Babbitt

S >> Sinclair Lewis >> Babbitt


With them were six wives, more or less--it was hard to tell, so early in
the evening, as at first glance they all looked alike, and as they all
said, "Oh, ISN'T this nice!" in the same tone of determined liveliness.
To the eye, the men were less similar: Littlefield, a hedge-scholar,
tall and horse-faced; Chum Frink, a trifle of a man with soft and
mouse-like hair, advertising his profession as poet by a silk cord on
his eye-glasses; Vergil Gunch, broad, with coarse black hair en brosse;
Eddie Swanson, a bald and bouncing young man who showed his taste
for elegance by an evening waistcoat of figured black silk with glass
buttons; Orville Jones, a steady-looking, stubby, not very memorable
person, with a hemp-colored toothbrush mustache. Yet they were all so
well fed and clean, they all shouted "'Evenin', Georgie!" with such
robustness, that they seemed to be cousins, and the strange thing is
that the longer one knew the women, the less alike they seemed;
while the longer one knew the men, the more alike their bold patterns
appeared.

The drinking of the cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing. The
company waited, uneasily, hopefully, agreeing in a strained manner that
the weather had been rather warm and slightly cold, but still Babbitt
said nothing about drinks. They became despondent. But when the late
couple (the Swansons) had arrived, Babbitt hinted, "Well, folks, do you
think you could stand breaking the law a little?"

They looked at Chum Frink, the recognized lord of language. Frink pulled
at his eye-glass cord as at a bell-rope, he cleared his throat and said
that which was the custom:

"I'll tell you, George: I'm a law-abiding man, but they do say Verg
Gunch is a regular yegg, and of course he's bigger 'n I am, and I just
can't figure out what I'd do if he tried to force me into anything
criminal!"

Gunch was roaring, "Well, I'll take a chance--" when Frink held up his
hand and went on, "So if Verg and you insist, Georgie, I'll park my car
on the wrong side of the street, because I take it for granted that's
the crime you're hinting at!"

There was a great deal of laughter. Mrs. Jones asserted, "Mr. Frink is
simply too killing! You'd think he was so innocent!"

Babbitt clamored, "How did you guess it, Chum? Well, you-all just wait
a moment while I go out and get the--keys to your cars!" Through a froth
of merriment he brought the shining promise, the mighty tray of glasses
with the cloudy yellow cocktails in the glass pitcher in the center. The
men babbled, "Oh, gosh, have a look!" and "This gets me right where I
live!" and "Let me at it!" But Chum Frink, a traveled man and not unused
to woes, was stricken by the thought that the potion might be merely
fruit-juice with a little neutral spirits. He looked timorous as
Babbitt, a moist and ecstatic almoner, held out a glass, but as he
tasted it he piped, "Oh, man, let me dream on! It ain't true, but don't
waken me! Jus' lemme slumber!"

Two hours before, Frink had completed a newspaper lyric beginning:

"I sat alone and groused and thunk, and scratched my head and sighed
and wunk, and groaned, There still are boobs, alack, who'd like the
old-time gin-mill back; that den that makes a sage a loon, the vile and
smelly old saloon! I'll never miss their poison booze, whilst I the
bubbling spring can use, that leaves my head at merry morn as clear as
any babe new-born!"

Babbitt drank with the others; his moment's depression was gone; he
perceived that these were the best fellows in the world; he wanted to
give them a thousand cocktails. "Think you could stand another?" he
cried. The wives refused, with giggles, but the men, speaking in a wide,
elaborate, enjoyable manner, gloated, "Well, sooner than have you get
sore at me, Georgie--"

"You got a little dividend coming," said Babbitt to each of them, and
each intoned, "Squeeze it, Georgie, squeeze it!"

When, beyond hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about
prohibition. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in
their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming
profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed
statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.

"Now, I'll tell you," said Vergil Gunch; "way I figure it is this, and
I can speak by the book, because I've talked to a lot of doctors and
fellows that ought to know, and the way I see it is that it's a good
thing to get rid of the saloon, but they ought to let a fellow have beer
and light wines."

Howard Littlefield observed, "What isn't generally realized is that it's
a dangerous prop'sition to invade the rights of personal liberty.
Now, take this for instance: The King of--Bavaria? I think it was
Bavaria--yes, Bavaria, it was--in 1862, March, 1862, he issued a
proclamation against public grazing of live-stock. The peasantry had
stood for overtaxation without the slightest complaint, but when this
proclamation came out, they rebelled. Or it may have been Saxony. But
it just goes to show the dangers of invading the rights of personal
liberty."

