The Last Titan. A Life of Theodore Dreiser

Here is how Dreiser described the scene in his novel:

But what created far more excitement after a very little time was the fact

that at high noon one of the men who trolled—John Pole—a woodsman,

was at last successful in bringing to the surface Roberta herself, drawn up-

ward by the skirt of her dress, obviously bruised about the face—the lips

and nose and above and below the right eye. . . . John Pole, who with Joe

Rainer at the oars was the one who had succeeded in bringing her to the

surface, had exclaimed at once on seeing her: ‘Why, the pore little thing!

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She don’t seem to weigh more’n nothin’ at all. It’s a wonder tuh me she coulda

sunk.’ [Grace Brown stood 5’ 2” and weighed 100 pounds.] And then reach-

ing over and gathering her in his strong arms, he drew her in, dripping and

lifeless, while his companions signaled to the other searchers, who came

swiftly. And putting back from her face the long, brown, thick hair which

the action of the water had swirled concealingly across it, he had added: ‘I

do declare, Joe! Looka here. It does look like the child mighta been hit by

somethin! Looka here, Joe!’ And soon the group of woodsmen and inn guests

in their boats were looking at the brownish-blue marks on Roberta’s face.

Dreiser not only deepens the drama of the discovery of the dead girl’s body,

but reflects the emotion of the woodsmen, who in actuality planned to lynch

Gillette, had they found him before the police.15

Dreiser’s last stop before returning to New York was Herkimer, the county

seat where Chester had been tried for murder, the Bridgeburg of An Amer-

ican Tragedy. He visited both the courthouse and the county jail in which

Chester had been incarcerated until his trial began. Here Dreiser may have

hoped to examine the court record, but by this time, so many years after

the 1906 trial, its 2,129-page “abstract” was obtainable only in large New

York State law libraries. As a result, his major sources were the newspaper

accounts, especially those in the World and the New York Sun, and a 1906

pamphlet entitled Grace Brown’s Love Letters, which Dreiser may have picked

up in Herkimer.16 His biggest source was his imagination, which had been

recently tested in the writing of Newspaper Days. Some reviewers complained

that the autobiographical volume was too long at more than five hundred

pages, but what impresses the reader today is Dreiser’s imaginative reading

of his past, for he surely could not have remembered all the conversations

and extended minutiae that buttress the narrative. It was this same big sil-

ver screen that would fictionalize the biography of Chester Gillette.

–

Upon his return from California in the fall of 1922, Dreiser had established

his New York residence at 16 St. Luke’s Place in the Village, where one of

his neighbors was Sherwood Anderson, and another was A. A. Brill, the

Freud translator and psychiatrist, whom Dreiser had known since 1917. In

1923 Boni & Liveright issued The Color of a Great City, a collection of

sketches and stories about New York, mostly old, some done around the

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turn of the century. The firm also finally reissued The “Genius” —in its original and completely uncut form, in spite of the complaints by Sherman and

others and the censoring eªorts of Mencken made in hopes of salvaging

the book. It brought Dreiser the highest royalties of any book to date, in-

deed significantly more than he had earned from a number of the earlier

ones. When The “Genius” was first issued by John Lane, it had sold 7,982

copies and earned Dreiser royalties in the amount of $2,394.60 before it

was withdrawn the next year in the face of Sherman’s threats of prosecu-

tion. When Liveright reissued it, it sold over 48,000 copies between 1923

and 1933 and earned Dreiser more than $25,000. He also continued to re-

ceive $4,000 a year from Boni & Liveright in the form of advances while

he worked on An American Tragedy. By that fall, he told several corre-

spondents that the new novel was “1/2 done” and that he expected to com-

plete it by the following August.17

By this time Dreiser and Helen were quarreling frequently. It is not

altogether clear whether Helen ever made St. Luke’s Place her primary ad-

dress, but she had taken her own apartment at 35 West 50th Street soon

after their return east. Their relationship had suªered somewhat in Cali-

fornia, possibly because of the attention Helen was receiving from randy

producers and directors. There, amid the glamour of fast fortunes and the

possibility of overnight stardom for beautiful young women, Dreiser’s sag-

ging literary fame was no match for the allure of the Hollywood moguls.

Back in New York, he started seeing other women—those with whom he

had already trysted, Louise Campbell and the others, but also a new one,

named Sallie Kussell, an aspiring if neurotic writer from Chicago who would

become one of the typists and editorial advisors of An American Tragedy.

“The trouble with you,” Dreiser told her at the height of their attraction

to each other in the summer of 1923, “is that you have a gripping sex ap-

peal for me.” With this rivalry, Helen’s relations with Dreiser had reached

the same level of frustration over his philandering as Estelle had felt shortly

before he met Helen in 1919. Both women complained bitterly at their

neglect, and Estelle often whined, which, given her nickname of “Bert,”

may have suggested the character of the distressed Roberta Alden once she

finds herself pregnant and unloved by Clyde. (Another model, of course,

was Jug, whose seniority to Dreiser may have prompted the idea of mak-

ing Roberta two years older than Clyde. The only legitimate Mrs. Dreiser

had, of course, already served as the basis for Angela in The “Genius” and

inspired the marriage stories in Free. ) In March of 1924 Helen left New York

for Portland to visit her mother and sister, with the intention of eventually

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making her way back to Hollywood to revive her career, this time as a singer.

Dreiser, while persisting in his “varietism,” missed her dearly. And it is be-

cause of their separation that we have an epistolary record of his emotional

ups and downs as he struggled to complete An American Tragedy, “harder,”

as he told Helen on March 30, “than any I ever wrote.” Later in 1924, Louise

Campbell returned from a year in Europe, and started typing and editing

the manuscript. The transcript in turn was being sent in sections to his pub-

lisher, who immediately set it up in type in the hope of getting a running

start on its eventual publication.18

Dreiser did little else but work on the book, but by June he had only

reached the point “where the factory girl & the rich girl in Clyde’s life are

enlarging & by degrees destroying him.” He found himself in a similar

quandary, because he had set himself between Helen and other women.

Fearing that she was possibly seeing someone else, he told her on one day

that he wasn’t “sleeping with anyone.” On the very next he recorded in his

diary a sexual encounter on the beach with one Magdalene Davis, an ac-

tress by night and secretary by day who came from the grimy coal town of

Ebensburg, Pennsylvania. He was now drinking bathtub gin and occa-

sionally even smoking cigarettes, something very unusual for Dreiser be-

cause of his bronchial history. One night he stumbled into Mame’s apart-

ment and sobbed bitterly that he couldn’t finish his novel. It was around

this time that Esther McCoy entered his life, after writing him the usual

fan letter. She was then an undergraduate at the University of Michigan,

and her leftist political leanings would encourage Dreiser’s commitment to

communism in the 1930s. One night in May, perhaps in search of further

romance, he attended a party at the Long Island Sound mansion of W. C.

Fields. He was running himself down and even thought “of going to the

country for a few days—to a work-farm like Muldoon’s used to be to see

if I can be pulled into shape.”19

By the fall of 1924 Dreiser had moved to a street-level flat at 118 West

11th Street near Washington Square, one of the Rhinelander apartments,

where Mame and Austin also lived as managers. He worked every day on

the novel, even Sundays, sometimes from eleven in the morning until ten

at night. By the end of the year he had Books I and II written, typed, and