Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [11]
What is so brilliant about Lewis’s treatment of the Kennicott marriage is that he reverses our expectations by making the frequently lumpish Will both the more powerful personality of the two and, very often, the more sympathetic. This was a conscious decision: In his introduction to a 1937 edition of the novel Lewis admitted that Carol is not “of as good stuff as her husband.... I had most painstakingly planned that she shouldn’t be—that she should be just bright enough to sniff a little but not bright enough to do anything about it.”
Some readers have exaggerated Carol’s deficiencies, assuming that she is meant to be a complete lightweight and that the solid virtues of Will and of his friend Sam Clark constitute the most positive values on Main Street. A 1921 Broadway play adapted from the novel took this point of view and portrayed Carol as a pretentious featherhead. This is a drastic misreading, however. Will, though demonstrably a good man and endowed with both more intelligence and more humor than Carol, is severely limited as a human being. Carol, though a foolish woman in many ways, is saved by ideals and ambitions that are as noble as they are absurd. Her tragedy is not great drama but simply “the humdrum inevitable tragedy of struggle against inertia” (p. 456). Even silly little Erik Valborg, her minion, is validated by his hopes and dreams, and if he meets a mediocre end as a B-movie actor, then perhaps the next Erik Valborg who comes to Gopher Prairie really will turn out to be a Keats.
For the real enemy is not affectation, like Carol’s, or mindless enthusiasm, like Erik’s. It is
an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment ... the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God (p. 273).
Main Street is very, very American, but it is not purely American. Shaw, in his characteristically flippant manner, spoke the truth when he said that Lewis’s criticisms applied to other nations as well, but that Americans clung to the idea that they were unique in their faults (Literary Digest, December 6, 1930, p. 19); the British novelist John Galsworthy remarked, truly, that “Every country, of course, has its Main Streets” (Lewis, From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919-1930, pp. 47-48). Still, a disdain for intellect (or for what we nowadays prefer to denigrate as elitism) has been particularly marked in America, perhaps because of our commitment, stated if not practiced, to egalitarian democracy: On Main Street, Lewis writes, “to be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue” (p. 274).
More than eighty years after Lewis’s novel this is true, and it is true not only on Main Street but on Wall Street as well, and on Park Avenue, and on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is what makes Main Street such a stunning achievement: While it succeeds in being “contemporary history,” capturing a particular place at a particular moment in time, it also speaks for our own time; it is remarkable how much of Main Street is still pertinent. Gopher Prairie at war is not so very unlike our own flag-waving “war on terrorism.” Will Kennicott’s breezy dismissal of legal procedure—“Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it’s justifiable to set aside ordinary