The first time I ever heard of the subject of sex, I was four or five years old, playing on the street with a little white boy and a Negro girl, the child of a janitor. They were whispering about something mysterious and exciting; there were two people living across the street who had just been married, and something they did was a subject of snickers. I, who wanted to know about everything, tried to find out about this; but I am not sure my companions knew what they were whispering about; at any rate, they did not tell me. But I got the powerful impression of something strange.
It was several years later that I found out the essential facts. I spent a summer in the country with a boy cousin a year or two younger than I, and we watched the animals and questioned the farmhands. But never did I get one word of information or advice from either father or mother on this subject; only the motion of shrinking away from something dreadful. I recollect how the signs of puberty began to show themselves in me, to my great bewilderment; my mother and grandmother stood helplessly by, like the hens that hatch ducklings and see them go into the water.
Incredible as it may seem, I had been at least two years in college before I understood about prostitution. So different from my friend Sam De Witt, socialist poet, who told me that he was raised in a tenement containing a house of prostitution, and that at the age of five he and other little boys and girls played brothel as other children play dolls, and quarrelled as to whose turn it was to be the “madam”! I can remember speculating at the age of sixteen whether it could be true that women did actually sell their bodies. I decided in the negative and held to that idea until I summoned the courage to question one of my classmates in college.
The truth, finally made clear, shocked me deeply, and played a great part in the making of my political revolt. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty I explored the situation in New York City, and made discoveries that for me were epoch-making. The saloonkeeper, who had been the villain of my childhood melodrama, was merely a tool and victim of the big liquor interests and politicians and police. The twin bases of the political power of Tammany Hall were saloon graft and the sale of women. So it was that, in my young soul, love for my father and love for my mother were transmuted into political rage, and I sallied forth at the age of twenty, a young reformer armed for battle. It would be a longer battle than I realized, alas!
II
Another factor in my life that requires mentioning is the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. The Sinclairs had always belonged to that church; my father was named after an Episcopal clergyman, the Reverend Upton Beall. My mother’s father was a Methodist and took the Christian Herald, and as a little fellow I read all the stories and studied all the pictures of the conflicts with the evil one; but my mother and aunts had apparently decided that the Episcopal Church was more suited to their social standing, and therefore my spiritual life had always been one of elegance. Not long ago, seeking local color, I attended a service in Trinity Church; it was my first service in more than thirty years, yet I could recite every prayer and sing every hymn and could even have preached the sermon.
In New York, no matter how poor and wretched the rooms in which we lived, we never failed to go to the most fashionable church; it was our way of clinging to social status. When we lived at the Weisiger House, we walked to St. Thomas’ on Fifth Avenue. When we lived on Second Avenue, we went to St. George’s. When we moved uptown, we went to St. Agnes’. Now and then we would make a special trip to the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, which was “high” and had masses and many candles and jeweled robes and processions and genuflections and gyrations. Always I wore tight new shoes and tight gloves and a neatly brushed little derby hat—supreme discomfort to the glory of God. I became devout, and my mother, determined upon making something special of me, decided that I was to become a bishop. I myself talked of driving a hook-and-ladder truck.
We moved back to the Weisiger House, and I was confirmed at the Church of the Holy Communion, just around the corner; the rector, Doctor Mottet, lived to a great age. His assistant was the Reverend William Wilmerding Moir, son of a wealthy old Scotch merchant; the young clergyman had, I think, more influence upon me than any other man. My irreverent memory brings up the first time I was invited to his home and met his mother, who looked and dressed exactly like Queen Victoria, and his testy old father, who had a large purple nose, filled, I fear, with Scotch whisky. The son took me aside. “Upton,” he said, “we are going to have chicken for dinner, and Father carves, and when he asks you if you prefer white meat or dark, please express a preference, because if you say that it doesn’t matter, he will answer that you can wait till you make up your mind.”
Will Moir was a young man of fashion, but he had gone into the church because of genuine devoutness and love of his fellowmen. Spirituality is out of fashion at the moment and open to dangerous suspicion, so I hasten to say that he was a thoroughly wholesome person; not brilliant intellectually, but warm-hearted, loyal, and devoted. He became a foster father to me, and despite all my teasing of the Episcopal Church in The Profits of Religion and elsewhere, I have never forgotten this loving soul and what he meant at the critical time of my life. My quarrel with the churches is a lover’s quarrel; I do not want to destroy them, but to put them on a rational basis, and especially to drive out the money changers from the front pews.
Moir specialized in training young boys in the Episcopal virtues, with special emphasis upon chastity. He had fifty or so under his wing all the time. We met at his home once a month and discussed moral problems; we were pledged to write him a letter once a month and tell him all our troubles. If we were poor, he helped us to find a job; if we were tempted sexually, we would go to see him and talk it over. The advice we got was always straightforward and sound. The procedure is out of harmony with this modern age, and my sophisticated friends smile when they hear about it. The problem of self-discipline versus self-development is a complicated one, and I can see virtues in both courses and perils in either extreme. I am glad that I did not waste my time and vision “chasing chippies,” as the sport was called; but I am sorry that I did not get advice and aid in the task of finding a girl with whom I might have lived wisely and joyfully.