Part 9

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.

So there were Corydon and Thyrsis, more fast in the trap than ever. Corydon and her baby were staying with her parents; while Thyrsis lived in a lodginghouse, this time up in Harlem. He was not permitted to see his wife whom he could not support. He had not seen his son for six months, and was naturally, anxious to know what that son looked like. It was arranged between the young parents that the Negro maid who took care of the child should wheel the baby carriage to a certain spot in Central Park at a certain hour of the afternoon, and Thyrsis would be there and watch the little one go by. The father kept the appointed tryst, and there came a Negro nursemaid, wheeling a baby carriage, and the father gazed therein and beheld a horrifying spectacle--a red-headed infant with a flat nose and a pimply skin. The father went away, sick at soul--until he had the inspiration to send a telegram, and received an answer informing him that the nursemaid had been prevented from coming.

The lodginghouse where Thyrsis had a room was kept by an elderly widow who had invested her little property in United States Steel common and had seen it go down to six dollars. As fellow lodgers, there was the father of Thyrsis, who was drinking more and more; and that Uncle Harry who had almost reached the stage where he put a bullet through his brain. Meanwhile, the uncle considered it his duty to give worldly-wise advice to a haggard young author who refused to “go to work.” The mother of Thyrsis, distracted, kept repeating the same formula; half a dozen other occupants of the lodginghouse, broker’s clerks, and other commercial persons, took an interest in the problem and said their say.

Such was the life of a would-be prophet in a business world! So that winter I wrote the most ferocious of my stories, _A Captain of Industry_, which became a popular item in the list of the State Publishing House of Soviet Russia. The manuscript was submitted to the Macmillans, and the president of that concern was kind enough to let me see the opinion of one of his readers. “What is the matter with this young author?” was the opening sentence. The answer of course was that the young author was unable to get enough to eat.

Critics of _Arthur Stirling_ and of _Love’s Pilgrimage_ complain of the too-idealistic characters portrayed, the lack of redeeming weaknesses in the hero. Let the deficiency be supplied by one detail--that during that dreadful winter I discovered my vice. Living in these sordid surroundings, desperate, and utterly without companionship, I was now and then invited to play cards with some of my fellow lodgers. I had played cards as a boy, but never for money; now I would “sit in” at a poker game with the young broker’s clerks and other commercial persons with whom fate had thrown me.

So I discovered a devastating emotion; I was gripped by a dull, blind frenzy of greed and anxiety, and was powerless to break its hold. The game was what is called penny ante, and the stakes were pitifully small, yet they represented food for that week. I cannot recall that I ever won, but I lost a dollar or two on several occasions. I remember that on Christmas Eve I started playing after dinner, and sat at a table in a half-warmed room gray with tobacco smoke until two or three in the morning; the following afternoon I began playing again and played all night. So it appeared that I was an orthodox Southern gentleman, born to be a gambler! After that Christmas experience I took a vow, and have never played cards for money since that time.

X

Not all the humiliation, rage, and despair could keep new literary plans from forming themselves, colossal and compelling. Now it was to be a trilogy of novels, nothing less. Ecstasy was taking the form of battles, marches, and sieges, titanic efforts of the collective soul of America. _Manassas_, _Gettysburg_, and _Appomattox_ were to be the titles of these mighty works, and by contemplation of the heroism and glory of the past, America was to be redeemed from the sordidness and shame of the present. The problem was to find some one capable of appreciating such a literary service, and willing to make it possible.

I went up to Boston, headquarters of the culture that I meant to glorify. I stayed with my cousin, Howard Bland, then a student at Harvard, and devoted myself to the double task of getting local color and an endowment. I succeeded in the first part only. Thomas Wentworth Higginson had read _Springtime and Harvest_, and he introduced me to what was left of the old guard of the abolitionists; I remember several visits to Frank B. Sanborn and one to Julia Ward Howe. I went to a reunion of a Grand Army post and heard stories from the veterans--though not much of this was needed, as the Civil War has been so completely recorded in books, magazines, and newspapers. I inspected reverently the Old Boston landmarks and shrines; for I had exchanged my Virginia ideals for those of Massachusetts and was intending to portray the Civil War from the Yankee point of view.

I thought Boston ought to be interested and warm-hearted. Why was Boston so cold? Perfectly polite, of course, and willing to invite a young novelist to tea and listen to his account of the great work he was planning; but when the question was broached, would anyone advance five hundred dollars to make possible the first volume of such a trilogy, they all with one accord began to make excuses. Among those interviewed I remember Edwin D. Mead, the pacifist, and Edwin Ginn, the schoolbook publisher, a famous philanthropist. Mr. Ginn explained that he had ruined the character of a nephew by giving him money, and had decided that it was the worst thing one could do for the young. In vain I sought to persuade him that there might be differences among the young.

It was in New York that a man was found, able to realize that a writer has to eat while writing. George D. Herron was his name, and he happened to be a socialist, a detail of great significance in the young writer’s life. But that belongs to the next chapter; this one has to do with the fate of Corydon and Thyrsis, and what poverty and failure did to their love. Suffice it for the moment to say that the new friend advanced a couple of hundred dollars and promised thirty dollars a month, this being Thyrsis’ estimate of what he would need to keep himself and wife and baby in back-to-nature fashion during the year it would take to write _Manassas_. The place selected was Princeton, New Jersey, because that university possessed the second-largest Civil War collection in the country--the largest being in the Library of Congress. So in May 1903 the migration took place, and for three years and a half Princeton was home.

XI

On the far side of a ridge three miles north of the town, a patch of woods was found whose owner was willing to rent it as a literary encampment. The tent had been shipped from Canada, and a platform was built, and an outfit of wooden shelves and tables. Also there was a smaller tent, eight feet square, for the secret sessions with Clio, muse of history. Both canvas structures were provided with screen doors, against the inroads of the far-famed Jersey mosquito. Water was brought in pails from a farmer’s well, and once a week a horse and buggy were hired for a drive to town--to purchase supplies, and exchange one load of books about the Civil War for another load.

_Manassas: A Novel of the War_--so ran the title; the dedication said: “That the men of this land may know the heritage that is come down to them.” The young historian found himself a stamping ground in the woods, a place where he could pace back and forth for hours undisturbed, and there the scenes of the dreadful “new birth of freedom” lived themselves over in his mind. The men of that time came to him and spoke in their own persons, and with trembling and awe he wrote down their actions and words.

His method of working had evolved itself into this: he would go through a scene in his imagination, over and over again, until he knew it by heart, before setting down a word of it on paper. An episode like the battle scene of _Manassas_, some ten thousand words in length, took three weeks in gestation; the characters and incidents were hardly out of the writer’s mind for a waking moment during that time, nor did the emotional tension of their presence relax. And in between these bouts of writing there was reading and research in the literature of sixty years past: newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, works of biography and reminiscence. The writing of _Manassas_ must have entailed the reading of five hundred volumes, and the consulting of as many more.

In the meantime Corydon took care of the baby, a youngster of a year and a half, who seemed to know exactly what he wanted and would yell himself purple in the face to get it; the inexperienced young parents sometimes wondered whether he would kill himself by such efforts. During his incarceration in the city the child had suffered from rickets, and now a “child specialist” had outlined an extremely elaborate diet, which took hours of the young mother’s time to prepare. Under it the infant throve and became yet more aggressive.

Corydon and Thyrsis had wanted nothing but to be together; and now they had what they wanted--almost too much of it. Now and then they met the farmer and his wife, a gentle old couple; when they drove to Princeton, they met the clerks in the stores and in the college library; they met no one else. Possibly some women could have stood this long ordeal, but Corydon was not of that tough fiber. While her husband went apart to wrestle with his angel, she stayed in the tent to wrestle with demons. She suffered from depression and melancholy, and it was impossible to know whether the trouble was of the mind or of the body.

Nowadays, every disciple of Freud in Greenwich Village would know what to tell her. But this was in the days before the invention of the Freudian demonology. Birth control, as explained by a family doctor, had failed, and could not be trusted; since another pregnancy would have meant the death of the young writer’s hopes, there was no safety but in returning to the original idea of brother and sister. Since caressing led to sexual impulse, and therefore to discontent, it was necessary that caressing should be omitted from the daily program, and love-making be confined to noble words and the reading aloud of Civil War literature. Thyrsis could do that, being completely absorbed in his vision. Whether Corydon could do it or not was a superfluous question--since Corydon _had_ to do it. This was, of course, a cruelty, and prepared the way for a tragedy.

