they seem to me entirely practical. I want grown-up human beings to
have some serious work to do, something constructive, something which
constitutes their main interest. When they have worked at this with
real, full-sized energy and determination, then let them recreate both
minds and bodies by any kind of play whatever which they enjoy, and
which does not interfere with their ability to go back to their work.”
[5] Detail, from a letter: “Twenty-five cents a week for clean collars
and cuffs, and newspapers. I wore the cuffs up high to keep them from
showing too much and getting soiled too fast. I did not have to buy any
clothes--my cousin H---- used to send me his cast off clothes. My meals
cost $3 a week.”
[6] Comment from a letter: “No human male could have been more
pitifully ignorant of the female critter, body, mind, and soul, than I
was at the age of 21. It was a tragedy, but I was not to blame. It was
the Victorian age.”
[7] In the more-or-less autobiographical novel, _Love’s
Pilgrimage_, it is related of Corydon and Thyrsis that they did
carry out this idealistic plan for a time after they were married. That
version is scarcely more than a dramatic heightening of some of the
facts, and the fiction does make clear the underlying neurotic conflict
in the young poet’s mind.
[8] In 1902 he took the account of this birth-scene to Paul Elmer More,
one of the leaders of the academic school of criticism then in power,
and was told that it could “_never_ be published.”
[9] To be exact, the $25 study was moved on a wagon to a farm near
by in the fall of 1904, and it was there that _The Jungle_ was
written.
[10] For instance, Richard Le Gallienne wrote of it as “at once
an authoritative document, a heart-searching appeal, and a tragic
entertainment. I don’t remember to have seen the old case of ‘the Poet
_versus_ the World’ put with more truth, more vehemence, and more
charm.”
[11] The Intercollegiate Socialist Society was to become the center
of rebellious thought and the forum for free discussion in the
conservative colleges of America. Few students with any spark of
intellectual curiosity but were touched by its liberalizing influences.
[12] This, however, appears to have been deliberate, because he was
going to show how Thyrsis learned, in the second volume.
[13] I have read the manuscript of this unpublished novel, and may be
permitted to express the hope that it will eventually be published.
[14] Sinclair appears, under the name of Sanford Peyton, as a pro-war
Socialist in a novel by the present writer, _An Old Man’s Folly_,
which deals with American pacifists in war-time. Sinclair, in reviewing
the novel, remarks that the war-time opinions attributed to him are
correct, and adds: “I can only tell him that reading them over now
makes me very unhappy, and I find myself with a continual impulse to
get into jail with the rest of his characters! I have had almost ten
years to think the thing over, and what I have to report is that if
at the beginning of 1917 I had known what I know to-day, I would have
opposed the war and gone to jail with the pacifist radicals.” Later in
the review he remarks of the Presidential idealist in whom he believed
at the time: “I cannot forgive him; it is not merely that he made a
fool of himself, but he made a fool of me!”
[15] However, in a letter, Sinclair defends himself against this
charge, saying: “I have no trace of that early bias left. You may think
I have, but I haven’t. What I have is a repugnance to ‘love-making’
without love.”
[16] Since 1926, Long Beach, Cal.