Thornton Wilder (39 page)

 

He was deeply discouraged about his future, and confided his doubts in a letter to his brother: “If you saw me closer, you'd wonder how any life could go on so crazily, at the mercy of this and that chance.” He didn't see what he could do but “trail a meaningless life about from Mansfield St. to some little trip and then back again. I don't marry. In fact all I'm supposed to do is to make books as a cow gives milk and to live as little as a
person
as possible.”
²⁴

 

“DON'T FORGET
what you said about finishing the BRIDGE in a spurt,” Lewis Baer wrote hopefully to Thornton on March 21, 1927. “We are anxious to get it to the printers soon so that we can get a lot of advance proofs.”
²⁵
Nine days later Baer tried again to nudge Thornton to some kind of action. “I am very anxious to set up the little bit we have of the BRIDGE,” he wrote, “but it is rather difficult to choose the type since I have not the faintest idea of how long you expect to make it.”
²⁶

Thornton could offer a dozen sometimes contradictory reasons why his novel lay unfinished on his desk: He had to seek work to earn money, and then he had to do the work once he found it; he had to work on his plays, especially when he felt he was “about to be brought to bed of a tragedy in 4 acts”; he needed to spend time in the Yale library to “verify some allusions”; he was lonely, and he needed to see his family; he needed to be away from his family and everyone else so he could concentrate; he had to work on the translation of
Paulina 1880,
but in order to do that, he teased, he had to study Fowler's
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
from cover to cover.
²⁷

Once he finished his tutoring job he went back to New Haven and tried to finish
Paulina
and
The Bridge.
In late May he received a letter from Edward “Ted” Weeks, then a junior editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, praising
The Cabala
and asking if Thornton had a new book in progress that they might consider for serialization.
²⁸
He sent Weeks “two very untidy portions” of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
with a letter revealing some of the dilemmas he faced as he struggled to finish the novel.
²⁹
There were “two separate novelettes” in the existing manuscript, set in a “ ‘theological' frame.” He had not finished “Parts Four and Five” of the book, and was “all flustered.” Thornton anticipated that Weeks might not buy the serial rights—and he didn't.
³⁰

Thornton had finished the first three parts of the novel, which the Bonis set in page proofs in mid-June—but he was still “all flustered' by parts 4 and 5. Whether it was apprehension, procrastination, writer's block, or unavoidable distraction, he was struggling to meet his commitment to the Bonis, at the same time wrangling over contracts, royalties, and their future association. He wrote to his mother from Briarcliff in March 1927 that Albert Boni had offered him “15% and 500 advance on each of three novels.”
³¹
Thornton wanted to publish his short plays as well, and Lewis Baer had written a letter in April to confirm their oral agreement for Thornton to proceed as he saw fit to publish the plays elsewhere in a “more or less limited edition,” with the provision that the rights would revert to him so that Boni could eventually publish a “complete edition” of his works.
³²

In June, Thornton reported to friends that his English publisher was “setting up” to publish both his translation of
Paulina 1880
and
The Bridge.
³³
He had promised to have both manuscripts ready so Isabel, who was traveling to England on June 15, could deliver them in person to his publishers in London, but this was another deadline he did not meet.
³⁴
By July 25 Thornton was writing to Baer at the Boni firm that the translation of
Paulina
would be ready within “a few weeks,” and offering to sell it for three hundred dollars.
³⁵
Then the project apparently lapsed unfinished, for reasons that are not clear. Any vestiges of Thornton's manuscript have yet to be found.

