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23 NOVELS OF SINCLAIR LEWIS
SESSION #5 NOV 2 NOVELS Novels 16 - 20 (16) 1935 IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. (17) 1938 THE PRODIGAL PARENTS. (18) 1940 BETHEL MERRIDAY. (19) 1943 GIDEON PLANISH. (20) 1945 CASS TIMBERLANE. =-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- (16) IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE (1935) II. PLOT OUTLINE. Only a year after Hitler and the Nazis had reached power by constitutional means in Germany, Sinclair Lewis was writing IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. Step by step, Lewis showed how a similar fascist takeover might very well happen here in the sober, God-fearing USA. He projected this event into the near FUTURE, a first for this novelist. First, an unscrupulous but popular western Senator might defeat Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic Party nomination for President in 1936. He would then go on to win the general election and within eight days of inauguration cow Congress into giving him power to legislate by decree. Step by step campaign rhetoric would give way to lying, deceit, violence, concentration camps and torture. All this is observed and resisted by small town Vermont newspaper proprietor, Doremus Jessup, a principled man who stands up to the dictatorship at no little cost to himself and his family. America was enduring its seventh year of economic Depression. Middle-class Americans were confused and no longer self-starting. It was Lewis's thesis that under such circumstances Rotarians, Babbitts and other easily led conformists of America were ripe for misleading by charismatic charlatans. And one such demagogue, fictional Western U.S. Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, it was who wrested the Democratic party nomination away from Franklin D. Roosevelt and then defeated a Republican and other candidates in the November 1936 general election. Within eight days of becoming President, Windrip and his evil Caligula-like kingmaker Lee Sarason reduced Congress and the courts to impotency via declaring a national emergency and arresting enough opponents to bring the rest to heel. In the next few months, ruling virtually by decree, Windrip and Sarason created an American corporatist state modeled on Hitler's Germany: the emerging America was anti-Negro, anti-Jewish, enforcing the leader's will through SS-like American Minute Men militias. At novel's end, after much terror, concentration camps and general evil, Windrip had been exiled to France and Sarason assassinated. A Puritan Army General now reigned in a new country whose states have been abolished and which has mobilized 5 million men to invade Mexico. Yet a democratic counter revolution was rising up (with Rotarians on both sides) and already controlled half the old USA. No one adhering to any of the several then competing political persuasions believed that the old USA would, could or should be re-established. IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE is also a study in political science and sociology. The novel shows how people in power instinctively reach out to personal cruelty and torture of their opponents. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ III. READINGS. (Based on 1993 Signet Classic pocketbook; Library of Congress number 93-086390) --[Every single word in Chapter One (pages (15 - 24) is about a May 1936 Rotary Club evening meeting in the Hotel Wessex. The Fort Beulah, Vermont Rotary Club is holding its annual Ladies' Night Dinner.] "The tables, arranged on three sides of a hollow square were bright with candles, cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurines of Mickey Mouse, brass Rotary wheels and small silk American flags stuck in gilded hard-boiled eggs. On the wall was a banner "Service Before Self, ..." (p. 16) --[The best framework for how to predict how Rotarians and other middle class Americans will react to a fascist takeover may be given in the little mediation of Chapter 20, p. 184:] "Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn 'reasonable' and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive." --A Delphic utterance by editor Jessup to two non-Rotarian friends (they will later prove heroes) during the Presidential campaign is "This is revolution in terms of Rotary" (Ch. 10, p. 83). What does that mean: a revolution cannot be made in America except on terms that Rotarians understand and accept? No fascist revolution can succeed without American Rotarians? An aphorism to mull over. Later the revolutionists demonstrated in another way the accuracy of Jessup's prediction, "This is revolution in terms of Rotary" by selecting "a ship's steering wheel" to be the new symbol of the American Minute Men/Storm Troopers. This symbol seemed wondrously apt as suggesting "the Ship of State ... the wheels of American industry ... and particularly the wheel emblem of the Rotary Club." (Ch. 17, p. 142) Fascist anti-semitism reached even conservative hitherto Republican Fort Beulah. There maple sugar and dairy machinery agent, Jewish Harry Kindermann was frozen out of contracts. Jessup's former yardman, Shad Ledue, now a fascist Gauleiter, had always called Kindermann "a fresh Kike." Proof: "He had laughed at the flag, the Church and even Rotary." (p. 146). ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ IV, BIOGRAPHIC/HISTORICAL. This novel's attention to international fascism and American politics is clearly influenced by Lewis's association with his second wife, the foreign correspondent and columnist Dorothy Thompson. He had written nothing this political before. As in BABBITT, ELMER GANTRY and THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE, the author once again depicts American Booster and Service Clubs and Rotarians as typical, easily led business-class Americans, precisely the two-legged sheep to make dictators thinkable. Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE is one of several in which members of American social, fraternal and service clubs, especially Boosters, Rotarians and Kiwanians, play striking roles. Indeed, Lewis, found something like a suspect because hypocritical "cult" of service to others growing as a post-evangelical Christian force in American middle class society. Such secular service had both its ennobling and its silly aspects, he judged. FINAL COMMENTS: Basically, the Rotarians of Fort Beulah are seen to be no better and no worse, braver or more cowardly, than other middle class American leaders and "samurai." Each Rotarian and Rotary Ann reacts to political stimuli as an atomic, fundamentally unsocialized individual, seeking his or her own narrow personal or family interest. But that is the way almost every literary creation of Sinclair Lewis gets through life. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ V. IMPACT. Huey Long was assassinated while the novel was going to press. Father Charles Coughlin continued to thunder from Detroit for a while on the airways. Liberals fought fascists and communists. The timing and timeliness of Lewis's novel was nearly perfect. Total sales reached more than 320,000 copies. It was a sensation. The book shocked readers. Critics found it politics, not art. MGM bought the film rights. Sidney Howard did a good script. But threats to ban it in Fascist Germany and Italy caused Sam Goldwyn not to film. The WPA/Federal Theatre Project sponsored a play version which opened simultaneously in 18 cities on October 27, 1937. There was even one version in yiddish. At the Adelphi in NYC, Lewis selected the cast and rehearsed them. Audiences loved the play but critics found it slipshod theater. Some 23 companies played it for a total of 260 weeks (Schorer 625) In 1938 and later HSL acted Doremus Jessup in his own rewrite of the WPA version. In his first appearance in a two hours and 40 minutes version, he received seven curtain calls (Schorer 640). VI. METHODS. This novel is mainly derived from arguments with and insights of Dorothy Thompson. HSL was in a "novel manufacturing mode" in order to afford his expensive life style and worked hard nine hours/day. He had a first draft finished in July and the book was finished by August 1935, and published 10/21/1935. He expressed a conservative middle of the road liberalism (Schorer, 610). ==-=-=-=--=-=-=-=---=-=-=- (17) THE PRODIGAL PARENTS (1938) II. PLOT OUTLINE. The novel's hero, Frederick William Cornplow ("Fred"), on the eve of his 56th birthday, is a very successful retailer and wholesaler of automobiles and recreational vehicles. He has solicitously taken good financial care of his parents and siblings. He is very fond of his kindly wife Hazel. But he draws the line (in theory if not always in practice) when it comes to coddling his demanding "you owe me a living" 28 year old Vassar graduate Sara (baptized Sarah) who still lives comfortably at home and gives no sign of moving out. Then there is Fred's and Hazel's handsome college student son Howard, a dreamer of fantastic dreams without a practical bone to his name. Curiously, Howard is much loved by Annabel Staybridge, daughter of the richest, most aristocratic businessman in Sachem Falls, New York. Fred shakes up his family when he announces that we will retire in one year and travel. This does not fit in with the plans of his children, especially Sara. Fred has to stay Fred and take care of them! The rest of the novel presents Fred constantly plotting ways to get away at least for a vacation with his wife while the children generally succeed in frustrating his plans. Sara goes so far as to insist the family doctor examine her father. Fred passes with flying colors. She then tricks him into being interviewed by a psychiatrist. That is the limit for Fred who then sneaks off with his wife and spends five