Thornton Wilder (79 page)

Charlotte wrote angry, often incoherent letters to her family, including one to her mother on April 15, 1945, about how no one in the family appreciated her poetry, or Isabella's. Charlotte spoke of her mother's demands of “impossible perfection.”
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She wrote to Amos in 1946 asking him to return to her the manuscript she called “I Remember,” which she had entrusted to Evelyn Scott, who in turn had given it to Amos for safekeeping. “Could you at, at your convenience, send it to me?” Charlotte asked her brother. “It is so personal in character that I doubt I shall ever offer it for publication: that too, is why I do not suggest that you read it, before sending it, should you feel the inclination to do so.”
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Charlotte chastised Amos: “I am well, not ill, never having been ill, and should be allowed to leave here,” she wrote, blaming Amos, Thornton, and their mother for withholding permission.
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Difficult as it was, the family believed that Charlotte was where she had to be, and they worked closely with her doctors, visited her when the doctors approved, and provided generously for all her personal needs—right down to, later, the pipes and tobacco she enjoyed smoking.

 

IN HAMDEN,
Isabella and Isabel collaborated long after Thornton came home from the war to buffer him from stress and shield him from people he did not want to see. They entertained friends whose company would be good for him, however. “Our house is honored this weekend by two Golden Guests, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh,” Thornton wrote to Amos in May 1946. “Larry, the greatest English actor in 200 years, says he is using the drive down here to study Lear which he brings to London in the Fall!”
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He called Olivier and Leigh “the Dioscuri” because he said, “I like to think of happy married couples as twins.”
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Thinking that rest by the sea would be good for Thornton and his work, Isabella and Isabel decided they should spend part of the summer of 1946 on Nantucket. It was there, near the end of June, that Isabella finally acknowledged to her children that she was very ill and needed help. She had cancer and had been trying to conceal the gravity of her illness from the family, including her sister, Charlotte. “She was suddenly taken ill last Thursday and we lost her Saturday morning,” Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer. “During the illness all her dear traits were before us in a new light—her self-effacement, her unwillingness to be a subject of concern, her Scots independence—her wanting to go through it all in her own way—all unforgettable and finding its way into the book I'm working on.”
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He wrote to his longtime friend William Rose Benét, “Henceforth the big things and the small things of life lose half their force because we cannot share them with her.”
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A poet to the end of her life, Isabella wrote about death in what was to be her last poem, found on the table next to her bed after she died. It began, “This earth is my favorite heaven! / Oh do not bid me go hence.”
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When Isabella died Wilder lost an encourager and a trusted critic as well his mother and the center of his family life. Facets of Isabella's personality and character are etched into the mothers Wilder portrayed onstage and in the pages of his fiction, especially in the dreams that they nurtured in their children. After his mother's death Wilder immediately set out to reconfigure his family life. He relinquished plans to go abroad, in order to stay at Deepwood Drive with Isabel, at least until Christmas, “finishing the novel and sort-of re-establishing a home. Important for Isabel is the feeling that she is needed and useful somewhere; otherwise—you can see—she seems to hang in mid-air.”
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FOR WILDER 1946
was a year of continual losses, his mother's death first of all. Charlotte was growing worse. His friend and confidant Ned Sheldon died April 1. Gertrude Stein died July 27, after undergoing cancer surgery. In the fall Wilder wrote to Alice B. Toklas of “the several Gertrudes”—of “the Gertrude who with zest and vitality could make so much out of every moment of the daily life,” of her capacity for friendship and “intellectual combat,” and the “giant-Gertrude” who “broke the milestones behind her.”
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He would understand if she had chosen someone else to be her literary executor, he said. In fact, in a clause in her will written just before her surgery, Stein had put her longtime friend Carl Van Vechten in charge of decisions about her unpublished work. Wilder offered Toklas his assistance with Stein's papers at Yale in any case, especially since he had persuaded her to deposit them there originally, and had recently “interested the editors of the Yale University Press in a possible publication of
Four in America.
”
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When Yale University Press published
Four in America
in 1947, Wilder provided in the introduction a clear summation that probably endowed Stein's work with more clarity than it actually possessed. Her work was unorthodox, Wilder emphasized, encouraging readers to “relax your predilection for the accustomed, the received, and be ready to accept an extreme example of idiosyncratic writing.”
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He paid special note to a question that had fascinated him long before he met Stein: He thought that it could be said “that the fundamental occupation of Miss Stein's life was not the work of art but the shaping of a theory of knowledge, a theory of time, and a theory of the passions. These theories finally converged on the master question: What are the various ways in which creativity works in everyone? That is the subject of this book.”
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Twenty years later Wilder would pose the question in his own way as a motif in
The Eighth Day:
“Nothing is more interesting than the inquiry as to how creativity operates in anyone, in everyone: mind, propelled by passion, imposing itself, building and unbuilding.”
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WILDER SET
aside the manuscript of
The Ides of March
so that he could take care of matters at home after his mother died. Once he felt he could leave Isabel, he drove without mishap to the Gulf Coast. In Biloxi and Pass Christian, Mississippi, and in New Orleans, Wilder forged ahead with his novel, doing “some fascinating Cleopatra-Caesar business,” and then moving back to the Catullus story and the Clodius conspiracy. “My narrative interest is threatened by too much colorful digression,” he said.
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Wilder spent most of the winter at Mérida on the Yucatán Peninsula. “The novel's going fine. It talks to me all the time,” he wrote to Isabel. “Last night it woke me up just as The Skin used to do in Quebec.”
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All his writing life Wilder craved solitude, the long, unstructured blocks of time that were essential for unfettered imagination, and then the patient work of creating the story and the characters and rendering them on the page. But the solitude often came with a price of loneliness and renunciation. While he often hated the solitude, he found it was “the only way to work.”
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In Mérida he quickly settled into a daily routine of work, breaking about five in the afternoon to “go over to the ruins until dark, taking the best guide with me or some learned treatise from the hotel's library.”
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He was fascinated with the Mayan ruins at Mérida and Chichén Itzá. “The ruins are overwhelming,” he wrote to the poet and translator Leonard Bacon:

