The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

to Marion not long after starting her aªair with Dreiser. “I’m sick of it.

These men, flitting lightly from one woman to another, with never a thought

of what is to become of the woman they have flitted from.” Such women

as she and her sister, she anguished, were fools. “If they’d think, they’d know

that marriage was made for them. . . . Instead, while they are young, they

prattle about equal sexual and civil rights, cooking up a fine kettle of fish

for their middle age.” Yet almost a decade later and by then married to the

successful New York food and beverage importer Arthur Phelps Williams,

she told Marion, herself by this time married and deserted by a French-

man, “I wouldn’t give two cents for the whole institution of marriage” be-

cause it aimed at “penning two entirely diªerent” people together to the

point of mutual hatred.59

Both women were colorful writers who never developed their talents in

a literary world still dominated by men. Estelle wrote best in self-descrip-

tions that were both biting and poignant. Speaking to her sister of their

mutual “friend, the honorable Theodore Dreiser,” she wondered why she

stayed with him. “This morning I went to a Catholic Church just oª Broad-

way,” she told Marion. “I saw the door open, and slunk in, and wasn’t in

one minute before I found myself crying in a dumb sort of way, for some

reason, I don’t know yet. . . . I saw the ‘Believers’ lighting candles to their

departed, and I had an insane desire to light one to my own departed soul.”

An alcoholic eventually, if not at the time she was with Dreiser (who still

did not drink much then), she ultimately returned to New Windsor, di-

vorcing Williams, whom she caught cheating on her. She underwent a dou-

ble mastectomy in 1940 and retreated for good to the family homestead,

where she died a recluse in a house full of cats in 1954.60

While Dreiser was still deeply involved with Estelle, he received a fan let-

ter from a literary admirer in Philadelphia. She was Louise Campbell, a mar-

ried woman in her twenties who spoke fluent German. She was petite, yet

another brunette, and—as Dreiser would soon discover—“a perfect little

cormorant of lust.” She had recently read A Hoosier Holiday and complained

lightly about Dreiser’s criticism of Pennsylvania. Otherwise, she had writ-

ten to praise other works including A Traveler at Forty, and to whet his in-

terest in her personally. “Ever since I came across your ‘Jennie Gerhardt’

I’ve read everything I could find that you wrote,” she told him on Febru-

ary 24, 1917. “For the last two weeks my sister and I have been having a per-

fect ‘orgy’ reading ‘a Traveler at Forty.’ I read it aloud to her and we sim-

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ply ‘ate’ every word of it.” As to his other travel book, she promised to make

him a list of Pennsylvania’s contributions to American history. Then after

admitting that she herself didn’t like the Keystone State or Philadelphia that

much, especially following her visits to New York, she told him that every

time she read a new book of his, his writings inspired her to try to write

herself. “But I seem to have more success in being decorative than intel-

lectual. My friends all seem to think I make a much better fashion model

than a writer.” She signed oª saying that if she ever in fact became a writer,

she hoped to meet him some day.61

“Why wait until you are famous?” Dreiser replied immediately, adding

that since he was “calmly working at above address,” she might as well visit

him now. As to Pennsylvania, he reminded her that he had written that he

and Booth could not “recall anyone of import at the time. ” He had once

lived in Philadelphia, he told her, and wouldn’t mind visiting that city again.

She visited him on Tenth Street about a month later. She noted his “very

large” writing desk made out of Paul’s rosewood piano, which Dreiser had

recently purchased from Mame. On its top she was startled to see a mouse

in a small makeshift cage. He had trapped it, he told her, but when he re-

alized it was only caught by the tail he planned to release it in the country.

They had lunch that day at the Brevoort. Louise remembered that they

paused outside the hotel to look up at an airplane. “This was 1917 and people

really did that.”62

Even though she had had no formal editing experience, he sent her away

with a short story to read and edit for matters of grammar, spelling, and

general sentence structure. Dreiser wrote easily and at any time, she later

recalled, and was not intimidated by the technicalities of composition. Be-

fore long she would be typing out the manuscripts to his two long volumes

of autobiography. They acknowledged their mutual attraction that day, but

they may not have consummated their aªair sexually until May 28. Ap-

parently because Estelle was jealously on the alert and Louise was still mar-

ried, they trysted in Trenton, halfway between New York and Philadelphia.

Armed with presents for Louise as well as a bottle of disinfectant, Dreiser

greeted her at the train station in the rain. Thanks to Estelle’s typescript,

we have the journal entry describing this blissful moment and those that

followed at the Sterling Hotel, where the two lovers registered as “Mr. and

Mrs. of Newark.” Beforehand, at the station, Louise expressed her nerv-

ousness about her husband: “Says she didn’t know till last minute whether

she would come. . . . Feels she is doing wrong. Conscience troubles her and

she is watched. . . . Reputation at stake. Will not come any more. I get a

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little angry.” But once in their hotel room, all was well for the next four

hours and forty-five minutes.63 That evening, back in New York, Dreiser

also had sex with Estelle, but Louise, now totally enamored of the Great

Writer, would last much longer.

The Genius himself, it will become clearer, was a troubled man when it

came to sex— or at least personal relations with women. He was Eugene

Witla incarnate, regardless of the author’s rather muted criticism of his hero’s

faults. In the wake of The “Genius” and all the grief its publication brought

him, he seems to have been more sexually active than ever before. At the

same time, with no money coming in from The “Genius” and very little

from his other books, he was feeling poor again and professionally frus-

trated. He would turn from one-act plays back to their literary equivalent,

short stories. In fact, since the suppression of The “Genius” he had been

looking for literary ways other than the novel to make a living. It was dur-

ing this dip in his literary fortunes that he met his first biographer, Dorothy

Dudley. Although her life of Dreiser is largely impressionistic, it also con-

tains firsthand information not otherwise available. The daughter of a

wealthy Chicago gynecologist, and a 1905 Bryn Mawr graduate, she met

Dreiser through Masters. She and Dreiser may have been lovers before she

married Henry Blodgett Harvey, a Lucky Strike executive, and moved to

Paris in 1925. “Do you know what woman Dreiser’s living with now?” she

was asked by a fellow writer in the fall of 1916. “Upon my ignorance as to

that,” she wrote in her book to characterize this post- “Genius” period, “the

first and last spark of interest in ‘America’s foremost novelist’ died.”64 Floyd

Dell and others had been right in their prophecies. The “Genius” had seri-

ously undercut the reputation of the author of Sister Carrie.

Mencken made things worse—and seriously threatened their friendship

for the first time—in his Book of Prefaces (1917). In summing up Dreiser’s

career as a writer and, as he touched on each of his friend’s books, passing

on information about literary influences Dreiser had told him of, he de-

scribed him as a “phenomenon inescapably visible, but disconcertingly hard

to explain.” Evidently, neither The Hand of the Potter nor perhaps even Es-

telle’s unhappiness was forgotten in this act of criticism. Mencken repeated

his complaint about Dreiser as a clumsy stylist who was now overstocking

his books with “details that serve no purpose,” but also called him a clod

of a personality, untutored as to formal learning if not unwashed. Dreiser

was admittedly intelligent and “a sound artist,” Mencken wrote, “but there

come moments when a dead hand falls upon him, and he is once more the

Indiana peasant, snu‹ng absurdly over imbecile sentimentalities, giving a

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