[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.”