Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  From his old friend William Lyon Phelps, in Scribner’s Magazine, came lavish praise, especially for the author’s style, although, Phelps said, “I am not quite sure what it is all about.”9 Wilder’s debut, it was noted more than once, marked the appearance on the American literary scene of a promising new writer. In May a letter came to Thornton in Princeton from one of the critics who mattered most—his former professor Charles Wager. “It is just like you, full of your delightful airs and graces, but with what seems to me a sense for a situation that you did not even promise to have in the days of your former incarnation,” Dr. Wager wrote. “It is the real thing, if I am judge, and of course I think I am . . . if one can be daring and clever and vivid and at the same time write like a gentleman and a wit, I cannot see why one would regret it. Besides all this, there is something curiously like wisdom in your book, and this strikes me as best of all.”10

  “If I deserved to be happy no letter could have made me happier than yours,” Thornton replied:

  How many hours I sat under your rostrum, burning with awe and emotion, while you unfolded the masterpieces. . . . I am an old fashioned believer and when I assert that I believe that lives are planned out for us I am always thinking of the fact that my father . . . sent his two sons to Oberlin where the younger could get the nourishment without which he would have remained a bright blundering trivial hysteric.11

  The Cabala quickly went into its second printing “with all the twenty-eight errata corrected,” Thornton noted.12 The book would be published in England in October by Longmans, Green & Company, Ltd. Although not a bestseller, it sold in respectable numbers—5,357 copies in the United States in the first year. The Boni brothers approached Thornton with an unusual proposition: If he would turn over to them $1,250 in royalties due him, they would match that amount and “plaster the country with adv’ts, to try and ram it down the public neck as one of the six bestsellers of the Spring and perhaps recoup all that was invested.” Thornton turned them down. “In the first place I must eat,” he wrote to Amy Wertheimer. “In the second, it would be absurd to make a little goldfish go through the antics of a whale.”13

  THROUGHOUT THAT hectic spring Amy sought Thornton’s attention—asking to read his work in progress, wanting to give him a twenty-ninth birthday party, reproaching him when he did not write her long letters. He reminded her of the boundaries he had prescribed in January with “affectionate gentleness and affectionate firmness.”14 Even their correspondence verged on “Not Fair Play,” he wrote to her in April, after a visit with his family in New Haven. Amy was married. She had children. He would continue to think about the limitations on their relationship, and he hoped she would as well. “It doesn’t matter much what a poor unattached abstracted bachelor does; but it [is] very important what a lady with the network of attachment like yours does . . . your attention must be overwhelmingly centered where you are.” Worst of all was his conviction that “I am cheating. New Haven [his family] implies that.”15

  She answered him with “beautiful pages” and “just in that vein of restraint with wistfulness which (haven’t we decided?) must be ours.” But he was worried that she was reading allusions to herself into his depiction of Alix in The Cabala. He cautioned her not to “wrench reflexions out of their context,” reminding her that “the earlier books [of The Cabala] were written before we met and have elsewhere their application.”16

  He defined himself for Amy in late April. He was trying to juggle all his “existences”: He was a graduate student; a “Sociable” who went to teas, dances, dinners, and movies; a teacher and a tutor; a published author concerned about the response to his new book; a writer filled with ideas for new books. It was a challenge to coordinate “all these persons I am,” he wrote, “and it’s too exciting.”17 Unknown to her, he confessed later, he was “leading the foxiest possible life trying to appear a gentleman and a Princetonian on a hobo’s budget.”18 His life was a whirlwind: In his few spare hours he was trying to finish his revisions to the last act of The Trumpet Shall Sound and write at least a few sporadic pages of the new novel; he was signing “a perfect tower of books”; the “Fox Film Company” telegraphed the Bonis that they were considering The Cabala for a film; the theatrical producer Charles L. Wagner “whom I don’t know from Adam,” Thornton wrote, liked the characterizations in The Cabala and wanted to “discuss a play.”19 Despite these demands on his time and energy, Thornton finished his M.A. requirements and the degree was “all won and over.” He was working on his new novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. “The book is going astonishingly,” he told his mother. “The weather is glorious and my health is perfect. But I’m all ‘sunk.’ I’m coming to you about the 22nd or23rd and sleep up in the hall and get cured. You are the only thing I can count on in a tiresome world.”20

  He was not very happy, he wrote to Amy, probably because “through distraction and laziness I haven’t written a word for so long, i.e. denied my raison d’être.”21 He would be all right once he got home, he told her, for “there is one place in the world I am really at peace and that is on the little cot up in the hall in Mansfield Street, with my Father and Mother and Isabel tiptoeing about their affairs.” There was another reason for his weariness: “This little M. A. has been drinking a little too much lately having fallen into a crowd after his own heart—tough-guys, chemists and physicists and other non-introspectives,” he confessed to Amy.

  Their major ordeals are just over and they are all for stealing the distilled alcohols reserved for experimental work in the biological laboratories and infusing it with whole groves of lemons and shaking violently at the level of the shoulders. Then I am almost happy, accepted as a mere fella among fellas. . . . I long to be ordinary as Elinor Wylie longs to be respectable.22

  It was important to Thornton to be “a mere fella among fellas,” but try as he might to be ordinary, he was remarkable. At twenty-nine, he was a successful teacher, his M.A. in French in hand; a published novelist, with a second novel under way; a dramatist whose play would open in New York in December. He would spend July on his second MacDowell Colony fellowship, where he could concentrate on writing the new novel and put the finish touches on The Trumpet Shall Sound, which Boleslavsky was “clamoring” to receive.23 His first novel was being reviewed all over the United States and in England, and earning modest royalties.

  For most of his MacDowell residency, Thornton was buried in his work on the The Trumpet Shall Sound and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, struggling with the “still shapeless mass of the first two books” of the novel, he wrote to a friend.24 He found that The Bridge of San Luis Rey flowed from his pen “almost without effort, phrasing itself in a thousand beautiful accidents, but it is desperately sad.”25 He was “retelling the story of Mme de Sévigné’s daughter, though under another name and in another age,” he wrote to Amy.26 After a few weeks, however, he tired of the “hothouse introspective conversation at Peterborough,” and considered going back to Princeton for better working conditions, or accepting Boleslavsky’s invitation to spend a week at his Connecticut farm.

  Thornton also wanted to “get one unencumbered honest-to-god visit with my own mother,” and enjoy some “congenial talks and salt-water swimming, the two enthusiasms of my life.”27 But when the director of the Lake Sunapee Summer School and Camp in New Hampshire asked Thornton to substitute for one of their French masters, he jumped at the chance to earn the extra income. In late July the camp director sent a roadster to MacDowell to take Thornton to Lake Sunapee, where he would stay until mid-September. He spent the morning hours teaching small groups of students and the afternoons swimming and taking long solitary walks. There was time for his own work, but he found it refreshing that most people at Sunapee paid no attention whatsoever to the fact the he had ever “meddled with writing.”28 “Once in a long while I add a paragraph to The Bridge,” he wrote to his mother, “but it’s a tender-growing lily and is never smudged with mere industry.” He wished that he and his mother, just the t
wo of them, could spend some time in September at “some sea-coast somewhere” while he finished the new novel. “It will go—again all right if you are near,” he told her.29

  The Wilder family was, as usual, scattered for the summer—with Thornton in New Hampshire, his mother in New Haven, his father and Isabel in Maine with various members of the extended Wilder family, his brother at his church in North Conway, Janet on a farm in northern New Hampshire, and Charlotte traveling in France with friends and writing an article about the journey entitled “In a Corner of France.”30 In mid-September, for once, the entire Wilder family was together in New Haven, albeit briefly—“every known Wilder around one table,” Thornton wrote, “and a very emotional Grace from Father, who, as you remember, loves the Clan.”31

