The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

Spake Zarathustra fell by chance into his hands—“In an hour, my life was changed.” For it seemed clear to him, as to an increasing number of contemporaries, that the future would see Zarathustra as the true savior of mankind—“The Jesus Christ of bourgeois Christianity being discredited.”

      Closing his eyes, so moved, Upton recited for Meta several exhilarating passages of Zarathustra, that couldn’t fail to sway anyone of sensibility; ending with the thrilling words—“ ‘A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised by a little poverty!’ ”

      To which Meta said, “Then we are much praised, I guess! For we are more than a little poor.”

      WHY HIS YOUNG WIFE wept so much, and allowed herself to sink into sickly depressive states, Upton didn’t know, for his temperament was entirely different: he liked to think of himself as a go-getter. So he felt constrained to lightly chide her, for her immersion in the self-serving throes of private life while the Revolution was in the making, and needed all their energies. Wasn’t there the prospect of the Good Time Coming, when the working class would go to the voting polls, and overthrow the existing bourgeois government, and seize the means of production, and precipitate the classless and stateless society which Marx had predicted? “No matter how poor we are, or how much we are made to suffer, so long as we know the future, Meta, that is enough.”

      “But we don’t ‘suffer’ nearly as much as most people,” Meta said, hesitantly, “like Negroes, and the poorest immigrants. And we can read—there is always the prospect of escape, through books.”

      “Books are not a means of ‘escape,’ Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.”

      Upton had spoken curtly, for, though he often lectured Meta on the particular injustices endured by Negroes and by poor immigrants, he did not like her to seem to contradict him when he was in his idealist mood.

      He’d been surprised and gratified—very surprised, and very gratified—by the unexpected response his novelistic exposé of the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, was receiving in its serialized form in the Socialist publication Appeal to Reason; the editor himself had expressed amazement at the newspaper’s mounting sales, and predicted more remarkable things for the future. (Upton hadn’t wanted to over-excite Meta and raise false hopes, but several New York publishers, including the capitalist bastions Macmillan and Doubleday, had expressed interest in publishing the novel in book form; and it had begun to seem not merely a fantasy, that Upton might soon have the means to pursue cherished goals: producing a play, founding a magazine, organizing a Socialist society in Brooklyn.)

      It was true that the “idyllic romance” of the New Jersey countryside had turned somewhat sour, for life in the ramshackle old farmhouse was arduous, though conditions had been much worse when the young couple and newborn son had to spend their first Princeton winter in a tar-paper-insulated cabin heated by a single wood-burning stove and all were freezing, and sickly much of the time. (If it had not been for the charity of the landlord-farmer and his wife, little David might have died of the croup; but on the coldest, most bitter nights, the young Sinclair family was invited to sleep in the farmer’s house, where it was reasonably heated, if not precisely “warm.”) Now, though they were living in a farmhouse of their own, it was a very primitive dwelling, with a roof that leaked, and rotted floorboards, and mice that scrambled about inside the walls; and it was so, Upton’s nerves were unusually sensitive to the baby’s near-ceaseless whimpering and crying, that distracted him from his concentration. And so, in warmer weather, Upton returned to the tar paper cabin, to work in solitude, on the ambitious Gettysburg. (So devoted was Upton Sinclair to his work, he’d resolved never to spend less than twelve hours a day at his desk, with the unfortunate but necessary consequence that Meta was obliged to milk the cow, that had come with the farmhouse; and deal with a flock of mangy chickens, that yielded very few eggs; and attempt to protect the meager fruits of a small orchard and garden from armies of worms, insects, and slugs that infested them in overlapping shifts. Upton sympathized with Meta’s frustration, as with her exhaustion; but he did not condone her frequently voiced despair—if they were to one day help found a Socialist colony it would be in a rural environment, and so the present farm work was excellent training.

      Upton was made to feel guilty, thus to feel resentful, when Meta complained of being “lonely”—and “bored”; for hadn’t she Upton, and little David, and the farmer’s wife to speak with; and any number of Socialist comrades with whom she might correspond, as Upton did, daily. But, Meta pleaded, she yearned for a change of scene, even for the small novelty of riding in the “moth-ridden” surrey into town; yet strangely, Meta often became over-excited when dressing “for town,” as Upton was clumsily hitching up the mare, and declared that she couldn’t come with him after all—her breath was too short, or her heart racing, or a “trouble in her womb” had flared up. (At this time, Meta suffered from a malady of the female reproductive organs, a result of the fourteen-hour labor she had endured in the poorly staffed maternity ward at Bellevue, for which she’d been advised, by a Socialist comrade-doctor, to take Lydia Pinkham’s Compound, and avoid red meats. And not to become pregnant again until she was in stronger health.)

      Yet, there was the hope of Revolution to come—soon. The probable date was now set for 1910, by Socialist theoreticians whom Upton Sinclair most respected.

      FREQUENTLY IN THE months following Upton’s adventures in the Chicago stockyards and slaughterhouses, the young writer succumbed to vivid recollections of those days, that had passed with the swiftness of fever-dreams; going about his errands on the morning of June 4, 1905, he was struck anew by the folly of the bourgeoisie surrounding him, on Princeton’s streets and sidewalks, how these well-to-do individuals resembled beasts doomed for slaughter, all unknowing of their fate. Five years until the Revolution! It would not be heads rolling but fortunes gone up in smoke, tribal delusions exploded.

      Yet, Upton felt a sharp disparity between these individuals and himself: for he wore workingman’s clothing, trousers of some plain inexpensive fabric, a faded shirt; a frayed straw hat on his head, pillaged from the farmer’s barn. And the citizens of Princeton were so well dressed! Only a very few, who must have been common laborers, and most of these dark-skinned, wore clothes like his; house servants of the well-to-do were better dressed, in their fresh-laundered uniforms. He had spent two months in Packingtown, in Chicago, living among the slaughterhouse workers, and badly missed it now. In such places the hellishness of the class struggle is evident to the naked eye while here in gilded Princeton you must delve beneath surfaces, to see with an “uncanny” eye.

      These entries Upton would make in his journal, faithfully each night. One day, the multi-volume Journals of Upton Sinclair would be read by the masses, he hoped.

      Making his way along the Saturday crowds of shoppers on Nassau Street, trying to keep his thoughts vibrant and optimistic, nonetheless Upton found himself thinking obsessively of the scene of the previous night: Meta sitting at the rickety kitchen table, revolver in hand, the long barrel of the weapon pointed at her head—indeed, pressed against the pallid skin at her temple. How vulnerable the poor young woman had looked, at such a moment! It was more telling than nakedness; Upton had wanted to turn his eyes away. He would never forgive Meta’s crude soldier-father for giving his daughter such a weapon, or allowing her to take it from his household, for what purpose Upton couldn’t guess. (He didn’t want to think that Meta’s father believed that Meta would need protection from him.) Her thin cheeks had been streaked with tears; her hand visibly shaking; in a flat hopeless voice she spoke of the contempt she felt for herself, as a “bad mother,” for her failure in being able to pull the trigger.

      A terrible sight, Upton would never forget. And would find very hard to forgive.

      “She is the mother of my son. The poor boy must never know.”

      Distracted, Upton found himself gazing at his lanky reflection in a shop window: a kind of scarecrow, with a battered-looking straw hat. To care little for appearances is very different from being made to realize how eccentric one looks, in the public eye. Like a vagabond he was carrying a few items, his recent purchases, in a contraption that consisted of two wheels, with