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.