Free and Other Stories and The Hand of the Potter. The latter (not actually
published until September 1919 because of a pending stage production)
must have been part of Dreiser’s test of his new publisher’s commitment.
This was certainly the case for the mystical Charles Fort’s The Book of the
Damned, which the firm reluctantly published at Dreiser’s insistence in
1920. Dreiser and Fort, the father of UFO spotters, shared the Spencer-
ian notion that the development of man had reached only its intermedi-
ate stage. The ambitious publishers balked, however, when Dreiser sug-
gested they publish John Maxwell’s attempt to depose Shakespeare as the
author of the plays, an eªort that had pretty much run out of gas with
Delia Bacon and other Shakespeare skeptics in the previous century. Both
these men were names out of Dreiser’s past. Maxwell (whose candidate for
Shakespeare authorship was Robert Cecil) had been the cub reporter’s first
boss at the Chicago Daily Globe, and Dreiser had published articles by Fort
while editing Smith’s Magazine back in 1906. He was beginning to reach
back in other ways as well.
Not only did Free contain many old stories, but at least three of the new
ones were provoked or inspired by the old story of Dreiser’s first marriage
and the fact that he was still legally married. Jug reentered his life in 1917
to ask for renewed financial support. In 1914 she had signed an agreement
to forgo alimony after February 1, 1915, in lieu of having received the fur-
nishings to their apartment at 3609 Broadway, along with two residential
lots they owned on Grandview Avenue in Rockland County, New York,
worth at least $600, and ten acres of apple orchard in North Yakima, Wash-
ington, which Dreiser had purchased from Arthur Henry and Anna Mal-
lon before they finally separated.16 Jug had held onto her job at the Delin-
eator for a while after Dreiser’s departure, but by now she had lost that
position and was asserting herself once again as “Mrs. Dreiser.” Rather than
meet her demands, which he could hardly aªord to do, he investigated,
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 7 7
without success, the possibilities of obtaining a divorce. Had he succeeded,
of course, he would have faced another domestic dilemma, for his various
lovers were bemoaning their status as simply members of his harem and
lining up to one extent or another to become the second Mrs. Dreiser. Lil-
lian Rosenthal was still in the picture and urged him to get a quickie di-
vorce in Reno; Louise Campbell complained angrily about her husband and
at the same time begged Dreiser not to throw her oª; Estelle Kubitz con-
tinued to live up to her nickname of “Gloom” by brooding over his infideli-
ties; and Kirah Markham, who had married the son of Frank Lloyd Wright,
was back in town intimating her willingness to renew their relationship.
Fairly seething at Jug, he wrote and published in quick succession sto-
ries that reflected his feelings about marriage. As an added complication
for both of them, Jug’s sister Rose, the one Dreiser had been so attracted
to when he first met the White sisters, was dying of cancer. The first two
stories, “The Second Choice” and “Married,” appeared in Cosmopolitan,
which featured romantic tales with suggestive illustrations. The third, “Free,”
came out in the more family-oriented Saturday Evening Post. All together
Dreiser earned from these publications around $2,000.17
“The Second Choice” is based on Dreiser’s 1892 aªair with Lois Zahn in
Chicago. As he wrote this story, Dreiser was still working on Newspaper
Days, in which he reflects his point of view of the aªair he had had with
the girl he left behind when he moved to St. Louis. As we have seen, shortly
before his departure, he had gone by one last time to see Lois but bolted
when he found her with the faithful telegraph operator whom she had en-
couraged in case Dreiser didn’t propose to her. In the short story, he gives
Lois’s side of the tale. After Dreiser had settled into his new job on the St.
Louis Globe-Democrat, Lois asked for the return of her love letters. In the
story, Shirley receives the answer to a similar letter to Arthur, who has gone
on to a better job in Pittsburgh, as Dreiser moved on to St. Louis. She broods
over her dilemma and the fact that the ruse to reignite their courtship has
failed. “Previous to him had been Barton Williams, stout, phlegmatic, good-
natured, well-meaning, who was, or had been before Arthur came, asking
her to marry him, and whom she allowed to half assume that she would.”
Barton represents the kind of conventional life and marriage that middle-
class morality has in store for both sexes, but of course he is her “second
choice” after Arthur appears on the scene. When it becomes clearer that
Arthur has lost his enthusiasm for her once they have had sex, she reluc-
tantly accepts her fate. “Yes, it must be—forever now, she told herself. She
must marry. Time would be slipping by and she would become too old.”
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 7 8
Her dreams were simply “too high, that’s all.” She enters the kitchen to find
her mother bent over the stove. Taking an apron, she proceeds to set the
family table.18
Shirley’s letter does not appear in “The Second Choice,” but what is sup-
posed to be Lois’s found its way into Newspaper Days. A postscript reads:
I stood by the window last night and looked out on the street. The moon
was shining and those dead trees were waving in the wind. I saw the moon
on that little pool of water over in the field. It looked silver. Oh, Theo, I
wish I were dead.
Dreiser states that he pulled it from “an old letter file,” but he was obvi-
ously writing fiction here as well as in “The Second Choice.” He was al-
most as emotionally committed to Lois in 1892 as he was to Jug a year later,
and both stories—Lois’s and Shirley’s—may be a celebration of his escape
from marriage.19
Although “Married” is based on the first years of his marriage to Jug, the
tale is basically lifted from The “Genius, ” where Eugene Witla has married
Angela Blue, set up housekeeping in bohemian New York, and realized his
mistake. Duer Wilde of “Married” is a musician instead of a painter. His
last name suggests that other artist who took personal freedom too far, at
least in his day. Oscar Wilde, especially his tragic history in which he was
tried twice for sodomy in 1895 and committed to two years in prison, which
broke him physically, had been a frequent subject of discussion among
Dreiser and his friends who lived and worked around Washington Square.20
It may have been their passing interest in the plight of the homosexual, but
more likely it was related to the personal freedom of the artist in general.
Like Witla or Dreiser, Wilde is moving up in his profession only to dis-
cover that his country-bred wife does not fit into the studio life of an artist
in New York. Like Jug, Marjorie is determinedly monogamous in a vari-
etistic world—“She was for one life, one love.” She disapproves of Duer’s
familiarity with other women. During their frequent spats on the subject,
she prods him gently but persistently to maintain his dignity and to re-
member that he is “married.” “He would learn that he was married,” Dreiser
tells us over and again in the story, as he had already rehearsed the argu-
ment for Cowperwood and Witla and indeed for himself. “He would be-
come a quiet, reserved, forceful man, weary of the silly women who were
buzzing around him solely because he was a musician and talented and good-
looking. . . . [Marjorie] knew what they wanted, these nasty women. . . .
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 7 9
Well, they wouldn’t get him. . . . She had him. He had married her. And
she was going to keep him. So there!”21
“Free” picks up the middle-class marriage at its close, when the wife of
a sixty-year-old architect is dying. Rufus Haymaker, whose conventional-
ity has been rewarded with all the signs of a successful career, including
an apartment on Central Park, has led a wretched life personally. The prob-
lem is reviewed several times in the story, which is largely told as an inte-
rior monologue to capture the emotional exhaustion of the protagonist.
Although it is Dreiser’s most frequently anthologized today, it is not one
of his best stories, perhaps because he had not experienced that segment
of married life. He was not a writer who began with a blank sheet; his