It is natural that Mr. Sinclair should be popular with the dispossessed: they who are so seldom flattered find in his pages a land of milk and honey. Here all the workers wear haloes of pure golden sunlight and all the capitalists have horns and tails; socialists with fashionable English wives invariably turn yellow at the appropriate moment, and rich men's sons are humbled in the dust, winsome lasses are always true unless their fathers have money in the bank, and wives never understand their husbands, and all those who are good are also martyrs, and all those who are patriots are also base. Mr. Sinclair says that the incidents in his books are based on fact and that his characters are studied from life…. But Mr. Sinclair, like the rest of us, has seen what he wanted to see and studied what he wanted to study; and his special simplification of the social scene is one that almost inevitably makes glad the heart of the victim of our system. It fills this victim with emotion, the emotion of hatred and the emotion of self-pity. Mr. Sinclair's novels sell by the hundred thousand; the wonder is they do not sell by the million.
But suppose now that one wishes to see the dispossessed rise in their might and really, in the name of justice, take possession of the world. Suppose one wishes to see the class-system abolished, along with all the other unhappy things that Mr. Sinclair writes about. That is Mr. Sinclair's own desire; and he honestly believes that in writing as he does he contributes to this happy consummation. One can hardly agree with him. In so far as his books show us anything real, they show us the helplessness, the benightedness, the naïveté of the American workers' movement. Jimmie Higgins, who does not exist as a character, is a symbol, nevertheless; and one can read reality into him. He is supposed to be the American worker incarnate; and was ever a worker so little the master of his fate? That, in point of fact, is just the conclusion that Mr. Sinclair wishes us to draw. But why is he so helpless? Because, for all his kindness and his courage, he is, from an intellectual point of view, from a social point of view,… the merest infant; he knows nothing about life or human nature, or economics or philosophy, or even his enemies. How can he advance his own cause,… how can he become anything but what he is…? [Mr. Sinclair's novels] arouse the emotion of self-pity. Does that stimulate the worker, or does it merely console him? They arouse the emotion of hatred. Does that teach him how to grapple with his oppressors, or does it place him all the more at their mercy?… [These] false simplifications of Mr. Sinclair, these appeals to the martyr in human nature, are so much dust thrown in the eyes of his readers. (pp. 293-95)
This is a free excerpt of 493 words. There are 813 words (approx.
3 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Sinclair, Upton 1878–1968: Critical Essay by Van Wyck Brooks Access Pass.
