Sinclair Lewis: The bard of discontents

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2003 by Allen, Brooke

It was similar to the way he would deal with the Communist-dominated League of American Writers, who in the politically polarized 1930s "crushingly embraced," in Lingeman's formulation, Lewis' antifascist It Can't Happen Here and honored it at a special dinner party the organization gave for Lewis. Lewis disliked the Communists' attempt to dominate the antifascist cause, and he was polite but intransigent: "Boys," he said in his speech, "I love you all, and a writer loves to have his latest book praised. But let me tell you, it isn't a very good book-I've done better books-and furthermore I don't believe any of you have read the book; if you had, you would have seen I was telling you all to go to hell. Now, boys, join arms; let all of us stand up and sing, 'Stand Up, Stand Up, for Jesus.'"

Lewis and Gracie's marriage had ended in 1928. The stress induced by the long, painful breakup, by the death of Lewis' loved and resented father in 1926, and by the pressure to finish Gantry, had made him intensify drinking habits that were already serious even by Jazz Age standards. His drinking and his hurry were evident in Gantry, the first of his books he had approached carelessly: Mencken accused him of having written the last 300,000 words "in a state of liquor." Lewis' habitual restlessness, too, began to overwhelm his creative efforts rather than to nurture them, as it had done in the past. Rebecca West, seeing him at this time, thought that "If he would sit still so that life could make any deep impression on him, if he would attach himself to the human tradition by occasionally reading a book which would set him a standard of profundity, he would give his genius a chance." But sitting still was something he simply could not do. As Ludwig Lewisohn remarked, he "seemed to have no inner certainty, no balance, no serenity, nothing between heaven and earth to which he could withdraw for quietude or healing." His next novel, Dodsworth, displayed much of the old genius, but alcohol and unhappiness were clearly, by now, taking their toll.

Lewis' second wife was as different from Gracie as it was possible to be. Dorothy Thompson was one of the foremost journalists of her day and, in the 1930s, would provide the loudest and best informed warning, in American newspapers, against Hitler and the rise of fascism all over Europe: she served as an almost lone Cassandra to an isolationist America. Her column in the New York Herald Tribune, "On the Record," launched in 1936, would make her the most influential woman in America after Eleanor Roosevelt.

Lewis, predictably, was excited by Dorothy's intelligence and independence at first, threatened by it later. She helped to mold his political views, which had always been instinctive rather than theoretical. Both of them deeply distrusted the new "isms" that were fashionable among their fellow intellectuals: not only fascism, which went without saying, but communism and socialism, though Lewis retained his essentially populist liberalism: "Even if Comm[monism] & Fax[cism] or both cover the world," he commented, "Liberal[ism] must go on, seeming futile, preserving civilization."