Review: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Hardcover, 428 pages
Published 1953 (originally 1924)

Acquired and read January 2013

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

A friend told me that, based on my interests in science and scientists in literature, I had to read this book for my Ph.D. exams. Now, a 1925 American novel was more than a little bit outside my scope of British literature of the nineteenth century, but no one on my committee objected, and I put it on the list. (She also told me it takes place in a fictionalized version of my home city, Cincinnati, but Lewis's fictional state of Winnemac is partially carved out of northwest Ohio, which makes Toledo seem more likely.)

Well, I will tell you that I am glad I did, because the things that interest me about science and literature are all over Arrowsmith, with the added wrinkle of the differences wrought by the increased professionalization of science that happened between the 1890s and the 1920s. Martin Arrowsmith is torn between pure scientific aspiration and the commercial and financial necessities of everyday life in early twentieth century America. Martin sees being in the laboratory of his mentor Gottlieb as a form of prayer (27); Gottlieb is said to obey "mysterious and unreasoning compulsions of his science" (123); Gottlieb says that a scientific calling is "a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry" (266); and Martin has the "one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unself-dramatizing curiosity" (279). But these scientific values come into conflict with those of his peers, his superiors, his employers, his wife, basically everybody. I actually found Martin's continuing attempts to integrate his personal values with society's values quite moving by the end of the novel, because it's a struggle we all go through in our own way.

His problem is not that he wants one thing and society wants another, but that actually he wants two contradictory things. At one point Martin is on track for an incredible discovery, and he dreams of the personal benefit this will bring him:

He had visions of his name in journals and textbooks; of scientific meetings cheering him. He had been an unknown among the experts of the Institute, and now he pitied all of them. But when he was back at his bench the grandiose aspirations faded and he was the sniffing, snuffling beagle, the impersonal worker. Before him, supreme joy of the investigator, new mountain-passes of work opened, and in him was new power. (299)

Right in that short passage, you see him go from material aspirations to scientific ones. He wants the material benefits of successful inquiry, but he also just want to do the work, to feel like he's accessing prayer or something mystical like his mentor Gottlieb. The two desires are linked, of course, but not the same, and do not always align, and that is the tragedy of Martin Arrowsmith. I myself am not a scientist, of course, but the professionalization of curiosity may yet be my tragedy, and the tragedy of all of us.