Review: Money Writes! by Upton Sinclair

In Mammonart (1925) Upton Sinclair threw down a comprehensive challenge to the received wisdom about the creation, content and valuation of art ("the six great lies"), and above all the extent to which artistic production and the standards of artistic criticism have been dominated by the requirements of ruling elites in "an economic interpretation" of the Western canon which in its early chapters presented a forceful essayistic argument for his position, then proceeded to a grand survey of that canon's writers and works from antiquity to the present day showing how this has been the case at every point. If the survey was uneven in places its selections of authors from differing periods and countries were nonetheless sufficiently balanced that Sinclair could say only so much about the literature of his own time and place, and one may add, the ways in which the age-old economic and social and political forces of which he wrote had shaped it. However, Sinclair did get to say his piece about both the writers of his time, and the conditions which produced them, in a book he published two years later Money Writes! (1927).

The last of the books in the Dead Hand sequence he published over the decade of 1917-1927, Money Writes! is also the shortest, and in contrast with the preceding Dead Hand books Sinclair produced on a foundation of journalistic and scholarly research with an eye to comprehensive coverage of their subject matter (as with, besides Mammonart, his studies of American education and the American press), the most personal--by which I mean that to a much greater degree than the others it derives from his personal experiences and personal observations as he takes up the questions "Just why do so many people want to be writers?" "What enables the aspirant to become 'successful,' as against what enables a writer to produce something of genuine artistic value?" and "What does it mean to walk one path against the other?"

As one who knows Sinclair at all might guess in this subsequent piece of "economic interpretation" his answer to these questions is bound up with the most fundamental aspects of the society in which he lived. For Sinclair the most fundamental fact of American life was economic inequality that was not only extreme but continually rubbed in the faces of those who have least in a way utterly without historical precedent via its mass media. Especially given the combination of how American society treats the "nobodies" who are its vast majority, never missing a chance to add insult to the already scarcely tolerable injury of the have-not; its relentless aspirationalist propagandizing--telling the "nobody" that "You can do it too!" and become a "somebody," and enjoy all the perks of being a somebody, and that they ought to think of that rather than a more just order of affairs; and the way in which careers in the arts are so often presented as a pathway from being a nobody to being a somebody; the plain and simple reality is that such motives have much to do with a many a person's decision to become a writer, or any other sort of artist.

They also have much to do with what writers produce, for in contemporary America as much as at any other point in the millennia Sinclair surveyed in Mammonart artists are expected to propagandize for the powerful as their way of earning their keep and punished if they do not--by those who would pay or not pay them for their work, by the critics who act as the guardians of "respectable" opinion. As Sinclair put it in a chapter allusively titled "Incense to Mammon," the artist can write about anything he likes across the whole of space and time and variety of life, but the sin qua non is that "they must be bourgeois, they must see life from the bourgeois point of view." Thus the artist must glorify riches, and those who have them, and never say anything that might call into question the status quo. Where all this was concerned the path seemed to him even narrower than it had been just a few years earlier, for the 1920s was not just a period of media consolidation and ultra-commercialism carrying further the trend he described in The Brass Check, but as the aftermath of World War I and the Red Scare in the wake of the Russian Revolution, an era of ferocious reaction.

Considering what this means for writers Sinclair reiterates the view he had expressed in Mammonart that artists, being sensitive, are susceptible to propaganda, propaganda for orthodoxy included. (Indeed, Sinclair phrases himself even more strongly here, declaring "[t]he average author" to be "fundamentally . . . a naive and trusting creature--half a child, or the make-believe impulse would not survive in him," with the result that "he believes what the grown-ups tell him, and is impressed by the princes of real life, just as by those in the fairy-tales.") Tending to make them conservative this means that "a great many" of them "do not have to be purchased, but serve privilege gladly and with spontaneous awe." Yet if many writers have no problem falling in line and doing what is expected of them this way, the disparities between the official line they are expected to promote and lived reality is such that what they produce can only be flimsy stuff, with those not so readily or completely falling into line finding themselves in a most awkward situation. Especially in the less free atmosphere prevailing after the war, Sinclair noted, many of these flew from the dilemma posed by knowledge of existing social realities and the obligations they impose on the artist into pessimism ("a symptom of . . . moral break-down," "decay," death, with the pessimism of capitalist art reflecting that "capitalism," since become "the negation of morality in social affairs," was itself dying), or psycho-babble (an age not of Freud, but of Freudians, as Sinclair says, followers of Freud "who pervert his doctrine in spite of all he can do"), or sheer muddle (indeed, "muddlement . . . the ideal of our intellectuals," precisely because no one who recognizes "economic inequality as a cause of social and individual degeneration is permitted to hold any responsible post in capitalist society"). The work resulting from this is likewise of little value, with the obscurity of style to which authors taking these tacks tend only underlining the lack of substance rather than concealing it. And it seems to Sinclair that all this has faced the artist with another dilemma, to, if given the chance to do so, "do well," with any artist of sincerity and intelligence knowing something of what the world really is but opting for the above approaches casting aside their real duty to humanity, squandering their potential, and destroying their souls and their bodies in the process--the cynicism of their course leading to dissolution, artistically and physically. Alternatively sticking to their principles as artists they, in trying to "do good," find themselves walking a path of hardships along which, if ever finding the chance to publish at all, they find themselves shut out of those "platforms" that can make a career, ignored or maligned by critics, and banned in censorious places like Boston, as they pay their bills by "selling insurance or digging the ground," or perhaps "teaching at a country school," which can be no less destructive. (The fate of the "talent that is lonely and without group support," Sinclair notes, tends to be tragic in a variety of ways.)

