The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

times. Dreiser also remembered helping Ed and Claire pick up spilled pieces

of coal from the nearby train tracks in order to heat their home. Sarah and

the three children remained in Sullivan for the next two or three years, with

occasional (and at times disruptive) visits from John Paul. After a year, the

older sisters were in frequent rebellion against their Terre Haute existence

under the father’s watchful eye. Despite his fierce religiosity and his fear for

his family’s reputation, John Paul’s influence over family matters waned with

his diminished ability to contribute to his family’s upkeep.

It was in the Sullivan house that Dreiser adopted his mother’s practice of

retreating to a rocking chair to think and to dream. All the rest of his life

the rocker was his favorite chair. In the early morning, he rocked and sang

to himself or hummed while looking out at the trees and birds. This future

chronicler of the snares of the city had his fertile imagination first stimu-

lated through an early and intense appreciation of nature. He took long

and solitary walks. “At first,” he recorded in Dawn, “my mother could not

understand why I wished to be so much alone or why my aloneness should

require such exaggerated periods of time, although she never suspected mis-

chief in my case and later told me so. I was just odd, she said, diªerent.”20

One day, he followed a bumblebee all the way across a wheat field, track-

ing it from flower to flower. On other days, he observed a wasps’ nest un-

der an eave, fish in the water, and finally at night a bat hanging upside down.

He began to ponder the strangeness of life.

It was also in Sullivan that the boy first discovered literature. Readers of

Dreiser’s deterministic fiction such as Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy

will be surprised to learn that his first literary influences were the roman-

tic ones of Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo

Emerson. They might be equally surprised to know that the first book to

influence this impoverished son of America was not by Karl Marx, but

Thomas E. Hill: Hill’s Manual of Social and Business Forms, first published

in 1878 and in successive editions thereafter. Billed as a “Guide to Correct

Writing,” it was a veritable almanac and encyclopedia on the subject of suc-

cess in postbellum America. Ever since the New England lyceum move-

ment before the Civil War, Americans had been encouraged to educate

themselves on proper decorum and diction in a new and promising republic.

Self-help books and pamphlets abounded, advising, for example, young ap-

prentices not to smell their meat at the dinner table before consuming it.

The emphasis was upon helping oneself up the ladder of success through

good manners and textbook locution, a far cry from the illicit behavior and

colloquial diction of Dreiser’s hard-boiled heroes and heroines.

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Dreiser remembered the Manual ’s peddler, a “Professor Solax,” perhaps

the first model for Charles Drouet, the traveling salesman in Sister Carrie.

“A small, trig, dandified man,” the professor wore “a cutaway coat and high

silk hat, with shoebrush whiskers and Jovian curls.” The bulky book cost a

whopping $3.50, but the Dreisers got their copy in exchange for the drum-

mer’s room and board while he sold his product to others in search of the

American Dream around the shabby village of Sullivan. This living arrange-

ment came about because of the professor’s interest in Dreiser’s sister Sylvia,

who had come to Sullivan to escape her father. The attention this nubile

adolescent paid the middle-aged dandy alarmed Mrs. Dreiser, who pleaded

with her daughter to keep “her place.” Later, Dreiser learned that “she and

the Professor had often met outside, and finally he begged her to run away

with him.” She didn’t, Dreiser later recalled, because “she feared that he had

a wife somewhere (by this time this had come to mean an obstacle to her)

and she did not go.”21

Dreiser never forgot Hill’s Manual, respectfully dedicated “To the Mil-

lions who would, and may, easily and gracefully express the Right Thought.”

He and Tillie (as Claire now preferred to be called) fought over it, both of

them in search of the right thought and the right sound. The “leather port-

folio” had pictures of model penmanship, the proper sitting positions while

writing, poems, demographic charts, samples of all kinds of letters, in-

cluding one “To a Young Man Addicted to Intemperance,” and love letters.

“Of all letters,” this future serial lover of women and lifelong writer of love

letters to them no doubt read in the section on “Letters of Love,” “the love-

letter should be the most carefully prepared” because it is the “most thor-

oughly read and re-read, the longest preserved, and the most likely to be

regretted in after life.” Further, the book oªered advice on how to hold a

knife and fork at meals and the proper way to eat soup (“Darksome mys-

teries all at the time, and since,” Dreiser remembered). Interestingly, it also

included an illustrated section on the “Etiquette of Traveling” on trains,

which is where Dreiser met his first wife and Drouet meets Carrie.22

–

The Dreisers’ last winter in Sullivan was di‹cult. With renters running oª

without paying, the boardinghouse venture finally failed. Sarah feared evic-

tion. To make matters worse, in January or February of 1882, John Paul

Dreiser was out of work again, and his daughters gradually abandoned their

h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s

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jobs as housemaids for selected Catholic families in Terre Haute. In fact,

three of the four had come to Sarah for motherly relief, especially from their

father’s endless, and evidently self-defeating, lectures about attending Mass

and avoiding temptation. Sylvia had been soon followed by Emma, who

eventually went to live with brother Al, now in Chicago. Finally, Mame ar-

rived in the family way after a brief aªair with an older man in Terre Haute.

“Colonel Silsby” (as he would be immortalized in Dreiser’s autobiography)

had given her his blessing and directions to the nearest country doctor who

performed abortions. The doctor, it turned out, had died years before. Sarah

delivered the child, a boy who lived not an hour. “While I was almost un-

conscious,” Mame told her brother many years later, “Mother took it and

buried it at the side of the house quite deep down where it still lies.”23

Just when it looked as if there were nowhere to turn, Paul, now success-

ful as a “strolling minstrel” and songwriter, reappeared to save the day.

Dreiser later recalled that when he thought of Paul, he thought of Thomas

Gray’s lines in “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” about the “un-

known Miltons and Caesars” who were missed by fortune or fate. For the

dedicated determinist who believed that everyone possessed a “chemism,”

a term invented by the pseudoscientists of his day to describe the ratio be-

tween will and instinct in a particular personality, Paul “was one of those

great Falsta‹an souls who, for lack of a little iron or sodium or carbon diox-

ide in his chemical compost, was not able to bestride the world like a Colos-

sus.” When he returned to help the family, Paul was twenty-four and the

author of The Paul Dresser Songster (he had changed his name to “Dresser”

because it was suitable to his stage life: it was more pronounceable and less

revealing of his first-generation German-American immigrant heritage,

which remained quite disparaged in that day). The gaudy ten-cent pam-

phlet of comic songs even featured the ebullient lyricist’s picture on the

cover.

Paul was Santa Claus to the eleven-year-old Dreiser and his family. He

heaped cash on his mother for rent and food as well as clothing for his

youngest siblings, who often had been sent home from school because they

had no shoes. Paul was a welcome contrast to the wandering Rome, who

came home occasionally but seldom brought anything but need and usu-

ally disappeared once he had satisfied himself and exhausted the family with

tales of his pointless explorations around the nation. Paul, on the other hand,

delivered more goods than even his father could supply. Sarah was his mag-

net, and, according to Dreiser, Paul’s “loving, helpful arms” never failed to

come to her support from that time until her death.

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Paul left after a few days, but plans were set in motion for a more per-

manent kind of help. Sarah and her three youngest children would remove

to Evansville, a largely German-American town on the Ohio River. Here,

Paul would soon be living and working at the Apollo Theater. First, his