Thornton Wilder (50 page)

Although Charlotte thought she had saved enough money to support herself for at least a year in New York, that did not prove to be the case. Too proud to take money from her mother or her brothers unless she could earn it, she would often live in poverty in the years ahead, ultimately sacrificing her mental and physical health to the unremitting struggles of the writing life. Unlike Isabel, Charlotte did not dream about a conventional marriage and family. In her midtwenties she had at least one serious male suitor, and saved at least one of his romantic letters to the end of her life.
²⁷
By her late twenties she had been romantically if not sexually involved with at least one woman, and perhaps others. “No room except to say every thought of you is held close in my memory—that the blessing of your love is around me all the time,” Charlotte wrote to one woman. “Come & be kissed,” she answered. “My love always.” Charlotte wrote again, “Bye, sweetheart. . . . Please know deeply that I love you & am close to you always.”
²⁸

Like Thornton, Amos, and Isabel, Charlotte had innate problems with intimacy. She faced them head-on: “The thing I'm learning now is that it would be well if, as children, one were trained in the technique of the ‘shock and delicacy' of intimacy,” she wrote to Amos in 1932. It was not easy, she reflected, to know how to be close to another person—“at once, self-responsible, and subtly dependent”—if you had grown up with suppressed emotions.
²⁹
In April 1932 Charlotte wrote a frank and prophetic account of her emotional life: “All my life I have stated my experience to myself . . . often in words. My experience has passed through my imagination and mind; my emotion I have checked at every turn. . . . A Narcissism forced on me. I did not take into my heart any gestures of tenderness given me. . . . Yes rarely, in any gestures of love, did I have a gush of feeling welling in my heart.” She remembered her first kiss from a woman. She was nineteen at the time, and the kiss, she wrote, “burned on my lips for a day.” Yet there was little emotion. “Let me state,” she wrote, “I have never had a homosexual consummation, nor come near it. I was too frigid to even experience the sensation of the kiss often.”
³⁰
She went on to write, with ironic prescience,

 

I have the belief that all my suffering is ahead of me: that my inhibiting experience does not make me seem frustrated, because I have been expressing constantly, in social relationships (never
feeling
the happiness in sheer glow), and in writing. . . . I have intimations of what I must get through . . . or might, that approximate a sudden insight into insanity. . . . I would say I know no one who has been more alone from birth. And who now, at thirty-three, am for the first time knowing I have someone, in two women friends. My own worst enemy heretofore. I know no one (except Amos) who had no mother, no father, no lover.
³¹

 

Through no fault of her own Charlotte had borne the brunt of the serial family separations, often the one child detached from the family, on her own. By choice and circumstance she repeated the pattern as an adult—profoundly bereft and alone.

Amos, the eldest, was scholarly, solitary, and often lonely. He had thought, studied, and prayed his way to some clarity of vision about the life he wanted to lead. He was an effective teacher at Hamilton College, where he served on the faculty from 1930 to 1933, so much so that the college awarded him an honorary doctorate of divinity in June 1933, the same year he received his Ph.D. at Yale. He moved on from Hamilton to become the Norris Professor of New Testament at Andover Newton Theological Seminary from 1933 until 1943. In 1929 Yale University Press had published
Arachne: Poems,
a collection of his poetry to follow
Battle-Retrospect and Other Poems
in 1923. Amos turned to biblical scholarship as he wrote his dissertation—“The Relation of Eschatology to Ethics in the Teaching of Jesus as Represented in Matthew.”

Endowed with the Wilder/Niven drive, but with his physical energy still compromised by his World War I experiences, Amos often pushed himself too hard, studying, teaching, writing, working prodigiously. As early as 1930 Dr. Wilder wrote to Charlotte to ask her to reach out to her brother, who was suffering, the father said, from “nervous exhaustion.”
³²
Teaching was arduous work, Amos found—as did Thornton and Charlotte, all of them college professors in the thirties. “I am very sorry for your overtired state,” Charlotte wrote sympathetically to Amos. “I know well what meeting classes is. I have compared them, in my mind, to restive horses.”
³³

By the fall of 1934, overworked and anxious, Amos was physically ill with a stubborn case of grippe, and again lapsed into a state of “nervous depletion.”
³⁴
To his chagrin his doctor ordered absolute rest and required him to take leave from his classes and go to New Haven to recuperate. He was bedridden there during the Thanksgiving holidays, surrounded by his parents, Isabel, and Charlotte for company. (“Father is getting to be very much of an invalid,” Amos worried.)
³⁵
At his doctor's orders Amos traveled to Florida in December 1934 with instructions to recuperate in the sun and not to return to teaching until January at the earliest. “It seems my reservoirs, so to speak, had gone down so very low that it meant a really long time to fill them up again,” he reflected. He had little physical energy, and could not “read anything solid for any length of time.” He recognized that his efforts to work despite his illness “very ill-advisedly, got to my nerves some.”
³⁶
His physical illness was compounded by the lingering stress of the war. But his long recovery was made more bearable because in Geneva, Switzerland, in the summer of 1934, he had met a young teacher, Catharine Kerlin, from Moorestown, New Jersey. Many years later Amos described the life-changing encounter:

 

As a long-time bachelor into my late thirties, I waited so long surveying the field and looking for perfection that I very nearly became a life-long Benedict. Then the rescue came from an unexpected quarter. Like many reluctant swains I felt especially on guard against red-haired maidens, against Kates . . . and against teachers. But then
this
Catharine turned up in Geneva who not only had bronze in her hair but turned to teaching. But I couldn't help myself. When we became engaged and married in 1935 we both saved each other from a dubious fate. She was being sounded out to be a head mistress in a private school. I was so far gone that I was thinking about founding a Congregational monastery of celibates.
³⁷

