boards by an amateur carpenter, who could saw straight if he kept his
mind upon it, but seldom did. It contained two canvas cots, a bundle of
bedding, a little round drum of a stove, a frying pan, a couple of
saucepans, and a half a dozen dishes. Outside there swung two hammocks,
one close to the tent for the young expectant novelist. The tent stood
on an exposed point, for the sake of the scenery and the avoidance of
mosquitoes; it commanded an uninterrupted sweep of Lake Erie, and the
gales would seize the little structure and shake it as with a giant’s
hand, a raging and tireless fury that lasted for days at a time.
The regime of this literary household was of primordial simplicity.
Drinking water was dipped from the mighty St. Lawrence. Waste was thrown
into the stream a little farther down. Soiled dishes were not washed in
hot water but taken to the shore and filled with sand and scrubbed round
and round. Black bass and yellow perch could be caught from the rocky
point, and now and then, when strange cravings of pregnancy manifested
themselves, a pine squirrel or a yellowhammer could be shot in the
interior of the island. There may have been game laws, but Thyrsis did
not ask about them; this Leek Island was on the Canadian side, the
nearest town many miles away, and the long arm of Queen Victoria did not
reach these campers.
The post office was on Grindstone Island, on the American side, and
thither the young author sailed in a leaky little skiff, purchased for
fifteen dollars. He bought groceries, and from a nearby farmhouse, milk
and butter. The farmer’s wife quickly made note of Corydon’s condition
and was full of sympathy and anecdotes. An odd freak this gypsy camper
must have seemed, wearing a big straw hat, such as are made for
haymakers, with a bit of mosquito netting wound about it for decoration.
It was a place of sudden and terrific thunderstorms, and the sight of
scores of lightning flashes playing about the wide bay and the pine-tree
covered islands was inspiring or terrifying according to one’s
temperament. Thyrsis was standing by the opening of the tent watching
the spectacle, his arm upraised, holding onto the tentpole, when there
came a sudden flash, an all-enveloping mass of light, and an
all-enveloping crash of sound; the upraised hand was shaken as by some
huge vibrating machine and fell numb to the side. Lightning had struck
one of the pine trees to which the tent was anchored, and the tree
crashed to the ground.
After the storm there was found in the tree a nest of the red-eyed
vireo, a silent little forest bird that you see bending under twigs and
picking tiny green worms from the undersides. Two of the young birds
were alive, and the campers took them in and raised them by hand--most
charming pets. They would gulp down big horny grasshoppers and then
regurgitate the hard shells in solid lumps; on this rather harsh diet
they throve, and it was amusing to see them refuse to heed their own
proper parents and fly to their fosterparents instead. At sundown they
would be taken into the tent, and flying swiftly about, they would clean
from the walls every fly, mosquito, spider, and daddy longlegs. They
would sit on the boom of the skiff during the crossing of the channel,
and on the heads of their fosterparents during the trip to the post
office--something that greatly interested the village loungers, also the
village cats. Now and then fishing parties would land on the island, and
be surprised to have two full-grown birds of the forest fly down and
alight on their hats.
V
The product of that summer’s activities was the novel _Prince Hagen_,
story of a Nibelung, grandson of the dwarf Alberich, who brings his
golden treasures up to Wall Street and Fifth Avenue, and proves the
identity between our Christian civilization and his own dark realm. The
tale was born of the playing of the score of _Das Rheingold_ to so many
squirrels and partridges in the forests of the Adirondacks and in the
Fairy Glen on the Quebec lake. The opening chapter was sent to Bliss
Perry, editor of the _Atlantic Monthly_, who wrote that he was delighted
with it and wished to consider the completed work as a serial. The hopes
of the little family rose again; but alas, when the completed work was
read, it was adjudged too bitter and extreme. “We have a very
conservative, fastidious, and sophisticated constituency,” wrote the
great editor, and the disappointed young author remarked sarcastically
that one could have that kind of thing in Boston. The truth was that the
story was not good enough; the writer was strong on emotions but weak on
facts.
