The Small Town
When “Main Street” (1920) was published, President Warren Harding had desired to establish a Rotary Club in every city, town and hamlet in order to foster the ideals of freedom and the progress of civilization. He took over the reins of the country that very year. The small town was the cradle of contemporary American Culture, with its inherent complacency and provincialism. The first literary trumpet blasts of deliverance from such narrowness had already been sounded the previous year (1919) with the publication of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio”, and H L Mencken’s “Prejudices”. Sinclair Lewis’ harsh indictment of village life, the middle class and the philistine in America had a ready receptive audience.
In spite of the lengthy tradition of realistic portrayal before “Main Street”, the village still persisted in American lore as the abode of rustics, the home of honest virtue, simplicity and friendliness. Meredith Nicholson in 1912 made a classic statement of everything to be perfectly comfortable and cheerful in Indiana, with lots of old-fashioned human kindness flowing round through his “Hoosier Chronicle”. The poems of Lee Masters and the stories of Sherwood Anderson had helped to strengthen the conventional view. There could be no doubt at all that Lewis through his “Main Street” made his first factual treatment of the American rural community to attract a large public response. He had destroyed the stereotyped small town and the medium sized town.
Lewis while refuting the charges made by Carl Van Doren in his article "Revolt for the Village” (1920) in “Nation”, stated that he had never fully read the poems of Masters and that a plan to write about the small town came to him during his sophomore years (1905) at Yale, as “The Village Virus”. The central character in it was Guy Pollock, but not Carol Kennicott. Before the revolt from the village could stabilize itself as a literary fashion, Lewis had come to the conclusion that village life could be anything but a sweet neighbourliness. The author had yearned for it in his heart of hearts that this should someday become a theme for his novel. It was not Lee Masters but Hamlin Garland who appeared to have his heart and mind; for as a boy, he had read the “Main Traveled Roads” and “Rosie of Dutcher’s Coolly”. Perhaps, it was then, that he had learnt to discard the conventional view of village life and to write about Mid Western people as he saw them. The book which saw the American small town was not the one sure abode of friendship, honesty and clean, sweet marriageable girls. ”Main Street” was his well-planned and eagerly written novel. After going through the first draft of this novel, Alfred Harcourt thought it to be the truest work he ever read.
Lewis had laid its scenes from his childhood memory. Though he was not the novelist of nostalgic memory, he desisted from criticizing Main Street “either from the Eastern point of view or the urban point of view, or from the aesthetic sophistication”. It was the opinion of Grace Heggar Lewis that “Main Street” was not a satire. After all, to reveal the truth of something, it need not be a satire, or a ridicule. The resume which Lewis and his wife submitted to Harcourt, described it as a reconciliation with one’s environment. “Only in the end does Carol learn the great secret of life, contentment in the real world in which it is never possible to create an ideal setting”. (12) Yet “Main Street” was a devastating satire from the head note of the novel. The theme was uniformity and negativism spread by the “Village Virus”.
“It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment, the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is dullness made God.
“A savorless people, gulping tasteless food and sitting afterward, coat-less and thoughtless, in rocking chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the World”.
Apart from the smugness, inhibitions, and prejudices of small towns, one frightening thing about the Mid Western mentality was playing at world dominion. Lewis was trenchant in the denunciation of American mediocrity. Through Carol Kennicott, one would be looking at the entire aristocracy of Gopher Prairie, all persons engaged in a profession, or possessed of grand parents born in America. Through her, the nothingness of an American village would be discovered. It was a combination of intellectual squalor and a swamp of prejudices and fears. One would soon realize how horrible it would be to shut up in a ghetto-like confinement of the small town and an equally terrible thing to be leading a life devoid of any adventurousness and with a sense of it being finished.
Usually, it was the voice of Sinclair Lewis, heard through the outbursts of his heroine Carol Kennicott. She was, in fact, a caricature of the advanced young woman of the current times. In college, she was capricious and an illogical reformer. She wanted, just then, to have a calling in a settlement house, like a nun, without the bother of the black robe and be kind and read Bernard Shaw and enormously improve a horde of grateful poor. Coming to Gopher Prairie, she desired to plant seeds of beauty and intelligence without knowing very much of either. Also, she was impulsive and tactless. Especially when in the role of Princess Winky Poo at a party and also when she asked the town millionaire to hand over the town of Gopher Prairie to her fully, she was very childish. Carol was, partly a reformer caricatured, and an advanced type of a modern young woman. Lewis had made “Carol” of his own self. Through her attempts to better Gopher Prairie, the author had adopted a patronizing attitude. She was better than Emma Bovary in “Madam Bovary”, in that Carol had designed a better life for herself. The same was confirmed by Lewis in his conversation with Charles Dreasted (14) in his article on “Sauk Centricities of Sinclair Lewis”. According to Sinclair Lewis, Carol was “dull about the male world interests of Dr. Kennicott”. (15)
In this regard, it would seem risky to identify the author’s point of view with that of the heroine. However, towards the end of the novel, it would become clear that only one side of the picture appeared shown. It had not occurred to her that there was also a story of Will Kennicott, into which she entered only so much as he entered into her. He had bewilderment and concealment as intricate as her own and soft treacherous desires for sympathy.
As was enthusiastically assumed in the 1920s, satiristic exposure was taken as Lewis’ principal concern. Lewis tries to make a balanced assessment of the small town. He also introduced the contrasting point of view of a stranger, Bea Sorenson, Carol’s Scandinavian maid, of Gopher Prairie.
We would find a trace of Lewis’ original conceptions in the early part of the novel. Carol and Bea Sorenson would make their tours of the small town independently if Carol’s impressions were bitter, those of Bea were optimistic and enthusiastic. These two views were exposed to make the intentions of Lewis obvious, to make the problem of the Mid Western small town clear to the mind of a reader.
Carol, in the end, made an attempt to conform to the village mores. She would make an endearing address to Mrs. Clark by her given name. Shortly before this, Carol had decided to forgive the villagers. She thought they were not to be blamed for their behavior. According to her, institutions and not individuals were to be blamed. Those who served the most would be the worst hit of human beings facing privation and victimization. The villagers, “soul-less inhabitants”, did not at all deserve such a harsh treatment. It was a lopsided view developed in the name of satire.
Moreover, this novel had two titles, one “The Main Street”which had an ironic undertone, the second one “The Story of Carol and Dr. Will Kennicott her husband, a simple life history of a cultured lady”. As a satire, the novel did not need the last two hundred pages. From Ch. XIX, Carol was shown to have spent her three years at Gopher Prairie. It was the story of her marriage. When Carol met Percy Breshahan, the automobile organization’s president, the heroine had lost her critical perspective. It had turned into adulation, for a local boy-turned-good. Carol was approaching her middle age. Foreseeing a drab future, she wanted to hold on to as much of romantic youth as she yet possessed. She was attracted to a young bohemian, Carl Balborg, who talked of art without practicing it, but when he finally sold his soul to Hollywood. The situations in the novel were purely personal but not social. If “Main Street” had suffered from prudishness, gossip-mongering and censoriousness, the heroine was not less guilty. She was indiscreet. And William Kennicott had to cut her to the requisite size.
The first part of this novel was a close analysis of provincialism. It consisted of an examination, subject by subject, of life in Gopher Prairie, the small town streets, parties, gossip, greed and pitiful cultural endeavors. From the heroine’s first tour of the Main Street she would get an impartial view. In the context, even pleasant objects like the agricultural implements in a warehouse were given an ugly and sinister quality. One would be looking through the eyes of Carol Kennicott at the village. Environment was not merely unattractive, but even threatening. Many of the characters were types; the town’s doctor, the gossipmonger, the town-atheist, the frustrated school teacher and the rebellious young artist. They were two-dimensional figures. They had not minds, but only voices. They were loud mouthed, breezy pioneers, speaking with a “barbaric yap”. Miles Bjornstam, the critic of Gopher Prairie standards, even he would roar at, rather than talk with Carol; the women like Juanita Haydocks were vociferous and insensitive.
“They were ungrateful; all that class of people. I do think the domestic problem is becoming simply awful. I don't know what the country’s coming to with these Scandinavian Clodhoppers demanding every cent you can save and so ignorant and impertinent and on my work, demanding bath-tubs everything - as if they were not almighty good and lucky at home if they got a bath in the wash-tub”. (16)
From this passage, it can be presumed that the villagers were very unprincipled and grotesque in behavior. The deliberations of the Thanatopsis Club and their summary treatment of English poetry, fiction, and essays were not only amusing but also betraying their ignorance of everything. The ignorant talk of Aunt Bessie and Uncle Whittier, and the outlandish talk of Perrys, the old pioneers, had all amounted to harmless amusement. A majority of the people forming into pacts with their opposition to the alien and the unfamiliar, were monstrous human beings. From a terrifying first experience, Carol expected a change in them, a cordial touch in them because her man was of their tribe. Miles and Bjornstam, being foreigners, were offered no quarter. At their wedding, there were only nine guests; and at the funeral of Bea and her son, Miles was the only mourner. When Mrs Bogart accused Fern Mullins, the young school teacher, of corrupting her dandy son, Cy, the entire town began to hate and demand a sacrifice. Carol felt that even her children would offer no hope of improvement. The entire town had no youthful people. They were all born old, grim, spying and censorious. Will Kennicott would outgrow his provincialism to win the han of the heroine. But soon he was in his original colors finding fault with Carol’s love of freedom. After some pages of the novel, the readers find Will Kennicott to be considerate, sensitive and free from his environment. Though Lewis diagnosed Main Street-ills, he would provide an excuse for them. The excuse was that the Middle West dealt with by him was not old enough to be known in any better way.
The fundamental criticism of Main Street was that it was more satiric than realistic, satiric about the problem. This was also ridiculously heightened for the purpose of caricature. The characters, instead of being true to life, were disposed to project the author’s controlling thesis. For example, Carol Kennicott was to voice the authorial criticism of ‘Main Street’. Jim Blausser was to show up the banality of boosting, while Gay Pollock was to illustrate an aberration of spirit caused by the village men. And lastly the case of Vida Sherwin would bring out the futility of uplift. In fact, Lewis’ characters were created to point out a moral. The art of creating his men and women into types and their failure was not a big offense when compared to the author’s insinuations at the end of the novel that they possessed some redeeming qualities which he had denied them throughout. Most of his major novels except “Dodsworth” could be likened to an explosion. Lewis could be likened to Matthew Arnold in that he wrote about American life like an alien commentator, with the vigor of an intellectual and with the perfect detachment of a shrewd person. Lewis excelled every other contemporary writer, even Hamlyn Garland, who could also write about the Middle West in an unsentimental way, but not without belittling the descendants of the Old Frontier.
Lewis was considered the man of the frontline in revolt. They were a set of disillusioned intellectuals. Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Floyd Dell, and Scott Fitzerald, besides Lewis, had no discoverable common ground among them for disillusionment. But from an interview of Lewis by Wagstaffe, in 1921, it had been proved conclusively that there was nothing unique about the revolt than a mere rebellion of the Second Generation about their fathers. But one essential difference between Lewis and revolt-writers was that they were fleeing to Paris, after finding their native country quite soul-destroying. He could not be like them ins spite of his numerous visits to Europe. He could not also be a perfect Greenwich resident like Floyd Dell. Lewis had for his prophets Wells and Shaw, and for his “glorious play fellow", his New Woman. “Main Street” contained his Chicago Bohemia in which Floyd Dell lived for five years.
The spirit of the twenties had kept Lewis under its influence. It was a decade of auto-restriction and hedonism. At times, Lewis wrote to oppose marriage as a cramping and an outmoded institution. He had also toyed with the idea of a free and uninhibited love as a key to perfect happiness.
Lewis and Sherwood Anderson had worked for the same cause, the war for one hundred percent Americanism and fundamentalism, against the doctrine that “an American to be a good American, must agree with every prevailing orthodoxy in theology, politics, economics, taste, and must school his manners accordingly until he would be interchangeable with any other American ….”. (17) the urge for freedom from conformity was quite converted with the return to a spirit of the earlier simple era. Change was his watch word, it meant a reversion to the values of a Frontier society. Freedom was his guardian spirit freeing him from every possible entanglement, and finally to dissipation, thus he lived for a decade.
An individual up against a degenerate society and a town would become a very interesting societal study. Carol Kennicott, the sophisticated heroine had at first entertained a great revulsion for the town of Gopher Prairie in which she was forced to live. It was because she had tasted the bitter fruits of defeat at the hands of the town's men. They resisted every effort of hers to refine or civilize them in her own way. In course of time, they made her life quite miserable, often resorting to eaves-dropping and scandal-mongering. It was almost inevitable for her to leave the town for good. She had practiced a sort of isolationism as a way of life. She had withdrawal as her avowed policy. Then she fled to Chicago in search of social service. She had an exposure to women-suffragettes and young rebels. The only difference between the two towns was that there was a slight political awakening in the latter. She had soon got tired of it and had decided to get back to Gopher Prairie and led the life of compromise.
A more influential novel, “Babbitt” was published in Fall, 1922. It was a novel about an average American Businessman of a town of three to four thousand people, Zenith. It was a town of enormous industrial power, its little Theater and Master of the Fox Hounds and lively country clubs. It had its usual menacing heresy bunt. It was Lewis’ aim to make this novel free from the cult of propaganda. The intention of Lewis became pronounced through a letter (18) written to Carl Van Doren, in November, 1920.again in his letter to Alfred Harcourt, Lewis had stated that he wanted to make it into the Great American Novel, “in so far as it crystalizes and makes real the average capable American (Babbitt) in all of us American at 46, prosperous but worried, wanting passionately to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it’s too late.”
The first hundred pages of “Babbitt” described, in a mock-heroic fashion, a day in the life of an average businessman. The substantial citizen was taken at his own valuation; every event was of a world-shaking importance, and must be captured in photographic detail; Businessman shaving, Businessman changing suits, Businessman starting his car, Businessman completing a deal etc. Had the author been detached, the effect would have been highly ironic. The reader would not be allowed to infer the limitations of his hero. The author pointed them out on the other hand. The city which never seemed to have been built for a giant-like “Babbitt” was really a pygmy. He was shown to be the archetype of a Booster, loud-mouthed, unthinking and insensitive. The cliches and prejudices of his speech belonged to a group. His symbols of truth and beauty became the mechanical devices that surrounded him. But he had no understanding of their workings. Success, according to him, was conformity to a pattern of living delineated by one true American art, the advertisement. The large national advertisers had fixed the surface of his life, a fix that he believed to be his individuality. Though he loved to speak sonorously of unselfish public services, the broker’s obligation to keep inviolate the trust of his clients, and a thing called Ethics, and its nature was confusing. The value of his work was exactly nothing. Beyond this, Seneca Doane, the middle-of-the-road liberal, appeared to represent Lewis’ point of view. He exercised a fearful despotism.
“What I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and of course, the tradition of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious family men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their clubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they are so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy”. (19)
Mr. Doane’s assessment was in tune with the unpublished introduction of Lewis. Then he did not even decide to give his hero a name. He was called Dumphry, “our conqueror and dictator of our commerce, education, labor, arti politics, morals and conversation”, (20) Babbitt was shown as a caricature of a real person prevented from realizing his self fully by the restrictions which all the people of his class impose upon their society. Babbitt did have an inner life, and a native decency which separated from his backslapping associates - Vergil Gunches and Chum Frinks. He was linked with the misfits like Paul Riesing.
Babbitt’s moral failure was partly excusable. He struggled to revolt against conformity. The Babbitts were only pawns in the hands of real villains, racketeers like Col. Snow, Jake Offutt and Henry Thompson. Lewis echoed the opinions of Mr. May (21) regarding the source of all evil in the American Eden.
The Muckrackers had brought their evil to light. Cruelty and misery seemed to disgrace America and the Twentieth century. Evil was the result, not of any human foible, or of modern society, but of the concentration of powers in the hands of a corrupt few. These had perverted the country’s institutions and stalled the progress of the country.
The Babbitts were not in the least responsible for this sorry state of affairs. It was an accepted middle class myth that they needed absolution, and Lewis was fully convinced of this fact. The whole tragedy of Babbitt’s life was the belief that he had control over his own affairs and that he would put up a bold fight in which he was to lose.
Lewis had converted him from a defiant hero to an average American Businessman. He would make a full circuit from conformity to conformity through defiance and withdrawal. He was back in the fold of the Good Citizen’s League. He was unable to bear the tyranny of this organization. Equally horrible was the condescension of the Booster’s Club. He would look up to his son Thomas Roosevelt Babbitt with the hope that he at least would lead a bolder and resolute life. This was the interesting societal aspect of this novel. Like the two Babbitts, there are two themes in this novel. A quarter of the book was devoted to a day in Babbitt’s life. Then, there followed certain episodes in which Babbitt had a thorough involvement. The meetings of the Real Estate Boards betrayed a hysterical local patriotism with males in a happy state of nature. Lunches at the “Roughneck Table” at the Athletic Club, a College Reunion, a Civic Election, would all go to round out the picture of group behavior, exhibiting a wide spectrum of group opinion as well as prejudice.
Comprehensiveness was one virtue of this novel. Correspondence school courses meant for Ted Babbitt, the Poetry of Chum Frink, Mrs. Babbitt’s own revolt towards a higher thought, getting under the influence of Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge “on cultivating the Sun Spirit”, would serve the purpose of a survey of Zenith at the time of Babbitt’s going to bed. Lewis would add to this the Mike Monday (Billy Sunday) and its profuse evangelism.
When, for Cooper and Hawthorne, the American Scene had nothing opulent to offer, for the literary scene, for Lewis, his Babbittean concept of the ideal, the standardized citizen, and the new civilization of vital standardized living implied that the whole nation had got into a blind alley of Babbittry.
“Arrowsmith” (1925) was a new novel on the research scientist. He was the new hero to pursue in his laboratory, a new subject, a scientific individualism, a new perspective. Although Lewis’ childhood as a doctor’s son might have contributed in a small way to the idea of Arrowsmith, its source mainly was in the experience and professional knowledge of Paul de Kruif, which contained many of those characteristics found in Arrowsmith, in both, there was keen observation, a capacity for devotion and a complete integrity.
The personal acquaintances of Paul de Kruif in scientific circles, his experience in the world of science, and his technical knowledge had all gone to constitute the background for Arrowsmith. This was particularly true in the latter part of the novel where the scenes of McGurk Institute and the Caribbean from Paul de Kruif’s friends and circle of acquaintances became prototypes for important characters in Arrowsmith. Upon his wife, Rhea was based on the characters of Leora. Max Gottlieb was a blending of Frederic Novy, de Kruif’s chief trainer, and a friend at the University of Michigan and of Jacques Loeb, colleague of de Kruif, temporarily at least, at Rockefeller's Institute. With the austere Novy in charge, the slogan in science was “do it yourself”. In the words of de Kruif, it could be described how one burned one’s hands blowing one’s own glassware for complex operators. A reflection of this could be seen in some passages, growing anaerobic cultures but he had been trained by Max Gottlieb who remarked that if need be, one should innovate one’’s own devices from improvised things, failing which one would almost be driven to by his results, even along with his fine equipment.
Points of similarity between Gottlieb and Jacques included a common reverence for physical chemistry, their broken English, and their sarcasm. Loeb’s characterization of a contemporary in the words, “as a physicist he is a good husband and father”, would remind us of Gottlieb’s description of Holabird as “that pants presser of science”.
Another character in “Arrowsmith” was taken directly from a Rockefeller associate of de Kruif, it was De Witt Tubbs. His prototype was Simon Flexer, the actual director of the Rockefeller Institute even as Tubbs was the mythical director of McGurk. Both had the same contempt for research by any but the contemporary menials and the urbane suavity of both was magisterial steel. Keeping this in mind as well as the parts he played in Lewis’ scientific education and in the selection of the “plague island”, one would be inclined to agree with Mark Schorer that “Arrowsmith” could never have been written without a technical authority such as de Kruif.
The central theme of “Arrowsmith” was the realization of the spiritual ideal amid the strain and struggle of American life. This strain, once described by Alexander Harvey, in “The Herald Tribune Books Section” as an agony of American life which emerges from American spiritual ambition that exceeds American Spiritual capacity”. The charge that the author was unable to comprehend this experience was well answered, not only by its portrayal but by its conquest. Arrowsmith’s spiritual ideal, an uncompromising dedication in search for truth, survived not only the opposing forces of commercialism, success, fame and the influence of a loving wife. Vacillating as he might be at times in his choice of Gods, careers, and second marriage, he never weakened his fundamental idea of his implacable pursuit of scientific truth.
Lewis did not find much scope for employment of conventions in a novel where development of its theme rested upon attacking conventions. True, at one point, early in Martin Arrowsmith’s career, he becomes engaged to a “wrong girl”. Again, in that phase of the novel, one could classify Cliff Clawson, as the true friend. And Dean Silva was the deus ex machine. The Philanthropists like Ross and Capitiola McGurk were so realistically drawn, including the less important but equally conventional figures of absent minded professors, class Jester. Also this casting of a medico as a protagonist was so unusual in a major novel that Lewis could be acquitted of the charge of conventionalism.
One very interesting aspect of Arrowsmith was the individual’s attitude to society. In the course of realizing his ideal of pure-science tradition against a rapidly growing applied sciences with an eye on instant utility of everything, the hero developed an escape from society. He was very nonconforming at every stage in his life, struggling to keep up an uncompromising attitude that he finally had withdrawn into a secluded life of selling a serum and living by it.
While in all the heroes of the second and the third decades of the 20th Century, Lewis had shown some attitudinal variations, in Carol Kennicott of “Main Street”, there is the growth of nonconformity in the beginning. In her utter revulsion from the mores of the small town, she withdraws into a self-satisfied complacent self-exile. In the end, there began a compromise in her life with what was quite inevitable. In “Babbitt”, the hero George F. Babbitt would traverse the cycle of conformity through an intermediate yearning for freedom. He associates himself for a while with the younger libertiness. Finally, he would return to the earlier compromises in life. Again, with Martin Arrowsmith, there was a growth of idealism, and a dedication to it. Unable to get on with the commercialism and cross opportunism of modern life, the hero had become an isolated individual, ready to lead his life in a back woods country without losing his independence.
“Elmer Gantry” (1927) was published with a tremendous fanfare; the reaction to this picaresque novel was mixed. The brethren in Kansas City had been spluttering with rage even before this. The New York Times had carried an account on the reaction of an old friend of the author, William Allen White. Sinclair Lewis standing before a pulpit in Kansas City Church, defied God, challenging him to strike him dead, if he could. He was more lost in making faces at God and forgot his craftsmanship.
The favorable reaction of the reading public could be seen through an upwards trend in sales to 150,000 copies. The advertisement was so effective as to give publicity to the book through billboards timing it with the General Conference of the Methodist Church in May, 1928. The book was hailed as an admirable satirical exposure of the state of religion in America, enmeshed in the tentacles of commercialism. The hero, Elmer Gantry, cunning and oratorical, would make a rapid headway in the world of religion. Device after device would make him enter a new denomination and round out the picture.
The novel began as a satire on revivalism. Elmer was thrown out of a Baptist Seminary to become a farm implements salesman,.He would find his pedestal as Billy Sunday partnered with Aimes Sample McPherson. Though this satire was the best part of the book, revivalism was not the only target. The early influences of Elmer, at the Terwilinger College and Mizpah Theological Seminary were handled very mildly.
As his hero joined the Methodist Church, Lewis would seize this chance to satirize another sect. The Protestant Groups, the Jews, and the Catholics would also get their share of abuse. To Lewis, all appeared in equally bad light, fit to be ridiculed. It was not also the question of the good priest versus the bad one. But those few priests, good in themselves, Dr. Brune Zechlin, the Old Testament Scholar at Mizpah, had given up their religious beliefs. Philip Mc Garry, Ph.D. in Economics and Philosophy was made to show that no educated person could believe in Christianity except in a very vague way: “The only dogma he was known to give out positively was the leadership of Jesus as to whose divinity he was indefinite”. (22)
A good priest’s career could run better but he had abandoned his chosen walk of life. But then Rev. Andrew Pengilly, the virtuous man saw God in nature, who would rather feel religion than reasons behind it. To him, a difference in doctrine would mean nothing. Frank Shallard was locked up in his doubts at the seminary. Dr. Zechlin had advised him to stay within the church and liberate it. No reasonable person could be a believing Christian. Elmer Gantry’s influence and his own stricken conscience had forced Shallard to give up the pulpit and turn to social work. Once for delivering an anti-Fundamentalist lecture, he was beaten and blinded.
Lewis had gone too far to expose the religious excesses connected with revivalism. To him, Christianity was both untrue and inconceivable. To him, a religious man was either a hypocrite or a moron. The good shepherd was the one whose sheep were fed with material feed, not stale spiritualism. A great deal of wit and humor had made the author's attack from becoming half-grained and peevish in the name of satire.
As against the norms of realism, there was the element of fantasy in this novel. In the name of this too, everything was handled in a weird and crude manner. Especially the marriage ceremony of Gantry and Sharon Falconer was very bizarre. It took place before a very grotesque shrine. The fantasy element would arise out of Lewis’ belief that formal religion was based on the self-interest of its leaders. One would be aware of sinister forces which are capable of giving a lethal blow to American liberties. They were the forces of righteousness. Gantry was a close associate of J.E. North, the Executive Secretary of the “National Association For Purification of Arts and Press” and a romping vice-slayer accompanied by a whirl-wind campaign all over the country. Elmer Gantry wanted to head all the Puritanic forces in the country to add to his self aggrandisement. Thus the country was in the hands of wizards and Ogres. Elmer Gantry was a compendium of all vices and a Satanic genius. For one to become a repository of all vices would amount to anti-reality. However, Sinclair Lewis had granted him a soul and a feeling heart during the days of his conversion at Terwilliger College. He was a man of immoderate personal ambition to attain which every means was right in itself. If Lewis thought that his hero had a conscience, it would be hard to believe.
That this novel had no artistry or no individual or no social conflict had been forcefully brought forward by Edwin Muir in a review. He thought it to be an “artistic failure”. More than that Lewis was undecided about his role, a novelist or a satirist. In this process, his hero became a type, too undefined to be a character. Yet on the whole, the novel was a devastating satire on religious hypocrisy. Rebecca West thought Sinclair Lewis ought not to have lived like a satirist; one worth the name, must have some imagination to visualize the positive aspects of religion as a power, to prove the state of the author’s mind, which was not much different from the hero’s. She quoted the concluding part of Ch. 28 of the novel, in which, Frank Shallard, a doubting Evangelist who proved Jesus to be a lover of flattery. He was denounced for not recommending cleanliness. He gave life to an economy which he never believed in saving but to live like a tramp. This was the height of clod-hop-handling of a Biblical narrative. Perhaps, Lewis felt the need to use the language and thought of a Babbitt to fight out Babbittry. He entered into an argument with him to reverse his opinions. He had, in this process, become a Babbitt himself. Mark Schorer, writing about this novel in 1955 in “The New Republic”, thought that “Elmer Gantry” as a novel, would stand far below Lewis “Main Street” and “Babbitt”. It lacked several beautifying sentimental reveries. These were markedly absent in this novel. Schorer went a step further to characterize Lewis as a “stark image of barbarity in whom nothing is missing but all religion and all humanity”. (23) Also, Schorer felt that Lewis’ hero had his moments of honesty, brief no doubt, when, “I am leading an absolutely Christian life, but I am bringing a whole lot more souls into Church than any of these pussy-footing tin saints…”. (24) But this was a fleeting mood of the character, only too soon to be out of it. As hinted by Mark Schorer, Lewis’ hero was a product of “an important if stultifying American tradition; the Protestantism of the hinterland…”. (25)
Lewis here got his religion, music and philosophy from his church and Sunday school as a boy. He had not the ability to evaluate the forces that had made him, or the historical situation in which he was involved. Though Lewis was quite aware of his hero’s deficiency, he remained helpless in view of the method of dividing everything before one. It was a trap in which the author was ironically cloistered. It was in this novel alone that the author was imprisoned in the vicious circle of a loathing social environment.
Mr. Elmer Davis (26) wrote a scathing review of this novel in the New York Times. (1927) H L Mencken, like other prophets, had set out to teach truth to men. Through it, he thought they would be liberated. And flatteringly enough to Mencken, these sheep in their joyful goose step, loudly proclaimed this to be the sole truth in the world. As pointed out by Couch (27), in his “Reputation”, Mencken published the Fifth Series of “Prejudices” in 1925, and had invited Lewis, by name, to come forward in attacking the Revival-Evangelist activities. In answer to it came this novel, “Elmer Gantry”.
The influence of Mencken on Lewis was quite immense. Firstly that this novel was dedicated “in profound admiration to H L Mencken” would avouch the truth of it. George G Nathan in his “Intimate Note Books”, (28) had narrated the incident. Lewis met him and Mencken when they were together to hand the advance sheets of his novel. It was a pleasant surprise to his great friend Mencken. This association was to snap in 1930 due to a misunderstanding between Mrs. Mencken and Mrs. Dorothy Thomspn Lewis. Secondly, the job of hunting and mocking at the Boobs and hypocrites, it was an enjoyable game to them both. As Mr. Dooley wrote in his “Art of Sinclair Lewis”, Lewis was polluted by the cynicism of Mencken and not by the purity of Schorer thought him to be, the original optimist hoped that all the trapped Americans would, one day, come out of it, through their native ingenuity, or enterprise, or even through the American destiny.
The credit of coining this new word “Babbilogue” went to Malcom Cowley. It as the favorite literary and conversational device, which could at best be called the satiric monologue. It was the facile virtue of Sinclair Lewis to imitate the long satiric monologues even of the characters, not yet created in a fit accent. Women were exempted from this parody. Those whom he invited included the voice of the long-winded men in the smoking cars, the Babbitts, the Gantrys, and the Lowell Schmaltzes. These speeches constituted the essential aspects of Lewisean satiric fiction.The Speaker’s (29) defects as well as that of his class would become unwittingly clear. He was a representative of the class. As long as the technique remained quite under the control of the author it was effective. There lurked a dancer of every satiric novel dwindling itself into a mere string of satiric monologues, even though it could not be a mere survey of satire.
Lewis’ art lay in forming a cascading outflow of inexhaustible mimicry, which the publisher, if he could, would operate the sluice gates judiciously, so as to enable him to get away with a fast seller from Lewis.. But in the case of “The Man who knew Coolidge” (1928), even this control could not work well.
For Babbilogue to succeed as a real talk, it must fulfill two requisites. It ought to be humorous, giving the reader a feeling that it was the talk of somebody, recognized readily. But from a close examination of a satiric monologue of Lowell Schmaltz, it would not be difficult to conclude that it was the talk of a class. An illustration is Lowell Schaltz’s praise of filing cabinets.
“May be you think I’m getting kind of Woozy about it, I’ll tell’em” but to me the beauties of the modern filing systems which enable a man to instantly and without the least loss of time or effort find a letter on which, perhaps, depends the closing of an important deal, is in its practical way, to say nothing of the physical appearance of modern up-to-date cabinets, no longer, mere wooden boxes but whether in steel or fire-proofed wood, the finest example of the cabinet-makers art and imitating perfectly the rarest woods to be “I often tell him”, these filing systems are, in every way, as beautiful as the flush on the maiden’s check when she first bears the whispered words of love, or the soft chirp of the mother bird at eventide, chirping to her birdlings. Yes sir, you bet your sweet life they are and you can laugh all you want to. (30)
This was not evidently sales talk but a burlesque of such talk, made up of verbosity, exaggeration, incongruities and contradictions, all going the way of absurdity. The disparity between the actual standards and the expressed ones would lend this a color of grotesqueness. At times, his speech was quite self-contradictory. It was a principle disproved the very next minute it was proposed at the same place. Talking about the prohibition law in the country, through the XVIII Amendment of the United States Constitution, Lowell made a ridiculous suggestion. If he drew attention to some fault in others, he would in the same breath, emphasize his own capability on the same score. He condemned the wanderlust in some. He would decry the ill treatment of Queen’s English at the hands of the younger generation. The contradiction was sometimes made obvious by a comparison between any two statements. The satiric monologue would reveal what the speaker liked to hide if only he could.
Lewis tried to analyze the social class through the talk of a typical individual. The very subtitle of the novel is ironic: “Being the soul of Lowell Schaltz constructive and Nordic Citizen”. But the irony was that this hero had no soul at all, not the rational soul at least. His mind was a reverberatory apparatus for advertising slogans and typical propaganda. These were the substitutes for the cultured expressions of that society. Their talk was the typical talk-talk, to speak of their mother country in glowing terms, as a nation greater than all the world put together, having the largest number of automobiles, radios, furnaces, suits of clothes, miles of cement walks and skyscrapers, in place of the Gods of the old times. They would have the material and the machines. He stated that through vacuum cleaners, Americans had given the world one mystery, unique to this country, which would outline the columns of the Acropolis. The Sixth Babbilogue was about the basic and fundamental ideals of Christian American Citizenship. “It turned out to be a salesman’s talk, of points of service and practicability. The effective and decadent culture of the Old World was replaced by the New Era of American Civilization. There was no noble guideline for the conduct of a person in society other than to read widely, think scientifically, speak briefly and sell the goods.” (31)
From under the rubble of it all, we would see the ugly personality of a fellow, Schmaltz was a failure, and a fraud, both at home, and in business. As a husband, he was a sadistic monster, who misquoted Freud to suit his convenience. His allegiance and affiliation were to the sinister and anti-democratic force in the name of social and political attitudes. It was this underworld which Lewis tried to expose in all his novels. If the Germans were too slow to align themselves to the democratic setup in America, they must be coerced into accepting it. He would proudly state how the Bolshevik were manhandled till they abandoned their doctrines at the instance of the Americanization Committee of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce.
The Hunkies immigrating from their foreign homes, still kept their ridiculous and uncivilized customs, instead of undergoing a process of acculturization and becoming real Americans. Lowell Schmaltz’s sinister qualities estranged him from public sympathy. He was an irredeemable Babbitt. He was a Babbitt gone nasty. If Babbitt was naive and complacent, Schmaltz was arrogant and assertive. Lewis had been able to capture some cultural reflexes of certain types of people. Lewis was not always as patronizing and as superior to the average American as he was in “The Man Who Knew Coolidge”. He had formed this novel with “Mercury” readers in mind. He described these reflexes which those readers had been trained by Mencken to recognize and condemn.
In March, 1929, came Lewis’ best novel, “Dodswordth”. Its theme was based on the problem of an American businessman face-to-face with culture.Neither the European culture nor the AMerican had been the topic for analysis. Lewis had sympathetically analyzed both cultures attempting to accept what was valuable as culture. It was also in part a satire on the American expatriates who not only lived a purposeless life in the name of their being artists, but also took every opportunity to revile their own mother country. They were the rotogravure type of men and women.
Lewis’ Dodsworth, after attaining the role of an active captain of the automotive industry, found himself alienated from everybody. He had detached himself from a position of great glory, after having made his Reliance Automobile Company, the leader of all. He had allowed his company to be taken over by the giant firm United Automotive Corporation backed by a mighty financier, Alex Kynance. He had willingly rejected the offer of Vice-Presidentship of the newer firm. Lewis was trying to project the Veblensque opposition between the Engineer and the Captain of finance. He would also establish a contrast between the heroic maker and doer and the ignoble manipulator of stocks and bonds and balance sheets. It would also mean loss of importance of Sam Dodsworth before the corporate financier Alec Kynane. Dodsworth grew restless through his urge for freedom from the charms of a business world. He thought that life had something more than mere worship of Mammon. It was the culture aspect of life. But he was well-grounded in the healthy American tradition. He was in quest of real happiness, face to face with the culture of Europe. Dodsworth was averse to everything showy and false in values. He was a discreet observer of what was best in the artistic workmanship of the anonymous and vulgar people. He was responsive and inquiring. He was led to ponder over the deficiencies of his own countrymen. His own countrymen were meddlesome, morality hounds. Was he to behave like his own other expatriates and stay back in Europe? For, like them, he too, could not face them, nay, stand them even. Dodsworth would be the window to oversee the world. Through his experiences he would grow into a mature man who had something of value from both the countries. Looking at his Zenith after his return from the continent, Dodsworth found his own compatriots not “very much interested” in anything whatsoever. They had cultivated caution until they had lost the power to be interested. The things over which they were most exclamatory - money, gold, drinking… were to the lords of Zenith, not pleasures but ways of keeping so busy that they would not admit how bored they were, how empty their ambitions.. They did things, they rushed, they supervised, they contended , but they were not interested. (32)
This picture of Zenith was quite similar to that of Babbitt’s Zenith. The vision was that of pygmies in a land made for giants. Dodsworth had overgrown his townsmen, yet, he would not detest them, or revolt against his society. It was the endeavor of Lewis to present his hero abroad in search of materials of culture. In vitality, the hero would stand superior to those of the effete of the Eastern States of the UR or people of the Old World. His country would stand before him like a frontier where his services would be needed.
His wife Frances Voelker was carried away by the glitter and splendor of European Culture. It was yet another social embellishment to her. Mrs. Dodsworth was frittering away her energies in the company of the butterflies of the Societies. She would fall into the trap of affairs with other men, only to become a driftwood. She developed a taste for butterflies and a revulsion to ants. To her, her husband was just an ant. Dodsworth was forced to abandon her and take in her place another lady of better culture, Edith Cartright. Together, they would eke a more meaningful life, commencing another venture not involving motor cars but garden suburbs. The Sans Souci Gardens project which had nothing sham or pretensions about it contributing its mite to the building of a new city,, finer than anything ,which an American could naturally boast of.
To get an insight into his new business, Samuel Dodsworth had read some magazine notes on architecture through “Country Life” notes on architecture. But whenever Samuel Dodsworth broached the topic, Francess Dodsworth was quite unsympathetic to his proposal. She was interested in her own self, in travelling and in Europeanization At the German Hotel Suit, Aldon Suits, Dodsworth reopened the discussion of his project and the need for Frances to return home and be his cultural advisor in America. It was the last weapon in his armory to use and recapture his wife for himself. He wanted to save her from falling into the trap of marrying Count Graffe Obersdorf. Between the hero and the heroine, there was an unbridgeable gulf and all was set for a divorce.
Dodsworth wanted freedom from his wife. But it was not possible for him to achieve it. A sympathy for his wife, a form of paternal attitude for her dominated his mind. Indifference to sex had killed the virile manhood in him. Through his exposure to Namde Azaredo, and his ultimate falling for Edith Cardright, his companion for life, he had come to understand the various types of human beings he had come across in his long and arduous journey in life. The lesson of his life was that none needed him. Firstly, the business for which he had given everything in his life, his wife, his children and even his society did not any longer need him. So were his children busy leading their lives without needing him. And then his friends Tub Perason and Rose Irel - even they too, after a time, had stopped taking interest in Dodsworth. He developed his personality into a strong and positive isolationism ready to receive the good, not only of his country’s culture, but also of Europe. Most men wasted their time in the name of culture.
After his alienation from his wife Francess, Dodsworth had the foretaste of what another useful type of a woman could be, through the personality of Namde Azerado, the sculptress. She could at least be a loving and a selfless wife, ideal for a pioneer like Dodsworth. It was through her that he had regained self-confidence as a Man, who could yet do something in his life. Through his initial exposure to Mrs. Edith Cartright, he had known the value of sympathy in molding a man, and more important than that, was the identical stand of her regarding the true culture which an individual should have, without, however, denigrating his own country’s traditions based on practicality. It was because of her concern for him that he was able to overcome the trap of pity for an irresponsible erring child, a paternal attitude into which he had fallen. Moreover, Edith was willing to accompany him back to his own country and town, Zenith. After the final encounter with Frances in New York, Dodsworth realized the necessity of abandoning Frances and linking himself to studying the world of culture together in the company of Edith Cardright, Samuel was a type of individual who too had gone through the cycle of conformity and isolation, which was strengthened by a deterministic attitude to society. It did not take him too long to realize that the upper class aristocrats had nothing to contribute to the enrichment of society. They would lie low, doing nothing but ape the degenerate European Culture, like the expatriates, reviling their native traditions at every available opportunity. Also noticeable is the fact that the hero was a very diligent student of men and women in society. It was the endeavor of the hero to absorb and imbibe the good in every culture, both American and European. It is really laudable that Sinclair Lewis had dealt with a very interesting theme bordering on internationalism, with tremendous foresight into the future. He had, in his lifetime, realized the drifting nature of American Society, with the “middle class” also undergoing powerful changes, through the Fifties and beyond, with the individual becoming more ethos-minded.
Samuel DOdsworth and Elmer Gantry were what the sociologists classified as “autonomists”. These had a conflict with the social group. But their reaction to the society of norms made them respond to it as positive or negative autonomists. This type can best be understood as a personality which does not become “atomic” wedded to isolation, on a physical or a mental plane. An autonomist is a strong individual who does not flee or live in an ivory tower.
Lewis sketches these types of individuals in the background. The individual, either the perplexed or the unperturbed, in confrontation with the mass society of 20th Century America had caught the fertile imagination of Sinclair Lewis through his cycle of novels between 1920 and 1929. These novels include “Main Street”(1920), “Babbitt” (1922), “Arrowsmith” (1925), “Elmer Gantry” (1927), and “Dodsworth” (1929). Wright Mill acknowledged Sinclair Lewis as an author endowed with a “Sociological Imagination”. It was the capacity to see and be interested in the overriding dramatic quality of “the interplay” of man and society, the biography and history of self and world. (33)
Mark Schorer pointed out that “With Lewis, the subject of the social section came first, researches conducted systematically like a cultural anthropologist. The story came last, devised limping under the burden of data.” Lewis also recognized the underlying assumptions of his works. He was aware of the habits of mind and method of composition, resembling the practices of most social scientists. In an interview, he spoke of his own method: “actually these three (plot, person and setting) are from the beginning, mixed in your mind; you want to do a story about a person who, as it becomes real to you, dwells in a definite house, street, city, class of society.” It is this view of the individual as a matrix of neighborhood, city, and class, which constitutes the basis of sociological imagination.
A human being is bound by his culture. He is free in will and its expression, against the collective will of society. The “interplay” becomes a kind of a combat, a drama where resolution is not always tragic, even though the antagonists are grossly unequal. The observer with the social imagination is one, who is aware that this drama is being played around him and focuses on it. He may be either a social scientist or an artist; it is his view of his life, not some professional pre-occupation that is of vital importance. It is doubtless that Sinclair Lewis’ imaginative frame of mind is sociological.
The problem of Sinclair Lewis was societal; the responses are alternative modes of behavior available to the protagonist vis-a-vis his culture. Davis Riesman (34), an eminent social scientist who formulated his theories much later, had Sinclair Lewis’ fiction as the basis for the sociological imagination. In “Lonely Crowd”, David Riesman presented the responses open to individuals, thus:
“Though conformity to universal culture and by accepting a narrow range of choice left to an individual, a difficult situation would be created for an individual.
There would also be a possibility for an individual to turn anomie.”
Durkheim, the French social scientist had used the term “anomie” referring to “a mental state of normlessness, of being without values to stricture one’s behaviors”. (35) It would be interesting to note that the poet, A E Housman had tried to define this human condition in his line, “a stranger and afraid in a world (he) never made”. (36)
A complaint of an anomie personality is “No one cares, it does not matter what I do because no one cares for me”.
A necessary consequence of anomie is isolation, physical or mental, estrangement from group membership with its reinforcing functions of support and solidarity. He is, in brief, a hypothetical man. “In the absence of group membership providing a norm, the individual is unable to meet circumstances through his resources of character, or moral strength; he has become anomie”. (37) It may also result from the adherence of the individual to two or more contradictory, incompatible or conflicting values about the same behavior, with the consequence that he becomes frustrated or anxious, unable to predict the behavior of others consistently. Such a value of conflict should not be confused with group conflicts.
A person living in a society, in his growing into adolescence may develop a conflict. This is prevalent in a situation where there is natural competition. This exists between two individuals or two groups, or perfect equality. This is the point of genesis for an individual to be a nonconformist.
Last but not the least in importance is the case of an autonomist. He is obviously a self-dependent, resilient person. A person can be either a positive or a negative autonomist. A survey of human types is thus relevant to the treatment of such people in the novels of Sinclair Lewis.
The two major novels “Main Street” (1920), the Nobel Prize novel for 1930 and the other “Babbitt” (1922), the most influential novel, together support the process of adjustment. In the first novel, the main character is Carol Kennicott, wife of Dr. William Kennicott, the hardy medical practitioner of Gopher Prairie. When she came to this small town, she came with very high hopes of reforming the town into the most civilized place in America. She wanted to educate the people into refinement, in higher ideals and broadmindedness. She wanted to improve the living conditions of the people, through good education at schools, and a real recreational club and designing several leisure-time activities like games and sports. But the vivacity and the impetuousness of the heroine had landed her in many troubles.
The men and women were beset with the evil of lack of interest in anything. While the men were driven by business-talk and money-talk, the women wasted their time in gossip and scandal-mongering. They were ignorant, living in death-like self-contentment. They were quite resistant to every improvement she made. Before long, it was impossible for her to lead a normal, respectable life as the wife of a very popular doctor. They were successful in antagonizing the husband in the name of stirring up a robust small-town-love in him. He had his own inhibitions in granting the well-needed freedom. To spend within the limits of the pocket money granted to her was her real problem. A freedom of movement was also begun to be looked down upon as something below her status. It was something unbecoming of a respectable housewife. Nextly, her employing Bea Sorenson, a Scandinavian immigrant, was looked down upon by the wives of the other gentry. They ridiculed her in a patronizing attitude. Her previous stay at Chicago as a librarian made her wear a dress showing her ankles. It was something not proper for a lady of upper class Gopher Prairie. Her association with Guy Pollock, a long--ago-demeaned-volcano of a reformer, who was a real renegade and with the Norwegian Miles Bjornstam, an alien farmhand had put her into trouble. Her indiscreet companionship was just short of a flirtation with an artist-tailor, Eric Valsborg, an effete and an unsophisticated actor. It had sealed her fate. She had to leave the town in utter dishonor. Also, she was unpopular when she openly lent her support to Miss Mullins, the young school teacher of Gopher Prairie.
By then, she had developed a hostile attitude conditioned by a total withdrawal from the town, in which she came to live. She had given up her dream of perfecting the town in order to save her soul from the stultifying restrictions of Main Street. She wanted to save her soul from near perdition. She became busy with the Red Cross work during the First World War: the camp fire girls, the Thanatopsis Club, and the plantation programme. The park near the railroad station had failed to satisfy her enthusiasm. She further diverted herself by running away to Washington D.C, to find her disillusionment intensified. The women social workers’ group and the violent women suffragettes appeared very abominable. Social advancement in a place could not be hastened through dynamism alone. It would mean a slow but painful waiting over long years.
She felt it purposeless to stay in a metropolis; compromise and adjust with the existing conditions appear very wise decisions on Carol’s part. Her life ran a full cycle from maladjustment to compromise. Carol was the type of individual who was at war with society.
The second novel “Babbitt” may be viewed as a companion piece. George F. Babbitt was an influential real estate businessman of Zenith. He had grown from strength to strength soon after his marriage to Myra, the daughter of a sound businessman Henry Thompson and later his partner of the Thompson-Babbitt Realtor Company in Zenith. After his marriage, he had his socialistic, service attitudes as a law student under check. He made his progress quite steadily with an unfailing integrity in dealing with his clientele. As he reached his forty sixth year, he had possessed everything in life, a sound business, wealth, comforts, and an imposing Dutch Colonial building on Floral Heights, the most fashionable area of Zenith. He had spent the prime of his life for his business. He had grown very well in business as well as in society as a respectable man, rising to the prestigious position of the Vice Presidency of the Boosters Club of Zenith. He had his children well brought up, the boy Thomas Roosevelt Babbitt, and Verona, his daughter - two young people with their own well-formed tastes and civilization. His wife too remained quite steady as a sheet anchor to her husband. At this later year in his life, he had a desire to be free from everything. He was a tired businessman. But the contentions of Babbitt were that i) in their business-civilization, they were hypocrites; there was an appalling gap between their profession and their practice; and that ii) they failed in too many quarters to recognize the fact that American Civilization was being undermined by an enormous variety of national strains and that until, “we begin seriously to appraise and warmly to cherish the elements which make up our life and to see the common element running through them, we shall…. Remain… a polyglot hoarding house. iii) ‘the most moving and pathetic fact in the social life of America today’ and our emotional and aesthetic starvation, of which the mania for petty regulation, the driving, regimenting and drilling, the secret society and its grotesque regalia, the firm grip on the unessentials of material organization of our pleasures and gaieties are all eloquent stigmata”. (38)
Babbitt wanted a life of his own, free from the business which had enchained him for years. He had developed a secure free life which had nothing to do with Zenith Society. He had run away from his wife Myra. He was finding pleasure in clandestine associations. Tanis Judique, a client of Babbitt, had the need for Babbitt’s counsel. He had given her the apartments in Cavendish, overlooking the claims of his friend Sidney Finkle Stein. The affair between them had taken an interesting turn and she was willing to teach him dancing in return for the personal interest taken in giving away the apartments to her. The meetings between them were more frequent than before. He was motivated by a deep desire for her. He became a driftwood turning his attention towards youth as youth. Idu Putiak, the nineteen year old manicure girl, in the Pompeian barber shop, very near his business establishment caught his eye. He had his dinner out at Biddlemeyers Inn, keeping his movement a secret. In the moonlight trip on the Zenith High Road, Babbitt became an ardent lover. After dropping her at home, Babbitt returned home with his girl-chasing. He was a visionary who thought beyond mere philandering. He was questing after a dream-girl babbitt had not the boldness to reveal his real mind. He was unable to be alone in the company of his wife. Even Myra was unable to understand him. He could no longer continue his affairs with young anomies. Babbitt’s attempts to lead the life of a trapper in Northern Canada in the company of Joe Paradise and never return to Zenith or into the world again, had all failed. But he could not live in isolation.
Tanis Judique had a set of friends “the Bunch”. They were the ardent “Midnight People”. Soon they admitted Babbitt was an old sport into their midst. Carrie Nork was a spinster. Babbitt was expected to dance with her, a thin young woman, who he could not place immediately. They were overdressed and were effeminate soda-fountain friends. Babbitt was sent out whenever a need arose for whisky to Healy Hansom’s in the company of Miss Sontag who kept on talking of Babbitt.
Tanis had spent her time dissolutely in the company of younger boys while Babbitt tried to spend his time in the company of Mrs. Carrie Nork when Tanis was looking the other way. Babbitt had found it difficult living that way in the company of “the Bunch”, because they were very intruding.
In course of time, the Good Citizen’s League run by Virgil Gunch, Dr. A.I. Dilling, the surgeon, Charles Mckelvey, the contractor, and the white-bearded Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the “Advocate Times”, came to offer membership to Babbitt. They controlled him through the business deal of changing the texture of “Street Traction Company” of Zenith. Thus Babbitt, at last, was controlled. He had been forced to compromise and return to conformity. From conformity, he had got into rebellion and freedom. But he had finally gone back to conformity, a typical individual’s ineffectual war against society.
In “Arrowsmith”, it was the hero’s lone fight against society, a scientist-hero against the commercialism of the drug world. It was the conflict between Applied Science and Fundamental Science. Martin Arrowsmith devoted his life to truth. He found the world too big or too mighty to be faced by a lonely individual. Working as a research scientist at the McGurk Research Institute, he discovered the credo of a scientist, a mission in life guided by devoted scientists like Max Gittilieb.
Martin Arrowsmith as a person had to sacrifice power and fame and a loving wife, Leora. His whole life was purpose-oriented, waging a lone battle against the self-centered in society. As his life had reached a climax, he developed an anomic personality with an undeterred love for liberty. He developed a strong isolationism, trying to sell his own serum along with his friend Terry Wickett as a protest against the groupism of society. He was prepared to lead a secluded life in a remote place. Thus the hero was an alienated individual. Though Arrowsmith’s withdrawal from society and its civilization, Lewis made his hero refuse to be bound by conventional social codes, mores of patterns of behavior, Arrowsmith could not find happiness even there.
The actual problem handled in this novel was the conflict between the individual’s culture and that of society. It was a serious anomic conflict. It was the endeavor of the hero to achieve freedom from work, to gain leisure for conducting research. Terry Wickett and Arrowsmith got their liberty at the price of their sanity. Perhaps, the conformist solution of Babbitt would have been a better alternative.
In “Elmer Gantry”, the hero was a man of colossal self importance. He has developed an ego which surpassed the normal self-contentment of a natural man. To him, culture was less valuable than reality. He would employ every theatrical trick at his disposal to attain the much desired success at the expense of others’ safety. His success in the pulpit was so certain that he would sway one and all, with his eye-catching sermons, well supported by a purposive oratory,. His career as a pastor and an evangelist was quite unreflective yet not hypocritical, being as coarse as anybody, with no superior learning, no integrity and no spirituality. But he had endeared the hearts of many. Yet, he was the fittest person to occupy a pulpit supported by materialists. The church was half the defender of petty privileges against the subversive forces. It was the instrument through which a nominal respect may be paid to virtues, inconvenient to practice. To him it was a useful agency for his personal elevation and excellence through an oratory. It was a positive source of income and position which he secured with his mediocre will, mean character and shallowness of brain. This picture of Elmer was relieved by some civilizing influences of boy-Elmer, the rudimentary forms of art, music, literacy, learning and ethical idealism, related to the church and the highest churchmen. But at the same time, he was a heartless, treacherous and cruel man. Instead of possessing the Puritan virtue, he was full of vindictiveness, Phariseeism and hypocrisy. His was a career of indictment of the church, in so far as the mechanism of the church had permitted the rise of a man of his type. Lewis’ hero had participated in vice on the physical plane, while the author had the psychological pleasure through a thorough exposure office. This was the character of a progressive, negativistic, autonomist. Lewis’ hero had a fall, though his amours with Sharon Falconer, a charming Evangelist. His marriage to her was symbolized by a grotesque scene.
