Dangerous Ambition

September 19, 2011
Hertog looks at two women writers born at the end of the Victorian era who tried boldly, if not always successfully, to negotiate the post-Victorian social upheavals. Although they lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson were confidantes with much in common. Pioneering feminists, their professional successes couldn’t compensate for massive personal unhappiness. Both had insecure childhoods: West, had a gambler father whose abandonment of his family determined West’s attitude toward men, human nature, parenthood, and women’s rights. Thompson was a child when her mother died of a self-induced abortion. Both women were also unhappy in love and parenthood: West had a famously abusive relationship with the married H.G. Wells that produced a son, Anthony, whom she resented and rejected. Thompson’s marriage to novelist Sinclair Lewis was disastrous, and their neglected son, a lackluster actor, gravely disappointed her. West became a formidable writer, and Thompson awakened America to the fascist threat in numerous articles, lectures, and radio shows. But in her later years, her anti-Zionism and self-righteousness diminished her popularity. Even though West’s career and personal dramas overshadow Thompson’s, Hertog (Anne Morrow Lindbergh) delivers a perceptive, engrossing warts-and-all biography of two brilliant women who were their own worst enemies. 30 b&w photos.

September 1, 2011

The professional successes and personal failures of two of the 20th century's most prominent and influential journalists.

Although Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) and Rebecca West (1892–1983) knew each for more than 40 years, Hertog (Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1999) has more on her mind than their friendship. She's not even all that interested their careers, which would have been considered extraordinary under any circumstances but were particularly remarkable for women born duringthe Edwardian era. Thompson, the first female head of a news bureau, was one of the earliest journalists to sound the warning against Hitler's megalomaniacal plans and remained a respected and influential figure through the end of World War II. West was a feared book critic and essayist who set new standards for long-form journalism with her New Yorker reports on the Nuremberg trials and a lynching case in Greenville, S.C., as well as her esteemed book on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These achievements get almost as much attention as West's tortured affair with H.G. Wells, which produced an embittered-for-life son, Anthony West, and Thompson's tortured marriage to Sinclair Lewis, which produced an embittered-for-life son, Michael Lewis. In Hertog's view, "neither Rebecca nor Dorothy knew how to be a woman," and though she is careful to preface this judgment with the qualifier, "within their contemporary gender stereotypes," a queasy mix of feminist jargon and women's-magazine psychologizing can't disguise the author's punitive attitude toward these admittedly less-than-perfect wives and dreadful mothers. Their impact on the political and cultural discourse of their times is far more important than their inadequacies as human beings, but Hertog fails to provide a balanced perspective.

Pretentious and poorly written, this irritating joint biography squanders a great subject.

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