Thornton Wilder (23 page)

Amos, as usual, was an easier “chess piece” for their father to handle. He had taken one course in the Yale Divinity School in his senior year, and had almost decided to become a minister. He had considered this vocation before the war, but the wartime experience had “crystallized” it somewhat.
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Haunted by his encounter with this twentieth-century apocalypse, Amos was reading the wartime work of French writers, and composing poetry about his own experience, exploring the war's ramifications in poems that would be published in 1920 in the
Yale Literary Magazine.

As he had before the war, Amos loved being on the tennis court; there he found a great outlet for energy and stress. Furthermore he was a highly skilled player. In June 1920 he and his partner, Lee Wiley, won the National Intercollegiate Doubles championship in lawn tennis.
²¹
That summer, for once, he had ample time to play tennis because his father did not dispatch Amos, now almost twenty-five, to work on a farm. Instead, said Amos, “He put me in a Wall St. bank in New York.”
²²
Then it was back to Europe, for Amos received a Hoover Fellowship to study at the University of Brussels.

“Various strange plans are unfolding for my support next year,” Thornton had written Charlotte the previous spring.
²³
Professor Canby was preparing to launch his “rather grand Literary Review for the New York Evening Post” and asked Thornton to write some book reviews. He hoped a job might materialize.
²⁴
He almost accepted a position teaching Latin in “a boy's boarding school in New Jersey,” his mother reported to a friend. “In fact,” she said, “he had several to choose from and always Latin as one of the subjects.”
²⁵

But other opportunities intervened. First Dr. Wilder sent Thornton, now twenty-three, to work for six weeks on a farm near Litchfield, Connecticut. Then, wonder of wonders, Thornton, who had never laid eyes on Europe except in his imagination and in books, was actually going to spend a year in Italy. He wrote gratefully, looking back, that his allies in finally achieving this exciting plan were “Luck; an old family friend; and my mother's perspicuity.”
²⁶
As Thornton recorded events years later, this time Isabella set in motion the events that carried him to Rome. She regularly read the
New Republic,
and noticed with interest “some travel letters from Rome by Stark Young.”
²⁷
Discovering there that the currency exchange rate was advantageous for Americans, she decided to talk to Latin scholar and professor George Lincoln Hendrickson of Yale, the Wilders' friend since the early days in Wisconsin. Dr. Hendrickson, formerly director of classical studies at the American Academy in Rome, told Isabella about foreign study opportunities for college graduates at the academy. Might this be just the opportunity for Thornton? He could travel to Europe, as his parents felt he deserved the chance to do, and simultaneously, he could study Latin and better equip himself to teach.

When Clarence W. Mendell, Thornton's Yale Latin professor, assured Dr. Wilder that Thornton “was the boy in his classes who [would] get the most out of a year” at the academy, “the great project was launched,” Isabella wrote.
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Thornton was accepted as a visiting student in the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. “So now the plan is for him to sail September first by the Fabre line steamer ‘Providence' to Naples and attend the American Classical School at Rome for a year,” his mother wrote. “He is going to study Latin, Italian and the usual local archeology.”
²⁹
Thornton was elated.

Even his father was pleased. The Rome experience would surely strengthen Thornton's credentials to teach Latin and, consequently, his ability to support himself. The experience might even lead to a master's degree. Besides, the foreign-exchange rate was attractive, and Dr. Wilder thought that Thornton's Italian year could be financed with nine hundred dollars—which he would not put into his son's “careless” hands all at once.
³⁰

“During my years in New Haven,” Thornton recalled nearly half a century later in his semiautobiographical sketch, “my father was a stone's throw [from] my successive rooms in the dormitories. I was very much under his eye. I was in constant contact with many of his oldest friends, Dean Stokes, Dean Jones, Professor Hendrickson, who were like extensions of himself.”
³¹
For Thornton and Amos Parker Wilder, the father-son relationship was a tangle of love and resentment, admiration and dismay, submission and rebellion. “In a son's eyes—and this is more true of this relationship than any other,” Thornton wrote many years after Yale,

 

a father carries with him like a pack on his back their total life together, not remembered in every daily [detail] but remembered as an uninterrupted presence. To the infant he was that tall stranger of unpredictable moods—alarmingly affectionate at times, alarmingly authoritative always. To the boy he was the one who punished or who rewarded (two faces of the same coin). To the youth he was the one who could give or withhold the money that could purchase those
sine qua non
that a youth's heart so passionately desires (decent clothes, tennis rackets . . .) To the full-grown man the father is the one who is felt as seeing, also, the total life of that son, all the foolish things he's ever done.
³²

 

Thornton concluded that it was difficult to live with a man who remembers everything about your young life, even when he remembers it “charitably.”
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He clearly did admire and love his father, and always would, but Thornton was twenty-three, a man grown—a man civilized. At last, college was done. Six weeks of farmwork, and then—Rome. Europe. Freedom.

 

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1920
, Thornton boarded the French ocean liner
Providence
, bound for Italy and the future.
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The voyage from New York to Naples took nearly two weeks. The ship accommodated 140 first-class passengers, 250 second-class passengers, and 1,850 third-class passengers, many of them, on the voyages from Naples to New York, Italian immigrants. Thornton traveled in second class, sleeping in an upper berth in a cabin for four persons. In seas tranquil or rough, he was a good sailor—had been ever since his transpacific voyages to and from China. Meals aboard ship were lively events in the second-class dining saloon, with “boisterous company” at the long bachelors' table, he wrote in later years. He recalled that his travel companions were civil servants, students, businessmen, and two Mormon missionaries. Most were “intoxicated” by their freedom and the prospect of the adventures awaiting them in Europe, not to mention “the carafes of wine on the tables.” He found himself “largely in the company of young men who had
left their fathers at home.
Very exciting it was.”
³⁵
One of his fellow passengers was a New York lawyer and Harvard graduate, a native of Sorrento and a “traveller and dilettante” who introduced Thornton to an array of colorful local characters once he reached Sorrento.
³⁶

As a boy Thornton had fallen in love with sea travel, the exhilaration of being encapsulated aboard a ship, surrounded by the ocean and the incomparable air. He relished the freedom to choose company or solitude, work or play, and he craved the continual promise of new landscapes and new people to be discovered. He could sequester himself to think, to write, and, on this voyage, to immerse himself in the study of Italian. He could emerge from his seclusion, eager for company, and then withdraw again when he needed time alone. The 1920 voyage to Europe was the forerunner of a lifetime of such journeys at sea, where Thornton could live comfortably, if temporarily, and write and fraternize his way across oceans.

