Arrowsmith: All that glisters is not a control
A cross-breed of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s melodic writing style and Catcher in the Rye’s conflicted teenage main character, Arrowsmith (and Sinclair Lewis himself) ended up as indelible as neither. Sinclair Lewis was the hottest thing in the 1920’s, winning and rejecting the Pulitzer Prize, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, and out-selling Fitzgerald in every possible way, but fell out of favor by WWII, when copies of The Great Gatsby were distributed to American soldiers so they could dream of making their own Gatsby-esque post-war rise. Arrowsmith specifically had a second coming recently, because people thought it was prescient of the Covid-19 pandemic. In reality, the book doesn’t particularly focus on the mechanics of plagues or baking sourdough during a quarantine.
The book technically focuses on the line between idealism and realism in Martin Arrowsmith’s journey as a doctor and a medical researcher, but the more interesting theme underneath is his obsession with aesthetics. Martin Arrowsmith is completely indecisive at all points in his life — being a doctor vs a researcher, choosing a high-brow society lady or a salt-of-the-earth home girl, being cultured and well-rounded or being 100% a medical savant — and ironically becomes anti-establishmentarian because of external pressures and perceptions. Arrowsmith must live life in extremes, because he is chasing a caricature that he wants to be — the lonely, genius scientist — and cannot reconcile other conflicting parts of his life with this high-minded ideal. When his self-image falls apart, Arrowsmith must literally run away from his life to chase this ideal again.
Arrowsmith grows up in Elk Mills, Winnemac, a fictional rural town in a fictional state. His absentee father is a snake oil salesman and medical quack, peddling fake cures around town, which kicks off Arrowsmith’s interest in medicine. He attends medical school in Zenith, the largest town in Winnemac, and encounters a host of characters who permanently shape his views on medicine. He looks up to Gottlieb, an aloof professor who cares more about his mysterious medical research than the school curriculum’s focus on practical medical training. His archrival is Angus Duer, a ruthlessly efficient medical student who is good at being “successful”. He is closest personally to Clif Clawson, a class-clown type who is uncouth and down to earth. He begins working for Gottlieb in his research lab, gains Gottlieb’s approval, and endeavors to do medical research instead of working in a hospital after graduation. He dates a wealthy English major who has all the accolades of prestigious schools, but isn’t actually smart, and forsakes her for a poor Midwestern nurse, Leora, who truly is. He fights with Gottlieb about his dedication to research after marriage, quits the lab, becomes a private doctor in Leora’s hometown, then a public health official in Iowa, then a doctor at a large Chicago hospital, and finally returns to Gottlieb in a private research think tank where they work on antibacterials. Bubonic plague breaks out, and Arrowsmith and Leora are sent to an island in the West Indies to conduct an A/B test on local residents with his antibacterial discovery. He is initially dedicated to the scientific method, but after Leora dies of plague, he lifts the A/B test and gives his antidote to everybody. The results of his experiment are then inconclusive and he doesn’t get scientific accolades for his life’s work. After Leora dies, he marries a high society lady who funds his scientific research, but he resents the loss of independence his life now imposes. He runs away to a cabin in the woods to continue conducting research in solitude, abandoning his wife and child.
At many points, Arrowsmith has to choose between one world and the other, with Gottlieb representing one pole and Angus Duer representing the other duality. Gottlieb lives in a shack on campus, spends all of his waking hours on bacteriology research, has a mentally disabled wife who essentially doesn’t speak or think, and no other true joys in the world besides research. Angus Duer is the same amount of driven, but in an opposing direction. He studies hard, is valedictorian of his graduating class, immediately enters a prestigious hospital to become a surgeon, and at the same time knows literature and music, has a high-society wife, and gains entrance to all the prestigious social circles. Both of these characters know precisely what they want out of their lives, but Arrowsmith does not. He picks some from Column A, some from Column B, depending on whatever inclinations he has at the moment. He dedicates himself to scientific research, but discovers that having true love means sacrifices of that singular ideal, and quits school to get practical, paying jobs. When he re-dedicates himself to bacteriology research by conducting research in the West Indies, it is no coincidence that it directly contributes to his wife’s death. After this, he is so emotionally fragile that he no longer has the fortitude to conduct such a cold, bloodless A/B test on living people. He gives everyone the medicine and invalidates his experiment. After this, he gets a fancy wife and has a child, but abandons this life of comfort for isolated research again. This is where the book ends. We cannot trust that he doesn’t undergo another reversal, because all we have observed so far is a mercurial tendency to flip flop on decisions. None of his decisions are actually made of his own accord, but instead, upon aesthetic inspiration from outside stimulus.
