The Novelist Who
Saw Middle America as It Really Was
Sinclair Lewis
captured the narrow-mindedness and conformity of middle-class America in the
first half of the 20th century. On the 100th anniversary of his best-selling
novel “Babbitt,” Robert Gottlieb revisits Lewis’s life and career.
Sinclair Lewis in
an undated photograph. Credit...Knopf
By Robert
Gottlieb The New York Times
This is the
centenary year of “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis’s best — and most misunderstood —
novel. He had written five inconsequential books that had received respectable
if not excited attention. And in 1920 — at the age of 35 — he had written “Main
Street,” the most sensationally successful novel of the century to date: hundreds
of thousands of copies sold, and a title that came to stand for the values,
both narrow-minded and wholesome, of what we now call Middle America.
The Pulitzer
Prize jury chose it as the year’s best novel, but in a scandalous reversal of
their decision, the prize’s trustees refused to approve the award and presented
it instead to Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” A few years later, when
the judges chose Lewis’s “Arrowsmith,” he refused to accept the
prize — Sinclair Lewis had a thin skin. (Nothing ever changes: When in
1974 the jury unanimously chose Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” the
prize’s overseers again refused to certify the decision, using words
like “turgid” and “obscene” to justify their action.)
At the time of
their publication, both “Main Street” and “Babbitt” were generally thought of
as satirical novels, America being the object of the satire. Both “Main
Street”’s Gopher Prairie, the small town that is the stand-in for Sauk Centre,
Minn., where Lewis grew up, and Zenith, the medium-size city where Babbitt
conducts his prosperous realty business, are meticulously and convincingly
anatomized: Lewis always got the details right.
The tremendous
success of “Main Street,” and the strong reactions to it, by both its champions
and detractors, suggest how close to the bone its truths struck; it was easier
to dismiss it or to enjoy it as elitist, anti-American satire than to accept it
as a disturbing vision of the realities of home. Lewis himself was clear about
his feelings for Gopher Prairie: He recognized it, he deplored it and he loved
it.
There was immense
anticipation over what he would come up with next, and in 1922 came “Babbitt,”
another big best seller whose satirical elements dominated the critical and
popular reaction to it. George F. Babbitt — 46 years old, a conventional
(conservative) husband, father, householder, golf player, Buick owner, clubman,
churchgoer — is living the American dream. “To the eye,” we’re told, he’s “the
perfect office-going executive — a well-fed man in a correct brown soft hat and
frameless spectacles, smoking a large cigar, driving a good motor along a
semi-suburban parkway.” And yet at odd moments he senses that something is
missing, that he’s buried his early impulses toward a larger, more meaningful
existence: In college he had aspired to becoming a lawyer defending the poor —
even running for governor someday.
Instead, he has
become an apostle of “Boosterism,” a loud, crass glorification of his
middle-class way of life in Zenith, “the Zip City — Zeal, Zest and Zowie —
1,000,000 in 1935.” He cares, in a desultory way, for his bland wife, Myra, and
their three children. He enjoys his success, his growing popularity in the
local business world, his lunches at the Zenith Athletic Club, whose lobby “was
Gothic, the washroom Roman Imperial, the lounge Spanish Mission and the
reading-room Chinese Chippendale.” Babbitt is happily climbing. Yet,
inexplicably, he has begun drifting away from his automatic conservatism,
actually sympathizing with local strikers. To his wife: “Honest, do you think
people would think I was too liberal if I just said the strikers were decent?”
(Myra’s reply: “Of course they would. But don’t worry, dear; I know you don’t
mean a word of it.”) As far as his Zenith world is concerned, though, this
apostasy is the first step on the road to that ultimate evil — socialism!
And then he does
the clichéd thing: has a fling with an appealing sophisticated widow whose
unlikely name is Tanis Judique — where was Lewis’s editor? — and attaches
himself to her coterie of cautiously bohemian friends. Whereupon he begins to
suffer from the withdrawal of approval by his Athletic Club world. “The
independence seeped out of him and he walked the streets alone, afraid of men’s
cynical eyes and the incessant hiss of whispering.”
The crisis comes
when Myra almost dies from acute appendicitis. Every afternoon for 17 days he
visits her in the hospital, “and in their long talks they drifted back to
intimacy.” He’s reunited with his old Zenith crowd, and within two weeks no one
“was more violent regarding the … crimes of labor unions, the perils of
immigration and the delights of golf, morality and bank accounts than was
George F. Babbitt.” Babbitt has undergone and survived what we now recognize as
his “midlife crisis,” but in 1922 nobody had ever heard of such a thing.
The Novelist Who
Saw Middle America as It Really Was
Is Babbitt a
comic character? A tragic character? Merely a stock character from what Lewis’s
friend and mentor H.L. Mencken labeled “the booboisie”? The triumph of
“Babbitt” is that we can’t confidently answer that question. The name Babbitt
entered the language — a “Babbitt” was a ridiculous conformist living in a
ridiculously small-minded world. Yet Lewis’s Babbitt is, finally, a man we care
about — a character rather than a caricature — one of a small group of American
fictional creations who, in the early years of the 20th century, stand in their
very different ways as landmarks in the story of the social evolution of our
country: Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Wharton’s Lily Bart, Booth Tarkington’s Alice
Adams, with Gatsby on the horizon.
Sinclair Lewis
was born in 1885. His father was a prominent doctor in Sauk Centre, a town of
about 2,800 — read all about it in “Main Street.” Fred, the oldest of the
doctor’s three sons, became a miller and was never of much consequence within
the ambitious Lewis clan. Claude, next oldest, was of considerable consequence:
He became a distinguished surgeon, admired and sought after well beyond the
city of St. Cloud, where he spent his adult life. When Lewis was 62, he
acknowledged that “for 60 years I have tried to impress my brother Claude.”
Sinclair Lewis
was never really known as “Sinclair,” his middle name. He was Harry, later Hal,
eventually “Red” to everyone who knew him. He was not a physically
prepossessing young fellow. “He was nearly six feet tall before he was 16,” his
magisterial biographer Mark Schorer writes, “with a short torso set on very
long and spindly legs, and weighed only 120 pounds; lank and lean, but with a
puffy, acne-ridden face (‘pimples,’ they said), big feet and hands, badly
coordinated in his movements, everything about his body hanging and dangling
and swinging and lunging and stumbling, and ice-blue eyes (astigmatic) rather
protruding, all of this thatched with a carrot-colored wig.”
Nor did he have
the happy normal outdoorsy boyhood — skating, swimming, duck-hunting — he later
claimed to have had; Schorer makes that clear. “He was a queer boy with only
one real friend in a town full of boys, laughed at by girls.” Sports? No.
Dances? “As I cannot dance I just went along with Ma to look on.” But a lot of
culture passed through town: military bands; the Ski-U-Mah Quartette; the
Maharas Minstrels; the Schubert Symphony Club; the Casgrove Company performing
with musical glasses, sleigh bells, mandolins and banjos; and itinerant
theatrical events, from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to the Jolly Della Pringle Company.
Most important —
crucial — there were books. His father had a modest library, and young Harry
began acquiring books on his own. (His favorite writers as a boy were Dickens,
Scott and Kipling, and he went on reading them throughout his life.) For years
he was a rotten student, until late in high school he began to shine. He was a
notorious cutup, a mimic and the proud author of “class yells”: “Cooma laca,
booma laca,/Bow wow wow —/Chingalaca, chingalaca,/Chow, Chow, Chow.” He had
crushes on one girl after another — sometimes two at the same time. He did
domestic chores, he had summer jobs. And he submitted flowery poems to various
magazines, all, of course, rejected. But he was also getting ready for college,
having decided to try for Yale, and after spending some time at Oberlin to
sharpen his skills, he was admitted there.
His career in New
Haven was checkered. His only distinction was being published regularly in the
Yale Literary Magazine, “The Lit” — romantic stories, more flowery poems.
Girls? Gauche attempts. Friends? A few. Intimacies? Hardly. The esteemed
educator William Lyon Phelps said of him, “He was not disliked in college, but
was regarded with amiable tolerance as a freak.” His emotional state? As
always, loneliness. Yet he was adventurous: one summer, work as a cattle feeder
on a cattle steamer to England; one fall, steerage passage to Panama, in search
of work there.
Then a few wander
years — a well-known artists’ community in Carmel, a short stretch on a San
Francisco newspaper, Upton Sinclair’s utopian colony in New Jersey. Finally,
New York, where he lived in Greenwich Village and found sympathetic companions
like Edna Ferber and Frances Perkins, who would go on to become F.D.R.’s famous
secretary of labor. He was earning a few dollars by selling scraps of things to
junky magazines and newspapers, and he was selling plots for stories to
established writers: Jack London, for one, who in one transaction paid him $70
for 14 story ideas, and Albert Payson Terhune (“Lad: A Dog”) for another. And
he had begun work on his first novel, “Our Mr. Wrenn.”
He was also
edging his way into the publishing world, working most effectively for George
Doran, who wrote about him: “Lewis pounded out on a typewriter the crispest of
American staccato opinion and criticism, literally reams of publicity stunts.
He was a dynamo of energy and freshness of thought.”
In 1912 he was
working for a publisher whose offices were on Fourth Avenue, in the same
building where Vogue had its offices, and late one evening he was
coming downstairs in the freight elevator when in stepped a very pretty young
woman who had also been working late. In his typical clumsy way, he managed to bump
into her, scattering to the ground the work she was taking home with her.
(“Meet cute,” Hollywood calls it.) Her name was Grace Livingstone Hegger, and
she was a junior editor and writer at Vogue, elegantly dressed, with a kind of
fancy accent that presumably came from her British parents and time she had
spent in Europe while growing up. (Her brother did not have this accent.)
Lewis was madly
in love, and wooed her ferociously with letters, notes, poems, jokes, the
dedication to “Our Mr. Wrenn” and expeditions, including a picnic on the
Palisades to which he brought lamb chops and canned peas that he cooked on a
portable stove. Eventually Gracie, as he called her, succumbed to his
unrelenting pressure and they were married in 1914 — he 29, she 26. She worked
hard to sophisticate him, getting him out of his hideous cheap blue suits and
into respectable tweeds, refining his Midwestern accent. For a few years they
had fun together — roaming around the country in a Model T Ford, settling down
in one place, then rushing off to another. And then the fun stopped.
But during these
years Lewis’s career as a writer was advancing. More financially rewarding than
the five early novels were the short stories he was churning out, conventional
fare snapped up by commercial magazines, at least 20 of them by the
popular and well-paying Saturday Evening Post.
We know a lot
about the Lewis marriage because Gracie would write two books about it (and
him), one a novel, the other a memoir. Both books are fond, outspoken and
convincing. They’re convincing about him as a father (they had one boy, Wells,
named after Lewis’s hero, H.G. Wells). When she gave birth, “Hal was infinitely
tender toward me but his care was for me, the baby seemed not to exist for
him.” They’re convincing about his sexuality: “He seemed unable to recognize
that the sexual act was not important to him, that making love was rather a
nuisance, and though he was essentially masculine and abnormalities of any kind
were shocking to him, he could not supply the confident and robust elements
which make for success in a love affair.” (The tell-all memoir wasn’t invented
yesterday.) They’re convincing about their lives together: “Didn’t he — and I —
live as much on the surface of life as did most of his characters, superbly as
one heard and saw them but whose inwardness was unexplored?”
The tremendous
success of “Main Street,” and the strong reactions to it, suggest how close to
the bone its truths struck.
Of Lewis’s five
early novels, “The Job” is the best, a persuasive account of how a poor but
determined young woman prevails in the commercial real estate business, a book
marred only by a preposterous romantic happy ending. Now, Lewis sensed, was the
moment for him to focus on “Main Street,” the novel about small-town America
that he had been considering and planning for years. And it, too, would be
centered on a young woman: Its subtitle was “The Story of Carol Kennicott.”
She’s a smart young professional librarian who’s brought to Gopher Prairie by
her young doctor husband. At first she’s certain that she can help change
things for the better — ameliorate the crudeness, the small-mindedness, the
lack of culture, of beauty. When her efforts are defeated by the kind but
impervious local citizenry, she leaves husband and town to find satisfying work
and a finer way of life in the Big City.
Yes, this is a
feminist story, but one with an inconclusive resolution: Soon enough, she’s
back to husband and Gopher Prairie, mortified, but with a growing appreciation
of the decencies of its people and the wholesomeness of its life. And despite
the humiliating setback, Carol plows on, more tactfully than before, perhaps,
but indefatigable. Was she meant to be taken as a high-minded emissary of
enlightenment or was she as much an object of Lewis’s satire as Main Street
itself? A century has gone by and we’re still not sure.
“Main Street,”
published late in 1920, exploded on the consciousness of America. There had
never been anything like its instant and sustained literary and commercial
success. Within months its sales had rocketed past 150,000 (eventually it would
sell in the millions), with praise from such sources as Britain’s leading
novelist, John Galsworthy (“altogether a brilliant piece of work and
characterization”), and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote to Lewis, “I want to
tell you that ‘Main Street’ has displaced ‘Theron Ware’ in my favor as the best
American novel.” “Main Street” was an Event, a Phenomenon — a triumph abroad as
well. Sinclair Lewis had arrived!
In the 1920s he
published not only “Main Street” and “Babbitt” but three other novels that won
comparable acclaim: “Arrowsmith,” about an idealistic young doctor-scientist;
“Elmer Gantry,” a scathing satirical account of evangelism and religion in
America — the top fiction best seller of 1927; and “Dodsworth,” about a retired
American businessman searching abroad for what he senses he’s missed out on in
his life — to me, his best-written and most affecting book and, later, the
basis of William Wyler’s brilliant film. (The maddening Mrs. Dodsworth owes
much to Gracie, whom he was more or less amicably divorcing.) And then, in
1930, the crowning moment of his career: He became the first American to be
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he understood the implications:
“This is the end of me,” his friend Lillian Gish reports him saying. “This is
fatal. I cannot live up to it.”
Indeed, from this
peak there was only one way to go: down. And down he went, although there was
almost uninterrupted commercial success. The highlights were “Ann Vickers” —
another account of a high-achieving woman and another novel undermined by its
improbable last-minute romantic ending — and the far from subtle “It Can’t
Happen Here,” a dystopian take on the career of the rabble-rousing demagogue
Huey Long, effective propaganda but hardly Nobel Prize material.
The main event of
the 1930s in the life of Sinclair Lewis was his marriage to the famous
journalist Dorothy Thompson. They first encountered each other in 1927, at a
journalists’ gathering in Berlin. She invited him to her birthday dinner the
following night, at which he cornered her and asked her to marry him, and when
she turned him down, swore to pursue her until she changed her mind. (That
involved trailing her relentlessly around Europe. Arriving in Moscow, where she
was covering the 10th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was asked by
reporters why he had come to Russia. “To see Dorothy,” he said.) When she
finally said yes, they were married in London and spent their honeymoon touring
England in an automobile trailer.
What was Dorothy
Thompson like? A 1940 profile in The Saturday Evening Post said: “She is one of
the most extroverted of humans, aggressively gregarious and tireless in debate.
For combined intellectual, physical and emotional energy, she has no known
equal, male or female.” She was also unflagging at her job, and her fame and
influence grew as she used her journalist’s pulpit to try to awaken America to
the growing dangers of fascism and Stalinism. She had interviewed Hitler before
the Nazis took control and published a violent attack on him called “I Saw
Hitler.” When he came to power, he expelled her from Germany — she had only a
day or two to pick up and get out of town — creating a furor that elevated her
from Star to Heroine.
Soon she began
writing her syndicated column “On the Record,” which appeared twice a week for
22 years, earning her a national readership of 10 million people with her
impassioned political views and her focus on women’s lives. (The famously witty
Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “Dorothy is the only woman in history who has had her
menopause in public and made it pay.”) She was also writing a column for
Ladies’ Home Journal and whirling around the country on endless lecture tours.
At the height of her fame, Time named her one of the two most admired women in
America. The other was Eleanor Roosevelt.
She was also
trying to be a wife and mother — she and Lewis had one son, Michael, an
extraordinarily difficult child she both adored and couldn’t deal with. (She
also adored Gracie’s son, Wells, and was devastated when he was killed by a
sniper in France not long before the end of World War II.) Lewis was as
terrible a father to Michael as he had been to Wells; Dorothy exhausted herself
trying to get him to pay attention to the boy, but it never happened. There
were two houses on the beautiful land the Lewises bought in Vermont. Momma and
Poppa lived in one, and little Michael (plus nurse and attendants) lived in the
other. When he was a child, Michael announced, “I think when I grow up I am
going to kill my daddy.”
“This is the end
of me,” Lewis said after winning the Nobel Prize. “I cannot live up to it.”
Meanwhile Lewis’s
drinking grew worse and worse. It was now conceded by both husband and wife
that he was an alcoholic. His behavior grew worse, too. When there were people
around he would launch into brilliant, and endless, monologues, wielding his
superb gift of mimicry — sometimes the speeches went on for an hour or more,
until his audience fled, enraging him. When drunk (which was much of the time),
he would insult people, abuse Dorothy, fire assistants, only to rehire them the
next day with effusive apologies. (One of them was the young John Hersey, years
before “Hiroshima,” who would later say, “I must have been too young to recognize
the bitterness of an exhausted gift, and of course I was ignorant of the
drinking history.”) He would also abuse students whom he had agreed to teach
and people who had come to hear him speak. At a lecture at Wesleyan College, he
asked the students, “How many of you want to write?” Most of them raised their
hands. “Good,” he said. “Go home and write,” and he left the stage.
The Lewis
marriage was eroding beyond repair. Dorothy drove him crazy with her incessant
talk of the situation in Europe. (“If I ever divorce Dorothy, I’ll name Adolf
Hitler as co-respondent.”) Whereas he would call her by his
own name, while impersonating his father: “Harry Lewis! Harry Lewis! Get your
lazy bones out of that chair and see to the wood! … How many times do I have to
tell you? And it’s past 8 o’clock, Harry Lewis, do you hear me?” “When I first
became Harry Lewis,” Dorothy was to recall, “I really did not know whether I
was or not.”
Yet there were
happy times in Vermont. Dorothy’s sister, Peggy, told their intimate friend the
journalist Vincent Sheean that “she can remember hardly anything but gaiety and
good will from all of those years.” And Dorothy’s diaries and letters to Red
were filled with love, even passion. Dorothy and Red always did better with
each other when they were apart.
One of their
final engagements took place onscreen in the first of the famous Hepburn-Tracy
marital comedies, “Woman of the Year,” which appeared in 1942. (It was an open
secret that the Lewises were the originals.) But by 1981, when a musical based
on the movie was a Broadway hit, people were interested only in its star,
Lauren Bacall. No one by then was interested in Dorothy Thompson, or, for that
matter, in Sinclair Lewis.
Their marriage
was over long before they officially divorced. Lewis, who had always been drawn
to the theater, was writing (bad) plays, and in 1939 he fell madly in love with
an 18-year-old aspiring actress named Marcella Powers. (He was in his 50s.)
