at the memorial in Marion, Ohio. “Anderson, his life and his writings, epit-
omize for me,” he wrote, “the pilgrimage of a poet and dreamer across this
limited stage called Life.”12 Just as Dreiser had thought the short story or
sketch was Anderson’s strong suit over the novel, Anderson had thought
writing about life instead of living it was Dreiser’s.
–
That fall he used more of his movie profits to buy himself out of the con-
tract with Simon and Schuster. He had been unhappy with the firm, even
thinking that the Jewish publishers may have thought him anti-Semitic and
f a c i n g w e s t
3 8 7
now wished to quietly suppress his books. “This constant undercover talk
about my anti-Judaism,” which he characterized in a 1939 letter to Lengel
as the result of “the mild correspondence” he had had with Hapgood, “has
caused all sorts of people who are inimical to me—writers and what not—
to not only play this up but exaggerate it in every quarter.” For $8,500, he
was now free to accept an oªer from Putnam’s, where once again the pos-
sibility of publishing a uniform edition of his books was dangled before
him. The Bulwark was promised by June 1, 1942. That Christmas, Mencken
hoped that Dreiser had got through the holiday “without too much mis-
ery.” The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 hadn’t helped.
A week later Dreiser told Louise Campbell, “Everybody seems to be ex-
pecting the sudden arrival of a thousand Jap planes that will level L.A., San
Francisco, Portland, Seattle & points North. Helen is stewing about her
poor mother in case they blow up her house.” Yet he closed on a lighter
note, saying he had “defense work here on my own desk . . . to defend my-
self against rising taxes by turning out more so-called literature.”13
Americans were now fully committed to war, both in Europe and the
Pacific. Dreiser was primarily interested in the Pacific front as well as aid
to Russia, not the “‘hands across the sea’ stuª ” that brought supplies to
England. This was unfortunately still his state of mind when he accepted
an invitation to speak at another town forum—this time in Toronto on
September 21, 1942. Since March Dreiser had been conducting a personal
correspondence with Hazel Mack Godwin, an American living in Toronto
who had first written him a fan letter back in 1936. Between 1942 and 1945
he wrote this fortyish housewife over two hundred letters in which he fre-
quently fantasized about their lovemaking. She had paid him a visit at his
expense in Los Angeles that summer. Leaving Helen alone at the North
Kings place, he stayed with Hazel in the Hotel Mayfair at Seventh and Wit-
mar in Los Angeles for at least two nights, possibly longer.14
The speech Dreiser was supposed to make in Toronto on September 21
was entitled “Democracy on the Oªensive,” but he never gave it because
of remarks about the British he casually made to the press the day before.
“Should Russia go down to defeat,” he told a reporter from the Toronto
Evening Telegram, perhaps thinking it was oª the record, “I hope the Ger-
mans invade England. I would rather see Germans in England than those
damn, aristocratic, horse-riding snobs there now.” He went on to accuse
the British of failing to open a second front in the war to aid Russia. In-
stead, Churchill “does nothing except send thousands of Canadians to be
slaughtered.”15 When these provocative statements were published the next
f a c i n g w e s t
3 8 8
day, the lecture was immediately canceled, and Canadian authorities even
considered detaining Dreiser, if only “for his own protection.” One Toronto
politico suggested that he should “be thrown into the North Sea.”
Dreiser and Hazel quickly boarded a train for the United States, where
their first stop was Port Huron, Michigan. Following the blowout in
Toronto, he had refused to give further statements to the press. But here
reporters caught up with him and “Mrs. Dreiser”—even staking out his
hotel room, where Dreiser had registered as “T. H. Dresser.” Unlike the
vigil of strike opponents in Harlan, Kentucky, the interest here was not
with the woman in his room (incredibly, never assumed by the press to be
anybody but Dreiser’s wife), but with his political statements. After a tele-
phone interview failed (Hazel responding, “Is Mr. Dreiser in town? . . .
I’d certainly like to meet him”), reporters for the Port Huron Times Her-
ald interviewed the elusive author on a street corner. The result in the next
day’s newspaper was a front-page photograph of a sullen Dreiser under
the heading “Second American Tragedy.” His hands were thrust into his
suit coat pockets as he posed defiantly. Although he later made a weak
attempt to backpedal, he now essentially repeated his statements about the
British and America’s Lend-Lease program, saying additionally that the
“English have done nothing in this war thus far except borrow money,
planes and men from the United States. They stay home and do nothing.
They are lousy.”16
Since it was wartime, no one seemed to mind that Dreiser had been de-
nied his freedom of speech in Toronto. In New York, the Writer’s War Board,
consisting of such authors and critics as Rex Stout, Pearl Buck (who won
the Nobel Prize in 1938), Franklin P. Adams (an old foe of Dreiser’s who
had accused him of plagiarism), and Clifton Fadiman (whom Dreiser had
known at Simon and Schuster), issued a statement expressing regret that
“an American writer of Mr. Dreiser’s eminence should thus insult and oªend
our Allies. . . . Certainly our enemies would pay him well for his disserv-
ice to our country’s cause.” Many newspapers seconded this opinion. Even
Dreiser’s old employer, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, piled on with an ed-
itorial entitled “Dunder-Headed Talk.” While the forty-three-year-old for-
mer antiwar novelist Ernest Hemingway bathed in the limelight of the press
for announcing his plans to somehow get himself into the war in Europe,
the seventy-one-year-old writer who had broken the ground for Heming-
way’s realism was described as that “hulking U.S. Novelist” who had once
again given aid and comfort to the enemy. Only George Bernard Shaw came
to his support: “Although the English do not know their own history, . . .
f a c i n g w e s t
3 8 9
Dreiser evidently knows it and reacts explosively when we pose as Herren-
volk exactly as Hitler does.” There was nothing to fuss about as long as
Dreiser was “soundly determined to see Adolf Hitler damned first.” Dreiser
promptly thanked the Irishman “for the kindly life-line to the presumably
drowning critic of dear old England.”17
–
Dreiser’s return to California involved a stayover in Chicago, where he re-
covered from another bout of bronchitis. By the time he got back home,
Jug had died—on October 1—at the age of seventy-three in St. Louis. There
is no record of Dreiser’s reaction, though it is known that he was paid up
on her alimony at the time. Once, more than twenty years earlier, she had
asked a friend whom she hadn’t seen in years: “Are you married! Or are
you like me—Never Again!” This fairly sums up her life after her twelve
years with the author of Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt, two books she
had helped to edit. She had endured the early death of her sister Rose, and
her brother Dick had been badly injured on a naval exercise. Although she
had become “Aunt Jug” to Ed Dreiser’s family, she probably went to her
grave somewhat embittered about her only husband. When the biographer
Robert H. Elias asked her for information in 1939, she wrote: “I am sorry,
but I can not oblige you by talking about my life with Mr. Dreiser. Altho
I’ve been asked by many others, I have talked to no one.” For Dreiser’s part,
he felt he had treated her fairly, paying her alimony oª and on for more
than thirty years.18
Upon Teddie’s return, Helen observed that he was “noticeably quiet. The
trip east with its accompanying notoriety [though she apparently never read
the report that he had been accompanied by ‘Mrs. Dreiser’] had taken its
toll in spite of his well developed immunity to criticism.” With American
involvement in the war getting into full swing and his bank account re-
plenished by Hollywood, Dreiser eventually turned back to literature—to
two projects that had been gestating for more than a quarter of a century.
He turned first to The Bulwark, and by March of 1943 had completed or
revised thirty-four chapters. At the same time he described The Stoic as “half
done.” He also planned to write a third volume of his memoirs, to be called
“A Literary Apprenticeship,” which was to have carried his autobiography