She has a sudden vision of Apocalypse. War. Towers crashing yet “an unchallenged faith and love and generosity, which . . . still lay deep-rooted in the American psyche to deliver us from death—remembering the Fair at the Flushing Meadow, the Futurama (sponsored by General Motors and displaying with such naive assurance the chart and prospect of these United States).” There is a kind of patrician Whitman at work here and one wonders does anyone now, nearly sixty years later, feel so intimately about Manhattan, the American fact?
In The Christmas Tree, Bolton has moved on to 1945. Mrs. Danforth wants her six-year-old grandson, Henry, to have a proper old-fashioned Christmas tree while all that he wants is to play with his bomber and fighter planes. She lives in a skyscraper overlooking the East River but a part of her is still anchored in the brownstone world of her youth, “the days when people really believed in their wealth and special privilege . . . the days of elegance, of arrogance, of ignorance and what a rashly planned security.” Today Christmas is vast and mass-produced on every side unlike the days of her youth. She broods on her son Larry, father to Henry. He lives now in Washington with a male lover while Anne, his ex-wife, is en route to New York for Christmas, accompanied by her new husband, Captain Fletcher, an Army Air Force wing commander. (Bolton errs on this one: he would have been at least a full colonel if not brigadier general.) Mrs. Danforth admires Anne’s resilience: the coolness with which she accepts the fact that she is often drawn to “the invert, the schizophrene, the artist. Men like that were never normal sexually.”
Mrs. Danforth is sufficiently in the grip of the Freudians of the Forties—never again, happily, to be so ubiquitous or so serenely off-base—to wonder if she had loved her son too much when they lived in Paris and it was quite clear to her that, at fifteen, he was having an affair with a French boy a year or two older. “She’d felt no censure of the boys, she had no inclination to reproach them. She’d only felt an immense love, an overwhelming pity for them. And oh, she questioned passionately, how much could she herself be held responsible for Larry’s inclinations? How much had she been implicated?” This was the era of the Oedipus Complex (something Oedipus himself did not suffer from since he didn’t know that it was Mom he had married after killing what he hadn’t known was Dad); also, of the era of popular books with titles like Generation of Vipers—denouncing the American Mom for castrating her sons. Although Proust must have taught Bolton a lot more than Mrs. Danforth would ever learn, it is probably true to the time that mother would blame herself for her son’s unorthodox sexual appetites.
Grumbach likes this the best of Bolton’s novels. It is certainly the most tightly plotted; it would make a solid old-fashioned drawing-room comedy with a melodramatic twist. Unfortunately, Bolton’s scenes between Larry and his lover are not quite all there on the page and what is there doesn’t have the reverberation that a memory, say, of Mrs. Danforth’s youth sets off in other pages. Bolton also makes the narrative more difficult for herself by shifting points of “view.” Mrs. Danforth gives way to Larry, preparing to break up with a lover while brooding upon his Parisian past; finally, should he join his ex-wife Anne and her new husband beneath his mother’s Christmas tree? We next shift to Anne on her way from Reno with her American husband; she is nostalgic for Larry,
an exceptional human being, she sometimes suspected that he’d given very little to anyone and that, as a matter of fact, he’d taken from others even less. It was in his enormous concern for the general human plight that his affections were the most implicated; his love of humanity in the large impersonal sense was profound. . . . He was at the mercy of certain tricks and habits of bad behavior—nervous reflexes which apparently he could not control. . . .
There the fatal flaw is named and prepares us for what is to come.
Anne and her manly Captain make up the family scene with the child and Mrs. Danforth. Larry’s presence is a dissonant note made worse by the arrival of his lover. Despite good manners all around, the collision between Larry and the Captain takes place over the child, who tells Larry that he hates him. The child prefers the war hero who has brought him numerous toy planes. The Captain then launches what is currently known as a “homophobic” rage at Larry, who tells him to get out. But instead they go out onto the terrace, sixteen stories above the street. The ladies hear loud voices, terrible epithets; silence. Larry comes back into the room, alone. He says that he has killed the Captain; pushed him over the railing. No, it was not an accident.
