“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._”