cautiously asked for her approval. She and her young son Hilary reached
Hollywood in August 1944 just in time for Dreiser’s seventy-third birth-
day. The guest list reached sixty persons and included two other old girl-
friends, Lillian Rosenthal Goodman and Esther McCoy (now Mrs. Berke-
ley Tobey), both by then California residents. Clare Kummer, Arthur
Henry’s third wife, and her daughter from an earlier marriage, who were
living in Northern California, also came to the celebration; Arthur had
died in 1934.
Marguerite and her son took a small bungalow near the Dreiser residence.
Dreiser spent most of the day there dictating the rest of the novel to her.
Work was completed the following May, but the manuscript then under-
went several changes. First it went to Louise Campbell back in Philadel-
phia, who thought it was a disaster as a literary work and also didn’t like
the heavy religious theme and so cut it severely. Elder at Doubleday (who
had advanced Dreiser $4,000 on the novel) put back about half the mate-
rial Campbell had excised.
–
The work left Dreiser physically exhausted until the summer when he took
up The Stoic with Helen’s assistance. The Bulwark had also left him emo-
tionally exhausted. Helen noticed that whenever he spoke of Solon Barnes,
his eyes filled up with tears. He was thinking not only of his father, she
added dubiously, but “what he considered his own shortcomings.” It was
in this state of mind that he decided to become a member of the Com-
munist Party. Most of those close to Dreiser went into denial over the de-
cision, saying that it wasn’t a political choice but a quasi-religious one in
which he could somehow enter the realm of acceptance along with Solon
Barnes. “Knowing that the final chapter of his life was approaching, and
soon he would no longer be able to speak out against Fascism and inequity
in the world,” Helen recalled, “he felt that joining the Communist Party
f a c i n g w e s t
3 9 7
would safeguard his position on the side of the common man. But to say
he was informed as to the political workings of the Party in this country
would be a false statement.” Mencken later branded Dreiser’s membership
in the Party as “an unimportant detail in his life.”34 Yet Dreiser considered
himself a full-fledged communist and a “Bolshevik.” His political activities
since the early 1930s had clearly been in concert with ostensible commu-
nist aims with regard to the working class. And not long before he took up
formal membership, he had received a check from the Soviet Union for the
equivalent of $34,600 in back royalties.
In a letter to the recently installed head of the American Communist
Party, William Z. Foster, which Dreiser approved if in fact he didn’t alto-
gether compose, he cited his reasons for joining the party. As Helen noted,
besides his link with the common man, he thought that communists
around the world had stood up to the evils of fascism. He also felt that as
an artist he wasn’t alone, citing the party memberships of Pablo Picasso of
Spain, Louis Aragon of France, Martin Andersen Nexo of Denmark, and
Sean O’Casey of Ireland. “Belief in the greatness and dignity of Man has
been the guiding principle of my life and work. The logic of my life and
work leads me therefore to apply for membership in the Communist
Party.”35
Dreiser may have also chosen to become a formal member of the party
because of the harassment he had received from the FBI and what was to
become the Congressional Committee for Un-American Activities. The
latter was already looking askance at the movie industry for its alleged sym-
pathies with communism. In Dreiser’s day the Congressional committee
was initially called the Dies Committee, after its chairman, Texas Con-
gressman Martin Dies—who, oddly enough, was a distant relative of both
Theodore’s and Helen’s (they of course being second cousins). In a fur-
ther irony, the man who ultimately became Dreiser’s literary executor fol-
lowing the deaths of Helen and her sister, Myrtle, was Harold Dies, a
cousin of the Congressman’s as well as Helen’s. He and Helen had reestab-
lished their relationship after Helen encountered him in Oregon when
she was visiting her mother in the late 1930s. Harold Dies was a commis-
sioned army o‹cer during the Second World War and was stationed in
Los Angeles. One day during a visit to the North Kings Road house, he
was asked by Dreiser whether he went “along with that cousin of yours,
Martin Dies.” Harold assured Dreiser that he didn’t, but he undercut some
of that assurance when he cast doubt on the viability of democracy in the
f a c i n g w e s t
3 9 8
Soviet Union. Indeed, Dies later remembered that his remarks provoked
Dreiser “almost to the point of rage. He denied that there was any such
condition and was so upset that Helen was afraid he might have a heart
attack.”36
There was nothing else left to do now but to finish oª Cowperwood,
whose capitalistic plundering Dreiser no longer admired. Since the finan-
cial empire of the real-life Yerkes had crumbled soon after his death, the
task of showing how the equation of life cancels out Cowperwood’s
achievements was relatively easy. Actually, he hadn’t really changed his mind
about Cowperwood, for he had hinted at the end of The Financier (as well
as TheTitan) of his antihero’s inevitable demise. Cowperwood was as much
a pawn of fate— or now the Creative Force—as the commonest of men.
