V

To the present critic, who is amazed by and genuinely admires the lean virtuosity of Mr. Hemingway, the second most astonishing thing about him is the narrowness of his selective range. The people he observes with fascinated fixation and then makes live before us are real, but they are all very much alike: bullfighters, bruisers, touts, gunmen, professional soldiers, prostitutes, hard drinkers, dope fiends.

Nowhere in the thirty pages did I find any mention of the fact that all this extraordinary writing was done under the stimulus of alcohol. A decade or so ago there was published inLifean article by a staff man who had been permitted to accompany Hemingway and a well-known motion picture actress about the city of New York for a couple of typical days. The writer described Hemingway as unable to go for an hour without a drink of liquor. As a result of this practice his health broke, and after a long siege in hospitals he put himself out of his misery by putting both barrels of his beautiful shotgun into his mouth and blowing off the top of his head.

And then the mail brings a volume containing 867 pages and weighing several pounds. It isSinclair Lewis: An American Life, by Mark Schorer. I have known about the preparation of this “monumental study” for several years. It is a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and so will be widely read; the story of a man whom I knew for almost half a century, whom I admired and helped when I could, whose books I praised when I could, and whose tragic ending I mourned because I had tried to prevent it and failed.

I have told how Hal Lewis showed up as a runaway student from Yale, expecting to find our Helicon Home Colony more interesting. He met there, not in an academic way but socially, such people as William James and John Dewey; Jo Davidson, the sculptor, who was later to do his bust; and Sadakichi Hartmann, art authority, whom Lewis had to help put out because he (not Lewis) was drunk. Also I remember that Professor W. P. Montague of Columbia University taught Lewis how to play billiards, and Professor William Noyes of Teachers College taught him how to tend the furnace. Edwin Björkman, translator of Strindberg, told him about that strange playwright, and Edwin’s wife, a suffragette and editor, later became Lewis’ boss. As I have already noted, Edith Summers, my secretary, became Lewis’ sweetheart at Helicon Hall.

It was all quite different from what he would have gotten at Yale, and he learned a lot about the modern world and modern ideas. He left us after several months and wrote us up in the New YorkSun. That was going to be the way of his life for the rest of his sixty-six years. He would wander over America and Europe, then settle down somewhere and write stories, long stories or short ones, about the people he had met and what he imagined about them.

Everywhere he went, both at home and in Europe, he ran into what is called “social drinking,” and his temperament was such that whatever he did he did to extremes. He became one of those drinking geniuses whose talents blossom and fade.

I have known two kinds of drink victims. There are the melancholy drinkers who weep on your shoulder and ask you to help them. You try to, but you can’t. Such a man was my kind father, whom I watched from earliest childhood and whom I remember introducing to Hal Lewis at Helicon Hall—shortly before my father’s pitiful ending. The other kind is the fighting drunk, and Hal became one of those; you may read the painful details in Professor Schorer’s book. Hal would throw his liquor into the face of the man who had offended him. He would use vile language and rush away—and rarely apologize later.

I never saw him in that condition; I was careful never to be around. That is why my friendship with him was carried on mostly by mail. I called on him once in New York, and found that he had to revise the manuscript of a play for rehearsal that afternoon; having been through that kind of thing myself, I excused myself quickly. He brought his first wife to my home in Pasadena, and he had not been drinking, so Craig and I spent a pleasant evening with them.

I have included ten of his letters inMy Lifetime in Letters. Professor Schorer has quoted a long one in which Hal scolds me for what I had written about one or two of his least worthy novels. I am sorry to report that his biographer has left out what I did to help my old friend at the time when he was publishing his greatest novel—one that I could praise without reservation. Hal had told me aboutBabbittduring his visit in Pasadena, and he wrote me from New York, “I have asked Harcourt, Brace and Company to shoot you out a copy ofBabbittjust as soon as possible.” I read the book at once, and sent them an opinion to which they gave display in their first advertisement:

I am now ready to get out in the street and shout hurrah, for America’s most popular novelist has sent me a copy of his new book,Babbitt. I am here to enter my prediction that it will be the most talked-about and the most-read novel published in this country in my life-time.

The book became probably the best-selling novel of the decade.

Later, when Lewis received the Nobel Prize and made his speech before the king and the notables in Stockholm, he named me as one of the American writers who might as well have been chosen for the prize. That was as handsome as anything a man could do for a colleague, and it was enough to keep me grateful to him up to the end. But I have to tell the tragic story of his “decline” and his “fall”—these two words are Schorer’s labels for large sections of the biography. “Decline” occupies 103 of the book’s pages, and “Fall” occupies the last 163 pages. “Decline” and “Fall” together comprise one third of the volume; and, oddly enough, when I figured up the years covered by those two sections, they cover one third of Lewis’ life (22 out of 66 years).

In Professor Schorer’s huge tome you may read the whole pitiful story of American “social drinking” as it affected the life of one man of genius. You may read about the parties and the rages, the various objects that were thrown into other men’s faces, and so on. The Berkeley professor has produced the most powerful argument against “social drinking” that I have encountered in my eighty-four years. My own books about the problem—The Wet ParadeandThe Cup of Fury, which I wrote in 1956—are small ones; Schorer’s contains more than half a million words—all of them interesting, many of them charming and gay, and the last of them a nightmare.

I will give only the names of the gifted people known to me who fell into the grip of John Barleycorn: Jack London, George Sterling, Eugene O’Neill, Scott Fitzgerald, O. Henry, Stephen Crane, Finley Peter Dunne, Isadora Duncan, William Seabrook, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Cram Cook, Dylan Thomas, Sherwood Anderson, Horace Liveright, Douglas Fairbanks, Klaus Mann. Most of these persons I knew well; the others I knew through friends. At least four took their own lives. Not one reached the age of eighty, and only three got to seventy-one of these, Seabrook, because he reformed.

And I will add one more name, which will be a surprise to many people: Eugene Debs, six times candidate of the Socialist Party for president of the United States. Gene was one of thenoblest and kindest men I have had the good fortune to meet. He was a tireless fighter for social justice. He was one friend of the poor and lowly who stood by his principles and never wavered. In his campaigns he went from one end of the country to the other addressing great audiences. I was one of his pupils.

I heard him first at a huge mass meeting at Madison Square Garden. I was a young writer then, and he greeted me as though I were a long-lost brother. Many years later when he came out to Los Angeles, I had the pleasure of driving him from an afternoon meeting in the Zoological Gardens to an evening meeting in the Hollywood Bowl. Theodore Dreiser was there in a front seat, I remember, and he shouted his approval.

Gene fought against the fiend all his life, and his friends helped him. I personally never saw him touch a drop of liquor, but I got the story from George H. Goebel, who had been appointed by the party leaders as the candidate’s official guardian. It was Goebel’s duty to accompany him on every lecture trip and stay with him every hour, morning, noon, and night. That was an old story to me of course. Many times, as a lad, I had been appointed to perform that duty for my father. But, alas, I was not as big and strong as George Goebel.

Albert Einstein came to America in 1931 to become a professor in the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He had been world-famous for a dozen years or so, had been awarded the Nobel Prize, and was a doctorhonoris causain fourteen of the world’s great universities. His coming was a prestige matter to Cal Tech and had been announced weeks in advance; reporters swarmed around him, the newspapers made front-page stories of his arrival, the institute gave a banquet in his honor, and one of the town’s many millionairesses contributed ten thousand dollars for the privilege of tasting that food.

I had been corresponding with Einstein for some years. He had read some of my books and had written me: “To the most beautiful joys of my life belongs your wicked tongue.” He had promised to come to see me; and soon after his arrival in Pasadena, Craig’s sister Dolly came in and reported, “There’s an old man walking up and down on the street, and he keeps looking at the house.”

Craig said, “Go out and ask what he wants.” Dolly went and came back to report, “He says he’s Dr. Einstein.” Craig said, “Go bring him in,” and called to me.

Such was the beginning of as lovely a friendship as anyone could have in this world. I report him as the kindest, gentlest, sweetest of men. He had a keen wit, a delightful sense of humor, and his tongue could be sharp—but only for the evils of thisworld. I don’t like the word “radical”; but it is the word that the world chose to employ about me, and Albert Einstein was as radical as I was. From first to last, during his two winters in Pasadena, he never disagreed with an idea of mine or declined a request I made of him.

Of course, it was shocking to the authorities at Cal Tech that Einstein chose to identify himself with the city’s sharpest social critic. I could forgive Dr. Robert Millikan, president of the great institution, because I knew he had to raise funds among the city’s millionaires and so had to watch his step; but Einstein was less tolerant. He knew snobbery when he saw it, and he expressed his opinions freely. He also recognized anti-Semitism and knew when his loyal and devoted wife was slighted. Said one young instructor at Cal Tech to Craig, “The Jews have got Harvard, they are getting Princeton, and they are on the way to getting Cal Tech.”

Of course, when our friends knew that we knew Einstein, they all begged to meet him; and when I told Einstein about it, he said, of course he and his wife would come to a dinner and meet our friends. We engaged a private dining room in the “swanky” Town House of Los Angeles. Craig and I went a little early to make sure that everything was in order, and we were in the dining room when Einstein and his wife arrived. He always wore a black overcoat—I think a bit rusty—and a little soft black hat. He came into the large room where a table was set for twelve and looked around as if at a loss. Then he took off his overcoat, folded it carefully, and laid it on the floor in an unoccupied corner. He then took off the black hat and laid that on top of the coat. He was ready for dinner. I was too tactful to mention that there is a hat-check room in fashionable hotels.

Another episode: Some labor leader was arrested in a strike. I felt it my duty to make a protest, but I doubted if the press services would pay heed to me. I thought they would pay heed to Einstein, and I asked him if he would care to make a protest. He told me to write out the message and he would sign it. He did so, and I turned it over to the United Press. It was not sent out. Whereupon I telegraphed a protest to Carl Bickel, head of the agency in New York. Bickel sent me a copy of the rebuke he had telegraphed to the head of the Los Angeles office, informinghim that he had made the United Press ridiculous and that hereafter anything that Einstein had to say on any subject was news.

