Thornton Wilder (59 page)

Letters of the period document the fact that Sam Steward called on Wilder on September 10, 1937—an unexpected stop on the unorthodox literary pilgrimage Steward undertook in what he called the “Magic Summer” of 1937 in his memoir,
Chapters from an Autobiography
, published in 1981. Steward had begun a correspondence with Gertrude Stein in 1933 when he wrote to notify her of the death of a mutual friend. As their correspondence grew he got the idea of writing to other authors he admired—Thomas Mann, Carl Van Vechten, A. E. Housman, Eugene O'Neill, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, W. B. Yeats, Somerset Maugham, and others. Steward hit on a letter-writing strategy that worked: He commented on the author's work, and he never asked for a thing—no questions, no autographs, no request for a reply.

Steward had set out on his unique literary pilgrimage after he heard Hamlin Garland mention in a lecture that he had known Walt Whitman and had actually touched him. Steward said that this “electrified” him.”
⁴⁶
He wanted to touch the man who had touched Whitman, to be physically “linked in” with Whitman. That moment of contact inspired him to write to Lord Alfred Douglas, who had been Oscar Wilde's lover. Steward was now “linked in to” Whitman by the touch of a hand. Perhaps he could be “linked in to” Oscar Wilde by going to bed with Lord Alfred Douglas, who was then sixty-seven and not especially attractive, Steward mused in his autobiography. Nevertheless, Steward wrote, if he wanted to “link” himself with Oscar Wilde more directly than he was “linked” to Walt Whitman, it had to be done.
⁴⁷
With the help of generous quantities of gin and bitters, Steward accomplished his mission.

After Steward's first meeting with Stein and Toklas in France, he headed for the next stop on his “pilgrimage”—his scheduled visit in Switzerland with Thomas Mann. But first, at Stein's behest, he would deliver Wilder's errant vest. Steward had met Wilder in 1929 and asked him to autograph a copy of
The Angel That Troubled the Waters
, but he was sure Wilder would not remember him. He agreed to call on Wilder in Zurich because Stein asked him to deliver the vest, but Wilder was not on the itinerary for Steward's amorous literary pilgrimage. In fact, Steward's opinion of Wilder's work had declined after Michael Gold's 1930 criticism of
The Woman of Andros.

Steward and Wilder immediately began a “whirlwind of talk” covering a wide range of topics. As Steward reconstructed their visit in Zurich forty-three years later, some of his facts were slightly askew. They spent “six or seven” afternoons and evenings together, Steward wrote in 1980.
⁴⁸
Their letters to Stein and Toklas give a different account, however: “Steward was here two days and a half and he's a fine fella and it was a pleasure,” Wilder wrote to Stein on September 13, 1937, just after Steward's departure.
⁴⁹
Steward wrote to Stein and Toklas on September 15, “I did see Thornton in Zürich, and Thornton was charming, and we talked like madmen for two days (because, he said, he hadn't talked to anyone in English for ten) and anyway, I always like to talk or listen.”
⁵⁰

According to Steward, that rainy night in Zurich marked the beginning of another “lengthy literary pilgrimage” for him.
⁵¹
He wrote in his autobiography that Wilder lectured him about religion and about how to handle his homosexuality—among other things, urging him to “study the lives and careers of the great homosexuals from the beginning down to the present day—Leonardo and Michelangelo to Whitman and beyond.” And then, Steward wrote, he and Wilder “climbed into bed together,” Steward “half-drunk” as he said he had to be “in those days to have an encounter.”
⁵²

In what appears to be the only published account of an instance of Wilder's sexual intimacy, Steward described an inhibited man with a “puritan reluctance” who “could never forthrightly discuss anything sexual,” and for whom “the act itself was quite literally unspeakable.” Nothing happened between them that “could be prosecuted anywhere,” Steward wrote, and “there was never even any kissing.”
⁵³
He and Wilder met for sex in Chicago, Stewart wrote in his autobiography. He told others that they also met in Paris. In 1973 Steward sold letters, Christmas greetings, and postcards he had received from Wilder between 1937 and 1948 (an average of slightly more than two items per year), and they were sold in turn to the Beinecke Library at Yale University, repository of the Wilder papers. Wilder's last extant letter to Steward was written September 14, 1948. Steward published the article about his relationship with Wilder in
The Advocate
in May 1980, and edited it for inclusion in his
Chapters from an Autobiography
in 1981.

In a 1993 interview with the columnist and author Owen Keehnen, Steward, then eighty-five, mused that Wilder “was afraid of sex and unfortunately I was put in the position of outing him but I never did it until after he had died.” Steward did not explain why he was “put in the position” of outing Wilder, but went on to say, “We were lovers in Zurich. He was very secretive about his homosexual inclinations but they were definitely there. We had quite an experience. Thornton always went about having sex as though it were something going on behind his back and he didn't know anything about it. He was more than a little afraid of it I think.”
⁵⁴

In his 1980 and 1981 account of events, Steward moved from the subject of sex, which was for Wilder a very private matter, to the subject of literature, which was a very public matter. Steward said that Wilder told him that he “wouldn't dare criticize anything” Stein wrote, but the Wilder-Stein correspondence and Wilder's letters and commentary reveal his forthright public and private questions and concerns about her work. According to what Steward wrote forty years later about what Stein and Toklas told him, his need for an umbrella on a rainy night in Zurich inspired Wilder not only to write the third act of
Our Town
—but to write the entire third act in one morning after their meeting.
⁵⁵
Wilder's letters, however, contradict this second- or thirdhand observation. They document that act 3 was well under way at least as early as June 1937, before Wilder and Steward met, and that the text of the play, including act 3, would not be completed until December, with more revisions done in January 1938.
⁵⁶
Wilder's correspondence documents the progress of his play, and it includes a letter he wrote to his mother and Isabel shortly after Steward's departure from Zurich revealing that he had just finished the second act of
Our Town
and written the opening of the third.
⁵⁷

More serious by far, Steward circulated the erroneous story that Wilder stole from novelist Wendell Wilcox the plot for
The Ides of March
(1948). Wilcox had published short fiction, and his only published novel was
Everything Is Quite All Right,
which appeared in 1945. Wilder was by then the author of four novels; was the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes, one in fiction; and was one of the best-known American writers in the world. He would generously mentor Wilcox, Steward, and other writers in Chicago and elsewhere. Documents clearly confirm that Wilder did not appropriate a plot from Wendell Wilcox. Wilder told a journalist in later years that he first thought of the plot of
The Ides of March
while he was in Rome in 1920–21.
⁵⁸
More significantly, Wilder's correspondence confirms beyond question that he began conceiving and planning the novel as early as 1922, soon after his first trip to Rome. On November 5, 1922—twenty-six years before the novel's publication and long before Wilder met Steward or Wilcox—Wilder had written to his mother about his idea for a “retelling of the strange relations that bound together Cicero, Clodius and his sister Clodia-Lesbia, Catullus, Julius Caesar and his wife.”
⁵⁹

As has been noted, Wilder was steeped in Latin language, history, and literature from an early age. He had long been fascinated with Catullus, Caesar, Cleopatra, and company. His strengths and background in Latin and classical literature had led him to study at the American Academy in Rome in 1920–21. In 1931 Wilder had written to the classicist and translator Sir Edward Howard Marsh about his idea for the “conversation-novel” he wanted to write someday, “turning upon the famous profanation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea—with Clodius, Clodia, Catullus, Caesar and Cicero.”
⁶⁰
In 1935 he listed among his projects “The Top of the World—(Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Clodius, Clodia),” and by 1939 he was writing about the novel in his journal, still calling it “The Top of the World.”
⁶¹

Steward did not know the facts of the matter in the late 1940s or in 1980 and 1981, when he spread the untruth about Wilder and his novel. Steward also wrote that many of Wilder's friends in Chicago “disappeared or grew cool or distant” as the story “gained wider circulation,” and that he ended his friendship with Wilder at this time. If Wilder himself or his host of close friends in Chicago or elsewhere made any reference to such an event, that evidence has not been found.
⁶²

Wilder's longtime friend Glenway Wescott, openly homosexual and the author of novels with homosexual subjects and themes, recalled in 1957 that Steward gave him “an amusing, resentful little account of his having sex with Wilder passingly in Paris some years ago; no one else ever told me any such thing.”
⁶³
Other gay men who knew Wilder over the years agreed that whether they believed Wilder was homosexual or heterosexual or bisexual or asexual, his personal life was intensely private, seemingly impervious even to rumor.
⁶⁴
A case can be made that Wilder was bisexual in his emotional affinities, celibate by choice or circumstance more often than not, and private about his sexual relationships. Other than Sam Steward's posthumous outing of Wilder, no evidence has surfaced to reveal whether he consummated physical relationships with women, especially the women who loved him, or with other men he knew in Rome or New York or Chicago or Paris or Zurich or elsewhere.

Wilder's private writings suggest sexual constraint, repression, sublimation, and at times, self-imposed celibacy, but he did not leave definitive answers. It is clear, however, that through his ongoing intellectual, philosophical, and intuitive inquiry, Wilder was keenly attuned to the subliminal forces in life and in art, that he thought deeply over a number of years about sexual implications for art and the artist, and that he affirmed and even celebrated sexual energy as a vital life force that can fire and empower the creative life. He discussed issues of human sexuality with Freud, studied them in the work of Jung and Henri Bergson and others, and reflected on them over the years in passages in his journals. Wilder's study of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville in the 1950s sheds light on his own evolving views on love and sex and “harmonious sexual adjustments.” (He wrote in his journal on July 20, 1953, for instance, that “the term
sublimation
is misleading: it implies only a
higher
transference of the sexual drive.”)
⁶⁵

In 1940, as he worked on
The Skin of Our Teeth,
Wilder considered plans to insert “jokes about sex” at regular intervals in the play. He was thinking about women in general and actresses in particular as he considered the “vast phenomenon” of sex, writing this revealing passage in his journal while he was “mildly drunk on a quart of Bordeaux”:

 

Laughter is not itself sexual, but how closely it is allied to that same censor that holds guard over all the confusions, the humiliations, and (to state the more positive side) the unspoken, unspeakable gratifications of life. . . . Sex is a vast phenomenon, a maw seldom pacified, never circumvented, and perpetually identified by the subconscious mind with the refractory exasperating, not to say unappeasable, character of external circumstance itself. . . .

A laugh at sex is a laugh at destiny.

And the stage is peculiarly fitted to be its home. There
a
woman is so quickly All Woman [
sic
].
⁶⁶

 

Wilder was not a novelist who chose to write graphically about sex, but his fictional characters are by no means sexless. This journal entry about the stage as the fitting home for sex encourages attention to the sexuality of the characters in his plays, especially from
The Merchant of Yonkers
/
The Matchmaker
onward—Dolly Levi; Mr. Antrobus, Mrs. Antrobus, and Sabina in
The Skin of Our Teeth;
Alcestis in
The Alcestiad
. Wilder offers his deepest speculations about sexuality in his nonfiction treatment of Melville, Whitman, Emily Dickinson.

When he met Sam Steward in Zurich in 1937, did Wilder, at forty, understand and embrace his own sexual identity? Did he explore or repress it, experiment or deny it, affirm or channel it, deplore it or celebrate it? Over the years his literary, spiritual, and philosophical belief and practice unfolded, evolved, and transformed. This kind of evolution seems to have been true as well of his sexual belief and practice. But Wilder was essentially a deeply private man, the product of a repressive upbringing in an intolerant, unforgiving, legally repressive era. Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual—whatever his inclinations and involvements may have been—he was a product of his era and his family, supremely conscientious and thoughtful by nature and by upbringing. He would have instinctively protected his own privacy as well as that of his sex partners, not out of hypocrisy but out of affection, out of courtesy, out of propriety, out of respect for others, and himself.