Thornton Wilder (10 page)

The unfinished, handwritten draft is testimony that the boy who went to China came home with the experience deeply etched in his memory and imagination. His years in China, especially in the Inland Mission School, left him with a firmly embedded skepticism about organized religion. The China experience awoke in him a fascination with the relationship between the multitude and the individual, the masses and the one, and he began as a teenager to try to decipher what it meant—a search that would last a lifetime.

The China experience also intensified the young Wilder's sense of being an outsider, a stranger. He was an American looked down on by many of his peers from England, cut off from his peers in China, separated from the family who loved him even if they did not always fully understand him. In those formative years Thornton grew resigned to the prolonged separations from his parents and siblings. How was he to know where he belonged, and with whom? How was he to function without kindred spirits—especially his mother and his brother? He idolized his brother. He adored his sometimes emotionally exhausted, frequently geographically distant mother. He loved, revered, and sometimes feared his dynamic father. He longed to have the family reunited.

Not only was Thornton separated from his parents and his brother and sisters; he was separated from his national identity, living surrounded by an exotically different culture but literally walled off from it, attending the rigorous English boarding school in the middle of China, where he studied German, French, and Latin but where there were no classes in Chinese, the language and the key to the culture he longed to explore. He was innately curious about the Chinese people, their customs, their daily lives. He was surrounded by the enigmas of the ancient, richly complex culture of China, yet denied the tools and the vocabulary that could help him know and understand it. Language, he thought, was the key to the mystery, and he began to discover the far-reaching power of the word.

5

“PARENTAL EXPECTATION”

For the man, a telling reflection: “Parental love is proportionate to the intensity of parental expectation of a child's contribution to life.”

—THORNTON WILDER,

“Chinese Story”

 

California and China
(
1912–1913
)

W
hat on earth shall I do at Thatcher [
sic
]—‘I haven't a rag to put on—not one!' ” Thornton, now fifteen, wrote to his mother from the SS
Nile
en route from Shanghai to San Francisco in late summer 1912. He had two old suits, he complained, but they were in “rags and tatters.” He might begin wearing “long trousers,” he wrote. “I am as big as some boys @ school who wore them. I wouldn't like to though.”
¹

He was being sent to live and study at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where his brother Amos had already distinguished himself as a top student, star athlete, and popular member of his class, and Charlotte would go to school in Claremont, California. The heady freedom of the long sea voyage took Thornton's mind away, at least temporarily, from his anxiety. His long-held dream of returning to California came closer to reality day by day during the monthlong voyage, and although his father's friends had tipped a stewardess to watch over Thornton and Charlotte, they were traveling virtually unencumbered by any supervision—“two
lone Babes on the Sea,
” Thornton joked in a long letter to his mother.
²

He slept on deck, along with many other passengers, and joined in one evening's entertainment—a vaudeville performance, wherein, he reported, “I recited an affair I made up impersonating 4 people.” At the shipboard fancy-dress evening, when passengers wore costumes, a young woman lent him an evening dress, and Thornton dressed up as a duchess, with yellow rope for hair. “Puritanical Charlotte expected to be shocked,” he wrote, “but as it wasn't so very decoletée [
sic
] (how on earth does it go) she let it pass.”
³
Meanwhile, young Amos was working hard during his summer vacation as a laborer on the farm of L. B. Husted near Saratoga, California, honoring his father's unorthodox vision of how his sons should spend their time between school terms. Years later, looking back, Amos interpreted his father's motivations:

 

My father thought there was no experience for a growing boy more valuable than working in a country store or on a farm. . . . All this was part of what our parent called “broadening experience.” . . . The long-range health factor weighed large, but most important was diversity of experience and initiation into varied aspects of the world's work and the common life.
⁴

 

Over the years Dr. Wilder found summer employment for his sons on farms from coast to coast—in California, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Vermont—and he dispatched his daughters to summer programs in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.

Amos had greatly pleased his father by writing that he would “be glad to be a missionary or minister. . . . If I cannot be a great man in the world, I will be a great man in myself.”
⁵
Sherman Thacher had recommended him to Farmer Husted with superlatives: Amos was “the finest kind of a boy, of the very highest moral character and of very careful religious training.” Thacher went on to praise Amos as an excellent student, and “a boy that it is always a pleasure to have about, who can be relied upon to work faithfully, intelligently, one whom you may trust absolutely with any financial responsibility.” Furthermore, Thacher wrote, Amos was “a boy who is contented anywhere, working, or playing, or reading a book, day after day.”
⁶

All the while Dr. Wilder was coping with his ongoing health problems, and he was mightily discouraged and depressed. Struggling to regain his health and eager to consult with American physicians, Dr. Wilder traveled to New York and New Haven in late summer 1912, far away from his duties in China and from his scattered. family—his wife and two youngest children still in Europe, and his three older children in California. His political and diplomatic worries intensified in this presidential election year, for China was an issue. Democrats, led by Woodrow Wilson, were advocating full diplomatic recognition of China, a position opposed by the Republicans and incumbent Republican president William Howard Taft, Wilder's friend and patron.
⁷

Despite the obstacles of illness and geography, Dr. Wilder worked hard to make the best possible arrangements for Amos, Thornton, and Charlotte, ultimately deciding that both the boys would go to Thacher School. Charlotte would be sent to board with the Maynard family, his friends in Claremont, California, but strangers to Charlotte, and she would attend public school there. Getting Thornton to Thacher School had been Dr. Wilder's goal since 1911, but Isabella—who held her own very strong opinions about how the children should be brought up—had overruled him then, insisting that Thornton and Charlotte accompany her back to China.
⁸

Dr. Wilder felt that Thornton needed “the virile atmosphere” of Thacher.
⁹
He was forthright as he filled out the required questionnaire for Thornton's admission: Was his son quick tempered? He was “inclined that way.” Did he get on well with other boys? “Not a good ‘mixer'—has a few congenials.” Did he have any difficulties in school? “None.” Yet, the father added, “Some teachers find him hard to classify.” Was he accustomed to seeing people play cards or other games for money? “On shipboard—and aware of it [in] Shanghai society.” What was his most serious fault or weakness? “He is ‘the boy that is different'—Sensitive—Self conscious—radiantly happy when with those he likes who understand him—May develop ‘moods.' ” Thornton was not good at sports, the father reported, but he loved music, art, drama, literature. He got low marks in many subjects because of “Lack of concentration.” Thornton was “not a good drudge.” He could be nervous, even “terrorized” by certain pressures and routines that were “easy to others.” He had a “delicate, fine nature.” He knew nothing about guns or rifles, and his father would be “delighted” for him to learn. In the matter of buying a horse for Thornton, “great economy” would be necessary. Unless he was sick Thornton would be expected to attend the Presbyterian church five miles from the school, where seats were reserved for Thacher boys.
¹⁰

Fortunately Thornton was not privy to the portrait his father drew for Sherman Thacher, but he lived in continual awareness of his father's high expectations and his own shortcomings. “What you are now you will be later,” Dr. Wilder had written to his son from Shanghai. “I know what a happy nature you are; and now to hold it. I much wish you might have more farm life—outdoor grandeur and practicality—that you might learn to work with your hands and depend on yourself.”
¹¹

For his father Thornton's acceptance at Thacher was a goal achieved. For Thornton, it was one more move in his father's chess game. Bristling with resentment at another separation from family members, Thornton prepared reluctantly to go to one more strange place, one more new school. “How hard and callous the Wilder family will get through all the bi-monthly and even weekly leave-takings,”he wrote to his mother.
¹²

It had also been a sad leave-taking for Dr. Wilder. Not only would he live alone in China once more, but he was still grappling with his illness. His health had improved from the months of treatment and relative rest in the United States, but the disease would be chronically debilitating from that time on. He would never fully recapture the robust physical and intellectual energy that had defined him before he was felled by the Asian sprue. He found himself fifty years old and frail, and overwhelmed by his complicated responsibilities in Shanghai.

As a teenager Thornton did not understand the professional burdens his father carried. He was also unaware of how deeply his father suffered the consequences of separation from the family. For Thornton the overriding reality was that for nearly two years he had been living away from both his parents and one or another of his siblings, communicating with them primarily through letters. Bound for one more new “home,” he hoped to hang on to some of his Chefoo friendships by correspondence. He had already learned, chameleonlike, to assume a definite persona for each recipient of a letter, changing colors as need be when he finished a letter to one person and began one to another, tailoring his voice and subject to the needs and interests of his correspondents. There seemed to be as many Thorntons as there were friends and relatives.

In his fifteenth year, embarking for California to live in his older brother's shadow at Thacher, Thornton slowly gave up trying to be the son he thought his father wanted him to be. He summoned the audacity and temerity to begin expressing his honest, sometimes obstreperous, true self. More and more often, as he stood on the bridge between boyhood and manhood, he struck a note of rebellion and defiance in letters to his father, despite his ongoing concern for the elder Wilder's health problems. In letters uncannily like the letters young Amos Parker Wilder had written to his own father, Thornton fired off complaints—attacking the school, his peers, and most of all, his father's edicts and decisions. By contrast, he still confided his hopes and dreams to his absent mother, and shared candidly with her the realities of his daily life and his intellectual and artistic pursuits.

