Thornton Wilder (11 page)

Although the Wilder children coped, each in his or her own way, with the prolonged parental absences, it was Amos who seemed to adjust most easily. He was quiet, self-effacing to the point of shyness, but popular, and his athletic prowess and academic achievement earned him the respect of teachers and fellow students. Isabel and Janet were happy and content with their mother, aunt, and grandmother. Janet knew no other way of life than to live in Europe far away from her father and brothers and sister Charlotte. The fractured family life was hardest on Thornton and Charlotte, both shy like Amos, but less stoic, more high-strung, and less equipped to acclimate to new surroundings. The family separation was a special agony for Charlotte, as the middle child, for she had been sent away from the family before—as a baby, before the birth of Isabel; and as a schoolgirl in Chefoo, allowed only an hour and a half each week to see her brother. Now she was being sent to live with total strangers in a new place—the Maynard family in Claremont. Isabella later came to believe that Charlotte's displacements as a child caused serious problems for her as an adult.
²²
Now in California, Charlotte was once again the Wilders' “sent-away” child.

Thornton's boyhood letters dramatically reveal the scope of his loneliness, and his longing for a normal family life. As he parted from his father and entered Thacher, not only was he homesick—for wherever home was—but he fell physically ill enough to be quarantined in the school sickroom. “This is the old situation of being sick after I leave you,” he wrote forlornly to his father in a letter headed “Thatcher[
sic
]. Sick room. Broken Heart. Sunday P.M.” Confined to bed and to his own company, he read and slept and played chess with himself “because no one else was allowed in the room for fear of catching appendicitis or gout.”
²³

Dr. Wilder delivered Charlotte to Claremont that autumn of 1912 into the care of the Maynards, his friends who would board her and supervise her daily life, including her schoolwork and activities. Years later Isabel remembered that from their youth, her older sister was “handsome, very intelligent” and an eager student with “a mind full of curiosity” and an “intense” awareness of nature. Isabel added, “She was also highly sensitive and easily upset”—a “very private person” with a tendency to brood.
²⁴
Charlotte had been happy at Chefoo, but she found much to brood about in her life in Claremont. Under Mrs. Maynard's strict supervision, Charlotte felt that she was being used as a household servant—washing dishes, cleaning, sweeping, with steady reproof and little praise from Mrs. Maynard.
²⁵
Apparently at Dr. Wilder's instruction, Mrs. Maynard tried to teach Charlotte domestic skills, including sewing—a difficult task for Charlotte because she was left-handed. “In short,” Charlotte wrote to her father, “I'm taken in as a member of the family without the privileges of a member of the family.”
²⁶
She recognized that some of Mrs. Maynard's discipline was good for her, but she dreaded the frequent scoldings, and even though she often enjoyed the company of the Maynard children, she begged her father not to send her back to Claremont for another year.

 

DURING HIS
year at Thacher, Thornton applied himself industriously to the task of learning to ride a horse. He had not ridden since his Shanghai days, and then, more often than not, he had been astride a pony, but he soon reported to his father that he could ride pretty well. By March 1913, he was riding out into the valley regularly, often making the ten-mile round-trip to Nordhoff, the nearest town. “I like riding all right but the only thing is it hurts,” he wrote to his father. “It made some huge blisters on me. I'll probably get used to it some day.”
²⁷
His horse was well into its teens, a white horse and “the nicest old thing ever bridled,” Thornton wrote.
²⁸

Far more at home with music, books, and plays, Thornton worked hard at the piano and the violin, occasionally performing in concerts at Thacher. He played second violin in a quintet, and gave a solo concert one night to an audience of Thacher's Chinese staff members—a special “treat,” Thornton wrote facetiously, “to keep them on the second day of their new year from going to some pagan festival.”
²⁹
Early in 1913 he wrote to his mother in disappointment about losing a part in the school play because of his father. The big Thacher event of the spring was a schoolwide festival that included a tennis tournament—in which young Amos, the California high school doubles champion, would no doubt be a star. Parents would be coming “from far and near,” Thornton wistfully reported to his mother. There would be a big crowd for the gymkhana, the shooting matches, the tennis tournament, a dance, and then the play in the Outdoor Theatre—a performance of Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Eager for a part in Wilde's “funny, frivolous farce,” Thornton tried out for the play.

