Opinions

Zenith

If Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s fine novel, Babbitt, is simply the story of George F. Babbitt, the only adverse comment I can make upon it is to question whether that gentleman deserved such detailed and careful study. One thing is certain: he does not deserve it a whit more if, as some newspaper has asserted, there are ten million of him than if there is only one.

But there are indications that Mr. Lewis intended also to depict the city of Zenith and to show Babbitt and his friends as typical of its spirit, to do with this novel for the city what he attempted to do in Main Street for the village. True, there are circles above Babbitt, in which move William Eathorne, the banker (magnificently sketched), and the McKelveys (not realized at all). And one is made to feel intensely that beneath the all-too-articulate Babbitt and his friends are toiling, almost inarticulate masses. ‘At that moment in Zenith, three hundred and forty or fifty thousand Ordinary People were asleep, a vast unpenetrated shadow.’ Nevertheless, it appears to me that in Babbitt, Vergil Gunch, Howard Littlefield, and the others, Mr. Lewis intended to typify the dominant spirit of Zenith. Indeed, if they did not typify it, if they were not significant of anything greater than themselves, he would hardly have taken such pains to depict them. ‘Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg....”’ This sounds very like special pleading.

Well, I recently spent a summer in Zenith. At least, it may well have been Zenith. It is in the same part of the Middle-West and it looks like the city Mr. Lewis describes. True, it has only 150,000 inhabitants, whereas Mr. Lewis claims 340,000 for his city. But Mr. Lewis is himself sufficiently of the Middle-West to be unreliable on this subject. And, to tell the truth, his city does not feel like a city of 340,000. The social items in its newspapers are too boisterous and unsophisticated; it has, apparently, neither orchestra nor art gallery. No, Mr. Lewis’s Zenith is my Zenith. But if this essay should happen to meet his eye, and he should protest that I have selected a city quite different from his, called it Zenith, and then set out to prove that it was not what he said it was, I can only reply that he may be right, but that if the Babbitts are not typical of a city of 150,000, still less are they likely to be of a city of 340,000.

As I say, I recently spent a summer in Zenith; but any observations that I make are not based solely on that single visit. My parents moved to Zenith when I was six years old—which, alas, was long enough ago to make them Old Residents by now; I lived there as a child, as a boy, and during my summer vacations from college; and I have returned to Zenith for six months or so every two or three years since. I have seen the city grow and have noted the changes more sharply for the intervening years of absence. And I assert that Zenith is not at all in spirit the kind of place that Mr. Lewis implies.

Of course I did not know, not really know, even one individual among the toiling throngs in the factories, at the steel plant, in the cement works. How should I? And I did not know the Babbitt group, save, superficially, a member here and there. But I observed them on the streets and heard them talk in hotel lobbies, and I admired the accuracy of Mr. Lewis’s eye and ear. The people I played with were the people who take their diversion at the Country Club or give dinners at the Zenith Club in the city proper. I saw them, too, at work in their offices: lawyers, doctors, railwaymen, brokers, architects, contractors, merchants; young men of twenty-five to forty; middle-aged men of forty to sixty-five; and their wives and daughters. A not unfair cross-section of Zenith life, once the hopeless separation from the vastly larger mass of manual labour beneath is admitted, and I think they were more numerous than the Babbitts. Of course I do not profess to have known them all; but I am not concerned with their numbers. The point is that they were Zenith. They gave the city its tone; you felt them in looking at the blocks and blocks of handsome houses; they made the Babbitts appear not so much shoddy as unrepresentative, insignificant; their composite soul was the soul of Zenith.

What, then, were these people like? In any profound sense that is a difficult question to answer. There was a deep similarity among them; something important that they all had in common, but something that was very hard to get at. It is, however, easy to say what they were not like. They were not like the Babbitts; they were not at all like the McKelveys or Horace Updike, the people whom George Babbitt longed to know; they were not like the characters in Mr. Hergesheimer’s Cytherea, nor like those in Margaret Banning’s Country Club People. They were less sophisticated, if to be sophisticated means to have a weary air and to say cynical things cleverly; they were more so, if it means to be reasonably well educated, to stand unconsciously for some reality (no matter what), and to have ease of manner.

