Sinclair Lewis Remembered

84. George Seldes

84 / George Seldes At Lewis’s insistence, Seldes became his near-­ neighbor in Vermont and remembered him with unqualified affection. He had been expelled from Italy for his criticism of the fascists, and Lewis often talked politics with him while he was writing It Can’t Happen Here. Source: George Seldes, Witness to a Century (New York: Ballantine, 1987), 289– 90, 292. In 1933, my wife and I, who had been guests of the Paul Osborns6 in Brattleboro , Vermont, decided to stay on that summer at a nearby boardinghouse. One day Lewis and his wife, Dorothy Thompson, driving home to Barnard, ­ Vermont, from New York City, stopped by and urged Helen and me to buy a house in their neighborhood. Lewis said, “You’ll be near the best college library [Baker, at Dart­ mouth] and the best hospital in New England [Mary Hitchcock Memorial and Hitchcock Clinic, Hanover, New Hampshire].” I replied, “That’s great, except for the fact Helen and I haven’t got any money.” “But I have too much,” Red replied, and persuaded us to come with him to Woodstock. We liked the first little house the real estate agent showed us: it was built in 1783, the last year of the Revolutionary War, and had wooden pins, not nails, holding it together. It had a gravity water supply. It had no heating except fireplaces , no electric light, no telephone within miles. It did have 125 beautiful acres, and a view of the entire Green Mountain range. The price was $4,500. Mr. Lewis took out a checkbook and made out a check to me for two thousand dollars. He then told the agent he would guarantee the mortgage—which was also two thousand dollars. Helen and I, with help from Gilbert,7 [Seldes, his brother], raised five hundred dollars, and later that summer we moved in, bought an automobile, which Helen knew how to drive, and registered as voters. Of all the great writers I have known in my seven European and Ameri­ can working decades, only one became a real friend. Hemingway chose to exhibit his dislike of my brother by attacking me; Theodore Dreiser was too diffi cult Part 12. Grub Street / 229 for anyone but adoring women to call more than an acquaintance; but of the great men of the literature of our time ­ Sinclair Lewis was the one easy to become friendly with; and when my wife and I were his neighbors in Vermont we became good friends even before we had the chance, not once but several times, to save him from delirium tremens, perhaps even to save his life. He became so good a friend he could in sober as well as alcoholic moments confess the most intimate details of his life and still remain a friend. [. . .] There was never any small talk at the Lewis table in Vermont. Sometimes there was an obvious subject—doctors for Arrowsmith, preachers for Elmer Gantry , Nazism and Fascism for It Can’t Happen Here. But a recurring topic over many years was the great Ameri­ can labor novel that was to be the Lewis masterpiece . It haunted him, it was discussed between each successful book, and labor writers were at Lewis’s table year after year. He probably accumulated filing cases of notes, but he never wrote the book. Perhaps it was because he had not come from a working-­ class family. Sometimes, when not trying out parts of his work in progress, Lewis would talk about anything at all—from religion to his relations with his first wife. He once said, “God is lachryma Christi”—or Christ’s tears of doubt—and once he said something that so impressed me I wrote it down immediately: “The Christian Church today is either an apology for no God at all or for God’s mistakes.” ...