Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

5.4 Anti-War! Struggle & Perseverance! Upton Sinclair's Dragon's Teeth!

                                                        Dragon's Teeth-from the Lanny Budd Series

         "Mostly he didn't talk about it; but once on a long motor ride, and again sitting out in the boat when the fish didn't happen to be biting, he had opened up and told a little of what he had seen. The worst of it was that the men who had suffered and died hadn't accomplished anything, so far as a survivor could see; France had been saved, but wasn't making much use of her victory, nor was any other nation" (Sinclair 12). This passage from Upton Sinclair's novel Dragon's Teeth (1942) recounts Allied involvement during World War II. Sinclair employs history, irony, and imagery to create a tone of struggle and perseverance. Throughout the narrative, protagonist Lanny Budd, a wealthy aristocrat secretly working for the President of the United States, travels to Europe disguised as an art dealers who sells and trades fine painting to connoisseurs on both Allied and Axis sides. At the story's inception, Budd, a classical pianist, art critic, undercover agent, devoted family man, and expectant father, waits in a French hospital for his wife Irma to bear a child,a baby girl, and is visited by former tutor and veteran ex-Lieutenant Jerry Pendleton who described World War as an event in which the men suffering and dying had achieved nothing (12). The two talk Lany's communist uncle, Jesse Blackless, a member of Irma's family (24-25). Throughout the story, Budd refers to Jesse as his Red uncle. They discuss the devastating effects of Crash of 1929 and each one's respective formula for saving the country and the world (24). Lanny says, "Uncle Jesse thinks he believes that everybody's behavoir is conditioned by the state of his pocketbook. But he's a living refutation of his own theory " because instead of only painting portraits for the rich and famous, he is leading a revolutionary movement "somewhere in the slums of Cannes" (25). Lanny, a capitalist and Blackless, a communist, ironically agreed that Russia was serving an important role for the Allies, and hoped that England , France, and America would do the same, as democracies who could peacefully resolve their differences (27). Throughout the novel and in the sequel called The Return of Lanny Budd, Sinclair repeatedly stresses that social change can occur, as Marx suggested, without a revolution (27). During this time, it was a common custom among the affluent to hold seances in hopes of discovering a means of alleviating the suffering and conflicts occurring in the world (49-50). Irma's family followed this practice as well, and Lanny visited a famous medium Madame Zyszynski who supposedly conjured spirits from the families of those participating and gave them advise, in most cases vague and illusive. Nevertheless, the activity provided a much-needed means of emotional catharsis. As Sinclair suggests, "All this seemed to indicate that there was some sort of universal pool of mindstuff, an ocean in which Lanny's thoughts and Madame Zyszynski's and other people's merged and flowed together. Figure yourself as a bubble floating on the surface of the ocean; the sun shines on you and you have very lovely colors; other bubbles float near, and you come together and from a cluster of bubbles--the guests of the yacht Bessie Budd, for example" (49). Sinclair further pursues this notion in his book Mental Radio (1930), and so does psychiatrist C. G. Jung in his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious . To Madame Zyszynski appeared the spirit of the Indian Chief Tecumseh who gave advise to Lanny Budd and his family (48). For Lanny, the mystery of communicating with the dead poses a metaphysical problem; however, the more significant dilemma stems from "the robbing and killing" from war (50). ironically, in both Dragon's Teeth and the Return of Lanny Budd, Lanny and father Robert earn their fortunes through arms sales, much like Undershaft in Shaw's Major Barbara and Sir Basil Zaharoff, Greek arms dealer and industrialist known as the "merchant of death" and mentioned frequently in Dragon's Teeth (^ www.britanica.com.; ^www. smithsonianmag.com.; Sinclair 78). Lanny possesses the wealth of Gatsby and the interest in books of Anatole France (78). Sinclair is adamant about the ability of democratic elections to achieve progress, too, not just resolutions (79). The author contrasts the two dominant ideologies of the time through the following thoughts of Budd: "The Communists take an attitude which makes force inevitable. If you start to draw a gun on a man, he knows that his life depends upon his drawing first. Could capitalism be changed gradually? Could the job be done by voting some politicians out of office and voting others in? Lanny had come upon a quotation of Karl Marx, admitting that a gradual change might be brought about in the Anglo-Saxon countries, which had had parliamentary institutions for a long time" (79).