Book Review: Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation, by Upton Sinclair

In the second chapter of his book Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation (1925) Upton Sinclair explains his purpose in writing the book as "to investigate the whole process of art creation, and to place the art function in relation to the sanity, health and progress of mankind." Of course, this raises the question of just what Sinclair actually means by art. His answer is that it is "a representation of life, modified by the personality of the artist, for the purpose of modifying other personalities, inciting them to changes of feeling, belief and action." Art is thus by definition "inevitably and inescapably propaganda"--"sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately" Propaganda.

However, if all art is propaganda it is also the case that not all propaganda is equal from the standpoint of artistic significance, Sinclair taking the view that "great," "real and enduring works of art" offer "propaganda of vitality and importance" according to "the practical experience of mankind," conveyed to the audience "with technical competence in terms of the art selected," with this combination of "propaganda of vitality and importance" with such competence to be expected only when "the artist in the labor of his spirit and . . . stern discipline of hard thinking, find[s] a real path of progress for the race."

From this one may conclude that art can never be about just the perfection of form, purely "escapist" or unconcerned with morality or politics; while Sinclair adds that far from being for only the few "great art has always been popular art," and that far from slavish devotion to tradition and the classics as models "vital artists make their own technique," with "present-day technique . . . far and away superior to the technique of any period."

Yet it is also the case that artists must live, and in line with the realities of the class societies of history this has generally meant the accommodation of the artists and their art to the requirements and desires of the rich and powerful--to those who have "owned" the artists as they have owned everything else--with service to these what enables an artist to do well in life (rather than do good), with the most "successful" becoming the coddled pets of wealthy and powerful patrons, and often enjoy critical respectability after their time. In contrast with those "ruling-class artists" the "hero" artists, the "martyr" artists, who did good rather than well--not least in "tak[ing] up the cause of the dispossessed and disinherited" rather than flattering their so-called betters--struggled and were even persecuted in life and often marginalized after their time, with all this reflected in the prevailing standards and canons (a triumph of Mammon over all other moral forces, hence his coinage of "Mammonart" here). Indeed, Sinclair makes it clear that he sees "six great lies prevailing in the art world" against which his positions run up, namely the lies of "art for art's sake" (the argument for art as an exercise in form only), "art snobbery" (the elitist art-is-for-the-few viewpoint), "art tradition" (advocacy of slavish classicism), "art dilettantism" (the view of art as pure diversion), the "art pervert" (the denial that art has anything to do with morality) and "vested interest" (the claim that art "excludes propaganda and has nothing to do with freedom and justice"). Challenging all of them in principle and in practice, here Sinclair endeavors "to set up new canons in the arts, overturning many of the standards now accepted," while in the process rescuing real "treasures" from "the scrap-heap" to which Establishment critics have consigned them, and transferring those false treasures now being exalted "to the history shelves of the world's library" where they belong.

After having lucidly explained the most fundamental of his intellectual premises Sinclair then proceeds upon a grand survey of art through Western history, proceeding from one figure and their works to the next down to the present time (generally devoting a chapter to each).

It is an exceedingly ambitious undertaking for a single-author work (and at that, a non-specialist who had his hands full with a staggering number of other interests and activities over the preceding decades), and it also seems only fair to point out the limits of the result. In surveying Western art, in spite of a handful of glances at the visual arts (Michelangelo, Raphael, and after that, curiously, just Whistler), and music (Beethoven, Wagner), what we get is in the main a survey of literature; with, after some coverage of the Bible and the highlights of Greek and Roman literature, Sinclair skipping over the Middle Ages entirely (no Beowulf or Norse sagas or Song of Roland or Nibelungenlied or Arthurian romances, etc., etc.) to the Renaissance, which rates mere glances before he gets on to the birth of modernity and the centuries since. Doing so he gives us mainly English and French literature with a little attention to a handful of the most prominent Germans and Russians (Goethe, Tolstoy et. al.), and only occasional glances at any other Western literature (Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Ibsen, Strindberg all we get from Southern Europe and Scandinavia), all as even in surveying the literatures on which he concentrates there are some curious omissions. (H.G. Wells appears in this book--but not as one of the writers to be discussed, just as Sinclair's host at the New Reform Club, where he pointed out one of the writers Sinclair does discuss, Henry James, as "the Great Cham.") One may add that besides the omissions Sinclair can seem very dismissive or impatient of a good deal of what he examines (in an extreme example, owning up to having given up reading Dostoyevsky's The Karamazov Brothers at the time of Father's Zosima's funeral, some two-fifths of the way into the book).

Still, imperfect as the survey is of art, or even literature, Sinclair still covers an impressive, and useful, amount of essential territory with knowledge, frankness and insight--enough to constitute a very respectable "intro to Western literature" course in itself. Indeed, I doubt that many of our tenured professors of literature these days, or even in his day, could do the job nearly as well, neither where sheer range is concerned, nor the significant task of making this long treatment of a very large and complicated subject so readable as Mammonart manages to be from beginning to end, in which his framing the text as a dialogue between a caveman and his wife ("Mr. and Mrs. Ogi") is the least of the matter, with Sinclair's not being an academic perhaps an advantage. Far from having been trained in "raking the dust-heaps of history" in the manner he so derided in his book on higher education in America, Sinclair here stands in relation to literature as a writer, reader, lover of literature for whom these works are first and foremost art to be experienced, for what they make the reader feel and think, rather than a priest calling the flock to worship or an archaeologist poring over relics in the hopes of uncovering clues to the past, bringing to bear in addition to the thoroughly worked-out intellectual position he spelled out in that early chapter genuine personal engagement.

