The Last Empire (8 page)

While Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair Lewis toured restlessly about Europe, trying to enjoy his success, he was already at work on
Babbitt
.

*    The Library of America has now brought out both
Main Street
and
Babbitt
in a single volume, and it was with some unease that I stepped into the time-warp that is created when one returns after a half century not only to books that one had once lived in but almost to that place in time and space where one had read the old book—once upon a time in every sense. It was said of Lewis that, as a pre–1914 writer, he had little in common with the rising generation of post–World War writers like Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner. It might equally be said that those of us who grew up in the Thirties and in the Second War made as great a break with what had gone before as today’s theoreticians made with us. Literary history is hardly an ascending spiral, one masterpiece giving birth to an even greater one, and so on. Rather there are occasional clusters that occur at odd intervals each isolated from the others by, no doubt, protocreative dust. Lewis was pretty much his own small
star set to one side of Twain, Crane, James, and Wharton, and the small but intense postwar galaxy which still gives forth radio signals from that black hole where all things end. In the Twenties, only Dreiser was plainly Lewis’s superior but Dreiser’s reputation was always in or under some shadow and even now his greatness is not properly grasped by the few who care about such things.

What strikes one first about
Main Street
is the energy of the writing. There is a Balzacian force to the descriptions of people and places, firmly set in the everyday. The story—well, for a man who supported himself by writing stories for popular magazines and selling plots to Albert Payson Terhune as well as Jack London, there is no plot at all to
Main Street
. Things just happen as they appear to do in life. In Minneapolis, Carol Milford meets Will Kennicott, a doctor from the small town of Gopher Prairie. There are events, some more dramatic than others, but the main character is Main Street and the intense descriptions of the place are most effective, while the people themselves tend to be so many competing arias, rendered by a superb mimic usually under control. Later, Lewis would succumb to his voices and become tedious, but in
Main Street
he is master of what Bakhtin (apropos Dostoevsky) called “the polyphonic novel. . . . There is a plurality of voices inner and outer, and they
retain ‘their unmergedness.’ ” Lewis is splendid on the outer voices but he lacks an idiosyncratic inner voice—he is simply a straightforward narrator without much irony—while his attempts to replicate the inner voices of the characters are no different, no more revelatory, than what they themselves say aloud.

“On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.” The first sentence is brisk; it places us in time—reminds us that this was Indian territory a half century ago, and so the white man is new to the scene, and his towns are still raw. “Cornflower” is
Saturday Evening Post
. “Corn” itself is a bit dangerous, as in corny. “Blue” isn’t all that good either. Yet, paradoxically, Lewis had a lifelong hatred of the cliché in prose as well as a passion for sending up clichés in dialogue: this can cause confusion.

Anyway, he has now begun the story of Carol Milford, enrolled at Blodgett College, a girl full of dreams even more vivid than those of Emma Bovary—dreams rather closer to those of Walter Mitty than to Flaubert’s Emma, though, in practice, as it later proves, Carol has more than a touch of Bouvard and Pécuchet in her when she takes to the field with one of her projects to bring beauty to a drab world. Lewis maintained that, as of 1920, he had read neither
Madame Bovary
nor Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology
, whose set of arias from the simple dead folk of a small-town cemetery inspired a generation of writers, achieving a peak, as it were, in Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
. Incidentally, there is some evidence that Lewis based her on the mother of Charles Lindbergh (cf. 132).

Carol is involved in the “tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.” Ostensibly on her behalf, Lewis drops Culture names all over the place. First, Robert G. Ingersoll, the nineteenth-century agnostic, and then Darwin, Voltaire. One can’t really imagine her liking any of them—she is too romantic; she dreams of truth and beauty. Ingersoll is a hard-bitten, dour freethinker. The other two are outside her interest. Later he tells us that she has read Balzac and Rabelais. Since she becomes a librarian, the Balzac would be inevitable but neither Carol nor Sinclair Lewis ever read Rabelais. There are some things that an experienced dispenser of bookchat knows without
any
evidence.

At a Minneapolis party, Carol meets Dr. Will Kennicott, a doctor in the small town of Gopher Prairie. He is agreeable, and manly, and adores her. In a short time: “He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend.” Will is “sincere” (a favorite word of Carol’s is “insincere”). Carol meanwhile (as a result of Mrs. Wharton on interior decoration and
Italian Gardens?
) has dreamed that “what I’ll do after college [is] get my hands on one of those prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I’d better become a teacher then. . . . I’ll make ’em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a quaint Main Street!” Hubris is back in town. One doubts if the worldly Grace Hegger Lewis ever thought along those lines in Sauk Center in 1916. But Lewis has got himself a nice premise, with vast comic potentialities. But instead of playing it for laughs and making satire, he plays it absolutely straight and
so achieved total popularity. Irony.

In 1912 Carol and Will get married. They take the train to Gopher Prairie. It is all very much worse than she expected. But Will exults in town and people. Although Lewis is noted for his voices, the best of the novel is the description of things and the author’s observations of the people who dwell among the things.

The train was entering town. The houses on the outskirts were dusky old red mansions with wooden frills, or gaunt frame shelters like grocery boxes, or new bungalows with concrete foundations, imitating stone. Now the train was passing the elevator, the grim storage-tanks for oil, a creamery, a lumber-yard, a stock-yard muddy and trampled and stinking.

They are met by Will’s friends, the elite of the village. There is a lot of kidding. Mock insults. Ho-ho-ho.

Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumberwagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and emptiness of the land.

This is “home.” She is in a panic. She notes “a shop-window delicately rich in error” (this is worthy of Wharton), “vases starting out to imitate tree-trunks but running off into blobs of gilt—an aluminum ash-tray labeled ‘Greetings from Gopher Prairie.’ ” And so she makes her way down Main Street, all eyes, later ears.

Carol entertains the village magnates, only to discover “that conversation did not exist in Gopher Prairie . . . they sat up with gaiety as with a corpse.” Nothing stirs them until one says, “ ‘Let’s have some stunts, folks.’ ” The first to be called on is Dave, who gives a “stunt about the Norwegian catching a hen.” Meanwhile, “All the guests moved their lips in anticipation of being called on for their own stunts.” A stunt was usually an imitation or ethnic joke. One can imagine Lewis’s own lips moving as he would prepare to hold captive some party with a monologue in a character not his own. As it turns out, there
is
conversation in Gopher Prairie—about “personalities,” often in the form of lurid gossip, usually sexual. Carol is not happy.

Lewis is good at tracing Carol’s ups and mostly downs. She puts on a play. Everything goes wrong. She joins the Library Board to encourage reading, only to find that the librarian believes that their function is not to lend but to preserve books. This, of course, was the ancestor of today’s Sauk Center Library where Lewis’s books are preserved but not read. Carol joins the Jolly Seventeen, the fashionable young matrons of the village in whose circle bridge is played and personalities dissected. Carol is thought a bit too citified and definitely stuck-up when she tries to talk of General Culture and town improvements. She does her best to fit in but she “had never been able to play the game of friendly rudeness.”

In time, Carol flirts with the lawyer, Guy Pollock. He loves literature and disdains the town and one can see that Lewis had it in mind to bring them together but Guy is too damp a character. She drops him; then she goes off in two unexpected directions. A beautiful young Swedish tailor has come to town, Erik Valberg. A townswoman soliloquizes: “They say he tries to make people think he’s a poet—carries books around and pretends to read ’em, says he didn’t find any intellectual companionship in this town. . . . And him a Swede tailor! My! and they say he’s the most awful molly-coddle—looks just like a girl. The boys call him Elizabeth. . . .” Plainly, the influence of Willa Cather’s curiously venomous short story “Paul’s Case” of 1905 was still strong enough for Lewis to ring changes on the sissy boy who dreams of art and civilization and beauty.

As it turns out, Erik is not hot for Will but for Carol. They talk about poetry; they lust for each other. They are two against the town. He is randy Marchbanks to her Candida. But nothing happens except that everyone suspects, and talks; and Lewis is at his best when he shows Carol’s terror of public opinion in a place where it is not physically possible to escape from eyes at windows. This sense of claustrophobia and of no place to hide is the heart of the book. Even the metaphor of the unending “grasping” prairie contributes to the stifling of the individual.

