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Title: Upton Sinclair
A study in social protest
Author: Floyd Dell
Release date: May 19, 2026 [eBook #78707]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: George H. Doran Company, 1927
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78707
Credits: Sean (@parchmentglow)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UPTON SINCLAIR ***
[Illustration: UPTON SINCLAIR _Photo by Odiorne_]
UPTON SINCLAIR
_A Study in Social Protest_
By
FLOYD DELL
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
ON MURRAY HILL : NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
UPTON SINCLAIR
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
JOSEPH FREEMAN
CONTENTS
I PRELIMINARY EXPLANATIONS 11
II SOUTHERN BEGINNINGS 16
III ADOLESCENT DISCOVERIES 31
IV THE YOUNG HACK 41
V THE ARTIST IN REVOLT 49
VI THYRSIS 59
VII THYRSIS AND CORYDON 72
VIII THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING 86
IX MANASSAS 97
X THE JUNGLE 104
XI LOVE’S PILGRIMAGE 121
XII KING COAL 137
XIII JIMMIE HIGGINS 143
XIV THE BOOK OF LIFE 151
XV THE GREAT PAMPHLETS 159
XVI OIL! 178
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189
INDEX 193
UPTON SINCLAIR
A Study in Social Protest
I. PRELIMINARY EXPLANATIONS
I.
Americans generally are truly surprised and puzzled by Upton Sinclair’s
fame abroad--by the fact that he seems to be regarded throughout the
world as his country’s most distinguished literary figure.... So great
is the discrepancy between his position in the world at large and his
position in his own country, that a book about him may as well begin by
offering some explanation, to bewildered American readers, of his world
fame.
The gist of the matter seems to lie in this:
Modern industrial America is a new portent in an old world; and the
world has looked to American literature for realistic description and
intellectual interpretation of it--and has found these things chiefly
and best in the writings of Upton Sinclair. Other American writers of
our time may be more acute psychologists, wiser in the lore of human
nature, more able to analyze and dramatize the traditional passions
of mankind. But in our American literature generally there is no such
account--at once emotionally and objectively convincing--of what
America is in its most characteristic contemporary aspects, as may
be found in the novels and pamphlets of Upton Sinclair. And this very
simply explains the fact of Sinclair’s special eminence in the eyes of
the world among American writers of this period.
From this point of view, then, it may roughly be said that, as an
expositor of modern industrial America, Sinclair takes rank with
Cooper, who put the America of the Indian and the pioneer on the
literary map of the world; with Mark Twain and (in so far as a prose
writer may be compared to a poet) with Walt Whitman--each of whom, in
his time, described and interpreted to the world a significant epoch of
American life.
These are strictly literary considerations; another consideration,
not purely literary (at least not from the American point of view) is
also involved in the great respect which Sinclair enjoys abroad. The
Voltairean tradition of the literary man as a fighter against wrong,
a champion of the oppressed, still survives in Europe. It is not an
offense against good taste (as it would be in our politer American
literary world) for such writers as Zola and Anatole France to take
sides in a Dreyfus case. And when they hear abroad that the author of
_The Jungle_ has been arrested in New York City for “picketing”
the offices of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as a protest against the
treatment of miners in Colorado, or that he has been arrested in
California for reading the Constitution of the United States in public
in a “free-speech fight”, they do not regard it as an unliterary
eccentricity, but as a kind of heroism appropriate to a profession
which has not abandoned its pretensions to courage.
II.
These preliminary pages may also serve to explain, to readers abroad,
some of the reasons for the failure of America to accord Sinclair the
rank to which it would seem that he is entitled by his achievements.
An obvious reason, of course, is that he interprets American life in
terms of a “class struggle” which is, as yet, alien to the idealistic
conceptions of the American intelligentsia in general. More will be
said on this point later. But there are, at the present moment, other
psychological obstacles in the way of a general recognition of Sinclair
in America.
One of these is his temperamental attitude toward life. He is
recognized as being fundamentally a Puritan; and Puritanism (for
reasons to be gone into at length later on) is just now very unpopular
among the American intelligentsia. Sinclair has, indeed, by virtue of
his passionate realism, his poetic and epic vision, and his critical
and revolutionary thought, far transcended in his writings the
limitations of the Puritan point of view. Yet it is perceptible at
times, and to Americans in revolt against Puritanism it counts heavily
against him.
Again, his attitude toward our machine civilization is one which
Americans find it difficult to understand--since it is neither the
popular one of uncritical adulation, nor the aristocratic one of
reactionary sentimental protest against the machine age as such. Both
these literary attitudes are well understood in America; but that a
writer may be an idealist, and yet be a cordial believer in this modern
machine civilization of ours, founding all his hopes for ultimate
justice and beauty and happiness upon machinery’s essential and
revolutionary possibilities, is still to the American mind a paradox.
III.
Nevertheless, there are unmistakable signs in recent American criticism
of a growing respect for Upton Sinclair. Time’s perspective has given
a new dignity to the gallant literary movement with which his name
is associated. It is remembered that Europe’s greatest critic, Georg
Brandes, once said: “I find three present-day American novelists worth
reading--Frank Norris, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.” The literary
movement of which these men were the leaders came (for reasons to be
recounted later) upon evil days, and seemed to end in discouragement
and chagrin. But now that it has very recently been revived in the
hands of younger writers, it is remembered that during that long
interval Sinclair remained its single unfaltering and powerful voice.
He can now be seen as a representative pioneer figure of an ambitious
interpretive effort of which the culmination is still to come in the
American literature of the future.
Of so much honor, in his own country, this prophet is now assured. And
it is certain that, as the kind of literature comes into its own which
Frank Norris, Jack London and Upton Sinclair first showed us how to
write in America, his literary stature will, like theirs, increase in
the eyes of his fellow-countrymen. We shall know that he was of the
race of giants, and forgive him those faults which we perceive to-day.
Meanwhile, his faults as well as his virtues will receive due attention
in this little book. But it may as well be said frankly that they
will be dealt with as the faults of a great writer, and analyzed with
the respect due to him as such. It should also be remarked that the
biographical details in these pages are intended to be subordinate to
the critical study of his development as a certain kind of writer--a
describer, critic and prophet of modern industrial America.
II. SOUTHERN BEGINNINGS
I.
Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland, September 20th,
1878. His father was one of the Norfolk Sinclairs, his mother one of
the Baltimore Hardens. That is to say, he was by ancestry and birth
a Southerner. His childhood, moreover--until his tenth year, when
his family moved to New York City--was spent in the very Southern
atmosphere of Baltimore.... This background is so alien to the theme
of modern American industrialism as to arouse a wonder and provoke a
question: How did this child of the South ever come to write _The
Jungle_?
For the South of his childhood had a history of its own, sufficiently
different from that of the factory-building North. It is true that
Baltimore, an important seaport in close proximity to coal mines, had
already begun its industrial career; but the relations of capital
and labor presented so far no tragic problems of which a little boy
would hear. And such vague rumors as might have reached the child in
Baltimore of the “labor troubles” up North--the strike in Chicago at
the McCormick reaper works, the agitation for an eight-hour day, the
Haymarket riot, and the hanging of the Chicago “Anarchists”--could
have made no deep impression on his young consciousness.[1] He was
living in another world than that. It was the world of an aristocracy
ruined by the Civil War and struggling to regain its place in the sun.
II.
The Sinclairs of Norfolk had been a navy family. Before the first
Sinclair came to America, there had been Sinclairs in the British navy.
A Sinclair had commanded a frigate in the American navy in the War
of 1812.[2] His son had followed him into the navy, and had been in
command of one of the ships of Commodore Perry in the famous expedition
of 1852-54 which “opened up” Japan. But in 1861, this officer had had
to make a disastrous choice of loyalties.... There was a story which
was a part of the Sinclair family tradition, about the two old sea-dogs
who sat up all one April night in Norfolk, arguing out their duty and
their destinies. One was Lieutenant Commander Arthur Sinclair, the
boy Upton’s grandfather; the other was his old friend and shipmate,
Captain David Farragut. Both were Southerners, both Virginians--and
Virginia had that day seceded from the Union. They argued all night
in Sinclair’s study and in the morning Farragut went North to offer
his services to President Lincoln--while Sinclair stayed to fight for
the South.[3] History preserves the name of Farragut as the commander
of the victorious squadron which captured New Orleans and Mobile and
sealed the South within a fatal blockade. Sinclair’s further career is
recorded only in the obscure annals of the defeated Confederacy. He
commanded a blockade-runner which was sunk in a storm off the coast
of England, carrying him to his death, and his body was buried in a
churchyard at Hull.
His family’s history was henceforth united with that of the lost cause.
His eldest son had served four years under his father in the U. S.
navy; he went into the Confederate navy, burned his ship to prevent its
capture by Farragut at Mobile, was an officer on the blockade-runner
_Alabama_ which was finally sunk in English waters, survived
to write a book about it, and died in poverty in a Soldiers’ and
Sailors’ Home. Another son was also in the Confederate navy, and,
more fortunate, lived to adorn New York society. Still another, Upton
Beall Sinclair, who was to become the father of the novelist, was too
young to see much of the fighting, though he took a gun and ran away
from home to help in the final defense of the Confederate capital,
Richmond.... The Sinclairs, along with all the rest of the South, were
ruined, at least until they could successfully adapt themselves to new
conditions. During the “reconstruction” period, when Southern affairs
were run by “carpetbagger” politicians from the North with the aid of
the votes of Negro freedmen, they were no longer members of the ruling
class, with a prescriptive right to places of power and pride. They had
to make their livings as best they could.
Moreover it would be a long time before the cotton and tobacco
industries adjusted themselves comfortably to the new wage-labor
system. Slavery was gone, and the old aristocratic ease only a
sentimental memory. But the South loved its memories, bitter as they
were--and drinking, that generous accompaniment of the old aristocratic
ease, became an important solace of the harassed post-war period.
Even if the proud womenfolk of the South got up stealthily in the
dead of night to wash the doorsteps and perform other menial tasks,
thus honorably concealing their poverty, there was always money for
the menfolk to spend on good whiskey. The liquor trade thrived in the
ruined South. And so it was that Upton B. Sinclair became a wholesale
liquor salesman.
The young salesman’s business took him to Baltimore, and there he met
and married Priscilla Harden, daughter of the secretary and treasurer
of the Western Maryland railroad. Maryland, violently Southern in
its sympathies--so much so that the first blood of the Civil War was
shed there when a mob resisted the passage of Northern regiments on
their way to Washington--had nevertheless been kept within the Union
by force of arms. It had not suffered with the rest of the South the
rigors of blockade; and though it had endured the inconvenience of
military occupation, it had not been devastated by invasion and battle,
and it was able to share to some considerable extent in the economic
growth and prosperity of the North after the war. The Hardens were
moderately rich; and one of Priscilla’s sisters had married a Baltimore
banker named Bland, who presently founded the United States Fidelity
and Guaranty Company, and became a millionaire many times over.
Priscilla Harden’s marriage with the young salesman was less fortunate
in an economic sense. Mr. Sinclair was not a sufficiently enterprising
salesman, and was destined never to rise from the ranks. A gentle
little man, the soul of courtesy to women and of loyalty to his
friends, full of proud old Southern ideals of chivalry, having the
knightly Robert E. Lee as his _beau ideal_, he was not one to
succeed in business.
In Upton Sinclair’s autobiographical novel, _Love’s Pilgrimage_,
there is a portrait of his father. From his old-fashioned aristocratic
point of view he hated this modern business world in which he
struggled. Those among whom his work took him “never guessed the depths
of his contempt for all they stood for. They had the dollars, they
were on top; but some day the nemesis of Good-breeding would smite
them--the army of the ghosts of Gentility would rise, and with ‘Marse
Robert’ and ‘Jeb’ Stuart at their head, would sweep away the hordes of
commercialdom.”
Mr. Sinclair was devoted to his wife and worshipped his only son. He
was bitterly unhappy because his ineffectual efforts on their behalf
left them still mired in poverty. As he brooded over his failure, he
came more and more to resort to the solace of his own wares; and of
that, too, he was ashamed. But he could at least teach his son to be a
kind and chivalrous Southern gentleman.
The boy’s mother was a Southern good woman, patient and practical.
Like other Southern women who had seen too much of the ravages of
drunkenness among their menfolk, she hated drink with a fierce hatred
born of fear. All her capacity for unworldly idealism was centered
in that emotion. She brought up her son to fear and hate liquor;
she herself did not even drink tea or coffee, because they were
“stimulants”, and there was in her example and attitude a continual
protest against “self-indulgence”--a touch of Spartan sternness. But
for the rest, she had an innocent and happy worldliness, which desired
and approved all the respectable comforts which life had to offer.
Except for this fear of the consequences of “self-indulgence”, a
fear which was emphasized by the family circumstances, her influence
upon her son would be wholly in the direction of conformity with the
respectable world. And if for a time she hoped to see him go into the
ministry, it was with the somewhat worldly expectation of seeing him in
a bishop’s robes....
In Grandmother Sinclair’s dining-room there was a portrait, well
remembered, of the old sea-dog, Commodore Sinclair; and the boy
Upton was told that he had his grandfather’s nose--in the portrait a
fierce, proud eagle-beak. And it was hoped that in the child’s quiet
stubbornness there was evidence of the ancestral trait of indomitable
will. The boy was to go into the navy, and might become a hero like his
grandfather. At the age of six, that was his ambition.
It was no unreasonable ambition. His parents were poor, but--aside
from such influence as might be exerted by his rich relatives--poverty
would not stand in the way of the appointment to the Naval Academy
of a boy who was of cavalier stock and whose forefathers had served
the State. He might easily enough get the nomination to Annapolis
from his congressman; it was only necessary for him to be a bright
enough lad to pass his examinations--and there would be no difficulty
about that. Early in childhood, without having gone to school, he had
taught himself to read, and had already begun to exhibit a precocious
intellectuality. The only possible question was one of health. A
series of infantile diseases had left him a rather delicate child.
That was dealt with by keeping him out of school till the age of ten,
to give his body, in the homely phrase, a chance to catch up with his
brains. And, though he pursued his education with more intensity by
himself than he would have done at school, he did become physically
robust. There was, apparently, every reason to believe that young
Upton Sinclair would become an officer in the U. S. navy.... One can
imagine him thus now, a slight, straight, grizzled captain, something
of a martinet, unquestionably brave, not very popular, a little aloof,
doing his duty, carrying on the family traditions. But life had other
destinies in store for him.
III.
The gentle, chivalrous father, unable to make a decent living for the
wife and son he loved, became in his discouragement more and more
dependent upon the liquid consolations which he peddled. Ashamed of
his lapses from grace, afraid to go home and confess himself again
conquered by his weakness, he would stay away, drinking himself into
the stupor of forgetfulness. The family poverty at times became
desperate. There were, to be sure, when bitter necessity had overcome
her pride, Mrs. Sinclair’s relatives to turn to for help. And the child
was, of course, always welcome at the homes of “Grandfather Harden” and
“Uncle Bland”. The Bland wealth was gained during the boy’s childhood
and youth, and he grew up amidst the constantly expanding grandeur of
the Bland family. The contrast between the luxury of these prosperous
Baltimore and country homes and his own dingy boarding-house background
made him feel more acutely the poverty of which he was the victim.
Moreover, the help that was extended to his family by these more
fortunate relatives could scarcely be given without, in the eyes of
a sensitive child, an appearance of condescension, against which
all his pride was in revolt. It seemed to a child’s sense of justice
that the family needs rightfully entitled them to a chance for life
and happiness; and it was shameful that this should be granted them
as a favor, that they should have to beg for it. “To each according
to his needs” is the natural economic code of childhood.... But it
was inevitably with his own needs and their frustration that he was
secretly preoccupied. It seems, to a child, that all for which he
wishes belongs rightfully to him already; and it is hateful to him
that power over his own life and happiness should be in other hands,
to be granted as a favor, not conceded as a right. To have to beg for
what already belongs to one is, in the code of childhood, to pay too
humiliating a price for it. One would rather, if one is sufficiently
sensitive, go without.
His sensitive egotism had thus in childhood become painfully
complicated with the poverty of his family and the wealth of some of
the family relatives. And, most painfully of all, he felt that he need
not remain, if he chose, the victim of his parents’ poverty. He was as
a child much loved by these rich relatives; and he understood that he
was always welcome to stay with them. This possibility, of escape from
poverty, never came up for formal decision, and remained for a long
time to torment him. But at the age of ten it emerged more definitely
into his consciousness, when his family decided to leave Baltimore.
They were going to New York City, where his father had got a position
as a traveling salesman--his line this time being hats, instead of
whiskey. It would have been very easy for the boy to stay on in
Baltimore and have his relatives’ assistance in getting an education.
In effect this would mean, when it came to his choice of a career, that
he would have all the advantages of a rich man’s son. He hated poverty;
and above all he dreaded going on with the endless and hopeless
struggle with drink in which his father was involved. But loyalty
and chivalry had been among the old-fashioned Southern virtues which
his father had inculcated in him, and he chose to share his father’s
struggle.... Perhaps he remembered the tale, heard as a child, of his
grandfather’s debate with Captain Farragut. Commodore Sinclair had done
his duty, and his grandson could do no less.
It was a bitter duty which he had to look forward to. He was getting
old enough now to help his father in his times of weakness. Soon, when
his father did not come home, it would be the boy’s task to seek for
him in one saloon after another until he found him. Yes, and give him
the reassurance that he most needed--that they still loved him in spite
of everything;--and so bring him back to the boarding-house where his
wife sat and wept.... The boy, in choosing, knew what he was in for.
The emotional relations between the boy and his father are described
in _Love’s Pilgrimage_, where the boy is called Thyrsis. “To
others his father was merely a gross little man, with sordid ideals
and low tastes; but to Thyrsis he was a man with the terror of the
hunted creatures in his soul, and the furies of madness cracking their
whips about his ears.”... “There were rich relatives, a world of real
luxury up above--the thing that calls itself ‘Society’. And Thyrsis
was a student and a bright lad, and he was welcome there; he might
have spread his wings and flown away from this sordidness. But duty
held him, and love and memory held him still tighter. For his father
worshipped him, and craved his help; to the last hour of this dreadful
battle he fought to keep his son’s regard--he prayed for it, with tears
in his eyes and anguish in his voice. And so the boy had to stand by.
And that meant that he grew up in a torture-house.”
IV.
A sensitive child who grows up in an ugly and hateful world becomes
something of a poet in self-defense. He has to shut himself away from
all the world’s ugliness and hatefulness in an imaginative world
of books and dreams. His natural creative energies, baffled by the
obduracy of outward circumstances, will begin to work upon the more
plastic materials furnished by reverie. Books and dreams are his
natural refuge, and to become an artist his inevitable secret dream.
“There was”, it is written of the boy “Thyrsis” in _Love’s
Pilgrimage_, “not much of what is called ‘culture’ in his family;
no music at all, and no poetry. But there were novels, and there
were libraries where one could get more of these, so Thyrsis became
a devourer of stories; he would disappear, and they would find him
at meal-times hidden in a clump of bushes or in a corner behind a
sofa--anywhere out of the world. He read whole libraries of adventure:
Mayne Reid and Henty, and then Cooper and Stevenson and Scott. And then
came more serious novels--‘Don Quixote’, and ‘Les Miserables’, George
Eliot, whom he loved, and Dickens, whose social protest thrilled him;
and chiefest of all, Thackeray, who molded his thought. Thackeray saw
to the heart of it; and no high-souled lad who read him and worshipped
him was ever after to be lured by the glamor of the ‘great’ world--a
world whose greatness was based upon selfishness and greed.” He needed,
it would seem, such help as Thackeray’s to enable him to resist the
very real temptation to become a part of such a world.
He needed, moreover, figures with whose heroic renunciation he could
take satisfaction in imaginatively identifying himself; nor did he
fail to find them in this realm of ideal types. In his childhood the
most significant of these figures was that of Jesus--who had hated the
power of Mammon and built up a Kingdom of the Spirit. The idea of Jesus
driving the money-changers out of the Temple remained throughout his
childhood a vivid and consoling fantasy. And this secret Kingdom of the
Spirit, in which he walked in lonely exaltation, gave him reasons more
profound even than those of love and duty for refusing to live a life
of luxury. For the life of his rich relatives was not the ideal life of
his poetic dreams. It seemed to him that these riches were wasted. They
were not used in achieving beauty and happiness, but only in acquiring
toys.
“What do I mean by toys?” he wrote later, in _Wilshire’s_. “Why,
just things. Nothing but things--all things in this big world except
half a dozen useful things. The uses of bread and bacon, of a stove
and a wood-pile, I recognize with all my heart; and also of beautiful
books in an occasional rare instance; and always, of course, of
prayer and music, of joy and love, of wisdom and high resolve. Those
things--that are as free as air and sky and the flowers--are serious
things; and all things else that this spreading earth has to show, all
the infinite unthinkability that is shut up in a thousand mighty cities
and is fought and cried for” by adult children “are _toys_--just
_toys!_” It is a cry out of his own childhood, when, forced
by unhappiness to take life seriously, he realized that these
grown-up people had by no means put away childish things. Toy-lovers
still, preoccupied with acquiring and displaying their toy-titles,
toy-learning, toy-houses, toy-food and toy-clothes, they were unable
even to wish for the real beauties and joys that life had to offer. His
path, then, surely, was different from theirs....
Yet, in so sternly and resolutely refusing to be tempted aside from
his own secret goal, he must have felt deep and aching regrets at
the good things which he was incidentally but necessarily giving up.
There had been a time in his childhood when he was naïvely fond of
luxury; there were relatives on his father’s side who were poor and
whom he did not care to visit because of a “snobbery of the palate”,
preferring the excellent table of his wealthier relatives. His mother
would scarcely have condemned that as “self-indulgence”; but it was a
worldly tendency which he learned to resist with Spartan asceticism.
In inwardly deciding to give up these luxuries, he must unconsciously
have felt it necessary to despise them; and among the luxuries which he
thus came to despise were such simple and innocent things as good food,
idleness, and play. His hard choice would seem to have confirmed him
in a too stern and ascetic attitude toward life. Some of the simple,
natural, happy, playful aspects of living were unconsciously classed
in his mind as temptations, and came to be regarded with the emotional
hostility[4] he had already been taught to feel for drinking, as
things to be feared and hated.... Nor, under the circumstances, was
that exaggerated emotion quite absurd. These things _were_
temptations to him; and it was the effort to save his poet’s soul alive
that he became a Puritan.
III. ADOLESCENT DISCOVERIES
I.
When the Sinclairs came to New York in 1888, they had not quite
left the South--for they stayed, at first, for a year or two, in a
“Southern” hotel on West 19th Street. It is described in _Love’s
Pilgrimage_ as inhabited by musty phantoms of the dead Southern
past--“old ladies who were proud and prim, and old gentlemen who
were quixotic and humorous, young ladies who were ‘belles’ and young
gentlemen who aspired to be ‘blades’. It was a world that would have
made happy the soul of any writer of romances; but to Thyrsis ... this
dead Aristocracy cried aloud for burial. There was an incredible amount
of drunkenness, and of debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense
strutting like a peacock, and avarice skulking like a hound; there
were jealousy, and base snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of
suspicion and scandal hanging like a poisonous cloud over everything.
These people came and went, an endless procession of them; they
laughed and danced and gossipped their way through the boy’s life, and
unconsciously he judged them, and hated them, and feared them.... Most
of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and artificial
poverty--the inability to dress as others did, and to lose money at
‘bridge’ and ‘poker’, and pay the costs of their self-indulgences. As
for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid what they owed; but they
were not always able to pay it when they owed it, and they suffered
all the agonies and humiliations of those who did not pay at all.
There was scarcely over a week when this canker of want did not gnaw
at them; their life was one endless and sordid struggle to make last
year’s clothing look like new, and to find some boarding-house that was
cheaper and yet respectable. There was endless wrangling and strife and
worry over money; and every year the task was harder, the standards
lower, the case more hopeless.”
And now the boy went formally to school for the first time, an East
Side school, and played rowdily about the streets of New York with his
schoolmates, to whom he was familiarly known as “Chappie”. He was able
to do two years’ work in one, and at the age of twelve had finished
grammar school; but because he was too young to enter college, he had
nothing better to do in the meantime than take the last year of grammar
school over again. “The fates took pity on him,” he says of himself in
_The Goose-Step_, “and gave him as teacher for that year a jolly
Irish gentleman, so full of interest in his boys that he did not keep
the rules. If you wanted to ask him questions, you asked and without
first raising your hand; you might even get into an argument with him,
as with any boy, and if he caught you whispering to your neighbor his
method of correcting you was novel, but highly effective--he would let
fly a piece of chalk at your head, and you would grin, and the class
would howl with delight.” A collection of one or two hundred books,
given him by aunts and uncles and cousins on Christmases and birthdays,
he left with the school, where it became the foundation of a class
library, to the delight of the boys and the Irish teacher, so that he
left school in a blaze of glory. His school-life, though he was found a
sufficiently apt pupil, was not all so satisfying nor by any means so
unconventional as in these instances. But it was too late for him to
be really amenable to the social pressure of the school-room and the
school-yard; he was an individual, cherishing his own secret dreams.
Though he played with other boys, he had no chums, no real friends.
“Where,” as he asks, in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ of Thyrsis, “should he
meet people who knew what he knew about life? Where in all the world
should he meet them, save in the books of great men in times past?”
Books were still his companions. In the summer of his thirteenth year,
when visiting his uncle in Baltimore, he discovered sets of Milton
and Shakespeare in expensive bindings, unread to that day and perhaps
since; he went straight through them in rapture, and found in Hamlet
a figure to shine in his imagination beside that earlier heroic and
beautiful figure of Jesus. For Hamlet was, like himself, a prince of
the spirit, cheated by the world out of his inheritance--the poet’s
natural inheritance of beauty and happiness. And Hamlet’s world seemed
to him like the world he had known all his life, in Baltimore and New
York. His predicament had made him think a great deal about the world.
It wasn’t, he knew, his father that was to blame for his misery; at
first he had thought the corner saloon-keeper was to blame--but behind
him he had seen first the brewer, then Tammany Hall, and finally rich
and respectable society, involved in a cruel and unscrupulous plot
to make money out of his own and others’ miseries. Yes, Hamlet, like
himself, was an idealist in revolt against the world.
He had vague plans of wringing from this brutal world his chance for
life. He needed knowledge first of all. And so, still nominally too
young, and obliged to tell a lie about his age, he began in 1892 the
five-years’ course at the College of the City of New York, from which
he was to receive his A.B. at the age of eighteen. This institution,
then located in an old brick building at Twenty-third Street and
Lexington Avenue, is described in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ as a
poor-boy’s college, “where the students all lived at home, and had
nothing to do but study; and so Thyrsis missed all that beneficent
illumination known as ‘student-life’. He never hurrahed at football
contests, nor did he dress himself in honorific garments, nor stupefy
himself at ‘smokers’. Being democratic, and without thought of setting
himself up over others, he was unaware of his greatest opportunity, and
when they invited him into a fraternity, he declined. Once or twice he
found himself roaming the streets at night with a crowd of students,
emitting barbaric screechings; but this made him feel silly, so he
lagged behind and went home.” For he had gone to this institution with
a purpose of his own; he was to use it, not let it use or shape him.
