House as chief editor of the Delineator. With TR in 1908, the subject had
been the Child Rescue Program; thirty years later with FDR, it was a res-
cue of a diªerent order. One wonders whether TR, one of America’s best-
read presidents, ever perused Sister Carrie the way he read Edwin Arling-
ton Robinson’s poems. This had led him to give Robinson a government
sinecure in the New York Custom House in 1902, the same year Dreiser
had wandered the streets of Philadelphia. Now the author of Sister Carrie
found himself wandering once again.
“One comes into life a driven mechanism,” he had once told an admirer
of The “Genius.” By this time his relationship with Simon and Schuster was
going definitely sour. For one thing, the firm had remaindered the books
purchased from the bankrupt Liveright, Inc. For another, Dreiser had not
finished The Stoic. Since 1936 he had been renting out Iroki at various times
and seeking to sell the cabins and their thirty-six acres for $65,000, more
than twice what he had paid for it. He soon had a buyer on time for a lower
price, perhaps $40,000, but the deal fell through because of the coming
war. He had been “a dunce” to buy it in the first place, he now thought. “I
soon found I didn’t like the climate,” he told his last lover, Hazel Mack God-
win, three years later. “Also being a rich man’s region every form of service
was high.”61
With Iroki still unsold and the continued financial burden of its up-
keep, Dreiser thought of returning to California. In the end, he rather
backed into moving there permanently at the end of 1938. Because of his
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 8 0
continued emotional involvements with other women, Helen was on an-
other extended visit to her mother in Portland. He left New York for Port-
land in a Thanksgiving blizzard and eventually wound up with Helen in
Glendale, California, where he established the first of his final residences
in that state. There, he told Louise Campbell, the sun blazed up to ninety-
two degrees and the “gold-leaved trees in tiger-tan mountain canyons
greeted my eyes!”62
t r a g i c a m e r i c a
3 8 1
s i x t e e n
Facing West
–
For the first two years or more it did not make any diªerence
to me that there was very little doing intellectually in Los Angeles—
or I might say in Southern California. I was lost in contemplating
the velvety brown mountains, the amazing flowers and the relaxed mood
in which every one took the perpetual and to me stimulating and
restoring sunshine. As a matter of fact, I owe Southern California
a debt—a romantic one to be sure, but nevertheless
one that I shall never be able to pay.
D R E I S E R T O G E O R G E D O U G L A S , A U G U S T 1 4 , 1 9 2 9
as america inched closer to war, Dreiser warmed himself once again
in the California sun. Instead of working on The Bulwark, now a couple
of years overdue at Simon and Schuster, he dived back into his scientific
studies, embarking this time on a quest that was decidedly religious. Per-
haps like Melville at the end of his life in Billy Budd, this last American ti-
tan struggled to reconcile good and evil in the world. For Dreiser was the
last great American writer of Melvillean dimensions who had been born in
an essentialist world and grown up with the crosscurrents of Darwinism.
Dreiser’s ultimate testament of acceptance, lately quickened by his con-
version to communism, would be found in Quakerism (which he would
celebrate in The Bulwark as possibly a substitute for his father’s Catholi-
cism). Writing to an admirer who had heard him speak at Whittier Col-
lege in January 1939 and asked rhetorically whether it wasn’t “a tremendous
thrill to know God occasionally,” he reminded her that man’s vision of God
was severely limited and obscure. His entire talk, he said, “had been in-
tended to convey the idea that the enormous revelations of Science in re-
gard to nature indicate a necessary balancing of forces that at one point of
man’s limited grasp appear evil and at another point good.” Life, he con-
tinued, required both. Ultimately, though, “no intentional evil or cruelty
can be attributed to the creative force or God.”1
In a way, Dreiser was becoming something of a latter-day transcenden-
3 8 2
talist. In a 1938 essay, he had argued as well that all nature was both good
and evil. Man needed evil in this balancing act called life the way doctors
needed disease; therefore, the distinction between good and evil was mean-
ingless. “You might even say,” he concluded, “that evil is that which makes
good possible.” Or as Emerson once stated, evil was merely “privative” or
relative. Yet the determinist had the last word. “Be glad,” Dreiser wrote, “if
for the present you are not [evil’s] victim.”2 Even though God’s plan was
all beauty in its grand scope, man’s specific welfare in this creation was en-
tirely expendable.
In February of 1939 he gave more lectures on the same general subject,
mainly to women’s clubs in Oakland, San Francisco, Portland, Salt Lake
City, and elsewhere, earning almost $1,500 after commissions and travel
expenses. In an interview he gave the evening before speaking at the San
Francisco Town Hall Forum, he named John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell,
and William Faulkner as the younger American writers he most admired
because they “reported” the world “directly and forcefully and sensitively.”3
As fatigued as he might have been after relocating his residence across a
continent, he pushed himself into lecture after lecture because he felt he
needed the money. He may have, for he was $2,000 in arrears in alimony
payments to Jug, who was still living in the Village in New York. It wasn’t
long, however, before he sold to Hollywood through his agents Will Lengel
and Donald Friede screenplays based on Sister Carrie and “My Brother Paul”
of Twelve Men. These became Carrie, featuring Laurence Olivier in his first
important role as Hurstwood, and My Gal Sal, starring another rising ac-
tor, Victor Mature, as Paul Dresser.
Dreiser’s first apartment on his return to California was located at 253A
West Loraine Street in Glendale, but it was not only too small but too far
from the studios. In May he and Helen moved to another apartment at
1426 North Hayworth Avenue in West Hollywood, just north of Sunset
Boulevard. He told Edgar Lee Masters that he was now “within ten or fifteen
minutes (by car) of the big barns.” As in the early twenties, when they had
occupied seven diªerent residences in Southern California, the magnet was
Hollywood. This time the novelist turned out to be a successful “screen-
writer,” selling his two literary properties for almost $100,000. Dreiser would
sell one more novel, posthumously. An American Tragedy made a second
film comeback as A Place in the Sun in 1951. Sometime in the early forties
he met Elizabeth Taylor, whose family had relocated from London to es-
cape the war. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” he told the child actress, who
would star in A Place in the Sun opposite Montgomery Clift, “if you would
f a c i n g w e s t
3 8 3
act in one of my pictures some day?” Earlier, he had beseeched an ailing
John Barrymore to act in what would become Carrie. “Don’t die. Live to
present Hurstwood for me. I have, for so long, thought of you treading—
in . . . his sorrowful way.”4 But Barrymore was making his last stage ap-
pearance in Chicago and would die in 1942.
Dreiser was still in the Glendale house when the columnist Arthur Mil-
lier interviewed him for the Los Angeles Times of March 12, 1939. During
most of the interview, Dreiser stewed over the way Hollywood mangled lit-
erary works, even as he profited from their desecrations. Millier described
Dreiser as “white-haired, tall, erect, rangy, discreetly paunched.” Dreiser
oªered his guest a chair and then retreated to “a small rocker for himself
and rocked, rocked, rocked.” As he did so, he “picked from a neat pile on
the table the first of some 20 paper handkerchiefs which, throughout the
interview, he twisted, untwisted, and folded.” Millier described Dreiser’s
accent as “pungent city editor’s American.” He was wearing his trademark
small bow tie—“of the sort college boys and drummers wore about 1912.”
By now Dreiser was almost forgotten as a writer. Even though his works
were being made into movies, he complained that the producers’ and di-
rectors’ names were plastered all over the films, while the credits featuring