Chapter IV: The Young Hack

I.

He was, in a humble and practical way, already a writer. He had found that he had the “curious knack” of doing trivial little things--verses, jokes, poems--that pleased others. “They came from some little corner of his consciousness, he scarcely knew how.” And, most incredibly, they sold! He had been doing these things since he was fifteen. He was soon making as much as four or five dollars a week doing these things in odd moments....

The family fortunes being for the time improved, he was free to spend these princely sums upon himself. And since what he most desired was freedom, he was somewhat reluctantly permitted to have a room of his own, away from his parents, paying his rent and buying his own food out of his literary earnings.

The room, a top-floor hall bedroom, cost $1.25 a week.[5] That did not leave much for food; but he scorned the worldly demands of appetite, and negligently fried his own meals, or thought his high thoughts while he ate the cheapest dishes in the cheapest restaurants--thereby laying up for himself in years to come a case of chronic indigestion. He would stay in his unheated room until he got too severe a cold, and then pay a precious dollar more to move into a room with a radiator in it.... And meantime there was an “Uncle Terry”, an elder brother of his father’s, sporting it in New York society. And occasionally the rich Baltimore relatives would come to New York and invite the young student to a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria and a musical comedy afterward and then perhaps a late supper. Doubtless they meant well; but their guest would bitterly reflect, after an evening empty of beauty or meaning, that upon what had been wasted in those few hours he could have lived for months!

From his fifteenth to his sixteenth year he went on in this fashion. He spoke of becoming a lawyer; but this was more than anything else a mask to hide, even from himself, his rash and beautiful dream of becoming a poet.... And then, one winter midnight, when he was sixteen, there came to him his first visitation of poetic ecstasy.

He was walking at the time alone in a beautiful garden, for it was during a holiday visit to those “upper regions” of luxury which were his for the asking. The experience came suddenly and abruptly. “He could not have told whether he walked or sat down, whether he spoke or was silent--his consciousness was given up to the people of his dreams, the companions and lovers of his fancy. The cold and snow were gone, and there was a moonlit glade in a forest; and thither they came, one by one, friendly and human, yet in the full panoply of their splendor and grace. There were Shelley and Milton, and the gentle and troubled Hamlet, and the sorrowful knight of la Mancha, with the irrepressible Falstaff to hearten them all; a strangely assorted company, yet royal spirits all of them, and no strangers to each other in their own world. And here they gathered and conversed, each in his own vein and from his own impulse, with gracious fancy and lofty vision and heart-easing mirth.”

That was the first of what he came to recognize as a poet’s ecstasies, to wait for and welcome, and to remember as authentic signs of his own election to a poetic career. For these visions were more real than reality; and they summed up in some vivid form all that he felt, and more than he was aware he knew, about life. They seemed to come from unknown deeps of his soul; they were what the dull professors of English literature were unwittingly referring to when they spoke so glibly of a poet’s “inspiration”.

He was at first so awed by these visions as to be disinclined to grapple with them and attempt to fix them in words. It seemed to him that a whole lifetime must needs be dedicated to realizing them in verse. Yet “he soon discovered that these visions of wonder came but once, and that when they were gone they were gone forever. And he must learn to grapple with them as they fled, to labor with them and hold them fast, at the cost of whatever heartbreaking strain. Thus alone could men have even the feeblest reflection of their beauty....”

II.

But, meanwhile, he was under the practical necessity of supporting himself. His “curious knack” of writing things that sold must be cultivated. And also, as his father’s earning capacity became more uncertain and undependable, it was necessary for him to contribute to the support of his mother. If he could make enough money by writing, he need not quit his studies. And so, still holding fast to his secret hope of becoming a poet, he threw the reserve of an immense stock of youthful energy into the task of making a living by hackwork. He knew well enough what sort of things he could write that would sell, and he wrote them. Boys’ stories, tales of adventure, full of his own earlier boyish dreams of adventure, flowed easily from his pen.

There were also jokes to be manufactured at odd moments and sold to the comic papers, or to artists who drew for the comic papers. A dollar apiece was the established price. In an _Argosy_ serial written at the age of nineteen, when he was commencing to break under the strain of hackwork, he introduced a poet, come to New York with an epic poem in his pocket, poor fool! but fortunately falling in with a smart lad who supports himself by writing these jokes; and the process is thus described by this latter character:

“I have a regular list of joke subjects--there is the tramp joke,
the mother-in-law joke, the boarding-house joke, the small boy
brother joke, the life-insurance agent joke, the cannibal and
missionary joke, and so on. I have counted them up, and I am sure
there are fifty subjects....

