Thornton Wilder (78 page)

 

WHEN HE
heard the news on August 14, 1945, that the war was over, Thornton was having dinner with his sister Janet in Washington, where his brother-in-law, Toby Dakin, was still stationed in the International Law Branch of the Judge Advocate General's Office. They “wandered around among the crowds until two a.m., and gazed at the front of the White House,” Wilder wrote.
⁷⁹
He was “full of thoughts about the Atomic Bomb,” Wilder told Bill Layton. Those thoughts were going to “explode in the play I do when I've finished
The Alcestiad
, namely
The Hell of the Vizier Kabäar
; about the necessity of finding a non-religious expression for the religious (The Alcestiad); and always, always, about the War: and the millions of aspects there are to it.”
⁸⁰

By August 20 Wilder was back in Miami again, still waiting for his official discharge. As he had often done in the past, Wilder wrote to Sibyl in detail about his work in progress. He hoped the acclaimed actress Elisabeth Bergner, an Austrian refugee, would star in his
Alcestiad
because she had the range to play the young Alcestis in the first act, the “golden young matron” in the second act, and the “agéd slave, water-bearer in her own palace, with scenes of tragic power and mystical elevation” in the third. “And all to be played,” Wilder wrote, “against that crazy atmosphere of the numinous that is possibly hoax and the charlatanism that
may
be divine. And the preposterous-comic continually married to the shudder of Terror.”
⁸¹
The play was very difficult, if not impossible, to write, for it “must be subtended by one idea,” he said, “which is not an idea but a question (and the same questions as the Bridge of San Luis Rey!). . . .”
⁸²
He was keenly aware as he wrote that every scene must be “balanced just so,” and not resort to “dazzling theatrics.”
⁸³

His other play in progress(
The Hell of Vizier Kabäar
, as he now referred to it) would be even more difficult, “but in a different way,” Wilder reflected.

 

That will require the good old-fashioned plot-carpentry that I've never done; the joiner's art that must be then rendered invisible, as though it were perfectly easy. . . . The danger of the Alcestiad is that the effectiveness may be greater than the content (to which Jed replied, quoting an old Jewish exclamation: “
May you have greater troubles!
” But what greater trouble could an artist have?) The Hell of . . . can't run into that danger. Its content is not a hesitant though despairing question.
⁸⁴

 

WILDER LEFT
Florida with more manuscript pages in hand, but still no discharge orders. “From other people's stories, I judge that postponements are the order of things in the Army,” his mother had written to him. After all, she observed, millions of men had had to be gotten into the army in “record time” and it was predictable that it would take time and some occasional “muddling” to get them out.
⁸⁵

Lieutenant Colonel Wilder, soldier and playwright, finally received his separation papers at Camp Devens in Massachusetts on September 19, 1945.
⁸⁶

32

“POST-WAR ADJUSTMENT EXERCISE”

[
The Ides of March
] was, in fact, my post-war adjustment exercise, my therapy. Part almost febrile high spirits and part uncompleted Speculations on the First Things.

—THORNTON WILDER TO GLENWAY WESCOTT,

April 7, 1948

 

The United States, Mexico, England, and France (1940s)

I
t is not only work which has kept me silent and interrupted my correspondence with even my best friends,” Wilder apologized to Eileen and Roland Le Grand in March of 1946. “It is a sort of post-war malaise which I won't go into further lest I give the impression of self-pity or misanthropy or melancholia. It's none of those things. Call it out-of-jointness, and forgive me. I think I've recovered now.”
¹
He was too optimistic, however, for his postwar adjustment and recovery would take far more time and effort than he anticipated, and he was only slowly “reacquiring habits of concentration and perseverance.”
²
Another factor, no doubt, was that a military intelligence officer's life is governed by the persistent protocols of secrecy—and prolonged enforced secrecy can exacerbate the isolation of an already intensely private man. In 1947 Wilder wrote to British friends June and Leonard Trolley, whose wartime wedding he had helped to arrange in Rome in 1945, “I had a sheltered life during the War and have no right to talk of post-war maladjustment, but that uprooting in my middle age did have bad after effects on me. One of them was a relapse into melancholia, lethargy and unsociableness. . . . What I needed was to work and in order to work, solitude.”
³

His work was his therapy, he said, and he threw himself into it, drafting scenes in his plays, working on the novel that would become
The Ides of March
, and taking up a “compelling” new enthusiasm—trying to establish the chronology of the estimated five hundred plays of Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635), the great playwright of the Spanish golden age. At times Wilder devoted ten-hour days to researching Lope de Vega in the Yale University Library, and traveled to other libraries as well to examine additional sources and collect new data. “I think this passion was a useful therapy,” he wrote; “pure research has nothing to do with human beings.” When he realized that this quest to date Lope's plays could be a “Life-work” and that it was an escape from rather than a solution to his problems, he “willed” himself to “quit it,” but couldn't stop.
⁴
Instead, when he was supposed to be writing, he was often preoccupied

 

all day and far into the night on the chronology of the plays of Lope de Vega (but out of the 500, only those between 1595 and 1610). Passion, fury and great delight. Yes, a compulsion complex. Sherlock Holmes as scholar. . . . It is perhaps my harbor from the atomic bomb. In the meantime, letters mount up, duties neglected.
⁵

 

The time was not entirely wasted, however, for Wilder actually found a kindred playwright in Lope who, as his essay “The New Art of Writing Plays” (1609) reveals, believed in departing from the traditional stage treatment of time and place, and suffusing his plays with both comedy and seriousness of purpose, contending that whether he was writing comedy or tragedy, a playwright could entertain an audience and at the same time communicate a moral purpose.
⁶

Lope soon had to make way for another of Wilder's enthusiasms—existentialism, an interest that had fallen on already seeded ground. He had been reading Kierkegaard and Kafka since before the war, and now turned in earnest to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, who lectured at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton, as well as at Carnegie Hall in New York on his 1946 visit to the United States, his second such tour. Wilder was absorbed, he said, “by Existential philosophy and its literary diffusion, especially in France.”
⁷
Sartre and Wilder met on February 24, 1946, when Sartre gave two lectures at Yale, and they saw each other often that year. Later Sartre invited Wilder to translate
Morts sans sépulture,
his controversial new play, which would open in Paris that November. Sartre did not give Wilder a copy of the play until two years later, but he described it. “Jean-Paul Sartre has given me the American disposition of a play he's written that would freeze your gullets,” Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon and her new husband, the writer Garson Kanin. “Will any American manager produce it? Five French Maquis are variously tortured and raped by some Pétain militiamen. But it's not about the Resistance movement; it's about the dignity of man and the freedom of the will.”
⁸

By March 1946 Wilder believed he had almost finished
The Alcestiad.
⁹
He told his brother that the play was “about how Alcestis had real Kierkegaardian despair”—the despair born out of the struggle over whether and how to realize and connect to the Self, and to become the Self “grounded transparently in the Power which constituted it.”
¹⁰
Wilder doubted whether Alcestis could resolve this dilemma by the time a three-act play was over.
¹¹

Meanwhile he was working on
The Ides of March,
his “novel-in-letters about Julius Caesar and the scandal of the profanation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea.”
¹²
The Roman “good goddess,” or goddess of fertility, the Bona Dea was worshipped in secret rites by aristocratic Roman matrons and the Vestal Virgins, and at least one ceremony had allegedly been violated by the presence of a man in disguise, said to be the Roman politician Clodius Pulcher. Wilder incorporated the character and the event into the novel he had been thinking about since his first Roman sojourn in 1920–21. He was also filling his manuscript with Caesar's ideas about leadership, politics, power, and liberty, as well as Cicero's thoughts on the poetry of Catullus.
¹³

The work was going slowly but he kept at it, dispatching Isabel to New York and then to London in his stead to represent his interests in Jed Harris's revival of
Our Town
—an assignment that proved to be a full-time job for Isabel, who welcomed the travel and the excitement, even though Harris was as difficult and demanding as ever. Already Isabel was becoming the historian and archivist of her brother's work, as well as his proxy and his agent on the scene. When Amos wrote to inquire about how Thornton's plays were faring, Isabel gave him an accounting: The Italian dramatic company run by Wilder's friend, the great Italian actress Elsa Merlini, had produced
Our Town
in Italy in 1939, despite Fascist efforts to disrupt the performances. She was now touring Italy with the play in her repertory. Merlini had told Wilder that while many Italians did not “completely understand Act I and II,” they “adored and understood Act III” and waited patiently to see it.
¹⁴

Isabel also reported to Amos that
Our Town
had been performed in Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina, and Hungary, and, in a pirated production, in Spain.
Our Town
was the first foreign play to be performed in Berlin soon after the occupation, with audiences transfixed as they sat or stood in the rubble of buildings. Plays could be performed only by approval of the occupying powers in each country, and Isabel noted that “the Russian authorities stopped it” in their zone in Berlin after three days, purportedly because the play was “unsuitable for the Germans so soon,—too democratic.”
Our Town
was successfully performed in Munich, however, and Wilder's Swiss-based agent, who handled the German-language productions of the play in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, let them know that it was being done all over Germany.
Our Town
had played during the war in military prison camps, and in a USO performance in Holland. The leaders of a festival to celebrate the liberation of Holland sought the rights to perform
The Skin of Our Teeth
because, they said, “it speaks for them” and “the whole world at this time rising out of ruins.” Authorities in Japan requested permission to translate and perform
Our Town
in native Japanese theaters because of its reflection of the “American and democratic way of life and the art and literature it represents.”
¹⁵
American occupation authorities were already beginning to turn to Wilder as an artistic voice during what would become the Cold War.
¹⁶

Wilder said to an interviewer in 1948:

 

One of the greatest gratifications of my writing life has been the reception of
Our Town
and
The Skin of Our Teeth
in Germany. During the run of
Skin
in New York I was already in the service, but I was astonished at the fact it was never listed among plays dealing with the war, the preoccupation then in everyone's mind. The Germans not only had no doubt that it dealt with the war, but found that the role of Cain throughout the play, and the third act, had for them all but unbearable actuality.

