The Accursed (52 page)
A
t last, Josiah Slade and Upton Sinclair are to meet. But in hardly the circumstances these idealistic young men would have chosen, and with hardly the result.
HE WOULD MOVE
now more forcibly. In the history of the Revolution, it was time.
Ever more his devotion to the cause grew. Ever more, his certainty that he was in the forefront of change.
His sojourn in Princeton was coming to an end, or nearly. There would follow now a triumphant move to New York City, and from there to—he knew not precisely where: the great state of California, or a Socialist commune in rural New Jersey. There, the Socialist principles of shared property, shared labor, shared food would prevail.
He would not beg Meta to accompany him. But he believed, if he explained carefully enough to her, she would want to be with him, and would not doubt him again.
SOME FACTS OF
his life Upton Sinclair had hoped to conceal. He had hidden from Meta and from those comrades—Florence Kelly, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, with whom he’d founded the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in 1905—the fact that his mother’s father was John S. Harden, a “high official” of the notorious Western Maryland Railroad; yet more egregiously, his father’s grandfather was Commodore Arthur Sinclair of the U.S. Navy, a hero of the War of 1812 rumored to have “profited considerably” through his military connections and to have gloated
There is no war that is not a rich harvest—for some!
Such blunt truths of the capitalist spirit, such
facts
—somehow did not repel the majority of Americans, as one might expect. Why?—young Upton Sinclair yearned to know.
He had himself firsthand experience of the rich—from time to time pitied, in his threadbare Baltimore home, with a failing salesman/drunkard father and a helpless and overwhelmed mother, and invited to spend time with his Harden grandparents; he had no illusions as to the higher quality of the intelligence of the rich, as of their moral condition; it is true, the rich can be “generous”—“charitable”—no one more kindly, in an ostentatious manner, than rich Christian women at such times of years—Christmas, Easter—when their hearts are swayed by the pathos of the poor!—this is true, but not relevant to the cause of social justice.
When private property is abolished the true spirit of Christianity will emerge. But not until then.
Sinclair felt a stab of shame, that his weak, often ailing mother took pride in the sorry fact that her Harden ancestors were Protestant landowners in northern Ireland, said to be of the very highest rank of breeding, wealth, and influence. How ashamed to be told, with a reproachful squeeze of his hand
In your veins their blood flows, even now! The blood of aristocrats.
These painful biographical facts! Never to be published in any “profile” of Upton Sinclair, if he could prevent it.
THOUGH HE PASSIONATELY
opposed censorship of course. Any infringement upon the freedom of others—the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of freedom in speech and in print—the
natural rights of man
—Upton Sinclair would oppose with his life.
“Thank you—but
no.
There is only one man for this office—that is Jack London.”
It was flattering, and very tempting, to be offered the first presidency of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, in the fall of 1905. But with a grave smile for the nominating committee Upton Sinclair had declined in favor of the popular and far more famous young Socialist author from San Francisco.
“Though I don’t know the man personally, I have read such remarkable work of his—
The Call of the Wild, The Sea Wolf, The War of the Classes
—above all that masterful chronicle of slum life
The People of the Abyss—
I can vouch for his genius. And what I’ve heard of our comrade—his efforts in the cause of Socialism—I would stake my life on it, that Jack London would present our cause to the world more admirably than any other individual of our time.”
He was utterly sincere! This was not false modesty—this was not modesty at all, Upton would have insisted. The vision of Socialism presented by Karl Marx—and refined by Friedrich Engels—was impersonal, and shorn of individual ego; all that was
ego
was of the past, condemned to decay, wither away and vanish within a few generations; this Upton Sinclair believed passionately, and meant to inculcate into his daily, moral life as the most effective antidote to his quasi-bourgeois background.
At this time Upton Sinclair had been twenty-six—about to publish the most challenging work of his career,
The Jungle;
already the author of numerous articles, plays, and books since his first novel
Springtime and Harvest
in 1901. Jack London was two years older and had not published nearly so much—yet
The Call of the Wild
and
The Sea Wolf,
best sellers in several languages, had made him famous—as popular a writer as the legendary Mark Twain whose prime was now past.
Now in the spring of 1906 Upton had yet to meet London. He had yet to shake London’s hand and to gaze upon the young Yukon adventurer face to face—though he’d seen London’s rugged photograph in numerous places, including the
New York Sun
where the “socialist-seditionist” author was anathema to the editorial writers.
How handsome London was! In secret—for his wife Meta would not have understood such a predilection—Upton examined photographs of the adventurer-writer hoping to see in his comrade’s smiling gaze some sort of—mystic connection, or kinship . . . Upton could not have articulated what he sought but knew it to be the identical
ravishment of the soul
he’d experienced when first reading Byron’s
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
and Blake’s
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell;
intellectually, it was Marx, Engels, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche whom Upton most admired, but he could not feel the sort of zealous passion for these thinkers he felt for the poets, and for Jack London, who was not only his contemporary but a sort of brother, or soul mate . . . Guiltily aware of himself as the privileged son of a genteel family, he found fascinating the details of London’s very different background: London was the illegitimate son of an itinerant astrologer, born in San Francisco in poverty, forced to quit school at the age of fourteen to work as a sailor, gold miner, and manual laborer; as a young man he’d begun writing for newspapers, and had been bold enough to campaign as the Socialist mayor of Oakland in 1901. (London had lost, of course—but newspaper accounts spoke of the power of the “Boy Socialist” to “captivate” the crowds that gathered to hear him speak.) In Upton’s dreams London appeared not wraith-like, like most dream-figures, but solid, earthy, muscled, lively and livid-faced; as he’d been rumored to be in actual life, London was quarrelsome, yet charming; so very charming, it was impossible to turn away from him, or to shake off the effect of his personality . . .
Here is my deepest self
Upton thought
—far deeper than I myself can realize.
For there was, as Upton had come to believe, following the shrewd cultural analysis of Nietzsche, a
deep, true, primitive self
—most often betrayed by the moral cowardice of the public man.
At Upton’s instigation the men had been exchanging letters for the past year—voluminous letters—doggedly earnest on Sinclair’s side and fervid, and florid, on London’s—extolling the crimes of capitalism and the virtues of Socialism. Upton had urged London to accept the invitation of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society to be its first president, and London had declined initially, but allowed himself to be cajoled, and eventually won over. Each young writer had sent inscribed copies of his books to the other—Upton seemed to be the more impressed, rapidly reading the stirring pages of
The Sea Wolf,
London’s new best seller, only just published and already in its eighth printing; he’d written to London in San Francisco—“You are a ‘real’ writer—I am but a ‘muckraker.’ But I hope I can recognize literary genius when I confront it.”
Weeks had passed, without London responding. At last, when Upton received a scrawled card from London, he’d been dismayed by the bluntness of London’s remarks: “The Socialist sentiment of your work is faultless but I am afraid that your temperamental lack of touch—your ‘sex- attitude’—is anathema to my own view of the subject.”
Lack of touch! Sex-attitude!
Upton Sinclair was utterly baffled what this might mean, and had no one whom he dared ask—certainly not his wife.
HOW BUSY THE
New Year and spring of 1906 had been for Upton Sinclair! Having agitated for Jack London to be president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, he’d felt obliged to help organize the plenary meeting in New York City at Carnegie Hall; his co-founders Clarence Darrow and Florence Kelly, though supportive of the effort, did not live in the vicinity of New York, and were too busy with other matters to participate. Upton had only just recovered from the ordeal of rebutting a flood of attacks following the publication of
The Jungle,
and what he believed to be a major article for the influential journal
Everybody’s
—“The Gospel According to St. Marx”—completed in record time, even for Upton Sinclair. (Yet, fast as Upton could write, typing so rapidly he was in danger of wearing out a new typewriter ribbon within a week, and developing cramps in both his hands, he was uneasily aware that Jack London could write faster, as well as far more successfully—though London hadn’t begun publishing until 1900, by 1905 he’d already published ten books, each of them having created an extraordinary “stir” with the public.) Lately Upton was obliged to commute to New York City several times a week, by train; it would have been a felicitous time to meet with Meta, and see little David, and work out a reconciliation with his family, and yet—somehow, Socialist obligations took precedence over mere personal life, and Upton never found time.
Since Meta had moved out of the farmhouse on Rosedale Road, Upton’s eating habits were yet more sporadic. It was painful to him to see, in the reflections of store windows in Princeton, how, in his mid-twenties, he still resembled an adolescent male of seventeen or eighteen; so many hours of hunching at his writing desk had permanently rounded his shoulders, like the shoulders and backs of those poor mill-worker children whom Mother Jones had presented to horrified audiences, as examples of the exploited. “Well—no one has exploited
me
. I have done it myself!” Upton’s eyes, which were nearsighted, watered easily; he had not yet found time to visit an eye doctor and acquire a new prescription for his lenses. His health was beginning to be a chronic worry to him despite his strict diet and habits of cleanliness; a Socialist specialist in nutrition had advised him to fast as frequently as possible, avoiding meat, fish, and eggs, as it was now known that such a regimen led to an increase in the metabolic rate, or energy—though Upton had to confess, he felt no more energetic than ever, and often felt enervated and even discouraged—a predilection he had to fight against, vigorously. Set beside his hero Jack London—in his own eyes, at least—Upton envisioned himself as a sort of quasi-male, or stunted male—as London had so uncannily perceived, Upton lacked the temperament for
touch
—for human contact.
Yet Upton had married an attractive young woman, a fact that often bedazzled him.
How,
and
why
?
—
he would have said that he loved his young wife, and hoped to be a reasonably good husband to her, yet, when they were apart, as they were so frequently since the publication of
The Jungle,
Upton had difficulty remembering what Meta looked like; and his little son was interchangeable, Upton thought, to his shame, with any number of other young babies . . .
Suddenly in Upton’s New York life there were so many young women—so many people! And many were recent immigrants to the United States, or the sons and daughters of immigrants, like the Lithuanians Upton had interviewed in Chicago, as background for
The Jungle;
in New York City, residents of immigrant neighborhoods on the Lower East Side—“teeming” and “lawless” as the Hearst newspaper called them—were drawn to the Socialist cause, and impressed Upton Sinclair with their vitality and passion. They were German, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, as well as Lithuanian and Russian—their heavily accented English was frequently incomprehensible to him, even as their emotions were vivid and direct and so very different from the veiled and obscure emotions of the class to which he and Meta Fuller were born.
“You won’t accompany me to the rally, Meta? I wish you would—it will be an historic event.”
How many times Upton had pleaded with his wife, whose political sentiments, he’d thought, had been near-identical with his own, and whose methodical, meticulous editing of his manuscripts—often, line by line, and hour by hour—had been invaluable to him; but his voice expressed a sort of wistful yearning and childish hurt.