The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

attitude toward her own convent life was founded the convent of ‘Our Lady

of Peace.’” Since the convent scenes cover the second half of the book, this

may mean that he was halfway through his novel when he moved in with

Anna that fall. Meanwhile, Dreiser was spinning his own romance in the

same urban jungle that Hilda is protected against. Indeed, as we learn on

his very first page, the city is the seducer as much as any drummer on a

train. “The gleam of a thousand lights,” he wrote, “is often as eªective as

the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye.”4

By the time Henry moved in with Anna, Dreiser had written the first

ten chapters of Sister Carrie. He wrote “steadily,” as he told Mencken, un-

til the middle of October, then quit in disgust, thinking his work was “rot-

ten.” He laid the manuscript aside until December, when Henry came back

to prod him again. He wrote on until the end of January before quitting

once more, just before the climactic scene of the book, where the story will

cease to be mainly Carrie’s and become primarily Hurstwood’s. “Then in

February,” he told Dorothy Dudley in 1930, “Arthur Henry, oª flirting with

some girl, came back and read it. He thought there was nothing wrong with

it, told me I must go on.” Possibly, Dreiser was blocked by his unpleasant

memories of the World and that fateful day in City Hall Park when the idea

of Hurstwood was first born. But if so, he recovered from the blues those

memories gave him, “managed to get the thread” of his story back, and

“finished it up.”5

The plot of Sister Carrie involves essentially three characters who, true

to Dreiser’s sense of determinism, are pawns of heredity and environment.

Like Henry’s tale, it begins hopefully, if not romantically, with a young

woman seeking her destiny, but unlike Hilda’s fate, which involves nuns,

priests, and a garden, Sister Carrie’s destiny threatens to become a train ride

to hell as she becomes involved with two male predators. The fates of all

three intersect first in Chicago and then in New York to send Carrie to star-

dom on Broadway, Hurstwood to the soup kitchens and flophouses of the

Bowery, and Drouet on his merry way, neither hurt nor helped by his in-

teraction with the other two. Knowing nothing of Henry’s chivalric code

but only self-interest, like any lower creature, they are driven by the gods

of money and sex to their fates. Carrie Meeber (“amoeba”) moves from the

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country to the city, exchanging her virginity for material comfort. Her suc-

cessive lovers, Charles Drouet and George Hurstwood, see her, recipro-

cally, as a symbol of the pleasure money and power can purchase. Carrie

abandons the unmarried Drouet for the married Hurstwood, who in turn

leaves his family and his position as manager of a posh Chicago saloon,

steals money from his employers, and flees with Carrie to New York. There,

as he eventually fails in his new investment, Carrie abandons him as well,

and he soon finds himself homeless, sick, and dazed by fate in the winter

of 1896.

–

It is di‹cult to see how this plot can be the Siamese twin of A Princess of

Arcady. Yet these two books, both published by Doubleday in 1900, one an

Arcadian romance, the other a grim tale of success and failure, were born

together on the Maumee. Indeed, Henry helped cut and revise Sister Car-

rie, and Dreiser later claimed to have finished A Princess of Arcady. “At that

time,” he told Mencken, “Henry’s interest in Sister Carrie having been so

great his own book was neglected and he could not finish the last chapter.”

This may be an exaggeration or even an outright lie, for by 1916 when Dreiser

made the claim, he and his friend had been estranged for many years. Fur-

thermore, the style throughout the thirteen chapters of A Princess of Ar-

cady appears to be uniformly Henry’s. What the boast does suggest, aside

from an opportunity to undercut the work of a former friend, is that Dreiser

was as familiar with Henry’s plot as Henry was with Sister Carrie. In fact,

as he told Mencken, “Since he had told it to me so often and I knew ex-

actly what he desired to say, I wrote it.”6

The Princess of Arcady is also a nature book in the tradition of John Bur-

roughs, “one of the living men,” Henry once wrote, “I admire most at a

distance.” (Ironically, Dreiser once interviewed Burroughs for an article in

Success, but Henry never met him.) Henry would develop his abilities as a

nature writer much more directly in his next two works, An Island Cabin

(1902) and The House in the Woods (1904). They are Thoreauvian recollec-

tions of his escapes from the daily grind of the city—first on an island oª

the coast of Connecticut, which Anna had either purchased or rented, and

then in the Catskills, where the couple built a cabin. These books reflect

the nineteenth-century idea that even pristine nature cannot help us if we

cannot help ourselves. “Let those who think they are unhappy, because of

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an unfriendly world, retire to a wilderness,” he writes in An Island Cabin,

“and they will discover the source of all their sorrows is in themselves.” As

nature writers of such self-help books went, he was probably at least as good

as most of his competitors. The Brooklyn Eagle called his books “delightful

nature literature,” and Bookman stated that “As a result of life so close to

nature Mr. Henry brought back a more intangible yet indestructible pos-

session in the form of fresh ideals and hopes.”7 He was a dreamer, just like

Dreiser. And like him, he pursued beauty (usually in the feminine form)

most of his life. In fact, there is something of Henry in Carrie’s daydreamy

nature. Dreiser even dedicated Sister Carrie to Henry, “whose steadfast ideals

and serene devotion to truth and beauty have served to lighten the method

and strengthen the purpose of this volume.” He withdrew the dedication

in later printings, however, and never again formally dedicated a book to

anyone, except Grant Richards (“Barfleur”) in A Traveler at Forty (1913) and

his mother in A Hoosier Holiday (1916).

Henry, on the other hand, dedicated An Island Cabin to his by then ex-

wife Maude. And while their separation was brutally sprung on Maude

(in the presence of Anna), they remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Henry was that lovable, and he attracted Dreiser as much as anybody else

who was charmed by the man’s cherubic looks and aªable way. One gets

the sense of his ebullience from reading his books, especially the ones fol-

lowing A Princess, where he drops all pretense of the storyteller and as-

pires to become the Emersonian essayist and poet. Henry had already

worked out his idea of the self-reliant life in two essays, “The Doctrine of

Happiness” and “The Philosophy of Hope,” both utterly derivative of the

transcendentalist doctrine. Dreiser’s theme in Sister Carrie also argues that

no island sanctuary exists in life, but in Carrie and Hurstwood’s world the

romance of self-reliance gives way almost completely to the naturalistic

picture of robotic characters true to their basic needs and nothing more.

When young Hilda of A Princess is asked whether she would like to live in

the city, she answers yes, but only out of love and self-respect: “if ever the

prince should come and marry me.” When Carrie is asked to remain in the

city by Drouet, it takes only twenty dollars—“two soft, green, ten-dollar

bills” to persuade her.8

Dreiser’s Chicago and New York experiences in the 1890s meshed to pro-

duce this masterpiece of reportorial realism, poetry, family history, and the

drama of the city. He knew well the types he wrote about. He had seen

many examples of Drouet on his train trips while on magazine assignments.

Carrie, of course, springs in part from the character of Emma and from at-

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tributes of his other sisters. And Hurstwood, the first unforgettable tragic

figure of American literature in the twentieth century and the prototype

for such other unforgettable failures as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby and

Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, was based on Hopkins. He was also based—

though Dreiser probably wouldn’t have admitted it at the time— on his

general sense of his father’s failure in life. John Paul Dreiser barely lived

long enough to be aware of the novel. He died on Christmas Day 1900, a

little over six weeks after the book’s publication on November 8. He was

by then living in Rochester, New York, with Mame and Austin Brennan.