The Journal of Arthur Stirling by Upton Sinclair
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Upton Sinclair >> The Journal of Arthur Stirling
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THE JOURNAL OF
ARTHUR STIRLING
("THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW")
[by Upton Sinclair]
REVISED AND CONDENSED
WITH AN INTRODUCTORY SKETCH
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
The matter which is given to the public in this book will speak with a
voice of its own; it is necessary, however, to say a few words in advance
to inform the reader of its history.
The writer of the journal herein contained was not known, I believe,
to more than a dozen people in this huge city in which he lived. I am
quite certain that I and my wife were the only persons he ever called his
friends. I met him shortly after his graduation from college, and for the
past few years I knew, and I alone, of a life of artistic devotion of such
passionate fervor as I expect never to meet with again.
Arthur Stirling was entirely a self-educated man; he had worked at I know
not how many impossible occupations, and labored in the night-time like
the heroes one reads about. He taught himself to read five languages, and
at the time when I saw him last he knew more great poetry by heart than
any man of letters that I have ever met. He was the author of one book,
a tragedy in blank verse, called The Captive; that drama forms the chief
theme of this journal. For the rest, it seems to me enough to quote this
notice, which appeared in the New York Times for June 9, 1902.
STIRLING.--By suicide in the Hudson River, poet and
man of genius, in the 22d year of his age, only son of
Richard T. and Grace Stirling, deceased, of Chicago.
Chicago papers please copy.
Arthur Stirling was in appearance a tall, dark-haired boy--he was really
only a boy--with a singularly beautiful face, and a strange wistful
expression of the eyes that I think will haunt me as long as I live. I made
him, somewhat externally and feebly, I fear, one of the characters in a
recently published novel. That he was a lonely spirit will be plain enough
from his writings; he lived among the poverty-haunted thousands of this
city, without (so he once told me) ever speaking to a living soul for a
week. Pecuniarily I could not help him--for though he was poor, I was
scarcely less so. At the time of his frightful death I had not seen him for
nearly two months--owing to circumstances which were in no way my fault,
but for which I can nevertheless not forgive myself.
The writing of The Captive, as described in these papers, was begun in
April, 1901. I was myself at that time in the midst of a struggle to have
a book published. It was not really published until late in that year--at
which time The Captive was finished and already several times rejected.
It was an understood thing between us that should my book succeed it would
mean freedom for both of us, but that, unfortunately, was not to be.
Early in April of 1902 I had succeeded in laying by provisions enough to
last me while I wrote another book, and I fled away to put up my tent in
the wilderness. The last time that I ever saw Arthur Stirling was in his
room the night before I left. He smiled very bravely and said that he would
keep his courage up, that he was pretty sure he would come out all right.
I did not expect him to write often--I knew that he was too poor for that;
but after six weeks had passed and I had not heard from him at all, I
wrote to a friend to go and see him. It developed that he had moved. The
lodging-house keeper could only say that he had left her his baggage, being
unable to pay his rent; and that he "looked sick." Where he went she did
not know, and all efforts of mine to find him were of no avail. The only
person that I knew of to ask was a certain young girl, a typewriter, who
had known him for years, and who had worshiped him with a strange and
terrible passion--who would have been his wife, or his slave, if he had not
been as iron in such things, a man so lost in his vision that I suppose he
always thought she was lost in it too. This girl had copied his manuscripts
for years, with the plea that he might pay her when he "succeeded"; and she
has all of his manuscripts now, except what I have, if she is alive. All
that we could learn was that she had "gone away"; I feel pretty certain
that she went in search of him.
In addition, all that I have to tell is that on Monday, June 9th last I
received a large express package from Arthur. It was sent from New York,
but marked as coming from another person--evidently to avoid giving an
address of his own. Upon opening it I found two packages, one of them
carefully sealed and marked upon the outside, The Captive; the other was
the manuscript of this journal, and upon the top of it was the following
letter:
MY DEAR ----: You have no doubt been wondering what has become
of me. I have been having a hard time of it. I wish I could
find some way to make this thing a little easier, but I can
not. When you read this letter I shall be dead. There is
nothing that I can tell you about it that you will not read in
the papers I send you. It is simply that I was born to be an
artist, and that as anything else I can not live. The burden
that has been laid upon me I can not bear another day. I have
told the whole story of it in this book--I have kept myself
alive for months, sick and weeping with agony, in order that I
might tear it out of my heart and get it written. It has been
my last prayer that the struggle my life has been may somehow
not be useless. There will come others after me--others perhaps
keener than I--and oh, the world must not kill them all!
You will take this manuscript, please, and go over it, and cut
out what you like to make it printable, and write a few words
to make people understand about it. And then see if any one
will publish it. You know more about all these things than I
do. If it should sell, keep part of the money for your own
work and give the rest to poor Ellen. As to The Captive--I
all but burned it, as you will read; but keep it, sealed as
I have sealed it, for two years, and then offer it to some
publishers--to others than the nine who have already rejected
it. If you can not find any one to take it, then burn it, or
keep it for love, I do not care which.
