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23 NOVELS OF SINCLAIR LEWIS
SESSION #4 OCT 26 NOVELS 12- 15 (12) 1928 THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE. (13) 1929 DODSWORTH. (14) 1933 ANN VICKERS. (15) 1934 WORK OF ART. (12) 1928 The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen II. PLOT OUTLINE. THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE is a chatty, tongue in cheek series of six monologues by one Lowell T. Schmaltz. Like Lewis's realtor George BABBITT, Schmaltz is a small businessman of the mythical midwestern American city of Zenith in the state of Winnemac. Office supplies are his trade. He is an ardent Kiwanian, much sought after as a speaker about his business trips and other excursions. Schmaltz's not entirely credible claim to fame is that he was, VERY briefly, an acquaintance of President Calvin Coolidge in their college days at Amherst. In Part I of the monologues, Lowell T. windily regales, with many digressions, this and other claims to fellow businessmen in a train's Pullman sleeper car. He tells how not long ago he took his wife and two children to call on Silent Cal in the White House. The Schmalzes got as far as the President's outer office and had all their questions answered by an aide. Is the President a good fisherman? Does he belong to a service club, and on and on. Suddenly and with apology, the family learned that the President could not see them: the British ambassador was calling. In Part II Lowell Schmaltz is playing cards in his hotel room in Chicago. He keeps putting off resuming play in order to tell a joke. After many pointless asides, allegedly to give background to the coming witticism, he finally begins the joke then forgets the punch line. Part III ("You Know How Women Are") finds our hero calling on a distant cousin in Troy (an overnight pullman ride from Zenith) to seek a loan for his business. Obviously, the cousin has just stung Schmaltz by giving unsolicited advice: don't talk so much; don't tell so many lies about your past. Much of the monologue is about wife Mame and her cat Minnie and Lowell's dog Jackie. And also about an aging girl friend Schmaltz visits on trips to New York City. In Part IV ("You Know How Relatives Are") Lowell tells wife Mame about his just completed call on the cousin. Schmalz exaggerates. He fibs. He protests his marital fideiity. The title of Part V is 'Travel is So Broadening.' Our monologist begins by thanking his hosts Mr and Mrs George Babbitt for a fine fried chicken dinner just enjoyed. Lowell Schmaltz advises George how to prepare for a long drive out to Yellowstone National Park. This includes lavish details about wardrobe, car chains, cook stoves. (An authorial note to the reader says that publishers edited out 37 other articles recommended traveler to traveler.) THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE ends (Part VI) with 'The Basic and Fundamental Ideals of Christian American Citizenship." This reproduces Mr. Schmalz's remarks to the Men's Club of his Pilgrim Congregational Church. As for gift giving at Christmas, what is holier than Practicalness? Forget books, etchings and smoking-jackets. Be practical. Give tire chains, radiator shutters and anti-freeze mixtures! Give electric trains so a child can just watch rather than have to amuse himself actively. And let me tell you, says Schmatz, of my recent call on President Coolidge. Our visit was brief but he answered my questions about U.S. policy in several areas. The motto of Lowell Schmaltz is 'Read widely, think scientifically, speak briefly, and sell the goods!' ==-= III. READINGS. From the 1928 Harcourt, Brace & Company first edition. Notable quips, asides and observations abound. [Examples: using 1928 Harcourt Bruce edition] PART I "The Man Who Knew Coolidge" --[p. 27 f] Consider every great surgeon, lawyer, banker or department-store owner. "Who is it that enables these gentlemen to do business and get their great ideas across in an up-to-date, efficient, time saving manner? Who is it but the office-supply man! Yes sir, I'm proud of my profession, and as a matter of fact I have the honor of representing the office-supply category in our great Zenith Kiwanis Club! Just take filing-cabinets alone!" --[p. 46 f] "There's a lot of sorehead critics of America that claim we're standardized, but -- Well, to take an example, let me take ... the fellow that I happened to be lunching with before I caught this train -- just take the difference between him and me. We both belong to the Athletic Club, we both belong to service clubs, we have our places of business in the same black, we live within a quarter of a mile of each other, we both like golf and a good lively jazz on the radio. And yet this fellow and me -- his name is Babbitt, G.F. Babbitt, fellow in the real estate game -- we're as different as Moses and Gene Tunney. ... George and me can be friendly, yet as different --- "Well, like this, for instance: I drive a Chrysler, and Babbit doesn't. I'm a Congregationalist, and Babbitt has no use whatsomever for anything but his old Presbyterian church. He wears these big round spectacles, and you couldn't hire me to wear anything but eyeglasses -- much more dgfnified, I think. He's got so he likes golf for its own sake, and I'd rather go fishing, any day. And -- so on. Yes sir, it's a wonderful thing how American civilization ... has encouraged the ... free play of individualism." [p. 82 ff] "I tell you how I feel about religion, anyway. ... as for the Catholics -- I hope one of you gentlemen are Catholics and I wouldn't want this to go any farther, but I've always felt the Catholics were too tolerant toward drinking and smoking and so aren't, you might