Naturally she was flattered by this attention from a world-famous man, and she
genuinely liked him, but she was wise enough — or wary enough — not to marry
him. He plied her with gifts, paid her expenses, wrote plays for her, but she
wanted to act, not be Mrs. Sinclair Lewis. It was all very public, and not very
seemly. When Powers wouldn’t tag along with him on his travels, he would take
her pleasant, passive mother in her place to look after him and provide some
kind of undemanding companionship — anything rather than be alone. Eventually
Powers married an appropriate young man, and Lewis behaved well, but he
understood that his emotional life had ended. Along the way, he himself took up
acting, performing such parts as the Stage Manager in “Our Town” and the George
M. Cohan role in Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” in a variety of summer and
regional theaters.
As for his later
novels, they range from mediocre to terrible. Only two stand out in any way.
The best-selling “Cass Timberlane” (1945) is about an attractive youngish judge
who falls in love with the very young, exciting Jinny, who marries him, leaves
him for a sexier man and returns to him repentant. Jinny, of course, is a
fictionalized Marcella Powers, played in the hit MGM movie version by Lana
Turner, opposite Spencer Tracy as the judge.
The other is the
preposterous “Kingsblood Royal” (1947). Lewis, determined to strike a blow
against racism, scoured the country interviewing Black Americans, from servants
and manual laborers to ministers and educators. Then he invented a young,
successful (and white) banker with a perfect wife and family, who somehow
discovers that he is — are you ready? — one thirty-second “Negro.” He’s
shocked, fascinated and determined: He must divulge this terrible secret to the
world. You would have thought that a sophisticated postwar Midwestern city
would absorb this “scandal” without a murmur, but no, his life is shattered.
Fortunately, his wife is true blue and stands by him as he takes his place in
the Black world. This farrago of nonsense was ridiculed by critics, yet was a
considerable best seller, his last. Two feeble novels were to follow, but after
a quarter of a century as America’s leading novelist, his effective career was
over.
He was, at the
end, the thing he had always most feared being: alone — and lonely.
His life petered
out into a sad, isolated existence, this quintessential American dying in 1951
in a hospital outside Rome, with only an anonymous Franciscan nun in
attendance. Despite his substantial achievements, he still saw himself as ugly
and unlovable. And he was, at the end, the thing he had always most feared
being: alone — and lonely.
It’s all too easy
to focus on the peculiar and unpleasant aspects of Lewis’s life. Attention must
also be paid to his remarkable capabilities and his large generosity. He never
stopped encouraging and helping young writers: He just loved talent wherever he
spotted it. He may well have been the most widely and deeply read person of his
era — and what he read, he remembered. (He could, and did, spew forth pages of
his favorite authors, Dickens above all others.) His superb Nobel Prize speech
is mostly a paean to American writers, first and foremost Dreiser, with whom he
had had a violent altercation but whom he now credited with
liberating American writing from the gentilities of William Dean Howells. He
also extols Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent
Millay, Carl Sandburg, Ring Lardner, Thomas Wolfe, O’Neill, Hemingway, Dos
Passos and Faulkner, among others.
As for his
writing, he was never a stylist. His books are almost without a voice of their
own, lacking both power and lyricism. But they are superbly constructed, and
they keep you reading. Certainly they are convincing in their presentation of
the surface of things, and it is this all-consuming attention to the surfaces
of American life that makes him unique in American letters.
From the start he
was watching, absorbing, cataloging. His friend Anna Louise Strong, who later
became America’s leading sympathizer with Communist China, wrote of him when he
came to Seattle in 1916: “He showed me notebooks full of descriptions. He went,
for instance, to the docks in Seattle and wrote down lists of what he saw … the
size of packages, what was in them, how they were loaded or unloaded, where
they came from, what everything looked like on those docks. … He did this
everywhere he went, across the country.”
In a sketch of
himself never published in America, he wrote, “My real traveling has been
sitting in Pullman smoking cars, in a Minnesota village, on a Vermont farm, in
a hotel in Kansas City or Savannah, listening to the normal daily drone of what
are to me the most fascinating and exotic people in the world — the Average
Citizens of the United States.”
You could say that
Sinclair Lewis spent his life taking an inventory of America.
