Thornton Wilder (85 page)

 

He wrote much of his official report in Venice, chafing to get back to his creative work, but still wondering where to go next, and what to do. At fifty-five he was growing more aware of the exigency of time, and the dilemma of how to use it. “Oh, how badly I run my life,” he wrote to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. “How I postpone from year to year the establishment of those conditions under which I can work. And I don't mean
work
in the sense of producing volumes, I mean work in the sense of working on and in and with myself.”
²⁴

He was being pursued at that time by a resolute “lioness” in the diminutive form of his friend Ruth Gordon, who was determined to revive and stage
The Merchant of Yonkers
in London. In a flurry of telephone calls from Paris to Venice, she and Garson Kanin urged Wilder to come to Paris to confer with them and Tyrone Guthrie about a potential production, starring Gordon, of course.
²⁵
Despite misgivings, Wilder was tempted. He bargained with himself: If he agreed to the project, he would have to be “stern thereafter—say goodbye to collaborations and go and hide myself.”
²⁶
He thought he would finish his play, and then write a movie script, an opera libretto, and a comic novel—all in the spirit of freedom, and in the hope of enjoying the “modest gift” that had been given him.
²⁷
Nevertheless, Wilder acquiesced to Ruth Gordon's wishes and met her in Paris in mid-October to talk about adapting
The Merchant of Yonkers
into the script, slightly revised, which became
The Matchmaker
.

 

IN HIS
January 1953 journal Wilder struggled with doubts about himself as an artist and a person, analyzing and overanalyzing his earlier work, and regretting the consequences of the “Externalizing Years,” as he now called his Harvard experience.
²⁸
He was sick with a “deep-lodged cold and deafness.” Alone and ill in his hotel room in Baden-Baden, he worried that the time he had spent on events other than writing had been wasteful, even harmful. Yet he had to believe that he could still create literary work that showed “that during these years I have been watching, listening and feeling, in the . . . presence of multifaceted life.”
²⁹
He promised himself that “the next things I write must have a new theme and form, a new theme in form.”
³⁰

He was not afraid of the literary challenges. Instead, he confessed in his journal, “What I am afraid of is myself—of those tiresome drives toward moralization and over-simplification.”
³¹
He wanted to “reintroduce lyrical and romantic beauty into the theatre”—elements that would “surprise” an audience with “lyrical feeling”—despite the danger of being didactic and even “bombastic.”
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But whether he wrote a play next or a novel, he resolved never “to be caught up into that ‘non-fiction' thought-world again.”
³³
Later, when the critic, editor, and translator Eric Bentley asked Wilder to provide an introduction to a Spanish play for one volume of his four-volume series,
The Classic Theatre
, Wilder declined because, he said, he wrote nonfiction “badly and with excruciating effort.”
³⁴

He acknowledged in a journal entry that “Even the dear Lope-studies are an albatross about my neck. And the [Norton] book!—[It] is like some greedy improper self-deception that I can adequately write that kind of book.”
³⁵
Two of his Lope research papers were published in the early 1950s—“New Aids Toward Dating the Early Plays of Lope de Vega” in
Varia Variorum: Festgabe für Karl Reinhardt
in Germany in 1952; and “Lope, Pinedo, Some Child Actors, and a Lion” in
Romance Philology
in August 1953.
³⁶
He vowed to finish the Norton book as soon as he returned to the United States in May 1953. Despite conscientious efforts over the next several years, this was a promise he would never be able to keep.

 

ON JANUARY 12, 1953
, while Wilder was still in Europe, he made the cover of
Time.
The artist Boris Chaliapin, who created more than four hundred cover portraits for the magazine
,
painted a striking image of Wilder, with a framed drawing of the American flag in the background. Chaliapin captured a sadness in Wilder's eyes that most artists and photographers missed during the fifties. “The American is the first planetary mind,” ran the caption under Wilder's portrait, alluding to his recent lectures. The
Time
cover led many people to conclude that it was Wilder himself who had “the first planetary mind,” when he was actually referring to Americans in general. The magazine's biographical portrait of Wilder described him as “a kindly, grey-haired gentleman from the East” and a “loquacious American” who lectured “with much waggling of eyebrows and flourishing of hands.” The author of the article also advanced the mistaken premise that “for one of his years and talents, he has written comparatively little.”
³⁷

Wilder frequently heard but paid little heed to this quantitative assessment of his career. However, he was very proud to discover in 1953 that his sister Janet, the one Wilder sibling who had in
fact
written very little and had never been published widely except for scientific articles, was now a magazine columnist. While Janet and Toby Dakin were well known in and around Amherst for their good works and philanthropy and their proactive citizenship, Janet was also recognized for her scientific and equestrian interests. Since falling in love with horses when she was a schoolgirl in England, she had become a skilled equestrienne and a leading figure in equestrian circles, but she had never raised a foal until Lord Jeff was born to her Morgan horse Bonnie. In December 1952 Janet published the first of a series of popular magazine articles about bringing up Lord Jeff. Her background as a scientist informed her work as she researched and devised training methods. Called “Jeffy's Journal,” the series ran in the
Morgan Horse
through April 1956, and was later published as a book,
Jeffy's Journal: Raising a Morgan Horse
(1990)
.
Janet wrote about the adventures, good and bad, that she and Jeffy shared over the years, whether he was winning horse shows or bucking her sky-high and tossing her into the snow.
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She dedicated the book to her mother.

When Thornton read Janet's first magazine column, he wrote her a fan letter: “I never saw a happier illustration of the deepest rule about writing. Be possessed by your subject—know it, live it—and you will write well.”
³⁹

 

ACCORDING TO
the noted director Tyrone Guthrie, it was Ruth Gordon's husband, the writer Garson Kanin, who had the brilliant idea for a revival of Wilder's unsuccessful play
The Merchant of Yonkers.
Guthrie, Gordon, and Kanin agreed that the most serious obstacle to a successful revival was that the play “bore the stigma of failure”—something Guthrie suggested was “in present-day America far more damning than a conviction for rape or arson.” Therefore Gordon and Kanin proposed that Wilder revise, update, and rename the play; that Ruth Gordon star as Dolly Levi; and that the production be mounted in London rather than New York, knowing that if they “tried and succeeded in London” the play might then open in New York “cleansed of the guilt of failure, redeemed, restored to a state of grace.”
⁴⁰

Although
Merchant
had failed on Broadway, it had often been revived in professional and amateur productions. In March 1952, early in his discussions with Gordon, Guthrie, and Kanin, Wilder decided to withdraw
The Merchant of Yonkers
from Samuel French representation in England “until further notice.”
⁴¹
Guthrie easily persuaded the producer Binkie Beaumont, who had successfully produced
The Skin of Our Teeth,
to present the “new” version of the play, now titled
The Matchmaker.
Beaumont wrote to Wilder, “I am enormously optimistic that we may be launching something which will eventually be a wonderful success for London and, who knows?—we might even visit New York.”
⁴²
Ruth Gordon was set to star in the show, which was soon scheduled as one of the plays in the spotlight at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954, after a tryout in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Wilder, who was usually reluctant to attend the opening nights of his own plays, was present in Newcastle and found it “very heady and exciting.”
⁴³
From there
The Matchmaker
moved to Edinburgh, to open August 23, 1954. If all went well there would be a ten-week tour, including an appearance at the Berliner Festwochen, a drama festival in Berlin, and then an opening in London at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on November 4, 1954.

