The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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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.