Эптон Синклер - Oil!

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Oil!: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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The basis for the movie There Will Be Blood. Based on the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration, it is the story of Bunny Ross, the son of a wealthy California oil operator, who discovers that politicians are unscrupulous and that oil magnates are equally bad.
In Oil! Upton Sinclair fashioned a novel out of the oil scandals of the Harding administration, providing in the process a detailed picture of the development of the oil industry in Southern California. Bribery of public officials, class warfare, and international rivalry over oil production are the context for Sinclair's story of a genial independent oil developer and his son, whose sympathy with the oilfield workers and socialist organizers fuels a running debate with his father. Senators, small investors, oil magnates, a Hollywood film star, and a crusading evangelist people the pages of this lively novel. 

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He invited her to lunch; and all the way as he drove to the place, his busy mind was flying from scheme to scheme. Rachel would remain secretary of the “Ypsels,” and be paid a salary for her work, the same as she would have got as a social worker. The young Socialists would hire a larger hall, and would publish a weekly paper, aimed at the high schools and colleges of Angel City. Bunny was now free from the promise he had made to Dr. Cowper, not to make propaganda in Southern Pacific. And he was going to make it, you bet! The students of that university and all others would learn something about modern thought, and about the labor movement, and about Socialism, and—well, not too much about Communism, of course, because Dad would call that violence, and it might be breaking the law!

CHAPTER XVIII THE FLIGHT

I

This summer of 1923 was a pleasant one for Bunny. To be one of the editors of a little paper, and be able to say what you thought, and print it week by week and distribute it, with no Dean Squirge to take it away from you, and no police or patriots to raid your office! To mail it to every one you knew, and flatter yourself with the idea that they were reading it, and being cured of their prejudices! Bunny had put all his former classmates on the mailing list of “The Young Student,” and in the fall the “Ypsels” were going to sell it on the college campuses, and maybe trouble would begin then, and they would get some advertising free!

Dad was slowly picking up. He read the little paper every week, a sort of loving censorship. But it wasn’t needed, because Rachel, orthodox Socialist party member, was wasting no space on the left wingers. When these extremists got hold of Bunny and cajoled him into thinking that both sides ought to have a hearing, Rachel would say, what was the matter with their getting out a paper of their own? So here was Bunny, being “bossed” as usual—and by a woman! It was almost as bad as being married!

Another source of relief—Vee was not quarreling with him so much. She had been so shocked by his mad proposal to go off and get himself killed in heavy industry, that she was glad to compromise and take half his time, and let Rachel and “The Young Student” have the other half. Vee was working hard on her new picture, “The Golden Couch,” telling about an American darling of luxury who fell into the toils of a fake prince from some Balkan country. To play the part they had got a real Roumanian prince, who had most charming manners, and was willing to devote himself to Vee at all times when Bunny was busy with his Socialist Jewess.

Also they were getting agreeable letters from Bertie, who had been transported to heaven. Such a brilliant world, with such important things going on! She had lunched with the Prince de This, and dined with the Duchesse de That. Why wouldn’t Dad and Bunny come over and visit them—Bunny might make a really brilliant marriage. Dad chuckled; the idea of him going to Paree and trying to polly voo Francy!

The blackmailers were busy, of course; but since his illness Dad had left all that trouble to Verne. Congress was on vacation, which meant a partial respite; the senatorial reds might denounce the oil leases in their home states, but the papers no longer had to print what they said. A curious superstition, that when things were said in Congress, even the most respectable newspapers found it necessary to mention them. Such things brought politics into disrepute with business men.

The drilling of the Sunnyside tract was under way. A dozen wells were flowing, and justifying all that had been expected of them. Sometimes Dad was driven to the office, but most of the time the bright young executives would come out to his home, and sit in the den and get their orders. Such clean-cut efficient young men, with all their faculties concentrated upon getting oil out of the ground! No visions tormenting them, no strains of music haunting them, no hesitations, no uncertainties, never a doubt that to get oil out of the ground was the purpose of man’s life! So they kept their wits about them, and mastered their departments, and increased their prestige and their salaries; and when any one of them had taken his departure, there was an unuttered sadness between Dad and his son. Why couldn’t Bunny have been like young Simmons, or young Heimann, or young Bolling?

II

The doctor had said that Dad must not think about business more than two hours a day; so Bunny would tempt him for a stroll, a very slow one, and perhaps they would hear a sermon of Eli’s as they walked along the street, and that never failed to divert Dad’s mind and set him to chuckling. He took a kind of malicious delight in watching the glory sweep of the Third Revelation; by proving that the masses were boobs, you made it all right to take their naval reserves! Dad subscribed to a little paper issued by one of the rival religious showmen of the town, full of denunciations of Eli and exposures of his trickery.

The regular churches were jealous of this new Revelation, which had burst so rudely upon them. Eli was an upstart and a mountebank, and Tom Poober, the clerical rival, declared that he faked a lot of his alleged cures, he hired people to stand up and tell how their crippled limbs had healed and their cancers had disappeared. Also, Eli’s followers had not been willing to give up their customs of rolling and talking in tongues, and Eli had had to build for them a number of sound-proof rooms in the Tabernacle, where these rites were carried on. “Tarrying rooms,” they were called, because you went there to “tarry with Jesus”; and when things got going, you would see a hundred men and women rolling on the floor, pawing one another, tearing off their clothing; you would see a woman jerking her head back, or leaping several feet at a time, here and there, exactly like a chicken with its head cut off. The orgies would end with a mass of human creatures piled into a heap, wriggling and writhing, amid a smell of sweat that would make you ill.

The Reverend Poober would print such things, and send newsboys to sell the paper in front of the Tabernacle; the newsboys would be fallen upon and beaten, and the police would fail to arrest the assailants, or having arrested them, would turn them loose. Were the politicians of Angel City afraid of the power of this stuffed prophet? Tom Poober would ask in large capital letters, and Dad would chuckle—in the mood of that Western pioneer who came home and found his wife in a hand-to-hand conflict with a bear, and rested his gun upon the fence and took a seat and called, “Go it, woman! Go it, bear!”

There was another charge—the prophet was said to be fond of the company of handsome young women. That was a cruel thing to hint, because Eli was strenuous in denouncing fornications and adulteries, as much so as any Hebrew prophet of the First Revelation. Dad chuckled and speculated; until it happened one day that he and Bunny took a long drive, and stopped at an unfrequented beach, looking for a place for Bunny to get a swim. There was a cheap hotel on the waterfront, and coming out of the door, whom should they run into but Eli Watkins, with an indubitably handsome young woman! The young woman walked quickly on, and Eli exchanged greetings with Dad and Bunny, and then excused himself. Dad stood for a minute, looking after the couple and saying, “By golly!”

Then he turned and went into the hotel, and to the man at the desk remarked, in a casual tone, “I met that gentleman, but his name has slipped my memory—the one that just went out.”

“That’s Mr. T. C. Brown, of Santa Ynez.”

“Is he staying here?”

“He just checked out.”

Dad began to glance over the hotel register, and there he read, as big as life, “T. C. Brown and wife, Santa Ynez.” And in the crude scrawly handwriting of Eli Watkins, which Dad had at home upon several business letters! It was all Dad could do to keep from bursting out laughing. By golly, if he were to tip off Tom Poober to the contents of that hotel register, he would knock the Third Revelation as high as a kite!

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