Reviews for Love's Pilgrimage

The average rating for Love's Pilgrimage based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-04-14 00:00:00 Agnieszka Flizik Oh Upton. You really are insufferable. Sinclair's socialism is so tinged with Victorian moralism that this is quite a tortuous read. What pity I have for Meta Fuller!

Review # 2 was written on 2019-10-11 00:00:00 Kevin Walter After a while reading through, the familiarity of the theme is uncanny, although not in details; at some point it suddenly becomes clear that this tale of travails is of every artist of every art, whether musician or someone in performing arts in theatre or films, or painting or sculpture, even architecture at that; one is familiar with lives of Van Gogh and Frank Lloyd Wright, and others who went through much on their quest of art. The unfamiliarity of details of the tale here stems from lives of writers of literature being rarely written in such details of their strife between struggle to survive while not giving in to demands of world for less than their excellence, and their ability to live through the perjury and loneliness that's their lot, until they find success. One somehow thinks of writers as being able to do the writing after a full day of working for survival, giving up the trivial pursuit of relaxation that occupy others during waking hours not spent in needs of earnings. Within a page or two, a reader familiar with life of author might begin to wonder if this work, at least so far, has roots in early years of the author. As one reads on, it's clear that it is, in fact, pretty much Upton Sinclair's own story, of the first few years of his beginning, both as an author and as part of a couple, a couple very much in love with one another and with an ideal of art and intellectual life, of growth of selves and soul, but with very different personalities, and diverse needs. Most of the story ďeals with the strife of the author, and travails of his love as seen through his point of view, which eventually turns to a comparatively balanced one between the two, so much so, eventually a reader might end up sympathetic more with her than him, although his scrupulous fairness leaves little scope to blame - except in his determination about not taking a steady well paid work to support his wife and child, and thus put them through hardships, all because his determination that he'd only work at his writing, and that according strictly to his highest lofty views as per his understanding. The novel format he's employed in telling what's basically his own story, has a further device to veil the names of characters, a simple one. It begins with the couple reminiscing at the place they met, and ends where they lived for years, as they presumably look back over their togetherness and years of love; but they pick names - Thyrsis and Corydon - out of old, presumably Greek, legends, each one for themselves, and are referred throughout this book only by those names. So if one has read The Brass Check and The Journalof Arthur Stirling, one has a certainty that this must be an autobiographical novel, but the author holds back from admitting it, and one has no idea if it's all literally factual. If one is familiar with this author, one may safely bet it is, as seen by him. At the end the couple mentions cryptically that it's the story of their love and togetherness and marriage, of first five years of it, and next five years would make another book; they discuss the title and main salient points, giving tantalising glint, but that's all. The author doesn't say if he did write it, after all, nor how they could be so at peace at the point about being together, looking back, while having come to an end. ............. "He was full of old-fashioned ideas, which would take the quaintest turns of reactionism; his politics were summed up in the phrase that he "would rather vote for a nigger than a Republican"; but then, in the same breath, he would announce some fine and noble sentiment, out of the traditions of a forgotten past. He was the soul of courtesy to women, and of loyalty to friends. He worshipped General Lee and the old time "Virginia gentleman"; and those with whom he lived, and for whose unclean profits he sold himself, never guessed the depths of his contempt for all they stood for. They had the dollars, they were on top; but some day the nemesis of Good-breeding would smite them'the army of the ghosts of Gentility would rise, and with "Marse Robert" and "Jeb" Stuart at their head, would sweep away the hordes of commercialdom. "Thyrsis saw a great deal of this forgotten chivalry. His nursery had been haunted by such musty phantoms; and when he first came to the Northern city, he stayed at a hotel which was frequented by people who lived in this past'old ladies who were proud and prim, and old gentlemen who were quixotic and humorous, young ladies who were "belles," and young gentlemen who aspired to be "blades". It was a world that would have made happy the soul of any writer of romances; but to Thyrsis in earliest childhood the fates had given