Upton Sinclair

“ The water is brilliant azure, shading to emerald in the shallows; over it flies the man-o’-war bird, snow-white, with a long white feather trailing like a pennant. The sun shines nearly always. There is a tennis court, surrounded by a towering hedge of oleanders in perpetual blossom. There are roses, and a garden in which a colored boy raises our vegetarian vegetables. The house is wide and rambling, with enough verandas so that both halves of this two-family utopia can sleep outdoors.
Mike is working on his autobiographical novel—it was published under the title of The High Romance. ”

“ You are nothing but children! And you have no money! How can people get married without a cent in the world!” The two mothers fell to disagreeing as to which of their offspring was the more to blame, and so an old-time friendship passed into temporary eclipse. Corydon was hastily spirited away to another summer resort; but not until she had taken a solemn vow—to learn the German language more rapidly than Thyrsis had learned it!
At the end of October the poet returned to New York with an invisible crown on his brow and inaudible trumpets pealing in his ears. ”

“ Lawrence, and again in an “open camp” on an Adirondack lake, and had been perfectly happy. But I no longer had the firm conviction that the future of mankind depended upon the words I was putting on paper; on the contrary, I was obsessed by memories of horror, inescapable, inexcusable. The house was haunted—but I had no other place to go.
For more than seven years, ever since her first heart attack, Craig had been insisting that I could not live alone. It had become a sort of theme song: “Oh, what will you do? What will become of you? You must find some woman to take care of you.” ”

“ All the editors and readers and salesmen and officeboys of a great publishing firm were sure that King Midas would be a best seller; and anyhow it did not matter, since a new novel, still more brilliant, was gestating in the writer’s brain. It was springtime again, and the apron of mother nature was spilling flowers. Corydon and Thyrsis boarded a train for the Thousand Islands, and on one of the loveliest and most remote of these they built a wooden platform, and set up a small tent, and began the back-to-nature life. ”

“ In politics and economics, I believe what I have believed ever since I discovered the socialist movement at the beginning of this century. I have incorporated those beliefs in a hundred books and pamphlets and numberless articles. My books have been translated into forty languages, and millions of people have read them. What those millions have found is not only a defense of social justice but an unwavering conviction that true social justice can be achieved and maintained only through the democratic process. ”

“ I remember winter nights in Central Park, New York, and tree branches white with snow, magical in the moonlight; I remember springtime mornings in several places; a summer night in the Adirondacks, with moonlight strewn upon a lake; a summer twilight in the far wilds of Ontario, when I came over a ridge and into a valley full of clover, incredibly sweet of scent—one has to go into the North in summer to appreciate how deep and thick a field of red clover can grow and what overpowering perfume it throws upon the air at twilight. ”

“ Corydon and Thyrsis had wanted nothing but to be together; and now they had what they wanted—almost too much of it. Now and then they met the farmer and his wife, a gentle old couple; when they drove to Princeton, they met the clerks in the stores and in the college library; they met no one else. Possibly some women could have stood this long ordeal, but Corydon was not of that tough fiber. While her husband went apart to wrestle with his angel, she stayed in the tent to wrestle with demons. ”

“ But in The Journal of Arthur Stirling and Love’s Pilgrimage, you gave yourself away. It is no wooden doll who walks through those pages—it is a living, suffering bundle of conceit, cruelty, selfishness and folly, such as we know ourselves to be. And you make us feel the nobility and generosity that lies behind all that conceit, cruelty, selfishness and folly—you make us feel that we, too, may, with all our faults, achieve something for mankind. ”

“ For all my thinking lifetime I had been making tests of the big-business press of America. Almost everywhere it was on the side of privilege and exploitation, almost nowhere was it alert to the interest of democratic freedom. I had made notes and had envelopes full of clippings, and a head full of memories and a heart full of rage. I decided that I would put all that into a book and use the huge circulation I had got from that four-page Kansas weekly paper.
Seeking a title, I went back to the days of my youth when I had joined in the election campaign against Tammany Hall. ”

“ It is no small thing to give strength to youth. Perhaps it is the greatest thing that literature can do.
I think it was in the following year that I found you again, in the Appeal to Reason; in the meantime, like you, I had found it impossible to wage war on the world alone, and I had identified my cause with that of the workers of the world. It is true that there are not in America at present many young people who can as readily identify their own hurts and aims with yours as I could; but there are many all through the world, and there will be more. ”

