less articulate members of the party--those who carried the soap-box
and set up the gasoline torch at street meetings, not those who made
the speeches. The book was to begin with an affectionate and faithful
picture of the type; and it went on to show Jimmie’s bewilderment in
this war situation, and the arguments by which he was kept out of the
war and urged into it. Presently, however, in accordance with the
author’s pro-war animus, Jimmie succumbs to the example of several good
Socialists, including a German comrade who is anxious to help overthrow
the Kaiser, and enlists in the army. Here the story begins to take on
sweetly fabulous outlines. Being torpedoed on his transport, Jimmie is
waited upon in hospital by the Honorable Beatrice Clendenning, a member
of the British aristocracy, and is genially indulged in Socialist
argument by His Majesty the King of England.
“We’ve had some terrible poverty,” admitted His Majesty. “We shall
have to find some way of getting rid of it.”
“There ain’t no way but Socialism!” cried Jimmie....
Jimmie then, by single-handed heroism, stops the German army with a
machine-gun, winning the battle of “Chatty Terry” and in fact the war.
“The whole course of the world’s history might have been different”,
it is playfully related, “if one little Socialist machinist from
Leesville, U. S. A., had not chanced ...” etc. Wounded and sent to base
hospital, he there fraternizes across the social chasm with a rich and
formerly sinful young man: one who had actually seduced other men’s
wives, and had got properly punished for it earlier in the story in
the manner of Abelard; the war has made him democratic and thoughtful,
and Jimmie learns from him that even the rich are unhappy.... It was
a piece of fiction calculated to break down the anti-war morale of
Socialist readers.
There is an important difference, however, to be noted between him and
the other intellectual Socialist leaders who had left the Party. Most
of these became bitter and venomous opponents of the revolutionary
movement, and used every opportunity to denounce it, particularly
in its newest form of Russian Bolshevism, in what they had been
accustomed to call “the capitalist press”. The same opportunities were
offered to him. Here, indeed, was his opportunity, such as more than
one “leader of revolt” has not failed to take advantage of, to endear
himself to those rich and powerful classes whose hatred had driven
him into poverty and neglect. He might have become a fashionable and
prosperous war-time renegade. But when he, too, was offered large sums
of money for speeches or articles to help in defeating certain anti-war
Socialists in important municipal elections, he was astonished and
hurt. “What do they think I am?” he asked. “When this is all over, I
shall be back in the ranks again.”
And he was presently back in the ranks again.
It was the intervention of the United States against the Socialist
government of Russia, and the private anti-Soviet war conducted by
the Administration after the armistice with Germany, which ruthlessly
disillusioned him as to President Wilson’s idealism.
History was kind to him. The intervention of American arms in Siberia
came in time for him to let Jimmie Higgins share in his disillusion.
The final chapters of that novel show Jimmie Higgins sent with the
American forces to Siberia, to fight against the new Socialist
Republic. Jimmie fraternizes with the Bolsheviks, and learns the truth
from them. “He”--like his creator--“had swallowed their propaganda, he
had filled himself up on their patriotism, he had dropped everything
to come and fight for Democracy.... And now they had broken their
bargain with him....” He distributes Bolshevik propaganda among his
fellow soldiers--as happened at Archangel in actuality, when American
regiments mutinied and refused to fight. Jimmie is caught at it, and
tortured to make him betray his comrades. But the thumbscrews and the
water-cure fail to break his spirit. That chapter is called “Jimmie
Higgins Discovers His Soul”. In the next and final chapter--“Jimmie
Higgins Votes for Democracy”--he escapes from his tormentors by going
insane. The effect is to give the previous naïvely pro-war chapters an
effect of fine irony. A sympathetic American critic, Carl Van Doren,
finds that the novel “showed traces of a romantic pulse, settling
down, however, toward the end, to a colder beat”. It was the late and
necessary disillusionment of a too hopeful and generous mind.
III.
In 1920 came _100%: The Story of a Patriot_, published in England
under the title of _The Spy_. Let Mr. Van Doren continue: “It is
the colder beat which throbs in _100%_, with a temperature which
suggests both ice and fire. Hardly since _Jonathan Wild_ has
such irony been maintained in an entire volume, as that which traces
the evolution of Peter Gudge from sharper to patriot through the foul
career of spying and incitement and persecution opened to his kind of
talents by the frenzy of non-combatants during the war. To this has
that patriotism come which on the red fields of Virginia poured itself
out in such unstinting sacrifice; and, though the sacrifice went on
in France and Flanders, was it worth while, Mr. Sinclair implicitly
inquires, when the conflict, at no matter what distance, could breed
such vermin as Peter Gudge? Explicitly he does not answer his question;
his art has gone, at least for the moment, beyond avowed arguments,
merely marshaling the evidence with irresistible ironic skill and
dispensing with the chorus. _100%_ is a document which honest
Americans must remember and point out when orators exclaim, in the
accents of official idealism, over the great days and deeds of the
great war.”
