The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (18 page)

Babbitt is identified with his city, Zenith, to such an extent that the story begins not with him but with the city. We are told, and this is significant, that the city’s austere towers were “neither citadels, nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.” The city of Zenith, a midsize urban center, the backbone of American business and productivity, is a character in its own right. Indeed, Zenith is
the
all-American city. “A stranger suddenly dropped into the business-center of Zenith could not have told whether he was in a city of Oregon or Georgia, Ohio or Maine, Oklahoma or Manitoba. But to Babbitt every inch was individual and stirring.”

Unlike
Huck Finn,
where the break with the past was a deliberate act of liberation, here attitudes toward the past are more in tune with Henry Ford’s dictum that “history is bunk.” The new buildings seem to have arisen out of a void. All vestiges of the past, the “fretted structures of earlier generations,” the post office with “its shingle-tortured mansard,” the “red brick minarets of hulking old houses,” the factories that have “stingy and sooted windows” and the “wooden tenements colored like mud,” are mere “grotesqueries,” in deliberate contrast to the “shining new houses” of fortunate souls like Babbitt who have made it. The nature that Huck both loved and challenged is as much a victim here as are history and tradition. As the narrative progresses, we understand that the uncomfortable coexistence of the old and shabby buildings with the new and polished structures of Zenith, of the natural with the artificial, is implied in the conflicts between the city’s inhabitants: on one side are the slovenly wage earners and the radical elements that support them; on the other the clean, upright citizens residing in office towers and cheerful new houses, precursors to our McMansions and antiseptically remodeled homes.

After a detailed description of the city waking up, its shining towers that “aspired” from the mist, the streets gradually filling with factory workers, shop assistants and other productive employees, we finally come to the forty-six-year-old George F. Babbitt, on the sleeping porch of his Dutch Colonial house in the residential district of Floral Heights, complete with a master bedroom “right out of Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes.” The occupants of Huck’s smothery houses, the respectable, churchgoing citizens, have become more refined and in a sense more formulaic. “If people had ever lived and loved” in this room or “read thrillers at midnight and lain in beautiful indolence on a Sunday morning, there were no signs of it.”

The sounds of the city intrude on his sleep. There is the milk cart, the whistling paper carrier thumping the paper against the door, the neighbor’s car, and finally the alarm clock that puts a stop to his dreams. Before he is fully awake, that alarm clock is described in great detail: early in the novel we are invited to recognize that this all-American businessman, a defender of individualism and free trade, is best defined not by any peculiarity of temperament or cherished keepsake but by his ownership of the best of the “nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments,” making its owner “proud of being awakened by such a rich device.” In terms of social status, it is “almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires.”

Once Babbitt begins to stir, we follow him from the sleeping porch through his bedroom to the bathroom. Every object he encounters along the way is described with the pointed detail of an advertising brochure. Like the city itself, everything in this house is “up-to-date” and of the moment, devoid of the messiness of personal taste or the burden of history. The shiny and meticulous quality of the surfaces produces a spooky refracted light of the kind we will later come across in films such as
The Truman Show
and
American Beauty,
where a fabricated reality intrudes on the protagonists’ souls. The objects Babbitt transfers from one suit to another—a fountain pen, a silver pencil, a gold penknife, a silver cigar cutter, seven keys all hanging from his watch chain—are of “eternal importance” to him, “like baseball or the Republican Party.” Without them, he feels “naked.”

Next we meet Myra Babbitt, George’s loyal wife. We are told that she “no longer had reticences before her husband, and no longer worried about not having reticences.” So she appears in a petticoat, unaware of her “corsets which bulged.” Although Myra is a “good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman,” no one but her youngest daughter really cares much about her or is “entirely aware that she was alive.” At breakfast we meet the Babbitts’ three children: the “dumpy brown-haired” twenty-two-year-old Verona, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and ardent advocate of social causes; Theodore Roosevelt, known as Ted, who at seventeen is a typically wild teenager; and finally Babbitt’s favorite, the ten-year-old Katherine, called Tinka, whom her father greets each morning with “Well, kittiedoolie!”

