Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (58 page)

As Paul’s fortunes slumped, the family flitted from one shabby dwelling to another. Among all the hardship Theodore was his mother’s favourite. His biographer, Richard Lingeman, sees the child’s reciprocal adoration as the reason Dreiser – although sexually promiscuous to the point that sterilisation was once considered –could never make a lasting relationship with any other woman. He would be emotionally misshapen for life. What schooling he picked up was scrappy, although he read voraciously. A key moment was the family’s drift to the outskirts of Chicago in 1882. The booming city was, Dreiser later recalled, ‘the wonder of his life’. The move was assisted by a relative who had made it big as a brothel-keeper. In 1887 the sixteen-year-old Theodore left home and threw himself into the heart of the city’s seething life, sent on his way by his mother with three dollars and a lunch bag.

In Chicago, the young hopeful tramped the streets, looking for work, picking up jobs where he could. With 50,000 new incomers a year, all with similar hopes, you needed luck to survive. Fortune smiled, briefly, on him when a relative financed a year at Indiana University and that single year at Bloomington enabled him in later life to proclaim himself a ‘college man’. But in 1890 his mother died – and with her, he said, died any idea of home and family. After his brief spell of higher education he took to the streets again. He was chronically lonely and never well. He confessed in his later memoirs to irrepressible masturbation – the prelude to a life of inveterate Don Juanism: he carried, as it pleased him to say, a lifelong ‘cross of passion’. The twenty-year-old Dreiser – lanky, wall-eyed, penniless, bronchitic, virginal – was not a young man to excite interest in the girls he fantasised about, though he would make up for those delayed gratifications in later life when fame and money added a lustre to his unprepossessing appearance.

In 1892 he finally found a niche in journalism as a space-rate (i.e. freelance) reporter and reviewer for the
Chicago Globe
. There was no long-term future in such hackery, but it was an apprenticeship and got his pen moving. He broadened his view of things, more particularly America, with a year’s bumming around the country in 1894, gravitating, inevitably, to New York, a city whose dynamism dwarfed even that of Chicago. His ideas were forming. He was now a disciple of Herbert Spencer and the English thinker’s Social Darwinism. He had immersed himself in Balzac and would be, for life, a believer in literary realism – ‘veritism’, as it was called. In New York, he kept body and soul together as a ‘magazinist’ – a better vehicle for a man of ideas than deadline-pressed newspaper reporting. Weeklies and monthlies were booming. Many of Dreiser’s pieces were trite – but some, such as the account of a lynching (later fictionalised as the story ‘Nigger Jeff’) and the account of a night (one of many over the years) in a flophouse forecast the novelist to come.

His brother Paul (Dresser), meanwhile, had made it earlier in life as a popular
song-writer (his greatest hit was ‘On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away’) and would be a welcome source of financial handouts to Theodore during the thirty more years of penury – although he had little time for his brother’s sentimental warbles. In 1898, after an extended engagement, he married Sara Osborne White, a schoolteacher from Missouri. The couple never really cohabited and soon separated. He denied her the children she craved; she denied him the divorce he wanted. It was, as the term then had it, a MINO – a marriage in name only. He found consolation in innumerable affairs and one-night stands with other women – ‘varietism’, he called it.

Dreiser had been trying his hand at magazine stories and in 1900 he embarked on his first novel,
Sister Carrie
. He encountered difficulties in finding a publisher which would have deterred authors less dogged than he. His addiction to windy abstractions was one thing which put off potential publishers. That which begins
Chapter 8
is typical Dreiserism: ‘Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind.’ To reach what Dreiser offers, readers have to inure themselves to such ubiquitous windbaggery. Even more objectionable at the time was
Sister Carrie
’s explicitness about the sexual act. The age was not ready for it. The manuscript was finally accepted by Doubleday on the recommendation of the congenial novelist (another ‘realist’) Frank Norris, who proclaimed the work a ‘masterpiece’. Then Mrs Doubleday happened to read it, and
Sister Carrie
was firmly rejected. Masterpieces were one thing: references to women’s breasts being handled something quite other. Unwisely, Dreiser resolved to hold Doubleday to their initial agreement. They published it, insisting on many cuts of ‘offensive material’, but delivered the novel effectively still-born into the world. Dreiser’s veritism went down badly with the few reviewers who looked at it. The
Chicago Tribune
complained, ‘Not once does the name of the Deity appear in the book except as it is implied in the suggestion of profanity.’ There was some consolation in that
Sister Carrie
was hailed in Britain – where writers such as Thomas Hardy and George Moore had created a less godly climate for fiction.

Sister Carrie
has one of the nineteenth century’s more hackneyed plots – that of the fallen woman. Dreiser adds a twentieth-century twist. Caroline Meeber falls, quite as hard as George Eliot’s Hetty Sorrell, Hardy’s Tess, or Moore’s Esther Waters, but goes on to pick herself up with spectacular success. The action opens in 1889 with the heroine on the train to Chicago, casting never a backward look at the farming family she is leaving behind her. Carrie is eighteen years old, endowed with latent beauty, intelligence, innocence and – most importantly – talent. On her journey she is accosted by Chas. H. Drouet. A salesman by profession, Drouet is a seducer by nature. In the big city Carrie finds herself so much urban flotsam. The
only work she can find is as a $4.50 per week shop assistant. In the face of this prospect she succumbs to Drouet’s charms, encouraged by ‘two soft green ten-dollar bills’ he gives her. Now ‘fallen’, she falls in with another admirer, the middle-aged, prosperous saloon manager, George W. Hurstwood – a married man (something Carrie does not at this point know) with children her age. He yearns discontentedly for ‘sympathy’ and thinks he has found it in Carrie. Drouet lands Carrie, now his mistress, a part in an amateur theatrical in which, to everyone’s surprise, she shines brilliantly. Hurstwood gains some advantage over his rival by hinting at marriage – bigamously, as it would have to be.

In the finest scene in the novel, while closing up his saloon he discovers the firm’s safe unlocked. It contains $10,000. The physical feel of the money tempts him and ‘the imbibation of the evening’ has rendered him reckless. He takes the cash out, to fondle it as one might caress a beautiful woman, and ‘While the money was in his hand, the lock clicked. It had sprung. Did he do it? He grabbed at the knob and pulled vigorously. It had closed. Heavens! he was in for it now, sure enough. The moment he realized that the safe was locked for a surety, the sweat burst out upon his brow and he trembled. He looked about him and decided instantly. There was no delaying now.’ Fate having delivered the money into his hand, he elopes with Carrie. Did he mean to steal the money? Dreiser leaves it enigmatic. Hurstwood and Carrie end up, married but not married, in New York. For him, thereafter, it is the long descent to the flophouse and burial in Potter’s Field. His last words are ‘what’s the use?’ Meanwhile Carrie, ignorant of George’s fate, becomes a Broadway star, though she is unconvinced by the uses of fame and fortune.

As the century turned, Dreiser found himself blocked artistically, chronically ill, depressed and, for all his promiscuities, alone. There followed what his biographer calls ‘the lost decade’. He published no fiction between 1900 and 1911, other than an unexcised text of
Sister Carrie
. The obstacles put in that novel’s way he saw as clinching evidence of prejudice against anyone ‘who attempted anything even partially serious in America’. He had started writing his second novel,
Jennie Gerhardt
, in 1901. The story of a German-American girl, it developed themes opened in
Sister Carrie
but found the same disfavour with publishers (try another line of work, one good-naturedly advised him) or, when belatedly published in 1911, with reviewers and readers. Dreiser fell back on magazinery. But his fiction, unsuccessful as it was in the marketplace, had attracted the support of opinion-forming friends, notably H. L. Mencken, who devoted himself to promoting the Dreiser cause.

