Like Amos, Thornton, and Charlotte, Isabel was eager to get away from New Haven and home. She was saving her money so she could go back to England, as far away as possible.
“THIS PLACE is too good to be true,” Thornton wrote from Princeton in the fall of 1925. “It may be spoiled by my having to work a little; they’ve signed me up for a course called Historical Grammar that makes my head sweat to write it down.”25 Despite the often tedious work his classes required—the work was “very hard and dry-as-dust,” Thornton complained—he could spend far more time writing than was possible at Lawrenceville.26 By November, Thornton Wilder the writer had superseded Thornton Wilder the graduate student.
At twenty-eight he had been writing seriously for nearly half his life, and at last he could call himself a professional novelist and playwright, thanks to good fortune on two fronts: The Boni brothers definitely wanted to publish his first novel and drew up a contract, and Richard Boleslavsky chose his Geraldine de Gray as one of four plays for the 1926–27 repertory season at the American Laboratory Theatre. This was unexpected good news, as Thornton had sent the newly finished play to Boleslavsky at the end of October, not expecting him to select it for production but hoping it would at least interest him in reading other plays in the future.27 “He sent me the reports of the playreading committee,” Thornton wrote to Amy on November 23. “They all conceded that it was good construction and [an] interesting subject, but asserted that it had no literary value. The sauce of them! That’s almost as bad as my French professor who announced to me at the close of my analysis of an old sonnet that I had no imagination.”28
Still Thornton was elated—and then very quickly inundated with work preparing the novel manuscript for publication and revising the play for production. He was especially eager to get the novel off his hands. “I long to be free of it; it’s become a fretting burden,” he wrote.29 In his view it was a cluster of intertwined “novelettes,” or books.30 That fall he was wrestling with book 4, which would be entitled “Astrée-Luce and the Cardinal,” although, as the manuscript was taking shape, the woman Astrée-Luce was called Mlle de Homodarmes.31 He had written enough of book 4 to send it along for his mother’s review. “I am very unhappy about the middle of it,” he wrote to her.
The more I look at the whole thing the more I see it as a bundle of notes that I should work over for months yet. But I must hurry. “It will have to do.” I never thought I should have to say that of anything of mine, but I am frantic to finish this five-year thing and get back to my plays.32
When Boleslavsky offered 10 percent of gross receipts, and asked for extensive revisions to Geraldine de Gray, Thornton promised to do all he could to make his play succeed.33 His melodrama, set “at the edge of Woodsville, Indiana,” in 1872, stars Geraldine de Gray, a governess, beautiful and pure, who falls in love—like Jane Eyre—with the brooding master of the house, father of the little girl whom Geraldine is hired to tutor. Wilder explained to Boleslavsky, “My hope in casting the play into the form of a burlesque on dime novels was, partly, to see if I couldn’t somehow force an eloquence out of the funny old romantic diction.” But he had such confidence in Boleslavsky’s “judgment and experience” that he would “gladly accede to any alterations” needed.34 Thornton worked hard on the revisions in December, including rewriting the opening of the play. He was also touching up Exile and reworking a comedy he called The Pilgrims, planning, with Edith Isaacs’s encouragement, to submit both full-length plays for Boleslavsky’s consideration, along with The Trumpet Shall Sound, the four-act play he had composed at Yale.
Boleslavsky was a crucial link in the chain of theater history—firmly connected to Konstantin Stanislavsky, who had collaborated with Tolstoy and Chekhov in the nineteenth century, and who introduced new theories and methods of acting early in the twentieth century that would still resonate in the twenty-first. Born in Poland in 1889 and educated in Russia, Boleslavsky had been schooled in Stanislavsky’s famous Moscow Art Theatre, beginning in 1906. Boleslavsky starred in Moscow Art Theatre productions around the world, and his effectiveness as an actor, teacher, and director led him to be named director of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Boleslavsky returned to Poland, taught and directed in Germany, and by 1922 was living in the United States, where he founded the American Laboratory Theatre in 1923. “The Lab,” as it came to be known, rigorously trained a repertory company of actors to perform classical as well as new, experimental plays. Boleslavsky was a gifted teacher who transmitted Stanislavsky’s philosophy in Europe and the United States, and enhanced it with his own theories, articulated in the book Edith Isaacs would publish for him—Acting: The First Six Lessons (1933).
Thornton was surprised and “very proud and happy” when he heard the good news from Boleslavsky about Geraldine de Gray, although Boleslavsky soon changed his mind and decided instead to produce The Trumpet Shall Sound. This was the first big break for Wilder the dramatist. The play would have an audience in New York—off Broadway, but even so, a significant launching ground for a new playwright.
As he migrated from novels to plays to French grammar that fall, Thornton kept “groping about for the subject of a new play,” he wrote to Amy. “There are beautiful walks these days along the Raritan canal,” he told her,
and almost every day (and twice a day) I push my feet before me among the leaves, constructing a whole new play every day from old germs of plots, and then discarding it when the excitement has ebbed. . . . Anyway, I’m hunting for my next play a happy subject and to fit myself for it I am running every morning at seven, renouncing cigarettes, avoiding artistic people, speaking slowly, refraining from frowns and trying to be good. Surely those charms cannot fail to work.35
When he wasn’t writing, running, or studying, he was going to the theater. That fall he was “thoroly [sic] excited” by Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, which he had first seen in Rome; Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard; Ibsen’s The Wild Duck; and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, among others.36 He found occasional escape in a longtime hobby—one he had enjoyed for years—collecting the records of German repertory theater. “I can hardly wait until the Univ. Library receives its weekly batch of foreign newspapers. I tear open the great Zeitung and fill out a diagram,” he wrote to Amy. In red ink he charted openings of plays; in pencil he jotted down dates of the season’s performances.37 His new indulgence was movies. “I am a movie-goer and very enthusiastic,” he wrote to his mother, encouraging her to see “Griffith’s Sally of the Sawdust (you mustn’t miss that), Lubitsch’s Kiss Me Again and The Gold Rush.”38
ON NOVEMBER 19, 1925, Thornton put his signature on his first publishing contract, for the novel he called The Caballa (at first using the preferred spelling of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary), and then changed to The Cabala. The Boni brothers scheduled the book for publication in the spring of 1926 by their firm, Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. “Tonight I am signing a heavy legal contract for the publication of my novel,” he wrote to Rosemary Ames.39 Despite his sensitivity over their age difference he had accepted her invitation to a dance later in November, and in spare moments, he teased, he was brushing up on his “polka and schottische,” telling her to “hope for the best.”40
A month later he wrote to congratulate his brother, who was preparing to preach his first sermon to his own congregation in North Conway. Like most siblings the Wilders were grateful for those moments when a brother or sister deflected parental concern, giving even a brief respite from their father’s hovering. “I am happy that in spite of Father’s 5 months of hysterical, fainting in coils on the hearthrug every time you got a letter and other demonstrations, all is well,” Thornton told Amos. “He has now devoted his anguished attentions to minute brooding over Isabel’s dramatic callers and the clauses in my publisher’s contract.”41
The brothers, especially Amos, did some hovering of their own over their sister Charlotte that year. She had proved hers
elf a brilliant student at Mount Holyoke and at Radcliffe. She was a good editor, and would prove to be an effective teacher. But most of all she wanted to write. However, Charlotte increasingly felt the stress of her own self-imposed mission: to earn enough money so she could live on her own and write. She was constantly writing poetry, and Thornton had recognized and encouraged her gifts early on. He told their mother, “If she keeps on right she may discover herself as something of a very high order, that will scatter our magazine poetesses as a hawk does the hens.”42 Charlotte confided in Amos the worrisome news that she had discovered that the stimulating lectures and concerts she had always enjoyed now “really churned me up and gave way to periods of depression. I was being over-stimulated all the time. I could hear a rattling in my head when my thoughts, like rats, scuttled about.”43
She was twenty-seven years old, more of a loner than any of her siblings, and most likely facing a more difficult struggle for independence than her two brothers because she was a woman, and, furthermore, a woman who longed to be a writer. Her struggle was intensified because she was beginning to suffer bouts of what would eventually become chronic depression. Charlotte tried her best in 1925 to ward off her melancholy and the “rattling” in her head by avoiding two pleasures she prized—the intellectual engagement of lectures and the emotional comfort of music.
