Sinclair Lewis

The immediate impetus to my undertaking a biography of Sinclair Lewis came from Professor James L. W.  West III, who had been very helpful with my biography of Dreiser. In the throes of trying to conceive a new book project, I asked him for suggestions. He said (I paraphrase): “Why not do a biography of Sinclair Lewis? He’s been neglected, Schorer’s biography was unsympathetic, etc., etc.” As I’ve painfully learned in this earthly travail, the best advice one can give another person is that which he or she wanted to do all along but didn’t know it. It happened that I had loved Lewis’s books in college, especially Main Street and Babbitt — the former, probably, because I’m from a Middle Western small town myself and had gone off to an Eastern School, and the latter because I have some innate predilection toward satire — a satire bone, if you will, which Lewis tickled. I went on to write a senior paper on Lewis at Haverford College and defended it at a seminar in the English department (I had made some half-baked claims about the sociology of literature). Lewis and I go back.

Because of the aforesaid interest, I eagerly read Mark Schorer’s biography when it came out. It rather depressed me — fallen idols and all that, but however I squirmed, Schorer’s impressive accretion of detail overwhelmed my demurrers and, after all, hadn’t this work been hailed as “definitive”? This, roughly, was the prevailing opinion among readers and scholars at the time, I suppose. But after rereading the book recently, talking to people in the field, perusing articles from back issues of this very Newsletter, I began to think that perhaps Schorer’s book wasn’t the last word after all. It was very much of its times — the 1950s, the heyday of New Criticism, conformity, and anti-communism. As I discovered in writing a biography of Dreiser, there are new things (one hopes) to be discovered, or at least to be teased out of extant material with a fresh eye; and new perspectives, critical and social, and one’s own experiences and times and sensibility, to bring to bear. And so I began to believe a new book was possible. I think Schorer showed a failure of sympathy, at times a simmering hostility, to both the man and his works, that now seems excessive. What the explanation is I don’t know (though I’ve read some plausible speculations), and I have no desire to wrestle with the ghost of Schorer, whose research was awesome (indeed, the very massiveness of the detail sometimes serves to overpower his attempts to be fair minded, though they’re often pro forma). One must write a biography “against” some prevailing view, and that is what I set out to do vis a vis Schorer, in terms of questioning his evidence and conclusions, not an intellectual vendetta. I believe that Schorer did not fully interpret Lewis’s personal relations with his wives and friends, particularly Dorothy Thompson; nor did he adequately place him in the context of his times; nor fully appreciate him as a satirist and political and social critic. Lastly, though, God knows, Lewis’s life was often sad and self-destructive; he was a funny man, as well as a trenchant critic of American flaws, which he knew as well as a rejected lover knows his mistress’s body.

He was a consummate professional, a man containing a boy inside who could never find his (first) mother or please his father — a lonely boy but, in a way characteristic of so many incipient writers, not pathologically but productively so. As a social critic, he was not kidding; he bore scars from his own lash coming back at him. (There is the larger question of a chronically misunderstood satirist in a literal-minded society in which the provocateur’s methods — exaggeration, put-on, hoax — are taken with deadly solemnity e.g., challenging God to strike him dead.) Feeding into this backlash sensibility was a deep-seated sense of unworthiness and a desire to punish himself. In women he wooed the departed mother; there was something of the little boy lost (or abandoned) in his petitions. Then he fled from too much intimacy. He married his illusions of his two wives, and later rebelled against the disappointing reality…. I have other such theories, impressions, half-thoughts still working beneath the threshold of articulation — all subject to revision or cancellation without notice.

Pre- 1920s: The Job as a work of social realism, which is now being rediscovered by feminist scholars, and some of the short stories. And Our Mr. Wrenn when read in conjunction with H.G. Wells and the progressive social thought of the day. Post- 1920s: I am quite interested in It Can’t Happen Here and Kingsblood Royal, which offer visions of America that were true then and are true today in a prophetic sense.

Main Street for its indelible pictures of small town life; Babbitt for its satirical vision. I agree that Arrowsmith is Lewis’s most fully realized novel, but what if it had been more of a satire?

I am shortly going on leave from my job at the Nation and plan to put in sustained time at the Lewis Collection at Yale, as well as other collections around the country, and to revisit Sauk Centre and environs and to talk with as many survivors who knew Lewis as I can find.

Just in general, I would appreciate any articles, tearsheets, primary materials, letters, leads, observations, advice, anecdotes not only about the man but about the current assessment of his books, critical and popular, in academe and among general readers; and examples of his influence on later writers. Of course, I would be overjoyed to hear about hertofore untapped sources, letters, diaries, etc.

I’m pleased I’ve finished it, relieved, but also sorry for I miss it and the constant ruminating over why he did this or that, which kept my mind profitably and pleasurably occupied for many a day. But it was a rewarding project–for me and I hope for Lewis’s reputation. I believe it was successful in the latter sense because it stirred up much discussion and reassessment by reviewers. That can be a double-edged sword, though. A few reviewers were prejudiced or said nothing cogent. And there were those essay reviews in which my book figures as a mere afterthought to the reviewer’s self-indulgent flights. But the great bulk of the essays and assessments of Lewis were sincerely welcome. One of the freshest of them, by the way, was by the conservative National Review‘s reviewer, which you reprinted in the last issue of the Newsletter. My greatest disappointment was, naturally, the negative reviews, which can bruise one’s self-esteem, however long one has been in the writing business–particularly the one by John Updike in the New Yorker. He made a kind of condescending allusion to the SL Society — why I’m not sure — so I apologize for subjecting your members to guilt by association.

Surprisingly (to me), he found some eager defenders among the reviewers, who dismissed my attempt to take a new look at Lewis as presumptuous (after 40 years!). I must say that those reviewers — and I include Updike — seemed to be oblivious to the new material, new attitude, new critical perspectives I tried to inject into my book, though the fault for that may be mine. If I had it to do over, I would devote more space to spelling out what was new in my work and how, precisely, I differed from Schorer. But I figured that would become tedious, and I can’t believe general readers care all that much about these matters. Some of Schorer’s defenders were misleading, too. I recall, for example, Updike saying he read my notes and found no citations of new (post-Schorer) criticism. But I cited Jim Hutchisson’s The Rise of Sinclair Lewis frequently, and also the collection of essays he edited — plus other somewhat older but still post-1961 collections like Marty Bucco’s, and the articles that appeared in this newsletter over the years, including those critical of Schorer! For the record, let me mention new material I used, inter alia: letters from Grace Lewis to Stella Wood, which covered the years of her marriage to Lewis; letters to a woman he had fallen in love with when he was breaking with Grace and writing Elmer Gantry; the correspondence of Lewis and George Horace Lorimer; Lewis’s medical records from the Austin Riggs clinic, including interviews with psychiatrists and medical history; various memoirs such as Ida Kay Compton’s and Jack Koblas’s Sinclair Lewis: Home at Last, which features interviews of a lot of contemporary Minnesota folk; three biographies of Dorothy Thompson, plus all the material in her papers and diaries at Syracuse (including accounts of her lesbian affairs, which Schorer did not touch, though it might just have had a passing effect on the marriage).

Speaking of Dorothy, I have a theory that Schorer reflected her vision of Lewis and may have, in a kind of twisted gallantry, seen Lewis as a cad and avenged her honor, so to speak. As for me, my appreciation of him deepened, though I can cite the litany of his well-known faults. But I think of the good side, the generosity, the feverish brilliance, the humor, and spontaneity. As he matured (much delayed) and while he was on the wagon, he was more mellow than in his “famooser” years, a more emotionally generous human being (his letters to Wells Lewis, at the Harry Ransom Research Center with Grace’s papers are touching). Marcella Powers had much to do with his improved mood (see his letters to her, from which I didn’t quote enough) at this time. So it was a severe blow when she left him — though she couldn’t have done otherwise at her age. And then his life started spiraling downward without her.

I think The Job has obvious relevance to women’s lives today, though it is probably seen as a portrait of a much much older sister. Ann Vickers would appeal to the same constituency, though it doesn’t hold up very well as a novel in my opinion. It Can’t Happen Here has an eternal relevance to what I might call the recurring fascist tendencies in American life. Kingsblood Royal is a searing historical pamphlet, and I was very gratified to see Brent Staples praise it in the New York Times as still true today.

Babbitt is still my favorite. It achieves such a deft balance between realism and satire. It is funny in places. It evokes with accuracy and hardly a whiff of didacticism, the politics and power and social anatomy of a typical American city, as well as the leading institutions, such as business and religion, and the Chamber of Commerce booming and the competitiveness, and the petty corruption and the power structure — the real rulers who pull the strings behind the scenes. And Lewis limns a brilliant, almost tactile and surreal portrait of the central character’s environment, the “thingification” of his life, the tiny gadgets, consumerism, advertising and PR oppress him. I sometimes wonder if T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” influenced him. Has America changed that much since 1922?

Well you’re correct about Thompson, see #2 above. I would have very much liked to have talked to Alfred Harcourt and learned more about the estrangement between him and Lewis, though I think I offered some good theories. H. L. Mencken’s diaries and his memoir My Life as Author and Editor (another post-Schorer source) are pretty revealing, though handle with care, but I’d love to have interviewed him. But then I’d love to interview Mencken on general principles. Also Carl Van Doren, his oldest friend. All men I see, so I’d add Marcella Powers. (I contacted her daughter by her second husband and was ready to interview her out in New Mexico, but she suddenly refused to talk to me. Why, I don’t know.) Though I should say, judging from Mark Schorer’s letters at Berkeley, he found the three main women in Lewis’s life quite a handful — used to have nightmares about them! Cherchez la femme! Think of all the novels Lewis’s wives inspired! He got as good as he gave.

1. Elmer Gantry
2. Sauk Centre, Minnesota
3. George F. Babbitt
4. Elmer Gantry
5. It Can’t Happen Here
6. Arrowsmith
7. Arrowsmith
8. Edith Wharton
9. Minnesota
10. Grand Republic