Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  No detail involving his children escaped his attention, and he posted letters to two continents tending to arrangements for them: “Get little Isabel’s nose down to school,” he instructed his wife in Florence. “She is very immature as her dear letters indicate. But she is full of affection & goodness.”28 Get Amos a horse, he told his Yale friend Sherman Thacher. “Amos indicates that a horse is very desirable, not only through his own wishes but perhaps for efficiency. Will you please get him a suitable animal of economic cost. I will increase my November remittance.”29 The Thacher School, which Amos was attending at reduced cost, emphasized the outdoor life, taking full advantage of the surrounding mountains, canyons, and trails to give the boys experience camping, ranching, and horseback riding.

  The elder Wilder wrote to Thacher in haste January 17, 1912: “I enclose money order for $150.00. Pls. apply to Amos’ account. . . . At the end of this school—in the summer—I hope to clean you up in full. My newspaper is sold but being paid for in installments. Amos’ letters are calculated to gladden the parental heart.”30 Dr. Wilder was greatly relieved to have finally found a buyer for his newspaper after struggling to meet the expenses of part of his family in Europe, part in China, and part in California, not to mention his own ever-growing expenses in Shanghai. By then he was “jaded with the Revolution.” For the three most turbulent months of the conflict he had worked every day until midnight. “China will be upset for a long time,” he predicted.31 He hoped to get away in the summer for a rest in Japan, and, if possible, to travel to Europe to see his wife and daughters.

  Thornton and Charlotte longed for their family to be reunited—and experienced firsthand one of the repercussions of the revolution. On February 10, 1912, Thornton wrote to his mother in Italy that the Chinese servants at the school were on strike because the revolutionary headquarters in Chefoo offered Chinese men eighteen dollars a month to join the army—ten dollars a month more than they were paid to work at the school. As a result, students at the Boys’ School had to pitch in and do the work. Like his classmates, Thornton was washing dishes, serving meals, and carrying water.32 He regretted that he was kept above the fray, inside the walls, not allowed to know the Chinese and their struggles, or to learn their language.

  “You can’t think how really close the life is here,” he wrote to his mother.

  It makes me lonely every night. No “Kindred spirits” (as Anne of Green Gables says) to converse with. I see I must hurry. I have written you an extra long letter because I am lonely. Won’t we ever get together, Mother, Amos and all of us. . . . Try and arrange me away from prison.33

  By February 1912 the family faced a more urgent problem, for Dr. Wilder, heretofore endowed with almost superhuman stamina and good health, was very ill. He was suffering chronic digestive problems that sapped his energy and his customary zest for life and work. His illness was serious enough to lead him to take home leave, in hopes that doctors in the United States could come up with a diagnosis and cure. His leave was granted February 17, 1912, and would last until October 21, 1912. “Suffered much of many physicians. Tarried in four hospitals and sanitariums,” Dr. Wilder wrote in his brown leather journal in October 1912.34

  Leaving Charlotte and Thornton at Chefoo—with trusted friends standing by in case of emergency—he set out on the long voyage to San Francisco, where he would seek medical attention. He made a quick trip to Ojai to visit Amos at the Thacher School and came away so impressed that he began to think seriously of enrolling Thornton there as well, if he could afford it. He wrote to Sherman Thacher about Thornton: “I want for him the manliness and wholesome quality, physical and otherwise, that your school confers on boys.”35 Just as he had offered a flexible pay arrangement for Amos’s tuition, Thacher extended such a provision for Thornton’s.

  In Berkeley doctors determined that Dr. Wilder had contracted Asian (or tropical) sprue, a chronic illness of the digestive system that would plague him for years to come.36 His physician hospitalized him in Adler Sanitorium in San Francisco for a few days, but the illness persisted well into the summer, and he continued to lose weight and energy.

