Black Mischief

KINGSBLOOD ROYAL (348 pp.) -Sinclair Lewis - Random House ($3)

Grandpa Kenneth Kingsblood, dentist and solid citizen of Grand Republic, Minn., had summoned the family to a conference. Ranging from oldsters to younglings, but all equally curious, they assembled "beneath the pictures of the Pilgrim Fathers and sleigh-rides and Venice, sitting on the imitation petit-point chairs, on the egg-yolk-yellow couch, on the floor, looking at one another and at souvenir ashtrays and an Album of the New York World's Fair." When they were settled, Grandpa Kingsblood informed them in a trembling voice that his son Neil had something on his mind "which he will now confess to you."

Then up rose redhaired, freckled Neil, wounded officer-veteran of World War II, and a man likely some day to be president of Grand Republic's Second National Bank. He said: "I have learned that my mother . . . is descended from . . . an ancestor . . . who was . . . a full-blooded Negro. Which makes every one of us, technically, either a Negro or the close relative of one." Neil's announcement is followed by screams of denial, rage and panic.

Cut & Slash. Sinclair Lewis has scarcely ever put pen to paper without causing controversy; this time, he has thrown himself so furiously into the battle against anti-Negro discrimination that he is likely to arouse the noisiest whirlwind of his career.

Kingsblood Royal (which is the Literary Guild's choice for June) is a novel chiefly in the sense that it contains some of the most artificial fiction, dressed in the worst prose, that "Red" Lewis has ever written. In essence, it is a cut-&-slash pamphlet, packed to the boards with ferocity, diatribe and disgust. Kingsblood Royal is not another onslaught on the old established fact of Southern discrimination; it is a blow at the smug white of the Northern cities--at the man who merely dabbled in race prejudice until the industrial needs of World War II caused thousands of migrant Negro workmen to blacken his lily-white doorstep.

Thou Art the Man. Such a dabbler, at first, was affable, average-man Neil Kingsblood. Like all his friends in Grand Republic, Neil simply took for granted that Negroes were unfit for racial equality because they were lazy, dishonest and incapable of intellectual development. And in this comfortable state of prejudice Neil remains--until he reads the old letter which proves to him that he is one-thirty-second-part Negro himself.

While Neil is innocently advancing toward this discovery, Author Lewis is sentimentally setting the stage for it. Neil is shown to have a lovely white wife, a little daughter "with [a] skin of strawberries and cream," a high-class home in a "restricted" residential district. Posed before Neil Kingsblood is the agonizing moral question: must I admit "my touch of the tarbrush" when I know what misery this admission will create for my wife and child?

In Black & White. Neil finds the answer when, for the first time in his life, he visits the local colored section and finds out that Negroes are human beings. This revelation also gives Author Lewis a wonderful chance to employ his most sneering and dramatic satire--through the simple device of ranging the struggling Negroes of Grand Republic on one side of the stage and the "Babbitts" of the white community on the other. Author Lewis' Negroes are not idealized--in fact some of them are shoddy and worthless characters--but most readers are likely to agree with Neil that they, as Lewis presents them, are more valuable to the human race than Lewis' contemptuous whites.

But crusading Author Lewis plays against the white community with loaded dice, and his chief means of supporting the colored is to go all-out in discriminating against the white. When Neil publicly confesses his Negro blood, and associates with Negroes, he loses every single one of the friends he has known since boyhood, his wife is the only woman who will stand by him, and there is not one employer in Grand Republic who will defy the outraged city fathers by giving him a steady job. Only in the last, melodramatic chapter--which reads like a climax by James M. Cain--does Author Lewis feel the need to range a couple of whites at Neil's side, when he is almost lynched by a horde of furious Babbitts, armed with shotguns.

Ever present in Kingsblood Royal is Lewis' old, skilled ability to catalogue sarcastically the interiors of middle-class American homes and offices. Ever absent is what talent he once possessed for building characters out of flesh & blood rather than rage and cardboard. And in the end,

Author Lewis--like many a crusader in a good cause--ruins even his power as a pamphleteer by presenting his favored ideas and characters with an emotional slickness that never amounts to more than mawkishness.

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