The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

of either the Great War or Prohibition. Yet they have heard the song “Brown

Eyes, Why Are You Blue?” (released in 1925), and the young women wear

flapper-like rhinestone bands around their foreheads.

But, again, Dreiser’s themes spanned a larger time frame. One of the

quickest and easiest ways to get rich in America, according to the pulp fiction

at the turn of the century, was to marry money. Often, however, there was

a poorer girl whose pregnancy already laid claim to the ambitious suitor.

“What produced this particular type of crime about which I am talking,”

Dreiser wrote, “was the fact that it was not always possible to drop the first

girl.” The only way out was often murder, since the pregnant girl could not

deal with her shame and demanded marriage, while the rich girl would have

vanished at the first whiª of scandal. It probably impressed Gillette in the

middle of New York’s lake country where there were frequent boating

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mishaps—as it no doubt did Dreiser in writing his novel, since he had grown

up in a lake district around Warsaw—that such a crime could plausibly be

staged as an accident. In fact, Dreiser had studied at least fifteen such cases

before he finally decided to base his novel on the Gillette-Brown case, mainly

because of the availability of the stories in the files of the World and other

newspapers.9

In the early 1890s, while still in St. Louis, Dreiser took note of a case in

which a young perfume dealer had poisoned his girlfriend so that he could

marry into one of the old French families of St. Louis. One of the “most

tragic” of the cases Dreiser encountered, when he first came to New York

in 1894, is remarkably similar in the choice of murder weapons. Carlyle Har-

ris, a young medical student, also poisoned a poor girlfriend to be with a

rich one and was tried, convicted, and executed for murder.10 It was the

Roland Molineaux case of 1898–1902, however, that Dreiser first studied

seriously and tried to adapt as a novel during the winter of 1915, what was

in eªect the first version of An American Tragedy . Curiously, this was yet

another poisoning case: Molineaux, a chemist, had sent poison to a fellow

club member following a quarrel.

In fact, Molineaux was convicted of poisoning the rival member’s aunt,

who accidentally consumed the poison intended for her nephew on De-

cember 28, 1898. He was granted a second trial, however, mainly because

of his influential family connections, and was then acquitted. Earlier, after

he had quarreled with another club member over the hand of a wealthy

woman, this man too had died of a mysterious poisoning. It was one of the

most sensational crime stories of its era. Molineaux, who spent twenty

months on death row at Sing Sing before his second trial, went on to write

and produce a play before going insane and being committed to a mental

hospital, where he died in 1913. (Coincidentally, before going completely

mad, he had been a patient at Muldoon’s Sanitarium.) Dreiser’s story was

originally called The Rake (not to be confused with Dreiser’s earlier

unfinished book, following Sister Carrie, “The Rake,” which was essentially

the earliest draft of The “Genius” ), but extant drafts of the first six chapters

show that he couldn’t extract from the case the story he had really wanted

to tell: that of the ambitious lover who is also poor.11

Dreiser also began a novel based on the 1911 Clarence Richeson case in

which a New England minister poisoned his sweetheart in order to wed a

rich parishioner; this manuscript is now lost.12 Other cases to come under

consideration were, along with the Gillette-Brown case, the William Orpet

case of 1916 (yet another poisoning case), and the Harry New, Jr., murder

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trial of 1919, in which the accused was the son of a powerful and wealthy

Indiana ex-Senator and postmaster general. In “Neurotic America and the

Sex Impulse,” written after his visit to Savannah in 1916 and appearing in

Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Dreiser mentions all these cases, including Gillette-

Brown, and others as well.

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By 1920, however, it had become abundantly clear that Chester Gillette’s

case best matched the kind of crime required as the historical basis for An

American Tragedy. During its composition, Dreiser was briefly distracted

by the sensational 1924 trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for kid-

napping and murder. They were defended by Clarence Darrow, whom

Dreiser probably knew through his Chicago connections. He told Helen:

“It’s one of those fantastic things that seems to hold so much more than is

on the surface. Just the desire to kill doesn’t seem to explain it. . . . A great

novel there somewhere.”13 (There was, but it would not be written until

Meyer Levin’s Compulsion in 1956.) Leopold and Loeb were two brilliant

but spoiled rich college boys in Chicago who had tried to commit the per-

fect crime, mainly for its own sake. Yet as in the Molineaux case Dreiser

needed a youth who, incidentally like himself, had grown up in relative

poverty and come east to seek his fortune under the compulsions of the

American Dream of getting rich almost overnight.

Once back in New York, Dreiser renewed research on his novel. As the

seventeenth anniversary of the drowning of Grace Brown approached, he

and Helen motored to the crime scenes. They left the city on June 30, 1923,

stopping the first night in Monticello and reaching Cortland on July 1. There

they drove around, as Helen remembered, “to get a general impression of

the city as a whole—the best residential section, the factory section and the

poor streets of the town.” Dreiser noted the same pattern of wealth and

poverty he had observed when he had initially explored the cities he passed

through on his journey east in the early 1890s. The next day they drove east

to the Brown homestead outside South Otselic and met a farmer who had

known Grace’s father, who had died in the interim. Dreiser described the

same lonely country road leading to the house in his novel, according to

Helen. From there they went up to De Ruyter, which marked the entrance

to the lake country as well as the beginning of Grace’s fateful journey, and

traced the couple’s steps to Big Moose Lake (Big Bittern in the novel). It

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was July 3 when he and Helen registered at the same Glenmore Hotel. On

the Fourth Dreiser spoke to the guide who claimed to have found Grace

Brown’s body. Afterward, he rowed out on the lake with Helen to the se-

cluded South Bay, where the girl had died. In the boat, Dreiser’s concen-

tration on the scene was so intense that it appeared to Helen as if he was

about to fall into the same catatonic state that envelops Clyde before he

accidentally hits Roberta with the camera, sending her to her death. Find-

ing themselves drifting over the “deathlike stillness” that was once Grace

Brown’s grave, Helen recalled that she became a little frightened. “Maybe

Teddie will become completely hypnotized by this idea,” she fantasized, “and

even repeat it, here and now.”14

We don’t have a record of what the guide told him, except for what was

absorbed into An American Tragedy, but one of the search party left a brief

record of his impressions. Roy C. Higby was thirteen at the time of the in-

cident and was on the scene because his uncle owned the Big Moose Trans-

portation Company. It was he who first spotted Grace’s body from the deck

of the craft coordinating the rowboats that had set out in search of the miss-

ing couple. “I can remember exactly my first sight of the body,” Higby wrote

in recalling that day Grace was brought to the surface by either a pole or a

hooked line.

Her forehead was badly cut from the hairline of her left forehead across the

right eyebrow and looked as though it had been struck by a fairly sharp or

medium blunt instrument, heavily enough to lay the scalp wide open. She

was dressed in a white shirt-waist, green (light green) skirt and button shoes

and stockings. . . . I do not remember too much about what was done with

the remains after being taken to the hotel, but I do recall that the men

searched about an hour for the body of her companion and after hearing

about his having taken his suitcase, etc., with him in the boat, their native

shrewdness told them there was more to this than an accidental drowning.