Birthday of a Preacher Man: Elmer Gantry Turns 80

From an article in the Wall Street Journal. I think this essay is so good, I'm lifting it in its entirety.

By WILFRED M. MCCLAY
December 28, 2007; Page W13

You probably didn't notice it, but that old rogue Elmer Gantry turned 80 this year. A surprising thought, perhaps, given what a fixture Sinclair Lewis's 1927 fictional portrait of a bogus and amoral itinerant Midwestern preacher has become in both our speech and our imaginations. Was there really a time when we didn't have Elmer to kick around -- or to kick others with? It is hard to imagine. No less than the camp meetings on the frontier or the Scopes Trial or the stadium revivals of Billy Graham, the character Elmer Gantry has shaped the world's impressions of American religion.

Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry in the 1960 movie.

A crude, profane, hard-drinking and oversexed football player from Paris, Kan., Gantry, using his histrionic gifts and his "arousing barytone," latched onto the ministry because of the power it gave him over others. The book related Gantry's picaresque wanderings from one ministry to another, always looking out for the main chance, always complicating his life with amorous dalliances, always ready to beat a hasty retreat, always emerging from his scrapes with ambitions undimmed.

His creator was a gloomy alcoholic Midwesterner with a personal life just as rootless and messy as Gantry's. But Lewis (1885-1951) gave us a cultural icon whose name is invoked every time there is a scandal involving sex, money and a preacher.

Not many writers can claim similar success in adding to our storehouse of powerful archetypes -- or our cupboard of easy clichés. But this is the chief consolation for a literary career that has otherwise faded into obscurity. Lewis's reputation peaked in 1930, when he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature. With this award and the invention of two cultural icons -- Gantry and the crass businessman George F. Babbitt -- Lewis has a secure place in the history books. But that does not mean that, except as cultural artifacts, his books are much worth reading today.

The textbooks assure us that Lewis is one of the great satirists of modern American life, telling hard truths about the shallowness and hypocrisy of Middle America through a series of important novels -- from "Main Street" (1920) to "Babbitt" (1922), "Arrowsmith" (1925), "Elmer Gantry" and "Dodsworth" (1929). There is some truth to this. But the adult reader is likely to tire quickly of Lewis. His descriptions of even the simplest scenes are permeated with snobbishness and juvenile editorializing; his plots are studded with absurd and implausible twists. And his characters are as simplistic as those in comic books. They sometimes change, but they do not grow or develop. And there is no larger view behind his criticism, no sense of what kind of world Lewis would favor over the gimcrack one that he loathed so much but could not stop writing about.

In short, there is plenty of obsession but almost none of the marks of high novelistic craftsmanship in Lewis's books, particularly "Elmer Gantry." As Rebecca West wrote in a scathing contemporary review of the novel, Lewis's satire fell short because he did not "possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others." In other words, the narrowness he described was as much his own as that of the people he depicted. He lacked vision and generosity of spirit precisely because he was still fighting the intramural battles of his native world.

That is not to say that he could not write vividly. "Elmer Gantry," observed sociologists Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, "was as loathsome a character as has ever been born in the mind of an American writer." Completely cynical, without a shred of genuine religious faith or natural piety, Lewis's Gantry is an engine of social-climbing ambition. By the book's conclusion he has made himself into "Dr. Gantry," a major national religious leader whose sermons are broadcast on the radio and who holds an influential pastorate in New York. Even at the end, he barely escapes blackmail by a secretary with whom he has had an affair. But the book closes with Gantry's congregation loudly affirming his innocence and his promise that "We shall yet make these United States a moral nation!" -- even as he is taking note of a new singer in the choir, "a girl with charming ankles and lively eyes, with whom he would certainly have to become well acquainted."

With such gibes directed against not only the sawdust trail but the clergy in general, small wonder that "Elmer Gantry" was so controversial (literally banned in Boston) and such a strong seller (175,000 copies in the first six weeks). It was a deliberate affront to the pious. Lewis had, after all, dedicated the book to the acidulous skeptic H.L. Mencken, "with profound admiration," a clear indication that the book was an intervention in the culture wars of its day. But even its most admiring readers found little to praise in it as a work of literature.

For that reason, the movie version of "Elmer Gantry," made in 1960 and starring Burt Lancaster, was forced to take radical liberties. Director Richard Brooks's screenplay extracted a coherent story from Lewis's sprawling mess, shifting around countless details and slashing away about two-thirds of the text. It invented a significant role for George F. Babbitt himself, transformed another character into a complex agnostic newspaper editor who is both friend and foil to Gantry, and presented established clergymen as men of decency and principle, something that Lewis was loath to do.

It also complicated the character of Gantry, making him a more intriguing human being, a mixture of charlatanism and generosity, of hypocrisy and genuine faith, of self-centeredness and loyalty, of lust and love. The movie also provides development of his character -- all the way up to the conclusion, when a fire engulfs the revival hall, killing scores of the faithful, including Gantry's preaching partner (and inamorata) Sharon Falconer. In the end we see him, seemingly a changed man, walking away from the ruins and quoting Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

We cannot tell what he was walking away from, or putting away. Was it revivalistic showmanship? Or religion in general? Or merely that phase of his life? The ambiguity reflects the moral seriousness with which the movie ends -- a notable contrast to the book's flippant and cynical conclusion and a more fitting basis for us to reflect on the meaning of Elmer's 80th year. Sinclair Lewis created a character larger and more interesting than he knew. You will have to look beyond his book to see it.

Mr. McClay is a humanities professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.