We Came Along with a Hammer

Good Lord, you mean to say that Lewis won his Pulitzer for having ripped himself off? According to this account of Main Street at The Millions it would appear so. What a smug little hack. Well, at least Penny doesn’t have to feel bad for not having read his best stuff. You may not have had the Whopper itself, but you have had the Whopper Jr., and the lingering taste and indigestion is the same…

Actually, this fills me with fear. When you consider the ratio of canonical authors to classic novels  on the to-be-read list there is cause for worry: Wharton, Cather, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Cheever, Mailer, Updike, Morrison, Roth. Wharton — the Age of Innocence. Fine and dandy. Steinbeck for Grapes of Wrath, doubleplusgood.  But Faulkner for The Reivers? Hemingway for the Old Man and the Sea? Beloved is Morrison’s best known, and American Pastoral widely considered one of Roth’s best, I believe. But then they are more recent and more familiar….I wonder in time how many of these will come to seem pity prizes, disguised lifetime achievement awards, or just the fruits of a weak year, like Kate Winslet’s Oscar…

In the interests of reviving the blog a bit, we’re making it a bit more relaxed and conversational, and incorporating some posts where we discuss our reactions to the book. We’re thinking of doing these like a real podcast soon, but first we’ve got some kinks to work out. (Like, say, learning how to edit sound.) So here’s a transcript of our postmortem on Arrowsmith.

We open with Penny reporting her encounter with an actual reference to Arrowsmith in pop culture:

Dreadful Penny: ….it was a naughty joke that Hawkeye was telling.

Diablevert: About Arrowsmith? What was the context?

Penny: It was an early M*A*S*H episode, and Hawkeye was like, making out with a nurse in a naughty way, and Trapper comes in and asks about some naughty pictures, Hawkeye’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And Trapper’s like, “Well, why did I find them before, behind your copy of Arrowsmith?” That’s hysterical. Such a great character note for Hawkeye. Of course he would have this copy of Arrowsmith, this doctor character who wanted to do good in the world, and save everyone, and thought he was kind of a savior. So: Thank you for enriching my knowledge of M*A*S*H, Sinclair Lewis. Or not even Sinclair Lewis. The Pulitzer committee.

Dv: Do you think that’s part of the problem with some of these books, that they’ve passed out of culture in a way?

Penny: Yeah, I think they definitely have. They’re books that time has forgot, and authors that time has forgot. I’m part of the Pulitzer forum on GoodReads, and I watch it sometimes and sometimes people get really passionate about these books. They love them so much, and wish that everybody read them. And I get that sense as we read them that they’re very much of a time, and you can’t really understand that time unless you experience — like, to be fully immersed in a time when the automobile was a seismic shift in culture.

Dv: That’s one of the things I sort of appreciate about them in the aggregate. The sense that it gives you, little details that you see repeated again and again — like they way in which soft coal apparently made living in cities at that time like a being in fucking coal pit. That’s not something that you’d every really pick up on from watching movies, or hearing stuff about that time, you don’t really imagine it that way.

Penny: And genuine skepticism about the automobile actually taking hold is kind of interesting. They’re all so scared of the car. But they’re all bildungsromans. And I wish that would….stop. Like a lot.

Dv: Yeah, we haven’t had a romance, really, except Age of Innocence.

Penny: I guess The Able McLaughlins was kind of a romance. That was definitely a book that time has justly forgot.

Dv: Oh, that was fucking terrible.

Penny: Yeah. I think The Able McLaughlins and Arrowsmith can both go down in history as books that almost killed our blog.

Dv: Yeah.

Penny: They were brutal.

Dv: The Able McLaughlins was at least more digestible, I feel like.

Penny: It was shorter.

Dv: Yeah, that’s pretty much what I mean. Is that it was much shorter. And an easier book to blow through, because it wasn’t terribly well-written. You know what I mean? So you were just like, “uh-hunh, uh-hunh, uh-hunh, whatever.” With Arrowsmith, it was more dense and just went on for fucking ever.

Penny: I guess Arrowsmith was more dense… of course, it was better written.

Dv: You’re forgetting how terrible The Able McLaughlins was, in my opinion. It was awful.

Penny: But Arrowsmith was so snide, in just an unpleasant way, in a way that I didn’t feel like I was participating in. I felt like Sinclair Lewis just hated everyone. In the world.

Dv: Yes.

Penny: So completely misanthropic.

Dv: I don’t know if he hated people. He just thought he was smarter than them. That’s been interesting, because one of the things he has contempt for has been a running theme in a couple of the books. The idea of this—I think he captures his time very well—this whole civic boosterism bit. Pep. Talking things up. All that shit. It was in The Magnificent Ambersons, one of the first books, that whole idea of—

Penny: Spirit and civic-mindedness.

Dv: And that’s something that’s not well-remembered.

Penny: The reputation of the upper-crust.

Dv: But also of the town. The idea of having this whole community of people being patriotic in a very local way. Which I think he captured well. But it’s really annoying to read about, because he has such contempt for all these people that display that quality.

Penny: But that’s what makes all of these books so xenophobic in that way, though. Because it is the pep, and this town spirit, and then there’s the encroaching city. And the fear of immigration comes into that. Nearly every book is about small towns disintegrating. Or even big cities, like in the Age of Innocence.

Dv: Do you know what’s funny? It’s sort of the weirdest thing. When I think back on it, the very first one we read was — what was the name of that?

Penny: His Family.

Dv: Thank you. In some ways, it was one of the most sophisticated ones. Because it had the fucking flapper, and was talking about the problems of the inner, urban city, and it had this chick, the daughter, who was like a Wobblie or whatever—

Penny: The reformer! Yeah.

Dv: Right. So even though it was a terribly-written book, in many ways—just leaden prose—but in terms of issues and the themes it was dealing with, in comparison to some of the other ones I think it had a different take. All the other ones, all of them are obsessed with this final conquering-of-the-frontier shit, which just seems so irrelevant at the moment.

Penny: Exactly.

Dv: The fucking prairie was fucking killing me. It was just like, three books and we were stuck in the goddamn wheat fields, and it we can’t, like…

Penny: Yeah. But there was also a genuine New Woman, in His Family, and the women in most of these books were…pretty contemptible.

Dv chuckles.

Penny: The female characters in Arrowsmith were like Leora, who just waited for no reason, and had bad grammar, in a kind of endearing way.

Dv: I like her better though, than some of the other female characters in that book. I agree that she — everyone in the book was treated with contempt. So I think she actually probably gets more credit than a lot of characters do. Because she sticks up for herself. She’s given that.

Penny: I guess that’s true. And he probably wasn’t expecting that much more of her, because he was probably a misogynist, so

Dv: He’s very chauvinist. I agree that he thinks Leora knows her place and that he thinks that’s a good thing. But in comparison to all the other characters—she rebels against her family. When they try and stop her from marrying Martin, she’s like fuck you, I don’t want to put up with your bullshit — in a very 19th century way that wouldn’t use words like that…

Penny: But she’s also like…. “Screw you, I’m not going to put up with all your nonsense, I’m …just going to sit at home and wait for you.”

Dv: Yeah, but it’s sort of like—

Penny: “But I’m going to wait, always, for you!”

Dv: Okay. One of the most irritating episodes in Arrowsmith is the pseudo-affair he has, where he gets bored with his job and starts macking on the daughter of his boss.

Penny: Of the booster? Pickerbaugh?

Dv: Yeah. Which, talk about shitting where you eat. But anyway. That whole thing is really dumb. But Leora’s attitude toward it is interesting, because she’s just like, “You’re being a dumbfuck. Get over it.” And that in itself is interesting, because it’s passive in that she just sort of sits there waiting for him. But…he’s being a dumbfuck. And he really just needs to get over it. Would you have wanted him, to…?

Penny: It didn’t ruin their marriage, it didn’t send them into divorce.

Dv: It was so petty, and tiny, and she could see that. She could see his limitations, in way that some of the other characters don’t. His second wife wants him to be a great man and all this bullshit, and that’s essentially what they break over. Whereas Leora sees past his bullshit and likes him anyway, which is why I feel like they made a good match. There’s a fair bit of depth to that writing in some ways, but there was just such a contempt, that reigned over everything, and made it very difficult to read because you didn’t care for the characters.

Penny: It was a book that seemed pleasingly accurate in its attention to the small details of its time and I appreciated that. But there was also a lot about science in it that we don’t accept anymore. And I think that just frustrating, and was something that very much dated that book. There was a lot of, “and then they discovered molecules!” And while I can appreciate what it was like to live at a time when nobody knew what a molecule was, it is kind of tedious to look back on that, and read that.

Dv: Oh, really? That’s interesting. That didn’t bother me. It did get a little technical, and that dragged a bit. But for me it was interesting because it was like the car bits, in that you forget this stuff was ever new.

Penny: I felt that way to a certain extent. But there was just so much of it in the book that it was obsessive.

Dv: Whatever Lewis is doing, he get so wrapped up in it. You can tell that with writers, when they’ve done all this research, and it’s like, “here’s 19 pages that explain exactly how this process works that have nothing to do with the goddamn plot.” And you’re just like: Dude. There was a bit of that, yeah. But I just didn’t see what his overall point was, in a lot of ways.

Penny: What do you mean?

Dv: The whole essential conflict in the book is Arrowsmith being the man of science and everything tries to pull him away from being this scientific researcher genius who’s purely pursuing science’s ends and not really even caring for the individual as per the individual, but only looking to discover the true principals of how all this shit works, and eventually, broadly, that will be good for the race. I think Lewis approves of all this, but it’s kind of hard to tell sometimes.

Penny: I don’t know if he approved of it, if you extrapolate to the plague stuff. The idea there was that he was going to conduct this perfect experiment, but then can’t, can’t bring himself to do it, because he’s too moved by human suffering. And not only human suffering in the abstract, but by his own suffering. So he loses his wife — spoiler alert!

Dv laughs.

Penny: I feel ridiculous, but sometimes talking about these books, I feel like “Sorry if we ruined that book for you. It was ruined for me in the first ten pages. By starting it.” So…no, it’s cool, Arrowsmith’s good, or not…

Dv: No, it’s not.

Penny: But I think the point of it was that humanism did intrude, that you can’t get past that humanism. You can’t in a purely scientific way. I think that was Lewis’ point.

Dv: See, I don’t know. I’m not sure about it because it doesn’t seem that way from the reaction of the characters. It was more like, Arrowsmith was really fucking depressed and gave up on everything, and became like, “Fuck. Fuck the experiment. I don’t give a fuck.” Lewis didn’t really give him a clear moment of “I reject my former principals, and now see that I was being blind to suffering.” He’s just sort of like, “Fuck it. My wife died. Who cares? Whatever you want to do, it’s fine.” Which might have been more realistic about how a person would actually behave in that situation.

So, that was November, eh? Man. Okay, so Arrowsmith almost killed us. It was long and a bit boring and it became hard to think of interesting things to say about it that didn’t sound like whining. But we decided fuck it, let’s try anyway. So, we’re gonna loosen things up and do these in a bit more conversational style.

In the meantime, however, it is only fair to summarize to get us started.

Arrowsmith is the story of Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor, and the book covers almost his entire medical education and career. Following a brief intro describing the boy’s first mentor — a local doc in a tiny cow town who has a little problem with the glug glug but is happy to let the boy Arrowsmith hang around the office and play with the specimens — the book spends its first, expansive section on Martin’s medical education at a state university, among the first of the huge institutions created out on the prairie.

Arrowsmith joins a frat, chums around with a bunch of other medical student, some skilled and priggish, some friendly, boorish, and rather bad doctors. His idealized conception of the selfless medical man is swiftly punctured by encounters with actual professors, from the old docs who rely on gut instinct and folk remedies to get by to the new docs who view a thriving practice as a mere launching pad for a political career, or better yet, a chance to get their face on the label of a patent medicine bottle. Only one of Martin’s professors retains his admiration and becomes a lifelong mentor to him: Max Gottlieb, a gloomy German who couldn’t give two shits about treating patients but is passionately dedicated to research, pulling all-nighters over his lab bench to ferret out the root causes of disease. At the time the book was written, the germ theory of disease was widely accepted, but though it was known that microscopic agents caused disease, how they did so — and more importantly, how they might be prevented from doing so — was still a hot research topic. (Wiki informs me that Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin in 1928; Arrowsmith won its Pulitzer two years before.)

Martin becomes enchanted with Gottleib’s brand of saintly asceticism and takes up lab work himself, but he soon hits a snag. Or rather, he picks up a snag, in the form of a rather slatternly young nursing student at the local hospital called Leora. (Their meet cute? He finds her taking an unauthorized break when she’s supposed to be cleaning the wards and bums a smoke off her.) Martin dumps his existing girlfriend and decides, rashly, to marry Leora right away. He ditches school for a couple weeks so they can break the news to her family — a maneuver that nearly gets him bounced out sans degree — her fam flips a wig, they get married anyway, yet can’t afford to live together because Martin’s barely scraping by on a small fund left to him by his parents, eventually he has to beg her folks for money, the whole thing’s a bad scene, basically.

Because he’s married now and needs to support his wife, Martin abandons research and decides, with his in-law’s help, to set up as a country doctor following graduation in Wheatsylvania, North Dakota. After many pages of bickering, boredom, and small town scandal, Martin starts spending all his time out in the garage, tinkering with home-grown experiments. Eventually his work results in a scientific paper, which in its turn is enough to get him a nod from his former mentor Gottlieb, and helps Martin’s reputation to the extent that he’s able to blow town for sunnier climes, or at least, for a post as assistant public health director at a small midwestern city, Nautilus.

At first Martin’s excited by the opportunity to put some of his evolving ideas about disease prevention into practice. But after about 6 seconds with his new boss, Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, a super-cheerful bastard posessing a teacup’s worth of knowledge about the practice of medicine but gallons and gallons of pious, patriotic swill on the subject of health, vitality, vitamins and so-forth that he likes to spew at luncheon club meetings — kind of a cross between Teddy Roosevelt and John Harvey Kellogg — Martin realizes that his new gig is about 90% mindless boosterism to 10% actual scientific and public service work, and only that 10% so long is it doesn’t interfere with the usual practices of the B.S.D.s in town by knocking down their vermin-infested tenements. Having 29,400 more people around does provide a few more opportunities for escapism that Wheatsylvania, and Martin tries a couple different ones to break up his career monotony — a) hanging with what passes for the “fast crowd” of the town and drinking a lot, and b) flirting with one of his boss’s daughters. The faithful Leora — who remains a blunt, slouch-socked, gum-snapper, permanently unsuited to the role of prominent doctor’s wife, but devoted to Martin — doesn’t mind a any too much, but rolls her eyes at b and pretty much orders Marin to snap out of it. Which he does, without ever really getting poonanynani, thereby eliminating the danger of causing conflict and interesting plot developments.

Instead, Martin is once again called to the bench, and after a series of twists and turns ends up with a new job as a researcher at a prestigious private institute in New York City. This, too, proves not to be an Eden on second glance: There’s vicious competition among the researchers, the heads of the institute all have their heads up their asses, etc. But Martin is once again reuinited with his old pal Gottleib, also a researcher at the institute, and gets down to some serious work. After a time — and many many pages on the state of bacteriological research at the time — Martin discovers the hot ticket, a new form of antibiotic that may have the potential to cure the plague. His bosses at the institute are preassuring him to publish his results, but his old mentor warns him again and again that he must conduct full, unimpeachable studies in order to really prove he’s got the goods — otherwise he’ll thrill the press and be shredded by fellow scientist. So Martin heads down to the Carribbean, where the plague has broken out on a small island, and he sets out to test his new “phage,” as he calls it. Martin wants to do his experiment the pure science way — some people get the real cure, some get bubkis to act as a control — but after a very hostile reception, when his new drug begins to look like it’s actually helping the island government comes down on him like a ton of bricks, wanting him to hand it out to everybody (and thus ruining his experiment). Martin is unmoved by their pressure, caring more for proving his point and finally coming up with some publishable results — until his wife, Leora, falls victim to the disease, and dies. At which point Marin loses his shit and starts handing the stuff out left right and center.

A grief-stricken Martin eventually comes home, salvages what he can of his results, and publishes them. At the same time, an acquaintance he made while on the island — a sophisticated, wealthy young widow — is rekindled again in New York, and he soon falls for her and marries her, and even has a kid. Wife No. 2 sets about making Martin into a great man of affairs — an endeavor made easy by the success of his plague treatments. Even though the results weren’t scientifically perfect, with a little help from the good PR men of the institute Martin is soon Hero Doc and in line for the directorship.

But just as ultimate public and professional recognition comes close, Martin gets fidgity once again. Looking out at the prospect of a life filled with black tie dinners, while his test tubes gather dust, he decides to chuck it all again, divorcing his wife, renouncing any claim to her fortune, resigning from the institute and retiring to a little cabin in the woods in Vermont run by a fellow scientist, where he divided his time between experiments and log-splitting. And there, blessedly, the book ends.

But here are some half-assed thoughts anyway.

Lewis’ style is like….it’s…put it this way, the sensation you get reading this is of a stoogie-clutching hand jabbing a square-tipped, callused index finger into your chest, kind of “Lemme tell you something, buddy —” I’ve never been hectored at for 70 solid pages, and to think there’s only 350+ more to go.

I can’t believe this dude won a Nobel. This is not his most famous work, and so maybe it’s simply not his best. But just for once I’d like to read an author in this little quest that didn’t seem to condescend to their characters. Lewis writes like a college sophomore discussing a high-school junior, there’s an undertone of “oh, aren’t you precious, and to think I used to be like that and take myself seriously.” All the characters are one-dimensional, which at least he has the balls to come out and admit. Still, I can sort of get an inkling of why this book might have seemed fresh and interesting when it came out — it is completely of its time, and thoroughly American. I mean, its descriptions of say, a frat house in a Midwestern University circa 1906 might seem a bit cliched today, down to the secret folder of test questions, but I’m thinking back in the 1920s Lewis was probably sketching out characters that hadn’t much appeared in literature before. Hell, the big midwestern colleges themselves only got started in the late 19th century. And he has a way—I’d hesitate before calling it a gift—with speech, and slang. His dialog is, if anything, more completely of its time than his descriptions, and reminds me in a way of Nabokov’s precise excerpts of Lolita’s “slangy speech,” which he uses so effortlessly to characterize her.

The trouble is, you don’t get much sense that Lewis even wants to poke below the surface. Even his main character, the doctor in training Martin Arrowsmith, you could sum up in a few words: Ambitious, impetuous, naive, blunt. And that seems to suffice for Lewis, because so far he doesn’t seem much interested in watching Arrowsmith mature but rather in using him as a living prop to illustrate what he takes to be the qualities of his time…