The book is rather puzzling to a reader familiar with works of this author, until one reads Brass Check, as this reader did after nearly four decades for a second time. Then it's clear why someone usually not overtly sentimental is writing this genre that fits far more in a middle ages poetry of old world.
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Normally Upton Sinclair wrote about factual accounts of things around, dressed up in a novel form instead of journalistic report, with fictional characters created to suit needs of the story, or real characters with or without a name change. This book simply doesn't fit, and after reading about it in Brass Check one may wonder if one would have had the same reaction that the then press had, if one had read it then.
And yet, having given it up in exasperation during first reading until one has come upon its mention in Brass Check, when one picks it up again, suddenly it's clear it's neither sentimental nor, as the author repeatedly says in Brass Check, a mere boyish prank. One suspects its rather what the author himself went through, all but the cable car and vanishing act with suicide mentioned repeatedly.
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The Journal of Arthur Stirling is, structured somewhat like those Russian dolls, a book about a book about a book, if not one more. Upton Sinclair's protagonist - it's unclear if it's the author writing about himself as Upton Sinclair - states thst he received a manuscript, or two, from someone he knew, named Arthur Stirling, and here he's giving one of them, the journal of his days after the last meeting between them.
The journal is about a book Arthur Stirling attempts to write, and subsequently to publish, while attempting to survive on very little. This book, titled Captive, is about a tyrant, a slave, a captive and some guests, situated in a banquet hall and a dungeon, in a palace, and Arthur Stirling has written it as a drama in blank verse, capturing the travails of a thinker trapped lone amonst lumpen, as most artists and thinkers find themselves.
The journal describes the journey of the author in his attempts to capture inspiration while keeping the world at bay, and to get it published subsequently. And while the author might or might not have explicitly been the protagonist admittedly, he certainly is Arthur Stirling, but then so are most authors unless born rich.
Arthur Stirling is the Captive, as expressed in writing of Arthur Stirling, and he's Upton Sinclair, hidden in the double coating of the protagonist and the lone Arthur Stirling; and he's the soul of every artist and writer, scientist and thinker.
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"It is not merely the vision, the hour of exultation; that is but the setting of the task. Now you will take that ecstasy, and hold on to it, hold on with soul and body; you will keep yourself at that height, you will hold that flaming glory before your eyes, and you will hammer it into words. Yes, that is the terror—into words—into words that leap the hilltops, that bring the ends of existence together in a lightning flash. You will take them as they come, white-hot, in wild tumult, and you will forge them, and force them. You will seize them in your naked hands and wrestle with them, and bend them to your will—all that is the making of a poem. And last and worst of all, you will hold them in your memory, the long, long surge of them; the torrent of whirling thought—you will hold it in your memory! You are dazed with excitement, exhausted with your toil, trembling with pain; but you have built a tower out of cards, and you have mounted to the clouds upon it, and there you are poised. And anything that happens—anything!—Ah, God, why can the poet not escape from his senses?—a sound, a touch—and it is gone!"
Familiar to writers, artists, thinkers.
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"But there is no rest. The mountain slope is so that there is no standing upon it, and once you stop, it breaks your heart to begin again. And so you go on—up—up—and there is not any summit."
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"And now you are writing The Captive. You do not go into the dungeon in the body, because you need all your strength; but in the spirit you have gone into the dungeon, and the door has clanged, and it is black night—the world is gone forever. And there you sit, while the years roll by, and you front the naked fact. Six feet square of stone and an iron chain are your portion—that is circumstance; and the will—you are the will. And you grip it—you close with it—all your days you toil with it; you shape it into systems, make it live and laugh and sing. And while you do that there is in your heart a thing that is joy and pain and terror mingled in one passion."
Does remind one of several passages in the World's End series.
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"Yes, sometimes I shrink from it; but I will do it—meaning what those words mean. I will fight that fight, I will live that life—to the last gasp; and it shall go forth into the world a living thing, a new well-spring of life."
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"We let Catholicism run around loose now, but that is because Voltaire cut its claws and pulled out all its teeth."
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"I have read about the French artists, the great masters of style, and how they give ten years of their lives to writing things that are never published. But I have noticed that when they are masters at last, and when they do begin to publish—they very seldom have anything to say that I care in the least to hear."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Badness is its own punishment, let the bad world observe.
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"... 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."
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"My religion is my Art. I have no prayer but my work."
Karmayoga, of course - except Upton Sinclair was heavily prejudiced against India, so he didn't know he was rediscovering ancient knowledge.
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"—This is what I long to do; to take the agony of that struggle and live it and forge it into an art-work; to put upon a canvas the soul of it; to put it there, living and terrible, that the men of this land might know the heritage that is come down to them."
That, in a velvety casing of poetic dressing up, is this work by Upton Sinclair.
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""We have read with the utmost interest the manuscript of The Captive which you have been so good as to show us. We are very sorry to say that it does not seem to us that the publication of this poem would be a venture in which we could engage with profit. At the same time, however, we have been very much struck with it, and consider it an altogether remarkable piece of work. We should like very much to have the privilege of an interview with you, should you find it convenient.""
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"The senior-partner's nephew is a young German, over to learn the language. He is on a furlough from the army. He has close-cropped hair, a low forehead, and two front teeth like a squirrel's. When he smiles he makes you think of a horse. He has opinions, commercial and political, which he enunciates in a loud voice. Think of listening to Prussian opinions!"
Funny, how much Upton Sinclair is unable to help loving Germany and all things German, despite the all too true observation there, about more than just Prussians!
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"—Is there any author in the world more vulgar than Macaulay?—unless it be Gibbon. Or possibly Chesterfield."
Would that be the Macaulay that set forth a policy of deliberately destroying India by throwing muck at everything that was great, just so as to turn a great ancient culture into a land of serfs, slaves and brown copies of so called whites?
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"I have heard Chesterfield's letters referred to as a "school for gentlemen." When the world is a little bit civilized, men will read them as they now read Machiavelli's Prince."
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""Why not confess the wild joys of getting drunk on champagne!" Poor fool, I have never tasted champagne."
Champagne is all right. Lots more better out there, too, from art and music and literature to stars and science and mathematics to tastes and textures and colours to lights and stones and flowers.
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"When I go among men it shall be to speak the truth, and when I press a woman to my heart, it shall be that a man may be born into the world."
Need one state the obvious? That he's unaware of his misogyny? That if he'd had a sister or a daughter, she might have not appreciated being discounted out of consideration as human, or else given in and succumbed and confirmed his biases as most females do to confirm to the low expectations of their environment, unwilling to take the hardships of the high road where the better they prove the harder they're punished? This bias from the author is all too obvious throughout the World's End series, of course.
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"—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 only racism and colonialism did not blind the Anglophile such as this author, they'd realise that weather affects those born and brought up in tropics just the same way, and conversely it's the need of heat that propels bodies in cold weather to work hard at activities physical.
It's also, less obviously but profoundly truly, why, the pursuit of knowledge is not for poor in colder latitudes, for it requires being free of manual labour that is vital for poor to keep warm in cold dark winters, while one must be rich to afford to be warm enough to sit in comfort quietly for thinking, reading, writing.
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"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!""
Reminds of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, specifically of the author who vanished when applauded, but generally of the John Galt valley that the heroine stumbles into by accident, in a determined pursuit of stopping the world's Atlas and Prometheus from vanishing.
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"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!"
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"I am coming back to read the French novelists. There are many of them
"I do not know. (I do not expect to like them—I do not like Frenchmen.)"
Obvious even in the World's End series, with rare exception of Marcel Detaze.
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The author, in guise of Arthur Stirling, goes on and on quoting Nietzsche, for about a fifth of the book around the middle!
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"... of the seven poets who constitute the glory of the literature of England in the nineteenth century, four of them were rich men, five of them were independent, one of them was endowed when he was a youth, and the seventh, the greatest of them all, died like a poisoned rat in a hole."
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"Do you not know that this very hour the reason why Europe does not believe in America is that it has not a man to sing its Soul? That it has been a century in the eyes of the world, and has not yet brought forth one single poet or thinker of the first rank?"
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"I name Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson, Browning and Swinburne, Shelley and Keats. I said that six of them were independent, and that the other—the greatest—died like a dog.
"Wordsworth came first; he was young and poor and struggling, and a friend left him just such an independence as I have cried for; and he consecrated himself to art, and he revolutionized English poetry, he breathed truth into a whole nation again. And when he was clear and looked back, he made such statements as these: that "a poet has to create the taste by which he is to be enjoyed," and that "my poetry has never brought me enough to pay for my shoe-strings."
"Byron; he was a rich man. I name Tennyson; he had a little competence, and he gave up the idea of marriage and for ten years devoted himself to art; and when he was thirty-two he published his work—and then they gave him a pension!
"Browning went his own way, heeding no man; and he never had to think about money. I name Swinburne; and the same was true of him.
"Shelley was wealthy. They kept him poor for a time, but his poems do not date from then. When he wrote the poetry that has been the spiritual food of the high souls of this century, he lived in a beautiful villa in Italy, and wandered about the forest with his books."
"poor Keats! Thou, the hostler's son—thou, the apothecary's clerk! Thou, sick and starved and helpless—thou, dying of disease and neglect and despair: Oh for a draft of vintage! ... he was only twenty-five! And he had never finished Hyperion—because he had not the heart!"
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