“All that memorization!” Wilder wrote to his mother. “On the train, in hotel rooms, etc. Jed only rehearsed me the last afternoon. The other days I worked with the Stage Manager. The day before the opening I was in despair. I thought I’d disgrace everybody, but ‘opening night’ was all right. And it’s getting better every time.”91 Still he found that memorizing lines—even lines he had written himself—was “like walking a tight-rope of danger.”92
What a year it had been. After his long apprenticeship in the theater, he had in the space of a single year achieved two successes on Broadway, and another Pulitzer Prize. Our Town had been runner-up to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men for the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best American play of the 1937–38 season.93 The Merchant of Yonkers awaited its Broadway opening. He had stepped onstage into the role he had written for others to play, and survived without too much embarrassment. He wrote to Woollcott, “Anyway: what’s life if it isn’t risk, venture, taxes on the will-power, diversity, and fun?”94
27
“PERSEVERANCE”
Working perseverance: These two years of taking up subjects and dropping them, of desultory reading as an evasion from writing, of mixed activities have undermined what little collection-to-work I used to have.
—THORNTON WILDER,
journal entry 36, November 1, 1940
The United States and Europe (1938–1940)
Brought up to be a citizen of the world, Wilder was increasingly disturbed in 1938 by what he called the “new Ugliness abroad among the Children of Men who hate one another.”1 Sadly Wilder read in the newspapers about “Freud, 82, standing by calming his family while the [Nazi] Troopers ransacked his house.”2 What would become of the Freuds? What would happen to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas if they stayed in France in wartime, and how would Sibyl Colefax fare in England? There were countless other friends and acquaintances who lived in Europe—and others, such as Max and Helene Thimig Reinhardt, who had already taken refuge in the United States. President Roosevelt was struggling with Congress for authority to strengthen U.S. Army and Navy forces. Germany had taken over Wilder’s beloved Austria. Maps were being fractured and reconfigured: Part of Czechoslovakia was ceded to Germany; Mussolini annexed Libya as part of Italy; Hungary wrested Slovakia from Czechoslovakia; and so it went.
Amid all the commotion in 1938, Wilder’s personal and professional worlds seemed, at least temporarily, to be stable, harmonious, and full of promise. He had successfully translated and slightly adapted A Doll’s House into a fresh English version of the play, which was promoted as a new acting edition.3 Heartened by the Broadway success of Our Town, he was still waiting confidently for Max Reinhardt to turn his attention to a production of The Merchant of Yonkers, the new play Wilder described as “a broad farce with social implications,” in a letter to Albert Einstein, who had written expressing his admiration for Our Town.4
The Merchant of Yonkers is an amalgam of stories and scenes from Johann Nestroy (who borrowed from English playwright John Oxenford’s 1835 comedy, A Day Well Spent) and a passage from act 2, scene 5 of Molière’s satirical L’Avare (The Miser, 1688), mingled with Wilder’s long fascination with farce and a sampling of ideas about the psychology of money that Wilder and Gertrude Stein had discussed. These disparate elements coalesced in Wilder’s imagination, and led to his invention of Dolly Levi, one of the strongest, savviest, most exuberant of the long line of remarkable women he created in drama or fiction.
When Wilder sat down for an interview with John Hobart of the San Francisco Chronicle in September 1938, he said, “Everything I have written has been a preparation for writing for the stage—my novels, my two volumes of one-act plays, my adaptations of Obey’s Lucrèce and Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I like to think of all that as an apprenticeship. For the drama, it seems to me, is the most satisfying of all art-forms.”5 His apprenticeship in writing drama actually gave way in 1938 and 1939 to a tough apprenticeship in getting his plays produced. At age forty-one he had achieved the remarkable feat of having two successful plays running simultaneously on Broadway—one translation/adaptation and one highly original drama, both directed by Jed Harris. In the contentious process of mounting Our Town, the Wilder-Harris friendship dissolved, with recriminations on both sides, but out of their bitter conflict the two achieved a stellar success and launched an American classic. Wilder had gladly entrusted his four-act farce to Max Reinhardt, the iconic director he had idolized since he was a teenager. He was convinced that Reinhardt would do his play masterfully. But if Wilder now regarded Harris with too much skepticism, he regarded Reinhardt with too much awe.
