24

Dorothy Thompson

ONE of the seven and a half million readers of Dorothy Thompson's column, which is syndicated in some hundred and fifty newspapers in America, had a dream about her the other night. She appeared in this dream as a trained nurse, starched, crisp, and tender, hovering beside a bed in which a sick world lay. The sick world was depicted by the familiar cartoonist's symbol of a frail figure with a bandaged globe for a head, and Miss Thompson was ministering to it by taking its temperature with one hand while she deftly gave it the hotfoot with the other. The chart that hung at the foot of the patient's bed was labelled simply "On the Record."

The dreamer interpreted this vision next day as symbolic of Miss Thompson's double talent for brooding in print over the welfare of mankind and at the same time inflaming it to further disasters. This quality in Miss Thompson affects people in various ways. Her admirers say that hers is the dilemma of the voice crying in the wilderness, of every farseeing patriot who must holler to be heard and must create panic in some places in order to bring peace to all. Other people, alarmed by her belligerence in print, see her as a dangerous warmonger and incendiary. They point to statistics which show that almost every second column she has written in the last two years has contained an incitement to war—first addressed to England and Mr. Chamberlain, and more recently to the government and the people of the United States, of whom she speaks freely as "ostriches," as "muddle-headed," and as "afraid to wake up and live."

PROFILES

THE IT GIRL—I

Whatever events may prove concerning Miss Thompson's philosophies and predictions, certain biographical facts about her suggest that her curiously split personality—half mother and half firebrand—was apparent at an early age. When she was ten, she fell out of a tree in her family's back yard in Hamburg, New York, skinning her elbow and knocking over her little sister. The record has it that Dorothy first rushed to comfort her sister and then, after a brief inspection of her own injured arm, lunged at the tree and almost broke a toe trying to kick hell out of the trunk. Anger at inexplicable happenings is still a part of Miss Thompson, and it is never far from the surface, although she is physically built to look as placid as Mother Ceres walking the abundant fields.

She is imposing rather than large, and she has an unexpected blond prettiness, which she is inclined to disclaim. "I don't like my looks," she will say—a remark which necessarily invites discussion. Bergdorf Goodman dresses her expensively, but the lines of her body are comfortable rather than smart, and she wears her clothes without getting any visible pleasure out of them. Her manner is usually calm, but often it breaks into irritability when people turn out to be as stupid as she expects them to be, and her conversation is on the whole impatient. Words like "Pah!" and "Pooh!" come easily to her, and she has a habit of answering remarks she considers wrong-headed with short objections like "That's absurd!" and "Don't be ridiculous!" Occasionally this fretfulness explodes into wrath when the target is important enough or when some social injustice is under discussion. One night last winter, Miss Thompson went to a dinner party at a friend's apartment; the talk, led by Miss Thompson, turned to world affairs, and someone made a careless, semi-humorous remark about Jews. Miss Thompson put down her knife and fork, and stood up. "I will not remain in the same house with traitors to the United States," she announced, rather obscurely, and left the table. After a white-lipped pause in the bedroom to get her wraps, she strode out of the apartment. She is sometimes a difficult guest because of such proclamations, and because scarcely any talk that is not concerned with the international situation interests her. Her husband,

Sinclair Lewis, has a name for the international situation as it relates to Dorothy; he calls it "it." Lewis and Miss Thompson have lived apart ever since he set off two years ago on a stagestruck tour, to play the leading rôles in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" and in his own play, "Angela is Twenty-two." Lewis lives in a hotel when he is in New York, but he and Miss Thompson are not legally separated and he is an occasional, happy caller at his wife's apartment on Central Park West. Sometimes, dropping in for a friendly visit, he waits alertly in the hall, listening to the buzz of voices from the living room, where Miss Thompson is talking to Vincent Sheean, Raymond Gram Swing, John Günther, or other cronies. When one of these friends wanders into the hall, Lewis corners him. "What's she talking about—it?" he asks. If the friend nods, Mr. Lewis tiptoes away.

Accused of overpreoccupation with world affairs, Miss Thompson is apt to remind hecklers, rather defiantly, that she has her lighter side. One example of this is her annual column on St. Valentine's Day, suggesting appropriate books to send to certain prominent people, and this is a joke she enjoys hugely, year after year. Last year she proposed, among others, the following valentines: to President Roosevelt, "All This, and Heaven Too;" to Harold Ickes, "Ferdinand the Bull;" to Joseph Goebbels, "Young Man with a Horn;" and to Mae West, "Man's Hope" and "Man's Fate." Another lark she likes to recall is her broadcast, a year and a half ago, on the absurdity of women's hats. "Tonight I have a really serious matter to discuss," she began, with mock gravity, and she went on to say, "I read a poem once about a tree that could in summer wear a nest of robins in its hair, but I am not that tree. Are you?"

Miss Thompson's charm is as industrious as her humor, and her friends are able to cite more than one instance when she has pulled herself out of a fit of thinking into a flurry of graciousness for purely sociable reasons. Sometimes the result is odd, because her mind is so full of a number of things. One night last summer, the Vincent Sheeans, who had rented a house not far from Miss Thompson's summer place near Bar-

25

nard, Vermont, asked her to dine. Their other guest was Otis Skinner, who is also a friend of Miss Thompson's. Twenty minutes after dinner was announced, Miss Thompson had not yet arrived, and the other three went in without her. When they were halfway through the soup, conversing gently, sounds of arrival in the hall were followed by the entrance of Miss Thompson, who stood dramatically in the dining-room doorway. "The Russians are in Poland!" she cried, without preamble. The startled silence that met this announcement reminded her of her manners, and she moved at once, flowingly, to Otis Skinner's side. "Oh, hello, Owen dear," she said.

LIKE a good many highly complicated people, Dorothy Thompson was born into a simple family in a small town. Her father was Peter Thompson, a Methodist minister who was often transferred from one parsonage to another in upper New York State, depositing his family successively in such towns as Lancaster, Tonawanda, Gowanda, and Hamburg. Dorothy was born in Lancaster in 1894, the eldest of three children; the others were Willard and Margaret, whom the family called Peggy. Mrs. Thompson died when Dorothy

was seven, and when Mr. Thompson remarried three years later, Dorothy took a dislike to her stepmother which expressed itself in fairly flamboyant ways. When the Thompson children were summoned to the parlor to speak pieces for the ladies of the parish who came to call, Willard and Peggy trotted in demurely and performed with grace; Dorothy generally kept the ladies waiting a while and then made a contrived entrance in a series of cartwheels. She was fond of Willard, who is now a salesman for the General Refractories Company and lives in White Plains, but her talent for protectiveness flourished more tenderly in defence of Peggy, who was four years younger than she was. Once, when Dorothy was about twelve, she heard that a teacher in the Gowanda school was punishing Peggy for some misdemeanor. Dorothy bounded into her sister's classroom and confronted the teacher violently. "Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare my little sister!" she said. Peggy, who is now the wife of Howard Wilson, an industrial engineer in Chicago, tells this story proudly. Mrs. Wilson is a small, quiet woman, dark and fragile.

Dorothy was deeply devoted to her father, and this attachment seems to have sharpened the friction between her and her stepmother. Mr. Thompson, a peaceful man, hit upon the idea of preserving harmony in the family by

sending Dorothy, when she was fourteen, to live with an aunt in Chicago. Dorothy went to high school, and later to Lewis Institute, in Chicago. She was not a brilliant scholar, and she says now that it was because she was always bored by the hard procession of facts with never a breathing spell for conjecture or interpretation. "You will think I am making that up, in the light of later events," she said to an interviewer not long ago, "but it's true." When Miss Thompson pronounces words which have a long vowel, like "true," "youth," "beauty," "futile," "fool," and "doom," her voice, ordinarily moderated, echoes ringingly.

She was popular in school as captain of the basketball team and as a leader in school affairs. By the time she entered Syracuse University in 1910, she had a reputation as a joiner and organizer with a rapidly developing taste for embracing causes. The most prominent underdog of the period was Woman, embodied in the suffragette, and Dorothy soon became remarkable at Syracuse as the university's most vigorous campaigner for votes for women. She had intended to make teaching her profession and, after her graduation in 1914, came to New York to take her teacher's examinations. She failed in English grammar and gave up the idea of becoming a teacher, but not the determination to have a career of some

"Sober, Mrs. Tomkins is the personification of virtue."

26

DON'T GUESS, LET ME TELL YOU

Personally, I don't care whether a detective-story writer was educated in night school or day school

So long as he doesn't belong to the H.I.B.K. school,

The H.I.B.K. being a device to which too many detective-story writers are prone;

Namely, the Had I But Known.

Sometimes it is the Had I But Known what grim secret lurked behind that smiling exterior, I would never have set foot within the door;

Sometimes the Had I But Known then what I know now, I could have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspector the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole in the floor.

Had I But Known narrators are the ones who hear a stealthy creak at midnight in the tower where the body lies and, instead of locking their door or arousing the drowsy policeman posted outside their room, sneak off by themselves to the tower and suddenly they hear a breath exhaled behind them,

And they have no time to scream, they know nothing else till the men from the D.A.'s office come in next morning and find them.

Had I But Known-ers are quick to assume the prerogatives of the Deity,

For they will suppress evidence that doesn't suit their theories with appalling spontaneity,

And when the killer is finally trapped into a confession by some elaborate device of the Had I But Known-ers some hundred pages later than if they hadn't held their knowledge aloof,

Why, they say, Why, Inspector, I knew all along it was he, but I couldn't tell you, you would have laughed at me unless I had absolute proof.

Would you like for your library a nice detective story which I am sorry to say I didn't rent but owns?

I wouldn't have bought it had I but known it was impregnated with Had I But Knowns.
—OGDEN NASH

kind. After several futile attempts to find a job in New York, she finally got work addressing envelopes at the women's suffrage headquarters in Buffalo and became so eloquent about the cause that she was presently sent to tour the state, making speeches at county fairs or from trucks parked on the main streets of various towns. In one town her funds gave out, and she was unable to hire a booth at a fair where the anti-suffragists were already well established; she stood vibrantly in front of the anti-suffragist headquarters and loudly intoned, over and over, "I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness." When people stopped to stare at her, she hastily slipped them a couple of votes-for-women pamphlets. Another time, addressing the townspeople from a parked truck, she saw them begin to wander away toward the municipal band, which had struck up a tune at the next corner. Competition from a brass band was like a saving shot in the arm to Miss Thompson. She climbed down from the truck, went into a stationer's store, and bought a slate and some chalk. Hopping on the truck again, she drew a rowdy picture of the bandmaster and held it up to the crowd, and when a few people wandered back to the truck to see what she was doing, she erased the bandmaster and wrote on the slate, "Is this the treatment a lone gal gets?" The appeal to chivalry won her an audience. They surged around her and she triumphantly finished her speech.

The suffrage campaign was a fine outlet for Miss Thompson's combined gifts of showmanship and compassion, but soon her attention was diverted by the first World War. Characteristically, she wanted to be where the excitement and the suffering were greatest. Every branch of overseas service turned her down, however, because of her lack of specific training, and she spent the war years in New York, in small towns upstate, and in Cincinnati, supporting herself by jobs she hated-paid social work and copywriting in an advertising agency. In New York she lived in furnished rooms on West Sixteenth Street with two other girls and, out of the small amount of money she earned, managed to send some regularly to her father to help pay her sister Peggy's tuition in college. In 1920, Peggy married Mr. Wilson, and Dorothy saved up $150 and sailed for Europe. Before the ship was two days at sea she had fallen in-to spirited talk with a group of Zionists who were bound for a conference

in London. The Zionists knew a born crusader when they saw one, and through the influence of their leaders the International News Service agreed to let Miss Thompson try her hand at covering the conference. She had written only advertising copy and a few unsuccessful poems, but she proved to have the knack of passionate reporting. International News printed the Zionist stories, and after the conference ended, Miss

Thompson set out—some- what like that other Doro- thy who wandered through the Land of Oz—to travel through Europe, writing freelance pieces and selling them at space rates to the A.P., the International News Service, the London Star, the Westminster Gazette, and the Manchester Guardian.

THE Europe of 1920, recovering from four years of war and shaken by riots and revolution, was exciting material for any reporter, and an extraordinary kind of reporter's luck seemed to march with Miss Thompson. She arrived in Dublin the day Hamar Greenwood became Chief Secretary for

Ireland and three days before Archbishop Mannix was kidnapped by the Sinn Fein. She got to Cork the day Terence MacSwiney, its mayor, went to jail to die of his celebrated hunger strike, and persuaded him to give her the interview which was to be his last. When she went to Italy, the taxi that took her from the station in Milan to her hotel plunged her into the middle of a riot staged in the city streets by

some ten thousand striking metalworkers. Soon her name came to figure largely in the conversation of other, older foreign correspondents in the twilight of some bar. "Dorothy Thompson got into town at noon," one would say.

"Good God," another would reply, "what happened at one o'clock?"

In the summer of 1920, Miss Thompson arrived in Paris in the midst of a provoking lull. She had developed a fine instinct for news and a valuable determination to meet everybody who might be important to her; she was still free-lancing at space rates, however, and peaceful times meant bankruptcy. She got a job with the American Red Cross,

28

APRIL 20, 1940

the German, listened to him once more, and again submitted the same translation. Miss Thompson sighed, strode off to her typewriter, and wrote an account of the youth movement which proved to be accurate and perceptive, and which was based to a large extent on what she gathered from the inflections of the German's voice and the gestures of his hands and shoulders. She speaks German easily now, but her French is still uncertain, and she employs a French-born secretary (she has three secretaries altogether), whose chief task is condensing important articles from French

newspapers and magazines into English synopses for the boss to ponder.

VIENNA suited Dorothy Thompson. It was a city, then, that was becoming to her, as Paris might be becoming to another type of woman, New York to still another. She looked Viennese in a blond, blooming kind of way, and in that warm, delusive, postwar atmosphere the feminine side of her character blossomed haltingly, like a tune from a Viennese music box. She had plenty of Austrian beaux, and she encouraged them expertly in her spare time. "Yes, dear," she would say gently to some swain who was trying to snatch a kiss, "but right this minute I've simply got to get to the bottom of this Bulgarian business." Sometimes the electric quality of even her leisure hours frightened her suitors. One Christmas Dorothy shot two thousand feet down a dangerous mountainside on a toboggan before her escort, a small Austrian, had nerved himself to get onto his own toboggan. Another time, at a dinner party, Miss Thompson took advantage of a slight lull in the conversation to recite the Bill of Rights from beginning to end. She had made an early and forceful impres-

sion on Vienna's diplomatic colony when she was invited to lunch one day with Phyllis Bottome, the English writer, who was in Vienna to consult Dr. Alfred Adler about one of her psycho-neurological novels. Miss Bottome's luncheon party was formal and included the British Ambassador, his wife, and several other foreign diplomats and their wives, and the conversation was a polite murmur until the main course was brought in. Miss Thompson then startled the other guests into silence by pounding joyfully on the table with her knife and fork. "Meat, meat, raw meat!" she chanted, in a happy singsong. Miss Bottome thinks that this was probably part of a poem Dorothy had picked up somewhere, but Miss Thompson now says, rather coldly, that she does not remember where it came from. Such lively social appearances and the continued brilliance of her work as a correspondent soon made her a leader in Vienna's group of English and American writers, which included—besides Phyllis Bottome and her husband, Captain A. E. Forbes Dennis—Clarence Streit, John Gunther, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Miss Millay was not a correspondent, but, as an acquaintance of hers once observed, she is a poet who likes to get around. When they were not working, these friends would gather at Sacher's to argue about world affairs, or occasionally about more frivolous matters. Once they spent a long session deciding whose brains, among all those assembled there, would, if removed and pickled, make the best paperweight. As most of them remember it, Dorothy Thompson's brains were ranked first.

With the doomed contrariness of strong-minded women, Miss Thompson married, in 1923, a man whom she could eventually neither dominate nor control. He was Josef Bard, a Hungarian who was romantic-looking,

THE NEW YORKER

29

popular with women, brilliant in conversation, and—as a husband—elusive. He had written several books about philosophy and one novel which was translated into English, but he talked better than he wrote, and his professional reputation was rapidly eclipsed by that of his wife. The Bards' domestic crises soon echoed as far as the first World Economic Conference of the League of Nations, at Geneva. American correspondents who had assembled there to cover the Conference remember how Miss Thompson turned up alone one day, although she had no assignment, and spent most of a week sitting darkly in the International Bar while old friends, in shifts, sought to comfort and advise her. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1927. Bard went to live in London, where he subsequently married a well-to-do Englishwoman. In 1928, Miss Thompson married Sinclair Lewis, and when the couple visited London on their honeymoon, Lewis cordially invited Bard to breakfast with them at their hotel. Bard accepted and the meal went off graciously.

DURING the middle twenties, Dorothy Thompson breezed through Central Europe in a blaze of newspaper reporting that moved John Gunther later to describe her in print as “a blue-eyed tornado.” Even her most masculine exploits were colored by a pure, unconquerable femininity. Once, when she had flown to Czechoslovakia to interview Eduard Beneš, then Foreign Minister, the plane in which she was returning to Vienna was grounded by a storm near a small Czech town. She hurried to the post office to wire her story and, finding that she had not enough cash to pay for it, told the clerk to send it collect. He refused, unless she could show him a Czech press card. Miss Thompson had

no Czech press card, but she instantly wrote out a message in German and shoved it under the grille. It was addressed to Beneš, and it read, “Beloved. Will you bring pressure to bear to have all the officials working in this post office fired? Sweetie.” After Miss Thompson had agreed to withdraw the message to Beneš, the startled clerk sent the interview collect. Another time, on her way home from the opera in Vienna one night, she stopped at the Central Telegraph Bureau to get the late news, and learned that Marshal Josef Pilsudski and his army had begun their march on Warsaw to take over the Polish government. Other correspondents were running for the railroad station where the Warsaw train stood puffing on the tracks, and Miss Thompson, wearing a gleaming evening gown and satin slippers, scurried along after them, stopping only to make two telephone calls. One was a message to her hotel to send her typewriter and some daytime clothes to the station; the other was an appeal to Sigmund Freud, her most prosperous Viennese acquaintance, to lend her some money. Freud sent a messenger racing to her with the equivalent of three hundred dollars. The messenger arrived in time, and so did the typewriter and suitcase, but before Miss Thompson could change her clothes on the train, the tracks ahead were blown up by mines and the train stopped ninety kilometres from Warsaw. The reporters spilled out into a cold, wet darkness to look for other transportation, and gallantly handed Miss Thompson into the first car they found—a Daimler, which instantly, at her command to the chauffeur, shot ahead and left them. When the driver of the Daimler demanded sixty dollars to drive to Warsaw, however, she changed to a Ford which she picked up at the next town. Five kilo-

metres outside of Warsaw, the driver of the Ford, frightened by the sound of guns, refused to go any farther. Meanwhile, the empty Daimler, on its return trip, was fired on by the revolutionists, and Floyd Gibbons, somewhere on the road in his own hired car, saw it whiz past him, spattered with bullet holes. He recognized the car and when he met the other correspondents at the Hotel Europa in Warsaw, broke the news to them that Dorothy Thompson was undoubtedly dead. Miss Thompson at about that moment was plodding into Warsaw in her satin slippers, lugging her bag and her typewriter, and swearing monotonously.

IN her flat in Vienna, Dorothy Thompson gave parties at which the food and wine were superb and the guests, according to John Gunther's published memoir about Miss Thompson, “A Blue-Eyed Tornado,” included “prime ministers, psychoanalysts, agents provocateurs, Balkan refugees, proletarian novelists, withered aristocrats, spies, and musicians.” Women who went to the parties are inclined to remember them as uncomfortable and Miss Thompson as a detached hostess with little interest in anyone who had no unusual information to give her. “The parties had no fragrance,” one sensitive feminine guest has since observed. Miss Bottome, the student of Adler, describes Miss Thompson's remoteness more thoughtfully. “Dorothy had no foliage,” she says. “She was like a tree rooted in the earth and reaching in a straight line to the sky.” Men had a good time at Miss Thompson's soirées, however; newspapermen in particular admired her single-mindedness, even when it kept them feeling rather tense, and they speak respectfully of her now. Raymond Gram Swing will tell you that she is one of the

7.

30

"Take a telegram to
the Museum of Natural History."

few newspaperwomen he has known who were not a hellish nuisance to work with. "Dorothy never asked favors of the boys because she was a woman," Mr. Swing says staunchly. He adds that she nearly always had a bigger expense account than any other foreign correspondent, and that raised her standing in two ways. A reporter with a big expense account is generally a reporter with initiative, loved and trusted by the home office; in Miss Thompson's case it also meant that she could buy her own railway tickets, hire cars, and charter planes. Not only was she no trouble to newspapermen but she could even give the boys a lift occasionally.

IN 1923, Curtis bought the New York Evening Post, and in 1925, Miss Thompson was appointed head of the Berlin office, which was the headquarters of the European news service of the Ledger and the Post. Two years

later, at a tea given for the press by Gustav Stresemann, she met Sinclair Lewis. A few days after the tea, H. R. Knickerbocker, who was then assistant Berlin correspondent for the Curtis papers, took Lewis to a party at Miss Thompson's flat off the Tiergarten. The party, marking her thirty-third birthday, happened to fall on the day she received her final decree of divorce from Josef Bard, and when Lewis heard that, he asked her at once to marry him. She turned him down lightly, and the next night Lewis traced her to a banquet and repeated his proposal formally before a dozen people at the speakers' table. Two days later, when Miss Thompson flew to Vienna to cover a Red riot, Lewis was still proposing, and she took him along with her, with Mrs. John Gunther as chaperon. In the plane, Lewis sat and looked worshipfully at Miss Thompson, with now and then a nervous glance at the rocking

earth beneath them; although his published works included a story about aviators called "The Trail of the Hawk," he had never been in an airplane before. When they got to Vienna, his romantic daze had attained such epic proportions that he agreed happily to Miss Thompson's suggestion that he while away the time by writing a few signed stories about the riots for the Ledger at space rates. She was not always, however, so practical an opportunist with Lewis; when he took to following her everywhere she was amused and flattered by his devotion, and presently began to display a certain coquetry. Once, taking off from Berlin for Russia, she beat him to the airport by five minutes, and Lewis arrived in time to see only the white hand of his love waving from the plane in a mocking farewell. He followed her again doggedly and was met in Moscow by reporters eager to interview him as the distinguished author of "Main Street." What, they asked him, did he find most interesting in the European situation? "Dorothy," replied Lewis. The reporters tried again and asked him what had brought him to Russia. "Dorothy," Lewis said patiently. "What will be your business in Moscow?" one man inquired. Lewis looked at him thoughtfully. "Dorothy," he said.

Lewis and Miss Thompson were married in London in May, 1928, a month after Lewis's divorce from his first wife, Grace Hegger Lewis. They returned to America in the same year, and in 1930 their son, Michael, was born. Michael is in school in Arizona now, and his mother travels out there by plane to spend a weekend with him whenever she can. Her ideal of motherhood is intact and glowing, although, like her other ideals, it is not always easily realized. As a mother, Miss Thompson combines, perhaps more than most women, the qualities of tenderness and fieriness. Recently she remarked that she had enjoyed the act of childbirth. "I felt it was something I could grit my teeth and go into battle about," she said.

—MARGARET CASE HARRIMAN

*(This is the first of two articles on Miss Thompson. The second will appear next week.)*

NON SEQUITUR DEPARTMENT

[From the World-Telegram]

Magistrate Rothenberg decided that maybe the prisoner would feel better if he had a little sheep, so he held him in $10 bail.

23

# PROFILES

## THE IT GIRL—II

WHEN Dorothy Thompson came home to America in 1928, after eight years as a foreign correspondent in Central Europe, the times were opportune for a budding philosopher and social commentator. Rich Americans had ignored Europe, except as a playground, since the Armistice, and poor Americans were too busy getting rich in 1928 to think much about the predicament of the world in general. The country, uninformed and receptive, was more or less in the frame of mind of a creamy dowager idly asking a caller "What's new?" and Miss Thompson was bursting with information. Her qualifications as a public figure were romantic as well as practical. She was thirty-four years old—young for an expert on foreign affairs; she had a blond, breezy beauty and a contagious manner; and she had just married Sinclair Lewis. Lewis was plainly fascinated by his bride and in the first years of their marriage always referred interviewers to her with the statement that she was the greatest woman on earth. He is still nervously inclined to suspect that this is true. Miss Thompson's emergence as a celebrity familiar to the whole American public did not actually occur, however, until she began her column in the *Herald Tribune*, eight years after her return to America. This deferred fame was the result of several things that preoccupied her in the meantime. In chronological order, they were domestic life, the birth of her son, Michael, in 1930, the belligerence of Theodore Dreiser, and the coyness of Adolf Hitler.

Lewis bought a farm near Barnard, Vermont, and the transition from the revolutions of Middle Europe to an unaccustomed, rustic peace encouraged Miss Thompson to think less with the quick reactions of a reporter and more in the contemplative mood of an analyst. She read a great deal and wrote a few magazine articles and some book reviews, but most of her time was spent sociably discussing groceries with tradesmen or wrangling with architects over additions to the house. Sometimes she startled her staff of five servants by appearing in the kitchen to cook dinner—she is a fine, enthusiastic cook—and to stir up a German *Bowler*, the white-wine punch with strawberries,

which always affects her with a slight homesickness for the old Berlin and Vienna. When the Lewises took an apartment in New York for the winter, Mrs. Lewis directed workmen in tearing out a projection in the wall near the fireplace and building bookshelves around the hearth, so that anyone sitting in the comfortable chairs she planned to place by the wood fire could reach out and choose a book without getting up. She bought cherry logs for the fireplace and arranged the reading lamps so that they shone cheerily in the right places. It was a charming picture she had conjured up, and the only reason it turned out badly was that she had forgotten to ask the renting agent whether the fireplace was a real one. The fireplace, the agent told her regretfully when everything was finished, was a phony.

