Thornton Wilder (21 page)

Thornton was not the only aspiring writer wrestling with the question of how to join in the war effort, especially now that he was twenty-one and eligible for the draft. Ernest Hemingway, another unknown young writer with poor vision, was memorizing the army eye chart out in Kansas City, Missouri, so he could pass the examination. Closer to home, Steve Benét, now editor of the
Lit,
considered it an embarrassment and indignity to have to do military service behind the lines in some sort of clerkship. He had been afflicted with scarlet fever during his childhood, and the illness left him with impaired vision. Nevertheless Benét, the son of a career army officer, was determined to enlist in the army in July 1918. He, too, contrived to memorize the army eye chart because his eyes refused “to read the nice little black letters on the card.”
²⁶
He passed and was inducted into the army, serving for three days before an alert sergeant saw him peeling potatoes by holding them so close to his eyes that he risked stabbing himself in the nose. Benét was ordered to repeat the eye test, this time with a different chart. He failed and was immediately discharged from the army.
²⁷
He got a job at the State Department in Washington, writing to a friend that he was relegated to “a legion of the halt, blind and heart-diseased.”
²⁸

Meanwhile, Thornton had his own worries about being rejected because of his eyesight, a concern shared by Dr. Wilder. Unbeknownst to Thornton, his father was writing to Amos, urging him to save money “with remorseless care” because, he feared, “in the years to come you will have not only yourself but some of these others, especially hopeless Thornton, to finance.”
²⁹
Dr. Wilder pulled strings in Washington to land Thornton a civilian job for the summer of 1918 doing clerical work at the War Industries Board, the government agency set up in 1917 to mobilize industry to support the war effort and to protect the peacetime economy. Thornton's typing classes were finally going to pay off—to the tune of a desk job at a salary of thirty-five dollars a month. He headed to Washington, where at first he roomed with Yale men Benét and John Carter, but quickly grew uncomfortable in the “atmosphere of Perpetual Carousal” and the noise “created by that perpetual competition of cleverness which constitutes the relation of Steve and John.”
³⁰
By then he and Benét had established a respectful if wary friendship, not so much an overt rivalry as a quiet competition that may have served from time to time as motivation for both writers.

Thornton soon gave up on the “Perpetual Carousal” and moved into quieter quarters in suburban Chevy Chase, Maryland.
³¹
He set aside solitary time in the evenings to work on a new play,
Vecy-Segal,
which he wanted to share with Steve Benét's older brother, the poet and editor William Rose Benét, whom he had gotten to “know very well.”
³²
Bill Benét, eleven years Thornton's senior, had received his Yale degree in 1907, and in 1924, with Yale professor Henry Seidel Canby, would establish the
Saturday Review of Literature.
When he and Thornton met, Benét was associate editor of
The Century Magazine,
and had published four books of poetry, with another in the offing. He would become an influential editor, critic, and poet, and would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1942. He was in Washington in the Aviation Reserve that summer of 1918, and took an encouraging interest in Thornton and his work, praising his playlets “extravagantly,” and leaving Thornton with a “renewed enthusiasm” to get ten of them revised, typed, and off to the Yale University Press, in hopes of publication.
³³

To do that he had to stay at his office after hours to use a typewriter. The combination of daily office work, surrounded by people, and nighttime literary work in the solitude of an empty office agreed with him. Thornton felt himself “engaged on really big things in my writing-self,” and he relished putting in hours of “refreshing blessing work. Something new has come into my idea of what it is all about and I now take joy and solace in my work as though it were something warm and caressable,” he wrote. In his plays he was striving for a “touch of acid” amid the idealism, so that there would not be even a “remote taint of sentimentalism.”
³⁴

