Aaron Gadd

THE GOD-SEEKER (422 pp.)--Sinclair Lewis--Random House ($3.50).

Sinclair Lewis' new novel concerns Aaron Gadd, a carpenter by trade, who by a singular series of half-convictions, and somewhat to his own surprise, becomes a missionary to the Sioux Indians, A.D. 1848.

Aaron is a New England boy, raised in the Berkshires, "not tall nor short, with a brush of chestnut hair, and brown eyes that were serene and markedly friendly, his forehead noble and clear as a scholar's --or an actor's--only a fair dancer but a competent drinker." His dying grandfather, who had Episcopal leanings, was "a merry and evil old man who remembered the days . . . when, small though he was, he could swing a quarryman's sledge and make a woman moan with love." He had urged Aaron to become a rebel and go west.

Arrowsmith Adverse. Aaron's father was a deacon in the Congregational Church, and smuggled runaway slaves to Canada, but when Aaron befriended a runaway dog, the old man blew its head off with a shotgun. Aaron's girl was Nadine, a Catholic in the town of Adams, "a cotton-mill hand by day, but by evening a plump, wriggling, rolling, rejoicing, inviting, shoulder-shaking, cooing, laughing, black-eyed, black-haired, black-tempered young woman, who loved all that was bright and shoddy and loud, and loved all males."

Thus far The God-Seeker reads somewhat like any other frontier novel, with Martin Arrowsmith cast as Anthony Adverse. When a revival meeting comes to Adams, however, and Aaron, aged 25, finds himself at the mourners' bench without quite knowing how he got there, the book takes on a distinctive air that makes it unusual among drum-and-petticoat books and also among Lewis' own 20 previous novels. Aaron Gadd tries to be a Christian.

Author Lewis doesn't let him have an easy time. Aaron falls half in love with a girl he meets at the Missionary Home, Selene Lanark, "all vigor, speed, tautness . . . She was on the tall side, slender, rather tanned: olive-brown of skin with a wonderful smoothness to it ... Her eyes had the tint of black glass . . ." Presently he discovers that Selene is a half-breed, that her father is a rich trader living near Aaron's Mission of Bois des Morts in Minnesota. When he gets there, Aaron finds how much there is to do before he can get to his preaching.

Honorary Bricklayers. In the refrain of "Squire" Harge, superintendent of the mission, he must "husk the corn and shell it and finish the fall plowing and get up some fence posts and flail out the wheat and boss the Indian women while they dig the rest of the turnips and potatoes and move that big stone under my kitchen stove and put a new floor in my sitting-room and there's some repairs on the cart and we need a new privy and a couple of ox-yokes and I have a clock that won't run . . ."

Of such incidents and characters The God-Seeker is compounded. Aaron comes to know and fear tough Caesar Lanark, falls half in love with Huldah Purdick (while Selene is away), argues with a suave Catholic missionary, becomes friendly with Black Wolf, an Oberlin-educated Indian who is trying to convert the whites to the beliefs of the Indians. Finally he flees with Selene from the wrath of her father, becomes a prosperous builder in St. Paul (after marrying Selene), encourages his workmen to go out on strike, and on the eve of the Civil War is somewhat surprised to find himself smuggling runaway slaves as his father had before him.

In a proletarian happy ending he persuades the union to accept a runaway Negro bricklayer as an equal, whereupon both he and Selene are voted honorary members. Author Lewis never lets the reader know whether, in his opinion, Aaron Gadd has found God or not.

Urbane Indians. Unlike Elmer Gantry or the other pious hypocrites in Lewis' fiction, Aaron Gadd is an honest man. It is remarkable that at 64, after a career of vigorous scoffing, Lewis has written a serious study of an idealistic minister and presented him as a sensible and sympathetic character. It is still more remarkable that he has done so without ridiculing Aaron's personal struggle for grace and his hope of salvation, that he has made the forlorn life of the mission adventurous despite the total lack of adventurous incident, and that he has never let the whole affair fall below a plane of good-natured raillery.

Yet The God-Seeker scarcely seems more than a rough sketch for a novel. It wavers between a sympathetic view of Aaron's religious questionings and a breezy freethinker's ridicule of the pretensions of the faithful. It likewise wavers between its realistic portrait of prairie life and its satirical account of the mission to the Indians--with the Indians educated, civilized and urbane, and the whites cantankerous and benighted.

The deeper difficulty is that the world around Aaron Gadd never seems to be the world of 1848. Doubtless there were revivalists as blunt as the Reverend Mr. Chippler, missionaries as self-seeking as Balthazar Harge and theologians as long-winded as Deacon Popplewood. But there were others, too. Whatever else Americans had or lacked 100 years ago, a belief in God was fundamental to most of them. In The God-Seeker, except for Aaron Gadd, Author Lewis leaves it only to Babbitts in frock coats.

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