Sinclair Lewis Remembered

68. Eileen Agar

68 / Eileen Agar After their marriage, Lewis and Thompson rented a villa near Naples where they planned to live and work for several months before returning to the United States. The British painter and photographer Eileen Agar (1899–1991) by chance lived nearby in Portofino and visited them. Source: Eileen Agar, A Look at My Life (London: Methuen, 1988), 80–82. After rejecting a dilapidated forty-­ room barracks of a place, Dorothy and ­ Sinclair had settled into a little guest house in a huge park. There was a salon, and a great glass verandah looking over Naples and the sea; the kitchen was on one floor, with a not very desirable bedroom (being parkward, green and cool, instead of seaward, blue and warm), and up above, three bedrooms in a row; and the whole resting on a big stone terrace. Hal, as we called ­ Sinclair, was hard at work on Dodsworth, us­ ing the villa Galotti (of which this guest house was a tiny appendage ) as the setting for parts of this novel. Tall, with brushed-­ back carrot-­ colored hair, a global forehead and informal rubbery face, he was an intelligent octopus, with large pop-­ eyes, an electric vitality and long lanky limbs which spread everywhere like tentacles. As we were still in Portofino, it did not seem far to hop across the water from Genoa to Naples, and we accepted their invitation hoping that things would go as smoothly as the crossing. For the first few days, everything in the garden was gorgeous, including the panoramic view of Vesuvius across the bay, even though we were woken up at seven o’clock every morning by the insistent tapping of two typewriters. Both Dorothy and Hal were hard at it, their mechanized muses demanding to be fed. But then one night at dinner all hell broke loose. Dorothy got up from the table saying that she must find some missing pages from the manuscript she was writing for a syndicated newspaper. Lewis was very drunk, and obviously feeling that his work was of more moment than Dorothy’s, he erupted bitterly. After all, he said, he had written a few books himself in his time that were somewhat more important than her bloody manuscript. He was completely plastered and ended up by stalking out of the room into the garden, where he 184 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered tripped in the dark among the rose bushes and fell into an intoxicated sleep. It was Joseph6 who had to rescue him, pick him out of the thorns and put him in his ex-­ wife’s bed. Apparently, Dorothy later recorded in her diary that she felt Hal had denounced her to Joseph that night. [. . .] Dorothy and Hal missed their train and Joseph had to put them up for another day. He said they were all smiles and friendliness towards both of us, charming and uncomplicated. In the same letter he told me he rather liked Hal this time, though he still thought him neurotic and unsure of himself. He recognized Lewis’s courage, and his brilliance as an interpreter of America, but feared he had nothing to offer as an alternative to the stupidity he exposed. Joseph wrote to me that he saw Lewis as a weeping interpreter, whose mouth would grin and scold and ridicule, but whose heart wept because all the time he was exposing his own self. He probably drank to ease the ache, for later, reading another Lewis novel, Joseph remarked: “You can smell the whisky between his lines.” Mixed feelings about Hal were the order of the day. Joseph recalled a time when he had been reading Lewis’s novel Main Street aloud to Dorothy Thompson (they were still married then). She tore the book out of his hands and stamped on it. “I hate that book,” she said. A few years later she was Lewis’s biggest admirer.­ Sinclair was often criticized for his meanness, but at one point he offered to support Joseph for a year or two so that he could get on with his writing. Joseph never accepted this generous offer, but he certainly appreciated it. ...