Correspondence

Lewis' Labor Novel

To the Editor:

In amplification of Mr. Ramon Guthrie's memories of Sinclair Lewis' labor novel: Lewis came to Chicago in the spring of 1923 to collect material for his novel. He talked with men about their jobs. In the Morrison Hotel he met a waiter who hoped to change to a better job by learning commercial art by correspondence; his object was to do ben-day for fashion plates. I accompanied Lewis to the waiter's house, where Lewis picked up a lot of personal information. There was no talk of Sacco-Vanzetti on this trip, but I am confident Debs was in Lewis' mind, and his interest in labor went back to his Halcyon Hall days.

During this stay in Chicago
Lewis talked with Dr. Morris Fish-
bein, then editor of "The Journal
of the American Medical Associa-
tion." Fishbein said: "Up at our
office we have hundreds of files on

doctors; why don't you take a look
at them and write a book about a
doctor?" Lewis took the sugges-
tion, and then, or soon thereafter,
Fishbein put him in touch with
Paul de Kruif, who practically
provided Lewis with a complete
medical-school course at second-
hand. Lewis' debt to Dr. Kruif—
as to all the men he consulted pro-
fessionally—was very great, and
the result was a fine novel—"Ar-
rowsmith."

If Lewis had been able to visual-
ize a working man who became a
leader by sheer force of person-
ality, and that man's family, I
think he would have written his
labor novel. But many years oe-
fore he had taken up economic
theories, and the experts on whom
he relied talked theory instead of
action. Ben Stolberg told me:
"Lewis can't handle ideas." But
Lewis could handle character and
observe behavior, whereas Stolberg
couldn't write fietion.

HARRY HANSEN.

Books Received

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with him on it in Connecticut and Vermont. Eugene Debs was the prototype of the hero. The title was to be *The Man Who Sought God*.

The world-wide excitement over the Sacco-Vanzetti affair was at its height at the time and may have had a part in suggesting the novel to him. Although he felt no militant interest in the case, Red talked about it frequently and saw analogies between Sacco and Vanzetti, as martyrs to a reactionary society, and Debs, persecuted and imprisoned by similar interests.

From Venice, Red decided to go on to Ragusa and Athens, but since I had a novel of my own to finish up, I turned back to France.

I next heard from him, a couple of months later, when I was established in a small village in the Dordogne. Red had a way with telephones. I was so awed by the miracle of his getting a call through to the primitive local switchboard at one of the rare moments when the postmistress happened to be on duty and the fat, ancient postman sober enough to pedal down to the far end of the village and fetch me, that I could only bellow a bewildered yes when I understood that he wanted me to drop my work and come to Paris to go on a walking trip through Alsace. Before the connection finally sputtered out, he managed to add that a specialist in Vienna had warned him that he was facing a complete collapse unless he entered a hospital immediately.

It took two or three days of patient insistence to get him out of Paris and on a train for Strasbourg.

From Strasbourg to Bale, switching from Alsace to the Schwartwald and with zig-zags to avoid famous beauty spots is about a hundred miles. With with stops wherever, as Red said, "church steeples and the

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bright prattle of little children" promised beer, we did it in about ten
days. It was the longest stretch over which I ever saw Red completely
happy. His brief account of the trip in _Dodsworth_ makes it sound more
strenuous than it was. Red did, as he says, find himself breathing deeper,
sleeping better, brooding less, and drinking beer instead of cognac."
But he didn't "sweat and ache" too much under the weight of his rucksack.
He did carry a rucksack, but its entire contents were a Bible, _The Imita-
tion of Christ_, a recent number of _The Bookman_, and a toilet kit.
The problem of socks, shirt and underwear he solved by stepping into the
bathtub--when we stopped at hotels that had bathtubs--with them on and
lathering them thoroughly. In the morning, they were often "sort of almost
nearly dry enough" to wear again. On the second day, he threw _The Bookman_
away.

It was characteristic of Red, that while America was ringing
with pulpit-thumping dehunciations of _Elmer Gantry_, its godless author
could have been found lying under a tree along a road in Alsace, absorbed
in either the Bible or Thomas a Kempis.

