Dangerous Ambition: New Women in Search of Love and Power

Dangerous Ambition by Susan Hertog is a dual biography of Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West, two women writers, an American and a Briton, whose decades-long friendship supported each other through romantic and professional ups and downs. Many years ago I read and enjoyed Rebecca West's novel The Birds Fall Down; I picked up this book because of Rebecca although by the end of it I liked Dorothy better. Dorothy and Rebecca had much in common: they both experienced emotional deprivation in difficult family situations, both felt abandoned by their fathers, both turned to writing in order to support themselves, both saw themselves as pioneer feminists, both had stormy relationships with men, and both had troubled children. Each reigned over the literary spheres in their respective countries, winning honors for their works and shaping public opinion during some of the most tempestuous events of the twentieth century.

According to Elizabeth Powers in the Weekly Standard:

As the title indicates, ambition had its perils. The lesson we are to draw concerns the conflict suffered by two women in thrall to what Hertog calls “Victorian” gender expectations: Like Tess Harding in Woman of the Year, both wanted a career but also to be loved and cherished by a life partner. Here, too, the “parallel lives” work well. Both women were born in the 1890s and had a broken background in common. Thompson’s mother died when she was eight; and père Fairfield abandoned the family home when Cicely was eight. The central calamitous event for both was the misfortune of entering into a relationship with a famous man. Thompson married Sinclair Lewis, to whom she was introduced in Berlin, and West had a 10-year liaison with H. G. Wells, beginning in 1913. For West, this liaison led to a period of social isolation, just when she was taking her place as a major literary figure. She had a child out of wedlock, a circumstance she spent the rest of her life trying to keep from becoming public. Thompson’s son with Lewis was legitimate, but like Anthony West, Michael Lewis suffered from parental neglect.

Many of the gory details have been published elsewhere, especially concerning West’s son, and neither woman comes off well in the telling. For instance, West deemed Anthony “a total loss, he has spoiled my work and my friendships, he is the worst thing that ever happened to me. .  .  . He is like some horrible dwarf in a fairy tale.” Similarly, at 18 months, Michael Lewis was left in the care of a nurse while Thompson “embarked on a whirlwind tour of forty cities, hellbent on informing Americans about the changing landscape of German politics.” His childhood was spent in schools out of sight of either parent.

The great gap between appearance and reality seems to characterize the human type portrayed here, the world-improver who neglects those near and dear, especially those most dependent on her. But the travesty of professed ideals does not end there. Absolutely no one ends up looking good in this book. In their relations with friends, spouses, and lovers, West and Thompson show themselves alternately to be needy, irrational, irresponsible, vindictive, disloyal, backbiting, and petty. Their contempt for ordinary folks ran deep: Americans were spoiled, materialistic (this during the Depression!), vulgar, superficial, hedonistic, devoid of ideas and ethical underpinnings, and small-minded. Among other things, we are reminded that public intellectuals like to buy houses and entertain in lavish style, even while reporting on food shortages from a war-ravaged continent. (Read more.)

The problems which haunted Dorothy and Rebecca are still very much with us. They had to balance work and domestic life, which is still a challenge to many women. As professional women trying to run the world, neither was able to devote adequate time to their children, but not necessarily because of their jobs. It was rather because they sent their children away at every available opportunity, to be reared and educated by others. Dorothy, learning from her own mistakes, wrote in a 1939 column entitled "If I Had a Daughter":

Marriage is a union―it is not a league of two separate sovereign states, it is not two orbits in a common sky; and I would tell her that making a full-time marriage is, by and large, a full-time job for most women....Society, at this moment, has a greater need of good mothers than it has of more private secretaries, laboratory assistants, short-story writers, lawyers, social workers and motion-picture stars. [It is more important] to produce a fine man than it is to produce a second-rate novel, and fine men begin by being fine children. (p.239)

While Dorothy's marriage to Sinclair Lewis was destroyed by his alcoholism, Rebecca's marriage to Henry Andrews was haunted by his addiction to pornography. While Dorothy eventually found consolation in her Christian faith, poor Rebecca, who agonized over a love-hate relationship with Catholicism, suffered from emotional instability as she flitted from lover to lover. Part of Rebecca's behavior is probably due to the fact that before her father abandoned his family without a penny, he had sexually abused her. Both women experienced anguish over the bad behaviors of their sons.

In spite of personal sufferings, Dorothy and Rebecca had keen insights into their changing era, especially into the shifting politics of the times. They thought in terms of history and the international stage, reaching beyond the often myopic views of national politics. I found that Hertog avoided an anachronistic slant in that each subject is shown as being a woman of the past, subject to many of the prejudices of their epoch, which the author does not gloss over. It is overall a well-written and balanced biography, refusing to spare the heroines while giving praise where it is due.

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