Chapter XI: Love’s Pilgrimage

I.

The success of _The Jungle_ in 1906 had put the young author immediately in possession of some thirty thousand dollars; and with this money he founded, that fall, at Englewood, New Jersey, a co-operative undertaking called the Helicon Home Colony. This project had been outlined in an article that summer in the _Independent_, in which he said:

“Here am I on my little farm, living as my ancestors lived--like a cave man or a feudal baron. I have my little castle and my retainers and dependents to attend me, and we practise a hundred different trades: the trade of serving meals, and the trade of cleaning dishes, the trade of washing and ironing clothes, of killing and dressing meat, of churning butter, of baking bread, of grinding meal, of raising chickens, of cutting wood, of preserving fruit, of heating a house, of training children, and of writing books! And all these crowded into one establishment, in close proximity, and all jarring and clashing with each other! And all carried on in the most primitive and barbarous fashion, upon a small scale, and by unskilled hand labor.” The coöperative argument, as developed by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, follows: “It takes a hundred cooks to prepare a hundred meals badly, while twenty cooks could prepare one meal for a hundred families and do it perfectly.... It takes a hundred ignorant nursemaids to take care of the children of a hundred families, and develop every kind of ugliness and badness in them; it would take only twenty or thirty trained nurses and kindergarten teachers to take care of them coöperatively, and bring them up according to the teachings of science.” He goes on to say that “there must be, in and near New York, thousands of men and women of liberal sympathies, who understand this situation clearly, and are handicapped by its miseries in their own lives--authors, artists and musicians, editors and teachers and professional men, who abhor boarding-houses and apartment hotels, and yet shrink from managing servants, who have lonely and peevish children like my own, and are no fonder of eating poisons or of wasting their time and strength than I am. There must be a few who, like myself, have realized that it is a question of dragging through life a constantly increasing burden of care, or making an intelligent effort and solving the problem once for all. To such I offer my coöperation. I am not a business man, but circumstances have forced me to take up this problem, and I am not accustomed to failing in what I undertake.”

Many answers were received to this announcement, and the plan was experimentally carried out by fifty or sixty people, including ten children. The colonists bought nine and a half acres of land sloping down from the Palisades on the Hudson, within an hour of New York City. There was a large three-story building, formerly a boys’ school, equipped with a pipe organ, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a theater, a billiard room, thirty-five bedrooms, a children’s dormitory, dining-room and play-room, a heating system, etc. Lodging cost $3 a week, meals $5 a week, “or $4 if we only eat two meals”; and the children were taken care of at a cost of $4 a week apiece.

“I look back on Helicon Hall to-day,” says Upton Sinclair in _The Brass Check_, “and this is the way I feel about it. I have lived in the future; I have known those wider freedoms and opportunities that the future will grant to all men and women. Now by harsh fate I have been dragged back into a lower order of existence, and commanded to spend the rest of my days therein. I know that the command is irrevocable, and I make the best of my fate--I manage to keep cheerful, and to do my appointed task; but nothing can alter the fact in my own mind--I have lived in the future, and all things about me seem drab and sordid by comparison. I feel as you would feel if you were suddenly taken back to the days when there was no plumbing and when people used perfume instead of soap.”

This colony of middle-class intellectuals was not a very radical experiment; but it furnished the newspapers an opportunity for sensational stories none the less. Reporters were always snooping about, spying in the nursery and eavesdropping in the pantry, and going back to write stories about “Upton Sinclair’s love-nest”. When William James and John Dewey came to visit the colony and talked of current affairs beside the fireplace, that was not news; but when, at the weekly dance, according to the democratic traditions of the place, the resident professor of philosophy danced with the two pretty Irish girls who waited on the table, that was something to be spread before a shocked America. Among the reporters was a young Yale College student named Sinclair Lewis, afterward the famous author of _Main Street_; he tended furnace at Helicon Hall and afterward wrote it up for a New York paper. What he wrote was playful, and the colonists would have enjoyed the fun except that some of them had their livings to think about. Subsequently an American newspaper was sued for libel by Upton Sinclair for scandalous lies concerning the Helicon Home Colony; a retraction and apology were printed, but the American public continued to believe the worst.

This eminently conservative and, within its own limitations, entirely successful economic and social experiment came abruptly to an end after six months. One night in March, 1907, a fire, possibly of incendiary origin, burned Helicon Hall to the ground, destroying among the total contents of the house all of the young agitator’s manuscripts and documents, including certain documents concerning defective armor plate furnished to American battleships. The Helicon Home Colony was wiped out.

