My best friend from high school is now a writer, famous enough to be the subject of a forthcoming study. What did you read, his biographer asks me, back then in the 50's, back there in the Bronx?
We read everything, but especially American fiction. Ours was probably the last high-school class taught to believe that there was an American literary tradition to inherit, a literal bloodline to join; the last class taught to believe in cultural continuity, to admire and respect literary elders. Ours was also probably the last class taught to believe that there was no higher calling than art: those of us not so blessed—and it was a matter of being blessed—as to be able to produce it, those of us who could not, alas, be novelists, could at least spend our lives teaching literature—preaching it, really. We could be critics, not in the sense of scourges or excoriators but in the sense of explicators, transmitters, celebrators, champions.
Some of our reading was work. Anything written before 1900 was, by definition, work. Anything written after 1900 by Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, or Theodore Dreiser was also work. Anything written in or about the 1930's—one could almost touch the heaviness, smell the grayness—was work: the depression was, after all, depressing, and we were fifteen. Fifteen, we loved the 20's. Possibly because ours too was a postwar decade with a Republican President, possibly because ours too was an affluent time, or possibly just because of all those wonderful novels, the 20's weren't work, but love.
But there was a problem for us in the Class of '55 at the Bronx High School of Science: we were Jewish. The problem was not that there were few Jewish novels from the 20's for us to read; that was no surprise. Better than anyone else could know, we, the first- and second-generation American born, knew that our parents and grandparents had been far too busy in the 20's moving from the Lower East Side to the Bronx and Brooklyn where we were born to have written novels. Besides, we would correct that imbalance, teach the novel or write our own, and nothing in our education, formal or informal, ever suggested to us that in wanting to concentrate on literature we were being presumptuous, that maybe English was a field into which we should fear—or, at least, hesitate—to tread. No one pointed out to us that even in the 50's at Columbia there was one Lionel Trilling and at Johns Hopkins one Earl Wasserman and at Cornell one M.H. Abrams and at Harvard one Harry Levin and that all the way out there in Montana—Montana!—there was one Leslie Fiedler. Nor was the problem that the American literature we loved was Judenrein. The problem was that it wasn't, that when Jews did appear in the novels of the 20's they were almost always, though in varying degrees, unpleasant.
For a Jewish reader a Jewish character, however minor, looms absurdly large; a casual anti-Semitic slur, however easy and reasonable to dismiss as a mere innocuous social reflex, reverberates for pages and pages. It may not be right or fair but it is unavoidable. Anyone who identifies himself as a member of a group that is or has been slighted knows that the wary and guarded eye notices the telltale word—“Jew,” “Negro,” whatever—half a page away and that a warning bell, persistent and insistent, immediately goes off. So we had a problem, we Jewish youngsters who so much loved the American writers of the 20's (we were also, incidentally, the last class taught that writers were to be loved, not just as artists but as people, that writers, because they did what they did, were a race apart, that good writers were good people and great writers were great people). The problem—their Jewish problem but our American problem—threatened to spoil everything.
Did F. Scott Fitzgerald, our darling, have to notice, as narrator of The Beautiful and Damned, “two young Jewish men talking in loud voices and craning their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances”? Did Anthony Patch in the same novel have to notice “a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores [and] in the door of each . . . a dark little man watching the passers with intent eyes—eyes gleaming with suspicion, with pride, with clarity, with cupidity, with comprehension. New York—[Anthony] could not dissociate it . . . from the slow, upward creep of this people—the little stores, growing, expanding, consolidating, moving, watched over with hawk's eyes and a bee's attention to detail—they slathered out on all sides”? Did Joseph Bloeckman, Anthony's rival in love, have to be a “stoutening, ruddy Jew” whose nostrils are “overwide” and who speaks “with a little too evident assurance”? Did he have to be “overdressed,” did he have to affect an “inappropriate facetiousness . . . in ties”? Did his hands have to advertise themselves with too many “heavy rings” and “the raw glow of a manicure”?
And then there was Meyer Wolfsheim in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, a character whom Edith Wharton absolutely adored as that “perfect Jew.” Perhaps Fitzgerald should not be blamed for Wharton's Jewish problem—see, for insance, her “pushy, little Jew” Rosedale in The House of Mirth—but what about the Jewish problem of his narrator, Nick Carraway? It is not enough for Nick to describe Wolfsheim as “a small, flat-nosed Jew [with] two fine growths of hair . . . luxuriat[ing] in either nostril”; he goes on to notice that Wolfsheim “covered Gatsby with his expressive nose,” “flashed” his nose “indignantly,” “turned his nostrils . . . to me in an interested way”; he has Wolfsheim's “tragic nose . . . trembling.”
