Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Thornton was also devouring novels, good and bad, about various periods and strata of society in Roman life. The determined writer somehow found moments amid the camp chaos to add “some handsome brocaded lengths to my Roman memoirs, vital, rich, crowded. Conscious of that inexhaustible invention that is so lacking these days where they can give you a thousand details without giving you a thousand lights, my portraits rise from my own pages to surprise me, solid, three-dimensional, speaking. All of them a little eccentric and all frustrated, wretched, but forceful, combative.”56

  Even the most fiercely disciplined writer must exert immense concentration if he is to keep writing a sophisticated first novel, set in Rome, while living in the rowdy jungle of a Connecticut summer camp for boys. Thornton not only succeeded in doing so, but in the process planted seeds that he would harvest later on, in plays and in another novel, this one set in Peru. “Now I’m staging Dramatics up here,” he wrote to a friend, “and projecting real effects with a few benches and a station lamp.”57 (An early experiment in minimalist staging, perhaps—despite his disclaimer that “storytelling and the production of Shows raise my life slightly above that of a tree.”)58 To entertain his campers at the Monday-night marshmallow roasts, Thornton “ransacked the stories of Poe for material.” He read Treasure Island to the boys on Thursday nights. Every Saturday night, he said, “I stage a melodrama all written by me, about purple rays, or ancestral ghosts, or pirates out kidnapping orphan asylums.”59 He cast the plays with other counselors, an occasional lady, and “a number of smart boys.” Together they produced “finished pretentious four-act plays”—The Perth Emeralds, The Idol’s Eye, Bagdad [sic], The Kidnappers, and The Mean Trick, among others. With relish they improvised many of their lines, Thornton wrote, “often making our happiest strokes, not in rehearsal, but during the performances.”60 On Sunday nights he told Bible stories, and because many of the boys had “never heard of Goliath or Esau or Belshazzar,” they gave Mr. Wilder “credit for a great deal of talent.”61

  As for the future novel, Thornton was getting an education in the history of Peru and in the process, unbeknownst to himself, gathering material for a book he had not yet even imagined. Every Wednesday night he had to tell an Indian story at the camp’s council. Rather than turn to Native American legends, Thornton “compromised on the Aztecs and Incas and got a great deal of pleasure out of it.”62 He read William H. Prescott’s History of the Discovery of Mexico and History of the Discovery of Peru, and in the foreboding shadows of firelit nights, transfixed his boys with mysterious, frightening, often bloody and violent Inca and Aztec lore. It took “everything short of parlor-magic” to keep his forty “shrill” campers amused, and Thornton entertained them expertly.63 At the same time he was honing his narrative skills on an audience of little boys with short attention spans and no patience for the dull and lifeless. In return his usually obstreperous campers gave him their rapt attention—and invaluable practice in creating dynamic, enthralling stories, whatever the source or the genre.

  Thornton grew a little mustache that summer, and it turned out to be red. He was lean, fit, and tan from hiking, swimming, canoeing, and keeping watch over his boys. He was counting the days till freedom. He wanted to spend some time in New Haven with his father, and do some work on his Roman memoirs in the Yale library “to verify allusions and collect those bits of false learning that give my pages the quality of stiff rich tapestry.”64 He hoped to visit Charlotte in Boston and North Truro, and go back to Newport, he said, “for my favorite solitary walks, and to refresh the memory of the sea-gulls to whom I read Shelley.” He also longed for some time in New York to be a “professional theater-goer”—to see everything from the Ziegfeld Follies to Mrs. Fiske (Minnie Maddern Fiske, a famous American actress)—and then, he said, he would head back to “my dear School, to which I return with Joy and relief.”65

  AT LAST Isabella, Isabel, and Janet were on their way home from England, planning to sail in mid-September. Thornton and his father had found a house in New Haven to rent for the family, since Isabella insisted that they give up the “old matchbox” in Mount Carmel.66 Thornton told his father he wanted to contribute $250 to the tickets for passage home for his mother and sisters, and to send his mother $100 of “serenity money.”67 This was not “for the necessities of travel,” Thornton lectured his father with surprisingly candid disapproval, “but for the amenities that are so necessary for a Lady—details which you have always misunderstood; your obtuseness in such refinements has cost you more than money—a self-respecting ‘compliment’ to the Stewardess, a few minutes of taxi after the chaos of the dock, a lemonade on deck occasionally, 50 cents for the ship’s concern, and so on.”68

  Thornton looked forward eagerly to his mother’s return and to the reunion with the sisters he longed to get to know again. He gave his mother constant praise: She was, he wrote her, the “most rare of ladies, none in all my roaming have been so bright, so individual, so stimulating as you. Aren’t I a lot like you? Claim it.”69 He told a friend that the family was about to be reunited, and that each of the five Wilder children had “either beauty, brains or goodness; several have two of these attributes; one has all.”70 Who was the one? Most likely Amos, but Thornton didn’t say.

  Conscious as he was of his own faults and virtues, however, Thornton was clear on another point: His father, he said, was “very much in doubt as to whether to be proud of me for having held a job for three years—I am the ne’er-do-well and black-sheep of a dreamer family—or angry because I am not rich or famous.”71

  15

  “MILLSTONES”

  I am ground between two millstones of an unsatisfying life and an unsatisfying art.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO ISABELLA NIVEN WILDER,

  December 2, 1924

  New Jersey and New York (1923–1925)

  In his midtwenties, Thornton Wilder was working hard to be an independent man, a self-supporting schoolmaster, and a part-time writer—but his self-esteem still turned with the weather vane of his father’s approval. After his mother’s return from Europe, however, his father looked more positively on Thornton’s achievements. “You will not let my observations on your development perturb you; there is much I do not know, especially as to your and mother’s gifts and interests,” Amos Parker Wilder wrote to his son in September of 1923. “You are doing well now,” his father continued, with uncharacteristic praise. “You are a good boy; it is probably that the environment is the super-thing for your unfolding; well-nourished, among good people; responsibility being developed. It is amusing to see how teaching gives one confidence.”1 Thornton bridled at the insinuation that his “good” qualities could be attributed to Lawrenceville rather than to his own nature and efforts.

  There was more: Dr. Wilder wanted Thornton to go to graduate school, preferably in English, and thought he should try to get his work published in magazines. Or, as Dr. Wilder put it, “My two ideas you will consider for what they are worth: (1) advanced study preferably in English as your forum & support (2) some prose & poetry offerings to the magazines from time to time to get acquaintance and confidence.”2 When, in the same letter, Dr. Wilder told Thornton that he had recently seen Harry Luce and Briton Hadden, who were flushed with the great success of their Time magazine venture, Thornton read reproof between the lines. His aspirations were great, but his achievements so far were modest, greatly exceeded by those of some of his Yale classmates. His own brother had already published a book. Thornton needed no reminder of his lack of success—and being published occasionally in magazines was not going to satisfy him, or, he imagined, his demanding father. He answered with a four-page letter of his own, copying it into his letter book and then ripping out all but remnants of the pages.

  Thornton wrote sympathetically to his brother, who was also enduring their father’s remonstrations, confessing that there were times when he felt their father’s “perpetual and repetitive monologue is trying to swamp my personality, and I get an awful
rage. He has wonderful and beautiful qualities, but he has one monstrous sin. Mother, Charlotte, you and I (and lately Isabel) have lived in a kind of torment trying to shake off his octupus-personality.”3 During those years, as Amos approached thirty and Thornton and Charlotte were not far behind, they still grappled with their father’s force in their lives. When the trio shared their perspectives on their father, as they often did in letters, Thornton and Charlotte were the rebels and Amos was the conciliator. “I have sometimes felt the queer warps we may have taken from our upbringing,” Amos wrote to Charlotte,

  but I am philosophical enough to be sure that life has its powers of transmuting and equalizing all such handicaps by peculiar compensations. Father’s influence on us was determined by his parents and so on back. He could not help it. And the good he did us was no doubt far greater than the other. Besides, we haven’t the whole story of the family yet. If our lives are not altogether normal, they are at least extraordinarily rich in content, spiritual tact, artistic apprehension, imagination, etc. We have greater conflicts to resolve than most people but we develop thence unusually formidable personalities.4

  In the fall of 1923 Thornton wrote letters to encourage his mother and his brother as they tried to acclimate to life in New Haven after the years abroad. Amos, Thornton, and Charlotte wanted their mother to be happy in New Haven, and the family, including Aunt Charlotte, agreed that Isabella’s comfort would depend on “longsufferingness on Father’s part and peace in the family.”5 Even with young Amos close by, however, Isabella felt lonely and out of place in New Haven. It was an ordeal, she said, just to go out to dinner parties with her family. She dreaded even appearing with the whole family. “Looked at en masse no family appears well,” she wrote to Thornton. “Especially the ageing and unfashionable parents. By myself I could perhaps chatter along and hold my own but before your Father and Isabel I am quite dumb and lost. I do not know how to face this lighthearted and busy town. It makes me feel very far away. . . . Do not lose sleep over my trouble. But comfort me somehow.”6

  He did his best. “But don’t I know just what you mean!” he responded right away:

  It’s the malady of the Wilders; each is better when the others aren’t around. Father is ponderous when Amos and I are near; but I enter houses that he has just left and I hear wonders of his wit and nonsense. Hasn’t Charlotte insisted a hundred times, almost with tears, that when we are not around she is Madame Recamier?7 I have even a suspicion that Isabel is more buoyant at those parties where there is no chance of meeting my depreciating eye over the shoulders of the dancers.8

  He went on to compliment his mother for her wit and charm, comparing her brilliance to that of his other heroine, Mme de Sévigné. He was convinced, he told her, that she had “the purest natural and cultivated talent for living” that he had ever seen. “You have something to talk with that hundreds of restless women have not,—the excellence of your own mind, with its monologue of temperate wise humorous content,” he assured her, urging her to laugh at her fears.9

  Thornton more than anyone else in the family could help Isabella restore her equilibrium. She would not or could not turn to her husband for any kind of comfort, financial or other, and she kept him keenly aware of that deficiency. From boyhood Thornton had been sensitive to his mother’s moods and emotional needs, and had done his best to offset them. Now that he was earning his keep, he wanted to give her as much financial comfort as possible, even though Isabella discouraged that, not wanting to deplete his limited resources. He went to great lengths to provide concert tickets for her anonymously, and to supplement her income. Over her protest he made her keep a check, part of which she used, gratefully, to buy “a grand winter coat.”10

  The house their father leased at 96 Bishop Street was in a section of New Haven “which has no other distinction,” Thornton wrote to a friend, “than that one carries into it. But wherever my Mother goes she surrounds herself with the same Chinese embroideries and books and delicious tea and personal charm and a troop of original sons and daughters, and calls it a Home.”11 He wished he could give his mother books, every luxury, vacations, a house, security. Maybe someday.

  For the time being he was back at Lawrenceville School, busier than ever. Mr. Foresman’s father and infant son died in the same week of September, and Foresman underwent complicated oral surgery, so Thornton could not leave the school. Enrollment had risen to more than five hundred boys, so that classes were larger and the faculty workload increased accordingly.12 When some teachers were fired, Thornton had to step in until new ones were hired, teaching six periods a day. He had a nightmare, “the distant reverberation of a nervous breakdown—in which all night I lecture, lecture, without ceasing, on the pronouns and subjunctive.”13 Nevertheless, he could write to his mother, “I love teaching and have learned a hundred more of its secrets.”14 He scarcely liked the French, he told her, “or their country,” but he adored their language and literature, and thoroughly enjoyed teaching French.15 He still clung to the hope, however, that this would be his last year of teaching.

  Thornton’s connection to his mother was deeply affectionate, whimsical, and playful. He was coming up to see her, he wrote, and she should get used to the idea of his mustache before he arrived. He “understood some of the most delightful corners in international literature in the light of her personality.” On the day after he wrote to scold his father, he wrote to “propose” to his mother: “Madam, I solemnly propose to you: will you be my mother,” he teased. “Consider well; this is the most solemn step in a matron’s life: are you sure we are compatible? Is my face one that you could endure at a thousand breakfasts? Divorce in this matter is not so easy as it was. Many wretched mothers are tied for life to unseeing sons.”16

  He saw her and the rest of the family as often as he could, inviting them to Lawrenceville or making the trip to New Haven when he had twenty-four hours free. His sisters came for a visit and “left a host of real admirers behind,” he told his parents.17 His weekend duties could be confining, so he had to satisfy his hunger for theater by attending previews of plays in nearby Trenton, which was suddenly “snowed under with try-outs.”18 He kept up with theater in New York by reading newspapers and journals, and stayed in touch with Stark Young and Mrs. Isaacs. Young encouraged Thornton to call on him in New York, but Thornton hesitated. After all, Stark Young kept company with Eleonora Duse and Charlie Chaplin. “You I dare not see,” Thornton wrote to Young. “You do not know me if you do not understand my strange reluctance to go and see people who are busily and brilliantly occupied. Me, shy?—but it’s true. I tell my Mother she must have punished me at the age of three for intruding and ever since I walk down side alleys.”19 In lieu of a visit he sent Young a long letter full of astute and witty commentary on current theater performances and personnel.

  Thornton headed to New Haven for Christmas, stopping en route for what turned out to be a glamorous theater binge in New York. The overworked schoolmaster caught between two millstones stepped briefly into a dazzling parade of theater events. The first night he had dinner with Edith Isaacs and her family overlooking the lake at Central Park, and capped the evening with a three-hour conversation with Stark Young, mainly listening to Young’s “extraordinary” anecdotes and verbal portraits of theater luminaries.

  Thornton spent the next morning at rehearsals of Zona Gale’s new play, Mr. Pitt, adapted from her novel Birth, and learned that Pirandello was due to arrive in New York the next day to supervise production of his cycle of plays. He had lunch with Stark Young and dinner with the playwright and author of musical comedies Clare Kummer, who invited him to go with her to see her musical comedy, One Kiss, adapted from a smash hit in Paris. From the actress Lola Fisher she had received a copy of Thornton’s And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead, and professed to be “bewitched” by it. (Lola Fisher had most likely passed Thornton’s script along from her friend William Lyon Phelps, the Yale English professor who was a lifelong friend of the Wilders.) T
he next day Thornton watched an acting workshop at Boleslavsky’s Laboratory Theatre—“one of the most illuminating things” he’d ever seen.20 As a finale to his enthralling New York adventure, he enjoyed the Theatre Guild production of The Failures by Henri Lenormand, directed by Young. “So beautiful, so beautiful,” Thornton wrote.21

  He was in paradise—but it did not seem to occur to him that these luminaries in the theater world could truly enjoy the company of a thin, shy schoolmaster with a dapper mustache, an eager smile, a brilliant mind, and a remarkable knowledge of and gratifying enthusiasm for the theater. All they knew of Thornton Wilder the writer was a handful of very short plays, a few letters, and, in some instances, scattered passages from an unfinished novel. It was Wilder the man they invited to lunch, dinner, rehearsals, workshops, and performances. Unwilling as he was to intrude, Thornton did not even imagine that these impressive people enjoyed his refreshing, exuberant company, and simply liked him for himself. He wrote to a friend afterward that the only fault of his new friends in New York was “their inability to see how unworthy of their lights I am.”22

  SOON IT was back to being the schoolmaster, but Thornton returned to New York briefly, at Edith Isaacs’s invitation, to accompany her to a dinner in honor of Mrs. Edward MacDowell of the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Mrs. Isaacs wanted to recommend Thornton for a summer residency at MacDowell, and to introduce her young protégé to Mrs. MacDowell in advance. Bill Benét attended the dinner that night, and introduced Thornton to his wife, the poet Elinor Wylie. Thornton found her “young and pretty and irritable,” and soon came to admire her poetry. The British author Rebecca West was there also, seated between the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson and the leading stage designer Norman Bel Geddes. She was dressed in a “sack of deep blue-green,” Thornton noted, and her “bright defiant flushed little face touched with an orange rather than a red rouge.” He learned that she was traveling with her little girl, supposedly fathered by H. G. Wells, and was known as the “most famous living unmarried mother.”23