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time. Whatever literary energy and imagination he now had left was almost
totally devoted to these speculations. He thrived on Douglas’s flattery and
readily accepted an invitation to visit southern California for his health in
February 1935—he attributed a recent illness to “some mysterious change
which robbed me of 22 pounds.”48 After giving up his Ansonia suite and
recuperating at Iroki, Dreiser spent the spring and most of the summer at
Douglas’s house in Los Angeles on South Westmoreland Avenue. The two
were like lay brothers in an almost mystical pursuit, Douglas fully enlisted
in Dreiser’s open-ended exploration of science. In August Helen came out,
and the couple took up temporary residence on Rosewood Avenue until
the fall.
Once back in New York and at Iroki, he published an essay entitled “Mark
the Double Twain” in an academic journal. It opposed Van Wyck Brooks’s
thesis that puritan America had stifled Mark Twain and tried to split him
in two, the humorist who was forced always to stay within the confines of
convention and the powerful pessimist who could only speak freely from
the grave in such posthumous writings as The Mysterious Stranger (1916),
What Is Man? (1917), and the Autobiography (1924). “The truth is,” he con-
cluded, “that Twain was not two people, but one—a gifted but partially
dissuaded Genius who, in time, and by degrees changed into his natural
self.”49 That November he hired the bright and breezy Harriet Bissell. Just
out of Smith College, a petite blond, she answered his anonymous news-
paper advertisement for a secretary at twenty-five dollars a week. It was the
depth of the Depression in 1935, and she won out over dozens of other ap-
plicants, shortly after she was interviewed at Mt. Kisco. Harriet worked
mainly at Iroki alongside Helen, who in the face of her Teddie’s relentless
philandering had begun to seek peace of mind in Buddhism and Christ-
ian Science, later suggesting the dénouement for Berenice’s love aªair with
Cowperwood in The Stoic.
Dreiser was grief-stricken when he learned the following February of
Douglas’s sudden death by heart attack; he sent four dozen roses to the fu-
neral. About the same time, however, another friend returned from a decade-
long estrangement. Just as he had first appeared at the end of Dreiser’s close
friendship with Arthur Henry, H. L. Mencken now re-established himself
in Dreiser’s volatile life. Actually, their correspondence had resumed in the
fall of 1934, when Dreiser wrote to Mencken to deny a rumor attributed to
him on why the two had had their falling out. They had already spent an
evening drinking together, and in 1935 Mencken had dissuaded Dreiser from
being drafted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters by reminding
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him that his old nemesis Hamlin Garland was one of its “most eminent
members.”50 In 1930 Mencken had married Sara Haardt, eighteen years his
junior, but she was in poor health and died in 1935. By then Mencken was
well adrift from the literary world, having given up the American Mercury,
and was flourishing as a political correspondent. He had also drifted fur-
ther to the right, or as far in that direction as Dreiser had strayed to the left.
The Republican and the Communist now had little more in common than
their past together, but that was apparently stronger than either of their
current political leanings. As with the First World War, the returning storm
clouds from Germany provided another basis for their renewed relation-
ship, though the two writers would never be as close as they had been in
the heyday of their dinners at Lüchow’s.
In April of 1937, a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in English at
Columbia University wrote to ask Dreiser to reconcile his recent activity
as a reformer with his literary reputation as a determinist. Robert H. Elias
had written his master’s thesis on Dreiser and would eventually become his
biographer. The answer he got might have easily discouraged Elias from
choosing Dreiser as a topic for his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of
Pennsylvania. While he sympathized with the weak whose suªering seemed
undeserved, Dreiser told the graduate student: “I am forced to realize that
the strong do rule ‘the weak.’ . . . When I take part in Communist activi-
ties and write Tragic America, I am still a determinist and still a helpless
victim of my own feelings and sympathies.”51 Whether Dreiser realized it,
he had eªectively dodged the question. He never explains how one can hon-
estly believe in reform and remain a determinist, only that as a determin-
ist he also feels sorry for the weak. But then this is not an uncommon phe-
nomenon in social thought. From Marx to Lenin and beyond, we have the
belief in historical determinism alongside the contradictory idea that his-
tory can be directed.
Like many supporters of communism then and idealists in general, he
held onto the Soviet dream even after it became evident that Stalin was
killing his own people in a maniacal eªort to make that dream come true.
Four years earlier, Dreiser had rebuªed Max Eastman’s request to voice pub-
lic support for imprisoned Bolsheviks loyal to Trotsky. Dreiser was so in-
terested “in the present di‹culties in Russia and in Russia’s general fate,”
he said, “that I am not prepared, without very serious consideration, to throw
a monkey wrench such as this could prove to be, into their machinery.”
This allegiance to the socialist ideal had been set in stone with him almost
since his visit to Russia. He told Kennell, shortly after returning, “while I
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am going to stick [in Dreiser Looks at Russia] to what I saw favorable and
unfavorable I’m going to contrast it with the waste and extravagance and
social indiªerence here.”52 When that waste and indiªerence changed to
poverty in the Depression, he changed irrevocably into a communist.
–
With most of his books out of print, Dreiser had already begun his descent
into literary oblivion. The joining of his name with that of the Commu-
nist Party of the United States plus his support of the Soviet Union hadn’t
helped his image much abroad or at home. It was one thing to be vaguely
socialist—most writers of the era were—quite another to endorse the out-
come of the Revolution in the Stalinist 1930s. The next American to win
the Nobel Prize was Eugene O’Neill in 1936, who felt he had stolen the
award from his friend and former associate at the Spectator. He said as much
in the press, reflecting the American bitterness over the 1930 decision. Pri-
vately, O’Neill told Dreiser: “I can say to you with entire sincerity and
truth . . . that I would take a great deal more satisfaction in this prize if you
were among those who had had it before me.” Upon receiving the award
in 1950, William Faulkner was even more emphatic, initially refusing to go
to Stockholm in part because the judges had “passed over Dreiser and Sher-
wood Anderson to reward a writer like Sinclair Lewis and Old China Hand
Buck.”53 Faulkner might have added that the Swedes had earlier ignored
Mark Twain and Henry James.
No Pulitzer Prizes had ever come Dreiser’s way either, but this couldn’t
have surprised anyone, since it was then given “for the American novel . . .
which shall present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the
highest standards of American manners and manhood.” Sinclair Lewis had
declined it in 1926, stating that such standards allowed censorship of great
literature (but mainly because the Pulitzer judges had ignored their com-
mittee’s selection of Main Street in 1921).54 Dreiser was becoming almost
exclusively a political commodity. Yet early in 1938 Longmans, Green, and
Company oªered him $500 to present Thoreau in its Living Thoughts se-
ries. He needed the money, but it was also an honor— one of the last the
novelist received in recognition of his work—since others who agreed to
do such books were André Gide (Montaigne), Julian Huxley (Darwin), John
Dewey ( Jeªerson) and Edgar Lee Masters (Emerson). Dreiser spent the
money before doing any work on the project.
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Before he could get down to work, he was invited to attend a peace con-
ference in Paris that summer with all expenses paid. It was hosted by the
League of American Writers and was to focus on the current problems in
Spain. The League was also taking part that week in the World Conference
for Peace Actions and Against Bombing Open Towns. The previous sum-
mer General Franco had further seeded the developing European storm
clouds by casting Spain into a civil war between Fascists and Loyalists.