the gift of seeing beneath the shams of things, and to him this dead Aristocracy cried out loudly for burial. There was an incredible amount of drunkenness, and of debauchery scarcely hidden; there was pretense strutting like a peacock, and avarice skulking like a hound; there were jealousy, and base snobbery, and raging spite, and a breath of suspicion and scandal hanging like a poisonous cloud over everything. These people came and went, an endless procession of them; they laughed and danced and gossiped and drank their way through the boy's life, and unconsciously he judged them, and hated them and feared them. It was not by such that his destiny was to be shaped." "Most of them were poor; not an honest poverty, but a sham and artificial poverty'the inability to dress as others did, and to lose money at "bridge" and "poker", and to pay the costs of their self-indulgences. As for Thyrsis and his parents, they always paid what they owed; but they were not always able to pay it when they owed it, and they suffered all the agonies and humiliations of those who did not pay at all. There was scarcely ever a week when this canker of want did not gnaw at them; their life was one endless and sordid struggle to make last year's clothing look like new, and to find some boarding-house that was cheaper and yet respectable. There was endless wrangling and strife and worry over money; and every year the task was harder, the standards lower, the case more hopeless." He might be describing White Russians, but there is a difference, and these are U.S. "Southerners", living forever psychologically in a romanticised past, with contempt for life past civil war. "There were rich relatives, a world of real luxury up above'the thing that called itself "Society". And Thyrsis was a student and a bright lad, and he was welcome there; he might have spread his wings and flown away from this sordidness. But duty held him, and love and memory held him still tighter. For his father worshipped him, and craved his help; to the last hour of his dreadful battle, he fought to keep his son's regard'he prayed for it, with tears in his eyes and anguish in his voice. And so the boy had to stand by. And that meant that he grew up in a torture-house, he drank a cup of poison to its bitter dregs. To others his father was merely a gross little man, with sordid ideas and low tastes; but to Thyrsis he was a man with the terror of the hunted creatures in his soul, and the furies of madness cracking their whips about his ears. "There was only one ending possible'it worked itself out with the remorseless precision of a machine. The soul that fought was smothered and stifled, its voice grew fainter and feebler; the agony and the shame grew hotter, the suffering more cruel, the despair more black. Until at last they found him in a delirium, and took him to a private hospital; and thither went Thyrsis, now grown to be a man, and sat in a dingy reception-room, and a dingy doctor came to him and said, "Do you wish to see the body?" And Thyrsis answered, in a low voice, "No."" And herein one finds the genesis of budding socialist that young Upton Sinclair began to grow towards becoming, with a hatred for capitalism and much more so for the vice business of the city, eventually expressed in the trilogy about N.Y. city - The Metropolis, The Moneychangers, and The Macine - "Thyrsis could not have told how soon in life this sense had come to him. In his earliest childhood he had known that his father was preyed upon, just as certainly as any wild thing in the forest. At first the enemies had been saloon-keepers, and wicked men who tempted him to drink with them. The names of these men were household words to him, portents of terror; they peopled his imagination as epic figures, such as Black Douglas must have been to the children of the Northern Border. "But then, with widening intelligence, it became certain social forces, at first dimly apprehended. It was the god of "business"'before which all things fair and noble went down. It was "business" that kept vice triumphant in the city; it was because of "business" that the saloons could not be closed even on Sunday, so that the father might be at home one day in seven. And was it not in search of "business" that he was driven forth to loaf in hotel-lobbies and bar-rooms? "Who was to blame for this, Thyrsis did not know; but certain men made profit of it'and these, too, were ignoble men. He knew this; for now and then his father's employers would honor the little family with some kind of an invitation, and they would have to swallow their pride and go. So Thyrsis grew up, with the sense of a great evil loose in the world; a wrong, of which the world did not know. And within him grew a passionate longing to cry aloud to others, to open their eyes to this truth!" ............. Then there is Corydon, the other youth this story began with, and now returns to:- "This girl was like a beautiful flower, Thyrsis told himself'like all the flowers that had gone before her, and all those that would come after, from generation to