_King Midas_ had failed wholly to produce the hoped-for effect; it had
sold about two thousand copies and brought its author two or three
hundred dollars. So now the publishers were not interested in _Prince
Hagen_, and no other publishers were interested; they would take the
manuscript and promise to read it, and then manifest annoyance when a
hungry young writer came back after two or three weeks to ask for a
decision.
Thus occurred the painful incident of Professor Harry Thurston Peck,
told with much detail in _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_. Besides being
professor of Latin at Columbia, Peck was editor of the _Bookman_ and
literary adviser to Dodd, Mead and Company. He read _Prince Hagen_ for
his former pupil and called it a brilliant and original work, which he
would recommend to the firm. Then began a long siege--six weeks or
more--the culmination of which was the discovery that the firm had never
seen the manuscript they were supposed to be reading.
The cries of rage and despair of the young author will not be repeated
here. Poor Harry Peck has long been in a suicide’s grave; President
Butler kicked him out of Columbia after some widow had sued him for
breach of promise and given his sweetish love letters to the press.
Perhaps the reason he neglected the young author’s manuscript was that
he was busy with that widow, or with some other one. Harry was a devotee
of decadent literature, and he broke the one law that is sacred--he got
caught.
VI
That dreadful winter Corydon went back to her parents, while Thyrsis
lived in a garret room, and haunted publishers and editors, and wrote
potboilers that he could not sell. He did sell a few jokes and a few
sketches, book reviews for the _Literary Digest_, and articles for the
_Independent_. He wrote a blank-verse narrative called _Caradrion_,
portions of which are in _Love’s Pilgrimage_; also a novelette, _The
Overman_, an attempt to portray ecstasy and speculate as to its source.
Many critics have quarreled with Thyrsis because of so much “propaganda”
in his books; but here was a work with no trace of this evil, and the
critics never heard of it, and it existed only in the Haldeman-Julius
five-cent books.
The literary editor of the _Independent_, who had the saying of thumbs
up or thumbs down on book reviews, was Paul Elmer More, of whom Thyrsis
saw a great deal before the days of More’s repute. A man of very
definite viewpoint--as oddly different from his young contributor as the
fates could have contrived. Thyrsis, always eager to understand the
other side, was moved to a deep respect for his cold, calm intelligence,
akin to godhead, subsequently revealed to the world in the series of
_Shelburne Essays_. More never made propaganda, nor carried on
controversy; he spoke once, and it was the voice of authority. The
hothearted young novelist would go off and ponder and wish he could be
like that; but there were too many interesting things in the world, and
too many vested evils.
There are two factors in the process of growth that we call life; the
expanding impulse and the consolidating and organizing impulse. In the
literary world these impulses have come to be known, somewhat absurdly,
as romanticism and classicism. Both impulses are necessary, both must be
present in every artist, and either without the other is futile. Paul
Elmer More spoke for the classical tradition and carried it to the
extreme of condemning everything in his own time that had real vitality.
Many times I pointed out to him that his favorite classical authors had
all been rebels and romantics in their own day; but that meant nothing
to him. He had understood and mastered these writers, so to him they
meant order and established tradition; whereas the new things were
uncomprehended and therefore disturbing. It was amusing to see More
publish essays in appreciation of writers like Thoreau and Whitman, the
revolutionists of their time. What would he say about the same sort of
writers of our own day? The answer was, he never mentioned them, he
never read them, or even heard of them.
The young wife had her baby, and the young husband sat by and held her
hand during the fourteen-hour ordeal. Soon afterward he converted the
experience into seven thousand words of horrifying prose. He took these
to Paul Elmer More, and the cold Olympian intelligence spoke briefly.
“It is well done, supposing one wants to do that kind of thing. But it
seems to me one shouldn’t. Anyhow, it is unpublishable, so there is no
use saying any more.” Said the young writer: “It will be published, if I
have to do it myself.” Eight or nine years later this material appeared
as the birth scene in _Love’s Pilgrimage_, and for some reason the
censors did not find out about it. Now, being half a century old, it is
presumably a “classic,” and safe.
