In talks and letters Thornton, Amos, Isabel, and Charlotte shared their perspectives on their father’s enduring influence, and Charlotte sought at least once to broach the matter in a letter to Dr. Wilder that could have been written by any of her siblings as well. “I had the feeling when I was last home, that you felt me very aloof and unknown to you,” Charlotte wrote to him:
I think that you brood over us too much . . . it does not make for a free and natural relationship. The talks we have trouble me, and make me confused. You speak with such anxiety, and put such apprehensions into my head. I know, I think, something of the nature of the disasters life may bring: but I believe strongly—(and if I am to have individuality—I must have a set of beliefs determined by my experience) that it is not helpful to dwell on fears; that it would unfit me for being aggressive and positive in useful ways. . . . You are troubled if I differ from you in any belief. I cannot agree with that. As I see human nature, in my many acquaintances, the beautiful relationships have come when each leaves the other free to choose; anything else is forcing, and one cannot dominate another, or suppose that his truth is all truth.11
While the older Wilder children struggled with their history of paternal domination, Janet, the youngest, and the least susceptible to her father’s influence, had made her own choices freely. Amos, the eldest, buried himself in his work. Thornton’s role in the family was circumscribed by his new duties as the breadwinner, the provider, and frequently, for the six other family members, the counselor and comforter—since he had by default displaced his father and his older brother as the head of the household. In particular he nurtured his three sisters, paying for Janet’s college education and encouraging Isabel and Charlotte in their writing. Isabel’s fiction and Charlotte’s poetry would be published by Coward-McCann, which had published Thornton’s plays, and there may have been a coattail effect in the decision to publish the Wilder sisters. But more than anything else, unlike their father, Thornton urged his sisters simply to be themselves.
Without neglecting his family responsibilities, Thornton tore himself away from the Deepwood Drive home and the family to secure the energy and solitude essential to the writer—not a purely selfish act but a practical necessity now that he had to earn the wherewithal to keep the home fires burning for the rest of them. Most of all, however, he had to get away from home in order to be himself.
WHEREVER HE was, Wilder was deeply connected, emotionally and practically, to the family. In copious letters to them, as richly detailed as diaries or journals, he recorded events as well as his work in progress, his reading, his thoughts, his advice and counsel. He worried about his aging father, who still wanted all his brood around him, preferably doing his bidding—and who wanted in vain to be, once and for all, the focus of his wife’s love and care.
Wilder gladly sent his youngest sibling to college, paying her bills, encouraging her passion for science, enjoying her company whenever possible. Of all of the Wilders, Janet had the clearest, most precise, and most practical vision of what she expected from life: She wanted to be a scientist, and credited the Montessori school she had attended in Berkeley for imprinting in her “a love of animals and respect for nature” that led to her vocation. Direct and matter-of-fact, Janet seemed at home wherever she was—perhaps because from the time she was six months old her family had moved her from one country to another, first from Berkeley in the United States, where she was born, to China, and then from Shanghai to Paris, and on to Italy and England.12
As she looked back on her childhood, Janet recalled her parents’ contrasting disciplinary techniques—Papa’s delivery of an occasional spanking preceded and followed by long, boring lectures; and Janet’s preference, Mother’s “sound and proper” and instinctive way, reacting exactly like a mare to a foal: “Offense—followed by immediate punishment.”13 She remembered her sex education—or lack of it. “No information whatsoever from my parents; in fact as you will hear, negative instruction.” Most of what she learned about birth she gleaned from watching the family’s cat, named Billy Sunday, deliver a litter of kittens on her bed. At movies with her mother and Isabel, Janet was ordered to shut her eyes when the “film got to the kissing part.” Once her father took her to a temperance lecture at a church on the New Haven green, and when the lecturer turned to the effects of alcohol on human reproduction, “Father took me firmly by the hand and we left.”14 Looking back in later years, Janet reflected that she never knew her father at his best, but a “cloud seemed to descend on the house when he came in.” She believed, on the other hand, that their mother was “the sun and moon to Thornie.”15
Although Janet clearly recalled the “acute poverty” of her family’s life in New Haven, she loved her friends and her school life there, so much so that she “cried and cried” at the news that her mother was taking her and Isabel to live in England in 1921, when she was eleven. She was saved “from total misery” because her mother enrolled her in a riding school. Janet had not been a robustly healthy child, and when Isabella heard that horseback riding could help children overcome certain health problems, she arranged for Janet to take riding lessons with “an ancient and honorable old retired cavalry officer with a few riding horses stabled nearby,” and then at the Oxford Riding School.16 In her first lesson Janet fell in love with horses, and this passion stayed with her all her life.
