The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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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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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