Review: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

A couple reviews up at USF of various and sundry audio productions: David Warner stars in King Lear, and Peter Davison stars as King of the Time Lords.

Mass market paperback, 456 pages
Published 2008 (originally 1924)

Previously read January 2013
Acquired June 2014
Reread September 2014

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

When I was assigned to teach the Modern Novel, I almost instantly knew that not only did I want to teach Arrowsmith, but that I wanted to teach it first, even if some of the other novels I was teaching preceded it in publication. I'll explain why, but perhaps the long way round. (Arrowsmith does everything the long way round.)

It's often helpful when reading works of fiction to find those metafictional moments where they talk about other works of fiction, because what the fiction says about other fictions should tell you something about what it thinks fiction should be doing, and thus what itself is doing. If a character in a sci-fi story says all those sci-fi stories you've read are unrealistic in that they depict ventilation ducts people can crawl through, you'll know this sci-fi story is depicting itself as more realistic. Arrowsmith does this with a comment about novels about truth-seekers:

[M]ost people who call themselves “truth-seekers” […] did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the “secret of life” in laboratories which did not seem to be provided with Bunsen burners or reagents; or they went, at great expense and with much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one’s navel. (271)

So from this I think we can see that Arrowsmith is a novel about people questing after truth, but one that positions itself as taking place in the "real world," not some abstruse fantasy. Martin Arrowsmith is a man seeking truth, but he does so in a world that is provided with Bunsen burners and reagents. I don't know enough about science to know if Lewis actually gets the practicalities right, but it definitely comes across as realistic-- or, perhaps, realist.

George Levine's monograph Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England has been a strong influence on how I understand the realist novel; he examines a range of novels, biographies, and memoirs about how people interact with the world scientifically, but in the middle of it all, he has this great statement about realism:

[T]he practice of realism itself, and critical demands for truthfulness, suggest how central to the Victorian novel was the enterprise of knowledge seeking and truth telling, how often plots turn on the power of protagonists to develop the proper temper and state of mind to allow realistic confrontation with the “object”—what one might see as acquisition the proper “method.” One can only achieve truth through objectivity; one can only be objective by virtue of the moral strength of self-restraint. (149)

This rings true for me-- so many Elizabeth Gaskell novels, for example, are about their protagonists learning to see or communicate what actually happened; this could describe Mary Barton, North and South, and Wives and Daughters. You could argue similar things about George Eliot, I expect. But Levine's idea doesn't only fit the Victorian realist novel; even if modernism was taking off in 1924 (A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man was eight years old; Mrs. Dalloway was one year away), over in America, Sinclair Lewis was still practicing realism.

Arrowsmith really resonates with Levine's statement above. It is a novel about a man trying to find the proper "method": does he have a good way of seeking knowledge and telling truth? The novel might contain a number of experiments, but the novel itself is an experiment in seeing if a particular method works, or if it fails, or what alternatives might exists, or what modifications might need to be made.

This really comes through in one of Martin's conversations with his mentor, Gottlieb. In class, I made my students work through a whole long speech of Gottlieb's where he lays out not just what a scientist should do, but how they should be. I'll be kinder to you lot and just give you a single excerpt:

He [the scientist] must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yes dis is a funny t’ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless—so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by the eloquent statesmen and soft-hearted authors—and see once what a fine mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling how he loves everybody! (279)

As you can see, Gottlieb's conception of science extends beyond the laboratory. If science is a way of thinking and being in the world, you can't just turn it off. Your heartlessness will extend into society itself. Gottlieb sees this as a positive-- the scientist will do a better job than all the other people who claim authority over society.

Earlier, I said the novel itself was an experiment, and this accords with something Levine says about the texts he's working with, where the "method" being tested is the scientific, objective one (much like in Arrowsmith):

All these novels implicitly question, more or less critically, the ideal of self-denial in pursuit of objectivity, as that ideal impinges on the lives of real people living in the material world.
     Each of them is sensitive to the difficulties of truth—its disguises and elusiveness and dangers. […] The novels frequently build their plots around the problems caused by the body and the passions in gaining access to the truth, except that, as novels, they can never dismiss the body as trivial or irrelevant. (150-51)

 Arrowsmith is very much a novel about "real people living in the material world" (that it is too material a world is clearly Lewis's concern) and the body is not trivial or irrelevant-- the body is actually at the heart of what is my favorite part of Arrowsmith, Martin's in-the-field testing of both science and his scientific ideals. Gottlieb says the scientist must be heartless to guide society, and Martin tries to put that heartlessness into action when he goes to St. Hubert to try to rid it of the plague with his new medical discovery.

This novel is always good, but this is the part where I think it gets really good. As Martin tries to stick to his ideals in the face of the realities of the world, the book gets genuinely moving and tragic. Gottlieb might want Martin to dismiss the body as trivial or irrelevant, might want him to be heartless and so do more for society than all those with "heart," but in the end Martin's ideals collapse and he has to come to grips with the awful tragedy of how the world works.

It's a great example of the realist novel at its best, and that made it a great book to lead my class off with. The whole twentieth-century trajectory of the novel is arguably about rebelling against the kinds of things Arrowsmith does here, but I love it anyway.