“ So it came about that for something like a quarter of a century Mary Craig Sinclair controlled the purse strings of the richest woman in Pasadena.
The main factor in this, I think, was that for the first time in her life Mrs. Gartz met someone whom she regarded as her social equal and possibly her superior. Craig had not only the loveliest Southern voice, but also had gracious manners, wit, and what is called charm. She could keep a roomful of company in continuous laughter. Both men and women would gather around to hear what she had to say. ”

“ A girl child had been raised and trained to believe that she was destined by Almighty God to rule over millions of people—or at least to sit on the throne beside the ruler and bring a future ruler into the world; and she was destined instead to be dragged from her throne and hauled through avenues packed with screaming, cursing people crowding in to see her head chopped off upon a high public platform. ”

“ To them I made answer that the experiences of my childhood were “reality,” quite as much so as the blood and guts of the Chicago stockyards or the birth scene in Love’s Pilgrimage. It is a fact that I have been all my life gathering material on the subject of the liquor problem. I know it with greater intimacy than any other theme I have ever handled. The list of drunkards I have wrestled with is longer than the list of coal miners, oil magnates, politicians, or any other group I have known and portrayed in my books. ”

“ When the great lawyer Asquith was in the midst of his sophistries, the young American could stand no more; he half rose from his seat, with his mouth open to say what he thought of these starvers of British labor. Half a dozen times he rose, with words starting from his throat, and half a dozen times he sank back again. They would have arrested him, no doubt, and his protest would have been heard. But it would also have gone to Amsterdam, where the polite judges had still to decide the problem of the custody of Thyrsis’ son! ”

“ I gave him Arthur Stirling and the manuscript of Prince Hagen, and told him about Manassas, which I wanted to write. I had tried the public and got no response; I had tried the leading colleges and universities, to see if they would give a fellowship to a creative writer; I had tried eminent philanthropists—all in vain. Now I tried a socialist, and for the first time found a comrade. Herron promised me money and kept the promise—altogether about eight hundred dollars. How I could have lived and written Manassas without that money I am entirely unable to imagine. ”

“ Success always went to my head, and I became drunk, thinking it was going to be like that the rest of my life; and so I could found a colony, or start a magazine, or produce a play, or win a strike—whatever might be necessary to change the world into what it ought to be.
In this case the first thing I did was to buy a saddle horse for a hundred and twenty-five dollars. It wasn’t as reckless as it sounds because the horse could also be driven to the buggy, and I had to have some form of exercise to help the poor stomach that apparently was not equal to keeping up with the head. ”

“ The “novice in literature” had come to display “the mind of a master”; the “tumult of young blood” had become “musical and poetic fervor, at times bordering on the inspired”; the “crude work” had become “a novel of tremendous power”; “the youth, the inexperience of the writer” had developed, according to the Outlook, into “workmanship that may be called brilliant ... sincerity as well as knowledge are apparent on every page”—and so on through a long string of encomiums. ”

“ There were actually others who understood; who saw what had gradually become dear to me, that the heart and center of the evil lay in leaving the social treasure, which nature had created and which every man has to have in order to live, to become the object of a scramble in the market place, a delirium of speculation. The principal fact the socialists had to teach me was that they themselves existed.
One of the pamphlets I read was by George D. Herron; it moved me to deep admiration, and when I took it to my editor and critic, Paul Elmer More, it moved him to the warmest abhorrence. ”

“ The girlhood sweetheart of Craig in the Far South had brought to her a poem so sad that it had moved her to tears, and she had carried it ever since in her memory. “The Man I Might Have Been” was its title—the grief-stricken cry of those who fall into the trap of John Barleycorn. Now here was the author of that poem, in love with the same woman; and both the unhappy suitors—the Southern boy and the crowned poet of California—were fated to end their lives by their own hands, and those of John Barleycorn.
Thyrsis was invited up to New York to give advice about the life of Winnie Davis. ”

“ To walk in a windstorm and feel it beating upon you is a sensation of the body no more definite and unmistakable than this windstorm of the spirit, which has come to me perhaps a hundred times in my life. ”