The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (22 page)

One can see why Babbitt would be both attracted to the joys of freedom and frightened by its perils, for freedom does have many perils, and the best way to confront them is not to avoid being free but to cultivate independence of thought, the kind of freedom that, incidentally, has been the great engine of American creativity and vitality in all fields, from engineering to literature. It is not enough to study chemistry. For that breakthrough to come, you need to have that precious and ineffable thing, so difficult to capture, that cannot be trained: you need to have imagination.

What every reader has in common with Babbitt is that, like him, we are faced with choices, from trivial matters like choosing toothpaste to decisions about what to do, whom to see or be, where to live or work. Freedom of choice lies at the heart of every democratic society. Against the onslaught of consumerism, against all the overwhelming siren voices that beckon, our only weapon is to exercise our right to choose. And to make the right choices, we need to be able to think, to reflect, to pause, to imagine, because what is being sold to you is not just toothpaste or deodorant or a bathroom fixture, but your next president or representative, your children’s future, your way and view of life.

Now that David Coleman has let Johnson loose upon the world, my hope is that he will go places his creator never dared, freeing himself from the straitjacket of those tedious informational texts. If he is to be a good and upstanding citizen, Johnson will need to understand what it means for his country to go to war and what kind of peace is a just peace. He will need to reflect on what is moral and what is not, and to understand that he cannot simply blame the president or Congress for an aberration like Guantánamo, because he has a choice to vote for one and not the other; he has a choice to voice his opinions. He can boycott, he can protest, he can tweet. But what he cannot do is shirk his responsibility—that is what Johnson would learn if he were to undertake to travel with Huck Finn and his progenies through the imaginary landscape of American fiction. Who knows, if his boss were to ask him to do something that he considered immoral, he might even, without fear, tell him where to go.

And should he be free, despite the new curriculum, to follow his curiosity, he might learn—to quote the immortal words of William Stoner, the eponymous hero of John Williams’s
Stoner,
an anti-Babbitt if ever there was one—that “as his mind engaged itself with its subject, as it grappled with the power of the literature he studied and tried to understand its nature, he was aware of a constant change within himself; and as he was aware of that, he moved outward from himself into the world which contained him, so that he knew that the poem of Milton’s that he read or the essay of Bacon’s or the drama of Ben Jonson’s changed the world which was its subject, and changed it because of its dependence upon it.”

Paralisi Cardiaca:
these are the words inscribed in the records of the Clinica Electra, on the outskirts of Rome, explaining the cause of death for America’s fugitive Nobel laureate. It means “paralysis of the heart,” an apt description for the author of
Babbitt,
which, flipping
Huckleberry Finn
on its head, tells the story of a conflict in which a “sound heart” loses to a “deformed conscience.” When I first read
Babbitt,
in college, I was too caught up with the obvious satire on conformity to pay much attention to the murmuring of its protagonist’s heart. It is easy to catch the satire, less so the pathos. Perhaps I felt more secure laughing at Babbitt and despising him than feeling pity.

At the time, like so many of my age, I was immersed in avant-garde works of fiction, which seemed far more complex and rewarding. It was Beckett, with his scrappy and disjointed characters, and Ionesco, whose condemnation of bourgeois conformity kept me up at night and ignited my imagination. But the heart is there, from Babbitt’s first appearance; we hear its faint pulse running throughout the entire story, challenging the incessant medley of distracting noises, belying the inhabitants of Zenith’s seemingly confident complacency. The regular interplay between the underground life of Babbitt’s heart and his surface existence, between his secret silences and his loud proclamations, is what rescues
Babbitt
from being an oversimplified exposé.

Unlike the surface world, which is full of hurried words, the language of the heart is silent and inarticulate. At first we hear it as Babbitt struggles to sleep despite the racket outside. He is dreaming again “of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.” This fairy child, “so slim, so white, so eager,” awaits him in “the darkness beyond mysterious groves,” until he can get away from his “crowded house” and his “clamoring friends.” She believes in him, soothes him, cries that he is “gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail—” but here his romantic thoughts are interrupted as life intrudes into his dream: “Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.”

Babbitt asks himself one question: Why? Why, despite his success, his loyal family, his status among his community, his prosperity and the promises of the future, does he feel so dissatisfied? This
Why?
runs throughout the story, following Babbitt from his sleeping porch into the office, returning home with him after a successful if shady transaction and persisting in the midst of jolly banter with his friends, at home, during parties, at the moment of his most satisfying deals. He can find only one response: “I don’t know.” Perhaps the answer is simply the fact that “he who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.” This is where the heart comes in, to help Babbitt find an answer, or perhaps to disturb him and deprive him of his sense of complacency, to warn him that he does have a choice—there are alternatives to his way of life.

Panic comes to him in unexpected places, like a series of short strokes followed by minor epiphanies, as when, in the midst of a party with his gang of Good Fellows and their wives, they decide to hold a séance and summon the “Wop poet” Dante, “the fellow that took the Cook’s Tour to Hell.” Suddenly and in the “impersonal darkness,” the “curst discontent” revisits him, and his friends’ hackneyed jokes at the expense of the poet’s “spirit” are no longer funny to Babbitt. As their shallowness and ignorance are revealed to him, he is “dismayed by a sudden contempt for his surest friends.” He has a glimmer of Dante’s immortality and wishes he had read the dead poet. One more lost chance, because he knows he never will.

