Molasses & Manassas

THEIRS BE THE GUILT (287 pp.)--Upton Sinclair--Twayne Publishers ($3.95).

Upton Sinclair has always been the most unreal character in his own books. He proves this once again in Theirs Be the Guilt, a re-edit of Manassas, which he wrote 56 years ago. Sinclair, then 24, was living in two tents near Princeton, NJ. and doing research from books hauled from the university library in a rented horse and buggy. Years have left the innocent style intact--a genuine fustian or homespun purple--as well as the sentimentality, which would shame Dickens for a cynic. Thus the novel is not only a publishing oddity but it gives a rare picture of how the most tragic event in U.S. history looked to a generation three or four wars ago.

Like other Sinclair novels, Theirs Be the Guilt has its Lanny Budd, i.e., a character who, when history's big scenes are played, is to be found stage center, or at least behind the arras with tape recorder. Here, this character is Allan Montague, a boy growing up on a slightly mythical Southern plantation, with a swarm of smiling Negroes in the great house--and another swarm of Negroes out in the cotton fields, where it is hard to see if they are smiling or not. Probably not. But for Allan and his dashing cousins, 'Dolph and Ralph, Valley Hall is a world, and the best of all possible.

"Yes, Virginian." The needs of cotton, his father's health, and melodrama send Allan at twelve to live among his mother's kin on Boston's Beacon Street. Are his principles as a gallant son of the South in danger? They are, and soon there is the fateful passage: "Uncle William, you must help me. I have been reading Uncle Tom's Cabin." Yankee Uncle William promptly takes young Allan to an abolitionist meeting, where Allan learns from an escaped slave: "Yes, Virginian, there is a Simon Legree."

From that time on, in his pilgrimage to discover the truth about North and South, Allan meets all the top people. There is "the notorious Levi Coffin of Cincinnati," founder of the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves; Allan is armed with a hunting knife for killing abolitionists, but is charmed into nonaggression by the old Quaker's "thees" and "thous." Later, Allan searches out John Brown at Harpers Ferry, "to pour out his soul." Before long, he knows that "he was dealing with a lunatic or a martyr." Allan can do nothing, either, with Jefferson Davis, except stare into his eyes and say: "God grant you wisdom, Mr. Davis." Later, he regrets not having "poured out his soul," but he wisely suppresses the impulse again when, in his presence. Abraham Lincoln worries about the Constitution and tells two stories of doubtful humor. Most of the speeches and conversations of the great sound authentic; only the hero, Montague-Sinclair, is unreal. He is, nevertheless, an engaging figure to the connoisseur of the absurd in fiction--a kind of Candide without Voltaire.

"Sign Here." Despite melodrama, moonshine and molasses, all the arguments in America's great debate are in the book. Somehow, the modern reader gets the impression that young Sinclair--a bit of a snob for all his progressive sociology --is half at heart with the legendary young woman who first learned the facts of history from Gone With the Wind. Midway through the epic she declared, "If the South loses, I'll just die."

Anyway, at Manassas, Sinclair leaves the field to the exultant Southern cavalry, with 'Dolph and Ralph Montague on their chargers singing, "War to the hilt !/Theirs be the guilt/Who fetter the freeman/To ransom the slave!" Moralist Sinclair, as grimly didactic a writer as ever bled on paper, had planned two sequels, Gettysburg and Appomattox, but he let his publisher talk him out of the trilogy. It is a pity to have missed Allan Montague at Appomattox, saying quietly but firmly to Robert E. Lee: "Sign here!"

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