Elmer Gantry ~ Sinclair Lewis ~ 11/98 ~ Book Club Export

Pat, I'm happy that you plan to join the discussion. I hope it will be a lively one with plenty of good exchanges.

I don't think Elmer Gantry will destroy any well-founded respect for the ministry, but it might have you mentally reviewing some of the less admirable examples of that calling either in your own experience or in recent well-publicized cases.

Lewis doesn't condemn everyone who ever preached a sermon, served a mass, or led a public prayer. Just where he himself was coming from, so to speak, is a question I hope we can deal with, and it will be enlightening to have some analysis from readers who are familiar with the various denominations that figure in the novel.

Lewis was nothing if not hard-hitting in these novels in the muck-raking tradition. I confidently expected to sail through the book in a couple of sittings, having read it once more than half a century ago; but I found I had to keep putting it down because it is so intense, so densely written, with so little relief from the attack mode.

He was careful, incidentally, not to generalize about formal religion; every attack was based on the behavior of some fictional character, with the reader left to make inferences.

Ros

Hi all:

I wasn't too anxious to join the Gantry reading. I thought it was a too easy read for SN, but Milt ordered it from B & N since he wanted the new Scrabble dictionary. No extra ship. charge for an additional book.

Since it's such a quick read, I'll reread my Lewis bio and see what I can contribute from the life.

Charlotte

Charlotte, I'm delighted that you will be joining us. Are you talking about the mammoth Mark Schorer bio? Not my idea of a quick read, I'm afraid. I think Schorer exemplified the experience of many biographers, developing a love-hate relationship with his subject. He is certainly harsh in his criticism of Lewis's works and struggles to find some basis for the author's bitterness and negative approach to the topics of his fiction, but at the same time exhibits sympathy toward the plight of this unhappy difficult man.

It took me several sessions of attentive reading, over several days, to get through Elmer Gantry with the goal of being able to discuss it intelligently. The parallels to Dickens are inescapable and in fact are referred to in a number of critical essays about Lewis. But I want to withhold comments on Lewis as a literary stylist, etc., until December.

I got the video and managed to sit through about half of it. It's disgusting, nothing like the book, one of those cases where they bought the title and a few names of characters and just cooked up a typical 1960's Hollywood mess.

Hey, have we started our discussion already?

Ros

I thought about getting the HL Mencken dedication copy of Elmer Gantry for 13-Grand from B&N but opted for the Signet Classic paperback instead. I received today!

It's not like there are a million choices of editions, at least not offered on the Internet?? I guess I'll have to stick with my old signet, too. Was hoping there might be some really authoritive text available.

Ginny

Ginny, by "authoritative text" do you mean one which would annotate all the possible resemblances to real people and real events? I don't think it was wholly a roman a clef, though it's tempting to consider it as such. Of course, what immediately comes to mind (to us old geezers anyway) is Aimee Semple McPherson. Lewis is known to have made one plot change in order not to be charged with libelous imitation of her. Maybe we can find further information in the Lewis biographies. Charlotte has one she can refer to, and one of my branch libraries yielded a huge book by Mark Schorer, as well as a couple of slim collections of critical essays.

I think we might be trend-spotting here -- Lewis's scurrilous prose and unwavering sarcasm are about due for a comeback in popularity. We'll be in the vanguard again, eh? Nevertheless, I'm drawn toward a less-than-scholarly approach of getting a bit of historical background, reading first for plot lines, and dealing with other matters as they arise. It is known, alas, that Lewis had a lifelong problem with alcohol that plagued him as he wrote this book. He certainly wasn't alone in that illness. I've wondered if it was almost like a requirement for a certain type of literary genius which was released only when the individual was "freed" from the constraints of everyday life. I don't want to dwell on this but I've wondered if there might be a connection to Lewis's bitterness about certain social issues and the hypocrisy that surrounded them.

Ros

The term picaresque novel is used to describe a narrative in which the "hero" is actually a rogue or scoundrel. This label has been applied to Elmer Gantry, and the opening chapter might well support the choice:

We meet Elmer in 1902 as a handsome, burly college senior who is "gloriously drunk," who enrolled at a fundamentalist college in Kansas because his mother saved and scrimped to provide an education for him, but who "detested piety and admired drunkenness and profanity." As a student he is lazy and ill-prepared, lacking in motivation and direction. His principal attributes appear to be a fine resonant voice for singing and speaking, a strong body for playing football and fighting, and a lively interest in "girls" which is gratified by frequent crossings of the state line from dry Kansas to wet Missouri to enjoy liquor and the favors of a complaisant young woman. Two other important characters are introduced: Elmer's atheist roommate, Jim Lefferts, and the pious and earnest Eddie Fislinger - who takes advantage of Elmer's emotional vulnerability to wrest from him an embarrassingly public acknowledgement of religious faith which is quickly repudiated.

At this point it's tempting to close the book. Let's persevere, however, and discover how Lewis creates an astonishing adventure, an amoral and self-seeking journey that carries this rascally anti-hero from heights of indulgence to depths of fear and disgrace, and back again.

Ros

Yes, this is going to be a toughie, and I'm so glad our Ros is at the helm here, it sure raises more questions than it answers. Almost thru, will bide mouth until some of the rest of you come on in, and so I can catch up. Lewis was always one of my favorite writers, have read his Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Main Street, and the autobiographical one about the world travelers?? But not his very last one.

This is the first time I see in his books another side. Interesting!!

Ginny

Ros:

I have the Mark Schorer. It's a great book. I once read it in its entirety. I will check it out on Gantry, but I am also involved in Sir Gawain, Betrand Russell, Pinsky's Dante. Didn't finish Gantry yet. Will have to forget the rest of the Tuscan Sun. Also trying to keep uf with the NY Times, The New Yorker, Poets and Writers Mag. and various other literary stuff. It's coming out of my ears. But I'm having a ball. Should have been living this way all my life.

Charlotte

Charlotte, I agree totally!

Ginny

Aren't we all - as we carry this load of "must-reads" - just tingling with mental energy? No fogies we, except for unexpectedly nodding off in front of the television after dinner.

Charlotte, it would be wonderful if you could share your gleanings from the Schorer biography, particularly about the background of preparation Lewis underwent to familiarize himself with aspects of various religious denominations.

Wasn't Gantry based in part on a real clergyman he knew?

As I recall, it was a far cry from what he could have learned from observation to what finally appeared in print. We'll need all our literary objectivity to deal with his rancorous interpretations or misreadings of organized religion.

I posted a message in the Tuscan Sun folder reminding readers that this discussion has begun and suggesting that we look at Gantry as if it had been written by a suddenly-revived Dickens, taking the heavy-handed humor and one-sided portraits as "historical" to give ourselves some distance from the delicate subject matter.

Ros

I waited only two days for our local library to locate a copy of Elmer Gantry at a local college. After reading just a few pages I am intrigued, but must get my own copy. This one is ancient, teeny type, and is falling apart and brown.

So far this brazen, good for nothing young man, or should I say "lout" sounds all too familiar to me.

I'll try to get hold of my own copy tomorrow.

Speak to you soon.....Love, Fran

Welcome, Fran. Yes, that young Elmer strikes one as hard to love, doesn't he? Yet Lewis will repeatedly tell how his sheer physicality proves a magnet for all kinds of people - more often to his advantage than to theirs.

The copy I'm using is a reprint of the original 1927 Harcourt, Brace edition, issued some years ago by Book of the Month Club when they were producing American classics from the original plates; so I'm guessing yours is the same densely printed small type and crowded page. But hang in there, we're going to "do it to death."

(That, parenthetically, is an expression I was shocked to see written on the chalkboard by a second-grade teacher in an inner-city school back in the years when militancy was in flower. It's a powerful image, though I didn't think it was something to tell kids who were already surrounded by death, but apparently I was the only one who noticed.)

Ros

Elmer is definitely not in demand at this time. Tried two B&N, Borders and our huge local bookstore, and no one had it! However my library just came through with a paperback copy. The only problem is that I'll have to use post-its instead of my usual notes in the margins.

Read some of Schorer's "afterward" before I began and found it to be enlightening as far as the manner in which Sinclair Lewis approached the writing of a novel. He is said to be the most systematic of all the American novelists. Schorer tell us that "it resembles nothing so much as the method of anthropological field research."

Before he wrote anything he would think of the novel in terms of it's subject as in this case ,"the preacher novel". He then mingled with the kind of people who would usually be involved in the particular subject matter. He would observe them,listen to them and take copious notes…including every kind of detail imaginable. He drew detailed maps of where the action would take place not only of the city or town but down to the homes in which the characters would live, work and play out their lives. I mean down to the type and placement of the furniture and the kind of dogs the inhabitants were to have.

It says that from that point slowly the characters would emerge and Lewis would write out detailed biographies for each of them. From all of this the story began to emerge with a summary at first and then the re-writes, expanding the story as he went along.

Goes on to tell of how he immersed himself with preachers to get his material for the book. Perhaps someone else would like to tackle that as I am out of space and time right now. It's fascinating stuff.

Helen, how fascinating! I see I need that book, too!

There's one cultural shock or time shock right off the bat! So much is made of how BIG Elmer is, how HUGE how tremendous and he's only 6'1.!! If that, is he 6'1" or 6 feet tall? Either way, a giant he's not!!

Ginny

I just found six postings I hadn't seen before...oh well. There'as more of us aboard here than I thought. Charles I don't know if you made the right choice in editions. I have the Signet beside me and its a drab looking little thing.

Ginny: I think it's possible that in 1927, 6'1'' was considered pretty tall...but certainly not huge. I went back to the passage and they describe him as all around big,broad, even his hands and face. He also sounds like the hippie of his day...his hair,"worn rather long".

He had scorn for men who had a love of books,flowers or were faint of heart. He is described as a gladiator,who majored in intimidation and the seduction of girls. What a guy.

Ros: I am delighted to learn that the book is nothing like the movie. I remember really disliking the movie.

Helen paraphrasing from Schorer...."He then mingled with the kind of people who would usually be involved in the particular subject matter."

Lewis must have picked a really raunchy bunch to mingle with. (I know no ending with preposition.)

But got to remember ministers, clergy, are still human.

My son worked as a collector for General Finance when he was first out of school. He claims ministers are the worst credit risks. Default rate is about 70%.

I hope to follow this discussion, probably lurking all the way. I don't have time to read the book and anyway, read it already years ago. I remember being greatly impressed by it, as well as the other popular Lewis novels, so this will be so interesting.

Some quick thoughts (about half way through Gantry): I've noted a few negative comments about the movie. I really remember NOTHING about it (except that both Burt Lancaster AND Shirley Jones won Academy Awards) - but I CAN STILL SEE LANCASTER…"The mornin' an the evenin' Star". The book confirms for me that he did it just right. This jerk had charisma. And this particular "hook" plays a prominent part in Gantry's arsenal. (I also must confess I had a teenage crush on LuLu Bains (Shirley Jones)!!)

