The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

Franco received the support of Germany and Italy, while the socialist-

minded Loyalists were backed by France’s Popular Front government of

Léon Blum and the Soviet Union. The Soviet interest might have been ar-

gument enough for Dreiser to attend. He crossed on the Normandie, where

he met the sister of Jack Powys, Marian, on the boat. She and her son were

on their way to visit Jack in his new home in Wales and urged Dreiser to

visit there on his way back to the United States.

“Here is the first result to the trip 4 addresses so far. Plenty of publicity

for the Loyalists,” he told Marguerite Tjader, with whom he had been stay-

ing that summer in Noroton, Connecticut. (For the last two years, he and

Helen had been living apart for long stretches. Marguerite had divorced

her husband, Overton Harris, in 1933.) He added that his speech in Paris,

to the more than one thousand delegates at the World Conference for Peace,

had been a success and that Marguerite should print it in her little maga-

zine called Direction. Actually, his speech had been moved to last on the

program after he voiced his objections publicly that the conference, far from

being a progressive attempt to aid Spain and end the bombing of open

towns, was in fact a move to win popular support for England’s position of

neutrality in the face of Hitler’s saber rattling. As it turned out, the French

socialist government ultimately gave in to British pressure and abandoned

Spain, and Russia was too far away to eªectively aid the Loyalists. By 1939

Spain belonged to Franco and the Fascists.55

Dreiser’s speech was given full space in the Paris newspapers, but it re-

ceived no notice whatever from the heads of the World Conference, who

did not ask him to speak again. Undaunted, Dreiser headed to Spain to see

things for himself. He was anxious to get out of Paris anyway. “It’s not that

Paris isn’t interesting but I’ve seen it before & it hasn’t changed very much,”

he told Harriet Bissell. He was also suªering from insomnia, and his morn-

ing depressions were “stupendous.” (Dreiser’s pessimistic moods usually

cleared by noon.) When he reached Barcelona in early August he told her:

“I am here in a dangerous atmosphere. They are expecting a big push from

Franco & more intense bombings every hour.” He dined with the heads of

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the Loyalists and took away from them a proposition for President Roo-

sevelt. A few days later he was in London, seeking out government o‹cials

who might be sympathetic to Spain, but he found the British bureaucracy

overwhelming. He told Harriet that he was “going [to] run up to Corwen,

in Wales to see Jack & his brother Theodore,” who was also a novelist.56

No writer was more devoted to Dreiser than John Cowper Powys, who

after many years of living in America had returned to England and finally

settled back into what he considered his ancestral home in Wales. He had

even praised Tragic America, while at the same time admitting that he paid

little attention to politics. Dreiser felt the same toward Jack. When Dreiser

first came to visit Marguerite Tjader in 1928, she pulled from her book-

shelves a recently published volume of poetry by Powys, which she praised,

assuming that Dreiser had never heard of its author. “It was then,” she later

wrote, “that Dreiser uttered the word Jack in such a tone that I could sense

his aªection even before he began to tell me about their deep friendship.”

Powys was “living as simply as any retired Welsh farmer,” Marguerite learned

from Dreiser following his visit to Corwen. “His luxury was the long walk

which he took each day. . . . Usually wrapped in a rough greatcoat or tweed

cape, Powys was the unforgettable figure he had always been to Dreiser.

Their walks together, at various times in the past, as now, partook of the

nature of some earthy, pagan or mystic rite.”57

Before leaving England to return to the States in mid-August, Dreiser

visited Reading Gaol, where Oscar Wilde had been imprisoned for two years

for the crime of sodomy. Inside cell C.3.3, he wrote a poem, which he sent

to Marguerite:

Tie your spirit to a sail

Call for sky and wind

Fly in mood to Reading Gaol

To a cell bound mind

Write a message on a wall

To a heart that died:

“Yet this day shalt thou with me

In Paradise abide.”

For years he had been interested in homosexuality as yet another example

of the belief that man did not make himself. Before long he would become

something of an activist on the issue, writing on behalf of a man sentenced

to fifteen years in San Quentin for a homosexual oªense. “As I understand

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it,” he told the California Board of Prison Terms and Pardons in 1940, “[ X]

is a creative artist of considerable ability. . . . The failure to cure a man of

an abnormality with which he was born was proved beyond a doubt in the

case of Oscar Wilde,—and to destroy the man is to destroy the artist. . . .

Even conservative England only gave Wilde 2 years.”58

Once back in New York, Dreiser turned to the Thoreau project, over

which he had both procrastinated and worried aloud in letters back to Har-

riet. Scanning a volume a day of the complete works of Thoreau, she pro-

vided the basis for Dreiser’s thirty-two-page introduction. Dreiser himself

had read Walden years before, and indeed its ant scene may have inspired

the short story of the pre– Sister Carrie era, “The Shining Slave Makers.”

Claiming to have read some 2.4 million words of Thoreau for the intro-

duction and selection, he singled out Thoreau of all the New England tran-

scendentalists, including Emerson, as being at least partially redeemed from

their heady optimism because of his healthy skepticism and insistence on

sticking with natural facts for their own sake as well as possible emblems

of the Oversoul. Thoreau, he said, speaking for himself as well, was “for-

ever knocking at the door of the mystery.” He seems to have sensed some

of the faint pessimism in Walden without having read of Thoreau’s doubts

expressed in The Maine Woods about nature’s harsh or fickle treatment of

man. Dreiser was still eating and sleeping nature, or science, himself, and

this interest dovetailed nicely with Thoreau’s activity as naturalist as well

as transcendentalist. He concluded that any inconsistencies in Thoreau’s

thought counted “for nothing, because, as I see it, his source [nature] is in-

consistent.”59

Apparently, President Roosevelt saw no political contradictions in Dreiser’s

anticapitalistic stance (earlier he had advised FDR to close Henry Ford’s

factories if the auto maker did not allow collective bargaining ) and his

request for a personal interview on the matter of the Loyalists in Spain,

whose proposal he had brought back with him. Dreiser conveyed their

plan for Roosevelt to help them as quietly as he was assisting Great Britain,

despite the restraints of the Neutrality Act of 1937. As he told Helen, the

Spaniards wanted the president “to do certain things for women & chil-

dren . . . which he can do without publicity of any kind.” After some ini-

tial confusion— or procrastination by reluctant staª members in the o‹ce

of the Assistant Secretary of State—Dreiser, whose FBI file thickened by

the year, was invited to dine with the president on September 7 aboard his

yacht on the Hudson River. There it was decided that Dreiser would at-

tempt to form a committee of prominent citizens to organize donations of

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food and medicine to the Loyalists, thereby circumventing the restrictions

of the law against the U.S. government’s active involvement in the grow-

ing crisis in Europe. As he had with the committee of prominent citizens

for the Harlan coal miners, however, to his great disappointment he failed

here, too, no doubt because of his growing reputation as a communist as

well as—it now appeared—a political crank. Roosevelt, who had probably

read either Sister Carrie or An American Tragedy and was therefore impressed

and somewhat softened politically toward Dreiser because of his literary

achievements, subsequently formed the committee himself and sent flour

to Spain.60

Strange bedfellows these two—Roosevelt and Dreiser. One, who followed

his second cousin to the White House, was considered a “second-rate in-

tellect” but a world-class political strategist, while the other was the son of

poverty and heir to nothing more than his own genius, a light now largely

gone out. TD, as many of his lovers called him, was closer in temperament

and intellect to TR than FDR; in fact, he had twice visited that earlier White