The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

angrily, and then weeping hopelessly; declaring that she “could not go on, but prayed for the strength to be delivered from her misery”; to the horror of her husband, Meta had dared to press the barrel of a revolver against her forehead, and could not be persuaded to surrender the weapon to Upton for at least ten agonized minutes.

      At this time, their infant son was sleeping in his cradle in the next room.

      So, the immediate crisis had passed. But Upton was left stunned, demoralized and confused; as dazed as if he’d been struck a blow to the head with that very revolver, that his wife had brought with her when they’d married. (That is, Meta had brought the weapon with her in secret, that had belonged to her father, an ex–army officer whom Upton had not yet met.)

      Yet, Upton was resolved to go about his domestic duties, and fulfill his Saturday’s shopping and errands in town, as if nothing were wrong; for his wife’s moods were so mercurial, it might well be that, when he spoke with her again, later that day, nothing really was wrong, and Meta would have forgotten her distress of the previous night.

      Still, she had come to dislike the “idyllic surroundings” in which the young couple was living, in the countryside near Princeton; and each meal prepared in the bleak kitchen with its wood-burning stove and hand-pump sink, was a plunge into the unknown, as each effort of nursing a colicky baby was fraught with the possibility of disaster.

      “I think that I am not a good mother,” Meta had begun to lament, “as I am not a good revolutionary. If this were the French Revolution, I should be guillotined.” Her humor was senseless, to Upton. Her laughter was harsh, and upsetting—not the sweet throaty laughter of the young woman with whom Upton Sinclair had fallen in love, only two years before.

      The future, which had seemed so promising to Upton, was now uncertain; like the progress of Socialism in the capitalist societies of Europe and America, precarious and somewhat haphazard, unpredictable as a vast game of chance. It was evident that reform was needed on every side, from the shame of child-labor in factories throughout the entire country, to the debased and dehumanizing conditions of the Southern Negroes, whose lives were hardly improved from the slavery of their grandparents. Yet, how should he and his fellow Socialists confront such a massive entity? Had he the requisite courage?

      Brooding upon these matters, Upton lost track of time; it was like him, to lapse into a sort of waking fugue, from which the baby’s crying or his wife’s sharp voice would wake him, scarcely knowing where he was. On the Nassau sidewalk, he was being jostled by pedestrians, who stood about gazing and gaping at the now shut front doors of the First Presbyterian Church across the street, where the private wedding ceremony must have been in progress. The stately procession of motor vehicles and carriages had ended; the select wedding party was all inside the church, it seemed.

      “I hope they will be happier than Meta and I have been. I hope it isn’t the institution of marriage that is the dilemma, but only just our passing—transient—moods . . .”

      There was a murmur in the crowd, as, across the street, the wide white doors of the church were flung open; and a young woman in a wedding gown and a man in formal attire quickly descended the stone steps—could this be the bride and groom, so soon? The young woman wore a wedding gown of dazzling silken-white beauty, with a long train that trailed against the grimy pavement; the gentleman, a formal coat and tails, and white gloves, and a high top hat that gave him a grotesque sort of height, like one on stilts. Despite the elegance of their clothing, this newlywed couple moved with an air of clumsy haste, even of urgency, as if in flight; climbing into a brougham that awaited them at the curb, a carriage of another era, drawn by four horses—four! (And each of these horses a splendid specimen, Upton saw—purely black, with high heads, braided manes and tails, and not the smallest patch of white at their forelegs or ankles to distract the admiring eye.) Such was the young Socialist’s somber mood, he failed to respond in his customary way to this display of capitalist greed, but sadly wondered how so lovely a young woman, probably not twenty years old, should have been aligned with a gentleman so singularly repulsive!—the bridegroom being at least three times her age, squat-bodied, flaccid-faced, with a face like a toad’s.

      Upton, who kept a journal hidden away beneath the floorboards of his writing-cabin, rehearsed what he would write there, when he returned home; for very few minutes of the young writer’s life were “lost”—that is, would fail to be converted into useful prose, for future reference, if not for publication.

      Revolutionary theory isn’t required to reason that such a marriage is a forced one. The bride has been SOLD—like chattel. Shame to her family, and to all her tribe! For all her youth and angelic beauty, she shall soon regret her life.

      ONCE IN MOTION, afoot, Upton soon lost himself in the very mundane nature of his errands, making his way along crowded Nassau Street, along Chambers, and Bank, and Witherspoon; frequently consulting his notes for the morning: flour, sugar, cornmeal, eggs, soap, bread, tea, barbershop, library—this last underscored several times, for Upton was immersed in a Civil War novel of “Socialist ideology,” and had come to reside near Princeton University primarily to use the university’s special historical archives. (Does it strike the reader as ironic, that Upton Sinclair of all persons should wish to peruse the library holdings of Princeton University, while inwardly denouncing the institution as a bastion of Caucasian privilege; still more, that such covert behavior contradicted the secret principle of Socialism: NO COMPROMISE WITH THE ENEMY.)

      How Upton Sinclair, author of the youthfully ambitious King Midas and the misguided creator of the hoax-experiment The Journal of Arthur Stirling, came to live near Princeton, New Jersey, is a complex tale on the surface; yet, beneath, fairly simple—being penniless, after the failure of his first two books, he had entered into a financial arrangement with the wealthy Socialist George D. Herron, in which he and his family would be supported at thirty dollars a month, in surroundings very different from their pestilent garret room in New York City, while Upton labored at a Civil War trilogy destined to convert the masses to Socialism. The first novel, Manassas, was completed; the second, Gettysburg , was well under way; with Appomattox yet to come: the very pinnacle, Upton believed, of Socialist vision. Neither Upton Sinclair nor his sponsor Mr. Herron could doubt that the trilogy would have a vast popular appeal, if the masses were made aware of it, and urged to read it; for had not Jack London a remarkable success, with similar “popular”—“adventure”—materials. Though there was always frustration in trying to convert the downtrodden, who clutched to their hearts the delusions of the ruling class as if such delusions could be their own.

      The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn’t want to put restraints on “robber barons”—he might become one, one day!—so Upton mused, and would inscribe in his journal that night.

      On such matters Upton had often lectured Meta, in the early months of their marriage. Particularly, Upton was given to quoting Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—Only where the State ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous.

      Though Upton knew himself ideologically estranged from Princeton, indeed an enemy alien in its midst, nonetheless he and Meta had several times strolled, on twilit evenings, along leafy Prospect Street, in order to overhear undergraduates singing in their palatial eating clubs—“Why, the boys sound like angels! How is it possible?” Meta exclaimed; or in the yet more sumptuous West End of the village, where great old houses from Revolutionary times were to be seen: Maidstone, Mora, Pembroke, Arnheim, Wheatsheaf, Westland (said to be the home of ex-President Grover Cleveland, on Hodge Road) and, not least Crosswicks Manse, dimly visible from Elm Road. Taking care not to be swayed by the architecture of these grand houses, or the society to which it belonged; for all wealth sprang from the labor of others, wage-slaves to the machine. This would come about, Upton said, when the “historic phase of classes” had completed itself. So, while Meta listened, Upton lectured her on the threefold dialectic of Marx and Engels, the St. Simonean concept of class struggle, and the Smith-Ricardo labor theory of value; and those eminent predecessors frequently cited by Marx and Engels: Fourier, Owen, Feuerbach, Hegel. It couldn’t have been an accident, Upton said excitedly, that both Marx and Darwin published revolutionary books in the single year 1859; nor an