The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (17 page)

They said, “Suppose the country is entering upon a war—where do you stand then? Do you arrogate to yourself the privilege of going your own way in the matter, in the face of the nation?

“Yes,” I said, “that is my position. If I thought it an unrighteous war I would say so. If I were invited to shoulder a musket in that cause and march under that flag, I would decline. I would not voluntarily march under this country’s flag, nor any other, when it was my private judgment that the country was in the wrong. If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that—but that would not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.”

Like all other classics of world literature,
Huck Finn
is a provocation. Those who hate it are disturbed by its heresies, and those who love it are not immune, either; they are provoked by the timeless image in the mirror that the book relentlessly, if compassionately, reflects. Hemingway and all those other American writers who found their own ancestors in a book called
Huck Finn
were right—they were not exaggerating. One by one, the characters in
Huck Finn
would populate the landscape of American fiction, redefining home and homelessness. In the ensuing decades, Jim would light out for his own territory and start telling his own story: he would reclaim his identity, his faith and confidence, and discover his rage and pain. The Widow Douglas, the inhabitants of the smothery towns, even Tom Sawyer—all would appear and reappear in different guises. The small towns Huck and Jim passed by on their raft would acquire new identities, Huck would return and the theme of the solitary individual, his sound heart resisting a monitoring conscience, would be articulated in different times and different manners.

One character remains: the reader. When Mark Twain wrote
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
there were still physical territories to light out to, but in twenty-first-century America, such uncharted terrain is part of fiction as well as fantasy. The only way to light out, to see the “sivilized” world through fresh eyes, is through our imaginations, our hearts and our minds, and that is the real question for us: Will we risk striking out for new territories and welcome the dangers of thoughts unknown?

PART II

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beautiful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

—E. E. Cummings

Legend has it that Mark Twain said he didn’t write a sequel to
Huck Finn
because he was pretty sure a grown-up Huck would have turned out like all the other grown-ups around him, who were mostly crooks and thieves. No one seems to know what happened to Tom Blankenship, the real-life model for Huck, but Twain (perhaps apocryphally) claimed that Tom Sawyer grew up to be “respectable”—in fact, a justice of the peace, which wasn’t any better than a crook or a thief, at least in Huck’s view.

I have in mind another real-life model for the adult Huck: a writer born in 1885, the year
Huckleberry Finn
was first published, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. I am thinking of Sinclair Lewis, or Harry Sinclair Lewis, who was called Hal by his first wife and some of his friends and was also known as Red, for the color of his hair and not his political views, though these were famously left of center. His father was not a drunken hobo but an upright doctor, and he himself was anything but a vagrant. Born a generation after Huck, Hal grew up at a time when the untamed wilderness Huck hoped to light out for was scarcer, the “smothery” villages had expanded into a new kind of smothery city, slavery was officially abolished and had been replaced by segregation, and new forms of hope and horror were coming into being.

“Everyone ought to have a home to get away from,” Sinclair Lewis once wrote, and homelessness seems to have been ingrained in his very being: he felt it as much when he was with his family as he would at Oberlin and Yale. Among the various groups he attached himself to, he always remained a “furriner,” as he used to put it. He was constantly on the move, afraid of settling down, living in many houses, none of which would be turned into a home, and despite the love of two intelligent and attractive women, fame and fortune, blockbuster bestsellers and the privilege of being the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature, he died an alcoholic, alone and on foreign soil.

I somehow find myself returning to unsatisfying words like “poignant” when trying to describe Sinclair Lewis. I find it immensely poignant that upon his death, he left almost no personal possessions behind. “He had no real love of possessions,” his first wife, Gracie, said. “The houses he bought one after another were mostly furnished houses; he walked in and he walked out.” Gracie reported that when the contents of the Thorvale Farm, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, his last American home, were sold at auction in May 1952, among the six hundred items listed on the auction manifest, the only personal ones were “a leather traveling bag marked with an ‘L’ and covered with hotel labels, a large typewriter in a heavy leather case, an L-shaped desk and two tennis rackets.” A little old woman bid on the tennis rackets—she told Gracie she’d wanted them for her two nephews, who needed to practice more—but someone else got them, for $18. At an exhibition in his honor at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1952, the memorabilia were: “bible, soft hat, walking stick, cigarette case, eyeshade, chess set, fountain pen.” There were no other keepsakes, no sentimental treasures, no things.

