Zenith

Here's a between-the-world wars power couple for you, Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson. Husband and wife were equally famous in there day, but I'm afraid Thompson has more or less sunk into obscurity, whereas Lewis is still fairly well-known. This is due to the fact the latter is now part of the literary canon (thanks in large part to winning a Nobel), and if you take a college literature course, he's one of those dead white males you have to read if you want to pass, graduate, and get a job writing ad copy for electronic billboards. However, you don't really need to have Lewis forced upon you. You can read him simply because his 80, 90, and 100-year-old books are...readable. More than that, they're actually relevant. Works such Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry satirize provincialism, materialism, pharmaceuticals, and born-again con men. Like I said, relevant. In fact, the current U.S. President could have come out of a Lewis novel.

Fiction is often written with an eye on posterity. You write it now and hope it can still be appreciated a hundred years hence. However, journalism, Dorothy Thompson's chosen profession, is written in the here and now. Of course, the subject matter journalists cover can be of interest 80 or 90 years hence, but as history, written by historians living a 80 or 90 years hence. The journalism of the here and now may very well still exist in those far-off history books, but as the footnotes and bibliography in the final pages, proof that the historian did his or her research. So if you're an avid footnote and bibliography reader, you've heard of Thompson. Or came across her in a biography of her husband. Or...you've read a biography of Thompson herself. There's been at least three in the 59 years since her death. She did a lot of living in what used to be the here and now.

 

Originally a suffragette, Thompson decided once she had the right to vote that learn a little bit about the world before pulling a lever for this candidate or that. Journalism seemed a good way to accomplish that. A foreign correspondent in Ireland, she interviewed a leader of the Sinn Féin party. She then headed for Vienna where she met John Gunther, a highly respected journalist of the day (though today he may be best known for the rather sad book Death Be Not Proud, about his son who died of cancer.) For a while she was the Chief of the Central European Service for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Two years later she switched to the New York Post (this was decades before Rupert Murdoch got his greedy little hands on it), and became head of its Berlin bureau, where she witnessed the rise of National Socialism, better known as Nazism. In 1931, she interviewed Adolf Hitler, who at the time something akin to a congressman. He failed to impress Thompson, who described him in her subsequent book I Saw Hitler as the "very prototype of the little man." Once the little man became Chancellor (akin at first to a president, then to a dictator), he had Thompson kicked out of the country, and then spent the rest of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s looking for ways to impress her. No, no, no, I shouldn't lay all that on Thompson. Hitler clearly had issues, even as people to this day disagree what those issues were (rejection to art school? Syphilis? A missing testicle?) Back home in the United States, Thompson was asked to write a column for the New York Tribune titled "On the Record". Soon carried by more than 170 newspapers, giving her a readership of over ten million people, she became one of the most popular syndicated columnists, and the second most popular syndicated female columnists behind First Lady Elinor Roosevelt. NBC took notice, and hired Thompson as a radio commentator. Thompson didn't waste her fame on trivialities, as she became a leading spokesperson against the rise of fascism. What did her husband think about all that? Lewis was worried about fascism, too, and not just its rise in Europe. He wrote a novel in 1935 titled It Can't Happen Here about an American dictator (according to Amazon, there's been a spike in sales of late. I can't imagine why.)

Unfortunately, their shared political beliefs wasn't enough to save the marriage. it lasted just 14 years and produced one child, a son. What went wrong? Here's one clue. Lewis joked to his friend, the journalist John Hersey (best known for the book Hiroshima), that he was going to divorce Dorothy Thompson and name Adolf Hitler as a co-respondent. Of course, no such assignation took place. I take it to mean that Lewis didn't like all the globetrotting his wife's job required. Should we then see Sinclair Lewis as a male chauvinist who though a woman's place was in the home? That would be at odds with both his literary output and his romantic life. Lewis was attracted to career women (his wife before Thompson was also one) and this is reflected in his novels. In fact, the heroine in Main Street is a career woman. That book and others he wrote further criticizes a society that forces women to be stay-at-home wives, some 40 years before Betty Friedan made the same argument. Then again, writing about career women in the abstract is one thing. Marrying one may have caused him to blink.

There were other problems, like infidelity. Thompson had affairs with both men and women. Despite Lewis' rather ghoulish appearance (hoping to rid his face of acne scars, he tried expensive radium therapy that only made things worse), he used his fame as a novelist to bed a girl on occasion. But his real mistress was the bottle. An alcoholic long before he met Thompson, Lewis would pass out in the midst of social gatherings, embarrassing Thompson. He also sometimes passed out in their bedroom, which brought it own humiliation. But even minus adultery or booze, the union might not have lasted. They were both writers but different types of writers, he a novelist, she a journalist. Novelists tend, and are even compelled, to be homebodies, with as limited contact with the world as possible (which is why some of the more successful ones end up in cabins in the woods.) Journalists, on the other hand, often work erratic hours and are away from home quite a bit. These two just didn't see each other all that often, and sometimes absence makes the heart grow fouler. The divorce finally came in 1942, albeit without Hitler's name being dragged into it. Some things fortunately don't happen here.