The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

utes of calisthenics. They were, Dreiser recalled, “as lymphatic and flabby

as oysters without their shells, myself included.”27 Following this exercise,

they were required to keep in the air three small medicine balls (invented by

Muldoon). All the while the “Captain” shouted commands and ridiculed

their awkwardness. Next they were required to jog around the gym, do more

push-ups and jumping jacks, and then head for the showers (another of the

coach’s inventions, according to Dreiser). Afterward, adorned with towels

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and a wool jacket around their heads and a bathrobe over their gym clothes,

they each drank two glasses of hot water as they perspired on their wooden

stools. The routine was topped oª by a cold shower, after which they donned

riding togs over flannel underwear—the dress for breakfast at 7:30.28

The tortures of the sanitarium included horseback riding and long hikes

overlooking Long Island Sound. At least once Muldoon took his crew five

miles out in a tallyho and ordered them to walk back home. By the end of

the second week, Dreiser’s appetite improved so that he had gained five

pounds. He began to feel stronger. His nervousness disappeared, or at least

abated, and his eyesight improved. Before, everything had seemed to be oª

center or at a slightly wrong angle—possibly the eªect of the medicine he

had been taking on either his “cast” eye or perhaps his good one. “Now I

began . . . to feel as if life were not so bad. People were all wretched and

greedy as I had imagined, but so was I, and why not accept the conditions?”

He cynically eyed his fellow patrons, several of them relatively young men.

For all of them, he thought, “Money was the main object . . . nothing but

money.”29

–

By the first week of June 1903, after five weeks and $256.75 of Paul’s money,

Dreiser returned to New York to claim his job on the New York Central

Railroad. He reported a few days later to its carpentry shop at Spuyten

Duyvil. The “Spike,” as the carpentry shop and the other buildings there

were called, sat on land extending out into the Hudson opposite the mouth

of the Harlem River, a mile or two north of where the George Washing-

ton Bridge is today. It was a beautiful spot then, just across from the Pal-

isades and surrounded by expensive yachts, right next to a spa for the rich.

Here the “neurasthenic author” was assigned to R. P. Mills, supervisor of

buildings, who provided Dreiser with the following letter to F. A. Strang,

the shop foreman at Spuyten Duyvil:

This will introduce you to Mr. Dreiser whom you will put to work doing

general labor around the shop and outside, paying him fifteen cents an hour

[or $1.50 a day for the ten-hour shift]. He is a man recommended to me by

Mr. Hardin and is completely run down mentally. Mr. Hardin requests that

we keep him busy at general labor in order to build him up physically. You

will put him to work at once at the amount specified.

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Obviously, Mills was trying to please Hardin, his superior, who in turn was

possibly reacting up the line to the influence of Depew, who now sat on

the railroad’s board of directors. Interestingly, Depew, whose reputation for

clean living was part of his public signature as a popular orator of his day,

had also been once a patient at Muldoon’s.30

After presenting his letter to Strang’s assistant, Dreiser looked for a room

to rent nearby, but most of the cottages there were vacation homes. He found

a room in Kingsbridge, one train stop to the south and three minutes away.

It was part of the “summery” cottage of a woman by the name of Hard-

enbrooks, who lived with her daughter, a nephew, and a cousin. Dreiser

was charmed with everybody but the cousin, whom he found “cold” and

indiªerent. In Dreiser’s autobiographical novel The “Genius,” the protago-

nist has an aªair with the landlady’s daughter, but there is—notwithstanding

an earlier biographer’s surmise—little or no indication that Dreiser was in-

terested in this woman, whom he described as “a weary-looking lady, rather

pale.” And in September, Jug rejoined her husband there.31

On the morning after securing his place with Mrs. Hardenbrooks,

Dreiser rose at 5:45, after a night of tossing and turning, and prepared to

enter the world of manual labor he had left as a teenager in Chicago, hardly

more than a decade ago. Loyal to the Muldoon routine, he performed jump-

ing jacks and drank “three or four” glasses of the prescribed hot water and

then—as if he were reporting for a white-color job—took a bath and

dressed for breakfast. At the carpentry shop, he was assigned to “two brawny

sons of labor who looked for all the world like twins so much were they

dressed alike.” Dreiser himself was somewhat inappropriately dressed for

manual labor, even though his suit was by now threadbare. The author of

Sister Carrie was made to carry heavy ash posts, eight feet long and six to

eight inches wide. Despite his time at Muldoon’s, he was in no shape for

this kind of lifting. As he strained to lift one of the posts over his shoulder,

he felt a sharp pain across his back and down his legs.32

The two men he worked with were friendly and tried to show him the

“trick” of heavy lifting, but they (and later others) also vied for his assis-

tance in order to minimize their own labors. Once the three had lugged

and dragged all the posts to the second level of the shop, Dreiser was as-

signed to sweep up sawdust and shavings. At noon he gloomily ate a sack

lunch seated on a pile of lumber. The workers had descended from the sec-

ond floor and elsewhere—“painters, carpenters, tinsmiths and whatnot, and

lined themselves up in a row on lumber piles and benches.” They spoke

mainly of work and the threat of being laid oª, and indeed the experience

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as a whole gave Dreiser fresh insights on the laboring class. Yet he was also

revolted by their “pointless political argument[s], so barren of ideas that it

was painful.”33

Twenty years later, with hindsight and a humor for which Dreiser is not

generally known, he described his fellow workers at the carpentry shop as

laughable pawns of big business. Malachi Dempsey was “so ignorant” he

did not even know the meaning of “Europe.” “His church, his flat, his pipe,

six children at thirty-four years of age, and his wife, last and least, consti-

tuted his world.” Another, Big John Peters, at three hundred pounds, with

flesh cascading over his hidden belt line, “was as genial and unimportant

as a child.” Always cheerful, Big John would admire the yachts on the Hud-

son and often remark: “Woodenja think them fellas would feel poorty good

sittin’ out there on the poop deck of them yachts smokin’ their perfectos,

eh? Wooden that be swell for you and me, eh sport?”34

Dreiser returned to Kingsbridge exhausted from his first day. Even the

view of the Hudson in the approaching sunset as the train whisked him the

mile south from the railroad yard did little to raise his spirits. Forgetting

for the moment his recent joblessness and poverty as well as the lessons he

had learned at Muldoon’s, it now seemed to him that he had fallen about

as low as one possibly could without dying: “To be compelled to rise thus

every morning at six or rather five-thirty, to eat a lonely and rather deso-

late breakfast and to hustle out through a damp atmosphere while others

were still drowsing seemed the height of hardship to me.” Things got worse

when the regular shop foreman returned two days later—“a relentless un-

feeling creature [who] would sometimes smile in a coarse and it seemed to

me cruel way, exclaiming the while, ‘that’s the ticket.’ Sometimes he would

pitch in himself, for show’s sake largely . . . only to work the men up to a

great pitch. . . . Then he would go oª somewhere and rest while they would

work on.”35

Although he later wrote with relative detachment of his experiences at

the “Spike” in Free, Dreiser especially resented the demeaning labor of hav-

ing to crawl under tables and around machinery to sweep up wood shav-

ings. After about six weeks of this routine, he asked R. P. Mills to transfer

him to a plumbing crew. Apparently, it was not only the foreman who wore

on Dreiser’s nerves, but his brother Paul, who kept tabs on him and tried

to cheer him with jokes about his being the “all-around Supt. of the tie lift-