Miss Thompson was enchanted with homemaking, and with motherhood after her son was born, but she had planted so many seeds of battle in various directions that it seemed unlikely her career would ever settle into a domestic rut. When Theodore Dreiser's book "Dreiser Looks at Russia" was published in 1928, Miss Thompson charged him publicly with plagiarism. She said in an interview that Dreiser had stolen three thousand words from a series of articles entitled "The New Russia," written by her for the New York *Evening Post* earlier in 1928, when she was head of the Central European service for that paper, and later published as a book. Dreiser denied the charge and talked thunderously of calling in his lawyers about it, but nothing definite happened until a night in March, 1931, when the late Ray Long gave a dinner at the Metropolitan Club for one Boris Pilnyak, a Russian writer. Long's guests included Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Arthur Brisbane, Irvin Cobb, and Heywood Broun, and things went well until Long, with the cigars and brandy, called on his guests for speeches. Lewis, invited to speak first, rose, bowed, and said, "I am very happy to meet Mr. Pilnyak. But I do not care to speak in the presence of one man [here he stared alarmingly at Dreiser] who has plagiarized three thousand words from my wife's book on Russia." He then sat down, and Long hastily called

on Irvin Cobb, who obliged with a soothing flow of anecdote. When the party broke up, Lewis addressed Dreiser directly. "I once spoke of you in a public speech as a great American writer," he said, "but I also say to you that you are a—" Before he had completed his garland of rosy epithets, Dreiser reached out, like a bear after a zookeeper, and slapped him twice with his open hand. Lewis rushed at Dreiser with raised fists, and the boys were separated with difficulty by the other men present. "Dreiser is a powerful guy, but he's pretty old," Lewis remarked to reporters next day. Dreiser's comment to the press was more petulant. "Aw," he said, "I was asked to write 'Arrowsmith' before he was."

MISS THOMPSON'S writings are banned in Soviet Russia now, but this proscription has caused her less concern than her ejection from Nazi Germany in 1934 because of her book "I Saw Hitler." She had lived happily in Berlin from 1925 to 1928 as chief of the Central European service of the Philadelphia *Public Ledger* and the *Evening Post*, and she had developed a deep affection for the German people; also, a good part of her eight years in Europe had been spent in trying to see Hitler. In 1923, after the failure of his *Putsch* with Ludendorff, Hitler went into hiding in Murnau at the home of Frau Hanfstaengl, the mother of Ernst Hanfstaengl, who was to become the Nazi publicity chief. Miss Thompson, then Vienna correspondent for the *Ledger*, followed Hitler to Murnau and arrived at Frau Hanfstaengl's house two hours after

Dorothy Thompson

24

APRIL 27, 1940

"But why should I pay twice as much just for a view?"

he had left for another, more secret
shelter. For the next five years she
pursued him to offices, hotels, and jails
in a vain attempt to get an inter-
view. In 1931, three years after her
marriage, Miss Thompson took a trip
abroad with her husband, and this
time Hitler finally consented to see her,
at his headquarters in the Kaiserhof
Hotel in Berlin. "He had a message
for the world, and so he was ready
to see me" is the way Miss Thomp-
son puts it. Hitler kept her waiting
an hour, making a combined total of
eight years and one hour, and it is
possible that Miss Thompson's annoy-
ance with him, when she was at last
admitted, was not altogether imperson-
al.

"When I finally walked into Adolf Hitler's salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel," she wrote in 1932 in a magazine article, "I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog." In her book "I Saw Hitler," she called the Führer "little man," addressed him as "Oh, Adolf!," and reproached him for his futile ambition. Miss Thompson has taken a good deal of ribbing about her supremely wrong estimate of Hitler's importance, and she still refers to it anxiously in her speeches. "Where I was really wrong,"

she said at a Book and Author lunch-
con last year, "was in not trusting to
my first judgment." Miss Thompson's
third, and present, judgment of Hit-
ler is an eloquent one. Out of some
238,000 words she has written on in-
ternational affairs in her *Herald Tri-
bune* column in the past two years, near-
ly 147,000—or more than three-fifths
of the total—have been devoted to at-
tacking his regime.

Possibly what threw Miss Thomp-
son off during the Hitler interview was
her own rapidly crystallizing desire to
be a commentator and a psychologist
on world affairs rather than merely
a trained observer. She was no longer
content simply to report events; she
wanted to explain them, even to pre-
dict them. People who had known her
in Europe in the twenties noticed the
difference in her point of view when
she came back in the thirties. In Vienna,
in 1931, she fell to brooding about the
state of Europe and how sadly it com-
pared with the ideals of the Versailles
Treaty and the League of Nations.
Always quick to think of a new ap-
proach to a story and of a friend to dir-
ect her to the proper source, she went
to John Gunther's flat and asked him
where she could find a set of Wood-
row Wilson's speeches from 1918 on.
Gunther directed her to the American
Embassy, and presently Miss Thomp-
son wrote one of the first of her omin-
ous pieces. Later published as part of a

series in the Saturday Evening Post, it was mainly a reminder of what Mr. Wilson had dreamed of and a sharp complaint that very little of it had come true.

This kind of academic
survey was a strange depar-
ture for the Dorothy Thomp-
son who had once fought
her way barehanded into the
thick of revolutions. Her
friends, noticing how much
she had changed, neverthe-
less remembered that her at-
titude toward the European
scene had been a thoughtful
one even in the twenties. They liked to
recall, for instance, a night in Vienna
in 1922, during the worst period of
inflation, when Miss Thompson was
dining at the Hotel Bristol with Morris
Ernst and Walter Lippmann. The talk
turned to the possibility of revolution in
Vienna, and Ernst, newly arrived and
appalled by the conditions he found,
wanted to know simply when it would
come. "Probably tomorrow," Miss
Thompson told him. Lippmann dis-
agreed. "Revolution will never come,"
he said. "The Viennese will keep on
waltzing." As he spoke the last word,
a hunger riot broke out in the street
in front of the hotel. A reporter's fever
came over Miss Thompson and, ig-
noring the men's protests (they stayed
where they were), she threw her fur
coat over her shoulders and ran out into
the crowd. Tossed against a wall of
angry people, she brought up breath-
lessly beside a woman who was standing
with an arm raised, ready to throw a
brick through one of the hotel win-
dows. The woman looked at her with-
out lowering her arm. "Lady," she said
civilly, "you better get back into the
hotel. You don't want to spoil that nice
fur coat." Miss Thompson returned to
the hotel doorway and the rioter went
ahead and heaved the brick through the
window. What impressed Morris Ernst
about that episode was Miss Thomp-
son's uncanniness in predicting trouble
in Vienna only a few minutes before
it came.

IN 1936, the time seemed ripe for the début of Dorothy Thompson as an interpreter of world affairs, and the New York *Herald Tribune* engaged her to write three columns a week on that subject. Mrs. Ogden Reid, co-publisher with her husband of the *Tribune*, likes to think of American women as being alert and on their toes, and she

THE NEW YORKER

25

proposed to Miss Thompson a column
about politics, wars, and domestic and
international problems written so that
women could easily understand it and
would not always have to be seeking
information from their husbands, who
(Mrs. Reid suspected) often had mis-
taken ideas about such things. Miss
Thompson's column made its first ap-
pearance on March 17, 1936, with a
cozy, woman-to-woman chat on the

Corporations Tax Bill. In spite of this
stern introduction, women readers were
moved by the crusading spirit that shone
through the printed words in each suc-
ceeding article, and perhaps even more
by Miss Thompson's richly indignant
prose. It was somehow a vicarious outlet
for the wrath against things in gen-
eral that slumbers fitfully in all wom-
en. Housewives—possibly Miss Thomp-
son's greatest audience—were flattered,

too, by the thought that they were
at last considered intelligent enough
to wrestle mentally with the world's
woes. One feminine reader, who lives
in the suburbs, recently bestowed on
the column what seemed to her the last
word in praise. This woman comes in-
to town by train frequently, to shop,
and she has developed a habit of look-
ing around the car to see what her
fellow-travellers are reading. "Do you
know who most of the people are
who are reading Dorothy Thompson's
column?" she inquired excitedly of a
friend. "Men!"

Men are apt to wear a puzzled frown
when they read Miss Thompson's
column. The elastic quality of her
thinking and her fearless prose style
confuse them, and one male reader
pointed with astonishment not long
ago to a single column of about 1,700
words in which Miss Thompson had
contrived to comment definitely upon
thirty different topics. Her flexible brand
of logic and her rapidly shifting judg-
ment are also disturbing to the mas-
culine mind. For example, in Jan-
uary, 1938, she recommended the ap-
pointment of Colonel Charles Lind-
bergh to a high office in the League
of Nations, describing him as "a young
man of international
sympathies, of human-
itarian instincts, and
of organizing abilities,
who is internationally
known, international-
ly beloved." In Sep-
tember, 1939, after
Lindbergh's speech in
favor of strict neutral-
ity for the United States
(an idea to which Miss
Thompson is notably
opposed), she wrote
bitterly, "Colonel Lind-
bergh's inclination to-
ward Fascism is well
known to his friends."
Miss Thompson's crit-
ics of both sexes are
inclined to suspect her
humor, particularly the
kind displayed in the
occasional columns fea-
turing imaginary diag-
logues at the breakfast
table between herself
and someone she calls
"the Grouse." The
Grouse, who bears lit-
tle resemblance to Sin-
clair Lewis and even
less to Oliver Wendell

"All right, men, break step."

26

APRIL 27, 1940

Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, is fond of rather heavy-footed parables, such as the one about the man who owns two cows and is approached by a Socialist, a Communist, and a Fascist, each of whom explains to him what he must do with his cows according to each political creed. The Socialist says, "You can keep one cow. That's enough to furnish milk, butter, and cheese for your own family." Here Miss Thompson interrupts the Grouse. "But it isn't," she says brightly, "not the way this family eats butter." To quote Miss Thompson, farther on in the column: "There was a pause. 'Where does the New Deal belong in this picture?' [she asks.] 'Oh, the New Deal,' said the Grouse, 'tells you that you should shoot one of the cows and pour the milk down the sink.'" The Grouse columns have some admirers who like to recall, too, how Miss Thompson dealt humorously with Father Coughlin when he referred to her in his speeches as Dottie. "I do not know why Mr. Coughlin calls me Dottie," she wrote blandly. "I don't feel I know him well enough to call him Chuck." Since then she has continuously called him Chuck. Even her most ardent champions agree, however, that there was not much humor in the celebrated burst of laughter from Miss Thompson at a Bund meeting in Madison Square Garden last year, which caused her removal by police from the front row and her subsequent sensational departure from the hall. They feel uncomfortably that laughter like that is dangerous, a little too closely akin to the Nazis' own tricks of hysterical horseplay.

MISS THOMPSON'S relations with Mr. and Mrs. Reid, her employers, have been peaceful except for a short period after she discovered that certain male columnists on the *Herald Tribune* had a slight financial advantage over her. Her contract called for $10,000 a year, plus fifty per cent of all syndicate sales over $10,000. Walter Lippmann, on the other hand, was paid a straight salary and fifty per cent of all syndicate sales, with no reservations. Armed with this information, Miss Thompson called at Mrs. Reid's office, unleashed an oral column on her, and departed with a new contract. Last June, *Time* published an article about her which included the statement that her earnings for 1938, from her column, lectures, magazine pieces, and radio broadcasts, had amounted to about $103,000; the figure was arrived at

by sleuths operating for *Time* and was not authorized by Miss Thompson. A few nights after the article appeared, she dined with Henry Luce, publisher of the magazine. "Harry," she said clearly, as the guests sat down to dinner, "how much money did you make last year, and how did you make it?" It seemed to her, she went on to explain, that if her income was any business of *Time's*, she had an equal right to know what Luce's income was. Luce laughed nervously and replied with some joking remark or other. Miss Thompson still refuses to discuss her earnings, but John Moses, her agent, reminded of the $103,000 mentioned in *Time*, says carefully, "The figure is not too high." Moses was not disturbed by Miss Thompson's withdrawal, last winter, from lecture tours and the radio; even if she never returns to them, he says, the effect on her income will be small, since the increase in the number of newspapers that buy her column—from seventy papers in 1937 to a hundred and fifty in 1940—promises to continue steadily.

Miss Thompson's retirement from lecture tours was due to a natural desire to be in New York during the production of "Another Sun," a play she had written in collaboration with Fritz Kortner, a German playwright and producer. The play opened on Broadway on a Tuesday evening this February and closed the following Saturday, but since it passionately demonstrated Miss Thompson's concern for refugees, and was also acted largely by refugees, most of the critics dealt with it gently, although in some bewilderment. "It's

the only play I ever saw," one of them explained, "in which so many things happened at once to so many people that when one of the characters died in the middle of the stage, the audience didn't notice it for ten minutes." On closing night, Miss Thompson sent a charming note and a small bonus to each member of the cast, and the company broke up amid graceful regrets.

