Chapter XIV: The Book of Life

I.

“Why do you always think of things first?” H. G. Wells wrote to Sinclair, upon receiving _The Book of Life_. “I should have been at that in a year or two. I may still do it in spite of you.”

It was in fact a book of a more or less Wellsian sort, in scope if not in treatment. It was published in 1921 and 1922. “The writer of this book”, says the introduction, “has been in this world some forty-two years. That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have made many painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking about him, he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering for lack of that same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the case, it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the pain.

“There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year, asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is dying of cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A man has invested his savings in mining-stock, and can I tell him what to do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read? Many such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of people, earnest, hungry for happiness. The things they need to know are not taught in the schools, nor in the newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend.”

He promises that he “will not pretend to know what he merely guesses, and where it is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind book; it is not written for its author’s glory, nor for his enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you in the brief span of your life. It will attempt to show you how to live, how to find health and happiness and success, how to work and how to play, how to eat and how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care for your children, how to deal with your fellow men in business and politics and social life, how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what art to enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the books phrase it!”

II.

The prophet, in his most realistic mood, becomes a teacher of mankind. And the prophet in Upton Sinclair has been considerably disillusioned and humbled before undertaking this task. There are here no overweening airs of seership; and though the book seeks to generalize too much from a specific life experience, it is none the less valuable on that account. If no one is wise enough to tell all of us how to live, we can nevertheless learn something from those who tell the truth about themselves. This is the counsel of a man who has seen, lived and suffered much, who has kept through trying years his faith that life has a meaning to be discerned by the human mind, who believes resolutely that, in large affairs and in small, knowledge gives us power. If it reveals the limitations of his knowledge, it is nevertheless an invigorating book, dealing as it does simply, sincerely and candidly with the fundamental problems of life. “You have written”, May Sinclair wrote to him, “the best and sanest things about love, and, it seems to me, the best and sanest things about society.” And it will be no serious derogation from this praise if we proceed to emphasize, for our purposes, its inevitable shortcomings.

The Book of the Mind and the Book of the Body are, on the whole, useful guides and primers. It is, however, noteworthy that while in the Book of the Mind there is some awareness of the contributions of modern psychology to our understanding of life, there is actually no great use made of such knowledge. The author’s view of life remains, with slight empirical exceptions, a pre-Freudian view. All life’s difficulties are apparently to be dealt with by the argumentative method, by reasonable arguments addressed to presumably reasonable minds. And such difficulties as are patently not amenable to reform by reasonable arguments are left entirely out of this purview, or are met with gusts of moral indignation. That there exists, for instance, among life’s important problems for young people, such a problem as the successful establishment of heterosexuality or even the problem of psychic emancipation from the home, is not at all indicated nor apparently at all understood. And in default of any useful insight into these realms of conduct, an undue burden of explanation of human behavior has to be placed, elsewhere in the book, upon the theory of economic determinism--which under this severe pressure begins to take on some mythological characteristics. And this lack of intimate knowledge of the operations of the mind leaves him with none too adequate defenses against his own tendency to credulity, in the matter of spiritistic marvels, where nevertheless he maintains such skepticism as he can muster.

The Book of the Body though characterized by an over-emphasis, due to his own unhappy experiences, upon the Stomach, is nevertheless interesting and useful.

III.

The Book of Love, on the whole very sensible and enlightening, suffers inevitably from the lack of a really modern psychological apparatus. His view of the subject proceeds simply and confidently upon the theory that the sexual arrangements of mankind can be classified exclusively with reference to the property-systems upon which they depend. This conception, though in itself a useful one, provides the author with the opportunity to indulge his own moral animus in the guise of economic determinism. Whatever in the way of human sexual habits he doesn’t approve of, becomes an illustration of “exploitation” by a ruling class. Moreover, in his presentation of what he regards as objectionable sexual conduct, the psychic burden of his own repressions becomes sometimes painfully obvious. In relating what he regards as sexual scandal, he becomes uncritical, incapable of serene thought, generosity, taste, or humor. He does not permit himself to realize that it is largely human nature itself that he is condemning, rather than merely the aberrations of a property system. In more than one passage he betrays something of his early emotional bias against sex[15]--an emotion which he rationalizes, not always successfully, into a preoccupation with its actual dangers.

