V
And then the mail brings a volume containing 867 pages and weighing several pounds. It is Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, by Mark Schorer. I have known about the preparation of this “monumental study” for several years. It is a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, and so will be widely read; the story of a man whom I knew for almost half a century, whom I admired and helped when I could, whose books I praised when I could, and whose tragic ending I mourned because I had tried to prevent it and failed.
I have told how Hal Lewis showed up as a runaway student from Yale, expecting to find our Helicon Home Colony more interesting. He met there, not in an academic way but socially, such people as William James and John Dewey; Jo Davidson, the sculptor, who was later to do his bust; and Sadakichi Hartmann, art authority, whom Lewis had to help put out because he (not Lewis) was drunk. Also I remember that Professor W. P. Montague of Columbia University taught Lewis how to play billiards, and Professor William Noyes of Teachers College taught him how to tend the furnace. Edwin Björkman, translator of Strindberg, told him about that strange playwright, and Edwin’s wife, a suffragette and editor, later became Lewis’ boss. As I have already noted, Edith Summers, my secretary, became Lewis’ sweetheart at Helicon Hall.
It was all quite different from what he would have gotten at Yale, and he learned a lot about the modern world and modern ideas. He left us after several months and wrote us up in the New York Sun. That was going to be the way of his life for the rest of his sixty-six years. He would wander over America and Europe, then settle down somewhere and write stories, long stories or short ones, about the people he had met and what he imagined about them.
Everywhere he went, both at home and in Europe, he ran into what is called “social drinking,” and his temperament was such that whatever he did he did to extremes. He became one of those drinking geniuses whose talents blossom and fade.
I have known two kinds of drink victims. There are the melancholy drinkers who weep on your shoulder and ask you to help them. You try to, but you can’t. Such a man was my kind father, whom I watched from earliest childhood and whom I remember introducing to Hal Lewis at Helicon Hall—shortly before my father’s pitiful ending. The other kind is the fighting drunk, and Hal became one of those; you may read the painful details in Professor Schorer’s book. Hal would throw his liquor into the face of the man who had offended him. He would use vile language and rush away—and rarely apologize later.
I never saw him in that condition; I was careful never to be around. That is why my friendship with him was carried on mostly by mail. I called on him once in New York, and found that he had to revise the manuscript of a play for rehearsal that afternoon; having been through that kind of thing myself, I excused myself quickly. He brought his first wife to my home in Pasadena, and he had not been drinking, so Craig and I spent a pleasant evening with them.
I have included ten of his letters in My Lifetime in Letters. Professor Schorer has quoted a long one in which Hal scolds me for what I had written about one or two of his least worthy novels. I am sorry to report that his biographer has left out what I did to help my old friend at the time when he was publishing his greatest novel—one that I could praise without reservation. Hal had told me about Babbitt during his visit in Pasadena, and he wrote me from New York, “I have asked Harcourt, Brace and Company to shoot you out a copy of Babbitt just as soon as possible.” I read the book at once, and sent them an opinion to which they gave display in their first advertisement:
I am now ready to get out in the street and shout hurrah, for America’s most popular novelist has sent me a copy of his new book, Babbitt. I am here to enter my prediction that it will be the most talked-about and the most-read novel published in this country in my life-time.
The book became probably the best-selling novel of the decade.
Later, when Lewis received the Nobel Prize and made his speech before the king and the notables in Stockholm, he named me as one of the American writers who might as well have been chosen for the prize. That was as handsome as anything a man could do for a colleague, and it was enough to keep me grateful to him up to the end. But I have to tell the tragic story of his “decline” and his “fall”—these two words are Schorer’s labels for large sections of the biography. “Decline” occupies 103 of the book’s pages, and “Fall” occupies the last 163 pages. “Decline” and “Fall” together comprise one third of the volume; and, oddly enough, when I figured up the years covered by those two sections, they cover one third of Lewis’ life (22 out of 66 years).
In Professor Schorer’s huge tome you may read the whole pitiful story of American “social drinking” as it affected the life of one man of genius. You may read about the parties and the rages, the various objects that were thrown into other men’s faces, and so on. The Berkeley professor has produced the most powerful argument against “social drinking” that I have encountered in my eighty-four years. My own books about the problem—The Wet Parade and The Cup of Fury, which I wrote in 1956—are small ones; Schorer’s contains more than half a million words—all of them interesting, many of them charming and gay, and the last of them a nightmare.
I will give only the names of the gifted people known to me who fell into the grip of John Barleycorn: Jack London, George Sterling, Eugene O’Neill, Scott Fitzgerald, O. Henry, Stephen Crane, Finley Peter Dunne, Isadora Duncan, William Seabrook, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Cram Cook, Dylan Thomas, Sherwood Anderson, Horace Liveright, Douglas Fairbanks, Klaus Mann. Most of these persons I knew well; the others I knew through friends. At least four took their own lives. Not one reached the age of eighty, and only three got to seventy-one of these, Seabrook, because he reformed.
And I will add one more name, which will be a surprise to many people: Eugene Debs, six times candidate of the Socialist Party for president of the United States. Gene was one of the noblest and kindest men I have had the good fortune to meet. He was a tireless fighter for social justice. He was one friend of the poor and lowly who stood by his principles and never wavered. In his campaigns he went from one end of the country to the other addressing great audiences. I was one of his pupils.
I heard him first at a huge mass meeting at Madison Square Garden. I was a young writer then, and he greeted me as though I were a long-lost brother. Many years later when he came out to Los Angeles, I had the pleasure of driving him from an afternoon meeting in the Zoological Gardens to an evening meeting in the Hollywood Bowl. Theodore Dreiser was there in a front seat, I remember, and he shouted his approval.
Gene fought against the fiend all his life, and his friends helped him. I personally never saw him touch a drop of liquor, but I got the story from George H. Goebel, who had been appointed by the party leaders as the candidate’s official guardian. It was Goebel’s duty to accompany him on every lecture trip and stay with him every hour, morning, noon, and night. That was an old story to me of course. Many times, as a lad, I had been appointed to perform that duty for my father. But, alas, I was not as big and strong as George Goebel.