XII

_Prince Hagen_, after having been declined by seventeen magazines and twenty-two publishing houses, had been brought out by a firm in Boston and, as usual, disappointed its author’s hopes. But there came one or two hundred dollars in royalties, almost enough to pay for the building of a house. An old carpenter and his son drove from the village, and Thyrsis worked with them and learned a trade. In two or three weeks they built a cabin on the edge of the woods, sixteen feet by eighteen, with a living room across the front and a tiny bedroom and kitchen in the back. It was roofed with tar paper, and the total cost was two hundred and fifty-six dollars. Ten per cent of this price was earned by the device of writing an article about the homemade dwelling and selling it to the _World’s Work_, for the benefit of other young authors contemplating escape from civilization. The baby, now two years old, watched the mighty men at work, and thereafter the problem of his upbringing was solved; all that was necessary was to put him out of doors with a block of wood, a hammer, and a supply of nails, and he would bang nails into the wood with perfect contentment for hours.

But the problem of the young mother was less easy of solution. Winter came howling from the north and smote the little cabin on the exposed ridge. Snow blocked the roads, and walking became impossible for a woman tired by housework. She could get to town in a sleigh, but there was no place to stay in town with a baby; and what became of the woman’s diversion of shopping, when the family had only thirty dollars a month to live on? There occurred the episode of the turkey-red table cover. It was discovered as a bargain in a notion store, price thirty cents, and Corydon craved it as one pitiful trace of decoration in their home of bare lumber. She bought it, but Thyrsis was grim and implacable, insisting that it be folded up and taken back. Thirty cents was a day’s food for a family, and if they ran up bills at the stores, how would the soul of America be saved?

Sickness came, of course. Whether you were rich or poor in America in those days, you were subject to colds and sore throats, because you knew nothing about diet, and ate denatured foods out of packages and cans. Corydon had obscure pains, and doctors gave obscure opinions about “womb trouble.” She paid a dollar a bottle for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which was supposed to remedy “female complaints,” and did so--by the method of dulling the victim’s sensations with opium. The time came when Thyrsis awakened one winter night and heard his wife sobbing, and found her sitting up in bed in the moonlight, with a revolver in her hand, something she kept for protection while her husband was working in the college library. She had been trying for hours to get up courage to put a bullet into her head, but did not have that courage.

XIII

The grip of dreadful winter was broken, and it was possible to walk once more. Flowers blossomed in the woods, and also in the two tormented souls. For the great novel had been completed, and this time it was promptly accepted. The great firm of Macmillan called it a distinguished piece of fiction, paid five hundred dollars advance upon it, and agreed to publish it in the autumn. So it was possible for the little family to buy a turkey-red table cover, and also a vase to fill with woodland flowers, and to get the horse and buggy more frequently--one dollar per afternoon--and drive to town and ramble about the campus and listen to the students singing their songs at twilight.

A town full of handsome young college men was a not disagreeable place of residence for the girl-wife of a solitary genius, condemned by grim fate to celibacy. It was not long before Corydon had met a young instructor of science who lived only a mile or two away on the ridge. He came to call; having horse and buggy, he took Corydon driving, and she would come back from these drives refreshed and enlivened. Life became still more promising.

Presently the time came when she told her preoccupied husband a quaint and naïve story of what had happened. The young instructor had admitted, shyly and humbly, that he was falling somewhat in love with her. It was innocent and idyllic, quite touching; and Thyrsis was moved--he could understand easily how anyone might fall in love with Corydon, for he had done so himself. He was glad it was so noble and high-minded; but he suggested, very gently, that it would be the part of wisdom not to go driving with the young man any more. Corydon was surprised and pained by this; but after a few more drives she admitted that it might indeed be wiser.

So again she was lonely for a while; until it happened that in the course of her search for health, she encountered a high-minded and handsome young surgeon, a Scotchman. Strangely enough, the same thing happened again; the surgeon admitted, shyly and humbly, that he was falling somewhat in love with his patient; this time he himself suggested that it would be wiser if he did not see her any more. Corydon told Thyrsis all about it, and it was excellent material for a would-be novelist who lived a retired life and had few experiences of romantic emotions. But in the end, the novelty wore off--it happened too many times.

_5_

_Revolt_

I

Floyd Dell, contemplating his biography of myself, which was published in 1927, asked me to explain the appearance of a social rebel in a conventional Southern family. I thought the problem over and reported my psychology as that of a “poor relation.” It had been my fate from earliest childhood to live in the presence of wealth that belonged to others.