A Pilgrim’s Digression

If I had the technical knowledge necessary to do so, I’d create one of those unscientific and ultimately time-wasting Internet quizzes, and I’d title it “Which Sinclair Lewis character are you?”

Are you the back-slapping Rotarian and proudly ignorant family man, George Babbitt? Are you the profoundly unhappy, emotionally unsatisfied, desperately seeking “Culture” woman of the lonely prairie, Carol Kennicott? Are you the true-believing, hard-drinking, womanizing, Christian evangelist, Elmer Gantry? Or perhaps you are the enormously wealthy, but vaguely dissatisfied and anxious to experience what you’ve missed in life, fifty-something industrialist, Samuel Dodsworth?

The past couple weeks, I’ve been reading Lewis’ last novel of his great nineteen-twenties period, Dodsworth. Dodsworth is one of those novels I’ve been saving up for a rainy day. I do this with most of the writers I consider important to me, in some way: I read everything they write, except for one last, important book, which I keep in the back of my mind as a good read at a time when I can’t find anything else to read.

With Kafka, I am setting aside The Castle; Tolstoy, I still think War and Peace will be my rainy day book, though I read about a hundred pages in it a couple years ago, before giving it up as hopelessly dry compared to Anna Karenina. Dickens, I am saving Bleak House for some future date.

With Lewis, Dodsworth has been the book I’ve been saving, and now I am reading it. Having read his other good novels when I was much younger, it is perplexing to return to Lewis now, at my advanced age of 32. I read on Wikipedia that Dodsworth is a satiric novel–the same comment is made of his other works, as well–yet it does not seem nearly so satiric, to me, as Babbit. We are meant to feel superior to, if not to detest George Babbitt. Samuel Dodsworth is a more sympathetic character, not a vicious caricature, like Babbitt.

Or perhaps I would even sympathize with Babbitt, if I were to go back and read that novel again in its entirety, which I may well do one day. The problem with reaching middle-age is that suddenly one begins to feel more like one of Sinclair Lewis’s caricatures of adulthood than like one of his youthful protagonists with whom we are supposed to identify, such as Carol Kennicott.

I have to confess, I find Carol, with her inane desire for intellectual and emotional stimulation, to be pretentious and rather stupid, though I know I am supposed to see her as the proto-feminist, crushed by the meanness and hypocrisy of small-town, Mid-Western life. Samuel Dodsworth, however, is a character with whom I can sympathize. Dodsworth is a man who has succeeded at business, but failed at life; in that respect, he is rather like Babbitt, who at the end of the novel about his life, says to his son, “I’ve never done a single thing I’ve wanted to in my whole life! I don’t know ’s I’ve accomplished anything except just get along.”

After outlining all that Dodsworth is–a Republican, a captain of industry, a believer in prohibition and the Episcopal church–Lewis writes of Dodsworth that despite all this, “He would never love passionately, lose tragically, nor sit in contented idleness on tropic shores.” Yet, in his youth it seemed like adventure and love were Dodsworth’s for the taking. Lewis begins the novel with a romantic scene set at the turn of the twentieth century, in which a very young Dodsworth meets his future wife for the first time.

Other writers might have devoted more time to the blooming courtship between the two young lovers, but for Lewis it is enough to suggest that Dodsworth’s great romance began auspiciously enough. In the second chapter, Lewis skips ahead twenty years to show us the long-married couple, their passion for each other completely dissipated and their desire to see the world together, as expressed early in their courtship, left unfulfilled.

What happened? As Babbitt would say, Dodsworth spent the previous twenty years getting along, putting off what he really wanted to do, not realizing he would never be able to do it, at least not with the same spirit of youth he once possessed.

I think Dodsworth’s character, as outlined above, is someone many people can sympathize with. Rather than a caricature, he is a perfect picture of what often happens to people as they grow older and become engaged in family affairs and making money.

That is not to say that Lewis is not essentially a satirist. His sketches of characters such as Judge Turpin, a Conservative judge who sentences bootleggers to hard labor, then stops by Dodsworth’s house for a night of heavy drinking and poker, is wicked satire. But Dodsworth is not portrayed satirically, at least I don’t think so.

By chapter two, we learn that Dodsworth is selling his automobile company and, though he has the opportunity to continue working for the company that has bought him out, he decides in an uncharacteristic moment of impulsiveness to throw it all away and go to Europe for five or six months. Maybe longer.

As contrasted with the magnate who bought him out, Alexander Kynance, Dodsworth seems almost enlightened. Kynance can’t understand Dodsworth’s motivation for wanting to take an extended, maybe permanent vacation. “Europe? Rats! Dead’s a doornail! Place for women and long-haired artists!” Kynance says, going on to extoll the virtues of not taking a vacation at all, saying “There’s no rest like a little extra work!” (Kynance seems always to be speaking in exclamation points; I imagine him as one of those silver-haired businessmen in television commercials for accounting firms, always rushing to a board meeting with several hangers-on trailing in his wake.)

Yet Dodsworth has his faults, chief among them his inability to express himself. Rather like our current President, or like many ordinary people (myself included), he stumbles horribly when trying to express complex thoughts and emotions. Tied to his intellectual clumsiness, he seems unable to stimulate even a milligram of desire in his wife. They live in two separate worlds, colliding awkwardly when he tries to reawaken the connection they once had. He also seems blind to the fact that his wife is obviously interested in other men.

In a scene aboard the ship that takes Dodsworth and his wife Fran to Europe, Dodsworth stands up on deck, and looks out at a lighthouse on the coast of England. He cannot adequately express the emotion it stirs in him when he realizes that he has finally arrived in England, but he races below decks to a party Fran is attending, and drags his wife topside in order to share the moment with her. The silent romance of the moment lasts only five minutes before one of her suitors, an English Lord (who is probably a big phony, though the Dodsworth’s wouldn’t realize that), ambles up and breaks the mood with advice about buying boots when the travellers reach London.

Much of the novel can be summarized in that one scene: when Dodsworth seems nearest to personal fulfillment, an ugly reality interrupts, destroying the beauty of an epiphanic moment. The remainder of the novel is merely an extrapolation of this initial deflation of Dodsworth’s hopes.

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for writers who are ignored or derided by the critical establishment in Universities. Literary scholars, though they would of course deny any intentional discrimination on their part, act as boosters only for the fortunes of writers they consider sufficiently complex–with complexity, these days, usually meaning something about how a writer critiques conventional notions of power, race, class, and gender.

Not long ago, I read a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, (another of those good books I had been saving for a rainy day; it must be pouring outside). What someone has written about Maugham could also be said of Sinclair Lewis, first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature:

Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of “lyrical quality”, his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work. It seems equally likely that Maugham was underrated because he wrote in such a direct style. There was nothing in a book by Maugham that the reading public needed explained to them by critics. Maugham thought clearly, wrote lucidly, and expressed acerbic and sometimes cynical opinions in handsome, civilized prose.

I especially approve the sentence “There was nothing in a book by Maugham [or Sinclair Lewis] that the reading public needed explained to them by critics.” If you don’t write for the appreciation of critics and scholars, not only will they not appreciate you, they will probably trash you in print.

Lewis really doesn’t need any explanation. His Main Street could be considered an early feminist novel, except that it was written by a man, thus it can be dismissed. To cite the remainder of the conventional wisdom about Lewis, his other novels merely present to the reader humorous caricatures, or archetypes, of noisy, obnoxious Americans, with little or no depth of character or theme. His plots are plotless, his description bad, and by the way, it’s terribly annoying how he uses odd contractions (know’s) to express how people actually speak. Lewis is a minor writer, merely at the top tier of the second-raters, as Maugham once said of himself, self-deprecatingly.

One would think that Lewis’s liberal politics, at least, would endear him to the writers of turgid, American literary critical prose. Lewis, after all, was the man who said, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” To me, it’s just incomparably sad that someone who wrote a decent novel about the rise of fascism in America, It Can’t Happen Here, finds himself disregarded by academics who, nonetheless, have adopted his essential message: “Yes, it can happen here.”

Either literary critics are not as liberal as they profess to be, or liberal politics must be combined with a kind of literary elitism. Of course, academics would also deny that they are exclusionary; after all, most literary scholars have built their careers on elucidating the idea of an “open canon” in which previously disregarded authors or texts may take pride of place.

The discerning reader might infer from the above that I am resentful of minority writers knocking off the “classics” that I love. I don’t mean to quibble about whether there is a sort of literary Affirmative Action taking place, whereby minority writers are promoted while traditional, “white” authors are demoted. I am perfectly comfortable with people reading and enjoying rediscovered authors of whatever quality and race; after all, I’d like to see some of my favorites, such as Maugham and Lewis better appreciated.

I see the academy as exclusionary because it privileges a narrow sense of complexity as defined in terms of a writer’s stance on certain sociological or philosophical issues. This exclusion extends not just to writers, however, but to readers as well. There is nothing more exclusionary than the language we use. Depending on our vocabulary and our intellect, the way we speak and write can exclude any number of people from partaking of the brilliance of our deep and insightful thinking [if you detected a trace of sarcasm there, my apologies to your ego]. What has always disturbed me most is that academics don’t seem to particularly care that they have adopted the jargon and pompous, incomprehensible stylings of French philosophes such as Jacques Derrida. Their attitude seems to be that, “Well, the Natural Sciences have their own jargon, and so why not literature?”

The problem is that the use of a specialized language creates an elite circle of proselytes and priests uninformed by the insights of outsiders and unconcerned that inbreeding among faculty members at our Universities might result in a deformation of our understanding and appreciation of literature.

When I read a novel such as Dodsworth, I am struck by how undated it seems, after some 77 years. It reads well. Doesn’t that count for something, in terms of a writer’s standing in the hierarchy of writers as defined by academics? There are no jolting moments at which times the reader is made self-conscious of reading a book that is old, written in period language or with locutions heavy as an antique Royal manual typewriter. How many writers now several decades dead can we say of, “His writing is still fresh and meaningful for us today.”

We live in a nation ruled by a President with attributes of both Presidents Coolidge and Hoover, combining a kind of cold detachment from reality with complete incompetence. Our Congress is corrupt, effete, and ineffectual, regardless of party. Just as Coolidge once said that the business of America is business, so Americans seem conscious of little else except their wallets. Getting and spending, to paraphrase Wordsworth, is our primary preoccupation.

I’ve often thought that one reason the draft has not been reinstated for the Iraq War is that first, it would do too much damage to the economy, and second, it would make the war a reality in too many homes across this land. Confronting death in such a personal way would distract us from our true purpose in life, which is buying things.  I guarantee the surest way to end Bush’s war is to reinstate the draft and start shipping hundreds of lower, middle, and upper-class kids overseas who would ordinarily be going to college and pursuing happiness, like everyone else.

However, Lewis’s writing remains fresh not only because our political and social climates are similar to that of the nineteen twenties. Lewis’ writing remains fresh because his characters are as alive and walking the streets with us today as they were nearly eighty years ago. Dodsworth, Babbitt, Kennicott, Gantry…they are Americans, and they are us.

If Lewis were alive today, perhaps he would turn his acid pen to creating another American archetype, the archetype of the modern liberal professor, secure in his hypocritical elitism and his moral and intellectual superiority to the common lot of humans. It would be a just revenge by a writer who deserves better than second-tier status.