upon his immense celebrity as the author of _The Jungle_, falls
within this period when “muck-raking” was being outlawed and editors
and writers taught a lesson by those in control of American business.
He was one of the few who dared to brave this Thermidorian reaction,
and he was chief of those to suffer from it. It is his temerity
which explains the fact that his reputation in America as a novelist
fell during that period to zero, or lower. He missed, by remaining a
“muck-raker”, his chance of regaining literary respectability. His next
novel, _The Metropolis_, published in 1907, was an attack on New
York society; and _The Moneychangers_, published in 1908, was an
exposé of Wall Street. Nor is this explanation to be discounted by the
fact that _The Metropolis_ and The _Moneychangers_ were not
very good novels.
The point is worth laboring. Novels far inferior to those two would,
in that period, have maintained Upton Sinclair in American critical
esteem, if they had been of a different tendency; not to realize that
is to be ignorant of American criticism and its fashions. It was the
fashion to sneer at Upton Sinclair, and to accept the yellow-journal
pictures of him, in which he was represented as a mere sensation-monger
and fool to boot. Georg Brandes, generally accounted the world’s
greatest modern critic, was astonished at this American neglect of
one of its greatest writers; on visiting this country in 1914, he
took pains to say to the reporters who met him at the steamer that
there were three American novelists whom he found worth reading, among
these being Upton Sinclair. The statement, as it generally appeared in
the press, referred only to Frank Norris and Jack London, omitting
Upton Sinclair’s name altogether. Doubtless it was naïvely regarded
as incredible that anyone should really take this disreputable
“muck-raker” seriously.... And it was not until a new rebellious
literature and criticism emerged after the war, under the leadership
of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, that Upton Sinclair was again
mentioned among American writers by any reputable native critic who was
not a Socialist.
IV.
_The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_, though better as
propaganda than as art, are nevertheless of interest to us for what
they reveal of their author’s psychology at this period. The former
novel grew out of his observations of the life of the idle rich during
his fame as the author of _The Jungle_. His celebrity made him
naturally an object of curiosity and interest to these rich people;
and its secrets, such as they were, were readily exposed to him. It
happened to be within his power, if so he chose, to remain in such a
life. A group of capitalists had come to him, as he relates in _The
Brass Check_, “with a proposition to found a model meatpacking
establishment; they had offered me three hundred thousand dollars worth
of stock for the use of my name”; and he adds: “if I had accepted that
offer and become the head of one of the city’s commercial show-places,
lavishing full-page advertisements upon the newspapers, I might have
... been invited to be the chief orator at banquets of the Chamber
of Commerce and the National Civic Federation, and my eloquence would
have been printed to the extent of columns; I might have joined the
Union League Club and the Century Club, and my name would have gone
upon the list of people about whom no uncomplimentary news may be
published under any circumstances. At the same time I might have
kept one or more apartments on Riverside Drive, with just as many
beautiful women in them as I wished, and no one would have criticized
me, no newspaper would have dropped hints about ‘love-nests’.” This
opportunity, no temptation in reality, appears nevertheless to have
intrigued his imagination sufficiently to make such a “temptation”
the theme of his new novel. Its hero comes to New York and undergoes
the temptation of wealth and luxury. It is a kind of ironic sequel to
the unfinished trilogy of the Civil War; its hero is the son of the
man who fought in _Manassas_ to save the Union from destruction.
The Union had, by that epic agony, been saved--for what? For this,
says the disillusioned author, pointing to the waste and vulgarity and
triviality of the life of the “Four Hundred”.... It will be seen that
the theme psychologically precedes that of _The Jungle_; and it is
not surprising to find the book revelatory of an actually less mature
point of view than is shown in that masterpiece. Its emotional effects
are of a juicelessly ethical character. The young hero turns his back
upon these temptations, and resolves to earn an honest living! One
remembers Jurgis in _The Jungle_; he could not turn his back on
Packingtown--he had to live its life; and only thus are we enabled to
know what Packingtown was. Yet, through some identification of himself
with his young aristocrat in this later book, the author is unable to
imagine his surrender to metropolitan luxury, even for a moment; so
that we never learn, in any emotional sense, in any sense but that of
factual detail, what metropolitan luxury means. The _dégringolade_
of a high-souled young man under such influences--and possibly his
eventual revolt under other influences--was the story called for by the
theme. It was never written; only the surface details are presented.
So meager a use of the vast powers displayed in _The Jungle_
suggests some internal conflict in connection with this theme, and we
may perhaps be permitted to look there for the answer to this literary
riddle--if it is permissible at all to inquire why a writer does not
always remain at his best.
_The Moneychangers_, a sequel to _The Metropolis_, had the
same central character. The book was based upon the panic of 1907,
of which it undertook to give the “inside story”. It might have been
treated as an epic theme; but it was viewed in too narrow and factual a
way, through the eyes of this aristocratic young moralist-hero, who, as
the total upshot of these events, is merely surprised and shocked that
people can be so bad--and refuses to dine at the house of one of the
scoundrels. There was to have been a third volume; it was written as
a play, _The Machine_, and in it the hero falls in love with the
scoundrel’s daughter, who has in the meantime taken up settlement work
and renounced her father’s riches. It was, then, toward this grand
event that that creation moved!
Jack London had written of _The Jungle_: “It is alive and warm. It
is brutal with life.” No one would say that of _The Metropolis_
or _The Moneychangers_. They are emotionally thin performances.
Ill-health, and poverty after the Helicon Hall experiment (see next
chapter), doubtless partly account for this inadequacy. In both novels
the hero remains essentially untouched by all that goes on about him,
scarcely more than an observer--a disembodied ghost, as it were, of
the author himself, looking on and taking note of all that happens
with an admirable journalistic faculty, but capable of no depth of
human emotions. In _The Brass Check_ the author remarks that
the critics were cross with his hero, saying that he was “a prig”,
and that he “ought to have been really tempted by the charms of the
lovely ‘Mrs. Winnie Duval’,” and he goes on to say: “It has happened
to me, not once, but several times, to meet with an experience such
as I have portrayed in the ‘Mrs. Winnie’ scene, and I never found it
any particular temptation. The real temptation of the Metropolis is
not the exquisite ladies with unsatisfied emotions; it is that if you
refuse to bow the knee to the Mammon of Unrighteousness you become
an outcast in the public mind. You are excluded from all influence
and power, you are denied all opportunity to express yourself, to
exercise your talents, to bring your gifts to fruition. One of the
reasons _The Metropolis_ had a small sale was because I refused
to do the conventional thing--to show a noble young hero struggling
in the net of an elegant siren. The temptation I showed was that of
the man’s world, not of the woman’s; the temptation of Wall Street
offices, not of Fifth Avenue boudoirs. It was a kind of temptation of
which the critics were ignorant, and in which the public, alas, was
uninterested.” Indeed, an interesting theme. And a pity it is that
these novels did not actually deal with it. But we are now perhaps
in a position to make at least a guess at the psychic conflict which
held the author’s emotions so tight-locked during the composition
of those two books: it might well have been, no vulgar conflict of
worldly ambition with his high ideals, but a conflict involving his
old aristocratic emotions--for he had been offered, Tantalus-like,
the opportunities of public leadership, only to have them snatched
out of his grasp--a conflict between the poet-prophet, the Shelleyan
“unacknowledged legislator of mankind”, and the newer humbler rôle of
the imaginative novelist who identifies himself with weak, suffering,
stumbling, pitiful humanity itself. For a moment he had taken the
latter rôle, and produced a masterpiece of prose fiction. But the poet
in him demanded another destiny; and in that conflict he became neither
poet nor quite novelist, but journalist-agitator.
In the meantime, in 1907, he had published a book entitled _The
Industrial Republic_. Its dedication, “To H. G. Wells, ‘the next
most hopeful’,” is an allusion to an inscription written by Wells in
a book presented to him: “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from
the next most hopeful!” The Wells book was _A Modern Utopia_;
and in this book Sinclair goes him one better. It is sub-titled: “A
Study of the America of Ten Years Hence”. It is a Socialist America
that is thus described, though its Socialism is of so mild a sort
that even the American Socialists of those days must have found it a
somewhat watery potion. “If Mr. Bryan would only procure and read a
really authoritative treatise upon modern scientific Socialism (say
Vandervelde’s _Collectivism and Industrial Evolution_) he would
understand that his programme is so close to that of the Socialists
that the difference would require a microscope to discern.” And this
Bryanesque government-ownership Socialism was to be brought about by
the election, in 1912, of a radical Democratic President, probably
William Randolph Hearst. “It may be, of course, that some one else
will get the Democratic nomination in 1912; that matters not at all
in my thesis--the one thing certain is that it will be some man who
stands pledged to put an end to class-government. Following it there
will be a campaign of an intensity of fury such as this country has
never before witnessed in its history.” This is a remarkably accurate,
if somewhat exaggerated, foreshadowing of the Wilson-Roosevelt-Taft
campaign of 1912, which was fought out fiercely on social issues.
But he goes on to predict an industrial crisis, a new “Coxey’s Army”
marching on Washington, a panic, and then the Revolution: needless to
say a peaceful one. The captains of industry will have been told by
the President that, “since they can no longer run their business, they
must allow the Government to take possession and run it--the price
to be paid for their stock being a matter for future negotiation, and
a matter of no great importance to them in any case, because of the
income and inheritance laws just then being rushed through Congress.”
The revolution, thus defined, was to take place “within one year after
the Presidential election of 1912”. It was a youthful guess that
one need not be ashamed of having made, though one may smile at the
youthful rashness of putting it on record in print; it was based on
some quite widespread Social Revolutionary expectations of the period,
and its immediacy seemed natural enough to a young Utopian in a great
hurry.
But, with a revolution coming in six years, there might have seemed the
less reason for him to discipline his imagination to the novelist’s
difficult and humble task of representing human nature. If this
young writer was to be henceforth of distinguished use to American
literature, he had to suffer more hurts and disillusionments.
XI. LOVE’S PILGRIMAGE
I.
The success of _The Jungle_ in 1906 had put the young author
immediately in possession of some thirty thousand dollars; and
with this money he founded, that fall, at Englewood, New Jersey, a
co-operative undertaking called the Helicon Home Colony. This project
had been outlined in an article that summer in the _Independent_,
in which he said:
“Here am I on my little farm, living as my ancestors lived--like a cave
man or a feudal baron. I have my little castle and my retainers and
dependents to attend me, and we practise a hundred different trades:
the trade of serving meals, and the trade of cleaning dishes, the
trade of washing and ironing clothes, of killing and dressing meat,
of churning butter, of baking bread, of grinding meal, of raising
chickens, of cutting wood, of preserving fruit, of heating a house,
of training children, and of writing books! And all these crowded
into one establishment, in close proximity, and all jarring and
clashing with each other! And all carried on in the most primitive and
barbarous fashion, upon a small scale, and by unskilled hand labor.”
The coöperative argument, as developed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
follows: “It takes a hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals badly,
while twenty cooks could prepare one meal for a hundred families and do
it perfectly.... It takes a hundred ignorant nursemaids to take care of
the children of a hundred families, and develop every kind of ugliness
and badness in them; it would take only twenty or thirty trained nurses
and kindergarten teachers to take care of them coöperatively, and
bring them up according to the teachings of science.” He goes on to
say that “there must be, in and near New York, thousands of men and
women of liberal sympathies, who understand this situation clearly, and
are handicapped by its miseries in their own lives--authors, artists
and musicians, editors and teachers and professional men, who abhor
boarding-houses and apartment hotels, and yet shrink from managing
servants, who have lonely and peevish children like my own, and are no
fonder of eating poisons or of wasting their time and strength than I
am. There must be a few who, like myself, have realized that it is a
question of dragging through life a constantly increasing burden of
care, or making an intelligent effort and solving the problem once
for all. To such I offer my coöperation. I am not a business man, but
circumstances have forced me to take up this problem, and I am not
accustomed to failing in what I undertake.”