Once I mentioned to Einstein that someone had called my social protest “undignified.” The next time he came to our home he brought a large and very fine photograph of himself, eighteen by twenty-four inches, and on it he had inscribed six lines of verse, in colloquial German that calls for a Berliner. Needless to say, that trophy was framed and hung on the wall, and German visitors always call for a flashlight and a footstool to stand on.

People ask for the text of the verses, so I give it here, first in German, then in translation:

Wen ficht der schmutzigste Topf nicht an?Wer klopft die Welt auf den hohlen Zahn?Wer verachtet das Jetzt und schwört auf das Morgen?Wem macht kein “undignified” je Sorgen?Der Sinclair ist der tapfre MannWenn einer, dann ich es bezeugen kann.In herzlichkeitAlbert Einstein

Whom does the dirtiest pot not attack?Who hits the world on the hollow tooth?Who spurns the now and swears by the morrow?Who takes no care about being “undignified”?The Sinclair is the valiant manIf anyone, then I can attest it.In heartinessAlbert Einstein

There is an amusing story connected with those verses.Lifepublished six pages of photographs of American rocking chairs; and I wrote them a playful note, rebuking them for having left out the most characteristic of all American chairs, the cradle rocker. I enclosed a photo of myself in our cradle rocker and pointed out the photograph of Einstein just behind the chair—which the great man had often sat in. I mentioned the poem, and there came a phone call fromLife’s Hollywood office. Theeditor, an agreeable lady, asked for the text of the poem. I said it was in German, and she didn’t know German. Would I translate it for her? I said I would, but I also said it would be useless, asLifewouldn’t publish it. She asked why, and I answered, “Because it praisesme.”

The lady laughed merrily; she thought that was a witticism, asked again for the translation, and wrote it out line by line.Lifepublished the letter and the photograph, April 28, 1961. It did not mention the poem. So I knewLifebetter than one of its own editors! I had a bit of fun telling her so when next I had her on the phone.

Einstein was surprised to learn that I had never been invited to speak at Cal Tech and had never had the honor of meeting Dr. Millikan. I told him that Bertrand Russell, when he had come to speak at Cal Tech, had made an engagement to have lunch with us at the home of Mrs. Gartz. The lecture took place in the morning, and we had arranged to meet him afterward, but Dr. Millikan carried him off to lunch at the Valley Hunt Club and made no apology to us.

On one of Einstein’s last days in Pasadena, I went to his home to say good-by to him. You entered his house into a hallway, and on one side was a door opening into the dining room and on the other a door leading into the living room. I was saying my farewell to Einstein in the living room; just as I was ready to leave, Mrs. Einstein came in and said in a half whisper, “Dr. Millikan is here. I took him into the dining room.”

I, of course, started to get out of the way; but Einstein took me firmly by one elbow and led me out of the living room and across the hall and opened the dining-room door. “Dr. Millikan,” he said, “I want you to meet my friend Upton Sinclair.” So, of course, we shook hands. I said a few polite words and took myself off.

I never saw Dr. Millikan again, but I will include one more story having to do with him. At the time of our entrance into World War II, Phil La Follette was opposing our entrance and came on a lecture tour to Pasadena. Dr. Millikan’s son was casting about to find someone to oppose Phil in debate, and he came to me. I was in favor of our entrance, as I had been in thecase of World War I; in both cases most of my socialist friends opposed me, some of them very bitterly.

When young Millikan asked if I would be willing to enter the lists, I consented. My wife attended the debate and found herself seated just in front of a group of young socialists who were jeering at my speech; when she turned around and looked at them, they recognized her, and got up and moved to another part of the hall. When some of the ardent patriots jeered at La Follette, I got up from my seat on the platform and asked them please to hear him. Some photographer took a snapshot of that moment, and it made an amusing picture.

My friendship with Einstein continued by mail for almost twenty years. And in the course of time I received another jingle from him—he had a propensity for writing them. A pacifist lady, Rosika Schwimmer, worked up a little fuss with me over a story I had told in my bookUpton Sinclair Presents William Fox, to the effect that she had gone to Fox with a proposal to finance a “peace ship” to Europe, and he had declined. Rosika claimed that the story was false and employed a lawyer to demand that I state in the next edition of the book that it was false. I was perfectly willing to say that she denied it, but how could I say it was false when it was a square issue of veracity between two persons, and I had no other evidence?

Rosika sued me for libel—the only time that has ever happened to me. Obviously it was no libel, for she had made the same appeal to Henry Ford, and with success as all the world knew. She carried the case to the Supreme Court of New York State and lost all the way. She also carried it to Albert Einstein, and he, friend to all pacifists, wrote me some verses, mildly suggesting I take on more weighty foes. I replied with another set of verses, pointing out that I had taken on the Francos and the Hitlers.

Postscript: When I published an article about Einstein for theSaturday Reviewof April 14, 1962, Dr. Lee DuBridge, present head of Cal Tech, wrote me a long letter protesting my statements about that institution. In reply I wrote him some of my evidence that I had been too polite to include in my article; for instance, that Mrs. Einstein had complained to my wife that shehad never been able to get the use of the bus that was maintained for the convenience of faculty wives. Dr. DuBridge had sent his letter to me to theSaturday Review, requesting publication; but theSaturday Reviewpresently informed me that he had withdrawn his request. I was left to guess that he had read my letter.

