This article was written by Michael Fedo
In 1970, a travel editor at the Los Angeles Times asked me to go to Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis's boyhood home and write an article about the town believed to be the model for Gopher Prairie in the novel Main Street. It was first published in 1920 and my piece would tie in with the 50th anniversary of the book's release.
Ben Dubois was the last person alive in Sauk Centre who was born the same year as Lewis -1885 - and who grew up with him. He affirmed that life in Sauk Centre was often painful for Harry Sinclair Lewis, though in a letter Lewis wrote to a graduating class at his old high school he said it was a good place in which to grow up. Yet Lewis keenly felt a measure of displacement in this small community; he was a runty kid with a bad complexion, who couldn't earn the affection of his physician father and felt inferior to his older brother, Claude, who would follow their father into medicine.
Dubois was 85 when I met him at his desk in the lobby of the Sauk Centre Bank. He had been retired for years but still held court there greeting area residents - mainly old farmers or their descendents who accorded him respect bordering on reverence. During the Depression, Dubois kept his bank open, never foreclosed on a delinquent farmer, and he suffered along with nearly every other resident of Stearns County. It was with some pride he told me soon after we shook hands, that he'd once cast a presidential vote for the socialist Eugene Debs.
Being a raconteur, Dubois was full of stories about his old boyhood chum. "Harry was a homely, ornery chap," he recalled. "Nobody liked him very much, which made him the butt of practical jokes. One time he wanted to tag along with some older boys, and because he was a sucker for pranks, they let him. They said they were going to gather hazel nuts. Well, they scooped up a couple handfuls of rabbit droppings, told Harry they were hazel nuts, and got him to eat a good share of them before he figured things out."
"He didn't do particularly well in school either, which displeased his father. To tell the truth, nobody around here ever thought he'd amount to very much. He was never happy here, but then, he wasn't happy anyplace else either, was he?"
I asked Dubois if he knew anything about Lewis's residency in Duluth, Minnesota, which was where I was raised, and would have been a toddler during Lewis's stay.
"Well now, I don't think he liked it at all, but you see he was there to do some research. He captured the city rather well, don't you think? It's all there in Babbitt and Kingsblood Royal. Pretty much captured it, if you ask me."
At a General Conference Baptist convention in Duluth one 1940s summer, our pastor, Marvin Samuelson, spied Sinclair Lewis in attendance taking copious notes during presentations. Fearing that Lewis's observations might later find their way into another novel even more spurious than Elmer Gantry, our pastor approached the noted cynic to inquire after the condition of his soul, and might he wish spiritual counseling?
Lewis spurned the offer, but was quite civil during the exchange, which lasted several minutes. He even thanked Rev. Samuelson, when our minister said he'd pray for Lewis anyway.
After learning of this encounter - offhandedly inserted into one of the preacher's Sunday sermons - Mother mentioned she'd been loaned a copy of Elmer Gantry some years before and found it so loathsome that she'd thrown the book that didn't belong to her in the furnace.
I checked out the novel at the library during my sophomore year in high school, and unlike Mother, did not find it disgusting, but troubling. I didn't see Rev. Samuelson in the Elmer Gantry character, but I thought it possible that there were Gantrys sermonizing elsewhere in America.
Following Elmer Gantry, I checked out another Lewis novel, Kingsblood Royal, upon learning he'd written it while living in my hometown.
Adrift after his divorce from Dorothy Thompson in 1942, Lewis moved to Duluth during the winter of 1944 and settled into an expansive house in the east end of town that he described as "(Duluth's) best residential section." He first rented, then purchased the home at 2601 East 2nd Street, and was assigned the phone number of Hemlock 6817. "It is a kind of manor home," he wrote in a letter to his then-paramour, Marcella Powers. "Brick, enter a little courtyard, big drawing room, paneled library, furniture rather shabby, but most comfortable, 5 masters bedrooms with 3 baths, a couple servants rooms, in the basement a jolly foolish miniature bowling alley and a game room. . . . I think I shall love my manorial splendor."
He was captivated by the physical attractiveness of our city on a hill overlooking Lake Superior, and in another letter to Powers he wrote, "Duluth is as individual and beautiful as ever - more magic than when I last saw it now that (the) Skyline Parkway (is) completed." Lewis loved looking down on Duluth and the harbor from that new roadway atop the city, stretching practically its entire length.
An entry from Lewis's diary on Tuesday, May 11, 1944, reads: "It's amazing how much happier I am here than in Hollywood a year ago, with all its Kate Hepburns and Cedrick Hardwickes and Romanoff Restaurants." But he also wrote to Powers, "I have found the people here kind, friendly, and about as ponderously dull . . . as any I have ever known outside the pages of that gt (sic) masterpiece Babbitt." About the Duluth men who joined the Chamber of Commerce, he wrote, "They are peculiar to America and in Babbitt I just began to paint them."
In Duluth too, his awareness of racism was heightened and would be central to Kingsblood Royal. The main character, Neil Kingsblood discovers he is 1/32nd black and encounters unexpected northern Minnesota racists. While reading it I recalled that Mother had mentioned - when I was nine years old - the 1920 lynching of three Negroes in town that took place less than a mile and half from our house.
