Thornton Wilder (96 page)

In December 1974 and January 1975, he and Isabel were at Sanibel Island, Florida, where Wilder was “perishing of boredom and sometimes of the cold.”
⁵¹
He was “flexing up” to write his New Year's resolutions. “One is to see a lot of you,” he wrote to Gordon and Kanin:

 

Another is to obey my doctor's orders almost scrupulously. I can't smoke, I can't drink, I can't rassle alligators. As it is I obey him pretty well. I don't even like cigarettes, but I can't break myself of reaching out for one, especially when I'm trying to “write.” As to drinking I told him, face to face, that I must have one drink a day when the shades of night fall. He looked severe and changed the subject, but I do have one and make it a double.
⁵²

 

Wilder once told Paul Horgan that Goethe believed “each of us is born with some inner resonance that for all our lives tell us what our ideal age is,” no matter what the calendar said. “
I
was an old man when I was 12,” Wilder told Horgan, “and now I
am
an old man,
and it's splendid!
”
⁵³
One reason it was splendid was because Wilder himself was walking testimony to the adage that creativity, if sustained, defies time, age, and even infirmity, and that the fruits of creativity can outlast a human life. Gertrude Stein had spoken years earlier about the importance of the “spirit of play” in creative work, and he was playing with his new novel and with other tempting ideas.
⁵⁴
In April 1974 he traveled to New York for meetings about a “mini-TV-serial” of
Theophilus North.
⁵⁵
He wrote to Sol Lesser in September that he was collaborating “over a script for
Theophilus North
,” but that he was not permitted to reveal names yet for the project, which did not materialize.
⁵⁶
Lesser had sent him a reprint of their
Our Town
correspondence, first published in
Theatre Arts
in 1940, and Wilder wrote of this evidence of their collaboration all those years ago, “It breathes the joy in concentrated work.”
⁵⁷

“There is no limit to creativity, but there are two required conditions,” Wilder wrote in 1972: “EROS at your right hand, Praise of life at your left.”
⁵⁸
As a writer and as a man, he knew many incarnations of love and praise. He wrote after Gertrude Stein and Sibyl Colefax died that he had “always believed emphatically that all and every derivation of Eros is the sole fount” of energy.
⁵⁹
For Wilder, trained from boyhood in the classics, and acquainted as an adult with Freud in person and in theory, “eros,” or “love,” was a complex term with multiple meanings, ancient and modern, including but also reaching beyond the sexual. Wilder knew Plato's views of Eros, expressed in his
Symposium—
love as the universal principle or energy that drives human life, illustrated by the Scala Amoris—the evolution and ascent from love and desire for the beauty of the physical body to love and desire for the beauty of the soul, the beauty of goodness, knowledge, wisdom, and truth. Wilder was acquainted with Freud's conceptions of eros as the life instinct, as opposed to the death instinct; of the variations of love—love between the sexes; self-love; family love; the love in friendship; the love for ideas or objects; the love for mankind. He wrote of
Theophilus North, “
The book is about the humane impulse to be useful, about compassion, and about non-demanding love.”
⁶⁰

“Is creative work difficult in the mid-70s?” a journalist asked Thornton Wilder when he was seventy-six.
⁶¹
Wilder had never forgotten Freud's observation years earlier that Verdi had composed “his most radiant life-affirming work” when he was old.
⁶²
Wilder told the journalist, “If you get a concentrated idea, all your writing blocks disappear. Writing at this age is not hard, not if you have the right idea—an idea deeply relative to yourself.” He went on to say:

 

Verdi wrote
Otello
at 78 and
Falstaff
at 79. Picasso was a beaver until his death in his 90s . . . Sophocles at 90 was hauled into court by his grandchildren, saying the old man was non compos and might will his estate to somebody else. When he went before the court the judge said, “What do you have to say for yourself?” “I'll tell you something,” Sophocles replied. “I wrote this morning the great chorus from
Oedipus at Colonus.
This work is a treasure.” “Either I am crazy or you are,” the judge said. “Case dismissed.”

This is an attractive story for us old men.
⁶³

 

WILDER ONCE
called himself the poet laureate of the family. “As I say
so beautifully
in
Theophilus North,”
he wrote to his brother, “ ‘The bane of family life is advice.'—We were all but strangled with it.”
⁶⁴
In his plays and his novels family was a predominant subject. In Wilder's daily life family was an anchor, usually a comfort and help, sometimes a nuisance, and always a responsibility, generously fulfilled. He supported Charlotte and her medical care from 1941 onward, first with out-of-pocket funds and income from investments, and then from a trust established in 1966, and a second trust “related to the proceeds from
Theophilus North
,” set up in 1972.
⁶⁵
He set up a substantial trust for his other siblings as well.

He had also established two separate trusts for Isabel, his longtime hostess, companion, agent, and assistant. She was an indispensable help to him, even though at times each of them chafed at the bonds that united them. Wilder had written to Garson Kanin that if
The Eighth Day
made any money, he wouldn't get a penny of it because it was in a trust for Isabel, “administered by a New Haven Bank and Donald Gallup (Yale Univ. Library), my literary executor.
By law
, I have no voice in any decisions regarding it. The assumption would be that Isabel and Gallup and the bankers (who couldn't distinguish
Anna Karenina
from
The Girl of the Limberlost
or
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine
) would consult me deferentially on any question of T.V., radio, film, musicalization, etc. But
legally
they shouldn't and I'm going to stick by the law.” But, he added, he would reserve the rights to the next novel for himself.
⁶⁶
From the outset
The Eighth Day
was a robust moneymaker, with more than $391,245.02 in domestic earnings and $115,795.19 in foreign royalties by 1975, and while Wilder apparently kept the rights to his final novel, he steered the royalties from
Theophilus North
to Charlotte's trust.
⁶⁷

For the forty years of Charlotte's illness, Thornton, Amos, Isabel, and Janet never wavered in their devotion to their sister. On November 12, 1969, by family decision, Charlotte had moved from the Long Island Home in Amityville, where she lived for more than twenty years, to the Brattleboro Retreat in Brattleboro, Vermont, one of the oldest private psychiatric hospitals in the United States.
⁶⁸
By that time Charlotte's arthritis and her weight so severely affected her knees and her feet that she could barely walk. Janet had taken over much of the oversight of Charlotte's care as Isabel suffered more frequent health problems of her own. Janet was very much in favor of the move to Brattleboro, believing that Charlotte would have more privacy, her own room, better care, more personal attention, and more freedom. It would be easier for the family to travel back and forth to visit her. As financially and morally supportive of his sister's treatment as he always was, Wilder harbored the concern that her doctors had never gotten to the root of Charlotte's illness. “Incidentally,” he had written in 1969, “we Freudians are convinced that no treatment of an out-and-out schizophrenic is worth a bean that does not find the sources in early childhood and report those thoroughly.”
⁶⁹

Charlotte was grateful for the improved conditions at Brattleboro. She had always dreamed of returning to her Greenwich Village apartment, but, she wrote to Thornton, some of her friends had told her that New York was no longer a pleasant place to live because of crime and congestion. She seemed content in Vermont. She told her brother she needed a Polaroid camera to help her in her writing. In her excursions out of the hospital, she said, she wanted to “find some little known part of the U.S.A.” where she could photograph the inhabitants and write about them. He immediately wrote to Brattleboro to approve the idea and the expense.
⁷⁰

The family ordered a new Remington typewriter for Charlotte in 1971 because she had her heart and mind set on resuming her writing. “The food here is
impossible
,” Charlotte typed in a letter to “Dear Thornt,” but otherwise, she said, “I have a private room, the typewriter and beginning draft of a prose book.”
⁷¹
Meantime, in the attic of the Wilder home in Hamden, there were boxes full of Charlotte's papers—brittle pages of poems and prose gathering dust under the eaves.

 

ON APRIL 17, 1975
, the day he turned seventy-eight, Wilder wrote a letter of regret to his old friend and colleague Sol Lesser, who had approached him on behalf of Martha Scott about doing a new, technicolor film of
Our Town.
⁷²
He did not want any new film version made, Wilder replied. Besides, he added, “I'm old now and not in the best of health and must limit my activities of every sort for the slow but steady progress I am making on a new work.”
⁷³
He tried to cooperate with his publisher's wishes that he continue to promote his work, giving interviews on
Theophilus North
and on the Kennedy Center's American Bicentennial production of
The Skin of Our Teeth
, with Martha Scott as Mrs. Antrobus and Elizabeth Ashley as Sabina. (Later that year, José Quintero directed a production of
Skin
at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on Broadway.) “I always feel slightly soiled by thus ostentatiously selling my baked goods like a market-crier—but that's because I was born and brought up a Wilder-Niven,” Wilder wrote to his brother in July 1975. He apologized to his family for some of the “annihilating reviews” that his work had received. “I take and forget them like the weather but it distresses me that my kinfolks are among the readers. Sorry, I'm sorry.”
⁷⁴

He was following his doctors' orders 90 percent of the time, he said, and that meant that to protect his eyes he could not read as copiously as he had always loved to do. Nevertheless, in the months before his death, he “devoured with joy” Lewis Thomas's
The Lives of a Cell
and James D. Watson's
The Double Helix.
“What sublime reaches,” he wrote. He had studied evolution at Yale, had written about it in
The Eighth Day,
and was “glad to have lived long enough to peek into these processes,” he wrote Amos. “What would Darwin have thought! And what Goethe!”
⁷⁵

 

“I SUPPOSE
you know I go into Mass. Gen. Hospital on the 2nd (best hospital in the country),” Wilder wrote to his nephew on August 22, 1975. “The specialist from there who diagnosed me here (he visits Martha's Vineyard twice a month) indicated that it was the most routine form of the prostate trouble,—no problem.” Wilder planned, he said, “to be a cheerfuller and more sociable fellow next year—. One doctor has brought my blood pressure down to normal and shown me how to keep it there; and now another doctor is ready and eager to correct this nuisance. . . . Let's plan to be cheerful together.”
⁷⁶

In November 1975, seventy-eight and still convalescing from the cancer surgery, Wilder was reading Montaigne, he wrote to his friend Malcolm Cowley—“grand reading for us old men. He lived through woeful times and retained that equilibrium. His mainstay was neither religion nor the (later) reliance on reason and the Enlightenment's belief in progress, but on the wisdom of antiquity—
especially Plutarch
!” He reported to Cowley that he was “guardedly convalescing and cheerful. . . .”
⁷⁷

As Isabel looked after Thornton during his recovery from the prostate surgery, she herself was “bravely coping with her handicaps,—respiratory mostly,” he wrote to Eileen and Roland Le Grand. He and Isabel were hoping to go South to escape the Connecticut winter, but they thought there were too many “elderly Americans” in Mexico and Florida. Perhaps they would get through the winter in Hamden and then go to Martinique.
⁷⁸

In late November 1975, with his doctor's permission, Wilder made plans to go to New York for two weeks. He wanted—needed—another “hideaway.” He especially wanted to see two movies which he believed would be “very beautiful”—Satyajit Ray's
Distant Thunder
(
Ashani
Sanket
), and Ingmar Bergman's
Magic Flute—
and to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner in the city with Isabel and Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. His friend the young actor and director Jim O'Neil gave him a guest card to stay at the Harvard Club on West Forty-fourth Street in New York, where, Wilder said, he would be “presumably cut dead (though I do have a Harvard degree).” He had not yet regained his strength, nor was he confident about walking any distance, so he would not “venture out much except to those movies.” However, he said, “I've been house-bound and hospital cocooned so long that I can get a grand feeling of adventurous freedom just strolling from 44th Street to the New York Public Library.”
⁷⁹
After Thanksgiving he had dinner with Gordon and Kanin, and then they took a taxi to the Algonquin Hotel for a nightcap. Afterward they strolled along Forty-fourth Street back to the Harvard Club.
⁸⁰