Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Thornton concluded that it was difficult to live with a man who remembers everything about your young life, even when he remembers it “charitably.”33

  He clearly did admire and love his father, and always would, but Thornton was twenty-three, a man grown—a man civilized. At last, college was done. Six weeks of farmwork, and then—Rome. Europe. Freedom.

  ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1920, Thornton boarded the French ocean liner Providence, bound for Italy and the future.34 The voyage from New York to Naples took nearly two weeks. The ship accommodated 140 first-class passengers, 250 second-class passengers, and 1,850 third-class passengers, many of them, on the voyages from Naples to New York, Italian immigrants. Thornton traveled in second class, sleeping in an upper berth in a cabin for four persons. In seas tranquil or rough, he was a good sailor—had been ever since his transpacific voyages to and from China. Meals aboard ship were lively events in the second-class dining saloon, with “boisterous company” at the long bachelors’ table, he wrote in later years. He recalled that his travel companions were civil servants, students, businessmen, and two Mormon missionaries. Most were “intoxicated” by their freedom and the prospect of the adventures awaiting them in Europe, not to mention “the carafes of wine on the tables.” He found himself “largely in the company of young men who had left their fathers at home. Very exciting it was.”35 One of his fellow passengers was a New York lawyer and Harvard graduate, a native of Sorrento and a “traveller and dilettante” who introduced Thornton to an array of colorful local characters once he reached Sorrento.36

  As a boy Thornton had fallen in love with sea travel, the exhilaration of being encapsulated aboard a ship, surrounded by the ocean and the incomparable air. He relished the freedom to choose company or solitude, work or play, and he craved the continual promise of new landscapes and new people to be discovered. He could sequester himself to think, to write, and, on this voyage, to immerse himself in the study of Italian. He could emerge from his seclusion, eager for company, and then withdraw again when he needed time alone. The 1920 voyage to Europe was the forerunner of a lifetime of such journeys at sea, where Thornton could live comfortably, if temporarily, and write and fraternize his way across oceans.

  Aboard the Providence in 1920, he took Italian lessons from one of his cabin mates, an Italian American who was traveling to visit his grandparents. He tried to read Dante’s Divine Comedy in Italian, and he memorized long passages. On the ship’s top deck, “amid the careening smoke stacks and the flying spray,” he practiced the Italian phrases he was learning, shouting into the wind, “When does the next train leave for Rome?” and other useful expressions.37 He was a lucky man, he knew. “I have always been favored by luck,” he wrote in later years, looking back on this journey and others. “A large part of luck is opportunity and the eye to recognize it. A large part of luck is readiness.”38

  After his ship docked in Naples in mid-September, Thornton made his way first to Sorrento because he was not due at the American Academy in Rome until early October. He could stay in Sorrento cheaply and explore the medieval streets, churches, and cloisters, as well as the cliffs and the countryside and the islands in the bay. An avid tourist, he climbed Vesuvius—“a wicked mountain, half of every step you take is lost in the sliding blue-black dust, yet so steep that every step for two hours and a half is palpably lift.”39

  Coincidentally, Dr. and Mrs. Charles Wager were traveling in Italy just at the same time, and Thornton enjoyed seeing them in Sorrento before they moved on to Rome. He took a room at the Hotel Cocumella in Sorrento, encountering there a colorful international cast of characters with whom he could practice his Italian, French, and German. Barely a week into his stay he wrote to his family, “I love Italy now indissolubly; and the Italians; and the language.”40 He was storing away in memory and imagination the names, faces, and stories of the people he met, the vistas he saw, the conversations he overheard—rich material to be transmuted later into fiction and drama.

