Theophilus North (2 page)
It's in keeping with the serendipity that ruled Wilder's life that this novel is reappearing at a time when some of America's leading capitalists are going through some pretty hard mirror-time (Enron, Martha Stewartâagain!âWorldCom, executives being perp-walked to the booking station for fraud, tax evasion, insider trading). This makes the bookâto use that dreadful termârather
relevant
after all these years.
“He chuckled to me once that it was his âMarxist novel,' ” Tappan Wilder recalls. Robert Maynard Hutchins, to whom the novel is dedicated and for whom it was written, noted Wilder's views on the subject of the moneyed classes in his eulogy at Yale's Battell Chapel on January 18, 1976:
Thornton used to say that he and I were brought up in the “late foam-rubber period of American Protestantism.” And the worst of that, he said, was that we didn't have the courage to think what he called “window-breaking thoughts.” He quoted Karl Marx as saying, “Tell me in what neighborhood you live and I'll tell you what you think.” Thornton thought that we had lived too long in the wrong neighborhood[s] . . . the neighborhood of late foam-rubber Protestantism and, as a semiprofessional
money raiser, in the neighborhood of the very rich. “The rich,” he said, “need to be lapped in soothing words.” What was required was window-breaking rhoughts. The enemy was philistinism, parochialism, narrow specialization. The object of educationâindeed of the whole of lifeâwas the expansion of the imagination. This could lead to window-breaking thoughts.
Also in the Yale archive is an incomplete semi-autobiographical sketch titled “Yale, 1920” in which Wilder postulates a law that
“Private wealth arrests the advance of civilization; great wealth reverses it”
(italics in original).
Reasonable minds could spend a lively evening over brandy and Cohibas hashing this over. Did those 300-odd libraries that Andrew Carnegie endowed really “arrest” the advance of civilization? Did Andrew Mellon's gift of his art collection to the United States “reverse” civilization? I'll have another brandy, please, the XO. Point is, the DNA that flowed in Thornton Wilder's veins was Maine-Calvinist. He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, raised for a short but influential period amid mind-boggling poverty in China (though comfortable himself). His father and mother inculcated in him and his brother (a preacher) the paradigmatic values of the middle class. Wilder spent his life teaching and storytelling, when not dropping by for a drink at the Alqonguin with Ruth Gordon or Alexander Woollcott. His feet, unlike those of another midwestern boy who spent time at Princeton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, were planted firmly on the ground. The
terra
doesn't get much
firma
than 50 Deepwood Drive, Hamden, Connecticut, living with your sister.
In his biography of Wilder, Gilbert Harrison asserts that “Thornton was not anti-money. But money, as Dolly Levi [from the aboriginal
The Merchant of Yonkers
] said, was like manure, ânot worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.' ” (How many times have you heard that quote attributed to someone else?) Discussing the portrayal of the rich in
Theophilus North
, Harrison quotes from Wilder's own journal:
[Thorstein] Veblen missed the point about conspicuous waste; it is a repressive strategy. It is designed to cow the less fortunate into believing that the privileged rich are of a different order of man and are mysteriously entitled to their out-sized possessions.
Never mind MarxâLenin could have written that. But here we have a fuller version of his knowing smile with his nephew Tappan: Harrison writes that Thornton said in his sixties, “I'm getting to be a crypto-Marxian. . . . The unequal distribution of wealth vitiates against all exchange of ideas. Like the cuttlefish it exudes a black secretion.”
So, a lot is going on underneath the glittery surface of
Theophilus North
. Given Wilder's bring-on-the-guillotine views, his age and failing health, it's downright remarkable that the novel doesn't read like a bar rant by a cranky old Bolshevik.
Wilder was never that, of course. He was, his nephew says, ever aware of a tendency within himself toward “the didactic direct,” to mount the nearest soapbox or pulpit stairs and start preaching. He was too much of an artist to fall for that. He was first, middle, and last a storyteller. This is what made him a pleasure to read when I was fifteen and still at age fifty. At its best,
Theophilus North
reads like one of those exuberant letters to his classmate and mother back in 1922. It may sometimes seem to pile on, but mostly it brims with delight, wit, prodigious learning, voice, bon mots, epigrams, apothegms, aperçus, grace, and yes, what a lot of lovely girls are in it. It may now be our winter of 2003, but in these pages it is still and forever the golden, enchanted summer of '26.
âChristopher Buckley
Blue Hill, Maine
       Â
In the spring of 1926 I resigned from my job.
The first days following such a decision are like the release from a hospital after a protracted illness. One slowly learns how to walk again; slowly and wonderingly one raises one's head.
I was in the best of health, but I was innerly exhausted. I had been teaching for four and a half years in a boys' preparatory school in New Jersey and tutoring three summers at a camp connected with the school. I was to all appearance cheerful and dutiful, but within I was cynical and almost totally bereft of sympathy for any other human being except the members of my family. I was twenty-nine years old, about to turn thirty. I had saved two thousand dollarsâset aside, not to be touchedâfor either a return to Europe (I had spent a year in Italy and France in 1920-1921) or for my expenses as a graduate student in some university. It was not clear to me what I wanted to do in life. I did not want to teach, though I knew I had a talent for it; the teaching profession is often a safety-net for just such indeterminate natures. I did not want to be a writer in the sense of one who earns his living by his pen; I wanted to be far more immersed in life than that. If I were to do any so-called “writing,” it would not be before I had reached the age of fifty. If I were destined to die before that, I wanted to be sure that I had encompassed as varied a range of experience as I couldâthat I had not narrowed my focus to that noble but largely sedentary pursuit that is covered by the word “art.”
Professions. Life careers. It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy's and girl's imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of the imagination.
At various times I had been afire with N
INE
L
IFE
A
MBITIONS
ânot necessarily successive, sometimes concurrent, sometimes dropped and later revived, sometimes very lively but under a different form and only recognized, with astonishment, after the events which had invoked them from the submerged depths of consciousness.
The F
IRST,
the earliest, made its appearance during my twelfth to my fourteenth years. I record it with shame. I resolved to become a saint. I saw myself as a missionary among primitive peoples. I had never met a saint but I had read and heard a great deal about them. I was attending a school in North China and the parents of all my fellow-students (and my teachers in their way) were missionaries. My first shock came when I became aware that (perhaps covertly) they regarded the Chinese as a primitive people. I knew better than that. But I clung to the notion that I would be a missionary to a really primitive tribe. I would lead an exemplary life and perhaps rise to the crown of martyrdom. Gradually during the next ten years I became aware of the obstacles in my path. All I knew about sainthood was that the candidate must be totally absorbed in a relationship with God, in pleasing Him, and in serving His creatures here on earth. Unfortunately I had ceased to believe in the existence of God in 1914 (my seventeenth year), my view of the intrinsic divinity in my fellow-men (and in myself) had deteriorated, and I knew that I was incapable of meeting the strictest demands of selflessness, truthfulness, and celibacy.
Perhaps as a consequence of this brief aspiration I retained through life an intermittent childishness. I had no aggression and no competitive drive. I could amuse myself with simple things, like a child playing on the seashore with shells. I often appeared to be vacant or “absent.” This irritated some; even valued friends, both men and women (perhaps including my father), broke with me charging me with “not being serious” or calling me a “simpleton.”
The S
ECOND
âa secularization of the firstâwas to be an anthropologist among primitive peoples and all my life I have returned to that interest. The past and the future are always
present
within us. Readers may observe that the anthropologist and his off-shoot the sociologist continue to hover about this book.
The T
HIRD,
the archaeologist.
The F
OURTH,
the detective. In my third year at college I planned to become an amazing detective. I read widely in the literature, not only in its fictional treatment, but in technical works dealing with its refined scientific methods. Chief Inspector North would play a leading role among those who shield our lives from the intrusions of evil and madness lurking about the orderly workshop and home.
The F
IFTH,
the actor, an amazing actor. This delusion could have been guessed at after a consideration of the other eight ambitions.
The S
IXTH,
the magician. This aim was not of my seeking and I have difficulty in giving it a name. It had nothing to do with stage-performance. I early discovered that I had a certain gift for soothing, for something approaching mesmerismâdare I say for “driving out demons”? I understood what a
shaman
or a medicineman probably relies upon. I was not comfortable with it and resorted to it seldom, but as the reader will see it was occasionally thrust upon me. It is inseparable from a certain amount of imposture and quackery. The less said about it the better.
The S
EVENTH,
the lover. What kind of a lover? An omnivorous lover like Casanova? No. A lover of all that is lofty and sublime in women, like the Provençal Troubadours? No.
Years later I found in very knowledgeable company a description of the type to which I belonged. Dr. Sigmund Freud spent his summers in a suburb of Vienna called Grinzing. I was spending a summer in Grinzing and without any overtures on my part I was invited to call at his villa on Sunday afternoons for what he called
Plaudereien
âdesultory conversations. At one of these delightful occasions the conversation turned upon the distinction between “loving” and “falling in love.”
“Herr Doktor,”
he asked, “do you know an old English comedyâI forget its nameâin which the hero suffers from a certain impediment [
Hemmung
]? In the presence of âladies' and of genteel well-brought-up girls he is shy and tongue-tied, he is scarcely able to raise his eyes from the ground; but in the presence of servant girls and barmaids and what they are calling âemancipated women' he is all boldness and impudence. Do you know the name of that comedy?”
“Yes,
Herr Professor
. That is
She Stoops to Conquer
.”
“And who is its author?”
“Oliver Goldsmith.”
“Thank you. We doctors have found that Oliver Goldsmith has made an exemplary picture of a problem that we frequently discover among our patients.
Ach, die Dichter haben alles gekannt
!” (“The poet-natures have always known everything.”)
He then went on to point out to me the relation of the problem to the Oedipus complex and to the incest-tabu under which “respectable” women are associated with a man's mother and sistersâ“out of bounds.”
“Do you remember the name of that young man?”
“Charles Marlow.”
He repeated the name with smiling satisfaction. I leaned forward and said, “
Herr Professor
, can we call that situation the âCharles Marlow Complex'?”
“Yes, that would do very well. I have long looked for an appropriate name for it.”
Theophilus suffered, as they say (though there was no suffering about it), from that
Hemmung
. Well, let other fellows court and coax, month after month, the stately Swan and the self-engrossed Lily. Let them leave to Theophilus the pert magpie and the nodding daisy.
The E
IGHTH,
the rascal. Here I must resort to a foreign language,
el picaro
. My curiosities throw a wide net. I have always been fascinated by the character who represents the opposite of my New England and Scottish inheritanceâthe man who lives by his wits, “one step ahead of the sheriff,” without plan, without ambition, at the margin of decorous living, delighted to outwit the clods, the prudent, the money-obsessed, the censorious, the complacent. I dreamt of covering the entire world, of looking into a million faces, light of foot, light of purse and baggage, extricating myself from the predicaments of hunger, cold, and oppression by quickness of mind. These are not only the rogues, but the adventurers. I had read, enviously, the lives of many and had observed that they were often, justly or unjustly, in prison. My instinct had warned me and my occasional nightmares had warned me that the supreme suffering for me would be that of being caged and incarcerated. I have occasionally approached the verge of downright rascality, but not without carefully weighing the risk. This eighth ambition leads me into my last and overriding one: