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The Journal of Arthur Stirling: "The Valley of the Shadow", a novel by Upton Sinclair |
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Part 2. Seeking A Publisher - September 1st. -- September 30th. |
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_ PART II. SEEKING A PUBLISHER September 1st. -- September 30th. September 1st. "The reason for delay in replying to your letter is that it was mislaid. I am directed by Mr. ---- to say that he has so many requests to read manuscripts that he is compelled to make it an invariable rule to decline. "Secretary." So that hope is gone! That letter--or rather the chain of thoughts which it brought me, made me feel ill to-night. "So many requests!" "An invariable rule!" So many swarming millions, helpless, useless, dying unknown and unheeded. And I am in the midst of them--helpless, unknown, and unheeded! And now that I have done my work, I can not find any one with faith enough--interest enough--even to look at it! How could a man who is a poet--who writes things that stir the hearts of men--how could he send such an answer to such a letter as I wrote him? I do not think that _I_ shall ever send such an answer! Or is it really true, then, that the world is such a thing that it closes the hearts even of poets? That his ardor and his consecration, his sympathy and love and trust--he gives all to the things of his dreams and never to the men and women he meets? Oh how shall I find one--just one--warmhearted man! * * * * * I begin the trying of the publishers once more to-morrow. * * * * * September 2d. I am in my sixth week! Two weeks of the money is nearly gone--I had to get another pair of shoes and a necktie and to have some things laundered twice. I have to be respectable now, I can not wash my own clothes at the faucet when no one is about. My "room" costs me seventy-five cents a week, and my food from a dollar and a half to two dollars. At the end of the seventh week I shall have over fifty dollars clear. I have made up my mind to give up the place at the end of that time. Twelve dollars is the most I ever earned, but I can't stand it longer than that. I shall be clear for nearly four months, and that will surely put me safe until I have found a publisher. I would go away into the country again, only I must have books. I have nothing to write now. * * * * * --Oh the heat of this dreadful city; sometimes it takes all my strength to bear that and my drudgery, and nothing else. When the night comes I am panting, and can only shut my eyes. If I am kept here long, I tell you I shall never, as long as I live, be as strong and keen as I might have been. So long as I was working, striving for an education, preparing myself, I could bear it. But now I have done all that I can do amid these surroundings. I cry out day and night, "I have earned my freedom!" * * * * * September 6th. He had no business to send me that answer! He had no business to send it! I care not how many such requests he gets! Pain throbbed in that letter, hunger and agony were in it; and if he were a man he would have known it! He had no business to send me that answer! I shall never forgive him for it. * * * * * The last publisher said it would take a month; they had many manuscripts on hand, and could not do any better. So I have only to set my teeth together and wait. * * * * * I count the days before my escape from that hideous place down-town. The thought of it drives me wild--it gets more and more a torture. Can I stay out the week? I ask. * * * * * September 8th. All day--all day--I have but one thought in my mind--but one thought in my life! I am beset by it, I can not escape it. That horrible shame to which I am subjected! It turns all my life to gall! It beats down my enthusiasm, it jeers at my faith, it spits into the face of my unselfishness! I come home every night weak and worn and filled with despair, or else with a choking in my throat, and helpless, cruel rage in my soul. Never mind that I am going to be free--the wrong is that it should ever have been--it will stay with me all my days and turn all my life to gall! It will wreck all my visions, all my aspirations, my faith, my eagerness; the memory of it will sound like a mocking voice in my ears, a sneer! Day by day I strive and struggle and tear my-self to pieces, and sink back worn out; and don't you suppose that has any effect upon me? I can feel it. I see it plain as day, and shudder at it--I am being cowed! I am being tamed, subdued, overpowered; the thing is like a great cold hand that is laid upon me, pressing me down, smothering me! I know it--and I cry out and struggle as if in a nightmare; but it only presses the harder. Why, I was like a lion--restless--savage--all-devouring! Never-ceasing, eager, untamable--hungry for life, for experience, for power! I rushed through in days what others took months at--I watched every instant--I crowded hours into it. * * * * * --And now look at me! I crouch and whine--there is an endless moan in my soul. Can you break a man's spirit so that he never rises again? So that all his attempts to be what he was mock at him? So that he never _tries_ any more? Look at those poor wretches you pass on the street-- those peasants from Europe, from