glorious months on ships and ashore from England to Constantinople and finally in southern France. Fred and Hazel had been almost cut off from departure at the dock in Boston by son Howard and pregnant wife Annabel, Fred's most sincere admirer after his wife. Against all this Fred rebels, with a certain amount of success. Since 1914 there had been growing a counter-revolution of parents against the rebellion of Youth (Ch. 38). To Fred (Ch. 13) it was the Fred Cornplows down through the centuries who created civilization. Egyptian Cornplow planned the pyramids and showed compassion to sweating slaves. A Roman Fred Cornplow had conquered Syria and ruled it with justice. In the Dark Ages Father Abbot Cornplow innovated in agriculture and in building stones. Under Oliver Cromwell Fred Cornplow had tamed ecclesiastics. The American Civil War was not between Grant and Lee but "between Private Fred Cornplow of Massachusetts and Private Ed Cornplow of Alabama." (p. 100) Cornplows had been John Bunyan and Lord Byron. Once his name was pronounced Babbitt; another time it was Ben Franklin. "He is the eternal Bourgeois, the bourjoyce, the burgher, the Middle Class..." (p. 100) "He is Fred Cornplow; and when he changes his mind, that crisis is weightier than Waterloo or Thermopylae" (p. 100) As he travels abroad, Fred hopes wistfully and at the end of the road to "be minutely great" after a lifetime of hard work where he was to others merely "greatly small" (Ch. 36, p. 268). The recurring Sinclair Lewis theme that travel, travel anywhere, just might bring enduring solutions to human problems is underscored in THE PRODIGAL PARENTS (as 13 years later in his final novel WORLD SO WIDE) when Fred Cornplow approvingly quotes Kipling, "For to admire an' for to see, For to be'old this world so wide-- It never done no good to me, But I can't drop it if I tried." (Ch. 34, p. 250) --(Ch. 38, pp. 282ff) [FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY.] "Women have for decades been revolting against the restrictions of men and the home. ... Perhaps next would come ... the Revolt of the Men; they would admit how sick they were of the soft and scented cushions of women ... and leave their wives and children flat. If the institution of The Family was to survive at all, ... parents would have to stop expecting children to accept their ideas. ... Men and women must expect nothing, nothing whatever, from each other as of vested right. ... Fred had the ... faith: that nobody ought to expect any sacrifice from anybody else ..." --(Ch. 40, p. 299) [FRED WRITING TO WIFE FROM FISHING CAMP IN CANADA] "It seems to me now that it isn't going where you want to that is freedom, but knowing that you can go." IV, BIOGRAPHIC. By 1937 HSL's marriage to Dorothy Thompson was disintegrating. V. IMPACT. The year 1938 in America would not have found many viewers at all of TV family sitcoms. Hence, Sinclair Lewis's THE PRODIGAL PARENTS could do no more than anticipate The Beaver, Archie Bunker, Dan and Rosie, Ted Bundy, Samantha of Bewitched and other later favorites. VI. METHODS. He worked long hours on THE PRODIGAL PARENTS and had given up liquor for a pound of chocolate a day. But he felt too tired to do the voluminous research he had once done. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= (18) BETHEL MERRIDAY (1940) II. PLOT OUTLINE. (Using 1940 Doubleday hardback edition.) Not all of Lewis's novels by any means are of the "how to" ilk. But 1940's BETHEL MERRIDAY most certainly is. It might be styled "All About the Stage for Dummies." The heroine, Bethel Merriday, was born June 1, 1916. On her sixth birthday her mother caught her imitating the slouching, slow walk of an old woman and rebuked her for generally showing off, speaking up in Church and in this case for "copying" people. Bethel said, "Oh! I'm not copying her. I'm trying to be her. I can be a lot of different people." Her mother's comment: "It all sounds like maybe you're going to be an actress." (Ch. 1, p.2) At home in Sladesbury, Connecticut, Bethel learned something of acting from motion pictures. Without ever having seen professional actors in the flesh, she grew ever more sure that she would be an actress and she shared this vision with her skeptical young friends. And she would be a professional stage actress, not an amateur. "I'm not going to play at playing. No! It isn't good enough!" (Ch. 1, p. 13) Finally, in the summer of 1931 a touring troupe came to Sladesbury. 