The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

ing husband once and for all. Accordingly, Dreiser came home one day and

announced that he was giving up the reporter’s game in New York and go-

ing back to Pittsburgh. In the meantime, he rented a room for himself on

East Fourth Street, which, ironically, turned out to be in a bedhouse. From

there he had a friend in Pittsburgh forward his letter addressed to Emma

back to New York. It said that he had reestablished himself in Pittsburgh

and had room for Emma and her two children. At first Hopkins refused to

let her go but soon relented. He himself moved to a cheap hotel.

Actually, Emma moved to a flat on West Seventeenth Street, where she

lived with her children for several years. Hopkins’s fate is not clear, and

Emma may have never seen him again. One source suggests that he went

back to his wife in Chicago. But in his memoirs, Dreiser gave his brother-

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

9 3

in-law a Hurstwood obituary: “I know I never saw him but once after, a

most washed-out and deteriorated-looking person, and then he did not see

me. A few years later, as [Emma] learned, he died—still working for the

same hotel.” In Sister Carrie, the “gloomy Hurstwood” on the brink of his

final descent broods “in his cheap hotel . . . not wholly indiªerent to the

fact that his money was slipping away.”52

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

9 4

f i v e

Editorial Days

–

New York is a Christian city, if anyone should inquire of you.

It has 2,000,000 residents and 546 churches.

E V ’ R Y M O N T H , O C T O B E R 1 8 9 5

dreiser drops almost completely from sight between December 1894

and September 1895. Decades later he completed two autobiographical vol-

umes, Dawn and Newspaper Days, but these followed his life only through

1894. Although he had plans for two more volumes, he never wrote them.

What little we know about this missing period comes from an unpublished

fragment titled “A Literary Apprenticeship,” which may have been the start

of the third volume and which he apparently began some years after finish-

ing Newspaper Days. In it he states that he still worked for the New York

World between January and “late February or the early days of March,” but

misremembers the year as 1894 instead of 1895. He speaks of his dreams of

becoming a real writer instead of a reporter—uppermost in his mind were

the “meteoric” literary successes of Rudyard Kipling and Richard Harding

Davis.1

The main subject of “A Literary Apprenticeship,” however, is not Dreiser’s

inspiration leading up to Sister Carrie, but his frustrated eªorts to establish

himself as a writer outside of newspaper work. Even while he remained on

the World, he wasn’t allowed to write up his own stories. One of his final

assignments before he left the newspaper was to cover the morgue on East

Twenty-Sixth Street, along with the neighboring Bellevue Hospital, whose

mentally ill patients were guarded by “hobbling ghouls of caretakers.”2 The

hospital was caught up in the graft of Tammany Hall, and Dreiser consid-

9 5

ered writing an exposé of the misapplication of its medical resources and

oªering it to a magazine. He became aware of other possibilities as he walked

around the Bowery, where he soon lived in a hall bedroom nearby. Here he

struggled to write what he thought the magazines would publish. He even

tried to interview Mark Twain, whom he encountered on the street one

day.3 But at this time his freelance eªorts met with no success.

The drifters and derelicts that filled the Bowery in the continuing de-

pression no doubt provided grist for what would be his first novel, however.

Even the healthy could find no work, and, like George Hurstwood, thou-

sands of homeless men slept on gratings and huddled against doorways to

warm themselves against the sleet and winter gusts. Once he stopped writ-

ing for the World, Dreiser himself began to feel “down and out.” He told

Dorothy Dudley, his first biographer, “I got terribly depressed. My money

was dwindling, I thought, my gosh, I would have to go back to newspaper

work.”4 Near Houston Street a few days later, he struck up an acquaintance

with a young Italian girl, “pretty and gracious.” When he told her he had no

money, she took him to her room nearby, over her father’s restaurant. Her

parents liked him, she said, and would provide him a room for nothing next

to hers. He fancied they were looking for a son-in-law. He allegedly lived

with this family for a short time, perhaps until the spring, undecided, he told

Dudley, “whether to accept her oªer [of marriage?] and thus escape from

misery and solitude.” He wondered whether Italian in-laws would be better

than Jug’s Methodist ones, more accommodating of his exotic dreams of him-

self as a writer. But Italian also meant Catholic, and his rejection of his fa-

ther’s religion was by now irrevocable. And even as he lived oª the Italian

family and their daughter’s infatuation for him, Dreiser may also have been

corresponding with Jug. Their extant letters date only from 1896, but the

content of the earliest ones suggests lost letters from the previous year.

It was during this period that Dreiser decided to write another play. While

he was drama critic on the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, he had drafted a comic

opera called Jeremiah I. Perhaps suggested by a reading of Twain’s A Con-

necticut Yankee (1889), the play concerned an Indiana farmer who is magi-

cally transported to Aztec Mexico, where he becomes a bully. This time

Dreiser either wrote or intended to write “Along the Wabash,” which he

described as a “comedy drama” when he filed for copyright in 1895 at the

Library of Congress. The play has never been found (indeed, may have never

been written), but its title curiously anticipates Paul’s most famous song,

“On the Banks of the Wabash,” written two years later.5 Dreiser later claimed

partial authorship of that song.

e d i t o r i a l d a y s

9 6

Dreiser the hopeful dramatist was, of course, more than capable of dram-

atizing his own di‹cult days and may have exaggerated his situation in the

winter of 1895. He was probably never truly in the same peril as those he

saw every day in the Bowery, because even then he had relatives nearby to

lend a hand. Emma might not have been much of a resource after she left

Hopkins, but there was always Paul. He was back on the road for the win-

ter but probably never out of touch. And he was scheduled to return to

New York that spring, as he had the previous year, when Theo had visited.

As Robert H. Elias has observed, initially it was Dreiser’s relationship to

Paul, not his own talent as a writer, that helped him survive in New York.6

Coarse in manners, grossly overweight, hardly educated beyond the pop-

ular culture of the day, and ever attired in the gaudy uniforms of newfound

Broadway success, Paul was not only a practical source of help but in some

ways an emotional surrogate for the mother they both still mourned.

Until recently, our knowledge of Paul came largely from his brother’s

sketches, especially “My Brother Paul,” written in 1919. Apart from his songs,

Paul left no writings except for an article, crafted no doubt with Theo’s help,

in the Metropolitan of November 1900 (coincidentally, the same month in

which Sister Carrie first appeared). Entitled “Making Songs for the Mil-

lions,” it revealed that Paul had been cheated out of the profits of his very

first song. In 1886 he had given the lyrics of “The Letter That Never Came”

“to a man whom I no longer love” to score it for the piano. When he re-

turned to New York after a tour on the road, he saw his song published un-

der the other fellow’s name in the New York Clipper. Everywhere he went

he heard his song.

A letter here for me? was the question that he asked

Of the mailman at the closing of the day—

He turned sadly with a sigh, while a tear stood in his eye,

Then he bow’d his head and slowly walked away.7

“Another man was getting the money,” he recalled, “and I was getting the

laugh.”

Paul had arrived in New York “an absolute stranger,” but apparently the

threat of poverty did not scare him the way it did his brother. In fact, when

it came to adversity, the fat man seemed to float through it like a butterfly.

On the day he learned his song had been stolen and was down to his last