haven’t the drag on the public—that’s all.”44
Upon Richards’s return to Paris, the two men traveled to the Riviera and
Monte Carlo, where they were joined by Sir Hugh Lane, a Dublin art col-
lector whom Dreiser watched gamble away sums that made his own mea-
ger but nevertheless painful losses at the gaming tables seem almost in-
significant. After a visit to Nice with Richards and Lane, he and Richards
went on to Italy, seeing on the way to Rome that most popular of sites for
American tourists—the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Later on Dreiser remarked
that, so far as he could tell, the principal idea of visiting Europe for most
Americans was to say that they had been abroad. He stayed two weeks at
the Grand Continental Hotel and again took in the usual tourist sights him-
self. He found St. Peter’s architecturally overwhelming but not artistically
beautiful. One of the last things he did was to participate in a papal audi-
ence. His father, of course, had subscribed to papal infallibility, and here
at least the son wasn’t altogether so brazen in his disbelief and disapproval
of the Church as he had been on other occasions and would be again. Nat-
urally, he condemned “the true history” of the Church and even joked qui-
etly with other members of the audience while waiting for the appearance
of Pope Pius X. Yet when that particular Holy Father, whose opposition to
both ecumenism and modernism earned him an early sainthood, “scarcely
looked” at him, Dreiser seemed to feel—if ever so fleetingly—a sense of
his own “critical unworthiness.”45
In Florence he visited the U‹zi, the Pitti, and the Belle Arti and walked
along the Arno. “I should always think of the Arno,” he wrote, “as it looked
this evening. . . . I should always see the children playing on the green banks,
quite as I used to play on the Wabash and the Tippecanoe.” He visited, among
other Italian cities, Milan, Venice, and Perugia before passing through
Switzerland to the Fatherland. Dreiser reached Germany by March 12, and
shortly—after a mistaken detour to Mayence—arrived at his father’s birth-
place in Mayen. Mayen was a still partially walled city of eight thousand
inhabitants, “somewhere between the Moselle and the Rhine at Coblenz”—
and still almost totally Catholic, having been one of the earliest German
towns to convert to Catholicism in the fourteenth century. He wrote
Mencken on March 25, “I struck my father’s birth place yesterday and found
real German beer to say nothing of a quaint old village which is 900 years
old.” The only relatives he found, however, were in “the local graveyard,”
which had actually been turned into the city park. Some of the Stations of
the Cross remained along the central pathway, and there were also a few
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2 1 3
old gravestones. One of the relations he found among them, to his “real
shock,” was Theodore Dreiser (1820–1882). “I think,” he wrote in A Trav-
eler at Forty, “as clear a notion as I ever had of how my grave will look af-
ter I am gone and how utterly unimportant both life and death are, any-
how, came to me.” He also located the grave of John Dreiser, one of his
father’s twenty-one siblings by three wives.46
After visiting the other, newer cemetery in search of antecedents, he wan-
dered into the town to find it rudely updated by “another type of life.” The
medieval city had largely given way to such modern artifacts as a Singer
Sewing Machine business, a bookstore featuring only relatively new books
and current titles, a newspaper o‹ce, and a movie theater. Aside from the
town castle built into the mammoth city wall, which he visited, not that
much of the past, not even a Dreiser grave with a birth date before 1800,
remained. After spending the night in a hotel just outside the gates of the
old city, he left Mayen “with a sorrowful backward glance.” He had found
no living Dreisers, only his ancestral home. But he had found St. Clement’s,
the church his father had attended as a boy, along with the house of the
priest and possibly the “identical cherry tree” under which young John
Paul Dreiser had eaten the forbidden fruit and been subsequently exposed
by his stepmother. According to local legend, the church’s twisted steeple
(a construction flaw replicated when Mayen was rebuilt following World
War II) had been the work of the devil himself, who had agreed to finance
the construction of the church because he thought the townspeople were
building a pub. When he discovered it was to be a church, he twisted the
tiled bell tower.47
The following day he was in Berlin, where he would met Hanscha Jower.
He told Richards that he was again becoming anxious to return to the States.
Earlier, he had threatened to go home, saying, “No more Europe on the
worry basis for me.”48 Although Richards had helped plan the finances for
his trip in which he could cash letters of credit at hotels along the way,
Dreiser ultimately thought Richards had gotten him over his head finan-
cially. He went on to Amsterdam and then to Paris, where “Barfleur” gen-
tly chided him for not trusting his future earning power in his books. It
was not just a question of running out of money before he got home, how-
ever, but of not having much left of the funds advanced by both Century
and Harper’s on which to live once there. He passed up a planned walking
tour of the South of England to take a boat home from Dover in mid-April.
Dreiser boarded the Kroonland, sailing under the American flag, on April
13, but not before seriously flirting with the idea of taking the Titanic, one
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2 1 4
of the faster “smart” boats which had left on its first and fated voyage on
April 9. Later, he told his friend Floyd Dell, “I missed the Titanic by two
days thank heaven & I was so anxious beforehand to see how it would be
on a new boat like that.” But since money was a concern, Richards sug-
gested the slower boat.49 On April 16, the Kroonland learned by wireless
that the Titanic had hit an iceberg oª the coast of Newfoundland, and al-
most two-thirds of the 2,800 passengers were reported to have drowned.
Actually, there were only slightly more than 2,200 onboard, out of which
1,513 perished, but that fact certainly wouldn’t have eased the terror of those
currently at sea on other vessels and possibly headed over the same sea route.
Indeed, the reported dead, and even the actual count, far exceeded the
Kroonland’s total passenger capacity of 1,162.
The captain ordered that the news be kept secret until the ship reached
New York, but one of the gentlemen aboard, Herr Salz, “busy about every-
thing and everybody,” Dreiser recorded in his typescript, “had gleaned it as
a sea secret from the wireless man” by providing him cigars. Dreiser was
seated with several other passengers in the card and smoking room as Salz
entered the compartment, “very mysterious-looking.” When he insisted that
the men among them come out on deck so that the ladies could not hear
him, one joked that “perhaps Taft had been killed, or the Standard Oil Com-
pany has failed.” The “whole, healthy, debonair manner” of the group
changed instantly upon receiving the news. The overtaking gloom thick-
ened further when one noted that their ship had another week left on the
same deadly seas. “The terror of the sea,” Dreiser recalled, “had come swiftly
and directly home to all. I am satisfied that there was not a man of all the
company who heard but felt a strange sinking sensation as he thought of
the endless wastes of the sea outside—its depths, the terror of drowning in
the dark and cold.” As he went to his berth thinking of the horror of it all,
he felt a great rage “in my heart against the fortuity of life.” The women
on board eventually heard the news but pretended not to know. Previously
gregarious passengers became suddenly reserved, and others seemed almost
manic in making repeated reference to the catastrophe. “The philosophers
of the company,” he wrote, “were unanimously agreed that as the Titanic
had suªered this great disaster through carelessness on the part of her
o‹cers, no doubt our own chances of safely reaching shore were thereby
enhanced.”50
It wasn’t until they reached Sandy Hook at the entrance of New York’s
harbor that they finally heard the full story from the boarding pilot, his
pockets bulging with newspaper reports of the tragedy. Many passengers
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