Novelist as Critic

THE MAN FROM MAIN STREET (371 pp.) --Edited by Harry Maule and Melville Cane--Random House ($3.75).

Like a good many other U.S. novelists who get a kick out of posing as intellectual primitives, Sinclair Lewis was much more of a literary fellow than he let on. Between novels he wrote almost a million words of essays, sketches and reviews. In The Man from Main Street, two of Lewis' associates have combed together a miscellany of his nonfiction which contains its full quota of transient fluff but also proves that Lewis had a lively if undisciplined gift for criticism.

Most of Lewis' pieces about other people's books were really implicit defenses of his own. Throughout his life he kept up a running journalistic battle in behalf of realism, by which he meant his idea that the American village could be "as inquisitorial as an army barracks'' and the American businessman "the most grievous victim of his own militant dullness." At the same time, Lewis kept firing away at his literary enemies: the "genteel philosophy" personified in William Dean Howells, a writer with "the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage"; literary commercialism, which bent the imagination to a soapsuds formula, and highbrow professors who "like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead."

The single most interesting piece in The Man from Main Street is an unpublished introduction to Babbitt in which Lewis discussed his caricature of "the Tired Business Man . . . who plays third-rate golf and first-rate poker at a second-rate country club." But there are other, highly readable things: a sly reminiscence of a month spent with Upton Sinclair in a Utopian-socialist community; a group of sketches about his apprenticeship as a reporter ; a picture of Jack London trying to read Henry James and bursting out with a wail: "Do any of you know what all this junk is about?"

In Babbitt, Main Street and other novels, Sinclair Lewis broke through the lace curtain of gentility and poured satiric wrath on the American Yahoo--but later he failed to realize that the fight he had fought was over and won. In his articles he kept shadow-boxing at opponents he had knocked out years before, and perhaps it was this tedious concentration on the bogies of his youth that made his later books seem like watery rewrites of his best work.

What saved Lewis from becoming a bore was his love for the American scene, and his self-perception. In an obituary he once composed for himself, he described Sinclair Lewis as "a cheerful pathologist, exposing the cliches and sentimentalities of his day"--and then added: "It is evident that Mr. Lewis smote . . . sentimentality because he knew himself to be, at heart, a sentimentalist."

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