Miss Thompson's departure from her radio hour was, however, a sterner separation. For some time her sponsor, the General Electric Company, had worried about the violence of her radio attacks on Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and—occasionally, as the thought struck her—less obvious targets. Caught between the glories of free speech and the perils of libel, General Electric first tried to soften Miss Thompson's diatribes by having Phil Spitalny's orchestra introduce her with a tune like "Love Sends a Little Gift of Roses" and by quickly bringing on, after she had finished speaking, a trio of girls who sang, for example, "Thank God for a Garden, Thank God for You." This was makeshift, and presently the sponsor arranged to have the announcer state at the beginning of each program that General Electric was not responsible for Miss Thompson's views. Matters came to a head one night when Station KWK, in St. Louis, cut her off the air in the middle of a talk, giving as its reason the opinion that she was too belligerent—"against everybody," a wide-eyed station official added. Restrictions like those irked Miss Thompson, and when her contract came up for renewal neither she nor

THE NEW YORKER

27

General Electric was in the mood to renew it.

She has made several guest appearances on the air recently, and one of them was notable for its drama. Last fall she joined a round-table discussion on the American Forum of the Air program with Boake Carter, Jay Franklin, and Ernest Lindley. It soon became apparent that Miss Thompson intended to do most of the talking, and the men, in their efforts to speak, began to interrupt her irritably. Heckled on all sides and trying to outtalk three men at once, Miss Thompson finally broke down and wept. She had the last word, though. "I agree with the Pope!" she shouted suddenly through her sobs. The Pope had not been quoted or mentioned up to that moment, and the abrupt introduction of his name startled Carter, Franklin, and Lindley into momentary silence. By the time the debaters resumed their discussion the heart was out of it, and presently the Forum's time was up. As the battle faded off the air Miss Thompson's voice was clearly heard, protesting to the last.

TWO years ago, a speaker at a banquet of the Friendship Dinner Group, at which Miss Thompson received the medal annually awarded by the American Woman's Association, archly suggested the forming of a "Dorothy Thompson for President" club. When Sinclair Lewis heard about it, he made a remark which was quickly lifted by Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and other married radio comedians. "I wish they *would* elect Dorothy President," he said wistfully, "so I could get to

write 'My Day.'" Lewis has spent most of the last two years on tour in his new rôle of actor in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" and in his own play, "Angela Is Twenty-Two." Miss Thompson has not seen him act, but she speaks indulgently of his recently awakened passion for the theatre. "Everyone should have a new interest at some time or another," she says. Lewis, who lives in amicable separation from his wife, is not always as tolerant of her interests. Sometimes, dropping in at her apartment on Central Park West, he extracts a promise from her in the vestibule, before he has got his coat off, that there will be no talk of the world situation, or—as he refers simply to the topic which generally dominates his wife's conversation—"it." "Let us not discuss it," he will say. "I mean let us not discuss it. O.K.?" Miss Thompson nods agreeably, and then Lewis leaves his coat in the hall, walks into the living room, thrusts a lighted cigarette into the outstretched hand of a bronze Epstein figure Miss Thompson is fond of, and cozily takes off his hat.

Miss Thompson has an office at the *Herald Tribune*, but she works mostly at home, in bed or in her study, a pleasant room filled with maps, globes, atlases, and books. She wakes up about ten in the morning and calls immediately for one of her three secretaries, who work in alternate shifts at the apartment and the *Herald Tribune* office. The secretaries are Madeleine Walker, Madelon Shiff, and Madeline Shaw; they were christened that way, and Miss Thompson calls them by their first names, pronouncing all three alike. They

call her Mrs. Lewis, in low, respectful tones. After breakfast on a tray, Miss Thompson reads a mass of American and foreign newspapers and magazines and a collection of clippings and condensations prepared by her secretaries. Articles from European papers are translated for her by Miss Walker, except for those in German, the only foreign language Miss Thompson knows well. Often what she reads gets her out of bed with a great heave of indignation, and she snatches up the telephone and, pacing back and forth, calls Washington, London, or Paris. She has built up an international cabinet of advisers and experts, to whom she turns continually for information and counsel; it includes Harold Nicolson, the British M.P.; Alexander Sachs and Gustav Stolfer, economists; Morris Ernst, the attorney; Raoul de Roussy de Sales, American correspondent for *Paris-Soir*; and Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of *Foreign Affairs*. This private brain trust is a fluid organization, however, since almost every new authority Miss Thompson meets is elected to the circle. Sometimes a contribution from a new acquaintance appears in the column verbatim and without quotes, although Miss Thompson never presents another's thoughts as her own without asking permission. "Oh, that's good!" she will exclaim in the middle of a remark by an ambassador, a politician, or a refugee. "Can I have that?" As a rule Miss Thompson would rather talk than listen, and in ordinary conversation she is less a companion than an opponent. Even her close friends are sometimes unnerved by her eloquence, and by a way she has of appearing to think about what she is going to say next while anyone else is talking. "I have a terrible impulse when I'm with Dorothy," one woman has said, "to suddenly stretch my mouth with my thumbs, push my eyebrows up with my fingers, and shriek, 'The cat is on the mat!' I'm positive Dorothy wouldn't notice anything out of the ordinary." Another woman friend, defending Miss Thompson with the statement that she is, in spite of everything, generous, warm-hearted, and loyal, pointed out that she was the first person to telephone her when she was in the hospital last winter, having a baby. "How are you, darling?" Miss Thompson asked affectionately. "I'm fine," the patient said, and then, according to eyewitnesses, she held the receiver to her ear for ten minutes until the nurse came and took it away from her. "What on earth was she talking about all that time?" the

29

"We feel that we owe you an explanation."

offensive in the west," "There will be purges in Germany. Mr. Ribbentrop will be one of the casualties," "Franklin Delano Roosevelt (to make a very bold and somewhat wild prediction, which is pure hunch) will not be a candidate," and "There will be a movement to make Mr. Roosevelt Secretary of State." She concluded the 1940 Horoscope darkly enough with the statement "The greatest event that will take place this year is not to be found in this column." A good many people who took this to be a prediction of America's entry into the European war still feel uneasy about it.

Miss Thompson's Delphic activity is an entertaining enough kind of game, but her main interest and—according to a few brooders—a dangerous power lie in her attitude toward the United States in relation to the war. She plainly feels that America's neutrality is a kind of cowardice, and she has repeatedly implied that if the United States manages to keep out of the war, it will be without her approval. Two years ago she wrote,

"If France and Great Britain... are embroiled in war... the United States will consider their cause its own." Since then she has tried tirelessly and with some passion to make the United States back her up in that statement, and she has used some fancy language toward that end. "If America, out of fear of war," she wrote five months ago, "withdraws from consideration of the European scene, America will miss the greatest intellectual and spiritual adventure of the century." A few weeks later, referring to the neutral European nations in danger of quick eclipse, she wrote, "We should aid them, and in a grandiose way, economically, financially, and in the fortification of their defenses."

Last month, Miss Thompson sailed for Europe to visit various neutral nations and as many as possible of those at war; she cannot go to Germany or to Russia because of her falling-out with both countries. She telephones her column three times a week and is trying to arrange some short-wave broadcasts

to America. In America, her seven and a half million readers remain loyal, susceptible, and slightly confused. Their condition of alternating excitement and gloom—caught from the infectious Miss Thompson—was fairly well expressed by a conversation two of them had the other day. "Whatever you say about Dorothy Thompson, whether she's right or wrong," the first one said, "you must admit that she is absolutely and utterly sincere." "I know," the other replied thoughtfully. "That's what I'm afraid of." —MARGARET CASE HARRIMAN

*(This is the second of two articles on Miss Thompson.)*

## NEATEST TRICK OF THE WEEK

*[From the Oklahoma Daily]*

The University president took occasion to criticize sharply the practice of cutting across lawns and thru hedges on the campus.

"One of the things that gives me the greatest anxiety is the way students take these shortcuts," he asserted. "They often go right thru the trees."

30

TRIBAL RITES

IN "Morning Star," at the Longacre, Sylvia Regan gives us the biography of an East Side Jewish family from December, 1910, up through November, 1931. In the course of these long and complex annals of the poor, one of the Feldermans is burned up in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, another is killed in the World War, and close friends of the family are involved in the depression and the Russian Revolution. For some reason, nobody goes down on the Titanic, but except for that I can't think of any major disaster Miss Regan has left out. So much calamity ought to make an eventful play, but I'm afraid it doesn't. "Morning Star" has its full share of racial humor and special reference (not always comprehensible to me); it has at

least five plots, since almost every member of the cast has an emotional problem to be investigated; it even has a measure of social indignation, there being those in it who speak favorably of labor unions; but, in spite of all these attractions, it held my attention only intermittently.

One trouble is that Miss Regan's construction is so ingenuous that nothing which happens can come as much of a surprise to anybody (with the first mention of the war, for instance, I felt sure that the son of the house was going to get killed in it, and I was not disappointed). Another is that while sentiment is fine, bathos is not, and there are moments when the stage is so crowded with motherhood, love, sacrifice, patriotism, and simple nobility that even

Mr. Channing Pollock might conceivably find himself oppressed. Finally, the heroine, the grand old matriarch, has appeared so relentlessly in drama and fiction that she is less a character than an institution, like the butler in a drawing-room comedy. Molly Picon, making her first appearance in a Broadway play, gives a simple, touching performance in this part, but even she can't disguise its essential familiarity. Joseph Buloff, as a boarder with a heart of gold in spite of an annoying habit of going to bed with his hat on, has the happiest rôle and plays it extraordinarily well. I also enjoyed the voluminous Georgette Harvey, who enters much too briefly as a colored cook, and Sidney Lumet, as a thirteen-year-old boy undergoing his *bar mitzvah*, if that is the right way to use this gay but mysterious term.

"HEAVENLY EXPRESS" is an example of what happens when the imp of fantasy runs away with a good man, or, if you include the actors, quite a lot of good men. Albert Bein, who wrote "Little Ol' Boy" and "Let Freedom Ring," in this case has imagined a sort of supernatural extra on the Santa Fe Railroad, a ghost train taking the old and tired to paradise. This, as you might guess, is tough on the regular timetable, but not nearly as tough as it is on the customers, who have not been asked to coöperate in such whimsical goings-on since Morley took Hoboken. Like Mr. Brink in "On Borrowed Time," the Young Hobo in "Heavenly Express" is a contact man for the Almighty, but, unlike Mr. Brink, he never succeeds in making heaven sound like a very attractive place, except possibly as a substitute for the National Theatre. The best thing that can be said for Mr. Bein's play is that he seems to know a great deal about hobos and railroad men, but I'm afraid that accurate terminology is only a means in the theatre and not an end.

John Garfield, an actor of unquestionable ability, seemed to be having a difficult and embarrassing evening as the divine messenger, and the others, including Harry Carey, Aline MacMahon, Philip Loeb, and Russell Collins, weren't much better off. It was all too bad. I like to think that "Heavenly Express" is just one of those works of misguided and superabundant imagination that even the best writers have to get out of their systems from time to time.
—WOLCOTT GIBBS

"LILIOM"

Burgess Meredith is a very tough guy, but Ingrid Bergman doesn't care. Vinton Freedley's revival of the Molnar fantasy is at the 44th Street Theatre.

SILHOUETTES

# Dorothy Thompson

BY GERALDINE SARTAIN

SINCLAIR LEWIS tells a story about Dorothy Thompson that he believes explains her. He tells it with a chuckle that expands into explosive laughter.

"Now I want you to get the picture of her standing there on the truck, a girl of twenty-one, facing all those scoffing people," he says. "She was a professional agitator for suffrage then, and she had hit an upstate town that was hostile to feminism. The Mayor was courteous, but he had set the stage for the advent of the 'furrin agitator.'

"Dorothy began her speech and the municipal band struck up *Yankee Doodle*. It blah-ed on and on. The crowd laughed and started trickling away. Dorothy stood there on the truck thinking, 'I'm licked.'

"Then she saw a stationery store across the street and climbed down from the truck. In a minute she came back with a child's small blackboard and some chalk. She started drawing caricatures of the Mayor, the band leader, other local stuffed shirts.

"She wrote on the board, 'This is what a lone gal gets.' The crowd surged around her. She began her speech again. They stayed. She had put it over.

"There you have Dorothy."

An air of husbandly pride sits comically upon the Lewis face during the narrative of Dorothy's resourcefulness.

He has a profound respect for Miss Thompson's oratorical journalistic feats. He has seen their character gradually change, although their legendary quality continues.

If there was a Richard Halliburton tinge to the anecdotes of Dorothy's early encounters as a foreign correspondent with revolutionists and monarchist coups, she has redeemed herself in the same manner as did Vincent Sheean.

