Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Thornton “talked” to himself about these matters in his first serious effort to keep a journal, using images in an entry on May 26 that would reappear in his later work: His journal helped him to see the incidents of daily life in a “new light,” he wrote, leading him to the “surprising discovery” that “life is more a matter of strands and threads than the young platitudinous philosopher who uses the phrase erewhile realized. In the Rondo of life there are more recurrent themes than there appears at first hearing . . .”55

  BY THE time he was twenty, two lifelong habits were firmly forged: Thornton would spend countless hours writing in his journal and writing letters. Of all the letters he exchanged with numerous people during his youth, Thornton was most consistently and completely himself with his brother. They were friends as well as brothers; they trusted each other absolutely, knew each other’s history and foibles, and loved each other anyway. As Thornton approached the end of what would be his last year at Oberlin, he wrote a revealing self-portrait in a long, heartfelt letter to Amos. His brother was just winding up a much-needed leave from active duty with the American Field Service ambulance detail in France, reviving his health and spirit in London, and taking long walks and reading Wordsworth in the Lake District. “Your religious self-examination I cannot duplicate. I am a less conscientious nature and do not examine my faith,” wrote Thornton, the perennial questioner.

  I fling myself upon my knees as though at a divine compulsion, mostly when I am happy tho also in extremis. I am happiest in loving and being loved by human people and next to that in writing words and being commended for them, and next to that in mysteries of the spirit, into which I penetrate I believe more every year, until perhaps God will be my whole life.56

  He was deeply interested in the Catholic Church, and in his private moments had thought about becoming a priest. He had confided that idea to his mother, who in a letter dated May 30, 1917, promised the family’s support if he made the decision to enter the clergy in the Episcopal Church instead.

  In his letter to Amos, Thornton conjectured that “everyone feels that his nature cries out hourly for it knows not what,” but he reflected that his situation was unique in one crucial way: he was a twin—a twinless twin, whose brother died at birth. Because of his twin’s death, Thornton wrote, “an outlet for my affection was closed. It is not affection alone but energy and in it I live and because of it I believe I seem to see life as more vivid, electric and marvelous than others so placidly do.”57

  The Wilder brothers respected as well as loved each other, and, close as they were in age, there was surprisingly little if any rivalry between them. Even though he was not Thornton’s twin, Amos wrote in later years, “there was some sort of occult affinity in my makeup for his fabulation, like the telepathic understanding between [the twin brothers] Manuel and Esteban in The Bridge of San Luis Rey.” Amos understood that because his brother had lost his twin at birth, Thornton “was predisposed to fascination with this relationship. Indeed one could hazard that he was haunted all his life by this missing alter ego.”58

  The loss haunted Thornton when he was twenty, on the cusp of adulthood, holding on, despite everything, to his “vivid, electric and marvelous” vision of life as it might have been, life as it was, life as it could be.59

  10

  “FLOWERING INTO LITERATURE”

  My whole family is flowering into literature it seems all at once.

  —ISABELLA NIVEN WILDER TO AMOS NIVEN WILDER,

  May 31, 1917

  Berea and Yale (1917–1918)

  The Wilders were as scattered as ever in 1917, but wherever they were, somebody was writing poetry or prose—Thornton in Ohio and then in Berea, in the mountains of Kentucky; Amos in France and then in Macedonia; Charlotte at Mount Holyoke; Isabel in Connecticut and then in Michigan. Amos Parker Wilder was continually writing speeches and fund-raising appeals for Yale-in-China in New Haven, and Isabella, in Mount Carmel, was penning poems and sending them out to national journals, as well as firing off letters to the editors of various newspapers and magazines. She was trying her hand at writing a one-act play for children, and was working on a book review as part of a contest sponsored by Doubleday, Page & Company, hoping to win the cash prize and use it to buy a Corona typewriter.1 Only Janet, age seven, had yet to become a writer.

  Isabella wrote to young Amos to praise his letters, and to tell him he was becoming a stylist. “My whole family is flowering into literature it seems all at once,” she told him:

  The Wilders are saturated nearly to the typhoon point (to change figures). For Thornton has sent us a really number one Sonnet addressed to his adored teacher, Dr. Wager; and Isabel has started to write short stories by all that is extraordinary—not merely one or two with effort and compulsion, but spouting like a geyser—three at once and they come to her complete without need of change or corrections as fast as she can write them down. And she says they clamour to be written. If only [William] James were alive, it would be worth his while to study your several mentalities to see how it happens that seven angels have entered into us all at once, as it were.2

  The Wilder family, like the similarly creative, peripatetic James family, was composed of two parents and five children, some of whom were writers. Isabella Niven Wilder had been reading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, a book of significant importance in her own independent spiritual quest. She may have had in mind James’s designation of two religious mentalities—the healthy minded, who tend to celebrate life, and the “sick soul” attuned to the tragic potential of existence. Thornton and his mother apparently discussed James’s ideas in relation to their own family, for Thornton wrote to his brother, “Wm. James has a chapter somewhere on us two, the child of open nature and the self-clinging one”—although Thornton did not specify which he thought was which.3

  The writings of the four older Wilder siblings quite naturally evolved in proportion to their individual “mentalities” and motivations. Half a century later, in his novel The Eighth Day, Thornton Wilder reflected: “Nothing is more interesting than the inquiry as to how creativity operates in anyone, in everyone.”4 For evidence of how creativity operates, for better or for worse, he did not have to look beyond his own family, composed of two driven, high-powered parents and their gifted children—striving to excel and yearning for parental approval and for authentic self-expression, two often-conflicting objectives. Through forces beyond their control, some innate, some prompted by circumstance, Amos, Thornton, Charlotte, and Isabel were already launched on the lifelong journey toward creative self-expression, some to fulfillment and some to failure.

  WHEN THORNTON left Oberlin in June 1917 to begin seven weeks of summer work in Berea, Kentucky, it had been decided that he would return to Oberlin for his junior year, a decision that would be revisited over the summer.5 Meanwhile his parents were happy, Dr. Wilder wrote to Thornton as he made plans for the Berea summer, “that you will be content with a soil fling there—, that for the present you will walk the humble round.”6 He wanted his son to serve an apprenticeship in grassroots America. Thornton would be interested in the people at Berea, Dr. Wilder predicted, and would find there “an enviable opportunity to see that segment of American life.”7

  During that summer the Wilders, except for young Amos, fanned out over the United States, some vacationing, some working, all doing Dr. Wilder’s bidding—and it was not easy orchestrating all those plans for the family, he complained to Thornton: “It would be easier to plan many things if Ma would discuss; but it is not her way. Everybody has his burden; this is mine and after all, it is a minor one; think of all the dreadful things I might have in my quiver.” The father mused to his son that “John Wesley had a wife who was absolutely impossible; he went about his business. I have one of the bright women of her time; why is it more than a minor matter that she declines to speak to her husband?”8

  Undeterred by his wife’s opposition, however, Wilder took
Isabel as far as Albany, New York, to catch a train that went straight through to Battle Creek, Michigan, where she would spend the summer taking a physical-culture course at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. “It’s her father’s latest and least happy scheme (to my thinking) and besides, what shall I do without her,” Isabella complained to young Amos.9 She was going to miss her seventeen-year-old daughter, who helped her with the housekeeping, the errands, and seven-year-old Janet’s care. “Isabel went off looking pale, pretty but tired herself,” Isabella worried. “She had studied very hard,” and made the honor roll again at New Haven High School.10 After she got past her homesickness, Isabel had a wonderful time in Battle Creek taking classes in swimming, first aid, calisthenics, Swedish gymnastics, and dancing, at which she excelled.

