pleasure-seeking creature, devoted to personal adornment.” But there was
another theory, a better one Sherman thought, that presented men and
women more ideally and hopefully, even under realistic conditions.31
Dreiser, of course, was striking out for new territory in fiction when he
reflected Eugene’s psychosexual conflicts, laying the groundwork in the
twentieth century for the psychological naturalism of such writers as Sher-
wood Anderson and William Faulkner. Freud is not mentioned, but his
ideas were already in the air—hotly discussed and debated at the Liberal
Club in Greenwich Village—and Dreiser would read him in the late teens
and early twenties. “His hero is really not Sister Carrie or the Titan or the
Genius,” the critic Randolph Bourne acutely noted, “but that desire within
us that pounds in manifold guise against the iron walls of experience.”32
But psychology was but another name for naturalism, as far as Dreiser’s op-
ponents were concerned. Both theories rendered the once-ethical person
helpless and unattractive.
–
Dreiser spent the winter of 1916 in Savannah, Georgia, where he rented a
room for $2.50 a week at 103 Taylor Street West. He went south ostensibly
to rid himself of a persistent case of the grippe, but perhaps another rea-
son to get out of town for a while was that his relationship with Kirah was
deteriorating toward its eventual collapse. She had already left him at least
twice because of his infidelity, the second time in June of 1915. In any event,
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 5 8
he was looking for a quiet and comfortable place to work on A Hoosier Hol-
iday. Like A Traveler at Forty, this travel book had a personal dedication,
this time to his mother. Chastened by her memory and the travel book’s
focus on youthful innocence, it generally lacked what was now expected in
every Dreiser book. To many readers and reviewers of A Hoosier Holiday,
which appeared at the end of 1916, Dreiser had finally produced “a book
in which the sex urge does not reign supreme.” It is true that chapter 60
reflects back on his college trip to Louisville, which involved several loose
women, but the story lacks the specificity he later made public in Dawn.
Furthermore, at Mencken’s suggestion, he changed the name of Day Allen
Willy, one of his companions on the Louisville excursion and “now a highly
respectable Baltimorean and a God-fearing man,” to simply “W.”33
But even as Dreiser was cleaning up his act, as it were, forces were mount-
ing to make him pay for his excesses in The “Genius.” That summer, as sales
of the novel reached eight thousand copies, Professor Sherman’s objections
were acted upon by the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice, which
threatened Dreiser’s publisher, John Lane, with criminal prosecution if they
did not withdraw the book from the market at once.34 The complaint had
originated in Cincinnati after John F. Herget, a Baptist minister, acting on
an anonymous tip, alerted F. L. Rowe, the secretary of the Western Society
for the Prevention of Vice in Cincinnati, that The “Genius” was “filled with
obscenity and blasphemy.” Rowe in turn complained to John Sumner, re-
cently appointed executive secretary of the New York Society and succes-
sor to Anthony Comstock, who died that year. Armed also with some of
the oªending pages torn by an irate reader from the copy in the New York
Public Library, Sumner quietly confronted J. Jeªerson Jones at the John
Lane Company on July 25, 1916. Sumner sought to avoid the method of
his predecessor, whose theatrics had mainly provided oªending books with
“free advertising.” (Comstock’s assault on Leaves of Grass had given Whit-
man the greatest sales of his lifetime.) Three days later, the American di-
rector who had been so eager to get the book away from Harper’s imme-
diately conceded to Sumner’s demand, leaving the book—and Dreiser—in
limbo. “This book was selling the best of any,” Dreiser told Mencken in
characteristic exaggeration of his sales (which were nevertheless mounting ),
“and now this cuts me oª right in mid stream. Don’t it beat hell.”35
His tone suggests that he initially took the whole matter somewhat lightly.
“Am perfectly willing to break the postal laws and go to jail myself,” he joked.
“It will save me my living expenses this winter.” Either he was confident
that only a few changes would have to be made (as it turned out seventy-
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 5 9
five pages of The “Genius” were earmarked as “lewd” and seventeen as “pro-
fane”), or he hoped the Society for the Prevention of Vice was already be-
ginning to lose credibility with the American public and could be bluªed
or compromised. Mencken initially suggested such a compromise, having
himself done so after he had run afoul of the society briefly with the pub-
lication of the Parisienne, one of several saucy magazines he and Nathan
put out on the side mainly to support The Smart Set. The threatened charges
against The “Genius” were twofold: the first involved Section 1141 of Arti-
cle 105 of the New York Penal Code, which forbade the sale or distribution
of “any obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, sadistic, masochistic or
disgusting book, magazine, pamphlet,” and so on. The second invoked Sec-
tion 211 of the U.S. Criminal Code against sending obscene material
through the mail.36
The whole matter ceased to be amusing when bootleg copies of the sup-
pressed novel began selling for fifty dollars apiece. The fact that Jones had
wilted so readily when confronted with the remote chance of criminal pros-
ecution and the possibility of jail now began to enrage Dreiser. Just as the
publisher of Leaves of Grass in 1881 had withdrawn the book without any
charges actually being filed, no charges were ever filed in the case of The
“Genius.” By the end of 1916, in fact, it was becoming clear that neither the
U.S. District Attorney for New York nor the Postmaster General was in-
terested in pressing charges.37 Jones tried to placate Dreiser but in eªect
said one thing and did another, never calling Sumner’s bluª by reoªering
The “Genius” for sale. His indecision, indeed reluctance to get further in-
volved in the case, ultimately compelled Dreiser, in a desperate eªort to
free up his book again for sale, to file a “friendly” lawsuit against the John
Lane Company in order to force the matter into an o‹cial decision as to
whether the novel was obscene. He sued his publishers for $50,000 for vi-
olating his contract. By complying with Sumner’s order, John Lane had given
credence to the idea that Dreiser was guilty of obscenity. Yet their refusal
to keep publishing the book had no defensible basis without a legal deci-
sion against him. If he could get a court to rule that The “Genius” was not
obscene and thus win the suit, he could get them to either reissue the book
or turn it over to Dreiser to find another publisher. The Appellate Court
that considered the case, however, sidestepped the sticky matter of ruling
on an obscenity case by dismissing Dreiser’s suit on a technicality in 1918:
since no criminal charges had ever been filed against the book by Sumner,
there was no formal question of obscenity to consider.38
Not long after Sumner’s initial confrontation with the John Lane Com-
t h e g e n i u s h i m s e l f
2 6 0
pany in the summer of 1916, Dreiser informed Mencken that there was an
eªort underway to organize a “Committee of One Hundred” to assist in
the defense of The “Genius.” Mencken was agreeable as long as the eªort
didn’t contain any “professional radicals,” meaning Greenwich Village so-
cialists. This interest soon led to Dreiser’s turning to the Authors’ League
of America to support a petition against the suppression. The League’s sup-
port, it was hoped, might embolden Jones to be more combative with Sum-
ner. Dreiser had scorned the League’s eªorts to enlist him as a member in
1913, claiming that their interests lay solely in protecting “second serial &
moving picture rights” instead of challenging the moral strictures of the
era.39 Now with his publisher apparently deserting him, he was forced to
swallow his pride and accept any help the League might provide. The prob-
lem was that more than a few of the writers asked to sign the petition didn’t
consider The “Genius” a very worthy cause, either because of its perceived
literary weaknesses or its excessive focus on what was considered illicit sex.
As a result, the final draft of the petition noted that the undersigned “may
diªer from Mr. Dreiser in our aims and methods, and some of us may be
out of sympathy with his point of view.”40
One of those for whom even this stipulation was not enough was Ham-