The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

causes. “In my belief,” says one of the gossiping neighbors of the girl’s fa-

ther, William Magnet, the local foreman of the striking workers, “it’s some

rich fellow she met up to the city. Many a Saturday night when work was

over she’s been seen to take the train. I understand she spread round the re-

port she was goin’ to business college up there.”44 In fact, Mary has died

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from a botched abortion. Current censorship codes would have prevented

Dreiser’s broaching the idea, but the hint is clear enough. Her father is so

overcome with grief that he cannot be persuaded to fulfill his strike duties,

which involve translating Ferguson’s speech to the Italian workers.

To bring Magnet around, Ferguson first appeals to his sense of brother-

hood in the fight for fair wages. When that fails, he tells Magnet his own

sad story. Here Dreiser works out more of his personal anxieties and anger

in his fiction as he had with Kirah in writing The Titan. For Ferguson’s story

comes chapter and verse from Dreiser’s marriage with Jug and the tensions

of their current relationship. For many years he resented the fact that Jug

persisted in identifying herself as “Mrs. Dreiser.” “I didn’t stay with her. . . .”

Ferguson likewise complains. “A good living is all she gets out of me. It’s

all she ever will get. Except my name. She hangs on to that. And my free-

dom. She’s got that locked up safe enough, or she thinks she has. She claims

I’m not good enough to marry any other woman.” Later, Dreiser would be

grateful that he could use Jug’s steadfast refusal to grant him a divorce as

an excuse not to marry his current flames. But now, in the summer of 1913

before the aªair with Kirah began to show signs of frustration, he may have

thought he wanted to marry again.

The point of Ferguson’s story is that he took a mistress who has recently

died. “She did love me anyhow, this other woman,” he tells Magnet,

“whether I was good enough or not. She didn’t get a living out of me. She

didn’t get my name.” Ferguson is grief stricken, too, but nevertheless ready

to perform his labor duties. Ultimately, Ferguson’s story gives Magnet the

will to put aside his pain and perform his duty, too. After he exits the stage

to do so, one of Magnet’s neighbors slips Ferguson a ring. Earlier Magnet

wonders what happened to the ring his daughter had worn of late. “She

said I was to give you this,” the old woman says to the labor leader in the

play’s last line. “She said I was to say she died happy.” “The Girl in the Co‹n”

found many admirers, not only when it was first published in The Smart

Set in the fall of 1913, but when it was produced several years later.

In July 1913, Dreiser moved to 165 West Tenth Street in Greenwich Vil-

lage, an area that was home now to socialists and anarchists, whom

Mencken despised. “There was never a time in my youth,” Mencken wrote

in the 1940s, “when I succumbed to the Socialist sentimentalities that so

often fetch the young of the bourgeoisie.” Accordingly, he never seemed to

tire of criticizing Dreiser for his own socialist sympathies born out of a child-

hood of poverty. “While he lived uptown with Sara [ Jug ],” Mencken re-

called in another memoir with some bitterness after the two men had bro-

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ken oª their relationship for a decade, “he led a thoroughly bourgeois life,

and there was no sign in his carriage of the Bohemian, though he was al-

ready practicing a Latin Quarter promiscuity, but once he got down to 10th

Street he took to the life of art, and was soon a painful figure to his old

friends.”45 This is somewhat unfair. While Dreiser did enjoy “a Latin Quar-

ter promiscuity” there, he was less formally interested in its political visions

than he would become in the radical politics of the 1930s. He associated

primarily with Villagers whose intellectual reputations survive to one or an-

other extent today—though these, too, not simply the lesser figures, were

surely the targets of Mencken’s ridicule. Floyd Dell had moved there to write

for the Masses, then edited by Max Eastman. Others included the writer

Hutchins Hapgood, the anarchist John Reed and his protégé Lincoln

Steªens, the birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, the poet Louis Un-

termeyer, Sinclair Lewis, and Waldo Frank, editor of The Seven Arts. Soon

after he settled there, Ficke and Powys joined the community. Dreiser vis-

ited the Liberal Club, a popular neighborhood meeting place for artists and

writers on MacDougal Street. There such progressives as Horace Traubel

on Whitman, Jacques Loeb on the latest sex theories, and others were cycled

through as speakers.46

Though Mencken delighted in castigating the literary philistines, he was

becoming ever more politically conservative and ever observant, at least in

public, of conventional morality. For his part, Dreiser was comfortable flout-

ing convention. When Kirah joined Dreiser on West Tenth Street in the

winter or spring of 1914, Mencken thought her Village friends “tin-pot” so-

cialists and found her bohemian way of decorating their ground-floor flat

distasteful and impractical. He couldn’t help contrasting Jug’s “folksy flats

in 123rd Street and upper Broadway” with Kirah’s campy arrangement of

their two-room flat with its ceiling-high windows and double coal fireplaces.

“The furniture was all arty and half a dozen paintings by Kirah hung on

the wall.” The building was old (it is long since torn down), reflecting the

general neglect of the neighborhood, which had been abandoned by the

upper middle class in New York’s huge development northward in the nine-

teenth century. Mencken also objected to the dim lighting. Kirah provided

the flat with candles that “were always guttering and going out.” At about

the same time John Cowper Powys, who lived a few blocks east of Dreiser

on Tenth Street and Patchin Place, told his brother Llewelyn that he wasn’t

sure whether Kirah was Dreiser’s “wife or his tart.”47

It was in this art nouveau austerity, where his Italian neighbors turned

out to be counterfeiters, that Dreiser, emboldened by the critical success of

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“The Girl in the Co‹n,” wrote in the summer of 1914 six more one acts,

dashing them oª in succession the way he had his Maumee stories in 1899.

These symbolic dramas were collected, along with “Girl,” in Plays of the

Natural and the Supernatural (1916). He was also stimulated in his play-

writing by the Washington Square Players, a group of for the most part am-

ateur actors who first practiced their experimental theater in the Liberal

Club, and at least once in Dreiser’s apartment, before opening to the pub-

lic with a bill of one-act plays in the spring of 1915.48

Dreiser’s were closet dramas, “reading plays” as he told Mencken, who

published some of them in the Smart Set. 49 As with “The Lost Phoebe,” it

is somewhat puzzling as to exactly where they came from, for the realist for

whom the Fact was glorious enough in The Financier and The Titan delved

into what would later be termed the Theater of the Absurd to speculate on

the meaning of life. Their themes on the “equation inevitable” anticipated

his philosophical essays in Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920). Dreiser told

Mencken in sending him three of them that they represented “merely the

eªort at drama outside the ordinary limits of dramatic interpretation.”50

The editors of Dreiser’s collected plays speculate that a seeming brush with

death was the catalyst for at least one of them. While Dreiser was back in

Chicago seeing Kirah, who had temporarily returned there because of his

infidelities, he underwent surgery to remove a painful carbuncle on his neck.

The surgeon, Kirah’s family doctor, underestimated the time the operation

would take. As Kirah later told the biographer W. A. Swanberg,

Working with laughing gas Dr. Julia [Strong ] realized it was going to take

longer than she had anticipated and ordered oxygen. A nurse went to the

store room and found it locked. . . . In the end it was brought from another

building and by that time Theo was turning blue and we were all, doctor,

nurses and I, cha‹ng his hands and feet to restore circulation. When the

tank of oxygen was finally brought and administered he rose up on the op-

erating table roaring with gargantuan laughter. “I got it, I’ve got it on you

all, the secret of the universe, the same thing over and over, God damned