happy” on the island: “Wonderful as it was . . . I could never say that I was
wholly happy here, not even at peace at any time, with myself, however
much I might be with Winnie or the sea.” Most biographers of Dreiser have
accepted Henry’s extended description of Dreiser as an unhappy, almost
irascible guest who simply objected to the primitive accommodations. Yet
even Henry admitted that Dreiser had brought his problems with him—
but after saying so, he proceeds to exaggerate his friend’s reactions to the
island experience. “He stood by his grip on the sand,” Henry introduces
“Tom” upon his arrival, “and as I turned from the sky and water and dis-
tant shore line, radiant and sparkling with hues of a fair morning, I saw a
cloud of uncertainty and trouble in his face.”3
Dreiser, according to Henry, disliked the smell of the island woods. He
thought they should scrub the cabin floor at once, and wash the “greasy”
dishes. “When the dishes were done,” Henry writes, “we went to the beach
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 6 5
and captured the crabs for bait. As we picked them from their hiding places,
Tom’s wonder and interest grew. He cursed them for elusive devils, sighed
over their fate.” The two also disagree significantly in worldviews. Dreiser
is the grouchy if uncomfortable relativist, while Henry holds forth in Emer-
sonian splendor. “How little we know . . . ,” Tom says. “Here we sit with
our eyes cocked on the universe like two wise frogs croaking by their
pond. . . . We look and speculate, but what can we say after it all, except
to exclaim in meaningless phrases over its varying aspects. Why all this mar-
velous beauty?” Henry for his part insists on the significance of nature “be-
yond the mere tickling of our senses.”4
The arrival of Jug a week later, along with the return of Anna and Brigitte,
brought little tranquillity to the island. Called “Ruth” in An Island Cabin,
Jug had, Henry notes, a girlish figure, a glorious mass of red hair, and bright
blue eyes. Not a philosopher, she was “a complex combination of child and
woman, a being of aªectionate impulses and stubborn fidelity, devoted to
the comfort of her husband, and managing, in some mysterious fashion,
to reconcile her traditional beliefs with his unorthodox thoughts and
ways.”5 Ruth’s devotion to her Tom’s (or Teddy’s) needs, however, leads to
even more strife in paradise. Once Anna (“Nancy”) arrived, she joined
Arthur in complaining about the way the visiting couple wanted to rearrange
the kitchen, close in the porch, have meat instead of fish, and wash dishes
in their scarce drinking water instead of the ocean surf.
All the while, when he wasn’t grousing about something, Dreiser sat in
a rocking chair and sang or hummed old German ballads. “Tom” also paints,
but there is no evidence that Dreiser ever approached an easel. An Island
Cabin, an exercise in nature writing, is mainly of interest today for what it
suggests about Dreiser in the immediate wake of Sister Carrie. By devolv-
ing into such domestic detail, Henry eªectively scuttled his original pur-
pose. And he also pretty well jettisoned his friendship with Dreiser, who
by the time he heard about his exploitation in An Island Cabin was already
almost suicidal. Often contradicting himself, Henry later denied that
“Tom” was based on his friend. “The chapters dealing with the squabbles
of our little group of islanders,” he wrote in a preface or appendix intended
for the third edition of An Island Cabin to assuage Dreiser’s anger, “were
written solely to show how foolishly we throw away our opportunities of
delight. This particular friend happened to be the one staying with me, and
it was, therefore, the incidents in which he figured that were chosen to point
my moral and to adorn or mar my tale.” “Tom, as I have depicted him,”
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 6 6
Henry wrote, “could not have produced ‘Sister Carrie,’” which he earlier
describes “a great American novel.”6
Yet in An Island Cabin, he wrote of Dreiser’s fictional counterpart as
the born poet he then believed his friend to be—“no one [is] more sen-
sitive to the world about him, more deeply sympathetic with it, than is
Tom.” By early in 1904, however, when he and Anna were living in a cabin
