The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

framed by “a great flaring white bonnet.”12 On his very first day at school,

he remembered, this hooded figure paced the class through its ABCs in Ger-

man, pointing to each letter with a long wand also used for corporal pun-

h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s

6

ishment. Other than recitation, the order of the day for the young students,

though never perfectly enforced, was absolute silence.

Dreiser remained a harsh critic of the Catholic Church all his life, yet his

curiosity about it, or about the beliefs that organized religion commanded,

never abated. After visiting a cathedral in France in 1912, he was astounded

“that the faith of man had ever reared so lovely a thing.” In Rome he even

participated in a papal audience, and he sometimes substituted supersti-

tious practices for prayer. Later, his bitterness toward the Church shifted

from memories of what its dictates had put his parents and siblings through

to the belief that “the gold-encrusted, power-seeking, wealth-loving Papacy”

exploited the ignorance of the lower classes and Third World peoples. “No

wonder,” he wrote in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917, “it be-

came the first business of the Russian Communists to rip out root and

branch the eastern or Asiatic extension of this . . . designing and serpen-

tine organization!”13

Closer to home, Dreiser believed that one of the first victims of his fa-

ther’s slavish allegiance to the Church was his brother Paul, whose early re-

belliousness eventually led to several scrapes with the law. In 1872, at age

fourteen, husky and already well on the way to achieving his adult weight

of more than three hundred pounds, Paul was sent to St. Meinard’s Semi-

nary in southwestern Indiana, near Evansville, to study for the priesthood.

The accounts vary as to how long he lasted, possibly two years, but he even-

tually made his way to Indianapolis. There he was able, his brother recalled,

“to connect himself with an itinerant cure-all company, a troupe or wagon

caravan which traveled gypsy fashion” from town to town, entertaining the

locals and trying to sell them Hamlin’s Wizard Oil. Although this experi-

ence whetted his appetite for the stage, Paul was back in Terre Haute a few

years later and in trouble with the law. Apparently, he was charged with the

burglary of a saloon, and his debt-ridden father had to come up with $300

to pay his son’s bail.14

The rest of the siblings also seemed to find trouble to be their main

teacher, no doubt, according to Dreiser, because of the perceived hardships

their father’s Catholic faith brought to the family. Possibly only two of the

ten children grew up to be religious in any sense. In full adulthood, after

many mistakes with men, Mame became a Christian Scientist. The even

wilder Sylvia, who gave birth out of wedlock, also adopted the religion of

Mary Baker Eddy and became a “full-fledged” Practitioner, or healer.15 Gen-

erally, however, the girls in the family fared no better in youth and early

adulthood than their brothers, as all of the Dreiser brood seemed to follow

h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s

7

their eldest brother out into the world and into trouble. The most trou-

bled and troublesome was the second-eldest son, Rome, “short,” Dreiser

noted with some bitterness in Dawn, “for Marcus Romanus, a very noble

handle for so humble a mid-western boy.” As a teenager Rome had ap-

prenticed as a printer and showed the promise of the newspaper man his

brother Theodore would become for a time.16 But something happened to

him along the way. He took to showing oª, to drinking, wearing flashy

clothes, and going about with loose women. Like several of Dreiser’s pro-

tagonists, he sought the American Dream of success but settled for its sham

materialism. He also fell in love with long distance. He would be involved

in the railroad business all his life, working as a butcher on trains when-

ever he could hold a job—but the alcoholic Rome spent much of his time

in and out of saloons and local jails.

–

In 1879, by the time Dreiser was seven or eight, the family split up because

of economic hard times. Sarah may also have wanted to get away from the

general gloom her husband seemed to cast over the children, especially the

youngest and most impressionable of them, because of his business failures

and rigid Catholicism. John Paul remained in Terre Haute as a general

handyman in a local woolen mill and tried to keep a rein on the older girls—

Mame, Emma, Theresa, and Sylvia—who were fast falling, one after an-

other, into the perils of unsupervised adolescence and older men. With Paul

and Rome already on the road and Al apprenticed to his mother’s brother

on the farm in North Manchester, Sarah took the three youngest children,

Claire, Theo, and Ed, south to Vincennes—a provincial “French-looking”

town also on the Wabash, but diªerent from Terre Haute, Dreiser re-

membered, with its cobblestone “streets narrow and winding, the French

love of red and white predominating.”

Here, to save money, the Dreiser foursome moved in with a woman later

remembered as “Sue Bellette,” whom Sarah had befriended in Terre Haute

when the French orphan worked there as a seamstress. Now Madame Bel-

lette was married to the fire chief of Vincennes and lived above the firehouse,

where there also was room for the Dreisers. Apparently, at the behest of

influential town leaders who could insure his continued employment, the

fire chief had allowed prostitutes to visit his fire station’s bunk rooms dur-

ing the wee hours, for trysts with the local politicians or firemen. After his

h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s

8

marriage, he determined to stop the practice, but Sue, having been birthed

if not brought up by a French prostitute—so Dreiser’s mother later told

him—“would have none of it.” Sarah soon quarreled with her former pro-

tégée over the immoral situation and departed with her children in tow

after only five weeks—but not before young Theo, “being a restless, early-

rising child,” one morning saw “one of these daughters of desire, a corn-

haired blonde, her pink face buried in a curled arm, lying on the bed allotted

to one of the firemen serving on the night shift.”17

Sarah took the children to Sullivan, a town that mixed family memories

good and bad, since it was here that John Paul had enjoyed his only clear

success, as a mill owner in the late 1860s, and here that he had failed once

and for all with the mill fire and his head injury. To make that memory

even more bitter, there now stood prospering in place of John Paul’s shat-

tered dream another mill built exactly like the first. Parts of the town, how-

ever, were shabby and run down, and unlike Terre Haute and Vincennes,

the Wabash did not grace the town, only a creek called the Busseron. Dreiser

found the place far less interesting than Vincennes.18

Initially, Sarah moved in with the family of Thomas Bulger, an Irishman

who had known John Paul when he owned his mill there. Like the senior

Dreiser, Bulger was, in Dreiser’s words, “a priest-ridden Catholic,” with a

wayward son who wasn’t as lucky as the initially wayward Paul Dresser. By

the turn of the century, Jimmy Bulger would become a bank robber. He was

convicted of murder for killing a man during a holdup in Cobleskill, New

York, and was executed in 1903 at Dannemora Prison under the name of

“Whitey” Sullivan (called “‘Red’ Sullivan” in Dawn). On the morning he

was led to the electric chair, Dreiser later recalled, “he confessed his evil ways,

received communion, and so, if we believe the noble religionists, passed pure

and regenerate, into the presence of his Maker!” Perhaps some of Dreiser’s

pity for the young Irishman as well as his rage against the Church bled into

his sympathetic depiction of Clyde Gri‹ths, the convicted murderer in An

American Tragedy (1925), whose father, Asa, is also a religious zealot.19

After a week or two with the Bulgers, Sarah found “a small white five- or

six-room house” in the northeast corner of Sullivan near the railroad yard

and round house of the E. & T.H., a line that ran between Evansville and

Terre Haute. The rent was seven dollars a month for a shabby, somewhat

run-down place with no furnishings. It bordered on a large vegetable gar-

den, which Dreiser and his mother began to cultivate. Later, income was

derived from renting rooms to railroad and mine workers, although some

of them skipped out without paying during particularly hard economic

h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s

9