Thornton Wilder (80 page)

Looking back on his novel in 1956, Wilder wrote to Maxwell Anderson:

 

Of all the works I've done that book comes nearest to what one would call fun. Fun to shift from voice to voice; to build up the complicated time-scheme (there are several howling boners in it); fun to parody the apparatus of a work of scholarship; fun to force the reader to assume that people have been much the same in all times and ages.
⁵³

 

THERE WAS
growing concern in the Wilder family in 1947 because, six years after her breakdown, Charlotte was getting no better and her future seemed hopeless. Dr. Mildred Squires and her staff at Amityville considered recommending a prefrontal lobotomy as the only remaining option for Charlotte's treatment. She was referred to Dr. John E. Scarff, a neurosurgeon and a principal member of the staff of the Neurological Institute at New York–Presbyterian Hospital. Dr. Scarff thought Charlotte would be a good candidate for the procedure—which was controversial but frequently used in the 1940s and 1950s, when more than forty thousand lobotomies were performed in the United States.

The surgery severed the nerve fiber system between the prefrontal region of the brain and the thalamus, “the seat of emotional feelings.”
⁵⁴
The family was warned of the seriousness of the operation and the great risks involved: If positive results did not materialize within two years, there was little hope of recovery, and danger of a permanent vegetative state. The Wilders decided there was no choice but to take the risk, however, and Charlotte was lobotomized by Dr. Scarff at the Neurological Institute of Presbyterian Hospital in the spring of 1947.
⁵⁵
Charlotte came through the surgery well and seemed herself immediately afterward, although she had no memory of what had happened to her. Doctors told the family that although it was too early to know how she would respond, her personality appeared to be intact.
⁵⁶

Within a few weeks, however, Charlotte had regressed and reverted to her presurgery behavior—alternately withdrawn and passive, or depressed, or hostile and aggressive. At times she had to be confined in a special ward “under complete supervision.” She wrote letters that were sometimes lucid and normal, and at other times irrational and paranoid. She often wrote poetry, which the family hoped they might get published to encourage her, but the poems were only shadows of her earlier work.
⁵⁷

About two and a half years after her lobotomy Charlotte suddenly, for no apparent reason, seemed to come back to life. She was pleasant and responsive, and eager to see her family. Soon she was well enough to go by herself into the village of Amityville to a coffee shop or to the movies. More than anything else, she wanted to go back to Manhattan—to live in her own apartment again, to have her own independent life, and to write.
⁵⁸

 

WILDER HAD
to finish his novel in 1947. He and his family needed the infusion of income, but most of all his immersion in
The Ides of March
had helped him regain his creative energy and momentum. He delivered the final manuscript to Harper & Brothers in the fall of 1947, and the novel was published on January 16, 1948. At the request of
New York Times
critic Brooks Atkinson, who was preparing to review
The Ides of March
in February 1948, Wilder wrote a detailed accounting of the sources that had helped to shape certain characters and episodes in the novel: His severely disabled friend and mentor Ned Sheldon was the model for Caesar's friend and confidant Lucius Mamilius Turrinus, who had survived wartime torture that “was progressively cutting off his limbs and depriving him of his senses.”
⁵⁹
Caesar confided in Turrinus as Wilder had confided in Sheldon. Wilder dedicated his novel to Sheldon and to the Italian poet Lauro De Bosis. “To Edward Sheldon,” Wilder wrote, “who though immobile and blind for over twenty years was the dispenser of wisdom, courage, and gaiety to a large number of people.”
⁶⁰

Lauro De Bosis was, in part, the model for Gaius Valerius Catullus. Wilder had known De Bosis since his first journey to Italy, and their friendship continued when De Bosis came to the United States in 1928 as executive secretary of the Italy-America Society in New York. De Bosis had at first been sympathetic to Mussolini and Fascism, but by 1924 had begun to oppose the Fascist regime and its totalitarian policies. By 1930 he had resigned his job with the Italy-America Society and returned to Italy, where he organized a resistance group, the Alleanza Nazionale, hoping to facilitate a coalition of opposition forces to thwart the spread of Fascism in Italy.

Inspired in part by Percy Bysshe Shelley's political tracts, De Bosis wrote letters and pamphlets attacking Mussolini and the Fascists, and urged people to pass them on as chain letters to sympathizers. When he heard that activist Giovanni Bassanesi had dropped 150,000 anti-Fascist pamphlets in a flight over Milan in 1930, De Bosis began to plan his own similar flight over Rome—despite the fact that he had never flown a plane. He raised funds to purchase a small plane, took a few hours of flying lessons, armed himself with 200,000 anti-Fascist letters, and set out on his quest. When his plane was damaged en route as he stopped to refuel, De Bosis had to abandon the aircraft and its cargo of letters. The purpose of his foiled mission was discovered, and he went underground in Switzerland, raised funds for another small plane (this time with a contribution from his mistress, the actress Ruth Draper), and had 400,000 copies of his letter printed.

On October 2, 1931, De Bosis made the flight to Rome, scattering letters over the city in his wake, and flying so low over Mussolini's headquarters that spectators said it looked as if the plane were actually climbing the Spanish Steps. He managed to penetrate Roman air defenses as he flew into the city and as he climbed skyward on departure—but after he left the city his plane disappeared, never to be found.
⁶¹

Wilder wove the device of “The Broadsides of Conspiracy” into his novel—creating a “chain letter” that “was circulated throughout the Peninsula by the thousands” by the Council of Twenty, conspirators who hoped to “Shake off the Tyranny under which our Republic groans.”
⁶²
He wrote in the dedication to
The Ides of March
that Lauro De Bosis was a “Roman poet who lost his life marshaling a resistance against the absolute power of Mussolini; his aircraft pursued by those of the Duce plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea.”
⁶³
Actually Mussolini's planes were not able to take off in time to pursue De Bosis, and no trace of the poet or his plane was ever reported. De Bosis was thirty years old.

“I have just finished your book,” Ruth Draper wrote to Wilder in March 1948. “I am fairly dazzled by its brilliance. . . . Of course I felt a deep emotion when I read the dedication. I felt too a great pride in my association with a work of such beauty, dedicated to the memory of my lover, & my beloved friend—both heroes,—both men of lofty vision.” She had always hoped Wilder would write something about De Bosis and Sheldon. “I am so grateful to you,” she wrote, “so proud & happy thinking of their pride could they know that their names & a record of their achievements stand together on your page.”
⁶⁴

Wilder modeled at least one of his characters after someone who was still vitally alive—Tallulah Bankhead. His reflections on Roman women born into great houses in “the Old Roman Way” were illuminated by his knowledge of Bankhead's background. He told Maxwell Anderson, “I'll give you 2½ guesses as to what lady well known to the U.S. public—daughter, granddaughter, descendant of senators, governors, etc., etc. gave me some ‘lights' on how a Clodia ticked (the revolt against being duped by society's genteel facade).”
⁶⁵
Clodia Pulcher was a controversial woman, according to various Latin sources of the period, “an important and ruthless political force and an ostentatiously abandoned hussy.”
⁶⁶
Wilder's Caesar writes in his journal that Clodia lived “only to impress the chaos of her soul on all that surrounds her.”
⁶⁷

 

The Ides of March
is a complex novel about the dynamics of religion, ethics, leadership, power, politics, love, and art, especially literature. Wilder explores the nature of the written word—the introspection and self-revelation of the journal; the intimate communication and occasional subterfuge of the letter; the disclosing or withholding of the self in poetry; the truth or the distortions of history and biography. He was surely thinking of Charlotte—and perhaps Amos and Isabel and himself as well—when he had the poet, orator, and historian Asinius Pollio draw a portrait of poets in a long letter to Vergil (Wilder's chosen spelling of the name in
The Ides
) and Horace in book 1 of the novel. According to Wilder's Pollio, poets were thought to be “inept in all practical matters,” as well as absentminded, impatient, and subject to “excessive passions of all sorts.” Furthermore Pollio believed that “all poets in childhood have received some deep wound or mortification from life which renders them forever fearful of all the situations of our human existence. In their hatred and distrust they are driven to build in imagination another world.”
⁶⁸