Russia! See the restless, shifting eyes, the cringing gait--_that_ is what it is to be tamed! * * * * * Hateful tyrant of the commonplace--so you will lay your cold hand over me and crush out all the fire from my heart. All this that was to build new empires--new hopes, new virtues, new power; all that I was, and all that I sought to be! Ah, but you will not crush me--understand it well, you may beat me and kick me, you may starve me to death, but you will never overcome me, you will never tame me into one of the pack-horses of society! I will fight while I have a breath in me, while my heart has left one beat. The time may come when I shall have to drag myself away like a sick beast to die in the mountains; but if it does, I shall go defying you! * * * * * Bah! --How I wish I could find a rich man who could spare it, and from whom I could steal a thousand dollars. I would turn it into a thousand songs that diamonds could not buy--that would build new empires--and then I would pay the poor rich man back. * * * * * --I read a poem of Matthew Arnold's last night:
September 10th. A man was talking to me to-day about what I am doing. "I should think you would try to get some work more congenial," he said, "some literary work." Yes!--I sell wholesale-paper, and that is bad enough; but at least I do not sell my character. I to enter into the literary business world! I to forsake my ideals and my standards--to learn to please the public and the men who make money out of the public! Ah, no--let me go on selling paper, and "keep my love as a thing apart--no heathen shall look therein!" * * * * * What could I do, besides? And who would give me a chance? I could not review books--I know nothing about modern books, and still less about modern book standards. Neither do I know anything to write that any magazines would want. * * * * * --And besides, in four days more, shall I not have fifty or sixty dollars? And what shall I want then? * * * * * Ah, how I count the days! And when I am out of this place, how I will run away from it! The very books I read while I was there will always be painful to me. --They will be glad to get rid of me, too. Poor me--I have given up trying to be understood. All these things pass. My business is with God. * * * * * Cicero thinks that the remembering of past sorrows is a pleasure. Yes, when the sorrows are beautiful, noble. But I have sorrows in my life, the thoughts of which send through my whole frame--literally and physically--a _spasm_. * * * * * September 11th. I told the bald-headed, grim-visaged senior-partner to-day that I was going to leave. He seemed surprised--offered me a "raise." I told him I was going out of New York. * * * * * --I am a liar. Sometimes I philosophize about that. I am an unprincipled idealist. I have not the least respect for fact; I am doing my work. If I could help my work, I would lie serenely in all the six languages I know. And if I were caught, I would say, "Why, yes, of course!" I think I would rather have a finger cut off than say to a New York business man, "I am a poet!" * * * * * September 12th. I have been forcing myself to read Gibbon, but half of him was all I could stand. I think with astonishment of the reputation of this history, a bare recital of facts, without the least interest or importance, and a recital by the shallowest of men! The vulgarity of his character is more evident than ever since the repressed parts of his biography have appeared. It is comical. And this man, who has no more understanding of spirituality than a cow, to tell the story of the greatest movement of the soul of man in history! There is not one gleam of the Christian superstition left in me. I have nothing to fear from the sneers of Gibbon any more than I have from those of Voltaire; but I do not care to hear lectures on the steam-engine by a man who does not believe in steam. * * * * * --Some of these days--the last thing that I can see on the horizon of my future--I am going to write a tragedy called Jesus. The time is past, it seems to me, when an artist must leave alone the greatest art-theme of the ages. Is it not the greatest? Is there any story in history more sublime than the story of this man? A humble, ignorant peasant he was, and out of the faith of his soul he made the future of the world for centuries! It is a thing that makes your brain reel. I write it casually, but I have shuddered over it far into the deep, deep night. I have dreamed of two acts--one of them Gethsemane, and the other Calvary.--Poor fool, perhaps I shall never write them! * * * * * I have burrowed into that soul, seeking out the truths of it; the truths, as distinguished from the ten thousand fancies of men. When I write that drama I shall deal with those truths. The climax of the scene in the garden of Gethsemane will be a vision in which looms up before him the whole history of Christianity; and that will be the last agony. It will be then that he sweats blood. That will be something, I think. * * * * * September 13th. To-morrow is the last time I shall ever go into that hellish place! To-morrow is the last time in all my life that I shall ever have to say, "We have this same quality in ninety-pound paper at four sixty-nine!" Throughout all this thing it seemed to me that when I came out I should no longer have a soul. But it is not so; I shall still keep at it grimly. * * * * * September 14th. And now to-day I make my plans. I must keep near a library; but I shall hunt out a room uptown. There I can be near the Park, and I shall suffer a little less from these hideous noises. I shall go over there and spend every day--find out some place where there are not too many nurse-girls! I can not begin any other book; I must stand or fall by The Captive. I shall be a "homo unius libri"! But I can not attempt to write again--ever--in these circumstances. It is not that my force is spent--I am only at the beginning of my life, I see everything in the future. But I could not wrestle with these outside things again--it took all my courage and all my strength to do it once. * * * * * There is no reason why I should worry about that. I have fifty-six dollars, and I am free for four months, barring accidents. And surely I shall have found some one to love my book by that time! * * * * * And so I set to work reading. * * * * * September 15th. A slight preliminary, of course. I spent a ghastly day hunting for a room. I found one in a sufficiently dirty and cheap place, and then I spent another hour finding a man who would take my trunk for a quarter. Having succeeded in that, I walked up there to save five cents; and when the trunk came the driver tried to charge me fifty cents! * * * * * Picture me haggling and arguing on the steps--"Didn't know it was so far--Man didn't understand"--God knows what else! And then he tries to carry off the trunk--and I rushing behind, looking for a policeman! Again more arguing, and a crowd, of course. At last it appears that I have to pay him what he asks and go down to the City Hall and make my complaint--hadn't told him how many steps there were, etc. So finally I agree to carry it up the steps myself, if he'll only leave it for a quarter! Next you must picture me breaking my back and tearing my fingers and the damned wall paper--while the damned frowsy-headed landlady yells and the damned frowsy-headed boarders stick out their heads! And so in the end I get into my steaming hot room and shut the door and fall down on the bed and burst into tears. * * * * * O God, the stings of this bitter, haunting, horrible poverty! The ghastly weight that has hung about my neck since ever I can remember! Oh, shall I ever be free from it? Shall I ever know what it is to have what I ought to have, to think of my work without the intrusion of these degrading pettinesses? They are so infinite, so endless, so hideous! The thing gets to be a habit of my thoughts; my whole nature is steeped and soaked in it--in filthy sordidness! I plot and I plan all the day--I can not buy a newspaper without hesitating and debating--I am like a ragpicker going about the streets! Sometimes the thing goads me so that I think I must go mad--when I think of the time that I lose, of the power, of the courage! I walk miles when I am exhausted, to save a car-fare! I wear ragged collars and chafe my neck! I stand waiting in foul-smelling grocery shops with crowds of nasty people! I cook what I eat in a half-dirty frying-pan because I can not afford to pay the servant to wash it! So it is that I drag myself about--chafing and goaded--crouching and cringing like a whipped cur! My God, when will I be free? My God! My God! * * * * * --The boarding-houses that I have been in! The choice collection of memories that I have stored away in my mind, memories of boarding-houses! The landladies' faces--the assorted stenches--the dark hallways--the gabbling, quarreling, filthy, beer-carrying tenants! Oh, I wring my hands and something clutches me in my heart! Let me go! Let me go! Six times in the course of my life, when I have been starved sick on my own feeding, I have become a "table-boarder"; and out of those six experiences I could make myself another Zola. The infinite variety of animality in those six vile stables--the champing jaws and the slobbering mouths and the rank odor of food! The men who shoveled with their knives or plastered things on their forks as hod-carriers do mortar! The women who sucked in their soup, and the children who smeared their faces and licked their lips and slopped upon the table-cloth! The fat Dutchman who grunted when he ate, and then leaned back and panted! The yellow woman with the false teeth who gathered everything about her on the table! The flashy gentleman with the diamond scarf-pin and the dirty cuffs, who made a tower out of his dirty dishes and then sucked his teeth! O God! And the loathsome food!--For seven years I have had my nose stamped into this mud, and all in vain; I can still starve, but I can not eat what is not clean. --Some day I shall put into a book all the rage and all the hate and all the infamy of these things, and it will be a book that will make your flesh sizzle. And you will wonder why I did it! It will be better than Troilus and Cressida, better than the end of Gulliver's Travels--better than Swellfoot the Tyrant! * * * * * I wonder why nobody else ever reads or mentions Swellfoot the Tyrant? I call it the most whole-hearted, thorough-going, soul-satisfying piece of writing in any language that I know. * * * * * --When you think of my work you must think of these things! I do not mention them often, but they are never out of my mind. If you should read anything beautiful of mine, you must bear in mind that it is about half a chance that there was a dirty child screaming out in the hall while I wrote it. * * * * * September 20th. It took me a couple of days to realize that I have still not to go down-town. But I have a fine facility in making myself new habits! Just now I am on a four months' studying campaign. It is monotonous--to read about. I get up at six, and when I have had my breakfast and fixed a lunch, I go over into the Park. There are only birds and squirrels and a few tramps about then, and it is glorious. Sometimes I am so happy that I do not want to read; later come the squalling children and the hot sun; but I flit about from place to place. I wonder what they think of me!-- Wer bist du, und was fehlt dir! * * * * * I read all day, right straight along, and all night, now that it is not too hot. I have always done my reading by periods--I read our nineteenth-century poets that way, sixteen hours a day; I read Shakespeare in three weeks that way, and finished the month with Milton. So when I got German, I read Goethe and Schiller, and Moliere and Hugo again. Now I am reading history; it gives me the nightmare, but one has to read it. Every night when I put down my book, I flee in thought to my own land as to a city of refuge. A history where everything counts! A history that is not a mad, blind chaos of blood and horror! A history that has other meaning than the drunken lust and the demon pride of a Napoleon or a Louis le Grand! --Some day the ages will discern two movements in history: the first, the Christian dispensation, and the second the American. There is a great deal in knowing how to read, especially with such books as history. I try to read as I write; to lash my author, to make him fill my mind. If he gets sluggish I am soon through with him--I read whole paragraphs in a sentence, and whole volumes in an hour. * * * * * September 25th. The third week of the publisher's month has gone by. God, how cruel is waiting! I wonder if their readers knew how hungry I am if they would not hurry a little! I say to myself--"There has been enough of this nonsense! Oh, surely there will not be any more, surely these men must take it!" * * * * * September 28th. I still read the literary journals and tingle with excitement thinking of the time when The Captive is discussed in them. Can I believe that this book will not stir the world? If I did not believe it, I could not believe anything! I feel a new interest now in the authors that people talk about. I want to know who they are and what they do. And all the time I find myself thinking: "Have I more than this man?--More than that man?" That always throws me into despair, because I am a great admirer; and because I am always hypnotized by the last thing that I read. But I find very little that is great in modern books. Books are better made now than they ever were before--I mean in the way of literary craftsmanship. As far as form goes, there is no author living who would put together such a hodge-podge as Wilhelm Meister, or La Nouvelle Heloise. But they all imitate each other; they are all mild and tame; there is no real power, no genius among them. They have even forgotten it exists. * * * * * I came across this, for instance, the other day in a book of Mr. Howells's: "In fact, the whole belief in genius seems to me rather a mischievous superstition, and if not mischievous, always, still always, a superstition. From the account of those who talk about it, genius appears to be the attribute of a very potent and admirable prodigy which God has created out of the common for the astonishment and confusion of the rest of us poor human beings. Do they mean anything more or less than the mastery which comes to any man in accordance with his powers and diligence in any direction? If not, why not have an end to the superstition which has caused our race to go on for so long writing and reading of the difference between talent and genius?" Is not that simply blasphemous? * * * * * --Have I genius? Ah, save the word! How can I know? It is none of my affair--I do my work. Genius is next to the last and most sacred word we know, next to God; and next to the most abused word. Every man will possess it, in degree proportionate to his vanity. I think if they knew the work and the terror that goes with even a grasp at it, they would not make so free with it. * * * * * September 30th. I wait--I wait for The Captive. I do all these other things--I read, I think, I study--but all the while I am merely passing the time. I am waiting for The Captive to win me the way. All my life hangs on that, I can do nothing else but pray for that--pray for it and yearn for it! --Yes--and do you know it?--I am sinking down every day! Down, down! The Captive is my high-water mark; where I was when I wrote that I shall never come again in my life--until I am given my freedom and new courage, and can set to work to toil as I did then! Tell me not about future books, foolish publishers! I have told you I put all that I had and all that I was into that book! And by that book I stand or I fall. _ |
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