INTRODUCTION

George F. Babbitt: Promoting the Middle Man

In his novel Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis took a close look at what America was fast becoming and described it in clear, often damningly accurate and hilarious detail. In the 1920s, when readers first encountered the novel, they glimpsed new trends and tendencies that were going on all around them; we, as readers today, are in the curious position of witnessing just when and how the world as we know it—the world that we see virtually everywhere and that we tend to take for granted—came into being.

The hero, or at least the main character, of the book is hardly unusual. He is distinguished by neither intelligence nor stupidity, bravery nor cowardice, kindness nor cruelty. Although he manages to demonstrate all these characteristics, none of them can quite define him. In fact, George F. Babbitt is most interesting because he is not interesting, because he manages to locate himself between the extremes, positioning himself resolutely in the middle. He is, to put it simply, a middle-class, middle-brow, middle-aged, middle-American male who is about to embark on a midlife crisis. As a resident of the middle-sized Midwestern city of Zenith in 1920, he is poised on the brink of a great boom in the American economy and all the daring social changes that came along with it.

Yet as a person of some (although it must be stressed, just some) feeling, moral conscience, and spiritual belief, he is also heir to the terrible disillusionment that followed the Great War (World War I), which, in fact, is directly mentioned only once in the book (p. 111). Babbitt may not have participated in the “war to end all wars,” but his experience of his world makes clear in subtle ways just how America was struggling to redefine and, at the same time, to remain itself after the cataclysm. Babbitt, who was and probably still is regarded by many as a (if not the) quintessential American type, stands at the center of a culture that, to borrow from Charles de Gaulle, had gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening phase of civilization.

George F. Babbitt may not be a very likeable character, but he is difficult to hate completely. Ultimately, like some of the people who inhabit Sinclair Lewis’s fiction, he makes his peace with his times by choosing to go along with them and with all that he has previously questioned. The notion of conformism, which Babbitt at times praises and at other times ridicules, plays a powerful role in the way he lives his life. One may not wish to be exactly like everyone else, but at the same time, one cannot afford to be too different. The pressure of others is inescapable in the end.

Nevertheless, perhaps his very lack of anything outstanding, whether for good or ill, makes Babbitt a genuinely outstanding modernist creation. Babbitt functions in literature as most people appear to function in life: He blends in, goes along, tries to uphold what is generally thought to be best for himself and perhaps his family and, at the same time, strives to make a buck. This blend of business not with pleasure but with what is supposed to be decency (which is never much fun) is an uneasy one. During the course of the narrative, Babbitt strays, questions his own misgivings, looks to end his own unhappiness, and rebels. In the end, he makes amends. Unwilling to accept the peril that comes with rebellion, Babbitt cautiously, but gratefully, injects himself back into the social matrix that he has come so close to despising. He is saved at the expense of being lost.

The Author

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in Sauk Center, a village on the Minnesota prairie, on February 7, 1885. The third son of a country doctor, Lewis lost his mother (who had been the daughter of a doctor) when he was just six. His stepmother, née Isabel Warner, encouraged his reading and gave him access to his father’s extensive library. He attended public schools, where his red hair and bad complexion (caused by a chronic skin disease) made him the object of mockery. He went on to Oberlin Academy but quickly transferred to Yale. There in New Haven, and in New York City, he met socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair (at whose commune he worked as a janitor) and the great chronicler of the Yukon, Jack London (to whom he sold several plots for stories). He contributed to the university’s literary magazine, providing mostly romantic poetry and fiction about knights of old and their fair damsels. While in college, he spent his summer vacations shipping out on a trans-Atlantic cattle boat, looking for work on the Panama Canal, and struggling to earn money as a freelance writer.

After receiving his M.A. from Yale in 1908, Lewis worked his way across the country as an editor at publishing houses. In New York City’s artistic enclave, Greenwich Village, he met such leftist writers as Floyd Dell and John Reed, whose sympathetic first-person chronicle of the Bolshevik Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, would become a classic. Lewis wrote a book page that was syndicated nationally. After he married Grace Livingston Hegger in 1914, the couple spent much time traveling the United States. Lewis published his first novel in 1912, and even the birth of a son, in 1917, did not slow him down: Between 1912 and 1920 he published six novels, only the last of which brought him any success. In Main Street (which came out in the autumn of 1920 and sold briskly through Christmas), Lewis depicts Carol Kennicott, an intelligent and independent woman who feels stifled by the small town, Gopher Prairie, in which she and her doctor husband live. Like Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Carol has an affair with a young man, who she feels sure will take her away from her tedious rural life. Yet after the couple break up in Washington, D.C., she returns to Gopher Prairie, refusing to accept her failure but ultimately thwarted in her desire to create a life away from there.

Two years later, Lewis’s novel Babbitt was released and became an immediate best-seller. While Main Street exposes the lack of freedom and democracy in small-town American life, Babbitt lampoons the notion that American urban centers were at all urbane. Published in 1925, Lewis’s novel Arrowsmith follows an idealistic Midwestern doctor who, while treating an epidemic, is tempted by success. Elmer Gantry (1927) examines the life of a charismatic evangelical minister whose good fortune only deepens his hypocrisy. Dodsworth (1929) tells the story of a wealthy American couple (from Babbitt’s city of Zenith) who travel to Europe, where they realize that their marriage has failed. In 1930 Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Meanwhile, Lewis’s marriage, not unlike the Dodsworths’, had fallen apart. He divorced his first wife in 1928, and later that year he married the well-known foreign correspondent Dorothy Thompson, with whom he traveled throughout Europe. His drinking, however, was taking a toll on his life and career. Although he was financially secure, many of his friends were alienated by his alcoholism. He left Thompson in 1942 for a much younger woman and learned two years later that his son from his first marriage had been killed in combat in France. Although Lewis continued to publish novels throughout the 1930s and 1940s, they never received the praise or awards that his earlier work had earned.

In the 1930s, Lewis had started writing for the theater. His best-known play, It Can’t Happen Here (1936), a look at how fascism might flourish in the United States, was originally produced by the Federal Theatre Project, a Depression-era, government-funded program that created jobs for out-of-work theater people; it was widely produced all over the country. Lewis, a wealthy but lonely old man, died from complications due to alcoholism in Rome on January 10, 1951. True to form, he left one more novel (World So Wide), which was published after his death.

The Story

In Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis’s plotting is marvelous in that it seems not to have much of a structure. Events, almost all of them rather minor, occur as they do in our day-to-day experience and at first amount to what may be mistaken for a sketch of the ordinary. Only when we get to the place—the middle ground—that the main character occupies do we find a lucid, coherent succession of dramatic narrative. This chain of “events” occurs, in fact, in the middle of the novel, with a sequence of three dinner parties, each of which seems trivial in itself. Yet this series of parties turns the entire novel into an aching, often dizzying complaint about the terribly unfair demands of modern life.

The book begins with a day in the life of George F. Babbitt, a day sometime in April 1920, in the suburbs of the Midwestern city of Zenith. From his first moments of consciousness, when he is awakened by noise generated by someone trying to start a Model T, we share Babbitt’s thoughts and dreams. He goes back to sleep, trying to recover the recurrent image of a fairy child who tries to lead him out of the mundane and into an authentic life. We watch him dress, and we sit with him at breakfast, where we meet his wife, Myra, and their children, Theodore Roosevelt Babbitt, Verona, and Katherine (Tinka). We journey with him downtown to the real estate agency he runs. At his office, he cajoles and bullies those who work for him, wheedles, deals, and writes deceptive advertising copy, and also attempts to give up smoking. Although he comes up with a series of ingenious ways to make it harder for himself to put his hands on his own cigars, he never makes it hard enough; on his way to lunch at the Athletic Club, he stops and buys a cigar lighter for his car, a shiny device that impresses his cronies.

We lunch with Babbitt and his closest friend, whom he met in college, Paul Riesling, whose unhappiness Babbitt tries unsuccessfully to alleviate. After an unproductive afternoon at the office, we go home again with Babbitt, where we share an argumentative hour or two in the dining room. His idealistic daughter, Verona, educated at Bryn Mawr and now a secretary, fights with his high-spirited son, Ted, a fast-talking high school boy, over the use of the family car. Babbitt reads a magazine before retiring to his cot on the sleeping porch off the couple’s bedroom.

The Babbitts give a dinner party, which requires George to pick up an ice cream cake and also some bootlegged gin. The party comes off well: The couple’s friends and acquaintances get along perfectly, the conversation and food are fine, and Babbitt is so confident of his and his wife’s eminent place in Zenith society that he finally comes out and asks Myra if he can take a week, before their own vacation begins, and spend it fishing in Maine with Paul Riesling. Contented but wary, Myra agrees.

Convincing Riesling’s wife, Zilla, though, is quite another matter. The Babbitts visit them at their ultramodern apartment, and when the idea of the fishing trip is mentioned, Zilla explodes; only George’s bullying manages to persuade her to let Paul go. Their excursion is a retreat into the chummy world of male companionship. In smoke-filled Pullman cars, George swaps stories and jokes with the other men. In Maine, he wears flannel shirts and stops shaving, goes off with a guide into the wilds, plays cards, and drinks. And even though Paul seems just as gloomy as before, George returns to Zenith refreshed, feeling somehow hopeful and renewed.

This burst of hopefulness and renewal results in Babbitt’s becoming something of an orator at local Republican political meetings. His grandiosity melds with the half-truthfulness of his advertising jargon. Many, including and especially George F. Babbitt himself, are very impressed. Fully confident of his own worth, he attends his college reunion dinner, eager to regain the friendship of his former classmate Charles McKelvey, now one of the big names in local society. McKelvey and his wife, Lucille, are fixtures in Zenith’s newspaper society columns and entertain important people with British titles. In an effort to worm his way into McKelvey’s acquaintance, Babbitt pressures him to promise that he and Lucille will come to dinner.

Here in the middle of the novel is the deadly dinner party at which the McKelveys endure the Babbitts and their friends. Nothing much happens, but the party is a terrible failure. This episode, however, is followed by yet another dinner, one the Babbitts are obliged to attend. Another college classmate, who has not fared very well, and his wife host a fete that the Babbitts must submit to. Sandwiched between these two soirees is an account of a third: Zenith’s society columnist pens an affected and fawning report on how the McKelveys have hosted British industrialist Sir Gerald Doak. Although we never hear what the McKelveys have to say after their evening at the Babbitts’, we may be sure that it is rather similar to the remarks that pass between George and Myra following the time they must spend with people whom they regard as their social inferiors.

These central episodes mark a turning point in the main character and the novel. Babbitt, now resolved (in spite of the McKelveys’ rejection) to pursue his own success, spends time with various fraternal orders, booster organizations, and the local church, where the Rev. Dr. Drew preaches a rather muscular and self-serving Christianity. Drew seeks Babbitt’s advice on recruiting new students for the Sunday school. Babbitt ends up on a committee with a friend, “practical poet” Chum Frink, and with Mr. William Washington Eathorne, who as great-grandson of one of Zenith’s founding fathers is far, far above the McKelveys and their “smart set.” Babbitt applies his know-how from real estate advertising to the Sunday school project, selling the school as if it were a property and promoting it as if it were a new product. He also applies many of the techniques of business management—such as competition and hierarchical status—to Bible study classes. Eathorne, who receives Babbitt at his mansion, is pleased. Babbitt hires an idealistic reporter to help with public relations for the church school. The reporter ends up courting Babbitt’s daughter, and Babbitt looks on, somewhat enviously, as his son Ted spends time with Eunice Littlefield, the flapper next door.

The day-to-day operations of the real estate agency begin to sicken Babbitt. A trip to Chicago with Ted seems to bring father and son closer together, but in the big city, Babbitt feels lonely. Eventually, in Chicago, he runs into one of the titled gentry whom the McKelveys have entertained, the tired, old Sir Gerald Doak. They drink together and find that they have much in common. Hardly a member of the international set, Sir Gerald subscribes to the same organizations as Babbitt and describes the supposedly sophisticated Lucille McKelvey as a pretentious blabbermouth. The exhilaration of this out-of-town encounter is eclipsed when, the following evening, Babbitt runs into Paul Riesling in the company of a woman friend. He tries to “talk some sense” into Paul, whose unhappy marriage has led him into adultery, but Paul refuses to give up his new lady friend. In a matter of weeks, he and Zilla quarrel. Paul shoots but does not kill Zilla and ends up in jail.

Amid these events, Myra goes east to visit relatives, and for the first time since their marriage, George is left on his own. In this atmosphere of sudden freedom, suddenly bereft of his best friend, Babbitt feels a gnawing loneliness. He toys with the idea of becoming more friendly with his secretary, but she is uninterested in him. He flirts with a manicurist, whose teasing ultimately puts him off. The disreputable people across the street, Eddie and Louetta Swanson, invite him for drinks, and in his drunkenness he makes a pass at Louetta. Eventually, he shows an apartment to an attractive, artsy widow, a Mrs. Tanis Judique, by whom he is quickly captivated. His wife returns, and George, pretending he has a business meeting in New York, flees again to the masculine domain in Maine, where, as he goes on hunting parties, he decides to pursue Tanis.

On the train back from Maine, Babbitt meets Zenith’s leftist lawyer, the pro-labor Seneca Doane. Their conversation leads Babbitt to question his own Republican Party beliefs. Now, back in Zenith, he finds the men at the Athletic Club treating him differently as he, perhaps for the first time, speaks his mind on well-worn topics and current issues. His relationship with Tanis, which involves him in heavy drinking and a crowd of unconventional women and questionable men, helps to destroy many of the social ties he once carefully cultivated. Urged by his former cronies to join the Good Citizens’ League, a vigilante-like organization claiming to support decency in Zenith, Babbitt bravely declines. Even as his refusal brings criticism from family and friends, he stubbornly sticks to his position.

Yet Babbitt repents his philandering and rebelliousness after his wife suddenly becomes ill with appendicitis, and he fears she might die. Babbitt joins the Good Citizens’ League, gives up Tanis (or rather makes sure she gives up him), and returns to the fold. Once more secure in his place in the world, he looks to his son, Ted, who has dropped out of college and unceremoniously eloped with Eunice Littlefield, the libertine girl next door. Feeling his own life has all but ended, George F. Babbitt places his hopes in the next generation.

Inside Babbitt

Although many of the events that occur in Babbitt seem minuscule, the texture of the book and the nature and quality of its detail make the fiction rich in satire. Perhaps Lewis’s most noticeable target for ridicule is American business and the way urban life has become increasingly shaped by commercialization. From his first instant of consciousness (when he is woken by someone cranking a Ford), Babbitt’s world is filled with brand names, a few of them still familiar: B.V.D., Lilidol, Western Union, Waring, Bevo, Buick, Pierce Arrow, Packard, Standard Oil, Victrola, Ingersoll, Prince Albert Tobacco, and Pullman. Lewis, through such usage, is not succumbing to what we today call “product placement”; he is merely reporting how brand names and the products or services they define have invaded the personal lives of Americans.

Similarly, George’s home is inhabited by objects that define the Babbitts as up-to-date and prosperous people, including

an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal as sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board (p. 6).

The other rooms are furnished according to advice from “Cheerful Modern Houses for Medium Incomes,” in good, expensive, utilitarian style, and are completely devoid of taste. Lewis offers an explanation of how the car one drives reflects one’s status: “A family’s motor indicated its social rank as precisely as the grades of the peerage determined the rank of an English family” (p. 68). From the family record player to their choice of toothpaste, the Babbitts are what they own. Yet at moments readers may suspect the very opposite, that the Babbitts and others like them don’t own their possessions; rather, their possessions, to some degree, own them.

Lewis makes clear that this self-defining consumerism is hardly limited to just one family. The houses in Zenith’s affluent suburbs resemble each other, both inside and out, and so do the families—all of them as consumerist as the Babbitts—who live within them. Indeed, as the book progresses, people in Zenith argue in favor of the industrial virtue of standardization. While standardization in manufacturing may be beneficial in the long run, it may also lead to something more sinister; late at night, while Babbitt sleeps, Zenith’s socialist histologist, world-famous Dr. Kurt Yavitch, tells liberal lawyer Seneca Doane,

“What I fight in Zenith is standardization of thought, and, of course, the traditions of competition. The real villains of the piece are the clean, kind, industrious Family Men who use every known brand of trickery and cruelty to insure the prosperity of their cubs. The worst thing about these fellows is that they’re so good and, in their work at least, so intelligent. You can’t hate them properly, and yet their standardized minds are the enemy” (p. 92).

Not only does Yavitch describe Babbitt and his cronies, but he touches on a concept close to Babbitt’s heart. In his address to the Zenith Real Estate Board, Babbitt heaps praises upon “‘the Standardized American Citizen’ ” (p. 166) and sees standardization as a key justification for American superiority: “‘The extraordinary, growing, and sane standardization of stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and newspapers throughout the United States shows how strong and enduring a type is ours’ ” (p. 167). He even quotes his neighbor, newspaper writer T. Cholmondeley (Chum) Frink, the “practical poet” and advertising writer: “So when Sam Satan makes you blue, good friend, that’s what I’d up and do, for in these States where’er you roam, you never leave your home sweet home” (p. 168). America is fast becoming a nation that is everywhere the same.

Yet the most insidious invasion of business into American life is by way of the language. Even before talking pictures, radio, and television, spoken and written communication in the United States was permeated with the lingo of advertisements. On our first day with Babbitt, Lewis allows us to read Babbitt’s own real estate copy:

SAY OLD MAN!

I just want to know can I do you a whaleuva favor? Honest! No kidding! I know you’re interested in getting a house, not merely a place where you hang up the old bonnet but a love-nest for the wife and kiddies—and maybe for the flivver out beyant . . . the spud garden. Say, did you ever stop to think that we’re here to save you trouble? That’s how we make a living—folks don’t pay us for our lovely beauty! (p. 34).

The overly familiar, conversational tone, totally contrived to lure the male reader into buying a house, is laughably obvious, as are the deceptively rosy descriptions of the properties for sale. Ironically, later that night, when Babbitt finds his son enthusiastically reading promotional materials for correspondence schools, he (for good reason) cautions, “‘But same time, Ted, you know how advertisers, I mean some advertisers, exaggerate’ ” (p. 77).

But Babbitt is a mere amateur in comparison with that dean of ad writers, Chum Frink, who impresses the crowd at the dinner party that George and Myra throw for their friends by reading ads he has written for Prince Albert Tobacco and the Zeeco motor car. And as noted earlier, Frink is more than just a copywriter; his rhyming prose “Poemulations” (one of which George quotes in his pro-standardization speech) are syndicated in sixty-seven newspapers. The one Frink composes just before leaving for the dinner party is typical and revealing:

I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed and wunk, and groaned, “There still are boobs, alack, who’d like the old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and smelly old saloon!” I’ll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as any babe new-born! (p. 103).

Not only is the folksy versifying nothing short of awful, but it is, significantly, like all advertising copy, calculatedly meretricious. After all, a few hours after writing these pro-Prohibition lines, Frink is drinking cocktails with the Babbitts. (Later in the novel we watch him drunkenly stumble down the street late at night, decrying his own talents and mocking Babbitt.) Thus, business and its use of advertising has begun to corrupt the American language, making communication through words a medium primarily for lying. In speech and writing, the truth is replaced by standardized pieties that have been, at least among white, middle-class American males, universally accepted but rarely followed.

Babbitt and the Language of Hate

What Babbitt and his friends say and are willing to listen to make quite clear the limitations of their substitutes for genuine values. After George’s first triumph as an orator, he entertains at a men’s club event at his church “with Irish, Jewish, and Chinese dialect stories” (p. 171). In spite of their fervent patriotic boosterism, Babbitt and the other businessmen of Zenith are firm believers in their own freedom and their God-given right to make fun of anyone who is in any way different from themselves. The newspaper ad that draws Babbitt and his colleagues to a burlesque show implies just how bigoted its audience is: Featuring Jewish and Scottish comics, African-American tap dancers, and Italian strippers, the performance and its advertisement play to the lowest common denominator of Babbitt’s class. Any trace of ethnic or national origin other than white Anglo-Saxon Protestant instantly stereotypes the entertainers as “different” and thus inferior.

As he does with the language of advertising, Lewis demonstrates how the language of bigotry has permeated middle-American speech. Babbitt is aware that potential property buyers try to “jew you down on the asking-price.” One of the salesmen in the Pullman smoker with Babbitt and Paul Riesling recalls an uncooperative hotel desk clerk’s attitude with, “‘You’d ‘a’ thought I’d . . . asked him to work on Yom Kippur!’” (p. 128). When Babbitt asks the manicurist (with whom he is flirting) about her last name, she responds, “‘I guess it’s kind of kike. But my folks ain’t kikes’ ” (p. 260). At the Athletic Club, Sidney Finkelstein supports George’s purchase of the expensive car lighter: “‘The best is the cheapest in the long run. Of course, if a fellow wants to be a Jew about it, he can get cheap junk’ ” (p. 52). This self-loathing anti-Semitic remark is echoed by the burlesque show, in which “a Jewish comedian made vicious fun of Jews” (p. 157).

