Through a Glass Darkly

THE CUP OF FURY (190 pp.)--Upton Sinclair--Channel Press ($3).

"As long ago as 1938," writes Upton Sinclair in The Cup of Fury, "a statistician estimated that some 732 books bearing my name had been published in 47 languages in over 30 different countries." This was before the Lanny Budd books (eleven volumes, 7,507 pages, more than 3,000,000 words). Author Sinclair, at a leathery 77, says this in no spirit of vainglory, but in simple wonder that other literary men should have written less. In this wafer-thin volume, Sinclair gives his own explanation for the lesser outputs by writers he has known. The explanation, in a word: DRINK!

The Cup of Fury belongs to a once popular art form known as the temperance tract. Combined with a literary memoir, it makes one of the oddest and, in its way, most touching books of the season.

Singeing of Helicon. Sinclair first offers his credentials as a writing man--from the age of 14 he could not be stopped--and then his bona fides as a nondrinking man. Lifetime cumulative score: one sip of champagne at Delmonico's ("I could scarcely tell it from apple juice") and one hooker of whisky after paddling a canoe 40 miles in icy rain (he went out like a light). He also had family trouble with the stuff. His father had a traveling salesman's occupational failing, and Sinclair himself in 1907 was burned out of his cooperative colony, Helicon Hall, in New Jersey, after some of the help smuggled in booze. Result: a fire from which the master escaped in a badly singed nightshirt.

There is some inverse correlation, Sinclair thinks, between alcoholic intake and literary output. To the end of his days he will be unable, he vows, to understand how a drinking man like O. Henry, who "could not write anything bad," found it "an agony . . . to write at all." The suggestion is that Sinclair does not share the fairly widespread notion that the maladjustment to life which may lead a man to write may also lead him to drink.

In assembling his collection of literary wineskins, he draws on some surprising case histories and shows some unsurprising crackpottery. As detailed by Author Sinclair, they range from the tragic to the ridiculous. Sinclair items: Jack London was a child-prodigy drinker who got stewed at the age of five and went right on from there; Sherwood Anderson perished from having swallowed the toothpick in a cocktail sausage. Other literary victims of the demon rum, according to Sinclair's postmortem: Stephen Crane, Hart Crane. Sinclair Lewis (wine and beer), Theodore Dreiser (a slug before breakfast), Edna St. Vincent Millay (a flask tipper), and Eugene O'Neill (Benedictine and skimmed varnish).

Beyond a Soggy Field. Sinclair ranges beyond the soggy field of letters long enough to reminisce about the Duke of Windsor ("a brandy man") and Eugene V. Debs, who liked whisky as much as he disliked capitalism. But he prefers the glass-clinking company of professional writing folk. Despite H. L. Mencken's taunt that he would "make a drunkard of Sinclair" before Sinclair made a Socialist of him, Sinclair records affectionately that there was an odd friendship between the wowser-baiting wit and the civic-minded moralist. Sinclair seemed to suspect that Mencken pretended to believe that whisky and beer were nourishing and beneficial, just to "exasperate" him.

As for Dreiser, the Communists softened him with alcohol, so that he swung from being what close friends called an "antiSemitic Nazi" to Communist Party membership. The same thing, it is darkly warned, will happen to wine-soaked France. "Liquor works for the Communists in New York and Paris and in Moscow . . . It gave them the H-bomb."

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