The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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