The Cold Eye

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Sinclair Lewis possessed the Cold Eye, and this, John Derbyshire argues, made him more conservative than he would have admitted:

The one organ indispensable to a social novelist — much more so than, for example, a brain — is the Cold Eye: the ability to see one’s characters in all their folly and self-absorption, from a detached point of view — and yet with cynicism kept always at bay by some tenderness and a little envy. In that respect, at least, Sinclair Lewis was a great social novelist, which is of course a much higher thing than a mere satirist. The Cold Eye is everywhere in his books: he could not be sentimental if he wanted to — which, of course, he didn’t.

The passage I always remember in Main Street is the one where Carol decides that:

[I]n the history of the pioneers was the panacea for Gopher Prairie, for all of America. We have lost their sturdiness, she told herself. We must restore the last of the veterans to power and follow them on the backward path to the integrity of Lincoln, to the gaiety of settlers dancing in a saw-mill … This smug in-between town, which had exchanged ‘Money Musk’ for phonographs grinding out ragtime, it was neither the heroic old nor the sophisticated new. Couldn’t she somehow, some yet unimagined how, turn it back to simplicity?

She therefore seeks out the Perrys, elderly survivors from the pioneer days when the town was founded.

Their heroism and simplicity, however, seen up close, repel her. The Perrys are, in fact, narrow-minded fundamentalists who believe that: “What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us … All socialists ought to be hanged … People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked …”

Carol’s hero-worship dwindled to polite nodding, and the nodding dwindled to a desire to escape, and she went home with a headache.

There is endless scope for sentimentality in a passage like that one: sentimentality of all sorts, from Old Left romanticizing of the hardihood and courage of common folk to New Left tongue-clicking about the wickedness of white Christians pushing aside colorful, soulful aborigines. Lewis succumbs to none of the available temptations. He shows the pioneers as they undoubtedly were, and sends his sentimental heroine home with a headache.

As a child of the Midwest himself, Lewis knew of course that the nation could not have been made without the dull-witted, slightly fanatical sturdiness of the pioneers. He lets you know it, too. This is the America that is, that we must somehow come to terms with, as Carol eventually comes to terms, somehow, with her town and her marriage, as George Babbitt comes to terms with his city and his work. For those of us who think that wishful thinking is the defining characteristic of the Left, Sinclair Lewis is a friendly spirit.

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