Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Isabella begged Charlotte to dress and go out to lunch with her, and then to travel home to Hamden with her for the weekend, as they had planned. Charlotte agreed, but just before they reached the restaurant she “simply ran away, calling out that she had changed her mind—that her ‘inner voices’ told her not to go—to remain at her own room.” Alarmed, Isabella hurried back to Charlotte’s apartment, but Charlotte refused to let her in. Finally Isabella took the train home to Connecticut “frightened and exhausted,” in hopes of getting advice and help for her daughter in New Haven.3

  That night the news came by telephone that Charlotte had suffered “a complete nervous breakdown” and had been taken to Doctors Hospital in Manhattan, a fairly new private hospital. Because Thornton was at sea, and Janet and Amos were in Massachusetts, Isabella and Isabel coped with the immediate emergency, hurrying to Manhattan to begin what would prove to be a long vigil. The preliminary diagnosis was schizophrenia, and the doctors directed that Charlotte should be moved to the psychopathic department of the Payne Whitney Clinic at the Cornell Medical Center for thirty days.4 There Isabella and Isabel were referred to Dr. Lincoln Rahman, a young psychiatrist who not only was “pleasant and understanding,” according to Isabella, but was already doing groundbreaking research into schizophrenia.5 Dr. Rahman and his colleagues hoped that thirty days would be enough time for Charlotte’s recovery, and Isabella told them she would then take Charlotte home to stay “indefinitely.”6

  Isabel took her sister’s breakdown “very hard,” Isabella reported to Dwight Dana. As for herself, she was a mother in full armor, taking charge of the oversight of her daughter’s treatment, conferring with doctors, living “one day at a time,” worrying about finances—and adamantly insisting that for the time being Thornton must not know what had happened. “I shall not spoil Thornton’s trip with its responsibilities by any anxiety over home matters,” she declared to Dana and her family. “Have not decided yet how much to tell him or when. The fact that he got happily away without any of us knowing that a blow was to fall seems indicative to me that he should not know while he has to give himself so entirely to a new untried & perhaps difficult rôle in South America.”7

  “I think you were wise not to tell Thornton the whole story,” Dana wrote to Isabella, adding that “for the time being at least it might be as well not to refer to Charlotte at all, pending more information as to how things are going to work out.” Meantime, he reassured her, “Don’t worry about the financial part for I know Thornton will wish to take care of all of this, and his bank account is amply sufficient to do so.”8

  THORNTON WAS in Bogotá, still protected from the news about Charlotte’s illness, when he received a cable from the family that Janet and Toby Dakin were married. “Janet’s wedding was sudden,” Isabel explained to Dwight Dana,

  for the young man was drafted. By marrying now they had her Easter holiday for a trip South, and the hope of at least the spring together. . . . But it did make lots of excitement and complications. It was held in the pretty chapel of Winthrop’s church—Episcopalian. Amos gave her away. Just we four and my brother’s wife; the retired rector of the church, his wife, and a young couple, friends of Janet’s were present. They left at once after we had tea at the Dakins’ home and met Mrs. Dakin, an invalid of many years’ standing so she could not be at the ceremony.9

  When Thornton got the news of the wedding, he wrote to his new brother-in-law: “May you be very happy. May you found one of those American homes which is really one of the triumphs of civilization. . . . A thousand blessings on you both from Your brother Thorny.”10

  FROM HER first day at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, Charlotte was “up and dressed and busy,” thanks to the “elaborate routine” arranged for the patients.11 At first the family continued to receive good reports about her progress, and on March 8 Isabella and Isabel were heartened to receive a note from Charlotte herself. It was, Isabel wrote to Dana, “most reassuring, so affectionate and gentle, proving she connects nothing of that dreadful Friday with having seen Mother earlier in the day. She is fully conscious that she is ill and glad the past, which she felt she had not made a good job of, is over; and that she will not have to go on thus, and spoil the future.”12

  The Wilder family gathered around, unified in their support of Charlotte, endeavoring to provide the best medical care for her, but still determined to keep the news from Thornton. What could he do from South America that he was not already doing (through the attentive auspices of Dwight Dana, who promptly wrote checks on Thornton’s bank account to pay every bill for Charlotte’s medical care, as well as the bills for Janet’s trousseau)?

  The family insisted that Janet and Toby Dakin go on with plans for their southern honeymoon during Janet’s spring vacation from Mount Holyoke. Isabella and Isabel would keep watch over Charlotte. They commuted between Hamden and New York, and Amos traveled down from Massachusetts to see Charlotte in the hospital as often as her doctors would permit her to have company.

  Charlotte’s “nervous breakdown” was actually a psychotic episode that marked the onset of schizophrenia, and from the first, she was fortunate to be under the care of some of the best doctors at one of the best psychiatric clinics of the time. Standard treatment in 1941 included psychotherapy, various physical therapies, electric shock treatments, insulin shock therapy, and, as a last resort, lobotomy. The first antipsychotic drug would not be identified until 1952, or approved for use until 1954. Isabella and Isabel had frequent conferences with the doctors, providing family history, answering the questions the doctors raised based on what they understood at that time about schizophrenia and other mental disorders, trying to help shed “any light on Charlotte’s past that might add to the picture of the case.”13 There was no family history of mental illness or clinical depression—although Amos had certainly suffered depression from time to time, especially in 1934, and their parents may have done so from time to time as well. There were, however, physical issues: Charlotte skimped on food, smoked a great deal, had serious dental problems, and had undertaken a fast that further undermined her health.

  Isabella and Isabel thought that Charlotte’s childhood history of being separated from the family might be a factor. Some of the Wilders wondered if part of Charlotte’s illness was rooted in her relationship with their father and his ambitious drive for perfection in his children. There would be glimmers of Amos Parker Wilder’s relationship with his children in George Antrobus and his daughter, Gladys, in The Skin of Our Teeth: “Papa, do you want to hear what I recited in class?” Gladys asks him. “ ‘THE STAR’ by Henry Wadsworth LONGFELLOW.”14

  She strives to please her father:

  Look, Papa, here’s my report card. Lookit. Conduct A! Look, Papa. Papa, do you want to hear the Star, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow? Papa, you’re not mad at me, are you? . . . Papa, just look at me once.15

  With her mother’s encouragement, she tries to be perfect: “And, Gladys,” Mrs. Antrobus says, “I want you to be especially nice to your father tonight. You know what he calls you when you’re good—his little angel, his little star.”16

  AS AN adult Charlotte alternately defied her family’s advice and desired their approval. Her daily life in New York was defined by her struggle to earn even a subsistence living, all the while trying to hide her dire situation from her family. Poets seldom survived on the proceeds from poetry alone, Charlotte knew, and she pinned her hopes on the new prose book, under contract to Coward-McCann. But at the time of her breakdown it was giving her trouble—“vignette tales, about 20 or 25,” she wrote her mother, “all standing far off from subjective stuff, nothing intimate or involving personal stuff; each the kernel of some person, place, or tiny happening, which, if it happened, happened far away and long ago.”17 She continually assured Thornton, Isabella, and Amos that she was not “in a jam” about funds, even though she was. Amos had offered her a place to live and work near him and Catharine—“something to fall back on.” She
appreciated it deeply, she had written to him in the fall of 1939, promising “not to get into a nervous jam—but to stay well and unworried; and ahead of myself as I am now.”18

  She had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the fall of 1939 in hopes of receiving a year’s financial support, writing an application narrative so densely esoteric as to be incomprehensible. “I have known, and am knowing now, real privation—although I have, what many have not—the security of a home background, which saves me from experiencing these ultimate crises of nervous anxiety that come with insecurity,” she wrote to the novelist Rollo Brown in 1939, after she had pinned all her hopes on the Guggenheim Fellowship application.19 She was bitterly disappointed to be turned down.

  Charlotte had written a prose disclaimer about her sexuality in her first book of poetry, Phases of the Moon, for there were lesbian undertones in the poems. Charlotte sustained long, intimate friendships with the novelist Evelyn Scott and the educator and activist Ernestine Friedmann, the women to whom she had dedicated Phases in 1936. After the book was published, she had written to Amos about the “distasteful aspect of the confessional” in poetry. “I shall never again, doubtless, ‘let go’ in emotionalism in just that way, for I think an objectivity in me now functions in that material, absent then.” She wrote further in this letter to Amos:

  I was so explicit about the sex-frustration, because I wanted it to be understood, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was not a sexual pervert, experiencing sex in a woman’s world. It seemed necessary to me because so much emotion was shown as directed toward women that a natural inference might have been drawn. The reading public—used to the disguise of such things, achieved by a mere change of pronoun . . . would not, I argue, realize that had I been, I would have felt it necessary to be explicit about that—and might have jumped to a conclusion, unjust to me, from so much show of feeling for women.20

  Amos Wilder wrote with surprising candor about these themes in his sister’s poetry in his book The Spiritual Aspects of the New Poetry (1940). He had hired Charlotte to type his manuscript, encouraging her to comment on its substance and structure, but Charlotte apparently did not request changes in his treatment of her own work. In his chapter entitled “A World Without Roots,” Amos discussed the modern poet’s alienation from nature, including “the desolation wrought in the lives of sensitive and mature moderns by the frustration of the sex relationships, and we are speaking solely of the area of personal and psychological hurts.” To illustrate, he quoted poems by T. S. Eliot, Francis Thompson, Dante, Geoffrey Scott—and Charlotte Wilder. He cited the “ravages done to the will, to the life force itself, by traumatic experiences in the area of sex, especially by the record of sex conflict and irreparable injustices and remorses.” The “records and ravages” in the “secret lives of men and women” may be found in their art, Amos wrote. He contended that “there is abundant evidence of the costs of frustration in this area largely consequent upon the character of our civilization: man ‘burned by the ropes of his own flesh’ [a line from one of Charlotte’s poems] as a result of false sex attitudes, delayed marriage, or the febrile overemphasis on and exasperation of sex by commercialism and amusements.”21

  Amos surely had himself, his brother, and two of his sisters in mind when he wrote, “More particularly such frustration is due to paralyzing inhibitions, resultant from Puritan attitudes and training.” Referring to Charlotte by name only in a footnote, he wrote, “The author last quoted has expressed both the oppressions and the struggle consequent on frustrations in this area in a series of ‘Monologues of Repression,’ ” and then offered lines from one of Charlotte’s poems to illustrate. In this literary exposition of his sister’s “secret life” and, by extension, of a shaping force in his and his siblings’ upbringing, Amos, the devoted elder brother, may have diagnosed even more astutely than Charlotte’s doctors one significant root of her breakdown.

  Charlotte’s first book of poetry, Phases of the Moon, was stunningly unorthodox in style and subject matter; heart-wrenching in its emotional content, whether grounded in imagination or experience; and, in either case, portending what might lie ahead. Near the end of her book, in “(For the Two),” a poem about parting with someone beloved, Charlotte wrote,

  . . . but in the heart, in the place of being: what will become of me? The years wheeled; spun in the iron hub, I was torn on the spoke-ends and standing aloof—the intricate ghost-ridden—knew nothing, felt nothing. Destroyed . . . or fore-doomed to destruction. . . .22

  Her second book, Mortal Sequence, was by comparison sedate, muted, constrained—and, for the most part, conventional in style and subject. There are many instances of rhymed verse, of structure, order, boundaries, conformity. There seemed to be two poets—two Charlottes—foreshadowing the greater chasm in personality that was to come. She had written in 1936, in the defensive coda to Phases of the Moon, “At the close of the narrative suggested, we are left on the threshold of a future in which expanding experience, re-orientating the individual with respect to human relationships, effects a cathartic resolution of the particular conflict that troubles the pages here.”23 Unfortunately that would not be true for Charlotte.

  In part the family blamed Charlotte’s breakdown on Evelyn Scott, one of her closest friends, as well as her confidante and mentor. Isabel wrote to Dwight Dana, noting that Scott had always believed—unjustly—that the Wilders had neglected Charlotte and failed to support her financially. “Two years ago I feared and was prepared for this break,” Isabel wrote to Dana. “It had to come and we had to wait until it came; so did Charlotte, apparently. Now from bedrock, there is hope she can have a fresh start toward a more normal kind of life and especially, more natural and open personal and family relationships.”24

  By mid-March, however, it was clear that Charlotte was gravely ill, and that her treatment would last far longer than thirty days. She alternated between euphoria and rebellion, going on a hunger strike. Her doctors told the family what they had always known—that Charlotte was an “unusually strong-willed type.”25 Isabella was relieved to hear from the doctors that Charlotte demonstrated no suicidal tendencies. She was well enough on April 22 to write to Amos herself, and by early May Isabella and Isabel believed that Charlotte seemed completely normal.

  THORNTON HAD for years been the financial head of his family, and that role would irrevocably expand and solidify as Charlotte’s illness progressed. With Charlotte incapacitated, Janet newly married and on her honeymoon, Thornton in South America, and their mother now growing more and more anxious about Charlotte’s health and the accelerating cost of her treatment, Isabel, by default, began to pick up the emotional reins of the family. As Isabel described the family dynamics, Amos and Charlotte were especially close, and Amos was deeply concerned and conscientious—but despite his own “difficult year of mental depression in 1934” he was “too overworked and full of responsibility to be able to give the time” to fully realize the extent of Charlotte’s illness. Furthermore Amos had a demanding job and a wife and two children. Besides, Isabel wrote to Dana, Amos was “so sensitive and quick to respond emotionally, that he takes things very hard without always working it out mentally.” As for their mother, Isabel wrote, “she understands more than Amos for she knows Charlotte so much better and has seen so much more of her. She knows this is very serious and yet to protect herself she has to shy away from it. And Mother, too, suffers so acutely from worrying over the financial end, that she’s got to have C. quickly well to stop that leak.”26

  Dwight Dana tried repeatedly to reassure Isabella and Isabel that they need not worry about “the expense of Charlotte’s illness.” The money was available in Thornton’s accounts, he said, “and I know that Thornton would want to have no expense spared which might expedite his sister’s recovery.”27 Dr. Rahman and his colleagues assured the Wilders that Charlotte’s case was not hopeless, but that she would need at least six more months of hospitalization, and after that, “a sanatarium or quiet cou
ntry retreat for a very long time.” The doctors were particularly interested in Charlotte “because of her individual case history, and family background of New England clergymen, etc., and no history of mental illness or hereditary insanity.”28 They hoped as soon as possible to move Charlotte to their “branch in the country, the Westchester division of the New York Hospital at White Plains,” Isabel wrote, because there she would have more privacy and enjoy some freedom to roam outdoors. It would also be good for her to be cared for by new staff and live among new patients who had not seen her in the first throes of her breakdown.29

  BY APRIL 1 Thornton had received the news of Charlotte’s collapse. “From home, good and bad news,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas from Colombia. “Janet got married and Charlotte had—long deferred—her nervous breakdown.”30 He urged them to understand “the three volumes between the lines.”31 From various cities in Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador he communicated with the family and Dwight Dana by cable and letter, trying to allay his mother’s financial worries.

  Isabel, in concert with Dana, was also handling literary business on Thornton’s behalf while he was in South America. There were overtures about a radio script for the sale of radio rights to Our Town (Isabel worked long and hard on a script, but the project did not find a buyer); and inquiries about anthology rights to The Woman of Andros and Heaven’s My Destination (Thornton eventually said yes to Woman and no to Heaven).32 Meanwhile he had to concentrate on the work that was before him.