Arts and Letters

Sinclair Lewis was at heart a typical American reformer who was influenced by H. G. Wells and Henry Mencken, and he undertook to expose in his novels various facets of American life that seemed to him less luminous than they ought to be. But at bottom he had the same warmth of affection for the people and the country that Booth Tarkington had for Indiana. The difference between them was that Tarkington measured this life by the Hoosier scale while Lewis was able to see it in the scale of mankind.

Looking back, in a later preface, on his own early short stories, which suggested a "romantic medievalist" to the skeptical eye, Lewis saw that, as he said, but for some trick of destiny he might never have been "classed with the subversive." But as early as 1905, on one of his college vacations, returning from Yale to his native Minnesota, he had begun to write a novel to be called The Village Virus, which placed him already as a rebel. He had felt the zeitgeist that so many others were feeling at the time, the symptoms of an age that always emerge spontaneously in widely separated minds who appear to have a secret understanding. This book, which Lewis never finished, was a prophecy of Main Street, and so, in its way, was the setting of The Trail of the Hawk, the densely provincial small-town Plato College. There the Bible was still "good enough for us" and socialism and evolution were equally "un-Christian," and Lewis's Norwegian-American hero rebelled against the "virus" when the brilliant Professor Fraser was forced to resign. This youthful teacher was spreading the ideas of Ibsen and Hauptmann, with Shaw and Wells, who were bent on showing how much could be done with the world if people would use their minds and work together, a doctrine that to Plato College was simply the "bombast of self-pushing scientists" for whom anarchists were better than decent people. Carl Ericson, who took Fraser's part, was forced out with him as obviously a defender of obscenity and the throwing of bombs—the notions of "Shaw and that fellow who tried to shoot Frick"; then, marrying a college-settlement girl and learning to pilot a plane, he rose to fame as the "hawk" in the First World War.

This novel foreshadowed in certain ways Sinclair Lewis's later work, for one saw in it the kind of world that he was to measure society by and the kind of man that he was to choose for a hero. His model world was the Utopia of Wells and one might add the writers whom Carol Kennicutt presently read in Main Street, Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Veblen, Nexö, socialists all, who were devoted to the building of a world of the future. Then Lewis's young flyer Carl suggested some of the heroes of Wells, though this type, developed in Arrowsmith soon—the scientist who hates muddle, pretense, and cant—was much in the air of the early nineteen-hundreds. Veblen's workmanly engineers, who hated waste and muddle too, had contributed to the forming of this type in the literary world, and Robert Herrick's novels, abounding in Wellsian characters, may also have fed Lewis's imagination. One of these was Jervis Thornton, the architect in Waste, who preferred the austerity of poverty to the "squalor of riches"; another was the staunch Dr. Coburn, in his laboratory in the Chicago slums, abusing the chicaneries and improbities of the fashionable doctors. The young surgeon in Herrick's The Web of Life shared Martin Arrowsmith's disgust with the prostitutions and dishonesties of a world of go-getters, and he would have admired the "authentic scientist," the lonely seeker of truth, whom Lewis created in Arrowsmith's hero, Gottlieb. In their integrity, in their contempt for all forms of quackery, greed, and fraud, these characters were at one with the types that Lewis liked, and they were all working in some fashion or other for the kind of enlightened society that Shaw, Wells, Rolland, and Veblen variously dreamed of. Lewis's idea of the good society became in time less visionary—and something more easily attainable in terms of the present—but he was deeply at home at first in the socialist movement of the pre-war years and in H. G. Wells's utopian anticipations.

Behind the novels that Lewis was to write, most of them after the First World War, one felt the hovering presence of this image of a world with which the author was always comparing the visible world as it was, with even perhaps too much of its imperfection. He was like Carol in Gopher Prairie, who was thinking of all the authors she had read when she set out to make the town "artistic," when, seeing it as a "frontier camp," she hoped to have Strindberg plays there and expected the people to understand "profit sharing." In the end her heart softened towards the town. She pitied its young awkwardness and the isolation and shabbiness of its little brown houses; and this was Lewis's own deep feeling about his chosen American scene, and even the root of his longing to change it for the better. For he shared Carol's aspiration to get hold of a prairie town and do what no one had ever done before, since no one had ever done anything but hold revivals there or build perhaps a library for Elsie books. She wanted to make the town "beautiful," to put it in a word, and this was what Lewis's heroes wanted, not in Gopher Prairie alone but in Zenith, Nautilus, and Grand Republic also. Like Carol in Lewis's early novel, Cass Timberlane, nearly three decades later, hoped to "set up a few stones in what may be a new Athens," as Samuel Dodsworth, between the two, dreamed of making Zenith the "most beautiful city in the world." Lewis's heroes were the men who were bent on bringing this about, as doctors, scientists, manufacturers, editors, or judges—the "solid people" in a world that was otherwise "insane"—as the people he regarded with contempt or hostility were those who worked against it, the intolerant, the ignorant, the hypocritical, the cruel, and the smug.

