The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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fast paced “El,” or elevated train, constructed by Chicago’s transit king, Charles T. Yerkes.

When he wasn’t busy escorting one or another of the schoolteachers (in-

cluding Miss White) around the Exposition grounds, Dreiser took the ca-

ble car out to the west side of town to visit his father, whom he hadn’t seen

for almost a year. More than once they toured the astonishing exhibits at

the fair together, including a simulated German village, but the old man

wasn’t up to much walking around the picturesque concourses, and father

and son no doubt took advantage of the launches that ran over more than

two miles of watercourse. He found his father “thin as a grasshopper, brood-

ing sadly with those brown-black German eyes.” Now in his seventies, John

Paul Dreiser still stood tall and erect, looking with his cape like a Prussian

soldier. This, as well as the rest of his quasi-military uniform, was largely

made of material from Paul’s discarded clothes. He fretted endlessly about

money and wondered whether Theo could actually aªord their outings.

Father and son got along now because Dreiser no longer openly fought his

father’s cloying Catholicism. He simply lied when asked whether he had

kept up the Church sacraments. He learned that Al and Ed hadn’t come

near their father in months, and Dreiser left him at the end of his Chicago

stay with a nagging sense of guilt.42

Before he left, he saw his two brothers and perhaps reproached them for

ignoring their father. Ed was still driving a laundry wagon, and Al was work-

ing for an electric plant. Neither felt he was getting ahead in Chicago, and

both soon answered Theo’s invitation to join him after he returned to St.

Louis. But the depression had now begun to set in, and after six weeks of

searching they were back in Chicago. Ed eventually migrated to New York

City to pursue an acting career. But Al, a morose, brooding man, would

ultimately vanish from the life of Theodore Dreiser. While in St. Louis he

had vocally disapproved of Theo’s connection with “Mrs. X”; it is possible

he had once like his brother Paul contracted a venereal disease.43 Al had as-

pirations and longings for “a higher intellectual life” and eventually tried

advertising in Chicago, writing on one occasion Bromo Seltzer jingles that

did not sell.

–

Dreiser, too, ached for something better than the arduous routine of news-

paper reporting with its late-night hours and low pay. Even though he felt

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he had already distinguished himself on the Republic, his salary remained

at the same pitiful eighteen dollars a week, less than half that earned by his

friends McCord and Wood. Once back in St. Louis, he courted Jug by mail

with long letters he later classified as his “first and easiest attempt at liter-

ary expression.”44 He longed to get her into bed, and it was in the thrall of

this not so chivalrous point of view that he proposed marriage to her in

November and they became engaged. Jug visited Theo in St. Louis from

time to time, but she wouldn’t allow him to visit her in Florissant, where

she taught, some twenty miles northwest of downtown St. Louis. The be-

trothal lasted five years, and the resolutely elusive Jug did not surrender her

virginity until she became Mrs. Dreiser.

Paul came to St. Louis in January 1894 as part of the cast of The Dan-

ger Signal, which played at the Havilin. He met Dreiser’s newspaper friends,

including McCord and Wood, and later Jug, whom he would never like.

In fact, Paul viewed Jug as mired in midwestern convention whose medi-

ocrity would stifle Theo’s development as a writer, and he tried to dissuade

his brother from continuing the engagement. Theo should at least remain

single long enough to try out his talents on New York.45 For his part,

Dreiser clung to the idyllic notion of having Jug and a little cottage some-

where, yet in his restlessness, continued to see “Mrs. X” and the young

teacher Miss Ginity on the sly. He wanted only Jug, he thought, but there

was no other way to satisfy his sexual hunger; Jug wouldn’t even consent

to sit on his lap.

One day a newspaperman “blew in” from Chicago and got a job on the

Republic. Like Dreiser, Winfield Hutchinson was engaged to a type of girl-

next-door but could not aªord to get married yet. Hutchinson longed to

start a country newspaper in Grand Rapids, Ohio, where he had been raised.

Dreiser, as he later recalled, felt so uncertain as to his “proper future” that

he was soon converted to the idea of becoming his partner in the enterprise.

Not long after Hutchinson lost his job on the Republic “over his inability

to imagine something properly one night,” the two new friends departed

separately for Ohio.46 Dreiser was on the open road once again, leaving yet

another city and yet another woman behind. But this woman was his fian-

cée, and Jug promised to wait for him. He promised, too, but was already

cultivating doubts about having and holding the same woman.

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f o u r

Survival of the Fittest

–

How was it, I now asked myself, after nearly three years

of work in which I had been a reporter, a traveling correspondent,

a dramatic editor, and a staª feature man doing Sunday and

daily features, I should now once more be called upon

to do this wretched reportorial stuª ?

N E W S PA P E R D AY S

although dreiser didn’t know it for certain as his train from St. Louis

pushed through Indiana to the northwest corner of Ohio (“over the Clover

Leaf route”), he had begun a journey whose final destination would be New

York. By the time he left St. Louis in early March of 1894, the attraction of

that “great and glowing centre” of America had been well planted by his

brother Paul. He could not have known that he was also within four or five

years of, not journalistic success, but literary greatness. Writing to a friend

from his Sullivan days, he drew a self-portrait that reveals a measure of his

self-confidence: “when you look at [my picture], you will see egotism writ-

ten in every lineament; a strong presentment of self love in every expres-

sion. I have a semi-Roman nose, a high forehead and an Austrian lip, with

the edges of my teeth always showing. I wear my hair long, and part it in

the middle, only to brush it roughly back from the temples. Then I’m six

feet tall, but never look it, and very frail of physique. I always feel ill, and

people say I look cold and distant. I dislike companionship as far as num-

bers go, and care only for a few friends.”1

In his autobiography Dreiser maintains that he left St. Louis entirely on

his own initiative, armed even with a letter from the Republic (presumably

from H. B. Wandell) to help him find another newspaper job. Although

he evidently did have an invitation to start the country newspaper with

Winfield Hutchinson in Grand Rapids, it is not improbable that Dreiser

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was fired from the Republic by Wandell, who, as we have seen, rather sourly remembered Dreiser as not much of a newspaper man. Interestingly,

Dreiser was careful to follow up the claim of this letter of recommenda-

tion in the autobiographies by mentioning later that—for reasons unex-

plained or unexplainable—he never used it as he sought newspaper jobs in

Toledo, Cleveland, Buªalo, Pittsburgh, and New York.2 He also asserts that

the Republic oªered him an increased salary as an incentive to remain in

St. Louis. As near to broke as he was, it hardly seems likely that he would

have set out for the unknown just then.

He may have left St. Louis in part to get away from Jug, whose deter-

mined resistance to his advances seemed to contribute to increasingly reg-

ular moods of depression, an a›iction he suªered from during several pe-

riods in his life. Yet in manic relief from those moods, he wrote prodigiously

to his “honey pot” while still in St. Louis and afterward, longing for her

presence and occasionally accusing her of indiªerence. At the same time,

however, he also tried to initiate a romantic correspondence with Emma

Rector, the daughter of old family friends living in Indiana. (One wonders

whether Dreiser was bipolar. The manic phase of this condition is usually

accompanied by lower inhibitions and a correspondingly raised libido. This