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Work of Art

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Sinclair Lewis may have written more about "service" and the art of being useful to others than any other American novelist. Sometimes he praises altruistic service. More often he skewers hypocritical politeness and feigned kindness as mere marketing ploys to sell inferior products. His 1934 novel about hotels and hotel management, WORK OF ART, is especially heavy on attention to service.

In WORK OF ART three generations of the Weagle family grow up in and work for boarding houses, inns and hotels. Focus is on two brothers, Myron and Ora, of the second generation. Poetic, ethereal Ora could not wait to escape hotel drudgery, though never too proud to ask plodding Myron for money.

As Myron thought, learned and managed a steady climb to national respect within the expanding world of early 20th Century hotel managers, he was always skeptical when praised for "creativity" at Rotary Club luncheons and Chamber of Commerce dinners. He dreamed minutely of the shape of his perfect inn or dream hotel: its napkins, its menus, its front desks, its coddling of guests. Yet he never quite pulled off perfection.

Myron argued with younger brother Ora about whether it was even possible to combine money making with administering institutions. "Maybe there were business men, and successful ones, who were not money grubbers, but creators, he suggested" (Ch.4). Myron tried hard to combine these two talents, but never quite succeeded. If anyone could pull this combination off, it was the much admired traveling salesman, J. Hector Warlock whom Myron began noticing when only 15 while front desking the family owned American Hotel in Black Thread, Connecticut. Warlock "could sell fleece-lined overshoes in hell! (Ch. 4) Over time he convinced Myron that all trades evolve: barbering becomes surgery. Taverns become inns, become hotels and someday most people will live in hotels instead of houses.

Young Myron learned the service dimension of just being friendly from American Hotel bartender Jock McCreedy. Bartenders held democratic court in pre-Prohibition America. Myron Weagle learned as well to manage inebriated businessmen and "lonely and love-starved women" (Ch. 9) living in hotels. By 1904 theoreticians of hotel management were already agreed that a hotel staffer owed guests "a metaphysical blessing called 'Service'; that he should be at once the Little Brother and the Kind Uncle of everyone who registered -- call them by name ... and ask them tenderly about the Folks, illnesses, weather, and business conditions Back Home" (Ch. 11). But Myron never excelled in "oozing unfelt cordiality."

Myron came to admire the great hotels as excelling even churches, universities, forts and hospitals for knowing "the heart and blood circulation of history" (Ch. 11). He met and liked Luciano Mora, whose family had kept six generations of inns and hotels in Naples. Together they fanatically glorified "innkeeping as veritably an art" (Ch. 15). Hotel management was far more than just an interesting way to make a living.

COMMENT: In February 1905 the Rotary Club of Chicago was created, launching the entire service club movement. In this centennial year 2005 Rotarians are learning that it was in 1934's WORK OF ART that a prissy school superintendent in Black Thread, Connecticut made a much quoted linkage between "two great spiritual awakenings": Boy Scoutism and Rotarianism: "a Boy Scout is a young Rotarian, and every Rotarian is a Boy Scout in long trousers!" (Ch. 17)

Mryon rose. Myron fell. Myron bounced back. In 1932, towards novel's end, in his early 50s with his management career in shreds, he used his last savings for a hot summer drive with family to tiny Lemuel, Kansas. Things looked bleak and dull but Myron's "Rotarian enthusiasm," comic though it was, propelled him on. In Kansas Myron built and then transformed The Commercial Hotel. But minor magic came as well. For the first time ever, his wife Effie May became "a hotelman's wife" as had Myron's mother before her. Teen age son Luke Weagle, age 16 in 1933, also opted for a future in hoteling and warmed his father by suggesting a great development site for a new approach to America's rising world of automobile tourists, whose idea of a vacation was simply to drive all over the place for the sheer fun of driving on passable roads.

Sinclair Lewis, as always, tells a great yarn: this time about the ups and downs in a rising America's unending pursuit of craftsmanship and material success.

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