The Western Writings of Sinclair Lewis

CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), the scourge and tormentor of America's villages and cities, its businessmen, preachers, and doctors, also proudly called himself a "fanatic American."¹ The same sense of blighted national expectations that fueled Lewis's outrageous satires also inspired him to create fictional characters and situations which express explicitly his ideals for a maturing America. These ideals are inseparable from Lewis's conception of himself as a westerner, and of the American West as the site, one day, of a newer and better civilization. The words of Cass Timberlane, one of Lewis's fictional heroes from the novel of the same name, express Lewis's own western aspirations:

"It's just that I have some kind of an unformulated idea that I want to be identified with Grand Republic–help in setting up a few stones in what may be a new Athens. It's this northern country–you know, stark and clean–and the brilliant lakes and the tremendous prairies to the westward–it may be a new kind of land for a new kind of people, and it's scarcely started yet."

There is a miracle in the story of how all this has happened in two or three generations. Yet, after this period, which is scarcely a second in historic time, we have a settled civilization with traditions and virtues and foolishness as fixed as those of the oldest tribe of Europe. I merely submit that such a scheme is a challenge to all the resources a novelist can summon.²

Lewis's development of his western themes and characters may be seen emerging strongly in two of his early novels, The Trail of the Hawk (1915) and Free Air (1919), both written before the phenomenal success of Main Street in 1920 thrust him into national fame. The heroes of these early romantically conceived but realistically detailed novels, Carl Ericson of The Trail of the Hawk and Milt Daggett of Free Air, are examples of Lewis's new western pioneers. Both are depicted as authentic new Americans, cleareyed midwesterners who love their land and who have grown up possessing some of its strength and vitality. Such qualities will continue to be the means by which Lewis legitimizes the ambitions of his later and more wellknown fictional figures like Carol Kennicott, Martin Arrowsmith, Sam Dodsworth, Cass Timberlane, and Neil Kingsblood.

But Carl Ericson and Milt Daggett are more than just a pair of pastoral westerners. They are both creative technologists. Carl as aviator and inventor and Milt as mechanic and engineer-to-be are both seminal heroes for Lewis, figures whose alliance both to their western land and to the scientific and technological future qualifies them as appropriate figures to carry on Lewis's conception of a continuing process of pioneering in America. If America was to extend the limits of its destiny, as Lewis fervently hoped, it would be through the efforts of native westerners who had grasped the tools of the new science.

As novels, however, The Trail of the Hawk and Free Air are less than compelling, their seriousness undercut by the conventions of popular romance. It is in Main Street, published in the year following Free Air, that Lewis's controlling ideas about the emerging America are first shaped into powerful coherence. Main Street opened a decade in which new pioneers would occupy a central position in most of Lewis's big novels. Carol Milford Kennicott of Main Street, like her predecessors in the two earlier novels, is a representative young American who sees great work to be done in her western homeland and eagerly anticipates her own part in it. Like Carl and Milt, too, she is closely identified with the region's natural landscape, as the book's opening makes clear. She is first attracted to her future husband, Doctor Will Kennicott, by those qualities of his personality closest to her own: his fondness for tramping and the outdoors, his sense of the heroic midwestern past, and his occasional awareness of the possibilities for its future. His proposal of marriage to Carol is presented in the only terms which she would have accepted: "`It's a good country, and I'm proud of it. Let's make it all that those old boys dreamed about.'" Doc Kennicott's failure to recognize the appeal of this vow for Carol lies at the base of their later misunderstandings.

Carol's dream for the unlikely town of Gopher Prairie, in which the couple set up housekeeping, is to convert it to a place of beauty, a project in town planning spawned by Carol's sociology reading in college, and perhaps by such influential works of the time as Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow. Carol's ideas for social reform extend beyond rebuilding prairie towns. Will complains that she is "`always spieling about how scientists ought to rule the world,'" an idea straight out of Thorstein Veblen, and she espouses other progressivist concerns. But it is primarily as a thwarted builder that she is presented to the reader. Looking over the town upon her arrival, she sees with the eye of the planner and the architect.

