Arrowsmith

The Pulitzer He Declined

Lewis wrote Arrowsmith with the assistance of Paul de Kruif, a microbiologist who provided the scientific accuracy that makes the novel’s laboratory scenes convincing, and published it in 1925. It won the Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis declined — the first major American writer to decline the award. His stated reason was that such prizes create a chilling conformity, a literature shaped to win prizes rather than to be good. The gesture was characteristic: Lewis was constitutionally unable to accept official validation without immediately attacking the system that offered it.

Arrowsmith is unusual in Lewis’s work because its protagonist is genuinely heroic. Martin Arrowsmith moves from small-town general practice through the public health system through the commercial pharmaceutical world through, eventually, a wealthy private research institute, and at each stage he encounters the same opposition: the pressure to make his science serve social, commercial, or institutional purposes rather than the pure question of what is true. Lewis follows this pressure with documentary precision, and the portrait of American medicine as simultaneously idealistic and systematically corrupted is the novel’s great achievement.

Max Gottlieb and Pure Science

The novel’s moral centre is not Arrowsmith but his mentor, Max Gottlieb — an elderly German Jewish bacteriologist who represents, in Lewis’s rendering, the ideal of pure science: indifferent to funding, hostile to publicity, committed solely to the question of whether the experiment is designed correctly and the results are accurately reported. Gottlieb is presented without irony, which is unusual for Lewis. He is not satirized, not deflated, not shown to be complicit in the world around him. He is Lewis’s closest approach to an unambiguous ideal.

Arrowsmith’s tragedy — to the extent that the novel ends in tragedy — is his inability to become Gottlieb, to maintain the absolute purity of scientific commitment against the human needs for love, success, recognition, and belonging. He is repeatedly tempted and repeatedly falls: he takes credit he does not fully deserve, allows his work to be published before it is complete, permits the institute to exploit his plague research for publicity. Each compromise is explicable and human. The cumulative effect is a career that is successful by every conventional measure and falls short of the only standard Gottlieb established that Arrowsmith actually believes in.

The Caribbean and the End

The novel’s dramatic peak is the Caribbean plague sequence, in which Arrowsmith is sent to test a bacteriophage treatment on a plague-stricken island. The scientific protocol requires a control group — some patients receiving the treatment, others not — and the human cost of maintaining scientific rigor in the face of dying people is the novel’s sharpest ethical question. Arrowsmith abandons the control group, administers the treatment to everyone, and thereby loses the data that would have made the result scientifically conclusive. The decision is both humanly correct and scientifically disastrous.

He ends the novel working in independent research in the Vermont woods with a single companion, having abandoned his career and his second marriage. It is Lewis’s version of the happy ending: the only place where pure science is possible is outside all institutions, all social pressures, all the human machinery that makes compromise inevitable.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Lewis’s most generous and most thoroughly researched novel — the portrait of an American idealist who comes closest to earning his idealism.