Maisie Knew (“to drag an exile unwillingly home”), Norris’s McTeague, and
Wharton’s The House of Mirth, among others. He placed it ahead of Sister
Carrie as well, which he faulted for its two almost disparate plots. “In the
midst of the story of Carrie, Mr. Dreiser paused to tell the story of
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Hurstwood—an astonishingly vivid and tragic story, true enough, but still
one that broke the back of the other. In ‘Jennie Gerhardt’ he falls into no
such overelaboration of episode.” The fact that Mencken preferred Jennie
Gerhardt, which lacks the compelling story of Sister Carrie, suggests his my-
opia in fully appreciating Dreiser’s genius—probably equaled only by Crane
in America—in dramatizing such a brutal picture of inhumanity that is all
too human.
We have in this review the seeds of future discontent between these by
then fast friends and advocates of a truly veristic American literature. For in
his preference for Jennie Gerhardt, Mencken was objecting to more than the
two plots in Sister Carrie. This son of middle-class parents in the largely Ger-
man Baltimore was a literary progressive but also a social conservative who
extolled Jennie’s strength of character, which Carrie entirely lacks. Jennie’s
story, he wrote in The Smart Set, “loses nothing in validity by the fact that
life is meaningless, a tragedy without a moral, a joke without a point.” Jen-
nie was not a moral tale—it had no more moral than a string quartet or the
first book of Euclid, he said—but in fact this naturalistic novel does have a
moral or at least the concession that good exists in places in the universe, re-
gardless of whether it is triumphant.31 As we shall see, Dreiser was to find
this glimmer of goodness in the worst scenarios—with his play The Hand
of the Potter (1916), for example, which Mencken would roundly condemn.
Mencken also reviewed the novel in the Baltimore Evening Sun of No-
vember 27 and the Los Angeles Times of December 10. At the end of Novem-
ber, Jennie Gerhardt had sold almost 5,000 copies; by the end of the year,
7,712. This was certainly a marvelous contrast to the initial figures for
Sister Carrie, yet both Dreiser and Harper’s were somewhat disappointed,
the latter even fearing that Dreiser’s reputation from his first novel was
dampening the sales of the next. For Dreiser the disappointment was partly
financial; he had hoped to travel to London to continue his research on the
Yerkes saga, but he felt it was beyond his means. Even though he had writ-
ten almost three books in the last year, the idea of returning to the world
of editing was never far from his mind. It was at this time that a monocled
English publisher named Grant Richards entered his life.
–
Richards, a sophisticated Edwardian at home in the best salons and hotels
of Europe, had in 1901 made the first of his annual visits to the United States
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in search of American manuscripts to publish in England. He was partic-
ularly enamored of the novels of Frank Norris, especially after the publi-
cation of McTeague, to which Richards had secured the English rights. At
a luncheon that spring, he and Norris discussed the future arrangement of
his other Doubleday books in England, when Norris suddenly announced
that he could tell Richards about “an author worth two of me.”32 He was
referring, according to Richards, to Dreiser and the di‹culty he was hav-
ing with Doubleday, who had not yet given in to the idea of publishing Sis-
ter Carrie. That would place their meeting in 1900 instead of 1901, so there
is some reason to doubt Richards’s complete accuracy in his characteriza-
tion of Dreiser and their aªairs. Richards was also a friend of Doubleday
and his wife, but in his memoirs he repeated the Dreiser assertion that Neltje
Doubleday had been instrumental in the Doubleday suppression of Sister
Carrie. It was at this time that Richards first read the novel, but he did not
make an oªer on it because Heinemann was already committed to its trun-
cated version.
Richards also read the first twenty chapters of Jennie Gerhardt two years
after first meeting Dreiser in 1906 (not 1911 as it has been stated in earlier
biographies).33 Not long after that novel finally appeared in 1911, the two
men met once again. Informed that Richards would reach New York in early
November, Dreiser left an inscribed copy of Jennie Gerhardt at his hotel
shortly before he arrived. In a note giving his address and telephone num-
ber so that they might breakfast following his arrival, Dreiser wrote: “I hope
if you are interviewed you will say something definite about me and Jen-
nie. It seems almost impossible to make my fellow Americans understand
that I am alive.” When the two met the following day, Richards, in spite of
Dreiser’s sour note, took it for granted that the author of the new book
with such positive reviews ought to be in the best of spirits. Yet even though
the book was being reviewed fairly well, Dreiser did not feel it was going
to bring him a great deal of money— or the fame he craved and had de-
served since 1900. He was also balked in completing The Financier, prom-
ised to but not yet contracted by Harper’s, because he could not aªord to
follow the career of Yerkes to Europe where it had come to an end with the
mogul’s death in 1905.34
Besides a genuine admiration of his talent and a sincere desire to en-
courage its continued development, Richards was possessed of the not-so-
concealed motive of getting The Financier away from Harper’s and into the
hands of the Century Company, where he was informally connected. Ac-
cordingly, he first pulled Dreiser out of his funk and persuaded him to in-
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2 0 8
sist on an advance from Harper’s for The Financier— on the not entirely
remote chance that the firm might balk and lose it to Century. But after
seeing the first thirty-nine chapters of The Financier, Harper’s (which was
also reissuing a thousand copies of Sister Carrie) gave Dreiser a $2,000 ad-
vance as well as another $500 against future royalties on Jennie Gerhardt.
This by itself was probably enough to bankroll Dreiser’s European visit,
but Richards also arranged for Century to put up $1,500 for three travel ar-
ticles for its magazine and an option on a possible book on his impressions
of Europe, which would become A Traveler at Forty in 1913.35
“Things are moving around here in a peculiar way,” Dreiser told Mencken
on November 11. “I may go to Europe on the 22nd of the month for the
Century Company—London, Paris, Rome & The Riviera!” Confidentially,
he acknowledged that the company would like to get his future books.
Richards had done his job well, as Dreiser seemed a new man almost over-
night, though the ups and downs of his shifting moods were nothing new.
The smooth-talking Englishman even suggested Dreiser had a good chance
for the next Nobel Prize in literature, but no American was to win this prize
for many years. (Dreiser’s only sense of consolation in this regard may have
been that it was won in 1912 by a German, Gerhart Hauptmann.) Mencken
merely ignored Richards’s wild suggestion about Dreiser’s winning the prize
when he congratulated his friend on the trip and said he hoped to be in
London in the spring himself.36
The Century Company held a send-oª party for Dreiser, and he and
Richards sailed for England on the Mauretania on November 22, 1911.
Dreiser would remain in Europe until the following April and visit not only
England, but France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. And he would re-
turn with plenty of copy for the three Century Magazine articles as well as
the book. Indeed, he kept a diary while abroad and also wrote part of the
103 chapters of the draft version of A Traveler at Forty; these were reduced
to 53 for publication. Much of the excised material contained “woman
stuª,” as Dreiser told Mencken, but the manuscript was also simply too
long and redundant in its Dreiserian way of piling fact upon fact. The Cen-
tury editors (strongly encouraged by Richards, who sought to protect his
privacy) objected “like hell” to his accounts of interviews or outright trysts
with prostitutes. They also felt there was in general too much attention
paid not only to the seamy side of European life but its rampant poverty
among the laboring classes. Furthermore, the majority of the poverty was
found in England, where Dreiser exhibited symptoms of his later Anglo-