The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

be things in Heaven and Earth that are not dreamed of in our philosophies.”

He experienced the illusion as he approached the Brooklyn Bridge. “His

gait and manner suggested the sea to me. He was slim and uncouth and

rather shabby as to his get-up and yet amusingly loutish and waggish and

decidedly more than half drunk.” “Ah, well. We’re very low today, but we’ll

be much better by and by,” said the ghost as it “proceeded to execute a fairly

airy and trill-ful melody to which he added a few gay steps and capers.”

Then he “danced on and up the street and out of sight.”20

Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, Dreiser looked up at the magnificence of

Manhattan’s tall buildings and lamented his fate. “If one only had the key,

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1 7 1

the friendly word,” he thought, “how easy it would be to obtain a compe-

tence there.” But success was not necessarily the fruit of hard work and hon-

esty, as Armour, Fields, and the other captains of industry he had written

about in Success had claimed. “It did not exactly depend on fitness. Many

a man not so fit as I was rolling in luxury. It had been given to him. . . .

And yet they talked of earning your bread.” “How silly,” he thought. “In

nature no such rule held as earning anything singlehanded. Each one was

favored or discriminated against before he began. I was favored. I was given

to write and no one had ever taught me.”21

–

He walked north to Twenty-Second Street and Fourth Avenue with the

thought of appealing to a charitable society but went instead finally to the

o‹ces of the New York Central Railroad at Forty-Second Street and Fourth

Avenue. Before turning to the railroad that day, he had spent an evening with

Mame and Austin Brennan, who were now living in Washington Square. He

had also dined with Jug’s brother, Dick White, who was a lieutenant aboard

the battleship Indiana, docked in the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard. But he asked

neither of them for help, and he did not seek out Paul either. (Emma, who

was also still in the area, had married John Nelson, like Hopkins another

loser, and was too needy herself to have been of any assistance to her younger

brother.) According to An Amateur Laborer, actually written in 1904, he spoke

with George Henry Daniels, the general passenger agent for the New York

Central, who in turn passed him on to A. T. Hardin, the railroad’s engineer

of maintenance of way. In “Down Hill and Up,” written twenty years later,

Dreiser claims that he intended to see Depew, but in fact he had retired as

president in 1899. Dreiser was hired for light physical labor in early April and

instructed to report the following week. Rather than return to Brooklyn,

where his room was already given up, but his trunk was still stored, he de-

cided to spend the intervening two or three days at the Mills Hotel, a way

station for the indigent at 164 Bleecker Street. To do this, he pawned his watch.

The pawnbroker, Dreiser told an interviewer almost forty years later, took

pity on him and gave him twenty-five dollars for a watch he had bought for

only eight dollars in St. Louis. With the money he purchased new shoes to

replace his worn-out ones and a hat for the one that had blown oª his head.

He headed down Broadway to the hotel on the edge of Greenwich Village,

where its rooms, or stalls, went for twenty cents a night.22

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

1 7 2

As Dreiser walked past the Imperial, a luxury hotel on Broadway, a cab

stopped before it and two men jumped out, both of whom Dreiser recog-

nized immediately. One was “a small, dark little hunchback,” while the other

was fat and ruddy. The hunchback was Pat Howley, the other was the writer’s

brother, Paul, still fairly well-oª as the author of “On the Banks of the

Wabash.” Dreiser had probably seen his brother only briefly since their

falling out in 1897, when he lost his editorship at Ev’ry Month, but it seems

Paul had heard from Mame about their younger brother’s emotional state

and was concerned about him. When the rotund songwriter recognized his

brother on Broadway that day, Dreiser recalled that he “looked at me with

his big soft blue eyes—the eyes of my mother”—and cried. That day, amid

the noise of Broadway, Paul looked sadly at the shabby clothes of the now

130-pound Dreiser. After some discussion, Paul forced $75 on his reluctant

brother. Paul was scheduled to go to Buªalo that day, but wanted to see his

brother as soon as he got back. Dreiser agreed and after more talk resumed

his walk down Broadway to the Mills Hotel.23

One would think that with this second windfall of the day, he might have

stayed at the Ritz instead of the Mills. Built in 1896 by philanthropist Dar-

ius O. Mills, it resembled the Hyatt hotels of today in that the rooms look

down on a central lobby. But the similarity stops there, for the only inte-

rior source of light in its nine stories of cramped spaces came from the lobby.

In “A Wayplace of the Fallen,” written a year after his brief occupancy at

the Mills, he remembered the rooms as “really not rooms at all . . . but cells

partitioned or arranged in such a way as to provide the largest amount of

renting space and personal supervision and espionage to the founder and

manager but only a bare bed to the guest.” The rooms were about the size

of prison cells, even smaller than his hall bedroom in Brooklyn. “The at-

mosphere of the whole building was permeated with tobacco smoke” and

after “lights out” at ten, also filled with the sound of coughing, snoring,

and loud complaints about both.24

As promised, Dreiser went to see Paul the following Monday. After two

or three nights at the Mills, the inviting lobby of the Imperial Hotel must

have reminded Dreiser of the painful contrast between his own situation

and Paul’s. Seeing his brother’s run-down condition, Paul wouldn’t listen

to his unrealistic talk about working for the railroad. He signed up Dreiser

as a patient at William Muldoon’s sanitarium in Olympia, New York, near

White Plains. Since the 1870s, Muldoon, a celebrated wrestler and boxing

trainer, had hobnobbed with the elite of Broadway and New York. His pals

included Paul Dresser, known on Broadway to all the show-business types

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

1 7 3

since the mid-1890s. Muldoon’s sanitarium began as a training camp for

boxers in 1900, but by 1902 had become a famous health spa catering to

the rich and intemperate. Paul himself had taken the treatment at Mul-

doon’s “repair shop.” Other patrons included Pat Howley and Mame’s com-

mon-law husband Austin.25

Paul accompanied Dreiser to White Plains the following day. On the train,

they reminisced about growing up in Indiana and wondered about the for-

tunes of their various brothers. Al Dreiser, who had idolized Muldoon in

his prime as a wrestler, was still in Chicago. Ed, the youngest, was pursu-

ing an acting career in New York. The scapegrace Rome could be anywhere,

of course, boozing and bumming his way around the country.

Muldoon was a powerfully built man of about fifty-five with the manner

of a socially savvy drill sergeant. Privately, the inmates of the sanitarium

called him “Buldoon.” Each one of them paid approximately fifty dollars

a week to be harassed and insulted back into good health. Here it was that

Dreiser, although he rather disliked the experience, finally found the “doc-

tor” who would start him firmly on the road to recovery. Most of the en-

rollees were alcoholics while Dreiser suªered from physical and mental

exhaustion. He was nevertheless as harshly treated as the others. Like the

“Captain” in Sister Carrie, Muldoon treated his wards like wayward chil-

dren. “He seemed,” Dreiser later wrote, “to have no respect for either wealth

or poverty, but to have a profound contempt for weakness—physical, men-

tal, moral.”26

A Civil War veteran, a former New York policeman, a Shakespearean ac-

tor, and the boxing coach who had trained John L. Sullivan for his famous

fight with Jake Kilrain in 1889, Muldoon presided over a fairly grueling daily

schedule. One hyperbolic witness pronounced the routine to be “a mild

duplicate” of what Sullivan had undergone in preparation for the Kilrain

fight, which lasted seventy-five rounds. Although Muldoon never lacked

for customers, he kept his classes small so as to ride herd on the inmates

personally. Each day began at 6:00 a.m. in a gymnasium equipped with low

stools. Here the men—about ten in a class—first performed forty-five min-