The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

ner, Edward Sandoval, Kenneth Silverman, David H. Stewart, Alan Trach-

tenberg, Mark and Maggie Walker, and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz.

I would like to thank my student research assistants during the years of

this endeavor: Amanda Jo Atkins, Jennifer Chenoweth, and Erin Fleming.

For help in special collections, I thank Nancy Shawcross and John Pollack

of the Dreiser Papers at the Van Pelt–Dietrich Library at the University of

Pennsylvania, where copyright is held and permission to quote is granted

for all of Dreiser’s unpublished writings; and Rebecca Cape of the Lilly Li-

brary at Indiana University, where the second largest collection of Dreiser

papers can be found. I am also indebted to the special collection depart-

ments of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, the Kroch

Library at Cornell University, and the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Closer to home, I thank John Fitzpatrick, Pat Fox, and Cathy Henderson

at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas

at Austin; and Steven Escar Smith, Director of the Cushing Memorial Li-

brary and Archives at Texas A&M University, where I was also assisted by

the interlibrary loan department of the Sterling C. Evans Library.

Parts of chapters 6 and 7 appeared in a slightly diªerent form in “Notes

from the Underground of Sister Carrie, ” Dictionary of Literary Biography

Yearbook: 2001, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Farmington Hills, Minn.: The Gale

Group, 2002), 360–66.

Financial support for the research and writing of The Last Titan came

from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National En-

dowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Program, the Research Foun-

dation at Texas A&M University, and the O‹ce of the Dean of Liberal

Arts at Texas A&M University.

At the University of California Press, I have once again benefited from

the wisdom and energy of Associate Director and Acquisitions Editor Stan-

ley Holwitz. My thanks also to my editors there, Mary Severance and Ellen F.

Smith.

My favorite recipient of thanks is the same one I have gratefully ac-

knowledged in every book I’ve written, my wife and colleague at Texas

A&M, Cathleen C. Loving.

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

x v i

o n e

Hoosier Hard Times

–

Life was a strange, colorful kaleidoscopic welter then.

It has remained so ever since.

A H O O S I E R H O L I D AY

since her marriage in 1851, Sarah Schänäb Dreiser had given birth al-

most every seventeen or eighteen months. Twelve years younger than her

husband, this woman of Moravian-German stock had eloped with John

Paul Dreiser at the age of seventeen. If the primordial urge to reproduce

weren’t enough to keep her regularly enceinte, religious forces were. For

Theodore Dreiser’s father, a German immigrant from a walled city near the

French border more than ninety percent Catholic, was committed to prop-

agating a faith his famous son would grow up to despise. Sarah’s parents

were Mennonite farmers near Dayton, Ohio, their Czechoslovakian ances-

tors having migrated west through the Dunkard communities of German-

town, Bethlehem, and Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. Sarah’s father disowned

his daughter for marrying a Catholic and converting to his faith. At 8:30

in the morning of August 27, 1871, Hermann Theodor Dreiser became her

twelfth child. He began in a haze of superstition and summer fog in Terre

Haute, Indiana, a soot-darkened industrial town on the banks of the Wabash

about seventy-five miles southwest of Indianapolis.

His mother, however, seems to have been a somewhat ambivalent par-

ent even from the start. After bearing her first three children in as many

years, Sarah apparently began to shrink from her maternal responsibilities,

as such quick and repeated motherhood sapped her youth. Her restlessness

drove her to wish herself single again. She may also have missed the secu-

1

rity and approval of her angry parents. As Dreiser tells it in Dawn (1931),

a memoir of his youth, she even wished herself dead or, in a bolder fantasy,

her children. One evening, while visiting what family still welcomed her—

a brother in North Manchester, Indiana, Dreiser recalled from family

legend—“she went to the door and stood looking out at a clearing which

surrounded the farmhouse.” There she saw coming out of the woods “three

lights, bobbing lightly to and fro” in procession. They seemed to approach

her before vanishing over a rail fence and into the woods. “Right away,”

Dreiser quoted his mother, “I knew that those were my three children and

that they were going to die!” The deaths of Jacob, George, and Xavier did

indeed follow, one after another in the next three years, and the remorse-

ful Sarah threw herself at the feet of the God her favorite son would come

to view as an inscrutable combination of beauty and terror. If only she could

become a mother again, she begged the Almighty, she would never again

fail to meet her responsibilities.1

Her prayer was answered: the first of her next ten children arrived soon

thereafter. Paul, who adapted the family name to Dresser and achieved fame

as the author of such songs as “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal

Sal,” was born in 1857. He was followed by Marcus Romanus, or Rome, in

1860; Maria Franziska, or Mame, in 1861; Emma Wilhelmina, or Emma,

in 1863; Mary Theresa, or Theresa, in 1864; Cacilia, or Sylvia, in 1866; Al-

phonse Joachim, or Al, in 1867; Clara Clothilde, or Claire (also “Tillie”),

in 1868 or 1869; Theodore, or Theo, in 1871; and Eduard Minerod, or Ed,

in 1873.2

Sarah’s superstition, combined with John Paul’s Catholic fears of God’s

retribution, naturally made an impression on young Theodore. Yet even

though he sometimes consulted Ouija boards and fortune-tellers as an adult,

he never seems to have allowed such suspicions to invade his fiction to any

serious extent. Indeed, previous biographers have tended not to see his su-

perstition in the context of the late nineteenth century, when spiritualist

movements in America and England flourished and reports of the doings

of Madame Blavatsky and other mediums filled the newspapers of the day.

Dreiser recalled an episode from his infancy when his mother feared her

sickly child was close to death. Opposite the crowded family dwelling in a

German neighborhood on South Ninth Street resided an enfeebled woman

thought to be a witch. She gave illegal medical advice to the German com-

munity and was often consulted in emergencies. One night, when Theo’s

demise appeared imminent, Sarah sent young Mame across the street to

fetch the aged recluse. The woman refused to enter the Dreiser house be-

h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s

2

cause of Mr. Dreiser’s strict religious views, but she told Mame to have her

mother measure the ailing child from head to toe and from fingertip to

fingertip: “If the arms are as long as the body, bring the string to me.” Find-

ing the measurements satisfactory, the old woman then announced that

Theodore Dreiser would not die. But to complete the healing, he must be

taken out during the full of the moon for three successive nights and po-

sitioned so that the light would “fall slant-wise” over his face. Each night

Sarah was to bless her child with the following words, in German: “What-

ever I have, take away. Whatever I am doing, increase it!” “As a result of

this remarkable therapy,” Dreiser recalled almost fifty years later, “I am re-

ported to have improved. In three months I was well.”3

Dreiser, who as an adult endured almost annual bouts of bronchitis, re-

membered himself not only as sickly, but as a “mother child” who was

a›icted by vision problems that previous biographers have identified as a

“cast” in his right eye, a condition in which one eye does not focus because

of a misalignment of the optical muscles. He was also a homely child with

protruding teeth who clung to his mother’s skirts and cried easily. “It al-

ways seemed to me,” he recalled, “that no one ever wanted me enough, un-

less it was my mother.” Not only did he miss his mother for the rest of his

life after her death, but as a boy he lamented that as a late child he had

missed seeing her in the prime of her beauty, now recorded only in the mem-

ories of his elder siblings.4 Dreiser considered his mother a poet, “after her

fashion,” who, though she endured a poverty-stricken life, continued “to

contemplate beauty—her only earthly reward, as I came to know.” Sarah’s

frequent daydreaming would suggest in part the model for Carrie Meeber

in Sister Carrie (1900), who ultimately dreams—as Dreiser writes of her in

his first novel—“such happiness as you may never feel.”5

Although it seemed to the young Dreiser that his mother never sat down,

whether it was taking in laundry from wealthy families on Wabash Avenue