years later. He also “enjoyed his a›uence, his power at Butterick.”14
By the spring of 1910 Jug had fallen ill with rheumatic fever. She turned
over her social role to Annie, who apparently saw no reason to mistrust
Dreiser, her boss at Butterick, and so proved to be an inadequate chaper-
one for her daughter. Thelma, too, claimed that she was unaware of
Dreiser’s romantic interest in her, though there is evidence to think that
this old-age view of her adolescent self was a defense against impropriety.
At least one witness has testified that “Thelma was likewise gone on” Dreiser.
One night while dancing at the Yacht Club, Dreiser suddenly asked her
whether she enjoyed dancing with him as much as with the younger men
in their party. Thelma indicated that he must know she preferred him, but
r e t u r n o f t h e n o v e l i s t
1 9 7
she intended the response, she later said, as completely platonic because
she had always felt “perfectly safe” with him. At this point, he asked her to
call him “Theo,” and then he kissed her.15
At first, her mother thought nothing of his subsequent doting on
Thelma, but as it became apparent that Dreiser was getting ready to leave
his wife over her daughter, Annie Cudlipp went into swift action. Either
by trickery or with Thelma’s cooperation, she dispatched her daughter to
Saluda, North Carolina, to be watched over by friends who also intercepted
Dreiser’s urgent love letters. Meanwhile, she issued Dreiser an ultimatum:
either he give up his pursuit of Thelma or she would disclose the whole
matter to the Butterick management, where she knew that Erman Ridg-
way, one of the o‹cers above Dreiser in the company, was having an aªair
with a young female employee by the name of Ann Watkins. Dreiser re-
fused, and as a result he was asked to resign his position to avoid scandal
for the company. Mrs. Cudlipp took a year’s leave of absence from her job
and sailed for England with Thelma.16 Dreiser went to pieces, perhaps ap-
proaching the emotional instability of 1903.
He had fallen hard in love but was eªectively denied his prize by a woman
who, it turned out, could be more irrational than he in his worst moments,
for Mrs. Cudlipp later committed suicide, as did her two sons. (Thelma
eventually married twice, the second time to Charles S. Whitman, who be-
came governor of New York and who apparently abused her both mentally
and physically.)17 By October 1910 Dreiser had separated from Jug, even
without benefit of Thelma, his “Flower Face,” a term of endearment he had
once applied to Jug. From the Park Avenue Hotel on October 3, he told
Thelma: “You now see before you a homeless man.” He wondered why she
hadn’t written, but of course his letters never reached her, at least not at the
time of the crisis. Her mother had feigned her approval of a marriage if he
and Thelma waited one year. When it almost instantly became clear that
she had no intention of agreeing to anything of the sort, Dreiser got pan-
icky and suªered several sleepless nights. “I am so worried and harassed I
scarcely know which way to turn,” he told Thelma in another dead letter.
“Sweet you don’t seem to understand that it is proximity that is essential
to me—nearness to you.” A few days later, he wrote her mother that Jug
had suggested over the phone that he return to her for ten days (“as a boarder
at the apartment”) so that she “be allowed, in appearance at least, to desert
me.” But Mrs. Cudlipp would have none of it, and Dreiser was already re-
duced, it seemed, to the little boy in Indiana who once fainted when his
mother pretended to leave her children. “Oh, Honeypot be kind—be kind
r e t u r n o f t h e n o v e l i s t
1 9 8
to me,” he pleaded with Thelma in a letter read only by her mother, “you
said once you would once be mother & sister and sweetheart to me. I am
a little pleading boy now in need of your love, your mother love.” For the
second time in his life, Dreiser contemplated suicide.18
–
Dreiser’s emotional breakdown, if that’s what it was, didn’t last long. What
saved him this time was his writing, whereas in 1903 it was his writing—
or the poor reception of Sister Carrie—that had damned him. Four days
after prostrating himself before his teenaged beauty, he told Mencken he
was considering “several good things.” He might have thought of getting
another editor’s job, but “first-oª I should finish my book.” Incredibly, he
did just that. On February 24, 1911, he told Mencken he had not only
finished Jennie Gerhardt but was halfway through another, which would
become The “Genius” in 1915. “I expect to try out this book game,” he told
his friend, “for about four or five books after which unless I am enjoying a
good income from them I will quit.” Mencken replied that it was “Bully
news!” reminding him of his opinion (“I have often said so in print”) that
Sister Carrie was one of “the best novels this fair land has ever produced.”
And to encourage Dreiser even further, he told him: “Whether you know
it or not, ‘Sister Carrie’ has begun to soak in.”19 Dreiser evidently believed
it. In a most remarkable burst of activity, bottled up for the last decade, he
finished a draft of The “Genius” that spring and almost immediately began
his fourth novel, The Financier (1912), which set out to fictionalize the en-
tire career of the traction king Charles T. Yerkes, Jr. Ultimately Dreiser re-
worked the tale, extending it to The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947) and
cutting The Financier by one third for its 1927 edition, the one still
reprinted today.
By the time he told Mencken he had finished Jennie, he had moved—in
the late fall of 1910 —from his hotel on Park Avenue to 608 Riverside Drive,
where he rented a room in the home of Elias and Emma Rosenthal. Elias
Rosenthal was an attorney and a patron of the arts; his wife was a writer.
Together they embraced the world of art as it reflected the more fashion-
able and glamorous aspects of New York in such magazines as the Delin-
eator. In the receding memory of the assassination of President McKinley
in 1901, this art scene also included socialists. It was possibly in the com-
pany of the Rosenthals—and that of their attractive twenty-year-old
r e t u r n o f t h e n o v e l i s t
1 9 9
daughter Lillian, a musician—that the newly “single” Dreiser had attended
the Anarchists’ Ball in Greenwich Village on Christmas 1910. There he met
a young writer by the name of Sinclair Lewis. “Red” Lewis and Dreiser were
to have a stormy relationship during their literary careers. Whether Dreiser
was ever aware of it, the often sarcastic Lewis had already criticized him for
editing a ladies’ magazine, saying “‘Sister Carrie’ is not the sort of lady who
is readily associated with household recipes and a children’s page.”20
He also met the diva of the event, Emma Goldman, then at the pinna-
cle of her career as an anarchist, notorious for her personal history as well
as her flamboyant lectures against capitalism. Not only had she possibly
been associated with McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz; she had also been
the lover of Alexander Berkman, who had tried to assassinate Henry Clay
Frick following the Homestead strike in Pittsburgh in 1892. Dreiser, as we
will recall, had arrived in that city almost in the immediate aftermath of
the strike, and his impressions of the spectacle of penniless steel workers
locked out of the Homestead plant would remain with him throughout his
life. Goldman, just two years older than Dreiser at forty, had also shared
another site of social injustice, the penitentiary of Blackwell’s Island in the
East River. Living opposite the island in a shabby flat in 1901, he and Jug
had watched their prospects dwindle with the suppression of Sister Carrie.
Emma had served a year there in 1904 after being convicted on charges of
inciting to riot. Dreiser would have a future with this anarchist as well as
with Lewis, who was then only dabbling in the movement. For now, as one
witness at the ball reported, Dreiser and Goldman got into a discussion on
“the advancement of anarchism.” The recent editor-in-chief of Butterick
Publications, in the words of one of the guests that evening, “waggled his
scrawny forefinger, and looked superiority through his heavy, gold rimmed,
scholastic eye glasses; but Emma sent back hot shot—speaking as quietly
as the haus frau she seemed to be” as she insisted on the “complete and im-