 

Their relationship grew despite the geographical distances between them. The miles were bridged by letters, and she saved most of his. From Andover Newton, he mailed a letter to her aboard the SS
Champlain,
due to dock in New York on September 18, 1934. He told her he treasured “very much” the memory of their meetings in Geneva, and would be “very much disappointed” if they could not see each other early in the fall. They had several weekend visits before Amos got sick. By Christmas he was recuperating in a “big quiet room” with an ocean view in an “ultra clean boarding house run by a very motherly and helpful woman” in St. Petersburg, Florida.
³⁸
He and Catharine continued to exchange long letters, and soon Amos was in love. He wanted to send her flowers but held back for fear that at the girls' boarding school where she taught she would have “been in for a general razzing.” Instead he sent her a box of pecans from the Kumquat Sweet Shop in Clearwater, Florida. “If I ever bother you, you just tell me to slow up,” he wrote, “and I will be perfectly amenable. Our relation started off so perfectly that it shouldn't ever have any misunderstandings—as so many; and we can have it so by speaking right out.”
³⁹

Amos was still in Florida in late January, improving, but not strong enough to travel home and resume his teaching schedule. He was living for her letters, he told Catharine, and eager for a reunion with her.
⁴⁰
Thornton wrote to Les Glenn about Amos's illness: “Amos had a kind of nervous breakdown. CONFIDENTIAL. Phobias and tics. Started off by intestinal flu. He feels much better now.”
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By mid-March Amos was planning his journey home.
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Soon after his return Amos and Catharine were engaged. He reflected many years later that he “suffered the happy fate of being married to an internationalist, a can-doer, a nest builder.”
⁴³

 

WHILE THORNTON
was perpetually on the road during the thirties, events on the home front were always on his mind, and the family followed his achievements with pride, although in his father's case, with some skepticism. “Thornton's book a success,” Dr. Wilder wrote to Charlotte after
Heaven's My Destination
appeared in January 1935. “London papers favorable. I presume conservatives not all favorable!” He went on to tell her, “I suspect Hawthorne and Geo. Eliot would handle certain aspects differently and shall tell Thornton so though I have not read it in full.” He urged Charlotte and Amos to “sit in judgment” on Thornton's books so they could advise him of “obvious shortcomings” because, the father said, “the good fellow must learn things. Suffering is a severe school.”
⁴⁴

To Grace Foresman, his friend since Lawrenceville days, Thornton wrote from Chicago to sum up his life: “I still enjoy teaching tremendously, and especially on this campus and in this city,” he said. “My family is all well, except Papa whose health is uneven. Mother still is so attached to her house and garden that we can't budge her away more than one night.” He reported that his delays in delivering his new novel had driven his publishers “insane.” He warned her, “Be prepared for the fact that it's utterly unlike the other novels; nearer to
The Happy Journey to Trenton & Camden
. I hope it amuses you and touches you, Grace! An author really writes for a few friends; the indistinct public foots the bill.”
⁴⁵

He wrote to another friend, offering an apology:

 

A good deal of the book is tough, full of bad words and life's unlovelier traps; but I hope you will see that none of the coarseness is there for cheap display. The subject of the book goes quietly on under the surface din: the earnest humorless undefeated hero trying to live an extravagantly idealistic life in the middle of a cynical defeatist world—a Gideon-Bible travelling salesman. On the title page I placed the motto from The Woman of Andros so that readers wouldn't think it was merely a rowdy comic book—“Of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age”—namely priggishness, preachiness, confusion, etc. I hope it will be somehow useful to a lot of troubled young people.
⁴⁶

 

Wilder mailed an advance copy of the book to Grace Foresman in December, describing its intended mood: “Today I sent you a book that I hope will make you laugh right out loud once in a while, even tho' some parts of it are as sad as sad can be.”
⁴⁷

Soon after
Heaven's My Destination
hit the bookstores, Thornton told Amos that he had “made a slip and got the actual name of a girl-evangelist in [the book], and may be seriously sued for libel” for showing her taking cocaine. “ Sure I'll pay,” Thornton went on, “but won't the trial be fascinating! Me as George Brush insisting on her taking all my money and more and then me as Sir Walter Scott diligently writing novels for years to pay a mountainous debt?”
⁴⁸
Fortunately nothing came of the matter.

Thornton had his own longing for home during those years in the thirties, and he expressed it in a letter to his brother after Amos married his Catharine: “I think of you as having everything I haven't got,” Wilder wrote from Vienna in September 1935. “You have a home, a continuity, a job. . . . I'm longing to settle down, as you have, and start a routine of working and reading and quiet evenings at home. I think I can begin it about next week, but until then I remain a hotel-room boy surrounded by cracked and overflowing suitcases.”
⁴⁹

 

WHILE THE
Wilders lived out their family saga in the thirties, George Brush, Thornton's picaresque hero, was searching for home and family in the fictional universe of
Heaven's My Destination.
As he turns twenty-three, this traveling textbook salesman believes he should already have put down roots and “founded an American home.” He says to an acquaintance, “You know what I think is the greatest thing in the world? It's when a man, I mean an American, sits down to Sunday dinner with his wife and six children around him.”
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He aspires to “settle down and found an American home.”
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When he tries to persuade a young woman to marry him and share “a fine American home,” he enlists the help of his prospective sister-in-law to convince Roberta, his reluctant bride. “Will you go and ask her to come here?” George pleads. “And, Lottie, listen: we'll have a nice home somewhere and you can come in all the time for Sunday dinner, and the whole family can come in from the farm, too. We'll have some fine times, you'll see.”
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Later on, when Roberta wants to leave the marriage, George is in despair: