Bible Boar

Author Sinclair Lewis, whose position as National Champion Castigator is challenged only by his fellow idealist, Critic Henry Louis Mencken, has made another large round-up of grunting, whining, roaring, mewing, driveling, snouting creatures--of fiction-- which, like an infuriated swineherd, he can beat, goad, tweak, tail-twist, eye-jab, belly-thwack, spatter with sty-filth and consign to perdition. The new collection closely resembles the herd obtained on the Castigator's last foray, against the medical profession (Arrowsmith, 1925) and a parallel course is run, from up-creek tabernacles, through a hayseed college and seminary to a big-city edifice with a revolving electric cross. But the Arrowsmith plot is altered. This time the Castigator, instead of exerting his greatest efforts in harrying a fine-mettled creature to refuge in the wilderness, singles out the biggest boar in sight and hounds him into a gratifyingly slimy slough. The tale has an obscure hero, another Lewisian lie-hunter who, to purge the last bitter dregs of pity and fear, gets his gentle eyes and mouth whipped to a black pulp by the K. K. K. before he is released. But the boar is the chief sacrifice and its name has the inimitable Lewis smack, Elmer Gantry.*

The Story. Elmer Gantry of Paris, Kan., was born to be a talented garbage contractor or meat salesman. But his pious mother and the Baptist Church have given him everything except any longing for decency and kindness and reason." So they, and his well-developed thirst, lust and cowardice, drive him into the ministry. The first page finds him drunk in a saloon near his alma mater, Terwillinger College. Needing a fight, he lurches into a soap-box crowd that a pimpled Y. M. C. A. pipsqueak is converting, and flattens the hecklers. The Baptists gasp. "HellCat" Gantry, the black-maned campus bully with his boasted amours and loud contempt, get religion? The pipsqueak fawns and prays. A bully bigger than Gantry, "Old Jud" Roberts, praying (and weeping) fullback from Chicago, holds a chest-pound-ing, fistshaking, handshaking, "manly challenge" revival. "HellCat" confesses publicly. The half-baked atheism of "Hell-Cat's" only friend and roommate, Jim Lefferts, is no match for raw afflatus. Unwittingly the atheist supplies all that the convert needs for his "Call" and ordination. The Holy Spirit enters Elmer Gantry, in a timely jolt of Bourbon.

A too-strenuous visitation of the same spirit causes Elmer's ejection, three years later, from Mizpah Theological Seminary. But he has known the intoxication, stronger than drink, of speaking from a pulpit; has learned, among other rewards of the profession, the ease with which a pastor, who is a baritone solo incarnate, can seduce the parish kittens. A few years of selling farm implements and indulging in small town waitresses are an ideal prolongation of Elmer Gantry's novitiate for his first great phase, evangelism.

For this phase, the Castigator lays by his swine-goad, and Author Lewis, no friend of man but an unerring creator, when he likes, of living women, picks up his imagination, some sympathy and a torch. He creates Sharon Falconer and takes Elmer Gantry into a midwest revival tent to see her--young, slender, stately, warm, husky-voiced, a priestess in white with a ruby velvet girdle, with a face of rapture and passion. Before she suspected she was Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary, her name was Katie Jonas, a Utica mick and typist. Sometimes she feels like a little girl, worn out with saving souls and making money, which is her destiny. An emotional mystic, she has been made articulate by an intellectual mystic, Cecil Aylston, a globe-covering Oxford oddity of whose passions, hot and cold, she is now weary. Offstage she is an efficient business woman and it is from that angle that Elmer Gantry approaches, and reaches, the little girl, the passionate woman, the saint.

He quiets his flashy drummer's clothes and fills her tabernacle with a trial harangue on the money-value of Salvation. He pours forth, besides salesmanship, all the fervor of a conversion which actually is semi-sublime. He ousts Aylston and after a period of self-restraint not wholly calculating, gets taken to a quiet, spacious, surprising manor in Virginia. Here, one midnight, a wing of the house turns out to be a crazy shrine to many goddesses, including ape-headed ones, Aphrodite, Christian saints and Sharon. The latter, hysterical in a crimson robe with gold symbols, makes Elmer chant the "Song of Solomon" and initiates him into mysteries of which he can understand at least half.

They are a whirling dervish and a shooting star, touring the country with a large gospel "crew." Throngs of converts, waves of exaltation, of debauch, of prosperity. . . . Passion and prosperity agree with Elmer Gantry so well that when Sharon builds her pier-tabernacle on the Jersey Coast--hailed by the Chamber of Commerce as a "high-class spiritual feature ... at the snappiest of all summer colonies"--he feels about ready to supersede her as the chief attraction. But Sharon is spared such a fate. Filled by the ocean and stars with a new vision, she holds aloft a white cross on her opening night; calls on the throng to try its faith. A cigaret stub starts a holocaust. Her faith does not flinch. Elmer Gantry, alone of all the gospelers, bulks, punches and tramples his way out, into the sea, where he rescues people who have already touched bottom, thus becoming a hero. He finds Sharon the next day in the charred ruins, still holding her white cross.

After a few years of other men's wives, widows and waitresses, she is only a dull ache to him. He fails at gospeling alone and at Free Thought, but skulks neatly in at the back door of Methodism. He marries and intimidates the heiress of Banjo Crossing, chaste Cleo Benham. He acquires poetry and philosophy: Longfellow and Elbert Hubbard. He invents religious advertising and finds that its effectiveness increases with its blatancy. With Cleo's exterior to help him, and lucky breaks with women to keep him happy, he blunders rapidly upward in the great state of Winnemac,* arriving at Zenith, famed home of Realtor George T. Babbitt (whom the reader glimpses one day in the street).

A gasbag bishop, a yahoo press, jealous brother-shepherds and a sardonic lawyer help him to shout his way to fame. He introduces harmonicas, samples of grape juice, a wrecked motor car, weightlifters and radio in his church to put it on the map. He agrees that "Jesus Christ would have been a Rotarian." He crusades against Vice with roars, arresting amiable factory girls and German home-brewer, while his own pantry amours flourish and the lawyer offers him whiskey. The higher he climbs, the braver and cruder he grows. Just before he is called simultaneously to a Manhattan pulpit and the secretariat of a national morals censorship--having edified London with his famed sermon on Divine Love, originally cribbed for him from Agnostic Bob Ingersoll by Atheist Jim Lefferts--he neatly turns a blackmail plot, by comparatively harmless criminals, into a coat of whitewash that dazzles even himself. He dreams of scourging the entire nation into faith and morals. During his prayer of thanksgiving he ogles a new choir girl's ankle-- without faltering on a syllable.

The Significance. What folk of the 21st Century are going to ask about 20th Century cinemas, tabloid newspapers and this book, is: "Did such people really live in the U. S.?" Their hastier historians will say: "Yes," and show convincing clippings from the N. Y. Times's rag editions (instituted 1927) about John Roach Straton, Edward Hall and Aimee Semple McPherson. Of course these headliners are no more representative of the U. S. clergy than Senator Heflin is representative of the U. S. Senate. But the Castigator, trained on newspapers to inflict sansculottism, portrays skeletal types of Americanos with all the malice, which is more than all the art, of which he is capable. The clerical creatures in Elmer Gantry are children of ideas and the ideas seem to have been whipped up out of unhappy memories of the Sauk Centre Sunday School, with all the panicky fury of a believer's wrestling with Doubt. This wrestling has cost the Castigator ill nature, megalomania, nervous breakdowns and the creatures of his forced moods are far less credible, as contemporary humanity, than Hogarth's Gin Alleyites, Swift's Anglo-Lilliputs or even Dante's infernals. As literature Elmer Gantry is compelling and permanent, but only for its violent virtuosity. The dogmas of Fundamentalism are battered unmercifully through out Elmer Gantry. The Castigator props them up and knocks them down with tremendous gusto, concentrating on oldtime Hell, Jonah, infant damnation, the Virgin Birth and a surly Jehovah. He goes so far as to let his spokesman criticize Christ for inconsistency and for overlooking sanitation. The spokesman (Frank Shallard) has faith of a variety too subtle for what the Castigator's friends call the "booboisie." Yet few of the latter will proclaim the Castigator, for his cerebral snobbery, what a papist in Elmer Gantry calls Frank Shallard: "Worse than a murderer." The Castigator's rabid theophobia is its own antidote. His bolts, loosed wildly, fly wide.

The Author. The sea, wise men have observed, is the great civilizer. Sinclair Lewis was born in Minnesota. He began, during his newsgathering, as a romantic; hence Carol Kennicott, Leora Tozer, Sharon Falconer. His style has never transcended the monotonous, sardonic reportorial parenthesis, but he has transcended the romantic. He has flowered bitterly as a gopher-village agitator, a born malcontent, a flaying man, a perfectionist. His books betray a self-tortured spirit too coarsely active for tolerance (he begged God to strike him dead in a Missouri pulpit), too weak for silence (he lets an Elmer Gantry character dislike Main Street, then stabs him), too solemn for sportsmanship or humor (of which he has some, vide "a beard like a bath sponge," a bartender crying "Whoop!"). His latest lie-hunter, in an all-night argument, voices the whole Lewis diagnosis: "I shall never be content" and its excuse: "Isn't it a good thing to have a few people who are always yammering?"

The Castigator has lately been living and lionized in Washington, D. C., one of the most curious men of his time. Unpleasant carnage and a drab anticlimax are in store if he plans to descend next upon the helpless politicians.

Sinclair Lewis is 42, blond, spare, married.

*ELMER GANTRY -- Sinclair Lewis -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

*"'Between Chicago and Pittsburgh."