342 Making It New: 1900–1945expresses vaguely liberal opinions for a while, he even takes up with a fast set of
local bohemians. But, like Carol Kennicott, he is eventually absorbed back into the
provincial. Defined, once again, by a world of convention and commodity, all he
can hope is that his son Ted will not surrender like him. “Don’t be scared of the
family,” he tells Ted, “No, nor all of Zenith. Nor of yourself, the way I’ve been. Go
ahead, old man! The world is yours!”
What is striking about Babbitt is that its satirical account of middle-class
boosterism and provinciality hovers close to the affectionate. Lewis seems half in
love with the thing he mocks. More to the point, there are no values in the book
beyond those of the protagonist; and all he has to offer, by way of resistance to the
normality of Zenith City, is feeble dreams, sad moments of escape, and, for a while,
a bohemian lifestyle that turns out to be as conventional and internally competitive
as that of the boosters. By the time Lewis came to write Dodsworth (1929), a novel
about a retired automobile manufacturer traveling in Europe, the muted, compro-
mised criticism of the middle class that characterized his earlier novels had taken a
further turn. The central character, Samuel Dodsworth, is almost wholly admirable.
A man who embodies all the solid, practical virtues of the provincial middle class, it
is he who truly values not only American sense but European sensibility. Not only
that, he is both a scholar of a kind and an artist, we are told, “an authority on auto-
mobile designing” and someone who “had been influenced by his vision, a quarter
of a century ago, of long, clean, streamlines!” By contrast, his wife Fran is Carol
Kennicott or the “fairy child” of the earlier novels seen through a glass darkly. It is
she at whom the satire is leveled because of her levity and pretentiousness, her fail-
ure to appreciate all that is best about her husband and her homeplace. Lewis con-
tinued to write novels committed to the idea of social and political change, such as
Asa Vickers (1933), about a Midwestern girl who becomes a social worker, and It
Can’t Happen Here (1935), a warning about the possibility of fascism in the United
States. But, by now, he had returned to a reassertion of those very middle-class,
middle-brow, and middle-western standards he had begun by satirizing. Hardly a
radical in his youth, he was certainly not a conservative in his later years: one of his
last novels, for instance, Kingsblood Royal (1947), deals critically with race relations,
while another, The God-Seeker (1949), explores the problems of Native Americans.
To that extent, his is not the same story as that of Ellen Glasgow. But, in his own way,
he reacted as she did to radically changing times by returning to values he had once
vigorously resisted: as a result, a novelist who began as a pathfinder ended up seem-
ing curiously old-fashioned.
Lewis has been called one of the worst writers in modern American literature, yet
someone without whose books that literature cannot be imagined, not least because
he opened up a new world, that of the middle-class Midwest, to American literature.
By contrast, Sherwood Anderson was a deliberate stylist. But he, too, focused his best
work on the provincial life of the West. And without that work, too, modern
American literature is difficult to imagine. “He was the father of my generation of
writers,” William Faulkner was to observe. Storytellers as otherwise different as
Faulkner himself, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean Toomer, and ErskineGGray_c04.indd 342ray_c 04 .indd 342 8 8/1/2011 7:53:48 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 48 AM