Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [5]
with a purely literary thought of village charm—hollyhocks and lanes and apple-cheeked cottagers. What she saw was the side of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church—a plain clapboard wall of a sour liver color; the ash-pile back of the church; an unpainted stable; and an alley in which a Ford delivery-wagon had been stranded (p. 34).
It is easy to make fun of Carol’s overheated imagination, but we can never really do that, for we realize that the ugliness she perceives everywhere in Gopher Prairie is not incidental but spiritual. In the entire town there are “not a dozen buildings which suggested that, in the fifty years of Gopher Prairie’s existence, the citizens had realized that it was either desirable or possible to make this, their common home, amusing or attractive” (p. 40).
Likewise, when Carol founds a theater group in Gopher Prairie she is inspired by heady visions of Yeats, the sparkling wit of Shaw, and the Abbey Theatre and the scenic artistry of the great Gordon Craig; but the best that she and the town are able to come up with is a lowbrow farce called The Girl from Kankakee, which even she, after the event, must admit turned out to be “a bad play abominably acted” (p. 233). Again and again Carol’s hopes are shattered, and while we are often amused by her aspirations, we are never really unsympathetic to them, however ridiculous they might be. At least she tries for something better; at least she refuses to be content with utility and mediocrity.
Harry Sinclair Lewis, midwestern America’s rebellious but not unaffectionate son, was born in Sauk Centre on February 7, 1885, the third child of Dr. Edwin J. Lewis. Dr. E. J., as he was known, was transparently the model for Dr. Will Kennicott of Main Street. Like Will, he was solid, hardworking, utterly respectable, and uncommunicative, but with a humorous, sardonic streak. Like Will, he could be seen in a rather heroic light: making country calls four or five times a week, driving far into the frozen countryside in a sleigh, and performing surgery by candlelight on kitchen tables.
Lewis’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was six, and a year later Dr. E. J. married Isabel Warner, a kind, motherly woman who soon became a pillar of the community, taking a leading role in the Gradatim Club, the Monday Musical Club, and the Order of the Eastern Star. Like Carol, she was interested in the welfare of the Scandinavian farmers in the surrounding countryside, and established a rest room in Sauk Centre where farm wives and children could be comfortable while their husbands drank or did business in town.
Young Harry did not appear to be marked for success. His father reportedly informed his older brothers that they might have to look out for him: “You boys will always be able to make a living,” he told them. “But poor Harry, there’s nothing he can do” (quoted in Lingeman, p. 7). This changed when, as a teenager, Harry became fired with a driving ambition to attend Harvard.
He was sent for a pre-college year to Oberlin Academy in Ohio, then a religiously oriented school where, for the first and last time in his life, he took a serious interest in Christianity and decided he wanted to become a missionary. Furious, Dr. E. J. laid down the law: Missionary work was out, and so was the relatively freewheeling Harvard. “You must prepare for Yale or go to No college,” he stormed (quoted in Lingeman, p. 17).
Lewis toed the line, not without some relief, as his zeal was already waning; he would quickly develop into what he was to remain for the rest of his life, a confirmed atheist with a deep dislike for fundamentalist Christianity. Asked, in the 1940s, whether a lack of religious belief did not make for an unhappy life, he objected heatedly to the idea.
If I go to a play I do not enjoy it less because I do not believe that it is divinely created and divinely conducted, that it will last forever instead of stopping at