The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (2 page)

When asked why he chose remote ages and settings for his early novels, Wilder answered ‘Because I am not yet ready to do something modern. I cannot yet reconcile a philosophic theme with the ringing of doorbells and telephones.’ Actually, in Wilder’s novels as well as his plays, literal setting and time are almost incidental – embroidery rather than scaffolding. He experimented with setting in fiction just as he experimented with sets on stage. The ‘sets’ of his novels are draped in richer detail than the minimalist sets for his plays, but in Wilder’s fiction, as in his drama, time and place are not fundamental to the story. Character and theme dominate.

This is especially the case in
The Woman of Andros,
set on Brynos, an imagined Greek island, before the birth of Christ. (One interviewer reported that Wilder had said the novel was set in 400 BC, but he commonly wrote that it was ‘about 200 BC – that is, in the decline of the Great Age of Greece.’) Wilder’s major character, the woman of Andros, is Chrysis, a beautiful, intelligent
hetaira
, or highly cultured courtesan, who is the benefactress of a household of dependent ‘stray human beings,’ misfits, outsiders like herself, whose physical and/or emotional needs Chrysis seeks to fulfill. She and her younger sister Glycerium love the same god-like young man. Throw into the brew two worried fathers, a contemplative priest of Apollo, some suspicious islanders, a battle-worn sea captain, and an avaricious pimp, and you are in for a compelling concoction of myth, fable and fantasia, laced with memorable aphorisms. (‘The loneliest associations are those that pretend to intimacy,’ for example. ‘It is true that of all the forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.’ ‘Stupidity is everywhere and invincible.’)

Wilder draws his readers into the interior lives of some of the inhabitants of Andros, especially lovely, alluring Chrysis. His 1929 journal reveals that she was his frequent imaginary companion as he worked on the book at the MacDowell Colony and on a trip to England with his mother. Revelations and lines of dialogue came to him as he took long walks, or rode the train, or spent hours at night copying the book by hand on the sea voyage from England to New York, beset by his habitual doubts. ‘From time to time the whole book seems mistaken,’ he fretted in his journal in October 1929:

Have I let myself go again to a luxury of grief? I remember this haunted me through the writing of
The Bridge
and I am still not sure whether
that
is the way the world is. Already I have begun to reduce some of the expressions. This perpetual harping on the supposition that people suffer within. Am I sufficiently realist?

He indicated that there were autobiographical traits in three characters – Chremes, one of the fathers of Brynos, this ‘happiest, and one of the least famous of the islands’; Chrysis, the Woman of Andros herself; and the young priest of Aesculapius and Apollo. Space here does not permit an exploration of Wilder’s life to illuminate that intriguing premise. There is, however, a prophetic, life-affirming scene in the novel that points us toward pivotal themes in Wilder’s future work. If you have seen or read
Our Town,
which appeared eight years after
The Woman of Andros,
you will recognise the story Chrysis tells her banquet guests about the Greek hero who begged Zeus to permit him to return to earth for just one day. Granted his dangerous wish, the hero, like Emily in Wilder’s play, discovers that the ‘the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure.’ He kisses ‘the soil of the world that is too dear to be realised.’

From the earliest pages of his first novels and plays, Wilder examined the universal quandaries encapsulated in the questions the young man Pamphilus asks in
The Woman of Andros
: ‘How does one live? What does one do first?’ In March 1930, Wilder wrote to Norman Fitts, then the
Boston Evening Transcript
critic, ‘It seems to me that my books are about: What is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it? In other words: When a human being is made to bear more than a human being can bear, what then?’ Wilder’s novels and plays pose evocative questions about spiritual belief and the mysteries of the mind and the spirit. He came to believe that the questions about the ‘vast themes’ took precedence over the answers, contending that writers ‘have only one duty, namely to pose the questions correctly.’

This challenge absorbed and tantalised him. Wilder’s first two novels and his early plays oscillated between story lines and search for meaning, between fable and examination of faith – but the emphasis rested on story and style rather than on substance and revelation. His focus changed with
The Woman of Andros,
however. Here the story is driven by the characters and their multifaceted search for meaning, including Wilder’s ongoing examination of the ‘sufficiency of love.’ The young man Pamphilus, for instance, perceives in many of his fellow islanders ‘a sad love that was half hope, often rebuked and waiting to be reassured of its truth.’ He asks, ‘But why then a love so defeated, as though it were waiting for a voice to come from the skies, declaring that therein lay the secret of the world.’ The islanders in
The Woman of Andros
struggle with the nature of the ‘perpetual flames of love’ that burn in the human heart – romantic love, especially first love; love for family; love of wisdom; even love for the unlovable in society. ‘If I love them enough, I can understand them,’ Chrysis reflects. She believes that life’s most difficult burden is ‘ the incommunicability of love.’ Ultimately Chrysis comes to the encompassing love of life itself: ‘Remember me,’ she says, ‘as one who loved all things and accepted from the gods all things, the bright and the dark.’

In
The Woman of Andros
Wilder was still probing other questions he had posed in
The Cabala
and
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
such as ‘whether the associations in life are based upon an accidental encounter or upon a profound and inner necessity.’ The characters in
The Woman of Andros
also grapple with the enigma of suffering, the mystery of death, the understanding of the ‘highest point towards which any existence would aspire.’ As the omniscient narrator, Wilder reflects that ‘the most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.’ Chrysis epitomises that journey, ultimately concluding that ‘It is the life in the mind that is important.’ When external events defy her power to shape or control, she relies on the interior harmony of mind, heart and spirit for ballast and refuge.

The Woman of Andros
set off an obstreperous critical controversy in the United States when communist critic Michael Gold labeled Wilder ‘the poet of the genteel bourgeoise,’ attacking him for writing novels that synthesised ‘chambermaid literature, Sunday-school tracts and boulevard piety.’ He called Wilder a ‘fairy-like little Anglo-American curate’ who perpetuated a literary ‘retreat’ from the ‘real problems’ of a real world, and challenged him to write a book about ‘modern America.’ Numerous critics and readers came to Wilder’s defence, and the novel pleased many critics, including Gilbert Thomas, who wrote in the
Spectator
that Wilder ‘has achieved both sensationalism and sentimentality, and has given us a delicately written idyll that is poignant in its restraint and quiet beauty.’ The
Times Literary Supplement
reviewer, however, called the novel a failure, albeit with ‘a collection of exquisite parts.’
The Woman of Andros
became a best seller, although not of the magnitude achieved by
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
for so long the yardstick by which all of Wilder’s other novels would be measured. Even so,
The Woman of Andros
ranked third on the list of best-selling novels in the US for 1930.

Thornton Wilder spent his literary life perpetually evolving – becoming a playwright of bolder innovation and theme, becoming a novelist of deepening vision and complexity, writing for an ever-expanding global audience. And how did he write what he wrote? Slowly. Painstakingly. In seclusion, when he could, in remote places in his own country, in favourite habitats in Europe, or aboard ships at sea. Part time, while juggling professional, personal and family obligations. In longhand, with pen or pencil, a unit of three pages at a time. He believed that the ‘mechanical flavor’ of the typewriter interfered with the clarity of his thought and his work. He crafted elegant sentences, fluid paragraphs, pages infused with irony, verve, wisdom and beauty. He found in the act of writing not so much pleasure as ‘a deep absorption.’ And there was the alluring power and possibility inherent in the process of ‘imaginative narration.’ In his notes for a lecture on the novel as a literary form, Wilder wrote, ‘Consider the story-teller: Out of his head he invents souls and destinies.’ Wilder went on to say, ‘There seems to be some kind of law deep down in human nature whereby the most compelling means of communicating ideas about the nature of what it is like to be alive is to ENWRAP one’s illumination in a STORY.’

Welcome to the world that Thornton Wilder, the story-teller, created in
The Woman of Andros,
to the invented souls that inhabit that world, and to the illuminations enwrapped in the story. In his fiction as in his plays, Wilder gives us the questions, sharp and clear, and leaves it to us to find the answers.

Penelope Niven

T
HE
W
OMAN OF
A
NDROS

The first part of this novel is based upon the Andria, a comedy of Terence who in turn based his work upon two Greek plays, now lost to us, by Menander
.

T
he earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness. The great cliff that was one day to be called Gibraltar held for a long time a gleam of red and orange, while across from it the mountains of Atlas showed deep blue pockets in their shining sides. The caves that surround the Neapolitan gulf fell into a profounder shade, each giving forth from the darkness its chiming or its booming sound. Triumph had passed from Greece and wisdom from Egypt, but with the coming on of night they seemed to regain their lost honours, and the land that was soon to be called Holy prepared in the dark its wonderful burden. The sea was large enough to hold a varied weather: a storm played about Sicily and its smoking mountains, but at the mouth of the Nile the water lay like a wet pavement. A fair tripping breeze ruffled the Aegean and all the islands of Greece felt a new freshness at the close of day.

The happiest, and one of the least famous of the islands, Brynos, welcomed the breeze. The evening was long. For a time, the sound of the waves, briskly slapping against the wall of the little harbour, was covered by the chattering of women, by the shouts of boys, and by the crying of lambs. As the first lights appeared, the women retired; as the air was filled with the clangor of the shop fronts being put into place, the boys’ voices ceased; and finally only the murmur of the men in the wine-shops, playing at games with ivory counters, mingled with the sounds from the sea. A confused starlight, already apprehensive of the still unrisen moon, fell upon the tiers of small houses that covered the slope and upon the winding flights of stairs that served as streets between them.

The wine-shops stood about the roughly paved square at the water’s edge and in one of them the five or six principal fathers of the island sat playing. By the time the moon had risen, two of these, Simo and Chremes, had outstayed their companions. Simo was the owner of two warehouses; he was a trader and had three ships that passed continually to and fro among the islands. The men had finished playing; the counters lay on the table between them and they sighed into their beards as they thought of the long walk through the ghostly olive trees to their homes. Simo was more tired than usual: whereas the law of moderation teaches us that the mind cannot be employed for more than three hours daily over merchandise and numerals without soilure, he had that day spent five hours in argument and traffic.

‘Simo,’ said Chremes suddenly, with the air of a man bracing himself to an unpleasant and long deferred task, ‘your boy is twenty-five now –’

Simo groaned as he saw the subject arising that he was never able to look in the face.

‘It’s four years,’ continued Chremes, ‘since you first said that a young man mustn’t be forced into marriage by his old people. And certainly no one has been trying to force Pamphilus. But what is he waiting for? He helps you in the warehouse; he exercises in the field; he dies at the Andrian’s. How many years must that kind of life go on before you agree with me that he would be better off married to my daughter?’

‘Chremes, he must come to me of his own accord. I will not be the first one to speak about it to the boy.’

‘First! It won’t be speaking of it first, Simo. It has been understood between our families for years that he will marry Philumena. It’s being spoken of all the time. The young people tease him about it from morning to night. He knows perfectly well that my daughter is ready to marry him. It’s sheer laziness on his part. It’s sheer unwillingness to take on the responsibilities of being a husband and a father and the foremost young householder on the island.’

‘He’s a young man who knows what he means to do. I will not coerce him.’

‘Then it’s settled that he doesn’t want to marry my daughter. It’s a humiliation for her to be waiting all these years for him to make up his mind, and her mother’s been after me to close the matter for a long time. Perhaps I shouldn’t say it, but you’ll be throwing away a good thing through sheer hesitancy, both of you. Philumena is by far the healthiest and the prettiest girl on any of these islands. And she’s clever at everything that is expected of a woman in the home. The uniting of our two families has advantages, Simo, that I don’t have to point out to you. But this lapse of time has made it clear that your son is going to wait until his fancy has been caught by some other girl, I suppose. So be it! From this very night my wife is going to start looking about for some other young man.’