One of the playlets he was crafting that summer was entitled
Centaurs,
later called
The Death of the Centaur: A Footnote to Ibsen.
Into the compact intensity of his familiar three-minute, three-character format, Thornton deftly brought together Shelley and Ibsen, and Hilda Wangel, the young woman who worships the hero in Ibsen's play
The Master Builder.
This playlet foreshadows some of the devices to come in Thornton's more mature work: He takes liberties with time (Shelley died in 1822, six years before Ibsen was born); characterization (two historical figures interact with a fictional creation); and setting (“Miss Fosli, will you kindly push forward the wicker settee from the last act?” Hilda says, addressing another of Ibsen's characters who is not visible in
Centaurs
, and “
A wicker settee suddenly appears.
”) The play's premise is that just before his death by drowning, Shelley was about to write a poem to be called “The Death of a Centaur.” Hearing this, Ibsen says, “And I claim that I wrote it. The poem hung for a while above the Mediterranean, and then drifted up toward the Tyrol, and I caught it and wrote it down. And it is
The Master Builder.
”

Shelley responds, “Well, it is not a strange idea, or a new one, that the stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed with words.”

He goes on to speak of the universal creative impulse, and the eradicating impact of war:

 

It is a truth that Plato would have understood that the mere language, the words of a masterpiece, are the least of its offerings. Nay, in the world we have come into now, the languages of the planet have no value: but the impulse, the idea of “Comus” is a miracle, even in heaven. Let you remember this when you regret the work that has been lost through this war that has been laid upon your treasurable young men. The work they might have done is still with you, and will yet find its way into your lives and into your children's lives.
³⁵

 

That summer of 1918, Thornton was continually aware of “the work that has been lost through this war”—and the work that might yet be lost, especially his own. There was solace in finishing, at least, this small play.

 

HE SPENT
most of his summer evenings plowing through a draft of
The Breaking of Exile
, set in China, the new three-act play he was crafting from the novelette he had begun at Berea in 1917. He would compose for half an hour or so, and then pause to type what he had just written. He gave his mother a rousing synopsis of the play, which involved roles he had written expressly for John Barrymore and Gareth Hughes. It was, he said,

 

about people in a white heat of intensity and I no sooner sit down to write it than I am cast into a fever myself and the terrible thing pours out onto the page. It is a terrible play about What Happened in a Cheap French Hotel in a port on the Yangtze-Kiang River. The war broke out and caught all these social and political exiles longing to go back to their countries . . . I bet you that at the close of the Second Act, every one in the audience screams loud and long or else dies of horror.
³⁶

 

The play not only drew on Thornton's impressions of China for theme, characters, and plot but utilized a setting he returned to often in his later work—the symbolic lonely boardinghouse, in this case a “Cheap French Hotel.” He sent the finished play off to well-known producer and director Arthur Hopkins—another hero who did not know Thornton Wilder existed. Hopkins kept the manuscript for a long time before sending it back with a polite rejection letter.

Thornton enjoyed Washington life with Bill Benét and other Yale friends.
³⁷
One of them, Bill Taylor, took it upon himself “almost boisterously” to make Thornton come out of his shell, encouraging him to be “more genial and approachable,” and Dr. Wilder thought the experience was good for him.
³⁸
All in all, he believed that the Washington experience would make Thornton “a little more confident—perhaps worldly,” he wrote Amos. “I have noted his underlying penetration and poise (he is a leader among such, by reason of his abilities). He smokes some cigarettes frankly—but assures me no drinking and I believe him.”
³⁹

 

“ARE YOU
already laying out itineraries . . . ?” Thornton wrote to his father in June. True to form, various Wilders spent the summer of 1918 in various places. The brothers were doing their part in the war, Thornton in Washington, and Amos with his regiment in reserve after a month of fighting in Château-Thierry/Belleau Wood, and soon to be thrown into the second battle of the Marne. Charlotte was again working at Mount Holyoke for the summer. Dr. Wilder attended the Yale commencement in late June, a ceremony “full of high patriotism,” he wrote to Amos in France.
⁴⁰
Isabel had finished her year at Northfield and joined her mother and sisters for a visit with Charlotte, who was “doing finely,” her father reported proudly. One of his Yale friends who had recently met her at Mount Holyoke wrote to tell Dr. Wilder “without blarney” that Charlotte was “the handsomest, most wholesome young woman he had met for a long time.” Dr. Wilder was delighted, and found it “gratifying to a fond parent to know he is equipping the world with a whole quiver of whales.”
⁴¹

 

IN EARLY
July, Thornton received the news that he had been drafted. His father thought it would be good for him to enter the army, but doubted that he could pass the physical examination for combat because of his vision. Dr. Wilder also believed that creative writers—especially poets—seemed to be temperamentally unsuited for combat in any case. Thornton filled out the standard questionnaire supplied by the draft board, noted in the newspaper that his draft number fell within the first two hundred chosen for the next national apportionment, and waited. Despite his vision problems and the heart murmur discovered in his physical examination, he did not ask for an exemption and expected to be called into service.

On the eve of his regiment's march to Soissons/Villers-Cotterêts during the second battle of the Marne, young Amos wrote to Thornton sympathetically about “the quandary of the dreamer and the aspiring artist in the nets of public and military hierarchy.”
⁴²
Amos felt it himself: “There seems to be a fundamental incompatibility of my temperament and the idea of military organization. One can't orient himself in any hierarchy of authority without giving a sad farewell to many gentle ways and actions. If I do this can I resurrect them afterwards?”
⁴³

Thornton had made up his mind to serve, however, and his father thought camp life and the military physical training would be good for him, especially “the mingling with men and reality.”
⁴⁴
But his father left matters up to Thornton and the draft board—although he said he would be willing to pull his “last string” to get Thornton into the merchant marine, where Dr. Wilder thought his son would “grow most.” He told Thornton, “I will try to get a ‘waiver' as to eyes and I usually get things I want where the welfare of my children is concerned.”
⁴⁵

Worried that he would not be accepted in the regular army, Thornton took the necessary examinations in Washington in early August. He was directed to take a special eye exam, and the doctor predicted he was likely to be inducted in a “lower class” but would no doubt be accepted because of the high demand for fighting men. “I took my Advisory Board Exam. and probably passed it. But this is not certain,” Thornton wrote his father August 14. “So I went today to the office of the Coast Artillery and put in my application for induction into that service. IT ONLY TAKES MEN WHO ARE IN GENERAL MILITARY SERVICE OF THE DRAFT (and of course general enlistments.) And Men who have had at least one year of College.” Thornton had investigated all the options, and concluded that his best avenue of service would be the army's Coast Artillery Corps, writing to his father, “They take you as you come from the draft board and ask no questions.”
⁴⁶

As of September 14 he was accepted and assigned to work as an office orderly for the 1st Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams outside Newport, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay. There would be a training period in September, followed by one or two months of training camp, which could result in the rank of second lieutenant. Then off to France to deal with “the very heaviest artillery, the Big Berthas etc.” If all went well, Thornton expected to be in France before Christmas. He was eager to let his brother know that he would be in the artillery, too, even though it was, Thornton said, “the unskilled emergency-rush section of it.”
⁴⁷

Their father was very proud of Amos's service in France, and saw to it that passages from many of his letters were published anonymously in the newspaper.
⁴⁸
By late August, however, after nearly two years in the war zone, Cpl. Amos Wilder was suffering what he described as “a kind of chronic anguish”—“some kind of radical depletion, made up of battle fatigue, sleeplessness, and nervous strain”—demonstration that post-traumatic stress disorder affected combatants long before it received an official name.
⁴⁹
This was the first recorded indication that Amos had ever experienced even a short period of depression, and his war journals reveal his efforts to analyze the source of his disability and to cope with it.
⁵⁰
To further complicate Amos's recovery, military orders dictated that he, like thousands of other young men on active duty during World War I, should undergo a “minor operation”—circumcision—to diminish the possibility of venereal disease. Circumcision at birth was still relatively rare early in the twentieth century, except for Jews and members of some other religious groups. During the war, however, military doctors in the field began to make up for lost time, operating on a generation of young army and navy men. Amos's procedure was performed on August 30. Afterward he found himself being carried to a hospital in a “speeding, swaying ambulance,” just as he had transported so many soldiers earlier.
⁵¹