Yet these pages represent, much more significantly, his escape from the domination of what he calls “the abominable old ideal of celibacy”, from which he had suffered. It may be said that he has, in his conception of marriage, achieved a really sane and healthy ideal. The treatment of love and marriage give the book its claim to serious consideration as a guide to life’s young adventurers.... Beyond the realm of marriage as founded upon what might be called complete or “true” love, his sympathy and understanding do not extend. Sexuality, in its possibly neurotic but still normal manifestations, all its merely adventurous, casual, experimental or play expressions, arouses in him an undue repugnance. (A reference to modern dancing and “petting parties” evokes the statement that “society is disintegrating, going back to the howling and fighting and cannibalism of the jungle”!) But it would be an injustice to the book to trace and further emphasize these occasional evangelistic outcroppings in a work whose merits are all in the direction of sexual sanity and health.

We may, however, pause to disengage one of the author’s characteristic attitudes for momentary attention, in its relation to his own psychic development. He believes very strongly in early marriage--at seventeen or eighteen. He gives many practical reasons for this proposal, but it is not difficult to perceive the one left unstated, the wish to live his own life over again and more happily. Indeed, one sometimes feels that it is to his youthful self that this whole book is addressed: that he is at forty saying precisely those things which if he had known them at eighteen would have saved him a world of unhappiness. And the passage which above all others seems a cry out of the heart, poignant with infinite regrets, is this advice to married lovers: “Be natural; be simple and straightforward; and beware of fool notions about sex.”

But it is perhaps due to the author that one word more be said about him as a guide. It should occasion no surprise to learn that his guidance must be taken with the usual discrimination. No guide, whether Aristotle, or Bacon, or Havelock Ellis, has known all the paths of life. Upton Sinclair is a guide conspicuously lacking in tolerance. Yet as guides go I do not hesitate to pronounce him an excellent one, if a little old-fashioned in his methods. If one must be intolerant--and it is a common human failing--it is better to be intolerant of drunkenness and debauchery than of, for example, the aspirations of mankind toward beauty, wisdom, and order. Puritans, it has been remarked earlier in these pages, are at the present time unpopular in America, where they are believed to have inflicted upon helpless populations much meddling and drastic tyranny in the effort to make us better. It is true that the agrarian revolt against the financial domination of the city, after its defeat in the political field in the great campaigns at the turn of the century, has lately been more or less successful in some rearguard attacks in the cultural field, including certain attempts to enforce rigid rural codes of morals and manners. At the same time, the acquisition of a considerable margin of leisure by a large part of that native population which had hitherto piously believed in keeping its nose to the grindstone, has resulted in a violent urban repudiation of former middle-class standards of decency and respectability; and lacking other approved channels, a vast amount of social and economic discontent of all sorts is finding expression at present in the new popular middle class protest against its own former moral narrowness. A moral nihilism is the approved note at present among the shell-shocked intelligentsia, and in this comfortable doctrine the prosperous middle-class is beginning to find spiritual encouragement for the diversions which enrich its newly-found leisure. It is impossible in America at the present moment to have any standards of conduct short of happy chaos without being regarded by the younger intelligentsia as a Puritan and hateful blue-nosed reformer. And since Upton Sinclair shares in this execration, it is only just to point out that he is actually a moral revolutionary, of the kind if not the quality of Blake or Nietzsche. One might not like to live in a world constructed according to the wishes of Upton Sinclair; I confess that I should not; but it would be a world wildly unlike the dreams of our Puritan forefathers.

IV.

The Book of Society, which concludes this work, contains an analysis of capitalist society and an argument for its reconstruction upon Socialist lines--an analysis and argument considerably but not fundamentally modified in the light of the Russian revolutionary experience; he prefers to hope for a peaceful solution of the economic problem, and makes various proposals to that end, which would obviate the disorder of an otherwise inevitable and violent revolution. This peaceful reconstruction, he declares, could begin at once “if we had sufficient intelligence.... And will anyone maintain,” he asks, “that it is the part of an intelligent man to advocate a less intelligent course than he knows?” It is by these views that Sinclair remains, despite his broad sympathies, identified with the pre-war Socialist movement, as distinguished from the post-war movement which denominates itself Communist.