Sinclair Lewis' Minnesota: A State of Mind; 1; Minnesota is Unplaced

To give it. To. You. The broadcasting service under a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting presents a state of mind. You can. Lose. Your. Job. This series was written by Dr James Lundquist native and author of several articles and a book on Sinclair Lois.

This is the first in its series of 12 programs devoted to a tour of San Carlos is Minnesota. Our tour will not require a road map or a triple-A travel guide only a willingness to indulge in some mental geography. Where our concern is with Minnesota as a state of mind rather than a state of the Union. Like Sinclair Lewis himself. We are not interested in the topography of Minnesota so much as we are in what Minnesota means to Minnesotans. As Lewis stresses again and again in his novels and stories our geographical states have much to do with our self-concept. We not only live in Minnesota or Wisconsin or Iowa or Wyoming Minnesota lives in us. Narrator For the series is Leslie Davis. The topic of this program is Minnesota is one place.

If one is inclined to think of Minnesota in terms of literature at all. Sinclair Lewis is the name that comes immediately to mind other Minnesotans have attained stature as writers and among these have Scott Fitzgerald has a critical reputation far ahead of Lewis's. But no other Minnesota writer used Minnesota as a setting. More significantly and notoriously than did Sinclair Lewis for his novels Main Street timber lane Kings blood royal and the God Seeker are set in Minnesota and other books such as the trail of the Hawk and arrow Smith as well as many of his short stories have Minnesota scenes or describe landscapes highly reminiscent of Minnesota and of course the scandal surrounding the publication of Main Street etched center on the national consciousness as small town USA. But Lewis's use of Minnesota in his fiction is more than a matter of pride in his home state or a consequence of the

environment in which he grew up. He saw in Minnesota a unique and not altogether admirable quality. Lewis explained this quality in an essay entitled Minnesota the Norse state which appeared in The Nation magazine for May 30th one thousand twenty three. When a soda is unknown to the average Easterner say to a Hartford Insurance manager a New York garment worker. Not so much because it's new is because it's neither western inviolate nor Eastern and crystallized factories and shore hotels are inevitably associated with New Jersey cow punchers and buttes with Montana. California is apparent and Florida in Maine but Minnesota is unplaced. I've heard a Yale Jr. speculate now you take those Minnesota City say take Milwaukee for instance. Why must I have a couple hundred thousand population has in it. This would be a composite Eastern impression of Minnesota. Vastness of wind beaten prairie flights as a parade ground. Only given up to wheat growing say for a fringe of pines at the

north then a few market towns of the South. Steps inhabited by a few splendid Yankees one's own sort of people and by Swedes who always began sentences with the veil I tank and who are invariably humorous. It is the unplaced quality of Minnesota that fascinated Lewis and it is this quality of the state that he exploited in his writing because so few of his readers knew what Minnesota is like or even where it is. The US was able to imprint his conception of the state in their minds as E.M. Forster the British novelist wrote in 1929. I persist in exclaiming What Mr. Lewis has done for myself and thousands of others is too large a piece of the continent and not imagination. The irony of what Lewis did with Minnesota is that he not only made Englishman like Forster conscious of the states make up he also had the same effect on Minnesotans before Main Street for example. The opinion of Will Kennicott the husband of the book's heroine on small towns would have been commonplace.

Good hustling burgs. It would astonish you to know how much wheat and rye and corn and potatoes they ship in a year. But Lewis gave Minnesotans another picture of their small towns a picture in which the Gopher Prairie has become places of misery and dead hope stifled by fundamentalist religion and economic tyranny. It was no kinder to Minnesota's cities and the zenith of Babbitt and Elmer Gantry and dogs were a city partly modeled on Duluth as well as Minneapolis St. Paul is the name without the thing. Instead of being the zenith of urban development as its boosters claim it to be it is with its slums and its got rich suburbs in many ways the nadir of urbanization. And as for Minnesota's Weldon is in the novel mantrap Lewis hermetically suggest that when a vacationer breeze in the cool pine scented air it is not simultaneously filled his soul with innocence. Minnesotans reacted violently to what Louis wrote about their state and it was rumored shortly after the publication of Main Street that if you should ever try to return to Sox center he would do

so at the risk of a lynching or at least a new suit of tar and feathers. However violent the reaction but was nevertheless forced Minnesotans to become more conscious of themselves and their surroundings. Among the many objectives of his fiction Lewis wanted to change the attitudes of Minnesotans toward Minnesota. Dislike the smug assurance on the part of so many that civilization in Minnesota was progressing in the best possible way. He had doubts about the future dots that he expressed through the thoughts of Carol Kennicott in Main Street. Here is the newest Empire of the world. The northern Middle West a land of dairy herds and exquisite lakes of new automobiles and tarpaper shanties and silos like red towers of clumsy speech and a hope that is boundless. An empire which feeds a quarter of the world yet its work is merely begun. They are pioneers these sweaty wayfarers for all their telephones and bank accounts and

automatic pianos and co-operative leagues. And for all of its facts richness there is is a pioneer land. What is its future. A future of cities in factories much more now a loping empty fields homes universal and secure our placid chateau ringed with sullen huts youth free to find knowledge and laughter willingness to sift the sanctified lies or creamy skin fat women smeared with grease and chalk. Gorgeous in the skins of beasts and the bloody feathers of slain birds playing bridge with puffy pink nail jewelled fingers. Women who after much expenditure of labor and bad temper still grotesquely resemble their own flatulence lapdogs. The ancient stale inequalities or something different in history. Unlike the tedious maturity of other empires what future and what hope Lewis writes immediately after this

passage that Carol's head ached with the riddle. It has now been almost a half century since the publication of Main Street as the passage of time given us the answer to Carol's riddle. But future and what hope is there for Minnesota. The answer depends on whether or not the attitudes of Minnesotans toward Minnesota have changed since Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street and this is something we will be trying to find a. Way to find out whatever the right place is this year were you a smart alec college professors are put on a spiel about Sinclair Lois. Yes but I thought you left as a question that you're supposed to know all there is to know about all read Lois and you don't even recognize me. I'm always more famous than is your professor and all that I suppose you can read my card. Let's see George F. Babbitt realtor homes not houses. That's right and all the way up here from the zenith zip City to check on you boys make sure

not you know what you're doing and so forth. Now that I'm partially retired I've got time to stick my nose in things like that. Retired from what Lewis wrote a book about you I thought you'd never retire just decided it was time to channel some of my punch and go in other fields. Such as pangs of attention to what people like you are doing with the reputation of the man who made me famous. Besides I felt like I go on with all this. What do you call it now. My materialism all his life. Yeah I guess I've raked in my share of the most and can maybe rest the old dogs now or the object of that. No no not at all. Now if you don't mind we'd like to continue here not mine. But he may not mind. You bet your bottom dollar I mine. I want to find out what's going on here. It doesn't sound like much is coming out I saw that snooty Carol Kennicott in a way out but he won't say a word to me either. As if good ole George Babbitt couldn't buy and sell her husband ten times over. Was too low brow for invite someone to read a new read Lois.

I mean for example if you really want to get in on the know Carol Kennicott. Nothing but a frustrated housewife who had the misfortune of being sent to college and getting her brain all steamed up with some high falutin notions dreamed up by a bunch of drug addicts living in an cellars and eating spaghetti. Tell you what she needs. Oh wow I will go into that right now but you know what I mean. Anyway I get from her is a bunch of high sounding squeaks. Now if you want the lowdown on rad boy George you have Babbit. OK now what's this I overheard a few minutes ago about you trying to find out something about Minnesota. Well our series is called Sinclair Lewis's Minnesota and in it we're looking at some of the things Lewis wrote and said about Minnesota and then we're going to pick up a picture. Oh you're going to show red got up his own country I'm going to show what the heck's and rabbit heads he made us all out to be is that it. Oh not at all you smile I'm glad to hear that. Because red wasn't all that hard on us here in the North Star State.

As a matter of fact I was on a business trip recently to Gallup and some of the old timers up there of the quantised club meeting I dropped in on where John about read in his books. We all agreed that while that skinny banker is costed much as he was it was pretty dadgum fair market. Well all things considered I mean there was some job deals being bowed back in the 20s around here. Sharp and raw was in on some of them myself before I learned better. And I'm not afraid to admit it but I mean we were we were quick to run out socialist side of town and valley that some preachers get away with too much bad logic and. People on the inside made a lot of money off the highway right away purchase and all around here. We pretty well kept the farmers down and now to rob them while they were working themselves to death trying to make an honest go of it and putting our food on our tables at the same time. Yeah Fred noticed all of that. There aren't many of us who escaped without getting a switching of one kind or another from the UC MD of taking Lewis's criticism pretty well nominate on line for an

inside straight. You see Red was kind of good natured about it all. There was a lot of good back slapping funny stuff in his books. They attacked us by laughing at us and no alibi Arklow Arma pretty soon he added laughing too with Amman and out ourselves I hope you don't miss that one. Well that bread was not a down in the mouth the preacher you know trying to tell everyone but himself how they should reform because it was mostly a joke or he was serious only to a point to squeeze the juice as much as he did add to see the humor in life and I guess the doosra you know as we used to say during Prohibition broke the law by bending the elbow lapped up the liquid and other words he losed I get use of stand English language. OK I think I don't do is talk dead language and neither did all read A's build a speech fresh from the pale believe me. Oh you've made an important point there alright and we're trying I just hope you make a first class try because read at some first

class things to say about this land of 10000 lakes that we're living in and most folks don't have any appreciation of what he did by publicizing Minnesota and more net. He helped a whole lot of us misstate to get to know ourselves and where we are a whole lot better. I remember writing letters to my realtor friend Duluth when he was trying to find a house up there in the 40s and told those colleagues of mine the business that they better do their best to find him a place we like because we needed him as a Minnesota neighbor like that damn fool that he was in many ways. Not even a mansion of the heart Dyckman view of Lake Superior could satisfy him for long. He went back to being the homesick tourist he was most of his life he always wanted to come back here and live like the rest of us of Minnesota Eskimos but I have a BS to Henri to take it easy for long. Well I guess I hung on the ears long enough and a matter of fact Mr. baton down you don't have to thank me for straightening ya die I just came up here to find out I was going out anyway I just want to make sure that

your you're going to be above board and fair with old red. I'm going to be on my way I got got a lab's contract for deed on a farm near banjo cross and got to talk to the widow who still live in there about her plans. Yes well Mr. Babbitt We certainly appreciate Like I said you don't have to thank me and don't be surprised by Doc in now and then just to see how your projects are getting along but I've got to hurry and I'll let my car in a no parking zone. No I don't get a ticket and a fine way to eat up what I save by getting 20 miles to a gallon on the way up here. I used to tell and read that you never did understand much about driving with a man who knows how to use the gas pedal right in the same cell all kinds of money up to up to 50 dollars a year if he does any driving just that all speak of with on let me open the door to say that I have it. That's kind of you but I can find no way. All right fine. Welcome right. You do that by.

I have a feeling that we haven't seen the last of Mr. Babbitt. But anyway as I was saying we will not look only at the Minnesota of Louis's day the Minnesota of the 1920s. But at the Minnesota of today also with an eye toward seeing whether or not the attitudes and manners of Minnesotans have changed since Sinclair Lewis wrote mainstreet. If any writer ever was qualified to change the thinking of Minnesotans in the process transform the state of UN plays into the state of someplace that writer was Sinclair Lewis. He was born on February 7th 1885 in the village he was later to make both famous and infamous a town about a few thousand inhabitants about 100 miles northwest of Minneapolis. It was the third son of Edwin J Lo as a physician and Emma Kerman blew it. When

Sinclair Lois christened Harry's and Claire was born. Sauk Center still had the appearance of a frontier town only freshly evolved into a rudimentary civilization. The town had been founded only 28 years before and the memory of the Indian outbreak of 1862 was still vivid to many citizens. But the town like to term its all forward looking. And with the acquisition of railroad service in 1882 the townspeople were envisioning unlimited growth and cultural development. But it was to be the kind of expansion characteristic of the American Midwest. The growth came mainly in the 1890s in the first two decades of this century. And the culture consisted of a small library a small high school a movie theater Ford automobiles and a drugstore. None of which charm Doctor Louis's youngest son. Jerry Lewis grew up observing the transformation of Sox center and Minnesota from the

19th century world of the front tear into the 20th century world of gasoline electricity and indoor plumbing which by the way the Louis home did not acquire until after young Harry had left. He was an awkward boy still being described in middle age as all arms and legs. He was never very successful in the sports from which boys are supposed to learn self respect. But his boyhood was not an unhappy one and its influence on his development is considerable. Here is what Lewis wrote about the years in which he grew up. It's extraordinary how deep is the impression made by the place of one's birth and rearing. A lasting are its memories. It's 29 years now since I left Sox center to go to college and more than a quarter of a century I have been back two or three times for a couple of months several times for a couple of weeks but otherwise I've been utterly out of touch with the town. Yet it's as vivid in my mind as though I had left there yesterday. I find myself thinking about streets and its people in the familiar friendly faces when I'm on the great avenues of New York.

Or Paris or Berlin or Stockholm. I'm a little stone hilly villages. Eventually our sun basking villas in Spain are the yellow ancient temples of Athens. Me forever. Ten miles will not be a distance in the mathematical tables but will be slightly more than the distance say from Sauk Center to Melrose. Be Forever. I should live to be 90 the direction west will have nothing in particular to do with California the rocky. Only that direction which is to the left toward Hoboken hill if you face the house of Dr. E. J Lewis. L. primitive and inherent to the impressions of boyhood. And I who am writing this in Connecticut in Chicago in mid-May to the farm which I bought in Vermont ever the slightest regret that I was born and reared in a Prairie Village instead of a New England or New York or Old England in the continent of Europe for that matter. If I seem to criticize privileges I certainly criticize them no more than I have New York or Paris of the great University. I'm quite certain I could have been born and reared in no place in the world I would have had more friendliness. Need Is A

