subject of the Wabash River.)5
Did Dreiser actually write the words to Paul’s most famous song? Paul
was always generous with his brother, so there is little reason to think he
would deny him credit if it was due. The letter to Jug is the only time we
know of that Dreiser made the claim before Paul’s death. In an article he
wrote for the Metropolitan late in 1898, he claimed merely to have been
present at the time of the song’s composition. But in 1916, in A Hoosier
Holiday, he boasted, “I wrote the first verse and chorus!” In “My Brother
Paul,” as well as in an introduction to Boni & Liveright’s Songs of Paul
Dresser, he told the same story of a collaboration between the two in writ-
ing the song, claiming that one day, while he was still editor of Ev’ry Month,
Paul, who was “sitting at the piano and thrumming,” asked his brother to
give him the idea for a song. Dreiser allegedly answered, “Why don’t you
write something about a State or a river? Look at ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’
‘Dixie,’ ‘Old Black Joe’ . . . something that suggests a part of America?
People like that. Take Indiana—what’s the matter with it—the Wabash
River? It’s as good as any other river, and you were ‘raised’ beside it.” And
here, as in his letter, Dreiser claimed to have written the first verse and
chorus.6
The truth is probably that Dreiser gave Paul the general idea of writing
about the Wabash River but wrote at most only a line or two of the song.
The fact that he wrote or planned to write a comic opera entitled Along
the Wabash in 1895 is perhaps evidence of his interest in the river for artis-
tic purposes, if not also of his influence on the composition of “On the
Banks of the Wabash, Far Away.” Yet in 1939, chastened by old age and the
aged memory of Paul, he told Lorna Smith, a California acquaintance, “I
only wrote part of the words. The music, title, and most of the words were
the inspiration and work of my brother Paul Dresser.”7 The first three lines
are vintage Paul with their emphasis on home and childhood, though
Dreiser too thought often of childhood and (along with Paul) of his mother,
whose ghost pervades Paul’s songs. The fourth line, “Where I first received
t h e w r i t e r
1 1 7
my lessons, nature’s school,” is possibly Dreiser’s. In Dawn there is much devoted to the young Dreiser’s infatuation with nature and the question of
what it all meant or how it came to be. Paul Dresser hardly had time for
nature. He was too busy with the world to notice flowers or fauna. Dreiser’s
various claims for anything more than a few words and the general idea,
however, were probably the result of the Ev’ry Month tiª, a hurt that fes-
tered for many years, before finally finding a sort of middle ground in a
boast that also romanticized his songster-brother—much as he would do
in “My Brother Paul” and the introduction to the Songs of Paul Dresser,
both love letters to a brother who had loved him like a father.
–
As “On the Banks” moved steadily toward national recognition in 1897,
Dreiser’s jealousy may have also manifested itself in the article he commis-
sioned from Arthur Henry for the April issue of Ev’ry Month. The ever rest-
less Henry had given up newspaper work after his marriage in 1894 and
scavenged around the country for more creative opportunities, leaving his
wife and their daughter behind in Toledo. In 1895, for example, he had be-
come a publicist for the magician Hermann the Great, who unfortunately
dropped dead of heart attack in his private railroad car a year later. By 1897
Henry was in New York hoping to make it as a writer, and at this early stage
in his writing career Ev’ry Month was possibly the first magazine in which
he published anything.8 Meanwhile, Dreiser, denied a pay raise as well as
complete editorial control as of the April issue, may have considered Henry’s
attack on Paul’s style of music his parting gesture of revenge for his mis-
treatment, as he saw it, at Ev’ry Month. 9
Henry himself was full of romantic visions of becoming a high-toned
poet, standing above the fray of a culture that valued success over integrity.
He was, as Dreiser later described him, “a dreamer of dreams, a spinner of
fine fancies, a lover of impossible romances which fascinated me by their
very impossibility.” Dreiser, too, was disdainful of the popular culture af-
ter two years at Ev’ry Month under the restraints of its commercially minded
owners. He told his friend that although he was drawing a good salary, “The
things I am able to get the boss to publish that I believe in are very few.”
Both men hoped to write someday about the true meaning of life, but the
two made curious bedfellows in the annals of American literature.10 Both
began by telling Americans what they wanted to hear. Henry had written
t h e w r i t e r
1 1 8
of the romance of white superiority in his Klan novel only a few years ear-
lier, and Dreiser, before he found his literary key in Sister Carrie, would
soon write puªed-up autobiographical sketches for Success magazine, ded-
icated to the American materialists “who have made the century great.”
Dreiser, whose “Prophet” columns had scratched more than the surface of
American society to contemplate its inequities and conundrums, now be-
gan his career as a freelancer by writing up the rich and famous.
The formula of success applied even to the literary famous, though to-
day most of them are more interesting for their station in life than their
place in literature. In “New York’s Art Colony,” Dreiser’s very first freelance
article, published in the November 1897 Metropolitan, he wrote about the
artistic and literary retreat at Lawrence Park, New York, then a sylvan ex-
panse of estates in Bronxville, only “twenty-six minutes from the heart of
New York.” (Perhaps to give his literary debut a weightiness he felt it lacked
in the shadow of the ascendant Paul, he signed the piece “Theodore
Dresser.”) Lawrence Park was “the home of the literati who believe that ge-
nius and talent are best fostered by quiet.” The literary outsider who lived
in a rented room on West Fifteenth Street spoke admiringly of the well-ap-
pointed homes of such luminaries as the “banker-poet” Edmund Clarence
Stedman; Tudor Jenks, the editor of St. Nicholas magazine; the now-for-
gotten author Alice W. Rollins; and Mrs. General Custer. At Lawrence Park
he found authorship with a pedigree nestled on ninety-six acres of woods
and slopes dotted with “trees, ribbed with fine rock, and starred with wild
flowers.” There were no fences or other signs of ownership, but admission
into the community clearly depended on wealth—along with the consent
of its members, who had taken up residence there on land purchased to
emulate art colonies outside London and Paris.
The article’s nine illustrations of homes, whose natural, uncultivated
grounds merged into one another, suggested anything but the literary world
in which Dreiser and Henry struggled. Here, Dreiser wrote, “one must ei-
ther have talent or a savoir-faire, according to the literary and artistic code
prevailing, to be eligible at all for such privileges as the colony extends.”11
That code had given its imprimatur to such Victorian realists as William
Dean Howells and Henry James, whose most memorable depictions of life
left out the vulgar and sordid details that Dreiser had seen as a journalist
and survivor of the tawdrier aspects of the city just twenty-six minutes south.
Stedman’s surviving claim to literary fame is that he was the first writer of
the genteel tradition to champion Leaves of Grass in the 1880s when that
great work was still denied the claim of literature. Even then, he did so with
t h e w r i t e r
1 1 9
a Victorian detachment that ultimately left his defense in doubt. Yet Sted-
man and his conventional poetry represented literary success in the 1890s,
or at least its worldly rewards.
That fall Dreiser also traveled to Chester County, Pennsylvania, and the
scene of the Revolutionary War battleground at Brandywine. In Truth he
extolled the beauty of the countryside, which like Lawrence Park oªered
relief from the fast pace of city life.12 The true purpose of the trip, how-
ever, was to seek out the homestead of another famous writer now nearly
forgotten, America’s centennial poet laureate Bayard Taylor. Once again,
the focus was not so much on the writer’s literary achievement but on the
spoils of his success; “The Haunts of Bayard Taylor” was published in Mun-
sey’s magazine for January 1898. In spite of his almost fifty books and more
than seven hundred newspaper and magazine articles, his distinguished ca-