After that party, having succeeded in finally persuading his wife to allow him, for the first time in their marriage, to go on a fishing trip with his best friend, Paul, to Lake Sunasquam, in Maine, Babbitt does not feel triumphant. Instead, “for many hours, for a bleak eternity,” he stays awake, “shivering, reduced to primitive terror, comprehending that he had won freedom, and wondering what he could do with anything so unknown and so embarrassing as freedom.”

When his wife and daughter Tinka leave him to visit relatives, he is “free to do—he was not quite sure what.” He wanders around the silent house, asking himself what he wants. “It was coming to him that perhaps all life as he knew it and vigorously practised it was futile; that heaven as portrayed by the Reverend Dr. John Jennison Drew was neither probable nor very interesting; that he hadn’t much pleasure out of making money.” And so Babbitt tramps in “forlorn and unwanted freedom,” childishly desiring the company of the fairy child.

Sinclair Lewis introduced a different kind of fear into American fiction: not the cosmic challenges of Melville or the puritan qualms of Hawthorne or the very real physical dangers of Twain or the insecurities and fears induced by poverty and injustice in Dreiser. With
Babbitt,
he gave us the first novel of anxiety. Alfred Kazin describes this other kind of fear, the one that is part of our everyday life, rooted in our terror of freedom at the very moment we most desire it: “There is indeed more significant terror of a kind in Lewis’s novels than in a writer like Faulkner or the hard-boiled novelists, for it is the terror immanent in the commonplace, the terror that arises out of the repressions, the meanness, the hard jokes of the world Lewis had soaked into his pores.”

Lewis had something in common with his protagonist. He appears to have felt, for very different reasons, the same fear when confronted with his solitary existence. As Updike put it, “His frenetic activity—all those books, all those addresses, all those binges—seems in the retelling one long escape, an anesthetic administered to a peculiarly American pain, just before the last screw of his talent could be turned.”

Babbitt is a different kind of mimic from Lewis. His public self, the incessant conversations that are in actuality long monologues, his jauntiness, the jollity and physical vitality that so impressed many impressive readers like Edith Wharton—all are attempts to cover a gaping void, to forget that Floral Heights and Zenith are mere decorations and props for a life that in essence is a paltry show. Like Jim Carrey’s Truman, he has a feeling that his real inner self, the one he catches only in glimpses, the one that appears in the guise of the fairy child, constantly eludes him—or perhaps it is the reverse, and he is the one eluding it?

While reading
Babbitt
,
interrupted by the clamor of a world that at times appears ever more like David Coleman’s dream universe, where “people don’t really give a shit about what you feel or what you think,” I was reminded of my conversation with Ramin in Seattle. And then I would think of Babbitt’s hidden heart, and of that fairy child, and I came to believe that those books that we hungered for and risked our lives for in Iran matter just as much right here in America, even if not everyone sees it that way.

While Sinclair Lewis is not much read in English classes or by book groups today, Babbitt has had a long afterlife. He has, like Huck, engendered all manner of progeny—lonely, dissatisfied, career-minded family men yearning to escape from the seemingly desirable entrapments of their mundane lives. We find him in various guises in the characters of John Cheever, John Updike, Richard Ford and Jonathan Franzen.

David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College, which I can only hope will become one of the informational texts our students are asked to read. In it, he reminds us that neither Babbitt himself nor what he represents will go away in the foreseeable future, and that his life and dissatisfaction have lessons for every one of us as we face that vital moment of choice:

The so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along on the fuel of fear and anger and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny, skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.

But of course, there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious, you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty, unsexy little ways, every day.
That
is real freedom.
That
is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big, fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life
before
death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness—awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over . . .

• • •

“It is the conflicting fate of an American artist to long for profundity while suspecting that, most profoundly, none exists,” Updike writes; “all is surface, and rather flimsy surface at that.” In this story of surfaces and mirrors, certain characters stand in for alternative paths that Babbitt might have chosen. He has chosen the path of the Good Fellows, but there are temptations. Take Paul Riesling and Seneca Doane, two former schoolmates, one of whom he loves and the other he begrudgingly respects.

Babbitt’s best friend, the sensitive and fragile Paul, wanted to be a musician—a fiddler, to be precise—but marriage to a boisterous girl who later turned into a nagging and disparaging shrew forced him to take up his father’s business: tar-roofing. With Paul, Babbitt becomes a different person: tender, protective and genuinely concerned, like a loving older brother. Paul is the only person who shares Babbitt’s past and his dreams, for Babbitt once wanted to be a lawyer, a governor maybe, a champion of the poor and the oppressed, before he married the good-hearted and placid Myra and became a salaryman.

When he sees Paul, Babbitt is “neither the sulky child of the sleeping-porch, the domestic tyrant of the breakfast table, the crafty money-changer of the Lyte-Purdy conference, nor the blaring Good Fellow, the Josher and Regular Guy, of the Athletic Club.” They shake hands solemnly and smile “as shyly as though they had been parted three years not three days,” greeting each other: