_Sinclair Lewis and the Average Man_
In the novels of Sinclair Lewis the Middle West has made another
contribution to American literature. He was born in 1885 in Minnesota.
It was in this country that he located Gopher Prairie. His father was a
physician like Kennicott, Carol’s husband in “Main Street.” Lewis holds
a degree from Yale and did not forget academic life in his stories.
He too made his début in journalism, where he had a chance to learn
something about the advertising methods which he parodies in his books,
at first hand. Then he became an enthusiastic motorist, traveling
through the different States of the Union. In one of his first novels,
“Free Air,” he recounts an automobile romance, lasting all the way from
New York to Seattle. Many “slices of life” graphically reproduced and
spiced with delightful humor, show already the hand of a master. The
hero, Milton Daggett, is a typical Lewis character, sympathetic and
full of an exuberant vitality. Milton owns a garage. On his way west
he meets a beautiful heiress whom he escorts and, of course, finally
marries.
“Mantrap,” a more recent novel, is the story of a trip through the
Canadian wilds. It shows much the same dynamism. The author, at that
time, had not yet sacrificed the pleasure of telling a story to
characterization and satire. However, he already showed himself a keen
observer of men and women, when he published “Our Mr. Wrenn” in 1916.
The book is intensely alive. It revealed Lewis’ talent to mimic people
and make them talk as if we had overheard them.
The scene is laid in a New York boarding house and the book recalls
Dickens’ descriptions of the life of the bourgeois. Lewis displays
the same humor, the same pathos and a similar deftness in drawing
characters. Wrenn is an elder brother of George Babbitt. He is
good-humored, a trifle sentimental and shows an almost morbid craving
for friendship. Like Babbitt he was born gregarious. He is shy and
almost obsequious with women. He longs to be loved and to tell some one
that he loves her, but he does not know how to conduct a flirtation. We
can very well imagine him playing a minor rôle in Flaubert’s “Bouvard
and Pecuchet,” that epic of commonplace romanticism. The scene where
Our Mr. Wrenn bids farewell to the setting sun reveals an unmistakable
touch of Flaubert’s sympathetic irony. Wrenn is too ignorant and too
modest to vent his feelings by trying to imitate the effusions of the
great romantic writers at twilight. And yet he can hardly control
himself on a fall evening as he sees the sun setting beyond the
Manhattan skyscrapers. He rarely looks at the sky, and prefers not
to, because, when he sees it, he takes it for an impossible road to
Mandalay, and it makes him blue. This particular evening, the sunset
has made Wrenn sad. To comfort himself he goes to a delicatessen store,
and learns a new recipe for cooking eggs. Never mind the setting sun,
after all! Wrenn is going to spend the evening with his friend Nellie,
whom he adores in silence and to whom he reads the newspapers! As he
thinks of it, he forgets the setting sun and he goes home hugging
against his bosom the little tin of potato salad which he bought for
his supper--let the chilly autumn wind moan around him if it wants.
More optimistic and ironic than Theodore Dreiser, Lewis has none the
less devoted himself to the satire of American society. The feeling
of the conflict between social and individual ethics, between the
state of the _mores_ in America and the real needs of the individual
citizen, inspired his work. “Main Street,” “Babbitt,” “Arrowsmith”
and “Elmer Gantry” present the same plea. Let it not be said that the
conflict between what the private man would like to do and what the
social standards permit him to do is not peculiar to the United States.
Doubtless there is nowhere a civilization without a society, and a
society without suppression of some sort. But, if the criticisms which
I have attempted to interpret impartially in these studies are true, it
seems evident that the conflict in question is more tragic in America
than anywhere else. Of all current social systems, that of the United
States puts the greatest check on the individual as opposed to social
expansion.[30]
Sinclair Lewis is by far the most optimistic of all contemporary
American novelists, at least in his first novels. And yet the sting
of the bee is there, and, the more he progresses in his career, the
more disillusioned he seems to become concerning the things and people
around him. What sort of United States does he show us? First of all,
an immense country, prosperous, comfortable and self-satisfied on the
surface, and in which more than one hundred million human beings live a
sort of vegetative life. This indeed is surprising to the traveler from
abroad, who visits the American shores. He sees optimism and joy all
around him. Joy is the product of action and the only incentive to it.
Neither action nor joy are possible without optimism. That Puritanism
should permit Americans to remain gay sounds paradoxical, but Americans
are not all Puritans and their joviality as a people is indisputable.
