Sinclair Lewis Remembered

12. Harrison Smith

12 / Harrison Smith Harrison “Hal” Smith (1889–1971), another Yalie (MA class of ’14) and a friend of Lewis’s from his early employment with George H. Doran and Company, was Lewis’s editor at Harcourt, Brace until 1931. Smith later edited a collection of Lewis’s correspondence with Alfred Harcourt and others, From Main Street to Stockholm (1952). Source: Harrison Smith, “­ Sinclair Lewis: Remembrance of the Past,” Saturday Review of Literature, January 27, 1951, 7–8. I awoke suddenly one night a week before he died and saw Lewis looking mournfully across his breakfast table at me, and my mind went back into the past, to my first meeting with him in his narrow room on Charles Street in Greenwich Village . I had been a freshman at Yale when he was a senior and an editor of the Lit, but I did not even know him by name until the evening I went over to Charles Street to visit George Soule,39 who was employed by that time in the publishing house of Frederick A. Stokes, where Lewis was reading manuscripts. It was impossible to concentrate on what George was saying in his calm, wise way for a loud, intense voice penetrated the walls and echoed down the dusty stairs. “That’s Red Lewis,” George said “You’ve got to meet him.” And there he was, perched like a crane on a couch, tall, lanky, red-­ headed, all knees and joints, sawing his hand up and down in a wildly passionate attack on an anonymous young man who was unable to get a word in edgewise. “Good Lord,” I thought, “here’s a revivalist minister on the loose.” I stayed silent in awe and admiration. For the first time in my life I was aware that I was listening to a man who violently and passionately cared about the same kind of things that had been vaguely con­ cern­ ing me, that here was a man dangerously aroused, brilliant. Part of my own awakening had come from reading Bernard Shaw40 and H. G. Wells.41 I thought of Lewis as a beardless, younger Shaw, or another Wells perhaps, and suddenly I knew that I had met my first genius. I had never liked to use this banal word, but then and later I attached it in my mind without embarrassment to ­ Sinclair Lewis. Part 3. Bohemia / 41 It was Lewis, as well as George Soule, who drew me to the musty old rooming house where, as one lucky enough to have a small income, I took the dark parlor downstairs. Cats, scarred and beaten up from battles and backyard love affairs, crept in on cold nights when I opened my window, until the black room around my bed seemed to be illuminated with the fire of green eyes. I began to know Lewis and to hear about the doctor father he worshiped. There were tales of riding with him on his rounds which I could match, because my own father had belonged to that noble and vanishing breed of general practitioners, and very different tales of Yale—where sleekly groomed and mannered youngsters from Groton, Exeter, and Hotchkiss passed the lanky red-­ headed Westerner on the campus with quick glances of mistrust. ...