The others are willing to perjure themselves to save Larry. But he will not allow it; he rings the police; he confesses. “Au revoir, Maman,” he says, when they come to take him away. Mother and son have now reverted to their earlier happier selves. . . .
With what pride, with what great pride she had watched him go!
There was a flickering, a brightness, somewhere in the room. She turned; she lifted her eyes. The light was smiting the silver angel on top of Henry’s Christmas tree, poised and trembling, with its wings and herald trumpet shining brightly, there it hung above the guttered candles and the general disarray.
“Pardon us our iniquities, forgive us our transgressions—have mercy on the world,” she prayed.
The Christmas Tree was published one year after the Kinsey Report furrowed a peasant nation’s brow. The melodramatic ending meant that Bolton was responding, as so many of us did, to the fierce Zeitgeist. But her general coolness in dealing with the taboo probably accounts for the almost instant obscurity of her work amongst the apple-knockers.
Many Mansions was published when Bolton was close to seventy. She writes of Miss Sylvester, who is re-creating her own past by reading a memoir-like novel she had written years earlier. It is February 1, 1950, her birthday: she is eighty-four and Harry Truman’s birthday present for her is to give the order to build the hydrogen bomb.
She broods upon her great age:
The life of the aged was a constant maneuvering to appease and assuage the poor decrepit body. Why, most of the time she was nothing more than a nurse attending to its every need. As for the greater part of the night one’s position was positively disreputable, all alone and clothed in ugly withering flesh—fully conscious of the ugliness, the ignominy—having to wait upon oneself with such menial devotion—here now, if you think you’ve got to get up mind you don’t fall, put on the slippers, don’t trip on the rug.
The body is now a perpetual sly nemesis, waiting to strike its mortal blow.
Meanwhile, Miss Sylvester has taken to pursuing lost time, that long-ago time when the body was a partner in a grand exercise known as life. She also frets about money. Has she enough if she should live to be ninety? Should she die soon, what about leaving her small fortune to the young Adam Stone whom “she had picked up in a restaurant . . . the only person in her life for whom she felt genuine concern”? Adam had been in the Second War; emerged bitter; devoured books “ravenously”; was at work upon a novel: “He had cast off his family. He had cast off one girl after another, or very likely one girl after another had cast him off.” Miss Sylvester had spoken to him in an Armenian restaurant on Fourth Avenue. “I see you’re reading Dante,” was her opening gambit. She knows Italian and he does not; this proves to be an icebreaker though hardly a matchmaker.
Now she turns to her long-abandoned manuscript. Two families. Great houses. And the old century was still a splendid all-golden present for the rich. Seasons now come back to her. “Summer was that high field on the high shelf above the ocean . . . the surf strong, the waves breaking. Something pretty terrible about it—getting, in one fell swoop, the fury of the breakers carried back to crack and echo in the dunes . . . the wild cold smell of the salt spray inducing mania excitement.” One suspects that Bolton is actually writing of her fourteen-year-old twin who drowned, but Miss Sylvester, her present alter ego, is single and singular and in wild nature more natural.
As an adolescent she lives among numerous grand relatives; but always set apart. Her father was an “Italian
musician,” a “Dago organ-grinder,” she comes to believe, as the subject is unmentionable. Then, on a memorable Sunday Easter dinner, her grandfather makes a toast, “Let us drink to the burial of the feud.” The organ-grinder, her father, Sylvester, is dead in southern Italy. He had been paid by the family to go away, leaving behind his daughter as a sort of boarder in their great houses.
Then, almost idly, she falls in love with a married relative; becomes pregnant. The resourceful family assigns yet another relative to her, Cecilia, who takes her to Europe, to fateful Italy, where she is treated as a respectable married woman in an interesting condition. The child, a boy, is born in Fiesole; but she never sees him; her positively Napoleonic family has promptly passed him on to an elegant childless New York couple who whisk him away to a new life, under a name that she will never learn. Cecilia raves about the anonymous couple’s charm; their wealth; the guaranteed happiness of the boy’s life. Grimly, the mother murmurs the phrase “ ‘tabula rasa,’ . . . as though she’d coined it.” She would now begin again as if nothing had ever happened.
