Thornton Wilder

by Penelope Niven

  One American characteristic that Wilder especially prized was mobility, which, thanks to his car, meant independence. He was traveling now in a gray Mercury Dynaflow convertible with red leather seats. He loved the freedom of the American road, where he could drive himself to New Hampshire or Rhode Island or Florida, or to Atlantic City or Tucson, or to the Massachusetts coast, where he and Isabel took refuge in the summer, or to Maine, where Amos and Catharine had built a summer cabin at Blue Hill. There was also the freedom of the sea, his escape route to Europe. By mid-September Wilder was on the way to Europe again, hoping to continue his Norton work in Italy and France. He was convinced he could get some rest on the voyage; he told his lawyer, as he told many others, “Baby’s best on a boat.”6 He was back home in Hamden in November but soon headed off again, this time to Florida. More peripatetic than ever, he planned to go to Key West and maybe to Havana, or maybe to Tucson, and then—who knew where?7

  Wilder was in New York on May 28, 1952, to accept the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He had been elected to membership in the academy in 1939.8 Pearl Buck presented him with the “highest honor for fiction” bestowed by the National Institute of Arts and Letters (the “inner body” of the Academy), observing that it was rare to “find a writer gifted and successful in such different fields as the play and the novel.”9 In his acceptance Wilder identified two “essential requirements” of the novelist: “He must be more interested in human beings than in forming generalized ideas about human beings; and he must believe profoundly in the principle of freedom in the life of the human mind.”10

  The accolades kept coming: On June 9 Wilder was at Oberlin College, where he and his brother would receive honorary degrees. The college conferred an honorary doctorate of divinity on Amos, now Professor of New Testament Interpretation at the Chicago Theological Seminary at the University of Chicago. Thornton received an honorary doctor of letters degree and gave the commencement address. He was “triply happy” that he and his brother would receive honorary degrees at the same time.11 His commencement address, “Wrestling with Thoreau,” was one of his Norton lectures, tailored for the occasion.

  THE WILDERS were keeping careful watch over Charlotte, who was now living on her own in Greenwich Village. “So I had lunch with Sharlie,” Wilder had written to Isabel in the fall of 1951. He was happy to see that his sister was “most definitely better in every way. Hat and dress downright smart. She’s now forbidden liquor and smokes only some expensive de-nicotined cigarettes.” He noted the irony, however, that although Charlotte seemed “almost completely well,” her conversations were less interesting.12 Had he been privy to some of the prose she was writing at the time, he would have changed his mind on both counts. “My life is a smashed crystal—I don’t know any other way to describe it,” she wrote.

  It is like the lens of a huge telescope that an explosive bullet has struck; the glass has not fallen out, but the entire surface—even the inside—shows an infinite cross-pattern of a mosaic of cracks without a centre. This situation, of course, started, as it happens[,] virtually with birth; but the inciting cause of the present situation began in what my notes tell me was 1940—about eleven years ago, or a trifle more. . . . The gist of the centre of it, itself, I think, is the complex of ten years in hospitals and psychiatric institutions, for a double reason—one of which, the one that kept me there the full ten years, was “a severe nervous breakdown,” which only I, of all the world, evidently, know that I did not have. . . .13

  The sister and brother summarized their lives with metaphors that were uncannily similar images, yet with enormously different implications: Charlotte’s life was a smashed crystal, a mosaic of cracks without a center. Thornton’s life was kaleidoscopic—a “beautifully ordered though multi-fragmented pattern.”

  However, Charlotte had shown so much improvement nearly three years after her lobotomy that her doctors had decided she could try to live independently. With Thornton’s financial support, she rented an apartment at 220 Sullivan Street, off Washington Square, and was soon “on a high grade octane work program,” she wrote to Isabel. “Writing like dear life.” She wanted to resume her writing career, planning, she said, to “write out of the experience of the last ten years. (That will be an exposition of my character that will certainly put me on a guillotine in the public gaze!)”14 But most of the time she didn’t know what to write, and still insisted that she had never had a “nervous breakdown or any other mental or physical trouble.”15

  In the winter of 1951–52, Charlotte stopped taking care of herself, failed to eat properly, filled her apartment to overflowing with newspapers. “Honey, why will you collect old papers?” Thornton wrote to her. “I’m the quickest tearer-upper in the world. Isabel’s always afraid that I’m about to throw away some ‘treasure.’ ” He liked rooms “as near to monastic cells as possible,” he told Charlotte, and expressed his concern that old papers lying about would “collect dust: asthmatic, choking, wearying, unclean, disorderly dust.”16