generation. She fitted so perfectly into her environment, she grew so calmly and serenely; she wore pretty dresses, and helped to serve tea, and was graceful and sweet'and with never an idea that there was anything in life beyond these things. So Thyrsis pondered as he went his way, complacent over his own perspicacity; and got not even a whiff of smoke from the volcano of rebellion and misery that was seething deep down in her soul! "The choosers of the unborn souls had played a strange fantasy here; they had stolen one of the daughters of ancient Greece, and set her down in this metropolis of commercialdom. For Corydon might have been Nausikaa herself; she might have marched in the Panathenaic procession, with one of the sacred vessels in her hands; she might have run in the Attic games, bare-limbed and fearless. Hers was a soul that leaped to the call of joy, that thrilled at the faintest touch of beauty. Above all else, she was born for music'she could have sung so that the world would have remembered it. And she was pent in a dingy boarding-house, with no point of contact with anything about her'with no human soul to whom she could whisper her despair! "They sent her to a public-school, where the sad-eyed drudges of the traders came to be drilled for their tasks. They harrowed her with arithmetic and grammar, which she abhorred; they taught her patriotic songs, about a country to which she did not belong. And also, they sent her to Sunday-school, which was worse yet. She had the strangest, instinctive hatred of their religion, with all that it stood for. The sight of a clergyman with his vestments and his benedictions would make her fairly bristle with hostility. They talked to her about her sins, and she did not know what they meant; they pried into the state of her soul, and she shrunk from them as if they had been hairy spiders. Here, too, they taught her to sing'droning hymns that were a mockery of all the joys of life." ............. And here one sees the genesis of Sylvia's Marriage. Thyrsis grappled with transition to manhood, having been admitted to college at a much earlier age, by speaking to various young men - one set for a life in church, another of what the author calls scientific but really a cross between materialistic and philosophical bent, yet another a common one and this next one from a fraternity house, scion of a rich family. "Thyrsis was appalled at the hardness and the utter ruthlessness of this man'he saw him as a young savage turned loose to prey in a civilized community. He had the most supreme contempt for his victims'that was what they were made for, and he paid them their price. Nor was this just because they were women, it was a matter of class; the young man had a mother and sisters, to whom he applied quite other standards. But Thyrsis found himself wondering how long, with this contagion raging among the fathers and the sons, it would be possible to keep the mothers and the daughters sterilized. ............. And perhaps here is a key to his quests in regions he nevertheless dares not trust himself:- "He took to keeping diaries and writing exhortations to himself. Because he could no longer use the theological prayers he had been taught, he fashioned new invocations for himself: prayers to the unknown sources of his vision, to the new powers of his own soul'"the undiscovered gods," as he called them. Above all he prayed to his vision of the maiden who waited the issue of this battle, and held the crown of victory in her keeping'" For, as anyone familiar with the author's World's End series knows, Upton Sinclair goes on about visions, psychic experiences, and more, all the while seeking to explain it all in a terminology that would keep him kosher with intellectuals and West even if not quite approved by church officially. ............. Pity he didn't go on with poetry - ""The quest of the spirit's gain' "Lured by the graces of pleasure, "And lashed by the furies of pain. "Thy weakness shall sigh for an Eden, "But the sword shall flame at the gate; "For far is the home of thy vision "And strong is the hand of thy fate!"" But then, poetry would have required him to let go of the support of the railings and swim or skate clear across, which he's too afraid to risk; Upton Sinclair would rather hold on to the acceptable as to land, beach, railings at a rink or a pool, and indulge a foot in water or on ice, for a moment. ............. Upton Sinclair writes beautifully about music in the World's End series, and here's how he began, much more evoking of his writing about psychic experiences and experiments:- "But if he could not understand the music, he could read books about it; he read a whole library'criticism of music, analysis of music, histories of music, composers of music; and so gradually he learned the difference between a sarabande and a symphony, and began to get some idea of what he went out for to hear. At first, at the concerts, all he could think of was to crane his neck and recognize the different instruments; he heard whole symphonies, while doing nothing but watching ....