  His Italian was improving day by day, and he was so enamored of Sorrento that he wrote to the secretary of the academy “with a moiety of truth, that the change of continent has had a temporarily upsetting affect on my constitution & a slight prolongation of my stay here is advisable.” Thornton proposed that he register by mail and arrive at the academy on October 10, a week later than scheduled. Then he plunged into a “systematic study of the beautiful antiquities at the Museo [Archeologico] Nazionale.”41 Dressed in his “eccentric-looking baggy grey suit,” Thornton went by boat from Sorrento back to Naples to walk “enraptured for hours among the bronzes and marbles” in the vast museum, home to countless artifacts and antiquities from ancient Greece and Rome, including treasures stolen from Pompeii.42

  “LEARNING ITALIAN quickly, and beside myself with delight,” he scribbled on a postcard to Amos from Sorrento October 14. Italy immediately inspired and liberated him, setting him free to write. He told Amos that he had already written “a whole play.”43 In a letter to his family he had shared the details:

  The thing you should really know about me now is that I am writing my beautiful pitiful play about the American widow at Capri and Dario Stavelli, the adventurer. Never did a play come to me more easily. Day and day I sit down and this beautiful touching dialogue flows from my pen. It is called “Villa Rhabani” but has no relation with the other play I projected with the same name. . . . But no one short of Elsie Ferguson, Gareth Hughes, Haidée Wright and Arthur Byron need attempt to play it.44

  A notebook among his papers reveals that in September in Sorrento, Thornton was working on act 1 of this new full-length play, completing the draft by September 30, 1920; by October 10 three acts were drafted, and he continued the work in Rome off and on from the fall of 1920 until February 10, 1921. He would revise the unproduced, unpublished play as late as 1924.45 Not only did Capri and the Bay of Naples provide the setting for this new drama, but the major male character, Dario Stavelli, is an echo of Wilder’s new friend in Sorrento, Dario Ercolano, one of two brothers introduced to him by the lawyer he had met aboard ship. Thornton wrote that Dario and his brother were “the most delightful type of Neapolitan,—lovable sharks. They know they are charming; it’s a sort of profession among them to be beautiful and courteous and sincere (!) But you must pay for it as you’d pay for any work of art.”46

  “I HAVE this minute arrived in Rome, and am waiting up in my room at half-past ten for some supper,” Thornton wrote his family on October 14, 1920. “The train was two-and-a-half hours late, and I know no more of Rome than can be gained on rainy evenings crossing the street that separates the station from the Hotel Continentale (The last room left for 22 lire).”47

  He shared his growing excitement in another letter home: “How perfect it is, my being here! How much happier a chance has fallen than a year in Paris or London or New York. Rome’s antiquity, her variety, her significance, swallow these others’ up, and I feel myself being irresistibly impelled towards saying of her that she is the Eternal City.” He told his family that he

  went with an archaeological party the other day to a newly discovered tomb of about the first century; it was under a street near the center of the city, and while by candle-light we peered at faded paintings of a family called Aurelius, symbolic representations of their dear children and parents borne graciously away by winged spirits playing in gardens and adjusting their Roman robes, the street-cars of today rushed by over us. We were clutching at the past to recover the loves and pieties and habits of the Aurelius family, while the same elements were passing above us.48

  This profoundly significant experience resonated far into his future. He conjectured that October day in 1920 that “two thousand years from now,” other people would be striving to recover the artifacts, experience, atmosphere, and humanity of his own time.49 He went on to do that himself, in fiction and in drama. Over the decades to come, in various manifestations, with diverse names and settings, he would resurrect and revisit the Aurelius family—just
people “clutching at the past” for the universal and the timeless in the human experience, and groping toward the future. Over time he would excavate and explore the “loves and pieties and habits” of unique yet universal characters—in Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and other plays, and in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, and other novels.

  Thornton took with him to Rome a grounding in classical mythology, history, and literature, including Dante’s work. He was captivated by the treasures of Rome—the paintings, sculpture, architecture, music, literature, and especially his new enthusiasm, archaeology. “One day our class in Rome was taken out into the country to dig up a bit of the Etruscan world, a street,” he wrote years later. “Once thousands of people had walked it. The rut was very deep. Those who have uncovered such a spot are never the same again.”50 He thought he would be an archaeologist as well as a writer.

  He threw himself headlong into his new life. On the day he had his first look at the house on the Piazza di Spagna where the poet John Keats died in 1821, Thornton wept. Then he recited the words from Keat’s “When I Have Fears” (1818)—words he knew by heart, words that most likely evoked his wartime anxiety about his own mortality: “When I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain . . .”

  “My new school is too serene and beautiful to be described,” Thornton wrote his family. He was living in Villa Ballacci, a small house belonging to the American Academy—“a villa overlooking Rome, all mine!” he wrote. “I have a bed-room, dressing-room and the bath all in a row.”51 He attended American Academy lectures and field trips; enjoyed the academy costume ball and other social events; met archaeologists, composers, artists, fellow students; encountered, he wrote to his family, “a number of American women who have married Italians, and this morning I left my cards on them and hope for an invitation to tea at least, if not a dinner-party, [with] the Marchesa de Johannis and Signora Malagola.”52 He was invited to formal luncheons and dinners at the academy, including one given by the wife of the academy secretary, who had known Isabella Niven Wilder at the Misses Masters School in Dobbs Ferry.53 He went to the theater and to the opera, and explored the city, map in hand. “Just back from another day’s wild wandering,” he wrote home. “Picture me backing up against a wall in a side street and unfolding my 3-ft. sq. map to find out where I am! Too happy for correspondence, that can become merely a characterless rattling bushel-basket of superlatives.”54

  News reached him from home in October that plays he had sent out to the Theatre Guild had been rejected, and he was “cast down” by the negative response. He wrote a brooding assessment of his seemingly futile efforts to become a playwright: “All my other plays when they were returned to me I immediately saw as riddled with errors and undermined with incompetence,” he wrote to his family.

  The Rocket. Mercifully destroyed and forgotten. The Dreamers having shaken off its ludicrous pseudo-psychoanalytical modern prologue and epilogue, is in process of being rewritten in a vein that candidly deprecates and retains the purple-patch rhetoric. . . . The Breaking of Exile, a good theme, a few sharp characterizations, three or four vivid moments, eked out with half-hours of earnest young naiveté, poor little Thornton’s lucubrations on War, on disgrace, on morality! The Trumpet Shall Sound is extraordinarily vague to me, and I cannot tell whether the three or four pictures I have in my memory . . . may or may not be on paper, may never have left my forehead.55

  He supposed he would just keep on writing plays, and he still had hopes for Villa Rhabani. He promised to send a copy of the script to Connecticut so that his mother could get it out to other producers and directors. Temporarily preoccupied as he was with being a student, an archaeologist, a socialite, a tourist, and a dilettante in Rome, Thornton was still, underneath it all, an aspiring dramatist. He wouldn’t give up on that yet.

  In a letter to his family from Italy that fall, he painted a vivid self-portrait:

  Looking in the cheval-glass I see a young man . . . who implicitly, or by reason of his large shell glasses, presents an expectant eager face to the view. His shoes and clothes are in travel-state, but he is carefully shaved and brushed. On his pink cheeks and almost infantile mouth lies a young innocence that is not native to Italy and has to be imported in hollow ships, and about the eyes there is the same strong naiveté, mercifully mitigated by a sort of frightened humor. He is very likely more intelligent than he looks, and less charming. Alone in Italy? To study archaeology!56

  An ocean away Dr. Wilder worried about his son, who seemed to be having entirely too much childish, even dangerous fun in Italy. He fired off a stern letter, laden with cautions: “Dear boy, I pray for you—that you may be benefitted by these experiences and not return to us impaired in soul.” While his letters home were “interesting reading,” Dr. Wilder wrote, they were full of “so many curious people, so many, so many derelicts.” He urged Thornton to beware of the “follies, the emptiness of it all,” and to strive “earnestly to come manfully through it, and not merely to save your own soul, but others along with you.” He hoped that Thornton would “keep safe” his “precious gifts from despoiling.”57

  It seemed that Dr. Wilder’s shadow could stretch across continents and an ocean, as it did back in the China days, and hover about as conspicuously and critically as it did at Yale—but Thornton, at twenty-three and a half, was not so vulnerable now to parental control as the much younger Thornton had been, except in the matter of financial dependence. Dr. Wilder was not in good health that fall, still coping after more than a decade with the chronic problems caused by the Asian sprue. However, he was making speeches with “more pep” after he recovered somewhat from the most recent breakdown in his health.58 He relinquished his Yale-in-China work in 1920 and joined the staff of the New Haven Journal-Courier as associate editor, a position he would hold for nine years.59 He was “quite happy in the office,” he wrote to Thornton; “I find things I can do, partly under the editor—some editorial and at times a good deal; and some high class reporting for the managing editor. I am learning the town and the people.”60 In a sense the activist journalist and editor was starting all over again. He wrote “almost daily” editorials, was still in demand as a public speaker, still a respected figure in Yale circles, but as he neared sixty, he was keenly aware that he had never fulfilled the high expectations he had set for himself. His health had restricted him, and his income, his temperament, and his family had suffered accordingly. As he was able to achieve less and less, he needed and expected more and more from his children, and sought to live through them.

  Amos Parker Wilder was a lonely man, he often told the children, intimating that it was because his wife held herself emotionally remote from him, even suggesting that she tried to deny him his children’s full company and affection. But now he was at home “two or three evenings in the week,” and all was going well, he wrote to Thornton. Isabel was attending a local art school, “eager for companionship.” Janet was enjoying public school. He reported that Amos was “very happy with his friends and work” and that Charlotte was “full of vivacity.”61 But he worried that Thornton, far away in “that setting where there is so much to make you unworthy,” would fail to keep alive “the consecration to high things.”62

  But Thornton was in his glory. He found his classes at the academy exciting, although he often missed lectures when sightseeing or social engagements diverted his attention. He reveled in his walks about the city, map in hand, and came to know Rome and its treasures so intimately that he could give an authoritative tour. As Christmas approached, Thornton and Charlotte made plans for her to travel from Milan to visit him in Rome. Like her brother, Charlotte loved Italy, and despite the rigors of her YWCA work schedule—ten hours a day, seven days a week, and then four days off at the end of each month—she managed to travel, enjoying it “immensely,” and writing vivid letters home about her experiences.63

  Thornton was surprised just before Christmas by the a
rrival of two Yale men, Henry Luce and William Dwight Whitney, both Rhodes scholars now, and eager to spend the holidays in Rome. Thornton found a cheap pensione for them within a stone’s throw of the house where Keats died, and took them along to some of his social engagements.64 He had met some girls from Miss Risser’s School in Rome, a fashionable finishing school for girls, among them a vivacious Chicagoan, Lila Ross Hotz, to whom Henry Luce was introduced at a party that Christmas in Rome. The two began to correspond and write poems to each other, and would marry in 1923.

  Wherever Thornton went in Italy—restaurants, parties, on streetcars and trains—strangers as well as friends or acquaintances told him their life stories, often confiding their dreams or their woes. He was accustomed to that role in his family, and encouraged it: “Tell me ALL, as they cry in books,” he wrote to his sister Isabel when he heard about some of her romantic problems. “I should be ashamed if you didn’t tell me the whole complicated affair, when I seem to be living in Italy for the sole purpose of receiving the confidences of ladies in distress. . . . There’s something in the air over here: everyone is unhappily in love every ten minutes of their lives, and only too glad to find a sympathetic eye and ear.”65 On another occasion he wrote her, “A woman’s heart, as you know, has no secrets from me, and my only prescription for its restlessness and sense of frustration is M-A-N. Woman is silly and man is stupid, but in one another’s company they seem temporarily to surpass themselves, and this false and superficial elation is the only thing we can write plays about.”66 He had his own “strange little sentimental experience that made concrete the warnings that Continental women however impersonal, comradely and full of good sense they seem, cannot understand friendship that is without romantic concomitants.”67