In his memoirs Guthrie recalled that the production of the play went like clockwork, but behind the scenes there were the usual convolutions and crises inherent in pulling a play from script to stage. At first Wilder revised his original script extensively, only to return to most of the original text, filling the “wastepaper baskets of Europe” with rewritten pages.
⁴⁴
In the end he produced a retitled script that was, he wrote to his dramatic agent, “merely a cut, trimmed, original, touched up YONKERS.”
⁴⁵

The Matchmaker
—the first American drama to be staged at the Edinburgh Festival—was launched to mixed but largely positive reviews. “It does not add up to anything at all in the end except an over-long, over-dressed, over-elaborated bore,” wrote Alan Dent in the Edinburgh
News Chronicle.
⁴⁶
For Derek Granger in the
Financial
Times
, however, the play was “consistently ebullient and daisy-fresh,” and full of “those little saws and scraps of home-spun wisdom with which Mr. Wilder has enriched American comedy.”
⁴⁷

Behind the scenes of his farce about love and money, Wilder was worrying about his own financial situation. His lawyer had informed him in 1954 that his 1952–53 income was about seven thousand dollars less than the year before, while his expenses were about six thousand dollars more, not counting the now-doubled cost of supporting Charlotte—more than four thousand dollars from May 1953 through April 1954.
⁴⁸
To make ends meet, Wilder had to draw about nine thousand dollars from his savings. But, he assured his lawyer cheerfully, the British production of
The Matchmaker
was going to make him “very rich.”
⁴⁹

The Matchmaker
went on to great success and a long run in London, not as a retread of an old play but as a fresh, lively new production. This was a different time, a different production, a different director, a slightly different script, and most of all, a different Dolly Levi. According to Binkie Beaumont, the acting was impeccable in the London engagement, most of the reviews were “jolly good,” and the audience “burst into rounds of applause on countless occasions out of sheer ecstasy of joy.”
⁵⁰
Furthermore, Beaumont wrote to Wilder, Ruth Gordon was “very definitely the toast of the town, a pillar of strength, and the most wonderful actress to work with that one could ever hope to be lucky enough to meet.”
⁵¹

From London
The Matchmaker
moved on to New York under the auspices of the Theatre Guild and the producer David Merrick. It opened on Broadway on December 5, 1955, and ran for 486 performances—Wilder's Broadway record. In 1964, transfigured once again, this time as
Hello, Dolly!
with star turns by Carol Channing, Ginger Rogers, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Ethel Merman, and others, the musical played 2,844 Broadway performances.
⁵²

 

SOON AFTER
The Matchmaker's
success at the 1954 Edinburgh Festival, Ian Hunter, the director of the festival, asked Wilder to contribute a play in 1955 for the “problem hall” in Edinburgh—the Assembly Room of the Presbyterian Church on the Mound, a large auditorium with pewlike rows of seats rimming three sides of a central platform. It was absurd even to consider the invitation, Wilder wrote in his journal, because he was facing “so many unfinished projects,” as well as his “increasing inability to carry through a project in a prolonged effort of concentration.”
⁵³
Still he began to think seriously about it. Perhaps he would write a science-fiction drama in the manner of Aristophanes. He could see a spaceship heading for another star, and Martians wanting to immigrate to earth, and people inhabiting caves on earth. He would call it “The Martians,” or perhaps, “Fifty Billion Acres.” In the flush of his initial enthusiasm, he pitched the idea to Binkie Beaumont, who was “bewitched” by it and immediately saw Helen Hayes in the lead role of the mother of eleven children, including four sons who went off to war.
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By mid-November, however, Wilder abandoned the idea.

That fall, in Aix-en-Provence, he was rereading, in French, Kierkegaard's
Philosophical Scraps
(Wilder's rendition of the title most commonly translated as
Philosophical Fragments)
—the philosopher's meditations on the nature of truth. In this book Kierkegaard questioned whether truth lies within the subconscious or the “true self” of an individual, waiting to be discovered, or whether it is external, waiting to be learned. He raised the possibility that there are universal truths that cannot be fully known or understood, and posed questions about the nature of love and of faith. At the same time that Wilder revisited Kierkegaard, he picked up the manuscript draft of
The Alcestiad,
which he had accidentally brought along to Europe in his baggage. He was almost immediately caught up in the script again, “with full conviction.”
⁵⁵