Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis ed. by Martin Bucco (review)

Reviews 71 Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis. Edited by Martin Bucco. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. 242 pages, $37.50.) These essays confirm an interesting fact. The elite critics, and some elite novelists, couldn’t stand it that Sinclair Lewis, a serious writer, could make millions of dollars with his novels and stories. If the public liked him so much he had to be cheap and thin, possibly even a hack. What they failed to under­ stand back in the Twenties and Thirties is that World War I had done some­ thing to the intelligent American citizen. It made him question a status quo that could allow a war to be fought to save both Great Britain’s and J. Pierpont Morgan’s chestnuts. The sharper reader of that day was ready for some­ one to examine the prejudices and the old-line beliefs of main street. Mark Schorer, coming from the New Critics position, tried to come to grips with the problem. Secretly, it seems, he admired Lewis’ success, but in the presence of his elite friends he couldn’t very well admit it. (This reader once overheard a wonderfully curious dialog between Allen Tate and Mark Schorer to that effect.) That is why his biography of Sinclair Lewis, despite the enormous amount of detail unearthed, is fraught with error and bias. On a number of occasions, Schorer is inclined to accept hearsay to prove his position instead of fact from those “who were there.” In his essay included in this collection, he works overtime, laboriously, to cover it up. The best essay, and the one with the most understanding, is James Lundquist ’s “The Sauk Centre Sinclair Lewis Didn’t Write About.” Lundquist points out that Lewis never quite dared to explore his private boyhood life. “But what seems most disturbing is that despite his tortured life, Lewis never seemed to confront himself in the way that could have helped—that is, through the very process of fiction, which just might have offered the kind of therapy that he most certainly needed. Sauk Centre . . . was a place fully as ugly and threatening as the early photographs make it out to be.” This reviewer has always felt, after having read Lewis and met him, that Lewis was, all his life, outraged by what had happened to him. He missed touching, and love, as a little boy after his mother died when he was six. Even his face, pocked with operations for skin cancer, appeared to be ravaged by his anger. I liked him the moment I met him. My heart went out to him because he appeared to be so desperately desperately lonely. But my Interior Commentator warned me to be wary—because for seemingly no reason at all he might lash out at me. Lewis was more of a stitcher than a weaver; he preferred to stab and scratch rather than to give love touches. The result was that he never let his characters, once he’d set them in motion, live their own lives. His work, inter­ estingly enough, is filled with exclamation points. He couldn’t resist pointing things out to the reader. “See! Look! That’s what she’s up to! Watch out!” Bucco is to be highly commended for digging out representative reviews and essays for all those novels of Lewis that came out all those years, from 1912 to 1951. FREDERICK MANFRED Luverne, Minnesota ...