The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

vent his pleading before any jury.” After two years he returned home to

a v e r y b a r d o f a c i t y

3 5

work in a local law o‹ce for “four or five years” before dying from con-

sumption at age twenty-four.21

Another college chum called Russell Ratliª (in A Hoosier Holiday and the

holograph of Dawn and “Sutcliªe” in the printed version) was an idealist

and reformer who, Dreiser testified, exercised a “serene and broadening

influence” on him, more than any other student he came to know in col-

lege. Ratliª was a poet, a philosopher, a vegetarian, and an orator with the

roundness and eloquence of “a youthful [Robert] Ingersoll”—the famous

lawyer-agnostic of the day, who championed unpopular social causes such

as penal reform and the plight of the poor. It was probably at this time

and with this influential friend that Dreiser’s social awareness of the de-

veloping contest between the haves and the have-nots in late-nineteenth-

century America—not simply his self-pity about having begun poor or his

sympathy for others like himself—was born. As impoverished as Dreiser

had been in his youth, he came to see his “unearned” talent as a writer, and

the class status it gave him, as salvation from the psychological damage his

family poverty inflicted on many of his siblings.22

Ratliª ’s interest in philosophy brought the work of Herbert Spencer to

Dreiser’s attention. One of the philosophical fathers of literary naturalism,

which holds that man is both product and victim of heredity and envi-

ronment, Spencer questioned the logic of religious dogmatists by arguing

that man is controlled by chemical forces that ultimately dictate individ-

ual fate; yet in an attempt to reconcile religion with science, he also sug-

gested that some of us were chemically superior, or chosen by God for suc-

cess. Ratliª may also have been responsible for introducing Dreiser to

Darwin and other naturalists. For years after Bloomington he often won-

dered what had become of Ratliª, how his chemistry, or “chemism,” had

served him in the experiment called life. He eventually heard from his old

friend in the 1890s when he wrote approvingly of Dreiser’s magazine work.

By then Ratliª was working for “some Indian agency.”23

Ratliª and Hall, along with Yakey as a “counter-irritant,” exercised “con-

siderable influence” over Dreiser during his first, and only, year of college.

They caused him, he said, “to seek for the wellsprings of life and human

actions more carefully than I ever had before.” For Dreiser, they were proof

of what Mildred Fielding had told him in Chicago, that “this college world

was little more than a realm in which one might find oneself intellectually—

if one had an intellect—a table spread with good things of which one could

partake if one had an appetite. The curriculum—a mere bill of fare. The

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3 6

professors and instructors—waiters who served what was provided but who

could neither eat nor digest for you.”24

Together these friends opened each other’s eyes. They went on field trips

together, belonged to literary societies, and once visited a local high school

spelling bee, where Dreiser recalled that some of the winners were attrac-

tive country maidens. With Hall and Ratliª, Dreiser also joined the col-

lege spelunking society. Not only was Bloomington, and all of Monroe

County, the center of the limestone industry, marked by deep quarries, but

the area was also underlain with a series of tortuous natural caves. One of

the earliest photographs of Dreiser shows him with a group of student cave

explorers posing solemnly with their staªs and holding balls of twine used

to trace their return to the surface during an exploration. During one ex-

cursion the three friends broke oª from a larger party to investigate a cave

on their own. They got lost after outpacing the length of their twine, played

out along the various ledges and through prehistoric doorways, some hardly

large enough to admit passage. All they had left was the lights attached to

their hats. In those days these were either miners’ lamps fueled by calcium

carbide or some kind of oil lamp. Such illumination was often unreliable,

and if the lights went out and matches got damp, as they usually did un-

derground, explorers were cast into utter darkness. Dreiser speaks of hav-

ing taken “half a dozen or more candles,” which would have been even more

precarious. Evidently, their light held, for the three finally groped and

scraped their way to safety after hours of panic and increasing hunger and

thirst. This threat of a “premature burial” gave Dreiser nightmares that con-

tinued “for a long period thereafter.”25

One other college chum mentioned significantly in Dawn is Day Allen

Willy (David Ben O’Connor in both the holograph and published versions),

a well-to-do law student and the son of a judge in Northern Indiana. Willy

was always up for action and ready to pay Dreiser’s share of the cost, even

on a Thanksgiving trip to Louisville, where they hoped to spend the night

with two young women Willy knew. Dreiser also needed to consult an oculist

there because the long hours of college reading were apparently straining

his good eye. They got to Louisville—careful not to sit next to the girls un-

til their train cleared Bloomington— only to discover (since the out-of-town

newspapers typically didn’t reach Bloomington until late afternoon, after

they had boarded their train) that a cyclone had nearly devastated the city.

Dreiser was also devastated (again) when he proved to be too shy or hesi-

tant with Kathie Millership, the name he gave to the girl he was supposed

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3 7

to entertain—while Willy apparently encountered no di‹culties in romanc-

ing his date. The eye appointment scheduled for the next day was postponed

for twenty-four hours because of the storm. While his three companions

returned to Bloomington, he waited alone in his hotel room, mortified once

more that he was a miserable failure with women yet consumed with “sex

hunger.”26

He was hardly more successful on a similar, if more pecuniary, mission

in Chicago during Christmas vacation, when Willy visited and the two went

to a brothel. Willy, who was staying at the expensive Palmer House, again

footed most of the bills. This time the hot anticipation of sexual adventure

ended with mutual disenchantment over the coarseness of the prostitutes.

Dreiser nevertheless managed to fondle the “rounded solid flesh” of one of

these women, even though he lacked the necessary five dollars to take her

upstairs. He was saved from embarrassment by Willy, who appeared to de-

clare that there was nothing “worthwhile” in the house. They tried other

houses in the red light district on the South Side, and Willy eventually found

satisfaction. He would have paid for his friend’s indulgence as well, but

Dreiser stubbornly abstained, claiming that the entire process had been

ruined for him because of a lack of independent means.

While at home that Christmas, he became aware of the widening gap

between himself and his siblings, whose interests were exclusively practi-

cal. After his college exposure, all at home except his dear mother seemed

slightly remote. Finding his father out of work once again, he looked upon

the all too familiar dilemma not as the sorrowful son but now as the stu-

dent of psychology or biology “interested in the life history or processes of

any given species.”27 There must have been just the slightest sadness, there-

fore, when he remembered that his privileged tenure as the observer, the

college student to whom the “real world” could be regarded as hypotheti-

cal, had already reached its midlife and would terminate in the spring.

For he tells us in Dawn that he decided in December to quit after one

year and make his way alone “as before.” This decision may have been ten-

tative at first; he fails to mention that, according to the Indiana Student of

January 1890, he stated that he hoped to return for his sophomore year.

Furthermore, in the holograph of Dawn he reveals that in truth he did not

see how it would be possible to “secure another year.” When he visited his

benefactor in Chicago during his Christmas vacation, Miss Fielding told

him she had merely wanted to expose her former student to the possibili-

ties of higher learning and perhaps professional life. “Men do go to college

late in life,” she told him, “and you might like to do that some day.”28

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3 8

To compensate for the reality that awaited him, he began to tell himself

that he had never belonged at college in the first place. Nevertheless, his

year away from working-class strife had lifted him out of his milieu long