Now Lewis, in his vision of the actual world, was like Carol in another way—they had both read Mencken as much as Wells and Shaw—and perhaps this led Lewis to overstress the "boobishness" and Babbittry that were by no means confined to American towns. Mencken had shaped Lewis's view of Plato College in The Trail of the Hawk, the college to which Elmer Gantry might have gone—the salesman-evangelist with his "gospel crew," the inventor of the "Hallelujah Yell," who proved how useful the "prayer-life" was "in attaining financial success." Elmer, with Babbitt and "the man who knew Coolidge," were personifications of Mencken's ideas, though Mencken could scarcely have imagined the foils that Lewis found for them in his admirable, intelligent, whole-souled American types. It was true that, in Elmer Gantry, Andrew Pengilly, the upright Methodist minister, was a minor figure beside the blatant fraud who filled the scene, who "climbed swiftly in Christian influence and character" to bigger churches in larger towns, acquiring a new "Sister Falconer" at every step. But, at a moment of national self-scrutiny, it was almost the mission of Lewis to devote his great gifts as a satirist to the scourging of this world, to the scarification of American society and the purging of all that was evil in it, whether merely complacent or unlovely or definitely base. With his fierce desire for a good society and his furious passion for justice, he made war upon these evils, great and small, as Carol made war on the sloth of Gopher Prairie, attacking the shams and the false prophets with the "high-class hustlers" who convinced their fellow-citizens that all was well. In later novels like Ann Vickers, Kingsblood Royal, and It Can't Happen Here he was to exhibit the hysterias that beset the country, together with the ferocities of cruelty that accompany its kindness, in the treatment of Negroes, for instance, in the conduct of prisons, in the not unthinkable rise of Berzelius Windrip. When Ann Vickers, the enlightened prison matron, exposed the horrors of Copperhead Gap, the "good old punishments" the professionals took for granted, she was trapped and forced to resign as Professor Fraser had been forced to resign at Plato College, and the young banker and his family were cast out as "niggers" in Kingsblood Royal when they took the side of the persecuted Negro soldiers. The moral of It Can't Happen Here was that it could happen here because of the complacency and ignorance of conventional people, the Daughters of the American Revolution who boasted of their descent from rebels and opposed all attempts to realize what their forebears had fought for.

It was "Revolution in terms of Rotary" that won the day in It Can't Happen Here—the Berzelius Windrips, in short, sprang out of the Babbitts, the people who were "perfectly democratic, except in regard to social standing, wealth, political power and membership in clubs." It sprang from the "Christian business men" who had lady-friends in other towns and made "Patrick Henry orations about windshield-wipers," the boosters with pep and business-punch who respected only bigness, in mountains, jewels, muscles, wealth, or words. Along with Babbitt was "the guy who put the con in economics" and the "fellows with hair on their chests and smiles in their eyes and adding-machines in their offices" in the "old Zip City" that might have been in Oregon or Georgia as well as Minnesota, among them the man named Koplinsky who made such a point of "keeping these damn foreigners out of the country." With their ponderous and brassy assurance they liked to talk of the "friendly city" where one "didn't shoot Jews, Catholics, socialists, or saints" but "just didn't go calling on them," and where realtors went to the head of the class for their skill in salesmanship when they knew nothing whatever about plumbing or sewage.

Such was the business civilization that appeared in Sinclair Lewis's books, a world that was mainly interested in size and numbers, in which ministers talked of their "membership turnover" and the motto "Service and Practicality" was a cloak for hypocrisy, cant, and cowardly trimming. It was full of young crusaders who were bent on destroying everything that "our bankers and other experts consider unworthy." There were to be no complaints in this world in which Abraham Lincoln would have been the president of the Wrigley Gum Concern and Hawthorne would have written ads for the new Hupmobile, although most of the wives of the great executives had voices like the sound of a file being drawn across the edge of a sheet of brass. In this world, moreover, one seldom saw two married people who seemed to enjoy being in each other's presence, and another Spoon River Anthology might have been written about the ruined lives beneath and behind it. Most of the good and sensitive people were depressed in this world, or at least obscure, like Abbott Hubbs, the generous young newspaperman. These obscure men who were also intrepid were Lewis's special favorites. There was Doremus Jessup, for one, the editor in It Can't Happen Here, with his hatred of intolerance, cruelty, pomposity, and humbug, and there was Gottlieb, who made great discoveries that meant nothing to the public, the scientist who had no interest in worldly success.

In the range and variety of his types, in his fecundity, in his virility, Sinclair Lewis suggested another Dickens—the "Dickens of America," the name to which the hotelman's brother, the writer brother, aspired in Lewis's Work of Art. In his temperamental zeal for reform, Lewis suggested Dickens too, while he resembled Mark Twain in his high animal spirits, his pity for the under-dog, his hot head and his warm heart, his passionate, impulsive, mercurial quixotism. Like Mark Twain, he was capable of a savage indignation against injustice and cruelty that was rare in his time—and, having less genius, he certainly had more courage; while, again like Mark Twain and other writers, like Trollope in a way, he had a considerable element of the Philistine in him. This led him to look askance at precious intellectuals and "hobohemians," as it led him to praise the "eternal bourjoyce" in the motor-salesman Cornplow whose children adored everything Russian till they went back to tennis. There was a touch of the Philistine too in Lewis's relative disregard of the treatment and style of his novels as compared with the subject, owing to which he was later condemned, or patronized unread, by critics for whom the subject was of no importance. In a time that cared only for the "art" of the novel, Sinclair Lewis was pushed aside by writers who prized themselves for their discrimination—he was to be called "not even a good second-rate," a phrase that might have been applied, on the same grounds, equally well to some of the world's great writers. For Lewis the treatment was secondary, while he devoted all his care to the documentation of the all-important subject. Each of his novels had a major theme, a type and phase of American life, the theatre, editing, evangelism, manufacturing, science, hotel-keeping, prison-routine, the law, or marriage, so that, while some of the novels were weak, their total effect was a panorama of twentieth-century American civilization. That his influential fables altered this civilization, and, by making his readers aware of it, often for the better, was a proof of the vitality of Sinclair Lewis, the irrepressible human force that might have been described as the conscience of the country.