The strongest impression they made on me was that of smoothness. Their homes ran quietly, despite perpetual servant trouble; they entertained easily; even the weekly dinner-dance at the Country Club gave me a sense of smoothness that was rather delightful. The immense dining-room would be crowded—scores of big tables and little tables almost uncomfortably filled; but there seemed to be no friction, and the voices were a well-modulated hum, pleasant to hear. People did not seem to get in one another’s way; and that was true mentally as well as physically. They were very well-bred and they were not at all self-conscious. Almost, these people, collectively, had grace. A kind of delightful suavity surrounded them, that was like the suavity of their smoothly running Packards and Cadillacs.

Not that they all had Packards or Cadillacs. Many of the younger men were still struggling near the bottom of the business ascent; a great many were less than well-to-do; a few were known to be virtually down and out. But the point is that none of them, even among these last, ever so much as questioned the system. Hatred and jealousy of individuals there must have been; a revolt against the collective whole, or even a doubt of its importance, none whatever.

They were so very sure of themselves, so beautifully sure. They had something of the easy charm one sniffs up at the tea-room of the Ritz (in Paris). They were so sure of themselves that if an outsider expressed radical opinions or even questioned rudely the importance of the reality for which they stood, these Zenith people were not annoyed, but, quite politely, amused. They were, in fact, civilized.

This was the dominant surface impression that I carried away from Zenith after my last visit, and it is so different from anything that I have read or heard about even the smallest minority in any Middle-Western city that I have gone about telling it to a number of people—in New York and elsewhere. My listeners, when at all interested, were sceptical, and usually observed that Zenith must be very different from most Middle-Western cities—a special case. It may be so. I do not profess to generalize about the whole region. Zenith is the only Middle-Western city that I know well. But I am doubtful. I rather fancy that people are corrupted by literature. They do not see things for themselves, even those close-by; instead, they read in novels or plays that things are thus and so, and take the author’s word for it. And the author, himself, I fancy, is frequently writing about what he, too, has read to be thus and so. One sees Victor Margueritte, for example, becoming uncomfortably aware (like all the rest of the elderly writers, through hearsay) that something dreadful has happened to the younger generation, and then setting out to write about it in La Garçonne—a work as sheerly literary, lacking in observation, and impossible in its psychology, as a novel by Florence Barclay.

But, to return to the people of Zenith, I found them very like well-bred people anywhere else—like, say, well-bred people in Philadelphia or in an English city. They read—the women, anyway—desultorily, as people everywhere read, but books demanding some effort: The Revolt against Civilization, The Education of Henry Adams, novels by Couperus, Bojer, and Knut Hamsun; almost never poetry. They did not know a great deal about pictures—at least, pictures and statues were not an intimate part of their lives—because in Zenith there was no art gallery; they did not have daily opportunity to look at pictures. But a great many of them were intelligently and sincerely fond of music, because there was much good music to be heard every year in Zenith. A string quartet would be glad indeed to draw such a house in New York as it draws in Zenith.

When you come to think of it, all this is natural enough (except perhaps the intensity of their love for music—but I shall say more of that later). There is no reason outside of literature why these people should have been crude or conventionally Middle-Western. Virtually all of them had been away to school or college, probably half of the younger men and a much larger proportion of the younger women in the East; all had travelled widely in America, and a great many, especially the women, in Europe. A considerable number of the older ones go to California or Florida for the winter.

There were, of course, different groups and eddies within this society. There were the very young—the débutantes and their swains. I observed them at the dances and talked casually with a few, but I really learned little about them. My very superficial impression, which I give you for whatever it may be worth, was that they had magnificent and amusing savoir-faire, beneath which they hid an ashamed ingenuousness. I do not know or greatly care what their morals were, but I should guess that they were much the same as morals were among people of their age and wealth ten years ago or twenty.

