(2 of 4)
For this phase, the Castigator lays by his swine-goad, and Author Lewis, no friend of man but an unerring creator, when he likes, of living women, picks up his imagination, some sympathy and a torch. He creates Sharon Falconer and takes Elmer Gantry into a midwest revival tent to see her—young, slender, stately, warm, husky-voiced, a priestess in white with a ruby velvet girdle, with a face of rapture and passion. Before she suspected she was Joan of Arc and the Virgin Mary, her name was Katie Jonas, a Utica mick and typist. Sometimes she feels like a little girl, worn out with saving souls and making money, which is her destiny. An emotional mystic, she has been made articulate by an intellectual mystic, Cecil Aylston, a globe-covering Oxford oddity of whose passions, hot and cold, she is now weary. Offstage she is an efficient business woman and it is from that angle that Elmer Gantry approaches, and reaches, the little girl, the passionate woman, the saint.
He quiets his flashy drummer's clothes and fills her tabernacle with a trial harangue on the money-value of Salvation. He pours forth, besides salesmanship, all the fervor of a conversion which actually is semi-sublime. He ousts Aylston and after a period of self-restraint not wholly calculating, gets taken to a quiet, spacious, surprising manor in Virginia. Here, one midnight, a wing of the house turns out to be a crazy shrine to many goddesses, including ape-headed ones, Aphrodite, Christian saints and Sharon. The latter, hysterical in a crimson robe with gold symbols, makes Elmer chant the "Song of Solomon" and initiates him into mysteries of which he can understand at least half.
They are a whirling dervish and a shooting star, touring the country with a large gospel "crew." Throngs of converts, waves of exaltation, of debauch, of prosperity. . . . Passion and prosperity agree with Elmer Gantry so well that when Sharon builds her pier-tabernacle on the Jersey Coast—hailed by the Chamber of Commerce as a "high-class spiritual feature ... at the snappiest of all summer colonies"—he feels about ready to supersede her as the chief attraction. But Sharon is spared such a fate. Filled by the ocean and stars with a new vision, she holds aloft a white cross on her opening night; calls on the throng to try its faith. A cigaret stub starts a holocaust. Her faith does not flinch. Elmer Gantry, alone of all the gospelers, bulks, punches and tramples his way out, into the sea, where he rescues people who have already touched bottom, thus becoming a hero. He finds Sharon the next day in the charred ruins, still holding her white cross.
After a few years of other men's wives, widows and waitresses, she is only a dull ache to him. He fails at gospeling alone and at Free Thought, but skulks neatly in at the back door of Methodism. He marries and intimidates the heiress of Banjo Crossing, chaste Cleo Benham. He acquires poetry and philosophy: Longfellow and Elbert Hubbard. He invents religious advertising and finds that its effectiveness increases with its blatancy. With Cleo's exterior to help him, and lucky breaks with women to keep him happy, he blunders rapidly upward in the great state of Winnemac,* arriving at Zenith, famed home of Realtor George T. Babbitt (whom the reader glimpses one day in the street).