he told an interviewer from the New York Times the next week, “is silly.”52
Anyway, using de Maupassant’s style to tell a tale of immorality in Amer-
ica had already been tried, without commercial success, by Kate Chopin in
The Awakening.
–
If Dreiser had been simply known as the author of Sister Carrie before 1907,
he was now quietly famous for it. By September his publisher had sold more
than 4,600 copies, earning the author more than $800. A year later, Gros-
set & Dunlap took over the book, purchasing both unbound sheets and
plates from Dodge. The firm reprinted 10,000 copies and sold over half of
them in 1908. In the meantime, Dreiser was getting restless at the Broadway.
His renewed reputation may have contributed to his desire for a bigger
challenge (and salary) in the magazine world. An editor friend of Dreiser’s
at Munsey’s, John O’Hara Cosgrave, perhaps sensing the situation, recom-
mended him to George W. Wilder, president of Butterick Publications.
Wilder’s firm issued three American fashion magazines primarily dedicated
to selling tissue-paper dress patterns, the Delineator, the Designer, and New Idea for Women. Wilder, a flamboyant businessman always on the lookout
for publicity for his magazines, which boasted a combined circulation of
1.8 million, wanted an idea man as much as an editor. Dreiser, with both
his success as a magazinist and his reemerging reputation as a writer, seemed
a perfect match. Dreiser met with Wilder in his o‹ces atop the Butterick
Building just above Washington Square at Spring and MacDougal Streets
in June 1907 and was hired at a salary of $7,000 a year.53
Installed in a large o‹ce heavy with woodwork and polished black fur-
niture, Dreiser at first controlled only the Delineator but was editor-in-chief
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 8 7
of all three magazines by 1908. The magazines worked (on a much larger
scale, with more than 42,000 manuscripts a year under consideration to
one extent or another) in the same way as Ev’ry Month had. That is, they
sold a particular product by publishing features that encouraged the pur-
chase of the company’s product and its ethos, in this case dress patterns
and the glory of clothes and fashion. Dreiser brought in as contributors
such recognizable names as Woodrow Wilson, Mrs. William Howard Taft,
Jack London, and William Jennings Bryan (whose eªorts for the silver
standard Dreiser had admired in the 1890s). Even Arthur Henry was called
up for duty to furnish the lyrics for some sentimental songs. Other for-
mer friends and associates who contributed included Peter McCord, now
married and working as an illustrator for a newspaper in New Jersey, and
Joseph H. Coates, editor of the Era, to which Dreiser had contributed in
1903.54 The novelist-turned-editor had learned his editor’s lessons well at
Broadway, for under his watch nothing was allowed in the Butterick pub-
lications that might oªend. Usually 150 pages in length and filled with draw-
ings of women’s clothing, The Delineator was dedicated, Dreiser wrote in
the September issue, not only to the female’s mastering her own sartorial
destiny but “to strengthening her in her moral fight for righteousness in
the world.” “The Delineator buys things of an idealistic turn,” he told one
correspondent. “We like sentiment, we like humor, we like realism, but it
must be tinged with su‹cient idealism to make it all of a truly uplifting
character.”55 The author of Sister Carrie was still on holiday from the nether
world of realism.
Since most of the Delineator readers were mothers, many of newborn
children, one of the first series Dreiser commissioned focused on the proper
care and feeding of infants. It was in this endeavor, ironically, that he first
met Henry Louis Mencken, nine years his junior. Mencken, a newspaper-
man with a book on George Bernard Shaw already to his credit, had read
Sister Carrie in 1901 and may have even been the author of a review in the
Baltimore Sun of June 26, 1907, comparing the novel to the late Frank Nor-
ris’s McTeague in terms of having “the same power and brutality.”56 The
child care articles were published under the name of Dr. Leonard K. Hirsh-
berg, not a pseudonym but the name of an actual Baltimore pediatrician
who drew up rough drafts that Mencken silently rewrote. Before the Age
of Spock in America, the articles insisted, among other things, that babies
needed to cry at least twenty minutes a day for the mere sake of exercise.
In the essay “The Nursing Baby,” mothers were told that the infant was “an
extremely delicate organism” that should be handled with care and as sel-
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 8 8
dom as possible: “The young mother who, in the excess of her pride and
love, cuddles her baby to her breast and showers kisses upon it by the half-
hour makes a pretty picture, it must be admitted, but it cannot be main-
tained that the little one is benefited by the caresses.” On the contrary, “her
every kiss helps to make it nervous and irritable and prepares the way for
disease.” The articles instructed that there were diªerent kinds of crying
the mother ought to learn to recognize. They also advised that “the young
wife ought not to take the advice of the grandmothers and women in the
neighborhood” and “the mother should not make a slave of herself wait-
ing on the child, but clothe it in some comfortable manner and let it fight
out its own troubles.”57
Just how Dreiser squared this advice with his own excessive need for
motherly aªection as a child is not known. Nor is it altogether clear why
the cigar-smoking, beer-drinking bachelor Mencken was squandering his
talent on such a topic, but he was already in search of horizons beyond mere
newspaper work. Not only was Dreiser, a known literary quantity, the gen-
eral editor of a magazine enterprise as influential as Ladies’ Home Journal,
but because of his complicated Dodge contract for Sister Carrie, he was, in
addition to his editorial duties for Butterick, now part owner and editorial
director of B. W. Dodge Company. Dreiser was Mencken’s first big literary
connection in New York, which would lead him in later years to his coeditor-
ship with George Jean Nathan of The Smart Set. In September Dreiser had
expressed the interest of his publishing firm (quite without his partner
Dodge’s compliance) in Mencken’s next book, on the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche.58 The two corresponded formally for almost a year over
the baby series and finally met sometime in the spring of 1908. No record
of Mencken’s impressions survives, but in the 1920s Dreiser remembered
meeting in his well-appointed editor’s o‹ce “a taut, ruddy, blue-eyed, snub-
nosed youth of twenty-eight or nine whose brisk gait and ingratiating smile
proved to me at once enormously intriguing and amusing.”
“More than anything else,” Dreiser recalled “he reminded me of a spoiled
and petted and possibly over-financed brewer’s or wholesale grocer’s son who
was out for a lark. With the sang-froid of a Caesar or a Napoleon he made
himself comfortable in a large and impressive chair which was designed pri-
marily to reduce the over-confidence of the average beginner.” Wearing yel-
low shoes (still fashionable in Baltimore if not then New York) and a bright
tie, the Baltimore cigar maker’s son soon won over completely the great man
from the provinces of Indiana. “All thought of the original purpose of the
conference was at once dismissed,” Dreiser remembered fondly, “and in-
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 8 9
stead we proceeded to palaver and yoo-hoo anent the more general phases
and ridiculosities of life, with the result that an understanding based on a
mutual liking was established, and from then on I counted him among those
whom I most prized—temperamentally as well as intellectually.”59
Dreiser wrote in Twelve Men and elsewhere that his life took several im-
portant turns and that the change was always signaled by his meeting a man,
not a woman.60 There had been Peter McCord and to a lesser extent Dick
Wood in St. Louis, where he got the first hint of his literary aspirations.
And there had been Arthur Henry in Toledo and New York, who had driven
him to realize his singular talent in one of its finest moments. Now the man
Mencken extended his influence, or at least he would try.
d o w n h i l l a n d u p
1 9 0
n i n e
Return of the Novelist
–
For all his floundering round in the commercial world
he remained an artist still.
T H E “ G E N I U S ”
dreiser found mencken at a time when he was losing others. Paul, of
course, his ever reliable brother, had died. And even though Dreiser used