The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

“Read this Jug slowly,” he closed, “and think how it will be with us.” In Sep-

tember, with the marriage date still not settled, he encountered a woman

who looked like Jug on the New York Central while returning from one of

his magazine assignments. No doubt stirring up the memory of their hav-

ing met on a train, he wrote, “She did look so modest and quiet looking,

but she followed me with her eyes.” Like the fictional Drouet whose initial

approach to Carrie on a train is borrowed from the fiction of George Ade,

Dreiser took advantage of the situation, he confessed to Jug in yet another

tease, and helped the young woman arrange her seat, and “so began a talk

which lasted from 12:30 midnight until almost 5 am.”21

One would hardly know from Dreiser’s magazine topics that the Spanish-

American War had begun with the mysterious explosion of the Maine in

Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 260 Americans. Lost in love

and the literature of magazines, Dreiser was almost oblivious of the war.

His only articles remotely connected with the national obsession, fueled by

the sensationalist news coverage by the dueling papers of Hearst and Pulitzer,

are about ammunition factories for Ainslee’s and Cosmopolitan and one called

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“Carrier Pigeons in War Time” in Demorest’s—all appearing in July.22 Oth-

erwise, his published writings dwelled on such serene subjects as the “Quiet

Nooks” of the naturalist John Burroughs, the “Haunts of Nathaniel

Hawthorne,” and various painters, sculptors, and musicians.

He also continued to publish poetry, mainly in his friend Richard Duªy’s

magazine. In the August number of Ainslee’s, whose cover illustration de-

picts a returning wounded soldier, is found Dreiser’s poem entitled “Night

Song.” It has nothing to do with the war but, in the mode of Rossetti, reflects

on a love gone dry. “Night Song” never made it into Dreiser’s three collec-

tions of poetry—and for good reason. Lacking Rossetti’s gift for internal

rhythm, its flat lines resemble the hackneyed lyrics of some of Paul’s songs,

as in this second stanza:

Over fields lighted white by the moon,

Comes the wind with a tune.

Through the trees gleam the stars, and so rare

Each caress of the air.

Ah, my love, once so true, can it be

All forgotten of thee.

As in “On the Banks of the Wabash,” where the lover longs to stroll once

again with his “Mary dear,” Dreiser’s night singer roams in despair of his

love, who unlike Mary is not yet dead.

But to meet, for a day, once again!

Thus alway, I complain.

And of you all the night voices croon

When the world seems aswoon.23

Whether Jug ever saw this publication and, if so, just what she thought

of its theme of lost love is not known. Nor can it be said for certain whether

Dreiser enjoyed brief encounters with other women during his extended

courtship; there is no direct evidence, only what is suggested by the actions

of Eugene Witla in The “Genius” and by something Dorothy Dudley claims

Dreiser told her when she interviewed him for her biography. In “The Re-

turn,” appearing in Ainslee’s two months later, he continued the theme of

unrequited love, this time returning to a river not unlike the Wabash, “where

the long green grass / Waves as of old.” Paraphrasing Dreiser, Dudley

speaks of a fellow writer, “a beautiful creature with a voice and a career be-

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fore her [who] surprised him with the gift of a summer of romance in [the]

Virginia mountains.” Unlike Jug, she was something of a believer in free

love and was willing to break her engagement with another man. She was

not, however, willing to give up her writing career, and that ended every-

thing for Dreiser, who apparently told Dudley that no household could

sustain more than one writer— or egotist.24

Whatever the case, Sallie O. White, as Jug’s name appeared on the mar-

riage certificate, finally got the marriage she had held out for on December

28, 1898, in a Methodist ceremony conducted by the Rev. J. W. Duªy in

Washington, D.C. Those in attendance included her sister Rose and pos-

sibly their brother Richard White, a midshipman finishing at the Naval

Academy in Annapolis. (The couple may have honeymooned in that city.)

