Thornton Wilder (34 page)

 

Be ready to get the flash that I am a little of Mlle. De Marfontaine too; and presently you will discover that I am Alix d'Espoli and Marcantonio and a lot of people. If I went through the text with a red pencil and underlined every passage that somehow alluded to my most secret life I should have to resharpen the pencil several times. That's why I write fiction and plays instead of essays and poems: The things I have to say are so intimate that I would be ashamed to publish them under I [he underscored twice] and so pour them into men, women and children.
⁴⁸

 

Thornton could be moved to tears, he had written to Amy in the fall of 1925, “when a great author is praised for some special beauty, above all for some transformation he has made of the troubles of his life into the gold of his art.
⁴⁹
Early in 1926 he resolved with new determination that he would somehow find the way to devote all his time and energy to writing. He would transmute his own troubles into the “gold” of his novels and plays, tapping his recent painful experience for material—both dramatic action and emotional resonance. He would spin gold in the character of Alix and in the epilogue, “The Dusk of the Gods,” in
The Cabala,
as well as in characters emerging in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
and even later in
The Woman of Andros
and other literary works. “More and more I am retiring into myself to write,” he told Amy in January 1926. “Twenty-nine years of material collected—goodbye, I close the studio door; a few beautiful books, a romantic play or two, then goodnight.”
⁵⁰

 

THORNTON LEFT
a convoluted trail of letters and manuscript drafts that make it difficult to trace with precision the evolution of the ultimate draft of
The Cabala
(which he pronounced, as the
Concise
Oxford Dictionary
recommended, with the emphasis on the first syllable rather than the second).
⁵¹
But at last he finished the novel and turned it in to the Bonis. If only his novel would sell, he would tell friends and family good-bye and go “where there's sunlight. And Indians and sunsets and rattlers.”
⁵²
He was trying to work on his plays, “preparing a faultless text of 14 (fourteen) 3-minute plays” for Boni, and, if that firm didn't want them, for submission to the Dial Press and other publishers. The Bonis had planned “to use them as a follow-up book,” Thornton told Amy, but he feared they might have “chilled toward them” over time.
⁵³

“Devil take me if I don't run away to Taos one of these fine mornings,” Thornton wrote to Amy that January. He just wanted to get away from civilization and “respectability and nice clothes and the Whole Social Grimace.” Maybe he'd head for Florida and the ocean, and sunlight, and write a children's book.
⁵⁴
He didn't know “when or how or where” he would go, just that he felt compelled to. “My urge to go comes from way within and the ‘way within' knows just what it is doing,” he wrote.
⁵⁵

He was weary of his life at Princeton to the point of illness—“the ‘nice' people, the cultivated conversations, the academic tone—do not permit me to be simple or sincere.”
⁵⁶
He was inordinately restless, wishing he could “say a long farewell to all civilization” and “return to ocean, sun and sleep.”
⁵⁷
He let his family know how he was feeling—and was soon inundated with letters urging him to come home for a visit. He went, stepping into a family drama that rivaled most of the scripts he had actually written to date. Thanks to his mother and his father, Thornton had a double dose of drama genes—the innate propensity to enlarge and embroider an event in the telling and retelling. His father warned him that the family would “fall to pieces financially at any moment” should Amos Parker Wilder retire or die; therefore it was Thornton's duty to get that M.A. so he could draw a salary for the rest of his life. His mother, hearing Thornton threaten to go to live in a Cuban village described in the February 1926 issue of
Scribner's
Magazine
, fell into “hallucinations of snakes, revolutions, typhoid and the Inquisition.” Dr. Wilder opined that an act of God could, at any moment, “easily precipitate the family into such straits that it would require a steady salary” from Thornton to provide food and shelter.
⁵⁸
Thornton reflected that his father's chronic financial anxiety and caution amounted to a “mania, a distortion of essential values that I can excuse only in him who has worked so long & faithfully at dreadful tasks and still must way beyond the age when most men can begin to sit back. He is a dear soul, but with his two blind eyes—propriety and prudence—awfully hard to talk with.”
⁵⁹

Thornton spent several days with his family, listening to their pleas that he not abandon Princeton and civilization and life in general. Somehow he left New Haven in better spirits, and set about making some practical changes in his life: dropping the course he hated at Princeton and substituting a course “worthy of a human's time”—Old French; promising his parents he would finish the academic year; meeting with his publishers in New York to see the book jacket and blurbs for
The Cabala.
While he was in New York he had a brief visit with the actor Glenn Hunter, he told Amy, describing Hunter as someone he used to know in the army, “long before he was famous.”
⁶⁰

That winter Thornton and Amy waged a tug-of-war over their relationship. She idealized him, he told her, and described him in “rosy-tinted phrases” as if she had “invented someone.” Here was the reality, he wrote to her: “There is a graduate student, harassed, prematurely aging, lazy, talkative but ill-informed, too analytical for many friendships, always hankering for friendships he can't have etc etc.” She had simply transformed him into a fantasy, “with all the ‘colors' ” of her “beautiful nature.”
⁶¹
Undeterred, she wanted to see him, and they met occasionally for lunch or dinner—but Thornton was increasingly uncomfortable about the secrecy of their meetings. They should not make any clandestine plans, for the “very implication” of secrecy had in it “the power to pain other people.” Perhaps they should “work towards a kind of resignation to not seeing one another for a while,” he wrote to her.
⁶²
“I would like nothing better than to see you often,” he wrote in late February; “to come and go naturally in your home. But that is only possible if I am a friend of the group. I want to be liked and understood and welcomed by Mr. Wertheimer, and the children and the neighbors.”
⁶³
He wanted their friendship to last but he rebelled “at anything that faintly looked like subterfuge,” especially because it could ruin their “lifetime friendship.”
⁶⁴

