Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

The United States and Europe (1930s)

  When he was in his midfifties and working on a chronology of his life, Thornton Wilder looked back on the decade of the 1930s—years overcrowded with work, travel, and the demands and occasional pleasures of his new fame.1 A few key events stood out in his memory: In 1930, his third novel, The Woman of Andros, was published, and he accepted an appointment as a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, where, he said, he taught “for half of each year until 1936.” In 1931, The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act was published.2 His new lecture career began in February 1929 and, except for one hiatus, continued through the end of March 1937. Wilder traveled throughout the United States, sometimes for several weeks at a stretch, lecturing nearly all the way. Then, from 1930 until 1936, he would alight at the University of Chicago long enough to teach for part of each year. Between lecture commitments and teaching obligations, he made trips to Hollywood, Hawaii, Europe, and the West Indies.

  Somehow, as he taught, lectured, and traveled during the thirties, Wilder found time and energy to write six new one-act plays and two novels. He worked for a stint doing screenwriting in Hollywood, and translated or adapted three plays, one of which had a respectable run on Broadway. He wrote two major three-act plays—Our Town, which enjoyed a huge success on Broadway and on tour, and The Merchant of Yonkers, which did not.

  His first major publication in the thirties, The Woman of Andros, appeared on February 21, 1930, with thirty thousand copies printed in advance, joined by twenty thousand additional copies on the official publication day. For twelve weeks, beginning in April, the novel was on the bestseller list. The yield for the year: seventy thousand copies sold in the United States; $16,000 in royalties for Wilder, not including the $2,500 advance, which he had quickly earned back; third place on the 1930 list of the year’s ten bestselling novels. Reviews were mixed but mostly positive, and an advertisement in the Saturday Review of Literature on March 15, 1930, published highlights: “Writing of this temper is rare in American fiction . . . ‘The Woman of Andros’ is the best book we have had from Thornton Wilder,” according to the New York Times. “Wilder’s third and best,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune reviewer. “In every page one feels that Wilder is writing for the ages. . . . A creation of beauty,” from the New York Telegram.3

  Of the negative reviews, the most controversial was written by the communist critic Michael Gold, a champion of proletarian literature. Gold regularly used his critical platform in the New Masses and other leftist publications to attack writers and visual artists who did not conform to his views that art should be proletarian and political in purpose and subject matter. He was, Edmund Wilson wrote, one of the “more or less organized and highly self-conscious group of the social revolutionary writers,” including John Dos Passos, John Howard Lawson, and others—although, Wilson observed, Dos Passos was “a good deal more intelligent” than Gold.4 A passionate advocate of a Marxist approach to literature, Gold was one of the most strident voices in the contentious discourse in the thirties about the relationship between art and contemporary life.5

  Michael Gold focused on Wilder and his work in a highly critical review in the April issue of the New Masses. Gold’s platform expanded in October 1930 when the New Republic published his longer article attacking Wilder and all his novels and plays: Wilder’s characters in The Cabala, Gold wrote, were “some eccentric old aristocrats in Rome, seen through the eyes of a typical American art ‘pansy’ who is there as a student.” Gold intensely disliked The Woman of Andros and scorned Wilder’s three-minute plays as “pretty” and “tinkling” and presenting “the most erudite and esoteric themes one could ever imagine.” Alas, according to Gold, Wilder was no poet of the proletariat, but the “poet of the genteel bourgeoisie” whose goal was “comfort and status quo.”

  After reprimanding Wilder for how and what he did write, Gold spent nearly two columns of his four-column piece attacking Wilder for how and what he did not: He did not write with the language of the “intoxicated Emerson” or the “clean rugged Thoreau” or the “vast Whitman.” Wilder did not write about cotton mills or child slaves or murders or coal miners. Gold presumed that Wilder, who in reality had worked hard all his life and worried about money since he was a boy, was “the perfect flower of the new prosperity.” Furthermore, Gold sneered, Wilder was the “Emily Post of culture,” and—in perhaps the only accurate statement in the essay—“the personal friend of Gene Tunney.” In conclusion Gold challenged Wilder to “write a book about modern America.”6

  Gold’s review set off a vigorous dispute in the pages of the New Republic. The nation at large was far too preoccupied with the economic impact of the Depression on Americans’ own lives to worry overmuch about whether their national literature should be driven by economics, as Gold and his colleagues contended, or by classical, romantic, and ethical themes as advocated by the New Humanists and others, or by modernism—or by writers like Wilder who wrote independently of any critical school or trend. The tempest at the New Republic had its repercussions in the rarefied atmosphere of the literary world, where the “social revolutionists” were attacking mainstream writers and, on occasion, one another. Gold regularly attacked writers including Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Robinson Jeffers, and even Carl Sandburg, whom he usually admired as a proletarian poet.7

  On May 4, 1932, in the New Republic, Edmund Wilson addressed “The Literary Class War,” writing that Gold’s “attack” on Wilder in 1930 “was an attempt to arraign Mr. Wilder at the bar of the Communist ideology.” Wilson pointed out that Gold himself had been the target of criticism from “his own Marxist camp,” having enjoyed “considerable success” with his semiautobiographical novel about the New York East Side, Jews Without Money, published in 1930—the same year as Wilder’s The Woman of Andros. Wilson reported that communist critics had condemned Gold and his bestselling book because he had failed to mention “the mass” and “labor organizations and strikes,” and had written about “merely poor people” and not “proletarians.” Gold vigorously defended himself on principles that Wilder might very well have exerted on behalf of his own work: Gold accused one Marxist critic of being “too dogmatic in his application of the proletarian canon,” arguing, “Each writer has to find his own way . . . I did not want to falsify the emotional values and bring in material that I did not feel. I do not believe any good writing can come out of this mechanical application of the spirit of proletarian literature.”8

  Although Wilder made no public response to the brouhaha, he was dismayed by the attack. “You can imagine my astonishment and disgust at the wretched controversy running in the New Republic,” he wrote to Lee Keedick.9 What Wilson and Gold did not know was that well before the flap, Wilder had been thinking deeply about the American experience and “the American flowering,” as he called it in his 1929 letter to Sibyl Colefax.10 His Woman of Andros was conceived and almost completely written before the 1929 crash of the U.S. economy.

  Wilder’s first public reference to the Gold episode apparently came in November 1933 during his two-week lecture appearance at the University of Hawaii, widely covered by the local press. Wilder told one interviewer that he believed radical critics to be “wrong in their claim that man is solely the product of the economic order under which he lives,” and that he believed that the “fundamental emotions, love, hate, fear, anger, surprise are common to all mankind, in any milieu, in any age.” He observed that “the left-wingers” thought that “all literature, all life, commenced somewhere around 1900, when they began.” Furthermore, they had not themselves “met the first big test”: They had yet to produce the kind of writing that in “their viewpoint would count as good literature.”11

  “Myself have dwindled to the least fashionable of authors,” he wrote ruefully to Sibyl Colefax in 1932, when he was deeply absorbed in work on his new novel, Heaven’s My Destination. “Few book reviews come out without a passing disparagement of my work. But I don’
t mind. I have a rather low opinion of my books myself, but am fairly conceited about the next ones.”12

  “I AM to be a ‘special lecturer’ in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago during the Spring Term,” Wilder announced to Sibyl Colefax. “Yes, Iliad and The Birds and Dante and Don Quixote and everything. And I can’t even spell.”13 During the thirties Wilder’s schedule was a jigsaw puzzle; still, he not only worked it out but enjoyed it—at least at first. He explained one of his major reasons for agreeing to teach at the University of Chicago: “The teaching work is really necessary to me; I write very little and slowly and I need a congenial daily routine to occupy me while the dim notions for books shape themselves. Apparently some writers write a great deal and can create a daily life out of it, but others work seldom and have a great deal of energy left over for another activity.”14

  The invitation to teach came from his longtime friend Robert Maynard Hutchins, a boy wonder, then a young adult wonder, and, at age thirty, a wonder on the national stage as the newly appointed president of the University of Chicago. Like Wilder, Hutchins was a product of Oberlin and Yale. Both men were the sons of fathers who were Yale graduates, and who embraced the religious and ethical traditions espoused by Oberlin (where Hutchins’s father was a professor of homiletics from 1907 until 1920) and the intellectual and social expectations fostered at Yale. Like Amos Niven Wilder, Robert Hutchins had served in the ambulance corps during World War I. After the war he was an outstanding student at Yale, despite the hours he had to spend working to pay for his education. Handsome and charismatic, he was particularly acclaimed for his debating and public speaking skills. In 1923 he was appointed secretary of the Yale Corporation; in 1925 he received his law degree, magna cum laude, at Yale Law School, and accepted an appointment to teach there. He became acting dean and associate professor at the Yale Law School in 1927, and in 1928, at the age of twenty-eight, was appointed professor and dean. This was his launching pad for the presidency of the University of Chicago, which he assumed in 1930. In that role he was a catalyst for change and controversy with his vision of cooperative interdisciplinary education and innovative undergraduate programs, and his determination to reorganize the university and to give it a national rather than simply a regional presence.15

  “Love my classes,” Wilder wrote to his mother in the spring of 1930 soon after he began teaching at the university, “and they’re sprouting that affectionate contempt for me which is the attitude I ask of my classes.” He lectured on a range of topics, including Don Quixote and quixotisms, and the novel as a genre, working for hours each week to “frantically assemble stuff for four 50-minutes lectures and more.” But he was thriving, as well as getting to know “droves of undergraduates” and, he hoped, winning their confidence.16 He worked hard to prepare for his classes. “I worry in my sleep,” he wrote to his mother, “and wake up wondering if I have enough notes to pull me through those eternal fifty-minutes.”17 In mid-February, when he lectured on five consecutive Tuesday evenings in the university’s “downtown college” at the Art Institute of Chicago, his topic—“Sophocles for English Readers”—was advertised on billboards all over the city. His classes there, like those he taught on the university campus, were jam-packed, standing room only, with people on waiting lists: “Professor” Wilder was a star.

  Back in New Haven, as the national economy worsened, Dwight Dana cautioned him about spending too much money and urged him to conserve. Wilder was spending most of his money on other people, however, especially his family. Isabella wrote to Dwight Dana in May 1931 to express her gratitude for his help to Thornton. “How fortunate for him that you can take these cares off him, insurance, contracts & these dreadful tax-problems. He is not very practical and his Father’s mental state now is such that we can get no help there. In fact I carefully keep all questions from him as they only worry & excite him.”18

  Among other philanthropies, Wilder was financing an Oberlin College education for Tom Harris, a New Haven boy, the son of a blue-collar family. Harris had attended the Lawrenceville School, and Wilder paid his expenses all the way through Oberlin. “Your bank account is getting rather low,” Dana cautioned, “and the prospects of its being replenished in the near future are not so very bright, and I am, therefore, writing to suggest that you go as slow as you can on expenditures, certainly until the new book comes out and until we see how it goes.” 19 Dana recognized, he said, that Wilder was “under such heavy personal expenses in connection with keeping your family going and in other directions,” but he warned Wilder again in October, “Your income is so irregular that it is really impossible to say whether you are living beyond your income or not, but I should be afraid that this coming year that would certainly be the case unless you can hold your expenses down to a considerably lower point than last year and also unless your income from lectures and from the book of plays is very considerable.”20

  Wilder responded promptly: “I have turned over an entirely new leaf,” he wrote. “I have gone in for Voluntary Poverty. Voluntary Poverty is practically indistinguishable from Involuntary Poverty, but the hair’s breadth of distinction makes a world of difference. . . . I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t take taxis. And so on.”21

  Despite his “Voluntary Poverty,” however, he wanted to contribute to various charities in New Haven and Chicago. He was also giving to a “secret Trustee’s Fund” at the university to help students facing Depression-era hardship—“students who are fainting in the corridors for lack of food and doing unheard of feats to get an education.” He wrote that it “makes education wonderful to see the price these students pay, and it makes Yale look cold, conventional, constipated and unlighted.”22

  WILDER THE successful novelist was also, simultaneously and fervently, Wilder the aspiring dramatist. During the thirties his escalating renown as the novelist, the lecturer, the professor, and the linguist helped open the doors of Broadway and Hollywood to Wilder the playwright. Since his teenage years he had been learning his craft as a playwright, immersing himself in dramatic literature—seeing every possible play; analyzing the texts, the acting, the directing, the staging; writing his short plays; and then leaping into ambitious experiments with the full-length drama. Living with self-rebuke in the aftermath of the failed production of The Trumpet Shall Sound, he filled notebooks with names of three- and four-act plays, and ideas and scenes for some of them. Then he reverted to the discipline of the one-act play, first as the laboratory for his experiments in drama, and then simply because he appreciated the one-act form for itself. On November 5, 1931, Coward-McCann and the Yale University Press published his second volume of plays, The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act—six plays in all.

  It was fitting that Wilder worked on the one-act plays in Germany in 1931 with the volatile, charismatic director Jed Harris as his traveling companion. Their friendship had grown since their paths had crossed briefly on that northbound train in Florida in 1927. There would be a profound intersection of their professional lives in 1937. But in May 1931, Wilder was back in Munich, one of his favorite European cities, when Harris joined him for a few days. They went to the theater and to the opera—Don Giovanni—where they encountered Polly and Gene Tunney. The next day Wilder gathered Harris and the Tunneys and “threw a brilliant lunch at the Bayerischer Hof (the waiters fainted in coils),” he wrote to his family. “I’m very fond of Jed,” Wilder added,

  but if he’d stayed another week I’d have been in a Sanatorium. We had long ten-hour conversations about everything under the sun. He shopped the antiquarians for old furniture. Like Andy [Townson] (in the same hotel) he slept every day until noon, so I continued producing a new one-act play every two days. . . . Anyway I was sorry to see him go.23

  Wilder—too trusting, sometimes naive and gullible—could become too enamored of a friend. Such was the case with the mercurial Harris, who habitually alienated almost everyone who knew him. In the summer of 1933 Sibyl Colefax warned Wilde
r from afar to be cautious about Jed Harris, whose career, like that of many directors, seesawed between success and failure, with Harris’s volatile temperament vacillating accordingly.

  Wilder’s friendship with Jed Harris expanded to include Harris’s mistress, the actress Ruth Gordon, with whom he had a son, Jones Harris, born in 1929. Wilder’s friendship with Gordon would last for the rest of his life, and he would write certain dramatic roles especially for her. From the first Wilder respected her as a remarkably talented actress, thoroughly enjoyed her company, and soon began calling her the “finest girl in the world” as well as the “drollest and most original.”24

  TOWARD THE end of the 1920s, Wilder recalled in later years, he “began to lose pleasure in going to the theatre.” He “ceased to believe in the stories” he saw presented there.25 At the same time, he reflected, “the conviction was growing in me that the theatre was the greatest of all the arts. I felt that something had gone wrong with it in my time and that it was fulfilling only a small part of its potentialities.”26 After the great success of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder could now command attention for almost anything he wanted to publish, and, as already noted, in 1931 Coward-McCann brought out The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. At the same time Yale University Press issued a special signed limited edition of the plays. These one-acts were widely noticed and, for the most part, positively received. Right away some of them were produced, chiefly by amateur theater groups, with Samuel French, Inc., handling the dramatic rights.27

  Wilder explained his intentions years later: “I began writing one-act plays that tried to capture not verisimilitude but reality,” he wrote. “In The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden four kitchen chairs represent an automobile and a family travels seventy miles in twenty minutes. In Pullman Car Hiawatha some more plain chairs serve as berths and we hear the very vital statistic of the towns and fields that passengers are traversing; we even hear the planets over their heads.”28 Well ahead of Our Town, Wilder was experimenting with theatrical time and space—departing from linear time; minimizing settings and props; using a stage manager to narrate and interpret events.