on this continent. The family with which I stayed lived on flour and
bacon; they didn’t even have a cow. Once or twice a year, when they
traveled to a store, they traded skins for salt and cartridges. Later
that summer, on a canoe trip, I stayed with some old people who had a
cow, and lived on skimmed milk and potatoes, trading butter at the store
for tea and sugar. On another trip I met a French-Canadian settler, with
a swarm of half-nourished babies, who did not even have a rifle to keep
the bears out of his pigsty.
XI
Having arranged to meet my mother and some friends at Charleston Lake,
which lies at the head of the little Gananoque River, I bought a canoe,
bundled my stuff into the bow, and set off--so eager for the adventure
that I couldn’t wait until morning. I paddled most of the night up the
misty river, with bullfrogs and muskrats for company, and now and then a
deer--all delightfully mysterious and thrilling to a city youth. I got
lost in the marshes--but the mosquitoes found me, rest assured. After
midnight I came to a dam, roused the miller, and went to sleep in his
garret--until the miller’s bedbugs found me! Then I got out, watched the
sunrise up the river gorge, and stood on the dam and threw flies for
black bass that jumped half a dozen at a time.
I paddled all that day, and stayed a while at a lonely farmhouse, and
asked a hundred questions about how pioneer farmers lived. I remember
coming out onto Charleston Lake, very tired from paddling and from
carrying my canoe over the dams; the wind was blowing up the lake, so
after getting the canoe started, I lay down and fell asleep. When I
woke, my frail craft was grating on the rocks at the far end of the
long lake. I paddled to the hotel; there was a dock, and summer guests
watching the new arrival. I had made the whole journey without mishap;
but now I put out my hand to touch the dock, a sudden gust of wind
carried me out of reach--and over I went into the water with everything
I owned!
This lake was a famous fishing resort, and there were rich men from the
cities amusing themselves with deep-water trolling for large lake trout.
They had expensive tackle, and reclined at ease while guides at four
dollars a day rowed them about. I paddled my own canoe, so I did not
catch so many trout, but I got the muscular development, which was more
important. Doubtless it was my Christian duty to love all the rich
persons I watched at this and other pleasure resorts; but here is one
incident that speaks for itself. The son of a wealthy merchant from
Syracuse, New York, borrowed a shotgun from me, stuck the muzzle into
the sand, and then fired the gun and blew off the end of the barrel. I
had rented this gun in the village and now had to pay for the damage out
of my slender earnings; the wealthy father refused to reimburse me,
saying that his son had had no authority to borrow the gun.
You may notice that here again I was meeting rich and poor; going back
and forth between French-Canadian settlers and city sportsmen.
XII
By the beginning of the year 1900, the burden of my spirit had become
greater than I could carry. The vision of life that had come to me must
be made known to the rest of the world, in order that men and women
might be won from their stupid and wasteful ways of life. It is easy to
smile over the “messianic delusion”; but in spite of all smiles, I still
have it. Long ago my friend Mike Gold wrote me a letter, scolding me
severely for what he called my “Jesus complex”; I answered, as humbly as
I could, that the world needs a Jesus more than it needs anything else,
and volunteers should be called for daily.
I was no longer any good at potboiling and could not endure the work. I
had a couple of hundred dollars saved, and it was my purpose to write
the much talked-of “great American novel.” I counted the days until
spring would be far enough advanced so that I could go to the country. I
had in mind Lake Massawippi in Quebec, just over the New York border; I
was so impatient that I set out in the middle of April, and when I
emerged upon the platform of the sleeping car and looked at the lake, I
found it covered with ice and snow; the train was creeping along at
three or four miles an hour, over tracks a foot under water.
My one desire was to be alone; far away, somewhere in a forest, where
the winds of ecstasy might sweep through my spirit. I made inquiries of
real-estate agents, who had no poetry in their souls and showed me
ordinary cottages. At last I set out in a snowstorm, and walked many
miles down the lake shore, and discovered a little slab-sided cabin--a
dream cottage all alone in a place called Fairy Glen. It belonged to a
woman in Baltimore and could be rented for May, June, and July for
twenty-five dollars. With the snow still falling, I moved in my
belongings. The place had one large room, a tiny bedroom, and a kitchen,
everything a would-be poet could desire.
