278
JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
like the father a doctor. In 1947 he said, "for sixty years I have
tried to impress my brother Claude," and without success. The father
was an even more implacable monolith who had an aswer to all of life's
questions except one, namely, how such a "bundle of nerves," his son,
could bring in so much money. On that great occasion, a young writer's
first significant publication, Dr. E.
J.
Lewis wrote to his exultant son,
whose eight-part serial
The City Shadow
had appeared
in
Nautilus
in
1909-1910:
The sentiment of the magazine is decidedly bum but it is all right when
they pay you good money. They are evidently quite bright people but
evidently neurotics chasing off a new or old track.... That Nautilus
is certainly the greatest amount of dish-water in one package that I
have seen for a long time.
And this was the man to whom all his life Lewis was the small and
erring boy whose life-long law was
Hoc pater meus dixit. .
The sanest and warmest people
in
the book are two women:
Dorothy Thompson and Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton is not a
major character in the biography nor was she an intimate of Lewis,
but her letters to him about his work stand out for their warmth,
and what can only be called "motherly" encouragement. Even from
afar she must have sensed what he needed.
It is impossible to praise Dorothy Thompson too highly. Hand–
some, brilliant, with a rock-like integrity, and enough charity to save
the human race, she leads one only to say that if she could not save
him,
no one could. But all gifted people are double-edged in their
effect, and it was perhaps precisely because she was so intelligent
and so decent that he got so he could not stand her. One of the
jokes about Dorothy Thompson, after the breakup of her marriage
to Lewis, went like this: it is a dialogue, in the morning, in the
Lewis apartment; Lewis, "It's a nice day"; Mrs. Lewis, "No, it is
not, and I'll tell you why ..." At this point, so the story goes, he
put on
his
hat and left, she at the beginning of a long speech. But
surely, however voluble and however concerned with "The Situation"
-Lewis once said that if he ever got a divorce he would name
Hitler as the corespondent-she was a wise person with a sense of
what was what and what went together and what did not, possessed
of a genuine sense of history by which she could look before and
after. She was every bit as heroic as Lewis was not. But all
this
was,
I suppose, the final blow for Lewis, to marry someone who was both
strong and sane, to have to try to adjust his disastrous personality
