What Would a Twenty-First Century Edition of Mammonart Include? Some Thoughts

Upton Sinclair's Mammonart is almost a century old--the hundredth anniversary of the book's publication next year.

It seems a natural time to think about how such an effort--one applying the same theory to the literature that was his prime concern--would look today. I found myself thinking especially of how the same Sinclair he wrote that book, rather than the more conservative Sinclair of later years, would, espousing the same views, treat the literature of his time, and the literature of the near-century after he finished the book, particularly insofar as the common valuations of some of those books he discussed have changed since his day, and he did not have a chance in this book to pass judgment on many a book that has since been treated as important.

After the passage of the past century I suspect Sinclair would, with the same mind-set but an awareness of what the century produced, he would permit much of what he said stand, certainly among those writers he thought important enough to merit a chapter then, and would still be thought to merit a chapter now. Of those who are still much read I think his assessments of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, for example, would stand--if he might add to them an expression of exasperation at the continued celebration of those authors a hundred years later.

But much else would change. I imagine, for example, that in the wake of Hitler, Heidegger and the rest he would have a more critical attitude toward Friedrich Nietzsche than he did in his book. He would not bother to mention a writer like the now long forgotten Richard Harding Davis, finding other authors with whose careers he could make the same point.

As for those who became important later, I suspect that Sinclair would have no more use for the Modernists and postmodernists so celebrated during the century than he did for other purveyors of the irrational and anti-rational (like a Coleridge), especially insofar as that irrationalism and anti-rationalism romanticizes evils of its present (as Dostoyevsky did in his view, kneeling before the tyrannies of Czarist Russia), or a historical past whose passing was not to be lamented in the slightest (as Scott did). Believing as he did that great art was popular art Sinclair was also dubious about the unreadable. All this being the case I think he would not worship at the altar of James Joyce, and positively despise a T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound. I think he would also despise the likes of Evelyn Waugh, and Vladimir Nabokov (with the subject matter of the latter's most famous book adding to his distaste). He would not be kinder to D.H. Lawrence, and perhaps not much kinder than that to the writer and work Lawrence rescued, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Still, I think he would devote only so much ink to the lot. Sinclair would probably prefer to spend his time rescuing from the scrap-heap those writers the Modernism/postmodernism-worshipping critics so devalued. I can see this including, besides figures he did cover in his book, like Frank Norris and Jack London, whom critics have treated less kindly since Sinclair's day (and if he was not too modest, himself along with them), others who had not yet risen high enough to warrant space in an effort such as Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck, and that whippersnapper from Yale who mocked at his Helicon Home Colony project in the New York Sun, Sinclair Lewis.* F. Scott Fitzgerald would not need rescuing per se--but I think that writing of him today Sinclair might emphasize aspects of Fitzgerald and his books others tend to overlook.

Sinclair did not give H.G. Wells a chapter in the original, but I think that he might do so today, attending to his realist work, at least. Whether he would appreciate Wells' science fiction, or any writer's, seems a different matter, Sinclair showing little regard for the fantastic, or even just the speculative. (Praising London he had nothing to say about The Iron Heel, while I suspect the train of rightist dystopia which makes up so much of the respectable science fiction would not please him--the work of an Aldous Huxley, still less the work of an Anthony Burgess.) Perhaps the twentieth century would have changed his attitude about that, but then again perhaps not. In either case George Orwell, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, might be too big for him to ignore, but I think his feeling toward Orwell would be complicated--enough so that I do not know whether he would have emphasized Orwell's progressive inclinations, or the conservative, "zealot of pessimism" side of Orwell that made him an icon of Cold War Anti-Communism.

I am less clear on which writers from outside the English-speaking world that he would find worthy. Still, I do not think he would care much for France's existentialists and absurdists--but that he might have a good word for such figures of Germany's "New Objectivity" as Hans Fallada, and maybe a good word for Bertolt Brecht too (if probably more out of respect for his intent than his technique).

I imagine, too, that where the roll of honor is concerned Sinclair would have had a few surprises for us--surprises precisely because so few were paying attention to them in any language beyond the easy suggestions I present here. Who these might be, I think, would make the most interesting speculations of all.

* Upton Sinclair writes of the incident in his examination of American journalism, The Brass Check.