19 End and Beginning
The death of Craig left me with a sense of desolation beyond my power to describe. Hunter and his wife Sally went back to Arizona. The sister and nieces scattered to their homes, and I was in that lovely old house in which every single thing spoke of the woman who had bought it, arranged it, used it—and would never see it again. I had lived in a town for twenty years and never entered a single home; I had no one to speak to but the clerks in the post office, the market, the bank. In my early days I would not have minded that; I had camped alone all summer, in a tent on an island in the St. Lawrence, and again in an “open camp” on an Adirondack lake, and had been perfectly happy. But I no longer had the firm conviction that the future of mankind depended upon the words I was putting on paper; on the contrary, I was obsessed by memories of horror, inescapable, inexcusable. The house was haunted—but I had no other place to go.
For more than seven years, ever since her first heart attack, Craig had been insisting that I could not live alone. It had become a sort of theme song: “Oh, what will you do? What will become of you? You must find some woman to take care of you.” Then she would add, “Oh, don’t let some floozie get hold of you!” My answer was always the same: “I am going to take care of you and keep you alive.” But now she was gone, and I could say it no more.
We had friends, but they were mostly far away; elderly married couples who came to see us once or twice in a year: Sol Lesser, who had produced Thunder Over Mexico for us; Richard Otto, who had run the EPIC campaign for us; Harry Oppenheimer, New York businessman who had promised to come and run the state of California for me if I had had the misfortune to get elected. Now I spent several weeks wondering which of these good friends I should ask to help me find a wife.
For decades I had been a friend and supporter of the New Leader; and every week had read the gay verses of Richard Armour. He had sent me his books, beginning with It All Started with Columbus, and continuing with It All Started with Eve and It All Started with Marx. I was so pleased that I wrote him some lines in his own style; I recall the last two lines:
And if you find that I’m a charmer
You’ll know that I’ve been reading Armour.
He is dean of Scripps College, some twenty miles east of my home; but for many years we did not meet. It happened that Hunter Kimbrough was a classmate of Frederick Hard, president of the college, and Hunter was in the habit of stopping by on his way to and from Arizona. He and Dick Armour became friends, and several months after Craig’s death, Hunter invited Dick and his wife to my home for a picnic lunch. So it was that I met Kathleen Armour, gracious, kind of heart and with a laugh as merry as her husband’s verses.
After days and nights of thinking about it, I composed a letter to Kathleen, putting my plight before her. The unmarried women I knew could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and not one of the four was suitable. In a woman’s college Kathleen must know many; I didn’t mean a pupil, but a teacher, or member of such a family.
I received a cordial reply, and soon I was invited to Kathleen’s home. There I met the sister of Hunter’s friend, Fred Hard, president of the college. She was a widow, and her years were seventy-nine, appropriate to my eighty-three. She was twice a mother, once a grandmother, and three times a great-grandmother. She was of a kind disposition, with a laugh as happy as Kathleen’s and an abundance of good sense. She was born in South Carolina and had lived in several parts of the United States. She was well read and was part of a cultured environment. She was staying in the lovely home of the college president, keeping it during summer while he and his wife were in Europe. Her name was May, and Dick Armour had written her some verses:
For her, two cities vie and jockey:
First Claremont claims her, then Milwockey.
The West and Middle West both crave her,
To both she brings her special savor,
For in the one or in the other’n,
She’s still herself, completely Southern.
But here alone we can rejoice
With lifted hearts and lifted voice
And happily and smugly say:
When it is August, we have May.
I invited her to my home. The large downstairs rooms were dark, she said; and I pointed out to her that the long velvet curtains could be thrown back. In the living room are four double windows, from floor almost to ceiling, and in the dining room are five more of the same; the rooms are practically one, because the wide double doors roll back into the walls. But she said she would be lonely in that half acre of gardens surrounded by a high hedge of two hundred eugenia trees. She said she might marry me if I would come to live in Claremont; but I saw myself living in a town full of college boys and girls who would come to ask for interviews, and who would consider me snobbish if I put a fence around my house. I do my work outdoors, weather permitting—as it does most of the time in southern California.
So, back I went to my lonely existence. Hunter was disturbed, for to him the Hard family represented the best of culture, that of the South. Maybe the Armours had something to do with it—I did not ask—but I met May at their house again, and she was cordial. More time passed, and there came a birthday letter, telling me of her interest in my work and wishing me happiness. So I went to see her again; this time I did not stand on ceremony, but put my arms around her, and it was all settled in a few minutes.