The old lady finished her reading: “If her book should fall into the hands of others addicted as she was to the habitual reading of novels, what exactly would their feelings be?” One wonders—is there such a thing now as a habitual reader of novels? Even the ambitious, the ravenously literary young Adam seems to have a suspicion that he may have got himself into the stained-glass-window trade.
With a sufficient income, Miss Sylvester moves to New York. She becomes involved with another young woman, Mary (they live in a gentle ladies’ pension near Fifth Avenue, presided over by yet another of the multitudinous cousins). “How passionately Mary loved the world and with what eagerness she dedicated herself to reforming it. . . .” The two young women study to be opera singers; but they have no talent. Then Mary involves them in settlement work and organizing women workers—it is the era of the young Eleanor Roosevelt, and Miss Sylvester realizes in old age that “with all the central founts of love—sexual passion and maternity—so disastrously cut off, had not this deep, this steadfast friendship for Mary been the one human relationship where love had never failed to nourish and replenish her?” But she loses Mary to marriage; then to death, which also claims, at Okinawa, Mary’s son.
Miss Sylvester has a long relationship with a Jewish intellectual, Felix; but feels she is too old to marry him; then he announces that he is to marry his secretary, who has been his mistress for ten years: Miss Sylvester’s decade of intimacy. They part fondly, for good.
She takes in, as a boarder, a young novelist. Son of a fashionable boring couple she once knew. Bolton is too elegant a novelist to reveal him as the old lady’s son but sufficiently mischievous to find him, despite great charm, of indifferent character, even flawed.
The book concludes with Miss Sylvester in her flat, collecting some much needed cash for Adam, who is waiting for her at the Armenian restaurant. But even as he is telephoning, she is felled by a stroke. Angrily, Adam leaves the telephone booth “to go back in the dining-room to wait for his old lady, under the impression that she is on her way.”
What then was the figure in the carpet that my highly imagined Edmund Wilson made out on his stately way to the floor? As I emerge from Bolton’s world, I am sure that what he saw was the fourteen-year-old twin sister brought back from full fathom five—with pearls for eyes—by a great act of will and considerable art to replace the mediocre Mary Britton Miller with a magically alive writer whom she chose to call Isabel Bolton, for our delight.
The New York Review of Books
18 December 1997
* THE ROMANCE OF SINCLAIR LEWIS
Elmer Gantry. It Can’t Happen Here. Babbitt. Main Street. Dodsworth. Arrowsmith. Sinclair Lewis. The first four references are part of the language; the next two are known to many, while the last name has a certain Trivial Pursuit resonance; yet how many know it is the name of the writer who wrote Elmer Gantry, played in the movie by Kirk Douglas—or was it Burt Lancaster?
Sinclair Lewis seems to have dropped out of what remains of world literature. The books are little read today, and he’s seldom discussed in his native land outside his home town, Sauk Center, Minnesota. Although Sauk Center holds an annual Sinclair Lewis Day, the guide to his home recently admitted, “I’ve never read Main Street. . . . I’ve been reading the biographies.” Elsewhere, the Associated Press (July 18) tells us, “About forty copies of Lewis’s books are on the shelves of the town library. For the most part, that’s where they stay.”
“I expect to be the most talked-of writer,” Lewis boasted before he was. But the great ironist in the sky had other plans for him. In the end, Lewis was not to be talked of at all, but his characters—as types—would soldier on; in fact, more of his inventions have gone into the language than those of any other writer since Dickens. People still say, in quotes as it were, “It can’t happen here,” meaning fascism, which probably will; hence, the ironic or minatory spin the phrase now gets. In the half century since Sinclair Lewis (one wants to put quotes about his name, too) what writer has come up with a character or phrase like Babbitt or Elmer Gantry that stands for an easily recognized type? There is “Walter Mitty” and Heller’s “Catch-22”; and that’s that. Of course, much of this has to do with the irrelevance of the novel in an audiovisual age. It is “Murphy Brown” not “Herzog” that registers, if only for the span of a network season. Finally, even if the novel was of interest to the many, its nature has certainly changed since the first half of the century when serious novelists, committed to realism/naturalism, wrote about subjects like the hotel business, the sort of thing that only pop novelists go in for nowadays.
