from them, we should get busy telling some of the stories about America that have never been told.
A book like Main Street, which made such a stir, is like Main Street. It is like “I’ve seen all Europe” tourists, who have spent two days in each country in a round-the-town bus.
In a magazine like The American Mercury the stones are also too much of a pattern—they’re all about how the “Deacon Screwed the Methodist Minister’s Wife,” and how the “Town Prostitute Was Put in Jail for Coming to Church on Sunday and Mixing with the Good Folks.”
When you hear people saying about Babbitt—that it is not the whole story and that much more can be said—you agree with them. Then they begin to talk about “the other side” and you lose hope. You see they mean, by “other side,” Dr. Crane and Booth Tarkington.
So far from these being “the other side,” there are a million other sides. And so far from Babbitt being too strong, the stories that may be written about America will make Babbitt an innocent little child’s book to be read at the Christmas School entertainment along with The Christmas Carol and “Excelsior.” The man who suggests the strangeness and variety of this life most is Sherwood Anderson. Or was. I think he’s got too fancy since he wrote Winesburg, Ohio.
A French writer who said there was no real variety in the life of the French because they all had red wine on the table, sat at little tables in cafés to gossip, and had mistresses, would be called a fool. Yet an American will criticize his country for standardization on no better grounds—namely, that most of them are Methodists or Baptists, Democrats or Republicans, Rotarians or Kiwanians.
Babbitt is a very interesting book. But I believe it would be possible for a German writer with a talent similar to Sinclair Lewis to write a book called Schmidt or Bauer which would be just as sweeping a portrait.
Do you want to know what the gentleman looks like? He is much easier to describe than Babbitt.
Tuesday—December 23, 1924: The mystery explained! Today, at American Library, found out what it is:
“Time—that dimension of the world which we express in terms of before
