SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 4.

But why drag a caravan when motor touring? What advantage
over stopping at hotels, or carrying a tent and camping at night?

The caravan excels both of these in the amount of luggage
one can take. Two suit cases is capacity for a motor. Now
this is all very well for a trip lasting not over a week, but
after a month or two one is a little weary of doing without hot
water bottles, "The Oxford Book of Verse," and the other necessi-
ties of life, and of assuring one's self, day after day, that this
last surviving shirt is really much cleaner than it looks -- or is.

In a large caravan, one can carry at least as many luxuries as
one would have in a summer cottage. It is a yacht, with the
advantage that it doesn't pitch when you want to sleep. As a
writer, I have here two typewriters, fifteen hundred sheets of
paper, envelopes and the like, forty books, besides enough ward-
robe for any emergency. Persons who are so fortunate as not to
have to write might substitute a folding boat, fishing tackle,
guns, golf clubs, tennis kit, and all the other paraphernalia
necessary for any form of sport which they might encounter in a
three-months tour, together with evening clothes should they
become tired of comparative roughing-it and come on a good dance
some evening.

Specifically, the advantage of a caravan over staying at
hotels is that, in any country, the hotels are mostly bad and
mostly expensive. Providing the lady lieutenant of the caravan is
a good housekeeper, the caravan will provide better beds and
incomparably better food than nine-tenths of the better hotels.
Nor is there any law against leaving the caravan in a garage and
staying at a hotel when one finds a good one -- it is worth doing
for the pleasure of being free from waiters, staring lobby
loungers, tips, and the smell of hotel kitchens when you return to
the caravan.

The advantage of caravanning over camping in a tent every
night -----

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 4.

You know these collapsible tents that a boy can put up in five minutes? Well, that boy assisted by two adults, irritable from driving, takes half an hour to it. Then there is the pleasure of cooking in a wind which blows out the flame if you use a kerosene stove, and stings your eyes with smoke if you make a camp-fire. And the pretence that the running board of the car makes a very nice chair. And the bugs, the gnats, the sand in the steak. And the sleep either on a shaky cot bed or on the ground, where astonishing roots have sprung into being under the ground cloth since you laid it.

With a caravan, it is necessary only to draw into a field, chuck the folding chairs and table out of the caravan, and in two minutes -- which in this case means two minutes -- Madame can be cooking on an excellent sheltered kerosene stove, and she has a huge cupboard of groceries to draw upon instead of the two cans and one biscuit box which are all one can carry in the back of a car. The beds are quite as good as those of a sleeping car and easier to make, and when you arise in the morning, you can find a clean handkerchief without having to dig under spare tires, the tow rope, and a forgotten and most adhesive bag of chocolates.

Over a caravan with the engine and driver's seat on the same chassis, the trailer caravan has the advantage of flexibility. It is vastlier easier to get a seventeen-foot trailer with a thirteen-foot car drawing it around a street corner or up a twisty trail than it would be to manoeuver a twenty-foot single vehicle, yet the latter would have three feet less of living quarters. It is also desirable often to detach the caravan, leave it in a farmyard, and have the car free for such mountain byways or woodland roads as would be impassable to a caravan.

This sounds rather like advertising, but since there are a dozen or so separate British firms making trailer caravans, I assure you that it is not advertising but merely the zeal of an excitable recent convert.

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STNCLAIR LEWIS No. 4.

After trying aeroplanes, steamers, sloops, trains, canal
boats, motors with camp equipment, horseback, canoes, and all
known forms of travel save camel back and the sedan chair, I
desire to preach, with this typical zeal of a convert, that there
is no more agreeable form of leisurely travel than with a motor
and a trailer caravan in all the world -- except walking, knap-
sack on back, and outside of Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, that
sport has apparently vanished forever.

Yet I doubt if in all America there are as many as a dozen
trailer caravans. There are a few with engine enclosed, but why
carry your summer cottage along with you when you merely want to
skip into the next village to buy eggs? Somewhere in America is
a yet unknown Henry Ford who will make millions by building trailer
caravans. He will find that for traffic-jammed roads near great
cities, they are useless; but he will sell them by the thousand
for vacations in, say, Arizona or Colorado or northern New England.
I present him with the idea, and I hope that he will give me a
caravan now and then, for I am a life victim of caravanning. I
expect to be seen at the age of eighty smoking placidly in a folding
canvas chair beside a caravan in Montenegro or Michigan or
Madagascar, free from all the nervous compulsions of cities, yet
with every comfort the city knows -- including caviare, a radio,
and the special final extra sports edition of the daily Edgar
Wallace novel.

And why caravan in England?

I am writing on a table inside my agreeably warm caravan. For
the first time in two weeks of coaxing sunshine (the English climate
is as badly maligned as the American bathroom) it is too chilly to
write outdoors. My pitch is on the North Downs and between
groves of trees I can look down on the Kentish weald, with its hop
fields, its oast houses like baronial watch-towers, its nestling
cottages, red brick, or black and white, or sometimes of broad
white clapboards, indicating a source of New England's colonial
architecture.

-6-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 4.

Fifteen miles away is gray Canterbury -- we left the caravan
in this woodland yesterday and slipped over there in half an hour,
to sit in the cathedral. Six miles away is Faversham, with its
huddled leaning shops of the sixteenth century, and beyond it the
Thames estuary, where you look across salt marshes, melancholy at
dusk, boisterous at noon with bird song, and see the stacks of
steamers heading out for Rio and the Southern Isles. It is as
startling to see the masts of a brig across this grassy expanse as
it would be to see them across Saskatchewan wheatfields.

Less than thirty miles away is Dover -- thence one could be in
Paris in six hours. Thirty-eight miles away, Sevenoaks and the
ducal house of Knole, unchanged since the days when James I used to
stay there, Knole with its three hundred and sixty-five rooms, its
fifty-two staircases, its deer park of a thousand acres, all a
living symbol of the ways when courtliness and not jazz and wise-
cracking was the ideal of a gentleman. (It probably wasn't.
Probably James I was devoted to wise-cracking. But it is good for
the bumptious modern soul to be awed by this lordly house and its
revelation of more spacious days.)

All these, with a hundred demure villages, a hundred old flint
churches, an hour or so away, yet from them we can return to this
caravan, our castle. To-morrow we move to the South Coast, and the
drowsy Cinque Ports will be our neighborhood -- and still we
shall have our own house, pleasant in its secure familiarity.

*Why not caravan?*

-7-

NOTE TO EDITORS: This article must not be published before

SATURDAY,

1928.

UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS.

ARTICLE No. 5.

MAIN STREETS AND BABBITTS OF BRITAIN,

By Sinclair Lewis.

( World copyright by United Press Associations. All rights reserved. )

The distance is a hundred miles, which should occupy a proper motorist, one who doesn't waste time in seeing anything, only from breakfast to lunch. But it kept us scourring for two days, and all we saw was the pageant of nineteen hundred years, from the antiquity of Cockneys reading race returns on the sands of Margate to the modernity of the lighthouse built at Dover by Roman soldiers.

We left the caravan to guard itself, in this field on the North Downs, and with the motor we advanced on the Kentish shore.

Because we were not going anywhere, we went many places. I have found in several countries that the best way of seeing nothing whatever is to follow a splendidly paved, admirably guarded, through highway, and I am converted now to the rustic mode of going everywhere by going nowhere in particular -- with a caravan to come back to, when Nowhere has been found.

We slipped across to Whitstable, where the herring boats come in and the gritty beach is thick with oyster shells. To Tankerton, which is like the Jersey Coast in America -- itchy with boarding houses, and with shops purveying those exotic wares that people consume only at the seashore: peanuts and painted shells, sixpenny detective novels and pimply red glassware, photographs made in three minutes and thrown away in six. To Herne Bay, serene and agreeable, but inspiring the speculation as to why a mile-long pier is preferable to one of only three hundred feet.