Erik is a farm boy turned tailor turned autodidact: he has got the point. “It’s one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose. They do just the opposite.” Carol’s attempts to integrate him in the town fail. Will observes them walking together at night. There is no scene, but it is clear that Erik must leave town, which he does.

The other counterpoint voice to Gopher Prairie is Miles Bjornstam, unfondly known as “the Red Swede.” He is a self-educated laborer; he cuts wood, does odd jobs, lives in a shack like Thoreau. He reads Veblen. Reading lists of the characters are all-important to Lewis. Carol has not only read but
bought
“Anatole France, Rolland, Nexe, Wells, Shaw, Edgar Lee Masters, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Henry Mencken.” Of those on this list, three subsequently gave Lewis blurbs. Ambitious penpersons take note.

Daringly, Carol pays Miles a call; he shocks and delights her by putting into words her own thoughts about the village. Then he goes into business for himself; prospers with a dairy; marries Carol’s best friend, her maid-of-all-work, Bea Sorenson, who comes from the hinterland and though she peaks with a comic Scandinavian accent her heart is gold. Earlier, the village was scandalized that Carol had treated her as an equal. Now, although Mr. and Mrs. Bjornstam are hardworking and prosperous, they are still shunned, partly because of their foreignness and low class but mostly because the agnostic Miles has been “lippy” about God’s country and the most perfect of its Main Streets. With the arrival of the First World War everyone is now a super-American, busy demonizing all things foreign—like Miles and Bea. But Carol continues to see the Bjornstams and their child. She, too, has a son.

It is during these scenes that Lewis must do a fine balancing act between melodrama and poetic realism in the Hardy vein (sometimes Hardy, too, lost his balance). The Bjornstams are the only people Carol—and the reader—likes. But the villagers continue to hate them even though Miles has done his best to conform to village ways.

Bea and her child get typhoid fever, from the bad water that they must drink because the neighbor with the good water won’t share. Will Kennicott does his best to save Bea and her child but they die. Carol is shattered. Miles is stoic. When the ladies of the village unexpectedly call with gifts, not knowing that mother and child are dead, Miles says, “You’re too late. You can’t do nothing now. Bea’s always kind of hoped that you folks would come see her. . . . Oh, you ain’t worth a God-damning.” Like Erik, he, too, leaves town.

Set piece follows set piece. There is a trip to California, where Will searches for fellow villagers and, unhappily for Carol, finds them. She is now ready to leave Gopher Prairie, “Oh, is all life always an unresolved but?” She resolves the “but.” She will get out into the world,
any
world but that of the claustrophobic censorious village folk. Will accepts her decision even though he continues to be In Love With Her. (Rather unlikely this.) Carol and son set out for Washington, D.C.—the city from which we locals used to set out for New York as soon as we could. On the train east, the boy asks where they are going and Carol says, “We’re going to find elephants with golden howdahs from which peep young maharanees with necklaces of rubies, and a dawn sea colored like the breast of a dove . . .” John Cheever would, years later, redo this bit of purple most tastefully.

The elephants turn out to be the Bureau of War Risk Insurance, where she does clerical work, and in mythical, magical Washington “she felt that she was no longer one-half of a marriage but the whole of a human being.” She moves among army, navy, minor officialdom. She revels in “the elm valley of Massachusetts Avenue . . . the marble houses on New Hampshire Avenue . . .” and the splendors of the restaurant on the roof of the Powhatan Hotel.

Will pays her a call; she is now a whole woman and so able to return to Gopher Prairie; she is, somehow, mysteriously, at peace with its boredom and mean-spiritedness. But she will not be coopted; she will not be a booster. She has another child. She sees Erik again—at the movies, up there on the silver screen; he had found his way to Hollywood. “I may not have fought the good fight,” Carol says at the end to Will, “but I have kept the faith.” On those words of the great Populist William Jennings Bryan, the book ends.