The Last Empire (7 page)

The Nobel Prize followed in 1930. That was the period when the Swedes singled out worthy if not particularly good writers for celebration, much as they now select worthy if not particularly interesting countries or languages for consolation. Although the next twenty-one years of Lewis’s life was decline and fall, he never stopped writing; never stopped, indeed: always in motion.

“He was a queer boy, always an outsider, lonely.” Thus Schorer begins. Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, population 2,800. At the same time a couple of dozen significant American writers were also being brought up in similar towns in the Middle West and every last one of them was hell-bent to get out. Lewis’s father, a doctor, was able to send him to Yale. Harry or Hal or Red was gargoyle ugly: red-haired, physically ill-coordinated, suffered from acne that was made cancerous by primitive X-ray treatments. He was a born mimic. He had a wide repertory of characters—types—and he was constantly shifting in and out of characters. But where Flaubert had only one act, The Idiot, Lewis had an army of idiots, and once started, he could not shut up. He delighted and bored, often at the same time.

Although Lewis had been born with all the gifts that a satirist needs to set up shop he was, by temperament, a romantic. Early writings were full of medieval fair ladies, gallant knights, lands of awful Poesie where James Branch Cabell was to stake out
his
territory, now quite abandoned. Lewis also had, even by American standards, absolutely no sense of humor. In a charming memoir his first wife, Grace Hegger, noted, “
Main Street
was not a satire until the critics began calling him a satirist, and then seeing himself in that role, is it possible that [his next book]
Babbitt
became true satire?” The question is double-edged. Like Columbus, Lewis had no idea where he had gone, but the trip was fun. He loved his high-toned heroine, Carol Kennicott, but if others thought her a joke, he was willing to go along with it.

In youth Lewis wrote yards of romantic verse, much of it jocose; yet he had heard Yeats at Yale and was much impressed by the early poetry. Like most born writers, he read everything: Dickens, Scott, Kipling were his first influences. But it was H. G. Wells’s
The History of Mr. Polly
that became for him a paradigm for his own first novel. Like most writers, again, he later claimed all sorts of grand literary progenitors, among them Thoreau, but it would appear that he mostly read the popular writers of his time and on the great divide that Philip Rahv was to note—Paleface versus Redskin—Lewis was firmly Redskin; yet, paradoxically, he deeply admired and even tried to imitate those Edith Wharton stories that were being published when he was coming of age, not to mention
The Custom of the Country
, whose Undine Spragg could have easily served time in a Lewis novel.

The literary world before 1914 is now as distant from us as that of Richardson and Fielding. In those days novels and short stories were popular entertainment. They were meant to be read by just about everybody. Numerous magazines published thousands of short stories of every kind, and a busy minor writer could make as good a living as a minor bank president. Writing was simply a trade that, sometimes, mysteriously, proved to be an art. William Dean Howells had balanced commerce and art with such exquisite tact that he was invaluable as editor and friend to both the Paleface Henry James and the Redskin Mark Twain. Howells himself was a very fine novelist. But he lived too long. For the rising generation of the new twentieth century, he was too genteel, too optimistic (they had carelessly misread him); too much Beacon Street not to mention London and Paris and the Russia of Dostoevsky, whose first translations Howells had brought to the attention of those very conventional ladies who were thought to be the principal
audience for the novel in America.

While still at Yale, Lewis headed straight to the action. Upton Sinclair had started a sort of commune, Helicon Hall, at Englewood, New Jersey, and in 1906 Lewis spent two months there, firing furnaces and writing. By 1909 he was at Carmel with his classmate William Rose Benét, another professional bookman. Lewis worked on the San Francisco
Bulletin
, and wrote. When Jack London had come to Yale to speak for socialism, Lewis had met him. Although Lewis was to be, briefly, a card-carrying Socialist, he was never much interested in politics, but he very much admired the great Redskin writer, and he got to know him at Carmel.

London wrote short stories for a living. Unfortunately, he had trouble thinking up plots. Although Lewis was not yet making a living from short stories, he had thought up a great many plots. So, in 1910, Lewis sold Jack London fourteen short story plots for $70. Two became published short stories; the third the start of a not-to-be-finished novel. Lewis later described London at that time as someone more interested in playing bridge than sea-wolfing. He also described how “Jack picked up James’s
The Wings of the Dove
. . . and read aloud in a bewildered way. . . . It was the clash between Main Street and Beacon Street that is eternal in American culture.” Well, eternity is a long time in bookchat land.

