"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair, Reading A Great Book Many Years Too Late!

 

 

 

 

Despite how much literature, and a great deal of the "great literature" I have read in my life, I had never read "The Jungle" or any other book by Upton Sinclair until just now.  A couple of months ago, my sister-in-law in Wisconsin suddenly mailed me a copy of "The Jungle" with a note that said "Roger, I tried to read this book, but got frustrated right away.  I think you'll have more patience with it."  On some levels I was surprised by the book and note and, on some other levels, I was not.  She is a pretty voracious reader, rather brilliant with near perfect scores on her college admission tests when she came out of high school almost 30 years ago.  But I have noticed over the years that her reading material tends to be a bit toward the general adult fiction level.  I had asked her about why she didn't like the book or "got frustrated" with it and never seemed to get a succinct answer.  

 

 

Anyway, my wife Candice decided when it was time for us to choose another book for our joint reading effort in which I read aloud while Candice washes the dishes each day and we alternate in who chooses the books.  When she finishes washing the dishes, I dry them and eventually put them away each evening.  I have to say I was also somewhat surprised that Candice chose this book but thought that it might have been curiosity about what her sister gave up on.  But she also tends to like more "great literature" when I do the reading aloud than she would usually read on her own.  

The first thing I noticed about the book is that it is a markedly dark novel, about as dark as anything I have ever read.  I don't cull much in literature and don't usually say anything is too dark for me.  But this novel is incredibly dark, moving consistently from one disaster among the central characters to another without ever having a bright spot or a lucky day last any longer than the next sunrise, if the sun rises at all the next day.  But it is a fine novel with excellent character development, plot and counter plot, and a couple of definite goals from the beginning to the end.  I would say that the primary goal of the novel, which I suspect is true of everything Sinclair wrote, is to promote socialism as the best form of government for the United States.  In Sinclair's defense, I would also say that his secondary goal was to write a good to great novel which would be accepted widely by the reading public.  I have no crow to pick with his first goal since I have known several devout socialists in my lifetime, and I would even agree that socialism is a far better form of government in its pure form (which can never be fully achieved) than several other forms of government.  As for his second goal, I came out of the novel firmly convinced that Sinclair had definitely achieved his second goal with flying colors. This is a fine novel!  Yes, it is as dark as the deepest corner of an underground coal mine, but it is also a fine novel.

The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, and his family are the central characters, native Lithuanians who emigrate to the United States and find themselves living, if that is  not too strong a word, in the meat packing neighborhood of Chicago.  The novel was published in 1905 and covers about a ten year period before and after the turn of the century.  Sinclair chose to give the neighborhood around the meat packing companies, slums, and railroad yards as Packing Town.  It is filled with immigrants from several different countries and cultures who struggle to survive on a daily basis in which the meat packing companies operate as the Meat Trust in conjunction with the Railroad Trust, two entities which are each comprised of several companies who work in a cohort in order to control and suck the lives out of their employees just as they take the lives of trainloads of cattle and hogs.  The book served to educate the American public about the outrageous practices of the meat packing industry and the multitude of ways in which those companies live off the lives of everyone they come into contact with, whether they are employees or customers.   They own the local public officials, judges, police, and nearly every human who comes into contact with the meat packing industry.  They are a predatory entity both as individual companies and as a loosely constructed conglomerate.  

Jurgis and his family suffer one debilitating event after another from the packing industry, local real estate companies, the police and courts, and each other.  His wife dies in childbirth because the family has no money for a doctor.  His only child drowns in the mud and water surrounding their home. He is jailed multiple times and eventually blacklisted because he beat his wife's supervisor who had lured her into prostitution.  Another child in the family is frozen nearly to death walking to work in a Chicago winter and eventually killed and eaten by rats after being locked into his work site at the end of the day.  But eventually, Jurgis is converted to socialism, gets a job in a hotel owned by a socialist with a social conscience, and become a devout evangelist for socialism. The novel ends with about 20 pages of a lengthy sermon about the virtues of socialism and the predatory nature of capitalism.  Yes, it's dark as hell, but it's a fine novel.  If you haven't ever read it, give it a chance and commit before you begin it that you won't give up, as my sister-in-law did, before you have read at least fifty pages. 

