The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

canal-like rivers to the north and south sides, resembled Paris and the Seine,

with its numerous bridges linking the Left and Right Banks. The parallels

between the two cities went deeper than the physical because Pittsburgh

was also a dynamic urban laboratory just waiting for its Balzac. Here was

another realist’s paradise, but where were its artists? He thought it a won-

der that Pittsburgh had not already produced “a score of writers, poets,

painters and sculptors instead of—well—how many?” Yet Dreiser later told

Mencken that from the time he discovered Balzac almost all the way through

to the composition of Sister Carrie, he “never had the slightest idea” of be-

coming a novelist. His first literary ambition was to write a comic play.

Nonetheless, for Dreiser, reading Balzac in Pittsburgh constituted an

epiphany. “It was,” he recalled, “as if a new and inviting door to life had

been suddenly thrown open to me.”24

–

A writer Dreiser doesn’t mention but one who may have begun to influence

his writing as early as Pittsburgh was Stephen Crane. By 1894, he could have

heard about the naturalist’s new brand of Bowery Journalism or even pe-

rused its literary metamorphosis in Maggie, Girl of the Streets (1893) or “An

Experiment in Misery” (1894). In a sketch about Allegheny Hospital that

appeared in the pages of the Dispatch of April 28, 1894, Dreiser contrasted

the beauty of the morning sunshine with the routine death of a patient.

Just as in Crane’s cruel depictions of nature’s aloofness from human suªer-

ing, Dreiser wrote in “Hospital Violet Day” of one of the patients who had

died on a spring day on which “for the first time, violets came in quantity”:

“Poor Fintz! . . . When the light shone bright he coughed blood, and when

all the patients had been arranged by windows, or wheeled to the court be-

low, long-suªering Fintz died.”25

That summer he wrote of a potter’s field located on the way to the Ohio

River community of Bellevue, two or three miles from downtown Pitts-

burgh. It had neither a name nor anyone to watch over it. There were no

s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t

8 1

visitors to walk “its barren paths. Those who lie there came tagged and writ-

ten upon from the river’s slime and the garret’s discouraging want, victims

of the same unerring forces that make beautiful the neighboring mau-

soleums. . . . These sleepers are the potter’s brood.” Already we can discern

in Dreiser’s observations the footsteps of an apathetic God, supremely

indiªerent about the human condition. Our only relief comes in the fact

that we don’t feel “the desolateness of that mound of the future, which shall

be one’s own and over which the elements shall sweep in their varying

moods, as though we had never been.”26

Dreiser definitely read Hamlin Garland. In a letter to the prairie natu-

ralist in 1903, in response to belated praise of Sister Carrie, he wrote, “Years

ago (1894) when a newspaper writer in Pittsburgh I made the acquaintance

of ‘Main Traveled Roads’ in the lovely Carnegie Library of Allegheny while

lounging away the long afternoons of my ‘city hall’ assignment. I have never

forgotten it. Like the other beautiful things of life those fresh flowered sto-

ries of yours became identified with my dearest remembrances and I have

always followed your work with interest. Only a year ago I read ‘Rose of

Dutcher’s Coolly.’”27 Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (1895), like Sister Carrie, was

about a young woman who went to Chicago to escape the country and its

stifling routine. It too had become a target of the censors.

In Newspaper Days Dreiser recalls writing other human interest pieces that

anticipate the pathos of his best writing. His reading of Balzac, along with

the “very picturesque nature” of Pittsburgh, he claimed, helped him to

“achieve a series of mood or word pictures anent the most trivial news mat-

ters.” In one little allegory, he recalled, he thought of a common housefly

as a worthy subject. “He was arriving about now; being young and ambi-

tious and having freshly crawled out of some breeding-pit somewhere, he

alighted on the nearest fence or windowsill, brushed his head and wings

reflectively and meditated on the possibility of a livelihood or a career of

sorts. What now, pray, could be open to a young and ambitious fly in a

world all too crowded with flies?” In fact, the story, called “The Last Fly of

Fly Time,” was set in the fall, when winter is approaching to doom all flies,

however young and ambitious. Appearing in the Dispatch of October 3, it

describes the fly almost as dramatically as Old Fintz or the anonymous dead

in a potter’s field. Harassed by the flypaper trust, the relentless pursuit of

the housewife, and singed wings from flying too near hot dishes, as well as

the inevitable end of fly season, “the fly is a suicide by inheritance.”28 Per-

haps it was true of man, also.

Once he had landed his job, Dreiser moved his residence to Mt. Wash-

s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t

8 2

ington. He spent a major part of his time downtown in and around the

Dispatch building, when he wasn’t on assignment at the North Side. And

possibly inspired by Crane’s Maggie, he ventured again into working neigh-

borhoods and now also into the red light districts. One of the latter could

be found directly behind his building. His colleague Martyn was his guide

to the mill districts, but Dreiser, driven by loneliness, conducted his own

interviews with prostitutes. There is “a type of girl between fifteen and

twenty-three or -four,” he wrote later, “who for reasons of poverty or the

hope of finery takes to the streets, and a few of these I made friends with.”29

He records doing business with at least two of them, an olive-skinned

brunette and a red-head. He remembered little about them (though he re-

calls one “large and soft and white, with big hips and small feet and hands”).

He was halted dead in his tracks, however, by a third “with indiªerent

yet haunting blue eyes” that he never forgot. He met her on the streets late

one rainy night. When they reached her shabbily furnished room, he was

astonished at her beauty—“a face so delicate and intelligent and a body so

gracefully and delicately formed that I was almost breathless with delight.”

But there was one problem. As she disrobed, he noted track marks on one

of her arms. “She was a dope fiend—a consumer of cocaine or heroin or

what not, via the needle.” Overcoming his shock at the young woman’s

wretched circumstance and no longer interested in her sexually, he, who

had grown up around prostitutes in Sullivan, Vincennes, and Evansville,

addressed her as a brother, beginning a “hortatory and moralic [ sic] dis-

course anent the error and pity of all this.” He gave her three dollars—two

more than sex would have cost him and all the money he had on his

person—and went home, thinking “of her and the old house and the bare

room and the punctured arm.”30 What did he know about life, anyway, he

demanded of himself, to be preaching to this desperate young woman?

A short time later he “interviewed” Andrew Carnegie at the Duquesne

Club for the Dispatch; that is, he was permitted to listen to a prepared speech

at which reporters were allowed no note taking and took away only a copy

of the speech to use in their stories of the event. At the time Dreiser may

have thought back to the beautiful girl with needle marks or to the mill

workers packed into tiny dwellings, overcrowded with boarders taken in to

assist with the rent—all this so “that Mr. Carnegie might give the world

one or two extra libraries with his name plastered on the front.” Later on,

Dreiser used the handout as the basis of yet another fake interview with

Carnegie for Success magazine. Here, because of the ideology of the maga-

zine, he was diametrically diªerent in his treatment of the great man. The

s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t

8 3

industrialist is quoted in an article attributed to Dreiser as saying he be-

lieved a time was fast approaching “when true success in life would be rec-

ognized as consisting neither of wealth nor fame, but having been useful

to mankind.”31

New York, the ultimate stage on which this American naturalist would

observe and dramatize the indignities of life, was now only a night train

ride away. The idea of going there soon—when he was financially ready

perhaps—was becoming stronger. He was already perusing some of that