A lady with whom I frequently exchange opinions on the trolley-cars of
my town took me to task recently for commending Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s
_Main Street_ as an achievement worthy of all respect. “I know a
score of Indiana towns and they are not like Gopher Prairie,” she
declared indignantly. “No,” I conceded, “they are not; but the Indiana
towns you have in mind are older than Gopher Prairie; many of them
have celebrated their centennial; they were founded by well-seasoned
pioneers of the old American stocks; and an impressive number of the
first settlers--I named half a dozen--experienced the same dismay and
disgust, and were inspired by the same noble ambition to make the
world over that Mr. Lewis has noted in Carol Kennicott’s case.”
Not one but many of my neighbors, and friends and acquaintances in
other towns, have lately honored me with their views on provincial life
with Mr. Lewis’s novel as a text. Most of them admit that Minnesota
may be like that, but by all the gods at once things are not so in
“my State” or “my town.” This is a habit of thought, a state of mind.
There is, I think, something very delightful about it. To encounter
it is to be refreshed and uplifted. It is like meeting a stranger who
isn’t ashamed to boast of his wife’s cooking. On east and west journeys
across the region of the tall corn one must be churlish indeed to
repel the man who is keen to enlighten the ignorant as to the happy
circumstances of his life. After an hour I experience a pleasurable
sense of intimacy with his neighbors. If, when his town is reached, I
step out upon the platform with the returning Ulysses, there may be
time enough to shake hands with his wife and children, and I catch a
glimpse of his son in the waiting motor--(that boy, I’d have you know,
took all the honors of his class at our State university)--and it is
with real sorrow that I confess my inability to stop off for a day or
two to inspect the grain-elevator and the new brickyard and partake of
a chicken dinner at the country club--the snappiest in all this part of
the State! Main Street is proud of itself, and any newcomer who assumes
a critical attitude or is swollen with a desire to retouch the lily is
doomed to a chilly reception.
My joy in _Main Street_, the book, is marred by what I am constrained
to think is a questionable assertion in the foreword, namely: “The
town is, in our tale, called Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. But its Main
Street is the continuation of Main Street everywhere. The story would
be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and
not very differently would it be told up York State or in the Carolina
Hills.” Now I should say that there are very marked differences
between Gopher Prairie and towns of approximately the same size that
have drawn upon different strains of foreign or American stock. Mr.
Lewis depicts character with a sure stroke, and he communicates the
sense of atmosphere admirably. There are paragraphs and single
lines that arrest the attention and invite re-reading, so sharply do
they bite into the consciousness. One pays him a reader’s highest
tribute--“That’s true; I’ve known just such people.” But I should
modify his claim to universality in deference to the differences in
local history so clearly written upon our maps and the dissimilar
backgrounds of young America that are not the less interesting or
important because the tracings upon them are so thin.
Human nature, we are frequently assured, is the same the world over,
but I don’t believe it can be maintained successfully that all small
towns are alike. All manner of things contribute to the making of a
community. A college town is unlike an industrial or a farming centre
of the same size. A Scandinavian influence in a community is quite
different from a German or an Irish or a Scotch influence. There are
places in the heart of America where, in the formative period, the
Scotch-Irish exerted a very marked influence indeed in giving tone and
direction to the community life, and the observer is sensible of this a
hundred years afterward. There are varied shadings traceable to early
dominating religious forces; Catholicism, Methodism, Presbyterianism,
and Episcopalianism each imparting a coloring of its own to the social
fabric. No more fascinating field is open to the student than that
offered by the elements that have contributed to the building of
American communities as, for example, where there has been a strong
foreign infusion or such a blend as that of New Englanders with folk
of a Southern strain. Those who are curious in such matters will find
a considerable literature ready to their hand. Hardly any one at all
conversant with American life but will think instantly of groups
of men and women who in some small centre were able, by reason of
their foresight and courage, to lay a debt upon posterity, or of an
individual who has waged battle alone for public betterment.
The trouble with Mr. Lewis’s Carol Kennicott was that she really had
nothing to offer Gopher Prairie that sensible self-respecting people
anywhere would have welcomed. A superficial creature, she was without
true vision in any direction. Plenty of men and women vastly her
superior in cultivation and blessed with a far finer sensitiveness to
the things of the spirit have in countless cases faced rude conditions,
squalor even, cheerfully and hopefully, and in time they have succeeded
in doing something to make the world a better place to live in. This
is not to say that Carol is not true to type; there is the type, but
I am not persuaded that its existence proves anything except that
there are always fools and foolish people in the world. Carol would
have been a failure anywhere. She deserved to fail in Gopher Prairie,
which does not strike me, after all, as so hateful a place as she found
it to be. She nowhere impinges upon my sympathy. I have known her by
various names in larger and lovelier communities than Gopher Prairie,
and wherever she exists she is a bore, and at times an unmitigated
nuisance. My heart warms, not to her, but to the people in Main Street
she despised. They didn’t need her uplifting hand! They were far more
valuable members of society than she proved herself to be, for they
worked honestly at their jobs and had, I am confident, a pretty fair
idea of their rights and duties, their privileges and immunities, as
children of democracy.
Nothing in America is more reassuring than the fact that some one is
always wailing in the market-place. When we’ve got something and don’t
like it, we wait for some one to tell us how to get rid of it. Plunging
into prohibition, we at once become tolerant of the bootlegger. There’s
no point of rest. We are fickle, capricious, and pine for change. In
the course of time we score for civilization, but the gains, broadly
considered, are small and painfully won. Happiest are they who keep
sawing wood and don’t expect too much! There are always the zealous
laborers, the fit though few, who incur suspicion, awaken antagonism,
and suffer defeat, to pave the way for those who will reap the harvest
of their sowing. There are a hundred million of us and it’s too much to
ask that we all chase the same rainbow. There are diversities of gifts,
but all, we hope, animated by the same spirit.