in the Adirondacks, the experience that formed the basis for his fourth
book, The House in the Woods, his feelings were more complicated. In a
letter to Dreiser dated February 17, which included a draft of the intended
preface and also expressed anger at revengeful comments Dreiser had ap-
parently made to Anna, Henry wrote: “It is very clear to me that this book
is not responsible for the interruption of our friendship. That was doomed
before the book was written, and the doom of it lay in the fact that you
could listen to what other people might insinuate or a‹rm concerning
me . . . in the fact that, in spite of our long intimacy, under all manner
of circumstances and conditions, you could form such a vulgar and undis-
criminating, undiscerning conception of my attachment for Anna, and
in the fact that you could tolerate in yourself such a gratuitous animos-
ity toward her.”7
Later, in “Rona Murtha,” Dreiser suggests that Anna was jealous of
Henry’s intimacy with him, but he also admits to a resentment of his
friend’s interest in Anna at his expense. He may have retaliated by hint-
ing to friends, as suggested in his sketch, that Henry was exploiting Anna
for her money while deserting Maude and their daughter. In the same let-
ter, Henry assured Dreiser that “Maude and I were not separated until she
was happily engaged with the Briggs Real Estate Company,” making a salary
with commissions of “nearly $4,000 a year.” “At that time,” he added,
“Maude, Anna and I were on aªectionate and friendly terms, and this
friendship has increased till now.”8 This is probably true, for many years
later Maude in her letters to Robert H. Elias, who was writing Dreiser’s
biography in the 1940s, regarded her late husband (who died in 1934) kindly
if also as an irresponsible romantic. Anna herself did not think as fondly
of Henry as Maude did, once he left her a few years later for another woman
half his age. Clare Kummer, a playwright and the “Mrs. Angel” of Dreiser’s
“Rona Murtha,” became Henry’s third wife in 1910. Anna Mallon proba-
bly should have listened to her mother, who distrusted Henry from the
start and cut her daughter out of her will when she married him. Anna
apparently never got over her separation from Henry. In and out of men-
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 6 7
tal hospitals for the rest of her life, she drowned on May 7, 1921, at age
fifty-nine, in a possible suicide.9
–
Upon returning to New York, Dreiser and his wife had to give up their apart-
ment on the West Side for a smaller place on East Eighty-Second Street,
looking out onto Blackwell’s (today Roosevelt) Island, which then housed
the sick, criminal, and insane. He managed to overcome his acquired dis-
taste for magazine work well enough to sell several sketches to magazines,
including one based on an experience he had had while visiting Connecti-
cut that summer. Others were based on personal friends and acquaintances,
such as the graphic artist William Louis Sonntag, Jr., and Jug’s father,
Archibald White; these later reappeared in Twelve Men. He also reworked
“Curious Shifts of the Poor” for Success. 10 With the manuscript of “The
Rake” abandoned since Christmas 1900, he had worked away on what would
become Jennie Gerhardt. Once he had forty chapters written, he had ap-
proached several publishers in search of a contract and an advance, including
George P. Brett of Macmillan, who had expressed admiration for Sister Car-
rie. He also tried McClure, Phillips, and Company, which would publish
the first edition of An Island Cabin, perhaps after Doubleday refused it be-
cause of Henry’s role in the Sister Carrie aªair. Despite the rave English re-
views of the abridged edition of Sister Carrie, American publishers were
not interested in Dreiser. “If this is your slant on life,” he heard again and
again, “quit, get out, it’s rotten.”11
In his continuing eªorts to salvage Sister Carrie, he tried to purchase the
plates in hopes of finding another firm to bring it out right, but Double-
day demanded $500. That fall he managed to secure a contract at J. F. Tay-
lor, a small reprint firm looking to expand. Rutger B. Jewett, one of the ed-
itors there, believed in Sister Carrie (though it is possible he may have wanted