“Then, to take the tramp idea, for instance; there are a dozen
things available in connection with tramps. There is the fact that
tramps don’t like to saw wood, that they are afraid of water, and
bull-dogs, and tough apple pies. You see, when you get the thing
reduced down like that it is very easy to take any one of the ideas
and build a joke up around it.”

Shall we have, by way of illustration, from the scrap-book fondly kept by Upton Sinclair’s mother during this period, a joke thus manufactured?

Old Lady--You look as if you never washed, sir.

Weary Will--Yes, ma’am; I prefer godliness.

Not a very good joke? Well, the editor liked it, and that sufficed. Another on the same theme:

Peregrinating Peter--Look dere at dat sign!

Emigrating Edward--‘Cleaning and dyeing establishment.’ What about
it?

Peregrinating Peter--Didn’t I tell you them two allus went
tergidder?

And here is one that harks back to the days of the “Raines law” hotels, when beer could legally be served in New York on Sunday only with a meal--the meal being, in practice, a sandwich, endlessly reserved to each customer in turn:

“The complaint reads,” began the justice, “that the plaintiff
entered your hotel on Sunday and ordered a sandwich and a glass
of beer. That he was peaceably enjoying the same when you, the
proprietor, assaulted him violently. Guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty, your honor.”

“And why did you do it?”

“Your honor, the feller did me out of a whole Sunday’s trade.”

“How, pray?”

“Why, he ate the sandwich!”

Thus the “joke-factory”. And when Upton Sinclair is accused, as he has been, of having no sense of humor, he is perhaps entitled to the defense that he had to manufacture too many jokes at a dollar apiece....

Later came stories and serials in the _Argosy_, a cheap popular magazine of adventure fiction. They had the first place in the magazine, and doubtless his mother was proud of her boy’s achievement.

It was early in the month of February, in the year 1804, along the
northern coast of Africa.

A small vessel of Moorish rig was speeding over the Mediterranean
waves, urged onward by a fierce gale. The little craft was
close-reefed, and her decks were swept by the flying spray.

Thus begins _In the Days of Decatur_, a novel complete in one issue. And _In the Net of the Visconti_, a serial:

In the month of June of the year 1402 two horsemen were riding
through a deep forest in central Italy. Their horses were spattered
with foam....

These youthful literary talents did not fail to attract the attention of Street & Smith, publishers of five-cent novels, and presently he was given a regular job producing this kind of fiction for adolescents. Under military and naval pseudonyms, he wrote a weekly series about life at West Point and another about life at Annapolis. The Spanish-American war came on, and he sent both his young heroes to Cuba. “Killing Spaniards” became a profitable literary occupation. Each week he wrote a number of the Army weekly (15,000 words) and of the Navy weekly (15,000 words), and every other week a complete volume (over 50,000 words) for some cheap “library” series--accomplishing during this period the almost incredible number of 56,000 words a week. He kept two stenographers going all the time. One came one day, the other the next day; he would start dictating at 8 o’clock in the morning and dictate until noon, about 2,000 words an hour or 8,000 a day, Sundays not excluded. In the afternoon he would revise the typed matter brought in from the previous day’s dictation, and in the evening he would take a long walk in the park and think up the next day’s story. This was while he was still nominally a college student, and actually undertaking to keep up his intellectual life. These hack labors occupied some eight hours a day, leaving eight more for intellectual pursuits, for he was operating on a sixteen-hour work-day, leaving eight hours for the necessary business of eating and sleeping. For these hack labors he received $70 a week, at the rate of an eighth of a cent a word. At the age of twenty, he was turning out more than two million words a year.

He had shown that he was capable of coping with the world on its own terms. But he had not given up his secret dream of becoming a poet. Sometimes, when the ecstasy came, he would turn aside from these necessitous labors, and try to capture its magic in a net of words. He would try, and hope that he had succeeded, and know that he had failed. Poetry is a jealous mistress. But he could not take time off to court her properly. Street & Smith would not pay him a weekly salary while he was learning to be a poet. The world did not want poetry enough to pay for it. The best that was in him was worthless in the eyes of the world. The world valued only this “curious knack” of turning out adventure stories for adolescent minds. Be a hack, then, or starve! There lay his choice.