Close to Home: Sinclair Lewis Society Talk on "It Can't Happen Here"
“Arrogance, abuses, these are the things which never change but which disguise themselves in a thousand forms beneath the mask of prevailing morals: to lift off this mask and expose them, this is the noble task of the person who devotes oneself to the theatre."
—Beaumarchais
CLOSE TO HOME
Slings, Arrows, & Outrageous Behavior in the Theatre of Sinclair Lewis
The following is an adaptation of a talk I gave on 7/18/2025 at the first in-person Sinclair Lewis Society conference since 2017, as always in the writer’s birthplace Sauk Center, MN. I had been slated to speak at the 2019 conference, which was cancelled due to a death in the community and not rescheduled owing to the pandemic.
The Society resumed with a bang this summer to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Arrowsmith, for which Lewis was offered but declined a Pulitzer, and the 90th Anniversary of It Can’t Happen Here, the anniversary on which I chose to focus for the obvious topical reasons as well as its dual life in the theatre world that Lewis loved.
Good morning. What an honor to be here in Sauk Center, where my late grandfather Roger Forseth (1927-2016) came so many times for research or to attend this conference. I know at least a few of you go back far enough to have known him personally and to have heard him speak. I can hear his voice still.
My grandfather left us many beautiful insights into the life and work of Sinclair Lewis (1951), the bulk of which I have anthologized in a book, Alcoholite at the Alter: The Writer and Addiction, alongside his writings about John Barryman, Don Birnam, Saul Bellow (not an addict), Fitzgerald, Ivan Gold, Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, and even Alexander the Great.
So far I’ve spent more time with my grandfather's writing about Lewis than with Lewis firsthand and am therefore conditioned to read Lewis through my grandfather's lens. My grandfather’s lens, as Lewis’ fellow alcoholic and Midwesterner, among other sympathies, was as trained on Lewis' life as his work, and with a much greater degree of empathy than many Lewis scholars including, notoriously, his own first biographer Mark Schorer, whose detailed but derisive portrait (1961) is held accountable by my grandfather in his article, “The Biographer as Victim,” that is included in our book. As I continue my own study of Lewis, seeing him through my grandpa is proving enriching and enlightening in a way that I would wish for any reader of great books.
The problem of biography and its impact on objectivity has long fascinated me, whether what we learn about van Gogh’s warm heart, for example, makes us love his work irrationally the more or, in cases like Wagner’s notorious Nazi sympathies that forever taint our ear. Tempting though it is, experience has taught me that it may be best indeed not to meet our heroes.
In Lewis’ case, the problem of biography seems to have been that the more critics and (jealous) peers knew about the man, the more they denigrated his literary and personal style. My grandfather explores this in his 1997 article "Can You Go Home Again?", his delivery of which formed one my dearest personal memories when, as a new college freshman, I took the Amtrak from Kalamazoo to Chicago to hear him at that year’s ALA Conference. In this humane and illuminating article about the expats' general treatment and depictions of Lewis, my grandfather wrote:
"These stigmatizing and misleading portraits bracket Lewis's life. But they do far more and far less than that. Because they have been so frequently quoted, they have achieved an iconic reality: in the guise of physical descriptions, they actually render, at once, moral and aesthetic judgments. It is not worthwhile to deconstruct these cartoons, for they stand for what they transparently are: an essentially prurient vulgarization of Lewis's person, his life, and ultimately, his literary achievement. For, in the end, what both Schorer and Hemingway are judging through their physical descriptions of the man is the literary style he practiced: the journalistic, utilitarian style of American Realism."
While my grandfather posthumously sympathized with Lewis, from the "altar," if you will, of his own recovery and recognition of Lewis' lack thereof, I too find myself taken with the genius and humanity of the man viewed as one of our most lacerating satirists. I disagree with the normally beyond-reproach late Terry Teachout, who panned Lewis’ legacy in his review of the 2002 Lingeman biography for the National Review, a biography for which my grandfather was grateful as overdue response to the Schorer, Teachout closes, "Richard Lingeman, for like all ideology-driven critics, whatever their particular political persuasion, confuses intentions with results. Sinclair Lewis really cared, therefore he must have been a major novelist—and maybe he could have been one, too, if only he'd cared a little less and written a whole lot better.” I am doubly confounded by this statement, at pains to see how a writer could perform better than Lewis, a virtuosic wordsmith who achieved a level of craft to which “really caring” would be essential. Mr. Teachout and I will have to agree to disagree on this one.
In his Lingeman review for The New Yorker, John Updike was more introspective in his yet-similar damnation: “His frenetic activity—all those books, all those addresses, all those binges—seems in the retelling one long escape, an anesthetic administered to a peculiarly American pain, just before the last screw of his talent could be turned.” Admitting Lewis’ obvious escapism, noting his many attempted geographical cures, compulsive theatrics, and of course dipsomania, Updike makes me wonder, what is Lewis' "peculiarly American pain”? Is it little more than the "American disease" of alcoholism, as my grandpa might venture, or our country’s general dearth of unified tradition—our birthright to an excess of freedom—that can lead to a sense of perpetual unmooring? That I can imagine. And what might have been the "last screw of his talent"? Might we wish from or for Lewis a more quiet profundity like Willa Cather, a writer who Lewis admired, as she him. It may or may not be relevant that Cather, my own dearest writer, was haunted by neither libation nor libido to complicate introspection; she also didn’t engage much with the world. How easy it is to wish something more or different from other writers.
As someone who clearly marvels at Lewis’ writing, I favor Vidal’s more forgiving take for The New York Review of Books, “The Romance of Sinclair Lewis,” from the decade before, prompted by the publication of the Library of America’s Main Street and Babbitt. Vidal writes, “[He was] a superb mimic…he is master of what Bakhtin (apropos Dostoevsky) called “the polyphonic novel….” There is a plurality of voices inner and outer, and they retain ‘their unmergedness.”
In an article from 2007 entitled “You Can Go Home Again,” my grandfather answer his own question “Can You Go Home Again?” from 10 years before. The Lingeman biography alongside Sally Parry’s publication of Lewis’ Minnesota Stories and George Killough’s Minnesota Diary: 1942-46 make literal and figurative headway in, as Grandpa wrote, “restoring Lewis to his rightful place in American literary history,” with Minnesota as home, and home as truth:
”Because of the shortcomings of Schorer’s work, we are indeed fortunate now to have Richard Lingeman’s splendid Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street…a richly detailed and carefully documented narrative. In the process we become familiar with Lewis entire: one of the most difficult of men, at turns admirable and perverse….Yet sufficient time has passed for Lingeman to present his subject with fairness and clarity. “
However and whyever Lewis’ detractors went after him, throughout his body of work I am moved by the humanism imbedded in the interior lives and behaviors of characters major and minor. From his sensitivity to the male condition, matter-of-fact empathy toward the female dilemma (it’s worth reading that Babbitt excerpt below), and general mockery of bigotry, Lewis is as much progressive sociologist as he is snarky know-it-all. And he has more than a touch of the poet, noting the lyrical bursts that bloom amid or bookend rapid-fire streams of exposé and reportage. These moments often feel like taking a breath of which both writer and reader are in need.
Biographers and critics have also claimed that Lewis didn't put much of himself in his work, but I see him everywhere. Babbitt’s detailed tussle with his cigarette addiction could be a stand-in for Lewis and drink, while Babbitt’s many self-conscious remarks about alcohol are even more transparent: “He did not possess a cocktail-shaker. A shaker was proof of dissipation, the symbol of a Drinker, and Babbitt disliked being known as a Drinker even more than he liked a Drink.” Through these comments Lewis is quite literally laying his own struggles at our feet. Most recently, with my immersion in It Can't Happen Here for this talk, I am touched by the notion that he put the best of himself in Doremus, a character who:
"…knew himself abnormally well" and "that far from being a left-wing radical, he was at most a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal, who disliked pomposity, the heavy humor of public men, and the itch for notoriety which made popular preachers and eloquent educators and amateur play-producers and rich lady reformers and rich lady sportswomen and almost every brand of rich lady come preeningly in to see newspaper editors, with photographs under their arms, and on their faces the simper of fake humility. But for all cruelty and intolerance, and for the contempt of the fortunate for the unfortunate, he had not mere dislike but testy hatred."
