Tycoon

DODSWORTH -Sinclair Lewis -Harcourt Brace ($2.50).

The Man. Samuel Dodsworth was, perfectly, the American Captain of Industry, believing in the Republican Party, high tariff, and, so long as they did not annoy him personally, in prohibition and the Episcopal Church. He was the president of the Revelation Motor Company; he was a millionaire, though decidedly not a multimillionaire; his large house was on Ridge Crest, the most fashionable street in Zenith; he had some taste in etchings; he did not split many infinitives; and he sometimes enjoyed Beethoven. He would certainly (so the observer assumed) produce excellent motor cars; he would make impressive speeches to the salesmen, but he would never love passionately, lose tragically, nor sit in contented idleness upon tropic shores.

To define what Sam Dodsworth was, at fifty, it is easier to state what he was not. He was none of the things which most Europeans and many Americans expect in a leader of American industry. He was not a Babbitt, not a Rotarian, not an Elk, not a deacon. He rarely shouted, never slapped people on the back, and he had attended only six baseball games since 1900. He knew, and thoroughly, the Babbitts and baseball fans, but only in business.

While he was bored by free verse and cubism, he thought rather well of Dreiser, Cabell, and so much of Proust as he had rather laboriously mastered. He played golf reasonably well, and did not often talk about his scores. He liked fishing in Ontario, but never made himself believe that he preferred hemlock bows to a mattress. He was common sense apotheosized.

His Wife. Daughter of a beef-colored burgher, who had brewed his way into millions and respectability, Fran was. nevertheless, poised and luminous. She had been to Europe and to an Eastern finishing school; she had born and bred two children; aged 41, she looked a decade younger, for her hair was ash-blond, her figure slim. She talked occasional baby-talk to Sam, tolerated his lovemaking, entertained his friends. Her time was filled with clubs, committees, charities, and bridge; but when Sam sold out his automobile business to a motor corporation, and was temporarily free, she declared her boredom and insisted upon being taken abroad.

Their Story. When they sailed, Fran knew what she wanted -romance, and a luxurious orgy of aristocracy, after the mediocrity of Zenith; but Sam only knew that he'd like to see the land of his ancestors, inspect the Rolls Royce and Mercedes plants; then, refreshed, rush home to work at a motor caravan idea for campers, or a residential section for Zenith that should be guiltless of Tudor castles and Swiss chateaux.

In London, Fran quickly annexed the cousin of aristocracy who made love to her while Sam attended a dinner given in his honor by his London agent. The dinner was at a Soho restaurant, and yet: There was a horseshoe table with seats for thirty. Along the table little American flags were set in pots of forget-me-nots. Behind the chairman's table was a portrait of President Coolidge, draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and about the wall -Heaven knows where Hurd could have collected them all -were shields and banners of Yale, Harvard and the University of Winnemac, of the Elks, the Oddfellows, the Moose, the Woodmen, of the Rotarians. the Kiwanians, and the Zenith Chamber of Commerce, with a four-sheet poster of the Revelation car. Fran would have sneered. . . .

Outside was the dark and curving Soho alley, with the foggy lights of a Singhalese restaurant, a French bookshop, a wig-maker's, an oyster bar. And the room was violently foreign, with frescoes by a sign painter -or a barn-painter: Isola Bella. Fiesole, Castel Sant' Angelo. But Sam did not look at them. He -who but once in his life had attended a Rotary lunch -looked at the Rotary wheel, and his smile was curiously timid. There was no reason for it apparent to him, but suddenly these banners made him feel that in the chill ignobility of exile he was still Some One.

For the first time at ease with London, Sam returned contentedly to his hotel. Fran was sobbing. The Englishman had "insulted" her. She must go immediately to France.

Lonely at first in Paris, Sam was able to drag her to all the places mentioned in the guidebooks, but only once would she sit with him at a sidewalk cafe. "Smart people don't." Sam sputtered over her reply: "Why can't you enjoy both as long as you do enjoy 'em? Nobody's hired us to come here and be stylish! We haven't got any duty involved! Back home there may have been a law against enjoying ourselves the way we wanted to, but there's none here!" "My dear Sam, it's a matter of keeping one's self-respect . . ." Finally came the dismal feminine finish: "Oh, you simply can't understand!"

Before long Fran had collected a flattering group of carpet knights, and while Sam "ran over" to Zenith for a disillusioning visit, Fran succumbed to the blandishments of an Austrian Jew. Sam forgave her, but made her "travel," only to discover that "if there is anything worse than the aching tedium of gazing out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs."

They rounded up at Berlin where Fran collected another lover, and this one she proposed to marry. Sam, bewildered, obligingly "deserted" to Paris where he found an honest harlot; to Italy where he found the improbable Edith. Edith thought she could be happy with him in Zenith, though "America terrifies me. I feel insecure there. I feel everybody watching me, and criticizing me unless I'm buzzing about Doing Something Important. And there's no privacy."

But Fran was not finished with him yet. Her Teutonic lover got bossy, his mother refused to have a divorcee for daughter-in-law. On the steamer, westward bound. Fran took Sam for granted. But when she blithely flirted with new whippersnappers Sam finally balked, rowed ingloriously, took the return steamer to Edith.

The Significance. In fixing upon a label for the rung above Babbittry, Mr. Lewis evidently recognized his grave responsibility to vocabulary, for he wavered and fussed, changed and substituted, before committing himself to "Dodsworth." His difficulty is plain: Dodsworth, no simple ameba, reacts to stimulae of the shifting European scene not automatically but thoughtfully, individually. Dodsworth is a type, recognizable, familiar; but the type is susceptible to variations. Fran's type also is familiar -to those who read Henry James, and dally in cosmopolitan circles. Literati have even traced resemblances to the first Mrs. Lewis, substituted dark for ash-blond hair, substituted this for that and that for this, thought her the prototype for Fran.

Less important than Babbitt or Arrowsmith, kinder and more accurate than Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth is as shrewd a piece of reporting as any of the earlier volumes. No scoop, it has a pale prelude in Tarkington's Plutocrat, but Dodsworth is the exhaustive definitive edition.

The Reporter. Redheaded, gaunt and cadaverous, Super-Reporter Lewis sniffs atmosphere with a long, peculiar nose, pierces actuality with swift sharp glances. He early attained universal notoriety for Main Street and Babbitt, but long before that he had struggled as unsuccessful newspaper hack in Waterloo, Iowa, in San Francisco, New Haven. Supporting himself by prolific short stories, he led his nomadic existence, on foot, by motor, from St. Paul to Cape Cod, from Minneapolis to Washington and back again, gleaning, and sorting, and sifting the facts that compose his incisive writings. He started Dodsworth in Berlin, continued in France, Italy, and the Aegean Islands, finished the first draft on a motor caravan tour through England.