  Meanwhile, Charlotte, now nineteen, was enthusiastically working on the Mount Holyoke College summer farm project, designed to help increase the wartime food supply. Interested in becoming a doctor or a scientist, she was also doing her own original research project “on the subject of Protozoa” for the college zoology department, which had provided books and a microscope and other instruments for her. She was studying “heredity and medicine” as well, and writing poetry. Her poem “Hollows” would receive the Sigma Theta Chi Prize for 1918–19, with an award of twenty-five dollars and a personal message from Robert Frost commending her for having the “faith that seeks poetic form through poetic substance.”11

  Dr. Wilder had high hopes for Charlotte, and he wanted her, along with Thornton, to have some experience traveling and living in Europe, as had already been true for Amos, Isabel, and Janet. Over the years, however, Dr. Wilder had grown increasingly concerned about Charlotte’s temperament. She was “very able & resourceful,” he had written to Amos, “but she needs to be in a serene and cheerful environment during this formative period; for she has a disagreeable side which must be kept dwarfed or she will grow up unlovely in moods.”12 He believed that associating with “bright, happy, Christian girls” at Mount Holyoke would “surely mold her.”13 The college environment had in fact been good for Charlotte, stimulating and sheltering her during what would be some of the happiest years of her life. She was “full of rectitude,” Dr. Wilder told Thornton, but added that “she lacks sympathy; frowns on sentiment; I can never make a college president of her while she carries a basket of chips on her shoulder and is too keen in judgments. Yet Mt. Holyoke is doing her good.”14

  EXCEPT FOR his father’s campus visits, Thornton had not seen any of his family in nearly a year, and he devoured all the news from home.15 He told his mother that he imagined his homecoming at the end of the summer: “dismounting at the car almost on to the laughing Janet, then Isabel bubbling half down the street and you drying your hands with [a] towel on the doorstep and grinning like a Cheshire cat.”16 “I am an unusually isolated personality,” he wrote, and he felt he could reach out only to his family.17

  He was in Kentucky in mid-June, quickly caught up in the farm routine—digging ditches, laying pipes for a cannery, excavating for cesspools, driving a team of mules to scrape and level ground, hoeing sweet potatoes and carrots, helping to unload thousands of empty cans for the cannery, tossing them from hand to hand until he was “bleeding in twenty places.”18 He registered to take a shorthand class at the college, and devoted some of his limited free time to working on the sonnets he had begun at Oberlin. He was also working on a “novelette” for his mother, he wrote her in July, instructing her to keep it a secret. The subject was foreign life in China. He predicted it would amuse her. “It’s about people with damaged reputations who retire to the Coast for seclusion,” he told her. “Aha, but you will yet laugh, albeit humour is only its incidental.”19 He called it Genivar Wyatt, and rapidly filled two notebooks with the first draft of fourteen chapters. It threatened to grow “to novel-size,” he told his mother in late July, and he was eager to send it to her. There were certain literary influences, he wrote: “It is dripping with irony, often tragic, under the aegis of [George] Meredith.20 Although he did not finish the novelette, he kept it in his portfolio and would later rework the idea as a play, The Breaking of Exile. He was beginning to learn that for the serious writer, no writing exercise is wasted, and everything is potential fodder for future work.

  Thornton kept a grueling schedule at Berea, rising at 6 a.m. for breakfast, studying shorthand from 7 until 8:30, attending his shorthand class from 8:30 until 10, and then working on the Berea farm from 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. After quitting time he read or wrote, if he could stay awake, and then fell “eagerly” into bed.21 Thornton polished his sonnet to Dr. Wager one last time, and mailed it to the professor, who proudly shared it with his wife and their friends.22 The sonnet eventually made it into print in an anthology edition of the Oberlin Literary Magazine, called Oberlin Verse 1908–1918.

  Thornton’s roommate was driving him to “tears of vexation”—a feeling that was no doubt mutual. The boys worked their way into a respectful friendship, however, and soon the two were reading books aloud after work. They read Treasure Island, Thornton said, with his roommate fascinated because he had never heard of pirates.23 In the letters he scrawled at night or on Sundays, Thornton griped to his father and talked literature to his mother. His mail brought the usual avalanche of advice from his father: “Become an authority [on] Kentucky . . . become an intelligent man after years of varying experiences. . . . Keep your New Testament at hand on the table. Learn the place of prayer as a bulwark against the storms of life—none of us escape.” Dr. Wilder hoped Thornton would be “brave and cheerful and of good faith”—a daunting challenge, Thornton soon found, as he endured the daily drudgery at Berea.24

  BEREA COLLEGE was established in 1855, and in keeping with its Christian affiliation and its motto—“God has made of one blood all peoples of the Earth”—it was the first interracial and coeducational college in the South. It was founded by abolitionist John G. Fee, who envisioned a college that would be, like Oberlin, “antislavery, anti-cast[e], anti-rum, anti-sin.”25 The college primarily served Appalachian students of limited means, who studied tuition-free at the college in return for working at least ten hours weekly on the college farm or in other campus jobs. Like Mount Hermon, Berea had as its mission learning, labor, and service—principles Amos Parker Wilder had long embraced for his sons and daughters, along with the college’s anti-caste, anti-alcohol, and anti-sin credo.

  Thornton was introduced to folk arts and crafts at Berea, and to mountain dialects, and, in the fields, to fellow workers who thought he was crazy. He lived in overalls as they did, slept in the same dorm, ate the same food, but he was always reading books and writing and using big words—and taking long solitary walks up and down the nearby hills, even in the rain. On Sundays, he attended the Berea church, where he had to listen to “vile, Mount Hermon-made hymns with rhythms worse than ragtimes: And judgment day sermons.”26 (Many of the hymns had been composed or gathered by the late Ira D. Sankey, the charismatic American gospel singer who traveled the world for years with Moody on his religious crusades; hence Thornton laid the “blame” on Mount Hermon.)

  By this time his brother had enlisted for another three-months’ duty with the American Field Service and transferred to Macedonia to serve with the French Army of the Orient. In the winter of 1917 the Thacher School had raised enough money to buy a new ambulance for the American Field Service in honor of Amos.27 Thornton was very proud of his brother’s work, and the ambulance service was receiving much-deserved international publicity. It reached Berea in the form of the Saturday Evening Post, as well as the Pathé weekly newsreel footage, which the college showed its students and farmworkers. Thornton was covetous as well. “Oh, that my hair was blown by an Aegean wind or that beneath my feet the prow folded the ‘holy waters of Pauline memory,’ ” he wrote to Amos. “Instead I drag a hoe over a sod that only the tradition of Daniel Boone enriches, and that, but doubtfully.”28

  BY LATE August, Isabella, Thornton, Isabel, and Janet were v
acationing at Highland House, a rambling summer hotel at North Truro on Cape Cod, where Thornton was invigorated by twice-daily swims far out into the ocean and long walks on the beach. He wrote to his father that he had found the “elixir of youth” in the “lashed and surging” windswept sea. He was enjoying the company of a new acquaintance, a “young instinctive Prince,” he wrote to Dr. Wager. People told the two young men they looked alike, but they were “antipodal,” Thornton said, and they were planning weekend visits when college resumed in the fall.29 He had been in an “agony of indecision” about his college plans—“whether to return to Oberlin, come to Yale or go to Harvard.”30 Relaxed and rested, however, he wrote to his father that he would “go wherever you say, abounding in obedience.”31

  Isabella wrote to Amos from Cape Cod that at last the plans were firm: Thornton would transfer to Yale, she said, “so you two may graduate together after all, and Charlotte the same year!”32 (Actually Charlotte would receive her degree at Mount Holyoke in 1919, and the brothers would finish their degrees at Yale in 1920.) The logistics of Thornton’s transfer to Yale were complicated, however. He had to obtain his Thacher and Berkeley transcripts because the Oberlin registrar reported that Thornton’s Oberlin records had been “mislaid.” “Now this is hardly possible—to mislay the entrance records of one of their own students,” Isabella wrote; “so I suspect they simply will not take the responsibility of recommending him. They must think, simply, that it would not be to the credit of Oberlin to pass him over with or without a claim and then have him fall down and discredit them. . . . I almost think Thornton might better have been left at Oberlin to finish.”33