Thornton Wilder (20 page)

Thornton also corresponded with Charlotte, who was happily occupied with her studies, scientific experiments, and writing at Mount Holyoke. Released from the expectation of letters written home on Sunday afternoons, Thornton turned instead to writing long letters to Dr. Wager, who still held his loyal allegiance as the best teacher he had ever known. From Oberlin, Dr. Wager wrote to his former pupil, “I haven't said how I miss you and sigh for you and talk of you to all comers; nor how wise I think you were to leave us.”
⁵⁴

During his first year at Yale, Thornton was invited to join the Elizabethan Club, founded in 1896. Located in a historic colonial home on College Street, the club had a library stocked with first editions of Shakespeare—quartos and folios—and the works of Milton and others. On the walls of the house hung paintings and engravings—images of Erasmus, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson.
⁵⁵
This was a congenial place where faculty and students could gather for tea, tomato sandwiches, conversation, and intellectual exchange. Membership was offered only after nomination and election by existing members of the club, and Thornton's membership was no doubt encouraged by William Lyon Phelps, a longtime Niven family friend, who had been the club's president as well as chairman of its Board of Governors.

In December, Thornton wrote a minuscule playlet on a postcard, titling it
Dialogue in the
Elizabethan Club
and mailing it to Dr. Wager. In this vignette Thornton is asked if he came from a college out west. “Yes, Oberlin, Ohio,” he answers. The distinguished Yale professor of English, Chauncey Brewster Tinker, observes that Oberlin is where “the great Mr. Wager is.” Thornton responds: “Yes, do you know him?” “No,” Professor Tinker replies. “But his pupils come around praising him.” Thornton tries to find words and “strains the language for eulogy and at last ends impotently, but impulsively . . . I should never have left.” Professor Tinker “throws back his head with a kind of snort.” Thornton wrote to Professor Wager, “By the great rivers, classical and Christian, I swear that every word of this is true. I have made myself to appear rude for you!”
⁵⁶

But he was finding himself at Yale, and basking in the stimulating company of his new friends. In fact, his mother reported to Amos, Thornton had been neglecting his courses and had to spend time in the Yale infirmary because he was so exhausted “by late hours talking with fellow students.” He was “relishing the companionships almost too excitedly and almost at the expense of both his health and his studies.”
⁵⁷
Yet he found time to write his playlets, as well as to work on fiction and essays. One three-minute playlet to undergo several revisions and a transformation of title was
The Walled City
, which Steve Benét published during Thornton's second semester at Yale. “Every soul dwells in its walled city,” one of the characters says.

Eventually, some years after it was published in the Yale
Lit,
Thornton deleted that line, and changed the title to
Nascuntur Poetae . . .
The ellipses evoke the entire Latin saying to which Thornton referred: “Poets are born, but orators are made.” In all its versions, this short play examines the life of the artist—the “chosen”—and the blessing of the artistic gifts, as well as the risks. “I am not afraid of life. I will astonish it,” the gifted boy—the poet—says. “God's gifts are not easily borne; he who carries much gold stumbles, and is burdened,” he is told by the Woman in the Chlamys in the early, unpublished version of the play.
“I
bring the dark and necessary gifts.” When she warns that he will know himself “isolated, solitary, unlovable,” the boy wants to relinquish the gifts. It is too late, she tells him, and he has no choice in the matter in any case.

The third character in the playlet, the Woman in Deep Red, asserts that his life is a journey and “has its destination.” Because artists are “chosen,” they are “breathed upon,” set apart and given the power to create in words or images or music. Artistic responsibility and power isolate the artist—but then, the Woman in the Chlamys says, every human being is isolated. “Every soul is a walled city and [no] other may enter save at dusk and in strange moods, nor may thy soul visit another's save in rare and unknown hours.”
⁵⁸

When his play was published in the
Lit
at Yale in 1918, Thornton, then twenty-one, was a restless, frustrated, gifted college boy, virtually alone in his belief that he was born to write. Ahead of him lay struggle and success far beyond what even his ambitious imagination could conjure in those days at Yale. He was a writer eager to be about his life's work, but temporarily required to be a college student and chafing at the bonds. Yale would indeed “reduce him some” as his father hoped, but it would also expand him, challenge him, urge him closer to his authentic voice.
⁵⁹

By the time
The Walled City
appeared in print ten years later, revised and renamed
Nascuntur Poetae . . . ,
it reflected Thornton Wilder's emerging view of the challenge and the mission of the writer: “The life of man awaits you, the light laughter and the same misery in the same day, in the selfsame hour the trivial and the divine,” one of the women tells the young poet prophetically, in words nowhere to be found in the earlier version at Yale. “You are to give it a voice. Among the bewildered and the stammering thousands you are to give it a voice and mark its meaning.”
⁶⁰

11

“HEROES”

The veneration will grow. His place is beside the heroes he mused upon.

—THORNTON WILDER,

In Praise of Guynemer

 

New Haven, Connecticut; Washington, D.C.;
Newport, Rhode Island (1918)

A
s he neared his twenty-first birthday, Thornton was idealistically given to hero worship. Foremost on his current roster of heroes were his brother, Amos, now a corporal in A Battery, 17th Field Artillery, 2nd Division, fighting at the front in Rupt Sector, southeast of Verdun; Charles Wager, the Oberlin professor he idolized; Georges Guynemer, the French flying ace he would eulogize; the actor John Barrymore; the producer and director Arthur Hopkins, and the latest in a long line of show business luminaries about whom he fantasized—the young Welsh actor Gareth Hughes.

“I am perpetually enthusiastic over some composition or book, some person or some friend,” Thornton wrote to his brother.
¹
He was “ ‘writing' much,” he told a friend, “both for the waste-basket and for posterity which is only a temporary postponement of the waste-basket.”
²
A good deal of his writing was directed toward his current living heroes—long letters of self-revelation to Amos and to Professor Wager, and plays conceived for Barrymore, Hopkins, and Hughes—although the latter three knew nothing of Thornton Wilder or his writing. Not only had Professor Wager led Thornton through classical literature, occasionally suggesting related ideas for plays Thornton might write, but he often tantalized his former student with accounts of his occasional trips to Detroit or Cleveland or New York to go to the theater. “I missed seeing Gareth Hughes in Cleveland,” Wager wrote, knowing of Thornton's admiration for the young Welshman. “If I had, would have invited him to dinner and talked to him of you.” Wager had a friend who actually knew Hughes, and reported that he was “quite as engaging as he looks.”
³

“Your wonderful many-sided letter has been in my head all day like a dazzle,” Thornton wrote to Wager in January 1918.
⁴
He shared, in turn, an account of his own recent adventure in New York. Thornton had so avidly followed newspaper accounts of Gareth Hughes's rising career that he felt he knew the actor as well as he knew anyone of his age, “and better.”
⁵
When Thornton made his own trip into Manhattan to go to the theater, he decided on an impulse to call Hughes and make an appointment under the pretense that “some of the boys of the Yale Dramatic Association would like to have me discuss his appearing with them in ‘Everyman' about Easter time.” Hughes agreed to meet Thornton at four thirty in his apartment on Waverly Place near Washington Square.
⁶
Eagerly Thornton walked through “a bitter cold early evening” and climbed four flights of dark stairs to Hughes's rooms.

Gareth Hughes surpassed Thornton's expectations. Starstruck, he described Hughes to Dr. Wager: “He is Ariel, but more pathetic than Ariel. He is sheer genius and poetry. And, when his glasses are off, the divinest thing to look upon that I have ever seen. He was calling the comparatively gloomy and stone-like visitor ‘Thornton dear' within three-quarters of an hour.”
⁷
Soon Thornton found himself playing Welsh hymns on the piano, and staying for supper, and playing with the dog, Juba. Hughes told Thornton that he was “a peasant, the son of a Welsh singer,” and that he ran away with a Shakespearean theater company when he was about fifteen. Hughes hated life, he told Thornton, except when he was in a good play, but he found theatrical people especially hateful and disgusting. Thornton learned that his hero knew Shakespeare “up and down,” and that he was “very poor.” Even so there was a manservant, whom Thornton met that night—a “whimpering, Irish ‘decayed' actor.”

Thornton stayed until one “talking excitedly” with Hughes. “He didn't want me to go even then,” Thornton reported to Wager, “and assured me it was the nightingale and not the lark I heard.”
⁸
The next evening Thornton took Gareth to meet Isabella, who was visiting friends in the city. “He was perfectly wonderful in company,” Thornton wrote to Dr. Wager. “Talking not only of his experiences with famous actors, but telling old Welsh legends and quoting. My mother was delighted with him as were they all; no one can take his or her eyes off of him.”
⁹
After Thornton returned to New Haven, a letter came from Hughes: “It is so grey here today and it has been so cold and cheerless and I am steeped in poverty and starving but soon the sun will shine. Oh it is so grey! I wish you were here to talk to me for I am lonely indeed.”
¹⁰

Thornton was enthralled and infatuated with Gareth Hughes, whom he had admired from afar for so long. He was even more determined to write plays for Hughes. (As it turned out, Hughes's burgeoning career as a silent movie star superseded his theater career through the late twenties. Hughes did not succeed in the “talkies,” however, and tried to reestablish a stage career in the thirties. In the early forties he became known as Father David, and became a lay missionary to the Paiute Indians in Nevada.)

 

IN 1918
Thornton was simultaneously relishing his brief acquaintance with Gareth Hughes and worrying about some of the women in his life. He thought he understood women thoroughly because he was so close to his mother and sisters; nonetheless, at times he was baffled by them. He was shocked to learn secondhand of the engagement of Agnes Gammon, the cousin of his China Inland Mission School and Oberlin College friend, Theodore “Ted” Wilder. Agnes was a young woman whose company he had occasionally enjoyed, and he considered it “a model of womanly delicacy and fine feeling” that she did not send him “the embittering news herself.” “I never could quite make out whether I was on the point of being engaged to Agnes or Nina Trego,” he wrote to Ted Wilder.

 

An alliance with the former would have been exhilarating, and the quarrels would have been fine, vigorous and tonic as [a] sneeze. With Nina life would be close-centred, nervous, with only oases of serenity and the quarrels would have been silent, repressed, dark and intense. In considering a possible wife—and this is a real ipse dixit, Ted—choose her in the light of her quarrels. Ascertain her style of argument, her method in animosity. But I hear you laughing at me.
¹¹

 

“AMOS HAS
won the Croix de Guerre,” Thornton wrote Dr. Wager in January 1918.
¹²
To the end of his long life, with his usual modesty and self-deprecation, Amos reflected that the honor he received on October 28, 1917, was “a roll of the dice in the lottery with which our French division chose to honor several drivers of our departing Section 3, many of whom were more worthy than myself.”
¹³
All in all 101 Yale men received the Croix de Guerre in World War I.
¹⁴

Thornton won his own honor in the spring of 1918, far more modest than Amos's Croix de Guerre but significant in the Yale sphere nonetheless. His short story “Spiritus Valet” won the John Hubbard Curtis Prize given annually by the Yale English Department for an outstanding literary work by an undergraduate.
¹⁵
Thornton's prizewinning story, published in May 1918 by the Yale
Courant,
is an early example of a catalytic encounter between the writer's rich imagination and his copious reading. Thornton not only thought deeply and analytically about what he read but often posed hypothetical questions about a particular character, theme, or plot that captured his attention. “What if?” he seemed to ask. Wilder had steeped himself for several years in the writings of Henry James, and the echoes of plot and theme suggest that when he composed “Spiritus Valet,” he thought about James's story
The Aspern Papers.
James's romantic tale of loss, greed, and intrigue is based on actual accounts of romantic letters written by Lord Byron to two of his mistresses. The letters and the mistresses survived Byron, and James had put his imagination to work on these facts to create a tale of an old woman living out her days in a shambles of a Venetian palace, holding fast, despite the efforts of others, to the love letters written to her long ago by an esteemed American poet, and to the life, love, and memories embodied in them.

In “Spiritus Valet,” Thornton wrote of a fictitious poet, Sebastian Torr, whose life was full of “strange silent periods during which the poet seems to have entirely disappeared”—particularly a few years when “the only evidence of the poet's continued existence issued in the shape of the seven short but matchless lyrics to the ‘golden-haired lady.' ”
¹⁶
Torr's biographer seeks to illuminate the “dark ages” of his life, and embarks on a quest to identify the “golden-haired lady” and, he hopes, to obtain from her “many facts, letters, and perhaps poems.” He locates Mrs. Judith Manners, who had indeed briefly known the great poet. She soon falls victim to a fusion of forces: She feels her youth slipping away; she is bored with her life; the biographer is beseeching her to turn over letters that do not exist, for she is not the lady in question, and the poet never wrote poems or letters to her, much less loved her. “I have no letters; I have no secrets,” she protests honestly to the determined biographer. But he persists, and, finally, “starved” of excitement, Mrs. Manners wonders, “What harm would it do if I encouraged the rumor a little. . . . Why, that would be Romance. I might even, if I dared, write the letters myself.”

She begins to think, defiantly, Why not? She proceeds to invent the letters, not attempting to forge the poet's handwriting, but copying the imaginary epistles “into an old diary, using diluted ink,” under the ruse that “she had carefully copied the letters as they came, into a very private diary, and then had destroyed them.”
¹⁷
So this polished, smoothly written, thoroughly intriguing tale unfolds—Thornton's variation on Henry James's extrapolation of a true story. What if there were letters? James asked. What if there weren't? Thornton seems to have wondered. It was a fascinating challenge, creating a fictitious world out of fragments of reading or memory or fancy—or an amalgam of those—and then animating that world with vividly imagined form, plot, characters, setting, and theme.

 

“I AM
a wandering independent,” Thornton wrote to his brother sometime during the spring of 1918, confessing that he often cut his classes to write plays “without end and then tear them up. . . . When someone has flattered me about something I go around like a bull in a China shop, cutting classes and neglecting duties and calling it Artistic Temperament.”
¹⁸
He was now a member of the
Lit
board; was escorting Grace Parker, a young woman from New Haven, to social events; and was resisting his father's efforts to make him “fit the mould of the practical, diligent, thoughtful American boy and
I don't fit
.” Thornton told Amos that if he should be drafted after his twenty-first birthday, he would “very likely ‘pick up and be a man,' ” as his father urged him to do. He would then “cease writing illuminating dialogue and excited prose, and offer up my whole personality and impulses on the altar of ‘Just-like-the-Other-Fella.' ”
¹⁹

The war was omnipresent in the life of his family and the nation. He was living and writing on a university campus that had become a virtual military installation, in a campus community whose professors and students had stood in the forefront of Americans challenging the country's isolationist stance on World War I. In 1915 Yale had organized the first artillery battalion of any American university.
²⁰
That same year Yale professor Hiram Bingham III, the explorer and archaeologist who discovered Machu Picchu, had offered a silver loving cup as a reward to the class enlisting the most members in military training programs.
²¹
By the time Thornton entered Yale, hundreds of Yale students had gone off to Europe to help in the ambulance service or fight in military service, and one by one, the remaining men, Thornton among them, considered what role they should assume in wartime.

The published history of the Yale class of 1920 devoted an entire section to the war. “After all, there were some four hundred and fifty of us, in France, on the ocean, in training camps, in all the services and under all sorts of conditions,” wrote Walter Millis, a member of the Class Book Committee and managing editor of the
Lit,
who went on to become a journalist, military historian, and author. “When you say that Nineteen Twenty, being a good average Yale class, did just a little more than good average service in a time of stress, you have really summed up the whole matter,” Millis reported.
²²
Many Yale men, like Amos Wilder in the class of 1917, served in the ambulance corps. Amos was the only member of the class of 1917 to receive his Yale degree with the class of 1920, as he had served in the war longer than any of his classmates.
²³
Official records documented the Yale men who had served in the war—6,257 in the army, 1,431 in the navy, 65 in the marines, and 1,119 in foreign armies.
²⁴
The official army and navy death lists included 186 Yale men, of whom at least six were members of the class of 1920. The class could also claim flying aces, captains in the balloon service, officers and enlisted men in the field artillery, two men in the “Tanks,” one man in “Chemical Warfare,” and a number of men wounded.
²⁵
Those left behind at Yale drilled, marched, and took part in summer military camps.