Dreiser (and Helen) finished The Stoic by the middle of October 1945. Like
some other early readers of the manuscript ultimately published in 1946,
the novelist James T. Farrell, who had written his own trilogy about Studs
Lonigan, thought that Dreiser’s trilogy shouldn’t end with Berenice’s pil-
grimage to India. He had other complaints while lavishing praise on the
book in general. Dreiser was grateful and accepted most of his ideas for re-
vision. He thanked the younger writer and poignantly confessed that he
had “simply stopped writing at the end because I was tired.”37
Dreiser died four days after writing to Farrell, on December 28, 1945, the
delayed result of a heart attack the night before. It was exactly forty-seven
years to the day of his marriage to Jug and forty years to the day after the
death of the model for the man he had just killed oª in The Stoic, Charles
Tyson Yerkes. He was seventy-four years old and had complained of acute
pain in his kidney the night before. During the afternoon of the 27th he had
started to work on the final new chapter of The Stoic. Around five he and
Helen drove down to the beach at the end of Washington Boulevard to
watch the sunset. Strolling along the boardwalk, they came upon a hot dog
stand run by a cheerful man who told them proudly of his five children.
Dreiser remarked that he seemed grateful for so little. Upon their return to
the North Kings Road house, he looked pale but insisted that Helen read
him the penultimate chapter of The Stoic, which they had revised earlier in
the day.
He complained of the kidney pain shortly before they retired. Helen was
awakened in the middle of the night by Dreiser standing in the center of
her bedroom in his nightgown. As she approached him, he collapsed to the
floor in pain. A physician was summoned, and Dreiser was stabilized for
f a c i n g w e s t
3 9 9
the night. The next day he felt revived after receiving oxygen, but by late
afternoon he was clearly dying, his semiconscious state cadenced by shal-
lower and shallower breathing and his extremities turning blue. The physi-
cian returned to pronounce him dead at 6:50 p.m. Dreiser was buried in
the Whispering Pines section of the sprawling Forest Lawn Memorial Park,
northeast of his residence. In a final irony for the writer whose social protests
were sounded from both within and without his literary works, his burial
in this upscale cemetery was delayed until January 3 because of a grave dig-
gers’ strike.38
The funeral service at the Church of the Recessional, the cemetery chapel,
mirrored the conflicted philosophy of Theodore Dreiser. It was jointly con-
ducted by Dr. Allan Hunter of the Mt. Hollywood Congregational Church,
where Teddie and Helen had occasionally attended services, and the play-
wright John Howard Lawson, who had once been hired to dramatize Sis-
ter Carrie. The Rev. Hunter spoke of Dreiser’s fascination with the journal
of John Woolman, while the progressive Lawson—soon to become one of
the “Hollywood Ten” during the McCarthy hearings—reminded mourn-
ers that Dreiser had recently joined the Communist Party. All the while
Dreiser lay serenely in his open co‹n, with a countenance, Helen remem-