The Sunkist Utopian (Page 2)

Interestingly, though, both Mattson and Arthur praise Boston, a novel so mind-numbing it manages to squash all interest in Sacco and Vanzetti and depress whatever outrage one might feel at the legal cabal that executed them. But Mattson and Arthur praise it for different reasons. To Mattson, who makes no bones about Sinclair's work--"I read Sinclair's novels as political tracts," he explains, "not as exercises in literary expression"--the enigmas of the Sacco and Vanzetti case augured well for Sinclair's writing, for they inserted into it a much needed "layer of complexity." In fact, Mattson argues that Boston supplied the "realist dimension to his politics" that ultimately turned what Mencken called the Sunkist Utopian into a card-carrying Democrat willing to work within the party in order to push it to the left.

Arthur, on the other hand, views Boston as a notable if flawed literary achievement. (It made Sinclair a Pulitzer Prize contender; he won in 1943 for Dragon's Teeth, a book long forgotten, like most of his work.) According to Arthur, not only did Sinclair collect an enormous amount of material for the book but his creation of a Jamesian narrative center, based on Boston matriarch Elizabeth Glendower Evans, prevented the novel from sinking into the moralistic propaganda of books like The Moneychangers (a denunciation of J.P. Morgan), King Coal (about the Colorado coal strike of 1914) and Oil! (an indictment of the petroleum industry). These are just the sort of books that Bachelder spoofs as plodding and predetermined. "The wonderful thing about America is that you always have a shot," he writes, "while the dreadful thing about a Sinclair novel is that you don't."

The difference of opinion over Boston, one of emphasis, highlights an important distinction between these commendable biographies. Mattson's real interest lies in the symbolic nature of Sinclair's life; The Other American Century is a narrative about utopian idealism, democratic faith and literature as political activism. To Mattson biography grants us insight into the historical questions and broader forces shaping the individual. Though Arthur does not shortchange these issues, he cares about Sinclair qua Sinclair, an often unlikable human being, a teetotaler, a failure as a father and a latter-day Puritan (he backed Prohibition) whose irrepressible spirit and moral urgency tend to mitigate his unrelieved selfishness. This Sinclair is a people's writer who speaks to his audience without condescension or mystification: "He read literature as they did, for instruction, persuasion, and entertainment." Not for him were the Modernist complexities of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

Both authors cogently make their case, and though Arthur's Sinclair is far more palpable--and fallible--than Mattson's prudish but indefatigable progressive, read together their books evoke a man of distinctly American stripe: the activist dreamer with a messianic streak. Bachelder sees him this way too: "Sinclair, who has witnessed a century of horror, who has been killed countless times, tells us that for every act of greed, hatred, and violence, for every Ludlow Massacre, he has witnessed one hundred acts of compassion and cooperation. Do not, he says, tell him that we cannot remake our world. Do not!"

Born in 1878 in Baltimore to a family he liked to depict as decayed Southern aristocracy, the son of a well-mannered, stern mother and an alcoholic traveling salesman, Sinclair was a sickly child. "The wider breakdown of genteel culture invaded Sinclair's boyhood," Mattson writes, "as if a social and historical virus became a virus inhabiting his little body." Maybe so. More likely, he was a boy on the make whose family moved to New York City ("a city that loves to display economic disparity," intones Mattson) when he was 10. At 13 he entered City College, and within three years he was supporting his mother by selling stories and jokes to pulp magazines. ("Bedbugs made him a Socialist," writes Bachelder. "Bedbugs and Shelley.") Also influenced by Emerson and Carlyle, Sinclair enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University while working for Street and Smith, the publishing syndicate that churned out juvenile books and dime novels.

By 1900--he was 22--Sinclair had dropped out of Columbia, and with his young wife, Meta Fuller, and their new-born son, he moved briefly to a cabin on the St. Lawrence River. Supporting his family with the scant proceeds of his first novel, Springtime and Harvest (1900), Sinclair had launched himself, after a fashion. The novel did not sell. But he learned that publicity was as important as aesthetic quality in his first real coup: He pretended his novel The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903) was based on the suicide of a real poet--James Frey in reverse.

Disappointed by poor sales (even the Stirling hoax didn't guarantee solvency) and cynical about the literary machine, Sinclair joined the Socialist Party. Mattson likens this new passion to a religious conversion, but according to Arthur it was through meeting two rich Socialists--George Herron (a former college professor) and Gaylord Wilshire (the land speculator for whom LA's Wilshire Boulevard is named)--that Sinclair found intellectual, emotional and financial backing. Herron introduced him to Kropotkin, Kautsky, Veblen and Marx, and provided a coherent framework for his dissatisfaction with American life. Sinclair traced its ills to capitalism, and as a moralist, not a theorist, he firmly believed, as Arthur writes, "change the system, and you will change the people." His newfound political allegiance meant realism in fiction; no more historical fiction, like the Civil War saga Manassas (1904). Rather, under the sway of an editor at Appeal to Reason, a Populist-Socialist weekly with a circulation of 250,000, Sinclair found his true mission muckraking the Chicago stockyards.

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