The Accursed Read online

  But this riposte was too precious to fling away without recording it, that night, in his journal.

  In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all?

  IN THE RELATIVELY less stressful era before Meta’s “suicide attempt” the young couple often went strolling of an evening, with their infant son carried in a sort of Eskimo-backpack, strapped to Upton; as the countryside was less hospitable to strollers than the village of Princeton, its private lands being marked by no trespassing signs every one hundred yards or so, Upton and Meta walked in town, and on the Princeton University campus; so idyllic a setting, Upton observed, yet so much a bastion of privilege, it could make him physically ill if he allowed himself to dwell upon it. Hastily then, Meta directed him away, to Alexander Road; where, at the little stone train depot, Upton was inspired to speak of all that the “monopolistic” railroads had done to American citizens; and to tell her, and any others who chanced to overhear, on the railway platform, that the forcible Revolution must be made, if the peaceful transition failed. Gripping Meta’s slender arm tightly he quoted one of his favorite passages from Zarathustra: “ ‘Behold, the pale criminal has nodded: out of his eyes speaks the great contempt. My ego is something that shall be overcome: my ego is to me the great contempt of man—that is what the pale criminal’s eyes say.’ ”

  Meta listened courteously, as Meta usually did; but Meta did not seem to comprehend.

  “Nietzsche speaks in riddles, Meta. Yet, if you have the key, his words aren’t riddles but crystal-clear. I am a pacifist, as you know—but—what prophecy! There will one day be gunfire, and bombs, and high-leaping flames, and cries in the streets, if the worshippers of Mammon don’t heed our warnings.”

  “It will be the U.S. Army that fires upon the Revolutionaries, I’m afraid. Or Pinkerton’s, as they’ve done at the strikes.” —So Meta murmured, in an unassertive voice.

  Taking little heed of his wife, except that he required her as an attentive listener, Upton led her from the platform onto the graveled railroad bed, as no train was imminent; and onto the dully gleaming rails and wooden ties. He spoke of the old fascination the railroad had exerted upon him since boyhood: the railway cars, the steam locomotives, the monsters of iron and steel and speed and romance—that same romance the contemptible J. P. Morgan and his Railroad Trust tried to exploit in the name of greed. Upton did love the railroad, he confessed, by which he meant the machinery itself, and the sheer wonder of it—the pride, the great noise, the happy sight of thick black smoke curving backward; the “melancholy music” of its calls in the night; the whistle, the clattering of wheels, the deafening roar, the marvelous O of the locomotive’s boiler face.

  “When Jack London and I meet, and we two must meet, I will ply him with questions about ‘riding the rail,’ as I know he has done such things. I will ask if he has ever witnessed a railroad accident—they are terrible to behold, it’s said. It’s all bound up,” Upton said excitedly, “with the New Brotherhood of Man, as it is wrested from the Old Tyranny. For how could it be otherwise, in the dialectical history of the class struggle? Life is a simple and clearly defined evolutionary process in which the strong overcome the weak, and are in turn overcome by the yet stronger; and so entire species may pass away into extinction. The old way of belief—that God ‘created’ the heavens and the earth and all that dwell on the earth—has been thoroughly refuted by Darwin and Nietzsche and their followers; now, we look to Marx, and Kropotkin, and Bakunin as our visionaries—and Jack London.”

  Upton went on to speak of the role of “chance” in the dialectic process; the way in which, for instance, President McKinley was killed by the assassin Czolgosz, who’d functioned unwittingly as an agent of historical necessity, though the world dismissed him as a rabid anarchist-madman. And with McKinley’s sudden death, the elevation of Roosevelt to the presidency. “By such ‘chance’ history is altered forever,” Upton said, “and it can’t be an accident that The Jungle is appearing now, during Roosevelt’s administration. For there is much more likelihood that Roosevelt will take note of it, than McKinley.”

  Meta may have smiled to herself, at the possibility of her young, unprepossessing husband, invited to the White House to discuss his exposé of the Chicago stockyards.

  “For isn’t the artist by nature a revolutionary?”