Along with laying out the big picture of American society and what it means for Art and the Artist in the very best of his vivid and forceful fashion Sinclair, once again, shows what this has meant for individual writers and their individual works as he speaks his piece about some he did discuss in Mammonart (as with Jack London), and many he did not. Of some of those he writes of he does not think very much--like Booth Tarkington, a "'diehard' Tory" who, after "for a generation . . . interpret[ing] the well-to-do classes of the middle west, and mak[ing] them gracious and charming," turned into what would today be considered a right-wing troll with his 1927 novel The Plutocrat.* In figures like Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O'Neill he saw extraordinary talents whose work was limited, even mutilated, in important, unfortunate, ways all too telling of the times. (The great "proletarian playwright" O'Neill, even at this early stage in his career, had grown pessimistic--indeed, the chapter on him the occasion for Sinclair's principal discourse on the subject. The "great-hearted," "clear-sighted," stubbornly "truth-telling" Dreiser also seemed to Sinclair to lack a grasp of the social forces that drove his characters, so much so that Sinclair could imagine one reading An American Tragedy and getting from it nothing more than a "Sunday sermon" teaching that "the wages of sin is death.") This is even more the case with those whose earlier work could seem an indictment of their later production, as in his comparison of the pre-war with the post-war Edith Wharton, or what he says of Sherwood Anderson (the chapter about whom is actually entitled "Muddle," for he seems to Sinclair to embody "muddle" more than anyone else). Those for whom he actually had the most sympathy, it seemed, were the ones of whom we were least likely to have heard of at all, like Gerald Lively, from whose poems in Songs of a Soil Slave Sinclair quotes some extraordinary verse.

It seemed to me that the judgments Sinclair made in this work he will not greatly surprise anyone who read Mammonart. Still, because of the structure and approach of the book Sinclair's personal quirks were more prominent--as with his Puritan streak. A supporter of Prohibition who had seen alcohol destroy many a talented author, he let us know it at such length that I became impatient with his singing about "Mister Booze." Even as one finding less and less value in the irrational and the backward-looking and the obscure, and sympathizing greatly with his critical stance toward such work, Sinclair's impatience with it could seem excessive. Even in his appraisals of particular authors he cited favorably he could appear to me wrong-headed. The example that most quickly leaps to mind I strongly disagree with his view of Dreiser as lacking a grasp of social forces, it seeming to me that just such a grasp was why, as David Walsh put it, his most famous book "presented more clearly" than any work before or since "the grinding up of a human being by the brutal machinery of American capitalist society."

Still, all these seem to me to be comparative quibbles. Sinclair's larger vision of the realities of the America of his time (which, for all his hopes, expectations and efforts is essentially the America of our own time) is indisputable, economic inequality then as it is now the defining fact of societal life, and manifest in the culture in the same ways, with the same implications and temptations and dangers for those who would embark on an artistic career, all as the 1920s can seem an era of artistic freedom for those of the views toward which he was sympathetic compared with the 2020s. (If Sinclair appreciated him less fully than he ought to have done, his era, after all, did produce a Dreiser--all as Sinclair plugged away. What figure of comparable stature today would you compare with either?) Certainly Sinclair's appraisal of the essential naiveté of artists, and the way those forced to "wise up" a bit fly from social realities into a pessimism, psycho-babble and muddle wrapped up in obscurity of style, seems to me a perfect characterization not just of the source and substance of the Modernism of his time, but the continued worship of that Modernism in the century since, reinforced by "cultural Cold War," by the eventual succession of Modernism by postmodernism. (Sinclair tells us that he "ridicule[d]" James Joyce, but at century's end the Modern Library ranked his Ulysses the best English-language novel of the twentieth century to no controversy whatsoever, this no more and no less than what "everyone" expected given that the standards Sinclair and others like him fought against endured.)

Indeed, Sinclair's individual judgments are also far more often right than wrong (as they seemed to be to as he ranged from the essential immaturity of mind of Rudyard Kipling, to the Tory-turned-Troll quality of Tarkington, to the essential meaninglessness of H.L. Mencken's smug cynicism, and much, much else), while Sinclair's ear for poetry particularly impressed me--reflected in how those whose advocacy he took up certainly merit rescuing from the obscurity in which they stand today. (How telling it is of the deranged character of the last century's critical standards that the piffle of a T.S. Eliot should be regarded as the supreme accomplishment of English poetry in his century while a talent such as Lively remains unrecognized!)

Amid it all what Sinclair had to say about not just the artist's works, but the artist's life, rings true again and again, from his telling of his own experience of the slush pile in his youth, to the sad ends to which so many of the writers he discusses came, while knowing why they came to such ends. (In his remarks about both the way the desire to be a "somebody" is the prime mover of many a literary career, and the tragic fate of the unsupported talent Sinclair only says what is obvious to any intelligent person but only very rarely acknowledged in a society preferring stupid clichés instead.) Indeed, when reading this book's earliest chapters I was sure that Money Writes! would rank with Balzac's Lost Illusions and Jack London's Martin Eden as one of those very, very few books which tells the truth about what it really is to be a writer in their time, and in our own time--and as I turned the last page on what is not only the briefest but briskest and most entertaining of Sinclair's Dead Hand books, I regarded myself as having only been confirmed in that judgment.

* As Sinclair put it "the girding of the 'reds'" drove Tarkington "into a sort of 'To hell with you' mood" that had him make a hero out of a virtual caricature of arrogant, trustified wealth acting "the ugly American" during a trip abroad in that book (all of which the press received very favorably indeed).