The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

sixty-five cents, he “knocked around all night” on Broadway, choosing

breakfast over a bed. A rough-and-tumble type, he never fully compre-

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hended his younger brother’s darker and more nuanced view of the world.

Possessing only one year, if that, of formal music study, he disdained what

he called “high-class music”—not only because it was beyond him but be-

cause it represented a social class that deemed him and his Tin Pan Alley

colleagues inferior. Like brother Rome in his class anger, if not in his shift-

less approach to life, Paul wore his commonality as a badge of honor, much

preferring—he wrote in the Metropolitan article—a “broiled steak with

plenty of bread and butter” to any posthumous recognition of his musical

talent.8 As it turns out, he probably would not have received any posthu-

mous recognition, outside the annals of Tin Pan Alley, without his brother’s

touching reminiscences and the collection of many of his ballads as The

Songs of Paul Dresser (1927), which Theo edited.

Paul’s songs were about people who love and lose because of their

selfishness or their impatience for the material comforts denied them dur-

ing their impoverished childhood. As we know, several of the Dreiser sis-

ters had their heads so turned, and in “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,”

written in 1894, somebody’s sister has gone oª to the big city and fallen

into prostitution. She can’t face her family—and especially her mother, a

figure informing many of Paul’s songs—and so she tells a former school-

mate about to return home:

Just tell them that you saw me,

She said, They’ll know the rest,

Just tell them I was looking well, you know,

Just whisper if you get the chance to mother dear, and say,

I love her as I did long, long ago.

The song was a huge success that year and established Paul with Howley

and Haviland. Some of his other better-known titles include “The Pardon

That Came Too Late,” “I Can’t Believe Her Faithless,” and “The Lone

Grave.” The latter was reminiscent of what Dreiser himself had already writ-

ten about potter’s fields and lonely deaths in Pittsburgh, a story he would

shortly revise and publish under the title of “Forgotten.”9

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Dreiser had been trying his hand at both fiction and magazine articles, ap-

parently without success, throughout the winter of 1895. By spring he was

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nearly broke but not prepared to marry back into the Catholic Church or

to return to Pittsburgh, St. Louis, or even Jug, still more or less patiently

waiting for him in Missouri. Once again his rescue came through Paul.

Dreiser went around to the East Twentieth Street o‹ces of Howley, Hav-

iland, and Company, to see his brother, only to discover he hadn’t yet re-

turned from his winter’s road trip. He had an interesting proposal for the

music sheet company, but he thought he would need Paul’s support in get-

ting the owners to agree to it. Paul wasn’t an o‹cial partner there until 1901,

but his music was one of the company’s main sellers and his opinion would

weigh in favorably, so Dreiser hoped. The idea was for the company to start

a magazine to advertise its merchandise. Other music companies, such as

Ditson, where Fred Haviland had been employed, had such magazines, the

forerunners of today’s house organ in an American business. With the

growth of Howley, Haviland, and Company, Dreiser argued, this would be

the next logical step in the firm’s development.

On his return, Paul agreed, and he easily persuaded Howley and Havi-

land not only that this would be a fine idea but that his brother, with his

newspaper experience, would be an able editor. Dreiser was soon installed

in a small o‹ce on the second floor, just large enough for two chairs and

a table. There he conducted the business of the new magazine, which he

called Ev’ry Month. While young Dreiser edited copy or talked with con-

tributors, the music business in the main o‹ce went ahead as usual. Young

women hastily addressed and folded circulars, and others pounded type-

writers, while men in green eyeshades worked over desks and messenger

boys carried packages in and out of the establishment. In one corner at a

piano there might be a blond in “a gorgeous hat and gown” trying out one

of the firm’s new songs with an accompanist. In another corner, Paul might

be standing at a second piano, thrumming out the tune to another sad, nos-

talgic tale. Not only was the place noisy, but it was also filled with tobacco

smoke, which filtered up to the garret of the editor, who rarely smoked.10

If the noise was a distraction, it was also a constant reminder that the rai-

son d’être of the magazine was primarily to sell the company’s wares.

But Dreiser had bigger ideas for his new magazine, whose first issue ap-

peared in October 1895. Its moderate success (eventually reaching a circu-

lation of 65,000) marked not only an upswing in business for the firm but

a major step forward in Dreiser’s literary development. Initially subtitled

“An Illustrated Magazine of Popular Music, the Drama, and Literature”

(later changed to “The Woman’s Magazine of Literature and Music”), it

hosted a large, thirty-two- to forty-eight-page format consisting of four

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newly released songs each month along with an editorial section called “Re-

view of the Month” (later “Reflections”), reviews of current New York plays,

poems, and short stories. Some of these were written by Dreiser’s former

newspaper colleagues Peter McCord, Dick Wood, and Arthur Henry, but,

at least for the first year, Dreiser wrote most of the copy himself. After a

year of profits, Dreiser hired George C. Jenks, a former colleague at the

New York World, to help him with some of the editorials.11 Dreiser was paid

ten dollars a week while preparing the first issue and fifteen a week once

publication got underway.

The magazine was filled with sentimental songs and stories, though

Dreiser’s editorials were often lofty recyclings of material he got from Her-

bert Spencer. The cheaper halftone printing technology that was replac-

ing woodcuts at the turn of the century allowed for an abundance of aªord-

able illustrations, usually of pensive young women or distinguished-looking

men, whose élan encouraged readers to merge their consciousness with each

Ev’ry Month daydream. Aside from the minor help of his friends and the

printed songs featured in each issue, Dreiser signed much of the copy he

wrote with pseudonyms: for the “Reflections” column he was “The

Prophet”; for others he used either combinations of his brothers’ names

(“Edward Al”) or his future wife’s maiden name (“S. J. White”—Sara Jug ).

Generally, Ev’ry Month gave the budding writer a ready outlet for the kind

of casual reporting he often had been denied as a journalist and unleashed

his imaginative curiosity in almost every direction around the city. Unlike

Walt Whitman, whose newspaper o‹ce was the equivalent of Herman

Melville’s whaling ship, Dreiser’s literary Harvard and his Yale (as the au-

thor of Moby-Dick called his experiences at sea) was not so much the news-

paper as it was the magazine.12

Ev’ry Month was one of a number of magazines emerging in the 1890s

that diªered widely from their more serious (some now thought stuªy) fore-

runners, such as Century and Harper’s. With their informal approach to life

and their appeal to the consumer with a little recreational cash, they envi-

sioned a world of leisure and luxury that animates the dreams of Sister Car-

rie. Part of that vision was conveyed by Ev’ry Month’s illustrations, as Dreiser

frankly acknowledged in the inaugural issue of October 1895. “The actresses

selected” to pose for them, he said, were not chosen for their individual dis-

tinction but simply because they were “pretty, and because they serve to

adorn a page of serious matter better than anything else.” Such alluring faces

as that of Violet Dale, a “very promising little toe dancer,” were to be found

on almost every page of the first issue, allowing the viewer to “see in them

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the moods and expressions of other beings, not always a part of our lives,

and often not even a part of the life of the world in general.” It was the

“formula female” that seemed to ennoble life and set the mood for its artis-

tic expression. Of course, as the magazine of a music publisher, Ev’ry Month

also invited readers to participate in the general nostalgia of the songs pub-

lished in each issue. The first month’s musical features included Theodore

F. Morse’s “The Arrival of the Bride” and Paul’s “I Was Looking for My