Fun With Fund-Raising

GIDEON PLANISH -- Sinclair Lewis -- Random House ($2.50).

Readers who have wondered what has happened to the red-faced, satiric talents of Sinclair Lewis will be relieved to know that nothing has. Of his Prodigal Parents (1938) the New Yorker quipped:

"Mr. Lewis remains a first-rate writer. Let's just sit this one out." The time has come for readers to swarm back into the ballroom. In Gideon Planish, his 18th novel, the Nobel Prizewinner has the old shillelagh out and cracks it on the skulls of the "organizators" and "philanthrobbers" who man the huge U.S. industry of fundraising.

Little Gid Planish, aged ten, dreams of being something "rotund and oratorical." At college he concludes that virtue has to be organized. At 29 he is Dr. Gideon Planish, Professor of Rhetoric in Kinnikinick College, Iowa. He wears a small brown beard and is ready to jettison his too-provincial mistress. Already expert at self-deception and hypocrisy, he does not get rid of Teckla for his own good, but for hers. Thinks Gideon: "It wouldn't be fair to take her off to New York and Washington and face those snobs and intriguers."

In his freshman class, Gideon finds Peony Jackson. He daydreams about her "shining in a chemise." She marries him. Gideon becomes editor of Rural Adult Education in Des Moines, learns to write reverently of "mothers, duck hunting, the Y.M.C.A., the Salvation Army, the Catholic Church, Rabbi Wise, the American flag, cornbread, Robert E. Lee, carburetors and children up to the age of eleven." As a lecturer, he learns to tell the lady on his right that the movies are a pernicious influence on the young, and the lady on his left that the movies stimulate the youthful imagination. Successively Gideon's fortunes are hitched to:

> The Association to Promote Eskimo Culture, Inc., whose president is sole beneficiary.

> William T. Knife, creator of Okey-Dokey, a beverage with "just enough caffein in it to be profitably habit-forming."

> Dr. Elmer Gantry, "a fine, manly New York clergyman," foremost exponent "of a streamlined gospel."

> Deacon Wheyfish, president of the Blessed to Give Brotherhood, prepared to meet any request for a financial report with: "Damn it, how do you cold-hearted and cold-faced carpers and critics know but what maybe the best training to expand the soul of man is to dig down for money that somebody will waste!"

> Colonel Charles B. Marduc of the advertising agency of Marduc, Syco & Sagg, who will not handle any patent medicine, liquor or contraceptive ads, caring for them "through a separate firm with which his name wasn't even connected." The Colonel's ambitious daughter would not hesitate to blackmail, double-cross or kidnap him. Cracks he to her: "You must have been bumming around with some new lover--maybe your husband!"

U.S. entry into the war moves Gideon, nearly shakes him loose from Marduc. Offered the presidency of Kinnikinick College, Gideon is nostalgically tempted. But Peony Planish keeps him in the field of big-league ballyhoo while she meets "honeybee" Gideon's best friend at the dreary Hex Hotel.

Murder by Research. Lewis' characters have as little inwardness as a fudge sundae. All the psychological conflicts have happened on minus Page One. How Gideon Planish gets as far as he does is a commentary on U.S. middle-class culture, but how Colonel Marduc managed to amass his pre-eminence only Lewis knows. In place of people, Lewis offers types, murderous research in the field of philanthropy, and a lambasting wit.

Lewis has attempted to bring together two diverse kinds of speech: realistic (the reproduction of natural conversation) and satiric (the reductio ad absurdum of natural conversation). Changing keys back & forth, some of the speech sounds wrong; most of it sounds more than right, being both natural and quintessentially comic. If Lewis is not the complete master of such language modulation, he has at least suggested the difficulties and rewards.

Says Lewis of his latest work: "This man Lewis is certainly going downhill fast. In each of his early books--Babbitt, Main Street, Elmer Gantry--there were one or two characters you could like. But in Gideon Planish everybody's a scoundrel."

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