Sinclair Lewis Remembered

64. Vincent Sheean

64 / Vincent Sheean Vincent Sheean (1899–1975) was an Ameri­ can journalist and novelist who befriended Lewis in the mid-­ 1920s and remained in Lewis’s orbit the rest of his life. Source: Vincent Sheean, Personal History (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing , 1937), 278–79. By that rule of contradiction which operated upon me all through this time— I could not stop talking about Moscow. I must have been a great bore to everybody I met, and sometimes they did not hesitate to tell me so. [. . .] ­ Sinclair Lewis was in Berlin, too, and his response to my obsession was an incomparable one; I still laugh sometimes when I think of it. Dorothy Thompson, who became Mrs. Lewis soon afterwards, asked me to dinner one night with some assorted German countesses and her prospective husband. Lewis—“Red,” we called him— was in fine form, and at his best he was one of the funniest people in the world. I had been particularly tiresome about Moscow that evening, for I was leaving the next day to see the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution . I kept on telling everybody, including the surprised German countesses, that they ought to go to Moscow for the seventh of No­ vem­ ber, for the spectacle alone, if for nothing else. Catching, for about the five hundredth time, the sound of my voice informing some hapless German lady that she had to go to Moscow, Red suddenly burst forth. “Oh you must come to Moscow for the seventh of No­ vem­ ber,” he chanted, giving the sentence the obvious contour of a line by Vachel Lindsay.18 He went on without a pause, and in five minutes he had recited a whole poem by ­ Vachel Lindsay—all about what was going to happen in Moscow on the momentous day (with a boom, boom, boom!) and how it was imperatively necessary for everybody to go there to see it. When we had recovered from this he went on and did the same thing in three other styles: Longfellow,19 Swinburne, Tennyson.20 The rhymes and metres were perfect, the parodies so keen that even the Germans did not need to be told what they were. The Tennyson parody was a triumph of inge- Part 9. Kansas City to Berlin / 175 nuity and wit, for it is always more diffi cult to hit off a good poet than a bad one. I have never heard anything like those improvisations; even Red could never do them so well again. They not only delighted their audience, but they performed one of the best offi ces of parody—showed up an absurdity. The most humorless enthusiast could scarcely have spoken of Moscow on the seventh of No­ vem­ ber after that. ...