"That's it--no one got a right to invade personal liberty," said Orville
Jones.

"Just the same, you don't want to forget prohibition is a mighty good
thing for the working-classes. Keeps 'em from wasting their money and
lowering their productiveness," said Vergil Gunch.

"Yes, that's so. But the trouble is the manner of enforcement," insisted
Howard Littlefield. "Congress didn't understand the right system. Now,
if I'd been running the thing, I'd have arranged it so that the drinker
himself was licensed, and then we could have taken care of the shiftless
workman--kept him from drinking--and yet not 've interfered with the
rights--with the personal liberty--of fellows like ourselves."

They bobbed their heads, looked admiringly at one another, and stated,
"That's so, that would be the stunt."

"The thing that worries me is that a lot of these guys will take to
cocaine," sighed Eddie Swanson.

They bobbed more violently, and groaned, "That's so, there is a danger
of that."

Chum Frink chanted, "Oh, say, I got hold of a swell new receipt for
home-made beer the other day. You take--"

Gunch interrupted, "Wait! Let me tell you mine!" Littlefield snorted,
"Beer! Rats! Thing to do is to ferment cider!" Jones insisted, "I've
got the receipt that does the business!" Swanson begged, "Oh, say, lemme
tell you the story--" But Frink went on resolutely, "You take and save
the shells from peas, and pour six gallons of water on a bushel of
shells and boil the mixture till--"

Mrs. Babbitt turned toward them with yearning sweetness; Frink hastened
to finish even his best beer-recipe; and she said gaily, "Dinner is
served."

There was a good deal of friendly argument among the men as to which
should go in last, and while they were crossing the hall from the
living-room to the dining-room Vergil Gunch made them laugh by
thundering, "If I can't sit next to Myra Babbitt and hold her hand under
the table, I won't play--I'm goin' home." In the dining-room they stood
embarrassed while Mrs. Babbitt fluttered, "Now, let me see--Oh, I was
going to have some nice hand-painted place-cards for you but--Oh, let me
see; Mr. Frink, you sit there."

The dinner was in the best style of women's-magazine art, whereby the
salad was served in hollowed apples, and everything but the invincible
fried chicken resembled something else. Ordinarily the men found it hard
to talk to the women; flirtation was an art unknown on Floral Heights,
and the realms of offices and of kitchens had no alliances. But under
the inspiration of the cocktails, conversation was violent. Each of the
men still had a number of important things to say about prohibition, and
now that each had a loyal listener in his dinner-partner he burst out:

"I found a place where I can get all the hootch I want at eight a
quart--"

"Did you read about this fellow that went and paid a thousand dollars
for ten cases of red-eye that proved to be nothing but water? Seems this
fellow was standing on the corner and fellow comes up to him--"

"They say there's a whole raft of stuff being smuggled across at
Detroit--"

"What I always say is--what a lot of folks don't realize about
prohibition--"

"And then you get all this awful poison stuff--wood alcohol and
everything--"

"Course I believe in it on principle, but I don't propose to have
anybody telling me what I got to think and do. No American 'll ever
stand for that!"

But they all felt that it was rather in bad taste for Orville Jones--and
he not recognized as one of the wits of the occasion anyway--to say, "In
fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial
cost, it's the humidity."

Not till the one required topic had been dealt with did the conversation
become general.

It was often and admiringly said of Vergil Gunch, "Gee, that fellow can
get away with murder! Why, he can pull a Raw One in mixed company and
all the ladies 'll laugh their heads off, but me, gosh, if I crack
anything that's just the least bit off color I get the razz for fair!"
Now Gunch delighted them by crying to Mrs. Eddie Swanson, youngest
of the women, "Louetta! I managed to pinch Eddie's doorkey out of his
pocket, and what say you and me sneak across the street when the folks
aren't looking? Got something," with a gorgeous leer, "awful important
to tell you!"

The women wriggled, and Babbitt was stirred to like naughtiness. "Say,
folks, I wished I dared show you a book I borrowed from Doc Patten!"

"Now, George! The idea!" Mrs. Babbitt warned him.

"This book--racy isn't the word! It's some kind of an anthropological
report about--about Customs, in the South Seas, and what it doesn't SAY!
It's a book you can't buy. Verg, I'll lend it to you."

"Me first!" insisted Eddie Swanson. "Sounds spicy!"

Orville Jones announced, "Say, I heard a Good One the other day about
a coupla Swedes and their wives," and, in the best Jewish accent, he
resolutely carried the Good One to a slightly disinfected ending.
Gunch capped it. But the cocktails waned, the seekers dropped back into
cautious reality.

Chum Frink had recently been on a lecture-tour among the small towns,
and he chuckled, "Awful good to get back to civilization! I certainly
been seeing some hick towns! I mean--Course the folks there are the
best on earth, but, gee whiz, those Main Street burgs are slow, and you
fellows can't hardly appreciate what it means to be here with a bunch of
live ones!"

"You bet!" exulted Orville Jones. "They're the best folks on earth,
those small-town folks, but, oh, mama! what conversation! Why, say,
they can't talk about anything but the weather and the ne-oo Ford, by
heckalorum!"

"That's right. They all talk about just the same things," said Eddie
Swanson.

"Don't they, though! They just say the same things over and over," said
Vergil Gunch.

"Yes, it's really remarkable. They seem to lack all power of looking at
things impersonally. They simply go over and over the same talk about
Fords and the weather and so on." said Howard Littlefield.

"Still, at that, you can't blame 'em. They haven't got any intellectual
stimulus such as you get up here in the city," said Chum Frink.

"Gosh, that's right," said Babbitt. "I don't want you highbrows to get
stuck on yourselves but I must say it keeps a fellow right up on his
toes to sit in with a poet and with Howard, the guy that put the con
in economics! But these small-town boobs, with nobody but each other to
talk to, no wonder they get so sloppy and uncultured in their speech,
and so balled-up in their thinking!"

Orville Jones commented, "And, then take our other advantages--the
movies, frinstance. These Yapville sports think they're all-get-out if
they have one change of bill a week, where here in the city you got your
choice of a dozen diff'rent movies any evening you want to name!"

"Sure, and the inspiration we get from rubbing up against high-class
hustlers every day and getting jam full of ginger," said Eddie Swanson.

"Same time," said Babbitt, "no sense excusing these rube burgs too easy.
Fellow's own fault if he doesn't show the initiative to up and beat it
to the city, like we done--did. And, just speaking in confidence among
friends, they're jealous as the devil of a city man. Every time I go up
to Catawba I have to go around apologizing to the fellows I was brought
up with because I've more or less succeeded and they haven't. And if you
talk natural to 'em, way we do here, and show finesse and what you might
call a broad point of view, why, they think you're putting on side.
There's my own half-brother Martin--runs the little ole general store my
Dad used to keep. Say, I'll bet he don't know there is such a thing as
a Tux--as a dinner-jacket. If he was to come in here now, he'd think we
were a bunch of--of--Why, gosh, I swear, he wouldn't know what to think!
Yes, sir, they're jealous!"

Chum Frink agreed, "That's so. But what I mind is their lack of culture
and appreciation of the Beautiful--if you'll excuse me for being
highbrow. Now, I like to give a high-class lecture, and read some of my
best poetry--not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things. But say,
when I get out in the tall grass, there's nothing will take but a lot of
cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge
in it here, he'd get the gate so fast it would make his head swim."

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 and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of
life we're used to here. But, by golly, there's this you got to say for
'em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern
ideals. And darn if a lot of 'em don't put it across! Somebody starts
panning a rube crossroads, telling how he was there in 1900 and it
consisted of one muddy street, count 'em, one, and nine hundred human
clams. Well, you go back there in 1920, and you find pavements and a
swell little hotel and a first-class ladies' ready-to-wear shop-real
perfection, in fact! You don't want to just look at what these small
towns are, you want to look at what they're aiming to become, and they
all got an ambition that in the long run is going to make 'em the finest
spots on earth--they all want to be just like Zenith!"


III

However intimate they might be with T. Cholmondeley Frink as a neighbor,
as a borrower of lawn-mowers and monkey-wrenches, they knew that he was
also a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent; that behind
his easiness were sultry literary mysteries which they could not
penetrate. But to-night, in the gin-evolved confidence, he admitted them
to the arcanum:

"I've got a literary problem that's worrying me to death. I'm doing a
series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of 'em a real
little gem--reg'lar stylistic stuff. I'm all for this theory that
perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough
things as I ever tackled. You might think it'd be harder to do my
poems--all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness--but
they're cinches. You can't go wrong on 'em; you know what sentiments
any decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick
right to 'em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there's a literary
line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow
who's really THE American genius? The fellow who you don't know his
name and I don't either, but his work ought to be preserved so's future
generations can judge our American thought and originality to-day? Why,
the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads! Just listen to
this:

It's P.A. that jams such joy in jimmy pipes. Say--bet you've often
bent-an-ear to that spill-of-speech about hopping from five to
f-i-f-t-y p-e-r by "stepping on her a bit!" Guess that's going some, all
right--BUT just among ourselves, you better start a rapidwhiz system
to keep tabs as to how fast you'll buzz from low smoke spirits to
TIP-TOP-HIGH--once you line up behind a jimmy pipe that's all aglow with
that peach-of-a-pal, Prince Albert.