Homeschooled in London, Janet entered public school in New Haven when she and her mother returned from England in August of 1928. After her high school graduation she enrolled in Mount Holyoke, as Charlotte had done, was elected chairman of the college judicial board in her senior year, and received her degree in zoology in 1933, magna cum laude. Thornton wrote proudly of his sister, “Janet graduated Phi B K and magna cum laude. The only Wilder to make the big grades.”17 She remained at Mount Holyoke to earn a master of science in 1935, and then went to the University of Chicago to work on her Ph.D.
Her mother must have been horrified to read Janet’s description of her money-saving “mode of existence,” preparing meals in her Ph.D. adviser’s laboratory at the University of Chicago. She made her lunch in the lab, she reported, where the hens used for research laid dozens of eggs. “So I use those,” she wrote. “Twice a week one pound of the best beef liver arrives to feed the fish and worms; they consume part of it, the rest gets thrown out. I think I’ll try frying some tomorrow in my cute little frying pan. The students have done so before and not died.”18
She survived, returning to Mount Holyoke in 1939, doctoral degree in hand, to teach zoology. Janet was not without her own record as a writer: At least one of her poems was published in the Mount Holyoke literary magazine during her undergraduate years. From 1936 to 1940, while her brothers and sisters were publishing poetry, novels, plays, and essays, she published scholarly papers drawn from her graduate studies of insect life. The capstone of her work as a writer would come in 1990, however, with the publication of a book titled Jeffy’s Journal: Raising a Morgan Horse, described as “The touching story of a woman and the Morgan Horse she raised from birth.” Dedicated to her mother, the book contains a series of monthly articles Janet published in the Morgan Horse, beginning in December 1952 and continuing through April 1956. Janet recognized that as the last-born child, thirteen years younger than her brother Thornton, she probably had “no early influence” in his life—but she felt she came “out strong” in his references to horses in two of his later works, The Matchmaker and The Eighth Day.19
DURING THE 1930s Isabel was the only Wilder sibling living full-time in the new house on Deepwood Drive, but she yearned for a home all her own. She was at work on a new novel in the late 1920s, “A thoroughly American story this time. I have the first thousand words,—began yesterday and I am entirely thrilled and wrapt in anticipation. Mother too is pleased and thinks it will beat the other all to pieces.” But her social life kept her busy—perhaps too busy, Charlotte warned her. Isabel published three novels during the 1930s: Mother and Four (1933), He
art Be Still (1934), and Let Winter Go (1937). Her first, Mother and Four, tells the story of a mother with four children struggling to survive after her husband dies. People who knew the Wilders perceived strong autobiographical threads in the novel, which according to Amos “had a modest success.”20
While her novels could not be classified as literary fiction, they were a cut above the usual popular fiction. Isabel had her own lecturing contract with Lee Keedick, traveling about in 1933 and 1934 to lecture on the reading and writing of novels, and on “The Modern Stage in America and Europe.” But as much as she wanted to write, she found it awfully hard, frustrating work, and more than anything else, she wanted that home of her own, complete with husband and children. Isabel’s desires are painfully evident in the second and third novels—wherein love comes belatedly to heroines who struggle for independence from home, and from loving but distant fathers. Disheartened by her literary life and her love life, she was increasingly eager to get married. “I look at every man, wondering, thinking, hoping,—is it he? I must get over caring and accept my status. Thornton says one can close one’s mind to the whole subject, and says one must forget one wants to marry and if it is to be, it will happen. I’m trying and that’s no good!”21
Disappointed by the modest success and benign neglect of her published novels, Isabel began to focus more and more on her brother’s career. She enjoyed helping her brother as part-time secretary and agent, and eventual buffer and protector of his privacy and his writing time. Thornton appreciated and respected his sister’s work on his behalf, and supported her financially in return. Gradually Thornton and Isabel moved into a symbiotic relationship that would last Thornton’s lifetime: He traveled, wrote, taught, lectured, and earned the family income. She helped their mother run the house and, after Isabella’s death, ran it herself; assisted with many of Thornton’s business affairs, including his correspondence and some of his contracts; tended to family matters so he could be free to do his work; and often served as his hostess and traveling companion.
But Charlotte grew concerned about the path Isabel was treading. “I love your writing,” she wrote to Isabel, and then expressed some astute observations about the evolving career choices of two aspiring writers who were sisters of a world-famous writer:
In a way you are so identified, in emotion and energies, with Thornton’s career, that you drain off the intensity that would otherwise go into [your writing]; and that is completely valid provided there is nothing in you that is being frustrated by it. I have a different orientation. I love his work, too, but I could not consider it so much mine that I would throw over mine, to absorb myself in it. . . . Somehow each person makes his own pattern, by some inner necessity, and then gives himself to it.22
As Isabel began to put down deeper and deeper roots in the Hamden home, surrounded by her brother’s work, Charlotte, the middle child, took fiercely independent steps to make a new home for herself. Reluctant to be financially dependent on anyone, even a devoted older brother who sincerely wanted to help her, Charlotte struck out on her own in 1933, resigning her stable job as a Smith College professor to move to New York and have a go at writing full-time. During the years of teaching she had written poems and essays that were published in such journals as the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, Commonweal, the Nation, and Poetry. She explained to her mother in a letter in March 1933 that for the good of her creative life, she had to stop teaching. She had saved enough money to support herself for at least a year, she wrote, and she would not be a burden to her family. “I do hope you see it my way,” she wrote. “I dreaded very much giving you this anxiety. And am so happy, and find so many people think I am not at all a silly ass to do it.”23
Charlotte broke the news to Dr. Wilder only after the deed was done. “Dear Father,” she wrote in 1933 from Yaddo, the writers’ and artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, knowing her father would be shocked by her decision. “I have resigned from Smith, after five years there. I want to live in another world from that of a woman’s college; and want to write so much more than to teach, that I decided the choice must be made now. . . . With good health, so far, and a job to fall back on, I have as reasonable a chance as I can hope for, to do what I most want to do.24
Dr. Wilder was disappointed, but still proud of Charlotte even though she would not become the college president he had hoped for. As for her writing, he was pleased that Poetry had published her poem “Of Persons, Not Alive” in the March 1932 issue, but he was perplexed. He told her the poem was “too cryptic for Dad,” but he knew it had to be good because it was published in a “distinguished magazine.”25
Thornton wrote Charlotte to congratulate her on her residency at Yaddo, where she worked on a book of poetry, and he offered his financial help. “If your New York life becomes expensive, do not hesitate to call on me,” he told her. “Do not crowd your soul by living on sandwiches and sausages.” He went on to give her a family update: “Amos has finished his thesis, and is far cheerfuller. Isabel has made much progress in her novel and is cheerfuller. Mama is beginning to be aware of home-economic-security and is cheerfuller. I am full of new wonderful thoughts and am cheerfuller, so your new well being should sustain ours—less Wilder nail-biting, fears, and scruples and distrusts.”26
Although Charlotte thought she had saved enough money to support herself for at least a year in New York, that did not prove to be the case. Too proud to take money from her mother or her brothers unless she could earn it, she would often live in poverty in the years ahead, ultimately sacrificing her mental and physical health to the unremitting struggles of the writing life. Unlike Isabel, Charlotte did not dream about a conventional marriage and family. In her midtwenties she had at least one serious male suitor, and saved at least one of his romantic letters to the end of her life.27 By her late twenties she had been romantically if not sexually involved with at least one woman, and perhaps others. “No room except to say every thought of you is held close in my memory—that the blessing of your love is around me all the time,” Charlotte wrote to one woman. “Come & be kissed,” she answered. “My love always.” Charlotte wrote again, “Bye, sweetheart. . . . Please know deeply that I love you & am close to you always.”28