I'd quarrel with the use of the term picaresque novel in relation to this book. I think of Giles Goat Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor, even Candide.

P.S. This is the first time ever, ever, ever, in my life I've been reading two things (fiction) at once. How y'all do that I don't know. Charlotte, you amaze!

….Charlie

Charles, no point in nit-picking over literary definitions, is there? but - although your examples of the picaresque novels are fine, I have to add that I can see elements of the picaresque in the episodic structure of the narrative, which really lacks the rising-action - climax - denouement of the classic plot, and also in the totally "picaroon" depiction of Elmer, a no-goodnik if there ever was one, for whom Lewis appears to have a sneaking admiration even as he emphasizes his sleaziness.

But the movie? No, no, and again no. Trasheroony. In my view, Burt Lancaster slobbered; Shirley Jones was a Barbie doll gone wrong; Jean Simmons was 180 degrees away from Sharon Falconer. The script was stuffed with phony morality at all the wrong places. So whaddya think, did I like it?

Ros

Ros: As for picaresque, I focused on the episodic, adventurous nature of those narratives for which I gave examples. On further reflection, I'd have to say that Gantry does have another quality of the 'picaresque' - the "first he's down, and then he's up, and then he's down again" facet to the main character's 'story'.

As for the movie. OUCH!! Can I recommend another movie to you??

Gracious, did you see that thing on Walker Railey last night? Gosh. I always thought he did it. Now there, would we say, was another parson struggling with demons, yet the Prosecution definitely thought he was evil. Would we say Elmer was evil? Perhaps I should shut up,having only read half. Just wanted to throw Walker Railey into the flock...

Ginny

I'm half-way, too... Elmer wasn't evil... just uncouth, and greedy maybe. IMHO

Ginny, please tell me who Walker Railey is or was and what he did or was thought to have done. Where did you see this?

Ros

He was a Methodist Minister, Bishop candidate, I hate you missed that, it was on...is it Dateline NBC? An update. Man of the cloth, charismatic preacher but began receiving threatening letters, wore a bullet proof vest to the services, and one night this paragon of virtue arrived home to find his wife, a concert pianist and organist, dying in the garage, strangled. She remains in a semi comatose state. He tried to kill himself while staying in her hospital room and wrote a note about being possessed by a demon. His youth was quite similar to that of Elmer, actually.

The FBI found that the saliva on the threatening letters' envelopes he had received was his own. And there was a girlfriend, a psychiatrist, with whom he had been having an affair. He tried to establish phone call alibis, but messed up there and lied about the times.

I didn't get to see the end, but thought I heard them say that he had married AGAIN!

When he LURCHED across at the narrator of the piece and showed how the police had taken him in, I wanted to run from the room, he should have left that off: you can see clearly the madness, and you can see how he could have done it. He was shaking.

It's sort of a Midnight in the Garden kind of story... another true garden of good and evil. I noticed in the tapes of the trial when the FBI expert revealed he had licked his own envelopes and fabricated the story, and the typewriter was his own, he smiled. Did any of you see that? Gosh, sent chills thru me. He smiled.

Parents were alcoholics, maybe the poor soul is psychotic, who knows?

Ginny

Thanks, Ginny. Well, Elmer stopped short of murder, and he was not psychotic. Narcissistic, yes, and a touch psychopathic, maybe, in the sense of having a diminished empathy and a certain indifference to the standards of society.

I think Lewis sets out early to make the reader aware, not only of Gantry's faults, but of what he himself sees as the pitiable gullibility of most people and their willingness - even eagerness - to be used by anyone with a commanding physical presence and that seductive, self-centered emotional greed.

Ros

Some things that struck me very early on-

(1) Lewis has some obvious favorite targets, usually lumping them all together as 'three'-peas-in-a-pod: politicians, the clergy, and businessmen (usually salesmen): Speaking of Gantry in Ch.1, Pt.1 - "He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously." (p.9). Ch. 3, Pt. 4 - "In his class in Public Speaking, a course designed to create congressmen, bishops, and sales-managers..." (p. 58). Ch. 8, Pt. 1 - "Often he thought of resiging and going into business. Since buttery words and an important manner would be as valuable in business as in the church." (p. 117). Of course, he becomes a sales-man for a few years (his wandering in the desert) before he comes back to the church and combines the two.

(2) How he inserts understated or brutal put-downs that it is easy to miss if you're not careful, or are skimming. The last paragraph in Ch 1, Pt 2 - "It was lamentable to see this broad young man, who would have been so happy in the prize-ring, the fish-market, or the stock exchange... (p. 13).Ch. 8, Pt. 2 - "The Old Testament God's habit of desiring the reeking slaughter of everyone who did not flatter him seemed rather antisocial..." (p. 120)

(3) His knack for, like a prize-fighter himself, softening up the opposition before the knock-out punch. Reread Ch 2, Pt 1. He goes on a length about Gantry's association of the church with some of the finer things in life: music, oratory, painting, philosophy...He had got so much from the church ("everything")except...WHAM!"any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason." (p. 34), Well, ok! What do you REALLY think of the influence of the church on Elmer? (As in: Ros, what did you REALLY think of the movie?!!!)

Later. Charlie

Charles is right, Lewis DOES slip in lots of slaps in the face, some of which are downright funny. I laughed out loud at some of them, while, on the other hand, privately wondering who had done what to Lewis to produce this bitterness.

Yet I do think he addresses a very important point: the difficulty of a human or normal man trying to be pure, you might say. It must be an awful burden, if you're a member of a sect which advertises it's preachers to be perfect, and its laymen to be examples, even to the most pious. In fact, I know it is. After all, we are only human, and some particular religious sects do seem to demand perfection in their leaders, which, of course, is impossible.

It must be very difficult to KNOW when one has a "vocation" or "call." I know many men of the cloth struggle with temptations.

I think, if you've ever been to a tent revival, that Lewis is spot on as far as the excitement and the sort of mental hysteria that is produced, and I'm thinking he's not too far off in his depiction of a young man caught up in religious fervor.

The pride of the mother (I've only read half the book) is also a factor, but I guess Lewis is saying to himself that NOBODY is perfect, and that the "call" may be based on other things than what it appears to be.

I will never forget Susan Smith (the one who ran the car with her two children off a bridge about 15 miles from here) and her pious religious statements, almost rote, after the murders. I wonder if hypocricy is a natural result of the warring factions: the need to be presented as perfect, and the impossibility of same.

The Walker Railey matter is an example of things carried to extremes, but it can't be denied: it's true, and Gantry is fiction. Somehow, I think Lewis knew somebody pretty well and guessed the rest.

Ginny

Brethren and sistern, I will take for my text a definition by the philosopher and educator John Dewey:

[What we call] God is the force which draws men toward the good.

Examine this carefully to recognize that Dewey is identifying every human's wish to be "good," and saying that for many, this wish is contained in the concept of an anthropomorphic and largely benevolent deity which seems to care about our behavior, while for others it may be represented by an infuriating force, an avenger bent on punishing our failures to fall down and adore. The embellishment of one or both of these concepts provided, for many centuries, every aspect of cultural enrichment available to the common man or woman. Think about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which shows plainly how the old pagan festivals and rituals and their attendant rewards and terrors were appropriated by the Christian fathers as a way of enriching and enlivening miserable lives and at the same time drawing people into the circle of the new formal religion.

I think the question Charles poses will be central as we continue our discussion.

Let me comment, Charles, on two of the instances you cite. It's important to remember that Lewis's facetious comment on the "anti-social" aspects of the religion is given to Frank Shallard, the one true believer Lewis permits us to see. And the "finer things" that Elmer experienced through the church are pitiable and trite. Lewis seems to suggest that this low level is as far as Elmer ever got, that he had no understanding of anything of real quality. (Not everyone is a Sister Wendy who can be credited with understanding all fine art through her collection of picture postcards.)

Pat, belatedly responding to your earlier message . . . you are so right in reminding us that the clergy are, after all, only human. But do you have the impression that Lewis was skillful at hunting out and emphasizing his subjects' weak points rather than their strong ones? Somehow I was reminded of the current popularity of tell-all books, movies, and TV docudramas about respected artists, authors, and various historic figures. Very few people know anything about the works of -- let's say -- Virginia Woolf, but many more could tell you about her precarious mental health and her sex life. These presentations, usually cloaked in that glowing sepia light that suggests "the olden days," concentrate on the inevitable and titillating shortcomings of famous people and disregard their contributions to human thought, welfare, or spiritual well-being.

You know I'm not a Christian so I'll ask your forgiveness for quoting a biblical text; but isn't there something in Scripture about "casting the first stone"? Was Lewis so full of self-hate and self-deprecation that he could be comfortable only when he found fault with others?

We find as we continue to read that Elmer Gantry has brief moments when he ponders his own misconduct and feels that he ought to reform. But how long do they last?

Ros

Hi All:

I think my previous posts on this book have been lost. I am having a hard time reading Gantry. I'd much rather read Schorer's bio of Lewis. Schorer is more literary and a much better writer.

This book created an uproar when it was published. Schorer quotes many well-known writers who thought Elmer was a sleeze, a manipulator and only into religion for what he could get out of it personally Of course there was much complaint from the religeuse who felt they were being satifized..

I am half-way through the novel and except for occasional bits of good writing, it leans towards melodrama-- expecially with the introduction of Sharon Falconer.

However, Elmer's first sermon is reminiscent of the Hell-fire sermons by John Donne or James Joyce's sermon by a priest in "Portrait of the Artist." The only difference, which is a positive, is that Elmer's emphasis is on love rather than damnation.

I guess it is too soon to post Schorer's disdainful quotes. Will save them till the end.

Charlotte

This is my first post in this discussion, having been off-line for about a week, or mostly so. My copy of the novel is a raggedy, dissolving library book, so I don't have any extra information or annotations. I'm overwhelmed by the info. in the wonderful posts, and equally impressed with Lewis's attitude about the religious environment Elmer would have known. The line Charles quotes struck me forcefully: "...music, oratory, painting, philosophy...He had got so much from the church ("everything")except...WHAM!"any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason." (p. 34). Those of you who have the Schorer bio --- what does the quthor say about Lewis' early religious education?

Jo, welcome to the less-than-pristine world of Elmer Gantry's 20th century.

Charlotte, I seem to remember earlier posts but they must have been left in the "preview" discussion before this became the official BC selection. I know that was where you mentioned having the Lewis bio and volunteered to supply information, so you'll be able to satisfy Jo's curiosity about Lewis's actual religious background.

I have a feeling that people of our generation/s (the barely senior, the fully senior, and the super-senior), having inherited from our English teachers a feeling of obligatory reverence for Sinclair Lewis -- and perhaps having read some of his works in our teens when we welcomed anything satirical, critical of the establishment, and full of (ahem) and vinegar -- may be somewhat unsettled as we approach this book with a more mature and more sophisticated viewpoint.

But -- courage, my friends! We've read some great things, but we've also waded through our share of printed drivel in the past three years, and it will take more than a few hundred pages of outdated muckraking to defeat us.

Ros

Hi, My name is Steve Jarrett and I'm new to SeniorNet and these discussions. I just got my copy of Gantry and plan to start reading and joining in. I also belong to another on line book group and read 2 books a month for that one. I am also still working and have a great deal of reading to do for that, so I'm hoping I have the time to get everything done. If my wife starts complaining that I'm isolating and neglectful, I'll know it's time to drop something.

Steve!! Welcome, welcome! We are delighted to see you here and look forward to your remarks. We've got some stunning discussions about to be announced, but you're in the right place!! This will be a good one!

Now, then:

Outdated??

All I have to say, Friends, is: Jim Bakker
Walker Railey
give me a moment, and I'll think of some more.

Ginny

And, Ginny, sad to say, William Jefferson Clinton. I am absolutley convinced that when Bill bites his lip and asks for forgiveness and prays with those who mean to guide him out of his sinful ways, THERE IS NOT AN OUNCE OF SUBJECTIVE HYPOCRISY in his actions.Much like Gantry, I'd submit.

Charlotte: I agree that Lewis' writing is not what I would call literary. When he writes that Falconer's kiss to Gantry "was like a swallow's flight" it seemed positively out of place. Forced.

Also you mentioned melodrama. When Gantry and Falconer were "called" into her secret chamber (her "furnace of scarlet") - well, even Hollywood wouldn't film that scene!!

Oh yes: Jimmy Swaggart. Stayed up half the night trying to think of his name.

Charles: What an interesting observation!! But is the hypocrit ever aware of his hyporcisy? Does awareness of the situation remove the label of hypocricy entirely? Interesting??

I looked up the word hypocrisy and it means: "acting a part; a pretending to be what one is not, or to feel what one does not feel; esp., a pretense of virtue, piety, etc. hypocrite: one who pretends to be pious, virtuous, etc. without really being so."

I would be intersted in the derivation of that word, I must get the CD ROM of the OED!!!

The definition seems to suggest that one who is acting is hypocritical, but one who is NOT acting, is not!

Amazing.

Ginny

Steve, welcome indeed to this discussion. You're joining Books and Literature at an auspicious moment, as we gaze with astonishment at the way it has grown in a short time from a rather tentative and conversational beginning to a gigantic Round Table that rivals the one at Camelot and indeed exceeds it in its provision of something for everyone. This discussion looks as if it will be a free-for-all, so don't hesitate to jump in with comments, questions, agreements, dissent...anything relevant to the book and the subject.

>Ginny, I haven't hoisted OED from its nest yet but my big American Heritage Dic shows that hypocrite and hypocrisy existed in Middle English with the sense of both "actor/acting" and "dissembler/dissembling." I think a conscious act is always implied.

You've listed some names, but I have to admit I'm not entirely clear about your context. Could you help me out by elucidating?

Ros

OH, somebody said the book was outdated?? And they may have meant the language, the "Say,...." and whatever, but I was trying, in my hysterical way, to point out that the THEME as I see it: the conflict of conscience in the case of the religious leader, is with us still, today, yesterday and probably tomorrow: and we've got lots of living proof in the persons cited?

It fascinates me the "take" people have on this book, how they instantly react to their OWN touchstones. It may be that even tho we dislike the florid writing, that the book is a classic, after all. Maybe a great one. BUT, she hastens to add, I'm not thru!!

Ginny

Hi Everyone:

I am having a hard time reading Gantry. Unlike Dickens, Lewis has utter disdain for his characters. He is writing pure satire, without any ameliorating feelings towards his characters. Dickens has empathy and warm feelings towards his characters. Lewis has none. This novel has nowhere near the enchantment of Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” or the sensitivity of Thomas Wolfe, which were written of about the same era.

I’m much happier quoting Mark Schorer, who is a better, more literary writer. He says:

“Elmer Gantry is the noisiest novel in American literature, the most braying, guffawing, belching novel we have and it is it’s prose that sets the uproar going: if we are to have a novel filled with jackasses and jackals, let them by all means, bray and guffaw. On the same grounds, one may defend “by crackee, by jimminy” crudities of the physical environment within which this noise goes on, this imbecilic articulateness, only pointing out in addition that Lewis’s old ability to invoke a concrete world--the smell of Pullman car dust, the food at a church picnic, the contents of the library of a small Methodist bishop--is still sufficiently in force to cram full the outlines of his stereotypes.

One can go further. At each of his three climaxes, Lewis abdicates such sense of the dramatic scene as he may have had and retreats into melodrama. “ (Page 478. I will come back to the climaxes after I’ve read them later on in the novel.)

Schorer quotes Maxwell Geismar (p. 480)

“Just as there is really no sense of vice in Lewis’s literary world, there is no true sense of virtue. Just as there is practically no sense of human love in the whole range of Lewis’s psychological values and no sense of real hatred--there is no genuine sense of human freedom.”

Schorer goes on to say “Elmer Gantry is a work of almost pure revulsion. It seems to shudder and shake with loathing of that which it describes. The very fact that the novelist must create the image of the thing he loathes, in order to his express his loathing, points to the peculiar imaginative animus that motivates this novel.” He then goes on to speculate on the sources of such feelings in Lewis’s own life.

Thomas Wolfe used the diary of George Webber (in “You Can’t Go Home Again”) to describe meeting Lewis (who he has given the name of Lloyd McHarg) for the first time. He says McHarg “had aspired to Fame and won her, and I saw it was an empty victory.” Wolfe goes on to say “he had her more completely than I could ever hope to have her, yet it was apparent that for him Fame was not enough. He needed something more and he had not found it.” Wolfe modifies minor facts to disguise that Lewis was indeed the prototype for McHarg, “but they are transparent and the general account is nearly a hundred pages long and substantially literal.” (p. 558)

Lewis Mumford surveyed Lewis’s work said that “Elmer Gantry,” was unspeakable, but “Dodsworth” was splendid.

FROM MY OWN POINT OF VIEW: I still haven’t finished it, but I see this book as a stereotypical artifact on the college student of 1902 in the midst of the Roaring Twenties. At the very beginning Lewis gives us an almost complete description of Gantry’s appearance, voice and inward thoughts. He describes Gantry’s state of drunkeness in detail, his obsession with the past and mentions his bigotry. Lewis tells us, amusingly, that “He was born to be a senator. He never said anything important, and he always said it sonorously.” “in the enchantment of it you did not hear his slang, his boasting, his smut and the dreadful violence which he performed on singulars and plurals.” Very good writing, indeed. Lewis goes on to tell his that Elmer detested piety and admired drunkeness and profanity. He is brutal in his treatment of others and together with his friend Jim “shows a Freshman his place in society by removing all his clothes and leaving him five miles in the country.” He thinks he is popular and well -liked, is elected to Class President twice and interprets the chiliness evidenced by others as envy and fear. This gives him a feeling of greatness. Yet he has no other friend than Jim Lefferts.

I was just a little kid in the thirties, but I remember some of the slang in common use during that era.. I remember the empty eloquence of people in authority who gave speeches full of moral platitudes, declaiming virtue and ardent patriotism in the style of William Jennings Bryan. I remember the emphasis on sonority, the private lessons some kids took in a subject called Elocution. (Now that field of study is more gently named Oral Interpretation.) It was a period which gloried in Kiplingesque poems about giving one’s life to one’s country in battle and adhering to the straight and narrow. Do we see some of these practices reflected in the activities of the Christian Right?

P.S. I will check on Schorer to see if there’s anything about Elmer’s early religious education.

Charlotte

We hear a lot about Clinton's ability to "compartmentalize" the various facets of his life. One might say that Gantry has the same ability? And that, in my understanding, neither Gantry, nor Clinton are "hypocrites" as the various things that "push-pull" them are "unto themselves" - these dualities coexist in their strange personalities. Both are charismatic. Clinton is a true believer (in his religion) AND a pathological womanizer. Gantry is a pathological womanizer (he MUST have them - although the 'having' generates disgust), a natural drinker and all around profane guy, but paradoxically is a 'true believer' also.

Charlotte: Right. There are NO sympathetic characters to be seen so far in this novel. Lewis despised them all, and that chills our engagement with his characters.

A possible exception, for me anyway, might have been Jim Lefferts, but he has more or less disappeared. ROS: In my cloudy thinking it has crossed my mind that Jim could be a stand in for Lewis. Yes/No??

Charlie

Charles, that's a perceptive thought. But no, I don't think Lewis saw himself as the only good man. I think someone, in some of the huge collection of Lewisiana, has succeeded in identifying a Good Person in every one of his works. Frank Shallard is surely that good person here. Goodness knows we won't find many more - or more correctly, we'll find more good people but very few who have the backbone and integrity that led Frank to his later decision.

You've brought me back to the point, which is the novel Elmer Gantry. Let us not expend energy hating either the author or the central character. Let's consider instead the skill with which Sinclair Lewis created a charming rogue of limited intelligence and generous physical gifts, sparing us no detail of his weakness, greed, lechery, deceptiveness, and hunger for power -- and yet frequently reminded us that he loved his mother. Lewis shows us over and over again how the same bag of tricks goes on fooling one set of congregants after another -- and lets us see each brief spasm of penitence when Gantry is caught, figuratively or literally, with his pants down. Lewis enjoys letting Gantry hobnob with the Big Boys, the Rich Folks, but there's always that sneaking fear that somehow they can see through him. And there's the supreme irony that his entire career in the ministry was built on the foundation of a single idea filched from the treasury of the Evil One himself - the atheist Robert Ingersoll.

Clumsily overwritten, yes; extreme in its black-and-white good-and-bad contrasts, yes; repetitious and tiresome in spots, yes. But in the end, suspenseful -- for we will read to the final page hoping that the comeuppance Elmer Gantry deserves will descend on him at last.

Ros

Yes, of course, Ros!! Thank you, thank you.. I had forgotten that irony - that Gantry's mantra ("what is love?")- was filched from an atheist. Oh, that's rich!!

And then there's THE CALL. It seems Lewis had a lot of fun toying with the serious, to fundamentalist Christians, tenet that those who served the Lord were "called" to do so. Gantry's 1st call was after a bottle of moonshine. His 2d was from Sharon Falconer before their initial night of passion. Lewis seems to have 1001 ways to poke fun at the rituals of worship.

Charlie

Charlotte, thanks for that informatin on the Schorer. Fascinating. And, of course, a critic takes a certain position and defends it. I agree he writes well, even if I don't agree with everything he says.

I also don't agree with whoever there said Dodsworth was a masterpiece? It's so autobiographical it might be a diary, at least I found it so, but I enjoyed it all the same. I think he got a LOT out in it towards his former wife, tho.

Now you've all raised some great points.

I think it's interesting that here, as we always do, we've found so much to talk about. I think that's one of the strengths of our Book Club Online, that, unlike, perhaps, a F2F Book Club where people sit in a group and have trouble controlling their facial expressions when one person says something,( which leads to everyone saying the same thing), here we are, from all different walks of life and backgrounds, saying what we really think!! And that way WE have a more diverse and thus interesting discussion, as we agree to disagree.

