Books: Senior Dissenter

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF UPTON SINCLAIR (342 pp.)—Harcourt, Brace & World ($6.95).

In the absence of a public monument (some outdoor version of the Laocoon would seem to be called for), Upton Sinclair has written his autobiography.

For those who came in late—anyone under 40—it should be explained that Upton Sinclair, now 84, has had his finger in every pious and progressive cause since 1900 and has published 90 books, most of this unimaginable wordage being in the promotion of beliefs that range from socialism and mental telepathy to vegetarianism and teetotalism, and against Mammon—variously embodied as Privilege, the Trusts, the House of Morgan, the Press, etc. As monument, the book is touchingly human. As autobiography, it is something less; success in that elusive art is achieved only by those whose quarrel has been with themselves rather than the world. Sinclair, who has quarreled with everybody else, has never found the slightest reason to criticize himself. But the book is a naively honest and endearing record.

Cupid’s Darts. “Was it really genius?” asked the wonderful old windbag of his own remote and astounding youth. A prodigy, certainly. The son of a boozy soft-goods drummer who was pathetically proud of his descent from a long line of Southern naval officers, Upton was a boy wonder. He was still in short pants and scarcely through his freshman year at New York’s City College (he entered at 13) before he had written his first novel. At his peak, his output of hack work and potboiling romances reached a sizzling 8,000 words a day. Of the many millions of words he wrote, few are the right ones in the right order, but some defect of ear, taste or intelligence mercifully protected him from knowing this.

Then there was the matter of his socialism or “industrial democracy” or “social justice,” as he variously called his faith. He came to it, he says, out of social resentment (the Sinclairs had come down in the world). Socialism was then in its quasi-religious phase, and he became one of its missionary preachers. It gave him fame and a million dollars from devout readers who devoured the prophet’s politics and didn’t care a damn about his prose.

The books that brought him fame, from The Jungle (about the Chicago stockyards) to Boston (the Sacco-Vanzetti trial) and The Brass Check (the capitalist press), were really fictionalized expose journalism; they belong to social rather than literary history. It is not his fault that today he seems quaint and a bit comic, like Mrs. Amelia Bloomer. For better or for worse, the U.S. has taken a good deal of his advice. Strikers, for instance, whose cause Sinclair fought from Pasadena to Passaic, are no longer jailed out of hand by local police chiefs acting under the orders of the Chamber of Commerce. Late in his autobiography there is a wistful recognition of the fact that no one any longer thinks of him as an enemy of established society and that the world he rebelled against has disobligingly vanished.

Terrible Time. Sinclair emerges from his own book an admirable, sympathetic and totally cranky figure, best seen in his early years enjoying every minute of the terrible time he gave himself. He lived through one winter in a windy cabin in the New Jersey woods within horseback ride of the Princeton library. Theories about food and sex complicated his life. Food was either all vegetables or, for a time, all meat. Once his wife tried to kill herself with a pistol. For one thing, she was depressed about life in a snowbound cabin on a no-sex basis.

To Sinclair the obvious answer to this sort of thing was to found a Socialist colony, which he did in 1906 in a former private school in New Jersey named Helicon Hall. It was an improvement on the cabin, but troubles persisted. Drunk artists turned up; the press wrote stories about free love. Young Sinclair Lewis quit Yale to work there as a furnace tender for a month and proposed to Upton’s blonde secretary (she turned him down). The school building burned down, and the Sinclairs joined another colony in Arden, Del., where one idealist turned up with two suitcases full of manuscripts and left with Sinclair’s wife. Another, an anarchist shoemaker, insisted on discussing the physiology of sex in mixed company. Expelled by the comrades, the vengeful cobbler laid an information against the colony for violation of the Delaware Sabbath observance laws, and Sinclair spent 18 hours on the rockpile.

Sinclair’s public career .was something of an anticlimax. The titles of two Sinclair books tell the sad story: I, Governor of California—and How I Ended Poverty (1933) and I, Candidate for Governor—and How I Got Licked (1935).

Does old Sinclair have more than an inkling of his own character? A sonnet he chooses to quote suggests that he does. “Child.” apostrophizes Poet Harry Kemp, whose ear, like Sinclair’s own, was of purest tin,

. . . be true

To that which makes a sincere man of you.

No man has ever been so sincere for 84 years. It is a pity that, as Edith Cavell observed of patriotism, sincerity is not enough.