The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

through the first decade of the twentieth century. One problem, however,

f a c i n g w e s t

3 9 0

was that he was soon in need of another publisher. He had decided to bolt

from Putnam’s because the firm, waiting in vain for The Bulwark, had failed

to even begin to publish a uniform edition of his books. He told Mencken

he was looking for another publisher who would cover Putnam’s $2,000

advance on the “complete works” as well as another $1,000 advance on The

Bulwark. 19 Ironically, the search led him full circle back to Doubleday, the

publishing house that had first started him down his rocky road to literary

fame.

The Bulwark ultimately shows faint signs of the old Dreiser magic at

telling a story, but the plot in the first forty-two chapters, or half the book,

is too linear and rushed in its unfolding—ultimately the result of the work

of Doubleday’s editor, Donald Elder.20 Instead of developing the root causes

of this Quaker Tragedy, the chapters merely flesh out the plot as prelude

to the tragic denouement in which a Quaker family’s spirituality is finally

crushed by materialism and the modern age. Its patriarch, Solon Barnes, is

partially an incarnation of John Paul Dreiser, in that he sees everything in

terms of divine order and tries unsuccessfully to insulate his five children

from the temptations of a material world. Isobel, homely like Marguerite

in “The ‘Mercy’ of God,” becomes disillusioned in her spinsterhood. Orville

and Dorothea grow up like Clyde’s cousins to become greedy consumers

who value society over individual merit. In other shades of An American

Tragedy, Stewart gets into trouble while joyriding in an automobile. Etta

goes the way of so many of Dreiser’s devotees of beauty and romance in A

Gallery of Women.

Originally, Dreiser had planned to present Barnes as the disillusioned re-

ligionist: “The good man,” as Edgar Lee Masters recalled upon first hear-

ing of the book upon meeting Dreiser in 1913, “who loved God and kept

his commandments, and for a time prospered and then went into disaster.”

But by the time Dreiser turned back to the project in the early forties, he

had—in the words of a close friend—“no interest in novels” and had also

undergone something of a religious conversion himself.21 Indeed, the rea-

son for his return to fiction after more than fifteen years was not artistic at

all. He did so in order to enshrine his newly awakened religious sentiment.

He endowed his latest fictional creations with the transcendentalist belief

that in spite of all the adversity life had to oªer there lay behind it a struc-

ture and divine plan if one could only see it. This was not altogether a new

idea in Dreiser’s thinking, of course. He had allowed the existence of such

religious figures in Jennie Gerhardt and An American Tragedy (in the case

f a c i n g w e s t

3 9 1

of the Rev. McMillan). Furthermore, as an inoculated Catholic, he was al-

ways alert to the duality of life in which man was an insignificant part un-

til he surrendered himself to the mystery of a universe and envisioned its

ultimate order and purpose.

What was now “new” was Dreiser’s a‹rmation, not only in The Bulwark

but in The Stoic, of the unity and plan of “the Creative Force” that was

working through us. In the big picture of Dreiser’s literary career, it wasn’t

a radical change but (to quote Richard Lehan) a shifting of “the magnify-

ing glass . . . showing Spencer’s realm of antithetical forces being absorbed—

contradictions and all—within Thoreau’s oversoul—that is, on a transcen-

dental level of beauty and order.”22 That little editing job for which Harriet

Bissell had done most of the reading probably turned out to be a catalyst

in Dreiser’s final development as a writer and a thinker.

There is something of a parallel, of course, between transcendentalism

and the Inner Light of Quakerism. Emerson was one of Dreiser’s heroes,

and Elias Hicks was another. “The religion that appeals to me as the most

reasonable of all religions,” he had told an interviewer in 1927, “is that in-

terpreted and taught by Elias Hicks, a Quaker. Hicks believed [like Emer-

son] that every individual must have his own revelation of the truth. He

believed there was a divine instinct in every man, something that told him

to sit still and listen.” About the time that Dreiser was writing his intro-

duction to the Thoreau selection, he discovered or perhaps became more

acquainted with the life and writings of the Quaker John Woolman through

a meeting with Rufus Jones. Dreiser had consulted Jones, who was then

chair of the American Friends Service Committee, in his doomed eªorts

following his return from Spain and his meeting with President Roosevelt

to form a committee of distinguished citizens to provide American relief

for the Loyalists. After visiting Jones at his home on the Haverford College

campus outside Philadelphia, Dreiser read at least one of his books on the

history of the Friends as well as the Quaker’s autobiographical writings. In

December 1938, he told Jones (whose first name became that of the father

of Solon Barnes in The Bulwark): “As you know I am very much interested

in the Quaker ideal. Like yourself I rather feel that it is the direct road to —

not so much a world religion as a world appreciation of the force that pro-

vides us all with this amazing experience called life.”23 In other words, the

“Creative Force,” a term Dreiser preferred to God because of the latter’s as-

sociation with the old ideology of sin and redemption he had initially ab-

sorbed as a Roman Catholic.

As noted earlier, the original story of The Bulwark had come from Anna

f a c i n g w e s t

3 9 2

Tatum, his live-in lover following his return from Europe in 1912 (later a

somewhat pathetic figure who had to hock her typewriter during the De-

pression). But the early life of Solon Barnes, which makes up Part I of the

three-part novel, was based largely on the life of Rufus Jones himself. Part II

consisted of a merging of three various drafts written over the years, and

the last part was written in 1944 and 1945 with the help of Marguerite Tjader.

Just as Ruth Kennell may have been Dreiser’s conscience on Russia, Mar-

guerite became his muse on religion as they edited The Bulwark. A pacifist,

she had converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1930s.24

As finally published in 1946, The Bulwark, after racing rather woodenly

over years and events, settles down to focus on Solon Barnes and his two

youngest children, Stewart and Etta. Stewart is another Clyde, eager for the

fruits of life, but also endowed with a conscience, which leads him to sui-

cide when he is accused with other boys of causing the death of a young

woman through the administration of a drug intended as an aphrodisiac.

Etta, based on Anna Tatum (who had initially forbidden Dreiser from writ-

ing her story until her mother died),25 leaves her Quaker home outside of

Philadelphia to attend the University of Wisconsin. There she falls in with

a liberated woman who had drawn her there and whose aªection for Etta

may be homosexual. This possibility, however, is not developed. Rather,

Dreiser sends Etta on to New York, where she falls in love with an artist re-

sembling himself in his early Greenwich Village days.

Ultimately cast oª by this painter, Etta is ashamed to return home for

Stewart’s funeral. Fearful that her presence would only add to her parents’

grief, she remains in the shadow of her past, much like the harlot in Paul

Dresser’s “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me.” She finally comes home when

her mother is dying and remains there to console her father. Barnes by

now is a broken, disillusioned man. The diametric opposite of Frank Cow-

perwood, whom Dreiser would soon finish oª, Solon cannot abide the

dishonesty of the banking business to which he has devoted his profes-

sional life. Generally, he sees Quakers all around him giving in to Amer-

ican materialism. With the bulwark of his old morality gone, Solon even-

tually comes to see a larger truth in which the world’s ills can be explained

as part of a divine plan. One day he comes upon an insect “industriously

nourishing itself ” on a flower. “Why was this beautiful creature . . . com-

pelled to feed upon another living creature, a beautiful flower?” he asks

himself. The answer is that behind everything in nature both good and

evil “there must be a Creative Divinity, and so a purpose, behind all of this

variety and beauty and tragedy of life.” Etta, too, shares in this conversion

f a c i n g w e s t