Lewis was restless and rash and conflicted; Doremus, with all his sincere soul-searching, was as consistent as even Henry James could wish a character to be, right unto the end. As O'Neill gave himself the happy childhood he did not personally experience with Ah, Wilderness! , might Lewis—given or driven to defensiveness after 15 years in the spotlight—been giving himself credit for and intentionally sharing with the world, who found him so acerbic, something of his actually big heart? Art can not only sublimate but also redeem its maker.
In It Can’t Happen Here, which my grandfather felt was Lewis’ last great work, I'm touched that Lewis at age 50—five years after winning the 1930 Nobel prize for literature and increased struggles with his material and muse—gave himself Doremus. At the same time he gave America what would prove to be for me, here at its 90th anniversary, a life-changing read. As a case study still reeling from the book’s eye-opening powers, I see myself of proof of its practical agency, aiding one’s will to see, inspiring greater action, and perhaps wisely suggesting we prepare for the worst.
The world premiere cast of Babbitt at La Jolla Playhouse, Fall 2023.
On a lighter note, before reading It Can’t Happen Here, I was fascinated with learning about Lewis’s own stage adaptation of the novel following, as we all know, its resurgence on the bestseller list and in widespread synchronous stage performances during Donald Trump’s first stint in office in 2017. I am a so-called "theatre person" and over the past few years I have closely followed a stage adaptation of Babbitt, spearheaded by Matthew Broderick who loved the novel and, along with director Christopher Ashley and Tony-winning playwright Joe diPietro, decided to to tackle staging it. As with the Dylan-born Girl from the North Country, I was shamelessly proud to see a Minnesotan in the spotlight at California’s La Jolla Playhouse in the fall of 2023 and again one year later, wish substantial script and cast changes, in Washington, DC.
We’ll see if Babbitt the play makes it to New York but, in the meantime, it’s not the least surprising that Matthew Broderick recently announced his next turn as Tartuffe at the New York Theatre Workshop this winter. I think Molière is an excellent choice for this actor clearly interested in the Lewisian theme of hypocrisy. And I do hope Broderick will keep boosting Lewis studies in other ways, perhaps via his very famous wife's book club.
With the Babbitt play in mind, it was fascinating to learn that Lewis and screenwriter John C. Moffitt (1901-1969) adapted It Can’t Happen Here for the WPA's ambitious Federal Theatre Project, an endeavor that managed to not only persist but thrive from 1935 to 1939 before its defunding at the dawn of McCarthyism. The Federal Theatre Project, according to William Kwinski's excellent 2012 piece for this society's Newsletter, "wedded journalism to theater in a new way…with large dreams for an American theater and its role in lifting the country out of its Depression while creating the framework for the future—in the words of its co-founder Hallie Flanagan, 'not an art which would be an occasional unrelated accompaniment to everyday existence, but a functioning part of national life.'"
The Federal Theatre Project’s wedding of journalism to theater was doubtless doubly attractive to Lewis, who two years later, in 1941, made his Broadway debut via the direction of Good Neighbor, a socially minded play by Jack Levin that closed the night it opened. Brooks Atkinson reviewed it for the New York Times with the theatre personified as a woman in such a dated tone that it's quite hilarious as well as not the least bit clever. It also smacks a disregard for Lewis that perhaps betrays more than the theatre community's view of his dramatic potential:
“Although Sinclair Lewis has been interested in the theatre for several years, she has been mighty cool to him. She bridled a little in the beginning, but the brazen hussy grows more disinterested toward him all the time. She was definitely aroused in 1934 when he wrote The Jayhawker, with Lloyd Lewis, and she was ready for an affair two years later when he and John C. Moffitt turned It Can't Happen Here into play form. But something seems to have gone wrong in Angela is Twenty-two in which Mr. Lewis appeared in public out of town during the season of 1938-39.
Last evening at the Windsor Theatre he approached her from another angle. He directed the staging of Jack Levin's Good Neighbor, and invested cash in the production. But the theatre apparently is less interested in him than ever. Perhaps his intentions have never been honorable—or, to be more exact, not honorable enough, for the theatre is no prude. But, to judge by the treatment he received last evening, the theatre is definitely through. The Lewis suit is cold.”
Atkinson dedicates a couple paragraphs to specific issues, calling Mr. Lewis's direction a "beginner's job" then concludes, "The theatre is no respecter of persons. After a seven-year wooing, she has given Mr. Lewis an icy rebuff.”
This tone from Atkinson feels characteristic of many Lewis detractors who extend their attacks of his work to that of his person. Perhaps he was viewed as too successful too hurt, too critical of others to deserve kindness.
My study of Lewis the unrequited theatre-lover paused here as I became swept away by It Can't Happen Here, of which my grandfather wrote in 2001, shortly before 9/11, “That novel, years after its publication, still has the impact of a hammer. It is a powerful dystopia on a level with his very best work.”
I can't help but think that the more we read It Can't Happen Here, the better chance we of continuing to say, “It Hasn't Happened Here.” A look at contemporary affairs, however, begs the question of just how much IS already happening here, with banned books, Minute Men-like immigrations officers, to cite fellow Nobel winner Paul Krugman, tasked by Stephen Miller with drumming up three thousand undocumented immigrants with criminal records each day to capture and send to Alligator Alley, nothing less than a concentration camp. Krugman notes there may in total be only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and 14,000 convicted of violent crimes, leading ICE to conduct roundups based on appearance and without due process to meet their quota.
This calls to mind my grandpa's assessment of that most chilling character Effingham Swan's sudden murder of Doremus's son-in-law, "the almost whimsical political terrorism of institutional lawlessness." With our fear-mongering and art-hating (or at least insensible) President appointing himself head of the Kennedy Center while banning books and defunding education and the arts, is our current situation more threatening than any since 1935? It is about to happen here? A recent Sinclair Lewis Google alert led me to this profound data from Jonathan Zimmerman for The Times Higher Education:
Troops during the Second World War were sent millions of books, including works that were highly critical of American culture and society, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. Published in pocket-sized paperbacks that soldiers could carry easily on the front, these “armed services editions” taught servicemen and women that free speech and open expression distinguished America from its fascist enemies. “BOOKS ARE WEAPONS,” declared the motto printed in the Dell War series of paperbacks. “In a free democracy, everyone may read what they like.”
I’d not connected where the book title had come from till roadtripping with my mom from Duluth to Sauk Center this July.
That insight put me in mind of James Baldwin's possibly over-quoted, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” Lewis refers to his "greatly beloved land" in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and I believe shared Baldwin's view of criticism born of care. In general Lewis seemed baffled at the feathers he ruffled, such as my grandfather humorously recounted on the greasy spoon in Free Air (1919) in his 1993 article “A Romance of Manners and Class.” I've always found this section so entertaining, I hope you don't mind my reading it in full:
“The heroine of the novel, Claire Boltwood, and her father are motoring through Minnesota and stop for lunch at “Reaper,” where (Lewis writes) they “encountered a restaurant which made eating seem evil”:
“It was called the Eats Garden. As Claire and her father entered, they were stifled by a belch of smoke from the frying pan in the kitchen. The room was blocked by a huge lunch counter; there was only one table, covered with oil cloth and decorated with venerable spots of dried egg yolk. The waiter-cook, whose apron was gravy-patterned, with a border and stomacher of plain gray dirt, grumbled, ‘Whatdyuhwant?” (74)
My grandpa comments:
“This was written by a man who had been there. The direct, reportorial manner anticipates the later, great novels, yet its actualness, while contrasting sharply with the idealized, pastoral romantic relationship central to Free Air’s story, infuses that story with a rough charm.
Lewis from the beginning took singular pride in his reportorial accuracy. His reaction, therefore, to the questioning of that accuracy in Free Air is not surprising. Shortly after the serialized publication of the novel in the Saturday Evening Post, H. G. Davis, secretary of the Minnesota Highway Development Association, wrote the Post’s editor, G. H. Lorimer,
“The opening chapter…is creating a great deal of unfavorable comment in Minnesota, owing to the fact that it is appearing at the opening of our tourist season, picturing the roads of Minnesota as actually impassable.”
