Chapter 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.