Aboard the
Providence
in 1920
,
he took Italian lessons from one of his cabin mates, an Italian American who was traveling to visit his grandparents. He tried to read Dante's
Divine Comedy
in Italian, and he memorized long passages. On the ship's top deck, “amid the careening smoke stacks and the flying spray,” he practiced the Italian phrases he was learning, shouting into the wind, “When does the next train leave for Rome?” and other useful expressions.
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He was a lucky man, he knew. “I have always been favored by luck,” he wrote in later years, looking back on this journey and others. “A large part of luck is opportunity and the eye to recognize it. A large part of luck is readiness.”
³⁸

After his ship docked in Naples in mid-September, Thornton made his way first to Sorrento because he was not due at the American Academy in Rome until early October. He could stay in Sorrento cheaply and explore the medieval streets, churches, and cloisters, as well as the cliffs and the countryside and the islands in the bay. An avid tourist, he climbed Vesuvius—“a wicked mountain, half of every step you take is lost in the sliding blue-black dust, yet so steep that every step for two hours and a half is palpably
lift
.”
³⁹

Coincidentally, Dr. and Mrs. Charles Wager were traveling in Italy just at the same time, and Thornton enjoyed seeing them in Sorrento before they moved on to Rome. He took a room at the Hotel Cocumella in Sorrento, encountering there a colorful international cast of characters with whom he could practice his Italian, French, and German. Barely a week into his stay he wrote to his family, “I love Italy now indissolubly; and the Italians; and the language.”
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He was storing away in memory and imagination the names, faces, and stories of the people he met, the vistas he saw, the conversations he overheard—rich material to be transmuted later into fiction and drama.

His Italian was improving day by day, and he was so enamored of Sorrento that he wrote to the secretary of the academy “with a moiety of truth, that the change of continent has had a temporarily upsetting affect on my constitution & a slight prolongation of my stay here is advisable.” Thornton proposed that he register by mail and arrive at the academy on October 10, a week later than scheduled. Then he plunged into a “systematic study of the beautiful antiquities at the
Museo [Archeologico] Nazionale
.”
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Dressed in his “eccentric-looking baggy grey suit,” Thornton went by boat from Sorrento back to Naples to walk “enraptured for hours among the bronzes and marbles” in the vast museum, home to countless artifacts and antiquities from ancient Greece and Rome, including treasures stolen from Pompeii.
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“LEARNING ITALIAN
quickly, and beside myself with delight,” he scribbled on a postcard to Amos from Sorrento October 14. Italy immediately inspired and liberated him, setting him free to write. He told Amos that he had already written “a whole play.”
⁴³
In a letter to his family he had shared the details:

 

The thing you should really know about me now is that I am writing my beautiful pitiful play about the American widow at Capri and Dario Stavelli, the adventurer. Never did a play come to me more easily. Day and day I sit down and this beautiful touching dialogue flows from my pen. It is called “Villa Rhabani” but has no relation with the other play I projected with the same name. . . . But no one short of Elsie Ferguson, Gareth Hughes, Haidée Wright and Arthur Byron need attempt to play it.
⁴⁴

 

A notebook among his papers reveals that in September in Sorrento, Thornton was working on act 1 of this new full-length play, completing the draft by September 30, 1920; by October 10 three acts were drafted, and he continued the work in Rome off and on from the fall of 1920 until February 10, 1921. He would revise the unproduced, unpublished play as late as 1924.
⁴⁵
Not only did Capri and the Bay of Naples provide the setting for this new drama, but the major male character, Dario Stavelli, is an echo of Wilder's new friend in Sorrento, Dario Ercolano, one of two brothers introduced to him by the lawyer he had met aboard ship. Thornton wrote that Dario and his brother were “the most delightful type of Neapolitan,—lovable sharks. They know they are charming; it's a sort of profession among them to be beautiful and courteous and
sincere
(!) But you must pay for it as you'd pay for any work of art.”
⁴⁶

 

“I HAVE
this minute arrived in Rome, and am waiting up in my room at half-past ten for some supper,” Thornton wrote his family on October 14, 1920. “The train was two-and-a-half hours late, and I know no more of Rome than can be gained on rainy evenings crossing the street that separates the station from the Hotel Continentale (The last room left for 22 lire).”
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He shared his growing excitement in another letter home: “How perfect it is, my being here! How much happier a chance has fallen than a year in Paris or London or New York. Rome's antiquity, her variety, her significance, swallow these others' up, and I feel myself being irresistibly impelled towards saying of her that she is the Eternal City.” He told his family that he

 

went with an archaeological party the other day to a newly discovered tomb of about the first century; it was under a street near the center of the city, and while by candle-light we peered at faded paintings of a family called Aurelius, symbolic representations of their dear children and parents borne graciously away by winged spirits playing in gardens and adjusting their Roman robes, the street-cars of today rushed by over us. We were clutching at the past to recover the loves and pieties and habits of the Aurelius family, while the same elements were passing above us.
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