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Sinclair
Lewis
DODSWORTH (1929) Reviews and Notes by Patrick Killough (A) Review for http://www.barnesandnoble.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here is how your review appear on the title page: RATING OF NOVEL: FOUR STARS * * * * TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: The Heroine Performed Just As She Had Forecast Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), reading all Sinclair Lewis novels., July 21, 2005, Samuel Dodsworth, hero of the 1929 novel DODSWORTH, is a somewhat atypical product of Sinclair Lewis's mythical midwestern city of Zenith. Zenith was the haunt at times of Elmer Gantry and George Babbitt, among other notables. In 1925, aged 50, big, kindly Sam Dodsworth was virtually forced to sell the automobile company he had piloted for 20 years, to a larger, tougher competitor. What were he and his wife Frances to do next? Their two children were grown. So it was off to Europe with no clear plans. Enjoying what she perceived as her last decade of "youth," Fran flitted from one flirtation to another: aboard ship, in London, in Paris, in Berlin, with a final dose of adultery with an indigent Austrian count. She initiated divorce proceedings against Sam in Germany. But the count's mother refused consent to a marriage with a non-Catholic divorcee too old to bear children. Fran sought not very contritely to return to Sam who had meanwhile been dallying for weeks near Sicily with comforting, widowed American expatriate Edith Cortwright. Sam made an honorable stab at reconciliation but finally definitively opted to marry Edith. Or did he? At close of the last page we are not quite sure. *** The conflict between Sam and Fran is inevitable from the first chapter. In Zenith 28 year old Yale graduate, Mass. Tech. post-graduate and junior automotive executive Sam met Fran at an August dance in 1903. She was a blonde ice angel, Frances Voelker, not long out of finishing school and some travel in Europe. As a girl she had had a crush on football hero Sam. After dancing, Sam knew that he had found his purpose in life: marrying this child and keeping her forever in a shrine. He would master Europe to be worthy of Fran. Weeks later during a rainy stroll, Sam proposed marriage. Fran, to her credit, warned him that he might not like what he would get: "Oh, Sam, my dear, but I'm so grasping! I want the whole world, not just Zenith. I don't want to be a good wife and mother and play cribbage prettily! I want splendor! Great horizons! Can we look for them together?' 'We will!' said Sam." By 1908, after two children and with the financial backing of his multi-millionaire father-in-law, Sam took over recently formed Revelation Automobile Company. He kept his nose to the grind and did not travel the world for nearly the next two decades. *** The rest of the story leisurely and against a broad backdrop of world cities worked out the tensions of Chapter One. Sam continued to idolize Fran. Fran was never happy in narrow, plodding Zenith and took out her discontent by nagging Sam and criticizing all his friends. Hectoring never stopped, even after they went together on his life's dream, a leisured trip to Europe. Having sacrificed her real youth to marriage and children and boredom in Zenith, 40-something Fran asserted her right to one last "youthful" fling, which in the end proved too much even for the long-suffering and much loving Sam.*** As for Sam, never was there so introspective a Sinclair Lewis creature. Samuel Dodsworth mentally tried out one scenario for himself after another. He would return to America and become an automotive innovator. He would become an intellectual and write the history of autos. He would learn to relax and master the European art of good conversation. He would join a journalist friend and travel the jungles of South America and Asia. And on and on. Sam found travel hard work, hotels boring and pointless drinking all too attractive. He still wanted the world but "I don't want anything enough to fight for it much. I've done about all I ever imagined" (Ch. 17). Truth be told: there were many things he never attempted: holiness comes instantly to mind. Any sustained search for God might just have filled the notable empty spots of Sam, Fran and everyone else in the novel. Sam seemed to sense this towards the end: "Maybe I didn't hitch myself to a high-enough star! This one don't look very good!" But then Sinclair Lewis would have had to be Graham Greene to tell such a tale and that he surely was not. *** The novel became a Broadway play and in 1936 a vastly enjoyable movie, still available for borrowing through www.netflix.com. Walter Huston was Sam Dodsworth and Ruth Chatterton his wife Fran. David Niven played a young English gigolo. Other cameo roles were filled by a terribly young John Payne as well as Spring