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Sinclair
Lewis
WORK OF ART (1934) Two Reviews by Patrick Killough (A) REVIEW FOR HTTP://WWW.BARNESANDNOBLE.COM [NOTE: I was told in a phone call June 14, 2005 to Barnes and Noble.com that their web site does not yet carry reviews of books which are ONLY available through their network of used book dealers. The good news is that "sometime soon" this policy will change. Meanwhile I have no intention of offering the review below to anyone besides barnesandnoble.com. So whenever their policy changes, they are welcome to it. This "rebuff" is a "first" in dealing with this excellent book sales company. TPK 06/15/2005] REVIEW'S TITLE: A morality tale for MBA students BOOK'S RATING: FOUR STARS * * * * For an MBA course on business ethics one of my sons wrote about black marketeer Harry Lime in Graham Greene's novel THE THIRD MAN. It seems likely that Sinclair Lewis's "hotel" novel, WORK OF ART (1934) has been similarly mined and meditated upon by teachers and students concerned for what is good and bad in business. The novel's hero certainly spent much time preoccupied with this concern. *** We readers are carried from 1882 till 1933 through the ups and downs of three generations of the Weagle family and their varying attitudes to the art of hotel management. Focus is on the second generation, two brothers Myron and Ora. Myron is the plodding, steady, predictable Tortoise. Ora is the mercurial, chore-dodging Hare. Myron moves slowly up and eventually down the ladder of management of American hotels, always searching for and never finding or building his ideal inn. Ora is a young poet and later alcoholic playwright and movie script writer. Down the decades their paths cross with less and less frequency and with growing incomprehension. *** Myron learned that neither hotelier nor teacher nor anyone else can care for masses of Americans without "entertaining" them. From his father and mother at the American House in Black Thread, Connecticut Myron absorbed dos and don'ts of serving boarders and traveling salesmen. Within the rapidly growing world of pre-touring car American vacations, Myron Weagle acquired a solid, eventually national reputation as a reliable, cautious hotel man. He lived to hear himself lauded as "creative" at Rotary Club luncheons and Chamber of Commerce dinners. During a managerial stint at the Saint Louis world's fair in 1904 Myron was steeped in the ethos of service, which in those days simply meant "oozing unfelt cordiality" (Ch. 11) *** This year, 2005, is the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Rotary Club of Chicago and indeed of the launching of the worldwide service club movement. There is global Rotary attention to Sinclair Lewis and other critics of service clubs. See http://www.rotaryhistoryfellowship.org/library/critics/index.htm. And this novel, WORK OF ART, is the source of the well known saying, "...of these two great spiritual awakenings, a Boy Scout is a young Rotarian, and every Rotarian is a Boy Scout in long trousers!" (Ch. 17). Here as in other novels, Sinclair Lewis probes (sometimes lovingly, more often satirically) the extent to which an adult American male has any identity left over and apart from his job. *** Myron Weagle, no matter how often knocked down, always rallies to boost and see the good wherever fate lands him, including his late, almost despairing purchase of a little roadside inn in Lemuel Kansas. Sinclair Lewis calls Myron's enthusiasm for Lemuel in summer both "Rotarian" and "a little comic" (Ch. 35). *** A man does what he can. And Myron at tale's end is pleased that his talented young son wants to carry on the family tradition of being good, smart, caring hotel men. *** =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- B. REVIEW for http://www.amazon.com REVIEW'S TITLE: A Grand Yarn of Hotels "For Boy Scouts and Rotarians" BOOK'S RATING: FOUR STARS * * * * Sinclair Lewis may have written more about "service" and the art of being useful to others than any other American novelist. Sometimes he praises altruistic service. More often he skewers hypocritical politeness and feigned kindness as mere marketing ploys to sell inferior products. His 1934 novel about hotels and hotel management, WORK OF ART, is especially heavy on attention to service. In WORK OF ART three generations of the Weagle family grow up in and work for boarding houses, inns and hotels. Focus is on two brothers, Myron and Ora, of the second generation. Poetic, ethereal Ora could not wait to escape hotel drudgery, though never too proud to ask plodding Myron for money. As Myron thought, learned and managed a steady climb to national respect within the expanding world of early 20th Century hotel managers, he was always skeptical when praised for his "creativity" at Rotary Club luncheons and Chamber of Commerce dinners. He dreamed minutely of the shape of his perfect inn or dream hotel: its napkins, its menus, its front desks, its coddling of guests. Yet he never quite pulled off perfection. Myron argued with younger brother Ora about whether it was even possible to combine money making with administering institutions. "Maybe there were business men, and successful ones, who were not money grubbers, but creators, he suggested" (Ch.4). Myron tried hard to combine these two talents, but never entirely succeeded. If anyone could pull this combination off, it was the much admired traveling salesman, J. Hector Warlock whom Myron began noticing when only 15 while front desking the family owned American Hotel in Black Thread, Connecticut. Warlock "could sell fleece-lined overshoes in hell! (Ch. 4) Over time he convinced Myron that all trades evolve: barbering becomes surgery. Taverns become inns, become hotels and someday most people will live in hotels instead of houses. Young Myron learned the service dimension of just being friendly from American Hotel bartender Jock McCreedy. Bartenders held democratic court in pre-Prohibition America. Myron Weagle learned as well to manage inebriated businessmen and "lonely and love-starved women" (Ch. 9) living in hotels. By 1904 theoreticians of hotel management were already agreed that a hotel staffer owed guests "a metaphysical blessing called 'Service'; that he should be at once the Little Brother and the Kind Uncle of everyone who registered -- call them by name ... and ask them tenderly about the Folks, illnesses, weather, and business conditions Back Home" (Ch. 11). But Myron never excelled in "oozing unfelt cordiality." Myron came to admire the great hotels as excelling even churches, universities, forts and hospitals for knowing "the heart and blood circulation of history" (Ch. 11). He met and liked Luciano Mora, whose family had kept six generations of inns and hotels in Naples. Together they fanatically glorified "innkeeping as veritably an art" (Ch. 15). Hotel management was far more than just an interesting way to make a living. COMMENT: In February 1905 the Rotary Club of Chicago was created, launching the entire service club movement. In this centennial year 2005 Rotarians are learning that it was in 1934's WORK OF ART that a prissy school superintendent in Black Thread, Connecticut made a much quoted linkage between "two great spiritual awakenings": Boy Scoutism and Rotarianism: "a Boy Scout is a young Rotarian, and every Rotarian is a Boy Scout in long trousers!" (Ch. 17) Mryon rose. Myron fell. Myron bounced back. In 1932, towards novel's end, in his early 50s with his management career in shreds, he used his last savings for a hot summer drive with family to tiny Lemuel, Kansas. Things looked bleak and dull but Myron's "Rotarian enthusiasm," comic though he felt it to be, propelled him on. In Kansas Myron built and then transformed The Commercial Hotel. But minor magic came as well. For the first time ever, his wife Effie May became "a hotelman's wife" as had Myron's mother before her. Teen age son Luke Weagle, age 16 in 1933, also opted for a future in hoteling and warmed his father by suggesting a great development site for a new approach to America's rising world of automobile tourists, whose idea of a vacation was simply to drive all over the place for the sheer fun of moving atop passable roads. Sinclair Lewis, as always, tells a great yarn: this time about the ups and downs in a rising America's unending pursuit of craftsmanship and material success. -OOO- Black Mountain, NC June 16, 2005 -OOO- |