One result of that combination of viewpoint, engagement and scope was a good deal of iconoclasm--for the most part, well-warranted iconoclasm. Admittedly I disagreed with particular appraisals of Sinclair again and again, especially as he got to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where my reading has been more extensive and frankly my opinions about the authors he discussed stronger. (I thought him overly dismissive of Coleridge, and Scott, and Dostoyevsky; thought it wrong that he saw in Balzac wallowing in the money-mad world of which he wrote rather than criticism of that world, and indeed, "relentless, ferocious assault" on it; etc.) Still, he argued well for his positions, leaving those with whom he disagrees few nits to pick and often something to think about. (Sinclair dislikes Coleridge for his obscurity and irrationality, Scott for celebrating the Middle Ages, Dostoyevsky for going over from rebellion to reaction, and one cannot deny that all those charges are true, or that the only difference between Sinclair in disliking them for that and the kinds of critics he assails here is his being more forthright about his politics, and taking a progressive rather than a conservative or reactionary view stance.) And the truth was that I found myself agreeing with Sinclair more often than not--about the cult of the Classics, about the politics of Shakespeare, about Zola, about much, much else. Indeed, treating writers such as Henry James (a hankerer after feudalism and its relics and supposed graces, for whom no people exist but those furnished with "large sums of money . . . without effort on their part" permitting them "complicated and subtle aesthetic sensibilities"), or Oscar Wilde (whose "smart" dialogue is produced with the simple-minded formula of proclaiming the opposite of "any statement involving the simple common sense of mankind" to produce overrated epigrams), or Joseph Conrad (a "cruel-souled" "Zealot of Pessimism" in the "Agnostic Sunday School" of whose books "Agnosticism upon closer study turns out to be Capitalism," and for whom "the capitalist ownership and control of marine transportation" is "God," and accordingly ever given to directing "jeering scorn," "venom" and satire at the "altruistic impulse"), Sinclair was again and again a breath of fresh air, saying what seems to me all too obvious and obviously in need of saying, but all too rarely, actually, said. (Especially about Conrad, given how "liberal" English teachers so unthinkingly serve up to their students the insanity into which Kurtz descends in Heart of Darkness as the indisputable, sole, truth about human nature.)

At the same time he made good on his promise to try and rescue many a treasure from the scrap-heap--like the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, whom Sinclair hails the "[Robert] Burns of New England," while in putting in a word for not-quite-ignored figures like a Shelley or Keats reminding us that in his day they were given less than their due (and perhaps still are). At the same time those writers we may be surprised to see included in spite of their mention serving no such purposes, as with political dramas-without-politics author Humphry Ward, or adventure story writer Richard Harding Davis, still help Sinclair explain what he is trying to say about the history of literature, down to his own time.

In the process Sinclair not only tells us something about these authors and works, and by way of them illustrates and supports his arguments from early in the book--and very powerfully--but usefully develops many of those ideas he expressed initially, as with his thoughts about the "ruling-class artists" and "hero artists" (persuasively exemplified by the contrast between French playwrights Racine and Moliere), and the contrast between the art of ruling elites, and the art of oppressed and rising classes, not least the way in which the art of the former stresses form, the latter content. Particularly rare, and affecting, in the case of a Whittier or a Burns or a Keats he reminds us of the struggles endured and the scorn faced by those poets who emerge from the people than the salons, and wrote of and for those from whence they came (struggles and scorn that, he does not forget, mean that many a would-be poet, one who might well have been great, dies, not only without recognition, but without ever having had a proper chance to compose a line, "some mute, inglorious Milton" resting in an unmarked grave).

Alas, few have since had the benefit of the insights Sinclair offers in this book about authors and literature and art more broadly--far fewer than Sinclair hoped at the time. Writing Mammonart he still thought that the bad old world he was struggling against was but "an evil dream of but a few more years," and its standards with it. However, here we are a century later, with the predictable result that the six lies he called out remain very much with us. Indeed, they are the standards by which Sinclair's own works have been judged; been weighed, measured and found wanting; as one sees looking at Anthony Arthur's obituary for Sinclair in that newspaper that (as he relates in another work, The Brass Check) treated him so abominably in life. Deriding his works for being "admitted propaganda," for his "interest in persuasion and politics"--for his having "sold his birthright for a pot of message"--it makes clear just how little Sinclair's case that all art is by definition propaganda altered the prevailing standards. The result is that where Sinclair endeavored to rescue literary treasures from the scrap-heap, his own novels have been tossed into the same scrap-heap ("no longer read" Arthur flatly said), with the same going for everything else he had to offer, Mammonart most certainly included--as the shelves of the library of which Sinclair spoke have only become more crammed with false treasures.

Literature, culture and social thought today are all the poorer for it.