The Incorruptible Sinclair Lewis

by PERRY MILLER

1

THE first night out of New York on the Niew Amsterdam, September 7, 1949, my wife said, “That man going out of the bar looks like Sinclair Lewis.” I caught a side glimpse which I shall forever behold —of that long figure, its head tilted back, its narrow shoulders heightened and compressed, an elastic-jointed puppet held two inches off the deck by invisible strings, so that the longest pair of legs ever attached to so short a body jerked their way across the room in a motion that had nothing to do with the ordinary act of walking.

The obituaries, since his death on January 10, comment on the length ol his lees and the convoluted patterns he made bv inlert wining them. Actually, he was not especially talk and not pretermiturally supple: it was the nervous compulsion inside the man that incessantly contorted his body as he talked or smoked or drank. It also sharpened his face and tormented his skin, drove him restless from place to place (made him hover, at last, over Italy like an exhausted hawk), gutted his loves and his friendships, kept him an obstinate adolescent at the same time that it wore him out; and finally it killed him.

I had the good fortune never to have met him before; hence we had never quarreled. When he had been working (if that is the word for what he did in preparation for the worst book he ever pieced together) upon The God-Seeker, he had wanted to consult an out-of-print work of mine on New England theology. I offered, through the bookseller, to send him my own copy; he found another somewhere, and never replied. Now I was to discover that this sort of thing Lewis did not forget, Of all the men I have ever known, his gratitude — for such a trifle — was the most profound and the most lasting. The point being that one thing really counted — his work. By which I mean that many observances which count much for other people, ruthlessly and magnificently and brutally did not figure for him. Or rather, he had so schooled himself to not letting them matter that even when he stooped to acknowledge them he just did not any longer know how to cope with them. He and I were friends within five minutes, because we did not have to explain anything.

It took no astuteness to realize that Sinclair Lewis was dying. He had barely recovered from a siege of pneumonia (on ibis voyage he was not drinking): his hand shook, and the wavering of his legs meant that he was unsteady on them. With him was his brother. Fr. Claude Lewis of Saint (‘loud. Minnesota of whom Bed had not seen much in recent decades, who was six years older than he*, and who addressed him, to my never ending astonishment, as “Hal.”Dr. Lewis looked a good ten years younger: Bed’s myth lo which lie clung with inexhaustible solicitude was that he was about to introduce Claude for the first time to the immemorial riches of Europe. He asked mv advice morning and evening as to just how gradually and circumspectly he should spring the art galleries and cathedrals on brother Claude, so as not to heap too much into the initiation.

The whole business was infinitely comic: Dr. Lewis is a distinguished surgeon, of eminent common sense, who can and does find his wav about the world by his own native shrewdness. And when it comes to the conventional “ sight-seeing. Bed Lewis was about the most unperceptive and blundering of all the myriads of tourists this country annually exports. (He was as delighted as a boy with the tableau of the assassination of William the Silent in the Prinsenhof at Delft, and hung over the piece of the wall in which they have framed bv glass the ricochet of the bullet, but the Grande Place of Brussels made him think only of Kansas City; he was never certain he was eating a good European meal unless he knew he was in the most expensive restaurant in the town.)

Still, all this was a clue: here was Sam Dodsworth casting himself, with outward bravado and considerable inward trepidation, as Virgil to a Dante who in fact was competently on his own. Sinclair Lewis was about to impart to his untraveled brother the immense stores of insight which to him, the muchtraveled Odysseus, had become old stuff. One remembered the calculated brevity of the items Dodsworth finally enumerated as the sum total of what he was able to learn out of years of tourism.

I had easily assumed that Lewis made up Dodsworth’s list by looking down from a vast familiarity with Europe, as a device in “character study.” The creature, not the creator, had obviously acquired no more out of Europe than a knowledge of time-tables and the way to say “too much.” My education took one vast stride forward when I discovered that the relation of this particular artist to that particular creation was not so disjunctive. It took another —a more tentative step—as I began to comprehend that nevertheless Dodsworth was not mere autobiography, not just an alias for Sinclair Lewis. It came momentarily to a dead halt when daily conversation (I pressed him unfairly) showed that if Dodsworth was in any sense Lewis himself, nevertheless the creator did know in what frame of reference he had set the man and that only thereafter had he become identified with the character. It took a final and immense leap when I realized that, although Lewis could not say it, and certainly would not, in the writing of that book, he had been (and still was) both in and out of it —not so much triumphantly as hopelessly. He had not mastered Dodsworth: he had presented him, and now was compelled to re-enact him.

I found that the secret was much the same when I got him onto Main Street and Babbitt. I then and there, with great relief, said good-by to the notion (which in the last weeks has been monotonously asserted in the obituaries) that Lewis was a “realist” and a “satirist.” It does indeed become a curious comment on our age that lyrics and love songs which in any previous period would have been published frankly and freely as such, had to be composed, in our time, by this highly American artist under such elaborate disguises as his vast accumulation of the minutiae and the lingo of American life. What I have yet to learn — perhaps few of us yet understand or want to inquire too closely — is where did the love come from that could pour upon these things with a passion so concentrated that the only relief permitted it was to lash out against the very objects to which it was inescapably and irrevocably bound?

2

FOR the sake of the record, let me say that during Lewis’s last year, I saw much of him — simply because I was in Europe and able to reach him. We perfected a little fiction between us that my wife and I, his newest, friends, were his oldest and only friends. This gambit often grew rather harrowing as his perpetual mulling over the past disclosed the number of former friends who were now estranged, or at any rate out of touch. He received staggering quantities of mail, most of which (when he was with us) he never opened. In October he came to Holland and delivered a lecture at the University of Leiden. (Announced as an appearance for my class in American literature, it was attended by virtually the whole university, and had to be held in the great auditorium.) We drove him to Delft, Haarlem, and Alkmaar, to Antwerp and Brussels. We stayed with him in the spring at Florence, in the Villa di Costa with its vulgar spun-glass balustrades, and we last saw him at Zurich in August.

In December of 1949 he had found, in the Cook’s Tourist Office at Florence, Alexander Manson, who became his secretary, chauffeur, nurse, and interpreter. I gather that Aleck and his lovely Tina were with him to the end. I knew that Lewis had tried this “secretary” arrangement before, and that it had ended in repeated disasters; but Aleck Manson is something special: he knows Europe completely, speaks the languages, can repair a car or order a dinner, tell a story or comprehend a picture, and both he and his wife devoted themselves to Lewis with a disregard of self that would take all the recent history of Europe to explain. The beauty and poignance of the story is that Aleck instantly knew, and never for a moment imagined anything else, what Lewis signified as an artist. I am a countryman of Sinclair Lewis, as Aleck is not; and I grew up with his novels a part — a very great part — of my experience; most of those who read this did likewise. It took me all these years, and then the illumination of his discourse, and after that Aleck’s by no means blind consecration, to realize what a terrifying thing it is to be in at the death of a lion. I use the word lion not in the flip sense of a target for hostesses: I mean it in the primitive sense of a leonine beast who roars his last defiance from a cave in the rocks.

You may think that this is melodramatic overstatement as against some of the facts. Externally they are shabby enough. During the winter, while he worked on the novel which will be published this spring, he managed — with Aleck’s help — to keep away from the bottle. As soon as he finished the manuscript, he started drinking, until his Florentine physician forbade him spirits. When I reached him in April, he was guzzling quantities of red wine, and despite Aleck’s strenuous efforts, he generally succeeded in knocking himself out by afternoon. At a Florence restaurant he commanded the orchestra to play the sentimental tunes of his earlier escapades; he peeled off and flung about fivethousand-lira notes — Babbitt on a spree — until Aleck could get him out and pour him into the car. By August he was drinking only beer, but he had already had two serious heart attacks and should not have touched even that.

I suppose hundreds of people in three decades have seen Sinclair Lewis drunk; no doubt he made a vast public spectacle of himself. I cannot say what kept him going through the years of creativity; I do know that at the end of it, his back to the wall, facing himself drunk or sober, he did not flinch. There was something positively reckless about it. He was not drinking because he was miserable and wanted solace; neither was he what you would call a drunkard. He was no disenchanted, alcoholic Scott Fitzgerald, drinking compulsively. There may not have been much joy in what Red was doing, but there was still plenty of defiance. Remember, this was not Walter Scott collecting his retainers about him in feudal glory; this was not Zola declining in the realization of an enshrined place in the Academy. This was just an American who had written himself out, to whom the Nobel Prize was no canonization but merely one of those things that happen, for whom the dignity of the artist had no external supports, and who yet somehow maintained it, as Poe and Whitman did, on the terms which this nation imposes upon its artists — terms that Lewis gladly, as a matter of fact, imposed upon himself for fear he might otherwise take himself too solemnly.

This was something that ran deep and strong in him — his hatred for pomposity. I don’t mean his treasuring the hypocrisies of Main Street or the sanctimoniousness of Elmer Gantry: that was something else entirely. I mean his attitude toward himself as a writer and toward writing in general. It was too serious a business to be taken solemnly. In the last months he had a game he would play with Aleck—it went on interminably—in which he was the stuffy, grandiose German Professor and Aleck was the trembling Privatdocent; the point of the game (aside from letting Lewis show off his German, for he was vain about his smattering of languages) was that the Herr Professor Dr. Geheimrat made a damn fool of himself. It was a way of throwing bricks at high silk hats. It was a Mark Twain gesture, it was deeply and embarrassingly American, but it was also more: it was a myth-maker thumbing his nose at those who would reduce myth to literalness.

3

BEING a professor of literary history, I wanted to find out what he derived from. The answer was instructive: Dickens. He knew Dickens by heart. There was little to be gained by asking him about what had come in between, about realists and naturalists. He had read here and there, but most of them meant little to him, except for Shaw and Wells, who to him were primarily writers that showed what might be done with Dickensian exaggeration in a modern situation. The most valuable and most plausible thing in his account of his own beginnings (you must understand that I seldom asked him a point-blank question) was the perfect naturalness and inevitability with which, it had seemed to him, a young writer of about 1910, with Dickens as a model, would proceed to make social comedy out of America.

Yes, he recognized that by now the generation of the twenties, himself the foremost, were being defined in historical terms and treated as radical departures, as collectively a great break with the past. He had no such sense of the story at all; as for most of the “influences” which, according to our historians, brought about the revolution, he was unaware of them or else heard about them only after their effect on his own work had been detected by some ingenious critic. He would agree that up to a point it had been a matter of the time and place; as he talked about the comming of the deep-freeze, television, and the high-powered automobile to Gopher Prairie, he saw that he had caught Main Street just at the turning point, at a now vanished point, and that his book was already a matter of history — and then he would take flight into fantasy, showing that he had never been and could never be capable of thinking in terms of history, He was in love with mythological and typological creations like Mieawber and Gradgrind, and all his effort had been to evoke such genii out of the American bottle. It was a constricted and stoppered vessel he had — as he saw it — to work with, which is one reason he vented so much rage upon it. His incantations had to be more labored than those of Dickens, who was in a position to summon up, with a wave of the hand so to speak, a Pecksniff or a Mr. Squeers. In America there had to be a vaster quantity of documented fact before Lewis could extract from it a Babbitt or a Gantry, just as there had to be all the knowledge of the River before Mark Twain could set Huck Finn afloat upon it.

Lewis listened to, and sometimes was impressed by, what the critics said of his books as providing a panorama of the civilization, but for him Babbitt and Gantry and Arrowsmith were creations; he was still trying the old art when he wrote such pathetically documented things as The Prodigal Parents or Cass Timberlane. He was still trying it even last winter, and told me with affected complacence, as though one should say that Winston Churchill had dropped in yesterday, that in the new book Mr. and Mrs. Dodsworth had reappeared.

In this view — I believe I am not overstressing it — the lecture he gave for my class at Leiden was immensely revealing: most of the students were bewildered, because it was not anything they expected or wanted Sinclair Lewis to say. He worked on it carefully, and his notes reside now in the University Library. It was his last effort at any such sustained discourse — in Florence he made one or two perfunetory appearances on platforms, when it took all of Aleck’s immense diplomacy to keep him from attempting to deliver an address in Italian! Al Leiden his argument was that America is not new, it is actually very old. He proved this first by dwelling on the antiquity of the Indian culture; how that was linked to the present American civilization so as to furnish us with its venerability never became quite clear. Secondly, he insisted, Americans all brought with them the civiltzation of Europe, and consequently their culture is as old as any European. He then blamed the Europeans for the antics of the Americans: because they expect us to act like wild Indians, we are obliged to put on a show for them. If you listen to the second half ol a sentence uttered by the visting American, he said, it will be a logical, sensible statement, but the lirst half will contain some “Oh boy" or “Gee whiz" or “What the hell" to assist the European in keeping up his illusion.

