Thornton Wilder (44 page)

 

“I
think
I'm going to positively enjoy it,” Wilder wrote to lecture agent Lee Keedick about his forthcoming lecture tour.
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By January 1929 he was on his way to Montreal; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati, Ohio; Kansas City, Missouri; and various destinations in Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.
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He proved to be an immensely popular lecturer—witty and energetic, erudite but entertaining. In his early thirties he was balding, bespectacled, and handsome—looking something like the actor Douglas Fairbanks, one journalist thought, “with his small dark moustache, sturdy, athletic figure and incessant activity.”
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With good humor he endured his baptism as a professional lecturer—experiencing almost everything that could go wrong, and trying to put on a good show in spite of the inevitable obstacles. He had to confront one problem most lecturers never bother about: Some of his first lectures were too short, and he had to work hard at expanding them. He discovered the importance of tailoring each lecture to each audience. He grew frustrated with the press, complaining that “the stuff they wrote is so bum that I'm going to refuse interviews one of these days. One woman in an entirely complimentary interview thought it was cute to call me the Tunney couple's honeymoon companion! And it got into the headlines.”
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Wilder was his own harshest lecture critic. He gave a lecture in Kansas City, Missouri, that he thought was “rotten.” In Pittsburgh he had to compete with a basketball game “going on quite audibly a few feet away.” In St. Louis, he said, his heart sank when he had “to climb onto a platform full of the jazz band's instruments and speak to a dining hall, with wild orange night club festoons all over it, the whole room decorated to look like a coral grotto!”
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There were bad acoustics, and the inevitable mix-ups on hotel and transportation arrangements. Some audiences didn't laugh when the lecture was funny and did laugh when it wasn't, and the size of the crowds was sometimes disappointing. The pace was exhausting: By April 19 he was “pretty well wore-out and looking forward to some sleep and some writing.”
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Wilder built up a repertoire of speeches on drama and on literature—such general topics as “The Relation of Literature and Life” and “The Future of American Literature.” He grew adept at packing his suitcase with clothes for various climates and degrees of formality—a tuxedo for some occasions, a suit for others—although he complained in December about having to pack “Tropical clothes for Pasadena” and a “Polar Express outfit for Michigan.”
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Along the way he accepted the invitation from his old friend Robert Maynard Hutchins, now president of the University of Chicago, to teach there part-time beginning in 1930.

In the summer of 1929 Wilder drove to Peterborough, New Hampshire, in his new car to sequester himself in the peaceful woodlands at the MacDowell Colony so that he could concentrate on
The Woman of Andros.
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“I've found a way of introducing Chrysis and her day into the novel,” he told Isabel later. “A whole new second chapter. Awfully hard book to write, my god, but some beautiful places.”
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That fall Wilder took his mother back to England—incognito, he wrote to Isabel. (He sometimes registered in hotels as Niven Wilder, “very incog.,” he said.)
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In London they went to the theater, and Isabella and her sister, Charlotte, enjoyed some private visits, with “long heart-to-heart talks,” Wilder wrote.
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In Paris they saw Gene and Polly Tunney. Although Isabella's favorite city was London, she enjoyed being in Munich with her son, who delighted in giving her the grand tour of Europe, replete with music, theater, and fine food, unencumbered by financial worries and family duties.

He managed to work wherever they were: “I slowly write Andros and read a lot about the Grk tragedians for my college course,” he said in a letter to Isabel from Oxford.
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“I have been working well mornings in all these cities, making so many changes and insertions that I have to start copying the novel into a new cahier,” he wrote from Munich.
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But the two travelers missed the home folks, Wilder reported: “We pine after you often . . . and say what's Pa doing? And what's Isabel doing? And what's Amos doing? And is Janet happy? We're not perfect travelers because we adore the folks at home.”
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By late November he and his mother had returned to New Haven. “This restless soul got back in due time and entered the Harbor with all sorts of swelling Whitmanesque emotions,” Wilder wrote to a new friend in London, Sibyl Colefax, well known as a hostess and later as an interior decorator. “I get drunk on New York and go striding about as though the city were named after me and the Hudson River rolled slowly to please me. But after a few hard knocks and a few hotel bills I retired to my favorite university town and subdued myself to work.” At times he was uncertain that his exotic new novel would speak to readers. He was assessing the contemporary American literary scene, concluding that “the American flowering, the American maturity is drawing nearer and nearer, though the evidence is all in works imperfect in themselves, like Ernest Hemingway's
Farewell to Arms
, Cozzens's
The Son of Perdition
and La Farge's
Laughing Boy
. The surest evidence lies in the audiences; the reading public is developing beyond all anticipation.”
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Wilder believed, however, that the theater was “in an awful turmoil,” with dozens of “bad plays” running each week and “then being folded in the warehouse.” Most theaters had “lost the courage to be adventurous,” Wilder contended. He hoped that he might write something to counteract that.
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ON DECEMBER 18, 1929
, Wilder signed a contract with the Boni firm for the publication of
The Woman of Andros
, the manuscript to be delivered on March 1, 1930, although he actually transmitted the final pages during the first week of January. Under Dwight Dana's supervision, Wilder's contract allowed him to keep the motion picture, serial, and dramatic rights, as well as the rights to publish a collection of his novels. Dana acted as his agent and attorney-in-fact, and Isabel began to act as his representative for translation rights.

