438
PARTISAN REVIEW
Neither the letters nor the prose pieces are remarkable for general
ideas. What is remarkable about them is the restless and driven energy
they index: an energy that found its expression, as the letters testify,
in a savage writing schedule; an ostrich gluttony for masses of data
procured from real estate catalogues, church conventions, and the
specialized knowledges of such men as De Kruif, whose brains Lewis
picked for
Arrowsmith,
and Birkhead, the De Kruif of
Elmer Gantry.
Lewis deliberately and exuberantly submitted himself to more lousy
rhetoric than any writer can be expected to do and live. In doing so
he learned a great deal about the daily bombardment of crooked speech
which is the lot of his countrymen. He had what Hart Crane demanded
of the poet in a machine society-Han extraordinary capacity for sur–
render, at least temporarily, to the sensations of urban life." And what
sensations he chronicles! He also had what Hart Crane had not: a con–
stitution and an arrangement of nerves that could make such a sur–
render without being destroyed in the process, and a mimetic gift that
delighted in retaliation. Crane killed himself, Lewis developed an even–
tual tolerance for the toxic substances to which he was exposed, and,
in his later years, an affection for them because he had survived them.
Mithridates, he died old. The spectacle of Lewis preparing to lay siege
to an American subject is awe-inspiring. There is no Jamesian principle
of parsimony here-no scuttling away with just enough facts to feed
the imagination, and no more. James was a gourmet, Lewis (like Joyce)
a glutton, a Gargantua. He had an insatiable appetite for steaming
mountains of American fact, and the writing process was for him less
the conscious wooing of the spirit of intellectual beauty than the per–
istalsis of a digestive system that would honor a goat.
The energy with which Lewis devoured his subject matter could be
called single-minded if there were not a couple of energies left over:
for example, the energy which he devoted to getting his books sold and
his name known. The first volume which Lewis published with the
new firm of Harcourt, Brace and Howe was called
Free Air,
an engag–
ing romance in which attention was equally divided between getting
the girl and repairing the automobile. The unsuccessful Eastern com–
petitor for the hand of the Midwestern nymph has the ability to rough
it in the north woods, but he can't fix a flat: a somewhat exclusive def–
inition of manhood. From the sale of the movie rights to
Free Air,
Lewis got some capital to invest in the new publishing firm. As a sort
of noisy partner, he could then bombard his associates with suggestions
about the proper handling of his books. He overlooked no detail, from
advertising copy which he wrote himself, to the lists of critics to whom