Prince Albert is john-on-the-job--always joy'usly more-ISH in flavor;
always delightfully cool and fragrant! For a fact, you never hooked such
double-decked, copper-riveted, two-fisted smoke enjoyment!

Go to a pipe--speed-o-quick like you light on a good thing! Why--packed
with Prince Albert you can play a joy'us jimmy straight across the
boards! AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!"


"Now that," caroled the motor agent, Eddie Swanson, "that's what I call
he-literature! That Prince Albert fellow--though, gosh, there can't
be just one fellow that writes 'em; must be a big board of classy
ink-slingers in conference, but anyway: now, him, he doesn't write for
long-haired pikers, he writes for Regular Guys, he writes for ME, and I
tip my benny to him! The only thing is: I wonder if it sells the goods?
Course, like all these poets, this Prince Albert fellow lets his idea
run away with him. It makes elegant reading, but it don't say nothing.
I'd never go out and buy Prince Albert Tobacco after reading it, because
it doesn't tell me anything about the stuff. It's just a bunch of
fluff."

Frink faced him: "Oh, you're crazy! Have I got to sell you the idea of
Style? Anyway that's the kind of stuff I'd like to do for the Zeeco. But
I simply can't. So I decided to stick to the straight poetic, and I took
a shot at a highbrow ad for the Zeeco. How do you like this:

The long white trail is calling--calling-and it's over the hills and far
away for every man or woman that has red blood in his veins and on his
lips the ancient song of the buccaneers. It's away with dull drudging,
and a fig for care. Speed--glorious Speed--it's more than just a
moment's exhilaration--it's Life for you and me! This great new truth
the makers of the Zeeco Car have considered as much as price and style.
It's fleet as the antelope, smooth as the glide of a swallow, yet
powerful as the charge of a bull-elephant. Class breathes in every line.
Listen, brother! You'll never know what the high art of hiking is till
you TRY LIFE'S ZIPPINGEST ZEST--THE ZEECO!"


"Yes," Frink mused, "that's got an elegant color to it, if I do say
so, but it ain't got the originality of 'spill-of-speech!'" The whole
company sighed with sympathy and admiration.




CHAPTER IX

I

BABBITT was fond of his friends, he loved the importance of being host
and shouting, "Certainly, you're going to have smore chicken--the idea!"
and he appreciated the genius of T. Cholmondeley Frink, but the vigor
of the cocktails was gone, and the more he ate the less joyful he
felt. Then the amity of the dinner was destroyed by the nagging of the
Swansons.

In Floral Heights and the other prosperous sections of Zenith,
especially in the "young married set," there were many women who had
nothing to do. Though they had few servants, yet with gas stoves,
electric ranges and dish-washers and vacuum cleaners, and tiled kitchen
walls, their houses were so convenient that they had little housework,
and much of their food came from bakeries and delicatessens. They had
but two, one, or no children; and despite the myth that the Great War
had made work respectable, their husbands objected to their "wasting
time and getting a lot of crank ideas" in unpaid social work, and still
more to their causing a rumor, by earning money, that they were not
adequately supported. They worked perhaps two hours a day, and the
rest of the time they ate chocolates, went to the motion-pictures, went
window-shopping, went in gossiping twos and threes to card-parties,
read magazines, thought timorously of the lovers who never appeared,
and accumulated a splendid restlessness which they got rid of by nagging
their husbands. The husbands nagged back.

Of these naggers the Swansons were perfect specimens.

Throughout the dinner Eddie Swanson had been complaining, publicly,
about his wife's new frock. It was, he submitted, too short, too low,
too immodestly thin, and much too expensive. He appealed to Babbitt:

"Honest, George, what do you think of that rag Louetta went and bought?
Don't you think it's the limit?"

"What's eating you, Eddie? I call it a swell little dress."

