I was filing away some of my grandparents’ papers the other day when I spotted a short letter addressed to my grandmother, Cecile Belle Adam, in October 1940. It was a simple letter about missing a dinner engagement or similar and it made me start wondering why do we bother keeping such old correspondence. Then I looked at who sent it and immediately thought: Could it be? Could it be THE Sinclair Lewis? The Nobel Prize laureate for literature? Not a chance, I thought, and filed it away.
But it was nagging me so I dug out the letter today and Googled ‘Sinclair Lewis signature’. And lo and behold, THE Sinclair Lewis was indeed asking for a rain check so he could catch up with Grandma and Grandpa.
Why would one of the most well-known American novelists of the mid-1900s want to be asked again to spend some time with my grandparents? I have no idea but can only speculate. I did some research and found an almost identical letter Lewis wrote earlier in the month amongst some archival material at St Cloud State University. There was also a collection of letters Lewis wrote to his mistress before and after he wrote to Grandma. Same paper, same format, same typewriter … and same return address. The story started to unravel.
That autumn Lewis had driven through Madison and loved the town and during a get together with the University chancellor offered to teach a class in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin during the 1940/41 term. The University and the city were abuzz with having such a well-known writer in its midst. Ten years earlier Lewis had become the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and still was riding high on his fame. In 1940 he seemed to be going through a rough patch in his life. He was separated from his second wife and his 10-year-old son and was quite fond of the drink. He had a mistress, who was half his age, who joined him in Madison and then asked the University Theater to run a production so his ‘niece’ could play a part between 23-26 October. He rented a huge house on Summit Avenue a short walk from grandpa’s parsonage.
Meanwhile, Grandma and Grandpa were living an idyllic life and were well known in social circles around Madison. Grandpa was recently appointed as the minister at University Methodist Church right across the road from the University of Wisconsin and loved his work. Grandma had published her first novel, The Red of Dawn, three years earlier and had just won a prize at the University of Wisconsin for her play Calling Mr. and Mrs. America. My dad was in his senior year at Madison East High School and Uncle Carl had just started his first year at the University of Wisconsin as a journalism major.
Who knows how Grandma first caught Lewis’s attention. She formerly taught English at university so perhaps she had connections with the English Department at the UW. She probably saw Lewis as a kindred spirit as they were both ‘novelists’. Maybe Lewis just happened to stumble in to church and heard Grandpa preaching. In one of his letters to his mistress Lewis said he hadn’t made many acquaintances in Madison, so being new in town perhaps he was eager to mingle with the locals and just enjoy a Sunday afternoon home-cooked meal. From the sounds of the letter, Grandma invited Lewis but then had to renege on the invite and make a quick trip to Ohio to check up on her ailing father, Manford McCrosky.
Grandma and Grandpa never got to give Lewis that rain check. A few days after writing to Grandma, Lewis showed up at the English class he was teaching and impulsively and without warning told his 24 students that he was leaving. He explained to the students that he had taught them all he knew after only five classes. The next day he was gone. For the University, its whirlwind courtship and divorce with Sinclair Lewis remained a puzzling mystery and the stuff that campus legends are made out of. For Grandma, her chance to mingle with one of the literary greats of her time vanished. But there was good news … her father pulled through the operation and lived another 10 years to a grand old age of 85.
