10: Main Street

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

There’s a funny kind of story about Main Street; it was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer prize only to be rejected by the Board of Trustees with the prize going eventually to Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. It’s funny because the two works have a great deal in common and this little Wikipedia fact gives me a perfect opportunity to talk about both books. Sinclair Lewis is the 1930 Nobel Laureate of Literature.

Meet Carol Kennicott, the main character of Main Street. Carol Kennicott is a woman of intelligence, education and good understanding, who feels oppressed by the pettiness, the hypocrisy and the wilful ignorance of her small world, the town of Gopher Prairie, in which she lives with her husband. She loves music, art and books and is unhappy in a town that has no true appreciation of those things, which other residents, including her husband, consider to belong to a different world than their own. Main dinner conversations are invariably about town gossip and the doings of various persons – not a word about liberal ideas or interesting books. All is dull and meaningless and Carol longs for something more.

Meet Newland Archer, the main character of The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer is a man of intelligence, education and good understanding, who feels oppressed by the pettiness, the hypocrisy and the wilful ignorance of his small world, the select society of upper-class New York, in which he lives with his wife. He loves music, art and books and is unhappy in a society that has no true appreciation of those things, which the other residents, including his husband, consider to belong to a different world than their own. Main dinner conversation are invariably about town gossip and the doings of various persons – not a word about liberal ideas or interesting books. All is dull and meaningless and Newland longs for something more.

They have further things in common. Carol tries to press on reforms in the village; a new Georgian town hall, for example. Her reforms are rejected and ridiculed by everyone and Carol is oblivious to everyone’s true opinion of her. Newland Archer pursues Ellen Olenska and is oblivious, until the end, that everyone has been aware of his secret flirtation.

The similarities end eventually; The Age of Innocence is a smoothly written story of the Golden Age of upper-class New York and Main Street is a viciously realistic satire of small town life. Not much happens in Main Street – well, that’s just not true ... satire happens in Main Street. All of the small town personae are archetypes that have been brought to a horribly overbearing life by realistic details and dialogue. The endless description aptly gives the idea of Carol’s oppression in such a society, fully of petty little back-stabbings, vicious gossip, and the pettiness of Main Street, with its generic name and rundown shops, which eventually dominate Carol’s life. It is a depressing and realistic atmosphere and one might sympathize with Carol. If only she were likeable.

The truth is that Carol is not likeable. She is wrong and ignorant about many things – not about history or literature, of course, as she is very well-read and smart, but about the people around her. She assumes that because the villagers have no very sophisticated ideas, that they have no ideas at all. She assumes that because they are placid and dull at dinner parties that they really are placid and dull. She doesn’t see that the town gossip is their outlet of intellectual activity and the activity therein is substantial because the power of gossip to ruin a person or drive them out of town is very real and substantial. Carol sees the power of gossip with her own eyes, as she watches two of her friends succumb to its effects, and yet she does not understand that these events were caused by the thoughts and ideas of the townspeople, an entity that she never gave much thought to.

Further, Carol finds the same dissatisfaction in life in Gopher Prairie that Newland Archer finds in New York. The foibles of people of Gopher Prairie are human foibles and not particular to small towns. And yet Carol never considers that this might be the case and yearns to be in a big city. Indeed, when she finally gets away to Washington, she finds that office gossip is just as bad a village gossip.

This book said everything about small town life that I too detest, with eloquence, realism and savage satire. I think it’s the savage satire that I don’t like. It was so bleak – the long description which were describing Carol’s conversion into a typical small-town woman in a large city when she visits Minneapolis (she has all the experiences and thoughts of a villager in a strange city, thinking of what her small-town friends would think if they saw her doing this and that) are so very austere and the reader sees that Carol’s case is hopeless – that she would be absorbed into the village, lose her love of knowledge, become as dull as the next woman, and if a new Carol Kennicott should come along, she would ridicule her and patronise her with the rest of the villagers.

