Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  His Roman days were full of lectures and sightseeing, the occasional raucous party of graduate students, and the more sedate entertainments in the homes of new acquaintances—expatriates, the academy circle, and native citizens. He teased, in a passage that foreshadowed the novel he would soon begin about Rome and Roman society, that he was presenting himself “as a sort of objet-d’art of a most singular and quaint charm, rentable for teas, dinner-parties and dances; will read MSS plays to adoring ladies; will sit in their palaces and talk to them about their own uniqueness,”68

  Early in 1921, father and son exchanged some angry letters about money, which Thornton thought his father had failed to send, and Dr. Wilder had sent but thought his son had squandered. Actually Thornton was managing his finances better than his father thought, and Amos Parker Wilder was dispatching funds more generously than Thornton could believe.69 He apologized to his father for his strident letters about money.70 He was a “great father,” Thornton wrote—witty, charming, eloquent, making sacrifices for his children that were sometimes thoughtlessly received.71

  Their lively father-son discourse through letters soon moved on from finances to the future. What would Thornton do when he left Rome, and when, and why? His mother’s concerns were focused less on the future than on the present. Back home, Isabel was writing a novel, Isabella wrote to her son. Was Thornton writing? How was his play progressing—if at all? Right away he wrote to her, “I attach my poor play that has been lying all these months in a state of perpetual rewriting.”

  It’s about an American millionairess at Capri with her fatal disease, who falls into the toils of a beautiful Italian adventurer. Au fond there seems to be much in [it] of [Henry James’s] “The Wings of the Dove” and your anecdote of the Dobbs girl who became infatuated with the Neapolitan boatman. The play is a long hymn of love, profane love, of course, most pagan. It fairly limps along until it comes to a love-scene, Helen and Dario, or the Baroness and Dario, and then it develops some of the most exquisite and tender conversations . . . etc. Strange to say, Flora Hypatia Storey [one of the characters in Thornton’s earlier play The Trumpet Shall Sound] and Mrs. Helen Darrall have much in common. They are both more in love than beloved, they are both deceived.72

  He was an artist who deftly sketched portraits of women in his fiction and drama, and in his letters. There was his affectionate relationship with the mother whose mind and spirit he revered; the vulnerability of the heroines he created in his plays; the old women with their “malicious stories and their wise disillusioned comments” who fascinated him, along with the “pseudo-motherly” attention they paid him.73 It was these old women he wanted to write about—and he would, importing some of the women he met in Rome, mostly expatriates, into his later fiction and his plays.74 He had a history of close relationships with much older women—sometimes women more his grandmother’s age than his mother’s. He had felt at home with them when he was a teenager, read aloud to them, corresponded with them, and treated them with gallant attentive courtesy and sincere interest. Thornton had a gift for friendship that transcended age and gender, and as he grew into his adult life, many of his closest friends would be older women.

  There were good friendships with men as well during the year in Rome. Various Yale men came and went: With an American friend, Bill Bissell, he visited Assisi that March, and the journey led to an “impassioned return to Franciscan study.”75 In Perugia he happened on a “complicated funeral service” in a dark candlelit church, where “earnest-faced young Franciscan monks” intoned psalms.76 Thornton thought that Catholicism was “the most beautiful religious system that ever eased the heart of man; centering about a liturgy built like Thebes, by poets, four-square, on the desert of man’s needs.” He wrote to his brother, “You and I will never be Roman Catholics,” but he encouraged Amos, reading theology at the University of Brussels, to study “this magnificent and eternal institution, and humbly sit down to learn from her the secret by which she held great men, a thing the modern church cannot do.”77

  There were other young American men in his ever-expanding circle of acquaintances, as well as young Italians. Thornton especially enjoyed the company of Lauro De Bosis, whose mother was an American and whose father was the Italian poet and translator Adolfo De Bosis. Lauro, four years younger than Thornton, was an aspiring poet and translator, and an intense, charismatic young man who was then studying chemistry at the University of Rome. Thornton thought of him for years afterward as one of his best friends. The De Bosis family invited Thornton to lunch, an event that turned out to be “twice as delightful” as he expected. He described it for his mother—“The reddish-yellow villa, hung with flowering wistaria at the end of a long avenue of trees; choked garden plots with various statues of Ezekiel glimpsed through the foliage; the rooms of the house furnished in rather ugly Victorian manner—all modern Italian taste in music and art being deplorable, perhaps because they are so discriminating in literature.”78 There were several other guests at lunch that day, including the young poet Ezra Pound.79 In Rome, Thornton discovered the work of Luigi Pirandello, “an Italian playwright whose plays I adore.”80 He was deeply moved by a performance of Pirandello’s new play, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author), in which the audience is greeted by a dark, empty stage with curtain raised, and one character is the Manager—the manager of the theater. Thornton would experiment with some of these concepts later in his own plays.

  Rome was a continual feast for his eager mind and spirit, and his sojourn there certainly nourished his writing as well.

  13

  “CHOICE SOULS”

  It is a great opportunity—a few months—to learn your Paris, the language and the rest—but of what avail if you become corrupted—perhaps cynical, reckless—even coarsened: you can hardly escape this; yet you are the one dedicated to speak delicate truths to choice souls.

  —AMOS PARKER WILDER TO THORNTON WILDER,

  July 12, 1921

  France and the United States (1921–1922)

  As much as Thornton loved Rome, he began to feel overwhelmed and even intimidated by it. He found that “the very complexity of things flays one’s peace of mind to the point of torment.” He wrote to his father on February 1, 1921:

  You are haunted by the great vistas of learning to which you are unequal; continuous gazing at masterpieces leaves you torn by ineffectual conflicting aspirations; the social pleasures and cheap successes bring (against this antique and Renaissance background) more immediate revulsions and satiety. . . . Your queer “aesthetic” over-cerebral son may yet turn out to be your most fundamental New Englander. . . .1

  He thought he should leave the academy about Easter time, spend a “week or two in Florence and the hill towns,” and then go on to Paris for a couple of months before returning to the United States in late June.2

  His father, no doubt pleased by Thornton’s new assessment of Rome, was not opposed to more travel. Ideally he wished that Thornton could have a journey akin to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s three-year exploration of Europe after he graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825. Longfellow had traveled and studied in Italy, Spain, France, England, and Germany, taking formal courses in universities and walking through country towns and villages, talking to people, learning their ways and their language, all to prepare himself to teach modern languages. Dr. Wilder wrote to Thornton, “My wish for you—the analogy is Longfellow’s, if you know his story—is that you might have three intensive weeks in Germany; on the language and meeting as many people as possible; a walking trip etc. among the people. I would supplement that by the same in France, a month if possible; then for a bird’s eye of England etc.”3 But the simplest and cheapest thing to do, he wrote to Thornton, would be to book passage and come home, although, Dr. Wilder mused, “If there is anyone who would be benefitted by even a look and dash through a number of countries, it is you; it is clearly the kind of education you need.”4

  Thornton did not
want the family to sacrifice any further for such travel, however. He was grateful to have had the experience in Italy, he wrote, “and if those qualities have not been added to me that you sent me to Europe for, by my happiness here, no amount of eager gazing-about and applying historic quotations further can add them to me.”5

  Parents and son were also trying to plan what Thornton would do once he returned to the United States. He proposed that he go to New York to see if he could find a job writing drama reviews or a weekly column, perhaps for Henry Seidel Canby’s new journal. If not, he could find a teaching job, and he was determined, no matter what, to forge ahead with the writing. “I am going to be at a frightful disadvantage for some years, sheepish and put-upon,” he acknowledged to his father, “but when I am discovered things will be vulgarly resplendent; I vend a cake Americans will hug.”6

  But Papa had more practical ideas: Thornton could teach or get a civil service job in Washington, with status, stability, and a salary—and write on the side. Or he could find a job in a publishing firm or a bookstore. He needed to serve an apprenticeship in a steady, income-producing occupation, needed to have an insurance policy and a bank account. Once again Polonius preached to Laertes: Thornton should “get a grip on the deep solemn relation between God and Man.” He should not exploit his “youth and high spirits, drifting from one play to another newspaper etc—the years slipping by until the late thirties when many have died off” and others had to get false teeth. He needed a “dignified permanent” life and career. Despite his “feverish plans for writing,” he must commit to a trade or calling or profession. Otherwise, Thornton was in jeopardy of poverty, envy, even “moral deterioration.”7 But for now Dr. Wilder just wanted to get his son out of “poor old decayed Italy.”8

  As he contemplated his “chess pieces,” Dr. Wilder decided to send his wife, Isabel, and Janet abroad that spring. Isabella had been ill with a chronic sore throat and general weakness, and her husband hoped that a change of scenery would provide the complete rest she needed, and settle her nerves. She wanted to go to Italy, but her husband held out for England, which he thought would be better for the children. He believed he could afford it, if they used part of the money that Isabella had inherited from a relative.9 Amos planned to study at Oxford for a year, and Dr. Wilder insisted that it would be good for Isabella, Amos, and his sisters to spend the year in close proximity. “The girls will blossom out, I think, in the environment,” he wrote to Thornton. “Most important, Mother Wilder will freshen up. . . . I am happy to think it may be possible.”10

  Finally matters were settled: Isabella, Isabel, Janet, and Amos would live in England. Thornton would go to Paris and, if possible, to England and Germany, and then come home and find a job. Dr. Wilder would provide the money for his travels—but Thornton would pay for it in guilt. His father spelled out the details:

  Thornton: to get this large sum together represents sacrifice that you can’t understand—letting go things needed for the future of your “aging parents.” I am telling you this, not to tax your sympathies, but to suggest that you handle it earnestly. It is a reflection, dear boy, that we are almost afraid to send so much, fearful you will lose it; or throw it about recklessly—later to be abroad without money, unhappy, humiliated, borrowing right and left. . . . France will shock you with the high prices and the other places too; the money will slip away: I beg you to watch every penny. . . . Faithfully economize at every point, and have money to pay your bills in full, including the ocean passage [to the United States] which will be high. Thus you will earn the respect of your father.11

  As the end of his sojourn in Rome drew near, Thornton realized gratefully that he knew Romans “in every walk of life.” Like “a young man possessed,” he had thrown himself into the history and culture of the Eternal City, as well as its contemporary life, until he was “frightfully up to date in their arts and literature.”12 The city would haunt him in memory and imagination, and figure powerfully in his future writing life. But it was time to go. He left Rome on May 18 and headed for France by way of Florence, Siena, and Milan, where he spent three days with Charlotte. He read a hundred of her poems during their visit, but was disappointed that it did not seem to occur to her to ask if he had written anything new.

  By early June, Thornton was in Paris. “Don’t worry or think about me,” he wrote to his father. “I wear clean linen, brush my teeth, ‘hear Mass,’ and drink much certified water. Without sticking to Americans I meet many people you would like to feel near me in ambiguous Paris.”13

  AT FIRST glance he was shabby and shy, his blue eyes darting alertly behind his spectacles, seeing everything. He found Frenchmen “not so immediately ‘sympathetic’ as the Italians.”14 He was lonely, missing his family and friends, missing Rome, but determined to make the best of “ambiguous Paris.” As romantic as the bohemian writing life had seemed from afar, Thornton found that living in penury in Paris severely hampered his social life. At least in Rome he had the security of comfortable quarters and good food at the American Academy, and an ever-widening circle of friends and acquaintances. In Paris in the summer of 1921, however, without money to buy new clothes or launder the old ones, or to eat or drink in a decent restaurant, or to afford anything but the cheapest tickets to the opera or the theater, and these only rarely, the best he could do was “take long walks in this priceless city” and “stay home in this nasty little room and write as I haven’t written for years.”15

  In his bedbug-infested hotel room in Paris, Thornton began writing about his experiences in Rome, not quite sure where they were leading—a novella or a memoir? Sometime that spring or summer he began a prose manuscript called Memoirs of Charles Mallison: The Year in Rome.16 There is a veneer of autobiography in this fictitious memoir, complete with imagined footnotes and a citation of another fictitious memoir, The Boy Sebastian, which supposedly preceded The Year in Rome. The Roman memoir was conceived, according to Wilder/Mallison, to explore the “profound impression that a year in Italy can make upon a youthful spirit prepared by wide reading and a habit of reflection.”17

  Thornton’s transformative adventures in Rome reverberated in his imagination in pages he would write in Paris and beyond. Every day that June of 1921, he stepped out of his Roman memories into the vibrant reality of Paris. The decadent allure of the city was irresistible. He loved strolling the quais, roaming about Notre Dame, eating in cheap restaurants and sidewalk cafés, hearing classical and liturgical music in the cathedrals and churches, and going as often as he could to the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. But the overriding fact was that he was writing once again, on fire with ideas ignited by the Roman adventure and fueled by his incessant reading, observations, and reflections.

  After nearly a month in the city, Thornton decided that he knew the Paris theater scene well enough to write about it in a “chatty theatrical column” he called “The Boulevards and the Latin Quarter.” He submitted his work to the English-language newspaper the Telegram—columns that apparently went unpublished.18 He hoped to find some kind of job so he could stay in Paris until Christmas. He tried unsuccessfully to get hired to sell books at Brentano’s, and hoped in vain to find work at the Herald. He was being very frugal, he assured his father, staying in his cramped, dirty room in a rundown hotel, using public baths for showers, buying “little penny paper copies of the great French classics” to read “indefatigably,” but having trouble finding opportunities to practice speaking French.19 He was amazed that his vast reading in French literature had not helped him in “the slightest in speaking or in grammar,” he wrote to his mother.20

  By accident, in his rambles around the Left Bank, Thornton found an extraordinary bookshop on the rue de l’Odéon. It was called Shakespeare and Company, and, wonder of wonders, it not only sold books but also lent them to customers. The business had been established in November 1919 by an American woman, Sylvia Beach, who found Thornton “rather shy and a little like a young curate.” He seemed different from other
young American writers of his generation who were in Paris then. For one thing, she said, he did not “wear cowboy shirts and corduroy pants.” He was modest and unobtrusive, and moved into and out of the shop quietly.21

  Shakespeare and Company was abuzz with excitement that summer of 1921 because Beach had undertaken the mammoth challenge of publishing James Joyce’s controversial Ulysses, which had recently been the target of an obscenity trial in the United States after Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of the Little Review had published excerpts from the novel in their journal. Despite their lawyer’s defense that Joyce’s work was “disgusting rather than indecent,” the judge convicted Anderson and Heap of the obscenity charge, and American publishers (including Boni & Liveright) declined to publish the book.22 Thus Sylvia Beach came to the rescue, sending solicitations to people around the world in order to sell the novel by advance subscriptions ahead of its publication in the fall. On one of Thornton’s visits, Beach introduced him to Joyce, nearly forty, living what Thornton later called his “self-imposed exile” from Dublin, yet bound to it “in love and hate, parallel, irreconcilable.”23 Joyce had been at work on Ulysses for at least seven years, exploring a theme that would haunt Thornton’s own later work: “the extent to which every individual—you and I, the millions of the people who walk this earth—is both sole and unique and also archetypical.”24