Main Street, Sinclair Lewis [red white and royal blue hardcover txt] 📗

He made conversation: “I didn’t know you were a bosom friend of the Perrys. Champ is the salt of the earth but somehow I can’t imagine him joining you in symbolic dancing, or making improvements on the diesel engine.”

“No. He’s a dear soul, bless him, but he belongs in the National Museum, along with General Grant’s sword, and I’m⁠—Oh, I suppose I’m seeking for a gospel that will evangelize Gopher Prairie.”

“Really? Evangelize it to what?”

“To anything that’s definite. Seriousness or frivolousness or both. I wouldn’t care whether it was a laboratory or a carnival. But it’s merely safe. Tell me, Mr. Pollock, what is the matter with Gopher Prairie?”

“Is anything the matter with it? Isn’t there perhaps something the matter with you and me? (May I join you in the honor of having something the matter?)”

“(Yes, thanks.) No, I think it’s the town.”

“Because they enjoy skating more than biology?”

“But I’m not only more interested in biology than the Jolly Seventeen, but also in skating! I’ll skate with them, or slide, or throw snowballs, just as gladly as talk with you.”

(“Oh no!”)

“(Yes!) But they want to stay home and embroider.”

“Perhaps. I’m not defending the town. It’s merely⁠—I’m a confirmed doubter of myself. (Probably I’m conceited about my lack of conceit!) Anyway, Gopher Prairie isn’t particularly bad. It’s like all villages in all countries. Most places that have lost the smell of earth but not yet acquired the smell of patchouli⁠—or of factory-smoke⁠—are just as suspicious and righteous. I wonder if the small town isn’t, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix? Some day these dull market-towns may be as obsolete as monasteries. I can imagine the farmer and his local store-manager going by monorail, at the end of the day, into a city more charming than any William Morris Utopia⁠—music, a university, clubs for loafers like me. (Lord, how I’d like to have a real club!)”

She asked impulsively, “You, why do you stay here?”

“I have the Village Virus.”

“It sounds dangerous.”

“It is. More dangerous than the cancer that will certainly get me at fifty unless I stop this smoking. The Village Virus is the germ which⁠—it’s extraordinarily like the hookworm⁠—it infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces. You’ll find it epidemic among lawyers and doctors and ministers and college-bred merchants⁠—all these people who have had a glimpse of the world that thinks and laughs, but have returned to their swamp. I’m a perfect example. But I shan’t pester you with my dolors.”

“You won’t. And do sit down, so I can see you.”

He dropped into the shrieking desk-chair. He looked squarely at her; she was conscious of the pupils of his eyes; of the fact that he was a man, and lonely. They were embarrassed. They elaborately glanced away, and were relieved as he went on:

“The diagnosis of my Village Virus is simple enough. I was born in an Ohio town about the same size as Gopher Prairie, and much less friendly. It’d had more generations in which to form an oligarchy of respectability. Here, a stranger is taken in if he is correct, if he likes hunting and motoring and God and our Senator. There, we didn’t take in even our own till we had contemptuously got used to them. It was a redbrick Ohio town, and the trees made it damp, and it smelled of rotten apples. The country wasn’t like our lakes and prairie. There were small stuffy cornfields and brickyards and greasy oil-wells.

“I went to a denominational college and learned that since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. From college I went to New York, to the Columbia Law School. And for four years I lived. Oh, I won’t rhapsodize about New York. It was dirty and noisy and breathless and ghastly expensive. But compared with the moldy academy in which I had been smothered⁠—! I went to symphonies twice a week. I saw Irving and Terry and Duse and Bernhardt, from the top gallery. I walked in Gramercy Park. And I read, oh, everything.

“Through a cousin I learned that Julius Flickerbaugh was sick and needed a partner. I came here. Julius got well. He didn’t like my way of loafing five hours and then doing my work (really not so badly) in one. We parted.

“When I first came here I swore I’d ‘keep up my interests.’ Very lofty! I read Browning, and went to Minneapolis for the theaters. I thought I was ‘keeping up.’ But I guess the Village Virus had me already. I was reading four copies of cheap fiction-magazines to one poem. I’d put off the Minneapolis trips till I simply had to go there on a lot of legal matters.

“A few years ago I was talking to a patent lawyer from Chicago, and I realized that⁠—I’d always felt so superior to people like Julius Flickerbaugh, but I saw that I was as provincial and behind-the-times as Julius. (Worse! Julius plows through the Literary Digest and the Outlook faithfully, while I’m turning over pages of a book by Charles Flandrau that I already know by heart.)

“I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute: I didn’t want to face new streets and younger men⁠—real competition. It was too easy to go on making out conveyances and arguing ditching cases. So⁠—That’s all of the biography of a living dead man, except the diverting last chapter, the lies about my having been ‘a tower of strength and legal wisdom’ which some day a preacher will spin over my lean dry body.”

He looked down at his table-desk, fingering the starry enameled vase.

She could not comment. She pictured herself running across the room to pat his hair. She saw that his lips were firm, under his soft faded mustache. She sat still and maundered, “I know. The