THORNTON ENDURED an “awful crisis” during the Christmas holidays in 1925, and unrequited love was the crux of it. Only cryptic details of the experience survive in a few enigmatic letters and, almost a year later, in a startling entry in his journal. He first shared some of the experience in early January 1926 in a letter to Amy:
Just when I’d made the resolution to never think about anything else for the rest of my probably brief life than goodness and art. Yes, madam, I had an awful crisis over Xmas. You remember when I met you I let escape that I was coming to discover that Life slapped me sharply when I ventured outside those two pathways?
Well, that was no pose. At last I resolved to do of my own free will what circumstances would presently force me to do anyway. And I killed myself. I am no longer a person. I am a heart and a pen. I have no brain. I have no body. I have no pride (oh what an amputation was there!) I have no fear (wish that were true!) There is something of all this in the Epilogue to The Cabala. Je n’existe plus.44
Amy wrote back immediately, full of concern. “My dear Amy,” Thornton replied, “I just meant I was awfully upset. It has nothing to do with you. I am in the middle of a kind of nervous breakdown.” He wanted to run away to Florida or somewhere, he told her. He hated his work, dreaded his exams at Princeton, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t find the time to write. “How naughty of you to get so excited over mere phrasing,” he scolded her, seeming to rationalize. “To Kill oneself in that sense, is a sort of religious idiom for shaking off one’s old lazinesses and trying again. I’d quote you its loci classici [he used double underscores] only it would look like lecturing.”45 But Thornton’s distress seemed to anxious Amy to be more than mere phrasing. She offered him comfort and affection.
“There is no affection in the world that I would be stupid enough to refuse,” he answered.
All life is made possible by it. You have so much of mine. But the only kind I am ready for now is a clear serene understanding affection. When I see among my friends the kind that is touched with suffering I understand, but I draw back. I loved with all the exaggeration one can imagine; but I was not only not loved so in return. I was laughed at. The cleverest humiliations were set for me. And for a long time I am going to be the most cautious the most distrustful (of myself) man in the world. Again you find further hints of this in the Memoirs, most indirectly stated.46
No trail of clues or facts leads to the identity of the person who failed to love Thornton in return, who “cleverly” humiliated him in 1925, and who wounded him so deeply. The impact was profound and enduring, however, leaving him by his own admission extremely cautious and doubtful about relationships, stripped down to “a heart and a pen.” Regardless of the identity or the circumstances, Thornton responded by deliberately “killing” within himself the propensity to love with “exaggeration”—to idealize, to trust, to connect intimately with another person.
The experience continued to haunt him, and to be transmuted into his literary work, as his 1926 journal and certain letters reveal. These passages open a window on his innermost life and the often-shrouded revelation of self in his work. Months after his letter so alarmed Amy Wertheimer, he wrote in his journal about his intention in his first two novels—a passage that appears to have been wrung onto the page, if words scratched out are any indication. In that journal entry he resurrected words he had written to Amy in January 1926:
The Cabala was written because I brooded about great natures and their obstacles and ailments and frustrations. The Bridge was written because I wanted to die and I wanted to prove that death was a happy solution. The motto of The Bridge is to be found in the last page of The Cabala: Hurry and die!
In The Cabala I began to think that love is enough to reconcile one to the difficulty of living (i.e. the difficulty of being good); in The Bridge I am still a little surer. Perhaps someday I can write a book announcing that love is sufficient.47
The interval of a few months had at least restored in him a little hope that love might be someday be “sufficient” to “reconcile one to the difficulty of living,” and Thornton began to embed in his fiction allusions to his “most secret life.” In a letter to Amy he revealed the autobiographical shadows in his work, and so offered the key to others who might be curious about his inner life. He cautioned Amy not to think that he had disguised himself as the cardinal in The Cabala:
Be ready to get the flash that I am a little of Mlle. De Marfontaine too; and presently you will discover that I am Alix d’Espoli and Marcantonio and a lot of people. If I went through the text with a red pencil and underlined every passage that somehow alluded to my most secret life I should have to resharpen the pencil several times. That’s why I write fiction and plays instead of essays and poems: The things I have to say are so intimate that I would be ashamed to publish them under I [he underscored twice] and so pour them into men, women and children.48
Thornton could be moved to tears, he had written to Amy in the fall of 1925, “when a great author is praised for some special beauty, above all for some transformation he has made of the troubles of his life into the gold of his art.49 Early in 1926 he resolved with new determination that he would somehow find the way to devote all his time and energy to writing. He would transmute his own troubles into the “gold” of his novels and plays, tapping his recent painful experience for material—both dramatic action and emotional resonance. He would spin gold in the character of Alix and in the epilogue, “The Dusk of the Gods,” in The Cabala, as well as in characters emerging in The Bridge of San Luis Rey and even later in The Woman of Andros and other literary works. “More and more I am retiring into myself to write,” he told Amy in January 1926. “Twenty-nine years of material collected—goodbye, I close the studio door; a few beautiful books, a romantic play or two, then goodnight.”50
THORNTON LEFT a convoluted trail of letters and manuscript drafts that make it difficult to trace with precision the evolution of the ultimate draft of The Cabala (which he pronounced, as the Concise Oxford Dictionary recommended, with the emphasis on the first syllable rather than the second).51 But at last he finished the novel and turned it in to the Bonis. If only his novel would sell, he would tell friends and family good-bye and go “where there’s sunlight. And Indians and sunsets and rattlers.”52 He was trying to work on his plays, “preparing a faultless text of 14 (fourteen) 3-minute plays” for Boni, and, if that firm didn’t want them, for submission to the Dial Press and other publishers. The Bonis had planned “to use them as a follow-up book,” Thornton told Amy, but he feared they might have “chilled toward them” over time.53
“Devil take me if I don’t run away to Taos one
of these fine mornings,” Thornton wrote to Amy that January. He just wanted to get away from civilization and “respectability and nice clothes and the Whole Social Grimace.” Maybe he’d head for Florida and the ocean, and sunlight, and write a children’s book.54 He didn’t know “when or how or where” he would go, just that he felt compelled to. “My urge to go comes from way within and the ‘way within’ knows just what it is doing,” he wrote.55
He was weary of his life at Princeton to the point of illness—“the ‘nice’ people, the cultivated conversations, the academic tone—do not permit me to be simple or sincere.”56 He was inordinately restless, wishing he could “say a long farewell to all civilization” and “return to ocean, sun and sleep.”57 He let his family know how he was feeling—and was soon inundated with letters urging him to come home for a visit. He went, stepping into a family drama that rivaled most of the scripts he had actually written to date. Thanks to his mother and his father, Thornton had a double dose of drama genes—the innate propensity to enlarge and embroider an event in the telling and retelling. His father warned him that the family would “fall to pieces financially at any moment” should Amos Parker Wilder retire or die; therefore it was Thornton’s duty to get that M.A. so he could draw a salary for the rest of his life. His mother, hearing Thornton threaten to go to live in a Cuban village described in the February 1926 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, fell into “hallucinations of snakes, revolutions, typhoid and the Inquisition.” Dr. Wilder opined that an act of God could, at any moment, “easily precipitate the family into such straits that it would require a steady salary” from Thornton to provide food and shelter.58 Thornton reflected that his father’s chronic financial anxiety and caution amounted to a “mania, a distortion of essential values that I can excuse only in him who has worked so long & faithfully at dreadful tasks and still must way beyond the age when most men can begin to sit back. He is a dear soul, but with his two blind eyes—propriety and prudence—awfully hard to talk with.”59
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