  Thornton marveled more than ever at his mother’s spirit and achievements, and wrote a portrait of her in 1926, when he was twenty-nine and his mother was fifty-three:

  She who is so bright and witty and feminine . . . for the last ten years has had to do her own housework. She is the delight of her friends—the committees of the Y. W. C. A. and International Girls Institute on which she serves (arriving late, with a collie on a leash, wilful and enthusiastic and capable) keep giving her flowers and odd and tender tributes. She has lived through the fretfulnesses of five stormy obstinate children and the humors of a husband from an opposite mould. With her hands scarcely dry from the dishwater she turns to read French, German and Italian. She enchants all the young men and women we children bring into the house.32

  Isabella worried about what would become of unemployed Thornton in the fall, and he set her mind—and his own—at ease in late August. He had spent much of June tutoring Andrew “Andy” Townson, whose parents Thornton had met through his friend Robert Hutchins. Thornton despaired because Andy did not apply himself to his studies and, therefore, couldn’t seem to “learn a thing.”33 The boy had failed all his college admissions exams and so was at loose ends for the fall. His affluent parents, who had decided college was clearly not for their son, hired Thornton to take Andy abroad in late September, to stay until Christmastime, after which they would situate Andy in the family business. They would pay all Thornton’s expenses, plus a stipend of two hundred dollars a month. He would have to miss the opening of his play at the American Laboratory Theatre, but he assured Andy’s father he was willing to do that.

  Thornton and many others had expected that he would publish a book and see a major production of one of his plays when he was in his early twenties. Now he was twenty-nine, and looking at his novel and plays “impersonally.” “I hope they’re well done and well liked,” he said, “but I don’t want to mingle with actors and literary people and I fight to keep my life separate. Besides I always hope to earn my living in other ways so that I need never strain to write a word for money. In that way I can always contradict managers and withdraw my stuff if they want to alter it.”34

  ALBERT AND CHARLES BONI were poised to publish Thornton’s second novel—with the stipulation that it should be longer than the first one—and they were willing to pay Thornton an advance on royalties that made it possible for him to settle some debts and to outfit himself for the trip to Europe. (He didn’t need much, he wrote: “Three suits, a tuck, an overcoat, a raincoat, never more than five books, a sweater . . . some linen and some MSS. Behold my baggage in this world.”)35 He planned to go to New York to meet with the Bonis, and then with Boleslavsky about The Trumpet Shall Sound, now in rehearsals and scheduled to open at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York in December.

  As he finished his preparations for the journey, Thornton wrote to his father, who was vacationing on Squirrel Island, Maine: “I wish I were out on the granite ledges of Squirrel with you, dear Papa, best of men—I’m twenty-nine and every year makes me understand and love you more, and just one tiny wait more and I’ll be a help and not a hindrance. Be patient with me 7 x 7 + 1 times and things will clear. Your dreadful child Thornt.”36

  BY MOST measures, a young novelist, playwright, and teacher on a subsidized trip abroad might have felt a reasonable degree of pleasure. This was not the case for Thornton Wilder in October 1926, however, as he recorded in the journal he began to keep in London. By then he had spent nearly three futile weeks trying to interest twenty-year-old Andy Townson in the cultural, artistic, and architectural wonders of England, France, and Germany. Thornton wrote to his family that he was afraid Andy was “bored to extinction.”37 This usually affable young man was not inclined to spend his time or his generous allowance on edification in Europe. Andy and his chaperone/tutor were hopelessly incompatible travel companions, and Thornton had enough experience teaching and supervising young men to recognize that Andy much preferred the company of “certain roistering companions” he had met along the way.38

