Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  His father no doubt thought that Thornton was just being Thornton. His mother worried that he was sinking into a “decadent period,” but she also recognized that Thornton had “used up Oberlin, and hence his desire to cease.” She believed that at a new institution—Harvard, Yale, or Columbia—“he would revive interest in his education and go through with it.” Meanwhile, Thornton was “producing playlets and stories like an adding machine with scarcely a click,” their mother wrote to Amos.15

  Thornton missed his brother and his quiet understanding, for Amos was still a world away. After completing three months with the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris he had transferred on January 31, 1917, to the American Field Service and in February was assigned to the front in the Argonne. Sensitive accounts of transporting the wartime wounded filled the pages of his letters, often written at night in the dim light of improvised lamps in army dugouts. Back home his proud father offered “extended excerpts” for publication in the New Haven Journal-Courier and other newspapers.16

  By early April 1917, with President Wilson leading the nation into the war, world events overshadowed Thornton’s despondency, as well as his halfhearted academic pursuits and his dreams of writing. When Congress approved the declaration of war on April 6, 1917, Thornton wrote to his parents for guidance. He was almost twenty, and it was time to decide what part he would play in the war. Oberlin’s president, Dr. Henry C. King, and Professor Wager spoke to students about the “bigger aspects” of the war, and some Oberlin men “hurried up to Cleveland to enlist hot-foot.” Others decided to stay in college until the end of the semester. Thornton was inclined to wait and see, to “drill and cross” on campus, where military training was being organized as it was in colleges and universities throughout the United States.17

  He agonized over the decision. For a short time he considered joining some Oberlin boys who were going to Paris to work as hospital orderlies, and his father encouraged the plan, as Thornton duly noted on a postcard: “You are very comforting in your description of an orderly’s job as ‘loitering along the corridors and being pleasant with the maimed.’ I understand that it was to carry swill and help the undertaker. Please find out which one of us is right.”18

  Thornton imagined himself a soldier, and wrote to his family, “How absurd even to you I would look with a bayonet; I have no faint reflection in my mild make-up of the heroic! I should smile up to the last minute. And equally absurd with my illogical mind would I seem declaring myself after due process, a conscientious objector.”And then there was the ultimate confrontation: “But all consideration leads to that moment when one shoots.”19

  “Thornton has had a ‘quake of the soul’ at last,” his mother reflected, when she heard from her “mystical-minded boy” as the United States geared up for wartime. She predicted he was moving toward a “deep sincere visualization of a world of struggle and problem[s].”20 Oberlin drills, marches, and field excursions began in earnest April 11, with 350 men participating. College men with on-campus training were promised eligibility to become noncommissioned officers. While Thornton’s participation in the training exercises did not mean he had committed to enlist, he told his family, it did seem to him that he must do so—not because he was a hero, or because he felt “that the issues for an American are not great enough to risk everything for,” but because of what the experience could do to him “in sudden maturing, completing,” and for what it could do to inject “greatness” into his “Little Gift” as a writer.21 He wrote his brother about the new routine: marching three times a week, undergoing endurance drills and sham battles. “It commits us to nothing however but strenuous exercise and a state of being nervously wrought.”22 He told Amos that he had almost decided that he should enlist.

  By the end of April, Thornton was confiding his worries about the war and his role in it to Grandmother Niven: “What is being planned for me? I do not know.” He wore eyeglasses, and had been told that his eyesight might keep him from being conscripted. But if he passed, he would be reconciled to the soldier’s life. “In my funny, sensitive way of being distressed and despairing over my life and my fitness, I am always at odds with life,” he told her. “I am a personality peculiarly isolated.” He loved his country, but he had his doubts about the power of war to improve the human condition. He wondered if his father might send him to work on a farm; seventy Oberlin boys had already departed to “serve the agricultural need of their country and their country’s allies,” Thornton reported.23

  In the midst of the “scorching” reality of wartime preparations, classes went on at Oberlin, as did the annual French play, in which Thornton played a small role. He wondered all the while if his “little practice in French” would prove to be significant in wartime.24 He had just turned twenty, and he told his mother he was now thinking seriously about enlisting. When Isabella heard that Thornton’s poor vision and dependence on eyeglasses might make him ineligible, she wrote to young Amos: “So I am very thankful. . . . One of you in the track of shellfire is all I can stand.”25

  “REALIZATION OF the war and Personal Determinations come to me with regular frequency, but between them I drift back to my pre-occupations with literature and with the little social life around me,” Thornton wrote apologetically to his family that spring. He welcomed the company of Nina Trego, an Oberlin senior with “an elfin pointed oval” face, “dusky” skin, the eyes of “a mad Ariel,” and a “salty” tongue.26 Even though they quarreled often and heatedly, they enjoyed each other immensely. She held her own with Thornton, and never hesitated to criticize his writing, even his letters home. Once, when he asked her to read a letter, she told him “with a reproving smile that it was magnificent writing but that there were some things in it that she wouldn’t send ‘if she were I,’ ” adding, “although, of course, your parents must be used to that kind of letter.” She was “sharply independent and warning-ful but elfin and super-intelligent,” he wrote admiringly.27 She was “a young seer.”28 All in all, he confided to his mother, he was “becoming absorbed in the entrancing Miss Nina Trego.”29

  Nina thought Thornton should do farmwork for the war cause, but he leaned toward going to Europe. They were living in “Great Adventurous Days.”30 His neglect of his college work was intensified by the reality that the war was disrupting life in general, and academic life in particular, with college students now leaving in droves to enlist. “All the boys are gradually going,” he told his father, adding that the Oberlin dean predicted that two-thirds of them would leave by the end of the month.31 Torn as he was about whether to enlist, Thornton rebelled when his father tried to discourage him. “I feel ashamed of myself for being so easily reduced to acquiesce by you,” he wrote Dr. Wilder in May. “If I were worth my salt, I would fly into a fiery passion, demand your support for my enlisting and cow you into admiration—but instead I am a poet, a lover of the meek-eyed Peace and farthest Maine-coast solitude.”32

  But he grew increasingly anxious, believing he should serve in the military but fearful that, like so many young men, he might perish in battle before he had realized his aspirations. These exigencies led to Thornton’s resolve to devote himself totally to his literary development. “Other[s] fight for their country or for their sheer love of great action,” he wrote to his family, “but the artist is the great egoist, and counts the world well lost for one created perfect thing.”33 But if he was going to die young in battle, he was determined to leave some good work behind. To that end he started keeping a journal. He began with an epigraph from Twelfth Night: “Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy . . .’tis with him in standing water, between boy and man.” This was followed by an aphorism: “When enthusiastic—make a note of. For what is not expressed dies.”34

  The pages of his journal were suffused with ideas for plays and short stories. First he would write out a draft of his prose in a leftover exam “blue book” or whatever was at hand, and then he would copy it with “meticulous neatness into a notebook.
”35 Sometimes he escaped into daydreams—plays he would write, and stage and film stars he would cast in those plays, especially the handsome young Welsh actor Gareth Hughes. He copied portions of reviews of Hughes’s performances, pasted a newspaper photograph of Hughes in the journal, and wrote a passage about how Professor Wager had actually seen Hughes play an “unimportant role” on Broadway, but remembered “more vividly his chance glimpse of the young actor striding splendidly down Fifth Avenue the next morning.”36 When Gareth Hughes disappeared from the news, Thornton worried that he had left for the trenches.

