The Peripatetic Reviewer

BY EDWARD WEEKS

THE first problem to be resolved by a biographer is that of length: How long need the book be? The Victorians, more leisurely readers than we, were content with a two-volume life and expected that persons of special distinction, like Nelson or Byron, would require three or four. Twentieth-century publishers have resisted this propensity for girth, yet it will be noted that Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee ran to four large octavos, and his life of Washington, which was still unfinished at his death, ran to six. Carl Sandburg’s life of Abraham Lincoln was a longer devotion: collecting, sifting, and writing, he devoted thirty years to it, the first two volumes, The Prairie Years, appearing in 1926, and the next four volumes, covering The War Years, in 1939.

It was Lytton Straehey who gave us the taste for a more terse interpretation. In his single volume. Queen Victoria, and in the vignettes of Eminent Victorians, his power of selection, his swift spanning of the years, and his epigrammatic style took the place of the slower, more detailed documentation, and he almost entirely dispensed with footnotes. From his success came the axiom that, whenever possible, a biography should be held within the covers of a single book. Cecil Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Jenkins’ Elizabeth the Queen, Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Yankee from Olympus and her The Lion and the Throne are happy examples of the one-volume treatment.

Artists are an enticing subject for biography; their long struggle for recognition, their poverty, Bohemianism, and the pathos of success that often comes too late all appeal to the more conventional reader, as we know from reading Hendrik Van Loon’s sympathetic study of Rembrandt, or Irving Stone’s portrait of Van Gogh in Lust for Life. But in writing about an actor or a playwright, a new complexity is encountered in the bitch-goddess, success. The search for the new theme and the writing of the new play, then the ordeal — anguish for some — of casting and rehearsing; the exhilaration of the first night, the applause, the favorable reviews, and the long run — this is the rhythm of a playwright’s life, yet the telling about it becomes proportionately difficult with each success. The trials and tribulations of an apprentice are what Moss Hart celebrated in his Act One, but biographies cannot stop short of success, as his book does, and success can be so tedious and repetitive in the reassessment.

“He was a queer boy, always an outsider, lonely.” So begins MARK SCHORER’S biography of SINCLAIR LEWIS (McGraw-Hill, $10.00). It required a very big book, some eight hundred pages, and nearly a decade of research and writing to take the measure of this contentious novelist, the first American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize and one who, more than any other, left his stamp on that virile decade, 1920 to 1930. Despite his ugly awkwardness, there was an appealing quality to “Hal” Lewis, as he was known as a boy, and he never lost it; as he matured, it drew to him women as different as Frances Perkins and Dorothy Thompson, nor was it ever glossed over by success. This book is a monument to the driving force of an author whose light shone and flickered and whose aspiration never spared himself nor those who loved him.

The first three sections tell of Lewis’ home town, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and of his unsentimental relations with his parents, of his rebellious years at Oberlin Academy and at Yale, and of his “Climb”; and if ever there was a plaintive record of hopes dashed and of unrewarded apprenticeship, this is it. At sixteen he stood six feet; he had thin legs, hair “like a new copper cent,” protruding blue eyes, and a face riddled with pimples. (The scars would be pitted and lifelong from the X-ray treatments later.) Hal’s father was the village doctor, practical, dictatorial, and harsh. Not until he was taken into the Benét family did Hal know what an affectionate home was like. There were two older brothers — Fred, a nonentity, and Claude, a good-looking athlete whose popularity Hal longed to emulate. The doctor didn’t think that Harry had a bright future, and he let the boy know it. The disparagement was shared by the rest of the village, and the mockery the gang made of the gawky kid is disgusting.

The boy compensated by talking like a blue streak, by debating in school, by writing poetry; and his secret weapon of retaliation was the diary which he kept from 1900 to 1908 in a code, to which he truly confided. The diary tells of “the unobtainable Myra Hendryx.” (“What a waist, what a head, what arms, what shoulders, and what legs! O what a charming girl she is and how I love her.”) It tells of how Pa beat him up when he came home late at night (“Had a big fight with myself as to whether I should run away or not. Finally decided not to . . .”); it tells of his desire to go to Harvard and of the doctor’s insistence that he prepare for Yale.

The Lewises were people of small means, and from the moment he left for college, Hal was either pinched for money or earned what he could in part-time jobs. He worked intermittently for the New Haven Journal and Courier; he wrote poems, part Tennyson, part Poe, for the Yale Lit; and during the summer vacation he worked on cattle boats to England. (“I am learning to get along with men better —to jolly them — or the opposite — an art in which Claude is such an adept — though of course I can never approach to him in it.”)

