Thornton Wilder (16 page)

Dr. Wilder was soon encouraging Thornton to volunteer as a hospital aide in France and join his brother in the cause. “Please look into the matter,” Thornton wrote to Amos, “and tell me if I could ever harden myself to terrible sights and sounds.”
⁵⁶

Meanwhile, as an Oberlin sophomore, Thornton found himself, for the “only time” in his life, truly interested in his studies.
⁵⁷
He respected most of his professors—but the finest, in Thornton's grateful opinion, was Charles Henry Adams Wager. Dr. Wager, who had earned his Ph.D. in English at Yale in 1896, was a meticulous scholar, a dynamic teacher, and a sympathetic mentor. He and his wife, Annie, regularly entertained students in their comfortable home near the campus. In a sense the students were the children of this childless couple, and teaching at Oberlin was Dr. Wager's life. He wrote scholarly articles, including occasional reviews for the
Dial
, but he concentrated on teaching. His challenging, often inspiring courses usually had waiting lists, especially his Classics in Translation.

Dr. Wager's intellectual interests and expertise encompassed the classical world, the Italian Renaissance, and Elizabethan and Victorian England. In the Oberlin College Archives may be found his course notes for many of the classes he offered over his thirty-five-year career at the college: Classics in Translation, first of all—the course that would so captivate and inspire Thornton Wilder. Wager was also a specialist in the Franciscan order, and traveled to Italy many times to deepen his knowledge, along the way collecting a comprehensive Franciscan library. All of his life Thornton would pay homage to this teacher. “Prof. Wager here is one of the greatest living authorities on St. Francis,” Thornton wrote to his mother in one of many letters praising his professor.
⁵⁸
Wager was, Thornton thought then and later, “the greatest class lecturer I have ever heard.”
⁵⁹
He wrote to his mother, “Prof. Wager is my great friend. Every time he opens his mouth I'm ‘influenced' to the depths of my being. He's looking after my reading—irreproachable.”
⁶⁰

Thornton was learning “the complete art of Starched Prose” in his Exposition and Essay-Writing course. His class elected him one of two assistant editors of the school newspaper, and he joined the college library committee. Not only was he prospering academically, but with some of his summer earnings he bought himself a new suit. He was measured for it on a trip to New York. “It is dark grey,” he told Amos. “The vest is of that careless opulent cut. The collar is English rolled and fits carelessly well. I have [not?] tried the trousers but I know they won't drag on the ground.”
⁶¹
But he needed a new winter overcoat and hated to ask for one. Even his father noticed that his old one was a “weird” garment, Thornton said; he had been wearing the same one since Chefoo days, and dreaded discussing the need with his father. He told his mother about it first, adding that he “could recall St. Francis' vow of Poverty and wear it another year if necessary.” He asked his mother to write to him privately about his father's “money state and tell me whether it would be adding the last straw to an impossible load if I presented the question to him.”
⁶²
Thornton finally broached the matter and got the money for an overcoat, but not without conflict, and he wrote a passionate letter to his father in rebuke:

 

You have a way of not being open about money matters that is perfectly harrowing for us. . . . You ask me to get a coat between sixteen and eighteen dollars [Thornton got it on sale for seventeen] but in your heart of heart you expect it will be twenty-two. Just because Amos and I have been so minutely brought up we comply to the letter when our whole life and thought would be happier if we could feel proud of working out our own economies on our own money. Money and money-matters will be the last end of our family anyway. Poor mother has almost been robbed of her mind by worry over money; she can get so wrought up over the price of a pair of shoes that she is intellectually nil for a week. You are secretive and furtive about it; you may sometime become suspicious and injured. I hate to ask for money or talk about it and so I drag on for weeks without soap or equally absurd details because I feel that money is such an oppressive difficult thing.

 

Thornton went on to remind his father dramatically that when Saint Francis of Assisi changed from his old life to his new life of poverty, “he ran naked out of his father's house.”
⁶³

 

THORNTON WAS
soon hopelessly behind in all his sophomore courses, even organ, but at least his writing was yielding pleasure: His playlet
A Fable for Those Who Plague
was performed in Finney Chapel “as an item on the Vaudeville of Society Night” at Oberlin. Although the play was “too slight and sub-tile [
sic
] for the hall or for the carnival mood” of the event, “the great audience laughed and applauded,” Thornton reported.
⁶⁴
He was also having fun as an actor—and getting a good review in the school paper. He performed in the Latin Department drama as Peniculus, “the Sponge, the Parasite,” in a metrical translation of Plautus's
Menaechmi,
the source for Shakespeare's
Comedy of Errors.
“I had a light beard the color of fried apples and a red nose,” he wrote to his mother. “We acted in front of a picturesque Roman street and the play was happily over-flowing with the customs and manners of Ancient Roman Bourgouisie [
sic
].”
⁶⁵

All in all, he told his mother, “I'm having a great time this year. Probably because I'm better dressed.”
⁶⁶
He was socializing and writing with zest. One Monday morning he took a vigorous four-mile walk and came home with an idea that he converted into a new three-minute playlet “about the mixture of Classical and Christian mythology in the Renaissance.” He named it
Proserpina and the Devil: A Comedy for Marionettes
, and it would show up in the college literary magazine in December 1916.
⁶⁷
While he wasn't studying as much as he should, he was doing

 

a good deal of original writing. . . . The best has been the Saint Story in the Magazine and a
3
-minute playlet called “Proserpina and the Devil” for Marionettes. And a “Masque of the Bright Haired” for the Red Headed Club = “Order of the Golden Fleece” they call themselves. I shall send this Masque to Percy MacKaye since it is his line—reminding him of the ridiculous urchin during the rehearsals of Antigone.
⁶⁸

 

Thornton also collaborated on some writing projects with Marion Tyler, describing her as “the brightest and most charming girl in College (slim and great dark eyes with quaint embroidered things on her dark dresses; shy but vivid).” They were writing two essays and a one-act play, set on the China coast, “
for the market
,” he wrote proudly. He was supplying the “purple patches and general ideas” while Marion added ideas and structure.
⁶⁹

He often visited the Wagers, and wrote to his mother, “They sit me down and start laughing before I speak, and all of me is suddenly released and I talk and talk like an old crow. I get the horrible thought that he likes me better than what I write.”
⁷⁰
Professor Wager had taken his often socially awkward student under his wing, tactfully coaching him to “bring out the idealler strains” of his “inherited personality.” Since boyhood Thornton had been more comfortable in the company of adults than with people his own age. By his own admission, he could be “a kind of Breakfast-table Kaiser,” dominating conversations, becoming “educative,” criticizing his peers when they uttered “bromides,” asking their opinions only to “disagree with them noisily.” He told his father, “To put it short—I see you in myself and laugh, and then go on exaggerating what I saw.”
⁷¹

As a result of Dr. Wager's gentle criticism, advice, and encouragement, Thornton found himself acquiring new friends. “I always thot [thought] that I was constitutionally disgusting to all men,” Thornton wrote to his father. “But now I know I have four friends among the Philistines where before I had one. And I
do
like them more and more . . . I will always say that Prof. Wager did half but my new coat did the other half.”
⁷²

Thornton would have to stay at Oberlin for the holidays, for, as usual, there was no money for a trip home at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Dr. Wilder was off on a Yale-in-China speaking and fund-raising tour of the Midwest, which would take him to Battle Creek, among other places. Grandmother Niven joined her daughter and granddaughters for Thanksgiving, and they missed Thornton and Amos “awfully,” Isabella wrote.
⁷³
She also sent Thornton a copy of a poem she had written on hearing of the tragic death of one of her favorite poets, Émile Verhaeren, the famous Belgian Symbolist whose poems she had translated from French into English. She planned to send her poem to the
New Republic.
⁷⁴
In their letters to each other, Isabella and Thornton enjoyed an ongoing dialogue about music and literature they loved, and prose or poetry they had written, freely exchanging criticism and advice writer to writer, more than mother to son. “I am very happy in getting letters with poems [in] them . . . ,” Thornton wrote to his mother after he had dissected some of her poetry. “And such good ones too.”

He was becoming a mystic, he told her, sometimes even cutting classes under the pretext of an earache or some other malady so he could work on an essay on “mysticism and its literature.” Professor Wager's courses were opening Thornton's mind and imagination to the world of the ancient and classical mystics, and to the more recent work of Cardinal Newman and other Catholic theologians. “Perhaps we can enter the Catholic Church together and be out of the old American stupidity,” he wrote to his mother.
⁷⁵
Thornton later told his brother that he knew that his “Roman Catholic tendency” pained his “dear Papa so, and Mama too, who has become so full of Theology and metaphysics that I'm afraid of her.”
⁷⁶

Isabella had a busy schedule in Mount Carmel and New Haven, keeping house; caring for Isabel and Janet; making suffrage talks; attending faculty teas; volunteering for the Red Cross; working with a Town-Food Committee, part of the Connecticut governor's drive to promote agricultural interests to support the war effort; and serving as chairman of the education committee of the Mount Carmel Schools, personally leading schoolchildren in a village improvement project.
⁷⁷
Thornton missed his mother and sisters, and his brother remained very much on his mind. Having finished his assignment with the Paris Service, Amos was driving in the American Friends Service ambulance operation during that autumn before the United States joined the war. He lived in a château in Neuilly with sixty other volunteer drivers, keeping a journal of his experiences and reflections in small black
carnets
(notebooks) like those that French schoolchildren used, and staying as connected with his family as slow, transoceanic wartime mail would permit.

Safe in Ohio, Thornton was beginning to worry about the war and his place in it. “Tell me about the brave French, give anecdotes of nobility in young men,” he wrote again to Amos. “Stir me up over the war. Tell me, could I harden myself to hospital work?”
⁷⁸

 

THORNTON RECEIVED
a visit from his father that December as Dr. Wilder made his way back east from Battle Creek. He wrote to his wife from Oberlin that the Battle Creek regimen had been good for his health. He noted that Amos was “presently remembered here [at Oberlin] as a gentleman-athlete.” As for Thornton, he looked “well and brisk as ever,” Dr. Wilder reported to his wife. “His room in the men's building is light and well ventilated; his clothes were properly hung up. He seems to be getting on well.”
⁷⁹

9

DISTANT SONS

So writes a distant son, doting for your least considered moments, the crumbs of your time.

—THORNTON WILDER TO HIS “DEAR OLD PAPA”

[May 1917?]

 

Oberlin (1917)

O
ften I'm dissatisfied and unhappy; I want to leave college and live on a Desert Island. Would it cost much?” Thornton wrote to his mother in the fall of his sophomore year at Oberlin. “Everything I read or hear reminds me that I ought to be finished with all this and be at it.”
¹
During the second semester Thornton felt even more strongly: “I was not made for College; I was made for Plato's Republic where artists, on presentation of promising credentials, were supported by the state; or where Maecenases [the patron of Horace and Virgil] may be found to offer leisure and encouragement to those whose mental current no outer circumstances can interrupt without causing this quiet desperation.”
²

He argued his case forcefully in a long letter to his father in January 1917:

 

Why should we go to College at this time of our life it is hard to see. Our minds are in a ferment; we cannot realize an idea; or imagine a conviction. Art, sex and religion are driving us mad, and time or mood for reflection we have none. There are long periods, sometimes a whole week when I am so miserable because I cannot think of a beautiful thing to write that I seem to [be] beating my head in despair again[st] a stone wall. Sometimes when the din and voices of these years of my life become too insistent, I say:

“Come, I'll stop all this. I'll try not to answer anything, or write anything or aspire [to] anything. I will be an ordinary boy; I will eat and study and wash and be full of polite attentions to other people. Then after a few months I will come back to this inner room, and perhaps I being older can put it in order.”

 

He couldn't tell whether his restlessness was more acute than that experienced by other boys. “We all conceal it, and from our parents first of all,” he wrote. “But College is not an answer to it—not Oberlin with its fat Christian optimism.” If he had to go to college another year, he wanted to go to Harvard. Better yet, he wanted to go live on Monhegan Island, perhaps for a year, “until all this fever is over, and I have grown up, or grown stiff or whatever it is that allows one to accept the world, and be content with a life of Houses and dinners lived on a life of Dreams and Cries.”
³

By February he was beseeching his father to let him go to Italy—not to “relieve suffering” or “to see pictures and Classical landscapes” or to “get away from the uninspired complacency of Oberlin”—but simply to have some time to himself, perhaps six months.
⁴
He proposed a “business arrangement” to his father: “Give me three or four months on Monhegan, or a year alone somewhere, and I will give you something final and convincing.”
⁵
He was determined to prove himself as a writer—and as soon as possible. His father was equally determined that, while his son might be outgrowing Oberlin, Thornton would finish the academic year and then move on to the final two years of college elsewhere, most likely at Yale.

As he traveled on Yale-in-China business in March 1917, Dr. Wilder visited Thornton at Oberlin and found him still campaigning to be sent to Italy. Thornton had even tried to enlist the support of Sherman Thacher for his idea of working in a hospital for wounded soldiers in northern Italy.
⁶
He confided in his old schoolmaster his recurring self-doubts: Was he “especially immature?” Was his father “with his fostering solicitude unduly unjust?” Was his father right that Thornton must be “forever self-distrustful?”
⁷
Dr. Wilder was, in fact, surprisingly sympathetic to Thornton's situation that March: “As I look over your beautiful letters read since my return, some written before my visit, I realize what an inadequate Papa I am,” he wrote,

 

how you long to exchange communications with me on many lines with much sincerity and openness and how I barrier you with misgivings and rebukes. It seems to be life that thus we should dark-glass even those we best love and to whom we would be useful, especially in this critical business of youth finding itself. Let it console to tell that as I looked you over from the train I thanked heaven for such a son; and that it pleasantly surprises me to find richer veins in my boy than even I dared to hope.
⁸

 

He reassured Thornton even further: “You
think
I will be content with small things for you, dear; but no one is keener to know your parts and there is nothing too high for you to attain. . . . Would I plan Italy and languages and voice cultivation and the best unless we were preparing for large things!”
⁹
But Dr. Wilder meant for the preparation for “large things” to take place at Oberlin for the time being, expecting that Thornton could finish his college course in one more year. Consequently Thornton trudged through his schedule, dreading two “dull classes” but still savoring Dr. Wager's Classics in Translation; reading Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex
; and exploring the work of the Irish poet, playwright, and novelist George Moore, with whom, Thornton said, he was “twin-knit.” He thought he and Moore were “Affinities,” and especially enjoyed Moore's aphorisms, his tone and mood, his “interest in the forms and spirit of the Catholic Church and his Cadence—his great contribution to the English sentence borrowed by him from the Anglo-Irish.”
¹⁰

His sophomore malaise did not stop Thornton from writing plays and reviewing those of others. He had written two of a planned series of three “spiritual stories”—“Caone and Acuthuna” and a florid, melodramatic short story, “The Marriage of Zabett,” which he was trying unsuccessfully to sell to a literary journal.
¹¹
It ultimately appeared in the
Oberlin Literary Magazine
in June 1917. Despite its melodrama, this was a well-written tale about a young woman whose wealthy father betrothed her to his business partner. The reluctant bride-to-be recoiled at any physical contact with her fiancé, longing instead to devote her life to God and the church. “Oh, to tell the torment of a life unaltered about an altered spirit,” Thornton wrote of his heroine, who, by story's end, was hailed as “St. Zabett of Kaage.” He was trying a new method in these stories—“plain narrative, with economy of ornament and absolutely with[out] comment; as innocent of labored footnotes as the book of Acts.”
¹²
On his own Thornton was reading Ibsen's
Ghosts,
and the work of the English poet Rupert Brooke, who had been killed in battle on the Western Front in 1915, at the age of twenty-eight.

During that third year of the Great War, Thornton brooded over his future, his frustration at the paucity of time to write, his eagerness to get college behind him—and his anxiety about his family. “There are two insidious ghosts in our family,” he wrote to his father in March. First, they were “not abundantly generous to one another,” he felt; they were “a grudging family.” And the second “ghost” was their “fear of poverty.”
¹³
The seven Wilders were “so splendid individually,” Thornton reflected. “If we were a sober, New England, around-the-lamp, co-praying family I insist, we should be less,” he declared. “Amos would be more docile; I less modern, Charlotte less promising, Isabel less vivid, Janet more sophisticated, Mother less concentrated. You more demand-ative. We should be cut into pieces.”
¹⁴

His father no doubt thought that Thornton was just being Thornton. His mother worried that he was sinking into a “decadent period,” but she also recognized that Thornton had “used up Oberlin, and hence his desire to cease.” She believed that at a new institution—Harvard, Yale, or Columbia—“he would revive interest in his education and go through with it.” Meanwhile, Thornton was “producing playlets and stories like an adding machine with scarcely a click,” their mother wrote to Amos.
¹⁵

Thornton missed his brother and his quiet understanding, for Amos was still a world away. After completing three months with the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris he had transferred on January 31, 1917, to the American Field Service and in February was assigned to the front in the Argonne. Sensitive accounts of transporting the wartime wounded filled the pages of his letters, often written at night in the dim light of improvised lamps in army dugouts. Back home his proud father offered “extended excerpts” for publication in the
New Haven Journal-Courier
and other newspapers
.
¹⁶

By early April 1917, with President Wilson leading the nation into the war, world events overshadowed Thornton's despondency, as well as his halfhearted academic pursuits and his dreams of writing. When Congress approved the declaration of war on April 6, 1917, Thornton wrote to his parents for guidance. He was almost twenty, and it was time to decide what part he would play in the war. Oberlin's president, Dr. Henry C. King, and Professor Wager spoke to students about the “bigger aspects” of the war, and some Oberlin men “hurried up to Cleveland to enlist hot-foot.” Others decided to stay in college until the end of the semester. Thornton was inclined to wait and see, to “drill and cross” on campus, where military training was being organized as it was in colleges and universities throughout the United States.
¹⁷

He agonized over the decision. For a short time he considered joining some Oberlin boys who were going to Paris to work as hospital orderlies, and his father encouraged the plan, as Thornton duly noted on a postcard: “You are very comforting in your description of an orderly's job as ‘loitering along the corridors and being pleasant with the maimed.' I understand that it was to carry swill and help the undertaker. Please find out which one of us is right.”
¹⁸

Thornton imagined himself a soldier, and wrote to his family, “How absurd even to you I would look with a bayonet; I have no faint reflection in my mild make-up of the heroic! I should smile up to the last minute. And equally absurd with my illogical mind would I seem declaring myself after due process, a conscientious objector.”And then there was the ultimate confrontation: “But all consideration leads to that moment when one shoots.”
¹⁹

“Thornton has had a ‘quake of the soul' at last,” his mother reflected, when she heard from her “mystical-minded boy” as the United States geared up for wartime. She predicted he was moving toward a “deep sincere visualization of a world of struggle and problem[s].”
²⁰
Oberlin drills, marches, and field excursions began in earnest April 11, with 350 men participating. College men with on-campus training were promised eligibility to become noncommissioned officers. While Thornton's participation in the training exercises did not mean he had committed to enlist, he told his family, it did seem to him that he must do so—not because he was a hero, or because he felt “that the issues for an American are not great enough to risk everything for,” but because of what the experience could do to him “in sudden maturing, completing,” and for what it could do to inject “greatness” into his “Little Gift” as a writer.
²¹
He wrote his brother about the new routine: marching three times a week, undergoing endurance drills and sham battles. “It commits us to nothing however but strenuous exercise and a state of being nervously wrought.”
²²
He told Amos that he had almost decided that he should enlist.

By the end of April, Thornton was confiding his worries about the war and his role in it to Grandmother Niven: “What is being planned for me? I do not know.” He wore eyeglasses, and had been told that his eyesight might keep him from being conscripted. But if he passed, he would be reconciled to the soldier's life. “In my funny, sensitive way of being distressed and despairing over my life and my fitness, I am always at odds with life,” he told her. “I am a personality peculiarly isolated.” He loved his country, but he had his doubts about the power of war to improve the human condition. He wondered if his father might send him to work on a farm; seventy Oberlin boys had already departed to “serve the agricultural need of their country and their country's allies,” Thornton reported.
²³

In the midst of the “scorching” reality of wartime preparations, classes went on at Oberlin, as did the annual French play, in which Thornton played a small role. He wondered all the while if his “little practice in French” would prove to be significant in wartime.
²⁴
He had just turned twenty, and he told his mother he was now thinking seriously about enlisting. When Isabella heard that Thornton's poor vision and dependence on eyeglasses might make him ineligible, she wrote to young Amos: “So I am
very
thankful. . . . One of you in the track of shellfire is all I can stand.”
²⁵

 

“REALIZATION OF
the war and Personal Determinations come to me with regular frequency, but between them I drift back to my pre-occupations with literature and with the little social life around me,” Thornton wrote apologetically to his family that spring. He welcomed the company of Nina Trego, an Oberlin senior with “an elfin pointed oval” face, “dusky” skin, the eyes of “a mad Ariel,” and a “salty” tongue.
²⁶
Even though they quarreled often and heatedly, they enjoyed each other immensely. She held her own with Thornton, and never hesitated to criticize his writing, even his letters home. Once, when he asked her to read a letter, she told him “with a reproving smile that it was magnificent writing but that there were some things in it that she wouldn't send ‘if she were I,' ” adding, “although, of course, your parents must be used to that kind of letter.” She was “sharply independent and warning-ful but elfin and super-intelligent,” he wrote admiringly.
²⁷
She was “a young seer.”
²⁸
All in all, he confided to his mother, he was “becoming absorbed in the entrancing Miss Nina Trego.”
²⁹