I built a fire in the open fireplace, and warmed my face while my back
stayed cold; that first night I fiddled vigorously to keep my courage
up, while creatures unknown made noises in the forest outside and
smelled at my bacon hanging on the back porch. Next day I walked to town
to do some purchasing. Snow was still falling. I met a farmer driving a
load of straw or something to town, and he pulled up his horses and
stared at the unexpected stranger. “Hello! Be you a summer boarder?”
“Yes,” I confessed. “Well”--and the old fellow looked about at the
snowflakes in the air--“which summer?”
I had fires of the heart to warm me, and I began to write my wonderful
novel--the story of a woman’s soul redeemed by high and noble love.
_Springtime and Harvest_ I called it, and it was made out of the life
story of a woman I had known, a girl of great beauty who had married a
crippled man for his money, and had come to understand his really fine
mind. At least that is what I imagined had happened; I didn’t really
know either the woman or the man--I didn’t know anything in those days
except music and books and my own emotions.
I would, I fear, be embarrassed to read _Springtime and Harvest_ now;
not even loyalty to this present task has caused me to open its pages.
But at that time I was sure it was the most wonderful novel ever
written. I always do think that about every book I write; the blurb the
publisher puts on the jacket--“This is Upton Sinclair’s best work”--is
perfectly sincere so far as the author is concerned. I write in a fine
glow, expecting to convert my last hostile critic; and when I fail, the
shock of disappointment is always as severe as ever.
XIII
Springtime came at last, and the Fairy Glen was carpeted with flowers.
The little brook in front of the door sang songs to me, and I to it:
I ask you where in your journey
You see so fair a sight,
That you have joy and singing
All through the winter night.
The sunrise over the lake was a daily miracle, and the great winds that
lashed the forest trees were brothers to my soul. Again and again that
ecstasy came to me--no one to interfere with it now--and I labored days
and nights on end to catch it and imprison it in words.
There were comical incidents in my hermithood, of course. Wild things
came to steal the butter that I kept in the spring; I set a trap, and
behold, it was nothing more romantic than a skunk. The little devil
ruined a pair of trousers for me--I not knowing his ways. I left the
trousers to soak in the stream for a week, but all in vain. Worse yet,
my drinking place was ruined for the entire summer.
Also, I must mention the French-Canadian family that lived up on the
mountain side and sent me fresh milk and eggs and butter by a little
ragged boy. I tried out my homemade French on them, and the _mère_ of
the household paid me a high compliment. “Oh, you speak _French_
French!” Now and then she would write me notes, in homemade spelling,
and one of these deserves a wider audience. She explained that she would
not be able to send milk on the morrow because she was going to the
town--“_il me faut faire arracher dedans_.” The vision of the poor
woman having herself “pulled out inside” disturbed me greatly, until I
realized that she meant _some teeth_ (_des dents_).
Summer came, and the city boarders. Halfway to town was a golf links--a
new game, then coming in. I saw able-bodied men driving a little white
ball about a field all day, and it seemed to me more than ever necessary
that they should have a new ideal. I was impatient of every form of
human vanity and stupidity, and if I have become less so with the
passage of the years, it has been merely to spare my digestion.
The summer brought my mother and some friends, including the girl with
whom I was to fall in love. But that is a story I’ll save for the next
chapter; here, I am dealing with the book. I labored over it, sometimes
five or six hours without moving from my seat, and for days at a time
without seeing a soul or thinking about anything else. The human
organism is not made to stand such strain, and I began to notice stomach
trouble. It grew worse and plagued me for years--until I humbled my
stubborn pride and learned mother nature’s lesson--to limit the number
of hours of brainwork, and get some exercise and recreation every day.
Many years later I came upon a saying of old John Burroughs, which came
home to me as truth immortal and ultimate. “This writing is an unnatural
business; it makes your head hot and your feet cold, and it stops the
digestion of your food.”
On the first of August the owner of my fairy cabin took it for her own
use, and I moved up to a lonely farmhouse on the mountainside, where I
became the sole and solitary boarder. I would go out into the
woods--sugar-maple trees they were, and for breakfast I had their juice
in a thick dark syrup, freshly melted. I always have to have a place to
walk up and down while I am working out my stories, and in that
sugar-maple forest I wore a path six inches deep--back and forth, back
and forth, for hours on end every day.
There were mosquitoes, almost as annoying to me as human beings, and
when they found me, I would go out and sit in the middle of a field of
clover hay and do my writing. The crickets hopped over my manuscript,
and the fieldmice nibbled at my shoes; and then came the mowers to
destroy my hiding place. I remember one little French-Canadian whom I
engaged in conversation, and how he rolled up his sleeves and boasted
of the power of his stringy muscles. “You want to mow avec me, il you
faut très strong bras!” I remember also walking miles down the road in
the morning to meet the mail carrier; I had sent the first part of my
great novel to a publisher and was hoping for a reply, but none came. It
was the beginning of an agony that lasted many weary years. My curses
upon those publishers who let manuscripts pile up on their desks unread!
September came, and an invitation from my clergyman friend, Mr. Moir,
who now had a camp at Lake Placid. He asked me to visit him for a couple
of weeks. I was so near the end of my story, I ventured out of hiding;
but I found it was a mistake, because I could do no work at all when I
had to fit myself to the meal hours and other habits of the world. I
tried in vain for a week or two; I remember that I read the letters of
Robert Louis Stevenson in this interval--and very thin and poor they
seemed in comparison with what filled my soul.
At last, in desperation, because cold weather was coming fast, I went
out on one of the islands of Lake Placid and found a little “cook
house”--a tiny cabin with no windows and no furniture but a stove. I
rented it for the sum of five dollars, and spread a couple of blankets;
and with the brown leaves falling in showers about me, and the cries of
blue jays and the drumming of partridges in the air, I wrote the closing
scenes of my tragedy. I later used that little cook house in _The
Journal of Arthur Stirling_. Also I used the siege of the publishers
that was still to come. But of that I had no vision as I bundled up my
belongings and returned to New York, a conquering hero in my own
fantasy. I was carrying in my suitcase the great American novel for
which all the critics of those days were waiting on tiptoe!
_4_
_Marriage_
I
I believe that marriage can be studied as a science, and practiced as an
art; that like every other natural phenomenon, it has its laws,
psychological, moral, and economic. At present it would seem that many
others hold this belief. We have seen the rise of marriage counselors,
and I have heard that marriage is even the subject of courses in
college. But when I was young, it was generally taken for granted that
marriages had to be ill-assorted and that married couples had to quarrel
and deceive each other. Here is a case record, an example of what
happens when marriage is entered into in utter ignorance of all its
practical problems.
The story was told in _Love’s Pilgrimage_, with the variation of a few
details. In ancient Greek pastorals, Corydon and Thyrsis were two
shepherds; but the lines in Milton’s “L’Allegro” caught my fancy:
Where Corydon and Thyrsis met
Are at their savory supper set,
Of herbs and other country messes.
And so I said, “For purposes of this tale let Corydon be a girl.”
In writing the book, I told the story as the girl wanted it told. If it
seemed to her that the manuscript failed to give a sufficiently vivid
account of the hardheadedness and unreasonableness of Thyrsis, I would
say, “You write it the way it ought to be.” So Corydon would write a
paragraph, or maybe a page or a scene, and in it would go. I was so
sorry for the fate of women that I found it hard to contend with them.
The marriage of Corydon and Thyrsis was dominated by the most pitiful
ignorance. Both parties had been taught very little, and most of that
was wrong. Corydon had lived the solitary life of a child of the city
nomads; her father had been a newspaper reporter, then deputy clerk of a
court, and she had been moved about from boardinghouses to apartments;
and in the course of twenty years of life she had picked up one intimate
girl friend, a poor stenographer dying of tuberculosis, and no men
friends whatever. As for Thyrsis, he had, besides Corydon, one girl
friend.
Let not Laura Stedman fail of her due place in this story: little Laura,
golden-haired and pretty, prim and precise. She was the granddaughter of
Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, and happened to live in the apartment
house next to me for two or three years. We had our childish “scrap,”
and I vaguely remember pulling her pigtail, or something brutal like
that. Later, at the age of fifteen or so, I would go to call upon her,
and experience tumultuous thrills; I recall one occasion when I
purchased a new hat, of a seductive pearl gray, and went walking with
Laura in this regalia, so excited that my knees would hardly hold me up.
We discoursed learnedly about the books we were reading, among these
_Romola_, a “classic.” First there is a Greek seducer named Tito Melema,
and I remarked sapiently that I considered him “magnificent.” Laura
flushed and exclaimed, “I think he is a perfect beast!” I had to explain
that I was speaking from the technical point of view; the character was
well drawn. So then the little lady from New England consented to
forgive me.
II
Between Corydon and Thyrsis the determining factor, as in nine tenths of
marriages, was propinquity. Corydon came to the place where Thyrsis was
writing his great novel; she visited the romantic cabin in the Fairy
Glen; and since someone had to read the manuscript, she carried it off,
and came back flushed with the discovery that this hateful, egotistical,
self-centered youth whom she had known and disliked for ten years or
more was a hothearted dreamer, engaged in pouring out a highly romantic
love story destined soon to be recognized as the great American novel.
“Oh, it is wonderful!” she exclaimed; and the rest of the scene tells
itself. Literary feelings turned quickly into personal ones, and the
solitary poet had a companion and supporter.
But, oh, the grief of the parents on both sides of this ill-assorted
match! Quite literally, if a bomb had exploded in the midst of their
summer vacation, it could not have discommoded them more. A clamor of
horrified protests broke out. “But you are crazy! You are nothing but
children! And you have no money! How can people get married without a
cent in the world!” The two mothers fell to disagreeing as to which of
their offspring was the more to blame, and so an old-time friendship
passed into temporary eclipse. Corydon was hastily spirited away to
another summer resort; but not until she had taken a solemn vow--to
learn the German language more rapidly than Thyrsis had learned it!
At the end of October the poet returned to New York with an invisible
crown on his brow and inaudible trumpets pealing in his ears. He and
Corydon proceeded to spend all day and half the night reading Goethe’s
_Iphigenia in Tauris_ and practicing Mozart’s sonatas for violin and
piano. But there developed grave obstacles to this program. Corydon’s
family was inconvenienced if Thyrsis arrived at the apartment before
breakfast; also, the mother of Thyrsis adhered stubbornly to the idea
that Corydon ought not to play the piano later than eleven in the
evening, and should be taken home before her family went to bed. There
was only one way in the world to escape such fetters--by means of a
marriage license.
Thyrsis had only ten or fifteen dollars, but was wealthy in the certain
future of his masterpiece. So the young couple went to the study of the
Reverend Minot J. Savage at the Church of the Messiah and were
pronounced man and wife. By this step, as Thyrsis quickly discovered, he
had deprived himself of the last chance of getting help in his literary
career. With one accord, all relatives and friends now agreed that he
must “go to work.” And by this phrase they did not mean eight hours a
day of Goethe plus six of Mozart; they did not mean even the writing of
great American novels; they meant getting a job with a newspaper, or
perhaps with a bonding company.
III
Something happened that the author of _Springtime and Harvest_ had not
dreamed of in his most pessimistic moment; a publisher rejected the
novel. Several publishers rejected it, one after another! The Macmillans
were first, and Scribner’s second; Brander Matthews kindly read the
manuscript and passed it on to W. C. Brownell, literary adviser of
Scribner’s, and I went to see this soft-spoken, gray-bearded critic, who
explained his opinion that the book was not one that would sell. What
that had to do with the matter was not clear to me. Again and again
those in authority had to explain that they were representing
businessmen who had capital invested in the publishing of books and who
desired to receive dividends on that capital. I could understand such a
business fact; what I couldn’t understand was how men employed for such
a purpose could consider themselves critics, and be solemnly discussed
as critics by other critics like themselves.
Professor Matthews saw me at his home--very fashionable, on West End
Avenue, the walls of the study lined with rare editions and autographed
pictures and such literary trophies. He was sorry, he said, but he had
no further suggestions to offer. When I asked about the possibility of
publishing the book myself, he advised strongly against it; there would
be no way to market the book. When I suggested that I might market it to
everybody I knew, a chill settled over the conversational atmosphere.