II.

Upton Sinclair had been for a young author, rich, and thus he had spent and lost his riches. Now he was a poor man; and for a number of years he was to be tormented by indigestion and by domestic unhappiness. He commenced a wandering life, spending the summer of 1907 at Point Pleasant, New Jersey, the winter at Bermuda, the next summer in the Adirondacks, meanwhile writing _The Metropolis_ and _The Moneychangers_. During a winter’s “rest” in California in 1908-9 he organized a traveling theatrical company to produce Socialist drama, and put on three of his own plays. He then went with his family to live at the single-tax colony at Arden, Delaware, where he remained for three years. During all this time he was the butt and victim of newspaper mockery and sensationalism. But in 1910 there occurred at Arden a preposterous incident which relieved the newspapers of the trouble of making up lies to print about him. The truth, for once, was amusing enough. Sinclair tells the story in _The Brass Check_.

“Close upon the edge of Arden there dwelt an Anarchist philosopher, a shoemaker hermit, whose greatest pleasure in life was to rise in public meetings and in the presence of young girls explain his ideas on the physiology of sex. The little Economic Club of Arden invited him to shut up, and when he claimed the privileges of ‘free speech’ the club excluded him from its meetings and when he persisted in coming, had him arrested. It happened that the members of this Economic Club were also members of the baseball team, and they played a game on Sunday morning; so the Anarchist shoemaker repaired to Wilmington and swore out warrants, on the ground of their having violated an ancient statute, dating back to 1793, forbidding ‘gaming’ on the Sabbath. It happened that I did not belong to the Economic Club, and had nothing to do with the trouble; but I had played tennis that Sabbath morning, so the Anarchist shoemaker included me in his warrants.

“So behold us, eleven young men summoned to the office of a Wilmington Justice of the Peace one evening, and finding the street packed solid for a block, and people even climbing up telegraph poles and lamp-posts to look in at the window and watch the proceedings.”

They were fined, but refused to pay their fines; and so they were all sent to jail for eighteen hours. “When we came out from the jail we were met by twenty-two newspaper reporters and three cameramen, and everything we had to say took the front page, top of column. Incidentally, I got a curious revelation. For years I had written poetry, and had never been able to get it published; but now I found that by the simple device of writing it in jail, I could get it on the front page of every newspaper in Philadelphia and New York!” He quotes two lines:

‘And then in sudden stillness mark the sound--
Some beast that rasps his vermin-haunted hide.’

“When my cell-mate, Berkeley Tobey, read those lines, he remarked: ‘That’s me!’ To which I answered: ‘Tobey, that’s you’.”

The cells in which they had spent the night had been characteristic of the American jail system, filthy and swarming with vermin; they had been given food unfit for animals. Men were serving life-sentences in this jail, working in a clothing factory under a sweatshop contractor, without a spot where they could get a glimpse of sunlight or a breath of fresh air. What these released members of the Economic Club told the reporters about conditions in that jail “made an uproar in Delaware”.

Furthermore, they served notice that they were going to have the Attorney General of the state and the Chief Justice of the supreme court arrested for playing golf on Sunday, so that they might find out what it was like in jail. It was decided by the authorities that no more arrests would be made for “gaming on the Sabbath”, and the prison commissioners decided to add an exercise court to the prison.

“I look back,” says Upton Sinclair, “upon my life of nearly twenty years of muck-raking, and am able to put my finger on exactly one concrete benefit that I have brought to mankind. Twenty or more men who are serving life sentences in the Newcastle County Workhouse owe it to me that they get every now and then a glimpse of the sunlight and a breath of fresh air!...

“Can you blame me,” he asks, “if I stored away in my mind for future reference the fact that when it is necessary to get some important news into the papers, I can manage it by getting myself sent to jail? This”, he adds, “is a discovery which is made, sooner or later, by all social reformers; and so going to jail becomes a popular diversion and an honorable public service.”

III.

_Samuel the Seeker_, in 1910, had marked the lowest ebb of its author’s powers. Indigestion seems to have been largely to blame: “my poor tummy”, he says, “simply wouldn’t let me feel any emotions.” Accordingly _The Fasting Cure_, in 1911, an account of the means by which he had finally restored himself to health, has a closer relation than it might seem to have to the literary life. Novelists, like armies in the Napoleonic maxim, get ahead on their stomachs. And thus there appears, in the same year, another great novel--_Love’s Pilgrimage_.

It is the story of his own life, or rather, of the earlier part of it, up to the year 1904. So many references have already been made to it in these pages, and it has been drawn upon so often for biographical material, that it will be dealt with here briefly. But a letter from the Dutch novelist, Frederik van Eeden, may be quoted:

“It is surely your greatest book, and very nearly one of the great books of the world.... You give wooing, marriage, pregnancy, birth, in great classic lines.... Of course you have read Zola’s description of a birth. Yours is better, because it is more human, more poetic. It is one of the best things in English literature.... This book will make your world fame.”

While subscribing to these enthusiastic comments, one may note that the book, in dealing with the life of young Thyrsis, his earlier self, shows less of a detached and mature point of view than might have been expected. He has identified himself, so far as attitudes toward love and art are concerned, with his young hero, who was, from any mature point of view, outrageously wrong (or egregiously neurotic) about both these important matters.[12] The book’s greatness does not in the least lie in the direction of self-understanding, let alone self-criticism. It lies rather in its robust immersion in the stream of life. Nothing appals the writer; everything is told--it matters not that it is in impassioned self-defense. Its candor is magnificent, shameless, beautiful. It succeeds as realism. It is a masterpiece, vastly different from _The Jungle_, not comparable with it in detachment or breadth, but not inferior to it in truth and power. It must be named in any list of great American novels.

IV.

It was an unfinished story. It was intended to be followed by another book[13] dealing with the later life of Thyrsis, and Corydon his wife. But actual events in their stormy marriage interfered.

In this ill-matched and ill-fated marriage of theirs, the prime cause of discord would seem, to an outside observer, to have lain in the temperament of the husband, with his ignorant poetic fear of the realities of human love; nor is it strange that this should have produced in his girl-wife a state of emotional instability and irresponsibility. Her emotional divagations, though she might undertake to justify them by modern theories of freedom, would be explained more truly as her exasperated reactions to his aloof and Olympian nature. And he, less aloof and Olympian then he seemed, would find himself in what he later described as “a maelstrom in which a man’s physical, mental and moral integrity are subtly and bewilderingly tossed and buffeted and maimed”. They had been involved in this secret and painful domestic melodrama for eight years. The conclusion of _Love’s Pilgrimage_ suggests their belief that they had at last achieved a durable peace and happiness through a frank facing of their problem. But that hope seems to have been too precarious. Hardly had that book, with its tender record of their young love, and its high hopes for the future, been published, than a crisis arrived in their lives, which ended their marriage. Corydon went away with a lover; and Thyrsis instituted suit for divorce.

The divorce, after much painful newspaper publicity, was denied, on grounds of “collusion”. According to the New York laws, if both parties appear to desire the divorce, that is a reason for not granting it. These private affairs were the topic of nation-wide newspaper discussion, into which we need not go. “I felt in those terrible days”, Sinclair writes in _The Brass Check_, “like a hunted animal which seeks refuge in a hole, and is tormented with sharp sticks and smoke and boiling water.” His earning power had been destroyed by the newspapers; no one would read his books, or publish what he wrote. His health seemed permanently undermined; he did not think he was going to live, and he “did not much care”.

He did not wish to appeal the case, because the law required that the evidence in the case must be printed “and remain public property forever”. But he had received from his friend van Eeden a letter assuring him that Holland was a civilized country, where divorce was granted upon reasonable grounds, without publicity. Accordingly he went to Holland, in 1912. He intended to spend the rest of his life in Europe. “It seemed to me that I could not bear the sight of America again.”

V.

In Holland he obtained his divorce quietly and without scandal. “I wish”, he says in _The Brass Check_, “to pay tribute to the kindest and most friendly people I have ever met--the Dutch. When I came to them, sick with grief, they did not probe into my shame; they invited me to their drawing-rooms for discussions of literature and art, and with tact and sweetness they let me warm my shivering heart at their firesides. Their newspapers treated me as a man of letters--an entirely new experience to me. They sent men of culture and understanding to ask my opinions, and they published these opinions correctly and with dignity. When I filed my divorce suit they published nothing. When the decree was granted, they published three or four lines about it in the columns given to court proceedings, a bare statement of the names and dates, as required by law.”

He goes on to say: “There were many men in Holland, as in England and Germany and Italy and France, who hated and feared my Socialist ideas. I made no secret of my ideas; I spoke on public platforms abroad, as I had spoken at home. When reporters for the great Tory newspapers of England came to interview me, I told them of the war that was coming with Germany, and how bitterly England would repent her lack of education and modern efficiency, and her failure to feed and house her workers as human beings. These opinions were hateful to the British Tories, and they attacked me; but they did not attack the author of the opinions, by making him into a public scarecrow and publishing scandals about his private life.”