  “This is my first letter since you have been ill,” Thornton wrote from Chefoo in March. “Oh, my father, of course I am very sorry that you have gone but if you needed it, may there be no complaint from here.” He would not gripe about being left behind with Charlotte in China, “because Amos has been left alone in the continent with no other members of the Family.” Thornton did complain, however, about his mother’s absence: “Oh, but Father, I wish I could see Mother. It seems many years since I saw her last. I want to see her very much. When you make your plans try and let me be near her and—Amos. And of course, father dear, I want you too; my—dear Papa.” He asked his father to remember him to President Taft, and to “ask him when he’s going to give me my papa for good and all. . . .”37 He signed his letter “Lovingly Thornton Wilder.”38

  With their father now in the United States and their mother still in Europe, Thornton and Charlotte spent the spring and most of the summer at Chefoo. Thornton’s grades were average to low: He received his highest score (80) in scripture, and his lowest (46) in algebra. He ranked fifth in Latin in a form of twenty-two students, and eighth in a form of twenty-three in English. His lowest rank—a twenty-second—came in penmanship. But a note from the form master affirmed that “his conduct during the time he has been at the school has been exemplary,” his work “has been faithfully performed,” and his music teacher pronounced his work excellent.39

  He was caught up in what he called “self-educating”—reading Horace, learning to play Beethoven sonatas, learning a “flashy” Chopin prelude by heart “for those people who ask & Papa will not allow me to refuse.”40 Most of all, he was elated to learn that plans were under way—at last—for him and Charlotte to return to the United States. “Here we are again,” he wrote to his mother. “Sunday Night. 8:15 PM. Charlie [his nickname for Charlotte] going to bed up in her nunnery and I still in prison with promise of release in a month.”41

  They were to sail on the SS Nile for San Francisco, with a family friend supervising their departure, since their father was still in the United States. Papa had instructed Thornton to write an account of the long homeward voyage, and he did so in at least one sixteen-page letter to his mother, illustrated with rough sketches. “Save it,” Thornton asked, “so I can show him that I made some semblance of obeying.” He wrote to his mother, “It seems years since I saw you and I can only imagine you in a dim, wistful way as being something like I’d like to be.”42

  THE YEARS of separation from family, and the boarding school discipline of weekly letters home, turned the young Thornton Wilder into an inveterate letter writer, and by the time he was a teenager the habit was entrenched. Even in his compulsory letters, he was adept at conveying the weekly news in dramatic form—avid criticism of activities he disliked; colorful accounts of swimming or eating or being seasick; a long list of “old letter debts to pay,” as he put it, listing in one brief note eight adults back in Berkeley to whom he owed letters.43 He devoted one entire compulsory letter to his father to a rant against cricket, laying out the rules that “surprised” him, and saying, in closing, “hoping you are not an enemy of raillery, I am still, Lovingly, Thornton Wilder.”44

  Following the orders of the prefect who read each boy’s weekly letter, Thornton often had to write every misspelled word correctly several times: “Contents. Opinion. Surprise.”45 Once he had to rewrite a compulsory letter three times because the supervising teacher “did not like the writing or paragraphing!”46 This was his disciplined apprenticeship in letter writing. His letters gave his father sporadic satisfaction, some dismay, occasional pride, and a strong measure of paternal apprehension. Dr. Wilder forwarded one letter to his sister, Helen, with a headnote: “Here are sidelights on this dear & unusual lad, whose unfolding between Isabel’s & my own diverging influences I watch with prayerful solicitude.”47

  Now and then
there was a flash of precocious understanding of others. “Write me if there is anything but gladness in Mother’s letters,” Thornton had asked in a letter to his father on September 30, 1911, when his mother had reached Italy. “She has had bad hours, self-made it seemed to me then, in Berkeley and Florida. I hope she has none in her Utopia.”48 While Dr. Wilder wished his wife were “serene and enjoyed things more,” he understood that “the long strain of raising a family has given her ‘nerves’ ”—but according to Isabella’s letters, she was still not “composed enough to make a home for you children yet.”49

