FRAGMENTS FROM A MARRIAGE: Letters of Sinclair Lewis to Grace Hegger Lewis Harold ("Hal") Sinclair Lewis and Grace Hegger met in 1912 in a freight elevator in a New York City office building. She was the Beauty Editor at Vogue; he was a manuscript reader for the Stokes Publishing Company several floors below. He courted her intensely for more than a year; she found him amusing but not marriageable. Curiously, she came to love him only after Our Mr Wrenn, his first serious novel, had been accepted for publication. They were married in 1914. The marriage lasted formally until 1928, but it was under a strain very early. Lewis was all his life restless and unpredictable, and it was soon clear that he liked the idea of marriage better than marriage itself. He needed the freedom to come and go at will, while Grace had fairly conventional yearnings for a settled home life and stable friendships. Nevertheless, she attempted to accompany him in his wanderings, even after the birth of their son Wells in 1917. But even her best efforts to allow Lewis his freedom left him uncomfortable, just as his best efforts to play the role of husband and father left her dissatisfied. They came to a pattern of temporary residences from which he would wander and return. He left not to return in 1925, and they agreed to a separation that finally ended in divorce. Shortly after, Lewis married journalist Dorothy Thompson, who would eventually divorce him also after a marriage much like Grace Hegger's. Grace remarried well, to Telesforo Casanova, a stockbroker of Spanish origins. Sinclair and Grace Hegger Lewis (she wrote under that name) remained on good terms, however, for the rest of his life; and after his death in 1951 she published a memoir of their life together, With tove From Grade (1955). She had also published a fictional version, HalfA Loaf, in 1931. Lewis had written her hundreds of letters; only a few dozen had been saved, however, some of which she drew on for her published work. Others, of which Lewis had kept copies, appeared in the biography by Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961). After Grace's death, the letters came to the library of the University ofTexas.1 To read through them is, sadly, to trace the pathology of a marriage doomed, as Schorer has said, by incompatibility and immaturity on both sides: "when the gorge does not rise, the heart bleeds for them: if only they had had a little maturity, their love might have had a chance!" Certainly we can glimpse from Lewis's side, and in fine-grained detail, his attempt to accommodate his life as a working writer to the demands of wife and family on the one hand and an essentially childish egoism on the other. In person, Lewis was capable of great charm and companionship, but he could not always sustain his better self. He could also be fickle, domineering, and abrasive. He picked up and dropped acquaintances almost daily. For him, conversation was often a matter of performance: he was given to The Missouri Review · 72 spontaneous dramatic improvisation, often in dialect, and to elaborate fantasies and games. Much of the early emotional side of his life with Grace was expressed in a private fantasy of children at play. All of this appears in his letters. But he was also capable of the most insincere and self-serving sentimentalism as he tried to extricate himself from one marriage and to embark upon another, and of a shrewd impersonality in calculating matters of money. He is at his best when he turns his attention—and his imagination— outward to others. —Speer Morgan William Holtz I The earliest letter comes from before the Lewises' marriage. It is a complete fiction, supposedly written from Edith Wharton's home in Lenox, Massachusetts . What he did not know was that two years earlier Edith Wharton liad sold her Lenox home and had moved permanently to France. Although he would later come to know Wharton and visit her as an equal, here he is an unknown writer merely fantasizing about a novelist he admires. The admiration endured...