Curious

In 1921, when Sinclair Lewis’s book Main Street was passed over for the Pulitzer Prize in favor of The Age of Innocence, he sent Edith Wharton a congratulatory letter expressing his admiration for her work. She responded warmly, saying that this was the “first sign I have ever had–`literally’–that `les Jeunes’ at home had ever read a word of me.” Although distressed that Lewis’s book had been rejected because it had offended certain readers, she felt that his work had brought her hope: “Some sort of standard is emerging from the welter of cant and sentimentality, and if two or three of us are gathered together, I believe we can still save Fiction in America.” Lewis and his wife came out to Saint-Brice-sous-Forˆt soon after this exchange of letters. His relationship with Wharton was cordial but not intimate. They saw each other intermittently for several years, and he dedicated his novel Babbitt to her.¹

Edith Wharton is one of the few female authors to whom I often return. Her tangled, somewhat awkward relationship with Sinclair Lewis has always sparked my curiosity. Depending one whom one references, Edith’s note was laced with some irony. Last month I finally checked out a copy of Lewis’s Main Street from the library.

Lewis’s Main Street is criticized for failing to transcend the vice-like perspective of its heroine, Carol Milford. That is, to say, Lewis’s novel is not buoyantly American, per se. It is a satire meant to dissolve the romance and sentimentalism America often attributes to rural, small-town life. I approached Main Street prepared for an academic dissection, a cold-witted lab project that would dismember Lewis and point to his failure to become a “great American novelist,” an ambition after which he earnestly (not, as is in vogue, ironically) chased. It would be a lesson in what not to do, how not to stumble over oneself in the path. “Maintain a shrewd, academic distance,” I told myself, then just as soon forgot it.

But occasionally I find a character, author, or plot-line that strips me of the illusion of individuality. It pins those parts of myself that I find most sacred (or shameful) to a humble highway billboard for all to see. And although it may be possible to view one’s hidden self with a critical eye, one cannot escape the embarrassment of self-revelation. Indeed Main Street digs up that self-condemned part of your heart–whether it be a root of romantic populism, idealistic dreams of reform, or fanciful notions of self-autonomy–and exposes its futility.

This novel, like any, has its flaws. It is too clever. At points, it feels hackneyed, theatrically contrived. What sparse and eventual redemption Lewis summons at the end does little to redeem Main Street. But whatever its shortcomings, this novel becomes personal. To laugh at Carol is to laugh at oneself. To ridicule Carol is to ridicule oneself. To defend Carol is to defend oneself.

Although he is also a Nobel prize-winner, Sinclair Lewis is no Edith Wharton. And as you read Main Street you recognize that no one was more conscious of shortcoming than Sinclair Lewis. Lingerman, author of the biography Rebel From Main Street, noted that “[Lewis] measured American life by high standards and found it was not good enough. Yet who else depicted his country’s faults with such coruscatingly funny, ambivalently loving satire? His fiction functioned at its highest pitch when galvanized by anger at some banality or stupidity or injustice.” Those who have read Main Street should note what a striking parallel can be found between the Lewis Lingerman depicts and the heroine Lewis created. Carol Kennicutt seems to be born out of an autobiographical self-loathing and, broader still, a chagrin for “housebound and airless America.”

Lewis’s life was a maze of writers’ squabbles, alcoholism, and family tragedy. His immense popularity takes many by surprise for Sinclair Lewis’s works have all but disappeared from the American canon. Although his popularity fell as quickly as it rose, his prolific writing never flagged between the years 1912-51. Neither did his displeasure for American Arts and Academe in which Lewis found “the divorce in America of intellectual life from all authentic standards of importance and reality” personified. He made more enemies than friends prior to death and Lewis’s legacy was unfairly tarnished by an unfortunate biographer, the kind one wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, the kind of biographer that hates his subject second only to himself by the time the scribbled manuscript is typeset.

Yet even the notoriously vindictive Mark Schorer, whose spiteful Sinclair Lewis biography was published within the decade Lewis died, begrudgingly admits that although “[Lewis] was one of the worst writers in modern American literature…without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. That is because, without his writing, we can hardly imagine ourselves….He gave us a vigorous, perhaps a unique thrust into the imagination of ourselves.”

For myself, reading Sinclair Lewis reiterated how relying on the popular “canon” can cheat us of formative works and worthy writers.  It increased my desire to hunt up the long-forgotten or oft-overlooked. It encouraged me to broaden my horizon and resist cursory judgment. I was reminded to hunt for resources in unlikely places and savor the unexpected.  Do yourself a favor: find a work that can do the same for you.  

¹The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian