people” in America go to summer hotels for the “warm months”; he was
perhaps thinking of the class he was addressing in that publication:
workingmen do not read _Country Life in America_.... But this
prose, in comparison with the fragments of last year’s manifesto quoted
above, has in it the quality of civilized conversation; the shrill
boyish note is gone; it is a man speaking. The boy has grown up. And
he has grown up, somewhat in spite of himself, through the influence
of human experience in its most inescapable domestic terms. He has
been living, not in a poetic Shelleyan grotto, but in what despite
some unusual features is nevertheless unmistakably a home. He has
been a husband and father,--doubtless not a very good husband, for
a preoccupied artist may easily fail, and a puritanical idealist is
pretty certain to fail, to be that--yet the head of a household, a
breadwinner, a man responsible to wife and child; he has almost if not
quite ceased to dramatize himself in the grandiose rôle of a solitary
and unique figure bearing the burden of a poetic doom. He has become
considerably humanized, and as it happens through suffering--for
domesticity is not the least of those miseries in which, as he
complained in his manifesto the previous year, he had been stewed and
mashed. Corydon does not seem to have been a very efficient housewife
or very capable mother; and she probably seemed to an impecunious young
poet dreadfully extravagant. They were both terribly overworked. Yet
domesticity, to the young poet a monster of such frightful mien that to
be hated need but to be seen, when endured sufficiently was found to
have human values of its own; and though he might never be said to have
been thoroughly domesticated, though the close and warm intimacies of
family life remained something to shy away from as much as possible,
yet he had gained something from his experience which now led him to
show other young people the way to these life-values, at a price within
their meager means!
And so to continue with the article; the next few paragraphs are
introductory to his theme, but interesting for their realistic
information:
So overwhelming was the force of custom that for many years I
never dreamed there was any other way to live. At last, however,
the truth dawned upon me that I was foolish to pay for the
use of a hotel in the country when what I wanted was only the
country and not the hotel. I chanced one day to be walking in the
woods when I came upon a little cabin which had been built for
picnicking purposes by a lady who had immediately afterward been
providentially smitten with a rheumatic knee. This house I hired
for $25 for the season, and then I began to discover what things
there were in life. This house had cost about $400; and from force
of custom I rented it without inquiring further.
Meantime, also, I went back to the city in winter, though there was
nothing I wanted in the city except books.... I am writing this
article because I know that there are in New York many thousands of
poets, painters, musicians, and other would-be dwellers in the land
of the spirit, living in just exactly that way, and never dreaming
that there is any other way for them to do it; that there is any
sort of shelter save a hall bedroom at $2 a week, or any sort of
food save what is shoved at them over a restaurant table at twenty
or thirty cents a dish! Figure up the cost of a hall bedroom at $2
a week for a lifetime ...
Thus far, to be sure, this is simply a country studio for artists that
is being suggested; but it abruptly becomes a home in the same sentence:
and then consider that houses suitable for the occupancy of poets
and lovers may be built at a cost of from $50 to $150, and dwelt in
all the year round at a cost of $6 a week for two and $2 more for
the baby.
Five years ago, the writer met a charming young couple one summer,
engaged, and painfully in love. With the naïveté of lovers,
they told me all about the problem--which was that he was only
twenty-six, and was earning only a poor $1800 a year; and they had
waited two years already--they expected to wait one more, and then
he would receive $2,200, and upon that they were heroically going
to try to get along. The writer has not seen them for three years,
but just the other day he made inquiry. Whether the increase was
delayed or their courage gave out, he does not know--but they are
still engaged!
It may seem a little unfair for this young writer, of all persons, to
taunt these cowardly lovers; but that he can do so means that he has
at last accepted that impulse which in spite of so many qualms carried
him into marriage as, not a weakness nor a folly, but a thing to be
proud of--not a mere falling into a “trap of Nature”, but a responsible
action of his own; that is to say, his sexual impulse is at last
acknowledged to be a part of himself, and not a “devil” nor an “enemy”.
But to proceed:
The house shown in this illustration cost $156. This figure is
larger in two respects than necessary--mistakes were made in its
construction, and it was built in a place where lumber is very high
in price. As described in this article, it can be built for about
$125.
