Thornton Wilder (24 page)

 

This profoundly significant experience resonated far into his future. He conjectured that October day in 1920 that “two thousand years from now,” other people would be striving to recover the artifacts, experience, atmosphere, and humanity of his own time.
⁴⁹
He went on to do that himself, in fiction and in drama. Over the decades to come, in various manifestations, with diverse names and settings, he would resurrect and revisit the Aurelius family—just people “clutching at the past” for the universal and the timeless in the human experience, and groping toward the future. Over time he would excavate and explore the “loves and pieties and habits” of unique yet universal characters—in
Our Town
,
The Skin of Our Teeth,
and other plays, and in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Eighth Day, Theophilus North
, and other novels.

Thornton took with him to Rome a grounding in classical mythology, history, and literature, including Dante's work. He was captivated by the treasures of Rome—the paintings, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, and especially his new enthusiasm, archaeology. “One day our class in Rome was taken out into the country to dig up a bit of the Etruscan world, a street,” he wrote years later. “Once thousands of people had walked it. The rut was very deep. Those who have uncovered such a spot are never the same again.”
⁵⁰
He thought he would be an archaeologist as well as a writer.

He threw himself headlong into his new life. On the day he had his first look at the house on the Piazza di Spagna where the poet John Keats died in 1821, Thornton wept. Then he recited the words from Keat's “When I Have Fears” (1818)—words he knew by heart, words that most likely evoked his wartime anxiety about his own mortality: “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain . . .”

“My new school is too serene and beautiful to be described,” Thornton wrote his family. He was living in Villa Ballacci, a small house belonging to the American Academy—“a villa overlooking Rome, all mine!” he wrote. “I have a bed-room, dressing-room and the bath all in a row.”
⁵¹
He attended American Academy lectures and field trips; enjoyed the academy costume ball and other social events; met archaeologists, composers, artists, fellow students; encountered, he wrote to his family, “a number of American women who have married Italians, and this morning I left my cards on them and hope for an invitation to tea at least, if not a dinner-party, [with] the Marchesa de Johannis and Signora Malagola.”
⁵²
He was invited to formal luncheons and dinners at the academy, including one given by the wife of the academy secretary, who had known Isabella Niven Wilder at the Misses Masters School in Dobbs Ferry.
⁵³
He went to the theater and to the opera, and explored the city, map in hand. “Just back from another day's wild wandering,” he wrote home. “Picture me backing up against a wall in a side street and unfolding my 3-ft. sq. map to find out where I am! Too happy for correspondence, that can become merely a characterless rattling bushel-basket of superlatives.”
⁵⁴

News reached him from home in October that plays he had sent out to the Theatre Guild had been rejected, and he was “cast down” by the negative response. He wrote a brooding assessment of his seemingly futile efforts to become a playwright: “All my other plays when they were returned to me I immediately saw as riddled with errors and undermined with incompetence,” he wrote to his family.

 

The Rocket.
Mercifully destroyed and forgotten.
The Dreamers
having shaken off its ludicrous pseudo-psychoanalytical modern prologue and epilogue, is in process of being rewritten in a vein that candidly deprecates and retains the purple-patch rhetoric. . . .
The Breaking of Exile,
a good theme, a few sharp characterizations, three or four vivid moments, eked out with half-hours of earnest young naiveté, poor little Thornton's lucubrations on War, on disgrace, on morality!
The Trumpet Shall Sound
is extraordinarily vague to me, and I cannot tell whether the three or four pictures I have in my memory . . . may or may not be on paper, may never have left my forehead.
⁵⁵

 

He supposed he would just keep on writing plays, and he still had hopes for
Villa Rhabani.
He promised to send a copy of the script to Connecticut so that his mother could get it out to other producers and directors. Temporarily preoccupied as he was with being a student, an archaeologist, a socialite, a tourist, and a dilettante in Rome, Thornton was still, underneath it all, an aspiring dramatist. He wouldn't give up on that yet.

In a letter to his family from Italy that fall, he painted a vivid self-portrait:

 

Looking in the cheval-glass I see a young man . . . who implicitly, or by reason of his large shell glasses, presents an expectant eager face to the view. His shoes and clothes are in travel-state, but he is carefully shaved and brushed. On his pink cheeks and almost infantile mouth lies a young innocence that is not native to Italy and has to be imported in hollow ships, and about the eyes there is the same strong naiveté, mercifully mitigated by a sort of frightened humor. He is very likely more intelligent than he looks, and less charming. Alone in Italy? To study archaeology!
⁵⁶

 

An ocean away Dr. Wilder worried about his son, who seemed to be having entirely too much childish, even dangerous fun in Italy. He fired off a stern letter, laden with cautions: “Dear boy, I pray for you—that you may be benefitted by these experiences and not return to us impaired in soul.” While his letters home were “interesting reading,” Dr. Wilder wrote, they were full of “so many curious people, so many, so many derelicts.” He urged Thornton to beware of the “follies, the emptiness of it all,” and to strive “earnestly to come manfully through it, and not merely to save your own soul, but others along with you.” He hoped that Thornton would “keep safe” his “precious gifts from despoiling.”
⁵⁷

It seemed that Dr. Wilder's shadow could stretch across continents and an ocean, as it did back in the China days, and hover about as conspicuously and critically as it did at Yale—but Thornton, at twenty-three and a half, was not so vulnerable now to parental control as the much younger Thornton had been, except in the matter of financial dependence. Dr. Wilder was not in good health that fall, still coping after more than a decade with the chronic problems caused by the Asian sprue. However, he was making speeches with “more pep” after he recovered somewhat from the most recent breakdown in his health.
⁵⁸
He relinquished his Yale-in-China work in 1920 and joined the staff of the
New Haven
Journal-Courier
as associate editor, a position he would hold for nine years.
⁵⁹
He was “quite happy in the office
,”
he wrote to Thornton; “I find things I can do, partly under the editor—some editorial and at times a good deal; and some high class reporting for the managing editor. I am learning the town and the people.”
⁶⁰
In a sense the activist journalist and editor was starting all over again. He wrote “almost daily” editorials, was still in demand as a public speaker, still a respected figure in Yale circles, but as he neared sixty, he was keenly aware that he had never fulfilled the high expectations he had set for himself. His health had restricted him, and his income, his temperament, and his family had suffered accordingly. As he was able to achieve less and less, he needed and expected more and more from his children, and sought to live through them.

Amos Parker Wilder was a lonely man, he often told the children, intimating that it was because his wife held herself emotionally remote from him, even suggesting that she tried to deny him his children's full company and affection. But now he was at home “two or three evenings in the week,” and all was going well, he wrote to Thornton. Isabel was attending a local art school, “eager for companionship.” Janet was enjoying public school. He reported that Amos was “very happy with his friends and work” and that Charlotte was “full of vivacity.”
⁶¹
But he worried that Thornton, far away in “that setting where there is so much to make you unworthy,” would fail to keep alive “the consecration to high things.”
⁶²

But Thornton was in his glory. He found his classes at the academy exciting, although he often missed lectures when sightseeing or social engagements diverted his attention. He reveled in his walks about the city, map in hand, and came to know Rome and its treasures so intimately that he could give an authoritative tour. As Christmas approached, Thornton and Charlotte made plans for her to travel from Milan to visit him in Rome. Like her brother, Charlotte loved Italy, and despite the rigors of her YWCA work schedule—ten hours a day, seven days a week, and then four days off at the end of each month—she managed to travel, enjoying it “immensely,” and writing vivid letters home about her experiences.
⁶³

Thornton was surprised just before Christmas by the arrival of two Yale men, Henry Luce and William Dwight Whitney, both Rhodes scholars now, and eager to spend the holidays in Rome. Thornton found a cheap
pensione
for them within a stone's throw of the house where Keats died, and took them along to some of his social engagements.
⁶⁴
He had met some girls from Miss Risser's School in Rome, a fashionable finishing school for girls, among them a vivacious Chicagoan, Lila Ross Hotz, to whom Henry Luce was introduced at a party that Christmas in Rome. The two began to correspond and write poems to each other, and would marry in 1923.

Wherever Thornton went in Italy—restaurants, parties, on streetcars and trains—strangers as well as friends or acquaintances told him their life stories, often confiding their dreams or their woes. He was accustomed to that role in his family, and encouraged it: “Tell me ALL, as they cry in books,” he wrote to his sister Isabel when he heard about some of her romantic problems. “I should be ashamed if you didn't tell me the whole complicated affair, when I seem to be living in Italy for the sole purpose of receiving the confidences of ladies in distress. . . . There's something in the air over here: everyone is unhappily in love every ten minutes of their lives, and only too glad to find a sympathetic eye and ear.”
⁶⁵
On another occasion he wrote her, “A woman's heart, as you know, has no secrets from me, and my only prescription for its restlessness and sense of frustration is M-A-N. Woman is silly and man is stupid, but in one another's company they seem temporarily to surpass themselves, and this false and superficial elation is the only thing we can write plays about.”
⁶⁶
He had his own “strange little sentimental experience that made concrete the warnings that Continental women however impersonal, comradely and full of good sense they seem, cannot understand friendship that is without romantic concomitants.”
⁶⁷

His Roman days were full of lectures and sightseeing, the occasional raucous party of graduate students, and the more sedate entertainments in the homes of new acquaintances—expatriates, the academy circle, and native citizens. He teased, in a passage that foreshadowed the novel he would soon begin about Rome and Roman society, that he was presenting himself “as a sort of
objet-d'art
of a most singular and quaint charm, rentable for teas, dinner-parties and dances; will read MSS plays to adoring ladies; will sit in their palaces and talk to them about their own uniqueness,”
⁶⁸

Early in 1921, father and son exchanged some angry letters about money, which Thornton thought his father had failed to send, and Dr. Wilder had sent but thought his son had squandered. Actually Thornton was managing his finances better than his father thought, and Amos Parker Wilder was dispatching funds more generously than Thornton could believe.
⁶⁹
He apologized to his father for his strident letters about money.
⁷⁰
He was a “great father,” Thornton wrote—witty, charming, eloquent, making sacrifices for his children that were sometimes thoughtlessly received.
⁷¹

Their lively father-son discourse through letters soon moved on from finances to the future. What would Thornton do when he left Rome, and when, and why? His mother's concerns were focused less on the future than on the present. Back home, Isabel was writing a novel, Isabella wrote to her son. Was Thornton writing? How was his play progressing—if at all? Right away he wrote to her, “I attach my poor play that has been lying all these months in a state of perpetual rewriting.”

 

It's about an American millionairess at Capri with her fatal disease, who falls into the toils of a beautiful Italian adventurer. Au fond there seems to be much in [it] of [Henry James's] “The Wings of the Dove” and your anecdote of the Dobbs girl who became infatuated with the Neapolitan boatman. The play is a long hymn of love, profane love, of course, most pagan. It fairly limps along until it comes to a love-scene, Helen and Dario, or the Baroness and Dario, and then it develops some of the most exquisite and tender conversations . . . etc. Strange to say, Flora Hypatia Storey [one of the characters in Thornton's earlier play
The Trumpet Shall Sound
] and Mrs. Helen Darrall have much in common. They are both more in love than beloved, they are both deceived.
⁷²