The Accursed

Making his way along the Saturday crowds of shoppers on Nassau Street, trying to keep his thoughts vibrant and optimistic, nonetheless Upton found himself thinking obsessively of the scene of the previous night: Meta sitting at the rickety kitchen table, revolver in hand, the long barrel of the weapon pointed at her head—indeed, pressed against the pallid skin at her temple. How vulnerable the poor young woman had looked, at such a moment! It was more telling than nakedness; Upton had wanted to turn his eyes away. He would never forgive Meta’s crude soldier-father for giving his daughter such a weapon, or allowing her to take it from his household, for what purpose Upton couldn’t guess. (He didn’t want to think that Meta’s father believed that Meta would need protection from him.) Her thin cheeks had been streaked with tears; her hand visibly shaking; in a flat hopeless voice she spoke of the contempt she felt for herself, as a “bad mother,” for her failure in being able to pull the trigger.

A terrible sight, Upton would never forget. And would find very hard to forgive.

“She is the mother of my son. The poor boy must never know.”

Distracted, Upton found himself gazing at his lanky reflection in a shop window: a kind of scarecrow, with a battered-looking straw hat. To care little for appearances is very different from being made to realize how eccentric one looks, in the public eye. Like a vagabond he was carrying a few items, his recent purchases, in a contraption that consisted of two wheels, with a vertical carrying-case and handle-bar. He saw that he was standing at the window of Joseph Sweet’s Confectionery on Palmer Square, facing an opulent display of peppermint sticks, petits fours, caramels, bonbons, and glistening candies; most elaborately, chocolates fashioned into ingenious shapes (baby chicks, soldiers, bears, even miniature musical instruments and dirigibles)—another display of what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption. To one who, like Upton, avoided all rich foods, as well as meat, such a display was fairly sickening to behold. Ah, he wanted to step inside the shop, to protest! To point out to the proprietor, the clerks, the smiling customers, what a waste such luxuries represented, what vanity, when in nearby Trenton and New Brunswick, not to mention the wretched sweatshops along the Delaware River, children as young as five or six labored for fourteen-hour days, for mere pennies. Did the citizens of Princeton not know—did they not care?

Upton had not read firsthand accounts, but he had heard of a particularly sordid incident that had taken place in Camden several weeks before: a public lynching, of a young black man and his sister, executed by white-clad hooded figures of the dread Ku Klux Klan and observed by as many as five hundred persons crowded into a field. Sequestered in the Princeton vicinity as he was, Upton had no way of learning more about the incident, except through letters sent to him by New York comrades, that dealt primarily with other matters. It was significant to Upton, no one in the Princeton area with whom he had spoken knew anything about this outrage. Yet, just the other day, the President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, had visited Princeton, as the houseguest of wealthy political patrons. He regretted that he hadn’t found out more about Roosevelt’s visit, and picketed outside the residence in which the President had stayed. One day, he would be a martyr to the Revolution—arrested, beaten by police, charged with trumped-up acts of creating a public disturbance, public lewdness, treason. The true Revolutionary does not wait to be called, but seeks his destiny himself. His faith is his courage.

It was at that moment, as Upton turned, that he happened to see, in one of those accidental moments that can alter a life, his wife Meta across the square—somehow, Meta had come into town after all, leaving the baby behind? with the farmer’s wife?—was this possible?—though in the next instant, as the young woman moved on, in the company of another person, Upton halfway doubted it could be she. This young woman, though resembling Meta in startling respects, including even her wavy honey-colored hair, and a pert little straw hat identical to Meta’s, was wearing a long flounced skirt in a floral design, which Upton might have recalled from the days of their courtship; but which he had not seen on his wife in some time. At the farm, Meta wore shapeless clothing, sometimes a man’s clothing—for appearances did not matter, obviously, in their new bohemian life. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him, Upton thought. And when he squinted across the busy square, a moment later, the honey-haired woman had vanished.

Even so, Upton felt faint with emotion. If Meta had made her way into town without him, it was an act of virtual infidelity—deceit. And to leave little David behind! He wondered how it had happened that his marriage, entered into with such romantic sentiment and Socialist idealism, had turned sour; had become a trap; for him no less than for his wife. Yet it was a trap whose bars were human beings, a woman and an infant son whom he loved more than his own being. Unthinkable that we can part. Yet, how can we continue to live together? And if—if we suffer another “error”—and bring another innocent child into the world . . .

So Upton brooded, crossing busy Nassau Street onto the university campus, and so to Chancellor Green Library; into the dignified, high-domed reference room, where, as in the past, Upton felt a thrill of joy—for the hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world; his model was Charles Dickens, as well as America’s great author Harriet Beecher Stowe whose Uncle Tom’s Cabin was popularly credited with having precipitated the Civil War!* (#litres_trial_promo) And so why should it not be Upton Sinclair who should take his place among the great authors of Western civilization? Frankly, Upton had grown secretly bored with the fustian melodrama of his Civil War trilogy, though George Herron purported to find the first novel “thrilling”; but, as he was contracted to finish it, he would; for Upton Sinclair was a man of integrity, even, at times, as his wife charged, a foolish sort of integrity. What he most yearned to do was begin another novel like The Jungle—an “incendiary bomb of a novel” as it had already been called by his Socialist comrades—that would advance the cause of social reform in the world. The entire United States—if not the entire world—would be forced to take note of him: for his targets were the Beef Trust, and the Railroad Trust, and the Oil Trust, and the shameful “profits” (as a Socialist wit called the evangelical “prophets”) of bourgeois religion; Upton was taking on also the hypocrisy of American “public education” and the sham of journalism itself, in particular the “yellow” gutter press of Hearst. Though he was only midway in Gettysburg, with the great bulk of Appomattox yet ahead, Upton had already begun to plan two new novel projects, satirical attacks upon the arts in a bourgeois culture, to be titled Mammonart and Money Writes. For it was certainly true, as the prophet Zarathustra preached, Rather be angry than be put to shame. And if you are cursed, I do not like it that you want to bless. Rather join a little in the cursing.

By nature, Upton was a gentle person, and had never “cursed” in his life. But, he was determined to learn.

ANOTHER TIME, crossing Washington Road after having spent several fruitful hours in Chancellor Green Library, amid toiling and serious-seeming undergraduate boys, Upton saw, or seemed to see, his wife Meta on the farther sidewalk; this time, she was wearing a cream-colored frock Upton didn’t recognize, and she was in the company of a tall gentleman in a linen suit, a total stranger to Upton. Yet, the young woman was certainly Meta: the chestnut-red curls escaping from beneath her wide-brimmed straw hat, the pert uplifted profile and the “Scots” coloring to her cheeks, that had been pale these past several months. And, for a scant moment, it seemed that she had glimpsed him.

Unless Upton was light-headed from having eaten very little that day. And quite the fool, to imagine that his adoring young wife was deceiving him with a stranger.

Yet he stared after the couple, making their way in the opposite direction; the young woman carrying a yellow sun-parasol, and her arm casually linked through the arm of the tall gentleman; and after a long moment roused himself, to stagger in the direction of Witherspoon Street, his last stop before returning home.

Though it went against Upton’s principles to dine out, since restaurant food was shockingly expensive, and not likely so nutritious as meals prepared at home, Upton thought it might be a good idea to fortify himself at the Knight’s Court Tavern on Witherspoon Street; otherwise he might be susceptible to light-headedness and hunger pangs. Entering the unpleasantly smoky interior of the tavern he tried not to notice the undergraduates at most of the tables, for he was obliged to dislike them, even to detest them, as scions of the wealthy who attended college as if it were a country club and theirs by hereditary privilege. (While Upton had toiled away at part-time jobs to put himself through the City College of New York amid an eager, at times frantic swarm of immigrants and immigrants’ children of whom many were exceptionally intelligent, and unabashedly ambitious and opportunistic. But they were the sons and daughters of the proletariat, generally, and so he did not resent them.) Upton had heard surprising things about Woodrow Wilson’s hope to reform Princeton University, particularly to raise academic standards, which were far below those of Harvard and Yale at this time, let alone the fabled English universities upon which the American Ivy League universities were modeled.

As an undergraduate, with no family income to support him, Upton had lived in unspeakably impoverished conditions. Yet he did not regret his experience, for it was at that time he had converted to Socialism, and felt a powerful kinship with all workingmen, the victims of the capitalist juggernaut. By contrast, these Princeton students, many of them sporting the cocked hats of their clubs, were deprived, in a sense, of this kind of knowledge, and had no comprehension that the bourgeois way of life was in fast decline; that they and their families were doomed to early extinction; that the Apocalypse close at hand would usher in a new era. Ah, the New Jerusalem to come!—when all men and women of all races and colors should know themselves kin, and never again enemies.

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentize into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power. And the Proletarian, transformed, would teach its former class enemies the virtues of self-restraint, charity, communal sharing, and contempt for greed.

In the bustling tavern, Upton ordered cheese, dark bread, and a glass of milk from the bemused waitress and sat lost in such thoughts, that had the effect of consoling him. Then, as the young male voices on all sides were so loud, gay, and fired with the myriad enthusiasms of youth, he couldn’t help eavesdropping; hearing excited news of a recent crewing victory over Brown; crude and jocose commentary on President Wilson and his “family of females”; and rumors that a “coal-black nigger” had been detained, as the possible murderer of the young Spags girl; except that a prior detainee, an immigrant from eastern Europe, had signed a confession to Trenton police, this newer detainee was believed to be the actual murderer, and not the other. (Discussing the Spags murder, of which Upton had heard only rumors, the young Princeton undergraduates were indignant and incensed; several of them infuriated that a “coal-black nigger” should defile a white girl, and yet voices were raised in his defense . . .)