May Sinclair's The Creators: High-Cultural Celebrity and a Failed Comedy

May Sinclair's The Creators: High-Cultural Celebrity and a Failed Comedy Michèle K. Troy Hillyer College-University of Hartford IN 1904, BRITISH NOVELIST May Sinclair achieved overnight celebrity with her third novel, The Divine Fire. Yet she did not luxuriate in her new-found fame, as a glance at an unpublished manuscript written several years after The Divine Fire makes clear. In the few handwritten sheets of "The Miss-May-Sinclair," Sinclair treats the weighty topic of her own fame with a surprisingly whimsical hand. Deviating from her usually somber writing, she dishes up a parodie depiction of herself as a natural history specimen. "But little is known of this very curious & interesting animal," she begins, documenting her behaviors with the impersonal eye of a museum cataloguer. "Its habit is to hide itself in its outer burrow, or studio, during the forenoon, when the little creature applies itself with comic fury, building up a heap of manuscripts wh[ich] w[oul]d seem to serve it for purposes of protection and indeed nutrition," yet it has also been seen "dancing with abandonment & to excess." l While playful in tone, and scribbled with corrections, "The MissMay -Sinclair" nonetheless reflects Sinclair's awareness of her precarious perch in the literary world, a position she shared with other authors who faced changing standards of literary classification which they could not fully influence or anticipate. Her classification as a literary "animal ," for instance, varies from country to country. "The Miss-MaySinclair found in America w[oul]d seem to be a distinct species. It is certainly more widely known in that country." More important, however, is the unpredictability of her future classification. Asserting that "naturalists " cannot agree on the date of the creature's appearance, she suggests that this date "may. . . be calculated approximately from certain fossilized remains—unmistakably the print marks of an extinct animal — preserved in the Higher Tertiary deposits. (? top shelf litera50 TROY: SINCLAIR ture)."2 Her parenthetical aside, "? top shelf literature," reveals her hoped-for mark of distinction; she knows university archives have begun collecting her "fossilized remains," yet is hesitant about whether they will preserve her as an "extinct" author under the classification she desires. In short, even as Sinclair caricatures the processes of literary categorization, she recognizes that such decisions are beyond her control . Held up against her competitors on the horizon of posterity, she knows that she and her works will become artifacts whose fate will be decided by an unknown host of someones. If this humorous snippet suggests Sinclair's lighthearted willingness to cede control in matters of her own literary status, it is misleading. In fact, as an author who became a celebrity just seven years into a fictionwriting career that spanned almost thirty years, she wrestled with the dilemma of fame. Praise from the middle-brow masses, she worried, would only make her work suspect in the highbrow circles to which she aspired, undermining her bid for a spot in the high-cultural halls of fame. As if to work through this fear, she repeatedly returned to the theme of fame, perhaps nowhere more thoroughly than in The Creators: A Comedy, a novel circling the lives of six would-be authors which she began writing on the heels of "The Miss-May-Sinclair." Serialized in the American Century Magazine from November 1909 to October 1910 and published in full by the Century Company in September 1910, The Creators voiced Sinclair's frustrations with the power of the publishing world and the press to build up and tear down literary careers. The novel takes pains to detail the pressures of the market on three female and three male authors. "Life lures them out of their solitude . They rebel & are made captive," Sinclair asserts in an abbreviated typescript of the novel, whose subject she describes to her editors as "the play of life on genius, the response of genius to life."3And indeed, Sinclair 's authors face numerous sacrifices on the road to establishing literary reputations, as they try to write in the face of marital disagreements, obligations to children and aging parents, financial worries, illness, and fame. The Creators was a resounding failure in the...