Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  In 1969 Wilder was trying by long distance from Baden-Baden to arrange a donation of his manuscripts to the Beinecke Library at Yale, with Donald Gallup, its curator of American Literature, in charge of them, and Isabel and Louise Talma assisting with the transfer. Gallup and Wilder’s lawyers were pressing him, trying to maximize Wilder’s tax advantage for the gift. “I feel terrible imagining you and Louise (and Don) marshaling all that anxious scrupulosity on the job,” Wilder wrote from Europe. “As I cabled, throw every damn MS into the hopper: next year is time enough to consider the letters.”65 Fortunately for posterity, the manuscripts were not destroyed.66

  As he moved into the final years of his life Wilder was holding on to some lifelong friendships—writing weekly letters to Robert Hutchins, who was undergoing treatment for bladder cancer; and hoping to go to the Beinecke Library at Yale to an eightieth-birthday party for Wilmarth “Lefty” Lewis, who had donated to their alma mater his vast collection of eighteenth-century books, papers, art, and artifacts focusing on the life and writings of Horace Walpole. Wilder was also endeavoring to avoid scholars and biographers, trying to discourage those who wanted to write about him—such as an English professor in a Maryland community college, to whom Wilder wrote, “I am about to be 75; I have lost most of the vision in one eye—I can only give only a few hours to reading and writing in order to spare the other eye. . . . It must be damned hard to find a thesis subject about me because I change all the time.” He had no philosophy, Wilder went on—“just some contradictory notions,” and he changed his religion “every ten years.” He had no unified technique as a novelist or as a playwright, because every novel was different from all the others, and the same was true for his plays. Besides, there was always a “veil of irony” over what he wrote, and, consequently, it was difficult to tell when he was “talking seriously” or putting words into the mouths of his characters. “Give it up,” he urged the professor, or “wait till I’m dead.” Better yet, “Work on another author.”67

  Wilder was particularly unhappy about a biography being written by the English professor Richard H. Goldstone, scheduled to be published by Harper. Instead of writing the critical biography he had originally proposed, Goldstone began to solicit copies of Wilder’s letters and to seek interviews with his friends and associates for the book ultimately published in 1975 by E. P. Dutton as Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait. Despite the fact that the two men had known each other during World War II, Goldstone did not understand him, Wilder wrote to him in 1968:

  I’m not tearful, I’m not self-pitying. I don’t view myself tragically, I don’t spend any time complaining or even looking backward. . . . Struggles? Disappointments? Just out of college I got a good job at Lawrenceville and enjoyed it. I made a resounding success with my second book. The years at Chicago were among the happiest in my life. I got a Pulitzer Prize with my first play. What friendships—Bob Hutchins, Sibyl Colefax (400 letters), Gertrude Stein, Ruth Gordon (hundreds of joyous letters, right up to this week). . . . Of course my work is foreign to you. You can’t see or feel the play of irony. You have no faculty for digesting serious matters when treated with that wide range that humor confers. . . . Go pick on Dreiser or Faulkner. Leave me alone. Write about Arthur Miller.68

  IN APRIL 1970 Wilder embarked on his last voyage by slow boat—a leisurely, uneventful trek across the ocean. He loved these old-fashioned ships with no telephones in the cabins, and portholes that could actually be opened to the sea air and the sound of the waves “all night—wonderful.”69 He was traveling a long, circuitous path to the final version of his last novel—from the seminal stages in 1967 to the publication of Theophilus North in April 1973, when he was seventy-six. As he worked on the novel, he also worked sporadically on two new one-act plays for the “Bleecker Street” series, but did not complete them, concentrating his creative energy once and for all on the novel that had its genesis in 1967 even before The Eighth Day was published.70 As the new book took deep root in his memory and imagination, Wilder explored the tapestry of his whole life, so seamlessly fusing memoir and fiction that it is difficult to discern where one leaves off and the other begins.

  37

  “LIFE AND DEATH”

  God damn it . . . in times of mortal danger (which is also any time in life, if you’re really alive) you must encompass both poles—life and death.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO JAMES LEO HERLIHY,

  February 12, 1970

  The United States and Europe (1970–1975)

  You’re constantly alluding to your ‘last days,’ ” Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer, trying to lift her spirits after she had undergone major surgery. “That’s bad for you—as well as ungrateful—since you’re obviously full of lively response and generous energy. Let’s have some more birthdays—some more sun, rain, and snow—and then ‘greet the unseen with a cheer’ (Browning), but not mention it to others.”1

  That was his attitude in the final five years of his life as his physical energy failed, sabotaged by too much good food and wine, too many highballs and cigarettes, too little exercise (the inveterate walker who could cover five, ten, or even twenty miles a day had long since retired), and the onset of ailments that plague the human body as it wears out. He suffered from hypertension, heart problems, pain in his right knee, and “general rheumatism” as he termed it. He grew increasingly deaf, and had to limit the daily use of his eyes because of a circulatory problem and cataracts. He had a hernia operation in 1968. “I’m very old now,” he wrote to a friend in March 1971. “I’ll be 74 next month. I’m having eye-trouble and circulation trouble but inside I’m as cheerful as a cricket and Lord be praised, there’s nothing the matter with my stomach and my appetite.”2