IN MID-SEPTEMBER in Hamden, still waiting for Reinhardt, Wilder the playwright and actor was supplanted by Wilder the son and brother. His mother and Janet were in Scotland when Isabel had to be hospitalized in New Haven for “a considerable operation,” and the house and grounds on Deepwood Drive were badly damaged by the great New England hurricane of 1938 that struck Long Island and New England on September 21—the deadliest natural catastrophe to hit Connecticut since the great hurricane of 1815.6 Wilder was playing the Stage Manager in Our Town the night the storm hit. Throughout New England an estimated six hundred to eight hundred people died and more than sixty thousand structures were demolished by the massive storm, which leveled forests and wiped out bridges, telephone service, and electricity. By the end of September, Wilder had dealt as best he could with the storm damage at home. Isabel was recuperating well from her surgery, and he was preparing to meet his mother and Janet at the boat and “break the news” of Isabel’s operation and “the hurricane-torn house and grounds.”7
Soon he was in New York, working full-time with Reinhardt at last on the production of Merchant of Yonkers, set to open in December.8 “Rightly or wrongly I am being leaned upon,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott as his days were crammed full—listening to readings as the play was cast, inspecting stage designs, and polishing the script.9 At first he was thrilled. There were ‘glorious uproarious times going on at the Windsor Theatre,” he reported to Woollcott. “Reinhardt a great great man; his comic invention is dazzling; the actors adore him.”10
Reinhardt and his producer, Herman Shumlin, conferred with Wilder on all major production matters, especially cast and set design. There were “casting agonies,” Wilder confided to Bobsy Goodspeed.11 He lobbied aggressively for Ruth Gordon to play Dolly Levi. Shumlin believed that she was too short, that she “might not satisfy us at the close of the play”—but Wilder knew that “she would be very funny, very brilliant, and carry all before her in the first three acts” because he had seen her “prodigious success” in London in the “low broad farce,” William Wycherley’s Restoration comedy The Country Wife. Wilder persuaded Shumlin, but when Gordon was approached about the role she did not commit to it. “She said that she liked the play and she knew that she would be good in the part,” Wilder reported. “Perhaps she has some other production in mind; perhaps Jed Harris has prejudiced her against me.”12 He hoped they could persuade her, but in the end she wouldn’t agree because, Wilder said, she distrusted Reinhardt as a director.13
The role ultimately went to Jane Cowl, although Wilder feared—correctly, as it turned out—that she was too much of a “tragedy-queen.”14 At first Cowl declined to take direction from Reinhardt, but soon she progressed, Wilder said, “from offended Bernhardt to adoring slave. Now it’s all ‘Professor, will you please read that line for me,’ and ‘I never worked under a great director before.’ ”15
Wilder was also asked his opinion of noted Russian painter and set designer Nicolai Remisoff’s drawings for the sets—and he objected to them emphatically. “They are very attractive and skillful and full of wonderfully caught accuracy in details of architecture and furniture,” Wilder wrote. “But they are very different from what I imagined for the play” because they were “thick, solid, heavy, actual and over-rich in detail and idea.” He wanted the actors to have “the full attention of
the audience—of painted canvas, none too fresh, just enough for suggestion of time and place.” As Our Town had demonstrated, Wilder the playwright was convinced that the audience should put its imagination to work on the stage settings, and the set should not “weaken” the “vitality of gesture and word.” Wilder asked for and got another designer, Boris Aronson, who designed for the Group Theatre during the thirties.16
Reinhardt had his heart set on music for the play—singing as well as dancing and some instrumental background. Wilder resisted, however, afraid that music would “introduce an operetta unreality into the action,” would “upset the characterization of the persons on stage,” and, most of all, would “upset the American audience’s attitude. Dance and . . . song does not, for them, mix well with real story-telling and real activity,” Wilder explained.17 Reinhardt won out in the end, and Wilder admitted that he liked the Vandergelder Recreational and Burial Society band, the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant waltzes. “But best of all,” he said, “is the veiled pathos and sweetness of 15 lovable people out for a holiday.”18 (Reinhardt’s determination to mix Dolly Levi and company with music and dance was vindicated with the metamorphosis of Merchant into The Matchmaker in 1955 and then into Hello, Dolly! in 1964.)