And Dreiser finally got Jug the way he had wanted her all along—though

the next poem he published, five months later in Ainslee’s, was called

“Bondage.” Nonetheless, though it may not mean much in Dreiser’s case,

there is little or no evidence of his straying from his vows during the early

years of the marriage. Perhaps with Jug, at least in the beginning, he would

better withstand “the ceaseless drag of all desire.”25

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Dreiser had four articles appear the month he married, three in January,

and eight in February. He continued this remarkable output throughout

1899 and into 1900, even after he had actually begun Sister Carrie. About

the same time he started writing the novel, he interviewed William Dean

Howells for Ainslee’s and published “Curious Shifts of the Poor” in De-

morest’s. Dreiser’s most important literary interview and his most serious

work as a freelancer may indeed form the nexus for Sister Carrie.

In the interview Dreiser finds Howells on the threshold of the kind of

social sympathy that only a Bowery Journalist such as Dreiser (or Crane)

could ever have truly crossed. The “Dean of American Letters” (an appella-

tion apparently first given Howells in the Ainslee’s interview) may seem a

strange bedfellow for the future “Father of American Realism.” But realism

is a somewhat elastic term. With Dreiser we are not talking about the earnest

novel of manners for which Howells is most celebrated today or even the re-

alism of the Social Darwinists such as Crane and Norris; a more appropri-

ate term is naturalism, in which (1) the “moral” element does not necessar-

ily triumph over the forces of heredity and environment; and (2) Anglican-

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bred individuals are just as vulnerable as any immigrant class. In the liter-

ary realism of Howells’s masterpiece, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), the

protagonist rises spiritually or morally even as he falls materialistically. A

year following that novel’s publication, however, an event occurred that

would give Howells pause in his confidence about the balance of the cos-

mos. After the Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago, eight Knights of Labor

protesters were unfairly convicted of anarchy; five were sentenced to death,

and the other three received long prison terms. Howells was among the few

writers to join the protest, which did not save the condemned (one com-

mitted suicide and the other four were executed), though the other three

were eventually pardoned. Two years later, in 1888, Howells moved from

Boston to New York to take over “The Editor’s Study” for Harper’s. The

move also marked his transition from dissecting the manners of Boston

society to providing a broader social basis for his fiction.

This shift found its most noteworthy literary expression in A Hazard of

New Fortunes (1890), where the plot involves labor unrest and class conflict

in New York City. Howells had also discovered about the time of the Hay-

market Square riot the writings of Tolstoy, including What to Do? (1886),

a powerful political tract that assails the state of poverty the Russian nov-

elist found in Moscow. Interestingly, Dreiser had read What to Do? in col-

lege. Given his deprived background, he would have come, in either 1889

or 1899, to slightly more revolutionary— or philosophical—conclusions

than Howells does in A Hazard of New Fortunes. Yet if Howells would never

go as far as Dreiser, his book embraces, in a panoramic canvas worthy of

Tolstoy, social problems ignored in his earlier works. By the 1890s, then,

Howells was prepared at least for the “sterner realism” of Crane, Garland,

and Norris, if not the completely amoral and race-neutral notions about

man in Sister Carrie. In fact, he allegedly told Dreiser one day following its

publication, “You know, I don’t like Sister Carrie. ”26

Another reason Howells’s view of Sister Carrie may have been tainted was

Dreiser’s subordination in the Ainslee’s article of the master’s reputation and

achievement to his noble character, especially in his recent eªorts to help

younger writers. Here Dreiser was possibly dreaming of eventually joining

the ranks of Crane, Garland, Cahan, and others (he did not read Norris’s

McTeague until after writing Sister Carrie) as part of Howells’s stable of ap-

proved writers. In fact, he had first “interviewed” Howells in a most posi-

tive manner for the April 1898 issue of Success, in a piece entitled “How He

Climbed Fame’s Ladder.” It has been argued that the interview was based

mostly on material Dreiser took from Howells’s My Literary Passions (1895)