Thornton Wilder

by Penelope Niven

  By the fall of 1934, overworked and anxious, Amos was physically ill with a stubborn case of grippe, and again lapsed into a state of “nervous depletion.”34 To his chagrin his doctor ordered absolute rest and required him to take leave from his classes and go to New Haven to recuperate. He was bedridden there during the Thanksgiving holidays, surrounded by his parents, Isabel, and Charlotte for company. (“Father is getting to be very much of an invalid,” Amos worried.)35 At his doctor’s orders Amos traveled to Florida in December 1934 with instructions to recuperate in the sun and not to return to teaching until January at the earliest. “It seems my reservoirs, so to speak, had gone down so very low that it meant a really long time to fill them up again,” he reflected. He had little physical energy, and could not “read anything solid for any length of time.” He recognized that his efforts to work despite his illness “very ill-advisedly, got to my nerves some.”36 His physical illness was compounded by the lingering stress of the war. But his long recovery was made more bearable because in Geneva, Switzerland, in the summer of 1934, he had met a young teacher, Catharine Kerlin, from Moorestown, New Jersey. Many years later Amos described the life-changing encounter:

  As a long-time bachelor into my late thirties, I waited so long surveying the field and looking for perfection that I very nearly became a life-long Benedict. Then the rescue came from an unexpected quarter. Like many reluctant swains I felt especially on guard against red-haired maidens, against Kates . . . and against teachers. But then this Catharine turned up in Geneva who not only had bronze in her hair but turned to teaching. But I couldn’t help myself. When we became engaged and married in 1935 we both saved each other from a dubious fate. She was being sounded out to be a head mistress in a private school. I was so far gone that I was thinking about founding a Congregational monastery of celibates.37

  Their relationship grew despite the geographical distances between them. The miles were bridged by letters, and she saved most of his. From Andover Newton, he mailed a letter to her aboard the SS Champlain, due to dock in New York on September 18, 1934. He told her he treasured “very much” the memory of their meetings in Geneva, and would be “very much disappointed” if they could not see each other early in the fall. They had several weekend visits before Amos got sick. By Christmas he was recuperating in a “big quiet room” with an ocean view in an “ultra clean boarding house run by a very motherly and helpful woman” in St. Petersburg, Florida.38 He and Catharine continued to exchange long letters, and soon Amos was in love. He wanted to send her flowers but held back for fear that at the girls’ boarding school where she taught she would have “been in for a general razzing.” Instead he sent her a box of pecans from the Kumquat Sweet Shop in Clearwater, Florida. “If I ever bother you, you just tell me to slow up,” he wrote, “and I will be perfectly amenable. Our relation started off so perfectly that it shouldn’t ever have any misunderstandings—as so many; and we can have it so by speaking right out.”39

  Amos was still in Florida in late January, improving, but not strong enough to travel home and resume his teaching schedule. He was living for her letters, he told Catharine, and eager for a reunion with her.40 Thornton wrote to Les Glenn about Amos’s illness: “Amos had a kind of nervous breakdown. CONFIDENTIAL. Phobias and tics. Started off by intestinal flu. He feels much better now.”41 By mid-March Amos was planning his journey home.42 Soon after his return Amos and Catharine were engaged. He reflected many years later that he “suffered the happy fate of being married to an internationalist, a can-doer, a nest builder.”43

  WHILE THORNTON was perpetually on the road during the thirties, events on the home front were always on his mind, and the family followed his achievements with pride, although in his father’s case, with some skepticism. “Thornton’s book a success,” Dr. Wilder wrote to Charlotte after Heaven’s My Destination appeared in January 1935. “London papers favorable. I presume conservatives not all favorable!” He went on to tell her, “I suspect Hawthorne and Geo. Eliot would handle certain aspects differently and shall tell Thornton so though I have not read it in full.” He urged Charlotte and Amos to “sit in judgment” on Thornton’s books so they could advise him of “obvious shortcomings” because, the father said, “the good fellow must learn things. Suffering is a severe school.”44

