Daria's Bookshelf: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis (1935)
A populist fascist wins the US presidential elections, and nothing else goes right.
If there’s a book for our times, this must be it, indeed. My Penguin edition is dated 2017, and whoever thought of the reprint, bless their souls, for they didn’t now then that, as we say in Russian, those were just flowers — the fruit is yet to come.
The story starts shortly before the US presidential elections of 1936. A populist wins. The US promptly turn into a dictatorship. We’re seeing the unfolding events primarily from the POV of Doremus Jessup, a 60-year-old newspaper editor from a town in Vermont.
For a book on so gloomy a subject1 this book is an oddly delightful read, thanks to its style. A lot of it is very episodic, either descriptions of events or scenes full of dialogue, but nothing it never drags. If it was a painting, you’d see the dance of the brushstrokes. Although I must admit that somewhere in the middle I got a bit tired of more and more descriptions of how exactly this dictatorship worked, because hey, it’s written in 1935! Even Kristallnacht hasn’t happen yet, not to mention the entirety of the WWII and Holocaust! What can he imagine that’s so bad? (As if the French and Russian revolutions didn’t offer enough material already.)
But then it is through these somewhat repetitive descriptions that one big reality creeps onto you, the reader, the reality of how many lives are steamrolled in these regimes. Try as I might to stay out of the news that come from Russia, I still see how another person got arrested for nothing, how another suspect died in a police cell; how a certain prison was turned into a torture camp for Ukrainian POW. In a month it’s a year since Navalny’s death. None of that is a game, it’s not a show, you can’t escape it by turning off you radio or your phone. People suffer and people die. And there’s no way to tell who’ll see it through.
Lewis’s narration may be all sorts of dynamic and light, but the subject allows only for so many moments of respite. Which are then oh so precious not just for the characters. That’s when we all share the bittersweet knowledge of what we’re fighting for.
To make it clear, the book has a lot of heart (and sharp wits!) in the figure of Doremus Jessup and his circle. That’s definitely 80% of the said delight. Doremus just never gives in or up, at least not for long. Does he get scared? Absolutely! Does he get his ass kicked? Plenty of times. Does it discourage him? Hell no. And it’s rather interesting to see a *sixty* year old in that role. Maybe part of the reason for the writer’s choice is that as at 30 or 40, he might still not have enough stubborn integrity in himself, or that that’d probably imply little kids he’d have to actively protect, whereas here the kids are of age and actors in their own right. I don’t know for sure, but I wonder and I also certainly do appreciate this unusual choice. It’s somewhat inspiring even, in the sense that — you’re never done.
Another great aspect is the way the female characters are written, for they are written with loads of respect. Not all of them are admirable, of course, but if they’re not, it’s for their choices which are also done by men. And in the actions of more positive characters there’s plenty of vigour and strength, and it’s never the same kind, they’re each their own person. Quite a refreshing portrayal even from our times, 90 years later!
The only possible non-PC bit comes in the shape of the mastermind behind the presidential campaign and the dictatorship, who is gay and generally rather decadent. But then, I guess — I hope! — this narrative choice isn’t justified by homophobia but by the attempt to show utter hypocrisy because the presidential campaign was, unsurprisingly, built around good old Amurica and traditional values, with which this guy hardly aligns.
Also, on a totally different note, half the time I was questioning either my knowledge of English, or Lewis’s, or generally American English of the time, because that syntax made me pause too often, so that I make it out. I wonder if that’s why I vaguely remember that Lewis’s other book, Babbitt, was somewhat of a struggle, although I think I liked it in the end.
Oh, and did I already mention that there’s a war with Mexico?
I’ll finish this little log entry with one of my favourite exchanges from the book, where we see Jessup, a Liberal, talk with Karl Pascal, a Communist, and which made a point, several points even, I never thought of previously but I’m going to ponder for some time:
‘[Doremus speaking:]… Another thing: I’m a middle-class intellectual. I’d never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I’ll have to accept it. That’s my class, and that’s what I’m interested in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want — well, all right, say it, we want cake! And when you get a proletarian ambitious enough to want cake, too — why, in America, he becomes a middle-class intellectual just as fast as he can — if he can!’
‘'Look here, when you think of 3 per cent of the people owning 90 per cent of the wealth—’2
‘I don’t think of it! It does not follow that because a good many of the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke — that plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don’t get any better paid than stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are the same. It isn’t what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class — whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I’m tired for apologizing for not having a dirty neck!’
‘Honestly, Mr Jessup, that’s damn nonsense, and you know it!’
‘Is it? Well, it’s my American covered-wagon damn nonsense, and not the propaganda-aëroplane damn nonsense of Marx and Moscow!’
‘Oh, you’ll join us yet.’
‘Listen, Comrade Karl, Windrip [the US dictator] and Hitler will join Stalin3 long before the descendants of Dan’l Webster. You see, we don’t like murder as a way of argument — that’s what really marks the Liberal!’4
Wiki calls the book a dystopia, which is fair enough. I’d still prefer to stick to calling it just a novel. Makes it more generally accessible, maybe?
Oh, on that note — allow me to share this mind-blowing visualisation from 2021 of what the wealth of America’s richest people looks like. See if you have patience enough to reach the blue ribbon.
Allow me to remind you again, this book was published in 1935. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and USSR which, among other things, split Poland was signed in 1939.
Well, I must be a liberal after all.
Please tell me it had a happy ending with ice cream and puppies 🫣