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Sinclair Lewis Remembered
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1772-0
Chapter One
Hazel Palmer Lynam
Hazel Palmer Lynam (1890–1963), an acquaintance of Lewis in his adolescence, attended Oberlin College and later taught school in Duluth.
Source: Hazel Palmer Lynam, "The Earliest Lewis," Saturday Review of Literature, April 14, 1934, 628.
Dr. Lewis was our family physician while we lived in Sauk Centre, and one summer arranged for Harry to work as night clerk in my father's hotel, the Palmer House. I imagine this must have been his first hotel experience and must have been about the time he finished high school or early in his college career.
Our small hotel circle and their friends found a great deal of amusement in the "fool" things Harry did, as it was generally recognized by this time that he would never amount to very much. They liked to recount how he called a traveling man at five-thirty in the morning to tell him that he had forgotten to call him for the five o'clock train.
I remember once he fell through the glass top of a cigar case for no good reason at all. He was standing by it and, I suppose, strayed so far away mentally that he neglected to maintain his center of gravity in a practical position.
My younger brother discovered him as a storyteller. He used to sit up on the desk behind the glass partition, where the bookkeeping was done, and listen to the stories Harry would tell. Sometimes I joined them. He would ask us what we would have, and no matter what subject we chose, he would start immediately and go on and on. My brother, by right of prior discovery, insisted on doing most of the selecting, so the stories were usually a little bloodthirsty for my taste. The only fragment of these tales that remains in my memory at all is one about a man tied in a cave and driven mad by the constant slow drip of water on the back of his hand.
I can remember once Harry spent a long time urging me to study and be valedictorian of my high school class. He was distressed because I was not taking a proper interest in my work. I was quite stimulated about the idea for three or four days, so he must have been rather convincing.
He was willing to put himself out, more than most adults, to amuse us; and we liked him very much in spite of the mild contempt with which he was viewed by our elders.
Chapter Two
Isabel Lewis Agrell
In her memoir, Isabel Lewis Agrell (1916–2000), Sinclair Lewis's niece, preserved personal accounts, family documents, and even a recipe for "Sinclair Lewis Cookies," which called for a shot of bourbon.
Source: Isabel Lewis Agrell, Sinclair Lewis Remembered (Crosslake, MN: privately printed, 1996), 35–36.
Sinclair used to say that the only person he really wanted to impress was his brother Claude, but he was never able to do so. Untrue. Claude was very proud of his younger brother. I'm sure that Sinclair exasperated Claude many times throughout their lives, but there was always a strong bond between them. I know that they both had great respect and affection for one another.
Because there was over a six-year difference in their ages, Claude undoubtedly had little interest in including a little brother in his boyhood games and pranks. By the time Claude left home for a year of teaching after high school graduation, Sinclair was still in grade school.
Claude maintained a good and happy relationship with his entire family throughout his life. I think Claude thoroughly enjoyed his friendship with Sinclair, in spite of the fact that he was much more conventional and even-tempered than his illustrious brother.
In a financial record of Claude's when he was at the University of Minnesota, one item mentioned was "Suit for Harry—$19.00." When I questioned my mother one time about the youthful Sinclair, her reply was that "he was a nice young man."
Claude was in touch with Sinclair throughout their lives by letter, by phone, or in person. Within my memory, during the twenties and thirties, whenever Sinclair visited Claude and Mary's home, he was treated as a very important guest. The best white linen tablecloth covered the dining room table. Large white linen napkins were a must.
The best glassware, silver, and china were used. We always had white linen tablecloths and napkins, fresh every Sunday, as did Grandfather Lewis, but when Sinclair came, everything was a little extra special. Our dear German maid, Katy Meyer Lang, dressed in black or white uniforms with a white organdy apron on special occasions. She said that the only thing Sinclair ever complained of was the orange juice, which he thought should not be strained as she had been doing.
At one dinner party, which my mother gave for Sinclair when I was in high school during the '30s, our neighbors, Bishop and Mrs. Kemerer, were invited. Sinclair arrived very intoxicated. Mrs. Kemerer was a good sport and humored Sinclair although I am sure my parents were embarrassed.
Claude and Mary visited New York during the late '20s. Sinclair took them to a speakeasy and on a tour of the Île de France, the ocean liner. These were the only events I remember, although I am sure there must have been more, knowing Sinclair's delight in showing provincial relatives the sights of the city.
New Haven and New Jersey
1903–8
After a college preparatory course at the academy of Oberlin College in Ohio, Lewis enrolled in Yale University in the fall of 1903. Some of his instructors and classmates there–Chauncey Brewster Tinker, William Lyon Phelps, Henry Seidel Canby, and Leonard Bacon–later reminisced fondly about him. Although a frequent contributor to student publications, he essentially remained an outsider during his years in New Haven. He was so disaffected he took off the academic year 1906–7 to live and work in Upton Sinclair's cooperative community in New Jersey and to travel before returning to Yale. He completed his undergraduate degree in the spring of 1908 while working part-time for the New Haven Journal-Courier.
Chapter Three
Chauncey Brewster Tinker
Chauncey Brewster Tinker (1876–1953) was professor of English literature at Yale University (1899–1945), where he was affectionately known as "Yale's Dr. Johnson." He was among the first to recognize Lewis's talent. Tinker, whose mind Lewis found "keen, appreciative, eager, humorous," inspired him to excel in his studies during his first year.
Source: Chauncey Brewster Tinker, "Sinclair Lewis, a Few Reminiscences," Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters n.s. 2 (1952): 65–67.
My own acquaintance with Lewis had been formed as early as September 1903. It began, oddly enough, as I was walking across the old campus on my way to the very first class which I ever taught at Yale College. I was accosted by a tall, redheaded boy, who asked, "Are you my Prof? My name is Harry Lewis." "Oh yes," I replied in some surprise. "I have your name on my list. How do you do?" He went on, "How about this fellow Yeats that's going to lecture tonight?" "Well," I answered, "he is an Irish poet, and his name is pronounced 'Yates.' You had better go and hear him." It was clear that the boy was interested in poetry. So was I. Here was a bond between us.
I was never dismayed by the presence in my classroom of this rather gawky and excitable person, whom his classmates presently called "Red Lewis." He sometimes wearied me, but he was my best student, and my eager helper. He enjoyed all the work and wanted to recite most of the time. His thirst was hydroptic. He often stayed after class to talk with me, and his classmates criticized him for it. But he did not care. He and I loved the same things, and that was enough for Harry. When he left me after one of these interviews, I was no better than a deflated balloon, but his enthusiasm won me, and we became good friends. This enthusiasm I shall always remember as his first and most conspicuous quality, and I am glad to have known him in his youth when the skies glowed with the dawn of a glad new day.
He was of course at the furthest remove from a sentimentalist. Nevertheless there was, I believe, at the heart of the creature a passionate affection that irradiated everything around him. But association with him was no quieting experience. He wanted in return as much as he gave, and this was of course a staggering demand. To supply it with anything like continuity was, for a young instructor, simply out of the question. After all, one had one's work to do, and it required most of one's time. I must beware of giving the impression that there could be any intimacy between a young instructor and a freshman in that forgotten world, but affection and respect were by no means incompatible with it.
There was a third passion that frequently held sway within him. I do not know how to name it, save to call it unexpectedness. With Harry you could never tell. To fit him into a category or to look for any principle that governed his behavior was to discover that nothing would serve to define him. The conventions and restrictions of good society–especially of good collegiate society–were offensive to him. His abiding temptation was to undermine them and blow them at the moon. He might in that process spread a good deal of discomfort and make the judicious grieve, but at least life ceased at once to be commonplace and dull. After all, he was Red Lewis, and friend as well as foe had to admit it. An anecdote from a later period of life will illustrate his utter waywardness. After the passage of a number of years, his classmates, in repentant mood, invited him to attend a class dinner at the Yale Club and make a few remarks. When his turn came to speak, he rose and began in some such way as this, "When I was in college, you fellows had no use for me, and I have to tell you that I have none for you." His remarks are said to have been received with thunderous applause. Lewis had cleared the air. He had purged the stuffed bosom, and thereafter much was forgotten and all was forgiven. Similarly, when membership in the Institute was offered to him he thrust the invitation aside with something like scorn. But thirteen years later he repented and gratefully accepted election. Later still, he even served as one of the Directors of the Academy.
Chapter Four
William Lyon Phelps
An eminent Boswell scholar, William Lyon Phelps (1865–1943) joined the Yale faculty as an instructor the same semester Lewis matriculated, and he supported the brash midwesterner throughout his undergraduate career. Phelps rose through the faculty ranks (instructor 1903–8, associate professor 1908–13, professor 1913–33). During the decade between his retirement from Yale and his death, he continued to be considered one of America's preeminent academic minds.
Source: William Lyon Phelps, "Men Now Famous," Delineator 117 (September 1930): 94.
I remember him well as a freshman at Yale. He came from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 1903. His name was Harry S. Lewis. He was very tall, incredibly thin, and his head was crowned with a mass of fiery red hair. Very few of his classmates knew his Christian name; he was universally known in college as "Red" Lewis, both because of his hair and because of his radical opinions, which he took no pains to conceal. At that time he was a disciple of Upton Sinclair. He was not disliked in college, but was regarded with amiable tolerance as a freak. He took not the slightest interest in the idols of the place–athletics, societies, and so on; nor did he care to "make" any of the positions in extracurricular activities that are rewarded with social distinction. And as he took no interest in these things, he did not see why he should pretend to do so. In other words, he was a complete and consistent individualist, going his own way, and talking only about things that interested him. We at once found a common bond of friendship in our admiration for a Minnesota poet, Arthur Upson, whose brief life ended tragically, and who had written some beautiful verse. On that ground of intimacy, we proceeded to have many long discussions on literature, the real passion of Lewis. I liked and admired him immensely, although our views on many subjects were and are irreconcilable. It was a pleasure to me to see a lad who thought for himself. In his senior year he became an editor of the Yale Literary Magazine.
Chapter Five
Henry Seidel Canby
Henry Seidel Canby (1878–1961), best known for his contributions to early American literary scholarship, began teaching at Yale after he graduated from that institution in 1899. He was editor of the New York Evening Post for four years, achieved professorial status in 1922, and became one of the founding editors of the Saturday Review of Literature in 1924. He was also the author of several books, among them Classic Americans (1931), The Age of Confidence (1934), Thoreau (1939), and Whitman (1943).
Source: Henry Seidel Canby, American Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), 307–9.
I have known [Lewis] well, though never intimately since our paths seldom cross, for forty years. I knew him first as a Yale undergraduate, a nonconformist, getting what he could—and he got a great deal—from that stronghold of intelligent conformity where radicals, once they are accepted as Yale men, can say or do what they please. (It is said that [Josiah W.] Gibbs, greatest of mathematical physicists, was saved for his university by some elder statesman who remarked that he might be incomprehensible, but he was a good Yale man.) Sinclair Lewis would often drop in for an evening in the room in "dirty Durfee" where I was living with Chauncey Brewster Tinker. This would have been in 1906. Tinker, a conservative in literature but never a reactionary, was a brilliant lecturer who could make tradition glow with life. The young man and the older were temperamentally alike, though worlds apart in their ideas of how to live. Both had ignitable minds which would explode at a hint of the cheap or the false, but as to what were true and what were false values, they could seldom agree. For Sinclair derived his emotional consents from nature as interpreted by the scientists, and Tinker from Doctor Johnson and the Word of God as validated by the Anglican Church. Thus it came about, as often with a child of nature, that Lewis worshiped Tinker's impeccable taste while distrusting his philosophy, and Tinker was increasingly annoyed by a writer whose idea was to lash sensual man into finding his own way to salvation. Santayana would have enjoyed their conversation, then and later, and been supercilious to both. [...]
Too many easy judgments were formed of Lewis in his percussion-powder days. He had a face of boilerplate, but his mental skin was as sensitive as a baby's. If he drank, it was, as with Poe, to quiet his nerves, usually with contrary results. There was a noble independence about the man, to be respected even when he used it to sneer at the genteel age, which was his enemy. I have seen him rise from a dull dinner party, say "I'm tired," go through the nearest door, pop into the most available bed–and emerge two hours later in excellent humor. Once he chose an ambassador's room, which made difficulties with protocol.
But Lewis was always and essentially a realistic idealist, a true, if surprising, product of the liberal late nineteenth century in which he had his roots. He was always, you will note, on the side of the angels. But his eye and ear were too honest to please the respectable, who prefer genre paintings to candid photographs. The trouble was not his choice of characters–the country was full of Babbitts and Elmer Gantrys. It was the overpowering and often unpleasant reality he gave to them. Only in moments of intense perception do we see both type and individual in a person we like or hate. We are blind to the type, or do not recognize the individual. Sinclair's gift was for realizing, and always with a satiric point. Dialogue was his best medium. Some of his most brilliant dialogues were never written down. Once at my house he rode high on an imaginary conversation between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Jonson was the patronizing highbrow; Shakespeare was the popular writer, humble in a dangerous way before Art and Learning. He could give the people what they wanted, since he was not writing for posterity like his learned friend. To this day I see Lewis's quizzical Will and pompous Ben more vividly than in any historian's portrait. It is the art that Shakespeare himself practices in Polonius and Falstaff, and excellently adapted to letting society recognize its own warped or frightened soul behind an inescapable verisimilitude.
(Continues...)
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