Thornton Wilder (47 page)

As Wilder's professional life expanded during the thirties, his personal world widened to encompass a variety of new friendships. Of course he still valued his longtime friends—Bill Nichols; Les Glenn; and Gene Tunney, who asked him in 1930 to consider another joint trip through Europe, although they couldn't make their schedules jibe this time. He enjoyed the company of a younger crowd of Chicagoans, among them some of his own writing students—Gladys Campbell, a poet and teacher; the budding playwright Robert Ardrey; the fiction writer Charles Newton.
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“Lately I have been going up to New York a little and seeing people,” he wrote to Sibyl Colefax in November 1932. “My best friends
there
(Chicago holds my real ones) are Jed Harris and Ruth Gordon. Lately Edward Sheldon. . . . Alex. Woollcott is a real pleasure too.”
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Sheldon, the well-known playwright, was bedridden and crippled by a rare form of arthritis, and particularly savored lively company and letters. Alexander Woollcott, ten years older than Wilder, was the nationally known author and critic famous (and often feared) for his biting wit and his controversial commentary. (Woollcott's friend Harpo Marx claimed that the portly Woollcott resembled something that got loose from the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.) Woollcott would become one of Wilder's closest friends. In New York, Wilder sometimes played poker with playwright Noël Coward. He became a frequent guest at Woollcott's island retreat in Vermont, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne's country home on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, where Wilder, the Lunts, Katharine “Kit” Cornell, Woollcott, and other weekend guests “lived practically Nudist, eating wonderful things, playing anagrams and falling on the floor in coils” as Woollcott held forth on a variety of topics.
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The lake evoked poignant memories of Wilder's boyhood on the shores of Lake Mendota, Wisconsin, and he took solitary walks just past daybreak, loving the “early mist and horizontal sunlight and dew on the cobwebs” and “the lake's smell, and the particular seaweed moss on the stones at the water's edge and the cray-fish holes beside the piers: that was my boyhood, too.” He had known lakes in England, China, and Austria, he said, and others in the United States, but none of them shared the nostalgic light and the air and the “particular bundle of smells” of the Wisconsin lakes.
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There were other fascinating new friends and acquaintances: “Mary Pickford wants me to write a play with her,” Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon in the summer of 1933.
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He told his family that Pickford asked him to collaborate with her on a stage play for Lillian Gish and herself. “She outlined the plot. . . . The same night I pushed Edna Millay in a ricksha for a mile at the World's Fair. When do I get my school work done? You ask?”
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He had a gift for friendship, and his coterie in Chicago included the city's foremost hostesses, such as the eccentric Edith Rockefeller McCormick. Wilder enjoyed a much deeper friendship with Chicago hostess and arts patron Mrs. Charles Goodspeed. Widely known as Bobsy Goodspeed, she was a personage in her own right—glamorous, intelligent, and passionately interested in the arts. She invested much of her husband's wealth and her own energy as a patron of Chicago arts and culture, and served as president of the Arts Club of Chicago. She was especially interested in music, arranging for Vladimir Horowitz to give a private concert, entertaining Arthur Rubinstein in a “quiet home dinner,” giving a tea for George Gershwin. The Goodspeeds' apartment was the center of many congenial gatherings, and it was there that Wilder's friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas would begin.

Robert and Maude Hutchins also paved Wilder's way to some of his Chicago friendships. The handsome couple had made a splashy entrance on the Chicago scene, although Maude Hutchins quickly demonstrated that she would not be the typical college president's wife. Tall, stylish—and charming when she wanted to be—she was also an artist and wanted to spend much of her time working on her often-controversial sculptures in the skylit studio on the top floor of the president's house. To the detriment of her husband's career, she did not have the patience or grace for large social events, and many university people joined other Chicagoans in considering her aloof and snobbish. But she liked intimate gatherings, and came to think of Wilder as one of the family. He proved to be one of the most loyal friends and supporters of the Hutchinses as their tenure in Chicago grew more difficult and controversial.