  To Grace Foresman, his friend since Lawrenceville days, Thornton wrote from Chicago to sum up his life: “I still enjoy teaching tremendously, and especially on this campus and in this city,” he said. “My family is all well, except Papa whose health is uneven. Mother still is so attached to her house and garden that we can’t budge her away more than one night.” He reported that his delays in delivering his new novel had driven his publishers “insane.” He warned her, “Be prepared for the fact that it’s utterly unlike the other novels; nearer to The Happy Journey to Trenton & Camden. I hope it amuses you and touches you, Grace! An author really writes for a few friends; the indistinct public foots the bill.”45

  He wrote to another friend, offering an apology:

  A good deal of the book is tough, full of bad words and life’s unlovelier traps; but I hope you will see that none of the coarseness is there for cheap display. The subject of the book goes quietly on under the surface din: the earnest humorless undefeated hero trying to live an extravagantly idealistic life in the middle of a cynical defeatist world—a Gideon-Bible travelling salesman. On the title page I placed the motto from The Woman of Andros so that readers wouldn’t think it was merely a rowdy comic book—“Of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age”—namely priggishness, preachiness, confusion, etc. I hope it will be somehow useful to a lot of troubled young people.46

  Wilder mailed an advance copy of the book to Grace Foresman in December, describing its intended mood: “Today I sent you a book that I hope will make you laugh right out loud once in a while, even tho’ some parts of it are as sad as sad can be.”47

  Soon after Heaven’s My Destination hit the bookstores, Thornton told Amos that he had “made a slip and got the actual name of a girl-evangelist in [the book], and may be seriously sued for libel” for showing her taking cocaine. “ Sure I’ll pay,” Thornton went on, “but won’t the trial be fascinating! Me as George Brush insisting on her taking all my money and more and then me as Sir Walter Scott diligently writing novels for years to pay a mountainous debt?”48 Fortunately nothing came of the matter.

  Thornton had his own longing for home during those years in the thirties, and he expressed it in a letter to his brother after Amos married his Catharine: “I think of you as having everything I haven’t got,” Wilder wrote from Vienna in September 1935. “You have a home, a continuity, a job. . . . I’m longing to settle down, as you have, and start a routine of working and reading and quiet evenings at home. I think I can begin it about next week, but until then I remain a hotel-room boy surrounded by cracked and overflowing suitcases.”49

  WHILE THE Wilders lived out their family saga in the thirties, George Brush, Thornton’s picaresque hero, was searching for home and family in the fictional universe of Heaven’s My Destination. As he turns twenty-three, this traveling textbook salesman believes he should already have put down roots and “founded an American home.” He says to an acquaintance, “You know what I think is the greatest thing in the world? It’s when a man, I mean an American, sits down to Sunday dinner with his wife and six children around him.”50 He aspires to “settle down and found an American home.”51 When he tries to persuade a young woman to marry him and share “a fine American home,” he enlists the help of his prospective sister-in-law to convince Roberta, his reluctant bride. “Will you go and ask her to come here?” George pleads. “And, Lottie, listen: we’ll have a nice home somewhere and you can come in all the time for Sunday dinner, and the whole family can come in from the farm, too. We’ll have some fine times, you’ll see.”52

  Later on, when Roberta wants to leave the marriage, George is in despair:

  “I don’t want to go on!
” he cried. “What good does it do to go to work if I haven’t got a home to work for?” He put his hands over his face. “I don’t want to live,” he said. “Everything goes wrong.”53

  To no avail he offers to give up his job “because my home’s more important to me than my business is.”54 Alone again, George feels a “stab of physical pain” when “on the evening walks, he glimpsed through half-drawn blinds the felicities of an American home.”55

  In Heaven’s My Destination, as in much of the work that lay ahead, Wilder the novelist, the dramatist, and the literary archaeologist would excavate and explore the felicities and challenges of family—of home.

  23

  “STRANDS AND THREADS”

  Since I have been keeping this Journal I have seen the incidents of the day’s life in a new light. One aspect of this consideration of events is the surprising discovery that life is more a matter of strands and threads.