That said, it would seem impossible that a mere biographer could effectively eliminate a popular and famous novelist; yet that is exactly what Mark Schorer managed to do in his 867-page biography, Sinclair Lewis.* Schorer’s serene loathing of his subject and all his works is impressive in its purity but, at the end, one is as weary of Schorer himself as of Lewis. I once asked Schorer, an amiable man who liked to drink almost as much as Lewis did, why he had taken on a subject that he so clearly despised. The long answer was money; the short, too. In this Schorer did not resemble Lewis, who, as much as he liked every sort of success, had a craving for Art in an echt-American way, and a passion for his inventions; also, he believed that somewhere over the rainbow there was a great good place that would prove to be home. As it turned out, he was never at home anywhere; and his restless changes of address take up altogether too many pages in Schorer’s survey, as they must have used up too much psychic energy in Lewis’s life, where the only constant, aside from frantic writing and frantic drinking, was, as his first wife sadly observed, “romance is never where you are, but where you are going.” Since he never stayed put, he never got there. Wives and women came and went; there were hardly any friends left after the end of the great decade of his life, 1920–1930.
In 1920, the unadmired great man of American letters, William Dean Howells, died, and Lewis published Main Street; then Babbitt (1922); Arrowsmith (1925); Elmer Gantry (1927); Dodsworth (1929).
The Nobel Prize followed in 1930. That was the period when the Swedes singled out worthy if not particularly good writers for celebration, much as they now select worthy if not particularly interesting countries or languages for consolation. Although the next twenty-one years of Lewis’s life was decline and fall, he never stopped writing; never stopped, indeed: always in motion.
“He was a queer boy, always an outsider, lonely.” Thus Schorer begins. Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, population 2,800. At the same time a couple of dozen significant American writers were also being brought up in similar towns in the Middle West and every last one of them was hell-bent to get out. Lewis’s father, a doctor, was able to send him to Yale. Harry or Hal or Red was gargoyle ugly: red-haired, physically ill-coordinated, suffered from acne that was made cancerous by primitive X-ray treatments. He was a born mim
ic. He had a wide repertory of characters—types—and he was constantly shifting in and out of characters. But where Flaubert had only one act, The Idiot, Lewis had an army of idiots, and once started, he could not shut up. He delighted and bored, often at the same time.
Although Lewis had been born with all the gifts that a satirist needs to set up shop he was, by temperament, a romantic. Early writings were full of medieval fair ladies, gallant knights, lands of awful Poesie where James Branch Cabell was to stake out his territory, now quite abandoned. Lewis also had, even by American standards, absolutely no sense of humor. In a charming memoir his first wife, Grace Hegger, noted, “Main Street was not a satire until the critics began calling him a satirist, and then seeing himself in that role, is it possible that [his next book] Babbitt became true satire?” The question is double-edged. Like Columbus, Lewis had no idea where he had gone, but the trip was fun. He loved his high-toned heroine, Carol Kennicott, but if others thought her a joke, he was willing to go along with it.
In youth Lewis wrote yards of romantic verse, much of it jocose; yet he had heard Yeats at Yale and was much impressed by the early poetry. Like most born writers, he read everything: Dickens, Scott, Kipling were his first influences. But it was H. G. Wells’s The History of Mr. Polly that became for him a paradigm for his own first novel. Like most writers, again, he later claimed all sorts of grand literary progenitors, among them Thoreau, but it would appear that he mostly read the popular writers of his time and on the great divide that Philip Rahv was to note—Paleface versus Redskin—Lewis was firmly Redskin; yet, paradoxically, he deeply admired and even tried to imitate those Edith Wharton stories that were being published when he was coming of age, not to mention The Custom of the Country, whose Undine Spragg could have easily served time in a Lewis novel.