Thornton Wilder (27 page)

His job secure for a second year, Thornton set out in July for Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, to rest, write, and spend some time with Charlotte, who had returned from Europe and was working in Boston. En route he stopped in Newport, Rhode Island, to “look at the old battlefield” at Fort Adams.
⁴⁹
He decided to stay in Newport for a while. For four dollars a week, he rented a room in the small dormitory atop the Newport YMCA, where he enjoyed “abundant showers, clean beds” and the use of a swimming pool and gym. “Every day in the Gym I can be found hurling crowbars and fleeing among the trapezes,” he wrote to his mother.
⁵⁰
He swam each day in the high “menacing” surf at Newport Beach, and then stretched out in the sun and sand to read—or to think about nothing at all. He summed up the atmosphere in a letter to Charlotte: “I have a cheap little clean room, an intimate typewriter, a thousand vistas of an almost-Italian sea, the neighborhood of the Rich, excellent surf-bathing, and the use of a well-equipped Gym all to myself, an opportunity I am really using, and at whose results you will be pleased.”
⁵¹

When he was not admiring the “beautiful and dangerous mists” arising from the ocean, he was enjoying long walks in the “wild and upthrusting” countryside, exercise that relaxed him and gave him time to think.
⁵²
He was only “a tepid believer in the efficacy of long walks as far as mere physique goes.” While he had taken long walks wherever he was—“At Thacher, Berkeley, Oberlin, New Haven, Europe (what glorious ones) and around Lawrenceville”—it was Thornton's opinion that ten minutes of lifting weights or chinning on a bar yielded “twenty times the reaction” of a twelve-mile walk.
⁵³
But those long walks paid off for the writer's mind if not his body, and he was often composing as he strode down country roads, untangling a snarl in a passage or dreaming up a new plot. He also explored Newport, as he had Berkeley, Rome, and Paris, until he felt he knew almost every inch of the place. Since Rome, he had habitually “excavated” the cities and towns he visited, absorbing their culture; probing their history, sociology, and psychology; wooing the people he met along the way into conversation and camaraderie, however temporary.

Sitting at an Underwood typewriter in his room at the Y, Thornton worked for several hours each day typing the novel he had been writing in fragments of time over the past year. He detoured briefly to polish “A House in the Country,” a short story inspired by Chekhov.Thornton wrote a poignant account of a lonely clerk in a warehouse who had dreamed since boyhood of having a “big old house in the country and of filling it with relatives and friends over whom he saw himself playing the part of the benignant despot.” In the gentle progression of the story, Old Malcolm gradually slips from the sad drudgery of his real world into the companion-filled fantasy of his dream world.
⁵⁴
The tightly focused, understated story is a quiet counterpoint to the ambitious extravagance of Thornton's unfolding novel. “I will try and place it somewhere,” he wrote to his mother, “but whether it is placed or not, it should have given pleasure to the little republic of Wilders.”
⁵⁵

To help pay his summer expenses, Thornton posted an advertisement in the local newspapers, seeking a summer job. “TUTORING,” it read. “An instructor in one of the foremost preparatory schools and a recent Yale graduate is willing to serve as tutor in French, English or Latin.”
⁵⁶
Meanwhile, as he typed, he was revising draft number six of the novel he was calling
The Trasteverine
, and “already a thousand and one felicities have been added and three thousand
gaucheries
cast out,” he said.
⁵⁷
It was set in Rome, and he needed books to augment his imagination and memory—Dante in Italian; Sidney Colvin's
Life of Keats—
but to his dismay he found the local public library sparsely equipped for serious writers. He was reading English biographer and critic Lytton Strachey, and took to heart Strachey's intimations about fusing “a host of disparate details” under one common trait “in order to give an impression of rich complicated romantic life.”
⁵⁸
Thornton was casting about on the wide seas of his reading, “fishing” for his own style and voice—and Strachey's words set him to practicing, and then incorporating such richly complex sentences into his novel.

His father had in the past, half in jest, cautioned his brilliant children about carving cherrystones when they were writing. Dr. Wilder may have had in mind the intricate, minuscule carvings some Asian and Western artists wrought on actual cherrystones, or he may have been thinking of certain metaphorical references to literary figures. One of his favorite writers, Samuel Johnson, had observed that John Milton was “a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock but could not carve heads upon cherry stones.”
⁵⁹
Depending on how one regarded a carved cherrystone, such an art could be a boon or a handicap. Thornton was carving some cherrystones, he confessed to his father that July of 1922, and he owed it to Lytton Strachey, sending along an example from his novel in progress. The passage, slightly revised, would appear in print that September in a new literary journal, the
Double Dealer,
published in New Orleans from January 1921 until May 1926. The magazine published the early work of William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, and Ezra Pound, as well as Thornton Wilder. He sent off a short piece to the
Double Dealer
almost before the ink was dry in July, and the magazine—which he had never even seen—published it in September. Titled “Sentences,” and inspired by Rome, Dante, and Lytton Strachey, this one-page appearance marked Thornton's first published work after Yale.
⁶⁰

Just as Thornton's three-minute playlets were finger exercises in drama, these “Sentences,” stimulated by his reading of Strachey, were finger exercises in prose, part of Thornton's intensive practice in the craft of fiction. He liked the immediate gratification of publication, as well as this advance exposure for his emerging novel.

He sent part of the flourishing manuscript off to the
Dial
in August. In a brief letter he offered the editors the first book—“ten to twelve thousand words”—of
The Trasteverine,
the current title of his “series of imaginary memoirs of a year spent in Rome.” He added a disclaimer: “These give the appearance of being faithful portraits of living persons, but the work is a purely fanciful effort in the manner of Marcel Proust, or at times, of Paul Morand.”
⁶¹
Thornton read Morand in French, and was no doubt drawn to his eccentric, often hedonistic characters, as well as his vivid imagery.

The editors of the
Dial
declined Thornton's offering because, they told him, they needed to see the whole. “Well, I can hardly send them books seven and eight,” he told his mother ruefully, “when I have not yet begun Book Two. And I am unwilling to kill myself with the composition of an interminable Book Two without still greater assurance of their using it.”
⁶²
Still, this was an encouraging response from a prestigious literary journal.

Near summer's end Thornton returned to New Haven to fill in for his father at the
Journal-Courier
for two weeks so that Dr. Wilder could enjoy a vacation in Maine. During his short tenure at the newspaper, Thornton stepped into his father's shoes and wrote editorials headed “The Preparatory School versus the High School,” “Preparing for a Coal Shortage,” “The Theatre in America,” and the “The Shelley Centenary”—which led to an invitation to turn it into a longer piece on the poet's centenary for the
Yale Alumni Weekly.
Thornton expanded and polished the piece, in part because he hoped it might impress his Yale professors, and perhaps even help his chances of teaching at Yale someday. Called “The Shelley Centenary—A Notable Exhibition of Shelleyana at the Brick Row Book-Shop,” it ran on October 13, 1922.
⁶³

 

BACK AT
Lawrenceville for his second year, Thornton was set to teach a heavy schedule of twenty-four hours weekly, but he felt much more at home—“settling down and getting so school-masterish,” he wrote to his mother.
⁶⁴
He had thirty-three charges in Davis House that fall, and there were almost a dozen new masters. But even with the added workload, Thornton wrote to his mother, he was “being extremely well paid for being happy.”
⁶⁵

As was his reflex after all the years of the family separation, Thornton kept up a lively correspondence with his parents and siblings. After years of letters from his father, full of affection and admonitions, advice and reproof, Thornton, nearly twenty-five, composed a parody his father found “very funny,” according to a note scrawled in Dr. Wilder's hand on the face of the letter. Thornton turned the tables on his platitude-spouting father:

 

Keep fat and well. Drink lots of water. When you're feeling unwell do as the animals do and eat nothing. Whatsoever things are indisputable, whatsoever things are common knowledge since the reign of Albert the Good so think on these things. If you see a task ahead say to yourself, This one thing I do. . . . Be kindly and impersonal in your relations to people, remember that they have their trials, too; even if a Bishop offers you liquor quietly and firmly turn your glass down. Remember Luther nailing his principles to the door of Wurtenburg [
sic
] and holding to a diet of Worms. You know how anxious I am about the particular perils that beset your temperament. Love, Thornton
⁶⁶

 

ALTHOUGH HE
was “caught in the quick-sands of Teaching” in the fall of 1922, Thornton wrote a new three-minute playlet,
And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead,
set after Judgment Day, when “time comes to an end like a frayed ribbon.” In addition to this dramatic affirmation of the need to protect the self in the face of government, religion, art, and culture, Thornton was caught up in his novel, writing in his few private moments, and reading to research certain details. He was currently engrossed in Pierre de Labriolle's
Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne.
⁶⁷
He wrote a detailed synopsis of his Roman memoirs for his mother that fall. The second book, he told her, featured a “wealthy maiden lady of ancient lineage,” Mlle. Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine. She and her compatriots, a group of royalists (including a cardinal, a critic, some minor royalty, and an assortment of expatriates), begin to plan an ecumenical council for 1938, although most of them know it will never take place. Thornton was embroidering intricate details of setting and plot into the story, including “interior decorating & culinary.” He sketched the other books, or sections, to come in the novel—“the death of Keats faithfully documented and seen through the veil of ‘my' dislike and revulsion”; the story of an American utopian experiment, replete with his “views as to the special way of educating boys with gifts”; his play
Villa Rhabani
; and the story of a “wonder-working Italian woman in the tenement of Trastevere; how at her death her body was sliced for magical relics.” He also envisioned the “deliberate retelling of the strange relations that bound together Cicero, Clodius and his sister Clodia-Lesbia, Catullus, Julius Caesar and his wife, with all the ramifications of sacrilege, incest and every other crime; an incredible novelette lying there to anyone's hand these two thousand years. Don't ask me how much reading is behind that.”
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Some of the ideas he had conceived and sketched by 1922 would make it into his first novel,
The Cabala
, but the “deliberate retelling” of the story of Julius Caesar and company would materialize many years later, in 1948, in the novel he titled
The Ides of March.

But the book he was writing after lights were out in Davis House, and on weekends, and in spare moments here and there, was a hodgepodge—a dazzling, mystifying panorama of a book; a first novel glutted with his intense imaginings, his ambitious artistic impulses, his endless curiosity and prodigious memory, his fascination with history, philosophy, religion, languages, people, and every book he'd ever read. How in the world would he weave it all together into an organic story? He was conceiving this first novel as if he had to pack into its pages all he ever knew, ever thought, ever believed, ever questioned, ever wanted to say. It was hopelessly disjointed, overlarge, obscure, impossible—and he knew it. He confessed as much to his mother:

 

From all these eccentrics and madmen and scoundrels—thousands of portraits—is supposed to arise the hot breath of a life more romantic than Jules Verne—an escape from routine and weariness and stenographer's-anemia, and a reproduction of the feeling that Rome gives you when you're no longer in it. Of course it is only written to please myself: There is nothing in it except what I am madly curious about; no compromise made for people who do not like the particular forms of strangeness and disorder that I like.
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Most of the time Thornton was the teacher and assistant housemaster, doing every duty; endearing himself to students, colleagues, and parents; earning money, as his father had feared he'd never do; and sharing a good portion of it with his family. The rest of the time he was living in the past and in the future—living in Rome—living in his book.