Their route crisscrossed the state in order to pass through all of the places
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2 4 8
where Dreiser had lived as a child (one of the promises he had secured from
Booth). They first went to Warsaw, where many memories were clearly un-
locked, although the only record of Warsaw in Dreiser’s notes is a local news-
paper clipping describing his teenage hometown as the “City of Beautiful
Churches.” (Dreiser’s diary notes for his book stop between August 15 at
Erie, Pennsylvania, and August 20, when they entered Wabash, after driv-
ing south from Warsaw.) This first stop after an absence of almost thirty
years was perhaps the most di‹cult because he was not prepared for the
change, which transcended mere landscapes and the haunts of youth. “It
is all very well to dream of revisiting your native soil and finding at least
traces, if no more, of your early world,” he wrote in A Hoosier Holiday,
“but I tell you it is a dismal and painful business. Life is a shifting and
changing thing.” One of the lakes north of town was now encircled by a
casino and resort cabins instead of the beautiful trees he remembered.
Other old monuments were missing: the bookstore, the small restaurant
with an oyster counter, a billiard and pool room—though there were three
new churches. He visited the Grant House and Thralls Mansion, where
he and his “poet mother” and two siblings had lived. The second house
looked “very tatterdemalion,” now a tenement infested with four families
instead of one.9
When the Dreisers lived there, he had had his own room. Now that room
was occupied by a Mr. Gridley, who promptly volunteered the information
that his son had been killed in the war at the Dardanelles. Later, while vis-
iting his old school nearby, Dreiser found the old man telling Speed and
Booth the same “moving details of his son’s death and the futility of the
campaign at the Dardanelles.” As “he of my former room” retailed the
story again, a small boy from somewhere in the neighborhood “stood with
his legs very far apart, his hands in his pockets, and merely stared and lis-
tened.” The scene was possibly amusing except for the third sidewalk
local—“a short, dusty, rotund, rather oily-haired man who announced that
he was the owner of the property which had formerly sheltered me, and
who by virtue of having cut down all the trees and built the two abom-
inable houses in front seemed to think that he was entitled to my friend-
ship and admiration.”10
As they descended to Indianapolis, they passed through Kokomo, “where
James Whitcomb Riley once worked in a printer’s shop.” Dreiser notes here
in his book that he understood that the beloved Hoosier writer, who died
just before Dreiser’s book went to press, had “no love for my work.” At
Carmel, where Booth kept his summer studio behind his parents’ house,
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2 4 9
they paused for a few days’ rest, and Speed turned the chauªeur duties over
to a crippled boy named Bert, whom Booth had more or less adopted. They
then set out for Terre Haute, where they wandered up and down the streets
looking for Dreiser’s birthplace and the other houses in which he lived, but
too much had changed for him to recognize anything for sure. Here, in
reminiscences for the book, he buried Rome prematurely as he would also
do in Dawn, saying that his brother died of alcoholism in a “South Clark
Street dive in Chicago, about 1905.”11 Even though in the city of Dreiser’s
beginning a more up-to-date hotel was aªordable, they stayed at the Terre
Haute House for nostalgic reasons. Booth sketched the city from across the
Wabash. In Sullivan, twenty-five miles directly south, Dreiser posed for a
photograph with ragged neighborhood urchins dressed much like himself
at their age before the house in which he had lived. “I thought,” he mused,
“of my mother walking about in the cool of the morning and the evening,
rejoicing in nature. I saw her with us on the back porch . . . [myself ] lis-
tening to stories or basking in the unbelievable comfort of her presence.”12
In Vincennes, another twenty-five miles south, he found the firehouse
in which they had lived briefly with Sue Bellette, but for some reason he
does not mention—as he does in Dawn—the fact that his mother’s friend
was running a whorehouse out of the building. When they moved onto
Evansville, Dreiser— or his editor—also neglects to give the reason his fam-
ily felt it necessary to leave that city, which again involved prostitution—
the business of Paul’s girlfriend and inspiration for “My Gal Sal.”13 Per-
haps with the war on and the American demonization of the Germans,
Dreiser was revising his history a little. In Bloomington, he discovered his
old college so grown, not only in size, but in “architectural pretentious-
ness as to have obliterated most of that rural inadequacy and backwoods
charm” he had once enjoyed. He could find only a few buildings he re-
membered, and he wondered to himself where all the young women he
had known (or had wished to know) and the professors who had taught
him had gone. “What is life,” he asked himself, “that it can thus obliter-
ate itself ? . . . If a whole realm of interests and emotions can thus definitely
pass, what is anything?”
It was Thursday, August 26, the eve of Dreiser’s forty-fourth birthday.14
They took the wrong road at first on their run back up to Indianapolis
and Carmel, hitting a small pig along the way. In Carmel Dreiser became
attracted to the daughter of one of the neighbors of Booth’s parents. Mur-
rel Cain was a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who wore her hair
in a bob and looked athletic in the photograph she gave Dreiser— of her-
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 5 0
self in a bathing suit. “Tell me you think you love me . . . ,” he wrote later
from Savannah, Georgia, “at least until you see me again anyhow.” Booth
was to remain at his western studio for a few months; Dreiser was to take
the train back to New York. He had heard America singing. “Oh, the
whistling, singing American, with his jest and his sound heart and that light
of humorous apprehension in his eye! How wonderful it all is! It isn’t En-
glish, or French, or German, or Spanish, or Russian, or Swedish, or Greek.
It’s American.” At least in America one could dream—in spite of the fact
that life possibly led nowhere. America was a psychic wonderland in which
“we were conceived in ecstasy and born in dreams.”15
–
That fall Joyce Kilmer, then a staª writer for the New York Times, inter-
viewed the popular but now forgotten writer Will N. Harben on the fu-
ture of the novel. Maintaining it was doomed, Harben blamed the popu-
larity of the automobile, the growing interest in the airplane, and the book’s
future arch enemy, moving pictures. The Georgia spinner of rural romances
also told the New York Times that he was not in sympathy “with the theo-
ries of some of our modern realists.” Insisting that it was almost impossi-
ble to think of the American novel without thinking of Howells, Harben
said that the average realist “doesn’t believe that emotions are real.” The
greatest materials for the novelist, he said, were to be found in the emo-
tional and spiritual side of nature, or “the soul of man.”16 No doubt his in-
terviewer agreed. Today, with a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike named
after him, Joyce Kilmer is otherwise remembered for Trees and Other Po-
ems (1914), particularly its title poem, doggerel for popular consumption
then and now (“Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make
a tree”). A thoroughgoing sentimentalist who dedicated this poem to his
mother-in-law, he probably hadn’t hurt his literary career by marrying the
daughter of Henry M. Alden, editor of Harper’s Magazine. (Alden, we will
recall, had once turned down Dreiser’s ant story and discouraged him about
the publishing prospects for Sister Carrie. ) Kilmer’s spirituality, however,
fit right into the scheme of things literary in 1915. He was a romantic in the
mold of George Gearson in “Editha,” Howells’s short story about the dan-
gers of romantic sentiment in the Spanish-American War—and like Gear-
son, Kilmer became an early casualty of war. In the summer of 1918, he by-
passed the o‹cers’ corps to enlist in the “Rainbow Division”— one of the
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