Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis - A One-Trick Plough Horse ...

As the son and grandson of physicians, Sinclair Lewis had a store of experiences and imparted knowledge to draw upon for Arrowsmith.Published in 1925, after three years of anticipation, the book follows the life of Martin Arrowsmith, a rather ordinary fellow who gets his first taste of medicine at 14 as an assistant to the drunken physician in his home town. It is Leora Tozer who makes Martins life extraordinary. With vitality and love, she urges him beyond the confines of the mundane to risk answering his true calling as a scientist and researcher. Not even her tragic death can extinguish her spirit or her impact on Martins life.

A One-Trick Plough Horse ...
... the John Deere tractor of fiction, a paint-by-the-chapter-numbers novelist! Sinclair Lewis, America's first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, did indeed write the same novel time after time. Babbitt the Man of Business, Gantry the Man of Religion, and Arrowsmith the Man of Science are identical triplets. Their life stories all begin as a child who feels exceptional in the drab materialist monotony of a provincial town, who thus foolishly overestimates his own abilities and his proximity to the center of Fate. They make their first escape toward a larger world, only to be hobbled by sexual vulnerability, by the `natural enemy' of their ego-fulfillment, Woman. On they forge, nevertheless, through chapter after chapter of compromised achievements and mitigated failures, until it seems that the novel per se is merely a contraption for humbling the perennial American Young Man of Promise. No novelist has ever humilated his heroes as vindictively as Lewis, or portrayed every one of his characters with such grim contumely and condescension.

But wait! Isn't that Young Man -- Gantry/Arrowsmith/Babbitt; Gantabbitsmith -- oddly familiar? Aren't all those vulgar small-minded philistines perfectly recognizable? Neighbors and kinfolk at some stage of your life? Isn't it lucky for my own self-esteem that Lewis never wrote a book called "Bruno", about the man of Music?

Arrowsmith aspires to a kind of distinction, in science and medicine, that makes his struggles more estimable, and his eventual shortcomings more painful than those of Gantry, but the point of the novel is much the same: the mightiest tree can only grow in fertile soil, and the soil of American culture, as Lewis saw it in the 1920s, was sterile. One has to wonder whether Lewis's fervid denuciations of American pretensions weren't perhaps the qualities most admired in his writing by the judges of the Nobel committee.

There are slashes of scalpel-sharp satire in Arrowsmith, though it's hardly a book that you'll roll on the floor laughing over. And it's remarkably pertinent, even after 80 years, to many of the debates over education today, especially at the university level. Every one of the little debacles that beset the life of Arrowsmith in the first decades of the 20th C is just as likely to beset the life of a bright, ambitious youth in America today. That's the weakness of Lewis as a novelist, that he is as episodic as a soap-opera, and almost as predictable. But his strength is that he relentlessly told Americans the truth about themselves, then and now.

Unlike Gantry or Babbit, however, as Arrowsmith bumbles through his failures as a small town citizen-doctor and eventually reconnects with his 'counterpart', the immigrant Jewish bacteriologist Gottlieb, his fundamental integrity and decency always survives. Arrowsmith is not a tale of moral degeneration like Elmer Gantry. One can sincerely 'root' for Arrowsmith to come though with his 'self' intact. And then, the surprise: the last large episode of Arrowsmith is uncharacteristically gripping, a genuine adventure that I do not wish to spoil by disclosure, except to note that it takes place on a Caribbean island that sounds identical to Domenica, one of my own Blessed isles. But this is the part of the book that troubles me most; Lewis seems committed to a view of science and scientists as Promethean rebels, only true to themselves when they strive in uncompromising individualism to light some sacred fire. It's that 19th C "Hero", the exceptional man extolled by 'lofty thinkers' from Carlyle to Rand and beyond. The vision of science as a collaborative triumph of society and government - the vision I share - seems to have horrified Sinclair Lewis. The great scoffer at folly of American literature disappoints me here; he could measure the shallows but he couldn't sound the depths.

Arrowsmith is a book that grows as you read it, but I wouldn't suggest this novel for a first approach to Sinclair Lewis. The iconoclastic Elmer Gantry, addressed to religious hypocrisy and opportunism, shoots its barbs of scorn at a bigger target, and tells an uglier truth. Arrowsmith is "a good read" but Elmer Gantry is salubrious bitter medicine.

Did Sinclair Lewis deserve the vaunted Nobel Prize? Sentence by sentence, as a wordsmith, certainly not! But as a social commentator, as a portraitist of a culture with all its warts and pimples, certainly yes! And consider some of the other winners: Rudolf Eucken, Paul Heyse, Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Grazia Deledda, John Galsworthy, Pearl Buck, Frans Sillanpää, Johannes Jensen, Mikhail Sholokov, Patrick White, William Golding, Claude Simon, Toni Morrison, Orhan Pamuk ... Did any of them produce a body of work of stronger fiber and deeper insight than Sinclair Lewis? Or of greater permanence?

Read the eloquent review of a few days past, by Mr. Schneider, for a similar perspective.

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