Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  All the while Dr. Wilder was coping with his ongoing health problems, and he was mightily discouraged and depressed. Struggling to regain his health and eager to consult with American physicians, Dr. Wilder traveled to New York and New Haven in late summer 1912, far away from his duties in China and from his scattered. family—his wife and two youngest children still in Europe, and his three older children in California. His political and diplomatic worries intensified in this presidential election year, for China was an issue. Democrats, led by Woodrow Wilson, were advocating full diplomatic recognition of China, a position opposed by the Republicans and incumbent Republican president William Howard Taft, Wilder’s friend and patron.7

  Despite the obstacles of illness and geography, Dr. Wilder worked hard to make the best possible arrangements for Amos, Thornton, and Charlotte, ultimately deciding that both the boys would go to Thacher School. Charlotte would be sent to board with the Maynard family, his friends in Claremont, California, but strangers to Charlotte, and she would attend public school there. Getting Thornton to Thacher School had been Dr. Wilder’s goal since 1911, but Isabella—who held her own very strong opinions about how the children should be brought up—had overruled him then, insisting that Thornton and Charlotte accompany her back to China.8

  Dr. Wilder felt that Thornton needed “the virile atmosphere” of Thacher.9 He was forthright as he filled out the required questionnaire for Thornton’s admission: Was his son quick tempered? He was “inclined that way.” Did he get on well with other boys? “Not a good ‘mixer’—has a few congenials.” Did he have any difficulties in school? “None.” Yet, the father added, “Some teachers find him hard to classify.” Was he accustomed to seeing people play cards or other games for money? “On shipboard—and aware of it [in] Shanghai society.” What was his most serious fault or weakness? “He is ‘the boy that is different’—Sensitive—Self conscious—radiantly happy when with those he likes who understand him—May develop ‘moods.’ ” Thornton was not good at sports, the father reported, but he loved music, art, drama, literature. He got low marks in many subjects because of “Lack of concentration.” Thornton was “not a good drudge.” He could be nervous, even “terrorized” by certain pressures and routines that were “easy to others.” He had a “delicate, fine nature.” He knew nothing about guns or rifles, and his father would be “delighted” for him to learn. In the matter of buying a horse for Thornton, “great economy” would be necessary. Unless he was sick Thornton would be expected to attend the Presbyterian church five miles from the school, where seats were reserved for Thacher boys.10

  Fortunately Thornton was not privy to the portrait his father drew for Sherman Thacher, but he lived in continual awareness of his father’s high expectations and his own shortcomings. “What you are now you will be later,” Dr. Wilder had written to his son from Shanghai. “I know what a happy nature you are; and now to hold it. I much wish you might have more farm life—outdoor grandeur and practicality—that you might learn to work with your hands and depend on yourself.”11

  For his father Thornton’s acceptance at Thacher was a goal achieved. For Thornton, it was one more move in his father’s chess game. Bristling with resentment at another separation from family members, Thornton prepared reluctantly to go to one more strange place, one more new school. “How hard and callous the Wilder family will get through all the bi-monthly and even weekly leave-takings,”he wrote to his mother.12

  It had also been a sad leave-taking for Dr. Wilder. Not only would he live alone in China once more, but he was still grappling with his illness. His health had improved from the months of treatment and relative rest in the United States, but the disease would be chronically debilitating from that time on. He would never fully recapture the robust physical and intellectual energy that had defined him before he was felled by the Asian sprue. He found himself fifty years old and frail, and overwhelmed by his complicated responsibilities in Shanghai.

  As a teenager Thornton did not understand the professional burdens his father carried. He was also unaware of how deeply his father suffered the consequences of separation from the family. For Thornton the overriding reality was that for nearly two years he had been living away from both his parents and one or another of his siblings, communicating with them primarily through letters. Bound for one more new “home,” he hoped to hang on to some of his Chefoo friendships by correspondence. He had already learned, chameleonlike, to assume a definite persona for each recipient of a letter, changing colors as need be when he finished a letter to one person and began one to another, tailoring his voice and subject to the needs and interests of his correspondents. There seemed to be as many Thorntons as there were friends and relatives.

  In his fifteenth year, embarking for California to live in his older brother’s shadow at Thacher, Thornton slowly gave up trying to be the son he thought his father wanted him to be. He summoned the audacity and temerity to begin expressing his honest, sometimes obstreperous, true self. More and more often, as he stood on the bridge between boyhood and manhood, he struck a note of rebellion and defiance in letters to his father, despite his ongoing concern for the elder Wilder’s health problems. In letters uncannily like the letters young Amos Parker Wilder had written to his own father, Thornton fired off complaints—attacking the school, his peers, and most of all, his father’s edicts and decisions. By contrast, he still confided his hopes and dreams to his absent mother, and shared candidly with her the realities of his daily life and his intellectual and artistic pursuits.

  He had been led to hope that his mother would return to California by midyear 1913, and he counted on that reunion. “I don’t know to what degree I’ll like school,” he confessed to her. “But oh lady, you’ll be back (with the eternal Wilder question-mark) in June.”13

  IN MID-SEPTEMBER of 1912, Thornton found himself in the Ojai Valley, near Nordhoff, California, living in a rustic, ranch-style school surrounded by high mountains and rough terrain, tamed here and there into avocado and citrus orchards, with the nearby Sespe River twisting through rugged crags and canyons. It took him several weeks to adjust to life at the Thacher School, where the boys often slept outdoors in the canyons, rode horses along the river, and worked on trail building or other ranch projects after their school day was done.

  Two schools could hardly have been more different than Thacher and the China Inland Mission School. In Ojai, Thornton was transplanted into an environment where the school’s founder believed that insofar as possible, school life should mirror real life, with a daily emphasis on self-reliance, practical as well as analytical thinking, good manners, kindness, tolerance for others, and appreciation and respect for the natural world. Sherman Thacher, a graduate of Yale, class of 1883, had founded his school in 1889. From his father, a Latin professor at Yale from 1842 until 1886, Thacher inherited “an aversion to people of wealth,” and this often influenced his decision about whether to admit a young man to Thacher.14 He would sometimes turn away a prospective pupil whose parents were ostentatiously wealthy, while he made every effort to admit worthy students whose parents lacked the financial resources to send them to Thacher, especially if he perceived the boys to be of sterling character. Such was the case for his Yale friend and fellow Skull and Bones member, Amos Parker Wilder, who wanted to entrust his sons to Sherman Thacher and the school, which was already building a reputation as an effective Yale feeder establishment.

  Thacher’s letters to Dr. Wilder were accommodating to a fault: Wilder was offered a reduced rate, to be paid monthly at his convenience, or any other plan that “may prove to be in accordance with what you can satisfactorily arrange.”15 Once Thacher wrote, “I enclose our school bill, as a matter of form, the understanding always being that you shall treat it as may be convenient to you.”16 Without this largesse, Amos and Thornton Wilder would never have been able to go to Thacher.

  He hoped that his school would produce young men with independent minds. He set high standards in the clas
sroom (hiring many teachers fresh out of his alma mater), but he also encouraged the arts and sports, especially horseback riding. He wanted each student to have a horse, and to learn how to care for the horse as well as to ride it. (Thacher believed there was “something about the outside of a horse” that was “good for the inside of a boy.”) Once they were ready, students were free to ride all over the inviting, sometimes intimidating terrain of the Ojai Valley, and to explore the rugged, often desolate mountains and wilderness.

