the book, in dealing with the life of young Thyrsis, his earlier self,
shows less of a detached and mature point of view than might have been
expected. He has identified himself, so far as attitudes toward love
and art are concerned, with his young hero, who was, from any mature
point of view, outrageously wrong (or egregiously neurotic) about both
these important matters.[12] The book’s greatness does not in the least
lie in the direction of self-understanding, let alone self-criticism.
It lies rather in its robust immersion in the stream of life. Nothing
appals the writer; everything is told--it matters not that it is
in impassioned self-defense. Its candor is magnificent, shameless,
beautiful. It succeeds as realism. It is a masterpiece, vastly
different from _The Jungle_, not comparable with it in detachment
or breadth, but not inferior to it in truth and power. It must be named
in any list of great American novels.
IV.
It was an unfinished story. It was intended to be followed by another
book[13] dealing with the later life of Thyrsis, and Corydon his wife.
But actual events in their stormy marriage interfered.
In this ill-matched and ill-fated marriage of theirs, the prime
cause of discord would seem, to an outside observer, to have lain
in the temperament of the husband, with his ignorant poetic fear
of the realities of human love; nor is it strange that this should
have produced in his girl-wife a state of emotional instability and
irresponsibility. Her emotional divagations, though she might undertake
to justify them by modern theories of freedom, would be explained more
truly as her exasperated reactions to his aloof and Olympian nature.
And he, less aloof and Olympian then he seemed, would find himself in
what he later described as “a maelstrom in which a man’s physical,
mental and moral integrity are subtly and bewilderingly tossed and
buffeted and maimed”. They had been involved in this secret and painful
domestic melodrama for eight years. The conclusion of _Love’s
Pilgrimage_ suggests their belief that they had at last achieved a
durable peace and happiness through a frank facing of their problem.
But that hope seems to have been too precarious. Hardly had that book,
with its tender record of their young love, and its high hopes for the
future, been published, than a crisis arrived in their lives, which
ended their marriage. Corydon went away with a lover; and Thyrsis
instituted suit for divorce.
The divorce, after much painful newspaper publicity, was denied,
on grounds of “collusion”. According to the New York laws, if both
parties appear to desire the divorce, that is a reason for not granting
it. These private affairs were the topic of nation-wide newspaper
discussion, into which we need not go. “I felt in those terrible days”,
Sinclair writes in _The Brass Check_, “like a hunted animal
which seeks refuge in a hole, and is tormented with sharp sticks and
smoke and boiling water.” His earning power had been destroyed by the
newspapers; no one would read his books, or publish what he wrote. His
health seemed permanently undermined; he did not think he was going to
live, and he “did not much care”.
He did not wish to appeal the case, because the law required that
the evidence in the case must be printed “and remain public property
forever”. But he had received from his friend van Eeden a letter
assuring him that Holland was a civilized country, where divorce was
granted upon reasonable grounds, without publicity. Accordingly he
went to Holland, in 1912. He intended to spend the rest of his life in
Europe. “It seemed to me that I could not bear the sight of America
again.”
V.
In Holland he obtained his divorce quietly and without scandal. “I
wish”, he says in _The Brass Check_, “to pay tribute to the
kindest and most friendly people I have ever met--the Dutch. When
I came to them, sick with grief, they did not probe into my shame;
they invited me to their drawing-rooms for discussions of literature
and art, and with tact and sweetness they let me warm my shivering
heart at their firesides. Their newspapers treated me as a man of
letters--an entirely new experience to me. They sent men of culture and
understanding to ask my opinions, and they published these opinions
correctly and with dignity. When I filed my divorce suit they published
nothing. When the decree was granted, they published three or four
lines about it in the columns given to court proceedings, a bare
statement of the names and dates, as required by law.”
He goes on to say: “There were many men in Holland, as in England and
Germany and Italy and France, who hated and feared my Socialist ideas.
I made no secret of my ideas; I spoke on public platforms abroad, as
I had spoken at home. When reporters for the great Tory newspapers
of England came to interview me, I told them of the war that was
coming with Germany, and how bitterly England would repent her lack of
education and modern efficiency, and her failure to feed and house her
workers as human beings. These opinions were hateful to the British
Tories, and they attacked me; but they did not attack the author of the
opinions, by making him into a public scarecrow and publishing scandals
about his private life.”
VI.
In the meantime, during his stay in Holland and England, he had written
a novel called _Sylvia_, published in 1913. Its locale is divided
between the aristocratic South and aristocratic Boston; it bears, more
lightly than his New York novels, its inevitable burdens, journalistic
exposition of class-traits, and sociological and moral arguments. Most
unexpectedly, it presents a heroine of authentic charm--a sparkling,
witty, vivacious young Southern girl, whose destiny it is to resist
and at last succumb to the wooing of a young millionaire. It is
unexpectedly tender, also, in its dealings with the South; even the
author’s principles do not blind him to the charm of that environment.
It is the tenderness, perhaps, of nostalgia, of one in exile looking
back across the bitter defeats of adult life to the scenes of his
childhood. It is not, however, a transcript of actual memories; it owes
a good deal to reminiscent tales of the South heard from the friend who
was presently to become his second wife. It is dedicated “To the People
at Home”, and it is the one of all his books which might conceivably
not hurt their feelings.
The story, however, was obviously unfinished; and a secondary theme of
the book, which was emphasized only on the last page, required another
volume for its presentation. This was the theme at the time being
sensationally presented to American playgoers and readers by Brieux,
in his play, _Damaged Goods_--a novelized version of which, with
the playwright’s grateful consent, was written and published in 1913 by
Sinclair.
_Sylvia’s Marriage_, accordingly, which appeared in 1914, relates
the consequences to this marriage of her husband’s pre-marital wild
oats, in the form of a blind baby--a result accounted for with
satisfactory realism. The novel, however, rises far above merely
propaganda effects in dealing with the life of his heroine after
she has left her millionaire husband and come back with her blind
baby to live in the Southern home of her childhood. A realistically
disillusioned woman, she is neither pathetic nor embittered, nor has
she lost her charm, her wit, or her brilliance. These qualities,
deepened rather by her tragic experience, are her weapons in the
ensuing struggle with her family and friends and the milieu in general.
For here she observes, in the habits of the young blades and in the
sheltered ignorance of the young belles, the possible origins of other
such tragedies as hers; and with a realistic and reckless candor she
intervenes in more than one engagement, to the bewildered shock of her
family and the malicious amusement of the town. These pages are true
high-comedy, as fine as anything of the sort that English or American
fiction has to offer. The duel between this disillusioned and frank
young matron and the conventional reticences of the polite world is
done with a masterly hand. But fiction of this sort, except from the
most distinguished foreigners, was at the time considered disreputable
in America, because it dealt frankly with sex; and now, by a swing of
the wheel of fashion, it would be considered unduly moralistic.
Comments have been made in these pages on the cramping effects upon
some of this writer’s fiction by his moral conceptions; and it will
be in place here to note that these moral conceptions have been
complained of, not because they were moral, but because they involved a
distaste for the subject in hand, and led to an undue slighting of its
realities. But in the case of this novel, the moral conceptions lead
rather to a richness of truth in dealing with the subject in hand, and
are consequently not to be complained of by one whose interest is in
the business of getting life into terms of fiction. If some of the more
romantic aspects of sexual adventure are neglected by Sinclair, in his
preoccupation with certain of its realistic consequences, that is to be
expected, and is all the more readily to be forgiven since the aspects
which he neglects are sufficiently celebrated elsewhere. He has taken a
difficult aspect of the sexual theme and, throughout the latter part of
this novel, handles it magnificently.
Some references have also been made in these pages to the neurotic
attitudes toward sex displayed by its subject in his earlier life; and
the argument might be expected here that his preoccupation with the
frightful physical dangers of sexual adventure is an illustration of a
neurotic fear. There is little doubt that it is the neurotic conflicts
in the minds of all artists which lead them to their particular themes:
the important question is what they then do with those themes. Do
they get truth and beauty out of them? Upton Sinclair’s opinions, as
such, on the whole subject of sex, will be dealt with later on. For
the present, it needs merely to be said that he has, in _Sylvia’s
Marriage_, artistically justified his emotional preoccupation with
the sterner and sadder aspects of a theme which has many aspects.
VII.
He had never expected to return to America. He did return, however,
in 1913, and in the course of the year was married to Mary Craig
Kimbrough. She was of an old Southern family, and at the time of the
wedding, in Virginia, her husband noted that the event was respectfully
treated by the newspapers; which, he remarks in _The Brass Check_,
was explained by the information contained in the news dispatches, to
the effect that the bride’s father was “one of the wealthiest men in
this section, and controls large banking interests.”
If, however, the newspapers had presumed that the groom was henceforth
to lead a correct and respectable literary life and keep out of radical
politics, they were mistaken.
XII. KING COAL
I.
Once back in America, Sinclair was inevitably drawn into the field of
agitation. From a winter in Bermuda, where he had written _Sylvia’s
Marriage_, he returned to investigate the coal strike then going on
in Colorado. It was a sufficiently dramatic episode in our industrial
history; eleven thousand miners, with their wives and children,
on strike and evicted from company-owned homes, were living in
tent-colonies that had been raided and shot up by gun-men--and finally
machine-guns had been turned on them, their tent-colony at Ludlow had
been burned, and three women and fourteen children had been suffocated
to death. Yet this news was being published only, with the most rare
and meager exceptions, in the Socialist papers. Sinclair resolved
to break this conspiracy of silence. Being convinced that John D.
Rockefeller, Jr., was personally responsible for the tactics of the
mine-owners, he went to Mr. Rockefeller’s office and asked that he meet
and talk with an eyewitness of the barbarities with which the strike
was being repressed. The interview was denied. Then Sinclair hit on
the idea of inviting a group of people to put bands of crêpe around
their arms and walk in silence up and down in front of 26 Broadway,
the Rockefeller offices, in token of mourning for the dead women and
children of Ludlow. Picketing, except in labor strikes, was then a new
publicity device, though the suffragists afterward made it familiar.
Reporters were informed of the plan, and were on hand next morning when
the demonstration began, together with a great crowd. There were also
policemen, who told the pickets to go away. They replied that what they
were doing was not unlawful, and continued. They were then arrested.
They were followed by reporters to the police station, and Sinclair
was there interviewed. He explained the purpose of the demonstration,
and told the entire story of the Colorado coal strike. Within a few
hours the newspapers were on the street with the story emblazoned on
the front page, with three or four columns of news of the strike,
as contained in the interview. The device had been successful: the
conspiracy of silence was broken.
The pickets were fined and, on refusing to pay their fines, were locked
up in the Tombs. The newspapers sneered at this “pink-tea martyrdom”,
as one of them described it, and said that the demonstration was
actuated by “no genuine desire to effect a reform”, but only by “a
morbid craving for notoriety”. Nevertheless the papers sent special
correspondents to the coal fields, and the strike news continued to
occupy the front page.
After Sinclair’s arrest, his wife took up the demonstration. She was
not arrested, but a false report that she had been was sent out by the
Associated Press, which brought her mother in alarm to New York, with
the news that her father had disinherited her after reading the morning
paper. She continued to marshal the demonstration for two weeks, and
her husband reports that her habitual “Southern lady” airs awed the
policemen so much that they kept everybody else off the sidewalk so
that the silent parade she was leading should have room to walk up and
down undisturbed. A Southern lady is accustomed to having her way; and
when she decided that her husband had been in jail long enough, she
serenely interrupted court proceedings to have that matter attended to.
“In the South, you understand,” says Upton Sinclair, “anything from a
court to a fire-engine will stop to pick up a lady’s handkerchief”--and
it appears that the air of expecting such consideration is effective
also in the North. But these public demonstrations, however much she
might approve of them in principle, were so alien to her Southern
tastes that after going calmly through each day’s ordeal she would come
home at night and cry.
