This blague's readers know that I've been revisiting books that I first read in the 1950s. Last week I reported on Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, which was required reading in junior-year English in Erasmus Hall High School. I re-read Arrowsmith in the very convenient Library of America series, which includes Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth (along with Arrowsmith) in one thick volume. I felt that I owed it to Lewis (after all, he did win a Nobel prize) to read another of his novels. Elmer Gantry won the toss.
While Arrowsmith has not worn very well, Elmer G. is uncannily pertinent. It's about an amoral fundamentalist preacher. He's a nasty opportunistic bastard who crusades against vice but maintains a series of mistresses; he's out for notoriety and money no matter what the cost to his parishioners or to American society. He even becomes --and here Lewis is truly prescient -- the first radio evangelist. It's a heavy-handed, sloppy, brutally satirical book, but it's also right on target. I kept waiting for Elmer to be exposed, but the novel ends when he dodges another mistress and sets out on a route to more and more power. It's a very dark view of the penetration of politics by religion. No wonder it was banned in Boston; even eighty years later, it's much too hot for high school -- although I can't imagine a single book that would be more medicinal for pious youth. And now I understand why Arrowsmith was given us to read: honor the Nobel laureate, but stay as far away as possible from controversy. Dodsworth is about adultery; Main Street attacks American provincialism; Elmer Gantry pillories religion. Arrowsmith is a greatly inferior novel, but it was safer.
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