The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

friendliness and a kind merriment. I noticed his buck teeth, which were

very white and well cared for, and I studied his long fingers when he took

oª his gloves.” In spite of the ex-Hoosier’s “staccato way of talking, his eli-

sions disposed of by saying, ‘Don’t you know,’” the lawyer was instantly

impressed with “the power of his mind, and with the vast understanding

that he has of people, of cities, of the game of life.” He and Dreiser saw

each other several times over the course of Dreiser’s stay in the city. Mas-

ters learned that his new friend was writing an autobiography. Dreiser also

spoke of his idea for The Bulwark and of a “philosophical work that he

was about to write.”28

Also living in Chicago at this time and editing Building Management news

was Will Lengel, who had been Dreiser’s assistant at the Delineator. Lengel

had gone west after Dreiser’s dismissal, but he had kept in touch with his

“father,” as Dreiser became to him over the years. He was forever trying to

get back to New York and asking his old boss if his future plans might in-

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clude his talents. When Dreiser indicated his intention of possibly visiting

Chicago, Lengel quickly spread the word. “I spent a great afternoon yes-

terday at the Chicago Post with Floyd Dell and some of the Post boys. . . .

I don’t know of a writer in the country who has the staunch and loyal per-

sonal following that you have. . . . They were overjoyed when I told them

you contemplated a visit to Chicago. They want to see just how you get

your handkerchiefs accordion plaited.”29

Dreiser had already met Dell briefly in New York in 1911. The twenty-

six-year-old editor of the literary review of the Chicago Evening Post had

lauded Jennie Gerhardt in a long and glowing review as “a bigger, finer thing”

than Sister Carrie. The two had subsequently begun a correspondence, and

at the time of Dreiser’s departure for Chicago Dell was already or soon to

be reading a draft of The “Genius.” Though married, Dell was enjoying an

open aªair with Kirah Markham, who was five years his junior and was to

appear as Andromache in an upcoming production of Euripides’ The Tro-

jan Women at Maurice Browne’s Little Theater. This half-Jewish beauty with

olive skin, dark hair, and seductive eyes, whose real name was Elaine Hy-

man, was the liberated daughter of a jeweler who gave her the means to

follow her whims as well as artistic interests in drama and painting. Dreiser,

who was not easily drawn into conversation except in the presence of the

opposite sex, became almost immediately infatuated with the actress. By

the time of his departure, the two were lovers on the verge of an intense

and frequently anguished three-year love aªair. Dreiser later described her

as “tall and graceful, her tallness youthful and classically statuesque, her grace

pantherlike in its ease and rhythm.”30

Many of the people whom Dreiser met in Chicago could be found at

Maurice Browne’s experimental theater in the new Fine Arts Building on

Michigan Avenue. Every Sunday evening friends of the theater gathered

for “tea”—to hear an invited speaker or perhaps a visiting poet or novelist.

Browne himself was a compelling personality, described by Powys as “a ma-

niacal Messiah of theatrical art,” a reference to Browne’s courageous rebel-

lion against the commercially viable melodramas and musical comedies that

monopolized the American stage before (and after) Eugene O’Neill. Dur-

ing his stay in Chicago, Dreiser attended Little Theater sessions in the com-

pany of Masters or Lengel. He was treated as a formidable celebrity. “The

novelist sat solidly on a chair too small for his big body, motionless,” save

for his handkerchief folding and unfolding, Browne remembered. Once,

while he did so, he was engaged in a discussion in which his opponent’s

“mind darted round him like a terrier round an elephant. Dialectically,

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Dreiser was defeated on every point; but with stolid and imperturbable

tenacity he pushed his opinion forward step by step, as overwhelmingly as

a glacier.” The pipe-smoking Powys noticed that Dreiser didn’t smoke, which

he thought “in itself de-humanizes anyone.”31

–

Kirah Markham played not only in Browne’s production of The Trojan

Women but later made a cameo appearance in The Titan as Stephanie Pla-

tow. There she is part of the “Garrick Players” at the same Little Theater

in Chicago; her father is a wealthy furrier instead of a jeweler. Like Kirah,

she is tall, dark, and alluring. And perhaps also like Kirah, Stephanie sleeps

around; before becoming Cowperwood’s lover she has aªairs with Gardner

Knowles (Dell), drama critic at the Post, and Lane Cross (Dreiser himself ),

an artist who acts as stage director for the dramatic group. In the end she

turns out to be more unfaithful than Kirah, who mostly teased Dreiser about

other men and hoped he would give her a child some day.32 When the

financier finds Stephanie with another member of the players, he ends the

aªair. In real life, Dreiser eventually requested that Kirah remain faithful to

him while he managed brief aªairs with other women, and she is possibly

the only woman who —though she apparently loved him as much as did

Jug, Thelma, or any of the women who followed Dreiser into the 1920s and

1930s—ultimately refused to remain with him under this double standard.

It is not known how early in their three-year relationship Dreiser made these

demands. He may have been testing her as early as 1914, before they began

living together in New York later that year. If so, at the same time he was

also putting her into his novel as the more sexually active Stephanie.

The plot of The Titan involves a series of mistresses as Cowperwood be-

comes the sexual varietist that Dreiser himself became in the life allotted

to him after the sinking of the Titanic. Indeed, one wonders whether the

two names— of the novel and the ship—weren’t loosely related in Dreiser’s

mind as he searched for the second title in his planned trilogy. Where The

Financier develops Cowperwood from youth to middle age in Philadelphia,

The Titan chronicles his adventures in Chicago, alternating between finan-

cial conquests and sexual triumphs. (Indeed, Stuart P. Sherman, a professor

at the University of Illinois and one of the author’s major nemeses follow-

ing the publication of The “Genius,” called The Titan “a huge club-sandwich

composed of slices of business alternating with erotic episodes.”) With re-

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spect to business, Dreiser followed the Yerkes record almost without devi-

ation, depending on actuality for his fictional reality. For the rest, he seems

to have freely mixed in his own fantasies with personal experiences. While

The Financier suªers from its redundancy of detail, The Titan, outside of

its impressive documentation and dramatization of Chicago politics and

business in the 1880s and 1890s, is simply boring. “I do not know how many

seductions there are in this book,” wrote Ford Madox Ford (then still writ-

ing as Ford Madox Hueªer) from England. “I have counted eleven to the

credit of the hero; and I see there are some more seductions toward the end.

I have not been able to finish the book.”33

In his Smart Set review of The Titan, Mencken would try to address this

problem on the grounds that literary art required a new standard under

which the truth about life would be freely depicted. He condemned “the

best-sellers of the moment, shot from the presses in gaudy cataract,” but he

was in fact defending Cowperwood against the charge that he lacked all

humanity or heart. Other reviewers who complained that the novel wanted

not only beauty but authentic tragedy, Mencken implied, were looking for

a protagonist in the same romantic tradition, called “realism” since the rise

of Howells and James in America and George Eliot in England. Even

“among the Titans who have made industrial civilization,” it was thought,

Dreiser might have selected “one who now and then quickened in aªec-

tion to his fellow-man.” Yet Dreiser had already heard such palaver about

rich men—indeed from them when he conducted the interviews for Suc-

cess in the 1890s. He believed that most men and women, regardless of so-

cial level and circumstance, operated on the principle of the Lobster and

the Squid. The new realist, or the naturalist, Mencken insisted, subscribed

to only two articles: (1) that the novelist describe human beings as they ac-

tually are; and (2) that “he is under no obligation to read copybook morals