280
JOHN HENRY RALIEGH
I was fifteen. You get along now and don't ruin my night's business."
After such history, what forgiveness?
III
If
Lewis was cast in the role of John Marcher-Theron Ware,
Professor Schorer plays two other James characters: the respective
protagonists of
The Aspern Papers,
the demanding pursuit down the
avenues of the past in search of a character, and
The Figure in the
Carpet,
the attempt to unravel the mystery and find the meaning.
There would be many ways of telling this story. One could
"psychologize" Lewis out of existence ("With that face and that
father, how could he have been saved?"). Or one could stand back
in
horror and moralize over the whole mess. Or one could encase
it in some easy generalities about the "fate of the American writer."
Or, worst of all, one could try to be "objective" and "nimtral." It is
one of the many virtues of this biography that it does none of these
things. It has to be read to be appreciated, but it can be said that
it is a triumph nbt only of scholarship but of tone and tact as well.
Just the right' distance from Lewis is established at the start and
held to the end by a perspective that is pervasively but not heavily
ironic and that can turn with ease, and without break, to either
comedy or tragedy but that never loses sight of the fact that Lewis,
at his very worst, was still a human being.
The form is both copious and severe, innumerable details held
together in a simple over-all structure. Lewis' life had a conveniently
disastrous symmetry : an over-all curve from an unhappy childhood
to a miserable death and within this arching pattern there is a kind
of muted ugly duckling story about the "hick" from the Midwest
who wins fame and fortune. The life by itself has then a very basic
and primitive appeal, the human fascination with tragedy and with
the tale of the ugly duckling. Within this over-all frame two things
are going on. First, and most obvious, is the year-by-year, month–
by-month, week-by-week, day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour account
of his life. Secondly, Lewis, in the first part of the book, gradually
emerges into the forefront of American life and in the last part
gradually disappears from it. By "emerging to the forefront" I do not
me.aIl simply that he became famous- for he became famous with
Main Street
and remained so--but that he had a genuine relevance
to his culture: he told it something about itself, about the existence
of Main Streets. and Babbitts.
If
he finally falsified both. images
in
his
