COMMENTS & QUESTIONS

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

HUGH WALPOLE

Mr. Lewis writes with facility, but it is a terrific, not a mild, facility. It seems sometimes that it is only the raw material for a book, but it is not rawly presented. It is a little overwhelming for a quiet reader, and this extravagance of detail becomes wearisome. Mr. Lewis is certainly a remarkable writer, and even when you are thoroughly bored by him you must admire his persistence and vitality.

—from his introduction to Babbitt (1922)

 

MAY SINCLAIR

It is a very remarkable achievement to have made such a thing as Babbitt so lovable and so alive that you watch him with a continuous thrill of pleasurable excitement. Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s method of presenting him is masterly, and in the highest sense creative because it is synthetic. He does not dissect and analyze his subject, but exhibits him all of a piece in a whole skin, yet under such powerful X-rays that the organism is transparent: you see all its articulated internal machinery at work. Never for a moment do you detect the clever hand of the surgeon with his scalpel. Not once does so much as the shadow of Mr. Sinclair Lewis come between you and Babbitt. In his hands Babbitt becomes stupendous and significant.

The minor characters have not perhaps the solidity and richness of the persons of “Main Street,” because in “Main Street” the protagonist is the community, and all the cast are principals, significant members of the group. Here the minor characters are important only in their relation to the central figure, but (with the exception of one fantastic caricature, the poet, Chum Frink) each one of them is drawn with the same devout reverence for reality; each is alive and whole in its own skin: Mrs. Babbitt, Vergil Gunch, Paul Riesling and his wife, Zilla: the Babbitt children, Ted and Verona. If reality is the supreme test, Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s novel is a great work of art.

And it is an advance on its predecessor in style, construction and technique. One might say it would have as many readers but that “popularity” is a mysterious and unpredictable quality. For though nobody will recognize himself in George F. Babbitt, everybody will recognize somebody else. Here, as in “Main Street,” Mr. Sinclair Lewis has hidden the profound and deterrent irony of his intention under the straightforward innocence and simplicity of his tale.

—from the New York Times (September 24, 1922)

 

H. L. MENCKEN

Let me confess at once that this story has given me vast delight. I know the Babbitt type, I believe, as well as most; for twenty years I have devoted myself to the exploration of its peculiarities. Lewis depicts it with complete and absolute fidelity. There is irony in the picture; irony that is unflagging and unfailing, but nowhere is there any important departure from the essential truth. Babbitt has a great clownishness in him, but he never becomes a mere clown. In the midst of his most extravagant imbecilities he keeps both feet upon the ground. One not only sees him brilliantly; one also understands him; he is made plausible and natural. As an old professor of Babbittry I welcome him as an almost perfect specimen—a genuine museum piece. Every American city swarms with his brothers. They run things in the Republic, East, West, North, South. They are the originators and propagators of the national delusions—all, that is, save those which spring from the farms. They are the palladiums of 100% Americanism; the apostles of the Harding politics; the guardians of the Only True Christianity. They constitute the Chambers of Commerce, the Rotary Clubs, the Kiwanis Clubs, the Watch and Ward Societies, the Men and Religion Forward Movements, the Y.M.C.A. directorates, the Good Citizen Leagues. They are the advertisers who determine what is to go into the American newspapers and what is to stay out. They are the Leading Citizens, the speakers at banquets, the profiteers, the corruptors of politics, the supporters of evangelical Christianity, the peers of the realm. Babbitt is their archetype. He is no worse than most, and no better; he is the average American of the ruling minority in this hundred and forty-sixth year of the Republic. He is America incarnate, exuberant and exquisite. Study him well and you will know better what is the matter with the land we live in than you would know after plowing through a thousand such volumes as Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion. What Lippmann tried to do as a professor, laboriously and without imagination, Lewis has here done as an artist with a few vivid strokes. It is a very fine piece of work indeed.

—from Smart Set (October 1922)

 

LILLIAN C. FORD

Of this new novel by Sinclair Lewis the publishers say that “they believe it is better—even better!—than ‘Main Street.’ ” That “even better” is touching. But it is exceedingly doubtful if the public that grinned over or applauded or deprecated “Main Street” will agree with this dictum.

In reading “Babbitt,” one feels that Mr. Lewis has little new to say. His success in the earlier novel has emboldened him to say the same thing again and to say it louder. If now and then his voice becomes strident, his satire a little overdone, without the enlivening humor that made “Main Street” such a treat, at least, most readers will agree that “Babbitt” is a book well worth the reading, even though it lacks much of the humor and spontaneity of the earlier book.

—from the Los Angeles Times (October 1, 1922)

 

CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE

[Babbitt] is an expression not of discerning observation of American middle class life and character but of propaganda that passes with some of our young writers as liberal thinking, as cosmopolitanism, or sophistication.

At east-side restaurants it is eloquent and seems important, but it has little to do with the forces that are making our social or political character. Labor, over which it sentimentalizes, is chiefly interested in getting for itself those material possessions into which Mr. Lewis, we suspect, despite his contempt, is ready enough to put a good part of his royalties. The comforts of city life and of modern farm life, which the radical sentimentalist scorns, but so far as we have observed seldom foregoes, are made possible not by the producer of raw materials but by the middle class worker, the director, organizer, distributor. The realtor, for example, makes it possible for Mr. Lewis, when the proceeds of his novel-making accumulate, to get a suburban or even a city palace without going from plot to plot, from street to street, until he finds what he wants.

That the middle man produces nothing in the sense the farmer does, is obvious. But without the bourgeois, with his planning skill, his organization of means, his perhaps naive and unbalanced enthusiasms, scorned of the intellectual who profits by them, we should have a state of primitive society, existing on the rim of famine and a prey to the harsh buffets of unsentimental nature. The bourgeois makes the city and what in the way of security and physical amelioration the city connotes. Mr. Lewis and his like owe him most of the things which they enjoy and we doubt they are the men for the primitive life to which their vague theorizing would return us.

Speaking of the recent passion of real estate men to call themselves “realtors,” how about the recent passion of novel writers to call themselves “artists”? There is infinitely more pompousness in Greenwich Village than in any athletic club. Come out of it, Mr. Lewis. Read Huck Finn and see how a real “literary artist” does his work.

—October 8, 1922

 

REBECCA WEST

To write satire is to perform a miracle. One must hate the world so much that one’s hatred strikes sparks, but one must hate it only because it disappoints one’s invincible love of it; one must write in denunciation of ugliness and put the thing down in unmistakable black and white, yet keep this, as all written things, within the sphere of beauty. But Mr. Lewis has been equal to these things. He writes of vulgar Zenith City and its vulgar children, yet never writes a vulgar line. He is merciless to George F. Babbitt, that standardised child of that standardised city, with his pad-cheeks and puffy hands, his hypocrisy and his ignorance, his dishonesty and his timid sensualities; and he reveals him lovable and pitiable, a strayed soul disconsolate through frustrated desires for honour and beauty.

—from the New Statesman (October 21, 1922)

 

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

A cheap, vulgar life is cheap and vulgar! This appears to be the real message of the new novel by the author of Main Street. There is, to be sure, a suggestion of another note formerly not strange to Mr. Sinclair,—the joy of working out one’s own salvation, or trying to,—but this spirit is only a weak infusion. In his later novels, indeed, this author seems to have shifted his emphasis from the more or less unreal (but entirely possible) individual who rebels against a real environment, to the more or less unreal environment which slays the individual. There is a gain in technique, perhaps, but scarcely in significance.

The significance of this central idea can in no way be proved. Babbitt is not a picture of American life; American life is too big to be pictured in a single novel. Besides everyone knows that while Babbitt, a real-estate man, has no philosophy but that of “hustle,” no wit but that of coarse chaff, and is ignorant about many things, such as drainage, that pertain to his specialty, you cannot have half-an-hour’s chat with the average American—garage man, architect—without discovering more sense and knowledge than Babbitt is ever allowed to possess. Your garage man will tell you something of the idiosyncrasies of women who drive cars, or are driven in them; your architect will tell you how it is that school-buildings may be made not only fire-proof but panic-proof, and both will have really good ideas about bringing up children. Babbitt and his group are not typical of America.

But are they not typical of some small section or stratum of American life? If so—and America is so various that one cannot deny it—then they are not pictured with the careful Balzacian realism necessary to make them true.

No, the truth is, Babbitt is simply a satire—a monstrous, bawling, unconscionable satire, on phases of American life that Mr. Lewis happens to have chosen and which he has concentrated arbitrarily and quite unnaturally into a single-life story. Mr. Lewis is the most phenomenally skilled exaggerator in literature to-day.

—November 1922

 

FORD MADOX FORD

With an immense admiration for Babbitt as a book, I always had behind me the dim feeling that Mr. Babbitt himself was a little of a Robot, moved here and there by his creator in an unimaginably real projection of Main Streets—the landscape, as it were, being in the major chord.

—from Bookman (April 1929)

 

BERNARD DE VOTO

Too unscrupulous a satirist, too defective a technician, too limited by the intellectual and emotional clichés of his generation, too naive and too earnest, Sinclair Lewis is nevertheless the best novelist of his generation in America. He knows America better than any of the others, and he has conspicuously what they lack, fecundity and strength.

—from Saturday Review of Literature (January 28, 1933)

Questions

1. How would you define Babbittry? Is it still with us? If so, to what degree?

2. Is there something definable that is replacing Babbittry? If so, what would you call it? What are its characteristics?

3. Do you see any relation between Babbitt’s male chauvinism and his other values? What does “manliness” have to do with a business ethic?

4. Is Babbitt’s situation particularly American? Would a small-town businessman in France, England, or Thailand, for example, have been radically different? What in the American character or situation contributes to Babbittry?