Thornton Wilder (45 page)

Wilder explored the harsh consequences of unrequited love and forbidden love in his early fiction—Alix's unrequited love and Marcantonio's incestuous love in
The Cabala
; the doomed love of Pio for the Perichole and Manuel for the Perichole in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
; and the tragic, illicit love of Chrysis and her sister Glycerium for Pamphilus in
The Woman of Andros.
The heart and spirit pay a great price for loving where love is not returned, or for loving where love is forbidden. Best to deny, restrain, reroute the love, he seems to say; best to pour the love instead into art or religion or selfless service to humanity.

Like Wilder, Chrysis, the Woman of Andros, expresses her view of human experience “in fables, in quotations from literature, in proverbs and in mottoes.” Like Wilder during the years he was working on
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
Chrysis “regarded herself as having ‘died' ” and she reflects that “the only thing that troubled her in her grave was the recurrence, even in her professional associations, of a wild tenderness for this or that passerby, brief and humiliating approaches to love.” She becomes acutely aware that she is alone, and that this loneliness is an essential part of the human condition. “Why have I never seen that before? I am alone,” she wonders, adding. “The loneliest associations are those that pretend to intimacy.”
⁴⁷
Wilder, like Chrysis, believed in the supreme importance of the life of the mind. She says,“I no longer believe that what happens to us is important. . . . It is the life in the mind that is important.”
⁴⁸
The omniscient narrator reflects that “the most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.”
⁴⁹
Perhaps from his own private experience, Wilder scripts a lesson that Chrysis passes along to Pamphilus in her “strange command” to “praise all life, even the dark.” As a result, Pamphilus “too praised the whole texture of life, for he saw how strangely life's richest gift flowered from frustration and cruelty and separation.”
⁵⁰

In at least two instances the novel foreshadows
Our Town,
the play Wilder would complete in 1937. Chrysis entertains and instructs her banquet guests with the story about the Greek hero who begged Zeus to permit him to return to earth after death for just one day. Like Emily in
Our Town,
the hero discovers that “the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure.” He then kisses “the soil of the world that is too dear to be realized.”
⁵¹
Second, near the end of the story, Pamphilus, the young protagonist, climbs to “the highest point on the island to gaze upon the moon and the sea.” His reflections foreshadow Wilder's
Our Town
: “Pamphilus thought of the thousands of homes over all Greece where sleeping or waking souls were forever turning over the dim assignment of life. ‘Lift every roof,' as Chrysis used to say, ‘and you will find seven puzzled hearts.' ”
⁵²

 

ABOARD THE
SS
Lapland
October 24, 1929, traveling home to the United States, Wilder made a fair copy of his book. Afterward he expressed his lingering doubts in his journal:

 

From time to time the whole book seems mistaken. Is it drenched I ask myself with the wrong kind of pity? Have I let myself go again to a luxury of grief? I remember this haunted me through the writing of The Bridge and I am still not sure whether that is the way the world is. Already I have begun to reduce some of the expressions. This perpetual harping on the supposition that people suffer within. Am I sufficiently realist?
⁵³

 

For Wilder the act of writing was an organic fusion of artistic endeavor and personal quest, as revealed in the last lines of his introspection, when he reflected that without effective irony, the book “must run the greater danger in committing itself to anguish & to the profoundest inner-life—if it fails artistically it will be all the more instructive to me, not only as a writer, but as a person.”
⁵⁴

 

WILDER HAD
been working on
The Woman of Andros
for nearly two years, and as he had done with the first two novels, he delivered the final manuscript to his publisher in stages. By the time he signed the official contract most of the manuscript was in his publisher's hands. He finished the book in early January 1930 at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, while he was lecturing in California. Soon afterward he made a side trip to the Thacher School in Ojai to keep his promise to Sherman Thacher to speak to the students at his old school.

Wilder sought his mother's help when it was time to read galleys for the book because he had to stay on the lecture circuit until March 10. “I begin to think I know why I am doing it,” he wrote to Sibyl Colefax in February 1930. He was lecturing, he said,

 

partly of course to assemble money to pay for the new house and its Steinway; partly to buy the thirty-five volumes of Saint-Simon in the edition grands écrivains de France. All that is true but only vaguely felt by me. I know now that the tours are Preparation. I don't know quite what they prepare for: I prepare and Circumstance fulfills. . . . At all events I am burning out a host of awkward adolescent fears and maladjustments. I am actually serener. And the more people I meet the more I like people. I know America down to every absurd Keep Smiling Club, every gas station, every hot-dog stand.

 

He told Sybil he would begin teaching April 1 at the University of Chicago—“ ‘Tradition and Innovation—Aeschylus to Cervantes,' 40 lectures (including Dante) with the students writing a 6-minute paper every morning to prove that they read the long assignment for homework. It's absurd, but is very American and is exactly what I want.”
⁵⁵

 

LEE KEEDICK
had no trouble persuading Wilder to take on another ambitious challenge when he proposed that Wilder debate the popular British novelist Hugh Walpole, also a Keedick client, on the question of whether fiction or nonfiction “throws more light on experience.”
⁵⁶

“Yes, I'd like to debate Mr. Walpole,” Wilder replied: “Resolved: that reading great fiction and drama throws a better light on experience than reading great history and biography. Would be willing to attack either side.”
⁵⁷

A telegram from Keedick confirmed the plans: “Walpole accepts debate takes fiction side.” Keedick tried, without success, to persuade Gene Tunney to preside at the debates, originally scheduled for February 16, 1930, in New York; February 23 in Chicago; March 2 in Boston; and March 4 in Detroit.
⁵⁸
Wilder soon began to have second thoughts, however. After nine months of heavy-duty travel and lecturing, he was worn out and unwell. The schedule was “cruel,” he complained to Keedick, and asked that the February 16 date be pushed forward at least a day so he could be in “smart condition” for the “ordeal” of the debate.
⁵⁹
It was difficult to find time to prepare for the debates as well as hone his lectures.

Concerned about Wilder's health and stamina, Keedick rearranged his tour schedule to minimize travel, and gave up the idea of debates in Chicago and Detroit. The “easier” itinerary he arranged for Wilder was still daunting—from California to Calgary to Chicago to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to lecture, and then to New York, where Wilder and Walpole would debate on February 16, with the second debate set for Washington the next day. The debates turned out to be hugely successful. A “record audience” attended the first, at the Selwyn Theatre in New York.
⁶⁰
In Symphony Hall in Washington there was a crowd of four thousand. “It looked like a football game,” Wilder said afterward. “It was not a very good debate,” but the crowd “scarcely coughed, while our humble little abstract ideas advanced and retreated in a very sedate combat.”
⁶¹

21

“VARIETY, VARIETY”

My life has variety. The other night I had supper (4 am) as the guest of Jack McGurn (Capone's chief representative and lieutenant) and Sam [Hunt] the golf bag killer. Tonight I dine at Mrs. Rockefeller McCormick's off the gold plate that Napoleon gave Josephine. Variety, variety.

—THORNTON WILDER TO J. DWIGHT DANA,

January 18, 1932

 

The United States and Europe (1930s)

W
hen he was in his midfifties and working on a chronology of his life, Thornton Wilder looked back on the decade of the 1930s—years overcrowded with work, travel, and the demands and occasional pleasures of his new fame.
¹
A few key events stood out in his memory: In 1930, his third novel,
The Woman of Andros
, was published, and he accepted an appointment as a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, where, he said, he taught “for half of each year until 1936.” In 1931,
The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act
was published.
²
His new lecture career began in February 1929 and, except for one hiatus, continued through the end of March 1937. Wilder traveled throughout the United States, sometimes for several weeks at a stretch, lecturing nearly all the way. Then, from 1930 until 1936, he would alight at the University of Chicago long enough to teach for part of each year. Between lecture commitments and teaching obligations, he made trips to Hollywood, Hawaii, Europe, and the West Indies.

Somehow, as he taught, lectured, and traveled during the thirties, Wilder found time and energy to write six new one-act plays and two novels. He worked for a stint doing screenwriting in Hollywood, and translated or adapted three plays, one of which had a respectable run on Broadway. He wrote two major three-act plays—
Our Town
, which enjoyed a huge success on Broadway and on tour, and
The Merchant of Yonkers,
which did not.

His first major publication in the thirties,
The Woman of Andros,
appeared on February 21, 1930, with thirty thousand copies printed in advance, joined by twenty thousand additional copies on the official publication day. For twelve weeks, beginning in April, the novel was on the bestseller list. The yield for the year: seventy thousand copies sold in the United States; $16,000 in royalties for Wilder, not including the $2,500 advance, which he had quickly earned back; third place on the 1930 list of the year's ten bestselling novels. Reviews were mixed but mostly positive, and an advertisement in the
Saturday Review of Literature
on March 15, 1930, published highlights: “Writing of this temper is rare in American fiction . . . ‘The Woman of Andros' is the best book we have had from Thornton Wilder,” according to the
New York Times.
“Wilder's third and best,” wrote the
New York Herald Tribune
reviewer. “In every page one feels that Wilder is writing for the ages. . . . A creation of beauty,” from the
New York Telegram.
³

Of the negative reviews, the most controversial was written by the communist critic Michael Gold, a champion of proletarian literature. Gold regularly used his critical platform in the
New Masses
and other leftist publications to attack writers and visual artists who did not conform to his views that art should be proletarian and political in purpose and subject matter. He was, Edmund Wilson wrote, one of the “more or less organized and highly self-conscious group of the social revolutionary writers,” including John Dos Passos, John Howard Lawson, and others—although, Wilson observed, Dos Passos was “a good deal more intelligent” than Gold.
⁴
A passionate advocate of a Marxist approach to literature, Gold was one of the most strident voices in the contentious discourse in the thirties about the relationship between art and contemporary life.
⁵

Michael Gold focused on Wilder and his work in a highly critical review in the April issue of the
New Masses.
Gold's platform expanded in October 1930 when the
New Republic
published his longer article attacking Wilder and all his novels and plays: Wilder's characters in
The Cabala
, Gold wrote, were “some eccentric old aristocrats in Rome, seen through the eyes of a typical American art ‘pansy' who is there as a student.” Gold intensely disliked
The Woman of Andros
and scorned Wilder's three-minute plays as “pretty” and “tinkling” and presenting “the most erudite and esoteric themes one could ever imagine.” Alas, according to Gold, Wilder was no poet of the proletariat, but the “poet of the genteel bourgeoisie” whose goal was “comfort and status quo.”

After reprimanding Wilder for how and what he
did
write, Gold spent nearly two columns of his four-column piece attacking Wilder for how and what he did not: He did not write with the language of the “intoxicated Emerson” or the “clean rugged Thoreau” or the “vast Whitman.” Wilder did not write about cotton mills or child slaves or murders or coal miners. Gold presumed that Wilder, who in reality had worked hard all his life and worried about money since he was a boy, was “the perfect flower of the new prosperity.” Furthermore, Gold sneered, Wilder was the “Emily Post of culture,” and—in perhaps the only accurate statement in the essay—“the personal friend of Gene Tunney.” In conclusion Gold challenged Wilder to “write a book about modern America.”
⁶

Gold's review set off a vigorous dispute in the pages of the
New Republic.
The nation at large was far too preoccupied with the economic impact of the Depression on Americans' own lives to worry overmuch about whether their national literature should be driven by economics, as Gold and his colleagues contended, or by classical, romantic, and ethical themes as advocated by the New Humanists and others, or by modernism—or by writers like Wilder who wrote independently of any critical school or trend. The tempest at the
New Republic
had its repercussions in the rarefied atmosphere of the literary world, where the “social revolutionists” were attacking mainstream writers and, on occasion, one another. Gold regularly attacked writers including Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Robinson Jeffers, and even Carl Sandburg, whom he usually admired as a proletarian poet.
⁷

On May 4, 1932, in the
New Republic,
Edmund Wilson addressed “The Literary Class War,” writing that Gold's “attack” on Wilder in 1930 “was an attempt to arraign Mr. Wilder at the bar of the Communist ideology.” Wilson pointed out that Gold himself had been the target of criticism from “his own Marxist camp,” having enjoyed “considerable success” with his semiautobiographical novel about the New York East Side,
Jews Without Money,
published in 1930—the same year as Wilder's
The Woman of Andros.
Wilson reported that communist critics had condemned Gold and his bestselling book because he had failed to mention “the mass” and “labor organizations and strikes,” and had written about “merely poor people” and not “proletarians.” Gold vigorously defended himself on principles that Wilder might very well have exerted on behalf of his own work: Gold accused one Marxist critic of being “too dogmatic in his application of the proletarian canon,” arguing, “Each writer has to find his own way . . . I did not want to falsify the emotional values and bring in material that I did not feel. I do not believe any good writing can come out of this mechanical application of the spirit of proletarian literature.”
⁸

Although Wilder made no public response to the brouhaha, he was dismayed by the attack. “You can imagine my astonishment and disgust at the wretched controversy running in the New Republic,” he wrote to Lee Keedick.
⁹
What Wilson and Gold did not know was that well before the flap, Wilder had been thinking deeply about the American experience and “the American flowering,” as he called it in his 1929 letter to Sibyl Colefax.
¹⁰
His
Woman of Andros
was conceived and almost completely written before the 1929 crash of the U.S. economy.

Wilder's first public reference to the Gold episode apparently came in November 1933 during his two-week lecture appearance at the University of Hawaii, widely covered by the local press. Wilder told one interviewer that he believed radical critics to be “wrong in their claim that man is solely the product of the economic order under which he lives,” and that he believed that the “fundamental emotions, love, hate, fear, anger, surprise are common to all mankind, in any milieu, in any age.” He observed that “the left-wingers” thought that “all literature, all life, commenced somewhere around 1900, when they began.” Furthermore, they had not themselves “met the first big test”: They had yet to produce the kind of writing that in “their viewpoint would count as good literature.”
¹¹

“Myself have dwindled to the least fashionable of authors,” he wrote ruefully to Sibyl Colefax in 1932, when he was deeply absorbed in work on his new novel,
Heaven's My Destination.
“Few book reviews come out without a passing disparagement of my work. But I don't mind. I have a rather low opinion of my books myself, but am fairly conceited about the next ones.”
¹²

 

“I AM
to be a ‘special lecturer' in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago during the Spring Term,” Wilder announced to Sibyl Colefax. “Yes, Iliad and The Birds and Dante and Don Quixote and everything. And I can't even spell.”
¹³
During the thirties Wilder's schedule was a jigsaw puzzle; still, he not only worked it out but enjoyed it—at least at first. He explained one of his major reasons for agreeing to teach at the University of Chicago: “The teaching work is really necessary to me; I write very little and slowly and I need a congenial daily routine to occupy me while the dim notions for books shape themselves. Apparently some writers write a great deal and can create a daily life out of it, but others work seldom and have a great deal of energy left over for another activity.”
¹⁴

The invitation to teach came from his longtime friend Robert Maynard Hutchins, a boy wonder, then a young adult wonder, and, at age thirty, a wonder on the national stage as the newly appointed president of the University of Chicago. Like Wilder, Hutchins was a product of Oberlin and Yale. Both men were the sons of fathers who were Yale graduates, and who embraced the religious and ethical traditions espoused by Oberlin (where Hutchins's father was a professor of homiletics from 1907 until 1920) and the intellectual and social expectations fostered at Yale. Like Amos Niven Wilder, Robert Hutchins had served in the ambulance corps during World War I. After the war he was an outstanding student at Yale, despite the hours he had to spend working to pay for his education. Handsome and charismatic, he was particularly acclaimed for his debating and public speaking skills. In 1923 he was appointed secretary of the Yale Corporation; in 1925 he received his law degree, magna cum laude, at Yale Law School, and accepted an appointment to teach there. He became acting dean and associate professor at the Yale Law School in 1927, and in 1928, at the age of twenty-eight, was appointed professor and dean. This was his launching pad for the presidency of the University of Chicago, which he assumed in 1930. In that role he was a catalyst for change and controversy with his vision of cooperative interdisciplinary education and innovative undergraduate programs, and his determination to reorganize the university and to give it a national rather than simply a regional presence.
¹⁵

“Love my classes,” Wilder wrote to his mother in the spring of 1930 soon after he began teaching at the university, “and they're sprouting that affectionate contempt for me which is the attitude I ask of my classes.” He lectured on a range of topics, including
Don Quixote
and quixotisms, and the novel as a genre, working for hours each week to “frantically assemble stuff for four 50-minutes lectures and more.” But he was thriving, as well as getting to know “droves of undergraduates” and, he hoped, winning their confidence.
¹⁶
He worked hard to prepare for his classes. “I worry in my sleep,” he wrote to his mother, “and wake up wondering if I have enough notes to pull me through those eternal fifty-minutes.”
¹⁷
In mid-February, when he lectured on five consecutive Tuesday evenings in the university's “downtown college” at the Art Institute of Chicago, his topic—“Sophocles for English Readers”—was advertised on billboards all over the city. His classes there, like those he taught on the university campus, were jam-packed, standing room only, with people on waiting lists: “Professor” Wilder was a star.

Back in New Haven, as the national economy worsened, Dwight Dana cautioned him about spending too much money and urged him to conserve. Wilder was spending most of his money on other people, however, especially his family. Isabella wrote to Dwight Dana in May 1931 to express her gratitude for his help to Thornton. “How fortunate for him that you can take these cares off him, insurance, contracts & these dreadful tax-problems. He is not very practical and his Father's mental state now is such that we can get no help there. In fact I carefully keep all questions from him as they only worry & excite him.”
¹⁸