A Souvenir of Sinclair Lewis
FARRELL, JAMES T.
WRITERS and WRITING A Souvenir of Sinclair Lewis By James T. Farrell Sinclair Lewis was a tall, thin, nervous man with a pock-marked face. When young, his hair was red, and he was nicknamed...
...There were features of Babbitt in some of my own relatives...
...He avowed that he liked the anonymity of New York...
...All of us are contradictory...
...They failed to see the strain of feeling in the man, and they also did not understand that in Dodsivorth Sinclair Lewis was projecting something of his own problems, his own quest in life...
...He was a man of liberal spirit and of generous intentions...
...When young, his hair was red, and he was nicknamed "Red...
...I never saw him again...
...It tells the story of a hypocritical Protestant minister who has a great appetite for life and a talent for fraudulency...
...Dodsivorth presents a businessman in a less satirical light than did Babbitt...
...I was not sure that he meant this...
...But, shortly after this, Lewis accepted an assignment reviewing books for a mass-circulation magazine...
...This received excellent reviews and made a lot of money for the author...
...From time to time, some critic would declare in public that Dreiser deserved the prize more than Lewis had...
...This was exaggerated by charges and counter-charges between Dreiser and Lewis's wife, Dorothy Thompson...
...He tried to keep up with new books and would constantly recommend the work of young writers...
...And this all expressed feelings and attitudes of Lewis...
...But Lewis had become famous for his satirical characterizations and the critics had stereotyped him...
...1 wanted to read more and more...
...He was genial and felt quite at ease...
...Several times during the evening, he remarked on how American writers do not see enough of each other and do not talk enough about the problems of writing...
...His confidence in himself seemed to have been somewhat shattered...
...In New York, he remarked, he could walk along the streets and not be recognized...
...At present, his books are not fashionable with the newer generations of American critics...
...But once again,he mentioned the isolation of American writers...
...There was an element of cultural yearning in Sinclair Lewis...
...They accused one another of plagiarism when they both published books concerning a visit to the Soviet Union...
...And they were different kinds of men...
...He denounced the Moscow Trials of the 1930s as frauds, and in the 1940s he supported President Roosevelt for re-election...
...Besides Main Street and Babbitt, his best books are Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth...
...I believed that my parody would amuse Sinclair Lewis...
...I was struck by Lewis's loneliness...
...He should not write criticism, engage in controversies or become involved in politics...
...I came to know Sinclair Lewis, but not intimately, in the 1940s...
...Dreiser pioneered in realistic fiction in America, and met the assaults, attacks and smears of many philistines and of Victorian-minded literary critics, professors and prudes...
...On another occasion in the 1940s, I had dinner at his home...
...I wanted to protest against the sentimental and forward-looking gospel of service which Babbitt voiced...
...Finally, the author died and a biography of him, worse than the book and the successive adaptations, was then written, and once again more money was made and the mills of fame kept on grinding away...
...I believed that all this bothered Lewis...
...My bosses and superiors in the big oil corporation for which I worked as a filling-station attendant talked like Babbitt...
...It is a true characterization, written with feeling...
...And 1 did not want the book to end...
...This novel was a great discovery to me and I read in a slate of intense excitement...
...I voiced a strong objection to some of the newer American critics and said that they ought to be attacked...
...I saw the trails of Lewis's real-estate dealer...
...This will change, and Lewis's place in both American and world literature will be sure and firm...
...He saw it as the image of more culture...
...He was not as certain of himself as he seemed or as one would possibly assume...
...From then on, I said, in parody, a worse musical show, a worse moving picture, a worse radio play and a worse television adaptation would produce a fortune...
...Lewis did not actively engage in political affairs, but now and then he would take a stand on an issue...
...He also spoke of his native Minnesota and said it was changing and was becoming more cultivated...
...I grew indignant...
...She revolts against the parochialism of her home town...
...His books emphasize the gap he observed between a world of culture and sophistication and the provincialism of his native small town of Minnesota...
...I first read Babbitt when I was 22 and a college student...
...They lectured us at sales meetings as Babbitt might have...
...Lewis became one of the writers who helped me to try and liberate myself...
...In America, Elmer Gantry has often been underrated and treated as too much of a burlesque...
...He said that they live separate lives and see too little of one another...
...There seems to have been little sustenance for him in his fame and success...
...He helped us to see aspects of America more clearly, to create the moods and develop the attitudes which went into the great reforms of the Roosevelt New Deal...
...The worse the work became in the successive adaptations, the more the money rolled in and the greater became the author's fame...
...Sometimes, I believe he was sentimental and over-praised young writers...
...The well of loneliness was closing around him, and beyond it was the shadow of approaching death...
...They look down on writers like Lewis, just as they do on Dreiser and Zola...
...Hi- loneliness was related to some ambivalence in his nature...
...George Babbitt, in people I knew...
...On the contrary, he took personal offense...
...Lewis often paid tribute to Dreiser for the lonely and courageous struggle he had made as a realistic writer...
...He dismissed it as a religion...
...I said that the way to become a great writer was to write a bad book...
...He told friends that it was proper that I should have done this, and liked my retaliating...
...Now and then, in a newspaper or magazine, someone would remark that the Nobel Prize had never been awarded to Theodore Dreiser but it had been given to Lewis...
...I sat beside him at a dinner...
...Businessmen interviewed in the newspapers often suggested Babbitt...
...He disagreed with me, declaring that a writer must save all of his energy for creative effort...
...One of Lewis's finest traits was his generosity of spirit...
...It was not that he was insincere, however...
...I read not only in excitement but also in a growing mood of rebellion...
...In fact, he was more influential than any American writers of the twentieth century, except perhaps Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and H. L. Mencken...
...His books had big sales all over the world...
...He wrote of attitudes which I had seen and heard many times, but of which I had not heretofore become conscious...
...At a dinner given in honor of the Russian writer Boris Pilnyak in the early 1930s, Dreiser publicly slapped Lewis in the face...
...He yearned and sought for the bigger world...
...But he also liked New York...
...I suspect that there was a definite feeling of rivalry between Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser...
...We talked of Communism...
...He enjoyed discovering new young writers and praising them in public and in literary reviews...
...Not only is it amusing, but it is also a very true rendering of a type...
...I recall an evening when my wife and I had dinner with him at Luchow's, a restaurant which he, H. L. Mencken and other friends of theirs liked and frequented...
...The main character of this work is Carol Kennicott, a culturally frustrated and yearning housewife in a small town in a Middle Western state like Minnesota...
...During his lifetime, he won as much recognition as perhaps any living novelist...
...I recall a regrettable personal experience with Sinclair Lewis...
...He attacked me in print, and after having been pressed by a journalist to say something, I made a retaliatory remark...
...He believed that writers should attack one another, a view in contradiction with what he had several times told me of his feelings about the loneliness and isolation of writers...
...Lewis recognized this, but the two men did not really like each other...
...He performed this role for many others of my generation...
...All writers who came after Dreiser have owed much to him for his struggle...
...One evening, he came to my home for dinner...
...James T. Farrell is author of two dozen works of realistic fiction, including the Studs Lonigan trilogy...
...There was some doubt and insecurity in him about his own literary position and talent...
...He added the word "Babbitt" not only to the American language, but also to other languages...
...I was talking in a bantering manner, and I had no thought of him personally in some remarks which I made...
...I mention the contradictions in Lewis here in order to suggest that he was a man seeking something which he could not find...
...Then a play, worse than the book but based on it, would make even more money and the writer of the bad book would become more famous...
...He spoke warmly...
...almost lovingly, of Minnesota, of his family, of a brother who had become a doctor...
...To us, he was a much more important and influential writer than Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner...
...He died in Italy in 1951, a lonely man...
...It deals with a trip to Europe by this businessman, and it reveals a searching and seeking quality that was part of Lewis's own character...
...He was a celebrity himself, and he had come to care more for the association of celebrities than for relationships with other people...
...My generation in America was profoundly influenced by Lewis...
...He was far away from the America which, despite his sharp satires, he loved...
...He was the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize...
...But it is better to overpraise even out of sentimentality than to neglect and ignore...
...Dreiser was more self-centered and paid less attention to the literary scene and to young writers...
...Lewis's novel revealed to me aspects of American life with which I had grown up...
...He was quite relayed, mellowed, and in a mood which was almost sentimental...
...And he felt that he had roots in that smaller world which he had satirized out of a feeling of angry love...
...The accounts of his last days are sad to read...
...Then, we commented on contemporary American literary criticism...
...And he was one of the outstanding American writers of this century...
...His first big success was the novel Main Street...
...I laughed...
...Because of the fact that he did not rewrite Babbitt, Dodsworth was criticized on its appearance...
Vol. 38 • November 1955 • No. 45
