The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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pel gloomy moments,” he told Jug, “and so I love to lounge at tables and

look out.”26 He planned to spend the winter reading Darwin, the bespec-

tacled Dreiser told her, but by the fall of 1896 he had already begun to en-

hance his Spencerian impressions. (In the September 1896 Ev’ry Month he

had pronounced all life as a helpless product of the sun.) “You would[n’t]

care for such study I suppose,” he said, “seeing you don’t believe in Evolu-

tion.” He had just finished a chapter “relating to probable reasons why in

nature, the male courts the female.” Perhaps Jug was still too much a Chris-

tian, he implied, “but your lover is firmly grounded in the belief and gains

as much satisfaction from observing the truth of it, as some would in ob-

serving the nearness of a novelistic fiction to actual life.”27 He may also have

been reading about human sex in the explicit underground novels of the

day, not that di‹cult to find in New York.

Later, as the approach of a marriage that would demand fidelity to only

one sexual partner terrified him more and more, he seemed to qualify his

unbounded love with the caveat that “if ever you are grieved because of me,

be sure that circumstances outside the control of my will and desire, and

not I, are to blame.” This comment reflects more than the basic determin-

ism he would dramatize in his novels; it also suggests his growing ambiva-

lence regarding a benign deity. He was already caught between the past and

the onrushing future in intellectual America, between antebellum ideas

about morality and sexual responsibility, and the Darwinian idea—as it

was being explained in the “pragmatism” of William James—that “truth”

depended on necessity, which is to say, whatever worked in life.28

His social life became more and more tempting. There were late-night

parties with fellow writers and editors of the other magazines in the city.

“We had a banquet at the Arena, Saturday,” he told Jug. He had heard “sto-

ries and comic and tragic recitations, together with songs, musical selec-

tions and speeches that were hilarious to the ridiculous degree. There were

ten courses and eight kinds of wine, though I only drank a little.” Dreiser

was surely telling the truth about the drinking, for he was a moderate im-

biber most of his life, but his frequent comments to Jug about other women

who would welcome his company probably stemmed more from an inno-

cent tease or eªort to chastise her for her prudishness. Certainly he held up

his brother Paul as no positive example. The one-time candidate for the

priesthood had just returned from Terre Haute in March 1897 to announce

his plans to marry an old flame, but Dreiser confided to Jug that Paul “loves

all women too well generally to love any one in particular for long. He is

fickle, fat and forty and worse than ever.”29

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Dreiser was also caught up in the literary whirl of New York. Reviews in

Ev’ry Month praised such works as Hamlin Garland’s Main-Traveled Roads

(1891), which he had read while still in Pittsburgh, and Stephen Crane’s The

Red Badge of Courage (1895). “Here is a novelist for you, if you want an

American,” wrote “Edward Al” of Crane in the May 1896 issue. Crane ex-

pressed “the sentiments that are nothing, if not the whisperings of the over-

soul.” In the September 1896 issue, he published Crane’s “A Mystery of Hero-

ism,” a vivid tale of the grimness of the Civil War. (In the issue of February

1897, he also had Jenks praise Crane’s “The Men in the Storm.”) Although

Garland would later abandon Dreiser over the “pornography” of The “Ge-

nius,” Dreiser never failed to credit the prairie realist as one of his early lit-

erary models. He put Crane even more firmly in this category. “He was

among the very earliest of my purely American literary admirations and

one of the few writers who stood forward intellectually and artistically at a

time when this nation was thoroughly submerged in romance and senti-

mentality and business as it is today,” he told Max J. Herzberg in 1921.30

Earlier that year, in the June issue, as the serialization of Twain’s Personal

Reflections of Joan of Arc in Harper’s wound down, Dreiser also praised “this

rugged old humorist” who was “something far more than a mere hu-

morist. . . . [H]e is a great writer. Like Balzac himself he can aªord to let

the critic smile and dissect at leisure, serene in the consciousness that he

has in some measure understood and expressed the wondrous workings of

the human heart.”31 As we shall see, Dreiser was as prescient of Twain’s fu-

ture fame as he would be of Whitman’s. Both were vernacular writers who

taught him that it was all right to let his characters talk naturally—

something he too would be censured for in Sister Carrie.

He also published his own poems, sometimes under Jug’s pseudonym,

sometimes under his own name. “I sing of the toiling masses,” he now wrote

with Whitman again on the brain, “of the hands that never cease,”

From their labor and wretched living till the soul wings home in peace:

For the name of the poor is legion, where the name of the rich is score,

And the hearts of the poor are trampled by the things which the rich

adore.

In another he borrowed his title from a Thomas Hardy novel. “The Mad-

ding Crowd” expressed the sentimental love of “woodland ways and syl-

van glades” over the “crowded marts” whose “mad temptations” and “phys-

ical tastes” lead to an early grave. He may have feared his own sense of

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potential debauchery, although his “tastes” did not run to alcohol. He told

Jug later that year, “I take so little exercise, practically none at all, that some-

days I really feel wretched for the lack of it.”32 The literary life took its toll.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe died in July 1896 at age eighty-five, he read

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), possibly for the first time, and praised it in the

next number of Ev’ry Month as the “famous story of the woes of blackmen

in this gracious land of ours” who had since “been freed and provided for.”

(Perhaps in the rush of editorial adrenaline here Dreiser had temporarily

forgotten about the lynching he had seen outside St. Louis.) It didn’t mat-

ter what the critics were already saying about the novel’s sentimentality and

crudeness, he insisted, because the tale “was matchlessly adorned by the

beauty of truth, whereas the flood of literature which daily rolls about us

is finely written but hopelessly defiled by moral lies and pompous aªecta-

tions.” He had recently lambasted Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s A Singular Life

(1895), an extremely popular novel described by its promoters as the best

American novel since Stowe’s famous book. A Singular Life, he railed, had

nothing to do with greatness. It had “no charms” whatever. Furthermore,

he declared, “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps can’t write.”33

In reviewing the British novelist Halliwell Sutcliªe’s The Eleventh Com-

mandment (1896), the Ev’ry Month editor who filled his issues with pictures

of fashion-plate females complained of the tendency to present women as

beings more spiritual than human. The modern reader, he insisted, was

“weary of the idiocy of [such] writers who are always trying to cover up

the human element in human beings and showing love as a high, thoroughly

reasonable and philosophical aªair. . . . If [Sutcliªe] had gathered love’s

meaning from hard, fanciless teachers like Spencer, Huxley and Hume, his

story would not sound so unnatural and meaningless.” In other words, writ-

ers of such romantic fictions were ignoring the “probable reasons why in

nature, the male courts the female”—and vice versa. The British author

had apparently received “his thoughts of spirituality in love from poets and

mystics like Goethe and Carlyle.”34 In cold reality, there were such women

as his sister Emma who exploited as much as they were exploited, and there

were women such as Jug, who were submissive in everything except pre-

marital sex. Out of their opposites the idea of Carrie Meeber no doubt took

root.

Dreiser may have been thinking of his own literary chances when, in the

August 1896 number, he again called on Whitman, who emphasized beau-

tifully in his poems “the need of being strong, of entering the race with

sturdy, fleet limbs, and flesh fair and sweet.” In the same issue he published

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“Forgotten,” recycling in near-verbatim fashion “Hospital Violet Day,”