During our trip, the labor novel began to take on definite shape.
Building around the theme, "Blessed are they were are persecuted for
righteousness sake," Red would develop long segments of the story, weav-
ing and expanding episodes as they came into his mind, without any thought
of composing them. In one scene Clarence Darrow (fictionalized, of course)
knowing that the hero has been framed, tries to convince him that his
only hope lies in pleading guilty and throwing himself on the mercy of
the court. In another outstanding passage the hero suddenly sees himself
as a self-dramatizing charlatan, reveling in his martyrdom. Sometimes
another character, "the international waiter," a sardonic, picaresque, wine

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expert on life (Montenegrin by birth; Viennese, Parisian and Swiss
by education), would slip into the story as a foil to the innocence and
idealism of the hero. There were scenes between Clarence Darrow and the
"international waiter" that were so splendid that any attempt I might
make to describe them would only garble them. Eventually Red came to
feel that the "international waiter" deserved a novel of his own.

Although the Sacco-Vanzetti affair may have provided the
first inspiration for the labor novel, it would be a mistake to attribute
to Sinclair Lewis any kind of sustained political conviction. He had
been, briefly, during his college days, a socialist. He still took it
for granted that, by and large, politicians are scoundrels and govern-
ments more or less consciously contrived swindles to enable small cliques
to exploit the masses. But, in his mature years at least, he did not
believe that anything could be done about it. Eugene Debs might be a
saint in his eyes, but that did not mean that either Debs' or Marx's or
anybody else's social doctrines would ever be a panacea.

The title, _The Man Who Sought God_, also needs explaining.
Whether or not Sinclair Lewis had a religious mind depends on one's con-
cept of religiosity. He had scant use for Yaweh and the God of Caiaphas
or of high priests in general.

"God is the lacrimae rerum," he said, "the eternal tears of
things."

In keeping with these concepts, the hero of the labor novel
was to be a workingman who came to social and political awareness flounder-
ingly, in the course of his search for what was to run afoul of Church
and State on the charge that "he stirreth up the people." But the final

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crisis of the story was to be his inner struggle against an insidious messiah complex that threatened to destroy his humility and integrity.

From Bale we went back to Paris. Red took an apartment in Auteuil, but he was too restless and unhappy to settle down. Paris never agreed with him for long. Around the first of July he began his wandering again. My wife and I accompanied him as far as Munich and spent a week with him there. When he saw us off for Paris, he seemed so forlorn and at loose ends, so in need of help and companionship, that only the necessity of my earning a living kept us from changing our minds about leaving him. Fortunately, the train that was to take him to Berlin and, as it turned out, to his first meeting with Dorothy Thompson, pulled out from the station within a few minutes of our own.

Some weeks later Red telegraphed asking me to join him and Dorothy at Cologne for a walking trip up the Rhine. At Mainz, I think it was, Dorothy had to leave us. Red and I wandered about the Rhineland for a few days longer before joining her at Berlin.

All during this period, the labor novel was shaping up in his mind. As he told it, in disconnected episodes, for the most part, but with enough links to give it a unity, it was a powerful and beautiful work that promised to become all that he hoped for it.

Red never boasted of what he had done or was going to do. In most ways he was extraordinarily modest. When I once suggested that he could stand comparison with an H. G. Wells or an Arnold Bennett, both of whom he admired extravagantly, he was quietly shocked at my irreverence. He did,

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however, say that this novel was going to be better than anything that
he himself had ever written--"even better than Arrowsmith." He felt
that he was not ready to write it yet. He wanted the experience of writ-
ing at least one more major novel first, while letting the labor novel
ripen gradually in his mind.

Any one who knew Sinclair Lewis remembers the unending mono-
logues that he could improvise for hours at a time. During my first
stay in Berlin with him, either Dorothy or I--or perhaps both of us--
suggested that he put one of the current monologues on paper. Within a
few days, he had written *The Man Who Knew Coolidge*.

It must have been in November --I living in Paris at the time--
that Dorothy asked me to come to Berlin to keep Red company while she
covered an assignment in Moscow. She was living in Charlottenburg and
invited me to use her apartment during her absence. Red had taken a
suite in a small hotel a mile or so away. We met every evening for dinner
and often at noon for lunch. Although he had begun work on *Dodsworth*,
the labor novel was still very much in his mind. We talked much more about
it than of *Dodsworth*. It was either during my stay or shortly after that
he wrote to J. B. McNamara, then serving a sentence in San Quentin, con-
cerning his project, It goes without saying that McNamara's reply urged
him enthusiastically to carry it through.

It was in 1929 that Red made his first serious attempt to write
the labor novel. He and Dorothy were living on their farm in Vermont.
A number of authorities on labor, economics, etc. were in residence as a
consultant staff. One of the experts was the late Ben Stolberg; I have
forgotten who the others were. Everybody except Red buckled down to the
job of writing the book. Red himself seemed rather baffled and discon-
torted

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by the invasion. He would take naps, go for walks, read detective stories, get quietly but purposefully drunk, turn out pot-boilers for the *Saturday Evening Post*, while the board of experts sat is solemn conclave laying out the novel.

