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Sinclair Lewis
KINGSBLOOD ROYAL (1947) Two Book Reviews by Patrick Killough A. REVIEW FOR http://www.barnesandnoble.com Preview Your Review ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Your Title: Kingsblood Royal ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here is how your review will appear on the title page: T. Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), is preparing to teach Sinclair Lewis, May 19, 2005, RATING OF THE BOOK: FOUR STARS * * * * TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: Amateur genealogical research can upset your life In 1947 two great novels exposed American prejudices. *** The first novel to appear was GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT by Laura Z. Hobson about a reporter assigned to research anti-semitism who pretended to be Jewish and got some most unpleasant surprises in the process. 30 year old Gregory Peck starred that same year as reporter Phil Green in a Daryl F. Zanuck film. *** Sinclair Lewis probed with more wit and sarcasm a parallel prejudice in his 20th novel, KINGSBLOOD ROYAL, about a rising white banker, Neil Kingsblood who learns he is 1/32 Negro and decides as a matter of morality to secede from the caucasian race. *** Neil Kingsblood had been wounded in 1943 as an army captain in World War II--a conflict which is still raging at book's beginning. As he settled back down in Grand Republic, Minnesota (population 85,000) into civilian life as a junior bank officer, Kingsblood began to be sensitized to whites' speaking and acting unkindly towards both negroes and Jews. His wife began his sensitizing to negroes by the cruel way she let their colored maid Belinda leave their service to attend to a family illness. Neil also grew uneasy hearing mindless slurs against Jews at his club. After a lavish Christmas family dinner, Neil's dentist father passed on a family tradition that the Kingsbloods are descendants of British and Spanish royalty, in fact from an unacknowledged son of Henry VIII and Queen Catharine of Aragon. Kindly Neil agrees to his father's proposal to research the legend. *** He read old family letters from paternal ancestors, becoming increasingly entranced by the likelihood of his own royal descent. He then turned to his mother's family, the Saxinars. His mother's mother had told Neil as a boy of a Canadian French fur trader background. *** During this genealogical research Neil begins to rise at the bank after he proposes to cultivate returning veterans as customers. On a business trip to St Paul and Minneapolis, Neil called on his 83 year old grandmother Julie Saxinar and Grampa Edgar. Julie Saxinar spoke of his great great great grandfather Xavier Pic, born around 1790 died after 1850 as a great voyageur and linguist. He may not, admittedly have been pure French. Perhaps Xavier had some Chippewa blood. Certainly he married a Chippewa girl, Initially shocked, Neil begins to enjoy the notion of an Indian princess in his genealogical up-line. *** Later, however, at the Minnesota Historical Society in Minneapolis Neil learns that Xavier Pic was almost ' a full-blooded Negro, ' having been born in Martinique. The well known frontiersman Pic had written a letter to General Sibley asking that celebrity not to refer to him as anything but French, in order to protect Pic's daughter (who had married an American white) and his resulting grandchildren, who must not be exposed to the humiliations black people faced in parts of the USA. *** Neil henceforth increasingly views himself and his daughter as Negroes. He cannot, he admits to himself, see anything good coming if his ancestry becomes known. But for another 250 pages Neil Kingsblood increasingly disregards the advice of his great, great, great grandfather about the prudential wisdom of passing for white and publicly explores his infinitesimal 'negritude' at considerable cost to his career and his family's social status. Shame on you, silly, racist America, says, in effect, Sinclair Lewis! -OOO- Also recommended: RIchard Wright, BLACK BOY. Martin Light, THE QUIXOTIC VISION OF SINCLAIR LEWIS. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-== B. REVIEW FOR http://www.amazon.com KINGSBLOOD ROYAL is a 1947 novel rich in sometimes unintended, sometimes avoidable consequences as a basically dull, average American Neil Kingslbood plods back into American business humdrum after being wounded in 1943 as a Captain in the US Army. He "piously" (like the Roman hero Aeneas) promises his father to look into a family legend (surprisingly communicated rather late to the hero) that the Kingsbloods are descendants of English royalty. Nothing is clear one way on the other on the paternal side of genealogy. But interviews with his father's mother and then with a Minnesota historian reveal first that Neil's great, great, great maternal grandfather, the Canadian voyageur Xavier Pic, had a Chippewa wife. And shortly thereafter there is convincing documentary evidence that Pic himself was 100% black, having been born on the isle of Martinique around 1750. That maked the startled Neil Kingsblood both 1/32 black heavily Native American as well. What to do about it? There was and had been no suspicion among any family members or friends and business colleagues that the Kingsbloods were (by certain American, mainly Southern, standards) legally black. No one need ever find out. And it was pretty clear that if the word got out, the results would not be pretty. Yet Neil, a man not otherwise noted for boldness or delicate conscience, decides to "come out," even after being advised not to by newfound black friends in the city of Grand Republic, Minnesota. The results are even more awful than a reader nearly 60 years after the fictional events might imagine. Neil loses job after job. His wife is socially ostracized. Eventually even his young daughter is as well. Family members of his generation beg him to keep quiet. When he does not, a marriage does not take place. A divorce occurs. Neil is blamed for his father's sudden death. Bloody mindedness spreads. At the very end of the novel, the hero, his family and some armed black friends fire on an angry mob massing at the Kingsblood home after community leaders failed to persuade them to move out of the semi-prestigious neighborhood. The police move in to arrest Neil and others but exempt Neil's wife Vestal, daughter of a community leader. She however remains true to Neil to the end. She assures her arrest by hitting a policeman over the head with a pistol. The story may sound far-fetched. But remember 1925 when black Doctor Ossian Sweet moved into an angry previously all white neighborhood on the East Side of Detroit. Shots from inside Sweet's house killed a demonstrator outside. Defended by Clarence Darrow, Sweet was acquitted. (No one was killed in KINGSBLOOD ROYAL). But racial violence rose through the next twenty years in Detroit. Anti-black racism was still strong in 1947 when KINGSBLOOD ROYAL hit the streets. In some small way Sinclair Lewis may have almost succeeded in laughing American racial idiocy away. TPK Black Mountain, NC 05/31/05 -OOO- |