The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

lin Garland. He had praised Sister Carrie to Dreiser in a 1903 letter and re-

ceived him when he came to Chicago in 1913 to research The Titan. In fact,

Garland had held a favorable opinion of Dreiser until the summer of 1913.

When he nominated Dreiser for election to the National Institute of Arts

and Letters that year, he learned that another member of the society, Robert

Underwood Johnson, strongly objected. Johnson had resigned from the ed-

itorship of Century Magazine after it agreed to publish Dreiser’s excerpts

from A Traveler at Forty. Their unedited versions, Johnson told Garland,

contained accounts of “illicit relations with five diªerent women, with dis-

gusting details.” Garland agreed that such a sex-obsessed man would not

make a good member of the institute, but it was the vulgarity of The “Ge-

nius” that sealed his ultimate disapproval. When asked to sign the Authors’

League petition, he wrote Eric Schuler, its secretary, opposing the action.

Mencken appealed to him, reminding Garland of the trouble he had had

with Comstock over Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, but Garland would not re-

lent. The Prairie Realist who had known Whitman personally and defended

him publicly in the wake of his battle with the censors complained in the

manuscript of his literary reminiscences, Companions on the Trail (1931),

that Dreiser’s realism had been based essentially on his sexual problems.41

Many, of course, did sign, through the eªorts not only of Mencken but

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of Harold Hersey, assistant to Schuler and a clerk of the copyright o‹ce of

the Library of Congress, who had written Dreiser a fan letter in 1915 about

Sister Carrie. 42 The five hundred or more signers included Jack London,

fellow Hoosier Booth Tarkington, George Ade, Henry B. Fuller, Arnold

Bennett, H. G. Wells, Amy Lowell, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Ezra

Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Ar-

lington Robinson, Carl Van Vechten, Horace Traubel, Max Eastman, John

Reed, and Ida Tarbell. The dissenters counted Howells, Ellen Glasgow,

Brander Matthews, and the best-selling author Rex Beach, who was also a

member of the executive committee of the League.43 One other prominent

writer to decline was the author of “Trees.” “It may interest you to know,”

Mencken told Dreiser on December 16, 1916, “that Joyce Kilmer, the em-

inent critic of the New York Times, has refused to sign the protest. May

the good God help Joyce.”44

–

If Kilmer, a recent Catholic convert, had lived long enough to read Dreiser’s

next challenge to American decency, he would have been sure that God was

on his side. Mencken read it in manuscript that month and was furious at

Dreiser for wanting to publish something so verboten, if not in fact ac-

tionable under current criminal codes on obscenity, this while Mencken

himself dutifully worked to gather signatures from reluctant supporters of

the League petition.45 The Hand of the Potter, Dreiser’s only four-act play,

took up the story of a sex oªender whose behavior is considered philo-

sophically and sympathetically. According to its epigraph, he took his title

and theme from the Rubáiyát: “What! did the Hand then of the Potter

shake?” The reference is to two of the children of Aaron Berchansky, a thread

peddler living on the lower East Side. Of his ten children, four of whom

are already dead, Masha is “a lame embroideress,” and Isadore is a child mo-

lester. The idea of God as a potter prone to mistakes may have come from

Dawn, then in manuscript. There Dreiser recalls an old potter with a small

shop on Vine Street in Evansville. “He sat before an open window, winter

and summer, his wheel or whirling platform before him, shaping clay into

pitchers, cups, saucers, bowls and the like,” Dreiser wrote. “It was my first

introduction to the mystery of form.”46

The plot itself was closely based on an actual sex crime that occurred in

New York in the summer of 1912. The nude body of a twelve-year-old girl

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with forty-one stab wounds was discovered in a vacant lot outside the child’s

residence. Police arrested an ex-convict with a record for “imperiling the

morals” of a fourteen-year-old girl. During a grand jury hearing designed

by the district attorney to play on the feelings of the suspect’s guilt-ridden

parents, they confessed their belief that their son was the murderer. Still on

the loose, he was found two days later in a tenement house, where he had

committed suicide. He left behind several notes admitting his guilt but

pleading insanity. There were similar murders in New York and elsewhere

in the country in the teens that might also have inspired Dreiser, includ-

ing the highly reported case in which Leo Frank was accused of the mur-

der of a thirteen-year-old girl in Atlanta.47 Its elements of anti-Semitism

toward the accused—who was ultimately lynched by vigilantes—may have

suggested the Jewish character of the Berchanskys, who are Russian immi-

grants but for some reason speak like German émigrés. The play relies on

the stereotypical image then of the “dirty Jew,” but only with reference to

the family’s impoverished conditions, which were shared in the same part

of the city by Italians soon to be depicted in The Color of a Great City.

There are several parallels between the Berchanskys and the Indiana Dreis-

ers. The character of the patriarch is one of the stronger aspects of the play,

for once again we have Old Gerhardt or the reincarnation of John Paul

Dreiser. And Mrs. Berchansky is as forgiving of her son’s problem as Sarah

Dreiser was about her oªsprings’ di‹culties, even Rome’s. The cast of char-

acters includes a six-year-old niece called “Tillie,” the nickname of Dreiser’s

sister Claire, one of the trio of youngest children, including Theo, who lived

with Sarah after the family split up for economic reasons. In the drama,

Isadore (which partially rhymes with “Theodore”) lusts after this child be-

fore settling upon his eleven-year-old victim. Dreiser diverged from the facts

of the actual murder to show Isadore also trying to fondle his teenaged sis-

ter Rae. One is tempted to ask whether these additions are a reflection of

Dreiser’s teenage sexual fantasies about his sister Tillie, two years his sen-

ior. On the other hand, this may not have been sexual at all, but merely a

writer’s way, à la Poe in “The Cask of Amontillado,” of avenging a real per-

son in fiction. “I have not as yet described my sister Tillie as she was then,”

Dreiser initially wrote in a canceled passage in the manuscript of Dawn,

“but a blacker eyed, . . . more self-aggrandizing little magpie never lived.”

Two years after he wrote The Hand of the Potter and perhaps penned this

indictment, Claire died at age forty-six of breast cancer— on May 30, 1918.48

As with The “Genius,” Dreiser may also have put some of himself into his

play. According to the biographer Richard Lingeman, Mai Dreiser, Ed’s wife,

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who strongly disapproved of Dreiser’s philandering, having heard more than

an earful from Jug, whom she had befriended, thought her brother-in-law

ought to be sterilized.49 Whether she read The “Genius,” Mai, a devout

Catholic, was reportedly shocked over the moral condemnation the novel

was receiving. Was it evidence that her husband’s closest brother was sexu-

ally abnormal? Dreiser was aware of his sister-in-law’s disapproval of him.

Perhaps in this climate of family suspicions, he secretly used the play as a

means of self-exploration. It contains Dreiser’s first allusion in his works to

the theories of Sigmund Freud, whose work was generally known by Green-

wich Village writers by the middle teens. A few years later Dreiser’s pub-

lisher, Boni & Liveright, issued the first American edition of An Introduc-

tion to Psychoanalysis. 50 Wharton Esherick, an artist whom Dreiser met in

1924, testified that it was his impression after knowing the writer for many

years that Dreiser couldn’t control his sexual appetite. “He was absolutely

a fool with a young girl—those beautiful 16- and 17-year-olds. He always

wanted to get them on his lap.” Esherick added that Dreiser persisted in

this conduct even in the company of the woman who eventually became

his second wife. Although Dreiser’s interest in pubescent girls generally

did not go beyond such flirting, he did later have a sexual aªair with a

seventeen-year-old and may have been similarly interested in her fourteen-

year-old sister.51

Whatever the self-revelations in The Hand of the Potter, it is a powerful

play because it draws from the old Dreiserian well of family memories and

the later one of public documents. Although the third act may distract some-

what from the dramatic action of the play with its rather tedious and largely