Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis

   1922; 370 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Laurels : None listed, but Wikipedia notes that the controversy that Babbitt sparked was influential in the decision to award the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature to Sinclair Lewis.  Genre : Satire; Highbrow Lit; Americana.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    Any way you look at it, George F. Babbitt is living the good life.  He’s got a loving wife and three darling kids: two daughters, Verona and Tinka; and a son, the eldest, Ted, in high school, and who George plans to send to Law School when he graduates, something that wasn’t an option for him when he was growing up.

    George does all the correct things he’s supposed to do as a fine, upstanding citizen of the Midwest city of Zenith.  He’s a diehard Republican and very much anti-union.  He’s a dues-paying member of the Elks, the Boosters Club, the Zenith Athletic Club, and the Chamber of Commerce.  He attends the Chatham Road Presbyterian Church, pastored by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew, who enlightens George as to what he should think about things like disarmament, tariffs, and Germany.

    He plays golf, albeit not very well.  He hobnobs only with other fine, upstanding men, and scratches their backs, if you know what I’m saying, in exchange for them scratching his.  His best friend is Paul Riesling, an old college chum, whom George admires very much.

    If George F. Babbitt isn’t the richest or most influential man in Zenith, it’s not from a lack of effort.  He’s comfortably middle-class, and he’s sure all the rich, upstanding men in Zenith hold him in high regard.

    But every once in a while lately, a vague feeling of discontent tries to nudge its way into George’s thoughts.  He dreams about getting away from it all by going camping with his friend Paul up in the rustic woods of Maine.  Just to escape for a bit from the stress and hubbub of making money and raising a family in Zenith.

    Thank goodness such rebellious thoughts never stay long.  Failure to strictly abide by the set-in-stone middle-class standards could impact his fine, upstanding status in the community.

What’s To Like...

    Babbitt was published in 1922.  The Great War was over, so was the post-war recession, and optimism ran rampant in the United States, particularly if you were a white middle-class businessman.   The story is set in the fictional city of Zenith, somewhere in the Midwest.

    I was impressed with Sinclair Lewis’s depiction of life in the early 1920’s.  Prohibition was in full-swing, but home-brewed beer and alcohol was easy to come by if you had connections.  Air-conditioning was non-existent, so a lot of houses had a “sleeping porch” (I slept in one once!) to cope with the summer heat.  There are milk trucks, paper-carriers, and a furnace man.  The trolley was the main way to get around the city, and you took the train to go to another city or state.  Cars were certainly common, but you had to “crank the Ford” to get it started.

    Paradoxically, I was amazed at how much society back then resembles today’s social/political climate.  George is vexed because his kids don’t seem to listen to him.  The churches feel it’s their place to influence elections, and evangelists are mostly interested in making money.  Cocaine-use is a problem and business executives perpetrate shady deals.  Anti-immigrant sentiment runs high and “fake news” is cited when one doesn’t like what’s written in the newspapers (see the second excerpt below).  Science is viewed as being in opposition to religion, and leftist “long-hairs” are leading kids astray.  Despite Prohibition, morals are loosening, probably due to fads such as Feminism and New Ageism leading people astray.

    The main theme of Babbitt concerns the consequences of “going against the flow”, in terms of marital fidelity, politics, and religion.  The Status Quo may be corrupt, but it’s also extremely powerful.  The “rebels” of Society might offer tempting alternatives, but in the end, they’re just as shallow and phony as The Establishment.  You step out of line at your own risk.

    There were a fair number of typos in the book, which is not uncommon for a “Public Domain” edition.  Most of them were word splits: motor-cycle, basket-ball, high lights, week-end, to-night, etc.  and they might be just scanning inaccuracies.  It’s also possible that English grammar was slightly different a century ago.  Languages evolve.

    I liked the “lingo” that Sinclair Lewis uses - slangy idioms like “snoway talkcher father”, “pleasmeech”, “Jever”, and “frinstance”.  It sets the down-home tone of the novel quite effectively.  I enjoyed the séance, and chuckled at the mention of Theosophy and Pentecostals.  I learned a new Latin phrase, “hinc illae lacrimae”, which roughly means “that is what those tears were for”, and I felt that comparing the Babbitts/McKelveys dinner date with that of the Babbitts/Overbrooks encapsulates the whole message of the book.

    There is a small amount of cussing, mostly in the dialogue, and about what you’d expect from fine, upstanding middle-aged men.  There’s one roll in the hay, and it’s done off-screen.  The pacing is somewhat slow, but that’s the norm for a typical highbrow book, and it’s balanced by Sinclair Lewis's excellent writing.  The ending is both hopeful and cynical.  Giving more details about that would entail spoilers.

Kewlest New Word ...

Zob (n., slang) : a good-for-nothing; a fool.  (a Yankeeism).

Others: En brosse (adj.; phrase); Picaresque (adj.); Supercilious (adj.); Credulous (adj.).

Kindle Details...

    The “public domain” version of Babbitt is always free at Amazon.  There are various other e-book editions available, each of them has assorted extras.  The most expensive of these was $5.38.  I went with the freebie.   

Excerpts...

    He stood before the covered saucer of raspberry jelly, and grumbling over a clammy cold boiled potato.  He was thinking.  It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practiced it was futile; that heaven as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn’t much pleasure out of making money; that it was of doubtful worth to rear children merely that they might rear children who would rear children.  What was it all about?  What did he want?  (loc. 3489)

    He belonged to the sound, sane, right-thinking wing, and at first he agreed that the Crooked Agitators ought to be shot.  He was sorry when his friend, Seneca Doane, defended arrested strikers, and he thought of going to Doane and explaining about these agitators, but when he read a broadside alleging that even on their former wages the telephone girls had been hungry, he was troubled.  “All lies and fake figures,” he said, but in a doubtful croak.  (loc. 3958)

 “Say! I know what was the trouble!  Somebody went and put alcohol in my booze last night.”  (loc. 2281)

    I don’t have anything significant to quibble about.  There were a poopload of characters to meet and keep track of.  The book is heavy on character studies and light on action and adventure.  But those are things I expect from a highbrow novel, and let’s face it, it is unlikely that a middle-class, middle-aged white suburbanite would have many thrills and spills in his life.

    What impresses me is the immediate and significant impact that Babbitt had on the American public.  It is unsurprising that his caustic and poignant depiction of the average businessman of the time sparked heated debate between his fans and detractors, which of course resulted in it becoming an instantly bestseller.

    Indeed, because of it, “Babbitt” is now an official word in our language (Really.  It’s in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  Google it), meaning “a materialistic and complacent businessman conforming to the standards of his social set”.   Ditto for the milquetoast practice thereof, which are called “Babbittry”.

    8½ Stars.  One last tidbit about Babbitt.  J.R.R. Tolkien was so influenced by the book that he called his newly-imagined Halfling creatures “hobbits” as a tribute to it.  The Bilbo Baggins character we meet at the beginning of The Hobbit, before he gets corrupted by going on an adventure with the dwarves, is a perfect and deliberate example of a Babbitt.

    So says Wikipedia in its post on the novel.  Curiously, this is totally absent from their post on the word "Hobbit".