The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

especially the heavy repetition of Cowperwood’s complex financial deal-

ings, which strains the attention span of the average reader of novels. But

with such fully realized characters as Butler and his daughter Aileen, the

reader can gain a clear picture of the personal complications in the life of

someone as rapacious as Cowperwood. (Butler is livid when he discovers

his daughter is having an aªair with Frank and vows revenge, which sends

the financier to prison.) We might pity the old man as an angered father,

but not as a leading citizen in league with corrupt politicians. Pity for the

egotistical Cowperwood (whose motto is “I satisfy myself ”) is out of the

question, except possibly when he is committed to solitary confinement of

the Eastern Penitentiary, drawn in graphic detail by Dreiser.16

One could perhaps argue that Cowperwood is less compelling than even

some of the minor characters in the book. He is stoically fearless—

unrealistically described more than once as “jaunty” in the face of almost

certain disgrace and imprisonment. Cowperwood’s father in his bankruptcy

and disgrace over his son’s criminal conviction is more believable. Stener,

one of those parasites or blood-suckers who try to slip through life with-

out fully confronting it, is also more colorfully drawn. We see the once

confident politico reduced to crying at home in his bathtub—as his “po-

litical carcass was being as rapidly and eªectively picked clean and bare to

the bone as this particular flock of political buzzards [Stener’s former con-

spirators] knew how to pick him.” Even the other prisoners sentenced for

petty oªenses at the same time as Cowperwood and Stener show more hu-

man tenderness and vulnerability than the protagonist. Notably, one of

them, a common horse thief, resembles Dreiser’s ne’er-do-well brother

Rome: “obviously of German extraction but born in America, of a stocky

build, all of five feet ten inches, with light, straight yellow hair and a skin

that would have been ruddy if he had been well fed.”17

Cowperwood, as noted, is a victim in the cosmic sense. Although there

is nothing of Hurstwood’s vulnerability or Jennie’s innocence, Dreiser

makes it clear that the gifted financier can no more resist his fate than any

l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c

2 2 6

of the weaker personalities in his story. At the end of this novel, after in-

voking as he did in the opening another sea image—this time the Dar-

winian one of the Black Grouper, which survives “because of its very re-

markable ability to adapt itself to conditions”—Dreiser brings on stage

the three prophetic witches from Macbeth to suggest that life is ultimately

no better for the strong than for the weak. (Dreiser himself occasionally

consulted readers of tea leaves, though Cowperwood is not superstitious.)

The witches find—for both Macbeth and Cowperwood— only “sorrow,

sorrow, sorrow.”

–

Reviews of The Financier were on the whole favorable, but, mainly because

of its excessive length and detail, sales were fewer than for Jennie Gerhardt.

Mencken set the tone in his review in the New York Times of November

10. Although conceding to the usual complaints about the author’s awk-

ward style (“he never so much as takes the trouble to hunt for a new ad-

jective when an old one will answer as well”), he praised its grand scale in

dramatically inscribing the American scene at the time of Yerkes’s Philadel-

phia ascent. Noting the plethora of tales about municipal corruption over

the last few years, he argued that no other writer “has brought its prodigal

details into better sequence and adjustment, or made them enter more vi-

tally and convincingly into the characters and adventures of his people.”

On the west coast, the San Francisco Bulletin of November 16 claimed that

Dreiser was the only living American novelist whose works “may be spo-

ken of in the same breath with those of the great European realists.” Harper’s

Monthly for December wrote that “not even the many notable critics who

bestowed so much extravagant-seeming praise upon Sister Carrie and Jen-

nie Gerhardt could well have seen in these books the promise of such a

novel.”18

Reviews in the Midwest (except for the faithful William Marion Reedy’s

ecstatic one in his Mirror) and the South were less comfortable with the

amoral Cowperwood. “Greed and graft are glorified,” wrote the reviewer

at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of November 16, “conservatism in morals cav-

iled at, the ‘grasping legality of established matrimony’ contrasted rather

unfavorably with illicit love that is not tainted with guile or gain.” The

Charlotte Observer of January 12, 1913, conceded that Dreiser rivaled

Balzac and the French School in general by showing that “Christianity and

l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c

2 2 7

religious teachings” had little to do with the control of passion and moral-

ity. If The Financier had a moral at all, the reviewer concluded, it must be

that “life is finely adjusted and easily unbalanced.” The St. Joseph [Mis-

souri] Press of January 31 tried its best to see the novel as a warning to

“young men of the acquisitive temperament.” “Some day,” Mencken

promised Dreiser as the two prattled back and forth as the reviews came

out, “I am going to write an essay on the moral mind: its inability to see

anything save a moral spectacle. . . . At the moment they propose a law

making copulation a felony.”19

By the end of the novel Cowperwood remains unscarred and (ultimately)

unpunished. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser (or Arthur Henry) had written an end-

ing to soften the fact that Carrie ends up rich in spite of her sins. In The

Financier he may have been urged by an editor at Harper’s to bring in Shake-

speare’s witches to counter the impression that Cowperwood was getting

oª too easily. For his complete downfall and death were beyond the scope

of volume one, and his imprisonment is more eªective as an argument

against cruel and unusual punishment than it is as a form of censure for

Cowperwood. The chapters on the Eastern District Penitentiary are as

moving in their description of the prisoner’s degradation and deprivation

as they are exact in the physical description of the castle-like house of de-

tention. Its Quaker innovations intended to change the behavior of in-

mates through “confinement in solitude” had long since been condemned

by Alexis de Toqueville and Charles Dickens on their visits to the famous

prison. ( With its spoke-like floor plan prisoners could be kept under con-

stant supervision through the use of a panopticon.) Dreiser had obviously

visited the prison, which first opened in 1829, during one of his research

trips to Philadelphia, if not earlier while living there during his nervous

breakdown.

In fact, the novel may mark the beginning of Dreiser’s reputation as a

champion of penal reform. Not long after the publication of The Financier,

he signed a petition asking President Woodrow Wilson to grant clemency

to Julian Hawthorne. The son of the famous novelist had been sentenced

to one year in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta for the Cowperwoodesque

scheme of selling $3.5 million worth of stock in nonexistent gold and sil-

ver mines in Canada. Dreiser wrote a letter in support of Julian’s bid for an

early release. Published in the St. Louis Star of July 12, 1913, it expressed his

hope that the newly elected Wilson, “a broad-minded, artistic and clement

person,” would pardon Hawthorne. (He did not. After Julian was released

l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c

2 2 8

at the end of 1913, he wrote a book about his prison experience, entitled

The Subterranean Brotherhood [1914].) Later, Dreiser wrote an introduction

to Walter Wilson’s Forced Labor in the United States (1933).20

Even though The Financier didn’t sell as well as Jennie Gerhardt, with re-

ceipts dwindling considerably three months after publication mainly be-

cause of reviewers’ complaints about its length, Dreiser’s literary reputation

grew only stronger. He was in good company at Harper’s, which published

in the same fall list for 1912 Albert Bigelow Paine’s three-volume biography

of Mark Twain and Arnold Bennett’s Your United States. Several reviewers

considered Dreiser the only major American author then doing his best

work. Dreiser’s most serious competition came mainly from Europe, al-

though Edith Wharton’s seventh novel, The Reef, also appeared that fall. In

her case, the New York Times did not find a reviewer as friendly as Mencken

had been to Dreiser. Evidently still smarting over the questionable tragedy

of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (a woman “who failed so pathetically to

qualify as a milliner after she had shilly-shallied away her chances of mar-

rying either for love or for money”), the reviewer more or less dismissed

The Reef. 21 Penetrating fiction about women—like the quest for realism in