Sinclair's War & Peace

WORLD'S END--Upton Sinclair--Viking ($3).

To the literary, the novels of Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, King Coal, Oil!, Boston, etc.) are not literature. To historians, they are not history. To propagandists, they are not propaganda. But to millions of plain people, they are all three of those things. Of living U. S. writers he has been far & away the most widely trans ated -- into at least 47 languages in 39 countries. In Middle Europe, in Russia, in China, in India his name (sometimes confused with Sinclair Lewis) is known to people who never heard of Ernest Heming way, never will hear of Branch Cabell. This is not merely because Sinclair's clear, unsubtle writing practically translates itself. It is because his fables make social injustice seem simple.

World's End is the first novel this world novelist has written about the world of nations. "The field is so enormous, the issues so crucial," he says in a note to the reader, "that I, as a novelist, have for years been running away from them." The better to see them, perhaps; for the setting of World's End is not contemporary : it is a novel about Europe and America between 1913 and 1919. Upton Sinclair lived in Europe before World War I; he knew some of the peace conferees of 1919 and some of the journalists, particularly Lincoln Steffens, who watched their struggles. Through his new novel readers may recover much of the atmosphere, some of the meaning of those days.

Lanning Prescott Budd, born in 1899, son of the European sales manager of Budd Gunmakers, lives on the Riviera with his delicious mother, Beauty Budd, nee Mabel Blackless. A symbolic opening scene shows young Lanny dancing in a Dalcroze festival in Germany, in 1913--the dance being an interpretation in "Eurythmics," the rage of the time, of the triumph of music over the furies of Hell in Gluck's Orpheus and Eurydice. Before the real furies set sail over Europe the following summer, Lanny visits charming upper-class friends in England and Germany, glimpses the squalor of the lower classes.

That all is not what it seems is naturally well known to Lanny's father, Robbie Budd. A Yaleman sleek and capable as a panther, Robbie turns up in sudden glamor from time to time, goes swimming with his son, instructs him in the munitions game, warns him again & again that the coming war will be "for profit." Father and son have tea with the Munitions King, Zaharoff, who oddly begins to talk like Upton Sinclair: "Suppose some nation should decide that its real enemies are the makers of munitions? Suppose that instead of dropping bombs upon battleships and fortresses, they should take to dropping them upon de luxe hotels?"

Thus Lanny is well prepared to be neutral when war comes. His education in sex includes an affair with Rosemary, a cool English suffragette, and the discovery that his mother has a lover, Marcel. The smart neutrality enjoined upon him by his father becomes difficult when Marcel goes off to fight--and be mutilated--for la patrie, when Rosemary during a London assignation pointedly asks for American sympathy. A cultivated Swiss diplomat tells him the difference between business and art (a typical Sinclair simplicity): "One might look at a Rembrandt picture or hear a Beethoven symphony, without depriving others of the privilege; but one couldn't become an oil king without taking oil away from others."

Taken to Connecticut by Robbie when the U. S. enters the war, Lanny meets his pious, powerful grandfather, president of Budd Gunmakers, and gets his bellyful of class ritual in the family, at St. Thomas's prep school and in local society. He wants to go back to the Riviera where he can play the piano, go swimming and talk Provenc,al to the fishermen. After the Armistice, he goes, meeting on the way a professor of geography, a member of the U. S. commission to the Peace Conference, who hires Lanny to be his interpreter and secretary. Thereby Lanny gets a front seat at the momentous international drama.

Upton Sinclair assures the reader that "so far as concerns historic characters and events my picture is correct in all details." A Jules Romains would endow those events of the spring of 1919 with greater irony and subtlety than Sinclair possesses, but the last third of World's End is a strong and skillful performance. Wilson's struggle to tie the Peace to his League; Clemenceau answering Wilson with obscene oaths; these antagonists, the intrigue around them and the terrible, complex forces acting upon them are drawn with authority.

At the end, having seen their chief beaten into lethal compromises and near breakdown, the U. S. staff looks darkly upon the future. Into Lanny Budd's mouth Novelist Sinclair puts a polite paraphrase of a remark actually made by young William Bullitt: "Tomorrow night I leave for the Cote d'Azur, and lie on the sand and get sunburned and watch the world come to an end!"

As an interpretation of history, World's End needs to be read with a certain care if it is not to be limitlessly untrustworthy. Sinclair's dice are loaded, despite the fact that he is obliging enough to load them in plain sight. World War I. for example, was not brought about by Basil Zaharoff, though to a fellow gunmaker of limited intelligence--or a revolutionist ditto--it may have seemed that way. Sinclair's storytelling abilities and his own general kindliness make it easy for superficial readers to simplify his import even more than he does himself.

As a novel, World's End provides 740 pages of equable Book of Knowledge narrative told by a healthy, sincere and well-informed old gentleman. Puttering about his garden in Pasadena, Calif., dressed in an old pair of slacks and a flopping canvas hat, Upton Sinclair thought it all up afternoons and evenings while transplanting rosebushes or trimming his favorite fig trees. He has lived that way ever since he lost his EPIC campaign for Governor six years ago. In the mornings he glances at the papers "to see what has happened to the poor old Allies," then settles down to his regular 1,000 words a day. From his windows in the rambling, one-story Sinclair frame house he looks across the Arroyo Seco to mountains on three sides. When a visitor comes in, Sinclair's tanned, evangelical face lights up as he says: "First I want to show you something beautiful"--prize roses or irises in a living-room vase.

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