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Cass Timberlane

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From Book-of-the-Month Club News upon First Edition publication: "This book responds to the test by which one of the wisest of professional readers applies to all his manuscripts, it most humanly bleeds. It is Sinclair Lewis' nineteenth novel (some of which have bled very little), and it is one of his best. Also, in spite of being his nineteenth, it is technically advanced, and fresh in its subject matter, wise, and sincere. The old master has learned how to use words with the minimum of wastage. Gone now are the descriptive catalogues of the paraphernalia of American life, which, after the first years, grew as tiresome as Whitman's lists of occupations. Dropped now (and sometimes we miss them) are the incredibly realistic conversations, rambling on for the sake of sarcasm. So sure is the hold on the theme that the author can insert incisive narratives (a lifetime in two pages) of marital relationships which never enter into the story, but are like the symbolic paintings on the walls of palaces where Chaucer stages his stories. Yet these brief narratives are not symbolic but bitterly real, and supply without changing the focus of the novel many other tragedies and comedies of marriage being acted in Grand Republic, Minnesota, where Judge Timberlane and his Jinny played theirs with the egotism of self-centered experience. ¶ You will find in Cass Timberlane [italics] most of Sinclair Lewis' faults as an observer of life. If you go with him, you must share experience as he sees it. To certain aspects of any society he has always been, and is, insensitive. Thin-skinned himself, it is the coarse, the rough, the lacquered with insincerity that set his imagination sparking. It is reconciliation with the man at home as God chose to make him, which is his only solution--but a reconciliation not in principle but by bitter-won personal experience. No one can doubt that his America is in three dimensions, and each angle a deep one, but it is often a shocking America, healthily shocking to those who draw their judgments more from the New Testament and less from the Old than does Lewis. ¶ But you will find also a double charge of Lewis' outstanding virtues in Cass Timberlane [italics]. He is a fierce and fearless writer, who has not been afraid to make this novel of marriage an unsparing search into the sexual where it is relevant, thus writing one of the frankest books of our generation, yet without a trace of the sickly pornography of some modern realistic fiction. And he is a humorous writer, whose humor makes up for its lack of amiability by a brilliant wit for which, so it seems to me, Lewis has never had enough praise. And he is a tender writer, when the scene deserves it, which makes him deeply moving at climactic moments, because he holds tight to his sympathies until his characters have as much as they can bear. Finally, like all novelists of the first rank, he never forgets, at least in this book, that his first job is to tell a story. ¶ So much about the novel in general. The theme of the story itself is as old as the hills (like most stories). It is the tale of middle-aged Judge Timberlane, stiff, very human, incorruptible, with a zest for life, and of his love at first sight for Jinny, the light-footed girl, with black hair, and a sprightly eye, and a quick intelligence. But it is still more a story of the adjustment of experience to inexperience. For the judge has had one marriage, with a selfish waster, and his heart is full of romantic ideals suppressed by a disillusioning experience. And his girl, Jinny, is like a child asked to go on a diet before she has tasted the foods on a normal table. This oversimplifies, but it is the center of the story. The older man puts everything he has into his marriage, and his unswerving and uncritical love for his wife makes her (which is not usually true of Lewis' women) as charming and as companionable and as desirable as he thinks. But he is daily, hourly afraid that he cannot give enough, that there are experiences he is making impossible for her. He is afraid of her, and he is right. It is a 'heel,' a professional seducer of women needing relief from their husbands--and Cass' best friend--who is the serpent in this near-tragedy. He is a man who could feel like a woman, give her what she really wanted which was a chance to give all herself, not to be protected, or too much loved. And it was not until the selfish Jinny (as a man would write) had given to the wrong man that he became wrong for her, and she could come back to an equality of love. ¶ In spite of Jinny's charm and the likable qualities of two other women (and one female cat) in this narrative, Cass Timberlane [italics] is one of the most devastating attacks on women in American society that I have ever read. The men range all the way from scabrous immortality to vulgar coarseness, pitiable weakness, or sins and virtues so dull and commonplace as to take them out of sympathy. But the women--drunkards, lecherous, avaricious, unscrupulous parasites upon their men whom they ruin, spiritual murderers, loud vulgarians--if they were not so specialized they would be terrifying. And indeed, the verdict of this book and the knife of its satire, is that American men, excepting the 'wolves,' the scoundrels, the 'heels,' and the perverted, are afraid of their wives, and that is the chief trouble with what we call typical American society. Nevertheless, if often horrifying and sometimes painful, and certainly not always fair, this is not a cynical story, if only because Cass and Jinny, for whom after all it was written, are rare human beings that any discriminating person would wish to have as friends.--Henry Seidel Canby"