With Love from Gracie: Sinclair Lewis: 1912-1925

By Grace Hegger Lewis

The rise of author Sinclair Lewis, most famous for his works Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry, written by wife Grace Hegger, a former editor at Vogue. A warts and all portrayal of a stormy relationship between a difficult wife and an impossible husband.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: Oct 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745997

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

WITH LOVE FROM GRACIE

SINCLAIR LEWIS: 1912-1925

BY

GRACE HEGGER LEWIS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6

FOREWORD 7

PART ONE—MEETING AND MARRYING—1912-1914 8

1 8

2 17

3 23

4 27

5 32

6 37

PART TWO—MARRIAGE AND MAIN STREET—1914-1921 42

7 42

8 47

9 52

10 58

11 72

12 80

13 87

14 93

15 99

16 106

17 112

18 119

PART THREE—SUCCESS—1921-1925 125

19 125

20 132

21 138

22 145

23 151

24 155

25 160

26 168

27 174

28 179

29 188

30 194

31 199

32 206

33 213

34 220

35 224

36 228

Envoi 236

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 238

DEDICATION

FOR MY SON

The late Lt. Wells Lewis

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied

Who told me time would ease me of my pain!

I miss him in the weeping of the rain;

I want him at the shrinking of the tide;

The old snows melt from every mountain-side,

And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;

But last year’s bitter loving must remain

Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear

To go,—so with his memory they brim!

And entering with relief some quiet place

Where never fell his foot or shone his face

I say, There is no memory of him here!

And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks are due to Melville H. Cane and to the Estate of Sinclair Lewis for permission to quote from unpublished letters to Lewis which are the property of the Estate; and also to quote from letters to and from Lewis published in From Main Street to Stockholm, edited by Harrison Smith, copyright, 1952, by Melville H. Cane and Pincus Berner, Executors of the Estate of Sinclair Lewis, and published by Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc. I am also indebted to the following individuals—or to their estates, if they are not living—for permission to quote from their letters to Lewis: F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. L. Mencken, James Branch Cabell, Joseph Hergesheimer, John Galsworthy, Edith Wharton, and H. G. Wells; and to the Yale University Library for my use of a letter from G. H. Lorimer to Lewis. James Branch Cabell has allowed me to quote on pp. 126-131 from letters which Lewis wrote to him. Mrs. Alfred Harcourt has given me permission to quote extensively from the privately printed Some Experiences, by the late Alfred Harcourt, copyright, 1951, by Ellen Knowles Harcourt. Paul de Kruif has provided me with much valuable material about the writing of Arrowsmith. To all these individuals I am especially grateful.

In addition, the following publishers have given me permission to quote from the books indicated: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc.—from Three Rousing Cheers by Elizabeth Jordan, copyright, 1926, 1927, Elizabeth Jordan, 1938, D. Appleton-Century Co., Inc.; Crown Publishers, Inc.—from My Thirty Years’ War by Margaret Anderson, copyright, 1930, by Covici, Friede; E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.—from The Gift of Life by W. E. Woodward, copyright, 1947, by W. E. Woodward; Harcourt, Brace & Co., Inc.—from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, copyright, 1921, by Harcourt, Brace & Co., copyright renewed, 1949, by Sinclair Lewis; from Arnold Bennett by Reginald Pound, copyright, 1953, by Reginald Pound; Harper & Brothers—for Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Time Does Not Bring Relief from Renascence and Other Poems, copyright, 1917, 1945, by Edna St. Vincent Millay; Simon & Schuster, Inc.—from One American by Frazier Hunt, copyright, 1938, by Frazier Hunt; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.—for A Crowded Trolley Car, from Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie, copyright, 1921, 1932, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.; The Viking Press, Inc.—from Arnold Bennett’s Journal, copyright, 1932, by The Viking Press, Inc.

Chapter 28 originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Vogue, April 15, 1951, and is included here with the permission of the Condé Nast Publications, Inc.

G. H. L.

FOREWORD

THIS STORY will introduce a Sinclair Lewis unknown to his readers of the last twenty-five years, during which time he has become a legend. Through poems, letters, and dramatic events, I have sought to recall that exciting, demanding, endearing young man—on his early jobs, through his early novels, and in the triumph of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith.

This is also the story of our life together.

Any woman—whether she be wedded to an obscure clerk or a world figure, whether she be a genuine partner or a shadowy substance—is a vital influence in that man’s development. When a biography is indicated, this woman must be carefully and respectfully considered. If she is a writer’s wife she may be sentimentally called an inspiration, but she is more likely to be an instrument, a barometer, a screen, a counter-irritant. Whatever her value, there she is, for better or worse, woven permanently into the pattern of his life.

G. H. L.

PART ONE—MEETING AND MARRYING—1912-1914

1

SINCLAIR LEWIS and I were never properly introduced. He picked me up in a freight elevator.

It had been an especially wearisome day in the editorial office of Vogue magazine where for fifteen dollars a week I wrote captions so fancy that it was hard to tell if I was describing a hat or a soufflé. I also rewrote manuscripts of social register contributors who had something to say but did not know how to say it. That day, September 12, 1912, I had been reading proof, checking names and dates and credits, and I was equally bored by office routine and the repetitious business of reaching home and what I knew I would find there—lamb hash, probably, the one thing my handsome, helpless English mother knew how to make.

And now it was seven in the evening and only the freight elevator was running. Old and dirty and tired it was and that’s how I felt when the door shuddered open at a lower floor. Someone got on and I didn’t even lift my eyelids. Then a voice spoke—I remember the exact words:

I beg your pardon but—uh—didn’t I meet you one day with George Soule?

I looked up, quite far up, for this stranger was over six feet. I was sure I had not met him before but I smiled perfunctorily and then he called me Miss Hegger and gave me his name and said he was with Stokes on the seventh.

The elevator wheezed to a halt at the street floor and when Lewis stepped back to let me pass out first, he awkwardly knocked my bag from under my arm. In stooping to pick up the bag his derby hat, which he had removed in the elevator, fell from his hand and rolled away. Distraught, he dropped the bag, started after the hat, and bumped into an empty pail which overturned with a clatter.

I burst into helpless laughter. Charlie Chaplin himself, only taller. Lewis was slender, narrow of shoulder and short of waist but with a certain elegance of carriage. He had crinkly red hair, a long face with a broad forehead and a small chin, and, at this moment, imploring blue eyes. I retrieved his hat, he retrieved my bag, and we let the pail take care of itself. He asked to walk with me to the subway, only three blocks away, but in that short distance he talked steadily, telling me I was the most exciting person he had seen since he came to New York, that he had purposely gone to tea rooms where I lunched just to watch me, would I lunch with him soon, tomorrow, where was I born, he was born in Minnesota, he had gone to Yale, he was writing a novel, he couldn’t dance, he wished he had a mustache like George’s, couldn’t grow more than seven hairs simultaneously and all of them a different shade, how about a noble square beard like a French gourmay—was that the way to pronounce it? He bet I spoke French like a native, where did I live, he lived in Greenwich Village. Breathless, he pulled out a shabby leather case and from it produced a card on which he wrote: Chelsea 267 Abbie Browne 10 Vannest Place and on the other side he drew a one-line caricature of his profile.

We had reached the entrance of the subway and waving good-by to him I swiftly ran down the steps and was beyond the ticket chopper before the idea came to him that he might have ridden home with me.

The Sinclair Lewis I met that day in the freight elevator remained unchanged to the time of his death in 1951. He never lost his uninhibited way of picking up strangers who happened to catch his fancy or provide material for his writing needs. And he kept always, too, his boyish eagerness to make new friends, pouring out an immediate torrent of confidences to speed the slow conventional approach to friendship; his humility in the face of the unfamiliar in these new friends; and his subsequent, if temporary, idealization of them.

From our first meeting in 1912 to the autumn of 1915 I kept a Memory Book. This was a natural continuation of earlier books which had contained invitations and dance programs and love letters from shy boys, and is now almost the only remaining record of those early years.

Neither Hal (as I called him) nor I ever kept a diary. We were introspective only as it affected our daily life or what he might be writing. We were more interested in the motives of others than in our own. Of necessity I had an engagement book, but this was the nearest I ever came to keeping a journal. Into the morning, afternoon, and evening boxes on the engagement pad I would crowd not only fixed appointments but the state of the weather and the state of my mind and health; who was at the party and whether it was fun or dull; and always comments on work in progress. Unfortunately only a few of these pads remain. The others I destroyed as I did hundreds of his letters to me, as well as letters from famous people, simply because we were always on the move and had no permanent home in which to store them.

Indeed, when I began to collect the material for this book I was amazed that I had kept as much as I had. And when I asked permission of others to see the letters Hal must have written them, I met with the same answer: I never keep letters, any letters. I wish now I had. Gone are the attics and the horsehair trunks and the little bundles tied with faded ribbons. And even if there still were attics there would be no letters because people don’t write letters any more. They telephone and radio their immediate needs, and for sentiment they send a colored postcard with X marks my room or a commercial greeting which covers every possible event or relationship, every state of mind or body, the forgotten as well as the remembered birthday, the convalescent card which says, Sorry you have the— and then a dial to whirl to the following ailments and in these very words: Sniffles, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, mumps, tummy ache.

In those early days, though Hal rarely lost faith in his future as a serious writer, he always poked fun at himself as a famooser, whatever he may have been thinking privately. Perhaps posterity was not completely absent from his mind when as early as The Job, his third novel, he kept the first autograph page in pencil, which was dated May 23, 1915, and began: A world where the Goddess of Romance doffs her turquoise robe, her silver filet & the tissue of dreams, to jerk on each morning, when the alarm clock sounds, a neat suit that doesn’t show stains or grow shiny under the sleeves too quickly. More likely he was being the careful editor.

As for anything in his handwriting eventually having a monetary value, the thought never occurred to us. I was positively shocked when visiting the Joseph Hergesheimers at their Dower House in West Chester, Pennsylvania—after the appearance of The Three Black Pennys and Java Head and before Main Street had been written—to have Dorothy ask me if I saved all my husband’s canceled checks.

What for? After I’ve balanced the check book into the waste-paper basket they go.

Heavens, I save all of Joe’s. Don’t you realize those signatures will be valuable some day? I’ve heard that Bernard Shaw worries about paying small bills by check for fear of depreciating the value of his autograph.

Here is the first communication from Hal which I kept in the Memory Book, September, 1912:

Miss G. Hegger,

Dear Madam:

You will be surprised to receive this letter from a totale stranger, but I feel that it is my duty to warn you against a young man calling himself Sinclaire Lewis, whom I hear that somebody seen you walking with him. Now Madame don’t take my word for this for I understand you don’t know who I am or anything about me but investiggate for yourself and you will find that this isn’t no good man for a fine lady like yourself to associate with. He is very lazy and don’t make hardly any money no matter what he may tell you and I don’t think he ever will. He has been in love with a lot of girls and they have all given him the mitten because they all think he is kind of foolish in the head & writes such peculiar stuff about them you know poetry and so on. I am a society man myself and I know what’s what and I tell you, my dear friend, this ain’t a person with no social standing what ever. I am told his father is a shoemaker and his nine brothers are all of them bad fellowes and they don’t amount to much of anything at all. One of them is a brakeman on the D. L. & W. and one is a horse doctor and one a Xian science doc in South Waukegan and one is a rat catcher for the Natl Biskit Company, and he ain’t any better than they are so beware, I warn you, your affektinate friend,

L. C. Van R. J.

This warning was followed by a form letter from the Lewis Comforting Corporation, Ltd., offering its select services to comfort, amuse, inspire, suitor, at a time named by Miss Hegger. Sample service, no charge.

