Sinclair Lewis Remembered

58. James Branch Cabell

58 / James Branch Cabell Lewis by his own admission fell into the trap of potboiling in such negligible novels as Mantrap and The Man Who Knew Coolidge, a mistake the rival novelist Cabell exploited. Source: James Branch Cabell, As I Remember It (New York: McBride, 1955), 167–68. Lewis rather too often for his own good as a writer resorted consciously to what he termed “whoring”—by which he referred to no bedroom activities, not hereabouts at least, but meant the rapid and facile writing of mediocre tales which his being famous enabled him to sell at a handsome rate to this or the other periodical . It was his notion, as he assured me more than once, that a practiced author could do this whensoever he elected, and then, in his novels, return at will to writing in his best vein. I did not argue about the matter. But nowadays I am quite firmly persuaded that the career of ­ Sinclair Lewis disproved this notion. And, at any rate, I thought that Mantrap andTheManWhoKnewCoolidgewerealmostunadulterated “whor­ ing” in book form, and that in Elmer Gantry, an exaggeration which, by and large, I enjoyed, there was a great deal meritorious of the same Scriptural doctrine . ...