Minnesota Write-Off -- Sinclair Lewis's Martin Arrowsmith as Seeker of Truth
Written: Feb 06 '04 (Updated Feb 07 '04)
Product Rating:
Pros: A classic American novel by a son of Minnesota, one of America's most celebrated writers.
Cons: Not one.
The Bottom Line: An early 20th Century man of both profound moral character and surprising weakness defines the new American Century through his medical practice.
NFP's Full Review: Sinclair Lewis - Sinclair Lewis: Arrowsmith, Elmer...
What propitious timing in these days of politicized health care to read about the moral struggle of a young country doctor as he tries to define who he is – what America really is – by how he practices medicine.
Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was the son of a Minnesota country doctor. He wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning novel Arrowsmith in 1925, shortly after his first successful skewering of American commercial fatuousness and cultural provincialism in the highly-praised novels Main Street and Babbitt, and just before his blistering of homegrown religious hypocrites in Elmer Gantry.
But unlike George Babbitt and Gantry -- whose less than admirable personas were the vehicles of Lewis’ biting satire -- Dr. Martin Arrowsmith is actually the ideal American Archetype – sensitive, moral, honest and deeply caring. This paragon of character has his flaws, but with the help of two other “pure” characters (his main love interest Leora Tozer and his unyieldingly idealistic research partner Terry Wickett) he confronts his failings with an earnestness that sets him apart from others of Lewis' main characters.
However, seekers of satire and cynicism need not fear – Lewis hasn’t sheathed his sharp eye for the ugly and humorous detail of America’s Deficient Character in this tremendous novel. For the noble Arrowsmith is the vehicle Lewis uses to ridicule the politicians and medical professionals we might well recognize from today’s public health care debate.
The Dickensian names tell the story: Congressman Almus Pickerbaugh, Dr. Rippleton Holabird, Medical Director A. DeWitt Tubbs of the McGurk Institute, and Dr. Roscoe Geake, Director of the New Idea Medical Instrument and Furniture Co. of Jersey City, NJ (manufacturer of the famous Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and New Idea Panaceatic Cabinet).
THE BOOK:
Martin Arrowsmith grew up in the small mythical town of Elk Grove in the small mythical midwestern state of Winnemac and studied medicine at the large mythical Winnemac State University in the mythical town of Mohalis near the larger mythical town of Zenith.
Surrounded by every conceivable overbearing not-so-mythical type of medical student – the preachy missionary, the ardent social climber, the money-grubbing striver – Arrowsmith early on carves out a niche for himself as the Pursuer of Pure Science, inspired by the university’s largely-neglected researcher Max Gottlieb.
Lewis recognized that the 20th Century’s new great frontier was science, and in the first quarter century, medical science in particular. So why not create a moral fable about the direction of America’s burgeoning society around this exciting discipline with its immense possibilities and enormous pitfalls?
Fed on the dreams of his hometown’s failed drunken Doc Vickerson at whose knee he first read Gray’s Anatomy, Lewis' Arrowsmith wanders through this novel like a lost soul navigating the hills and dales of hopes and aspirations and fears – his and ours.
One passage in particular underlines this linking by Lewis of medicine and the American heartland as metaphor for the American Spirit. Young Arrowsmith, seeking to clear his mind after a tumultuous and confusing freshman year after which he must decide how to proceed in his studies, takes a summer job as a “roughneck” running phone lines across the Montana prairie:
“The wire gang were as healthy and simple as the west wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled electrical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were scientists. They laughed easily and were content to be themselves, and with them Martin was content to forget how noble he was. He had for them an affection he had for no one at the University save Max Gottlieb.”
Yet Martin has his failings, too. He’s desperately lonely, and foolishly (and not always honestly or forthrightly) seeks love and inspiration from a series of women who reflect the very struggles he is going through in his soul.
There’s Madeline Fox from Zenith who just wants to marry a proper and respectable doctor; the sensitive and commonsensical South Dakotan Leora Tozer with the insufferably provincial parents and brother who nonethless understands his every desire; and New York socialite Joyce Lanyon who needs Martin’s idealism to help her justify her enormous wealth.
Martin flails from sticking to his ideals to a yearning for comfort whatever the price. Through it all, the brilliant Martin Arrowsmith nevertheless remains such a real person that it’s impossible not to root for him as he sinks deeper and deeper into the jumble of medical politics and petty jealousies, and tries harder and harder to stay afloat with his ideals. Lewis makes him so very achingly human in often frank terms:
“It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who was in no degree a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after truth yet who stumbled and slid back all his life and bogged himself in every obvious morass, that Martin’s intentions toward Madeline Fox were what is called ‘honorable.' He was not a Don Juan, but he was a poor medical student who would have to wait for years before he could make a living. Certainly he did not think of proposing marriage. He simply wanted – like most poor and ardent young men in such a case, he wanted all he could get.”
The narrative takes Arrowsmith from Winnemac to South Dakota to Chicago to New York to the Lesser Antilles and back to New York. He suffers tragedies and losses great and small, and finds some moments of happiness amidst a handful of moral victories. Ultimately this vacillating anti-hero reaches the point of no return and must make the final Great Choice of his life (and ours), which Lewis saves for the last page of the novel.
In the hands of this master satirist and cynic, will Martin pick The Lady or the Tiger? Standing in front of an office of the huge McGurk Institute office, trying to decide whether to take a flyer on an expedition to the Lesser Antilles to try and develop an antitoxin for a plague, Lewis -- being a Midwsterner -- sums up Arrowsmith thus:
“Born to the prairies, never far from the sight of the cornfields, Martin was conveyed to blazing lands and portentious enterprises.”
IN SUM:
Martin Arrowsmith is the quintessential American pioneer as doctor, a seeker after truth and nobility in a mostly vacuous and boorish world not worthy of him.
It is appropriate that the paperback edition I picked up in a used book store has on its cover a simple yet eloquent painting by the guru of Americana Grant Wood, titled “Country Doctor.” The image is of a pair of soft-looking hands picking through a basic medical bag.
This book is so well written it reaches out to your eyes and mind. Each word, each paragraph, each chapter is a treat, and I couldn’t put it down. On top of that it's a social document of the first order as relevant today as before, if not more.
This is one great read, and I recommend it highly.
This review is part of Stephen_Murray's Minnesota Write Off. Please check out other participants' contributions by visiting Stephen's profile page; the links are on the bottom: http://www.epinions.com/user-stephen_murray
Written at the height of his power in the 1920s, the three novels in this volume continue the rigorous unmasking of American middle-class life begun b...More at Buy.com
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