There was also the fast set, a small group of young married people. Personally I saw nothing of them and can only repeat what I was told of them by others: that they drank hard in order to experience some emotion in promiscuous embraces, and that it was all hopelessly raw. I cannot vouch for the truth of the description, but it sounded plausible. Having refused to generalize about the whole of the Middle-West, I am certainly not going to do so about the whole of the United States, but I can say that, from what little I have seen of fast sets anywhere in America, they have always seemed to me raw. I have seen elegance and swiftness delightfully combined in Europe, but not in America. It may be that this group in Zenith represented some obscure, desperate and futile revolt against the smoothness of Zenith society, of the Zenith soul. If so, it was pathetic, for it did not cause so much as a ripple. People did not seem even shocked by it, only bored.

This, then, was the impression I received of Zenith people: smoothness, ease, manner, something approaching grace, something approaching charm. It was very delightful.

Still, I should not like to live in Zenith. For, if it has none of the faults popularly attributed to the Middle-West, it has others, unsectional, beneath and perhaps even in part the cause of its charm, that trouble me deeply.

This society, which is the heart and mind and soul of Zenith, is immensely conservative, immensely conventional, both morally and mentally. It does not belligerently flaunt, or argue in favour of, conventional standards; it accepts them as something settled a long time since. There is a good deal to be said for this—or for a part of it. Indeed, there is a good deal to be said for most of what Zenith does or is. Is not more real freedom to be obtained through accepting certain age-old conventions, such as that of marriage and married fidelity, for instance, and then making the best of them, than through wasting one’s strength in struggling against them, with no adequate substitute to offer? But Zenith accepts too much. It accepts the Steel Corporation, Mr. Gary, the American Legion, the Republican Party, the total wickedness of the I.W.W., the sole responsibility of Germany for the war, and the entire basic system of Capital and Labour as at present existing, though it is willing to concede improvements in detail. But this attitude probably makes for the almost suave charm of this society, which is, after all, the same kind of charm that was to be found in Upper-Middle-Class English society before the war.

These people are amazingly cut off from and ignorant of the vast labouring class. They know that not one of themselves could be elected congressman or mayor or even to membership on the school-board, but they accept the fact coolly and without much resentment as revealing nothing more than the jealousy of the ‘Have-Nots’ for the ‘Haves,’ of those at the bottom for those who have deservedly reached the top. Yet they are democratic among themselves, and, unlike the McKelveys, admit newcomers easily, with no inquiry into their antecedents. They are not really snobbish. Many of the men are employers of labour on a large scale, yet even they seem to be merely exasperated by the increasing difficulties in controlling their men, in much the same way that the women are annoyed by the difficulty of getting and keeping servants. They talk of demagogues, of Red propaganda, of the unwillingness of men to do an honest day’s work, of labour unrest, of Bolshevism—oh, especially of Bolshevism! But among even these employers I could detect no perception that the whole economic system was being seriously questioned, and certainly no perception of the numerical strength and growing unity of the questioners. But it would not be fair to consider this ignorance in the class of people I am describing as confined especially to Zenith or the Middle-West. Where in the world does it not exist?

A lesser fault was that there was no good general conversation. Indeed, there was virtually no general conversation at all. Perhaps this was because the men did not join in. There seemed, in fact, to be a strange separation of men from women in Zenith. The attitude of the men toward the women was delightful—easy, courteous without being deferential in the obnoxious Southern fashion—and the women’s attitude toward the men was equally pleasant. But men and women seemed to have nothing in common. They often did things together, played golf or bridge or tennis or even went on long canoe-trips, but they did not think together. They did not even appear to be united by sex-attraction. One simply did not feel, not ever, the haunting presence of that restless vivifying emotion. Zenith was uncannily, horribly cool. How in the world, I kept wondering, did babies get born here? Still, they did, and their mothers, with quite inadequate help, looked after them admirably. For real amusement the men liked to get off by themselves, have dinner, drink, and play poker or bridge. They were continually giving small parties of this sort in some private dining-room of the Zenith Club. At one which I attended a discussion of wives arose, the model wife being esteemed the one who cheerfully let her husband go out any or every evening. On this same evening a mixed dinner-party was being given in the ladies’ dining-room of the club, and when it was over the young men of that party drifted into our smaller room for a few minutes. They sniffed up rather wistfully the doggy atmosphere that pervades a stag-party and helped themselves to drinks from the bottles on the sideboard. ‘And where are you going now?’ one of us inquired. ‘Up to Jim’s house to play bridge.’ ‘Think of it!’ exclaimed my host pityingly, as the victims to sex filed out. ‘They’re going to Jim’s house—to play bridge—with women!’

