XVI. OIL!

I.

One of the difficulties of writing a critical biography of a living writer is that he changes while he is being written about. When this book was begun, it was with the idea that Upton Sinclair, in spite of two fictional masterpieces, had found the novel too narrow a medium for the expression of his vast and robust interest in the social and economic tragi-comedy of life, and that he had reached his fullest self-realization in the series of great pamphlets descriptive of American culture. But there is now at hand the astonishing new novel, Oil!, upon which he has been at work for the past two years, and that judgment has to be reversed.

Oil! stands beside and in many ways above The Jungle. It is a maturer work, and if it does not have the intensity and poignancy of that early masterpiece it has a greater breadth of vision and a deeper knowledge of life. Its curiosity and range and ease and power are Tolstoyan. It is a large book, a great canvas, as great as that of the great pamphlets, and carrying all their effects easily within its simple story. It is the story of Oil, in human terms, and in terms of all classes—the oil magnates and their families, the rich, the poor, the workers, idlers, the doll-house life of Hollywood, and the political machinations that have been reverberating through America for the last four years: it is all here, in the story of an oil magnate’s son, his father, his sweethearts, and his friends, including the vital figure of Paul, the young workingman who gives him his first glimpse into the rebel world beneath his happy paradise. No extended account of it will be given in these last pages; it suffices to say that it restores to us Upton Sinclair the novelist, and that it constitutes one of the great achievements in the literary discovery of contemporary America.

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.

II.

It remains only to complete the picture with some brief account of his other activities, carrying the story of his life down to the present.... Little has been said of him here as a playwright; but he has written many plays, produced some of them himself under Socialist auspices, and one of his late plays, Singing Jailbirds, published in 1924, dealing with the ruthless persecution of the I. W. W. under the California “Criminal Syndicalist” law, is a more poignant and effective example of the expressionistic drama than any that has been produced on the American stage. It has been played in England as a means of raising funds for the striking miners, and last year in Vienna on the revolutionary anniversary, November 8th and 9th. This remarkable play is the outcome of the author’s experience in 1923, during the free speech fight at Los Angeles in connection with the I. W. W. harbor strike. The rights of free speech being illegally denied by the police to the members of the I. W. W., he undertook to uphold the law against those who, sworn to defend it, were engaged in violating it in the interests of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association. He and his associates, assembling in San Pedro on private property with the consent of the owner, were arrested by the police for the crime of reading aloud, and hearing read, three sentences from the Constitution of the United States—those guaranteeing “freedom of speech and of the press, and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for the redress of their grievances.” The act of reminding the people of California of these antique rights as guaranteed in that venerable document constituted a crime which made Sinclair, according to the Los Angeles chief of police, “more dangerous than 4,000 I. W. W.” The complaint on which he was illegally arrested charged him with “discussing, arguing, orating and debating certain thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories ... were detrimental and in opposition to the orderly conduct of affairs of business, affecting the rights of private property....” He was accordingly thrown into jail and held “incommunicado”. While in jail he learned of an incident which had happened there the day before—fifty men crowded into a small prison hole without air for singing their I. W. W. songs—the origin of his play, Singing Jailbirds. “I am not”, he wrote to the chief of police after his release on bail had been at last effected, “a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit that when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming on to private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice.”

III.

For a number of years Upton Sinclair has occupied a peculiar situation, as the publisher of his own books. This, as may be remembered, began with his first novel, which could at first find no publisher. The Jungle, also, when it had been rejected by five publishers, he decided to publish himself, and had made the plates when a publisher summoned up the courage to take it over—and made a fortune on it. Ten years afterward, The Profits of Religion could find no publisher, and he published it himself; he has sold some sixty thousand copies, and still sells two thousand copies every year without advertising. He was told that there were fifty criminal libel suits and one or two thousand civil suits in The Brass Check, so he published that himself. He printed twenty-three thousand copies, and they were sold in two or three weeks; orders came in for forty thousand more, but this was at a time of paper shortage, and he found it hard to get paper—doubly hard, because in several instances when it was discovered what the paper was to be used for the orders were canceled; a hundred and thirty-five thousand copies were sold altogether, in spite of these difficulties. “Also”, the author remarks, “I have managed to give away seven or eight thousand copies of Singing Jailbirds.” Jimmie Higgins, 100%, The Goose-Step, The Goslings, and Mammonart were similarly published; and the business flourished sufficiently to enable him to buy the plates and copyrights of books originally published by other publishers, so that he now owns twenty-six of them, and has all but three or four in print. He does not, however, recommend the method to other authors, and tells the story of a man who was in the business of manufacturing brushes, and whose wife, when he found at the end of the year that he had been selling the brushes below cost, said enthusiastically: “But think what an enormous business you do!” The story sums up, he admits, his own experiences as a publisher. The method, however, keeps him in touch with his readers. “Never a mail comes that there is not a letter from some workingman or workingwoman, some poor student, or teacher, or political prisoner, who has been able to get my books for one reason and one only—that they are available at low prices. It is not an unusual thing for me to hear of a single volume that has been read by scores of people, prisoners in jail, of workingmen in mines and lumber camps, or teachers in a school, or professors in a college. I get letters from South Africa and South America, from Alaska and New Zealand, from India and Russia.” Many of his books, scarcely heard of in America, are best sellers in Great Britain and its colonies, in Germany, Italy, Holland, Denmark, the Scandinavian countries, and the states from Finland down to Serbia, while hundreds of editions were published in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, where the printing of his books has recently been made a state monopoly.

IV.

At the age of twenty-three it had been Upton Sinclair’s ambition, as expressed in the preface to his first novel, to publish a library of helpful books for “the humble people of our land.” This dream of a workingmen’s library has recently come true in an indirect way, as one of the enterprises conducted at his instigation by the “Garland Fund.” The manner in which the fortune which had been repudiated by a strange young millionaire named Charles Garland came to be used for this and other liberal and radical purposes is thus described by Sinclair in What’s the Use of Books?—a pamphlet published by the Vanguard Press:

“I am going to tell you a story. It is as strange as any fairy story you ever read, and with this one difference—it happened exactly as I tell it, and only three or four years ago.

“Once upon a time there was a young man who had been born into a home of luxury. He had everything in life that a young man could desire, and before he was twenty-one a relative died and left him a million dollars. Ask most Americans what they would like to have happen to them, and they will say that to have a relative die and leave them a million dollars would suit them fine. But for some strange reason it didn’t suit this rich young man. He was troubled with an uncomfortable thing called a conscience; he had the crazy notion that before a man spends money he ought to earn it. He said that he hadn’t earned that million dollars, and so he wasn’t going to take it.

“It was none of my business, but I was worried, thinking about that million dollars, and all the things that could be done with it. Lying there in a Wall Street bank, piling itself up—according to present-day customs being loaned out to speculators and big business men, and thus being used directly contrary to the ideas of the young man! I sat down and wrote him a letter, pointing this out and begging him to take the money and use it for spreading his ideas of social justice—or, if he hadn’t faith enough in his own ideas, then to entrust the money to a group of the best friends of social justice he could find. Many others wrote the young man to the same effect, and the upshot was that he changed his mind, and took the million dollars and established an endowment called ‘The American Fund for Public Service.’

“So there was a group of men and women having this responsibility; and right away they began getting letters from me. I wanted them to spend the money for one thing—cheap books for the workers. Books differ from most other things in that their inner spirit is not dependent on their outer form. The most important ideas in the world can be printed and sold for a few cents, and if you get the ideas they are exactly as useful to you as if they had come out of a costly volume printed on vellum and bound in silk. Therefore, I argued, books should come first.

“Others agreed with me, and so there came into being an institution called the Vanguard Press, having magically in its possession one hundred thousand dollars of that Wall Street money, and pledged through its trustees to spend the money in selecting the books most needed by the every-day people of this country, having them edited and printed, and offered to the people at the lowest possible prices.”

V.

Throughout his career, with the exception of the brief period during the war referred to in an earlier chapter, he has been actively identified with the Socialist Party; he was a Socialist candidate for Congress in 1906 and 1920, for the Senate in 1922, for governor of California in 1926. In the present state of the Socialist movement in America, split as it is between the Socialist and the Workers (Communist) Party, and with these groups more or less hostile to one another, he is the one figure, since the death of Debs, who commands the respect of all branches of the revolutionary movement.

VI.

Most of Upton Sinclair’s personality is expressed in his social-revolutionary interests and activities. Upton Sinclair, “the person,” aside from these activities, is a slight, wiry, graying figure, an early riser and hard worker, keeping one or two stenographers busy all day; an excellent tennis player, an eager talker; self-described as “easily bored, naïve and impersonal”; dealing with “griefs, troubles and failures” by putting his emotions into the book he is writing; somewhat skeptically interested in spiritistic phenomena, very hopefully interested in new devices, regarded as absurd by the medical profession, for curing disease; an occasional lecturer to women’s clubs, able to mitigate the shock of his opinions to precisely the amount that such organizations can stand; wearing the cast-off clothes of a rich young friend, precisely as when he was seventeen and living on $4.50 a week; always in debt, never hesitating to borrow money for some project which he regards as for the benefit of humanity; always hopeful of enormous success in each new project, each new book; very boyish, impulsive, trustful, stubborn; fondly regarded as impractical by those who love him ... including a wife who backs him loyally, and who appears in his writings as “M. C. S.”, and in Mammonart as “Mrs. Ogi”.

VII.

Upton Sinclair is at this point in his career forty-eight years old; he intends to live to be as old as Bernard Shaw, and he probably will. His future literary career may bring surprises; the poet in him may yet overwhelm the propagandist. It is sufficient, however, to have seen the development of a raw cub of genius, an ethereal poet, afraid of real life, into the fearless and robust transcriber of the tragi-comic welter which is contemporary America. And we may conclude with the reminder that it is as one of the leaders of a significant American literary movement that he has here been studied—a movement which will seem of larger and larger importance to us as we learn and cherish our own literary history—a movement which was killed twenty years ago because there was too much troublesome truth in it, and which is only in these last few years being painfully born again: he is one of the great pioneers in the fictional discovery and exploitation of modern America.