The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

IV

Springtime and Harvest had been sent to the leading book reviews, and now came a letter from Edward J. Wheeler, editor of the Literary Digest. His attention had been caught by the preface; he had read the novel, and, strange to say, agreed with the author’s high opinion of it. Would the author come to see him? The outcome was a proposition from Funk and Wagnalls to take over the book, put it into type again, and issue it under a new title, with illustrations and advertisements and blurbs and other appurtenances of the great American novel.

So once more Thyrsis was swept up to the skies, and it became possible for a baby to be born into the world. All the editors and readers and salesmen and officeboys of a great publishing firm were sure that King Midas would be a best seller; and anyhow it did not matter, since a new novel, still more brilliant, was gestating in the writer’s brain. It was springtime again, and the apron of mother nature was spilling flowers. Corydon and Thyrsis boarded a train for the Thousand Islands, and on one of the loveliest and most remote of these they built a wooden platform, and set up a small tent, and began the back-to-nature life.

This canvas home contained two tables and two sets of shelves built of boards by an amateur carpenter, who could saw straight if he kept his mind upon it, but seldom did. It contained two canvas cots, a bundle of bedding, a little round drum of a stove, a frying pan, a couple of saucepans, and a half a dozen dishes. Outside there swung two hammocks, one close to the tent for the young expectant novelist. The tent stood on an exposed point, for the sake of the scenery and the avoidance of mosquitoes; it commanded an uninterrupted sweep of Lake Erie, and the gales would seize the little structure and shake it as with a giant’s hand, a raging and tireless fury that lasted for days at a time.

The regime of this literary household was of primordial simplicity. Drinking water was dipped from the mighty St. Lawrence. Waste was thrown into the stream a little farther down. Soiled dishes were not washed in hot water but taken to the shore and filled with sand and scrubbed round and round. Black bass and yellow perch could be caught from the rocky point, and now and then, when strange cravings of pregnancy manifested themselves, a pine squirrel or a yellowhammer could be shot in the interior of the island. There may have been game laws, but Thyrsis did not ask about them; this Leek Island was on the Canadian side, the nearest town many miles away, and the long arm of Queen Victoria did not reach these campers.

The post office was on Grindstone Island, on the American side, and thither the young author sailed in a leaky little skiff, purchased for fifteen dollars. He bought groceries, and from a nearby farmhouse, milk and butter. The farmer’s wife quickly made note of Corydon’s condition and was full of sympathy and anecdotes. An odd freak this gypsy camper must have seemed, wearing a big straw hat, such as are made for haymakers, with a bit of mosquito netting wound about it for decoration.

It was a place of sudden and terrific thunderstorms, and the sight of scores of lightning flashes playing about the wide bay and the pine-tree covered islands was inspiring or terrifying according to one’s temperament. Thyrsis was standing by the opening of the tent watching the spectacle, his arm upraised, holding onto the tentpole, when there came a sudden flash, an all-enveloping mass of light, and an all-enveloping crash of sound; the upraised hand was shaken as by some huge vibrating machine and fell numb to the side. Lightning had struck one of the pine trees to which the tent was anchored, and the tree crashed to the ground.

After the storm there was found in the tree a nest of the red-eyed vireo, a silent little forest bird that you see bending under twigs and picking tiny green worms from the undersides. Two of the young birds were alive, and the campers took them in and raised them by hand—most charming pets. They would gulp down big horny grasshoppers and then regurgitate the hard shells in solid lumps; on this rather harsh diet they throve, and it was amusing to see them refuse to heed their own proper parents and fly to their fosterparents instead. At sundown they would be taken into the tent, and flying swiftly about, they would clean from the walls every fly, mosquito, spider, and daddy longlegs. They would sit on the boom of the skiff during the crossing of the channel, and on the heads of their fosterparents during the trip to the post office—something that greatly interested the village loungers, also the village cats. Now and then fishing parties would land on the island, and be surprised to have two full-grown birds of the forest fly down and alight on their hats.