Baiter to Booster

WORK OF ART--Sinclair Lewis--Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).

If a Soviet reader were asked to name his favorite U. S. author he would probably say John Dos Passes. If the same question were put to a Swede, the first name off his tongue would doubtless be that Nobel Prizeman Sinclair Lewis. But such a loyal Swede would have in mind Author Lewis' earlier, better books (Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry). With such a second-rate novel as Work of Art following hard on the heels of his mediocre Ann Vickers (TIME, Jan. 30, 1933), readers of any nationality can see with half an eye that Sinclair Lewis is slipping. What skimpy satire there is in Work of Art is aimed at literary racketeers. Its main story hymns the praises of a plodding hotelman who rose to the top of his trade.

Fannie Hurst would have choired the paean with more gusto. Horatio Alger would have awarded his hero a more thoroughgoing financial success. But not even Zenith's Chamber of Commerce could have done a more wholehearted job of boosting than this onetime Babbitt-baiter has done.

Myron and Ora Weagle, sons of a small-town hotelkeeper in Connecticut, are as different as brothers can be. Myron is a conscientious worker whereas Ora fancies himself as a poet. When they leave home, Myron is content to get an even more menial job at another hotel, but Ora drifts to Manhattan, his idea of Parnassus. Step by step, but with a fatherly eye more on priggish Myron than on piggish Ora, Author Lewis reports their slow, vicissitudinous careers. Ora finds the fleshpots of Greenwich Village agree with him. He writes one good but unsuccessful novel, the fruit of a brutally selfish love affair with a mulatto girl. Then he supports himself in uneven luxury by literary hackwork (including begging letters), borrowing, sponging. Eventually he develops a flair for playwriting. makes a tidy fortune, goes to Hollywood.

Meantime poor but honest Myron has discovered his career (hotelkeeping) and his ambition (to build and run the Perfect Inn). Through long and unamusing years he works his way up through every job in every kind of hotel until he is making good pay as an expert with a reputation. Then he sinks everything into his Perfect Inn, only to face failure when a murder and suicide on the gala opening night give the place a noisome name. Bloody but unbowed, Myron goes back to an underling's job. The story ends with his running a country hotel in Kansas, scheming to build the Perfect Tourist Camp.

When he writes of the fortuitous tragedy that wrecked Myron's inn. Author Sinclair reports it as he thinks TIME would have:

"Sin in Inn"

"Boniface Myron Weagle strode the floor of the Royal Suite, whisky & soda in hand. 'Let's drink a toast to mv new hotel. the Black Thread (Conn.) Inn, the best lil ole inn in the world,' he indicated. Tycoon B. F. Vince, president & founder of the Brass Institute, price-fixing and high-talk-slinging organization of Yankee pot manufacturers, answered, 'Brother, I'm with you.' The six magnates present, and Mine Host Weagle, drank jovially. It was four o'clock on the morning of June 11, after a successful opening of the Inn. As they swung into 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.' they heard a pistol shot & another. They stopped, aghast. It was merely an incident of conducting a successful roadhouse, however. Nothing had happened save that the motorboat-racing only son of Former United States Senator Burnside Farragut Colquhoun (pron. Caboon), celebrated advocate of the Christian virtues, had murdered self & lady, Cinemactress Paxton."

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