The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
Street as more than a novel: It was the true account of American life. The novel’s impact was compared to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The literary historian and Lewis biographer Mark Schorer described it as the “most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history.” More than any other book, Main Street gave the political label “liberal” its cultural content.
Lewis presented himself as a man of the prairies who knew America intimately. But Schorer noted that he knew little of the United States and almost nothing of its history. Rather, he was a literary man through and through—though some would describe him as an academic manqué because he made up for his lack of experience by doing detailed research—and he drew on the fiction of H.G. Wells (after whom he had named a son) for the themes of his early writings. His worldview came from reading the arguments of the German Darwinist Ernest Haeckel on evolution, the Hungarian theorist of social degeneration Max Nordau, and the Belgian symbolist playwright Comte Maeterlinck, who won the Nobel Prize in 1911. He was not very interested in politics per se, but, while still at Yale, the twenty-one-year-old Lewis was drawn to Upton Sinclair’s utopian Community Helicon Hall, in then bucolic Englewood, New Jersey. In its brief history, Helicon Hall—purchased with the money Upton Sinclair made from The Jungle—drew in such luminaries as William James, Lincoln Steffens, and Emma Goldman. A few years later, in 1909, Lewis lived for a time in another would-be utopia, Jack London’s Carmel commune. While there, he sold story plots to London, whose imagination had begun to run dry. From 1909 to his triumph with Main Street in 1920, Lewis was immersed in the literary world.
Main Street caught the post-war literary mood of disillusion perfectly. It distilled and amplified the sentiments of Americans who thought of themselves as members of a creative class stifled by the conventions of provincial life. It’s the story of Carol Kennicott, a sensitive young woman from the big city who is trapped by a nearly loveless marriage with a stodgy middle-class husband. She’s also imprisoned by small-town life in Gopher Prairie, a dreary midwestern settlement dominated by Rotarians. Carol, like Randolph Bourne, was repelled by the “grayness” and “dullness” of “shabby” town life in America. Unlike the towns of an idealized Europe, characterized by “noble aspiration” and a “fine aristocratic pride,” Gopher Prairie (modeled on Lewis’s Minnesota hometown of Sauk Centre) was defined by the “men of the cash-register…who make the town a sterile oligarchy.”
Carol is tormented by the self-satisfied mediocrity that surrounds her. She dreams of a “better life,” of “a more conscious life,” though she is never able to define it. In his notes for Main Street, Lewis wrote of Carol Kennicott: “Her desire for beauty in prairie towns was but one tiny aspect of a world-wide demand [for] alteration of all our modes of being and doing business.”
Carol and the people she’s drawn to, such as Guy Pollock, a lawyer twenty years her senior, provided a stock of tropes for the next half century’s commentaries about the conformity of American life. “I had decided to leave here,” Guy tells Carol. “Then I found that the Village Virus had me. . . That’s all of the biography of a living dead man.” “The Village Virus,” as Carol explains it to herself, is contentment: “The contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is slavery self-sought and self-defended. It is dullness made God.” Americans, Carol says, are “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”
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