His original concept of the story had been ruled out as a childish fantasy. Thus far, all that he had really learned from their extensive tutoring in the history and theory of labor-unionism was: that Debs was an insignificant dreamer of no possible interest to any serious student of labor; that there _was_ no real labor movement in America; that, if there had been one he was too ignorant of Marx, Bakunin, Liebknecht and a host of others to write a novel about it; and (this much on his own) that he didn't _want_ to write the kind of novel that they insisted he _must_ write.

In the end he wrote *Ann Vickers* instead. One day in the fall of 1930 I drove over to see him. Red came out on the terrace to meet me. "You'll be glad to know that I'm writing a novel about a business woman," he said drily. "You don't know anything about business women, do you? Good! Neither do I, and I don't want to."

From a creative point of view, the years between *Dodsworth* and *It Can't Happen Here* must have been rather harrowing ones for Red. *Ann Vickers* was a passable novel perhaps, but he knew that it was not a good one. *Work of Art* was an underdeveloped negative of the "international waiter" novel. Whatever his inner anguish may have been, Red kept it to himself. He was the world's most assiduous brooder, but he never did his brooding on any one's shoulder. One day in the fall of '34 he did remark

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that most writers had at most a decade of real productivity in their
lives. "After that, they are through." He cited Irvin Cobb, Dreiser,
Jack London. "Of course, a man can never know about himself."

A few days after this Red began answering his own question by
writing _It Can't Happen Here_.

In April 1936, Red asked me to start serious work with him
on the labor novel. He was in good shape. _It Can't Happen Here_ had
restored his confidence in himself. He had not tasted so much as a
glass of beer in twenty-six weeks. During the spring we had several ses-
sions together on the book.

Basically the plot was the same as it had been nine years
earlier in Venice. Roy (as we called the hero tentatively) was to be a
home-grown Gene Debs. In the course of his groping for a God who is at
once the tears and the meaning of things, he was to become a radical and
to suffer the penalty for his convictions. Because of _The Man Who Knew
Coolidge_, the original title would have to be changed. We considered a
number of alternatives, among them _The Unconquerable_ and _Roy Against the
World_, neither of which we liked much.

As soon as I could get away in June, we set out for Connecti-
cut to gather documentation. My experience over a period of half-a-dozen
years as semi-skilled labor in various Connecticut factories qualified me
as enough of an expert for Red's purposes. I had worked on most kinds of
machine-tools and still remembered enough to know a shaper chuck from a
collet. As a refresher course, Red acquired a small library of machinists'
manuals and set me to studying them.

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Working on a book with Red, as I already knew from what little I had done on _Dodsworth_, was always a hectic job. One had to be on tap twenty-four hours a day. Red himself could get sufficient sleep by snatch-ing naps, of anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours, between ideas. Whenever a new idea occurred to him, he dropped everything else and started off in full cry after it--on the quite valid theory that the surest way of getting a thing done was to do it immediately.

We covered the Naugatuck and Connecticut valleys from a variety of angles. The program of a typical day was a morning of conferring, getting notes into order, reading local newpapers for names, activities and interests; lunch with a factory owner or executive; an afternoon spent inspecting a factory or two and a CCC camp; dinner and a beer garden with a group of workmen; a post-midnight snack and a prowl through some of the more obscure quarters of town with a police reporter. One of our closest friends was a mountainous triple-chinned German chief mechanic name d Emil whose artistry on a milling-machine fascinated Red. On the night of the first Louis-Schmeling fight, Emil took us to a combination gambling joint and speak-easy--though prohibition had been repealed a good two years earlier--to listen to the bout.

Although Red was incognito only to the extent that he signed hotel registers as H. S. Lewis, in order not to be hounded by reporters, most of our acquaintances among the workers knew nothing about this Mr. Lewis except that he was good company and had something to do with books. They talked naturally and easily with him. Once when he protested at never being allowed to pay for any part of the several meals we had with them, one of the men explained, "Hell, Mr. Lewis, you're just too swell a guy for your money to be any good around here."

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Around two or three o'clock in the morning, when I would manage to get to bed with more hope than expectation of getting some sleep, Red was apt to drop into my room for a last cigarette and a few final questions such as:

"What kind of an operation is a buck-grinder used for?"

"Tell me once more the difference between a pawl and a good dog. How do you suppose dogs ever came to be called that?"

"Would an educated mechanic--one who had a high school education--say 'morphadite' for 'hermaphrodite?'

"How much difficulty would a boy of Roy's intelligence have in understanding _Das Kapital_?"

"When did conveyor belts first come into general use?"

"Can an ordinary lathe-hand read a blueprint? How long does it take to learn to read a micrometer--a 'mike'?"

"Do you think we should have Zoe join the CP?"

"What would the population of Torrington have been in 1910, and what did they make there beside needles and skates?"

"What did you say the difference between a dog and a pawl is again?"

Sometimes I was afraid that we were getting too much documentation. Red shook the suggestion off. "The main reason for having documentation is to know how much of it you can leave out. I may not even mention a turret-lathe once in the whole book, but I must know _why_ I don't."

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As a matter of fact, it irritated him to be thought of as belonging to the "slice of life" school of literature. "Sure, I'm a photographic realist," he said, "like James Joyce--only a hell of a lot less so."

Warned by the debacle of 1929, I took particular pains not to seem to be writing his novel *for* him. Occasionally, after he had been thinking aloud about a character or a situation for a while, he would ask me to take over. Now and again, he would interrupt to say, "That's not a bad idea. Let's get it down on paper." Other times he would cut in with: "No, he doesn't do that. Here is what he *does* do, though!" and take up the story again himself. Talking things out in this way was no more than mulling around in the general atmosphere of the novel and not serious enough for us to argue about. We had talked over *Dodsworth* in its earliest stages in the same way.

He always solicited suggestions, on plot, character, episodes and dialogue as well as details of documentation. He took them for what they were worth, and nothing more. As an instance of the basis on which we worked, one of Red's notes to me reads:

Drrmn

much thanks for your letter abt strike--I shan't follow it exactly, but it gives me lots of idea. . . You make Zoe (the heroine of the novel) a little too flip; she is slow-spoken, brooding, accurate.

In a subsequent note, he wavers on Zoe's character:

Let's get away from the skinny young heroine of today; but Zoe is in danger of being too lush.

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Another memorandum defines her as being "attractive
in cynical gaiety."

Actually, the personality of Zoe was not overly important
to the story. Roy was the character that counted; and Roy, the gangling
boy with "red, almost orange hair", born in a New England Sauk Center,
of parents who used Dr. E. J. Lewis' favorite catch-words against him,
was Red Lewis himself.

The end of our trip, and as it happened of the labor novel,
came suddenly. We had invited some of our friends--mostly workers in a
Naugatuck plant--to dinner. It was Red's idea, and until within an
hour before we were to meet them, he seemed enthusiastic about it.
Suddenly, for no reason that he could think of, he made up his mind not
to go. Simultaneously he decided that, since my wife was planning to
come down from Vermont to spend the Fourth of July with friends of ours,
it would be a gracious gesture if, to spare her the hot train ride, we
drove up to get her. His plans further called for us to stop overnight
at Provincetown on our way and then drop in for lunch with Sidney Howard
who was living in the Berkshires.

When I pointed out that what he was proposing was a jaunt of
some seven to eight hundred miles and that, since he disliked traveling
more than a hundred miles a day in a car, it would take us a week to do
it, he was unimpressed. His contention was that since Provincetown was
in Massachusetts, it _must_ lie somewhere along the direct route from Connec-
ticut to Vermont. In the end, he agreed to my suggestion that I stay on
in Connecticut long enough to fill in some of the gaps in our notes.

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He insisted on leaving his own car with me and hiring a car and driver to take him to the Berkshires.

Next morning as he was getting into the hired car, he spoke enthusiastically of how much we had accomplished and how much fun we had had doing it. Then, as the car started up, he added a final word that is still something of an enigma to me. Here it is, verbatim: "And now I am sorry I have to go home and be a fascist." He said it as if he really was sorry--sorry for himself and that it had to be.

Nothing was said, then or ever, about abandoning the project. It was understood that we were to meet in Vermont and go on with our work. As a matter of fact, we did put in a few more sessions on it, but by the end of the summer he had already begun writing *The Prodigal Parents*.

Any speculation as to why Sinclair Lewis never wrote the one novel that seems to have carried more of his hopes than any of those he did write, must take into account the great part that Dr. E. J. Lewis played in his son's emotional life. Red's attitude toward his father (he had died some ten years earlier) was a curious mixture of awed reverence and rankling resentment. All of his best books were an affirmation of his hard-won emancipation from being Harry Lewis of Main Street. Yet throughout his life, whenever Red stood on the verge of giving the true measure of himself and the forces that were in him, the shade of Dr. E. J., as Red always called him, snorted the phrase that never lost its power to bring him to heel: "Harry, why can't you do like any other boy ought to do!"

In the labor novel, as Red's memoranda to me show, both Roy's parents and Zoe's father were to be incarnations of Dr. E. J.

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Red hated being Harry, he winced in acute discomfort when any one called him Harry, yet periodically he yielded to a compulsion to be Harry. His worst books, those that are at complete variance with himself (Work of Art and The Prodigal Parents are cases in point), were written by Harry Lewis to propitiate his father. The labor novel would have been a more direct attack on all that Dr. E. J. symbolized than anything that Red had yet written.

Another point to be considered is that Red's natural medium was what may best be called *raillerie*. He was certainly not a realist in the sense that Balzac was, nor a naturalist in the sense that Zola and Turgenev were. For him versimilitudes and probabilities existed, for the most part, only to be controverted and twisted into amusing pretzels. His best books are epic fantasies. I asked him once if he had any specific models for George F. Babbitt.

"How could I have?" he said, "There was no such thing as a Babbitt until I invented him--though after that, of course, the world was full of them."

But the labor novel, as Red envisaged it, could not be handled as a *raillerie*. The Prodigal Parents, which he wrote instead, is both a grotesque *raillerie* and a slapstick attack on most of the things that the labor novel was to glorify.

Although he once told me, "I should like to be the Voltaire of our age," Red had none of the missionary urge of a Voltaire. One of his convictions that never wavered was that the novelist's job is to write novels, not to crusade for causes. As for his own work, he always insisted that he

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had never intended to be anything of a "do-gooder" and could not imagine
any of his novels having any effect on the American scene.

One of the principal reasons why Red abandoned the labor novel
seems to be that, consciously or not, he had come to regard it as a book
that he "ought to" write.

Red's penchant for writing books that he ought _not_ to write was
one of the secrets of his success. He was fond of relating a conversation
with George Horace Lorimer in which the famou _Saturday Evening Post_
editor had mournfully warned him that to publish _Main Street_ would be a
professional suicide. _Babbitt_, _Arrowsmith_ and _Elmer Gantry_ confirmed
Sinclair Lewis' reputation as a monster to whom nothing was sacred. He never
set out intentionally to be an _enfant terrible_; but if there was any segment
of the American public that one or another of his books did not seem calculated
to alienate, it was an oversight. Even _Dodsworth_ was not without
its sting; as Red conceived it, it was to be a dignified cuff to those of
his readers who had gloated too smugly over _Babbitt_.

Perhaps the surest clue as to why Red never wrote the labor novel
lies in the book that he wrote in its stead. _The Prodigal Parents_ is not
a good book. At best, it is such a novel as George F. Babbitt himself might
have written as a counterblast against his creator. If Dr. E. J. could have
read it, he would have sighed that at last Harry was getting some sense.
In the hero, Fred Wm Cornplow of Sachem Falls, Red did a sympathetic carica-
ture of a small town Babbitt in revolt against not only the newfangled
highfalutin-ness of his children and their demands on him, but also against
society's, and even his own, concept of what he "ought to do."

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Plaintively he wants <u>somebody</u> "in this doggone family to do what they want to do for once." He is for the overthrow of "the naively new and wearisomely antiquated system . . . equally practiced by small circles of relatives and great nations, whereby A sacrificed his honest desires on behalf of B, and B sacrificed for C, and C sacrificed himself violently but complainingly for A, and everybody resented the whole system and chanted, 'How loyal and unselfish we all are--curse it! '

From J. B. McNamara's letter urging him to do the book, to the
countless persons of various stations who through the years had exclaimed,
"Oh, you _must_ do it!", to my own obtuse eagerness to keep him on the job,
when he wanted to set out to see if, miraculously, the tip of Cape Cod _might_
not pop up somewhere along the Connecticut River--everything had contribu-
ted to an atmosphere of shrill insistence and made the novel one that he
_ought_ to do.

Red was a rebel in the old time tradition. He might have sniped
at red-coats from behind his own stone wall, but he would never have signed
with the Minute Men. He was a steadfast neutral in both World Wars, for in-
stance, He could never bring himself to join an army with banners, no matter
how small its numbers or how worthy its cause. He revolted against being
shoved--even into writing a novel of revolt.

Red seems never to have put the labor novel entirely out of
his heart. In 1947--twenty-two years after it had first occurred to him,
he revamped the original title into _The God-Seeker_. When Aaron Gadd, the
hero of this historical novel of early Minnesota, invites his employees to
form a union, it is almost surely a faint reminiscence of the novel he
never wrote.