The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

and as a delivery man for a laundry roughly parallel Dreiser’s Chicago ex-

periences as described in the autobiographies. Ruby Kenny of the novel,

for example, is Alice Kane in Newspaper Days and Lois Zahn in reality.24

After two years in Chicago, Eugene returns to visit his parents and meets

Sara White’s counterpart in Angela Blue, visiting from Wisconsin, also a

schoolteacher and older than her beau (by five years instead of Jug’s nearly

three). Soon following their mutual attraction, he proposes marriage, but

like Dreiser goes oª to pursue his career for several years, during which he

comes to regret (and undermine) his commitment. After working as an il-

lustrator in New York and developing into a realist of the Ashcan School,

Eugene returns to the Midwest to marry Angela when she threatens sui-

cide after having given into his sexual longings.

Book II takes up the next 300 pages of the 736-page novel and concerns

Eugene’s rise as a painter, his nervous breakdown, and his rise again as gen-

eral editor of a magazine conglomerate similar to Butterick Publications.

It follows Dreiser’s marriage so closely that he feared Jug would burn the

manuscript if she knew about it. Just as Dreiser was attracted to Jug’s sis-

ter, Eugene is attracted to Angela’s sister, but Jug would have been infuri-

ated to learn that the sister is made into an active flirt in The “Genius,” cer-

tainly not the case with Rose White or, for that matter, probably any of

Archibald White’s conservatively bred daughters. More than likely, how-

ever, Jug never read The “Genius.” 25 Book III covers the Thelma Cudlipp

episode from start to finish, even down to Dreiser’s echoing some of his

frantic love letters to the eighteen-year-old. This is Suzanne Dale, who is

put beyond Eugene’s reach by her irate mother; Mrs. Dale also causes him

to lose his job with the United States Magazines Corporation. In a last-

ditch eªort to keep her husband, Angela allows herself to become pregnant

but dies in childbirth. Like Jennie Gerhardt, The “Genius” first had a happy

ending in which Eugene and Suzanne find each other again, but Dreiser

switched it to one in which, when they meet, they pass each other, “never

to meet [again] in this world.” Instead, Eugene discovers Christian Science,

and the story ends on a philosophical note.26

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The novel is too long for its story. It is tedious and melodramatic in too

many places, downright unrealistic in others (for example, in the depic-

tion of the near-nymphomaniacal Carlotta Wilson, with whom Eugene

trysts while working for the railroad). It was clearly an act of literary self-

indulgence, more of Dreiser’s fictional and nonfictional summing up of

himself as he struggled to make a living solely by his pen. But the novel is

also epical in its strength and scope, dramatizing impressively the art scene

in America in transition from New England gentility to the raw Whit-

manesque celebrations of the self. Mencken’s reviews of Dreiser’s novels and

of this one in particular in The Smart Set for December 1915 are usually

credited for making the central argument for Dreiser’s panoramic and epi-

cal qualities (“It is rambling, formless, chaotic—and yet there emerges out

of it . . .”).27 But in this case it was Dreiser’s recent friend John Cowper Powys

who not only articulated Dreiser’s new American strength but securely

linked it to Whitman’s.

The transplanted Englishman noted that like Whitman, Dreiser had

found his first “profoundly appreciative hearing in England”—as though

both writers were so large that one needs the perspective of the Atlantic “as

a modifying foreground.” Dreiser’s Balzacian details Powys compared to

Whitman’s long poetic catalogs. And in terms of style, or the lack of it,

Powys correctly pointed out that most of what comes under criticism with

Dreiser—as indeed it did with Whitman—was his use of the vernacular.

This and his attention to detail were part of the essential quality of an epic.

Yet readers and critics were misled by “certain outstanding details—the

sexual scenes, for instance, or the financial scenes” and so missed Dreiser’s

“proportionate vision.” With reference to The “Genius,” Powys might have

pointed to the very first scene in the book subsequently designated as “ob-

scene” by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the same watch-

and-ward alliance that had threatened Leaves of Grass in the 1880s. Here

Eugene kneels before his girlfriend Stella to tighten one of her skates:

She stood before him and he fell to his knees, undoing the twisted strap.

When he had the skate oª and ready for her foot he looked up, and she

looked down on him, smiling. He dropped the skate and flung his arms

around her hips, laying his head against her waist. “You’re a bad boy,” she

said.

Dreiser captures in this brief passage not only the passion but the entire

culture of sex and its taboos at the end of the American nineteenth cen-

t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f

2 5 6

tury. “To the European mind,” Powys wrote, “there is something incredi-

bly absurd in the notion that these Dreiser books are immoral.” Not only

were they not immoral, but they were religious. “It [Dreiser’s religious sen-

timent] is felt and felt very powerfully; but it is kept in its place. Like Walt

Whitman’s stellar constellations, it su‹ces for those who belong to it, it is

right enough where it is.” And it was balanced, he thought, by the body,

which was inexplicably tied in its urges to something spiritual. “If one is

interested in the ‘urge—urge—urge,’ as Whitman calls it, of the normal

lifestream as it goes upon its way, in these American States,” Powys con-

cluded, “one reads Dreiser with a strange pleasure.”28 Overall, Powys could

have chosen a greater Dreiser novel to celebrate this way, yet The “Genius”

in its swaggering disregard for the American ban on sex in literature was

the immediate successor to Whitman’s book, the first one to be “banned

in Boston.”

This was one of the favorable reviews, of course, and they divided almost

evenly between the positive and negative, few occupying any middle

ground. It took an academic to make the strongest negative review, and that

was Mrs. Peattie’s friend in Urbana, Professor Stuart Sherman of the Uni-

versity of Illinois. Just in case somebody wasn’t completely aware of it, Sher-

man noted that Dreiser was the first non-Anglican American to produce

major American literature. But he didn’t mean it as a compliment. It was

to remind his readers during the war that Dreiser was “born of German-

American parents” in Indiana. His five books constituted “a singularly ho-

mogeneous mass of fiction” in which Sherman found neither “moral value”

nor “memorable beauty.”29

This was the voice of Puritanism making its last cry in a new wilderness.

“College professors, alas, never learn anything,” Mencken later observed in

response to Sherman’s attack, but Sherman’s was also the voice of Realism

against the inroads of Naturalism.30 Sherman was the first academic critic

to assess Dreiser; the rest had largely ignored him and his fellow natural-

ists in favor of the great literary lights of the last century, not only realists

such as the (still living ) Howells and James but the antebellum romantics

who had inspired them. These were not the writers F. O. Matthiessen

identified in The American Renaissance (1941) for elevation in the mid-twen-

tieth century (Melville, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman)

as much as such Schoolroom Poets as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James

Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—

the trinomial “gentleman” of the American Renaissance who were more

clearly linked to New England Brahmanism and middle-class conventions.

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“The real distinction between one generation and another is in the thing

which each takes for its master truth,” Sherman observed. Dreiser and his

fellow naturalists had simply come up with a new theory, the Darwinian

idea that all life is exclusively and selfishly devoted to its adaptation and

survival. In the cases of both Darwin and the naturalistic writers, once they

had formulated their general law, they looked exclusively for evidence to

support it. “Let us then,” Sherman wrote, “dismiss Mr. Dreiser’s untenable

claims to superior courage and veracity of intention, the photographic tran-

script, and the unbiased service of truth; and let us seek for his definition

in his general theory of life, in the order of facts which he records, and in

the pattern of his representations.” Dreiser’s theory presented men and

women not only with the will to survive but the will to pleasure wherever

they found it: “The male of the species is characterized by cupidity, pug-

nacity, and a simian inclination for the other sex. The female is a soft, vain,