Silly Babbitt. - "Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street" - book review

National Review, March 11, 2002 by Terry Teachout

Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street, by Richard Lingeman (Random House, 656 pp., $35)

The best way to jump-start a novelist's reputation -- or to kill it -- is to write his biography. Forty-one years ago, Mark Schorer performed the latter act upon the sodden corpse of Sinclair Lewis by publishing an 867-page autopsy report. Elegantly written but seemingly endless, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life was the first of the big-time blockbuster pathographies, the story of an unlikable alcoholic who somehow contrived to produce Main Street and Elmer Gantry in between benders. Unlike most of its offspring, it was reasonably sympathetic -- but not to Lewis's work, for which Schorer had little use, calling him "one of the worst writers in modern American literature."

Richard Lingeman, by contrast, comes not to bury Lewis but to exhume him; and his agenda, as befits a senior editor of The Nation, is not even slightly hidden:

Schorer's biography was a product of its time, the time of the silent 1950s, the era of the anticommunist culture war in academe, the heyday of the New Critics, who placed text above social context. In more recent years, scholars have succeeded in viewing Lewis's books through different critical lenses, with the result that his works have come back into repute.

Had this predigested snippet of conventional academic wisdom been placed at the beginning of Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street instead of the end, I wouldn't have bothered to read the rest of the book, especially since my previous encounter with the author's prose style, his numbingly pedestrian two-volume biography of Theodore Dreiser, didn't exactly whet my appetite for his thoughts on the life and work of Sinclair Lewis. Fortunately, though, Lingeman has learned to play a better game than he talks. While I'm far from certain that Lewis needed a new biography, this one has the virtue of being 200 pages shorter than Schorer is, and it is dully but decently written. What's more, Lingeman mainly sticks to matters of fact, saving most of the sermonizing for a brief, fatuous epilogue that the unsympathetic reader may skip with a clear conscience: "His iconoclasm chimed with America's coming of age after World War I, but he wrote with a real moral passion. He really cared." (Italics in the original, believe it or not.)

If you don't know anything about Lewis's life, rest assured that the facts are all here, and as depressing as ever. A small-town boy who longed for the rich, full life, he made a pile writing uplifting short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, then bit the hand that fed him with Main Street, a novel about the spiritual poverty of small-town life that wowed the high-minded middlebrows and brought him even more money (nothing succeeds like self-hatred). He was the first American novelist to win a Nobel Prize, no doubt because he told Europe exactly what it wanted to hear -- that America was full of boobs and boors. He married a social climber, whom he left for a bisexual newspaper columnist, after which he took up with an 18-year-old actress; unable to cope with the rigors of celebrity, he anesthetized himself with alcohol, which made him noisy and garrulous, and increasingly friendless. He died in Italy in 1951, having long outlived his talent, and the obituaries were cruel, dismissing him as a ham-fisted satirist whose once-celebrated novels were now faded period pieces.

Was there really more to Sinclair Lewis than that? As Lingeman reminds us, H. L. Mencken, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Edith Wharton (to whom Babbitt is dedicated) all thought so. Mencken described Main Street as "well written, and full of a sharp sense of comedy, and rich in observation, and competently designed," while Woolf, amazingly enough, called Babbitt "the equal of any novel written in English in the present century." Yet their praise not infrequently had a sting in the tail: West, for example, argued that despite his undeniable gifts, Lewis did not in the end "fulfill that necessary condition of the satirist. He has not entered into imaginative possession of those qualities the lack of which he derides in others."

For all its implicit snobbery, this criticism has the sharp ring of truth. At the same time, it also suggests an important aspect of what gives Lewis's best books such enduring interest as they possess. Unlike so many of the small-town boys who shook the dust of Main Street from their feet and spent the rest of their lives writing contemptuously about it, Lewis never fully succeeded in turning his back on the provincial world of his youth. He couldn't: It was bred into him. Time and again, those who knew him noted that he bore a strong family resemblance to George F. Babbitt, the loud-talking, well-meaning, all- American philistine whom Mencken took to be "an almost perfect specimen -- a genuine museum piece."

The trouble with Babbitt, of course, is not that it isn't accurate, but that it is obvious to the point of painfulness. I hadn't looked at Lewis's best-remembered novel since high school, but Lingeman's praise made me curious to see how it held up, so I picked up a copy and spent the next couple of hours wincing. To read Babbitt eight decades after its publication is to be struck by how much of its social portraiture has retained its point, but Lewis could never stop himself from overegging the pudding, piling detail upon detail until you finally lose all patience with him. And though he had a near-infallible ear for the rhythms of American speech, he was incapable of writing well enough to clearly differentiate his own voice from those of his characters, a grievous error in a novelist who sought above all things to portray the sheer crassness of middle-class America: