Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Back in Connecticut, Wilder found his restlessness intensifying, along with his frustration with Jed Harris, who was blocking all attempts at negotiations with “his exorbitant demands.”42 He dealt with the Harris business as best he could; conferred with Dwight Dana on other business matters; turned down an invitation to teach at Princeton; caught up with mail; at Dr. Freud’s request, tried to help his nephew-in-law, now a refugee in the United States, find a job; spent time with his mother—and planned another trip to Europe. He decided to sail in early May for a week in London, a visit with Stein and Toklas in France, and a month working, and walking in the Fontainebleau forest.43

  “Everyone is trying to dissuade me,” he wrote to Reinhardt, “saying that even if I do not find war I will find such uneasiness that the trip will be valueless.”44 But he was determined to go to Europe anyway. Before his departure he accepted several acting engagements for summer theater performances of Our Town, and dealt with another headache: “The ugly possibility of having to go to law hangs over me,” he told Reinhardt. “Mr. Jed Harris is threatening to sue me for not selling ‘Our Town’ to a certain motion-picture company. I hate law-suits, but I am eager to establish that a writer cannot be forced to sell his work to a film company without some guarantee and safe-guard of sympathy and fidelity to the spirit of a text.” Wilder hoped that the matter would be settled out of court, “but,” he wrote, “it further delays my making plans and upsets my concentration of mind.”45

  Reinhardt was then directing his acting students in Los Angeles in what Wilder called his “hitherto almost neglected Pullman Car Hiawatha” and he asked if Wilder had a new play near completion. Wilder replied that since his aborted Mexican journey he could “feel many subjects hesitating, preparing, building,—and each one trying to clothe itself in its own appropriate form.” He believed that a dramatist not only had to create a new play but also had to “each time create a new form.” That ambitious but perhaps impossible challenge may have been at the crux of Wilder’s inability to go forward with The Alcestiad or any other of the subjects “hesitating, preparing, building” in his imagination. He had created a new form with Our Town but was determined not to repeat himself. Besides, rooted as it was in Greek drama and mythology, the dramatization of the Alcestiad was not the most likely subject for innovations in form. Honoring the classical Greek dramatic convention of following a tragedy with a comic, often farcical satyr play, he had already conceived The Drunken Sisters, to conclude productions of The Alcestiad—but the play itself continued to defy him.

  Wilder alluded to this search for form in an essay he was writing on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in the fall of 1939: Noting that the play received the second prize at the Greek festival where it was first produced, Wilder suggested that the second prize “reminded us primarily that masterpieces are difficult. Their survival and the diversity in their appeal are evidence that they come to us from a removed thought-world not easy to penetrate. Sometimes their difficulty proceeds from an inner necessity on their authors’ part continually to innovate in form and subject matter.”46

  He was possessed of that “inner necessity,” and this helps to explain Wilder’s migration from one genre to another and his “perseverance” in pursuit of his craft, as well as his “evasions”—the recurring periods of what appeared to be writer’s block, and the long, sporadic intervals between the completion of one work and another. Vulnerable as he was to distractions, many of them self-imposed, Wilder was not so much a writer of fits and starts as one bent on a prolonged, continuous evolution and growth as an artist. He had learned early that no unfinished novel or play was a total waste of his time and creative energy, and that the creative struggle could be a concomitant and even a catalyst of growth. Wilder wrote to Reinhardt that his next play would “have been greatly helped exactly by the fights and resistances I had with the Alcestis-subject.”47 Meantime he put that play away, confessing to Max Reinhardt months later that he was “bitterly disappointed” that Alcestis “failed to come to birth.”48

  In Hollywood, Wilder’s agent, Rosalie Stewart, was presenting him offers to write movie scripts, and “hammering” Jed Harris on “his likelihood of losing” his threatened lawsuit over the Our Town movie rights in arbitration.49 Stewart, with Wilder’s approval, proposed that Harris accept an outright cash offer of $7,000 from Wilder instead of the $12,500 he wanted. By early May, Harris had dropped his threat of a lawsuit, and Wilder could sail for Europe on May 6 with a clear conscience and a release from stress—at least until July 10, when he had to be back in the United States to begin rehearsals for his summer stock performances.

