Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  It was too late, however. Had the original cast stayed on, the play would no doubt have survived for a much longer run on Broadway. Without its original stars, the last curtain would fall on September 25, 1943, after 359 performances, and the projected national tour fell through after only one week. Nonetheless, as happened with Our Town, amateur and stock rights would be immediately in demand.

  THAT MAY, as he prepared to go overseas for the duration of the war, Major Wilder also took care of necessary legal matters—updating his will, and solidifying Dwight Dana and Isabel’s authority to administer his business and literary affairs in his absence. At the request of his attorneys he also drafted a detailed six-page discussion of “MATERIALS To use in my absence if stupidity, malice, envy or avarice should institute a plagiarism suit against The Skin of Our Teeth.”17 Wilder’s New Haven lawyers had in mind recent plagiarism suits filed against George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart for The Man Who Came to Dinner and Noël Coward for Blithe Spirit. Wilder’s scathing dissection of the Campbell-Robinson charges was kept on file by his lawyers but never had to be used, as no litigation materialized.18 Still, Wilder’s forceful defense of his work revealed his passion about the episode, and his astute analytical powers—powers that had served him well as a teacher and scholar, and would make him a highly effective military intelligence officer. “Divide the defense into two parts,” he wrote in his contingency “brief”:

  Against the charge that the whole play is a theft of the whole novel or any extended portion of it; Against the charge that there are many parallel passages. Concede that the play bears the influence of many works and that among others it reflects the influence of Joyce’s novel.

  Show that both novel and play have in common that they represent all mankind represented in one man, and the institution of the family represented in one family . . . Generalized man and generalized family is a characteristic of modern literature.19

  He noted that he had employed the universal generalization in his previous work: Our Town, for instance, “is about all Towns, and all existences; The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden is about a million American families; etc.”20 Wilder pointed out numerous traditional literary, biblical, and mythological sources which had influenced Joyce and countless other writers, including himself.

  His unsent letter to the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature had been carefully controlled in tone. Early in the uproar over the attack, Dwight Dana had counseled Wilder that it was important that he not make statements to anyone—advice Wilder had scrupulously honored, perhaps to his detriment.21 Now Wilder’s anger animated this memorandum to his lawyers: Campbell and Robinson were “faking” and “throwing sand,” Wilder wrote. They deserved “plenty of ridicule” for their “cooked-up analogies,” their “tissue of vague nothings.” They were “unable to furnish one real piece of evidence between the two works.” Most of all, they clearly did not understand the literary tradition within which he and Joyce and other writers worked.22

  Satisfied that his family and his lawyers were armed for any domestic battles in his absence, Major Wilder flew out of Presque Isle, Maine, on May 21, 1943, bound for his new assignment in the North African theater of war. Fighting was particularly widespread and intense in Tunisia when Wilder arrived in Algeria, where Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was in charge of the U.S. command structure in the prolonged battle for North Africa. Wilder was first stationed at Northwest African Air Force (NAAF) Headquarters as an intelligence officer. After a month he was transferred to NAAF Headquarters, Rear, as a planning officer. He wrote Dana that the next time he visited his law offices he was “going to cast an eye around and see how it’s administered.” He went on to write that while he loved his work, he hoped that when the war was over, he would “never have to administrate again” and could “return to that excruciatingly ‘lone wolf’ profession: authorship.”23

  Wilder actually proved to be a highly effective administrator with a knack for strategic planning. He found the preparations for the Italian campaign “fascinating” with the focus on “maps, reconnaissance photographs and computations.”24 It was on an epic, global, life-or-death scale the kind of tantalizing puzzle he had welcomed all his life, whether he was documenting German and Austrian theatrical productions, memorizing musical scores, playing with anagrams or crossword puzzles, or deciphering Finnegans Wake. His assignment required a good deal of travel, and he was stationed at times in Bouzaréah, La Marsa, and Algiers as well as Constantine. He traveled on military business to many North African towns and cities—Tunis, Sousse, Oran, Casablanca, Marrakech. As he moved about North Africa, his quarters, shared with other officers, ranged from a “wealthy Mohammedan’s villa,” with seven rooms and a large central court, to a five-room city apartment, with a housekeeper who cooked, cleaned, and did laundry, to basic military tents and billets.25

  Wilder found his civilian life catching up with him even in North Africa, however, when a traveling entertainment group appeared in Constantine, led by the London producer Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont, and starring Vivien Leigh and Beatrice Lillie, who proudly announced that she was singing songs to the troops she had sung “at the end of the last war.”26 “I’ve been reading Italian and talking Italian to the (happy) Italian prisoners who work at the Post,” Wilder wrote to his mother in September 1943.27 His Italian- and German-language skills were important tools in his work. When he wrote to his family he endeavored to paint a positive picture of his daily life and his work. Yes, he was safe. Yes, he was warm enough, or cool enough, depending on the season. Yes, he had plenty to eat. Yes, he was healthy and strong. Yes, the scenery was beautiful; he would bring his family to see it one day. Mail call one day brought him a “lovely note from Charlotte,” he wrote to Amos. “What hopes that raises.”28

  “Nothing so lifts a soldier’s morale as getting a letter from home and nothing so depresses him as reading it,” Wilder had once written to Woollcott.29 He was writing not from his own experience so much as from his observation of the young pilots he worked with, especially those whose girlfriends broke their hearts. But in July 1944 Wilder’s mail brought him a depressing letter from Charlotte’s friend Evelyn Scott, who was convinced that Wilder and his family were deliberately “incarcerating” Charlotte in psychiatric hospitals, and that she was not only completely sane but quite capable of living a normal life on her own. Charlotte was then a patient in the New York State psychiatric hospital at Wingdale, New York, where she was treated with electric shock therapy, insulin therapy, and drugs. Nothing worked for long; the treatments left Charlotte sometimes responsive and stable, sometimes irrational or depressed, sometimes withdrawn, and sometimes aggressive. The family never knew which Charlotte would greet them on their visits.30

  Wilder wrote a firm but tactful letter to Evelyn Scott in return, noting that he and his family understood that Charlotte could give “every indication of being restored to herself,” only to have that “lucid interval” evaporate without warning. Charlotte maintained an “implacable silence” toward her doctors, pretending “not to see nor hear them,” and this behavior made it difficult for the doctors to help her. Wilder was reassured, he wrote to Scott, that Charlotte was where she needed to be for her treatment and recovery because Dr. Tom Rennie, “one of the most distinguished doctors for mental illness in the country” and the chief of the Psychiatric Section of New York Hospital, was his friend, and was taking a personal interest in Charlotte’s case. “He assures me that there is still a measure of hope that she may rejoin the outside world,” Wilder wrote, “and that he will continue to follow her case and let us know when he thinks that she has sufficiently recovered to justify a change of background.”31

  IN APRIL 1944, almost a year into his North African duty, Wilder was nearing exhaustion, feeling every now and then as though he “couldn’t flog one more step out of the old horse.”32 He now understood how his father must have felt “those last years on the top of his ill health trying to churn out editorials for the Journ
al Courier.”33 Wilder wrote to his friend the actor William “Bill” Layton, “God almighty, I shall be 47 this month, and my life has not been such as to prepare me for inflexible routines. I arrive here at 8:15 and seldom leave before 7:15 in the evening and no Sundays off.” Nevertheless, he was still “crazy about the work” and his colleagues and his boss.34 But he constantly hoped, he wrote to his aunt Charlotte, that “this horrendous smashing crashing war will soon be over.”35

  There was some good news from home when some of his literary properties seemed to take on a wartime life of their own. Back in the United States, Isabel and his publishers were fielding requests for translation rights for some of his novels and plays. The Red Cross was showing Howard Estabrook and Herman Weissman’s 1944 film version of The Bridge of San Luis Rey in Algiers, and all Wilder’s clerks were going to see it—without Wilder, who declined. Marc Connelly was performing as the Stage Manager in a 1944 New York revival of Our Town directed by Jed Harris at the City Center.36 Harris had also mounted a successful “London military” production of Our Town in 1944, performed by GIs and WAACs for military audiences.37

