Thornton Wilder (15 page)

“Your Squirrel Island is a wonderful place,” Thornton wrote to his father. “I know every path of it, however hidden beneath berry-vines, and every ledge and shelf of it.”
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He rowed the circumference of the island, savoring the exercise of his “hard-earned muscle” as well as the misty views. One day he decided to row across the channel to visit his mother and sister, and amused a local “salt” with his questions (“Am I facing the right direction?”) and his “antics” as he sought to steer the rowboat safely across the water. It was a “blister-raising ride,” but he made it. His little sister was given to “disgusting” fits of temper, he reported to his father, but his mother seemed well and “full of humor.” She was indulging her enthusiasms over her writing and reading, but seemed “notably less feverish” about it than she sometimes was.
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As the summer waned Dr. Wilder urged Isabella to keep Janet in Maine because of the polio epidemic in metropolitan areas that had quarantined multitudes of people, including Isabel and Charlotte in Pennsylvania.
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While Amos won several tennis tournaments in Massachusetts and Maine that August, Thornton traveled alone to Monhegan Island, Maine, about ten miles out to sea, where he enjoyed a blissful vacation all on his own. By late August he was a guest at Monhegan House, the historic inn built in 1870 in the center of the island. A mile and a half long and only a half mile wide, Monhegan is bounded by steep cliffs overlooking the ocean on the eastern shore, and the more serene harbor and shoreline to the west. Thornton wrote to his father that it was “the most glorious place” he ever saw.
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A traditional sanctuary for migrating birds, the island was also a refuge for artists. “It's not just an Artists' Island,” Thornton wrote to his mother after he had explored the island; “it's an artist's own hearth and home.”
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He saw the studios of painters Arthur B. Davies and Robert Henri, and the scenery moved Thornton to extravagant descriptions. “The sights are tremendous,” he exulted. “I've climbed chasms and crept to the edge of edges all day,” He found himself on “a high eminence and saw the great ocean kneeling at the base of a great cliff of grey rain-washed rock.” He hiked and swam, attended a lecture on “Aspects of German Life,” and met fascinating people, including a Hungarian who knew novelist George Moore personally.
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Thornton carried on brief flirtations with some of the hotel maids. “There are the prettiest maids in this Hotel you ever saw,” he wrote his mother. “Did I get this common streak from you?—I
always
notice the servant girls, but forget to look into Limousines.”
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There were several interesting German academics in residence at the inn that week, some affiliated with German universities and some with American (and a few of them, unbeknownst to Thornton and the others, actually engaged in espionage). He was enthralled with their conversation, part in English, part in German. He also enjoyed meeting a “sweet-faced, motherly German lady” who was the mother of twins, one a painter and the other a golf champion. Thornton, the twinless twin, was intrigued to learn that they were “strangely lonesome” when they were separated.
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But the highlight of his luxuriously indolent stay on Monhegan was meeting the Austrian drama critic, translator, and impresario Rudolf Kommer, who, Thornton heard, “knew personally almost all the principal novelists and dramatists in Europe and England.”
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Thornton introduced himself to Kommer, who also represented the great Austrian producer Max Reinhardt's theatrical interests in the United States. Reinhardt had long been one of Thornton's theatrical idols. Since high school days he had avidly read (and collected records of) German-language theatrical performances. He kept track of productions in the great theaters of Germany and Austria, and of the playwrights, directors, and actors involved in them, Reinhardt foremost among them. Thornton often daydreamed about mounting his own plays on the great stages of the world, directed by legends such as Reinhardt, and starring the finest actors of his era. Now, after his stultifying summer in the fields of Mount Hermon, he found himself magically transplanted to a seaswept Maine island and savoring the company of Rudolf Kommer, the next best thing to the great Max Reinhardt himself. Kommer was “very much struck” with the young man's knowledge of modern German drama, which he found “creditably detailed,” he told Thornton, “even for a cultured German.”
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Thornton poured out his hopes to Kommer, who generously read and commented on Thornton's playlets, and listened to his disappointment over the rejection of his full-length play. He would heed Kommer's advice about revising his Johnson-Boswell playlet. “I'm bound to you for much encouragement and many new ideas—difficult to assimilate!—” Thornton wrote in appreciation.
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From Monhegan, Thornton traveled to Augusta, Maine, to join his brother in a visit to their father's brother, Julian, and his family. There they saw their father's old home place, near the Maine State House and next door to the home of Senator James G. Blaine, whose children had been Amos Parker Wilder's boyhood playmates. They found their uncle Julian Wilder “big and unconventional, affectionate, a little wild-looking.” He was a dentist, an alcoholic, and something of an inventor, whose house and motorboat were full of laborsaving devices he had created.
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Thornton and Amos then returned to Connecticut to spend some time with their father in early September, and enjoyed a “fine Sunday together” climbing nearby Mount Carmel.
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Back at Oberlin, Thornton settled into a challenging academic schedule—required courses in chemistry, economics, exposition and essay writing, and English history; organ lessons in the Conservatory of Music; and—at long last—Dr. Wager's famous Classics in Translation.

Dr. Wilder, meanwhile, was giving Thornton detailed notes on
The Rocket—
“making marginal comments on it that it'll take me a week to erase,” Thornton complained. His father's opinions, Thornton wrote to Kommer, were “ ‘antipodal' to yours.”
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He rejected his father's idea that the play was “remote from popular tastes because of etherealized shading” but then launched into self-criticism about the weakness of certain characters and his opinion that his own last act “was heavy with too-plain moralization, and dull to extinction.”
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Thornton could take criticism in stride, but he was half amused, half irritated to discover that his sister Charlotte had actually rewritten some of his work. “As I read my manuscript,” he wrote to her at Mount Holyoke, “I began to miss some of my cherished phrases; every now and then I saw that someone had inserted perfunctory bridges over which the timid mind might step—with petticoat lifted = when the art of writing is a matter of alpine climbing—peak to peak, and let the chasms snatch the fearful.”
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DURING THE
summer of 1916, while Thornton was coping with mindless drudgery and constant sunburn to bring in the hay and the strawberries at Mount Hermon, and Amos was honing his championship tennis game and trying to ward off the tedium at the military training camp on Plum Island, the war in Europe was moving ever closer to the consciousness of citizens of the United States. Reaching out to young men, Theodore Roosevelt sought to advance the cause in a rousing speech to the teenagers at the Plum Island training camp on the “disgrace” of America's delay in joining the war.
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Beginning with the first battle of the Marne in 1914–15, Americans, led by the American colony in Paris, had begun to help open convalescent centers in Paris for wounded soldiers, and to organize an ambulance corps to help the French transport war casualties. The Paris Service, as the volunteer ambulance service was coming to be known, was staffed largely by Americans, mostly young men from American colleges and universities, who were volunteering in great numbers. Dr. Wilder, following these events closely, began to mention the Ambulance Service to Amos, who turned twenty-one on September 18, 1916, and was about to begin his senior year at Yale.

“On my twenty-first birthday Papa threw out another hint concerning the American Ambulance,” young Amos wrote in his diary October 6. “I said nothing about it until the next day, though I thought much. I then took him up on it and said I wanted to go. The best thing in these dilemmas is to do the extraordinary thing.” Amos recognized that the volunteer ambulance drivers came to their service from a variety of motives: “The main idea, as with the aviators of the Lafayette Escadrille, was to be where the action was, and with this was mixed the romance of adventure.”
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There were different, far more personal reasons underlying the decision for Amos, as he wrote privately in his journal:

 

I have no definite convictions about my life work. I am not powerfully impelled by religious convictions. My certain aim is to make people happy—in an ultimate and lasting way of course. . . . But I am as yet no zealot. I am interested in the social movements of the day. . . . It would delight me to be a country pastor, a worker in the schools of China, a farmer, a writer. I would like to study more after college. I would like to travel in Europe. . . . I wish to be a good speaker.
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His motive in going to the American Ambulance Field Service in France, Amos said, “was that of education, development, experience.” He would miss his senior year at Yale, but he thought he would later enjoy it “all the more for an interim.” He would be meeting a demanding need in wartime—and, at the same time, seizing an opportunity to get off on his own and test his self-reliance.
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By September 26 Amos Niven Wilder had been accepted to begin work as a volunteer in the ambulance service in Paris. Like many young men at that time, he was an inexperienced driver, so he immediately enrolled in a driving and maintenance course at Tom O'Connor's Depot Garage in New Haven.
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On October 21, Amos sailed from New York for Liverpool. In London, he paid a visit to that tennis mecca, Wimbledon, finding it deserted, with faded old posters clinging to the stands. “It was as though everybody had gone off to war and left it exactly as it was on August 1, 1914,” he wrote in his journal, not then imagining that he would play doubles at Wimbeldon in 1922.
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On November 6 Amos arrived in Paris to join hundreds of other American student volunteers who would serve as ambulance drivers in France.

 

DR. WILDER,
still running Yale-in-China in New Haven, was very busy in the fall of 1916—as always, the “chess master” moving his children from one place to another on a global chessboard. If the war continued, he thought, Thornton and Charlotte should go to Europe to be part of it. “You know I regard [the war]
the
great University at this time and want you
all
in it (but done judiciously and at the right time),” he wrote Amos.
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With Amos in France, Thornton at Oberlin, and Charlotte at Mount Holyoke, he turned his attention to Isabel. (Seven-year-old Janet was much too young yet to warrant one of his grand designs—although it was an ominous sign that she loved playacting, usually casting herself as a queen.) Satisfied with Thornton's experience at Mount Hermon, Amos decided that Isabel must be enrolled at the companion school for girls, Northfield Seminary in Northfield, Massachusetts. Isabel was sixteen years and eight months old, pretty and petite—just a half inch over five feet tall—and a freshman at New Haven High School, where she was a good student and “a young lady of fine qualities and great promise,” according to school officials.
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The Northfield enrollment was at capacity, however, so Isabel stayed at home in Mount Carmel, helping her mother with Janet and the housekeeping chores, and attending New Haven High. Her grades were good, and she was popular with students and teachers alike.

Her father went ahead with the official application for her admission to Northfield in the fall of 1917, listing the patchwork of schools she had attended, from Shanghai to Berkeley to Florence, Italy, to Vevey, Switzerland, back to Berkeley, and now to New Haven. He thought his daughter was interested in arts and crafts and sewing and possibly drawing. She was a “practical type” without any particular life goals as yet, he wrote. She was “quiet, efficient, domestic rather than intellectual,” although her grades were good. He wanted her to attend Northfield because he wanted his daughter in a community that stressed Christian character.
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Isabel was accepted for the fall of 1917, and would spend two years at Northfield. On June 30, 1919, Amos Parker Wilder would write to inform the Northfield administration that he deeply appreciated their care of Isabel, and that she had “improved in all ways.” But Miss Masters of the Misses Masters Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies and Children in Dobbs Ferry, New York—Isabella's alma mater—was “good enough to propose that our Isabel go there this Fall.” After the “steadying of two years at Northfield,” he wrote, he “dared to believe that the girl can have comradeship with the wealthy without being impaired.”
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“AMOS'S GOING
away has intoxicated you and Papa so with swelling emotions that letters from Oberlin will surprise you by their thinness,” Thornton wrote to his mother. “Soon letters will be coming to you from Red Cross hospitals with censor-stamps on the back and Papa will feel that at last he has a son in the foreign field. How relentlessly I am shown up by it all—a minor who doesn't study hard and who needs money from time to time.”
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He urged his brother to write him all the details of his war work—“the knots, under the rug”—instead of the “grand skeleton letters” he wrote to spare the family worry.
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