Love's Pilgrimage: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair

To which the boy replied, “You might try to get your pupils to feel one deep emotion about life, or to think one worth-while thought; then they might stand a chance of knowing how it feels to write.”

Section 7. Thyrsis was still reading in the papers and magazines of philanthropists and public-spirited citizens; and he was still sitting down to write them and explain his plight. He would beg them to believe that he wanted nothing but a bare living; and he would send copies of his books or articles or manuscripts, and ask these people to read them. And about this time an unusual thing happened—one of these philanthropists answered his letter. He wrote that he did not agree with Thyrsis’ ideas, by any means, but appreciated the power of his writing, and was certain that he had a career before him. Whereupon Thyrsis made haste to follow up his advantage, and wrote another letter—one of the most intense and impassioned that he ever composed in his life.

He told about the new book he was dreaming. For years he had read his country’s history, and lived in it and thrilled with it. Especially had he read the Civil War; and now he was planning a book that should hold the War, and all the meanings of the War, as a wine-cup holds the rich flavors and aromas of the grape. A titan struggle it had been, the birth-agony of a nation; and it was a thing to be contemplated with amazement, that it should have produced so little in the way of art. Half a dozen poems there were; but of novels not one above the grade of juvenile fiction.

What Thyrsis was planning was a new form; a series of swift visions, of glimpses into the very heart of the nation’s agony. He described some of the scenes that were haunting him and driving him. The winter’s night in the ditches in front of Marye’s Heights, when the dead and dying lay piled in windrows, and the soul of a people sobbed in despair! The night on the field of Gettysburg, when the young soldier lay wounded, but rapt in his vision, seeing the hosts of the victorious future defiling upon that hallowed ground! The ghastly scenes in Andersonville, and the escape, and the long journey filled with perils; and the siege of Petersburg, and the surrender; and last of all the ecstasy of the dying man in the capital, when the grim, war-worn legions were tramping for two days through the city. Such, wrote Thyrsis, was the book that he wished to compose, and that was being stifled in him for the lack of two or three hundred dollars.

Upon the receipt of this letter the philanthropist wrote again, suggesting that the poet come to see him and talk things over. He sent the price of a railroad ticket to Boston; and so Thyrsis made the acquaintance of a new world—one might almost say of a whole new system of worlds.

For here was the Athens of America, the hub of the universe. In Boston they worshipped culture, they lived in literature and art and the transcendental excellences; and by the way of showing that there was no snobbery in them, they opened the gates of their most august mansions to this soul-sick poet, and invited him to tea.

Thyrsis got a strange impression among these people, who were living upon their knees before the shrine of their own literary history. One was treading here upon holy ground; in these very houses had dwelt immortal writers—their earthly forms had rested in these chairs, and their auras yet haunted the dim religious light of these drawing-rooms. There were old people who had known them in the flesh, and could tell anecdotes about them—to which one listened in reverent awe; at every gathering one met people who were writing biographies and memoirs of them, or editing their letters and journals, or writing essays and appreciations, criticisms and commentaries and catalogs and bibliographies. And to be worthy of the visitations of such hallowed influences, one must guard one’s mind as a temple, a place of silences and serenities, to which no vulgar things could penetrate; one excluded all the uproar of these days of undisciplined egotism—above all things else one preserved an attitude of aloofness from that which presumed to call itself “literature” in such degenerate times.

To have become acquainted with these high standards was perhaps worth the rent of a room and the cost of some food and clean collars. So Thyrsis reflected when, after his week of waiting, he had his interview with the benevolent philanthropist, who explained to him, at great length, how charity had the effect of weakening the springs of character, and destroying those qualities of self-reliance and independence which were the most precious things in a man.

Section 8. It was a curious coincidence, one that seemed almost symbolic—that Thyrsis should have gone from the Brahmins of Boston to the Socialists of the East Side!

In one of the publishing-houses he visited, Thyrsis had met a young man who gave him a Socialist magazine to read; as the magazine was published in the next building, Thyrsis went in and met the editor. About this time they were crowning a new king in England, and Thyrsis, who had no use for kings, wrote a sarcastic poem which the Socialist editor published free of charge. And so the boy discovered a new way in which he could relieve his feelings.