"A Place To Come To" by Robert Penn Warren--Book Review

 

When this novel was first released a reviewer in "The Harvard Crimson" had this to say about it: 

"In his latest novel, Robert Penn Warren combines a Southern preoccupation with the past with a typically modern concern with selfhood and alienation. His protagonist literally revels in his aloneness, his rootlessness, his inability to love. Nor is he content with a mere demonstration of his problems; instead, he explains them to us, over and over again, in a style that mixes the lofty literary references of academic--Jed is a medievalist at the University of Chicago--with Faulknerian neologisms and strings of appositives."  (Julia Klein, "Harvard Crimson", April 23, 1977)

In the end, Ms. Klein did not write a positive review of Robert Penn Warren's novel and I firmly believe she erred by doing so.  While this novel is not another "All The King's Men", Warren's best novel, it is a markedly good novel by a great writer and deserves to be read and appreciated just as much as anything else Warren ever wrote.  But, I suppose when you have won three Pulitzer Prizes, one for "All The King's Men" and two for a pair of his books of poetry, you are expected to write stupendously great literature even if your intent was only to produce a grocery list.   It seems to me that simply because Robert Penn Warren was never invited to join the group of American winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature some critics and general readers think he can be forgotten, left by the wayside of mass marketed literature, and ignored.  The list of American Nobel winners which includes Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Brodsky, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and now even Bob Dylan, is a prodigious list and I do not mean to belittle or question the credentials of Bob Dylan by adding him to list as the last person.  But I do believe that Robert Penn Warren was just as deserving of a Nobel Prize as any American writer who was ever awarded one and a bit more than a few on that list. When I make a list of the greatest American writers, the names I put on that list are Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Buck, Warren, and Flannery O'Connor who also never lived long enough to accumulate a body of literature sufficient to earn the Nobel.  I also find it interesting that three of those writers are southern writers, Warren, Faulkner, and O'Connor.  

And that last statement brings me to one of the most important misconceptions about Robert Penn Warren.  He is sometimes thought of as an Appalachian writer and he definitely was not.  He was indisputably a Southern writer.  He was a self-avowed member of The Fugitives at Vanderbilt and lived much of his life, especially his academic life, at Vanderbilt University and Louisiana State University neither of which is Appalachian.  And his retirement was spent in New England.  Yes, Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky, Western Kentucky, which is not in Appalachia, not even in the ever expanding political definition of Appalachia used by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the congress which is a purely political definition based totally in pork barrel politics and not remotely culturally based.  Warren was born and raised in Todd County Kentucky on the Tennessee border in Western Kentucky far outside both the political and cultural boundaries of Appalachia.  He never referred to himself as Appalachian and rightly so.  He never wrote Appalachian Literature.  He wrote Southern Literature and wrote it just as well as Faulkner and O'Connor, even better at times.  

Now that I  have made one more diligent attempt to murder the myth of Robert Penn Warren as an Appalachian writer, let's talk about this book which is a damn fine novel about a southern college professor, raised in Alabama,  living in Nashville and teaching at a college which we can assume is based loosely on Vanderbilt. The writer and professor moves to Chicago to pursue a doctorate, has an affair with a young Jewish woman there, then marries a young woman from the Dakotas who eventualy dies of cancer.  He returns her to her homeland to be buried near her relatives and after her death returns to Tennessee to teach.  The novel is filled with very unique, very human, very well written characters who move in and out of the protagonists life which is often centered around a group of friends which his wealthy lover and her husband have collected on their southern farm.  The protagonist is drifting loosely along in life, attempting to abandon and deny his youth in the deep south and at times filled with ennui.  The death of his wife and her burial in the Dakotas where she grew up is part of the source of that rootlessness but the character is much deeper than one source of ennui.  He is drifting through a group of friends and acquaintances who ride fancy horses, attend fancy parties with their fancy friends, and also seem to drift from moment to moment without aim or purpose.  

But this is a fine novel filled with excellent character development, precise plotting, and tension which must always seek resolution.  It is, admittedly, not "All The King's Men" and it was never intended to be. Warren intended this novel to be "A Place To Come To" and it is.  He intended this protagonist to be Jed Tewksbury whose father died drunk falling from a wagon box while attempting to urinate on the hindquarters of a mule only to be found graveyard dead on a dirt road in Alabama with his penis out of his pants.  That graphic image haunts Jed Tewksbury throughout the novel and a great deal of his ennui can be said to be rooted both in his childhood poverty and his father's ignominious death and drunken lifestyle along with his mother's eventual love for and marriage to a stepfather whom Jed Tewksbury does not really  like and, yet, Jed finds in the end that his little hometown in Alabama is "A Place To Come To".  The novel is filled with the characteristic, powerful writing of Robert Penn Warren.  He moves through the novel like a world champion boxer scattering a combination of literary left hooks, body blows, and precise three and four words jabs into the mind of the astute reader.   If you love good to great literature, southern literature, you need to read this book, and remember as you read it that it was never intended to be "All The King's Men".