Her day-by-day cables, in crisp journalese, divorced from editorial opinion, have been

replaced by books and magazine series written in an authoritative manner—the work of a writer whose interest has shifted from news events to the world forces behind the history she records. The 1917 street-corner harangues are now addresses delivered with assurance from the stage of Town Hall Club, New York City, and from the platform of 300 women's clubs, business men's luncheons and university forums that dot the continent.

The new Dorothy Thompson is far from the fresh-faced, corn-fed girl who invaded Europe fifteen years ago with $150 in her pocket, a yen for newspaper work and no background for it but a prodigious intellectual curiosity and remarkable ease in making friends.

Now, there's a whisper around that she will be heard from politically. She has laid aside the detachment with which a journalist views the shifting social scene and wishes aloud that she could manage a public berth along with home, husband, child, writing and lecturing.

The wish may be but the prelude. She could fill a Senate post or an Ambassadorship with more intelligence and a greater knowledge of world affairs than the men who win these political seats customarily. At the Friendship Dinner of the American Women's Association, where Dorothy was toastmistress recently, one speaker even suggested, lightly but meaningfully, that it might be the right moment to launch a "Dorothy Thompson for President" Club.

Her radical friends, who looked on her as a fellow traveller for years, lament the conservatism that marks her social philosophy since she achieved the success of the *Saturday Evening Post*, of Main Street lecture platforms, and life as the wife of the Nobel Prize winner. When they speculate on her political future, they breathe (*Continued on page 54*)

16

"Third, if your features are too bad, try plastic surgery. It's far the quickest way.

"Fourth, if your hair is straight— don't brush it. Have a good long permanent and never touch spinach.

"Fifth, never go out without make-up. I only use lipstick on the street myself but heaven knows it's not because I don't need it—it's just inertia cropping out."

"You May be Far Away From Me," said the call boy, and Miss Lillie departed to sing it. We left her breaking a suitcase with the greatest of charm over the head of Mr. Reginald Gardiner. It was the hundredth performance of the show, but a large number of the cast peering at her from the wings rivalled the audience with their laughter. Which is something!

## BLACK PEARL

*(Continued from page 12)*

at her and said "How do you do?" politely. After a time it was evident that he did not intend to say more.

My, my, thought Alicia, we are getting on, aren't we?

"Mr. Porthly tells me he had some wonderful deep-sea fishing in Florida," she said. "Were you down there with him?"

Black Pearl said, "No."

"You have such a nice sunburn." Alicia remarked experimentally and none too truthfully, "that I was certain you must have spent the winter in the South."

Black Pearl seemed to consider that only direct questions demanded answers. When this became apparent Alicia said, "So many men dislike spending the winter in one place. I suppose you prefer to travel?" Then she added, "Don't you?" by way of precaution.

"No," he said. "No."

Wow, thought Alicia, one whole unnecessary word. He's getting very redundant.

"I'm a stay-at-home, too," she said. "But I do like to attend anything interesting that takes place around New York. We're fortunate in the sporting events we get here, don't you think?"

"I don't know," said Black Pearl.

"You wouldn't," said Alicia. "I mean, er, you wouldn't know of another place that has hockey, boxing, football, polo, tennis—anything you'd want to see; and it's all so accessible. What's your favorite sport?" There, she thought; this time I've got you.

Black Pearl looked mildly surprised. "None," he said.

"But you must be interested in one of them," said Alicia prayerfully, "either actively or as a spectator—aren't you?"

"No," said Black Pearl, and finished off the lobster.

"I read an interesting article last week about the use of leisure time," Alicia improved. "It treated principally of famous men and their hobbies. I can't remember just where it appeared. Did you read it?"

"No."

Of course you didn't, thought Alicia. I just made it up. But anyway, you can't fool me. I know you can't read.

Frank Bartholomew leaned toward her. "How are you doing?" he asked.

Alicia jumped. "Don't startle me," she whispered. "It's the first time I've been spoken to tonight. I wish I could change places with you. Mrs. Whosis Pardue hasn't stopped talking since she sat down."

"No, she hasn't," said Frank. "Pretty good for a guest of honor. What did you draw?"

"God knows," said Alicia. "A nameless creature with a one word vocabulary. No."

"Don't you know who he is?"

"Yes," said Alicia, "I'm pretty sure. He's the Man in the Iron Mask."

Mrs. Pardue reclaimed Frank's attention and Alicia turned back to Black Pearl. I'd better wait to make sure he doesn't drown in the soup, she thought.

They ate in silence a minute. Then Alicia put down her spoon.

"What were we talking about?" she said. "Oh, yes, it was hobbies, wasn't it? I was telling you about that article. It's amazing the things people collect, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Black Pearl.

Baby's second word, thought Alicia. I'll bet he can say Mama and Daddy, too.

"We all have the collector's instinct, I suppose," she said. "Remember how years ago everyone collected shells and cigar-bands?"

"Shells?" said Black Pearl.

"Sea-shells," Alicia explained patiently. "Not French seventy-fives. Do you collect anything?"

"No."

"Not even canaries?" I'm getting maudlin, she thought.

"No," said Black Pearl, and looked neither surprised nor amused.

Alicia attacked her squab with bitterness. "Don't your children collect anything, either?" she asked between gritted teeth.

Black Pearl said a whole sentence. "I'm not married."

Which fact, thought Alicia, automatically cancels such conversational subjects as children's games or sports, child psychology, schools, camps and the servant problem. Not to mention divorce, long engagements, misunderstood husbands and debutante daughters. What's more, I'll bet he's an only child and an orphan besides.

"Do you have a large family?" she asked.

*(Continued on next page)*

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53

"No," he said. "None."

Of course not, thought Alicia. If you
did they'd never have let you go out
without your male attendant.

"Do you know," she said, "that you're
the first person I've ever met who is
really free of family? It must give you
time to do lots of things. I suppose you
attend the concerts a good deal, or the
opera?"

"No."

"So many people prefer to listen in
at home now. I suppose you do, too?"
she said, and thought, Or don't they let
you have music in a padded cell?

"No," he said. "I have no radio."

"I've never cared much for broad-
casts, either," said Alicia. "But I do
like sculpture and painting, don't you?"

"No."

This is the end, thought Alicia. I am
not going to ask him if he's read any good
books lately. That low I won't fall. I
will simply sit here in silence and be a
misera ble failure. Never will my frame
be invited to darken the Porthly doors
again, and after this I don't even
care. Better to starve than to suffer
like this. Thank Heaven, he likes the
salad, too. He's busy, at least. It
wouldn't do to let the poor thing sit
there looking untalked-to. Well, I may
as well eat, too; this will probably be
my last Porthly avocado. Maybe I can
catch Black Pearl unawares, while he's
all softened up with Lorenzo dressing.

"Are you a professional man?" she
asked...

"No."

"A New Yorker?"

"Yes."

"You're in Wall Street?"

"No."

This can't go on, thought Alicia.
If we're going to play Twenty
Questions I might as well let the
whole table in on it.

"You know," she said, "you're
the most mysterious man I've ever
met. I've told you all about my-
self and everything I'm interested
in. But I don't know a thing
about you." If that doesn't get
him, she thought, nothing will.

Black Pearl actually turned
toward her. Alicia hung on the
edge of her chair, tense with ex-
pectancy. It can't be possible,
she thought, that my little prize
package is actually going to talk
—of his own free will and accord
permit some verbal gems to drop
from those hitherto virgin lips!

Black Pearl cleared his throat.
"Oh, that's all right," he said
courteously, and turned back to
his Bombe Naluska.

Alicia sank back in her chair.
My spirit is broken, she thought;
only the iron will of the last of
the Graves will carry me through

until coffee. Dear Mrs. Porthly, please
let us have coffee in the drawing room, as
far away from the men as possible. Let
me have just a few minutes of peace and
comfort before you turn me out into the
cold night never to return.

"Alicia," said Frank, "what are you
mumbling to yourself?"

"Be quiet," said Alicia. "I'm pray-
ing."

"For what?"

"For the success of my dear dinner-
partner's studies."

"Studies? What's he studying for?"

"A master's degree."

"In law?"

"No," said Alicia witheringly. "In
idiocy."

For the second time that evening Mrs
Porthly looked down the length of her
table and beamed. Then she caught Mrs.
Pardue's eye and everyone rose. As the
ladies walked out of the dining room,
leaving the gentlemen behind, Mrs.
Porthly waited for Alicia.

"My dear," she said, "you don't know
how I envied you this evening. You were
so animated at dinner. You seemed to be
having *such* a fascinating time with that
*interesting* man, Mr.—what *was* his
name?"

"Oh, yes," said Alicia, and each word
dripped with sweetness. "He was so
stimulating—simply *fascinating!* I know
I shall never forget him. What *was* his
name, anyway?"

DOROTHY THOMPSON

*(Continued from page 16)*

with feeling, "What an American Rosa
Luxemburg she could be!" They recog-
nize the passion of her convictions and
the fire of her oratory. They regret both
aren't oriented in the direction that
seemed inevitable when she was pro-
Bolshevist, and half the revolutionary
leaders of Europe gathered at her Berlin
home.

They cite sadly her talk at an informal
dinner the leftist intellectuals gave Sin-
clair Lewis when his anti-Fascist *It
Can't Happen Here!* came out. Then she
summed up what they considered her
changed philosophy in one bridling para-
graph, "I am a conservative. How could
I be otherwise? Look at my houses, my
lands, my family!" They remember her
vaunted resourcefulness and wonder if
she is rationalizing. They may forget
she was the child of an upstate New
York minister of the Methodist Church.

The girl, Dorothy Thompson, whom
John Gunther once described as "an
amiable blue-eyed tornado that swept
through Europe in the nineteen-twenties,"
fell into some of the most important
news "scoops" in journalistic history.

She was the last person to interview
McSweeney—the very day he began his
tragic hunger strike in jail. She hit
Vienna the day Emperor Karl made his
first attempt to regain the Hapsburg
throne. During the second Karlist
putsch in 1922 Dorothy, by a ruse,
passed through lines of opposing troops
into the palace for a world "scoop"—the
only interview with Empress Zita—and
carried out to the young Prince
Otto, who had lost a throne, a
message of comfort from his
mother.

She galloped over Europe in-
terviewing premiers, kings,
queens, presidents, crown princes.
Without notice she started for
the Pilsudski revolution in War-
saw in evening clothes, borrow-
ing $500 for the trip from her
friend, Sigmund Freud. She was
almost shot in Bulgaria.

These were adventurous years.
She even found time for romance,
in 1923 marrying Josef Bard,
Hungarian-Jewish intellectual and
author.

After the Pilsudski affair
Dorothy stopped scoop-chasing
and settled into the next and
more important phase of her
career. She became chief of the
Central Europe Bureau in Berlin
for the Curtis-Martin newspapers
—the Philadelphia *Public Ledger*
and the New York *Evening Post*.

She was by now more en-
thralled with the reasons for the
constantly boiling European pot

"That's her fast out-curve I was telling you about!"

54

Mademoiselle

than in its occasional lid-lifting. Political
philosophy, rather than politics, began
to absorb her. At her salons gathered
not only the leading journalists and
writers of two continents, but prime
ministers, duchesses, refugees, musicians,
actors

This long period of interneship
brought into being the reflective Dorothy
Thompson, heightened the serious quali-
ties of mind that made her flee the
harassing requirement of the daily news
cable for the more contemplative field
of magazine writing.

And "Red" Lewis happened along
about then. Dorothy and he met at a
party in Berlin given by the Hearst cor-
respondent, H. R. Knickerbocker. "Red"
was fascinated by the beauty and the
flashing mind of Dorothy, and he says
he told her that night, "I'm sick of all
this—the horror of cities—and I want to
go off to Vermont and get a three-
cornered house. Will you come with
me?"

Instead, Dorothy lured the precipitate
Lewis off to Vienna to write four mas-
terly articles on the revolution for her
paper, at space rates—a feat that must
have stunned her home office. He fol-
lowed her to Russia, and a year or so
later, in 1928, when he was divorced
from the first Mrs. Lewis, "Red" and
Dorothy were married in St. Martin's
Registry Office, London, with H. G.
Wells as witness. The vicar was
muddled about Dorothy's nationality and
kept talking about the marriage "cement-
ing Anglo-American relations."

The honeymoon was a contrast to
Dorothy's first with Josef Bard. She
and Bard had spent theirs in Rome, with
Dorothy covering three sessions a day of
the International Women's Suffrage Con-
vention. A journalist friend remembers
Dorothy and Josef stealing away one
night on a foursome. They took a fiacre
up the Palatine Hill and sipped sweet
wine in the moonlight and ate small
Roman strawberries in a little cafe while
Dorothy discussed Freud's latest book,
not yet published, which she had read.
Passionately she upheld Freud's thesis

for February, 1936

that essentially man wishes, above all
else, simply to lie down by himself and
die.

Lewis and Dorothy took a car and a
trailer, equipped with kitchen so Dorothy
could practice her proficiencies at cook-
ing, and toured the back country of the
British Isles.