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SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 5.

Then great Margate, which is Far Rockaway with Cockney
trimmings, with hoarse minstrels instead of jazz, bad tea at four-
thirty instead of bad "hot dogs" at four, and English clerks with
coats off and trousers rolled up, timidly wading, instead of American
clerks doing exactly the same thing.

And here I relearned what in other years I had learned at the
Derby, at football matches, and on Hampstead Heath -- that the really
vulgar Englishman can be more vulgar than any American. (I hope
St. John Ervine, Shane Leslie and other Irish and therefore super-
British critics will not again put me in my place for saying it.)
The high-caste Englishman and Englishwoman have probably the surest
good taste in the world. The low-caste Englishman -- from the
East End or Manchester back-streets or Lancashire villages - is
perhaps the most noisy, hearty, embarrassingly vulgar soul living.
He is a "card". He bounces.

The low-caste American may be worse. He is tough. He is
sinister. Whether he be Yank or Wop or Hunky or Yid or Mick by
descent (to use his own categories), his glance at a stranger
suggests hatred and brass knuckles; you feel that though he
probably has never yet murdered a paymaster, he admires the grim
blades who have done so. With it all, this American outcast has
the ingenuous, usually mistaken, never quite impossible belief
that he is essentially as good as anybody else, and that his son
or his grandson will be Some One instead of a tough in a hired
bathing suit on a public beach. He has a discontent which, if not
divine, is aggressively human.

But the clerk or the shop assistant gamboling on the Margate
sands, even if he be quite a superior assistant, with littler
assistants under him, has sunk into contentment with being a Nobody,
with being ignorant, with liking shrunken clothes, colored comic
periodicals, coco-nut shies, imitation negro minstrels, and ham-
and-kidney pies of parboiled sandstone encased in sheet lead. So
he "makes the best of it" -- that virtue of slavery -- and he
bounces, he sings, he displays his not entirely delicate lingerie,

-2-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 5.

them to admire courage and to despise intelligence -- a code which
the Britons later passed on to America. Richborough, the mystery
port of the war -- how the menacing aeroplanes must have circled
over these cranes and warehouses amid the marsh! Sandwich, with
houses unchanged since Queen Elizabeth stayed there, and St.
Clement's church of the pre-Norman tower.

At Sandwich Bay, we spent the night. The most attractive house
in the little settlement (exclusive as a vicar's aunt) was a
fifteenth-century timbered structure -- and it was not without a
malign delight that an American, who had often heard the English
snicker at us for erecting imitation châteaux and importing the
beams for fake chalets, discovered that though the material in
this antiquity was genuine enough, it had been brought from Hither
and Thither and other distant places, and put together only a
few years ago. I shall be less ashamed now of my genuine antique
Charles I chair in which, undoubtedly, Charles would have sat,
except for the fact that it was made 250 years after his death.

Pointing at this almost Fifteenth Century house, the hotel
manager murmured, "The Prince of Wales took that place for six
months, not long ago, to play golf here. There's another rather
distinguished person just walking past, by the way -- he
staying with Lord and Lady Astor here." The "rather distinguished
person," quietly stumping along the road by the beach, was Lord
Balfour!

And so, next day, to Deal; across high windy downs, looking
on steamers swaggering up the Channel, to Dover: the Norman
castle, the Roman Pharos, and a church which may be of authentic
Saxon origin -- the oldest church in Christendom in which services
are still held. Through Folkestone and Hythe, then across the
hills, along winding lanes, past flint churches and shining corn-
fields, to the pasture where our caravan had remained, quite
unprotected for six and thirty hours.

And not even the folding chairs and tables and the rolled up
tent, outside the caravan in plain view from the road, had been

-4-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 5.

I have known extraordinary friendliness in motoring in
America. But I am certain that I shall never find anything like
this experience in England.

I was tramping through Shropshire a year ago, and I wanted to
find a lodging for the night. The landlady of a pub at which I
inquired had no rooms to let but, looking through the window, she
droned, "Here comes Mr. Jones. Perhaps he can tell you."

Mr. Jones was a smart young farmer in a small motor.

"Can you drive a car?" he asked me abruptly, when the landlady had hobbled out to stop him and to explain.

"Yes. Why?"

"I'm stopping here in the village tonight," he said. "You
take my car, and in Ludlow you'll find some place to stay. Just
leave the car at Smith's garage and I'll pick it up tomorrow."

I know. A thing like that doesn't happen. But it did.

(No, I didn't take the car!)

The English inhospitable? That's the sort of thing said by
foreigners who have encountered only hotel pages -- and by the
English. And as it would be impossible to convince either of
these stubborn classes, I give up.

-7-

SATURDAY, AUGUST 18, 1928.

UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATIONS.

ARTICLE No. 6

By Sinclair Lewis.

(World copyright by United Press Associations. All rights reserved.)

I want to give more of the details of housekeeping in a
caravan. This is by unanimous request of all the horde of first
readers of these articles. She says women will be interested.

I have been surprised, even in England, land of caravanning,
to find that most people consider it a barbaric, uncomfortable,
and slightly dangerous way of travel. One good lady gasped, "But
you'll get so tired of living just on porridge and bacon," and
another, "But what _will_ you do in case of rain? Of course a
caravan won't be weather-proof, and the rain will keep you awake
all night."

Actually, a decently built caravan is quite as weather-proof
as a house, and actually, there can be more variety of food than
in a summer cottage because the supplies vary as one moves on.
The menu is limited only by the cook's knowledge. We have had,
in the caravan, such English food as roast beef, new potatoes with
mint, and chops; such American food -- thanks to the blessed
art of canning -- as flapjacks with maple syrup, fried chicken
and corn fritters, corn on cob, cream of tomato soup, and clam
chowder. We have had Parisian crêpes susette; and the cook has
invented a new chicken and corn soup, and a way of baking apples
with butter, honey, and sherry -- a concoction which belongs more
to Brillat-Savarin than to the Komplete Kamp Kook.

-1-

SINCLAIR LEWIS No. 6.

The several manufacturers of England build caravans which run from seven feet in length to huge, specially ordered vehicles, land yachts which extend to twenty-two or -three feet and cost from six hundred pounds to several thousand. An Indian rajah has had built, for big game hunting, a whole train of luxurious trailer caravans, with a full-sized bath room. The smallest cost from sixty to eighty pounds, and can be rented for two pounds (less than ten dollars) and up a week. Even these modest vans -- which have the advantage of being easy to pull, easy to handle in a rough camping-ground -- contain seats which make up into a double bed or two single beds, a one-burner oil stove, a hinged table, folding up against the wall, a wash-up sink, and enough cupboards for clothes, food, and dishes for two people, and with a tent and folding beds along they will take care of four people for a week's holiday.

Such a caravan could easily be made by any village carpenter, on an old delivery-waggon chassis, and if the walls were made like those of most of the cheaper caravans in England, of painted canvas glued upon light wood, it could be pulled by the feeblest third-hand flivver.

But for three months of wandering the smaller caravans -- well, it would take a Darby and Joan to endure it.

Ours is a seventeen-footer, weighing slightly more than a ton. Drawn by a medium-priced American car, it will make thirty miles an hour on straight, level roads -- which means that, as most of the pretty English roads are hilly, crooked as a ram's horn, and not much broader, we average eighteen. And that is more than enough, for so rapidly does the English landscape change that it would be criminal to move one's caravan pitch more than forty or fifty miles in a day.

It is not unlike a houseboat on wheels, in exterior appearance. Made of plywood, armored with thin aluminum, it is light, yet strong as steel. The front wheels swing far around on a

-2-