In a boys' school, of course, boys played all the roles, male and female. Thornton was thrilled when he won the part of one of the leads—“Lady Bracknell, a very sharp, lorgnette-carrying old Lady,” he told his mother. “I began learning my part right off and fell to work trying not to laugh at the clever epigrams I had to say.”
³⁰
He was already something of a ham, not nearly so shy onstage as off, and especially fond of comedy and farce. Thornton was happily absorbed in preparations for the play until one evening when Sherman Thacher interrupted him as he sat reading by the fire in the parlor. Thornton described the ensuing scene in the letter to his mother:

 

“Oh Thornton,” [Mr. Thacher] said, “your Father said in a letter that he would rather not have you in the plays taking female parts, so, altho' he didn't absolutely order you, I think we had better do as he says.” I was terribly disappointed. Now another boy has the part. It'll be very un-funny to watch the part I might be taking. The worst part of all comes in the explaining to other boys all about how my puritanical pater disapproves, etc.
³¹

 

 

AS MUCH
as he admired Sherman Thacher and his school, Dr. Wilder decided to move his “chess pieces” once again—to send Amos to Oberlin College and to withdraw Thornton from the school the coming year. When he heard of the plans, Sherman Thacher wrote Consul General Wilder a stern reprimand. He demonstrated “peculiar vacillations” with his sons, Thacher charged, moving them every few months. He told Dr. Wilder that he had received a letter from Mrs. Wilder saying that the only point on which she and her husband agreed in the children's education was that it was best for Thornton to return to Thacher. Furthermore, Thacher told Wilder, Amos was disappointed to be heading for Oberlin rather than Yale, although he accepted the decision “loyally and bravely.” It was hard for Amos to see his friends go off to great universities while he “for some reason he can hardly appreciate is sent to a college that is hardly heard of far from its own locality and special friends.”
³²

Dr. Wilder would later write Thacher to thank him for his influence on Amos and Thornton. “They are more manly in consequence and I believe lovers of truth,” their father reflected. “Amos is a serious young man and introspective; without the tennis, horse back riding, the love of nature bred of the mountains, I suspect his development would have been feverish—as it is, he sadly mixes up God and Nature for which I am glad. Surely to love one is to love the other.” As for Thornton, Dr. Wilder wrote, before he went to the Thacher School

 

he was the last word in high browism, a delicate, girl-playing, aesthetic lad in the early teens; this kind of boy making a one-sided, often unhappy, inadaptible [
sic
] man is familiar. By wise contact with out-door life, wholesome farm work, physical weariness and honest country people, Thornton is really quite a man; has a fair chest, a firm hand-shake and mixes well with all classes. What was done with him can be done with many another “difficult” boy. But it requires wisdom.
³³

 

BY JUNE 1913
, Thornton was eager to travel to Berkeley, where his mother and little sisters were now recovering from the long journey from Europe and settling into a rented house at Third and Townsend streets.
³⁴
He could hardly wait for the reunion, and he promised to take good care of his mother. The house creaked, she told him, and while she was happy there during the day, she was uneasy at night. He pledged that he would be her companion and protector, even her servant. “When I get there I will expect to wash dishes,” he wrote, adding that he would willingly be her slave. “We will have a lovely time this summer.”
³⁵

Thornton longed to spend the summer in Berkeley with his mother and sisters, and wanted “
very
much” to take a summer school course. He was determined to persuade his father that he should not, as Dr. Wilder wished, spend the summer working on a farm. Thornton couldn't bear the prospect of another separation from his mother so soon after her two-year absence. Besides, he complained to her, it was his father's “Dementia”—the idea that Thornton and Amos should spend the summer working on a Wisconsin farm. Rather than that “Wisconsin Agricultural idea,” Thornton proposed, let him work in the garden at home in Berkeley. “Mother, you can make me dig up your garden for 15 minutes (or if necessary more) a day. We will send to Huyk and Von Style Brothers, Amsterdam, for some rare and costly bulbs over which one must work hourly. We can also get some inexpensive Portland cement and I will make you an Italian garden.”
³⁶

Perhaps because he was outnumbered, or perhaps because he was sick and overworked, Amos Parker Wilder gave in to the family's wishes. Thornton stayed at home, did some volunteer work with children “in a poor part of town,” he reported to his father in a letter, and found the children “as interesting as they were ragged.” He read to them and played dominoes with them. And he was gardening after all: “I have already weeded extensively in our side gardens and back,” he wrote, “with many plans for the future.”
³⁷

 

MEANWHILE, IN
Shanghai, Consul General Wilder generated another summer imbroglio over the annual Independence Day reception. He decided to hold the reception at his own expense, at his home rather than at the consulate, and to serve only grape juice and water. The American community, however, “decided to relieve Mr. Wilder of embarrassment by holding its reception in the Palace Hotel.”
³⁸
Afterward, an official State Department report condemned the “friction” created by Dr. Wilder's handling—or mishandling—of the 1913 celebration of the Fourth of July.
³⁹

Even in the throes of controversy in Shanghai, Dr. Wilder completed arrangements for the ongoing education of his children. He gave in to Isabella's demand to keep her younger children at home, but overruled Amos's desire to go to Yale, believing that Amos needed more maturity. To that end Dr. Wilder went forward with plans to send Amos first to Oberlin College. Thornton and Charlotte would enter the junior class at Berkeley High School. “I am again prepared to perhaps fall in with another school,” Thornton wrote to his father in September 1913. “The beauty of the school is that so far it has left me entirely alone. I confess that I never expected that. I got a little of that at Chefoo, but never a drop at Thacher. I like it on that account, very much.”
⁴⁰

Alone in Shanghai, Consul General Wilder struggled under the weight of incessant official details, reports, protocol, and procedures to the point that his superiors and many American citizens in Shanghai were displeased with his performance. Consul-General-at-Large George Murphy wrote in his official 1913 report that Wilder lacked “Consular training and official energy. He is a man of most respectable and creditable life. He is an eloquent speaker. He is a strong advocate of total abstinence. He is a man of good appearance,—quiet, gentlemanly, and amiable. BUT he is not by disposition competent to well and thoroughly conduct the affairs of this office.”
⁴¹
He noted that Dr. Wilder's health had been bad, that he had been on extended home leave, but “He says that it is now improving.”
⁴²
In sum, Murphy reported that Amos Parker Wilder was a good man but a “poor consular officer.”
⁴³

As of June 1913 Amos Parker Wilder was officially a failure in Shanghai, as well as the focus of considerable controversy. There were calls for the State Department to replace him. He was proud, stubborn, and ambitious—but he was no longer young or vigorously healthy. Separated from his wife and children, he left the daunting disorganization of his office at night and returned to the Shanghai Club and the room where he now lived, facing his doubts and problems in solitude, no doubt wondering how long he would keep his post in Shanghai and what he would do, at his age, if he lost it.

6

“ALL ASPIRATION”

It is a discouraging business to be an author at sixteen years of age. Such an author is all aspiration and no fulfillment.

—THORNTON WILDER,

Foreword,
The Angel That Troubled the Waters

 

California, Vermont, and China (1913–1915)

B
y the fall of 1913 five of the Wilders were consolidated under one roof in Berkeley, California—all but Amos Parker Wilder, in Shanghai; and young Amos, beginning his freshman year at Oberlin. At Berkeley High School, Thornton was enrolled in classes in English, German, geometry, beginning Greek, and Virgil. He quickly became an “impresario,” he wrote his father, when his one-act farce,
The Advertisement League
, was chosen for a vaudeville entertainment at the school on September 26, 1913, to benefit the new gymnasium. “The Vaudeville Show has come to be one of the most enjoyable features of the school term,” and Thornton's skit was “a truly original conception,” according to the staff writers of
Olla Podrida,
the high school yearbook.
¹

In a letter to his father Thornton described his play facetiously as “a magnificent treatment of all the problems that ever ruined the worrying-powers of man. Its dynamic force in way of social uplift is almost as tremendous as it is negligible.”
²
He was directing a cast of four girls and two other boys, and finding rehearsals “perfect nightmares” when there were no teachers on hand. In deference to his father, Thornton cast himself as Mr.—not Mrs.—Lydia Pinkham (the nineteenth-century Massachusetts woman whose famous vegetable compound could supposedly cure every malady known to womankind).
³
“Of course I have adhered to your demand that I remain in masculine clothes,” he told Dr. Wilder. “When you have changed your mind as to it please notify.”
⁴

Thornton's letters to his father grew increasingly contentious, setting off an occasional transoceanic tug-of-war between father and son. Thornton questioned the decision to send Amos off to Oberlin. He had accompanied his brother to the train station for his departure. “I think that if you had been there you would have wondered how such a thing ever came into your head,” Thornton scolded his father, attacking not only the decision but the college to which, in his view, his older brother had been dispatched unfairly. He wrote sarcastically that he had heard that “Oberlin is well spoken of in that portion of Ohio.”
⁵
Despite Thornton's concerns, his brother seemed to thrive at Oberlin, and Thornton did not dread going to classes at Berkeley High School, as he had at Thacher. His grades were decent, and the pleasure of being at home with his mother and sisters offset most of the shortcomings of the school. Besides, he wrote to his father, a public school was better than a private one “because a public school is see-what-you-can find and a private is take-what-you've got.”
⁶

