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JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
resistible: "He had a head of unmanageable red hair and a freckled
face and a pair of remarkable blue eyes, the pupils of which darted with
light." "He was never still, his hair flowed, his blue eyes blazed, his
long, sensitive hands gesticulated." Lewis himself seemed to think of the
electrical state as a kind of beatitude, and he dealt it out to his most
fulfilled and creative hero, Martin Arrowsmith. When Arrowsmith is
finally by himself, devoted solely to his research, "He hurled out
hypotheses like sparks," and "always he hummed." So too Professor
Schorer has embedded this basic metaphor into the impressionistically
written parts of the book: "He seldom sat, but often slouched, long
thin
shanks folding and unfolding, hands always plucking at his face–
nose, ears, cheek, chin-much jumping up, prancing, slouching again,
smoking, smoking." Thr 'ughout the book Lewis continually "darts"
and "spins." To this mus, be added the gruesome irony that his skin
disease was probably augmented, and a permanent and malevolently
red scar was imprinted upon his face, by X-ray treatments, at one time
an ignorantly barbaric method of treating acne.
As for the dance of the atoms, first, it was characterized by
contradictions of character, a maniacal range of interests, and a
restless, haunted rootlessness. Travel with him was an obsession, pos–
sessed as he was by the "fallacy of elsewhere." Afraid of planes, al–
though very interested in aviation, compulsive about trains-like Freud
he had to be at the station at least an hour beforehand-his was the
province of the automobile and the steamship, both of which were
invented, it seems, for the benefit of Sinclair Lewis. Without them
his life would have been impossible. Fords, Cadillacs, a final black
Studebaker, which he owned in the last black days in Italy, and trans–
Atlantic liners, carried this self-styled lover of Thoreau all over the
surface of the United States, the Atlantic Ocean and most of Europe,
with an extensive side-trip to the Caribbean, for research on
Arrow–
smith.
He once attempted an extended tour on foot, a camping trip into
Canada, but turned back before the planned journey was completed.
But by whatever means he traveled, he had hardly ever pitched camp
before he was beginning either to break it up or planning to break
it up. Neither was he ever very stable as to where he proposed to go
next. His life was the history of changed plans.
His range of interests was gargantuan, irrational, and, as usual,
obsessive. They often bordered on genuine knowledge, but never actually
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constituted knowledge itself. "He does not know what knowledge is,"
said Dorothy Thompson. Information was his real interest, and the
reference book was his favorite book (he had a whole library of them).
