The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

rator, for whom work as a writer always came first (like Dreiser), is never-

theless jealous (like Dreiser) of the woman’s having a lover other than

himself. It may not be a coincidence that the melodrama here—seemingly

unconscious in Dreiser’s story—reminds one of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange

Interlude (1928).

The sources for the remaining two stories are unknown. “Bridget Mul-

lanphy” (perhaps her real name) is based on an Irish charwoman whom

Dreiser obviously knew when he lived at 165 W. Tenth Street. “Ida Haucha-

wout” is an insignificant sketch about a country daughter who is victim-

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ized by her father and husband. Following the father’s death, Ida inherits

part of his farm, but after she marries a man as insensitive as her father, he

gets the property when she dies in childbirth.

–

Sometime during 1929 Dreiser began a new aªair. Yvette Székely, who, like

Thelma Cudlipp almost twenty years earlier, was still in her teens. She was

the daughter (actually, stepdaughter) of a female acquaintance, a freelance

journalist from Hungary who frequented Dreiser’s weekly soirees. The re-

sult of her father’s tryst with a French prostitute, who relinquished custody

of the child, Yvette became the ward of her father and his wife in Budapest.

The couple soon divorced, with the court giving custody of Yvette to her

father. But Margaret Székely wasn’t one to hesitate when it came to getting

on with her life. She soon fell in love with an American colonel who left

her to go back to his wife, but the aªair gave her the idea of going to Amer-

ica anyway. She stole Yvette away from her father and, along with their

younger daughter, Suzanne, left for America. Five months later in New York

she met and married Roy Phelps Monahan. That marriage lasted only weeks,

and the new Mrs. Monahan took her daughters to a hotel room to live.

The year was 1922, when Yvette was about nine years old. It was at this time

that she was first sexually molested by a neighbor Margaret Monahan had

casually employed to watch her children when she was out.

As Yvette wrote in her memoir, Margaret Monahan “had a way of being

where the action was, more especially if the situation held people of fame

and importance,” such as the now celebrated Dreiser. There is even the pos-

sibility that Margaret herself had an aªair with Dreiser. (Assertions that

Suzanne did also are improbable, however).57 By the time they met him,

Margaret and her two daughters were living on the Upper West Side, not

too far from Dreiser’s midtown apartment at Rodin Studios. After she took

her two daughters to a number of the Dreiser gatherings, Yvette and her

sister came to view the author as a father figure and to call him “TD” in-

stead of “Mr. Dreiser.” At one of his Thursday night receptions, possibly

just after Margaret had interviewed Dreiser for a Budapest newspaper, he

slipped the seventeen-year-old Yvette a note to meet him the following Tues-

day at the Fifty-Seventh Street Schraªt’s Restaurant near his studio apart-

ment. Fatherless and starstruck by Dreiser’s literary fame, Yvettte was al-

ready prepared to endure his advances to win his friendship and attention.58

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As they sat in the restaurant, Dreiser continued to regard her in an avun-

cular way, but it became clearer and clearer after a number of similar meet-

ings that he wanted her sexually. Eventually the two retreated to the Mt.

Kisco house, which Yvette along with her mother and sister had visited be-

fore Dreiser began his overt eªorts at seduction. Yvette remembered his tak-

ing out a rubber sheet from a black leather satchel and spreading it out on

the bed upstairs. “I lay down on the sheet,” she recalled, “hoping this part

of the ‘business’ would soon be over with. Then a mountain lowered down

on me, propping part of its weight on elbows.” After that they met a few

times in the Hotel Wellington, conveniently near his residence, and finally

in a basement room he had her rent on Eighty-Eighth Street. This time

Dreiser was not merely crossing the line of conventional morality. Yvette

was legally a minor at seventeen, and he was breaking the law. Her mother,

of course, through her long-standing lack of supervision and perhaps her

eagerness to use her daughters socially to maintain her own professional re-

lationship with a famous man, had practically hand-delivered the girl to

Dreiser. (A year or so later, Margaret Monahan sent her daughter to the

apartment of Max Eastman to return a fountain pen he had left in Yvette’s

bedroom during a party at their house, possibly as “bait.” Eastman was wait-

ing for Yvette in his pajamas, explaining that he was recovering from sur-

gery on his inner thigh. As it had been raining, he urged the “lithe and

dark-haired” girl with upward curled lashes to remove her wet shoes. “When

I did,” she recalled, “he rose, peeled oª the rest of my clothes, and led me

to bed with him.”) For his part, Dreiser expressed concern if not fear about

the consequences of his actions, asking Yvette over the next year when she

would turn eighteen. Whether he realized it, he had committed rape in the

second degree according to New York state laws in 1929. This carried a max-

imum imprisonment of ten years, though a conviction would have required

more than the victim’s uncorroborated testimony. Their relationship, how-

ever, was not exclusively sexual. Dreiser often had Yvette read poetry to him.

As with the other women, he listened to her and shared his moods and

thoughts. Yvette joined his army of “secretaries” (at six dollars a week) and

was put to work on his scientific essays. Long after their sexual relationship

had ended, Yvette remained his friend, and they corresponded until Dreiser’s

death. In the 1950s, she married the widowed Eastman, whom she had first

met at Dreiser’s West Fifty-Seventh Street apartment so many years before.59

While Dreiser may have been waiting for the other shoe to drop on this

latest sexual exploit, one fell instead on his fortune. The stock market crash

of October 1929, “Black Tuesday,” wiped out approximately half his finan-

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cial worth. The country would soon be deep in poverty that spread now

from the traditional poor to men in suits and ties who sold apples on the

streets as a respectable way of getting a few cents without actually begging.

To Dreiser the economic and social catastrophe, as we shall see, only rein-

forced his belief in communism and drove him further down the path

toward social activism, if not civil disobedience.

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f i f t e e n

Tragic America

–

Do I seem to you to go through the world making bellicose noises?

D R E I S E R T O E . S . M A R T I N , S E P T E M B E R 4 , 1 9 3 4

in 1930, at the start of the nation’s long economic ordeal, Dreiser looked

every day of his fifty-eight years. His slightly jowly face and graying hair

in faint retreat from the top of his head suggested a certain fatigue, while

the steely gray eyes revealed, in spite of his cast, the same old alertness to

his surroundings. In most pictures of the time, his smile is nothing more

than a broken grin, as if to suggest wariness but not trepidation. His shoul-

ders had become somewhat rounded as his original height of six feet, one

and a quarter inches shrank almost an inch with increasing age. Although

Dreiser had taken at least two major walking tours in his life, he never ex-

ercised on a regular schedule. The degree of health he still enjoyed he prob-

ably owed to all the walking he was forced to do as a youth in Indiana.

Since Russia, he had taken to drinking during the day, and even in the morn-

ing. With age, he also had more frequent bronchial attacks, which would

not respond well to the wet Northeast winters any longer. His weight hov-

ered around two hundred pounds.

That spring the stock market recovered about 20 percent of its losses,

and President Herbert Hoover, the Great Engineer who had fed the starv-

ing Belgians during the First World War and overseen the recovery of the

shattered European economy, still hoped that his organizational skills

would lead America out of its own financial woes. Historians have long

maintained that Hoover was the scapegoat for the Depression. Even though

3 5 4

he had never held elected o‹ce before, he was probably one of our more