The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

3 9 3

and at her father’s funeral declares: “Oh, I am not crying for myself, or for

Father—I am crying for life. ”26

Dreiser would apply a similar romantic paradigm to The Stoic (1947),

which follows Cowperwood to London, where he tries and ultimately fails

to control the finances of the city’s Underground. This time, however, it

was Helen who made her religious interests felt in a Dreiser novel. Indeed,

one of Cowperwood’s passing lovers in the final volume, Lorna Maris, is

related to Frank the way Dreiser was to Helen. In Frank and Lorna’s case,

it was Frank’s father and Lorna’s grandfather who were siblings. (Dreiser’s

mother and Helen’s grandmother, of course, were sisters.) But Helen also

influenced Dreiser’s sending Berenice Fleming, who is the final threat to

Aileen Cowperwood, to India after Frank’s death at sixty from Bright’s Dis-

ease. There she studies the Bhagavad Gita and gives up the material world,

ultimately returning to America to found a hospital for the indigent with

money and valuables left to her by Cowperwood. Dreiser owned a copy of

the Hindu Scripture, but he apparently didn’t read in it deeply. Rather, it

was Helen’s interest in the subject, perhaps as a final attempt to live with

Dreiser’s infidelities, which went on almost to his death, that led to this

particular denouement in the novel. Berenice can also now accept the fact

of Cowperwood’s sexual infidelities as part of the Divine Plan, something

the Bhagavad Gita, which celebrates duty (including marital fidelity) along

with other principles of self-control and the ultimate transcendence of ma-

terial and sexual desires, wouldn’t have sanctioned.27

And there was another woman who not only influenced one of Dreiser’s

texts but also inserted her own material into his oeuvre. In late December

of 1943, he told Louise Campbell that he had a contract with Esquire to

write six sketches about “Unworthy Characters.” It turned out to be his

“Black Sheep” series, which ran between October 1944 and March 1945—

“amusing pictures of people who just weren’t able to conform to social the-

ories.” He told Louise that the first, “Black Sheep No. One: Johnny” would

be based on Rome, who “was a scream!” “And in that connection I’ve been

thinking that you might have some character—male or female—who . . .

might fit into the series.” In other words, her writing would be published

under Dreiser’s name. The sketch would, like the others, earn $300, out of

which he promised to pay Louise one third. As it turned out, she got only

$50 for “Black Sheep No. Four: Ethelda,” concerning a woman who uses

up well-meaning beaux until her chances in life fade away with her looks.

It is obvious that Dreiser touched up the portrait, for its style bears a re-

f a c i n g w e s t

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semblance to the sketches in A Gallery of Women, but Esquire no doubt would have published it untouched because it was in actuality buying

Dreiser’s name, not these generally banal stories.28

–

On January 4, 1944, Walter Damrosch, president of the American Acad-

emy of Arts and Letters, informed Dreiser that he was to receive its Award

of Merit, given every five years. It was “not only for the distinction of such

books as the [ sic] american tragedy, sister carrie, twelve men, and

a long line of other volumes, but also for your courage and integrity in

breaking trail as a pioneer in the presentation in fiction of real human be-

ings and a real America.” Evidently, Dreiser’s literary oblivion was not com-

plete, perhaps held oª by Sinclair Lewis’s repeated eªorts to renominate

him for the Nobel Prize. The award carried a $1,000 prize and travel ex-

penses to New York in May for the ceremony, which would also honor

S. S. McClure, Willa Cather, and the actor Paul Robeson. Mencken dis-

approved. “I hear that you are going to New York to be crowned with a

laurel wreath by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. If this is true,”

he told Dreiser in March, “I can only deplore the fact that you are having

any truck with that gang of quacks. Its members for many years were your

principal defamers.” He advised Dreiser to tell the Academy to stick the

award “up their rainspouts.”29

This time Dreiser did not take his old friend’s advice, as he had almost

a decade earlier in refusing membership in the National Institute of Arts

and Letters, several of whose members had opposed The “Genius.” Strug-

gling oª and on with The Bulwark, he needed some palpable recognition

of his literary gifts, something to suggest that he could still write—and finish

both The Bulwark and The Stoic. The honor also reactivated his lifelong

plan for an edition of his collected works, now to carry an introduction by

Richard Duªy. When he arrived in New York in May, Marguerite Tjader

was shocked at his altered appearance. He seemed thinner and older. Once

in his room at the Commodore Hotel, however, he pulled her to his side

“with his old vibrant quality.” At the same time, he was also full of the re-

ligious sentiment that had gone into The Bulwark. “Well, I believe in God,

now—a Creative Force,” he told her that afternoon in New York. He spoke

of the summer of 1937 when he had visited Calvin Bridges at the Carnegie

f a c i n g w e s t

3 9 5

Biological Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. One afternoon

after hours in a laboratory, he came into the sunshine and stooped over some

yellow flowers to find the “same exquisite detail [he] had been seeing all

day in the tiny organisms under the microscope.”30

On this last visit to the city in which he had spent more than half his

life, he met other old friends and family. Duªy, who had supported him

in the days both before and after the publication of Sister Carrie, saw him.

Dreiser also enjoyed a reunion with Edgar Lee Masters, who accompa-

nied him to the awards ceremony. He spent time with his niece, Ed’s

daughter Vera. He greeted a number of other old friends in his hotel suite,

including his second biographer, Robert H. Elias, but his planned reunion

with Mencken, who was the first to tell Dreiser’s life from the standpoint

of his works, never came oª because of the latter’s illness. In another, more

devastating disappointment, he said good-bye to Mame, his eldest sister,

who was dying at age eighty-four. Austin Brennan had already preceded

her. A Christian Scientist for many years, she told her brother at one of

their last meetings: “Just think, Theodore. We can’t even make a little blade

of grass grow, without God.” At Mame’s funeral, he saw his brother Ed,

who though only two years his junior now looked much younger than

Dreiser.31

Before Dreiser boarded his train to Chicago and the West on June 5, he

recorded two radio broadcasts for the O‹ce of War Information, located

just down the street from his old Fifty-Seventh Street apartment. He didn’t

know it, of course, but the occasion was just days before the D-Day inva-

sion of France by Allied Forces. In spite of his FBI record or perhaps be-

cause of it, the OWI considered Dreiser somebody who could influence the

German people. On one of the recordings he reminisced about his father

who had left Mayen to avoid the militarism under Bismarck. He closed by

saying, “Just as a try-out, let’s have a few hundred years of the brotherhood

of man!”32 He also visited the Mt. Kisco house one last time; it had finally

found a buyer.

He returned, not to Los Angeles, but to Portland. Helen had not ac-

companied him to New York because she had to visit her sick mother in

the Northwest. Dreiser, fearing that Helen might not have full legal claim

to his estate, had finally decided to marry her in a secret ceremony planned

in Stevenson, fifty miles east of Portland. Yet on the way to the altar, he

had conflicting thoughts. “I miss you so intensely!” he wrote Marguerite

from Stevenson the day before the ceremony. “In fact the long slow trip—

that 15-car train crowded with soldiers, their wives or girls, their noise and

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3 9 6

[blather] & drinking, was enough to drive me mad. For mentally and emo-

tionally I was seeking to be back with you in the Commodore.” When he

married Helen on June 13, 1944, it was under the name of Herman Dreiser

instead of his full name. Helen thought it was to avoid publicity.33 It was.

Before he left New York, he had asked Marguerite to come out to Cali-

fornia to help him finish The Bulwark. Helen had been acting as his lat-

est secretary, but she reluctantly agreed to the idea once Marguerite had