Thornton Wilder

by Penelope Niven

  Thornton’s glitzy New York life was exhilarating, but his Lawrenceville life wore him “to a frazzle.” On top of a rigorous daily schedule he was tutoring and translating to earn extra funds so he could stop teaching. He planned to spend most of his spring break in New Haven, he wrote his mother: “You may nurse me back to serenity.” He hadn’t heard from his father “since Moses was a pup,” and Thornton assumed that his own “badness has at last got the disapproval it deserves.” He asked his mother to put his father in a “gracious temper to receive me.”24

  In fact Dr. Wilder was not in the best frame of mind that winter and spring of 1924. The death of his friend and wealthy Yale classmate Edwin McClellan on January 20, 1924, had reminded him of his own mortality—and intensified his worries about earning money in his later years. To augment his income from the newspaper, Wilder still traveled to make speeches—“a sad melee of wholesome sentiment” with “a little patriotic appeal,” he wrote to Thornton. He didn’t earn much for them, but, he said, “it helps keep my family going in the latter rain—as the days draw nigh when Father’s earnings grow less if not quit—and then . . . what will poor tense Mother do then!”25

  When Dr. Wilder wasn’t worrying about money, he was worrying about his grown children. At least Charlotte was nicely settled in Boston, doing well as an editor at Youth’s Companion, and finishing work on her master’s degree at Radcliffe. Janet, now fourteen, still lived under her parents’ watchful care in New Haven. She was “horse mad” and caught up in “a stamp collecting craze” and “such an amusing, extraordinary individual!” Isabel, who had always been a homebody, was now living and working in New York. She was happily employed as an assistant to the literary agent Elizabeth Oñativia—and “having quite a lively time.” She liked earning her own money, and made enough that spring to repay loans from her mother and from Thornton, and to save thirty dollars, “so I am terribly pleased with myself,” she wrote.26

  Dr. Wilder was not pleased, however. “Isabel is in the great city [New York],” he wrote to Thornton, asking him to keep an eye on his sister.27 As for Amos, he was “sound and wholesome as a nut—no harm can befall a good man—it is well to give the world such,” Dr. Wilder told Thornton. However, he professed certain reservations about his older son, who seemed to hide away with his books and studies when he should be “out slaying lions.”28

  As Dr. Wilder’s own physical health deteriorated, a continuation of the long downward spiral generated by the Asian sprue, he worried about Amos’s physical health as well as his mental and emotional well-being. He recognized that the war had left its mark on Amos. In France in October and November 1917, Amos had suffered malaria before effective drugs were available to treat and cure the disease. People who contracted certain types of malaria could be susceptible to relapses. Could that be one cause of Amos’s occasional malaise, his seeming lack of energy—his failure to be “out slaying lions”? (This would be a lingering worry for the family, as indicated in lines from a letter Isabel wrote in 1925: “I’m afraid he’ll never be really strong. The malaria, at least, malarious symptoms, shadow him. In tennis his strength is not equal to a sustained effort. His game is still good, too good for his vitality.”)29

  Once again calling on the Yale network, Dr. Wilder arranged for Amos to be examined by Dr. George Blumer in April 1924. “Sent him to the best—ex dean of Yale Medical School,” Dr. Wilder scrawled on the back of a letter he received from the distinguished Dr. Blumer.30 “I just wanted to tell you that I found nothing physically wrong with your son,” Dr. Blumer reported after he examined Amos. “He presents a picture which is not unusual in young men who went through the period of the war and whose nervous systems have not yet quite recovered from that experience. I feel sure that ultimately he will come out all right.”31

  Dr. Wilder had his hands full trying to tend to his adult children. Thornton had apparently received—and decided to reject—an offer to teach at Yale. “As for yourself, dear Thornton: I counsel you to hold yourself in check until you have laid permanent foundations and obtained a card of introduction for the rest of your life by teaching at Yale, now the door is opened for at least two years,” his father wrote.32 It is not clear what the offer was, or why Thornton wanted to turn it down, but his father was dismayed, chiding, “We older men know one can do much who has a Forum and who is on some pay roll. ‘Thornton of Yale’ is interesting: and gets you hearers.” Dr. Wilder had no faith that his son would “find a foothold in literature or call it what you will. I know you lad, your improvidence; you have kept but little ahead of the wolf even with a king’s ransom income as youth goes.”33 However, Dr. Wilder acknowledged that Thornton had loaned him some money that “cleared a situation nicely,” and was “a great service.”34

  THORNTON WOULD not go to teach at Yale, but he did hope against hope that the MacDowell residency would come through so that he could spend the summer writing in New Hampshire. William Lyon Phelps wrote a letter of recommendation for Thornton, as did Edith Isaacs and Bill Benét, whom Thornton was now calling Mr. Elinor Wylie as his admiration for her and her poetry grew. The Benéts would be at the MacDowell Colony that summer. “If I could spend a summer near by that tremendous mind I’d die at peace,” he told his mother.35 By late May he had been accepted for residence at the colony for July and August. “I didn’t know how badly I wanted it until it was mine,” he said. He promised his mother two weeks at the beginning of the summer and three weeks at the end, and “in the interim,” he wrote, “I shall write you two of the most beautiful plays you can imagine.”36

  For the first time in his life, free of farms and summer camps and tutoring, Thornton could use most of a summer to write—and, better still, to write in a setting devoted to nurturing writers and artists. The MacDowell Colony, the first artists’ colony to be established in the United States, was founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian, on their 450-acre farm near Peterborough, New Hampshire. MacDowell, a founder of the American Academy in Rome, appreciated the stimulation and fellowship that artists from different disciplines could share. Because he found himself inspired and immensely creative at the farm, he believed that other artists could profit by the chance to retreat and work there, surrounded by beautiful forest and meadowland. Rustic private studios scattered throughout the quiet woods provided ideal working conditions, and the artists gathered at night for company. Thornton lived in the men’s dormitory with four other bachelors. Artists in residence that summer included, among others, poet Padraic Colum and his wife; Bill Benét and Elinor Wylie; and Tennessee Mitchell Anderson, recently divorced from Sherwood Anderson. She was “a handsome earthy free-speaking woman,” Thornton said, who was “the center of Chicago’s renaissance of a few years ago.”37 Thornton enjoyed her lively company, and perceived the undertones of sadness and bitterness in her exuberance. He called her “a real flame of mine.”38

  His favorite colonist at MacDowell, however, was the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. He found Robinson a man of “few graces” and “difficult, austere, an infinitely conscientious workman, as yet little known of the casual public,” despite the fact that he had won the Pulitzer Prize. Even though his fame was modest, many people thought of Robinson as “the foremost American poet.” Robinson disliked contemporary poets, Thornton discovered that summer, and “would be quite content to finish his life with Shakespeare, Racine and a spare anthology.”39 But the taciturn poet liked the fledgling playwright and novelist enough to invite him to dinner during the Christmas holidays that year.

  Thornton grew ever more enchanted with Elinor Wylie, and entrusted sheaves of his playlets to her and her husband, respecting their opinions. He reported to a friend, “I spent part of the Summer with Mrs. Bill Benét II, and singed my thinning wing at the blaze of Elinor Wylie.”40 After the hard work at the farms and summer camp of past years, Thornton was in his element, savoring the company of fellow artists, reading intensely, and turning out creative work, giving more time to hi
s plays than to his novel in progress. He kept a list of the authors he was reading—Jane Austen, H. H. Munro (Saki), Beaumont and Fletcher, Elinor Wylie, Pirandello, E. M. Forster, Molière, Sherwood Anderson, Cocteau, Proust, Maurois, and Thomas Mann, among others. He looked forward to reading Amy Lowell’s biography of Keats and Vincent d’Indy’s book on César Franck. He told a friend, “I never cry for fiction (save when I’m composing it) but I weep myself ill over biography.”41 He kept working on the Roman portraits, and by mid-August was halfway through his play alternately entitled Geraldine de Vere and Geraldine de Gray. He had also assembled the book of collected writings that he hoped Norman Fitts would publish, with Thornton’s subsidy. Its table of contents included ten three-minute playlets, three “Fables and Tirades,” and five “Roman Portraits.”