It stands about three miles outside of Princeton, New Jersey, which
was chosen because it is a beautiful town with a library. The house
is built upon a long strip of land bordering a dense woods; this
strip has a score of great trees upon it, and no less than a dozen
springs, of various degrees of coldness. It was of no use to the
farmer who owns it, and he rented it for $10 a year.
The house is 16×18 feet. It has three rooms--a kitchen, a bedroom,
and a living-room--respectively 6×7, 9×7, and 11×16 feet. Six by
seven sounds small for a room, but every part of it was calculated
beforehand, and there is plenty of space....
He continues with details of its construction and cost. There is a
piazza, to be used as a dining-room in summer. “A good deal of the
furniture is home-made, of plain white pine; it can be varnished or
covered with pretty stuffs, though the present house is in the Spartan
style.” The house took six days to build. “Enough crockery and kitchen
utensils--agate-ware and unbreakable--can be bought for $5 or $10,
and then the house is inhabitable--for poets and lovers!” Near-by in
the woods is a study, costing $25. “It is 8×10, and sounds small; but
it holds a table, a book-case, a stove, a trunk, two chairs, and an
unpopular novelist”--who presently was to write there a book that would
be read all over the world.[9]
It is a brave description; but certain reflections present themselves.
This “Spartan” simplicity, one feels sure, is not dictated entirely
by poverty, but by a Spartan temperament; and one is equally sure
that the Corydon of whom one has read in _Love’s Pilgrimage_,
however delighted she might be at having a house of her own to be
mistress of at last, would have preferred something less bleak. She
was not Spartan: she was Corinthian, rather; and her tastes have not
been consulted, or have been sternly overruled, in the planning of
this home. One looks at the photograph so proudly furnished; a neat,
bleak, Quakerish place, for whose drabness poverty does not wholly
account--the home of an ascetic, a despiser of soft living, of comfort,
of ease; the home of one who recognizes the uses “of bread and bacon,
of a stove and a woodpile”, and scorns all beauty except that “of
prayer and music, of joy and love, of wisdom and high resolve”, and
perhaps of “beautiful books in an occasional rare instance”--a moralist
still! And one remembers, in one of Corydon’s letters in _Love’s
Pilgrimage_, the wistful cry: “Oh, but how I want a poor taste
of joy!” One might guess that a girl of her temperament would be
exasperated into rebellion by a husband who was afraid of beauty and
joy in its most innocent forms, afraid even of his love of her; and
that this rebellion would take forms calculated to torment and madden
even him out of his Olympian austerity. Not a happy prospect for this
marriage! But even if it should ultimately prove too great a strain for
either of them to endure, it was meanwhile breaking down, apparently
as far as human experience was capable of doing so, his imaginative
resistance to reality; and its robust influences, combined with those
of a new philosophy of life, to be discussed later, served to make, out
of a conceited boy-poet, a man and a writer.
VIII. THE JOURNAL OF ARTHUR STIRLING
I.
In 1903 there appeared a book entitled _The Journal of Arthur
Stirling_, purporting to be the real diary of a young poet who
had, after a bitter and unsuccessful struggle, committed suicide. An
editorial introduction, signed “S.”, gave a sketch of the poet, and
quoted from a New York newspaper a notice of his death “by suicide in
the Hudson River”.
The book was something of a sensation among that small class of
American readers who cared enough about their country or its literature
to be moved by the thought of a poet being driven to suicide by neglect
in the midst of one of the richest cities in the world. The book was
widely reviewed, and though it was generally felt that Arthur Stirling
was a “difficult” young man, abnormally sensitive in his attitude
toward life and overstrained in his attitude toward his art, the book
was praised by those who knew artists as a true picture of young
genius.[10]
The book incidentally related certain rebuffs and indignities at the
hands of editors and publishers. And these publishers, recognizing
themselves in the story, did not fail to recognize the young poet as
Upton Sinclair--and so the truth came out. The critics, especially
those who had compared the journal of Arthur Stirling with the diary
of Marie Bashkirtseff, resented being hoaxed, and discussion of the
book ceased. It was treasured, however, among discerning readers as
being, despite the fact that its author was still alive and kicking,
a sufficiently authentic account of the exasperated psychology of the
young artist in his struggle with poverty and neglect.
