which he had written for the Pittsburgh Dispatch on May 12, 1894. The dy-
ing man, Old Fintz in the Dispatch story, becomes Channing in “Forgot-
ten,” but the description of “Violet Day” in the hospital is taken exactly
from the Dispatch piece. Ellen Moers has suggested that the story also owes
its theme to Paul Dresser’s ballad, “The Letter That Never Came,” for there
is present in both the dying man’s futile eªorts to notify a relative or friend.
In Dreiser’s story, no replies ever come to the hospital from “West Virginia
city,” and Channing—like the man in Paul’s song—dies “forgotten.”35 The
larger influence here, as it had been with the story’s Pittsburgh version, was
Crane’s “Bowery Journalism,” recently raised to nobler heights in The Red
Badge of Courage. Thrilled as he was to be running a magazine and writing
what he chose to write, Dreiser retained his sympathy for those caught in
the urban misery around him—and as a lifelong worrier about money, he
feared it might sweep him too from his editor’s chair and leave him in the
gutter.
–
He stayed in the editor’s chair at Ev’ry Month for nearly two years. The
second year shows a faint decline in quality or Dreiserian verve at the be-
ginning, and by the April and May 1897 issues the change is so marked
that it seems that either the editorship has been erroneously attributed to
him or he was being heavily overruled by Paul or, more likely, the part-
ners, with whom he had diªering political opinions.36 Paul may have ob-
jected to the publication of Arthur Henry’s “It Is to Laugh” in the April
issue, which mocked Paul’s brand of comic opera as merely a series of prat-
falls. It described a songwriter character smashing furniture in a recent farce
and advised writers accordingly to “avoid anything subtle. Your sarcasms
must have teeth. Rapier thrusts at social conditions are lost. Use a club,
and be sure and land on the old wounds.” (Later, Henry would describe
Paul in print as “a very fat man . . . hanging, as it were, over the keys [of
a piano] thrumming and humming a song he was composing. . . . [It] was
very sad, and in spite of his exuberant, well-fed appearance, he seemed to
feel it. I surely saw a tear roll down his big fat face as, a verse completed,
he sang it softly through.”)37 Just how much Dreiser himself contributed
to the satire of Paul’s theatrical methods in his own trade magazine can-
not be known, but the fact that it appeared under his editorship suggests
e d i t o r i a l d a y s
1 1 0
he was feeling a mounting frustration at his brother’s success and his own
static situation.
Without a doubt, however, starting with the recycled “Forgotten,”
Dreiser began to turn his—and the magazine’s—attention from the purely
literary and musical to the sociological. In September 1896 he reviewed Abra-
ham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), a vivid account of
living conditions in the Jewish ghetto of New York. Cahan, a Russian émi-
gré and militant socialist whose political views ought to have found favor
with Dreiser’s sense of the urban poor, was also, as Dreiser noted, the founder
and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. But somehow Jewish poverty didn’t
register with him to the same degree as the Irish or German or Lithuanian
poverty he had seen in Pittsburgh. Instead Cahan’s brand of Bowery Jour-
nalism presented “a picture of unrelieved sordidness and hardness for the
most part, with the finer, softer traits of character entirely obscured.” Yekl,
he granted, was “undoubtedly an authentic account of the lives of people”—
if only of those “who, though near neighbors, are great strangers to us.”38
The next month he tried his hand at ghettos of the poor himself, detail-
ing the underbelly of the glittering city. Comparing Manhattan to a flow-
ering plant and rather tangling the metaphor, he wrote: “Down in the dark
earth are the roots, drawing life and strength and sending them coursing
up the veins; and down in alleys and byways, in the shop and small dark
chambers are the roots of this luxurious high life, starving and toiling the
long year through, that carriages may roll and great palaces stand brilliant
with ornaments.” The fascinating surface, he continued, “conceals the sor-
row and want and ceaseless toil upon which all this is built.” Then he turned
to the wretched and dwarfed specimen “of masculine humanity” who was
charged with vagrancy after attempting to eat garbage from a restaurant.
“Thus could be written,” said the future author of Sister Carrie, “the story
of many another.”39
With so many George Hurstwoods crisscrossing Broadway and the Bow-
ery, Dreiser recognized that some must have come originally from the eco-
nomically privileged classes, or at least the solidly middle class knocked down
by the last gusts of the Panic of 1893. And indeed, there were already many
examples of personal debauchery among the rich in America. By 1897 Frank
Norris had drafted Vandover and the Brute; although it would not be pub-
lished until 1914, after Norris’s death, it reflected the fears of the nineties.
Social Darwinists of the era still preached that the “brute” in the middle-
class person could be controlled, while of course it ran rampant in the lower
classes exemplified by Norris’s McTeague. (It was about this time that An-
e d i t o r i a l d a y s
1 1 1
drew Carnegie began to talk about giving away his money instead of leav-
ing it to his heirs. He would build libraries instead of spoiling the next gen-
eration with unearned wealth.) “Like the flight of a comet, from outer dark-
ness into outer darkness,” Dreiser noted of the tragic rich, “the progress of
the spendthrift up from obscurity, through gilded and glittering resorts, into
the asylum and the Potter’s Field, must ever arrest the attention of the eye
and the mind.” “They say this last one was a prince of good fellows,” Dreiser
continued. “Yes, while he had money. So are all the prodigals.”40
Returning a month later to the subject of the forgotten graves he had
written about in Pittsburgh, Dreiser imagined how these once “flash and
flippant” good fellows so quickly disappear behind the numbered grave
boards that “mingle with unnumbered weeds.” The lesson, intensified by
his boyhood poverty, would haunt him all his life. He was beginning to be-
lieve in hard work as the only means of success, yet also suspected that fate
had the final say. Part of the equation, of course, was the spark of “ambi-
tion, or its complementary term, selfish desire, [which] is the lever that
moves the world.” And those with the most ambition and blessed with tal-
ent, he believed, came to New York.
Of course, many others came as well, whether to stay or to visit, includ-
ing members of the Dreiser clan. Christmas 1896 was a family reunion. They
all gathered at Emma’s, and he ate everything, Dreiser told Jug, “from candy
to imported plum pudding.” Claire and Ed were visiting from Chicago;
Mame and Austin Brennan brought John Paul Dreiser, now seventy-five.
Also present at what was to be the last large family gathering were Theresa
and Al, indeed all the children but Sylvia and the wandering Rome. Bren-
nan, the only example of dissipated wealth here, got sick, but it was “no
special cause for alarm,” Theo told Jug. “He is subject to all the ailments
that come to one because of high living.” Mame, he said, “is more of a nurse
than anything else now-a-days.”41 Paul was in his usual high spirits, show-
ing no signs of slowing down.
–
By the late winter of 1897, Dreiser seemed unsettled. He had become well
known to the magazine world in the city and was oªered the editorship of
“a new magazine in three colors, which H. E. Jones is going to start,” he
told his fiancée. “However I think I have had enough of new magazines.”
Either trouble was brewing with the partners or Dreiser felt he had exhausted
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1 1 2
his material for Ev’ry Month. Even with Jenks as his assistant, he needed
more time to research his copy. He felt confined to his cramped editorial
o‹ce, not only because of work but by the freezing weather that winter. “I
have remained close in my o‹ce for two days,” he told Jug. “This the M.D.
says is not good for me, but neither is the extreme cold.”42
By April—the month that Henry’s “It Is to Laugh” appeared—some-
thing had definitely changed around the o‹ce. Between this issue and the
following September, when previous biographers and critics have assumed
Dreiser left the magazine, the “Reflections” column lost its title and was