lic square bounded by Main, Buªalo, Center, and Lake streets. Later, Dreiser
recalled how charmed he had always been by the scene, especially the sound
of the great bell in the clock tower. Two blocks down Buªalo Street stood
Center Lake, with “a handsome boat-house oªering all manner of small
boats for hire.”29 His mother’s parents, aunts, or uncles had lived in the vicin-
ity, and his mother even owned several acres of land somehow left to her
by her estranged parents. For the first time in his life, Dreiser felt that he
and his siblings belonged somewhere.
One clear improvement in Warsaw was that Dreiser got to attend pub-
lic school for the first time. As ever, John Paul had insisted on a Catholic
education, but this time Sarah stood up for her children on the issue. As a
Catholic convert (a fact her son played down in his memoirs) she had orig-
inally supported her husband on this choice. But his financial failure in Sul-
livan and their subsequent hard times had gradually worn down her reli-
gious allegiance; by the time she and the three children left Chicago for
Warsaw, she was closer to the “pagan” Dreiser liked to remember. They were
no longer going to pay for an inferior school, Sarah now asserted, when
they could get a superior one for free. In fact, the public school was right
next to the house they rented after discovering their first choice was next
door to —yes—prostitutes. Instead of the grim welcome of a nun looking
to discipline him, Dreiser found a pretty young woman of twenty. And he
found for the first time a curriculum devoid of what he considered to be
the superstition of the Roman Catholic Church. Instead of medieval warn-
ings about how either the Jews or all non-Catholics were going to hell, he
was ushered into the secular world of learning, including American litera-
ture, which until the rise of Theodore Dreiser was essentially a Protestant
literature produced by writers of English stock. From his “plump, rosy, fair-
haired” young teacher, the future author formally met Nathaniel Haw-
thorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
1 6
Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, James Feni-
more Cooper, William Dean Howells, and—Dreiser’s lifelong favorite—
Edgar Allan Poe.30
Theodore’s grades for 1883 were in the middle B range. The record for
his first year at West Ward Public School No. 4 reveals that he was best at
reading (94.3 percent), geography (92 percent), and writing (87 percent).
He was less than a B student in mathematics (77 percent), spelling (78 per-
cent), and grammar (79 percent). His school attendance was regular, and
his deportment was “good.” Ed’s grades were slightly lower; his overall av-
erage for the 1885–86 school year was 80 percent—though he excelled in
math with a 96 percent.31
In recalling the names of the American writers of the Romantic era he
had read, Dreiser thought that for all his “modest repute as a realist, I
seem . . . somewhat more of a romanticist than a realist.”32 In fact, Dreiser
in his literary maturity was both, in a blending of the ideas of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries. As his final philosophy suggests, evidenced
in the material that was posthumously organized and published as his Notes
on Life (1974), he and his fictional extensions lived in a world whose uni-
versal beauty was also a form of terror to the individual. Critiques of Dreiser’s
work usually focus on its Darwinian determinism, in which people are
whisked along by the forces of heredity and environment. Or—as lately—
it is seen psychologically, since it begins properly with the beginning of the
twentieth century and eventually the age of Freud. But Dreiser had his be-
ginnings in the age of Emerson and its nineteenth-century essentialist claims
for an ordered universe, instead of the accidental, relativistic universe of
many twentieth-century intellectuals. His first heroine, Carrie Meeber of
Sister Carrie, goes where her predecessors in American literature do not in
terms of breaking social taboos about marriage and the place of the woman.
Yet at the end of her story, there is the same Romantic desire for a more or-
dered, even logocentric world in which the human condition has a happy
ending, qualified though that desire may be by a sense that ultimately it
never can be satisfied.
–
It may have been Poe’s claim that every great work of art is about the death
of a beautiful woman that inspired Dreiser to see the “formula (female)”
as symbolizing the last trace of the possibility of total fulfillment. Person-
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
1 7
ally, he confessed, it had led him to “the invasion of homes, the destruc-
tion of happy arrangements among others, lies, persuasions, this, that. In
short, thus moved, I have adored until satiated, so satiated, indeed, as to
turn betimes in weariness, even disgust, and so fleeing.”33 Like Poe, Dreiser
was always in search of the woman who could love him as much as he re-
membered his mother had, and this led him, as he freely admitted, through
the life of an emotional nomad.
This ideal woman had to embody the flesh and the spirit in the roles of
lover and teacher. His mother had been his first “lover,” and his first wife
(also named Sara, without the “h”) was a schoolteacher. (His later lovers
began almost exclusively as literary admirers and became in many cases his
editors and typists.) The first teacher to touch his heart, and perhaps his li-
bido, however, was his first public school instructor, a young divorced
woman named May Calvert. Dreiser spells her name “Mae” in A Hoosier
Holiday (1916), a nostalgic account of a visit to the state in 1915. When he
returned to Warsaw and entered his old schoolhouse, which he was amazed
to find still standing, he was haunted by the sounds and sights of his first
year in a public school and especially the memory of May.
“You see,” he wrote, “hitherto, I had been trained in a Catholic school . . .
and the process had proved most depressing—black garbed, straight laced
nuns. But here in this warm, friendly room, with girls who were attractive
and boys who were for the larger part genial and companionable, and with
a teacher who took an interest in me, I felt as though I were in a kind of
school paradise.” By the time of his return to Warsaw, he had been mis-
takenly told that May Calvert had died, and that belief merely served to
fortify his memory of the “blooming girl” who “at that time seemed one
of the most entrancing creatures in all the world.” He remembered her deep-
blue eyes, light-brown hair, and “rounded, healthy, vigorous body,” along
with the fact that in her class he had sat in the fifth seat from the front in
the second row from the west side of the room.34
Sometimes the young teacher would pinch the young man’s cheek or even
run her hands through his dark hair, as we learn in Dawn, where her name
is spelled correctly as “May.” Dreiser also hinted in Dawn that this hand-
some young woman of twenty came close to crossing the line in her en-
couragement. Toward the end of the year, while he was reading aloud af-
ter school a passage from Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” she praised
the performance. Flushed and drawn to this woman, he wanted to hold
her, but did not dare. She put her hand on his shoulder, then around his
waist. (This last detail was removed when the manuscript of Dawn was ed-
h o o s i e r h a r d t i m e s
1 8
ited for publication.) “I snuggled up to her, because I thought she was lovely,”
he admitted. (But for all her charms and her young pupil’s already evident
skill in writing, she failed to impart the basic rules of spelling and punctu-
ation, skills Dreiser would never master.)
Interestingly, another female in that classroom to fascinate him was a
“Cad” Tuttle. In the holograph of Dawn, she is Carrie Rutter, whose “full
brown eyes and rounded chin and heavy, shapely neck were richly sensu-
ous.” Perhaps this young lady also contributed to one of the classics of Amer-
ican literature. In Sister Carrie, Drouet refers to Carrie as “Cad.” (Dreiser
also remembered other attractive females in the class, sometimes cynically.
There was Maud Rutter, Carrie’s sister, “soft and plump and blonde, the
type sure to be fat at forty.”)35
Lustful as his thoughts sometimes were, he was still shy around girls. He
occasionally stuttered in their company and generally thought himself un-
attractive to the opposite sex. ( When he was an adult, some women de-