Wilder’s first three novels were set in exotic eras and foreign places, and his fourth was set smack in the middle of the American heartland. Yet time and setting are almost irrelevant in Wilder’s early fiction. Literal setting and time seem incidental—ornamentation rather than scaffolding. He was experimenting with setting in fiction just as he experimented with sets onstage. The “sets” of his novels are draped in richer detail than the minimalist sets for his plays, but in Wilder’s fiction, as in his drama, character and theme dominate.53 The human personality and behavior, human conflicts, the plight of the human condition form the crux of his work; these universals defy time and place. The personalities, questions, and issues in each of his first four novels could be readily transported to other times and places. People can be lost, dysfunctional, suffering, struggling with how to live in any city, town, village, or countryside—anywhere, anytime. People can die unexpectedly and catastrophically anywhere, anytime. People can test the boundaries of society; can be outcast, alienated, isolated; can love and not be loved in return anywhere, anytime.
It was evidence of Wilder’s cosmic mind and vision that he could work on Heaven’s My Destination and simultaneously read Nietzsche (“Nietzsche has been my great discovery of this last year, my meat and drink,” he said) and translate from German into English a contemporary comedy first produced in Vienna, and from French a contemporary play based on a Roman legend dating to 509 BC.54 Fascinated with world literature and languages, he was eager to try his hand at translating and adapting the work of others. Two opportunities came his way in 1932: The producer Gilbert Miller asked him to translate Otto Indig’s Die Braut von Torozko—“Not literature,” Wilder said, “but a delightful play.”55 Not satisfied with Wilder’s first version of The Bride of Torozko, Miller asked him to “alter it.” Miller was still not happy with Wilder’s second draft, and then had to shelve the play because of the Depression economy. A year and a half later, when Miller resurrected the project, Wilder, busy with other projects, released him from all obligations. Miller turned to another writer, whose efforts resulted in the script produced on Broadway in 1934, starring Jean Arthur, Sam Jaffe, and the young Van Heflin. The play closed after twelve performances.
Wilder’s other opportunity was extended by Katharine Cornell, fresh from her triumphant role in 1931 as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. Cornell and her husband, producer and director Guthrie McClintic, invited Wilder, an unproven young playwright, to translate André Obey’s Le viol de Lucrèce for a Broadway production to star Cornell. Obey, whose play opened in Paris in 1931, was one of a procession of artists to tell the story of the Roman matron, Lucrece, who was raped by Tarquin, the Roman prince. “I should be proud to translate Le Viol,” Wilder wrote to Cornell in April 1932. “It is an eloquent play in itself and the freedom with which it overrides the conventions of the stage should make it very fruitful and additionally important.”56 Wilder had by then signed with a dramatic agent, Harold Freedman of Brandt & Brandt, and could expect to earn $180 a week if the play succeeded. As “only a translator,” he felt “very remote” from the production, however—but he said he was “a great admirer of Kath. Cornell, the woman,” and “happy” that the project would bring them together often.57
Cornell and company took the play to Cleveland, Ohio, in November 1932, and it opened on Broadway on December 20, 1932, with McClintic directing. The production was not a success but Cornell was praised for her portrayal of Lucrece. Wilder received generally favorable reviews for his translation, although there were those who believed he had not done justice to Obey’s text. The play led to a breakthrough for Cornell, however, for the experience encouraged her to try Shakespeare. The director Arthur Hopkins told Cornell that Lucrece was her “most successful failure.”58 Wilder’s translation was published as Lucrece in 1933—and, for better or worse, his interest in theater was now a matter of wide public visibility.