  As the family letters wove their way from Chefoo to Shanghai to the United States to Europe and back, Thornton found companionship on paper with his mother in Italy or Switzerland and his father in China. With his mother he discussed poetry, plays, and music, and confessed his loneliness and his affection. To his father he gave practical reports of his activities, and glimpses of his worries and disappointments. Once his father was upset to discover that Thornton had written a private letter to his mother, and wrote to chastise his son. Thornton replied in self-defense: “First, it was very lush and sentimental, the mood that Mother can accept, if she is ready in her mood of a letter from the son. . . . Mother’s letter held no words that I would not have you see. There was that part of my self that Mother shares with me: the expression of Sentimentality.” His father, he knew, would have found it “silly” and “too weak and light for big, powerful people.”50

  CONSUL GENERAL WILDER had left a host of problems behind in Shanghai, and most of them awaited his return from his eight-month-long home leave. Whether because of his flagging health, or prolonged overwork, or his inability, despite his best intentions, to deal with the unremitting demands of his duties, he was not functioning well in his diplomatic post in Shanghai, as his official evaluations made painfully clear. He was liked and admired in Shanghai, as he had been in Hong Kong, and much in demand as a public speaker, wrote Consul-General-at-Large Fleming Cheshire, who had so enthusiastically praised Amos’s accomplishments in Hong Kong. But Shanghai was a different story. While Dr. Wilder appeared to endeavor to “maintain a high standard of efficiency as Consul General,” his 1911 inspection report had noted, he lacked “one very essential qualification . . . commercial instinct.” He was criticized by some American merchants in Shanghai as being “political rather than mercantile.” Instead of the “excellent” ratings he had attained in Hong Kong, Dr. Wilder had been demoted to “good” in 1911 in Shanghai.51 By June 1913, that would drop to “poor,” this time in the inspection conducted by Consul-General-at-Large George Murphy. Dr. Wilder was a fine man, but “exceedingly weak” in “administrative ability.” Furthermore, as Wilder himself acknowledged, he had “no commercial training and had no aptitude for details.” Despite these considerable failings, Murphy wrote, he considered Consul General Wilder to be “personally a most excellent man and, in some other respects, a useful and creditable Consular officer”—a man of “the highest personal standards” who was “popular and respected,” “unobtrusively and generously charitable,” and an influence for “peace and good will.”52

  THORNTON WILDER was nine years old the first time he saw China, and he lived there for six months before moving back to the United States to Berkeley, California. He was nearly fourteen the second time he saw China; this time he lived there for a year and eight months before returning to California. Decades later he revisited China in his memory and imagination and began to write about the Chinese experience in fiction and nonfiction. He started Doremus, a novel about Dr. Alexander Fuller Buckland, a Methodist missionary in China, and his wife, Mildred, and their children. (Dr. Wilder had a good friend, Doremus Scudder, who was a minister in Hawaii.) “The life of a missionary’s children in China near the beginning of the present century would have [been] perfect joy except for one thing,” Thornton wrote decades later. “Anything that was really adventurous or fascinating was forbidden.”53 The partial draft of the novel not only offered biting commentary on the missionary movement, but comedy verging on farce, including the spectacle of the Buckland children running wild, with their amah chasing them on bound feet. Then there was the graphic drama of the children witnessing a public execution.

  Like the father of one of Thornton’s roommates at Chefoo, the Reverend Doctor Buckland was a native of Tennessee. He was an “almost total failure” as a missionary. For him “Christianity turned largely on the Christian’s conviction of sin.” Thornton wrote in the manuscript draft, “Religion was presented under two guises, the ecstatic and the terrifying.” Dr. Buckland believed “that every man and woman born into the world stood in dire need of salvation,” and each had to be “frightened, bullied, or somehow lugged into Heaven.”54

  The unfinished, handwritten draft is testimony that the boy who went to China came home with the experience deeply etched in his memory and imagination. His years in China, especially in the Inland Mission School, left him with a firmly embedded skepticism about organized religion. The China experience awoke in him a fascination with the relationship between the multitude and the individual, the masses and the one, and he began as a teenager to try to decipher what it meant—a search that would last a lifetime.

