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48 / George Jean Nathan Nathan, too, believed Lewis’s collaboration with De Kruif was productive, even if Lewis’s behavior had become increasingly erratic. Nathan remembered in particular a meeting with Lewis in London in the spring of 1923. Source:GeorgeJeanNathan, The Intimate Notebooks of George Jean Nathan (New York: Knopf, 1932), 14–16. I began to meet our friend more frequently. He would stop in at my apartment in the late afternoon for a Florestan cocktail, sometimes so moody that he didn’t speak five words and at other times so excited and voluble that he would stand up and, apropos of nothing at all, make speeches at me for an hour on end. These speeches, generally couched in dialect of one species or another, were invariably on one of two subjects: himself—in terms of a facetious self-­ appraisal predicated upon critics who did not suffi ciently appreciate him, and myself—consisting for the most part in deplorings of the unhappy facts that I didn’t drink enough, that I didn’t have the sense to recognize “Hobohemia” for a swell play, that Menc­ ken and I were nice enough fellows all right but that we ought to get married, and that something ought to be done about our recognizing Stuart Sherman19 anyway. At other times I would call on him in whatever hotel room he was occupying that week. He never used a chair in any such room, but always favored a far end of the bed, the rest of the bed usually being taken up by a varying and vari­ ous assortment of individuals who gave one the impression that he had run down into the street and herded them in indiscriminately a few minutes before. Who most of them were, I never had the faintest idea. Many of them looked like a comic-­ strip artist’s idea of anarchists; they all talked at once about everything under the sun; and they all drank his liquor very proficiently. He called them all by diminutives of their Christian names, always duly announced in introducing each one of them that each was a great guy, and confidently and enthusiastically predicted to me on each and every occasion that no less than six of those present were virtuosi of one sort or another who one day would take the critics off their 132 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered feet. None of them—there were at least eighty or ninety he thus eulogized in the period of my visits—has yet been heard of. He had been living in London for several weeks with Paul De Kruif, his col­ laborator, working on Arrowsmith—originally called Dr. Martin ­ Arrowsmith— before I got there on my annual spring trip. The day I arrived I went to a lunch party, where I found myself seated between John Drinkwater20 and Philip Gue­ dalla,21 neither of whom I had previously met. I had not sat down before Gue­ dalla said to me, “You are an Ameri­ can and I have a message for you. If your country doesn’t recall ­ Sinclair Lewis at once, there will be war between England and the United States!” It did not take a confidant of the oracles to imagine what had been happening. Our friend Red, as his nickname goes, had all too evidently been living up to his sobriquet, if not its communistic implications, at least in its taurian. It developed that the moment he had set foot on the English shore he had begun to make speeches. These speeches—according to Guedalla amounting up to the hour to something like two or three hundred and delivered in dialect on every conceivable occasion at the rate of a dozen or so daily, or rather nightly—had mainly to do, it appeared, with the shameful failure of the En­ glish critics, excepting only Hugh Walpole, to take a proper interest in Ameri­ can literature. Our friend, despite the German, French, Italian, Cockney and Way Down East dialects in which he couched his diatribes, may have minced words but certainly not meanings. He not only, while calling loudly for ’arf and ’arf or a spot of whiskey old top, named names, but dates, places and weather conditions . Every now and then, by way of prolonging international amity for a little while longer, it had been necessary for De Kruif, a veritable Sandow22 of a man, to grab hold of his colleague, pull him down into a chair, and sit on him...

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