  But Thornton had far more patience with Andy than he had with himself. “The impulse to keep a notebook derives from my great restlessness and dissatisfaction with myself,” he wrote. Their journey was barely begun, but already he was eager to be free of his reluctant student, to go to the south of France where he could concentrate on finishing The Bridge of San Luis Rey and “relieve legitimately all this chaotic literature in my head.”39 He regretted undertaking this exasperating pilgrimage. “Why did I ever go into this thing?” he wrote after a visit with his friend Bill Nichols, a recent Harvard graduate and a Rhodes scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. “And now I groan for freedom, and fret, and fester. God knows that just seeing Oxford, and all the business of our good long talk filled me with perfect rage to get back to my fountain pen and commit something beautiful.”40

  He shared his frustration with his family as well: “Oh, I should never have entered into this contract,” he wrote them from Rome on October 25, 1926. “I should have had the faith to come over alone. I am punished. My beautiful book would have been written by now instead of festering in me.”41 It was a great relief when Andy’s brother Chick appeared in London and the brothers set off on daily excursions of their own. In those free hours Thornton walked the London streets thinking “absurdly, in ‘fine phrases,’ ” he wrote in his journal. “I am alone most of the day in picture galleries and churches and I eat most of my meals alone, and all this talking to myself has become bad for me.”42 He was “nervously self-conscious” about his appearance in London as well, he wrote, and “a little so everywhere.”43 He was nearly thirty and belatedly, in his mind, gaining some recognition as a playwright and novelist. But he had learned all too quickly that even with good reviews and modestly good sales for a first novel, The Cabala was not going to produce a significant financial return, and he had doubts that his second novel would either. Lonely, self-conscious, restless, dissatisfied, he wanted above all to write, and he knew that this trip to Europe only temporarily deferred the problem of earning a living.

  For the time being, however, there was money in his pocket, and his first obligation was to Andy. Thornton was known to his friends as a superb tour guide in Europe, but his best efforts to plan tours and events to interest Andy fell flat. Thornton had envisioned a journey that was “all adventure and all friendship and all important discoveries in art and archeology,” but in fact Andy hated “museums and churches and walks and things.” Because Andy loved to fly, they did so whenever possible. They flew across the English Channel, and Thornton found air travel “a very impressive experience,” he wrote home. “Thank you for carrying on all my insurance these days,” he wrote to his father back in New Haven. “I have to ride in airplanes so often with Andy that you may get the dividends before you know it.”44

  Thornton’s new journal became the repository for scenes and ideas for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The novel was growing slowly, but he found that whole passages could be inspired by a walk, a fragment of a symphony, an artistic detail in a cathedral or museum. Still he was adrift, uncertain about how to plan the next few months of his life, much less the next few years. He had made no firm commitment to teach or to study or to take
any sort of job that might steadily, dependably pay his bills. He reflected in his journal that he had three “contracted books” for the Bonis: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, he noted, followed by an edition of The Trumpet Shall Sound (which would not materialize, as it turned out); and an edition of “plays long and short” which would appear with another publisher in 1928 as The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, a collection of the three-minute playlets. But on his occasional solitary walks, doubting that he could make money writing, Thornton looked squarely into the future and decided that he would have to combine writing “with some kind of college work.” After he finished the books he had promised to the Boni brothers, he reflected in his journal, “I must write a book of literary criticism that will get me a special lectureship at Yale or Harvard. Then can I be the first American don in Oxford or Cambridge?”45

  He could be fatalistic—or perhaps, as the grandson of a Presbyterian clergyman, predestinarian in his views: “In fact, all my reading in cynical authors has not robbed me of the sensation of being a disobedient and foolish actor in a play whose author (in spite of me) gives me beautiful scenes and permits [me] to confront some rare and noble dramatis personae.”46

  THORNTON AND Andy made brief stops in Rome, Naples, and Paris, where Thornton called on Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company. Beach introduced him to Ernest Hemingway, whom Thornton described to his mother as “one of the two other good novelists of my generation, the 3rd being Glenway Wescott.” Wilder and Hemingway had a “grand long talk.”47 They decided that their “immediate predecessors”—Sherwood Anderson, James Branch Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather—were “quite inadequate.”48 Thornton gave Hemingway a copy of The Cabala.49