The Press: Super-Reporter

While crowds were rioting in Vienna and burning down the Palace of Justice last fortnight, a tall, stooped, cadaverous U. S. traveler with an expression halfway between a hunter and a man hunted, was stationed in Germany. It was Novelist Sinclair Lewis, now slipping off to dine with Berlin babbitts, now stalking away from insistent newspaper correspondents (TIME, July 25).

One correspondent from whom Mr. Lewis did not stalk away was Dorothy Thompson, curt, mannish, foreign servant of the New York Evening Post. They talked about the Vienna disturbance. “I wish I could see it,” said Novelist Lewis, absently.

“Fine, come along,” snapped Miss Thompson. “I’m flying to Vienna at six o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Mr. Lewis thought her promptness in taking him up seemed “unfair.” But the thing was done. He had to go.

In Manhattan, Miss Thompson’s employers grinned. She had made a great stroke. They splashed impressively on their front page about the celebrated novelist who was turning “reporter for a day” for the Post. They primed the Post’s readers for some stories of strife such as had not been written since Richard Harding Davis went to Cuba.

When the “revolution” at Vienna was reported suddenly quelled, with only a few score civilians shot down by government troops, some of the Post’s readers supposed that this meant the super-reporting of Novelist Lewis would not come off. Others were more hopeful, remembering that Mr. Lewis had been a reporter—in New Haven, Conn., in San Francisco, and hither and yon for the Associated Press—before ever he sold a novel; and that even now his literary technique is regarded by critics simply as superlative journalese. They fancied Sinclair Lewis could do as much with the aftermath of a brief city riot as most correspondents could do with a full-fledged civil war. They were right.

The Lewis articles in the Post quickly disposed of Novelist Lewis, the “romantic” figure, by revealing that he had never before been up in an airplane. At the Berlin flying field, “everything in life be came wildly different from the nor mal, mousy existence of a literary gent mooching about his garden or his words.” flat, writing words, words.”

As quickly, Super-Reporter Lewis was brought forward to make observations beyond the power of liners,” workaday wrote hacks. the “Dozens of air Super-Reporter, “with their vast wings of corrugated metal, monstrous as pterodactyls, field.” wallowed on the macadam field.”

Hangars, houses and steeples cance.” “quietly The dropped into Super-Reporter insignifigance “above the foam of thickening clouds … in the boiling fog which lay between us and the civil war . . . through the strange sky, in sane with sunset,” to Bratislava. There, “everything was mad.” The Super-Reporter’s workaday comrades miraculously procured auto dark.” mobiles in “that madness in the dark.”

In Vienna, all was peaceful down the broad, leafy boulevards. But at the Central Cemetery, the Super-Reporter found a scene worthy of his typewriter. He mentally jotted down a neat phrase—”a mass burial for men and women who died in a mass movement”—and squared off to gather the scene’s color and emotion.

There was the hastily mobilized reservist militia, “in awkward shambling uniforms of ill-dyed green buckram,” marshaling perhaps 2,000 mourners. The Super-Reporter noted “an old wattled hinterland peasant with gold earrings. . . . The pathetic mourning of the very poor—ragged arm bands made from black petticoats. . . .” He described the 60 coffins at the grey stone gates “under the splendor of flowers, red banners and black streamers.” He let Novelist Lewis spill drops of irony on the “oozing” funeral orations: “. . . such measured, useful and reasonable words . . . uttered by bearded and clever men—all of it like a nice debating society.”

The crowd was still, “like the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day in London, when stranger looked at stranger in the incredible silence which gripped the roaring city.”

The funeral march began with a brilliant silver coffin, a child’s coffin. The Super-Reporter dashed away his own “ludicrously sentimental tears,” swallowed hard and snatched up minor incidents for the eager readers of the New York Evening Post.

He saw an urchin and a policeman in comic argument. He noted “sombre men with the blessed Red Cross on their arms,” with stretchers ready for emergencies, which soon arose. “A youth of fine features and clear eyes” went suddenly mad, presumably with grief. “He bellowed horribly. He stretched his hands like the claws of a leopard and leaped upon one of the guards, screaming.” They carried him off. The crowd followed the coffins.

Refining the pathos further, the Super-Reporter told of a sobbing man who told how his brother had been shot down carrying a Mozart score they were to have played together. . . . “Vienna slept and dreamed of cakes and whipped cream. . . .”

The Lewis articles gained wide notice in the U. S. Editors-envied the Evening Post its coup. Foreign correspondents outwardly echoed the sentiments of the Evening Post’s Miss Thompson in Berlin, who said to Super-Reporter Lewis with mock grudging: “I guess it’s all right, but it does seem a rather long way of saying, as I could, ‘Flew to Vienna. Quiet.'”

Inwardly, however, Miss Thompson and her peers were saying: “It just shows what you can write when you’ve got the big name and they let you cut loose. That is, if you’ve got the ability.”