You may be interested to hear of another man who sat in our cradle rocker more recently. Craig’s brother Allan, a Mississippi planter who has succeeded in his life purpose of buying back most of his father’s lands, wrote Craig that his close friend, Judge Tom Brady, was lecturing in southern California and would like to meet us. Allan had been Craig’s darling from babyhood and could have anything he asked from her. An appointment was made, and Hunter brought the Judge to our home one evening.

He was a grave and courteous Southern gentleman who was spokesman for the citizens’ councils and had helped to spread them all over the Deep South. We welcomed him, and he sat motionless in the chair and in a quiet, persuasive voice repeated what was obviously the speech he had been delivering to southern California audiences. It took an hour or more, and we listened without interruption.

Then I said, very gently, that I happened to have personal knowledge of some of the events to which my guest had referred, and that several of the institutions he had named as communist were nothing of the sort. For example, the League for Industrial Democracy. I had founded it more than half a century before. I had run it from my farmhouse attic in the hills above Princeton, New Jersey, for the first year or two, and I had known about its affairs ever since. It was just what it called itself: an organization for democracy, and never anywhere in its publications was there any suggestion for the achieving of socialist aims except by the democratic process.

Then some of the persons whom the judge had called “communist-influenced” were my friends. For example, Oswald Garrison Villard, for many years publisher and editor of theNation.I had known Villard well and had read his magazine from my youth. He was a libertarian of conviction so determined that it might be called religious. It would have been impossible to name an American less apt to fall under communist influence. And so on for other names that I have now forgotten.

Our guest listened without interruption; when I finished, he said that he was surprised by what I had told him and would give careful study to the matter and not repeat the mistakes. So we parted as Southern gentlemen, and on the way back to the motel he told Hunter that he was humiliated by what had happened. When he got home he sent me his book and later one or two pamphlets; but I have not heard that the policies of the citizens’ councils have been modified in this respect.

Early in 1933 William Fox, most mighty of the movie moguls—excuse the movie language—came into my life. He wrote that he wished to visit my home. My wife, who knew the smell of money when it came near, got a good fire burning in our fireplace and saw that a pitcher of lemonade was prepared, with no alcohol in it. The country boy from Oregon who was our servant at that time was literally trembling with excitement at the prospect of seeing the great William Fox. When the boy came in to report the arrival, Craig said, “What did you tell him?” The answer was, “I told him to rest his hat and set.”

William Fox had brought his lawyer with him and was “set” for action. He had been robbed of a good part of his fortune during the recent panic; he wanted that story told—and I was the man to do it. I explained somewhat sadly that I was in the midst of another writing job and never liked to break off my work once started. Usually Craig let me make my own decisions, but not that one. She told Mr. Fox that I would accept his offer of twenty-five thousand dollars—and what could I do aboutthat?

Every day Fox came with his suitcase full of documents and his little round pudgy lawyer to elucidate them. Every day he rested his hat and set, and every day he had his pitcher of prohibition lemonade. I hired two secretaries to listen on alternate days, and so in a very short time I had a book. The great mogulhimself suggested the title,Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox; and when the mighty labor was done and the bulky manuscript complete, Fox put the check into my wife’s hands—not mine! He went off to New York in the midst of loud cheers from the Sinclair establishment.

And what happened then? Well, to be precise—nothing. I waited patiently for two or three days, and then I waited impatiently for two or three weeks, and I heard not a word. Then I received a letter from my friend Floyd Dell, who happened to be in New York. How Floyd got the information I have forgotten, but the substance of it was that Fox was using the threat of publishing my manuscript in an effort to get back some of the properties of which he had been deprived. I asked a lawyer friend in New York to verify this information for me, and when it was verified I knew exactly what to do. I sent my carbon copy to my dependable printers in Hammond, Indiana, and instructed them to put the book into type, send me the proofs, and order paper for twenty-five thousand copies. Before long it occurred to me that it might be a wise precaution to tell them to order paper for another twenty-five thousand copies.

When those beautiful yellow-covered books hit Hollywood, it was with a bang that might have been heard at the moon if there was anybody there to listen. It wasn’t but a few hours before I received a frantic telegram from William Fox, threatening me with all kinds of punishments; but the twenty-five-thousand-dollar check had been cashed, and the books had gone to reviewers all over the United States—and I guess William Fox decided that he might just as well be the hero I had made him. Anyhow, I heard no more protests, and I sold some fifty thousand copies of the book at three dollars a copy. (It would cost twice that today.) I was told that immediately after the book appeared, there was posted on the bulletin board of all entrances to the immense Fox lot a warning that anyone found on the lot with a copy of the book would be immediately discharged. So, of course, all the hundreds of Fox employees had to do their reading at home.

It is interesting to note that now, as I read the proofs of this book, the great Fox establishment is shut down and the company is issuing statements that it is not going into bankruptcy.

It was also in 1933 that we got involved with Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian film director. He had come to Hollywood two years before to make a picture. Because he would not do what our screen masters wanted, his plans had miscarried, and now he was about to return to Russia. Then, only a few hours before he was supposed to leave, he sent a friend to us with a wonderful idea: if only someone would raise the money, he would go to Mexico and make an independent picture of the primitive Indians about whom Diego Rivera had told him.

We hated to see a great artist humiliated by the forces that had assailed Eisenstein in California; so we very foolishly undertook to raise the money. Mrs. Gartz put up the first five thousand dollars—on condition that Craig’s brother Hunter Kimbrough should be the manager of the expedition.

Now, the way in which “independent” pictures are made is as follows: the director gets a certain sum of money and shoots a certain number of miles of film; then he telegraphs back to the investors that the picture is, unfortunately, not completed and that he must have more money, and more miles of film, or else, unfortunately, the investors will have no picture. Thereupon, the investors put up more money, and the director shoots more miles of film, and then telegraphs that the picture is, unfortunately, not completed and that he must have more money, and more miles of film, or else, unfortunately, the investors will have no picture. There may have been some case in the history of movie expeditions where this did not happen, but I have not been able to come upon any recollection of it in Hollywood.

Eisenstein and his staff went to the tropical land of Tehuantepec, and made pictures of Tehuana maidens with great starched ruffles over their heads, and bare feet that gripped the rough hillsides like hands, and baskets made of gourds painted with roses. He went to Oaxaca and made pictures of masonry tumbling into ruins during an earthquake. He went to Chichén Itzá and made pictures of Mayan temples with plumed serpents and stone-faced men and their living descendants, unchanged in threethousand years. He climbed Popocatepetl and made pictures of Indian villages lost in forgotten valleys. Miles and miles of film were exposed, and packing cases full of negatives in tin cans came back to Hollywood.

Meanwhile, my wife and I found ourselves turned into company promoters, addressing persuasive letters, many pages long, to friends of Soviet Russia, devotees of Mexican art, and playboys of the film colony—anyone who might be tempted by a masterpiece of camerawork and montage. We interviewed lawyers and bankers, and signed trust agreements and certificates of participating interest. We visited Mexican consuls and United States customs inspectors, and arranged for censorship exhibitions. We mailed bank drafts, took out insurance policies, telephoned brokers, and performed a host of other duties far out of our line.

And Eisenstein went to the Hacienda Tetlapayac and made endless miles of film of a maguey plantation, with peons wearing gorgeous striped serapes, singing work hymns at dawn by old monastery walls, driven to revolt by cruel taskmasters, and hunted to their death by wild-riding vaqueros. He went to Mérida and “shot” señoritas with high-piled headdresses and embroidered mantillas. He made the life story of a bullfighter—his training and technique, his footwork and capework, his intrigue with ladies of fashion, and his escape from vengeful husbands, fiercer than any bull from Piedras Negras. The most marvelous material: pictures of golden sunlight and black shadows; dream scenes of primitive splendor; gorgeous pageants, like old tapestries come to life; compositions in which the very clouds in the sky were trained to perform.

But, oh, the tens of miles of film and the tens of thousands of dollars! The months and months—until at last Craig began to cry out in protest and to demand an end. Mexico is a land of difficulties and dangers, and Hunter Kimbrough was managing the expedition; her affection for him multiplied the troubles in her mind. “Bring them home!” became her cry, day and night.

And, meanwhile, Eisenstein was in Chapala, shooting white pelicans, gray pumas, and Nayaritan damsels paddling dugouts in mangrove swamps. He was in Cholula, shooting Catholicchurches with carven skulls, and images of Jesus with real hair and teeth. He was in Guadalupe, photographing miraculous healings, and penitents carrying crosses made of spiny cactus, crawling by hundreds up rocky hillsides on bare knees.

“Bring them home!” demanded Craig; and she and her husband came to a deadlock over the issue. The husband was infatuated, she declared; he was as complete a madman as a Soviet director. They argued for days and nights; meanwhile, Eisenstein tore off the roof of a Tehuantepec mansion to photograph a dance inside, gave a bullfight to keep an actor from going to Spain, and made arrangements to hire the whole Mexican Army. Again Craig clamored, “Bring them home!” And again husband and wife took up the issue; this time the husband was seized by a deadly chill and had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance, and he lay on his back for two weeks.

The raising of money went on, and freight trains groaned under the loads of raw film going into Mexico, and exposed film coming out. Eisenstein shot the standing mummies of Michoacàn, the flower festivals of Xochimilco, and the “dead peoples’ day” celebrations of Amecameca, and ordered the Mexican Army to march out into the desert to fight a battle with a background of organ cactuses thirty feet high. It was the beginning of the fifteenth month of this Sisyphean labor when Craig assembled the cohorts of her relatives and lawyers, and closed in for the final grapple with her infatuated spouse. “Bring them home!” she commanded; and for eight days and nights the debate continued. To avoid going to the hospital, the husband went to the beach for three days; then he came back, and there were more days and nights of conferences with the assembled cohorts. At times such as this, husbands and wives discover whether they really love each other!

Craig was with me in the dream of a picture—until she decided that Eisenstein meant to grind her husband up in a pulp machine and spin him out into celluloid film. She thought that thirty-five miles of film was enough for any picture. And then she stood and looked at her husband, and her hands trembled and her lips quivered; she had licked him in that last desperate duel, and she wondered if in his heart he could ever forgive her. He did.

The real reason for Eisenstein’s delaying tactics was that he did not want to go back to his beloved Soviet Union. He had been trying to get a contract to make a picture in India, one in Japan, one in the Argentine. His relations with Craig’s brother had reached a point where he cursed Hunter; and Hunter, a Mississippian, got a gun and told him the next time he cursed he would be shot. So, I sent a cablegram to Stalin, asking him to order Eisenstein to return home; in reply I received a cablegram signed by Stalin informing me that they no longer had any use for Eisenstein and considered him a renegade.

The history of that cablegram is amusing. Craig regarded it as she would a rattlesnake in her home. Anyone who saw it, including the F.B.I., would assume that I was a cryptocommunist. The evil document must be locked up in a secret treasure box that contained such things as the letters from Jefferson Davis and his daughter, Winnie. I was not even allowed to know where that box was hidden.

But I had told one or two friends about the cablegram. Way back in the early Greenwich Village days I had known Robert Minor, art editor ofThe Masses. I had played tennis with him at Croton; and much later, in the days when I was writing the Lanny Budd books, he provided me with a story of what it was like to be arrested by the French police—a story that makes a delightful ending for the first Lanny Budd book,World’s End. Now, a friend in New York mentioned the cablegram to Bob, and reported Bob’s comment, “Tell Upton if he has a cablegram from Stalin he is the only man in America who can say it.”

In the end, we made a contract with Amtorg, the Russian trade agency in New York, which handled the whole Eisenstein matter. We agreed to ship the film to them with precise specifications that the boxes should not be opened in New York but should be forwarded immediately to Moscow where Eisenstein would cut the film, and the cut film would be shipped to us. So Eisenstein received orders that he could not fail to obey, and Hunter did not have to shoot him.

The director and his two associates left Mexico City in ourBuick car and drove to New York; but instead of going at once to Moscow, as the agreement specified, Eisenstein stayed in New York, and about a week later we received letters from persons in New York to whom he had been showing the film.

That settled the matter for us. We put it into the hands of our lawyer, with instructions to repossess the film, repack it, and ship it to Hollywood—which was done. We made an agreement with Sol Lesser to cut it, and that was done. And in the spring of 1934Thunder Over Mexicowas scheduled to open at the Rialto Theater in New York.

In the eyes of the communists, of course, we had committed a major crime. We had deprived the great Russian master of his greatest art work, and we had done it out of blind greed. All over the world the communist propagandists took up that theme, and we could not answer without damaging the property of our investors.

The situation was still more odd because my friends, the socialists, were also involved. I was just on the point of announcing my EPIC campaign for the governorship of California. I had sent a copy of my program to Norman Thomas, and he lit into it in the New YorkCall, denouncing EPIC as a “tin-can economy,” and me as “a renegade to the socialist movement.” The Socialist Party, which had placed a large order for seats for the opening night of Eisenstein’s film, canceled the order. So, we were getting it from all sides. On opening night there was a minor riot; communists yelled protests, and some of them shook their fists in my face in the lobby of the theater.

I had one comfort, however. Among the investors in the picture was Otto H. Kahn, New York banker and art patron; he had put in ten thousand dollars at my request, without ever having met me. I invited him to dinner with my wife and me at the Algonquin Hotel on the evening of the opening. He came up to me in the lobby and took both my hands in his and said, “I am telling all my friends that if they want to invest money and want to be sure of having it carefully handled and promptly accounted for, they should entrust it to the socialist, Mr. Upton Sinclair.”

Of course,Thunder Over Mexicowasn’t a very good picture. It couldn’t be because it was only a travelogue and had no form.Sol Lesser, an experienced producer, did his best and dealt with us fairly. The investors got about half their money back, and Sol’s friendship was the best thing that we got out of the whole experience.

When the film had run its course, we turned it over to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and occasionally I see mention of its being shown here and there. As for Eisenstein, he went back to Russia; I have no report on his meeting with Stalin. But all the world knows that for many years he was put to teaching his art instead of practicing it, and that when he made another picture it was a glorification of the most cruel of all the tsars.

I come now to one of the great adventures of my life: the EPIC campaign. There had come one of those periods in American history known as a “slump,” or, more elegantly, a “depression.” The cause of this calamity is obvious—the mass of the people do not get sufficient money to purchase what modern machinery is able to produce. You cannot find this statement in any capitalist newspaper, but it is plain to the mind of any wide-awake child. The warehouses are packed with goods, and nobody is buying them; this goes on until those who still have money have bought and used up the goods; so then we have another boom and then another bust. This has gone on all through our history and will go on as long as the necessities of our lives are produced on speculation and held for private profit.

Now we had a bad slump, and Franklin Roosevelt was casting about for ways to end it. In the state of California, which had a population of seven million at the time, there were a million out of work, public-relief funds were exhausted, and people were starving. The proprietor of a small hotel down at the beach asked me to come and meet some of his friends, and I went. His proposal was that I should resign from the Socialist Party and join the Democratic Party, and let them put me up as a candidate for governor at the coming November election. They had no doubt that if I would offer a practical program I would capture the Democratic nomination at the primaries, which came in thespring. I told them that I had retired from politics and promised my wife to be a writer. But they argued and pleaded, pointing out the terrible conditions all around them; I promised to think it over and at least suggest a program for them.

To me the remedy was obvious. The factories were idle, and the workers had no money. Let them be put to work on the state’s credit and produce goods for their own use, and set up a system of exchange by which the goods could be distributed. “Production for Use” was the slogan, and I told my new friends about it. They agreed to every one of my suggestions but one—that they should get somebody else to put forward the program and run for governor.

I talked it over with my dear wife, who as usual was horrified; but the more I thought about it, the more interested I became, and finally I thought that at least I could change my registration and become a Democrat—quietly. It was a foolish idea, but I went ahead; and, of course, some reporter spotted my name and published the news. Then, of course, Craig found out and I got a mighty dressing down.

A great many people got after me, and the result was I agreed to run for the nomination at the primaries. I didn’t think I could possibly win, and I was astonished by the tidal wave that came roaring in and gathered me up. I had no peace from then on; I carried the Democratic primary with 436,000 votes, a majority over the total cast for the half dozen other candidates.

So I had to go through with it, and Craig, according to her nature, had to back me. She would hate it for every minute of the whole campaign and afterward; but once I had committed myself, I was honor-bound, and quitting would be cowardice. There are no cowards in Mississippi.

Some months earlier I had made the acquaintance of a young man of some wealth who had established a Bellamy Society and had printed an edition of Bellamy’s charmingParable of the Water Tank. Now I went to him and served notice that he had to be my campaign manager. I don’t know whathiswife thought of that, but I know that he dropped everything and gave hisheart, his mind, and a lot of his money to that tremendous political fight. Richard S. Otto was his name, and the name of the movement was EPIC—End Poverty in California. It was a wonderful title, and went all over the world.

We had moved from our Long Beach cottage back to Pasadena, and now we had to move from Pasadena because so many people had got our address and gave us no peace. We bought on mortgage a home in Beverly Hills, where we fondly thought we could hide. I had an elderly woman secretary, and was using her little front room as an office. Now Dick Otto moved the EPIC movement into that little front room, and presently the elderly secretary had to find a new home and leave the whole cottage to EPIC.

It wasn’t long before Dick had to hunt up a bigger place; he moved three or four times and at the end leased a whole office building. People came from all over the state, and brought funds when they had any; if they had none, they offered their time, often when they had nothing to eat. The movement spread like wildfire—quite literally that. The old-men politicians were astonished, and the newspapers, which had kept silent as long as they dared, had to come out and fight it in the open.

As for me, it meant dropping everything else, and turning myself into a phonograph to be set up on a platform to repeat the same speech in every city and town of California. At first I traveled by myself and had many adventures, some of them amusing, others less so. I had an old car, which had a habit of breaking down, and I would telephone to the speech place to come and get me. Once I was late and was driving fast, and I heard a siren behind me; of course, I stopped and told my troubles to the police officer. He looked at my driver’s license before he said anything; then, “Okay, Governor, I’ll take you.” So I rode with a police escort blazing a mighty blast and clearing traffic off one of the main highways of central California. The phonograph arrived, and the speech was made!

I am joking about its being the same speech, because as a matter of fact something kept turning up and had to be dealt with. Our enemies continually thought up new charges, and I had toanswer them. I would try to get them to come and debate with me, but I cannot recall one that ever accepted. That doesn’t mean that I was a great orator, it simply means that I had the facts on my side, and the facts kept on growing more and more terrifying. The Republican opposition had no program—it never does, because there is no way to defend idle factories and workers locked out to starve. We have the same situation now, as I write, in 1962; but we don’t quite let them starve, we give them a stingy “relief”—and they can thank EPIC for that, though they do not know it.

Self-help co-operatives had sprung up all over the state, and of course that was “production for use,” and those people automatically became EPIC’S.

Our opponents would not debate; however, there were challenges from the audience, and now and then I would invite the man up to the platform and let him ask his question and present his case. That was fair play, and pleased the audience. There were always communists, and several times they showered down leaflets from the gallery. They called EPIC “one more rotten egg from the blue buzzard’s nest.” (The “blue buzzard” was the communists’ name for the New Deal’s “blue eagle.”) When the shower fell, I would ask someone in the audience to bring me a leaflet, and I would read the text and give my answer. It was a simple one: We wanted to achieve our purpose by the American method of majority consent. We might not win, but if we cast a big vote we would force the Roosevelt administration to take relief measures, and we would have made all America familiar with the idea of production for use; both these things we most certainly did.

That campaign went on from May to November, and the news of it went all over the United States and even further. We had troubles, of course—arguments and almost rows at headquarters. I would be called in to settle them, but all I told anybody was to do what Dick Otto said. That brave fellow stood everything that came, including threats to kill him. There was only one thing he needed, he said, and that was my support.More important yet, he had Craig’s. She never went near the headquarters, but when I was on the road, she spoke for me—over the telephone.

Sometimes she went to meetings that were not too far away. She always sat back toward the rear and was seldom recognized. At the outset of the campaign, at a meeting in a church, she observed that everybody sat still, and it occurred to her to applaud something I had said; instantly the audience woke up, and the applause became continuous. That was a trick she did not forget.

We had an eight-page weekly paper called theEPIC News, and I had to write an editorial for it every week, and answer our enemies and keep our organizers and workers all over the state alive to the situation. Sometimes Craig wrote for that.

A big advertising concern had been hired to defeat EPIC. They made a careful study of everything I had written, and they took passages out of context and even cut sentences off in the middle to make them mean the opposite of what I had written. They had had an especially happy time withThe Profits of Religion. I received many letters from agitated old ladies and gentlemen on the subject of my blasphemy. “Do you believe in God?” asked one; and then the next question, “Define God.” I have always answered my letters, and the answer to question one was “Yes,” and the answer to question two was “The Infinite cannot be defined.” There wasn’t the least trouble in finding quotations from both the Old and New Testaments that sounded like EPIC, and it wasn’t necessary to garble them.

When we carried the primaries, we were the Democratic Party of California, and under the law we had a convention in Sacramento—the state capital. I remember that Mrs. Gartz came with us to that convention. Craig had been too busy to manage her now, and another lady as large and stout as Mrs. Gartz had gotten hold of her. This lady had herself nominated as EPIC candidate from her assembly district; also she had a son and was frantically beseeching me to make him state commissioner of education. She owned a half-dozen houses in California andrented them, and had the wonderful idea that all homes should be exempt from taxation. Poor Mrs. Gartz never knew what was being done to her, and at the convention I had to tell those two large ladies to go back to their seats and let me alone. The upshot was that Mrs. Gartz’s daughter took her for a trip around the world until the EPIC nightmare was over.

Halfway through the campaign I wrote a little dramatic skit calledDepression Island. I imagined three men cast away on a small island, with nothing to eat but coconuts. One was a businessman, and in the process of trading he got all the coconuts and trees into his possession. Then he became the capitalist and compelled the other two to work for him on a scanty diet of coconuts. When the capitalist had accumulated enough coconuts for all his possible needs, he told the other two that there were “hard times.” He was sorry about it, but there was nothing he could do; coconuts were overproduced, and the other two fellows were out of jobs.

But the other two didn’t starve gracefully. They organized themselves into a union and also a government, and passed laws providing for public ownership of the coconut trees. The little drama carefully covered every point in the national situation, and nobody in that EPIC audience could fail to get the idea.

A group of our EPIC supporters in Hollywood undertook to put on the show in the largest auditorium available. I went to see Charlie Chaplin, who said he would come and speak at the affair—something he had never been known to do previously. I remember trying to persuade several rich people to put up rent for the auditorium. I forget who did, but there was a huge crowd, and nobody failed to learn the geography lesson—location of Depression Island on the map.

In the month of October, not long before election day, I made a trip to New York and Washington. I stopped off at Detroit and visited Father Coughlin, a political priest who had tremendous influence at that time. I told him our program, and he said he endorsed every bit of it. I asked him to say so publicly, and he said he would; but he didn’t. He publicly condemned some ofthe very things he had approved, and he denied that he had given his approval.

In New York, of course, there were swarms of reporters. EPIC had gone all over the country by that time. I had an appointment with President Roosevelt at Hyde Park. It was five o’clock one afternoon, and some friends drove me up there. The two hours I spent in the big study of that home were among the great moments of my life. That wonderfully keen man sat and listened while I set forth every step of the program, and he checked them off one after the other and called them right. Then he gave me the pleasure of hearing his opinion of some of his enemies. At the end he told me that he was coming out in favor of production for use. I said, “If you do, Mr. President, it will elect me.”

“Well,” he said, “I am going to do it”; and that was that. But he did not do it.

I went to Washington to interview some of Roosevelt’s cabinet members and get their support if I could. Harry Hopkins promised us everything in his power if we got elected. Harold Ickes did the same—the whole United States Treasury, no less. Also, I spent an evening with Justice Louis Brandeis—but he couldn’t promise me the whole Supreme Court.

I addressed a luncheon of the National Press Club, and that was an interesting adventure. There were, I should guess, a couple hundred correspondents of newspapers all over the country, and indeed all over the world. I talked to them for half an hour or so, and then they plied me with questions for an hour or two more. I was told afterwards that they were astonished by my mastery of the subject and my readiness in facing every problem. They failed to realize the half year of training I had received in California. I can say there wasn’t a single question they asked me that I hadn’t answered a score of times at home. I not only knew the answers, but I knew what the audience response would be.

I had all the facts on my side—and, likewise, all the fun. I can say that EPIC changed the political color of California; it scared the reactionaries out of their wits, and never in twenty-eight years have they dared go back to their old practices. The same thing can also be said of civil liberties; they have never dared tobreak a strike as they did at San Pedro Harbor before our civil-liberties campaign in the early twenties.

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