The Journal of Arthur Stirling by Upton Sinclair
U >>
Upton Sinclair >> The Journal of Arthur Stirling
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16
Do not stop!--I cry it all day--Do not stop!
* * * * *
April 30th.
It is weak of me, but sometimes I can not help but look ahead--and think
that it is done! I could not find any words to tell the joy that that will
be to me--to be free, after so long--to be free!
I do not care anything about the fame--it would not be anything to me to be
a great author. If it could be done, nothing would please me better than
to publish it anonymously--to let no one ever know that it was mine. If I
could only have the little that I need to be free, I would publish all that
I might ever write anonymously.
Yes, that is the thing that makes my blood bound. To be free! Let it only
be done--let it only be real, as it will be--and the naked force of it will
shake men to the depths of their souls. I could not write it, if I did not
believe that I was writing words that would grip the soul of any man--I
care not how dull or how coarse he might be.
* * * * *
I finished the first act just now.
* * * * *
May 1st.
I am wild to-day. Oh, how can I bear this--why should I have to contend
with such things as this! Is it not hard enough--the agony that I have to
bear, the task that takes all my strength and more? And must I be torn to
pieces by such hideous degradation as this? Oh, my God, if my life is not
soon clear of these things I shall die!
* * * * *
Oh, it is funny--yes, funny!--Let us laugh at it. The dance-hall musician
has brought home his 'cello! I heard him come bumping up the stairs with
it--God damn his soul! And there he sits, sawing away at some loathsome jig
tunes! And he has two friends in there--I listen to their wit between the
tunes.
Here I sit, like a wild beast pent in a cage. I tell you I can bear any
work in the world, but I can not bear things such as this. That I, who am
seeking a new faith for men--who am writing, or trying to write, what will
mean new life to millions--should have my soul ripped into pieces by such
loathsome, insulting indignities!
Oh, laugh!--but _I_ can't laugh--I sit here foaming at the lips, and
crying! And suppose he's lost his position, and does this every day!
Now every day I must lay aside what I am doing and sit and shudder when I
hear him coming up the steps--and wait for him to begin this! I tell you,
I demand to be free--I _demand_ it! I want nothing in this world but to
be let alone. I don't want anybody to wait on me.--_I don't want anything
from this hellish world but to be let alone!_
It is pouring rain outside, and my overcoat is thin; but I must go out and
pace the streets and wait until a filthy Dutchman gets through scraping
ragtime on a 'cello.
All day wasted! All day! Does it not seem that these things persecute you
by system? I came in, cold and wet, and got into bed, and then he began
again! And the friends came back and they had beer, and more music. And I
had to get up and put on the wet clothes once more.
* * * * *
May 2d.
I was crouching out on one of the docks last night. I had no place else to
go. I can think anywhere, if it is quiet.
A wonderful thing is the night. I bless Thee for the night, oh "_susse,
heilige Natur_"!
It was a voice in my soul, as clear as could be.
--She can not bear too long the sight of men, sweet, holy Nature: the
swarming hives--the millions of tiny creatures, each drunk and blind with
his own selfishness; and so she lays her great hand upon it all, and hides
it out of her sight.
Once it was all silent, and formless as the desert; soon it shall all be
silent and formless again; and meanwhile--the night, the night!
* * * * *
Oh, I hunger for the desert! I do not care for beauty--I have no time for
beauty, I want the earth stern and forbidding. Give me some place where no
one else would want to go--an iron crag where the oceans beat--a
mountain-top where the lightning splinters on the rocks.
* * * * *
I go at it again. But I am nervous--these things get me into such a state
that I simply can not do anything. It was not merely yesterday--I have it
constantly. The dirty chambermaid singing, or yelling down to the landlady;
the drunken man swearing at his wife; the boys screaming in the street and
kicking a tomato-can about. When I think of how much beauty and power has
been shattered in my life by such things as these, it brings tears of
impotent rage into my eyes.
I must be free--oh, I must be free!
* * * * *
It comes strangely from the author of The Captive, does it not?
I give all my life to my work, and sometimes, when I am broken like this, I
wonder if I do not give too much. Once I climbed to a dizzy height, and I
cried out a dizzy truth:
"O God, how as nothing in Thy sight are my writings!"
I do not know if I shall ever reach that height again.
* * * * *
May 3d.
I have not one single beautiful memory in my life. I have nothing in my
life that, when I think of it, does not make me _writhe_.
To all that I have lived, and known, and seen, I have but one word, one
cry--Away! Away! Let me get away from it! Let me get away from cities, let
me get away from men, let me out of my cage! Let me go with my God, let
me forget it all--put it away forever and ever! Let me no longer have to
plot and plan, to cringe and whimper, to barter my vision and my hours for
bread!
Who knows what I suffer--who has any idea of it? To have a soul like a
burning fire, to be hungry and swift as the Autumn wind, to have a heart as
hot as the wild bird's, and wings as eager--and to be chained here in this
seething hell of selfishness, this orgy of folly.
* * * * *
Ah, and then I shut my hands together. No, I am not weak, I do not spend my
time chafing thus! I have fought it out so far--
"I was ever a fighter, so one fight more!"
I will go back, and I will hammer and hammer again--grimly--savagely--day
by day. And out of the furnace of my soul I will forge a weapon that will
set me free in the end--I think.
* * * * *
May 4th.
I wrote a little poem once. I remembered two lines of it--a nature
description; they were not great lines, but there flashed over me to-day an
application of them that was a stroke of genius, I believe. I was passing
the Stock Exchange. It was a very busy day. I climbed one of the pillars,
in spirit, and wrote high above the portals:
Where savage beasts through forest midnight roam,
Seeking in sorrow for each other's joy.
* * * * *
May 5th.
A dreadful thing is unbelief! A dreadful thing it is to be an infidel!
--That is what all men cry nowadays--there is so much infidelity in the
world--it is the curse of our modern society--it is everywhere--it is
all-prevailing!
I had a strange experience to-day, Sunday. I went into a church, and high
up by the altar, dressed in solemn garb and offering prayers to God--I saw
an infidel!
He preached a sermon. The theme of his sermon was "Liberalism."
"These men," cried the preacher, "are blinding our eyes to our salvation,
they are undermining, day by day, our faith! They tell us that the sacred
word of God is 'literature'! And they show us more 'literature'; but oh, my
friends, what new _Bible_ have they shown us!"
As I got up and went out of that church, I whispered: "What a dreadful
thing it is to be an infidel!"
Oh Dante and Goethe and Shakespeare--oh Wordsworth and Shelley and Emerson!
Oh thrice-anointed and holy spirits! What a dreadful thing it is to be an
infidel!
What a dreadful thing it is to believe in a Bible, and not to believe in
literature--to believe in a Bible and not to believe in a God!
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.
* * * * *
There are many ways to look at the world, and always a deeper one. I see it
as a fearful thing, towering, expanding, upheld by the toil and the agony
of millions. Who will bring us the new hope, the new song of courage, that
it go not down into the dust to-day?
To do that there is the poet; to live and to die unheeded, and to feed for
ages upon ages the hungry souls of men--that is to be a poet. Therefore
will he sing, and sing ever, and die in the sweetness of his song.
When I think of that--not now as I write it here in bare words--but in
quivering reality, it is a hand upon my forehead, and a presence in the
room.
* * * * *
May 6th.
Chiefest of all I think of my country! Passionately, more than words can
utter, I love this land of mine. If I tear my heart till it bleeds and pour
out the tears of my spirit, it is for this consecration and this hope--it
is for this land of Washington and Lincoln. There never was any land like
it--there may never be any like it again; and Freedom watches from her
mountains, trembling.
--It is a song that it needs, a song and a singer; to point it to its high
design, to thrill it with the music of its message, to shake the heart of
every man in it, and make him burn and dare! For the first time there is
Liberty; for the first time there is Truth, and no shams and no lies,
enthroned. The news of it has gone forth like the sound of thunder, and has
shaken all the earth: that man at last may live, may do what he can and
will!
