Uppie's Goddess

SOUTHERN BELLE (407 pp.) -- Mary Craig Sinclair--Crown ($5).

Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair, 74, is probably the only woman still living in the U.S. who can claim to have been described as "svelte" by Mrs. Jefferson Davis. Hers is a truly romantic as well as a wonderfully goofy story--the memoirs of a Southern belle who married a notorious radical. It is husband Upton Sinclair for whom the belle has now told all, and her revelations carry his strangely sentimental imprimatur ("My Southern belle remembers tenderly those dear dead days . . ."). The book, irresistible to students of U.S. life and manners, is the story of Mary's life with Sinclair, that strange, admirable, preposterous figure of a vanished America--a man with every gift except humor and silence.

Hookless Future. "I was born in the midst of vast cotton plantations," Mary's story begins, and things "were about as they had been during the days of slavery." Ashton Hall--the Kimbrough place close to the Jefferson Davis house on the Gulf Coast near Biloxi--featured all the regulation black nannies and the beaux whose only weakness was the bottle. A gallant gentleman named Jerome Winston was Mary's fiance. Alas, there came the day when Daddy, old Judge Kimbrough, pronounced the terrible words: "Jerome Winston is not worthy of the love of my little daughter." Before the question of just what was wrong with poor, unspeakable Jerome can be answered, the narrative moves to New York.

In the heart of Yankeeland, where Mary Craig Kimbrough went to Miss Finch's school in Manhattan, all sorts of things other than magnolia hung heavy in the air, notably suffragists, single-taxers and Socialists. It was a Red dead sea full of poor fish dreaming of a bookless future. The biggest catch in it was Upton Sinclair, most renowned of muckrakers. whose novel The Jungle had assaulted the citadels of the Chicago meatpackers with the near-violence of a near-vegetarian. The book had been intended as an attack on porkpacking capitalists; actually it made the U.S. not sick of capitalism but leery of canned meat. "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach," Crusader Sinclair sadly acknowledged. But The Jungle won him an invitation to Theodore Roosevelt's White House and the attention of the Kimbroughs.

American Romantics. Mother Kimbrough met him at a Michigan health farm--he was devoted to shredded wheat --and she promptly decided that he was a gentleman "despite those clothes." He was not very tall, but his eyes were blue. Unhappily, he was married. Still, Mary and Sinclair developed an intellectual sort of friendship, and in his circle she began to meet Fascinating People. There was Anarchist Emma Goldman, who was apt to throw vases (filled) at her lover. There was Sinclair Lewis, who sort of absentmindedly squeezed Mary's knee under a Greenwich Village tablecloth. There was a young poet called George Sterling--given to flowing tie and knickerbockers, a great sonneteer after the first 14 lines--who once knocked on Mary's apartment door. "Goddess!" said he, and dropped on one knee.

In time, she became not Sterling's but Upton Sinclair's goddess. After a messy divorce from his first wife, Sinclair married his belle in 1913. Mary Sinclair still regards it as a matter for wonder that a granddaughter of the Confederacy should have latched onto a radical like Upton. In this wonder lies the secret of the book's charm. She never seems to realize that the romanticism of early Socialism and that of the Old South were akin. However different the windmills they were tilting at, both Mary and Upton were American romantics. Besides, most social reformers are dedicated snobs (Upton himself, claiming kinship with the Duchess of Windsor, wrote a series of articles about her folks).

Freud to Fission. The rest of the book is a wife's-eye view of Upton Sinclair's career, written in a mincing, exclamation-pointed style that sustains the author's fond boast of having been the first student ever to gain a grade of 100 in English at the Mississippi State College for Women. Though Mary Sinclair loyally supports her husband's politics, there is a recurring refrain that goes something like: "I told Uppie not to do it, but he wouldn't listen and so he was arrested again." Sinclair fought John D. Rockefeller Jr. by picketing his Wall Street offices in crape. He bugled for milk, vegetarianism, Prohibition. Sacco and Vanzetti. Yet even a New York Socialist leader said: "Sinclair is an ass." And he never really wrote very well. After a rejected manuscript, according to one anecdote, Mary said sadly: "Why can't you seem to use the right words?"

Uppie's fight against the world was honorable, but his "industrial democracy" is as dead as Eugene Debs. His main battle--against poverty--was won not really by his Socialist martyrs but by the capitalist villains. Nowadays, the Sinclairs live in Monrovia, Calif, and at 79 Uppie is as convinced as ever that he is a power in human affairs. He notes proudly that he is the author of three million books and pamphlets "flowing into every country in the world." He keeps up the old reformer's unreformed habit of issuing letters-to-the-editor on every subject from Freud to fission. He is never discouraged, but even if he were, says Mary, there is always Bernard Shaw's consoling thought to the effect that even Jesus failed.

How will the world get along without Upton Sinclair? Mary wondered about that once. But, said the Sinclair doctor reassuringly: "You should be wondering how Heaven could get along with him."

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