The Confused Case of Upton Sinclair

THE distinguishing trait of Mr. Upton Sinclair as a writer is a sub-literary belligerence conditioning all he produces. I call it “sub-literary” because Mr. Sinclair is likely to insist that the moral (and sociological) righteousness of his end is more important than the aesthetic failure of his means. As for the belligerence, has any American pamphleteer been more apt to scent the battle afar off? Life with him is a constant warfare. A fugitive broadside appeal to end poverty in California shares with The Jungle this quality of attack. Arguments for diet, health, socialism, divorce, new methods of publication, and mental telepathy are attacks, but so are “novels” like Boston, Oil!, 100% — The Story of a Patriot and Mountain City.

The same defiance colors The Brass Check, The Goose-Step, and The Profits of Religion. Indeed, it is curious how persistently Mr. Sinclair wears the chip on his shoulder. A prefatory note to a reissue of King Midas admits that the book confuses the Appassionata and the Fifth Symphony, but he lets the confusion defiantly stand, apparently on the ground that “what I have written I have written.” Most books of reminiscence are mellow, but not Mr. Sinclair’s. The brief preface to his American Outpost says that “after a spell of over-work, I feel myself temporarily old, and seeking a light and easy occupation” — autobiography. If the reader doesn’t care for this covert insult, let him lump it: “well, there are forty serious books of mine which he can read.” All his life Mr. Sinclair has been unable to see what is wrong with this attitude of his.

Mr. Sinclair’s eagerness to combat evil led him some years ago to explicate current history through the easy method of fiction. He began the Lanny Budd series, the latest volume of which has just appeared. Lanny Budd is a combination of the Count of Monte Cristo, Sherlock Holmes, Harry Hopkins, and the Archangel Raphael, always appearing at the right moment and at the right spot, always international yet always American, now a socialist, now a millionaire, now an art dealer, now a mystery man, the master of encyclopedic knowledge, irresistible to women, yet pure as Galahad, and forever capable of drawing out confidences from Laval, F.D.R., Hitler, the British government, Stalin, Hearst, the underground, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, fascists, communists, Republicans, Democrats, Frenchmen, Russians, Germans, Italians, Hollywood stars, and, for aught I know, Esquimaux.

Does this seem harsh? Consider this veracious paragraph on the dust jacket of A World to Win¹:-

At the opening of this story— in Vichy in 1940 — Lanny Budd has been the intimate of the world’s great — famous and notorious—for more than twenty years. Outwardly the friend and confidant of the Nazi and fascist gangsters, this secret agent of Franklin D. Roosevelt is one of the most amazing figures in modern fiction. Between his visit to Laval in 1940 and his interview with Stalin in 1942, his encounters with history in this book involve him in a series of unparalleled adventures. He is captured by French patriots who think him a Nazi agent, and has a narrow escape. He is thrown out of England because of his involvement in Hess’s flight to Scotland. In America, too, he ferrets out facist activities and even uncovers a plot against the life of the President. . . .

Is not this reminiscent of Superman, Dick Tracy, and other elementary productions of the kept capitalist press manufacturing opiate for the masses?

But the half has not yet been told-and this is merely one volume out of seven. The blurb goes on —

A high spot.... is Lanny’s concern with the beginnings of the atomic bomb. After preliminary study with Einstein himself — including some delightful interludes of Mozart duets with the physicist

— he departs on his most dangerous mission, which ends in the icy waters of the Arctic. A fabulous cruise through the Pacific on a luxury yacht [!] brings him to Hong Kong on December 7, 1941, where he is once more in the center of the whirlwind. There follows a laborious journey through China, a stay in war-torn Yenan, and refuge in friendly Russia. The book concludes with a vivid personality sketch of Stalin, and with Lanny’s audience with that not-soinscrutable leader.

Neither Captain Nemo nor Phineas Fogg got around with the speed of light like Lanny Budd.

Not even Eugene Sue rose to this height of romantic claptrap. But if you say to Mr. Sinclair that all this has nothing to do with the art of literature, that not even printing the circulation figures for the series and listing the translations, as he does on pages 626-627, make this nonsense credible or his characters interesting, Mr. Sinclair instantly springs upon you. And his attack is interesting.

Mr. Sinclair’s general argument is that the smugness of the upper classes, including literary critics, college professors, the owners of publishing houses, and the editors of magazines, creates a tacit conspiracy against a “radical" like himself. These people, he says, do not want to listen to his honest plea for a better ordering of human affairs. Therefore they deny him importance as a “writer” because that is the quickest and subtlest way to get rid of the problems he raises. Next, Mr. Sinclair makes two contradictory assertions. The first is to argue that the test of art is irrelevant because his heart is pure. The second is to hint that, a hundred years from now, honest critics will return to his books, exclaim at our blindness, and declare he had been turning out unacknowledged masterpieces all along.

What critics will say a hundred years hence is anybody’s guess. But if we survive as a race, I suspect there will still be a difference between literature as an art, and mere prose. Within limits that have nothing to do with imaginative valuation, Mr. Sinclair’s prose has a certain low order of competence. It is competent in the sense that it is transparent. It immediately reveals what little it has to say — and I say “little” merely because Mr. Sinclair has cultivated a trick of being so simple that the result is endless monotony. By and by the trained reader comes to feel that, from Mr. Sinclair’s point of view, he belongs in the seventh grade. As a problem in sociology the reader may, indeed, belong in the seventh grade, but the art of literature does not consist in assuming that there is where he belongs. It consists in coming as close as possible to lifting him up to the seventh heaven. Mr. Sinclair is uplifting by intention, but he does not lift up.

Once or twice he has achieved imaginative dignity. In The Jungle his meritorious indignation fused with imaginative vision and produced a minor masterpiece. In the opening pages of Oil the little boy’s ride across the country in his father’s car is a rewarding thing to read. There are moments in Mountain City, there are moments in Boston, there are moments in other writings by him, that do achieve imaginative autonomy. But for the most part Mr. Sinclair’s belligerent desire to expose, persuade, and convince so conditions his prose that his cardboard figures do not interest, his style is tiresome, his thought by sheer iteration grows more and more shallow.

At this point Mr. Sinclair (in the last two pages of A World to Win and in previous publications) enters one of the most extraordinary demurrers ever made in a critical problem. His statement is that he has been translated into many foreign tongues. Therefore he must be a truly great writer. But the argument is fallacious. In the first place, translation proves almost nothing — what has not been translated? In the second place, the history of prose translation shows how often works flat in style translate very readily. Cooper, for example, mainly a bad stylist, has been widely translated — even more widely than Mr. Sinclair; whereas Hawthorne and Henry James, both excellent stylists, enjoy no comparable bibliographies. Finally, Mr. Sinclair’s foreign vogue has not been due to his imaginative splendors, but to his sociological simplicity. He has made the iniquities of American capitalism very, very clear, and there has been no time in the twentieth century when foreign readers have not wanted to read about the iniquities of American capitalism.

Nevertheless, Mr. Sinclair is a major figure — and I make the statement ungrudgingly. He is a thoroughly American personality. A fluent — a fatally fluent— writer with an unconquerable desire to preach and teach, he has a heart honorably moved by human suffering. He has written indignant pages about the old, unreformed Packingtown, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, fascism, the kept press, oil, real estate, the churches, and the refusal of poetry lovers to take George Sterling at Mr. Sinclair’s loyal valuation of an old friend. His expository writing is sometimes admirable, never more so than when he is explaining a mechanical process like the sinking of an oil well. In that case the necessity of following the process step by step confines his didacticism and his loquacity. His insight into society is sometimes shrewd, and his prophecies are occasionally correct. Above all, his courage is the admirable courage that Mr. Granville Hicks rightly celebrated in The Great Tradition and that President Conant of Harvard called for in his celebrated article, “Wanted: American Radicals.” It is the courage of American individualism, which has nothing to do with the socialism of Mr. Sinclair’s dream.

But when Mr. Sinclair explicitly or implicitly demands that one’s sympathy for his courage be translated into one’s admiration for him as a literary artist, one can only deny the confusing plea. A pamphlet novel can occasionally rise into artmostly, Mr. Sinclair’s do not. Propaganda can rise to high literary level, as in the case of Paine, whose style is a joy forever, even when his ideas are shallow and contradictory.

But propaganda equally valuable from Mr. Sinclair’s point of view can also sink (as most of his writing does) to the sub-literary and the belligerent. Two instances are Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School and Helper’s The Impending Crisis, both clever documents, both without literary merit. What Mr. Sinclair does not understand is that persons who do not like his “radicalism” would still oppose his ideas, even if he wrote with the pen of Burke or Milton; and that competent literary judges, however “radical,” would still have patiently to declare that most of his prose is essentially vulgar prosethat is, prose that does not lift into the perfection of literature, however righteous the intent of its maker may be.