Sinclair Lewis Remembered

11. Mary Heaton Vorse

11 / Mary Heaton Vorse Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966) was an affluent New York feminist best known as a labor and social justice activist as well as a journalist, novelist, and poet. For her lifetime of service, she was honored—along with Eleanor Roosevelt and Upton ­ Sinclair—with the first United Auto Workers Social Justice Award. She was also the model for the character of Mary French in John Dos Passos’s novel trilogy U.S.A. (1930–36). Lewis later listed her among the people he saw most often during the period 1910 to 1915. According to Schorer, Vorse “was kind to him” and for her “all his life, he felt a rather special affection and loyalty, even though they were never intimately associated.”31 Source: Mary Heaton Vorse, Time and the Town (New York: Dial, 1942), 95–96. The nucleus of what was to be the Provincetown Players was forming that ­ summer [1911]. Susan Glaspell and Lucy Huffaker32 had taken Miss Roseboro’s house. Hutchins Hapgood and Neith33 had come back to Provincetown. ­ Sinclair Lewis was back, living at the Avellars’ wharf. He was prodigious. He would come into the house, roaring that “he had a girl and her name was Daisy, when she sang the cat went crazy, with delirium and epilepsy and all sort of cata­ leptics.” A stream of fantasies, of stories, of ideas streamed from him. He never stopped. He ate almost as much blueberry pie as Wilbur Steele.34 He wrote a whole boy’s book in three weeks, seventy thousand words, called Hike and the Aeroplane [1912], probably the first airplane book for boys. He wrote it to make money to begin his first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn. He raced through the first twenty thousand words of that in the next three weeks and when Joe [O’Brien]35 and I read it, we knew here was an author. He was never still, his hair flamed, his blue eyes blazed, his long, sensitive hands gesticulated. He got himself sunburned to dull plum color over and over again and peeled. He galloped over the dunes barefoot. He shook sand into the picnic basket. He came in shouting he had an idea, and a flood of nonsense to float Noah’s Ark would resound through Kibbe Cook’s house.36 Part 3. Bohemia / 39 I would chase him out with a broom. The children would join in. The dog would bark. We would go slamming in and out Kibbe Cook’s house doors, with Red leading all of us, looking like one of the earlier Sennett films.37 Joe O’Brien, Wilbur Steele, and Art Hutchins38 joined in these comic roughhouses and it was as if a herd of buffalo pounded through the little house. ...