(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[S]inclair Lewis proposed to Dorothy Thompson in Germany, but wooed her with talk of Vermont.
He popped the question – and spoke of the wondrous house they could buy in the Vermont countryside – at a dinner party in 1927. It was only the second time they had met. The party was to celebrate Thompson’s 33rd birthday and, more importantly from Lewis’ perspective, her divorce, which had become final that day. Lewis was in Europe fleeing an unhappy marriage himself.
“(W)hen everyone else had left, he wouldn’t go home,” Thompson told a friend the day after the party. “And he went on and on. And he stayed and stayed. And at 3 o’clock in the morning he asked me to marry him.” She paused for a moment, then asked her friend, “Shall I?”
Thompson was intrigued by his wit, charm, persistence, and perhaps also his fame. Lewis, 10 years Thompson’s senior, was among America’s most famous writers – the author of such iconoclastic novels as “Babbitt” and “Elmer Gantry,” which criticized American commercialism and religious fundamentalism. Thompson was a rising star in journalism, having drawn attention as a young female reporter covering such topics as European Zionism and life in the Soviet Union.
Lewis continued to pursue Thompson and, a year later, when his own divorce became final, they married in London. He had picked as his wife the one American woman whose writing career could rival his own. In fact, her fame would soon eclipse his, which would sting Lewis’ ego and strain their marriage.
The couple returned to the United States by boat, arriving in New York on Aug. 27, 1928. Thompson told reporters covering their arrival that her main concern about returning, after living so long in Europe, was how she would adapt to life under Prohibition.
After a few days in the city, the newlyweds traveled to New England to see friends and hunt for a summer home. In September, they visited their New York landlord, E.F. Connett, who had a summer place in Vermont. Driving onto the property in Barnard, Thompson was struck by what she saw: old stonewalls, “birches, tamaracks, maples and spruce,” as well as the “run-down orchards,” “delicious air” and a distant view of Mount Ascutney. This seemed like just the place Lewis had promised her.
Lewis agreed it was perfect, and he acted as impetuously as he had when he met Thompson, offering Connett $10,000 on the spot.
The property, which included 300 acres of rolling fields and two old farmhouses on opposite sides of a valley, was worth about $3,000, if it were farmed. Connett jumped at the offer. Papers were immediately drawn up and signed, and within 24 hours Connett was heading south to retire in Florida.
Thompson and Lewis called the property Twin Farms. They decided to live in the smaller house and fix up the other, which they dubbed the Manor, as a guesthouse. It was the first property Lewis had ever owned. (The property, now an exclusive inn where room rates top $2,000 a night, was in the news recently when Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner stayed there.)
The home became Thompson and Lewis’ warm-weather base. When they were there together, they would eat a hearty breakfast and then retire to their typewriters to pound out stories for hours on end. By late afternoon, they were ready for a long walk around their property, inevitably looping past the Manor to survey workers’ progress on extensive renovations.
When the work was finished, they would host such celebrated writers as H.L. Mencken and Bernard DeVoto, as well as famed journalist George Seldes, who lived just down the road in Woodstock.
Despite their national and international careers, the couple put down roots in Vermont. When they returned to the farm in early summer 1930, they brought their newborn son, Michael. Soon they were joined by Lewis’ teenage son from his first marriage, named Wells.
The couple hired a large staff of locals to maintain the houses and grounds. Thompson wanted Michael and Wells to have playmates, so she invited employees to bring their children to work. Lewis found the result disastrous. Seeking silence, he would hole up in the Manor to work, but the children always seemed to be within earshot.
Relations between employers and employees proved complex. Thompson didn’t mind when women who were unable to come to work sent daughters, nieces or mothers in their places. But she wrote threatening notes to the staff when work wasn’t done to her satisfaction.
She grew to enjoy the Vermonters she met, even if they sometimes proved perplexing. When she asked her chief gardener what he thought of Calvin Coolidge, he replied: “There’s a hell of a lot of Coolidges ain’t in the White House.”
Despite his aversion to the mainstream, Lewis went to local Rotary Club meetings, “because I want to know Vermont, the first place I have ever had a real home in.” Several of his subsequent books would embrace the values he saw in his new neighbors.
Still, many locals found him baffling. At one point, he thought he recognized the seeds of creative genius in his handyman, a Mr. Murphy, and paid him to sit for hours in Lewis’ study and listen to classical music. This was all too strange for the man, who promptly quit.
The couple’s fame only grew during their Vermont years. Lewis continued to write novels, though these failed to find much critical acclaim. He remained a best-selling author, however. And one fall day in 1930, as he was packing for the annual return to New York, Lewis received a phone call from Sweden. He had won a Nobel Prize for literature for “Babbitt,” written eight years earlier.
The prize brought Lewis more fame, but it didn’t bring contentment. To Thompson’s embarrassment, Lewis managed to mention the prize in countless conversations with friends and acquaintances.
In 1931, Thompson landed one of the rare interviews granted by a rising German politician, Adolf Hitler. She came away thoroughly unimpressed. “He is formless, almost faceless,” she wrote. He is “a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”
Still, despite his mediocrity, Thompson recognized Hitler as a threat. “I thought: Mr. Hitler, you may get, in the next election, the fifteen million votes you need. But fifteen million Germans CAN be wrong.”
Thompson’s critical comments attracted attention, especially in Germany. When she returned to the country two years later, Hitler, who had just been appointed chancellor, had her expelled. She was the first American journalist removed from Germany. The personal attack only raised Thompson’s professional standing. She began writing a regular column for the New York Herald Tribune and later the Ladies’ Home Journal, and became a much sought-after public speaker.
Lewis bristled against life in his wife’s shadow. He worried people would take to calling him “Mr. Dorothy Thompson.”
Though they usually maintained a civil façade, they couldn’t hide the growing tension from friends. Their dinner parties often divided into two groups, those who came to talk politics with Thompson and those who came to listen to Lewis’ legendary wit. During one party, when conversation turned to the worsening political situation in Europe, Lewis roared, “The situation? The situation? God damn the situation!” If he had to listen to more such discussion, he said, he would have to shoot himself.
Despite his protests, Lewis was keenly interested in “the situation,” both nationally and internationally. In 1935, he took the issues convulsing Europe and placed them in an American setting in his novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” in which he imagined a fascist being elected president of the United States. (The book returned to best-seller lists earlier this year.)
Despite his fame, Lewis struggled in his personal life. One of his problems was that he drank too much. “One ought to have more charm than a whisky and soda,” Thompson complained. Humorist James Thurber, a friend, wrote, “You couldn’t always tell at seven in the morning whether he was having his first drink of the day or his last one at night.”
The separation between them was becoming more severe. Work often took Thompson and Lewis overseas, but seldom together. Eventually, they both had affairs.
Despite their estrangement, Thompson hoped that Twin Farms would lure Lewis back. But eventually, she gave up and filed for divorce in January 1942, at the courthouse in Woodstock.
She asked Lewis for the farm.
“Give me Vermont,” she wrote. “I want to watch the lilac hedge grow tall and the elm trees form, and the roses on the gray wall thicken, and the yellow apples hang on the young trees, and the sumac redden on the hills, and friends come, and your two children feel at home.”
Thompson got to keep the house and lived there with her new husband, artist Maxim Kopf, until his death in 1958. She died three years later. They are both buried in a Barnard cemetery.
Lewis had died in 1951 in a small hospital outside Rome. His years after leaving Vermont had been nomadic ones, as he shifted his things between rented rooms and hotels. He had never remarried, never been able to reproduce his earlier successes, nor find another place where he felt at home.
