The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

ing that critics see as the basis for the story: the one for the 18th and one

preceding it on January 17, entitled “This Calls for the Hemp.” Both re-

ported the story of the arrest of a black ex-convict named John Buckner

for the sexual assault of two women, one black, one white, in Valley Park,

Missouri, about fifteen miles from St. Louis.

The January 17 report, “This Calls for the Hemp,” follows the incident

up to Buckner’s arrest and incarceration by the local sheriª, who initially

stands up to the lynching mob. Its racist epithets (“worthless negro,” “black

fiend,” “demon”) may disqualify Dreiser as the author, though as a reporter

in the 1890s he was no doubt encouraged to engage in such rhetoric. Dreiser

is also rougher on the accused in “A Victim of Justice,” using the archaic

“varlet,” meaning “rascal” or “knave,” to characterize the African-American’s

life before the attempted rape.47 On the other hand, “Nigger Jeª,” as pub-

lished in Ainslee’s and later in Free and Other Stories, treats the Buckner char-

acter more sympathetically than does the first newspaper report, and the

follow-up account of January 18 also seems less judgmental. “Ten-Foot

Drop” dramatically reports how the prisoner was taken from the sheriª and

hanged from a bridge and begins with a one-sentence paragraph that is more

dramatic than reportorial: “They lynched him.”

While it is possible that someone else wrote the first report, similarities

between the second article and “Nigger Jeª ” strongly support Dreiser’s

authorship. Both accounts involve the rape of a nineteen-year-old white

woman. In each, the accused is found cowering in the sheriª ’s “cellar dun-

geon.” “Don’t kill me, boss,” we read in the newspaper account. “Oh, my

Lawd, boss, don’t kill me,” Dreiser’s Jeª Ingalls pleads. Both describe the

distorted look on the doomed man’s face, his contorted figure as he is

dragged from his hiding place, tied into a sack, and thrown in the back of

a wagon for transport to his doom.

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Republic: “His face was distorted with all the fear of a hunted beast. The

eyes rolled wildly and great beads of sweat gathered on his forehead. Instead

of pleading the miserable fellow began wailing more like an animal than a

human being.”

“Nigger Jeª ”: “The black face was distorted beyond all human sem-

blance. . . . [He] seemed out of his senses. He was breathing heavily and

groaning. His eyes were fixed and staring, his face and hands bleeding as if

they had been scratched or trampled on. He was bundled up like limp

wheat.”48

Both express sympathy for the condemned man, even though he is black

and guilty. In the article, it is his criminal record and suspicious actions re-

ported by witnesses that convict him, but Dreiser’s lynching victim says,

“Before God, boss, I didn’t mean to. . . . I won’t do it no mo’.” In other

words, Jeª is Dreiser’s first victim of the cosmic forces that will doom so

many of his protagonists, from George Hurstwood to Clyde Gri‹ths. He

is guilty of human weakness that involves sex, which symbolizes the irre-

sistible desire for beauty. But whereas the Republic article of January 18 ex-

presses no revulsion at the punishment, except to match “Nigger Jeª ” in

its description of the agony of the accused, the fictional Davies turns away

from the sight of the bound and bleeding man, exclaiming “Oh, my God,”

as he bites his fingers unconsciously. But the story’s deepest sympathy, like

that of Paul’s songs, is reserved for the victim’s mother. (Interestingly, this

scene is absent from “A Victim of Justice,” whose plot is framed by a med-

itation on the forgotten dead of a potter’s field.) Once the hanging has taken

place and the body is returned to his mother’s shanty outside of town, Eu-

gene goes there and finds “a little negro girl,” Jeª ’s sister. When asked why

her brother had returned home, thus making his capture possible, the re-

ply is that “he wanted tuh see motha.” And it is when he finally comes upon

the “old black mammy, doubled up and weeping,” that he decides to “get

it all in.”