I am writing this on Thursday night, and I am almost dead. I
mean to get some money to-morrow, and then to buy a ticket for
as far up the Hudson as I can go. In the evening I mean to find
a steep bank, and, with a heavy dumb-bell I have bought, and
a strong rope, I think I can find the peace that I have been
seeking.
The first thing that I have to say to you about it is, that
when you get this letter it will be over and done, and that I
want you, for God's sake, not to make any fuss. No one will
find my body and no one will care about it. You need not think
it necessary to notify the newspapers--what I'm sending you
here is literature and not journalism. I have no earthly
belongings left except these MSS., upon which you will have to
pay the toll. I have written to M----, a man who once did some
typewriting for me, asking him to use a dollar he owes me in
putting a notice in one of the papers. I suppose I owe that to
the people out West.
I can't write you to-night--before God I can't; my head is going
like a steel-mill, and I'm _so_ sick. You will get over
this somehow, and go on and do your task and win. And if the
memory of my prayer can help you, that will be something. Do
the work of both of us if you can. Only, if you do pull through,
remember my last cry--remember the young artist! There is no
other fight so worth fighting--take it upon you--shout it day
and night at them--what things they do with their young artists!
God bless you, dear friend. Yours, ARTHUR.
The above is the only tidings of him, excepting the extended accounts of
his death which appeared in the New York Times and the New York World for
June 10 and 11, 1902, and several letters which he wrote to other people.
There remains only to say a few words as to the journal.
It is scrawled upon old note-books and loose sheets of paper. The matter,
although a diary, contains odd bits of his writings--one of two letters
to me which he had me send back, and some extracts from an essay which
a friend of mine was offering at that time to magazines in the hope of
placing it for him. There is a problem about the work which I leave
to others to solve--how much of it was written as dated, and how much
afterward, as a piece of art, as a testament of his sorrow. Parts of it
have struck me as having been composed in the latter way, and the last
pages, of course, imply as much.
Extraordinary pages they are to me. That a man who was about to take his
life should have written them is one of the strangest cases of artistic
absorption I know of in literature. But Arthur Stirling was a man lost in
his art just so--so full of it, so drunk with it, that nothing in life had
other meaning to him. To quote the words he loved, from the last of his
heroes, he longed for excellence "as the lion longs for his food."
So he lived and so he worked; the world had no use for his work, and so he
died.
S.
NEW YORK, _November 15, 1902_.
READER:
I do not know if "The Valley of the Shadow" means to you what it means to
me; I do not know if it means anything at all to you. But I have sought
long and far for these words, to utter an all but unutterable thought.
When you walk in the forest you do not count the lives that you tread into
nothingness. When you rejoice with the springtime you do not hear the cries
of the young things that are choked and beaten down and dying. When you
watch the wild thing in your snare you do not know the meaning of the torn
limbs, and the throbbing heart, and the awful silence of the creature
trapped. When you go where the poor live, and see thin faces and hungry
eyes and crouching limbs, you do not think of these things either.
But I, reader--I dwell in the Valley of the Shadow.
Sometimes it is silent in my Valley, and the creatures sit in terror of
their own voices; sometimes there are screams that pierce the sky; but
there is never any answer in my Valley. There are quivering hands there,
and racked limbs, and aching hearts, and panting souls. There is gasping
struggle, glaring failure--maniac despair. For over my Valley rolls _The
Shadow_, a giant thing, moving with the weight of mountains. And you
stare at it, you feel it; you scream, you pray, you weep; you hold up your
hands to your God, you grow mad; but the Shadow moves like Time, like the
sun, and the planets in the sky. It rolls over you, and it rolls on; and
then you cry out no more.
It is that way in my Valley. The Shadow is the Shadow of Death.
CONTENTS
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER
PART I. WRITING A POEM
II. SEEKING A PUBLISHER
III. THE END
PART I
WRITING A POEM
The book! The book! This day, Saturday, the sixth day of April, 1901, I
begin the book!
I have never kept a journal--I have been too busy living; but to-day I
begin a journal. I am so built that I can do but one thing at a time. Now
that I have begun The Captive, I must be haunted with it all day; when I
am not writing it I must be dreaming it, or restless because I am not.
Therefore it occurred to me that in the hours of weariness I would write
about it what was in my mind--what fears and what hopes; why and how I
write it will be a story in itself, and some day I think it will be read.
* * * * *
I have come to the last stage of the fight, and I see the goal. I will tell
the story, and by and by wise editors can print it in the Appendix!
Yesterday I was a cable-car conductor, and to-day I am a poet!