say, really hardly typically American and all." [p. 88 f] " ... what organizations are doing a greater good and providing more real happiness today than the service clubs, all of 'em, though I myself am a Kiwanian and I can't help feeling that maybe our own organization has got the edge on the other fellows -- we aren't as darned snobbish as these Rotarians, and yet we aren't, you might say, as common as the Civitans and Lions and -- Yes sir! "Think what these clubs provide. A chance for a lot of the most responsible and forward-looking men of the community to get together once a week, and not only have a high old time, with all the dignity of our positions checked at the door, calling each other by our first names ... any man enjoys having a chance to let down and be human like that. "And then the good we do! Why say, just this past year our Zenith Kiwanians gave the kids at an orphan asylum a dandy auto ride and free feed. And believe me: it was one fine ad for the Kiwanians because we took the kids out in trucks, and every truck had on it a great big red sign, 'Free Outing for the Unfortunate Kiddies, provided Free by Zenith Kiwanis Club.'" PART III "You Know How Women Are" [p 168] "I guess that in the vacuum cleaner America has added to the world its own mystery, that'll last when the columns of the Acropolis have crumbled to mere dust!" PART VI "The Basic and Fundamental Ideals of Christian American Citizenship" [p. 251 ff] "Mr. Chairman, reverend sirs, and friends and brothers of the Men's Club of the Pilgrim Congregational Church: ... it is the greatest conceivable pleasure and honor to have with us this evening ... Dr. Elmer Gantry, formerly of Wellspring Methodist but now Gloriously located in New York. ... it is thinkers like Dr. Gantry ... who finally determine our philosophy ... and our ethics... ...I chose the title of this brief and modest talk -- "The Basic and Fundamental Ideals of Christian American Citizenship." I merely want to outline ... the ethics of the New Generation -- of the New American Era. ... there are two principles almost entirely developed by and peculiar to America of tday, and these are Service an Practicalness! Service is ... the poetry, the swell manners, the high adventure of business. ... you can do more than just sell the customer the goods he wants ... you can, in fact, tie him to you by that subtle form of friendliness known as Service, so that, without its really costing you much of anything, you can make him feel that he's getting double value for his money. [p. 258] Service! If the Rotarians and Kiwanians had done nothing else, they would have justified themselves and made their place secure in history for all time by their insistence on the value and beauty -- the, in fact, if I may without sacrilege say so, religion of Service. [p. 261] That's Service -- and, like Virtue, it brings its reward. ... The grocery customer will often prefer a second-rate apple in a handsome wrapper to a first-rate one carelessly bundled in plain tissue paper. A motorist will stand for pretty bad gasoline if the gas-station employees wear handsome uniforms, greet the customer respectfully, and wipe off his windshield free. ... That's Service! And remember that only a low and sordid commercialist would look on it as something which merely sells more goods -- though it certainly does that, too. But over and above that, it promotes friendliness, good fellowship, brotherhood, and thus makes for the millennial day when all the world shall be one happy Christian fellowship. --"Rotarians and Kiwanians" have insisted on "the religion of Service." Imagine L'il Abner Yokum in the big city. Fancy an Archie Bunker who never lets anyone else talk. Or an Al Bundy who reads books. Then think back to a world of 1928 and you have their archetype, Lowell T. Schmaltz, THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE. The book is a hoot. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ IV, BIOGRAPHIC. HSL in 1927 separated from Grace Hegger. 1928 divorced her. Married Dorothy Thompson. Bought Twin Farms in Bernard, Vermont. V. IMPACT. Most early reviews were negative. "six maniacal monologues by a Babbitt" (Schorer 500) Generally found "dull." HSL himself was "exasperatingly garrolous." Sales were minute (Schorer 501). Sinclair Lewis was briefly tired of writing increasingly well researched, carefully plotted novels like MAIN STREET and BABBITT. He wanted some time off and for a lark, and to please his pal H. L. Mencken, he dashed off in THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE the kind of manic monologues that Lewis himself was likely to launch at parties on the slightest provocation. Remember the pitch that Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza made to the network considering their proposed TV show SEINFELD? Sinclair Lewis's 1928 novel THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE is equally a story "about nothing at all." Or perhaps it is about H. L. Mencken's "boobus americanus."The novel's hero Lowell T. Schmaltz is an air head. Schmaltz is recognizable as representing millions of ordinary, bumbling American Dagwoods. That is, if you can imagine an utterly self-absorbed humorless Dagwood Bumstead. VI. METHODS. To make a little quick money while waiting for divorce from Gracie, HSL expanded his original short story for Mencken's MERCURY by adding five more rants. While HSL was working on ELMER GANTRY, Birkhead read aloud from a newspaper about a man who had met Coolidge and when returned to his service club, stood at the door and let every member shake the that had shaken the hand" (Schorer 461). He then went to work on Dodsworth (Schorer, 490). From Berlin he added 35,000 words to the original 15,000 (Schorer 496). Published April 5, 1928 (Schorer 500). ======-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=--=- (13) 1929 DODSWORTH. II. PLOT OUTLINE. Samuel 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. When 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. 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!" --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). -- 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). 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). 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. III. READINGS. [EMBEDDED in TEXT above/] IV, BIOGRAPHIC. DODSWORTH came out in 1929. HSL spent time researching his never written "labor" novel. V. IMPACT. The novel became a Broadway play with Walter Huston in the lead 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. 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. VI. METHODS. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (14) 1933 ANN VICKERS. SUMMARY BY PATRICK KILLOUGH The novel ANN VICKERS carries the heroine from birth in 1889 to her early 40s around 1933. She progresses from pre-pubescent tomboy to a teen with a crush and through losing mother and father before college. Ann studies nursing, does graduate work in social work-related fields, is awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, publishes a book on 'Vocational Training in Women's Reformatories' and becomes a columnist with a national following. You are a married liberal woman goes to parties and hears so much TALK in which people per Roget's Thesaurus "cry, roar, shout, bawl, halloo, whoop, yell, bellow, howl, scream, screech, screak, shriek, shrill, squeak ... yawp, vociferate ... rend the air..." (Ch. 35, p. 421f) --Ann Vickers squeezes her lover's wife's hand when the judge is sentenced to jail. This is not the first novel in which Sinclair Lewis puts two women with claims on the same man face to face. --America came of age in the early and middle lifetime of Ann Vickers. What a time! "Hijackers murdering bootleggers. ... Aviators crashing on cottages and burning up old ladies in them. Babies kidnaped and murdered. ... Methodist bishops accused of stock-gambling and rigging elections. ... Five-year-old boys in nice suburbs playing gangster and killing three-year-old boys. ... A skinny little Hindu that drinks only goat's milk baffling the whole British Empire. ... A nation of one hundred and twenty million people letting a few fanatics turn it from beer to poison gin." (Ch. 46, p. 541f) III. READINGS. --'She had found nothing difficult in conducting an office, being punctual, giving directions to stenographers, imagining what her competitors would do -- all those occult rites whereby men become presidents, and bathtub manufacturers so princely that their biographies are printed in the magazines.' (Ch. 21, p.265) Ann Vickers also makes herself a craftsmanlike writer: --'There were in Ann's manner of writing no fines herbes, neither tarragon nor chervil. It was the honest corned-beef hash of literature. But she was so much in earnest, she labored so ceaselessly, that she impressed some scores of thousands from Bangor to San Jose, and certainly she did win that sure proof of achievement, the disapproval of her acquaintances.' (Ch. 47) -=-=--=-=- FOR MARY KILLOUGH"S CLASSROOM NOTES AND READING SELECTIONS SEE http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/sinclairlewis_annvickers.html IV, BIOGRAPHIC. Birth of second son Michael. 1930 Nobel Prize. Time in and out of England. With wife Dorothy Thompson. V. IMPACT. Initial reviews in USA and England were generally good. Catholic magazine AMERICA found the book obscene. Lewis was compared to H.G. Wells as realistic, non-aesthetic. A kind of Bildungsroman using one person to sketch developments in American history. Similar approach as Dodsworth: a woman trying to find herself (Schorer 581) Sold over 133,000 copies. VI. METHODS. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ (15) 1934 WORK OF ART. II. PLOT OUTLINE. Lewis's WORK OF ART (1934) meanders 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. 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. 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." 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." 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 in 1911 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. ^^^^^^^^^^ III. READINGS. [from 1934 Doubleday, Doran edition] --(1) [Theme of the novel.] 1897. Black Thread Center, Conn. roof of the American House Hotel. 15 year old poet Ora Weagle compares the likely futures of himself and plodding plugger 17 year old brother Myron Weagle. "'Well, the poor devil,' thought Ora, 'he'll probably be happier in his hick way than I will. I'm going to New York! I'm going to make me some perfect Work of Art! Golly, I bet I suffer like all get out, like in Sentimental Tommy and David Copperfield, while he sticks here and scratches himself in the sun ....'" IV, BIOGRAPHIC. HSL was in hotel in NYC in early 1933 gathering material for his hotel novel. A lifelong obsession with hotel keeping, beginning with his teenage night clerking in Sauk Centre. Sings the praises of middle class virtues. (Schorer 597) V. IMPACT. Initially sold 50,000 copies. In reprints, etc. by 1959 total of 118,000 copies. 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. VI. METHODS. HSL dictated notes at 200 words/minute. Characters and towns were born. Maps. street names. (Schorer 585). Settled three weeks at Del Monte Lodge near Carmel, with his secretary. Drank heavily. +_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_+_ Black Mountain, NC 10/24/2005 Revisited 11/19/2005 |