The college did, indeed, serve to introduce him to the world of
knowledge; “but that did not take long, and afterwards it was all in
his way. The mathematics were a discipline, and in them he rejoiced as
a strong man to run a race; and this was true also of the sciences, and
of history--the only trouble was that he would finish the text-books
in the first few weeks, and after that there was nothing to do save
to compose verses in class, and to make sketches of the professors.
But as for the ‘languages’ and the ‘literatures’ they taught him--in
the end Thyrsis came to forgive them, because he saw that they did
not know what languages and literatures were.” “I marvel,” he says in
_The Goose-Step_, “when I realize that it was possible for me to
read _The Acharnians_ of Aristophanes, line by line, and hardly
once get a smile out of it, nor have it occur to me that there was any
resemblance between what happened in that play, and the fight against
Tammany Hall and the Hearst newspapers which was going on in the world
about me.” Of the Latin professor he writes: “I can see this old
gentleman’s knitted brows and hear his angry tones as he exclaims: ‘Mr.
Sinclair, it is so because I say it is so!’ Five hours a week for five
years I studied with that old gentleman, or his subordinates, and I
read a great deal of Latin literature, but I never got so that I could
read a paragraph of the simplest Latin prose without a dictionary. The
professor of English literature chanced to be a propagandist--but
not, of course, of radical ideas of any sort; that would scarcely
have been tolerated. He was an ardent and argumentative Catholic, and
his idea of conducting a class in literature was to find out if there
was anything in the subject which could in any way be connected with
Catholic doctrine and history, and if so, to bring out that aspect of
the subject.” Finally, as his time in this college was nearing its end
he got a leave of absence on the ground that he had to earn his living,
and spent two months sitting on the bed in his eight-by-ten bedroom in
a lodging-house, spending his days and nights learning for himself.
He made the great discovery of cheaply-printed prose classics--English
poetry he already knew by heart. The Spartan plainness, the lack of
outward beauty, in these little paper-bound volumes did not offend him.
“One could get so much for so little, in this wonderful world of mind!
For eight cents he picked up a paper volume of Emerson’s _Essays_;
and in this shrewd and practical nobility was so much that he was
seeking in life! And then he stumbled upon a fifteen-cent _Sartor
Resartus_, and took that home and read it. It was like the clash
of trumpets and cymbals to him. Hour after hour he read, breathless,
like a man bewitched, the whole night through. He would cry aloud with
delight, or drop the book and pound his knee over the demoniac power of
it. The next day he began the _French Revolution_; and after that,
alas, he found there was no more--for Carlyle had turned his back upon
democracy, and so Thyrsis turned his back upon Carlyle.”
For, in the New York public schools, he had begun for the first time
to learn, as he could scarcely have learned in the South, the history
of his country as an experiment in democracy. His hatred of the
sham aristocracy of the South had made him thrill to the lessons of
democracy. He had read ten large volumes about Lincoln. And because
the great historic idea of democracy was something new to this young
rebellious Southerner, he could understand and respond to all its
revolutionary implications. These implications might be smugly covered
up in the school histories, but they were plain enough for him in
nineteenth century literature. “Wordsworth and Tennyson, Browning and
Swinburne--he followed each one as far as their revolutionary impulse
lasted. Even Ruskin, who taught him the possibilities of English prose,
and opened his eyes to the form and color of the world of nature--even
Ruskin he gave up, because he was a philanthropist and not a democrat.”
Nevertheless, his own ideals were fundamentally more aristocratic
than he realized. It was from his father’s aristocratic point of view
that he had first in childhood learned to hate commercialism; and his
father’s notion of Gentility arising under the leadership of Robert E.
Lee to drive out the hordes of commercialdom had found its spiritually
aristocratic analogue in his childhood vision of Jesus driving the
money-changers from the Temple. It was as an aristocrat that he had
turned against plutocracy; but sensitive and energetic members of a
defeated aristocracy sometimes make common cause with the democracy
against their common enemy, the rich. So far his democracy was a little
like Byron’s. And his hatred of a sham Aristocracy was not the least
aristocratic thing about him. He was conscious of superiority to those
against whom he measured himself and his desire was for a Kingdom of
the Spirit where he should take his true rank among the peers of that
realm.
II.
His family belonged to the Episcopalian church. He had been taught
the Christian virtues in his childhood, but theology had not been
emphasized. Church-going was more important than orthodoxy. It pleased
his mother to be escorted to church on Sunday by husband and son, these
correctly attired for the occasion in kid gloves and derby hat. Though
the family always lived in poor neighborhoods, it was to a fashionable
Fifth Avenue church that they went, to be taken by the polite usher
with padded shoes into the half-occupied pew of some more or less
hospitable church member. Coming out, they would look at the costumes
of the churchgoers, marvel at the Vanderbilt palaces they passed by
on their way home, and talk about how much everything must cost. The
boy’s mother, who had little enough of comfort and leisure in her
life, enjoyed these occasions innocently, and the father appreciated
the opportunity to dress up in his Sunday best and wear his tight and
“dressy” patent-leather shoes. But the boy, because he had a really
religious nature and took religion seriously, began to revolt against
this practice. It, too, he declared, was a sham.... From the age
of fourteen he had been the protégé and friend of a clergyman, the
Reverend William W. Moir, of the Church of the Holy Communion, in New
York. This warm-hearted clergyman had gathered about him a whole flock
of boys, rich and poor, and young Sinclair was one of his favorites.
To him the boy took his first theological difficulties, and was given
volumes of Christian apologetics to read. These completed his downfall,
for they revealed how feeble were the intellectual defenses of the
church against its critics. His clergyman friend was not, however,
seriously troubled about the boy’s agnosticism, declaring that he would
come back.... Nor were his family seriously troubled over his apostasy.
They were not interested in theological matters. But his refusal to go
to church was a different matter. That made his mother very unhappy.
And it shattered, moreover, her dream of seeing him a bishop....
At the same time he was beginning to pain his father by speaking
disrespectfully of the Democratic party. And when he presently went
on to utter disrespectful opinions concerning the Vanderbilts, and
respectability in general, he passed out of the range of parental
comprehension.
And now, beside Jesus and Hamlet, a third great ideal figure came
into the world of his imagination--Shelley.... The course in English
literature at college had somehow failed to conceal that poet’s
existence. It was in his senior year, reading _The Skylark_ in
class, that he abruptly realized that what he was going through in
college was a “ghastly farce.” And accordingly he went home, to conduct
his own education for a time. His education had been all along an
attempt to discover the values of life, so that he might choose for
himself what his own life should be. His secret wish was to be a poet;
and now this wish was given its largest and noblest interpretation
by his worship of the great poet who had declared poets to be “the
unacknowledged legislators of mankind”.
IV. THE YOUNG HACK
I.
He was, in a humble and practical way, already a writer. He had found
that he had the “curious knack” of doing trivial little things--verses,
jokes, poems--that pleased others. “They came from some little corner
of his consciousness, he scarcely knew how.” And, most incredibly, they
sold! He had been doing these things since he was fifteen. He was soon
making as much as four or five dollars a week doing these things in odd
moments....
The family fortunes being for the time improved, he was free to spend
these princely sums upon himself. And since what he most desired was
freedom, he was somewhat reluctantly permitted to have a room of his
own, away from his parents, paying his rent and buying his own food out
of his literary earnings.
The room, a top-floor hall bedroom, cost $1.25 a week.[5] That did not
leave much for food; but he scorned the worldly demands of appetite,
and negligently fried his own meals, or thought his high thoughts
while he ate the cheapest dishes in the cheapest restaurants--thereby
laying up for himself in years to come a case of chronic indigestion.
He would stay in his unheated room until he got too severe a cold, and
then pay a precious dollar more to move into a room with a radiator in
it.... And meantime there was an “Uncle Terry”, an elder brother of his
father’s, sporting it in New York society. And occasionally the rich
Baltimore relatives would come to New York and invite the young student
to a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria and a musical comedy afterward and
then perhaps a late supper. Doubtless they meant well; but their guest
would bitterly reflect, after an evening empty of beauty or meaning,
that upon what had been wasted in those few hours he could have lived
for months!
From his fifteenth to his sixteenth year he went on in this fashion. He
spoke of becoming a lawyer; but this was more than anything else a mask
to hide, even from himself, his rash and beautiful dream of becoming a
poet.... And then, one winter midnight, when he was sixteen, there came
to him his first visitation of poetic ecstasy.
He was walking at the time alone in a beautiful garden, for it was
during a holiday visit to those “upper regions” of luxury which were
his for the asking. The experience came suddenly and abruptly. “He
could not have told whether he walked or sat down, whether he spoke or
was silent--his consciousness was given up to the people of his dreams,
the companions and lovers of his fancy. The cold and snow were gone,
and there was a moonlit glade in a forest; and thither they came, one
by one, friendly and human, yet in the full panoply of their splendor
and grace. There were Shelley and Milton, and the gentle and troubled
Hamlet, and the sorrowful knight of la Mancha, with the irrepressible
Falstaff to hearten them all; a strangely assorted company, yet royal
spirits all of them, and no strangers to each other in their own world.
And here they gathered and conversed, each in his own vein and from
his own impulse, with gracious fancy and lofty vision and heart-easing
mirth.”
That was the first of what he came to recognize as a poet’s ecstasies,
to wait for and welcome, and to remember as authentic signs of his
own election to a poetic career. For these visions were more real
than reality; and they summed up in some vivid form all that he felt,
and more than he was aware he knew, about life. They seemed to come
from unknown deeps of his soul; they were what the dull professors of
English literature were unwittingly referring to when they spoke so
glibly of a poet’s “inspiration”.
He was at first so awed by these visions as to be disinclined to
grapple with them and attempt to fix them in words. It seemed to him
that a whole lifetime must needs be dedicated to realizing them in
verse. Yet “he soon discovered that these visions of wonder came but
once, and that when they were gone they were gone forever. And he must
learn to grapple with them as they fled, to labor with them and hold
them fast, at the cost of whatever heartbreaking strain. Thus alone
could men have even the feeblest reflection of their beauty....”
II.
But, meanwhile, he was under the practical necessity of supporting
himself. His “curious knack” of writing things that sold must be
cultivated. And also, as his father’s earning capacity became more
uncertain and undependable, it was necessary for him to contribute to
the support of his mother. If he could make enough money by writing,
he need not quit his studies. And so, still holding fast to his secret
hope of becoming a poet, he threw the reserve of an immense stock of
youthful energy into the task of making a living by hackwork. He knew
well enough what sort of things he could write that would sell, and he
wrote them. Boys’ stories, tales of adventure, full of his own earlier
boyish dreams of adventure, flowed easily from his pen.
There were also jokes to be manufactured at odd moments and sold to the
comic papers, or to artists who drew for the comic papers. A dollar
apiece was the established price. In an _Argosy_ serial written at
the age of nineteen, when he was commencing to break under the strain
of hackwork, he introduced a poet, come to New York with an epic poem
in his pocket, poor fool! but fortunately falling in with a smart lad
who supports himself by writing these jokes; and the process is thus
described by this latter character:
“I have a regular list of joke subjects--there is the tramp joke,
the mother-in-law joke, the boarding-house joke, the small boy
brother joke, the life-insurance agent joke, the cannibal and
missionary joke, and so on. I have counted them up, and I am sure
there are fifty subjects....
“Then, to take the tramp idea, for instance; there are a dozen
things available in connection with tramps. There is the fact that
tramps don’t like to saw wood, that they are afraid of water, and
bull-dogs, and tough apple pies. You see, when you get the thing
reduced down like that it is very easy to take any one of the ideas
and build a joke up around it.”
Shall we have, by way of illustration, from the scrap-book fondly kept
by Upton Sinclair’s mother during this period, a joke thus manufactured?
Old Lady--You look as if you never washed, sir.
Weary Will--Yes, ma’am; I prefer godliness.
Not a very good joke? Well, the editor liked it, and that sufficed.
Another on the same theme:
Peregrinating Peter--Look dere at dat sign!
Emigrating Edward--‘Cleaning and dyeing establishment.’ What about
it?
Peregrinating Peter--Didn’t I tell you them two allus went
tergidder?
And here is one that harks back to the days of the “Raines law” hotels,
when beer could legally be served in New York on Sunday only with a
meal--the meal being, in practice, a sandwich, endlessly reserved to
each customer in turn:
“The complaint reads,” began the justice, “that the plaintiff
entered your hotel on Sunday and ordered a sandwich and a glass
of beer. That he was peaceably enjoying the same when you, the
proprietor, assaulted him violently. Guilty or not guilty?”
“Guilty, your honor.”
“And why did you do it?”
“Your honor, the feller did me out of a whole Sunday’s trade.”
“How, pray?”
“Why, he ate the sandwich!”
Thus the “joke-factory”. And when Upton Sinclair is accused, as he
has been, of having no sense of humor, he is perhaps entitled to the
defense that he had to manufacture too many jokes at a dollar apiece....
Later came stories and serials in the _Argosy_, a cheap popular
magazine of adventure fiction. They had the first place in the
magazine, and doubtless his mother was proud of her boy’s achievement.
It was early in the month of February, in the year 1804, along the
northern coast of Africa.
A small vessel of Moorish rig was speeding over the Mediterranean
waves, urged onward by a fierce gale. The little craft was
close-reefed, and her decks were swept by the flying spray.
Thus begins _In the Days of Decatur_, a novel complete in one
issue. And _In the Net of the Visconti_, a serial:
In the month of June of the year 1402 two horsemen were riding
through a deep forest in central Italy. Their horses were spattered
with foam....
These youthful literary talents did not fail to attract the attention
of Street & Smith, publishers of five-cent novels, and presently
he was given a regular job producing this kind of fiction for
adolescents. Under military and naval pseudonyms, he wrote a weekly
series about life at West Point and another about life at Annapolis.
The Spanish-American war came on, and he sent both his young heroes
to Cuba. “Killing Spaniards” became a profitable literary occupation.
Each week he wrote a number of the Army weekly (15,000 words) and of
the Navy weekly (15,000 words), and every other week a complete volume
(over 50,000 words) for some cheap “library” series--accomplishing
during this period the almost incredible number of 56,000 words a
week. He kept two stenographers going all the time. One came one day,
the other the next day; he would start dictating at 8 o’clock in the
morning and dictate until noon, about 2,000 words an hour or 8,000
a day, Sundays not excluded. In the afternoon he would revise the
typed matter brought in from the previous day’s dictation, and in the
evening he would take a long walk in the park and think up the next
day’s story. This was while he was still nominally a college student,
and actually undertaking to keep up his intellectual life. These
hack labors occupied some eight hours a day, leaving eight more for
intellectual pursuits, for he was operating on a sixteen-hour work-day,
leaving eight hours for the necessary business of eating and sleeping.
For these hack labors he received $70 a week, at the rate of an eighth
of a cent a word. At the age of twenty, he was turning out more than
two million words a year.
He had shown that he was capable of coping with the world on its own
terms. But he had not given up his secret dream of becoming a poet.
Sometimes, when the ecstasy came, he would turn aside from these
necessitous labors, and try to capture its magic in a net of words. He
would try, and hope that he had succeeded, and know that he had failed.
Poetry is a jealous mistress. But he could not take time off to court
her properly. Street & Smith would not pay him a weekly salary while
he was learning to be a poet. The world did not want poetry enough
to pay for it. The best that was in him was worthless in the eyes of
the world. The world valued only this “curious knack” of turning out
adventure stories for adolescent minds. Be a hack, then, or starve!
There lay his choice.
V. THE ARTIST IN REVOLT
I.
In this manner he earned his living and helped support his mother,
until he was twenty. He had finished college at the age of eighteen,
“passing comfortably near the bottom of his class”, and had entered
Columbia University as a graduate student. During these years, he had
written millions of words of hackwork--a total bulk, he had estimated
it, equal to the complete works of Sir Walter Scott! The psychology
of the period that immediately follows could not well be understood
without taking that fact into consideration. It is obscured in his
own autobiographical novel, _Love’s Pilgrimage_, and does not
at all enter into the quasi-autobiographical _Journal of Arthur
Stirling_. Both of these books tell of the frantic and frenzied
struggles of a young writer for self-realization in the midst of
poverty. In neither of these books will the young writer solve the
problem of poverty by doing any other kind of work except writing: and
this “no compromise” attitude, when carried to such extreme lengths
as it is in these books, alienates a good deal of the sympathies of
the reader. One is better able to understand such reckless and wilful
intransigence when one realizes that this is the maddened rebellion
of an over-driven hack. All work and no play may make Jack a dull
boy, when Jack is an ordinary citizen; but if Jack feels himself
to be an artist, too much hackwork and no opportunity for creative
self-expression makes him go berserk. It is the artist’s revolt against
slavery; and like any slave-revolt it is likely to be marked by “red
ruin and the breaking up of homes”. It is these years of successful
literary drudgery, these millions of meaningless and merely saleable
words, that explain the ruthless singleness of artistic purpose in the
face of every obstacle and in defiance of common sense. It is this
situation which explains the extraordinary combination of abnormal
personal sensitiveness with an inhuman indifference to all opposing
human claims, whether in himself or in others who are dear to him; and
it not merely explains but, more than anything else, serves to excuse
the belief, on the part of the young man himself, that the frightful
excesses of his morbid egotism are symptoms of “genius”.
The onset of this period of revolt was necessarily delayed at first
and then intensified by a sense of his responsibilities toward his
mother. The burden of her support had lately been borne much more by
him than by his father. It may seem obvious enough to us that, in these
circumstances, she should turn to her relatives for assistance, leaving
the boy free to struggle with his career; but perhaps this was not so
obvious to the relatives--and it was an idea which could grow in the
boy’s mind only in the most painful fashion, and with the assistance of
an immense amount of quasi-impersonal idealism.
He had to believe that his poetic career was of the utmost importance
to humanity--perhaps never a difficult thing for a young poet to
believe. And since being a poet meant necessarily being poor, his
poverty had to have a quasi-divine sanction and justification, which
his ascetically-religious tendencies made it easy for him to feel.
Poetry was to be not a career so much as a Mission. The Muse might
have spoken to him in such words as those of Jesus, saying: “If any
man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and
children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he
cannot be My disciple”. Indeed, the struggle through which he went
was in the nature of a religious conversion, such as has led more
than one zealot to break the bonds of filial affection and devote his
life to poverty and danger. Yet his repudiation of his mother--for
such it must have seemed to him--was a hard matter. And the partial
transformation of his earlier ambition from that of becoming a poet in
the pure and restricted sense to that of becoming a poetic novelist
was perhaps not merely due to the influence of years of story-writing,
but was a compromise with his sense of obligation to her. For he
conceived of himself as ultimately and brilliantly successful. Such
success would enable him to resume his obligations to her, without
endangering his own ambitions. But this was the utmost compromise of
which his tormented mind was capable. And in the meantime he had to
repudiate all human obligations that stood in his way. He had to hate
the Christianity he had already intellectually outgrown, and, with
some help from Nietzsche, whom he had read in the German, to scorn its
teaching of Obedience, as a slave-morality unfit for free men.
II.
This, in his twentieth and twenty-first years, was his secret life,
and his preparation for the struggle soon to come. Ostensibly, he was
at the university in preparation for a career as a lawyer. “His mother
had given up all hope of seeing him a bishop, and they had compromised
on a judgeship.” But he easily found reasons for repudiating that
career: “Here at the university there was a law-school, and he met the
students, and saw that this, too, could not be. These ‘lawyers’ were
not seeking knowledge for the love of it--they were studying a trade,
by which they could rise in the world. They were not going out to do
battle for justice--they were perfecting themselves in cunning, so that
they might be of help in money-disputes.” Besides, “they were a coarse
and roystering crew, and he shrank from them in repugnance”.
Being secretly dedicated to a literary career, he was particularly
sensitive to the deficiencies of the courses in English literature.
An eminent professor and critic assigned him a “theme” on College
Athletics. He decided to quit the course, and the following
conversation ensued, as reported in _Love’s Pilgrimage_:
The professor gazed over his spectacles at him. “Why?”
“I don’t think I’m getting any good out of it.”
“But how can you tell what good you are getting?”
“... I don’t seem to feel that I am.”
“It’s not to be supposed that you would feel it--not at this early
stage. You must wait.”
“But I don’t like the method, sir.”
“What’s wrong with the method?”
He was not sure, he said; but he did not think that writing could
be taught. Anyway, one first had to have something worth saying----
“Are you laboring under the delusion that you know anything about
writing?... Because if you are, let me disabuse your mind at once.
There is no one in the class who knows less about writing than
yourself.... It is my business to teach students to write. I’ve
given my life to it, and I think I know something about it. But you
think you know more than I do. That’s all.”
And so they parted.
In a similar course under an even more eminent professor and critic, a
grammatical error was discovered in a poem. “You will find such things
occasionally,” said the professor, as the story is told in _The
Goose-Step_. “There is a line in Byron--‘There let him lay’--and I
have an impression that I once came upon a similar error in Shelley.
Some day before long I plan to read Shelley through and see if I can
find it.” Shelley was the boy’s dearest friend; and he quit that course
also.
Nevertheless, while at the university, he discovered for himself how to
master a foreign language. He familiarized himself in a few days with
the main features of its grammar and syntax, and then read--looking
up each word once for all time, and impressing its meaning so firmly
in his mind that he would never have to waste time looking in the
dictionary again. On the side he thus taught himself German, French,
and Italian and read immensely in all those languages. In German he
made enthusiastically the acquaintance of Goethe, a picture of whom as
a young poet he carried about in his pocket “like a lover”--perhaps,
unwittingly to himself, as a secret promise of the coming true of his
own rash poetic ambitions.
His only friends were still in the world of imagination. He had no time
to make friends; and, if he had wished to do so, he was too much of an
oddity at the university; “there was a certain facetious senior who
had caught him hurrying through the corridors one day, declaring in
excitement that--
‘Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow!’
But he had long ago ceased to hope for a friend, or to care what
anybody thought about him; it was clear to him by this time that he had
made himself into a poet, and was doomed to be unhappy.”
The time came when he could withhold himself no longer from his own
creative work. “There were many signs by which this state might
have been known. He went quite alone, and spoke to no man; he was
self-absorbed, and walked about with his eyes fixed on vacancy; he
was savage when disturbed, and guarded his time unscrupulously. He
had given up the last formalities of life--he no longer attended any
lectures, or wore cuffs, and he would not talk at meal-times. He took
long walks at impossible hours, and he was fond of a certain high hill
where the storms blew. These things had been going on for a year; and
now the book that had been coming to ripeness in his mind was ready to
be born.”
The projected book was a novel, to be called _Springtime and
Harvest_. He was so full of this novel that he could not think about
anything else; “the professors at the university, and all his relatives
and acquaintances had given him up as a hopeless case”. But he had a
hundred dollars saved up; and he would spend the summer in the country
doing his book.
In the early spring he went to Quebec, found a lonely shack in the
woods, had provisions brought to him twice a week, and wrote madly.
It was his break for freedom.
III.
That was in the spring of 1900, when he was not yet twenty-two years
old. The previous years, ever since he had grown conscious of his
poetic destiny, had been years of struggle and preparation to fit and
free himself for his chosen creative task. It doubtless seemed to him
that the preparation was complete, and that there remained but the
actual struggle of accomplishment, under the mere handicap of poverty.
The truth would perhaps have been too discouraging to face.
Though he had formally decided to seek fame as a writer of prose, he
had not really renounced his poetic ambitions; and we are obliged to
consider, as gently as possible, his claims to distinction as a poet.
His conceptions were truly poetic, and Shelleyan in their nature; it
is not strange that his verse should have been thinly intellectual and
of a rarefied emotional quality; it is natural enough that it should
have dealt with life not directly but through the medium of vague
images from some ideal fairyland; its lack of original music, its lack
of observation of the natural world, its lack of any striking verbal
qualities--all these are faults which might be overcome in time by a
young poet of great energy and high ambitions. The early poems of great
poets are sometimes terribly bad, and it would be rash to conclude from
the mere feebleness and unoriginality of a young poet’s verse that
he has no future. Yet in the fragments submitted for our examination
in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ it is impossible to find any positive
evidences of any sort indicating a poetic vocation.
The same faults, indeed, are apparent in his early prose; but miracles
are more to be expected in the realm of prose achievement. Yet it was
with but a scanty equipment that this young writer faced the world
so confidently. This first novel of his, produced with his heart’s
blood, was a shadowy affair; for his heart had no blood in it yet,
only morals, ideas, and egotism. The terrible defect of this first
creative effort was his lack of knowledge of life. Such knowledge as
he had assimilated came from books. But of first-hand acquaintance
with life he gave no indication. His actual experience of twenty-one
years of existence in this troubled planet had been, it would seem, too
painful for realization in concrete form; it had been refined by some
psychic process into moral lessons, and it was in this dry form that it
reached his imagination, to emerge in earnest but jejune fables that
had but the remotest relation to reality. His imagination was securely
barricaded against actual life. Of actual life he was afraid, however
ardently he might live in his airy refuge of dreams and thoughts. Such,
indeed, was his conception of the poet’s life. It was by deliberate
intention that he turned his back upon the welter of experience.
Filled as he was with moral earnestness, he no doubt despised the late
nineteenth-century ideal of the “Ivory Tower”. Yet he lived in an
equally remote and cloudy refuge of his own--it might be called a Tower
of Clouds.
So long as he continued to live shut away from life behind those cloudy
battlements, ambition and moral earnestness would scarcely avail him
to become one of the Shelleyan “legislators of mankind”. He would
have remained, for all his excellent intentions, utterly ineffective,
forever unable to gain a hearing. His “genius” had to be informed
by human experience before it could give him power to communicate
his emotions to mankind. And since his ascetic fear of life made him
incapable of learning joyously, he had to learn by pain. Life had to
batter down the walls of his refuge, force itself upon him, pry open
his eyes, pierce into his ears, overwhelm the defenses of his mind,
before it could reach his heart.... The education of the artist is
sometimes a complex business. A poem of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s,
well-conned by him at the time, tells of the pain involved in “making
a poet out of a man”. He was prepared to suffer that pain. But he was
unprepared to suffer the further pain, which was to complicate his life
for several years, of making a man out of a half-grown artist-boy. It
would take a woman to do that for him.
But he was inured to pain, already an adept in those sufferings which
come from resisting the claims of life; and life, even in the shape of
woman, would find him a worthy and resourceful antagonist. It promised
to be an epic conflict.
VI. THYRSIS
I.
The young poet’s struggle with human nature is told at length in
_Love’s Pilgrimage_. With the information there given, and with
inferences of our own, we may draw this brief outline of the origins of
that struggle in his mind.
A pattern of fear--fear of the outside world--had existed in his mind
since early childhood. Specifically it concerned drinking. “In his
earliest childhood he had known that his father was preyed upon, just
as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At first the enemies had
been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who tempted him to drink with them.
The names of these men were household words to him, portents of terror;
they peopled his imagination as epic figures, such as Black Douglas
must have been to the children of the Northern Border. But then, with
widening intelligence, it became certain social forces, at first dimly
apprehended. It was the god of ‘business’--before which all things fair
and noble went down.” And as this conception of the vast network and
conspiracy of worldly evil was widening in the intellectual realm into
an intelligent and useful theoretical understanding of the nature of
capitalist society, in the meanwhile--or so we may conclude--it was
broadening in the untutored realm of the unconscious mind into a more
or less morbid fear of woman, as the other great “temptation” of life.
