CONTEMPORARY WRITERS, BRITISH AND AMERICAN

II. Sinclair Lewis

T HAS already been said that Sinclair Lewis writes notebooks

IT

and not novels. That his characters are not characters but masses of detail. That his plots are not plots: that Babbitt and Main Street could go backward quite as well as forward and nobody the wiser. And that Mr. Lewis is not essentially an artist.

All of it is true in a measure, and all really represents one fact. Sinclair Lewis believes in notebooks. When only an editor of the YALE LIT. he is supposed to have said, to the neophytes at some remote Smoker, "Keep a notebook! and watch the back of the neck of the man in front of you." And there are some who would say that Lewis himself-with a notebook-has been scrutinizing the back of the American bull neck ever since.

He certainly hasn't been looking in men's eyes. Nor reading their souls. He has been watching coldly, and at a distance, and with an inhuman attention to detail, the externals. He has photographed, you may say, and even his photographs are not sympathetic Camera Studies; they are passport snapshots-with plenty of detail and no Soul.

Of course it will be admitted immediately that Mr. Lewis has an array of detail in his novels that nobody remotely interested in modern America can afford to neglect. Mr. Lewis is a camera in every keyhole. Mr. Lewis is a microphone in every home. Mr. Lewis has a perfect and terrible reporterial knowledge of routine American life that no living writer can match. The question is only Don't his pictures lack Soul? Isn't there something he forgot to report? Hasn't he left out Spiritual Values, with all his Cold Accuracy?

Not necessarily. Remember that the Soul, in literature, is after all only selected detail. A few selected qualities in an individual,

an age, or a class are usually emphasized by recurrence till familiarity with these qualities seems to the unwary reader an understanding of the Soul. Thus the author "gives us the Soul" merely by with-holding the other details.

Lewis doesn't give us Souls simply because he doesn't with-hold details. He would rather show Babbitt washing his teeth and brushing his bald-spot than not. He would rather record a hundred pages of futile conversation-if it were true to life, and it always is than leave it out. You might call Lewis a Champion of the Individual, for there is nothing so trivial in any humdrum life that he is content to neglect it entirely.

Perhaps he is doing what some of the modern poets are doing— Sandburg, for example. They believe in giving the material of poetry and not the form: Lewis gives the material of his artAmerican life graphically described and leaves out the Soul, the selection, and the art.

For it will be no critical novelty to say Lewis is not greatest as an artist. He is master of the sentence, to be sure: the sentence is the unit of power in all his work. But he seldom handles a whole incident of any length with success, and almost never gets big effects. There is little sustained art in Lewis. His plots, for instance, are decidedly of the wounded-snake variety-however much (to take up the snake comparison, rather indecently) every burnished scale of the inert length glistens and shoots fire.

It is interesting, in connection with this lack of sustained art in his work, to notice how often the adjective Tin-panny has been applied to Lewis. How often his literary tone has been called, not loud, but shrill. And then to find justification for such criticism in, say, the grand climax of Main Street: Carol's noble profession of faith and her husband's "Where's the screw-driver". If we are emotionally roused at all by that, it is hardly higher than a giggle.

Lewis has his limitations as a novelist, decidedly, which makes it all the more fortunate that we need not consider him only, or even mainly, as such. Elmer Davis has called him a "sociological reporter". His works, as almost everybody has pointed out, clearly parallel the sociological novels of Wells, and as H. S. Canby has pointed out, they are also "successors and companions of the

wrathful studies of Charles Kingsley, the moral epics of George Eliot, the colloquial satires of Mark Twain, and the first biting plays of Shaw". Reform literature in the best Victorian tradition!

Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, far more than they are novels, are good, comprehensive, hostile descriptions of our civilization in its materialistic stage. If they survive our day it will be as pictures of the time-group photographs of the American monsters of the first quarter of the century. They will not survive as great works of satire-Lewis is not a great satirist, however much he would like to be-they may survive as fiercely accurate mimicry by a man with malice in his heart and a note-book mind.

One fact, though, America today should appreciate. Sinclair Lewis' great concern is always America. Flaccid America was the villain of Main Street; and of Babbitt; and of Arrowsmith; and now Mr. Lewis has so loved the world of fat-headed America once more as to give us Elmer Gantry. We ought to appreciate it. We ought to applaud his affectionate heart; and instead most people don't even see the point.

It wasn't only the preachers Lewis was attacking in Elmer, nor mainly the preachers, but America, that lets them get away with it. He wasn't trying to prove all ministers are Gantrys, any more than Uncle Tom's Cabin proved all slave-owners were Legrees: it was enough there should be one, going unpunished. Elmer Gantry is an attack on the ignorance and indifference of the American people, Canby says, and "from the first low cackle of the prologue to the last gigantic obscenity" (quoting Mencken) "it is American."

Mr. Mencken would say so. Of course, it is his picture of America, just as it is his view of religion written in his brand of satire. If there ever was a grand Revival Meeting for the cult of Mencken, Elmer Gantry is it. Utterly reckless, feckless, lawless and Godless in its methods. Like Mr. Mencken. Violently in love with fireworks and Frightfulness. Like Mr. Mencken. With a frenzied faith in the sovereign efficacy of knocking. Like Mr, Mencken. And aimed full at the heads of the discontented Young People who Think.

And yet we need not believe Lewis is "copying" Mencken, or

kowtowing before his throne. All of Lewis' work shows the same fundamental aims that come out-more boisterously-in Elmer. He believes in Intelligence, as Mencken does, and Intelligence above all things. Intelligence can kick away the rubbish of the old creeds, or the business-man's shibboleths, and asks nothing to Take its Place. Intelligence enjoys chaos and battens on anarchy. Art has no place in It, because Art simplifies, and the Intelligence needs only the facts. There is no System and Philosophy in It: systems are for weaklings; Intelligence needs no philosophy. But let their be much loose Detail in It, for the Strong Intellect can't get too much.

THOMAS COPELAND

THI

Excuse Me

HINGS like that go deep when you're a kid-and that's all I was, a kid of seventeen still in high school. You'd think that, being a city boy, I wouldn't have been so simple, but the city never hit me that way. The old woman was always after me about things like not counting my change and not standing up for myself, and the wife is the same way now. I suppose they're right, and I'm pretty much of a softy. But I get my fifty a week regular from the Company, and that's all I want. No, it ain't all I want, but its all I dare to want. I might look for more and I might get it. Then I might not. I'm scared to take the chance. Life is too hard or I'm too soft. Put it any way you want. Maybe I'm just a boob.

I certainly am with the women. I feel funny when I'm with them-like I was talking to some one I didn't know very well. So I don't make much of a hit with them. The wife says that I act as if her women friends were going to bite me. "They won't hurt you," she says. Well, I don't know. . . Anyway, I guess I'm not much of a ladies' man. And I think it all goes back to this business on the Fall River boat. Things like that sort of dig into you when you're a kid, you know.

You see, I was going to visit some relations of my mother's in New Bedford. I wouldn't let none of the family come down to the pier with me because I was afraid the old woman would kiss me or something and I wanted to look like a grown man and not

high school kid like I was. Like one of those tough taxi drivers that hang around garages all day, making cigarettes and talking loud out of the side of their mouths. I wanted to be hardboiled, or make people think I was-that's about the same thing anyway, I guess. There was a funny river smell about the pier, and I caught a sight of the big curve of the steamer's white sides as I went up the gangplank that sent a thrill down my neck.

You wouldn't believe the noise those nigger porters made in the downstairs saloon or whatever they call it, running around as if they were off their nut, jumping in and out among the people, waving their white gloves around, and talking all the time. The