Note 4 — II. SOUTHERN BEGINNINGS

However, Sinclair writes in a private letter: “I am not opposed to the play aspects of life. The facts are these: As a boy, I did every kind of playing that boys can do. I played tennis in Central Park, football and baseball in vacant lots, and was nabbed by the police in the usual style, built bonfires and roasted stolen potatoes, skated on ice in winter and played shinny on roller skates the rest of the year, climbed on the roofs and threw clothes-pins at the people on the street. I was in every kind of danger. I used to say, playfully, that fate must be keeping me alive for some purpose, because I had escaped death by a hair’s breadth a dozen times before I was fourteen. I could outrun any boys I knew for long distances. I have run all the way around Central Park, and I have ridden a bicycle from up town in New York over Brooklyn bridge to Coney Island, gone in swimming in March with snow on the ground, and then ridden home again; this at the age of seventeen. At about that age I set out with desperate determination to learn to play the violin, practicing eight hours a day. It was work, but done in order that I might be able to play. At the present time, when my wife is ill and I have to stay at home nearly all the time, I play an hour or two every day—always sight reading, and I get as much excitement out of struggling through a Mozart sonata as some people get out of a horse-race. I get as much fun out of a tennis tournament as any of the young fellows. I have also been devoted to the theatre, having never missed seeing a good play except because of poverty.

“From the age of twenty to twenty-eight or twenty-nine I did no playing, but this was because I was in a desperate struggle to survive as a writer; but that was not a matter of philosophy but of practical necessity. You wouldn’t say that a man was opposed to play because he didn’t play while he was in a battle.

“Theoretically I am opposed to play under the following circumstances; first, when it is cruel and involves wanton suffering to either human beings or animals. I have always enjoyed hunting and fishing, but the game or fish were always eaten. Second, when the play is destructive to health; and that is the basis of my objections to the kind of play which involves alcohol. I know so many ways to have a good time which do not involve a headache next morning. Naturally, the condition of my father’s liver when he died has a good deal to do with this attitude. Third, play which is not a recreation after work, but a substitute for work. I saw in Greenwich Village a great many young idlers calling themselves radicals and doing nothing for the movement, and that made me tired....

“I think you mistake my attitude toward dancing. As a boy at various ‘springs’ in Virginia, I danced a lot and was duly dressed up for fancy balls. I remember very well being a ‘baker’. I don’t think I was more than six years old, and I was expected to carry a tray with rolls on it, but I very soon shed that encumbrance. Later on I never danced, simply because the dancing I saw was done by the idlers of ‘society’, wasting time, and it was a matter of expensive clothes, and all that sort of social frummery: either that, or you had to patronize the underworld. My objection to modern jazz dancing is that it represents the taking possession of America by that underworld. I think that jazz dances are awkward and ugly, being imitations of savage sex dances. Of course, as time goes on, if they survive, they will be idealized....

“My ethical ideals on these questions are very simply stated, and they seem to me entirely practical. I want grown-up human beings to have some serious work to do, something constructive, something which constitutes their main interest. When they have worked at this with real, full-sized energy and determination, then let them recreate both minds and bodies by any kind of play whatever which they enjoy, and which does not interfere with their ability to go back to their work.”