  Meta concurred, yes.

  As there can be no social progress without genius, Upton continued, so there is no genius without social progress. “Thought is power, as Victor Hugo believed; and God creates art by way of man. So, God continues to add poets of genius to the world when the needs of progress require, and if the Revolution brings violence, even of a monstrous sort, why then the poet must be in the service of monstrousness.”

  Meta murmured gently, “But do you believe in ‘God,’ Upton? I’d thought you had said we should not, any longer.”

  “Of course I don’t believe in ‘God’ in the old, discredited way,” Upton said, “but as ‘God’ in a kind of dialectical history. Though I am a pacifist, as I am a vegetarian and a teetotaler, yet it gives me a sort of thrill to consider what monstrousness the Revolution may bring forth. A new breed of humankind, perhaps; a new morality—‘Beyond good and evil,’ as Nietzsche has said.”

  “Like the French Revolution?” Meta shivered. “The guillotine—how horrible it seems to me. And so many revolutionaries were beheaded by it.”

  “Not like the French Revolution, Meta,” Upton said, with exasperated patience. “This is an entirely new sort of Revolution, which our Socialist comrades have worked out. It will involve a ‘crash’ of the bourgeoisie—of capitalism. Think of a railroad accident—the wild exhilaration of such drama—for here we have the image of all that’s most powerful brought to a sudden stop; the virile forward-motion arrested; the brute strength stymied; the billowing black smoke of the locomotive stilled; the complacent passengers in their private Pullman cars, with every sort of luxurious accouterment, thrown through the smashed windows, and broken in body and spirit, their blood draining into the common earth. What remorse then, when it’s too late—what terror at the destruction of vanities! The mighty engine overturned, flames billowing forth, and oily black smoke—panicked cries and screams—mangled faces, bodies like those of wounded snakes, impaled frogs—godly steel corrugated as if it were cardboard. What power has the Railroad Trust now?”

  Upton was speaking with such passion, Meta had to pluck at his wrist, to quiet him; for individuals on the platform were listening, very curiously. And Upton fell silent, abashed. For in the next seconds there came along the track the three-car shuttle called, by locals, the Dinky, making its way from Princeton Junction to the village of Princeton, its thin perky smoke puffing upward. Upton Sinclair hurriedly scrambled out of the railroad bed and up onto the platform, helping his wife beside him; he would have stayed to watch the half-dozen passengers climb onto the little train, with a kind of envy, had not Meta, hugging her cotton shawl close about her, murmured: “Upton, please—I want only to go home now.”

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Upton discovered his wife seated at their bare kitchen table, late at night; the barrel of the ugly revolver held against her forehead, and her finger pressed tremulously against the trigger. (Upton had never fired a gun, and had no idea how hard one must press the trigger; the prospect would have terrified him.) He’d wakened to find Meta slipped from their bed; he’d lighted a candle, to search for her; not wanting to call for her, for fear of waking little David, and provoking an onslaught of ear-splitting wails.

  It was a hellish sight—seeing Meta in the kitchen, beside a sullenly burning kerosene lamp. Yet further distressing was the fact that, in surrendering the weapon to him, Meta wept bitter tears saying how she detested herself as a bad mother, and lacked courage to do what God had whispered to her, to do.

  “God would not ask of you such a cruel thing,” Upton protested, “even the Old Testament God of wrath.”

  For weeks afterward Up
ton was haunted by his wife’s piteous words, and couldn’t think how he deserved to hear them. Had he not been a devoted husband and father, despite their frugal circumstances?

  Did his wife not realize that he loved her, despite his commitment to the Socialist cause? “Yet it seems, for a woman, this isn’t enough.”

  In his journal noting, for posterity

  The Revolutionary must not marry, no more than the martyr.

  A POISON HAD SEEPED into their marriage, if not into their very souls, since their arrival in Princeton and the “rural experiment” on the old farm on Rosedale Road: but the young author could not determine what this poison was.

  Could it be a poison of place? Or, less clearly, of time?

