Sinclair Lewis Remembered

5. Henry Seidel Canby

5 / Henry Seidel Canby Henry Seidel Canby (1878–1961),bestknownforhiscontributionstoearly Ameri­ can literary scholarship, began teaching at Yale after he graduated from that institution in 1899. He was editor of the New York Evening Post for four years, achieved professorial status in 1922, and became one of the founding editors of the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924. He was also the author of several books, among them Classic Ameri­ cans (1931), The Age of Confidence (1934), Thoreau (1939), and Whitman (1943). Source: Henry Seidel Canby, Ameri­ can Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 307–9. I have known [Lewis] well, though never intimately since our paths seldom cross, for forty years. I knew him first as a Yale undergraduate, a nonconformist, getting what he could—and he got a great deal—from that stronghold of intelligent conformity where radicals, once they are accepted as Yale men, can say or do what they please. (It is said that [Josiah W.] Gibbs, greatest of mathematical physicists, was saved for his university by some elder statesman who remarked that he might be incomprehensible, but he was a good Yale man.) ­ Sinclair Lewis would often drop in for an evening in the room in “dirty Durfee” where I was living with Chauncey Brewster Tinker. This would have been in 1906. Tinker, a conservative in literature but never a reactionary, was a brilliant lecturer who could make tradition glow with life. The young man and the older were tempera­ mentally alike, though worlds apart in their ideas of how to live. Both had ignitable minds which would explode at a hint of the cheap or the false, but as to what were true and what were false values, they could seldom agree. For ­ Sinclair derived his emotional consents from nature as interpreted by the scientists, and Tinker from Doctor Johnson and the Word of God as validated by the Anglican Church. Thus it came about, as often with a child of nature, that Lewis worshiped Tinker’s impeccable taste while distrusting his philosophy, and Tinker was increasingly annoyed by a writer whose idea was to lash sensual man into Part 2. New Haven and New Jersey / 23 finding his own way to salvation. Santayana3 would have enjoyed their conversation , then and later, and been supercilious to both. [. . .] Too many easy judgments were formed of Lewis in his percussion-­ powder days. He had a face of boilerplate, but his mental skin was as sensitive as a ­ baby’s. If he drank, it was, as with Poe, to quiet his nerves, usually with contrary results . There was a noble independence about the man, to be respected even when he used it to sneer at the genteel age, which was his enemy. I have seen him rise from a dull dinner party, say “I’m tired,” go through the nearest door, pop into the most available bed—and emerge two hours later in excellent humor. Once he chose an ambassador’s room, which made diffi culties with ­ protocol. But Lewis was always and essentially a realistic idealist, a true, if surpris­ ing, product of the liberal late nineteenth century in which he had his roots. He was always, you will note, on the side of the angels. But his eye and ear were too honest to please the respectable, who prefer genre paintings to candid photographs. The trouble was not his choice of characters—the country was full of Babbitts and Elmer Gantrys. It was the overpowering and often unpleasant reality he gave to them. Only in moments of intense perception do we see both type and individual in a person we like or hate. We are blind to the type, or do not recognize the individual. ­ Sinclair’s gift was for realizing, and always with a satiric point. Dialogue was his best medium. Some of his most brilliant dialogues were never written down. Once at my house he rode high on an imaginary conversation between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Jonson was the patronizing highbrow; Shakespeare was the popu­ lar writer, humble in a dangerous way before Art and Learning. He could give the people what they wanted, since he was not writing for posterity like his learned friend. To this day I see Lewis’s quizzical Will and pompous Ben more vividly than in any historian’s portrait. It is the art that Shakespeare himself practices in Polonius and Falstaff, and excellently adapted to letting society recognize its own warped or frightened soul behind an inescapable verisimilitude...