With Elmer and Sharon before the pulpit in an amorous encounter, it was followed by an invocation to numerous antique, fertility-Gods and Goddesses like Blessed Mother Virgin, Mother Hera, Mother Frigga, Mother Ishtar, Mother Isis, Dread Mother Astarte, a horrid combination of religious and carnal pleasuresome experiences, which was an aspect of orgiastic Evangelism. In juxtaposition to this scene was the coarser scene, between a retired preacher and his wife, going to bed, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of their marriage. It was barrenness incarnate. These two incidents would prove the nightmarishness of the world-image.
But these two would add to an effect. The noisiness, and crude adhering would go to highlight the author’s ability to invoke a concrete world. Thus, Elmer Gantry was an evil--minded autonomous man with an acute negativism.
The latter Lewis was an apologist of American Culture. He had developed an aversion for an immoral, antisocial, negativistic autonomy. Samuel Dodsworth was a positive autonomist. He lived in the world as did, rather than as what he ought to be. He started his life and attained success under the veil of conformity. From a young virile man of basketball glories at the University, he had scaled the heights of the automobile business and soon became the Captain of the Industry, the Reliance Locomotive Company. He was married to Francess Voelker, the rich brewer of Zenith. He had prospered through business. He was an inventor of the popular Revelation motor car. He had earned his respectability with a comfortable membership at Zenith’s Kennipoose Canoe Club.. He had risen too soon to the peak of the industry, picking up every dollar wherever he could, with the diligence of a shrewd businessman.
At the age of 52, he grew tired of being a businessman. He wanted to retire from this crazy dollar-chasing world. He wanted to be a yearner of culture and a freedom from the erstwhile cramping life as a businessman and an inventor. At that time, just then, he wanted to hand over the enterprise. Alec Kynance, the giant financier was ready to merge this unit into his own larger organization, United Automotive Corporation, with the offer of their Vice-Presidentship to Samuel Dodsworth. But the decision of Samuel Dodsworth to quit this type of life was so firm that he rejected the offer. The desire to see the wider world through prolonged travel to Europe had also earned him a mocking from the business magnate. Thus came to an end the life of conformity for Dodsworth.
In the company of his wife Francess Dodsworth, he landed in England. The tastes of Dodsworth and Francess were often in conflict. While Dodsworth wanted to build up his edifice of culture on the salutary base of American lower middle class traditions of pragmatism, she had already a previous exposure to culture; she was prone to high culture of the Aristocracy, her El Dorado being Paris and Europe. She felt superior to Dodsworth in every way, with her knowledge of French, German and Italian languages. Her knowledge of culture was nothing but looking to Europe for ideals, mores and fashions. Aristocratic men and women interested her. The interest of men in the artistic minded wife of an American businessman meant a gratification of sexual interests. She had slowly fallen prey to this instinct, first, during their stay in England in the company of an opportunistic person Major Lockert. She had abandoned her stay in England in a mood of utter remorse. Her mood of falling into the safe hands of Dodsworth was but temporary. Their reconciliation had got another short lease of life.
Life in Paris was quite strange to Dodsworth. For Francess was a life of effete culture, drinks, dances and a spending spree in the company of Madame Reve de Penable. She was a mysterious lady of influence who never talked of herself. To her, the Dodsworths were an addition to her circle. They were invited to dinner at Ermitage. Dodsworth returned to his world of self-confidence, of finally being gay and cosmopolitan. He was happy to ponder over the fact of winning poker over Tub Pearson with his style of playing, perfected by European Culture. The misunderstanding between Dodsworth and Francess had widened dur to a free outspoken talk about her friends, Madame de Penable, Endicott Everett Aitkins, Dean of American Literary Colony, Princess Madame Maravigliari, and Arnold Israel, an American Jew, Francess had walked into a trap. Her husband considered them wasters of time and mere butterflies. Francess did not tolerate this criticism, coming from an American, Samuel Dodsworth who was a boob in their view. She, in her retort made her intentions clear in preferring butterflies to ants.Dodsworth, after a two week, uneasy stay, had decided to return to Zenith and to do something instead of wasting his time in Paris. In the company of Rose Ireland, an editor-friend of his, who had much in common to share, he rushed into rural America, instead of into the New York business world of pseudo-business in life. One found no time to talk even. But they still had time to indulge in opening ceremonies in New York. Samuel could not understand the myth of it all. Fresh from Europe, there was in him a slight anti-American feeling. He had come to know how the young men and women were contaminated by the academic European Socialism. He had observed the typical life of Sheila Richards, daughter of Elain Richards of Good Wood National Bank, Long Island. His provincialism had regained its height. It was also, perhaps, a mistake on his part, to go to Europe. Rose Ireland had strengthened his instinct to fight, rather than to sit and converse in perfection and concentrate on proper evening waistcoats. Was it life at all? In the last episode, the meeting in Ritz, which symbolized Europe, Dodsworth met Edith Cortright and, together, they formed into a team of questers of culture, the true and the sustaining one, without losing anything of their own, original Americanism. Thus, Dodsworth was an example of a positive autonomist in a society. He had looked up to the lower middle class values rather than that of the higher middle class society.
In Lewis’ latter novel, “The Prodigal Parents”, there was a reverse polarity. The hero Fred Cornplow was the man pitted against the communist youngsters. He, it was proclaimed, with four to ten thousand a year, an automobile and a nice little family in a bungalow on the edge of town, made the wheels of progress go round.
If Babbitt’s speech to the realtors was funny, (and Lewis thought it was), then his own solemn address to Fred Cornplow must be funny too. It was the same speech. The only explanation which Malcolm Cowley could find was that Babbitt killed Sinclair Lewis and wrote the book himself.
“That explains ‘The Prodigal Parents’ as no other story, true or false, can explain it. Babbitt gets himself glorified and his victim, the late critic of middle class stupidity, gets blamed for publishing a novel so stupid that the middle class won't read it.” (39)
Malcolm Cowley described “The Prodigal Parents” as not merely a botched copy of Babbitt but Babbitt upside down. Fred Cornplow was described in these words. “... Babbitt triumphant, Babbitt addressing his fellow members of the Zenith Real Estate Board. I turned back to that speech…”. It’s the fellow, Babbitt proclaimed about his soundness and respectability. Louis Kronenberger gave much the same opinion: “Lewis convinces us nothing here except his own Philistinism and Philistinism in a writer is the sin against the holy ghost”. (40)
In Lewis’ latter novel, “The Prodigal Parents”, there was a reverse polarity. The hero Fred Cornplow was the man pitted against the communist youngsters. He, it was proclaimed, with four to ten thousand a year, an automobile and a nice little family in a bungalow on the edge of town, made the wheels of progress go round.
If Babbitt’s speech to the realtors was funny, (and Lewis thought it was), then his own solemn address to Fred Cornplow must be funny too. It was the same speech. The only explanation which Malcolm Cowley could find was that Babbitt killed Sinclair Lewis and wrote the book himself.
“That explains ‘The Prodigal Parents’ as no other story, true or false, can explain it. Babbitt gets himself glorified and his victim, the late critic of middle class stupidity, gets blamed for publishing a novel so stupid that the middle class won't read it.” (39)
Malcolm Cowley described “The Prodigal Parents” as not merely a botched copy of Babbitt but Babbitt upside down. Fred Cornplow was described in these words. “... Babbitt triumphant, Babbitt addressing his fellow members of the Zenith Real Estate Board. I turned back to that speech…”. It’s the fellow, Babbitt proclaimed about his soundness and respectability. Louis Kronenberger gave much the same opinion: “Lewis convinces us nothing here except his own Philistinism and Philistinism in a writer is the sin against the holy ghost”. (40)
It was obvious that Dodsworth was tied down by people, strengths, and weaknesses which he had not recognized in his younger years in East Rock, Yale.He was chained by every hour he worked. They had left him stiff, and spiritually rheumatic. Thirty years back, he was a Richard Harding David hero, but in his 52nd year, he wanted nothing specific in life. But, ultimately, he wanted to set up his own community for residents in America, in Zenith, called “Sans Souci Gardens”, which had enough artistic beauty. He wanted to use the high culture instinct of Francess Dodsworth in his building. But she had gone away without evincing any interest in his project. While they lived in their suites, in their Paris hotel, Dodsworth went to a newsstand to pick up “Country Life”. He had studied its columns on architecture to gain a first hand knowledge of the subject.
In course of time, Samuel Dodsworth had found an ideal companion in Edith Cortright, the widow of Cecil Cortright, the Ambassador to Britain. She was the right type of a wife to him. It was through her company that he had realized his fuller manhood. Before he could settle himself with Edith, he had the healthy influence of Namde Azerdo, the sculptress, who would have made a perfect wife for a husband with a pioneering spirit like Dodsworth’s. He was able to distinguish between an honest, selfless and self-reliant working lady and an irresponsible moral wreck like Francess Voelker. Dodsworth had adjusted himself to the position of an independent receiver of what was the very best both from America and Europe.
Lloyd Morris acutely saw the book was as interesting because it revealed Lewis’ values clearly. “Only professional critics”, he said, “could have been so blind as to miss what Lewis had been saying since his ‘Main Street’.The better way of life which he implied but never explicitly proposed was, not a new one, but the American life of yesterday, ‘the old, free, democratic individualistic career of American middle class’, the American dream of a freedom which would have come when the environment had been mastered. The youngest generation represented not continuity, but an abrupt and a violent deviation; they were used in the novel as moral symbols, the embodiments of the psychological hobgoblins which threatened the peace of the old-fashioned Americans, the hallucinatory concepts of communism, moral disintegration and social and economic collapse. For fifteen years, Lewis’critics had denied him recognition because he had always failed to include in his picture, a definition explicitly and fully - but he was never less an artist”. (41)
“It can’t happen here”, published in 1935 was a political phantasia. The hero, Doremus Jessup was a small-town journalist, the Vermont editor and the old time liberal and an intellectual bourgeois. The State was rocked by men in power and power passing from one hand to another, from Senator Berzelius Windrip, to Lee Sarason, and finally into the hands of Colonel Haik. through the fall of these three men,, the end of a Fascist regime had set in. This was followed by the funny concept of the American Cooperative Commonwealth under the leadership of a defeated Republican Party Candidate Walt Trowbridge of 1936. This was also superseded by General Emmanuel Coon assisted by the Western Farmers, leaving in doubt the future of the Cooperative Commonwealth or the Corporate State.
