Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Despite his extracurricular activities, Thornton passed all his first-semester courses, even solid geometry—most likely, he joked to his father, because the professor was “too well-bred” to flunk him.25 On the other hand, Thornton reported, his English professor knew “the very pocket of my soul” because of the themes he was writing.26 He was writing in earnest, far more drama than fiction, essays, or poetry, and he knew day in and day out the “great depressions and wild exhilarations” that visit young writers. The young author, Thornton reflected years later,

  is drunk on an imaginary kinship with the writers he most admires, and yet his poor overblotted notebooks show nothing to prove to others, or to himself, that the claim is justified. The shortest walk in the country is sufficient to start in his mind the theme, the plan and the title, especially the title, of a long book; and the shortest hour when he has returned to his desk is sufficient to deflate his ambition. Such fragments as he is finally able to commit to paper are a mass of echoes, awkward relative clauses and conflicting styles.27

  As always, Thornton was reading insatiably, and he recognized that the pages he wrote were “full of allusions” to the pages he read.28 His curiosity propelled his reading and his writing, and in his freshman year, his byline appeared frequently in the best venue then at his disposal: the Oberlin Literary Magazine. His St. Francis Lake: A Comedy appeared in December 1915, followed in January 1916 by Flamingo Red: A Comedy in Cages (a play his mother disliked). His prizewinning essay, “The Language of Emotion in Shakespeare,” appeared in March 1916, followed in April by “Sealing-Wax,” a short story, and in May by one of his three-minute plays, Brother Fire: A Comedy for Saints.

  On February 18, Thornton wrote in his diary, he worked until one in the morning writing and polishing the essay to enter in the Shakespeare essay contest, and he was gratified to win, especially since the ten-dollar prize meant a significant addition to his pocketbook. He confessed to his brother that he was ashamed of the work, but “The Language of Emotion in Shakespeare” was remarkably thoughtful, fluid, and polished for an essay from the pen of a college freshman.29 “We have lost a living, expressive speech,” argued the fledgling playwright, who would later help transform the speech of modern drama. “Great plays need great, but natural language.”30

  ABSORBED AS he was in keeping up with his classes and indulging his love of reading, writing, and music, Thornton seemed unaware during his Oberlin days that he was attractive to women, young and old. At a dinner party he met an elderly lady he considered a “most remarkable” person, and planned to read aloud to her, as he had read to the late Dora Williams in Berkeley. “I’m going to be an expert in Old Lady psychology,” he wrote to his family. “It’s a little tiresome tho—when they start talking about Dickens—They were all about sixteen when Dickens was at his zenith.”31

  Young Oberlin coeds also sought Thornton’s friendship and company, a welcome experience for him after the all-male environment at the Boys’ School at Chefoo and at Thacher, and his casual friendships with a few girls at Berkeley High School. In the spring of his Oberlin freshman year, he wrote two long letters to his mother about Ruth Keller, a senior Latin major who was not “pleasing and beautiful” to boys, but whose “delightful, colored personality” made her one of his favorite companions. They took long walks, studied together, laughed a lot, and read aloud Joseph Vance, a bestselling novel by William Frend De Morgan. Thornton advised her about her future life, warning her not to “just live at home in her flat with her mother talking and sewing and gossiping” after she graduated.32 (After Oberlin, she went on to marry, have six children, give one son Thornton as a middle name, and manage an interesting career.)

  In letters, Thornton playfully passed along romantic advice and counsel to his sister Charlotte, almost, as a family member later observed, as if he were making up a drawing room comedy in his head.33 “Do you see anything of boys up there?” he wrote to her at Mount Holyoke. “You must get them to call on you, too, remember. I can’t have a sister who scares the boys away.” He even proposed sending a picture of himself to Charlotte, signed “Yours, Herbert” or “Love, Chauncy”—or maybe she could get Amos to send a picture of himself in his tennis flannels. Then Charlotte could pretend they were her boyfriends. “It would give you a ‘new dignity’ and ‘added prestige,’ ” Thornton urged his sister, “and, Lord [it’s] what you need!”34

  His own dignity and prestige were bound up in his writing, which brought him increasing visibility among Oberlin professors and students, and such regular publication in the college literary magazine that he reported to his family in May 1916 that he “had sworn off sending anything more” because it was “atrociously bad taste to have so many things in succession—a Freshman, too.” 35 He had been working all spring on the May production of The Last Word About Burglars, subtitled A Disordered Fancy in One Act, which he called “the first honest ‘artistic’ thing of mine to be given.” 36 There are three characters in the play, but the script runs to eight handwritten pages, longer than his typical three-minute playlets. As the play opens, a husband and wife come home from the theater and discuss the unnerving fact that the wife has been hearing someone in the house at night. Later that night the wife confronts the burglar—a young boy with a tragic story to tell. The husband rushes on the scene to rescue his wife—but he cannot see the burglar. “You are ill again,” he tells his wife. “There was no one here. You have been brooding over burglars until you have nightmares of them. What was he like?” 37 While the fledgling psychology major was at work here, there are also signs of the fledgling playwright in the dramatic tension built through dialogue, through the symbolism—the interplay of darkness and light, illusion and reality, self-negation and affirmation—and through the final irony that the burglar actually restores rather than steals the heroine’s sense of self.

  Thornton was also writing a longer play, motivated by a competition sponsored by Grace George, whom he described as a “prominent and distinguished New York actress-manager.”38 A successful stage actress, director, translator, and adapter, George was offering a large monetary prize for the best American play by an American college undergraduate. Thornton decided “without much audacity” that he should enter the contest because, he said, “I’m such an undergraduate and I write plays as I eat.”39 The play’s title morphed from Ventures Joyous to The Belinda (Ventures Joyous) to its ultimate title, The Rocket: An American Comedy in Four Acts. He completed one draft at Oberlin, and would continue to work on it at Yale. He summarized it for his father: “The story briefly concerns a young lady of a quiet, old wealthy family in Chicago who suddenly disturbs her family with an attack of ideals she has had.”40 Her idealism propels her to act in a “tuberculosis-propaganda moving-picture play” and to make “sincere and good little speeches to working girl leagues and to school-children in Central Park.” When her sincerity is questioned and she is condemned for acting in a movie, the “misunderstood” heroine retires to a “small farmhouse in Illinois.” His play was intended to be “a kind of High Comedy,” Thornton explained to his father, and not a cynical commentary on “the folly of youthful idealism and enthusiasm.”41

  Finally he wrote to his mother that he was ready to mail The Rocket to Grace George, along with a “nice letter and a certificate” from Professor Wager.42 Off to New York went Thornton Wilder’s first full-length play to compete for a prize he would not win. But this advance from the three-minute playlet to the four-act, full-length drama was a significant leap for an aspiring playwright.

  The encouragement he was hearing from his new mentor, Charles Wager, contrasted with the frequent criticism Thornton received from his father. “My heart stopped still when you said that I seemed only prepared to use the lighter forms of literature,” Thornton wrote to his father in May. “I probably have even more respect for them than you; but please offer me encouragement toward (even) tragedy.” He went on to report that “Even Prof. Wager thinks I ought to win the big prize—there
is only one of course—with my play, as do naturally the lesser critics that are privileged to hear parts of it.” Nevertheless Thornton expected The Rocket to come back to him, and then, he said, “I shall put it by and touch it up again when I am older. I am proud of the parts that I will never be able to touch up—but when I put myself in a professional reader’s place and read it, I know too well that it is food for smiles.” There were, he said, “realistic farm-interior domestic touches in the last Act. They’re at first hand.” He hoped his father might be proud of those.43

  AS USUAL, the elder Wilder was designing practical summer activities for his children. Isabel and Charlotte would attend a course of lectures at Chautauqua, and then go (against their wills, Isabel said) to a horticultural school for women in Ambler, Pennsylvania, where their father would pay for a month’s stay—which turned into two months when the girls were quarantined at the school during that summer’s polio epidemic.44 Just as Thornton had tried to take Charlotte in hand, he wrote Isabel some detailed advice about how to be more grown up that summer, and to become a “real modern storming young woman.”45

  Amos, who had now completed his junior year at Yale, spent the summer playing tennis and working on the staff of a YMCA center that served Camp Washington, a military training camp populated by a thousand high school boys, located near Fort Terry, on Plum Island, off Orient Point, New York.46 To his dismay, Thornton was destined for another farming summer, this time at the Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts. He was not happy about it. “The majestic contract for my valuable labor I return signed,” he wrote to his father in May 1916. “Did you know,” he continued, half in jest, “that you were doing what the psychologists call ‘infringing on my personality’ when you ask me to sign a blank agreement in which you fill in the details.”47

  Thornton dreaded ten summer weeks of nine-hour workdays on yet another farm. He bargained to be allowed to attend the Oberlin commencement ceremony before he went to Mount Hermon, and to have a few days in Mount Carmel with the family. By July 12, 1916, he was working like a Trojan, he complained, “under the hottest sun!”48 It was easier to adjust physically than it was to accept the work “with resignation mentally,” he confided in a letter to his mother, adding, “my fatalism increases with my blisters.”49

  8

  “THE ART OF WRITING”

  As I read my manuscript, I began to miss some of my cherished phrases; every now and then I saw that someone had inserted perfunctory bridges over which the timid mind might step—with petticoat lifted = when the art of writing is a matter of alpine climbing—peak to peak, and let the chasms snatch the fearful.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO HIS SISTER CHARLOTTE,

  October 16, 1916

  Mount Hermon and Oberlin (1916)

  The evangelist Dwight L. Moody’s Mount Hermon School for Boys was—like the China Inland Mission School, Thacher, and Oberlin—Amos Parker Wilder’s kind of school. According to the Mount Hermon School catalog, the boys’ school educated “young men of sound bodies, good minds, and high aims. It is designed for those who have already conceived a serious purpose in life; for those who are in earnest to secure a useful education; for those who desire to know more of the Bible.”1 To carry out his goals, Moody intended to “help young men of very limited means to get an education such as would have done me good when I was their age. I want to help them into lives that will count the most for the cause of Christ.”2 A “certain amount of manual labor daily” was required of all students. The school did not accept “vicious or idle boys,” boys with “delicate physical constitutions,” or “those who are drifting.”3 Dr. Wilder himself could not have created a better school environment.

  Thornton was one of many boys who went to Mount Hermon to work on the farm for the summer. (At least one of them was sent there by parents who mistakenly thought it was a reform school.) The boys carried out their strenuous duties in the verdant fields surrounding the handsome school buildings, and lived in a dormitory on campus. “I won’t be too enthusiastic about this place yet because I haven’t started work, but so far it’s great,” Thornton wrote to his family in July 1916 from Mount Hermon.4

  Once the work began, however, his opinion of the place shifted rapidly. He quickly discovered that summer farmhands were allowed to eat in the school dining hall, but not to sit with regular students—and he thought the food was awful. He complained to his father that even after “an incredibly hard day’s work” when he was “hungry as a boar,” the food made him “shudder.” “Sometimes it’s perfectly disgusting,” he wrote. This rankled because he was informed after he arrived that there would be major deductions from his salary, which was only fifteen cents an hour for ten hours of work a day, six days a week: Of his weekly nine-dollar paycheck, four dollars would be deducted for room, board, electricity, and laundry.5

  The work was “terrible,” Thornton griped. “Half the time I can barely stagger up and down the rows.” 6 To make matters worse, he was afflicted with mosquito bites, bedbugs, and sunburn. At least he had a private room in the workers’ dormitory, where, tired as he was, he could read for an hour and a half each evening—currently Ibsen’s plays, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and the worn copy of Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici his father had lent him, with passages underlined throughout. When he wasn’t reading he was writing in snatches of time—letters, stories, playlets in which there is evidence of his wide, deep reading in the after hours, before he fell asleep from a surfeit of exercise. (One compensation: He was gaining weight despite the bad food, growing husky, he could report, and developing a chest.)

  Sunburned and exhausted after the day’s labor in the fields, Thornton lost himself in the evening in Religio Medici (A Doctor’s Faith), the spiritual testimony of the seventeenth-century physician and metaphysician Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82). Browne’s often luminescent prose shed light for nineteen-year-old Thornton in his own spiritual ruminations. Dr. Wilder might have been surprised to know the depth of his son’s fascination with the ideas and the language in Religio Medici. Thornton promised to send this “ ‘devotional’ book” to his brother, telling him it was written “in the most exquisite style.” And, Thornton said, “The discussions of the supernatural especially are written in the most stirring eloquence I ever read.”7

  Powerful religious forces vied for Thornton’s allegiance during his boyhood: his father’s staunch moral and philosophical convictions, first of all; his mother’s gentler, more open-minded idealism, and her wide reading, especially of William James; Thornton’s own chorister’s love for the liturgy and religious music of various faiths, especially the Catholic Church; his instinctive curiosity and stubborn need to question authority; his alternating interest in and resistance to the religious principles of the schools he attended at Chefoo and Oberlin, and his resulting skepticism about missionaries and evangelical movements; the ongoing tension between his sense of duty, bred from years immured in the rituals of church and Sunday school and Bible classes, and his innate need to question, to study, to read, to come to terms with his own spiritual identity in his own way.

  “I am becoming more and more removed in any religious directions—mystical,” he confided in his brother. “Beauty and spiritual occurrence and pities and permeations are my sure spots, and the Gospel of John vibrates of them;—but of course I don’t know what I do think yet.”8 He occasionally tried to reassure his worried father: “I wish you wouldn’t sound so harassed and pathetic about whether I read my Bible and pray or not,” Thornton wrote. “Of course I do. If I didn’t force of habit and superstition and a hundred and one other things would torment me all night.”9

  He could most likely identify with Sir Thomas Browne’s assertion that he was religious despite the “several circumstances that might persuade the world” that he had no religion at all, in part, as Browne wrote, because of “the indifferency of my behavior and discourse in matters of religion, neither violently defending one, nor with that common ardor and contention o
pposing another.”10 As Browne said of himself, Thornton “could never hear the Ave-Maria bell without an elevation.”11 His rich imagination and aesthetic sensibility responded instinctively, often fervently to the music and liturgy of certain religious services—Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. Thornton was often captivated by what Browne described as the “wingy mysteries in divinity and airy subtleties in religion.”12 One of Browne’s ideas in particular seems to have resonated, at least subliminally, and made its way into Thornton’s later fiction and drama: “Every man is not only himself; there have been many Diogenes and as many Timons, though but few of that name,” Browne wrote. “Men are lived over again; the world is now as it was in ages past. There was none then but there hath been someone since that parallels him, and is as it were his revived self.”13

  Instinctively Thornton knew at nineteen what Browne had written in 1635, at thirty: He did not have to travel over “the flux and reflux of the sea” to explore the mysteries of world and of life itself. He could accomplish that travel, Browne wrote, “in the cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.”14 And then there was Browne’s compelling image: “Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us.”15

  Deliberately or not, his father had set Thornton on the path to two catalytic spiritual encounters during his first two years of college. The first came with the loan of Dr. Wilder’s own marked-up copy of Religio Medici, which stirred Thornton’s instinctive love for language and elegant literary style as well as his spiritual belief. The second came with Thornton’s deepening regard for Oberlin professor Charles Wager, and through him, a host of influences, including Sophocles, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Saint Francis of Assisi, and Cardinal John Henry Newman. Wager was “one of the greatest living authorities on St. Francis” and was writing a book on him, Thornton told his mother.16 Not surprisingly, Saint Francis showed up in one of Thornton’s playlets—Brother Fire—and when Professor Wager read it, he had announced in the company of Theodore Wilder that Thornton “had captured the exact spirit of the whole matter!”17 (“Bring me not logic, sister. She is the least of the handmaids of Love,” says Thornton’s Brother Francis to the peasant woman Annunziata in her hut in the mountains of northern Italy.)18