Books: Laureate of the Boobolsie

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CASS TIMBERLANE—Sinclair Lewis—Random House ($2.75).

On Main Street one day last week George F. Babbitt, Booster, ran into Honest Jim Blausser, Hustler. Above them (in the words of their creator, Novelist Sinclair Lewis) “the towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist.”

Said Honest Jim: “I certainly was astonished in the streets of our lovely little city, the other day—a knocker!”

“Who d’ya mean?”

“Harry S. Lewis from Gopher Prairie—I mean Sauk Centre—this writing fellow that calls himself Sinclair Lewis.”

“Well now, Jim,” said George Babbitt; “maybe you hadn’t ought to be too hard on old Red Lewis. You don’t want to forget he made me and you and. . . .”

“Sure, how can I forget it? And he made us and this Great Country the laughing stock of the whole world, didn’t he?”

“Well, now, Jim, I don’t know that you should look at it just that way. Say, did you hear that Lewis got nearly 500,000 smackers for this new book of his before it was even published?”

“Five hundred thousand bucks! You mean they gave him all that money just to write a book? Why, that’s half a million dollars!”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s Big Money. Why, with all that we made for him in those other books—if this socialistic income tax didn’t take most of it away from him—he must be a millionaire. Why, he’s Big Business.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now the way I think, this Lewis kind of put you and me and this place on the map. He certainly is a funny bird, but it’s like in sales-pulling letters, you can give the clients the lovey-dovey stuff or you can give ’em the old one-two. Red Lewis gives ’em the old one-two. So they give him $500,000. That’s just sound business practice. Maybe Lewis wasn’t so dumb after all. He certainly knew where the duck was going to fall.”

“Say, George, I certainly am glad you put it that way, I might have gone around knocking this fellow Lewis. This writing certainly is a queer business, but I want to tell you, and it’s just as sure as God made little apples, the thing that distinguishes our American commonwealth from the pikers and tinhorns in other countries is our Punch. You take a genu-wine, honest-to-God homo Americanibus and there ain’t anything he’s afraid to tackle. Snap and speed are his middle name! He’ll put her across if he has to ride from hell to breakfast, and believe me I’m mighty good and sorry for the boob that’s so unlucky as to get in his way, because that poor slob is going to wonder where he was at when old Red Lewis hit town! Do you suppose we could get old Red into Rotary some day?” “Wouldn’t be surprised, it’s a changing world,” said George F. Babbitt wistfully.

Golden Horseshoe. The man whose literary killing was of such inflaming interest to George F. Babbitt and Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson was in Man hattan last week. He had breezed in from his newly acquired 15-room Tudor man sion on Duluth’s lake front to:

¶ Haunt Manhattan’s better taprooms in dismal abstinence (Lewis, once no mean tosspot, is under strict doctor’s orders not to touch liquor).

¶ Squire Literary Agent Marcella Powers, thirtyish, whom Lewis says he will not (but rumor insists he may) soon marry.

¶ Attend to sundry pressing business mat ters. Among them: the sale to M-G-M of the movie rights to Cass Timberlane, which, together with The Book-of-the-Month Club donative and the magazine serial rights, would certainly boost the total take for his new novel well up toward the half-million-dollar figure. It would ease Novelist Lewis into that golden horseshoe where Kathleen Winsor (For ever Amber) currently queened it over U.S. letters.

Beside that ardently swelling literary bosom, the lean, taut, fidgety figure of the author of Main Street, Babbitt and Arrowsmith might seem a little out of place and even a little out of date. For a decade Lewis had favored U.S. readers with a book almost every biennium, but his last important work had been done in the beginning of the ’30s. If Cass Timberlane now acquired new importance, that was chiefly due to the fact that the hundreds of thousands of men & women who would read his new novel had, while he was writing it, made the U.S. the No. 1 power in the world to which (with Novel ist Upton Sinclair) he was America’s No. 1 interpreter.

Opulent Age. When World War I ended, every U.S. war worker who could afford to, invested his wages in a silk shirt with peppermint candy stripes. The shirt was a gonfalon of the future. Prosperity was just around the corner.

Soon the U.S. was obsessed with a challenging peacetime problem— plumbing. Soon it had the most luxurious bathrooms since Haroun A; Rashid piped Tigris water into Bagdad—and in much th esame stryle. It also had the fastest automobile and airplanes, the most lavish radios, the most sumptuous refrigerators, the baggiest plust fours, the biggest skyscrapers housing the biggest millionaires, the biggest speakeasies, the biggest racketeers and gang wars, the biggest crime wave, and in the end the biggest depression, winding up in the biggest war in history.

Ah! Wilderness. But while it lasted and whil the Age of Opulence covered the land with its fertilizing flood, Americans floated and liked it. The Booster and the Hustler appeared, to do battle with the Knocker. For there were knockers. Many of the long-haired critics had fled prosperity in favor of poverty in Paris. In London, the most important of them, Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, found a name for the period’s typical man: “Apeneck Sweeney.” He called the age’s greatest poem simply: The Waste Land.

Critic Henry L. Mencken slashed at U.S. smugness and provincialism and fixed the arbiters of its life and bad taste in a cruel epithet: the booboisie. And Poet E. E. Cummings mocked:

take it from me kiddo believe me my country, ’tis of you, land of the Cluett Shirt Boston Garter and Spearming Girl With the Wrigley Eyes (of you land of the Arrow Ide and Earl & Wilson Collars) of you i sing; land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham, land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve— from every B.V.D. let freedom ring.

Main Steet. But the intellectual strut and prosodic perplexities of many of the scoffers left all but a few U.S. readers unmovedd. Main Street moved them. When it appeared (1920), U.S. readers swooped upon it with a cry of shocked delight, and made it their own. Gopher Prairie, first savagely repudiated and then eagerly claimed as the pen name for Lewis’ birthplace, Sauk Centre, Minn., was a cartoon of all U.S. small towns slashed on in strokes broad enough to be unmistakable to the most reluctant. Its inhabitiants, at once fearsome and folksy, were at best expertly stage-managed simulacre of U.S. small-town types, at worst human caricatures of something ineluctably real. Its heroine, Carol Kennicott, the Madame Bovary of the wheat elevators, was the archetype of a million repressed U.S. small-town men & women. Even readers who detested Carol Kennicott as much as her Gopher Prairie neighbors did were attracted by her husband, solid, plodding long-suffering Dr. Will Kennicott. Main Street was a shriek against the standardized smugness of U.S. life and a coo of satisfaction that it was so solidly smug.

Anybody could understand Main Street. Novelist Lewis’ style might be rasping and insistent, but it was no more complicated than a buzz saw. Main Street’s narrative neatness made it as readable as a Saturday Evening Post story. And Author Lewis had a phonographic knack for recording the hodgepodge patter of U.S. provincial speech that at best was inspired, at worst vivid vaudeville. As a storm of controversy whipped up the sales, Main Street ran through eleven printings in less than four months.

At Zenith. Two years after Main Street, Novelist Lewis did a similar job for the U.S. small city (Zenith) and the U.S. businessman. George F. Babbitt, the rotund realtor, trapped in the dilemmas of middle-aged marriage and infidelity and the saurian rip and slash of pitiless business competition, was Lewis’ most human and lovable character, as Babbitt was his most mature work.

Later (1925) came Arrowsmith, an onslaught on the mass production of doctors and mass practice and humbuggery of medicine, a romantic apotheosis of the medical scientist. Dodsworth (1929), the esthetic and amatory adventures of Samuel Dodsworth, automobile tycoon, and his wife in the cultured lands of Europe was a modern Innocents Abroad. Elmer Gantry (dedicated to Henry L. Mencken) was a rich caricature of a corrupt and ranting preacher (as he might appear to the village atheist). In The Man Who Knew Coolidge, a superb tour de force, Lewis used his remarkable talent for mimicking U.S. speech to let George F. Babbitt (this time called Lowell Schmaltz) reveal the mind, manners and morals of Babbitry in Babbitt’s native tongue.

The Scourge of Sauk Centre. Sinclair Lewis was born (1885) in Sauk Centre (Minn.). His father was a country doctor. So was his grandfather. So is his older brother Claude, who still practices in Sauk Centre. (His eldest brother Fred is a Sauk Centre miller.)

The town’s future scourge was a shy, imaginative, difficult boy who envied his brothers’ skill at sports and at bagging partridge. He wanted to go to Harvard, but his father sent him to Yale. All of his friends there “belonged to the submerged tense.”

At Yale he began work on Main Street (then entitled The Village Virus). In Manhattan he edited a magazine, got bored with that and buzzed off to Panama, returned by steerage to Yale, where he took his degree.

After a dozen odd jobs he became editor and advertising manager for Publisher George H. Doran. In 1914 Harper pub lished Lewis’ first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn.

Says the author: “Since then, I’ve never done an honest day’s work. Writing novels is an easy life — don’t let any writer tell you how hard it is.” What Price Glory? In 1926 Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize ($1,000) for Arrowsmith, turned it down. His reason: the provision in Donor Pulitzer’s will which says that the prize shall be given to “the American novel [published during the year] which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life.” When Lewis accepted the Nobel Prize ($46,350) in 1930 the U.S. press howled.

Lewis was the first American to receive the award. (It has since been given to Novelist Pearl Buck and Playwright Eu gene O’Neill.) Said skeptical Correspondent Dorothy Thompson when he telephoned her the news: “How nice. I’ve just been awarded the Order of the Garter.”

In his acceptance speech in Stockholm Lewis lashed at the Academy of Arts and Letters,* paid solicitous respect to younger U.S. writers (Novelists John Dos Passes, Thomas Wolfe, et al.). There was another howl in the U.S. press. Later, the august doorman at Club 21, in those days Manhattan’s most discriminating speakeasy, turned Lewis away. The Scourge of Sauk Centre sank down on the curb and said dismally: “What’s the use of winning the Nobel Prize if it can’t even get you into a speakeasy?”

Battling Lewis. The literary career of Novelist Lewis, a diffident, retiring, friendly, even tender man, has been punctuated by a series of grim battles. At Kansas City’s Linwood Boulevard Methodist Church Lewis was to lecture to a fundamentalist audience on U. S. literature. Thinking to liven up his talk, he referred to the rumor that God had struck Naturalist Luther Burbank dead because of his liberal views. “Tell you what,” said Lewis, “I’ll give myself up as an experiment—we’ll find just how God does this—I’ll give him just ten minutes to strike me dead.” That practically emptied the church. When Elmer Gantry appeared, a Virginia pastor offered to lead a mob to lynch its author.

In 1931 Cosmopolitan’s Editor Ray Long gave a dinner for visiting Russian Novelist Boris Pilnyak (The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea). Lewis was asked to speak. He rose and said: “I am very happy to meet Mr. Pilnyak. But I do not care to speak in the presence of one man who has plagiarized 3,000 words from my wife’s book on Russia [Dorothy Thompson’s The New Russia].” The man charged with plagiarism was the doyen of U.S. novelists, Theodore Dreiser (it was later explained that both he and Author Thompson had got their material from the same Russian source). Later the words “cheat” and “liar” were heard from a comer of the room. Novelist Dreiser was seen to swing at Novelist Lewis, but peace-loving fellow diners pinioned the gladiators.

Last year Lewis engaged in a verbal slugging match with Harvard’s crotchety critic Bernard DeVoto, who (in The Literary Fallacy) had attacked Lewis and other writers of the ‘205, had urged that the epithet “fool” be introduced into the vocabulary of literary criticism. “Fool,” cried Novelist Lewis.

Many Marriages. The Lewis married life also has been somewhat diverse. In 1914 he married Grace Livingstone Hegger. They were divorced in 1928. Their only son, Wells Lewis, was killed in World War II.

The month after he got his divorce, Lewis married Foreign Correspondent Dorothy Thompson. He had wooed her all over Europe, at parties, in railway coaches, on airplanes. He had even followed her to the Soviet Union. When the eager Russians asked Lewis what he had come to see in the land of Socialism, he replied: “Dorothy.” They were divorced in 1942. They have one son.

Says Lewis: “Being married to Dorothy was like living in the Herald Tribune city room.” He once claimed: “She disappeared into the NBC building ten years ago.” Dorothy is believed to have contributed to the portrait of “Winifred Homeward the Talking Woman” in Gideon Planish. “She was an automatic, self-starting talker. Any throng of more than two persons constituted a lecture audience for her, and at sight of them she mounted an imaginary platform, pushed aside an imaginary glass of ice water, and started a fervent address full of imaginary information about Conditions and Situations that lasted till the audience had sneaked out—or a little longer.” Says Dorothy: “No one can live with Sinclair Lewis for ten years without being educated.”