Many answers were received to this announcement, and the plan was
experimentally carried out by fifty or sixty people, including ten
children. The colonists bought nine and a half acres of land sloping
down from the Palisades on the Hudson, within an hour of New York
City. There was a large three-story building, formerly a boys’ school,
equipped with a pipe organ, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a
theater, a billiard room, thirty-five bedrooms, a children’s dormitory,
dining-room and play-room, a heating system, etc. Lodging cost $3
a week, meals $5 a week, “or $4 if we only eat two meals”; and the
children were taken care of at a cost of $4 a week apiece.
“I look back on Helicon Hall to-day,” says Upton Sinclair in _The
Brass Check_, “and this is the way I feel about it. I have lived
in the future; I have known those wider freedoms and opportunities
that the future will grant to all men and women. Now by harsh fate I
have been dragged back into a lower order of existence, and commanded
to spend the rest of my days therein. I know that the command is
irrevocable, and I make the best of my fate--I manage to keep cheerful,
and to do my appointed task; but nothing can alter the fact in my own
mind--I have lived in the future, and all things about me seem drab and
sordid by comparison. I feel as you would feel if you were suddenly
taken back to the days when there was no plumbing and when people used
perfume instead of soap.”
This colony of middle-class intellectuals was not a very radical
experiment; but it furnished the newspapers an opportunity for
sensational stories none the less. Reporters were always snooping
about, spying in the nursery and eavesdropping in the pantry, and
going back to write stories about “Upton Sinclair’s love-nest”. When
William James and John Dewey came to visit the colony and talked of
current affairs beside the fireplace, that was not news; but when,
at the weekly dance, according to the democratic traditions of the
place, the resident professor of philosophy danced with the two pretty
Irish girls who waited on the table, that was something to be spread
before a shocked America. Among the reporters was a young Yale College
student named Sinclair Lewis, afterward the famous author of _Main
Street_; he tended furnace at Helicon Hall and afterward wrote it
up for a New York paper. What he wrote was playful, and the colonists
would have enjoyed the fun except that some of them had their livings
to think about. Subsequently an American newspaper was sued for libel
by Upton Sinclair for scandalous lies concerning the Helicon Home
Colony; a retraction and apology were printed, but the American public
continued to believe the worst.
This eminently conservative and, within its own limitations, entirely
successful economic and social experiment came abruptly to an end after
six months. One night in March, 1907, a fire, possibly of incendiary
origin, burned Helicon Hall to the ground, destroying among the total
contents of the house all of the young agitator’s manuscripts and
documents, including certain documents concerning defective armor plate
furnished to American battleships. The Helicon Home Colony was wiped
out.
II.
Upton Sinclair had been for a young author, rich, and thus he had spent
and lost his riches. Now he was a poor man; and for a number of years
he was to be tormented by indigestion and by domestic unhappiness.
He commenced a wandering life, spending the summer of 1907 at Point
Pleasant, New Jersey, the winter at Bermuda, the next summer in the
Adirondacks, meanwhile writing _The Metropolis_ and _The
Moneychangers_. During a winter’s “rest” in California in 1908-9 he
organized a traveling theatrical company to produce Socialist drama,
and put on three of his own plays. He then went with his family to
live at the single-tax colony at Arden, Delaware, where he remained
for three years. During all this time he was the butt and victim of
newspaper mockery and sensationalism. But in 1910 there occurred at
Arden a preposterous incident which relieved the newspapers of the
trouble of making up lies to print about him. The truth, for once, was
amusing enough. Sinclair tells the story in _The Brass Check_.
“Close upon the edge of Arden there dwelt an Anarchist philosopher,
a shoemaker hermit, whose greatest pleasure in life was to rise in
public meetings and in the presence of young girls explain his ideas on
the physiology of sex. The little Economic Club of Arden invited him
to shut up, and when he claimed the privileges of ‘free speech’ the
club excluded him from its meetings and when he persisted in coming,
had him arrested. It happened that the members of this Economic Club
were also members of the baseball team, and they played a game on
Sunday morning; so the Anarchist shoemaker repaired to Wilmington and
swore out warrants, on the ground of their having violated an ancient
statute, dating back to 1793, forbidding ‘gaming’ on the Sabbath. It
happened that I did not belong to the Economic Club, and had nothing to
do with the trouble; but I had played tennis that Sabbath morning, so
the Anarchist shoemaker included me in his warrants.
“So behold us, eleven young men summoned to the office of a Wilmington
Justice of the Peace one evening, and finding the street packed solid
for a block, and people even climbing up telegraph poles and lamp-posts
to look in at the window and watch the proceedings.”
They were fined, but refused to pay their fines; and so they were
all sent to jail for eighteen hours. “When we came out from the jail
we were met by twenty-two newspaper reporters and three cameramen,
and everything we had to say took the front page, top of column.
Incidentally, I got a curious revelation. For years I had written
poetry, and had never been able to get it published; but now I found
that by the simple device of writing it in jail, I could get it on the
front page of every newspaper in Philadelphia and New York!” He quotes
two lines:
‘And then in sudden stillness mark the sound--
Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide.’
“When my cell-mate, Berkeley Tobey, read those lines, he remarked:
‘That’s me!’ To which I answered: ‘Tobey, that’s you’.”
The cells in which they had spent the night had been characteristic of
the American jail system, filthy and swarming with vermin; they had
been given food unfit for animals. Men were serving life-sentences in
this jail, working in a clothing factory under a sweatshop contractor,
without a spot where they could get a glimpse of sunlight or a breath
of fresh air. What these released members of the Economic Club told the
reporters about conditions in that jail “made an uproar in Delaware”.
Furthermore, they served notice that they were going to have the
Attorney General of the state and the Chief Justice of the supreme
court arrested for playing golf on Sunday, so that they might find out
what it was like in jail. It was decided by the authorities that no
more arrests would be made for “gaming on the Sabbath”, and the prison
commissioners decided to add an exercise court to the prison.
“I look back,” says Upton Sinclair, “upon my life of nearly twenty
years of muck-raking, and am able to put my finger on exactly one
concrete benefit that I have brought to mankind. Twenty or more men who
are serving life sentences in the Newcastle County Workhouse owe it to
me that they get every now and then a glimpse of the sunlight and a
breath of fresh air!...
“Can you blame me,” he asks, “if I stored away in my mind for future
reference the fact that when it is necessary to get some important
news into the papers, I can manage it by getting myself sent to jail?
This”, he adds, “is a discovery which is made, sooner or later, by all
social reformers; and so going to jail becomes a popular diversion and
an honorable public service.”
III.
_Samuel the Seeker_, in 1910, had marked the lowest ebb of its
author’s powers. Indigestion seems to have been largely to blame: “my
poor tummy”, he says, “simply wouldn’t let me feel any emotions.”
Accordingly _The Fasting Cure_, in 1911, an account of the means
by which he had finally restored himself to health, has a closer
relation than it might seem to have to the literary life. Novelists,
like armies in the Napoleonic maxim, get ahead on their stomachs. And
thus there appears, in the same year, another great novel--_Love’s
Pilgrimage_.
It is the story of his own life, or rather, of the earlier part of it,
up to the year 1904. So many references have already been made to it
in these pages, and it has been drawn upon so often for biographical
material, that it will be dealt with here briefly. But a letter from
the Dutch novelist, Frederik van Eeden, may be quoted:
“It is surely your greatest book, and very nearly one of the great
books of the world.... You give wooing, marriage, pregnancy, birth, in
great classic lines.... Of course you have read Zola’s description of a
birth. Yours is better, because it is more human, more poetic. It is
one of the best things in English literature.... This book will make
your world fame.”