For the forty years of Charlotte’s illness, Thornton, Amos, Isabel, and Janet never wavered in their devotion to their sister. On November 12, 1969, by family decision, Charlotte had moved from the Long Island Home in Amityville, where she lived for more than twenty years, to the Brattleboro Retreat in Brattleboro, Vermont, one of the oldest private psychiatric hospitals in the United States.68 By that time Charlotte’s arthritis and her weight so severely affected her knees and her feet that she could barely walk. Janet had taken over much of the oversight of Charlotte’s care as Isabel suffered more frequent health problems of her own. Janet was very much in favor of the move to Brattleboro, believing that Charlotte would have more privacy, her own room, better care, more personal attention, and more freedom. It would be easier for the family to travel back and forth to visit her. As financially and morally supportive of his sister’s treatment as he always was, Wilder harbored the concern that her doctors had never gotten to the root of Charlotte’s illness. “Incidentally,” he had written in 1969, “we Freudians are convinced that no treatment of an out-and-out schizophrenic is worth a bean that does not find the sources in early childhood and report those thoroughly.”69
Charlotte was grateful for the improved conditions at Brattleboro. She had always dreamed of returning to her Greenwich Village apartment, but, she wrote to Thornton, some of her friends had told her that New York was no longer a pleasant place to live because of crime and congestion. She seemed content in Vermont. She told her brother she needed a Polaroid camera to help her in her writing. In her excursions out of the hospital, she said, she wanted to “find some little known part of the U.S.A.” where she could photograph the inhabitants and write about them. He immediately wrote to Brattleboro to approve the idea and the expense.70
The family ordered a new Remington typewriter for Charlotte in 1971 because she had her heart and mind set on resuming her writing. “The food here is impossible,” Charlotte typed in a letter to “Dear Thornt,” but otherwise, she said, “I have a private room, the typewriter and beginning draft of a prose book.”71 Meantime, in the attic of the Wilder home in Hamden, there were boxes full of Charlotte’s papers—brittle pages of poems and prose gathering dust under the eaves.
ON APRIL 17, 1975, the day he turned seventy-eight, Wilder wrote a letter of regret to his old friend and colleague Sol Lesser, who had approached him on behalf of Martha Scott about doing a new, technicolor film of Our Town.72 He did not want any new film version made, Wilder replied. Besides, he added, “I’m old now and not in the best of health and must limit my activities of every sort for the slow but steady progress I am making on a new work.”73 He tried to cooperate with his publisher’s wishes that he continue to promote his work, giving interviews on Theophilus North and on the Kennedy Center’s American Bicentennial production of The Skin of Our Teeth, with Martha Scott as Mrs. Antrobus and Elizabeth Ashley as Sabina. (Later that year, José Quintero directed a production of Skin at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on Broadway.) “I always feel slightly soiled by thus ostentatiously selling my baked goods like a market-crier—but that’s because I was born and brought up a Wilder-Niven,” Wilder wrote to his brother in July 1975. He apologized to his family for some of the “annihilating reviews” that his work had received. “I take and forget them like the weather but it distresses me that my kinfolks are among the readers. Sorry, I’m sorry.”74
He was following his doctors’ orders 90 percent of the time, he said, and that meant that to protect his eyes he could not read as copiously as he had always loved to do. Nevertheless, in the months before his death, he “devoured with joy” Lewis Thomas’s The Lives of a Cell and James D. Watson’s The Double Helix. “What sublime reaches,” he wrote. He had studied evolution at Yale, had written about it in The Eighth Day, and was “glad to have lived long enough to peek into these processes,” he wrote Amos. “What would Darwin have thought! And what Goethe!”75
“I SUPPOSE you know I go into Mass. Gen. Hospital on the 2nd (best hospital in the country),” Wilder wrote to his nephew on August 22, 1975. “The specialist from there who diagnosed me here (he visits Martha’s Vineyard twice a month) indicated that it was the most routine form of the prostate trouble,—no problem.” Wilder planned, he said, “to be a cheerfuller and more sociable fellow next year—. One doctor has brought my blood pressure down to normal and shown me how to keep it there; and now another doctor is ready and eager to correct this nuisance. . . . Let’s plan to be cheerful together.”76
In November 1975, seventy-eight and still convalescing from the cancer surgery, Wilder was reading Montaigne, he wrote to his friend Malcolm Cowley—“grand reading for us old men. He lived through woeful times and retained that equilibrium. His mainstay was neither religion nor the (later) reliance on reason and the Enlightenment’s belief in progress, but on the wisdom of antiquity—especially Plutarch!” He reported to Cowley that he was “guardedly convalescing and cheerful. . . .”77
As Isabel looked after Thornton during his recovery from the prostate surgery, she herself was “bravely coping with her handicaps,—respiratory mostly,” he wrote to Eileen and Roland Le Grand. He and Isabel were hoping to go South to escape the Connecticut winter, but they thought there were too many “elderly Americans” in Mexico and Florida. Perhaps they would get through the winter in Hamden and then go to Martinique.78
In late November 1975, with his doctor’s permission, Wilder made plans to go to New York for two weeks. He wanted—needed—another “hideaway.” He especially wanted to see two movies which he believed would be “very beautiful”—Satyajit Ray’s Distant Thunder (Ashani Sanket), and Ingmar Bergman’s Magic Flute—and to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner in the city with Isabel and Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. His friend the young actor and director Jim O’Neil gave him a guest card to stay at the Harvard Club on West Forty-fourth Street in New York, where, Wilder said, he would be “presumably cut dead (though I do have a Harvard degree).” He had not yet regained his strength, nor was he confident about walking any distance, so he would not “venture out much except to those movies.” However, he said, “I’ve been house-bound and hospital cocooned so long that I can get a grand feeling of adventurous freedom just strolling from 44th Street to the New York Public Library.”79 After Thanksgiving he had dinner with Gordon and Kanin, and then they took a taxi to the Algonquin Hotel for a nightcap. Afterward they strolled along Forty-fourth Street back to the Harvard Club.80
On December 6, bone weary from his journey, Wilder returned one last time to the house on Deepwood Drive. On December 7 he and Isabel looked forward to having dinner at the home of Catherine Coffin. Her son, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Yale’s chaplain, would be there as well. Needing to rest before the evening’s engagement, Wilder retreated to his room, donned his bathrobe, and lay down to sleep.
Sometime later in the afternoon, he died of a heart attack.
FOUR DAYS before his death Thornton Niven Wilder had written to friends, “I am now old, really old, and these recent set-backs have taken a lot of energy out of me.” He had not given up, however. Far from it. He wrote, “I think I’m pulling myself together for another piece of work.”81
EPILOGUE
There is no adventure in life equal to that of being and asserting one’s self.
—THORNTON WILDER
journal entry 742, June 2, 1957
He was buried on December 9, 1975, in the cemetery in Mount Carmel, Connecticut, where Amos Parker Wilder had been buried in 1936, and Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder in 1946. A simple stone marks the site and bears the name of Amos Parker Wilder, followed by “His Wife Isabella Thornton Niven” and the names of three of his children: Thornton Niven Wilder (1975), Charlotte Elizabeth Wilder (1980), and Isabel Wilder (1995). Amos Niven Wilder died on May 1, 1993, and was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery on May 4, 1993. A separate headstone carries his name, and his wife’s. Catharine Kerlin Wilder was buried there in 2006. Janet Wilder Dakin, who died October 7, 1994, was buried near h
er husband in Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Thornton Wilder’s interment service was led by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and attended by family and a few invited friends. The Reverend Amos Niven Wilder read scripture, and said of his brother, “He realized life while he lived it—and brought incomparable visions to all experiences and relationships, and not only in his writing.” Amos gave thanks in the benediction for his brother’s work, for his “conviviality and incandescence,” and for the “rich annals of friendship, devotion, talent, and praise.”1
On Sunday afternoon, January 8, 1976, Thornton Wilder’s friends and family gathered in Yale’s Battell Chapel for a memorial service. Flowers filled the chapel—tributes from the president of the German Federal Republic, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the officials of Yale University, and the Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste—testimony to Wilder’s bonds with a global audience. An organist and two violinists played Bach. As in Our Town, the hymn “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” was sung. After the service the music of the Yale Memorial Carillon drifted through the winter air.
A few of his multitude of longtime friends spoke at the memorial service—Ruth Gordon, Bob Hutchins, and Lefty Lewis, among others. Tappan Wilder read from his uncle’s work, including these words spoken by Julius Caesar in The Ides of March: “Where there is an unknowable there is a promise”; and these from the archbishop in The Eighth Day: “Life is surrounded by mysteries beyond the comprehension of our limited minds. . . . We transmit (we hope) fairer things than we can fully grasp.”2 These characters spoke for Wilder the writer and Wilder the man who evolved from the boy running alone in China, going his own way, then and always transcending the boundaries.
Through the voice of Chrysis, his Woman of Andros, Wilder reflected that “the most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.”3 He traveled down those corridors all his life. He did not pretend to know the answers to the mysteries, but he knew the questions and was not afraid to ask them, over and over again, in his work and in his personal life.
Wilder’s death was duly noted internationally. This quintessential American writer had lived, worked, and traveled as a citizen of the world, connecting globally with his era. He captured the spirit and the promise of his own country, and his planetary themes and questions touched a global audience as well, transcending time and place. Many of his novels and plays are vividly alive and relevant in the twenty-first century. To the end of his life he believed, as he had written in 1952, that “the artist through his creation, has been in all times a force that draws men together and reminds them that things which men have in common are greater than the things that separate them; and that the work of the artist is the clearest example of the operation of freedom in the human spirit.”4
He was a rare writer: one who worked as intensely hard on the innermost self as he did on the art. He had written to Isabel in 1937, “We’re all People, before we are anything else. People, even before we’re artists. The rôle of being a Person is sufficient to have lived and died for.”5 In his unfinished lecture on biography, composed in the early 1930s, Wilder wrote out a premise that described his own life: “By a strange spiritual law positive personalities so far assimilate their lives that they would not wish their very misfortunes otherwise. Their destiny is themselves.”6
GUIDE TO NOTES AND SOURCES
Through the facts, as scaffolding, we hope to see the SOUL and we hope thereby to gain light on our own.
—THORNTON WILDER,
notes for a lecture on biography, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL
Thornton Wilder left a mass of unpublished and published letters, manuscripts, journal pages, and other documents—a substantial scaffolding of facts that shape and support a narrative of his life and work. This biography has grown out of more than a decade of close study of these primary sources. In their magnitude they document and illuminate Wilder’s exterior life and much of his interior life, as well as the evolution of his creative work.
The majority of Wilder’s papers may be found in the Thornton Wilder Papers and the Thornton Wilder Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. These papers and resources include correspondence, manuscripts, and other documentation of the lives of the Wilder family, including Amos Parker Wilder, Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder, Amos Niven Wilder, Charlotte Elizabeth Wilder, Isabel Wilder, and Janet Wilder Dakin. Throughout the endnotes, I have referred to the Thornton Wilder Papers and the Thornton Wilder Collection as the Thornton Niven Wilder Collection, or TNW Collection, YCAL. In addition there are numerous uncataloged letters, manuscripts, and other Wilder resources in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke. When they are quoted or cited, these documents are designated as uncataloged. Papers quoted or cited from other public collections are so noted. There are significant private collections of Wilder papers, but the holders of these collections are, by request, not identified in the annotations. Other libraries and institutions containing Wilder resources include the following:
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA
Amherst College, Amherst, MA
Amherst Public Library, Amherst, MA
Berea College, Berea, KY
Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York, NY
Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Research Center
British Library, London
Boston University, Boston, MA
College of Wooster, Wooster, OH
Columbia University, New York, NY
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Federal Bureau of Investigation Files/Freedom of Information Act
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA
Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, NJ
Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
Newberry Library, Chicago
New York University, New York
Northfield Mount Hermon School, Mount Hermon, MA
Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
Österreichisches Theatermuseum, Vienna, Austria
Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Private Collections
Rice University, Houston, TX
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College/Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London, repository of the archives and records of the China Inland Mission School, Chefoo (now Yantai, Shandong, China)
Smith College, Northampton, MA
Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
Thacher School, Ojai, CA
University of California, Berkeley, CA
University of Chicago Library, Chicago
University of Houston, Houston, TX
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
University of Texas, Austin
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison
In lieu of a separate bibliography, titles and complete publication details are provided in the notes for all works quoted or cited. Titles, sources, and dates of Thornton Wilder’s published and unpublished work are given in full in the notes. Throughout, readers are referred to the most readily av
ailable editions of Wilder’s published works.
Major publications during his lifetime, with copyright information provided by the Wilder Family LLC c/o The Barbara Hogensen Agency, include the following:
Novels
1926: The Cabala © 1926 Wilder Family LLC
1927: The Bridge of San Luis Rey © 1927 Wilder Family LLC
1930: The Woman of Andros © 1930 Wilder Family LLC
1935: Heaven’s My Destination © 1935 Wilder Family LLC
1948: The Ides of March © 1948 Yale University, Fisk University, and Oberlin College
1967: The Eighth Day © 1967 Wilder Family LLC
1973: Theophilus North © 1973 Wilder Family LLC
Plays
1928: The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays © 1928 Wilder Family LLC
1931: The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act [The Long Christmas Dinner; Pullman Car Hiawatha; The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden; Queens of France; Love and How to Cure It; and Such Things Happen Only in Books] © 1931 Wilder Family LLC
1933: Lucrece © 1933 Wilder Family LLC
Penelope Niven Page 80