|
23 NOVELS OF SINCLAIR LEWIS
Session # 3 OCTOBER 19 Novels 9 - 11 ARRROWSMITH, MANTRAP, ELMER GANTRY A. OUTLINE OF THE PLOTS. (9) 1925 ARROWSMITH. II. PLOT OUTLINE. Martin Arrowsmith grew up in the mythical midwestern state of Winnemac in the tiny town of Elk Mills. We meet Martin, in 1897, a bright boy, aged 14. He hung around the local small town doctor. Martin awed his friends by bandaging bruises and dissecting squirrels. In college the German Jewish professor and bacteriologist Max Gottlieb preached an unrelenting gospel of science, objectivity and mastery of detail. In medical school at the state university in Mohalis, 15 miles from Zenith, Martin began a lifelong battle with two visions of his future: to be a rich, socially prominent doctor (as most of his fellow medical students had in mind to become) or to devote his life to pure science. Martin's fellow medical student Terry Wickett reinforced Gottlieb's creed at various times in Arrowsmith's future. Two young women symbolize Arrowsmith's career choices. Arrowsmith became engaged to both simultaneously. Madeline is working on her PhD in English. Leora is a simple nurse. Madeline wants Martin to marry her and become a rich doctor. And she nags him to acquire the related social skills. Leora knows that his work will always be more important to Arrowsmith than she, yet she is content to help him achieve his goals. Martin Arrowsmith was an ordinary American, but with 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 stillborn. Leora died on the Caribbean isle where Martin was heroically combatting and researching plague. On that island his one-time idol Dr Gustaf Sondelius also died while joyfully exterminating infected rats and ground squirrels. 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 effort 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 was persuaded that pure research into disease wass what he was meant to do. And a wife and child are not merely irrelevant but too time consuming and distracting from his destined goal. He therefore abandoned family and joined his old friend and Socratic gadfly Terry Wickett to do celibate science in a primitive woodsy cottage in New England. They envisioned expanding to a like-minded community of no more than eight males. ^^^^^^^^^^^ COMMENTS: 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! One motif appears here which seems to haunt Sinclair Lewis: the hero puts his two fiancees together and hopes that they will like one another and be friends. It does not work. Simple, tenacious Leora wins. III. EXCERPTS from ARROWSMITH 1998 Signet Classics PocketBook) (1) [Book's Beginning] Ch. I,I, p.1 "The driver of the wagon swaying through forest and swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of fourteen. Her mother they had buried near the Monongahela -- the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the grave beside the river of the beautiful name. Her father lay shrinking with fever on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats. "She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man quavered, 'Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If we could find your Uncle Ed, I guess he'd take us in.' "Nobody ain't going to take us in,' she said. 'We're going on jus' long as we can. Going West! They's a whole lot of new things I aim to be seeing.' "She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat by the fire, along. "That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith." (2) [Martin's Quest, Ch. 5.III, p. 43. (This is the) "biography of a young man who was in no degree a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after truth yet who stumbled and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every obvious morass..." (2) [Arrowsmith's religious impulse, Ch. 16 IV,p. 170]. "Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. Since the death of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new passion, and he found it now in Gustaf Sondelius's war on disease. " (3) [Doctors gossip about Arrowsmith, Ch. 17I, p. 176.] "'I hear Arrowsmith hits it up too much ... likes his booze awful' well.' "'Yes, so they say. Shame ... Arrowsmith is great on books and study, but he's a freethinker -- never goes to church.' "'Is that a fact! Hm. Great mistake for any doctor to not identify himself with some good solid religious denomination, whether he believes the stuff or not. I tell you a priest or a preacher can send you an awful lot of business.'" (4) [Leora sizes up Sandy's underlying passions, Ch. 20, III., p. 218.] "'I'm not going to help you fool yourself. You're not a booster. You're a lie-hunter. Funny, you'd think to hear about these lie-hunters, like Professor Gottlieb and your old Voltaire, they couldn't be fooled. But maybe they were like you: always trying to get away from the tiresome truth, always hoping to settle down and be rich, always selling their souls to the devil and then going and doublecrossing the poor devil. ... anyway: you, Sandy, you have to stumble every so often; have to learn by making mistakes. I will say one thing: you learn from your crazy mistakes. But I get a little tired, sometimes, watching you rush up and put your neck in every noose -- like being a blinking orator or yearning over your Orchid.'" (4) [The Job v. The Life, Ch. 25 I., p. 270f] "The real flaw in his year of Chicago was that through all his working day he did not live. ... After hours, he almost lived. Leora and he discovered the world of book-shops and print-shops and theaters ..." (5) [Second Wife Joyce criticizes Martin, Ch. 39 VI, p. 438] "When he sought to explain that he must be free from entanglements, she suggested, 'Are you such a weak, irresolute, little man that the only way you can keep from concentrating is by running away? Are you afraid of the big men who can do big work, and still stop and play?'" (6) [Joyce v. Martin when he decides to move to Birdies' Rest in Vermont -- alone Ch. 40, 442f] "'I wish I could make you see just how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old argument. It's just the absurd, cowardly sort o f thing these tired highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they're getting strength to conquer life, when they're merely running away from it.' ... "Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear a flannel shirt and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? ... (Martin replies) "I imagine it's just that argument that's kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly call it, and those of us that are pioneers -- Oh, this debate could go on forever! ... But the fact is I've suddenly seen I must go! I want my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it. You've been generous to me. I'm grateful. But you've never been mine. Good-by.'" (7) [Joyce visits Martin in Vermont, proposes to move across the lake Ch. 40 III, P. 448f] "'Joyce, I do love you. ... You are lovely! But you want a playmate, and I want to work. I'm afraid you can't stay. No.'" (Joyce to Martin) "You've left common sense. I am common sense. I believe in bathing! Good-by!'" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ IV, BIOGRAPHIC. 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 satirist 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 wonder why only in ARROWSMITH Sinclair Lewis created his 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. V. IMPACT. 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.) VI. METHODS. Lewis read widely. He hired a consultant/collaborator. He drew several prototypes based on material supplied by 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. =-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= (10) 1926 MANTRAP II. PLOT SUMMARY: (Using 1926 Harcourt, Brace first edition June, second printing June 1926) Ralph Prescott, 40 year old bachelor, mama's boy and burnt out New York lawyer accepts an offer to rough it one summer in the Canadian wilderness. He is befriended by Joe Easter, a backwoodsman, and tempted by Joe's flirtatious ex-manicurist wife Alverna. It is the mid 1920s. Ralph Prescott, 40 year old bachelor and mama's boy, (but he pulls in $40,000/year as a lawyer in New York City) is persuaded by E. Wesson Woodbury, Babbitty executive of a stockings company, member of the same Westchester County golf club as Ralph, to join him for several weeks in summer roughing it in northern Canada. "... way up north of railhead, along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border -- the Mantrap River country" (Ch. One, p. 13). They will paddle canoes, portage their gear overland, fish, hunt, meet Indians and fur trappers and live the the simple, rugged life of the great outdoors. Prescott made the trip because he was working long hours for no good reason and under self-imposed stress. Still in New York, he contemplated "The long trail. A dim path among enormous spruces. Overhead, gold-green light slipping through the branches. Lost lakes, reflecting as ebony he silver of birch groves. ... Grim wordless Indians, tall and hawk-nosed, following for league on league the train of a wounded moose. A log cabin, and at the door a lovely Indian princess. A trapper bearing a pack of furs -- luxuriant ermine and cross-fox and beaver" ( Ch. One, p. 16f.) Once on the trail and in the canoes, however, Ralph Prescott comes to detest the bullying, self-important Wes Woodbury, who exults in simply being north of latitude 53. He wanders into a Cree Indian encampment, "Indian men magnificently doing nothing, thinking nothing, and wanting nothing" (Ch. Six, p. 59). There arrives at one of their camping spots (unknown to all, a 1587 French Catholic missionary foundation) 46 year old Canadian fur trader Joe Easter. Joe owns a store at Mantrap Landing on Lac Qui Reve. Ralph soon regards Joe as a true friend and begs him to take him away from Wes Woodbury. Joe does. As their canoe heads toward Mantrap Landing, Joe tells of a visit last year to Minneapolis where he met and married a spunky manicurist, Alverna, and brought her to live with him in the wilds. Alverna is a famous flirt and Ralph is soon madly in love with her. To break away from undignified temptation, he pushes off in a canoe with a guide to find his original host, Woodbury, about whom he feels increasingly guilty. But Alverna runs away from Joe, chases Prescott and persuades Ralph to take her with him back to civilization. Their Indian guide steals their canoe and abandons the lovers just before a Joe Easter catches up with them and massive forest fires almost engulf all three. Joe's renews of man to man friendship and rescues Ralph Prescott from Alverna's mantrap. The men improbably renew their macho friendship and Alverna asserts her independence and determination to return to the USA and live her own life, no matter how ditzy that life seems to others. Ralph intends to take Joe to New York and make him a city man. At the station in Winnipeg Alverna's two male admirers put her on a train for Minneapolis. But Joe refuses to travel on to New York with Ralph. End of story. As literature: an easy, pleasant, undemanding read. III. READINGS. (1) [Ralph and Woodbury travel in a caboose. Ch Three, p. 28.] "The train had a caboose and an aged passenger car behind the long brown creaking line of freight-cars. ... Now (Ralph) sat in the caboose, tilted back in a wooden chair, and listened to the aged conductor, who had woolly hair in his ears and a drawling endless wisdom in his gossip of weather and government and traveling-men and the reason why wives are, of many, accounted irritable. ... "It was like the office of a lumber-camp, the interior of the little red car at the end of the train. There was a desk, a shelf-tale which could be folded up against the wall, and hard-looking chairs. Here gathered the aristocracy of the train: the conductor, a traveling salesman for groceries who knew every person and every scandal from Bearpaw to Kittiko, and a real sergeant of the Royal Mounted Police, as good as a movie in his taut scarlet coat, his broad hat, his incredibly well-cut riding breeches." (2) [Stern wheeler Steamer, Ch Six, p. 57] "The steamer Emily C. crept down the yellow flood of the Flambeau River to Kittiko, where Ralph and Woodbury and their Indian guides would at last take to canoes. "As to the tonnage of the Emily C. Just -- it hasn't any tonnage in particular; it has only pounds and ounces. Though it is sixty feet long, with no less than seven staterooms (including one cabin de luxe fitted with running water and a special china cuspidor, for such infrequent dignitaries as the Fishing Inspector), yet the superstructure is of inch pine, and the partitions of cardboard. " ... It is a stern wheeler, and paddles contentedly through three feet of water or turns surprisingly from steamer into canoe and shoots a rapids, curveting among the rocks." (3) [Alverna reacts to husband Joe Easter's mild criticism of her flirtatiousness and fastidiousness, Ch. Eleven, p. 132] " ... 'you men make me sick! Because I try to be jolly, and have a little conversation besides just dirty stories and swearing and how all-hellish smart you birds are at shooting and fishing, and because I like to have folks act like educated ladies and gen'lemen, and maybe ask you to take a little time off from your hard work at sitting and listening to your hair grow, and clean up and look kind of nice and civilized -- Oh, you make me sick.'" IV, BIOGRAPHIC. In 1924 Sinclair Lewis and his physician brother Claude wangled an invitation from the Canadian government to take part in an annual Treaty Trip, i.e., visiting Cree, Chippewa and other Indian tribes to pay each member $5 to console them for having taken away their lands. Sinclair lasted only a month away from his booze but his brother continued on as planned and his diary, later excerpted and published, plus Sinclair's own recollections proved to be the only research necessary when time came to dash off MANTRAP. Sinclair Lewis, as he had for the American Midwest, in MANTRAP created a fictitious swathe of northern Canada populating it with non-existent rivers and lakes, some named after real ones in Minnesota and Wisconsin. There are, fortunately, also other reasons to read MANTRAP. First, Sinclair Lewis gives a feel for Canada's wilderness regions: riding in a caboose, in steamboats and overnighting in cheap, dirty hotels. Adding to the backdrop are RC Mounted Police, canoes, fur traders and more. There is fishing. There are dogs and the Northern Lights. All are described as well and lovingly as Sinclair Lewis always describes the glittering surface of things. Next, speaking to us in the year 2005, there is the theme of "stress management." Off to the wilds of Canada! Pack up your troubles and lose them tramping The Long Trail! In the end, the sheltered city slicker, Ralph Prescott shows true grit. When crisis comes, he somewhat implausibly surmounts all manner of primitive challenges and returns refreshed and in triumph to the big city. Note also scattered religious references: Wes Woodbury made what he is by "the sanctity of salesmanship" (Ch. Eight). How, we are invited to wonder, did fur trader Joe Easter handle prayer, "alone for day after day on the winter trails -- prayer and the hand of Omnipotence in the wilds?" (Ch. Nine). There you have MANTRAP. V. IMPACT. Collier's serialized it February - May 1926 (Schorer, 435, 438). Harcourt published it in June. The film version starred Clara Bow and Ernest Torrence opened in New York July 7. Reviewers were kind. "The English liked it" (Schorer, 440). VI. METHODS. Lewis made a trip through wilderness Canada. He kept notes. He used those notes. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= (11) 1927 ELMER GANTRY II. PLOT OUTLINE. "Elmer Gantry was drunk" is the novel's first sentence about the hero during his college football. days. Despite occasional lapses into altruism and piety, Gantry mainly uses religion as a tool for his personal social advance. The novel has three parts. The novel has three obvious sequential divisions. --(1) [Chapters I - X] From birth through college and Baptist ministerial school, his first pulpit and ending in his escape from deacon's daughter Lulu Bains (a woman he considers not good enough for him to marry) and subsequent expulsion from a Baptist seminary. The novel begins in 1902 during Elmer's college years. --(2) [Chapters XI - XV ] Elmer then becomes a businessman, a top aide and lover of woman evangelist and feminist Sharon Falconer and is devastated by her death by burning. --(3) [Chapters XVI - XXXIII] Elmer resumes and elaborates an earlier sketchy plan. He will rise socially through religion, clubs, connections and showmanship. He engages in the business of New Thought, then climbs to be a Methodist minister, husband and father, a crusader against vice during the Prohibition era, a Rotarian, a golfer, a philanderer. His sights are on becoming a bishop. The books concludes (apparently in 1926) with Elmer preaching, "We shall yet make these United States a moral nation!" III. READINGS. (Using 1927 Harcourt, Brace and Company First Edition) Sinclair Lewis and Rotary Sinclair Lewis in several works presents business leaders as relentlessly cynical, self-seeking and hypocritical, as self-assessed captains of business and industry. Since many of the second end third echelons of American business leaders gravitated naturally to Rotary, then Rotarians were fair game for satire. In ten years (1920 - 1930) Sinclair Lewis had written so much so well that he became the first American awarded the Nobel prize for literature. In two of his novels, BABBITT and ELMER GANTRY, American service clubs were satirized. Rotary is not the name of the service club in BABBITT but is so named in ELMER GANTRY. In Chapter XXVII of the 1927 novel many things was said of the Rotary Club of the fictional Indiana city of Zenith which the hypocritical, boozing Reverend Gantry was now at last thought worthy to join. Herewith some samples: "The Rotary Club was an assemblage of accountants, tailors, osteopaths, university-presidents, carpet-manufacturers, advertising men, millinery-dealers, ice-dealers, piano salesmen, laundrymen, and like leaders of public thought, who met weekly for the purposes of lunching together, listening to addresses by visiting actors and by lobbyists against the recognition of Russia, beholding vaudeville teams in eccentric dances, and indulging in passionate rhapsodies about Service and Business Ethics. They asserted