These are the last words of the revision for Free, too, but Dreiser adds

something before the close in the later version which may be revealing. We

must remember that “Nigger Jeª,” as one of the Maumee stories, was in-

spired or compelled by Arthur Henry, the author of Nicholas Blood,Candi-

date, that tale, as Maude Wood Henry put it, about the “negro menace to

the white people.”49 Dreiser and Henry, as we shall see, fell out hard be-

tween 1899 and 1918, when “Nigger Jeª ” reappeared in Free. By then Dreiser

probably regretted whatever commonplace racist ideas they may have

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shared at the turn of the century. It wasn’t that his original story had been

racist—far from it, but in the Ainslee’s version he had merely observed the

plight of blacks, expressed its “feeling and pathos” instead of condemning

lynchings outright. In the revision for Free he has to articulate—perhaps

apologize for—the “cruel instinct of the budding artist,” and state that it

“was not so much the business of the writer to indict as to interpret.” Of

course, the story as a whole does condemn by indirection, the way art

should, but somehow Dreiser felt the need to apologize here for being an

artist instead of a political activist. Certainly by the end of World War I,

when Free with its revision of “Nigger Jeª ” appeared, he was far more the

activist than he had been in 1899.

–

Indeed, the earliest fictional seeds of his future activism can be found in “A

Mayor and His People,” a story that is more important for its evidence of

Dreiser’s political unhappiness with the way the capitalistic world worked

(even as, ironically, he wrote for Success) than as a prototype of the new re-

alism he would produce in Sister Carrie.

But another article that came out of Dreiser’s visit to New England in

the spring of 1898 may also oªer an important insight about the immedi-

ate foreground of Sister Carrie. He wrote Jug from the Colonial Hotel in

Concord, Massachusetts, that he had visited Boston the day before and was

slated to visit Cambridge, Salem, and Lexington before his return to New

York. During his trip, Dreiser picked up many visual impressions of the

American literary past as represented by the homes of the Transcendental-

ists and Schoolroom Poets. Despite its title (reminiscent of his piece on Ba-

yard Taylor), however, “Haunts of Nathaniel Hawthorne” clearly focuses

on the man, the writer, and the crisis that led to his beginning to write The

Scarlet Letter. 50 Dreiser was deeply impressed by his visit to the custom house

in Salem, where, he noted, Hawthorne had wasted his talent before his in-

voluntary “removal from the surveyorship through trickery and betrayal.”

It is clear from the article that Dreiser, who was already possibly beginning

to think he was wasting his literary talent in magazine articles, had done

his homework on Hawthorne. He alludes to most of the novels and the

major short stories, and the capsule biography in which his discussion is

couched suggests he had read a book-length biography, probably Moncure

Conway’s popular life of 1890.

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Although Dreiser’s article is on the surface merely an e‹cient and well-

written summary of known facts about one of America’s most famous writ-

ers, one has to wonder whether his focus on Hawthorne in the custom house

immediately before he wrote The Scarlet Letter didn’t have an influence on

the writing of Sister Carrie. Dreiser notes that the Salem “magician,” as he

called him, wrote his “masterpiece” following his “betrayal.” He too felt he

had been “betrayed” at Ev’ry Month, in its way a literary sinecure like the

one Hawthorne had enjoyed in the custom house. Even without reading

the famous Preface in which Hawthorne complained about his treatment,

Dreiser may have understood The Scarlet Letter as Hawthorne’s protest

against the inequities of society in which appearances are more important

than reality. The plot of the novel is daring and even rebellious in its use

of extramarital sex. Also, like Sister Carrie, it involves the intertwined and

yet separate dramas of a woman and a man in violation of strictures based

on religious ideology. Throughout most of his story, Hawthorne approves

if not applauds his heroine in her defiance of the puritanical social codes,

even allowing Hester Prynne to tell the neurasthenic and guilt-ridden Arthur

Dimmesdale, “What we did had a consecration of its own.”

In preparation for his article, Dreiser even visited the house on Mall Street

in Salem where Hawthorne wrote his “masterpiece,” noting just where his