In 1910 Lewis moved on to Washington, D.C., which was to become, more or less, his home base in the United States. Meanwhile he worked for New York publishers as reader, copywriter, salesman. He was also selling fiction to the flagship of commercial publishing,
The Saturday Evening Post
, as well as to other magazines. From 1913 to 1914 he produced a syndicated book page that was carried in newspapers all around the country. By putting himself at the center of bookchat, he ensured good reviews for his own books in much the same way that in England now ambitious young writers not only review each other’s books but also often act as literary editors in order to promote their future reviewers. Those destined for greatness will eventually review television programs in a Sunday newspaper, thus getting to know the television and film magnates who will, in due course, promote them personally on television as well as buy their products for dramatization. The English literary scene today is like that of the United
States pre-1914.

Lewis’s first novel,
Our Mr. Wrenn
, is very much school of Wells; it was, of course, well reviewed by his fellow bookmen. In the next four years Lewis published four more novels. Each had a subject, of which the most interesting was early aviation,
The Trail of the Hawk
(1915). Lewis had got to know Paul Beck, one of the first army fliers, and the novel presages, rather eerily, Lindbergh’s career. In my memory these books are rather like those of Horatio Alger that I was reading at the same time, something of an agreeable blur. Since the Subject comes before the Characters and since Lewis was a thorough researcher, there are many little facts of the sort that pop writers today provide as they take us on tours of the cosmetics or munitions businesses, subjects they usually know very little about beyond idle, as opposed to dogged, research. Only James Michener, through hard work, has mastered the fictional narrative as a means of instruction in a subject of interest to him, like Hawaii; and then to millions
of others.

The first five novels established Sinclair Lewis as a serious if not particularly brilliant novelist; but one with, as they say at
Billboard
, a bullet. As a careerist, Lewis was an Attila. In his pursuit of blurbs, he took no prisoners. He cultivated famous writers.
Main Street
is dedicated to James Branch Cabell
and
Joseph Hergesheimer, the two classiest novelists of the day.
Babbitt
is dedicated to Edith Wharton, who took it all in her magnificent ruthless stride.

In 1915 his old mentor Upton Sinclair was invited to assess the product. He did:

You seem to me one of the most curiously uneven writers I have ever known. You will write pages and pages of interesting stuff, and then you will write a lot of conversation which is just absolute waste, without any point or worthwhileness at all; and you don’t seem to know the difference. Everything of yours that I have read is about half and half . . . whenever you are writing about the underworld, you are at your best, and when you come up to your own social level or higher, you are no good.

Nicely, Upton Sinclair adds a postscript: “Don’t be cross.” Writers usually get other writers’ numbers rather more quickly than critics ever do. After all, as contemporaries, they have been dealt much the same cards to play with.

By 1929, the apprenticeship of Sinclair Lewis was over. He had married and become the father of a son, Wells, named for H.G., whom he had yet to meet (Lewis was deeply irritated when people thought that
he
had been named for Upton Sinclair when his father had named him after one Harry Sinclair, a dentist of the first rank).

The genesis of Lewis’s ascent can be located in the year 1916 when he and his wife, Grace, came to stay in Sauk Centre with Dr. Lewis and his wife, Sinclair’s stepmother. In her memoir, Grace Hegger Lewis is very funny about what must have been a fairly uncomfortable visit. “One morning when ‘the curse’ was upon me,” Grace asked for breakfast on a tray. The Lewises said no, while Hal, Grace’s name for her husband, was “furious. He had always taken for granted his affection for his parents and their behavior he had never questioned. But seeing his family through the eyes of New York and of marriage he was appalled by his father’s overbearing rudeness.” Grace suggests that this visit forced Lewis to see his hometown in an entirely new way and shift the point of view from that of a lonely offbeat lawyer in what was to be called
The Village Virus
, to that of Carol, a girl from outside the village who marries the local doctor, Will Kennicott, and so observes
the scene with big city (in her case Minneapolis) eyes.

Grace reports that Dr. Lewis did apologize; the young couple stayed on; and the town magnates were brought to their knees when they learned just how much Lewis had been paid for a two-part serial in the
Woman’s Home Companion
($1,500). “When he told them that it had taken him two weeks to write the serial, the banker, dividing so much per diem, was visibly awed. . . . The young Lewises were to find that this measuring of talent by dollars was fairly universal, and Hal was hurt at first by the lack of interest in the writing itself.”

Their later life in Washington sounds agreeable. She tells us how they would walk to the Chevy Chase Club with the young Dean Achesons and how Lewis also frequented the Cosmos Club and got to know General Billy Mitchell, Clarence Darrow, and the scarlet lady of our town, Elinor Wylie—murmur her name, as indeed people were still doing a few years later when I was growing up. The Lewises seem not to have known the Achesons’ friend Grace Zaring Stone, author of
The Bitter Tea of General Yen
, who, when told by a lady novelist that she was writing a novel about Evil, sighed, “If only I had thought of that!”

Lewis maintained that the idea for a novel whose subject would be a small Midwestern market town came to him in 1905. I should suspect that it was always there. Village life was the first thing that he had known and, sooner or later, writers usually deal with their origins. The real-life lawyer Charles T. Dorion was to be the main character, an idealistic soul, able to see through the pretences, the hypocrisies, the . . . the . . . the absolute boredom of Sauk Centre (renamed by Lewis Gopher Prairie). But the 1916 homecoming gave Lewis a new point of view, that of his elegant New York wife, to be called Carol. Dorion was demoted to supporting cast, as Guy Pollock.

In July 1920, in a Washington heat wave, Sinclair Lewis finished
Main Street
. He gave the book to his friend Alfred Harcourt, who had started a new publishing house to be known, in time, as Harcourt, Brace, in which Lewis had invested some of his own money. In the business of authorship he seldom put a foot wrong.

October 23, 1920,
Main Street
was published and, as one critic put it, “if
Main Street
lives, it will probably be not as a novel but as an incident in American life.” Even Schorer, not yet halfway through Lewis’s career, concedes, a bit sadly, that the book was “the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history.” As of 1922 an estimated two million Americans had read the book; and they went right on reading it for years. With Howells gone, Lewis took his place as numero uno and reigned both at home and abroad until 1930, after which, according to Schorer, “with the increasing conformity at the surface of American life and the increasing fragmentation at its base, there have been no contenders at all.” I’m not sure that Bill or Ernest or Scott or Saul or Norman or . . . would agree. The contenders are all in place. The problem is that fiction—stories intended to be read by almost everyone—ceased to be of much interest
to a public “with no time to read” and movies to go to and, later, television to watch. The
Saturday Evening Post
serial, often well-written by a good writer, would now be done, first, as a miniseries on television or as a theatrical film. Today nonfiction (that is, fictions about actual people) stuffs our magazines and dominates best-seller lists.

In any case,
pace
Schorer, conformity in American life, whatever that means, would certainly be a spur to any writer. As for fragmentation, it is no worse now as the countryside fills up with Hispanics and Asians as it was when Lewis was describing the American hinterland full of Socialist Swedes and comic-dialect Germans. Actually, to read about the career of Sinclair Lewis is to read about what was a golden age for writing and reading; now gone for good.

Lewis’s energetic self-promotion among the masters of the day paid off. His dedicatees Cabell and Hergesheimer wrote glowing testimonials. Predictably, the novel appealed to the English realists if not to Bloomsbury. The former wrote him fan letters—John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West; presently he would be taken up by the monarch of bookchat and the master of the fact-filled realistic novel, Arnold Bennett. At home a fellow Minnesotan wrote him “with the utmost admiration,” F. Scott Fitzgerald. But five years later Fitzgerald is wondering if
Arrowsmith
is really any good. “I imagine that mine [
Gatsby
] is infinitely better.” Sherwood Anderson leapt on and off the bandwagon. Dreiser ignored the phenomenon but his friend H. L. Mencken was delighted with Lewis, and praised him in
Smart Set
. When Lewis’s sometime model Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for
The Age of Innocence
, Lewis wrote to congratulate her. As for this uncharacteristic lapse on the part of a committee
designed to execute, with stern impartiality, Gresham’s Law, Mrs. Wharton responded with her usual finely wrought irony: “When I discovered that I was being rewarded by one of our leading Universities—for uplifting American morals, I confess I
did
despair.” She praises Lewis vaguely; later, she is to prove to be his shrewdest critic.