The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

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first American units dispatched to France—and was killed in the Second

Battle of the Marne.

When The “Genius” was first published in the fall of 1915, the best-sell-

ing books included Zane Grey’s The Rainbow Trail, Rex Beach’s Heart of

the Sunset, and Harben’s latest, The Inner Law. It was not only this Amer-

ican bent for romance that greeted the publication of The “Genius,” but the

nation’s political climate, which grew increasingly hostile toward “hy-

phenated” Americans—many of whom were not shy about expressing their

sympathy for the Fatherland. The German-American population was a dis-

tinct minority in 1915, comprising about 10 percent of the population.

Americans were glad to be staying out of the war, but with Wilson, a lover

of English civilization, in the White House, and the majority of Ameri-

cans having antecedents in the British Isles, sentiment quickly grew for

the English. To make matters worse, as far as Dreiser was concerned, the

American ambassador to Great Britain was none other than the pro-British

Walter Hines Page, Doubleday’s former partner during the suppression of

Sister Carrie.

The “Genius” in this America was seen as the literary equivalent of another

German U-boat, threatening to undermine traditional Anglo-American

standards of decency and morality. Vigorously opposed to “this hypnotism

which is going on in art, in which whatever is opposed to the righteous

forces of the will is celebrated,” Mrs. Elia W. Peattie of the Chicago Tribune

of December 4, repudiated the idea that The “Genius” was, as one reviewer

had suggested, the American prose-epic. Peattie, a former contributor to

the Delineator when Dreiser was editor, vowed: “I will never admit such a

thing until I am ready to see the American flag trailing in the dust dark

with stains of [the blood of ] my sons, and the Germans completing their

world rule by placing their governor general in the White House.” N. P.

Dawson, another lover of the courageous poetic idealism that Kilmer in

his death would come to represent, expressed in the New York Evening Globe

of October 30 her sincere hope that Dreiser’s new novel “will immediately

appear in a German translation. That’s how kindly we feel toward the Ger-

mans!” Such chauvinistic reviewers rose eagerly to condemn The “Genius.”

“Sex-land uber alles would seem to be Theodore Dreiser’s national anthem,”

commented Life magazine on November 15, 1915. Using the battle imagery

spilling over from the war, the reviewer continued: “There was ‘Sister Car-

rie,’ ‘Jennie Gerhardt,’ ‘The Financier,’ ‘The Titan,’ and at no time, in any

of them, was it very far to Tipperary. But now, in ‘The Genius,’ [sic] he ac-

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tually goes into action on the fictional front . . . singing ‘sex-land’ in close

formation of fine type all along the line!”17

Like Mencken, Dreiser was pro-German in his sympathies, but also de-

cidedly anti-British regardless of the war. In paying back Ford Madox Ford

for his belittling remarks about The Titan in a review of The Good Soldier

(1915), Dreiser blamed that extracted German’s British leanings for his fail-

ure to tell an honest story in spite of its realistic methods. “It is all cold nar-

rative, never truly poignant,” he wrote in The New Republic that year. “The

whole book is indeed fairly representative of that encrusting formalism

which, barnacle-wise, is apparently overtaking and destroying all that is best

in English life.” He may have continued to admire the English for their

support of Sister Carrie, though his trip to England had left him less re-

ceptive to the British in general. Now he resented their “sniªy reverence

for conventionalism and the glories of a fixed condition.” About the same

time, he spoke elsewhere of “the despicable British aristocracy.” Dreiser’s

growing antagonism toward the British melded with Mencken’s quips about

German military superiority and his celebrations of German victories. Plan-

ning, he said in one letter to Dreiser in early 1915, to study German so “that

I may spend my declining years in a civilized country,” he cheered the Ger-

man victory at the Battle of Soissons, where the French lost more than nine

thousand soldiers.18

What the two friends didn’t share, however, was the same opinion of

Dreiser’s latest novel—his worst yet in Mencken’s opinion but, as Dreiser

ultimately decided, his favorite if he had to choose one over all the rest. Af-

ter accepting several of his one-act plays for The Smart Set, Mencken had

repeatedly asked to see the text of The “Genius.” (As already noted, for most

of its composition it did not have quotation marks around its presumptive

title. Dreiser told Mencken that he added them because there was another

book of the same title, but reviewers assumed he was signaling a flaw in its

hero, Eugene Tennyson Witla. Other working titles were “This Matter of

Marriage,” “The Glory of Eugene,” “Eugene Witla,” “The Hedonist,” “The

Dreamer,” and “The Sensualist.”)19 When Dreiser finally did dispatch part

of the manuscript in early December 1914, he was still “pruning” out sty-

listic blemishes he knew his friend would detect. By the end of the month,

Mencken had read the entire 320,000-word typescript. Keeping up the bon-

homie about German military might and their shared heritage, he preferred

to speak to Dreiser in person about The “Genius. ” The two met over the

matter in Dreiser’s apartment, where Mencken recalled years later they had

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had a “friendly row” that chased Kirah out of the apartment “horrified by

the thought of two Christians murdering each other.” Yet in all probabil-

ity, Mencken was circumspect. They still considered each other good friends,

and Dreiser had presented him with the manuscript of Sister Carrie. A little

more than a year later, Mencken claimed that it wasn’t the questionable or—

as it was ultimately called—pornographic content of The “Genius” that

bothered him, but its weakness as a work of art. He tried to downplay his

dislike for the novel by telling Dreiser that it was “still my blind spot.”20

The New York Times of October 10, comparing The “Genius” unfavor-

ably with Sinclair Lewis’s The Trail of the Hawk, described it as “a study of

the artistic temperament, but really of only one abnormal weakness, that

of ungoverned sexual passion and its eªects on the life and work of an oth-

erwise great artist.” Dreiser later claimed that he had no particular artist in

mind when he wrote the novel, only the “Ashcan” school of painters, sev-

eral of whom he had known as magazine illustrators and whose “slice of

life” focus reflects Dreiser’s realism or naturalism in his own fiction. They

were the “New York Realists” who led the revolt against the genteel tradi-

tion in American art during the first two decades of the twentieth cen-

tury. Among those he may have used as models was William Louis Sonn-

tag, Jr., who had illustrated Ev’ry Month when Dreiser was editor and whom

Dreiser would memorialize as W.L.S. in Twelve Men. 21 Other possibilities

include the Ashcan painters George Luks, John Sloan, Robert Henri,

Everett Shinn, and William Glackens, who illustrated A Traveler at Forty.

He may also have drawn from Alfred Stieglitz, whose “The El in the Storm”

and “Winter on Fifth Avenue” Dreiser had singled out for praise in Suc-

cess and Ainslee’s respectively (both in 1899)—photographs that may have

suggested the driving snowstorm Hurstwood endures during his decline

in Sister Carrie. 22

The primary model, of course, was Dreiser himself, whose autobiogra-

phy was also well underway with the composition of Dawn. Indeed,

Dreiser had been trying to fictionalize his life since the turn of the century.

In 1943, he told Mencken that he had written thirty-two chapters “of what

was to be The ‘Genius’ ” in 1903 and then destroyed them in 1907 or 1908

to clear the way for the resumption and eventual completion of Jennie Ger-

hardt. Another autobiographical novel attempted even earlier was “The

Rake.”23 This last was possibly to be based on his sexual escapades as a re-

porter, but The “Genius” was the book that finally fictionalized the sexual

“varietism” of Theodore Dreiser.

Divided into three “books,” as An American Tragedy would be arranged,

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the novel was patterned after Dreiser’s life, but more loosely in Book I (“Youth”) than in the other two (“Struggle” and “Revolt”). The first part

recounts the life of the protagonist growing up in a middle-class family in

Illinois instead of the hard-scrabble upbringing Dreiser experienced in the

small towns of Indiana. We follow Eugene Witla to Chicago, where he be-

comes a newspaper illustrator and an evening student at the Art Institute.

His sexual initiation, his jobs in a hardware store and a real estate o‹ce,