This one was a bit of an enigma.
Here’s the plot summary, courtesy of Wikipedia:
The novel follows the heroine, Ann Vickers, from tomboy school girl in the late 19th century American Midwest, through college, and into her forties. It charts her postgraduate suffragist phase in the early 20th century. As a suffragist, she is imprisoned, and her experiences there lead her to become interested in social work and prison reform. As a social worker in a settlement house during the First World War, she has her first sexual affair, becomes pregnant, and has an abortion. Later, having become successful running a modern and progressive prison for women, she marries a dull man, more out of loneliness than love.
Mired in a rather loveless marriage, she falls in love with a controversial (and perhaps corrupt) judge. Flouting both middle-class convention and that of her progressive social circle in New York, she becomes pregnant by the judge, having a son.
I saw a lot of clues early on that Lewis was doing something subversive -- portraying his female protagonist as an actual female, with a mind and drive of her own, not subservient to any man.
At Ann’s gate, Ben complained, “Aw, gee, Ann, why haven’t you got a fellow? You never did have a fellow. Gee, I wish you were my girl!”
Ben was profoundly astonished and embarrassed by being smacked with a hearty kiss, and more astonished that Ann followed it up with, “You’re sweet, but I’ll never be anybody’s girl!” and dashed into the house.
And for a while, Lewis’s narrator seems to be on Ann’s side.
“Jiminy, Ann Vickers is funny,” Observed Mildred Evans. “She’s crazy! She says she don’t want to get married. She wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or somethin’, I dunno. She’s crazy!”
Oh, Mildred, how wise you were, how wise you are! Today, married to Ben, have you not the best radio in town? Can you not hear Amos ‘n’ Andy, or the wisdom of Ramsay MacDonald relayed from London? Have you not a Buick, while Dr. Ann Vickers jerks along in a chipped Ford? Do you not play bridge, in the choicest company, while she plays pinochle with one silent man? Good Mildred, wise Mildred, you never tackled the world, which will always throw you.
Good-night, Mildred. You are ended.
Frankly, when it comes to Sinclair Lewis novels, that is exactly the kind of content I come for. Tear those small-minded people down, Lewis! But in the context of this novel, that authorial intrusion certainly seems like Lewis is on Ann’s side -- Ann and her quest for a realized life without any subservience to men.
The Injured Small Boy
Ann goes to college, and draws the attention of one of her professors, Glenn Hargis, Ph.D. Ann finds him smart, and somewhat amusing.
But she could not go on being meek and reverent with him -- the bright young student with the sage master. She did not deceive herself about him, as she had with Adolph Klebs, which was discerning, for Adolph Klebs was far more or a piece, far more consistently selfish and contemptuous than Glenn Hargis, Ph.D. She was soon answering him a placid “Uh-huh” instead of a breathless “Oh, yessss!”
He resented it. “You don’t take me seriously!” he said plaintively.
“Well, do you?”
“I most certainly do! Well, perhaps I don’t. But you ought to. I don’t pretend to have any better mind than you, Ann, but I happen to know more.”
“So does everybody. I’m the executive type, I guess. I’ll always have people working for me that know more than I do, only I’ll run ‘em. I don’t think it’s any especial virtue to be a walking encyclopedia when you can buy the nice sitting kind, second-hand, for fifty dollars!”
“I’m not an encyclopedia! My purpose in class is to inspire the students to think for themselves.”
“Well, I’m thinking for myself -- about you, Dr. Hargis, so you ought to like that.”
“You are the most offensive young woman!”
“Honestly, I don’t mean to be! I guess I am. I don’t mean to be. But somehow, all men, including my father -- especially he -- have always seemed to me like small boys. They want to be noticed. ‘Mother, notice me! I’m playing soldiers!’ And that Boston preacher they had in chapel last Sunday: ‘Young ladies, notice me! I’m so noble, and you’re just poor little lambs that I’ve got to lead.’ If he’d heard some of the giggles at the back of the chapel!”
“And,” irritably from Hargis, “I suppose you charming maidens giggle at me in class, at the back.”
“No, we don’t. We get awfully thrilled. You make Richard Coeur de Lion as real as President Taft.”
“Well, I ought to. He was a lot realer. Did you know, by the way, that Richard was a fair poet and a first-rate literary critic? He said…”
Dr. Hargis was off, agreeable as ever when he forgot himself, and Ann was off, listening, agreeable as ever when she forgot him as a man and listened to him as a book talking.
A book talking. But not a man. No, not a man. Men are such little boys, after all.
But Hargis is important. He pushes her. In goading her, he shows his desire for her to be for something more than “just a girl.”
“After all, Ann, you’re typical of all women; you’re realistic enough about things that don’t touch your emotions; you weigh the butter and count the change, so the poor wretched serving-maid can’t cheat you out of one cent. But you refuse to ask yourself what you really do believe, and whether your belief came by honest thinking or was just inherited from the family. And some day you’ll have the same -- probably worthy but certainly irrational -- the same faith in your husband and your sons! Just a commonplace woman, after all, my dear Lady Scholar!”
“I think you’re beastly!”
“I know I am! I don’t for a moment, though, want to rob you of the consolation of your superstition. I just want you to understand yourself -- that’s the chief purpose of college isn’t it? -- and so long as you’re a sweet, serene, wholesome Hausfrau, don’t try to be a razor-edged intellectual also!”
They even attempt a love affair of sorts, Ann far less committed to it than Hargis.
She was not startled; she was comfortably pleased when he put his arm round her and drew her cheek down to his shoulder. She snuggled there, warm against the tweed. But she was annoyed when he lifted her cheek to kiss her, when he touched her breast.
Not much experienced, she had yet known enough dances, enough sleigh rides, not to be utterly naive. “Oh, Lord, do all men follow this same careful-careless technique? All the same? And expect you to be surprised and conquered? Just as all cats chase mice the same way, and each thinks it’s the first bright cat to discover a mouse? Now the idiot will drop his arm and paw at my thigh.”
He did.
She sat up, furious that in betraying himself as just another Model T out of the mass-production, he betrayed her also as nothing but a mechanism, to be adjusted like a carburetor, to be bought like a gallon of gas. She threw off his arm, as his hand smoothed her thigh. “Oh, stop it!”
“Why, Ann! Why, my Ann! Are you going to spoil it by--- You go and spoil it all by thinking beastly thoughts, when we were so happy, together, away from the campus---”
“Beastly!” She was more furious. “I don’t mind your trying to seduce me. (Only you can’t!) But you’re old enough to not do the injured small boy!”
“I wasn’t trying to seduce you!”
“Weren’t you?”
“You make me sick, all you nuns, with your books and your little committees and your innocent little songs! Emotionally ten years old! Green-sick! And you’ll keep yourselves from life till you’re safely decanted and marry insurance men and live in bungalows with plate-glass in the front doors! When you might live -- have all the world -- purple Greece and golden Italy and misty England---”
“I don’t see just what being seduced has to do with visiting purple Greece and misty England. New way of paying for Cook’s Tours, I should think!”
“Everything! It has everything to do with it! Women who aren’t afraid, who have rich, exciting emotional experiences, they don’t get stuck in the suburbs; they see the world -- no, not just see it, like a tourist, but know it, live in it where they choose, mistresses of their own fates. You jeer, you try to be funny, when I bring you the wisdom and grace of Europe, along, of course, with what the European hasn’t got, what the American man has, the loyalty and dependability and kindness and--- You idiot!”
To her considerable astonishment, she was seized and kissed soundly, so that she choked. She stopped despising him, and stopped being rational and lofty, and her lips seemed alive. “Oh, please!” she begged.
“Don’t you want to be a real woman, not just an educated phonograph? Don’t you want to feel, to have your whole body burn, to know glory, and not just timidity in a pinafore?”
“I do but--- I’m not ready---”
“Shocked like a Sunday school brat!”
“I’m not shocked at all! Good heavens, this is the modern age! It’s not 1890! I’ve studied biology. But one doesn’t do these things lightly. I’d have a lover, if I wanted him enough, that particular him!”
“You wouldn’t! You’re too afraid!” He kissed her again, coarsely, fiercely. She was blinded a moment, for a moment thrilled, as though she were a barren estuary through which the returning tide was gushing. Then she was cold and empty as he overdid it. He was too realistic to be real.
“Stop it, I said!” she demanded. He loosed her but he stared hopefully, the ambitious little boy, sure that he really was going to the circus, and he urged, “You have no passion!”
“Oh, yes I have! Since we seem to be rather frank, I’ll tell you that I did feel the beginnings of a thrill, just now, till you decided to try the role of cave-man. Wude and wuff! Oh, Dr. Hargis!”
“No passion. Printer’s ink for blood. You’re a biological monstrosity, you and all the girls here. Too superior, you think, to meet a man on his own honest grounds! Biological monstrosity, that’s what the so-called well-bred American woman is! Not one atom of healthy, splendid passion!”
“Could it possibly occur to you that I might have plenty of passion for some men but not for you? Possibly you aren’t the heroic and tempting male you think you are. Once, I wanted to call for a shoemaker’s son who worked in a grocery. He was a male. But you -- fingering at seductions, turning your history into little smart-aleck attitudes! I’d rather be seduced by the Anthony Hall janitor!”
He threw his coffee pot into the rucksack, swung the sack brusquely round his shoulders, and tramped off, down the wood-road, not turning back.
She wanted to call to him. She didn’t want to be seduced -- not now at least -- but he was her intensest friend -- at his worst he was warmer and more solid than any girl---
She piped up a feeble “Glenn!” but too late. He was out of sight.
Then she was touched by the small boy who had been so proud of his little lunch, his European knapsack, his copper coffee pot, his wine that he could not afford.
“Maybe he was right. Maybe I just talked myself into virtue,” said the moral young woman who had defied the vile seducer.
It is passages like that that makes me think Lewis is really exploring territory here -- trying to divine the true nature of women, if not just the true nature of a woman like Ann Vickers. Does she feel passion? Is it the same kind of passion that is felt by a man? In his frustration it is easy to see that Glenn Hargis doesn’t know, but beneath that there is also the sense that neither does Sinclair Lewis.
The Entire Range of Human Imbecility
And like Lewis, his female protagonist is also exploring -- the world dominated by men and the seemingly strange rules that govern it.
In that spirit Ann becomes a suffragette, and is briefly jailed for engaging in illegal protests.
As day by day [her fellow female inmates] became more knowable and more human, more like girls in Waubanakee or Point Royal, so did the jail itself seem less extraordinary and strange with dread. It was not a “prison,” smacking of mysterious terror; it was, like the Black Maria, just a place, a place where she happened now to be, as she might have been in a railway station, bored with waiting and thinking about the inefficiency of the world. For it was not the cruelty of the whole system of laws and courts and prisons which she resented now so much as its futility. “Let’s assume that the court is right and that I am a criminal,” she fretted. “All right. What does the state accomplish by shutting me up here for two weeks? The theory is that I am a violent rowdy who injures the little policeman and threatens the mayor. What is there about sitting idle for a fortnight among professional prostitutes that is going to make me so gentle, that is going to teach me so much self-restraint, that when I come out the policeman and mayor will be safe?”
She saw that war was stupid, that conducting business for the profit of a few owners was insane, that thrones and crowns and titles and degrees were as childish as playing with tin soldiers, but that in the entire range of human imbecility, there was nothing quite so senseless as imprisonment as a cure for crime … and that the worse the crimes became, the more serious it was that there should be only so barbaric an effort to cure.
She’s questioning. She’s attacking. She thinks she knows and can do better. She is even confronted (i.e., Lewis has her confront), the strangest of the strange rules in the world governed by men.
“Gee, oh, gee, Miss Vickers, I guess maybe you guess -- Oh, Gawd, and I was so careful! I’m going to have a kid. That dirty Morris! I’ll claw his eyes out! He ain’t written to me, not one word, for a month.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s over two months now. And my boss will fire me -- he’s awful’ strict -- he’s a swell boss -- he never tries to make none of us girls. But it’s my Dad I’m scared of. Oh, Gawd, Miss Vickers, honest, he’ll kill me!”
“Want to marry Morris?”
“That Mamzer! Oh, I wouldn’t mind. But I guess he’s got a new girl and he’ll tell me -- oh, gee, you don’t know how violent that guy gets -- he’ll tell me to go jump in the lake! If I only had a fellow like yours! But it’s my Pop. We’re orthodox, and Morris, he ain’t hardly better than a Goy. Honest, if I was to marry him, Pop would come after us both with a shotgun. And if I was to have a kid without marrying, he’d come after me with a coupla guns!”
She was trying to be humorous. Her voice cackled with the effort. She even smiled sweatily. But Ann could not smile back. Tessie’s brittle, anemic youth was gone already, in ten weeks. Her hair was stringy and dribbled out in greasy locks under the brim of her cheap, smart pink hat, and in her cheap, smart near-silk stockings were long runs through which peeped black hairs. She looked forty, and ill, and abandoned.
Ann flitted across to sit on the arm of Tessie’s chair, to smooth her shoulders, and there was more tenderness than usual in the cool, professional voice by which a social worker protects herself from the agony of too much sympathy:
“It’s hell, Tess. I understand. What can I do?”
“I got to get rid of it, somehow. I’ve tried exercising and running up and down stairs till … I fainted, this afternoon, just after I run up five flights to our fur loft. I guess I got to have a doctor do something. A girl told me about one, but he’s a stinker. You got to find the name of a good one for me!”
Instantly, in ten seconds, Ann skimmed through the whole subject of abortion and came out convinced. … Life demanded that normal women bear children, without the slightest consideration of the laws passed by preachers, or by small-town lawyers in legislatures. But these laws still remained. And society punished by a lifetime imprisonment in the cells of contempt any girl who was false to them and still true to the life within her that was the only law she knew. Then it was as righteous for a girl thus threatened to flee from her neighbors’ spitefulness as it was for a revolutionist to flee from the state’s secret police.”
Strong words. And clear. Clear as day. What is Lewis doing here? Is this a feminist novel?
A Human Pigeonhole Named Miss Vickers
And yet, through it all, there is Ann searching, always searching, not for something to believe in, or for a cause to fight for, but for herself, for who she truly is.
Ann was living in a hotel dreary and small as the Hotel Edmond, but large enough to entertain her intimates -- Pat Bramble, Dr. Wormser, two or three residents whom she had known at Corlears Hook. It was gratifyingly cheap. She knew that her days with Ardence were numbered, and she was saving. Ardence was generous in money; Ann had eight thousand a year, as against the three thousand, including board and room, she had had at Rochester. She wanted to be extravagant; she pored over python slippers and Talbot hats in the shop windows. But she did not want them so much as she wanted a half year of wandering or of sitting still, away from offices and “case records” filled out with the agony of a human soul reduced to a few figures. She wanted again to find out whether there was still an individual called Ann, with the ability to love and be angry and foolish, or only a human pigeonhole named Miss Vickers.
She has been a social worker for some time now. Working at a grind so aptly described. The agony of a human soul reduced to a few figures. She decides to go on a European vacation. On the ship that takes her across the ocean, she observes and interacts with the strange and desperate characters driven, like her, by their ennui.
There was the diamond buyer. As he crossed from twice to six times a year, he knew all about ships. Certainly, no captain could have been so glidingly eloquent in explaining the automatic steersman, no head steward so emphatic about what to order from the menu and wine-list. But he made all his information apropos of a little affair. He managed to insinuate “Let’s sleep together” even when he said, “I saw a porpoise this morning.” Ann did not, theoretically, mind being seduced again. Nice time for it, vacation, with no lecture engagements. But she did object to being not an individual woman, but merely a coupon.
There was the boy just graduated from Princeton, going over to study at the Sorbonne. He was refreshing as cold water. But he seemed so young! Herself eight years out of college, Ann felt a hundred, a little scarred and clinging to optimism only by sheer will and obstinacy, when the boy yearned to her, “You’re in social work! Oh, I’d like to be! Don’t you think that, after all, the most important thing in the world is justice?”
Dear child! What did it mean? What was “justice”? She could have answered, a year ago. “He was right, Pontius Pilate,” she brooded.
You know, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, let me say here that it’s the prose. For me, you primarily read Lewis for prose like this. And here it comes in full force.
There was the sound, earnest, unamorous, unidealistic group of drinking men in the bar who, by the end of the passage, had almost admitted her as a fellow male. They did not, like the diamond merchant of the theatrical manager, snoop about women’s cabins, their hackles rising at the scent of lingerie. They took it out in high-balls and endless guffawing stories. They were the mining engineer, a couple of newspapermen, an Austrian doctor, a cranky and conservative manufacturer from Chicago, and Italian-American antipasto importer, a Scotch bank-manager from Trinidad, and an ex-congressman from Arkansas.
They called themselves the “True Tasmanian Sabbath-Observance and Rabbit-Hunting Association.”
They were reality.
Ann scolded herself for that artless conclusion.
How were these hearty, unsubtle scoffers more “real” than poets unveiling the mantled soul, than harried reformers who viewed a human being not as a hundred and sixty pounds of flesh maintained by beefsteak and rest upon horsehair mattresses, but as integers in a social equation that expressed paradise?
“Well, they just are more real!” said Ann.
And, indeed they are. Real in the way that perhaps only Lewis can see.
With her drinking set, forgetting a world in which the population was divided between worried “uplifters” and “problems,” Ann regained much of the wisdom she had possessed as a child of ten in Waubanakee, and perceived that most men were neither spectacled angels nor tubercular paupers, but solid, stolid, unpicturesque citizens who liked breakfast, went to their offices or shops or factories at seven or eight or nine, admired sports connected with the rapid propulsion of small balls, cherished funny stories and the spectacle of politicians and bishops, quarreled with their wives and nagged their children yet were fond of them and for them chased prosperity, were unexpectedly competent in the small details of their jobs and, despite the apprehensions of prophets, had somehow managed to get through 30,000 years since the last ice-age, to invent coffee and safety-razors and oxy-acetylene welding, and promised to muddle on another 30,000. And they were kind, where they understood. Their most dismaying monkey-capers -- wars, gossip, malice, vanity -- were due not to inherent fiendishness but to lack of knowledge and lack of imagination.
God, Lewis is like this -- and so is Ann since she is his protagonist and her thoughts and the narrator’s voice are often too well entwined to be entangled. They don’t hate people (or men). They just characterize them so damn well.
No! The True Tasmanians again taught her that the mass of ordinary humans were not the hopeless morons and sadists that Mamie Bogardus, Belle Herringdean, and even, when she had to rise before eight-thirty, Dr. Wormser thought them, but sound stock, lacking only some unusualness of the glands, or a chance crisis, to be saints or heroes. And that was good. For if most people were fools, as the highbrows Ann had been meeting seemed to think, then why vote or start hospitals or write articles or support the public schools or do anything whatever but collect a set of Shakespeare and a ton of beans and retire to a cave?
It was not so light or obvious a discovery of Ann’s that people were actually people.
For a century the preachers had wailed that most people were not people at all, but subhuman or fiendish, because they drank and fought and wenched and smoked and neglected the church. Now, since war-days, there had arisen in America a sect which preached just as earnestly that most people were not people at all, but subhuman or even Baptist, because they did not sufficiently drink, fight, wench, denounce the church, and smoke before breakfast. In trusting the human race to get along, then, Ann was not merely revolutionary; she was nihilistic.
With mental apologies to the Battleaxe and Eleanor, she guiltily enjoyed the exclusively male companionship of the True Tasmanians, from eleven to one, and five to midnight, delighted to be accepted as a fellow male, who would not be too easily shocked by good clean dirt; the more delighted at being the subject of feverish gossip by all the other women aboard.
The True Tasmanians did not encourage her to go on expecting to see a fairy-tale Europe, entirely of gray towers in a forest green, and herds of strange deer, lily-white. What they expected to see, she gathered, was the Savoy Bar, the racetrack at Longchamps, and offices in Cheapside and on the Boulevard Haussmann and Unter den Linden. But she was bound for the Tower of London, the chapter-house at Salisbury, and a cliff of golden samphire above the sea.
This is a journey, a passage from one place to the next, and like the Hero’s Journey through the Underworld, Ann meets strangefolk along the way, men who accept her as one of them, and who will guide her in her trials ahead, her trials not of defeating a dragon, but of knowing and understanding herself.
She discovered now that the purpose of travel is not to seek new people, but to escape from people, and in unfamiliarity to discover one’s unfamiliar self.
One’s Unfamiliar Self
And who is this unfamiliar self? This Ann Vickers? Decidedly, she is not the feminist hero that I first thought that she might be.
For an hour she sat forward in a deep chair, stooped over, biting a knuckle. A hundred times she thought, “I’ll telephone him. I will! No. I won’t!” She rose, mechanically, her head filled with the vision of him and of his kisses; she drained his cocktail, washed the shaker and glasses, put them away, and unseeingly caressed Jones the cat when, to make her notice him, he vainly played at cat-and-mouse with a ball of paper. “I’ll telephone him. I must! I can’t let him go, not to that beastly little flapper!”
She turned on the radio, but after a moment of Terry Tintavo crooning “That Atlantic City Mooooon” she snapped it off viciously.
Mostly, through her hour of agony, she sat like a softer “Thinker.” She “went to pieces.” That is the accepted phrase. The fact is the opposite. The scattered pieces of her at last flew together; the pieces of Ann Vickers that had been dropped in so many corners: in Humanitarianism, which, being interpreted, means putting diapers upon old evil judges and old evil tramps; in sketchy dabblings at psychology, in affection for friends, backdrifts to the conditioning of a village childhood, fear of being afraid, desire for an impossible perfectionism with some good saline humor about that spectacle of herself trying to be perfect, in a muted pride at having become of species of Great Woman, in the romantic guidance of the shreds of Keats and Tennyson that she still remembered, in the drag of such daily and inescapable ordinarinesses as unpaid bills, and the taste of fresh peas, and the smell of pinks on a street barrow, and the corn on her tow that made a little ridiculous some interview with a state official, and how much to tip the hotel janitor who, after all, had only fixed her bathroom light this past month, and the ever-imagined sound of Pride’s crying, and her neighbors’ radios when she wanted to sleep, and the regret that she had forgotten to send flowers to Dr. Wormser on her birthday -- all these dissevered pieces of Ann Vickers flew together and she became one integrated passionate whole, a woman as furious for love as Sappho.
To the eye she was a modestly dressed and comely woman sitting on the edge of an overstuffed chair in one cell of a skyscraper hotel scientifically provided with electric lighting and electric refrigeration, in the cinematic city of thousand-foot towers and steel and glass and concrete. But all the layers of niceness and informed reasoning and adaptation to the respectability of concrete had been stripped off, till she was naked, nude as a goddess -- a woman tribal leader in the jungle.
Rarely did she think in words, but chiefly in emotions, explosive and scarlet. Yet now and then her inner words were clear:
“I do want to add a millionth of a degree to civilization. Like Florence Nightingale. (Not so cranky, I hope!) I do like a job of some dignity and respect. I like power. I do! I do not want to spend my life paying grocery bills! And I can put it over. I have! Power and initiative and the chance to give Kittie Cognac a chance.
“And I don’t care one hang for all of it! I want love; I want Pride, my daughter. I want to bear her. I have a right to her. I want to teach her. I would be glad if some ranchman out of an idiotic ‘Western novel’ came along and carried me off. I’d bear his children and cook his beans. And I wouldn’t become a drab farm-wife. I’d learn grains, soils, tractors. I’d fight for the cooperatives. I’d go into politics. And all the time I’d have Pride and my man---
“But maybe I couldn’t have Pride and my ranchman and still have ambition, any more than I can have Pride and Lindsay and ambition. How simple we were when we used to talk about something called ‘Feminism’! We were going to be just like men, in every field. We can’t. Either we’re stronger (say, as rulers, like Queen Elizabeth) or we’re weaker, in our subservience to children. For all we said in 1916, we’re still women, not embryonic men -- thank God!
She seems to be toying with it here -- toying with the idea that she can be a woman and she can be powerful -- but then retreats to the far more traditional idea that, as a woman, she can’t be a man, and therefore, obliquely, not powerful.
And indeed, in the end, she surrenders entirely to the sheltering power of men, embracing both motherhood and her identity as something worth sacrificing for their growth, their strength, their wise power.
She made secret Jesuitical arrangements with her night nurse that when Russell came in before ten the nurse was to look agitated and throw him out with speed.
She did.
When he had fled before that sternness which is common to American traffic policemen, secretaries to British cabinet ministers, and nurses universally, Ann gave her son -- her son! -- his late supper (her breasts trembled as though they were stroked by a lover’s hands), then wriggled into a position for exhausted sleep, and did not sleep. She missed something. She tried to keep from admitting that it was Barney, but she caught herself speculating whether, before Nature’s last sardonic trick on women, she would have time to bear Barney another child.
She was looking at the door, saw it hitch slowly open, as if by itself, and Barney was there, smiling. He came swiftly to her, sat on the edge of her bed, raised her -- while she held her arms out to him and struggled to sit up -- and kissed her, with no word. When he had laid her head on the pillow again and stroked her cheek, she felt utterly healed.
“It’s the Saints themselves have watched you!” he said. “I’ve been on the phone to Malvina Wormser all day. I knew about the boy ten minutes after he came. And I’ve been standing in a doorway across the street till Spaulding (that louse!) was gone and I was sure he wouldn’t come back. But I’m not going to do any more sneaking like this!”
“How did you get in, after hours?”
“Bribed two people, bullied two more, and made love to two others -- exactly the right mixture. And I have a letter from Malvina in my pocket, in reserve, if I need it.”
“Have you seen our boy?”
“I certainly have!”
“Approve of him?”
“Enormously.”
“You agreed with me you wanted a girl. D’you mind?”
“I lied. I wanted a boy, like the devil. My only son! And listen to me. I’m not going to give him up to any damned Russell-laddie--”
(“But he’s so touching!”)
“--and I’m not going to give you up to Russell any longer. I don’t know how but--- We’ll go into that later, when you’re stronger. … I love you!”
“Darling, what shall we name him?”
“Matthew. After my father. (No, he wasn’t the saloonkeeper; that was his father; my old man was worse -- he was a contractor, with a heavy fist, a great sense of humor, and no ethics -- A West Street Lincoln.) Besides, Mat is an honest, decent nickname for a kid to have.”
“Yes! Mat Dolphin, my son -- I’m already scared of him! Mat! What a come-down! When I was a girl, I thought that if I ever had a son I’d call him something nice and romantic -- a Lady Novelist’s name -- Peter or Raoul or Noel (especially if born in summer!) or Geoffrey or Denis. Then Mat! And I love it -- and you! What a gorgeous brown suit! I’ve never seen it before. English?”
“Made here. Heather, from Isle of Mull. Smell nice? Sniff.”
“Lovely. A man invited me to tramp through the Scotch highlands once.”
“Yes, Lindsay is very fond of them, or says he is. But I warn you that he never actually tramps more than five miles a day.”
“Beast! You always know too much. If I were married to you, I wouldn’t get away with seeing lovers in my bedroom after ten o’clock.”
“You would not! I saw your friend Lindsay the other day.”
“That’s nice. Keep him. I’m in love with a wild Fenian, and I want no respectable men about me. ‘---that sleep o’ nights!’ Lindsay? I don’t remember the name. I remember no names---” She yawned, immensely. “Remember no names in the world except Barney and Mat.”
“You’re to go to sleep now.”
“Sit by my bed a minute. Pull that chair over and sit by my bed. Just a minute. And hold my hand.”
Safe now, guarded and warmed by his hand, she was instantly asleep. It may have been an hour later, it may have been two hours, when she was awakened by the nurse’s coming in and clucking with professional horror and personal sentimentality. Her hand was still in his, unmoving, and in the subdued light she could see him sitting stiffly, chewing an unlighted cigar. His arm, she wailed, must ache abominably. “You poor darling, you go and rest now!”
His good-night was to kiss her drowsily closing eyes, unspeaking.
“And I used to think, in Feminist days,” she brooded, as she floated into sleep, “that the whole physical side of love -- kisses, caresses, little pattings -- was vulgar, and suited only to high-school boys, milkmaids, soppy spinsters, people who sing about Moon and June and Spoon. Holding hands? Banal! I was going to have a high spiritual romance. Sit across from the well-beloved and discuss the funding of municipal gas works, I suppose! I have a high spiritual romance! And Barney’s hand seems to me, this particular day, like the sheltering hand of God!”
I quote these at length because there is so much power in every scene, not just in a chosen phrase or two. Lewis is indeed showing, not telling, and everything, everything seems to support his theme. Russell (Spaulding) is Ann’s dull husband, Barney Dolphin is Ann’s extra-marital lover, with whom she has this child Mat, a child to replace her Pride (a daughter she previously aborted).
And if that isn’t blunt enough for you, mark the closing paragraphs. Here, note that Barney has just recently been released from prison.
Barney was pacing the raw new garden below, in shirtsleeves, smoking a pipe. She guessed that he was planning how the rose plot might be better laid out.
-- He is now tending her garden. --
When she came down he had breakfast ready for her.
“But that was wonderful of you, Barney!”
“Is the coffee good? Is it really good? Is it?
“Marvelous!” (And by coincidence it was.)
-- Would she have said any different? --
“Well, that’s good. Ann!”
“Yes, milord.”
-- Milord! --
“I think that soil where the rose-bushes are planted is wretched. You ought to put in enormous quantities of fertilizer.”
“Yes---”
“And I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to sell this place, even if we do go West. We have--- I should say you have, an excellent investment.”
“Of course, I’ll do what you think.”
“And while I was in the pen, I read your paper on the relationship of crime and tuberculosis, in the Journal of Economics. I’d question your figures. Shall I check up on them?”
-- He is correcting the mistakes she made in being a professional. --
“Oh, would you? That would be terribly kind. Oh, Barney!” said in meek ecstasy the Captive Woman, the Free Woman, the Great Woman, the Feminist Woman, the Domestic Woman, the Passionate Woman, the Cosmopolitan Woman, the Village Woman -- the Woman.
-- That is diabolical, the way Lewis brands her the Woman, folding all of the gender-bending and gender-affirming roles that she has played into one overriding avatar of womanhood, the one now subservient to her obligations to her husband and child. --
He paced the floor. In horror she saw that he was unconsciously following a fixed pattern: nine feet up, two feet over, nine feet back, two feet over, nine feet up, unchanging, while he grumbled, “Though it’s the most unholy nerve in me to criticize you in anything, my dear!”
She said, and she made it casual as she could, “Did you ever think, Barney, that we’re both out of prison now, and that we ought to have sense enough to be glad?”
“But how are you---”
“You, you and Mat, have brought me out of the prison of Russell Spaulding, the prison of ambition, the prison of desire for praise, the prison of myself. We’re out of prison!”
“Why! We are!” Again he paced the floors, but his path now was not nine feet by two.
Just a Girl
Perhaps this ending should not have surprised me. After all, early on, in the opening pages, there is an encounter that should have tipped me off. Ann is a young tomboy here, playing with some of her young male friends, all pretending to be and arguing over who should be Christopher Columbus, with Ann taking on that role over the objections of her friends that she is “just a girl.”
They turned to see, standing on the bank, a new boy. Ann stared with lively admiration, for this was a hero out of a story book. Toward such mates as Ben and Winthrop, she had no awe; except in the arts of baseball and spitting, she knew herself as good a man as they. But the strange boy, perhaps a year older than herself, was a god, a warrior, a leader, a menace, a splendor: curly-headed, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, smiling cynically, his nose thin and contemptuous.
“What d’you kids think you’re doing?”
“We’re playing Columbus. Want to play?” The crew were surprised at Ann’s meekness.
“Nah! Playing!” The stranger leaped aboard -- a clean leap where the others had panted and plumped. “Let’s see that gun.” He took the revolver from Columbus, casually, and worshipingly she yielded it. He snapped it open and looked into the barrel. “It’s no blame good. I’ll throw it overboard.”
“Oh, please don’t!” It was Ann who wailed, before Winthrop, the owner, could make warlike noises.
“All right, kid. Keep it. Who are you? What’s your name? My name is Adolph Klebs. My dad and I just come to town. He’s a shoemaker. He’s a Socialist. We’re going to settle here, if they don’t run us out. They run us out of Lebanon. Haa! I wasn’t scared of ‘em! ‘You touch me and I’ll kick you in the eye,’ that’s what I told the policeman. He was scared to touch me. Well, come on, if we’re going to play Columbus. I’ll be Columbus. Gimme that gun again. Now you kids get busy and line the side of the boat. There’s a whole slew of redskins coming off in canoes.”
And it was Adolph-Columbus who now observed, “Bang, bang, bang!” as he introduced European culture to primitive Americans by shooting them down, and of all his followers none was more loyal, or noisy, than Ann Vickers.
She had never before encountered a male whom she felt to be her superior, and in surrender she had more joy than in her blithe and cocky supremacy of old.
That kind of gives away the game, doesn’t it? Females feel joy in surrendering to males, no matter how much they squawk and crow about their own supremacy.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