  Into his 1917 journal also went accounts of Professor Wager’s inspiring lectures on Dante and Euripides, Cardinal Newman and Saint Ignatius Loyola, and of his own stolen hours copying musical scores in the library. Thornton entrusted his ongoing literary work to the journal, which he hoped would “portray the various steps in the evolution” of his writings. He wrote out ideas for a play he soon condensed into a new three-minute playlet—The Acolyte—inspired in part by Professor Wager’s lecture on the Ion of Euripides. A foundling left on the steps of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Ion was taken in by the priests to be raised as a slave. Thornton originally conceived his play expressly to star Gareth Hughes as a “lay-brother and caretaker of an old Mission in Southern California” who hesitates to become a monk because he was a foundling, left on the doorstep of the mission and raised by the brothers there. He does not want to commit his life to the church until he finds his birth family and learns why he was abandoned.37

  Thornton worked hard over several days in May to honor Professor Wager with a sonnet, and began writing two other sonnets as well, trying to emulate the classical literary form and idiom he knew his professor admired. He would continue refining the Wager sonnet as late as December 1917. The May 17 draft in his journal does not inspire confidence that Thornton was destined to be a poet. It read in part, “Oh, let me listen on that saving word / That brings to leaf the branches of my mind.—/ As Saul leaned to Gamaliel, strangely stirred, / Urgent for God, and that dim work assigned.”38 Even so, when Thornton had polished the sonnet to his satisfaction, he sent it to Charles Wager.

  Thornton also confided to the journal his fears about the war, filling pages with his apprehensions and his conflict about what to do. His imagination and empathy brought the horrors of battlefield into vivid reality, but he decided—for the third time—to enlist. Congress was about to pass the conscription bill, and soon the young men of the country would know the particulars—who would be called, and how, and when. “If I were one dummy among a thousand khaki dummies I believe that my thousand separate distresses would merge into one distress—the monotony of the military life, perhaps later, the terrible variety of military action,” he reflected. “I am a tragical boy tonight, as despairing as a cat at sea.”39

  He wrote with foreboding:

  I can see that I have always in the back of my mind the assurance that the war will end soon, that I was cultivated for a sudden term of violence at my twentieth year. And it is with this that I combine the—I deplore—little religious sense that I have. I can imagine myself believing up to the moment of my first “Company, fire!” that Providence would never bring me to active fighting. . . . Perhaps I am not all fool since I can see and ridicule (although I cannot correct) my illusions.40

  He had nightmares: “Last night I dreamed of my first day in the trenches,” he wrote in the journal.41 He thought it was Belgium where he was fighting in his dream. He and the other new soldiers were asked to write on paper with torn edges. Then they were given gas masks and warned that poisonous clouds were about to enfold them. He donned his mask quickly and smelled the deadly bromine fumes. He could not remember the rest.

  BACK IN New Haven, Amos Parker Wilder was gratified to hear in April that Thornton had been promoted to corporal, in charge of eight Oberlin men, and was taking an advanced military course to learn how to drill his charges. Pleased and proud, Dr. Wilder wrote, “You do not explain how you chance to be a corporal; you know a father is always surprised when his boy does better than the average boy! I confess this is power in an unexpected direction.”42 But soon, Thornton wrote in his journal, he had been “deposed from my corporal-ship in drill through sheer incompetence.” He could not imagine how he was going to break the news to his father. “Our good Captain John Allen was grieved to do it,” Thornton wrote, “for he placed me there from a kindly impulse, and the only thing I regret is the damage done to his opinion of me. But I have spoken to him this morning, saying that I am glad of the retirement, the complications of squads-on-to-left and squads-to-the-left-march harassed me, and his face showed relief.”43

  Now that he was a disgraced “deposed” corporal, Thornton decided that in his letters home, for the time being, he would maintain a “Furtive Silence” about his demotion.44 Fortunately he was reinstated as a corporal on May 2, although “perhaps not permanently,” but at least he did not have to inform his father of his temporary fall from grace.45

  IN THE spring of 1917, that time of limbo when Thornton and countless other young men waited to learn if they would be conscripted, he and his father revisited an earlier battle—the question of whether and where Thornton would go to college for his junior year. The father lobbied for Yale. The son balked. He did not think he could pass all the Yale entrance exams, for one thing. He did not want to go to Yale, for another. Most of all he wanted to continue studying with Professor Wager, even though he believed that Wager was “not particularly fond” of him. “He likes the great, boyish, naive, accepting boys,” Thornton wrote to his father, “and I am odd, over-learnèd, distressed and adrift, but ruddered by my own conceit.”46 Still, he was “no less fond” of his professor, and while he knew there were “brilliant and literary” professors at Yale and Harvard, they lacked “that spiritual almost ascetic magnetism of Mr. Wager.” He thought it was better for him to “live in an ordinary routine college” with Wager than in a “World-famous University without him.” Then Thornton offered an alternative that he knew would rivet his father’s attention: “Albeit if you hear of some Catholic college I will discuss that seriously. I think that after all I am an acutely religious temperament and that beside it nothing else matters.”47

  The big question about Thornton’s future was settled in May by the national conscription law, which proclaimed that only men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty would be drafted. “That leaves Thornton out,” his mother wrote with relief.48 She reported to Amos in Europe that Thornton had “suddenly become sane and calm again.”49 He wrote his own private letter to his brother about the outcome: “All the fever about my going into the army has passed—There were moments perhaps hours when it seemed to me the perfect thing for me to do—but with the news that the Registration age is from 21–30, the fever has passed with the necessity. For the present Father’s plans carry.”50

  Dr. Wilder’s plans for Thornton, as usual, included a summer of farmwork, this time at Berea College in Kentucky. At least agricultural work now had the larger purpose of helping the war effort. In the fall Thornton would resume his college program—most likely at Yale or Harvard. “I want to come back to Oberlin next year,” he insisted in another letter to his father. “Other people are content to have Providence lay the school burdens on their children,” he argued, trying another tactic, “but [you] have taken the work into your own hands;—it creates a different psychological reaction in the pupil’s mind; mostly puzzlement.”51

  Thornton offered evidence that Oberlin had served him well, and would continue to do so: “During the last year under the tart instruction of Nina Trego I have civilized down a little from the Shelley manner and these people have understood me better and met me on a more generous footing.” He was afraid that on another campus his “bedraggled despairing moods would increase. If the world is still going to College next year allow me to come to this nourishing back-stream.”52

  When, after a “long unproductive period,” Thornton “suddenly w
rote a story,” he realized again, he told his father, “that whether I go or stay, whether I work or study or travel is all superficial. My real life is abstract and moves along on its own will and caprice, and all these outer things are a shrugging-of-the shoulders, a cork-on-the-stream. So do what you like; a hoe or a hospital pail or a bayonet in my hand are phantom, for my hand holds always a fountain-pen.53

  Whether fate took him to war or to Yale or to another summer farm, he hoped that he could at least spend some time at home in Mount Carmel. He expressed that wish in a letter to his father, fusing his own dramatic bent with the style of writers he admired at the time, especially George Moore. Thornton was, he wrote extravagantly,

  a distant son, doting for your least considered moments, the crumbs of your time. . . . As a mystic counts the troubles and irks of this life nothing compared to the felicities that shall be hereafter, so I dream beyond the plowed field and the dusty hay, to the moment when there is a rushing from the house to the Father returning and to the smell of Mother’s risotto and the following of her about, talking to her as she works.54

  THORNTON HAD arrived at Oberlin an awkward adolescent, full of self-doubt and countless enthusiasms. He would leave Oberlin a more mature, self-confident young man with a much more clearly defined vision of who he was and what he wanted from life. He had been academically challenged in ways he had not expected, and Professor Wager played the catalytic role in his intellectual and artistic development, as well as in his growing acceptance by his fellow students. Thornton reveled in his friendships and in the acclaim he enjoyed when he shared his writing in campus productions and the college literary magazine. Like most of his peers, he agonized over the war—its transformation of the world as they had imagined it to be; his quandary about what role, if any, he should assume in wartime; the shock of the first recognition of his own mortality. The war galvanized him as a writer, provoking some subject matter, of course, but, more than that, solidifying once and for all his absolute determination to be a writer.