The investigation of the strike now took Sinclair to Colorado, where
he undertook to attack the problem of news-suppression at its source,
and succeeded in putting the Associated Press on its defense before the
world. The whole story is told in _The Brass Check_. Returning
to the East, he found that a group of radicals had been arrested
for holding a street-meeting in Tarrytown, New York, whither Mr.
Rockefeller had retired from the storm of publicity to the seclusion of
his estate. Sinclair then went to Tarrytown on behalf of free speech,
and, being forbidden to hold a street-meeting and unable to rent a
hall, he persuaded a millionaire neighbor of Mr. Rockefeller’s to give
him the use of an open-air theater for a meeting to discuss the “Ludlow
massacre”. In the meantime the Broadway demonstration case had been
appealed; and in due time the higher court had handed down its august
decision, affirming the decision of the police magistrate, on the
ground--highly instructive to a man who had been ridiculed and insulted
for so many years by the newspapers--that “no citizen has a right
to rebuke another citizen by subjecting him to ridicule or insult”.
There was, however, a difference in these cases: Mr. Rockefeller was a
millionaire.
II.
Returning to the literary life for a time, Sinclair edited, that
summer, while living at Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y., _The Cry for
Justice_, “an anthology of social protest: the writings of
philosophers, poets, novelists, social reformers, and others who have
voiced the struggle against social injustice: selected from twenty-five
languages, covering a period of five thousand years”, with an eloquent
introduction by Jack London (1915). And later he put his knowledge
of the Colorado situation into a novel, _King Coal_, which was
published in 1917.
_King Coal_ is perhaps as fine a labor novel as could be written
under the disability of having a young aristocrat for its hero. The
disability, moreover, is not so great as might be imagined in the
light of _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_. This young
aristocrat is, happily, different from the young aristocrat in those
books. He is not so naïve, his morality is at least not so oppressively
solemn, he is robust, high-spirited, humorous, and likeable; as the
somewhat rebellious son of a coal-magnate, he gets a job, not in his
father’s mines, for he would be recognized there, but in the mines
belonging to the father of a chum, and not merely sees what is going
on but takes an active part in the highly exciting events that happen,
including the organization of a union, an abortive strike, and a
mine-explosion. The working people in the book are, though minor
figures, real enough to remind us that this book is by the author
of _The Jungle_. The theme is really fictionized, not merely
served up in journalistic hunks. The propaganda is implicit though
all-pervading. There is even a shadowy but real “love-interest”, thus
described by Georg Brandes in his introduction to the book:
“Most beautifully is this [the author’s poetic attitude] shown in Hal’s
relation to a young Irish girl, Red Mary. She is poor, and her daily
life harsh and joyless, but nevertheless her wonderful grace is one of
the outstanding features of the book. The first impression of Mary is
that of a Celtic Madonna with a tender heart for little children. She
develops into a Valkyrie of the working-class, always ready to fight
for the workers’ right.”
True and interesting as it is, it leaves considerable to be desired as
fiction. The young aristocrat, even in this likeable guise, impedes
rather than develops the labor theme. The story, told from the point
of view of Red Mary, might not have been so clear an exposition of
all the facts, but it might have been--it could have been--another
_Jungle_. It does credit to the author’s intelligence rather than
to his powers of human feeling. Even the great mine disaster is not,
from the point of view necessitated by the choice of a sympathetic
outsider as the central figure rather than one directly involved, a
tragedy. But, in not attempting a more vital treatment, it does not
fail. It is a minor, and on its own limited plane a brilliant, success.
XIII. JIMMIE HIGGINS
I.
After a winter in the South, at Gulfport, Miss., Sinclair went to
California in 1915, and made his home at Pasadena, where he continued
to reside.
In the meantime there was a war going on in Europe, toward which
Sinclair as a Socialist had to orient his views. The international
Socialist movement had been traditionally and on principle
anti-militaristic; but in all the European countries involved, the
conservative elements of the party had found reasons for abandoning
these principles and supporting the war. In America the intellectual
leadership of the party was almost entirely in favor of declaring war
on Germany. Sinclair had written pacifist articles in the past; but
he regarded German militarism as a menace to the Socialist hope of
revolution, and he joined with a group of Socialist intellectuals,
including W. J. Ghent, Charles Edward Russell, J. G. Phelps Stokes,
and William English Walling, in issuing a _Practical Program for
Socialists_, in which it was urged that Socialists should “adjust
themselves to events”, and further recommended a large war budget,
universal military training, and conscription of both male and female
citizens. After the announcement of the resumption of unlimited
submarine warfare by Germany, Sinclair telegraphed to President
Wilson, on February 3, 1917:
“As one who has devoted his life to a passionate struggle for
Democracy, I cannot remain silent in this hour of Democracy’s
greatest peril. To delay naval action in this crisis is to give
Germany all she wants and to risk the existence of everything for
which a lover of freedom cares to live. On the other hand you
have a chance to take the greatest forward step in history if in
offering the American fleet to keep open the sea lanes to England,
you obtain agreement by allied nations that all territory taken
from Central powers in this war shall be neutralized and made
forever independent under international guarantee.”
The rank and file of the American Socialist party were, however, still
anti-militarist, and on April 11, five days after the declaration
of war, the party in special convention at St. Louis, adopted by a
three-fourths vote a platform denouncing war and national patriotism
and opposing enlistment by the workers in this war. The familiar
theoretic Socialist position on war was thus reaffirmed: “The only
struggle which would justify the workers in taking up arms is the great
struggle of the working class of the world to free itself from economic
exploitation and political oppression. As against the false doctrine of
national patriotism, we uphold the ideal of international working-class
solidarity. In support of capitalism we will not willingly give a
single life or a single dollar; in support of the struggle of the
workers we pledge our all.... We brand the declaration of war by our
government as a crime against the people of the United States and
against the nations of the world.”
Such was the majority report. A minority report sponsored by John
Spargo, held it “our Socialist duty” to help “our nation and our allies
to win the war as speedily as possible”, and another minority report
proposed to “recognize the war as a fact” and to promote an early and
democratic peace. The action of the convention was not final, and
the platform as adopted was submitted to a referendum of the whole
membership. Though the party was afterward considerably demoralized by
the defection of so many of its intellectual leaders, their counsels
were in this crisis unhesitatingly rejected, and the anti-war platform
was ratified by a 12 to 1 vote. Sinclair was one of a number of
prominent Socialists who then resigned from the party. He issued an
address to his former comrades, in which he said:
I cannot but believe, Comrades, that the difference between our
opinions comes from the fact that I have lived in Germany and know
its language and literature, and the spirit and ideals of its
rulers. Having given many years to a study of American capitalism,
as it exists in the domain of the beef trust, the steel trust,
and the coal trust, I am not apt to be blind to the defects of my
own country; but, in spite of these defects, I assert that the
difference between the ruling class of Germany and that of America
is the difference between the seventeenth century and the twentieth.
I find those with whom I talk here in the West utterly unable
to conceive what the Prussian ruling class is. They cite its
modernness, its use of science; failing to realize that this is
precisely the thing which makes it dangerous--a beast with the
brains of an engineer....
“I intend,” he said in conclusion, “to go on working for Socialism as
hard as I can....”
From April 1918 to February 1919 he published _Upton Sinclair’s_,
a monthly magazine with the subtitle “for a clean peace and the
internation”. It was devoted to what its editor believed to be
President Wilson’s war and peace policies. He took the Wilsonian
idealism at its face value, and not unnaturally believed that the
President had secured the proper pledges from the allied governments.
And so, having identified himself for the time being with this
idealistic and eloquent administration, he was doing his bit, by
propaganda among recalcitrant radicals, to help win the war that was to
make the world safe for democracy.
II.
In 1918 he commenced publication, first in his own magazine, and after
its discontinuance in the _Appeal to Reason_, of a war novel
called _Jimmie Higgins_.