  At Chefoo, Thornton had been confined by language, boundaries, and structure, cut off from home and denied access to the exotic country that surrounded him. At Thacher he was free. Nature was his classroom. His brother was already deeply at home at Thacher, with accomplishments greater than Thornton could even aspire to equal. He wouldn’t excel, as Amos did, in the classroom, on the tennis court, in the student government, or on the baseball field. Thornton’s interests lay beyond sports, and at Thacher he could indulge them freely. He could play in the orchestra and study piano and violin. (“Beethoven’s Sonatas have been called the musician’s Shakespeare, and if ever you live in the same house as I do you’ll get to know them,” he nagged his father.)17 He spent hours in the library reading and writing. Best of all, not only could Thornton write plays; he could even see one of them produced. The school boasted a Greek-style amphitheater, located in a steep ravine surrounded by barns and pastures, an “Arcadian spot unmarred by artificial scenery, with a stream bed separating the audience and the actors.”18 It was the site of many remarkable performances, Thornton wrote his father. One of them was Thornton’s The Russian Princess: An Extravaganza in Two Acts. The play was produced in the Outdoor Theatre on May 21, 1913, with Thornton directing and appearing as the villain, Grand Duke Alexis of Russia. He wore a heavy fur coat and, his classmate Lefty Lewis remembered, went “darting about the stage while his fellow-actors looked on helplessly.”19 The play was “Thornton’s big moment at the Thacher School.”20 Written by Thornton and another student, Jack Drummond, the drama was set in Paris, in an apple-vendor’s shop and in a cabaret. Others who witnessed the production believed that Thornton “furnished the plot, and Jack Drummond the spelling and punctuation” and one of the teachers thought that the drama owed its inspiration “to Thornton’s fur coat.”21

  Although the Wilder children coped, each in his or her own way, with the prolonged parental absences, it was Amos who seemed to adjust most easily. He was quiet, self-effacing to the point of shyness, but popular, and his athletic prowess and academic achievement earned him the respect of teachers and fellow students. Isabel and Janet were happy and content with their mother, aunt, and grandmother. Janet knew no other way of life than to live in Europe far away from her father and brothers and sister Charlotte. The fractured family life was hardest on Thornton and Charlotte, both shy like Amos, but less stoic, more high-strung, and less equipped to acclimate to new surroundings. The family separation was a special agony for Charlotte, as the middle child, for she had been sent away from the family before—as a baby, before the birth of Isabel; and as a schoolgirl in Chefoo, allowed only an hour and a half each week to see her brother. Now she was being sent to live with total strangers in a new place—the Maynard family in Claremont. Isabella later came to believe that Charlotte’s displacements as a child caused serious problems for her as an adult.22 Now in California, Charlotte was once again the Wilders’ “sent-away” child.

  Thornton’s boyhood letters dramatically reveal the scope of his loneliness, and his longing for a normal family life. As he parted from his father and entered Thacher, not only was he homesick—for wherever home was—but he fell physically ill enough to be quarantined in the school sickroom. “This is the old situation of being sick after I leave you,” he wrote forlornly to his father in a letter headed “Thatcher[sic]. Sick room. Broken Heart. Sunday P.M.” Confined to bed and to his own company, he read and slept and played chess with himself “because no one else was allowed in the room for fear of catching appendicitis or gout.”23

  Dr. Wilder delivered Charlotte to Claremont that autumn of 1912 into the care of the Maynards, his friends who would board her and supervise her daily life, including her schoolwork and activities. Years later Isabel remembered that from their youth, her older sister was “handsome, very intelligent” and an eager student with “a mind full of curiosity” and an “intense” awareness of nature. Isabel added, “She was also highly sensitive and easily upset”—a “very private person” with a tendency to brood.24 Charlotte had been happy at Chefoo, but she found much to brood about in her life in Claremont. Under Mrs. Maynard’s strict supervision, Charlotte felt that she was being used as a household servant—washing dishes, cleaning, sweeping, with steady reproof and little praise from Mrs. Maynard.25 Apparently at Dr. Wilder’s instruction, Mrs. Maynard tried to teach Charlotte domestic skills, including sewing—a difficult task for Charlotte because she was left-handed. “In short,” Charlotte wrote to her father, “I’m taken in as a member of the family without the privileges of a member of the family.”26 She recognized that some of Mrs. Maynard’s discipline was good for her, but she dreaded the frequent scoldings, and even though she often enjoyed the company of the Maynard children, she begged her father not to send her back to Claremont for another year.

