Thornton Wilder

by Penelope Niven

  You and I and Isabel and Janet or everybody are taking a house near London (Oxford or the Thames-side) all Summer. And we, all or some or more, are staying there until March. Then I am coming back to lecture for two months under Lee Keedick (the best: Margot Asquith and G. K. Chesterton and Hugh Walpole). You stay on if you like.42

  Wilder wanted his mother to go over to England early in the spring to “find a house with a garden, please. . . . And a big house.”43 It needed to be spacious, not only for the family but for houseguests. He told her that he would be traveling abroad in July with three Lawrenceville boys “vaguely” under his care, that the boys would “drop in and out during the Summer,” and that Gene Tunney would visit in the fall.44 Not to worry about the expense; they could afford it: He had just received six thousand dollars from the Boni firm, he told his mother. Etching the words in deeper, darker ink, he promised her that there was “More monthly” to come.45

  Wilder’s sudden success, prosperity, and fame inundated him with opportunities, challenges, and frequent headaches. He was unhappy with his publishers, who had been, in the case of The Cabala, careless and even inattentive in the production of the book. The Bonis were often slow to promote his books, late with royalty payments, and not as supportive as Wilder wished of his ideas for future projects. He decided early in 1928 to take matters into his own hands. For one thing, he was being wooed by Harper & Brothers publishing executive Cass Canfield, just Wilder’s age, a Harvard graduate, World War I veteran, reporter, and advertising man, and three years away from becoming president of Harper.

  On January 16, 1928, Wilder wrote to Cass Canfield to say that he wished to commit himself to Harper on the condition that “the House of Harpers will consent to subsidize me to the extent of five thousand a year for three years beginning June 1929” even though that period would include some of the time when he would be completing the books he was obligated to give Albert and Charles Boni. In return Wilder would consider all future books to belong to Harper, except for the book of his short plays which was set to be published by Coward-McCann, since the Bonis were not interested in bringing it out. The fifteen thousand dollars from Harper would constitute an advance on royalties for “at least two novels of 50,000 words [each] or more.” If it turned out that Wilder would not need the advance sum, he wrote, he would be “willing to enter into a contract along the ordinary lines” on terms satisfactory to the author and the publisher.46 In what was a highly unusual arrangement, Wilder signed a secret agreement promising to move to Harper once his contractual obligations to the Boni firm were fulfilled.

  “I’ve been going thru Hades; breaking with the Bonis,” he wrote to the Townsons in mid-February. “I went about it all wrong and now there are scenes, and gore, and screams. Heaven help me, but [it] had to be. But gee I could have done it more nicely and I’m sunk in self-reproach.”47 By late June he was a “wore out schoolteacher just comin’ back to life,” and he was afraid he was going to have to resort to litigation over some of his snarled contracts.48 At his father’s encouragement, he turned to the New Haven lawyer J. Dwight Dana for legal advice. “A week ago I took unto myself a lawyer so that he could keep my poor contracts and papers and he found out that I had been vague and amiable and that my affairs were in a bad way.”49 From that time on Wilder relied on Dana and then his firm, Wiggin & Dana, founded in 1934.

  In February, Wilder had faced another professional decision. He found in his stack of mail a letter from renowned lecture agent Lee Keedick, who represented and sometimes managed public figures including polar explorers such as Sir Ernest Shackleton and Capt. Roald Amundsen, and the controversial Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Keedick usually had a waiting list of eager prospective clients, and it was significant that he solicited Wilder. “If you ever plan to do any lecturing I shall be glad to meet you at your convenience and discuss the matter in its many phases,” Keedick wrote on February 4, 1928. “I feel confident that the public would welcome an opportunity to hear you on the lecture platform.”50

  Wilder replied in a brief note February 9, putting Keedick off.51 But the impresario was a fast worker. On February 15 he met with Wilder in Lawrenceville, and departed with a signed contract in hand.52 On February 21 he sent Wilder a copy of an advertising circular for his approval. “Of course, you may not approve of some of the statements,” Keedick wrote, “but please remember that the committees realize this is our appraisal of you, and not your own opinion of yourself.”53

  Wilder fired back his objections on February 23. “I have never been in South America. And in the next sentence I could hardly have ‘evolved the . . . Perichole’ because she was a historic woman. . . . The heading: ‘Greatest novel of the age’ is liable to antagonize really cultivated people rather than win them. Tolstoi and Hardy and Conrad haven’t been dead so awfully long.” Wilder also objected to the statement that he was unsurpassed “ ‘by any foreign writer.’ Sure, I’m [un]surpassed by a good many foreign authors, but, my god, by all?? I suppose you meant scarcely surpassed. And even that’s a bit thick.”54 He then added what had to be an unusual request: “Don’t put me down as terribly expensive, Mr. Keedick. Or make it plain that there is a sliding scale for serious educational institutions. I couldn’t face an audience if I thought they were astonished that such a ‘humanitarian’ author was after big cold prices.”55

  Wilder’s first formal public lecture resulted from an invitation to give the Daniel S. Lamont Memorial Lecture on the topic of “English Letters and Letter Writers” at the Sampson Lyceum at Yale on May 4, 1928.56 Wilder apologized to Keedick in advance: The lecture was “rotten,” he wrote, and it was meant to be read rather than delivered with any drama or style.57 He wrote at least two lengthy drafts of the lecture, the one he apparently delivered in 1928 and one he adapted and expanded to use on his lecture tour. In both texts he discussed such great English letter writers as Horace Walpole, William Cowper, and Edward FitzGerald, and gave special attention to the Frenchwoman he considered the greatest of all letter writers—Mme de Sévigné. In the more formal draft of the lecture—apparently the text he delivered in 1928—Wilder advocated reading the great letter writers on three levels: “the surface level, that is the literary exercise; the second level . . . the profile of a personality; and the third level, which is news of the soul.”58 (He called this trait “news from within” in the other draft.) The 1928 text is also notable for Wilder’s reflections on the art of writing in whatever genre: “Art is confession; art is the secret told,” Wilder wrote, adding later in the lecture,

  but art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and to hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life, the alternations between one’s hope of self-improvement and one’s self-reproach at one’s failures. “Out of our quarrels with other people we make rhetoric,” said William Butler Yeats; “out of our quarrels with ourselves we make literature.”59

  WILDER’S NEW celebrity opened the door to new friendships. On the train home from Miami after Christmas in 1928, Wilder had met that “young wizard in the Broadway theatre,” Jed Harris, who, before he was thirty years old, had produced and directed such Broadway hits as Broadway (1926), Coquette (1927), The Royal Family (1927), and The Front Page (1928). Although Harris and Wilder had overlapped at Yale, they had not known each other during their college days, and on the train, Harris actually mistook Thornton for Amos, the “tennis player at Yale.”60

  Wilder stayed in touch with Gene Tunney, who invited him to visit his training camp in the Adirondacks once the school year ended. “I’m sure you would find it interesting in seeing the way a ‘champion’ prepares for a contest,” Tunney wrote to Wilder, “and healthful in trying to keep up with a ‘champion’ in his daily exercises.”61 Tunney would be training for his upcoming world heavyweight championship bout, defending his title against a challenge from the New Zealand boxer Tom Heeney. Wilder wrote back to accept the invitation to Tu
nney’s camp, and to propose that they travel in Europe together in the fall. “I am particularly interested in two things,” Tunney replied on January 30:

  First that you will come to my camp during the summer and spend more than I hope five or six days, as you suggest, and the idea of doing Europe in the way you suggest this fall. I have made up my mind to go abroad this fall but have had only vague notions of what I would do when there. Your . . . outline of a proposed trip with you is just exquisite. I love the idea. That, to me, would be the most perfect way of doing Europe. We will give the thought great contemplation between now and the time I see you this spring.62

  By March the two men were making firm plans to travel together in August in England, France, or the Aegean Islands. Tunney told Wilder in confidence that he planned to box only once in 1928, in the summer, and the rest of the year he would be free to do as he liked. What he did not tell Wilder or almost anyone else was that for nearly two years he had been carrying on a secret romance with Carnegie Steel heiress Polly Lauder, and that he had decided he would retire from boxing after the Heeney fight, his last contractual commitment.

  Admiring and befriending writers as he did, Tunney was genuinely pleased to observe Wilder’s success: “Well, I see, old fellow, they are pushing you up, up, ever up and skyward,” he wrote in March. “It certainly is most gratifying to me. It’s amazing how rapidly one’s star climbs. You have hitched your wagon to a star that soars as rapidly as a meteor falls. I am watching your rise from the side-lines, and I hope all this lionizing will not affect your well-balanced head.”63

  Then there was Scott Fitzgerald. When Wilder found a letter from Fitzgerald in the mountain of his mail, he wrote back promptly to say, “I have been an admirer, not to say a student, of the Great Gatsby too long not to have got a great kick out of your letter.” He hoped they might meet and “have some long talks on what writing’s all about,” Wilder wrote, adding,

  As you see I am a provincial schoolmaster and have always worked alone. And yet nothing interests me more than thinking of our generation as a league and as a protest to the whole cardboard generation that precedes us from Wharton through Cabell and Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. I know Hemingway. Glenway Wescott, I think, is coming down here for a few days soon. I’d like to think that you’d be around Princeton before long and ready for some long talks. I like teaching a lot and shall probably remain here for ages; a daily routine is necessary to me: I have no writing habits, am terribly lazy and write seldom. I’d be awfully proud if you arrived in my guestroom some time.64

  He sent Fitzgerald a copy of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and soon received an invitation to visit Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in February at Ellerslie, the supposedly haunted nineteenth-century mansion they had rented at Edgemoor, overlooking the Delaware River, on the outskirts of Wilmington, Delaware. The two men apparently met in February when Fitzgerald spoke at the Princeton Cottage Club, for Wilder wrote to him that his speech was a “wow,” and the audience wanted more. They were now “Thornt.” and “Scotty,” and in anticipation of his visit to the Fitzgeralds, Wilder wrote, “It is wonderful to have been liked by you and to have been told so, for the self-confidence I have exhibited toward my work I have never been able to extend to my person.”65

  Among the other guests for that particular one of the Fitzgeralds’ legendary wild literary weekends was Edmund Wilson, then managing editor of the New Republic. Wilson and Wilder met on the journey to Ellerslie, and Wilson described their meeting in February 1928 in some detail in “A Weekend at Ellerslie,” collected in his book The Shores of Light (1952). Wilson would first review Wilder’s novels in August 1928, but had not yet read Wilder’s books when they met on the train en route to see the Fitzgeralds. Wilson wrote that he had “the impression that [Wilder’s] novels were rather on the fragile and precious side,” and was, therefore, “surprised to find him a person of such positive and even peppery opinions.”66 He was further impressed that in the animated and, in some cases, inebriated company that evening, Wilder held his own in the conversation and the drinking, but “remained sharply and firmly” sober. (Wilder had long since forsaken his boyhood temperance pledge.) By one account, later in the evening the drunken Fitzgerald took Wilder up to the attic to show him something and accidentally fired a gun, just barely missing him.67 In Wilson’s version of the evening, however, “Scarcely had we left the table when the Fitzgeralds announced they were going to bed and left the guests to fend for themselves.” Scott Fitzgerald slept all night, according to Wilson, but Zelda, refreshed after a few hours’ sleep, rejoined the guests later in the evening, and, as Wilson recalled, Wilder left Ellerslie early the next morning.68

  Fitzgerald answered Wilder’s note of thanks with appreciation, a request, and a compliment: “Thank you for your friendship, for it is that,” Fitzgerald said, “and for being such a hell of a nice person as well as a fine workman.” The request: Zelda wanted to read some modern French writers in French—but writers who were “not so hard as Proust.” Could Wilder recommend some books that Fitzgerald could find at Brentano’s? The compliment: The Fitzgeralds’ six-year-old daughter, Scottie, “announced that she liked you much the best of any of ‘the people,’ ” and Wilder was “a hit” with the rest of the family as well. They hoped he would come to Ellerslie again soon. Fitzgerald teased that he was thinking of publishing two of his own novels in one volume and “calling them ‘the Cabala.’ What do you think? . . . I am writing this under difficulties,” Fitzgerald joked at the end of his three-page letter. “There is a highball at my elbow but I keep drinking out of the ink bottle by mistake.”69

  Soon afterward came a note from Zelda thanking Wilder for sending her several books in French, and telling him he was “gargantuanly nice” to send them. “The books are divine and very depressing and I appreciate enormously your sending them,” she wrote. “They are exactly right for my capacities in French and I am amazed that foreign words should actually make sense but not too much of it, like English ones do.” She told Wilder that she, Scott, and Scottie were sailing on the Paris for France on April 20, and that they hoped to see him there later in the year. The sudden change of plans—for they had a two-year lease on Ellerslie—was, Zelda wrote, “All on account of a trip to New York and a bouncer and a taxi-driver, a doctor and the visceral system—and our attempt to condition the night clubs to us.”70

  ON MARCH 10, 1928, the president and fellows of Yale University voted to award Wilder an honorary master of arts degree at the commencement exercises set for June 29, 1928.71 While grateful and flattered, Wilder was still uncomfortable with his sudden celebrity and did not believe he had accomplished enough to justify the honor. He worked over a draft of a letter, explaining his reasons for declining, and expressing his belief that “a number of years must pass before I feel sufficiently mature enough to take my place for what I hope may be some public usefulness.”72 (In 1947 Wilder accepted an honorary doctorate from Yale in a company of honorees that included the poet T. S. Eliot, the scientist Linus Pauling, and the theologian Henry Pitney Van Dusen, among others.)

  Wilder labored through the spring of 1928 to carry on his Lawrenceville work, prepare for the Lamont lecture, and juggle the demands of his literary life. Meantime his friend Gene Tunney was preparing for a lecture of his own. Knowing of Tunney’s love of Shakespeare, William Lyon Phelps of Yale invited Tunney to lecture to his Shakespeare class on April 23, 1928. So many Yale students wanted to hear Tunney speak that there was a standing-room-only crowd in a large auditorium on campus. Speaking informally, without notes, for about forty-five minutes, Tunney told his audience that when he was a marine during World War I he decided to read Shakespeare. He began with The Winter’s Tale, which he read ten times before he believed he understood the play.73 For a writer everything is material: A few years later, in Wilder’s novel Heaven’s My Destination, the hero, George Brush, reads King Lear ten times trying to find the talent in it.

  “You are a ‘kindred spirit’
and our ‘kinship’ started aeons and aeons ago on some spiritual plane of eternity,” Tunney wrote to Wilder in June. “There is no measuring it by weeks or months or years. It seems to have always been.” He told Wilder that he never discussed his “real” friends with journalists because those real friends were “too sacred for that.”74 There was already wide press coverage of the European jaunt Tunney and Wilder were planning, for they were two highly visible celebrities that summer of 1928—the book-loving heavyweight champion of the world, preparing to face a challenger for the title in July in Yankee Stadium, and the novelist who had just won the Pulitzer Prize, and whose book was an international bestseller.

  Wilder arranged for a leave of absence from Lawrenceville for the coming academic year, wrapped up the semester, and, not long after commencement, traveled to Speculator, New York, to join Tunney at his spartan Adirondack training camp. There Wilder could see how Tunney trained and prepared for a fight, and at the same time, he could get some much-needed rest and vigorous exercise himself. There was little privacy, however, with curious reporters on the scene. “Tunney and Wilder Plunge into River as Canoe Upsets,” reported the New York Times on June 29, 1928, noting that the champion and the author had no difficulty swimming to shore after their canoe capsized in the “chilly waters” of the Kunjamuck River.75 According to Wilder, Tunney had taken along a copy of William Hazlitt’s essays when they embarked, and he surfaced after the canoe flipped over holding the Hazlitt book between his teeth.76 Years later Wilder remembered fondly “the fun we had at the training camp in The Adirondacks” and his “delighted surprise” when he was “trotting beside” Tunney, who turned to him “after stepping on a caterpillar” and solemnly and aptly quoted Shakespeare: “ ‘The humblest beetle that we tread upon in corporal sufferance feels a pang as great as when a giant dies.’ ”77