Time has confirmed that judgment; the book remains a permanently
valuable and interesting contribution to our knowledge of what may
without prejudice be called youthful genius, and--more than that--a
moving plea on its behalf.
But it is further interesting to us as a stage in its author’s
development. It was the second book after his marriage, and it deals
directly with his own most acute problems--not only the problems of
poverty and neglect, but with the psychic problem involved in his own
conception of himself, his destiny, and his duties.... The book was
written feverishly, day and night, during six weeks in the spring of
1902, on an island in the St. Lawrence River. His son had been born in
the previous December. The birth of his child had necessarily altered
the course of his life; it had bound him to reality. And it was with
the inescapable necessity of such an alteration in the course of his
life, the necessity of making terms with reality, that he was now
in violent inward struggle. He had, by rebellion, just previously,
established himself as a poet and a free soul; as such he had no
chains; even his marriage had by prescriptive arrangement involved
no human obligations whatever; he stood alone, and compromised with
nothing. And he had hardly had time to enjoy this freedom when it was
snatched away from him, not by a world that he could defy and resist,
but by Nature--including his own newly discovered Human Nature. If it
was an evil and ugly world that kept him in poverty, it was something
in himself which could scarcely be dismissed as ugly or evil that bound
him to his wife and child. And it was at the behest, not of the world,
but of this something in himself, that he had to compromise, and give
up his freedom. In giving it up, he gave up necessarily what had been
his fundamental conception of himself, as a Poet, consecrated only to
his career, free from every other duty. A painful renunciation, and
one which he would be slow to make. In leaving, then, his wife and
child, to go away and write this book, he was not merely attempting
desperately to make some money, he was taking this occasion to deal in
terms of art with the internal conflict which obsessed him.
The Arthur Stirling of the book was based in part upon Sinclair’s
imaginings concerning the life of an actual young poet whom he had
met once or twice--a waiter and a snow-shoveller, who had sought a
publisher in vain, yet of whom it had been said by an eminent poet in
Sinclair’s hearing that “he had written lines not surpassed by one
of his years since Keats”. But it was chiefly, of course, based upon
his own experience as a neglected writer. It begins, however, with
the young poet writing his book--and this part of the story goes back
to, and might be an actual diary of, his life two years before, when
he had made his great break for freedom--when, with a hundred dollars
in his pocket he had left the world behind and gone to a shack in the
country to write his great book.... That is to say, he had gone back
to the days when he was free, to the days when he had a right to think
of himself as a poet. No girl casts her shadow over these pages. The
tragedy must be blamed upon the world, not upon her.... And now, once
more a poet, he savors again in memory the beauty and the pain of the
poetic doom:
It is not merely the vision, the hour of exultation; that is but
the setting of the task. Now you will take that ecstasy, and hold
on to it, hold on with soul and body; you will keep yourself at
that height, you will hold that flaming glory before your eyes,
and you will hammer it into words. Yes, that is the terror--into
words--into words that leap the hilltops, that bring the ends of
existence together in a lightning flash. You will take them as they
come, white-hot, in wild tumult, and you will forge them, and force
them. You will seize them in your naked hands and wrestle with
them, and bend them to your will--all that is in the making of a
poem. And last and worst of all, you will hold them in your memory,
the long, long surge of them; the torrent of whirling thought--you
will hold it in your memory! You are dazed with excitement,
exhausted with your toil, trembling with pain; but you have built
a tower out of cards, and you have mounted to the clouds upon it,
and there you are poised. And anything that happens--anything!--ah,
God, why can the poet not escape from his senses?--a sound, a
touch--and it is gone!
These things drive you mad.--
But meanwhile it is not gone yet. You have still a whole scene in
your consciousness--as if you were a juggler, tossing a score of
golden balls. And all the time, while you work, you learn it--you
learn it! It is endless, but you learn it. In the midst of it,
perhaps, you come down of sheer exhaustion; and you lie there,
panting, shuddering, your hands moist; you dare not think, you
wait. And then by and by you begin again--if it will not come, you
_make_ it come, you lash yourself like a dumb beast--up, up,
to the mountain-tops again. And then once more the thing comes
back--you live the scene again, as an actor does, and you shape
it and you master it. And now in the midst of it, you find this
highest of all moments is gone! It is gone, and you cannot find
it! Those words that came as a trumpet-clash, burning your very
flesh--that melody that melted your whole being to tears--they are
gone--you cannot find them! You search and you search--but you
cannot find them. And so you stumble on, in despair and agony; and
still you dare not rest. You dare not ever rest in this until the
thing is done--done and over--until you have _nailed_ it fast.
