Frank Cowperwood: Boy Financier

FRANK COWPERWOOD: BOY FINANCIER Philip L. Gerber By 1911 Theodore Dreiser was ready to begin writinghis Financier, which he envisioned as a long volume, in all probability some 500,000 words. It would recreate in fictional terms the story of Charles Tyson Yerkes, Jr., the robber-baron whose life, of all those he had researched, seemed most "interesting" as an archetype. Writing from research was not particularly new to Dreiser, yet he had never approached fiction in this manner; his previous novels were grounded upon reminiscences concerning his own life and the lives of those close to him. A mountain of notes, more than sufficient, was amassed in preparation for his new venture. Although these would later be supplemented by additional research, they already told him almost everything he would need, even to the end of his tale. Yerkes himself had died in 1905; in 1910 his properties had been auctioned off; and in April, 1911, with Mrs. Yerkes' death, the life-plotted outline for Dreiser's novel was substantially complete. For most areas of this life a rich documentation was accessible. This was true particularly of the man's Chicago, New York, and London experiences, during which metropolitan newspapers had dogged his trail. But Dreiser, intending to treat more than his financier's middle and later years, had in mind a cradle-to-grave saga. This meant a birth, a childhood, an adolescence, not merely as perfunctory steps toward manhood, but as way-stations on the route to wealth and power in the Republic. Dreiser, in his devotion to the behavioral sciences, knew that heredity and environment rendered the child father to the man and that his financier—whom he would call Frank Algernon Cowperwood— must have formative years such as would not merely facilitate but determine the emergence of a mature tycoon. Unfortunately, there was little to go on. Dreiser's own deprived boyhood in this instance was of little use in depicting a boy born with everything desirable. He was pledged to holding to the truth of the Yerkes story, but the further that history receded in time, the more fragmentary was the record. Yerkes' "Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport, Philip L. Gerber has written widely on Dreiser, including Theodore Dreiser (1964) and numerous articles. He is now in the process of completing a book on the creative process of Dreiser's composition of The Financier, The Titan, and TAe Stoic. 166Philip L. Gerber early youth, quite understandably, was the least well documented area of all. Nonetheless, a boyhood for Frank Cowperwood might be fabricated, one with considerable verisimilitude, but it would require snaring resources from a variety of directions and amalgamating them into a believable life. Dreiser was not a complete stranger, in a general way, to the youth of a typical financier. At the turn of the century he had personally interviewed Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, and Philip D. Armour for Success and had been told by each that financiering was a natural-born talent, that single-mindedness was vital, that a true financier possessed the ability to spot opportunity as well as the aggressiveness to seize the moment, that practical experience was always to be preferred over schooling. In composing his fictional portrait, Dreiser adhered closely to these traits, most of which, happily, were discernible in Yerkes' life. To build upon these, Dreiser drew principally from five sources: (1) Facts ascertainable from Yerkes' biography; (2) Historical information available through public offices and directories; (3) Memories from Dreiser's own boyhood; (4) Influences from Darwin and Spencer; (5) Details from the life of Jay Cooke. The Cowperwood boyhood, from Frank's birth to the day he leaves school at age seventeen to work for Henry Waterman, occupies the first three chapters of The Financier. A close examination of these pages reveals the mosaic-like pattern eventually shaped from the sources. Among the hundreds of sheets of jottings Dreiser assembled, the first manuscriptnote in the Financier sequence dealt with the population of Philadelphia at the time of Yerkes' birth (DMN, p. 1). From itevolved the novel's first sentence, descriptive of Philadelphia in 1837 and followed by a historical resum...