America had ended the war transformed: she alone was stronger, unravaged. The prevailing American mood was still pragmatic, practical, independent of the great isms of the Old World. ‘This is essentially a business country,’ said Warren Harding in 1920, and he was echoed by Calvin Coolidge’s even more famous words, uttered in 1922: ‘The business of America is business.’ All these different strands – anti-intellectualism, business, the suspicion of Europe, or at least her peoples – were brilliantly brought together in the novels of Sinclair Lewis, the best of which, Babbitt, appeared in that remarkable year, 1922.
It would be hard to imagine a character more different from Dedalus, or Tiresias, or Jacob or Swann, than George F. Babbitt. A realtor from Zenith, Ohio, a medium-size town in the American Midwest, Babbitt is hardworking, prosperous, and well liked by his fellow citizens. But Babbitt’s success and popularity are just the beginning of his problems. Lewis was a fierce critic of the materialistic, acquisitive society that Oswald Spengler, R. H. Tawney, and T. S. Eliot so loathed. Eliot and Joyce had stressed the force of ancient myth as a way to approach the modern world, but as the twenties passed, Lewis dissected a number of modern American myths. Babbitt, like the ‘heroes’ of Lewis’s other books, is, although he doesn’t know it, a victim.
Born in 1885, Harry Sinclair Lewis was raised in the small Minnesota town of Sauk Center, which, he was to say later, was ‘narrow-minded and socially provincial.’ One of Lewis’s central points in his books was that small-town America was nowhere near as friendly or as agreeable as popular mythology professed. For Lewis, small-town Americans were suspicious of anyone who did not share their views, or was different.9 Lewis’s own growing up was aided and eased by his stepmother, who came from Chicago – although not the most sophisticated place at the time, at least not a small town. His stepmother encouraged the young Harry to read ‘foreign’ books and to travel. He attended Oberlin Academy and then headed east to Yale. There he learned poetry and foreign languages and met people who had travelled even more than his stepmother. After Yale, he went to New York, where at the age of twenty-five he found work as a reader of manuscripts and as a press agent for a publisher. This introduced him to the reading tastes of the American public. He had a series of short stories published in the Saturday Evening Post. Each was slightly subversive of the American self-image, but the stories’ length did not do full justice to what he wanted to say. It was only when he published his first novel, Main Street, which appeared in October 1920, that ‘a new voice was loosed on the American ear’.10 Published in late autumn, in time for the Christmas rush, Main Street was that rare phenomenon, a best-seller created by word of mouth. It was set in Gopher Prairie, a small town that, naturally enough, had a lot in common with Lewis’s own Sauk Center. The inhabitants of Gopher, their prejudices and peccadilloes, were brilliantly observed, their foibles and their fables about themselves cleverly caught, so that the book proved as popular in middle America as it was among more sophisticated types who would not have been seen dead in ‘the sticks.’ The book was so popular that at times the publisher could not find enough paper to issue reprints. It even managed to cause a scandal back east when it was revealed that the Pulitzer Prize jury had voted for Main Street as winner but, unusually, the Columbia University trustees who administered the prize had overturned their decision and given the prize instead to Edith Wharton, for The Age of Innocence. Lewis didn’t mind; or not much. He was a fan of Wharton and dedicated his next book, Arrowsmith, to her.11
In Babbitt, Lewis moved on, from small-town America to the medium-size midwestern city. This was in many ways a more typical target; Zenith, the city where the story is set, exhibited not only America’s advantages but also its problems. By 1922 there had already been a number of novels about businessmen in America – for example, Dean Howells’s Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s Financier (1912). But none of them had the tragic structure of Babbitt. Lewis, with his passion for ‘foreign’ literature, took a leaf out of Emile Zola’s book. The Frenchman had ridden the railways on the footplate and descended into the mines to research his great series of Rougon-Macquart novels in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Likewise, Lewis travelled by train to visit several midwestern towns, lunching in the Rotary associations with realtors, mayors, chairmen of the chambers of commerce. Like Zola, he took copious notes, recording in his grey notebooks typical phrases and figures of speech, collecting suitable names for people and places. All this produced Babbitt, a man who lies ‘at the very heart’ of American materialist culture.12 The central quality that Lewis gives Babbitt is his success, which for him entails three things: material comfort; popularity with his fellow citizens, who think like he does; and a sense of superiority over the less successful. Complacent without recognising his complacency, Babbitt lives by a code of Efficiency, Merchandising, and ‘Goods’ – things, material possessions. For Lewis, paralleling Eliot, these are false gods; in Babbitt’s world, art and religion have been perverted, in the service, always, of business. The point at which Lewis makes this most clear is when one of the characters, called Chum Frink, delivers a speech to the ‘Booster’s Club,’ a sort of Rotary association. The theme of Chum’s speech concerns why Zenith should have its own symphony orchestra: ‘Culture has become as necessary an adornment and advertisement for a city to-day as pavements or bank-clearances. It’s Culture, in theaters and art galleries and so on, that brings thousands of visitors…. [So] I call on you brothers to whoop it up for Culture and A World-beating Symphony Orchestra!’13
The self-satisfaction is all but unbearable, and Lewis doesn’t let it last. A shallow begins to form in this perfect world when Babbitt’s closest friend kills his wife. There is no mystery about the death; and it is manslaughter, not murder. Even so, the friend is sent to prison. This set of events is thoroughly dislocating for Babbitt and provokes in him a number of changes. To the reader these are small changes, insignificant rebellions, but each time Babbitt tries to rebel, to lead what he thinks of as a more ‘bohemian’ life, he realises that he cannot do it: the life he has made is dominated by, depends on, conformity. There is a price to pay for success in America, and Lewis presents it as a kind of Faustian bargain where, for Babbitt and his kind, heaven and hell are the same place.
Lewis’s indictment of materialism and the acquisitive society is no less effective than Tawney’s, but his creation, certainly more memorable, is much less savage.14 He made Babbitt’s son Ted somewhat more reflective than his father, a hint, perhaps, that middle America might evolve. This slight optimism on Lewis’s part may have been a clever move to aid the book’s success. Upon its publication, on 14 September 1922, the word Babbitt, or Babbittry, immediately entered the vocabulary in America as shorthand for conformism. Even more strongly, boosterism came into widespread use to describe an ad-too-familiar form of American self-promotion. Upton Sinclair thought the book ‘a genuine American masterpiece,’ while Virginia Woolf judged it ‘the equal of any novel written in English in the present century.’15 What sets Babbitt apart from the European literary figures being created at the same time is that he doesn’t realise he is a tragic figure; he lacks the insight of classic figures in tragedy. For Lewis, this complacency, this incapacity for being saved, was middle America’s besetting sin.16