And if we are, of course, the sum and total and perhaps just a tad more of our experiences, then it's obvious we'll react differently to the issues raised in the book.

And of course, there is NO right or wrong here. NO particular opinion to espouse, and we certainly do NOT need to agree at all.

I'm still only 1/2 way thru the book, and so far the issue which still looms largest for me is that of the seeming contradiction between the position Elmer holds in life and his inner convictions or lack of same. Perhaps you don't see that as the major issue in the book. I will be interested to find out what you DO think is the main theme?

I don't think we can just dismiss out of hand the fact that he's not much of a person?? Take it for granted as if it were a fact of life?

Charles: I thought all religions experienced the "call?" I remember quite a bit of conversation in Brideshead Revisited about the "vocation," and having the call to same??

Let's do a spot check here, (with apologies to our Noble Leader, but it does seem to me we're coming from different countries here) just to see what sorts of experiences we've all had? Not to answer if you feel these questions too personal, but it will give us some idea of where YOU are coming from here.

1. Have you ever attended a tent meeting or evangelistic gathering? Do you find Lewis's portrayal of same realistic??

2. Have you personally ever known somebody like Elmer? Either IN or OUT of the ministry??

3. Does this portrait of Elmer Gantry seem unreal? Do you think Lewis is exaggerating??

4. Do you think it matters whether or not a religious leader actually tries to be upright??

5. Is this a story about religion at all??

I still contend that what Lewis has written so far is accurate, and, more than that, dead on. He knew somebody, you can rely on that, and he's skewering them unmercifully. But why? Maybe in his time there weren't so many Jim Bakkers, and it was the more scandalous, would we raise an eyebrow now?

I DO want to know about the three climaxes to the plot.

Ginny

Ginny:

Please put me on the list for the Lucia video.

Thanks,

Charlotte

Charlotte, you're ON the list!!

Thanks,

Ginny

May I get on the list too, Ginny?

Ginny, here are my answers to your questions:
1)No.
2)No.
3a) Yes; 3b) yes.
4) Yes and No.
5) I don't understand this question.

Ros

May, you certainly can! Charlotte, I wrote Larry to send them on to you when he finishes, and please write our May (we put up our Christmas tree yesterday,May and I thought of you with my little Wisconsin football player!! No cheese, tho!!)and get her address, have already sent yours to our Larry.

Ros: Question is obscure? What else is new? Let me go look again.

Ginny

1. Have you ever attended a tent meeting or evangelistic gathering? Do you find Lewis's portrayal of
same realistic??
Yes, Very realistic... Went to a revival when I was in H.S. with a friend... and they were really weird... Lots of shouting Amens..

2. Have you personally ever known somebody like Elmer? Either IN or OUT of the ministry??
Yes... Had a young minister at a church camp once. I'm sure he may have turned into an Elmer Gantry.

3. Does this portrait of Elmer Gantry seem unreal? Do you think Lewis is exaggerating??
Maybe a little exaggeration, but Lewis is trying to get a point or description across.

4. Do you think it matters whether or not a religious leader actually tries to be upright??
Remember the drunken preacher"Do as I say... not as I do."

5. Is this a story about religion at all??
Not really.. more about the conning of the gullible public. It's still going on today. TV religion is big business and I'm not sure you can call it religion either.

Now, that's interesting, Pat, and I think it points out the different perspectives we each bring to any book. I just read where John Updike said he'd never have read Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full had he not been obliged to because of his position as judge on the National Books Awards.

Updike's talents aside, it's interesting to me how this old piece can stir immediate recognition in the reader, depending on his experience.

If Elmer had been, say, a used car salesman, I wonder if the book would have made less impact on its audience at the time or caused such a furor? Of course, Updike did that theme of the profligate used car salesman later in his Rabbit series, didn't he?

Ginny

Pat, thanks for posting your frank answers to Ginny's questions. Your responses were really interesting. I've never attended a revival meeting; the closest I've come were some "family hours" for deceased members of the African-American community in which I taught for many years. The passion and the emotional release there were genuine, and I observed very strong responses on the part of people I'd known for a long time only as quiet, reserved, professionally competent individuals. In that setting of shared faith and mourning, which was familiar to them though not to me, they behaved differently.

I agree with you that this book is not exactly about religion. Lewis must have carried a big load of resentment and disappointment in order to have expressed himself with such bitterness. He also had a tendency to poke fun at anything he didn't quite agree with.

Apparently in his youth Lewis really had strong religious beliefs and thought about missionary work, but in college he lost interest, proclaiming that "who knows but that my old resolves toward this noble work might be renewed, if I could only believe half of Christian theism." This led him to believe that other young people who continued to participate in religious work were hypocrites -- how could anyone "believe" if he himself couldn't?

Pat, could we almost feel a twinge of compassion for the author, who lost something that had once been meaningful to him?

Ros

SINCLAIR LEWIS An American Life by Mark Schorer More notes on Sinclair Lewis from the above biography:

“HE WAS A QUEER BOY * * * * When he became famous he tried to promulgate his view of having had a totally normal boyhood. But Schorer suggests that such normalcy could not have produced “such a wild man, so mad and so unhappy. He was a queer boy with only one real friend in town.” He was laughed at by girls, especially by the one he adored throughout his adolescence.

He was nearly six feet tall before he was sixteen with a short torso set on very long and spindly legs and weighed only a hundred and twenty pounds; lank and lean, but with a puffy, acne-ridden face

* * big feet and hands, badly coordinated in his movements, everything about his body hanging and dangling and swinging and lunging and stumbling and ice-blue eyes (astigmatic), rather protruding, all of this thatched with a carrot-colored wig.” (p 3.)

He was besieged with derogatory nicknames, “the original reuben of the joke books and the itinerant vaudeville troupe of that time, the butt of every crude bit of horseplay. He, whose work was one day to illustrate Constance Rourke’s conception of American humor was himself, first of all, an illustration of it. He was lonely. He became Sinclair Lewis.” (p. 3)

(A NOTE ON HIS GIVEN NAME He was mostly called Harry, and there were also a number of derogatory nicknames. There has been much speculation that he had adopted the name Sinclair because of his admiration of the writer Upton Sinclair. The fact is that his father had given him the name Sinclair to honor an old friend Dr. George Sinclair, a dentist.)

“In him we have the doubly pathetic sight of as youth who is driven into an inner world even more bleak and barren than the exterior world that expelled him, who would have gladly chosen that world. And this difference from the novelistic pattern was to make for the real enigma of his novels, a persistent conflict of values that clashed no less within him” (p. 4).

E.J. LEWIS - Physician and Surgeon. -- Lewis’s Father

Schorer says we would call him a “character.” Rather cold, rigid, parsimonious, almost compulsively methodical, absolutely without self-questioning, with a dedicated sense of the value of hard work for hard work’s sake and with that dubious Puritanism, a fine sense of professional responsibility.

A contemporary of young Sinclair (then called Harry) said Dr. Lewis “hadn’t any imagination, little conception of child’s point of view (was) dictatorial, harsh and a bit cruel. He took himself (too) seriously, which can be overdone. From statements made by the old doctor, Harry didn’t have a bright future; and I think the doctor’s feelings were realized by Harry. Perhaps that was the spur that pushed Harry on.”

EARLIEST MENTION OF RELIGION IN SCHORER’S BIO:

In the last years he spent in his native Sauk Centre Lewis developed an interest in religion . He not only attended the regular services in the Congregational Church, but regularly visited the Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist and Roman Catholic Churches and went to meetings of the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor. He shunned dances and parties, possibly because he could not bear to suffer watching his unobtainable love Myra Hendryx, showering her favors on other boys.

He records every encounter with her in his diaries, “but he is already reconciled to the impossibility of his love.”

“Walked a little way behind MYRA HENDRYX this after, coming home from school. What a waist, what a head, what arms, what shoulders and what legs! O what a charming girl she is and I love her. But alas!, she does not like me.”

Around 1902, he began to develop a strong sense of piety, not out of the limited religious background at home, but rather from a feeling of self-righteousness not uncommon in a young person who feels superior intellectual endowment, as well as social inferiority. He recorded in his diaries then that he is no longer interested in any girl. They take up too much time, which is a waste” when considered in proportion to their value.”

He views 4th of July celebrations with disdain and goes with a friend to a lake to read the Bible together. He finished Genesis in one month and Exodus before the end of the next.. He was beset by loneliness and took refuge in poetry and Bible reading to fill the gap of value in his inheritance with religious purpose.

That spring he wrote in his diary:

“I love to hear all the church bells ringing together. To ears unaccustomed to them they may sound “jangling.” But I have heard them for 17 years and love them. When I hear them in winter I seem to be lying in the hammock under the trees, and listening to them. When I hear them as I do now, in a still evening, they make me feel that the world and its riches are not worth a tithe of home and its surroundings.” Schorer calls this “an almost uniquely lyrical entry.”

Lewis had a love-hate relationship with Sauk Centre, where he spent his growing-up years. At age 17 he left to go to Oberlin College in Ohio.

A NOTE ABOUT OBERLIN: Founded by Congregational clergyman, as the first coed. college, its purpose was to train teachers and Christian leaders and missionaries “for the boundless and most desolate fields of the West.” It permitted no racial barriers and became the center of a famous fugitive-slave episode. At its founding , each student was required to do 3 or 4 hours of manual labor daily, for health, economy and morality. When Lewis came to school there, the atmosphere was “earnest EVANGELICAL LIBERALISM. Chapel was held once a week and all classes and ceremonies were opened with prayer.

The Evangelical atmosphere gave Lewis the first real focus he’d ever had, but there was little opportunity for developing warm social relationships. He did not become happier or less lonely, but he ceased to flounder and began to find solace in organized activity. In his diary, he listed his typical day which included study, classes, gym workouts, Chapel and reading a chapter of Bible before bedtime.

However, at the end of the school year, he left Oberlin to return home and prepare independently to go to Yale. The most eventful development during the time he spent there was when he professed himself at a YMCA meeting “as a true follower of Jesus Christ. * * * “This day of my profession of Christ,” he says, “is surely one of the most important of my life.” He took training at the Y and became a Sunday School teacher and recruited others to do the same. He began to plan to study theology at Yale and to become a foreign missionary.

NOTE: I could research his loss of faith in evangelistic religion in a later post, if there is interest. Charlotte

Charlotte, many thanks for supplying this wealth of information about Lewis from Schorer's biography. Even without any data about his later life you've given us a picture of an intelligent, uncomfortable, unhappy youngster that may well set the scene for our better understanding of the adult Lewis and offer some perspective on his writings.

Ros

Ros:

I have checked Schorer on Lewis's turning away from religion, but could not find much detail. I think what he's given us so far helps us to understand where he's coming from and allows us to decide for ourselves why he might turn away from organized religion, but perhaps continue private religious practice.

Charlotte

A personal note. I work for Welch's (the Grape Juice Co.), so imagine my surprise when I came across a reference to "an illustrious grape-juice company" in Chapter XXVI. This is a clear reference to Welch's. Gantry uses a representative of this company to pass out grape-juice samples - to show the "superiority of soft drinks to the horrors of alcohol." The founder of Welch's was, in fact, a notorious tee-totaler (sp?), a rather religious person, and the original raison d'etre for Welch's Grape Juice was as an alternative to the alcoholic sacramental wine. Maybe I'll suggest to our Marketing people the possibility of using this hook again!!

Charlie

Elmer Gantry was one of 65 books "banned in Boston" in 1926. The ACLU challenged the Massachusetts Blasphemy Act, one of the ACLU's first challenges to arts censorship.

Charlie

Re Questions for Discussion

Character development. My sense is one of coming back over and over to Gantry's central character, the same traits manifesting themselves as he progresses and becomes aware of more and better things to lust after. He continually hones his particular skills as his horizons are broadened but HE DOES NOT CHANGE.

I am particularly struck but his attitude toward women: he wants, desires, needs - but in the having his desire turns to dislike, discomfort, indifference, hate. This pattern is the same with every woman in his life.

I wonder how this might relate to Sinclair Lewis' attitude toward women? Charlotte?

Charlie

Charles:

That's a long story. I remember that he was married to Dorothy Thompson the famous journalist and have the book DOROTHY AND RED about the marriage . Hope I can find it. Am not sure about how many previous marriages there were. Will see what I can pick up.

Today's our big day--The Lunch in NYC. Can't wait to see the wonderful friends we've met here.

Charlotte

Charlotte, we await your return with details. Lewis's second wife, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, was one of my heroines when I was in high school. I can't quite remember why but it had something to do with her being an accomplished and brilliant career woman, as they were called in those days. Her independence and success were, I think, factors in the breakup of the marriage. His first wife, Grace Hegger, was more the educated-doormat type. She got back at him, as many a discarded wife did, by writing thinly disguised accounts of their marriage.

Charles, I agree with your assessment of Elmer Gantry's behavior toward women, but I'm not sure how productive it is to extrapolate that to Lewis's behavior. With apologies for using outdated clinical terminology, I might suggest that Lewis could have been projecting his own feelings onto his character, or on the other hand he could have been projecting his conception of the most despicable kind of male attitude.

Remember how Gantry felt about "Sharon Falconer" - she was beautiful, powerful, successful, etc. Should we wonder why he dispensed with her midway through the book?

Ros

Ros:

We had a ball at the luncheon. Missed you and Charles and Larry. Milt says he posted a note and thank you to the wonderful people who made it all possible, but I can't seem to find it tonight. Joan and Ginny, I believe, finally met each other for the first time after months of email and phone calls. I met Ann Alden, Ella Gibbons, Walter Jenkins, Katie Sturtz, Helen, Bruce, who is Joan P.'s husband and Joan's wonderful sister Kay who drove us in to the city.

Milt and I could not get over the all the work the planning committee did in a the very short time they had together. It was original, artistic and intelligent. The games we played were well above standard and gave us an opportunity to laugh and get to know a little bit more about each other.

The food was excellent and the party room was just right right for our group. Hope we have many more like this in the future.

Charlotte

Some Gantryesque notes from the NY Times:

There is a new park being built in Long Island City called Gantry Park. "It takes its name from two giant, hulking structures of blackened iron which were used to lift freight trains onto river barges. The gantries are as powerful as the triumphal arches and classical monuments built during a City Beautiful movement" which was in existence a century ago.

Hulking, powerful and giant-sized as well as good-looking must have been a good reason for Lewis's decision to choose such a last name for Elmer.

Also: In the current discussion as to whether Tom Wolfe's new book A MAN IN FULL is journalism or literature, Wolfe reported that "Lewis actually got to the pulpit and preached before he wrote Elmer Gantry."

Evidently the book is still considered one that readers should know about, but I'm still finding it hard to finish.

Charlotte

Charles:

I went back to Schorer with your question about Lewis's attitude towards women. Schorer says that in a series of stories in Cosmopolitan Magazine Lewis evidenced a hostile attitude towards women that found " its fullest statement in CASS TIMBERLANE." The implication was that all wives, as demonstrated by ONE wife and her daughter-in-law are by nature termagents but a knowing husband can deceive them into manageability and grace

However, Frances Perkins, the famous Secretary of Labor said that Lewis probably marched in the Women's Suffrage Parade in 1912. Lewis, himself, wrote that he couldn't march because he was handing out copies of a women's suffrage publication for girls. He said "it was a parade of brains expressed through marching feet" and reported overhearing a newsboy telling a friend "it was some parade. Those women walked like queens."

I'm still looking for my copy of DOROTHY AND RED. It must have been a tumultuous marriage. Thompson was an independent woman and wouldn't accept garbage from anyone, not even a husband.

Charlotte

Remember, that before the novel "dispensed" with Falconer, Gantry had begun to weary of her in a number of ways. His eye had begun to wander, and her intellect had certainly come under his microscope: ..."it was impossible for her to originate any sentiment more profound than "I'm unhappy."" It seems that, to Gantry, the grass was always greener. After her loss, he, of course, began to recall her only fondly again - forgetting any defects he might have uncovered while she was with him.

It's interesting how influential, and yet, really, how little mentioned Elmer Gantry's mother is in the novel...I'd say she plays a role much greater than the pages allotted to her.

We're baaaaaack!! Loved your comments on Elmer, and you can be sure ELMER was one of the topics at the Luncheon!! Just think, it was just two years ago that we first started here, and we've just gone from strength to strength, thanks to you all. Onward and upward!!

I still don't know what the theme of Elmer is!!

Ginny

Well, Ginny, neither do I, except for my persistent feeling that it is not about religion qua religion. Maybe it's related to the theme of human weakness and fallibility, something that Lewis appears to labor at in every one of his "problem" or "socially significant" novels. Like Plato with his myth of the cave, Lewis seemed to carry in his mind an image of the ideal world, the ideal society, the ideal person, and then set out to prove that none of these existed - yet - in our civilization, and that our best efforts led only to the dimmest firelit view of their shadows.

But what was Lewis himself? A flame burning in a tragically flawed lamp; an unattractive, fidgety, half-sickly, nervous, fatally sarcastic, permanently disappointed man; an alcoholic, a disappointed Christian, a disappointed socialist, a disappointed lover, a gleeful muckraker, a voluminous, compulsive writer whose style never rose above the mediocre but whose incendiary subject matter brought him fame and reward and made publishers wealthy, whose powers of invention diminished as he aged, and who died -- as we all will -- alone.

I think the power of the book lies in its ability to make us look - first - at a type of person who despite his shortcomings had the ability to influence thousands, who defrauded many but who indirectly made some lives happier even if he didn't care about them; and - second - at the idea of organized religion and a consideration of its strengths and weaknesses as Lewis saw them.

Ros

Roslyn, I know you hate this kind of thing, but that was beautiful! What do you mean, he died alone? What happened to World So Wide's Wife # 2???

How do you mean, we ultimately die alone? No matter who is in the room?

So the theme is the flaws in all of us and the disappointment with the world. Sounds like Rabbit Angstrom to me, does anybody else see the connection?

Yet Arrowsmith , do I seem to remember, was bright? Was that an earlier book??

I WILL finish this book in the next two days and hope to be a bit more coherent when I do.

GAGS

Dorothy Thompson disentangled herself from their contentious and competitive marriage though I think she still had kind feelings toward him. His relationship with Marcella Powers was, I think, the last overt connection he had, but to the best of my recollection, no one was there when he died in an Italian hospital after a stroke or some similarly debilitating illness.

I feel I haven't done justice to this discussion, having given up on producing a brief and snappy synopsis. Perhaps Charlotte will get back to us with an explanation of Schorer's "three crises."

I think the book is segmented according to Gantry's major sexual relationships: with Lulu, from whom he flees; with Sharon, that voluptuous and awe-inspiring powerhouse whose death comes at a convenient moment; with Cleo, who brings him respectability and deadly boredom; with Lula again, because he never learns; finally with Hettie, who almost fixes his clock - except that Lewis throws in a deus ex machina and rescues him. Interspersed are his lesser erotic peccadilloes and his miniature crises of faith, as he abandons the ministry but returns to it, switches denominations for reasons of career advancement; feels a tiny pang now and then, as when Frank Shallard goes down fighting; and suffers remorse each time he is nearly caught in a misdeed.

The reader might conclude that virtue doesn't pay, bad triumphs over good, and perhaps that organized religion is a sham. On the other hand, we might think that the author had more than one axe to grind.

I'll return to one of my overview questions: Is there any character development in this novel? Does anyone, good or bad, grow, change, live? Or is it just a poor imitation of Dickens minus the triumph of the good and the repentance of the sinner? Opinions, anyone, pro or con?

Ros

Does anyone, good or bad, grow, change, live?

I guess I don't have much faith in people changing their lives. I've always been skeptical of the instant conversions that occur on the religious programs on TV or anywhere else.

There has been no one in my limited acquaintance, that has promised to be better, change their behavior, mode of life or whatever, and succeeded. Our environment may influence our behavior, but only to the extent that it is modified for survival. In teaching, it seems, we try to modify the child's behavior in hopes that it will continue to maturity.. Enough of that... just musing.

Pat, your message made me rethink my question. You are wise to understand that we humans remain largely the same throughout our adult lives. As we get old and - some of us - crotchety and difficult - it is often said about us that we're just the way we always were, only more so. Yet even the worst of us have grown up a little, have learned to adapt somewhat to the real world.

Writers of fiction have the luxury of making their characters do what they want them to do, and that often includes making them change for the better or become more mature as the book progresses. I think of Cold Mountain, for example, where all three major characters showed development: Inman became softer and less isolated, and emotionally warmer as he helped needy people during his journey home. Ada adapted to her harsh environment and acquired skills that she previously scorned as beneath her - and she also learned to love a difficult man. Ruby moved from her proud independence (imposed on her by a tough childhood) to being able to relate lovingly to others. Both women were drawn together until they almost became two halves of a single personality. At the end of the book all three were different from the way they had appeared at the beginning.

Now, these were not real people; Charles Frazier made them what they were, and he wanted them to be "better" at the end than at the beginning. In most of the Dickens novels, several characters change for the better, grow up, or repent, or sometimes they go downhill and end in disaster. However, I don't see that Sinclair Lewis did that with any character in Elmer Gantry. In this way, he made the book flatter and less "realistic" than it might have been. Everyone of any importance is just as good or bad, dumb or smart, lucky or unlucky, as they were at the outset...except for Gantry, who (as I might have said before) could fall into any sewer and come out covered with honey.

Lewis might have thought he was "telling it like it is." But, Pat, you are a generous person and think well of the world -- do you think the world of religion is really the way Lewis portrayed it?

Ros

do you think the world of religion is really the way Lewis portrayed it?

Goodness, no. I really think that the religions as we look at them here, are basically sincere. Gantry is right about one thing, I think, the Baptists, Methodists, and other Protestant sects just aren't that different. Beliefs around the world, whether worshipping God or some other diety, are necessary to our mental, spiritual well-being. Even the agnostic has a religion of sorts.

The TV religions do draw a lot of attention, but they appeal to the person who would have gone to the revival meetings of the past.

An aside: My Aunt, a talented musician, left her husband and 2 small children to join the Billy Sunday Evangelists in 1922.. The family was just about in mourning, as they tell it. But she returned 2 years later very disenchanted, and never went to any church service again, nor allowed her children to attend any religious training.. I never found out what caused this trauma.

You know, actually Pearl Buck had some of the same experiences? Her parents were missionaries in China and forever more in her books people of religion never came out very well. I especially remember her remarks about the choir singing. I guess it's disillusioning, some of the experiences that people have had, some of them with less than perfect ministers?

And of course, authors have to write what they think and believe. I'm fascinated by, as you know, Waugh, and in Brideshead Revisited the main character, actually two of the , well actualy three of the main characters, after struggling long and hard against Catholicism, finally convert or revert. I hope that doesn't spoil the book for anybody.

Yet Ros has said that was an early phase, so I guess I need to read a later book and compare. Now Lewis was the same? Can we think of any character Lewis wrote who was of a hopeful happy nature? Does Arrowsmith count? How about Dodsworth? I'm not sure now I want to see the movie of Elmer. Those of you who did, what seemed to be the conclusion or what point did you think the movie made??

Ginny

CHARLES DICKENS ALIVE AND WELL IN THE LIBRARIES OF AMERICA

GERALD CHARLES DICKENS THE GREAT, GREAT GRANDSON OF THE AUTHOR OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL PLAYS SCROOGE

A story on page one of the NY Times today describes the performance of the role in Lone Jack, a rural community southeast of Kansas City.

Mr. Dickens says "In England we are blase about him. We have Chaucer, we've got Shakespeare, all those other blokes." "here they show me their copies of the Carol and hold them out reverently," as though they were altar cloths."

Commenting on persistent interest in The Christmas Carol, Carey Perloff, director of an actor's theater in San Frascisco commenting on the two-class society America is becoming (the rich and the poor) said, "Maybe its's because there's so much wealth here," as well as guilt.

"Americans do have a social conscience. They really believe they can redeem themselves. They're hopeful that there still is a body politic."

Jerry Patch, the dramaturge at a theater in Costa Mesa, CA adapted the Carol as a spritual vehicle. He says, "It brings out the religious '" and ecumenical experience." at a religious time of year and the theater becomes more like a church than the theater usually is."

My post continued:

Kurt Beattie who performs Scrooge at A Contemporary Theater in Seattle says, "It really gets to the men, "particularly the ones dragged to the theater by their wives, Most powerful is "the identification of Scrooge's grief with childhood which * * * has tremendous resonance with the audience. I think the story is to a large degree about a man having walled himself off from society.

Others comment on the rejuvenation the play brings against the commercialism attendant to the Christmas holiday. They say there is lingering appeal in Scrooge's emerging humanity, but it is his meanness that we remember most fondly.

"We all love a villian more than a regenerate soul," said Fred Kaplan, a Dickens biographer. "A regenerate soul is wonderful, but a bore. I mean who wants to hear Clinton apologize?"

And Mr. Edelstein, director of A Contemporary Theater identifies Scrooge as a miser and misanthrope like those in Moliere's plays. He believes that the Carol is a story about someone who is the worst version of ourselves who becomes the very best version of what we might be.

I think that's the difference between Hard Times and Elmer Gantry.

Charlotte

Charlotte, thanks for posting the NYT piece about A Christmas Carol. I saw it this morning, just above the fold in the National Edition, and read part of it. Yes, I think if one chooses to search, many of Dickens's "Mr. Feelgood" touches can be found in Hard Times, but there are precious few in Elmer Gantry. That's perhaps why Lewis, for all his flaws, can be viewed as a few steps advanced beyond Dickens's mawkish Victorian hypocrisy, which allowed him to gloss over his own personal life and pretend that he, like the other Queen-fearing Brits of the time, loved the poor, upheld virtue, and eschewed vice. Not so different from today, when we love happy endings on TV but thirst for blood in politics. (Did you read the NYT Mag article about welfare in New York?)

Ros

Does anyone think that Elmer ever shows capacity for honesty, decency? I keep returning to that moment in the chapel when Judson Roberts, his mother and the others-- teachers, deans, school comrades, presumably -- are urging him to declare for the faith and commit himself to a life of devotion, when he remembers Jim Lefferts warning him not to let them hypnotize him. "He saw Jim's eyes, that for him alone veiled their bright harshness and became lonely, asking for comradeship. He struggled; with all the blubbering confusion of a small boy set on by his elders, frightened and overwhelmed, he longed to be honest, to be true to Jim -- to be true to himself and his own good honest sins and whatsoever penalties they might carry." At that moment there seems to be the faint potential for honesty, but oh, what he becomes after gives in to the pressure, "Bewildered. Misereable. . . . False to Jim." False to a self that was never allowed to surface, maybe. After this, so far there seem to be no redeeming moments.

Has anyone read "The Loop" by Nicholas Evans? I also enjoyed "I know this much is true" by Wally Lamb.

Ros:

How can you compare Lewis to Dickens? I think Dickens is literature. Lewis except for an occasional brilliant bit of writing in Elmer Gantry, borders on being trash. He often wrote while drunk, just to make money. I couldn't bear the character of Elmer Gantry, though I do remember enjoying other works of his in my youth.

Didn't read the article about welfare in NY. With all the reading I do, haven't had time for the Mag. section of the Times. It hasn't been that good lately.

However, what people tend to forget is that most of the people on welfare are single mothers. How can mothers with several children work? With three children and the attendant volunteer activities, I could do nothing else.

Now I recall I did read some of the article: For these women, workfare is merely a band-aid to remedy the lack of a good education they should have received when they, themselves, were children.

Charlotte

Jo Meander:

Glad you brought this passage to my attention. Will go back and check it out. Didn't yet finish the last few pages of Gantry and Schorer's afterword. I've just gone back to Sir Gawain who've I been neglecting lately, but guess I'll have to force myself to wrap up Gantry.

It's so great to know a little more about who I'm talking to after having met you at the lunch.

Charlotte

Charlotte, I've given considerable thought to your question, "How can you compare Lewis and Dickens?" and I'd like to offer some response - without in any way intending to force you to change your opinions, which I perceive are strongly held. This is a free forum and all positions are acceptable. However, a further exchange seems appropriate in this discussion.

I won’t labor the points that Lewis admired Dickens and that numerous critics have drawn parallels between the two authors, always of course with reservations about their differences. Such remarks are, I think, based primarily on comparisons of style.

Let me turn first to background: Both authors were profoundly affected by adverse experiences in childhood and youth, though one carried his burden of bitterness openly and the other cloaked it in sentiment. Both were passionate about social issues. Lewis imagined an unattainable ideal world and dramatized an ugly, unredeemed, self-seeking reality; Dickens showed the need for reform, but soothed his readers by solving the problems of a handful of characters and bringing either tearful repentance or dreadful doom to the miscreants.

Both Dickens and Lewis used the sensational -- bringing into print ugly and shocking details of evil deeds and sordid lives. Dickens was in fact one of the pioneers of the sensational novel which used moral preaching as a cover for writing about how the other half lived. What seems tame, sympathetic, and almost charming to us was both shocking and exciting to the readers of the mid-nineteenth century, and they accepted it in the guise of deploring the conditions and the sinful or pitiful people being described.

In Dickens’s novels we find floating corpses, homeless children, murderers, filth-clogged streets, stinking tenements, betrayed women, bedraggled prostitutes, drunkards, opium addicts, thieves, and charlatans. We are invited to laugh at illiterate orphans and unwashed laborers, at old people, poor people, fat people, prisoners, factory workers, people who are cheerful in their ignorance and those who are ridiculous in their attempts to educate themselves.

Can you spot parallels with the crowds of boobs and dupes on whom Lewis sheds his contempt? The difference is that Lewis chose not to -- or possibly was unable to -- sweeten his message with sentiment or use a magic wand to select and redeem a few worthy souls. This constitutes an important difference in both style and intent.

It also points to an important difference in the times. Dickens was writing in the Victorian era, a period that emphasized the glossy surface of “good behavior” and impossibly restrictive rules and conventions but nevertheless included honest efforts at reform. Lewis flourished after World War I, amid the turmoil of Prohibition and the rise of bootleggers and organized crime, increasing freedom of expression, revolt against convention, and the upheaval about science and religion that attended and followed the Scopes trial.

Both men wrote because they wanted to, and, yes, also because they needed income. Whether Lewis was drunk when he wrote doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of his work. Were we to disparage every writer who used alcohol or drugs to deaden his or her pain and liberate the Muse, our pantheon would be considerably diminished.

I would judge both writers to be about equal in terms of the ratio of pot-boilers to genuine efforts. Dickens, after all, had to churn out those serials, had to fill up his own magazine, and had to support his family and his petite amie and make a good public appearance, including the famous fur coat which his adoring American fans nearly chopped to pieces when they swarmed over him and clipped little souvenir chunks for themselves.

Well, that's enough from me for this time. I welcome responses from anyone who is tuned in...or turned on...or hasn't dropped out.

Ros

That was great, Ros. I wish I remembered the characters in Dickens clearly enough to spot parallels to characters in E.G., but mostly I remember tone, and that is the big difference for me. I agree that both authors are satirists, and that they explore and expose human weaknesses, but there is an unrelieved bitterness in Gantry in contrast with the feeling Dickens creates. The latter belives in human nature, in its capacity for goodness, recovery and redemption. So far I don't see anything like that in Lewis. I read Main Street years and years ago, but I cannot remember it now.

Having finally finished Elmer and admitting to glossing over the "middle parts," I'm surprised at several things at the end, and the astuteness of Ros's questions in the header.

I find the writing at the end just as good as the beginning, Elmer unchanged, (does this mean, or does it ever mean that the character must grow and change or suffer the author's permanent banishment from the realms of character development)?

Schorer in his Afterword, makes quite a point of Lewis's NON drinking heavily during the writing, his living WITH an agnostic preacher and his homework.

An AGNOSTIC preacher, now there's a contradiction in terms.

I must say I'm a little non plussed by the three "climaxes" outlined by Schorer, and disagree with this being solely seen as an historical novel.

The quote is, "we are reading what is really an historical novel, a novel about religious practices in a now-lone-gone era in our cultural history."

We have Blue Laws here where I live, the material is just as fresh to me as if it were written yesterday. I know of a church organist, for instance, who has been carrying on an affair with a married man for years and years, and he's now joined the choir of the church she plays in. There's nothing new under the sun, the events he has chronicled are happening today, just turn on the television.

I do agree, however, having finally finished the book, that Elmer has not changed. And I do like Jo's point about his brief struggle with morality, but morality lost very quickly.

In fact, Elmer almost seems the antithesis, probably spelled wrong, but who has a spell check, of moral struggle, unless it's a mirror reflection. HIS struggles are against principle and morality. It's actually very interesting.

He's sort of a psychopath in that regard....what's the term for people who barracade themselves mentally from normal human feeling??

Then there's a note about the last 30,000 words having been written when Lewis's own life fell apart. Quoting Mencken, those were written in a state of drunkenness.

I always mourned the characterization of one of my favorites, Coleridge, as a hopeless drug addict. Actually ruined some of his few works for me.

The background material Schorer provides, that Lewis himself dared God to strike him dead in 15 minutes from the pulpit: that Lewis himself took to preaching as background info is fascinating.

How would one interpret that singular strange act??

To a disbeliever, would that be proof positive that Lewis triumphed? To a believer, would Lewis's own life decline be proof that God doesn't dance to Sinclair Lewis's timetables??

And the fact that Gantry is based on REverend L.M, Birkhead, a Unitarian and an agnostic, makes it even more interesting.

I can't answer Ros's second question, as I skimmed too much in the middle when Jim Lefferts made character changes.

I did think it a bit much that MAMA Gantry, on a short visit, immediately noticed Elmer's infidelity and pointed out to him that he'd not changed one whit from his schoolboy ways.

Lewis then has Gantry turning to Hettie for comfort, for saying ANYTHING kind, suggesting that infidelity is caused by Mama. A bit ahead of his time there??

I loved the sly dig that Elmer had turned into exactly what she had made of him.

If a learned scholar finds three climaxes, does this mean the book lacks focus, and a clearly defined plot??

Ginny

Ros:

That was a wonderful post. I read much of Lewis's work in the past and enjoyed it. Of course I don't remember much of it now. I was a teenager when I read Arrowsmith, Dodsworth, etc.

But I couldn't stand reading about a despicable, manipulative, character who is only ambitious for himself. I cannot see him as a truly reliogious character.

I think that an important aspect of great literature is how the character is changed for the better. Though Gantry attains a revered place in society, there is no change in the kind of person he really is.

Charlotte

Jo Meander:

The unrelieved bitterness is what is so unpalatable. I take writing course and have been told by many teachers to write about the good, include what's not so good, but don't make it so bad that it makes readers feel miserable. Gantry makes me miserable.

Charlotte

Ginny:

It was hard going, but I finally finisished it. The turnaround by Elmer's immorata was completely unbelievable, though the input of the mother was very Dicken's-like.

Elmer's going to make us a moral nation? HO HO HO!

I don't tthink Schorer would have studied Lewis if there was only Gantry.

Just had an interesting thought: Maybe Lewis was trying to do a book on religion like Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which was about the meat industry in Chicago. I think that did a better service to the nation and probably was influential in setting up the kFood and Drug Administration.

Charlotte

Ginny:

Perhaps Lewis did a service in portraying what can happen when the religious right gets too strong as it has in our recent political doings.

I think we are coming to realize that everyone is human, even Movie Stars and ESPECIALLY those in high office. We all make mistakes which can sometimes be very serious, Henry Hyde and Bob Livingston not excluded.

Charlotte

Ros:

More thoughts: We really can't contrast Gantry with the Christmas Carol. My quoting from the Times article was just to report on what some of us could have missed in not seeing it.

Also, we probably shouldn't contrast a 19th Century writer with one working in the 20th. Dickens helped to clean up many of the horrible living conditions that no longer exist today, or almost don't.

Our country is certainly becoming more commercial. Even once socially conscious people are becoming acquisitive and buying into the stock market. There certainly is a need for our becoming more morally concerned.

Charlotte

We're probably almost - but not quite - finished with Elmer, and at the end of the week comes Rating Day. Now it's time to consider the next round of nominations. I believe Iona Ross (see above, message 84) has already submitted the first one. for The Loop, by Nicholas Evans. Are there any more? Have we still some carried over from previous lists?

Ros

I suggest Ulysses by J. Joyce

Charlotte

Yes, I've got tons of them, but I think we need a new folder?? For nominations, and so will get that up pronto. If you can this time, please indicate a sample or two of the writing, that might help.

My first nomination is Larry's Party by Carol Shields, and I'll be right back in with that new folder.

I don't think we want to hold any nominations over, so please nominate afresh in the next day or so....we've not got a deadline and can carry on nominations while we chat over the current selections.

Ginny

Nominate Here for our March selections:

The NY Times has come out with list after list of the Notable Books of 1998, and several just look wonderful.

Am off in the next few days to B&N where I hope to look up several of those listed in the hopes we might want to read. Everybody scour the libraries and bookstores to bring more good books to our attention!

I note our Book Clubs are right UP on the new Non Fiction, in some cases we've read something like 80% of the "best" of the new non-fiction! We're falling a bit behind in the fiction, but so much of it is dreck....oops, was that a judgment call?

Ginny

was that a judgment call? ..... Yes, and you were right, on your call.

You know, Pat, I have seen the members of one literary society which shall remain nameless, and their discussion of books, absolutely refuse to even consider reading something on the best seller lists. I do think that's taking it a bit far, they're missing some great books. Yet the list of the fiction best sellers today in the NYTimes is not very inspiring:

1. A Man in Full which rose immediately to the top of the list because a) Tom Wolfe wrote it and b) it's an excellent read. I'm tremendously enjoying it and if it weren't so big and expensive I'd nominate it for us.

2. Bag of Bones by Stephen King-Horror
3. The Simple Truth by David Baldacci -Legal thriller
4. Mirror Image by Danielle Steele- Romance
5. Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy,,,Terrorism
6. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver which they say is excellent. 5 Female characters in the Belgian Congo
7. When the Wind Blows by James Patterson...Suspense
8. All Through the Night by Mary Higgins Clark -Mystery
9. The Vampire Armand by Ann Rice- Vampires
10 Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden....somebody at the Books Group Luncheon (YES we did talk books) said they had read this and it was great! A young woman in Kyoto 11. The Locket by Richard Paul Evans--young man learns life working in nursing home.
12. Charming Billy by Alice MacDermott- secrets of the past emerge at party
13. Today I Feel Silly.... by Jamie Lee Curtis--young girl's moods.
and so on.

Those are hardbacks, and of the Non Fiction hardbacks, we've read or are about to read: Tuesdays With Morrie, and The Professor and the Madman.

On the paperback lists, we have read The Perfect Storm, A Civil Action (by the way, have any of you seen the John Travolta adaptation of that? They say the egotism of Jan Schilctmann really comes out)? Into Thin Air, Undaunted Courage, Under the Tuscan Sun, and Into the Wild.

That's a pretty good average, so you can say we're up to date on our Non Fiction, but remiss in our Fiction.

Still, there's one thing for sure, we've read 12 books last year, minimum!

Ginny

Ginny, I've looked back at your earlier message summing up your reactions to Elmer. Let me say first that I don't find the terms "agnostic" and "preacher" mutually exclusive unless we limit the definition of the latter to a specific and unwavering belief in a set of specific formal religious tenets. Do I recall somewhere a quotation about "I believe, help Thou my unbelief"?

I was not surprised that Elmer's conventional and devoted mother would have looked straight through all the folderol and noticed that he wasn't keeping his wife as happy as she thought Cleo deserved; nor that she would have noticed the closeness between him and his "secretary." Who else worries about her son's behavior in just the way a mother does?

In terms of chronology Lewis wasn't "ahead of his time" if he attributed some of Elmer's difficulties to his maternal upbringing. But I hadn't thought about the irony of that remark crediting his Mom for everything he had become. Your astute reading of the passage translates that to "Thanks to you I'm a no-good, home-wrecking, sanctimonious wretch pretending to a piety I don't feel and bent on ruling the world regardless of the spiritual destruction I cause."

More later.

Ros

Ros: I'll agree with your last paragraph... He certainly is a poor example of a man, much less a preacher.. Thank goodness he is only one and I hope does not represent the clergy as a whole..

I can struggle through this book only because I know that Queen Lucia will be fun to re-read.

What a fascinating turn we've suddenly taken here! What a difficult book to discuss. A protagonist with no redeeming features. A loser who wins in the public eye. A con artist with no soul?

Ros: What is the definition of an agnostic? If we take the word "preacher" as I believe Lewis intends it here, that is a person who does sermons to teach about religion, then to me the two are mutually exclusive.

To me there is a world of difference between a Man of God, a Man of the Cloth who has dedicated his whole life to the service of God as I expect we all ought to do, and his varying moments of disbelief which he truly agonizes over, and one who does not believe at all. The agnostic is waiting to be shown? The old Robert Frost, "there may be little or nothing beyond the grave, but the strong are saying nothing till they see..." (excuse errors, from memory) type of thing?? Willing, if shown?

And again, certain denominations may quibble over the particular calling, ie.: is a Methodist Man of God ordained, as, say, a Roman Catholic priest would be? But I'm sure we don't want to get into a religious discussion here. We can visit the Religion folders for that.

I'm trying to say to me there's a difference, but perhaps I'm alone in that thought????

A difficult book, a good discussion, I don't feel we've left any stone unturned, or is there one??

Ginny

The impressions that stay with me from Gantry are those of Preacher Man as scam artist, one who is in it for the game, the schtick, the con. And yet, there is a fairly deep level of belief, or at least a fear that the religious precepts that Gantry toys with may very well be true.

I also see another element. More truthfully, it is an element I looked for, as a validation of something I've seen in my own life. Many times, it seems to me, some people use religion as a sort of shield which allows them to defer responsibility for their own actions, their own lives. Might I see Gantry as one who was not particularly careful about his own morals, as one who played loosely with the feelings and emotions of others? As one who embraces the role of sinner as a natural state of mankind and who thereby relaxes the dictum to sin less? As one who focuses his energy on accepting the savior (the easy part) while at the same time neglecting the need for personal rectitude (the hard part)?

I think of Aunts on my fathers side, deeply religious pentecostal missionaries who abdicated their familial responsibilities to save the Jews of Israel. They, and their daughters might have been better served, had their energies been directed more locally!

What we need are fewer social saviors showing us "the way" - fewer essays (especially best sellers) on our lack of morals, fewer standards issued from on high and more people taking care of their own houses with more care. We need less "moral authority" and more "personal morals". I suppose I digress. As stilted as the writing is and as melodramatic as the action becomes much of the time, and as bitter as the author obviously is, it is quite appalling how the face of Gantry can still be glimpsed in the face of the Religious Right, The Moral Majority, oh, even in the face of our most popular politicians of the Middle-Left. One can at least be assured that none of this would surprise Sinclair Lewis.

Charlie

Charlie: You said it all... Such a good review.

Chalres, that's fabulous and a wonderful review, as Pat said, maybe you'd like to post it on our B&N site under Online Reviews??? You can list SeniorNet Book Groups or give the url, THAT'LL show them where the good discussions are!

I think it's much easier to concentrate on saving Israel or Africa and much harder to attend to dealing with it in your own personal life with those you encounter face to face...

I seem to remember something once about Mother Theresa in which, after she had become famous, she had attracted tons of wishful followers eager to take up her work in India and she told them to look to their own neighborhoods, their own cities, and deal with that first. She said there was just as much want in America of the soul every day to do as there was in India, and it should be dealt with first. I liked that. I'm not Catholic, but I liked that.

I do like your unique take on Gantry's license to preach on immorality, that's an angle I had not thought of, and it does make perfect sense.

Supposedly one of the yardsticks by which you judge an enduring work of fiction is whether or not the characters still ring true and have something to say after all the years after the book was written, and I do think that is true in this book.

Ginny

Charles, congratulations on your summary and striking evaluation. We've all appreciated your comments. I feel you are being more generous toward Gantry than was Lewis himself, who repeatedly illustrated his character's shallowness and lack of reflection or insight.

Like you, Lewis did hint at Gantry's underlying fear of eternal punishment for his failure to live up to the religious precepts his mother had tried to teach him. And he would certainly have agreed with your suggestion that (like Candide) we would all do better to cultivate our own gardens.

I think there is more than one course that can be followed by those who find that formal religious institutions are meaningless and their practitioners hypocritical. Lewis, disillusioned and disappointed in his search for spiritual meaning, chose the path of denunciation and scorn. His "Bah, humbug!" was not succeeded by a tearful return to the fold and a penitent scattering of generosity and coin. He remained bitter.

Readers might be interested to learn that in a recent Pacific Book Auction (November 1998 Bulletin), a first edition of Elmer Gantry, in its original binding and dust jacket, sold for $2.070.

Ros

Charles, wonderful commentary! I agree that Gantry cared very little for the lives of others. To me he seems the total pragmatist: the material comfort, the beautiful trappings and the renewed sense of power are the enducements to ally himself with the Methodist church. I wonder what would have happened to him in our era? I don't think he would have ever entered the ministry. Professional football or politics, maybe! His succumbing to the blandisments of the teachers, ministers, and his mother while he was still in school seem like a real fall from grace. He was a better person when he was being "natural." Jim Lefferts knew this was true.
What about the other characters? Lewis introduces some interesting, contrasting figures, one through the rational Frank Shallard, who struggles with himself over his commitment to religious leadership. He seems a very good man, and through him Lewis introduces Andrew Pangilly, who seems genuinely spiritual. His arguments agaainst the doubters are sincere,lively and intelligent. Is Lewis taking care not to condemn formal religion so much as to condemn the self-serving hypocrites who gravitate to it?

VCR Alert!!

Eileen Megan has posted this in the NYC trip, want you all to know!!

Another FYI - on A&E tonite at 9:00 the program "American Justice" will discuss the "Civil Action" trial - you can see all the real people involved in the trial.

Eileen Megan

Ginny has reminded me that Elmer is still dangling, waiting for closure and our evaluations. Please think about how you would rate this difficult experience, and we'll then consign it to the archives.

Frankly, I'm glad to see the last of that scoundrel. I didn't enjoy the book much; however, reading it and thinking about the author and his choice of subject added some furnishings to a part of my own past -- two parts, actually: my early childhood, when so many things were happening that I barely glimpsed, and my adolescence, when I began reading Lewis and found in the novels something so different from what I perceived in this recent experience. His style and his choice of topics belong to a bygone era. His personal strivings and his lifelong unhappiness are perhaps timeless. This book gave me a window on all those aspects of Lewis's fiction, and on that basis I'd give it a 5 out of 10.

Ros

I agree... Elmer Gentry came across to me as a rather warped individual... tried my best to find some good in him. If anything, it was his ability to sell his religion... He seemed to be a very human character subject to all weaknesses, a do-as-I-say preacher, not-as-I-do peacher.

The story line was not to bad, but I had a problem with the dialogue. Did people really talk that way? I'll give the book a 4 out of 10.

Ros: Do I need to go back and read other books by Lewis... I can remember my folks discussing Main Street, which was banned from our library in my hometown.

As a stylist, Lewis is not someone I'd put on my reading list. I would however, recommend reading the book to others for (1) the historical perspective and (2)for his portrayal of an archetype that still lives today. 6

Pat, don't you think it might be interesting to have a look at Main Street and try to figure out what all the fuss was about ? I'm sure it would impress you as innocent, almost naive, today, and the central character, Carol Kennicott, is really a sympathetic figure.

Your point about the dialogue really rang a bell with me. It was certainly full of outdated slang, and it also seemed choppy and awkward. I guess Lewis didn't have much of a gift for smooth writing. However, I think that everyday speech was different in the years the book covers. Today we're influenced (unconsciously perhaps) by television and movie dialogue. Our slang is certainly different, and of course slang changes rapidly and even when the same words are used they constantly acquire new meanings. Furthermore, younger people speak at a rate that must be twice as fast as 50 years ago. (I've actually verified this with a court reporter.)

Just a digression: Have you ever read any of the books written by Booth Tarkington about young people in the earlier years of the century? Seventeen, for example, or Alice Adams. They are truly quaint.

Ros

For the variety of viewpoints Lewis explores, for his portrayal of Frank Shallard (his stunning fate for trying to see clearly and act by his honest vision), for his negative reaction to popular evangelism, I give Elmer G. a 6.

Jo, thanks for your response and for reminding us -- by calling attention to the touch of compassion Lewis revealed in his account of Frank Shallard's fate -- that the book wasn't simply 432 pages of unrelieved ugliness.

As a result of everyone's sterling ability to rise above mere distaste and consider literary quality, Elmer has fared better in our ratings than I had at first feared. Thanks to all for sticking with it.

Ros

I think that's a great point by Jo, and tho the subject was unrelievedly bad, I enjoy Lewis's writing. This is not my favorite book by him, but it's not that far from the others he wrote which are better received. Certainly Babbitt is dated, in language , anyway, as I suppose Arrowsmith must be, because of the subject matter. I found the language in Dodsworth to be dated but not the emotions, and neither in this book do I think the emotions and the situations are outdated or outrageous, so I'll give it a 7 because I felt I understood the character and his recent incarnations. It doesn't compare to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and it's interesting that that point was raised. That may well have been Lewis's intent, but it didn't succeed. In all our research, did we ever find out WHY he wrote the book? In his own words? I do apologize if this has been taken up, got a little frazzled there what with our first Books Gathering, and all.

Ginny

I keep wondering who the popular preachers of the day were. Does Amy Semple McPherson ring any bells? Any real-life figures that could have inspired Sharon Falconer? (Was it "Sharon"? I forget already!) Any Elmer Gantry-types? Chatauqua revival tents must have been part of the '20's culture.

Yes, Jo, Aimee Semple McPherson was - though Lewis denied she was the exact model - at least a prototype of the attractive female revivalist of the time. During the completion of the manuscript McPherson pulled a "disappeared, believed drowned" stunt. That's why Lewis had to change Sharon's death from his original idea of drowning to burning, so that there might be no charge of libel.

Possibly the most famous revivalist of the first half of the century was Billy Sunday, who together with Dwight Moody of Chicago's Moody Bible Institute and their hymn-writing colleague Homer Rodeheaver, dominated popular evangelism for a long time.

An ironic personal memory floated up as I wrote this: To my childish mind, the charismatic figures of McPherson and the famous or infamous speakeasy owner Texas Guinan were somehow indistinguishable ... both exotic, both in the news, both talked about by adults, both bafflingly involved in activities I didn't fully understand.

Ros

Gee, i wonder what they had in common? Could it be ...PUBLICITY?

I remember a local luminary by the name of Katerine Khulman (this was in the '40's) who used to broadcast from the Carnegie Lecture Hall on Pittsburgh's North Side or "Old Allegheny." She had quite a following, and though I can't remember a thing she said in her broadcasts, I do believe I would still recognize her voice. More recently, we have been blessed with a duo called "Brother Dan and Sister Ann" who got into some kind of legal/financial difficulties fifteen or twenty years ago. The fad seems to be dying, even the TV personalities are getting less attention, so we are spared the sight of elderly ladies sending part of their Social Security checks to such people.
My favorite line in Elmer Gantry Comes from Andrew Pengilly, after Elmer has regaled him with all the progress, financial emphasized, he has been making with his church: "Mr. Gantry, why don't you believe in God?"

Chicago Chicago That toddlin' town, toddlin' town The town that Billy Sunday could not shutdown

sung by Frankie words by ?

Charles, the "Chicago" you quoted goes wa-a-a-y back before Frank Sinatra. I know there's a place on the Internet that would give you the date, composer, and lyricist but I can't remember how to address it. In the other "Chicago" from that dreadful bomb "Robin and the Seven Hoods" Sinatra calls it "My kind of town." My home town, incidentally, the place I love best though we moved away 50 years ago and so much has changed that it seems it's only the concrete sidewalks and the peculiar quality of the light that are still familiar.

There's yet another "Chicago" song we used to sing in grade school; the chorus goes, "Chi-CAW-go! Chi-CAW-go! Chi-CAW-go is my home! My heart is in Chi-CAW-go, wherever I may roam!" ( As an Easterner, you might not have known that the middle syllable is pronounced like the crow's noise, not like the gear tooth or what a Bostonian would call a motor vehicle.)

But I digress. It seems Elmer Gantry was able to do in Zenith (albeit on a smaller scale) what Billy Sunday couldn't in Chicago. Speakeasies, bookie joints, and gangsters were part of daily life and I was far too young to make any judgments.

Ros

Jo, I haven't really kept track but I know there are at least two cable channels entirely dedicated to religious broadcasts, and locally there are two other independent channels which feature several hours of revivalist preaching, direct telecasts from churches, etc., so the overall total of this kind of religious message doesn't seem to be diminishing here. Perhaps that's just a level of local coverage that is marketable in the Detroit area.

Ros

Also "hog buthcher to the world"??

I just sat here and read all your comments on Elmer Gantry. I am so sorry I couldn't get in on the discussion. My computer was out of commission for about 5 weeks. All fixed now. I was the one who originally suggested Gantry, and I'm pleased at all the discussion that took place. Many of it made me rethink some of my original thoughts on the book and other reenforced some. I definetly could not have kept up with the discussion on Dickson, etal. because I am not from a literary background, but I found them most intriguing.

As far as the character development goes: I agree with someone back there. We all probably know someone who has never learned from their mistakes, or believe THEY don't make any, it's always the other guys fault. In our church, of about 60 members, we have gone through6 ministers in 15 years. Two quit preaching, one divorced and remarried. One of the wives of the minister divorced him and married one of the married parishners. I also read in a magazine article several years ago about how ministers are plagued by all the sins that we everyday people battle. I believe Lewis' portrayal of Elmer was rather acqurate. JUst a side note: listening to an Indian doctor talk on the radio about what turned him on to medicine, he said that many American doctors took up medicine in school after reading Arrowsmith. Having not read it, does it make sense? Thanks for the entertainment.

Elmer Gantry	by Sinclair Lewis
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