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What happened to otherwise fine writers when they had to describe a Jewish face? What was Willa Cather thinking of when she came to portray Louis Marsellus in The Professor's House?
Louie's eyes were vividly blue, like hot sapphires, but the rest of his face had little color—he was a rather mackerel-tinted man. Only his eyes, and his quick, impetuous movements, gave out the zest for life with which he was always bubbling. There was nothing Semitic about his countenance except for his nose—that took the lead. It was not at all an unpleasing feature, but it grew out of his face with masterful strength, well-rooted, like a vigorous oak-tree growing out of a hillside.
And Willa Cather rather liked her Louie! At least she liked him more than does Professor St. Peter, to whom Louie's “zest for life” too often results in “heedless enthusiasm that made him often say untactful things” and a tendency to “pick up a dinner party and walk off with it.” Professor St. Peter, Cather writes, had “cultivated [Louie] as a stranger in town, because he was unusual and exotic, but without in the least wishing to adopt anyone so foreign into the family circle.” As the professor tells his wife, “One likes the florid style or one doesn't”—the Professor doesn't. When his daughter marries this Jew, the professor remarks how “both she and her mother had changed . . . and hardened [and] Louis . . . had done the damage.”
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John Dos Passos's Jews in Three Soldiers are even less attractive: Eisenstein, “a little man of thirty with an ash-colored face and a shiny Jewish nose” whose “sallow face” contracts into a “curious spasm” when he speaks in his “feeble, squeaky, . . . nasal voice”; Stern, who also has “a sallow face” and “curious lips for a Jew.”
In Manhattan Transfer the Jew most in evidence is the slimy and sinister Broadway producer Harry Goldweiser, a source of obvious physical discomfort to Dos Passos: “The curve of Harry Goldweiser's nose merges directly into the curve of his bald forehead, his big rump bulges over the edges of a triangular gilt stool.” He is even more repulsive to Ellen, who feels his “eyes measur[ing] her face like antennae,” who “feels his words press against her body, nudge in the hollows where her dress clings; she can hardly breathe for fear of listening to him. . . . She feels helpless, caught like a fly in his sticky trickling sentences. . . . His eyes are full of furtive spiderlike industry weaving a warm sweet choking net about her face and neck.” It is not surprising, therefore—painful, but not surprising—that when Ellen needs an abortion she visits—who else?—Dr. Abrams, “a short broad man with a face like a rat. . . . Short doll-hands the color of the flesh of a mushroom hang at his sides. He hunches his shoulders in a bow. . . . He heaves a hissing sigh and . . . looks in her eyes with black steel eyes like gimlets.”
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In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises the American newspaperman Jake Barnes is almost as obsessed with Robert Cohn's nose as Nick Carraway is with Meyer Wolfsheim's. The fact that Cohn had gotten “his nose permanently flattened” in a match at Princeton, Jake says, “gave him a certain satisfaction of some strange sort, and it certainly improved his nose. . . .” Unlike Fitzgerald's Wolfsheim, however, Cohn—never Robert, by the way, but always Cohn or Robert Cohn—is a major character. Hemingway never lets the reader forget that Cohn is a Jew, not an unattractive character who happens to be a Jew but a character who is unattractive because he is a Jew. Jake derides Cohn's “hard, Jewish, stubborn streak,” Cohn's way of gazing at the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley “as his compatriot must have looked when he saw the promised land, . . . that look of eager, deserving expectation,” Cohn's “air of superior knowledge” (so “superior and Jewish,” Jake's friend Bill Gorton adds). Mike Campbell, the main anti-Semite in the novel, speaks for them all when he berates Cohn: “Do you think you amount to something, Cohn? Go away. Go away, for God's sake. Take that sad Jewish face away.”
It is Cohn's “air of superior knowledge” that stimulates Bill's outrageous overreaction to Cohn's gaffe at a bullfight. It is bad enough that Cohn asks if one can bet on a bullfight—“You don't need any economic interest” is Jake's barely veiled rejoinder. But when Cohn says he is “afraid [he] may be bored,” Bill—decent, even-tempered Bill—positively explodes: “He's got this Jewish superiority so strong that he thinks the only emotion he'll get out of the fight will be being bored. . . . That kike!”