“Of course, if you are willing to do anything like _that_--” When I
persisted in talking about it, I completely lost caste with my “man of
the world” professor, and never regained it.
I wrote a potboiler, and earned a couple of hundred dollars, and
borrowed another two hundred from my uncle, and went downtown and
shopped among printers until I found one who would make a thousand
copies of a cheap and unattractive-looking little red volume, such as my
ascetic notions required. The book contained a preface, telling how it
had been written and what a wonderful book it was. This preface was made
into a pamphlet and sent to everybody I knew--not so very many, but by
dint of including my father’s friends and my mother’s, there were
several hundred names. The price of the book was one dollar; about two
hundred copies were sold, just enough to pay back the debt to my uncle.
The pitiful little book with its pitiful little preface was sent to all
the New York newspapers; two of them, the _Times_ and the _American_,
sent a reporter to see the author. Hopes mounted high, but next morning
they dropped with a thud. All the picturesque details about the young
poet and his wife were there, but not one word of the wonderful message
he hoped to deliver to mankind. Incidentally, the author learned the
value of personal publicity in the marketing of literature. As a result
of a column apiece in the two largest morning papers of New York, he
sold two copies of _Springtime and Harvest_. He knew--because they were
the only two copies sold to strangers.
Corydon and Thyrsis were now fast in the “trap” of marriage; living in
one crowded room, opening on an airshaft, in a flat belonging to the
mother and father of Thyrsis. The would-be creative artist was writing
potboilers in order to pay the board of his wife and himself;
incidentally, he was learning the grim reality behind those
mother-in-law jokes he had written so blithely a few years back! The
mother of Thyrsis did not like Corydon; she would not have liked a
female angel who had come down to earth and taken away her darling son,
until recently destined to become an admiral, or else a bishop, or else
a Supreme Court judge. Neither did the mother of Corydon like Thyrsis;
she would not have liked a male angel who had taken a daughter without
having money to take proper care of her.
The idea of a marriage that involved no more than the reading of German
and the playing of violin and piano duets had been broken up by an old
family doctor, who insisted that it was not in accordance with the laws
of physiology. He made Thyrsis acquainted with the practice of birth
control; but alas, it turned out that his knowledge had not been
adequate; and now suddenly the terrified poet discovered the purpose of
the trap into which mother nature had lured him. Corydon was going to
have a baby; and so the reading of German and the playing of violin and
piano duets gave place to visiting other doctors, who professed to know
how to thwart the ways of nature; then rambling about in the park on
chilly spring days, debating the problem of “to be or not to be” for
that incipient baby.
These experiences were harrowing and made indelible scars upon two young
and oversensitive souls. Aspects of life that should have been full of
beauty and dignity became freighted with a burden of terror and death.
Under the law, what the young couple contemplated was a state-prison
offense, and the fact that it is committed by a million American women
every year does not make it any the less ghastly. Thyrsis saw himself
prisoned in a cage, the bars being made not of steel but of human
beings; everybody he knew was a bar, and he hurled himself against one
after another, and found them harder than steel.
IV
_Springtime and Harvest_ had been sent to the leading book reviews, and
now came a letter from Edward J. Wheeler, editor of the _Literary
Digest_. His attention had been caught by the preface; he had read the
novel, and, strange to say, agreed with the author’s high opinion of it.
Would the author come to see him? The outcome was a proposition from
Funk and Wagnalls to take over the book, put it into type again, and
issue it under a new title, with illustrations and advertisements and
blurbs and other appurtenances of the great American novel.
So once more Thyrsis was swept up to the skies, and it became possible
for a baby to be born into the world. All the editors and readers and
salesmen and officeboys of a great publishing firm were sure that _King
Midas_ would be a best seller; and anyhow it did not matter, since a new
novel, still more brilliant, was gestating in the writer’s brain. It was
springtime again, and the apron of mother nature was spilling flowers.
Corydon and Thyrsis boarded a train for the Thousand Islands, and on one
of the loveliest and most remote of these they built a wooden platform,
and set up a small tent, and began the back-to-nature life.