II
We were to be married in the Episcopal Church, and the rector was called in to hear my story. I had obtained a divorce half a century before, I being the innocent party in the suit. I had been remarried by an Episcopal clergyman, on the banks of the Rappahannock River—with jonquils blooming on the riverbank and behind me the heights on which twenty thousand Union soldiers had given their lives. The rector in Claremont said that if the church had given its sanction once, it would not refuse it again; so all was well.
We wanted the wedding as quiet as possible. All my life I have sought publicity—but for books and causes, not for myself, and if we could have had our way, no one but the family would have known. But the law in California requires that both parties appear at the county office building and sign an application for a license—and this two days before the marriage can take place. The license is valid anywhere in the state; so I had an idea: “Let’s go into another county, where there’s less chance of our being known.” We motored to San Bernardino, where two kind ladies gave us the blanks and instructions, and gave no sign that there was anything unusual about us. But soon after we got back to Claremont, the telephone calls began, and we knew that all the cats were out of the bag. Later we learned that courthouse reporters make it a practice to inspect the lists daily before closing time.
The clergyman had agreed that only members of the family and half a dozen invited friends were to be admitted: the Armours, of course, and the Sol Lessers, and the Richard Ottos of the far-off EPIC campaign. Dr. Hard gave his sister away, and the bride’s granddaughter, Barbara Sabin, was matron of honor. Hunter acted as my “best man.” The doors were guarded, and the morning ceremony was performed with the customary age-old dignity. But when the bride and groom emerged from a side door, there was what appeared to be a mob. A flood of questions was poured out, and cameras before our eyes were making little clicking noises. There was a crony of the far-off EPIC days, Hans Rutzebeck, a sailor who had written a grand book about his life, The Mad Sea. He had had plenty of time to talk to the reporters, and when I greeted him his claims of friendship were confirmed.
So the story was lively, and it appeared in all the evening papers. More detailed stories with photographs were in the morning papers all over the world. I do not exaggerate; friends, and strangers too, cut them out and sent them to us from half a dozen capitals of Europe, and from Brazil, Tokyo, India, Australia. College president’s sister, aged 79, marries muckrake man, aged 83—you can see how it was, and May was amused. She even got an album in which to keep the clippings for her great-grandchildren.
So this story has a happy ending. We both enjoy good health, and age does not bother us. We live with our books and papers in a wonderful fireproof house that a rich banker built, got tired of, and sold cheaply some twenty years ago. There is a half acre of land, completely surrounded by the hedge of eugenia trees. There are twenty-one kinds of fruit trees, and instead of lawns there are lantana and sweet alyssum, which do not have to be mowed. There is a camellia bush, and a golden oleander as big as a cottage; there are rosebushes, an iris bed, poppy beds that are a dream—and when I get tired of hammering on a typewriter, I go out and pull weeds from the poppies.
Now the house is fixed up May’s way; the velvet curtains are drawn back, and there are bright curtains and new paint in spots and everything is gay. Her friends come and carry her off to luncheons and musicales and exhibitions of paintings; in the evenings we read some of the fifty magazines that I take, or play the word game called Scrabble, which she has taught me. She is ahead one day, and I the next.
III
Ordinarily I do not attend luncheons or dinners—my diet of rice and fruit cuts down my social life. But as I write, my wife and I have just returned from a trip to the East that was one long round of luncheons and dinners. (I kept to my diet—and probably left a trail of puzzled waiters behind me.)
Some months ago the New York chapter of the American Newspaper Guild wrote to inform me that a Page One Award in Letters was to be presented to me and invited me to attend the ceremony late in April. Then, shortly afterward, came a letter from Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, telling me that the UAW was also giving me an award—at its annual convention in Atlantic City early in May—and would like to present it to me in person. I could scarcely resist two such invitations.
The trip by air was a miracle to me. I had made only two short flights before. Now I saw the whole of the United States spread under me like a map, and I marveled at the nearness of the mountaintops and the vast spread of the plains. On the bare, brown deserts I observed great black spots, and I puzzled my head as to what could be growing on a desert floor; until I realized suddenly that these were the shadows of clouds, also beneath me. It was fascinating to observe how the shape of every spot corresponded exactly to the shape of its cloud. In the Middle West the farms were all laid out in perfect rectangles with the quarter sections clearly distinguishable; but as we got farther east, the irregularities increased until everything was chaos, including the roads.
All kinds of enterprises like to make use of celebrities, and the airport was no exception. The management, learning of my age, had taken the precaution to send a wheelchair to the plane. When May saw it she said to the porter, “You get in and let him wheel you.”
My son, David, was on hand with his wife and his car. An engineer, he publishes pamphlets about his technical discoveries of which his father is unable to understand a sentence. One of the problems he has solved is that of spinning a plastic thread so fine that one spool of it would reach all the way around the world. Both May and I are fortunate, in that we can love and admire our “in-laws.”
The American Newspaper Guild presented me with a handsome gold figure, which now stands on our mantel. The citation runs as follows:
Page One Award in Letters to Upton Sinclair, author of hundreds of books and papers, including The Jungle and The Brass Check, over a span of 60 years, all of which contributed immeasurably to the advancement of democracy and public enlightenment. 1962.
Some sixteen hundred people were present, and I made a short speech.
IV
A few days later David and his wife drove us down to Atlantic City, where the sixty-five hundred delegates of the United Automobile Workers throughout the world were having a week’s assembly. I had never met either Walter Reuther or his younger brother, Victor, and this was a pleasant occasion for both me and my family. Present also was Michael Angelo Musmanno, who as a young lawyer had plunged into a last-hour effort to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. A wonderfully kindhearted and exuberant person, now close to the seventies, he has become a judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. When I asked him how this miracle had come about, he answered with a smile: “It is an elective office.”
On a Sunday evening we found ourselves confronting the sixty-five hundred cheering delegates, many of whom no doubt had read Flivver King. It was a dinner affair, and I found myself seated between my wife and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, whom I had not seen since a visit to the White House in 1935, just after the EPIC campaign. There was plenty of time for conversation, especially since I had had my rice-and-fruit meal an hour or so earlier.
Walter Reuther presented to me the Social Justice Award of the United Automobile Workers—an ebony plaque that carries this citation:
With admiration and affection and in thankful appreciation for the great moral courage and social conscience that motivated your writings as you exposed the inhuman exploitation of labor in American industrial jungles. Your life and your work have contributed immeasurably to the extension of the frontiers of Social Justice. May 1962.
In my speech of acceptance I told how I had made a socialist, or a near-socialist, out of Henry Ford’s wife; and how, when he saw that he could not win the strike, he made all his plans to close up his plants—and was only deterred from it at the last moment by his wife’s announcement that if he carried out this evil purpose she would leave him. The story was new to those delegates, and I will not attempt to describe the enthusiasm with which they received it.
Mrs. Roosevelt also gave one of her warm-hearted talks, and so it was a worthy occasion to those labor men and their wives. I imagined that newspaper readers might also be interested in it, but I examined the New York morning and afternoon papers and discovered that they had nothing whatever to say about the affair. I am used to newspaper silence about my doings, but I had really thought they would have something to say about the eloquence of Eleanor Roosevelt, and of the welcome she had received from that vast throng. But not one word in the Monday morning and afternoon papers! I paid a call on the labor editor of the New York Times, and he was cordial—he took me about and introduced me to several other editors—but he had nothing to say about the paper’s failure to say anything about the UAW assemblage.
The award from the UAW included a check for a thousand dollars. I had written Walter that I would use the money to put a copy of Flivver King in the libraries of all the branches of the union throughout the world. In Atlantic City Victor Reuther told me that they planned to reissue Flivver King themselves and make it available to all their members. So I shall use the money to put in the union libraries copies of this present book and of the memorial edition of Southern Belle.
V
Meanwhile, in New York, I met many old friends. Also, I was asked to appear on several TV programs, and my interviews with Eric Goldman, Mike Wallace, and Barry Gray were great fun. One of the most unusual occasions was a luncheon given by my faithful agent, Bertha Klausner, who invited only those people who are working, in one way or another, with my various books—publishing or reissuing or dramatizing them for stage or screen. And there was a roomful of them!
Happily, there seems to be a revival of interest in my books. The Jungle is now in paperback, and students are reading it and teachers are talking about it in their classes. World’s End and Dragon’s Teeth, two of the Lanny Budd volumes, are also in paperback. So is Manassas, under the title of Theirs Be the Guilt. Mental Radio, my precise and careful study of Craig’s demonstrations of her telepathic power, has just been reissued by a publisher of scientific books, with the original preface by William McDougall and, in addition, the preface that Albert Einstein wrote for the German edition. The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of Social Protest is to be republished with modern additions. And A Personal Jesus, an attempt at a modern insight, is also being reissued.
Our Lady is being dramatized. Another Pamela is being converted into a musical comedy. Walt Disney is now setting out to make a movie of The Gnomobile, my story for children, which is also going to be reissued with gay illustrations from the French edition. And there is to be a TV series drawn from the Lanny Budd books. I cannot attempt to control this last and can only hope for the best.