 

“THIS CAESAR
is the most personal expression of mine in the book, and yet I am not aware of running counter to ‘facts' at any point (save, of course, the chronology of his wives),” Wilder wrote to Brooks Atkinson.
⁶⁹
Wilder knew before the novel was published that his “liberties with ‘history' ” would “annoy the learnéd and render the layman vaguely uneasy.” He wrote the latter words to the poet Rosemary Benét, who was preparing a profile of him to include in the February 1948
Book-of-the-Month Club News
, featuring
The Ides of March
as a March selection.
⁷⁰
He was surprised that his novel was even chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and was happy to cooperate. “It wouldn't hurt to mention that I spent two years of my life in Central and Southern Italy,—one studying archaeology; the other in the War,” he told Benét (who was the wife of Stephen Vincent Benét). “That won't make the book any more ‘factual' but it will tend to give the impression that most of the time I at least knew where I was inventing. In addition, my novel is my second one about Rome, (and I certainly would love to do one about that city in the Renaissance, too!).”
⁷¹

Despite Wilder's concentration on
The Ides of March
, his journal, his imagination, and his writing hours were still haunted by another compelling figure—Alcestis, the heroine of the play he had put aside. By now the stories of Caesar and Alcestis were so interwoven in Wilder's imagination that as he suspended his work on
The Alcestiad
, he imported the story into book 1 of
The Ides,
retelling the legend of Alcestis in a letter that Asinius Pollio writes to Vergil and Horace.

Wilder had written a “fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic,” he explained in a brief preface to the novel, and he played with time, as he made perfectly clear to his readers:
“The reader is reminded,”
he wrote at the outset of book 2,
“that the documents in each Book begin at an earlier date than those in the preceding Book, traverse the time already covered, and continue on to a later date.”
⁷²
This kaleidoscopic refraction of time and events is shaped by different characters, different voices, different angles of vision. Wilder's epigraphs in the novel forecast his major themes. First he renders a slightly flawed translation of lines from Goethe's
Faust, Part Two
: “The shudder of awe is humanity's highest faculty / Even though this world is forever altering its values. . . .” Then he offers a “Gloss”: “Out of man's recognition in fear and awe that there is an Unknowable comes all that is best in the explorations of his mind,—even though that recognition is often misled into superstition, enslavement, and overconfidence.”
⁷³
When asked about his intentions for
The Ides of March
, Wilder told an interviewer that his novel “attempts to show the mind of a man like Julius Caesar, with enormous experience of men and affairs, trying to separate the elements of superstition from those of religion, the elements of exploitation from those of government,” and endeavoring to determine whether his own role as the Roman emperor was “of his own making or whether he was an instrument of a Destiny Force beyond his knowledge.”
⁷⁴

Within his major themes in
The Ides of March,
Wilder examines topics he had explored in his preceding work: love, family, religion, fate, chance, and destiny. In this novel he also contemplates power, leadership, politics, propaganda, and mortality. Although Wilder's penchant for irony must be taken into account, he seems to answer his earlier questions about whether love is sufficient when he has Catullus write to Clodia, “Never, never, can I conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love
is
its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is.”
⁷⁵

 

The Ides of March
, published when Wilder was almost fifty-one, is far richer, more mature, more complex, and more accomplished in form, theme, and characterization than his earlier works of fiction. The novel is beautifully written; its strong, clear passages are infused with wisdom. It is a testament to his continuous evolution as a novelist and stylist, as well as a thinker. Although Wilder still probed the meaning of love, of religion, of fate, of destiny, he seemed at least to have made a measure of peace with some of the old questions, as if he had come to recognize and accept the unknowable. He also tackled new questions: His experience in the prewar and war years led him to a prolonged contemplation of the nature of leadership, the risks and obligations of power, the dangers of propaganda, and the dynamics of freedom and individual responsibility.