The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

current girlfriend, Anna Winter (alias Sallie Walker, the actual namesake

for “My Gal Sal,” and called Annie Brace in the published version of Dawn),

visited the family briefly in Sullivan. Twenty-seven or twenty-eight and “very

dark as to hair and eyes,” Anna quickly charmed Sarah with the happy ex-

pectation that her eldest son had finally found a good girl and might set-

tle down.

Eagerly, Sarah and her brood moved to Evansville in May. Going from

a town of twenty-two hundred to one of thirty thousand was a big change

for the family. Sarah set up housekeeping in a brick cottage in the midst of

the bustling burg at 1415 East Franklin Street. What she may not have

known, not at the outset certainly, was that Anna, who regularly sent the

family groceries, was not exactly the good girl she had hoped but in fact

ran one of Evansville’s more upscale whorehouses. Once again, a prostitute

had entered the life of the impressionable Theo —and his mother. Yet when

Sarah learned the truth this time, she did not take the evasive action she

had in Vincennes. Although she was aware of the benefits of keeping on

the right side of society, there was also a wild streak in this woman, who

after all had run away from her Mennonite parents to marry a Catholic,

whose rigid views she would eventually resist. She might sigh and cry over

the failures of her children, but she never blamed them, because she be-

lieved they couldn’t help themselves in a world of uncontrollable circum-

stances. When they reached adulthood, she never pried into their aªairs,

and so Paul’s arrangement with his “Gal Sal” was at least tolerated or po-

litely overlooked.

The Evansville house Paul found for them (and where he paid the rent)

was far and away superior to their austere accommodations in Sullivan. Un-

like the drafty, empty house there that had had to be furnished with dis-

carded furniture, this one was more completely and comfortably appointed.

“No shabby makeshifts and leavings here, as at Sullivan,” Dreiser fondly re-

membered in Dawn. “Instead, in the dining-room a shining new table with

a complete set of chairs, and in the parlor, not only parlor furniture but a

piano! . . . Quite like one who has seen a fairy wave her wand and work a

miracle, stood my mother, looking at it all from first one doorway and then

another. And behind her, patting her shoulder, because she was crying, my

brother Paul.”24 Paul, the sentimental songmaker, was crying, too.

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If the young Dreiser’s lot was improved at home, he still had to contend

with the parochial schools. Evansville had three prosperous German Cath-

olic churches. Its adjacent parochial schools, however, were austere and over-

crowded. And here too German, not English, was taught; boys and girls

were instructed separately. The boys’ education was largely the responsi-

bility of one Ludwig von Valkenburg, who was also the church organist

and all-around factotum. Over him and the school stood the Reverend An-

ton Dudenhausen. “Stout, pompous, aggressive,” Dreiser remembered, per-

haps with some hyperbole, “this priest had the presence and solidity of a

ferocious bull. The mere sight of him terrified me, so much so that when

he was anywhere near . . . I lost all self-possession and stood agape, won-

dering what terror, punishment or deprivation might not be in prepara-

tion.”25 Younger brother Ed, too, hated the school, possibly even more than

Theo. At first, he refused to enter the schoolhouse.

Despite these schoolroom horrors, Theo, Ed, and Tillie apparently got

on well enough. This wing of the Dreiser family, headed by the indefati-

gable Sarah, lived in Evansville for one year, until the early summer of 1883.

Then, some months before their departure, word leaked to Sarah’s Evans-

ville neighbors that Paul’s girlfriend was connected to a house of ill repute,

thereby socially stigmatizing the other Dreisers. As if this whiª of scandal

were not enough, the itinerant and pugnacious Rome rolled into Evans-

ville, showing the wear and tear of his latest debaucheries. Finding that Paul

was well-respected, at least among saloon types, he bragged of his sibling

connection, borrowed money from Paul’s friends that he did not repay, got

into drunken brawls, and finally landed in the Evansville jail. At about the

same time, Paul contracted syphilis, possibly from one of Anna’s girls, and

turned to his mother for help. “I recall his coming to my mother and weep-

ing over his condition and her advising that they oªer up masses to God

and prayers to St. Joseph and the Virgin Mary accompanied by flowers in

order that he might be speedily cured,” Dreiser wrote in a passage that was

later excised from Dawn. 26 Paul and Anna broke up that spring, mainly be-

cause of his dalliances with her employees, and the Dreiser household in

Evansville broke up with it.

With nowhere else to go, Sarah moved to Chicago, where the nineteen-

year-old Theresa had a third-floor walk-up of six rooms at West Madison

and Throop streets. Before long, John Paul, once again or still unemployed,

had joined them, along with Mame and Emma, while Paul went back on

the road, with either another minstrel show or a theatrical group. Chicago

had a population of more than a half-million and was just becoming the

h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s

1 4

great metropolis of the Midwest when the future author of urban realism

got his first look at it. Dreiser, raised in mostly German communities, had

never before encountered such ethnic diversity. Their Chicago neighbor-

hood counted first-generation immigrants from just about everywhere—

Germans, Swedes, Czechs, Poles, and Irish. At first Theo found a job as a

cash boy in a store; then he and Ed worked as newsboys for the summer,

but Sarah ultimately decided that Chicago was not aªordable or right for

her three youngest children and packed them up to move back to Indiana.

It was during this brief stay in Chicago, however, that the twelve-year-

old Theo first came to appreciate his father. It had been four or five years

since Dreiser had actually lived with his father for any length of time, and

as a result, the boy was well on his way to becoming a “lapsed Catholic.”

(He was still in his middle teens when he made his last confession.)27 But

in spite of John Paul’s fanatical devotion to the Church, he now struck his

son as sincere, honest, and intelligent, as well as clever in his assessments

of and remarks about their neighbors. In addition, for the first time Dreiser

felt sorry for his father, not only as a dupe of Catholicism but—and worse—

as a victim in so-called democratic America of economic forces beyond his

control. Later, while writing Dawn, he suspected that his father had been

clinically depressed.

The adolescent Dreiser also became more acutely aware of the opposite

sex at this time. Looking back on his pubescence from middle age, he con-

fessed that “for the second, third and fourth decades of my life— or from

fifteen to thirty-five—there appeared to be a toxic something in form

itself—that of the female of the species where beautiful—that could eªect

veritable paroxysms of emotion and desire in me.” His experience in

Chicago was tentative, however. He became interested in a girl on his

block—“a gay, shapely, buxom, young hoyden of perhaps ten or twelve.”28

But before he could get anywhere with the girl, a rival cornered him and

struck him, cutting his lip. Dreiser was not a strong youth, tall and gan-

gling, then neither physically nor temperamentally able to defend him-

self, and so he retreated. Afterward, he was enraged and mortified, at both

his attacker and his helplessness to defend himself.

–

In September of 1883, the Hoosier odyssey of Dreiser’s youth and adoles-

cence took him to Warsaw, in the northeastern part of the state, not far

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1 5

from where Sarah’s brother and his family lived. Thirty-five miles to the

east lay the city of Fort Wayne, where Dreiser’s parents had lived as new-

lyweds. Warsaw had several lakes, and two of them—Center and Pike—

came close enough to shape some of its street configurations. The town’s

many venues for boating, fishing, and swimming made it a popular sum-

mer resort. Dreiser remembered Warsaw—where he lived between the ages

of thirteen and sixteen—as “one of the most agreeable minor residence

towns” he had ever known. The Kosciusko County courthouse, a magnifi-

cent structure of native sandstone towering 160 feet and topped with a

square clock tower with faces on all four sides, stood at the center of a pub-