SINCLAIR LEWIS'S NOVEL ARROWSMITH (1925)

Reviews by Patrick Killough


Two book reviews of
Sinclair Lewis
ARROWSMITH (1925)


 I. for http://www.barnesandnoble.com

THE AUTHOR: Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), is studying Sinclair Lewis's America, April 30, 2005, 


Review Title: How Martin Arrowsmith Did What He Was Born To Do

The novel ARROWSMITH begins with one third of a page not obviously related to what follows. We are shown a turning point in the life of Martin Arrowsmith's 14 year old great  grandmother Emmy. The family is migrating west by wagon through Ohio. Emmy's mother has just been buried. The ailing father begs his daughter to break off and head south to Cincinnati where his brother might give them refuge. The girl assumes charge of her family including noisy, tattered siblings and declares that no one will take them in, adding, "Going West. They's a whole lot of new things I aim to be seeing."

Does the life of Martin Arrowsmith replicate great grandmother Emmy's? Where is he heading? What are his temptations to stray?

We meet Martin, in 1897, a bright boy, aged 14. He hangs around the local small town doctor in Elk Mills, mythical midwestern State of Winnemac. Martin awes his friends by bandaging bruises and dissecting squirrels. Later he went to college and prepared to become a doctor. In medical school he is tempted by competing role models among students and teachers. He oscillated between a future as a consciously upwardly mobile, prosperous, leisured M.D. or a single-minded researcher into the root causes of ill health. The German Jewish professor and bacteriologist Max Gottlieb preached an unrelenting gospel of science, objectivity and mastery of detail. Martin's fellow medical student Terry Wickett will reinforce that creed at various times in Arrowsmith's future.

Martin Arrowsmith was an ordinary American: anything but a Renaissance man, except for  boundless curiosity and a willingness to work hard at something once he believed in it--which in the end proved to be basic scientific research in a celibate male community of two in backwoods Vermont. Martin Arrowsmith had two wives: Leora, the first, demanded only marital fidelity, got it from him, and in return supported him selflessly and unobtrusively wherever his often shifting goals carried them. To Chicago. To New York. Their only child was still born. Leora died on the Caribbean isle where Martin was heroically combatting and researching plague. Recently widowed Joyce, by contrast, the second and very wealthy Mrs Arrowsmith, he had met and dallied with during the plague. Their marriage produced one son and a moderate amount of reasonable efforts by Joyce to help her husband acquire social graces, learn to relax and to cool his passion for pure totally absorbing research.

In the end Arrowsmith is persuaded that pure research into disease is what he is meant to do. And a wife and child are not merely irrelevant but too time consuming and distracting from his destined goal. He therefore abandons family and joins his old friend and Socratic gadfly Terry Wickett to do celibate science in a primitive woodsy cottage in New England. They envision expanding to a like-minded community of no more than eight males.

That is the tale of MARTIN ARROWSMITH, by some accounts the most widely read novel of Sinclair Lewis. 

Other Books also recommended: Mark Schorer, SINCLAIR LEWIS AN AMERICAN LIFE (1961). Sinclair Lewis, FREE AIR (1929). James M. Hutchisson, THE RISE OF SINCLAIR LEWIS, 1920-1930 (1996, 1997).

-OOO-

TPK 04/30/2005


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II. For http://www.amazon.com


Here is your review the way it will appear:

REVIEW TITLE: ARROWSMITH: A Hard Book To Read Just for Itself

Reviewer:    T. Patrick Killough (Black Mountain, NC United States)
 
The challenge to readers of Sinclair Lewis's 1925 masterpiece ARROWSMITH is that so much is known about the author that it is hard to focus on the novel.

We have the Yale and University of Texas collections of the author's typescripts and notes, including Lewis's sketches of floor plans of the all important fictional McGurk Institute in New York. We know what first wife Gracie added, what massive collaborator Paul De Kruif contributed. We know how badly Sinclair Lewis wanted to prove to critics that he was not just a "knocker" of flawed characters and a negative satirst of an America full of Babbitts. We know how the researching, planning and writing of ARROWSMITH created and consolidated a method of doing fiction that Sinclair Lewis then used over and over again. A method hammered out with Paul De Kruif.

We think of parallels between the collaborators' nine week research jaunt by ship through the Caribbean and Graham Greene's turning his travels in Liberia and Mexico into books. We wonder why only in ARROWSMITH Sinclair Lewis created one heroic figure -- again, we notice, in collaboration with a Paul De Kruif whom Lewis taught to write better and who taught Lewis about science and scientific role models.

We think of the huge impact of Lewis and ARROWSMITH on the contemporary world, not just in the USA. No potboiler novel could have drawn John Ford to direct the 1931 movie ARROWSMITH. Ronald Coleman played Martin Arrowsmith, Helen Hayes was Leora Tozer and Myrna Loy played Arrowsmith's temptress during the plague on the sultry West Indian isle. (NOTE: The film may be borrowed via http://www.netflix.com.)

In the novel, Dr Martin Arrowsmith oscillates between medical careerism and self-sacrificial idealistic devotion to a cause: pure scientific research. There is little room for women in his life, especially if they try to shape the hero up into being a competent tennis player and snappy dresser. In the end, Martin Arrowsmith can become Martin Arrowsmith only in a simply living, tiny male celibate community in the woods of Vermont. Shades of John Henry Newman at Littlemore!

Try to read this book just for itself. Caveat: that is easier said than done. But the novel has its own charm apart from its history and impact.

-OOO-

TPK 05/01/2005