Free The Last Empire by Gore Vidal Page B

there is no plot at all to
Main Street
. Things just happen as they appear to do in life. In Minneapolis, Carol Milford meets Will Kennicott, a doctor from the small town of Gopher Prairie. There are events, some more dramatic than others, but the main character is Main Street and the intense descriptions of the place are most effective, while the people themselves tend to be so many competing arias, rendered by a superb mimic usually under control. Later, Lewis would succumb to his voices and become tedious, but in
Main Street
he is master of what Bakhtin (apropos Dostoevsky) called “the polyphonic novel. . . . There is a plurality of voices inner and outer, and they
retain ‘their unmergedness.’ ” Lewis is splendid on the outer voices but he lacks an idiosyncratic inner voice—he is simply a straightforward narrator without much irony—while his attempts to replicate the inner voices of the characters are no different, no more revelatory, than what they themselves say aloud.
    “On a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern sky.” The first sentence is brisk; it places us in time—reminds us that this was Indian territory a half century ago, and so the white man is new to the scene, and his towns are still raw. “Cornflower” is
Saturday Evening Post
. “Corn” itself is a bit dangerous, as in corny. “Blue” isn’t all that good either. Yet, paradoxically, Lewis had a lifelong hatred of the cliché in prose as well as a passion for sending up clichés in dialogue: this can cause confusion.
    Anyway, he has now begun the story of Carol Milford, enrolled at Blodgett College, a girl full of dreams even more vivid than those of Emma Bovary—dreams rather closer to those of Walter Mitty than to Flaubert’s Emma, though, in practice, as it later proves, Carol has more than a touch of Bouvard and Pécuchet in her when she takes to the field with one of her projects to bring beauty to a drab world. Lewis maintained that, as of 1920, he had read neither
Madame Bovary
nor Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology
, whose set of arias from the simple dead folk of a small-town cemetery inspired a generation of writers, achieving a peak, as it were, in Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
. Incidentally, there is some evidence that Lewis based her on the mother of Charles Lindbergh (cf. 132).
    Carol is involved in the “tense stalking of a thing called General Culture.” Ostensibly on her behalf, Lewis drops Culture names all over the place. First, Robert G. Ingersoll, the nineteenth-century agnostic, and then Darwin, Voltaire. One can’t really imagine her liking any of them—she is too romantic; she dreams of truth and beauty. Ingersoll is a hard-bitten, dour freethinker. The other two are outside her interest. Later he tells us that she has read Balzac and Rabelais. Since she becomes a librarian, the Balzac would be inevitable but neither Carol nor Sinclair Lewis ever read Rabelais. There are some things that an experienced dispenser of bookchat knows without
any
evidence.
    At a Minneapolis party, Carol meets Dr. Will Kennicott, a doctor in the small town of Gopher Prairie. He is agreeable, and manly, and adores her. In a short time: “He had grown from a sketched-in stranger to a friend.” Will is “sincere” (a favorite word of Carol’s is “insincere”). Carol meanwhile (as a result of Mrs. Wharton on interior decoration and
Italian Gardens?
) has dreamed that “what I’ll do after college [is] get my hands on one of those prairie towns and make it beautiful. Be an inspiration. I suppose I’d better become a teacher then. . . . I’ll make ’em put in a village green, and darling cottages, and a quaint Main Street!” Hubris is back in town. One doubts if the worldly Grace Hegger Lewis ever thought along those lines in Sauk Center in 1916. But Lewis has got himself a nice premise, with vast comic