More gave the _congé_ to his tempestuous young contributor; after that I
saw him only once, an accidental encounter in the subway at the height
of the excitement over _The Jungle_. I asked, “May I send you a copy?”
The reply was, “Some time ago I made up my mind I was through with the
realists.” So there was no more to say. Later, the stern critic was
forced to return to the realists; in his book, _The Demon of the
Absolute_, I found him condemning Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser.
Myself he did not condescend to mention.
The _Independent_ published my paper on “Teaching of Languages”
(February 27, 1902) and a follow-up article, “Language Study: Some
Facts” (June 19, 1902). I sent a questionnaire to a thousand college
graduates, and discovered that among those who had been out ten years,
practically none could read the languages they had studied in college.
Another article was called “A Review of Reviewers” (February 6, 1902),
occasioned by the odd contrast between the reviews of _Springtime and
Harvest_, a pitiful, unattractive little volume published by the author,
and the reviews of the same novel when it was issued under the name of
_King Midas_, in conventional costume by an established publishing
house. It was, quite unintentionally, a test of book reviewers and their
independence of judgment. _Springtime and Harvest_ had a preface, which
had crudity and inexperience written all over it; accordingly, the
thirteen reviewers of the United States who found the little book worth
mentioning employed such phrases as: “proofs of immaturity” ... “this
tumult of young blood” ... “a crude one, showing the youth, the
inexperience of the writer” ... “betrays the fact that he is a novice in
literature” ... “considering his youth,” etc.
But then came _King Midas_, a stately volume illustrated by a popular
artist and bearing the imprint of Funk and Wagnalls. It carried the
endorsement of Edwin Markham, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Barrett
Wendell, and George Santayana; also a rousing publisher’s blurb: “Full
of power and beauty; an American story of today by a brilliant writer;
no novel we have ever published equals this in the wonderful reception
accorded to it, in advance of publication, in commendations from the
critics and in advance orders from the trade.”
In the face of this barrage, what became of the crudity and
inexperience? In the first eight weeks after publication, fifty reviews
appeared; and setting aside half a dozen that connected the book with
_Springtime and Harvest_, only one critic noted crudity and
inexperience! The “novice in literature” had come to display “the mind
of a master”; the “tumult of young blood” had become “musical and poetic
fervor, at times bordering on the inspired”; the “crude work” had become
“a novel of tremendous power”; “the youth, the inexperience of the
writer” had developed, according to the _Outlook_, into “workmanship
that may be called brilliant ... sincerity as well as knowledge are
apparent on every page”--and so on through a long string of encomiums.
The article made amusing reading for the public but cannot have been
very pleasing to the critics upon whom a young writer’s future depended.
VII
Corydon went to spend the summer with her parents in the Catskills, and
Thyrsis went back alone to Leek Island, which seemed home to him because
it was full of memories of the previous summer. He put up the tent on
the same spot, and sailed the same little skiff, older and still
leakier, across the stormy channel. He had gone too early, because of a
new book that was clamoring to be written, and the icy gales blowing
through the tent almost froze him in his chair. He built the fire too
hot in the little round drum of a stove, and set fire to his tent, and
had to put it out with the contents of his water pail. For several days
the channel could not be crossed at all, and the author lived on dried
apples and saltine crackers. The fish would not bite, and the author
went hunting, but all he could get was a crow, which proved to have a
flesh of deep purple, as strong in texture as in flavor.
From the library of Columbia University, the author had taken a strange
German book called _Also Sprach Zarathustra_. While waiting for the muse
to thaw out, the author lay wrapped in blankets reading this volume. He
put an account of it into his new work, _The Journal of Arthur
Stirling_, which helped to launch the Nietzsche cult in America. The
vision revealed in Zarathustra is close to the central doctrine of all
the seers, and in a chapter on Nietzsche in _Mammonart_ I pointed out
its curious resemblance to the beatitudes. My friend Mencken, reviewing
the book, declared that nothing could be more absurd than to compare
Jesus and Nietzsche. My friend Emanuel Haldeman-Julius took up the
cudgels, declaring that Mencken was an authority on Nietzsche to whom I
should bow--overlooking the fact that _Arthur Stirling_ was published in
1903, and Mencken’s book on Nietzsche in 1908. I could not induce either
Mencken or his champion to publish the words from _Zarathustra_ that are
so curiously close to the beatitudes.
