Books: Carol Kennicott’s Story

WITH LOVE FROM GRACIE (335 pp.)— Grace Megger Lewis—Harcoud, Brace ($5.75).

The sad point of Babbitt was not so much that Zenith’s leading realtor was a philistine, but that he half knew it and hankered vaguely after something more than the life of a rich land shark.

The sad point about Main Street was that Carol Kennicott knew that Gopher Prairie was full of philistines, but did not understand that Chanel No. 5 would never rout a gopher from its hole.

There was something of Babbitt in his creator, Sinclair Lewis, and there was something of Carol Kennicott in his first wife, Grace Hegger Lewis. Gracie was, Lewis once wrote, “all the good part of Carol.” This lends an uncommon interest to what would otherwise be a commonplace biography—Grace’s account of her years with “Hal.”

The facts of Lewis’ life are well known, but Gracie Lewis, now sixtyish, gives them an extra dimension of pity and the kind of patronage the best of women give to a lost, once-loved husband.

Gracie Was a Lady. She met Harry Sinclair Lewis after he had come to Manhattan from his native Sauk Center, Minn., via Yale. It happened in 1912 when young Hal—his friends called him “Red” for his thin, gingerish thatch—saw a lady across a tearoom. It was Grace Hegger, daughter of a Catholic German-American art dealer. She had golden hair, a job on Vogue, and she brought out the romantic in Hal, who wrote her some of the goofiest poetry boy ever wrote girl:

Princess, princess, silver maiden, Throw your casement open; see— On the terrace I am singing; Come and take the road with me!

The princess did, and it was a long, rough road. But Gracie makes clear that young Hal’s romanticism persisted, and that it gave him a place from which he could see his own America with an out side eye.

Being a Famooser. The couple went to Sauk Center to visit the family and found themselves strangers, whereupon Lewis turned his home town into Main Street, an overnight literary sensation. Lewis was then 35, and Gracie thinks fame came too early. He and Gracie and their 3-year-old son Wells (named for H.G.) took ship for England and the captain of the Carmania asked them to sit at his table. “Jeezus!” cried Lewis in the very accents of Main Street. “There’s something to this being a Famooser!”

He met everyone from Osbert Sitwell to Lady Astor, and of course Wells met Wells. The British were eager to see in Main Street support for the comforting conviction that Americans, though rich, were a pretty uncouth lot. So Lewis was warmly received, but not all appreciated his japeries. When he met some prominent Irishmen, his notion of humor was to sing a funny song about Christ walking on the water. Lewis insisted on doing imitations at dinner, and they went on too long. He even fancied he resembled Bernard Shaw and bought a wig at Clarkson’s”, the theatrical wigmaker, to improve his Shaw impersonation (the older clown was not amused).

You Are the Cream. Gracie put up with this sort of thing and much more. After all, Hal was not as bad as that young F. Scott Fitzgerald. But sadness enters the book as Lewis begins to struggle with the intangibles of his trade. He never developed anything but the vaguest philosophy. The man who had been America’s topographer never mastered its geology. Under flattery and attention, Lewis began to show signs of egocentricity. Mrs. Lewis sadly records how the writer who had driven himself (“Where do I work?” was the first question he asked of a new house), began to drive others. Friends were taken up and thrown off. He drank like a fish. He called women in the middle of the night to talk until dawn.

The marriage, Gracie says delicately, was “dissolved.” Actually, she got a plain Reno divorce in 1928, lived to marry a New York investment counselor named Tellesforo Casanova. After a few years she wrote a novel setting Hal and the world to rights about the whole thing. The book was called Half a Loaf, and its heroine remarked, after leaving her writer-husband: “She had licked the cream off the milk pail; she had had the fresh half of the loaf.” Twenty-five years later Gracie evidently thinks that bland diet not so bad.

As for the end of the real Lewis — still drinking, restless and unhappy about God and man — Gracie has little to say except to quote his second wife, Dorothy Thompson: “Maybe Sinclair Lewis did not love God. But I am sure that God loves him.”

The gallantry of an ex-wife could go no further. Not the least charming thing about this book is that Grace Hegger Lewis seems utterly unconscious of how irritating a good woman can be. Few will grudge her right to say the last word because she has said it gracefully; yet the traditional artist-wife dilemma intrudes through the narrative. Gracie wanted a home and Lewis wanted anything but.

She gave her hostage to fortune in their one child. Wells, who grew up to write a novel while at Harvard, was killed in action as a U.S. officer in World War II, at the age of 27. In his childhood he was shuttled between expensive pillar and posh post (King George V “saluted” him as he rode in London’s Rotten Row) until he came to look at his famous father with a cool eye. He would brace himself to lecture him on the evils of drink only to find the unpredictable Hal had become his sober, fascinating self again. The boy’s judgement still stands: “Father’s a bit difficult at times, but I love the old bastard.”