 

He noted that the Russians said they banned
Our Town
because it glorified the family, and
Skin
because it represented war “as inevitable.” But, Wilder said, “To a half-attentive listener
Skin
says the very contrary.”
¹⁷
In those postwar days, when people were hungry for normalcy and hope, Wilder's plays were establishing him as a familiar voice, American as well as international. In half-destroyed, makeshift theaters around the globe, diverse audiences were finding personal as well as universal resonance in his characters and themes.

 

ISABEL WILDER
stood at a crossroads in the 1940s as she took on more and more of the responsibility for overseeing her brother's literary affairs, as well as Charlotte's medical treatment. In 1939 Isabel had entered into a publishing agreement with Coward-McCann, which held the option to publish the novels she hoped to write after
Let Winter Go.
For an advance of three hundrd dollars, she agreed to deliver a new novel in the fall of 1939, a deadline later postponed to September 1, 1940. During that time Isabel also worked on a play, and while she did deliver the novel in 1940, she withdrew it just before it went to the printer, recalling that she did so because of “the outbreak of the War.”
¹⁸
Tim Coward had earlier admonished Isabel to make prudent decisions about her own literary career. “You have got to get going with your own development or you never will,” he chided. “I know this business of the theatre is fascinating and can eat up the years. If you want to be a sort of general advance agent, stage manager, and go-between for Thornton, that is all right, if you do it with your eyes open. But you are not going to do much creative stuff yourself as long as you do the other.”
¹⁹

Isabel kept trying to write after the war, but gradually set aside her own creative work and concentrated on Thornton's. During the war, with her brother far away, Charlotte hospitalized, and her mother growing older, Isabel had become the family's official “stage manager”—orchestrating Charlotte's care, Thornton's literary business, her mother's daily life. Whether these duties served as the reason or the excuse, they increasingly consumed her attention and energy, and Isabel set aside her own writing—with some relief, it may be speculated, for she had always found writing hard work. She could never be certain that she hadn't ridden her brother's coattails to her first publishing contract with one of her brother's publishers. Marriage and a home of her own had eluded her, but now she had a brother, a sister, and a mother who needed and depended on her, and she devoted her energy to them.

Charlotte, meanwhile, faced her own battles throughout the forties, still declining, for the most part, to acknowledge that she was or ever had been physically or mentally ill, still refusing to cooperate with her doctors and nurses, alternating between lethargy and depression, and periods of aggression and hostility—toward her family, her caregivers, and her fellow patients. Sometimes she spent hours writing poetry or prose, or letters, some cogent, some irrational, to friends, relatives, or strangers. Often antisocial and belligerent, she did not want to engage with other patients, or, at times, with her family members when they came to visit. She also began to suffer gastrointestinal and other serious physical health problems.

While Thornton had moved during the war years from the United States to North Africa to Italy and home again, Charlotte had moved to the Westchester branch of New York Hospital in White Plains, then to Harlem Valley State Hospital in Wingdale, New York, and finally to the Long Island Home, a private psychiatric hospital in Amityville, New York. She was transferred there in January 1945, on the recommendation and referral of Wilder's friend Dr. Thomas Rennie. By 1944 Charlotte was convinced that there were at least three people masquerading as Thornton Wilder, disguising themselves with makeup, using her brother's name, and even writing his books and plays. “The Thornton Wilder who wrote
The Skin of Our Teeth
is not the same man who wrote
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
” she told Isabel.
²⁰

Charlotte clung to her own dreams of writing. She had not lost her “devotion” to her “expressive needs,” she wrote to Evelyn Scott, but she had no privacy at Amityville, and she felt that her words were “read and returned to her mockingly.”
²¹
In November 1945 Charlotte wrote Evelyn that she had to throw away “about eight months' work, some of it . . . the most ‘precious' ” she had ever done. She couldn't see visitors at Amityville, she said to Scott, “not even you.” When people came to see her they seemed like strangers, she wrote, “some of them nicer than in life; but—the psychiatrist's ace trump, I suppose, a club. Thornton twelve feet high, without the hat!”
²²