look at the sons of rich men in New England where their motor cars and their travel. Seems to me that they're not having one tenth the fun which I had as a kid swimming and fishing in soch like our cruising is perilous depths in a raft probably made of stolen logs travelling out along a lake for a picnic. I think 10 miles on end with a shotgun in October sliding in Hoboken heel stealing melons or listening to the wonders of an elocutionist at the G.A.R. all. Yes it was a good time. A good place and a good preparation for life. Louis titled this short essay The long arm of the small town. The title that is especially apt since many of Lewis's impressions of Minnesota were acquired before he went away to college in 1902. Thereafter he never settled permanently in the state hall although he made sporadic attempts at relocating in Minnesota lived for periods of time in St. Cloud. Man Cato St. Paul Minneapolis in a cabin on big Pelican Lake in Excelsior on the shores of Lake Minnetonka and

finally in Duluth. It was in Duluth that he made his most serious attempt at putting down roots buying a large house with frontage on Lake Superior in 1045. He sold the house the next year but as Lewis emphasizes in the long arm of the small town even though he never maintained a permanent residence in Minnesota as an adult he was permanently conscious of the state and realized that his own personality could be understood only in reference to the place in which he was born or in 10 miles would always mean slightly more than a distance from Sauk Center to Melrose. Minnesota for Louis then was a state of mind. It was his understanding of his Minnesota heritage was not entirely the consequence of his youthful experiences in the state or his later visits. Once he determined on a career as a writer he set out to research his environment in a way that gave him insights possessed by no other American novelist Vernon old Parrington the scholar and

critic has written about the manner in which Lewis acquired the kind of information with which Main Street and Babbitt and those other novels are filled. Mr. Lewis has been an enormous pains to gather his materials at their sources. He has taken upon himself to become a specialist in depicting the genus Americanus. He has loafed along Main Street played poker in back rooms with wicked young men drunk in respectable clubs and exchanged hearty backslapping with the sons of Rotary. He has devoted days to the smoking compartment as a poem and garnering the ripest wisdom and choicest stories of traveling salesman. He has listened to philosophic brokers discourse on ethics studied political and constitutional theory with realtors learned all about Bolshevism from presidents of chambers of commerce and instructed in the elements of economics by Republican congressman discovered the fallacies of Darwinian evolution from clerical fundamentalists and the superiority of fascism over democracy from the greatest captains of industry. No field of American

experience has escaped his minute investigation. But we might also say in echoing Parrington that no field of Minnesota experience escaped Lewis's inquiry all sections of Minnesota and dozens of characters modeled on Lewis's observations of Minnesota found their way into his writing as he lodged Minnesota in the imagination of his readers. Here ranged from the small town to the medium sized city to the metropolis from the western prairies to the wilderness of the north. Actual places often disguised only in name were captured in his photographic style. Center. Man Cato Duluth Minneapolis St. Paul the farm country around Fergus Falls in Morehead and the vacation land of the Arrowhead. All these places appear in the US as work as do their inhabitants. Small town doctor and school teacher in the Big City businessman and politician the preacher the wheat country banker the resort owner the vacationing fisherman all are captured by Lewis and made part of American consciousness.

In every instance Lewis stresses the relationship between the places and the people between Minnesota and Minnesotans and always he raises the same question. What future and what hope is there for these people and this state. The answer as much answer as Lou is the perpetual Razor of questions offers lies in what Minnesota means to those who live there. Many years after Lewis asked his question we have returned to the places he wrote again and the next weeks as we take you on a tour through Lewis country. You will hear the answers we received and in the process perhaps learn something about Minnesota as a state of mind. Maybe wondering however why we are willing to make so much out of what the listener called the unplaced state. It is for the same reason that Lewis gave as he wrote in one thousand twenty three. To understand America it is merely necessary to understand Minnesota. Whoever that this is no easy job

because as we do understand Minnesota you must be an historian an ethnologist a poet a cynic a graduate prophet all in one. Now that our itinerary and the purpose of our journey have been settled. We will go next to the place where Lewis began the small town. Our narrator will provide us with background on. The Village Virus. Lois's diagnosis how small town like. You have been listening to his Minnesota state of mind. This 12 program series has been produced by the St. Cloud State College broadcasting service under a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Her exposed view. Is with what we say. You speak with we could see you. And you cannot hide. Compassion which you feel you know. Sinclair you. Soo much we. Then would leave you. That it ought to be talking. Last night. Holding. Your. Nose. To one during. This series was written by Dr James Lundquist of the St. Cloud State College Department of English a music composed and performed by Lowell saki. This program was produced and directed by Gary Hawkins executive producer Scott bright.

Said to me. The View. Hasn't got a whole. Lot. Will. The parts of Lois and other characters are played by members of the same clubs big department of theatre. This is the national educational radio network.