that their one desire in their several callings was not to make money but only to serve and benefit a thing called the Public. They were as earnest about this as was the Reverend Elmer Gantry. "He [Rev. Elmer Gantry] was extraordinarily at home among the Rotarians; equally happy in being a good fellow with such good fellows as these and in making short speeches to the effect that 'Jesus Christ would be a Rotarian if he lived today--Lincoln would be a Rotarian today--William McKinley would be a Rotarian today. All these men preached the principles of Rotary: one for all and all for one; helpfulness towards one's community, and respect for God.'" ..... [ Also from Chapter XXVII] "The new Ku Klux Klan, an organization of the fathers, younger brothers, and employees of the men who had succeeded and become Rotarians, had just become a political difficulty. Many of the most worthy Methodist and Baptist clergymen supported it and were supported by it; and personally Elmer admired its principle--to keep all foreigners, Jews, Catholics, and negroes in their place, which was no place at all, and let the country be led by native Protestants, like Elmer Gantry." ..... [from Chapter XXX: After Elmer is granted an honorary doctorate of divinity by Abernathy College, Rotary makes its last appearance in the pages of the novel. "It was a great relief at the Rotary Club. They had long felt uncomfortable in calling so weighty a presence 'Elmer," and now, with a pride of their own in his new dignity, they called him 'Doc.'" For the complete text of ALL Rotary passages in ELMER GANTRY see my web site: http://www.patrickkillough.com/ethics/elmergantry.html ******* IV, BIOGRAPHIC. In 1927 Lewis separated from wife Grace. They divorced in 1928 and he immediately marriedforeign correspondent Dorothy Thompson. V. IMPACT. One incident from an evening talk to a church study group in Kansas City called down fire and brimstone on Lewis for the rest of his life as a reputed hater of God and religion. Denouncing the fundamentalist conception of a vengeful God of Hate, Lewis said such a God would not be happy with what he was about to say in the next 15 minutes. The media did distorted reporting of a God-defier in a pulpit! Elmer Gantry, the Movie (1960) Elmer Gantry, the 1960 film starring Burt Lancaster (Academy Award for Best Actor) and Jean Simmons, is highly regarded. Shirley Jones also won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Lulu Bains, one of Elmer's spurned women. Director Richard Brooks and his writers preserve the recognizable preacher/hypocrite of the novel while taking considerable liberties with the plot. They also humanize and soften Gantry the man. The film's focus is the second (central) part of the novel and shows the interaction of Gantry (Burt Lancaster) and feminist, virtually schizophrenic revivalist Sharon Falconer (Jean Simmons). The film ends with Elmer walking away from ministry and the ashes of Sharon's revival building on a New Jersey pier. As in the novel itself, the film repeats over and over Gantry's shameless plagiarizing from the essay on love by atheist Robert G. Ingersoll. "Love...is the Morning and the Evening Star." [The film may be rented at http://www.netflix.com.] VI. METHODS. COMMENTS: Sinclair Lewis was a systematic planner of his novels. Most began abstractly as "theme" novels. Elmer Gantry was, for instance, Lewis's "preacher novel." In 1926 He sought out a flamboyant Gantry like figure, Rev. William L. Stidger of Kansas City's Linwood Boulevard Methodist Episcopal Church. Stidger he had first met four years earlier when Stidger was in Detroit and suggested Lewis write a novel about preachers as they really are. Especially in Kansas City in 1927, dumping Stidger, Lewis dove deeply with agnostic Unitarian minister L.M. Birkhead into the city's milieu for many weeks, visiting the monthly meeting of liberal ministers, even preached personally in pulpits and wrote up copious notes. Lewis had read and collected over 200 books on religion before reaching KC. Lewis attended two or three churches on a Sunday and conducted a weekly Thursday lunch called "Sinclair Lewis's Sunday School Class" with nearly a score of local religious leaders, including a Catholic priest and a leading rabbi. Sinclair Lewis did not, therefore, deliberately misconceive or "make up" Rotary Clubs, revivals, newspapers or churches from whole cloth. It is not clear whether he did fresh research into Rotary between writing BABBITT and ELMER GANTRY. (see Schorer, 441ff). He reacted frostily to a criticism of his treatment of Kiwanis in BABBITT. -OOO- 10/17/2005 Revisited 11/19/2005 |