This from the author of Babbitt! If I was amused, my students were puzzled, because the primary (and almost the only) assumption among literate Europeans is that the recent literature of America is a sociological report on the horrors of a materialistic order, that all our artists hate it and want, like Lewis, to escape to Europe. In part. Lewis’s speech was sheer perversity: he got fun out of scandalizing the European stereotype. He, like all of us, was troubled over the charge that the American literature of protest, with himself as Exhibit A, was confirming Europeans in their anti-Americanism. But there was something else at xvork in him when he wrote this lecture, which I think is fundamental in his host work.

I stumbled upon it early in our friendship by telling him that as a boy in Chicago I had wanted to devote myself to the ancient history of the Near East. Nothing I ever said to him made his eyes shine so much. He too had wanted, more than anything in the world, to be an Egyptologist. Don’t ask me if this is true (although Claude did remember that the boy Hal had spouted a lot about Babylonia): my point is only thal he announced this to haxe been the great dream of his youth, and swore that it was the adventure yet to come. While his strength was xisibly failing, even after the heart attacks commenced, he descanted on how he and Aleck were to set out in the fall, work their way through Sicily, then go to Egypt and Damascus and Assyria, and at last penetrate to Persepolis. I do not know how much history he read, butt he loved to pontificate about Rameses If and the queen of Palmyra.

Was it a trauma of escapism? Maybe. In ordinary terms, I think it was something simpler: it was a thin lilfle boy in Sauk Center dreaming (over an unfinished book) about the gorgeous panoply of Ashur-bani-pal. Remember how many times the majestic syllables ol ancient history are invoked in his ironic addresses to America, how “Ur of the Chaldees” had for him a magic sound, and hoxv il seemed the supreme comment upon the tin Lizzie standing before the Bon Ton store that for this the pyramids were built and Hannibal crossed the Alps.

I said good-by to him one night in Zurich; Aleck was taking him the next day to Turin, and he and T knew that we xvould never meet again. The next morning, before breakfast, he telephoned: he wanted me to tell him whether Rangoon is a port for ocean-going xessels and the precise dates when Generals Lee and Grant died.

4

I SUPPOSE he knew that he would never get to Egypt. He probably would have been as restless before the pyramids as he was in the cathedral ol Antwerp, and would haxe distracted his attention from the sublimity of the pile by finding some ridiculous detail off to one side, or by looking al hts watch and worrying about whether he could get hack to the hotel on time. But that is not what concerns us. One of the most perceptive of my friends in Leiden came from his lecture exhilarated; when I asked her what she liked about it, she replied with unhesitating emphasis, “His fanaticism. That, she said, is what Europe needs, and she went on to contrast him and Dodsworth xvith Henry James: where James made so exquisite an eflort to comprehend the special essence of exery European place, to stretch his sensibility into the line web lhat would catch the slightest rexerberations, Lewis (like Dodsworth) stood intransigent and incorruptible. For this listener, and several others, his lecture had not been what he may consciously have intended it, the rebultal of a flimsy European stereotxpe about America; it was much more: it was a revelation of the sources of his energy as an artist, of the act of dedication he had performed so thoroughly that he could nexer, whether flamboyant or, as now, sick and battered, do anything but exemplify it. My friend said that she was reading Babbitt with new eyes.

The difficulty is that too few in America have read him with such eyes. Perhaps I might put my contention more bluntly (although it loses much if stated so flatly): it is all very well to call Lewis a realist because he heaped up the furnishings of the Kennicotts’ parlor or because he could mimic to ihe last grammatical alrocity the jabbenngs of the man who knew Coolidge, but at the heart of him Lewis was what we must call, for lack of a better word, a romancer. He loxed telling stories, and exen in this last year, in the ebb of his powers, could start with almost anything and make the draft of a novel out of it. I have never heard anything so fascinating, and it made the Dickens clue trebly revelatory.

Lewis could have earned a comfortable living writing stories for magazines; in fact, before Main Street he was doing exactly that. He might well have become another Hervey Allen or a Kenneth Roberts. What kept him from being just a spinner of yarns was not something more sophisticated in him — not any doctrinal adherence to, or even comprehension of, the tenets of realism or naturalism — but something more primitive. The scrupulous documentation was the working of a conscience. This organ does not operate so strenuously in easy living or in facile writing; it becomes tormenting only when there is some deep psychic dislocation, some wrong done — or some hurt felt.

5

I GATHER that few of Red’s friends got along with him for any period without certain stormy scenes. I had mine the night before his lecture, when we were invited for dinner by the Rector Magnificus of Leiden University. Professor van Groningen is a civilized, gentle classicist; his wife is witty and, fortunately, comprehends the world. They both had behaved with quiet heroism in the war, and are what in Holland is known as “conservative” on the Indonesian question (which means that they regret the American policy), but I never had any difficulty discussing it with them.

This night, I started the dinner off by remarking that the Amsterdam paper had called Claude the younger brother. (There is no way I can tell this story that reflects the slightest credit on me.) At the table, the van Groningens intimated their attitude toward Indonesia, whereupon Red launched into a patriotic tirade, of the sort he had voluminously burlesqued, in which the embattled Indonesians became American patriots at Valley Forge and his Dutch hosts supercilious Tories in London of 1776. I completed the ruin of the evening by asking the Rector to have Dr. Lewis escorted through the Faculty of Medicine on the morrow, managing by an inspiration of stupidity to say that Claude had heard his brother before and did not need to hear him again. The resulting scene was Red Lewis at his most histrionic: we were all denounced and assured that the lecture would never be delivered. The situation was saved only by the wit of Mevrouw van Groningen, who told funny stories, mostly at her own expense, while Lewis sulked like a child, until he came out of it, put his hand on my arm, and said of his hostess, “Wouldn’t Frans Hals have liked to paint her!”

Somehow, my wife and I got them back to the hotel. Claude pulled me aside and whispered as he went up to bed, “He’s been like that since he was a boy.”

Lewis was contrite, but of course wouldn’t admit it; he took us into the bar, and then the confession came, it’s been that way from the beginning, he said. I wanted to write, and I’ve worked like hell at it, and the whole of Sauk Center and my family and America have never understood that it is work, that I haven’t just been playing around, that this is every bit as serious a proposition as Claude’s hospital. When you said that Claude did not want to hear my lecture, Lewis told me, you set up all the resentments I have had ever since I can remember.

If much of this sounds petulant, it was. It was also the story of the artist in America. It was a revelation of the sources of what the perceptive Dutch woman found his redeeming fanaticism. It may have been bad manners but it was freedom, passionate and consuming. It was the élan that went into the writing of the great novels of the twenties, which makes them, in the guise of ferocious attacks upon America, celebrations of it. For at the end of the lecture on the next day, he said something which I believe he seldom brought himself to avow, which certainly he never put in print: “I wrote Babbitt not out of hatred for him but out of love.”

Schlegel’s Julius once said to his Lucinda that man is a serious animal and that we must attack this abominable propensity from all sides. “To that end ambiguities are also good, except that they are so seldom ambiguous. When they are not and allow only one interpretation, that is not immoral, it is only obtrusive and vulgar.” I am afraid that in the books of his later years Sinclair Lewis wrote much that allows only one interpretation. All this immense America had to be poured through him; there was too much of it, and finally he took merely to reporting it, as Whitman, when his vitality flagged, catalogued it. But Lewis never got altogether away from the ambiguity that informs his five triumphs of the 1920s.

Over and over again, after he had mailed the manuscript of this last book, when he would try to enjoy Italian scenery or the Swiss Alps, he would come back, with the reiteration of obsession, to asserting that he had written twenty-three novels about America, that nobody could ask more of him, that he had done his duty by his country. “I love America,” he would shout into the unoffending European atmosphere; “I love it, but I don’t like it.” As a closing statement on the career of Sinclair Lewis, this assuredly does not, whatever else you say about it, allow of only a single, and certainly not of a literal, interpretation.