  When he was not writing and socializing, Thornton was behaving as the model guest. “I think, dear Madam, I must have been well brought up,” he wrote to his mother August 14. “How do you explain that I am the servants’ favorite? I never arrive late at meals; I keep my room so that it has no terrors for the lady cleaning up; I am prompt about laundry; I can be trusted to close doors and windows & to turn out lights.” He occasionally lit the boiler, kept it in wood and coal, and “actually worked a couple of hours stacking a woodpile today.”42 He hoped he would be invited back to the colony again.

  BY MID-SEPTEMBER he was back in Davis House at Lawrenceville, with classes that were too large and duties that were too heavy, a schedule that put an end to the immersion in writing that had been a boon in Peterborough. He was excited to hear that “one of the best friends I have in the world, Lauro de Bosis of Rome,” would be coming to the United States to lecture on Italian literature for seven months—a lecture tour that was so successful that he would be invited to lecture at Harvard, as well as to repeat the tour for several years.

  Otherwise Thornton was “ground between two millstones,” dissatisfied with both his life and his art. He was constantly worn down by the “daily threat,” and the “wonder as to next year.” He was “hankering after being recognized,” and discouraged by “the indifference of a certain person I like!” (He did not provide any details about the “certain person”—or the where, when, or why.) He was anxious about his writings—“shame that I don’t take more pains, that they aren’t better and more numerous and that I don’t think out the long ones carefully enough.” But he was thankful, he wrote to his mother, that God, with all the “endless powers of invention and variety,” had found for him “the astoundingly right family.”43

  BY 1925 Amos Parker Wilder was pleased and proud that two members of the Wilder family had earned advanced degrees—Amos, who had received his B.D. at Yale Divinity School in 1924, and Charlotte at Radcliffe, where she received an M.A. in English in 1925. In addition Isabel was about to enter the newly established three-year certificate program in the Department of Drama at the Yale School of Fine Arts, founded in 1924 with a million-dollar gift from Edward S. Harkness. The program was directed by renowned teacher of playwriting George Pierce Baker, wooed away to Yale from Harvard. Baker had trained or mentored such playwrights as Edward Sheldon and Eugene O’Neill.44 Dr. Wilder knew his own Ph.D. had been helpful during his long, variegated professional life, and he was convinced that a graduate degree was a necessary credential as well as a dependable fallback for his brilliant children. He was determined that Thornton should go on for a master’s degree.

  Despite his longing for a life in New York, Thornton understood that his father was in dead earnest about “fallbacks.” Dr. Wilder had preached to his children about fallback plans for years. Inexorably the plans began to take shape for Thornton to earn a graduate degree—but he still confided to Isabel and others his private hopes. He told a friend in January 1925 that he and Isabel were going to “rent an apartment in a bad neighborhood somewhere” and do freelance writing.45

  Nevertheless, on January 16, 1925, Thornton wrote a letter of resignation to Lawrenceville headmaster Mather Abbott, explaining that he planned to go to graduate school, and notified his father that his bridges were “burned at Lawrenceville.”46 To his surprise, after his resignation, Thornton felt some regrets about giving up teaching—and at not having done a better job of it—but he could see more clearly the shortcomings in the school administration that rankled him. He would miss many of the boys, as well as the Foresmans, who had been like family to him. But it was time to leave, and he was determined to make the most of his freedom. It dawned on him that when he went to Princeton to work on the M.A.—in French rather than English—he was going to have much more time to write fiction and drama.

  He wrote to Mrs. Isaacs about his plans for graduate school and the “secret writing” he hoped to do, reflecting that he was not going to “plunge into intensive literary life” until he could feel sure that his efforts would not be “full of odd rushes, superlatives, meaningless excitements and ridiculous adverbs.”47 Thornton shared his news with Edwin Arlington Robinson: “I’m leaving teaching and going to the Princeton Grad. College for an M. A. in Old French and the leisure for surreptitious masterpieces.”48

  Unknown to Thornton, his Princeton acceptance was granted with minimal enthusiasm: “Teaching French in Lawrenceville—seems a fair but not brilliant case,” someone typed on Thornton’s official record.49 When she heard of Thornton’s acceptance, Isabel was disappointed, but he tried to reassure her: “Don’t jump to the conclusion that our retreat next year is off.” He told Isabel that “all that can be said for Princeton is that of all the plans it’s the cheapest & safest. If I go there it will be because I shall have had to fall back upon it.”50

