in Dawn, the love he still felt for his mother and his brother Paul. When
they returned to the Ansonia and boarded the elevator, he got oª at her
floor. As she recalled the evening, she unlocked her door and held out her
hand to say good night. She soon learned, however, that he had no inten-
tion of leaving.26
Clara eventually moved to New York and received a salary of twenty-five
dollars a week to edit chapters of The Stoic, which had been in process for
almost thirty years in one form or another. By this time, Dreiser was living
in the city, while Helen spent most of her time at Iroki in Mt. Kisco. An
acquaintance at the time described her as often looking “sad,” and Ellen
Copenhaver, Sherwood Anderson’s last wife, wrote of Helen: “Rumor has
it that she has lost Dreiser.” Between April and August of 1932, he wrote
about two-thirds of the final volume of his Cowperwood trilogy. Clara
dined out with him regularly during this time and observed his habits and
friends. He drank a lot, she remembered, but she never saw him intoxi-
cated. A friend in upstate New York sent him applejack, which they both
drank liberally, dropping a piece of charcoal into the brew to filter out any
impurities common (and sometimes dangerous) in Prohibition-era intox-
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 6 4
icants. Clara, already a chain-smoker, soon became dependent on alcohol
as well. One night while they dined out, “a tall, thin, red-faced man with
sandy hair” walked into the restaurant and headed straight for the bar. “That
was Red Lewis,” Dreiser told Clara, after the man had gulped down his drink
and quickly departed. He spoke of their quarrel and how the Nobel Prize
should not have been awarded to Lewis. On another occasion she met
George Jean Nathan, “a rather small, slender man, with gray hair, dark, wise
eyes, a small nose and wide, loose-lipped mouth.” He and Dreiser were dis-
cussing the possibility of beginning a new magazine, which would be called
the American Spectator, and Dreiser wondered whether Mencken, from
whom he was still estranged, might be interested in the enterprise.27
Clara accompanied Dreiser on a trip to San Antonio in the spring of 1932.
He was traveling again for his health, this time under the assumed name
of T. H. Dryer, perhaps to avoid a hostile press after the publication of Tragic
America. Eventually he went west to El Paso before returning to New York.
The trip had also been initiated, as had others, by a quarrel with Helen. He
was striving to work on The Stoic in peace somewhere. Clara, who met none
of Dreiser’s other women except Helen at Mt. Kisco, left the writer’s ser-
vice after three years and returned to Philadelphia, her departure hastened
by an auto accident that occurred while she was chauªeuring Teddie and
Helen.28 She eventually married and moved to England, where she became
involved with the Oxford Group, later known as the Moral Rearmament
Movement, in the 1940s.
That summer Liveright, Inc., filed for bankruptcy, with thousands of
copies of Dreiser’s various books on hand. The unsold stock included more
than 3,000 copies of An American Tragedy, more than 4,000 copies of the
recently issued Dawn, 4,000 copies of AGallery of Women, and 1,408 copies
of the controversial Tragic America. 29 Liveright himself went out almost as
quickly. A heavy drinker, he died broke of pneumonia at age forty-six on
September 24, 1933. Dreiser owed this publisher much, but he had never
trusted him. Later, in the hands of another who eventually remaindered his
books, he thought that he had never had a truer publisher than Liveright.
Meanwhile, the American Spectator had already been incorporated and
was to be jointly edited by Dreiser, Nathan, Ernest Boyd, Sherwood Ander-
son, James Branch Cabell, and Eugene O’Neill. According to its prospec-
tus, this “Literary Newspaper” sought to publish writers who ignore “the
conventionalist, the moralist, and the religionist.” It would be published
every month at first and then weekly. No one contributing author could
accept an article by himself, a rule that kept Dreiser busy trying to recruit
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 6 5
material suitable to Nathan and the others, but his preference for anticap-
italist and procommunist material often failed the test. When Dreiser sent
him an invitation to submit, Upton Sinclair commented that the editorial
board was “an oddly assorted bunch, and it will be interesting to see what
you are all able to agree upon.” Dreiser apparently had less trouble pub-
lishing his own work, which was mostly written on whim when he re-
membered that he was more comfortable as a writer instead of an editor.