The next letter was addressed

To the Hochwohlgeborene Demoiselle,

The Lady Grace Livingstone Hegger,

Plesaunce de Château Vieutemps.

Provence.

From her servant François Villon,

Alley of the Three Infirm Cats,

Paris.

To be delivered by the hand of

that stout rogue, Filsdefeu.

Inside the envelope was a two-page poem signed S. L., which began:

Red’s so queer and Red’s so bad;

He’s a quaint and lonely lad

Piping you this lonely tune

From a gray-mirrored dune

Which his Chief believes a desk:

But you’ll take this arabesque

And you’ll smile; you won’t much mind,

Lady, for your eyes are kind.

When imagination ceases

To discover swift releases

In The Philadelphia Shops,

Gingham Gowns for Weeding Crops,

Handy Inexpensive Stencils,

The Parisian Chef’s Utensils,

Chemisettes and guimpes and gores

And the other beastly bores,—

Please, dear lady, come and play;

Please don’t be industrious,

Lady, come; let’s run away;

Let’s go riding on the bus....

At the end of these verses, hand-written in ink:

My dear Miss Hegger:

I have read the above little verses with considerable interest and amusement. They provoke me to the following reflections on this unique young man—who is S. L.?

Re-ah-ly, are you quite sure

That this Red is not a boor?

Certainly his verse is very

Unrestrained, extraordinary,

Rather, well, unnecessary,

Doesn’t it appear to you

He’s The Sort of Person Who—?

He was Yale and Lit, you say?

Well, that’s something anyway.

What was Red’s fraternity?

Oh! he didn’t—Ah! I see!

As ever,

M. R. Van R. L.

Again in these rhymes he expressed his humility before the unfamiliar, before love itself, and yet how quickly he mastered the snobbish jargon of a fashion magazine.

From the beginning he chose for himself the roles of Jacques the Jester and François the Troubadour who sang to the Lady Grace of the holidays and holydays we spent together. I hope it is not a disservice to Sinclair Lewis to reproduce here a few of these Tennyson-and-water verses, as he called them, for they were sincerely and lovingly written and conveyed his romantic attitude toward me which was never basically to change. The illustration facing page 84 is another one of these poems from my Memory Book.

Along with the poems I was being bombarded with letters and telephone calls, many of them delivered to the office of Vogue at 443 Fourth Avenue. In 1912 Vogue’s editorial office had none of its present splendor, modern but not aggressively so. Edna Woolman Chase, now Chairman of the Editorial Board, was then managing editor, and sat in a swivel chair at a plain golden oak desk in one corner of a barebones cubicle with her young assistants around her. Queries were tossed over shoulders and when the telephone rang everyone listened. It might be appeals from the printer for delayed copy but oftener, so it seemed, it was from someone who wished to speak to Miss Hegger. Mrs. Chase began frowning and there were derisive yelps from the assistants.

Several floors below, too, there may have been frowns and yelps in the office of Frederick A. Stokes, publishers, where Sinclair Lewis was writing sentimental verses instead of reading such manuscripts as The Soul of Melicent by James Branch Cabell or taking to lunch Owen Johnson, whose Stover at Yale was best-selling at that time. However, Lewis must have done some work, for on September 12, 1913, I received a copy of The Soul of Melicent, illustrated by Howard Pyle, and with the following autograph inscription: The last thing before I left Stokes—where I lived beside the magic freight elevator—I read this as a Ms., and begged them to accept it because it was, I thought, a perfect love story. You see, since there are freight elevators, & since this was after Sept 12, 1912, I believed in love stories! So now I give it to you on our memory day. Hal to Grace.

Also with Stokes was George Soule, Hal’s close friend, whom he mildly envied for his blond mustache and small bones, for his Yale Club membership and his New York friends, who gave parties where tail coats and patent leather pumps were necessary. But George had the same sweet love of playing foolish games, and he became the Bunny Rabbit to Hal’s Funyaza-Goat and Grace’s Gralice, all drinking Barleducal tea in the land of Arcady instead of in Alice’s Wonderland. And tea it was, not cocktails, we three young people drank after office hours; and Arcady was any one of several tea rooms on Fourth Avenue or its side streets in the thirties. On pay days the bread and milk in small blue bowls of one of his poems was a tea party in the Palm Court of the old Park Avenue Hotel where the Vanderbilt Hotel now stands.

Mindful of George’s patent leather pumps and the subscription dances where he wore them and to which he invited me, Hal took dancing lessons at Duryea’s Dancing Academy, given by a bored young woman in a mirror-lined room where he was horrified by his awkwardness from a hundred angles. But as I think of it now, did he really want to dance? Wasn’t it that he wanted to know how other people felt when they danced? Was it just an excuse to take a girl in one’s arms? Was there a joy in it like eating and drinking or writing a page of prose which seemed to have written itself?

Saturday afternoons Hal introduced me, a born New Yorker, to a city I did not know. We lunched at Fraunces Tavern on Broad Street, where we were served, as Washington had been served, by waiters in white wigs and knee breeches. Then a zigzagging walk past boat slips still called by names the Dutch had given them; through communities of Armenians and Italians, and Jews still wearing side curls and virgin beards. Dinner, my first, at a Chinese restaurant on Mott Street. Silken panels of birds of paradise enclosed teakwood tables with marble tops, cold to the leaning elbows but rich with golden chow mein and eggs foo yung heaped in fairy-tale bowls of blue and white. Price, thirty-five cents and each order enough for two. He pointed out red doors which probably did not lead to opium dens and I shivered satisfactorily, but I clung to him with fear when we entered the Bowery, most lovely name, and found only the broken blossoms of civilization, the drunks and the derelicts. To crown the day we crossed Brooklyn Bridge and from Pierrepont Street watched Manhattan ripple into light.

In October he invited me to a Sunday picnic, the first I had ever been to with a man alone. Mamma was disapproving, but I set out for the old Grand Central Station anyhow, dressed in a tweed suit, felt hat, and low-heeled shoes—a costume no different from what I would have worn to Vogue on a rainy day. But Hal, when he came plunging toward me across the waiting room, was a—to me—fantastic sight: a shrunken misshapen cap clinging to the back of his red head; a dark blue flannel shirt, the like of which I had never seen except on the back of a day laborer, under a worn stiff business suit; a German rucksack and an army blanket strapped to his back, and a home-made walking stick in his hand. He was being stared at by the Sunday travelers, for it must be remembered that in 1912 the attitude toward dress was more formal. Women did not walk on Fifth Avenue in bare feet and gold sandals, in slacks, fur coat, and dark glasses. Children did not wear blue jeans and cowboy boots to school, and presidents of the United States did not appear on magazine covers with their shirttails, Hawaiian-patterned shirttails, hanging out....But that Sunday Hal’s obvious excitement and eagerness to please made me swallow my dismay.

This was my first train ride with Hal, and I was amused to watch him fussing like an old woman about the disposal of his possessions, and in a constant dither lest we miss our station. He told me then of his father’s painstaking, joy-robbing plans for even the shortest train journey, to visit relatives in Minnesota—a conditioning which would always, he guessed, make him get to the station way ahead of time.

When we reached our picnic spot, in the Ramapo Hills of northern New Jersey, he amazed me again—this time with the efficiency of his preparations. Out of the rucksack came ten-cent saucepans, knives, forks and spoons, paper plates and napkins, lamb chops which were soon simmering over the fire he built, succotash out of a can, a thermos of coffee—all of which he produced with such lovable triumph that I realized no other man had ever made me feel so tenderly possessive.

