Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
pure-tendencies instead of impure ones, as the world looked on
these things?... Some were sent into the world with a great lust
and great ability for wealth like himself, a mind swift to see, a
body strong to endure; and some were sent half equipped, almost
shapeless and formless.... Strength and weakness--there lay the
key, the answer.[828]
Stuart Sherman on Dreiser:
By eliminating distinctively human motives and making animal
instincts the supreme factors in human life, Mr. Dreiser reduces
the problem of the novelist to the lowest possible terms.... His
philosophy quite excludes him from the field in which the great
realist must work. He has deliberately rejected the novelist’s
supreme task--understanding and presenting the development of
character; he has chosen only to illustrate the unrestricted flow
of temperament. He has evaded the enterprise of representing human
conduct; he has confined himself to representation of animal
behavior.[829]
And the two novels he says are “like a club sandwich composed of slices
of business, alternating with erotic episodes.” It is true, but the
failure is one of art that does not merge them. What would Sherman
have? Shall these impulses be eliminated from literature, or from human
nature itself?
Sinclair Lewis: Our Own Diogenes[830]
As the row of his pudgy orange-backed volumes lengthens on the shelf,
it becomes evident that Sinclair Lewis is the bad boy of American
letters whose thoughts are on bent-pins while the deacon is laboring
in prayer. His irrepressible satire belongs to a new and irritatingly
effective school. He has studied the technique of the realists, and
under the beguiling pretense of telling the truth objectively and
dispassionately, he insists on revealing to us unaccommodated man as a
poor, bare, forked animal, who like Jurgen persists in thinking himself
a monstrous clever fellow. He is maliciously severe on all respectable
dignities. In his hands the noble _homo sapiens_ of common repute
is translated into an ignoble _homo libidinus et ventosissimus_--an
unattractive animal that runs in herds, serves its belly, and has a
taking way with the dams. The free-born American citizen, master of the
earth and its destiny, is little flattered by the portrait he draws,
and Mr. Lewis finds himself, in consequence, _persona non grata_ in any
convention of Elks or Rotarians.
The method he has chosen to adopt is a clever advance over the
technique of the eighteenth century, when pricking balloons was the
business of every wit. Those older satirists--nagging souls like Pope
and bold bad fellows like Churchill--were mainly concerned to annoy
their victims with pin-pricks. They were too completely the gentleman
to grow chummy with base fellows whom they frankly despised; and in
consequence they never discovered half the possibilities of the gentle
art of satire. Sinclair Lewis is wiser than they were. He has learned
that before one can effectively impale one’s victim, one must know all
his weaknesses and take him off his guard. So he ingratiatingly makes
up to George F. Babbitt of Zenith, drinks chummily with him, swaps
greasy jokes, learns all the hidden vanities and secret obscenities
that slip out in the confidences of the cups, beguiles him into
painting his own portrait in the manly midnight hours; and when the
last garment that covers his nakedness is stripped off, the flashlight
explodes and the camera has caught the victim in every feature of his
mean and vacuous reality.
No doubt it is an ungentlemanly thing to do--a calculating betrayal of
trusting human nature done in the sacred name of art; and it is certain
that the unhappy victim will hate the artist when he sees the developed
print next morning. Yet the picture is extraordinarily lifelike. All
the unlovely details of fat stomach and flabby muscles are sharply
revealed. It is too late to put on one’s clothes, and _homo sapiens_ in
the person of George F. Babbitt is revealed as a shambling, two-legged
animal, for the world to laugh at. The method is immensely clever;
it is the last word in the technique of despoiling one’s victim of
adventitious dignity, without which life becomes a mean, bleak affair;
but it is scarcely charitable. To think well of oneself and to wish
to impose that good opinion upon others, are common human weaknesses
that every tailor blesses. Without clothes man is only a caricature of
the godlike, and the artist who betrays our nakedness to our enemies
is very far from a gentleman. The confidences of the cups must be held
sacred, for if we cannot drink without fear of our babbling being
reported, what becomes of goodfellowship?
But the charge of betraying goodfellowship leaves Sinclair Lewis
unconcerned. His satire knows no compunctions. An irreverent soul, he
dares the wrath not only of George F. Babbitt, but of the innumerable
clubs to which Babbitt belongs. A buoyant scoffer, he does not permit
even the organized wrath of the Chamber of Commerce to disturb his
equanimity. He provokes respectable people on principle, and he has
laid a devilish plan to work systematically through our sacred American
decalogue, smashing one commandment after another. Already behind him
is strewn a sorry wreckage of established creeds and authoritative
slogans--a wreckage that delights the wicked and gives aid and comfort
to all evil-wishers in our comfortable and excellent society. Not even
a banker is sacred to him. Rotarians and Kiwanians, Billy Sundays and
Billy Bryans, voluble Congressmen and silent Presidents, even our
venerable Constitution itself, he scoffs at and makes merry over. And
to add insult to injury, he prospers in his sins. His calculating
wickedness returns him a fattening bank account. His impudent satires
sell like bargain-counter silk stockings. We pay handsomely to see
ourselves most unhandsomely depicted. If we would only take a lesson
from the strategy of the heathen Chinese, we might boycott Mr. Lewis’s
wares and reduce him to the beggary that is more becoming to wickedness
than a wanton prosperity. But a Christian people will not go to school
to the heathen, and so Mr. Lewis prospers in his wickedness and waxes
vulgarly rich.
Now what is the tremendous discovery that Sinclair Lewis makes so
much of, and that we pay so great a price to learn? It is no other
than this: that the goodly United States of America are peopled by a
mighty herd, which like those earlier herds that rumbled about the
plains, drives foolishly in whatever direction their noses point--a
herd endowed with tremendous blind power, with big bull leaders, but
with minds rarely above their bellies and their dams. In the mass and
at their own romantic rating they are distinctly imposing--big-necked,
red-blooded, lusty, with glossy coats got from rich feeding-grounds,
and with a herd power that sweeps majestically onward in a cloud of
dust of its own raising, veritable lords and masters of a continent.
But considered more critically and resolved into individual members,
they appear to the realist somewhat stupid, feeble in brain and will,
stuffed with conceit of their own excellence, esteeming themselves the
great end for which creation has been in travail, the finest handiwork
of the Most High who spread the plains for their feeding-grounds: with
a vast respect for totems and fetishes; purveyors and victims of the
mysterious thing called Bunk, who valiantly horn to death any audacious
heretic who may suggest that rumbling about the plains, filling their
bellies, bellowing sacred slogans, and cornering the lushest grass, are
scarcely adequate objectives for such immense power: a vast middleman
herd, that dominates the continent, but cannot reduce it to order or
decency.
Consider, suggests Mr. Lewis, what this rumbling herd signifies in
the light of rational and humane ideals. What sort of custodians of
civilization are these lumbering mobsters with their back-slappings and
bellowings? What becomes of the good life in a society that flowers in
Rotarian conventions? The banker has reduced America to the level of a
banker’s Utopia, and now bids us admire his handiwork. Other societies,
aristocratic and feudal, honored the priest and knight and artist above
the usurer and tradesman; other generations professed to serve truth
and beauty and godliness in their daily lives; but the great American
herd cares nothing for such things. In the name of democracy priest
and knight and artist are turned lackeys to merchants and realtors, to
men who would not recognize faith or chivalry or imagination if they
met them on the golf course, and who understand democracy as little as
they understand Christianity. In this land of material abundance the
good life is reduced to being measured in commissions and percentages;
civilization comes to flower in the broker; the mahogany desk is the
altar at which we sacrifice in a land of triumphant materialism. “God
help the country,” said Fenimore Cooper, years ago when the herd was
small, “that has only commercial towns for its capitals.” “Such a
country is past helping,” retorts Sinclair Lewis. “God cannot help
it, or the Devil. In the name of George F. Babbitt and Dr. Almus
Pickerbaugh and the Reverend Elmer Gantry, what can be expected of such
a country? A people that worships the great god Bunk shall have its
reward!”
To prove his amiable thesis Mr. Lewis has been at enormous pains to
gather his materials at their sources. He has taken upon himself to
become a specialist in depicting the _genus Americanus_. He has loafed
along Main Street, played poker in back rooms with wicked young men,
drunk in respectable clubs, and exchanged hearty back-slappings with
the sons of Rotary. He has devoted days to the smoking-compartments of
Pullmans, garnering the ripest wisdom and choicest stories of traveling
salesmen. He has listened to philosophic brokers discourse on ethics,
studied political and constitutional theory with realtors, learned
all about Bolshevism from presidents of Chambers of Commerce, been
instructed in the elements of economics by Republican Congressmen,
discovered the fallacies in Darwinian evolution from clerical
fundamentalists and the superiority of Fascism over democracy from
the greatest captains of industry. No field of American experience
has escaped his minute investigation, no authority has eluded his
catechizing. In the course of his studies he has come to master the
lusty American language in its subtlest shades and manliest _nuances_,
from the comic supplement to Dunn and Bradstreet, and he talks easily
with Main Street in its own vernacular. His rich and copious vocabulary
fills a commonplace scholar with envy, and his ebullient slang, his
easy slovenliness of enunciation, inflict on the simple-minded user of
the King’s English a hopeless inferiority complex.
Thus amply equipped with all the resources of scholarship, he has
written four learned treatises in exemplification of the thesis that
the _genus Americanus_ is cousin-german to the scoffing Mr. Mencken’s
lately discovered _boobus Americanus_. The introductory study,
_Main Street_, provided a comprehensive background and setting for
the full-length portraits he was to draw later. Gopher Prairie,
situated in the heart of agricultural America--in Meredith Nicholson’s
Valley of Democracy where the old-fashioned, kindly, neighborly,
wholesome, democratic virtues are presumed to thrive in a congenial
habitat--becomes in his unsympathetic analysis a place that William
Allen White would not recognize as his home town. Here, he tells us, is
respectability made sluggish and sterile. Here is “slavery self-sought
and self-defended.” Here is “dullness made God.” Here, diluted and
spread over a vast territory, the spirit of Babbitt has erupted