Sinclair Lewis Remembered

69. Alfred Harcourt

69 / Alfred Harcourt Harcourt was characteristically diplomatic in recording Lewis’s departure for Ran­ dom House. As he wrote Lewis on February 3, 1931, “If I’ve lost an au­ thor, you haven’t lost either a friend or a devoted reader.”7 As Richard Lingeman adds, however, “The impression is unavoidable that Harcourt was relieved at no longer having to cope with Lewis.”8 Source: Alfred Harcourt, Some Experiences (Riverside, CT: privately printed, 1934), 83–85. After Dodsworth, we did not publish any more of Lewis’s new books, but we kept the old ones. Although I saw him less frequently—and for a number of years not at all—nothing ever interfered with our personal feeling for each other. We had some long and intimate visits when he was in Santa Barbara in 1949. ­ Sinclair Lewis earned his success step by step, and paid for it. When he had an idea for a novel, he put as much study into the subject matter as a graduate student preparing a Ph.D. thesis, and he spent months living among the kind of people that were to be the fig­ ures in the book. If he couldn’t feel himself part of them so that he could write from within, he would give up the idea, no matter how much time he had spent on it. Time and time again he tried to write a novel about a labor leader, only to throw away what he had written. Before he started the actual writing of a book, he had its structure worked out with the greatest care. I remember an elaborate and detailed map of the imaginary city of Zenith where Babbitt lived. As Lewis was finishing a book, he would work eighteen or twenty hours out of the twenty-­ four, day after day. Like a man possessed, he couldn’t stay still, he couldn’t lie down, he couldn’t sit down, except at the typewriter . When, after the award of the Nobel Prize, a newspaper reporter asked him the typical question about his formula for success, his reply was, “The application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” He was one of the most generous-­ spirited men I ever knew. With some of the earlier books, he insisted that we take a larger share of some of the rights than I 186 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered had proposed. Where people had given him substantial help in enabling him to get a proper background for a book, he saw that they got generous recognition. He grew lonelier and lonelier. He longed for human companionship but he was so brilliant that he was soon bored by the people who could have given him affection. His sharp mind penetrated fast to the core of anything, and what he saw there was often disillusioning to him. He had none of the humdrum amusements and putterings most of us have that keep us steady. Sometimes it seemed as if his only relief was in drink. At times, he would collapse to the point where he scared everyone, including himself, and then he’d recover with amazing vitality. When I last saw him, he had gone for a number of years without drinking at all. His death, alone in Rome, caused a widespread sense of loss that would have astonished him. A force in modern literature went with him, but it is fitting that in his lifetime he attained the nearest thing there is to “contemporary immortality.” ...