Chapter III: Adolescent Discoveries

I.

When the Sinclairs came to New York in 1888, they had not quite left the South--for they stayed, at first, for a year or two, in a “Southern” hotel on West 19th Street. It is described in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ as inhabited by musty phantoms of the dead Southern past--“old ladies who were proud and prim, and old gentlemen who were quixotic and humorous, young ladies who were ‘belles’ and young gentlemen who aspired to be ‘blades’. It was a world that would have made happy the soul of any writer of romances; but to Thyrsis ... this dead Aristocracy cried aloud for burial. There was an incredible amount of drunkenness, and of debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense strutting like a peacock, and avarice skulking like a hound; there were jealousy, and base snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of suspicion and scandal hanging like a poisonous cloud over everything. These people came and went, an endless procession of them; they laughed and danced and gossipped their way through the boy’s life, and unconsciously he judged them, and hated them, and feared them.... Most of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and artificial poverty--the inability to dress as others did, and to lose money at ‘bridge’ and ‘poker’, and pay the costs of their self-indulgences. As for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid what they owed; but they were not always able to pay it when they owed it, and they suffered all the agonies and humiliations of those who did not pay at all. There was scarcely over a week when this canker of want did not gnaw at them; their life was one endless and sordid struggle to make last year’s clothing look like new, and to find some boarding-house that was cheaper and yet respectable. There was endless wrangling and strife and worry over money; and every year the task was harder, the standards lower, the case more hopeless.”

And now the boy went formally to school for the first time, an East Side school, and played rowdily about the streets of New York with his schoolmates, to whom he was familiarly known as “Chappie”. He was able to do two years’ work in one, and at the age of twelve had finished grammar school; but because he was too young to enter college, he had nothing better to do in the meantime than take the last year of grammar school over again. “The fates took pity on him,” he says of himself in _The Goose-Step_, “and gave him as teacher for that year a jolly Irish gentleman, so full of interest in his boys that he did not keep the rules. If you wanted to ask him questions, you asked and without first raising your hand; you might even get into an argument with him, as with any boy, and if he caught you whispering to your neighbor his method of correcting you was novel, but highly effective--he would let fly a piece of chalk at your head, and you would grin, and the class would howl with delight.” A collection of one or two hundred books, given him by aunts and uncles and cousins on Christmases and birthdays, he left with the school, where it became the foundation of a class library, to the delight of the boys and the Irish teacher, so that he left school in a blaze of glory. His school-life, though he was found a sufficiently apt pupil, was not all so satisfying nor by any means so unconventional as in these instances. But it was too late for him to be really amenable to the social pressure of the school-room and the school-yard; he was an individual, cherishing his own secret dreams. Though he played with other boys, he had no chums, no real friends. “Where,” as he asks, in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ of Thyrsis, “should he meet people who knew what he knew about life? Where in all the world should he meet them, save in the books of great men in times past?”

Books were still his companions. In the summer of his thirteenth year, when visiting his uncle in Baltimore, he discovered sets of Milton and Shakespeare in expensive bindings, unread to that day and perhaps since; he went straight through them in rapture, and found in Hamlet a figure to shine in his imagination beside that earlier heroic and beautiful figure of Jesus. For Hamlet was, like himself, a prince of the spirit, cheated by the world out of his inheritance--the poet’s natural inheritance of beauty and happiness. And Hamlet’s world seemed to him like the world he had known all his life, in Baltimore and New York. His predicament had made him think a great deal about the world. It wasn’t, he knew, his father that was to blame for his misery; at first he had thought the corner saloon-keeper was to blame--but behind him he had seen first the brewer, then Tammany Hall, and finally rich and respectable society, involved in a cruel and unscrupulous plot to make money out of his own and others’ miseries. Yes, Hamlet, like himself, was an idealist in revolt against the world.

He had vague plans of wringing from this brutal world his chance for life. He needed knowledge first of all. And so, still nominally too young, and obliged to tell a lie about his age, he began in 1892 the five-years’ course at the College of the City of New York, from which he was to receive his A.B. at the age of eighteen. This institution, then located in an old brick building at Twenty-third Street and Lexington Avenue, is described in _Love’s Pilgrimage_ as a poor-boy’s college, “where the students all lived at home, and had nothing to do but study; and so Thyrsis missed all that beneficent illumination known as ‘student-life’. He never hurrahed at football contests, nor did he dress himself in honorific garments, nor stupefy himself at ‘smokers’. Being democratic, and without thought of setting himself up over others, he was unaware of his greatest opportunity, and when they invited him into a fraternity, he declined. Once or twice he found himself roaming the streets at night with a crowd of students, emitting barbaric screechings; but this made him feel silly, so he lagged behind and went home.” For he had gone to this institution with a purpose of his own; he was to use it, not let it use or shape him.

The college did, indeed, serve to introduce him to the world of knowledge; “but that did not take long, and afterwards it was all in his way. The mathematics were a discipline, and in them he rejoiced as a strong man to run a race; and this was true also of the sciences, and of history--the only trouble was that he would finish the text-books in the first few weeks, and after that there was nothing to do save to compose verses in class, and to make sketches of the professors. But as for the ‘languages’ and the ‘literatures’ they taught him--in the end Thyrsis came to forgive them, because he saw that they did not know what languages and literatures were.” “I marvel,” he says in _The Goose-Step_, “when I realize that it was possible for me to read _The Acharnians_ of Aristophanes, line by line, and hardly once get a smile out of it, nor have it occur to me that there was any resemblance between what happened in that play, and the fight against Tammany Hall and the Hearst newspapers which was going on in the world about me.” Of the Latin professor he writes: “I can see this old gentleman’s knitted brows and hear his angry tones as he exclaims: ‘Mr. Sinclair, it is so because I say it is so!’ Five hours a week for five years I studied with that old gentleman, or his subordinates, and I read a great deal of Latin literature, but I never got so that I could read a paragraph of the simplest Latin prose without a dictionary. The professor of English literature chanced to be a propagandist--but not, of course, of radical ideas of any sort; that would scarcely have been tolerated. He was an ardent and argumentative Catholic, and his idea of conducting a class in literature was to find out if there was anything in the subject which could in any way be connected with Catholic doctrine and history, and if so, to bring out that aspect of the subject.” Finally, as his time in this college was nearing its end he got a leave of absence on the ground that he had to earn his living, and spent two months sitting on the bed in his eight-by-ten bedroom in a lodging-house, spending his days and nights learning for himself.

He made the great discovery of cheaply-printed prose classics--English poetry he already knew by heart. The Spartan plainness, the lack of outward beauty, in these little paper-bound volumes did not offend him. “One could get so much for so little, in this wonderful world of mind! For eight cents he picked up a paper volume of Emerson’s _Essays_; and in this shrewd and practical nobility was so much that he was seeking in life! And then he stumbled upon a fifteen-cent _Sartor Resartus_, and took that home and read it. It was like the clash of trumpets and cymbals to him. Hour after hour he read, breathless, like a man bewitched, the whole night through. He would cry aloud with delight, or drop the book and pound his knee over the demoniac power of it. The next day he began the _French Revolution_; and after that, alas, he found there was no more--for Carlyle had turned his back upon democracy, and so Thyrsis turned his back upon Carlyle.”

For, in the New York public schools, he had begun for the first time to learn, as he could scarcely have learned in the South, the history of his country as an experiment in democracy. His hatred of the sham aristocracy of the South had made him thrill to the lessons of democracy. He had read ten large volumes about Lincoln. And because the great historic idea of democracy was something new to this young rebellious Southerner, he could understand and respond to all its revolutionary implications. These implications might be smugly covered up in the school histories, but they were plain enough for him in nineteenth century literature. “Wordsworth and Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne--he followed each one as far as their revolutionary impulse lasted. Even Ruskin, who taught him the possibilities of English prose, and opened his eyes to the form and color of the world of nature--even Ruskin he gave up, because he was a philanthropist and not a democrat.”

Nevertheless, his own ideals were fundamentally more aristocratic than he realized. It was from his father’s aristocratic point of view that he had first in childhood learned to hate commercialism; and his father’s notion of Gentility arising under the leadership of Robert E. Lee to drive out the hordes of commercialdom had found its spiritually aristocratic analogue in his childhood vision of Jesus driving the money-changers from the Temple. It was as an aristocrat that he had turned against plutocracy; but sensitive and energetic members of a defeated aristocracy sometimes make common cause with the democracy against their common enemy, the rich. So far his democracy was a little like Byron’s. And his hatred of a sham Aristocracy was not the least aristocratic thing about him. He was conscious of superiority to those against whom he measured himself and his desire was for a Kingdom of the Spirit where he should take his true rank among the peers of that realm.

II.

His family belonged to the Episcopalian church. He had been taught the Christian virtues in his childhood, but theology had not been emphasized. Church-going was more important than orthodoxy. It pleased his mother to be escorted to church on Sunday by husband and son, these correctly attired for the occasion in kid gloves and derby hat. Though the family always lived in poor neighborhoods, it was to a fashionable Fifth Avenue church that they went, to be taken by the polite usher with padded shoes into the half-occupied pew of some more or less hospitable church member. Coming out, they would look at the costumes of the churchgoers, marvel at the Vanderbilt palaces they passed by on their way home, and talk about how much everything must cost. The boy’s mother, who had little enough of comfort and leisure in her life, enjoyed these occasions innocently, and the father appreciated the opportunity to dress up in his Sunday best and wear his tight and “dressy” patent-leather shoes. But the boy, because he had a really religious nature and took religion seriously, began to revolt against this practice. It, too, he declared, was a sham.... From the age of fourteen he had been the protégé and friend of a clergyman, the Reverend William W. Moir, of the Church of the Holy Communion, in New York. This warm-hearted clergyman had gathered about him a whole flock of boys, rich and poor, and young Sinclair was one of his favorites. To him the boy took his first theological difficulties, and was given volumes of Christian apologetics to read. These completed his downfall, for they revealed how feeble were the intellectual defenses of the church against its critics. His clergyman friend was not, however, seriously troubled about the boy’s agnosticism, declaring that he would come back.... Nor were his family seriously troubled over his apostasy. They were not interested in theological matters. But his refusal to go to church was a different matter. That made his mother very unhappy. And it shattered, moreover, her dream of seeing him a bishop....

At the same time he was beginning to pain his father by speaking disrespectfully of the Democratic party. And when he presently went on to utter disrespectful opinions concerning the Vanderbilts, and respectability in general, he passed out of the range of parental comprehension.

And now, beside Jesus and Hamlet, a third great ideal figure came into the world of his imagination--Shelley.... The course in English literature at college had somehow failed to conceal that poet’s existence. It was in his senior year, reading _The Skylark_ in class, that he abruptly realized that what he was going through in college was a “ghastly farce.” And accordingly he went home, to conduct his own education for a time. His education had been all along an attempt to discover the values of life, so that he might choose for himself what his own life should be. His secret wish was to be a poet; and now this wish was given its largest and noblest interpretation by his worship of the great poet who had declared poets to be “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind”.