African Americans, who by constitutional amendment had been declared equal citizens more than fifty years earlier, fare even worse. In Babbitt’s world they are railway porters and are referred to as “Negroes,” “niggers,” “cotton-pickers,” and “plantation darkies.” Again, an anonymous salesman on the train expresses the views of Babbitt and his ilk most clearly: “‘I haven’t got one particle of race-prejudice. I’m the first to be glad when a nigger succeeds—so long as he stays where he belongs and doesn’t try to usurp the rightful authority and business ability of the white man’ ” (p. 131). Anyone in any way different—in speech, culture, or color—is instantly viewed as inferior.

For the businessmen of Zenith, an Irishman is a “Mick,” an Italian is a “Wop” or a “Dago,” and a German is a “Hun” or a “Hunky.” In politics, Babbitt and friends condemn anyone other than strict Republicans. People who choose an alternative lifestyle are “Bohemians,” those drawn to culture “highbrows,” and those who live in the country “hicks,” “small-town boobs” from “Yapville” and other “rube burgs.” Lewis peppers his characters’ speech and thoughts with a lexicon of prejudice. The terminology reveals the need for Babbitt and his kind to exclude those “dangerous” segments of the population who they fear will threaten their own position in society. The larger cities, where such diversity thrives, such as New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, are places, Babbitt tells his realtor audience, “‘that no decent white man . . . would want to live’ ” (p. 164).

Babbitt and the Gender War

“White” is only one of the operative words in Babbitt’s consideration of what is acceptable. Undoubtedly the largest and most dangerous segment of the population, and certainly the most threatening, is female. Although, or perhaps because, women had just won the right to vote, an event to which the novel refers directly only once, the misogyny of Babbitt and his fellows is more than evident. His taxonomy of women bears witness to his ambivalence toward them:

He divided them into Real Ladies, Working Women, Old Cranks, and Fly Chickens. He mooned over their charms but he was of opinion that all of them (save the women of his own family) were “different” and “mysterious” (p. 113).

At the same time, to Babbitt women are apparently well-understood commodities, whose defects are well known. “‘That’s the trouble with women,’ ” announces Babbitt to his family, “‘that’s why they don’t make high-class executives; they haven’t any sense of diplomacy’ ” (p. 80). “‘Trouble with women is,’” he lectures his wife, “‘they never have sense enough to form regular habits’ ” (p. 85). Later he tells her, “‘That’s the trouble with women! They’re always criticizing and commenting and bringing things up, and then they say it’s ”for your own good“!’ ” (p. 314). He has already explained how Myra is incapable of thinking: “‘Woman never can understand the different definitions of a word’ ” (p. 285). He even ferociously chastises the dreaded Zilla Riesling, saying she is “‘taking advantage of being a woman and springing every mean innuendo you can think of’ ” (p. 123). When Myra expresses some sympathy for Zilla, George taunts, “‘I might of expected you’d stick up for your own sex!’ ” (p. 124). Toward the end of the book, when Babbitt asks himself, “‘Why can’t women ever learn a fellow hates to be bulldozed?’ ” (p. 322), he never pauses to recall just how savagely he bulldozed Zilla.

For Babbitt, the word “girl” has a pejorative yet erotic usage. While Babbitt applies it to the enchanted fairy girl he fleetingly pursues in his dreams, he identifies his secretary, Miss McGoun, with her “black bobbed hair against demure cheeks” (p. 34), as a real-life substitute for the attractive dream figure. His wife has faded from being an object of his desire; “Myra was distinctly a Nice Girl” (p. 81), he muses, but is no longer either nice or a girl. And on the whole, “girls” are not “nice.” When he rebukes his son for his interest in girls, Babbitt criticizes what he himself is drawn to: “‘a lot of fool girls with their dresses up to their knees and powdered and painted and rouged and God knows what all as if they were chorus-girls’ ” (p. 74). The personification of these “fast” types is Eunice Littlefield, the flapper next door, whom Ted marries and whom, by the end of the novel, Babbitt has identified as the fairy child of his dreams. As Eunice amusingly puts it, after soothing the Babbitt men’s frazzled nerves, “‘It beats the devil why feminists like me still go on nursing these men!’” (p. 336).

The answer to Eunice’s puzzlement is evident in the way Tanis Judique is able to use George’s need for reassurance that he is masculine to her own advantage. “‘I don’t think any woman ever learns to drive like a man,’ ” she tells him. In the presence of such a seemingly sensitive and sympathetic listener, he responds, “‘I never did like these mannish females,’ ” and, “‘It’s a man’s place to take a full, you might say, a creative share in the world’s work and mold conditions and have something to show for his life’ ” (pp. 254-255). Mrs. Judique heartily agrees. Once George’s wife has returned and Babbitt withdraws from Tanis’s life, she pressures him to come back and soothes his ego by extracting from him “facile masculine advice” (p. 324). Yet in the long run, the seductive widow becomes yet another encumbrance for him: “He wondered whether she had ever been anything more to him than A Woman” (p. 306). Babbitt’s musings suggest that, even at best, the most “A Woman” can ever be for him is someone to confirm his own manhood.

In actuality, the need for males to assert themselves as men is one of the most pervasive themes in the novel. Not only is Babbitt’s real estate brochure written expressly for male readers (“SAY OLD MAN!”), but the literature sent by correspondence schools to the unsuspecting Ted plays more explicitly with the same myths about virility:

The first displayed the portrait of a young man with a pure brow, an iron jaw, silk socks, and hair like patent leather. Standing with one hand in his trousers-pocket and the other extended with chiding forefinger, he was bewitching an audience of men with gray beards, paunches, bald heads, and every other sign of wisdom and prosperity (p. 70).

In a box next to the text, the flier insists that it teaches “How to be a MASTER MAN!” (p. 72). In this context, what is deemed significant is engendered in the masculine: Frink’s ad copy is “‘real he-literature’ ” (p. 109); Babbitt sees himself as “‘an old he-one’ ” (p. 132); in Maine he dons “‘he-togs’ ” (p. 135); the ideal Zenith citizen is the “‘Real He-man’ ” (p. 166); the Sunday School journals give Babbitt the sense of “‘a real he-world’ ” (p. 191); and a congressman’s report to the Boosters is deemed “‘real he-stuff’ ” (p. 329). Babbitt sees Zenith, which was founded “‘by the Fathers’” (p. 169) as home to “‘manly men and womanly women’” (p. 167). His clergyman, Dr. Drew, preaches ” ‘The Manly Man’s religion’” (p.185). Babbitt’s mother asserts that his late father knew “‘what a Real Man he was’” (p. 210), and Ted refers to himself and his father as the “‘Babbitt men’” (p. 218). Several times throughout the book, we hear a manly man described as a ”real guy” (p. 224, 266, 351). The constant pressure to play the role of a man haunts the male characters.

Of course, there is a certain irony to all this. Ted’s brochure for a boxing course-by-mail asks,

CAN YOU PLAY A MAN’S PART?

If you are walking with your mother, sister or best girl and some one passes a slighting remark or uses improper language, won’t you be ashamed if you can’t take her part? Well, can you? (p. 73).

Yet earlier, over lunch, Paul has told Babbitt about how Zilla made a scene while shoving her way into a movie theater. A man in front of her politely asked her why she was pushing him, and Zilla’s reaction was so outrageous that the man was ready to fight Paul, who ignored it all (p. 56); instead of coming to his wife’s rescue in a “manly way,” Paul chooses not to fight. If Paul is less of a man in the cinema lobby, he is also more sensitive and intelligent than his college buddy: Paul plays the violin, talks intelligently, and appears to have figured out long before George just how futile their lives are. Perhaps Babbitt’s friendship with him derives in part from the way Babbitt feels he must take Paul under his wing, like a younger brother, and rescue him. It is under the guise of helping Paul that Babbitt argues with Zilla and then takes Paul to Maine.

Nonetheless, Paul Riesling is the one character for whom Babbitt genuinely appears to care. His attempt to break up Paul’s fling in Chicago is well intentioned; he even backs Paul’s alibi by sending Zilla a postcard from Akron, where Paul has told her he has gone, and then visiting her, trying to get her to be nicer to Paul. When Paul shoots her and is jailed, Babbitt comes to his aid, tells the lawyer that he would be willing to lie on Paul’s behalf, and later visits Zilla to see if she will help reduce Paul’s sentence. (As another wonderful irony, Zilla has converted to an unforgiving sect of evangelicals.) Perhaps the most tender moment in the book comes when George puts his arm around his son’s shoulders and wishes “that Paul Riesling had a daughter, so that Ted might marry her” (p. 177). When Babbitt actually tries to express his feelings for Paul, the “shame of emotion” overpowers them (p. 137); and when Paul is jailed for shooting Zilla, Babbitt feels an overwhelming loss: “Babbitt returned to his office to realize that he faced a world which, without Paul, was meaningless” (p. 243).

Sadly, this desire for a closer relationship, some deeper connection with Paul, is necessarily accompanied by a fear of any such intimacy. Indeed, in the world that Babbitt inhabits, the fear of other men is never far. True, in the Pullman smoker to Maine, Babbitt feels a sense of freedom: “They were free, in a man’s world” (p. 126); and on a trip to another city, Babbitt sits in a hotel room, drinking and smoking cigars and swapping stories: “They were,” describes the narrator, “in fact males in a happy state of nature” (p. 155). Yet “nature,” as Babbitt understands it, requires a male always to play the Man. Men who are in any way unmanly become the objects of scorn and phobic loathing. The Rev. Mike Monday, a thinly disguised version of the popular evangelist preacher Billy Sunday, rants against “Lizzie boys” (homosexuals). Characters such as YMCA director Sheldon Smeeth, who insinuatingly tries to hold hands and pray with George, or real estate salesman Chet Laylock, whose “domestic confidences were as bubbling as a girl‘s” (p. 36), awaken in Babbitt a phobic revulsion. He finds with dismay that Tanis Judique’s circle contains “three overdressed and slightly effeminate young men” (p. 300); earlier, the narrator has implied that there is something very odd about Lucille McKelvey’s relationship with Horace Updike, “Zenith’s professional bachelor, a slim-waisted man of forty-six with an effeminate voice and taste in flowers, cretonnes, and flappers” (p. 88). For any male to incorporate any qualities that may be vaguely perceived as feminine—Babbitt notices his own “‘soft hands—like a woman’s. Aah! ’” (p. 241), and Myra’s physician notes that Babbitt, like most husbands, is a “‘lot more neurotic than the women!’” (p. 340)—verges on the criminal.

There’s No Bad Publicity

Like Main Street, which had generated much controversy and became an immediate best-seller, Babbitt aroused the indignation of many as it sold out across the United States. Sinclair Lewis’s satire of business in general and of particular aspects of business made him the target of journal and magazine articles and even cartoons for years. Yet the anger and outrage also made people want to talk about the book and thus created the need to read it. In Britain, and then through translations across Europe, George F. Babbitt became symbolic of what was good and bad in America. The negative publicity worked in Lewis’s favor.

Originally Main Street had been chosen to receive the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, but at the last moment the trustees of Columbia University (who award the prize) chose to give it instead to Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence. Similarly, Babbitt was also nominated for the Pulitzer, and in 1923 the prize again went to another novel: Willa Cather’s One of Ours. Lewis capitalized on this negative reception: When his novel Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer in 1926, he refused the prize by writing the committee a widely published letter, again causing controversy and of course more attention. Four years later, however, Lewis happily accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature; he was the first American writer to win it.

Lewis lived to see several of his works turned into films. Babbitt and Main Street were originally made as silent films and then shot again as talkies; Arrowsmith, Ann Vickers, and Dodsworth were also made into movies in the 1930s, and other novels were brought to the big screen in the 1940s. In the 1950s, with the development of television, Lewis’s works were adapted for the small screen. (His novel Elmer Gantry, which, when it was first written, was considered too sexually explicit, was finally filmed and appeared in cinemas nationwide in 1960.)

Yet Lewis’s success and fame waned following World War II. A shift in taste and values, away from the liberating spirit of the 1920s and the frustration of the Depression, and toward a very pro-business, conservative conformity, made his works seem less relevant to many. Although he continued writing, his reputation remained in the past. Perhaps more recent shifts in our culture may be credited with making Babbitt once again seem eminently readable.

 

Kenneth Krauss teaches drama at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. His books include Maxwell Anderson and the New York Stage (which he coedited), Private Readings/Public Texts, and The Drama of Fallen France. In addition to numerous articles, he has written plays, including There’s a War Going On, Boudoir Philosophy, Bodybuilders in Jockstraps, Out of Nowhere, and The Unimportance of Being the Ideal Butch. His current project, Male Beauty: Presentations of Postwar Masculinity, examines film, theater, and physique magazines from the 1950s.