a scathing commentary on Elmer Gantry

In today’s (12/28/2007) Wall Street Journal, the Houses of Worship column commented “that old rogue Elmer Gantry turned 80 this year.” The column was not admiring of Lewis’ work. Some excerpts:

• · “Lewis has a secure place in the history books. But that does not mean that, except as cultural artifacts, his books are much worth reading today.”

• · Gantry is described as “crude, profane, hard-drinking and oversexed”

• · “His creator was a gloomy alcoholic Midwesterner with a personal life just as rootless and messy as Gantry's.”

• · “…the adult reader is likely to tire quickly of Lewis. His descriptions of even the simplest scenes are permeated with snobbishness and juvenile editorializing; his plots are studded with absurd and implausible twists. And his characters are as simplistic as those in comic books”

• · “As Rebecca West wrote in a scathing contemporary review of the novel, Lewis's satire fell short because he did not ‘possess, at least in the world of the imagination, the quality the lack of which he is deriding in others.’"

• · "’Elmer Gantry,’ observed sociologists Jeffrey K. Hadden and Anson Shupe, ‘was as loathsome a character as has ever been born in the mind of an American writer.’”

• · (Elmer Gantry)….”was a deliberate affront to the pious. Lewis had, after all, dedicated the book to the acidulous skeptic H.L. Mencken, ‘with profound admiration,’ a clear indication that the book was an intervention in the culture wars of its day.”

• · “The movie version of ‘Elmer Gantry,’ made in 1960 …was forced to take radical liberties….. and presented established clergymen as men of decency and principle, something that Lewis was loath to do”

All this being said, I think that Elmer Gantry makes an ironically wonderful nom de guerre for me. In fact, I don’t know that I could have chosen better.