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.