So you go back again, though perhaps you are so tired that you are
fainting; but you fight yourself like a madman, you struggle until
you feel a thing at your heart like a wild beast; and you keep on,
you hold it fast and learn it, clinch it tight, and make it yours
forever. I have done that same thing five times to-day without a
rest; and toiled for five hours in that frenzy; and then lain down
upon the ground, with my head on fire.
Afterward when you have recovered you sit down, and for two or
three hours you write; you have it whole in your memory now--you
have but to put it down. And this forlorn, wet, bedraggled
thing--this miserable, stammering, cringing thing--_this_ is
your poem!
Every moment of this lost poetic life is dear to him, infinitely
precious, worthy to be recorded: the egotism, the querulousness, the
hysteria--these, too, are part of the poet’s doom, and beautiful as
such.
I am wild to-day. Oh, how can I bear this--why should I have to
contend with such things as this! Is it not hard enough--the agony
that I have to bear, the task that takes all my strength and more?
And must I be torn to pieces by such hideous degradation as this?
Oh, my God, if my life is not soon clear of these things I shall
die!
Oh, it is funny--yes, funny--Let us laugh at it. The dance-hall
musician has brought home his ’cello! I heard him come bumping
up the stairs with it--God damn his soul! And there he sits,
sawing away at some loathsome jig tunes! And he has two friends in
there--I listen to their wit between the tunes.
Here I sit like a wild beast in a cage. I tell you I can bear any
work in the world, but I can not bear such things as this. That I,
who am seeking a new faith for men--who am writing, or trying to
write, what will mean new faith to millions--should have my soul
ripped into pieces by such loathsome, insulting indignities!
Oh, laugh!--but _I_ can’t laugh--I sit here foaming at the
lips, and crying! And suppose he’s lost his position, and does this
every day!
Now every day I must lay aside what I am doing and sit and shudder
when I hear him coming up the steps--and wait for him to begin
this! I tell you, I demand to be free--I _demand_ it! I want
nothing in this world but to be let alone. I don’t want anybody to
wait on me.--_I don’t want anything from this hellish world but
to be let alone!_
And, in another mood:
To get the mastery of your soul, to hold it here, in your hands, at
your bidding, to consecrate your life to that, to watch and pray
and toil for that, to rouse yourself and goad yourself day and
night for that; to thrill with the memory of great consecrations,
of heroic sufferings and aspirations; to have in your heart the
power of the stars, of nature, of history and the soul of man ...
It is a lingering farewell to a beautiful past. For the Poet must
die. There is no place for him in such a world. When he has suffered
enough, he will take himself out of it. He endures his last indignity,
and faces tranquilly the death toward which he goes. “Do I believe
that I shall ever live again? I know that I shall not.... He has given
me an hour.... My life was beautiful.... There are no thoughts in
Oblivion.”... “No one will find my body, and no one will ever care
about it.”
Three years later Upton Sinclair wrote, in the preface to a new
edition: “No truer book than _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_ has
ever been written; it is the book of all my boyhood’s hopes and dreams,
and it is as dear to me as the memory of a dead child.”
It does preserve, with infinite love, the memory of a dead child--a
dead poet, tenderly and regretfully put to death by his own hand.
It foreshadows the end of an epoch, and the beginning of a new life.
II.
_The Journal of Arthur Stirling_ contained, incidentally, a
message. With the giving up of his own poetic career, he had become
conscious of the needs of others--a class-consciousness in the artistic
realm.
You let every man go his way--you let him starve, you let him
die in any hole that he can find. The poet--tenderest and most
sensitive of all men! the poet--the master of the arts of
suffering! Exposed on every side, nervous, haunted, unused to the
world, knowing how to feel and knowing that alone! Is not his life
an agony under any conditions,--is he not tortured for you--the
world? And you leave him helpless, despairing!
What is the matter with you?--How can you be so blind? There are
some of you who really love books--look and see the story of
genius--if it be not a thing to make you shudder and turn sick.
