The Sinclair Lewis Industry

...And these criticisms are almost as important as the book itself, because they are proofs of the character of that importance...

...For Elmer Gantry is journalism...

...But as Elmer Gantry from first to last is a stuffed figure, a man of straw--a sort of scarecrow, or Guy Fawkes figure, made only to be hanged as an effigy, or burned, or vicariously tarred and feathered, there is no blood into which to inject the potion, and the endless series of sexual acts and crimes through which Gantry is led becomes simply incredible, and almost incredibly tedious...

...Christianity, in a word, nowadays tends to get itself judged more by its activities along the lines noted above, than by its better and more beneficial social activities...

...one who watched his markets, who followed the ups and downs of the writing trade...

...There were dozens, scores, hundreds of possible plots for novels, short stories, plays...

...which date was with equal solemnity accepted by the press, as if it were a case of the issuance of a President's message, or of a decision of the Supreme Court affecting stockmarket values...

...She very keenly, and I think truthfully, demon- strates that Mr...

...A favorite place for such observations was a stool in a quick-lunch restaurant, in any Main Street, in any town where Lewis chanced to be...

...Strange phenomenon of "regimentation," of "standardization," of "business psychology," of "mass production"-in a word, of Main Street and of Babbittryl An author who, after many years of writing commercial fiction for Main Street magazines, from the New Thought organ, The Nautilus, to the Saturday Evening Post, suddenly emerges from the tuck of hack writers as one of the most considerable of the serious novelists of today with his vitriolic exposures of all the hypnotisms and mob-mindedness of the age in America, and then becomes himself, through the action of the very social forces and mechanisms which he has become famous by satirizing, a primary example of those forces I Well, the same, or much the same thing happened in the case of such men as Edison, a genius of invention...

...Jack London, at least in liis latter days, was not particularly inventive in the matter of plots...

...It deals (as it is almost needless to repeat at this rather late day after the release date has flooded the land with accounts of Elmer Gantry) with a Middle-West character, a specialized product of the same life and social conditions that produced George Babbitt and so many other Lewis figures...

...That he should be seized upon and exploited by the characteristic exploitation forces of his day, and that, indeed, he should seem to be thoroughly at home in that galley, is after all, no doubt, appropriate and inevitable...

...and unquestionably Sinclair Lewis also is a genius...

...Sinclair Lewis, then, as these anecdotes show (and that is the reason for telling them) began as he has developed namely, as a novelist of the school of Zola or Charles Reade--a novelist of documents, of newspaper clippings, notes, painstaking observations...

...They testify, in one way or an-other, to the fact that Elmer Gantry is a part of a very strong social movement now under way in this country, a movement of more fundamental significance than that other movement, or mood, of uneasy self- consciousness of wide-spread habits of national crudi- ties and uglinesses made manifest by Lewis in Main Street and Babbitt...

...For that trunk was packed with a veritable card-index of a fiction manufacturer...

...Once he sat up all night with Jack London in George Sterling's bungalow, going through the plot file...

...When it did--what a flood of publicity poured forth I Has the world of literature ever witnessed anything even remotely similar...

...its charities, its hospitals, its salutary effects in other directions...

...there were innumerable sketches in words of persons, places, happenings, recorded by Lewis himself...

...Not long out of Yale, and fresh from his unsuccessful effort to keep the Helicon Hall home fires burning by stoking the furnace in Upton Sinclair's "co6perative socialist colony," Lewis had trekked across country to the Pacific 578 THE from the Atlantic, seeking, as always he sought, contacts with other writers, and also, and much more significantly, seeking contacts with life as life is lived today on the Main Street which he was to discover for America as Columbus discovered America itself...

...Sinclair displayed his samples...

...But, I hasten to assure them, they do not have to undertake the painful task of reading it...

...Miss Rebecca West goes deeper, however, than does Mr...

...Ordinarily, and even in the case of books of real importance written by authors almost as celebrated as Mr...

