1926 - Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Introduction

Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith is not exactly the 1926 Pulitzer Prize winner. Sinclair was expected to win in 1921, but instead the award went to Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. His novel Babbitt was also recommended for the prize in 1923, but this time lost to Willa Cather for One of Ours. When his novel Arrowsmith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, he made history by being the first and only author to refuse it.

In a letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee, he wrote:

I wish to acknowledge your choice of my novel Arrowsmith for the Pulitzer Prize. That prize I must refuse, and my refusal would be meaningless unless I explained the reasons.

All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards; they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for Novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.

Those terms are that the prize shall be given "for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood." This phrase, if it means anything whatsoever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.

His speech made me consider quitting this blog altogether. I will continue, however, for two reasons that I do not believe contradict his strong and agreeable statement. One is for the reasons stated in my opening post (as a guide of discovering more authors, learn about American past, etc.), and the other is that I would need some form of readership to achieve an alien reward, and there is no risk of that.

I imagine the phrase “the highest standard of American manners and manhood” could be easily misrepresented during wartime. It would take much effort to apply this criteria to poorly written propaganda, and perhaps this is what Lewis feared.

Lewis did accept a Nobel Prize in 1930. His reasons were that the Nobel Prize was based on a career effort, not for a single novel. He strongly disapproved of the Pulitzer Prize’s marketing and repackaging of novels, based on the prize.

His refusal of the Pulitzer Prize gave the novel even more publicity. The book will also always be associated with the 1926 Pulitzer Prize. Not being an official winner certainly did not stop me from reading it and writing my lengthiest essay yet.

Plot Summary

Nearly his entire adult life, Martin Arrowsmith struggled to find an outlet for his curious and focused mind. The plot explores his various positions in medicine, one job at a time, in an almost allegorical format.

As a boy, Martin was as an assistant to an old country doctor. The doctor recommended that the poor, but bookish, Martin attend medical school, in order to substantially extend his knowledge and income.

While attending medical school Martin was surprised to find so many versions of knowledge. Every student and teacher professed contrasting ideas and varied approaches to medicine. The myriad idealisms left the eager-to-follow Martin without a clear direction.

He joined a fraternity where he met several characters with their vocational paths already determined. Angus Duer smartly and coldly pursued medicine, delighting teachers, but he lacked compassion. Irvine Waters preached the gospel of profit, and Reverend Ira Hinkley preached the Gospel itself. The only roommate Martin could tolerate was Cliff Clawson, whose rough humor and unpredictability gave Martin relief amongst his strict peers and studies.

His professors were no less diverse. Whoever the latest teacher was, Martin would set himself up in an imagined apprenticeship, following their philosophies and imagining himself in their specific professions. Luckily for Martin, his focused mind gave him success in these ventures. However, the only teacher to make a striking and lasting impression was a German professor named Max Gottlieb.

Gottlieb was perceived as a strange old man around campus. He was short with everyone he came across and mysteriously rode around campus on a bicycle, as if haunting it. He left his small on-campus house only when teaching his class, although he did not seem to take any pleasure in this either. He was secretly mocked amongst his fellow teachers and his students. They mocked his martyr attitude and his devotion to a supposedly pure science. However, he was widely respected globally for his thorough and detailed work in biochemistry.

Gottlieb greeted his students on the first day with a very demanding work ethic:

Gentlemen, the most important part of living is not the living but the pondering upon it. And the most important part of the experimentation is not doing the experiment but making notes, ve-ry accurate quantitative notes – in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel they can keep notes in their heads. I have often observed with pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees their results and science is not encumbered with them.

Martin clung to Gottlieb’s ideal, always desiring to achieve his level of consuming dedication and focused perspective. Every career path Martin chose was tested against Gottlieb’s teaching. These intense principles lead to most of his life’s frustration. Most of the doctors Martin met seemed to care about everything except science.

Martin’s struggle against shoddy science was not the only source of frustration in his life. His socioeconomic class also determined his happiness throughout life. Martin did not grow up in wealth. In the high paying world of doctors, Martin found himself perpetually out of place.

The comfort he felt in the laboratory did not extend elsewhere. His first visit to high society, at a symphony, left him strongly uneasy.

Martin found himself in a confusion of little chairs and vas gilded arches, of polite but disapproving ladies with programs in their laps, unromantic musicians making unpleasant noises below, and, at last, incomprehensible beauty, which made for him pictures of hills and deep forests, then suddenly became achingly long-winded. He exulted, “I’m going to have ‘em all – the fame of Max Gottlieb – I mean his ability – and the lovely music and lovely women – Golly! I’m going to do big things. And see the world… Will this piece never quit?”

It was not the price of an activity that troubled him, but the wastefulness and hidden intentions. Martin trusted Gottlieb’s vision of science because it was a skill working towards perfection. The money earned or status obtained was of no consequence, and, in fact, would only serve as a distraction. His childhood poverty only magnified these ideals.

While working a summer job installing electrical poles, he has an epiphany concerning this skilled poverty.

He was atop a pole and suddenly, for no clear cause, his eyes opened and he saw; as though he had just awakened he saw that the prairie was vast, that the sun was kindly on rough pasture and ripening wheat, on the old horses, the easy, broad-beamed, friendly horses, and on his red-faced jocose companions; he saw that the meadow larks were jubilant, and blackbirds shining by little pools, and with the living sun all life was living. Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses were tight tradesmen. What of it? “I’m here!” he gloated.

The wire-gang we as healthy and as simple as the west wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled electrical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were scientists. They laughed easily and were content to be themselves, and with them Martin was content to forget how noble he was. He had for them an affection such as he had for no one at the University save Max Gottlieb.

Martin briefly dated (and became affianced to) a young society woman named Madeline. Her initial interest quickly turned into desire for correction. He was frustrated, but he did not allow himself to treat her similarly condescending. Nor did he leave her. The relationship was set for a stalemate.

While running a medical errand to a nearby hospital, Martin had an argument with an insultingly informal nurse named Leora. Martin returned later to finalize and more articulately express his anger, but she quickly and disarmingly apologized. Through several more meetings, they found in each other a true soul mate. If Cliff Clawson served as a reminder of his lower-class history, then Leora provided him with a firm and growing foundation of an anti-pretentiousness.

Finding himself engaged to two women, he tells them both over lunch and finds himself with only Leora, who was dedicated as ever.

Martin spends the majority of adult life trying one career path after another. A common thread was his desire to be in a laboratory and dissatisfaction with fast and loose science.

The first job he found himself in was as a country doctor in Leora’s hometown. It was a promising location, since the local doctors were distant and there was little competition. However, the small town’s politics and fear of outsiders made it easy for the town to turn quickly against him. When Martin found the source of a typhoid outbreak to a poor, but beloved, old woman, the town turned on him. Once the typhoid subsided, the town allowed themselves a faint praise. This praise soon dissipated once they grew tired of his over-educated discourse, drinking, gambling, and his distracted manner. The town gossiped mercilessly and eventually Martin fled town to become an assistant to the director of health of a distant city.

The city’s director of health, named Pickerbaugh, spun a constant sermon, organizing and exciting the town against the latest disease. The terrible habits of spitting and drinking were demonized. After souls were saved during a church service, lives were saved with lectures by Pickerbaugh or Martin. Martin still preferred the slow and patient study of a laboratory and often clashed with the quick and shallow campaigns of Pickerbaugh. Their approaches to science also led to some personal conflicts between Martin and the propagandist Pickerbaugh.

He had the personal touchiness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct.

