Free The Last Empire by Gore Vidal Page A

time to read” and movies to go to and, later, television to watch. The
Saturday Evening Post
serial, often well-written by a good writer, would now be done, first, as a miniseries on television or as a theatrical film. Today nonfiction (that is, fictions about actual people) stuffs our magazines and dominates best-seller lists.
    In any case,
pace
Schorer, conformity in American life, whatever that means, would certainly be a spur to any writer. As for fragmentation, it is no worse now as the countryside fills up with Hispanics and Asians as it was when Lewis was describing the American hinterland full of Socialist Swedes and comic-dialect Germans. Actually, to read about the career of Sinclair Lewis is to read about what was a golden age for writing and reading; now gone for good.
    Lewis’s energetic self-promotion among the masters of the day paid off. His dedicatees Cabell and Hergesheimer wrote glowing testimonials. Predictably, the novel appealed to the English realists if not to Bloomsbury. The former wrote him fan letters—John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West; presently he would be taken up by the monarch of bookchat and the master of the fact-filled realistic novel, Arnold Bennett. At home a fellow Minnesotan wrote him “with the utmost admiration,” F. Scott Fitzgerald. But five years later Fitzgerald is wondering if
Arrowsmith
is really any good. “I imagine that mine [
Gatsby
] is infinitely better.” Sherwood Anderson leapt on and off the bandwagon. Dreiser ignored the phenomenon but his friend H. L. Mencken was delighted with Lewis, and praised him in
Smart Set
. When Lewis’s sometime model Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for
The Age of Innocence
, Lewis wrote to congratulate her. As for this uncharacteristic lapse on the part of a committee
designed to execute, with stern impartiality, Gresham’s Law, Mrs. Wharton responded with her usual finely wrought irony: “When I discovered that I was being rewarded by one of our leading Universities—for uplifting American morals, I confess I
did
despair.” She praises Lewis vaguely; later, she is to prove to be his shrewdest critic.
    While Mr. and Mrs. Sinclair Lewis toured restlessly about Europe, trying to enjoy his success, he was already at work on
Babbitt
.
    *    The Library of America has now brought out both
Main Street
and
Babbitt
in a single volume, and it was with some unease that I stepped into the time-warp that is created when one returns after a half century not only to books that one had once lived in but almost to that place in time and space where one had read the old book—once upon a time in every sense. It was said of Lewis that, as a pre–1914 writer, he had little in common with the rising generation of post–World War writers like Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner. It might equally be said that those of us who grew up in the Thirties and in the Second War made as great a break with what had gone before as today’s theoreticians made with us. Literary history is hardly an ascending spiral, one masterpiece giving birth to an even greater one, and so on. Rather there are occasional clusters that occur at odd intervals each isolated from the others by, no doubt, protocreative dust. Lewis was pretty much his own small
star set to one side of Twain, Crane, James, and Wharton, and the small but intense postwar galaxy which still gives forth radio signals from that black hole where all things end. In the Twenties, only Dreiser was plainly Lewis’s superior but Dreiser’s reputation was always in or under some shadow and even now his greatness is not properly grasped by the few who care about such things.
    What strikes one first about
Main Street
is the energy of the writing. There is a Balzacian force to the descriptions of people and places, firmly set in the everyday. The story—well, for a man who supported himself by writing stories for popular magazines and selling plots to Albert Payson Terhune as well as Jack London,