 

NO MATTER
how overwhelmed with work he was, Thornton was first of all a brother, a son, and a friend. Therefore it was not only the financial and professional imperative but also his sense of responsibility to his parents and sisters, as well as to his Lawrenceville friends, that led him to return to the Lawrenceville School for the 1927 fall term. Clyde Foresman, the Davis housemaster, was critically ill, and Dr. Abbott offered Thornton that position, which he declined, agreeing instead to return as the assistant housemaster. But after Clyde Foresman's death on July 14, 1927, Dr. Abbott telegraphed Thornton, pressing him to accept the leadership of Davis House. Amos Parker Wilder begged his son “not to refuse,” adding that “it would do a great deal to ease some of the problems in the family also.”
³⁶
Thornton gave in. (Abbott's telegram passed through their father's hands, Thornton told Isabel, and Dr. Wilder in turn sent his son “a series of pathetic telegrams begging me not to turn down four or five thousand bucks and residence. So I've accepted. Responsibilities and discipline and red tape galore—but I wouldn't write much anyway.”)
³⁷

He explained his decision to return to Lawrenceville in other terms to Nichols: There was the “rueful thought that altho
The Bridge
is a much better book than
The Cabala
, it is a much less gaudy one” and an “undeniably sad” one, and he had “better not count on too many dividends.”
³⁸
He could not risk his family's well-being on the faint hope that he could earn any money as a writer. In fact he was finding it difficult to collect the money his first book had already earned. He wrote to Baer at Boni in July about the delays in the publishing house: “I have always been very grateful and loyal to you for having discovered me. . . . But my loyalty is being thrown away, if you cannot be normally considerate of me these early difficult years. You have not yet caught up to the January statement; you promised me some of the Spring royalties; and surely some of the Advance on a book of which four-fifths are set up.” He asked Baer to send him his “five-hundred” so they could keep their association “cordial.”
³⁹

Thornton felt it was his responsibility to help provide for his parents and two younger sisters. He wrote to his friend Leslie “Les” Glenn that “with a dear vague impractical family group like mine I don't dare stake on the margin of risk. If something happened to Father. . . . . [
sic
] etc.” But his return to Lawrenceville would be just for a year, he insisted, and “In one more year I should be able to find a real niche somewhere.”
⁴⁰
He also wrote to explain his decision to Foresman's widow, Grace, encouraging her to continue to feel a part of Davis House.
⁴¹

Now he would have a house with seven rooms and a study and a housekeeper, as well as a large garden and a garage. He wished that his mother could live with him. She wouldn't have to run the house, he told her—just be there, and be herself, although he doubted she would agree. She was already begging off, mainly because there was Janet to consider.
⁴²

Because he was going to be a housemaster, stepping into a demanding full-time job, Thornton absolutely had to finish writing
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
no matter how little faith he had in its prospects for success. He went for “a spell” to the MacDowell Colony, where he found Mrs. MacDowell seriously ill. Edwin Arlington Robinson was there as usual; the “dean” of the colony, Thornton called him.
⁴³
New acquaintances that summer included DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, who were on the way to the New York opening of their play, based on DuBose Heyward's novel
Porgy
(his collaboration with George Gershwin on
Porgy and Bess
would begin in 1933); and the writer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who had been sent to Paris to cover World War I for the
New Republic
. She had been gravely wounded on the battlefield, an experience she reported in
Shadow-Shapes: The Journal of a Wounded Woman, October 1918–May 1919
, published in 1920.
⁴⁴
There was “much talk” at the MacDowell Colony that summer about Glenway Wescott's new novel,
The Grandmothers
(1927). “I'm jealous,” Thornton wrote to Marie Townson. “My only satisfaction is that the 3 musketeers aged 30 = Ernest Hemingway, Glenway Wescott and I may puncture the inflated rep's of the previous fashions: the Sherwood Andersons, Cabells, Cathers, what not. You'll scold me for that, but by dint of being modest most of the time I allow myself a little party of conceit every now and then.”
⁴⁵

