Chapter VIII: The Journal of Arthur Stirling

I.

In 1903 there appeared a book entitled _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_, purporting to be the real diary of a young poet who had, after a bitter and unsuccessful struggle, committed suicide. An editorial introduction, signed “S.”, gave a sketch of the poet, and quoted from a New York newspaper a notice of his death “by suicide in the Hudson River”.

The book was something of a sensation among that small class of American readers who cared enough about their country or its literature to be moved by the thought of a poet being driven to suicide by neglect in the midst of one of the richest cities in the world. The book was widely reviewed, and though it was generally felt that Arthur Stirling was a “difficult” young man, abnormally sensitive in his attitude toward life and overstrained in his attitude toward his art, the book was praised by those who knew artists as a true picture of young genius.[10]

The book incidentally related certain rebuffs and indignities at the hands of editors and publishers. And these publishers, recognizing themselves in the story, did not fail to recognize the young poet as Upton Sinclair--and so the truth came out. The critics, especially those who had compared the journal of Arthur Stirling with the diary of Marie Bashkirtseff, resented being hoaxed, and discussion of the book ceased. It was treasured, however, among discerning readers as being, despite the fact that its author was still alive and kicking, a sufficiently authentic account of the exasperated psychology of the young artist in his struggle with poverty and neglect.

Time has confirmed that judgment; the book remains a permanently valuable and interesting contribution to our knowledge of what may without prejudice be called youthful genius, and--more than that--a moving plea on its behalf.

But it is further interesting to us as a stage in its author’s development. It was the second book after his marriage, and it deals directly with his own most acute problems--not only the problems of poverty and neglect, but with the psychic problem involved in his own conception of himself, his destiny, and his duties.... The book was written feverishly, day and night, during six weeks in the spring of 1902, on an island in the St. Lawrence River. His son had been born in the previous December. The birth of his child had necessarily altered the course of his life; it had bound him to reality. And it was with the inescapable necessity of such an alteration in the course of his life, the necessity of making terms with reality, that he was now in violent inward struggle. He had, by rebellion, just previously, established himself as a poet and a free soul; as such he had no chains; even his marriage had by prescriptive arrangement involved no human obligations whatever; he stood alone, and compromised with nothing. And he had hardly had time to enjoy this freedom when it was snatched away from him, not by a world that he could defy and resist, but by Nature--including his own newly discovered Human Nature. If it was an evil and ugly world that kept him in poverty, it was something in himself which could scarcely be dismissed as ugly or evil that bound him to his wife and child. And it was at the behest, not of the world, but of this something in himself, that he had to compromise, and give up his freedom. In giving it up, he gave up necessarily what had been his fundamental conception of himself, as a Poet, consecrated only to his career, free from every other duty. A painful renunciation, and one which he would be slow to make. In leaving, then, his wife and child, to go away and write this book, he was not merely attempting desperately to make some money, he was taking this occasion to deal in terms of art with the internal conflict which obsessed him.

The Arthur Stirling of the book was based in part upon Sinclair’s imaginings concerning the life of an actual young poet whom he had met once or twice--a waiter and a snow-shoveller, who had sought a publisher in vain, yet of whom it had been said by an eminent poet in Sinclair’s hearing that “he had written lines not surpassed by one of his years since Keats”. But it was chiefly, of course, based upon his own experience as a neglected writer. It begins, however, with the young poet writing his book--and this part of the story goes back to, and might be an actual diary of, his life two years before, when he had made his great break for freedom--when, with a hundred dollars in his pocket he had left the world behind and gone to a shack in the country to write his great book.... That is to say, he had gone back to the days when he was free, to the days when he had a right to think of himself as a poet. No girl casts her shadow over these pages. The tragedy must be blamed upon the world, not upon her.... And now, once more a poet, he savors again in memory the beauty and the pain of the poetic doom:

It is not merely the vision, the hour of exultation; that is but
the setting of the task. Now you will take that ecstasy, and hold
on to it, hold on with soul and body; you will keep yourself at
that height, you will hold that flaming glory before your eyes,
and you will hammer it into words. Yes, that is the terror--into
words--into words that leap the hilltops, that bring the ends of
existence together in a lightning flash. You will take them as they
come, white-hot, in wild tumult, and you will forge them, and force
them. You will seize them in your naked hands and wrestle with
them, and bend them to your will--all that is in the making of a
poem. And last and worst of all, you will hold them in your memory,
the long, long surge of them; the torrent of whirling thought--you
will hold it in your memory! You are dazed with excitement,
exhausted with your toil, trembling with pain; but you have built
a tower out of cards, and you have mounted to the clouds upon it,
and there you are poised. And anything that happens--anything!--ah,
God, why can the poet not escape from his senses?--a sound, a
touch--and it is gone!

