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when he took the helm of the newly founded Smith’s Magazine. Dreiser
worked for Street and Smith between September 1904 and April 1906, and
as editor of its newest magazine, he got the circulation up to 125,000. But
the urge to write instead of edit was always just below the surface. “I am
an editor at present . . . ,” he told a recent enthusiast of Sister Carrie, “but
longing to do but one thing—write.” He came to know Charles Agnew Mac-
Lean, who was the editor for Ormond Smith’s pulp fiction series. MacLean
talked to Dreiser about the possibility of reissuing Sister Carrie and arranged
to purchase the plates from J. F. Taylor for $550, but this latest attempt at
a comeback for the book was not to be. In his editor’s chair at Street and
Smith Dreiser also first met Charles Fort, whose The Book of the Damned
(1920) and other books he would later champion (to the astonishment of
all except John Cowper Powys, a writer and a friend of Dreiser’s, who more
than shared his casual interest in extraterrestrial possibilities). He published
in Smith’s some of Fort’s Lannigan stories, which were apparently based on
real-life incidents.41
While editor of Smith’s Magazine, he also wrote and had published pieces
in Watson’s Magazine, where Duªy had moved as editor, having left Ainslee’s
when he was denied a partnership in the firm of Street and Smith. One of
these was “The Rivers of the Nameless Dead.” Here Dreiser began the life-
long practice of basing his fictions on a public incident or crime, an ap-
proach that would culminate in An American Tragedy. “The body of a man
was found yesterday in the North River at Twenty-fifth street,” the epigraph
said, quoting a New York newspaper. Behind that stark bulletin lay for
Dreiser the disappointment and suªering of so many (almost including him-
self in 1903) who had given themselves to the rivers surrounding Manhat-
tan because the “beautiful island is not possessed of happiness for all.” “Such
waters” were neither kind nor cruel—merely “dark, strong, deep, indiªer-
ent.” “The Track Walker” also depended on a grim incident worthy of a
journalistic headline (“body mangled by a passing train”).42 That Dreiser
arranged for these stories in Watson’s to state under the author’s byline that
he was the “Author of ‘Sister Carrie’” further shows that almost five years
after its publication, he still held out for its rebirth.
As her husband struggled along, editing and writing, Jug was probably
again frequently back in Missouri for economic reasons. Money woes were
no doubt on his mind when he published “The Silent Worker” and “The
Loneliness of the City” in Watson’s that fall. The first discussed ironically
the “beauty of wealth” in which the investment of ten thousand dollars is
the equivalent to one man’s labor every day of the year, “including Sun-
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days.” “Think of it! One man working for you, day after day, in rain or
shine, whether there be good times or bad,” forever “silent” in terms of
whether he is sick or has a family to support. No laborer in 1905, of course,
would have earned $10,000 a year, no matter how many hours and days a
week he put in. The second starts out with the same kind of hyperbole about
economic conditions, this time in terms of their psychological eªect on the
lonely crowd. “I live in a neighborhood,” he wrote, “which is an excellent
illustration of this. There are perhaps a hundred people in our apartment
house in the Bronx, a thousand, or it may be two or three thousand, in our
block. They live in small, comfortably furnished and very convenient apart-
ments, but they live alone.” Dreiser appears here to be developing another
literary tool, that of the psychological, which would also reach its apex in
his second masterpiece. “We cannot forever crowd into cities and forget
man for mammon,” he concluded. “There will come a day, and an hour,
in each and every individual life when the need of despised and neglected
relationships will weigh heavy on the soul.”43
Relationships probably weighed heavily on Dreiser that fall. Paul Dresser,
who had been reduced to “bankrupstcy” by the end of 1903, died on Jan-
uary 30, 1906, of either a cerebral hemorrhage or a heart attack—a death
possibly complicated by the eªects of the mercury treatment he had re-
ceived for syphilis in the early 1880s.44 He was only forty-nine. (Others in
the family who lived more conservative lives lasted much longer, not only
their father, but Mame, who lived sensibly in her maturity, and Ed, in adult-
hood the most “normal” of the siblings.) As Paul’s health failed, he had
moved in with sister Emma, at 203 West 106th Street. Hardly a month be-
fore his death, he had written his eldest sister on stationery with the let-
terhead “The Paul Dresser Publishing Company,” his last eªort to recover
financially, after the failure of Howley and Dresser: “Well Mame I am still
on earth & things are running along slowly.” But Paul was no businessman.
Little or none of his sheet music was selling, he said, because of the Christ-
mas season and its demand for “books, toys, etc.” His latest songs, reflect-
ing the state of his health, were morbid instead of gay and nostalgic. His
last song was entitled “The Judgment Is at Hand.” Dreiser first heard of his
brother’s death in a phone call from Emma. “And yet,” Dreiser wrote in the
essay “My Brother Paul,” “two years before he did die, I knew he would. . . .
He emanated a kind of fear. Depression and even despair seemed to hang
about him like a cloak.”45
The “Fat Man” died penniless, and almost friendless as far as any of his
Broadway cronies coming forward to help with the funeral expenses.
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
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Dreiser, of course, was just getting back on his feet and had nothing to con-
tribute. But by this time Ed was married to Mai Skelly, a former show busi-
ness protégée of Paul’s. With the help of Mai’s mother, Margaret, and the
White Rats, a fraternity of New York actors, they scraped up the money
for the funeral, and Paul was buried, initially in the Skelly family plot on
Long Island. Since Mai, as well as Ed ostensibly, was a devout Catholic,
Paul the one-time seminarian and lifelong if irregular Catholic, received a
solemn High Mass at St. Francis Xavier’s on Sixteenth Street that would
have made his father proud. The priest even read the lyrics to his last song.
His niece recalled that “all Broadway” was in observance. The mourners
included Louise Dresser, the stage name for Louise Kerlin, whom Paul had
“adopted” after hearing her sing one of his songs in 1899. Known as Paul
Dresser’s “sister,” she had become famous in the intervening years, singing
“On the Banks of the Wabash” and other sentimental ballads in vaudeville.46
The New York Times of January 31, 1906, reported that when she heard “by
telephone that her brother had died,” she was about to go on stage at Proc-
tor’s Fifty-Eighth Street Theater and canceled her performances for the rest
of the week. (In the same year as Paul’s death, however, she managed to re-
place her songwriter “brother” by marrying another almost as famous, Jack
Norworth, the author of “Shine On, Harvest Moon.”) Paul’s obituary noted
that he had written “The Blue and the Gray,” whose subtitle—ever apro-
pos of Paul—was “A Mother’s Gift to Her Country.”
Almost two years later Mame had Paul’s body removed to St. Boniface
Cemetery in Chicago, to lie beside their parents. Carl Dreiser, the unwanted
child of Sylvia, who as an adolescent at the turn of the century had possi-
bly been under Paul’s supervision in New York, told Dreiser in 1908 that
Paul’s grave still lacked a tombstone. Carl himself had gone to Chicago a
year earlier to try to turn around his luck with a failed life. “I am working
every day,” he told his Uncle Theodore, “but I sometimes get lonesome and
discouraged & feel like giving up everything.” He spoke of attending busi-
ness college, but instead, at twenty-two, he committed suicide.47
–
In April 1906, Dreiser left Smith’s for the new Broadway Magazine. It was
then owned by Thomas McKee, the Doubleday and Page lawyer who had
advised the publishers that they were legally required to publish Sister Car-
rie even in the absence of a written contract. The magazine was conceived
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as a “white-light” publication that reported on the scandals of the theatri-
cal profession as well as “telling on the great and powerful” in general. But