When Pickerbaugh left for an almost inevitable Senate position, Martin was left in charge. Once again, Martin was at odds with an entire population. Martin expanded the free clinics and quickly lost the already mild support of politically powerful doctors. While Martin excelled in medicine, he did not achieve much in the way of rallying the townspeople or avoiding offense. One set of lost relations led to many, and eventually to all. The mayor reacted by continually lowering his pay until the amount became unsustainable. Martin and Leora once again felt forced to leave and fled to work for Angus Duer.

Martin did not spend long at Duer’s practice. The fellow doctors, as well as the building itself, were as cold as Duer had always been. During his stay, Martin was able to spend some time in a laboratory. He wrote a brief paper on streptolysin for a scientific journal and achieved some notoriety. He was contacted by Gottlieb who was working at a laboratory in New York City. Martin used Gottlieb’s reference and was offered a job at the laboratory, which Martin quickly took.

The laboratory in New York was funded by a very wealthy family, and employed many great scientists. There was initially little pressure upon the scientists, and both Gottlieb and Martin found a bit of a home there. Martin’s pay was increased enough that Leora and he could enjoy some comfort and explore the city itself.

Martin felt slightly idle at the job, however, until the bacteria in a flask mysteriously disintegrated.

Now in Martin Arrowsmith there was no decorative heroisms, no genius for amours, no exotic wit, no edifying borne misfortunes. He presented neither picturesque elegance nor a moral message. He was full of hasty faults and of perverse honesty; a young man often unkindly, often impolite. But he had one gift: curiosity whereby he saw nothing as ordinary. Had he been an acceptable hero, like Major Rippleton Holabird, he would have chucked the contents of the flask into the sink, avowed with pretty modesty. But Martin, being Martin, walked prosaically up and down his laboratory, snarling. “Now there was some cause for that, and I’m going to find out what it was.

Martin worked sleeplessly in determining the reason. He suspected he had stumbled on a virus which had infected the bacteria. He was meticulous at eliminating all the possible external causes, to see if the implications were true. He dared not tell Gottlieb of his discovery until it was a fact. When all other possibilities were discounted, Martin named the effect "X-principle" and presented his results to Gottlieb. Gottlieb was impressed with his work, but made sure to tell Martin to keep his discovery quiet. However, the long hours and ever declining physical appearance of Martin alerted his bosses to his experiments.

He was unable to lie and they insisted on immediate publication of his discovery. He had not yet finished his experiments defining the X-principle, but they offered him a high position and a doubling of salary.

While struggling in preparing his paper, a scientist abroad had made a similar discovery and posted a very well written and detailed paper about it. The scientist called the bacteria-attacking virus bacteriophage (phage). The position and increased salary were lost. However, the pressure and stress of success were also eliminated.

Martin’s boss suggested that Martin continue to test the phage against various bacteria, in order to find a practical purpose. A large scale test soon presented itself when a small island called St. Hubert was affected by the plague. Martin was to go and do an experiment: to test half the population with the phage, and the other half without. The difficulty would lie in watching people die, but still refusing treatment. Leora insisted on accompanying him, although everyone urged otherwise.

Martin found great opposition on the island as well. The town’s leaders could not understand why the entire town could not be given the untested miracle cure. When those leaders died from the plague, there was not as much trouble. Martin conducted his test in a church which had served as a hospital. He had a laboratory where he created the phage, and also measured its affects on flasks containing the plague.

While away at the church, Leora grew impatient and wandered around his laboratory. She found one of Martin’s half-smoked cigarettes on the floor and smoked the rest, as a small reminder of her husband. She was unaware that an assistant had earlier spilled a flask of the plague on it.

When Martin returned she was already dead.

He was devastated and his experiment lapsed. A fellow doctor took over the church testing, but he meanwhile administered free phage for anyone on the island that came. Martin had met a young woman of wealth on the island, but avoided her after Leora’s tragic death.

His mourning turned into practical work, and he finished what he could of his experiment. The phage seemed to work on the plague. His bosses at the laboratory insisted he eliminate the doubt from his final report. When he returned to the US, he was given a hero’s welcome for curing the plague.