 

Were life 200 years long I'd love to set aside 5 to “fix” the infinitely complex symbolism of Gods and forces on the sculptures. . . . I feel in my bones the archaeologists are wrong,—as they were wrong in Greece for a hundred years. Those dandruff-covered library mice, the savants, are not the men to interpret the violence and fear-haunted imagination and the ceremonial magnificence of a race like Maya-Toltec.
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His explorations of the Mayan ruins provided an evocative parallel to his literary explorations of the ruins of Caesar's Rome, as he interpreted in his novel the “violence and fear-haunted imagination and ceremonial magnificence” of Caesar's empire and era. By late March 1947 in Mérida, where it was “hot as hell,” Wilder was thinking about returning to New Orleans—although he hated to move just then, he wrote Isabel, “because the daily novel-writing thing is going fine.” He had written some “new stuff” and “some more that's very wicked and very funny. The book's yelling with life.”
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He was back in New Orleans in April 1947, and then in Washington through May, reading Roman history and literature at the Library of Congress, and settling once and for all on the title of the novel. In late July he was at Saratoga Springs “working like a beaver” because he had promised to deliver the text of
The Ides of March
to Harper by August 1, 1947, “a wild and irresponsible engagement that I cannot live up to.”
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As his absorption in finishing the novel grew, his attention to
The Alcestiad
had declined. Once more he gave up his work on the play, in part because of his postwar “malaise,” but mainly, he wrote to the Trolleys, because “my ideas about life had changed and I felt it to be sentimental. Instead I'm working on my novel about Julius Caesar, told in letters exchanged between the characters—and such characters!! Caesar, Cicero, Catullus and Cleopatra!!”
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He came to this subject naturally, having grown up reading the classics at home and at school. From his early teens he was especially intrigued with Caesar and Cleopatra. The idea for
The Ides of March,
as has been noted, took root when he was a student at the American Academy in Rome in 1920–21, and he had sketched the plot in a letter to his mother in 1922.
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Over the years he explored the concept in his journal, as in this entry in February 1939:

 

Suppose I wrote
The Top of the World
and prefaced it with this note: “in this novel I have put into Julius Caesar's mouth words gathered from many authors in many different ages. The discourse to Catullus on nature is a paraphrase of Goethe's ‘Fragment' of
1806
. The arguments on the immortality of the soul in the conversation with Cicero are from Walter Savage Landor and he in turn was indebted for several of them to Plato and Cicero
.”
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He had been gathering sources for
The Ides of March
for more than twenty-five years, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes intentionally. He was “deep in the politics of 44 B.C.,” he had written to Stein and Toklas from Austria in 1937 when he was reading a “very good and frightening book called
Der Kampf um Caesar's Erbe
by Ferdinand Mainzer.”
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In 1942, on his cultural mission to South America, he had discovered a “new enthusiasm” in the figure of the legendary Venezuelan general Simón Bolívar (1783–1830). “I read the thousands of letters by him and laugh all the time at the contemplation of such gifts,” Wilder wrote.
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He was so drawn to Bolívar's combination of despair and hope that he modeled his Caesar in part on the general: “For a Caesar I was richly fed by a great admiration for the thousands of pages of Simón Bolivar's correspondence: a lofty smiling half-sad unshakenness in the face of the betrayal of friends and beneficiaries.”
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Wilder also immersed himself in the letters of Cicero. He acknowledged the influence of other writers, such as his longtime affinity for Goethe; his deepening knowledge of the work of Kierkegaard, thanks in part to his brother Amos, and to their friend Walter Lowrie, a noted Kierkegaard scholar and translator; and his reading of Sartre and his translation of Sartre's play.
The Ides of March
was also shaped by Wilder's talks on leadership with Gertrude Stein, and his own wartime encounters with military leaders and the politics and propaganda of military and civic power.

Like the novels that preceded it,
The Ides of March
is character- rather than plot-driven, and two characters occupy center stage: Caesar and Cleopatra. “The novel's full of glitter now that Cleopatra has arrived in Rome,” Wilder wrote Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, “but it's also getting deeper, wider and more preposterous,—yes, that's the word for the burden of vast implications I've assigned myself.”
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But from time to time the “work on the novel stumbled,” and when that happened, Wilder wrote to Sibyl Colefax, “I rolled up my sleeves to do a page or two to keep it in hand, and it came fine.” He wrote a “funny” scene in which Cicero had dinner with Cornelius Nepos, and as they talked about Caesar, Cicero's “fear, envy, and incomprehension” came out as “wit. Very funny.” The novel needed color, Wilder said, and he tried to juxtapose “very funny places” with “much that is painful” and much, he hoped, that was “beautiful.”
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He fused antiquity of subject with timelessness of theme in the novel, and encapsulated them in an innovative form that broke the fictional boundaries of structure, time, point of view, and voice. Wilder chose the epistolary form for his novel because, as was his habit and desire, he was experimenting with structure. He also wanted to avoid the omniscient narrator typical of most fiction.

“All art is pretense but the pretense of the historical novel is particularly difficult to swallow,” he wrote about
The Ides of March
when an excerpt from the novel was published in 1950 in
105 Greatest Living Authors Present the World's Best Stories, Humor, Drama, Biography, History, Essays, Poetry.
Wilder went on to explain his methodology: “I therefore moved the pretense over to a different terrain: I pretended to have discovered a large collection of letters and documents written by these notable persons. I attempted to coerce belief by submitting a sort of apparatus of historical method and scholarship.” In addition, he said, he “had approached the effect of the theatre.” He believed that in a “novel-in-letters each document tends to give the impression of a speech, a cry, at which we are present.” Furthermore he surrounded his work “with a veil of irony, offering it as a sort of parody of historical scholarship. I begged the question in that I not so much asked the reader to ‘believe' me as to ‘play this game' with me.”
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