Lewis would have known about these lynchings since reports of a 5,000 to 10,000-person mob storming the local jail generated national news. Also, while he lived in Duluth one of his friends was Kenneth Cant, son of Judge William Cant who convened the grand jury to consider indictments following the hangings. Some Duluth acquaintances speculated that it was these lynchings that impelled him to write Neil Kingsblood's story.
Increasingly piqued by racism in American society, Lewis sometimes expressed ambivalence about employing black domestics to succor him in his baronial estate. But he occasionally accompanied those same servants to services at St. Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church at 502 E. 6th St. where he witnessed black parishoners worshipping and conversing as he gathered material for Kingsblood Royal, a novel that would influence the writing of my own first book in 1979. Spurred by Lewis's analysis of racism in my county, I chronicled the June 15, 1920 murders in The Lynchings in Duluth.
Prior to the appearance of Kingsblood Royal in 1947, Lewis wrote another novel at his Duluth domicile - Cass Timberlane - that was published two years earlier. His courtship of Marcella Powers, the actress 35 years his junior framed the setting that explored aspects of a May-December relationship in this novel.
* * *
My hometown was abuzz with excitement in the fall of 1964 after a network television producer picked the city to be featured in a miniseries called The American Novel. Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt was to be featured in the program and Duluth was thought to be the setting for the fictional Zenith in the book, probably because of our town's sobriquet: "The Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas." Though Lewis himself once said Chicago was his model for Zenith, the disclaimer was never taken seriously probably owing to Lewis's Duluth residency.
The producer secured cooperation from Duluth's commercial and civic establishments for the project that was slated for telecast the following spring. The actor Pat Hingle was hired to narrate the script and shooting commenced.
The local Rotary Club, delighted that the entire country would see the town celebrated on national television, hosted a luncheon for the cast and crew at the conclusion of the filming, which the producer suggested might be included in the broadcast. Prominent citizens snapped up tickets, ignoring superintendent of schools, Laverne Rasmussen, who warned that they were about to be bamboozled, that Babbitt was not a complimentary figure nor was Zenith a beacon of enlightenment. He urged them to read the novel, because the program might reveal that Babbittry in the city was unchanged from the time Lewis published the book.
During the fete, there were speeches by community leaders before the program producer announced that Hingle would like to treat the audience to a few paragraphs from the novel. He delivered word for word the chauvinistic succeed-in-business-platitudes and condemnation-of-liberal-intellectuals declamation given by George Babbitt in the book to the Zenith Real Estate Board. Rotarians, however, seemed to have missed the point that this was Babbitt's speech and they frequently interrupted a startled and bemused Hingle with thunderous applause. When he finished, Hingle was accorded a standing ovation. Naturally the segment was incorporated into the telecast. Despite his satirical renown, Lewis rarely laughed, but he certainly would have enjoyed seeing the parallels between Duluth and his Zenith on national television.
The city absorbed another hit just a year later when a statue of its founder, Daniel Greysolon Sieur DuLhut was unveiled on the campus of the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Though created by the noted French artist, Jacques Lipschitz, the piece was ridiculed as a cartoon, a "Disneyesque giant," by critics. The UMD student handbook described it as looking like, "The Michelin Man holding a hot dog and missing his yo-yo." The $80,000 monument is rarely mentioned in tour guides to the city, but is considered by long-time residents as another incident in which the city was snookered.
Despite Lewis's disparaging take on those who aspired to wealth and prominence, in Duluth his associates included judges, business and civic leaders, as well as the socialite-novelist, Margaret Culkin Banning. And a casual assessment of Lewis's term in Duluth might conclude that he was relatively happy and successful. But happiness wasn't in the cards for the winner of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature. Invited to give the 1945 commencement speech at Duluth State Teachers' College (now the University of Minnesota-Duluth), he delivered an address titled, "The Excitement of Learning," and told friends he was disappointed in what he called an ungracious reception. Even so, he later lectured on the craft of writing to students in English classes.
Some entries in his Minnesota diaries touch on his pleasure with the city's scenic beauty, and of his enjoying concerts given by the Duluth Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Tannu Hannikainen, whom he knew socially.
But Lewis's sojourn in Duluth was relatively brief - less than two years. His research on the region completed, he moved on. Always a solitary figure Lewis was alone when he died in a Rome hospital in 1951.
"His funeral was here in Sauk Centre," said Ben Dubois. "Lots of literary folk stop by the cemetery to pay their respects. Seems sad in a way that more people visit his grave than visited him while he was alive. Not that Harry was that high on social affairs and small talk." Suffused with alcohol Lewis made caustic and belittling remarks to well-meaning people whose intellect he deemed inferior to his.
Though his insults soured the atmosphere at social gatherings, he nonetheless seemed to crave discourse while in Duluth, as he did throughout his life. Margaret Culkin Banning went out of her way to introduce him to residents who were pleased to entertain so eminent a celebrity. While often appearing to enjoy their company, Lewis could not help observing them through his writerly eyes. And as he did with his hometown gentry, he could not resist illumining their foibles in his fiction.
Michael Fedo has published seven books, most notably The Lynchings in Duluth, The Man From Lake Wobegon, and the novel, Indians in the Arborvitae. His essays, and short stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, AMERICAN WAY, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, and elsewhere.
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