They came home to get the Vermont
dream home, answered an advertisement
in person, and took the place on sight.
While "Red" wrote a check for $10,000,
Dorothy unpacked the bags. They
moved in that day. "Red" humorously
summed up his and Dorothy's romance
on one occasion, "I met her at a press
affair; she kidnapped me and took me
in an airplane to Vienna. Then we had
a war, a revolution, an assassination or
two. You see, it's great to have a little
woman in the home."

He still is at loose ends when Dorothy
leaves home for the lecture platform.
She limits her tours to ten or twelve
weeks, to the dismay of her manager,
who could fill all twelve months for her.
The manager looks on her as a real
trouper—says she’s the only lecturer he
ever booked who takes her date list and
goes out and fills it without a word.

The two homes of the Lewises in
Bronxville, N. Y., and near Woodstock,
Vt., provide Sinclair and Dorothy with
perfect retreats for serious study and
gruelling sessions of writing. The
Bronxville house is English style, sur-
rounded by gardens and woods, with
huge fireplaces, beamed ceilings, Oriental
rugs, some fine antiques, a warmly mel-
low library containing hundreds of
books, including those of Lewis in fifty
languages, and early American wall-
paper and elegant candelabra in the
rather formal dining room.

"Mitzie," the white angora, and
"Kippie," the cocker-spaniel named after
Clifton Fadiman, wander around at will,
but prefer five-year-old Michael's play-
room in the library wing. Michael is
very blonde with an angelic air and a
face that is a carbon copy of his
father's.

There is a typewriter in nearly every
room in the house. Dorothy usually
writes at the desk in her own room, that
is scattered with reference works and
books like Shephardson's and Scroggs's
*The United States in World Affairs*,
Barbara Spofford Morgan's *Individuality
in a Collective World*, Walter Duranty's
*I Write As I Please*, George Seldes'
*Sawdust Caesar*, and reports of the
Foreign Policy Association. She reads
few novels, no detective stories, mostly
serious works on the political and
economic scene here and abroad.

It takes five servants of an interna-
tional cast to run the suburban New
York residence. Four of them migrate
to the farm in the summer. There's
Marie, French, who turns out such beau-
tiful hors d'œuvres; the elderly Marthe,

THERE'S SOMETHING SMART 'DOUT SUDBURY SUE:

She's young, she's gay,
She's filled with glee,
SUE's cute and dainty
As can be.

She's keen to knit,
She loves to play,
She's full of fun
Both night and day;
And as you've heard,
She danced past two
With boys at YALE
And grand PURDUE.

SUE's eager too,
To skate and ski,
And she's a picture
At the tee;
And does she know
Her knit and purl?
We'll say she does!
The clever girl.

SUE knits her own;
For each affair
She always knows
The things to wear.
She has a dress
Of CRINKLE CREPE
And with it wears
A SILPAK cap.

"SLUE MARL," says SUE,
"Is smart and chic;
While INVERNESS
Will do the trick."
"SCOTCH TWISTS," says she,
"Are quite au fait!"
She sports a hat
Of FRILL BOUCLE.

And this is SUE's new knitting creed:
"SUDBURY YARNS MEET EVERY NEED,
For many patterns, many shades
You'll see in FASHION'S DRESS PARADES."

Like SUDBURY SUE, so trim and neat,
The SUDBURY LINE is quite complete.
How ask your yarn shop right away
About the newest "SUDBURY WAY".
If stock they lack, please let us know
And we will tell you where to go.
Then send to us for folder "U"
With patterns used by SUDBURY SUE.

sudbury
yarns

75A Chestnut Street --- Beacon Hill
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

55

MANHATTAN MADNESS

(Continued from Page 25)

German, who looks like a Whistler print; the chauffeur, gardener, and a governorness for Michael. Besides, Sinclair has a male secretary, Lou Florey, a crack stenographer, who has been with him eleven years, and Sinclair and Dorothy share another secretary, Peg O'Leary, sister of Mrs. Thomas R. Ybarra. Tommy Ybarra is a close family friend, who foreign-corresponded with Dorothy all over Europe.

"Twin Farms," which both the Lewises love passionately, covers 300 acres of Vermont woodland and meadow, with brooks and a lake for swimming. There are two houses, one a made-over barn with hand-made pegs, great fireplaces and a view of Mt. Ascutney, thirty miles away.

Michael lives in the guest house with his governorness, thus giving his father and mother quiet for their work. There are many visiting children, for Dorothy doesn't want Mickey to develop an only-child personality. When he was a baby his mother used to steal into his room to look at him ecstatically. Now she plays with him for hours, tells him stories and draws pictures for him. His favorite sketch subjects are Pop-Eye and Mickey Mouse.

She believes children should be happy and as unrestrained as possible. However, she inclines more toward old-fashioned common sense in their upbringing than the modernists who let their darlings "express themselves" to the acute discomfort of all grown-ups.

Parties or house guests never are permitted to interfere with the main business of the writing Lewises. When "Hal" (Dorothy's name for Harry Sinclair Lewis) was turning out at white heat his powerful political document against Fascism, she stood guard sternly over his retreat.

Writers, artists, German refugees fill the house in the play times. Their closest friend in the country is a past-middle-age minister's wife who is Woodstock's only iconoclast and pacifist, a liberal who still quotes Ruskin and who engaged the electric light monopoly in single-handed combat. So savage was the battle that the vicar's wife finally banned electricity from her home and went back to kerosene.

Without being intellectual snobs or collectors of famous people, the Lewises know everyone of note from Westchester to Moscow. At a recent dinner party, they gave, H. G. Wells was the guest of honor and G. B. Stern and Alice Roosevelt Longworth among the fifty guests. So were Clifton Fadiman, the Ybarras, the Seldes', F.P.A., Robert Forsythe (behind his false whiskers, and jolly well heckling Wells on his conservatism to the dismay of Dorothy and "Red"), Harrison Smith, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, former German Consul-General Paul Schwartz (whose anti-Nazi views

brought his retirement when Hitler came to power), and some D.A.R. types in antiquated hats.

Dorothy's favorite drink was served—the German bowle, a punch concocted of Rhine wine, champagne, strawberries and fruit juices. There was much warm discussion of international politics, and some listening to Father Coughlin's Sunday broadcast.

Unmindful of Mussolini's and Hitler's success at demagogy, Wells pontificated about Father Coughlin, "How can you take such a person seriously? You Americans get much too excited about Fascism."

Dorothy Thompson is one of those who is "excited" about Fascism. A passionate libertarian, she was expelled from Germany in 1934 for the realistic, but unflattering, view of the Reich's Fuehrer she presented in her book, *I Saw Hitler*, published a year before Hitler's rise to power. Her offense lay in calling Hitler "a little man, whose countenance is a caricature, who imagines himself a German Mussolini."

She considers Germany "the most hygienic prison in the world," believes the German people were swindled by Hitler when they got a Nazi dictatorship in place of the expected coalition government, and looks forward confidently to the sweeping overthrow of the Hitler regime.

Her early feminism, that led her from Syracuse University into the suffrage fight with Carrie Chapman Catt's forces, recoils from the subjugation of women under Fascism. She pleads for a return to "outworn liberalism," shuns reaction (differentiating it from conservatism in her vocabulary), and paints a Fascist society as one that ultimately stagnates.

She has done some good Saturday Evening Post series on conditions in Germany, the Hapsburg fortunes, political and economic chaos in Middle Europe, and more recently on the army on relief in the United States.

Her marriage has not been without its rumors of impending divorce. Those journalistic ghosts are laid forever, the Lewises hope. Their mental kinship is strong. They draw ideas from each other without weakening their individual talents. Dorothy's social welfare experiences in Cincinnati provided patterns for Red's book on prison reform, *Ann Vickers*.

Sinclair Lewis is so full of mimicry and lusty tom-foolery that when Dorothy learned from him by long-distance telephone that he had won the Nobel Prize, she shot back, "Oh, yes, and the King of Siam has just sent me his white elephant."

It took moments of expensive reiteration before she believed. Then her respect for his craftmanship brought calmly, "Well, why not? There's no one better."

tourist season no matter what the revolutionaries may be doing. Cubans, no matter what their political beliefs, are taught from infancy never to draw a bead on a foreigner who looks as if he had money in his pants.

Ordinarily at this time of year, the leisure classes would be aboard some luxury liner, helling around in the Mediterranean. These eight-to-twelve-week cruises always have been the most popular and profitable in the upper brackets. But as this is being written, travel agencies report a singular lack of interest in such jaunts.

The Italian Line is the only first-class steamship company offering Mediterranean cruises. Other lines cancelled their annual cruises through the blue waters late in the autumn, when it became certain that the sight of war, troop and hospital ships, to say nothing of submarines, cruisers and airplane carriers, might prove a depressing sight to middle-aged brokers and grande dames with high blood pressure. No one, apparently, has any desire to see History in the Making.

So the longer and more hedonistic romps this year are all to South America, Mexico or the South Seas. The superswell and expensive world cruises are even routed down the coast of South America, round the tip of South Africa and hence to India and the Far East, thus completely ignoring Europe and avoiding the Mediterranean.

One of the more gladsome pilgrimages will take off from Manhattan during the last week in January. This is the annual visitation of the Artists and Writers Golf (and Elbow-Bending) Association to Florida. It has been going on for years and is now known, historically, as the Scourge of Palm Beach. Residents baten down the hatches and keep their women off the streets after curfew (four a.m.).

This association comprises a great many men who draw the nation's cartoons and magazine covers, illustrate its fiction and its advertisements, write its short stories, novels and plays, edit its magazines and newspapers, and, in short, provide popular entertainment for all the peepul.

Grantland Rice has been president of the association for years, and Rube Goldberg, the inventor, is its vice-president. James Montgomery Flagg, Clarence Budington Kelland, Rex Beach, Fontaine Fox, Dean Cornwell, Bradshaw Crandell (who inherited Harrison Fisher's place on the jacket of *Cosmopolitan*), Damon Runyon, Jeff Machamer, Otto Soglow, Gene Buck and McClelland Barclay are only a few on its roster.

Once there was a tendency on the part of Palm Beach society to lionize the

56

Mademoiselle

19

BREAKFAST WITH DOROTHY THOMPSON

SO many people have asked me about my breakfast with Dorothy Thompson. Apparently people are insatiably curious about such occasions. What does she look like? Was it fun? What did you have to eat? Who else was there? What did you talk about? Were you scared? And so on. Anybody would think this meal of ours together was the most conspicuous and thrilling event of the spring, when actually it was a perfectly casual little affair which I am sure Miss Thompson has forgotten already.

It was by the merest chance that I breakfasted with her at all, as I do not know her well—but of course these are vivid times. Manuel Lothorp and I happened to be passing her place at the breakfast hour and Manuel suggested that we drop in.

"Well, I don't know, Manuel," I replied. "I'm rather an old glum at breakfast. I wouldn't be much company for the best-informed woman in the world."

"Fiddlesticks!" said Lothorp. "Just tell your hostess one or two interesting things and let her do the talking."

"What, for instance?" I asked, beginning to feel a trifle nervous.

"Oh, tell her a fact. Tell her the United States produces nearly as much steel as all the rest of the world combined."

"Heavens on earth, Manuel," I said, "you don't suppose Miss Thompson doesn't know a simple little thing like that, do you?"

"We'll soon find out," he said, and he pulled me along up the steps and pushed Miss Thompson's bell. It was 6:30 A.M., I remember, and the air was alive with pigeons.

The door was opened by a Polish maid. In one hand she carried a pigeon, which she handed to me.

"Release this bird, please!" she said.

"Certainly," I replied. "Any special direction?"

"Estonia," said the maid.

I released the bird, and Lothorp and I pushed our way past the girl into the home of Miss Thompson, already astir with tidings. Manuel addressed the maid, "Will you please tell Miss Thompson that Mr. White and Mr. Lothorp are here for breakfast, and that Mr. White says the United States produces more wheat than any country except Russia, more tobacco than any country except China, and four times as many automobiles as all the rest of the world combined?"

"Combined with what?" replied the maid, eying me sharply.

"Lithuania, you prying little minx," I put in. (Later, Miss Thompson admitted that the girl was a student of journalism.)

We entered the dining room, hungry and alert. There we were soon joined by our hostess, looking very beautiful, who greeted us with a simple "Hello."

"Hello," we both answered, simply.

The table was set for nineteen. A few syndicate scouts were already in their places, and down toward the end of the table was a representative of labor and one each of capital and intriguing. There was also a delegation from the C.I.O. and a runner from a map concern. The walls were studied with thumbnail sketches of yesterday's changes in Middle Europe. At each person's place was a noiseless typewriter and an immaculate dovecot.

As we sat down, the pantry door opened and in walked a slim, vivacious man carrying a silver tray. It was Sinclair Lewis. The tray was for Miss Thompson and contained a glass of orange juice and a terrestrial globe.

"What's that, Red?" said Dorothy Thompson, pointing at the orange juice.

"Try it," replied the famous novelist. "It's fraught with fruit." (Lewis is a scream in his own home.)

The phone rang and Lothorp, like a good fellow, answered. Of course we were all eager to know who would be calling up Miss Thompson at breakfast time.

"It's the Associated Press, in association with the United Press," said Lothorp, relaying the message. "They want to be hunched."

"You may tell the Associated and United Presses," replied Miss Thompson, "that Finland will absorb Estonia, Latvia will absorb Lithuania, Sweden will take Norway, Denmark will take the Netherlands, Switzerland will take Liechtenstein, Russia will take Iraq, and England—thanks to its shilly-shallying course

of action—will take potluck. What will you take, Mr. White?" she continued, falling quickly into the rôle of hostess.

"A cup of coffee," I replied, diplomatically.

"What's that about Corfu?" the great lady replied.

"Coffee!" I said. "A cup of coffee.

I'm a native-born American citizen and I want Java."

"We haven't any coffee, I'm afraid," she replied. "I am not interested in coffee. I am, however, tremendously interested in Corfu."

"Well then," I went on, "what are the chances of a soft-boiled egg?"

"That is a fair question," said mine hostess, brightening. "You ask what are the chances of a soft-boiled egg. A soft-boiled egg depends on three factors: (a) The presence or absence in the house of an egg; (b) the temperature of water into which the egg—assuming for a moment that there is an egg— is dropped; (c) the length of time the egg is allowed to remain in the water. Water suitable for boiling an egg has many turbulent undercurrents, all of which I am familiar with because I was there. Europe is at the boiling point, as you know. My kettle is another matter. Vitally different factors are at work in each case."

"How about that egg?" I coaxed.

The doorbell rang and the maid disappeared down the corridor.

"Every Polish maid to her own corridor," whispered Lothorp, adding a stupid pun to an already difficult breakfast situation.

The maid returned. "It's Fritz Kuhn," she announced.

"What does he want?" queried our hostess.

"He's getting up another Bund rally and wants you to come and laugh at it. He says he'll make it any date that's convenient for you."

"Tell Herr Kuhn I can't laugh this week, Hilda."

"How about that soft-boiled egg?" I persisted.

Miss Thompson turned on me rather savagely. "I've heard enough about that soft-boiled egg of yours," she said.

"Do you mean to tell me that with the world in the grip of the totalitarian countries, with Europe an armed camp, with Finland taking Estonia, Latvia taking Lithuania, Switzerland taking Liechtenstein, and Nazi propaganda spreading right here in the Western Hemisphere you can sit there and let your mind run on a soft-boiled egg?"

I nodded, truthfully.

"The fact is, Miss Thompson," I said, "tens of millions of us soft-boiled-egg eaters, as you know, are today living in constant fear. If you could give us some assurance that you will not

PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

June 25, 1938

721

Columnists on Parade
VIII. DOROTHY THOMPSON

BY MARGARET MARSHALL

DOROTHY THOMPSON is that combination of small-town girl who makes good and woman of the world which is peculiarly American. She has gone far in terms of prestige, income, and experience. Yet there is something tentative about her worldliness, something of the national adolescence about her maturity. She has the self-assertiveness of success, yet her rise has been so quick and telescopic that her very success may well induce a sense of insecurity. Or so it seems. In her most eloquent columns there is a large element of self-conscious showmanship, a straining for effect that often degenerates into exhibitionism. It points to a basic sense of inadequacy which is at once generic to this age of confusion and specific to the character and development of the first woman ever invited to address the New York Union League Club. In so far as it takes the form of humility it can be the beginning of wisdom. But humility is today at the bottom of the pile, as far as Miss Thompson is concerned—and she is industriously building up the pile.

Dorothy Thompson was born in Lancaster, near Syracuse, New York, in 1894, the daughter of an English Methodist clergyman. She was educated at the Lewis Institute in Chicago and at Syracuse University. At Syracuse she became active in the feminist movement in her college days. Her history suggests a bright, practical, vigorous American girl, eager for experience, accepting the necessity for earning a living as if it were a pleasant adventure, and full of high expectancy. She had planned to teach, but when the opportunity came she had a job with the woman's suffrage movement. From 1917 to 1920, according to "Who's Who," she was engaged in social work. After the war she went to Europe, which turned out to be her land of opportunity. Through a combination of luck and her own enterprise she hung up several journalistic scoops and ended by becoming the first woman bureau chief for an American newspaper in Europe. Meanwhile she grew up, and the prevailing influences of post-war Europe—disillusion, excitement, and instability—played over both her character and her career. She was a journalist at large in a world cut loose from all its moorings. Her fresh American intelligence and her charm, plus plain hard work, opened every door. She met everybody, officiated at revolutions, and achieved a salon in Vienna and Berlin. We may be sure that the impressionable young lady from Syracuse learned something from everyone she met and turned it to account.

Her final European triumph was her marriage to Sinclair Lewis in 1928, shortly before her return to America. She brought out of Europe a deep hatred of fascism (she was later expelled from Germany by the Nazi government) and the one positive, disinterested, and passionate conviction that emerges in the public performances of the leading lady of American journalism. This is her attitude on the Jewish question, which carries over to the issue of political persecution and freedom of speech in general. Her belief in civil liberties, which springs from a blend of Syracuse and Berlin, is genuine, and she has performed an important service by her campaign against fascism and in behalf of its victims, which, particularly as it has touched upon the Jewish phase, has undoubtedly brought protests from her reactionary audience. But she has put this genuine belief to factitious uses.

Miss Thompson became a columnist in March, 1936. In less than two years she had built up a clientele of 140 newspapers having a circulation of 7,500,000. She broadcasts regularly and is much in demand as a speaker. She writes for the *Ladies' Home Journal*, where her comment, designed for women, points up the phenomenon of a woman who is not imprisoned on the women's page. Her income must be close to $100,000. Her writing is vigorous and her appeal is wide. Her style is gusty and fresh. Each column reads like a tour de force. Where Lippmann soothes and is soothed, Thompson excites and is excited. Outrage is her favorite mood. In her tri-weekly columns of the five months from January to May (she is now on vacation) can be read the present character and preoccupations of the girl from Syracuse.

She is the most interesting and dramatic personality among the columnists. And the reasons lie not only in her natural vitality, her capacity for excitement, and her journalistic talent, but in the sense of conflict which shows through her highly volatile expression. Her columns are more or less evenly divided between foreign and domestic subjects—and her comment on foreign affairs is much the superior. She has written some excellent columns, both analytical and hortatory, on the folly of British foreign policy. Against the insolence and brutality of fascism she has carried on an unremitting campaign. On the issue of Austria and Czechoslovakia she is eloquent and for the most part realistic, though some of her writing on Austria in particular has been characterized by that hysteria into which she is often

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betrayed and which seems to be a compensation for some profound self-doubt. She became very sentimental about Schuschnigg, though she knew that it was Schuschnigg's "greatest friend" Dollfuss who scattered by dissolution and massacre the working-class forces which might have saved Austria. And in a preface to Schuschnigg's book she worked herself up to the bad taste of saying that she, Dorothy Thompson, would have died for Austria. In a curious column called Christianity's Crisis she wrote as follows: "The issue in the Germanic world, precipitated by the events in Austria, is not even in the first line the issue of Austrian independence. It is whether the Germanic world is to be Christian or pagan...." Yet Cardinal Innitzer, Schuschnigg's boss and high priest of Austria's Christianity, was the first to hail Hitler when the blow fell. Why

Despite these excesses, and in part because of them, if Miss Thompson were to be judged on the basis of her comments on foreign affairs, she would be set down as a liberal of good-will who sees the totalitarian flood advancing over Europe and wishes to stop its course. But in relation to her comments on the American scene her columns on Europe appear in a different light. For in this country she uses her thoroughly admirable attitude toward European fascism as a weapon against the New Deal in such a way as to make her the supporter of those forces and personalities that are most likely to fashion and pay for American fascism if and when it comes.

Miss Thompson's thesis, as far as the New Deal is concerned, is that it is not only potentially fascist but has already entered the first phase. "I wish for us all, for the New Year," she wrote on January 3, "a Congress that is no longer willing to be a Nazi Reichstag." This is a foolish statement of her most fruitful preoccupation, the analogy between fascist and prefascist Germany, which is the one subject on which she is thoroughly educated by experience, and the United States, about which she cannot possibly be as well informed, if only because of her protracted absence during crucial years. Given the alarmist tendencies of her emotional nature, her German and Austrian experience has been the matrix of a large part of her public expression since she returned to America. According to common supposition it produced, indirectly, Sinclair Lewis's picture of an American fascism in "It Can't Happen Here." Directly it has given rise to her campaign against European fascism—and to her attack on the New Deal. But whereas the first has the backing of a genuinely disinterested conviction, and direct knowledge, the second wears the marks of a rationalization dictated by another genuine impulse, that of ambition, which is a dominating element in her character and which is anything but disinterested. An editor I once worked for was a vociferous liberal on issues outside his own state. The very extravagance of Miss Thompson's outbursts against European fascism suggests

that they may be a form of compensation for her re-actionary columns on American issues, and the hysteria of her attack on the New Deal reinforces the impression. Certain other elements enter in. Miss Thompson's thinking is uncreative, her social understanding is largely information gathered by an extraordinarily absorbent mind through years of association with social problems as they were reflected in the journalistic mind of a dis-integrating Europe. These limitations, and her ambition, have combined to drive her into an attitude, at home, that makes her the delight of reactionaries and the prisoner of a brain trust which her position and her personality attract.

Miss Thompson's attitude seems to rest also on an assumption that is both plausible and appealing and has provided an escape for many a tired, or ambitious, intellectual. Stated simply it is that communism is as bad as fascism—look at Russia. Therefore we must fight both. The eagerness with which some of our leading minds have clutched at the assumption that the Russian version of socialism has exhausted and discredited the Marxian conception reveals more about the nature of leading minds than about the nature of socialism. Moreover, capitalist democracy has taken on a disproportionate prestige as the be-all and end-all of a large section of left opinion of all shades, including the American Communist Party. With the totalitarian regimes before us, we can all agree that capitalist democracy is worth preserving. The trouble is that it is not static and that although Marxian politics have come a cropper the economic prosperity of capitalism which sets the limits of its democracy is steadily degenerating in the way that Marx foresaw. The great problem of the times is to work out a technique for translating capitalist democracy into social democracy without sacrificing individual liberty. Miss Thompson's solution is to eliminate the proletariat. She also advocates, like Lippmann, the return to "first principles," and becomes, like him, irrelevant except as an apologist for the status quo and a gadfly to the New Deal. In this role she takes one outrage flight after another while thousands look aloft. She is much too clever, and has too many left associations from her European days, to indulge in red-baiting—she is eager indeed to prove that the New Deal has nothing to do with socialism. It is one concession she has not made to the career she has chosen; in any case she is genuinely anti-fascist, and she also has sense enough to know that fascism is a far more likely possibility, given the world as it is, than socialism. Thus, where Mark Sullivan sees a red bogy Dorothy Thompson sees a fascist menace—but her specific objections to the New Deal are essentially the same. In fact, Miss Thompson in her own right comes close to being that type of old-fashioned American conservative who really believes in free speech as a form of individual enterprise and, on

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the theory that it can do no harm, that "crazy ideas" are best exposed to the salutary effect of the open air. But she is also an up-to-date modern woman who has lived abroad, and her views are stated in terms reminiscent of prevailing social theories and shot through with knowing references to prevailing patterns of social thought. It is her mode of expression which makes her impressive —not least to herself. It is her basic conservatism that clinches her popularity with bankers and editors. (Is This...)

The germs of fascism, as well as the seeds of socialism, exist in any capitalist economy forced irresistibly toward collectivism. The New Deal, according to Miss Thompson, is cultivating the fascist germs, and she sees everywhere spectacular and premature growths. This allows her to make use of her German experience and to criticize the New Deal as one of the last embattled liberals. Around the first of the year, when Robert H. Jackson and Harold Ickes were making their famous speeches, Miss Thompson went on one of her emotional sprees. Mr. Jackson reminded her of Dr. Goebbels. The very process of thinking, she said, "is bludgeoned by this Administration." She painted an alarming picture of New Deal objectives, reminiscent of Dr. Johnson (Hugh S.).

> We are to maintain private ownership but have government control. We are to seek a balanced and expanding economy by contractual cooperation between government and agriculture, with penalties for non-cooperation, which is the sense of the farm bills which have just passed both houses. We are then to extend this AAA system to industry and set up a coordinated industry-labor-government mechanism with industry operating under contracts between themselves and government; and we are to have acquiescent courts. And if this is not fascism, then I am deaf, dumb, and blind.

This indeed is a characteristic Thompson paragraph, and it contains the pattern of her typical column against the New Deal. She begins soberly enough; she gradually becomes intoxicated with her own spirits; and she ends with D. T.'s.