  Graduate school acceptance in hand, Thornton was soon alight with high hopes about writing. In the absence of her regular drama critic, John Mason Brown, Edith Isaacs offered Thornton the chance to write the annual roundup of winter openings of new plays for Theatre Arts Monthly, a major publication in the drama world from 1916 until it ceased publication in 1964. Alternately thrilled at the assignment and afraid that he would fail, Thornton saw nineteen plays in New York, and then worried and worked over his article—“The Turn of the Year,” published in Theatre Arts Monthly in March 1925.51 He feared that the piece was too long at 2,500 words, and urged Mrs. Isaacs to cut and edit it as she saw fit. “If it turns out to be longer than most,” he wrote to her, “please compress any payment down to the average without regard to the number of words.” He was “proud and happy to have done it at all,” and hoped the review would not disappoint.52 “The article is really very good indeed,” she replied, and she was “immensely pleased.”53

  Thornton’s long, self-directed apprenticeship in the theater amply prepared him to write the review. He had a near-photographic memory where theater was concerned. His wide-ranging knowledge of dramaturgy and his years of sitting attentively in theater audiences equipped him to roam a spacious landscape, from classics to contemporary plays, and to offer informed views of the success or failure of the writing, the acting, the scenery, the direction, even the adaptations or translations. He could be witty and acerbic: He noted after one play, given in translation, that he “came away thinking of how rare and eloquent it would have seemed, if one had only been deaf.”54 He gave special praise to the actress Ruth Gordon (who would later become one of his closest friends) for forcing the audience “to breathless attention” despite her minor role in Philip Barry’s The Youngest, which Thornton gave a mixed review.55 His crisply written, candid, and authoritative article garnered good reviews itself, and introduced his name and credentials to a large, informed theater audience.

  He was now working industriously to get his own plays and fiction out into the world as well. He was forging ahead with Geraldine de Gray, planning to send it out to directors at two theater groups who had asked to see it. Most promisingly of all, however, there was some interest in his novel. The overture came from his Yale classmate Lewis Baer, who had been impressed with Thornton’s stories in their college days. Sin
ce graduation, Baer had worked at the New York World, and then in the advertising and publicity departments at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. In 1924 he joined Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., a new publishing company founded by brothers Albert and Charles Boni in 1923, becoming secretary and treasurer of the firm.56

  Albert Boni, previously of Boni & Liveright, brought significant publishing experience as well as a literary sensibility to his work, and would directly or indirectly launch some innovative publishing ventures. He had owned the Washington Square Bookshop in New York, and founded the Little Leather Library, publishing short versions of classics in a small, inexpensive format, and marketing them through Woolworth’s stores. In 1917 he had sold his shop and gone into the publishing business full-time with Horace Liveright. The Boni & Liveright Publishing Company initiated the popular Modern Library of the World’s Best Classics series. (One of their best salesmen was Bennett Cerf, who eventually bought the series, and went on to found Random House.) From the outset of their new publishing venture Albert and Charles Boni sought to publish contemporary authors. Their edgy list included Colette, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Upton Sinclair, Leon Trotsky—and soon, Thornton Wilder.

  When Baer approached Thornton about whether he had a book in progress, Thornton sent him a draft of the Roman memoirs. He waited half in excitement, half in dread, to hear what Baer would have to say. Biding his time as long as he could stand to, Thornton wrote to Baer in February to inquire about the manuscript, convinced that the Boni firm would turn it down.57 Two weeks later came a heartening letter from Baer. He and the Bonis had “cleared away some of the piles” of manuscripts on their desks for the spring season, and had managed at last to read Thornton’s manuscript—the first book of the Roman memoirs. “I am more than delighted to report that we are all crazy about it,” Baer wrote. “Albert Boni feels so strongly about your style that he is very anxious to see more.” He asked Thornton to send along more of the manuscript, as well as anything else he wanted them to see. “I do hope we will be able to get together a book which can mean the start of your career as an author (in print! I mean). No one would be happier than I.”58