2 1 5
crowded into the smoking room for the last time to devour the news, Dreiser
recalled. “Some broke down and cried. Others clenched their fists and swore
over the vivid and painful pen pictures by eyewitnesses and survivors. For
a while we all forgot we were nearly home.” But as the ship docked, the fast
friendships bound together on “the great deep” dissolved back into the in-
terests of “individuals of widely separated communities and interests,” as
the tragedy of the Titanic was largely forgotten by that generation. Dreiser,
too, looked ahead to his prospects and wondered whether he would ever
make a decent living as a realistic writer in a land so focused on make-be-
lieve. Since its only reality, he thought, was its cult and culture of money,
he may have felt reassured that he was now finishing a book to be called
The Financier. As his ship entered the harbor, he saw the mammoth build-
ings of the city. “They were just finishing the upper framework of the Wool-
worth Building,” he recalled, “that first cathedral of the American religion
of business.”51
r e t u r n o f t h e n o v e l i s t
2 1 6
t e n
Life after the Titanic
–
Mr. Dreiser calls on no exterior glamour for aid;
the Fact is glorious enough for him.
I N D E P E N D E N T, M A R C H 2 7, 1 9 1 3
the titanic disaster took the lives of several American millionaires,
including the namesake for John Jacob Astor, worth $150 million accord-
ing to the initial Associated Press report of April 16, 1912. Another mil-
lionaire with a now famous name to go down into history this way was
Benjamin Guggenheim, worth $95 million. Just a year earlier he had aban-
doned his wife and children for a mistress in Paris and was on his way back
to America to pay them a visit. The report also listed (erroneously) Colonel
Washington Roebling of Brooklyn Bridge fame, allegedly worth only $25
million, but the engineer who had perfected the suspension bridge lived
until 1926. Theodore Dreiser, practically broke after his European trip cost
more than Grant Richards had promised it would, might well have been
among the drowned if he hadn’t been so short of funds. He returned on
the Kroonland, much inferior in comfort and status to either the Titanic or
the Mauretania, which had taken him abroad. To some critics in America,
had they known how close he came to taking the wrong boat, it might have
been better if he had perished on the Titanic than to continue to pollute
American literature with stories about fallen women. But Dreiser was
finished with women as principals in his fiction, if not with uncompro-
mising realism. Indeed, he was largely finished with autobiography as fiction
after The “Genius,” whose publication was to wait its turn in the rush of the
novelist’s midlife renewal of his literary energy. He was now prepared to
2 1 7
write novels that would culminate the muckraking eªort of the last decade
to expose the shame of American business, while also celebrating one of its
more outspoken conspirators.
That June, five months before the appearance of The Financier, he told
Montrose J. Moses of the New York Times that Jennie Gerhardt was “an ac-
complishment of the past.” He vowed never again to write “another book
like it,” and he never did. He was now promoting The Financier, the novel
he had finished immediately upon his return from Europe, as a major de-
parture from his earlier works. He looked, Moses recorded, “very much like
the Man from Home. . . . Seated in a rocking chair, which moved back and
forth whenever we were traveling fastest, he now and then emphasized a
point with his goldrimmed glasses, in between whiles folding his handker-
chief four times in length and then rolling it into a tight ball to clinch an
argument.” “Maybe I sound disloyal,” he told Moses, “but Jenny’s [ sic] tem-
perament does not appeal to me any longer.” As he told a reporter from the
New York Evening Post in a 1911 interview, one reason he had written “chiefly
about women” in the past, was that woman “symbolizes the essentially artis-
tic character of the universe more than man does. . . . But, of the two, man
symbolizes power.” In his new novel, which was then still to be dubbed by
his publishers as merely “Part 1” of The Financier with Parts 2 and 3 to ap-
pear at six-month intervals, he said that “the note of the plot will come
from the man, and [a] man shall be the centre of the next three or four nov-
els.” He also suggested that another reason he could no longer write about
a woman after Jennie was possibly “because I know more about women
now.”1
After the failure of his relationships with Jug and Thelma, and perhaps
after his experience with some of the women he had met in Europe, he may
have lost his faith in the idea of Jennie’s innocence, if not of Carrie’s dura-
bility. It is even possible that Jennie was at least in part Dreiser’s ploy to
succeed in the marketplace after the devastation of Sister Carrie and to take
advantage of the feminist movement that was increasingly apparent dur-
ing the first decade of the twentieth century. Whatever the case, his repre-
sentation and perhaps his understanding of women shifted. In The “Ge-
nius,” Dreiser deconstructed the utility of the former Sara White’s virtues
in the character of Angela Blue. From now on, women would become more
or less a commodity to him, even as they remained a lifelong emotional ne-
cessity. The women in the life of Frank Algernon Cowperwood of The Fi-
nancier, like those of his real-life model, Charles Tyson Yerkes, Jr., swirl
around him like leaves in a storm. While most of Cowperwood’s financial
l i f e a f t e r t h e t i t a n i c
2 1 8
activities in the first volume were taken directly from the subject’s biogra-
phical record, Dreiser felt freer to imagine the financier’s personal and sex-
ual adventures. Another way of putting it is that Dreiser lived vicariously
through his buccaneering businessman, and out of his immersion in this
sexual overreacher’s life, both real and as imagined in The Titan, evolved
his own lifetime pattern as the serial lover of women.
By the time he returned from Europe, he had taken up with Anna P.
Tatum, a pertly articulate twenty-nine-year-old Wellesley graduate from
Fallsington, Pennsylvania, and the first of a number of mistresses with typ-
ing skills. Like several of her successors, she seems to have found Dreiser
homely but irresistible because of his compelling literary gifts and his Ames-
like way of talking to women. Shortly before his departure for Europe, she
had written out of the blue to tell him, almost breathlessly, how deeply “The
Mighty Burke” had stirred her. Appearing in McClure’s of May 1911, the
story is one of Dreiser’s first literary uses of his 1903 experiences as “an am-
ateur laborer.” But her major reason for writing, she continued, was to praise
Jennie, which she found “magnificently constructed—like a great piece of
music.”2 In praising his work, however, she had also come to quarrel with
it. This was another trait or requirement of the Dreiser women: generally,
they had to be more than physically attractive. They had to be intellectu-
als, readers of literature, and more often than not they were frustrated or
would-be writers as well.
Anna, who was bisexual, thought that Dreiser depicted men better than
women. “I do not believe there are any real Jennie Gerhardts,” she told him.
“Jennie is, I think, your idealization.” Annoyed, he suggested that she send
future criticism to his publisher. But Anna wasn’t to be put oª, and before
long she had read Sister Carrie, whose heroine she considered “a little beast.”
Yet unlike Jennie, Carrie was true. When Dreiser conceded he was better
at characterizing a “worldly type of women,” she promptly agreed because
she thought “at bottom you don’t like women. You like men infinitely bet-
ter and understand them 75 percent better.” Busy as he was at the time in
the creation of a male character whose personality dominates everyone
around him, Dreiser no doubt concurred. Anna told him of another man,
her father, whose Quakerism and religious ways had not shielded him from
normal human suªering and ultimately domestic tragedy. The story, which
eventually became the basis for The Bulwark (not published until 1947),
would haunt Dreiser the rest of his days as he approached this elusive project
from shifting philosophical points of view. Anna also read the manuscript
version of The “Genius” and pronounced it “the most intimate searching