A high moral tone and a demand for an expert diagnosis of our economic ills to be followed by the proper cure are the recurrent themes of the Thompson concerto. Into the bass she works a mass of expert statistics, facts, and assumptions supplied by her brain trust, which includes Winthrop Aldrich and Alexander Sachs, to show that the economic situation is bad and that the New Deal is confused. The treble is made up of cadenzas of her own improvisation. Sometimes the disharmony is glaring. In one of her treble, "clever" and personal "Grouse" columns she wrote as follows:

> There is nothing to fear, except the persistent refusal to try to find out the truth. The persistent refusal to analyze the causes of happenings. The persistent argument *ad hominem*—the scapegoat theme.

But in the next sentence she was having a go at the scapegoat theme herself: "If business is rotten because of fear of the government..."—though a few days later in the bass she listed "at least twelve" reasons why "business is rotten" culled from the findings of the learned societies meeting at the time. She is all for calm analysis, but one of her arguments against Hague's dictatorship is that he is setting a pattern which, "if I know the dominant C. I. O. psychology at present, they will follow" if Jersey City should ever have a labor government. "I happen," she writes, "to dislike intensely 'liberal' fascists, reactionary fascists, labor fascists, industrial fascists, Catholic fascists, and personal fascists."

"You don't have to choose between them..." she ended on high high C, "you can always die first."

Miss Thompson is always choosing, with a great dramatic gesture, between good and evil and in the name of freedom. She is always dealing in ultimate truths—and coming out on the side of immediate reaction. Even Walter Lippmann failed to find in the reorganization bill that attempt to extend the personal power of the President which is one of his obsessions. But Miss Thompson's slogan was "This bill must not pass," and she summoned all her resources of emotion, along with references to German fascism and the Greek city-state, in the fight against it. It was a good show. But it is just such good shows that cast most doubt on the motives of our self-appointed anti-fascist Joan of Arc. The New Deal is wallowing in confusion, both as a result of its historical predicament and because of political and economic factors peculiar to America. Certainly, as Miss Thompson says, we must face reality and not substitute slogans for thought, or agitation for deliberation. But she violates her own stated principles with an irresponsibility all the greater for being decked out in statements of principle. To fight the New Deal as if it were communist is vicious. To fight it as if it were fascist is also vicious, and even more confusing because it is a more subtle and intellectually less discredited approach. Both attacks are based on a failure to face reality. Both are capable of arousing in that middle class about which Miss Thompson professes to be so worried a vigilante spirit which can be bought by the highest bidder. When on top of this she reproaches the New Deal for not eliminating the proletariat, when she propounds the simple fallacy that the European despotisms have "logically grown" out of the European social democracies, she not only does not resolve confusion; she exploits it.

The threat of fascism lies not in the New Deal as such but in its probable failure to carry out its program, to adopt those measures necessary to achieve economic equity and administrative efficiency. It contains its own self-defeating elements—vide the reactionary section of the Democratic Party, which in turn accounts for much of the New Deal's dangerous political opportunism.

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about which Miss Thompson is so eloquent. It is precisely this section, combined with Republican reaction and the Dorothy Thompsons who speak for it, that provides the often effective resistance to the necessary measures. Meanwhile by such columns as that of May 11 Miss Thompson helps to draw out the worst type of reactionary sentiment. Under the title, The Right to Insecurity, she informed the government that though as employer she was willing to conform, she personally was not interested in having her old age provided for.

> I was brought up to believe [she wrote with incredible arrogance and irresponsibility] that there's only one thing absolutely certain in life and that is that one eventually dies. Never having had the slightest feeling of security, it's a luxury that I do not miss. I prefer exhilaration to certainty, risk to dulness, danger to bore dom, work to a job, and independence to a pension.

Unemployed and unemployables please copy.

Journalists exploit confusion and are exploited by it. Some rise above it. Others, after thorough conditioning, come to live in it as in a natural element, especially since it is one ocean from which gold can be extracted. Dorothy Thompson dived into it early and with a will; and at the age of forty-four she has reached a safe and well-appointed inland sea. That she continues to flail so violently would seem to indicate either that she is still afraid of sinking or that her intelligence and her science are urging her to higher, drier ground. If so, the sight of Walter Lippmann floating unresistingly in the same admirably tempered waters can offer no comfort.

## In the Wind

REPORTS FROM Cuba are carefully guarded, and American newspapers recently missed a significant story there. On May 20—Cuba's Independence Day—the government awarded its annual Orders of Merit. Ten foreigners received them. Five were prominent German Nazis, including von Ribbentrop, von Bülow-Schwante, and three officials of Berlin's Iberian-American Institute.

IN THE government trial of the Aluminum Company of America the prosecution had planned to call Robert J. Anderson, former manager of the Fairmont Aluminum Company, as a key witness. His company had been squeezed out of business by the aluminum trust; his testimony was considered highly valuable because he was one of the few experts in the business not on the pay roll of the Aluminum Company of America. Anderson was ready to testify that if the price of aluminum were reduced five cents a pound, the market would increase fivefold. Shortly before the trial began the government learned that Anderson had been added to the pay roll of the Aluminum Company of America, and it decided accordingly to dispense with his testimony. It also learned that George H. Haskell, another victim of the trust's

operation, who was to be the government's star witness— well as Haskell's two lawyers—had been similarly hired by the Aluminum Company. Haskell has been called to the stand anyway; his testimony in a personal suit against the company several years back is still on the record.

CROSS-COUNTRY: Wide fanfare has surrounded the formation of the "National Rededication Society," designed to "revitalize democracy"; but its assistant director has stated publicly that the society is not interested in Jersey City. . . . A recent column by Jay Franklin in which he denounced the "economic immorality" of the rubber companies for moving out of Akron was banned by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. . . . There are authoritative reports that Frederick T. Birchall was the author of the New York Times's famous unsigned Park story on the Nazi terror in Vienna. . . . Victoria Boot Demarest, granddaughter of the founders of the Salvation Army, recently admonished the D. A. R. against anti-Semitism, "even if communism has originated in Jewish minds, even if it is secretly backed by international Jewry. . . ." Several pro-New Deal Washington correspondents were fired, some resigned, some are now covering regional news. . . . President Roosevelt urged a delegation of peace leaders who protested against the naval budget to try their influence on Hitler. . . . Because six clenched fists (the revolutionary salute) appeared in WPA murals done for Swarthmore College, the college closed the room in which they appeared after public protest authorities showed the murals—while three of the six fists removed.

AROUND-THE-WORLD: Although the story has been played down, French Cagoulards are rearming feverishly Hans Lüthi, Swiss armament man, is the intermediary between the Cagoulards and the source of arms—which Germany. . . . Tokyo newspapers have featured a report of a sensational off-the-record Cliveden gathering where, according to these dispatches, Mr. Chamberlain said it would be just as well if Czechoslovakia went off the map. . . . Burgos journal recently announced that "Messrs. Hull and Roosevelt are proof of the absurdity of democracy."

THIS IS Europe's current mot:

"Que font les canons?"

"Des détonations (des dettes aux nations)."

SHORTLY BEFORE his appointment to the Supreme Court Justice—then Senator—Black went to a party where the guests all played a question game. To the question, "Who do you consider the greatest man living?" Black's reply was, "Justice Brandeis." (His wife voted the same.) To the question, "Has any human being the intelligence to fix fairly for all parties the price of a single pair of shoes? (a question designed to cast doubt on the validity of economic planning.)" Black replied, "No, not even a merchant."

[We invite our readers to submit material for In the Wind—either clippings with source and date or stories that can be clearly authenticated. A prize of $5 will be awarded each month for the best item.—EDITORS THE NATION.]

Sonntag, 5. Juni 1932

längliches, wettergebranntes rötliches Gesicht von
flammend rotem Haar umstrahlt — dem er seinen
Spitznamen Red verdankt, eine keck vorspringende
Nase und in der Umrahmung glitzernd roter
Brauen, mitten in dem Rot von Haut und Haar
mit fast erschreckender Kühnheit das Kontrast-
grün der glashellen Augen gesetzt. Ein Gesicht
von unwahrscheinlicher Beweglichkeit — Gefühle
und Gedanken fließen darüber hin wie Wasser,
der Spott zuckt auf und ab über die Haut, Lachen
und Empörung wirbeln um den Mund herum —
(Fortsetzung auf Seite 3)

Mrs Sinclair Lewis.

DOROTHY
SINCLAIR LEWIS

(Fortsetzung von Seite 1)

und nur die schmelzkühlen Augen, diese unwahrscheinlich unerschrockenen Augen von Chirurgen oder Inquisitoren, blicken gelassen, fast starr über den Aufruhr hinweg.

Als Sinclair Lewis auszog, die geistige Heimat
zu suchen, die er im Babbitschen Bereiche ver-
machte, stellte sich zwischen ihn und der euro-
päischen Geistigkeit, nach deren Kontakt es ihn
verlangte, immer wieder die Schranke der Fremd-
heit, des Andersseins ein. Es war fast als ob er
einen Dolmetscher brauchte, einen Mittler zwi-
schen der eigenen Welt und der sich ihm ent-
ziehenden äußeren Form identischen Strebens.
Er fand ihn in Dorothy Thompson — er fand in
ihr auch Halt, Heimat und Bestätigung — und
er sollte ihr später in seinem stark autobiogra-
phischen Roman „Mr. Dodsworth“ ein Denkmal
der Dankbarkeit errichten.

Und auch Dorothy fand nach europäischer Irr-
fahrt den Weg in die Heimat zurück, in die Welt,
in die sie ihrer ungebrochenen Kraft, ihrer über-
strömenden Vitalität nach gehörte. Sie begnügte
sich nicht mit der erschöpfenden Aufgabe, an der
Seite von Sinclair Lewis zu leben und ihren

leidenschaftlich verwöhnten Sohn zu betreuen. Sie
hielt an ihrer eigenen Aktivität fest, mit der
lächelnden Selbstsicherheit von Frauen, denen der
Ausgleich zwischen ihrer Arbeit und ihrem
Frauentum kein Problem ist.

Vor einigen Tagen tauchte sie plötzlich in
Europa auf. Sie war von der größten amerikanischen
Zeitschrift Saturday Evening Post. die durch phan-
tastische Honorare die besten Journalisten der
Welt für sich gewinnt, betraut worden, eine En-
quete über die Revisionsforderungen Europas zu
veranstalten. An einem strahlenden Mairmorgen
tauchte das Ehepaar Lewis in Paris auf. Er hatte
eigentlich gar nichts dabei zu tun — er kam her-
über, weil sie nach „drüben“ fuhr und weil es ihm
gut tat, ein wenig europäische Luft zu atmen. Do-
rothy sauste sofort nach Genf weiter, wo sie in
48 Stunden die bedeutendsten Staatsmänner der
neuen und der alten Welt interviewte. Sie kehrte
für zwei Tage nach Paris zurück — fuhr nach Wien
weiter, von Wien nach Polen — mit einem Ab-
stecher nach Karpathorußland — sie will dann noch
die Verhältnisse im polnischen Korridor studieren
und sich nach einer Abwesenheit von zwei Jahren
die Veränderungen in Berlin ansehen. Aber am
zwanzigsten Mai will sie sich bereits in Bremen ein-
schiffen ohne Rücksicht auf die Verwicklungen der
europäischen Lage, denn sie muß ihren Jungen aufs
Land bringen — und ihre Hetzjagd über den alten

Kontinent ist dieser einen gebieterischen Pflicht
unterworfen.

„Etwas amerikanisch die Reise“ — sagt sie und
lacht mit blitzenden Zähnen — „aber Sie ver-
stehen ja — der Bub war im Winter krank und
braucht frische Luft.“ Eine weiche Zärtlichkeit,
eine durchaus nicht verschämte schwärmerische
Liebe strahlt aus dem offenen schönen Frauenge-
sicht. Und dazwischen stellt sie Fragen über poli-
tische Verhältnisse — mathematisch richtige, sach-
liche Fragen, die den Dingen auf den Grund gehen,
ihre leidenschaftliches Mühen um Unparteilich-
keit spiegeln.

Während Dorothy Sinclair Lewis mit den schnell-
sten Expreßzügen durch Europa rast, in den Haupt-
städten die führenden Staatsmänner interviewt, sich
aus einem Wirbel von Dokumenten herausarbeitet,
sitzt ihr Mann in einem stillen Dorfe und schreibt
einen neuen Roman fertig. Und im Mittelpunkt
dieses Romans steht die Gestalt einer modernen
Frau, einer Frau von heute, mit ihrer neuen Pro-
blematik des Berufslebens, mit ihrer neuen Aus-
einandersetzung zwischen Gefühlsgebundenheit und
Freiheitsbedürfnis. „Es gibt eigentlich noch keinen
Roman der Frau von heute“ — sagt Dorothy nach-
denklich — und fügt mit einem stolzen Lächeln
hinzu — diesem Lächeln, das das ganze Glück des
Einklangs der beiden Menschen zusammenfaßt —
„und Red wird ihn schreiben können...“