Wilder was determined to avoid what he viewed as the undignified publicity events that had surrounded
The Bridge.
He still regretted the public hoopla about his trip with Gene Tunney, as well as the flashy exposure of the Hearst newspaper serialization of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey—
flamboyant headlines accompanied by cartoon illustrations in newspapers around the country. These two events undoubtedly helped sell his books, but Wilder insisted that “because of the very subject matter” of
The Woman of Andros,
there should be “no faint color of Hearst-Cosmopolitan” elements in the publicity for the new book. “I say as I did for the other book that as little publicity as possible is welcome to me,” he wrote to Albert Boni.
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Nor was Wilder happy about the 1929 movie version of
The Bridge
—part silent, part sound, starring Lili Damita and Don Alvarado, and promoted by MGM as a spectacular romance. Wilder had no hand in the film, which focused on the Perichole and her “tawdry indiscretions.” The novel came through “the movie mill with the usual bruises and abrasions,” according to the movie critic Frederick James Smith, who was not surprised that Hollywood “switched” Wilder's novel into a “hot story of a rampageous dancer,” and twisted “the study of why God cast five people in eternity into a peppy portrait of a heartless gamin[e].” Nevertheless Smith gave the movie three stars out of four.
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As Wilder worked on his new novel he was immersing himself in Greek drama and philosophy, spending time in ancient Greece in his imagination, his reading, and his preparations for the lectures he would give at the University of Chicago. He was rereading Aeschylus and Euripides, and he wanted to learn Greek. He was exploring the concept that Greek religion was divided into two parts: ethics, having to do with the violation of rights; and the mystic, the identification with the gods.
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In his journal he drew comparisons between Greek religion and religion as articulated in the Old and New Testaments, writing that the Old Testament conveyed the logic of passions, and the New Testament the logic of grace. One journal entry examines the parallels between concepts in Aeschylus's Orestian trilogy and precepts expressed in the Old Testament, reflecting one of the basic questions in the novel: What did the noblest type of person in pre-Christian paganism have to cling to in life's extremest difficulty?
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The Woman of Andros
was drawn in part from an incident said to have taken place before the opening scene of the
Andria,
a comedy by the Roman playwright Terence (ca. 190–158 BC).
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Terence had based his drama on two plays by the Greek dramatist Menander (342–291 BC)—
Andria
and
Woman of Perinthos,
or
Perinthia.
Out of the raw materials Terence and Menander provided, Wilder fashioned a tragedy rather than a comedy. Terence's play focused on the relationship between a father and a son, but in Wilder's novel the story is more complex. His heroine, Chrysis, is a beautiful courtesan, cultured and intelligent, an outsider, a stranger on the island, surrounded by the “stray human beings” she shelters and protects. She and her younger sister, Glycerium, are both in love with Pamphilus, the handsomest young man on the island, whose bride has already been chosen by their families. Pamphilus and Glycerium carry on an idlyllic secret love affair that leaves her pregnant. The rest of the cast of characters includes two worried fathers, a contemplative priest of Apollo, some suspicious islanders, a battle-worn sea captain, and an avaricious pimp, all caught in a compelling concoction of myth, fable, and fantasy.
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The young man Pamphilus expresses some of the fundamental questions in the novel, questions that are the subtext if not the core of much of Wilder's work: “How does one live? What does one do first?” As Wilder himself further explained it in a letter, “What is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it? In other words: When a human being is made to bear more than a human being can bear, what then?”
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His Greek studies also led to observations in his journal about the fundamental nature of literature. In one entry he wrote that “mere literature” is simply a “distraction from life,” while “Good literature is observation of life: pictures of its delightfully varied appearance. Great literature is the explanation of existence and suggestion of rules of how to live it. Great literature is the Didactics of life made perceptible to the heart.”
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This last principle expressed his intention for
The Woman of Andros.

His journal provides details about the logistics of his work: the time and place, even the conveyance—ship, or train, or a walk in the woods—where he wrote. Wilder had long been fascinated with aphorisms, and they abound in the novel, and in lists he kept in his journal and among his notes. He gave some of these lines to Chrysis, the hetaira—the Woman of Andros—writing to a friend that she was “developing into a sort of Dr. Johnson.”
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Pages of his journal record his ongoing critique of his novel in progress, details large and small: “Wish I could make up my mind as to whether the
chastity
sentence in the characterizing of the Priest is valuable or nonsense; also whether the opening nocturne is false or not,” he wrote in Munich on October 5, 1929. The lyrical “opening nocturne” in
The Woman of Andros
, first drafted in his journal, was true enough to stay—and later to be frequently quoted as one of the most beautiful passages in American fiction: “The earth sighed as it turned in its course: the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness.”
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He indicated that there were autobiographical traits within three characters in the novel—Chremes, one of the leaders and fathers of Brynos; the young priest of Aesculapius and Apollo; and the Woman of Andros herself. He did not expound on the traits, but to speculate, Chremes resembles Wilder (as well as the narrator in
The Cabala
and in a later novel,
Theophilus North,
and the stage managers in Wilder's plays) in providing exposition and interpretation. Chremes also expresses forthright opinions in hopes of guiding or even engineering the actions of others.

The mysterious priest of Aesculapius and Apollo is an often-detached observer of events, and the occasional confidant of inhabitants of the island, as well as a healer and a celibate (by choice—or by repression or constraint?). There are echoes here of Wilder's own disillusionment about emotional and sexual intimacy. Not only was Wilder the product of an upbringing that left its intimidating mark on his emotional and sexual life as well as the lives of his brother and two of his sisters, but the heartbreaks that wounded him in the 1920s had made him a cynic, wary of intimacy, full of doubts about himself and distrust of others. Against that background Wilder's words about the priest take on more resonance. The priest foreclosed options of true physical and emotional intimacy and channeled his life force into his work. Such a choice could empower the priest—or the artist—at the expense of the man, sheltering and at the same time isolating him from the “unstable, tentative” sons or daughters of men.
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