276
JOHN HENRY RALIEGH
(when he wished) ; philanderer, drunkard, lecturer; bellicose, lonely,
courageous, generous, self-destructive, cruel; a dandy, a · toady (after
repeatedly saying to Lord Beaverbrook during a long conversation,
"What do you
think,
Max?" Beaverbrook finally turned on him,
"What do you think, Sine?"), a democrat, a village atheist, a patriot,
an expatriate; a "nuisance" drunk who was obsessed with orderli–
ness; all the time living in "a frenzy ... half melancholy," his last
true friend and companion being the mother of his last mistress, who
had since married someone else. Professor Schorer sums it all up near
the end of the book:
Consider
him
at any level of conduct-his domestic habits, his social
behavior,
his
character, his thought, his art- always there is the same
extraordinary contradiction. Sloppy and compulsively tidy, absurdly
gregarious and lonely, quick in enthusiasms and swiftly bored, extra–
vagant and parsimonious, a dude and a bumpkin, a wit and a bore,
given to extremities of gaiety and gloom, equally possessed of a talent
for the most intensive concentration and for the maddest dishevelment
of energies; sweet of temper and virulent, tolerant and abruptly in–
tolerant, generous and selfish, kind and cruel, a great patron and a
small tyrant, disliking women even when he thought he most loved
them, profane and a puritan, libertine and prude, plagued by self-
doubt as he was eaten by arrogance; rebel and conservative, polemicist
and escapist, respectful of intellect and suspicious of intellectual pur-
suits, loving novelty and hating experiment, pathetically trusting in
"culture" and narrowly deriding "art"; cosmopolitan and chauvinist,
sentimentalist and satirist, romanticist and realist, blessed-or damned
-with an extraordinary verbal skill and no style; Carol K ennicott and
Doc, her husband; Paul Riesling and George F. Babbitt; Harry Lewis
and Dr.
E.
J.
Lewis or Dr. Claude
B.
Lewis ; Harry Lewis and even
Fred the miller, who never left home.
But underneath was always the void, "I'm just like this dog, all
I want is affection," he said to Leonard Bacon as he patted Bacon's
dog. "'He was terribly afraid to be alone,''' presumably, because
when he was there was no one there. He had no capacity for tender–
ness and said of himself, "I exist mostly above the neck." Dorothy
Thompson who knew him best and loved him best, against all reason
and experience, declared: "You aren't a husband or a lover or a
father but a person of expression, a man of words." An acute stranger,
the then Edna Louise Larson, who took his course in creative writing
at Wisconsin, observed that he was "a cold rather than a warm per–
sonality," and that there was a "seeming emptiness in him." "Who
then, was Sinclair Lewis? Did he know himself who he was? Or what
he stood for?" Even at the height of his fame, flushed with the success
