BAFFLING LEWIS

...So here it all is, sometimes literally blow-by-blow: the spotty Midwestern boyhood...

...World So Wide, his last novel, sounded to many critical readers like a bad parody of Main Street...

...That is one reason why many of us will continue, even after the disheartening disclosures of this book, to cherish Sinclair Lewis, and to find him valiant and important and necessary...

...He has also engaged his story in a dialectic of his own that makes Sinclair Lewis an extraordinary achievement...

...the intensive drinking followed by stiffly puritanical abstention...

...The novel never got written, though Lewis did accumulate data for it, and more than once called on Debs, for whom he had the greatest respect...

...Nor is there any definite place in which he can be located and so defined...

...Lewis's impulse, however, was deep-rooted and genuine...

...This is because Lewis somehow occupied more human and literary space over three decades, brushed against more edges of the world we have been busy knowing, than any other American writer...

...The source of Lewis's satire," Schorer soundly observes, "lies in the American defection from the American potentiality lor individual freedom...

...and the chaotic, collapsing days in Florence and Rome...

...Reviewed by R. W. B. Lewis ly^ark Schorer's Sinclair Lewis is in almost every way too big and too long: too big to hold comfortably, too long relative to the substance and significance of the subject...

...the parallel marriages to and divortej from the New York publishing houses...

...nor, indeed, was the Twentieth Century after about 1925...

...Hal, listen please, this is Dorothy...

...but occasionally it deepened into mimesis proper, into the "imitation"—almost in the classical sense— of a truly significant action...

...the frequently grotesque public behavior, the hopeless misunderstandings, fiascos, and disasters...

...Running through the long account like a comic motif is Lewis's periodic determination to write a "labor novel," a book at one time to be called The Man Who Sought God, with a hero based on Eugene Debs...

...and his story could have been told with radiant compactness...

...the continuingly huge public popularity and rewards (in 1945, Lewis earned $500,000 from Cass Timberlane before publication, and that virtually unreadable novel has by now sold 1,140,000 copies...

...Another and related reason, which Schoror's biography curiously strengthens, is the sense almost anyone over thirty-five must have (if he has been living in America and reading books) of a lively personal relation with Lewis, with his life and his novels and even his carryings-on...

...In any case, Lewis's special talent, which at one time was immense, wrought its own kind of destruction...

...But the size of this work is perhaps a sort of atonement for the author's general lack of sympathy and admiration for Lewis, even for the almost detectable revulsion of a writer of highly cultivated sensibility from Lewis's artistic crudity and his maddeningly unfocused ("aesthetically unorganized") vitality...

...It is unlikely that Lewis could have done much with this material...

...Beyond that, it is the effect of Schorer's argument to make at least this reviewer conclude with a higher estimate of the best of Lewis's fiction than Schorer himself seems ready to allow...

...If he could have been identified, his life could seem to enact a purpose, however unfortunate, and a theme...

...When he scolded America it was because Americans would not be free, and he attacked all the sources by means of which they betrayed themselves . . . The individual impulse to freedom and the social impulse to restrict it provide the bases of plots in novel after novel after novel...

...the series of novels—Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth—that led to the Nobel award in 1930...

...Lewis appears in these pages as a figure who—like many of his novels —was all surface and no core...

...As it was, the best biographical method, one gathers, was to pile up the endless facts, dates, names, incidents, encounters—ordering them only in Schorer's glum, elementary structure of six chapters, from "Small Town" and "College" through "Climb" to "Success" and thence through "Decline" to "Fall...

...One of several qualities in Lewis that emerges regularly from this crowded tale is his very considerable talent for mimicry...

...At innumerable private parties, Lewis enthralled his fellow-guests with improvised imitations of anybody and anything from the poetry of Longfellow, Swinburne, and Tennyson to the speech habits of his contemporaries, his friends, and his wives...

...One begins to suspect that it was this talent rather than a creative talent that was chiefly at work in Lewis's fiction...

...He was always, Schorer says, "leaving the unsatisfactory elsewhere, returning to the inadequate nowhere...

...the fumbling early novels, the unprecedented success of Main Street (1920) and then Babbitt (1922...

...the miraculous powers of self-recovery and the absolute dedication to sometimes frenzied but always astonishingly meticulous work...

...The mimetic ability was dominant...

...the eager, bruising days at Yale...

...and that the baffling refusal to render a firmly shaped and meaningful reality was due to a technique that did not attempt to grasp and dramatize a reality but rather to mimic the out-sides of persons and places and things...

...One is hard put to make out any essence in the man...

...the growing intimacy with Chauncey B. Tinker and William Lyons Phelps...

...This happens in Babbitt, where the action is no doubt pathetic, the thwarted groping back to some freedom remembered only in foolish dreams, but where the action is also that of a society betraying a deeply recognizable and touching hopefulness, an instinct to believe, to enthuse, to assert...

...I am by no means sure that such re-evaluation is not a part of Schorer's intention...

...Minnesota was not his spiritual or actual home, nor was New York or Hollywood or London or Munich or Florence...

...He had from adolescence onward a steady vein of what Schorer calls "undefined socialism," and his capacity for outrage at every form of intolerance, any encroachment on individual freedom endured undiminished...

...And in a hair-raising scene from real life, Sinclair Lewis, in a New York hospital after an explosive bout of drinking and furniture-smashing, attacked Dorothy Thompson with a tirade in which he mimicked her pleading with him: "Hal, be your old self, be some thing...

...Hear...

...George F. Babbitt had moved into the archetypes," he acknowledges...

...but he had only the most limited awareness of the potential drama in history, and he was not equipped to cut through those externals to the perennial human dilemmas...

...the first writing for the Yale Lit and the first publications in New York...

...he might have worked up the externals of the labor movement, as he did the externals of the medical profession for Arrowsmith or the hotel business for Work of Art...

...the awkward, gangling efforts to "find a girl," the tangled confusions of his first marriage to Grace Hegger, the gradual uproar of his second to Dorothy Thompson, the elderly relationship with the actress Marcella Powers...

...I don't think they were there...

...His restless journeys across America and Europe, his constant and bewildering buying and selling of houses only made palpable a lack of psychic and imaginative settlement...

...And though he honors that event less than he might and makes too little of Edith Wharton's extremely clear-eyed admiration for Lewis, Schorer has not only amassed everything we need lor our own judgments...

...the wildly unpredictable spurts of generosity, venom, artistic reverence and hatred, sanity and lunacy...

...Probably many guesses have been made . . . about the hidden depths of Sinclair Lewis," wrote an acute student of his in a writing class at the University of Wisconsin (1942...