  A recurrence of the excruciating back pain that had plagued him in earlier years led to three weeks in the hospital in 1973 for a slipped disk.3 In 1974 he wrote to friends, “I have lost most of the vision in my left eye and I have some trouble with respiration, but I am cheerful inside. I have good digestion. I read and read and when the spirit gives me an idea I write.”4 He underwent surgery for prostate cancer in September 1975, when he was seventy-eight. But the intellectual energy and the creative energy flourished as other powers ebbed, and despite encroaching age and failing health, Wilder had an exuberant good time writing what would be his final book. “I got a spurt of energy and have been working quite ‘smartly’ as New Englanders say,” he wrote to a friend in 1971. “Some droll stuff—who said I didn’t have a sense of humor!”5

  By April 1972 he had set aside all but one of the often rollicking, sometimes reflective stories in progress, and that one was set in one of his favorite cities, Newport, Rhode Island. He banished Todger and made Theophilus—the stillborn twin—the living hero of the book. As Wilder thought about his twin—his “identical replica,” and his own life as the twinless twin, he reflected:

  Non-identical twins are like other brothers but identical twins are not only several generations of characteristics inherited from their ancestors—as is every one—but are one man’s packet of characteristics in two editions. If your name (say) is George, there are two Georges. Outwardly you and your brother George resemble one another exactly. . . . Inwardly, too, you are identical, but the ingredients are differently mixed. . . . One’s not all saint and the other all sinner, sage or dolt.6

  As Wilder later explained to journalists, his stillborn twin brother would have been named Theophilus, the traditional name of second sons in earlier generations of the Wilder family, and he called Theophilus his “other self.”7 “North” was an anagram for “Thornton.”

  Wilder had written to his longtime friends Eileen and Roland Le Grand, “I have been ‘poorly’ as they say in the American language—eye-doctors, ear-doctors—respiration-doctors. Now at 74 I don’t bustle about easily.”8 But he could still sustain the difficult, patient, solitary work of writing a novel, and by October 1972 he had made substantial progress with Theophilus North. He had been writing various episo
des for five years before he decided to concentrate on Theophilus and Newport, but once that decision was made in 1972, he finished the novel in a year’s time. “As my book—I have been working very hard—approaches its end, more and more earnest notes about suffering in life insist on coming to the surface—and I want to ‘get them right,’ ” he wrote “and then the book will end in a blaze of fun and glamor and happy marriages (at the annual ‘Servants’ Ball’ at Newport!).”9

  Theophilus North is another Don Quixote, this time on a quest to discover what people do with their despair, their “rage, or frustration.” From the beginning Wilder the writer and Wilder the man had probed the eschatology of human existence, as had his brother, Amos, poet and theologian. How do we live, knowing that we will die? Wilder grappled with that central question in his last novel, written in the maturity of old age: “What does every different kind of person ‘store up’ to evade, surmount, transmute, incorporate those aspects of his life which are beyond our power to alter?”10

  He was having his own adventures as he wrote the adventures of Theophilus North. He was keeping up with the times, with current events, with flower children, hippies, pop culture. “There are two songs in the new Beatles album that are bitter, beautiful and very mature,” he had written to Gordon and Kanin: “She’s Leaving Home” and “A Day in the Life.”11 There were almost always adventures when Wilder sat at the steering wheel of an automobile. In 1972 he bought a new car—a blue two-door HT 8-cylinder Ford Mustang, which, on July 23 of that year, he drove into the left fender of a parked car near the Whitney Theater on Whitney Avenue in Hamden. He and the driver exchanged addresses and information, and Wilder went home and wrote out a detailed “Description of the Accident,” complete with a color-coded diagram of the scene.12 This was Wilder’s last recorded automobile accident. Fortunately, danger-prone as he was, he usually collided with inert vehicles rather than those on the move, and no injuries resulted.

  Later in 1972, on the strength of the first eight chapters of Theophilus North, Harper & Row paid Wilder “a smashing advance,” he wrote Irene Worth.13 The amount was one hundred thousand dollars.14 “Not bad for one in his 75th year—wot?”15 He described his novel to Worth:

  I must break the bounds of modesty to tell you that it’s a humdinger. It has all the colors of the rainbow—it ranges from the top of society and gives a large attention to servants—a bevy of beautiful women wrapped in tender language—Two splendid men friends of Theophilus—old man, old woman . . . and a real monster or two. . . . And there’s some laughter for dear Irene and every now and then a situation so painful that you’ll shake your head and say with Elspeth Skeel [a character in the novel],“Why is life so cruel and yet so beautiful?” The author does not presume to answer the question.16

  This is a novel created by an old man with a young and vital spirit, a man with his eyes on the past and the future, imbuing his book with lighthearted vision and deep-hearted wisdom. Autobiography and fiction intertwine, as readers who know Wilder’s life will discover. Theophilus is part rascal, part saint, part tutor, part interloper, an outsider looking in the windows at life in Newport—and then barging in the front door and taking matters into his own hands. As the novel opens, Theophilus, twenty-nine, a schoolmaster “in the best of health” but “innerly exhausted,” resigns his teaching job, buys a used car, and revisits Newport, where he had been briefly stationed during World War I. Theophilus makes his home in the YMCA and embarks on a summer rife with adventures that take him into the drawing rooms and libraries of Newport’s grand mansions, or “cottages,” and into Mrs. Cranston’s boardinghouse, an establishment run with strict decorum, and home to many of the servants who work in the grand cottages. Thanks to word of mouth and three days of newspaper advertisements, Theophilus is soon employed teaching tennis; tutoring young people in algebra, English, French, German, and Latin; and reading aloud in those languages, plus Italian, to invalids, shut-ins, and people with poor eyesight.

  Theophilus has been “afire” at various times with nine “Life Ambitions,” cautioning that “it is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood a growing boy’s and girl’s imagination” because they “leave profound traces behind them,” and “we are shaped by the promises of the imagination.”17 In one guise or another, to one degree or another over the course of the novel, Theophilus fulfills his nine ambitions: First, at times he appears to be a saint, although that may be more perception than reality. Second, he is an anthropologist, recognizing that “the past and the future are always present within us.”18 Third, he is an archaeologist exploring the “Nine Cities” of Newport. Fourth, he is a detective, tracking lives and motives. He is, fifth, sixth, and seventh, an actor; a magician (part mesmerist, part shaman); and a lover—not an “omnivorous” Casanova or a romantic troubadour, but a man with a “Charles Marlow Complex,” like Charles Marlow, the hero of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer—inhibited, shy, and tongue-tied in the presence of “ ‘ladies’ and genteel well-brought up girls,” but “all boldness and impudence” with “servant girls and barmaids” and “emancipated women.”19 Theophilus is also part rascal, or picaro, his eighth ambition—living by his wits, “without plan, without ambition, at the margin of decorous living, delighted to outwit the clods, the prudent, the money-obsessed, the censorious, the complacent.” He dreams of “covering the entire world, of looking into a million faces.”20 His ninth and ultimate ambition is to be a free man. Free, at least of his teaching job, Theophilus is ready for adventure—“for risk, for intruding myself into the lives of others, for extracting fun from danger.”21 Intrude he does, sometimes by invitation, sometimes by his own choice, sometimes by chance.

  Like The Eighth Day, Theophilus North may be read on many levels—first as a rousing good story, and then as a richly textured evocation of character and theme. Wilder gives Theophilus free rein to explore a wide range of topics—imagination, memory, friendship, romance, the architecture of family and community. He celebrates the imagination at the beginning and the end of the novel. “Imagination draws on memory,” he writes in the final lines of Theophilus North. “Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants’ Ball or even write a book, if that’s what they want to do.”22 He advances an intriguing formula for friendship, one he had tried to honor for years. “I recalled a theory that I had long held and tested and played with—the theory of the Constellations,” Theophilus says:

  A man should have three masculine friends older than himself, three of about his own age, and three younger. And he should have three older women friends, three of his own age, and three younger. These twice-nine friends I call his Constellation. Similarly, a woman should have her Constellation. These friendships have nothing to do with passionate love. Love as a passion is a wonderful thing but it has its own laws and its own histories. Nor do they have anything to do with the relationships within the family which have their own laws and their own histories. . . . But we must remember that we also play a part in the Constellations of others.23

  Wilder told friends in Newport that his book was “all about Newport! A Newport in large part spun out of my own head.” It should be read, he said, as “one of those historical novels—highly romantic and extravagant.”24 It was actually “a dozen novellas which finally ‘come together’ and justify its being called one novel,” he explained. This was a structure akin to those he had used in The Cabala and The Bridge of San Luis Rey all those years ago.25

  In a letter to the English professor Dalma H. Brunauer in November 1975, Wilder looked back over his life and work: “I have often been reproached for not having made a more explicit declaration of commitment to the Christian faith,” he wrote:

  If I had had a strict upbringing in the Catholic Church—like Mauriac or Graham Greene—I would certainly have done so. But I was a Protestant and I was thoroughly formed in the Protestant beliefs—my father’s, my school’s in China; Oberlin!—and the very thoroughness of my exposure to dogmatic Prot
estant positions made me aware that they were insufficient to encompass the vast picture of history and the burden of suffering in the world.26

  He emphasized that his novels are novels of questions: “I took refuge in Chekhov’s statement: it is not the business of writers . . . to answer the great questions (let the theologians and philosophers do that if they feel they must) but ‘to state the questions correctly.’ ”27

  Why are we on this earth? How do we live? And why? Wilder had asked these questions repeatedly in his published work and in his private life, testing possible answers: We are on this earth to serve, to work, to create, to love and be loved, to struggle and suffer and survive, to constantly evolve—the “Man of the Eighth Day.” We live as best we can, “every, every minute,” as Emily says in Our Town, appreciating the gift of life, aware of the universal in the particular—the multitude—without diminishing the value of the particular, the one. Theophilus, like Thornton, studied archaeology in Rome. In a reprise of his earlier allusions to the experience, Wilder writes in his last novel about learning to dig: