The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

many had openly stripped its Jews of their citizenship, barred them from

teaching in the universities, and forbidden their intermarriage with Gen-

tiles, or “Aryans.” A reader who had long admired Dreiser’s work and re-

cently met him wrote that she had learned of his statements to Hapgood

with something more than profound regret: “They say blood ties are strong

and apparently the ideas inculcated probably by your German parents have

proven stronger than your American education.” Now in spite of his liter-

ary talent, she found him personally despicable: “the meanest Jew in this

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country who has at heart the American traditions and ideals of freedom

and toleration . . . has more right in this country than you.”39 Realizing by

now that he had stepped into more than he expected, Dreiser tried to

backpedal, but his stubbornness doomed the eªort. In “Dreiser Denies He

Is Anti-Semitic” in the New Masses, where he had long been a favorite con-

tributor and topic, the editors were forced to admit that they were “far from

satisfied as to the adequacy of his final statement.” Dreiser disavowed any

hatred for Jews or admiration for Hitler. (Ironically, the Nazis banned all

his books that year, thinking that “Dreiser” was a Jewish name.) As a com-

munist sympathizer, he insisted that he favored the Jewish worker against

the Jewish exploiter as vigorously as he defended Gentile workers against

Gentile exploiters. This statement did little to mollify his critics, especially

the American Communist Party, which feared it would lose Jewish mem-

bers since it had frequently cited or quoted Dreiser in support of its ideol-

ogy. In a subsequent issue of the New Masses, party member Mike Gold’s

response to Dreiser’s “retraction” was that only “years of devoted battle

against anti-Semitism and fascism” could get him oª the hook.40

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By the end of this latest imbroglio, the Spectator had quietly gone out of

business. Dreiser himself had cut his ties to it at the beginning of 1934, dis-

gusted with his inability to publish writers he alone favored. Even O’Neill,

who viewed Dreiser as a major literary influence, had sided against him on

an article submitted by Powys. “Fundamentally,” Dreiser had told Nathan

in the summer of 1933, “Mencken stated the case to me in regard to you in

1926, . . . that all you could contemplate was the frothy intellectual and

social interest of the stage.”41 Actually, Dreiser had other competing inter-

ests. After his bruising battle with Paramount over An American Tragedy,

he quietly and without any strings attached sold the film rights to Jennie

Gerhardt to the same studio, which produced the movie in 1933. Then, af-

ter collecting $25,000 plus 7 percent interest in the film profits, Dreiser gave

the film only lukewarm praise, mainly because Jennie’s character, played by

Sylvia Sidney, loses what one film critic calls her “almost pathologically giv-

ing nature.” In fact, as Dreiser later told Eisenstein with particular refer-

ence to the film of Jennie Gerhardt, “All in all I am thoroughly disgusted

with the moving picture industry over here, not only because of the results

of my work, but in general, as you very well know, because of their cheap

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commercialism and toadying to the lowest and most insignificant tastes.”42

Such crassitude, which went hand in hand with capitalism anyway, would

not, however, keep him from selling to Hollywood again.

The next year he endorsed Upton Sinclair, who had won the Democratic

primary for governor of California. In a pamphlet entitled I, Governor of

California and How I Ended Poverty (followed after the election by I, Can-

didate for Governor: And How I Got Licked), the muckraking novelist prom-

ised to eradicate poverty in California by turning private property and land

over to cooperatives for workers and farmers. In the December issue of Es-

quire, Dreiser published “The Epic Sinclair.” The biographical article, whose

title contained the acronym for Sinclair’s slogan, “end poverty in cali-

fornia,” didn’t appear until the eve of the election. This was probably for-

tunate for Sinclair, even though he lost. For Dreiser, who alleged that he

had read ten of the candidate’s books, including The Jungle, merely reminded

his readers of Sinclair’s rejection among capitalists as a crank (one of whose

books had to be published by the same “almost shady company, which had

also ventured to republish my ‘Sister Carrie’”) and celebrated his socialis-

tic programs for America. Moreover, he opined, Sinclair had “done a more

brilliant job than either Mussolini or Hitler.” Still seeing Hitler as a Ger-

man New Dealer in 1934, Dreiser saluted Sinclair by alluding once more

to the fascist. “I can’t say, Heil Hitler, he concluded, “But I will say, ‘Hey,

Sinclair, more power to you!!!’”43

Dreiser seemed besieged and obsessed by such political projects. One, in

collaboration with Hy Kraft, turned into a movie script, which he called

in succession “Tobacco and Men,” “Tobacco,” and then simply “Revolt.” It

wasn’t to be confused, he told one prospective producer, with Erskine Cald-

well’s Tobacco Road (1932), now a successful play about poor whites, par-

ticularly appealing in the Depression; this was about the bloody tobacco

wars of 1907 in North Carolina between farmers and the Duke Tobacco

Trust—an uprising similar to a later one that became the basis for Robert

Penn Warren’s Night Rider (1939). Dreiser’s plot would, according to one

proposal, cover several generations, beginning briefly like The Financier in

antebellum America. It would also feature a family named Barnes, a sur-

name that reappears in The Bulwark. Cumbersome in its plot if also com-

passionate toward the exploited tobacco farmers, the script was never pro-

duced, mainly because Dreiser suspected Kraft of trying to steal the

screenplay for himself and sell it to Hollywood.44

In the fall of 1934 Dreiser found a new publisher in the firm of Simon

and Schuster. The publishers gave him a cash advance of $5,000 plus an-

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other $2,000 to pay oª the debt to the creditors of Liveright for the plates

to his other books and an additional $3,000 to buy up the stock of his old

books. In return, they expected to get The Stoic, another volume of short

stories, and the third volume of his autobiography. Instead, Dreiser gave

them an expanded edition of Moods, which Simon and Schuster, perhaps

as a result of their disappointment, put into a cheap binding, their first

mistake—as they would later discover—with their famous but irritable

writer. “The Works of Theodore Dreiser, past and present,” the firm

proudly announced following the signatures on the contract, “will hence-

forth be published by Simon & Schuster. . . . The fame of Theodore

Dreiser is an unshakable bulwark. He symbolizes the heroic mind and com-

prehending heart.” To seal their bargain, they stood the expense of a lav-

ish reception at Iroki. In the introduction to the new Moods, Sulamith Ish-

Kishor, whose biography of the Roman emperor Hadrian Dreiser was

promoting, continued the hyperbole by suggesting that if Dreiser hadn’t

already been known as a realist he would “without question be hailed as

a ‘new Walt Whitman.’”45

Instead of continuing to work steadily on The Stoic, Dreiser was “eating

and sleeping science. ” It was for a book on philosophy, as he told George

Douglas, the San Francisco journalist and friend from the early 1920s, who

was now living and working in Los Angeles. Dreiser, always generous with

unknown artists, tended to support second-rate talents, including Charles

Fort, Ralph Fabri, the Hungarian sculptor whom Helen liked so much, and

the artist Hubert Davis. Douglas was another. Dreiser thought he belonged

in the New York literary scene and even published several left-wing pieces

by him in the American Spectator—anonymously, so Douglas wouldn’t get

in trouble with his newspaper. Douglas also served Dreiser as a foil to

Mencken, whom Douglas criticized as a reactionary (true enough by the mid-

thirties, but Douglas may also have been jealous of the fellow journalist’s

success as a cultural and political critic).46

Douglas encouraged Dreiser’s random scientific inquiries and the some-

times fuzzy speculations on how this or that phenomenon was a microcos-

mic clue to the secret of the universe. “You are most lucid when most philo-

sophical,” the California journalist and essayist told Dreiser, apparently never

having read Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub. Like most literary men going back to

Whitman if not Emerson, Dreiser was not always lucid outside the magi-

cal realm of literature. There are parts of the posthumously published Notes

on Life that sink to near gibberish.47 Overall, he probably succeeded in

providing a coherent summary of the mechanistic theory at work in his

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