The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

XI

On the far side of a ridge three miles north of the town, a patch of woods was found whose owner was willing to rent it as a literary encampment. The tent had been shipped from Canada, and a platform was built, and an outfit of wooden shelves and tables. Also there was a smaller tent, eight feet square, for the secret sessions with Clio, muse of history. Both canvas structures were provided with screen doors, against the inroads of the far-famed Jersey mosquito. Water was brought in pails from a farmer’s well, and once a week a horse and buggy were hired for a drive to town—to purchase supplies, and exchange one load of books about the Civil War for another load.

Manassas: A Novel of the War—so ran the title; the dedication said: “That the men of this land may know the heritage that is come down to them.” The young historian found himself a stamping ground in the woods, a place where he could pace back and forth for hours undisturbed, and there the scenes of the dreadful “new birth of freedom” lived themselves over in his mind. The men of that time came to him and spoke in their own persons, and with trembling and awe he wrote down their actions and words.

His method of working had evolved itself into this: he would go through a scene in his imagination, over and over again, until he knew it by heart, before setting down a word of it on paper. An episode like the battle scene of Manassas, some ten thousand words in length, took three weeks in gestation; the characters and incidents were hardly out of the writer’s mind for a waking moment during that time, nor did the emotional tension of their presence relax. And in between these bouts of writing there was reading and research in the literature of sixty years past: newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, works of biography and reminiscence. The writing of Manassas must have entailed the reading of five hundred volumes, and the consulting of as many more.

In the meantime Corydon took care of the baby, a youngster of a year and a half, who seemed to know exactly what he wanted and would yell himself purple in the face to get it; the inexperienced young parents sometimes wondered whether he would kill himself by such efforts. During his incarceration in the city the child had suffered from rickets, and now a “child specialist” had outlined an extremely elaborate diet, which took hours of the young mother’s time to prepare. Under it the infant throve and became yet more aggressive.

Corydon and Thyrsis had wanted nothing but to be together; and now they had what they wanted—almost too much of it. Now and then they met the farmer and his wife, a gentle old couple; when they drove to Princeton, they met the clerks in the stores and in the college library; they met no one else. Possibly some women could have stood this long ordeal, but Corydon was not of that tough fiber. While her husband went apart to wrestle with his angel, she stayed in the tent to wrestle with demons. She suffered from depression and melancholy, and it was impossible to know whether the trouble was of the mind or of the body.

Nowadays, every disciple of Freud in Greenwich Village would know what to tell her. But this was in the days before the invention of the Freudian demonology. Birth control, as explained by a family doctor, had failed, and could not be trusted; since another pregnancy would have meant the death of the young writer’s hopes, there was no safety but in returning to the original idea of brother and sister. Since caressing led to sexual impulse, and therefore to discontent, it was necessary that caressing should be omitted from the daily program, and love-making be confined to noble words and the reading aloud of Civil War literature. Thyrsis could do that, being completely absorbed in his vision. Whether Corydon could do it or not was a superfluous question—since Corydon had to do it. This was, of course, a cruelty, and prepared the way for a tragedy.

XII

Prince Hagen, after having been declined by seventeen magazines and twenty-two publishing houses, had been brought out by a firm in Boston and, as usual, disappointed its author’s hopes. But there came one or two hundred dollars in royalties, almost enough to pay for the building of a house. An old carpenter and his son drove from the village, and Thyrsis worked with them and learned a trade. In two or three weeks they built a cabin on the edge of the woods, sixteen feet by eighteen, with a living room across the front and a tiny bedroom and kitchen in the back. It was roofed with tar paper, and the total cost was two hundred and fifty-six dollars. Ten per cent of this price was earned by the device of writing an article about the homemade dwelling and selling it to the World’s Work, for the benefit of other young authors contemplating escape from civilization. The baby, now two years old, watched the mighty men at work, and thereafter the problem of his upbringing was solved; all that was necessary was to put him out of doors with a block of wood, a hammer, and a supply of nails, and he would bang nails into the wood with perfect contentment for hours.

But the problem of the young mother was less easy of solution. Winter came howling from the north and smote the little cabin on the exposed ridge. Snow blocked the roads, and walking became impossible for a woman tired by housework. She could get to town in a sleigh, but there was no place to stay in town with a baby; and what became of the woman’s diversion of shopping, when the family had only thirty dollars a month to live on? There occurred the episode of the turkey-red table cover. It was discovered as a bargain in a notion store, price thirty cents, and Corydon craved it as one pitiful trace of decoration in their home of bare lumber. She bought it, but Thyrsis was grim and implacable, insisting that it be folded up and taken back. Thirty cents was a day’s food for a family, and if they ran up bills at the stores, how would the soul of America be saved?