Sinclair Lewis Remembered

87. Ramon Guthrie

87 / Ramon Guthrie According to Guthrie, Lewis worked for several months on his “labor novel” in 1936 before again abandoning the project. Source: Ramon Guthrie, “­ Sinclair Lewis and the ‘Labor Novel,’” Proceedings of the Ameri­ can Academy of Arts and Letters n.s. 2 (1952): 74–79, 81–82. In April 1936 Red asked me to start serious work with him on the labor novel. He was in good shape. It Can’t Happen Here had restored his confidence in himself . He had not tasted so much as a glass of beer in twenty-­ six weeks. During the spring we had several sessions together on the book. Basically the plot was the same as it had been nine years earlier in Venice. Roy (as we called the hero tentatively) was to be a home-­ grown Gene Debs. In the course of his groping for a God who is at once the tears and the meaning of things, he was to become a radical and to suffer the penalty for his convictions . Because of The Man Who Knew Coolidge, the original title would have to be changed. We considered a number of alternatives, among them The Unconquerable and Roy against the World, neither of which we liked much. As soon as I could get away in June, we set out for Connecticut to gather documentation. My experience over a period of half-­ a-­ dozen years as a semi-­ skilled laborer in vari­ ous Connecticut factories qualified me as enough of an expert for Red’s purposes. I had worked on most kinds of machine-­ tools and still remembered enough to know a shaper chuck from a collet. As a refresher course, Red acquired a small library of machinist’s manuals and set me to studying them. Working on a book with Red, as I already knew from what little I had done on Dodsworth, was always a hectic job. One had to be on tap twenty-­ four hours a day. Red himself could get suffi cient sleep by snatching naps, of anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours, between ideas. Whenever a new idea occurred to him, he dropped everything else and started off in full cry after it—on the quite valid theory that the surest way of getting the thing done was to do it immediately . 236 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered We covered the Naugatuck and Connecticut valleys from a variety of angles. The program of a typical day was a morning of conferring, getting notes into order, reading local newspapers for names, activities and interests, lunch with a factory owner or executive; an afternoon spent inspecting a factory or two and a C[ivilian] C[onservation] C[orps] camp; dinner in a beer garden with a group of workmen; a post-­ midnight snack and a prowl through some of the more obscure quarters of town with a police reporter. One of our closest friends was a mountainous triple-­ chinned German chief mechanic named Emil whose artistry on a milling-­ machine fascinated Red. On the night of the first Louis-­ Schmeling fight,14 Emil took us to a combination gambling joint and speak-­ easy—though prohibition had been repealed a good two years earlier—to listen to the bout. Although Red was incognito only to the extent that he signed hotel registers as H. S. Lewis, in order not to be hounded by reporters, most of our acquaintances among the workers knew nothing about this Mr. Lewis except that he was good company and had something to do with books. They talked naturally and easily with him. Once when he protested at never being allowed to pay for any part of the several meals he had with them, one of the men explained, “Hell, Mr. Lewis, you’re just too swell a guy for your money to be any good around here.” Around two or three o’clock in the morning, when I would manage to get to bed with more hope than expectation of getting some sleep, Red was apt to drop into my room for a last cigarette and a few final questions such as: “What kind of an operation is a buck-­ grinder used for?” “Tell me once more the difference between a pawl and a dog. How do you suppose dogs ever came to be called that?” “Would an educated mechanic—one who had a high school education—say ‘morphadite’ for ‘hermaphrodite’?” “How much diffi culty would a boy of Roy’s intelligence...