I did indeed so wish, for I admired Dreiser greatly as a writer. He was, to my mind, far more than a mere novelist. He had in his deep, ponderous, gigantic fashion got hold of something profoundly American, and if before twenty I read Charles Dickens, after twenty I read Dreiser and after Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and of the two of them I felt Lewis the more brilliant but I knew Dreiser would be the more nearly permanent. And he was getting old, whereas I was still young, young enough to wait for future rewards.
If I had doubts about myself, they were doubled and tripled by my fellow writers who were men. The gist of such criticisms, and there were more than a few, was that no woman, except possibly the veteran writer, Willa Cather, deserved the Nobel Prize, and that of all women I deserved it the least because I was too young, had written too few books of note, and was scarcely even to be considered an American, since I wrote about the Chinese and had lived only in their remote and outlandish part of the world. With my background and literary education, I was only too ready to agree with all this, and yet I did not know how to refuse the award without seeming even more presumptuous. In real distress, for it made me very unhappy to feel that my fellow writers were against the choice, I could only continue making melancholy preparations to go to Stockholm and accept the award which had been given me so unexpectedly and without any knowledge on my part that I was even considered a candidate.
It is only honest to say that I am sure the blast from my fellow writers fell upon me with a severity they had scarcely intended. I had for years worked so entirely alone in my writing, in such remote places in Asia, among people who could not understand my yearning to associate with others, especially Americans, who were writers and with whom I could communicate as kindred minds, that I was oversensitive to this American criticism which did indeed fall upon me too soon. And it must be confessed that I have never quite recovered, though years have passed, so that I have been too diffident, ever since, to mingle much with American writers or, perhaps, to undertake my proper responsibilities with them. To go among them even now revives painful memories of that autumn in 1938, when I was still new in my own country, still eager and hopeful and, as I can see now, absurdly worshipful toward my elders in the golden field of American letters.
And all this leads me to the kindly memory of Sinclair Lewis, himself a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As I said, I met him at a P.E.N. dinner, the only one, I think, which I have ever attended, and he sat next to me. I said very little because I felt reticent before so great a writer, and I listened with appreciation to what he said. He was already sad and disillusioned, and I felt a sort of reckless honesty in his words, his fine homely face turned away from me most of the time so that I had to listen carefully while he talked quickly on. Suddenly my turn came to make a little speech, and I got up, intensely mindful of the criticism from some of the very persons who sat that night before me, and looking back to what I had been taught in my Chinese childhood, I told them somehow, and I cannot remember exactly the words and I did not think them important enough to write down, that I had long ago learned that a mere teller of tales is not to be considered a literary figure, and that my novels were only stories to amuse people and make a heavy hour pass a little more easily, and a few more sentences of the sort. Mr. Kung would have approved all I said.
Sinclair Lewis, however, did not approve. When I sat down again, he turned to me with an animation sparkling with anger.
“You must not minimize yourself,” he declared, and I remember every word because they fell like balm upon my wounded spirit. “Neither must you minimize your profession,” he went on. “A novelist has a noble function.” And then, as though he understood all I had been feeling, he went on to speak of that function, and how a writer must not heed what others say. I would weary, he said, of the very name of The Good Earth, for people would act as though it were the only book I had ever written, but never mind people, he said, never mind! He had often wished, he said, that he had never written Main Street, so sick did he get of hearing people speak of it as “your book.”
“You must write many novels,” he cried with an energy intense and inspiring. “And let people say their little say! They have nothing else to say, damn them!”
What comfort that was from him, and how warmly I felt toward him ever after! Years later, when I heard that he had died in Italy so alone that he was reduced to playing his beloved chess games with his maidservant — though he said sadly she was so stupid that she could never remember how the knight moves — I wished that I could have known of his loneliness and could have made some return for his kindness to me. But I had supposed that a man so famous and so successful would have been surrounded by old and faithful friends, and I cannot understand how it was that he was not. I had heard of his faults and difficulties, but his genius was a burden heavy enough for him to bear, and because of it all his sins should have been forgiven, certainly by his friends.
I made this pilgrimage, therefore, to Sauk Centre and today I went about the town, trying to see it as perhaps it had seemed to him. I went into a little grocery store and asked the proprietor, a youngish man, if he knew of Sinclair Lewis. Oh, yes, he said, everybody knew about him here. They hadn’t liked him much after his Main Street, but people got over that and nobody cared now.
“Is there a monument to him anywhere?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” the man said cheerfully, weighing hamburger meat for a young woman with a fat baby, “there wouldn’t likely be any monument put up to him — not here.”
“Can you tell me which was his house?” I asked. He told me in an offhand way while he wrapped the meat and the young woman stared at me.
“It’s not open to the public,” he warned me. “It belongs to other people now.”
I thanked him and went away and found the house, a sober, comfortable middle-class house with gables and a porch and a neat lawn. And why, I wondered, should that fiery, honest, impatient spirit have come out of such a house? What accidental combination of elements produced him? I could only see him bursting out of those walls, and out of the town and what it stood for, loving it so much that he hated it for not being all he wanted it to be and knew it could be.
That was the way he loved his whole country, and that, too, I can understand.
Forest Haunt, Vermont
Our journey ends here in the Green Mountains of Vermont and across my memory stretch the broad reaches of our country. I am heartened, as always, by its size and its variety. There are many alarming possibilities in the fluid trends of our culture, and when I am oppressed by one shadow or another, as at times every thinking creature must be oppressed in the light of human history, I take to the car and, with as many of the family as possible, make a cross-country tour, sweeping widely and yet slowly enough to talk with people as I find them. Without fail I come home with confidence revived. The mere size of our land is an obstacle to any man who might imagine himself a Hitler or a Stalin. Yet size alone would not be a safeguard without the variety of our people, the many minds, each thinking with extraordinary vitality and independence within his individual limits. This variety is due, I suppose, to the variety of our ancestors and the customs they brought with them when they came here as immigrants to make a new country for themselves. We have not lived long enough together to become unified as the Chinese are, their racial differences all intermingled and melted into a common color, and their habits smoothed into uniformity by centuries of living together.
The Germans were well educated, far better than we are on the average, nevertheless they succumbed to Hitler, mainly perhaps because Germany is so small as to be physically manageable by one man and his adherents. And yet Russia succumbed to what is now called Communism, although she is so vast. But her people were ignorant and miserable and her intellectuals were persecuted and imprisoned, and when peasants and intellectuals revolt together, revolution is inevitable, although out of revolution invariably there comes chaos or dictatorship, and history is the proof.