Of Upton Sinclair and Booth Tarkington

Recently considering the reputation of Booth Tarkington I was struck by how close to the height of his glory he was when Upton Sinclair produced his book Mammonart--and declined to give him a single mention, even of a negative kind. Rather Sinclair had occasion to mention him in another of his nonfiction books, The Brass Check, in which Sinclair contrasted the press' treatment of his own divorce (as usual, missing no chance to scandalize him) with its far more respectful treatment of Tarkington's divorce.

The contrast put me in mind of Sinclair's discussion of "ruling-class artists," who pander to the powerful and established, flattering them and their views, and "hero artists" driven by conscience and conviction to challenge them. Sinclair did not in that earlier book necessarily have these two categories handy--and certainly did not put Tarkington in the one category and himself in the other--but the difference in treatment was telling nonetheless (Tarkington "a novelist whose work involves no peril to the profit system," as Sinclair put it, in contrast with the work of one such as himself).

Both ended up largely forgotten--but if it seems to me that Tarkington was a rather slight writer who simply became less fashionable, Sinclair was a writer critics sought to bury, especially amid the turn the country's political and cultural life took in the following decades, when conservative critics, advancing their prejudices behind pieties about the priority of form, and the inappropriateness of "message" and "politics" in art (by which they meant, of course, the message and politics of dissenters and not those of the powerful, which they did not recognize or criticize as message and politics at all). Looking back it can seem as if in the process both Tarkington's falling by the wayside (for his just not having said much, and not said it particularly memorably), and Sinclair's burial (because of what he did say, especially to the extent to which he made it memorable), validated what he had to say about the politics of criticism--the more in as the world did not change in the way he had expected it would.