VI.

In the meantime, during his stay in Holland and England, he had written a novel called _Sylvia_, published in 1913. Its locale is divided between the aristocratic South and aristocratic Boston; it bears, more lightly than his New York novels, its inevitable burdens, journalistic exposition of class-traits, and sociological and moral arguments. Most unexpectedly, it presents a heroine of authentic charm--a sparkling, witty, vivacious young Southern girl, whose destiny it is to resist and at last succumb to the wooing of a young millionaire. It is unexpectedly tender, also, in its dealings with the South; even the author’s principles do not blind him to the charm of that environment. It is the tenderness, perhaps, of nostalgia, of one in exile looking back across the bitter defeats of adult life to the scenes of his childhood. It is not, however, a transcript of actual memories; it owes a good deal to reminiscent tales of the South heard from the friend who was presently to become his second wife. It is dedicated “To the People at Home”, and it is the one of all his books which might conceivably not hurt their feelings.

The story, however, was obviously unfinished; and a secondary theme of the book, which was emphasized only on the last page, required another volume for its presentation. This was the theme at the time being sensationally presented to American playgoers and readers by Brieux, in his play, _Damaged Goods_--a novelized version of which, with the playwright’s grateful consent, was written and published in 1913 by Sinclair.

_Sylvia’s Marriage_, accordingly, which appeared in 1914, relates the consequences to this marriage of her husband’s pre-marital wild oats, in the form of a blind baby--a result accounted for with satisfactory realism. The novel, however, rises far above merely propaganda effects in dealing with the life of his heroine after she has left her millionaire husband and come back with her blind baby to live in the Southern home of her childhood. A realistically disillusioned woman, she is neither pathetic nor embittered, nor has she lost her charm, her wit, or her brilliance. These qualities, deepened rather by her tragic experience, are her weapons in the ensuing struggle with her family and friends and the milieu in general. For here she observes, in the habits of the young blades and in the sheltered ignorance of the young belles, the possible origins of other such tragedies as hers; and with a realistic and reckless candor she intervenes in more than one engagement, to the bewildered shock of her family and the malicious amusement of the town. These pages are true high-comedy, as fine as anything of the sort that English or American fiction has to offer. The duel between this disillusioned and frank young matron and the conventional reticences of the polite world is done with a masterly hand. But fiction of this sort, except from the most distinguished foreigners, was at the time considered disreputable in America, because it dealt frankly with sex; and now, by a swing of the wheel of fashion, it would be considered unduly moralistic.

Comments have been made in these pages on the cramping effects upon some of this writer’s fiction by his moral conceptions; and it will be in place here to note that these moral conceptions have been complained of, not because they were moral, but because they involved a distaste for the subject in hand, and led to an undue slighting of its realities. But in the case of this novel, the moral conceptions lead rather to a richness of truth in dealing with the subject in hand, and are consequently not to be complained of by one whose interest is in the business of getting life into terms of fiction. If some of the more romantic aspects of sexual adventure are neglected by Sinclair, in his preoccupation with certain of its realistic consequences, that is to be expected, and is all the more readily to be forgiven since the aspects which he neglects are sufficiently celebrated elsewhere. He has taken a difficult aspect of the sexual theme and, throughout the latter part of this novel, handles it magnificently.

Some references have also been made in these pages to the neurotic attitudes toward sex displayed by its subject in his earlier life; and the argument might be expected here that his preoccupation with the frightful physical dangers of sexual adventure is an illustration of a neurotic fear. There is little doubt that it is the neurotic conflicts in the minds of all artists which lead them to their particular themes: the important question is what they then do with those themes. Do they get truth and beauty out of them? Upton Sinclair’s opinions, as such, on the whole subject of sex, will be dealt with later on. For the present, it needs merely to be said that he has, in _Sylvia’s Marriage_, artistically justified his emotional preoccupation with the sterner and sadder aspects of a theme which has many aspects.

VII.

He had never expected to return to America. He did return, however, in 1913, and in the course of the year was married to Mary Craig Kimbrough. She was of an old Southern family, and at the time of the wedding, in Virginia, her husband noted that the event was respectfully treated by the newspapers; which, he remarks in _The Brass Check_, was explained by the information contained in the news dispatches, to the effect that the bride’s father was “one of the wealthiest men in this section, and controls large banking interests.”

If, however, the newspapers had presumed that the groom was henceforth to lead a correct and respectable literary life and keep out of radical politics, they were mistaken.