Perhaps the most positive fruit of Novelist Lewis’ recent flirtation with the little-theater movement was his friendship with Marcella Powers. She acted with him in a number of plays (see cut). Miss Powers decorated Lewis’ Manhattan apartment (where he wrote much of his new novel, Cass Timberlane). When he bought (for a reputed $26,000) his Tudor mansion in Duluth, Miss Powers went out to visit him and decorate that. Says Lewis, when asked if he is planning to marry again: “No signs of it.” Say his friends: “We just don’t know.”

The New Novel. Was Cass Timberlane autobiographical—a preview of Novelist Lewis’ apprehensions and hopes about the marriage of a middle-aged man to a young woman? Unlike most Lewis novels, Cass Timberlane posed no social problem. Blurbed ostentatiously as “a novel of husbands and wives,” it chronicled the courtship and marriage of sedate, flute-playing Judge Timberlane, of the Minnesota district court, and Virginia Marshland, draftsman and designer for the Fliegend Fancy Box and Pasteboard Toy Manufacturing Company.

Jinny was “a half-tamed hawk of a girl, twenty-three or four, not tall, smiling, lively of eye. . . . ‘Be an exciting kid to know,’ thought Timberlane.”

Even more than the “daring” of “her delicate Roman nose, fierce black hair,” Jinny’s voice stirred the Judge. “He loved his native city of Grand Republic, and esteemed the housewifery and true loyal hearts of its 43,000 daughters, but it disturbed him that so many of them had voices like the sound of a file being drawn across the edge of a sheet of brass. But Miss Marshland’s voice was light and flexible and round.”

“I would fall for a girl,” mused the smitten jurist, “merely because she has fine ankles and a clear voice. . . .” Judge Timberlane met Jinny’s friends—the hobo-hemian set of Main Street who had swapped their obsession with Algernon Charles Swinburne for a wordy concern with the cooperative commonwealth. He introduced her to his set—the respectables of Gopher Prairie, older, sadder and more civilized. Jinny called them “a bunch of furnace-regulators.” They tried to break up her engagement (“Cass, have you fallen for that young female grasshopper, that Marshland girl, at your age?” But “she reads Santayana and Willa Gather and, uh, and Proust!”).

Tender Is the Nightie. So they were married (“Children of their earthy and revolutionary time, flippant and colloquial and compelled to nervous banter, they were yet in the noble tradition of lovers. . . .”) and went to Florida for their honeymoon. There in a beach shack they celebrated at long last (p. 142) their nuptials. “At dawn, Cass woke her and they ran down the beach and bathed, unclad and laughing, and came back to new abandonment.” But back at their inn, “a woman joyful at finding victims who had not heard the news screamed at them, in delighted horror, ‘Been away? Then you don’t know. We’re in the war! Japan attacked our ships at Pearl Harbor today.’ ” Cried Carol Kennicott’s little sister, the new Mrs. Timberlane: ” ‘Oh, curse the luck! Why couldn’t I have known a few weeks? This time they’ll take women in the army. I could have seen Hawaii—France—Russia! And all the boys will be going . . . everybody. And I’ll be left home with the old women!’

” ‘And with me, my dear.’ ‘Yes,’ sardonically, ‘with you!”

The rest of the novel’s 390 pages are devoted to Judge Timberlane’s efforts to turn his young bride into a happy wife by teaching her chess, by integrating her in the social life of the best families, by siring a child (which dies), by varying the tedium of married life in Grand Republic with trips to Manhattan which end in Jinny’s running away with Bradd Criley. Bradd was Cass’s best friend, but later turned out to be simply “a heel.” What Judge Cass does about it will not surprise admirers of Dr. Will Kennicott.

As fiction, Cass Timberlane is several cuts above Anne Vickers, a good many more cuts below Dodsworth. It is of special interest as Novelist Lewis’ first try at a love story uncluttered with large social concerns, as an indication that the Scourge of Sauk Centre is moving toward a reconciliation with his origins, for his unusual preoccupation with sex.

Cass Timberlane will add little if anything to Lewis’ literary stature. But that was clearly established with Babbitt. As long as Lewis continued writing, he would be a ferment in U.S. letters. And he had achieved three things which nothing could change: to his obscure birthplace, he had raised a literary monument of the kind that Horatius Flaccus called “more enduring than brass”; to millions of U.S. villagers and small townfolk (of whom it was more & more clear that he was in his own peculiar way a charter member) he had given a spiritual habitation and a name: Main Street. To the American language he had contributed a new word (now augustly recognized by Webster): Babbitt.

* In 1938 Novelist Lewis was quietly assimilated into the Academy.