The Lonely Cameraman

SINCLAIR LEWIS (867 pp.)--MarkScho-rer--McGraw-Hill ($10).

If the term had been invented earlier, Sinclair Lewis might have qualified as the U.S.'s first Angry Young Man. He was obstreperous enough, and like his latter-day counterparts, his anger at society was that of a jilted lover.

Lewis was the third son of a stiffnecked Minnesota small-town doctor, whose approbation the writer always sought and never quite won. (Dr. Lewis wrote of his son in 1925: "It is certainly marvelous how such a bundle of nerves can pull in the money.") Christened Harry Sinclair Lewis and usually called Hal or Red, he was a tall, skinny, ginger-headed man afflicted all his life with a badly blotched complexion that set the seal on his ugliness. His physical unattractiveness made his youth lonely and affected his character and work. In this long and lovingly detailed biography, Critic Mark Schorer suggests that his volatile temper, his insatiable hunger for male companionship and female company, his manic alcoholism, his prankishness and exhibitionism, even his short and abortive acting career late in life, were the result of an emotionally starved childhood and adolescence. At a 1922 reunion dinner of his Yale class, Lewis said: "When I was in college, you fellows didn't give a damn about me, and I'm here to say that now I don't give a damn about you."

Some Bod. Deprivation, like fame, is a spur. The turning point for Lewis came late in 1920 with the publication of Main Street. He was then 35, had published six novels and numerous short stories to mixed notices. But Main Street touched a contemporary nerve as no novel has done since. It sold furiously and was discussed endlessly. Within ten years, it was followed by Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth. They brought Lewis wealth and world renown, both of which were cosmetics for an unattractive man. And in 1930 they brought him the Nobel Prize for literature, making Lewis the first American to win this International accolade.

His significant work is all concentrated in the ten-year span from 1920 to 1930. The novels after 1930, even the successful It Can't Happen Here and Kingsblood Royal, were jerry-built, and some of them were embarrassingly bad. E. M. Forster predicted his decline as early as Dodsworth; in an essay on Lewis called "A Camera Man," he wrote: "Photography is a pursuit for the young. So long as a writer has the freshness of youth on him, he can work the snapshot method, but when it passes he has nothing to fall back upon. It is here that he differs from the artist."

In fact, all his life Lewis was by disposition a journeyman commercial writer. In his youth he sold plots to Jack London, and when he came home from Stockholm with the Nobel Prize, he sat down to write some popular magazine fiction. Like other writers whose personal tastes are those of a mass public, he viewed all his work--including his magazine stories and movie scripts--with equal seriousness.

Droplets in Flood. Schorer, now professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, spent nine years preparing this elaborate biography. The amount of detail might have staggered Lewis himself, who worshiped detail. To extract two droplets from the flood: the book reveals that the four cords of wood that Dr. Lewis asked his son to chop on Feb. 23, 1903, were really 4 1/4 cords, and that on a Canadian trip in 1924 Lewis passed through Goose Lake, Snake Lake, Trout Lake, Clam Lake and Lac la Ronge. Research is the opium of the biographers; when the fit is on them, any fact, no matter how small, must be included just because it is available.

In the book's 814 pages (excluding check list and index), there are vivid scenes of triumph and disaster. There is the occasion, soon after the success of Main Street, when Lewis' crisply arrogant first wife, Grace Hegger, was introduced at a party as "Mrs. Lewis." Said she: "Please, Mrs. Sinclair Lewis. Even my dentist says, 'Mrs. Sinclair Lewis, spit!' ':

Lewis' relation to his second wife, the formidable Columnist Dorothy Thompson, was a mixture of admiration and antipathy. Lewis made a dining-out anecdote of the time when one Sunday morning he and Dorothy were in bed and the telephone rang. It was the President of the U.S., Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lewis passed the phone to his wife next to him, and for half an hour he had to listen while she straightened out the nation's affairs--with the wire across his throat.

He became convinced that Theodore Dreiser had plagiarized part of a book Dorothy had written about Russia. At a dinner attended by Dreiser, Lewis got drunk, refused to make a speech, explaining: "I do not care to speak in the presence of a man who has stolen 3,000 words from my wife's book." Dreiser sought him out afterward, demanded that Lewis make the statement again or take it back. Lewis made it again. "So I smacked him," recounted Dreiser later with relish. "And I asked him if he wanted to say it again. He said it again. So I smacked him again." The two men were separated, with Lewis shouting, "Theodore, you are a liar and a thief." Dreiser was flooded with congratulatory mail.

Of Bed & Bottle. There are the mel ancholy scenes of Lewis' increasing irascibility and wild bouts of drunkenness. In 1941, in an alcoholic fit, he smashed the furniture in his apartment. The doctor summoned Dorothy, by then living elsewhere, and with two male nurses and a straitjacket they carted Lewis off to a hospital. The whole time Lewis screamed, in frenzied parody of his wife: "You are sick, sick . . . Can't you take hold of yourself? . . . Hal, listen, please, this is Dorothy! Hear?"1

The year before he died (1950), when he was living in lonely splendor in a richly appointed villa on the southern edge of Florence, he wrote some autobiographical verse.

My first wife longed for social place She thrashed about with scarlet face To get the chance to meet a prince. My second made me shake and wince By violence, by blasts and blares, As she managed other folks' affairs. My third was winsome, playful, kind, But often difficult to find, For it was hard to keep in mind In what man's bed she now reclined . . .

Lewis had no third wife. But after his marriage to Dorothy Thompson broke up, he fell in love with a much younger woman, Marcella Powers, lived with her for close to seven years.

Death of a Type. Most critics, having all the literary graces except creativity, tend to overvalue style. Schorer, although he sometimes writes novels, is no exception. Lewis, says Schorer didactically, "was one of the worst writers in modern American literature." But Lewis possessed to a high degree what most stylists do not--the creator's gift for bringing a character or a book to vigorous (and often noisy, smelly, squalid) life.

The gift was born of passion. Lewis scathed and scorned America, and the fury of his attack and the accuracy of his evidence shocked the boosters of Main Street into startled self-surmise, starting the agonized self-appraisal and self-doubt that has characterized much of ILS. social criticism ever since. In the process, Lewis helped destroy once and for all the U.S.'s lingering cultural provincialism, as World War II destroyed its political isolationism. Yet the satirist's lashing must always be to some extent a self-flagellation. No thoughtful reader of his books can fail to see that Lewis, rebellious, drunken and selfexiled, loved Gopher Prairie, and the U.S., and that he never really left it. His definitive biography is still to be written.

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