Thornton Wilder (38 page)

Years later, in his last novel, the semiautobiographical
Theophilus North
(1973), Thornton referred to the source of his first full-length play:

 

While I was an undergraduate at college I had written and printed in the
Yale Literary Magazine
a callow play called
The Trumpet Shall Sound.
It was based on a theme borrowed from Ben Jonson's
The Alchemist
: Master departs on a journey of indefinite length, leaving his house in charge of faithful servants; servants gradually assume the mentality of masters; liberty leads to license; master returns unannounced and puts an end to their riotous existence. Lively writer, Ben Jonson.
⁸⁸

 

In his play Thornton transposed the action to a mansion in New York's Washington Square in the 1870s, and drew on the King James Version of 1 Corinthians 15:51–53 for his title: “for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” As the
New York Times
critic described the play, there was a “motley, ragtag, bobtail assemblage” of characters, “each with his or her petty faults and vices . . . a woman of the streets . . . a sea captain who has ‘got religion,' a wealthy Swedish matron who goes through life pretending to be a pauper, and a lunatic pyromaniac.” There is also Flora, the young servant girl who has rented the house to provide a temporary home and some money for the “swaggering young sailor whom she loves,” and who kills herself when she discovers his love is false.
⁸⁹
And there is Peter Magnus, the owner of the mansion, who comes home to discover the sins of his servants, and to dispense justice and mercy.

Thornton did not see his play until February 1927. Homesick, and feeling “awfully unattached and unwanted” after Christmas when his friends returned to Oxford, he began to make arrangements for his return voyage.
⁹⁰
He discussed them in a letter December 30, 1926, addressed to the Wilder family dog, Kelly—“Madam Kelly Wilder,” he wrote on the envelope. Thornton reported that he was “hankering for you and the grand people who watch over you and the only bed in the world I can really sleep in (you sleep on it too and know which one I mean).” He asked Kelly to pass along to the family his regrets that

 

the reviews on The Trumpet weren't more cordial, but that I can't work up much resentment (or even disappointment) for I might perfectly well have said the same things if the play had fallen to me to review. . . . I'm awfully sorry for Mr. Boleslavsky's sake, that's all. . . . For my own rep. I don't mind: The Bridge will bring them around.
⁹¹

 

When he saw the play in New York, Thornton gave the production and himself a mixed review, tilted toward the negative. “There are lots of beautiful things in the production,” he wrote to Nichols, “and the great technical virtuosity of Boleslavsky discovers lots of good things but there are some pretty distressing moments. . . . I don't like the play. It's remote from me. If I came upon it as the work of someone else I doubt whether I would see a grain of talent in it.”
⁹²
To the Townsons he wrote, “Between you and me and the critics the play isn't very good, but its few passages of emotion are so beautifully played by Boleslavsky's little troupe that every now and then I find someone who has been quite stirred by it—that is enough.”
⁹³

He had traveled many miles, globally, intellectually, and creatively, since 1919 when he finished
The Trumpet Shall Sound
and saw it in print at Yale. He was more aware than anyone else of the play's shortcomings, of the gap between his dramatic intention and the reality. The flaws, he knew, were his, not Boleslavsky's or the actors'. But for a tenacious artist, no matter the shortfall between dream and creation, no creative work is wasted. Every play that would come after grew out of every word written before—every scene, every strand of dialogue, every stage direction.
The Trumpet Shall Sound
was a vital part of his apprenticeship as a playwright, just as
The Cabala
was for the novelist.

The Cabala
was still selling in the United States and abroad, and the University of Michigan Comedy Club was going to produce
The Trumpet Shall Sound
in March. Thornton hoped to persuade Samuel French to publish an acting edition for the potentially lucrative amateur theater market. But for the time being, until
The
Bridge
was delivered to the Bonis, Wilder the novelist had to take precedence over Wilder the dramatist, and Wilder the wage earner had to come first of all.

18

DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

I don't write in leisure. I don't write from any aspect of my life that daily life can exhibit. I am Dr. Jeykl [
sic
] and Mr. Hyde.

—THORNTON WILDER TO ISABEL WILDER,

August 22, 1927

 

Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Florida (1927)

H
e was closing in on thirty in the winter of 1927, a young man of many facets, trying to coax them into harmony, or at least into some order of precedence. Which was the overriding self; which was the innermost, authentic self? Wilder the loner? Wilder the friend? Wilder the son and brother? Wilder the teacher? The wage earner? The reader and perennial student? The writer? The philosopher? The vagabond? He resolved to give precedence to the writer, and to go back to New Haven for two months, finish his novel in three weeks, and be very attentive to his mother and father, giving them “a sort of autumnal comfort.” At the same time, he would prepare himself “for writing (ten years from now) such beautiful books that all kinds of things will be forgiven me.”
¹

Determined to reorganize and simplify his life, he urged Amy Wertheimer to understand his need to concentrate on his work. “Only do allow me these years to be self-centered,” he wrote to her. “My whole talent will slip away from me if I don't learn to concentrate and cut out every distraction, even the apparently beneficent ones.” He told her he was at his “wits-end.” He absolutely had “to plunge about trying to teach myself to
fix
my mind and really work hard and plan, instead of just muddling through.”
²

He was working on himself as well as his writing. Beneath a gregarious exterior he was often shy, and insecure about how other people perceived him. In February of 1927, he sent a worried response to a critical letter from Bill Nichols: “I have been feared for my sharp tongue; I have been admired with a sort of distaste; only lately have I simplified out enough to be worthy of being liked (by men that is). I don't dare say that my silly egotism is entirely buried yet, but it is with you.”
³
Thornton urged Nichols to be patient with him:

 

When various sides of me come forward that you do not like—the introspective side, perhaps . . . or the sentimento-demonstrative side (I have not known you very long after all and cannot be sure what strains make you impatient); or the I-did-this-and-that side . . . when such things come up, be patient and realize that after a long ill-adjusted awkward age I am only just beginning to be simple.
⁴

 

WHILE THORNTON
carried on the occasional dialogue in letters, there were reflective soliloquies in the privacy of his 1926–27 journal. The pages were also filled with accounts of his travels, experimental pages of his novel, notes for plays he wanted to write, and critiques of plays he had seen or books he had read. He praised Max Reinhardt's production of Édouard Bourdet's
La prisonnière
, for instance, but took the play apart as a vestige of the “whole tedious theatrical cul-de-sac” of contemporary French playwrights.
⁵
He revealed in the journal the core intentions of his work: “Some day someone will discover that one of the principal ideas behind my work is the fear of catastrophe (especially illness and pain), and a preoccupation with the claims of a religion to meet the situation.”
⁶
His literary approach to religion reflected his ongoing personal exploration: “There is the mood in which one distrusts religion because it so exactly fulfills one's need,” he wrote in one journal entry. “You feel as though you had created religion because you wanted it so badly; instead of that it created you. (Most people feel this way about a life after death. Many do not want a life after death, but do want a loneliness mitigated in this.)”
⁷
He was simultaneously talking to himself about life as he sought to live it, and as he hoped to transmute it into fiction and drama.

By February 1927 he was reunited with his family in New Haven. He was slipping into a paternal role in the family, seeking to ease his parents' financial stress, worrying about Amos, Isabel, and Charlotte. Thornton feared that Amos was unhappy in his pastorate in New Hampshire. His brother had “a lonely scholar's and poet's mind” and an uncongenial congregation, Thornton felt, and, although Amos didn't say so, Thornton thought his brother longed to return to Oxford. But he worried that Charlotte's problems were the most difficult to solve. She was teaching at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and when she came to New Haven to see the family, he found her in bad health, overworked, and “high-strung.”
⁸
For once, however, he was not a problem to the family. “I am growing older (and high time) and serener,” he wrote to Nichols. “My new book is finished up to the close of the penultimate chapter and is much simpler and more immediate than the other.”
⁹
He had delivered the first installment of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
to the Boni brothers, who were thrilled with it—but much work lay ahead.

Alternately shy and gregarious, Thornton was meeting interesting people wherever he roamed, “butting into turgid complicated lives,” he wrote, always being “tangential to someone else's whirlwind.”
¹⁰
This description of his own proclivities was an apt summary of Samuele's role in the lives of the members of the Cabala, and that dynamic would show up again in some of Thornton's later fiction—
Heaven's My Destination,
for instance, and
Theophilus North.
In both those novels he demonstrated an affinity for characters who butted into “complicated lives” and attached themselves to “someone else's whirlwind.”

In real life, however, there was a continual tug-of-war: With his peers Thornton was at times still socially awkward and self-conscious—but his intellectual sophistication and elegant manners endeared him to his elders. He was still the loner, the outsider of his prep school days—yet he was gregarious and longed to be one of the crowd. He was a writer who wanted solitude but loved company. He craved opportunities to share his work, but he did not want to impose it on others.

During this time there were women he loved who loved him in return. He continued his often turbulent correspondence with Amy Wertheimer, despite his intention of taking a year off. Finally, however, Amy's persistent letters so intruded on his patience and his need for uninterrupted time to work that he broke off communication altogether. “I asked for a year's pause,” he wrote in a brief, straightforward letter. “I stick to it.” She had refused “a strong helpful friendship,” he told her. “I cannot give you anything else. . . . No one expects you to be happy. But to grip the elements of the situation
as they are
and to try and build up some kind of rich life for yourself from them.” Circling both numbers, he wrote emphatically that he had to accept “the conditions of life as they are: 1. I have never implied that I could love you. 2. That you have a rare home and set of friends to whom you can serve as a great wonderful woman.”
¹¹
For the next few months there was silence between them.

To Amos he wrote, “Beware of women. I'm having a terrible time shaking off one. She can't decide whether to shoot me, herself or her husband. . . . Ernest Hemingway's motto: We have enough trouble with the women we do love, not to stand any from those we don't. It's the one realm where kindness don't work.”
¹²

He still wrote affectionate letters to Rosemary Ames, who was young and adoring, who sought his advice—and who was not a constant challenge. Rosemary's father was still standing in the way of her dreams of acting, and Thornton was her sympathetic confidant. At times, Thornton wrote to Nichols, he thought he might propose to Rosemary, or maybe to Nina Trego. But he had only to count to ten to realize “I hated such responsibilities” and “since I loved both girls so much it must be a sign that I don't love either
enough
, and so I refused and continue a celibate and a writer.”
¹³

Having had enough of high-maintenance women, Thornton turned with relief and new appreciation to his male friends, especially that kindred spirit Bill Nichols. Their friendship, which had begun in New York in the early twenties and had crystallized in England in 1926, would last a lifetime, but it was most intense during the twenties. Theirs was a deep bonding of two men of similar temperament, similar interests, similar circumstances in life. They gave each other advice about books to read, career strategies, and women they were involved with. (Nichols would marry, and would give up an academic post at Harvard for a successful career in journalism, culminating as editor of
This Week
magazine.) They confided in each other and encouraged each other in times of stress or sadness. When Nichols, who was spending part of the spring of 1927 in Wales, shared his worries with Thornton by mail, Thornton wrote back sympathetically from New Haven:

 

Your depressed letter found me in a similar condition. How real they are while they last, and how false: Three parts, chemical (digestion, a metabolism or the ductless glands, probably the pituitary body!); three parts, celibacy; three parts, religion (or whatever it will be called in the next century. Whitehead calls religion—“What a man does with his solitariness”); three parts, mere apprehension about the future, the whole mystery of tomorrow, physical, financial, social etc; and three parts homesickness. The respective appeasements are exercise, marriage, good deeds, hard work, and a return to America.

 

Thornton's diagnosis grew out of his own experience, and he had come to think that some depressions “are so valuable and so important to personality” that you shouldn't “appease all of them; only keep one eye on the last.”
¹⁴
He told Nichols,“I kind of dread making new friends. I like them so and that means letters and visits and thinking. And all life slips away as one loves more and more people.”
¹⁵

 

IN 1927
Thornton was still earnestly casting about for ways to earn money. Encouraged by Nichols, he was working on “the self-advertising business.”
¹⁶
When Longmans, Green, the British publisher of
The Cabala
, sent him a scandalous French novel, Pierre Jean Jouve's
Paulina 1880,
“to translate and deodorize for them,” he accepted the offer immediately even though, he said, “I have a low opinion of translating. It oughtn't to take a week.”
¹⁷
Desperate to earn the money for the translation, Thornton gave some thought that spring to going to a writers' retreat, perhaps in New Mexico. He had heard about the flamboyant Mabel Dodge and her “primitivo-sumptuous colony” of artists, writers, and hangers-on at Taos, and he daydreamed about getting letters of introduction to her and paying her a visit there, where he would take long walks, absorb the local color, listen to music, and concentrate on his writing—particularly the novel, which was nowhere near completion.
¹⁸
Knowing that he couldn't live and work amid all the distractions at home, much as he loved his family, he “engaged a rented room in New Haven so that I could work without hearing the eternal telephone conversations of my women-folk.”
¹⁹

Just in time Professor William Lyon Phelps came to the rescue with a temporary job. He introduced Thornton to Gen. Charles Hitchcock Sherrill, the wealthy former U.S. ambassador to Argentina, who told Thornton that young Gibbs Sherrill had flunked out of Groton and needed a tutor. Thornton immediately agreed to take the job, at a fee of four hundred dollars, and headed to the Sherrill home in Briarcliff Manor, New York, for “five weeks of
Hamlet
and
Virgil,
skating and good cookery.”
²⁰
The money he earned would pay his living expenses for a while, with funds left over to hire a typist to prepare the final manuscript of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
and to have a publicity photograph made. By mid-March he was as sick of tutoring in New York as he had been of chaperoning Andy Townson in Europe the previous autumn. He was rested and healthy, however, thanks to the long walks he craved for exercise, and the solitude that usually stimulated bursts of creativity. “Isn't it great to feel as tho' you could chew rocks?” he wrote to Nichols.
²¹

He was habitually restless, with an innate yearning for the road, barely finishing one journey before he wanted to embark on the next. He acknowledged that he was living a “crazy vagabond life.”
²²
Maybe he would go to Taos, or to Monhegan or to New York or back to Europe. For the time being, Thornton wrote to Nichols, he would live in his room in New Haven, with

 

a well-oiled typewriter. A little money and an occasional opera. Delightful family. Tea at the Eliz. Club and a faint smell of incense from the undergrds. . . . Many swims up and down the shore with an awful nice crowd that never heard of Tchekov. A few dances as I reluctantly slip into the younger-married-set—and then, you get back. Hell! That's my life as it looks from here.
²³