--And to what is it? Is it to the heaping up of ugly cities, the packing of
pork and the gathering of gold? That is the thing that I toil for--to tear
this land from the grasp of mean men and of merchants! To take the souls
of my countrymen into the high mountains with me, to thrill them with a
soaring, strong resolve! _Living things_ shall come from this land of
mine, living things before I die, for the hunger of it burns me, and will
not ever let me rest. Freedom! freedom! And stern justice and honor, and
knowledge and power, and a noonday blaze of light!
Arise in thy majesty, confronting the ages!
Stretch out thine arms to the millions that shall be!
Justice thine inheritance, God thy stay and sustenance,
My country, to thee!
Those are feeble words. If this were a book, I would tear it all up.
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.
* * * * *
This is just a month from the beginning. A month to-day! Yes--I have done
my share, I have done a third of it--a third!
But the end is so much harder!
* * * * *
May 9th.
I have been for two days in the mire. I was disturbed, and then I was
sluggish. Oh, the sluggishness of my nature!
If ever I am a great poet, I will have made myself that by the power of my
will; that is a fact. I am by nature a great clod--I feel nothing, I care
about nothing. I look at the flowers as a cow chewing its cud.--It is only
that I _will_ to do right.
Sometimes the sight of my dulness drives me wild. Then again I merely
gaze at it. I try time and again to get my mind on my work, and
something--anything, provided it is trivial enough--turns me aside. Just
now I saw a spider-web, and that made me think of Bruce, and thence I went
by way of Walter Scott to Palestine, and when I came to I was writing a
song for--who was the minstrel?--to sing outside of the prison of Coeur de
Lion.
I go wandering that way--sometimes I sit so for an hour; and then suddenly
I leap up with a cry. But I may try all I please--I don't care anything
about the work--it doesn't stir me--the verses I think of make me sick. And
then I remember that I have only so many weeks more; and what it will mean
to fail; and that makes me desperate, but doesn't help.
When I have stopped at some resting-place in the poem, I can get going
again. But now I have stopped in the middle of a climax; and the number
of times that I have read that last line, trying to find another--Great
heavens!
* * * * *
But I can not find another word. I am in despair.
I know perfectly well what I shall do, only I am a coward, and do not do
it. I shall stay in this state till my rage has heaped itself up enough and
breaks through everything at last. And then I shall begin to hammer myself!
to swear at myself in a way that would make a longshoreman turn white. And
I shall spend perhaps two or three hours--perhaps two or three days--doing
that, until I am quite in a white heat; and then--I shall go to my work.
That is the price I pay for being distracted.
* * * * *
May 11th.
I said to myself the day before yesterday--with a kind of a dry sob--"I
can't do it! I can't do it!"
Oh how tormented I am by noises--noises! What am I not tormented by? Some
days ago I was writing in a frenzy--and the landlady came for her rent. And
the horrible creature standing there, talking at me! "So lonely!--don't
ever see people! Mrs. Smithers was a-saying--" Oh, damn Mrs. Smithers!
I thought I could never do it--I was really about to give it up. I went out
on the street--I roamed about for hours, talking I don't know what nonsense
to myself. And then at last I came home, and I knelt down there at the
bedside and said: "Here you stay without anything to eat until you've
written ten lines of that poem!"
And that was how I did it. I stayed there, and I prayed. I don't often
pray, but that time I prayed like one possessed--I was so lonely and so
helpless--and the work was so beautiful. I stayed there for nine blessed
hours, and then the clock stopped and I couldn't count after that.
But the day came, and then the ten lines! And so I had my breakfast.
These things leave you weak, but a little less dull.
* * * * *
May 13th.
I have been working with a kind of wild desperation all day to-day. Oh it
hurts--it hurts--but I am doing it! Whenever I read some lines of it that
are real--whenever some great living phrase flashes over me--then I laugh
like a man in the midst of a battle.
I shall be just as a man who has been through a battle; haggard and wild
and desperate. Oh, I don't think I shall _ever_ have the courage to do
it again!
I did not know what it meant! I did not! It was giving myself into the
hands of a fiend!
All great books will be something different to me after this. Did
Shakespeare write thus with the blood of his soul? Or am I weak? Did he
ever cry out in pain, as I have?
* * * * *
May 14th.
Another day of raw torture. It is like toiling up a mountain side; and your
limbs are of lead. It is like struggling in a nightmare,--that is just what
it is like. It is sickening.
But then you dare not stop. It is hard to go on, but it is ten times as
hard to start if you stop.
I could hardly stand up this afternoon! but the thing was ringing in
my ears--it went on and on--I had to go after it! I was in the seventh
heaven--I could see anything, dare anything, do anything. It made no
difference how hard--it called to me--on--on! And I said: "Suppose I were
to be tortured--could I go then?" And so I went and went.
I haven't written it down yet; I felt sick. But I know it all.
Oh men--oh my brothers--will you love me for this thing?
* * * * *
May 16th.
I did no writing yesterday or to-day. I have been terribly frightened.
I wrote what I had to write the day before yesterday--I could not help it.
But when I stopped my head was literally on fire, and the strangest mad
throbbing in it--I stood still in fear, it felt so as if something were
going to burst--my head seemed to weigh a ton. I poured cold water over it,
but it made no difference--it stayed that way all night and all yesterday.
What am I to do? I dare not think--I took a long walk, and even now I find
myself thinking of the book without knowing it. Imagine me sitting on a
doorstep and playing for two hours with a kitten!
Why should I be handicapped in such a way as this? I had never thought of
such a thing.
* * * * *
I was thinking about The Captive--it is my own. Nobody has helped me--I
have told not one person of it. Everything in it has come out of my soul.
* * * * *
May 17th.
I feel better to-day, but I hardly know what to do.
Meantime I was happy!--Think of a poet's being happy with city flowers! of
a poet's being happy with store-flowers--prostitute-flowers--flowers for
sale!
It was all about a narcissus--"Very flower of youth, and morning's golden
hour!"--as I called it once. And it danced so! (It was out on the
curbstone)--and I went off happy.
Then I thought of a poem that is pure distilled ecstasy to my spirit. I
will write it, and be happy again:
Sit thee by the ingle, when
The sear faggot blazes bright;
Spirit of a winter's night!-- ...
Sit thee there, and send abroad,
With a mind self-overaw'd,
Fancy, high-commission'd:--send her!
She has vassals to attend her;
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May,
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn's wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth;
She will mix those pleasures up,
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shall quaff it!--
Ah! And so I went along, "sun, moon, and stars forgot"--laughing and half
dancing. People stared at me--and I laughed. And then I passed three pretty
girls, and I laughed, and they laughed too. I guess they thought I was
going to follow them.
--But that pleasure was not in my cup, dear girls.
* * * * *
Some of these days I hope to live in a beautiful world, where a man may
speak to a pretty girl on the street. Badness is its own punishment, let
the bad world observe.
I would rather look at a beautiful woman than do anything else I know of in
this world, except listen to music.
* * * * *
May 18th.
I often think how I shall spend my money after The Captive is done. I shall
take a band of chosen youths, seekers and worshipers, and we shall build a
house on a mountain-top and worship the Lord in the beauty of music!
I shall have to begin at the beginning--I have never had any one to teach
me music. But oh, if I did know!--And if I ever got hold of an
orchestra--_how_ I would make it go!
And in the middle of it the astonished orchestra would see the conductor
take wings unto himself and fly off through the roof.
A book that I mean to write some day will be called The Pleasures of Music,
and it will sing the joys of being clean and strong, of cold water and the
early morning and a free heart. It will show how all the unhappiness of men
is that they live in the body and in self, and how the world is to be saved
through 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.
--And when I have shown all these things, Frau Musika, I shall tell of the
golden lands that I have visited upon the wings of thy spirit!--
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain!
What fields or waves or mountains,
What shapes of sky or plain!
What love of thine own kind, what ignorance of pain!
* * * * *
May 20th.
I live among the poor people and that keeps me humble. There is not much
chance for freedom, I hear them say, there are not many who can dwell in
the forests. Prove your right to it--prove what you can do--the law is
stern. I am not afraid of the challenge; I will prove what I can do.
But I see one here and there with whom the law is not so strict, I think.
* * * * *
I met a merchant the other night. I dreamed of him. He said: "I buy such
goods as men need; I buy them as cheaply as I can, since life is grim. I
sell them as cheaply as I can, since men are poor and suffering. I make of
profit what I need to live humbly. I am not of the world's seekers; I am of
the finders."
* * * * *
I met also a guileless fool.
We passed a great mansion. "I should like to know the man who lives there,"
said the fool.
"Should you?" said I.
"Is he a hero?" asked the fool.
"No," said I.
"Is he a poet?" asked the fool.
"No," said I.
"Must he not be very beautiful," said the fool, "that men judge him worthy
of so much beauty?"
* * * * *
May 21st.
I must finish this thing this time! That cry rings in my ears night after
night. I am toiling upward--upward--I can see no sign of the end yet--but
I must finish this time! If I had to stop with this thing haunting me--if
I had to go out into that jungle of a world with this weight upon me--to
repress myself with this fire in my heart--I could not bear it--I could not
bear it!
And if I stopped and went out into that world again--how many weeks of
agony would it cost me to get back to where I am now!
I must finish this time!
* * * * *
May 22d.
"No, officer, I am neither a burglar nor a highwayman, nor anything else
worth bothering; I'm just a poet, and I'm crazy, to all practical purposes,
so please get used to me and let me wander about the streets at these
strange hours of the night without worrying!"
Poor, perplexed policeman! Poor, perplexed world! Poor, perplexed mothers
and fathers, sisters and cousins and aunts of poets!
Mit deinen schwarzbraunen Augen
Siehst du mich forschend an:
"Wer bist du, und was fehlt dir,
Du fremder, kranker Mann!"
Who does not love the poet Heine--melodious, beautiful, bitter soul? Is
there any other poet who can mingle, in one sentence, savage irony and
tenderness that brings tears into the eyes? Who can tell the secret of his
flower-like verses?
Ich bin ein deutscher Dichter,
Bekannt im deutschen Land;
Nennt man die besten Namen
So wird auch der meine genannt.
Und was mir fehlt, du Kleine,
Fehlt manchem im deutschen Land;
Nennt man die schlimmsten Schmerzen,
So wird auch die meine genannt!
I have never seen but one beautiful thing in New York, and that is its
mighty river in the night-time. I wander down to the docks when my work is
done, and when it is still; I sit and gaze at it until the city is quite
gone, and all its restlessness,--until there is but that grave presence,
rolling restlessly, silently, as it has rolled for ages. It makes no
comments; it has seen many things.
To-night I sat and watched it till a tangled forest sprang up about me, and
I saw a strange, high-bowed, storm-beaten craft glide past me, ghostly
white, its ghostly sailors gazing ahead and dreaming of spices and gold.
* * * * *
The old, old river--my only friend in a whole city! It goes its way--it is
not of the hour.
It fascinates me, and I sit and sit and wonder. I gaze into its black and
gurgling depths, and whisper what Shelley whispered: "If I should go down
there, I should _know_!"
* * * * *
But no, I should not know anything.
* * * * *
_The days when thou wert not, did they trouble thee? The days when thou
art not shall trouble thee as much._
* * * * *
May 24th.
AN ESSAY AFTER RIGHTEOUSNESS
I write this to set forth a purpose which I have for over a year held
before me. I write it that it may serve me for a standard. I write it at
a time when my bank-account consists of twenty-five dollars, and I mean
to publish it at such a time as by the method of plain living and high
thinking, I shall have been able to increase it a hundredfold.
We are told that a man who would write a great poem must first make a poem
of his life. An artist, as I understand the word, is a man who has but one
joy and one purpose and one interest in life--the creating of beauty; he is
a man lifted above and set apart from all other motives of men; a man who
seeks not wealth nor comfort nor fame, nor values these things at all; a
man whose heart is forever lonely, whose life is an endless sorrow, and
whose excuse and whose spur and whose goal and whose consecration, is the
creating of beauty.
What power--be it talent or genius--God has given me, I can not tell; I
only know that an artist in that sense of the word I mean to be. I have
thought out a plan by which I shall make the publishing of my books, as
well as the writing of them, a thing of Art.
Pages:
1 |
2 | 3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16