Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, and Nathanael West's A Cool Million in 2024

In his biography of Sinclair Lewis Richard Lingeman argues that Lewis, like many of America's other literary greats of the early twentieth century, was a victim of the "cultural" Cold War, which in line with the Anti-Communism elevated to national religion status at the time denigrated any literature that admitted that there was such a thing as society and wrote about it with open eyes, while exalting literature that did the opposite in the process. (It seems entirely symbolic that the clinically insane, wrong-about-pretty-much-everything CIA functionary James Jesus Angleton was deeply into Modernism, and an admirer and friend of Ezra Pound.)

Lingeman also suggested that these many decades later, in a less overheated atmosphere, Lewis' reputation might enjoy something of a revival.

So far as I can tell no such thing has happened--in part because the atmosphere never became less overheated, the cultural Cold War's victory reflected not in that it ended with the completion of its ostensible job of defeating the Soviet Union and the movements with which it was associated, but in that it became so entrenched for so long that no one even noticed it anymore as it went on doing its job of fighting off dissents that neither began nor ended with the Russian Revolution and the state it created. The critical standards of the twentieth century remain the critical standards of the twenty-first century in a society that, as Philip Cunliffe put it in his remarkable counterfactual history Lenin Lives!, has been organized around the defeat of the left, the Cold War never ended on this level or any other--as we are endlessly reminded by those who scream "Marxist!" as an epithet, usually incorrectly for lack of actual Marxists to condemn or even remind them what Marxism actually looks like (Did they even remember that Marx guy? Or Lenin?), and the supposedly horseshoe theory-abiding center continues to punch relentlessly at an ultra-marginalized left that has always been and very much remains its real target while coddling an ever-more powerful right.

Indeed, if Lewis' book about a fascist takeover of America, It Can't Happen Here (1935), has got a bit of attention in recent years--the book, which seems to have become a bestseller for a while, and a stage play based on it--it does not seem to have revived interest in his broader body of work. Or for that matter, in the other writers who similarly essayed the theme of a fascist takeover of the country, as Nathanael West did a year earlier than Sinclair in his novel A Cool Million (1934). An adaptation of Voltaire's Candide to Depression-era America, with the creed of Horatio Alger aspirationalism standing in for old Pangloss' optimism, it is relevant that as hapless Lemuel Pitkin has his misadventures across a supposed Land of Opportunity, in the background a sleazy ex-president of the United States/criminal businessman is, in the name of all those received values, leading a fascist movement with the intent of making himself an American dictator. In contrast with Candide, where at the end of all the horrors they suffer the protagonist and his friends at least find a bit of peace by the shores of Marmara at tale's end, Pitkin's destruction is complete--and America's, for said ex-president has indeed realized his object of making himself America's Fuhrer.

Searching news stories of the past decade I came up with only a single mention of the book in a piece in Vulture way back in 2016. To the credit of its author Christopher Gilson and his editors the piece "gets it right," but it says a lot that no one else with a platform at all comparable gave it such attention at the time, or has given it such public mention in the many years since. This would seem an indication of West's star having sunk even lower than Lewis' over the years, in spite of his having had a bit of help from Hollywood (the 1975 cinematic adaptation of his other book, Day of the Locust, having at least a semi-classic status, while the name with which it furnished a young Matt Groening has of course been immortalized). However, much else may be at issue here as well--not least the greater harshness of the satire, evident in the way that if Lewis' book at least saw America in the end save itself from the dictatorship of Berzelius Windrip, there is no such redemption for the country in West's novel, closing as it does on the aforementioned unhappy note.