WILDER WAS putting down deeper roots in the thirties—not planting himself in one place, much as he loved Chicago, but grounding himself in fulfilling friendships and challenging work: He wrote to Sibyl Colefax about his appreciation for the “brightness and courage” of his students. He admired the Hutchinses and the “brave journey of the University of Chicago.” He was pleased, he said, with “the humor and beauty of my new novel that I’ve quietly begun again now that [the] term is over.”59 But his busy social life was taking its toll. He wrote to Ruth Gordon, “I teach worse and worse, instead of better. I talk awful rubbish. My days are dissipated amid so many types of activity that I cease to be anybody. Nothing I do has been sufficiently prepared. I go through life postponing thinking.”
Yet he had to teach. “I need the money for the running of Deepwood Drive,” he wrote in confidence to Gordon. “I get $4,000 for a half-year, which is pretty good, considering that I can live here pretty cheaply myself. To be sure, if I settled down to write consistently I could make a good deal more than that, but I hate to feel any necessity-money aspect to my writing.”60
He wrote to Sibyl, “Teaching and lectures make just enough to support me and my (very real) dependent household. If I gave over Salary, it might ever so possibly happen that my pen on paper might be influenced by the needs of Deepwood Drive; and then something disastrous might happen. I’m not a martyr in supporting the family, since I greatly enjoy the Teaching, but surely if Heaven’s My Destination does bring in something considerable I shall break away from both these activities and devote myself to writing seriously.”61
22
“HOME”
I cried buckets of good old-fashioned unexamined tears!—not because it was sad (those tears are all shed years ago) but because it was about a long lost now archaeological phenomenon, the home.
—THORNTON WILDER TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN,
after seeing Little Women, December 11, 1933
The United States and Europe (1930s)
Wilder loved movies, and he saw Katharine Hepburn in George Cukor’s Little Women two and a half times. He wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan that it made him weep, not because he was grieving for the past, but because the movie was about a “long lost now archaeological phenomenon, the home.” His choice of words was both resonant and prophetic, foreshadowing lines he would write five years later about Our Town, and echoing lines he had written more than a decade earlier about Rome. As noted, during his 1920–21 sojourn at the American Academy in Rome, where he was part of an archaeological group, Wilder had written to his family about “a newly discovered tomb of about the first century,” resting under a busy Roman street. There he had “peered at faded paintings of a family called Aurelius, symbolic representations of their dear children and parents borne graciously away by winged spirits.” Indelible in his memory was this vivid image of the strata of human history—“the street-cars of today” rushing over “the loves and pieties and habits of the first-century Aurelius family.” He recognized that “two thousand years from now” there would be similar “humanizing” efforts to “recover” and understand the family life of his own century.1
During the thirties Wilder was exploring the archaeology of home and family in his personal life as well as his creative work, and those excavations were yielding pathways to future writing, most remarkably Our Town, which would find its home on Broadway in 1938, and for years afterward in the hearts of a global audience. He drew tight connections between his encounters with archaeology in Rome in 1920–21 and the methods he used in writing Our Town. In a preface to the play he wrote that “the archeologist’s and the social historian’s points of view began to mingle with another unremitting preoccupation which is the central theme of the play: What is the relation between the countless ‘unimportant’ details of our daily life, on the one hand, and the great perspectives of time, social history, and current religious ideas, on the other?”2
He had already woven this theme into some of his one-act plays in The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. In 1933, en
tranced by the film version of Little Women, Wilder revisited some of the seminal details of his own family life. He felt, he said, “as though I were the last person left on earth who had ever blown on and wiped a lamp chimney; who had ever sat on the floor with brothers and sisters in heaps and listened to reading aloud; who had ever stood in a fever of expectation waiting for a parent to exclaim about the beauty and rightness of a Christmas present one had spent hours in devising.”3 He and his siblings had lived through hard times. They still looked out for one another, called one another affectionately by some of the old childhood nicknames—Charlotte was Sharlie or Charlie or Carla; Amos was sometimes Amy or ’Mus; Thornton was Thornt. or Thorny; Isabel was Isabello or Isabellina; their lingering favorites were Isaberry, Charlieberry, Thornyberry.
But Wilder’s response to Little Women was laced with more than nostalgia, and his thoughts went beyond possible fodder for his literary work. In those years following his first great literary and financial success, he turned homeward. He had built his family the comfortable house on Deepwood Drive, had set up bank accounts to provide whatever they might need. After many years of living in rented quarters around the world, Isabella could have her own permanent hearth and kitchen, a baby grand in her own living room, and her own garden where perennials could thrive. At last there was a house to which Isabel would not be embarrassed to invite her friends, where Thornton could have his own study, and where there was room for the entire family to gather for holidays.
Their father had suffered a stroke in 1928, and during the early 1930s, as his health broke down and he needed nursing care, he often lived away from Deepwood Drive, in private nursing homes in Connecticut or in the Berkshires or in Florida. He was now totally dependent for his financial support on his second son—the impractical boy who had grown up with his head in the clouds. Circumstances had enabled and then required Thornton to step into the paternal role his father, in the end, had been unable to play. The quintessential nineteenth-century patriarch, Dr. Wilder had managed despite the odds to educate his five children, and to see to it that his wife and children traveled the world, but he could never assuage their financial anxiety—largely because his own was so intense. His lifelong efforts to exert control over their individual dreams and actions grew out of his love for them, as misguided and oppressive as it could often be.
When he was a young man Amos Parker Wilder, abetted by his demanding mother, had set a remarkably high bar of expectations for the life he would live, but he had disappointed his most rigorous critic—himself. It was no small accomplishment to run a newspaper; to serve as a consular officer; to engage audiences as a popular orator; to work as an effective advocate and fund-raiser for Yale-in-China; and, most of all, to father five uniquely talented children who were, without exception, honorable people. But he felt himself a failure because he could never earn the money or the accolades he had expected.
In the last eight years of his life Dr. Wilder gradually succumbed to the inexorable hardship of years of chronic illness. On April 4, 1933, he updated his will. In September he suffered another stroke—emerging from two hours of spasms paralyzed on his left side. A nurse was assigned to care for him at home and to give him regular morphine injections. Dr. Wilder wrote to a friend in June 1935 that he was in “very broken health.”4 Still innately proud and stubborn in his sixties, Dr. Wilder saw his physical vigor ebbing away, and with it, his capacity to earn money and provide for his wife and Isabel and Janet, who even as adults were still dependent on their father and Thornton for financial support. There must have been a bittersweet mix of regret, resentment, and gratitude as Thornton supplanted him at the helm of the family.
Yet once Thornton had arranged for the construction and occupation of the house, and paid for it, and helped his family settle into it, he simply had to leave. He was part vagabond and gypsy, but something more than restlessness and the thirst for adventure regularly took him away from his family. He couldn’t work at home in the new study in the new house surrounded by his family, much as he loved them. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t carve out the solitude his writing required. His life at the University of Chicago provided a part-time refuge. He embraced that city and its richly diverse culture, and the university served him as a much bigger Lawrenceville by providing the familiar daily structure he needed. He could also have his solitude and privacy there, and as much company as he could stand. His lecture tours kept him on the road, and he firmly established the pattern he would follow for the rest of his life: He traveled for months each year in the United States or abroad, writing on the go, settling down for a few weeks here or there, hibernating, retreating into his work, then pulling himself out of it because he needed to earn more money, or to enjoy some human companionship, or to avoid writing during those periods when it seemed a struggle something akin to wrestling alligators.
As always, letters tethered him to his family, and as his schedule permitted or demanded, he would go home to Deepwood Drive, stay for a while, and then shove off again. From Munich, Germany, in May 1931, he asked Isabel to help their mother understand his absence:
Explain to Ma that I go to Munich to write some long things—not because of any éloignement [emotional distance] from Deepwood Drive or its occupants (on the contrary I work to get them over [here]) but because the tepid sociabilities of an American city like New Haven tinged with envy, detraction, etc. make work impossible. Chicago I could stand except that the school routine altho’ exciting as ever is too complicated for writing at the same time. There is no halfway solution.5
Wilder was still working hard on Heaven’s My Destination. “Am 15,000 words already advanced in the novel,” he wrote to Les Glenn on July 15, 1932.