This absence of sex-attraction in Zenith gatherings was only one expression of a lack that in course of time seemed to me almost insupportable—the lack of thrill. Everything was too quiet, too even, too reasonable. Nobody seemed ever to feel or think anything passionately. The key was low, pulled down, like the decoration of the houses, which was usually in good taste but so very sober and restrained. These people, I said to myself, must have some emotional outlet; what is it?

Well, the young men, no doubt, found an outlet in business. For it must be remembered that among all these men there was not one professional idler. It was one of the accepted conventions that a man must work. Some of them were idlers by nature and worked, I dare say, as little as possible; most of them worked almost fiercely, though not during such long hours as had the men of their fathers’ generation. And they drank hard at their stag-parties. I heard of one or two disreputable road-houses in the country near-by, so somewhere in Zenith sex-attraction did exist, but it existed as something outside the magic circle. So far as I was able to learn, very few of the young men I knew frequented those places. Their outlet was not women; they seemed strangely uninterested in women; they did not even talk about them at the stag-parties.

But what of the women, the younger women, themselves? They appeared so cool, so reasonable, so sure of themselves, and so gracious, that it seemed an impertinence to be sorry for them. Nevertheless, I was sorry for them—secretly. What outlet did they have? It is true that they had their homes to manage and their children to bring up. But, even with at best inadequate servants—hardly ever more than one, never more than two—and at frequent intervals no servants at all, this took only a small part of their time. Their homes were so well organized, and possessed, too, every known mechanical labour-saving device, from vacuum cleaners to electric stoves. What did these attractive young women do with their spare time? Well, they read, of course, and they gave or attended a great many teas, at which no man was ever present. That could hardly be an emotional outlet. Music, perhaps, was a partial one. As I have said, there was excellent music to be heard in Zenith. There were two concert courses every winter, to which came really great artists—Paderewski, Mischa Elman, famous string quartets, the Vatican Choir. And to these concerts, I feel sure, these young women listened with intelligence and emotion. (Their husbands sat through the concerts patiently). But even so? Zenith is, after all, only a small city. There may have been fifteen concerts in a season. What about the rest of the time? A few young women played exceedingly well, themselves. That might really be an outlet. But most did not play well enough to find satisfaction in playing at all, knowing what they knew of great music. They went in for golf and boating, and they danced a good deal, too—well, but without the grace of abandon. To me, for all their perfection and intelligence, they seemed only half alive.

They were intelligent, more so than their husbands—or perhaps more grown-up. And in a way they were well educated. They knew something about, were interested in, a great many subjects to which their husbands were indifferent—music, Russian dancing, Scandinavian literature, social welfare work, civic improvement, and so forth and so forth. But it is true that they did not know any one thing thoroughly, as their husbands knew their business. Again, I think, that was because they did not know any one thing passionately. ‘What can have been their outlet?’ I asked a woman—not in Zenith. ‘Virtue, perhaps,’ she replied. They seemed sadly wasted, somehow, those delightful young women, and only half alive.

I think, perhaps, that subconsciously they were afraid of coming alive. They filled their days deliberately with pretty, well-ordered, superficial activities. They made existence so pleasant and so full that it disguised the absence of life. A proof of this seemed to appear in their gregariousness. They clung together in everything. If they wanted to study a period of history they did not do it in solitude; they organized a club among themselves to study it. They organized a club or a class or a group for everything. It was as though they huddled together, for comfort—and in fear. Fear of what? Of their individual selves, I fancy. Groups have only a factitious life; real life is in the individual alone. And I think these young women were afraid of real life. So they were, I suppose, failures. But there was something finer in their failure than in their husbands’ narrow success. The young men were aware of but one possible activity in life—business; and threw themselves into it desperately. The young women were aware of a score, and, held back by all the pleasant conventions among which they existed, and, unlike their husbands, by a vague perception of dark troubled depths in the individual soul, threw themselves into none.

But how charming they were, how candid and clear and—oh, decent! I wonder if they would mind if they knew that, even while admiring, some one had found them, and Zenith, a little pathetic.