10 Barrow Street, New York.

Dec. 12. 1920

To Sinclair Lewis.

My dear Mr. Lewis:-

I have been reading Main Street and sending it to my friends both here and abroad. I expect to re-read it at intervals for some time. I can scarcely express to you my admiration for its surface fidelity.

I have lived in Main Streets most of my life, and I could match almost every incident from life. I know dozens of Carol Kenicotts, and what I want to know is why you didn't know her better?

I want to know why Willa Cather, Vachel Lindsay and I find one end of the rainbow in Main Street, and why you and masters, Anderson, Sandburg, Dreiser and thousands of others who flock from Main Street to the cities, can't find it?

I have been going about questioning young women for a year past, Why did you leave your home town? They are apparently all Carol Kenicotts.

And to me that means, among several things, first of all, this. They had nothing with which to buy the thing they wanted.

As young women in College, they had looked on at the rich show window of the world. They coveted fine and flaming things. They bitterly blamed the world for not being up to the show window. And they had but one little coin in their purse with which to buy.

They don't know it, but the Carol Kenicotts are still parasitic. They can't produce beauty and wonder, they can only appreciate it. They are as lacking in spiritual perception as Main Street is in intellectual perception. I don't think you meant to show her like that, but except in relation to her hired girl, you never show Carol doing anything creative or even unselfish. She is always a lady, and always a little less than womanly.

That's the young American woman all over. She has good taste and no religion. And--- didn't you see this at all?-- she never functions spiritually in sex? Which means usually that she is never thoroughly aroused physically. She was always restles s and detached because the one string which harps women into harmony with life, was never strongly plucked.

You know, I think that is the trouble with our American life; Men and women are both involved in it. They never really set

10 Barrow St. N. Y.

My dear Mr. Lewis:-

You score! I forgot you created Carol, I was
under the impression she was somebody we had known when we lived
in Main Street.

But I insist that you didn't see through her the way a woman
would. She was either worse than you painted her or more mysterious
else why did you glide over the experience of motherhood so swiftly?
Very thin ice indeed!

That was her one chance to understand the mystic power of
sex, and we have both agreed that she never understood it. As for
the Doctor, he was quite as lacking, as are most American men in
the art of arousing and satisfying the deeper impulses. Maud
Dyer got him by making him understand that he had aroused and
could satisfy depths in her that he had never touched in his wife.
He fell as much a victim to his male desire, to feel himself
effective, as Carol did with Eric.

Will Kennicott wanted to feel himself completely the male in
one plane as Carol wished to feel completely the woman, one sub-
duing and one inspiring, and they both of them lost the way.

I can tell you, Main Street gave me a scare! I have always
seen this general American failure to function socially through
sex, as a part of the general upheaval toward reality. I have
thought that it was part of the protest against secret diplomacy, against political ritual. Main Street made me wonder.

But you are wrong about yrs. Sam Clark. I am still exchanging
Christmas presents with her at Lone Pine or Independence or wherever
I knew her (I never really lived at Carmel, you know, just stopped
there to rest) I was with her when her children were born and I
helped lay them out for burial, and when there was no one else to
do it, I read the burial service. My relation to her was real, and
all Carol ever had was appreciation for what I had done or written.
All Carol ever was good for, was talk, until she had had a baby
or two perhaps.

I think my quarrel however, is with your method as a novelist. My own idea is that in every novel or play some one of the characters should see the way out. They might see it too late, but they should have a glimpse of it. None of your people ever did. If the rainbow was there, as I must believe it was to a man of your perception, where was it? Why do you keep it out of the book? Why do you in no instance record a fine or generous or spiritualizing episode? Where was God all this time?

Yes I know that you are not the only American novelist who
adopts this method. You may all be right and I may be wrong
about it. I have cast my lines in more primitive places. But
I would like to hear why this method seems the right one to you.

All this would sound as if I weren't tickled to death to think that you have written it. I am. It makes my own work seem more worth while to me than it has ever seemed. I stopped in the middle of it and wrote to Lindsay to get out the Calliope and make her sing!