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Later, when we learned to read more carefully and to listen more critically, there were gradations to be perceived. Some of these writers' Jewish problems did not seem nearly so severe; Willa Cather's, at least in The Professor's House, or Fitzgerald's (Bloeckman in The Beautiful and Damned is much more appealing than the apparent hero Anthony Patch and then, of course, there's Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon) . But some were as severe as they first seemed (Dos Passos's), and some (Hemingway's) were even worse than our first reading suggested. That first time around, though, they all caused pain and made us wonder where we were in the American literary tradition.
But then there was also Sinclair Lewis, and not just minor Lewis but the Lewis of his three major novels—Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith.
When the word “Jew” leaped off the page in Main Street it did so for clear and unequivocal reasons. In that novel Jews are part of the wide, cosmopolitan world, the world that is not Gopher Prairie: Minneapolis, with its “liquor warehouses, Hebraic clothing shops, and lodging houses”; Chicago, where Carol Kennicott is exposed to “symphonies and violin recitals and chamber music, . . . theater and classical dancing, [and] a certified Studio Party, with beer, cigarettes, bobbed hair, and a Russian Jewess who sang the Internationale”; and New York, where Carol's sociology instructor “had lived among poets and socialists and Jews.”
As for Gopher Prairie's own attitudes toward Jews, they are symptomatic of the two small-town viruses—provincialism and prejudice. Gopher Prairie parties are provincial, Lewis shows us, because the entertainment consists of “stunts: one Jewish, one Irish, one juvenile.” Will Kennicott's aunt and uncle are ridiculous because they believe that “Jews are . . . always peddlers or pantsmakers,” and Percy Bresnahan is revealed as a bigot when he accuses Carol of “talking like a New York Jew” for expressing an interest in the Bolshevik revolution.
The world of Zenith in Babbitt is wider and larger than the world of Gopher Prairie in Main Street. Zenith has Jews as members of and actors in its social landscape. Of four union officials, “one resembled a testy and prosperous grocer, one a Yankee carpenter, one a soda-clerk, and one a Russian Jewish actor [who] quoted Kautsky, Gene Debs, and Abraham Lincoln.” One of the “boys” in Babbitt's lunch circle at the Zenith Athletic Club is Sidney Finkelstein, the ladies'-ready-to-wear buyer at the local department store, who is no better and no worse than Babbitt or any of his other bourgeois and materialistic friends, identical even in his prejudices, as his own thoughtless and innocuous anti-Semitism makes clear:
I always say—and believe me, I base it on a pretty fairly extensive mercantile experience—the best is the cheapest in the long run. Of course if a fellow wants to be a Jew about it, he can get cheap junk, but in the long run, the cheapest thing is the best you can get! Now you take here just the other day: I got a new top for my old boat and some upholstery, and I paid out a hundred and twenty-six fifty, and of course a lot of fellows would say that was too much—Lord, if the Old Folks—they live in one of these hick towns up-state and they simply can't get into the way a city fellow's mind works, and then, of course, they're Jews, and they'd lie right down and die if they knew Sid had anted up a hundred and twenty-six bones.
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But above all, in Arrowsmith, there is Max Gottlieb, who is if not the hero of the novel then certainly the novel's—and the hero's—conscience. No major American writer had given a Jew such a positive prominent place in a novel before, and no non-Jewish one has since, except for Fitzgerald in The Last Tycoon. The difference, however, is instructive: Monroe Stahr is Jewish only because Fitzgerald tells us he is—because Irving Thalberg, the real-life source he is modeled on, was—but Fitzgerald makes no real attempt to connect Stahr's greatness with his Jewishness. Lewis, by contrast, never lets us forget that Gottlieb is Jewish—it is his dominant and persistent identity. Moreover, Gottlieb is not a great man who happens to be a Jew; he is a great man because he is a Jew.
He is also a victim of anti-Semitism. “Max Gottlieb was a German Jew” is how Lewis introduces him to us. He left Germany because he was “often . . . infuriated by discrimination against Jews.” He comes to the United States because he believes that “America . . . could never become . . . anti-Semitic.” At his first post in America, however, “no one . . . regarded him as other than a cranky Jew.” At the University of Winnemac, where Martin Arrowsmith becomes his student and disciple, he is “hated by his colleagues, who were respectful to his face, uncomfortable in feeling his ironic power, but privily joyous to call him Mephisto, Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic, Scientific Bounder Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, Intellectual Snob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew.” At Hunzicker's Pharmaceutical Company “the young technical experts resented his jolly thrusts at their commercialism, his mathematical enthusiasms, . . . viewed him as an old bore, muttered of him as a Jew.” At the McGurk Institute he is regarded, once war breaks out, “not as the great and impersonal immunologist but as a suspect German Jew.”
Lewis's understanding of the major impulse behind anti-Semitism and how it expresses itself is, I think, remarkable. He recognizes that anti-Semites think and use the word “Jew” not just as the last item in a list of epithets, or as one epithet out of many, but as a comprehensive category which includes and subsumes everything else of which someone is considered “guilty,” that to call someone a “Jew” in that particular tone of voice is to draw up, in just three letters, a whole bill of particulars, an arraignment.
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But if Gottlieb makes people uncomfortable because of his questioning, his independence, his intellectuality, and his skepticism, these are precisely the strengths for which Martin Arrowsmith so passionately loves him. They constitute “Max Gottlieb's truth.” Martin “preaches to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him, the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel of not believing gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable ignorance of one's self and of everybody else.” These comprise the famous “prayer of the scientist” which Martin utters so devoutly:
God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished. God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error. God give me strength not to trust to God!
Max Gottlieb is not just the flip side of the Robert Cohn coin, a Jew who really is superior and who uses his superiority benignly. Lewis makes him poignantly, even pathetically, human, and nowhere more so than in his longing for mundane companionship and ordinary love. As a Jew among suspicious or jealous Gentiles he has never had a colleague “to whom he could talk without suspicion or caution.” He finds no solace in his Gentile wife, “thick and slow-moving and mute—at sixty she had not learned to speak easy English and her German was of the small-town bourgeois who pay their debts and overeat and grow red.” His son “is a wild thing and a distress,” who lets his Gentile classmates believe “that he was from pure and probably noble German stock” and not of the “Jewish blood” about which Gottlieb is “alternately proud and amiably sardonic.” Martin Arrowsmith learns too late how profoundly Max Gottlieb longs for him, how deeply he yearns for Martin to be colleague, companion, son. In short, Max Gottlieb is a rounded and fully imagined human being.
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When Mark Schorer's biography of Lewis came out several years later, we discovered that the positive feelings toward Jews and the detestation of anti-Semitism which we had detected in Main Street and Babbitt and Arrowsmith were not just literary devices or methods of characterization but were intrinsic to Lewis. Can one imagine Dos Passos addressing, as Lewis did, the Sunday Afternoon Club of the First Presbyterian Church of Evanston, Illinois and using the occasion to attack the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford? Can one imagine Hemingway refusing—as Lewis did—to stay at the best hotel in Bermuda because it was known to discriminate against Jews? Can one imagine Fitzgerald replying to a letter from the German producer who held the European rights to his work as Lewis did? Told that he would have to provide evidence of Aryan descent if the Reich Chamber theater was to allow a production of Dods-worth, Lewis answered, “Who knows what ancestors [I] may have had in the last few hundred years? [I] really [am] as ignorant of them as even Hitler of his. In answering please use [my] proper legal name,” and he signed the letter, “Yours Sincerely, Sinclair Levy.”
But we didn't know about that in high school. All we knew was what we read in Main Street and Babbitt and Arrowsmith: not a single indignant, trembling, tragic, hairy-nostriled, tree-trunk of a nose; no loud or boasting, florid or affected, squeaky or nasal voices; no mackerel-tinted, mushroom-colored, sallow skin; no suspicious hawk's eyes; no hissing or slathering or trickling or choking; no producers or parvenus; no gangsters; no abortionists; no kikes. Just Jews, and not all of them wonderful—after all, how many Max Gottliebs can any group produce? “Normal” Jews, even mediocre and compromised Jews—Sidney Finkelstein in Babbitt, the “polite” and “industrious” Dr. Aaron Shultheis in Arrowsmith “who had been born to a synagogue in Russia but who was now the most zealous high-church Episcopalian in Yonkers.”
Not to have been included at all in Sinclair Lewis's America would have been for us disastrous, for he was the most inclusive, the most comprehensive, and, despite his renown as a satirist, the most generous of American novelists. But to see ourselves included in such multiple and various ways, when everywhere else we looked in the novels of the 20's we saw Jews who were aberrations of one sort or another; to find Jewish marginality treated as a source of ethical and intellectual strength, when everywhere else we looked in the novels of the 20's it was treated as a source of gaucherie and social-climbing; to come across portrayals of anti-Semitism aimed at ridiculing the anti-Semite, when everywhere else we looked in the novels of the 20's the object of anti-Semitism was to ridicule the Jew—beholding all this, we felt that Lewis legitimized us, naturalized us, conferred upon us (to borrow an evocative, phrase of Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway) the freedom of the neighborhood.