During the period of the Spectator years he published two sketches that
were reminiscent of the ones in Twelve Men, “Townsend” and “Winter-
ton.” The first focused on a clerk who aspires to the riches of a Vanderbilt
or a Rockefeller, but wastes away—like Hurstwood in the hard economic
times of the 1890s—in that earlier “Great Depression.” The other portrait
reached back to his newspaper days. Winterton, an editor of the New York
Express, modeled no doubt on one of the New York World editors Dreiser
had failed to win over, is eventually ruined by Anthony Comstock, whose
men raid Winterton’s private collection of nude photographs and French
posters.30
A similar piece came out in one of the earliest issues of Esquire, where
Dreiser once again had a magazine connection through Will Lengel.
“Mathewson,” one of his best sketches since those of Twelve Men, is based
on the decline of a talented journalist, the son of a wealthy printer who be-
cause of his alcoholism works only intermittently for the various St. Louis
newspapers. These include the Globe-Democrat and the Republic, where
Dreiser had once worked. Like Dreiser’s friend at the Globe-Democrat Dick
Wood, who wrote a novel in the naturalistic mode of the French, Wilson
Mathewson admires Zola and writes an article about him that fascinates
the narrator, who is fashioned after Dreiser as a St. Louis reporter. He sub-
sequently reads “of this man Zola with intense interest.” (This detail in the
plot gives us pause as to Dreiser’s denial that he ever read Zola and certainly
not before writing Sister Carrie. ) Zola’s “Paris, his people,” Dreiser writes,
“the kind of people who appeared to be not so much diªerent from what
was all about me here in St. Louis!” The story also shows in the narrator’s
fascination for Wilson Mathewson shades of Poe’s “William Wilson.” And
the young reporter’s visit to the mother of the Jeª Ingalls in “Nigger Jeª ”
is essentially redone when the narrator in “Mathewson” visits the widow of
an engineer horribly killed in a railroad accident. He had been sent there
by Mathewson, who was a temporary city editor one night at the Globe-
Democrat. Mathewson, who later dies of a drug overdose, admired the young
reporter because he hadn’t bothered the sobbing woman with a reporter’s
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 6 6
needless questions. Marguerite Tjader, who typed out the story for Dreiser,
noted later that it was a refreshing change from the combative political writ-
ing of recent years. She found the character of Mathewson “as eerie as a
character out of Poe or Baudelaire.” The story is not, of course, unpoliti-
cal, for Mathewson reflects Dreiser’s anger over poverty in America—both
in 1894 and in 1934. “Do I seem to rave?” the narrator asks. “Life, in the
main, is a cause for raving.”31
–
Unfortunately for Dreiser that year, this sympathy for the disadvantaged
did not always extend to the Jewish people, many of whom were already
trying to get out of Hitler’s Germany. Unlike the work of Wharton or Hem-
ingway, there is no memorable Jewish stereotype in Dreiser’s fiction, yet he
was personally capable of occasional anti-Semitic slurs. He may have dis-
trusted Liveright primarily because he was Jewish. He shared the bias com-
monly directed at Jews before the 1930s that labeled them as shrewd, money-
minded lawyers, bankers, and merchants. But Dreiser was always of two
minds concerning Jews, for he also accepted the other stereotype of the Jew
as somehow smarter than the average Gentile. And the superstitious
Dreiser, as he had written in A Hoosier Holiday, once stated that “for a period
of over fifteen years in my life, at the approach of every marked change . . .
I have met a certain smug, kindly Jew, always the same Jew, who has greeted
me most warmly.”32
In the September 1933 issue of the Spectator, the editors ran the pro-
ceedings of “A Jewish Symposium,” reprinted perhaps somewhat apolo-
getically as “Editorial Conference ( With Wine)” in 1934. This was one of