Chapter VII: Thyrsis and Corydon

I.

Thyrsis and Corydon, as we may for a while continue to call them, were married in New York City one day in October of that year, 1900. They had no money with which to set up housekeeping, and so they lived with his parents, while waiting for the book, which had been finished somehow amidst all this storm and stress, to be accepted.

The book wasn’t immediately accepted; it was, to the young writer’s astonishment, rejected--the first of many rejections.... Now that he had so rashly taken unto himself a wife, it was agreed by everyone that he should get a job and support her properly. But he refused to do so. Behind him lay the meaningless slavery of hackwork from which he had barely escaped with his poet’s soul alive; back into that slavery he was not going. And was it not fully understood that it was his mate’s privilege to share the hardships of a poet’s life?

In a world of relatives and friends who kept wondering why her husband didn’t get a job, who pitied her for what seemed to them her strange and humiliating position, the girl did not, as she might easily have done, lose faith in her artist-husband. But she began to lose faith in herself--feeling herself to be a weak and inferior and merely human person mated with a relentless, inexorable and inhuman will. Sometimes the shock of some new frustration in his career, some disappointment at the hands of an editor or publisher, left him a hurt boy to be comforted in her arms. But these moments were brief; ashamed of his weakness, he would lash himself to some new task, and send her to her corner to attend to what seemed to be her wifely duty of studying German. She could not get on with German, and that made her feel more abysmally inferior. It seemed that they had no time to be together, now that they were married. They did sometimes play Bach together, in his savage and determined and utterly unsentimental fashion. She liked to be read to, but he was too impatient for that--he ravaged the newspaper of its contents in three minutes and tossed it gutted aside, and dealt with books in a similarly purposeful and efficient way. If he spared time for a walk, he fretted at the frightful waste of time required for her dressing and primping. They ate, then and later, haphazardly, and lived for periods on cold food, bringing on in him a chronic case of indigestion and increasing his querulousness. It was small wonder that she in turn developed a case of nerves; and her capacity for thus giving pain brought her what all her capacity for giving joy had never brought, the reward of her husband’s serious attention. He would sit up with her all night and discuss and analyze her morbid fears, in the light of the latest therapeutic knowledge from abroad. It seems to have become, under those conditions, something of a habit for her to indulge in what were nicknamed “soul-mates”, as a means of securing some attention from her husband.

II.

It was his fierce determination to fight it out as a writer if he starved. His novel, _Springtime and Harvest_, was at last privately published, in the spring of 1901, with money borrowed from a relative. It contained a preface telling about himself and his hopes; this book was to be the first of a library which he intended to found, “for the purpose of increasing helpful reading among the humble people of our land.” He added: “_Springtime and Harvest_ may fail, and subsequent books may fail; but that library is quite certain to come. The writer is a man who gives all his time to his art, and some day or other, he will have money; it is by this use of it that he hopes to keep clean his artist’s conscience.” _Springtime and Harvest_ sold two hundred copies, enough to pay back the relative. This same relative, impressed with his energies and abilities, had already offered him a very good job in the financial world. But he did not want a job, he wanted a chance to develop his genius. He became shameless, and wrote begging letters to rich men famed as philanthropists, asking for a subsidy. Impersonal subsidies, not given out of friendship but for the encouragement of young talent, do now to a limited extent exist; perhaps Upton Sinclair’s later propaganda on behalf of that idea had something to do with its realization; but there was no such kindly custom then. His letters, when not thrown in the wastebasket by the rich men’s secretaries, were answered with the information that if he were truly a young man of genius he would find in poverty and struggle the best encouragement to achievement. Young poets must not, by rash generosity, be prevented from learning in suffering what they are to teach in song! In his case there was some truth in that smug and cruel notion; at least, it was to take more suffering than he had yet known to make him understand life....

He was still self-imprisoned in his tower of clouds. His idealism could not yet accept the human terms of marriage. The medical advice upon which the chaste earlier plans of the lovers had been abandoned had been accompanied with the information (which was news to Thyrsis) that actual marriage need not result in children. The advice, upsetting enough to the whole universe which the poet had erected upon his neurotic fear of life, had been only with much misgiving on his part acted upon. Marriage had opened a new world to him; but it was a too disturbing world, too alien to that cloudy realm of ideas and moralities, of disciplines and duties, in which he was accustomed to move; his generalizations had no meaning in this new pagan world of delight--and he presently, from high motives drawn from his own habitual realm, felt that it was his duty to renounce it. He had thoughtfully and earnestly concluded that it could not be right to enjoy the raptures of the marriage bed unless those raptures were consecrated to an unselfish purpose, namely that of creating new life. That purpose was not at all a part of his plans; it was totally in conflict with the much more important purpose of fulfilling his consecrated literary ambitions. Nevertheless, the idea of renunciation had come too late; it appeared that these connubial raptures had after all not been mere ignoble and unfruitful self-indulgence, but had been, however unintentionally, dedicated to their proper biologic purpose, after all.

And now the chagrined poet could in secret mock bitterly at himself as a deluded victim of Nature, and trace in memory the steps by which he had been led into that very trap of human responsibility which he had thought himself wise enough to avoid.... Yet there was a possible way of escape, even now, from the trap. And these bitter soliloquies were interrupted by a practical discussion of the question whether this new life, so inimical to the poetic career, should be permitted to be. It was discussed upon high moral grounds, pro and con. And it was in the nature of an astonishing revelation to the young poet of a hitherto unguessed secret of the feminine heart when, while they were trying to make up their minds, he observed Corydon’s profound interest and delight in a sufficiently ordinary baby halted in its carriage before the park bench where they sat talking. Was it, then, possible that this girl, who had come to him as a poet’s mate, and was presumed to be interested in nothing but inspiring and assisting his career--was it possible that she _wanted_ a baby? That, he concluded, was actually true; and, in the irreconcilable conflict of moral duties which the situation otherwise presented, that merely emotional factor was giving the deciding vote. Thyrsis was becoming more human.

III.

The birth, in December 1901, of his child, an event of which he was a startled witness, was almost too appalling a glimpse into that realm of human experience from which he had tried to escape. Yet not long afterward he was able to confront his memories of that event with a sufficiently fearless mind and build them up into one of the most remarkable scenes in the whole of modern realistic fiction--the scene being later incorporated into his novel, _Love’s Pilgrimage_.[8]

The child, a son named David, was a personage of sufficient importance to affect even such an inflexible determination as that of this young poet. He did not get a job, but he did hackwork. His pen had lost its old fluency in that sort of writing, it was no longer a knack but an agony; but he did it in desperation, together with book-reviews and every sort of literary odd-job by which he could make a dollar. He raised a laugh in an editorial office by offering, as an expert, to review a book on the care and feeding of infants; he was willing enough to be laughed at if he could thus get a much needed book without having to pay for it. _Springtime and Harvest_ was republished by a regular publishing house late in 1901 under the title _King Midas_, without diminishing either his poverty or his obscurity.... A new literary project needed for its accomplishment more peace than a new baby permitted, and he had to go elsewhere to work for some weeks; in the meantime his wife and her child were taken away by indignant relatives, and when he returned he was forbidden to see either of them until he should have “come to his senses” and agreed to behave like a proper husband--that is, get a job. By letter between the parted parents it was arranged that the nurse should bring the baby on a certain day and hour to a certain place in the park, so that he might see his son. A nurse did come to the spot at that hour, wheeling a baby much less beautiful than he remembered his own as being; and he was miserable until his telegram, asking if the baby had red hair, was answered by one explaining that the nurse had been ill and not able to go to the park that day!... But even this pressure failed to bring the stubborn young poet to terms, and his wife and child were presently allowed to go and share his poverty.

IV.

His second novel, _Prince Hagen_, though not published until 1903, was written in 1901. In 1902 he wrote _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_, a book which made a considerable sensation in the literary world, and which will be dealt with in the next chapter. Still poor, and unknown to the great public, he moved in the spring of 1903 to the outskirts of Princeton, N.J., where he lived with his wife and child in a shack in the woods, and wrote two more novels, the second of which was to bring him worldwide fame. His intellectual and artistic development during this period will be considered at length in the following chapters; but, as a significant detail revealing the progress and suggesting the limits of his emotional development, we may fix our attention on that shack in the woods near Princeton.

In the back pages of _Country Life in America_ for June 1904, following the accounts and pictures of expensive and luxurious summer residences for the rich, there appeared a brief article entitled _A Country House Built and Furnished for Only $156_ (Photograph by the author). It began:

The writer of this article is pursuing the occupation of unpopular
novelist, and is attempting what few even of the popular novelists
attempt--to live on his royalties.

One does not need to turn to the signature to know that it was written by Upton Sinclair. Yet for purposes of comparison we may, before going on, interpolate here some fragrants of a manifesto composed the previous spring, just before moving to this tiny house in the country:

... born to sing and to worship, as I was born to sing and to
worship ...

... stewed and mashed in misery for a lifetime, as I for seven long
years ...

... I could not greet my Muse until I had flung my banner wide ...

... You laugh at me, no doubt, but some day you will heed me ...

Unquestionably there is power in these phrases; but unquestionably also they are boyish.... And now we return to the article in _Country Life_:

Prior to the discovery herein to be set forth, I lived, as
most city-bred and non-wealthy people live, in a flat or a
boarding-house in winter and in a summer hotel in the warm months.

To be sure, it is scarcely true that “most city-bred and non-wealthy people” in America go to summer hotels for the “warm months”; he was perhaps thinking of the class he was addressing in that publication: workingmen do not read _Country Life in America_.... But this prose, in comparison with the fragments of last year’s manifesto quoted above, has in it the quality of civilized conversation; the shrill boyish note is gone; it is a man speaking. The boy has grown up. And he has grown up, somewhat in spite of himself, through the influence of human experience in its most inescapable domestic terms. He has been living, not in a poetic Shelleyan grotto, but in what despite some unusual features is nevertheless unmistakably a home. He has been a husband and father,--doubtless not a very good husband, for a preoccupied artist may easily fail, and a puritanical idealist is pretty certain to fail, to be that--yet the head of a household, a breadwinner, a man responsible to wife and child; he has almost if not quite ceased to dramatize himself in the grandiose rôle of a solitary and unique figure bearing the burden of a poetic doom. He has become considerably humanized, and as it happens through suffering--for domesticity is not the least of those miseries in which, as he complained in his manifesto the previous year, he had been stewed and mashed. Corydon does not seem to have been a very efficient housewife or very capable mother; and she probably seemed to an impecunious young poet dreadfully extravagant. They were both terribly overworked. Yet domesticity, to the young poet a monster of such frightful mien that to be hated need but to be seen, when endured sufficiently was found to have human values of its own; and though he might never be said to have been thoroughly domesticated, though the close and warm intimacies of family life remained something to shy away from as much as possible, yet he had gained something from his experience which now led him to show other young people the way to these life-values, at a price within their meager means!

And so to continue with the article; the next few paragraphs are introductory to his theme, but interesting for their realistic information:

So overwhelming was the force of custom that for many years I
never dreamed there was any other way to live. At last, however,
the truth dawned upon me that I was foolish to pay for the
use of a hotel in the country when what I wanted was only the
country and not the hotel. I chanced one day to be walking in the
woods when I came upon a little cabin which had been built for
picnicking purposes by a lady who had immediately afterward been
providentially smitten with a rheumatic knee. This house I hired
for $25 for the season, and then I began to discover what things
there were in life. This house had cost about $400; and from force
of custom I rented it without inquiring further.

Meantime, also, I went back to the city in winter, though there was
nothing I wanted in the city except books.... I am writing this
article because I know that there are in New York many thousands of
poets, painters, musicians, and other would-be dwellers in the land
of the spirit, living in just exactly that way, and never dreaming
that there is any other way for them to do it; that there is any
sort of shelter save a hall bedroom at $2 a week, or any sort of
food save what is shoved at them over a restaurant table at twenty
or thirty cents a dish! Figure up the cost of a hall bedroom at $2
a week for a lifetime ...

Thus far, to be sure, this is simply a country studio for artists that is being suggested; but it abruptly becomes a home in the same sentence:

and then consider that houses suitable for the occupancy of poets
and lovers may be built at a cost of from $50 to $150, and dwelt in
all the year round at a cost of $6 a week for two and $2 more for
the baby.

Five years ago, the writer met a charming young couple one summer,
engaged, and painfully in love. With the naïveté of lovers,
they told me all about the problem--which was that he was only
twenty-six, and was earning only a poor $1800 a year; and they had
waited two years already--they expected to wait one more, and then
he would receive $2,200, and upon that they were heroically going
to try to get along. The writer has not seen them for three years,
but just the other day he made inquiry. Whether the increase was
delayed or their courage gave out, he does not know--but they are
still engaged!

It may seem a little unfair for this young writer, of all persons, to taunt these cowardly lovers; but that he can do so means that he has at last accepted that impulse which in spite of so many qualms carried him into marriage as, not a weakness nor a folly, but a thing to be proud of--not a mere falling into a “trap of Nature”, but a responsible action of his own; that is to say, his sexual impulse is at last acknowledged to be a part of himself, and not a “devil” nor an “enemy”. But to proceed:

The house shown in this illustration cost $156. This figure is
larger in two respects than necessary--mistakes were made in its
construction, and it was built in a place where lumber is very high
in price. As described in this article, it can be built for about
$125.

It stands about three miles outside of Princeton, New Jersey, which
was chosen because it is a beautiful town with a library. The house
is built upon a long strip of land bordering a dense woods; this
strip has a score of great trees upon it, and no less than a dozen
springs, of various degrees of coldness. It was of no use to the
farmer who owns it, and he rented it for $10 a year.

The house is 16×18 feet. It has three rooms--a kitchen, a bedroom,
and a living-room--respectively 6×7, 9×7, and 11×16 feet. Six by
seven sounds small for a room, but every part of it was calculated
beforehand, and there is plenty of space....

He continues with details of its construction and cost. There is a piazza, to be used as a dining-room in summer. “A good deal of the furniture is home-made, of plain white pine; it can be varnished or covered with pretty stuffs, though the present house is in the Spartan style.” The house took six days to build. “Enough crockery and kitchen utensils--agate-ware and unbreakable--can be bought for $5 or $10, and then the house is inhabitable--for poets and lovers!” Near-by in the woods is a study, costing $25. “It is 8×10, and sounds small; but it holds a table, a book-case, a stove, a trunk, two chairs, and an unpopular novelist”--who presently was to write there a book that would be read all over the world.[9]

It is a brave description; but certain reflections present themselves. This “Spartan” simplicity, one feels sure, is not dictated entirely by poverty, but by a Spartan temperament; and one is equally sure that the Corydon of whom one has read in _Love’s Pilgrimage_, however delighted she might be at having a house of her own to be mistress of at last, would have preferred something less bleak. She was not Spartan: she was Corinthian, rather; and her tastes have not been consulted, or have been sternly overruled, in the planning of this home. One looks at the photograph so proudly furnished; a neat, bleak, Quakerish place, for whose drabness poverty does not wholly account--the home of an ascetic, a despiser of soft living, of comfort, of ease; the home of one who recognizes the uses “of bread and bacon, of a stove and a woodpile”, and scorns all beauty except that “of prayer and music, of joy and love, of wisdom and high resolve”, and perhaps of “beautiful books in an occasional rare instance”--a moralist still! And one remembers, in one of Corydon’s letters in _Love’s Pilgrimage_, the wistful cry: “Oh, but how I want a poor taste of joy!” One might guess that a girl of her temperament would be exasperated into rebellion by a husband who was afraid of beauty and joy in its most innocent forms, afraid even of his love of her; and that this rebellion would take forms calculated to torment and madden even him out of his Olympian austerity. Not a happy prospect for this marriage! But even if it should ultimately prove too great a strain for either of them to endure, it was meanwhile breaking down, apparently as far as human experience was capable of doing so, his imaginative resistance to reality; and its robust influences, combined with those of a new philosophy of life, to be discussed later, served to make, out of a conceited boy-poet, a man and a writer.