Monday, Dec. 22, 1930

Sauk Center & Plate of Gold

In a taxi to Sweden's Royal Palace last week drove Mr. & Mrs. Sinclair Lewis. The Lord High Chamberlain, Baron Rude-beck, and the First Lady in Waiting, Countess Lewenhaupt led them into an antechamber abuzz with guests. After a pause a silver trumpet sounded. Gustaf V, King of Sweden and of the Goths and Wends entered escorting Princess Ingeborg (his brother Carl's wife, the King of Denmark's sister), followed by the rest of the Royal Family. All Ladies of the Court were in black, for Queen Victoria of Sweden (No. 1 patient of best-selling Memoir-Writer Dr. Axel Munthe) has been dead only since April 4.

As the State Banquet (on gold plate) began, red-faced, protuberant-eyed Author Lewis found himself beside Princess Ingrid, blonde Royal granddaughter, thus had a definite edge of precedence over the three other Nobel Prizemen present: Medical Researcher Dr. Karl Landsteiner (Manhattan), Chemist Hans Fischer (Munich) and Physicist Sir Chandrase- Hara Venkata Raman of Calcutta (TIME, Nov. 24). Buxom, brunette Mrs. Lewis had at her elbow His Majesty's youngest brother Prince Eugen, 65. She remarked heartily afterward, "I have a date with him for Sunday."

Noticing that an extra, bemedaled servitor waited exclusively upon His Majesty, Prizeman Lewis jested:

"Perhaps he got those medals for the glorious soup he cooked in 1896."

Another Lewis jest: "I certainly congratulate you" (this to the Swedish Royal Family in general) "on keeping awake during that two-hour ceremony this morning."

Seeing King Gustaf prepare to smoke, Prizeman Lewis fished in his pockets for a cigaret. "When informed that no one but the King might smoke," cabled United Press, "Mr. Lewis left the cigaret in his pocket, but his face clearly reflected a strong Democratic sentiment."

Invitations to the State Banquet read "Home going at 9:30." Punctual to the minute, Gustaf V & family withdrew to their private apartments for His Majesty's nightly bridge game. Guests found their way out.

Not for Babbitt. Contrary to reports, it was not only for 'Babbitt that Author Lewis was raised to the Nobelity. His official citation, released last week by the Swedish Academy:

"The 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to Sinclair Lewis for his powerful and vivid art of description and his ability to use wit and humor in the creation of original characters."

172,946 Kroner. Prize presentations and the prizemen's acceptance speeches were at separate ceremonies. Each Nobel check for 172,946 kronor ($46,350) was encased in a sleek portfolio. Redder and redder flushed red-haired Author Lewis as the three other prizemen received their portfolios. When his turn came to step up to King Gustaf and receive $46,350 from the Royal hand Mr. Lewis advanced jerkily, bowed abruptly, deeply.

"Our Giants." Even more nervous two days later, Prizeman Lewis paced up & down a hallway in the Stockholm Stock Exchange, jerked out his watch repeatedly, fussed with his tie. But when the moment came for him to face the Stock Exchange hall, packed with the elite of Sweden, Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Center, Minn, conquered himself, spoke straight out and clearly the great speech of his life.

He spoke in English. Time and again his understanding Swedish audience rocked with laughter, found plenty of wit & humor in what the prizeman said:

". . . Poverty is not for the artist in America. They pay us, indeed, only too well. He is a failure who cannot have a butler and a motor and a villa at Palm Beach, where he is often permitted to mingle almost in equality with the barons of banking. But he is oppressed ever by something worse than poverty, by a feeling that what he creates does not matter; that he is expected by his readers to be only a decorator or a clown, or that he is good-naturedly accepted as a scoffer whose bark is probably worse than his bite and who probably is a good fellow at heart; that he does not count in a land that produces eighty-story buildings, motors by the million and wheat by the billions of bushels. . . ."

Such was the Lewis keynote: that men like himself suffer burning soul-frustration in the U. S., where "criticism ... is a chill activity pursued by jealous spinsters, former baseball reporters [i. e. Heywood Broun], and acid professors. . . . Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead."

Such a one, Prizeman Lewis indicated, is Princeton's Professor Emeritus Dr. Henry van Dyke, member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters who recently criticized the Nobel award to Babbitt's creator as a "backhanded compliment" to America (TIME. Dec. 8). Flaying the 50 academicians as a group, Mr. Lewis nevertheless made ten exceptions, evinced a weakness for: Nicholas Murray Butler (president of the Academy), Wilbur Lucius Cross, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, James Trus-low Adams, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Brand Whitlock, Edith Wharton, Booth Tarkington. But the Academy, he declared, "does not represent literary America today, it represents only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow!"

Reeling off a list of "our giants," Prizeman Lewis seemed to place three first:

Theodore Dreiser--"Without his pioneering I doubt if any of us [U.S. authors] could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life, beauty and terror."

Eugene O'Neill--"Who has done nothing much in the American drama save to transform it utterly in ten or twelve years from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and greatness."

Upton Sinclair--"Whether you admire or detest his aggressive Socialism. . . . He is internationally better known than any other American artist. . . ."

"Lucia Brides." In the dawn after the Lewis speech Mr. & Mrs. Lewis woke up in their hotel, blinked at two Swedish maidens wearing crowns of lighted candles. Known as "Lucia Brides," they served coffee, an old Swedish custom observed in the dawn each Dec. 13. Sensing that a photographer had sneaked into the room to flashlight the prizeman & wife in bed, pajama-clad Mr. Lewis tusseled with the fellow, threw him out.

Comment. "Sinclair Lewis," said Stockholm's Nya Dagtigt Allehanda "is a noisy savage." "Lewis," declared Tidningen, "is sincere." "Lewis is no charlatan," said Poet Eric Axel Karlfeldt, secretary of the Swedish Academy.

At Princeton, N. J., Dr. van Dyke observed: "Who would be so unkind as to interrupt the bubbling joy of the author of Elmer Gantry in receiving the Nobel Prize?" Prizeman Lewis had hoped that Dr. van Dyke would not "demand the landing of U. S. Marines at Stockholm to protect American literary rights." Princeton's patriarch rejoined: "Why send the marines to Stockholm to interfere with the Babbitt? Just tell it to them."

"So far from rejecting their Main Streets as Mr. Lewis urged." snapped the New York Herald Tribune, "most Americans have become rather proud of them, much prouder, we are bound to say, than they can feel of Mr. Lewis in his hour of awful nakedness at Stockholm.

''. . . Babbitts . . . continue to inherit the earth."

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