Theophilus North (55 page)
Thornton and I first met when we were freshmen at Oberlin College, sixty years ago. After the First World War separated us, we were reunited at Yale. When I went to the University of Chicago, we were reunited again and spent six years there together. After that we had to rely on the mails and such meetings as we were able to arrange. It wasn't so bad. We met in London, Paris (where we saw the Kanins), New York, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Albuquerque, and other places.
It was a family affair, more or less, at the start. My father was one of Thornton's teachers at Oberlin. His father employed me as a typist when I got to New Haven. Thornton's friendship with my mother continued long after the families had scattered. And then, of course, there were Isabel and Amos: Isabel at New Haven and by correspondence thereafter, and Amos at Oberlin, Yale, and Chicago, too. And to my childrenâlike so many other people's childrenâThornton was always “Uncle Thornton.”
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 we had lived too long in the wrong neighborhood. In fact, in his view I had lived in two of the wrong neighborhoods: 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 thoughts. 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.
As late as last August, Thornton wrote to me, “I continue to be crazy about the new frontiers in microbiology and astronomy. They expand the imagination.” When we were in college I showed him a book of critical essays that I had bought, and he said, “Short cut to culture.” No window-breaking thoughts here. He tried to open the world of music to me by giving me the first symphonic record I ever owned, Mozart's 34th; and his correspondence and conversation were full of Goethe, Kierkegaard, Teilhard de Chardin, Joyce, Nietzsche, Gertrude Steinâall of whom had broken some windows in their time.
But there was more to the expansion of the imagination than removing old obstructions and opening new vistas. There was the object of it all, which was to elevate and unite humanity by enabling the dwellers of one neighborhood to understand those of others and to share their ideas, hopes, and fears. So Thornton never joined in my admiration for Gibbon. He said that the Romans and the English were “cold-hearted”âthat is, they were short on imagination. “Gibbon,” he said, “gloats at the Colisseum. He sics the animals on.” Thornton's ultimate word of condemnation was “cruel.” Cruelty was a failure of the imagination.
For sixty years he was my teacher. His pedagogical methods were irresistible. They were deep personal concern and laughter. When I was ill or suffering from any misfortune, the letters were faster and funnier, but the lessons were not missing. Here is Thornton's account of meeting a President of the United States in a receiving line:
Thornton Wilder (right) with his older brother, Amos, at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, April 1975. This is the last known picture taken of the author, who died on December 7 of that year. Amos's status as a clergyman and a prominent tennis playerâhe was the Intercollegiate Doubles Champion in 1920âis mentioned in
Theophilus North
.
The President gave me the gimlet eye and vice versa. The President said, “Still scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Wilder?”
And I said, “Man dressed in a little brief authority performs such tricks under the high heaven as make the angels weep. See
Measure for Measure
.”
“Next,” the President said peremptorily.
This is his version of what happened when he got a bad review:
It's terrible to be humiliated that way. My barber lost his tongue and cut my hair in silence. The waitress at my
stammtisch
at Howard Johnson's murmured, “Never mind, dear. Maybe you'll do better next time. You'll be wanting the eighty-five cent blue-plate lunch. It's hash today.” My dog hid behind the woodpile when I called him, and when I spoke to the little girl next door, her mother called through the window, “Come inside, Marguerite. I think it is going to rain.”
He was the best of teachers and the kindest of friends.
The Afterword of this volume is constructed in large part from Thornton Wilder's words in unpublished letters, papers, 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 thanks for helping me to accomplish this task, for which, of course, I bear full responsibility. I thank Barbara Whitepine and Celeste Fellows for helping with housekeeping details. For their assistance and support throughout, I am honored to give a special salute to Robin Wilder, Jackson Bryer, Barbara Hogenson, J. D. McClatchy, and Penelope Niven. Christopher Buckley's enthusiasm for Thornton Wilder has been a joy to be around. Finally, I am deeply indebted to the helpful people at two institutions that care about good books: the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and all those at HarperCollins who have made this volume and this series possible.
Letters and Journals
The quotations from Thornton Wilder's letters and other material in the Foreword and Afterword, including the quotation from Isabel Wilder's letter in the Afterword, are taken from one of two 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 and punctuation errors have been silently corrected. All rights are reserved for this material by the owners.
Publications
Excerpts from published sources are identified in the order of their appearance in the text, with permissions noted as required: Amos Wilder's view about his brother's status as a twin appears in
Thornton Wilder and His Public
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), p. 10. Copyright © 1980 by Amos Niven Wilder. Reprinted by permission of Tappan Wilder. Robert J. Donovan's interview with Wilder, “Thornton Wilder on Life Today: âIt's an Age of Transitionâand It's Exciting,' ” appeared in the
Los Angeles Times
on October 15, 1973, and is reprinted in Jackson R. Bryer, Ed.,
Conversations with Thornton Wilder
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), pp. 106-109. Copyright,
Los Angeles Times
. Reprinted by permission. Robert Hutchins's tribute appears in the published record of the author's memorial service,
Thornton Niven Wilder
(New Haven: Yale Printing Service, 1976), pp. 8-10, and is reprinted here with the permission of Clarissa Hutchins Bronson.
Photographs
Both the photograph of Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder and the photograph appearing with the author's biography are reproduced with the permission of Tappan Wilder.
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”âhis 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 from 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 (1920â1921), 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 AtlanticâHemingway, Fitzgerald, Alexander Wooll-cott, 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.