23 NOVELS OF SINCLAIR LEWIS

SESSION SIX:   November 9

(A) Novels 21 - 23. 

(21) 1947  KINGSBLOOD ROYAL.
(22) 1949  THE GOD-SEEKER. 
(23) 1951 WORLD SO WIDE. 


(21) KINGSBLOOD  ROYAL (1947)

     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 then probed with more wit and sarcasm a parallel prejudice in his 21st 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.

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 1790.

The well known frontiersman Pic had written a letter to Henry Hastings 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, with much backing and hauling,  increasingly viewed himself and his daughter as Negroes. He could not, he admitted to himself, see anything good coming if his ancestry became known. But for another 250 pages Neil Kingsblood increasingly disregarded the advice of his great, great, great grandfather about the prudential wisdom of passing for white. Neil Kingsblood publicly explored his infinitesimal 'negritude' at considerable cost to his career and his family's social status. 

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 the Kingsbloods 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.

III. READINGS

--[What is it to be a Negro -- to Minnesota whites? p. 60 f]

    "To Neil, to be a Negro was to be ... Mac the porter, obsequious to white pawnbrokers ... (or) an animal with none of the animal freedom from shame ...
    To be a Negro was ... to have for spiritual leader only a howling and lecherous swindler.
    To be a Negro ... no matter how pale you were, was to wok in kitchens ... or in choking laundries ... or at shoeshine stands where the disdainful white gentry thought about spitting down on you.
    To be a Negro was to be unable -- biologically, fundamentally, unchangeably unable -- to grasp any science beyond addition and plain cooking and the driving of a car, any philosophy beyond comic dream-books. It was to be mysteriously unable ever to take a bath ...
    It was to be an animal ethically, unable to keep from stealing and violence, from lying and treachery. It was literally and altogether to be an animal, somewhere between human beings and the ape."


--[Forces that produced Reverend Dr. Jat Snood, "the nastiest piece of goods in Grand Republic" (p.158 f]

    "With the drifting of the great denominations, the Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians, from moaning and hallelujahs to indirectly-lighted Gothic and pulpit book-reviews, the job-tortured masses in America had dribbled into new churches which promised that they should have salvation if they could not have larger paychecks, and which encouraged them to howl publicly at the Devil, the Pope, and Wall Street, in recompense for not daring to howl publicly at the Boss.

    "With true American enterprise, spiritual leaders who in less cultivated days would have been Indian-medicine showmen or itinerant lady milliners had seen that they could make a tidy living by appointing themselves ministers or even bishops, renting a hall and setting up a church, with no annoying work except yelling loud and mourning low, and taking up three collections at every meeting."

--[Neil Kingsblood hires lawyer Sweeney Fishberg to save his home ownership, p. 309]

    "Neil took the case to Sweeney Fishberg, which was to proclaim that he had a righteous cause and that he would probably lose it. Sweeney was half Jew and half Irish, half Communist and half Roman Catholic, half propagandist against all prejudice and half cynic about all propaganda. He was St. Francis rewritten by Henry Mencken, Lenin with footnotes by George Schuyler. ... Why do you cranks and abolitionists come to me? I'm a Boston Catholic and a Republican. ... All right, all right, all right! Don't badger me! I'll take it..."

IV, BIOGRAPHIC.

HSL was living in Duluth, Minnesota when he conceived and planned KINGSBLOOD ROYAL. He also gathered written materials on black-white relations in that city and elsewhere, including on a trip to South Carolina.

V.  IMPACT.

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.

Before publication the selection by the Literary Guild assured a printing of 750,000 copies. The book shocked readers both north and south. Critics generally found it sociology rather than literature. Schorer (759) called it a "good bad book." Lewis paid a writer to prepare a screen text but nothing came of this. Critics applaud Lewis's mastery of the history of race relations in America. They found the novel's hero's hotheaded proclamation of his 3.125% black blood implausible. Some Negroes, including the NAACP's Walter White disagreed.

In the 2001 Modern Library Paperback edition there are eleven questions (pp. 323-325) appended at novel's end. The first note says that KINGSBLOOD ROYAL was often compared to UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. "However, soon after it was published, the book sank into obscurity and was ignored, even as other novels by Lewis, such as MAIN STREET and BABBITT became entrenched in the canon of great American novels. How might we account for the long-term critical neglect of what is arguably Lewis's most politically charged and incendiary novel, his only major work to put issues of race center stage?"


VI. METHODS

Lewis wrote his novel's +/- 50,000 word  plan in less than two months while still in Minnesota. After settling at his new home Thorvale Farm in NW Massachusetts, he quickly wrote the novel. By late September 1946 the MS was in the hands of the publisher (Schorer, 748).
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(22) THE GOD-SEEKER (1949,1975)

In 1927 Sinclair Lewis began a novel with the words, 'ELMER GANTRY was drunk,' In 1949 Sinclair Lewis introduced the future GOD- SEEKER, young Aaron Gadd, as experiencing 'Night in the dark New England hills, night and the winter stillness.'

Aaron Gadd rescued runaway slaves, both as a boy in western Massachusetts and later as a craftsmanlike carpenter and successful building contractor in booming pre-Civil War St. Paul on the Minnesota frontier. He also created an in- house labor union and fought that union over his giving a runaway slave bricklayer a job.

THE GOD-SEEKER is a fast paced tale of a young man's ambitious movement far to the west of St. Paul to test whether he has a mid 19th century vocation to be a Congregationalist missionary to the Sioux. Before he departs New England, he meets the exotic half-Sioux Selene Lanark, whose father runs a profitable Indian trading network on the frontier. Will Aaron's love for Selene deflect his life-long yearning for God or something at least God-like? It's worth reading the book to find out.

For the history buff there is the geography and early history of Minnesota, especially from 1848 to 1855:  its rivers, lakes, prairies, Chippewas, Dakotas (Sioux), voyageurs, dreamers, swindlers, politicians. We see the prairies and lakes achieve territorial status and move rapidly towards Statehood, as the Sioux cede their lands. The novel gives non- pompous attention to religion and its flowing narrative provides occasional stopping points and niches for quiet and not so quiet discussions of Calvinism, pre-millennialism, mysticism, the appeal of Jesus to the Sioux and on and on. Surprise piles on surprise.

The novel is vintage Sinclair Lewis. Hero Aaron Gadd falls in love with two women at once during his career as a novice missionary among the Minnesota Sioux. He faces the recurring Sinclair Lewis "great decision:" to be single-minded (and probably celibate) in the pursuit of (in this instance "religious:") greatness or instead to "play" with women as well as  bloviate, hunt and fish with men friends and other distractions. There is no happy compromising with any man's call to any form of  greatness.

And then there is made-in-America religion throughout: churches and fads of the 1830s and 1840s and early 1850s: cultists, American nudists, free thinkers, Calvinists and anti-Calvinists, theologians and American pulpit glory seekers. The book is worth reading for its serious, humorous and satirical portrayals of religion if for no other reason.

III. READINGS

--[At the close of Ch. 16, p. 99 f, One of the youthful Aaron Gadd's Massachusetts pastoral mentors left this advice somewhere deep forever in Aaron's memory:] "Our forebears ought to of loved the Baptists, but they drove 'em out. If you ever get to be a minister, Aary, you love wrong Christians just as much as you love right Christians. The shadow of the same cross falls on both of them."

--[Astonishingly good, biting, often true, deeply tragic is chapter 41, pp. 266 - 274] in which "I, Black Wolf, son of Shining Wind, of the Wahpeton Council Fire, being a pure-blood Dakota and a member of the medicine lodge, but having attended a school of the white people [NOTE: OBERLIN COLLEGE], am herewith warning my people...." against the white invaders and their superstitions.
    To this patriotic Sioux, the Catholic Trinity is Father, Son and Mother Mary. "The Protestants have no trinity, but a four-god council consisting of Father, Son, Holy Spirit and Satan." (266) White people's demigods include Santa Claus, witches, vampires and spirits of the dead.
    "... the Christians, cowering in their fear of the unknown, dare not worship together unless they have built a shelter insulated against evil spirits, and this they call church, chapel, temple, prayer-closet or whatnot." (267)

--[To the Sioux Black Wolf, educated at Oberlin College, p. 271]

    "It is as though Mohammedans should conquer an Ohio village, seize the land, announce that all the villagers are dirty and superstitious, and then expect them humbly to accept Mohammed as their loving redeemer!
    "We do admire the figure of the Lord Jesus Christ, whose humble life among peasants must have made him very much like any Indian today. Like us, he was democratic, uncommercial, fond of stories and feasting and laughter. ... we should add him to our religion. ...
    "(Christians) Those sour and grasping zealots  do not deserve a beautiful young God like Jesus. ... he faced death on a cross grimly, as a Dakota would. Ours is a religion for men (p. 271).

--[Aaron Gadd wants his headstone to read (Ch. 62, p. 407 f)] 'He built solid houses and paid pretty good, and if he didn't like it when the galoots went on strike, he didn't get all sore and sacred about it. Go thou and do likewise.' 

IV, BIOGRAPHIC.

HSL's five year relationship with Marcella Powers was over. She married. His health weakens. Begins to spend most time abroad.

V.  IMPACT.

Reviews were lukewarm. Novel sold only 30,000 copies. (Schorer 780)

THE GOD-SEEKER (1949) is, in my opinion, the most under-rated of Sinclair Lewis's many novels. Contemporary critics treated this late work as if they were waiting for an aging Babe Ruth to break his own home run record once again in his final year at bat. Perhaps THE GOD-SEEKER lacks the wall-clearing oomph of ELMER GANTRY, but it is a solid inside the park home run by a master student of American evangelical religion. It is time for a publishing revival of THE GOD-SEEKER.

VI. METHODS

Writing the GOD-SEEKER (originally NEIGHBOR) was the big project of 1948. He planned. He wrote traveling around the east, including Quebec, with Mrs Powers as companion. Wrote a 206-p plan, 110,000 words. Worked out the plot scene by scene Worked very hard. He introduced characters or ancestors of characters first seen in KINGSBLOOD ROYAL, notably Xavier Pic, in charge of the northernmost portion of the underground railroad in Minnesota.

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(23) WORLD SO WIDE (1950, 1951)

 31-year old Mr Hayden Chart survives a car wreck which kills his wife. He seeks solace abroad, spending much time in Florence, Italy, which he studies as the architect he has been. He is tempted to build his life around two women-- both at once, if possible. The first is a very intellectual fellow American Dr Olivia Lomond, a student of Renaissance, Italy. At one point she made a pet of a house fly; it seemed a lonely woman's only friend in Italy. For most of the novel Chart seems inclined to re-align his mind and tastes after hers. But in the end he opts for life with a fellow small town American, reporter Roxanna Eldritch. She is unpretentious, honest and has secretly loved Hayden Chart since she was ten and he eighteen. It is enough to tip the balance in her favor.

Earthy, honest Roxanna Eldritch, home town girl and reporter had been sent to Europe from Colorado to cover the 1950 Holy Year in Rome. She appoints herself an instrument for ferreting out lies among the expatriates of Florence.

First to be punctured is young, proto-fascist pseudo-intellectual American Lorenzo Lundsgard who is preparing a series of lectures supported by films and shoddy research designed to prove that history teaches that great men have always ruled the world through their innate gifts of leadership. Roxy's contacts as a journalist allow her to confront him with his lies about his real Christian name, which is Oley. He had, moreover, been married twice and was twice messily divorced, despite his claims never to have wed.

Lundsgard is a favorite of and financially dependent on the next phony that Roxanna skewers. He is Sir Henry Belfont, an English gentleman's English gentleman, a snob with infinite contempt for all things American. Roxy's sources have revealed Sir Henry's true past: he was born in Ohio; his grandfather had made a fortune selling shoddy goods to both sides in the Civil War; Lundsgard never saw England until age 14, later bought a seat in Parliament and a title. The enraged Belfont turns on Lundsgard who had brought Roxy to his villa, cuts off his funding for research, lectures and documentary films and, somehow, some way, drives our hero Hayden Chart definitively into the arms of the spunky, honest, all American Roxanne Eldritch.

Lundsgard then inexplicably lands a cushy foreign service job in South America and Olivia Lomond seems disposed to go there with him at the curtain.
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III. READINGS (Using the 1951 Random House hardback edition.)


--[Olivia illustrates her loneliness to Hayden Chart via her pet fly, p. 66f]

    "I'm not impressed by these celebrated lonely prisoners who made a pet of a rat. I made a pet of a housefly.

... There was only one in my room -- winter it was, too cold for flies, but this one, really, he was the bravest most clever little fly. His name was Nicky.

... The minute I'd come back to my room from the library and take off my jacket, he'd be there lighting on it -- perhaps barking a welcome in some infinitesimal way. Nights, he slept on the hot-water tap, always. He never touched my breakfast till I had finished it; just walk on the rim of the tray and look at the pot of honey. He would take walks on my hand without tickling me -- quite the most refined fly in Florence -- and the only person here that I knew well, till I met Professor Friar. Don't you call that a loneliness of distinction -- to be ecstatic over a housefly?

... He passed away. From pneumonia. He is now buried, though without a tombstone, in a  volume of Mirandola manuscript letters in the Laurentian Library."

--[How American tourists evaluate one another, p 102 f]

    "There is, Hayden found, something like a system of credits for sight-seeing: doing a cathedral thoroughly counts, let us say, eleven points -- exterior only, five; looking for not less than one second at every single picture in a large gallery comes to thirteen, inspecting a mountain village rarely beheld by tourists is seventeen, dining at a celebrated restaurant is six, but it you found it all by yourself, the credit is nine."

--[A view of Sir Henry Belfont, p. 118]

    " ... at an oak desk which had belonged to William of Orange, Sir Henry wrote his letters. But his desk chair had nothing of the royal touch about it. It was of the latest ingenuity, with a sponge-rubber cushion, for while Sir Henry's real elevation was imposing, it was not suited to oaken hardness. Too many tons of cream sauces had gone to the construction of it."

--[Hayden to his fiancee Olivia, p. 242.]

    Hayden: "'Olivia! Let's not be too sure about our marriage. It scares me a little.'
    Olivia: "' Not me. You just do what I tell you to, and you'll be happy.'
    Hayden: 'Maybe!'"

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IV, BIOGRAPHIC.

HSL finished WORLD SO WIDE  in April 1950. Avoided whiskey drinking for wine while furiously writing it. After frantic travel around Europe in his last few months, HSL died in hospital in Rome --with no full consciousness in his last ten days --  of heart disease January 10, 1951, after very heavy drinking. To a visitor viewing the corpse on the day of his death he looked 80 not 66. His brother Claude decreed cremation with ashes to be sent home.

His ashes were buried near his parents in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His last novel was published posthumously.

He was soon eulogized in THE ROTARIAN as "really, one of themselves who had made Rotary better" (Schorer p. 807)
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V.  IMPACT.

He returned to the theme of OUR MR. WRENN and Kipling's verse about "this world so wide." A compulsive theme for HSL.

Sinclair Lewis died in Rome, Italy January 10, 1951. His last novel, published shortly after his death, is set in Italy and portrays a segment, generally unlovely, of Florence's expatriate communities, mainly American.

In 1914 Sinclair Lewis's first novel OUR MR. WRENN began outside the Nickelorion movie house in New York City. 1951's WORLD TOO WIDE, Lewis's final novel, ended with the hero and his new bride happily relaxing in a bar in Ravenna, Italy. The world of SInclair Lewis was not often deep but it was always wide. He traveled through it. ever restless, ever hoping for something better, only to end in drink, dissipation and loneliness. R.I.P.

VI. METHODS

He finished WORLD SO WIDE in the first four months of 1950 (Schorr, p. 796).

He wrote in a letter of his final year of life:  "I am the diagnostician. I really don't know what to do about anything. I am not a reformer. I really don't care." (Schorer 797)

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COURSE REVIEW AND SUMMING UP:

FREE DISCUSSION of PRESENTATIONS:

--(A)  The novels and their content, themes, sources.

--(B)  The Life of Sinclair Lewis and its place in the novels.

--(C)  Lewis's impact on American and world letters.

--(D)  Lewis's methods of research and writing.

--(E)  Ad libitum.

-OOO-

11/09/2005