Unabashed, he progressed – in his third foray into fiction – with a massive work on the robber baron, Charles T. Yerkes. This interest in ‘capital’ marks the embryonic stirrings of overt Marxism in his thinking. The Yerkesiad, he proclaimed, would
be ‘American in theme, European in method’, and, true to his first literary love, Balzacian in length. America, Dreiser believed, was so big that ‘you can’t write about it in a small peckish way’. Dreiser took three large bites at Yerkes with
The Financier
(1912),
The Titan
(1914) and
The Stoic
(1947) – the last unfinished at the time of his death in 1945. Large as the canvas was, Dreiser failed to capture his subject. Even less successful was the ‘art novel’ he published
The ‘Genius’
(1915), not helped by the observable fact that the genius he had in mind was Theodore Dreiser.

Dreiser’s German background tilted him towards his ancestral homeland during the Great War. It helped his career as little as did his anti-Semitism in the run-up to the Second World War and his late life admiration for the USSR (until he actually went there and discovered Communism did not deliver clean sheets and hot running water). His willed opposition to current political orthodoxies was one of the reasons he never got the Nobel his proponents have always maintained he richly deserved. It was during the First World War that he began research on his one indisputably great novel,
An American Tragedy
. And it was as the war ended that he discovered the most enduring of his many mistresses, Helen Richardson. Some twenty-five years his junior, and looking younger than that, Helen was distantly related. She was, as he liked to call her, his ‘Golden Girl’. One of his diary entries, in the early days of their relationship, records what she brought into his life: ‘From 10 to twelve I work on mss. Two to 4:30 play with Helen. We copulate 3 times. At 5 return to work & at 7 get dinner. 9pm to bed.’

The manuscript he was working on, post-coitally, was
An American Tragedy
. It would be published, after the usual long quarrels with the publishers, in 1925. The idea for the novel was an actual murder. In 1906 Chester Gillette, a junior clerk at a skirt factory, impregnated a working girl, Grace Brown, thus foiling his aim to rise in life by marrying the boss’s daughter. He duped the mother of his unborn child with an offer of marriage, took her to an idyllic lake in the Adirondacks, and may or may not have clubbed her with a tennis racket and allowed her to drown. It is possible that at the last moment Gillette lost his nerve and did not intend to do it. But after huge publicity he went to the electric chair. Dreiser moved the action of
An American Tragedy
to the 1920s. ‘I call it an American tragedy,’ he explained, ‘because it could not happen in any other country in the world.’ America’s pervasive ‘tragic error’, he argued, was the belief that you could rise in life to fulfil your dream and were justified in whatever means you chose to do it – like clubbing an inconveniently fertile girl to death with a tennis racquet.

At last Dreiser had hit the jackpot: the reviews were ecstatic.
An American Tragedy
sold more copies in a month than all his earlier fiction combined. And it helped rather than hindered that it was banned in Boston. It was, wrote one critic,
the ‘Mount Everest’ of American fiction: at 400,000 words it was certainly mountainous. The publisher, Boni & Liveright, was obliged to bring it out in two volumes, even after Dreiser had shortened the text drastically. ‘What’s 50,000 words between friends?’ he is reported to have quipped.

Mencken, until this point Dreiser’s stoutest friend, took exception to the verbosity. It was, he wrote, less a novel than ‘a heaping cartload of raw materials for a novel.’ The criticism ruptured the friendship between the men for a decade. Poor all his life, Dreiser was now, at the age of fifty-four, flush. He was able to run three or four women simultaneously – Helen was the only one who lasted – and build himself a country mansion in upper New York State. He called the place ‘Iroki’, Japanese for ‘the spirit of beauty’.

In his last decades, Dreiser wrote little fiction and drifted towards socialism, deism and incorrigible pessimism. He wrote memoirs, of which
Dawn: an Autobiography of Early Youth
(1931) stands out, crusaded against literary censorship and stood –sometimes at personal risk – alongside the striking workers of America. During the Second World War he frankly expressed the hope that Germany would crush England, a country he loathed as heartily as Josef Goebbels. His wife died in 1942, but he did not remarry and left no (acknowledged) children. His last illness-racked years were spent in the warmth of southern California. One of his last acts was to join the Communist Party – had he lived, Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee would have had fine sport with him. His fellow ‘red’, and late-life friend, Charlie Chaplin read one of Dreiser’s militantly political poems (‘The Road I Came’) over the novelist’s coffin as it was lowered into the soil of Forest Lawn. It should have been Chicago.