THE
"TRUTH"
273
stranger, unbiased, uncommitted, and unconstrained, can approximate
the truth about another character.
But there is still a third and final irony residing in the fact that
even when all the facts are known, even when there are no constraints
or prohibitions in the telling, the character under consideration instead
of becoming clearer, as the details about him pile up, becomes more
mysterious and fluid, as the countless acts and attitudes of which his
life is made multiply, complicate, clash, and altogether defy any easy
generalization. Santayana's intuitive glance would have told the by–
stander that Lewis was a mess, but what a very special and complicated
and unique mess he was can only be appreciated by reading these 814
pages. And the "mess" has always the tendency to turn into a mystery,
for this total resurrection of Lewis negates all easy generalizations about
him. No life, much less Lewis's, WQuld bear such scrutiny without be–
coming both ambiguous and disreputable. The only thing this biography
proves with certitude is the incontestability of the old Italian saying:
"Someday the truth will be known, and it will be sad." As for Lewis,
he was both everything and nothing.
II
The first thing that one notices about the character of Sinclair
Lewis is a basic antithesis (one term of which contains another whole
series of antitheses). On the one hand there was a nothingness about
him.
This is the ground theme, the barren core, the empty heart of
his life. It is announced in the opening sentence: "He was a queer
boy, always an outsider, lonely;" and sustained to the awful end
when, as an Italian doctor prophesied, he would not just die, he
would "simply go down a hole." But there is a constant counterpoint
which makes up almost the entire substance of this great biography and
terrible story and which tells, in relentless detail, a story of consider–
able complexity of character and frenzy of activity, of innumerable
atoms jangling around the void. For
if
there was something un–
human or dishuman about him, he was at the same time all too
human, as the saying goes: considerable human complexity and con–
tradiction enveloping a final inner emptiness. In fact the only analogy
that I can think of to suggest his "character" is-insofar as I can
understand the conception-that of the atom: a mad, confusing, dance
of electricity which is finally quite unsubstantial. The image of electricity
in describing him is almost irresistible, for it is woven into the book.
People who saw him
in
action instinctively seized upon it, and the
startlingly red hair and the startlingly blue eyes made it duly ir-
