The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Mary Sinclair, Southern Belle Southern Belle is a handsome and interesting book. The belle who gives us this story of her life is Mary Craig Sinclair, wife of...
...The dreadful poverty which afflicted many of the people is sketched in the same sharp and clear fashion...
...He is endlessly tied up with meetings and movements which require countless speeches and pamphlets...
...But Upton has consistently acted as if he were sworn to poverty...
...Not merely does he write a book a year...
...Craig heartily supports all of her husband's efforts to make the world better, but she has never outgrown her love of the South or her appreciation of people as people or of drama as drama...
...One would have guessed that the chance of their getting together was about one in a billion...
...The wedding was the start of one of the most exciting and productive literary love stories on record...
...she will write me a postscript on this subject...
...Keeping up with Upton Sinclair has meant a restless and adventurous life...
...Through endless movements to improve the morals, health and average economic condition of the world, this man has had his wife close beside him...
...I have mentioned in print the fact that he is one of the most uneven of writers...
...The book was practically rewritten...
...Some of his books were on the best-seller lists and made money up in the hundreds of thousands...
...This perfectly straightforward account of life on a Mississippi plantation not too long after the tough times of war and Reconstruction may give many a Northerner an insight he never had...
...In books like Oil, Boston and King Coal, there are long passages which are magnificent and in between are sections which lack any sort of literary distinction...
...If I am lucky...
...The belle who gives us this story of her life is Mary Craig Sinclair, wife of Upton Sinclair...
...In a way, of course, this is as much a biography of Upton Sinclair as it is an autobiography of his wife...
...All of the differences between the Northern reformer and the Southern aristocrat were finally ironed out or simply disregarded...
...There is one mystery about Upton's books which might have been cleared up by this family narrative...
...I feel sure that some of Upton's other books have had the benefit of this sort of dual authorship...
...It is easy for Yankee liberals to make fun of the great plantations, the wide lawns, the porticoed houses, the quietly moving and soft-spoken old Negro servants...
...Their friendships, their social battles, their arguments, their interest in all sorts of notions, theories and movements, their movements from state to state and from town to town—all of them are sketched in rapid and simple prose...
...The author could not resist so powerful a combination...
...I have been inclined to attribute this lack of consistent quality to the rapidity with which the man works...
...In this book, each of them gets a short, unpretentious portrait...
...But we do not know which parages, the good ones or the bad ones, are those for which Man Craig is responsible...
...If it should happen that this book (which, by the way, is published by Crown, contains 407 pages and will cost you $5) becomes popular, it is likely to have one good effect which is far from the author's mind...
...We are passing through a time when the South needs friends...
...King Coal, for example, had been turned down by four or five publishers...
...The "wretchedly poor and ignorant people" whom Mrs...
...The cooperation of these two is to this day of the deepest and most devoted sort...
...For she made heavy contributions to most of his books...
...The story that results from this union of the blue and the gray is pure romance...
...It seems as if most of those who had a hand in creating the atmosphere of the first half of the 20th century had some sort of dealings with Upton Sinclair...
...Through it all, Craig has faithfully worked her way...
...Even now, when she has finished her autobiography, she is still looking for adventure around the next turn in the road...
...But to Mary Craig this was the normal way of life without any special coloration except that which was given by a child's pleasure...
...She and the publisher agreed...
...Then Mary Craig went to work...
...Jefferson Davis called "clay-eaters" lived not too far away from the gracious home set among the moss-bedecked live oaks...
...He has never been happy until the last dollar has been spent and he is once more comfortably in debt...
...Finally, George P. Brett of Mac-millan sent it back and explained his reasons in detail...
...And the chief conviction with which I have closed the book is that old Uppie, as he is called in this narrative, is just about the luckiest chap in the world...
...This literary effort is no underhanded attempt at reform...
...In the early days of this century, he was a rather gaunt and over-eager reformer-writer in New York, and Craig, as Upton calls her, was a lovely girl dancing the happy hours away down in Mississippi...
...If Upton has assisted in the production of Southern Belle, he is still left deeply in debt to Craig...
...For a man so engaged, it is simply impossible to do the necessary work of revision...
...And people—reformers, writers, artists, capitalists, politicians, rich widows and playboys—crowds of them are here, especially those on the crest of the progressive wave...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 51
