|
SINCLAIR LEWIS
ON WOMEN’S CLUBS or Will Carol Kennicott join P.E.O? REMARKS by Patrick Killough September 7, 2006 to N.C. Chapter M of P.E.O. at Highland Farms Retirement Community Black Mountain, North Carolina Nobel Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis cannot be with you today for the simple reason that he has been dead for 55 years. Were he alive, would he care enough about P.E.O. to spend an hour with you? Would you find him a disturbing presence? He was critical of just about every institution in America. And would therefore not likely be kind, I fear, to yours. Still, let us imagine that this not very pleasant man has heard of P.E.O.'s new motto, "It's OK to talk about P.E.O." And that he is therefore here with us gathering insights for a new novel about women and their clubs. Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre in what was still semi- frontier Minnesota. He died in Italy in 1951. In 1930 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Between 1912 and 1951 he published one boys adventure novella, 22 novels and many short stories. Most of his best work appeared between 1920 and 1930, including 1920 ... MAIN STREET, the premier Lewis novel on women’s voluntary organizations, 1922 ... BABBITT 1925 ... ARROWSMITH 1927 ... ELMER GANTRY and 1929 ... DODSWORTH. There are some fine later novels, as well, notably 1933 ... ANNE VICKERS, which treats of suffragists and other women in the workplace and in private organizations 1935 ... IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE 1945 ... CASS TIMBERLANE and 1947 ... KINGSBLOOD ROYAL. A good percentage of Sinclair Lewis’s novels became films, some still worth watching. Lewis was twice married and divorced: first to Grace Hegger and later to the famous political columnist Dorothy Thompson. By each wife he had one son. He hoped for a third marriage (one of December with May) to the much younger aspiring actress Marcella Powers, but she turned him down. He was christened Harry Sinclair Lewis. Throughout his college years he called himself Harry S. Lewis. He was usually either “Red” or “Hal” to his family, friends or wives. After college he signed his works simply “Sinclair Lewis.” The world Lewis gloried in was America that existed from just after the closing of the western frontier and through the Jazz Age succeeding World War One. That world ended with the Great Depression. From then on Lewis’s works became less timely. As he aged, he sank deeper into unattractive forms of alcohol addiction. Hal’s face was marred by childhood acne which never went away. Here is how he looked in 1940 to Father Edward Murphy of Xavier, the Catholic University for blacks in New Orleans: Now here
he was before me, a tall, thin, gangly figure with corrugated brow,
sparse hair combed flat, pale-blue agate eyes, a not too prominent
nose, and mottled cheeks sloping to a vague, slightly bulbous mouth.
And the instant I saw him, I liked him, for I surprised a wistfulness
which somehow suggested that of a little boy kept indoors for
misbehavior and peeking out a window. Too, the face seemed a parchment
on which many things had been written, erased, and rewritten; and I
began to wonder whether any God-challenging on the part of this
celebrity had been only a perverse form of truth-seeking.
(YANKEE
PRIEST, 241)
* * *
How
well did Sinclair Lewis know clubs, both for women and
for men? How
did he acquire this knowledge? Why did he appear betimes so viciously
opposed to
certain groups such as Boosters, Rotary, Kiwanis and the Daughters of
the American Revolution? Did he know P.E.O? If he were here with
Chapter M today, instead of me, what might he expect you to find you
all up to?His family made him especially aware of medicine and genealogy. Harry Sinclair’s clan abounded in doctors, including his paternal grandfather, father, uncle and older brother. He believed that his paternal grandmother, Emeline Johnson, was a descendant of Peregrine White of the Mayflower. His mother was Emma F. Kermott, born in London, Ontario, Canada, in 1849, later moving with her parents to Minnesota. In 1873 she married a fellow school teacher (who later studied medicine), Edwin J. Lewis. Harry Sinclair Lewis was her third son. Emma Kermott Lewis died of tuberculosis in 1891, when Harry was six years old. Seeking a cure, she had long lived away from home. Barely one year later, in July 1892, Dr Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, a daughter of the family with which he had boarded when studying medicine. As a father, Lewis Senior was aloof, self-important and with little empathy for children. By contrast, the second Mrs Edwin Lewis was robust, outgoing and very kind and attentive to her stepson. Isabel Warner Lewis was far beyond average in her zeal for reading, playing the piano and storytelling. Her abundant energy spilled over beyond her family into clubs and lodge activity, both in tiny Sauk Centre and in the state of Minnesota. Sauk Centre already