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  journal, May 26, 1917

  The United States and Europe (1930s)

  During the thirties Wilder wove into his work the “strands and threads” of his family life, his teaching life, his life on the road—and, always, his rich imaginative and intellectual life. In 1941, writing of Joyce and Cervantes, Wilder said, “The history of a writer is his search for his own subject, his myth-theme, hidden from him, but prepared for him in every hour of his life, his Gulliver’s Travels, his Robinson Crusoe.”1 Taking Wilder at his word, it appears that “every hour of his life” had prepared him to write, in a handful of years, Heaven’s My Destination and then Our Town—two landmark works infused with his predominant myth-themes: How do you live? How do you bear the unbearable? How do you handle the various dimensions of love, of faith, of the human condition? How do universal elements forge every unique, individual human life? And where does the family fit in the cosmic scheme of things?

  Wilder was offered a variety of jobs in the midthirties, turning down invitations to host a radio show, lecture aboard a luxury yacht in the Greek islands, and cover a sensational murder trial. When he received a tentative offer to edit a “class woman’s magazine,” Wilder was actually momentarily tempted, but the firm offer and the position never materialized. “Why should I even consider it?” he wrote to his lawyer.

  For the same reason that I go to Hollywood: adventure, color, the exhilaration of even pretending that I have a part to play in the immense bright stream of Twentieth Century activities. These things have no relation to my midnight secret life of literary composition. I’m Jekyll and Hyde. With the side of me which is not Poet, and there’s lots of it, I like to do things, meet people, restlessly experiment in untouched tracts of my Self, be involved in things, make decisions, pretend that I’m a man of action.2

  During the 1930s he was a man in constant motion, if not a man of action, juggling the parts he wanted to play—migrating from fiction to drama, from teaching in the university to lecturing in auditoriums and civic halls across the country, from fraternizing with literary lights and the intelligentsia to mingling with producers, screenwriters, and stars in Hollywood. Wilder’s first formal movie contract was negotiated in 1934 by Rosalie Stewart and Harry Edington of the H. E. Edington–F. W. Vincent Agency, whose clients included Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and other luminaries. This agreement took Wilder to the RKO studios in Hollywood for two weeks in 1934 to discuss ideas for a possible movie about Joan of Arc, starring Katharine Hepburn, with George Cukor directing. Wilder was paid fifteen hundred dollars and engaged to write a forty-page outline, which, if accepted, would lead to the assignment to write the movie script and be present for the filming.

  ENTIRE OFFICE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT YOUR MAGNIFICENT TREATMENT OF JOAN OF ARC, his agents telegraphed in May 1934, and Wilder waited to hear if he would be called back to work on the film for an additional fee of $13,500.3 While there was perhaps gratuitous praise for Wilder’s treatment, RKO declined to exercise his option on the grounds that they wanted to approach the film from a different angle. As it turned out, RKO abandoned the project, apparently because of lack of money, a growing concern even in Hollywood during the Depression.

  It was no doubt a disadvantage to the Joan of Arc treatment that Wilder the scholar seemed to overtake Wilder the dramatist as he emphasized the authenticity of his research, occasionally burdened his characters with cumbersome dialogue, and justified the didactic intentions for certain scenes—such as those in heaven, which were important, he explained,

  1. To please the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church.

  2. To raise the closing scenes of the picture from the realm of physical suffering and torture to the realm of a triumphant moral victory.

  3. To cast over even the homely passages an arresting awe-inspiring sense of divine intervention and guidance,—applicable to every member of the audience.4

  Wilder wanted to satisfy what he presumed would be the audience’s curiosity about what it felt like to be a saint, and what ordinary daily life was like for a “great historical character” (an idea he would revisit in his novel The Ides of March). He hoped the audience would come to “the final acceptance and willing grasp of death as a meaningful, triumphant and necessary ACT.”5 This lofty scenario did not suit Hollywood—but there are glimmerings of the third act of Our Town in Wilder’s depiction of “ordinary daily life,” and in his words about death.

