her individual life after having

merged so completely with him for the seventy-some days. His overpow-

ering personality still enveloped her spirit.43 They would keep in touch, as

she edited things of his, including the Russian book. In their subsequent

correspondence, which lasted until Dreiser’s death, Ruth’s enthusiasm for

the Soviet Union and worldwide communism never flagged. Nor did its

eªect on Dreiser, eventually leading to his membership in the Communist

Party.

These mixed impressions were detailed not only in Dreiser Looks at Rus-

sia and a series of articles under the same awkward title in the New York

World, but also in a special statement taken by Kennell and released to the

western press in February (the Soviets refused to publish it). “Personally I

am an individualist, and shall die one.” He had seen nothing, he said, in

Russia to dissuade him from his “earliest perceptions of the necessities of

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man.” Yet he could understand the Russian people’s wanting to try this ex-

periment after “the crushing weight of czardom.” It severely annoyed him

that Winston Churchill, whom he interviewed for a magazine article that

was apparently never published, gave the Soviet experiment a life expectancy

of only seven more years. Dreiser praised the Soviets for sweeping away

from their midst “dogmatic and stultifying religion,” yet he also worried

about their horrid living conditions, homeless children, and general un-

cleanliness. “They live too many in one room,” he remarked, “and are even

lunatic enough to identify it with a communistic spirit.”44 Though he

wasn’t ready to have the communist system in the United States, he thought

it would succeed in Russia, given the availability of modern technology.

Within three months of his return, this notion had been transformed into

the prediction, largely correct as it turned out, that in twenty years the So-

viet Union would be one of the great industrial nations of the world. For-

gotten were the dirty and crowded trains. They had been very pleasant

with spacious compartments, he later told W. E. Woodward, Helen’s old

boss, who had in 1919 prompted her to meet her famous cousin. For what-

ever reason, perhaps simply willed optimism with regard to the Russian

people, whose romantic spirit any long-term visitor to Russia will testify

is infectious, Dreiser became a convert to communism and a cheerleader

for the Soviet Union.45

–

Once back home in February 1928, Dreiser put Louise Campbell to work

on the Russia book as well as A Gallery of Women, which had originally six-

teen or seventeen sketches instead of fifteen. That summer he visited Woods

Hole Marine Biological Laboratory on Cape Cod at the personal invita-

tion of the Nobel Laureate Calvin Bridges. This was the beginning of his

scientific quest to probe the riddle of the universe through a microscopic

look at nature. He told Marguerite Tjader Harris, whom he had recently

met at one of his parties, “I’ve written novels; now I want to do something

else.”46 At this point Dreiser essentially gave up fiction except for sketches,

which he published in A Gallery of Women and elsewhere, but most of these

too were not new work. His trip to Russia had not only made him a con-

vert to communism (in Russia, not America yet) but turned his energies

to social activism, a pattern that would develop fully in the Depression.

In a distant anticipation of the National Endowment for the Arts, he ad-

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3 4 5

vocated that Congress establish a Secretary of the Arts to oversee among

other activities the display of paintings and murals in subway stations and

other public places (art, he said, makes “up for the absence, at times, of

sunlight, flowers, soothing breezes or views”). He tried unsuccessfully to

bring the Moscow Grand Opera’s Ballet to New York, proposing a com-

plex scheme of issuing $150,000 worth of stock to be purchased by “a small

group of patrons” to underwrite the project at $25,000 apiece. It was in a

way a veiled attempt to help the Soviet Union achieve o‹cial recognition

from the United States, which would not come about until 1933. The

financier Otto Kahn, chairman of the board of the New York Metropol-

itan Opera, gave the first (and apparently the last) $25,000. Yet he noted

cautiously in his letter of support that the project, “it is clearly understood,

has not the remotest relationship to propaganda, and no aim other than

an artistic one” The Soviet government also feared that these artists might

defect.47

In spite of his carping about living conditions and caps on individual

talent, which may have fueled Soviet fears about dancers’ defecting, in his

Russia book Dreiser celebrated the Soviet experiment as having the great-

est potential to produce an egalitarian state free of the humiliating poverty

he had known as a child. Even though it was put together by Kennell and

Campbell as well as the nominal author, Dreiser Looks at Russia retained much

of his magic as a travel writer. For at its heart it is more about his impres-

sions of Russia, his acute observations about people in general, than it is

about Russia itself. Dorothy Thompson’s The New Russia, published the same

year, was by comparison pedestrian in its journalistic treatment. There were,

however, “deadly parallels” between the two books, and in a letter to Horace

Liveright, Inc. (the publishing house’s new name in 1929), Thompson’s

lawyer threatened suit unless the publisher withdrew the book from sale at

once and turned over all profits to Miss Thompson. She by this time was

the new Mrs. Sinclair Lewis. Her famous husband was the one most out-

raged by the apparent plagiarism, which actually involved the articles

Thompson had published in the New York Evening Post that were the ba-

sis of her book. Part of his rage probably came from his alcoholism, which

grew more severe once he had remarried and returned to the United States.48

Dreiser, however, dismissed the charge as if it were baseless, even sug-

gesting that Thompson had taken material for her book from conversations

the two had had in Moscow. The similarity between the two books should

not have been surprising, one student of the controversy has remarked, be-

cause they relied on the same interpreters, o‹cial news releases, and news-

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paper accounts. In her book Thompson even confessed that it was “in-

evitable” that much of her information was “second hand.” But unfortu-

nately the parallels went beyond even this point, and it is ba›ing as to how

Dreiser got himself into this predicament. The many resemblances certainly

cannot be dismissed as another consequence of his photographic memory.

Dreiser may not have even proofread the book, either carefully or at all;

Campbell and Kennell apparently did most of the final work. His charac-

terization of the aªair in letters and responses to friends as trivial may have

been a form of denial. This feeble defense, or the lack of any real defense,

however, may have cost him the Nobel Prize, for his reputation took a beat-

ing from the scandal, even though it never materialized into a lawsuit. Also

brought up during the controversy was the reminder that Dreiser had been

accused of plagiarizing in Sister Carrie as well as in the poem in Moods that

resembled a sketch in Winesburg, Ohio. 49

If Liveright didn’t have enough on his plate with regard to his star writer,

Dreiser made noises about breaking his contract, not due to expire until

1932. The company had yet to fulfill its promise of publishing a uniform

or collected edition of his works and had not lived up to the letter of its

promise to promote his books weekly in the newspapers. Dreiser was also

becoming aware that Liveright, Inc. was living beyond its means and was

being operated not as a corporation but “as the property of one man.” This

latest tiª between them was settled after Liveright put Dreiser on the pay-

roll, not only as a “director,” which he had already been, but as an acqui-