The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

wrote in “The Essential Tragedy of Life,” was merely “an evoluted arrange-

ment of attractions and repulsions.” This was the “equation inevitable,” as

he called it in an essay of the same name in Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub: “due to

an accidental arrangement of chemicals, his every move and aspiration [is

anticipated] and accounted for by a formula.”29

That was both the terror and wonder of life. Man is drawn to beauty the

way the plant is drawn to the sun. Yet this mystery was undercut by reli-

gionists who insisted that man was “free” to choose from right and wrong

in his pursuit of beauty. In the first place, such terms were merely relative

to the situation. “You are mixing up religious balderdash with chemical and

physical facts or laws,” Dreiser told James Bann, a vitalist who insisted on

the ultimate independence of living things from natural or chemical laws.

“What is good in one climate, for instance, is not good in another.” Fur-

thermore, what was evil was not always wrong: “Murder among the

Mpongwe is not wrong, although unquestionably it is an evil to the indi-

vidual. . . . All we have, as any scientific chemist or physicist will quickly

prove to you, is a neuro-plasmically developed sense of balance or propor-

tion between all those things which relate to our material existence here—

not elsewhere, get that!” Yet the superstitious and latently religious Dreiser

didn’t always completely believe everything he preached. He was both a

mechanist and a vitalist who believed that man simply hadn’t learned enough

b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e

2 8 3

about the laws which governed him. This conviction would turn into an

obsession in the 1930s as he researched and wrote the various parts of his

unfinished Notes on Life. 30

–

On May 11, 1919, at 1:45 in the afternoon Dreiser was hit by a car while

crossing Columbus Circle. The police report states that he was treated at

Roosevelt Hospital for lacerations of the scalp, which required three stitches,

and of the right hand as well as a bruised right hand and right side. Upon

hearing of the obviously minor mishap, Mencken recommended an attor-

ney who “takes only 50% and expenses.” Dreiser refused to press charges

against the twenty-seven-year-old driver. He did, however, exaggerate his

injuries to May Calvert Baker, describing his condition as “two ribs bro-

ken and my scalp cut & my left arm nearly broken.” The teacher and her

former student had maintained a correspondence since their epistolary re-

union in 1917. When he had sent her a copy of “Married,” she replied on

March 29, 1918, that it was “a very true picture of many a married life,”

including her own early marriage, which had ended even before she had

become Dreiser’s teacher. “I freed myself from a loveless marriage which I

had no business to make. The result—a life of hardship and aloneness.”31

It is not surprising that she had been so aªectionate then toward Dreiser the

student. She was now as well.

That September he was planning a cruise down the Mississippi River from

St. Paul. He planned to visit her on the way out (perhaps making a visit to

Murrel Cain in Carmel as well), but the trip was canceled because his two

traveling companions were compelled to remain in New York to await the

military draft.32 Baker was “so disappointed” and urged him to make his

visit the following spring, telling him that with time away from “hard, mer-

ciless New York” life would not “seem quite so tragic.” She had earlier tried

to get him to lighten up, to write more idealistically about life. But as he

told her, “New York doesn’t make me any sadder or more cynical than any

other place in America or elsewhere. Life makes me sad.”33

When Dreiser finally made his visit to her in June 1919, they apparently

enjoyed an ecstatic reunion. The now retired teacher and her brightest stu-

dent motored to several Indiana towns, including Warsaw, where Dreiser

was not exactly welcome because of his descriptions of the “elite” in A

Hoosier Holiday. When he left her on June 24 to take the Interurban train

b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e

2 8 4

to Indianapolis, where he would be reunited with Maxwell, she was “greatly

grieved” at his going, adding that she must have “made an awful fool of

myself last week. . . . I miss you dreadfully and to think of you going back

to New York without another glimpse of you gives me the horrors.” She

begged him to return to Huntington on his way back east. “I won’t tell a

soul you are here and you can spend the night, . . . and no one need

know. . . . Please say you are coming for the ‘Fourth’ [of July], and I’ll love

you forever and a day.” Dreiser didn’t make the detour. He promised to send

her more of his books, but mainly in the hope that she would canvass In-

diana bookstores to promote them. As to his coming back any time soon,

he told her idly, “If the state of Indiana will make me a present of a small

house & garden on the Wabash I’ll come back there and live.”34 Their ex-

tant correspondence breaks oª here for the next eleven years.

Soon after his return, he and Estelle spent two days at the New Jersey

shore resorts of Ocean Grove and Asbury Park, where they were joined the

second night by Marion and “Menck.” Dreiser’s short diary entries for July

12–14 don’t express much enthusiasm for the outing. He passively describes

the scenes, refers rather distantly to Mencken, and gives no descriptions of

any “fierce rounds” with Estelle. He also exaggerated the pain of a sprained

ankle to avoid much socializing.35 He would keep up his relationship with

Mencken, but it would continue to cool over the next few years. Estelle,

too, would continue as his typist for Newspaper Days, but their intimacy

was now coming to an end. For Dreiser was about to fall in love again, the

way he had fallen for Kirah in 1913.

–

Her name was Helen Patges Richardson, and she was his second cousin—

her grandmother, Esther Schänäb Parks, and Dreiser’s mother had been

sisters. Helen, a tall beauty with gold-chestnut hair and a sensuous body,

was twenty-five but looked younger. She had been raised in a “matriarchy”

in Portland, Oregon, where her grandmother and mother operated a ho-

tel that backed up on a vaudeville theater. Her mother had married a Dan-

ish musician named George Christian Patges, but the marriage failed when

Helen and her sisters, Myrtle and Hazel, were children. At sixteen the stage-

struck Helen fell in love with the actor Frank Richardson. She married

him, and the couple tried their luck at theaters and clubs in Oregon, Wash-

ington, and finally the romantic city of San Francisco. But the romance

b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e

2 8 5

soon stalled when booking agents, according to Helen’s memoir, preferred

assigning her as a single. Eventually, the couple relocated to Richardson’s

hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Here, bored with her marriage,

Helen met a family friend, W. E. Woodward, an executive with the In-

dustrial Finance Corporation in New York, who eventually hired her as a

secretary.

Woodward happened to be a fan of Dreiser’s writing and at the time was

much taken by the just published Twelve Men. When Helen mentioned

that she was related to the author, Woodward urged her to meet him.36 Ap-

parently, she did not know his address but had Ed’s out in Far Rockaway.

She approached Dreiser’s youngest brother, who, fearing this attractive

woman was a gold digger, took an instant and lifelong dislike to her.

Nonetheless, he gave her his brother’s address in the Village. “This day I

met Helen,” Dreiser wrote in his diary for September 13, 1919; otherwise,

he remembered little about that Saturday morning. He was stunned by her

beauty, the sound of her voice which was “emotional and moving,” the way

her hair turned in the light between gold and brown, her beautiful hands

and figure. She reminded him of his sister Theresa, who had been killed by

a train in 1897. Dreiser records that Helen’s first question was about Ed’s

address, which may in fact have been an accurate account. Determined to

meet her famous cousin, Helen may have used her interest in Ed as a pre-

tense. Whatever the case, Dreiser and his cousin were immediately and in-

tensely interested in each other. “Give her Ed’s address,” Dreiser recorded

in his diary for that day. “Then ask her for hers. She trembles as she

writes. . . . I am tempted to take her in my arms & kiss her.”37 Instead, he