  Wilder was intrigued with the potential of the motion picture as an art form, and beguiled by the opportunity to earn so much money so fast for so little work. In the summer of 1934, Samuel Goldwyn asked Wilder to come to Hollywood to “add words to a former silent picture of Ronald Coleman’s called ‘Dark Angel’ ” and then to “write a new climactic closing scene to Anna Sten’s ‘We Live Again’ (Tolstoi’s Resurrection).” Wilder reported that he wrote three scenes that had been “shot,” and so, he concluded, “I have had my baptism in the films.”6 When We Live Again appeared in 1934, Wilder did not expect or receive a film credit.

  It was a heady existence, balancing the adventure and color of movieland with his “midnight secret life” as a serious writer. His Hollywood social life quickly grew to be even more fun than his exuberant life in Chicago—although not as emotionally satisfying because it was shallow and fleeting. While he often made fun of it, Wilder relished the glitz and glamour of Hollywood in what has been called its golden age. There were moments when his own life in Hollywood could have been a movie, starring some of the biggest names in films, with himself in a cameo guest spot. He even made the Hollywood Sidelights syndicated gossip column on September 14, 1934, hailed as a “Lion at Parties” and a “tremendous success” in the many divergent circles of Hollywood society that he had “penetrated.” The columnist Mollie Herrick admired his “genius for laughter and play” and his ability to switch in an instant from “nonsense to profundity.”7

  Wilder dined at Pickfair with Mary Pickford. The actress Marion Davies, supported by her lover, William Randolph Hearst, “sent out a collaborator to cook up a story for Miss Davies’ use in the movies,” Wilder wrote to Mabel Luhan. “It’s all about how a girl dressed as a boy and became the creator of all Shakespeare’s heroines at the Globe Theatre: Willie Hewes, the dark lady of the Sonnets. Yes, Essex and Elizabeth are in it. Did you ever hear anything more foolish?”8 The writer, film director, and composer Rupert Hughes (the uncle of Howard Hughes) took Wilder to a Hollywood Writers Club dinner, during which, Wilder said, he made a “short bad speech,” Will Rogers made a “long heavenly one,” and there was an earthquake.9

  Ruth Gordon was in town for screen tests at MGM, and “dazzled the powers over there,” Wilder wrote to the actor Charles Laughton, predicting that “something big will come of them.”10

  Wilder was spending time with Gordon, Laughton, and Helen Hayes, as well as screenwriters such as the playwrights Paul Green and Charles Lederer, the latter best known for his often edgy comedies. Lederer was “sick in bed of trying to build a movie about Mr. Wm. R. Hearst’s sce
nario,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott. “I am very fond of Charlie and to my great surprise he is very fond of me. We collaborated on a skit about censorship for the gala number of the Hollywood Reporter. I refused to sign my own name and used James Craven instead.”11

  The family back home in Connecticut followed Hollywood gossip and happenings with keen interest, and because the frugal Wilders could now afford to indulge in the occasional telegram, Wilder sent one to his mother on September 8, 1934: WAS OFFERED AND TURNED DOWN SOLO JOB ON NEXT GARBO PICTURE STOP ROLLER SKATED WITH WALT DISNEY.12

  But Hollywood life was not all glamour, he wrote his friend Grace Foresman. “It’s a mixture of very hard work and the industrious contrivance of untruths.”13 It was a dazzling, illusory, addictive, and often exhausting life with intense, deadline-driven work, and the drinking he was now doing at night with his new cohorts. It was enough to drive a man back to teaching. “Now I’m dying to withdraw from the whole business, refuse any money, and return to my university work, my correspondence, my reading and my thoughts,” he said. “I haven’t the strength to break off. Really.”14

  For Wilder, as for other novelists and playwrights who hired out in Hollywood during the Depression, there could be big payoffs, and Wilder had the chance to work on some serious projects in addition to the proposed Joan of Arc film. He collaborated with Paul Green to rewrite the final scene of Sam Goldwyn’s We Live Again, based on Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Goldwyn pronounced their work beautiful, but Wilder, Green, and three other writers did not receive on-screen credit for the finished product; the credit went, of course, to the principal screenwriters, Maxwell Anderson, Preston Sturges, and Leonard Praskins.15