Sinclair Lewis on American Literature

I am going back, way back for this post. Sinclair Lewis was the American to find the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have a love/hate relationship with Lewis. I had to read his Main Street and Babbitt in college.  I read Arrowsmith on my own. I tried It Can't happen Here in law school and couldn't take his style of writing and quit. That was it. 

Then in prison I ran across It Can't happen Here once more and I set down to read  it. I thought this time: Why wasn't this made into a movie?  Then I went onto reading Elmer Gantry. My experiences with those novels I wrote up and will present at another time, but the bottom-line is I do not see how he kept me reading but he did.  And that is a talent that should not be dismissed easily....

Still,  I wasn't sure what to do when I found the Nobel lectures. Unlike some I have already noted, Lewis put a title to his lecture: The American Fear of Literature. Well, that didn't sound so dated. Lewis does a roll call of American writers, including three future Nobel laureates, before saying what he has to say about writers in America:

Thus, having with no muted pride called the roll of what seem to me to be great men and women in American literary life today, and having indeed omitted a dozen other names of which I should like to boast were there time, I must turn again and assert that in our contemporary American literature, indeed in all American arts save architecture and the film, we – yes, we who have such pregnant and vigorous standards in commerce and science – have no standards, no healing communication, no heroes to be followed nor villains to be condemned, no certain ways to be pursued, and no dangerous paths to be avoided.

The American novelist or poet or dramatist or sculptor or painter must work alone, in confusion, unassisted save by his own integrity.

That, of course, has always been the lot of the artist. The vagabond and criminal François Villon had certainly no smug and comfortable refuge in which elegant ladies would hold his hand and comfort his starveling soul and more starved body. He, veritably a great man, destined to outlive in history all the dukes and puissant cardinals whose robes he was esteemed unworthy to touch, had for his lot the gutter and the hardened crust.

Such poverty is not for the artist in America. They pay us, indeed, only too well; that writer is a failure who cannot have his butler and motor and his villa at Palm Beach, where he is permitted to mingle almost in equality with the barons of banking. But he is oppressed ever by something worse than poverty – by the feeling that what he creates does not matter, that he is expected by his readers to be only a decorator or a clown, or that he is good-naturedly accepted as a scoffer whose bark probably is worse than his bite and who probably is a good fellow at heart, who in any case certainly does not count in a land that produces eighty-story buildings, motors by the million, and wheat by the billions of bushels. And he has no institution, no group, to which he can turn for inspiration, whose criticism he can accept and whose praise will be precious to him.

Is there so great a difference between 1930 and 2021?  That what we write comes to a question of our own integrity seems to still be true. Of course, not for me, a moral leper.