And what is said in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ specifically of his fear
of the one temptation can be read as covering the other: “Outwardly
he was like other boys, eager and cheerful, even boisterous; but ...
life had made him into an ascetic. He must be stern, even merciless,
with himself--because of the fear that was in him.... The fear that
self-indulgence might lay its grisly paws upon him!” “So it was that
the soul of this lad had grown somber, and taken to brooding upon the
mysteries of fate. Life was no jest and no holiday, it was no place
for shams and self-deceptions. It was a place where cruel enemies set
traps for the unwary; a field where blind and merciless forces ranged,
unhindered by man or God.”
It would not be strange if love itself were to come to seem to this boy
one of these “traps”. But at first it was only the simpler forms of the
sexual temptation that he feared. Not, indeed, in its grosser form, as
in prostitution; to one with his fastidiousness of temperament this was
no temptation; “the thought of a woman who sold herself for money”--he
had first heard of this strange transaction at college--“could never
bring him anything but shuddering.” Yet there were real temptations.
“All about his lodging-house lived the daughters of the poor, and these
were a snare for his feet.” At recurrent intervals a restlessness
would interrupt his serenity of work and study “and he would go out
into the night and wander about the streets for hours, impelled by a
futile yearning for he knew not what--the hope of something clean in
the midst of uncleanness, of some adventure that would be not quite
shameful to a poet’s fancy”--only to steal home unsatisfied, “baffled
and sick at heart”. He took, with some embarrassment, these troubles to
his clergyman friend, who told him of his own youthful struggle--“which
had resulted in victory, for he had never known a woman”. He emphasized
the importance of the boy’s choice: “On the one hand was slavery and
degradation and disease; and on the other were all the heights of the
human spirit.” He was eloquently recommended to “save and store” his
sexual energy, so that this base metal might become “transmuted to the
gold of intellectual and emotional power”. Such, he was assured, was
the “universal testimony of the masters of the higher life”. Tennyson’s
Galahad was referred to, whose strength was as the strength of ten
because his heart was pure.... Nor was this to be a denial of love,
but on the contrary its consecration. Some day he would meet the woman
he was to cleave to, whom of course he would expect to be a virgin;
and he must do her as much honor--“he must save the fire and fervor of
his young desire for his life’s great consummation”. And a “compact”
was made, according to which the youth was to write to the man every
month and tell him of his “success or failure”. In times of trial, the
thought of having to confess the truth to his friend was “like a sword
hanging over him”, and this alone was, on such occasions, what kept
him to his vow. Ordinarily, in a life so dominated by fear of sex, the
temptations are of a merely imaginative sort, since there is lacking
the courage to undergo those preliminaries of approach to the opposite
sex which must occur before the temptation can be of a very realistic
nature. But this youth’s masculine enterprise was not so wholly chained
up as that, it would appear, for _Love’s Pilgrimage_ recounts
one such hour of trial, in which a spirited girl at a summering-place
yields to his fiery importunities and makes a date with him, only to
be met by an ashamed youth who has in the meantime conquered these
impulses of his baser nature and now offers her his agonized apology
for his caddishness, together with some moral generalizations on the
subject. “Preaching won’t help it any,” she says; “I don’t want to
hear it. Good-bye.” For this, and other such vergings upon surrender,
he would punish himself by “months of toil and penance and of savage
self-immolation.... For several months at a time he would go without
those kinds of food that he liked; and instead of going to bed at
one o’clock he would read the New Testament in Greek for an hour.”
These moral struggles are reminiscent of Tolstoy’s, early and late
in life; except that Tolstoy was reproaching and punishing himself
for sins actually, rather than almost, committed. Like Tolstoy, he
kept self-reminding diaries and wrote exhortations to himself. And,
being an agnostic and unable to use the ordinary theological forms
of prayer, “he fashioned new invocations for himself: prayers to the
unknown sources of his vision, to the new powers of his own soul--‘the
undiscovered gods’, as he called them.” And “above all he prayed to his
vision of the maiden who waited the issue of this battle and held the
crown of victory in her keeping....”
This ideal of a future sweetheart began to take shape in his mind. Some
lines by the English bachelor-schoolmaster, Cory, were like a refrain
to his thoughts on this subject:
“Somewhere beneath the sun,
These quivering heart-strings prove it,
Somewhere there must be one
Made for this soul to move it; ...
_Some one whom I could court
With no great change of manner,
Still holding reason’s fort,
Though waving fancy’s banner._”
First of all, that is to say, she should be one who would take him as
she found him; an inspiration to him (of course), she should inspire
him to go on doing precisely what he wanted to do; hers was to be
the surrender, not his in any degree. A sufficiently unlikely young
creature, yet one for which the young poet is inevitably bound to wish.
For the rest, she should be of an angelic purity and goodness.[6]
II.
The vision of a distant wedded bliss, the reward of abstinence as
promised him by his clergyman friend, sufficed for a time; but his
poetic ambitions came presently to trouble and disturb that hope. As
a poet, doomed to poverty, he would be economically unable to accept
those conventions of marriage under which a husband is required to
support his wife.... These material limitations may have served to
halt the development of his love-ideals in a boyish stage. Nor is that
to be wondered at. A poet, in a society in which poetry is ordinarily
a neglected and unrewarded art, is faced by the painful choice of
renouncing either his art or the normal masculine satisfactions
involved in giving protection--a home, food, clothes--to his beloved.
He, then, was obliged to conceive their companionship in other than
terms of ordinary marriage. To take a wife, in the conventional sense,
would be to chain himself for life and give up all hope of achievement
in his art. And this very real danger to himself as an artist could but
reinforce his morbid fear of the actualities of sex, and confirm him in
his reluctance to assume an adult masculine rôle.
Under these not unfamiliar circumstances, the artist as a young man
sometimes accepts the compromise of casual, temporary and irresponsible
relationships; but to an ascetic young artist of high ideals these
were impossible. He was able to conquer his merely physical instincts;
but what would happen when he actually fell in love? Would he fall
blindly into the “trap” set by nature? If not, how would he seek to
avoid it?... In the meantime, at nineteen and twenty, he cultivated the
art of music, as a means of sublimating these troublesome emotions,
attended concerts, worshipped the hero-soul of Beethoven, and practised
till his fingers were raw and his back aching, on the violin. In
summer, in the country with his mother, he would take his violin into
the fields and play all day to the squirrels. A musician, arriving at
that summer resort, driving over in the hotel bus, heard an Italian
woman in the street singing the ‘Tannhaüser March’. He asked the woman
where she learned it; and she explained: “Dey ees a crazy feller in de
woods--he play it all day for t’ree weeks!”
At the age of twenty-one, it seemed to him that with the help of music
he had “beaten his devils”, and come to be “master of himself”.
Then he went to the country to write his book.
III.
The first fury of his creative impulse had barely spent itself when
his mother and another woman, her oldest friend, arrived to spend the
summer in a boarding-house in a village near Quebec, and with them the
other woman’s daughter, a dark-eyed girl of twenty. The girl brought
his lunches to the negligent young poet at work in his cabin in the
woods, and a companionship was begun, with emotional consequences that
made it difficult enough for him to concentrate on his work as a young
poet should. They were, in fact, before the summer was over, involved
in the torments and problems of first love.
She was a girl whom he had admired for her beauty, but scorned for her
submissiveness, and never for a moment in his imagination cast in the
heroic rôle of a poet’s mate. Not was she, apparently, at all suited
to such a rôle. From the worldly point of view, a poet’s mate should
doubtless be an eminently practical and capable person; and from the
poet’s own point of view she should be by temperament and education
able to understand and sympathize with his ambitions. None of these
things was true of this dark-eyed girl of twenty. She was spoiled
and wilful, fond of leisure and comfort, fond of play, with a deep
capacity for the pagan enjoyment of life. And perhaps it was these very
qualities, the dramatic complement of his own impersonal, fanatic,
Puritanical qualities, which attracted him to her.... That can be
understood; and it can be understood that he should fool himself into
thinking that he was going to educate and train her to be like himself
I But what perversity of feminine nature could have so laid open her
young girl’s heart to the worship of this scornful youth, and made her,
not merely fall in love with him as a summer’s idle diversion, but be
ready to go with him upon his own harsh terms into a life of poverty
and struggle? Perhaps it was the charm of his distinction, for he was
certainly like no other man she had ever known: though she might have
considered him as a well-brought-up young girl should, merely “queer”.
Perhaps it was something authoritarian and quasi-parental in his
attitude toward her; for he began his wooing by scolding her for the
kind of life she lived--for being an idle butterfly.
Then this conversation:
She: “But people aren’t to blame for the lives they live!”
He: “Why not?”
She: “Because--they can’t help them. They are bound fast.”
He: “They should break loose.”
She: “That is easy for you to say. You have no ties.”
He: “I did have them--I might have them still. But I broke them.”
She: “Ah, but you are a man!”
He: “What difference does that make?”
She: “It makes all the difference in the world. You can earn money,
you can go away by yourself. But suppose you were a girl--shut up in a
home, and told that was your ‘sphere’?”
He: “I’d fight--I’d break my way out somehow, never fear. If one
doesn’t break out, it simply means that his desire isn’t strong enough.”
So it begins. It might be a Russian wooing of the Nihilist period.
It seems that the butterfly has a soul, and truly desires freedom.
The young Nihilist tells her sternly that she must work for her
salvation. She begs humbly for instructions, for tasks--and he sets
them. He lectures her on Christianity, on marriage, on the wrongness
of the world as it is; and she listens with glowing eyes. Of course
the master reads his unfinished masterpiece to his pupil; she thinks
it wonderful.... Kisses begin to mingle with these lectures; boy and
girl kisses, cool as the touch of a flower. Yet even kisses such as
these awaken in his mind the reverberations of an old alarm; and he
commences to explain to her the essential loneliness of his destiny as
a poet. “And do you expect to have no human relationships as long as
you live?” she asks in awe. They discuss that. There is, it seems, a
possible mate for him. But she would have to endure every privation.
He would not turn aside one step for her sake. No, rather he would
drive her as mercilessly as he drove himself, up the steep hill toward
perfection. Not, one would think, an alluring prospect for a joy-loving
young girl! Yet it fails to frighten her. He quotes in warning:
“Maiden! a nameless life I lead,
A nameless death I’ll die;
The fiend whose lantern lights the mead
Were better mate than I!”
And now, in a month or two of companionship, she has had good reason
to know how realistically true that warning is. She knows how much
more important his book is to him than her mere company. He sets her
to learning German. He scolds her for not learning it instantly. A
sufficiently quaint courtship! But he is her master; she takes gladly
what he gives, the lectures, the scoldings, and, more infrequently,
the kisses. He is ashamed of kissing, as an unworthy weakness--and
doubtless also a waste of good time that might have been devoted to
further counsels of perfection. And presently it is understood that
she is his mate; by no means his perfect mate as yet, but presumably
to be perfected by further lectures, scoldings, and German lessons. Of
course, it is made clear, they are not sweethearts in any ordinary
sense. There has been already too much of kissing and petting; she is
to get down to her German, and grind away at that, so that some day she
may be his intellectual equal....
In _Love’s Pilgrimage_, where this courtship is described in
detail, the girl is called Corydon and the boy Thyrsis. The choice
of those names, Thyrsis and Corydon, for the principals in this
boy-and-girl romance, is relevant to the boyish and poetic ideal which
the young lover so gallantly and absurdly attempted to impose upon the
recalcitrant facts of their human nature. The original Thyrsis and
Corydon, in Greek and Roman pastoral poetry, were shepherd-boys and
dear friends; and it was such an idyllic and quasi-boyish companionship
in thought and work, without any of the disturbing influences of sex,
that this young lover had in mind. He was spiritually unprepared for
any surrender to the tempestuous waves of man-and-woman love; and if he
was so harsh and graceless in his treatment of his young sweetheart,
it was out of fear. And he may well have been afraid. He seemed to be
the master in this relationship, the dictator of hard terms which she
meekly accepted. Yet was he truly in control of the situation? Or did
this girl submit with such proud humility because her heart knew a
secret which he had yet to learn?
His learning of it proceeded slowly. Their talk and their studies
lasted late into the night at the lonely cabin in the woods. The gossip
of a summer resort community can be imagined, and the alarm of the
two mothers. The young people, conscious of their purity, could only
despise a world which thought that love necessarily meant “obscenity”.
“Everybody is thinking obscenity about us!” he said to her indignantly.
They stubbornly persisted in their companionship until the girl was
taken away to New York.... Now the young poet had time to write on
his book in peace; yet his thoughts of her gave him no peace, and he
spent the precious hours of his hard-bought freedom in writing long
letters to her. Not love-letters, precisely; they were scoldings on
paper, because the thought of her kept him from his work; exhortations,
warnings. He was trying to escape from her. Yet it was not she, after
all, who held him fast caught in that net; it was something within
himself, battling against his fears--the rash desire for life. Then
furiously he threw himself into the task of writing, to escape the
problem which confronted him.
The fact seemed to be that he had taken this girl’s destinies into his
own hands; she was his. But upon what terms? He had preached his quaint
Tolstoyan-Tennysonian idealism to her, and she had accepted it; she was
ready to live with him as a sister in one room in New York that winter.
This plan was reluctantly renounced on medical advice; apparently it
was not so easy to live an ideal life in defiance of the conventional
world.[7] What choice then was left except abandonment of a spiritual
responsibility he had undertaken--or ordinary marriage? That autumn he
came to New York knowing dazedly that he was going to marry her.
VII. THYRSIS AND CORYDON
I.
Thyrsis and Corydon, as we may for a while continue to call them, were
married in New York City one day in October of that year, 1900. They
had no money with which to set up housekeeping, and so they lived
with his parents, while waiting for the book, which had been finished
somehow amidst all this storm and stress, to be accepted.
The book wasn’t immediately accepted; it was, to the young writer’s
astonishment, rejected--the first of many rejections.... Now that he
had so rashly taken unto himself a wife, it was agreed by everyone that
he should get a job and support her properly. But he refused to do so.
Behind him lay the meaningless slavery of hackwork from which he had
barely escaped with his poet’s soul alive; back into that slavery he
was not going. And was it not fully understood that it was his mate’s
privilege to share the hardships of a poet’s life?
In a world of relatives and friends who kept wondering why her husband
didn’t get a job, who pitied her for what seemed to them her strange
and humiliating position, the girl did not, as she might easily have
done, lose faith in her artist-husband. But she began to lose faith in
herself--feeling herself to be a weak and inferior and merely human
person mated with a relentless, inexorable and inhuman will. Sometimes
the shock of some new frustration in his career, some disappointment
at the hands of an editor or publisher, left him a hurt boy to be
comforted in her arms. But these moments were brief; ashamed of his
weakness, he would lash himself to some new task, and send her to her
corner to attend to what seemed to be her wifely duty of studying
German. She could not get on with German, and that made her feel more
abysmally inferior. It seemed that they had no time to be together, now
that they were married. They did sometimes play Bach together, in his
savage and determined and utterly unsentimental fashion. She liked to
be read to, but he was too impatient for that--he ravaged the newspaper
of its contents in three minutes and tossed it gutted aside, and dealt
with books in a similarly purposeful and efficient way. If he spared
time for a walk, he fretted at the frightful waste of time required
for her dressing and primping. They ate, then and later, haphazardly,
and lived for periods on cold food, bringing on in him a chronic case
of indigestion and increasing his querulousness. It was small wonder
that she in turn developed a case of nerves; and her capacity for thus
giving pain brought her what all her capacity for giving joy had never
brought, the reward of her husband’s serious attention. He would sit
up with her all night and discuss and analyze her morbid fears, in the
light of the latest therapeutic knowledge from abroad. It seems to
have become, under those conditions, something of a habit for her to
indulge in what were nicknamed “soul-mates”, as a means of securing
some attention from her husband.
II.
It was his fierce determination to fight it out as a writer if he
starved. His novel, _Springtime and Harvest_, was at last
privately published, in the spring of 1901, with money borrowed from a
relative. It contained a preface telling about himself and his hopes;
this book was to be the first of a library which he intended to found,
“for the purpose of increasing helpful reading among the humble people
of our land.” He added: “_Springtime and Harvest_ may fail, and
subsequent books may fail; but that library is quite certain to come.
The writer is a man who gives all his time to his art, and some day
or other, he will have money; it is by this use of it that he hopes
to keep clean his artist’s conscience.” _Springtime and Harvest_
sold two hundred copies, enough to pay back the relative. This same
relative, impressed with his energies and abilities, had already
offered him a very good job in the financial world. But he did not want
a job, he wanted a chance to develop his genius. He became shameless,
and wrote begging letters to rich men famed as philanthropists, asking
for a subsidy. Impersonal subsidies, not given out of friendship but
for the encouragement of young talent, do now to a limited extent
exist; perhaps Upton Sinclair’s later propaganda on behalf of that idea
had something to do with its realization; but there was no such kindly
custom then. His letters, when not thrown in the wastebasket by the
rich men’s secretaries, were answered with the information that if he
were truly a young man of genius he would find in poverty and struggle
the best encouragement to achievement. Young poets must not, by rash
generosity, be prevented from learning in suffering what they are to
teach in song! In his case there was some truth in that smug and cruel
notion; at least, it was to take more suffering than he had yet known
to make him understand life....
He was still self-imprisoned in his tower of clouds. His idealism could
not yet accept the human terms of marriage. The medical advice upon
which the chaste earlier plans of the lovers had been abandoned had
been accompanied with the information (which was news to Thyrsis) that
actual marriage need not result in children. The advice, upsetting
enough to the whole universe which the poet had erected upon his
neurotic fear of life, had been only with much misgiving on his part
acted upon. Marriage had opened a new world to him; but it was a
too disturbing world, too alien to that cloudy realm of ideas and
moralities, of disciplines and duties, in which he was accustomed
to move; his generalizations had no meaning in this new pagan world
of delight--and he presently, from high motives drawn from his own
habitual realm, felt that it was his duty to renounce it. He had
thoughtfully and earnestly concluded that it could not be right to
enjoy the raptures of the marriage bed unless those raptures were
consecrated to an unselfish purpose, namely that of creating new
life. That purpose was not at all a part of his plans; it was totally
in conflict with the much more important purpose of fulfilling his
consecrated literary ambitions. Nevertheless, the idea of renunciation
had come too late; it appeared that these connubial raptures had after
all not been mere ignoble and unfruitful self-indulgence, but had been,
however unintentionally, dedicated to their proper biologic purpose,
after all.
And now the chagrined poet could in secret mock bitterly at himself as
a deluded victim of Nature, and trace in memory the steps by which he
had been led into that very trap of human responsibility which he had
thought himself wise enough to avoid.... Yet there was a possible way
of escape, even now, from the trap. And these bitter soliloquies were
interrupted by a practical discussion of the question whether this new
life, so inimical to the poetic career, should be permitted to be. It
was discussed upon high moral grounds, pro and con. And it was in the
nature of an astonishing revelation to the young poet of a hitherto
unguessed secret of the feminine heart when, while they were trying
to make up their minds, he observed Corydon’s profound interest and
delight in a sufficiently ordinary baby halted in its carriage before
the park bench where they sat talking. Was it, then, possible that
this girl, who had come to him as a poet’s mate, and was presumed to
be interested in nothing but inspiring and assisting his career--was
it possible that she _wanted_ a baby? That, he concluded, was
actually true; and, in the irreconcilable conflict of moral duties
which the situation otherwise presented, that merely emotional factor
was giving the deciding vote. Thyrsis was becoming more human.
III.
The birth, in December 1901, of his child, an event of which he was a
startled witness, was almost too appalling a glimpse into that realm
of human experience from which he had tried to escape. Yet not long
afterward he was able to confront his memories of that event with a
sufficiently fearless mind and build them up into one of the most
remarkable scenes in the whole of modern realistic fiction--the scene
being later incorporated into his novel, _Love’s Pilgrimage_.[8]
The child, a son named David, was a personage of sufficient importance
to affect even such an inflexible determination as that of this young
poet. He did not get a job, but he did hackwork. His pen had lost its
old fluency in that sort of writing, it was no longer a knack but
an agony; but he did it in desperation, together with book-reviews
and every sort of literary odd-job by which he could make a dollar.
He raised a laugh in an editorial office by offering, as an expert,
to review a book on the care and feeding of infants; he was willing
enough to be laughed at if he could thus get a much needed book without
having to pay for it. _Springtime and Harvest_ was republished
by a regular publishing house late in 1901 under the title _King
Midas_, without diminishing either his poverty or his obscurity....
A new literary project needed for its accomplishment more peace than a
new baby permitted, and he had to go elsewhere to work for some weeks;
in the meantime his wife and her child were taken away by indignant
relatives, and when he returned he was forbidden to see either of them
until he should have “come to his senses” and agreed to behave like
a proper husband--that is, get a job. By letter between the parted
parents it was arranged that the nurse should bring the baby on a
certain day and hour to a certain place in the park, so that he might
see his son. A nurse did come to the spot at that hour, wheeling a
baby much less beautiful than he remembered his own as being; and he
was miserable until his telegram, asking if the baby had red hair, was
answered by one explaining that the nurse had been ill and not able to
go to the park that day!... But even this pressure failed to bring the
stubborn young poet to terms, and his wife and child were presently
allowed to go and share his poverty.
IV.
His second novel, _Prince Hagen_, though not published until
1903, was written in 1901. In 1902 he wrote _The Journal of Arthur
Stirling_, a book which made a considerable sensation in the
literary world, and which will be dealt with in the next chapter.
Still poor, and unknown to the great public, he moved in the spring
of 1903 to the outskirts of Princeton, N.J., where he lived with his
wife and child in a shack in the woods, and wrote two more novels, the
second of which was to bring him worldwide fame. His intellectual and
artistic development during this period will be considered at length
in the following chapters; but, as a significant detail revealing the
progress and suggesting the limits of his emotional development, we may
fix our attention on that shack in the woods near Princeton.
In the back pages of _Country Life in America_ for June 1904,
following the accounts and pictures of expensive and luxurious summer
residences for the rich, there appeared a brief article entitled _A
Country House Built and Furnished for Only $156_ (Photograph by the
author). It began:
The writer of this article is pursuing the occupation of unpopular
novelist, and is attempting what few even of the popular novelists
attempt--to live on his royalties.
One does not need to turn to the signature to know that it was written
by Upton Sinclair. Yet for purposes of comparison we may, before
going on, interpolate here some fragrants of a manifesto composed the
previous spring, just before moving to this tiny house in the country:
... born to sing and to worship, as I was born to sing and to
worship ...
... stewed and mashed in misery for a lifetime, as I for seven long
years ...
... I could not greet my Muse until I had flung my banner wide ...
... You laugh at me, no doubt, but some day you will heed me ...
Unquestionably there is power in these phrases; but unquestionably also
they are boyish.... And now we return to the article in _Country
Life_:
Prior to the discovery herein to be set forth, I lived, as
most city-bred and non-wealthy people live, in a flat or a
boarding-house in winter and in a summer hotel in the warm months.
To be sure, it is scarcely true that “most city-bred and non-wealthy
people” in America go to summer hotels for the “warm months”; he was
perhaps thinking of the class he was addressing in that publication:
workingmen do not read _Country Life in America_.... But this
prose, in comparison with the fragments of last year’s manifesto quoted
above, has in it the quality of civilized conversation; the shrill
boyish note is gone; it is a man speaking. The boy has grown up. And
he has grown up, somewhat in spite of himself, through the influence
of human experience in its most inescapable domestic terms. He has
been living, not in a poetic Shelleyan grotto, but in what despite
some unusual features is nevertheless unmistakably a home. He has
been a husband and father,--doubtless not a very good husband, for
a preoccupied artist may easily fail, and a puritanical idealist is
pretty certain to fail, to be that--yet the head of a household, a
breadwinner, a man responsible to wife and child; he has almost if not
quite ceased to dramatize himself in the grandiose rôle of a solitary
and unique figure bearing the burden of a poetic doom. He has become
considerably humanized, and as it happens through suffering--for
domesticity is not the least of those miseries in which, as he
complained in his manifesto the previous year, he had been stewed and
mashed. Corydon does not seem to have been a very efficient housewife
or very capable mother; and she probably seemed to an impecunious young
poet dreadfully extravagant. They were both terribly overworked. Yet
domesticity, to the young poet a monster of such frightful mien that to
be hated need but to be seen, when endured sufficiently was found to
have human values of its own; and though he might never be said to have
been thoroughly domesticated, though the close and warm intimacies of
family life remained something to shy away from as much as possible,
yet he had gained something from his experience which now led him to
show other young people the way to these life-values, at a price within
their meager means!
And so to continue with the article; the next few paragraphs are
introductory to his theme, but interesting for their realistic
information:
So overwhelming was the force of custom that for many years I
never dreamed there was any other way to live. At last, however,
the truth dawned upon me that I was foolish to pay for the
use of a hotel in the country when what I wanted was only the
country and not the hotel. I chanced one day to be walking in the
woods when I came upon a little cabin which had been built for
picnicking purposes by a lady who had immediately afterward been
providentially smitten with a rheumatic knee. This house I hired
for $25 for the season, and then I began to discover what things
there were in life. This house had cost about $400; and from force
of custom I rented it without inquiring further.
Meantime, also, I went back to the city in winter, though there was
nothing I wanted in the city except books.... I am writing this
article because I know that there are in New York many thousands of
poets, painters, musicians, and other would-be dwellers in the land
of the spirit, living in just exactly that way, and never dreaming
that there is any other way for them to do it; that there is any
sort of shelter save a hall bedroom at $2 a week, or any sort of
food save what is shoved at them over a restaurant table at twenty
or thirty cents a dish! Figure up the cost of a hall bedroom at $2
a week for a lifetime ...
Thus far, to be sure, this is simply a country studio for artists that
is being suggested; but it abruptly becomes a home in the same sentence:
and then consider that houses suitable for the occupancy of poets
and lovers may be built at a cost of from $50 to $150, and dwelt in
all the year round at a cost of $6 a week for two and $2 more for
the baby.
Five years ago, the writer met a charming young couple one summer,
engaged, and painfully in love. With the naïveté of lovers,
they told me all about the problem--which was that he was only
twenty-six, and was earning only a poor $1800 a year; and they had
waited two years already--they expected to wait one more, and then
he would receive $2,200, and upon that they were heroically going
to try to get along. The writer has not seen them for three years,
but just the other day he made inquiry. Whether the increase was
delayed or their courage gave out, he does not know--but they are
still engaged!
It may seem a little unfair for this young writer, of all persons, to
taunt these cowardly lovers; but that he can do so means that he has
at last accepted that impulse which in spite of so many qualms carried
him into marriage as, not a weakness nor a folly, but a thing to be
proud of--not a mere falling into a “trap of Nature”, but a responsible
action of his own; that is to say, his sexual impulse is at last
acknowledged to be a part of himself, and not a “devil” nor an “enemy”.
But to proceed:
The house shown in this illustration cost $156. This figure is
larger in two respects than necessary--mistakes were made in its
construction, and it was built in a place where lumber is very high
in price. As described in this article, it can be built for about
$125.
It stands about three miles outside of Princeton, New Jersey, which
was chosen because it is a beautiful town with a library. The house
is built upon a long strip of land bordering a dense woods; this
strip has a score of great trees upon it, and no less than a dozen
springs, of various degrees of coldness. It was of no use to the
farmer who owns it, and he rented it for $10 a year.
The house is 16×18 feet. It has three rooms--a kitchen, a bedroom,
and a living-room--respectively 6×7, 9×7, and 11×16 feet. Six by
seven sounds small for a room, but every part of it was calculated
beforehand, and there is plenty of space....
He continues with details of its construction and cost. There is a
piazza, to be used as a dining-room in summer. “A good deal of the
furniture is home-made, of plain white pine; it can be varnished or
covered with pretty stuffs, though the present house is in the Spartan
style.” The house took six days to build. “Enough crockery and kitchen
utensils--agate-ware and unbreakable--can be bought for $5 or $10,
and then the house is inhabitable--for poets and lovers!” Near-by in
the woods is a study, costing $25. “It is 8×10, and sounds small; but
it holds a table, a book-case, a stove, a trunk, two chairs, and an
unpopular novelist”--who presently was to write there a book that would
be read all over the world.[9]
It is a brave description; but certain reflections present themselves.
This “Spartan” simplicity, one feels sure, is not dictated entirely
by poverty, but by a Spartan temperament; and one is equally sure
that the Corydon of whom one has read in _Love’s Pilgrimage_,
however delighted she might be at having a house of her own to be
mistress of at last, would have preferred something less bleak. She
was not Spartan: she was Corinthian, rather; and her tastes have not
been consulted, or have been sternly overruled, in the planning of
this home. One looks at the photograph so proudly furnished; a neat,
bleak, Quakerish place, for whose drabness poverty does not wholly
account--the home of an ascetic, a despiser of soft living, of comfort,
of ease; the home of one who recognizes the uses “of bread and bacon,
of a stove and a woodpile”, and scorns all beauty except that “of
prayer and music, of joy and love, of wisdom and high resolve”, and
perhaps of “beautiful books in an occasional rare instance”--a moralist
still! And one remembers, in one of Corydon’s letters in _Love’s
Pilgrimage_, the wistful cry: “Oh, but how I want a poor taste
of joy!” One might guess that a girl of her temperament would be
exasperated into rebellion by a husband who was afraid of beauty and
joy in its most innocent forms, afraid even of his love of her; and
that this rebellion would take forms calculated to torment and madden
even him out of his Olympian austerity. Not a happy prospect for this
marriage! But even if it should ultimately prove too great a strain for
either of them to endure, it was meanwhile breaking down, apparently
as far as human experience was capable of doing so, his imaginative
resistance to reality; and its robust influences, combined with those
of a new philosophy of life, to be discussed later, served to make, out
of a conceited boy-poet, a man and a writer.
VIII. THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING
I.
In 1903 there appeared a book entitled _The Journal of Arthur
Stirling_, purporting to be the real diary of a young poet who
had, after a bitter and unsuccessful struggle, committed suicide. An
editorial introduction, signed “S.”, gave a sketch of the poet, and
quoted from a New York newspaper a notice of his death “by suicide in
the Hudson River”.
The book was something of a sensation among that small class of
American readers who cared enough about their country or its literature
to be moved by the thought of a poet being driven to suicide by neglect
in the midst of one of the richest cities in the world. The book was
widely reviewed, and though it was generally felt that Arthur Stirling
was a “difficult” young man, abnormally sensitive in his attitude
toward life and overstrained in his attitude toward his art, the book
was praised by those who knew artists as a true picture of young
genius.[10]
The book incidentally related certain rebuffs and indignities at the
hands of editors and publishers. And these publishers, recognizing
themselves in the story, did not fail to recognize the young poet as
Upton Sinclair--and so the truth came out. The critics, especially
those who had compared the journal of Arthur Stirling with the diary
of Marie Bashkirtseff, resented being hoaxed, and discussion of the
book ceased. It was treasured, however, among discerning readers as
being, despite the fact that its author was still alive and kicking,
a sufficiently authentic account of the exasperated psychology of the
young artist in his struggle with poverty and neglect.
Time has confirmed that judgment; the book remains a permanently
valuable and interesting contribution to our knowledge of what may
without prejudice be called youthful genius, and--more than that--a
moving plea on its behalf.
But it is further interesting to us as a stage in its author’s
development. It was the second book after his marriage, and it deals
directly with his own most acute problems--not only the problems of
poverty and neglect, but with the psychic problem involved in his own
conception of himself, his destiny, and his duties.... The book was
written feverishly, day and night, during six weeks in the spring of
1902, on an island in the St. Lawrence River. His son had been born in
the previous December. The birth of his child had necessarily altered
the course of his life; it had bound him to reality. And it was with
the inescapable necessity of such an alteration in the course of his
life, the necessity of making terms with reality, that he was now
in violent inward struggle. He had, by rebellion, just previously,
established himself as a poet and a free soul; as such he had no
chains; even his marriage had by prescriptive arrangement involved
no human obligations whatever; he stood alone, and compromised with
nothing. And he had hardly had time to enjoy this freedom when it was
snatched away from him, not by a world that he could defy and resist,
but by Nature--including his own newly discovered Human Nature. If it
was an evil and ugly world that kept him in poverty, it was something
in himself which could scarcely be dismissed as ugly or evil that bound
him to his wife and child. And it was at the behest, not of the world,
but of this something in himself, that he had to compromise, and give
up his freedom. In giving it up, he gave up necessarily what had been
his fundamental conception of himself, as a Poet, consecrated only to
his career, free from every other duty. A painful renunciation, and
one which he would be slow to make. In leaving, then, his wife and
child, to go away and write this book, he was not merely attempting
desperately to make some money, he was taking this occasion to deal in
terms of art with the internal conflict which obsessed him.
The Arthur Stirling of the book was based in part upon Sinclair’s
imaginings concerning the life of an actual young poet whom he had
met once or twice--a waiter and a snow-shoveller, who had sought a
publisher in vain, yet of whom it had been said by an eminent poet in
Sinclair’s hearing that “he had written lines not surpassed by one
of his years since Keats”. But it was chiefly, of course, based upon
his own experience as a neglected writer. It begins, however, with
the young poet writing his book--and this part of the story goes back
to, and might be an actual diary of, his life two years before, when
he had made his great break for freedom--when, with a hundred dollars
in his pocket he had left the world behind and gone to a shack in the
country to write his great book.... That is to say, he had gone back
to the days when he was free, to the days when he had a right to think
of himself as a poet. No girl casts her shadow over these pages. The
tragedy must be blamed upon the world, not upon her.... And now, once
more a poet, he savors again in memory the beauty and the pain of the
poetic doom:
It is not merely the vision, the hour of exultation; that is but
the setting of the task. Now you will take that ecstasy, and hold
on to it, hold on with soul and body; you will keep yourself at
that height, you will hold that flaming glory before your eyes,
and you will hammer it into words. Yes, that is the terror--into
words--into words that leap the hilltops, that bring the ends of
existence together in a lightning flash. You will take them as they
come, white-hot, in wild tumult, and you will forge them, and force
them. You will seize them in your naked hands and wrestle with
them, and bend them to your will--all that is in the making of a
poem. And last and worst of all, you will hold them in your memory,
the long, long surge of them; the torrent of whirling thought--you
will hold it in your memory! You are dazed with excitement,
exhausted with your toil, trembling with pain; but you have built
a tower out of cards, and you have mounted to the clouds upon it,
and there you are poised. And anything that happens--anything!--ah,
God, why can the poet not escape from his senses?--a sound, a
touch--and it is gone!
These things drive you mad.--
But meanwhile it is not gone yet. You have still a whole scene in
your consciousness--as if you were a juggler, tossing a score of
golden balls. And all the time, while you work, you learn it--you
learn it! It is endless, but you learn it. In the midst of it,
perhaps, you come down of sheer exhaustion; and you lie there,
panting, shuddering, your hands moist; you dare not think, you
wait. And then by and by you begin again--if it will not come, you
_make_ it come, you lash yourself like a dumb beast--up, up,
to the mountain-tops again. And then once more the thing comes
back--you live the scene again, as an actor does, and you shape
it and you master it. And now in the midst of it, you find this
highest of all moments is gone! It is gone, and you cannot find
it! Those words that came as a trumpet-clash, burning your very
flesh--that melody that melted your whole being to tears--they are
gone--you cannot find them! You search and you search--but you
cannot find them. And so you stumble on, in despair and agony; and
still you dare not rest. You dare not ever rest in this until the
thing is done--done and over--until you have _nailed_ it fast.
So you go back again, though perhaps you are so tired that you are
fainting; but you fight yourself like a madman, you struggle until
you feel a thing at your heart like a wild beast; and you keep on,
you hold it fast and learn it, clinch it tight, and make it yours
forever. I have done that same thing five times to-day without a
rest; and toiled for five hours in that frenzy; and then lain down
upon the ground, with my head on fire.
Afterward when you have recovered you sit down, and for two or
three hours you write; you have it whole in your memory now--you
have but to put it down. And this forlorn, wet, bedraggled
thing--this miserable, stammering, cringing thing--_this_ is
your poem!
Every moment of this lost poetic life is dear to him, infinitely
precious, worthy to be recorded: the egotism, the querulousness, the
hysteria--these, too, are part of the poet’s doom, and beautiful as
such.
I am wild to-day. Oh, how can I bear this--why should I have to
contend with such things as this! Is it not hard enough--the agony
that I have to bear, the task that takes all my strength and more?
And must I be torn to pieces by such hideous degradation as this?
Oh, my God, if my life is not soon clear of these things I shall
die!
Oh, it is funny--yes, funny--Let us laugh at it. The dance-hall
musician has brought home his ’cello! I heard him come bumping
up the stairs with it--God damn his soul! And there he sits,
sawing away at some loathsome jig tunes! And he has two friends in
there--I listen to their wit between the tunes.
Here I sit like a wild beast in a cage. I tell you I can bear any
work in the world, but I can not bear such things as this. That I,
who am seeking a new faith for men--who am writing, or trying to
write, what will mean new faith to millions--should have my soul
ripped into pieces by such loathsome, insulting indignities!
Oh, laugh!--but _I_ can’t laugh--I sit here foaming at the
lips, and crying! And suppose he’s lost his position, and does this
every day!
Now every day I must lay aside what I am doing and sit and shudder
when I hear him coming up the steps--and wait for him to begin
this! I tell you, I demand to be free--I _demand_ it! I want
nothing in this world but to be let alone. I don’t want anybody to
wait on me.--_I don’t want anything from this hellish world but
to be let alone!_
And, in another mood:
To get the mastery of your soul, to hold it here, in your hands, at
your bidding, to consecrate your life to that, to watch and pray
and toil for that, to rouse yourself and goad yourself day and
night for that; to thrill with the memory of great consecrations,
of heroic sufferings and aspirations; to have in your heart the
power of the stars, of nature, of history and the soul of man ...
It is a lingering farewell to a beautiful past. For the Poet must
die. There is no place for him in such a world. When he has suffered
enough, he will take himself out of it. He endures his last indignity,
and faces tranquilly the death toward which he goes. “Do I believe
that I shall ever live again? I know that I shall not.... He has given
me an hour.... My life was beautiful.... There are no thoughts in
Oblivion.”... “No one will find my body, and no one will ever care
about it.”
Three years later Upton Sinclair wrote, in the preface to a new
edition: “No truer book than _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_ has
ever been written; it is the book of all my boyhood’s hopes and dreams,
and it is as dear to me as the memory of a dead child.”
It does preserve, with infinite love, the memory of a dead child--a
dead poet, tenderly and regretfully put to death by his own hand.
It foreshadows the end of an epoch, and the beginning of a new life.
II.
_The Journal of Arthur Stirling_ contained, incidentally, a
message. With the giving up of his own poetic career, he had become
conscious of the needs of others--a class-consciousness in the artistic
realm.
You let every man go his way--you let him starve, you let him
die in any hole that he can find. The poet--tenderest and most
sensitive of all men! the poet--the master of the arts of
suffering! Exposed on every side, nervous, haunted, unused to the
world, knowing how to feel and knowing that alone! Is not his life
an agony under any conditions,--is he not tortured for you--the
world? And you leave him helpless, despairing!
What is the matter with you?--How can you be so blind? There are
some of you who really love books--look and see the story of
genius--if it be not a thing to make you shudder and turn sick.
It has been so through all the ages, and it will be through all
the ages to come until society has a conscience and a soul. Tell
me if there is anything in this world more frightful than the lot
of poets who have been born poor--of Marlowe and Chatterton and
Goldsmith, Johnson and Burns and Keats! And who can tell how many
more choked before even their first utterance?
I can not talk of that, for it makes me sick; but I will talk
of the poets who were born rich. Is it not singular--is it not
terrible--how many of the great stalwart ones were rich? To be
educated, to own books, to hear music, to dwell in the country, to
be free from men and men’s judgments! Oh, the words break my heart!
--But was not Goethe rich, and did he not have these things? And
was not Hugo rich? And Milton? When he left college he spent five
years at his father’s country place and wrote four poems that have
done more to make men happy than if they had cost many millions of
dollars.
But let me come to what I spoke of before, the seven poets of this
century in England.
I name Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne,
Shelley and Keats. I said that six of them were independent, and
that the other--the greatest--died like a dog.
Wordsworth came first; he was young and poor and struggling, and
a friend left him just such an independence as I have cried for;
and he consecrated himself to art, and he revolutionized English
poetry, he breathed truth into a whole nation again.... Think
that the world owes its possession of Wordsworth’s poetry to the
accident that a friend died and left him some money!
I name Byron; he was a rich man. I name Tennyson; he had a little
competence, and gave up the idea of marriage, and for ten years
devoted himself to art; and when he was thirty-two he published his
work--and then they gave him a pension!
I name Browning; Browning went his own way, heeding no man; and he
never had to think about money. I name Swinburne; and the same was
true of him.
I name Shelley; and Shelley was wealthy. They kept him poor for a
time, but his poems do not date from then. When he wrote the poetry
that has been the spiritual food of the high souls of this century,
he lived in a beautiful villa in Italy, and wandered about the
forest with his books....
This state of affairs and its remedy were set forth, a few months after
the publication of the book, in an article entitled _My Cause_,
in the _Independent_. This is the “manifesto” referred to and
fragmentarily quoted on a previous page; it begins:
I, Upton Sinclair, would-be singer and penniless rat, having for
seven years waged day and night with society a life-and-death
struggle for the existence of my soul; and having now definitely
and irrevocably consummated a victory--having routed my last foe
and shattered my last chain and made myself master of my own life:
being in body very weak and in heart very weary, but in will
infinitely determined, have set myself down to compose this letter
to the world, before taking my departure for a long sojourn in the
blessed regions of my own Spirit.
I should not write a letter to the world for the purpose of setting
myself right; being “lord of a thousand dollars,” the world no
longer exists for me. What people think of me is not whispered in
the forests that I love, and I have read my last review, and waited
upon my last publisher, and cringed before my last rejection. The
sole reason for my writing is that in that world there are surely
others, born to sing and to worship, as I was born to sing and to
worship, but born less capable than I in the world’s low way--less
willing to fight the world with its own weapons--less cunning, less
unprincipled, than I. For such there being in the place from which
I have escaped no salvation, and no prospect, save to be stewed and
mashed in misery for a lifetime, as I for seven long years, I could
not greet my Muse until I had flung my banner wide and declared
myself to men.
The remedy which was set forth in equally eloquent terms was an
institution to be supported by rich men for the purpose of endowing
young authors of talent--an “American University of Literature”, with
a Board of Trustees “consisting of the noblest and truest and most
reverent literary men of the time”, employing “a corps of carefully
selected and trained readers” to consider and pass on manuscripts
offered in evidence of the possession of talent worth encouraging:
the standard of judgment being “not what the Public Wants, but what
American Literature wants, and what God wants, and what beauty and
truth and righteousness want....”
Only three years later, judgment upon this scheme was passed by the
author himself in somewhat brutally realistic terms. “I look back
upon it now”, he wrote in the preface to the new edition of the
_Journal_, “as an amusing illustration of the guilelessness of my
attitude toward the world. If any such plan were to be proposed to-day,
I should say that it was a device to emasculate literature, as the
newspaper and the college and the church have all been emasculated;
and I should argue that it were better for the young author to starve
all his life than to compromise with the powers that are in control of
the wealth of the world to-day. My error lay in supposing that it is
literature that makes life, instead of life that makes literature.”
IX. MANASSAS
I.
_The Journal of Arthur Stirling_ had been the death-cry of
his boyhood’s ideals; and it was heard by a Socialist editor and
lecturer named George D. Herron--a gentle ex-clergyman, a man much
lied about at the time in the newspapers, which chose to represent
a divorce and re-marriage of his as a “free-love” arrangement, so
that he was a notorious figure and in public esteem a monster of
iniquity. It was he who subsidized the young author during the period
of his hardest struggles, and it was his influence which led him to
read Socialist books and listen to Socialist arguments. There ensued
a swift conversion; for the young man badly needed a new ideal to
live by, in the place of the one which life had so rudely shattered;
and the Socialist philosophy was peculiarly suited to his needs.
His scientific interests, his acceptance of the Darwinian ideas of
evolution, his repudiation of the church and of mysticism, his interest
in history and belief in the democratic ideal, his sense of justice and
abhorrence of a class society, his Utopian tendencies, his conception
of himself as a rebel and revolutionist, had half prepared him for the
new philosophy of Socialism; nothing, indeed, had stood in its way
except the doctrine, centering about his own personal ambitions, of
literature as the determining influence in human progress: and once
he had given up his poetic ambitions, it would not prove difficult
for him to dethrone literature from the supreme place he had assigned
it, in favor of humbler material factors, as required by the Marxian
theory. It was not, he now perceived, literature that made life, but
life that made literature; it was, on the whole, the way men made
their living that determined their thought, including their sense of
right and wrong. What, then, he had found wrong with the world was
due fundamentally to its economic arrangements; and these economic
arrangements were in their very nature, according to the Marxian
reading of history, temporary; this present period of capitalism was
a passing phase in mankind’s conquest of its environment. It would be
destroyed by its own machinery; for the machine method of production
brought into existence a larger and larger class of wage-workers,
whose interests were necessarily inimical to those of the class which
lived on profits and dividends; and when these workers had learned the
lesson that they had nothing to lose but their chains and a world to
gain, in the words of the _Communist Manifesto_, they would unite
for revolutionary purposes, destroy capitalism, and create a workers’
commonwealth all over the world. He conceived this, in accordance with
the somewhat mild Socialist ideas of that period, as an essentially
peaceful process, to be brought about by voting the Socialist ticket;
the votes being influenced by “agitation”, in which a writer who had
the good of the world at heart could find an honorable and useful and
sufficiently important field for the exercise of his talents.... But,
truly more important than all this, so far as his development as a
writer is concerned, was that aspect of the Socialist philosophy which
gave, to one who had always feared and hated the world, some realistic
means of discriminating among its values, so that he could more freely
and fearlessly enter into an imaginative intimacy with it in all its
crude detail. His old ethico-artistic theory of life, which had held
him in imagination at as great a distance as possible from raw life,
and had permitted him imaginatively to entertain life’s welter only in
the highly sublimated form of precept and principle, had thereby played
him false both in love and in art, had fooled and cheated him on every
hand. This new theory of life, finding order in the very midst of what
had been an unintelligible chaos, made him braver and bolder in his
imaginative approach to human experience; it enabled him to see beauty
where before there had been only ugliness, and it is ultimately to the
bracing influences of this new philosophy that we owe his development
into a great realistic novelist.
His nearness to the Socialist philosophy is apparent in _Prince
Hagen_, written in 1901--a spirited and amusing though too obviously
didactic satirical fable, in which a Nibelung out of Wagnerian opera
comes to New York and pursues an instructive career in Democratic and
Republican politics, high society, and finance, and then proposes to
take back to the Nibelungs the benefits, already set forth in somewhat
Shavian terms, of Christianity and capitalism. It was published in
1903, and dedicated to his Socialist friend, Dr. Herron. But its
criticism of the world was his own--not Marx’s.
II.
He had planned a novel of the Civil War--a trilogy, in fact--to be
called _The American_. It was announced under that title in the
_Independent_ article, where he spoke of the Civil War as “to me
the greatest art-theme now unpre-empted”, “one of the most tremendous
efforts of the human spirit in all history”, and declared that he hoped
to give “the next four or five years” to the task. This projected work
had also been described in _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_:
The world is filled with historical fiction; it is the cant and
sham of the hour.--Bah!
--This is what I long to do; to take the agony of that struggle and
live it and forge it into an artwork; to put upon a canvas the soul
of it....
I saw some of it to-day, and it made my blood go!
I saw a poet, young, sensitive, throbbing at the old, old wrong,
at the black shame of our history; I saw him drawn into that
fearful whirlpool of blood and passion, driven mad with the pain
and the horror of it; and I saw him drilled and hammered to a grim
savageness, saw him fighting, day by day, with his spirit, forging
it into an iron sword of war. He was haggard and hollow-eyed,
hard, ruthless, desperate.... I saw a man, wild and war-frenzied,
riding a war-frenzied horse; he rode at the head of a squadron,
bare-headed, sword in hand, demon-like--thundering down-hill upon
a mass of men, stabbing, slashing, trampling, scattering! Above
the roar of it all I heard his cry: “Finish it! Finish it!”
And afterward he staggered from his horse and knelt by the men he
had killed, and wept.
--I saw him again. It was when the man of the hour had come at
last; when the monster had met his master; when, day by day, they
hammered it ...; when they closed with it in death-grapple in a
tangled wilderness, where armies fought like demons in the dark,
and the wounded were burned by the thousands. I saw companies of
fainting, starving, agonized men retreating, still battling, day
by day; and I saw the wild horseman galloping on their track,
slashing, trampling--and still with the battle-yell: “Finish it!
Finish it!”
I saw him yet a third time. It was done, it was finished; and he
lay wounded in a dark room, listening. Outside in the streets of
Washington a great endless army marched by, the army of victory,
of salvation; and the old war-flags waved, and the old war-songs
echoed, and he heard the trampling of ten thousand feet....
The first volume of this projected trilogy appeared in 1904, under
the title _Manassas: A Novel of the War_. As written, under the
sobering influence of the new philosophy that had intervened in the
meantime, it is by no means so rhetorical a work as might have been
expected from these announcements. It is, in fact, his first realistic
novel. It is at the same time beautiful. Its many-cadenced and never
negligent prose bends tenderly or humorously over the most minute
details of everyday life, and rises with a mature magnificence to the
height of the most chaotic battle-scenes, never once losing its grip on
reality. It impresses one, re-reading it after many years, as a great
war-novel. It has its special limitation, sufficiently characteristic
of the author in this transition phase: sex does not exist for its
hero; but that limitation, ridiculous enough in afterthought, does
not count against it as much as might be supposed. Politics fill that
foreground of emotional interest usually occupied in fiction by women,
and so profoundly passionate are these political emotions that one
scarcely notices, and does not resent, the substitution. The hero
is a Southern youth who goes to visit relatives up North, becomes
interested in the Abolition agitation, becomes gradually a convert and
an enthusiast, and, when the war begins, enlists in a Boston regiment
that is mobbed in passing through Baltimore on its way to Washington,
and takes part in the great defeat of Northern arms at Manassas, where
the book ends. Its historical background is marvelously sketched in;
and, though it may be a heretical taste, it is possible to prefer its
battle-scenes to those of _The Red Badge of Courage_, or, indeed,
to anything short of Byron’s in _Don Juan_ and Tolstoy’s in _War
and Peace_. Jack London, it may be remarked, called it “the best
Civil War book I’ve read”.
But it is interesting not only as a novel, but as a memorial of a
private struggle of his own. It is not for merely literary reasons
that a child of the South goes over to the traditional enemy. The
aristocratic South, the old South, was still alive in him; it was
the South in him that, in spite of all his efforts to be modern and
scientific and democratic, still gave him that unconsciously lordly
attitude toward life. He had only changed its terminology and not
its essence when, as a Prince of the Kingdom of the Spirit, as a
poet-aristocrat, he had demanded of the world his rightful place in the
seats of spiritual rulership of mankind. When he hated the South, as he
had done since boyhood, it was something in himself that he hated. And
now, when he had cast off these lordly pretensions that had only gained
him mockeries and injuries, and sunk his own aspirations toward freedom
and happiness in those of the masses of workingmen, now more than ever
he needed to free himself from his Southern heritage. It was for that
reason that he fought the Civil War over again in his imagination. In
the person of his hero he had to make war on the South; the slavery of
black men was his pretext--it was himself that must be set free, before
he could go on to write the new books that called to him....
The rest of the trilogy was never written. In the fall of 1904, he went
to Chicago to get material for a book about Packingtown. He worked
there seven weeks, came back with his imagination aflame, and--pausing
in 1905 to found the Intercollegiate Socialist Society[11]--wrote a
book that changed his whole literary career.
X. THE JUNGLE
I.
In 1905 there began to appear, in a Socialist weekly, the _Appeal
to Reason_, published in Girard, Kansas, a novel of the Chicago
stockyards, by an almost altogether unknown writer: _The Jungle_,
by Upton Sinclair. I can remember, as a boy of eighteen, reading in my
_Appeal_ that first chapter describing the wedding party of Jurgis
and Ona, and my delight in the rich, full-blooded humanity of that
scene. It was the happy prelude to what was to be, as week after week
the story unrolled itself, a tragic panorama of working-class life,
true, terrible, and magnificent....
The story was simple enough; it related the fortunes of a group of
immigrants who lived and worked in the stockyards district--their
struggle to get ahead, to own a home, to bring up their children
decently, while all the time they are brutally exploited, preyed
upon, robbed, outraged, by the unscrupulous forces which find in
their poverty and ignorance and helplessness mere opportunities for
enrichment. The group is crushed, one by one, in the struggle; the
old men are thrown on the scrapheap to starve, the women are drawn
into prostitution to keep body and soul together, the children die;
Jurgis himself goes to prison for smashing the face of a brutal boss,
and when he comes out his little world had been destroyed as if by an
earthquake--and he is left to wander, getting wisdom as he wanders,
and coming at last to believe in a Socialist reconstruction of this
hideous world. At every point the story is enriched by the most vivid
and relentless realistic detail; one is immersed in the filth and
stench and cruelty of the stockyards, and one feels the sublime human
aspirations which even there burn unquenchably in humble hearts.
For a while the knowledge that a great new novelist had appeared in
America was almost confined to the readers of that Socialist weekly--no
small audience, however, for the “_Appeal_ army” of enthusiastic
subscription-getters had drummed up half a million readers for that
publication. The first public, therefore, of this astonishing novel,
was of farmers resting in stocking feet beside the stove of winter
evenings, and of discontented workingmen in a thousand cities and
towns--an audience which, whether rural or urban, understood the
truths of human suffering which it so vividly portrayed. That was its
first success--its recognition and acclaim by a proletarian audience.
Then came recognition by fellow-writers, who heard of this strange
and powerful novel being published in a Socialist weekly, and sent
for back numbers. David Graham Phillips wrote to the author: “I never
expected to read a serial. I am reading _The Jungle_ and I should
be afraid to trust myself to tell you how it affects me. It is a great
work. I have a feeling that you yourself will be dazed some day by
the excitement about it. It is impossible that such a power should not
be felt. It is so simple, so true, so tragic, and so human. It is so
eloquent, and yet so exact.” And, of course, Jack London, his comrade
in the Socialist movement, did not fail to acclaim this achievement.
“The _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ of wage slavery”, he called it; and with
that legend on the jacket and in the advertisements it was brought
before the general American public in book form in 1906. It was an
immediate and enormous success. It became a “bestseller” in America,
England and the British colonies. It was translated into seventeen
languages, and the world became aware that industrial America in its
toil, its misery and its hope had found a voice.
II.
But the literary sensation in America had already become secondary to
the shock of its readers in learning of the conditions under which
their meats were prepared in Packingtown, not as affecting the workers
but as affecting their own health--for the story dealt incidentally
with the use of condemned meat. The author later remarked that he had
aimed at the public’s heart and by accident had hit it in the stomach.
His deepest concern had been with the fate of the workers, and he
realized with bitterness that he had become a celebrity not because the
public cared anything about the workers, but because it did not want to
eat diseased meat.
The public was more or less prepared for such charges against
the packers, on account of the “embalmed beef” scandal during the
Spanish-American war. President Roosevelt, responding to a widespread
popular demand, sent a commission to Chicago to make an investigation
of conditions in Packingtown. This commission was assisted, at
Sinclair’s expense, by Ella Reeve Bloor, who had been familiar with
conditions there and had helped him in his seven weeks’ investigation
preliminary to the writing of the novel; and the researches of this
commission appear to have confirmed the chief charges made in the book.
The young novelist accepted, as a Socialist, the opportunity which this
situation provided for agitation. But the packers, and large business
interests in general, were aroused, and all their power and influence
was used to keep this agitation from reaching the public, and to
represent the young agitator as an irresponsible sensation-monger. He
set up a publicity bureau, worked twenty hours a day, wrote articles,
sent telegrams, and gave interviews to roomfuls of reporters; but so
thoroughly had the newspapers been mobilized by the business interests
as a medium of defense that the publicity he actually achieved for the
workers’ cause was slight; and on the other hand, his own reputation,
in genteel literary and critical circles, and among the public at
large, was seriously damaged. In the course of these efforts, President
Roosevelt said to him: “Mr. Sinclair, I have been in public life
longer than you, and I will give you this bit of advice; if you pay
any attention to what the newspapers say about you, you will have
an unhappy time.” He might have taken this as a warning that his
temperament was not suited to public life, for he could not get used to
being lied about in the newspapers; but he persisted in his efforts,
and he did have a very “unhappy time”.
Nothing in particular was done about the workers’ conditions. Even the
President’s meat-inspection law, as finally passed, had, in the opinion
of those behind it, all its teeth drawn first. Sinclair continued his
attempt to agitate the question, but the public had been reassured, and
the effort was futile. In _The Brass Check_, where the complete
story of this period is told vividly, he says: “I look back upon this
campaign, to which I gave three years of brain and soul sweat, and
ask what I really accomplished.” He had taken, he says, a few million
dollars away from the Chicago packers, “giving them to the Junkers of
East Prussia, and to the Paris bankers who were backing enterprises
to pack meat in the Argentine”. He had also added a hundred thousand
readers to the circulation of a popular magazine, which speedily
repudiated its early muck-raking habits and became a defender of big
business; and he had made a fortune for his publishers, who immediately
became conservative and devoted their profits from _The Jungle_ to
promote a kind of writing hostile to everything in which he believed....
III.
_The Jungle_ was in fact the climax of a literary movement in
America which had aroused the fear and anger of large business
interests. The great middle-class reform movement, marked in the
political field by the careers of Bryan, Roosevelt and the earlier
Wilson, had produced an audience sympathetic to the telling of
unpleasant truths about American political and business conditions.
In the magazine field this was called “muck-raking”; there were
sensational revelations of the inside workings of Wall Street by Tom
Lawson, of municipal corruption by Lincoln Steffens, of Standard Oil
history by Ida M. Tarbell, of Beef Trust finance by Ray Stannard Baker.
In the fictional field there was a corresponding literature, written
by such men as Robert Herrick, Frank Norris and David Graham Phillips.
This literature had its social revolutionary fringe: Jack London
was an avowed revolutionist, and such Socialist critics of society
as W. J. Ghent, John Spargo, Robert Hunter, Charles Edward Russell
and William English Walling, had a wide hearing. A professor named
Thorstein Veblen had written a devastating book called _The Theory
of the Leisure Class_, and phrases from it passed into general
intellectual currency. These conditions were sufficiently alarming, in
a country where every year, in one great industry or another, there
was a bitter struggle between employers and men, in which bullets
were the decisive factor. And now a young man, by writing a book, had
put a great industry on the defensive before the whole public. It
was necessary to tighten the grip of business upon the intellectual
world. The newspapers were already well in hand; but there was a group
of free magazines which were making money out of “muck-raking”--the
very center of the intellectual rebellion. Big business struck at
this group of free magazines, effectively, through the medium of
advertising. The magazine policies were changed. Writers were called
off from investigations of industrial conditions. An immense campaign
of optimism was begun, and a cheerful outlook upon American industrial
conditions was preached and made synonymous with patriotism. The
writers for the most part changed with the times, and adapted their
views to the new editorial demand; the others were silenced or
discouraged. A few prominent radical journalists, unable to tell the
truth any longer in the magazines, bought one of their own; but they,
too, presently succumbed to the spirit of the times.... Sinclair
quotes, in _The Brass Check_, the titles of some representative
articles from a recent issue of that once-daring magazine: “How We
Decide When to Raise a Man’s Salary”, “The Comic Side of Trouble”,
“Interesting People: A Wonderful Young Private Secretary”, “From
Prize-Fighter to Parson”....
The public, deprived of the intellectual stimulant of unpleasant truth
before it had quite got used to it, was easily trained in more cheerful
tastes. Those writers who sought to revive the art of muck-raking found
themselves with an indifferent audience. “People aren’t interested in
that sort of thing any more.” While as for fiction, the old genteel
tradition reasserted itself, the standard of non-controversiality
became identical with the standard of decency, and any author who dared
to violate this standard ran the risk of finding himself removed in
critical esteem beyond the pale of literary respectability.
The measure of the wrath of the masters of America and the docility
of its intellectual class during this period may be taken from the
Gorky incident, which happened in the spring of 1906, coincident
with the _Jungle_ agitation. The great Russian novelist, Maxim
Gorky, had come to America to raise funds for the cause of Russian
freedom--a cause long since made popular among even the respectable
American intelligentsia by the writings of the American journalist,
George Kennan. A great welcome was prepared for him. But it happened
that two radical union leaders, Moyer and Haywood, were on trial for
their lives in a Western state in the course of an industrial war
between the miners and the coal-barons. Their cause had been espoused
by the Socialists, who now asked Gorky to sign a telegram of sympathy
to Moyer and Haywood. He did so. A White House reception to Gorky was
immediately canceled. And then the American papers, at the instance of
the Czarist embassy, began to denounce Gorky, on the pretext that he
had “insulted” the American people by bringing with him as his wife
a woman to whom he was not married. It was known to those who made
the charge that Russian revolutionists married without the churchly
processes which alone were “legal” in Russia, and that Madame Andreieva
was his wife according to the revolutionary code; they had known that
all along, and had not made use of the fact. Now they unloosed upon
him the furies of a hypocritical moralistic journalism. He was hounded
out of New York hotels, denounced in pulpit and newspaper throughout
the country; his mission was destroyed. And the American men of letters
who had been proud to be invited to dine with this Russian giant, were
afraid to brave that storm: one and all, the respectable writers turned
tail and fled, not daring to call their souls their own--a black day
in the calendar of American letters. Great reputations fell that day,
Mark Twain’s among them, in the minds of boys and girls, now grown up,
who saw that humiliating and cowardly action with the clear eyes of
youth and were ashamed for their country. If American literature is now
less timid about sex, that young indignation may have something to do
with it. But those boys and girls did not know why America and American
men of letters had suddenly become so prudish: they did not know that
Maxim Gorky’s influence had been destroyed in that sudden journalistic
whirlwind, not because of the lack of churchly blessings upon his
union with Madame Andreieva, but because he had rashly intruded into
an American economic struggle on the unfashionable side. He, and the
writers of America, must be taught a lesson, and made to realize who
was running this country and what happened to anybody who tried to
interfere with them.
The stage of Upton Sinclair’s literary career, immediately ensuing
upon his immense celebrity as the author of _The Jungle_, falls
within this period when “muck-raking” was being outlawed and editors
and writers taught a lesson by those in control of American business.
He was one of the few who dared to brave this Thermidorian reaction,
and he was chief of those to suffer from it. It is his temerity
which explains the fact that his reputation in America as a novelist
fell during that period to zero, or lower. He missed, by remaining a
“muck-raker”, his chance of regaining literary respectability. His next
novel, _The Metropolis_, published in 1907, was an attack on New
York society; and _The Moneychangers_, published in 1908, was an
exposé of Wall Street. Nor is this explanation to be discounted by the
fact that _The Metropolis_ and The _Moneychangers_ were not
very good novels.
The point is worth laboring. Novels far inferior to those two would,
in that period, have maintained Upton Sinclair in American critical
esteem, if they had been of a different tendency; not to realize that
is to be ignorant of American criticism and its fashions. It was the
fashion to sneer at Upton Sinclair, and to accept the yellow-journal
pictures of him, in which he was represented as a mere sensation-monger
and fool to boot. Georg Brandes, generally accounted the world’s
greatest modern critic, was astonished at this American neglect of
one of its greatest writers; on visiting this country in 1914, he
took pains to say to the reporters who met him at the steamer that
there were three American novelists whom he found worth reading, among
these being Upton Sinclair. The statement, as it generally appeared in
the press, referred only to Frank Norris and Jack London, omitting
Upton Sinclair’s name altogether. Doubtless it was naïvely regarded
as incredible that anyone should really take this disreputable
“muck-raker” seriously.... And it was not until a new rebellious
literature and criticism emerged after the war, under the leadership
of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, that Upton Sinclair was again
mentioned among American writers by any reputable native critic who was
not a Socialist.
IV.
_The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_, though better as
propaganda than as art, are nevertheless of interest to us for what
they reveal of their author’s psychology at this period. The former
novel grew out of his observations of the life of the idle rich during
his fame as the author of _The Jungle_. His celebrity made him
naturally an object of curiosity and interest to these rich people;
and its secrets, such as they were, were readily exposed to him. It
happened to be within his power, if so he chose, to remain in such a
life. A group of capitalists had come to him, as he relates in _The
Brass Check_, “with a proposition to found a model meatpacking
establishment; they had offered me three hundred thousand dollars worth
of stock for the use of my name”; and he adds: “if I had accepted that
offer and become the head of one of the city’s commercial show-places,
lavishing full-page advertisements upon the newspapers, I might have
... been invited to be the chief orator at banquets of the Chamber
of Commerce and the National Civic Federation, and my eloquence would
have been printed to the extent of columns; I might have joined the
Union League Club and the Century Club, and my name would have gone
upon the list of people about whom no uncomplimentary news may be
published under any circumstances. At the same time I might have
kept one or more apartments on Riverside Drive, with just as many
beautiful women in them as I wished, and no one would have criticized
me, no newspaper would have dropped hints about ‘love-nests’.” This
opportunity, no temptation in reality, appears nevertheless to have
intrigued his imagination sufficiently to make such a “temptation”
the theme of his new novel. Its hero comes to New York and undergoes
the temptation of wealth and luxury. It is a kind of ironic sequel to
the unfinished trilogy of the Civil War; its hero is the son of the
man who fought in _Manassas_ to save the Union from destruction.
The Union had, by that epic agony, been saved--for what? For this,
says the disillusioned author, pointing to the waste and vulgarity and
triviality of the life of the “Four Hundred”.... It will be seen that
the theme psychologically precedes that of _The Jungle_; and it is
not surprising to find the book revelatory of an actually less mature
point of view than is shown in that masterpiece. Its emotional effects
are of a juicelessly ethical character. The young hero turns his back
upon these temptations, and resolves to earn an honest living! One
remembers Jurgis in _The Jungle_; he could not turn his back on
Packingtown--he had to live its life; and only thus are we enabled to
know what Packingtown was. Yet, through some identification of himself
with his young aristocrat in this later book, the author is unable to
imagine his surrender to metropolitan luxury, even for a moment; so
that we never learn, in any emotional sense, in any sense but that of
factual detail, what metropolitan luxury means. The _dégringolade_
of a high-souled young man under such influences--and possibly his
eventual revolt under other influences--was the story called for by the
theme. It was never written; only the surface details are presented.
So meager a use of the vast powers displayed in _The Jungle_
suggests some internal conflict in connection with this theme, and we
may perhaps be permitted to look there for the answer to this literary
riddle--if it is permissible at all to inquire why a writer does not
always remain at his best.
_The Moneychangers_, a sequel to _The Metropolis_, had the
same central character. The book was based upon the panic of 1907,
of which it undertook to give the “inside story”. It might have been
treated as an epic theme; but it was viewed in too narrow and factual a
way, through the eyes of this aristocratic young moralist-hero, who, as
the total upshot of these events, is merely surprised and shocked that
people can be so bad--and refuses to dine at the house of one of the
scoundrels. There was to have been a third volume; it was written as
a play, _The Machine_, and in it the hero falls in love with the
scoundrel’s daughter, who has in the meantime taken up settlement work
and renounced her father’s riches. It was, then, toward this grand
event that that creation moved!
Jack London had written of _The Jungle_: “It is alive and warm. It
is brutal with life.” No one would say that of _The Metropolis_
or _The Moneychangers_. They are emotionally thin performances.
Ill-health, and poverty after the Helicon Hall experiment (see next
chapter), doubtless partly account for this inadequacy. In both novels
the hero remains essentially untouched by all that goes on about him,
scarcely more than an observer--a disembodied ghost, as it were, of
the author himself, looking on and taking note of all that happens
with an admirable journalistic faculty, but capable of no depth of
human emotions. In _The Brass Check_ the author remarks that
the critics were cross with his hero, saying that he was “a prig”,
and that he “ought to have been really tempted by the charms of the
lovely ‘Mrs. Winnie Duval’,” and he goes on to say: “It has happened
to me, not once, but several times, to meet with an experience such
as I have portrayed in the ‘Mrs. Winnie’ scene, and I never found it
any particular temptation. The real temptation of the Metropolis is
not the exquisite ladies with unsatisfied emotions; it is that if you
refuse to bow the knee to the Mammon of Unrighteousness you become
an outcast in the public mind. You are excluded from all influence
and power, you are denied all opportunity to express yourself, to
exercise your talents, to bring your gifts to fruition. One of the
reasons _The Metropolis_ had a small sale was because I refused
to do the conventional thing--to show a noble young hero struggling
in the net of an elegant siren. The temptation I showed was that of
the man’s world, not of the woman’s; the temptation of Wall Street
offices, not of Fifth Avenue boudoirs. It was a kind of temptation of
which the critics were ignorant, and in which the public, alas, was
uninterested.” Indeed, an interesting theme. And a pity it is that
these novels did not actually deal with it. But we are now perhaps
in a position to make at least a guess at the psychic conflict which
held the author’s emotions so tight-locked during the composition
of those two books: it might well have been, no vulgar conflict of
worldly ambition with his high ideals, but a conflict involving his
old aristocratic emotions--for he had been offered, Tantalus-like,
the opportunities of public leadership, only to have them snatched
out of his grasp--a conflict between the poet-prophet, the Shelleyan
“unacknowledged legislator of mankind”, and the newer humbler rôle of
the imaginative novelist who identifies himself with weak, suffering,
stumbling, pitiful humanity itself. For a moment he had taken the
latter rôle, and produced a masterpiece of prose fiction. But the poet
in him demanded another destiny; and in that conflict he became neither
poet nor quite novelist, but journalist-agitator.
In the meantime, in 1907, he had published a book entitled _The
Industrial Republic_. Its dedication, “To H. G. Wells, ‘the next
most hopeful’,” is an allusion to an inscription written by Wells in
a book presented to him: “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from
the next most hopeful!” The Wells book was _A Modern Utopia_;
and in this book Sinclair goes him one better. It is sub-titled: “A
Study of the America of Ten Years Hence”. It is a Socialist America
that is thus described, though its Socialism is of so mild a sort
that even the American Socialists of those days must have found it a
somewhat watery potion. “If Mr. Bryan would only procure and read a
really authoritative treatise upon modern scientific Socialism (say
Vandervelde’s _Collectivism and Industrial Evolution_) he would
understand that his programme is so close to that of the Socialists
that the difference would require a microscope to discern.” And this
Bryanesque government-ownership Socialism was to be brought about by
the election, in 1912, of a radical Democratic President, probably
William Randolph Hearst. “It may be, of course, that some one else
will get the Democratic nomination in 1912; that matters not at all
in my thesis--the one thing certain is that it will be some man who
stands pledged to put an end to class-government. Following it there
will be a campaign of an intensity of fury such as this country has
never before witnessed in its history.” This is a remarkably accurate,
if somewhat exaggerated, foreshadowing of the Wilson-Roosevelt-Taft
campaign of 1912, which was fought out fiercely on social issues.
But he goes on to predict an industrial crisis, a new “Coxey’s Army”
marching on Washington, a panic, and then the Revolution: needless to
say a peaceful one. The captains of industry will have been told by
the President that, “since they can no longer run their business, they
must allow the Government to take possession and run it--the price
to be paid for their stock being a matter for future negotiation, and
a matter of no great importance to them in any case, because of the
income and inheritance laws just then being rushed through Congress.”
The revolution, thus defined, was to take place “within one year after
the Presidential election of 1912”. It was a youthful guess that
one need not be ashamed of having made, though one may smile at the
youthful rashness of putting it on record in print; it was based on
some quite widespread Social Revolutionary expectations of the period,
and its immediacy seemed natural enough to a young Utopian in a great
hurry.
But, with a revolution coming in six years, there might have seemed the
less reason for him to discipline his imagination to the novelist’s
difficult and humble task of representing human nature. If this
young writer was to be henceforth of distinguished use to American
literature, he had to suffer more hurts and disillusionments.
XI. LOVE’S PILGRIMAGE
I.
The success of _The Jungle_ in 1906 had put the young author
immediately in possession of some thirty thousand dollars; and
with this money he founded, that fall, at Englewood, New Jersey, a
co-operative undertaking called the Helicon Home Colony. This project
had been outlined in an article that summer in the _Independent_,
in which he said:
“Here am I on my little farm, living as my ancestors lived--like a cave
man or a feudal baron. I have my little castle and my retainers and
dependents to attend me, and we practise a hundred different trades:
the trade of serving meals, and the trade of cleaning dishes, the
trade of washing and ironing clothes, of killing and dressing meat,
of churning butter, of baking bread, of grinding meal, of raising
chickens, of cutting wood, of preserving fruit, of heating a house,
of training children, and of writing books! And all these crowded
into one establishment, in close proximity, and all jarring and
clashing with each other! And all carried on in the most primitive and
barbarous fashion, upon a small scale, and by unskilled hand labor.”
The coöperative argument, as developed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
follows: “It takes a hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals badly,
while twenty cooks could prepare one meal for a hundred families and do
it perfectly.... It takes a hundred ignorant nursemaids to take care of
the children of a hundred families, and develop every kind of ugliness
and badness in them; it would take only twenty or thirty trained nurses
and kindergarten teachers to take care of them coöperatively, and
bring them up according to the teachings of science.” He goes on to
say that “there must be, in and near New York, thousands of men and
women of liberal sympathies, who understand this situation clearly, and
are handicapped by its miseries in their own lives--authors, artists
and musicians, editors and teachers and professional men, who abhor
boarding-houses and apartment hotels, and yet shrink from managing
servants, who have lonely and peevish children like my own, and are no
fonder of eating poisons or of wasting their time and strength than I
am. There must be a few who, like myself, have realized that it is a
question of dragging through life a constantly increasing burden of
care, or making an intelligent effort and solving the problem once
for all. To such I offer my coöperation. I am not a business man, but
circumstances have forced me to take up this problem, and I am not
accustomed to failing in what I undertake.”
Many answers were received to this announcement, and the plan was
experimentally carried out by fifty or sixty people, including ten
children. The colonists bought nine and a half acres of land sloping
down from the Palisades on the Hudson, within an hour of New York
City. There was a large three-story building, formerly a boys’ school,
equipped with a pipe organ, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a
theater, a billiard room, thirty-five bedrooms, a children’s dormitory,
dining-room and play-room, a heating system, etc. Lodging cost $3
a week, meals $5 a week, “or $4 if we only eat two meals”; and the
children were taken care of at a cost of $4 a week apiece.
“I look back on Helicon Hall to-day,” says Upton Sinclair in _The
Brass Check_, “and this is the way I feel about it. I have lived
in the future; I have known those wider freedoms and opportunities
that the future will grant to all men and women. Now by harsh fate I
have been dragged back into a lower order of existence, and commanded
to spend the rest of my days therein. I know that the command is
irrevocable, and I make the best of my fate--I manage to keep cheerful,
and to do my appointed task; but nothing can alter the fact in my own
mind--I have lived in the future, and all things about me seem drab and
sordid by comparison. I feel as you would feel if you were suddenly
taken back to the days when there was no plumbing and when people used
perfume instead of soap.”
This colony of middle-class intellectuals was not a very radical
experiment; but it furnished the newspapers an opportunity for
sensational stories none the less. Reporters were always snooping
about, spying in the nursery and eavesdropping in the pantry, and
going back to write stories about “Upton Sinclair’s love-nest”. When
William James and John Dewey came to visit the colony and talked of
current affairs beside the fireplace, that was not news; but when,
at the weekly dance, according to the democratic traditions of the
place, the resident professor of philosophy danced with the two pretty
Irish girls who waited on the table, that was something to be spread
before a shocked America. Among the reporters was a young Yale College
student named Sinclair Lewis, afterward the famous author of _Main
Street_; he tended furnace at Helicon Hall and afterward wrote it
up for a New York paper. What he wrote was playful, and the colonists
would have enjoyed the fun except that some of them had their livings
to think about. Subsequently an American newspaper was sued for libel
by Upton Sinclair for scandalous lies concerning the Helicon Home
Colony; a retraction and apology were printed, but the American public
continued to believe the worst.
This eminently conservative and, within its own limitations, entirely
successful economic and social experiment came abruptly to an end after
six months. One night in March, 1907, a fire, possibly of incendiary
origin, burned Helicon Hall to the ground, destroying among the total
contents of the house all of the young agitator’s manuscripts and
documents, including certain documents concerning defective armor plate
furnished to American battleships. The Helicon Home Colony was wiped
out.
II.
Upton Sinclair had been for a young author, rich, and thus he had spent
and lost his riches. Now he was a poor man; and for a number of years
he was to be tormented by indigestion and by domestic unhappiness.
He commenced a wandering life, spending the summer of 1907 at Point
Pleasant, New Jersey, the winter at Bermuda, the next summer in the
Adirondacks, meanwhile writing _The Metropolis_ and _The
Moneychangers_. During a winter’s “rest” in California in 1908-9 he
organized a traveling theatrical company to produce Socialist drama,
and put on three of his own plays. He then went with his family to
live at the single-tax colony at Arden, Delaware, where he remained
for three years. During all this time he was the butt and victim of
newspaper mockery and sensationalism. But in 1910 there occurred at
Arden a preposterous incident which relieved the newspapers of the
trouble of making up lies to print about him. The truth, for once, was
amusing enough. Sinclair tells the story in _The Brass Check_.
“Close upon the edge of Arden there dwelt an Anarchist philosopher,
a shoemaker hermit, whose greatest pleasure in life was to rise in
public meetings and in the presence of young girls explain his ideas on
the physiology of sex. The little Economic Club of Arden invited him
to shut up, and when he claimed the privileges of ‘free speech’ the
club excluded him from its meetings and when he persisted in coming,
had him arrested. It happened that the members of this Economic Club
were also members of the baseball team, and they played a game on
Sunday morning; so the Anarchist shoemaker repaired to Wilmington and
swore out warrants, on the ground of their having violated an ancient
statute, dating back to 1793, forbidding ‘gaming’ on the Sabbath. It
happened that I did not belong to the Economic Club, and had nothing to
do with the trouble; but I had played tennis that Sabbath morning, so
the Anarchist shoemaker included me in his warrants.
“So behold us, eleven young men summoned to the office of a Wilmington
Justice of the Peace one evening, and finding the street packed solid
for a block, and people even climbing up telegraph poles and lamp-posts
to look in at the window and watch the proceedings.”
They were fined, but refused to pay their fines; and so they were
all sent to jail for eighteen hours. “When we came out from the jail
we were met by twenty-two newspaper reporters and three cameramen,
and everything we had to say took the front page, top of column.
Incidentally, I got a curious revelation. For years I had written
poetry, and had never been able to get it published; but now I found
that by the simple device of writing it in jail, I could get it on the
front page of every newspaper in Philadelphia and New York!” He quotes
two lines:
‘And then in sudden stillness mark the sound--
Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide.’
“When my cell-mate, Berkeley Tobey, read those lines, he remarked:
‘That’s me!’ To which I answered: ‘Tobey, that’s you’.”
The cells in which they had spent the night had been characteristic of
the American jail system, filthy and swarming with vermin; they had
been given food unfit for animals. Men were serving life-sentences in
this jail, working in a clothing factory under a sweatshop contractor,
without a spot where they could get a glimpse of sunlight or a breath
of fresh air. What these released members of the Economic Club told the
reporters about conditions in that jail “made an uproar in Delaware”.
Furthermore, they served notice that they were going to have the
Attorney General of the state and the Chief Justice of the supreme
court arrested for playing golf on Sunday, so that they might find out
what it was like in jail. It was decided by the authorities that no
more arrests would be made for “gaming on the Sabbath”, and the prison
commissioners decided to add an exercise court to the prison.
“I look back,” says Upton Sinclair, “upon my life of nearly twenty
years of muck-raking, and am able to put my finger on exactly one
concrete benefit that I have brought to mankind. Twenty or more men who
are serving life sentences in the Newcastle County Workhouse owe it to
me that they get every now and then a glimpse of the sunlight and a
breath of fresh air!...
“Can you blame me,” he asks, “if I stored away in my mind for future
reference the fact that when it is necessary to get some important
news into the papers, I can manage it by getting myself sent to jail?
This”, he adds, “is a discovery which is made, sooner or later, by all
social reformers; and so going to jail becomes a popular diversion and
an honorable public service.”
III.
_Samuel the Seeker_, in 1910, had marked the lowest ebb of its
author’s powers. Indigestion seems to have been largely to blame: “my
poor tummy”, he says, “simply wouldn’t let me feel any emotions.”
Accordingly _The Fasting Cure_, in 1911, an account of the means
by which he had finally restored himself to health, has a closer
relation than it might seem to have to the literary life. Novelists,
like armies in the Napoleonic maxim, get ahead on their stomachs. And
thus there appears, in the same year, another great novel--_Love’s
Pilgrimage_.
It is the story of his own life, or rather, of the earlier part of it,
up to the year 1904. So many references have already been made to it
in these pages, and it has been drawn upon so often for biographical
material, that it will be dealt with here briefly. But a letter from
the Dutch novelist, Frederik van Eeden, may be quoted:
“It is surely your greatest book, and very nearly one of the great
books of the world.... You give wooing, marriage, pregnancy, birth, in
great classic lines.... Of course you have read Zola’s description of a
birth. Yours is better, because it is more human, more poetic. It is
one of the best things in English literature.... This book will make
your world fame.”
While subscribing to these enthusiastic comments, one may note that
the book, in dealing with the life of young Thyrsis, his earlier self,
shows less of a detached and mature point of view than might have been
expected. He has identified himself, so far as attitudes toward love
and art are concerned, with his young hero, who was, from any mature
point of view, outrageously wrong (or egregiously neurotic) about both
these important matters.[12] The book’s greatness does not in the least
lie in the direction of self-understanding, let alone self-criticism.
It lies rather in its robust immersion in the stream of life. Nothing
appals the writer; everything is told--it matters not that it is
in impassioned self-defense. Its candor is magnificent, shameless,
beautiful. It succeeds as realism. It is a masterpiece, vastly
different from _The Jungle_, not comparable with it in detachment
or breadth, but not inferior to it in truth and power. It must be named
in any list of great American novels.
IV.
It was an unfinished story. It was intended to be followed by another
book[13] dealing with the later life of Thyrsis, and Corydon his wife.
But actual events in their stormy marriage interfered.
In this ill-matched and ill-fated marriage of theirs, the prime
cause of discord would seem, to an outside observer, to have lain
in the temperament of the husband, with his ignorant poetic fear
of the realities of human love; nor is it strange that this should
have produced in his girl-wife a state of emotional instability and
irresponsibility. Her emotional divagations, though she might undertake
to justify them by modern theories of freedom, would be explained more
truly as her exasperated reactions to his aloof and Olympian nature.
And he, less aloof and Olympian then he seemed, would find himself in
what he later described as “a maelstrom in which a man’s physical,
mental and moral integrity are subtly and bewilderingly tossed and
buffeted and maimed”. They had been involved in this secret and painful
domestic melodrama for eight years. The conclusion of _Love’s
Pilgrimage_ suggests their belief that they had at last achieved a
durable peace and happiness through a frank facing of their problem.
But that hope seems to have been too precarious. Hardly had that book,
with its tender record of their young love, and its high hopes for the
future, been published, than a crisis arrived in their lives, which
ended their marriage. Corydon went away with a lover; and Thyrsis
instituted suit for divorce.
The divorce, after much painful newspaper publicity, was denied,
on grounds of “collusion”. According to the New York laws, if both
parties appear to desire the divorce, that is a reason for not granting
it. These private affairs were the topic of nation-wide newspaper
discussion, into which we need not go. “I felt in those terrible days”,
Sinclair writes in _The Brass Check_, “like a hunted animal
which seeks refuge in a hole, and is tormented with sharp sticks and
smoke and boiling water.” His earning power had been destroyed by the
newspapers; no one would read his books, or publish what he wrote. His
health seemed permanently undermined; he did not think he was going to
live, and he “did not much care”.
He did not wish to appeal the case, because the law required that
the evidence in the case must be printed “and remain public property
forever”. But he had received from his friend van Eeden a letter
assuring him that Holland was a civilized country, where divorce was
granted upon reasonable grounds, without publicity. Accordingly he
went to Holland, in 1912. He intended to spend the rest of his life in
Europe. “It seemed to me that I could not bear the sight of America
again.”
V.
In Holland he obtained his divorce quietly and without scandal. “I
wish”, he says in _The Brass Check_, “to pay tribute to the
kindest and most friendly people I have ever met--the Dutch. When
I came to them, sick with grief, they did not probe into my shame;
they invited me to their drawing-rooms for discussions of literature
and art, and with tact and sweetness they let me warm my shivering
heart at their firesides. Their newspapers treated me as a man of
letters--an entirely new experience to me. They sent men of culture and
understanding to ask my opinions, and they published these opinions
correctly and with dignity. When I filed my divorce suit they published
nothing. When the decree was granted, they published three or four
lines about it in the columns given to court proceedings, a bare
statement of the names and dates, as required by law.”
He goes on to say: “There were many men in Holland, as in England and
Germany and Italy and France, who hated and feared my Socialist ideas.
I made no secret of my ideas; I spoke on public platforms abroad, as
I had spoken at home. When reporters for the great Tory newspapers
of England came to interview me, I told them of the war that was
coming with Germany, and how bitterly England would repent her lack of
education and modern efficiency, and her failure to feed and house her
workers as human beings. These opinions were hateful to the British
Tories, and they attacked me; but they did not attack the author of the
opinions, by making him into a public scarecrow and publishing scandals
about his private life.”
VI.
In the meantime, during his stay in Holland and England, he had written
a novel called _Sylvia_, published in 1913. Its locale is divided
between the aristocratic South and aristocratic Boston; it bears, more
lightly than his New York novels, its inevitable burdens, journalistic
exposition of class-traits, and sociological and moral arguments. Most
unexpectedly, it presents a heroine of authentic charm--a sparkling,
witty, vivacious young Southern girl, whose destiny it is to resist
and at last succumb to the wooing of a young millionaire. It is
unexpectedly tender, also, in its dealings with the South; even the
author’s principles do not blind him to the charm of that environment.
It is the tenderness, perhaps, of nostalgia, of one in exile looking
back across the bitter defeats of adult life to the scenes of his
childhood. It is not, however, a transcript of actual memories; it owes
a good deal to reminiscent tales of the South heard from the friend who
was presently to become his second wife. It is dedicated “To the People
at Home”, and it is the one of all his books which might conceivably
not hurt their feelings.
The story, however, was obviously unfinished; and a secondary theme of
the book, which was emphasized only on the last page, required another
volume for its presentation. This was the theme at the time being
sensationally presented to American playgoers and readers by Brieux,
in his play, _Damaged Goods_--a novelized version of which, with
the playwright’s grateful consent, was written and published in 1913 by
Sinclair.
_Sylvia’s Marriage_, accordingly, which appeared in 1914, relates
the consequences to this marriage of her husband’s pre-marital wild
oats, in the form of a blind baby--a result accounted for with
satisfactory realism. The novel, however, rises far above merely
propaganda effects in dealing with the life of his heroine after
she has left her millionaire husband and come back with her blind
baby to live in the Southern home of her childhood. A realistically
disillusioned woman, she is neither pathetic nor embittered, nor has
she lost her charm, her wit, or her brilliance. These qualities,
deepened rather by her tragic experience, are her weapons in the
ensuing struggle with her family and friends and the milieu in general.
For here she observes, in the habits of the young blades and in the
sheltered ignorance of the young belles, the possible origins of other
such tragedies as hers; and with a realistic and reckless candor she
intervenes in more than one engagement, to the bewildered shock of her
family and the malicious amusement of the town. These pages are true
high-comedy, as fine as anything of the sort that English or American
fiction has to offer. The duel between this disillusioned and frank
young matron and the conventional reticences of the polite world is
done with a masterly hand. But fiction of this sort, except from the
most distinguished foreigners, was at the time considered disreputable
in America, because it dealt frankly with sex; and now, by a swing of
the wheel of fashion, it would be considered unduly moralistic.
Comments have been made in these pages on the cramping effects upon
some of this writer’s fiction by his moral conceptions; and it will
be in place here to note that these moral conceptions have been
complained of, not because they were moral, but because they involved a
distaste for the subject in hand, and led to an undue slighting of its
realities. But in the case of this novel, the moral conceptions lead
rather to a richness of truth in dealing with the subject in hand, and
are consequently not to be complained of by one whose interest is in
the business of getting life into terms of fiction. If some of the more
romantic aspects of sexual adventure are neglected by Sinclair, in his
preoccupation with certain of its realistic consequences, that is to be
expected, and is all the more readily to be forgiven since the aspects
which he neglects are sufficiently celebrated elsewhere. He has taken a
difficult aspect of the sexual theme and, throughout the latter part of
this novel, handles it magnificently.
Some references have also been made in these pages to the neurotic
attitudes toward sex displayed by its subject in his earlier life; and
the argument might be expected here that his preoccupation with the
frightful physical dangers of sexual adventure is an illustration of a
neurotic fear. There is little doubt that it is the neurotic conflicts
in the minds of all artists which lead them to their particular themes:
the important question is what they then do with those themes. Do
they get truth and beauty out of them? Upton Sinclair’s opinions, as
such, on the whole subject of sex, will be dealt with later on. For
the present, it needs merely to be said that he has, in _Sylvia’s
Marriage_, artistically justified his emotional preoccupation with
the sterner and sadder aspects of a theme which has many aspects.
VII.
He had never expected to return to America. He did return, however,
in 1913, and in the course of the year was married to Mary Craig
Kimbrough. She was of an old Southern family, and at the time of the
wedding, in Virginia, her husband noted that the event was respectfully
treated by the newspapers; which, he remarks in _The Brass Check_,
was explained by the information contained in the news dispatches, to
the effect that the bride’s father was “one of the wealthiest men in
this section, and controls large banking interests.”
If, however, the newspapers had presumed that the groom was henceforth
to lead a correct and respectable literary life and keep out of radical
politics, they were mistaken.
XII. KING COAL
I.
Once back in America, Sinclair was inevitably drawn into the field of
agitation. From a winter in Bermuda, where he had written _Sylvia’s
Marriage_, he returned to investigate the coal strike then going on
in Colorado. It was a sufficiently dramatic episode in our industrial
history; eleven thousand miners, with their wives and children,
on strike and evicted from company-owned homes, were living in
tent-colonies that had been raided and shot up by gun-men--and finally
machine-guns had been turned on them, their tent-colony at Ludlow had
been burned, and three women and fourteen children had been suffocated
to death. Yet this news was being published only, with the most rare
and meager exceptions, in the Socialist papers. Sinclair resolved
to break this conspiracy of silence. Being convinced that John D.
Rockefeller, Jr., was personally responsible for the tactics of the
mine-owners, he went to Mr. Rockefeller’s office and asked that he meet
and talk with an eyewitness of the barbarities with which the strike
was being repressed. The interview was denied. Then Sinclair hit on
the idea of inviting a group of people to put bands of crêpe around
their arms and walk in silence up and down in front of 26 Broadway,
the Rockefeller offices, in token of mourning for the dead women and
children of Ludlow. Picketing, except in labor strikes, was then a new
publicity device, though the suffragists afterward made it familiar.
Reporters were informed of the plan, and were on hand next morning when
the demonstration began, together with a great crowd. There were also
policemen, who told the pickets to go away. They replied that what they
were doing was not unlawful, and continued. They were then arrested.
They were followed by reporters to the police station, and Sinclair
was there interviewed. He explained the purpose of the demonstration,
and told the entire story of the Colorado coal strike. Within a few
hours the newspapers were on the street with the story emblazoned on
the front page, with three or four columns of news of the strike,
as contained in the interview. The device had been successful: the
conspiracy of silence was broken.
The pickets were fined and, on refusing to pay their fines, were locked
up in the Tombs. The newspapers sneered at this “pink-tea martyrdom”,
as one of them described it, and said that the demonstration was
actuated by “no genuine desire to effect a reform”, but only by “a
morbid craving for notoriety”. Nevertheless the papers sent special
correspondents to the coal fields, and the strike news continued to
occupy the front page.
After Sinclair’s arrest, his wife took up the demonstration. She was
not arrested, but a false report that she had been was sent out by the
Associated Press, which brought her mother in alarm to New York, with
the news that her father had disinherited her after reading the morning
paper. She continued to marshal the demonstration for two weeks, and
her husband reports that her habitual “Southern lady” airs awed the
policemen so much that they kept everybody else off the sidewalk so
that the silent parade she was leading should have room to walk up and
down undisturbed. A Southern lady is accustomed to having her way; and
when she decided that her husband had been in jail long enough, she
serenely interrupted court proceedings to have that matter attended to.
“In the South, you understand,” says Upton Sinclair, “anything from a
court to a fire-engine will stop to pick up a lady’s handkerchief”--and
it appears that the air of expecting such consideration is effective
also in the North. But these public demonstrations, however much she
might approve of them in principle, were so alien to her Southern
tastes that after going calmly through each day’s ordeal she would come
home at night and cry.
The investigation of the strike now took Sinclair to Colorado, where
he undertook to attack the problem of news-suppression at its source,
and succeeded in putting the Associated Press on its defense before the
world. The whole story is told in _The Brass Check_. Returning
to the East, he found that a group of radicals had been arrested
for holding a street-meeting in Tarrytown, New York, whither Mr.
Rockefeller had retired from the storm of publicity to the seclusion of
his estate. Sinclair then went to Tarrytown on behalf of free speech,
and, being forbidden to hold a street-meeting and unable to rent a
hall, he persuaded a millionaire neighbor of Mr. Rockefeller’s to give
him the use of an open-air theater for a meeting to discuss the “Ludlow
massacre”. In the meantime the Broadway demonstration case had been
appealed; and in due time the higher court had handed down its august
decision, affirming the decision of the police magistrate, on the
ground--highly instructive to a man who had been ridiculed and insulted
for so many years by the newspapers--that “no citizen has a right
to rebuke another citizen by subjecting him to ridicule or insult”.
There was, however, a difference in these cases: Mr. Rockefeller was a
millionaire.
II.
Returning to the literary life for a time, Sinclair edited, that
summer, while living at Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y., _The Cry for
Justice_, “an anthology of social protest: the writings of
philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have
voiced the struggle against social injustice: selected from twenty-five
languages, covering a period of five thousand years”, with an eloquent
introduction by Jack London (1915). And later he put his knowledge
of the Colorado situation into a novel, _King Coal_, which was
published in 1917.
_King Coal_ is perhaps as fine a labor novel as could be written
under the disability of having a young aristocrat for its hero. The
disability, moreover, is not so great as might be imagined in the
light of _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_. This young
aristocrat is, happily, different from the young aristocrat in those
books. He is not so naïve, his morality is at least not so oppressively
solemn, he is robust, high-spirited, humorous, and likeable; as the
somewhat rebellious son of a coal-magnate, he gets a job, not in his
father’s mines, for he would be recognized there, but in the mines
belonging to the father of a chum, and not merely sees what is going
on but takes an active part in the highly exciting events that happen,
including the organization of a union, an abortive strike, and a
mine-explosion. The working people in the book are, though minor
figures, real enough to remind us that this book is by the author
of _The Jungle_. The theme is really fictionized, not merely
served up in journalistic hunks. The propaganda is implicit though
all-pervading. There is even a shadowy but real “love-interest”, thus
described by Georg Brandes in his introduction to the book:
“Most beautifully is this [the author’s poetic attitude] shown in Hal’s
relation to a young Irish girl, Red Mary. She is poor, and her daily
life harsh and joyless, but nevertheless her wonderful grace is one of
the outstanding features of the book. The first impression of Mary is
that of a Celtic Madonna with a tender heart for little children. She
develops into a Valkyrie of the working-class, always ready to fight
for the workers’ right.”
True and interesting as it is, it leaves considerable to be desired as
fiction. The young aristocrat, even in this likeable guise, impedes
rather than develops the labor theme. The story, told from the point
of view of Red Mary, might not have been so clear an exposition of
all the facts, but it might have been--it could have been--another
_Jungle_. It does credit to the author’s intelligence rather than
to his powers of human feeling. Even the great mine disaster is not,
from the point of view necessitated by the choice of a sympathetic
outsider as the central figure rather than one directly involved, a
tragedy. But, in not attempting a more vital treatment, it does not
fail. It is a minor, and on its own limited plane a brilliant, success.
XIII. JIMMIE HIGGINS
I.
After a winter in the South, at Gulfport, Miss., Sinclair went to
California in 1915, and made his home at Pasadena, where he continued
to reside.
In the meantime there was a war going on in Europe, toward which
Sinclair as a Socialist had to orient his views. The international
Socialist movement had been traditionally and on principle
anti-militaristic; but in all the European countries involved, the
conservative elements of the party had found reasons for abandoning
these principles and supporting the war. In America the intellectual
leadership of the party was almost entirely in favor of declaring war
on Germany. Sinclair had written pacifist articles in the past; but
he regarded German militarism as a menace to the Socialist hope of
revolution, and he joined with a group of Socialist intellectuals,
including W. J. Ghent, Charles Edward Russell, J. G. Phelps Stokes,
and William English Walling, in issuing a _Practical Program for
Socialists_, in which it was urged that Socialists should “adjust
themselves to events”, and further recommended a large war budget,
universal military training, and conscription of both male and female
citizens. After the announcement of the resumption of unlimited
submarine warfare by Germany, Sinclair telegraphed to President
Wilson, on February 3, 1917:
“As one who has devoted his life to a passionate struggle for
Democracy, I cannot remain silent in this hour of Democracy’s
greatest peril. To delay naval action in this crisis is to give
Germany all she wants and to risk the existence of everything for
which a lover of freedom cares to live. On the other hand you
have a chance to take the greatest forward step in history if in
offering the American fleet to keep open the sea lanes to England,
you obtain agreement by allied nations that all territory taken
from Central powers in this war shall be neutralized and made
forever independent under international guarantee.”
The rank and file of the American Socialist party were, however, still
anti-militarist, and on April 11, five days after the declaration
of war, the party in special convention at St. Louis, adopted by a
three-fourths vote a platform denouncing war and national patriotism
and opposing enlistment by the workers in this war. The familiar
theoretic Socialist position on war was thus reaffirmed: “The only
struggle which would justify the workers in taking up arms is the great
struggle of the working class of the world to free itself from economic
exploitation and political oppression. As against the false doctrine of
national patriotism, we uphold the ideal of international working-class
solidarity. In support of capitalism we will not willingly give a
single life or a single dollar; in support of the struggle of the
workers we pledge our all.... We brand the declaration of war by our
government as a crime against the people of the United States and
against the nations of the world.”
Such was the majority report. A minority report sponsored by John
Spargo, held it “our Socialist duty” to help “our nation and our allies
to win the war as speedily as possible”, and another minority report
proposed to “recognize the war as a fact” and to promote an early and
democratic peace. The action of the convention was not final, and
the platform as adopted was submitted to a referendum of the whole
membership. Though the party was afterward considerably demoralized by
the defection of so many of its intellectual leaders, their counsels
were in this crisis unhesitatingly rejected, and the anti-war platform
was ratified by a 12 to 1 vote. Sinclair was one of a number of
prominent Socialists who then resigned from the party. He issued an
address to his former comrades, in which he said:
I cannot but believe, Comrades, that the difference between our
opinions comes from the fact that I have lived in Germany and know
its language and literature, and the spirit and ideals of its
rulers. Having given many years to a study of American capitalism,
as it exists in the domain of the beef trust, the steel trust,
and the coal trust, I am not apt to be blind to the defects of my
own country; but, in spite of these defects, I assert that the
difference between the ruling class of Germany and that of America
is the difference between the seventeenth century and the twentieth.
I find those with whom I talk here in the West utterly unable
to conceive what the Prussian ruling class is. They cite its
modernness, its use of science; failing to realize that this is
precisely the thing which makes it dangerous--a beast with the
brains of an engineer....
“I intend,” he said in conclusion, “to go on working for Socialism as
hard as I can....”
From April 1918 to February 1919 he published _Upton Sinclair’s_,
a monthly magazine with the subtitle “for a clean peace and the
internation”. It was devoted to what its editor believed to be
President Wilson’s war and peace policies. He took the Wilsonian
idealism at its face value, and not unnaturally believed that the
President had secured the proper pledges from the allied governments.
And so, having identified himself for the time being with this
idealistic and eloquent administration, he was doing his bit, by
propaganda among recalcitrant radicals, to help win the war that was to
make the world safe for democracy.
II.
In 1918 he commenced publication, first in his own magazine, and after
its discontinuance in the _Appeal to Reason_, of a war novel
called _Jimmie Higgins_.
“Jimmie Higgins” was the name popularly applied to the humbler and
less articulate members of the party--those who carried the soap-box
and set up the gasoline torch at street meetings, not those who made
the speeches. The book was to begin with an affectionate and faithful
picture of the type; and it went on to show Jimmie’s bewilderment in
this war situation, and the arguments by which he was kept out of the
war and urged into it. Presently, however, in accordance with the
author’s pro-war animus, Jimmie succumbs to the example of several good
Socialists, including a German comrade who is anxious to help overthrow
the Kaiser, and enlists in the army. Here the story begins to take on
sweetly fabulous outlines. Being torpedoed on his transport, Jimmie is
waited upon in hospital by the Honorable Beatrice Clendenning, a member
of the British aristocracy, and is genially indulged in Socialist
argument by His Majesty the King of England.
“We’ve had some terrible poverty,” admitted His Majesty. “We shall
have to find some way of getting rid of it.”
“There ain’t no way but Socialism!” cried Jimmie....
Jimmie then, by single-handed heroism, stops the German army with a
machine-gun, winning the battle of “Chatty Terry” and in fact the war.
“The whole course of the world’s history might have been different”,
it is playfully related, “if one little Socialist machinist from
Leesville, U. S. A., had not chanced ...” etc. Wounded and sent to base
hospital, he there fraternizes across the social chasm with a rich and
formerly sinful young man: one who had actually seduced other men’s
wives, and had got properly punished for it earlier in the story in
the manner of Abelard; the war has made him democratic and thoughtful,
and Jimmie learns from him that even the rich are unhappy.... It was
a piece of fiction calculated to break down the anti-war morale of
Socialist readers.
There is an important difference, however, to be noted between him and
the other intellectual Socialist leaders who had left the Party. Most
of these became bitter and venomous opponents of the revolutionary
movement, and used every opportunity to denounce it, particularly
in its newest form of Russian Bolshevism, in what they had been
accustomed to call “the capitalist press”. The same opportunities were
offered to him. Here, indeed, was his opportunity, such as more than
one “leader of revolt” has not failed to take advantage of, to endear
himself to those rich and powerful classes whose hatred had driven
him into poverty and neglect. He might have become a fashionable and
prosperous war-time renegade. But when he, too, was offered large sums
of money for speeches or articles to help in defeating certain anti-war
Socialists in important municipal elections, he was astonished and
hurt. “What do they think I am?” he asked. “When this is all over, I
shall be back in the ranks again.”
And he was presently back in the ranks again.
It was the intervention of the United States against the Socialist
government of Russia, and the private anti-Soviet war conducted by
the Administration after the armistice with Germany, which ruthlessly
disillusioned him as to President Wilson’s idealism.
History was kind to him. The intervention of American arms in Siberia
came in time for him to let Jimmie Higgins share in his disillusion.
The final chapters of that novel show Jimmie Higgins sent with the
American forces to Siberia, to fight against the new Socialist
Republic. Jimmie fraternizes with the Bolsheviks, and learns the truth
from them. “He”--like his creator--“had swallowed their propaganda, he
had filled himself up on their patriotism, he had dropped everything
to come and fight for Democracy.... And now they had broken their
bargain with him....” He distributes Bolshevik propaganda among his
fellow soldiers--as happened at Archangel in actuality, when American
regiments mutinied and refused to fight. Jimmie is caught at it, and
tortured to make him betray his comrades. But the thumbscrews and the
water-cure fail to break his spirit. That chapter is called “Jimmie
Higgins Discovers His Soul”. In the next and final chapter--“Jimmie
Higgins Votes for Democracy”--he escapes from his tormentors by going
insane. The effect is to give the previous naïvely pro-war chapters an
effect of fine irony. A sympathetic American critic, Carl Van Doren,
finds that the novel “showed traces of a romantic pulse, settling
down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat”. It was the late and
necessary disillusionment of a too hopeful and generous mind.
III.
In 1920 came _100%: The Story of a Patriot_, published in England
under the title of _The Spy_. Let Mr. Van Doren continue: “It is
the colder beat which throbs in _100%_, with a temperature which
suggests both ice and fire. Hardly since _Jonathan Wild_ has
such irony been maintained in an entire volume, as that which traces
the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to patriot through the foul
career of spying and incitement and persecution opened to his kind of
talents by the frenzy of non-combatants during the war. To this has
that patriotism come which on the red fields of Virginia poured itself
out in such unstinting sacrifice; and, though the sacrifice went on
in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. Sinclair implicitly
inquires, when the conflict, at no matter what distance, could breed
such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does not answer his question;
his art has gone, at least for the moment, beyond avowed arguments,
merely marshaling the evidence with irresistible ironic skill and
dispensing with the chorus. _100%_ is a document which honest
Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the
accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the
great war.”
A less sympathetic critic might find this book somewhat too hard,
somewhat too relentless--might protest that even “such vermin” as a
labor-spy might be credited with an occasional and irrelevant impulse
of kindness, of human decency, or of shame. It might perhaps be said
that in this book the realist has labored to repay to grim truth the
immense debt which the illusioned poet had so splendiferously incurred
during the war.[14]
XIV. THE BOOK OF LIFE
I.
“Why do you always think of things first?” H. G. Wells wrote to
Sinclair, upon receiving _The Book of Life_. “I should have been
at that in a year or two. I may still do it in spite of you.”
It was in fact a book of a more or less Wellsian sort, in scope if not
in treatment. It was published in 1921 and 1922. “The writer of this
book”, says the introduction, “has been in this world some forty-two
years. That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have
made many painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking
about him, he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering for
lack of that same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This
being the case, it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus
the pain.
“There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year,
asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is dying of
cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to
make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women?
A man has invested his savings in mining-stock, and can I tell him what
to do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little
time for self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to
read? Many such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of
people, earnest, hungry for happiness. The things they need to know are
not taught in the schools, nor in the newspapers they read, nor in the
church they attend.”
He promises that he “will not pretend to know what he merely guesses,
and where it is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally,
it is a kind book; it is not written for its author’s glory, nor for
his enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you in
the brief span of your life. It will attempt to show you how to live,
how to find health and happiness and success, how to work and how to
play, how to eat and how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care
for your children, how to deal with your fellow men in business and
politics and social life, how to act and how to think, what religion to
believe, what art to enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the
books phrase it!”
II.
The prophet, in his most realistic mood, becomes a teacher of
mankind. And the prophet in Upton Sinclair has been considerably
disillusioned and humbled before undertaking this task. There are
here no overweening airs of seership; and though the book seeks to
generalize too much from a specific life experience, it is none the
less valuable on that account. If no one is wise enough to tell all of
us how to live, we can nevertheless learn something from those who
tell the truth about themselves. This is the counsel of a man who has
seen, lived and suffered much, who has kept through trying years his
faith that life has a meaning to be discerned by the human mind, who
believes resolutely that, in large affairs and in small, knowledge
gives us power. If it reveals the limitations of his knowledge, it is
nevertheless an invigorating book, dealing as it does simply, sincerely
and candidly with the fundamental problems of life. “You have written”,
May Sinclair wrote to him, “the best and sanest things about love, and,
it seems to me, the best and sanest things about society.” And it will
be no serious derogation from this praise if we proceed to emphasize,
for our purposes, its inevitable shortcomings.
The Book of the Mind and the Book of the Body are, on the whole, useful
guides and primers. It is, however, noteworthy that while in the Book
of the Mind there is some awareness of the contributions of modern
psychology to our understanding of life, there is actually no great use
made of such knowledge. The author’s view of life remains, with slight
empirical exceptions, a pre-Freudian view. All life’s difficulties
are apparently to be dealt with by the argumentative method, by
reasonable arguments addressed to presumably reasonable minds. And
such difficulties as are patently not amenable to reform by reasonable
arguments are left entirely out of this purview, or are met with gusts
of moral indignation. That there exists, for instance, among life’s
important problems for young people, such a problem as the successful
establishment of heterosexuality or even the problem of psychic
emancipation from the home, is not at all indicated nor apparently
at all understood. And in default of any useful insight into these
realms of conduct, an undue burden of explanation of human behavior
has to be placed, elsewhere in the book, upon the theory of economic
determinism--which under this severe pressure begins to take on some
mythological characteristics. And this lack of intimate knowledge of
the operations of the mind leaves him with none too adequate defenses
against his own tendency to credulity, in the matter of spiritistic
marvels, where nevertheless he maintains such skepticism as he can
muster.
The Book of the Body though characterized by an over-emphasis, due
to his own unhappy experiences, upon the Stomach, is nevertheless
interesting and useful.
III.
The Book of Love, on the whole very sensible and enlightening, suffers
inevitably from the lack of a really modern psychological apparatus.
His view of the subject proceeds simply and confidently upon the theory
that the sexual arrangements of mankind can be classified exclusively
with reference to the property-systems upon which they depend. This
conception, though in itself a useful one, provides the author with
the opportunity to indulge his own moral animus in the guise of
economic determinism. Whatever in the way of human sexual habits
he doesn’t approve of, becomes an illustration of “exploitation” by
a ruling class. Moreover, in his presentation of what he regards as
objectionable sexual conduct, the psychic burden of his own repressions
becomes sometimes painfully obvious. In relating what he regards as
sexual scandal, he becomes uncritical, incapable of serene thought,
generosity, taste, or humor. He does not permit himself to realize that
it is largely human nature itself that he is condemning, rather than
merely the aberrations of a property system. In more than one passage
he betrays something of his early emotional bias against sex[15]--an
emotion which he rationalizes, not always successfully, into a
preoccupation with its actual dangers.
Yet these pages represent, much more significantly, his escape
from the domination of what he calls “the abominable old ideal of
celibacy”, from which he had suffered. It may be said that he has, in
his conception of marriage, achieved a really sane and healthy ideal.
The treatment of love and marriage give the book its claim to serious
consideration as a guide to life’s young adventurers.... Beyond the
realm of marriage as founded upon what might be called complete or
“true” love, his sympathy and understanding do not extend. Sexuality,
in its possibly neurotic but still normal manifestations, all its
merely adventurous, casual, experimental or play expressions, arouses
in him an undue repugnance. (A reference to modern dancing and
“petting parties” evokes the statement that “society is disintegrating,
going back to the howling and fighting and cannibalism of the jungle”!)
But it would be an injustice to the book to trace and further emphasize
these occasional evangelistic outcroppings in a work whose merits are
all in the direction of sexual sanity and health.
We may, however, pause to disengage one of the author’s characteristic
attitudes for momentary attention, in its relation to his own psychic
development. He believes very strongly in early marriage--at seventeen
or eighteen. He gives many practical reasons for this proposal, but it
is not difficult to perceive the one left unstated, the wish to live
his own life over again and more happily. Indeed, one sometimes feels
that it is to his youthful self that this whole book is addressed: that
he is at forty saying precisely those things which if he had known
them at eighteen would have saved him a world of unhappiness. And the
passage which above all others seems a cry out of the heart, poignant
with infinite regrets, is this advice to married lovers: “Be natural;
be simple and straightforward; and beware of fool notions about sex.”
But it is perhaps due to the author that one word more be said about
him as a guide. It should occasion no surprise to learn that his
guidance must be taken with the usual discrimination. No guide, whether
Aristotle, or Bacon, or Havelock Ellis, has known all the paths of
life. Upton Sinclair is a guide conspicuously lacking in tolerance. Yet
as guides go I do not hesitate to pronounce him an excellent one, if a
little old-fashioned in his methods. If one must be intolerant--and it
is a common human failing--it is better to be intolerant of drunkenness
and debauchery than of, for example, the aspirations of mankind toward
beauty, wisdom, and order. Puritans, it has been remarked earlier in
these pages, are at the present time unpopular in America, where they
are believed to have inflicted upon helpless populations much meddling
and drastic tyranny in the effort to make us better. It is true that
the agrarian revolt against the financial domination of the city,
after its defeat in the political field in the great campaigns at the
turn of the century, has lately been more or less successful in some
rearguard attacks in the cultural field, including certain attempts
to enforce rigid rural codes of morals and manners. At the same time,
the acquisition of a considerable margin of leisure by a large part of
that native population which had hitherto piously believed in keeping
its nose to the grindstone, has resulted in a violent urban repudiation
of former middle-class standards of decency and respectability; and
lacking other approved channels, a vast amount of social and economic
discontent of all sorts is finding expression at present in the new
popular middle class protest against its own former moral narrowness. A
moral nihilism is the approved note at present among the shell-shocked
intelligentsia, and in this comfortable doctrine the prosperous
middle-class is beginning to find spiritual encouragement for the
diversions which enrich its newly-found leisure. It is impossible in
America at the present moment to have any standards of conduct short
of happy chaos without being regarded by the younger intelligentsia as
a Puritan and hateful blue-nosed reformer. And since Upton Sinclair
shares in this execration, it is only just to point out that he is
actually a moral revolutionary, of the kind if not the quality of
Blake or Nietzsche. One might not like to live in a world constructed
according to the wishes of Upton Sinclair; I confess that I should
not; but it would be a world wildly unlike the dreams of our Puritan
forefathers.
IV.
The Book of Society, which concludes this work, contains an analysis
of capitalist society and an argument for its reconstruction upon
Socialist lines--an analysis and argument considerably but not
fundamentally modified in the light of the Russian revolutionary
experience; he prefers to hope for a peaceful solution of the economic
problem, and makes various proposals to that end, which would obviate
the disorder of an otherwise inevitable and violent revolution. This
peaceful reconstruction, he declares, could begin at once “if we had
sufficient intelligence.... And will anyone maintain,” he asks, “that
it is the part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent
course than he knows?” It is by these views that Sinclair remains,
despite his broad sympathies, identified with the pre-war Socialist
movement, as distinguished from the post-war movement which denominates
itself Communist.
XV. THE GREAT PAMPHLETS
I.
Modern industrial America has proved a difficult theme for the artists
whose business it is to handle it. There have been two recognized
attitudes of literary approach to this theme. The first, to be found
in the popular magazines, is an attitude of uncritical adulation
and blatant celebration of the advantages which accrue to its
beneficiaries. The other attitude, now found increasingly in fiction
appealing to the intelligentsia, is one of hopeless sentimental protest
against a machine civilization which is conceived as utterly vicious,
spiritually degrading, and altogether too hideous and uninteresting to
be worth picturing in any realistic detail--the space being occupied
instead by accounts of the miseries of the sensitive and artistic
souls who are represented as its chief victims. A welcome from the
American intelligentsia awaits any writer who will picture present
conditions as a confused and hopeless chaos; and on the other hand a
vast popularity, though with no such critical esteem, awaits the writer
who will uncritically celebrate the joys of riding about in expensive
motor cars, eating at expensive restaurants, playing at expensive
sports, indulging in expensive adultery, and exploiting generally
the advantages which accrue to the beneficiaries of the industrial
process. From a literary point of view, the objection to both these
methods is that they fail to come to grips with their subject.
In so new, vast and confusing a heap of materials as modern industrial
America presents, what is needed first of all is a pattern, an
ideological map of the scene. The old patterns will scarcely do--at
least those patterns which concern themselves narrowly with the
fortunes of individuals, against a background which can be taken for
granted. Here the background is of greater importance, and it is with
masses or groups of men that the story must needs be concerned. Or so
it would seem. The most successful experiment in this kind of fiction
was made by Frank Norris in _The Octopus_; there the canvas was
sufficiently large for the event portrayed, a farmer-railroad war.
But he failed to follow up this method in his succeeding book, _The
Pit_, where attention was concentrated upon a few individuals. A
literary problem is here involved, which has not yet been successfully
solved in fiction. Upton Sinclair’s _Jungle_ did suggest that one
solution lay in putting, as he declared he had attempted, “the content
of Shelley in the form of Zola.” But in his immediately succeeding
books, _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_, he failed
to make his wealth of reported detail a living part of his story. The
problem might have advanced further toward a solution, but for the
serious discouragements which American literature suffered, for more
than a decade, at the hands of those timid business classes who felt
that their interests were endangered by truthfulness in fiction; and
now that the younger writers in America are in general revolt against
the censorship of respectability, their daring has manifested itself
chiefly so far in venturing to deal frankly with sexual themes, leaving
almost everything else untouched. The problem still remains. But it is
again being attacked, in the field which precedes perhaps by necessity
the fictional one, that is to say in pamphleteering.
It was pamphleteering--magazine “muck-raking” as it was called--which
preceded and accompanied the great fictional period with which the
names of Frank Norris, Jack London and Upton Sinclair are associated.
That period of pamphleteering had scientific rigor as its goal; a
series of magazine articles on railroad corruption was praised by
saying that it read “like an interstate commerce report”. The new
period of pamphleteering is no less scientifically rigorous in its
factual basis, but it is more human, robust, vigorous, eloquent,
humorous, satirical, personal--and in these respects approaches
and sometimes achieves the effects of imaginative literature. This
pamphleteering at its best has the narrative and dramatic and
psychological excitements of the novel; and it does what the novel has
but seldom succeeded in doing, it comes to grips with the American
theme. It does so by virtue of having patterns which include the
tumultuous and shifting details of this theme--ideological maps of
the landscape, by which the writer can guide us swiftly from point
to point; and most of all, perhaps, it succeeds by reason of having
no such restricted personal scope as the novelist habitually feels
obliged to confine himself to: it deals with the broad panorama of
life. It furnishes perhaps the experimental models of a fiction soon
to be born, able to cope with such a theme as America presents. In any
event, it stands, in its foremost examples, as the latest and greatest
achievement of contemporary American literature.
And, as might perhaps have been expected, it is one of the surviving
leaders of the gallant fictional campaign of twenty years ago who
has set the pace in this new effort. Baffled, it would seem, by the
difficulty of getting so huge a drama into fiction, Upton Sinclair has
magnificently turned all his powers loose into the generous medium
of pamphleteering--to use that term in the sense not of small but of
controversial books.
Already, in 1918, there had appeared the first of a series of great
pamphlets which were to get modern America down on paper with a
fullness and a freedom never yet achieved in any other literary form.
This initial work was _The Profits of Religion_, announced as
“a study of supernaturalism from a new point of view--as a source
of income and a shield of privilege”. If the point of view was not
actually new, it had at least not been embodied in so ambitious a
review. Its manner was new, at least since Voltaire. Scarcely since
then had there been such a ruthless showing up of sacred institutions.
It was not a matter of arguing about creeds; it was a revelation of the
facts about the actual function of churches and churchmen in a class
society. It was a more devastating book than can readily be imagined.
A liberal clergyman, the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, wrote of it: “I must
confess that it has fairly made me writhe to read these pages, not
because they are untrue or unfair, but on the contrary, because I know
them to be the real facts. I love the church as I love my home, and
therefore it is no pleasant experience to be made to face such a story
as this which you have told. It had to be done, however, and I am glad
you have done it, for my interest in the church, after all, is more
or less incidental, whereas my interest in religion is a fundamental
thing.... You have done us all a service in the writing of this book.”
From a certain point of view, however, the importance of the book is
less concerned with its thesis than with the details of contemporary
life through which it leads like a pathway. Indeed, there is a sense
in which an ideological pattern of any sort justifies itself as a
means, whereby the artist leads us into the heart of his subject.
And Sinclair’s pattern is of value precisely where the facts would
otherwise be most confusing or negligible, that is to say in modern
life. In his historical prelude, the pattern seems to introduce too
great a simplification, and its literary value may be doubted; but it
serves as an efficient map through that contemporary American welter
of superstition and exploitation which is his actual theme. Doubtless
there are other important factors involved besides the economic one;
that does not so much matter when the picture is before us--“the Church
of Good Society”, “the Church of the Servant Girls”, “the Church
of the Slavers”, “the Church of the Merchants”, “the Church of the
Quacks”. These are part of our America; and these are the uses to which
a business régime finds these institutions apt and ready. It may be in
part an indictment of human nature rather than of capitalism; but it is
a true picture of a not unimportant aspect of modern industrial America.
II.
It was announced, moreover, that this volume was to be the first of a
series that should “do for Education, Journalism, and Literature” what
had here been done for the Church: “the four volumes making a work of
revolutionary criticism, an Economic Interpretation of Culture under
the general title of _The Dead Hand_”.
If there were any doubt of the significance of the Church as an
aspect of modern American industrial life, there was none concerning
Journalism and Education. American Journalism was in a peculiar
position: the newspapers, being almost the sole mediums of publicity,
had confidently and arrogantly used their opportunities to sing
their own praises, attributing to themselves all the virtues, and
glorifying in particular their own honesty, truthfulness, fairness,
incorruptibility. Their victims might be aware of the contrary, their
editors might have tales to tell in private, soap-box orators might
denounce them for falsifying and suppressing news of industrial
struggles in the interests of the employers--but who would listen?
They seemed as secure as Gille de Rais in his castle. And at their
back stood the Associated Press, loaded with international honors,
a sacrosanct institution, alert to prosecute for criminal libel any
obscure Socialist publication which dared charge it with partisanship.
It would indeed be difficult to prove a case against them, to expose
the truth which lay behind these gigantic self-advertised reputations
for purity. Yet it was nothing less than this that Upton Sinclair
undertook.
_The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism_ appeared in
1919. The reference in the title is to the metal counters used in
brothels, according to investigations which had given the phrase
some currency as a polite synonym for prostitution. The book was an
indictment of the corruption of the American press, with facts, names,
dates, proof complete. If the charges were false, they constituted
criminal libel, and the author could have been put in prison. But,
despite repeated challenges by the author, the truth of these
statements was never denied in court.
_The Brass Check_ is an extraordinary book--not in its daring
alone. Its contents vary from what might be described as dynamite to
the most preposterously farcical matters, which are not, however,
without their strict relevance to the subject under discussion, since
American journalism has its farcical as well as its tragic aspect.
Never in modern times have such widespread charges been made in such
personal terms--personal with reference to the accuser as well as the
accused. For it is, incidentally but first of all, an account of the
dealings of the author himself with the newspapers of America. The
book might for that reason have been ineffective; it was certainly
unconventional. But in this case the story of one man’s relations with
the press, embracing as it does some of the most important episodes in
American newspaper history during our time, is a valuable document.
Not all the personal incidents are important, though they illustrate
the characteristic traits of the American press. But the story of
Sinclair’s efforts to get the news of the Colorado coal strike into
the papers, and his battle with the Associated Press in connection
with the coal strike, is of the greatest importance. And this personal
story is only the beginning of the record; with an immense mass of the
most careful documentation, the whole field is covered in a factual and
convincing way.
The impression which the book made upon America, the eagerness with
which it was read here, as well as all over the world, revealed the
fact that there was an immense resentment against the pseudo-sanctity
in which these institutions had wrapped themselves; whether or not any
reforms were immediately effected by this exposure, it at least lifted
a cloud of repression from the minds of the American people. It was now
possible to speak disrespectfully of these great institutions without
seeming to be guilty of lèse majesté. It had been done, with impunity!
Aside, however, from its uncontroverted authenticity in detail, it
was a picture of America which could be recognized by those who knew
their country--a picture which has not before been compassed in our
literature. Here was a real American story: nor, from that point of
view, did it matter that the characters bore names that could be found
in Bradstreet’s. When the persons named in the book are forgotten, when
they are mere characters in the book, the book will still live on as
a picture of its age. Here pamphleteering has reached the heights of
great art.
III.
Upton Sinclair, almost forgotten as a novelist by his countrymen,
became by virtue of this book again a figure in American life and
literature. The post-war disillusionment had begun, people were willing
to listen to the truth--and here was a man capable of telling it. What
would his book on American education be like?
American education, it had begun to be realized, was largely a fetish.
Was it really education at all, the process so elaborately conducted
in our universities with amphitheatrical football performances in the
foreground and intellectual terrorization in the background? And if
not education, what was it, and why? Upton Sinclair, from the point
of view of those who are interested technically in the problems of
modern education, cannot furnish a final answer to that question.
But, in _The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education_, his
pattern provides us with preliminary guidance through the labyrinth of
astounding and ridiculous facts: it does show us, if not everything
that is the matter with American universities, at least what uses
American business stupidity is making of these huge and lumbering
institutions. There is, indeed, no Machiavellian cunning here,
certainly no far-seeing effort to make higher education in America an
efficient part of the capitalist system; but there is fear everywhere
of truth, fear of intellectual freedom, hysterical fear and stupid
tyranny. It is a tragic farce that is revealed in the book. The tragedy
lies in the wastage of youth, and the frustration of teaching talent.
But comic in the highest degree are the pompous figures that stalk so
solemnly through its pages--the dignified and ridiculous little lords
of the educational world who are hired to run their institutions so as
to please the men who have money to give.... The book was followed in
1924 by _The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools_, in which
the picture becomes both more ridiculous and more tragic, for petty
greed and unscrupulous commercial exploitation, as ruthless and vicious
as has ever been practised upon the helpless and the ignorant, become
part of the scene. These revelations are all of a specifically factual
and utterly convincing sort, and they portray in indelible terms the
species of moral and intellectual serfdom to which the higher and lower
educational institutions of America have been all but universally
reduced by the ignorance and the fears of a business régime. And,
together with their predecessors in this series of great pamphlets,
these books constitute a Contemporary History of American Civilization
by which we are known and judged all over the world, and which must be
read and studied by all Americans who dare to face realities.
In these books, moreover, a writer who despite two extraordinary
artistic triumphs has so often failed to come to complete and
satisfying fullness of expression in the medium of the novel, reaches
and maintains himself at the height of his powers. In this realm of
facts, as not always in the realm controlled by the imagination, he
is utterly assured and at home--capable, in this large field, of
Aristophanic laughter and epic vision. Across these huge canvases march
the multitudes of living mankind, tricksters and deluded ones, liars
and dupes, thieves and victims, masters and henchmen, the preachers,
editors, railroad presidents, financiers, politicians, soldiers,
gunmen, salesmen, teachers, children: it is a panorama of contemporary
American humanity, candidly, tenderly, relentlessly, magnificently
displayed.
IV.
_Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation_, published in
1925, the latest in this series of gigantic exposés, is a venture of a
different sort from the others. It does not deal especially with the
American scene; and its interest lies only partly within the field
of fact, being still more significantly within the field of opinion.
It is in one of its aspects a polemic in art criticism, or, more
specifically, literary criticism--an attack upon the theory of art for
art’s sake. It is also, from its own revolutionary point of view, an
“Outline of Literature”--the most spirited, honest, interesting and
informative ever published. But it may perhaps most interestingly be
considered here as a psychological document.
An American writer who early in this century wished to deal with
themes of social and economic significance found himself hampered by
an academic tradition concerning literature which had grown up since
the Civil War. That vast struggle had left America too spiritually
exhausted to take its due part in the great intellectual battles which
raged through Europe in the latter half of the nineteenth century;
and the literary productions which reflected those conflicts came to
us a little late and with an odor of sanctity which obscured their
controversial quality. The new effort to exploit the vast commercial
possibilities of America absorbed, moreover, for a generation or more,
all its best energies, and literature was left to the professors. By
these it was characteristically conceived as a serene realm high above
the vulgar conflicts of the day, a refuge from immediate interests,
a shelter from passing hopes and fears, a communion with “eternal”
things. This professorial view of literature had preferred to forget
the origin of its most admired productions in that very stress and
sweat of earthly conflict. It was a forgetfulness natural to the
epicene and timid class to whom education itself was no preparation
for the struggle of life but rather a retirement from it. According to
these professorial standards of taste, literature must not come too
dangerously close to reality, or it would incur the damnation of being
dismissed as “propaganda”. It was this attitude which the young Upton
Sinclair encountered when he began his literary career. He wanted to
show the evils of the existing world, and he wanted to help create
the desire for a world fit to live in. Such intentions as these are
no new thing in the history of literature--they have been implicit
and explicit in much of the world’s greatest literature. But he found
himself offending the taste of timid and nervous critics. They thought
it was all right for him to have opinions about the Civil War, because
that happened a long time ago; but he really ought not to have any
opinions about the Class Struggle, because that was possibly going
on right now. To try to make people sympathize with struggling poets
was sufficiently artistic; but to try to make people sympathize with
struggling workingmen was, in the cant phrase of the day, “propaganda”.
And yet it seemed to him, looking back over the world’s literature,
that it was full of “propaganda”, of one sort and another. If
Aristophanes satirized Athenian democracy, if Virgil concocted an
imitation epic in celebration of the founding of Rome, if Juvenal
muck-raked the high Roman society of his time in the most scandalous
fashion, if Shakespeare mocked and reviled the mobs and their rebel
leaders, if John Milton called on God to avenge the massacre of
Protestants in Piedmont, that wasn’t called propaganda, to be sure;
when the propagandists were dead enough, they were called artists. But
wasn’t all art inevitably concerned with revealing a view of life?
Propaganda in that sense was an intimate part of every work or art.
Mediocre poets like Southey were called artists in their time, because
they said all the approved things; and great poets like Shelley were
dismissed as loud-mouthed ranters because they wanted to change the
world. Keats was told to go back to his pills by the aristocratic
reviewers of his time because he was a radical and a friend of Leigh
Hunt’s.... Apparently, then, esthetic criticism was not as purely
esthetic as it deemed itself, but was involved with the fears of the
ruling class. Those who praise the existing scheme of things will
find their artistic virtues readily enough acclaimed. The rash young
revolutionist who turns his coat and comes out for law and order will
likely enough be made poet laureate. Morals, too, are involved--the
writer who is a rebel in politics will have his moral frailties
emblazoned before a shocked world and will be regarded as a monster;
while the writer whose opinions are correct may, if he is careful,
enjoy his adulteries and perversities and remain the darling of
respectable society. And, when one looks over the world’s literature,
how many first-rate writers are there who have not been social rebels?
How many writers have written anything worth while after they ceased to
be rebels? How many hugely-bolstered reputations of the correct sort
have any validity? And of those writers who were notoriously hostile or
indifferent to the great social rebellions of their time, how much has
their art lost by their blindness to what was going on?
These questions, fulminating in the mind of the young writer, set
in motion a long historical and critical inquiry of years, of which
_Mammonart_ is the result.... In the meantime, and especially
since the war, it appears that these professorial doctrines have
passed over into the minds of the younger generation of the American
intelligentsia and its writers generally, a natural symptom of
the social helplessness of this period of disillusionment. The
_fin-de-siècle_ art theories of the European ’nineties have been
taken over with much enthusiasm as a means of retaining artistic
self-respect while sitting among the ruins of pre-war hopes. Under
these circumstances, it can easily be understood that Upton Sinclair’s
book should arouse resentment--for it is implicitly a challenge to the
young writers of America to take their place as leaders in what Heine
called the Liberation War of Humanity.
Such is the content of _Mammonart_; in form it is a handbook
covering in short, vivid chapters a vast part of the world’s
literature, reviewing it against its own political and economic
background, with special attention to the manner in which the social
struggles of the times are reflected in the life and work of the
writers. It describes itself as an inquiry into art from the point of
view of revolutionary economics. It is the first of the kind to be
broadly undertaken, though Bernard Shaw in his essay on Wagner and in
his criticisms in general has furnished some interesting and valuable
examples of the method. It is a kind of criticism that is familiar
in Russia, where it has long been practised. But, though at present
something of a novelty in America, it is not likely to remain so.
The weakness of the various current attempts to deal with art from a
purely esthetic standpoint seem to make it inevitable that this more
revolutionary and realistic method will come into vogue.
Social revolutionary criticism, as it may be called, takes it for
granted that an artist is an interpreter of life, and judges the
truth and value of his interpretation by the test of how fully he
shows himself aware of what is going on in his world, with special
reference to social change, and whether he helps his audience to
understand and sympathize with such changes. He is recognized as a
discriminator of spiritual values, in some sense a creator of them,
and he is judged by the spiritual values he helps to create in a world
that struggles toward something greater and finer than its past. He
is not asked to be consciously attempting to create such values, and
least of all is he asked to believe in this or that specific program
of change--he is judged as an artist and not as a politician. It is
a frankly partisan criticism, but it represents the genuine esthetic
response of those who feel themselves to be living in a changing world
lighted by the hope of revolutionary improvement. It is a criticism
which attaches no importance to such sacrosanct effects as those of
tragedy. It welcomes cynicism and pessimism in regard to institutions,
but it regards cynicism and pessimism in regard to man’s ultimate
power of conquering his environment as merely morbid. It bases itself
on science, and claims the right to rank various kinds of “beauty”
according to its own scale of values. It is thus seen to be itself a
discriminator and creator of spiritual and esthetic values; it does not
hesitate to hurl gods from their pedestals nor throw outworn beauty
in the dustbin of time. Its weakness is that of all other theories of
art criticism--that it may become a cloak for the personal prejudices
of those who use it, giving them a dignity they do not necessarily
deserve. But it has vitality, and candor, and is more realistic than
any other kind of criticism that has yet appeared. Upton Sinclair’s own
moral preconceptions are occasionally obvious in this book; but he has
triumphantly escaped most of the dangers of this kind of criticism.
His book is so rich in its swiftly painted backgrounds, so moving in
its drama, so profoundly true on the plane in which it moves, and so
thoroughly and simply intelligible in its thesis, as to constitute a
very impressive and valuable example of the new social revolutionary
criticism.
As an utterance of its author’s point of view, the book arouses a
certain psychological curiosity--his alleged “Puritanism” again comes
under discussion. The erotic themes which constitute so large a part
of the world’s literature receive scant attention here. It might seem
that from his point of view mankind’s erotic problems are too simple to
bother with in literature; but some reflection upon his own writings
(including the unpublished manuscript of _Love’s Progress_) shows
that this is not so. One hazards the explanation that they seem to
him, these erotic problems of mankind, to be too involved with social
problems to be isolated, and indeed too complex to be satisfactorily
solved by mankind except upon terms of profound social change. His
impatience with literary critics would thus be the impatience of a
revolutionary mind, not content with such tawdry or cruel or cowardly
escapes as the world has thus far afforded to its rebels in the sexual
realm. One remembers the boy Thyrsis, who wandered at night seeking
some adventure that would be “not quite shameful to a poet’s fancy”.
So, it would seem, has he wandered through the byways of the world’s
literature, finding no erotic fancies that were not, to a realist and a
poet, tiresome to contemplate--as for example, when he turns away from
Coleridge’s “woman wailing for her demon lover” with the remark that
it is “a savage’s nightmare”. Such a mind would turn naturally to the
world’s future for its ultimate satisfactions, and form the habit of
subsuming under its social hopes its erotic dissatisfactions with the
world of contemporary reality.
It may be remarked that Upton Sinclair’s own practice has not been
invariably in the direction of slighting the sexual aspects of life;
he notably did not slight them in _Love’s Pilgrimage_--and when
urged by a friendly older novelist to be less frank in certain scenes,
he replied in terms which constitute an interesting defense of the
realistic method:
“I wish,” he wrote, “to give the inner significance of life, as it
comes to me; but on the other hand, I conceive that there is no way to
give this, except with the materials of the actual world which we have
at our hand.
“You will readily believe that I did not write the particular passages
in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ which you discuss, without much earnest
thought about the subject. I had certain emotions to portray, and I
knew only one way to do it. For instance, I could not have conceived
of the conveying of the emotions of the man who sees his first child
born, without describing the actual physical things which he saw. I
simply did not know any other way to do it. If you think that there is
any other way, I would be interested to have you tell me. Do you know
of any place in the world’s literature where it has been done? For my
part, I know of only one or two hints at it, and these very inadequate.
“You must understand that concerning both this subject, and that of the
passion scenes in the novel, I have a very definite conviction that the
attitude of modern civilization toward these subjects is a wholly false
and unnatural one. I believe that these things are part of human life,
and that we should learn to talk about them with the same simplicity
and naturalness that we use about any other of the deep facts of life,
such as, for instance, the problems of death or of religion.”
XVI. OIL!
I.
One of the difficulties of writing a critical biography of a living
writer is that he changes while he is being written about. When this
book was begun, it was with the idea that Upton Sinclair, in spite of
two fictional masterpieces, had found the novel too narrow a medium
for the expression of his vast and robust interest in the social and
economic tragi-comedy of life, and that he had reached his fullest
self-realization in the series of great pamphlets descriptive of
American culture. But there is now at hand the astonishing new novel,
_Oil!_, upon which he has been at work for the past two years, and
that judgment has to be reversed.
_Oil!_ stands beside and in many ways above _The Jungle_. It
is a maturer work, and if it does not have the intensity and poignancy
of that early masterpiece it has a greater breadth of vision and a
deeper knowledge of life. Its curiosity and range and ease and power
are Tolstoyan. It is a large book, a great canvas, as great as that
of the great pamphlets, and carrying all their effects easily within
its simple story. It is the story of Oil, in human terms, and in terms
of all classes--the oil magnates and their families, the rich, the
poor, the workers, idlers, the doll-house life of Hollywood, and the
political machinations that have been reverberating through America for
the last four years: it is all here, in the story of an oil magnate’s
son, his father, his sweethearts, and his friends, including the vital
figure of Paul, the young workingman who gives him his first glimpse
into the rebel world beneath his happy paradise. No extended account
of it will be given in these last pages; it suffices to say that it
restores to us Upton Sinclair the novelist, and that it constitutes one
of the great achievements in the literary discovery of contemporary
America.
It is as though in the great pamphlets Upton Sinclair had found his
stride, and brought back to the medium of fiction the verve and the
reality which he had learned in dealing with life at close quarters.
If he can continue in this masterful way, not even his Socialist
preoccupations can prevent him from being recognized as America’s
greatest novelist.
II.
It remains only to complete the picture with some brief account of
his other activities, carrying the story of his life down to the
present.... Little has been said of him here as a playwright; but he
has written many plays, produced some of them himself under Socialist
auspices, and one of his late plays, _Singing Jailbirds_,
published in 1924, dealing with the ruthless persecution of the I. W.
W. under the California “Criminal Syndicalist” law, is a more poignant
and effective example of the expressionistic drama than any that has
been produced on the American stage. It has been played in England as a
means of raising funds for the striking miners, and last year in Vienna
on the revolutionary anniversary, November 8th and 9th. This remarkable
play is the outcome of the author’s experience in 1923, during the
free speech fight at Los Angeles in connection with the I. W. W.
harbor strike. The rights of free speech being illegally denied by the
police to the members of the I. W. W., he undertook to uphold the law
against those who, sworn to defend it, were engaged in violating it
in the interests of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. He
and his associates, assembling in San Pedro on private property with
the consent of the owner, were arrested by the police for the crime of
reading aloud, and hearing read, three sentences from the Constitution
of the United States--those guaranteeing “freedom of speech and of
the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to
petition the government for the redress of their grievances.” The
act of reminding the people of California of these antique rights as
guaranteed in that venerable document constituted a crime which made
Sinclair, according to the Los Angeles chief of police, “more dangerous
than 4,000 I. W. W.” The complaint on which he was illegally arrested
charged him with “discussing, arguing, orating and debating certain
thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories ... were detrimental
and in opposition to the orderly conduct of affairs of business,
affecting the rights of private property....” He was accordingly
thrown into jail and held “incommunicado”. While in jail he learned
of an incident which had happened there the day before--fifty men
crowded into a small prison hole without air for singing their I. W. W.
songs--the origin of his play, _Singing Jailbirds_. “I am not”, he
wrote to the chief of police after his release on bail had been at last
effected, “a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin
and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit
that when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers
flung across a street to keep anyone from coming on to private property
to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I
have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties
were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our
cowardice.”
III.
For a number of years Upton Sinclair has occupied a peculiar situation,
as the publisher of his own books. This, as may be remembered, began
with his first novel, which could at first find no publisher. _The
Jungle_, also, when it had been rejected by five publishers, he decided
to publish himself, and had made the plates when a publisher summoned
up the courage to take it over--and made a fortune on it. Ten years
afterward, _The Profits of Religion_ could find no publisher, and he
published it himself; he has sold some sixty thousand copies, and still
sells two thousand copies every year without advertising. He was told
that there were fifty criminal libel suits and one or two thousand
civil suits in _The Brass Check_, so he published that himself. He
printed twenty-three thousand copies, and they were sold in two or
three weeks; orders came in for forty thousand more, but this was at
a time of paper shortage, and he found it hard to get paper--doubly
hard, because in several instances when it was discovered what the
paper was to be used for the orders were canceled; a hundred and
thirty-five thousand copies were sold altogether, in spite of these
difficulties. “Also”, the author remarks, “I have managed to give
away seven or eight thousand copies of _Singing Jailbirds_.” _Jimmie
Higgins_, _100%_, _The Goose-Step_, _The Goslings_, and _Mammonart_
were similarly published; and the business flourished sufficiently
to enable him to buy the plates and copyrights of books originally
published by other publishers, so that he now owns twenty-six of them,
and has all but three or four in print. He does not, however, recommend
the method to other authors, and tells the story of a man who was in
the business of manufacturing brushes, and whose wife, when he found at
the end of the year that he had been selling the brushes below cost,
said enthusiastically: “But think what an enormous business you do!”
The story sums up, he admits, his own experiences as a publisher. The
method, however, keeps him in touch with his readers. “Never a mail
comes that there is not a letter from some workingman or workingwoman,
some poor student, or teacher, or political prisoner, who has been able
to get my books for one reason and one only--that they are available
at low prices. It is not an unusual thing for me to hear of a single
volume that has been read by scores of people, prisoners in jail, of
workingmen in mines and lumber camps, or teachers in a school, or
professors in a college. I get letters from South Africa and South
America, from Alaska and New Zealand, from India and Russia.” Many of
his books, scarcely heard of in America, are best sellers in Great
Britain and its colonies, in Germany, Italy, Holland, Denmark, the
Scandinavian countries, and the states from Finland down to Serbia,
while hundreds of editions were published in the Union of Socialist
Soviet Republics, where the printing of his books has recently been
made a state monopoly.
IV.
At the age of twenty-three it had been Upton Sinclair’s ambition, as
expressed in the preface to his first novel, to publish a library of
helpful books for “the humble people of our land.” This dream of a
workingmen’s library has recently come true in an indirect way, as one
of the enterprises conducted at his instigation by the “Garland Fund.”
The manner in which the fortune which had been repudiated by a strange
young millionaire named Charles Garland came to be used for this and
other liberal and radical purposes is thus described by Sinclair in
_What’s the Use of Books?_--a pamphlet published by the Vanguard
Press:
“I am going to tell you a story. It is as strange as any fairy story
you ever read, and with this one difference--it happened exactly as I
tell it, and only three or four years ago.
“Once upon a time there was a young man who had been born into a home
of luxury. He had everything in life that a young man could desire,
and before he was twenty-one a relative died and left him a million
dollars. Ask most Americans what they would like to have happen to
them, and they will say that to have a relative die and leave them a
million dollars would suit them fine. But for some strange reason it
didn’t suit this rich young man. He was troubled with an uncomfortable
thing called a conscience; he had the crazy notion that before a man
spends money he ought to earn it. He said that he hadn’t earned that
million dollars, and so he wasn’t going to take it.
“It was none of my business, but I was worried, thinking about that
million dollars, and all the things that could be done with it. Lying
there in a Wall Street bank, piling itself up--according to present-day
customs being loaned out to speculators and big business men, and thus
being used directly contrary to the ideas of the young man! I sat down
and wrote him a letter, pointing this out and begging him to take the
money and use it for spreading his ideas of social justice--or, if
he hadn’t faith enough in his own ideas, then to entrust the money
to a group of the best friends of social justice he could find. Many
others wrote the young man to the same effect, and the upshot was that
he changed his mind, and took the million dollars and established an
endowment called ‘The American Fund for Public Service.’
“So there was a group of men and women having this responsibility; and
right away they began getting letters from me. I wanted them to spend
the money for one thing--cheap books for the workers. Books differ
from most other things in that their inner spirit is not dependent on
their outer form. The most important ideas in the world can be printed
and sold for a few cents, and if you get the ideas they are exactly as
useful to you as if they had come out of a costly volume printed on
vellum and bound in silk. Therefore, I argued, _books should come
first_.
“Others agreed with me, and so there came into being an institution
called the Vanguard Press, having magically in its possession one
hundred thousand dollars of that Wall Street money, and pledged through
its trustees to spend the money in selecting the books most needed by
the every-day people of this country, having them edited and printed,
and offered to the people at the lowest possible prices.”
V.
Throughout his career, with the exception of the brief period during
the war referred to in an earlier chapter, he has been actively
identified with the Socialist Party; he was a Socialist candidate for
Congress in 1906 and 1920, for the Senate in 1922, for governor of
California in 1926. In the present state of the Socialist movement
in America, split as it is between the Socialist and the Workers
(Communist) Party, and with these groups more or less hostile to one
another, he is the one figure, since the death of Debs, who commands
the respect of all branches of the revolutionary movement.
VI.
Most of Upton Sinclair’s personality is expressed in his
social-revolutionary interests and activities. Upton Sinclair,
“the person,” aside from these activities, is a slight, wiry,
graying figure, an early riser and hard worker, keeping one or two
stenographers busy all day; an excellent tennis player, an eager
talker; self-described as “easily bored, naïve and impersonal”; dealing
with “griefs, troubles and failures” by putting his emotions into the
book he is writing; somewhat skeptically interested in spiritistic
phenomena, very hopefully interested in new devices, regarded as
absurd by the medical profession, for curing disease; an occasional
lecturer to women’s clubs, able to mitigate the shock of his opinions
to precisely the amount that such organizations can stand; wearing
the cast-off clothes of a rich young friend, precisely as when he was
seventeen and living on $4.50 a week; always in debt, never hesitating
to borrow money for some project which he regards as for the benefit of
humanity; always hopeful of enormous success in each new project, each
new book; very boyish, impulsive, trustful, stubborn; fondly regarded
as impractical by those who love him ... including a wife who backs
him loyally, and who appears in his writings as “M. C. S.”, and in
_Mammonart_ as “Mrs. Ogi”.
VII.
Upton Sinclair is at this point in his career forty-eight years old;
he intends to live to be as old as Bernard Shaw, and he probably will.
His future literary career may bring surprises; the poet in him may yet
overwhelm the propagandist. It is sufficient, however, to have seen
the development of a raw cub of genius, an ethereal poet, afraid of
real life, into the fearless and robust transcriber of the tragi-comic
welter which is contemporary America. And we may conclude with the
reminder that it is as one of the leaders of a significant American
literary movement that he has here been studied--a movement which will
seem of larger and larger importance to us as we learn and cherish our
own literary history--a movement which was killed twenty years ago
because there was too much troublesome truth in it, and which is only
in these last few years being painfully born again: he is one of the
great pioneers in the fictional discovery and exploitation of modern
America.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[Books entirely out of print are so marked; editions in print are
marked with a *.]
Springtime and Harvest. A Romance. [With an introduction by the
author, and photograph of the shack in the woods where the book
was written.] Sinclair Press, 1901. [Out of print.]
King Midas. A Romance. [A reissue of Springtime and Harvest with a
new title.] Funk & Wagnalls, 1901. [Out of print.]
The Journal of Arthur Stirling. “The Valley of the Shadow.”
Appleton [anonymous edition], 1903; [with the author’s name,
and an explanatory preface], 1906. Sinclair [with explanatory
postscripts], 1923.*
Prince Hagen. A Phantasy. L. C. Page, 1903. Kerr, 1910. [Out of
print.]
Manassas. A Novel of the War. Macmillan, 1904. Sinclair, 1923.*
A Captain of Industry. [A Tale.] Appeal to Reason, 1906.
Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet], 1924.*
The Jungle. [A Novel.] Doubleday, 1907. Sinclair, 1920.* Vanguard
Press, 1926.*
The Industrial Republic. A Study of the America of Ten Years Hence.
Illustrated. Doubleday, 1907. [Out of print.]
The Overman. [A Tale.] Doubleday, 1907. Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet],
1924.*
The Metropolis. [A Novel.] Moffat Yard, 1908. Sinclair, 1923.*
The Moneychangers. [A Novel.] Dodge, 1910. Sinclair [revised
edition], 1923.*
Good Health and How We Won It. By Upton Sinclair and Michael
Williams. Stokes, 1909. [Out of print.]
Samuel the Seeker. [A Novel.] Dodge, 1910. Sinclair, 1923.*
Plays of Protest. The Naturewoman. The Machine. The Second-Story
Man. Prince Hagen. Kennerley, 1911. Haldeman-Julius [separate
pamphlets], 1924.*
The Fasting Cure. Kennerley, 1911. Sinclair, 1923.*
Love’s Pilgrimage. [A Novel.] Kennerley, 1911. Sinclair, 1926.*
Damaged Goods. [Novelized from Brieux’s play.] Winston, 1913.*
Sylvia. A Novel. Winston, 1913. Sinclair, 1913.*
Sylvia’s Marriage. A Novel. Winston, 1914. Sinclair, 1927.*
The Cry for Justice. An Anthology of the Literature of Social
Protest. With an Introduction by Jack London. Illustrated.
Winston, 1915. Sinclair, 1920.*
King Coal. A Novel. With an Introduction by Dr. Georg Brandes.
Macmillan, 1917. Sinclair, 1917.*
The Profits of Religion. An Essay in Economic Interpretation.
Sinclair, 1918.* Vanguard Press, 1927.*
The Brass Check. A Study of American Journalism. Sinclair, 1919.*
The Crimes of the “Times”. [Pamphlet.] Sinclair, 1919.*
100%. The Story of a Patriot. Sinclair, 1920.*
The Bock of Life. Macmillan, 1921-22. Sinclair, 1921-22.*
They Call Me Carpenter. A Tale of the Second Coming. Boni &
Liveright, 1922. Sinclair, 1922.*
Hell. A Verse Drama and Photo-Play. [Pamphlet.] Sinclair, 1923.*
The Goose-Step. A Study of American Education. Sinclair, 1923.*
The Goslings. A Study of American Schools. Sinclair, 1924.*
Singing Jailbirds. A Drama in Four Acts. Sinclair, 1924.*
The Millennium. A Comedy of the Year 2000. [A tale based on a
play written in 1907 and subsequently lost.] Haldeman-Julius
[pamphlets], 1924.*
The Pot-Boiler. A Comedy in Four Acts. [Written in 1912.]
Haldeman-Julius [pamphlet], 1924.*
Mammonart. An Essay in Economic Interpretation. Sinclair, 1925.*
Bill Porter. A Drama of O. Henry in Prison. Sinclair, 1925.*
Letters to Judd, An American Workingman. Sinclair, 1926.*
The Spokesman’s Secretary, Being the Letters of Mame to Mom.
Sinclair, 1926.*
Oil! A Novel. A. & C. Boni, 1927.* Sinclair. 1927.*
INDEX
Alcohol, 21, 29 note.
Annapolis, 22, 47
Appeal to Reason, 104, 146
Arden, Del., 125 _et seq._
_Argosy, The_, 44, 46
Asceticism, 29 _et seq._, 60 _et seq._
Associated Press, 138, 139, 165, 166
Baltimore, Md., 16, 19
Bloor, Ella Reeve, 107
_Book of Life, The_, 151
Boys’ stories, 46, 47
Brandes, Georg, 113, 141
_Brass Check, The_, 165, quoted _passim_
Brieux, 133
Broadway demonstration, 137
Budget, 41
Carlyle, 36
“Chappie”, 32
Chicago, 16, 17 note, 103, 104, 107
Church, 38, 39, 162
Clothes, 41 note, 186
Coal Strike, 137
College, 34, 49, 52, 53
Colorado, 137
Constitution, U. S., 180
“Corydon”, 65
_Country House Built for Only $156, A_, 79
_Cry for Justice, The_, 140
_Damaged Goods_, 133
Dead Hand, The, 164
Divorce, 130
Eden Musée, 17 note
Emerson, 36
Farragut, David, 17, 18
_Fasting Cure, The_, 128
Free-Speech fight at Los Angeles, 180
Galahad, 61
Garland, Charles, 183
Genius and its claims, 50, 86
Genteel tradition in American Literature, 110
German Lessons, 68
Goethe’s picture, 54
_Goose-Step, The_, 167
Gorky incident, 111
_Goslings, The_, 168
Greenwich Village, 30 note
Hackwork, 41
Hamlet, 33, 39
Helicon Hall, 121
Herron, George D., 97, 100
Holland, 131, 132
_In the days of Decatur_, 46
_In the net of the Visconti_, 46
Indigestion, 42, 73, 128
_Industrial Republic, The_, 118
Intercollegiate Socialist Society, 103
Jail, 126, 138, 181
Jesus, 27, 33, 39
_Jimmie Higgins_, 146, 148
Jokes, 44
_Journal of Arthur Stirling, The_, 78, 86
_Jungle, The_, 84, 104
“Killing Spaniards”, 47
_King Coal_, 140
_King Midas_, 78
Languages, learning of, 53
Lee, Robert E., 20, 37
Lewis, Sinclair, 124
Lincoln, 37
Literary enthusiasms, 27, 36, 37, 39, 43, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61, 63, 93,
94
London, Jack, 102, 106, 114
_Love’s Pilgrimage_, 128, 176 quoted _passim_
_Love’s Progress_, 129 note, 175
Ludlow massacre, 137
_Machine, The_, 116
_Mammonart_, 169
_Manassas_, 101, 115
Marriage, 72; 2d, 136
_Metropolis, The_, 113, 114
Moir, Rev. William W., 39, 61
_Moneychangers, The_, 113, 116
“Mourning pickets”, 137
Moyer and Haywood, 111
“Muck-raking”, 109, 161
Music, 26, 28, 29 note, 65, 73
_My cause_, 94
New York, 31
Nietzsche, 52
Norfolk, 17
Norris, Frank, 104, 114, 160
_Oil!_, 178
_100%: The Story of a Patriot_, 149
Packingtown, 103, 104, 107
Perry, Commodore, 17
Phillips, David Graham, 105, 109
Picketing on Broadway, 137
Play, 29, 186
Plays, 125, 179
Poetic ambitions, 42, 51, 56, 88
_Prince Hagen_, 78, 99
Professors, 35, 52
_Profits of Religion, The_, 162
Publisher of his own books, 181
Puritanism, 13, 155, 175
Realism, defense of, 176
Residence, 16, 31, 55, 72, 79, 84 note, 87, 103, 121, 125, 131, 132,
136, 137, 139, 140, 143[16]
Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 137, 139, 140
Roosevelt, Theodore, 107, 108
Ruskin, 37
Russia, 148, 158
Sabbath-breaking, see Arden
_Samuel the Seeker_, 128
San Pedro arrest, 180
Scott, Sir Walter, 49
Shelley, 39, 53, 94, 160
_Singing Jailbirds_, 181
Single-tax colony, see Arden
Socialism, 97, 119, 158, 185
Socialists and the war, 143
_Springtime and Harvest_, 55, 74, 78
_Spy, The_, 149
Stockyards, 103, 104, 107
Street & Smith, 46
_Sylvia_, 132
_Sylvia’s Marriage_, 133
Tarrytown, 139
Tennis, 29 note, 186
Thackeray, 27
“Thyrsis”, 69 _et passim_
Tolstoyan-Tennysonian idealism, 70
Toys, 28
_Upton Sinclair’s_, 146
van Eeden, Frederik, 128, 131
Wells, H. G., 118, 151
_What’s the Use of Books?_, 183
Wilson, Woodrow, 146, 148, 150 note
Zola, 160
FOOTNOTES
[1] He did, however, hear about the Haymarket riot later, when
the family moved to New York. “I remember seeing wax-works of the
anarchists making their bombs, in the Eden Musée, and I believed every
word of it--or shall I say, every wax-work of it. I well remember
the name of Altgeld [the governor of Illinois who later pardoned
the surviving Haymarket anarchists from prison] as a kind of super
bomb-thrower! I swallowed all its ideas complete.”
[2] “Sinclair, Arthur. Lieutenant, 10 June, 1807. Commander, 2 July,
1812. Captain, 24 July, 1813. Died 7 February, 1837.”--_U. S. Army
and Navy Register._
[3] “Sinclair, Arthur. Midshipman, 4 March, 1823. Passed midshipman, 4
June, 1831. Lieutenant, 3 March, 1835. Commander, 14 September, 1855.
Dismissed 18 April, 1861.”--_U. S. Army and Navy Register._
[4] However, Sinclair writes in a private letter: “I am not opposed to
the play aspects of life. The facts are these: As a boy, I did every
kind of playing that boys can do. I played tennis in Central Park,
football and baseball in vacant lots, and was nabbed by the police in
the usual style, built bonfires and roasted stolen potatoes, skated
on ice in winter and played shinny on roller skates the rest of the
year, climbed on the roofs and threw clothes-pins at the people on the
street. I was in every kind of danger. I used to say, playfully, that
fate must be keeping me alive for some purpose, because I had escaped
death by a hair’s breadth a dozen times before I was fourteen. I could
outrun any boys I knew for long distances. I have run all the way
around Central Park, and I have ridden a bicycle from up town in New
York over Brooklyn bridge to Coney Island, gone in swimming in March
with snow on the ground, and then ridden home again; this at the age of
seventeen. At about that age I set out with desperate determination to
learn to play the violin, practicing eight hours a day. It was work,
but done in order that I might be able to play. At the present time,
when my wife is ill and I have to stay at home nearly all the time, I
play an hour or two every day--always sight reading, and I get as much
excitement out of struggling through a Mozart sonata as some people
get out of a horse-race. I get as much fun out of a tennis tournament
as any of the young fellows. I have also been devoted to the theatre,
having never missed seeing a good play except because of poverty.
“From the age of twenty to twenty-eight or twenty-nine I did no
playing, but this was because I was in a desperate struggle to survive
as a writer; but that was not a matter of philosophy but of practical
necessity. You wouldn’t say that a man was opposed to play because he
didn’t play while he was in a battle.
“Theoretically I am opposed to play under the following circumstances;
first, when it is cruel and involves wanton suffering to either human
beings or animals. I have always enjoyed hunting and fishing, but the
game or fish were always eaten. Second, when the play is destructive
to health; and that is the basis of my objections to the kind of play
which involves alcohol. I know so many ways to have a good time which
do not involve a headache next morning. Naturally, the condition of my
father’s liver when he died has a good deal to do with this attitude.
Third, play which is not a recreation after work, but a substitute for
work. I saw in Greenwich Village a great many young idlers calling
themselves radicals and doing nothing for the movement, and that made
me tired....
“I think you mistake my attitude toward dancing. As a boy at various
‘springs’ in Virginia, I danced a lot and was duly dressed up for fancy
balls. I remember very well being a ‘baker’. I don’t think I was more
than six years old, and I was expected to carry a tray with rolls on
it, but I very soon shed that encumbrance. Later on I never danced,
simply because the dancing I saw was done by the idlers of ‘society’,
wasting time, and it was a matter of expensive clothes, and all that
sort of social frummery: either that, or you had to patronize the
underworld. My objection to modern jazz dancing is that it represents
the taking possession of America by that underworld. I think that jazz
dances are awkward and ugly, being imitations of savage sex dances. Of
course, as time goes on, if they survive, they will be idealized....
“My ethical ideals on these questions are very simply stated, and
they seem to me entirely practical. I want grown-up human beings to
have some serious work to do, something constructive, something which
constitutes their main interest. When they have worked at this with
real, full-sized energy and determination, then let them recreate both
minds and bodies by any kind of play whatever which they enjoy, and
which does not interfere with their ability to go back to their work.”
[5] Detail, from a letter: “Twenty-five cents a week for clean collars
and cuffs, and newspapers. I wore the cuffs up high to keep them from
showing too much and getting soiled too fast. I did not have to buy any
clothes--my cousin H---- used to send me his cast off clothes. My meals
cost $3 a week.”
[6] Comment from a letter: “No human male could have been more
pitifully ignorant of the female critter, body, mind, and soul, than I
was at the age of 21. It was a tragedy, but I was not to blame. It was
the Victorian age.”
[7] In the more-or-less autobiographical novel, _Love’s
Pilgrimage_, it is related of Corydon and Thyrsis that they did
carry out this idealistic plan for a time after they were married. That
version is scarcely more than a dramatic heightening of some of the
facts, and the fiction does make clear the underlying neurotic conflict
in the young poet’s mind.
[8] In 1902 he took the account of this birth-scene to Paul Elmer More,
one of the leaders of the academic school of criticism then in power,
and was told that it could “_never_ be published.”
[9] To be exact, the $25 study was moved on a wagon to a farm near
by in the fall of 1904, and it was there that _The Jungle_ was
written.
[10] For instance, Richard Le Gallienne wrote of it as “at once
an authoritative document, a heart-searching appeal, and a tragic
entertainment. I don’t remember to have seen the old case of ‘the Poet
_versus_ the World’ put with more truth, more vehemence, and more
charm.”
[11] The Intercollegiate Socialist Society was to become the center
of rebellious thought and the forum for free discussion in the
conservative colleges of America. Few students with any spark of
intellectual curiosity but were touched by its liberalizing influences.
[12] This, however, appears to have been deliberate, because he was
going to show how Thyrsis learned, in the second volume.
[13] I have read the manuscript of this unpublished novel, and may be
permitted to express the hope that it will eventually be published.
[14] Sinclair appears, under the name of Sanford Peyton, as a pro-war
Socialist in a novel by the present writer, _An Old Man’s Folly_,
which deals with American pacifists in war-time. Sinclair, in reviewing
the novel, remarks that the war-time opinions attributed to him are
correct, and adds: “I can only tell him that reading them over now
makes me very unhappy, and I find myself with a continual impulse to
get into jail with the rest of his characters! I have had almost ten
years to think the thing over, and what I have to report is that if
at the beginning of 1917 I had known what I know to-day, I would have
opposed the war and gone to jail with the pacifist radicals.” Later in
the review he remarks of the Presidential idealist in whom he believed
at the time: “I cannot forgive him; it is not merely that he made a
fool of himself, but he made a fool of me!”
[15] However, in a letter, Sinclair defends himself against this
charge, saying: “I have no trace of that early bias left. You may think
I have, but I haven’t. What I have is a repugnance to ‘love-making’
without love.”
[16] Since 1926, Long Beach, Cal.
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