Thornton Wilder (28 page)

14

“ALL MY FAULTS AND VIRTUES”

I've been consistent from birth—all my faults and virtues were just as marked in Chefoo and Thacher days as they are now, and by your letters then you seem to have been aware of it.

—THORNTON WILDER TO AMOS PARKER WILDER,

February 7, 1923

 

New Jersey and Connecticut (1922–1923)

I
n his midtwenties—a hardworking, wage-earning schoolmaster and erstwhile writer—Thornton Wilder was still squabbling with his father over money. He was applying for a summer camp job to augment his teaching income, he assured his father. But he still felt like a chastened schoolboy, defensively aware of all his shortcomings.
¹
He was especially sensitive about his father's skepticism that he would ever find “a foothold in literature,” but he plowed on.
²
He began keeping a new journal on September 4, 1922, while he was still in New Haven filling in at the newspaper for his vacationing father. The journal entries were written sometimes in English, sometimes in French, sometimes in shorthand. For a month he filled pages with notes on his daily activities and reflections on his prodigious reading—more of Morand's fiction and Flaubert's letters (which inspired him to write “painstakingly, religiously,” and to compose a paragraph for his novel “describing the fountain at the Villa Pamphily-Doria”).
³
He was absorbed in Proust's recently published
Sodome et Gomorrhe
, which Thornton called “the strangest book in the world, powerful & terrible.” Thornton praised Proust for daring to “open a whole new continent” in psychology, and marveled that although he was a “pioneer,” he was also the “complete master.”
⁴
Long interested in the study of psychology, Thornton also admired Proust's perceptive psychological portraits.

He made a list in his journal of the books he had read or reread during his summer vacation in Newport: Walter De la Mare's
Memoirs of a Midget
; Henry James's
The Wings of the Dove
and
The Awkward Age
; four volumes of the letters of Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century English writer and sometime publisher, best known for his copious correspondence and his Gothic horror story,
The Castle of Otranto.
Thornton also read Racine, George Meredith, the Greek poet Pindar, Jane Austen, and Cicero during those languid summer days in Newport.
⁵
He frequently immersed himself in the letters of Mme de Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal (1626–96). A thousand or more of her letters, most written to her daughter, survive to document her personal life as well as life, art, and politics in seventeenth-century France. Mme de Sévigné's letters and life captured Thornton's imagination and would often make their way into his writing.

He was schooling himself in fiction, but drama was also very much on his mind. Thornton went to the theater in Philadelphia; in Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey; and in New York as often as his schedule and budget allowed. Most often he saw classical drama or new contemporary plays, but with Tom Dickens, a Yale graduate who was the new Lawrenceville football coach, he went to see movies and vaudeville. He was reading Sherwood Anderson and Eugene O'Neill, deciding they both had faults but showed “the same wonderful promise.”
⁶
Most of all he was reading the texts of plays, “seeing” the dramas in his head, carefully analyzing the success and failures of certain writers—and drawing some fundamental conclusions about dramatic technique in the process.

The playwright who most caught Thornton's imagination and admiration that fall was the Spanish dramatist and poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81). Calderón had been a knight, a soldier, and a priest as well as one of Spain's greatest playwrights—considered by most as second only to Lope de Vega, who would later absorb Thornton's avid attention. “I suddenly became possessed of a desire to get hold of a less-known Calderón play and reshape it for the Yale Dramat,” he wrote in his journal September 11.
⁷
Once Thornton was drawn to a writer, his habit was to saturate himself in that writer's work, reading analytically, rereading a play or novel two or three times, taking notes along the way from the vantage point of the critic as well as the writer. He could dissect a work and then retrieve from its remains the techniques or themes he wanted to try with his own hand. As he plowed through Calderón's plays that fall, he found “delightful business” in them, but thought they were too “busily contrived” with as many as “thirteen noisy uninteresting plots.”
⁸

While he could read the work of French and German playwrights in the original language, he had to rely on translations of the Spanish, and disliked having to read a play secondhand. But he grasped enough of the theory inherent in the dramatic work of Lope de Vega and Calderón to decide that “unlike a book, a play must be seen quickly and quick projection in writing counts. Ibsen mulled over [his plays] with his sketches too much. I must never write one again without having a scenario first, as melodramatic as possible.”
⁹

At Lawrenceville School that fall, the necessary pleasures of reading and writing were quickly subsumed by the duties of reading student themes, grading papers, monitoring examinations, preparing for classes, and participating in community life. The journal entries ended abruptly on October 2, 1922. From that time on, Thornton's fall schedule was so intense that he began to suffer physically. “I haven't been awfully well for a number of days—nothing localized. Too late up nights and the nervosity of teaching,” he wrote in his journal.
¹⁰
Some days he met five classes, with his “slightly difficult” third-formers just before lunch, and his “really dangerous” fourth-formers at the end of the day.
¹¹
During his rare private hours he tried to relax, in company and in solitude. He went to the theater in New York and read plays in his spare time, often daydreaming about translating and adapting work by others—such as Pirandello. Though he had deemed the playwright's work “wonderful” since he had first seen it in Rome, he concluded that some of Pirandello's plays were “unadaptable.”
¹²

For physical relaxation he took long walks with colleagues or students, but most often by himself. Deep in the nearby woods, a fallen tree lay across a stream. The broad trunk was sturdy enough to hold a grown man, and Thornton liked to lie down on it and listen to the woods and water, or to nothing at all. When he needed solace or escape, he turned to music. As a boy in Berkeley, he used to sit “by the hour” to listen as the mother of one of his school friends played the scores of Puccini operas on the piano.
¹³
Although since childhood Thornton had studied piano, violin, voice, and organ, his lessons had been sporadic, often haphazard, except for his training at Oberlin's Conservatory of Music. It was a mark of his talent that he played and sang as skillfully as he did, all the while studying music history and musicology on his own. Occasionally he composed lyrics and melodies—“lilts,” he called them.
¹⁴
He followed the work of contemporary composers, went to concerts, loved playing four-hand piano, savored spending a private hour playing—the piano score of Mozart's
Così fan tutte
on one day, and on another, trying to find “almost in vain, the beauties that are universally reported to lie in the Slow Movement of the [Bach] Italian Concerto.”
¹⁵
After Charlotte had visited Thornton in Rome in 1920, she wrote to her mother about his erudition: “If he goes on being educated much longer, there won't be anyone left in the world of sufficient prestige in his eyes, to give him his ‘come-up-ance.' ”
¹⁶

He had his faults and virtues, Thornton knew—and he regarded his faults with an anguish even greater than that provoked by his father's letters. He knew he was a dilettante, knew he was self-absorbed, knew he could focus single-mindedly on his interests and enthusiasms at the expense of other people, knew he could impose those enthusiasms on other people, knew he could be so excessively, reflexively polite that he could seem hypocritical and insincere. He knew he had a history of poor understanding and management of money, but he was working earnestly on that fault, and was stretching his salary in order to help his family. And he was in a frequent ferment about religion—pulled to the mystics and classical Catholic literature and liturgy, open to philosophy, rebelling against the conventional Christianity of his youth, searching for a spiritual compass. He had come to believe that “Christianity has already strangled itself with its own inherent poisons and will have to be born again in a new quarter.”
¹⁷

As for his virtues, he believed that he was loyal, faithful, trustworthy, generally honest, eager for love and approval—and dutiful to a fault. He was trying to become a better teacher, and did not need his father's advice about that. Dr. Wilder hoped Thornton would leave his spiritual mark on each boy. He did not want his son to be “the graceful figure, cigarette in hand, to whom the little mutes, frightened, hopeful, nevertheless come in the holiness of childhood—only to go down the corridor empty!”
¹⁸
Thornton in his midtwenties understood that his father's “scandalized air” in reprimanding his children could be “pretty much assumed for our improvement.”
¹⁹

Most of all Thornton was determined to become a better writer. He searched earnestly for what he later described, in reference to James Joyce, as “his own subject, his myth-theme, hidden from him, but prepared for him every hour of his life, his
Gulliver's Travels,
his
Robinson Crusoe.
”
²⁰
Faults and virtues aside, Thornton was at twenty-five an educated man, cultured, informed, highly civilized. His parents had certainly done their part in that process, as had Sherman Thacher; Charles Wager; Canby, Tinker, Phelps, and a few others at Yale; his experiences in Rome and Paris; and the countless books he consumed over the years. Yet Thornton had always been his own best teacher.

Unfortunately he had little time to write, giving himself up to the school routine and the demands of his students, finding teaching to be easier in the second year than in the first, but still feeling intensely “burdened with more administrative trifles”—keeping attendance and tardy rolls, and rewards and punishment records for Davis House, being called “hither and thither” until he had “the illusion of being a Secretary for Foreign Affairs or a Wall Street magnate.”
²¹
In addition to all his other duties, Thornton joined his parents in trying to keep the far-flung Wilders apprised of each other's activities. Amos was still writing poetry and studying theology at Oxford, and taking rigorous bicycle trips through Italy on his vacation. During the 1921–22 academic year he had lived with his mother, Isabel, and Janet in a rented house on Chalfont Road in Oxford. Then Amos moved into an apartment and Isabella and the girls moved on to London. Isabella had been living in England since 1921, and wanted to spend some time in Italy and France, but in the spring of 1923, her husband urged her to return to the United States to care for her mother, whose health was beginning to fail. Besides, he teased in a letter to Charlotte, “Mt. Carmel must begin to wonder if it is really true that I hit her over the head with a talking machine and have a wife in Puxatawney [
sic
].”
²²

Isabella dreaded giving up her comparative freedom and going back to the drafty old “tumbledown house” in Mount Carmel where they had been living, with its wallpaper coming off “in ribbons,” its wooden beams and floors “powdering into decay,” and its frequent invasion by a “migration of ants.” Never mind that the house was surrounded by blooming hydrangeas in the spring and summer—it was a nightmare to keep up. The family called it alternately Hydrangea House and the Sleeping Giant, and Dr. Wilder and Thornton promised Isabella that if she would come home she would never have to live there again.
²³

Dr. Wilder, meanwhile, traveled, made speeches, and held down his editorial post in New Haven, sharing with the family letters “from unknown or prominent readers of his editorials who have been struck or touched by certain passages,” Thornton reported to his mother. He was always eager for news from London and pictures of his sisters. Eleven-year-old Janet was growing tall, and showing a strong interest in science and in horses. With all her brothers and sisters writing and publishing, Thornton teased, he would not be surprised if Janet wrote a book of reflections of a horse lover, calling it
Yeas and Neighs.
²⁴

Isabel, now in her early twenties, studied Old English embroidery and design at the Oxford City-County Council School, and audited a “celebrated course” in Restoration drama at Lincoln College as well as an English literature course at Christ Church. She also took an acting course at the Ben Greet Acting School in London, run by the famous British Shakespearean actor-director whose company toured popular productions of Shakespeare's plays in the United States. Isabel played a “walk-on part for two weeks when the Ben Greet Company played a 2-week tour” in Oxford.
²⁵
She studied typing and shorthand in 1922–23 in London, worked on a novel, and wrote at least two plays—a one-act called
The Empty-Handed
and a play in two acts entitled
At Dusk
, for which Thornton filed copyright protection on her behalf. He praised his sister's efforts, and began to send her books on playwriting, as well as advice about plays to study.