Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis ed. by Martin Bucco (review)

90Rocky Mountain Review to a discussion of part-time faculty, they slight the significance of the problem, as well as omit certain dimensions of it. The part-time phenomenon results from the same impulse to exploit resources (including human ones) and to ignore intangible costs which constitutes the authors' main thesis. A more complete discussion could have provided a concrete illustration of the way short-term solutions lead to longterm problems. While the arguments and statistics Bowen and Schuster have mustered are unlikely to persuade financially embattled administrators to take the long view, their recommendations may pave the way for balanced solutions once the anticipated problems materialize and warrant action. Those remedies would restore the traditional, collégial university by making the American professor, one of the great national resources, a priority once again. CHARLES G. DAVIS Boise State University MARTIN BUCCO, ed. Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. 242 p. This anthology of criticism on Sinclair Lewis follows the format of the Hall series, Critical Essays on American Literature. The book begins with a substantial introduction by the editor. Next is a series of reprinted reviews of Lewis' works. The larger part of the volume is comprised of essays on Lewis and his art — whether it is in fact art is the topic, explicit or implicit, of many of the essays, of which the great majority are reprinted and two were commissioned for the present volume. Bucco's introduction serves the fundamental purpose of introducing us first to the review literature, then to the critical literature, the latter serving in turn as a lead-in to a brief discussion of those representatives of the essayistic literature found in the anthology. At the very beginning, though, Buceo, in adducing Mark Schorer's monumental Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), lays out the dichotomies that pervade Lewis criticism. Was Lewis, as Schorer asserted, a bad writer; or was he a competent journalist? Was he a good satirist and a poor writer? Was he a good satirist or a clumsy one, perhaps primarily a caricaturist? Did he possess a first-rate practical mind but a third-rate creative talent? Was he always, even in his heyday and decline, as he clearly had been before Main Street (1920), a romantic, or was he a social critic? Was he indeed a Philistine himself — who could then so tellingly depict American Philistinism and the Boobus Americanus, to use the generic term coined by his admiring reviewer, H. L. Mencken? More questions than answers. Perhaps more as denominators than answers, Buceo suggests Lewis' ambivalence, his confusion. It would seem necessarily to be the ambivalence of the man, not of his writing. Lewis is no Kafka, and his writing is almost stridently one-dimensional. And it dates. And, as in the case of Edith Wharton, his long absence from his native grounds exacted a sorry toll on his verisimilitude — and not just that of his slang. The caricaturist Lewis — more than one critic avers that Lewis' satire amounted to no more than caricature — excited easy caricature on the part of too many contemporaneous critics who wanted him to be something else. Buceo is charitable — which not all of the anthologized critics are — when it Book Reviews91 comes to Lewis' decline in the 1930s and his slipshod efforts in the 1940s, before his sad end in 1951. The 25 reviews range in time from 1914 — a brief review of OurMr. Wrenn — to 1953 — a review of Lewis' posthumously published essays — and in authorship from Anonymous to such critics as H. L. Mencken, T. K. Whipple, Bernard De Voto, Maxwell Geismar, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley. In other words the bases are satisfactorily touched both as to time and to point of view. The latter is representative and varied in just about the way that the introductory discussion would suggest. The fifteen critical essays pick up chronologically about where the reviews leave off. (All but two essays date from after Lewis' death.) So that, including both reviews and essays, we have a trail of Lewis criticism spanning some seventy years. But while the points of view multiply and become more sophisticated, I do not think...