Valedictory

WORLD So WIDE (250 pp.)--Sinclair Lewis--Random House ($3).

Before his death in Italy two months ago, Sinclair Lewis finished his 22nd and last novel and called it World So Wide. It is an awkward, rambling book, often close to a caricature of Lewis at his best. But it will be read for what it is: "Red" Lewis' valedictory to his fellow Americans.

World's hero is Hayden Chart, 35, an architect who loses his pretty, nagging wife Caprice in an automobile accident for which he blames himself. Ridden by guilt (but not very hard) and by boredom with his old life in Newlife, Colo., Hayden sets out for Europe to recover his lost youth and to learn some of the things they never taught him at Amherst--the glory of the Middle Ages, for instance.

Lundsgard the Magnificent. "Oh, let yourself be happy!" cries Hayden to himself, and falls in love, first with the city of Florence, and second with a Midwestern female scholar named Dr. Olivia Lomond. The affair with Olivia reaches its decisive stage in a chilly mountain inn. Gushes Hayden: "I'm not fit to love you!" Counters Olivia: "The wild highlander in me has come to life again . . . thank God. Dearest Hayden . . . quit smothering yourself."

Hayden burgeons, but he still has a lot more to learn about the wide world. Some of it he learns with pain and dismay from Professor Lorenzo Lundsgard, lately of Hollywood. A new, if feebler, edition of that pious fraud, Elmer Gantry, with a touch of Berzelius Windrip, the magnificent Lorenzo plans a Technicolored crusade to convert America to the gospels of Culture and Leadership, meanwhile scooting across Europe and sweeping up historical tidbits as with a vacuum cleaner. Lorenzo also sweeps up Olivia. Hayden falls into the eager arms of Roxy Eldritch, a freckled, redheaded home-town girl with a pert tongue, a figure that no man can keep his hands off, and "the voice of a bird flying at dun twilight over the western plains."

Milord the Major. In World So Wide, Sinclair Lewis is again the Midwesterner who discovered the world and could not get over it. In one passage which almost recaptures the spirit of Dodsworth, Lewis observes: "Mr. Henry James was breathless over the spectacle of Americans living abroad and how very queer they are. . .But just how queer they are, Mr. James never knew. He never saw a radio reporter, never talked to an American Oil Company proconsul gossiping in the Via Veneto about his native Texas . . . Mr. James's . . . young American suitor, apologetic for having been reared in the rustic innocence of Harvard instead of the Byzantine courtliness of a bed-sitting-room at Oxford, has been replaced by the American flying major who in Africa, Arabia, China, Paris is used to being courted as the new Milord."

Lewis caught the shirttails of a vision here--the spectacle of America going out into the world to stay. But World So Wide never manages to hold on to the vision.

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