By the end of July, Thornton had finished his novel at last, and he moved on to spend a couple of days in August with old friends at the Sunapee summer tutoring camp at Blodgett's Landing in New Hampshire before returning to New Haven. As had happened before, however, he was asked to stay on and tutor at the Lake Sunapee summer school. “The usual crazy thing happened: I love it,” he wrote to Isabel. “I take twelve mile walks almost every day; I swim over a mile; I'm brown-black and roaring with health.”
⁴⁶
Amy Wertheimer was in residence across the lake for the summer, and Thornton saw her once a week. “She's resigned and wistful,” he told Isabel. “She always has house guests so that there isn't much occasion etc.”
⁴⁷
But there was occasion to visit Rosemary Ames, and he took advantage of it. She was the “star pupil” at the nearby Manarden Theatre Camp in Peterborough, and he went to see her. They were still affectionate pen pals: “Such letters—quite turn my head,” he told his sister.
⁴⁸

 

NOW THAT
he had delivered
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
what would he “write next, by slow stages at the Davis? Plays, I suppose,” he said. “Another letter from [producer] Charles Wagner wanting to see some and all that. But I have no burning ideas.”
⁴⁹
August brought word from Thornton's publishers that his new novel had caused a crisis in his publishing house. “We are in a quandary,” Lewis Baer wrote to Thornton on behalf of Albert and Charles Boni August 18. “The page proofs of The Bridge just arrived, and the book only comes to 195 pages. We've announced it as a $2.50 book , and really should follow up The Cabala with a book of the same price, but we've explained to you the booksellers' stupid feelings on this subject. They'll take a book, say, Humph, only 195 pages, and immediately raise H.”
⁵⁰
There were two alternatives, Baer wrote: “To cut the price, which may be bad; or to put in 6 or 8 illustrations, which gives it in the booksellers' eyes anyway an added distinction and cuts down on his objections. What do you think? Do you believe the book would lend itself to illustrations.”
⁵¹

Thornton wrote to Isabel what he truly thought: “Boni is revolted that [the novel] isn't long enough to keep up the fraud of a 2.50 book. He wants six to eight illustrations, and the Canadian and Esquimaux [Eskimo] rights. I begin to see a lit. agent to keep Bonis quiet.”
⁵²

The book would ultimately sport illustrations—ten plates, including the frontispiece, by the popular illustrator Amy Drevenstedt. Albert Boni wrote Thornton on August 30, 1927, to let him know that the exact publication date of the novel would be left open until they heard decisions from the Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in 1926, and the newly formed Literary Guild, started in 1927, as acceptance by either might postpone publication until December or January.
⁵³
Harry Scherman, the founder of the Book-of-the-Month Club, had been Albert and Charles Boni's partner in the Little Leather Books enterprise (an endeavor that had yielded more than 40 million books in its time), and Henry Seidel Canby, Thornton's creative-writing professor at Yale, was on the Book-of-the-Month Club board, which selected the books to send out to more than 46,000 members.
⁵⁴
These connections were not enough, however, for club acceptance of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

“The hurrying up of the last pages of the
Bridge
and the new arrangements of Lawrenceville were a lot to assimilate,” Thornton wrote to Marie Townson as he juggled the responsibilities of the novelist and the schoolmaster.
⁵⁵
In a later letter to Mrs. Townson, Thornton hinted at the ordeal of reading proofs for his books: “My mother has long been in despair over my spelling and even my grammar,” he wrote, “and insists on 3 literate persons reading all my proofs after me.”
⁵⁶
By that time the fall term was well under way at Lawrenceville School, and Wilder the novelist had set aside his work in favor of Wilder the schoolmaster.

Many years later, after Wilder's death, Clark Andrews, one of his former students, reminisced about Wilder the teacher—“incurable insomniac, inveterate walker, fanciful conversationalist, friend.” He described Wilder as a

 

tall, thin man, about six feet, with an owlish face, a pencil mustache and brown tortoise-shell glasses which partly hid his darting, inquisitive blue eyes. . . . He was a nervous man—a very nervous man, constantly looking at his watch. His head jerked back and forth, his eyes jumped around as if he expected to see the unexpected happen at any moment.
⁵⁷