The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

city’s glitzy magazines. One was the Standard, “a theatre and chorus girl

paper” with alluring photographs. Another, more serious, was Munsey’s, also

devoted to theater life in the great metropolis. These whetted his appetite

and toughened his nerve. It was about this time that a letter arrived from

Paul demanding to know why he was still “piking” about the West and urg-

ing him to visit New York that August.

–

Before Theo heeded Paul’s summons, however, he first went west—to St.

Louis and then to the town of Danville, seven miles from the nearest rail-

road station in Montgomery City, Missouri. There in the “backwoods” lived

Jug’s family: Archibald White, his wife, and whatever of their ten children

who were still unmarried, including that summer Jug herself. Dreiser later

wrote more than one version of his impressions of his wife’s somewhat ec-

centric father and the Danville farm he visited several times. In Twelve Men

(1919), the image was definitely favorable. “One might have taken him to

be Walt Whitman,” he wrote in the sketch entitled “A True Patriarch,” “of

whom he was the living counterpart.”

If to his children he was something of a dominating patriarch, White

was to his neighbors a born democrat who, Dreiser remarked, “treated a

Jersey cow with the same dignity of bearing and forcefulness of manner

that characterized him when he stood before his fellow-citizens at a pub-

lic meeting.” He was known as a friend to the sick, the poor, the widowed,

the orphaned, and the insane, and might have echoed Whitman’s general

call in the Preface to his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass to “[l]ove the earth

and the sun and the animals.” It seemed to Dreiser during the week or

more that he stayed with the White family that it cradled “the spirit of ru-

ral America”—from the democratic dreams of Jackson to the courage of

Lincoln.32

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8 4

Dreiser liked to remember himself and his love as locked into a “chemic

lust” for each other, but the facts of that summer visit seem to indicate that

Jug had not retreated from her resolve to abstain from premarital sex. Al-

though by now, as he recalled, he enjoyed “repeated fondlings,” such erotic

previews were regularly squelched by Jug’s fears that her parents would dis-

cover them or perhaps by her mortification at the thought of having sex in

her parents’ very home. Jug’s virginity survived the week-long assault, but

its survival—Dreiser later concluded—drove another nail in the co‹n of

their eventually doomed relationship.33 Certainly he felt then that there was

no use in spending any more time in Missouri. He had requested several

weeks’ unpaid leave from the Dispatch, and it was past time to head east

again, this time all the way to New York.

Along the way, he saw his old Globe-Democrat friends in St. Louis, Peter

McCord and Dick Wood. He also made a brief stopover in Pittsburgh to

refresh himself and collect clean clothes. Then the overnight train to Jer-

sey City, where Paul was waiting to take him across the Hudson River by

ferry. As the two brothers boarded the vessel, the would-be playwright and

future novelist imagined himself crossing the proscenium arch of a stage

for the first time. Making their way through the bustling city to the brown-

stone on West Fifteenth Street, where Paul was staying with Emma Dreiser

and her common-law husband, L. A. Hopkins, Theo realized that he had

not seen his sister since 1890, when their mother had died. At thirty-one,

the once lithe and sensuous beauty who had taken Hopkins away from his

first wife and children, had grown stout and was now herself the mother

of a boy and a girl, both under four. And Hopkins was beginning to look

and act like the fated Hurstwood, for whom he was the primary model.

Any bad omens the couple suggested were quickly forgotten as Paul

showed his little brother the sights of New York. They walked across Fif-

teenth Street and up Sixth Avenue to Twentieth Street, where they headed

east across Broadway towards Fifth Avenue. Just beyond Broadway on Twen-

tieth stood the o‹ces of Howley, Haviland, and Company on the third

floor. Paul was now in the sheet music business. “After years of essaying life

as a comedian and song writer in the middle west,” Dreiser wrote in a bi-

ographical memorandum, he had become an established song writer with

the publications of “The Letter That Never Came” and “I Believe It For

My Mother Told Me So.” Pat Howley and Fred Haviland had been clerks

in other music companies. In fact, Howley had worked for Willis, Wood-

ward and Company, which had published “My Mother Told Me So” and

had alerted Paul to the fact that the company was cheating him on royal-

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

8 5

ties. This revelation moved Paul to sever his ties with that company and es-

tablish a formal connection with Howley and Haviland.34

The enterprise was just then getting underway, but Paul was customar-

ily full of optimism. The fact that Howley was a hunchback also gave the

superstitious Paul hope that it would be a grand success. Haviland was still

working for the celebrated Ditson music company, with o‹ces in New York

and Boston, and using the position secretly, according to Paul, to aid their

new company “in disposing of some of their published wares.” Mostly, the

new firm sold Paul’s songs. Haviland, who was about twenty-seven, “shot

out questions and replies as one might bullets out of a gun,” Dreiser re-

membered: “‘DidyaseeDrake? Whaddesay? AnynewsfromBaker? Thedev-

ilyasay! Yadon’tmeanit.’”35

On the way to Paul’s o‹ce, Dreiser experienced Broadway for the first

time. Within a year he would produce a Whitmanesque catalog of the famed

avenue. He marveled at its surging crush of humanity and its store win-

dows, alive with a dazzle of paintings, furniture, clothing—whatever one

could want and imagine, he thought. Thousands of people, perhaps a hun-

dred thousand a day, passed up and down, staring into the lushly filled plate-

glass windows or walking by each other as utter strangers. Some of the build-

ings were a block in length. “And the carriages!” he recalled in his memoirs,

“and the well dressed people!” Within five years, these impressions would

become Carrie’s uneasy thoughts while living with Hurstwood in New York.

“The walk down Broadway,” he wrote in Sister Carrie, “then as now, was

one of the remarkable features of the city. . . . Men in flawless topcoats, high

hats, and silver-headed walking sticks elbowed near and looked too often

into conscious eyes. Ladies rustled by in dresses of stiª cloth, shedding

aªected smiles and perfumes. . . . The whole street bore the flavour of riches

and show, and Carrie felt that she was not of it.”36

“Broadway Paul,” as he probably should have been hailed, was clearly at

home on the stretch of Broadway between Union Square and Forty-Second

Street. Dreiser recalled in his memoirs the many famous addresses Paul

took him by on their stroll uptown that day—Tiªany’s still at Fifteenth;

Brentano’s Bookstore at Sixteenth; Sarony’s photography studio between

Fifteenth and Sixteenth; the Century Company, which would later pub-

lish A Traveler at Forty, on the north side of Union Square at Seventeenth

Street; Lord and Taylor, whose great building stood next to the one which

housed Paul’s business; and so on up the avenue to Thirtieth, where Au-

gustin Daly’s famous playhouse then stood. Here, too, Dreiser was visiting

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8 6

his future, for he has Carrie Meeber play the role of Laura in Daly’s Under

the Gaslight.

At Delmonico’s, recently moved from Fourteenth Street and Fifth Av-

enue to Broadway between Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth, his good

brother Paul hailed, “chipperly and genially, some acquaintance who hap-

pened to be in charge of the floor at the moment. Here as elsewhere he was

known.” The waiter greeted Paul warmly, which strongly impressed his kid

brother, who had long ago heard of this “sanctum sanctorum of the smart

social life of the city.” It was the same at the newly opened Metropole Ho-

tel at Forty-Second and Broadway. Here gathered daily the representatives

of the boxing, gambling, and theatrical worlds—all decked out in loud

clothes, diamond pins, straw hats, and “hot” socks. This was yet another

visit to the future, for Hurstwood flourishes in the same sartorial extrava-

gance as manager of Fitzgerald and Moy’s in Chicago. Here Hurstwood

first stood in the flesh. It was “Paul” this and “Paul” that, Dreiser recalled

in Newspaper Days: “‘Why hello, Dresser. You’re just in time. Have a