"Oh, it is, Mr. Swanson. It's a sweet frock," Mrs. Babbitt protested.

"There now, do you see, smarty! You're such an authority on clothes!"
Louetta raged, while the guests ruminated and peeped at her shoulders.

"That's all right now," said Swanson. "I'm authority enough so I know it
was a waste of money, and it makes me tired to see you not wearing out a
whole closetful of clothes you got already. I've expressed my idea about
this before, and you know good and well you didn't pay the least bit of
attention. I have to camp on your trail to get you to do anything--"

There was much more of it, and they all assisted, all but Babbitt.
Everything about him was dim except his stomach, and that was a bright
scarlet disturbance. "Had too much grub; oughtn't to eat this stuff,"
he groaned--while he went on eating, while he gulped down a chill and
glutinous slice of the ice-cream brick, and cocoanut cake as oozy as
shaving-cream. He felt as though he had been stuffed with clay; his body
was bursting, his throat was bursting, his brain was hot mud; and only
with agony did he continue to smile and shout as became a host on Floral
Heights.

He would, except for his guests, have fled outdoors and walked off the
intoxication of food, but in the haze which filled the room they sat
forever, talking, talking, while he agonized, "Darn fool to be eating
all this--not 'nother mouthful," and discovered that he was again
tasting the sickly welter of melted ice cream on his plate. There was
no magic in his friends; he was not uplifted when Howard Littlefield
produced from his treasure-house of scholarship the information that the
chemical symbol for raw rubber is C10H16, which turns into isoprene,
or 2C5H8. Suddenly, without precedent, Babbitt was not merely bored but
admitting that he was bored. It was ecstasy to escape from the table,
from the torture of a straight chair, and loll on the davenport in the
living-room.

The others, from their fitful unconvincing talk, their expressions of
being slowly and painfully smothered, seemed to be suffering from the
toil of social life and the horror of good food as much as himself. All
of them accepted with relief the suggestion of bridge.

Babbitt recovered from the feeling of being boiled. He won at bridge.
He was again able to endure Vergil Gunch's inexorable heartiness. But
he pictured loafing with Paul Riesling beside a lake in Maine. It was as
overpowering and imaginative as homesickness. He had never seen Maine,
yet he beheld the shrouded mountains, the tranquil lake of evening.
"That boy Paul's worth all these ballyhooing highbrows put together," he
muttered; and, "I'd like to get away from--everything."

Even Louetta Swanson did not rouse him.

Mrs. Swanson was pretty and pliant. Babbitt was not an analyst of women,
except as to their tastes in Furnished Houses to Rent. He divided them
into Real Ladies, Working Women, Old Cranks, and Fly Chickens. He mooned
over their charms but he was of opinion that all of them (save the women
of his own family) were "different" and "mysterious." Yet he had known
by instinct that Louetta Swanson could be approached. Her eyes and lips
were moist. Her face tapered from a broad forehead to a pointed chin,
her mouth was thin but strong and avid, and between her brows were two
outcurving and passionate wrinkles. She was thirty, perhaps, or younger.
Gossip had never touched her, but every man naturally and instantly rose
to flirtatiousness when he spoke to her, and every woman watched her
with stilled blankness.

Between games, sitting on the davenport, Babbitt spoke to her with the
requisite gallantry, that sonorous Floral Heights gallantry which is not
flirtation but a terrified flight from it: "You're looking like a new
soda-fountain to night, Louetta."

"Am I?"

"Ole Eddie kind of on the rampage."

"Yes. I get so sick of it."

"Well, when you get tired of hubby, you can run off with Uncle George."

"If I ran away--Oh, well--"

"Anybody ever tell you your hands are awful pretty?"

She looked down at them, she pulled the lace of her sleeves over
them, but otherwise she did not heed him. She was lost in unexpressed
imaginings.

Babbitt was too languid this evening to pursue his duty of being
a captivating (though strictly moral) male. He ambled back to the
bridge-tables. He was not much thrilled when Mrs. Frink, a small
twittering woman, proposed that they "try and do some spiritualism and
table-tipping--you know Chum can make the spirits come--honest, he just
scares me!"

The ladies of the party had not emerged all evening, but now, as the sex
given to things of the spirit while the men warred against base things
material, they took command and cried, "Oh, let's!" In the dimness
the men were rather solemn and foolish, but the goodwives quivered and
adored as they sat about the table. They laughed, "Now, you be good or
I'll tell!" when the men took their hands in the circle.