He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg - Sinclair Lewis produces

Sinclair Lewis has his first big hit with Main Street (1920) when he’s thirty-five years-old and his second with Babbitt (1922).  I’m poking around in his Library of America Chronology.  “November [1922], screen and dramatic rights to Babbitt sold to Warners for $50,000,” (p. 859), which, as always turning to the BLS inflation calculator, is a whopping $752,309.52 in today’s money, quite a pile.

Meanwhile, George Babbitt, who runs his father-in-law’s real estate office and is a big deal in Zenith City, don’t doubt that, is arguing with his daughter who is thinking of maybe going to work for a charity of all things:

“The sooner a man learns he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns ‘em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce – produce – produce!” (II.ii)

The “flipflop and doodads” bit, authentic frontier gibberish, is a good example of why the novel is such fun and was so popular, Lewis having figured out how to turn H. L. Mencken’s caustic Smart Set mockery of the American bourgeois into a real novel.  But it is those last words – if you for some reason descend to the very bottom of Wuthering Expectations, you will find the “inspirational” quotation from Sartor Resartus that George is parroting.  Well, it has inspired me.

Babbitt is a midlife crisis novel.  George has everything figured out, everything is going his way, except for the passage of time, and he has a crisis of meaning that allows Lewis to work him over pretty thoroughly.  I figured the novel would fizzle, but no, it has a real ending.

The book is structured much like the prestige series television of our time.  The first quarter is a “day in the life” of George Babbitt, which would fill the two-hour pilot.  Subsequent chapters are episodic – the Babbitts have a dinner party, George goes to a real estate convention – but little bits of plot accumulate until the story of George’s crisis emerges moving us to the season or perhaps series finale.

My favorite bit of George’s ordinary day.  He is enjoying his bath.  Really enjoying it:

The light fell on the inner surface of the tub in a pattern of delicate wrinkled lines which slipped with a green sparkle over the curving porcelain as the clear water trembled…  He patted the water, and the reflected light capsized and leaped and volleyed.  He shaved a swath down the calf of one plump leg.  (VII.iii)

George has an aesthetic sense, which is why he is worth putting in a novel, why he is worth saving, in whatever sense he is saved.  I am not sure why Lewis, on the next page, lectures George for liking “standard advertised wares” and so on.  Sometimes Lewis seems to lack confidence in his readers.

After his bath, George goes to bed and dreams of the fairy child – that aesthetic sense again – “beyond perilous moors the brave sea glittered” (VII.vi) – not what I was expecting in Babbitt, nor was I expecting what comes immediately before George’s dream.  He is asleep, and Lewis wanders through the city in a series of fragments, visiting a late-night meeting of union officials, hopping to a factory producing tractors “for the Polish army,” and then to Mike Monday, “the distinguished evangelist” who “had once been a prize-fighter.”  For about five pages, Babbitt turns into a John Dos Passos novel, just in this one place.  I don’t think this is what caught the attention of Warner Brothers, but it is pretty interesting.