Optimism and contentment are the daily colors of American life. Europe
is a gloomy country in comparison with America. “Smile and be happy!”
could never be a motto for the Old World. How could the average
American help being content? To confine ourselves to “Babbitt” and
“Main Street,” Americans in Sinclair Lewis’ novels are happy people.
They enjoy material comfort, sociability, confidence in what the future
has in store for them. Anybody who has had the privilege of living in
America knows well what that means. Comfort and material ease first.
There is in the United States a striking unanimity of contentment. In
no other country has the average man so many practical reasons for
believing in material success. Success is the rule in America for the
average person with an average intelligence. Not everybody makes a
fortune, many vegetate, a great many fail, but, materially speaking,
the United States is the land of plenty. There are comparatively few
paupers. Nearly every one is assured of a fair minimum of comfort and
ease. Large or small, the average American has a home, a hearth, a
house which is, as a rule, more comfortable than the average European
dwelling. Clean, neat and freshly painted, the American bungalow or
cottage is not necessarily artistic, but it is agreeable. Friendly and
yet distant from the neighbors, it is the image of its owner. Each
house is isolated, and yet sufficiently near another to facilitate
neighborliness. It is surrounded by a lawn carefully and almost
religiously mowed. Inside, there is a furnace heater, one or several
bathrooms, electric lighting, an icebox, not to forget the phonograph
and the radio. And who in America has not a garage, were it only for
a “Ford”? Living is simple, as is the furniture--and in still greater
degree, the cooking.
When the average American deserts his home--and he does it often,
on business or pleasure--innumerable refuges take care of him. He
is never left alone. Every good American is affiliated with one or
more associations. Masonic lodges in particular abound. There, he is
able to create many contacts. The spirit of solidarity, what he calls
“service,” is very strong in him. In his lodge or his club, the average
American (let us call him Babbitt with Sinclair Lewis) finds many
practical advantages. If he wants to borrow, sue somebody, or invest
money, be advanced in politics, he finds there a platform and a market.
Even the welfare of his family is attended to when he dies. A Mystic
Shriner, a Rotarian, an Elk, a Kiwanian, an Odd Fellow, a Forester,
or what not, every average American is subject to sudden mobilization
for a convention or a parade. He is the prisoner--a happy prisoner,
we must believe--of his clan. A quiet, and even a shy person at home,
he is spontaneously transformed into a rather frolicsome person among
his friends. Then he likes noise, demonstrations and escapades. He no
longer conceals his passion for eccentricities of all kinds. The French
proverb that _le ridicule tue_ does not apply to the average American
when he parades, several thousand strong, through the streets of a big
city disguised as a Turk, an admiral or a Spanish bullfighter, among
the din of brass bands. This sociable spirit follows him in business.
Nobody knows better than he how to make friends with a banker, an
insurance agent, a broker and the innumerable agents and peddlers who
continuously besiege him to insure him and to improve his well-being.
Then, if he is in quest of an education for his sons and daughters,
he can find around him a myriad of educational opportunities,
universities, colleges, schools, libraries, agencies of all sorts.
If he must “work his way through college,” the simple and democratic
character of American life is such that he can do so without loss of
self-respect.
From the religious point of view, the American scene is not less
attractive. Spirituality has become so attenuated in the United States
that the most hard-boiled agnostic may go to almost any church. No
sect, outside the Catholic Church, bothers much about the four final
ends of man nowadays, and the churches are too busy with this world to
pay much attention to the hereafter. American theology has exorcized
the devil long ago. Prophylaxy, citizenship and hygiene have just about
replaced the teaching of the Bible. The Church has become an annex to
the home, the university and the club. It is, first of all, a center
of social and moral action.
To explain American optimism the material organization of life
must also be taken into consideration. Basing itself on the use of
a continually improved machinery, this organization is perfect.
American prowess has adjusted machinery to life. Innumerable means
of transportation insure the maximum of comfort. Machines, large and
small, help the American to solve the servant problem. Elevators,
typewriters, telephones, calculating machines, motor cars, steam,
electric or automatic engines have been invented to save human labor
and exemplify the axiom that “time is money.” The Middle Ages expressed
their religious faith in the cathedrals. American comfort displays
itself in the Pullman car and the hotel palace.
In politics the average American has every reason for believing that he
is the best governed citizen in the world. Sovereignty lies entirely
in his hands, for better, for worse. American politics has its defects
and even its vices (incompetence, graft, bossism, etc.), and yet, when
all is told, the system of American government appears as the most
convenient appliance ever invented to answer the direct needs of the
governed. Taxes are paid and furnish a good revenue. Two big parties,
and only two, divide the country about equally and without serious
strife. There are cliques, and, perhaps, more than elsewhere, graft.