If it does not allude to some of your most cherished and secret hopes and problems I shall go into a decline. It’s our old friend The Arkansas-Texas picaresque. From Baptist Fundamentalism to Gross-stadt tolerance in three years: or How Rollo learned to be a Babbitt.
Only my ending is not to sophistication, but to troubled wisdom. You’ll see. All about the Depression.
Funny, vulgar, heartbreaking—and a big socio-historical document.6
In November 1933 Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer, “I think my new novel—half-done—will give you much pleasure. Comic, tenderly comic. It’s high time I raised a smile. Aren’t you in the mood to read a good thoughtful humorous novel?—well, I’m trying to give one to the republic.”7
THE SEVEN Wilders were a remarkably close family, their relationships tightly interlaced despite—or even because of—years of geographical separation and the separate pathways the siblings traversed as adults. They had learned early how to rally around one another through letters, faithfully dispatched across oceans and continents. One’s joy or achievement elated them all; one’s illness or sorrow brought them all grief. In the 1930s, as the country and the world transformed around them, the members of the Wilder family were experiencing profound changes themselves, some perceptible, some too subtle for comprehension at the time. In one way or another, however, all five siblings were searching for home. Especially during the thirties, this was a quest for Thornton, Amos, Charlotte, Isabel, and Janet, all of them working hard to establish vocation, relationships, home bases. Each and every member of the clan was caught up from time to time in living through high drama—individual dramas that fed the poetry, the fiction, and the plays that four of them would write.
In the haven of her own house Isabella gathered her five adult children around her as often as she could, encouraging them; delighting them and their friends with her company, her charm, and her cooking; reading and helping to edit the manuscripts her literary offspring were creating—Amos’s poems and scholarly articles; Thornton’s new novel and his experimental plays; Isabel’s novels, three of them published in the 1930s; and Charlotte’s prose and poetry: two books of poems published, one in 1936 and one in 1939. Isabella read and corrected galleys for Thornton and Isabel, and still wrote poems of her own. She
looked after her husband as best she could, and when she couldn’t provide the care he needed, or when she was exhausted by him, she and her husband’s doctors found someone who could take care of him elsewhere—usually in a nursing home or a private home maintained by a practical nurse.8
Realizing that his mental powers were ebbing as his body was giving out, Dr. Wilder wanted to make a book of his own. In 1930 he began pulling together newspaper columns, editorials, and speeches, soliciting the help and advice of Charlotte, the most experienced editor in the family. She set her father to work pasting his columns and the text of his speeches onto pages that could be inserted in notebooks, and arranged according to topics and themes. She wrote an encouraging letter commending his “gift for striking & witty expression” but suggesting that some “careful cutting” would be in order to reach the “modern reader.” Then, during the summer, when she was free of teaching, they could confer about which to eliminate and how to arrange the pieces.9 The book did not materialize, but Dr. Wilder appreciated his daughter’s “sensible” approach to the matter, and devoted much of his time to arranging and rearranging those pieces of the past.10
Like her siblings, Charlotte was still examining her relationship with her father, trying to make sense of it, and to come to terms with it. While Dr. Wilder’s sons had suffered in many ways from his intense intervention in their lives, they had at least managed to establish their independence, and to achieve a truce, if not a semblance of harmony, in their relationship with their father. But his relationships with Charlotte and Isabel had been especially damaging. (For one thing, they had uncomfortable memories of being asked by their father, bedridden during one illness, to come to his bedside and brush his hair to help him relax.) Both daughters attributed to their father’s strict, moralistic upbringing their eventual sexual repression and their consequent problems in intimate relationships. While Charlotte tried in the early thirties to make peace with her father, Isabel’s anger toward him would last for many years.
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