As a child, Sinclair Lewis was what we would call a “geek.” Despite his enthusiasm, he could not participate in the sporting life practiced by his father and older brothers. His one blessing (and curse) was an inability to appear “normal.” Both his life and his fiction are reminders of how much who we become is influenced by how we are perceived and defined by others. By all accounts he was spectacularly ugly. His face was pitted with scars from acne that troubled him all his life, made worse by radiation cures. Gore Vidal described him as having a “gargoyle” kind of ugliness, and he was pitilessly portrayed by Hemingway’s fourth wife, Mary, as “a piece of old liver, shot squarely with a #7 shot at twenty yards.” His tall and disjointed body gave the young writer John Hersey the impression of “a thin man put together with connections unlike those of most human beings.” His character seemed disjointed, too. He was plagued by an innate restlessness, the inability to settle down or even to sit still or carry on a proper conversation. Rebecca West found his interminable monologues “wonderful, but after five solid hours of it I ceased to look upon him as a human being. I could think of him only as a great natural force, like the aurora borealis.” Even some who admired him regarded him amiably as a “freak.”

Given all of this, one might expect that, like many of his contemporaries, he would write what his first biographer, Mark Schorer, called a “Moon-calf novel,” the sad tale of a lonely and misunderstood young American male. But rather than withdraw into himself, Lewis set out to discover America. His novels covered the burning issues of the day and touched on much of what still concerns us at the start of this new century: conformity (
Main Street
and
Babbitt
), religion (
Elmer Gantry
), women’s rights (
Ann Vickers
), fascism (
It Can’t Happen Here
), race (
Kingsblood Royal
), medical science (
Arrowsmith
). Most were controversial and engendered endless debates.
Kingsblood Royal,
appreciated more by blacks than by whites, was even called seditious.

Though Lewis was the first American novelist to win the Nobel Prize, this did not prevent him from being dismissed in his lifetime as a second-rate hack. In some respect, the prize sealed his fate, as the backlash at home was immediate and unrelenting. The American literary set saw the choice as a deliberate poke in the eye: his satirical portraits of small-town America, with its conformity and small-mindedness, perfectly confirmed Europeans’ worst prejudices. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whose literary fortunes have fared considerably better, did not mince their words in their assessment of their rival. Never one to elaborate when a few words would do, Hemingway summed up the prevailing view with his crisp statement “Sinclair Lewis is nothing.”

But if he is often cast aside from the pantheon of American letters, this disparagement is usually qualified with a “yet” or a “but.” Dismissals are generally accompanied by reluctant explanations of why he cannot be ignored. As recently as 2002, John Updike, whose Rabbit Angstrom owes more than a bit to George Babbitt, began his
New Yorker
review of Richard Lingeman’s biography (itself inspired partly by such dismissals) by questioning the need for a new biography, only to end by asking, “Who in the last century more manfully and systematically attempted to fill the demand, in recent times voiced by Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen, that American novelists cast off solipsism and introverted delicacy and embrace the nation as it exists, in its striving variety and dynamism?”

For Sinclair Lewis, as for Mark Twain and William Dean Howells before him, this was not a political but an existential task. A whole host of older writers, like Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, and younger ones, like Richard Wright, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Flannery O’Connor, would in their own fashion do the same. It was only three years after George F. Babbitt came into the world, in 1922, that we would come to know a young man called Jay Gatsby—who, coincidentally, would die in pursuit of his version of the American dream in the fictional year 1922, leaving us forever with that unresolved mystery of the green light at the end of the dock.

Although Lewis’s novels are called sociological, they were inspired not by politics or ideology but by a passion that gave him a sense of mission and a reason to live. “Lewis was not to be talked of at all,” Gore Vidal said, “but his characters—as types—would soldier on; in fact, more of his inventions have gone into the language than those of any other writer since Dickens.”

His literary mission was inspired by his anxiety for America, a sentiment that links him to Emerson and Whitman and, perhaps more than anyone else, to Thoreau, whom he admired greatly. “Have we no culture, no refinement,—but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil?—to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us?” Thoreau wrote in a bitter critique of America that he published in
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1863. “Even if we grant that the American has freed himself from a political tyrant, he is still the slave of an economical and moral tyrant. . . . Do we call this the land of the free? What is it to be born free and not to live free? . . . [W]e are warped and narrowed by an exclusive devotion to trade and commerce and manufactures and agriculture and the like, which are but means, and not the end.”

America’s commercialism is as well worn a trope as its individualism, and writers have gravitated toward this theme. We find it in the work of H. L. Mencken, who relentlessly caricatured the American “Booboisie,” as he called it, and the novels of the great American social realists Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair and of course Mark Twain’s
The Gilded Age
. It can be said that among the true guardians of American morality, its writers and thinkers have been the most steadfast, challenging readers to question complacent norms, to acknowledge injustice and recognize the underside of this heaving, thrusting, purposeful nation dedicated to making ever more new things.

And so it was that Hal Lewis, the wanderer who never managed to make any of the several houses he occupied into a home, wrote the most scathing critique of the small and smothery homes that Huck had attempted to escape from. In life, he resented “the ghetto-like confinement” of the small town, calling it the “Village Virus.” In his first blockbuster bestseller,
Main Street,
he gave us an idealist, Carol Kennicott, the wife of the village doctor, who tries to rectify the mercantile mentality of Main Street America through a futile attempt to beautify and vitalize her small town of Gopher Prairie. Later, in
Ann Vickers,
he would offer up a more liberated and emancipated version of Carol. But it is Babbitt who is his most perfect creation, Babbitt who leaves the pages of his novel and takes on a life of his own, becoming part of the American vernacular.

How did this elusive outsider, by choice and by force, create such a flawless portrayal of the ultimate insider: a character unlike Huck in every way and yet every bit as iconically American? His wife Gracie pointed out that “even though Lewis’s first successful novels can be recognized as written by him, it is significant that he created no school of writing as have Hemingway and Faulkner, Henry James and Flaubert. He influenced public thinking rather than public writing.” Perhaps Lewis’s main contribution to American literature was bringing fiction into the arena of public discourse.
Babbitt
is the product of a culture ever more standardized and atomized, less in tune with the vagaries of the heart, in thrall to monopolies, with their corporate language of efficiency and productivity. If we agree with Ezra Pound that “literature is news that stays news,” then we can safely say that Sinclair Lewis was, despite his poor standing in the literary establishment, the ultimate American novelist. We have to be thankful for the minor miracle that after almost a century,
Babbitt
speaks to us still.

“Garcong! Come here, you bloody garcong! . . . The lazy Frog. Let me tell you, they’d give us better service in Zenith. Gentlemen, have you ever been in the Zenith Athletic Club? Say, that’s a swell joint for you.” This could be a quote from
Babbitt,
but is not. It is Lewis at a bar in Paris, mimicking his soon-to-be-famous protagonist.

It has been said time and again that Sinclair Lewis captured Babbitt so well because he himself was in essence a Babbitt, but this is too simple an explanation. He does share with Babbitt a very American contradiction: the desire to settle down and the urge to be constantly on the move. But the two men respond very differently to this urge. It would be more accurate to say that Lewis was fascinated by his opposite, a man whose whole aim in life was to conform, to belong to the right club and own the right things. And since he could never be that individual, he conjured him up and entered his world through the large door of his imagination.

Lewis could portray a “standardized” man so well because he was a perpetual, if at times reluctant, outsider for whom normalcy was so inaccessible as to be almost desirable. As John Updike reminds us, mimicking others became a way of covering up his own inability to forge genuine relationships. One can only imagine how frustrated and resentful his second wife, the indomitable Dorothy Thompson, must have felt when, during an attack of DTs, as she was trying to help him into an ambulance, he preempted her rebuke by saying: “You’ve ruined your life, you’re ruining mine! You’ve ruined your sons, you miserable creature. You’re sick, sick.”

Writing, like alcohol, became a lifelong addiction. It allowed him to take refuge not just from the world but from himself. In a letter to Gracie, he wrote, “And the East River flows on like the dream of a minor god, below, and all the little brown houses are drowning, and I sit forever working as poetically as a Ford workman pushing buttons.” 

We first catch a glimpse of Mr. George Follansbee Babbitt one fine April morning as he struggles to remain asleep. Unlike his creator, Mr. Babbitt, or “Georgie,” as his wife, Myra, affectionately calls him, is a solid, hardworking, God-fearing family man who shares a prosperous real estate business with his father-in-law. He comes from a small town but has moved on to better things, an affluent life in a flourishing city, enabling him to view his place of birth, even his close relatives, with affectionate scorn as “the hicks back home.” Babbitt can claim to belong to that blessed community of self-made American men who have worked hard to get where they are and, by golly, the world should know how proud they are of their achievements! Soon we will discover that being a self-made man has little to do with independence or individualism: for men like Babbitt to get where they are requires a gradual surrender of the self to a higher ideal. Luckily, this comes naturally to someone whose God was business. Although a vocal champion of individualism, his survival depends on his melting into the background, acquiring the chummy facelessness that his place in society demands.