Sinclair Lewis: Rebel From Main Street
By Richard Lingeman
Random House, 659 pages, $35
It was inevitable that Sinclair Lewis and Richard Lingeman would collide. Lingeman, the pride of Crawfordsville, Ind. (“the Hoosier Athens”), has built an impressive career as a chronicler of small-town America, with emphasis on the Midwest. His fine biography of Theodore Dreiser pointed him in a literary direction, and the logical next step was a study of Lewis, who built his literary edifice on Dreiser’s foundation (though they quarreled bitterly, as Lewis quarreled with everyone he ever met). No writer ever did more to place the Midwest at the front and center of American literature.
Lingeman’s is a brave undertaking. Lewis has been giving headaches to his admirers ever since he burst onto the scene with his first triumph, “Main Street,” which affronted a too-easily-shocked America when it appeared in 1920. He followed that triumph with one of the most extraordinary decades of literary productivity in the history of this or any country: “Babbitt” (1922), “Arrowsmith” (1925), “Elmer Gantry” (1927), “Dodsworth” (1929) and a host of fugitive writings. For this hastily assembled catalog, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930, the first American to be so honored (he narrowly beat out Dreiser, perhaps because Lewis’ native Minnesota has more Swedes than Dreiser’s Indiana). Lewis also made scads of money, thereby alienating just about every other American writer except Edith Wharton (who was richer) and H.L. Mencken (who didn’t care). Then, a long and agonizing decline set in, punctuated by spasms of the old genius (“It Can’t Happen Here,” 1935), but still irrevocable, abject and total. In 1951 his ruined body finally gave out. Appropriately, this restless seeker died in Rome, the terminus of so many unfulfilled pilgrimages.
Had Lewis died at the height of his powers, say in 1932, he would be lionized still. His reckless life of overwork and hard play appeals perfectly to our Vanity Fair culture, and I’d wager he could drink Charlie Sheen under the table. But the problem, then as now, is that he lived too long and sold too many books to be taken seriously as an artist. Hemingway hated him for his popularity, wealth and garrulity (he wrote, “Sinclair Lewis is nothing”). But of course, Hemingway became far more popular, and now we can buy clothing and knicknacks from glossy catalogs with his craggy likeness trademarked and emblazoned on every surface. Could Lewis have dreamt up a more sublime vengeance?
An argument can be made (and was by John Updike in a recent New Yorker) that we do not need another Lewis biography. It’s true that this new volume has done little to displace Mark Schorer’s comprehensive 1961 study. But by writing this book, Lingeman has literally forced Lewis’ garish face before us again (the cover shows Lewis glowering at the would-be buyer from an uncomfortably close angle). That’s a good thing. In researching Lewis at my small-town library, I pulled a book at random off the shelf and saw that it had not been checked out since February 10, 1958. Sinclair Lewis deserves better from his people — a people he loved, even if he did not like them much.
The story proceeds at a rapid clip, in keeping with Lewis’ pell-mell existence. It opens, naturally, in Sauk Centre, Minn., the small town (Gopher Prairie in “Main Street”) that once shuttered itself against the chill winds of Lewis’ satire but now claims him proudly as a native son. His difficult childhood was followed by an equally hard time at Yale University, which never cottoned to the uncouth outsider. But like so many misfits, he found solace in his ability to devise an alternate reality in writing.
After moving to Greenwich Village and absorbing its bohemian currents, Lewis fell in love with and, in 1914, married Grace Hegger. She was charming and pretentious (she tried to spell his name St. Clair Lewis, but no one bought it), and Gracie and “Hal” found genuine happiness in their early years together. Lingeman is at his best describing their free-spirited romps across the country in a flivver, trips in which Lewis gathered material for the fusillade he was about to launch against the American boobeoisie. From that moment on, Lewis never stopped traveling or drinking (I assume he never joined either AA or AAA).
These road trips taught the young observer that the residents of his native land were just as herdlike as the buffalo who had roamed freely a generation or two earlier. “Main Street” punctured small-town orthodoxies, but it was only prep work for the brilliant satire of “Babbitt,” which took on a larger community (Cincinnati) and perfectly captured the selfish concerns and conversations of Warren Harding’s America. The next novels, “Arrowsmith,” “Elmer Gantry” and “Dodsworth” were nearly as good.
When Lewis was awarded the Nobel, he jokingly but correctly predicted that it was a fatal blow. After, he could never write as well, though he remained news fodder.
The pressures of constant touring and writing eventually took a toll on his marriage, and in 1928 Lewis and Gracie divorced. A month later, Lewis married Dorothy Thompson, a distinguished journalist who was one of the first to sniff out the Nazi menace. They became America’s first two-career celebrity couple and inspired the great Tracy-Hepburn vehicle “Woman of the Year.” But this curious pairing was doomed to failure through exhaustion and exasperation, and the final third of the book chronicles the depressing degradation of Lewis’ talent through drink and frivolity.
To Lingeman’s credit, the story moves along at a vigorous pace. He doesn’t linger overlong on any issue, but always drives the narrative forward. He’s especially good at capturing the work of writing: Lewis seems always to be speaking, listening and typing furiously with his two index fingers. In his prime, he cranked out 5,000 words a day.
But Lingeman’s pace brings some shallowness. If you are already well-versed in the aftermath of World War I, or the Sacco and Vanzetti case, or the Depression and New Deal, then you will not be bothered by a rapid-fire treatment of these topics. But I thought the book needed more historical and psychological shading. There is not enough on Lewis’ political views (his enthusiasm for labor leader Eugene Debs and progressive Wisconsinite Robert La Follette again show the restless Midwesterner inside him). There is not enough probing of his psyche, admittedly a dark place to root around. We learn exactly what Lewis looked like, including his ravaged face (Hemingway wrote brutishly, “it looked as pock-marked and blemished as the mountains of the moon seen through a cheap telescope”). But even after 500 pages, the man himself — Harry, Hal, Red, Sinclair — remains a cipher.
That’s not totally Lingeman’s fault. To an extent, the blame rests on Lewis’ gangly shoulders. It’s exhausting to read the incessant catalog of short-term apartments he rented, and petty feuds he started, and writing assignments he either performed poorly or brilliantly, depending on how much he’d been drinking. Lingeman heroically follows Lewis from lair to lair, like Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs Bunny, but after hundreds of pages, the effort weighs on writer and reader alike. If it’s Tuesday, this must be “Dodsworth.”
Yet the attempt to resurrect Lewis is important and should not be dismissed lightly. In everything he did, including his colossal failures, Lewis revealed a scope of ambition that set the tone for the American century. “[N]ever forget that you’re competing with Shakespeare,” he told a class of writing students. He and Hemingway were not so different, which may have been the source of their troubles.
The life of Sinclair Lewis still holds more meaning than the members of the academic community who exclude him want to admit (God how he would parody them if he could!). Certainly it holds meaning in the Midwest, where Lewis situated all but six of his 22 novels. He inherited a great angry literary tradition from the likes of Hamlin Garland, George Ade, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters, and passed it along enhanced to the Young Turks who came after him. If it is true that he never wrote a book as good as “Sister Carrie,” he still wrote “Babbitt” and “Elmer Gantry,” as good a study of religion as anything since “The Scarlet Letter.” Only David Mamet can compete with him for capturing the language of American commerce.
I found myself missing Lewis the more I read about him. There’s just so much cant that he could have sunk his teeth into over the last 50 years: freaky fads in the ’60s, self-actualization seminars in the ’70s, savings-and-loan scandals in the ’80s, dot-com narcissism in the ’90s and the backslapping Enron culture of corporate irresponsibility that we are now laboring to get out from under. And you just know he would have loved the Salt Lake City Olympics: weepy human-interest stories, crooked judges and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!
This book is not perfect, befitting its subject. But it has given us a chance to reassess a major American artist shrouded in near total darkness. And it has given us a new reason to see our own country, as Lewis did in his Nobel address, as “an America that is as strange as Russia and as complex as China,” an America deserving “a literature worthy of her vastness.”
In everything he did, including his colossal failures, Sinclair Lewis revealed a scope of ambition that set the tone for the American century.
