Lewis' Values

As early as 1939, Lewis had called himself “a Romantic medievalist of the most incurable sort”. It might sound quite perverse, coming from a novelist of his complexion. But there was a strain that was overlooked by many. He wanted a novel to consist of “Warmth and lucidity”. He had great liking for “purple passages” found in his “Main Street” which nobody had noticed. “The man who knew Coolidge” was a novel, with a special gift for mimicry, in its most undiluted form. “He was in the habit of talking his novels out, while writing them.” (3)

“Whatever Lewis wanted to be, he was not at all a romanticist, nor even a realist, but he was a satirist. His novels were rich in properties as a David Belasco stage production. And he seemed to have used properties in the Belasco manner.”(4)

He was also intimately topical. So Dorothy Thompson, his wife, confided “Really, Sinclair Lewis is a phonograph record.”

It was not realism but verisimilitude. It was the method of Lewis to make annoying, illusion-shattering use of “phony” names. He would mix them up, quite arbitrarily, with the real names, which he would really employ. He had invented a state of Winnemac, bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. In “Gideon Planish”, Lewis gave readers Sanderson Smith, who was an advocate of nudism, Thomism, and cricket, or, Mr. Knife who had sparkling quotations from Dr. Frank Buchman, painted on his cuspidors. It was this larger-than-life quality which was less closely related to folklore in Lewis, than in Dickens. For instance, Carol Kennicott’s last view of Main Street was both mystic and loving. As early as 1928, Lewis had declared that his own Utopia would not differ notably from that of the editor of the Saturday Evening Post. He said that he did not wish to do away with the Babbitts. He only wished that they might learn “to talk of the quest of God oftener than of the quest for the best carburetors”. In course of time, the sympathy deepening, the satire would become blunted. In “It Can’t Happen Here”, Lewis had distrusted all panaceas and rejected all revolutions. In “Prodigal Parents”, Lewis was ready to contribute to the idea that, through Babbitts, all achievements in civilization became possible.

What were the beliefs of Lewis? Who were his Gods? To what did he adhere? To the scientific method, Lewis had a very strong commitment. He once stated that he liked most the career of working in a research laboratory. When early in life, he considered a Scholastic career, it was not science but a professor of English Literature that seemed to beckon him. Lewis had a distrust of “Intellectuals”. He was uneasy in their company. He was, perhaps, repelled by the flummery and affectation of the artists. Perhaps, the warning note of Bernard Shaw that one should beware of all the artists except those who were really great artists.

It was, evidently, an inadequate gospel. Human problems could not, for themselves, be solved in any laboratory, nor, in any studio. If everything in the marketplace was futile, then, the outlook was evidently dark indeed. The solution offered at the end of the novel “Arrow Smith”, through the withdrawal of the hero as a solution, was already suggested by Robert Herrick. He believed in something which was more than science. His characters were more successful in rebellion than in affirmation. It would be futile to expect a programme for a satirist and a critic, in essence. If Lewis could not create spiritually adult human beings, the cause lay deeper than the choice of method; “Arrow Smith”, despite its hero retaining the sympathy of the world, stumbled and slid back into a wilderness, an isolation and ended in a morass.

As for religion, Lewis considered himself an atheist. It would be easy to agree with his journalist-wife Dorothy Thompson, that God was never taken in by that. He was, in essence, an American liberalist, who believed in free life. He was no propagandist, against anything save dullness. It was, in a way, true that it was at once quite misleading in itself.

The heroine, Una Golden, in “The Job” suspected that “Life is too scared to be taken in war, filthy industries and dull education”. “Again most forms and organization and inherited castes are not sacred at all”. Years later, Ann Vickers was shocked at the idea of Russell desisting going into business. She thought that a professional man had almost certain “Mystical Loyalties to his calling”. If he was to give it up it was tragic to him. Like any other American Lewis remained true to himself until, it was threatened from without and far more seriously from within. From the pedestal, where Doremus Jessup, the hero of “It Can't Happen Here” stood, the difference between Babbitts and Arrow Smiths did not seem fundamental to him. “No American whose fathers have lived in this country for over two generations is so utterly different from any other American”. So Deremus Jessup had rejected murder as a method of Government, which was the order in a totalitarian state - “Men’s souls and bloods are not egg shells for tyrants to break -”. He would, thus, reject the more dangerous tyrannies that would grow up in our own hearts. He would state “Blessed be they who are not patriots and Idealists, and who do not feel that they must dash and Do Something about it, something so immediately important, that all doubters must be liquidated - tortured - slaughtered”.

Sinclair Lewis had pricked the bubble of American Complacency, when they most needed a gadfly to sting them. He called them back to the tradition of American Independence at a time when many of his countrymen were ready to go whoring after strange gods. In these capacities, in spite of all the limitations of art and of insight and in spite of the tragic errors of his life, he served his country well and he deserved to be held in grateful remembrance.


(3) The intimate books of George Jean Nathan (1932)

(4) Robert Van Gelder, “Writers Writing”, Page: 78