Perhaps seeking companionship, Martin married the young wealthy woman he met on the island. She was tolerant to his rough-necked ways, but slowly he found himself adapting to the luxury.

After an accidental meeting with his old friend Cliff Clawson, he had realized how far he had come from his roots, and how idle he had been about his passions.

Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car, the cunningly hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smothering poison. He wanted to be out besides the unseen chauffer-His Own Sort! – facing the winter.

Martin left, although did not divorce, his rich wife. He joined a fellow chemist in a woodsy cabin, where they sold serums for money, and were able to work in the laboratory in the manner they wanted. In the end, Martin had still not discovered the complete nature of the phage, but he could finally live the ascetic chemist life and hone his skill as a scientist.

The sureness to which Max Gottlieb seems to have been born came to Martin slowly, after many stumblings, but it came. He desired a perfection of technique in the quest for absolute and provable fact; he desired as greatly as any Pater to “burn with a hard gem-like flame,” and he desired not to have ease and repute in the market-place, but rather to keep free of those follies, lest they confuse him and make him soft.

Notable Characters

Martin’s first wife Leora was perfect for him. She kept him grounded when he became arrogant and noble, she joyfully moved from town to town with him, and she was able to see past his rough exterior to love and respect him. Through Leora, Martin was able to find a place in his obsessive heart for love. Their personalities and ideas were perfectly compatible.

The difference between Martin’s relations to Madeline and to Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a serene comradeship. From their first evening, Leora and he depended on each other’s loyalty and liking, and certain things in his existence were settled forever.

Leora was from a poor background, similar to Martin's. She was refreshingly direct and unafraid when she spoke of important matters. She understood, much more than he, the importance of a secure foundation in life. Whenever his instinctive distaste of wealth waned, she would draw him back.

It’s fierce, being married. I did expect I’d have to follow you out on the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a Pillar of the Community. Well, I’m too lazy to look up a new husband. Only I warn you: when you become the Sunday School superintendant, you needn’t expect me to play organ and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy’s not learning his Golden Text.

Leora was as comforting as she was confrontational. She understood how Martin needed to be treated in any circumstance. She was able to determine whether he needed nudging forward or was bounding forward himself. If it was the latter, she adopted an accommodating role.

Till Martin graduated they kept that room, their home, ever dearer. No one was so domestic as these birds of passage. At least two evenings a week Martin dashed in from Mohalis and studied there. She had a genius for keeping out of his way, for not demanding to be noticed, so that, while he plunged into his books as he never had done in Cliff’s rustling, grunting, expectorating company, he had ever the warm, half-conscious feeling of her presense. Sometimes, at midnight, just as he began to realize that he was hungry, he would find that a plate of sandwiches had by silent magic appeared at his elbow. He was none the less affectionate because he did not comment. She made him secure. She shut out the world that had pounded at him.

Leora was always a relief for Martin. She quickly accepted the importance of Martin’s work. She even assisted him in the laboratory several times.

This was later contrasted with the difficult apprehension of his later wife, when discussing joining his friend Terry in the laboratory cabin.

“Now, by God, let me tell you-“

“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a ‘by God’ in every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific vocabulary?”

“Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I’m thinking of joining Terry.”

“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear a flannel shirt and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by taking in washing-“

"It’d probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No! I beg your pardon. That was an obvious answer. But- I imagine it’s just that argument that’s kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly call it, and those of us that are pioneers- Oh, this debate could go on forever! We could prove that I’m a hero or a fool or a deserter or anything you like, but the fact is I’ve suddenly seen I must go! I want my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it. You’ve been generous with me. I’m grateful. But you’ve never been mine. Good-by!"

Leora’s death was one of several in the novel, but was certainly the most tragic. It is rare to find someone who will ground you when your idea of yourself gets too lofty and who will encourage you when you feel depleted.

