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Re: [pf] "Babbitt" by Sinclair Lewis
by Molly Williams
02 December 2000 03:15 UTC

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Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Allusions has a lot to say about Babbit
and Babbittry!. To wit:

"A business or professional man [not a labourer] who comforms
unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards. Babbitt was the chief
character in the scathing 1922 Sinclair Lewis novel of the same name
that looked hard at smug, middle-class, unimaginative, insular,
conformist America.

"Reread the novel and you'll discover that George Follansbee Babbitt was
a little more complicated than that. He was dimly dissatisfied with his
life, had a tentative fling with bohemianism, took up a flirtation with
an attractive widow, even uttered a few unconventional opinions. Alas,
social pressure and fear led him to abandon his small rebellion and
settle back into conformity and boosterism. Babbittry means this form of
general behavior and outlook.

"H.L. Mencken, the ascerbic critic, pounced on this character with joy:
'As an old professor of babbittry, I welcome him as an almost perfect
specimen -- a genuine museum piece. Every American city swarms with his
brothers...He is no worse than most, and no better; he is the average
American of the ruling minority in this hundred and forty-sixth year of
the Republic. He is American incarnate, exhuberant and exquisite.'

"The term in use, by Ward Just in the 'Camelot' chapter of this 1997
novel /Echo House/:
'Eisenhower's Babbitts had been expelled and discredited, even Nixon
gone for good, disappeared somewhere in the California wasteland.
Suddenly every Democrat wanted to be in Washington, indisputably the
epicenter of American life.'"

So John, you are in good company with Mencken, and my only other comment
on all this is that a Babbitt sounds like something I struggle not to
be; I don't want social pressure and fear to determine how I live.

~ Molly Wms.