SINCLAIR LEWIS, USA
DROPPING BY MAIN STREET' 60 YEARS LATER

Author: By Charles E. Claffey Globe Staff

Date: Saturday, October 11, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

"The town is, in our tale, called Gopher Prairie,' Minnesota. But its Main Street is the continuation of Main Streets everywhere. The story would be the same in Ohio or Montana, in Kansas or Kentucky or Illinois, and not very differently would it be told Up York State or in the Carolina Hills. . ."

- Sinclair Lewis

"Main Street"

SAUK CENTRE, Minn. - It was cold, close to 25 below zero on Jan. 28, 1951, the day that "Harry" Lewis' hometown honored him at a memorial service in the high school auditorium, recalls Dick Schwartz, co-owner of the Palmer House Hotel.

"I remember walking to the high school that day - I was a junior - and seeing the window of a department store shatter from the cold," Schwartz says.

"Lewis was an atheist, you know," Schwartz continues, "and the only religious part of the ceremony was when three women got up and sang the hymn, I Hear a Forest Praying.' "

"He was odd, eccentric I guess. No town is prepared for a guy like that," said Schwartz, assessing the chronically ambivalent relationship between the famous novelist and the small midwestern town he invested with international celebrity.

It was 60 years ago this month that "Main Street" was published, an event without parallel in the American publishing industry.

Lewis would have settled for a sale of 10,000 copies; his publisher, Alfred Harcourt, was more enthusiastic: around 20,000, he predicted.

In the first six months of 1921, sales had exceeded 180,000 copies. Today, the figure is well into the millions.

Lewis had made it big at the age of 35 with his fifth novel, a mordant satire of provincial narrowness, bigotry and boosterism.

Letters of praise streamed in from such literay notables of the time as H. L. Mencken, Hugh Walpole, H.G. Wells, Rebecca West, Sherwood Anderson, Vachel Lindsay, and even from the grande dame of American letters, Edith Wharton.

From a fellow Minnesotan whose first novel, "This Side of Paradise," was published that same year, came the following:

"I want to tell you that Main Street' has displaced (The Damnation of) Theron Ware' in my favor as the best American novel. The amount of sheer data is amazing! As a writer and a Minnesotan let me swell the chorus - after a third reading," wrote 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald of St. Paul.

"Main Street" at first evoked wrath in this town and its environs. In nearby Alexandria it was banned; the weekly Sauk Centre Herald kept editorial silence for five months before noting in its edition of March 13, 1921:

"A perusal of the book makes it possible for one to picture in his mind's eyes local characters having been injected bodily into the story."

Within two years the town had forgiven all, and Harry Lewis ("Red" to most of his literary friends) was welcomed back as Sauk Centre's national treasure.

Today, Lewis is a cottage industry. Oversized street signs in the town proclaim: "Original Main Street'; a Sinclair Lewis Avenue bisects it.

There is a "Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center," featuring a Lewis Museum; the athletic teams of the Sauk Centre High School are called the "Main Streeters," or, abridged, the "Streeters."

A poster inside the Palmer House Hotel heralds a stage presentation of "Strangers," a play about the stormy marriage of Sinclair Lewis and newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson.

But as Don Griswold, the publisher of the Sauk Centre Herald, remarked drily the other day: "They're having trouble filling the 200-seat auditorium for the play."

In Sauk Centre parlance, Griswold is a "transplant" - he is not native to the town. He moved here in 1971 from a town in western Wisconsin when he decided to buy the newspaper.

An amiable curmudgeon, Griswold discusses the influence of Lewis and his works on the town. "Lewis isn't the drawing card he once was. I think he's had his day.

"Sinclair Lewis is not as much debated here as the little Sinclair Lewises who come here and expect to find bigots hiding behind every curtain."

Then he commences a harangue about "hit-and-run journalists who come here with preconceptions about the town, and never bother to take a note because their story is mostly written before they ever arrive here."

Griswold cites as the most egregious example of that style of journalism a reporter from Pravda who visited a year or two ago.

"I took him to dinner, took him around town and introduced him to everyone, and then he wrote a story quoting me as saying things I never said.

"The gist of the Pravda story was that Lewis somehow was ruined by the capitalist society he wrote about."

Griswold offers a final observation about Lewis and "Main Street": "It's bunkum to think that Lewis was saying that a small town is as bad as a big town. A town as closely knit as ours is almost tribal. Everyone knows it's in his interest to be a good guy. And this kind of society tends to eliminate the
criminal."

Dave Jacobson, a native of Sauk Centre, whose grandfather homesteaded the farm he now lives on, was the first teacher at the high school to make "Main Street" required reading.

"In college (Minnesota State University at St. Cloud) and in the Army, I was embarrassed when people who knew I came from Sauk Centre started asking me questions about Lewis. I just didn't know that much about him."

Jacobson remedied that deficiency, and determined that Sauk Centre's high- school graduates should know about the author.

The student reaction to "Main Street": "They seem to identify pretty closely with the book, even though it was written in 1920. And I've had students say to me, I know somebody just like Mrs. Bogart (the town gossip),' " Jacobson says.

". . . Though a Gopher Prairie regards itself as a part of the Great World, compares itself to Rome and Vienna, it will not acquire the scientific spirit, the international mind, which would make it great. It picks at information which will visibly procure money or social distinction. Its conception of a community ideal is not the grand manner, the noble aspiration, the fine aristocratic pride, but cheap labor for the kitchen and rapid increase in the price of land."

Some geographical and physical facts about Sauk Centre: The city is about 110 miles northwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul; or 130 miles southeast of Fargo, N.D.; or 350 miles south of Winnipeg, Canada. The population is about 3600, down about 2000 since the 1970 census.

The downtown area and most of the houses - many of them small "ramblers," with some bungalows, colonials and Victorians - are carefully maintained. There are 10 churches, one movie house (called the "Main Street"), one department store, three clothing stores, two banks, a country club with a nine-hole golf course, and one hotel.

The hotel is the Palmer House, which is owned by Dick Schwartz, 46, and Al Tingley, 48, a "transplant" from Auburn, Maine. The two men met in Minneapolis, became friends, and pooled their money to buy the rundown hotel.

Built in 1901, it was basically a hotel for traveling salesmen that went into decline in the mid-1920s. Now it has been restored and become a popular gathering place for residents and visitors.

Lewis worked briefly at the hotel as a night clerk the summer after he graduated from high school, and according to local lore was fired because he failed to awaken a salesman in time for him to catch the 5:30 a.m. train out of town.

"I had a preconception when I first came to Sauk Centre," Tingley says. "I had read almost all of Lewis' books, and I wanted to see Main Street' as it was, with the old cornices on the buildings that he wrote about. Instead, there was modernity all around."

Tingley concedes "there is a narrowness of view" in Sauk Centre, but adds: "The attitudes are really no different here than they are in Auburn, Maine."

Among the younger "transplants" who frequent the Palmer House is Dr. Jeffrey Millman, 33, a physician who grew up in Brooklyn, graduated from the University of Chicago Medical School and went to Los Angeles for his internship and residency.

The parents of Millman's wife, Patricia, are both from Sauk Centre but moved to Los Angeles before she was born.

"I visited here when Patti's grandmother died and I really liked it," Millman says. "I wanted to practice in a small town, and after I filled in for another doctor for a few weeks, we decided to move here.

"I don't think things have changed here that much since Main Street' in terms of attitude," Millman says. "People are friendly here, but they're very conservative politically and economically, and many of them tend to be cautious, suspicious."

As an example of the city's adherence to old ways, Millman tells of his attempt to get Sauk Centre to operate a city-owned ambulance.

"The city didn't want to do it because it would be stepping on the toes of a private operator who had the contract for years, taking his income away. The reason: We've had it all these years, and it's worked, why change now?' "

One reason for the Millmans' decision to move here, he said, is that "there isn't a better place to raise children." They have a 7-year-old daughter. "It's safe - we don't have to lock our doors - there's clean air and relatively clean water."

His wife, he says, is "something of a Carol Kennicott." (She is the protagonist of "Main Street," an educated woman from the Twin Cities stifled by her life as the wife of a country doctor in a small town.) "She misses cultural things - restaurants, a college nearby, and all that goes along with it: new ideas, liberal ideas, things that are lacking here."

Still, the doctor says, the absence of external intellectual stimuli presents a challenge: "People in a small town are each other's entertainment. You have to work at it."

Most communities have prominent families - leaders, achievers, vogue- setters - and in Sauk Centre one of these is named DuBois.

Pat DuBois is the third generation of his family to serve as president of the First State Bank. Another branch of his family has produced three generations of physicians.

Dressed in a blue pin-stripe suit, DuBois, about 60, says of Sauk Centre: "This is a comfortable place to live. Our schools, water, sewers, are all adequate for today, and we're not that far from the Twin Cities."

"We are not a a one-religion-dominated community," adds DuBois, "so, therefore, people live with understanding of other people. We have two strong Lutheran churches, and two strong Catholic, but religious leaders here are tolerant in the interests of community development."

" Main Street'? I never finished it. It never intrigued me. It might now. I'm more of a reader, more tolerant."

"Carol drove through an astonishing number of books from the public library and from city shops. Kennicott was at first uncomfortable over her disconcerting habit of buying them. A book was a book, and if you had several thousand of them right here in the library, free, why the dickens should you spend your good money?"

The Sauk Centre Public Library is a squat, gray, one-and-a half-story brick building on Main Street. A plaque near the front door bears this tribute
from Lewis: "To the Bryant Libary . . . With lovely memory of the days when its books were my greatest adventure."

Phyllis Lahti, head librarian, says the greatest demand at the library is for "best-selling fiction" and lists as the most popular authors Louis L'Amour, the king of the Western novelists, and Sidney Sheldon, whose bent is romantic adventure.

Lahti, who has been in her job for only a few months, says she has some innovations in mind, among which is the formation of a "Friends of the Library Group to stimulate interest in reading."

"The people in this city are very sports-minded, and the way one season overlaps another it doesn't leave much time for reading."

Sinclair Lewis was a Yale man, Lahti says, and there is a family in town with a son, she believes, who also is attending the college.

Michael McDonald, it develops, is a freshman at Harvard, although he had been accepted at Yale and Columbia as well, says his mother, Joan McDonald.

"For a while Mike was kind of fascinated with the notion of being the first Sauk Centre boy since Lewis to go to Yale. But he chose Harvard, instead, after talking with some alumni from this area," says his mother.

Bill and Joan McDonald moved here to their house on Main Street in 1960
from Waterloo, Iowa, where both worked as reporters on the Waterloo Courier.

"The pay was terrible," she recalls, "and when Bill got an offer to put out the publication for the Independent Trade Assn. we didn't have to think about it too long."

At first, Joan McDonald says, "I identified with Carol Kennicott a lot. But I took the advice of a very bright friend of mine who told me: You can have just as variegated a circle of friends in a small town as in a big city - but you have to make an effort to find them.' "

The late Mark Schorer, one of Lewis' biographers, noted of him and "Main Street" that he had "become through this single book a spokesman for a literary generation . . . a single writer who presented American culture and American attitudes toward its culture." Lewis, Schorer wrote, was a replacement for the former occupant of that exalted position, William Dean Howells, who had died in the spring of 1920.

In that third decade of the century Lewis flourished, with four more critically acclaimed novels to reinforce his reputation: "Babbitt," "Arrowsmith," "Elmer Gantry" and "Dodsworth." In 1930, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, an honor that also marked the beginning of his personal and professional decline.

His marriage in 1928 to foreign correspondent Dorothy Thompson - the second for both - was a union of two supreme egoists. Thompson's reputation soared in the 1930s, while Lewis' faded, a descent accelerated by his heavy drinking.

From all accounts, they were badly matched; she with her love of political arguments and abstract discussion and he with his inability to discuss intelligently anything outside his narrow range of interest.

Still, Lewis kept writing during this period, and in the eight years after their divorce in 1942. After World War II, he traveled extensively through Europe, returning to the United States briefly in 1949. He went back to Europe in 1950, and made his way to Italy, where he started another novel, never finished.

Schorer offered this critical appraisal of Lewis: "He was one of the worst writers in modern American literature but without his writing one cannot imagine modern American literature. That is because, without his writing, we can hardly imagine ourselves. . . . He gave us a vigorous, perhaps a unique thrust into the imagination of ourselves."

On Dec. 31, 1950, Lewis was taken from his home in Rome to a clinic on the outskirts of the city. The diagnosis was acute delirium tremens. He was never rational again and died of a heart attack 10 days later.

Lewis was cremated, and his ashes put in an urn and flown to the United States, arriving in Sauk Centre on Jan. 21, 1951. The urn was polished by the town's undertaker and deposited in the bank until the services seven days later.

After the service, Schorer wrote, family and friends proceeded to the Lewis family plot in the cemetery, where his brother, the "thrifty Dr. Claude, saw no reason for putting the handsome urn in the ground when it might serve as a memorial to his brother in the Bryant Library. . . .

"Dr. Lewis cut the sealed wire of the urn, peered into it, knelt and slowly let the ashes slide out. A gust of wind came up and scattered some of them on the artificial grass, blew some into air. . . ."

Dick Schwartz recalls a comment attributed to the mortician, Charles Corrigan: "Well, Lewis got away from this town after all."

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