THE
"TRUTH"
277
of
Babbitt,
Ludwig Lewisohn could speak of
his
triumphant face as
being composed of "glittering surfaces." At the end, living in his garish
villa in Florence, attended only by the shadowy, and apparently dubious,
Alexander Manson, his last "secretary," drinking himself to death in
solitary bouts, taking walks alone only on the shadow side of the house,
he exclaimed "Oh God, no man has ever been so miserable!" One has
to go back to Swift to find an equivalence to this, and, worse, he
had not a jot of Swift's authentic greatness. For after more than sixty
years of talking, writing, traveling, lecturing, loving, hating, whoring,
drinking, ranting, it had all added up,
fOT
him anyway,
to: zero. In
America, where life follows art, organic Americans are always acting
out the roles prescribed for them by fictional Americans, and Lewis
finally turned into the John Marcher of Henry James's
The Beast in
the Jungle.
Just as May Bartram had offered to save Marcher, so had
Dorothy Thompson tried to save Lewis. Both women-<>r men really–
fail. Marcher finally realizes that May Bartram should haw! been his
fate and in fact "was what he had missed." It is difficult to imagine
that Lewis would ever have thought this of "the Talking Woman"
of his conception, but he certainly must finally have come, through
the haze of alcohol, to Marcher's realization: "The fate he had been'
marked for he had met with a vengeance-he had emptied the cup
to the lees, he had been the man of his time,
the
man, to whom nothing
on earth was to have happened." According to those who were close
to
him,
Lewis had no real vanity, however angrily proud he could
be, and was thus deprived of that last great narcotic, self-deception.
He did not know what he was and therefore nothing had ever really
happened to him; and the knowledge evidently drove him to his death.
There are a host of other people in the book, the whole literary
world of early twentieth-century America and England, but out of
these scores of characters only three count: Dr. E.
J.
Lewis, the
father, Dr. Claude Lewis, the brother, and the wonderful Dorothy
Thompson, the wife. And Lewis is the flowing water to the bleak
rocks of his father and brother and the sturdy green tree of Dorothy
Thompson. The father and the brother were just like the father
and the brother of George Eliot: upright, capable, competent, suc–
cessful, both knowing who they were and what they wanted, always
disapproving of the red-haired maverick. But George Eliot was a
woman and having the approval and support of another man, G. E.
Lewes, could learn to live with the peimanent disapproval of her
father and her brother, but Lewis was a man and could not. Lewis
could never please his father, but he tried with Claude his brother,
