repetition!”51
The literary result of this perhaps minor medical crisis was “The Laughing
Gas,” an expressionistic drama that depicts simultaneously the patient’s phys-
ical struggle to survive the operation and his unconscious mind in dialogue
with a spirit (the nitrous oxide) about the meaninglessness of life. The first
expressionistic play staged in America, it anticipates the work of Eugene
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O’Neill and Thornton Wilder in enacting continuous and simultaneous
action on stage.52
In “The Blue Sphere,” his next exercise in this experimental genre, the ac-
tion concerns a deformed child, unwanted and unsupervised by his parents,
who flits about the house in pursuit of an imaginary ball, or blue sphere.
As the child in its chase moves closer and closer to nearby railroad tracks,
a fast mail train moves inevitably toward the fatal scene of impact. The child
will in fact be murdered, for the ball is controlled by the Shadow, which is
purposely trying to kill the child because it is a freak of nature. Dreiser’s
interaction with Sanger may have had an influence here. Later, in response
to a request from Sanger to write something in support of her cause, he ar-
gued that birth control was inherent in nature itself—that beings of higher
intelligence produced fewer oªspring in the natural “tendency to overcome
useless waste with intelligent care.”53
There is no indication— outside his mother’s much regretted wish in
the 1850s that her first three children were dead—that Sarah’s surviving
children were anything but loved in spite of the family’s poverty, but life
for the Dreiser family in Indiana would have been economically easier with
birth control. The house next to the tracks in the play resembles the one
next to a railroad yard in Sullivan in which Dreiser lived as a child. It was,
as noted, around this time that he was recalling that period in Dawn.54
Dreiser supported Sanger’s cause, but as a former Catholic he may also
have experienced pangs of doubt, if not guilt. After all, he was his mother’s
twelfth child. When the child in “The Blue Sphere” is killed by the train,
the conductor reluctantly approves because the child was one of nature’s
mistakes. Yet the engineer is beside himself with the horror of it all. “I saw
its face!” he yells. “I tell you! A beautiful child! I can never forgive myself
for this.”
“I didn’t make myself ” is a refrain implied throughout Dreiser’s work,
beginning with the rapist in “Nigger Jeª ” who pleads with his lynchers for
mercy because he couldn’t help himself and continuing in these plays—
and beyond. “In the Dark” features another American minority of the day,
the “Eyetalians” or “nagurs.” (In “The Mighty Burke,” Dreiser had demon-
strated among other things his familiarity with and sympathy for Sicilian
immigrants whose poverty made them work—and be treated—like goril-
las on street gangs and railroad crews such as the one at Spuyten Duyvil.
He also wrote about Italian immigrants in “The Toilers of the Tenements”
and “The Love Aªairs of Little Italy,” which appeared in The Color of a
Great City. ) This play is about an Italian fruit peddler who has murdered
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his brother. During the action, the dead man’s ghost darts about the stage,
“unconscious of duality.” When the killer is apprehended and fellow spir-
its of the deceased “sweep and swirl” around him, he denies responsibility
for his crime in the same pathetic fashion of Jeª Ingalls when confronted
with the crime of rape: “No meana to kill. No maka da strong word, no
maka da first blow!” pleads the Italian. Both figures are biologically trapped.
Dreiser’s sense of determinism would build as he moved toward his second
masterpiece about somebody—another nobody—who also commits mur-
der by accident.
Dreiser was working out something new in the summer and fall of 1914,
in the wake of The Titan’s relatively poor sales. Ironically, he had written
the Nietzschean story of Cowperwood while also thinking about The Bul-
wark and the role of religion in life. “The Spring Recital” is about the folly
of religion. Set in a prosperous New York church, the satire features an or-
gan recital attended only by four parishioners, the low attendance indicat-
ing the waning of religious belief in the twentieth century. The performance
is, however, also attended by the wraiths of past ages who testify to their
disappointment when they died and experienced no heavenly vision. This
disillusionment is shared by two dead lovers, whose only interests remain
physical satisfaction and sexual beauty, and “a barrel house bum a dozen
years dead, but still enamored of the earth,” who proclaims, “You thought
you’d find out somepin’ when yuh died, huh? Well, yuh got fooled, didn’
jah? . . . Har! Har! Har!” Throughout, the organist is entirely oblivious of
this supernatural activity. He concludes that it is useless to perform for only
four people and retires after half an hour to a local beer garden for some-
thing more intoxicating than the rituals of religious belief.
The final two plays in his collection, “The Light in the Window” and “Old
Ragpicker” are inferior to the others. The first presents a house in a fashion-
able district whose lighted window allows the less fortunate to observe a
wealthy couple assumed to be happy. In fact, the wife is miserable because
her mother-in-law wants her son to divorce her and marry a woman more
socially acceptable. Laura Kindelling is cut from the mold of Aileen But-
ler and Jennie Gerhardt. Indeed, the husband’s situation is a replay of Lester’s
dilemma in having to choose between Jennie and Letty, the divorcée from
his own social rank. Dreiser’s depiction of the rich couple is unremarkable,
indeed hackneyed in its treatment of the rich; but as usual he is masterful
in expressing his empathy with the have-nots as well as in his scorn for the
middle-management types who, like shark-suckers, would attach themselves
to the rich and famous.
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“Gee!” the Messenger Boy exclaims, “I wish I could live like dat! It must
be nice to be rich.” The observation of the Brisk Department Store Man-
ager, however, is clearly preemptive, indicating his own expectations in
climbing the ladder of success. “Now, that is what I call a lovely home. . . .
Hard-earned, no doubt. After all, prosperity depends on moral order and
honesty.” This had been the message of the industrial giants Dreiser had
interviewed in the nineteenth century. Now—after a decade of muckrak-
ing in the twentieth—it wasn’t believed so much anymore and was easy to
satirize. Even the Young Scribbler, “an assistant magazine editor and self-
imagined poet,” is taken in by the scene. He looks at the beautiful but
unloved wife and imagines himself marrying rich—Dreiser’s dream before
(if not after) he moved to New York and became a magazine editor and
“self-imagined poet.”
“Old Ragpicker” is hardly more than a dramatic sketch of a homeless
person who has lost his position and middle-class happiness after his fac-
tory with three hundred employees burned down. It had produced woolen
blankets. John Paul Dreiser’s Indiana mill had made wool, and it too, as we
remember, burned down and caused his ruination as a businessman. No
doubt this play also comes out of the memories Dreiser was turning over
for his autobiography. He was summing himself up. For otherwise he had
written himself out. Most of what he would write and publish for the next
decade was largely part of that summary. Possibly his worst exercise in auto-
biography would be The “Genius,” which cost him dearly in terms of his lit-
erary reputation at the time (and perhaps today). It would, however, ulti-
mately be his second-biggest money maker.
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e l e v e n
The Genius Himself
–
There is more than a hint here and elsewhere of the roman à clef.
N E W Y O R K W O R L D , O C T O B E R 2 , 1 9 1 5
in the summer of 1915, Dreiser threw a party for Edgar Lee Masters at
his Tenth Street apartment upon the publication of Spoon River Anthology.
Its gallery of characters features “Theodore the Poet,” who
. . . watched for men and women
Hiding in burrows of fate amid great cities,
Looking for the souls of them to come out,
So that you could see
How they lived, and for what.1
Among the guests for the August 5 reception was Franklin Booth, whose