Byington and a darkly ominous Paul Lukas. Sidney Howard's fast moving screenplay shortened the story (omitting much sightseeing and even a country or two) but was true to the essentials. William Wyler directed. The film was nominated for seven Oscars and won one: for best artistic direction. Do not miss seeing the film (rated one of TIME's 100 all time greatest) and read the novel. Each complements the other. -OOO- (B) Review for http://www.amazon.com RATING of this novel: FOUR STARS * * * * TITLE of this Review: A Novel That Sings Like Middle American Opera Sinclair Lewis's 1929 novel DODSWORTH has staying power. It remains widely read. It was made into a Broadway stage play and then a 1936 motion picture nominated for seven Academy Awards. Imagine Giancarlo Menotti or Leonard Bernstein turning DODSWORTH into an opera of Midwestern passion and rhetoric! Published the year before its author became America's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, DODSWORTH repeats and intensifies a number of themes, at least one visible as early as 1912's HIKE AND THE AEROPLANE. --The hero, automobile pioneer Samuel Dodsworth, wonders whether there a dimension to corporate life beyond sheer hard work and sticking to what one knows best. If so what is it? Travel? Leisure? The life of the mind? Good conversation? An absorbing hobby? A wife supportive of both his business and non-business quests? --Is travel in the sense of sheer moving from here to there, from one place to another, out roughing it on the long trail, the ultimate solution? Must man move incessantly in order to be happy? In New York City, after some months in a more relaxed, contemplative Europe, Dodsworth saw Manhattan as "veritably the temple of a new divinity, the God of Speed." That God of Speed "demanded a belief that Going Somewhere, Going Quickly, Going Often, were in themselves holy and greatly to be striven for. A demanding God, this Speed, ... who once he had been offered a hundred miles an hour, straightway demanded a hundred and fifty" (Ch. 16). --Midwestern Americans, makers of national greatness, at their best are regularly accused by Sinclair Lewis of being ordinary, conformist, risk avoiders. Without their Babbitry, their service clubs, their lodges and their main-line churches, American business leaders of the second magnitude are nothing, certainly not the legendary American pioneers of yesteryear. In some ways, Sam Dodsworth at 50 was therefore not a typical product of midwestern Zenith. He was "perfectly, the American Captain of Industry. ... (But) He was none of the things which most Europeans and many Americans expect in a leader of American industry. He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon. ... He knew, and thoroughly, the Babbitts and baseball fans, but only in business" (Ch.2). When Dodsworth opted for a few months of travel abroad before jumping back into the rat race, the man who bought out his company accused him of thinking that the purpose of life is loafing, whereas, "I tell you, Dodsworth, to me, work is a religion. ... Do big things" (Ch. 3). In London, even his wife Fran accused Dodworth (who had attended only one Rotary lunch in his life) of wanting to be "back in all the Rotarian joys of Zenith" (Ch. 11). Ross Ireland, a world traveler journalist, told Dodsworth that one reason he loved America so passionately was that its "Elks and the Rotarians and the National Civic Federation are (not) any more grab-it-all than the English merchant" (Ch. 16). In discussing America's appeal to him with emerging lady friend Edith Cortwright, Sam Dodsworth ironically concluded that there are only two good reasons for American businessmen to travel abroad: to attend "a Rotary convention, or on a conducted tour where he's well insulated from furriners. Upsets him. Spoils his pleasure in his own greatness and knowledge!" (Ch. 31). --Another recurring Sinclair Lewis riddle is the relation of husband to wife. Does a great American achiever really need a wife? If so, why? She dare not be his intellectual or entrepreneurial equal. She is permitted a few innocent distractions from running a household and raising children. Dancing and country clubbing are all right. Flirting with other men is frowned upon. And Dodsworth has absolutely no empathy for wife Fran as she frenetically reasserts her youth and her right not to be known as a grandmother. Above all, she has no right to carp at him, to put him in his place before his friends or hers. DODSWORTH was written by Sinclair Lewis at the height of his powers. If Samuel Dodsworth is a brooding Prince Hamlet among American business leaders, he is a distinctly understated American Hamlet. Yes, Sam Dodsworth is more Socratic than a Babbitt or a Rotarian but less human than the troubled, seeking sinners of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. -OOO- 07/22/2005 =-==-=-=-=-=- |