I know of some immortal poems that were written by a druggist's clerk, and
some by a gager of liquid barrels, but none by a cable-car conductor. "It
sounds interesting, tell us about it!" says the reader. I shall, but not
to-day.
To-day I begin the book!
* * * * *
I did not write that on April 6th, I wrote it a month ago--one day when I
was thinking about this. I put it there now, because it will do to begin;
but I had no jests in my heart on April 6th.
* * * * *
April 10th.
I have been for four days in a kind of frenzy. I have come down like a
collapsed balloon, and I think I have had enough for once.
I have written the opening scene, but not finally; and then I got into the
middle--I could not help it. How in God's name I am ever to do this fearful
thing, I don't know; it frightens me, and sometimes I lose all heart.
* * * * *
I suppose I shall have to begin again tonight. I must eat something first,
though. That is one of my handicaps: I wear myself out and have to stop and
eat. Will anybody ever love me for this work, will anybody ever understand
it?
I suppose I can get back where I was yesterday, but always it grows harder,
and more stern. I set my teeth together.
* * * * *
It was like the bursting of an overstrained dam, these last four days. How
long I have been pent up--eighteen months! And eighteen months seems like a
lifetime to me. I have been a bloodhound in the leash, hungering--hungering
for this thing, and the longing has piled up in me day by day. Sometimes it
has been more than I could bear; and when the time was near, I was so wild
that I was sick. The book! The book! Freedom and the book!
And last Saturday I went out of the hell-house where I have been pent so
long, and I covered my face with my hands and fled away home--away to the
little corner that is mine. There I flung myself down and sobbed like a
child. It was relief--it was joy--it was fear! It was everything! The
book! The book! Then I got up--and the world seemed to go behind me, and
I was drunk. I heard a voice calling--it thundered in my ears--that I was
free--that my hour was come--that I might live--that I might live--live!
And I could have shouted it--I know that I laughed it aloud. Every time I
thought the thought it was like the throbbing of wings to me--"Free! Free!"
No one can understand this--no one who has not a demon in his soul. No one
who does not know how I have been choked--what horrors I have borne.
I am through with that--I did not think of that. I am free! They will never
have me back.
That motive alone would drive me to my work, would make me dare _anything_.
But I do not need that motive.
* * * * *
I think only of the book. I thought of it last Saturday, and it swept me
away out of myself. I had planned the opening scene; but then the thought
of the triumph-song took hold of me, and it drove me mad. That song was
what I had thought I could never do--I had never dared to think of it.
And it came to me--it came! Wild, incoherent, overwhelming, it came, the
victorious hymn. I could not think of remembering it; it was not poetry--it
was reality. _I_ was the Captive, _I_ had won freedom--a faith and a
vision!
So it throbbed on and on, and I was choked, and my head on fire, and my
hands tingling, until I sank down from sheer exhaustion--laughing and
sobbing, and talking to God as if He were in the room. I never really
believe in God except at such times; I can go through this dreadful world
for months, and never think if there be a God.--Here I sit gossiping about
it.--But I am tired out.
* * * * *
The writing of a book is like the bearing of a child. But every birth-pang
of the former lasts for hours; and it is months before the labor is done.
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!
These things drive you mad.--
But meanwhile it is not gone yet. You have still a whole scene in your
consciousness--as if you were a juggler, tossing a score of golden balls.
And all the time, while you work, you learn it--you learn it! It is
endless, but you learn it. In the midst of it, perhaps, you come down of
sheer exhaustion; and you lie there, panting, shuddering, your hands moist;
you dare not think, you wait. And then by and by you begin again--if
it will not come, you _make_ it come, you lash yourself like a dumb
beast--up, up, to the mountain-tops again. And then once more the thing
comes back--you live the scene again, as an actor does, and you shape it
and you master it. And now in the midst of it, you find this highest of all
moments is gone! It is gone, and you can not find it! Those words that came
as a trumpet-clash, burning your very flesh--that melody that melted your
whole being to tears--they are gone--you can not find them! You search and
you search--but you can not find them. And so you stumble on, in despair
and agony; and still you dare not rest. You dare not ever rest in this
until the thing is done--done and over--until you have _nailed_ it
fast. So you go back again, though perhaps you are so tired that you are
fainting; but you fight yourself like a madman, you struggle until you feel
a thing at your heart like a wild beast; and you keep on, you hold it fast
and learn it, clinch it tight, and make it yours forever. I have done that
same thing five times to-day without a rest; and toiled for five hours in
that frenzy; and then lain down upon the ground, with my head on fire.
Afterward when you have recovered you sit down, and for two or three hours
you write; you have it whole in your memory now--you have but to put it
down. And this forlorn, wet, bedraggled thing--this miserable, stammering,
cringing thing--_this_ is your poem!
* * * * *
Some day the world will realize these things, and then they will present
their poor poets with diamonds and palaces, and other things that do not
help.
I wrote this, and then I leaned back, tired out. My thoughts turned to
Shakespeare, and while I was thinking of him--
But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill!
* * * * *
April 11th.
I have not done much to-day. I spent the morning brooding over the opening
speech. It is somber and terrible, but I have not gotten it right. It
must have a tread--a tread like an orchestra! Ah, how I wish I had an
orchestra!--I would soon do it then--_"So bist nun ewig du verdammt!"_
The secret of the thing is iteration. I must find a word that is like a
hammer-stroke. I have tried twenty, but I have not found the one.
* * * * *
--I spent the rest of the day thinking over the whole first act, mapping it
out, so to speak.
I have often fancied a resemblance between The Captive and the C-minor
symphony; I wonder if any one else would have thought of it. It is not
merely the opening--it is the whole content of the thing--the struggle of a
prisoned spirit. I would call The Captive a symphony, and print the C-minor
themes in it, only it would seem fanciful.--But it would not really be
fanciful to put the second theme opposite the thought of freedom--of the
blue sky and the dawning spring.
All except the scherzo. I couldn't find room for the scherzo. Men who have
wrestled with the demons of hell do not tumble around like elephants, no
matter how happy they are. I wish I could take out Beethoven's scherzos!
My heart leaps when I think of my one big step. I have put those pages
away--I shall not look at them again for a month. Then I can judge them.
* * * * *
April 13th.
A cable-car conductor and a poet! I think that will be a story worth
telling.
I have tried many and various occupations, but I have not found one so
favorable to the study of poetry as my last. I should have made out very
well--if I had not been haunted by The Captive.
With everything else you do you are more or less hampered by having to sell
your brain; and also by having to obey some one. But a cable-car is an
unlimited monarchy; and all you have to do is to collect fares and pull
the bell, both of which duties are quite mechanical. And besides that you
receive princely wages--and can live off one-third of them, if you know
how; and that means that you need only work one-third of the time, and can
write your poetry the rest of it!
This sounds like jesting, but it is not. I have only been a cable-car
conductor six months, but in that time I have taught myself to read Greek
with more than fluency. All you need is good health and spirits, a will of
iron, and a very tiny note-book in the palm of your hand, full of the words
you wish to learn. And then for ten or twelve hours a day you go about
running a car with your body--and with your mind--hammering, hammering!
It is excellent discipline--it is fighting all day, "_Pous, podos_,
the foot--_pous, podos_, the foot--34th Street, Crosstown East and
West--_pous, podos_, the foot!"
And then when you get home late at night, are there not the great masters
who love you?
* * * * *
April 15th.
Thou wouldst call thyself Artist; thou wouldst have the Eternal Presence to
dwell within thee, to fire thy heart with passion and dower thy lips with
song; canst thou go into thy closet, and alone with thy Maker, say these
words:
"O Thou Unthinkable, source of all light and life, Thou the great unselfish
One, the great Sufferer; Thou seest my heart this day, how in it dwells but
love of Thy truth and worship of Thy holiness. Thou seest that I seek not
wealth that men should serve me, nor fame that they should honor me, for
the glory that is Thine. Thou seest that I bring all my praise to Thy feet,
that I love all things that Thou hast made, that I envy no man Thy gifts,
that I rejoice when Thou sendest one stronger than I into the battle. And
when these things are not, may Thy power leave me; for I seek but to dwell
in Thy presence, and to speak Thy truth, which can not die."
* * * * *
That prayer welled up in my heart to-day. There are times when I sit before
this thing in my soul, crouching and gazing at it in fear. Then I see
the naked horror of it, the shuddering reality of it. I see the Soul:
motionless, tense, quivering, wrestling in an agony with the powers of
destruction. It is so real to me that my body stiffens into stone, and I
sit with the sweat on my forehead. That happened to me to-day, and I wrote
a few lines of the poem that made my voice break--the passionate despairing
cry for deliverance, for rest from the terror.
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.
It is that way when you write a book; and that way when you make a
symphony; and that way when you wage a war.
* * * * *
But my soul hungered for it. I have loved the great elemental
art-works--the art-works that were born of pure suffering. For months
before I began The Captive I read but three books--read them and brooded
over them, all day and all night. They were Prometheus Bound, Prometheus
Unbound, and Samson Agonistes.
You sit with these books, and time and space "to nothingness do sink."
There looms up before you--like a bare mountain in its majesty--the great
elemental world-fact, the death-grapple of the will with circumstance.
You may build yourself any philosophy or any creed you please, but you
will never get away from the world-fact--the death-grapple of the soul
with circumstance. Aschylus has one creed, and Milton has another,
and Shelley has a third; but always it is the death-grapple. Chaos,
evil--circumstance--lies about you, binds you; and you grip it--you close
with it--all your days you toil with it, you shape it into systems, you
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.
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