Like Thornton, Amos, and Isabel, Charlotte had innate problems with intimacy. She faced them head-on: “The thing I’m learning now is that it would be well if, as children, one were trained in the technique of the ‘shock and delicacy’ of intimacy,” she wrote to Amos in 1932. It was not easy, she reflected, to know how to be close to another person—“at once, self-responsible, and subtly dependent”—if you had grown up with suppressed emotions.29 In April 1932 Charlotte wrote a frank and prophetic account of her emotional life: “All my life I have stated my experience to myself . . . often in words. My experience has passed through my imagination and mind; my emotion I have checked at every turn. . . . A Narcissism forced on me. I did not take into my heart any gestures of tenderness given me. . . . Yes rarely, in any gestures of love, did I have a gush of feeling welling in my heart.” She remembered her first kiss from a woman. She was nineteen at the time, and the kiss, she wrote, “burned on my lips for a day.” Yet there was little emotion. “Let me state,” she wrote, “I have never had a homosexual consummation, nor come near it. I was too frigid to even experience the sensation of the kiss often.”30 She went on to write, with ironic prescience,
I have the belief that all my suffering is ahead of me: that my inhibiting experience does not make me seem frustrated, because I have been expressing constantly, in social relationships (never feeling the happiness in sheer glow), and in writing. . . . I have intimations of what I must get through . . . or might, that approximate a sudden insight into insanity. . . . I would say I know no one who has been more alone from birth. And who now, at thirty-three, am for the first time knowing I have someone, in two women friends. My own worst enemy heretofore. I know no one (except Amos) who had no mother, no father, no lover.31
&n
bsp; Through no fault of her own Charlotte had borne the brunt of the serial family separations, often the one child detached from the family, on her own. By choice and circumstance she repeated the pattern as an adult—profoundly bereft and alone.
Amos, the eldest, was scholarly, solitary, and often lonely. He had thought, studied, and prayed his way to some clarity of vision about the life he wanted to lead. He was an effective teacher at Hamilton College, where he served on the faculty from 1930 to 1933, so much so that the college awarded him an honorary doctorate of divinity in June 1933, the same year he received his Ph.D. at Yale. He moved on from Hamilton to become the Norris Professor of New Testament at Andover Newton Theological Seminary from 1933 until 1943. In 1929 Yale University Press had published Arachne: Poems, a collection of his poetry to follow Battle-Retrospect and Other Poems in 1923. Amos turned to biblical scholarship as he wrote his dissertation—“The Relation of Eschatology to Ethics in the Teaching of Jesus as Represented in Matthew.”
Endowed with the Wilder/Niven drive, but with his physical energy still compromised by his World War I experiences, Amos often pushed himself too hard, studying, teaching, writing, working prodigiously. As early as 1930 Dr. Wilder wrote to Charlotte to ask her to reach out to her brother, who was suffering, the father said, from “nervous exhaustion.”32 Teaching was arduous work, Amos found—as did Thornton and Charlotte, all of them college professors in the thirties. “I am very sorry for your overtired state,” Charlotte wrote sympathetically to Amos. “I know well what meeting classes is. I have compared them, in my mind, to restive horses.”33
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