SINCLAIR LEWIS: 1885-1951

Sinclair Lewis once remarked that he wanted no ceremony at his funeral except the singing of "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here." The committee of prominent citizens which last week was making plans for Sinclair Lewis' funeral in his home town cf Sauk Centre, Minn, did not find this suggestion appropriate. Even if they had, few of the Old Gang were left to remember the good old days when Sinclair Lewis was considered an unholy terror, the Scourge of Main Street, and hell's own foreign correspondent sent up to malign God's country.

The Civilized Barbarian. Sinclair Lewis' works have become period pieces. But in his prime, Lewis had no peer as a knocker of "homo Americanibus." Sinclair Lewis wrote mainly about one man, George Follansbee Babbitt, of Zenith, the Zip town. George Babbitt was a helpless materialist whose one standard was money, a quavering conformist whose only security was found in the back-slapping approval of his fellow Rotarians. He lived in physical comfort greater than kings enjoyed in the past, but he rarely stopped to enjoy it, for he was a Hustler. He was ashamed of his secret dreams. He was an adolescent who had never grown up, a semi-civilized barbarian.

Most of Lewis' novels are variations of Babbitt. Sam Dodsworth (who seems to improve with age) is an upper-class Babbitt with more dignity and deeper insights ("he sometimes enjoyed Beethoven"). Elmer Gantry is a Babbitt with a clerical collar and the courage of his disbelief; "Buzz" Windrip (the American dictator in It Can't Happen Here) is Babbitt running amuck with a submachine gun.

Lewis dealt mostly in what one critic has called "the medium-priced emotions." He was unconsciously, gushingly funny when he wrote about love. His women were unconvincing, unpleasant or foolish. His one real hero was Dr. Martin Arrowsmith, a knight of the test tubes.

Lewis handled the English language almost as clumsily as Theodore Dreiser, and with less force; he marshaled as many fascinating minor characters as Sherwood Anderson, but his understanding of them did not approach Anderson's awkward but subtle sympathy. Lewis was a good reporter, with an eye for detail. His mimicry of American speech was sometimes an inspired burlesque; his humor was usually broad enough for a Rotary luncheon.

His anger was loud, general, and without clearly visible purpose. Ugliness made him angry, but esthetes made him laugh. Materialism enraged him, but the spiritual roused him to scorn. He was angry at social injustice, but the idea of reform bored him just as much. The source of his anger seemed to spring from his childhood in Sauk Centre, in which, to his intense disappointment, he could see no Lancelots and no shining castles. Usually mislabeled a realist or a satirist, he was really a disappointed romantic.

His great merit was that he gave the U.S. and the world a sense of the enduring strength (ugly or not) of Main Street; and that he made Americans on all main streets, including Babbitt, stop hustling long enough to wonder uneasily where they were going.

The Era of the Great Belch. Cried the hero of Lewis' second novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, a little Babbitt who managed to break out of his narrow life: "Let us be great lovers! Let us be mad! Let us stride over the hilltops!" Those were the sentiments on which Harry Sinclair Lewis, a doctor's son of New England ancestors, consciously patterned his life. He went to Yale, worked as janitor at Upton Sinclair's Socialist community of Helicon Hall in New Jersey, lived on rice in a California seaside cottage. In 1919, after publishing six conventional novels, all failures, he set out to write what he called the "great American novelhighbrow and realistic."

In the U.S. it was a time of literary rebellion which came like a rude but welcome belch after a dull and heavy meal. Among the loudest belchers were famed Critics H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. At a Manhattan party one night, "Red" Lewis drunkenly embraced Mencken and Nathan and yelled: "So you guys are critics, are you? Well, let me tell you something. I'm the best goddam writer in this here goddam country . . ." Next day, after reading the proofs of Main Street, Mencken wrote to Nathan: "Grab hold of the bar-rail, steady yourself, and prepare for a terrible shock . . . That lump . . . by God, he has done the job . . . There is no justice in the world."

Main Street went through eleven printings in a few months. Lewis became one of the country's most prominent village atheists. In 1926, during a lecture in a Kansas City church, he challenged "the fundamentalist God" to strike him dead within ten minutes if He existed.* He was divorced from his first wife, wooed Foreign Correspondent Dorothy Thompson all over Europe, including the Soviet Union, finally won her in 1928 (they were divorced 14 years later).

In 1930, Lewis became the first U.S. writer to win the Nobel Prize. In his famous acceptance speech, he lambasted the Babbitts of U.S. literature, but spoke with a warmth that readers had missed in his books about "the America that has mountains and endless prairies, enormous cities and lost farm cabins, billions of money and tons of faith . . ."

Booster of the Bourjoyce. Red of hair and red of face, nervous, cadaverous, loud, looking (in the words of one observer) "corrugated, modest and oafisha country-store type," Sinclair Lewis went on striding across the hills. But slowly, respectability, as it must to most rebels, came to Red Lewis. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he had derided and denounced. His home town graciously forgave his insults, made him its favorite prodigal son. In a world of storm troopers and commissars, George Babbittand Red Lewisdid not look like such bad fellows after all. In The Prodigal Parents, Babbitt (this time called Fred Cornplow) was finally canonized by his creator. Wrote Lewis: "He is the eternal bourgeois, the bourjoyce, the burgher . . . and when he changes his mind, that crisis is weightier than Waterloo or Thermopylae." Sinclair Lewis, Knocker, had turned into Sinclair Lewis, Booster.

In the century's calm decades, he had been a firebrand; in the chaotic years after World War II, he became a quiet, transatlantic commuter, a familiar figure in Florence, living at last amid the palaces he had longed for. But like Sam Dodsworth (whom he reintroduced in his last novel, World So Wide, now appearing in the Woman's Home Companion), Lewis no longer felt at home anywhere, amid the alien marble or the native corn. Last week he died in a Roman nursing home at 65, attended only by his doctor and Franciscan nurses. The good sisters reported to the press that Lewis had repeatedly said: "I am happy. God bless you."

He was not a great writer, nor even a very good one; but he hit the U.S. hard in its solar plexus, immortalized a national character, and added several household words to the American language.

* With the better dramatist's appreciation of how long an audience would sit still, the late Bernard Shaw in a similar experiment gave God only three minutes.

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