A Requiem for Adonais
A rediscovered tribute to the King of Bohemia, written by America's greatest muckraker
Editor’s note: Upton Sinclair, the storied muckraker, mourned George Sterling as a “beautiful and noble and generous-souled poet,” even while expressing an abiding disappointment that his dearest friend was unable to control his alcoholism.
I’ve previously dismissed the life and poetic legacy of George Sterling, the so-called King of Bohemia, from which the alleged “charm” of Carmel-by-the-Sea evolved. I’ve always thought that Sterling crafted a mythology for himself, but that the mythology felt like a low-grade Realtor’s naive idea about how a poet should live.
I’m not the first. For a full recitation of the dumb romance and useless tragedy that was George Sterling’s life, see Catherine Prendergast’s 2021’s The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle that Shook America. (Hint: It ends with far too many suicides.)
Last week, while researching Sterling’s The Abalone Song, I stumbled across a 2,400-word requiem that Sinclair wrote about Sterling in 1927. It was published as the 27th chapter in a series called “Money Writes,” a collection of essays Sinclair wrote for The Daily Worker, the communist/progressive newspaper founded three years earlier in Chicago. Sinclair was a fiery day political activist who once ran for governor of California. His most famous work, The Jungle, was a shocking exposé of the meat-packing industry, and he continued his crusades against corruption and hypocrisy through the rest of his life.
Sinclair’s sorrowful elegy for Sterling provides a unique first-hand account of the melodramatic disorder behind Carmel’s Bohemian mythology. (It also exposes Sinclair’s utter misunderstanding about the psychology of addiction.) The Daily Worker essay about his friend, which he titled “Adonais,” has been lost to time until now.
I reprint it here in its entirety, without editorial comment:
By UPTON SINCLAIR
I come now to the dearest friend I ever had among men. Since he has gone, there seems a large hole in the world.
It was Jack London who gave him to me some twenty-five years ago, sending me a book of poems, “The Testimony of the Sons,” by George Sterling. In the fly-leaf, he wrote, “I have a friend, the dearest in this world.” Since friendship is a thing without limits, I also took possession of this poet. We corresponded for seven or eight years, and then I went to California to visit him and stayed several months at Carmel. A year or two later the fates played a strange prank upon us — he lost his heart to the woman who was later to become my wife.
How much of that strange story will it be decent for me to tell? It is hard for me to judge, because what the world calls “tact" is not my strong point; and I cannot ask my wife because she is ill, and since our friend’s dreadful death, I do not mention him. Some day the story will be known because he wrote her a hundred or so of sonnets, the most beautiful in the world. For sixteen years his attitude never changed; her marriage made no difference — when he came to visit us, he would follow her about with his eyes, and sit and murmur her name as if under a spell; our friends would look at us and smile, but George never cared what anyone thought. All his life long women had flung themselves at his head, and he had given them the pity and sympathy his gentle nature could not withhold. It was the tragedy of his fate that the woman he respected was the one he failed to win. When first he met her, he wrote in a copy of “The House of Orchards,” “I have thought of this as my last book. Do you wish it to be the last?” But later he wrote, “To know that you live is enough? You have given me back my art.”
When he first met her, and was bringing her a sonnet every day, they were walking on Riverside Drive in New York, and I chanced to come along. She was working on a book, and I with my customary reformer’s impulse remarked, “You have been overworking; you are worn out.” She answered. “This poet has just been telling me that I look like a star in alabaster.” “Well, I think you look like a skull," I said and went on, leaving the poet grinding his teeth in fury. “Someday I'm going to kill that man,” he exclaimed. And his companion replied, “That is the first man that ever told me the truth in my life. I am going to marry him!”
So she did; and for a while there appeared a certain element of acerbity in the criticisms which George would pen upon the margins of my manuscripts. But tenderness and patience were the least contribution I could make to our friendship; so I would laugh, and presently George would grow remorseful, and tell me that maybe I was half right after all.
There were two men in him, and a strange duel forever going on in his soul. In his literary youth he had fallen under the spell of Ambrose Bierce, an able writer, a bitter black cynic and a cruel domineering old bigot. He stamped inerasably upon George’s sensitive mind the heartless art-for-art's sake formula, the notion of a poet as a superior being aloof from the problems of men, and writing for the chosen few. On the other hand, George was a chum of Jack London and others of the young “reds,” and became a socialist and remained one to the end. Bierce quarreled with him on this account, and broke with him, as he did with everyone else. But in art the Bierce influence remained dominant, and George Sterling would write about the interstellar spaces and the writhing of oily waters in San Francisco harbor and the white crests of the surf on Point Lobos, and the loves of ancient immoral queens.
After which he would go about the streets of New York on a winter night, and come back without his overcoat, because he had given it to some poor wretch on the breadline; he would be shivering not with cold, but with horror and grief, and would break all the art-for-art's-sake rules, and pour out some lines of passionate indignation, which he refused to consider poetry, but which I assured him would outlive his fancy stuff.
At … our mourning pickets on Broadway … (in) 1914, George was in New York, and his “star in alabaster" was walking up and down eight hours a day amid a mob of staring idlers, her husband in jail and only a few “wobblies” and Jewish “reds” from the East Side to keep her company, George appeared and offered her his arm. “Go away,” she said: “this is no job for a poet!” But of course he would not go; he stuck by her side for two weeks, and up until the Lamb’s Club, where he was staying, the art snobs and wealthy loafers, joshed him mercilessly — some even insulted him, and there was a fight or two. During these excitements, George wandered down to the Battery and looking out over the bay he wrote that stunning poem, “To The Goddess of Liberty.”
Oh! is at bale-fire in the brazen
hand —
The traitor-light set on betraying
coasts
To lure to doom the mariner? …
You will find that in my anthology, “The Cry for Justice.” Also his song about Babylon, which really is New York, and San Francisco too:
In Babylon, grey Babylon,
What goods are sold and bought?
All merchandise beneath the sun
That bartered is for gold;
Amber and oils from far beyond
The desert and the fen,
And wines were of our throats are
fond —
Yeah! and the souls of men!
In Babylon, grey Babylon
What goods are sold and bought?
Vesture of linen subtly spun
And cups from agate wrought;
Rainment of many-colored silk
For some fair denizen,
And ivory more white than milk —
Yea! and the souls of men!
Also, I mentioned his tribute to the Episcopal church — and others — quoted in “The Profits of Religion.”
Within the house of Mammon his
Priesthood stands alert
By mysteries attended, by dusk and
splendors girt,
Knowing, for faiths departed, his own
shall still endure
And they be found his chosen, un-
troubled, solemn, sure
Within the House of Mammon the
Golden altar lifts
Where dragon-lamps are shrouded as
Costly incense drifts—
A dust of old ideals, now fragrant
From the coals,
To tell of hopes long-ended, to tell
The death of souls.
I have told how my friend Mencken asked me to write about Sterling without mentioning alcohol. The first time I visited George I was to be the orator at a dinner of the Ruskin Club in Oakland, and George was to read a poem. We met at the Bohemian Club in San Francisco, and George drank a couple of cocktails on an empty stomach, and we set out. On the ferry-boat I had difficulty in understanding his conversation; and finally the painful realization dawned over me that the great poet was drunk. My own father had been a drinking man and several of my relatives in the South, so I was no stranger to the spectacle; but this was the first time I had ever seen an intellectual man in that condition; and the next day I wrote George a note, saying it was too painful, and I was not going to stay at Carmel. He came running over to my house, and with tears in his eyes vowed he would never touch another drop while I was in California. Sometimes I have wished I might have stayed the rest of my life; it might be that is the greatest service I could have rendered to the future.
From that day on I never saw George with any sign of drink on him. He visited us at Croton, and went over the huge manuscript of “The Cry for Justice,” and chopped down some dead chestnut trees and cut them up for our fireplace, He was an athlete, and beautiful to look at — a face like Dante’s; grave and yet tender, and a tall, active body. We have a snapshot of him in bathing trunks, standing upon the rocks of Point Lobos with a abalone hook in his hand, and nothing more graceful was ever planned by a Greek sculptor.
George went back to San Francisco and lived at the Bohemian Cllub, where some admirer had bequeathed him a room for life. It is a place of satyrs, and the worst environment that could have been imagined under the circumstances, George had begun his drinking with Jack London and Ambrose Bierce, and then it was all gaiety and youth, the chanting of George’s “Abalone Song,” and the “grove play,” and the Bohemian “jinks.” But later on in life it become something different. Others may sing the romance and the charm of San Francisco; to me it is a plague-city, where all the lovely spirits drink poison — first Nora May French, and then Carrie Sterling, and then Jack London, and then my best of friends.
George had more admirers than any other man I ever knew, and he gave himself to them without limit. When they were drinking he could not sit apart; so tragedy closed upon him, He would come to visit us in Pasadena, and always then he was ‘on the wagon,” and never going to drink again; but we could see his loneliness and his despair — not about himself, for he was too proud to voice that, but for mankind and for the universe. It may seem a strange statement, that a poet could be killed by the nebular hypothesis; but M.C.S. (Mary Craig Sinclair, Upton’s wife — ed.) declares that is what happened to George Sterling. I believe the leaders of science now reject the nebular hypothesis, and have a new one; but meantime, they had fixed firmly in George’s mind the idea that the universe is running down like a clock that in some millions of years the earth will be cold, and in some hundreds of millions of years the sun will be cold, and so what difference does it make what we poor insects do? You will find that at the beginning, in “The Testimony of the Suns,” and at the end in the drama, “Truth.” It is what one might call applied atheism.
Once, M.C.S. tells me, George offered never to drink again, if she would ask him not to. But her notion of fair play did not permit her to do this. What could she give him in return? The ares of her own life were too many; she had a husband who refused to be afraid of his enemies, and so she had to be afraid for two, and there were long periods when she could not even answer George’s letters. He stayed in San Francisco, and now and then he would say he was coming to see us, and when he did not come, we would know why.
Mencken was coming to visit George, and just before his coming George was drunk. He was fifty-six years old, and there was no longer any fun about it, but an agony of pain and humiliation; and so he took cyanide of potassium, as he had many times threatened to do. To me it is something so cruel that I would not talk about it, were it not for the next generation pf poets and writers, who are parroting the art-for-art’s-sake devilment, and dancing to hell with John Bootleg.
Consider my friend Mencken. The death of this beautiful and noble and generous-souled poet has taught him nothing whatsoever; he writes the same cheerfully flippant letters in celebration of the American saloon. “Whatever George told you in moments of katzenjammer, I am sure that he got a great deal more fun out of alcohol than woe. It was his best friend for many years and made life tolerable. He committed suicide in the end, not because he wanted to get rid of drink, but simply because he could no longer drink enough to give him any pleasure.”
Was more poisonous nonsense ever penned by an intellectual man? How many pleasures there are which do not pall with age, and do not destroy their devotees! The pleasure of knowledge, for example — of gaining it, and helping to spread it. The pleasure of sport; I play tennis, and it is just as much fun to me at forty-eight as it was at fourteen. The pleasures of music; I play the violin, after a fashion and my friend Mencken plays it better, I hope — and does he find that every year he has to play more violently in order to hear it, and that after playing he suffers agonies of sickness, remorse and dread? I say for same upon an intellectual man who cannot make such distinctions; for shame upon a teacher of youth who has no care whether he sets their feet upon the road to wisdom and happiness, or to misery and suicide!
Let George Sterling speak from his grave the last words upon the subject — a few lines from “The Man I Might Have Been.”
Clear-visioned with betraying night,
I count his merits o’er,
And get no comfort from the sight,
Nor any cure therefore.
I’d mourn my desecrated years
(His maimed and sorry twin),
But well he knows my makeshift tears —
The man I might have been.
Decisively his looks declare
The heart’s divine success;
He held no parley with despair,
Nor pact with wantonness ,..
O Fates that held us at your choice,
How strange a web ye spin
Why chose ye not with equal voice
The man I might have been?