phobia. In one observation admitted to the printed chapters, Dreiser writes
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that he “never saw such sickly, shabby, run-down-at-the-heels, decayed
figures in all my life.”37
Dreiser began the original Traveler with a description of his current res-
idence at 3609 Broadway, near the new 145th Street subway station (“six
pretty rooms and a bath”), but Century editors wisely cut everything to
the sentence, “I have just turned forty.” It probably seemed unlikely that
Dreiser would have something new to say about Europe since so many
Americans before him had made the Grand Tour; he was, however, no gen-
tleman in that nineteenth-century sense but more like the irreverent Mark
Twain in The Innocents Abroad (1869). This was particularly true with En-
gland, whose inhabitants he noted “have this executive or managerial
gift. . . . They go about colonizing so e‹ciently, industriously.” And he
claimed a certain superiority about America’s servant class. British servants
didn’t “look at one so brutally and critically as does the American menial,”
who seems to say with his eyes that he is his master’s equal or better. “The
American clerk,” Dreiser wrote a little later in his book, “always looks his
possibilities—his problematic future; the English clerk looks as if he were
to be one indefinitely.”38
Also unlike most travel book writers, Dreiser recounts the tale of his meet-
ing with a prostitute in Piccadilly Square not long after his arrival in Lon-
don. The published version, “Lilly: A Girl of the Streets” is chapter 13 of
A Traveler at Forty, condensed and somewhat expurgated from what was
originally two chapters on the subject. Interestingly, when Mencken read
Dreiser’s “travel book,” he correctly thought that parts of it represented “the
best writing you have done since ‘Jennie Gerhardt,’” but he also detected
“a note of reticence,” in which Dreiser began “aªairs which come to noth-
ing.” In this “aªair” Dreiser meets two women, pays oª one with a shilling
to get rid of her, and takes the other, a Welsh woman of about nineteen
(and pregnant, as she later reveals), to a run-down building with private
rooms divided by cheap partitions. He is firm, almost bossy, with her—
expressing his disbelief in her story about having a middle-class family back-
ground and branding her tale about what happens to patrons who pay too
little as “one of the oldest stories of the trade.” He does not engage her serv-
ices but agrees to pay her if she accompanies him to a restaurant where he
plies her with questions about her life on the streets. Afterwards, he buys
her a box of candy, pays her three pounds, and returns her to her “shabby
room.” In an echo of Whitman’s “To a Common Prostitute,” Dreiser writes,
“I had tried to make her feel that I admired her a little and that I was sorry
for her a little.”39
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In the completely excised eighty-fourth and eighty-fifth chapters, the
narrator becomes sexually involved with another prostitute. In Berlin, on
March 26, 1912, he met Hanscha Jower, “large, soft, innocent, mild eye—
like one of Rubens’ women.” About thirty, she reminded him of “an un-
Americanized Jennie Gerhardt.” In Germany in those days the street
woman was not allowed to approach a man with the proposition of her
body. Yet “Any man may accost any unaccompanied woman,” we are told
in the unpublished pages of A Traveler at Forty. “If she does not want him
she does not speak.” Dreiser, the flaneur, watches Hanscha go down the
street and is finally convinced of her profession in the way she circles back
around another segment of the Alexander Platz. This leads to the in-
evitable. “We undress,” he writes in his diary, “and I find her charmingly
formed, quite the most charming I have seen for some time.” He finds her
nature aglow with a “keen but simple understanding of the order of
things.” In his manuscript, he described Hanscha as a “girl or woman [of ]
the type that I think I understand best of all: a vague, wondering soul that
does not understand life at all”—that is, an earth mother who intuits her
way through life the way Sarah Dreiser had navigated her way and that
of her three youngest children. Unlike Lilly, “you would not have assumed
for a moment that [Hanscha] was a street-girl—as distinctly she was not
at heart.”40
Afterward he hears the story of her family life and background—“her
German story”—the familiar one he had already put into Jennie. “Her fa-
ther was a carpenter and her mother—well, just a mother.” She had started
to learn the trade of weaving, as Dreiser’s older sisters had at one point or
another during their time with their father in Terre Haute. The pay was
terrible, though that probably wouldn’t have made any diªerence. “But there
was a young blood in town,” Dreiser writes in chapter 85 of his typescript,
“who fell in love with her, or with whom she fell in love, and who over-
persuaded her.” Like Sylvia, Hanscha had left her bastard child in the care
of her mother and tried working in the mills. The work was dirty. Occa-
sionally, she sold her body for extra cash and eventually became a prosti-
tute.41 “It is so easy for those born in satisfactory circumstances to moral-
ize,” Dreiser concludes. This woman and her circumstance touched him to
the core of his deeply sympathetic reaction to life. As a result, the story of
Hanscha Jower belongs in the published canon of Theodore Dreiser. For
it has the canvas that the “Lilly: A Girl of the Streets” has not—room enough
for Dreiser to engage almost self-consciously his inborn empathy with those
central characters who people his best work. Not the outside moralistic ob-
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2 1 1
server the Century editors made him in the “Lilly” episode, here Dreiser is
freely enamored of both the woman’s flesh and spirit.
–
While still in England, Dreiser spent three weeks at Richards’s country home
at Cookham Dean, Berkshire, and afterwards at the Capitol Hotel in Lon-
don. He visited Oxford, Canterbury, and other tourist sites. At Oxford he
learned from “Barfleur” (Grant’s pseudonym in A Traveler at Forty) where
Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde had lived. (He later met Wilde’s literary ex-
ecutor in Rome.) At Oxford the Indiana college dropout hadn’t changed
his opinion of the knights of the academy. “Here as elsewhere,” he wrote
in the printed book, “I learned that professors were often cads and pedants—
greedy, jealous, narrow, academic.” He also toured the smoky environs of
London’s East End and was glad for the change of countries by January 11,
when he crossed the Channel at Dover. He was greeted, he wrote of his ar-
rival in Calais, with “a line of sparkling French facteurs looking down on
the boat from the platform above—presto! England was gone. Gone all the
solemnity and the politeness of the porters who had brought our luggage
aboard, gone the quiet civility of ship o‹cers and train-men, gone the solid
doughlike quiescence of the whole English race.” Finding the French so an-
imated and colorful after the “gray misty pathos of English life,” Dreiser
felt as if he had suddenly returned to America.42
On their way to Paris, he and Richards stopped in Amiens, whose au-
gust cathedral drew from the ex-Catholic the astonishment “that the faith
of man had ever reared so lovely a thing.” In the City of Light, Dreiser found
the debonair Richards, who was currently between wives, as at home in the
French cafés as he was in English drawing rooms. In the Café de Paris,
“Barfleur was in fine feather and the ladies radiated a charm and a flavor
which immediately attracted attention.” A few days later Richards had to
return to London for two weeks, and Drieser plunged into the treasures of
Paris himself, seeing the Musée de Cluny and the Louvre, and taking a car
out to Père Lachaise—“that wonderful world of the celebrated dead.”43 But
as he pondered the lives and deaths of its famous inhabitants—including
his cherished Balzac—he also fretted over his financial situation. Sales of
Jennie continued to climb, but at a slower pace. He told Richards, who by
December had made clear his hopes of publishing all future works by
Dreiser, “I am not going to be a best seller or even a half seller. . . . Criti-
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2 1 2
cal approval won’t make a sale & critical indiªerence won’t hinder one. I