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The Innocents

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Sinclair Lewis usually had difficulty describing married couples who were each other's equals or at least contributed nearly equally as partners in their "divisions of labor." This negative charge cannot, however, be laid against his second of two novels published in 1917, THE INNOCENTS: A STORY FOR LOVERS. For forty of their sixty years Seth and Sarah Jane Appleby have been married and living in New York City. They raised one daughter who married a successful pharmacist and produced a male heir. Seth brings home the bacon from his job as something more than a clerk and salesman at a shoe store. Sarah Jane makes a happy home. The balance of their power does begin to shift one summer when Seth, not without a certain economic sense, decides to break out of his metropolitan rut and open a Tea Shop on rural Cape Cod where the couple has long spent its two week vacations. They bring to this project equally weak skills in selecting china and chairs and in the end lose their shirts in less than five months.

After further setbacks, they begin a wandering life together. Through New Jersey they tramp. Then at a hobo camp in West Virginia, Seth's star begins to rise. Sarah Jane indeed makes friends of the villainous looking hoboes, cooks their food, mends their clothes and brings about a reformation of manners and morals. But one of the tramps sees some potential for bigger things in Seth and coaches him in physical fitness, little tricks of body language and rhetoric which propel him into a leader's self-confidence. He and she return to the open road with the confidence of Christian apostles after Pentecost. Seth almost overawes his loyal wife with his developing talents but their mutual affection allows the couple to create a new, mutually satisfying equilibrium.

Call it flight. Call it travel. Call it greener grass across the road. But one persistent theme in both Sinclair Lewis's personal life and in his novels is that sheer movement, sheer trying out something completely new and different, simply hitting the trail -- all or some of these -- will almost surely bring good results, something better. "It's always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are" (Ch. XIII). Seth to Sarah Jane: "Let's see. New York doesn't want us. But somewhere there must be a village of folks that does. .. Come on, we'll start for Japan, and see the cherry-blossoms. Come on, old partner, we're going to pioneer, like our daddies that went West" (Ch. XII).

Finally, Chapter XVII has a paean to small town living that could have been written by Paul Harris, who tried in 1905, via establishing the world's first Rotary Club, to re-create in cutthroat, impersonal Chicago the virtues and general chumminess of the Wallingford, Vermont village (population 1,000) where he grew up. It is hard to imagine the same Sinclair Lewis writing so glowingly of village life in 1917 when he would show its unlovely side only three years later in MAIN STREET. And yet, there it is: "In a village, every clerk, every tradesman, has something of the same distinctive importance as the doctors, the lawyers, the ministers. ... "in Lippittsville Mr. Seth Appleby was not just a lowly person who helped one in the choice of shoes. He was a person, he was their brother, to be loved or hated." The indiscriminate calling of everyone by first name that Lewis would condemn a decade later in ELMER GANTRY's Zenith Rotary Club appears perfectly natural and amiable in the village of THE INNOCENTS.

Sinclair Lewis never lost the ability to surprise, just as Babe Ruth, even aging, was always capable on any given day of hitting one out of the ball park.

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