Sinclair Lewis Remembered

52. George Slocombe

52 / George Slocombe George Slocombe (1894–1963), a friend of Frazier Hunt and Sisley Huddleston, was the chief foreign correspondent for the British leftist newspaper the London Daily Herald during the 1920s and later wrote for the Evening Standard. He befriended Lewis in Paris. Source: George Slocombe, The Tumult and the Shouting (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 215–17, 219. The reaction against the nationalism of the war and the immediate postwar years had brought [British Prime Minister Ramsay] MacDonald and the British Labour Party to offi ce in England, a Radical and Socialist coalition to power in France. In the United States the intellectual reaction had taken the form of satire , and had reached its most remarkable expression in ­ Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt. I had met Lewis soon after the publication of his earlier work, Main Street, the first of his considerable successes. Many subsequent encounters have not revised my first impression of him. Tall, red-­ haired, with very pale blue eyes, a long upper lip, an extraordinary energy of speech, a very great diversity of ideas, a certain air of frenzy in his look, speech and gait, a frenzy half comic, half melancholy . He might have been poet or actor, so novel, so wild, so rhe­ tori­ cal were his sudden enthusiasms, his genial affectations, his native power of invention, mimicry and gesture. He had the rare art of living, for the moment, the character he portrayed. He entered into his mood; he borrowed his idiosyncrasies, his outlook , his gestures and his dialect. Once, at a pub­ lic dinner given in his honor in London, at which his hosts had, formally or informally, wittily or soberly recited his praises, he chose in his speech of reply to assume the part of an Ameri­ can Senator. The imitation was life-­ like, a work of genius. Ten years later he was one of the guests at a luncheon of Ameri­ can correspondents in London. Another guest, a celebrated raconteur and widely traveled writer, the charming and much-­ loved Bob Davis of the New York Sun,3 had spoken at inordinate length, as it seemed to Lewis. When it came his turn to speak he capriciously refused. 142 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered The chairman unwisely insisted. Lewis rose to his feet and harangued the audience , to its astonishment, in German. One night he came to dine at my apartment in Montmartre. Among the other guests was Walter Duranty, the celebrated Moscow correspondent of the New York Times.4 Duranty had never before met Lewis, and found him enchanting. He was in one of his happiest moods. Suddenly, à propos of the most trifling reference to British Royalty, he extemporized the narrative of an Ameri­ can traveling salesman from the Middle West who met a royal aide-­ de-­ camp in a public-­ house in London and persuaded himself that he had been taken by his chance acquaintance to visit Buckingham Palace and to meet the King. The tale was fantastic, but it had the art of verisimilitude. We saw the imaginative traveler and his boastful friend. We heard their long, friendly, maudlin dialogue. We saw the traveler return to his native city, improving upon the tale until it gained the dimensions of legend. Something of the same technique Lewis subsequently employed in his farcical novel, The Man Who Knew Coolidge. ...