a head that hung like a great heavy flower on a thin stem.” Personally, Dreiser
thought him just another American average raised up under exotic and
rarified conditions so that he probably never experienced a youthful period,
skipping it for the altar of high culture. The impression was first over-
whelming and then somewhat stifling to the blue-collar freshman, who
would never learn to spell right or use apostrophes with contractions. In
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
3 2
Clark’s Anglo-Saxon class, Dreiser received an “x” (“passed without grade”)
during the first trimester. Clark also taught him Philology in the second
term and The Study of Words [ sic] in the third term of the freshman’s year,
where he earned a “1” (“low pass”) and a “2” (“good”), respectively.
English literature is not among the nine courses in which Dreiser
enrolled—although he states in his autobiography that his Anglo-Saxon
course included “English literature.” He mentions Walter Deming Willikus
(Edward Howard Griggs), a graduate of the college who had returned to
Bloomington as an “Instructor in English” from a postdoctorate at Prince-
ton.15 Dreiser may have attended one or two literary or “musical” evenings
at Griggs’s “pea-green house” near the campus where he noticed the pro-
fessor’s wisp of a wife. He also took Elementary Latin during the first term,
earning a grade of “1.” It was taught by the school’s vice president, Amzi
Atwater, “an ardent Presbyterian” identified in Dawn by his actual name.
A more pious, “prayerful-looking” man Dreiser did not think he had ever
met. Atwater was a perfect fit for his era and ideology in American higher
education, another clergyman professor who saw learning as a vague ex-
tension of the teachings of the Bible. Tall and sanctimonious, he wore a
heavy black goatee that jutted out whenever “he turned his face heaven-
ward, as he frequently did.”16 Put oª by Atwater’s high manner and moral-
istic tone, Dreiser went steadily down hill. As with Clark, he had Atwater
for two more courses, Latin and Virgil’s Aeneid, during the second and third
terms. Both grades were “x.” (Although he was vice president, Atwater may
have been one of the faculty President Jordan was trying to work around
and eventually replace, yet Atwater remained while a few years later Jordan
left to become president of Stanford University).
It is not altogether clear from Dawn just who taught Dreiser his other
three courses; he mentions other professors either by fictitious or real names,
or a misremembered mix (such as “Willard Pelton Green” for Rufus L.
Green, Associate Professor of Pure Mathematics). Green probably taught
him Preparatory Geometry (“1”), Freshman Geometry (“=,” meaning a con-
ditional pass), and Freshman Algebra (“1”). Later Dreiser testified that he
never could see the “import” of any of these courses.
–
Like Emily Dickinson in her one year of college (and just about every other
freshman since), Dreiser seems to have derived more knowledge from his
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
3 3
college compatriots than from the professors. Upon his arrival, he found a
room with board not far from the campus. The walk to classes was no more
than ten or fifteen minutes, and he remembered the crisp September and
October days, the serenity and foliage so diªerent from the relentless pace
and treeless streets of the city he had so recently left. After the “vitality and
urge” of Chicago, Bloomington was like coming into a soundproof cham-
ber to rest. And no sooner had he slipped into its hypnotic lull than he
found himself also charmed by the sight of a girl next door, a student at
the college.
Petite, with blue eyes and pink cheeks and daily framed by the long win-
dow of her room at which she studied, she could be seen across the garden
of Dreiser’s rooming house. As he too studied by his window, they ex-
changed furtive glances. He was entranced by the scene of this attractive
young woman in her “brilliant window-niche” (as Poe, his favorite author,
once described his Helen) and sexually charged when she loosened her blond
hair and let it fall about her books. After about a week of this welcomed
distraction, his “feeble old landlady” smirkingly informed him as he
“brooded” over his studies that the young woman had requested help with
one of her classroom assignments. Dreiser was painfully shy and unsure of
himself, but apparently the young woman, of a “commonplace, a small-
town working-class family,” was nothing short of a flirt, and he later said
he could never forget her. Yet the help so cheekily requested involved a
knowledge of Latin grammar. Without any “trace of grammar in my sys-
tem,” he recalled in Dawn, “I stood trembling before another Waterloo.”17
But Dreiser’s first Helen was evidently more interested in romance than
Latin and quickly finessed the situation as Dreiser stood awkwardly before
her, tongue-tied with nervousness. Never mind the lesson. Was he from Fort
Wayne, where she knew a boy? But Dreiser, his mind drifting into flight,
couldn’t think of anything clever to say to her. “It never occurred to me,”
as he remembered the incident and its aftermath slightly diªerently in A
Hoosier Holiday, “to tease her, or to tell her how pretty she looked, or frankly
to confess that I knew nothing of Latin but that I liked her. . . . That was
years beyond me.”18 Dreiser, now almost his eventual full height of six feet
one-and-a-half inches but underweight from the long hours and harsh work-
ing conditions of the hardware store in Chicago, eventually slunk back to
his room in defeat, mortified by his bashfulness and inability to take ad-
vantage of the opportunity. He determined to do better next time, but it
never came. No more did his Helen present herself “statue-like” in her win-
dow, carefully opening the shutters and espying him. Now she seemed, as
a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y
3 4
she passed his rooming house on her way to classes, perfectly absorbed in
something— or someone—else.
In Dawn Dreiser names his roommate William Levitt; in A Hoosier Hol-
iday, he is called William Wadhams, a “gallant roysterer.” His real name
was Bill Yakey—and he was soon spooning over the fence with the girl and
taking her for Sunday carriage rides. Yakey was a law student and also one
of the stars of the football team. Gregarious and good looking, he was the
center of interest among his fellows. Their room became a regular gather-
ing place. Dreiser, while glad to have this extrovert on his side, so to speak,
also began to worry that he would never get a girl now with such compe-
tition. A few years later he remembered Yakey as “not so much of a friend.”19
He was unquestionably more experienced and at ease with girls. After tak-
ing the young hoyden as far as he could towards the bedroom, Yakey
promptly dismissed her as a “cute little bitch” who was trying to “string”
him along.
All this activity while the future lover of so many women stood agape in
silent admiration and envy. There was another girl of fifteen or sixteen di-
rectly across the street, whom the lusty Yakey evidently ignored. She was a
dark-haired doctor’s daughter, as shy as Theo himself. Whereas the attrac-
tion of the first girl had been decidedly physical for Dreiser, this one sug-
gested in the retrospect of middle age Dante’s Beatrice, whose physical ap-
pearance or sexuality in La Vita Nuova represents merely the first step on
the ladder of love and spirituality. She was truly “the girl next door” who
would not give up her virginity without a commitment, but Dreiser failed
here almost as quickly as he had with the flirt. After tearing up ten or fifteen
versions, he finally sent a note asking her to meet him on campus. She never
answered, and they never met.20 (Dreiser would later find another Beatrice
in his first wife and spend the rest of his life regretting it.)
It is not surprising that no fraternity ever oªered the lank and cheaply
dressed kid from Chicago a bid, though Dreiser thought he might have come
close to receiving an invitation to join Delta Tau Delta. He consequently
fell in with students from working-class backgrounds like himself, who were
more than likely paying their own way through school. One was Howard
Hall, as he is called in the holograph and final version of Dawn, who took
“a very small hall bedroom” on the third floor of Dreiser’s rooming house.
Hall was from Michigan, a blond-haired youth as thin as Dreiser. To in-
crease their needed bulk, the two lifted weights together. Hall planned to
become a lawyer even though a “speech impediment . . . promised to pre-