  That summer of 1944 Major Wilder hoped to have a few days’ leave “at a new rest camp” where he could enjoy the sun and the sea and some time for playwriting. “Another subject has been sneaking up on me that’s as promising as the Alcestiad,” he wrote to his mother:

  It’s still in the very germinal stage which is about the most fun of all but requires the largest stretches of uninterrupted meditating. All the developments of the plot that one rejects. One rejects so many that the final shape seems not so much a thing created as a thing discovered from the ready-made. You will be horrified to learn that the title of the new one will contain the word Hell! Yes, “The Hell of ——(then an Arab name)”. . . . Isn’t that awful?38

  The name he would choose was Vizier Kabäar.

  AFTER HIS promotion to lieutenant colonel on August 27, 1944, Wilder was assigned to Caserta, Italy, headquarters of the newly established Mediterranean Allied Armed Forces (MAAF). As a staff officer in the Air Plans division, Wilder interrogated prisoners of war, gathered and prepared intelligence, briefed and debriefed Allied pilots, and worked on plans for air attacks in Romania, Germany, Austria, and Yugoslavia, as well as strategic plans involving designated sites in Italy and France. Lieutenant Colonel Wilder was no cloistered celebrity soldier, safe at a desk in the United States. He was stationed in the heart of the MAAF control center, dispatched to travel all over Europe when he was not working long hours seven days a week in Caserta.

  In addition to his valuable service as a planning and intelligence officer, Wilder made his own unique cultural contributions to the Allies, directing a military production of Our Town in Caserta in November 1944, and a Serbo-Croatian production of Our Town in February 1945 in Belgrade, this one produced by Tito’s partisans, the guerrilla force commanded by Marshal Tito after Germany’s invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. These enterprises gave Wilder a change of pace—sometimes amusing and refreshing, sometimes frustrating and exhausting. He found his days “more and more cluttered” with duties beyond his military assignment, especially as he directed “a group of soldiers with very little theatre and professional experience and some WAC’s” who wanted to produce Our Town in November 1944. He was “pushed” into serving as acting chairman of a committee supervising an epidemic of theater productions at military headquarters in Caserta—everything from Our Town to Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound to Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.39 Nevertheless, overworked as he was, Wilder liked getting to know so many of the airmen, WACs, and WAACs, and “being able to ask them to tell me the stories of their lives.”40

  To relieve himself of some of the burdensome details of these productions, Wilder somehow finagled a transfer for M. Sgt. Lester Martin Kuehl from another air combat unit to his. Before the war, Kuehl had been the assistant stage manager for Jed Harris’s Los Angeles production of Our Town. Kuehl quickly relieved Lieutenant Colonel Wilder of some of his theatrical chores, especially with Our Town. The Stage Manager was played by Sgt. John Hobart, former drama critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, who documented the production in “Grover’s Corners, Italy,” an article in Theatre Arts in April 1945. “For exiled Americans overseas,” Hobart wrote, “Our Town inevitably stirred thoughts of home, and it also summoned a feeling of deep and honest pride. Grover’s Corners has never before seemed so wonderful a town or held so tangible a meaning.”41

  Although these amateur productions had their own share of “underground politics and some very bitter feuds,” Wilder complained, they still served as a welcome relief from the demanding work and duty schedule: “Day follows days with a featureless uniformity, a sort of winter quarters monotony.”42 Officers and enlisted men came and went, and Wilder especially enjoyed his colleague from British intelligence, Roland Le Grand, who asked him to serve as best man when he was married in October 1944 in Rome. Their friendship would last far beyond the war, and Wilder was godfather to Le Grand’s son, Julian, who was born in 1945.

  During his first several months in Caserta, Wilder lived in a tent, a weary forty-seven-year-old sleeping on winter nights huddled under several blankets and his heavy raincoat, with rolls of New York Sunday newspapers for insulation. But as a lieutenant colonel Wilder got his own private tent with a cot, a small table, and a chair, one of many military tents on the grounds of the palace at Caserta, which served as MAAF headquarters. There was no heat or electricity, however. His mother inundated her son, he teased, with “earmuffs, cummerbunds, toe-warmers, velvet kidney protectors, tonsil-guards and candle comforters.”43 He reassured her that he had been issued a B-10 field jacket made of alpaca and mohair with a fur collar. It kept him warm and looked “like a million dollars and twelve distinguished service medals,” he wrote.44 Later he was assigned more comfortable quarters in a trailer on the grounds.

