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The Journal of Arthur Stirling: "The Valley of the Shadow", a novel by Upton Sinclair |
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Part 1. Writing A Poem - May 1st. -- May 30th. |
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_ PART I. WRITING A POEM May 1st. -- May 30th. May 1st. I am wild to-day. Oh, how can I bear this--why should I have to contend with such things as this! Is it not hard enough--the agony that I have to bear, the task that takes all my strength and more? And must I be torn to pieces by such hideous degradation as this? Oh, my God, if my life is not soon clear of these things I shall die! * * * * * Oh, it is funny--yes, funny!--Let us laugh at it. The dance-hall musician has brought home his 'cello! I heard him come bumping up the stairs with it--God damn his soul! And there he sits, sawing away at some loathsome jig tunes! And he has two friends in there--I listen to their wit between the tunes. Here I sit, like a wild beast pent in a cage. I tell you I can bear any work in the world, but I can not bear things such as this. That I, who am seeking a new faith for men--who am writing, or trying to write, what will mean new life to millions--should have my soul ripped into pieces by such loathsome, insulting indignities! Oh, laugh!--but _I_ can't laugh--I sit here foaming at the lips, and crying! And suppose he's lost his position, and does this every day! Now every day I must lay aside what I am doing and sit and shudder when I hear him coming up the steps--and wait for him to begin this! I tell you, I demand to be free--I _demand_ it! I want nothing in this world but to be let alone. I don't want anybody to wait on me.--_I don't want anything from this hellish world but to be let alone!_ It is pouring rain outside, and my overcoat is thin; but I must go out and pace the streets and wait until a filthy Dutchman gets through scraping ragtime on a 'cello. All day wasted! All day! Does it not seem that these things persecute you by system? I came in, cold and wet, and got into bed, and then he began again! And the friends came back and they had beer, and more music. And I had to get up and put on the wet clothes once more. * * * * * May 2d. I was crouching out on one of the docks last night. I had no place else to go. I can think anywhere, if it is quiet. A wonderful thing is the night. I bless Thee for the night, oh "_susse, heilige Natur_"! It was a voice in my soul, as clear as could be. --She can not bear too long the sight of men, sweet, holy Nature: the swarming hives--the millions of tiny creatures, each drunk and blind with his own selfishness; and so she lays her great hand upon it all, and hides it out of her sight. Once it was all silent, and formless as the desert; soon it shall all be silent and formless again; and meanwhile--the night, the night! * * * * * Oh, I hunger for the desert! I do not care for beauty--I have no time for beauty, I want the earth stern and forbidding. Give me some place where no one else would want to go--an iron crag where the oceans beat--a mountain-top where the lightning splinters on the rocks. * * * * * I go at it again. But I am nervous--these things get me into such a state that I simply can not do anything. It was not merely yesterday--I have it constantly. The dirty chambermaid singing, or yelling down to the landlady; the drunken man swearing at his wife; the boys screaming in the street and kicking a tomato-can about. When I think of how much beauty and power has been shattered in my life by such things as these, it brings tears of impotent rage into my eyes. I must be free--oh, I must be free! * * * * * It comes strangely from the author of The Captive, does it not? I give all my life to my work, and sometimes, when I am broken like this, I wonder if I do not give too much. Once I climbed to a dizzy height, and I cried out a dizzy truth: "O God, how as nothing in Thy sight are my writings!" I do not know if I shall ever reach that height again. * * * * * May 3d. I have not one single beautiful memory in my life. I have nothing in my life that, when I think of it, does not make me _writhe_. To all that I have lived, and known, and seen, I have but one word, one cry--Away! Away! Let me get away from it! Let me get away from cities, let me get away from men, let me out of my cage! Let me go with my God, let me forget it all--put it away forever and ever! Let me no longer have to plot and plan, to cringe and whimper, to barter my vision and my hours for bread! Who knows what I suffer--who has any idea of it? To have a soul like a burning fire, to be hungry and swift as the Autumn wind, to have a heart as hot as the wild bird's, and wings as eager--and to be chained here in this seething hell of selfishness, this orgy of folly. * * * * * Ah, and then I shut my hands together. No, I am not weak, I do not spend my time chafing thus! I have fought it out so far-- "I was ever a fighter, so one fight more!" I will go back, and I will hammer and hammer again--grimly--savagely--day by day. And out of the furnace of my soul I will forge a weapon that will set me free in the end--I think. * * * * * May 4th. I wrote a little poem once. I remembered two lines of it--a nature description; they were not great lines, but there flashed over me to-day an application of them that was a stroke of genius, I believe. I was passing the Stock Exchange. It was a very busy day. I climbed one of the pillars, in spirit, and wrote high above the portals:
May 5th. A dreadful thing is unbelief! A dreadful thing it is to be an infidel! --That is what all men cry nowadays--there is so much infidelity in the world--it is the curse of our modern society--it is everywhere--it is all-prevailing! I had a strange experience to-day, Sunday. I went into a church, and high up by the altar, dressed in solemn garb and offering prayers to God--I saw an infidel! He preached a sermon. The theme of his sermon was "Liberalism." "These men," cried the preacher, "are blinding our eyes to our salvation, they are undermining, day by day, our faith! They tell us that the sacred word of God is 'literature'! And they show us more 'literature'; but oh, my friends, what new _Bible_ have they shown us!" As I got up and went out of that church, I whispered: "What a dreadful thing it is to be an infidel!" Oh Dante and Goethe and Shakespeare--oh Wordsworth and Shelley and Emerson! Oh thrice-anointed and holy spirits! What a dreadful thing it is to be an infidel! What a dreadful thing it is to believe in a Bible, and not to believe in literature--to believe in a Bible and not to believe in a God! You think that this world lives upon the revelation of two thousand years ago! Fool--this world lives as your body lives by the beating of its heart--upon the revelation and the effort of each instant of its life. And to-day or to-morrow the great Revealer might send to some lonely thinker in his garret a new word that would scatter to dust and ashes all laws and all duties that now are known to men. * * * * * There are many ways to look at the world, and always a deeper one. I see it as a fearful thing, towering, expanding, upheld by the toil and the agony of millions. Who will bring us the new hope, the new song of courage, that it go not down into the dust to-day? To do that there is the poet; to live and to die unheeded, and to feed for ages upon ages the hungry souls of men--that is to be a poet. Therefore will he sing, and sing ever, and die in the sweetness of his song. When I think of that--not now as I write it here in bare words--but in quivering reality, it is a hand upon my forehead, and a presence in the room. * * * * * May 6th. Chiefest of all I think of my country! Passionately, more than words can utter, I love this land of mine. If I tear my heart till it bleeds and pour out the tears of my spirit, it is for this consecration and this hope--it is for this land of Washington and Lincoln. There never was any land like it--there may never be any like it again; and Freedom watches from her mountains, trembling. --It is a song that it needs, a song and a singer; to point it to its high design, to thrill it with the music of its message, to shake the heart of every man in it, and make him burn and dare! For the first time there is Liberty; for the first time there is Truth, and no shams and no lies, enthroned. The news of it has gone forth like the sound of thunder, and has shaken all the earth: that man at last may live, may do what he can and will! --And to what is it? Is it to the heaping up of ugly cities, the packing of pork and the gathering of gold? That is the thing that I toil for--to tear this land from the grasp of mean men and of merchants! To take the souls of my countrymen into the high mountains with me, to thrill them with a soaring, strong resolve! _Living things_ shall come from this land of mine, living things before I die, for the hunger of it burns me, and will not ever let me rest. Freedom! freedom! And stern justice and honor, and knowledge and power, and a noonday blaze of light!
I wonder if any one will ever read this. As a matter of fact, I suppose ten people will read gossip about the book for every one who reads the book. * * * * * This is just a month from the beginning. A month to-day! Yes--I have done my share, I have done a third of it--a third! But the end is so much harder! * * * * * May 9th. I have been for two days in the mire. I was disturbed, and then I was sluggish. Oh, the sluggishness of my nature! If ever I am a great poet, I will have made myself that by the power of my will; that is a fact. I am by nature a great clod--I feel nothing, I care about nothing. I look at the flowers as a cow chewing its cud.--It is only that I _will_ to do right. Sometimes the sight of my dulness drives me wild. Then again I merely gaze at it. I try time and again to get my mind on my work, and something--anything, provided it is trivial enough--turns me aside. Just now I saw a spider-web, and that made me think of Bruce, and thence I went by way of Walter Scott to Palestine, and when I came to I was writing a song for--who was the minstrel?--to sing outside of the prison of Coeur de Lion. I go wandering that way--sometimes I sit so for an hour; and then suddenly I leap up with a cry. But I may try all I please--I don't care anything about the work--it doesn't stir me--the verses I think of make me sick. And then I remember that I have only so many weeks more; and what it will mean to fail; and that makes me desperate, but doesn't help. When I have stopped at some resting-place in the poem, I can get going again. But now I have stopped in the middle of a climax; and the number of times that I have read that last line, trying to find another--Great heavens! * * * * * But I can not find another word. I am in despair. I know perfectly well what I shall do, only I am a coward, and do not do it. I shall stay in this state till my rage has heaped itself up enough and breaks through everything at last. And then I shall begin to hammer myself! to swear at myself in a way that would make a longshoreman turn white. And I shall spend perhaps two or three hours--perhaps two or three days--doing that, until I am quite in a white heat; and then--I shall go to my work. That is the price I pay for being distracted. * * * * * May 11th. I said to myself the day before yesterday--with a kind of a dry sob--"I can't do it! I can't do it!" Oh how tormented I am by noises--noises! What am I not tormented by? Some days ago I was writing in a frenzy--and the landlady came for her rent. And the horrible creature standing there, talking at me! "So lonely!--don't ever see people! Mrs. Smithers was a-saying--" Oh, damn Mrs. Smithers! I thought I could never do it--I was really about to give it up. I went out on the street--I roamed about for hours, talking I don't know what nonsense to myself. And then at last I came home, and I knelt down there at the bedside and said: "Here you stay without anything to eat until you've written ten lines of that poem!" And that was how I did it. I stayed there, and I prayed. I don't often pray, but that time I prayed like one possessed--I was so lonely and so helpless--and the work was so beautiful. I stayed there for nine blessed hours, and then the clock stopped and I couldn't count after that. But the day came, and then the ten lines! And so I had my breakfast. These things leave you weak, but a little less dull. * * * * * May 13th. I have been working with a kind of wild desperation all day to-day. Oh it hurts--it hurts--but I am doing it! Whenever I read some lines of it that are real--whenever some great living phrase flashes over me--then I laugh like a man in the midst of a battle. I shall be just as a man who has been through a battle; haggard and wild and desperate. Oh, I don't think I shall _ever_ have the courage to do it again! I did not know what it meant! I did not! It was giving myself into the hands of a fiend! All great books will be something different to me after this. Did Shakespeare write thus with the blood of his soul? Or am I weak? Did he ever cry out in pain, as I have? * * * * * May 14th. Another day of raw torture. It is like toiling up a mountain side; and your limbs are of lead. It is like struggling in a nightmare,--that is just what it is like. It is sickening. But then you dare not stop. It is hard to go on, but it is ten times as hard to start if you stop. I could hardly stand up this afternoon! but the thing was ringing in my ears--it went on and on--I had to go after it! I was in the seventh heaven--I could see anything, dare anything, do anything. It made no difference how hard--it called to me--on--on! And I said: "Suppose I were to be tortured--could I go then?" And so I went and went. I haven't written it down yet; I felt sick. But I know it all. Oh men--oh my brothers--will you love me for this thing? * * * * * May 16th. I did no writing yesterday or to-day. I have been terribly frightened. I wrote what I had to write the day before yesterday--I could not help it. But when I stopped my head was literally on fire, and the strangest mad throbbing in it--I stood still in fear, it felt so as if something were going to burst--my head seemed to weigh a ton. I poured cold water over it, but it made no difference--it stayed that way all night and all yesterday. What am I to do? I dare not think--I took a long walk, and even now I find myself thinking of the book without knowing it. Imagine me sitting on a doorstep and playing for two hours with a kitten! Why should I be handicapped in such a way as this? I had never thought of such a thing. * * * * * I was thinking about The Captive--it is my own. Nobody has helped me--I have told not one person of it. Everything in it has come out of my soul. * * * * * May 17th. I feel better to-day, but I hardly know what to do. Meantime I was happy!--Think of a poet's being happy with city flowers! of a poet's being happy with store-flowers--prostitute-flowers--flowers for sale! It was all about a narcissus--"Very flower of youth, and morning's golden hour!"--as I called it once. And it danced so! (It was out on the curbstone)--and I went off happy. Then I thought of a poem that is pure distilled ecstasy to my spirit. I will write it, and be happy again:
--But that pleasure was not in my cup, dear girls. * * * * * Some of these days I hope to live in a beautiful world, where a man may speak to a pretty girl on the street. Badness is its own punishment, let the bad world observe. I would rather look at a beautiful woman than do anything else I know of in this world, except listen to music. * * * * * May 18th. I often think how I shall spend my money after The Captive is done. I shall take a band of chosen youths, seekers and worshipers, and we shall build a house on a mountain-top and worship the Lord in the beauty of music! I shall have to begin at the beginning--I have never had any one to teach me music. But oh, if I did know!--And if I ever got hold of an orchestra--_how_ I would make it go! And in the middle of it the astonished orchestra would see the conductor take wings unto himself and fly off through the roof. A book that I mean to write some day will be called The Pleasures of Music, and it will sing the joys of being clean and strong, of cold water and the early morning and a free heart. It will show how all the unhappiness of men is that they live in the body and in self, and how the world is to be saved through music, which is not of the body, nor of self--which is free and infinite, swift as the winds, vast as the oceans, endless as time, and happy as whole meadows of flowers! The more who come to partake of it, the better it is; for generous is "Frau Musika," her heart is made wholly of love. --And when I have shown all these things, Frau Musika, I shall tell of the golden lands that I have visited upon the wings of thy spirit!--
May 20th. I live among the poor people and that keeps me humble. There is not much chance for freedom, I hear them say, there are not many who can dwell in the forests. Prove your right to it--prove what you can do--the law is stern. I am not afraid of the challenge; I will prove what I can do. But I see one here and there with whom the law is not so strict, I think. * * * * * I met a merchant the other night. I dreamed of him. He said: "I buy such goods as men need; I buy them as cheaply as I can, since life is grim. I sell them as cheaply as I can, since men are poor and suffering. I make of profit what I need to live humbly. I am not of the world's seekers; I am of the finders." * * * * * I met also a guileless fool. We passed a great mansion. "I should like to know the man who lives there," said the fool. "Should you?" said I. "Is he a hero?" asked the fool. "No," said I. "Is he a poet?" asked the fool. "No," said I. "Must he not be very beautiful," said the fool, "that men judge him worthy of so much beauty?" * * * * * May 21st. I must finish this thing this time! That cry rings in my ears night after night. I am toiling upward--upward--I can see no sign of the end yet--but I must finish this time! If I had to stop with this thing haunting me--if I had to go out into that jungle of a world with this weight upon me--to repress myself with this fire in my heart--I could not bear it--I could not bear it! And if I stopped and went out into that world again--how many weeks of agony would it cost me to get back to where I am now! I must finish this time! * * * * * May 22d. "No, officer, I am neither a burglar nor a highwayman, nor anything else worth bothering; I'm just a poet, and I'm crazy, to all practical purposes, so please get used to me and let me wander about the streets at these strange hours of the night without worrying!" Poor, perplexed policeman! Poor, perplexed world! Poor, perplexed mothers and fathers, sisters and cousins and aunts of poets!
To-night I sat and watched it till a tangled forest sprang up about me, and I saw a strange, high-bowed, storm-beaten craft glide past me, ghostly white, its ghostly sailors gazing ahead and dreaming of spices and gold. * * * * * The old, old river--my only friend in a whole city! It goes its way--it is not of the hour. It fascinates me, and I sit and sit and wonder. I gaze into its black and gurgling depths, and whisper what Shelley whispered: "If I should go down there, I should _know_!" * * * * * But no, I should not know anything. * * * * * _The days when thou wert not, did they trouble thee? The days when thou art not shall trouble thee as much._ * * * * * May 24th. AN ESSAY AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS I write this to set forth a purpose which I have for over a year held before me. I write it that it may serve me for a standard. I write it at a time when my bank-account consists of twenty-five dollars, and I mean to publish it at such a time as by the method of plain living and high thinking, I shall have been able to increase it a hundredfold. We are told that a man who would write a great poem must first make a poem of his life. An artist, as I understand the word, is a man who has but one joy and one purpose and one interest in life--the creating of beauty; he is a man lifted above and set apart from all other motives of men; a man who seeks not wealth nor comfort nor fame, nor values these things at all; a man whose heart is forever lonely, whose life is an endless sorrow, and whose excuse and whose spur and whose goal and whose consecration, is the creating of beauty. What power--be it talent or genius--God has given me, I can not tell; I only know that an artist in that sense of the word I mean to be. I have thought out a plan by which I shall make the publishing of my books, as well as the writing of them, a thing of Art. No one will read very far in what I shall write without perceiving there a savage hatred of the spirit of the modern world of wealth; it is only because I have faith in democracy and hope in the people of my country that I do not go to worship my God on a desert island. The world which I see about me at the present moment--the world of politics, of business, of society--seems to me a thing demoniac in its hideousness; a world gone mad with pride and selfish lust; a world of wild beasts writhing and grappling in a pit. I am but a voice crying in the wilderness, and these things must run their course. But in the meantime there is one thing that I can do, and the doing of that has become with me a passion--I can keep my own life pure; I can see that there is one man amid all this madness whose life is untouched by any stain of it; who lives not by bread alone, nor by jewelry and gold; who lives not to be stared at and made drunk with pride, but to behold beauty and dwell in love; who labors day and night to keep a heart full of worship and to sing of faith to suffering men; who takes of the reward of that singing just what food and shelter his body needs; and who shrinks from wealth and luxury as he would from the mouth of hell. To live humbly and in oblivion would be my choice, but it will be my duty to do differently. I know enough about the human heart to know that the presence of one righteous man makes ten thousand unrighteous men angry and uncomfortable. And therefore, for the help of any whom it may comfort, and for the damnation of all the rest, I shall choose that the life I live and the thing I do shall be public; I shall choose that the millions in our country who are wearing out their frantic lives in the pursuit of the dollar, and the few who are squandering their treasures in drunken pomp, shall know that there is one man who laughs at them--whom all the millions of all of them could not buy--and who dwells in joy and worship in a heaven of which they can not even know. In other words, it is my idea not merely to make a poem of my life, but to publish the poem. I shall have other, and deeper, and kinder reasons also, for what I shall do. What I write in my books must be from my deepest heart, the confession of those moments of which I would speak to no living soul; it must be all my tenderness, and all my rapture, and all my prayer; and do you think it will come easily to me to put that out before the rough world to be stared at, to be bound up in a book and hawked about by commercial people?...
Would it not be interesting to me, if I could but pierce the future once, and see how long it is destined to be before I do so publish a book! I would do my work better, I fancy, for that.--But let it lie. I shall publish it some day surely, that I know at least. * * * * * Sometimes I can hardly realize what it will be to me when I have really won fame, when I can speak the things that so need speaking--and be heard. * * * * * May 25th. Line by line, page by page, I do it. I am counting the days now, wondering--longing. It is not merely the writing of it, it is the seeing of it--the planning and designing. Sometimes I brood over it for hours--I can not find what I want; and then suddenly a phrase flashes over me and like a train of gunpowder my thought goes running on--leaping, flying; and then the whole thing is plain as day. And I hold it all living in my hands. I am blessed with a good memory. In times of excitement such as that I seize all the best phrases and carry them away, and bury them out of sight, like a miser. They are my nuggets of gold. And sometimes I am a greedy miser, and stand perplexed; shall I go on and gather more, or shall I make off with the armful that I have? * * * * * May 26th. My religion is my Art. I have no prayer but my work. Sometimes that is a glory, and sometimes again that is an agony. To have no duty outside of yourself; to have no inspiration outside of yourself; to have no routine to help you, no voice to cry out when your conscience goes to sleep, no place of refuge in your weakness!-- All that is but the reason why I dare not be weak. I have chosen to lead and not to follow; therefore I have no rest, and may not look behind me, and can think of nothing but the way. To be the maker of a religion is to sweat blood in the night-time. * * * * * There is but one way that I may live--to take every impulse that comes--to be watching, watching--to dare always and instantly, to hesitate, to put off never, to seize the skirt of my muse whenever it shimmers before me. So I make myself a habit, a routine, a discipline; and so each day I have new power. So each day I feel myself, I bare my arms, I walk erect, exulting--I laugh--I am a god! --And as I write that a feeling takes rise in me, and my heart beats faster; but I am tired, I sink back, I do not take the gift that is offered; and then my conscience gives a growl, and in a flash I see what I have done, and feel a throb of rage and leap up. * * * * * One of my perils is that when I am strong I feel that I must always be so. This truth that is so obvious, these words that flow so swift--what need is there to fear for them, to write them now?--And so they are never written. * * * * * May 27th. Will you imagine me to-day, kneeling by the bedside, shuddering; my face hidden, the tears streaming down my cheeks--and I crying aloud: "I will--oh, I will!" I can not tell any more. * * * * * May 29th. I am coming to the last scenes. I hear them rumbling in my soul--far, far off--like a distant surf on a windless night. I am coming, step by step: I mean to fight it out on this line. I know a man who always rose to the occasion. Never was he challenged that he did not dare and triumph. Oh, if instead of being hungry and pining, I had but the music of that divine inspirer!--
May 30th. To-day. I had a spiritual experience--a revelation; to-day, in a flash of insight, I understood an age--whole centuries of time, whole nations of men. I had been writing one of the great hymns, one of the great victories; and I had been drunk with it, it had come with a surge and a sweep, it had set everything about me in motion--huge phantom shapes--all life and all being gone mad. And then, when I had written it, I went out into the dark night; I walked and walked, not knowing where, still tingling with excitement. And, suddenly, I stood spellbound--the cathedral! There it was--there it was! I saw it, alive and real before me--all of it--all that I had seen and known! I cried out for joy, I stretched out my arms to it--the great, dark surging presence; and all my soul went with it, singing, singing--up into the misty night! _ |
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