Carol is a compelling figure because of the extraordinary tension between the eager expectancy of her hopes and the forces of dullness and smugness which oppose her. Shut off from any meaningful chance to carry out her plans by her position as woman and wife, by her shallow education, by her own sentimentalism and flightiness, and by her sense of inadequacy to her monumental task, she can bring her dreams to no real accomplishment. At the end, no longer the potential creator, she remains a frustrated figure living under a self-imposed truce in a community which she might have transformed into something distinctive and beautiful, had she the technical skill and the nerve to match her idealism. Technical skill and nerve are the attributes of her doctor-husband, Will, but without vision he remains merely the severed half of her incomplete self. What is called for in the wider design of Main Street is a sublime architect, a figure whose pragmatic skills and courage to innovate are equal to the force of that creator's dream.

If Main Street shows us the incipient builder deprived of the realization of her goal–a new town on the prairie–Babbitt (1922) reverses this to reveal the shining midwestern city achieved, but without an appropriate creator to shape or interpret its destiny. Both novels are concerned with defining humane life for the citizens of a community. Both ask at what point in the process of development this humane life can best be realized. Babbitt's Zenith has clearly gone beyond that point, as Gopher Prairie has failed to reach it.

Instead of Main Street's heroic natural landscape blighted by human incompetence and pettiness, Babbitt presents us with a human-created world of immense technological dazzlement, but finally devoid of meaningful relationships between its human inhabitants and between them and their landscape or the products of their technology. Babbitt is a kind of upside-down Walden, wherein the buildings, houses, porcelain and tile bathrooms, and electric cigarette-lighters overwhelm the human figures and reduce their actions to insignificance. As he did in Main Street, Lewis dramatizes in Babbitt Lewis Mumford's contemporaneous observation that "architecture and civilization develop hand in hand: the characteristic buildings of each period are the memorials to their dearest institutions." ³ Whereas in Main Street we are shown the dream of a new western civilization without the reality, in Babbitt we have the reality without the dream, a humming dynamo of a modern city whose external intimations of heroic accomplishment mock the soft-bellied underachievers who inhabit it.

The city seems to offer great freedom and myriad opportunities for human achievement. At several points in Babbitt Lewis holds up his narrative flow to scan the entire city of Zenith, giving us a montage of simultaneous events, vignettes of character and scene underscoring the potentialities of the new city. Thus, Lewis's satire in Babbitt is placed against an urban landscape of great hope, a metropolis of boundless possibilities for accomplishment.

George F. Babbitt instinctively responds to these visionary intimations as one who "loved his city with passionate wonder." He palpitates in sympathetic response to its complex systems. Driving through its downtown streets he feels like a shuttle of polished steel in some vast machine. In his speeches to the Boosters' Club he loftily portrays the "realtor" as a farsighted visionary, functioning as a seer of the future and a heroic engineer, clearing the way for great changes. But of course Babbitt is unable to translate this vision beyond its grossest private meaning, as Lewis underscores it for us, "that a real-estate broker could make money by guessing which way the town would grow."Lewis puts Babbitt's ill-defined reverence for his metropolis into perspective by detailing his ignorance of its civic life, its social needs, its architecture, and his inability to do anything of a constructive or purposeful nature on its behalf. Nimble only in the petty business of buying and selling houses, Babbitt, with his monumental incompetence, is a perversion of Lewis's progressive dream. In a city built for giants, the midget Babbitt, its representative man, can only barter its structures; he cannot create them.

Lewis clearly expects something more from his main figure. For George F. Babbitt is more than just the typical American businessman. He is also a westerner, and the distinction, as the earlier works have demonstrated, is an important one for Lewis. As he explained it elsewhere, the westerners may look like easterners; "both groups are chiefly reverent toward banking, sound Republicanism, the playing of golf and bridge, and the possession of large motors. But whereas the Easterner is content with these symbols and smugly desires nothing else, the Westerner, however golfocentric he may be, is not altogether satisfied. . . . secretly, wistfully he desires a beauty that he does not understand." ⁴ Hence Babbitt's vague but insistent yearnings: "`Wish I'd been a pioneer, same as my granddad,'" he muses at one point. As a westerner, his desire for beauty frequently draws him back to nature. Even his romantic fantasies with the "faery child" of his dreams occur in a series of natural settings–groves, gardens, moors, the sea. But more striking are those occasions when, seeking the balm of the wilderness and male camaraderie, Babbitt heads off to the Maine woods to repeat the familiar American gesture of nonurban renewal. Even in Maine, of course, he can not shake off the city which claims him. Babbitt's retreat into nature fails, as do his escapes into bohemianism and liberalism, because his Zenith preoccupations have drained him of the values of hope and freedom which are his western birthright. The call of the wild is indubitably real to Babbitt, as it has perhaps always been to Americans, but his fragmentary and shallow conception of it ("`moccasins–six-gun–frontier town–gamblers–sleep under the stars–be a regular man'") renders him vulnerable to confusion and failure.

