Thornton Wilder (36 page)

 

She who is so bright and witty and feminine . . . for the last ten years has had to do her own housework. She is the delight of her friends—the committees of the Y. W. C. A. and International Girls Institute on which she serves (arriving late, with a collie on a leash, wilful and enthusiastic and capable) keep giving her flowers and odd and tender tributes. She has lived through the fretfulnesses of five stormy obstinate children and the humors of a husband from an opposite mould. With her hands scarcely dry from the dishwater she turns to read French, German and Italian. She enchants all the young men and women we children bring into the house.
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Isabella worried about what would become of unemployed Thornton in the fall, and he set her mind—and his own—at ease in late August. He had spent much of June tutoring Andrew “Andy” Townson, whose parents Thornton had met through his friend Robert Hutchins. Thornton despaired because Andy did not apply himself to his studies and, therefore, couldn't seem to “learn a thing.”
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The boy had failed all his college admissions exams and so was at loose ends for the fall. His affluent parents, who had decided college was clearly not for their son, hired Thornton to take Andy abroad in late September, to stay until Christmastime, after which they would situate Andy in the family business. They would pay all Thornton's expenses, plus a stipend of two hundred dollars a month. He would have to miss the opening of his play at the American Laboratory Theatre, but he assured Andy's father he was willing to do that.

Thornton and many others had expected that he would publish a book and see a major production of one of his plays when he was in his early twenties. Now he was twenty-nine, and looking at his novel and plays “impersonally.” “I hope they're well done and well liked,” he said, “but I don't want to mingle with actors and literary people and I fight to keep my life separate. Besides I always hope to earn my living in other ways so that I need never strain to write a word for money. In that way I can always contradict managers and withdraw my stuff if they want to alter it.”
³⁴

 

ALBERT AND CHARLES BONI
were poised to publish Thornton's second novel—with the stipulation that it should be longer than the first one—and they were willing to pay Thornton an advance on royalties that made it possible for him to settle some debts and to outfit himself for the trip to Europe. (He didn't need much, he wrote: “Three suits, a tuck, an overcoat, a raincoat, never more than five books, a sweater . . . some linen and some MSS. Behold my baggage in this world.”)
³⁵
He planned to go to New York to meet with the Bonis, and then with Boleslavsky about
The Trumpet Shall Sound,
now in rehearsals and scheduled to open at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York in December.

As he finished his preparations for the journey, Thornton wrote to his father, who was vacationing on Squirrel Island, Maine: “I wish I were out on the granite ledges of Squirrel with you, dear Papa, best of men—I'm twenty-nine and every year makes me understand and love you more, and just one tiny wait more and I'll be a help and not a hindrance. Be patient with me 7 x 7 + 1 times and things will clear. Your dreadful child Thornt.”
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BY MOST
measures, a young novelist, playwright, and teacher on a subsidized trip abroad might have felt a reasonable degree of pleasure. This was not the case for Thornton Wilder in October 1926, however, as he recorded in the journal he began to keep in London. By then he had spent nearly three futile weeks trying to interest twenty-year-old Andy Townson in the cultural, artistic, and architectural wonders of England, France, and Germany. Thornton wrote to his family that he was afraid Andy was “bored to extinction.”
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This usually affable young man was not inclined to spend his time or his generous allowance on edification in Europe. Andy and his chaperone/tutor were hopelessly incompatible travel companions, and Thornton had enough experience teaching and supervising young men to recognize that Andy much preferred the company of “certain roistering companions” he had met along the way.
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But Thornton had far more patience with Andy than he had with himself. “The impulse to keep a notebook derives from my great restlessness and dissatisfaction with myself,” he wrote. Their journey was barely begun, but already he was eager to be free of his reluctant student, to go to the south of France where he could concentrate on finishing
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
and “relieve legitimately all this chaotic literature in my head.”
³⁹
He regretted undertaking this exasperating pilgrimage. “Why did I ever go into this thing?” he wrote after a visit with his friend Bill Nichols, a recent Harvard graduate and a Rhodes scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. “And now I groan for freedom, and fret, and fester. God knows that just seeing Oxford, and all the business of our good long talk filled me with perfect rage to get back to my fountain pen and commit something beautiful.”
⁴⁰

He shared his frustration with his family as well: “Oh, I should never have entered into this contract,” he wrote them from Rome on October 25, 1926. “I should have had the faith to come over alone. I am punished. My beautiful book would have been written by now instead of festering in me.”
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It was a great relief when Andy's brother Chick appeared in London and the brothers set off on daily excursions of their own. In those free hours Thornton walked the London streets thinking “absurdly, in ‘fine phrases,' ” he wrote in his journal. “I am alone most of the day in picture galleries and churches and I eat most of my meals alone, and all this talking to myself has become bad for me.”
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He was “nervously self-conscious” about his appearance in London as well, he wrote, and “a little so everywhere.”
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He was nearly thirty and belatedly, in his mind, gaining some recognition as a playwright and novelist. But he had learned all too quickly that even with good reviews and modestly good sales for a first novel,
The Cabala
was not going to produce a significant financial return, and he had doubts that his second novel would either. Lonely, self-conscious, restless, dissatisfied, he wanted above all to write, and he knew that this trip to Europe only temporarily deferred the problem of earning a living.

For the time being, however, there was money in his pocket, and his first obligation was to Andy. Thornton was known to his friends as a superb tour guide in Europe, but his best efforts to plan tours and events to interest Andy fell flat. Thornton had envisioned a journey that was “all adventure and all friendship and all important discoveries in art and archeology,” but in fact Andy hated “museums and churches and walks and things.” Because Andy loved to fly, they did so whenever possible. They flew across the English Channel, and Thornton found air travel “a very impressive experience,” he wrote home. “Thank you for carrying on all my insurance these days,” he wrote to his father back in New Haven. “I have to ride in airplanes so often with Andy that you may get the dividends before you know it.”
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Thornton's new journal became the repository for scenes and ideas for
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
The novel was growing slowly, but he found that whole passages could be inspired by a walk, a fragment of a symphony, an artistic detail in a cathedral or museum. Still he was adrift, uncertain about how to plan the next few months of his life, much less the next few years. He had made no firm commitment to teach or to study or to take any sort of job that might steadily, dependably pay his bills. He reflected in his journal that he had three “contracted books” for the Bonis:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, he noted, followed by an edition of
The Trumpet Shall Sound
(which would not materialize, as it turned out); and an edition of “plays long and short” which would appear with another publisher in 1928 as
The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays,
a collection of the three-minute playlets. But on his occasional solitary walks, doubting that he could make money writing, Thornton looked squarely into the future and decided that he would have to combine writing “with some kind of college work.” After he finished the books he had promised to the Boni brothers, he reflected in his journal, “I must write a book of literary criticism that will get me a special lectureship at Yale or Harvard. Then can I be the first American don in Oxford or Cambridge?”
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He could be fatalistic—or perhaps, as the grandson of a Presbyterian clergyman, predestinarian in his views: “In fact, all my reading in cynical authors has not robbed me of the sensation of being a disobedient and foolish actor in a play whose author (in spite of me) gives me beautiful scenes and permits [me] to confront some rare and noble
dramatis personae
.”
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THORNTON AND
Andy made brief stops in Rome, Naples, and Paris, where Thornton called on Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company. Beach introduced him to Ernest Hemingway, whom Thornton described to his mother as “one of the two other good novelists of my generation, the 3rd being Glenway Wescott.” Wilder and Hemingway had a “grand long talk.”
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They decided that their “immediate predecessors”—Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather—were “quite inadequate.”
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Thornton gave Hemingway a copy of
The Cabala
.
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In Rome he visited the American Academy, where he was warmly welcomed by the director. “The book has been read by all with a sort of scandalous delight,” Thornton wrote to his family. “Even old Romans take it as the hot stuff from the secret circles!”
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He also had a reunion with Lauro De Bosis, who talked to Thornton about Mussolini, whom he knew well. To Thornton's great pleasure De Bosis had read his novel and understood that it was “preposterous” to regard
The Cabala
as realism. Thornton was sensitive to criticism from friends and critics when he felt that they failed to grasp his intentions in
The Cabala.
“I am mortified that you thot [thought] I put STYLE first,” Thornton wrote to Nichols after they had discussed
The Cabala,
which was being published in England that fall by Longmans, Green. “I suppose you are right; but the next book . . . [
sic
].”
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He appreciated a letter from his friend Harry Luce, and wrote to thank him with some illuminating lines about
The Cabala
and
The Bridge
:

 

Your remark that my C-b-la is more than style puts oil on an old bewildered wound. I thought the book was all about great natures in pain; but most of the reviewers tell me it is about eccentrics in ludicrous situations, and lean heavily on the style. I have buried a barbed sentence in my next book for them: “The Conde enjoyed the Marquesa's famous letters, but he [thought] that when he had admired the style he had extracted all their richness and intention missing (as most people do) the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.”
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With only slight changes, this passage about the “purport of literature”—the “notation of the heart”—may be found in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
in part 2: “The Marquesa de Montemayor.”
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BY EARLY
November, with London, Paris, Rome, and Naples behind them, Thornton and Andy were making their way by train from Florence to Munich. Wherever they went Thornton was the adventurer, imbibing the scenery and sunshine, walking the hillsides (Andy especially disliked walking), visiting with “friendly peasants” in the villages, savoring the food, and attending plays and concerts.
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He wrote to his father from Berlin:

 

By some curious chance we found the one boy in the United States who was equipped to get just NOTHING out of a European trip. He liked England immensely because he could ignore it and sit indoors drinking whiskey with some friends. There are no friends to drink whiskey with in France, Italy and Germany so for the most part he sits in his hotel room, reads the foreign editions of the American papers, and smokes.
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Throughout the whole trip Thornton was waiting “with clenched fists” until he could get back to work on
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
The desire to write was “tormenting the life” out of him, he complained. “Oh god for independence and silence!”
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He sent fragments of the manuscript to Andy's mother, Marie, who was fast becoming one of Thornton's bevy of women friends taking a great interest in his work. Mrs. Townson expressed some doubts about the book. “I am still hoping that when I finally get it out smooth, you will like it more than the C-b-la,” Thornton replied:

 

It is going to be much longer and so varied that there will be parts that will appeal to all moods. You will be surprised to hear that even on the trip I have been able to do some work on it—on trains, at meals, late at night, or on my walks, all sorts of notes, and anecdotes, and notions keep pushing up to my attention in spite of myself, and I am like to finish several blank books of odds and ends of suggestion before I can finally settle down to work hard.
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