He had been led to hope that his mother would return to California by midyear 1913, and he counted on that reunion. “I don't know to what degree I'll like school,” he confessed to her. “But oh lady, you'll be back (with the eternal Wilder question-mark) in June.”
¹³

 

IN MID-SEPTEMBER
of 1912, Thornton found himself in the Ojai Valley, near Nordhoff, California, living in a rustic, ranch-style school surrounded by high mountains and rough terrain, tamed here and there into avocado and citrus orchards, with the nearby Sespe River twisting through rugged crags and canyons. It took him several weeks to adjust to life at the Thacher School, where the boys often slept outdoors in the canyons, rode horses along the river, and worked on trail building or other ranch projects after their school day was done.

Two schools could hardly have been more different than Thacher and the China Inland Mission School. In Ojai, Thornton was transplanted into an environment where the school's founder believed that insofar as possible, school life should mirror real life, with a daily emphasis on self-reliance, practical as well as analytical thinking, good manners, kindness, tolerance for others, and appreciation and respect for the natural world. Sherman Thacher, a graduate of Yale, class of 1883, had founded his school in 1889. From his father, a Latin professor at Yale from 1842 until 1886, Thacher inherited “an aversion to people of wealth,” and this often influenced his decision about whether to admit a young man to Thacher.
¹⁴
He would sometimes turn away a prospective pupil whose parents were ostentatiously wealthy, while he made every effort to admit worthy students whose parents lacked the financial resources to send them to Thacher, especially if he perceived the boys to be of sterling character. Such was the case for his Yale friend and fellow Skull and Bones member, Amos Parker Wilder, who wanted to entrust his sons to Sherman Thacher and the school, which was already building a reputation as an effective Yale feeder establishment.

Thacher's letters to Dr. Wilder were accommodating to a fault: Wilder was offered a reduced rate, to be paid monthly at his convenience, or any other plan that “may prove to be in accordance with what you can satisfactorily arrange.”
¹⁵
Once Thacher wrote, “I enclose our school bill, as a matter of form, the understanding always being that you shall treat it as may be convenient to you.”
¹⁶
Without this largesse, Amos and Thornton Wilder would never have been able to go to Thacher.

He hoped that his school would produce young men with independent minds. He set high standards in the classroom (hiring many teachers fresh out of his alma mater), but he also encouraged the arts and sports, especially horseback riding. He wanted each student to have a horse, and to learn how to care for the horse as well as to ride it. (Thacher believed there was “something about the outside of a horse” that was “good for the inside of a boy.”) Once they were ready, students were free to ride all over the inviting, sometimes intimidating terrain of the Ojai Valley, and to explore the rugged, often desolate mountains and wilderness.

At Chefoo, Thornton had been confined by language, boundaries, and structure, cut off from home and denied access to the exotic country that surrounded him. At Thacher he was free. Nature was his classroom. His brother was already deeply at home at Thacher, with accomplishments greater than Thornton could even aspire to equal. He wouldn't excel, as Amos did, in the classroom, on the tennis court, in the student government, or on the baseball field. Thornton's interests lay beyond sports, and at Thacher he could indulge them freely. He could play in the orchestra and study piano and violin. (“Beethoven's Sonatas have been called the musician's Shakespeare, and if ever you live in the same house as I do you'll get to know them,” he nagged his father.)
¹⁷
He spent hours in the library reading and writing. Best of all, not only could Thornton write plays; he could even see one of them produced. The school boasted a Greek-style amphitheater, located in a steep ravine surrounded by barns and pastures, an “Arcadian spot unmarred by artificial scenery, with a stream bed separating the audience and the actors.”
¹⁸
It was the site of many remarkable performances, Thornton wrote his father. One of them was Thornton's
The Russian Princess: An Extravaganza in Two Acts.
The play was produced in the Outdoor Theatre on May 21, 1913, with Thornton directing and appearing as the villain, Grand Duke Alexis of Russia. He wore a heavy fur coat and, his classmate Lefty Lewis remembered, went “darting about the stage while his fellow-actors looked on helplessly.”
¹⁹
The play was “Thornton's big moment at the Thacher School.”
²⁰
Written by Thornton and another student, Jack Drummond, the drama was set in Paris, in an apple-vendor's shop and in a cabaret. Others who witnessed the production believed that Thornton “furnished the plot, and Jack Drummond the spelling and punctuation” and one of the teachers thought that the drama owed its inspiration “to Thornton's fur coat.”
²¹