The Accursed (17 page)

It was true that the “idyllic romance” of the New Jersey countryside had turned somewhat sour, for life in the ramshackle old farmhouse was arduous, though conditions had been much worse when the young couple and newborn son had to spend their first Princeton winter in a tar-paper-insulated cabin heated by a single wood-burning stove and all were freezing, and sickly much of the time. (If it had not been for the charity of the landlord-farmer and his wife, little David might have died of the croup; but on the coldest, most bitter nights, the young Sinclair family was invited to sleep in the farmer’s house, where it was reasonably heated, if not precisely “warm.”) Now, though they were living in a farmhouse of their own, it was a very primitive dwelling, with a roof that leaked, and rotted floorboards, and mice that scrambled about inside the walls; and it was so, Upton’s nerves were unusually sensitive to the baby’s near-ceaseless whimpering and crying, that distracted him from his concentration. And so, in warmer weather, Upton returned to the tar paper cabin, to work in solitude, on the ambitious
Gettysburg
. (So devoted was Upton Sinclair to his work, he’d resolved never to spend less than twelve hours a day at his desk, with the unfortunate but necessary consequence that Meta was obliged to milk the cow, that had come with the farmhouse; and deal with a flock of mangy chickens, that yielded very few eggs; and attempt to protect the meager fruits of a small orchard and garden from armies of worms, insects, and slugs that infested them in overlapping shifts. Upton sympathized with Meta’s frustration, as with her exhaustion; but he did not condone her frequently voiced despair—if they were to one day help found a Socialist colony it would be in a rural environment, and so the present farm work was excellent training.

Upton was made to feel guilty, thus to feel resentful, when Meta complained of being “lonely”—and “bored”; for hadn’t she Upton, and little David, and the farmer’s wife to speak with; and any number of Socialist comrades with whom she might correspond, as Upton did, daily. But, Meta pleaded, she yearned for a change of scene, even for the small novelty of riding in the “moth-ridden” surrey into town; yet strangely, Meta often became over-excited when dressing “for town,” as Upton was clumsily hitching up the mare, and declared that she couldn’t come with him after all—her breath was too short, or her heart racing, or a “trouble in her womb” had flared up. (At this time, Meta suffered from a malady of the female reproductive organs, a result of the fourteen-hour labor she had endured in the poorly staffed maternity ward at Bellevue, for which she’d been advised, by a Socialist comrade-doctor, to take Lydia Pinkham’s Compound, and avoid red meats. And not to become pregnant again until she was in stronger health.)

Yet, there was the hope of Revolution to come—soon. The probable date was now set for 1910, by Socialist theoreticians whom Upton Sinclair most respected.

FREQUENTLY IN THE
months following Upton’s adventures in the Chicago stockyards and slaughterhouses, the young writer succumbed to vivid recollections of those days, that had passed with the swiftness of fever-dreams; going about his errands on the morning of June 4, 1905, he was struck anew by the folly of the
bourgeoisie
surrounding him, on Princeton’s streets and sidewalks, how these well-to-do individuals resembled beasts doomed for slaughter, all unknowing of their fate. Five years until the Revolution! It would not be
heads rolling
but
fortunes gone up in smoke
,
tribal delusions exploded.

Yet, Upton felt a sharp disparity between these individuals and himself: for he wore workingman’s clothing, trousers of some plain inexpensive fabric, a faded shirt; a frayed straw hat on his head, pillaged from the farmer’s barn. And the citizens of Princeton were so well dressed! Only a very few, who must have been common laborers, and most of these dark-skinned, wore clothes like his; house servants of the well-to-do were better dressed, in their fresh-laundered uniforms. He had spent two months in Packingtown, in Chicago, living among the slaughterhouse workers, and badly missed it now.
In such places the hellishness of the class struggle is evident to the naked eye while here in gilded Princeton you must delve beneath surfaces, to see with an “uncanny” eye.

These entries Upton would make in his journal, faithfully each night. One day, the multi-volume
Journals of Upton Sinclair
would be read by the masses, he hoped.

Making his way along the Saturday crowds of shoppers on Nassau Street, trying to keep his thoughts vibrant and optimistic, nonetheless Upton found himself thinking obsessively of the scene of the previous night: Meta sitting at the rickety kitchen table, revolver in hand, the long barrel of the weapon pointed at her head—indeed, pressed against the pallid skin at her temple. How vulnerable the poor young woman had looked, at such a moment! It was more telling than nakedness; Upton had wanted to turn his eyes away. He would never forgive Meta’s crude soldier-father for giving his daughter such a weapon, or allowing her to take it from his household, for what purpose Upton couldn’t guess. (He didn’t want to think that Meta’s father believed that Meta would need protection from
him
.) Her thin cheeks had been streaked with tears; her hand visibly shaking; in a flat hopeless voice she spoke of the contempt she felt for herself, as a “bad mother,” for her failure in being able to pull the trigger.

A terrible sight, Upton would never forget. And would find very hard to forgive.

“She is the mother of my son. The poor boy must never know.”

Distracted, Upton found himself gazing at his lanky reflection in a shop window: a kind of scarecrow, with a battered-looking straw hat. To care little for appearances is very different from being made to realize how eccentric one looks, in the public eye. Like a vagabond he was carrying a few items, his recent purchases, in a contraption that consisted of two wheels, with a vertical carrying-case and handle-bar. He saw that he was standing at the window of Joseph Sweet’s Confectionery on Palmer Square, facing an opulent display of peppermint sticks,
petits fours,
caramels, bonbons, and glistening candies; most elaborately, chocolates fashioned into ingenious shapes (baby chicks, soldiers, bears, even miniature musical instruments and dirigibles)—another display of what Thorstein Veblen called
conspicuous consumption
. To one who, like Upton, avoided all rich foods, as well as meat, such a display was fairly sickening to behold. Ah, he wanted to step inside the shop, to protest! To point out to the proprietor, the clerks, the smiling customers, what a waste such luxuries represented, what vanity, when in nearby Trenton and New Brunswick, not to mention the wretched sweatshops along the Delaware River, children as young as five or six labored for fourteen-hour days, for mere pennies. Did the citizens of Princeton not know—did they not
care
?

Upton had not read firsthand accounts, but he had heard of a particularly sordid incident that had taken place in Camden several weeks before: a public lynching, of a young black man and his sister, executed by white-clad hooded figures of the dread Ku Klux Klan and observed by as many as five hundred persons crowded into a field. Sequestered in the Princeton vicinity as he was, Upton had no way of learning more about the incident, except through letters sent to him by New York comrades, that dealt primarily with other matters. It was significant to Upton,
no one in the Princeton area with whom he had spoken knew anything about this outrage
. Yet, just the other day, the President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, had visited Princeton, as the houseguest of wealthy political patrons. He regretted that he hadn’t found out more about Roosevelt’s visit, and picketed outside the residence in which the President had stayed. One day, he would be a martyr to the Revolution—arrested, beaten by police, charged with trumped-up acts of creating a public disturbance, public lewdness, treason.
The true Revolutionary does not wait to be called, but seeks his destiny himself. His faith is his courage.

It was at that moment, as Upton turned, that he happened to see, in one of those accidental moments that can alter a life, his wife Meta across the square—somehow, Meta had come into town after all, leaving the baby behind? with the farmer’s wife?—was this possible?—though in the next instant, as the young woman moved on, in the company of another person, Upton halfway doubted it could be she. This young woman, though resembling Meta in startling respects, including even her wavy honey-colored hair, and a pert little straw hat identical to Meta’s, was wearing a long flounced skirt in a floral design, which Upton might have recalled from the days of their courtship; but which he had not seen on his wife in some time. At the farm, Meta wore shapeless clothing, sometimes a man’s clothing—for appearances did not matter, obviously, in their new bohemian life. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him, Upton thought. And when he squinted across the busy square, a moment later, the honey-haired woman had vanished.

Even so, Upton felt faint with emotion. If Meta had made her way into town without him, it was an act of virtual infidelity—deceit. And to leave little David behind! He wondered how it had happened that his marriage, entered into with such romantic sentiment and Socialist idealism, had turned sour; had become a
trap;
for him no less than for his wife. Yet it was a trap whose bars were human beings, a woman and an infant son whom he loved more than his own being.
Unthinkable that we can part. Yet, how can we continue to live together? And if—if we suffer another “error”—and bring another innocent child into the world . . .

So Upton brooded, crossing busy Nassau Street onto the university campus, and so to Chancellor Green Library; into the dignified, high-domed reference room, where, as in the past, Upton felt a thrill of joy—for the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world; his model was Charles Dickens, as well as America’s great author Harriet Beecher Stowe whose
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was popularly credited with having precipitated the Civil War!
*
And so why should it not be Upton Sinclair who should take his place among the great authors of Western civilization? Frankly, Upton had grown secretly bored with the fustian melodrama of his Civil War trilogy, though George Herron purported to find the first novel “thrilling”; but, as he was contracted to finish it, he would; for Upton Sinclair was a man of integrity, even, at times, as his wife charged, a foolish sort of integrity. What he most yearned to do was begin another novel like
The Jungle—
an “incendiary bomb of a novel” as it had already been called by his Socialist comrades—that would advance the cause of social reform in the world. The entire United States—if not the entire world—would be forced to take note of him: for his targets were the Beef Trust, and the Railroad Trust, and the Oil Trust, and the shameful “profits” (as a Socialist wit called the evangelical “prophets”) of bourgeois religion; Upton was taking on also the hypocrisy of American “public education” and the sham of journalism itself, in particular the “yellow” gutter press of Hearst. Though he was only midway in
Gettysburg,
with the great bulk of
Appomattox
yet ahead, Upton had already begun to plan two new novel projects, satirical attacks upon the arts in a bourgeois culture, to be titled
Mammonart
and
Money Writes.
For it was certainly true, as the prophet Zarathustra preached,
Rather be angry than be put to shame. And if you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather join a little in the cursing
.

By nature, Upton was a gentle person, and had never “cursed” in his life. But, he was determined to learn.

ANOTHER TIME,
crossing Washington Road after having spent several fruitful hours in Chancellor Green Library, amid toiling and serious-seeming undergraduate boys, Upton saw, or seemed to see, his wife Meta on the farther sidewalk; this time, she was wearing a cream-colored frock Upton didn’t recognize, and she was in the company of a tall gentleman in a linen suit, a total stranger to Upton. Yet, the young woman was certainly Meta: the chestnut-red curls escaping from beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat, the pert uplifted profile and the “Scots” coloring to her cheeks, that had been pale these past several months. And, for a scant moment, it seemed that she had glimpsed
him.

Unless Upton was light-headed from having eaten very little that day. And quite the fool, to imagine that his adoring young wife was deceiving him with a stranger.

Yet he stared after the couple, making their way in the opposite direction; the young woman carrying a yellow sun-parasol, and her arm casually linked through the arm of the tall gentleman; and after a long moment roused himself, to stagger in the direction of Witherspoon Street, his last stop before returning home.

Though it went against Upton’s principles to dine out, since restaurant food was shockingly expensive, and not likely so nutritious as meals prepared at home, Upton thought it might be a good idea to fortify himself at the Knight’s Court Tavern on Witherspoon Street; otherwise he might be susceptible to light-headedness and hunger pangs. Entering the unpleasantly smoky interior of the tavern he tried not to notice the undergraduates at most of the tables, for he was obliged to dislike them, even to detest them, as scions of the wealthy who attended college as if it were a country club and theirs by hereditary privilege. (While Upton had toiled away at part-time jobs to put himself through the City College of New York amid an eager, at times frantic swarm of immigrants and immigrants’ children of whom many were exceptionally intelligent, and unabashedly ambitious and opportunistic. But they were the sons and daughters of the proletariat, generally, and so he did not resent them.) Upton had heard surprising things about Woodrow Wilson’s hope to reform Princeton University, particularly to raise academic standards, which were far below those of Harvard and Yale at this time, let alone the fabled English universities upon which the American Ivy League universities were modeled.