15-year old Bethel rapturously took in their performances, waited for actors and actresses at the stage door and even followed them to a drugstore where they had a bite. She drank in their shop talk. She spoke to a young actress. An older actor told Bethel that if she wanted to become an actress, she must train, play parts at every opportunity and get lucky (Ch. 2, p.30) Bethel went on to act in college and to be noticed in her senior year somewhat negatively by two professional directors. Her father paid for her to apprentice in summer stock on the Connecticut shore in the summer of 1938. In the autumn of that year connections which she made in summer stock helped her quickly but very luckily become part of a brand new touring troupe which would do ROMEO AND JULIET in modern dress. Bethel understudied Juliet and played her once, when the $1,000/week English leading lady took to drink. Other speaking parts were small. But Bethel was interested in all aspects of theater: musicians, lighting and especially scenery design. She worked very hard and she learned quickly that on stage you "Never do anything unless you understand why." (Ch. 11) Almost inevitably, the road show lost money and failed. This left 23 year old Bethel with time to choose among several men who offered her marriage, including her next door neighbor from home and two actors who had played Romeo and Mercutio on the road. She chose the talented "Mercutio" and they were married in Pike City, Kansas, population 7,000, end of the line for the theater tour. A few months later the newlyweds were acting together in New York for another company whose director had seen Bethel overact Nora in Ibsen's DOLL HOUSE in college only seven months earlier. Language once used for religion is now applied to show business: to actors on stage "each with his prides and secrets and sins," (Ch. 12), to the audience as heathens to be "advanced toward salvation," to faith in the power of staged illusions to change the world, to devout study of a role, to that limbo where all young actors and bull fighters float, and finally applied to "the solid American Protestant belief in the glory and efficacy of human will power. If anyone wanted enough to do anything, he would unquestionably do it..." (Ch. 18). The faces of most Americans today have been "ironed out by spiritual massage" (Ch. 33). Not so the face of a great actor. Or the face of a merely good actor. People who love theater will recognize one of their own in Sinclair Lewis. III. READINGS (Scattered in text above.) . IV, BIOGRAPHIC. V. IMPACT. Most reviewers enjoyed it. If you like novels about the theater, BETHEL MERRIDAY will call to mind Herman Wouk's 1955 MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR, without the latter's Angst. BETHEL MERRIDAY lacks the profundity of Goethe's 1796 WILHELM MEISTER. Sinclair Lewis portrays theater as a partnership between actors and audience and argues that being a good audience is a skill to be learned. VI. METHODS. The play derived from HSL's months of touring with and acting in his own play ANGELA IS TWENTY-TWO. -OOO- ==-=-=-=-= (19) GIDEON PLANISH (1943) II. PLOT OUTLINE: Gideon Planish, born a midwesterner in 1892 and reared evangelically, by age ten sensed that his gift of gab would take him far. He might become a governor or a senator. He would in any case hold large audiences rapt. But as an adult man of modest talents, Sinclair Lewis's Gid Planish sometimes rose and sometimes fell, lurching generally upwards in an occasionally ruthless career that touched academia, advertising and management of philanthropic organizations. As his physical vigor and belief in what he was doing slowly left him, his much younger wife Peony swelled from docile supporter of his great work and frivolous spender of his income into a powerhouse with developed skills networking among wives and daughters of the rich and famous. In late 1942 Peony effectively refused to allow Gid to save his soul by returning to academia, deciding that they would live on in New York where she would protect his income-providing career through her network of influential wives of the giants of philanthropy. Their daughter Carrie went to work in a defense factory. Gideon Planish weakly accepted being sentenced to modern mediocrity. End of plot. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ By taking over the nascent "Every Man a Priest Foundation," a bullying Gid made his first conquest in New York, and began "a career in holiness" by stealing both the vision of a saintly man ["Carlyle Vesper was as simple as Cardinal Newman"] (Ch 23, p. 195), as well as his job and his list of rich backers. In New York Planish moved into circles of pretentious frauds including that Reverend ELMER GANTRY whom SInclair Lewis had introduced in 1927. As soon as he, Peony and Carrie came to New York, Dr Planish's work brought him into the religious-philanthropic ambience of Gantry. That divine, after his flaming escapades in the Midwest, now dominated a pulpit in Manhattan and also had a daily radio program called (what else?) "Love Is the Morning Star." Thanks to the program's chewing gum sponsor, Elmer's voice reached a million or more hearers, "particularly shut-ins." From his base as pastor of the Spiritual Home Methodist Tabernacle on Morningside Heights, Gantry moved from strength to strength as radio pastor. Gantry had no peer as "living exponent of a streamlined gospel." Elmer Gantry was also a director of "the newest educational racket in town," The Modernistic Educational Bureau. Its staff both composed (by plagiarizing) and then sold encyclopedias. Planish attended a seminal luncheon for money-raisers at which Dr. Gantry was "torridly" present as directive secretary of the Society for the Rehabilitation of Erring Young Women" (Ch. 25, p. 211). Elmer and Gideon offhandedly formed a profitable partnership to design, manufacture and sell buttons advertising a political awareness organization of which both were directors, Dynamos of Democratic Direction -- DDD) (Ch. 28, p. 243). More broadly, GIDEON PLANISH is about American philanthropy and its money-raising feeding on big business. There are occasional sallies of insight and satire into that milieu. Gideon Planish learned that the purpose of fund-raising was to inculcate in rich (or poor) sinners the habit of giving and keeping on giving, in order "to expand their own miserable, narrow peanut souls" -- not to use the money for anything specific or philanthropic. The USA entered WW II and Planish's political patrons saw this as a "war of slogans." Planish was directed to promote his masters in terms of their coming contributions to post-war peace, with an eye towards the Presidency. But neither must he forget that war is good for business! (Ch. 29). Suddenly, alas, for philanthropy, money flowed away from charity and good works towards war bonds. Gideon weakly modeled aspects of himself on Elmer Gantry. But, more seminally, in 1925 Bruce Barton's booster life of Jesus, THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS, transformed Dr Planish. Never mind that Jesus was humanized downward as "a society gent, a real sport, a press agent and the founder of modern business." Lewis skewered THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS as the "Epistle to the Babbitts" (Ch. 14). It inspired Planish to create a witty column called "Corn-pone and Popcorn" and its most famous essay, on "Mental Elbow Grease." There are one or two other flashes of satire about American Protestant behavior. Towards the end of Ch. 17 (p. 148) Sinclair Lewis humorously wrapped the newly rapturous Gideon Planish inside the mission and suffering of the Apostle Paul as laid out in II Corinthians 11:23-30. Lewis knew his scripture well enough to transfer its language, as did his fictitious character Reverend Elmer Gantry and the real Bruce Barton. The passage is about Gideon Planish: "He saw himself dedicated now to the new life of service; in labors more abundant, in conferences above measure, on committees more frequent, in journeyings often, in long-distance telephoning often, in hunger and thirst at unpalatable public dinners, in cold audiences and nakedness of meaning -- and he was not afraid, and gloried of the things that concerned his infirmities." Not consistently humorous, GIDEON PLANISH holds a mirror to American philanthropy and what self-seeking charlatans once did to it. BIOGRAPHIC. In 1942 Lewis divorced Dorothy THompson. He lived in Minneapolis and lectured at the University there. V. IMPACT. As stories go, 1943's GIDEON PLANISH is a thin tale of ordinary, underachieving Americans. Sinclair Lewis was running low on creative juices. Yet there are scattered and surprisingly good nuggets, flashes of Lewis's old scorn of hypocrisy and greed along with a sad cameo farewell to an aging Reverend Doctor ELMER GANTRY, a rogue first seen in 1927. Published April 19, 1943. Most reviewers found it tired and perfunctory (Schorer, 698). Sold fewer than 140,000 copies (Schorer 740, note). VI. METHODS. He wrote in the summer of 1942 with some research assistance from a male secretary. His first son Wells was a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army. Delivered the MS to Random House in late 1942 (Schorer, 696). Planish reflected HSL's recent experiences in theater, academia and on lecture circuits (Schorer, 697) -=-=-=-=-=-=-= (20) CASS TIMBERLANE: A Novel of Husbands and Wives (1945) II. PLOT OUTLINE. In DODSWORTH (1929) and CASS TIMBERLANE (1945 ) Sinclair Lewis produced two notably similar novels, as similar as two sides of the same coin. In both tales an older American man is married to a younger American woman. In both stories the younger woman is bored and restless and has an affair with a man more glamorous than her husband. There is, however, a difference. The strayed but at heart (dubiously) reformed Fran Dodsworth seeks reconciliation with her husband Samuel. He makes a stab at it then (apparently) rejects her for another woman. The adulterous but more repentant Virginia (Jinny) Timberlane seeks reconciliation with Cass and he wholeheartedly and lovingly takes her back. This is HSL's "judge" novel. Cass Timberlane at tale's beginning was a 41 year old elected judge in the fictional city of Great Republic, Minnesota. A one-term Congressman who chose not to run for re-election after being divorced by his first wife, Cass was a member of Grand Republic's small interlocking elite. He loved cats and adopted Cleo, a black stray. With no lack of suitable women to choose as spouse number two, he was smitten by a young out of town, cat loving 'radical' whom he first noticed when she testified in a trial before his bench. Virginia (Ginny) Marshland was a draftsman and later during early days of World War II a not very talented newspaper cartoonist as well as briefly a success in local little theater. After developing mild diabetes, Ginny lost interest in her career. She had married Cass in a glittering church ceremony which she insisted on. She had one baby, which died within an hour of birth. Lecherous local men were always after her and eventually she moved to New York to be with one of them. Living in the suburbs with her lover's decadent sister, she grew more careless of her health, fell into severe diabetes which culminated in near death comas. Ginny's stuffy, but loyal and loving husband Cass sped to her rescue and took her home for a second chance at proving herself to him and his friends. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ III. READINGS. There may be people who read Shakespeare's HENRY IV and HENRY V simply because they enjoy the minor figure of Sir John Falstaff. If so, there may also be a few who re-read Sinclair Lewis's two novels CASS TIMBERLANE (1945) and KINGSBLOOD ROYAL (1947) for their fleeting glimpses of an amiable lawyer, the even more minor Sweeney Fishberg. When young Jinny is first noticed by Judge Timberlane, she lives on the other side of the tracks She is a draftsman working for a Jewish firm. Her friends are her age and politically radical. They can be youthfully silly as when one says "Hail the Hippopotamus" and the rest dutifully guffaw. An older lawyer, Sweeney Fishberg, seems normal in Jinny's hippy milieu and eccentric in Cass's stuffy law court, but is a happy warrior in both worlds. Feeling a fish out of water amid the tempestuous young talkers at a party Cass attended in Jinny's boarding house, the Judge nonetheless awoke when Jinny's employer and wife dropped by, along with Sweeney Fishberg, "... perhaps the most remarkable man in the cosmos of Grand Republic and surrounding terrain. He was an attorney, of liberal tastes, equally likely to take a labor-union case for nothing or to take the most fraudulent of damage suits for a contingent fee which, to the fury of his Yankee wife, he was likely to give to a fund for strikers -- any strikers on any strike." "He was a saint and shyster; part Jewish and part Irish and part German; he had once acted in a summer stock company, and once taught Greek in a West Virginia college; he was a Roman Catholic, and a mystic who bothered his priest with metaphysical questions; he was in open sympathy with the Communist Party." "For twenty years, ever since he had come to Grand Republic from his natal Massachusetts at the age of thirty, he had been fighting all that was rich and proud and puffy in the town, and he had never won a single fight nor lost his joy in any of them, and he was red-headed and looked like a Cockney comedian. He was nine years older than Cass, and no lawyer in the district ever brought such doubtful suits into court, yet no lawyer was more decorous, more co-operative with the judge, and Cass believed that Sweeney had thrown to him all the votes he could influence in Cass's elections as congressman, judge, and member of the Aurora Borealis Literary Association." (Ch. 10) Near novel's end Sweeney Fishberg was defending before Judge Timberlane a laborer charged with killing his foreman with a pickaxe. Fishberg suggested that another worker had done the killing and made the case revolve around which laborer was wearing a mustache at the time of killing. In Timberlane's chambers at day's end, court reporter George Hame said that Fishberg would convince the jury that the accused was not guilty if only "he had a single bit of evidence on his side." To the judge's question, "What is guilt," Hame replied, "You want a real definition, Judge -- one to go in the textbooks? ... Guilt is what makes you send for Sweeney Fishberg." (Ch.47) If Sinclair Lewis is guilty of anything, it is of NOT sending more often for Sweeney Fishberg. IV, BIOGRAPHIC. HSL was living in Duluth, making friends, especially a judge from whom he learned a lot about courts. V. IMPACT. In the 1947 film version, Spencer Tracy played Judge Cass Timberlane. Lana Turner was Ginny. Zachary Taylor played Cass's boyhood friend, adult lawyer, tomcat and eventual seducer of Ginny. VI. METHODS. During his months in Duluth, HSL made his last systematic efforts at research aimed towards novel writing. -OOO- November 02, 2005 Revisited November 19, 2005 http://www.patrickkillough.com/courses/hsl_05_11_02.html |