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and then fleshed out with a questionnaire that the older writer may have
completed and returned to Success. Yet there exist notes on Howells’s career
in Dreiser’s hand that appear to have been hastily indited as in an actual
interview. Whatever the case, Howells had evidently liked the harmless ob-
servations of the earlier article and invited Dreiser over to his apartment
overlooking Central Park for the Ainslee’s piece. The result of the face-to-
face interview, however, was a disaster in terms of any relationship he might
have fancied with Howells. Dreiser began by observing that it could be truly
said of the “Dean,” whom he described as “a stout, thick-set, middle-aged
man,” that he “is greater than his literary volumes make him out to be. If
this be considered little enough, then let us say he is even greater than his
reputation.” Worse yet: “Since it is contended that his reputation far out-
weighs his achievements, let this tribute be taken in full, for he is all that
it implies—[merely] one of the noblemen of literature.” And finally, “It
does not matter whether or not Howells is the greatest novelist in the world,
he is a great character.” Clearly, Howells’s most important contribution to
American letters was that he “has helped thousands in more ways than one,
and is a sweet and wholesome presence in the world of art.”
It is no wonder that Howells, who had reviewed the other naturalists,
never reviewed Sister Carrie. We can only imagine his annoyance, even out-
rage, at Dreiser’s cheeky condescension. Dreiser must have somehow fan-
cied that Howells considered himself “retired,” over the hill except as a men-
tor to the new wave of writers in the 1890s. “Do you find,” he asked, “that
it is painful to feel life wearing on, slipping away, and change overtaking
us all?”27
Dreiser, for his part, naively went away from the interview that day im-
pressed by his own vision of Howells and perhaps even imagining a cama-
raderie that surely never existed. “Is it so hard,” he ventured to ask Howells,
as if he were already a protégé, “to rise in the literary world?” He found
“dispiriting” the answer that it was about as di‹cult as any other field of
endeavor, but Dreiser was otherwise deeply moved by the older man’s new-
found passion for the oppressed. In his Ainslee’s article, he made a point of
mentioning A Traveler from Altruria (1894), in which Howells “sets forth
his dream of universal peace and goodwill.” He sketches there, Dreiser added,
“a state of utter degradation from which the brutalized poor rise to the purest
altruism.” He was also “charmed” by Howells’s humanity in My Literary Pas-
sions, including his devotion to Tolstoy’s passion for social justice.
There might also have been a little jealousy of Howells leavened into all
this mixed praise. Dreiser had been truly poor, not simply the son of a fa-
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ther in southern Ohio who never provided his family quite enough to main-
tain its middle-class status. He had also lived in or near the Bowery and
seen desperate human suªering first hand. Ironically, he faulted Howells
for resigning himself philosophically to the human condition in which all
must suªer in one way or another. (The criticism was blatantly hypocriti-
cal coming from a Spencerian philosopher who saw the good if not justice
in the way nature eliminates the weak.) “His sympathies are right,” Dreiser
conceded, “but he is not primarily a deep reasoner. He would not, for in-
stance, choose to follow up his speculations concerning life and attempt to
oªer some modest theory of improvement.”28
In “Curious Shifts of the Poor,” Dreiser may have thought he came closer
to reality. Although it is not exactly clear when the sketch was completed,
it appeared in the same issue of Demorest’s that featured an article on the
“Twelve Handsomest Married Women in the World.” In a way, the juxta-
position of such diverse subjects in the same number was no more out of
sync, Dreiser might have thought, than Howells writing about the same
kind of suªering from his “editor’s chair” overlooking Central Park. What
at the very outset drives the four sketches that make up the article (subti-
tled “Strange Ways of Relieving Desperate Poverty”) is Dreiser’s contrast
of men on the skids with the gaiety and good fortune of the city’s theater
district nearby. “Curious Shifts of the Poor” opens with the “Captain,” the
mysterious do-gooder who will reappear in the finale of Sister Carrie. This
“peculiar individual takes his stand” near Broadway nightly to find beds for
the homeless by first lining them up and then asking theater patrons and
other passers-by for the twelve cents required to pay for each man’s lodg-
ing. This “broken, ragged” queue of stragglers with the Captain at its head
is oªset by “firesigns announcing the night’s amusements, [which] blaze on
every hand.” The theaters are filling up, and “cabs and carriages, their lamps
gleaming like yellow eyes, patter by. Couples and parties of three and four
are freely mingled in the common crowd which passes by in a thick stream,
laughing and jesting. . . . All about, the night has a feeling of pleasure and
exhilaration, the curious enthusiasm of a great city, bent upon finding joy
in a thousand diªerent ways.”
The Captain is stoical in his sympathy for the homeless men who shiver
from the winter cold while waiting for hours to be marched away to a flop-
house on Tenth Street. With military bearing, he treats them brusquely and
acts in general as though he is merely performing a duty vaguely mandated
by Providence. Dreiser, too, though he personally sympathizes with the plight
of the poor, philosophically adopts the same stance at the conclusion of the
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four sketches. Their plight, he says, “should not appeal to our pity, but should
awaken us to what we are—for society is no better than its poorest type.
They expose what is present, though better concealed, everywhere. . . . The
livid-faced dyspeptic who rides from his club to his apartments and pauses
on the way to hand his dollar to the Captain should awaken the same pity
as the shivering applicant for a free bed whom his dollar aids—pity for the
ignorance and error that cause the distress of the world.”
The second sketch zooms in on a Catholic mission on Fifteenth Street
whose wooden collection box a‹xed to its front door advertises the fact
that it provides a free meal every day at noon to all in need. “Unless one
were looking up this matter in particular,” Dreiser writes of the relative in-
visibility of the poor in America’s most expensive city, “he could stand at
Sixth avenue and Fifteenth street for days, around noon, and never notice
that, out of the vast crowd that surges along that busy thoroughfare, there
turned out, every few seconds, some weather-beaten, heavy-footed speci-
men of humanity, gaunt in countenance, and dilapidated in the matter of
clothes.” The third sketch describes Bowery men slouching towards “a dirty
four-story building” where they wait in the cold for a bed for the night.
The last tells of Fleischman’s restaurant at the corner of Broadway and Ninth
around midnight, where every night for the last twenty-three years its owner
has dispensed free loaves of bread to men who dumbly line up, pass by, and
vanish again into the night.
The diªerence between Dreiser’s and Howells’s attitude about such hu-
man tragedy is subtle but also significant. While they both bow to the idea
“that life is di‹cult and inexplicable” (to quote Dreiser on Howells in “The
Real Howells”), the young Dreiser’s god is Herbert Spencer, while How-
ells’s guide at mid-life is Leo Tolstoy. Although Dreiser somewhat reluc-
tantly accepts the Spencerian—if not Darwinian—formula, he does not
altogether sanction it. This ambivalence underscores the later contradic-
tion between his activist sympathy for the exploited poor in corporate Amer-
ica and his belief in the survival of the fittest. Howells, on the other hand,
accepts the tragedy of the human condition as part of a providential de-
sign, even as he laments its toll in individual suªering. Although his social
thinking shifted as a result of the Haymarket Square incident and his read-
ing of What to Do?, he had begun his literary career at the feet of Emerson
and Hawthorne, who —philosophically, at least—never believed in reform
movements as any panacea for the human condition. Nevertheless, his tran-
sition from realism to —not naturalism—but a more realistic view of the
world may even have helped point the way for the early naturalists and so
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directly or indirectly for Dreiser himself. Shortly after the appearance of