Even the success of eliminating the plague was not enough to comfort him when she died.

What would be the worth of having all the world if he could not show it to her, if she was not there –

Favorite Passages

When Martin first joins the laboratory in New York, Gottlieb lectures him on the importance of his work:

To be a scientist – it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victims all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious – he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to the libarals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and the historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!

He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists – like those psycho-analysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.

He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet 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 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 not it is time for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around howling how he loves everybody!

But once again always remember that not all men who work at science are scientists. So few! The rest –secretaries, press-agents, camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t’ink you have a liddle of it born in you. If you haf, there is only one t’ing – no, there is two t’ings you must do: work twice as hard as you can, and keep people from using you. I will try to protect you from Success. It is all I can do. So…I should wish, Martin, that you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!

The pure science I kept mentioning above is finally fully explained to the reader and to Martin. Gottlieb’s speech instills a sense of honor and duty. Martin had always been unfulfilled in the diluted science at his jobs. Perhaps he never had a full sense of why. Martin’s career takes a positive turn after hearing this speech. He is finally given a mission statement and a clear philosophy to follow. Martin would no longer suffer lazy science.

When tired of the shortcuts and greed of the half-science Martin was forced to work with, he prayed “the prayer of the scientist.”

God give me with unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and 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 God!

No doubt Gottlieb prayed a similar prayer regularly.

Conclusions

Even though a few vacations and work-related absences delayed my completing the novel (it took 4 checkouts from the library), it is the Pulitzer winner (more-or-less) that I have enjoyed the most thus far. The main character was strong and dynamic, Leora was realistically ideal, and the plot’s style was engaging.

I also took pleasure to read language very specific to the time. Take, for instance, Leora’s first time in driving a car:

When she first sat at the steering wheel, when she moved the hand-throttle with her little finger and felt her own hands all this power, sorcery enabling her to go as fast as she might desire (within distinct limits), she transcended human strength, she felt that she could fly like the wild goose – and then in a stretch of sand she killed the engine.

The modern man’s emotional first time driving is already dulled by unending rides as a passenger in cars (and for some: video games and go karts). It was enlightening to hear the joy and terror of these true first experiences.

There was also a very particular vocabulary, which further enveloped me in the time and space of the story. Words like feetball (soccer), meteorlogicomania (astrology), pelf (short for pilfer, or to steal), and sacerdotally (priestly). I believe I will be the only website on the entire internet to feature the word meteorlogicomania, at least until the book is published online.

I am still at the point in the Pulitzers where I am not familiar with the books or authors. At one time Arrowsmith was popular amongst doctors and scientists. It showed them the many difficult or false paths that they could choose from, and what experiences they could expect from each.

Most of the paths are easy. The rewards of money or fame are tremendous. The only cost is to give up joy and excitement. Maybe some doctors did see themselves as Angus Duer’s or Pickerbaughs, and were able to convince themselves that such people were necessary for mankind overall. Perhaps some found the plague testing on St. Hubert to be inhumane (I certainly did).

I had great respect for Gottlieb and for Martin Arrowsmith’s work, as they dedicated what little lives they had to adding a small amount of knowledge to the world. In order for them to create lasting knowledge, they needed to work carefully and deliberately. Their impeccable work ethic was all they had, as the results of their experiments were rarely useful. It is understandable why the Pulitzer Prize committee found this book to contain a high standard of “American’s manners and manhood.”

Martin’s troubles with his vocation also resonated. The struggle to create a sustainable living while actively working on a dream is a universal struggle. Every person ends up in a job that seems like a good fit in almost every way, except that it may not match our true passion. Reluctance is reasoned away, the paychecks ease life’s relentless burdens, and dreams are continually deferred. If the dream later presents itself, the life developed may be too precious to risk losing. Martin Arrowsmith was able to completely give up his long-developed life, and he spends the remainder in poverty, but in complete joy.

Coming up next: 1932 - The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck