Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [8]
To Europeans and Europeanized Americans Lewis might have seemed crude, but the strength of his voice and his vision were undeniable. Babbitt, whose eponymous hero was an unimaginative businessman who feels, vaguely and inarticulately, that there must be more to life, was published in 1922 and made nearly as strong an impression as Main Street had. H. L. Mencken had been urging him for some time to take on “the American city—not New York or Chicago but the cities of 200,000-500,000—the Baltimores and Omahas and Buffaloes and Birminghams.” Lewis assured him that in Babbitt’s imaginary town of Zenith he had created the real thing. “All our friends are in it,” he told Mencken—“the Rotary Club, the popular preacher, the Chamber of Commerce, the new bungalows, the bunch of business jolliers lunching at the Athletic Club. It ought to be at least 2000% American, as well as forward-looking, right-thinking, optimistic, selling the idea of success, and go-getterish” (quoted in Lingeman, p. 173).
Babbitt was brilliant satire, but unlike Main Street, it was more satire than novel. George Follansbee Babbitt achieves pathos but not tragedy, and Lewis’s efforts to give him a soul were not entirely successful. This lack might have contributed to his decision to make his next novel, Arrowsmith, significantly less satirical than his two previous ones—a “straight” novel, in fact. Arrowsmith, the story of an idealistic doctor and medical researcher, is a powerful and emotional novel, and although it is very funny in places—Lewis did not find it easy to suppress his humor—it is essentially a serious piece of work about the assertion of personal beliefs in the face of social and financial temptations.
Arrowsmith was named the winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but Lewis, true to his convictions about his country and his role within it, refused the honor, explaining his decision to the Committee thus: Elmer Gantry, Lewis’s next novel, took on a subject he had long wanted to tackle: evangelism. Elmer Gantry is a bunk preacher just as Lancelot Todd was a bunk ad man. Lewis, who had been given a tremendous amount of help in researching Arrowsmith by a doctor, Paul de Kruif, realized he needed the same sort of insider knowledge for Gantry, so he set up shop in Kansas City and started reaching out to men of the cloth of every type, entertaining them—which meant questioning them, heckling them, challenging them—at weekly lunches that came to be known as “Sinclair Lewis’s Sunday School classes.” Paradoxically he became very fond of these drinking, fornicating, doubting, and all-too-human ministers whom he was so soon to lampoon in his novel. As his publisher Alfred Harcourt said of Lewis, he hated bunk but it was never individuals he hated, only their bunk performances.
[The] terms are that the prize shall be given “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” This phrase, if it means anything whatever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment (quoted in Lingeman, p. 279).
Lewis tended to show an affectionate magnanimity toward his fictional characters, with one important exception: the recurring character based on Gracie. The portrait of Carol Kennicott, only four years into the Lewises’ marriage, is affectionate; that of Martin Arrowsmith’s shallow second wife, Joyce, is less so; the portrayal of the arch-bitch Fran, in Dodsworth (1929), shows how badly the marriage had deteriorated.
Lewis had been drinking heavily during the writing of Elmer Gantry, and had had a hard time finishing the novel, the later chapters of which show the strain. Still, the book was a sensation, with heated reviews for and against, and the phrase