Manners.” One of Helen’s aspiring suitors was Rex Ingram, an imposing
actor who had played a bit part in Tarzan of the Apes (1918) and then be-
came director of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), Rudolph Valen-
tino’s first film and Helen’s biggest opportunity.45
At the end of November 1919, they moved again, to the front suite of a
large white stucco house on the southeast corner of North Larchmont and
Clinton streets. The move put them closer to Hollywood, within easy walk-
ing distance of many film studios. They often walked as far as West Holly-
wood, past enormous eucalyptus trees with their bark stripped oª and lying
about. The sidewalks were “literally carpeted” with red peppers, which had
fallen “from overhanging pepper trees.” The aspiring actress and the
would-be screenwriter remained at this address for about nine months, then
moved at the end of August 1920 to a community called Highland Park,
populated, as it turned out to their surprise, with demonstratively religious
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 8 9
people. These included their landlord, who lived upstairs and who loudly
greeted Dreiser each morning with “Praise the Lord . . . Praised Be His
Name!” This small, intensely devoted religionist no doubt reminded
Dreiser of his own father. The landlord’s wife was “a large, bony, physi-
cally hardened and angular woman,” Helen recalled, “who had probably
worked hard all her life, trying to keep the family going.” Obviously, she
was the more practical one. There was also a fifteen-year-old daughter liv-
ing in this two-story house at 1553 Curran Street, to whom Dreiser was
mildly attracted. But more than that, he saw in her the burning desire to
somehow extricate herself from her parents’ near poverty as well as their
religious fanaticism.46
It was at this Southern California address, just east of Hollywood with
its rank melodrama and frivolous comedies, that the idea for An American
Tragedy was fully born. Not all in Hollywood was lightweight, of course.
There were serious films too, if very much in the minority, and one won-
ders whether Clyde Gri‹ths’s last name does not owe something to the om-
nipresence of D. W. Gri‹th in the filming community. There were also
real-life people and events that might have suggested more serious themes.
The Fatty Arbuckle scandal, in which the popular film comedian was ac-
cused of raping and murdering a Hollywood actress, broke in September
of 1920.47 By that time Dreiser had abandoned work on The Bulwark. On
April 9, as he completed chapter 13 of the latest version, he expressed his
discouragement over the story. By July 7, he was “greatly wrought up” over
the “fruitless results of my eªorts to write.” Instead, he began work on An
American Tragedy, of which he completed twenty-one chapters, or just a
little beyond the first of the three “books” in the novel, while in Califor-
nia. The final version, less biographical than the earliest draft of Book I,
begins with a street scene in which Asa Gri‹ths and his wife run a mission
for the down and out in Kansas City. Asa, in a trait reminiscent of the Cur-
ran Street landlord, is known as “Praise-the-Lord Gri‹ths” because of his
inevitable greeting. He is also, as noted earlier, partly rooted in the im-
practical Andrew Conklin (“Asa” in Dawn), who ran the real estate com-
pany Dreiser worked for in Chicago in the 1890s. Asa Gri‹ths’s wife re-
sembles Helen’s description of the landlord’s spouse: “perhaps five years his
junior, taller, not so broad, but solid of frame and vigorous, very plain in
face and dress, and yet not homely.” Besides twelve-year-old Clyde and the
other Gri‹ths children, there is “Esta” (for Hester; as with Sister Carrie
Hawthorne’s magnum opus somehow imposed itself on Dreiser’s second
classic), who at fifteen sings hymns accompanied by a street organ and who
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 9 0
may be modeled on the teenaged female living at 1553 Curran Street. Esta
eventually runs away with an actor who will abandon her in pregnancy, but
for now she does not seem to mind the stares of male onlookers. “Physi-
cally,” Dreiser writes in chapter 1 of his great novel, “she was of a pale, emas-
culate and unimportant structure, with no real mental force or depth, and
was easily made to feel that this was an excellent field in which to distin-
guish herself and attract a little attention.”48
Just why Dreiser and Helen moved away from Hollywood is not known.
Dreiser may have wanted to get away from its immediate influences, so that
he could work in earnest on his new novel. Curran Street was in the hills,
and they had a “beautiful view.” Once away from the neighborhood on
North Larchmont with its noisy Hollywood tra‹c and tourists (even then),
he wrote in his diary for Labor Day: “I work on ‘An American Tragedy’ till
4 p.m.” Five weeks later he visited the Los Angeles Bible Institute, “look-
ing for someone who knows of little cheap missions.” Indeed, it seems likely
he may have actually begun the book, or at least conceived its outline, while
still on North Larchmont in the summer of 1920, when he told Will Lengel
that he didn’t know when The Bulwark would be finished and he was work-
ing on another novel.49
–
After the first twenty-one chapters, Dreiser made relatively little progress
on his great novel during the rest of his stay in Southern California. Wor-
ried more than usual about money, he not only worked on screenplays and
short stories, but began the sketches for A Gallery of Women (originally,
“Twelve Women”). He tried to sell them individually to Hearst’s Interna-
tional-Cosmopolitan, where Will Lengel had become managing editor.
Many of these were based on female acquaintances (not lovers in most cases)
whom he had known in Greenwich Village. In fact, the series may have
been initiated by his meeting with Florence Deshon in Hollywood. Her
life in New York and California became the basis of “Ernestine” in A Gallery
of Women. Deshon had been the mistress of Max Eastman while living in
Greenwich Village and working for the “legitimate stage.” When the film
industry beckoned in 1919, she went to Hollywood and became the mis-
tress of Charlie Chaplin. Dreiser recorded in his diary for November 29,
1920, that he met with her for lunch at the Come-On-Inn on Gower Street
in Hollywood. Florence told him about her life with Eastman (how he could
b a c k t o t h e f u t u r e
2 9 1
always get money from the rich for his socialistic causes) and Chaplin (who
was the victim of his first wife’s paternity suit after she had failed to snag
D. W. Gri‹th, whose name Dreiser rather significantly misspells with an
“s”). Florence oªered to introduce him to Chaplin if he came back, but
Dreiser did not “promise” because he was too busy with An American
Tragedy. He also thought she had her eye on him. (“Tells me of [Chaplin’s]
peculiarities. Likes him but . . . craves, as I can see, another literary celeb-
rity.”) Deshon committed suicide in 1922.50
The first sketch he actually completed concerns an equally sad case of
American womanhood in the teens and twenties. “Olive Brand” was mod-
eled on Edith De Long Jarmuth, who had married and divorced a wealthy
man in the West. In 1918 she married Edward H. Smith, a journalist at the
New York World who was one of Dreiser’s most loyal friends. Before she
was able to develop her newfound talents as a writer and social activist (hav-
ing been broadened by creative writing courses at Columbia University and
life in the Village), she died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Dreiser kept
in touch with Smith while he was in California, and it was Smith who kept
him abreast of the New York productions of “The Girl in the Co‹n” and
The Hand of the Potter in the fall of 1920. The following winter Smith pub-
lished an article on Dreiser’s literary status twenty years after Sister Carrie,
comparing him to other greats, such as Poe and Whitman, who were also
scorned by establishment critics. He also pointed to other, lesser writers of
the past who “succeeded in writing but one book before the iron hand of
convention took hold of them.” Smith concluded that Dreiser “keeps stead-
fastly on his way in the teeth of organized, commercialized, capitalized
Philistinism.”51
Interestingly, Dreiser started reading Poe again at this time. He also dipped
into John W. Robertson’s psychological study and in perhaps an ironic twist
of Poe’s concept of the doppelgänger made Clyde Gri‹ths’s cousin Gilbert
almost a twin. He had already read several biographies and studies of Poe,
he told the bookseller who had sent him Robertson’s book, but this was