These things drive you mad.--

But meanwhile it is not gone yet. You have still a whole scene in
your consciousness--as if you were a juggler, tossing a score of
golden balls. And all the time, while you work, you learn it--you
learn it! It is endless, but you learn it. In the midst of it,
perhaps, you come down of sheer exhaustion; and you lie there,
panting, shuddering, your hands moist; you dare not think, you
wait. And then by and by you begin again--if it will not come, you
_make_ it come, you lash yourself like a dumb beast--up, up,
to the mountain-tops again. And then once more the thing comes
back--you live the scene again, as an actor does, and you shape
it and you master it. And now in the midst of it, you find this
highest of all moments is gone! It is gone, and you cannot find
it! Those words that came as a trumpet-clash, burning your very
flesh--that melody that melted your whole being to tears--they are
gone--you cannot find them! You search and you search--but you
cannot find them. And so you stumble on, in despair and agony; and
still you dare not rest. You dare not ever rest in this until the
thing is done--done and over--until you have _nailed_ it fast.
So you go back again, though perhaps you are so tired that you are
fainting; but you fight yourself like a madman, you struggle until
you feel a thing at your heart like a wild beast; and you keep on,
you hold it fast and learn it, clinch it tight, and make it yours
forever. I have done that same thing five times to-day without a
rest; and toiled for five hours in that frenzy; and then lain down
upon the ground, with my head on fire.

Afterward when you have recovered you sit down, and for two or
three hours you write; you have it whole in your memory now--you
have but to put it down. And this forlorn, wet, bedraggled
thing--this miserable, stammering, cringing thing--_this_ is
your poem!

Every moment of this lost poetic life is dear to him, infinitely precious, worthy to be recorded: the egotism, the querulousness, the hysteria--these, too, are part of the poet’s doom, and beautiful as such.

I am wild to-day. Oh, how can I bear this--why should I have to
contend with such things as this! Is it not hard enough--the agony
that I have to bear, the task that takes all my strength and more?
And must I be torn to pieces by such hideous degradation as this?
Oh, my God, if my life is not soon clear of these things I shall
die!

Oh, it is funny--yes, funny--Let us laugh at it. The dance-hall
musician has brought home his ’cello! I heard him come bumping
up the stairs with it--God damn his soul! And there he sits,
sawing away at some loathsome jig tunes! And he has two friends in
there--I listen to their wit between the tunes.

Here I sit like a wild beast in a cage. I tell you I can bear any
work in the world, but I can not bear such things as this. That I,
who am seeking a new faith for men--who am writing, or trying to
write, what will mean new faith to millions--should have my soul
ripped into pieces by such loathsome, insulting indignities!

Oh, laugh!--but _I_ can’t laugh--I sit here foaming at the
lips, and crying! And suppose he’s lost his position, and does this
every day!

Now every day I must lay aside what I am doing and sit and shudder
when I hear him coming up the steps--and wait for him to begin
this! I tell you, I demand to be free--I _demand_ it! I want
nothing in this world but to be let alone. I don’t want anybody to
wait on me.--_I don’t want anything from this hellish world but
to be let alone!_

And, in another mood:

To get the mastery of your soul, to hold it here, in your hands, at
your bidding, to consecrate your life to that, to watch and pray
and toil for that, to rouse yourself and goad yourself day and
night for that; to thrill with the memory of great consecrations,
of heroic sufferings and aspirations; to have in your heart the
power of the stars, of nature, of history and the soul of man ...

It is a lingering farewell to a beautiful past. For the Poet must die. There is no place for him in such a world. When he has suffered enough, he will take himself out of it. He endures his last indignity, and faces tranquilly the death toward which he goes. “Do I believe that I shall ever live again? I know that I shall not.... He has given me an hour.... My life was beautiful.... There are no thoughts in Oblivion.”... “No one will find my body, and no one will ever care about it.”

Three years later Upton Sinclair wrote, in the preface to a new edition: “No truer book than _The Journal of Arthur Stirling_ has ever been written; it is the book of all my boyhood’s hopes and dreams, and it is as dear to me as the memory of a dead child.”

It does preserve, with infinite love, the memory of a dead child--a dead poet, tenderly and regretfully put to death by his own hand.

It foreshadows the end of an epoch, and the beginning of a new life.

II.

_The Journal of Arthur Stirling_ contained, incidentally, a message. With the giving up of his own poetic career, he had become conscious of the needs of others--a class-consciousness in the artistic realm.

You let every man go his way--you let him starve, you let him
die in any hole that he can find. The poet--tenderest and most
sensitive of all men! the poet--the master of the arts of
suffering! Exposed on every side, nervous, haunted, unused to the
world, knowing how to feel and knowing that alone! Is not his life
an agony under any conditions,--is he not tortured for you--the
world? And you leave him helpless, despairing!

What is the matter with you?--How can you be so blind? There are
some of you who really love books--look and see the story of
genius--if it be not a thing to make you shudder and turn sick.
It has been so through all the ages, and it will be through all
the ages to come until society has a conscience and a soul. Tell
me if there is anything in this world more frightful than the lot
of poets who have been born poor--of Marlowe and Chatterton and
Goldsmith, Johnson and Burns and Keats! And who can tell how many
more choked before even their first utterance?

I can not talk of that, for it makes me sick; but I will talk
of the poets who were born rich. Is it not singular--is it not
terrible--how many of the great stalwart ones were rich? To be
educated, to own books, to hear music, to dwell in the country, to
be free from men and men’s judgments! Oh, the words break my heart!

--But was not Goethe rich, and did he not have these things? And
was not Hugo rich? And Milton? When he left college he spent five
years at his father’s country place and wrote four poems that have
done more to make men happy than if they had cost many millions of
dollars.

But let me come to what I spoke of before, the seven poets of this
century in England.

I name Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne,
Shelley and Keats. I said that six of them were independent, and
that the other--the greatest--died like a dog.

Wordsworth came first; he was young and poor and struggling, and
a friend left him just such an independence as I have cried for;
and he consecrated himself to art, and he revolutionized English
poetry, he breathed truth into a whole nation again.... Think
that the world owes its possession of Wordsworth’s poetry to the
accident that a friend died and left him some money!

I name Byron; he was a rich man. I name Tennyson; he had a little
competence, and gave up the idea of marriage, and for ten years
devoted himself to art; and when he was thirty-two he published his
work--and then they gave him a pension!

I name Browning; Browning went his own way, heeding no man; and he
never had to think about money. I name Swinburne; and the same was
true of him.

I name Shelley; and Shelley was wealthy. They kept him poor for a
time, but his poems do not date from then. When he wrote the poetry
that has been the spiritual food of the high souls of this century,
he lived in a beautiful villa in Italy, and wandered about the
forest with his books....

This state of affairs and its remedy were set forth, a few months after the publication of the book, in an article entitled _My Cause_, in the _Independent_. This is the “manifesto” referred to and fragmentarily quoted on a previous page; it begins:

I, Upton Sinclair, would-be singer and penniless rat, having for
seven years waged day and night with society a life-and-death
struggle for the existence of my soul; and having now definitely
and irrevocably consummated a victory--having routed my last foe
and shattered my last chain and made myself master of my own life:
being in body very weak and in heart very weary, but in will
infinitely determined, have set myself down to compose this letter
to the world, before taking my departure for a long sojourn in the
blessed regions of my own Spirit.

I should not write a letter to the world for the purpose of setting
myself right; being “lord of a thousand dollars,” the world no
longer exists for me. What people think of me is not whispered in
the forests that I love, and I have read my last review, and waited
upon my last publisher, and cringed before my last rejection. The
sole reason for my writing is that in that world there are surely
others, born to sing and to worship, as I was born to sing and to
worship, but born less capable than I in the world’s low way--less
willing to fight the world with its own weapons--less cunning, less
unprincipled, than I. For such there being in the place from which
I have escaped no salvation, and no prospect, save to be 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 and declared
myself to men.

The remedy which was set forth in equally eloquent terms was an institution to be supported by rich men for the purpose of endowing young authors of talent--an “American University of Literature”, with a Board of Trustees “consisting of the noblest and truest and most reverent literary men of the time”, employing “a corps of carefully selected and trained readers” to consider and pass on manuscripts offered in evidence of the possession of talent worth encouraging: the standard of judgment being “not what the Public Wants, but what American Literature wants, and what God wants, and what beauty and truth and righteousness want....”

Only three years later, judgment upon this scheme was passed by the author himself in somewhat brutally realistic terms. “I look back upon it now”, he wrote in the preface to the new edition of the _Journal_, “as an amusing illustration of the guilelessness of my attitude toward the world. If any such plan were to be proposed to-day, I should say that it was a device to emasculate literature, as the newspaper and the college and the church have all been emasculated; and I should argue that it were better for the young author to starve all his life than to compromise with the powers that are in control of the wealth of the world to-day. My error lay in supposing that it is literature that makes life, instead of life that makes literature.”