PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

Art of the Night

by

George Jean Nathan

Sinclair Lewis, more than any other American novelist, has in him the potentialities of a valuable writer for the American stage. But he appears also to have in him that condescension toward the theatre which is shared by many of his fellow novelists. It is this condescension that, as in the case of novelists often, makes his attempts at drama unhappily inferior to his other literary enterprises and that withholds from our stage a talent that might otherwise excite and adorn it. It is not that he has no interest in the theatre, for it is very apparent that he has. It is rather that that interest is a left-handed one, something to be pardonably indulged in in the slack periods between novels, like a tumble off the water-wagon, a trip in blackface through the hot spots of Harlem, a reading aloud to a company of New Republic editors of the complete works of Lloyd C. Douglas, or the singing of "Frankie and Johnnie," unexpurgated, at a meeting of the D.A.R.

Although Lewis's name appeared as collaborator with Sidney Howard on the dramatization of "Dodsworth," by his own admission it was Howard who did most of the real work, and the success of the job was thus due to a craftsman who regards the theatre as a field of primary and serious endeavor and who has devoted much of his life to a close study of it. For both "The Jayhawker" and, more recently, "It Can't Happen Here" Lewis himself has been largely responsible; the latter, indeed though it carries the name of a collaborator, is practically all his work. Both have clearly hinted what Lewis might accomplish in the way of dramatic writing if he went at the business with the singleness of purpose and the pains which he applies to his novel writing. And both have equally clearly proved that he doesn't go at the business in any

E.M.I.C.A.E.S.

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such manner.

When Lewis is working on a novel, he will travel to the ends of the earth to acquaint himself with the necessary materials. He will interview, if his scheme calls for it, shoe-clerks, coal-miners, college presidents, railroad brakemen, trombone players, bus boys, Sanscrit professors, beauty contest winners, and God know what others. He will try himself out in the pulpits of churches, turn alfalfa farmer, practise the rumba, and act not only the fore but the hind legs of a chariot horse in a tank town "Ben Hur" troupe if it will give him the inside on something he is seeking. He will buy and read reference books by the ton, he will sleep on the floors of flop houses and in vats of glue factories for months, and he will enter the prize ring and permit himself to be knocked out even by Primo Carnera in order to get the right flavor into a single sentence. He will do all this, and more, for one of his novels. He will even drink nothing stronger than soda pop. But by way of preparation for a play, he will not go to a single theatre, save perhaps Minsky's; he will not bother to read the dramatic work of the better modern playwrights; he will do nothing to acquaint himself with the fundamentals of dramatic composition. And in this respect he is little different from most of his brother novelists who essay writing for the theatre.

As a result, his plays, like the plays of these others, rest in that no-man's land that stretches between the novel and the drama. They breathe much more of the book-stall than of the stage. And when here and there they do breathe of the stage the breath is patently a breath that smells suspiciously of apologetic cloves. It is a pity that Lewis takes this attitude toward the theatre. He has, as a writer, more force and fire, more sharpness of character sense, more rich humor and more general aliveness than nine-tenths of the men who are writing for the state ofmx this country at the present time.

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And he has it in him, as I have hazarded, to become a dramatist of importance if only he will make the drama a study as he has made the novel. For in his very novels there lies implicit the seed of sound drama, together with much of the bud of dramatic promise. Yet his plays, even when as in the case of "It Can't Happen Here" he fashions them from one of his novels, albeit his lesser ones, come forth with that seed sterile.

Hardy, Conrad, and Moore failed in their attempts at drama because they looked down upon the theatre and thought it child's play. Bennett said that writing a play, compared with a novel, was a baby trick, like shaking a rattle, and the plays he wrote were, accordingly, largely worthless. Galsworthy, on the other hand, and also Maugham appreciated that drama is an art, a very difficult art, and by applying themselves sincerely to it produced plays of merit. In this country, our novelists with negligible exception have seen fit to look upon the stage and drama as a cross between Coney Island and a night club. The result has been a succession of plays that even a third-rate professional playwright would be ashamed of, that is, presuming that some of them had ever been produced, for many of them were found to be too sour to tempt even shoestring producers. Lewis is too valuable a dramatist in the making to go the way of these others, whose names I politely spare print. The least he can do, before he sits down to his next play, is to read O'Neill, Anderson, and Behrman, and have a couple of drinks with Jimmy Durante.