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.

reading some famous U.S. novels of the 1920s - in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man

Not writing is a lot easier than writing, but I have some things I at least imagine I want to write, so I guess I will see if I remember how to write.  American books, Mimesis, British books, French books.  I am tired of being ignorant in private, so I will return, for a while, to being ignorant in public.

I feel that I do not know American literature especially well, but of course I know it better than any other; the feeling of not knowing it is an illusion caused by being surrounded by the stuff my whole life.  I also feel that I have recently immersed myself in American literature of, mostly, the first half of the 1920s, although when I add it up it is not really that many books.  Another illusion, caused by reading not just a pile of novels but also Langston Hughes’s great memoir of the ‘20s, The Big Sea (1940) and Edmund Wilson’s The Shores of Light (1952), like I am really digging in.

But many of the books – well, the fiction, not the poetry, whole ‘nother world there – are famous ones, sizable Humiliations that I have avoided for decades, so famous that they seemed all too familiar even if I did not really know exactly what was in them.  The Age of Innocence (1920), An American Tragedy (1925), Babbitt (1922) and F. Scott Fitzgerald, some Willa Cather novels – they seemed maybe a little dull.  They're not really so dull.

I am not used to reading such popular books.  They were big best-sellers, top 10 of the year, or close.  Cather was not in that game, although she sold pretty well, and Dreiser’s novel does not make the Top 10, but it made him instantly wealthy, allowing him to spend the rest of his life trying to write a “book of philosophy entitled The Formula Called Man” (Library of America timeline, 1935) and advocating for Stalinism.  Terrific.

Learning about Fitzgerald’s finances explained half of his life to me.  In 1919, he is almost unpublished; in 1920 he is selling stories, several of them, to the Saturday Evening Post for $3,000 a pop*. How much would that be today?  $39,291.61 – holy cow!  Plus he is getting movie money, options and so on, although at this point Fitzgerald and Dreiser and Wharton make as much money from selling books, not the rights to books.

Lewis was a hack writer who with Main Street (1920), which I have not read, hit on a perfect satirical comic formula, perfect for his audience but more importantly perfect for his talent.  Every couple of years he could write one on a new topic: business, religion, science, politics.  Let me fill out the magnificent quotation from Babbitt I put in the title:

“In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man; and I, for one, am only too glad that the man who has the rare skill to season his message with interesting reading matter and who shows both purpose and pep in handling his literary wares has a chance to drag down his fifty thousand bucks a year, to mingle with the biggest executives on terms of perfect equality, and to show as big a house and as swell a car as any Captain of Industry!” (Ch. XIV.iii)

The irony goes a couple of different directions there, doesn't it?  Another irony is that this, or something like it, wins Lewis a Nobel Prize.  Dreiser was a real possibility for a Nobel, too, for that big clunker of all things.  Plenty of prizes, plenty of prestige, are attached to these books, along with the cash.

I’ll wander through American literature for a few days and see what I remember.  Then it will be back to the booze and spaghetti.

* I made a grotesque error of memory here, which I corrected in a later post. Fitzgerald quickly hopped to $900 per story, and pretty soon "Benjamin Button" earned $1,000 - but not $3,000. Still, the basic point, about the huge amount of money suddenly dropped on Fitzgerald, is intact. Just not so much per story