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3.0 out of 5 stars
Elmer Gantry returns -- in person and in a weak clone, July 16, 2005
This review is from: Gideon Planish (Paperback)
As stories go, 1943's GIDEON PLANISH is a thin tale of ordinary, underachieving Americans. Sinclair Lewis was running low on creative juices. Yet there are scattered and surprisingly good nuggets, flashes of Lewis's old scorn of hypocrisy and greed along with a sad cameo farewell to an aging Reverend Doctor ELMER GANTRY, a rogue first seen in 1927.
The narrative framework:
Gideon Planish, born a midwesterner in 1892 and reared evangelically, by age ten sensed that his gift of gab would take him far. He might become a governor or a senator. He would in any case hold large audiences rapt. But as an adult man of modest talents, Sinclair Lewis's Gid Planish sometimes rose and sometimes fell, lurching generally upwards in an occasionally ruthless career that touched academia, advertising and management of philanthropic organizations. As his physical vigor and belief in what he was doing slowly left him, his much younger wife Peony swelled from docile supporter of his great work and frivolous spender of his income into a powerhouse with developed skills networking among wives and daughters of the rich and famous.
Gideon Planish's minutely busy weekend before and during the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 is laid out in detail. He was suddenly offered the presidency of Kinnikinick College in Iowa. There he had been dean and Peony one of his students. He realized wistfully that this was his last chance to redeem his soul from the hypocrisy of American big city philanthropy management. But Peony effectively brushed all this off by saying that they would live on in New York where she would protect his income-providing career through her network of influential wives of the giants of philanthropy. Their daughter Carrie went to work in a defense factory. Gideon Planish weakly accepted being sentenced to modern mediocrity. End of plot.
This is clearly not a great yarn. The grinding mediocrity of virtually every character numbs attention. Even several pages re-introducing 1927's energetic rascal, the Reverend Elmer Gantry, portray a running down celebrity whose ideas have not grown and whose energies now produce little worth remembering.
As soon as he, Peony and Carrie came to New York, Dr Planish's work brought him into the religious-philanthropic ambience of Gantry. That divine, after his flaming escapades in the Midwest, now dominated a pulpit in Manhattan and also had a daily radio program called (what else?) "Love Is the Morning Star." Thanks to the program's chewing gum sponsor, Elmer's voice reached a million or more hearers, "particularly shut-ins." He was rumored (falsely) to have studied at Harvard and in Germany but remained popular because "folksy" (Ch.19). From his base as pastor of the Spiritual Home Methodist Tabernacle on Morningside Heights, Gantry moved from strength to strength as radio pastor. His on-the-air sermons powerfully mixed "modern slang and long hard words." God, he argued to youth, was to be found as readily in the automobile as He had once been in the hay-ride. Gantry had no peer as "living exponent of a streamlined gospel."
Elmer Gantry was also a director of "the newest educational racket in town," The Modernistic Educational Bureau. Its staff both composed (by plagiarizing) and then sold encyclopedias. Planish attended a seminal luncheon for money-raisers at which Dr. Gantry was "torridly" present as directive secretary of the Society for the Rehabilitation of Erring Young Women" (Ch. 25). Elmer and Gideon offhandedly formed a profitable partnership to design, manufacture and sell buttons advertising a political awareness organization of which both were directors, Dynamos of Democratic Direction -- DDD) (Ch. 28).
On Sunday December 7, 1941, not knowing that the Japanese were to bomb Pearl Harbor later that day, Gideon and Peony attended Dr Elmer Gantry's morning services. The sermon proved that Europe was at war because God was displeased that in too many places, including Morningside Heights, people "did not go to church more regularly." Peony Planish was not, however, edified to see Gantry's cute young female secretary on display in the front row of pews (Ch. 29). And so the fire-breathing, drinking, womanizing rogue of yesteryear had grown into aging respectability and repetitive dullness.
More broadly, GIDEON PLANISH is about American philanthropy and its money-raising feeding on big business. There are occasional salllies of insight and satire into that milieu.
By taking over the nascent "Every Man a Priest Foundation," a bullying Gid made his first conquest in New York, and began "a career in holiness" by stealing both the vision of a saintly man ["Carlyle Vesper was as simple as Cardinal Newman"] (Ch 23), as well as his job and his list of rich backers. In New York Planish moved into circles of pretentious frauds including that Reverend ELMER GANTRY whom SInclair Lewis had introduced in 1927.
Gideon Planish learned that the purpose of fund-raising was to inculcate in rich (or poor) sinners the habit of giving and keeping on giving, in order "to expand their own miserable, narrow peanut souls" -- not to use the money for anything specific or philanthropic. The USA entered WW II and Planish's political patrons saw this as a "war of slogans." Planish was directed to promote his masters in terms of their coming contributions to post-war peace, with an eye towards the Presidency. But neither must he forget that war is good for business! (Ch. 29). Suddenly, alas, for philanthropy, money flowed away from charity and good works towards war bonds.
Clearly enough Gideon weakly modeled aspects of himself on Elmer Gantry. But, more seminally, in 1925 Bruce Barton's booster life of Jesus, THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS, transformed Dr Planish. Never mind that Jesus was humanized downward as "a society gent, a real sport, a press agent and the founder of modern business." Lewis skewered THE MAN NOBODY KNOWS as the "Epistle to the Babbitts" (Ch. 14). It inspired Planish to create a witty column called "Corn-pone and Popcorn" and its most famous essay, on "Mental Elbow Grease."
There are one or two other flashes of insight into American Protestant behavior. Towards the end of Ch. 17 Sinclair Lewis humorously wrapped the newly rapturous Gideon Planish inside the mission and suffering of the Apostle Paul as laid out in II Corinthians 11:23-30. Lewis knew his scripture well enough to transfer its language, as did his fictitious character Reverend Elmer Gantry and the real Bruce Barton. The passage is about Gideon Planish:
"He saw himself dedicated now to the new life of service; in labors more abundant, in conferences above measure, on committees more frequent, in journeyings often, in long-distance telephoning often, in hunger and thirst at unpalatable public dinners, in cold audiences and nakedness of meaning -- and he was not afraid, and gloried of the things that concerned his infirmities."
Another Pauline role model was William T. Knife, lay member of the Antinomian Church, referred to in ecclesiastical circles as "the humble millionaire who has applied the principles of of St. Paul to his private life and to the soft-drink business" (Ch. 21). Planish ghostwrote Knife's autobiography. This relationship led to wider personal contacts which facilitated Planish's natural transition from philanthropy to politics (i.e., by boosting others for President). For in the early 1930 big business feared revolution (especially by independent labor unions whose members were therefore exhorted to join churches instead) and therefore supported any philanthropy or politician promising to keep the lid on. But by 1940 times were changing and Gideon was convinced that there would soon be more money in anti-fascism than the current fascism of his masters. (Ch. 22)
Not consistently humorous, GIDEON PLANISH holds a mirror to American philanthropy and what self-seeking charlatans once did to it.
-OOO-
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