Wilder quickly found himself involved in every aspect of the production, as well as with ongoing revisions of the script in the mornings, and then sitting in on eight-hour-long rehearsals. “This afternoon the Professor, for the first time, ran through the Fourth Act,” Wilder wrote Reinhardt’s wife at midnight on November 20. “Even in a first reading like that what one saw was dazzling virtuosity in direction. Wonderful! As each character and situation developed all of us involved—including the Professor—would be shaken with laughter.”19 Wilder just hoped that everyone involved in the production, from producer Shumlin to the actor with the smallest role, would realize “the aspects of comic abandon and joy of life in the play.”20 His enthusiasm during rehearsals waned as time approached for the Boston tryout at the Colonial Theatre, beginning December 12. With a little more than two weeks to go until the December 28 opening, Wilder was increasingly distressed by what he saw onstage. Reinhardt’s propensity for pageantry and high drama led to a heavy-handed, sometimes stiff and awkward production. The play was not coming to life as Wilder had envisioned it.
Woollcott spent one evening in Boston “helping the sorely beset Wilder get tight at the Copley-Plaza,” he wrote to their friend Bob Hutchins.21 After Woollcott saw the Boston tryout, he predicted that the production would fail, and he was right. He immediately discerned the major problem: Because Reinhardt inevitably infused the play with his European expectations of farce, there was a disconnect with the American audience and its affinity for broader, less stylized, more slapstick comedy. Jane Cowl as Dolly was ill at ease with farce, and openly nervous, with “near explosions daily.”22 Wilder believed that Percy Waram was miscast as the male lead.
The play opened in New York at the Guild Theatre December 28, 1938, starring Jane Cowl as Dolly Levi, Percy Waram as Horace Vandergelder, and the young Tom Ewell as Cornelius Hackl. Reviews were mixed but largely negative, box-office business was bad, and the play closed in January 1939, after only thirty-nine performances, and probably would have closed sooner but for the subscription tickets already sold to Theatre Guild members.
A FAILED play, like a successful one, is an equation of many parts—script, director, producer, actors, audience, the events that transpire onstage, and those that swirl around offstage and on the larger world stage. Wilder wrote a terse recapitulation to Stein and Toklas: “Suffice to say that that play which had taken from July to December to get produced, was damned by the critics and withdrawn.”23 He wrote to Sibyl Colefax that he hoped Woollcott was right to predict that Merchant would have a revival after a few years “in the American idiom, and declare and justify itself.”24
He had learned “a great deal from the association with Reinhardt,” Wilder wrote to a friend in January 1939, looking to the future. “I shall continue to write more and all I ask is that the public attend them sufficiently to subsidy the expense of my long apprenticeship. I recommend my plays ten years from now.”25 He told the Reinhardts that “no words could express the richness of such a privilege as watching the Professor work on a text of one’s own, and all the stimulation of the personal association as well.”26 Harper & Brothers published the reading edition of the play on April 13, 1939, with Wilder’s dedication to Reinhardt. Later Wilder called Merchant his “Ugly Duckling,” and reiterated his hope that someday it would come into its own.27
He was discouraged and disillusioned in 1939, not only because of the failure of his play and his disappointment in himself—and in his hero, Max Reinhardt—but also because of “an unbroken succession of skullduggeries” perpetrated by Jed Harris. Our Town was still doing “good business,” but was “withdrawn by Jed Harris in a paroxysm of spite against the leading actor and against me,” Wilder said.28 Harris was reportedly unhappy when he discovered that Frank Craven was earning more money each week than he was. Wilder wrote to the Reinhardts about Harris’s action: “Jed Harris, in a fever of self-destruction, has closed the run of ‘Our Town’ in Chicago, although it was doing good business. Yes, something’s the matter with a theatre where both my plays were closed, though they were doing better than $9,000 a week.” He began to think that the American theater needed cheaper seats, and scripts and stages that fostered a “closer relation between the actor and the audience.”29
Enthralled as he had been with Reinhardt’s power and presence, Wilder ultimately had to accept the demise of The Merchant of Yonkers—but he was philosophical. He wrote to the Reinhardts from Mexico City in February 1939, “Lots of things turned out badly about our Merchant of Yonkers, but they fade into nothingness compared to the wonderful value for me of watching the Professor work, and the great privilege of learning to know you two better.”30
Before the final curtain had come down on The Merchant of Yonkers, Wilder decided he would travel to a new place, and throw himself into work on a new project. He decided to pour his creative energy into the play he was calling The Alcestiad: A Tetralogy, including The Alcestis of Euripides, and he would go to Mexico to concentrate on his Greek drama.31 He planned to spend two and a half months there, giving himself up to “Solitude; long walks; and work.” He didn’t want to “emerge into civilization” until he had finished two plays.32
He had sailed from New York January 20, but quickly discovered that while Mexico was beautiful and fascinating, he couldn’t work there. The sunsets were enchanting—“red-gold over the foreground, with its bougainvilleas and oleanders and the mountains in the distance are in blue and purple veils and the tops of the volcanoes are rose snow,” he wrote to Sybil.33 But for a month he struggled with his work and then gave up on Mexico: “The altitude, the alkali dust, the national food, the misery and unrest below the surface, and the reminders of centuries of cruelty and bloodshed,—all combine to upset one’s concentration,” he told the Reinhardts. Nothing helped—not even his customary long walks.34 (“I’m always harping on my walks,” he wrote to Sibyl, “but my walks are my work.”)35
It is impossible to tell whether Wilder couldn’t work in Mexico because of Mexico—or whether he just couldn’t work, period. He was “wrestling” with his new play, The Alcestiad. The structure was clear to him, the “idea-life” was exciting, but he couldn’t find the voice, the diction. “I keep trying to find an utterly simple English prose,” he wrote to Sibyl, “but it keeps coming out like a translation of a Greek classic, at one moment, and like a self-conscious assumption of homely colloquial speech at the next. I foresaw that it would be hard, but not as hard as this.”36 He began to think he would have to write the play in blank verse, difficult as that would be. He was searching for “a plainness, a purity” of rhetoric, and he hoped that Texas would show him the way to it.37
Wilder was grappling with another major distraction by long distance. Not only had Je
d Harris “gone into paroxysms of self-destruction” by closing the tour of Our Town, but he was threatening litigation over the amateur rights to the play. Wilder’s agent and lawyers and Isabel were inundated with telegrams about Harris’s demands for a “huge advance” and his “hairsplitting” arguments over percentages.38 Desperate to escape into his work, Wilder moved on to Houston and Corpus Christi, Texas, which he found “cold and rainy and uncongenial”—except for a local gambling place where people called him Doc and, Wilder reported to Woollcott, he threw away some of his money, but discovered that “like all descendants of Scotch Presbyterian clergymen,” he was “very lucky at dice.”39 Soon he abandoned Texas because he couldn’t work there either. Where to go? For the time being he was needed in Hamden, as his mother was alone while Isabel was spending a month in New York “under the impression that ‘life is passing her by.’ ”40 He doubted he would get any work done in Hamden either, but duty called.
Wilder’s goal of finishing The Alcestiad in 1938 had been deferred by his work on Our Town and The Merchant of Yonkers, but even when he was free of those projects, the new play was a struggle. It was a “golden subject,” and if it defeated him, he thought the defeat would be only temporary, for there were many other subjects “crowding in the notebooks,” he wrote to Sibyl, “and most of them come with innovations (i.e. revivals of lost excellences) of form.” But he was absolutely sure of one thing: “There will be from me no repetitions of ‘Our Town’ but there will be the freest possible treatment of time and place.”41
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