Sinclair Lewis Remembered

109. Betty Stevens

109 / Betty Stevens Betty Stevens, a Minnesotan journalist who had been formerly employed by a South­ ern CIO newspaper, was a friend to Lewis during the 1940s. They met while he was briefly teaching a course at the University of Minnesota in January 1942, and after she attended one of his lectures he invited her to visit him. She subsequently recorded her memories of several days she spent with him at Thorvale Farm in 1947. Source: Betty Stevens, “A Village Radical: His Last Ameri­ can Home,” Venture 2, no. 3 (1957): 35–46. The New England land looked tidy and neatly combed, unlike the untamed prairie of Minnesota and the bleak wilderness of the rock red earth around the iron mine. I was riding in a large black car with ­ Sinclair Lewis. His chauffeur Joseph [Hardrick] drove us from the Pittsfield station to Lewis’s New England farmhouse near Williamstown where I would be vacationing for the next ten days. “Thorvale Farm,” Lewis said. “You’ll like it. Looks across a valley at Mt. Greylock . But it’s not like the wheat farms back home.” When we arrived, he took my suitcases in his long hands, walking ahead of me, his tall, awkward body a rust-­ red exclamation point against the smooth green lawn. If his rangy and uncultivated look set him apart from the careful renovation inside, there was still that same wistful pride about his house that he had shown about his Duluth mansion two years before. I had been visiting Duluth relatives then, during the summer of 1945. “Who-­ dunnits,”hesaid,pointingtothebookcasesinmyroomupstairs.“Some Agatha Christies,7 too. Some people only confess to reading literature, but I like Agatha Christies, myself.” I noticed books everywhere, set in a whole wall of the living room, in the bedrooms , even tucked here and there near stair landings, as well as in the library and the upstairs study. Even the bright orange blocks on the dark blue of the 298 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered early Lewis editions caught my eye. Without asking, I was sure he had finished with the Duluth house. I wondered if he had taken his books with him to each of his restless households, to all the cities and counties where he had lived since he first left Minnesota more than forty years before. The white fringe that had edged the same dome of his head had now nearly overgrown the sparse red, and the lines in his face and hands were noticeably deeper than when I had seen him the year before in New York. In the bright New England kitchen, he opened a family-­ size refrigerator and said, “If you’re hungry after your trip, we can just help ourselves. Joseph won’t mind. Supper will be a little later.” It was more homelike than the Duluth kitchen, where haunches of beef and pork had hung behind sliding glass refrigerator doors. From the kitchen, he led me through the long living room out onto a white-­ pillared porch. A young man flashed by us, and there were quick introductions. His name was Barney. “My secretary,” Lewis explained. “Gone to New York for the weekend. To see a girl, I think. I don’t really need a secretary, but it gets lonesome up here, especially in the winter.” We stood there on the porch and looked out at the many acres of Thorvale Farm. So much land, and Lewis had not put in a crop. “Bill,” Lewis called to a young Negro man clipping bushes. “I want you to meet a friend of mine.” There were first name introductions again, and I could see that Lewis didn’t take to being a Lord of the manor. Bill was the gardener who lived with his father in a cottage on the grounds. Kingsblood Royal had come out that year—1947—and I told him I had liked it, even if much of the literary press hadn’t. “I don’t understand why most of the critics reacted the way they did,” he said, and the lines on his pitted face dug deeper, as though scratched in by a rake. “Jane White8 was up here visiting a few weeks ago. Lovely girl. I got to know the family when I was writing Kingsblood. Walter [White] was very helpful, gave me a lot of material from the NAACP files.” He talked on about how he had collected material for the book, and it was evident that he liked Kingsblood. “I...