It has been so through all the ages, and it will be through all
the ages to come until society has a conscience and a soul. Tell
me if there is anything in this world more frightful than the lot
of poets who have been born poor--of Marlowe and Chatterton and
Goldsmith, Johnson and Burns and Keats! And who can tell how many
more choked before even their first utterance?
I can not talk of that, for it makes me sick; but I will talk
of the poets who were born rich. Is it not singular--is it not
terrible--how many of the great stalwart ones were rich? To be
educated, to own books, to hear music, to dwell in the country, to
be free from men and men’s judgments! Oh, the words break my heart!
--But was not Goethe rich, and did he not have these things? And
was not Hugo rich? And Milton? When he left college he spent five
years at his father’s country place and wrote four poems that have
done more to make men happy than if they had cost many millions of
dollars.
But let me come to what I spoke of before, the seven poets of this
century in England.
I name Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne,
Shelley and Keats. I said that six of them were independent, and
that the other--the greatest--died like a dog.
Wordsworth came first; he was young and poor and struggling, and
a friend left him just such an independence as I have cried for;
and he consecrated himself to art, and he revolutionized English
poetry, he breathed truth into a whole nation again.... Think
that the world owes its possession of Wordsworth’s poetry to the
accident that a friend died and left him some money!
I name Byron; he was a rich man. I name Tennyson; he had a little
competence, and gave up the idea of marriage, and for ten years
devoted himself to art; and when he was thirty-two he published his
work--and then they gave him a pension!
I name Browning; Browning went his own way, heeding no man; and he
never had to think about money. I name Swinburne; and the same was
true of him.
I name Shelley; and Shelley was wealthy. They kept him poor for a
time, but his poems do not date from then. When he wrote the poetry
that has been the spiritual food of the high souls of this century,
he lived in a beautiful villa in Italy, and wandered about the
forest with his books....
This state of affairs and its remedy were set forth, a few months after
the publication of the book, in an article entitled _My Cause_,
in the _Independent_. This is the “manifesto” referred to and
fragmentarily quoted on a previous page; it begins:
I, Upton Sinclair, would-be singer and penniless rat, having for
seven years waged day and night with society a life-and-death
struggle for the existence of my soul; and having now definitely
and irrevocably consummated a victory--having routed my last foe
and shattered my last chain and made myself master of my own life:
being in body very weak and in heart very weary, but in will
infinitely determined, have set myself down to compose this letter
to the world, before taking my departure for a long sojourn in the
blessed regions of my own Spirit.
I should not write a letter to the world for the purpose of setting
myself right; being “lord of a thousand dollars,” the world no
longer exists for me. What people think of me is not whispered in
the forests that I love, and I have read my last review, and waited
upon my last publisher, and cringed before my last rejection. The
sole reason for my writing is that in that world there are surely
others, born to sing and to worship, as I was born to sing and to
worship, but born less capable than I in the world’s low way--less
willing to fight the world with its own weapons--less cunning, less
unprincipled, than I. For such there being in the place from which
I have escaped no salvation, and no prospect, save to be stewed and
mashed in misery for a lifetime, as I for seven long years, I could
not greet my Muse until I had flung my banner wide and declared
myself to men.
The remedy which was set forth in equally eloquent terms was an
institution to be supported by rich men for the purpose of endowing
young authors of talent--an “American University of Literature”, with
a Board of Trustees “consisting of the noblest and truest and most
reverent literary men of the time”, employing “a corps of carefully
selected and trained readers” to consider and pass on manuscripts
offered in evidence of the possession of talent worth encouraging:
the standard of judgment being “not what the Public Wants, but what
American Literature wants, and what God wants, and what beauty and
truth and righteousness want....”
Only three years later, judgment upon this scheme was passed by the
author himself in somewhat brutally realistic terms. “I look back
upon it now”, he wrote in the preface to the new edition of the
_Journal_, “as an amusing illustration of the guilelessness of my
attitude toward the world. If any such plan were to be proposed to-day,
I should say that it was a device to emasculate literature, as the
newspaper and the college and the church have all been emasculated;
and I should argue that it were better for the young author to starve
all his life than to compromise with the powers that are in control of
the wealth of the world to-day. My error lay in supposing that it is
literature that makes life, instead of life that makes literature.”
IX. MANASSAS
I.