Sinclair Lewis Remembered

81. William L. Shirer

81 / William L. Shirer William L. Shirer (1904–1993), journalist and historian, broadcast for CBS from Germany during the first year of the Second World War and became famous for his Berlin Diary (1941), which covered the years 1934–41, and for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960). He knew Lewis and Thompson in Vienna dur­ ing the winter of 1932/33 and in his memoirs remembered the stresses on their marriage . Source:WilliamL.Shirer, 20th Century Journey: A Memoir of a Life and the Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 449–50, 451–52. Dorothy and Red arrived in Vienna at the end of the summer of 1932 and rented a large apartment in the Wohlebengasse and a spacious villa on the Semmering , two hours by train south of Vienna in the mountains. At first they seemed quite happy, especially Dorothy, who was soon holding forth, as was her wont, in her salon crammed with admiring journalists, diplomats, statesmen, and what was left of the German, Austrian, and Hungarian aristocracy, discussing everything under the sun—art and love, but above all politics. This had been a prob­ lem for the Lewises ever since they were married four years before in London. Dorothy was much at home in Europe among Europeans; Lewis was not. Much of the conversation at Dorothy’s gatherings was in German, in which she was extremely fluent but which Red scarcely understood. He felt shut out of the talk, and his inevitable reaction, which was mercurial, was to stomp out and leave not only the party and the dwelling but the city. He was always taking off in a huff for other parts. Except for the Ameri­ can correspondents, Red could not stand Dorothy’s friends. Nor, even when he understood it, their talk. Politics did not interest him and he developed a phobia for her obsession about “The Situation.” “If she would just stop talking about ‘The Situation,’ for Christ’s sake!” he would say as I followed him to a bar, after he had made a hasty exit from one of Dorothy’s talkfests. “If she’d just call it off for five minutes! But she can’t. I’ve got to listen day and night to her prattle about the goddamn Situation.” [. . .] All through the winter in Vienna and on the Semmering he grew more ir- 224 / Sinclair Lewis Remembered ritable and drank more heavily, spending most of his time in the villa in the mountains, away from Dorothy. Already in their New York apartment, someone remembered, they had reached a point where they needed not only separate bedrooms but separate living rooms. “Sometimes I think you don’t see me at all,” Dorothy would write him from Vienna after he had taken off for Italy following a quarrel, “but somebody you have made up, a piece of fiction, like Ann Vickers.” It was his excessive drinking that bothered her most, and she would confide to his biographer of their life at this time that when he came to her room, late at night and drunk, he smelled of rotting weeds. ...