Sinclair Lewis: The bard of discontents

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2003 by Allen, Brooke

But Dorothy's high-powered career was more than the insecure Lewis could quite stand, and whatever her original ideas about sacrificing herself for her genius husband might have been, they soon flickered out in the face of his overwhelming neediness.

I say to myself, "You are totally unimportant and you are married to a man of genius-if you give up your life to make him happy it is worth it." But it isn't! It isn't! I can really do nothing for him. He is like a vampire-he absorbs all my vitality, all my energy, all my beauty-I get incredibly dull. If ever I begin to talk well he interrupts the conversation. . . . He is completely without consideration of me, yet he protests with the greatest tenderness that he loves me, and it is true he does.

The couple would eventually divorce in 1942, after years of unhappiness. Lewis had managed, somehow, to quit drinking, and he kept turning out novels, some of which were quite successful, notably Ann Vickers (1933), It Can't Happen Here (1935), Cass Timberlane (1945), and Kingsblood Royal (1947), an attack on racism which was quite a bit ahead of its time and won Ebony magazine's annual prize for the book that did the most to promote interracial understanding. But none of these books attained anything like the level of Lewis' great novels of the 1920s, a fact of which he was sadly aware. For a while you have it, "the old bite, the old sting," he said, lecturing a fellow-novelist, but then it's gone. The aging writer tries to hang on to his gift, and occasionally "the old boy coils up and down and rattles and strikes. 'By God, he actually did it again,' they'll say. But after awhile when some of the sting dies, it becomes apparent it was a hollow show. That he didn't have it at all anymore."

By the time of his death in 1951, Lewis was washed up personally and professionally. Even his best novels had gone out of fashion and were regarded merely as quaint relics of a cruder, rawer age. His rehabilitation is long overdue. Main Street can be called without reservation one of the great American novels-one of the great novels of any country-and Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, and Arrowsmith still pack a large punch. Circumstances and details are different, but in reading any of these books it is quite shocking to see how little the essential, mainstream America has changed since the 1920s. When Lewis writes of the medium-sized city "with its overwhelming menacing heresy hunt, its narrow-eyed (and damned capable) crushing [of] anything threatening its commercial oligarchy," can we say that things are any different today, or indeed that this mentality and these tactics are confined to the medium-sized city?

Lewis criticized Zenith, his fictional metropolis, for what Lingeman calls its "Chamber of Commerce ethos of growth for growth's sake and the American belief that material progress is the only progress, measured now by the proportion of cars to people." Again, what is so different? We no longer measure progress in terms of car ownership, since most of us who need cars now have them. We measure it, instead, in terms of consumer frenzy at the malls during the Christmas shopping season and declare that the more dollars spent, the "healthier" our country is-no matter how useless the items purchased, or how deeply into credit-card debt the shoppers have sunk.