BABBITT STEW

Closing this Sunday, November 3, in Washington, D.C. is Babbitt, Joe DiPietro's stage adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel.

None other than Matthew Broderick plays the title role in the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production, which I was lucky enough to see a couple of weeks ago when I was in D.C.

Strange to think that Ferris Bueller is old enough to play George Babbitt. We might tend to picture the role as the province of actors like Guy Kibbee, who played it in a 1934 movie version, or the grinning, wolfishly genial Edward Andrews, who played the character...

...in the 1960 movie version of Elmer Gantry.

But time marches inexorably on, and carries even an antic high school hustler like Ferris into the realms of complacent bourgeois middle age. And Broderick, who was born five days before I was in 1962, makes the role his own with a sort of dreamy, disassociated voice, as if he's halfheartedly playing at being an adult.

Even though it's in the third person, the book depends so much on describing its hero's sometimes barely conscious internal narratives that I wondered how it could really make the transition to the stage. DiPietro was way ahead of me. He locates his play in a library--the lovely, pristine set is by Walt Spangler--where a variety of attractive actors in contemporary clothes, in a variety of ages and races, are browsing.

The cast eventually starts reading aloud from Babbitt. Then a return cart is pushed onstage, with a large object on top, under a sheet. Said object turns out to be Broderick as we first see George Babbitt, rising from bed in the morning, brushing his teeth, having his breakfast. As George's day progresses, the readers, or "storytellers," assume the other roles. The device ingeniously allows for a diverse cast, and it allows them not only to narrate but sometimes to comment, omnisciently and often ironically, on the action. 

I was very keen to see this show, as I've been fascinated by all things Babbitt in recent years. In the early 2020s, I noticed an old Signet Classics edition of the book...

...in one of those little take-one leave-one libraries in an Italian ice place my family and I frequent, and reflected that I had never read the celebrated yarn, even though I love Lewis, and like so many people was astounded at the terrifying prescience and relevance of his 1935 It Can't Happen Here.

So I picked Babbitt up. A year or so later, I read it.

Even those who have never read Babbitt may have some idea of what it's about. The book was a sensation when it first came out in 1922, to the extent that the title character's name became a byword for a person of George's type, and his sort of behavior became known as "babbittry." 1945's Ziegfeld Follies even includes a duet between Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly to a song by George and Ira Gershwin called "The Babbitt and the Bromide," in which two gents exchange the same mindless pleasantries in all of their meetings, separated by decades, the only variations being costumes and dance styles.

The book itself, however, is the chronicle of two years in the life of George Babbitt, a real estate man and loyal Republican, Presbyterian and civic booster in the midwestern city of "Zenith." A husband and father, George is a happy consumer--proud to own "the best of the nationally advertised brands"--and an unquestioning social conservative and conformist.

Lewis follows him in painstaking detail as he goes through his days, exchanging commonplaces with colleagues and lecturing his son, venturing into public speaking and local politics, throwing parties angled at social climbing and going on camping trips and business trips. A shocking crime committed by his best friend shakes him up; he has an affair and eventually even flirts with socialism, but he never really grows much as a person. 

What an extraordinary work. I had a funky reaction to it, though; I'm guessing I can't be the only person who ever felt this way about it. I can't think of one episode in the book that didn't ring true, and still relevant, to me. It's amazing and appalling, for instance, when you read the scene of the racist talk between Babbitt and the guys in the smoking-car and you realize that you could set the same scene today, one hundred fucking years later, between a bunch of awful old white guys talking among themselves, and you wouldn't need to change a word. (This scene is omitted from the play, by the way.)

But as to the general method that Lewis uses to observe his hero, I had to wonder whether, if you followed anybody around--certainly including and maybe especially me--on our daily routines and our little adventures, and accurately reported our nattering internal monologues, you wouldn't get largely the same results: the same platitudes and evasions and self-justifications. Sure, the political and social values would shift a bit, but using the banality of Babbitt's inner life as Exhibit A in your indictment of his specific values seems specious to me. It had the odd effect of making me feel a little protective of old Georgie against the snarky God's-eye-view narration with which Lewis describes him. Or is it possible that was the intention? In any case, to paraphrase Flaubert, "Georges Babbitte; c'est moi."

The stage version had some of the same effect on me; listening to a D.C. audience chuckle condescendingly at George's hypocrisies, I had to wonder how many of us, if any, saw ourselves up there, at least a little bit.

By the way, I was astounded by another detail about the book's influence. Apparently J.R.R. Tolkien, of all freaking people, was among its admirers; he claimed that the word "Hobbit" derived from "Babbitt" because "Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place." I'd love to see a sequel to Lewis in which Babbitt has to infiltrate a dragon's lair.