The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

a J. F. Taylor version to end diªerently, with Ames finally rejecting Carrie

because of her immoral life), but his boss feared that Doubleday had al-

ready spoiled the market for Sister Carrie. In the end, they agreed to pub-

lish Dreiser’s next novel, still called The Transgressor, as well as Sister Car-

rie, if the first were a success. J. F. Taylor then also purchased the plates to

Sister Carrie from Doubleday for the price quoted to Dreiser. Dreiser was

to receive an advance of a $100 a month for the next year to finish the book.

He signed the contract on November 6, 1901, and soon thereafter gave up

d o w n h i l l a n d u p

1 6 8

his New York apartment to move with Jug to Bedford City, Virginia, where

he hoped he would find even cheaper living quarters and the quiet to finish

his book.

At first, the change of scenery had a palliative eªect on the author’s bruised

psyche, as well as on his physical condition. “It is very beautiful here,” he

told Duªy, who, aware of Dreiser’s increasingly fragile state of mind, had

recommended exercise. “The atmosphere is dry and clear. Mountains

twenty miles away loom up so close as to seem but a few minutes’ walk.”

But the depression had already set in too deeply, and by December, he de-

scribed writing as “steady strain.” It was impossible for him “to lighten it

even by walking.” He told his editor at J. F. Taylor that he was “straining

every nerve” to write and coming up dry.12 That Christmas, the Dreisers

broke up housekeeping and visited Jug’s parents in Missouri, which oªered

some distraction at least. He wrote Duªy from Montgomery City that

Christmas Day there among the White clan was a “rout of many children—

a Christmas that I like.” And the sketch “Rella” in A Gallery of Women

suggests that during the visit Dreiser developed an inordinate interest in

the eighteen-year-old daughter of a neighbor of the Whites, but when the

couple returned in January, by way of the Gulf Coast, to settle in Hinton,

West Virginia, he was in no better spirits than before. It was at this time

that Dreiser learned of the forthcoming publication of An Island Cabin. The

book first appeared serially in the New York Post, beginning in January 1902,

and Duªy sent him the first installment. In acknowledging it, Dreiser also

acknowledged that Henry “has rather gone out of my life recently,” but the

first installment would not have included the part about “Tom.” He also

thanked Duªy for the gift of Leaves of Grass and predicted: “Time will put

[Whitman] above all other American poets up to now.”13

As if running from the expected protests of his latest publisher, whether

over a deadline or the immorality of the emerging plot of Jennie Gerhardt,

which may have originally resembled Sister Carrie’ s, Dreiser was on the

move again in March 1902, this time to Lynchburg, Virginia. Duªy advised

him not to fret about “style” as he worked on his second novel. Yet at the

same time the editor was compelled to reject two of Dreiser’s submissions

to Ainslee’s—“The Problem of Distribution” and “A Mayor and His People.”

In between these rejections, Dreiser also learned from Duªy that Henry’s

book had earned a large advance sale as a result of its serialization.14 By

the end of March, Dreiser moved again, this time to Charlottesville, where

he remained until April or May. By now Jug, helpless in the face of her

husband’s depression and their dwindling funds, had gone back to her

d o w n h i l l a n d u p

1 6 9

parents in Missouri. She would go back and forth as Dreiser fought his

demons.

By June, mentally exhausted from his struggle to write himself out of his

depression, he abandoned his novel and promised to repay J. F. Taylor the

$750 he had received since the previous November. Perhaps relieved to be

without Jug because he feared that too much sex was contributing to his

poor health, he set out on a hiking tour to restore himself. Walking north

over three hundred miles, he reached Rehobeth Beach, Delaware, by the

end of the month. In July, he had settled in Philadelphia, but was no bet-

ter oª than before for the exercise and fresh air. Jug rejoined her husband

in his rented rooms on Ridge Avenue in the suburb of Wissahickon. By

now, with no more money coming in from J. F. Taylor, it became increas-

ingly clear to the unhappy couple that one could live more cheaply than

two. All Dreiser could count on now were payments for magazine work al-

ready done but still unpublished. He would soon ask Duªy for another

$100, even though he still owed him $80 from the first loan. “It seems to

me,” Duªy told Dreiser on November 4, “that it is about time you and I

got together for a talk and a walk.” He sent him John Stuart Mill’s autobi-

ography, recommending the chapter entitled “A Crisis in My Life.” Very

likely, Duªy visited his friend in Philadelphia in December 1902 and lent

him the additional money. Dreiser told Duªy in January that he had been

“busy doing nothing. Nervous prostration (which I have shortened to N.P.

for family use) still holds a restraining finger on me.”15

That winter, with Jug back in Missouri again, the author of Sister Car-

rie could be found walking the streets of Philadelphia in threadbare cloth-

ing. On February 9 he tried to apply for a position as conductor, but the

streetcar barn at Eighth and Dauphin was closed. He eventually walked

west on Market Street and across the Schuylkill River to speak with his

physician. Dr. Louis A. Duhring was on the medical faculty at the Univer-

sity of Pennsylvania, and though he was a dermatologist, he had agreed—

because he had suªered from the same malady—to treat Dreiser for

“neurasthenia.” Following one of Dreiser’s anxiety attacks the previous

November, the doctor had prescribed opiates to help him sleep and had

advised keeping a journal on his medical condition during waking hours.

(This became part of what was published as his American Diaries in 1983.)

Not very many days later, Dreiser was finally able to collect fifteen dollars

from a friend named Gray and another thirty-five or forty from the Era,

which had an o‹ce in Philadelphia and which would publish “A Mayor

and His People” in June 1903.16

d o w n h i l l a n d u p

1 7 0

Dreiser returned to New York around the middle of February 1903. He

took a room in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, at 113 Ross Street. It

was probably at this point that, as he later told a friend, he truly “went down

and down.” Reduced to living in a six-by-eight-foot hall bedroom not far

from the East River, Dreiser considered suicide by drowning. “The sight of

the icy cold and splashing waters actually appealed to me,” he recalled in an

autobiographical fragment composed more than twenty years later. “It would

be so easy to drop in. The cold would soon numb me—a few gulps and all

would be over. All that was necessary was to slip down into this gulf and

rest. No one would know. I would be completely forgotten.”17

At first resisting the idea, he roamed the Brooklyn riverfront, picking up

raw potatoes to eat from its docks. “Here in a tumble down street near the

waterfront . . . I hid myself away in ye hall bedroom—daily determined to

complete at least one saleable article, poem or short story. . . . I had writ-

ten a book to be sure, but who cared?” In 1943, he recalled for H. L. Mencken

the “cursed life” that had brought him, he thought, to the verge of suicide.

“My pride and my anger would not let me continue . . . and yet a lunatic

canal boatman ferrying potatoes from Tonawanda to the Wallabout Mar-

ket in Brooklyn did. Wanting me as a companion to accompany him on

his trip to Tonawanda, he stated as his excuse for his liberality or charity

was that he ‘thought maybe I was trying to run away from my wife.’”18

Saved from the act but with no more money for rent, not to mention the

$4.50 a week he spent for his twice-a-day meals of milk and bread, he now

decided to leave Brooklyn and try for a manual labor job on the New York

Central Railroad. A few years earlier and in better days, he had interviewed

its president, Chauncey M. Depew, for Success. 19 As he set out with “but

one lone quarter,” he beheld the vision of a Scotch-Irish sailor. “I have never

really believed in apparitions, materializations, boggarts, or kobolds,” he

claimed in 1924. “Yet now and again in my life . . . there have appeared to