A less sympathetic critic might find this book somewhat too hard,
somewhat too relentless--might protest that even “such vermin” as a
labor-spy might be credited with an occasional and irrelevant impulse
of kindness, of human decency, or of shame. It might perhaps be said
that in this book the realist has labored to repay to grim truth the
immense debt which the illusioned poet had so splendiferously incurred
during the war.[14]
XIV. THE BOOK OF LIFE
I.
“Why do you always think of things first?” H. G. Wells wrote to
Sinclair, upon receiving _The Book of Life_. “I should have been
at that in a year or two. I may still do it in spite of you.”
It was in fact a book of a more or less Wellsian sort, in scope if not
in treatment. It was published in 1921 and 1922. “The writer of this
book”, says the introduction, “has been in this world some forty-two
years. That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have
made many painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking
about him, he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering for
lack of that same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This
being the case, it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus
the pain.
“There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year,
asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is dying of
cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to
make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women?
A man has invested his savings in mining-stock, and can I tell him what
to do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little
time for self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to
read? Many such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of
people, earnest, hungry for happiness. The things they need to know are
not taught in the schools, nor in the newspapers they read, nor in the
church they attend.”
He promises that he “will not pretend to know what he merely guesses,
and where it is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally,
it is a kind book; it is not written for its author’s glory, nor for
his enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you in
the brief span of your life. It will attempt to show you how to live,
how to find health and happiness and success, how to work and how to
play, how to eat and how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care
for your children, how to deal with your fellow men in business and
politics and social life, how to act and how to think, what religion to
believe, what art to enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the
books phrase it!”
II.
The prophet, in his most realistic mood, becomes a teacher of
mankind. And the prophet in Upton Sinclair has been considerably
disillusioned and humbled before undertaking this task. There are
here no overweening airs of seership; and though the book seeks to
generalize too much from a specific life experience, it is none the
less valuable on that account. If no one is wise enough to tell all of
us how to live, we can nevertheless learn something from those who
tell the truth about themselves. This is the counsel of a man who has
seen, lived and suffered much, who has kept through trying years his
faith that life has a meaning to be discerned by the human mind, who
believes resolutely that, in large affairs and in small, knowledge
gives us power. If it reveals the limitations of his knowledge, it is
nevertheless an invigorating book, dealing as it does simply, sincerely
and candidly with the fundamental problems of life. “You have written”,
May Sinclair wrote to him, “the best and sanest things about love, and,
it seems to me, the best and sanest things about society.” And it will
be no serious derogation from this praise if we proceed to emphasize,
for our purposes, its inevitable shortcomings.
The Book of the Mind and the Book of the Body are, on the whole, useful
guides and primers. It is, however, noteworthy that while in the Book
of the Mind there is some awareness of the contributions of modern
psychology to our understanding of life, there is actually no great use
made of such knowledge. The author’s view of life remains, with slight
empirical exceptions, a pre-Freudian view. All life’s difficulties
are apparently to be dealt with by the argumentative method, by
reasonable arguments addressed to presumably reasonable minds. And
such difficulties as are patently not amenable to reform by reasonable
arguments are left entirely out of this purview, or are met with gusts
of moral indignation. That there exists, for instance, among life’s
important problems for young people, such a problem as the successful
establishment of heterosexuality or even the problem of psychic
emancipation from the home, is not at all indicated nor apparently
at all understood. And in default of any useful insight into these
realms of conduct, an undue burden of explanation of human behavior
has to be placed, elsewhere in the book, upon the theory of economic
determinism--which under this severe pressure begins to take on some
mythological characteristics. And this lack of intimate knowledge of
the operations of the mind leaves him with none too adequate defenses
against his own tendency to credulity, in the matter of spiritistic
marvels, where nevertheless he maintains such skepticism as he can
muster.
The Book of the Body though characterized by an over-emphasis, due
to his own unhappy experiences, upon the Stomach, is nevertheless
interesting and useful.
III.
The Book of Love, on the whole very sensible and enlightening, suffers
inevitably from the lack of a really modern psychological apparatus.
His view of the subject proceeds simply and confidently upon the theory
that the sexual arrangements of mankind can be classified exclusively
with reference to the property-systems upon which they depend. This
conception, though in itself a useful one, provides the author with
the opportunity to indulge his own moral animus in the guise of
economic determinism. Whatever in the way of human sexual habits
he doesn’t approve of, becomes an illustration of “exploitation” by
a ruling class. Moreover, in his presentation of what he regards as
objectionable sexual conduct, the psychic burden of his own repressions
becomes sometimes painfully obvious. In relating what he regards as
sexual scandal, he becomes uncritical, incapable of serene thought,
generosity, taste, or humor. He does not permit himself to realize that
it is largely human nature itself that he is condemning, rather than
merely the aberrations of a property system. In more than one passage
he betrays something of his early emotional bias against sex[15]--an
emotion which he rationalizes, not always successfully, into a
preoccupation with its actual dangers.
Yet these pages represent, much more significantly, his escape
from the domination of what he calls “the abominable old ideal of
celibacy”, from which he had suffered. It may be said that he has, in
his conception of marriage, achieved a really sane and healthy ideal.
The treatment of love and marriage give the book its claim to serious
consideration as a guide to life’s young adventurers.... Beyond the
realm of marriage as founded upon what might be called complete or
“true” love, his sympathy and understanding do not extend. Sexuality,
in its possibly neurotic but still normal manifestations, all its
merely adventurous, casual, experimental or play expressions, arouses
in him an undue repugnance. (A reference to modern dancing and
“petting parties” evokes the statement that “society is disintegrating,
going back to the howling and fighting and cannibalism of the jungle”!)
But it would be an injustice to the book to trace and further emphasize
these occasional evangelistic outcroppings in a work whose merits are
all in the direction of sexual sanity and health.
We may, however, pause to disengage one of the author’s characteristic
attitudes for momentary attention, in its relation to his own psychic
development. He believes very strongly in early marriage--at seventeen
or eighteen. He gives many practical reasons for this proposal, but it
is not difficult to perceive the one left unstated, the wish to live
his own life over again and more happily. Indeed, one sometimes feels
that it is to his youthful self that this whole book is addressed: that
he is at forty saying precisely those things which if he had known
them at eighteen would have saved him a world of unhappiness. And the
passage which above all others seems a cry out of the heart, poignant
with infinite regrets, is this advice to married lovers: “Be natural;
be simple and straightforward; and beware of fool notions about sex.”
But it is perhaps due to the author that one word more be said about
him as a guide. It should occasion no surprise to learn that his
guidance must be taken with the usual discrimination. No guide, whether
Aristotle, or Bacon, or Havelock Ellis, has known all the paths of
life. Upton Sinclair is a guide conspicuously lacking in tolerance. Yet
as guides go I do not hesitate to pronounce him an excellent one, if a
little old-fashioned in his methods. If one must be intolerant--and it
is a common human failing--it is better to be intolerant of drunkenness
and debauchery than of, for example, the aspirations of mankind toward
beauty, wisdom, and order. Puritans, it has been remarked earlier in
these pages, are at the present time unpopular in America, where they
are believed to have inflicted upon helpless populations much meddling
and drastic tyranny in the effort to make us better. It is true that
the agrarian revolt against the financial domination of the city,
after its defeat in the political field in the great campaigns at the
turn of the century, has lately been more or less successful in some
rearguard attacks in the cultural field, including certain attempts
to enforce rigid rural codes of morals and manners. At the same time,
the acquisition of a considerable margin of leisure by a large part of
that native population which had hitherto piously believed in keeping
its nose to the grindstone, has resulted in a violent urban repudiation
of former middle-class standards of decency and respectability; and
lacking other approved channels, a vast amount of social and economic
discontent of all sorts is finding expression at present in the new
popular middle class protest against its own former moral narrowness. A
moral nihilism is the approved note at present among the shell-shocked
intelligentsia, and in this comfortable doctrine the prosperous
middle-class is beginning to find spiritual encouragement for the
diversions which enrich its newly-found leisure. It is impossible in
America at the present moment to have any standards of conduct short
of happy chaos without being regarded by the younger intelligentsia as
a Puritan and hateful blue-nosed reformer. And since Upton Sinclair
shares in this execration, it is only just to point out that he is
actually a moral revolutionary, of the kind if not the quality of
Blake or Nietzsche. One might not like to live in a world constructed
according to the wishes of Upton Sinclair; I confess that I should
not; but it would be a world wildly unlike the dreams of our Puritan
forefathers.
IV.
The Book of Society, which concludes this work, contains an analysis
of capitalist society and an argument for its reconstruction upon
Socialist lines--an analysis and argument considerably but not
fundamentally modified in the light of the Russian revolutionary
experience; he prefers to hope for a peaceful solution of the economic
problem, and makes various proposals to that end, which would obviate
the disorder of an otherwise inevitable and violent revolution. This
peaceful reconstruction, he declares, could begin at once “if we had
sufficient intelligence.... And will anyone maintain,” he asks, “that
it is the part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent
course than he knows?” It is by these views that Sinclair remains,
despite his broad sympathies, identified with the pre-war Socialist
movement, as distinguished from the post-war movement which denominates
itself Communist.
XV. THE GREAT PAMPHLETS
I.
Modern industrial America has proved a difficult theme for the artists
whose business it is to handle it. There have been two recognized
attitudes of literary approach to this theme. The first, to be found
in the popular magazines, is an attitude of uncritical adulation
and blatant celebration of the advantages which accrue to its
beneficiaries. The other attitude, now found increasingly in fiction
appealing to the intelligentsia, is one of hopeless sentimental protest
against a machine civilization which is conceived as utterly vicious,
spiritually degrading, and altogether too hideous and uninteresting to
be worth picturing in any realistic detail--the space being occupied
instead by accounts of the miseries of the sensitive and artistic
souls who are represented as its chief victims. A welcome from the
American intelligentsia awaits any writer who will picture present
conditions as a confused and hopeless chaos; and on the other hand a
vast popularity, though with no such critical esteem, awaits the writer
who will uncritically celebrate the joys of riding about in expensive
motor cars, eating at expensive restaurants, playing at expensive
sports, indulging in expensive adultery, and exploiting generally
the advantages which accrue to the beneficiaries of the industrial
process. From a literary point of view, the objection to both these
methods is that they fail to come to grips with their subject.
In so new, vast and confusing a heap of materials as modern industrial
America presents, what is needed first of all is a pattern, an
ideological map of the scene. The old patterns will scarcely do--at
least those patterns which concern themselves narrowly with the
fortunes of individuals, against a background which can be taken for
granted. Here the background is of greater importance, and it is with
masses or groups of men that the story must needs be concerned. Or so
it would seem. The most successful experiment in this kind of fiction
was made by Frank Norris in _The Octopus_; there the canvas was
sufficiently large for the event portrayed, a farmer-railroad war.
But he failed to follow up this method in his succeeding book, _The
Pit_, where attention was concentrated upon a few individuals. A
literary problem is here involved, which has not yet been successfully
solved in fiction. Upton Sinclair’s _Jungle_ did suggest that one
solution lay in putting, as he declared he had attempted, “the content
of Shelley in the form of Zola.” But in his immediately succeeding
books, _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_, he failed
to make his wealth of reported detail a living part of his story. The
problem might have advanced further toward a solution, but for the
serious discouragements which American literature suffered, for more
than a decade, at the hands of those timid business classes who felt
that their interests were endangered by truthfulness in fiction; and
now that the younger writers in America are in general revolt against
the censorship of respectability, their daring has manifested itself
chiefly so far in venturing to deal frankly with sexual themes, leaving
almost everything else untouched. The problem still remains. But it is
again being attacked, in the field which precedes perhaps by necessity
the fictional one, that is to say in pamphleteering.
It was pamphleteering--magazine “muck-raking” as it was called--which
preceded and accompanied the great fictional period with which the
names of Frank Norris, Jack London and Upton Sinclair are associated.
That period of pamphleteering had scientific rigor as its goal; a
series of magazine articles on railroad corruption was praised by
saying that it read “like an interstate commerce report”. The new
period of pamphleteering is no less scientifically rigorous in its
factual basis, but it is more human, robust, vigorous, eloquent,
humorous, satirical, personal--and in these respects approaches
and sometimes achieves the effects of imaginative literature. This
pamphleteering at its best has the narrative and dramatic and
psychological excitements of the novel; and it does what the novel has
but seldom succeeded in doing, it comes to grips with the American
theme. It does so by virtue of having patterns which include the
tumultuous and shifting details of this theme--ideological maps of
the landscape, by which the writer can guide us swiftly from point
to point; and most of all, perhaps, it succeeds by reason of having
no such restricted personal scope as the novelist habitually feels
obliged to confine himself to: it deals with the broad panorama of
life. It furnishes perhaps the experimental models of a fiction soon
to be born, able to cope with such a theme as America presents. In any
event, it stands, in its foremost examples, as the latest and greatest
achievement of contemporary American literature.
And, as might perhaps have been expected, it is one of the surviving
leaders of the gallant fictional campaign of twenty years ago who
has set the pace in this new effort. Baffled, it would seem, by the
difficulty of getting so huge a drama into fiction, Upton Sinclair has
magnificently turned all his powers loose into the generous medium
of pamphleteering--to use that term in the sense not of small but of
controversial books.