SINCLAIR LEWIS GETS RELIGION
Tarcov, Edith
Sinclair Lewis Gets Religion THE GOD-SEEKER. By Sinclair Lewis. Random*House. 422 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by EDITH TARCOV SINCLAIR LEWIS' NEW NOVEL is another token of his much discussed decline and...
...So many real names of Honest Citizens are mentioned that there will hardly be a Minnesotan who won't find an ancestor sitting under an apple-tree in the God-Seeker...
...When her father, the local trader and villain, threatens to interfere with her life at the mission, Gadd marries Selene and starts life anew as a young carpenter in St...
...200 pp...
...After all, what counts in the long run is not thai we are popular at this moment, but that we are going to win the atomic war...
...Behind the Cloak and Dagger PROWLING RUSSIA'S FORBIDDEN ZONE...
...He preaches to the Indians in a language which he believes to be Sioux, but whjeh, in reality, only he himself understands...
...By Stephen Winsten...
...not mailer what it costs...
...a German Communist (old the author, "but if it helps the Soviets io produce the atomic bomb, we are all for it...
...Vanguard Press, 327 pp...
...When deeper levels are reached, the author's twin feelings of love and intended satire are in conflict...
...Lewis has come a long way from his old Babbitt...
...Side by side with bottomless misery, is the bottomless black market—as this typical scene at a railway station well describes: . . Everything was procurable...
...There is no doubt that in these photographs and paintings the authentic Shaw is presented...
...Last summer he traveled through the Soviet occupation zone on false papers, disguised as a good German Communist...
...But Lewis has left the virile line, the vital men who have at least those wonderful moments of fall or of rising above themselves...
...The book ends on a note of racial equality, when Gadd, our boss-hero, convinces his workers' union (founded by himself)., to accept an escaped slave into its ranks...
...Knop heard a Soviet officer lecture a German audience for two hours on the decadence of the West and the coming Soviet victory in World War III...
...Believe...
...dice...
...ONE CANNOT READ this account of grey misery, corruption, forced labor, callous treachery and* the lethargic disintegration of cultural and moral values without mixed feelings...
...Lewis seems sure that we the readers know he is judging...
...But if Werner Knop's escapades are not spectacular (despite the batedbreath creeping, crawling and prowling, where walking might have done the trick), it is precisely in the nonspectacular details of life under Soviet occupation that his book is very valuable...
...2.75...
...Someone wanted to know what about bacteriological warfare...
...t Shaviana DAYS WITH BERNARD SHAW...
...3.75...
...frontier adventurers...
...one can practically smell his sweat and get a feeling of his whole personality—he is a valid character...
...Reviewed by EDITH TARCOV SINCLAIR LEWIS' NEW NOVEL is another token of his much discussed decline and fall to mediocrity...
...Whether it is a contribution to a study of Shaw himself, only scholars m that field will be able to determine...
...AT THE JENA UNIVERSITY...
...The core Of hft life is his religious experience and the mission, yet he is aware of his status and privileges...
...Winston has now published these talks in a book which gains much in value by the many excellent illustrations, partly photographs and partly reproductions of paintings by Mr...
...A steady stream of Germans is always moving illegally between the Soviet zone and Western Germany, smuggling everything from potatoes to expensive lenses and MVD documents...
...It is brought about by the confused notion that by mentioning ideas (Democracy, Love, Equality, Peace) one fias contributed new and profoundly Mibstanee to these ideas...
...Paul...
...Harge is a clumsy, boisterous, pompous but honest man who has given up the chance of being a New England judge for the life of a frontier missionary...
...Tins may sound corny to us...
...I don't know...
...If Babbitt represents the American bourgeois, it is not because of the pointed finger but because of the nature of Babbitt, the character, and the world he lives in...
...who has written ior Antioch Review...
...For many Germans, despite their contemptuous hatred of the Russians, are quite prepared to swallow the most sinister interpretation of Allied motives put out by Moscow...
...The narrowness and drudgery of his new life disappoint him...
...Winsten...
...Soon after, he develops into a rich but progressive contractor who goes to church on Sundays, loves democracy, furthers the union of his workers, and helps slaves escape through the underground railroad...
...That is the most frightening thing that emerges from Werner Knop's book...
...I do know I build good woodsheds...
...He is very concernc...
...After many adventures and spiritual and physical struggles, he leaves the mission suddenly, running off with a beautiful girl, Selene Lanark...
...Werner Knop was born in Germany of Dutch stock, studied in Goettmgen, Freiburg, Frankfurt, left Germany in 1933 and became a British subject...
...Stephen Winsten was a neighbor of Bernard Shaw, and apparently they visited frequently and naturally Bernard Shaw talked a great deal...
...And so Harge Is only a minor character and Gadd rules henceforth...
...After a year as executive editor of "This Month" magasine, ho returned to Berlin to become political adviser of RIAS...
...The best thing in the book is the characterization of "Squire" Harge, head of the mission, who during a New England revival meeting inspires Aaron Gadd to repent his sins and join the mission...
...And that, translated into politics, is the Werner Knop story...
...And the last thing to worry such Germans is the prospect of Americans and Russians devising bigger and better ways of destroying one another...
...His second wife, dying of tuberculosis, complains to Gadd about her husband's sexual appetite...
...The Soviet officer obliged: "Unlike atomic warfare, bacteriological warfare involves no industrial problems...
...Full of the prejudices of his time, he fanatically believes that his sect is the only righteous one, and believes strictly and literally in the horrors of hell and the hard-to-attain bliss of heaven...
...soldiers and honest citizens...