Jessup is very much central to the theme of revolution personalized and its impact. The familial fortunes of the hero and his close associates made it their ambition to grow with the tide, some in the first circle had allowed these developments to sway their ordinary lives near Fort Beulah, Vermont. While Jessup was in the concentration camp, he grew up into a seasoned individual. He developed a disinterested mind so as to become casteless and be above his professional level too. He lost his peace of mind in course of time. He had busied himself in smuggling many individuals into Canada, a neutral country, across his country’s borders. Commercialism was an experimental principle with him only to be abandoned soon. He had taken up pamphleteering at great risk to his life. When he was caught in the act of antigovernment propaganda, his books and college were seized. From the jail he escaped into Canada, from where he had organized a revolution in the Middle West.
Thus, in the conformist turning into a rebel, we find an individual, a good old American with middle-of-the-road virtues. After a long life of sufferance and sacrifice, he waged a long battle against the apathy of an unstable society.
“Cass Timburlane” was published in October 1945. Judge class, in his forties, fell for a girl in the early twenties in this “thin veiled romantic narrative of the author himself”. Also Lewis was restating familiar American sentimentalities and cynicisms. It was dealing in observations that had been only part of American cliches about love and marriage for many a year. (42)
Edmund Wilson, however, credited Lewis with an alert perception of social phenomena; he saw that Lewis was trying to deal with a bright young woman of the Forties, a very different person from the woman of the earlier decades of the century. His Jinny Marshland “wants to compete without learning any trade, is rebellious against marriage, but does not want a job, leaves husband but does not stick to her lover”. Lewis wanted to catch this type but does not really succeed, because he does not like Jinny Marshland sufficiently; if the judge had not been so much in love, he might not have cared for her whimsicality and with a slight change of tone, we could have got one of Lewis’ female caricatures, like Peony in Gideon Planish”.
When Planish finds fault with Jinny Marshland over her inability to repay his goodness in patronizing her, but on the other hand, not hesitant to destroy him. In presenting this character or situation, Lewis was attempting to present an accurate social observation. It was an observation correctly identified by Edmund Wilson. (43)
In fact, the subtitle of this novel “A Novel of Husbands and Wives” is but a lead to the investigation of an American problem. (44) The novel’s protagonist would state that the issue under consideration is not less important than a World War drawing to a close: “If the world of the Twentieth Century", he vowed, “cannot succeed in this one thing, married love, then it has committed suicide, all but the last moan and whether Germany and France can live as neighbours is insignificant compared with whether Johan and Maria or Jean and Maria can live as lovers”. (45)
Brought into the main theme of Cass Timberlane and Jinny Marshland were a series of thirteen short marriage episodes - “Assemblages of Husbands and Wives”. Through these, the author wanted to point out the idea that these marriages were seemingly genuine, or happy; those who were lucky would hardly give such an impression. It was the endeavour of Lewis to put forth his conception convincingly , that the ordinary citizen of the ordinary American community was herded on by mere biological urges towards the disorder of promiscuity and homosexuality and incest. Timberlane would become the mouthpiece of Lewis as a conscious investigator. Lewis described this society as “this whole madhouse of love”.
You cannot heal the problems of one marriage until you heal the problem of an entire civilization founded upon mere suspicion and superstition; and you cannot heal the problems of a civilization thus forced until it realizes its own barbaric nature and realizes that what it thought was wholly meanness and what it thought success was merely the paper helmet of a clown more nimble than his fellow, scrambling for a peanut in the dust of an ignoble circus. (46)
This conclusion was not pessimistic. The plot of “Cass Timberlane” was identical with that of “Main Street”. A young woman marrying a professional man older than herself would find the environment stifling, fly in desperation and eventually return to her husband.
There were, of course, some differences; while Carol of “Main Street” would stop short of adultery, Jinny was from a permissive world. In pairing Jinny Marshland with Brad Criley, a scoundrel, Lewis seemed to have had the Victorian convention in his mind. As if to make the return of the heroine back into the waiting hands of the hero Cass Timberlane, treating her for diabetes, Lewis seemed to have secured the normal reader’s approving sympathy. In “Main Street”, the hero was shown to be very magnanimous in accepting the heroine in the end. Like Carol, Jinny also had made her surrender complete. The unmanning of the hero was more an ironical attitude than an attitude of humiliating the American Male meekness and submissiveness. In the words of Philip Wylie, (47) it was an ironic attitude to a happy ending. The couple in the end was in fact, more to suspicion and frustration.
But Mark Schorer’s interpretation that Sinclair Lewis’ love of lovers was so sentimental, that he wanted to make his marriage look different from a normal, problem-marriage of America. This view appears to be more plausible. As pointed out by Maxwell Geismar, in a comparative study of these novels, the parallel was the locale, the Minnesota Community, rather than, “in that appalling chain-state of Winnemar…” (48)
He had studied Lewis’ use of the East and West cycle occurring in his novels. Geismar thought that Lewis’ judge had no need to be like Horatio Alger. He had not the need to work his way into the upper echelon of society as Samuel Dodsworth did. In fact, he was born into it. Also there existed an upper echelon. Almost for the first time, Lewis was able to visualize an aristocracy or an haute bourgeoisie. It was an established one rather than the one on the make.
“But he would never enter Boone’s house or his Church and as for Boone’s asylum, the Federal Club, neither the truck driver nor any Scandinavian or Finn with less than 10,000 income nor any recognizable due, whatever would be allowed even to gawk through, the leaded-glass windows (imported). So, the division between the proprietors and the serfs was as violent in the Grand Republic as in London”.
In Cass’s Social Circle, it was obligatory to dress for party dinners as in London. In a more critical mood, Lewis might have portrayed a bogus aristocracy as he showed the well-to-do Seattle in “Free Air”. In fact, he occasionally satirized Cass Timberlane in a mild way; “If he was distinctively more left wing than Jinny Marshland thought, he was distinctively less than he thought… he had not yet gone many years beyond the good old Massa Dynasty. And golf at the country club is a sweet odour in the nostrils and a dependable anesthetic (49). But Cass Timberlane was not blind to Grand Republic’s class distinctions, race prejudice, fear of culture, and ugliness; he is very much concerned about Grand Republics and their civilizations “Mrs. Kenny Wargate, Manhattan-born and cynical daughter-in-law of the Ruling Family, asserted that Grand Republic had leaped from clumsy youth to senility, without ever having a dignified manhood. She jeered, “your Grand Republic slogan is: Tar paper shanty to vacant parking lot in three generations”. But judge Timberlane and his friends, loving the place at home believed that just now, after woes and failures and haste and waste experiment, Grand Republic was beginning to build up a kind of new city new to the world, a city for all people, a city for decency and neighborliness, not food ecclesiastical display and monarchical power… (50)
His vision was one that Lewis would share:
“I have some kind of an unformulated idea that I want to be identified with Grand Republic help in setting up a few stones in what may be a new Athens. It is this Northern Country you know, stark and clean - and the brilliant lakes and the tremendous prairies to the westward - it may be a new kind of land for a new kind of people and it’s scarcely even started yet”. (51)
Edmund Wilson thought, “Grand Republic, Minnesota is a place where one can imagine living, not like Main Street, a circle of Hell”. (52) Far from being a circle of Hell, the Grand Republic would offer the opportunity for the development of the only Paradise which Lewis could envision. Maxwell Geismar conceded that in Cass Timberlane, Lewis had conveyed something of the variety of the usual Midwestern Life. Also Lewis, by and large, would turn his back to several economic questions, like the working of cartels in Dodsworth, the merger of Zenith Locomotive COmpany with the United Automotive Corporation. After all, the middle class empire was breaking under the economic determinants of society.
Lewis had considered marriage as the sum of its most sensational, personal frustrations, or satisfactions, without ever realizing that it was a product of day-to-day interactions, between two complicated individuals and as a matter of shared, moral, social and economic responsibilities.
As religious, political and ideological terms had nothing to do with the seriously thought out values in Lewis’ mind, he could jumble them all together as he did here. In a society without religion, what sources of value could have existed? Simply the Midwest and the concept of its destiny had its place.
As was evident from Lewis’ Nobel Prize speech, he wanted to write a novel touching three generations, from 1818 to 1930. It could not take shape till in his “Breaking Into Print” (1937) in “Colophone”, where Lewis made a reference to his novel to be entitled, “The Children”, dealing with the Westward migration and a revolt of one against another generation. But Mark Schorer dismisses this “Colophone” reminiscence as not factual; Lewis, after several false starts about a labor novel, did not write at all. But in 1910, he contemplated a novel to be titled “Neighbour” with an alternative “The Man Who Sought God” and finally “The God Seeker”. It was an embodiment of idealism and the dedication which he sometimes found in the labour movement. As an alternative to Arrowsmith’s quest for Truth, the dedication to Scientific Truth, here was a life of a seeker of Truth. Furthermore, it also delineated in a final form, his own quest for the sources of value.
“The God Seeker” (1949) sketched the history of Minnesota for the past one hundred years. The story of Aason Gadd, his upbringing in Massachusetts, his experiences in a Sioux missionary as an assistant, his marriage to the daughter of a rider and his work as a carpenter and a builder in St. Paul, were all very patronizingly treated. The typical Lewisian perspective was satirical rather than historical. Lewis’ depiction of the clergy was similar to that in “Elmer Gantry”! The characters were all grotesque without any life-giving qualities, embodiments of inhumanity revealed in every speech.
“Life ain’t fun. When you think that most of us are doomed by divine grace to roast in hell, to say nothing of the mortgages and hail and bad crops and extravagant women folks, ‘taint any laughing matter”. (53)
Lewis had great regard for the pioneering men, opening up the West. But his contempt for their religious beliefs reduced their size in intellect and honesty. Squire Harge was no better than Elmer Gantry, who lured Aaron into the West, if not a veritable Babbitt of salvation. While Aaron was inflamed by the idea of saving many nations, his regard for the Indians as human beings remained questionable. Harge’s view of Indians is very much akin to the Grand Republican’s attitude to a Negro. He would say “Good God Almighty, how many times have I got to tell you that when any of the outlaw breeds - Niggers or Indians or Jews or the Italians, of the wild Irish or any of them - seem like they’re bright and decent and even religious, they are just imitating us like monkeys - Except that money’s don’t have - I suppose. He has sent us missionaries to them with wonderful tidings that if they turn to Jesus like little children, and if by God’s will they are alert - then they must be saved just like regular folks. What a lavishing mercy to send us to them”. (54)
The hero Aaron Gadd was conversant with Mencken’s views on Religion and he considered the religion of the Indians to be purer than the White’s. Their human content would be more valuable than that of the White’s. The Christian’s sickly cant of humility and self-abasement was only a device to spread prejudice and superstition which he rejected. He would cultivate his own garden. (One of the brightest Christian virtues is humility and so I say with humility, “there are many things I don't even expect to know and I am not going to devote myself to preaching about them but to building wooden shed, so true and tight that they don't need ivory and fine gold..) (55)
One would have thought that the clergy could cease to be Lewis’ bete noir. When Aaron established a labor union at St. Paul, Rev. Neill had put forward his fantastic view that obedience was the only true freedom. The debased trinity of Reason, Humanitarianism, and Progress was responsible for the greatest crimes since Eden.
So the novel was, therefore, not seeking rejecting God. Edward Wagenknecht would call this story in which humanism would be out-weighing Evangelism. It would be appropriate to state that it was a placement of caricatured Evangelism and humanism. The sources of value were secular - the land itself, respect for the dignity of other people, the American Dream - their attachment, that of the hero as well as the author were basically emotional.
The “World So Wide” (1951) published posthumously was a novel transmuted from “Over the Body of Lucie Jade”, the penultimate novel which failed even as a serial. It resembled his very first novel “Our Mr. Wenn” (1914). It had been formed from a phrase “This world so wide”, found near the end of this maiden novel. It had also been found from a poem of Kipling.
“For to admire an’ for to see
For to be’ old this world so wide”
The central character Hayden Chart, of this last novel was a lonely exile. He would realize that after the death of his wife, his life was empty. He began his life very soundly as an architect and a solid citizen of New Life (Colorado). In search of himself, the hero went to Florence. There was nothing to be found that could be called personality, which was other than the patterns with the clothes, the habits and the work of everyone would go to make.
The novel would focus our attention on the types of tourists, moving restlessly, finding nothing. There were yet some others “doing” Europe.
“There is, Hayden found something like a system of credits for sight seeing; doing a cathedral thoroughly counts, let us say, II points… inspecting a mountain village rarely beheld by tourist is 18, dining at a celebrated restaurant is 6, but if you found it all by yourself, the count is 9”. (56)
The American Colony, with its cocktail parties every month, with amiable friends, its engaging bridge, its books, imported from home to be read, was a big refuge for them all. Visiting art galleries periodically and church-going were their wont. These would thus be awaiting their death with nothing else to do.
“Some of them were students learning their Italian, or had met some Italian in their lives; and there were some scholars who were so serious as to barter away their souls for the trifles or learning…. No more important, in their atomic age, than a list of Assyrian Kings”.
The hero would still be unexposed to various alternatives. He would discover their shortcomings and to reject them one after another. His search for values in Europe was not fruitless. He would meet Olivia Lomond, to whom research was not an escape from life. Besides humanizing her he could himself emulate her devotion to scholarship. It was not decided to work out a reasonable pattern of their living together. The hero would return to America due to a sentimental devotion in him for his mother country but not due to a disillusionment with Europe. Though the known world did not give the hero any personality, he would seem to have experienced the truest source of value. This can be seen from the passage:
“He remembered the spires of new life and was faintly lonely at home. He knew, then, that he was unalterably an American; he knew what a special and mystical experience it is; for the American never really emigrates but only travels; perhaps travels for two or three generations but at the end it is still marked with the gaunt image of Tecumson.” (57)
The complication of the plot would bear out that the hero would be rescued from Olivia as well as from Italy, by Roxanna Eldritch, “a chunk from home”.
The significance of this lady was interestingly brought out in an analysis by Serge Hughes:
“She is the typical clever, healthy, American Girl who calls a thing by its right name and convincingly shows the hero that he could recognize pretence only in its most obvious dress. She makes perfectly clear that Babbitt, with his pitiful lack of taste and breeding but with a center and with the same drive is infinitely preferable to cheap aestheticism. It is better to act stupidly than to rot in a cultivated fashion. At the end of this novel, one finds the two newly married, on their way to other places, India and the Far East. this… the hero knows that he too will send post cards to the folks back home, buy sweaters for relatives and take a lot of snap shots”.
“The problem of Babbitt has come to a dead end. Exile is no answer. Art is no answer. Culture is a racket. Only this is much clear. There are some certain traits in Babbitts which are good. Out of all that messy Heritage, there are elements which can still be utilized and they must be used. For there is nothing outside of the Spotty Bourgeois heritage but sham and corruption”. (58)
The hero here was a shadow of Samuel Dodsworth; yet this novel of values would serve as a good social document.
(12) Grace Haggar Lewis : With love from Grade Sinclair Lewis (1912-1915) New York, Harcourt Brace. 1955 P. 190, 147
(13) Main Street (NY. Harcourt Brace, 1920, P.261)
(13) Main Street (NY. Harcourt Brace, 1920, P.261)
(14) Breasted, Charles: “Sauk Centricities of Sinclair Lewis”, 15th August 1934, Vol. XXXVIII. Saturday Review
(15) Letter to Carl Van Duren: Oct, 1921, the Man from the Main Street, Henry E. Maule & Melville H. Kane: NY : Random House, 1953 P. 141
(15) Letter to Carl Van Duren: Oct, 1921, the Man from the Main Street, Henry E. Maule & Melville H. Kane: NY : Random House, 1953 P. 141
(16) Main Street: (N) Sinclair Lewis, Harcourt Brace & Hoe (C 1992) (PP. 89-90)
(17) Carl Van Duren: “Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson : A Study of two Moralists” : Century CX (July, 1925) 362.69, ASRC
(18) Letter to Harcourt : December 28, 1920, the Main from Main Street (PP 21-29), Henry E. Maule & Merville H. Cane - NY Random House, 1953
(19) Babbitt : Novel (P.101) Harcourt Brace, 1922
(20) Man from Main Street P.21, H. Maule & Melville H. Cane, NY - Random House, 1953
(21) Henry F. May : The end of American Innocence (NY. Knopf, 1959) P.23
(18) Letter to Harcourt : December 28, 1920, the Main from Main Street (PP 21-29), Henry E. Maule & Merville H. Cane - NY Random House, 1953
(19) Babbitt : Novel (P.101) Harcourt Brace, 1922
(20) Man from Main Street P.21, H. Maule & Melville H. Cane, NY - Random House, 1953
(21) Henry F. May : The end of American Innocence (NY. Knopf, 1959) P.23
(22) Enler Gantry - (N) Sinclair Lewis, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1927 - P. 326
(23) Mark Schorer: “Sinclair Lewis and the method of Half Truths in society and self in the Novel”. Mark Schorer - (N.J.) Prentice-Hall, Englewood, Cliffs, 1962
(24) Elmer Gantry: Sinclair Lewis (N) - Harcourt Brace, (1927) NY - (P. 315)
(25) IBid (P.7)
(24) Elmer Gantry: Sinclair Lewis (N) - Harcourt Brace, (1927) NY - (P. 315)
(25) IBid (P.7)
(26) Davis, Elmer, New York Times Book, 13 March, 1927 (P. 1)
(27) Couch. William Jr.: “The Emergence, Rise and Decline of the Reputation of Sinclair Lewis”, Review of Chicago, 1954 - P.119
(28) The Intimate Note Books, George G Nathan )NY - KNopf, 1932) (pp 8-10)
(29) Cowley, Malcolm, New Republic, Liv (Apr 25, 1928) P.302
(27) Couch. William Jr.: “The Emergence, Rise and Decline of the Reputation of Sinclair Lewis”, Review of Chicago, 1954 - P.119
(28) The Intimate Note Books, George G Nathan )NY - KNopf, 1932) (pp 8-10)
(29) Cowley, Malcolm, New Republic, Liv (Apr 25, 1928) P.302
(30) The Man who knew Coolidge - Novel of Sinclair Lewis - Harcourt Brace, 1928 (p.29)
(31) The Man who knew Coolidge - Novel of Sinclair Lewis - Harcourt Brace, 1928 (p.29)
(31) The Man who knew Coolidge - Novel of Sinclair Lewis - Harcourt Brace, 1928 (p.29)
(32) Dodsworth: Sinclair Lewis - Novel - Harcourt Brace, NY (PP 192-193)
(33) C. Wright Mill: “White Collar” The American Middle Classes - 301.441-M-65 ASRC
(34) David Riesman - “The Lonely Crowd” (New Haven) Yale University Press (1950)
(35) M. Gee, Reece: Social Disorganization in America - Ch - The Social Disorganization Condition - Univ of Texas (C. 1962)
(36) Housman, A E (1859-36) - Last Poems - XII - Penguin Dictionary of Quotations - ed. J M Cohen - Eng. Library - 1960. 10401 - C R C Lib.
(35) M. Gee, Reece: Social Disorganization in America - Ch - The Social Disorganization Condition - Univ of Texas (C. 1962)
(36) Housman, A E (1859-36) - Last Poems - XII - Penguin Dictionary of Quotations - ed. J M Cohen - Eng. Library - 1960. 10401 - C R C Lib.
(37) David Riesman: “The Lovely Crowd” - New Haven, Yale Univ. Press. (1950)
(38) Harold Stearns: The Preface to his compilation of thirty minds, through civilization in the United States - discovered the common element in all the contributions - (1922) and Mark Schorer - Sinclair Lewis - an American Life - Ch. Success - P. 255-56 (1961)
(39) Malcolm Cowley: “George Fl Babbitt’s Revenge” - New Republic XCIII (1938) p.342
(40) Louis Kronenberger: “The Prodigal Lewis”, Nation CXL VI p.101
(41) Lloyd Morris: “Sinclair Lewis - His critics and his Public” North American Review, CCXLV (1938) p.381-390
(42) Diana Trilling: “Of Husbands and Wives”, Nation, CLXL 1945 p.381
(43) Edmund Wilson: “Salute to an old Landmark: Sinclair Lewis”, New Yorker, XXI Oct 13, 1945 p.98
(44) Ibid
(45) Cass Timberland: text - 11 NY. Random House, 1945
(44) Ibid
(45) Cass Timberland: text - 11 NY. Random House, 1945
(46) Ibid p.373
(47) Wylie, P. “Sinclair Lewis”, American Mercury, LXI, November 1945, 629-632
(48) Maxwell Geismar: “the last of the provincials” : The American Novel (1915-45)) Boston Boughton. 1949 p.149
(47) Wylie, P. “Sinclair Lewis”, American Mercury, LXI, November 1945, 629-632
(48) Maxwell Geismar: “the last of the provincials” : The American Novel (1915-45)) Boston Boughton. 1949 p.149
(49) Cass Timberlane: Text (p.82 & 83) - New York Random House (1945)
(50) Ibid (p.12, 28)
(50) Ibid (p.12, 28)
(51) Ibid: (N) Sinclair Lewis - Random House, New York - p.28
(52) “Salute to an Old Landmark : Sinclair Lewis”, New York XXI October 13, 1945, p.98
(52) “Salute to an Old Landmark : Sinclair Lewis”, New York XXI October 13, 1945, p.98
(53) The God Seeker (N) - Sinclair Lewis - NY - Random House (1949) p.17
(54) The God Seeker (Text) p.217 Sinclair Lewis (N) 1949
(55) The God Seeker (Text) p.380 Sinclair Lewis (N) 1949
(56) The World So Wide (Text) - p.102 (1951)
(57) The World So Wide - (Text) - p.21 (1951)
(58) Serge Hughes “From Main Street to World So Wide” - Common Weal, L. III (1951) p.650
Comments
Post a Comment