Yale was to have been different from everything that had gone before, and when it snotted him, the boy was bitterly hurt. In his rebellion he quit college, to become for a time the janitor at Upton Sinclair’s utopian colony, Helicon Hall. The links which drew him back a year later were Chauncey Brewster Tinker, his instructor in freshman English, who had been unfailingly encouraging; his one friend, Allan Updegraff; and his appetite for books and for writing, by now insatiable. Talking and long walks were his hobbies; socialism a theoretical ideal; he had already made notes for a novel on labor (one he was never to write); and his ear for dialogue, that incredibly accurate ear, had added to his repertoire the gift of imitation. When he took his degree, Mr. Schorer writes, “His education left him the nervous tramp who aspired to elegance, the radical who really wished to conform, the puritan from the hinterland who yearned to be the man of the world.”

I have dwelt so long on that period of Sinclair Lewis’ life which Mr. Schorer calls “the Climb” because it is so little known, because the buffeting and cruelty in it should be appreciated by those who will never write, and because it displays to such good advantage Mr. Schorer’s ability as a biographer. There are drawbacks, to be sure, for it is small pleasure to read the précis of Lewis’ early, mediocre short stories or the blueprints of novels which lived only in his mind. But the biographer keeps bringing us back to the blistered and blistering free lance who was coming to know provincial America with devastating accuracy.

Success, when it came with the five big novels leading up to the Nobel Prize, was not so much a period of gratification as of pursuit, for Lewis was still searching for the perfect place, the perfect friend, and the perfect mate. Charm had grown upon him—though, as Mr. Schorer says, Lewis never knew when he was overdoing it — and a very real distinction, as in his acceptance speech at Stockholm. But he had small patience for his young son, Wells, and, by this time, none for his first wife; the burden of living with himself, badgered and scarred as he had been, was not easy. Mr. Schorer avoids repetition as far as he can in the evaluation of the novels. He is acute in discussing their preparation and sedulous in reporting their impact on the critics and on the country. The stimulus of the years with Dorothy Thompson and the contentment at Twin Farms in Vermont are described as a happy oasis, but two prima donnas are too many. Then the decline begins with the heavy drinking. Here, as in the account of the boyhood, Mr. Schorer is to be commended for the candor and lack of mawkishness with which he depicts a period that must have been wretched to experience, tragic to behold.

I asked myself at the outset, as I took in the dimensions of the stout volume, “Can anyone really want to know that much about Sinclair Lewis?”, and my answer as I emerge is, yes, I did and I do.

When Captain R. F. Scott, the explorer, was lost beyond hope in the Antarctic, he left letters to his wife and to his dear friend, Sir James Barrie, which are the ultimate in courage. To his wife, speaking of their only son, he said, “Make the boy interested in Natural History. It is better than games. They encourage it at some schools. . . . You must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man; I had to force myself into being strenuous. . . .” Today, as we read PETER SCOTT’S autobiography, THE EYE OF THE WIND (Houghton Mifflin, $10.00), we can see how seriously the admonition was taken.

Mr. Scott calls himself “the luckiest, happiest man” he knows. Lucky, in part, because of the narrow shaves from which he emerged during his service aboard the destroyer Broke, and later aboard his own command, the S.G.B.9; happy, because he has found such satisfaction as a painter of birds and as a founder and director of the Wildfowl Trust. From childhood he enjoyed the company of his elders, chief among them his audacious, talented mother; Barrie was His godfather, Axel Munthe invited him to Villa San Michele, G. B. Shaw read aloud to him, and when he was seventeen Peter took Lord Grey ol Fallodon, then almost blind, to hear his first wood lark. He went to Buckingham Palace at the age of four to play train with Queen Alexandra, still later to make portrait drawings of the Queen and Princess Margaret.

In his writing he reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt: the doing is as important as the observing, and the gusto of the moment always comes through, in short, intimate chapters adorned with his sketches and lovely color plates, he tells, sometimes at too great length, ol how file led him on into this extraordinarily versatile career. At Oundle, where he excelled in biology, he had a pet ferret which he took to class in the lining ol his coat; he sang treble in the Bach oratorios; he collaborated in and illustrated his first book. Adventures Among Birds; and when the river was in Hood had his first exciting encounter with gray geese. At Cambridge he hunted the Fen Country for anything that: flew.

Gradually his reputation as a painter rose, and had it not been for the war, Scott might have become more artist than naturalist. But during his years at sea, the metamorphosis took place; he had seen enough ol killing and drowning at Dieppe and at Normandy. And when, at last, he was free to choose, it was his first love that drew him back to the west of England, where, at Slimbridge, he has created a unique reservation with his flocks ol ducks, geese, and swans which are joined every winter by their kindred wild fowl. By the ingenious use of rocket nets, he has captured and banded as many as four hundred a day in Scotland, Iceland, and Yorkshire; in these drives, over the past ten years, he and his team have marked more than 20,000 pink-footed geese. One individual bird was caught four times, twice in Iceland and twice in Scotland, and many have been handled three times by the Scott team.

I forgot to mention that he delights in gliding; he also won an Olympic bronze medal in his fourteen-foot dinghy. What he uses for money, he doesn’t say, but his fife, as he describes it in such pleasant recall, has been as full of nature and as strenuous as ever his father could have wished.