Wilder mingled with faculty intellectuals and countless students at the University of Chicago—traditional and nontraditional students of all ages and all walks of life. At first there was some faculty resentment of his appointment, not so much because of Wilder as because of Hutchins's determination to transform the university, and his propensity for bringing in his friends to help him do so. In time, however, Wilder won over the skeptics, and Chicago rapidly became his hometown.
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When he was young, poor, anonymous, and aspiring, Wilder had fallen in love with Rome, New York City, and Newport, Rhode Island—but when he was famous and sought after, and living in the heart of the city, he fell in love with Chicago. He carried on a love-hate relationship with Paris and Los Angeles, charmed by some facets of those cities, repelled by others. He felt at home in certain German cities, especially Munich and Berlin, and the Swiss-German city of Zurich. There were towns and villages, he loved—New Haven and Hamden, Peterborough, Juan-les-Pins, Martha's Vineyard, Monhegan Island. But all in all, there was probably no city he loved more than he loved Chicago when he lived there during the thirties.

In part he was glad to be reunited with the Midwestern landscapes of his childhood, but he especially loved the unique look of Chicago—the lake, the architecture, the sky. He wrote to a friend, “Every morning I wake up and see something very beautiful indeed. There lies the Midway looking like the Great Prospect at Versailles and there is the procession of towers of the University of Chicago, silver-gray and misty and ready for business.”
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But people, including his students, were at the heart of it all. Wilder enjoyed the company of
Chicago Tribune
literary editor Fanny Butcher and, for a time, met quietly and regularly in a writers' group with Butcher and five other Chicago writers—Dorothy Aldis, Kate Brewster, Arthur Meeker, Jr., David Hamilton, and Marion Strobel. Butcher recalled that they gathered twice a month in the home of one of the group,

 

had a bang-up dinner, and then got down to the business of listening to and criticizing what we had written in the interim. We called it our writing class. Thornton's role, he insisted, was as another writer, not as teacher, but his comments were the ones we all craved and heeded. At our last meeting he read us the part of
Heaven's My Destination
on which he was working. Everybody had the same reaction: “Thornton, it's very funny.”
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Wilder entertained a stream of guests during the time of Chicago's 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, otherwise known as the World's Fair of 1933—a pivotal event in his ongoing exploration of the United States of America. He rambled through the exposition as often as possible, especially during the weekends when he was “worn out with talking in public and reading endless compositions and worn out with eating in the Burton Court Dining Hall and making faintly mechanical conversation.” After slipping away to the sprawling world's fair he returned to campus “joyous and renewed.”
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“The Fair is not serious; but it's fun,” Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon. “Artistically it's one big lapse of taste, but on such a big scale that it becomes somehow important. I love it; I trudge all over those bright awkward acres, staring at my fellow-citizens. I see the back side of it: the immense personnel a little frantically earning a living, because scores of my students are selling hotdogs and pushing jin-rickshas and holding information booths.”
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He cheerfully entertained a parade of visitors who wanted to go to the fair during the summer of 1933. “I enjoy the Fair, great silly American thing that it is,” he wrote to a friend. “Scarcely a day goes by without a letter or phone call to the effect that some old friend of mine (or my father's, brother's, sisters') from China, California, Oberlin, Princeton, Lawrenceville, Yale, etc . . . is in town. I can't take 'em all to the Fair, but I take some. And I enjoy it all.”
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Texas Guinan telephoned Wilder for a favor that August. She wanted to take over the Dance Ship on the midway of the fair for performances of
Too Hot for Paris
. The Dance Ship, boasting two dance floors and two orchestras, was anchored in one of the two man-made lagoons gracing the exposition complex, would be the perfect venue for her revue, starring her well-endowed showgirls, but she needed a letter of reference. The fair's director of concessions was former University of Chicago professor Col. George Moulton, who wanted to know, Guinan told Wilder, “if I'm all right, if I keep an eye on my girls—and you know, Thornton, if they were my own daughters I couldn't take better care of them. And all he knows is the worst about me, the headlines and all that. . . . Now if you could write him a letter.” Wilder was happy to oblige, “making an honest woman of Texas Guinan and she got the job.”
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When Alexander Woollcott came to Chicago to see Wilder and the fair, Woollcott delighted in riding “in a Ricksha, his genial stomach pointing to heaven,” and weaving about the grounds. He didn't care for the exposition at first, but wound up “loving it squarely to the square inch.”
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Wilder, too, loved it to the square inch. He was soaking up the American spirit embodied in the exposition, and it was coloring the atmosphere of his new novel. “The Fair is a great big silly
kitsch kitschig
thing,” he wrote to Sibyl. “Bad educationally, bad aesthetically, and yet somehow very wonderful, lovable and impressive. . . . I go all the time, bewitched and warmed and almost in a state of gaseous exaltation. You know me—Walt Whitman's grandson, so sure of the immanent greatness and coming-of-age of the American people.”
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He was delighted when officials of the exposition asked him to compose the text for a “certificate or diploma” that visitors might buy to prove that they had been to the fair. Although they asked for something straightforward, Wilder understood what a special event this was in the lives of many people in that Depression era who had saved their hard-earned money and traveled from all over the country to see the fair. He wrote:

 

Be it known to my grandchildren, and to their grandchildren that I . . . . . . ( John or Jane Doe) . . . . . . was present at the Century of Progress, an exposition raised in a time of doubt and hesitation by the gallantry of the American spirit; lighted through the genius of man by the rays of Arcturus; and that there I obtained instruction, enjoyment and the sense of wonder.
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WILDER HAD
high hopes for
Heaven's My Destination,
a story served up from the delectable smorgasbord of his American experience from 1930 onward—part lecture tour, part world's fair, part Chicago, part “Variety, variety”—a kind of slapstick defiance of the Great Depression and the classics and, maybe, the critics. For the first time Wilder was out on the American hustings, living on his own. At last, no interference from Papa. He himself had stepped into Papa's role, building that house for the family, furnishing it, providing the money to run it. Thornton got his womenfolk comfortably and securely settled, and got out of Hamden and New Haven. He made Chicago
his
city.

He created his own world there, free from the strictures, no matter how well meaning, imposed by his family or anyone else. Despite that early temperance pledge, he could drink as much as he wanted to during Prohibition; spend his own money and make some more; and consort with people who consorted with Al Capone, or British royalty, or American theater wags, or Hollywood movers and shakers, or a fun-loving Chicago crowd.

Wilder's first three novels were set in exotic eras and foreign places, and his fourth was set smack in the middle of the American heartland. Yet time and setting are almost irrelevant in Wilder's early fiction. Literal setting and time seem incidental—ornamentation rather than scaffolding. He was experimenting with setting in fiction just as he experimented with sets onstage. The “sets” of his novels are draped in richer detail than the minimalist sets for his plays, but in Wilder's fiction, as in his drama, character and theme dominate.
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The human personality and behavior, human conflicts, the plight of the human condition form the crux of his work; these universals defy time and place. The personalities, questions, and issues in each of his first four novels could be readily transported to other times and places. People can be lost, dysfunctional, suffering, struggling with how to live in any city, town, village, or countryside—anywhere, anytime. People can die unexpectedly and catastrophically anywhere, anytime. People can test the boundaries of society; can be outcast, alienated, isolated; can love and not be loved in return anywhere, anytime.

It was evidence of Wilder's cosmic mind and vision that he could work on
Heaven's My Destination
and simultaneously read Nietzsche (“Nietzsche has been my great discovery of this last year, my meat and drink,” he said) and translate from German into English a contemporary comedy first produced in Vienna, and from French a contemporary play based on a Roman legend dating to 509 BC.
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Fascinated with world literature and languages, he was eager to try his hand at translating and adapting the work of others. Two opportunities came his way in 1932: The producer Gilbert Miller asked him to translate Otto Indig's
Die Braut von Torozko
—“Not literature,” Wilder said, “but a delightful play.”
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Not satisfied with Wilder's first version of
The Bride of Torozko,
Miller asked him to “alter it.” Miller was still not happy with Wilder's second draft, and then had to shelve the play because of the Depression economy. A year and a half later, when Miller resurrected the project, Wilder, busy with other projects, released him from all obligations. Miller turned to another writer, whose efforts resulted in the script produced on Broadway in 1934, starring Jean Arthur, Sam Jaffe, and the young Van Heflin. The play closed after twelve performances.