The Skin of Our Teeth (16 page)

 

The Skin of Our Teeth on Broadway (1942–1943)

Skin
's original Playbill. Left to right: Sabina (Tallulah Bankhead), Mrs. Antrobus (Florence Eldridge), Mr. Antrobus (Fredric March), Gladys (Frances Heflin), George (Montgomery Clift).

PLAYBILL.® All rights reserved. Used by permission.

 

At the opening of Act I, George Antrobus arrives home in Excelsior, New Jersey, carrying his latest discovery, the wheel. He is greeted by his adoring daughter, Gladys, and the lovable dinosaur and mammoth.

 

In Act II, the newly crowned Miss Atlantic City moves in on the recently elected president of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans.

 

At the end of Act II, George Antrobus leads his family to the ark and to safety. Behind him: Gladys, Henry, Mrs. Antrobus, and Sabina, with the Fortune Teller (Florence Reed) pointing and proclaiming, “They're safe. George Antrobus! Think it over! A new world to make—think it over!”

 

“I'm not afraid of you,” Sabina (former camp follower) says to Henry (
the
former enemy) in Act III.

 

“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth. . . .” Mr. Tremayne (Ralph Kellard), playing twelve o'clock, passes behind the Antrobuses, who are spending a quiet evening at home at the end of the play . . . and starting over once more.

Acknowledgments

The Afterword of this volume is constructed in large part from Thornton Wilder's words in unpublished letters, journals, business records, and publications not easy to come by. Readers interested in additional information about Thornton Wilder are referred to standard sources and to the Thornton Wilder Society's website:
www.thorntonwildersociety.org
.

Many Wilder fans deserve my thanks for helping me to accomplish this task, for which, of course, I bear full responsibility. Space permits me to extend thanks to only a few: Hugh Van Dusen, David Semanki, Barbara Whitepine, and Celeste Fellows. Four individuals deserve a special salute, and I am honored to give it: Barbara Hogenson, Paula Vogel, J. D. McClatchy, and Penelope Niven.

 

Letters and Journals

Quotations from Thornton Wilder's letters and his journal are taken from one of two principal sources: the unpublished letters, manuscripts, and related files in the Wilder Family Archives in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Wilder family's own holdings, including many of Thornton Wilder's legal and agency papers. Minor spelling errors have been silently corrected. All rights are reserved for this material.

 

Publications

Excerpts from published sources are identified in the order of their appearance in the text, with permissions noted as required: Richard Maney's summary of
The Skin of Our Teeth
is printed in his memoir
Fanfare: The Confessions of a Press Agent
(New York: Harper & Row, 1957), p. 330. Copyright © 1957 by Richard Maney. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. The December 2, 1941, excerpt from Wilder's journal appears in Donald Gallup, Ed.,
The Journals of Thornton Wilder
,
1939–1961
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 37–38. Copyright © 1985 by Union Trust Company. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. The excerpt from Wilder's “After a Visit to England” is published in
The Yale Review
XXXI: 2 (December 1941): 217–24. Reprinted courtesy of
The Yale Review
. Wilder's December 17, 1942, letter was published as “A Footnote to
The Skin of Our Teeth
,”
The Yale Review
87: 4 (October 1999): 68–70. Both
Yale Review
pieces are printed with the permission of Tappan Wilder.

On February 2, 1954, Wilder spoke to the James Joyce Society on “Joyce and the Modern Novel.” He later adapted his lecture for publication by the James Joyce Society in 1957. It was published in Wilder's
American Characteristics & Other Essays
(New York: Harper & Row, 1957; Authors Guild Backinprint Edition, 2000), pp. 172–80. Reprinted by permission of Tappan Wilder. Wilder's “Some Thoughts on Playwrighting” first appeared in Augusto Centeno, Ed.,
The Intent of the Artist
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941) and is published in
American Characteristics & Other Essays,
pp. 115–26. Reprinted by permission of Tappan Wilder.

 

Photographs

The original 1942 cast Playbill is reproduced with the permission of Playbill®. The five photographs of the original production appeared in
Life
magazine on November 30, 1942, pp. 93–100. They were taken by George Karger and reproduced with permission of George Karger/Pix Inc./Timepix. The author's photo, courtesy of the Yale Collection of American Literature and by permission of Tappan Wilder, shows Thornton Wilder playing the part of Mr. Antrobus in an unidentified summer stock production in 1947.

About the Author

Yale Collection of American Literature

 

In his quiet way, Thornton Niven Wilder was a revolutionary writer who experimented boldly with literary forms and themes, from the beginning to the end of his long career. “Every novel is different from the others,” he wrote when he was ­seventy-­five. “The theater (ditto). . . . The thing I'm writing now is again totally unlike anything that preceded it.” Wilder's richly diverse settings, characters, and themes are at once specific and global. Deeply immersed in classical as well as contemporary literature, he often fused the traditional and the modern in his novels and plays, all the while exploring the cosmic in the commonplace. In a January 12, 1953, cover story,
Time
took note of Wilder's unique “interplanetary mind”—his ability to write from a vision that was at once American and universal.

A pivotal figure in the history of ­twentieth-­century letters, Wilder was a novelist and playwright whose works continue to be widely read and produced in this new century. He is the only writer to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction and Drama. His second novel,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
received the Fiction award in 1928, and he won the prize twice in Drama, for
Our Town
in 1938 and
The Skin of Our Teeth
in 1943. His other novels are
The Cabala, The Woman of Andros, Heaven's My Destination, The Ides of March, The Eighth Day,
and
Theophilus North.
His other major dramas include
The Matchmaker,
which was adapted as the internationally acclaimed musical comedy
Hello, Dolly!,
and
The Alcestiad.
Among his innovative shorter plays are
The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
and
The Long Christmas Dinner,
and two uniquely conceived series,
The Seven Ages of Man
and
The Seven Deadly Sins
, frequently performed by amateurs.

Wilder and his work received many honors, highlighted by the three Pulitzer Prizes, the Gold Medal for Fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Order of Merit (Peru), the Goethe-Plakette der Stadt (Germany, 1959), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963), the National Book Committee's first National Medal for Literature (1965), and the National Book Award for Fiction (1967).

He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, to Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder. The family later lived in China and in California, where Wilder was graduated from Berkeley High School. After two years at Oberlin College, he went on to Yale, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1920. A valuable part of his education took place during summers spent working hard on farms in California, Kentucky, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. His father arranged these rigorous “shirtsleeve” jobs for Wilder and his older brother, Amos, as part of their initiation into the American experience.

Thornton Wilder studied archaeology and Italian as a special student at the American Academy in Rome (1920–1921), and earned a master of arts degree in French literature at Princeton in 1926.

In addition to his talents as playwright and novelist, Wilder was an accomplished teacher, essayist, translator, scholar, lecturer, librettist, and screenwriter. In 1942, he teamed with Alfred Hitchcock to write the first draft of the screenplay for the classic thriller
Shadow of a Doubt
, receiving credit as principal writer and a special screen credit for his “contribution to the preparation” of the production. All but fluent in four languages, Wilder translated and adapted plays by such varied authors as Henrik Ibsen, ­Jean-­Paul Sartre, and André Obey. As a scholar, he conducted significant research on James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
and the plays of Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega.

Wilder's friends included a broad spectrum of figures on both sides of the Atlantic—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Alexander Woollcott, Gene Tunney, Sigmund Freud, producer Max Reinhardt, Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. Beginning in the ­mid-­1930s, Wilder was especially close to Gertrude Stein and became one of her most effective interpreters and champions. Many of Wilder's friendships are documented in his prolific correspondence. Wilder believed that great letters constitute a “great branch of literature.” In a lecture entitled “On Reading the Great Letter Writers,” he wrote that a letter can function as a “literary exercise,” the “profile of a personality,” and “news of the soul,” apt descriptions of thousands of letters he wrote to his own friends and family.

Wilder enjoyed acting and played major roles in several of his own plays in summer theater productions. He also possessed a lifelong love of music: reading musical scores was a hobby, and he wrote the librettos for two operas based on his work:
The Long Christmas Dinner,
with composer Paul Hindemith; and
The Alcestiad,
with composer Louise Talma. Both works premiered in Germany.

Teaching was one of Wilder's deepest passions. He began his teaching career in 1921 as an instructor in French at Lawrenceville, a private secondary school in New Jersey. Financial in­de­pen­dence after the publication of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
permitted him to leave the classroom in 1928, but he returned to teaching in the 1930s at the University of Chicago. For six years, on a ­part-­time basis, he taught courses there in classics in translation, comparative literature, and composition. In 1950–1951, he served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Wilder's gifts for scholarship and teaching (he treated the classroom as all but a theater) made him a consummate, ­much-­sought-after lecturer in his own country and abroad. After World War II, he held special standing, especially in Germany, as an interpreter of his own country's intellectual traditions and their influence on cultural expression.

During World War I, Wilder had served a ­three-­month stint as an enlisted man in the Coast Artillery section of the army, stationed at Fort Adams, Rhode Island. He volunteered for ser­vice in World War II, advancing to the rank of lieutenant col­o­nel in Army Air Force Intelligence. For his ser­vice in North Africa and Italy, he was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, the Chevalier Legion d'Honneur, and honorary officership in the Military Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.).

From royalties received from
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
Wilder built a ­house for his family in 1930 in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven. But he typically spent as many as two hundred days a year away from Hamden, traveling to and settling in a variety of places that provided the stimulation and solitude he needed for his work. Sometimes his destination was the Arizona desert, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, or Martha's Vineyard, Newport, Saratoga, Vienna, or ­Baden-­Baden. He wrote aboard ships, and often chose to stay in “spas in ­off-­season.” He needed a certain refuge when he was deeply immersed in writing a novel or play. Wilder explained his habit to a
New Yorker
journalist in 1959: “The walks, the quiet—all the elegance is present, everything is there but the people. That's it! A spa in ­off-­season! I make a practice of it.”

But Wilder always returned to “the ­house
The Bridge
built,” as it is still known to this day. He died there of a heart attack on December 7, 1975.

 

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