...For these books, like Elmer Gantry, may have been boomed, advertised, pushed, promoted, marketed, like many other Main Street labels, slogans, brands of this-that-and-the-other thing demanded by Main Street, but they certainly were not conceived or executed in that spirit...

...One eager but indiscreet newspaper dared to violate the edict by printing a synopsis of the story of Elmer Gantry...

...Long before the appearance of the latest brand--Elmer Gantry--the "sales quota" forces of the industry began their farflung campaign...

...This time the character is a "Reverend," a clergyman, first of the Baptist persuasion, and then, after hectic interludes of itinerant evangelism and New Thought adventuring, a shining light of small-town Methodism...

...a wavering silhouette, a mere gesture of half-hearted benevolence...

...the industry that has now grown to such vast proportions had that battered trunk as its root and origin...

...Mencken's ideas in terms which hundreds of thousands of mob-minded readers will swallow whole that gives the book great importance as part of that movement against Christianity of which the Baltimore publicist is the leader...

...Lewis, indeed, does recognize--but in a perfunc- tory, listless fashion...

...Finding Elmer Gantry itself such difficult reading, finding in it little or nothing of that underlying, central spirit of authentic interest in his subject, of the under- standing of his material, which gave fire and force to Babbitt, for example, I lightened the burden of reading it by the perusal of many of the criticisms of the novel...

...The authors to whom they turn for their spiritual light and leading, are solemnly listed as being H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, H. L. Mencken --and, yes, believe it or not--Sinclair Lewis I Because, then, the book lacks any semblance of a realistic idea of religion, it is as trivial as any of Elmer Gantry's own sermons...

...For more than a year, through all the arts of publicity, the fact that the author of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith was writing, or, rather making, a novel that was to "deal with preachers" was spread throughout the land...

...Nevertheless, as an-other Elmer, this time an Elmer among the critics, Mr...

...and then, "Sinclair Lewis Dares God to Strike Him Dead...

...but since it was Lent, I inflicted upon myself the mortification of going through some four hundred pages of the most wearisome kind it has ever been my lot to endure...

...Sinclair Lewis has traveled in just that coach ; it is a photograph out of his memory, but developed in the acid of a disgusted hatred...

...like all things in America, it tends to become organized, and one of these days it will be organized...

...He nowhere shows that he has any under- standing of what organized religion, even in its gro- tesque variations and fungoid growths, means...

...Lewis brought a trunk with him to Carmel despite his difficulties and delays in getting there...

...but the eagle eye of some generalissimo of the industry promptly detected the breach of discipline, a telephone wire sizzled with rebuke and command, and the newspaper in question obediently yanked the offending article out of its first edition, and fell back into line through the rest of its editions of that day, humbly waiting till the "release date" became effective...

...He even denies to Sinclair Lewis any merit as a propagand- ist, recognizing him as "simply and solely a witch-burner...

...a novelist of method, a hard-working business novelist...

...In order that the impact of the terrific nature of Elmer Gantry should not be lessened by premature disclosures, a certain date was solemnly proclaimed by the industry for the "release" by the press of reviews or synopses of the contents of the book...

...H. L. Mencken, but its expression of Mr...

...Ten or twelve plots no more lowered the general level of plots in that trunk than a cupful or two of water lowers the level of a pond...

...It was the thing that drove him to Helicon Hall, to watch and casually to be part of a decidedly un-Main Street experiment in life...

...Sinclair Lewis Attends Y. M. C. A. Meeting...

...Then and there, as elsewhere and always later on, his keen eyes were observing, his curious and retentive memory was recording, everything he saw and heard--everything, that is to say, up to a certain level of perceptiveness, above which neither then nor since was he able to penetrate...

...Sinclair Lewis Preaches in Kansas City Church...

...He is exactly the sort of poor fool whose follies supplied all the newspaper clippings amassed by his biographer...

...Equally incredible is Gan- try's immunity from public exposure...

...London could write out the ones he used at a profit of a thousand dollars or so...

...on the contrary, this particular rake's progress is a nightmare of naive romanticism...

...It contains some of Lewis's best pages of keen description, and of his inimitable mimicry of the weird language and weirder ideas of small-town, MiddleWest men and women...

...Sinclair Lewis, in connection with his preparatory work on his forthcoming novel...

...blurb writing for publishing houses...

...As for the other decent clergymen, they are still more impossible to accept as being real than the ghostlike Pengilly...

...They may see its ef- fects without having to read it simply by scanning the mass of editorials, newspaper articles, and reports of angry sermons, which it is eliciting everywhere...

...meanwhile, he needed the plots, Lewis needed the quick sales at spot cash...

...Sinclair Lewis certainly deserves all the success he has won, so far as that success is explicable in terms of personal industry and perseverance...

...as Luther Burbank, a genius in the crossing of plant products for men and beasts...

...But all the time there burned in him that something or other, that dissatisfaction with things as they are, that vague yearning after other and presumably better and higher things which possesses so many millions of Americans...

...But "tiresome" is not the word...

...Of course, having committed myself to the task of reviewing the book, it was, no doubt, my duty to get through with it, and I suppose March 3o, !927 THE COMMONWEAL 579 (but I'm not a theologian) that one can't ask credit for mortifying one's self in the doing of one's duty...

...They are the novels, not of an objective, creative artist, but of a subjective victim of Main Street who also had developed by most laborious pains an almost unrivaled technique of observation and of the expression of his observations...

...His triumphant avoidance of exposure in his countless es- capades robs his creator (if that word may be used of the maker of such a sapless puppet) of all claim to being a realist...

...Meanwhile, book-news pages, literary departments in scores of city and smalltown journals, columnists and recorders of literary gossip, kept the publicity pots boiling with innumerable items...

...As the "publication date" approached, the campaign waxed more insistent...

...scores were examined, ten or fifteen were bought, at, I believe, five or ten dollars per plot...

...There is a lesson in this for Catholics--but this is supposed to be a book review, not a sermon, and I think that Catholics are intelligent enough to see for themselves what the lesson of Elmer Gantry is for them...

...But at least one detached observer cannot refrain from lighting a taper before the shrine of the neglected god of irony...

...He leaves little to be said by any other critic on that score...

...The Associated Press and other news agencies distributed "news stories"--"legitimate" news stories--concerning Mr...

...It is organized, militant, not to say rambunctious, Pro- testant Christianity rather than Catholicism which sup- plies the institutions, the habits, the customs, the move- ments, by which Christianity is being misjudged...

...newspaper reporting (though COMMONWEAL March 3 ~ , 1927 , , , , m not very much of that) the writing of boys' books, fiction making for all sorts of magazines...

...Lewis in this book does not function on the intellectual level of his theme, which, after all, is religion...

...But--well, if had it not been Lent when I read the book, I could not possibly have read the book...

...but anyway, that trunk became locally famous and a thing of wonder to the writers there, most of whom were six-days-a-week loafers, and mere Jock o' Dreams compared with the new arrival...

...so both were satisfied...

...news stories that might be the source of fiction plots...

...A very practical man indeed, and sensibly so...

...In support of the barrage of publicity, the heavier guns of large-space advertising were wheeled into position...

...it is muck-raking journalism put into the form of fic- tion, and it now seeks to make articulate and to increase the growing resentment which great numbers of people in all parts of the country are feeling against what they consider the tyrannous encroachments upon the liber- ties of the citizens by organized religious bodies...

...Lewis, reviews will appear at any time after their publication up to several months thereafter...

...Later on came many other experiences...

...A man who has stamped the thought of his age, and its language, with the ideas that now are connoted by such words as Main Street and Babbitt...

...So far--even when all due respect has been paid to the Ku Klux Klan and similar movements, and to such queer gentry as Senator Heflin--so far, the anti-Christian feeling now rampant in the country is mainly directed against the Methodist and Baptist persuasions, and allied sects, and this because of their organized in- terference with other people through such things as prohibition, the Anti-Saloon League, their lobbies at Washington, their attempts to control state legislatures, and their various activities along Blue Law Sunday laws and censorship gags...

...But is Elmer Gantry of the same kind as Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith...

...I well remember his advent in Carmel-by-the-Sea, in California, that colony of poets and painters and dramatists and fiction writers (and their hangers-on, and the yearners...

...They were starkly sincere criticisms of those aspects of American life which had rasped and wounded Lewis himself, as they rasp and wound so many of his feIlow-citizens...

...It has, indeed, many of the same general characteristics...

...March 3 ~ , x927 THE COMMONWEAL 577 THE SINCLAIR LEWIS INDUSTRY By MICHAEL WILLIAMS T HE making, the advertising, the marketing of Sinclair Lewis novels have become one of the great industries, almost to be compared with Ford cars, Camel cigarettes, the movies, radio, or Aim& McPherson crusades...

...Sinclair Lewis Addresses Conference of MethodistBaptist Clergymen...

...as Henry Ford, a genius in the mechanics of quantity manufacture...

...Superficially, it seems to belong to the category of the authentic Lewis novel ; but I do not think that it really belongs to it...

...He did it eagerly...

...That there is another side to organized Protestant- ism than the seamy side represented by Elmer Gantry, Mr...

...Rarely having money enough to pay for a sleeping-car berth, Lewis sat or lounged for many weary nights in smokingcars or day-coaches in his slow and tiresome journey...

...That acidulous etching of a day-coach in which Elmer Gantry travels in the fifth chapter of his story, unforgettable in its musty vividness, is not a fictitious picture...

...A "Father" Pengilly is the "mystic" of the shadowy group of "good" ministers...

...the thing that at long last was to become the spirit that lifted and separated the novels of his fame, Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith, above and apart from the great mass of his manufactured fiction...

...It would seem as if Sinclair Lewis must have col- lected at least a thousand clippings from the press de- scriptive of the hundreds of clergymen of all the sects who have "got into trouble with women," as the phrase goes, in one way or another, for many years past, and then distilled from them a concentrated essence of lubricity and lust, of lying, hypocrisy, cruelty, degrada- tion of the deadliest, to inject into the veins of his Elmer Gantry...

...There were clippings galore...

...Elmer Davis, in the New York Times, very lucidly points out, it is not only the dedication of Elmer Gan- try to Mr...

...it was the thing that drove him across the country to Carmelbythe-Sea...

...I forget...

...This resentment and oppo- sition becomes daily more deep and powerful...

...a man who has caused millions of other men to become uneasily self-conscious of their own cultural and social limitations and absurdities, indubitably is a genius...

...on his way, as the book ends, to the limelight that beats upon the advertising pulpits of New York itself, and to the presidency of a Society for the Reform of Practically Everything...

...or maybe he sent for it afterward...

...Robert Littell in the New Republic admirably exposes the fun- damental weaknesses of the book as fiction...

...Which meant that critics of such high standing as, for example, Carl Van Doren, Harry Hansen, Elmer Davis, Rebecca West, Robert Littell, J. W. Krutch, and others, had read (and more or less had marked, learned, and inwardly digested) Elmer Gantry, and had turned in their copy all ready for the issuance of the edict of "release," long before that date arrived...

...Elmer Gantry is a social movement industrialized...

...Littell into the subject of the book's failure as art, or even as the journalism of social criti- cism...

...But in the case of Elmer Gantry, hardly a literary journal, or literary department of a newspaper (at least, so far as New York is concerned, and I suppose the same thing was true elsewhere) failed to publish a long review coincidentally with or immediately subsequent to the coming of the eagerly awaited "release" date...