At the request of Lorimer, Lewis responded to Davis:
“I do not say…that the roads are impassable; simply that there is mud after rains—which there is…. The hole which I describe as the one in which Claire was stuck is the actual hole in which I was stuck, with my wife, and the cashier of the First National Bank of Sauk Centre. This was the hole near Freeport, and we were stuck in it for four hours in 1916…. I want Minnesota to be helped instead of injured by my story…. How many writers are writing about Minnesota, Mr. Davis? Any one save myself? Any one else boosting our prairies, our lakes? Our people? Then why do you want to tie my hands by insisting that I indulge in untrue glorification?
My grandfather concludes that, "this testy—and revealing—concern for reportorial accuracy, combined with his obvious affection for the land, is essential Lewis; it was with him from the beginning and was to be with him to the end.”
Speaking of criticizing America out of love, might this “tough love” also be possible regarding Americans. Maybe Lewis regarded the capacity of the human mind so highly that it angered him throughout the 1920s to observe how easily the intellect that separates us from beasts can devolve into mere conformity and commercialism, seemingly benign states that are ripe to be preyed upon. Reports from abroad in the 1930s showed just how dehumanized and depraved this same human spirit can quickly become through a lethal combination of suffering and brainwashing. Might Lewis in part have spilled so much ink to hold up so many mirrors to our foibles out of a larger hope for humanity—in a sense, love?
Supporting this possibility and greater even than the mobilizing power of Lewis' vivid violence in It Can’t Happen Here is the spiritual journey that occurs inside Doremus in what I'm enjoying thinking about as a three-act character circle rather than arc. Through an ingenious device over the course of the novel, Lewis has our hero challenge then deepen his original convictions via a brutally honest dialectic with himself. First, still safe himself, he questions the validity of all violent revolutions with in a lengthy solo debate. Then, after he personally experiences the force of an iron fist, he refers back to his previous line of thought, blaming those like himself for the complacency that allowed this tyranny to rise. Finally, in his ultimate Thoreauvian "one-man revolution," free but disguised and hunted by the novel's end, he arrives at its most famous lines, "I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever."
Kindergarten graduation, age five, 1985, at the home Twin Ports they bought in 1963 that we still have today.
For a 2001 article he named, "Two Notes to A Low and Dishonest Decade,” my grandfather paired Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here with Saul Bellow’s “The Hell It Can’t,” an unpublished short story he had discovered in Northwestern’s Bellow archives. He wrote:
“The story Lewis tells in It Can’t Happen Here is above all the story of Doremus Jessup. The triumph of Doremus, that most unlikely of heroes, is his embodiment—intellectually and morally—of “The Vital Center” years before Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s celebrated manifesto on the “Politics of American Freedom.” Doremus is the classic Jeffersonian Liberal, the defender of the individual against the state in the face of the ideologists and the demagogues of the Right and of the Left.
Yet even in the face of overwhelming power, the stoicism and spirit of the individual prevail. After imprisonment and torture, Doremus escapes, joins the underground, witnesses the tide turn against tyranny, followed by the promise of ultimate victory: “And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die” (548). The triumphalism of this, the final sentence of the novel is saved from sentimentality, for it is clear that the ordeal and the struggle of Doremus are far from over; indeed, the message is that for the freeborn, individual liberty will never be suppressed just as it may never be fully achieved.”
I give my grandfather these last words with profound gratitude to him for my life and my Lewis journey, with so much left to learn.
ENDNOTES
This from Babbitt and a man who clearly saw women’s dead-end dilemma:
“In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith, especially in the ‘young married set,’ there were many women who had nothing to do. Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves, electric ranges and dish-washers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework, and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their ‘wasting time and getting a lot of crank ideas’ in unpaid social work, and still more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties, read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared, and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging their husbands. The husbands nagged back.”
This Catherian burst of poetry from late in It Can’t Happen Here:
The meadow larks' liquid ecstasy welcomed him from the barbed-wire fences. If he missed the strong hills behind Fort Beulah, he was yet exalted by the immensity of the sky, the openness of prairie that promised he could go on forever, the gayety of small sloughs seen through their fringes of willows and cottonwoods, and once, aspiring overhead, an early flight of mallards."