had a vigorous club tradition and there were several organizations from which Isabel might choose. Women had been active in founding the Bryant Library. They were indispensable in the Glee Club and the Choral Union. Some women were regular students in Chautauqua courses.The mid-1890s were a golden age for dramatic and social clubs. In 1898 Sauk Centre women founded the Embroidery Club and the W.N.A. Circle, a group of 25 who combined embroidery with good works outside the Circle. Isabel Warner Lewis, Harry Sinclair Lewis’s stepmother, co-founded the Sauk Centre chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star. She was a frequent delegate to its State conventions. She was also active in the family’s inherited Congregational Church. But her greatest energies were reserved for the Sauk Centre Gradatim Club, founded in 1895. This was a study group of 30 women who read their way into parliamentary procedure and lore of foreign lands. The Gradatim Club established a reading room inside City Hall and a public rest room for farmers’ wives and children coming to town from the countryside. The club also mounted a campaign to trap flies. It pushed for a curfew ordinance and one prohibiting spitting in the streets. The Gradatim Club also boosted local history. Mrs Lewis’s club belonged to the Minnesota Federation of Women’s Clubs and Isabel was often a club’s delegate to state conventions. She held district-level offices in the Federation and rose to be state treasurer. Sinclair Lewis’s stepmother had relatives in Chicago. Visiting them plus attending meetings related to club affiliations often took her away from provincial Sauk Centre. Quite often young Harry went with Mrs Lewis on her journeys. He carefully observed her in action and drew on her and her clubs in later novels. For instance, club activities reappearing in MAIN STREET include eradicating flies and maintaining a rest room for visiting women from the country. As decades rolled by in his career as a fiction writer, Sinclair Lewis relied less and less on pure imagination. He became increasingly a camera-like reporter of contemporary or nearly contemporary social structures. Like Sir Walter Scott before him, Sinclair Lewis carefully located his characters in the social milieu which had created them. He dwelt not so much on their immediate family as on their neighborhood and their village or city. There are four or five recurring themes in the Nobel Prize winner’s works: -- many characters obediently and without serious questioning conform to their environment -- while others become partially or greatly alienated from their milieu. They try to define themselves by things and values other than what present themselves day by day -- while some characters run away from home forever or -- they run away but come back, defeated, relapsing into an ultimate compliance and conformity with local values -- or virtually uniquely, in ARROWSMITH, one says and means ‘to hell with society’ and does what he wants to do. In this literary churning and roiling of men and women in villages and towns, within jobs and professions and marriages, there are embedded clubs, including women’s organizations, as part of the action. Usually clubs are organic mosaics fitted into a larger milieu, and their function is to tame potentially autonomous, creative heroes and heroines into conformist sheep. In Lewis’s eyes you might find blatant hypocrites like Elmer Gantry in Rotary. But you will not normally find in clubs either the unabashedly vocal, the strong, the pioneering, the creative or the restless. * * *
Take Sinclair Lewis’s treatment of men’s clubs for a starter. In BABBITT (1922) the hero, a real estate agent, is a valued member of his Boosters Club in the fictional city of Zenith. He tries for nearly a year to go hog wild and to sow wild oats but is reeled back into conformity by family, his business community, church and the Boosters Club. ELMER GANTRY (1927), an amoral, alcohol loving preacher, was raucously welcomed into Zenith Rotary after leading a raid during Prohibition on a harmless German speakeasy. Rotarians were wild with applause when Reverend Gantry assured them 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. (Chapter XXVII)
Lowell T. Schmalz is THE MAN WHO KNEW COOLIDGE (1928). Schmalz's Kiwanis club makes noisily sure that the world knows how good it is to children in need. IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE (1935) showed how a Hitler-like U.S. Senator took over America only because enough Rotarians connived with the fascists. * * *
What about women’s clubs
and Sinclair Lewis?In several places Lewis lambastes the D.A.R. as hypocritical conformists who sing the praises of their generally low-life American ancestors. In real life, Lewis says, the good Daughters would rather die than admit a scruffy ancestor into their stuffy parlors. Women’s organizations come up fairly often in Lewis’s novels. But his most memorable treatment is in his first great work, MAIN STREET (1920). The heroine is Carol Kennicott, nee Milford. She was Minnesota born in the shapely city of Mankato. Her father, a judge, had moved there from Massachusetts. Carol’s mother died when she was nine. The judge then gave up the law and took his two daughters to Minneapolis, Minnesota. He died two years later, leaving enough money for Carol to go to college. At Blodgett College, on the edge of Minneapolis, Carol received a good, conservative, church-based education. From Mankato Carol Milford retained memories of New England order and a flair for town-planning. In college Carol discovered her versatile, multitalented depths. She considered many careers before choosing to be a librarian in St. Paul, Minnesota. Yet her abiding passion was for sociology, especially town-planning in general and village improvement in particular. Suddenly marriage gave her, she thought, her big chance to put her ideas into practice. She was wooed and won by small town doctor Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie. The town itself she saw for the first time only after their honeymoon in Colorado. She was immediately appalled by its look: its physical plainness, disorder and downright ugliness. The people were clearly in a rut and needed saving from themselves. How save them? How wake them up to their innate potential to create and appreciate beauty? At the end of a famous 32-minute self-conducted walk up and down and around Gopher Prairie’s Main Street, Carol Kennicott was in despair. She saw flyspecked windows. A dumpy hotel. And she feared that there were 10,000 other American towns with souls no better than Gopher Prairie’s. High school teacher of French and English, Vida Sherwin, became Carol’s first and most enduring ally in the project to civilize and refine Gopher Prairie. Vida told Carol who pulled the local levers of power, all pretty much content with things as they were. They were unanimous boosters of the glories of their wee heaven. Vida described the churches and clubs of Gopher Prairie. These included -- the library board and --the Thanatopsis Club, a women’s study group. This club went so far as to plant trees and run a restroom for country women (Chapter V). --Nor did Carol ignore the potential of imaginative parties, with charades and good talk. She also organized winter sleigh rides. The town was happy to indulge Carol in her whims. But the town did not change for the better. --There was also The Jolly Seventeen, whose membership varied between 14 and 26. It was “the social cornice of Gopher Prairie.” Its membership partially overlapped with that of the Thanatopsis Club, which the Jolly Seventeen also gently mocked for being too highbrow. The Jolly Seventeen played afternoon bridge (Chapter VII). Club members did not respond to Carol’s promotion of winter sports. --The Eastern Star held a highly regarded annual ball (Chapter VII). --What about the library? Carol Kennicott could not convince Gopher Prairie librarian Ethel Villets that “the chief task of a librarian is to get people to read.” To Ethel “the first duty of the conscientious librarian is to preserve the books.” (Chapter VII) Soon enough, “Carol had decided to use the Thanatopsis as the tool with which to liberalize the town” (Chapter XI). She went to her first meeting. A dozen other women were there. Their topic was English Poets. One lady summarized the external facts of Shakespeare’s biography. She opined wittily that Portia in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE might give lessons to American suffragists. A second lady “reported the birth and death dates of Byron, Scott, Moore, Burns.” Mrs. George Edwin Mott then gave ten minutes to Tennyson and Browning. The fourth woman spoke on “other poets,” specifically, “Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. [Felicia Dorothea] Hemans and Kipling.” “Gopher Prairie had finished the poets. It was ready for the next week’s labor: English Fiction and Essays.” The club women asked for Carol’s views. She suggested going into poets in more detail in the following year and adding less conventional poets such as Keats, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti and Swinburne. They agreed to try to devote a later program to these poets. A chance remark gave Carol a chance to wonder if the Thanatopsis members might persuade their husbands -- the leaders of Gopher Prairie -- to build a new city hall. She canvassed members one by one but found that each one’s husband liked things the way they were and was fine with their ladies. Thus, the school superintendent's wife said that we need a new school more than a new city hall. A city councilors wife said that revenues were not enough for Carol’s pet project. The richest couple in town declined to put up $2 million to a new city hall as a monument to their generosity. Nothing daunted -- yet -- Carol Kennicott asked Thanatopsis to help the town poor by mending used clothes before giving them away. The answer, No! And as for the future, her suggestion to study important trends and ideas such as chemistry and anthropology was not carried. Instead the club stood by its previously planned topic: Household Furnishings and China. Sauk Centre proved unreformable by drama club, chautauqua or any other private organizations. * * *
Against that backdrop, allow me to bring our visit with
Sinclair Lewis to a
conclusion.Please recall that we are imagining that Sinclair Lewis has come back to life and is sitting in a corner here with Chapter M. He is planning a new novel and intends to include P.E.O. in it. He is noting down what you are wearing, what questions you ask, what your club does, how high you aspire. He is, I think, pleased by your Cottey College and its efforts to produce women leaders. He is, however, probably cynically surprised that it has taken you from 1869 until 2006 to tell your story beyond your membership. He wants you to tell him more about your new motto: “IT’S OK TO TALK ABOUT P.E.O.” He may make that the title of his next novel. After this meeting he may take some of you aside, one by one, good sociologist that he is, and probe:
Knowing Sinclair Lewis, I think that he would guffaw (erroneously) at the idea of P.E.O., Rotary, Lions, Soroptimists, Kiwanis, the DAR or Zonta admiing and liking members who think bold new thoughts. It would take some doing to prove to him that P.E.O or any women’s organization except the old Suffragists seek anything but conformity, caution and safety. He would also smirk and say, “In the end, all clubs give their members what they want.” P.E.O. was sixteen years old when Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885. Both were products of the American Midwest and Minnesota is just north of Iowa, your organization's birthplace. If there was one woman in Minnesota who might have heard of P.E.O., it was the future nobel prize winner’s stepmother, Isabel Warner Lewis. Did that activist club woman know P.E.O.? Did Sinclair Lewis know P.E.O.? When he died his lonely alcoholic death in Rome in 1951, P.E.O. was 82 years old. I find it hard to imagine that he did not know your organization, or that if he knew it, he did not comment somewhere on it. But I do not recall Sinclair Lewis ever mentioning P.E.O. nor have my brief on-line searches of the internet yet turned up any links. I therefore leave with you, in the spirit of Carol Kennicott, a proposed project, a good deed: to research links between Sinclair Lewis and P.E.O. Start with the State of Minnesota and its 6,700 members in 153 P.E.O. chapters. Is one of those chapters in Sauk Centre, Sinclair Lewis’s birthplace? What do your sisters in Minnesota have to say on the subject of Sinclair Lewis and women's clubs? If time is lacking, then let Chapter M support the work of a trained researcher or a student at Cottey College willing to undertake your project. Do that, and I am sure Carol Kennicott will first applaud and then join Chapter M. Sinclair Lewis has asked me to thank you for hearing his views. He never promised to be comforting. -OOO- SOME BOOKS
BEARING ON OR BY SINCLAIR LEWIS
--Harold BLOOM (editor). SINCLAIR LEWIS (Modern Critical Views). New York. Chelsea House. 1987. viii. 144 pp. --Martin BUCCO. MAIN STREET: THE REVOLT OF CAROL KENNICOTT. New York. Twane Publishers. 1993. xiii. 144 pp. --Hallie FLANAGAN. ARENA. New York. Duell, Sloan and Pierce. 1940. 475 pp. [NOTE: This is a history by its director of the New Deal's The Federal Theatre Project. PP. 114 - 129 contain photos and the chapter "IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE" on Sinclair Lewis's contribution to the Project.] --Anthony Channell HILFER. THE REVOLT FROM THE VILLAGE: 1915 - 1930. Chapel Hill. U of NC Press. 1969. 275 pp. --James M. HUTCHISSON. THE RISE OF SINCLAIR LEWIS, 1920 - 1930. University Park PA. Pennsylvania Stare University Press. 1996. 2nd printing 1997. xii. 276 pp. --Grace Hegger LEWIS. WITH LOVE FROM GRACIE: SINCLAIR LEWIS: 1912 - 1925. viii. 335 pp. --Sinclair LEWIS. MAIN STREET. 1920. New York. Harcourt, Brace and Company. Dover Thrift Edition. Mineola, NY. 1999. Paper. iv. 400 pp. --Richard LINGEMAN. SINCLAIR LEWIS: REBEL FROM MAIN STREET. New York. Random House. 2002. xxiii. 659 pp. --Edward F. MURPHY, SSJ. YANKEE PRIEST: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL JOURNEY, WITH CERTAIN DETOURS, FROM SALEM TO NEW ORLEANS. Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1952. 315pp. [Reviewed as "The Priest Who Knew Sinclair Lewis."] --Sally E. PARRY (editor). GO EAST, YOUNG MAN: SINCLAIR LEWIS ON CLASS IN AMERICA. New York. Signet Classics. 2005. xvii. 329 pp. --Mark SCHORER. SINCLAIR LEWIS: AN AMERICAN LIFE. New York. McGraw-Hill. 1961. xxiii. 867 pp. --Vincent SHEEAN. DOROTHY AND RED. New York. Crest Books. 1963. 320 pages. (paper) --Vincent SHEEAN. PERSONAL HISTORY. Secaucus, NJ. Citadel Press. 1934. 1969. xvii. 403 pp. =-=-=-=- Black Mountain, NC Monday September 04, 2006 |