...He was like the guest who dropped in when the beds weren't made, the old man was beating his wife and the kids were out shooting Boris Shub first came to Germany with the Army's Psychological Warfare Division...
...the Uncontrolled German radio station there...
...The resultant picture is sentimental rather than sharp...
...In any case the reader will enjoy the book which is lively and witty and full of malicious humor...
...It is hard at times to know where his critii ism begins and where love and identification end...
...The general reader will not care so much for the accuracy of the portrait which emerges as for the pleasure which he will derive from the reading...
...1 don't believe in fear of divine vengeance, and I do believe in justice and equality—but let'* try not to use wordsl...
...with how to serve and conceive of his Uod...
...The New Leader end other publications, is now working on a novel...
...Harge has a good deal of sensuality and tenderness...
...It so happens that our Soviet bacteriologists are internationally known to be ' leaders in their field...
...An ugly woodshed that's there, right on the ground is handsomer to me than a ten-story temple that isn't there...
...How Hogarth's eyes would hava reveled in this I" And only a few miles-off, thousands of conscripted Germans and Russian soldiers, fallen from grace, work 8s slave laborers behind barbed wire to extract uranium for the Soviets...
...It affords bitter satisfaction to those who worked for Hitler...
...He is human...
...MANY OF THE CHARACTERS fit the current profitable historical novel trend: Selene, the glamorous half-caste whom Gadd marries, men and women Edith Tarcov...
...Reviewed by BORIS SHUB THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK masquerading as an unimportant thriller...
...By Werner Knop...
...Harge is related to Babbitt, to Dodsworth, to all the other good old Lewis characters: the touching clumsy provincials, the square simple- Americans, who reveal their complexities, their enormous appetites, yet are inextricably caught in their provincial rituals...
...Here his ability to pass as a native product gives him an advantage over those of us who managed to glimpse some of the same as American observers...
...There is a common paradox in the God-Seeker, both the hero and the novel...
...And more of this propaganda makes a dent than is generally supposed...
...THE METAPHYSICAL PROBLEMS of the God-Seeker are treated with the profundity of a Midwestern farmers' journal: .. Didn't you notice at the Mission that there's something damp and dripping in too much mouthing about salvation and about your love for your fellow-man...
...Against this grim background, the Soviet propaganda machine dins into German ears how the Anglo-American air force destroyed churches, libraries, universities and killed thousands of women and children in their "terror raids" against the great centers of German culture...
...Young Aaron Gadd from New England goes West to become a missionary lo the Sioux...
...HERE THE OLD LEWIS rears his head and shows us the character who might have been the hero of an exciting novel...
...It it the cheapest kind of modern warfare...
...As soon as she has died, Harge, though he mourns deeply for her, starts courting another woman...
...Two facts, however, are certain: Mr, Winston brings out all the human foibles of the old man...
...He loves to wear toy hats, black coats and shining boots...
...Sometimes they get caught, more often not (the "people's police" of the Soviet zone is not hard to bribe...
...INURING THE WAR Mr...
...but that becomes clear only very late in the book...
...Lewis has left them indeed, for his Aaron Gadds, the pale, fine angels...
...Aaron Gadd's religious problems ¦— the problems of Christian thought and life in 19th century America — are often treated too lightly, being expressed more by the outward idiosyncracies and prejudices of the period than by inner strife...
...Instead, the icsult is not profound but cheap — cheapening literature, ideas and the author...
...Taking all the precautions prescribed by OSS and Edgar Wallace, he managed to visit Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz and the heavily guarded uranium mine area near the Czech frontier...
...Hut tenderness and religion seldom interfere with Harge's peculiar kind of ascetic selfishness, so unrecognized by himself...
...Knop makes his feat sound harder than it is for one whose native tongue is German...
...yet his new hero is still Babbitt—rather, a caricature of Babbitt turned sentimentally progressive and intellectually ambitious, placed in 19th century frontier Minnesota...
...The book ought to be a Hollywood hit...
...Though essentially a lonely and little loved man...
...Knopf...
...If Aaron Gadd is to represent America in search of a soul (a rather unfortunate quest for a character), he and his soul are represented too simply and too much with the pointed finger...
...from food and clothes lo false papers, furniture, human flesh, counterfeit money, motor cars stolen in tha American son* with Russian blessing, guns, jewelry, and forged ration cards...
...missionaries...
...but to many Germans who lived—and still live-- in the shadow of Buchenwald, this madness makes good sense...
...Four years after the war, most of the inhabitants of once illustrious Leipzig, Dresden and, Weimar live under abject conditions, sealed off from consumers goods and ^jdeas, while the new elite of Communist functionaries, police officials and venal specialists enjoy seedy splendor...
...For a while I stood around watching, fascinated by the whispers, tha winks, tha indecent gestures, tha greedy bargaining, tha fearful glances...
...How far Mr...
...It tells the Germans in a few million well chosen words per day—over Moscow-style loudspeakers strung across leading intersections, through gigantic posters, carloads of pamphlets and newspapers—that the Western powers block the unification of Germany, exploit the Ruhr and, despite the generous Soviet offer fo evacuate the Red Army, refuse to remove their troops from Germany...
...One can see him in his shiny black coat, too worn to be elegant...
...The uranium mines are our greatest liability...
...Winston has been a faithful Eckermann or Boswell in the reporting of the talks is difficult to say...
...and many of the sayings which he reports have the true Shavian ring...
...Yet it is an unseen enemy of terrible consequence...
...The finger is rather blunt and robs Gadd of the pale life-blood he might have had...
Vol. 32 • June 1949 • No. 23