But the American voter is an optimist. He looks straight before him
and fulfills his functions as a citizen with an almost sacramental
solemnity. There are politically discontented people in the United
States, and their number is increasing, but they are still a small
minority. In spite of several incidents which cannot be ignored (see
Upton Sinclair’s novels on strikes, bribes and socialistic riots), the
United States is the only country where socialism has a small chance
of succeeding, and the only one where it is not yet in power. The
reason for this is that America is the country where man suffers least
and where he is least exploited. Labor is well paid and it is wisely
regulated. Competition is free and the distance between capital and
labor smaller than in other lands.
And yet Babbitt, the representative average American, is not happy.
Upon his discontent we should make a few reservations. First and above
all, let us remark it, the current pessimism to-day in the United
States is not a pessimism of the masses but of the élite. The case of
Sinclair Lewis and the people he puts on the stage in his novels is
remarkable on this point. To make him a pessimist without qualification
would be inaccurate.
Carol Kennicott represents the average American woman, Babbitt the
average American man. Both of them experience tragic moments, but, all
in all, they never despair, and return to the fold with, seemingly, the
approval and blessing of the author. After this preamble, I come to the
analysis of Sinclair Lewis’ novels.
* * * * *
“Main Street” is the moving picture of a small American town and the
portrait of a representative individual. Gopher Prairie is the typical
American settlement as there are hundreds of them in the United States,
east and west. Yet the difference in longitude has its importance.
As I have already pointed out, it is in the Middle West that one has
a chance to study the purest forms of American life to-day. That is
due to isolation and to the absence of aristocratic or unassimilated
foreign elements. It is there that Lewis studied his typical Americans.
Gopher Prairie is a little burg of about three thousand souls, not
a very large field for observation. Carol, the heroine, belongs to
a good family. She has been well brought up. She holds a University
degree and marries a doctor. Kennicott is an average man and a good
soul. He is neither very refined nor very cultured, but he is a kind
and reliable man, courteous, clean and disinterested. He is strongly
marked psychologically by what Freud calls the “mother complex.” He
has besides, like most Americans, a morbid sense of sociability and an
unqualified respect for public opinion.
In Kennicott the novelist has shown well the conflict of individual
initiative with the tyranny of accepted standards. Individual
initiative in the book is personified by his wife, Carol, a
semi-pathetic character but one whom Lewis was careful enough not to
turn into a Hedda Gabler. Her main virtue is zeal and her pet defect
restlessness. She is pretty, even a bit coquettish within the bounds
of respectability, a “womanly woman” rather than a feminist. She knows
several languages, art and literature, and is not satisfied with
all that. Like most American women she would like to reform society
and make the world better, let the world will it or not. Of course,
Gopher Prairie opposes her plans and refuses to be reformed. Carol is
bitterly disappointed, and so are we. She means so well, she is so
eager and sincere! And yet, when we think it over, we come pretty near
to agreeing with Sinclair Lewis that Carol overdoes it, and that a
reformed Gopher Prairie, with three thousand reformers in petticoats,
would hardly do to keep the place fit to live in. Lewis is certainly
not for the commonplace Gopherprairians. Is he more decidedly for
Carol? This is difficult to say, because he made her half a Joan of Arc
and half a Tartarin in skirts.
Carol stands as a living protest against the morons who surround her
thick as bats in a cellar. And yet when the end comes, she capitulates
and reënters Philistia willingly. It is difficult to know what to make
out of her. Flaubert, at least, was consistent in “Madame Bovary.”
Emma preferred death to capitulation. Suicide was for her the only
dignified solution of her problems. Imagine a Bovary converted to the
standards of her village with Doctor Rouault for her lord, and M.
Homais or Abbé Bournisien for her company until death! Sinclair Lewis’
attitude towards Carol is not clear. One dreams of her and of George
Babbitt as faithful in their revolt; of a Carol who should never return
to her commonplace country doctor or to the stagnant pools of Gopher
Prairie; of a Babbitt who should enlist with the I.W.W. and not leave
the responsibility for a happier future to his son. But this would be
pessimism and bolshevism _à la_ Tolstoi or _à la_ Romain Rolland. This
is an impossibility in America. So “Main Street” ends as quietly and
edifyingly as, let us say, “The Awakening of Helena Ritchie.”
Carol Kennicott, in any case, incarnates two characteristic American
traits,--on one hand the craving for independence, on the other
the almost morbid zeal for reform and apostolicism. She is a born
missionary. When she denounces the pettiness and vulgarity of Gopher
Prairie, it is doubtless Sinclair Lewis who speaks through her. But
when she pretends to destroy the world and to rebuild it in three days,
the novelist turns against her as against a Don Quixote in skirts.
Idealism in America, especially feminine idealism, is too easily turned
into intolerance and witch burning.
* * * * *
The case of Carol Kennicott recalls to mind that of Emma Bovary in
Flaubert’s novel, but there is a difference due to the fact that Carol
was born in America. Carol’s life is much less gloomy than Emma’s.
Doctor Kennicott is a better and more interesting man than Emma’s
husband. Gopher Prairie, in spite of all its shortcomings, is a more
cheerful place to live in than Mme. Bovary’s Normandy village. Who
knows whether Emma, had she migrated to the United States, would not
have ended by getting reconciled to a world where the thrills of the
movies, the automobile and the radio would have cured her of her
blues? As a member of a women’s club, and a social worker, she might
have taken a new interest in existence. Carol and Emma were, in many
respects, twin sisters. Both liked to read fiction and to mistake what
they read for reality. Both were married to commonplace and unromantic
country doctors. Both liked to build castles in Spain. Both shocked the
world around them by their adventures and escapades. As an artist, it
is true, Lewis does not come up to Flaubert’s level. Flaubert’s style
is plastic, something for the eye, as well as for the ear, to enjoy.
Lewis is almost exclusively oral, but he excels Flaubert in making
things and people move, breathe and speak in a lifelike way.
There is, according to the novelist, a double legend concerning the
American small town. The first is sentimental. According to it:
The American village remains the sure abode of friendship, honesty,
and clean, sweet, marriageable girls. Therefore all men who succeed
in painting in Paris or in finance in New York at last become weary
of smart women, return to their native town, assert that cities
are vicious, marry their childhood sweethearts and, presumably,
joyously abide in those towns until death.[31]
Then there is the “roughing it” legend:
The other tradition is that the significant features of all
villages are whiskers, iron dogs upon lawns, gold bricks, checkers,
jars of gilded cat-tails, and shrewd comic old men who are known as
“hicks” and who ejaculate “Waal, I swan.” This altogether admirable
tradition rules the vaudeville stage, factious illustrators, and
syndicate newspaper humor, but out of actual life it passed forty
years ago. Carol’s small town thinks not in horse-swapping but in
cheap motor cars, telephones, ready-made clothes, silos, alfalfa,
kodaks, phonographs, leather-upholstered Morris chairs, bridge
prizes, oil-stocks, motion-pictures, land-deals, unread sets of
Mark Twain, and a chaste version of national politics.[32]
In such a town, we are told, for every two contented people there are
hundreds, especially among the young, who are not. That is why the
intelligent and the well-to-do travel and leave for the big cities from
which they hope never to return. Even in the West the elder people
emigrate. They go to California to die.
The reason of these migrations is told by Carol’s story. It is the
necessity to escape from puritanical and provincial boredom. How dull
the little town in spite of his Morris chairs, his bridge parties and
his phonographs! Nothing left to imagination; heavy speech and heavy
manner; free thinking smothered under respectability:
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 the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery, self-thought and
self-defended. It is dullness made God.
A savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward,
coatless 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.
Carol Kennicott did not lack critical sense. She tried to explain to
herself the triumph of mediocrity around her. She was frightened by its
irresistible contagion. She saw the stupendous effects of the melting
process on the immigrants from Europe who, at that time, still flooded
the Middle West. How quickly they forgot their traditions, their
folklore and picturesque costumes. Take the Norwegian women of Gopher
Prairie. How light-heartedly they exchanged their red tunics, their
pearl necklaces, their black chemisettes lined with blue, their green
and gray aprons, their stiff capes (so well designed to enhance their
fresh little faces) for icy-white American blouses! How quickly their
home cooking was replaced by the national pork cutlets! Americanized,
standardized and commonplace, they lost their identity and charm
within a generation. Their sons, with ready-made clothes and ready-made
college talk, soon assumed a respectable air. The environment made of
these picturesque strangers is a banal replica of the world around them.
Doubtless all small towns are alike, and have always been in all
countries and climes. Isolation causes that. But the worst was that
Gopher Prairie wanted to set standards of mediocrity for the whole
world, or at least for one hundred and more million Americans:
It is a force seeking to dominate the earth, to drain the hills and
sea of color, to set Dante at boosting Gopher Prairie, and to dress
the high gods in Klassy Kollege Klothes. Sure of itself, it bullies
other civilizations, as a traveling salesman in a brown derby
conquers the wisdom of China and tacks advertisements of cigarettes
over arches for centuries dedicated to the sayings of Confucius.
Such a society functions admirably in the large production of
cheap automobiles, dollar watches, and safety razors. But it is
not satisfied until the entire world also admits that the end
of a joyous purpose of living is to ride in flivvers, to make
advertising-pictures of dollar watches, and in the twilight to sit
talking, not of love and courage, but of the convenience of safety
razors.
The end of “Main Street” is disappointing. Carol Kennicott’s generous
plans for the reformation of Gopher Prairie failed and she confessed
herself helpless. She lost all hope in social improvement and bowed to
accepted standards without renouncing entirely critical sense. After
all, an intelligent and zealous woman can devote herself to many useful
tasks, even in a retrograde community. There is the home, the church,
the bank, the school. If things cannot be changed, they can at least be
studied. Carol decided to try to understand what she could not reform.
Her career ends in a compromise. She goes “round-about,” like Ibsen’s
button-molder. It is suicide by sociology. This is pathetic when one
remembers the romantic longings of the heroine of “Main Street.” A
poet was asleep in her and tried in vain to flap his wings. She had
a quick imagination and an inborn sense of the beautiful, like all
romantic characters. When, for instance, she presided over the meetings
of the Campfire girls of Gopher Prairie, she could hardly help wishing
to change her “personality picture.” Her imagination soared and she
believed herself among the Indians. Those common-looking girls on Main
Street became transfigured to her eyes, as soon as they had put on
their Sioux costumes. As Carol looked at them dancing and performing
the rites of the Redskin she felt as if she were one herself.[33]
Let him who doubts Carol’s kinship with Emma Bovary read the pages of
the book where she practices landscape gardening at the little station
of Gopher Prairie and Sinclair Lewis’ comments on her experiment:
She felt that she was scrubbing a temple deserted by the gods and
empty even of incense and the sound of chanting. Passengers looking
from trains saw her as a village woman of fading prettiness,
incorruptible virtue, and no abnormalities; the baggageman heard
her say, “Oh, yes, I do think it will be a good example for the
children”; and all the while she saw herself running garlanded
through the streets of Babylon.
Planting led her to botanizing. She never got much farther than
recognizing the tiger lily and the wild rose, but she discovered
Hugh (her son). “What does the buttercup say, mummy?” he cried, his
hands full of straggly grasses, his cheek gilded with pollen. She
knelt to embrace him; she affirmed that he made life more full; she
was altogether reconciled ... for an hour.
But she woke at night to hovering death. She crept away from the
bump of bedding that was Kennicott, tiptoed into the bathroom and,
by the mirror in the door of the medicine-cabinet, examined her
pallid face.
Wasn’t she growing visibly older in ratio as Vida grew plumper
and younger? Wasn’t her nose sharper? Wasn’t her neck granulated?
She stared and choked. She was only thirty. But the five years
since her marriage--had they not gone by as hastily and stupidly
as though she had been under ether? Would time not slink past till
death? She pounded her fist on the cool enameled rim of the bathtub
and raged mutely against the indifference of the gods:
“I don’t care! I won’t endure it! They lie so ..., they tell me I
ought to be satisfied with Hugh and a good home and planting seven
nasturtiums in a station garden! I am I! When I die the world will
be annihilated, as far as I am concerned. I am I! I am not content
to leave the sea and the ivory towers to others. I want them for
me! Damn all of them! Do they think they can make me believe that
a display of potatoes at Howland and Gould’s is enough beauty and
strangeness?”
The last words of this romantic soliloquy show too well, alas! by their
triviality that Carol is only a Middle Western Bovary, but the tone
and the pathos of the piece are worthy of the best pages in Flaubert.
Salammbô, praying to the moon on her Carthaginian terrace, Emma giving
way to her blues in her boudoir, would have understood the melancholy
Carol dreaming of Babylon in a Gopher Prairie garden.
* * * * *
I now turn to “Babbitt.” The author’s literary tactics have changed
since he wrote “Free Air” and “Our Mr. Wrenn.” Plots have now given
way almost entirely to portraits, anecdotes to characters. Sinclair
Lewis’ tactics consist in heaping together the minutest details which
will help him to put a vital person before us. His first novels were
organic, the latter are merely episodic. “Babbitt” is almost plotless.
It is, at the same time, the picture of a man and that of a profession.
Babbitt is not a fancy. He is the _homo americanus par excellence_,
the representative average American. He recalls Molière’s “tradesman
turned a gentleman.” He makes us think of M. Jourdain as an immigrant
in America, parvenu, with a Packard and an up-to-date house full of the
most modern appliances. How proud M. Jourdain would be to-day of his
motor car, his telephone, his bathroom, his typewriter and his radio!
But M. Jourdain was an exception in seventeenth-century France and
George Babbitt, we are told--though this well may be pure calumny--is
the rule in twentieth-century America. Like Carol Kennicott, Babbitt
has a double personality.
First and foremost, he is a very caustic and live person. He is
married, possessed of children belonging to the species _enfants
terribles_. He lives in a rather expensive house in Zenith, a city
as famous to-day as Tarascon or the kingdom of Poictesme. He is very
concrete and very individualistic. On the other hand, taken as a
general type, he may be called _Monsieur tout-le-monde_. He is the man
of the crowds. Sinclair Lewis has gathered with a stroke of genius, and
incarnated in him, all the gestures, all the poses, all the hobbies,
all the colloquialisms of the average American. He likes to work and
do business on a large scale. He is fond of his home, fond of living
in it, and fond of leaving it too, once in a while. There is a dormant
romanticism in him, but it is harmless and unheroic. When Tartarin de
Tarascon had the blues, he went to hunt the lions in the suburbs of
Algiers. The call-of-the-wild takes George Babbitt away for fishing
parties into the wilds of Maine. He loves his wife, he loves his
children, but, oftentimes, civilization bores him and he would rather
love something else. He is a realtor by profession, neither more nor
less honest than his colleagues. For him, as for most of us, “business
is simply other people’s money,” as the French playwright puts it. And
George knows how to make money. He has his flirtations and perhaps
his passions. The imprisonment of a friend who killed his wife hit a
serious blow at his optimism, but his good humor survived. Finally,
like Carol, he makes an edifying end and returns to the fold, wishing
for his son a more cheerful world to live in.
Babbitt, as a representative man, is possible only in America. His
gestures, his foibles, his words and phrases, are explained by the
country where millions of human beings are cut on the same pattern,
made in series like automobiles or harvesters, because it cannot be
done otherwise. Quantity _versus_ quality, the masses against the
individual,--this is the great American problem and George Babbitt
is the half-sarcastic, half-tragic example of it. He is conformism
incarnate. The family, the school, the church, the thousand and one
associations which he must join manufacture for him his thoughts, his
feelings and his speech. They have made him an automaton, leaving him
very little personality. A democracy of more than one million citizens
produces Babbitts naturally, as apple trees their apples. Babbittry is
the inevitable ransom of some of the highest American virtues. A people
ceaselessly active, moving and advancing, needs discipline as much as a
professional army. Before being an individual, Babbitt is a private in
Democracy’s regiment. He wears a uniform; he performs certain duties;
he recites from a drill-book. Never mind if he left the best of himself
behind. Somebody else will pick it up for him. The triumph of the
greater number cannot be insured without the sacrifice of the minority.
Hence the tragedy of exceptional people in America, the agony of Poe,
the isolation of Whitman, the ordeal of Mark Twain, the exile of Henry
James, the sarcasms of Henry Adams. Hence the floating anxiety and
soul-fear of the man in the crowd.
It was advisedly, I believe, that Sinclair Lewis made Babbitt a
real-estate man, or, as he pompously calls him, in Western fashion,
a “realtor.” The profession is typically American. Since the closing
of the frontier the staking out of one’s claim to a “lot” has been
the last romantic adventure left to the pioneer and the conquistador.
Speculation is ingrained in Americans and advertising goes along
with it. The widespread use of publicity in the United States is
interesting, not only to the economist but to the psychologist.
Advertising is second nature with Babbitt. Advertising was born
in America out of industrial growth, market monopolization, the
standardization of products, not to forget competition. In a democratic
country where the market is swamped with goods and with manufacturers
eager to force their products upon the public, the megaphone and
amplifier methods are the only chances of success. But advertising is
not only a way of making a fortune in America. It is the most popular
form of American self-assertion. The average American has a genius for
hyperbole. His country is the land of the superlative. Advertising in
the United States is the safest business method, and everything there
relies more and more on publicity. The churches, the government, the
universities, art, literature and even philanthropy, can no longer do
without it.
The satire of publicity in “Babbitt” was timely. Lewis denounced its
brutal and tragic aspects. He showed it as a dangerous charlatanism,
an invasion of private life, a violation of free choice, an insult to
common sense. Unbridled publicity, as it is sometimes practised in the
United States, presupposes in its victims brains which have been dulled
to the point of apathy. One cannot very well imagine the American
methods of advertising as exposed in “Babbitt” succeeding in a nation
as traditionally ironical and free-minded as France, for instance,
where the average man is imbued with the Cartesian spirit and refuses
to accept as true anything which does not appear evident--even if it
were offered to him in a gold spoon.
Yet the American surrenders to publicity without much ado, with
resignation rather than with enthusiasm. I do not believe that he
is blind to the tricks of the advertisers. But he is busy and he
uses publicity as a convenience. The commercial “ad” is a machine
to simplify existence. “Time is money.” It spares one the bother of
choosing. It leads directly towards a goal. It facilitates shopping
which Americans, especially women, cultivate as one of their favorite
outdoor sports.
Babbitt is publicity personified, and the most curious characters in
the book are inveterate publicity maniacs.
* * * * *
“Arrowsmith” is a bitter and an almost tragic book. It takes up again
the case of advertising and its evil influence in the higher spheres.
In this novel we find the same verve, the same satirical genius,
the same humor of the preceding books. Yet the humor is darker and
decidedly more pessimistic. There is no happy ending and no compromise
in “Arrowsmith.” The equivocal attitude of the author towards his
characters has disappeared. Antagonisms are well defined and Lewis
does not straddle both issues at the same time. On one side stand the
charlatans, on the other the true and disinterested scientists. The
contrast between them is sharply and tragically emphasized. To make it
more so, the author brought reinforcements to the central characters.
Arrowsmith is not alone--like Carol or Babbitt. He has an escort of
devoted friends. Science is represented and defended by two or three
representative men, the Nietzschean Gottlieb, the heroic Sondelius and
the mystical Wicket. In the enemy’s camp there is Doctor Pickerbaugh
and this is enough. He is unique as a mountebank.
Sinclair Lewis has satirized medical fakes with as much gusto as
Molière, that sworn enemy of all quacks. The trail was good. The
charlatan of drugs and patent medicines, the chiropractors and the
mind readers swarm in the United States. The medical profession is
being besieged by counterfeits of all kinds. The sentimental campaigns
against vivisection, the drives against vaccination are parts of the
current events in America. In “Arrowsmith” Lewis avenged the common
sense of the American people. Let me summarize rapidly the plot of the
book.
It tells how young Arrowsmith took up his medical studies in a big
Western university, how he felt inspired by the teaching of his
misunderstood master Gottlieb, how he married and slowly made his way
in the world as a country doctor, then of his career in a drug factory
where he refused to barter his professional honor, how he joined a
great scientific institute, how he discovered antitoxins, how he went
to fight an epidemic of plague in the West Indies where he lost his
wife, how he was tempted to market his growing reputation, how he
married a rich woman and how finally he escaped and gave up everything
for the sake of disinterested science. I have too much respect for
the memory of the great William James to drag him from his grave
among the quacks, and yet, if there is a name well fitted to brand
what the novelist denounces in “Arrowsmith,” it certainly is that of
“pragmatism.” The truth for which Arrowsmith stands heroically to the
end, is the truth “which does not pay.” “Arrowsmith” is the work of an
idealist, a plea for science sought for its own sake. Such a manifesto
does honor to the ideals of the new American literature.
As to Sinclair Lewis as an artist, I have already noted along the
way many of his merits and his defects. He lacks consistency and
balance in composition. His books seem to come not out of a deliberate
and well-matured design, but of a blind and fervid vital impulse.
“Arrowsmith,” like “Elmer Gantry,” is written haphazardly. They are
not plastic, but show a rare gift of verbal effusion. There is a mimic
in every word which Lewis writes. From this point of view his only
rival is Dickens. By what name should we call this peculiar sense of
his which enables him to catch, as by a spontaneous contagion, the
words such as they are spoken, and to reproduce them with the accuracy
of a vitaphone? The average American in his novels may look like an
automaton when he thinks or acts, but, in speech, he is life itself.
Lewis’ facility for verbal invention is prodigious. I have no authority
to comment upon American linguistics. But I have already alluded to Mr.
Mencken’s book “The American Language.” I hope that he will not forget
George Babbitt and his friends as contributors to the next enlarged
edition of his volume. Where could we look for a more spontaneous
and fruitful eloquence? The American vernacular in “Babbitt” is as
nimble, “snappy,” cheerful and nervous as the American himself. Has
anybody ever more skilfully aped the living dynamism of the American
language?[34]
* * * * *
“Elmer Gantry” marks a new progress toward satire and a deepening of
Lewis’ social pessimism. It is still more bitter and more acrimonious
than “Arrowsmith.” It was not written to please. The author has
unmasked his batteries at last and thrown himself in open sedition
against the church. The book is one of the mightiest strokes ever hit
at hypocrisy since the days of “Tartuffe.” Hypocrisy takes a dangerous
and frankly criminal aspect in “Elmer Gantry,” a Barnum of religion.
America is not a country of hypocrites. Everybody there lives in the
open. If hypocrisy exists it is not individual but collective. The
old-fashioned hypocrite in European literature was interesting as an
exception. He might be called a hypocrite by defect. Gantry, on the
contrary, is a hypocrite by excess, and, one might say, by hyperbole.
He is always beyond truth, not under it. He is a hypocrite by ambitions
and anticipation, like Mark Twain’s Colonel Sellers. And yet Gantry
is even more repugnant than Tartuffe. He is a scoundrel, a debauché
and a cheat. Sinclair Lewis has drawn his portrait at length from the
day when he entered the ministry as one joins a baseball team, until
his triumph as an evangelist in his big church at Zenith. The scene
in the beginning of the book, where he abandons the woman whom he has
compromised and passes her to a rival with a lie, is enough to brand
him. Let the reader remember also the raid in the red-light districts,
where Gantry acts as a bully. But the triumph of his venom will be
found in the final prayer where he asks the Lord to make his country as
good and moral as he! Beware of a humorist! There is a sting behind his
smiles.
American critics have been unanimous in finding “Elmer Gantry”
overdone. Tartuffe’s rascality was qualified and it remained
accidental. He broke into M. Orgon’s house, as a thief who steals a
watch and then retires. Elmer Gantry is a hypocrite in broad daylight
and triumphant to the end. Such an obduration in crime and success in
mischief read like impossibilities. By unduly stressing the rascality
of Gantry, it may well be that Lewis intended to kill two birds with
one stone. “Elmer Gantry” is no less an indictment of a hypocrite than
a courageous study of the decline of religious ideals in America.
Religion, as everything else, has become automatic. Mysticism has been
replaced by respectability. The American churches failed to raise the
people to their high level, and, in order to make themselves popular,
they brought their ideals down to earth. To make up for the absence of
the really faithful they relied more and more on the larger number.
They were seized with the spirit of greed and material comfort, and
betrayed the teachings of Him who said that His kingdom was not of
this world. They courted money and, to keep the congregations, they
resorted to the advertising methods of the “realtors.” A display of
riches and material splendor outside, and within the walls everything
except Christianity. Hygiene, sport, eugenics, prophylaxy, domestic and
political economy, entertainments and very little Bible. Churches vied
with one another to see which could present the most gorgeous façade.
Cathedrals were erected, cathedrals of stone and not of faith. The
church became fashionable, a club, a school, a hotel, a parlor. Elmer
Gantry had no difficulty in investing his lust and greed in such a
temple. It repaid him well.
Around Gantry, the novelist has marshalled in complete array the forces
of the Protestant clergy in America. We are told that he managed to
peep through the doors of the temple before he satirized it. No wonder
the clergy rose in arms against him, and there is no doubt that he
did not render full justice to them. A great many noble souls were
not included in the parade. However, in the long run, one sees no
reasons why “Elmer Gantry” should prove more harmful to the clerical
profession than “Arrowsmith” to the medical one. To expose the faker
_manu militari_ now and then may prove after all a profitable operation
for the true servants of the temple.
From a literary point of view, “Elmer Gantry” shows the author in the
process of broadening his scope, while he intensifies the virulence
of his attacks. After the village idealist, the inhibited realtor;
the doctors, and then the clergymen. Who next? And yet through all
these avatars Sinclair Lewis has drawn always the same man. Good or
bad, he is the same. Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry were born the
same day, of the same parent. They all share in what seems to be, on
the part of the novelist, an excess of vitality. The large majority
of the characters in the American novels had been up to then anæmic.
Sinclair Lewis’ characters suffer from high blood pressure. It would
be a great loss to American literature if he should forget art for
muck-raking. Let him remember the lesson of Balzac and Flaubert. Those
great realists never lost sight of human passions, but they contrived
to hold art for its own sake far above the surge of their emotions.
They believed that, after all, our foibles, our defects or vices were
much less interesting and important than the view which the artist can
take of them in cold blood.