Sinclair Lewis Remembered

115. Perry Miller

115 / Perry Miller Perry Miller (1905–1963), literary critic, intellectual historian, and professor at Harvard University, was a highly regarded authority on Puritanism. He was the author of the groundbreaking two-­ volume Puritan intellectual history The New England Mind (1939, 1953) and he won the Pulitzer Prize in History post­ humously for The Life of the Mind in America (1965). Miller spent the 1949–50 academic year teaching at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Source: Perry Miller, “The Incorruptible ­ Sinclair Lewis,” Atlantic Monthly 187 (April 1951): 30–34. The first night out of New York on the Nieuw Amsterdam,1 7 Sep­ tem­ ber 1949, my wife said, “That man going out of the bar looks like ­ Sinclair Lewis.” I caught a side glimpse—which I shall forever behold—of that long fig­ ure, its head tilted back, its narrow shoulders heightened and compressed, an elastic-­ jointed puppet held two inches off the deck by invisible strings, so that the longest pair of legs ever attached to so short a body jerked their way across the room in a motion that had nothing to do with the ordinary act of walking. The obituaries, since his death on January 10, comment on the length of his legs and the convoluted patterns he made by intertwining them. Actually, he was not especially tall, and not preternaturally supple: it was the nervous compulsion inside the man that incessantly contorted his body as he talked or smoked or drank. It also sharpened his face and tormented his skin, drove him restless from place to place (made him hover, at last, over Italy like an exhausted hawk), gutted his loves and his friendships, kept him an obstinate adolescent at the same time that it wore him out; and finally it killed him. I had the good fortune never to have met him before; hence we had never quarreled. When he had been working (if that is the word for what he did in preparation for the worst book he ever pieced together) upon The God-­ Seeker, he had wanted to consult an out-­ of-­ print work of mine on New England theology .2 I offered, through the bookseller, to send him my own copy; he found another somewhere, and never replied. Now I was to discover that this sort of thing 338 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered Lewis did not forget. Of all the men I have ever known, his gratitude—for such a trifle—was the most profound and the most lasting. The point being that one thing really counted—his work. By which I mean that many observances which count much for other people, ruthlessly and magnificently and brutally, did not fig­ ure for him. Or rather, he had so schooled himself to not letting them matter that even when he stooped to acknowledge them he just did not any longer know how to cope with them. He and I were friends within five minutes, because we did not have to explain anything. It took no astuteness to realize that ­ Sinclair Lewis was dying. He had barely recovered from a siege of pneumonia (on this voyage he was not drinking): his hands shook, and the wavering of his legs meant that he was unsteady on them. With him was his brother, Dr. Claude Lewis of Saint Cloud, Minnesota—of whom Red had not seen much in recent decades, who was six years older than he, and who addressed him, to my never ending astonishment, as “Hal.” Dr. Lewis looked a good ten years younger: Red’s myth—to which he clung with inexhaustible solicitude—was that he was about to introduce Claude for the first time to the immemorial riches of Europe. He asked my advice morning and evening as to just how gradually and circumspectly he should spring the art galleries and cathedrals on brother Claude, so as not to heap too much into the ­ initiation. The whole business was slightly comic: Dr. Lewis is a distinguished surgeon, of eminent common sense, who can and does find his way about the world by his own native shrewdness. And when it comes to the conventional “sight-­ seeing,” Red Lewis was about the most unperceptive and blundering of all the myriads of tourists this country annually exports. [. . .] Still, all this was a clue: here was Sam Dodsworth casting himself, with outward bravado and considerable inward trepidation, as Virgil to a Dante who in fact was competently on his own. ­ Sinclair Lewis was about to impart to...