The novel ends, as did Main Street, with a chastened rebel, but Babbitt remains at last a more pathetic figure than Carol Kennicott, for unlike her he is never able to formulate coherently the dream which he is finally forced to deny. Still, Babbitt's son Ted, Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt, whose name resonates with his father's not quite forgotten aspirations toward progressive action and the manly western virtues, emerges at the end as an intimation of the hopeful future. Ted, the rebellious would-be inventor, "a natural mechanic, a maker and tinkerer of machines," who "lisped in blueprints," is the potential new technocrat who may rise out of Babbitt's ashes.

In Arrowsmith (1925) Lewis for the first time in a major novel presents a main character whose consequence as an agent of cultural progress matches his technical mastery and his dedication to his goals. Martin Arrowsmith, the doctor turned researcher, is an amalgam of the earlier Doc Kennicott and the visionary Carol. "I desired," Lewis recalled later, "to portray a more significant medico than Kennicott–one who could get beneath routine practice into the scientific foundations of medicine; one who should immensely affect all life." ⁵ "`That's what I want to do!'" says Martin Arrow-smith as a young country doctor listening to Gustaf Sondelius, the great epidemic fighter: "`Not just tinker with a lot of wornout bodies but make a new world!'" Although Arrowsmith exposes a great many charlatans and hypocrites within the medical profession, there are many competent and admirable doctors in the novel. Indeed, it is one of the book's ironies that an Olympian scientist like Max Gottlieb, an M.D. as well as a renowned pathologist, is incapable of diagnosing or treating his own wife's illness and must helplessly call upon "Dad" Silva, the despised medical school dean, for an accurate assessment of her condition. Still, Lewis most admires those like Gottlieb whose personal failures are rendered insignificant by the magnitude of their scientific achievements.

Along with his scientific credentials, Arrowsmith possesses in his midwestern roots the requisite reverberations of nature and the frontier. The book opens with the scene of a wagon carrying his pioneer forebears through the Ohio wilderness, and with his great-grandmother-to-be saying portentously, "`Nobody ain't going to take us in. . . . We're going on jus' long as we can. Going West! They's a whole lot of new things I aim to be seeing!'" Heavy-handed as it sometimes is, the novel's underlying pioneering theme is appropriate to Lewis's continuing search for the possibilities for creative achievement on the scientific frontiers.

In the central episode of the novel, wherein Martin and a team of scientists and health workers fight an epidemic of plague in the Caribbean, nature seems not the characteristic and familiar American restorative but the mask of a cosmic malevolence. The tropics, says Sondelius, dying of the plague, are the jest of God, with their surface beauty concealing such horrors as malaria and plague. But the overriding view of the novel is that these diseases are not God's jests but natural calamities capable of eradication through rational thought and action. The scientist-hero, then, is the ultimate humanist, working to reorder those conflicting aspects of the natural world to harmonize with human needs.

By the end of the novel, Martin is headed for a laboratory in the Vermont woods, where he will join other "pioneers" in new adventures in pure science. Martin Arrowsmith's final destination of the cabin-laboratory is an unmistakable projection of Lewis's linked themes of scientific progress, creative individualism, and nature.

Elmer Gantry (1927) stands as a kind of negative pole for all of Lewis's motivations toward social progress and creative individualism. Without even the vague yearnings and abortive bolts toward freedom of a Babbitt to touch his life with meaning, Gantry is Lewis's ultimate scoundrel and parasite, and the satire directed at him is correspondingly relentless. The book's only Christian antithesis to Gantry is a backwoods cleric who finds his God–predictably–in nature. But the Rev. Pengilly is a minor character whose forest mysticism remains etherealized and private, useless in any combat of ideas. An even more vital and significant foil for Gantry like Frank Shallard offers Lewis no model for a hero. An honest doubter like Shallard is to be preferred to a thoroughgoing hypocrite like Gantry, but the genus is not promising for Lewis. The preachers, like the practicing physicians and the businessmen, are Lewis's second-class citizens, functionaries and servants of the social order rather than its designers and creators.

Dodsworth (1929) presents the fullest treatment of the more characteristic figure toward whom the earlier novels have been pointing. In the opportunities for self-examination afforded by a vacation and a trip to Europe with his wife, Fran, Sam Dodsworth, fifty-year-old industrialist, decides that he wants to return to America and do something more with his life than build automobiles, an activity in which, he decides, there is "but little pioneering. "Instead, he plans to design and build gardened and forested communities with "noble houses that would last three hundred years, and not be scrapped in a year, as cars were."In pursuing this venture, Dodsworth prepares to become Lewis's most significant and characteristic new pioneer: a western idealist who has mastered the technology necessary to achieve his goal, a goal sanctioned by its associations with the familiar Lewis touchstones of cultural progress, individual creativity and nature.

Although Dodsworth is the culmination of Lewis's efforts to bring forth a visionary western technologist and builder, the work reveals a troublesome lessening of intensity toward the implications and consequences of the author's ideas, an inability or unwillingness to follow them through to their novelistic conclusions. Dodsworth closes with the promise of a new life for Sam, but he has now bounced from wooded estates to travel-trailers, which he imagines carrying urbanites in comfort into the forest. ("`Kind of a shame to have `em ruin any more wilderness. Oh, that's just sentimentality,' he assured himself.") And houses or trailers, we are never witness to their creation, nor do they quite qualify for their role, however much they might widen the vistas of nature-hungry Americans. The earlier dream of a Carol Kennicott, hazy as it was, embraced the entire community in a gesture of democratic inclusiveness, rather than just that comfortably well-off portion of it to which Sam Dodsworth seems ready to devote himself.

In such curiously diminished forms, western builders will continue to appear in Lewis's later novels, such as Work of Art (1934), Cass Timberlane (1945), Kingsblood Royal (1947), and The God-Seeker (1949). Finally, in Lewis's last novel, World So Wide (1951), published in the year of the author's death, the hopeful western horizon has simply turned into a blank wall. Once again Lewis posits his familiar builder-hero, but here his dream does not survive even the opening chapter. These reformed visionaries of his later works demonstrate Lewis's difficulty in engaging fully the concept of new pioneering which engrossed him throughout his career as a novelist. In one respect, these western pilgrims, forever diverting themselves from the shining city on a hill which is their professed destination, may dramatize their creator's misjudgment of his own abilities: although Lewis's impulses were often romantic and idealistic, his talents did not extend beyond the brilliant rendering of the actual and the ordinary. He may thus be seen as the victim of an idea which compelled him even as its formulation resisted his efforts to bring it to fictional life. In another respect, the halfhearted builders may suggest a collapse of will on Lewis's part, another manifestation of the familiar American failure of the dream.

Yet it is not Lewis's renunciation of his vision that is most striking, but rather that he clings to it long after it ceases to be a working force in his fiction, that he finally cannot renounce the vision. While the dream goes slack or is vulgarized in the later works, we are nevertheless left with an assertion of, or preoccupation with, a basic credo which remains consistent throughout Lewis's novels and which transcends his divided self. Whether Lewis defines the good life explicitly in the idealistic quests of his main character, or implicitly in the objects he selects for attack, the satirist and idealist in him merge to form his moral basis.

Like Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis attempted the great survey of American life as it passed swiftly into the modern phase. Somewhere, Lewis believed, between the sod shanty and the asphalt parking lot we had missed achieving an American civilization, but perhaps it was still not too late. When Lewis complained of and satirized the failures of his country, he also attempted to provide it with new emblems of possibility to stand against these shortcomings. When he attacked specimen American myths, he did so only when they became empty memorials of the past and apologies for present mediocrity, rather than dynamic impulses to advance our cultural possibilities. In his new pioneers, Lewis found a unique means to combine his divergent goals of personal freedom and creativity, on the one hand, and obligation to the social order, on the other. The fundamental Lewis hero hopes thus, through the discovery of his role and the achievement of his creative endeavor–invention, structure, community, medical discovery– not only to assert his own individuality but also to acknowledge his participation in the communal experience and his commitment to help shape the emerging new America.

GLEN A. LOVE, University of Oregon

Notes

1. Sinclair Lewis, The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950. Edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane (New York: Random House, 1953; rpt. Pocket Books, 1963), p. 105.

2. The Man from Main Street, p. 37.

3. Lewis Mumford, Sticks and Stones (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924; 2d ed. New York: Dover, 1955), p. 193.

4. Sinclair Lewis, "Minnesota, the Norse State," The Nation 116 (May 30, 1923): 626.

5. Quoted in Mark Schorer's Afterword to Arrowsmith (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 432.

Acknowledgment: This essay on Lewis's western writings is adapted from material in Glen A. Love's New Americans: The Westerner and the Modern Experience in the American Novel, published in 1982 by Bucknell University Press through Associated University Presses, and in his essay on Lewis, "New Pioneering on the Prairies," appearing in American Quarterly 25 (December 1973): 558–577 (copyright, 1973, Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania).

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources (in chronological order)

The Trail of the Hawk. New York: Harper, 1915. An early Lewis novel, notable for its anticipation of the author's later themes and characters.
Main Street. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. Lewis's first major novel, concerning a visionary girl and her stodgy husband in a midwestem village.
Babbitt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922. A brilliant treatment of the American businessman and the dream which eludes him.
Arrowsmith. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. Lewis dissects the medical profession and brings forth his most radical hero in a young scientist, Martin Arrowsmith.
Elmer Gantry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. The author's most caustic satire, an unrelieved attack upon the practitioners of the religion business.
Dodsworth. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. A mature treatment of the American businessman, prepared at last to follow his creative ambitions.
The God-Seeker. New York: Random House, 1949. A historical novel set on the frontier of the upper Mississippi Valley.
The Man from Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader. Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950, edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane. New York: Random House, 1953. Collects many important essays and personal statements, published and unpublished, by Lewis.

Secondary Sources

1. Books and Sections of Books

Austin, James C. "Sinclair Lewis and Western Humor." In American Dreams, American Nightmares, edited by David Madden, pp. 94–105. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. Sees Lewis as the leading figure in the tradition of American humor in the upper Midwest.

Geismar, Maxwell. Last of the Provincials, pp. 69–150. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. Perceptive reading of Lewis as writer in an era of historical transition.

Fleming, Robert E., with Esther Fleming. Sinclair Lewis: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. A thorough and recent annotated bibliography of Lewis works and criticism.

Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Sinclair Lewis. New York: Twayne, 1962. One of the most reliable and accessible introductions to Lewis's life and art.

Lewis, Claude. Treaty Trip, edited by Donald Greene and George Knox. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959. Shows Lewis's attraction to, and repulsion from, the wilderness, as revealed in a journal kept by his brother.

Love, Glen A. "Sinclair Lewis: New Pioneering on the Prairies," in his New Americans, pp. 219–54. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1982. An expanded version of the material in these pages, treating Lewis as a visionary westerner.

Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963. A brief (44 pages) summary of Lewis's life and work, for those not wishing to tackle Schorer's mammoth biography.

. ed. Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962. A collection of the best critical essays about Lewis and his work.

. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. A huge and impressive work, setting a new standard for excellence in American literary biography.

2. Periodical Articles

Fife, Jim L. "Two Views of the American West." Western American Literature 1 (Spring 1966): 34–43. Lewis, as a debunker of the American West, is contrasted with Eugene Manlove Rhodes. Both see the possibilities for the West.

Flanagan, John T. "The Minnesota Backgrounds of Sinclair Lewis' Fiction." Minnesota History 37 (March 1960): 1–15. Settings for many of Lewis's novels and stories are identified in Minnesota.

Lea, James. "Sinclair Lewis and the Implied America." Clio 3 (October 1973): 21–34. Surveys Lewis's attitudes toward America by examining seven of his novels ranging chronologically from 1830 to 1946.

Manfred, Frederick. "Sinclair Lewis: A Portrait." American Scholar 23 (Spring 1954): 162–84. Western writer Manfred's account of his friendship with Lewis, including perceptive observations on Lewis's character.

Miller, Perry. "The Incorruptible Sinclair Lewis." Atlantic Monthly 187 (April 1951): 30–34. Revealing insights into Lewis's later life by a renowned scholar and friend of Lewis.

Tanselle, G. Thomas. "Sinclair Lewis and Floyd Dell: Two Views of the Midwest." Twentieth Century Literature 9 (January 1964): 175–84. Compares and contrasts the two novelists in their treatment of midwestem setting and character.