Evening star., 1938-01-23
By Mary.Carter Roberts
HE PRODIGAL PARENTS. BY
Sinclair Lewis Garden City:
Doubleday-Doran.

L And so now the boy from
Sauk Center eats crow. -.
Was it Sauk Center? Better to say,
perhaps, the boy from Zenith and
Main Street. But the crow-eating
part can stand. There is no possible
question about that.
The above refers, you gather, to Mr..
Sinclair Lewis But certainly!
Well, the reviewer has always held
that MIR. Lewis is genius, but not,
as the popular superstition holds, a
genius of literature. Instead, 1t has
seemed to her for many years that his
real ability has lain in his uncanny
capacity for divining what the public
will be thinking and feeling next week
and giving it to them this week. thus
startling and annoying them, but not
disagreeing with them. Rather. he
has always been in complete agree
ment with substantial portion of the
population. His shock tactics have
been somewhat comparable to those
Of the magician who brings the rab-
bit not out of the hat. but out of the
air: the audience is expecting rab-
bit eventually. but not just from that
place or at that second. Consequently,
it gasps, is pleasantly outraged and
altogether entertained. To do this as
many times as Mr.. Lewis has, with
accurate timing and a minimum of
monotony. is by no means minor
feat in popular psychology.
For when he wrote Main Street"
there was already, in every Gopher
Prairie, a group of individuals per-
fectly aware of the sterile cultural
environment in which they lived.
When he wrote "Babbitt" he did no
more than go step farther in the
same direction and treat of the citizen
instead of the city. BY the time he
wrote Elmer Gantry' the less worthy
type of evangelist had done great
deal to debunk itself and was pre-
eminently a plum ripe for picking.
But no one had picked it; that
remained for Sinclair Lewis. And so
on.
On the strict evidence of the record.
therefore, it appears that Sinclair
Lewis is, above all things. an astute
feeler of the public pulse and that his
gifts as a novelist are those of the
successful practical joker-ability to
combine maximum Of shock with min
imum of outrage and to make the
victim end by liking it. No wonder
he has he'd his field so long against
all comers
NOV, in his present book, he once
more subtlv diagnoses a turn in
public feeling and gives voice to a
change in advance of any other artic-
ulation; he speaks at the moment for
that creature of his own past abuse
the American small business man, the
plain citizen, virtuous husband and
well-meaning paterfamilias. He names
his hero Fredk. VIM. Cornplow and
he sets him in a small city called
Sachem Falls. N. Y. where he
makes him successful dealer in
motor cars-absolutely prosaic. But
he ideallzes Fredk. VIM. within an
Inch Of his astonished life and assures
US glibly that in such fellows lies the
good kernel of all civilizations
Hearken, if you will, to his own
statement:
For who in the world" he asks,
''has ever been more important than
Fred Cornplow?
He has. at times. been too noisy or
too prosy; he has nov and then
thought more of money than of virtue
and music; but he has been the eter-
nal doer; equally depended upon-and
equally hated-by the savage mob and
by the insolent nobility.
when Fred Cornplow was an
Egyptian, it was he who planned the
pyramids. conciliated the mad pha-
raohs. tried to make existence en-
durable for the sweating slaves. In
the days when he was called Roman
Citizen he was centurion and he
conquered Syria and ruled his small
corner Of it with as much justice as
the day allowed.
LAS FIR. Abbot CornploW, in the
bright Dark Ages. he developed agri-
culture and the use of building stone;
later, as captain under Cromwell he
helped tame the political power of
the ecclesiastics. The American Civil
War was not fought between Gen.
Grant and Gen. Lee, but between Pvt
Fred Cornplow of Massachusetts and
Pvt. Ed Cornplow of Alabama; and a
few years later it was they who Gre
ated bribery and railroads and gave
all their loot to science
From Fred Cornplow's family, be-
tween BIC. 1887 and AID. 1887, there
came, despite an occasional aristro-
cratic Byron or an infrequent prole-
tartan John Bunyan. nearly all the
medical researchers. the discoverers of
better varieties of wheat, the poets, the
builders, the singers, the captains of
great ships. Sometimes his name has
been pronounced Babbitt; sometimes 1t
has been called Ben Franklin; and
once, if Eugene ONeill may be trusted,
he went by the style of Marco Polo and
brought back from civilized China to
barbaric Europe the sound of camel
bells and the silken tents, scented
with sandalwood, which have over
He is the eternal bourgeois, the
bourjoyce (Fredk. WINS own pro-
nunciation) the burgher, the Middle
Glass. whom the Bolsheviks hate and
initiate, whom the English love and
deprecate. and who is most of the
population worth considering in
France and Germany and these United
States.
HE is Fred Cornplow. and when he
changes his mind. that crisis is weight.
Ter than Waterloo or Thermopylae."
HoORAY! There are some exag-
gerations in the statement, but
still-hooray
And with that the reviewer may say
that she has quoted you virtually all
Of Mr.. Lewis novel. That is it sense.
The rest is elaboration.
The story tells, in brief, how Sara,
Fredk. WINS smart young daughter,
ieo;5ae aFfor x,.no%;~r n