Babbitt looks out the window and considers his city. Surveying the top of the Second National Tower, a building thirty-five stories high, he is inspired “by the rhythm of the city” and beholds “the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the ballad ‘Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo’ as though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.”

The first time I read
Babbitt,
during my college days, I associated it with E. E. Cummings’s poem “next to of course god, america i.” I loved Cummings and felt I had found the poetic equivalent of the “Babbitt experience.” At the time, I had little connection to the world outside my university, and I was too embroiled in its politics to care to know much about America beyond its precincts.
Babbitt
was a fun book to read, a critique of America, and that was enough. But something remained in the back of my mind, nagging me, or perhaps “beckoning” is a better word—something that made me return to
Babbitt
once I was more comfortably settled back in Iran. This time I saw things I had missed, the complications and paradoxes of being an American, or of life in a democracy, now that I found myself living in a totalitarian state. But it was not until I had returned to America and begun the process of becoming a citizen that I came to appreciate
Babbitt
fully. By that point I had come to feel as if certain aspects of that fictional universe were shimmering reflections of the reality I was then living. It was as if Lewis had perfectly captured our hollow, thing-filled times, as if the characters he created almost a century ago mimicked us, gloating over the fact that we had turned out to be their true progenies. Like the Red King in his confrontation with Alice, I am tempted to ask, Who dreamt up whom? Did the characters in
Babbitt
dream us up, or are we imagining them? I often find myself wondering: What is George Babbitt (or Myra or Ted) doing here, parading on my television screen, in new clothes, with a new haircut, using the same old words?

“What the country needs—just at this present juncture—is neither a college president nor a lot of monkeying with foreign affairs, but a good—sound economical—business—administration, that will give us a chance to have something like a decent turnover.” This is not a speech by Mitt Romney, George Bush or a conservative talking head on
Hannity;
it is Babbitt’s neighbor and friend Howard Littlefield, responding to Babbitt’s question “Don’t you think it’s about time we had a real business administration?” Littlefield is “the Great Scholar,” with a B.A. from Blodgett College and a Ph.D. from Yale in economics. He is an “authority on everything in the world except babies, cooking, and motors.” His real job, however, is as the “employment-manager and publicity-counsel of the Zenith Street Traction Company.”

There is a strict, if largely unspoken, hierarchy in Zenith. There are those above Babbitt in wealth and power, the ones he aspires one day to join—they belong not to the Athletic Club, as Babbitt and his regular cronies like Littlefield do, but to the Union Club, a notch above it, classier and more posh. These are men like Charles McKelvey, the contractor, and Colonel Rutherford Snow, owner of the
Advocate-Times.
Right above them is old money, represented by William Washington Eathorne, president of the First State Bank of Zenith. “Out of the dozen contradictory Zeniths which together make up the true and complete Zenith, none is so powerful and enduring yet none so unfamiliar to the citizens as the small, still, dry, polite, cruel Zenith of the William Eathornes; and for that tiny hierarchy the other Zeniths unwittingly labor and insignificantly die.”

It is not politics that rules Babbitt’s world—this is not the Soviet Union or the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the state reshapes its citizens’ social, cultural and personal lives. A different, more generous if equally ruthless god controls this universe. It is Mammon, the god of buying and selling. Babbitt has made “nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry,” but he is “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” The word “calling” is significant, because business is Babbitt’s true calling, and he embraces it with the zeal of a new convert. He speaks about real estate in terms of vision and poetry; he is not a broker but a “realtor,” whom he defines as a “seer of the future development of the community . . . a prophetic engineer clearing the pathway for inevitable changes.” Translated into more concrete terms, “a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow.” Babbitt calls this guessing “Vision.” He also helps elect the mayor, slandering and browbeating the antibusiness politicians and activists, talking about “Zip and Bang” and the “Standardized American Citizen,” his words for the model Rotarian. In short, his is not a world ruled by politics; if anything, politics is ruled by the business of selling. In Babbitt’s world, as in our own, a metaphorical Botox coats all walks of life: if a party loses an election, it will repackage itself and revisit its messaging rather than engage in meaningful reflection.

Long before Mitt Romney’s closed-room expression of disdain for the 47 percent of Americans he branded as “takers,” George F. Babbitt had it all figured out. In Babbitt’s view, “all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism.” He opines that “the sooner a man learns he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce—produce—produce! That’s what the country needs.”

Babbitt’s utilitarian philosophy is consistent with his attitude toward work. We are told that he is “conventionally honest,” and not kind. When Stan Graff, a lowly, overworked, underpaid employee, complains about his working conditions and wages, Babbitt, seeking to justify refusing him a raise, wants to know whether Stan is the kind of fellow who “kicks about working overtime, that wants to spend his evenings reading trashy novels or spooning and exchanging a lot of nonsense and foolishness with some girl” or “the kind of upstanding, energetic young man, with a future—and with Vision!” He ends his fatherly admonition by asking, “What’s your Ideal, anyway? Do you want to make money and be a responsible member of the community, or do you want to be a loafer, with no inspiration or Pep?” If he were with us today, I have no doubt that George Babbitt would be a regular guest or consultant on Fox News.

In a society like Iran, “Inspiration” and “Pep” come at the barrel of a gun, a very straightforward method of persuasion. There is nothing complicated about the brute force of an ideological state. Babbitt’s god wants to sell, not to kill; its main weapon is seduction. It is full of guile and promise and yet remains efficient and impersonal, like the up-to-date alarm clock gracing the Babbitts’ sleeping porch. Babbitt is persuaded that without that clock and his other gadgets, his life would be lacking, incomplete. “Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief and the senators who controlled the Republican Party decided in little smoky rooms in Washington what he should think about disarmament, tariff, and Germany, so did the large national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares—toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot-water heaters—were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, then the substitutes, for joy and passion and wisdom.”

Sinclair Lewis’s genius was in capturing the spirit of modern advertising when it had not yet come to dominate the American landscape and define the soul of the nation. Advertising was in essence a twentieth-century phenomenon, and, like so many things belonging to that century, it was made in America. Its genius lies in its ability to hijack our “joy and passion and wisdom,” repackaging them and returning them to us as fantasies, transforming everyday instruments, from cars to vacuum cleaners, into exotic objects of desire. Novelists, who are in the business of joy, passion and wisdom, were the first to grasp the power of advertising and technology in their best and worst forms. From Jules Verne’s fantastic journeys to the macabre worlds of
1984
and
Brave New World,
they would become prophets (often Cassandras) of the modern world.

Most of us citizens of the twenty-first century cannot simply mock and deplore Babbitt. Can we deny the fact that we feel a certain empathy for him, an uncomfortable sense of identification? After all, our iPhones, iPads and Kindles are sophisticated descendants of that up-to-date alarm clock. These and thousands of the other products we have come to depend on evoke passion, guilt, anxiety. We are told that Olay Regenerist will restore our youth, a Citi card will prevent us from being boring and Alcatel and Verizon will allow us to fulfill our dreams. Meanwhile, insurance companies think day and night about nothing but our well-being.

I can imagine standing in one of those interminable lines with a Babbitt-like figure waiting for the latest iPhone and sharing his “enormous and poetic admiration, though very little understanding, of all mechanical devices.” How many owners of a Mac who look nothing like Babbitt and might strongly disapprove of his lifestyle would feel, with him, that these devices are “symbols of truth and beauty?” Anyone who has gazed with longing at a clean, well-lighted Apple Store on her way to work may understand why Babbitt yearns “for a dictaphone, for a typewriter which would add and multiply, as a poet yearns for quartos or a physician for radium.”