Bernard Shaw in Sinclair Lewis

Running into Sinclair Lewis in Canterbury in 1921, writer Mary Austin took the recently famous author of Main Street, his wife, and a friend to nearby Herne Bay, where they chatted with Bernard Shaw for several hours. Afterward, Lewis--his nose, forehead, and lankiness Shavian--bought a fiery wig and whiskers and gleefully mimicked the preachy playwright. ¹ As a collegiate drama critic, Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) had been delighted but bewildered by Candida (1898); later, in New Haven in 1905, the Yale undergraduate had taken in the first performance of Mrs Warren's Profession. By this time, also the year of H. L. Mencken's laudatory little handbook, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays, Lewis had developed Shavianitis. In the clash between old actions of conduct and new ones, the campus rebel found Shaw's witty iconoclasm irresistible.

Like Shaw, Lewis became an ingenious social satirist and a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Both the playwright and the novelist have been likened to Aristophanes and Swift. Lewis's more than two-score novels (and more than a hundred popular stories) mimic the speech and action of the American middle class, turning what seems photographic realism into good-humored caricature. Having read the Fabians Wells and Shaw, Lewis the young middle-class journalist and freelance writer was in 1911-12 a card-carrying member of the Socialist Party of New York. Like Shaw, Lewis would come to a final defense of capitalism, but his early novels expose readers to the possibilities of a beneficial world socialism. His flexible, highly readable prose (provoking laughter primarily through exuberant exaggeration) flings itself at American versions of sham, complacency, and hypocrisy--in small towns, business, medicine, religion, marriage, welfare, philanthropy, and race relations.

And like Bernard Shaw, the author of such major novels of the 1920s as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth has been accused of overstressing his ideas and effects at the expense of aesthetic proportion and coherence. Lashing out at corruption, brutality, obscurity, and obscenity, Lewis upheld freedom, individualism, science, and toleration. Besides holding forth on the lecture platform, he also was a sometimes director-actor-playwright. Among his plays are Hobomemia (1919); Dodsworth (1934), an adaptation written with Sidney Howard; Jayhawker (1934), written with Lloyd Lewis; and It Can't Happen Here (1936), an adaptation written with John C. Moffitt.

All his life, it seems, Sinclair Lewis had Bernard Shaw on the brain. "Shaw" imagery crops up not only in a number of Lewis's essays but, more important, in seventeen of his twenty-two novels. Early in his literary career, Lewis began mentioning the Irishman and his dazzling New Drama. In his essay "The Passing of Capitalism" (1914) in The Bookman, Lewis specifies the playwright among authors who show the contemporary economic struggle behind their characters' actions. ² Timidly scrutinizing the cluttered room of Istra Nash, an affected American staying in an English lodging-house, the little hero of Lewis's first novel, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), sees on her bed a robe, a red slipper, an open box of chocolates, and "a green book with a paper label bearing the title Three Plays for Puritans" (128). ³ That Shaw is the playwright and that the plays in this octavo published in 1901 are The Devil's Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1900), the proper Mr. Wrenn, although he has an appetite for books, is here too flustered to discover. As an eager student at Plato College, however, Carl Ericson, the aviator-hero of Lewis's second novel, The Trail of the Hawk (1915), takes note of Professor Frazer's comment in Modern Drama class about Bernard Shaw's "brilliant work." ⁴ Well aware of the orthodoxy-heterodoxy conflict, Walter Babson, the nervous young editor with literary ambitions in The Job (1917), tells Una Golden, the central character (who thinks of herself as a Fabian socialist), that although he is...