  DURING HIS year at Thacher, Thornton applied himself industriously to the task of learning to ride a horse. He had not ridden since his Shanghai days, and then, more often than not, he had been astride a pony, but he soon reported to his father that he could ride pretty well. By March 1913, he was riding out into the valley regularly, often making the ten-mile round-trip to Nordhoff, the nearest town. “I like riding all right but the only thing is it hurts,” he wrote to his father. “It made some huge blisters on me. I’ll probably get used to it some day.”27 His horse was well into its teens, a white horse and “the nicest old thing ever bridled,” Thornton wrote.28

  Far more at home with music, books, and plays, Thornton worked hard at the piano and the violin, occasionally performing in concerts at Thacher. He played second violin in a quintet, and gave a solo concert one night to an audience of Thacher’s Chinese staff members—a special “treat,” Thornton wrote facetiously, “to keep them on the second day of their new year from going to some pagan festival.”29 Early in 1913 he wrote to his mother in disappointment about losing a part in the school play because of his father. The big Thacher event of the spring was a schoolwide festival that included a tennis tournament—in which young Amos, the California high school doubles champion, would no doubt be a star. Parents would be coming “from far and near,” Thornton wistfully reported to his mother. There would be a big crowd for the gymkhana, the shooting matches, the tennis tournament, a dance, and then the play in the Outdoor Theatre—a performance of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Eager for a part in Wilde’s “funny, frivolous farce,” Thornton tried out for the play.

  In a boys’ school, of course, boys played all the roles, male and female. Thornton was thrilled when he won the part of one of the leads—“Lady Bracknell, a very sharp, lorgnette-carrying old Lady,” he told his mother. “I began learning my part right off and fell to work trying not to laugh at the clever epigrams I had to say.”30 He was already something of a ham, not nearly so shy onstage as off, and especially fond of comedy and farce. Thornton was happily absorbed in preparations for the play until one evening when Sherman Thacher interrupted him as he sat reading by the fire in the parlor. Thornton described the ensuing scene in the letter to his mother:

  “Oh Thornton,” [Mr. Thacher] said, “your Father said in a letter that he would rather not have you in the plays taking female parts, so, altho’ he didn’t absolutely order you, I think we had better do as he says.” I was terribly disappointed. Now another boy has the part. It’ll be very un-funny to watch the part I might be taking. The worst part of all comes in the explaining to other boys all about how my puritanical pater disapproves, etc.31

  AS M
UCH as he admired Sherman Thacher and his school, Dr. Wilder decided to move his “chess pieces” once again—to send Amos to Oberlin College and to withdraw Thornton from the school the coming year. When he heard of the plans, Sherman Thacher wrote Consul General Wilder a stern reprimand. He demonstrated “peculiar vacillations” with his sons, Thacher charged, moving them every few months. He told Dr. Wilder that he had received a letter from Mrs. Wilder saying that the only point on which she and her husband agreed in the children’s education was that it was best for Thornton to return to Thacher. Furthermore, Thacher told Wilder, Amos was disappointed to be heading for Oberlin rather than Yale, although he accepted the decision “loyally and bravely.” It was hard for Amos to see his friends go off to great universities while he “for some reason he can hardly appreciate is sent to a college that is hardly heard of far from its own locality and special friends.”32

  Dr. Wilder would later write Thacher to thank him for his influence on Amos and Thornton. “They are more manly in consequence and I believe lovers of truth,” their father reflected. “Amos is a serious young man and introspective; without the tennis, horse back riding, the love of nature bred of the mountains, I suspect his development would have been feverish—as it is, he sadly mixes up God and Nature for which I am glad. Surely to love one is to love the other.” As for Thornton, Dr. Wilder wrote, before he went to the Thacher School

  he was the last word in high browism, a delicate, girl-playing, aesthetic lad in the early teens; this kind of boy making a one-sided, often unhappy, inadaptible [sic] man is familiar. By wise contact with out-door life, wholesome farm work, physical weariness and honest country people, Thornton is really quite a man; has a fair chest, a firm hand-shake and mixes well with all classes. What was done with him can be done with many another “difficult” boy. But it requires wisdom.33