  When his Christmas box arrived from Connecticut, jammed with good things to eat, Wilder kept some of the goodies and donated the rest in a collection box for “402 Italian orphans whom some nuns are maintaining at the ragged edge a few miles from here,” he wrote to the home folks. “I even re-wrapped them in their bright colorings, so that Isabel’s spent time will have a double reception and a double success.”45 During those war days Wilder came to fully appreciate the scale of his aunt Charlotte Niven’s ongoing work with the YWCA in Europe. During a trip to Rome he went to the local YWCA, introduced himself as Charlotte Niven’s nephew, and was impressed by the affection workers expressed for his aunt. “I see enough of the life of the WAAF and WAC’s to know what a tremendous need the YW’s fill in their lives,” he wrote to her.46 He commended her for drawing on “heroic resources” to continue her work “so unremittingly all this time.”47

  By year’s end Wilder was still “working like a fool,” but he occasionally found solace in walking through the Italian countryside. “I feel an even stronger continuity of strong life,” he wrote to his mother and sisters, recalling a Carducci sonnet about the patience of oxen in the fields, one that his mother had most likely translated:

  The oxen pull the plough. Do you remember, Mama, teaching me Carducci’s sonnet, “O Pio Bove,”—here it is. The Lombard pine and the umbrella pine are all around us; a wonderful eleventh century church is on the hill; forceful Roman ruins to the west. Oh, there are lots of times when we all get deeply war-weary with the tragic nonsense the Germans have raised in the world, but I’m always snatching gratifications as they come to hand. The Wilders and the Nivens transmitted to me sufficient vitality to make everything I could out of what I had. I’m no moper.48

  IN FEBRUARY 1945 Wilder learned that Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont and Laurence Olivier had obtained the rights to produce The Skin of Our Teeth in London. Olivier’s military schedule would permit him to direct the play but not to act in it. Beaumont, head of the theatrical production company H. M. Te
nnent Ltd., would oversee this successful production of Wilder’s play in March 1945, starring Vivien Leigh as Sabina. Wilder wrote to Olivier to express his pleasure at the news. “My idea is that the play could give practically the sense of improvisation,” he wrote, “a free cartoon, ‘The History of the Human race in Comic Strip.’ ”49 “The play was magnificent,” Beaumont wrote afterward to Wilder’s agent, Harold Freedman, and Olivier did a “first class production job.”50

  Wilder was “galvanized by the tempo of progress in the Pacific Theatre and by the dismay that must be sweeping over Germany.” He was quietly arranging for royalties from his plays in Europe to be given to writers and actors in those countries who seemed to be “in distress,” or to hospitals.51 He received the news that Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish, already planning for postwar days, had recommended him for a civilian post in the American Foreign Service as cultural relations attaché at the American embassy in Paris, to take effect once he was released from the army. Encouraged by his success in Latin America, Wilder was eager to accept the post. He was ideally suited for this multifaceted assignment, and he hoped it would begin soon, but nothing happened on schedule in the last months of the war.

  “I’m tired and I’m in a decline,” Wilder had written to his brother and sister-in-law in February. “I’m not tired in body—you never saw such constant health,—nor in mind, exactly. I’m just tired in nature.”52 He had been working nonstop, seven days a week, eleven or twelve hours a day, for nearly two years, deprived, most of the time, of his habitual long contemplative walks and his customary restorative hours devoted to reading or to listening to music. He realized that the “regimen” of “long hours” and “unrelieved singlemindedness finally drains many of one’s centers.” He wrote to Aunt Charlotte, “My participation in the terrible overwhelming war was microscopic but it was sufficiently related to it to have its reality, and by reason of that I can say I don’t regret a moment of it, even though it may have impoverished some of these other centers.”53