He was “in a bad way” emotionally and intellectually that winter, desperate for “some repose somewhere,” he told her:

 

My inner life is so exciting that it refuses to take rests: the book, the next book, my hatred of the classes, my discouragement with myself, the high-pitched table conversations. I sleep pretty well, but every now and then there are hours when I stare into the darkness and my crazy mind goes on jangling, not thinking but merely running over its cheapest gramophone records. My friends tell me I am getting nervous twitches around the eyes and mouth. I must calm down, somehow.
⁶⁵

 

Thornton kept up his correspondence with Rosemary Ames throughout the spring of 1926, in large part because she was an antidote to the burdens of his schedule and the demands other people made on him. He signed his letters “affectionately” and “Ever devotedly,” asked for her photograph, and teased her about the “host of knights” and “scores of elegant young men” who admired her and surrounded her wherever she was.
⁶⁶
“Just when I, through drudgery, and disappointed literary hopes, and divers cares, was stumbling into a premature middle age,” he wrote to her, “you came along and made me make one more attempt to be simple and healthy and carefree.”
⁶⁷

He gave her advice about her future, which she largely ignored. Despite his criticism of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts as a school that turned out “good slick competent Broadway actors” rather than “actors that work from within from a long painstaking experimental technique,” Rosemary enrolled in the academy and went on to a modest stage and film career.
⁶⁸
Their relationship gradually became a comfortable friendship, with Thornton, more often than not, giving avuncular advice whenever she asked him for it.

He hoped to spend Easter of 1926 in New Haven, staying for about six days and seeing “almost no one” so that he could rest, take long walks, wait somewhat apprehensively for the “first reviews of an outgrown book,” and work on a new one.
⁶⁹
The “outgrown book” was
The Cabala
; the new one, still in its early stages, was
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
He had made an inventory of all the plays he had “ever completed—eight full length plays in all, plus all the three-minute playlets.
⁷⁰
Novels and plays aside, he had to carry on his graduate work at Princeton. He enjoyed his literature course with “dear” Louis Con, distinguished author, scholar, and professor of French literature, who appreciated Thornton's work in return.
⁷¹
It was in Professor Con's class that Thornton had the idea for one of the first scenes in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

 

IN LATER
years Thornton was frequently quoted as saying that of his generation of writers, he was the only one who didn't go to Paris. Actually he went to Paris before many of the others but stayed a shorter time, yet still managed to find that favorite literary haunt, Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, and to meet Joyce, and to begin his first novel in a shabby hotel room in the summer of 1921. In Paris he had set out to re-create the Rome of his recent experience, fused with the Rome of his classical studies and his rich imagination. He had worked on the emerging story in fits and starts over the next five years, carving out time when his teaching, his summer work, and his other writing permitted, “but always with the sinking feeling that nowhere a publisher or friend would read it,” he confessed to Professor Wager.
⁷²
The Bonis and Lewis Baer had proved him wrong.

Early in the composition process he had developed a manuscript titled
The Memoirs of Charles Mallison: The Year in Rome
, replete with footnotes elucidating references in the story and citing another imaginary memoir,
The Boy Sebastian,
also by the fictitious Charles Mallison, published by the imaginary “Soochow Press in Soochow, China in 1913 in six unbound folio volumes.”
⁷³
There were other tentative titles for the novel along the way, including
Notes of a Roman Student
,
Roman Memoirs
, and
The Trasteverine
.

“Great long stretches of my Roman Memoirs are now done,” Thornton had written to his mother in 1923. “I am not ashamed of it.”
⁷⁴
He had struggled with form and style, and found it difficult, he wrote, to combine “the real and the fantastic.” At one point he had experimented with a few pages of a new novel “based on the survival of Greek divinities into modern Roman society” but set that aside and incorporated the idea of surviving dieties into
The Cabala
:
One of the novel's principal characters, Miss Elizabeth Grier, believes that the members of the Cabala are actually reincarnations of Olympian gods.

Readers of
The Cabala
have frequently found in the novel traces of Proust or James or Edith Wharton, and Thornton acknowledged Proust's influence, along with that of Saint-Simon, La Bruyère, Paul Claudel, Ernest Renan, Lytton Strachey, and Mme de Sévigné, who would surface dramatically in his next novel in the guise of one of the main characters. Yet it is significant that during the last year of his work on
The Cabala
, Thornton was analyzing James Joyce's
Ulysses,
struck most by two devices Joyce employed—in form, an intricately, deliberately constructed “architecture,” and in substance, an abundance of free-ranging themes, and allusions to everything under the sun.

The novel Thornton crafted was held together more by a fragile scaffolding than by the sturdy timbers and beams of structural, architectural design. The intertwined characters and episodes that he imagined play out freely with Rome as the stage, all witnessed by a narrator, a young American known to us only by his nickname, Samuele. The lovelorn Alix, princess d'Espoli, named him after her dog, a “beautiful setter” who “spent all his life sitting around on the pavement watching us with a look of most intense excitement.”
⁷⁵
Why Samuele? Asked that question many years later, Thornton wrote that he thought the choice was connected to the biblical child Samuel: “Speak Lord, I hear.”
⁷⁶

Ultimately the novel was organized into five books. “First Encounters” introduces Samuele and an American scholar, James Blair, who meet on a crowded train bound for Rome. Through Blair we hear about the members of the Cabala, four of whom warrant their own books within the novel. According to Blair, they are rich, influential, powerful, bored, lonely, and intellectually snobbish, with a hatred and contempt for what is new. “Here's a group of people losing sleep over a host of notions that the rest of the world has outgrown several centuries ago,” says Blair.
⁷⁷