BOOKS
439
copies must be sent. "How about a freak ad," he wrote the firm, "quot–
ing German, French, Spanish et al. comments in the original language?
And This:
MAIN STREET
M.D.B.
(Still the Most Discussed Book-M.D.B.)"
Batton and Barton lost a partner when Lewis decided to write novels.
As for the lists of critics, Lewis starts with newspaper reviewers and
ends with Gide and Eliot. The replies of the publishers to this barrage
dwindle in enthusiasm as the years pass.
The collection of prose pieces is of less interest than the letters.
Essays in opinion by a man without a talent for making distinctions are
likely to be monotonous. Lewis had as many general ideas as he
needed for the novels he wrote, and these pieces do not add to the
stock. They do present Lewis as he wished the public to see him:
gadfly, craftsman, and hick. Comments by Lewis on his literary fellows
are either unqualified praise (Carl Van Doren, Richard Wright) or
exercises in decapitation (Bernard De Voto). Lewis's remarks on the
craft and profession of a writer are those of a man with solid practical
experience and no sense of generic problems. He was of the old school
of American realists: find out the truth of the matter and set it down
as well as you can. His remarks on style, which are not without weight,
begin by denying that there is any such thing. His advice to young
writers is that of a man sure of his own assumptions about the nature
of writing, and not anxious to waste time questioning axiomatic mat–
ters:
"If
I knew a novice who really wanted to write, I would urge him
to spend ten years (1) in looking at and listening to everything about
him
and asking himself, 'What is this actually like, not what have I
always heard about it?' and (2) reading such novelists as Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Hemingway, Cather, Thomas
Wolfe, Dos Passos, Henry James, Mark Twain, Wharton, Faulkner,
Richard Wright, Maritta Wolff, Caldwell, Farrell, Steinbeck, Dickens,
Hardy, Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Scott, the Bronte sisters, Samuel
Butler, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, Kipling, Maugham,
George Moore, Balzac, and Proust." This is as extraordinary a catalogue
as any that Lewis ever devised (like Whitman he was a great writer
of catalogues, but he lined his nouns up less like a lover than like a drill
sergeant), but it is good advice and is given with the authority of a
professional. Lewis was cracker-barrel in his honesties: he was trained
in the school of the reporters, the men with the green eyeshades, along
with Ed Howe and Dreiser and Crane and Mark Twain and Heming-