 

BACK IN
Shanghai, Consul General Wilder had stepped from one controversy into another. On July 20, 1913, revolutionaries had taken up arms in Shanghai in a rebellion that was called the “Second Revolution,” aimed at Yüan Shih-k'ai's government. On into August, sporadic fighting and bombardment endangered foreign enclaves in the city. With the help of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps and foreign naval forces, Shanghai's municipal police were finally able to quell the insurgency, but only after intense fighting. “We have just been reading the newspaper account of your Revolution-Excitement. What a night you must have had when the arsenal was thrice stormed and a 1000 soldiers killed and bombs falling into the French quarter and entrances to Foreign Settlements barricaded,” Thornton wrote to his father. “Does business go on much as usual on a day like that [?]”
⁷

Dr. Wilder tried to maintain business as usual, but official and unofficial criticism of his work mounted, and his health declined again. Because he was losing weight and his energy was dissipating, he found it increasingly difficult to maintain his frenetic schedule. Whether or not the professional challenges and the physical stress were related, it became clear to him that it was time to leave Shanghai. He hoped for another, more congenial diplomatic appointment, perhaps in England or Canada. He wrote his official letter of resignation September 27, 1913, citing as the reason his physician's opinion that he could not continue to live in China or anywhere in Asia because of the Asian sprue, whose cure could be managed only, if at all, with a permanent change of climate. This time his resignation was accepted, with an official resignation date of December 18, 1913.
⁸

It was a somber Christmas. To the family's disappointment, the tight budget would not permit Amos to come home from college for the holidays, nor was there much money for Christmas shopping. Most of the Wilders traditionally dreaded Christmas, not only because they were never all together for the holiday season, but also because there never seemed to be enough money to buy gifts. Charlotte and Isabel were making batches of candy to send to Amos in Ohio. Thornton had seventy-five cents to buy gifts for six or eight people. “I feel in the position of paupers who are driven to theft. How justified they are!” he wrote to his father.
⁹
Dr. Wilder wrote his family a nostalgic letter reminiscing about past Christmases, recalling tramping through the snow in Madison one Christmas Eve to find more apples because Thornton's stocking was not completely full.

“Oh Father,” Thornton replied. “Imagine Mother overcome by a scarcity of apples.”
¹⁰
There might be a paucity of other gifts that Christmas in Berkeley, but Thornton predicted that, as customary, aunts and cousins would “pelt” the children with handkerchiefs.
¹¹

 

IN JANUARY 1914
Consul General Wilder wrapped up his work in Shanghai and, because no further diplomatic appointment was offered, prepared to go back to the United States and pick up the threads of his life there. He had gone to China with great hopes and ambition. He left China with broken health, broken confidence, broken idealism, broken hopes. He had his adversaries and critics in Shanghai, but he also had many loyal friends, and they gave him farewell parties shortly before his scheduled departure in February 1914, with much press coverage. In January he bade his staff farewell, and a crowd of friends, Chinese, Americans, and Europeans, gathered to honor him.
¹²
They praised his service to China and expressed their regret that he was departing. They gave him a silver cup, which, he assured the audience, would always remain in his home and would be passed down through the generations of his family as one of “the most treasured gifts he had ever received.” His audience laughed when he told them that the silver cup would be filled only with “harmless” beverages. He left them with a heartfelt speech about his vision for the future of China and its place in the world.
¹³

He arrived in Berkeley in late March of 1914, too late to see the February 13 vaudeville show at the high school, featuring another original playlet—
A Successful Failure
—by Thornton and his collaborator, fellow student Violette Still Wilson. It was recorded in the yearbook that Thornton gave a performance of the courtier, M. LeBeaux, that “will never be forgotten.”
¹⁴
Dr. Wilder wrote to Amos that spring from 2350 Prospect Street in Berkeley that he was “much pleased” with the status of the family. “Mamma is well & normal,” he wrote; “the children are dutiful (thus far certainly) with no obvious frictions—all are doing well in school. We are a bit crowded but are very happy together.”
¹⁵

“The days go pleasantly,” Dr. Wilder wrote to Amos in April. He joined Thornton for a weekly walk to Oakland and back, and he “tramped the hills” with Charlotte. The family went to the Congregational church on Sunday morning, and Thornton attended Saint Mark's Episcopal Church, where he sang in the choir. Dr. Wilder had no plans at present, he told Amos. He would stay in Berkeley “indefinitely.”
¹⁶
The longer he stayed, however, the more concerned he grew about his older children. Charlotte was clever, he thought, but tended to be cold. Thornton was a “high-brow” who needed “some virile currents in his life.”
¹⁷
Dr. Wilder was working on summer plans for his sons, hoping to send Amos to Madison, Wisconsin, to take some agricultural courses and labor as a farmhand to “get a working knowledge of a farm.” Now, with his own impaired health and the resulting uncertainties, he wrote Amos, one could never tell when this experience might pay off.
¹⁸
He was hoping to place Thornton at a farm and agricultural school at San Luis Obispo, California. The knowledge his sons could gain might come in handy to help support the family, their father observed, revealing to them a surprising new, far-fetched dream: “We might later own a ranch & work it [as] an investment and vacation home.”
¹⁹

Meanwhile he was convinced that the farm experience would do wonders for Thornton. “Of course it is a drastic thing to send a ‘fine edition' to feeding pigs and milking cows and haying . . . but it is a wholesome business,” Dr. Wilder wrote his elder son. “He will learn some things, get physical energy, and most important, get lifted for a time from this artificial life of book criticism and drama talk.” Dr. Wilder would “keenly support” Thornton's literature and art, he promised, “when he gets laid a foundation of strong body and good sense.”
²⁰

Thornton was a comical misfit as a first-time farmhand. “I've had two lessons in milking now. About two hours in all. Am still getting up at four-o'clock alarm altho' I don't have to,” Thornton wrote to his family from the Ellwood Varney, Jr., farm in San Luis Obispo in June.
²¹
Ellwood Varney, Sr., was a member of a Maine Quaker family, friends of Dr. Wilder's, who left Maine years earlier and began farming in verdant San Luis Obispo County, known for its farms and vineyards as well as the scenic beauty along the rugged Pacific coastline. But Thornton had little time for anything but his labors on the farm, spending his rare free moments wrestling with the typewriter he had rented because he wanted to write. Except for Sunday evening church services, when he wore a suit, Thornton lived in overalls, doing his best with the farm chores, and struggling in vain to please Varney and, by extension, Amos Parker Wilder. “The great crises of life resolve themselves into milking-times and pig-feeding hours,” he mused.
²²

While Thornton was trying to get the hang of farming and typing in California that summer, his brother, on completion of his first year at Oberlin, headed off to work on Tarpleywick Farm, the hundred-acre experimental farm owned by Professor H. C. Taylor five miles outside Madison, Wisconsin. Amos also studied animal husbandry, dairy husbandry, and agronomy at the University of Wisconsin summer school. He spent a grueling summer doing “man's not boy's work” from 5:00 a.m. until breakfast, and then from supper until dark, trekking five miles into Madison for his classes in between, and then five miles back to the farm. At least he was in congenial company: Of the half dozen or so farmworkers, there were several men with master's degrees and one with a Ph.D. Amos's boss told him he had “the makings of a farmer.”
²³

Once his sons were off on their summer farming adventures, Dr. Wilder set out on a monthlong Sierra Club trip with Charlotte. He hoped to “instill love of ‘the Wild,' and the Friendly Road” in his children.
²⁴
Earlier he and Charlotte had taken a short trip to Yosemite, but he became so ill that he had to interrupt the journey. This time his health permitted him to enjoy thirty “notable days in the Mountains,” he wrote to Amos, adding an aphorism: “While searching after stars, don't neglect gems at your feet.”
²⁵

Dr. Wilder's first objective after his resignation and his reunion with the family was to attend to his health, and that required a journey to see specialists in New York. He planned to go on to New Haven from there, in pursuit of his second objective. He had to find a job, and he turned to the Yale network that had served him so well over the past twenty years.
²⁶
He was soon offered a part-time appointment as secretary and treasurer of the Yale-in-China Association, a private, nondenominational organization founded in 1901 by a group of Yale graduates. First known as the Yale Foreign Missionary Society, the organization was called Yale-in-China by 1913. Although not an official arm of the university, Yale-in-China had its office on the campus in White Hall. Its mission was to work in the United States and in China to promote cross-cultural education, understanding, and communication, and to facilitate or establish school, college, medical, and cultural programs in China.
²⁷
Former consul general Wilder, with his ties to China and to New Haven, seemed a perfect match for this endeavor.

He would move to New Haven right away, and wanted to move the whole family east, but after some debate he and Isabella decided that she would stay on in Berkeley with the children so that Thornton and Charlotte could graduate from Berkeley High School in 1915. After graduation, Dr. Wilder insisted, they would set up housekeeping together in Connecticut because it was “bad for a family to learn to live apart; it is better to keep together despite the disadvantages.”
²⁸