Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy by Steven Michels

Author:Steven Michels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Owner of a Lonely Heart: Cass Timberlane

In addition to depicting Lewis’s image of a sound political man that we saw in chapter 3, Cass Timberlane also shows a middle-aged man whose sense of duty and integrity has left him lonely and unhappy. The novel traces how Cass lets his loneliness undermine his stable and rewarding professional life.

Cass is prone to fantasizing on the bench—about bass fishing, reading Thoreau, or just taking a nap. He’s also very much taken with Jinny Marshland, who, as the novel opens, is in the process of testifying in his courtroom. It’s, as “the newer psychiatrists, like the older poets” would have it, “love at first sight,” Cass confesses.[39] Work keeps him busy and satisfied, but he cannot help but being a little blue since his wife, “the costly and chattering Blanche,” divorced him.[40] Blanche was the ambitious one, and when Cass didn’t share her aims, she left him for someone who did. They were not a good match, and he has strong emotions about her even after it ended. “[H]e still loved Blanche enough to hate her,” Lewis writes.[41] Cass would have made a great father, had Blanche ever agreed to it. Indeed, having children, in addition to his fulfilling career and intellectual pursuits, might have given him an outlet for his emotional energies and negated his interest in Jinny.

Cass doesn’t have many friends, which further accounts for his growing desperation. “There’s too little love or friendship in life,” Cass tells Bradd, when he is fearful of losing his wife and his friend.[42] Cass is a good and sincere friend because he is not quick to take friendship; nor is he quick to toss it away. “[A] woman or a man has only four or five real friendships in his whole life,” he explains. “To lose one of them is to lose a chance to give and to trust.”[43] He takes in a cat, Cleo, despite his recognition that she might belong to someone. In that, his loneliness turns the judge into a thief. The best relationship Cass has with anyone is with his cook, Mrs. Higbee, a black woman of sixty. He trusts her opinion and not just because she is free with it; she also happens to always be correct in knowing what is best for him.

Like many of Lewis’s characters, Cass is torn between the life he has and the life he imagines. He sees himself as too devoted to the law to make a good husband but is nevertheless overwhelmed by loneliness. He reflects on “the torture of being bored by the two-frequent presence of his own self,” a common refrain among Lewis’s protagonists.[44] Cass wants a companion, someone who will add to the life he has created for himself without taking anything from it, in the same way Carl wants someone like Ruth. In Jinny, Cass sees the chance for a “tolerant friendship” but also “salvation by passion.”[45] He thinks that he wouldn’t repeat some of the same mistakes he made in his first marriage—marrying the wrong woman being foremost among them.

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