drink.’ . . . Then drinks, cigars, my brother telling and paying and har-har-
ing as freely as any. I felt as though I were in the heart of fairyland itself.”37
Paul Dresser was not only a friend to the successes but to the failures as
well—punch-drunk ex-prizefighters or long-haired thespians down on their
luck. In “My Brother Paul,” a veritable love letter to his late brother, Dreiser
remembered that although Paul was a “Jack Falstaª, with his love of women”
or a stand-up comic and songwriter who mildly mocked the current butts
of humor (the Irish day laborer, the Negro, and the Jew), sympathy was
truly his outstanding characteristic. When Dreiser asked his brother one
day why the needy should always appeal to him, he was simply told that
he ought to know “how it was.”38 His brother couldn’t stand to see people
suªer. No doubt he had Paul also in the back of his mind as he wrote about
Charlie Potter in the short story, “A Doer of the Word” (1902), who works
only for others. Paul was surely a wellspring for Dreiser’s own deep com-
passion for the human condition.
–
His visit to New York lasted only days, a week at most, but through Paul
Theo obtained “an excellent sip” of the city in which he was to live almost
without interruption for the next forty-five years. Before he returned to Pitts-
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
8 7
burgh, however, he became possibly more familiar with Paul and his
cronies than was altogether comfortable. One day as he sat with his brother
and friends at a curbside cafe, two women, looking like prostitutes, passed
by. One of Paul’s pals suggested they were “French,” implying not na-
tionality but the probability that they engaged in oral sex. When young
Dreiser challenged the assertion that the women were of French origin,
his naïveté was greeted with a gale of laughter. Before the evening was out,
Paul and his cohorts had arranged to initiate Dreiser in what he had ap-
parently considered a forbidden aspect of sexual foreplay. In an episode
that was suppressed until the 1995 scholarly edition of Newspaper Days, he
remembered it as “a wild, blood-racking, brain-scarifying experience”—
and he worried for weeks afterward that he might have caught “a low and
shameful disease.”39
When he returned to Pittsburgh in the late summer of 1894, the city had
lost much of the romance he had imagined he found in it. New York seemed
more like Balzac’s Paris than this now dreary steel and coal center. This new
mood was perhaps enhanced by his discovery of Herbert Spencer’s First Prin-
ciples (1893). Just as New York had blown away Pittsburgh, Spencer, whom
he now read with far more depth and experience than he had in his year of
college, “quite blew me to bits intellectually.”40 He also read Thomas Hux-
ley’s Science and Hebrew Tradition (1893) and Science and Christian Tradi-
tion (1894). The total impact of these volumes, he said, was to destroy the
last traces of his adherence to conventional religion. But where Huxley’s
eªect was to negate traditional religious views, Spencer gave Dreiser a new
religion, as it were. Essentially, the synthetic philosopher held that a higher
power was manifested through nature, or physical matter, but unlike tran-
scendentalism, which saw nature as merely an emblem of spirit, his doc-
trine emphasized nature itself.
Because the spirit was “unknowable,” only nature could be known, and
it was evidenced by the evolutionary movement of life, or force. This evo-
lutionary force operated on the world as a series of chemical reactions over
which man, as part of the chemistry, had no control. Spencer reduced man
to a chemical atom, or combination of same, which reacted to other chem-
ical formulas or human personalities or situations to produce what we call
chance or fate. Man’s options, therefore, consisted not in free will but merely
in the necessity of acting out the particular “will” or chemism he or she
chanced to receive, mainly through the combination of heredity and envi-
ronment. There was, however, one element in Spencer’s “survival of the
fittest” (his coinage, not Darwin’s) that is altogether missing from On the
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
8 8
Origin of Species; and that was a moral component. For Spencer, the world
was evolving towards perfection as its forces and counterforces came into
balance.
In the words of Donald Pizer, “Men at present are still guided by ego-
tism, Spencer believed, because society was still dominated by an older form
of evolution, but men were increasingly recognizing the greater social
e‹cacy of conscious altruism and ‘harmonious cooperation.’” Another au-
thority on Dreiser, Richard Lehan, is impressed that someone like Dreiser
without philosophical training could have so readily understood Spencer,
whose First Principles is not an easy book to read or comprehend. Possibly
Dreiser was helped along in his reading by the fact that he found what he
was looking for all along: a system of thought that would explain away the
pathos of the human condition. Dreiser put it best in Sister Carrie: “Our
civilisation is still in the middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer
wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet guided by
reason. . . . We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his in-
nate instincts dulled by too near an approach to free will, his free will not
su‹ciently developed to replace his instincts.” Man was only halfway along
in his evolution towards perfection, frequently torn between the demands
of instinct and the morality of will. Man is but “a wisp in the wind” among
the forces “which sweep and play throughout the universe.”41
Before he left New York, Dreiser had already decided he would return
there to live permanently. He went back to Pittsburgh and his job on the
Dispatch in order to save as much money as he could—enough to sustain
him in New York while he searched for another newspaper job. During the
next four months, he was able to lay aside $240 by doing without new
clothes and even regular meals. Later he thought he had done himself some
physical damage, which told on him during his first and most di‹cult year
in New York.42 He returned to New York in late November 1894. This time
there was no big brother to whisk him about, for Paul was, as usual in win-
ter, on the road. Instead, Dreiser was greeted only by the gloomy Hopkins
and—yet again—a sister in distress.
Dreiser was ill-prepared for a family burden at this juncture. He had his
own worries. “I was haunted by the thought that I was sure to fail,” he re-
membered. “And in addition that very remarkable book of Balzac’s, The
Great Man from the Provinces, so recently read, in which was recorded the
poignant failure of such a youth as myself, was weighing on me to a de-
gree.”43 With Paul away, Emma had rented his room, but there was still
space for Theo in what must have been a large apartment. Hopkins had
s u r v i v a l o f t h e f i t t e s t
8 9
lost his connection with Tammany Hall, which was under investigation and
beginning to lose power and influence in the city. In Dreiser’s view, Hop-
kins looked “played out.” Once a fairly aggressive and resourceful man, he
sat around the apartment, waiting for something to happen.
Within a day or so of his re-arrival, Dreiser set out to conquer the great
newspaper world of New York. He had been hearing about it now for more
than three years, since he had first joined the Fourth Estate in Chicago —
tales of the great Joseph Pulitzer of the World and the famed Charles A.
Dana of the Sun. He was immediately shocked to discover that, unlike news-
paper o‹ces in the West, New York’s were summarily closed to casual in-
quiries about employment. At one paper after another, the Herald, the Sun,
the Times, and the World—most of them facing City Hall Park at Cham-
bers Street and Broadway—he encountered “buªers” or “lookouts,” thugs
in business attire stationed outside every editorial o‹ce to mouth the words
“no vacancies.”
At first he couldn’t bring himself to challenge these hired ru‹ans or push
past them. Actually, he felt a general fear of New York, which he found
most intimidating and somewhat paralyzing. It was also December, and the
cold winds were not just meteorological but financial, for it was now the
very depth of the depression following the Panic of 1893. Thousands of men
thrown out of work loitered about the city. One day, at the height of his