The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

(To save money, Dreiser wrote a personal dedication in one of his ten free

author copies of Sister Carrie to all three of them, with the proviso that “if

any of you fail to read and praise, the book reverts to me.” The book did

come back to him, either after Mame divided up their father’s estate or fol-

lowing her own death in 1944, and is now part of the Dreiser collection at

the University of Pennsylvania.)9

There is no father figure in Sister Carrie. Only Carrie’s mother is vaguely

mentioned in the beginning of the book. Certainly the married Hurstwood

is no father figure. Carrie’s brother-in-law Hanson, who cleans out refrig-

erator cars in Chicago, is a doting father but also one of the first to try to

cheat her in the big city. There is no God the Father in this naturalistic tale

either, only children of desire. This is not any lofty desire for the beauti-

ful, but a basic, primitive desire for clothing, shelter, and sex, elevated to

the fantastic level suggested in the magazines of the day, including Ev’ry

Month with its exotic women. This is first illustrated in Carrie’s life with

the Hansons and her visions of something so much better. While Carrie

looks for a job the first day, she enters one of the new department stores.

Dreiser was no doubt thinking of Marshall Field’s at the corner of State

and Twentieth streets in Chicago, once burnt-out shells of horse-car barns

in which Field set up his business after the fire of 1871 and accidentally in-

vented the department store.10

As Carrie, with hardly a cent in her purse, passes down the aisles of the

store displaying its latest items, she cannot help but feel the claim of every

object upon her personally. “There was nothing there which she could not

have used—nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slippers

and stockings, the delicately frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, ribbons,

hair-combs, purses, all touched her with individual desire.” In spite of his

prosperous appearance, Drouet too is intoxicated by such symbols of the

good life. He “was as deluded by fine clothes as any silly-headed girl.”11

That and the company of successful men. It is associations above all that

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count to this salesman, or any salesman for that matter, on the lookout to

succeed in the selling of his wares. He dines in the “right” restaurants and

takes his nightcap at the “resort” of Fitzgerald and Moy’s saloon (originally

Dreiser used the real name of Hannah and Hogg’s of Chicago, before the

revision for Doubleday).

Here we meet George W. Hurstwood, the manager of the saloon and a

social notch or two above the drummer Drouet. Everyone in this book is

looking to ascend—as in all of Dreiser’s novels. Carrie is satisfied with

Drouet until the more burnished Hurstwood appears, just as in An Amer-

ican Tragedy, Clyde is satisfied with one girl until another more attractive

one (both physically and financially) comes along. Hurstwood himself is

by now about as high on the social ladder as he will ever get and serves as

a sort of social referee who ranks his saloon patrons according to three es-

sential groups in order to hold onto his position. He is a professional “Hail

fellow, well met” who knows most of his customers by name. Yet he also

knows his place.

He had a finely graduated scale of informality and friendship, which im-

proved from the “How do you do?” addressed to the fifteen-dollar-a-week

clerks and o‹ce attachés . . . to the “Why, old man, how are you?” which

he addressed to those noted or rich individuals who knew him and were in-

clined to be friendly. There was a class, however, too rich, too famous, or

too successful, with whom he could not attempt any familiarity of address,

and with these he was professionally tactful, assuming a grave and dignified

attitude, paying them the deference which would win their good feeling.12

The saloon manager keeps a neat life consisting of horse, house, wife, and

two children—until he meets Carrie.

–

Hurstwood has risen by perseverance “through long years of service, from

the position of barkeeper in a commonplace saloon,” but in the manner of

Paul Dresser, who often, in the beginning of his career at least, accepted

flat fees instead of royalties for his songs, Hurstwood may occupy a fairly

imposing managerial position, “but lacked financial control.” In other

words, he could fall into poverty almost immediately, as Paul would go broke

by 1903. This is a world of hangers-on and the sometimes lucky. Dreiser

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knew about both from personal experience and the American successes he

had interviewed during the last two years. Emma’s Hopkins had been a

cashier in the saloon of Chapin and Gore in Chicago before he fled with

her—and his employer’s cash. Marshall Field had begun, as he told Dreiser

during his interview, as a clerk in a dry goods house on South Water Street,

but his luck had been diªerent.

After Carrie has lost her job through illness and is living with Drouet at

a three-room flat on Ogden Place, she meets Hurstwood, whom she sees

immediately as “more clever than Drouet in a hundred ways.”13 Drouet

now seems to her to have no “poetry in him,” and in fact Drouet has been

losing interest in Carrie until Hurstwood enters the picture. But both

Drouet and Hurstwood merely hope to keep Carrie as a paramour—until

both men capitulate to a deeper infatuation when they see her in an Elks’

production of Daly’s Under the Gaslight (a play Dreiser had seen during

his days as a drama critic in St. Louis). Then, found out by his wife, who

threatens to have his wages garnisheed with his employers’ approval,

Hurstwood is cornered by circumstance. Determined to have Carrie now

at any cost, he steals his employers’ money and flees like Hopkins to Canada

and then to New York.

It is at this point in the plot that Dreiser got stuck once again, but he

also became energized, because the Hurstwood section in New York is what

gives this novel much of its drama and pathos. We feel a kind of detached

sympathy for the bedraggled figures in Crane’s “Men in the Storm” or the

soldier in Garland’s “The Return of the Private,” but Hurstwood personifies

the prosperity of the American Dream—and he flings it away for the youth

and beauty of Carrie. More tragic is the fact that Hurstwood cannot help

himself. The scene with the safe is a mechanical demonstration of Spencer’s

ideas about humans as wisps in the wind, “still led by instinct before they

are regulated by knowledge.” When the lock to the safe clicks shut, Hurst-

wood, still contemplating the act of theft, is left holding $10,800 of its funds.

Dreiser asks, “Did he do it?”14 The answer is no, but the consequences of

his actions must be accepted. This is no Pilliod’s Island or Mott’s Garden.

The island is New York on the eve of the Panic of 1893.

Sister Carrie amplifies the same sense of foreboding that informs Dreiser’s

earliest short stories. Hurstwood is doomed long before he finds himself

tipsy in front of his employer’s money. He is programmed for catastro-

phe. He arrogantly underestimates his wife, into whose hands he has put

the legal ownership of everything they have. The first omen of danger

comes from his son, who coolly informs his father in his mother’s pres-

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ence: “I saw you, Governor, last night.” George, Jr., has seen his father

with Drouet and Carrie at McVickar’s Theater watching a production of

Rip Van Winkle. If this isn’t his wake-up call, the reader’s comes along

shortly when “a gaunt-faced man of about thirty, who looked the picture

of privation and wretchedness” approaches Hurstwood on the street while

he is walking with Carrie and Drouet. Drouet is the first to see him and

the only one to sympathize, handing over a dime “with an upwelling feel-

ing of pity in his heart. Hurstwood scarcely noticed the incident. Carrie

quickly forgot.”15 Ultimately, Carrie will forget about Hurstwood, as will

his wife and two children.

Once Hurstwood and Carrie move to New York, and Hurstwood invests

in the Warren Street saloon, Dreiser traces his gradual downfall with

painful detail. One way this is accomplished is by watching his money dwin-

dle. Dreiser worried about money, as we know, most of his life, and this

phobia is dramatized in the increasing shabbiness of Hurstwood’s living

quarters. He and Carrie begin uptown in the neighborhood where Dreiser

and Jug first lived, then after three years move to the area around Fifteenth