Knowing what it was to live on a meager income I tried to discourage his small extravagances. But there were gifts of books; going to see Robert Loraine in Man and Superman, my introduction to Shaw; playing dominoes in the Café Lafayette on Saturday afternoon; the skull-cracking International Exhibition of Modern Art at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory; a bacchanalian ball, shockingly untidy, at Webster Hall in Greenwich Village, with Emma Goldman sitting at a table making thick sandwiches, Emma, the famous anarchist, looking like a comfortable housewife with her hair in a bun on top of her head and a rose thrust through it.

For me, flowers were the natural expression of welcome, celebration, consolation. For him they were a luxury—this is only guessing—at so many precious dollars a dozen, dollars needed for room rent and typewriter maintenance. But when he saw the box of flowers another man had sent me, in which every blossom was different and chosen with meaning, he asked jealously, Who sent them to you? I handed him the card. Back and forth he ran his thumb over the name. Engraved, he said, not printed.

But at Easter I did receive from him a large bunch of violets with a gardenia in the center, which was then the proper adornment for the Easter Parade. It was sharp and blowy and he appeared with the flowers and no overcoat. He told me afterwards it was because his overcoat was too shabby. His wrists were red with cold above his new gray mocha gloves and the top-heavy violets would come unpinned in the wind and dangle from the violet cord; but he was happy with the girl he loved, and though he wore a bowler and not a top hat, he was pleased to be part of a fashionable New York convention.

When he was elected to the Explorers Club, he proudly took me to a dinner with Rear-Admiral Peary, Carl Akeley, and Roy Chapman Andrews for speakers. He had been proposed by Henry B. Kane and Albert Payson Terhune and seconded by Henry Collins Walsh, the founder of the Club. When filling out his application for membership he answered the question on the expeditions he had directed and the scope of his explorations with Unimportant steerage rambles in Panama and cattleboat trip Portland to Liverpool. His other qualification was author of unadventurous fiction.

During that winter of 1912-13 I took to my bed with a cold and The Dream Vendor was born. This was a four-page newspaper—a daily for a few days only—typed and illustrated in the office of Adventure magazine, to which Hal had gone from Stokes as assistant editor and with a raise in salary. The only aim of The Dream Vendor was my entertainment: it contained interviews, children’s puzzles, answers to the lovelorn, all of doubtful humor even then.

The letter which follows in part was written to me from Richmond Hill, Long Island, home of Arthur Hoffman, editor of Adventure, for whom Hal had a great affection. Hoffman’s house was one of a suburban row, each with its carefully tended patch of lawn and flowerbeds. Arthur had neither time nor inclination for gardening but he had been solemnly watering, night and morning, a burdock weed which had grown to mammoth proportions. It may have been on this weekend that he and Hal decorated the weed with twists of colored paper, and then behind windows gleefully watched the neighbors and passing cars try to figure out what botanical novelty this was.

January 13, 1913

Sunday noon.

An old-fashioned mahogany desk, in a quiet room with a fireplace & lots of shiny floor-space around the leisurely chairs; outside, a hard-surfaced highway along which automobiles whizz. Gray yards, broken only by red-roofed rather too villa-esque houses, stretch to the thin black outlines of trees—open spaces & windy sky & quiet! Dear, my dear, how infinitely I would like to have a cottage even a ver-ee little cottage with one white settle before the door & one rose in the yard, out in even semi-country for six months with Best Playmate in the World. To peep out the open window in the morning on awakening & be in Carmel and an English village & Provençal &—the Little Cottage itself! All at once. To be very serious about the grass in the yard & the comfortable corner where the Morris chair or the some kind of a big chair was to live, so that it should be comfortable as befits its station. To sneak out early Sunday morning with Best Playmate in the World for a ten-mile tramp—no, not a tramp; rather a Canterbury Pilgrimage—before Best Playmate’s conscience made her hurry to Mass. To be very excited over a completed short story—Best Playmate’s first—or a raise or a mysterious neighbor who reads large tomes of Rosicrucian theosophy—or the first day of spring when a faint, exciting, inexplicable odor of the damp brown ground told of the reawakening of Earth. And always Best Playmate recovering from years of noisy city & job; reading the books she has always wanted to, going in town for teas & a ver-ee little theatre. Then, bimeby, the city again & faith that soon Best Playmate is to have her Riverside Drive or Park Avenue apartment. Wouldn’t it—I can’t tell how Best Playmate would like it, but to me it would be Paradise....

Dear sweetheart, I do write too long letters. I do risk boring you with incessant reiteration of fancy and demand. If you could but guess how much more I would like to write you! There seems never to be an end to the things to say to you, Best Playmate. And some times, in quiet softly colored hours & places like this, your spirit is so passionately close to mine, that I want not to write of tranquil walks but of great passionate things. But it’s as well—all men & all women can be passionate, with anger or fear or blind unbeautiful love; but who of all the world can have, with a big effective spirit, the wonderful quality of play you have?

Just once won’t you send me a little love? You said Grace had all your love. But could not she, who has so much of everything, spare me a little?

H

All his dreams in this letter were to come true: a little cottage, Carmel, Provence, an English village at the foot of the North Downs where in the late afternoon we trod the same road as the Canterbury Pilgrims. And always much love and loyalty and laugh’ ter. But the dream was ever more than the reality.

2

HOW DID the future author of Main Street come by the romanticism so evident in these letters and poems I have preserved in my Memory Book? In later years Lewis himself referred contemptuously to the medieval poems he had written and published while at Yale as appalling nonsense about Guinevere and Lancelot, a dumb hero if there ever was one, and said that he did not know why he wrote that way at that time. To me the answer was obvious.

In the eighteen-nineties, given any kind of a literate background, a sympathetic schoolteacher, a home with a library which contained Walter Scott, a mother who read to her little son before bedtime, a boy was helped to create for himself a dream world of knights in armor and ladies fair. Little Harry Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, had a background like this.

His father had taught school at Redwood Falls, Minnesota, but had wanted to be a doctor. He married Emma Kermott, daughter of Edward Payson Kermott, who was then living in Elysian, Minnesota, also the home of Lewis’s parents. By 1874 the young E. J. Lewises had saved enough money for the husband to take a two-year course at Rush Medical College in Chicago. After graduating, young Dr. Lewis first practiced at Ironton, Wisconsin; then he moved to Sauk Centre as a better location. Three sons were born—Fred, Claude, and Harry—before their mother died of tuberculosis in 1890 after an ineffectual visit to Arizona. Harry was then five years old. Two years later Dr. Lewis married Isabel Warner, whom he had known in Chicago during his medical student days. The second Mrs. Lewis never had children of her own, but as she was as red-haired as Claude and Harry, and wisely devoted, she was usually assumed to be their own mother and she rarely denied it.

In the town of Sauk Centre, population 2,500, and throughout a countryside of German and Scandinavian farms, Dr. Lewis was especially in demand when the babies were coming, but there could not have been too much money to buy books. In the back parlor was a cabinet containing sets of Dickens illustrated by Phiz and Cruickshank, and Sir Walter Scott with steel engravings of crusading knights and ladies in waiting, strange and exciting amid the alien corn. There was a leather-bound edition of Milton, the first book, aside from schoolbooks, Dr. Lewis ever bought, and a Goethe in German with Gothic type and delicate pen-and-ink sketches. The three Lewis boys loved the Youth’s Companion and the doctor would sometimes read out loud from the Outlook which he himself read from cover to cover. After six o’clock supper when the older boys were off about their business, Mrs. Lewis would read to little Harry. But the youngest boy did most of his reading at the Carnegie Public Library.

Harry had immense admiration for his brothers who were stronger than he, who could swim and skate and shoot prairie chickens and bob for fish through the