  For this part of New Jersey was quite beautiful, and Princeton an idyllic town lacking the ugliness of most towns. Upton had remarked in letters to his Socialist comrades how there appeared to be, in public at least, no “poor” people; certainly, no beggars; even the Negro house servants and laborers were respectably dressed, and lived in a respectable residential neighborhood on lower Witherspoon Street one might mistake for a “white” neighborhood. Yet, there seemed to Upton a kind of free-floating poison . . . Where once his young wife had doted on him and his writing, detecting in even his dashed-off pieces for the New York papers evidence of genius, she now showed but a perfunctory interest, and seemed scarcely to care that The Jungle was selling out every issue of Appeal to Reason in which it appeared. (“Since you are only being paid the usual rate by the magazine, it hardly makes any difference if the issues are ‘best sellers.’ We’re still poor”—so Meta pointed out with cruel accuracy and not at all the kind of sympathy a man might expect from a loyal wife.) It had been their custom for Upton to give his wife reading matter to study by kerosene lamp in the evening, so that they could discuss the pieces together; but by degrees Meta had lost interest, and even lost the material—which included Upton’s own “The Scientific Basis of Utopia,” which he planned to present at the first meeting of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society that summer.

  A terrible thought came to Upton: could his wife be in love with another man?

  Or, at least, seeing another man in secret?

  So the unhappy husband tormented himself while hunched over his writing table in his sacred work-place in the little cabin behind the farmhouse.

  This autumn, since the murder of the Spags girl not many miles away, and a rumor of other, “unspeakable” crimes in the vicinity, Meta had set out on solitary walks as if in defiance of circumstances; several times she declared she was “not fearful” as other women were; for it was crucial to her, to slip away from little David, when she could, to be alone with her thoughts and in no danger of being interrupted. At such times the frail young woman exhibited a remarkable, if not febrile energy, and could walk long distances—at least two miles into town, and back; or, in the woods and fields behind the farmhouse, an incalculable distance. She walked on Province Line Road and on Carter and Poe roads, in the area of Stony Brook Creek, as well as along Rosedale; by chance, Upton learned that she’d walked as far as Pretty Brook Road, that ran parallel with Rosedale, on the farther side of the creek. Sometimes, Meta dared to walk in Crosswicks Forest, though the land was prominently posted against “trespassers” of any sort; she returned with muddied shoes, as if she’d been tramping in a bog. And when she returned from an illicit walk, having failed to inform Upton that she was leaving the house, she was likely to be scant of breath, sunburnt, her clothing torn by brambles and her hair disheveled. “Meta, where have you been?” Upton would ask, disapproving; for after all, he’d had to interrupt his work, to take care of the baby. And Meta would say only vaguely that she’d been “on a walk—and lost track of time.”

  Upton had hidden the revolver. And the bullets, too. Yet, should Meta want to injure herself, how could he prevent her?—for all the sincerity of his love, and the passion of his moral beliefs, he knew himself helpless.

  Sensuality often grows too fast for love to keep up with. Then love’s root remains weak and is easily torn.

  Upton had noted this remark of Friedrich Nietzsche in his journal. It was not clear that it applied to him and Meta but there was a disturbing wisdom here.

  At first, as the Sinclairs had decided to live chastely, as “sister and brother,” to prevent another pregnancy, Meta had appeared pallid, nervous, anxious and short-tempered; yet strangely, with the passing of time, she began to exude an air of well-being, and secrecy; even, Upton thought, sensuousness.

  (Or did he imagine it?)

  There were the lengthy, unexplained walks, for which Meta scarcely troubled to apologize; there were occasions when Meta slept luxuriantly well past dawn, as she had not slept in the past, with an air of utter abandon, oblivion; and a notable reluctance to wake up, and resume her housewife-duties even when little David screamed for his mother’s attention.

  She played with the baby less. If she and Upton chanced to touch, to bump into each other in the cramped space of a room, she froze at once; which Upton did not find at all flattering.

  Naturally, the Sinclairs no longer shared a bed; Meta elected to sleep on a narrow cot in the front room, assuring Upton that she didn’t mind in the slightest.

  As autumn deepened into early winter, Upton became ever more conscious of his wife’s undefined air of well-being; the play of a smile about her lips, instead of a frown, as she prepared meals, or cleaned the kitchen after meals; the way she gazed at her reflection, in the sole mirror in the house, attached to a bedroom bureau, with an expression of wistfulness, hope, and—(unless Upton was imagining this, too)—coquetry. He was not by nature a suspicious person, yet it seemed to him significant that Meta now spent five or more minutes brushing her hair and, with girlish expectancy, viewing herself from several angles in the mirror, and fashioning her hair into unusual styles, he could only conclude were copied from sleek magazines like Vanity Fair, which certainly didn’t come into his household.

  Once, Upton came into the farmhouse from his cabin unexpectedly, to discover Meta trying on one of her old bonnets which she’d “livened up” with a bit of satin ribbon; another time, while searching in a drawer, he discovered, hidden behind items of feminine apparel, an expensive-looking brooch he’d never seen before, of mother-of-pearl inlaid with small red stones. (Rubies?) Meta claimed that this was a gift from her grandmother but Upton was suspicious, for why hadn’t he seen it before?

  Evasively Meta said it was but a “trifle”—she’d never worn it in his presence.

  One morning in late October when Upton was sitting at his writing table, in the little cabin overlooking a desiccated cornfield, he found himself so distracted by thoughts of Meta that he couldn’t write; and sat for a long while with his head in his hands. He’d been writing a letter to a comrade in the city but the passage of wind through the dried cornstalks seemed like whispering to him, though no words could be discerned.

  It was at this moment that Upton saw, some distance away, yet within the (evident) border of the cornfield, a horse and buggy moving at a leisurely pace, though no road or lane existed there, and no horse and buggy could cross a cornfield in so smooth-gliding a way . . . The buggy was attractive, though old-fashioned in style; yet, in this rural place, where no farmers owned motorcars, it did not appear so extraordinary as it would have appeared in Princeton.

  This had to be an optical illusion, Upton thought. Or a moment of weakness, from overwork. Or maybe the horse and buggy were passing along a road, invisible from the cabin. He returned to the letter and forced himself to reread it: the general subject was the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which had been organized early in the year with the purpose of counteracting the teachings of American professors in their ignorant and biased presentations of Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Feuerbach, Bakunin, et al.; the specific subject, the hoped-for election of Jack London to its presidency. For Upton revered London; he considered London one of Socialism’s proudest figures: handsome, bol
d, outspoken, provocative, and widely acknowledged as a genius for the “fireball” success of such best sellers as The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf. What excellent publicity the Society would reap if London were elected, and agreed to take office!—the fledgling organization would be flooded with applications for membership.

  So Upton Sinclair was arguing that the Society must elect London, and not Eugene Debs; though Debs was a veteran of the Socialist struggle, the man had undeniable problems—(excessive drinking, marital complications, ill temper)—and could not hope to command such general attention from both Socialists and “unbelievers” as the dashing London.

  Hadn’t London already distinguished himself in several confrontations with the enemies of Socialism?—hadn’t he addressed hostile gatherings, and launched an ambitious if ill-advised campaign for the mayoralty of Oakland, California? He was brash, but well spoken; “rough” yet “poetical”; a man among men but popular with women, including “ladies” of the upper classes. Inspired, Upton wrote: “He has been a salmon fisher, an ‘oyster pirate,’ a longshoreman, a sailor. He has tramped our great nation and knows it inside and out; he has lived in the horror of the Whitechapel slums, and searched for gold in the Klondike. He has been beaten by police, and jailed.”

  (Though Upton didn’t think to mention it, London had dashed off a generous blurb for The Jungle, soon to appear in hardcover: “Here it is at last! The book we have been waiting for! The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery! Comrade Sinclair’s The Jungle! And what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for black slaves, The Jungle will do for the white slaves of today . . . It will be read by every workingman. It will open countless ears that have been deaf to Socialism. It will plough the soil for the seed of our propaganda. It will make thousands of converts to our cause. Comrades, it is up to you!”)