The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

the first, he thought, to condemn Poe’s “Iago-like” literary executor, Rufus

Wilmot Griswold, and to clear Poe’s name of many of his assertions and

accusations. Poe’s main attraction for Dreiser, however, had been clearly vis-

ible all along. “I accept wholly [Robertson’s] theory of morbid heredity in

the case of Poe with its corollary that, ‘he was not always to be held re-

sponsible either for his acts or words.’”52

With that other Baltimore writer alternately amusing and annoying him

(Mencken was currently reading the typescript of Newspaper Days), Dreiser

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

2 9 2

made two new friends, George Douglas and George Sterling. Douglas was

at the time a literary editor and columnist for the San Francisco Bulletin.

Sterling, also then living in San Francisco, was an exotically romantic poet

and bohemian who had begun as a protégé of Ambrose Bierce. During the

week of October 18, 1920, Dreiser traveled by himself to San Francisco at

the invitation of Paul Elder, an art dealer who proposed a reception for him

at his gallery. The week consisted of several gala events and late-night bouts

of hard drinking with the two Georges, who had already been tested by

Mencken in an earlier visit to the city. Dreiser was happy to take a vaca-

tion from Helen, whose novelty at the moment seemed to be wearing a bit

thin. Conveniently, Lillian Rosenthal, who was in the cast of a play ap-

pearing in San Francisco that week, secretly waited in his hotel room for

him one night. Meanwhile, Helen, who had quarreled with her “Teddie,”

sent him frantic telegrams in response to at least one of his own. “Your

telegram final blow,” she exclaimed on October 18. “Good God. If you knew

the agony of this loneliness. Fear breakdown.”53 His sexual varietism was

beginning to resurface, and there may also have been a woman or two he

was seeing in Los Angeles.

On or about January 25, 1921, Teddie and Helen moved back into Hol-

lywood proper and rented rooms in the home of Mr. and Mrs. D. H. Mc-

Donald at 6309 Sunset Drive. Helen was working at the Morosco Studio

in a Bebe Daniels picture. Dreiser glumly noted that “her new director, an

ex-army colonel, struck on her,—her usual experience.” On March 8 they

moved down Sunset only a few intersections to 1515 Detroit. At this point,

the working title for An American Tragedy was “Mirage”—which Dreiser

also used as the title of a poem. By that summer, he told a friend that he

had “a box full of poems, unpublished,” perhaps including “Mirage” the

poem.54 Dreiser’s poetry is often about nature, not brute nature, but the

nature of romantic illusions and mysteries in the vein of Thoreau’s spiri-

tual quests. In “Mirage,” which first appeared in Moods: Cadenced and De-

claimed (1926), the elusive “you” is not found in the “dark days” of the

present but in the writer’s childhood past—“in the depths of a green wood

in spring.” Aside from its title, which otherwise suggests life as a complete

illusion or mirage, the poem seems to have little to do with the tragic theme

of An American Tragedy.

That spring Dreiser and Helen visited her mother in Portland. On the

way, the couple stopped in San Francisco, where this time Helen got to en-

joy the festive company of Sterling and Douglas, the former openly flirt-

ing with her, apparently with Dreiser’s tacit permission. On a subsequent

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

2 9 3

visit, in August of 1922, late one night or early in the morning as they drove

through Golden Gate Park, Sterling plunged into a lily pond to retrieve a

flower for Helen. She later fondly recalled the incident in her memoir, re-

membering Sterling as “a tall beautiful person with gray hair carefully

arranged over his forehead to cover some imaginary defect.” During the 1921

trip, they also spent time with Powys and his brother Llewelyn, who were

also in San Francisco.55

All the while Horace Liveright was waiting impatiently, pleading for that

next “Dreiser novel,” but he had to settle instead for a part of Dreiser’s au-

tobiography that would eventually become known as Newspaper Days, but

was originally published as A Book about Myself in 1922. There was also the

problem of the John Lane Company’s trying to hold onto The Bulwark at

the same time that Liveright was doling out a $4,000 a year for it in monthly

payments, now extended and modified with a $1,000 advance for the forth-

coming autobiography. Lane had also advanced money for The Bulwark and

still retained the legal rights to The “Genius, ” and it not only refused to sell

the novel itself but also declined to sell Dreiser copies so that he might re-

sell them on the lucrative black market. The question of what publisher

legally owned The Bulwark was further complicated when John Lane closed

its New York o‹ce and assigned its American titles to Dodd, Mead, &

Company. Mencken, who didn’t think that highly of Liveright, advised his

friend to turn what books he could over to Dodd, Mead. Dreiser, however,

didn’t trust the company to support him in the event another of his books

fell under the gun of the censor. On The Bulwark, he owed John Lane around

$1,600 and Liveright another $1,400, and he even considered asking Dodd,

Mead for a $3,000 advance to pay oª both. Ultimately, however, Dodd,

Mead, which had taken over Dreiser’s debt to Lane, decided against reissu-

ing The “Genius. ” In exchange for the cost of the plates, bound copies, and

copyright as well as the money owed to Lane, the company—perhaps un-

willing to be the next publisher of Dreiser’s most controversial book—

turned The “Genius” over to Liveright. It would be republished without any

of the recommended expurgations.56

The “Genius” would become Dreiser’s second most profitable book, but

it didn’t reappear until the spring of 1923. In the spring and summer of 1921,

Dreiser was still scraping about to make a living. Helen’s sister Myrtle ar-

rived in June, apparently separated from her husband and eventually in the

company of a man named Grell, who simply disappeared one day. (Myr-

tle would become the general basis for the hedonistic sister-in-law in “Reina,”

the opening sketch in A Gallery of Women. ) Helen bought a car, then an-

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

2 9 4

other after the first broke down, and they toured even more of California,

especially around Los Angeles. But Dreiser couldn’t relax, especially when

working on a novel. As 1921 began to fade and he had made so little head-

way on An American Tragedy, he began to fret over his place in the Amer-

ican literary pantheon. A new novel was needed to restore what some per-

ceived as his waning reputation. “Mr. Dreiser died without visible means

of support of any kind,” he wrote not altogether in jest to Mencken in Sep-

tember. “His body now lies in row eight, grave number seventeen of the

present L. A. Gas Works extension of what was recently the old St. Ignatz

cemetery.” Whether Mencken could read between the lines, he responded

with his usual wit and hilarity. The man who boasted of occasionally uri-

nating on Poe’s grave in Baltimore after a night of beer drinking told Dreiser:

“You will recall the case of the late Walt Whitman, another literary man.

For years he practised the following last words: ‘My one regret is that I could

not die on the field of honor, fighting for democracy.’ But his actual last

words were: ‘Lift me up, Horace; I want to shit.’”57

By this time, Dreiser and Helen had moved again, their seventh address

in Southern California in less than two years. In August, they had rented

a place at 652 North Columbus Street in Glendale, a community a few miles

northeast of Hollywood. Together they built flower boxes for the windows

of the little house, and Dreiser cultivated a small garden, something he ap-

parently did wherever he could. Once again he felt he had to put some space

between himself and Hollywood, and he tried another criticism of the movie

industry. “An Overcrowded Entryway,” which was never published, essen-

tially recycles the same material he had put into “Hollywood: Its Morals

and Manners” and “Hollywood Now.”58 Apparently not making any pro-

gress on his new novel, he tried at this time to sell the portraits that would

make up A Gallery of Women to Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan, but

they were simply too complicated and undersexed for that magazine. He

even thought to sell the manuscript of Sister Carrie, for which he believed

he could get $2,000. He had given it to Mencken and now oªered to split