_Arthur Stirling_ was written in six weeks of intense and concentrated
labor; that harrowing, fourteen-hour-a-day labor that is destroying to
both mind and body. Of course, my stomach went on strike; and I went to
consult a country doctor, who explained a new scientific discovery
whereby I could have my food digested for me by the contents of the
stomach of a pig. This appealed to me as an advanced idea, and for
several weeks I took after each meal a spoonful of pink liquid
containing pig pepsin. But gradually its magic wore off, and I was back
where I was before. So began a long siege, at the end of which I found
it necessary to become my own doctor and another kind of “crank.”
_Arthur Stirling_ was sent to a publisher, and I went into the
Adirondacks, on the Raquette River, and spent several weeks in the
company of hunters and lumbermen. I was a reasonably good hunter for the
first ten minutes of any hunt; after that, I would forget what I was
doing and be a thousand miles away in thought; a deer would spring up in
front of me, and I would see a flash of white tail over the top of the
bushes. The reader, having been promised laughter, is invited to
contemplate the spectacle of a young author lying on the edge of a
mountain meadow in November, watching for deer at sunset, wrapped in a
heavy blanket against the cutting frost--and reading a book until the
deer should arrive! The deer must have come up and smelled the back of
my neck; anyhow, there was a crash five or ten feet behind me, and a
deer going twenty feet at a leap, and me pulling the trigger of an
uncocked gun!
VIII
For months I had been living in fancy with Arthur Stirling, and this
poet had become as real to me as myself. Why not let this poet’s diary
pass as a true story--as in the spiritual sense it was? In New York was
a stenographer who had worked for me for several years, and he inserted
in the New York papers a notice of the death by suicide of the poet
Arthur Stirling. The reporters took it up, and published many
biographical details about the unfortunate young man.
So now the firm of D. Appleton and Company was interested in the diary
of this suicide. Their literary adviser was Ripley Hitchcock. He
happened to be in the Adirondacks and we had a meeting. I told him the
facts, and he made no objection to the hoax. It has always seemed to me
a harmless one; but a few solemn persons, such as my old teacher,
Brander Matthews, and my old employer, the New York _Evening Post_, held
it a high crime against literature. The book appeared in February of
1903 and created a tremendous furor. Practically everybody accepted it
as true--which did not surprise me at all, because, as I have said, it
was true in the inner sense.
The papers had long articles about the book, and some of them were
deeply felt. The best was written by Richard LeGallienne. Having nobody
to advise me about the customs of the world, I debated anxiously whether
it would be proper for me to write a letter of thanks to a man who had
praised my book. I decided that it would seem egotistical, tending to
make personal something that was purely a matter of art.
The hoax did not last very long. A shrewd critic pointed out the
resemblances in style between _King Midas_ and _Arthur Stirling_, and
that was the end of it. I wrote a manifesto on the subject of starving
poets and their wrongs, and how I was going to make it my life task to
save them from ignominy in the future. “I, Upton Sinclair, would-be
singer and penniless rat”--so began this war whoop published in the
_Independent_, May 14, 1903. I looked this up, intending to quote some
of it, but I found that I could not even read it without pain.
My friend and biographer, Floyd Dell, read the manuscript of _Arthur
Stirling_ in 1927, and complained that “it fails to do justice to a very
interesting person.” He explained his feeling: “It is too unsympathetic
to its hero--strange as that may seem! It is only in spots that you lend
complete imaginative sympathy to the younger Upton Sinclair.” Later in
his letter, he remarked: “I suspect that I am more interested in Upton
Sinclair as a human being than you are.” So here I give my friend a
chance to discuss this unusual essay and what it meant to him. He says:
Reading your MS., I came upon a few words from one of your youthful
manifestoes--“I, Upton Sinclair, would-be singer and penniless
rat”--and it made me remember what that article meant to me when I
was sixteen. I too was a would-be singer and penniless rat--and
your manifesto stirred me like a trumpet call. It sang itself into
my heart. I really think it is one of America’s great poems. I
think that in that prose poem you achieved the greatness as a poet
which you missed in your rhymes. I think it is a pity that it is
not in all the anthologies. I do not know how many other youths it
affected as it did me. Perhaps many of them have forgotten, as I
did till I re-read it just now. But that prose poem gave me the
courage to face an ugly and evil world; it gave me courage in my
loneliness; it made me spiritually equal to the burden of being a
dreamer in an alien world. It is no small thing to give strength to
youth. Perhaps it is the greatest thing that literature can do.
I think it was in the following year that I found you again, in the
_Appeal to Reason_; in the meantime, like you, I had found it
impossible to wage war on the world alone, and I had identified my
cause with that of the workers of the world. It is true that there
are not in America at present many young people who can as readily
identify their own hurts and aims with yours as I could; but there
are many all through the world, and there will be more. And to all
these you will be a person of great importance for that deeply
personal reason. If you will not think I am mocking you, I will say
that you will be in a true sense their saint. A saint, you know, in
the true sense, is one who has suffered as we have suffered, and
triumphed as we hope to triumph. One man’s saint is often no use to
the next man; each of us must have a saint of his own. And the real
difficulty with a good deal of your fiction is that your heroes do
not suffer enough nor sin at all. That is why your life is more
edifying in some respects than your novels.
But you are not yet in the frame of mind to confess your sins--you
are still self-defensively persuaded that some of the worst of them
were virtues. That is why many people don’t like you--who, indeed,
could possibly like anybody who was half as good as you have always
been persuaded that you were? But in _The Journal of Arthur
Stirling_ and _Love’s Pilgrimage_, you gave yourself away. It is no
wooden doll who walks through those pages--it is a living,
suffering bundle of conceit, cruelty, selfishness and folly, such
as we know ourselves to be. And you make us feel the nobility and
generosity that lies behind all that conceit, cruelty, selfishness
and folly--you make us feel that we, too, may, with all our faults,
achieve something for mankind. I do not value greatly your present
wisdom, which suits you better than it would me--I have a wisdom
that I shouldn’t trade for yours if you threw that of the Seven
Wise Men of Greece in with it. I do value your power as an
imaginative artist, as you know, greatly. But just as Keats’ life
has for us a value in addition to his poetry, so has yours.
To put it in the simplest terms, all over the world there are young
people who wish sincerely to devote their lives to revolutionary
betterment of the world; and those same young people will probably
fall in love with the wrong people, and suffer like hell, and
believe this and that mistaken idea about themselves and the other
sex and love; and while Upton Sinclair cannot prevent that, nor
tell them what to do about it when it happens (or be believed when
he tells them), he can do them good by letting them know that he
went through some of the same things. Among these “same things” I
include asceticism--a commoner youthful sin than you seem to think.
Many grown people are horribly ashamed of their youthful
asceticism. It would do them good to have you confess yours,
admitting all you lost by it (and knowing really just what you
lost), but explaining the apparently frightful terms upon which
“freedom” was offered to youth, and the impossibility of accepting
it upon such terms; and explaining the way in which the ascetic
life came to be associated with everything that was good--and again
with a full recognition of the deceitfulness of the combination,
and the years of pain and struggle ahead before the tangle of
falsehood could be unraveled.
IX
The manifesto in the _Independent_ had proclaimed my personal
independence--“I having consummated a victory,” and so on. I really
thought it meant something that the literary world had hailed my book
with such fervor. But in the course of time the publishers reported less
than two thousand copies sold, and called my attention to a tricky
clause in the contract whereby they did not have to pay any royalties
until the book had earned its expenses--which, of course, it never did.
This was before the authors of America had formed a league, and learned
how contracts should be drawn.