De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 45

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Upton Sinclair, the Zola of America
His connection with Holland by Dr. J.A. Russell.

Upton Sinclair has always been a far more popular writer on the continent of Europe than within his own country. And the reasons for this are not far to seek. He is the greatest representative of the protest against the complacent optimism of the American bourgeoisie. He has committed the most heinous of social sins: he has intruded into the economic struggle on the unfashionable side. In frankly declaring his sympathy for the under-dog, he has not spoken in half-measures; no felicities of language have been brought into use to modify his denunciation of the prevalent social and economic system; compromise would have earned him at least a qualified praise, but he has felt the justice of his case too strongly to mince matters. Accordingly, he has become something of an outlaw in his own country; a target for the invective of contemptible and pandering journalists. Campaigns of unwarranted abuse have been launched against his works to bring about their unpopularity and virtual suppression - sometimes actual suppression. But no calumny, no ignorant boycott, has ever been allowed to daunt the lofty persistence of Upton Sinclair. He has been forced back on the expedient of becoming his own publisher, he has at every turn defied his detractors, he has gone to prison for his principles, and he has never suffered misunderstanding of his motives to kill the idealist within him. Faults and fallacies there may be in his social doctrines, but mere stupid boycott of his works and the heaping of opprobrium upon the man will never silence truth and

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sincerity. These treatments have only confirmed the essential honesty of his presentation of contemporary society.

Always in the work of Upton Sinclair it is the element of protest that is emphasized. As Wordsworth wished to be considered ‘as a teacher or as nothing’, he wants to be thought of only as a reformer. In this respect he has analogies with other writers of his own country: Jack London, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser. And with perhaps greater writers in other lands. Mr. Geoffrey West calls him ‘The American H.G. Wells’; I have seen fit to rank him rather as ‘The Zola of America’. The main point is that he can be classed only with the sociological novelists wherever found. Broadly speaking, we may take the phrase ‘social protest’ to indicate the true bent of his work, as his most recent biographer does.¹⁾ And if we wish to find the most exact parallel with the work of another writer - even the life-story of another writer - we shall discover that writer in Emile Zola. How so many exact parallels have escaped notice is hard to imagine, for the careers of both novelists simply teem with points of common incidence - not always mere co-incidence, I suggest.

From the first, each writer had a hard furrow to hoe. Eearly circumstances were all against releasing material that the latent poet might fashion into creations of art. Yet, if those days of duress effectively curbed the soaring spirit of the poet that was in each, they laid the foundations of the realistic novelist that-was-to-be. Like Zola, Sinclair was born in a provincial town, Baltimore, and like the Provençal, he came at an early age to the metropolis, being but ten years old on his arrival in New York Also at an early age he took to the craft of letters, in which respect his precocity was more marked than that of his great French vis-à-vis. At first his contributions were of the most trivial nature-verses, jokes, poems. But, from the start, they sold. So successful, indeed, was he that even while at school, he was earning a fair competence. Regular work was offered him, so that when he left school and entered Columbia University when eighteen, he had huge literary commitments: each week he wrote a number of the Army weekly (15,000 words) and of the Navy weekly (15,000 words), and

1) Foyd Dell, ‘Upton Sinclair. A Study in Social Protest’.

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every second week a complete volume (50,000) for a cheap library series. For such an incredible output, he required the services of two stenographers. In this way he himself estimates that, before he was twenty-one, he had written ‘a total bulk equal to the complete works of Sir Walter Scott’. It was, of course, pure hack-work, and the pace was too hot to last. A year later, in any case, the poet within him rebelled at the soulless drudgery, and he threw up everything, and retired to a shack in the backwoods to think out his first conscious piece of work. Zola at the same age was just beginning on much the same lines to storm the press of Paris, battling with poverty the while. So far the two were absolute brothers in misfortune - Sinclair more in the sense of being baffled in his aspirations than through any economic hardship, for he was reckoned to be earning 8,400 guilders a year.

Like Zola's, the early novels of Upton Sinclair cannot be accounted remarkable. From these beginnings, however, it was evident that the method to which each was finding his way was a fearlessly realistic presentation of human activities, with already a tendency to stress the lot of those at the lower end of the social scale. Against the pre-Rougon novels of Zola, we have ‘Springtime and Harvest’, ‘The Journal of Arthur Stirling’, ‘Manassas’. But the resemblances cannot be pressed here. Yet ‘Manassas’ with its sub-title, ‘A Novel of the War’, published in 1904, may be regarded as Sinclair's contribution to protests at the horror of war, as ‘La Débâcle’ registers Zola's abhorrence. The war referred to here is the American Civil War, about which the author had obtained much reliable information. ‘The best Civil War book I've read’, is Jack London's judgment of it. The culminating scene is the battle of Manassas, at which the Northern arms suffered defeat. Sinclair was working on no set plan like that of the Rougon-Macquart epic, but because he was determined likewise to use his art for the exposure of social abuses, his more haphazard form of publication allows his books to be arranged alongside particular works in that great series. The next matter to engage his attention was the scandalous conditions reported to prevail in the packing works of Chicago. Accordingly, the ardent reformer went to investigate, and on his observation of life in the stock-yards he produced his first great novel, ‘The Jungle’.

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Chronologically, it corresponds to the first great success of Zola with ‘L'Assommoir’; but in the nature of the study involved and the material effects reproduced, it is most akin to ‘Le Ventre de Paris’. And in precisely the same way did the fastidious affect to be offended by the entrance of ‘Pork’ into American literature. Throughout the country an outcry arose against the author's unsparing descriptions of the horror of the life of Packingtown. Despite the denials of vested interests and the vilification of the press, the charges contained in the book were later substantiated, and ‘The Jungle’ became a ‘best-seller’ and was translated into seventeen languages.

The book made Sinclair a leader of the Socialist movement, and his constant agitations made his name anathema to Big Business, to government circles, and to the press. He now knew all the pitiless persecution for honesty of purpose that Zola had known for twenty years. But he never spared meretricious methods wherever he discovered them, and he never flinched from the difficult task of turning the press-pounded public mind against shams and dishonesties, in whatever sphere. The contest, however, was an unequal one, and the single-minded ameliorist found his heroic endeavours go for very little in his pharasaical land; so much so that Georg Brandes, on visiting America in 1914, expressed his astonishment at the deliberate neglect meted out to these works, enthusiastically acclaimed elsewhere. H.G. Wells, too, had eulogistically referred to him as ‘The most hopeful of Socialists’. The further novels which had earned him these plaudits were ‘The Metropolis’ and ‘The Moneychangers’, which deal with the themes of ‘La Curée’ and ‘L'Argent’. And like these works, they are better as propaganda than as art. With ‘Samuel the Seeker’ (1910) he touched his lowest ebb as a writer, but redeemed himself the following year with ‘Love's Pilgrimage’, which is really the story of his own life to the year 1904. A letter from Mr. Frederick van Eeden to the author forms an interesting commentary upon it. ‘It is’, he wrote, ‘surely your greatest book, and very nearly one of the great books of the world.’ Further on he compares a much-discussed description in it which the central incident of Zolas' ‘La Joie de Vivre’. ‘You give’, he says, ‘wooing, marriage, pregnancy, birth, in great classic

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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.’

On completing this work, circumstances combined to draw Sinclair into closer relations with Holland. He instituted proceedings for a divorce, but so much sensational publicity did the newspapers accord the matter that, his suit being refused, he decided to leave America. His fortunes hereabouts touched their lowest point, for besides the mental anguish of the time, no one would read his books or publish what he wrote. In this plight, a letter reached him from his friend, Mr. van Eeden, inviting him to visit Holland. He was also assured that Holland was a civilized country, where divorce was granted upon reasonable grounds, without publicity. The result was that in 1912 Upton Sinclair went to Holland. And here he obtained his divorce quietly and without scandal. In a later book, ‘The Brass Check’, he pays tribute to the Dutch, whom he calls ‘the kindest and most friendly people I have ever met.’ And he goes on to say, ‘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 hands at their firesides. Their newspapers treated me as a man of letters - an entirely new experience. 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.’ The tolerant reception given to his ideas was also an altogether new sensation to him, and of this change of attitude he was pleased to observe: ‘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

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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.’

During his sojourn in Holland - comparable to Zola's period of exile in England during the Dreyfus Affair - Sinclair was not idle, even fromg the literary standpoint. Just as Zola employed himself in composing ‘Fécondité’, so the Zola of America busied himself in writing ‘Sylvia’, published in 1913, and followed in 1914 by ‘Sylvia's Marriage’: works which, in respect of the social scourge with which they deal, may be likened to ‘Nana’. Unlike Zola, pining in Norwood, Sinclair had never expected to return to his own country; but return he did in 1913. During his stay in Holland and England he had made a host of friendships, none more fitting than that with his host. Dr. van Eeden, at Bussum, then in the plenitude of his powers as a worker for a ‘Happy Humanity’, and whose American experiences and humanitarian sympathies must have made him a congenial companion. Even yet Upton Sinclair's works have a prominent place on the book-shelves at ‘Walden’, as I was pleased to note on my very first visit there. And something of this Dutch hospitality has been appropriately repaid by the tribute under which Mr. Sinclair has laid the literature of Holland, by including in ‘The Cry for Justice¹⁾ suitable extracts from the sociological studies of Dr. van Eeden. In passing, it may be remarked that Upton Sinclair seems to be allied with another Dutch writer, for his patronymic is likewise Scottish and his forebears are known to have hailed from Great Britain. Altogether the connection is of the happiest nature.

Back in America, he was at once drawn into the maelstrom of agitation. After wintering in Bermuda, he went west to investigate the coal strike in the mines of Colorado. Sinclair's aim was to break down the ‘conspiracy of silence’ with which the newspapers met the situation. In this he was successful, but only after he had spent a short term in prison. His investigations, like those

1) ‘An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest’ is its sub-title.

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of Zola in the Département du Nord for the same purpose, inspired a great epic of the coal-mine; a work equalling the interest of ‘The Jungle’. This second ‘Germinal’ he named ‘King Coal’, and it is an essentially human document, ‘a sigh of the coal’.

‘I saw white bones in the cinder-shard,

Bones without number.

For many hearts with coal are charred,

And few remember.’

The intransigeant Sinclair now directed operations from Pasadena in California, as Zola did from his retreat at Médan. But from 1918 his works tend to take the form of the pamphlet - using the word in the sense of a controversial book. This part of his homiletic literature is now in relation with Zola's later work, when he gave his attention to outlines of society reconstructed: Sinclair's ‘Great Pamphlets’ period is clearly identifiable with Zola's last phase in penning, the series known as ‘Les Trois Villes’ and ‘Les Quatres Évangiles’. It began with ‘The Profits of Religion’, announced as ‘a study of supernaturalism from a new point of view - as a source of income and a shield of privilege’.¹⁾ This book he was obliged to publish in 1918 at his own expense, but the risk was justified, as the exposé struck at the mercenary basis of religion, and could not be ignored in ecclesiastical circles. In denouncing charlatanism it is his ‘Lourdes’, ‘Rome’, ‘Paris’, in one. Next, American journalism was arraigned, in ‘The Brass Check’: a peculiarly American study. Then came the turn of education, in successive works, ‘The Goose-Step’ and ‘The Goslings’, which have affinitites with parts of ‘Travail’, where more enlightened methods are urged. All these ‘Pamphlets’ embody what might be called an interpretation of culture - religious, literary and educational - founded on the doctrines of Marx, as Zola's ‘Évangiles’ were based on the theories of Novalis, Fourrier, Proudhon. Naturally, they effected no reconciliation with the social orders so fearlessly assailed, but the new rebellious literature that has emerged since the war ensures at least that they will not

1) ‘An Essay in Economic Interpretation’ was its secondary title.

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be denied a hearing, if only for the deep sense of social wrong that they inevitably impress.

Had Zola not been cut off so prematurely, it is probable that his constructive philosophies might have earned him a reputation for honest thinking in his own life-time, instead of being required to wait the slow verdict of posterity. With Upton Sinclair it might be said that not until ‘Oil!’ appeared in 1927 was anything like full recognition accorded him. For this story of the oil scandals in America, there is no counterpart in Zola (just as, surprisingly, there is no English equivalent for the apparently American invention of ‘Au bonheur des Dames’. So powerful was his commentary of American politics that it was deemed advisable by certain civic authorities in America and England to ban it from the libraries under their control. Of ‘Oil!’ Mr. Foyd Dell says: ‘It restores to us Upton Sinclair the novelist’. And he continues: ‘It is as though in the great pamphlets Upton Sinclair had found his stride, and brought back to the medium of fiction the verve and the reality which he had learned in dealing with life at close quarters. If he can continue in this masterful way, not even his Socialist preoccupations can prevent him from being recognized as America's greatest novelist.’

It only remains to say that he has continued in this masterful way, by the publication in 1928 of ‘Boston’, which forms the last, and one of the most complete, parallels with the work of his great French fore-runner. Zola's final action was his magnificent championship of the victimised Captain Dreyfus; Upton Sinclair's most public performance to date is perhaps his unremitting efforts on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. And just as Zola wrote down the record of that lamentable miscarriage of justice, in his last word, ‘Vérité’, so Sinclair has given an almost documented account of the protracted judicial proceedings in the Sacco Vanzetti case; but into the merits of the case we need not enter here. The author, at any rate, regards ‘Boston’ as his greatest achievement, and while in what is so undisguisedly a ‘case’ presentation we cannot expect a great novel in the artistic sense, we must pay homage to it as a monumental and courageous piece of work.

Throughout this essay we have remarked the parallelism between

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the life and work - general and particular - of the most realistic novelists of France and America. It remains to say that, characteristically and temperamentally, they are also closely akin. A slightly morbid strain may be detected in each, for it seems true that ‘it is the neurotic conflicts in the minds of all artists which lead them to their particular themes.’ Recognizing this, we may now note that the same faults belong to both. Narrowly Puritanical in outlook, they time and again allowed their thesis to spoil their work as novelists. In no sense are they great creative writers. We must admire the hawklike swoop and descent of their minds upon facts, but the intangible eludes them; even had the content of Shelley been theirs, they would have fashioned it to Naturalism. Their supreme achievement lies in their having waged, in that stark form, ‘The Liberation War of Humanity’. Never did they despair of that: Zola died proclaiming his Evangel, and Upton Sinclair would still resound with Tennyson that he ‘faintly trusts the larger hope.’