The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

VI

We employed an honest lawyer and made an honest statement of the value of our property. The insurance companies then cut it by one third and told us that if we were not satisfied, we could sue, which would mean waiting several years for our money. I learned too late that this is their regular practice; to meet it, you double the value of your claim. You must have a dishonest lawyer.

We could not afford to wait, for many persons were in distress, and I was unwilling to see them suffer even though they had no legal claim upon me or the company. We settled the insurance matters and sold the land for what it would bring; after the mortgage holders were paid, I had a few thousand dollars left from the thirty thousand The Jungle had earned. My friend Wilshire was in trouble with his gold mine just then, and as he had loaned me money several times, I now loaned some to him; that is, I invested it in his mine, and he wrote me a letter agreeing to return it on demand. But his affairs thereafter were in such shape that I never did demand it. And that was the end of my first “fortune.”

However, I did not worry; I was going to make another at once—so I thought. Having portrayed the workers of America and how they lived, I was now going to the opposite end of the scale—to portray the rich, and how they lived. There had come many invitations to meet these rich; there were intelligent ones among them, like “Robbie” Collier, Mrs. “Clarrie” Mackay, and Mrs. “Ollie” Belmont; there were some who were moved by curiosity and boredom, and some even with a touch of mischief. The suggestion that I should write The Metropolis came first from a lady whose social position was impregnable; she offered me help and kept her promise, and all I had to do in return was to promise never to mention her name.

I refer to this matter because, in the storm of denouncement that greeted The Metropolis, the critics declared that it was less easy to find out about “society” than about the stockyards. But the truth is that I had not the slightest trouble in going among New York’s smart set at this time. Many authors had stepped up the golden ladder, and my feet were on it. My radical talk didn’t hurt me seriously; it was a novelty, and the rich—especially the young ones—object to nothing but boredom. Also there are some of the rich who have social consciences, and are aware that they have not earned what they are consuming. You will meet a number of such persons in the course of this story.

The reason why The Metropolis is a poor book is not that I did not have the material but that I had too much. Also, I wrote it in a hurry, under most unhappy circumstances. The career of a novelist is enough for one man, and founding colonies and starting reform organizations and conducting political campaigns had better be left to persons of tougher fiber. It took me thirty years to learn that lesson thoroughly; meantime I lost the reading public that The Jungle had brought me.

I did my writing about smart society in a shack that had walls full of bedbugs. I made cyanogen gas, a procedure almost as perilous to me as to the bugs. I worked through the spring and summer, and when the New York Herald offered me my own price to make another investigation of the stockyards, I resisted the temptation and turned the job over to Ella Reeve Bloor. The result was a great story “killed,” as I have previously mentioned.

I was having my customary indigestion and headaches, the symptoms of overwork that I would not heed. Also, in the middle of the summer, Corydon suffered an attack of appendicitis that very nearly ended the troubles between us. A country doctor diagnosed her illness as menstrual, and when, after several days, I called a surgeon from New York, he said it was too late to operate. So there lay my youthful dream of happiness, at the gates of death for a week or two. I had then an experience that taught me something about the powers of suggestion, which are so close to magical; I saved Corydon’s life, and she knew it, and told me so afterward.

I literally pulled her back through those gates of death. She was lying in a semistupor, completely worn out by pain that had lasted more than a week; she had given up, when she heard my voice. I did not pray for her—I did not know how to do that—but I prayed to her, urging her to live, to keep holding on; and that voice came to her as something commanding, stirring new energies in her soul. When modern psychotherapists state that we die because we want to die, I understand exactly what they mean.

Corydon was taken to the Battle Creek Sanitarium to recuperate, accompanied by her mother and an elderly surgeon friend. How easy it is for human beings to accumulate needs! Four summers back Corydon and Thyrsis had lived with their baby in a tent in the woods and had thought themselves fortunate to have an income of thirty dollars a month assured them; but now Corydon needed sixty dollars a week to stay at a leisure-class health resort, and half as much for her mother’s board, and a private physician into the bargain. The child had to have a nursemaid, and a relative to take care of him in the Point Pleasant cottage; while the father had to flee to the Adirondack wilderness to get away from the worry and strain of it all! Such is success in America, the land of unlimited possibilities.