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First, his lifelong love of research is born from Gottlieb’s air of mystery and (initial) attractiveness. If you also find it ridiculous to shift the winds of your life based on an aromantic admiration of a person’s demeanor and air, then I’m with you there. Regardless, Arrowsmith hears about Gottlieb from other professors, and is “roused to reasonless excitement” by the “thought of working in a laboratory at night, alone, absorbed, contemptuous of academic success and of popular classes.” When he catches a glimpse of Gottlieb, he sees “beneath the arc-light a tall figure, ascetic, self-contained, apart. His swart cheeks were gaunt, his nose high-bridged and thin…He had worn the thread-bare top-coat of a poor professor, yet Martin remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape with a silver star arrogant on his breast.” To admire somebody means Arrowsmith must assign them a better visage than they actually possess. Arrowsmith doesn’t yet know what he actually wants to research, but he does know he wants to inhabit Gottlieb’s skin in order to distinguish himself from the basic masses. Again, the aesthetic aspect and the comparative aspect become apparent early: “On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was in a high state of superiority. As a medic, he was more picturesque than the other students, for medics are reputed to know secrets, horrors, exhilarating wickedness.” The key operating word is picturesque, a word no one has ever used to describe medical school. Arrowsmith views himself from an external perspective so he can see how other people will judge him (like Facebook’s “View Profile as the Public”). When Gottlieb rejects Arrowsmith, as a freshman, from joining his bacteriology class for sophomores, Arrowsmith has to take Gottlieb down a notch visually in his mind: “He recalled Gottlieb’s sardonic face; he felt and feared his quality of dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles, and he saw Max Gottlieb not as a genius but as a man who had headaches, who became agonizingly tired, who could be loved.” Seeing Gottlieb up close, as a real human, causes him to lose some of the mysticism that he had held from a distance, pointing to Arrowsmith’s inability to handle nuance and his consequent need for a bright line ideal to guide his life.
On the other hand, he also latches onto the elegant ideals of Angus Duer, who is the perfect, refined medical mercenary. Angus takes Arrowsmith to his first concert, where he is awed by the finery and spectacle of the place, telling himself, “I’m going to have ’em all — the fame of Max Gottlieb — I mean his ability — and the lovely music and lovely women — Golly! I’m going to do big things. And see the world…Will this piece never quit?” Angus genuinely enjoys music, while Arrowsmith wonders why “the bloodless, acquisitive Angus Duer should waste time listening to fiddlers” playing Bach and Beethoven. Arrowsmith’s primary motivation is the fame and aesthetic elegance of a successful persona, not the actual cultural hallmarks for their own sake, nor scientific discovery for its own sake. Similarly, his first girlfriend Madeline Fox is the same type of checkmark for him as Angus Duer. She is a pseudo intellectual who “knows all about literature except maybe how to read,” one who hosts elegant parties with “excessive doilies”. She causes Arrowsmith to doubt himself: “Martin was unaccustomed to such elegance. Though he had come in sulky unwillingness, he was impressed by the supper, by the frocks of the young women; he realized that his dancing was rusty…There was no strength, no grace, no knowledge that Martin Arrowsmith did not covet, when consciousness of it had pierced through the layers of his absorption.” But the knowledge that he covets doesn’t exist in a vacuum. He’s an attention whore only inspired to learn when he realizes other people at the party are impressed by Madeline’s refinement, and wants the same admiration for himself.
When he does meet Leora, who has a personality and temperament that he actually truly likes, he still has reservations about her before and during marriage. Even though she’s the perfect scientific companion, helping him with research and taking care of all administrative aspects of their lives so he can achieve his dreams, he still hankers for the refined society lady that will impress his friends: “The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora’s old quiet wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the Group. When she appeared with a hook unfastened or her hair like a crow’s nest, he worried, and said things about her “sloppiness” which he later regretted. ‘Why can’t you take a little time to make yourself attractive? God knows you haven’t anything else to do!’” Leora knows the opportunity cost of superficials vs substance, responding: “Do you want me to become a harem beauty? I could. I could be a floosey. But I’ve never taken the trouble…What do you want? Do you want a real princess like Clara Tredgold, or do you want me, that don’t care a hang where we go or what we do as long as we stand by each other?” Time spent putting on airs means less time spent on substantive research, something that Arrowsmith cannot understand even in his age.
In his insecurity and pride, Arrowsmith often turns to anti-establishmentarianism. If he can’t beat the system, he might as well pretend he’s not part of it, like a wounded hipster who can’t afford fineries pretending to like grunge garbage. During summer break in medical school, while his classmates like Angus Duer intern at hospitals, Arrowsmith wants to stand apart from the pack and install telephone cables in Montana. While he’s out doing manual labor, he still thinks about what Angus would think: “Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses were tight tradesmen. What of it? ‘I’m here!’ he gloated.” He disdains his fancy second wife’s high society friends partly because he cannot impress them, so he doubles down on his shabby life of scientific research. A large part of his motivation to do futile research comes from his desire to be a special snowflake apart from his peers.
There’s no doubt that Arrowsmith has a deep interest in research beyond superficialities — no one would spend years toiling in futility with only Gottlieb as validation without intrinsic motivation. But his desires are not as clear-cut as he imagines them to be. He can’t go without romantic companionship, he can’t forgo friends, social events, a real life, the way Gottlieb can. By the end of the book, Arrowsmith is unhappy with his scientific progress when he’s burdened by a wife and child, and escapes to a cabin in the woods to continue his research essentially in solitude. Sinclair Lewis listed Henry David Thoreau as a major inspiration, so it’s clear where this ending comes from. But we know that Thoreau postured as an ascetic monk while living 2 miles from town, collecting donuts from his mom every weekend. We (probably) know that Arrowsmith’s solitude in the woods at the end of the book won’t last. And we know that Sinclair Lewis himself postured as anti-establishment, refusing the Pulitzer Prize ostensibly because he didn’t agree with Pulitzer’s criteria, but actually refusing the prize because he was salty that an earlier novel, Main Street, did not win. He remained against the status quo his whole life, using his Nobel Prize speech to rage against the uninteresting state of mainstream American literature, and in Arrowsmith fashion, retired to a secluded farm for the remainder of his days.
