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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78707 ***
+
+
+        [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.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78707 ***