The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

Arthur Henry’s contributions in the Delineator from time to time, their

friendship too had all but died. His 1908 meeting with Mencken also co-

incided with the loss of another longtime friend and soul mate. Peter Mc-

Cord died November 10 of pneumonia in Newark, where he was living

with his wife and two children and working as an artist and cartoonist for

the Evening News. He was only thirty-eight, a year older than Dreiser. They

had known each other since their Globe-Democrat days. Dreiser left St.

Louis in 1894, but the Missouri native had remained until 1898, when he

relocated to Philadelphia to work for the North American, then the city’s

leading newspaper. Two years later he moved to Newark, and the two old

friends—who had no doubt also seen each other in Philadelphia during

Dreiser’s crisis there—took up their companionship again on a regular ba-

sis, meeting for dinner in homes now appointed with wives instead of the

bohemian atmosphere of Peter and Dick Wood’s atelier in St. Louis.

In Twelve Men, where McCord is the basis for “Peter,” its opening sketch,

Dreiser described his friend as wonderfully crazy—crazy like a poet. “I al-

ways felt,” Dreiser wrote, “as though I were in the presence of a great per-

sonage, not one who was reserved or pompous but a loose bubbling tem-

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perament, wise beyond his years or day, and so truly great that perhaps be-

cause of the intensity and immense variety of his interests he would never

shine in a world in which the most intensive speculation, and that of a purely

commercial character, was the grand role.” Dreiser, interestingly, was able

to make the transition into the world of money, at least for a time as we

shall see. But Peter died leaving his wife and children in relative poverty.

When Dreiser came forward to manage or oversee the funeral arrangements,

he must have been reminded of the di‹culty he had encountered when he

buried his mother in Chicago in 1890. McCord’s mother came east to see

that her Catholic son was given a burial “in consecrated ground” as well as

a proper funeral Mass. But Peter “had never been a good Catholic,” Dreiser

recalled in Twelve Men, “and there was trouble” with the presiding priest.

As he had done on behalf of his mother, he “threatened the good father

with an appeal to the diocesan bishop on the ground of plain common sense

and courtesy to a Catholic family, if not charity to a tortured mother and

wife. . . . All along I felt as if a great crime had been committed by some

one, foul murder. I could not get it out of my mind, and it made me an-

gry, not sad.”1

It was around this time that Dreiser first realized that he had moved away

from another friend of St. Louis days—his wife, Jug, who was now also

employed at Butterick in a minor capacity. More than two years older than

he and nearing forty, the conventional Jug must have seemed an impedi-

ment to his sense of freedom as an artist, if not as the respected chief edi-

tor of three fashion magazines. Many years later, he told his niece Vera, Ed’s

daughter, that he had remained with Jug much longer than he should

have—that she had by her hidebound nature deprived him of experiences

he felt he as an artist required. She objected to various types of individuals

and artists whom he entertained, or tried to, at home. Jug barred alcoholic

beverages, even wine, from her home. She may have also had racial reser-

vations, for Vera told W. A. Swanberg that in “wanting to discuss matters

with certain people, TD barred no one because of race, color, creed, etc.

There were times when he was expecting certain people when Jug went so

far as to put a sign on the door do not disturb. TD said she made [a]

rumpus like this several times.” Once in later years, while having lunch at

the Algonquin Hotel with a friend, she felt compelled to get up from their

main course and leave when the actor Paul Robeson sat down with friends

at an adjoining table.2

Jug was nevertheless for years Dreiser’s emotional and domestic anchor.

While narrow in her worldview, she was also well-read and something of a

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romantic—“truly cultured” and “charming,” according to Vera. Jug moth-

ered Dreiser much the way his own mother had. She handled money bet-

ter than he did—sometimes too well, for he once found her holding back

household money for a secret savings fund. Perhaps like Angela Blue, her

counterpart in The “Genius,” the former Sara White had hoped that a preg-

nancy would stabilize their deteriorating relationship. But Jug never got preg-

nant. For one thing, Dreiser practiced coitus interruptus. For another, there

is the possibility that he was sterile.3 It is not known whether Dreiser—like

Eugene Witla of The “Genius” —enjoyed extramarital trysts during the early

years of their living together as husband and wife. But after ten years their

union was becoming a marriage in name only for him and a matter of nerv-

ous surveillance for her. If he had cheated on her, Jug may have reacted the

way Angela does after Eugene has strayed and been caught. “While she said

nothing, agreed that she would forget, Eugene had the consciousness all the

while that she wasn’t forgetting, that she was secretly reproaching him.”4

Their life together would go on a little longer, until somebody as youthful

and compelling as a Carrie Meeber came along.

Meanwhile, Dreiser was a busy man. Not only was he working for But-

terick, but on the side he purchased the failing Bohemian Magazine in the

spring of 1909. He told Dorothy Dudley that he had hoped to use the mag-

azine as a home for material that he couldn’t use in the conventional De-

lineator, Designer, or New Idea for Women. 5 Dreiser’s Bohemian survived for only four monthly issues—from September to December. Mencken contributed “In Defense of Profanity” to the November issue, a piece that al-

though initially humorous in its point that the savage is “utterly incapable

of eªective swearing” because his vocabulary is so limited and thus unimag-

inative, ultimately falls flat in its argument. “When he arrives at that pin-

nacle of anger which just precedes the resort to assassination, he calls his

enemy a cow or a rat—a banal, and even pathetic exhibition of will with-

out deed. The annihilating crash of a civilized man’s profanity is beyond

him.” Mencken turns more serious when he points the finger of responsi-

bility for the prohibition of profanity at clergymen and women—“the prin-

cipal opponents of profanity, like the principal foes of alcohol.” He cites

the fifth chapter of Zechariah, which is the Biblical basis for hundreds and

thousands of “homilies against swearing,” saying that the verses condemn

perjury (“Him that sweareth falsely by my name”), not profanity.6 Mencken

would be more successful in arguing against the literary philistines.

Dreiser got contributions from other writers, popular in their day but

forgotten in ours, novelists such as Willard Huntington Wright and George

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Bronson Howard; the list also included George Jean Nathan, the drama

critic and future collaborator with Mencken on The Smart Set. But as in

his Ev’ry Month days, Dreiser may have written much of the copy for the

Bohemian himself. The collections of short pieces (such as Mencken’s on

swearing ) appear under the general heading of “At the Sign of the Lead

Pencil,” and much of it has Dreiser’s touch. He complains under “In the

Days of Discovery” about inherited wealth, saying the United States will

not have “puªed-up inheritors” on the one hand and “millions of bond slaves

on the other.” Yet it is also in this issue that Dreiser expresses an admira-

tion for supermen such as he would create in Frank Algernon Cowperwood,

who earned their own way by their natural gifts. “It may be,” he wrote un-

der the subheading of “The Day of Special Privileges,” “that [certain] men

are born to rule, that they come stamped with the imprint of hierarchies

and powers of which our philosophies know nothing. At any rate, they

come. Does any one really, honestly suppose that a man like J. P. Morgan

or Thomas F. Ryan [the New York streetcar magnate and financier] can be

ruled by the same principles and ideas which govern the carpenter or the

cobbler in the back street?”7 Dreiser’s concern was twofold: that the great

and gifted individual not be overregulated or stifled by society; and that a

society of carpenters and street cobblers not be exploited by the unleashed