  DESPITE ESCALATING tensions in Europe, Wilder spent six weeks of the summer of 1939 in France and in England. He especially savored his leisurely visits and talks with Stein and Toklas, and sometimes walked ten miles a day through the “endless” Fontainebleau forest. Wilder saw Harry and Clare Boothe Luce in Paris and, at their request, arranged for the Luces to visit Stein and Toklas. (Luce had left his wife and sons, obtained a divorce, and married Clare Boothe Brokaw in 1935.) Wilder enjoyed “some fine talks with Louis Jouvet and Jean Cocteau.”50 He had a poignant visit in London with Sigmund Freud, who was dying of cancer, and his daughter Anna. “Oh, I love him,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas afterward. “As always the occasion flowered into characterizing anecdote but it takes all my face and hands to tell it correctly so I’ll save it until our next visit.”51

  Back in the United States in July, Wilder the writer tried to ignore his guilty conscience as Wilder the actor plunged into rehearsals for upcoming performances as the Stage Manager in Our Town in four different theaters (three in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania) with four different casts. Isabel helped her brother immeasurably that busy summer, driving him to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, and taking care of business matters as well as the Deepwood Drive house. His performances that summer were “better and better,” Isabel told Dwight Dana.52 Wilder gave a lively account of his onstage role to Stein and Toklas. “It’s been very successful. In places we’ve broken house records; chairs in the aisle; ovations; weepings. Being present at these repetitions I get to know the play pretty well and I find a lot to wince at in addition to some fine wincing at the actors’ renderings, but I hope I’ve learned a lot that can go into future plays.”53 The acting stint that summer confirmed Wilder’s belief that a playwright needed some firsthand experience as an actor in order to do justice to a script. Even so his conscience hurt, for he had not written a thing other than letters, most of them perfunctory, since he gave up on Mexico and Texas and abandoned The Alcestiad.

  He was due a rest, however, after a remarkably productive decade of work—two novels, several one-act plays, adaptations of plays, collaboration on movie scripts, his work on several new full-length plays, and three Broadway productions. He began to relax by spending hours on a new literary obsession—James Joyce’s new novel, Finnegans Wake, published in May 1939. Already it was one of his “absorptions and consolations” and his “midnight recuperation,” he wrote. He spent most of his limited free time that summer “digging out its buried keys and resolving that unbroken chain of erudite puzzles and finally coming on lots of wit, and lots of beautiful things.”54 Wilder’s keen interest in Finnegans Wake would last for the rest of his life, often providing diversion, stimulation, and companionship, but sometimes causing him a good deal of trouble.

  GERMANY INVADED Poland on September 1, 1939, and England and France, as they were treaty-bound to do, declared war on Germany on September 3. Nearly 50 percent of Americans surveyed in a Gallup poll now believed that the United States would become involved in the war. Wilder was deeply worried about his friends in Europe, especially Stein and Toklas. “All the time I keep wondering what you are and will be doing?” Wilder wrote in September, as Stein and Toklas hunkered down to wait out one more war in Europe.55 (They had survived World War I in England, France, Spain, and Majorca.) “Here we read newspapers and listen to radios all day. W
e built dream-myths of hope and alarm,” Wilder wrote to Gertrude in September.56 On their side of the Atlantic, she wrote him, she and Alice were linked to the world only by radio.57

  The news from Europe in September 1939 reported catastrophe after catastrophe—on the Western Front, in Poland, in the Atlantic. Looking about for even some small way to help, Wilder made arrangements to give his Swiss Our Town royalties to an Austrian-German exile fund. He would donate his English royalties to Paternoster Row in London after the December 29, 1940, Luftwaffe bombing of that traditional home of many publishers, including Wilder’s British publisher, Longmans, Green.58

  In late September 1939 Wilder retreated to Woollcott’s island in Vermont, knowing that the private sanctuary would be full of congenial companions, including the actress Ethel Barrymore. There were “endless games of savage croquet, and crippling badminton and head-breaking pencil games,” but Wilder managed to work, “cleaning up a lot of chores,” reading some of the countless manuscripts people sent for his critique, and working on two new projects of his own. He was adapting the text of George Farquhar’s 1707 Restoration comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem, at the request of the producer-director Cheryl Crawford.59 Even though Wilder was making progress with the adaptation, he began to doubt that it would be a “practical entertainment” and he eventually set it aside unfinished; it would be completed by another playwright and performed after Wilder’s death.60

  In Hamden that September, Wilder was caught up in final negotiations for the sale of the Our Town movie rights. The independent producer Sol Lesser wanted to buy them and produce the film, and he wanted Wilder to write the screenplay. Wilder accepted the financial deal but declined to write the script, giving approval for Frank Craven, who had written a few minor screenplays, to work on a script with Lesser. A longtime friend and colleague of Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin, Lesser was a shrewd, trustworthy businessman whose Principle Pictures and Principle Distributing Company were well-respected in the movie industry. He had made a lot of money producing B Westerns and a string of successful Tarzan movies, and Our Town would be a step in a new direction for him. Lesser paid $35,000 for the movie rights to the play, with 60 percent going to Wilder and 40 percent to Harris.

  From the outset of the deal Wilder made it clear that he did not want a major role in planning or writing the movie because that would “inevitably lead to the general impression” that he had “completely authorized and was responsible for the final picture.”61 He was willing to meet briefly with Lesser in New York, and he would “always extend” to Lesser and the film his “cordial best wishes.”62 Wilder conferred with Lesser as promised and refused any payment for the consultation. Astounded that a writer would actually decline an offer of money, Lesser sent Wilder a snazzy radio in appreciation.63

  In early October, Lesser sent Wilder the first rough draft of the script, prepared by Craven, and Wilder could not resist responding with detailed notes.64 He believed that a stage play and a screenplay were essentially two different entities, two different art forms. He wrote to the ever-solicitous Sol Lesser in October:

  I feel that now the point has come in the work, as I foresaw, when my feelings must often give way before those of people who understand motion-picture narrative better than I do. It’s not a matter of fidelity to my text—since I doubt whether there has ever been a movie as faithful to its original text as this seems to be—it’s just a matter of opinion, and my opinion should often give way before that of those who know moving pictures thoroughly.65

  Nevertheless Wilder sent Lesser pages of notes over the next few months, and Lesser more often than not embraced Wilder’s suggestions. He urged Lesser to be bold, and to avoid the “danger of dwindling to the conventional. . . . I know you’ll realize,” Wilder wrote, “that I don’t mean boldness or oddity for their own sakes, but merely as the almost indispensable reinforcement and refreshment of a play that was never intended to be interesting for its story alone, or even for its background.”66

  WILDER WAS restless to the point of rootlessness that fall, as writers often are when they are not deeply grounded in their work, but even for a self-anointed theater gypsy, the new plays wouldn’t come. They eluded him, frustrated him, stymied him. The Merchant of Yonkers had left scars yet to heal, and Wilder seemed almost relieved to be distracted by Lesser and the movie. He hadn’t been able to work in Mexico or Texas or Connecticut. He had not written a page during his six summer weeks in England and France—and now, thanks to Hitler and company, working in Europe was at least temporarily out of the question. His head was “full of European places all the time,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas. “I’m fretful not to be there,—there as place; I have no wish to be near it as war.” He reiterated his concern about their safety: “If the war is to be long and terrible, should you be there with it all around you—especially should you be in Paris?”67

  He could not work in his writing room in the house on Deepwood Drive, much as he loved his family. He needed a few weeks of work “in solitary confinement,” and went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he followed events in Europe from the daily papers, with “hope and dread in every muscle.”68 For escape from current events and from writing, he lost himself in Finnegans Wake. He soon abandoned his solitary life in Atlantic City for New York, where he found an apartment, and tried to help arrange a U.S. lecture tour for Stein in hopes of getting her and Toklas safely out of France for the duration of the war. They refused to leave France, however, unless they were positive they could quickly and safely return.

  By mid-November, Wilder was reasonably content in his new apartment at 81 Irving Place near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, enjoying the quiet and the privacy, exploring the city, and probing Finnegans Wake, which, he said, made “great inroads” into his time. He had “untangled some more of its knots, but there remain a million.” 69 He loved having daily access to the theater—even Clare Boothe Luce’s “dreadfully easy, emphatic and vulgar” anti-Nazi play, Margin of Error, and Thunder Rock, written by his friend and former student Robert Ardrey, directed by the young Elia Kazan for the Group Theatre, and “so immediate a failure that it is being withdrawn after a week.” 70 Aleck Woollcott was starring as Sheridan Whiteside, the colorful character modeled on Woollcott himself, in The Man Who Came to Dinner, Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s new smash hit on Broadway. (The actor Monty Woolley first played the role of Sheridan Whiteside in the original 1939 stage production of The Man Who Came to Dinner.

  Wilder spent time with Charlotte, taking her to restaurants and theater performances. She was working on her mysterious new book, all the while patching together a meager living from her ongoing work for the WPA, and doing freelance editing and typing manuscripts—still refusing offers of financial help from her mother and her brothers. Thornton and Charlotte had seen “considerably more of each other, while he was in town in this more leisurely way,” Charlotte wrote to Amos. “He seemed to enjoy walking across town to take in my neighborhood,” she said, and her landlady, “although she manages to conceal it behind a worn discouraged harridan’s aspect, is a-flutter. I get the benefit of the prestige.”71

  Mabel Dodge Luhan, also in New York, arranged for Wilder to read and interpret eight pages from Finnegans Wake at one of her salons. For that gathering Wilder passed out mimeographed sheets “reprinting the first three paragraphs” of Joyce’s novel, along with “the Nocturnes on p. 244 and the close from 626,” he wrote to Edmund Wilson afterward. It turned out to be a boisterous evening at Luhan’s apartment, overcrowded with people coming out of curiosity about Joyce’s novel, or about Wilder or Mabel herself, and latecomers being turned away and “pounding on the door.”72

  Wilder was addicted to the novel, he told Stein and Toklas, obsessed with decoding that unbroken chain of complicated, erudite puzzles: “I’ve only skimmed the surface, but I know more about it than any article on it yet published. Finally I stopped, and put it away from me as one would liquor or gambling.”73 He soon relapsed, howev
er, reopening Finnegans Wake and spending “hundreds of hours” on it, and planning a visit with Edmund Wilson so that they could discuss the novel at length.74

  Looking back on the past few months, however, Wilder was exasperated with himself for his inertia and his “shocking busyness over trifles.”75 Despite his adamant disclaimer that he could not help with the Our Town film script, he had spent hours during those months in New York poring over letters and screenplay drafts from Sol Lesser, attentive down to the smallest detail of script and camera angles. Lesser not only solicited and encouraged him, but at least as far as their letters reveal, genuinely welcomed and incorporated most of Wilder’s ideas, respecting his wishes to restore certain cuts to the original script, and to abandon certain changes. Lesser proposed, for instance, that the film set up some conflicts in Emily and George’s marriage—conflicts that were Emily’s fault and that she would understand and regret only after her death. Wilder replied that for several explicit reasons, he felt “pretty concrete about trying to dissuade you against showing Emily returning to her fifth wedding anniversary and regretting that she had been an unwise wife.”76

  The most significant change Lesser made had to do with Emily’s death. “The first serious thing to decide is whether we should let Emily live or die,” Lesser wrote to Wilder, offering the reasons for and against such a major departure from the stage play.77 The ultimate decision was to let Emily live. “In the first place, I think Emily should live,” Wilder responded: