Lie-Hunter*

Castigator Lewis, Slightly Relieved, Hammers Out a Heroism

The Story. By dogged, self-determined ways, pale young Martin Arrowsmith made himself a doctor. What pricked him on from apprenticeship under a toping village sawbones to postgraduate work at the State of Winnemac's great Sears-Roebuckian university was an itching to learn, to know, to do.

At Winnemac, the itch was inflamed to an ache, a passion for pure science and meticulous laboratory research. The purposes of Arrowsmith's contemporaries were shoddy, sloppy (there was a beefy Bible-banger, a medical Babbitt, an icy, calculating dollar-chaser). And even stronger than Arrowsmith's reactions against these was his love for the lonely, sardonic genius of the school, Max Gottlieb, Mephistophelian German Jew, brilliant immunologist, pure scientist.

Gottlieb, seeing Arrowsmith's genius, loved him well, worked him cruelly, burned into him technic and skepticism so deeply that the boy was fashioned for his destiny before he met little Leora, who was to hold him to it.

Leora -- Leora Tozer -- was a probationer in the Zenith Hospital. She looked up from scrubbing a floor, grinned at self-important young "Dr." Arrowsmith; sassed him, understood him, made him her life. She was untidy, not brainy, not pretty. But her genius for living matched Arrowsmith's capacity for work.

Their life was a succession of frustrations. Leora's effort for a child was abortive. Arrowsmith's country practice in her home town -- Wheatsylvania, N. D. -- was satisfying (despite her puny relatives) until he indulged in research to cure a cattle-plague gratuitously, and was over cautious concerning a smallpox scare. The research aroused unbearable little professional jealousies. The pox turned out chicken, not small, and left raillery behind it. So again he cleared out, seeking his chance with a very modern, very shrewd private clinic in Chicago. Such clinics deal in fads, however, not in facts. He was sidetracked again -- until his research bore fruit in an appointment to McGurk Institute, Manhattan. The good angel was old Gottlieb.

Heaven opened. Arrowsmith had every facility, quiet, no interference. He had Gottlieb and one Terry Wickett, just such a lie-hunter as was Arrowsmith. He raced at his work, struck an unknown germ-eater, "Phage," and paused on the threshold of fame to establish scientific certainty. Came another blow. McGurk Institute, founded to cleanse a grubby name, could not risk loss of publicity. He was ordered to publish his find at once. He refused. A Frenchman found Phage, got the publicity. Arrowsmith was in bad odor at McGurk, even at McGurk, supposedly one of the three strongholds Science had in the land.

Still he worked on. Bubonic plague turned up in the West Indies and he headed the McGurk Commission. He would try out his Phage, but insisted that test patients be observed first. More hostility from McGurk, from the colonial government. When he finally had his way, Death, ironic in ghastly buboes, crept in arid throttled Leora. So that stroke for Science flew wide. Her death unmanned him, his figures went to pot, and the results McGurk published were flagrantly padded.

Woe, woe to lie-hunters! Gottlieb was decrepit, Leora gone. Arrowsmith tried life as the scientist husband of a rich widow. No good. Finally he buried himself in the Vermont woods, tracking down bacteriological verities with Terry Wickett. As the world saw it, he had "failed."

The Significance. Mr. Lewis once had a romantic twist (see Free Air, The Trail of the Hawk, The Job). Then discontent plagued him sore. He pickaxed through Main Street, spitted Babbitt. Now, slightly relieved but no whit satisfied, he hammers out a harsh heroism and lays it, hissing hot, to the flabby flank of Medicine. While he is thus occupied, his fancy is caught by a realist's dream of fair woman -- wry little Leora. The satire is swift, sure, great in its age, and Leora, being of life, will outlive it.

The Author. Sinclair Lewis -- son and grandson of doctors, onetime reporter, now 40 and the Nation's semiofficial castigator, -- may be somewhat rosily seen as he has projected himself in Lie-Hunter Arrowsmith. Yale made no pet of him when he matriculated from Sauk Center, Minn. ; but, after he wrote Main Street, his Yale class asked him to speak at a reunion. Lewis did speak -- a brief, baleful curse upon that class.

The Critics.

Stuart P. Sherman -- "Since Charles Dickens lashed us in Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes, no other novelist, English or American, has given us a satirical castigation so thorough or so deserved."

Henry Seidel Canby -- "By no means the moral document. ... It is a 'hardboiled' story of a 'hardboiled' youth, whose tough idealism is a thousand miles and a century away from the transcendental philosophy of Emerson's home'." 'Goodbye, proud world, I'm going home'."

*ARROWSMITH -- Sinclair Lewis -- Harcourt. Brace ($2.00).