Thornton Wilder (64 page)

Enthralled as he had been with Reinhardt's power and presence, Wilder ultimately had to accept the demise of
The Merchant of Yonkers—
but he was philosophical. He wrote to the Reinhardts from Mexico City in February 1939, “Lots of things turned out badly about our
Merchant of Yonkers
, but they fade into nothingness compared to the wonderful value for me of watching the Professor work, and the great privilege of learning to know you two better.”
³⁰

Before the final curtain had come down on
The Merchant of Yonkers,
Wilder decided he would travel to a new place, and throw himself into work on a new project. He decided to pour his creative energy into the play he was calling
The Alcestiad: A Tetralogy, including The Alcestis of Euripides,
and he would go to Mexico to concentrate on his Greek drama.
³¹
He planned to spend two and a half months there, giving himself up to “Solitude; long walks; and work.” He didn't want to “emerge into civilization” until he had finished two plays.
³²

He had sailed from New York January 20, but quickly discovered that while Mexico was beautiful and fascinating, he couldn't work there. The sunsets were enchanting—“red-gold over the foreground, with its bougainvilleas and oleanders and the mountains in the distance are in blue and purple veils and the tops of the volcanoes are rose snow,” he wrote to Sybil.
³³
But for a month he struggled with his work and then gave up on Mexico: “The altitude, the alkali dust, the national food, the misery and unrest below the surface, and the reminders of centuries of cruelty and bloodshed,—all combine to upset one's concentration,” he told the Reinhardts. Nothing helped—not even his customary long walks.
³⁴
(“I'm always harping on my walks,” he wrote to Sibyl, “but my walks are my work.”)
³⁵

It is impossible to tell whether Wilder couldn't work in Mexico because of Mexico—or whether he just couldn't work, period. He was “wrestling” with his new play,
The Alcestiad
. The structure was clear to him, the “idea-life” was exciting, but he couldn't find the voice, the diction. “I keep trying to find an utterly simple English prose,” he wrote to Sibyl, “but it keeps coming out like a translation of a Greek classic, at one moment, and like a self-conscious assumption of homely colloquial speech at the next. I foresaw that it would be hard, but not as hard as this.”
³⁶
He began to think he would have to write the play in blank verse, difficult as that would be. He was searching for “a plainness, a purity” of rhetoric, and he hoped that Texas would show him the way to it.
³⁷

Wilder was grappling with another major distraction by long distance. Not only had Jed Harris “gone into paroxysms of self-destruction” by closing the tour of
Our Town,
but he was threatening litigation over the amateur rights to the play. Wilder's agent and lawyers and Isabel were inundated with telegrams about Harris's demands for a “huge advance” and his “hairsplitting” arguments over percentages.
³⁸
Desperate to escape into his work, Wilder moved on to Houston and Corpus Christi, Texas, which he found “cold and rainy and uncongenial”—except for a local gambling place where people called him Doc and, Wilder reported to Woollcott, he threw away some of his money, but discovered that “like all descendants of Scotch Presbyterian clergymen,” he was “very lucky at dice.”
³⁹
Soon he abandoned Texas because he couldn't work there either. Where to go? For the time being he was needed in Hamden, as his mother was alone while Isabel was spending a month in New York “under the impression that ‘life is passing her by.' ”
⁴⁰
He doubted he would get any work done in Hamden either, but duty called.

Wilder's goal of finishing
The Alcestiad
in 1938 had been deferred by his work on
Our Town
and
The Merchant of Yonkers,
but even when he was free of those projects, the new play was a struggle. It was a “golden subject,” and if it defeated him, he thought the defeat would be only temporary, for there were many other subjects “crowding in the notebooks,” he wrote to Sibyl, “and most of them come with innovations (i.e. revivals of lost excellences) of form.” But he was absolutely sure of one thing: “There will be from me no repetitions of ‘Our Town' but there will be the freest possible treatment of time and place.”
⁴¹

Back in Connecticut, Wilder found his restlessness intensifying, along with his frustration with Jed Harris, who was blocking all attempts at negotiations with “his exorbitant demands.”
⁴²
He dealt with the Harris business as best he could; conferred with Dwight Dana on other business matters; turned down an invitation to teach at Princeton; caught up with mail; at Dr. Freud's request, tried to help his nephew-in-law, now a refugee in the United States, find a job; spent time with his mother—and planned another trip to Europe. He decided to sail in early May for a week in London, a visit with Stein and Toklas in France, and a month working, and walking in the Fontainebleau forest.
⁴³

“Everyone is trying to dissuade me,” he wrote to Reinhardt, “saying that even if I do not find war I will find such uneasiness that the trip will be valueless.”
⁴⁴
But he was determined to go to Europe anyway. Before his departure he accepted several acting engagements for summer theater performances of
Our Town,
and dealt with another headache: “The ugly possibility of having to go to law hangs over me,” he told Reinhardt. “Mr. Jed Harris is threatening to sue me for not selling ‘Our Town' to a certain motion-picture company. I hate law-suits, but I am eager to establish that a writer cannot be forced to sell his work to a film company without some guarantee and safe-guard of sympathy and fidelity to the spirit of a text.” Wilder hoped that the matter would be settled out of court, “but,” he wrote, “it further delays my making plans and upsets my concentration of mind.”
⁴⁵

Reinhardt was then directing his acting students in Los Angeles in what Wilder called his “hitherto almost neglected
Pullman Car Hiawatha
” and he asked if Wilder had a new play near completion. Wilder replied that since his aborted Mexican journey he could “feel many subjects hesitating, preparing, building,—and each one trying to clothe itself in its own appropriate form.” He believed that a dramatist not only had to create a new play but also had to “each time create a new form.” That ambitious but perhaps impossible challenge may have been at the crux of Wilder's inability to go forward with
The Alcestiad
or any other of the subjects “hesitating, preparing, building” in his imagination. He had created a new form with
Our Town
but was determined not to repeat himself. Besides, rooted as it was in Greek drama and mythology, the dramatization of the Alcestiad was not the most likely subject for innovations in form. Honoring the classical Greek dramatic convention of following a tragedy with a comic, often farcical satyr play, he had already conceived
The Drunken Sisters,
to conclude productions of
The Alcestiad
—but the play itself continued to defy him.

Wilder alluded to this search for form in an essay he was writing on Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex
in the fall of 1939: Noting that the play received the second prize at the Greek festival where it was first produced, Wilder suggested that the second prize “reminded us primarily that masterpieces are difficult. Their survival and the diversity in their appeal are evidence that they come to us from a removed thought-world not easy to penetrate. Sometimes their difficulty proceeds from an inner necessity on their authors' part continually to innovate in form and subject matter.”
⁴⁶

He was possessed of that “inner necessity,” and this helps to explain Wilder's migration from one genre to another and his “perseverance” in pursuit of his craft, as well as his “evasions”—the recurring periods of what appeared to be writer's block, and the long, sporadic intervals between the completion of one work and another. Vulnerable as he was to distractions, many of them self-imposed, Wilder was not so much a writer of fits and starts as one bent on a prolonged, continuous evolution and growth as an artist. He had learned early that no unfinished novel or play was a total waste of his time and creative energy, and that the creative struggle could be a concomitant and even a catalyst of growth. Wilder wrote to Reinhardt that his next play would “have been greatly helped exactly by the
fights
and resistances I had with the
Alcestis-
subject.”
⁴⁷
Meantime he put that play away, confessing to Max Reinhardt months later that he was “bitterly disappointed” that
Alcestis
“failed to come to birth.”
⁴⁸

In Hollywood, Wilder's agent, Rosalie Stewart, was presenting him offers to write movie scripts, and “hammering” Jed Harris on “his likelihood of losing” his threatened lawsuit over the
Our Town
movie rights in arbitration.
⁴⁹
Stewart, with Wilder's approval, proposed that Harris accept an outright cash offer of $7,000 from Wilder instead of the $12,500 he wanted. By early May, Harris had dropped his threat of a lawsuit, and Wilder could sail for Europe on May 6 with a clear conscience and a release from stress—at least until July 10, when he had to be back in the United States to begin rehearsals for his summer stock performances.

 

DESPITE ESCALATING
tensions in Europe, Wilder spent six weeks of the summer of 1939 in France and in England. He especially savored his leisurely visits and talks with Stein and Toklas, and sometimes walked ten miles a day through the “endless” Fontainebleau forest. Wilder saw Harry and Clare Boothe Luce in Paris and, at their request, arranged for the Luces to visit Stein and Toklas. (Luce had left his wife and sons, obtained a divorce, and married Clare Boothe Brokaw in 1935.) Wilder enjoyed “some fine talks with Louis Jouvet and Jean Cocteau.”
⁵⁰
He had a poignant visit in London with Sigmund Freud, who was dying of cancer, and his daughter Anna. “Oh, I love him,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas afterward. “As always the occasion flowered into characterizing anecdote but it takes all my face and hands to tell it correctly so I'll save it until our next visit.”
⁵¹

Back in the United States in July, Wilder the writer tried to ignore his guilty conscience as Wilder the actor plunged into rehearsals for upcoming performances as the Stage Manager in
Our Town
in four different theaters (three in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania) with four different casts. Isabel helped her brother immeasurably that busy summer, driving him to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and taking care of business matters as well as the Deepwood Drive house. His performances that summer were “better and better,” Isabel told Dwight Dana.
⁵²
Wilder gave a lively account of his onstage role to Stein and Toklas. “It's been very successful. In places we've broken house records; chairs in the aisle; ovations; weepings. Being present at these repetitions I get to know the play pretty well and I find a lot to wince at in addition to some fine wincing at the actors' renderings, but I hope I've learned a lot that can go into future plays.”
⁵³
The acting stint that summer confirmed Wilder's belief that a playwright needed some firsthand experience as an actor in order to do justice to a script. Even so his conscience hurt, for he had not written a thing other than letters, most of them perfunctory, since he gave up on Mexico and Texas and abandoned
The Alcestiad.

He was due a rest, however, after a remarkably productive decade of work—two novels, several one-act plays, adaptations of plays, collaboration on movie scripts, his work on several new full-length plays, and three Broadway productions. He began to relax by spending hours on a new literary obsession—James Joyce's new novel,
Finnegans Wake,
published in May 1939. Already it was one of his “absorptions and consolations” and his “midnight recuperation,” he wrote. He spent most of his limited free time that summer “digging out its buried keys and resolving that unbroken chain of erudite puzzles and finally coming on lots of wit, and lots of beautiful things.”
⁵⁴
Wilder's keen interest in
Finnegans Wake
would last for the rest of his life, often providing diversion, stimulation, and companionship, but sometimes causing him a good deal of trouble.

 

GERMANY INVADED
Poland on September 1, 1939, and England and France, as they were treaty-bound to do, declared war on Germany on September 3. Nearly 50 percent of Americans surveyed in a Gallup poll now believed that the United States would become involved in the war. Wilder was deeply worried about his friends in Europe, especially Stein and Toklas. “All the time I keep wondering what you are and will be doing?” Wilder wrote in September, as Stein and Toklas hunkered down to wait out one more war in Europe.
⁵⁵
(They had survived World War I in England, France, Spain, and Majorca.) “Here we read newspapers and listen to radios all day. We built dream-myths of hope and alarm,” Wilder wrote to Gertrude in September.
⁵⁶
On their side of the Atlantic, she wrote him, she and Alice were linked to the world only by radio.
⁵⁷