Sinclairism

Authors Upton Beall Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis are sometimes confused in the casual mind and not only because of their names. As penmen they are stylistic cousins of whom the younger and cleverer--Mr. Lewis--has far surpassed in ability and notoriety his more intellectual and radical elder. Yet when Sinclair Lewis was but a redheaded young yahoo learning at Upton Sinclair's colony, Helicon Hall (Englewood, N. J.), the rudiments of a Socialism which he was later to abandon for a creed 100% egocentric, Upton Sinclair was already a celebrity by inversion, a rebel whose voice of loud and monotonous dissent had long been heard in the land.

As literary sensations then went, The Jungle (1905) flaying Chicago's stockyards, The Metropolis (1908) flaying Manhattan and The Brass Check (1919) flaying journalism, were equivalent to the later temblors of Main Street and Babbitt. And it may be to the ian, constitutes himself the scourger of Vulgarity. Upton Sinclair, Marxian pedant, is the novelistnemesis of Capitalism.

In 1925, Mr. Sinclair issued a windy discourse, Mammonart, purporting to outline the history of Art and show that it has always been the valet of opulence. In 1923 he prescribed for U. S. education in The Goose-Step. But it is eight years since he has published a novel. The appearance of one* this summer might have passed unnoticed -- for Sinclair Lewis and others have long since so improved upon the Sinclair journalese that what once seemed striking is now stale as War news. But some policemen in Boston found passages in the book which made them feel it should be suppressed. Recalling H. L. Mencken's coup with "Hatrack" in the American Mercury under similar circumstances, Mr. Sinclair hurried off to Boston, imitated the Mencken tactics of selling his contraband publicly and orating on Boston Common,/- and of recent weeks the book has had a sale over which even a Communist might not be able to conceal his satisfaction. The Story of Oil!, like all Mr. Sinclair's stories, has appeared at length in the newspapers. Also it has been picked up and messed with for its political content by Samuel Hopkins Adams, a third-rate novelist, author of Revelry. It is the story of the Oil scandal, the Ohio Gang and the late President Harding, dragged out again and jumbled in with a lot of other sensational copy -- the evangelic vaga ries of Aimee Semple McPherson, athletic professionalism at the University of Southern California, high class prostitution at Hollywood, California's "Reds," labor college? anti-syndicalism "outrages" -- structurally built to reproduce life .-.s Mr. Sinclair has seen it lived in Southern California, and mentally f oundationed -- or undermined -- to show Capitalism as the causa of all that is horrid in the Golden West, Communism as the hope of all that is hopable there by Author Sinclair and the woeful workers whose Moses he is. Like many bores, Mr. Sinclair is genial; like more, he has investi gated his subject. So the charac ters are appealing -- J. Arnold Ross, onetime muleteer, rough-hewn oil baron; his son, Bunny, honest by his lights, which shift from the Kliegs of Hollywood to the rising Soviet sun; their friends, enemies, mistresses and Bunny's "Wobbly" comrades for whom great sympathy is obtained by their physical dis tresses including suicide by drowning in an oil well. All actual personages save the three Presidents of the era -- Wilson, Harding, Coolidge -- are heavily disguised, Aimee McPherson even appearing male. The action, so swift that it becomes uneventful, embraces Bunny's biography to his enlightened midtwenties and the father's up to his death in Europe as an oil-smeared refugee from U. S. justice. The properties are conscientiously collected and arranged in about onethird of the book but Author Sinclair evidently got weary of the creative task he had set himself and fell back on bare-faced bed time simplicity when his spirit drooped. It is readable because the legions of sentences are compact and brisk of pace, the characters "stay put" and the antiCapitalistic sermon at the end only lasts a paragraph. Nevertheless, even so ardent a Socialist and generous a man as Floyd Dell must be suspected of gentle hypocrisy when he declares of Oil!: "I can hardly tear myself away from it." The Author. Writing in the current Nation, Author Sinclair describes himself: "Behold me -- the prize prude of the radical movement; a man who can say that he has never told a smutty story in his life and who was once described by his former marital partner,* through the papers of the civilized world, as 'an essential monogamist' -- a very old-fogyish thing to be. . . ."

*OiL ! -- Upton Sinclair -- A. & C. Boni ($2.50).

/- A literal person, Author Sinclair read publicly The Song of Songs from the Bible. Parts of it, quoted in Oil!, had been cited as cause for suppressing Oil! Author Sinclair asked Boston police to ar rest him for uttering Holy Writ obscenities. The police sulked. He advertised that he would sell a Bible publicly as well as Oil! and succeeded in selling one to a police man by pasting an Oil! jacket on a Bible. No practical joke, this was supposed to involve the Bible in whatever legal proceedings might be brought against Oil! In a spirit more of fun and smartness, Author Sinclair brought out a special Fig Leaf Edition for Boston, with censored passages decorously stamped out by fig-like foliage. A likely passage for a fig leaf: "And then the new President : a little man whose fame was based upon the legend hat he had put down a strike of the Boston policemen, when the truth was that he had been hiding in his hotel room, with a black eye presented to him by the mayor of the city. His dream in life, as reported by himself, was to keep a store, and that was the measure of his mentality. He didn't know what to say, and so the news papers called him a 'strong silent man.' "

* The first Mrs. Sinclair (1900-1911, divorced) was Meta H. Fuller; the second (1913--), Mary Craig.-- ED.