Penelope Niven
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Thornton wrote to his father that he “felt more and more” that he would like to teach for a while in the Yale-in-China program, but he doubted they would accept him, or if he would even be suited to teaching. He wondered if you could be a good teacher if you were not a good pupil. “I might like to learn Chinese and try to build a literature around the passing old schools—and around the village life,” he told his father.29 Dr. Wilder must have been pleased to hear that his son would even consider such a practical ambition as teaching.
IN AUGUST 1914, Amos was with some friends near the Wilders’ old cottage on Lake Mendota at Maple Bluff, Wisconsin, when he heard the news that would soon reshape his life, along with the lives of so many others: War had broken out in Europe. Back in Berkeley that fall, Isabella Niven Wilder, like many other American citizens, was trying to do her part. She was “head over heels on the Red Cross Society of which she is secretary,” Thornton wrote to his father, who was off on his prolonged quest for some sort of cure or at least palliative treatment for his chronic debilitating illness.30 He had tried doctors and hospitals on the West Coast and the East Coast, and now, in September 1914, set his hopes on the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan.
Concerned as he was about his father’s health problems, Thornton did not let up on the continuous debate about his own college plans. Amos would be transferring to Yale, and Dr. Wilder seemed determined to send Thornton there as well. “You seem to be pretty eager for my entering Yale,” he wrote to his father in the fall of 1914; “—it might be worse!—I’ve been reading Yale and Harvard etc. papers and mags. up at the U. C. Library and there’s not much choice, but I might prefer the cloisters of Cambridge to the Bleachers of Yale, but there’s not enough inclination either way to give me Splittering Colic if I’m crossed in the matter, so alright.” At least if he went to Yale, he would be allowed to room on campus with his brother rather than live at home after the family moved to New Haven. Thornton was glad about that, believing that “Dorm. Life is college life while going home for meals is like from Kindergarten to High School.”31
In the meantime he was the man of the house in Berkeley, reporting on family events regularly to his father and his brother. At his father’s urging Thornton was working on athletics, trying to gain some skill in some sport, this time rowing. He was doing well enough with Indian clubs to be one of twenty boys chosen to do an exhibition at the housewarming of the new school gym.32 Isabel reported to her father that Thornton’s play was a hit at the high school, Charlotte had written a poem, and baby Janet was fine, “So Mother has something to talk & boast about.”33
Thornton filled letters with extended details about his sisters, describing Isabel as a “very self-conscious, fluffy headed person, getting a little slangy, a little loungy-about, and a little vain, but all smiles when the sun shines.” He admired her capacity for a “companionable good heartedness.”34 Charlotte was more complicated. By the time she was fourteen she had lived away from the family for more than three years of her life, and the years had left scars. She was a sensitive girl, sometimes volatile and unpredictable, but for a time in Berkeley, she was “unusually pacific and amiable,” Thornton was happy to say.35 Charlotte seemed to have inherited a double dose of Wilder/Niven stubbornness, however. She was, Thornton wrote,
a red cheeked, so-so plump girl in glasses; everything she says would be described as “stoutly” or “emphatically” put. She has a habit of talking protestingly which is the lighter side of her infallibility. You may not realize it but it’s positively serious, the way Charlotte can’t be corrected. . . . It’s all based on great underlying consciousness of being perfect that often shows up curiously.36
Yet she possessed an “unconscious charm,” Thornton added, “a kind of tantalizing childishness.” As the family member to whom Charlotte was closest, Thornton worried about his sister and felt responsible for her. The two of them took a long walk one spring day in 1915, searching the nearby hills for new flower specimens for their botany class. “Charlotte’s always threatening to go to all the lonesomest and most distant mountain-tops alone, and because of her perverseness she probably will some day,” he worried to his father; “but until then I have to act as guardian and ‘take’ her everywhere.”37
BY THE end of March 1915, in his senior year, Thornton was ready for a dramatic change. Public school had its shortcomings, so Thornton turned to all of Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco for “classroom” space and experience, and gravitated to the theater world. When he wasn’t writing his own plays or lurking around the Greek Theatre at the University of California nearby, he was reading European newspapers in the university library, avid for theatrical news, especially from Germany and Austria. He knew the names of prominent directors, producers, and playwrights at home and abroad, collecting information about them as other boys of his time fixed their attention on sports heroes or stamp collections. Before the move to Shanghai, Thornton had once mustered the courage to approach the famous playwright Percy MacKaye during rehearsals for one of his productions at the Greek Theatre. He told MacKaye that he, too, was writing plays, and had given MacKaye his address. When MacKaye had actually written to Thornton, he was “too shy” to write back, although he was “always dreaming of scenarios for Percy MacKaye.”38 Thornton attended every possible play, concert, and lecture, and seized every chance to participate in the arts. He auditioned for the Berkeley Oratorio Society, and was accepted.
He was fascinated by the ongoing construction along San Francisco Bay for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition—wonders to be unveiled in 1915 when the exposition opened its bejeweled grounds to more than eighteen million visitors. Before the exposition officially opened, Alexander Graham Bell himself had made the first transcontinental telephone call to officials in San Francisco, and one exciting highlight of the exposition was a daily cross-country telephone call. The exposition’s Palace of Transportation featured a Ford assembly line that, during three hours every afternoon, Monday through Saturday, produced and polished one automobile every ten minutes—a total of 4,400 cars during the run of the exposition. There was also danger, and tragedy: The aviation idol Lincoln Beachy had perished March 14 when his specially built plane crashed into San Francisco Bay while he was demonstrating to a crowd of some fifty thousand that he could fly it upside down.
THORNTON DISCOVERED that he could go to the exposition as many times as he could afford to buy a ticket, and each time he could see different “wonders of the world”—the actual Liberty Bell; the first ukulele to be played in the United States; a beautiful three-acre Japanese garden; lavish “palaces”—buildings full of art and inventions and technology. One of the largest was the Palace of Machinery, the world’s biggest steel-and-wood structure, fashioned after the Roman Baths of Caracalla, nearly a thousand feet long, with two intertwining miles of aisles crammed with exhibits. Best of all, Thornton thought, you could see plays, concerts, and works of art, as well as famous people—Thomas Edison himself; Amos Parker Wilder’s friend and patron, President William Howard Taft; Buffalo Bill Cody and Charlie Chaplin and Helen Keller. The opulent centerpiece of the exposition was the Tower of Jewels, an Italianate tower encrusted with more than one hundred thousand “Novagems,” glistening glass pieces that shimmered and shone in sunlight, or in the magical, manufactured light of evening. The 635 acres of exposition land also included the Zone, a wonderfully garish, flamboyant amusement park. Thornton loved wandering through the courts and lagoons and the waterfront. “It’s most wonderful,” he told Amos.39 And, best of all, he got to perform there when the Berkeley Oratorio Society (with several other local choral societies) sang composer Gioacchino Antonio Rossini’s setting of the Stabat Mater Dolorosa, first in Berkeley’s Greek Theatre, and then at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition’s Festival Hall. They also performed Brahms’s A German Requiem. In exchange for singing they received free admission to the exposition for a whole day—“which means an awful lot,” Thornton wrote, “at 50 ce
nts admission.”40
One of the Wilders’ neighbors, Frederick Cheever Torrey, invited various members of the Wilder family to be his guests at concerts in Festival Hall. Thornton was thrilled to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra give a series of twelve concerts. “It’s a wonderful organization and plays like one brain,” Thornton wrote to his father.41 Isabella and Thornton sometimes bought the cheaper standing-room tickets to concerts at the exposition, and he planned to buy his mother a full ticket for her birthday.
The Wilders enjoyed an interesting circle of friends in Berkeley, largely because of Isabella’s gifts for friendship and her wide-ranging cultural interests. Mr. Torrey, who took them to exposition concerts and gave Thornton the run of his excellent home library, was the nationally known San Francisco art and antiques dealer who had recently demonstrated the artistic foresight to purchase Marcel Duchamp’s controversial Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, which had scandalized most viewers at the landmark 1913 Armory Show in New York. Thornton would have seen the painting, which was hung in the stairwell of Torrey’s home during that time.42
Thornton frequently visited Mrs. Virgil Williams, widow of the painter who had been the founder and then director of San Francisco’s School of Design from 1874 until 1886, the year of his death. Dora Norton Williams was also a painter of some note. However, to Thornton in 1915—the year of her death—she was an elderly invalid who lived in the neighborhood, knew and admired Amos Parker Wilder, and had known Robert Louis Stevenson and claimed that he had “dedicated his ‘Silverado Squatters’ to her—a thousand years ago,” Thornton wrote to his father.43 (Actually Stevenson dedicated the 1879 edition of his book to his cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson.) Thornton frequently read aloud to Mrs. Williams and listened to her stories of the past. The Williamses were, indeed, close friends of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Dora Norton Williams was one of only two witnesses at his wedding to Fanny Osbourne on May 19, 1880, as well as Fanny Stevenson’s lifelong friend and confidante.
Across the street from the Wilders lived a former English teacher at the Thacher School, Talcott Williamson, who tutored Thornton in the mechanics of English—spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and paragraphing—none of which, Williamson remembered, interested the teenager very much. Williamson “sweated blood” trying to teach Thornton, who, when chastised, would respond hopefully that perhaps, when he became a writer, he would always have a stenographer.44
FOR SEVERAL months during his senior year at Berkeley High School, Thornton and his father engaged in what Thornton, with his ongoing fondness for German, termed a “wortwechsel”: an exchange of words (or a dispute) about where he would go to college. Since the Thacher School days, Dr. Wilder had hoped to send Thornton to Yale. He wanted to go to Harvard, however, because he thought it offered a more serious-minded academic atmosphere than Yale, his father’s alma mater, and he no doubt knew how this opinion would rankle. He most definitely did not want to go to Oberlin. After two years there Amos was transferring to Yale, and Thornton longed to be able to join his brother at Yale for his freshman year, if he couldn’t go to Harvard. “I sure hope we can keep a room at Yale,” he wrote Amos, although he doubted he would ever get there.45
Thornton lobbied his father aggressively not to send him to Oberlin—“Oberlin with its compulsory chapels and prescribed Scripture-class-work and its suggested Christian endeavors, Bible-class, YMCAs and Temperance Society.” He recognized that it might “seem awful” of him to complain about such an atmosphere. After all, he wrote, he was “the ridiculous ever-present of my own Sunday-school boy’s division. The only one of my class of 12 to be present often; the official organist; the performer of official odd-jobs; moving tables and passing messages.”46
But in the end Papa Wilder prevailed in his plan to send Thornton to Oberlin, and to transfer Amos to Yale for his junior and senior years. He believed strongly—and no doubt rightly—that Thornton needed the “congenial circle, the music, the quiet, the unaffected atmosphere of the old college town,” and that this atmosphere would “ripen our boy and protect him for a year until he is older when he can resist the shocks of a place like [Yale].”47 Dr. Wilder thought it would be easier for Thornton at Yale if he transferred there as an older, more mature, and experienced student.48
Thornton, just turned eighteen, resented the fact that his father was not only requiring him to go to Oberlin but denying him the freedom he had given Amos when he enrolled there. Amos had received a lump sum to set up his own living arrangements, whereas, Thornton protested, he was going to be “entrusted to two ‘sweet-faced’ old ladies” who ran Dascomb Cottage, the boardinghouse where he would live, and who would supervise him and his limited funds.49 “He needs supervision, that is someone to look after his clothes etc.,” Dr. Wilder wrote Amos. “He is a most helpless kid.”50
“I feel I don’t want to go to College at all,” Thornton finally wrote to his father. “College is just a broader, more roaring brighter world for a bounded High School Boy anyway.”51 If he could really do what he wanted, he told his grandmother, he wouldn’t go to college. He would just “travel and write, and live in ordinary, city boarding-houses and in the second class and steerage of boats, and in European attics and among the people of China. And ‘accidentally’ brush myself up against writers etc whom I admire, and get out of feeling that I’m always being hurt by father and always hurting him.”52
DURING HIS senior year in Berkeley Thornton was dejected about the tight family budget, and feeling trapped in what he saw as the nightmare of high school. He wanted his father to understand his unhappiness, particularly as symbolized by his “old deformed clothes.” Once, in his first-period class, in a long, dramatic letter marked “Private,” Thornton poured out his misery. Some of his friends didn’t want to be seen with him in the daytime, he wrote. They would take walks with him only in the evening. Thornton complained that he was wearing suits, hats, and even underwear handed down by his brother, his father, and some of his father’s friends. “I have an awful revulsion against anyone else’s underwear,” he wrote,
but when some of mine from Thacher becomes too torn and ragged, Mother takes it away and leaves nothing but Mr. O’Connor’s for instance, and [that] old blue suit of his. It makes me sick all over but I have to be down at this hate [sic] school by 9:, so I have to. Mr. Thacher two Easters ago (Three that is) gave Amos a check and told him to take me to a store and fit me out in long trousers. And Amos got me two pairs of the wide trousers style that was just then on the wane. And now two years later, I have to wear them up and down the back streets of Berkeley, without any confidence and walking alone. I’m enough of a by-word here at school as it is. My unconscious periodic sentences and hunting-for-the-right-word and my mannerisms make that. A person can only be himself with ladies of 85 and with real artists of some kind.53
He had saved $14.50, $10.00 of it from his work at the Varney farm the previous summer, and he was tempted to take it out of the bank and buy some decent clothes. He felt that unless he was writing “a story or piece or something,” he didn’t have “any right to breathe.” He was discouraged that when he wrote a story and showed it to his teacher and classmates “to vindicate” his existence, his writing was spurned. “I don’t mean to acquire anything—just to vindicate and so live.”54
Writing had already become a refuge and an absorption for him, as well as a means of vindication. He wrote at odd times, in odd places, and one favorite venue was any class in which he was bored or uninterested. In the spring of 1915, in the flyleaves of his first-year algebra textbook, he set up a table of contents for miniature plays he had begun to write, or planned to write.55 He called them Three-Minute Plays for Three Persons. They were distinguished by exotic settings and characters and, of course, the economy of action and character development mandated by the three-minute framework. Sitting in algebra class in his worn, outdated, second- or thirdhand clothes, Thornton transported himself into another world, vividly populated by chara
cters he imagined and invented, or characters he had read about. He also planned to create full-length dramas, which would, he daydreamed, be staged in theaters where they would “alternate with The Wild Duck and Measure for Measure.” He had grand visions of having his plays produced, and even cast them “with such a roll of great names as neither money nor loyalty could assemble.”56
The world he imagined could, at least for a time, supersede the real world he inhabited. “Authors of fifteen and sixteen years of age spend their time drawing up title-pages and adjusting the tables of contents of works they have neither the perseverance nor the ability to execute,” he wrote in 1928, when he was thirty-one. But the perseverance and execution could eventually grow out of the dreaming imagination, and the hunger to express it.
THAT SPRING Thornton began asking his brother for advice about how to organize his life at Oberlin. “I want to take College very mildly,” he wrote, “and be able to keep all my irons and waffle-pans in the fire. I’d like to take choral work and harmony of music, but I dread piano or violin lessons. I’ve such a rough-and-tumble preparation.”57 But he couldn’t let go of his disappointment that once again Wilder family life would be fractured, in yet another configuration. He managed to joke about it in a letter to his father: “Mother got a telegram last week. She thought it was from you saying possibly, ‘Isabel go to school in Rhiems [sic]; Janet learn Fiji immediately—official—,’ but it was from the Red Cross.”58