Main Street (Barnes & Noble Classics Ser - Sinclair Lewis [6]
He was not by any definition a success at Yale. Loud, overenthusiastic, extremely provincial and unsophisticated, he was also physically unprepossessing, with his tall, gangling frame, red hair, and acne. Added to these disadvantages was the fact that he was poor, at least in comparison with most of the other Yale boys.
Lewis made a little extra money by taking a night job on the New Haven Journal Courier as a rewrite man. This job, instead of being a hardship, opened new worlds to him, for it allowed him to attend plays on a press pass. His discovery of the theater, and most particularly of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen, who would become his prophets and heroes, changed his life. These two playwrights were revolutionary in their refusal to passively accept the status quo. They examined all the monolithic institutions of society—Marriage, the Family, Business, the Church, the State—and found them not only inadequate but arbitrary in their exercise of power. Things need not be as they were; anything could be questioned, changed, rejected.
This doubting, reforming mode was one religion Lewis could adhere to wholeheartedly, and it would dominate his career. All of his great novels—Main Street, Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927)—would question his society’s most basic values and assert that a better world was not only necessary but possible.
Lewis dropped out of Yale in 1906 and went to work with his friend Allan Updegraff at Upton Sinclair’s utopian community, Helicon Hall. They soon found that Helicon Hall, like so many utopias, was a hotbed of petty feuds and jealousies, and they left after a very short stay. Lewis then took a series of short-term jobs, and returned to Yale to graduate in 1908.
After graduation, Lewis set out to be a newspaperman, an obvious career move for him. The lightning pace of the newsroom was not congenial to him, however, for he wrote best when he had the leisure to think, rewrite, and revise; he lost jobs in rapid succession. During this time, Lewis was beginning to write fiction and to see that as his vocation. Finally, later that year, he moved to New York, the nation’s intellectual and artistic capital.
He took an apartment in Greenwich Village and eagerly participated in the “Little Renaissance” that was in full swing there, soaking up modern art and literature, as well as new ideas like Freudianism (which he instinctively rejected), and becoming a socialist. Lewis’s socialism was of the gradualist Fabian variety: He followed Shaw and H. G. Wells rather than the revolutionary Marxists, and he found Das Kapital “dreadful,” worse even than the Bible. Lewis’s political views would change very little over the years. His fundamental creed, voiced succinctly in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, was the classic liberal view that “everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.”
Lewis published a boys’ adventure novel and, shortly afterward, his first novel for adults, Our Mr. Wrenn, very much under the influence of his idol H. G. Wells, a socialist and a realist who, like Lewis, combined social passion with a powerful sense of humor. At the same period—in 1912—he met his future wife, Grace Livingston Hegger, a pretty and elegant beauty editor at Vogue. Gracie’s family had slipped down into the middle class, but she tried hard to maintain the Park Avenue lifestyle and demeanor of their earlier prosperity. She spoke with an English accent, although she had spent her entire life in America: It was hers, she claimed, by inheritance, since her parents were English. She renamed her fiancé “Hal”; Harry and Red, his usual nicknames, she found too plebeian, Sinclair too formal.
Many of Lewis’s friends found Gracie