SEMINAR HANDOUT # 1

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

1. THE towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of
steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver
rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully
office-buildings. The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier
generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red
brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted
windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such
grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the
business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes
they seemedfor laughter and tranquillity. Over a concrete bridge fled
a limousine of long sleek hood and noiseless engine. These people in
evening clothes were returning from an all-night rehearsal of a Little
Theater play, an artistic adventure considerably illuminated by
champagne. Below the bridge curved a railroad, a maze of green and
crimson lights. The New York Flyer boomed past, and twenty lines of
polished steel leaped into the glare. In one of the skyscrapers the wires of
the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily
raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and
Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old
shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes
clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and
hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one
roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates
and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful
as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city builtit seemedfor giants.
2. There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was
beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in
that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights. His name was
George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he
made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he
was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could
afford to pay. His large head was pink, his brown hair thin and dry. His face
was babyish in slumber, despite his wrinkles and the red spectacle-dents
on the slopes of his nose. He was not fat but he was exceedingly well fed;
his cheeks were pads, and the unroughened hand which lay helpless upon
the khaki-colored blanket was slightly puffy. He seemed prosperous,
extremely married and unromantic; and altogether unromantic appeared
this sleeping-porch, which looked on one sizable elm, two respectable
grass-plots, a cement driveway, and a corrugated iron garage. Yet Babbitt
was again dreaming of the fairy child, a dream more romantic than scarlet
pagodas by a silver sea. For years the fairy child had come to him. Where
others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited
for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could
slip away from the crowded house he darted to her. His wife, his
clamoring friends, sought to follow, but he escaped, the girl fleet beside
him, and they crouched together on a shadowy hillside. She was so slim,
so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would
wait for him, that they would sail Rumble and bang of the milk-truck.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)

3. Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do

not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it
meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but
he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of
inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.
 (). In his last year at Princeton he read too much and took to wearing
spectacles. I never met any one of his class who remembered him. They
did not even remember that he was middleweight boxing champion. I
mistrust all frank and simple people, especially when their stories hold
together, and I always had a suspicion that perhaps Robert Cohn had
never been middleweight boxing champion, and that perhaps a horse had
stepped on his face, or that maybe his mother had been frightened or
seen something, or that he had, maybe, bumped into something as a
young child, but I finally had somebody verify the story from Spider Kelly.
Spider Kelly not only remembered Cohn. He had often wondered what had
become of him.

4. Down-stairs we came out through the first-floor dining-room to the street.

A waiter went for a taxi. It was hot and bright. Up the street was a little
square with trees and grass where there were taxis parked. A taxi came
up the street, the waiter hanging out at the side. I tipped him and told the
driver where to drive, and got in beside Brett. The driver started up the
street. I settled back. Brett moved close to me. We sat close against each
other. I put my arm around her and she rested against me comfortably. It
was very hot and bright, and the houses looked sharply white. We turned
out onto the Gran Via. "Oh, Jake," Brett said, "we could have had such a
damned good time together. Ahead was a mounted policeman in khaki
directing traffic. He raised his baton. The car slowed suddenly pressing
Brett against me. "Yes," I said. "Isn't it pretty to think so?"

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

5. "I aint done nothing to him." Luster said. "He was playing there, and all of
a sudden he started bellering. What you want to get her started for,
Dilsey said, Whyn't you keep him out of there. He was just looking at the
fire, Caddy said. Mother was telling him his new name. We didn't mean to
get her started. I knows you didn't, Dilsey said. Him at one end of the
 house and her at the other. You let my things alone, now. Dont you touch
nothing till I get back. "Aint you shamed of yourself." Dilsey said. "Teasing
him." She set the cake on the table. "I aint been teasing him." Luster said.
"He was playing with that bottle full of dogfennel and all of a sudden he
started up bellering. You heard him." "You aint done nothing to his
flowers." Dilsey said. "I aint touched his graveyard." Luster said.

6. I went along the fence, to the gate, where the girls passed with their
booksatchels. "You, Benjy." Luster said. "Come back here." You cant do no
good looking through the gate, T. P. said. Miss Caddy done gone long ways
away. Done got married and left you. You cant do no good, holding to the
gate and crying. She cant hear you. What is it he wants, T. P. Mother said.
Cant you play with him and keep him quiet. He want to go down yonder
and look through the gate, T. P. said. Well, he cannot do it, Mother said.
It's raining. You will just have to play with him and keep him quiet. You,
Benjamin. Aint nothing going to quiet him, T. P. said. He think if he down
to the gate, Miss Caddy come back. Nonsense, Mother said. I could hear
them talking. I went out the door and I couldn't hear them, and I went
down to the gate, where the girls passed with their booksatchels. They
looked at me, walking fast, with their heads turned. I tried to say, but they
went on, and I went along the fence, trying to say, and they went faster.
Then they were running and I came to the corner of the fence and I
couldn't go any further, and I held to the fence, looking after them and
trying to say.