Newland Archer found his “something more to life” in the form of Countess Ellen Olenska, whom he was forced to let go of in a whirl of dramatic sacrifice and tragic loss. Carol Kennicott never does find any embodiment of her “something more to life” and her idea, as suggested by the last chapter, would ebb away slowly and prosaically, in her nursery and her kitchen, without the blaze and glory of tragedy.

(500) Days of Summer -- a digression

L.A. as filtered by love in '(500) Days of Summer' -- latimes.com

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I spontaneously saw "(500) Days of Summer" this past Sunday and subsequently found this article in the LA Times. It is a view of the movie from an architectural point of view. Tom is a budding architect and loves the architecture of Los Angeles. But the city in this movie, as the article points out, is free of contemporary buildings, like the Walt Disney Concert Hall, dwelling instead on an architectural style - of Corinthian columns and stucco decorations - more easily identified with Paris than LA and with the last century than this one.

But it's not just the architecture - everything seems to be "dated". Until the scene of Tom playing Wii with his sister, I wasn't quite sure that the film was set in present day. Summer's dresses in the flashback scenes are all so very vintage-looking. The Smiths, the band which Summer commented on the first time she talked to Tom, was formed in 1982. The books that they speak of, apart from Architecture of Happiness, are all classics: Tom enthused that they had a great conversation about "bananafish", which I take to mean "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J. D. Salinger, and Summer reads The Picture of Dorian Gray when she meets her future husband. Neither Tom or Summer seem to have any interest in contemporary fashions, they are bored by the exhibit of contemporary art that they go to - in fact, they are both set in their decidedly dated tastes.

In the movie, this out-of-dated-ness gives a loveliness to the movie, but is it really ideal to live in an idea world so far from the present world?

I just recently finished reading Main Street by Sinclair Lewis and, even though I didn't enjoy reading it, I found it very thought-provoking. In Main Street, a woman of good education and intellect, who loves to read, is thrust into a little village and finds herself suffocated by a place where most of conversation to be had is about village gossip (and not usually the juicy kind, but about how much money so-and-so spent on their curtains and so-and-so's income), the doctors have a petty rivalry that extends to their wives, people spy on passerbys from their windows, and no progress is ever to be had. The people who do read only read classics - books written by people long dead. They know nothing of their contemporaries, like Shaw or Romain Rolland. One of the more literary villagers tried reading Balzac and, shocked by the blatant display of adultery, had the book removed from the library shelves.

The main adjective to describe this village is "backwards". They have no interest in new things; they want their houses to look the exact same as the existing houses, they have no interest in new ideas (dangerous things, those), and they are so conservative that the sheriff led a (surely illegal) beating and driving out of a suspected socialist sympathetic to farmer's unions. The readers - people of education who read books in this sleepy village - read old books; their minds are trapped in yesteryear. They read books which bring to them worlds just as sleepy as their village - books which brought novel ideas at the time in which they were written, but which had become quite stale and old by that time. And this is the only influx of new ideas into people's minds.

I admit, I also have had little interest in reading new books. For one thing, they're hard to get hold of; the libraries are slow in acquiring them if they're not by a well-known author and the waiting lines are long if they are. I am like Tom and Summer, only my tastes are not so firmly set and defended. I like Tolstoy, Flaubert and Hugo and would be perfectly content if my reading list comprised solely of the entire work of Thomas Hardy and Zola's 20-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle. I love Nemirovsky's books because they are good books but also because they are written in a style that I love - and which I am very familiar with. Is this something of a fault? It seems a bit narrow-minded if the only books I can accept are the ones that I'm already familiar with from my previous days of reading. Isn't that is definition of backward, this acceptance only of familiar concepts?

I decided that it is rather something not to be in touch with the current world. It's no wonder that Tom crosses out so many potential jobs on his blackboard when his own taste in architecture is so antiquated. I think there needs to be a balance, temperance in the enclosure of oneself in a past world. Armed with this idea, today, I'm adding Doris Lessing to my reading list and I bought my first New Yorker.