  The China experience also intensified the young Wilder’s sense of being an outsider, a stranger. He was an American looked down on by many of his peers from England, cut off from his peers in China, separated from the family who loved him even if they did not always fully understand him. In those formative years Thornton grew resigned to the prolonged separations from his parents and siblings. How was he to know where he belonged, and with whom? How was he to function without kindred spirits—especially his mother and his brother? He idolized his brother. He adored his sometimes emotionally exhausted, frequently geographically distant mother. He loved, revered, and sometimes feared his dynamic father. He longed to have the family reunited.

  Not only was Thornton separated from his parents and his brother and sisters; he was separated from his national identity, living surrounded by an exotically different culture but literally walled off from it, attending the rigorous English boarding school in the middle of China, where he studied German, French, and Latin but where there were no classes in Chinese, the language and the key to the culture he longed to explore. He was innately curious about the Chinese people, their customs, their daily lives. He was surrounded by the enigmas of the ancient, richly complex culture of China, yet denied the tools and the vocabulary that could help him know and understand it. Language, he thought, was the key to the mystery, and he began to discover the far-reaching power of the word.

  5

  “PARENTAL EXPECTATION”

  For the man, a telling reflection: “Parental love is proportionate to the intensity of parental expectation of a child’s contribution to life.”

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  “Chinese Story”

  California and China (1912–1913)

  What on earth shall I do at Thatcher [sic]—‘I haven’t a rag to put on—not one!’ ” Thornton, now fifteen, wrote to his mother from the SS Nile en route from Shanghai to San Francisco in late summer 1912. He had two old suits, he complained, but they were in “rags and tatters.” He might begin wearing “long trousers,” he wrote. “I am as big as some boys @ school who wore them. I wouldn’t like to though.”1

  He was being sent to live and study at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, where his brother Amos had already distinguished himself as a top student, star athlete, and popular member of his class, and Charlotte would go to school in Claremont, California. The heady freedom of the long sea voyage took Thornton’s mind away, at least temporarily, from his anxiety. His long-held dream of returning to California came closer to reality day by day during the monthlong voyage, and although his father’s friends had tipped a stewardess to watch over Thornton and Charlotte, they were traveling virtually unencumbered by any supervision—“two lone Babes on the Sea,” Thornton joked in a long letter to h
is mother.2

  He slept on deck, along with many other passengers, and joined in one evening’s entertainment—a vaudeville performance, wherein, he reported, “I recited an affair I made up impersonating 4 people.” At the shipboard fancy-dress evening, when passengers wore costumes, a young woman lent him an evening dress, and Thornton dressed up as a duchess, with yellow rope for hair. “Puritanical Charlotte expected to be shocked,” he wrote, “but as it wasn’t so very decoletée [sic] (how on earth does it go) she let it pass.”3 Meanwhile, young Amos was working hard during his summer vacation as a laborer on the farm of L. B. Husted near Saratoga, California, honoring his father’s unorthodox vision of how his sons should spend their time between school terms. Years later, looking back, Amos interpreted his father’s motivations:

  My father thought there was no experience for a growing boy more valuable than working in a country store or on a farm. . . . All this was part of what our parent called “broadening experience.” . . . The long-range health factor weighed large, but most important was diversity of experience and initiation into varied aspects of the world’s work and the common life.4

  Over the years Dr. Wilder found summer employment for his sons on farms from coast to coast—in California, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Vermont—and he dispatched his daughters to summer programs in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts.

  Amos had greatly pleased his father by writing that he would “be glad to be a missionary or minister. . . . If I cannot be a great man in the world, I will be a great man in myself.”5 Sherman Thacher had recommended him to Farmer Husted with superlatives: Amos was “the finest kind of a boy, of the very highest moral character and of very careful religious training.” Thacher went on to praise Amos as an excellent student, and “a boy that it is always a pleasure to have about, who can be relied upon to work faithfully, intelligently, one whom you may trust absolutely with any financial responsibility.” Furthermore, Thacher wrote, Amos was “a boy who is contented anywhere, working, or playing, or reading a book, day after day.”6