THE DEATH OF ARROWSMITH

An Obituary of Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis, who died peacefully in his sleep yesterday afternoon, at his small country-place in Northwestern Connecticut, had been a rather forgotten author at eighty-six, but was still living. Yet at one time he was a figure of considerable notoriety, because of his jeering yet essentially kindly nature, and he was almost always a surprise to his friends, for he was almost always at their side. His个性和脾性在年轻时就已显现出一些特征,而这些特征在 later life were almost always present. He was a man of great wit, and his谐趣 often had a deep-effect on those who heard them. He was also a great reader, and his love of words was almost without equal. He was a man of great experience, and his stories were almost always true. He was a man of great humor, and his谐趣 often had a deep-effect on those who heard them. He was also a great story-teller, and his stories were almost always true. He was a man of great experience, and his stories were almost always true.

Although now they are unread, by most persons, a few of his novels, particularly "Main Street," "Arrowsmith," "Babbitt," "Elmer Gantry," and the ponderous four-volume chronicle of an American family, "The Tintayres," which Mr. Lewis began in 1944 and completed in 1950, are familiar to all Americans. His sociologists and literary historians, for their picture of the priggish and naive era, that is, of the first half of this century, picture was well rounded or unprejudiced, no one will maintain, today. Mr. Lewis seems essentially to have been a cheerful pathologist, joyfully exposing all the clichés and sentimентalities of his day -- the hearty falseness of senators and what were once known as "business boosters," the sentimentality of the smirking attitudes toward women in his times, the personal ambition of the clergy, the artists and the pro-

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fessional men, the brazen mawkishness of patriotism.

To the discerning reader of later years, it is evident
that Mr. Lewis smote -- or tried to smite -- a sentimentality
because he knew himself to be, at heart, a sentimentalist, a
romanticist, to whom green hills/and smiling girls and winter
storm were as naively exciting as they were to any popular
female novelist, and that he mocked the cruder manifestations
of Yankee Imperialism because he was, at heart, a fanatic
fanatic American, who never really liked the rigid condescensions
of the English people among whom he often lived -- including two
solid years in Derbyshire in 1951-2.

The "style" of Mr. Lewis's rather long-winded pictures
of Americana seems, on recent study, to have indicated a
decidedly confusing descent from extraordinarily discrepant literary an-
cestors. From a number perusal of his books, it together with
his own admissions, one may find him astonishingly drawn
deriving from both M.M.M.M. Dickens and Swinburne, M.M.M. H.G. Wells
and A.E. Housman, Thomas Hardy and H.L. Mencken and M.M.M.M.M.M.
M.M.M.M. Hamlin Garland, a truly confused and confusing ances-
tor. On the other hand, he seems to have left no M.M.M.M.M.M.M.
literary descendants. Unlike his celebrated contemporaries,
Colonel Theodore Dreiser (1871-1952) and Mr. Ernest Hemingway, who
was so dramatically killed leading his mixed M.M. Filipino and
Chinese troops in the storming of Tokio in 1949, Mr. Lewis seems to have affected but little the work
of the younger M.M.M.M.M. writers of fiction. Whether this is
a basic criticism of his pretentions to power and originality,
or whether, like another contemporary, Miss Willa
Cather, he was an inevitably lone and insulated
figure, we have not as yet the necessary perspective to see.

He even -- possibly in an unconscious imitation of his idol, Dickens -- dabbled with acting, over three or four years, appearing in various professional companies, with no especial credit or downwithmammoth discredit either.

For a good many years, Mr. Lewis was an extensive and, it would almost seem, a somewhat foolishly experimental wanderer.

He began his work with years on newspapers and in magazine and publishing offices; he had traveled through every state in the union; he knew most of Europe and, after the end of World War II, in 1944, most of Asia.

But on his return from England and rural Connecticut, he settled almost immovably in the Connecticut to which he had many ties. Though Mr. Lewis himself was born in 1885, he was a Minnesota prairie hamlet, in which his father was a quite typical country dmmmm physician, that father and his ancestors for eight or nine generations were born in near Connecticut, along the Housatonic River, of which Mr. Lewis himself has lived rural home, these past twenty years, has an extensive view.

Mr. Lewis attended Yale, and during the time dmmmm did his first newspaper work, on the New Haven Journal and Courier. It was naturally then that when he last returned from England, somewhat tired of travel and of England, he should settle in Connecticut, being weary of travel and of what he himself once called (in his brief travel book, "Tea for 1½," Random House, 1945) "the chronic wanderer's discovery that he is everywhere such an Outsider that no one will listen to him even when he kicks about the taxes and the beer."

Lewis was tall, lean, awkward, with a rough complexion and, in his later years, a mmm skull almost completely bald, save for a fringe of still rusty hair, who had he sported a chin whisker, he would almost comically have been taken for an impersonation of Uncle Sam, and a large share of the yearly dwindling number of interviewers and librarians who thought of making a pilgrimage to his home (a pilgrimage invariably ruined by the old man's derisive frivolity about all

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literary Honors and artistic poses) have noted that with
and advancing years he became more and more the Last Word
Surviving Connecticut Yankee. Even his voice assumed a Yankee
twang that is now forgotten and except in bad plays.

His neighbors still tell as their neighbor liveliest recol-
lection of him, that when Mr. Sir Wilfred
Willoughby, Willoughby, Westfrisket, Mr. Eisenbein Professor of
American Literature at Oxford, waited for him at the home, an entire
afternoon, Mr. Lewis was at a local garage, playing pinochle with
the village constable-undertaker.

Although, as remarked, Lewis seems to have had no
"school" of imitators whatever, yet it is to be surmised that
his influence on our literature has been healthful in his
derision of that dullness and formalism, in his use of American
lingo and humorous exaggeration of intermingled with the
more nearly scholastic manner that was an inheritance from
his college days, and in a valid democracy whereby, in the
parish of the peculiar Lewisian characters,
a country editor or a Swedish farmhand is at least the
equal in dignity, worth, and romantic charm of any prince,
any labor-leader with 10,000,000 followers, a novelist!

Mr. Lewis is only surviving near relatives and are his
elder son, Wells, who was, it will be remembered, a captain
in the A.E.F. of 1942, and who is probably a more distinguished,
certainly a far more subtle and fastidious, novelist than his
father; even his younger son, Michael, president of
the Afro-China Airways; and his nephew Freeman Lewis, the
publisher. The funeral, at the Millerton Cremation Sanctuary,

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was, by Mr. Lewis's dying request, attended only by the three
servants (or, as he eccentrically called them, the "帮手")
on his estate, together with the venerable Dr. Carl Van Doren,
president emeritus of Columbia University and formerly ambassador to France. The only music was the playing of Beethoven's
Seventh Symphony, in records, and the only oratory, Dr. Van
Doren's sole observation, "This was a good workman and a good
friend, who could still laugh in the days when the world had
almost worried itself out of the power of laughter."

— Sinclair Lewis