American leftie.(Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair)(Book review)

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, by Anthony Arthur (Random House, 400 pp., $27.95)

TIMED to coincide with the centenary of Upton Sinclair's best-known book, The Jungle, his expos of the meatpacking industry, Anthony Arthur's Radical Innocent chronicles the long, quixotic life of the prolific novelist and socialist gadfly. Neither hagiographic nor condescending, Arthur is an exemplary biographer, interested in human beings for their own sake, in all their unvarnished oddity.

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In common with many of capitalism's most relentless critics, Sinclair came not from the ranks of the desperately poor but from the disappointed. His paternal grandfather was an admiral in the Confederate Navy, his maternal grandfather a prosperous railroad executive, yet such a pedigree didn't guarantee a comfortable existence. (The law of the capitalist jungle is harsh.) Born in Baltimore in 1878, the only son of a vain, ineffectual, alcoholic father and a mother desperately clinging to memories of southern gentility, Sinclair spent much of his childhood in a succession of ever-shabbier boardinghouses. Often as a boy he was sent to the saloons to find Upton Beall Sinclair Sr. and bring him home.

Despising his father's weakness, Sinclair became a lifelong teetotaler and a fiercely independent autodidact. Although he didn't go to school until he was 10, he graduated from high school at 14 and began studies that same fall at the City College of New York. After finishing at CCNY he spent two years at Columbia University. Blessed with a quick intelligence and an exceptionally retentive memory, Sinclair also displayed a prodigious capacity for hard work. He'd started writing for publication while still in high school, and among his early books were two pseudonymous series of boys' adventure novels, one centered on West Point and its graduates, the other on Annapolis.

The fire-breathing radical, hymning the Spanish-American War? Well, this came before Sinclair's conversion to socialism at age 24, but he always regarded himself as a patriot, calling America to be true to its better self. People were naturally good and generous, he believed, if best kept at a distance. (By temperament he was inclined to be fastidious as well as abstemious.) The troubles besetting the land could be traced to the capitalist system and the "interlocking directorates" that kept it firmly and oppressively in place. Change the system and an enlightened state would blossom.

Those convictions, tempered by experience, sustained Sinclair for the rest of his life, fueling decades of activism, scores of books, and a serious run for governor of California in 1934. His causes were many. He deplored the exploitation of workers and made their plight uncomfortably palpable, most memorably in The Jungle and his 1917 novel King Coal. He preached temperance, exposed the seamy side of the liquor industry, and depicted the ravages of drink; Arthur describes The Wet Parade (1931) as "the only novel by a major American writer in praise of Prohibition." (A movie based on the book, starring Jimmy Durante, Walter Huston, and Robert Young, appeared not long before repeal.) He advocated press reform in The Brass Check (1919), a witty polemic, and in a book he wrote for his gubernatorial campaign--titled, with characteristic hubris, I, Governor of California, and How I Ended Poverty--where he proposed that newspapers be run by boards that included two college professors, an at-large member appointed by the governor, and "employees of the paper." Since, in the new socialist order, there would be "no private businesses to provide them with advertising subsidies," the papers would be responsible and public-minded.