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But the fact is that private life for the Lewises had become impossible. When Lewis was not working, he drank like a school of fish. He liked to clown around with pals, and at a party would do everything short of putting a lampshade on his head. But Dorothy was deadly serious. Their apartment in New York, like their house at Barnard, was often filled with pundits or important news sources. He often taunted her: "You, with your important little lectures—You, with your brilliant people."
Dorothy wrote a number of long, sad, reproachful letters trying to make Red into something other than he was. They were unanswerable and usually were unanswered. Anyone could have told her that when a wife has to write letters to her husband, the game is up. It was the last straw when Red got badly stagestruck. He made a fool of himself in his own terrible play, Angela Is 22, and cavorted with a series of leading ladies in a series of other plays. "I am horrified," Dorothy wrote. "You are happy. I happen not to be. I have loved a man who didn't exist."
Wrong Fury. Lewis lived nine years after their divorce in 1942. The lonely, tragic fiasco of Lewis' last days has been told in Mark Schorer's biography, and makes nonsense of Sheean's theories. The furies that possessed Lewis were not traceable to a schoolboy complexion. As for Dorothy, her last days were calm, anonymous and happy in a third marriage, to Maxim Kopf, a thick-knuckled Czech painter who treated her, perhaps for the first time, as a woman with no knives on her chariot's wheels.
But Sheean's liberal use of her intimate diary has removed that anonymity from everything else. Sheean says that the fact some passages were annotated or edited proves that Dorothy wished them known to the world. Other friends insist that she had been going over her records with the intention of writing her autobiography. Certainly, those entries give the book its chief quality. Beside their directness, Sheean's running commentary often seems out rageously intrusive. It is as if the reader had been watching through a one-way glass the agonies and the ecstasies of two troubled people — then suddenly out pops Sheean, the friendly family psychiatrist, commenting learnedly on the painful scenes just witnessed as if they were just so much case history.