  Charlotte began to experience occasional paranoid episodes, usually directing her angry outbursts at Isabel and Thornton, but sometimes at Amos and Janet as well. She developed bleeding ulcers and eventually had to be hospitalized for a hemorrhaging gastric ulcer. Afterward she recuperated at the Amityville home, but then was allowed to return to Sullivan Street. Ten months later, in a second hospitalization, most of her stomach and part of her colon had to be removed. In June 1953 she returned to the Long Island Home in Amityville for her recuperation from surgery. “Remember: you don’t only eat to support your body,” Wilder wrote to his sister. “You eat to support your soul. . . . Do not read while you eat—do as the Mohammedans do: eat in silent admiration: eating is thanking,—thanking for being.”17

  By now it was clear that physically and emotionally, Charlotte was incapable of living alone. She was officially readmitted to residency at the Long Island Home July 18, 1953, to stay there indefinitely. “Yes, I went to see Charlotte,” Thornton wrote from the MacDowell Colony in September 1953. “Amazing. Best she’s been since her first illness. Climbs up and downstairs like you or I.” He reported that one of the Long Island Home doctors had told him that there had been a “radical change” in her attitude, and that she had finally acknowledged that she did have a nervous breakdown and that her family “was acting for her own good and not merely maliciously restraining her liberty.”18

  It is not clear whether Wilder knew at the time of Charlotte’s surgery that another American playwright had a schizophrenic sister who had been lobotomized. In 1943, after six years of futile treatment for her schizophrenia, Tennessee Williams’s older sister, Rose, was subjected to the surgery. For Williams, his sister and her tragic illness were subject matter for Suddenly Last Summer and The Glass Menagerie. (In 1959 Wilder’s young friends Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor played in the movie version of Suddenly Last Summer, with its graphic depiction of a lobotomy and of conditions in some psychiatric institutions.) What was public, center-stage subject matter for Williams the dramatist was private business for the Wilders, although Thornton Wilder the novelist would later portray in his fiction two young women who suffer mental or physical breakdowns—Sophia in The Eighth Day and Elspeth in Theophilus North. As shall be seen, these characters evoke images of Charlotte Wilder and the lessons her family learned from her illness. Like Wilder, Williams was devoted to his sister, financed her lifetime of medical care, and set up a trust to protect her as long as she lived.

  FOR MOST of the fifties Wilder was, as usual, overwhelmed with work and by “unredeemed pledges of work”—projects ranging from writing a screenplay to leading a diplomatic cultural mission.19 In 1952 he accepted a five-thousand-dollar payment from the celebrated producer-director Vittorio De Sica to write “story ideas, plot ideas and dialogue” for a screenplay set in Chicago and based on what Wilder soon called a “worthless story” by Ben Hecht, drawn from Hecht’s 1943 novel, Miracle in the Rain.20 To
be produced by Warner Bros., the film was De Sica’s first movie project in the United States. After numerous sessions with De Sica in New York, Wilder withdrew from the project out of concern that “the whole constructions” might “suddenly topple down about our ears as forced, contrived.”21 He also worried that De Sica and his colleagues were bent on depicting Chicago as “a love-less jungle of concrete,” and that they were working with “plot and dialogue, of abysmal conventionality,” perhaps out of the “problem of picture-making in a new country,” where they feared rejection by American studio heads—which, Wilder recalled, had been the fate of Max Reinhardt and other European filmmakers.22

  Wilder’s attention swiftly turned from a film about Chicago to an international gathering in Italy. He was asked to lead the American delegation to the UNESCO International Conference on the Artist in Contemporary Society, to be held in Venice in September 1952, and to prepare the official report. He refused the invitation twice but finally agreed to go, in large part because this was the first time a “truly international company of artists has met together.” There were visual artists, writers in various genres, and musicians. Distinguished artists were chosen to report on their individual disciplines: Henry Moore on sculpture; Georges Rouault on painting; Arthur Honegger on music; Marc Connelly on theater—and Thornton Wilder, the Reporter General, speaking on behalf of them all. The artists who gathered in Venice wished to “re-affirm two principles which the world is in constant danger of forgetting,” Wilder wrote in his official summary:

  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.23

  He wrote much of his official report in Venice, chafing to get back to his creative work, but still wondering where to go next, and what to do. At fifty-five he was growing more aware of the exigency of time, and the dilemma of how to use it. “Oh, how badly I run my life,” he wrote to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. “How I postpone from year to year the establishment of those conditions under which I can work. And I don’t mean work in the sense of producing volumes, I mean work in the sense of working on and in and with myself.”24

  He was being pursued at that time by a resolute “lioness” in the diminutive form of his friend Ruth Gordon, who was determined to revive and stage The Merchant of Yonkers in London. In a flurry of telephone calls from Paris to Venice, she and Garson Kanin urged Wilder to come to Paris to confer with them and Tyrone Guthrie about a potential production, starring Gordon, of course.25 Despite misgivings, Wilder was tempted. He bargained with himself: If he agreed to the project, he would have to be “stern thereafter—say goodbye to collaborations and go and hide myself.”26 He thought he would finish his play, and then write a movie script, an opera libretto, and a comic novel—all in the spirit of freedom, and in the hope of enjoying the “modest gift” that had been given him.27 Nevertheless, Wilder acquiesced to Ruth Gordon’s wishes and met her in Paris in mid-October to talk about adapting The Merchant of Yonkers into the script, slightly revised, which became The Matchmaker.

  IN HIS January 1953 journal Wilder struggled with doubts about himself as an artist and a person, analyzing and overanalyzing his earlier work, and regretting the consequences of the “Externalizing Years,” as he now called his Harvard experience.28 He was sick with a “deep-lodged cold and deafness.” Alone and ill in his hotel room in Baden-Baden, he worried that the time he had spent on events other than writing had been wasteful, even harmful. Yet he had to believe that he could still create literary work that showed “that during these years I have been watching, listening and feeling, in the . . . presence of multifaceted life.”29 He promised himself that “the next things I write must have a new theme and form, a new theme in form.”30

  He was not afraid of the literary challenges. Instead, he confessed in his journal, “What I am afraid of is myself—of those tiresome drives toward moralization and over-simplification.”31 He wanted to “reintroduce lyrical and romantic beauty into the theatre”—elements that would “surprise” an audience with “lyrical feeling”—despite the danger of being didactic and even “bombastic.”32 But whether he wrote a play next or a novel, he resolved never “to be caught up into that ‘non-fiction’ thought-world again.”33 Later, when the critic, editor, and translator Eric Bentley asked Wilder to provide an introduction to a Spanish play for one volume of his four-volume series, The Classic Theatre, Wilder declined because, he said, he wrote nonfiction “badly and with excruciating effort.”34

  He acknowledged in a journal entry that “Even the dear Lope-studies are an albatross about my neck. And the [Norton] book!—[It] is like some greedy improper self-deception that I can adequately write that kind of book.”35 Two of his Lope research papers were published in the early 1950s—“New Aids Toward Dating the Early Plays of Lope de Vega” in Varia Variorum: Festgabe für Karl Reinhardt in Germany in 1952; and “Lope, Pinedo, Some Child Actors, and a Lion” in Romance Philology in August 1953.36 He vowed to finish the Norton book as soon as he returned to the United States in May 1953. Despite conscientious efforts over the next several years, this was a promise he would never be able to keep.

  ON JANUARY 12, 1953, while Wilder was still in Europe, he made the cover of Time. The artist Boris Chaliapin, who created more than four hundred cover portraits for the magazine, painted a striking image of Wilder, with a framed drawing of the American flag in the background. Chaliapin captured a sadness in Wilder’s eyes that most artists and photographers missed during the fifties. “The American is the first planetary mind,” ran the caption under Wilder’s portrait, alluding to his recent lectures. The Time cover led many people to conclude that it was Wilder himself who had “the first planetary mind,” when he was actually referring to Americans in general. The magazine’s biographical portrait of Wilder described him as “a kindly, grey-haired gentleman from the East” and a “loquacious American” who lectured “with much waggling of eyebrows and flourishing of hands.” The author of the article also advanced the mistaken premise that “for one of his years and talents, he has written comparatively little.”37

  Wilder frequently heard but paid little heed to this quantitative assessment of his career. However, he was very proud to discover in 1953 that his sister Janet, the one Wilder sibling who had in fact written very little and had never been published widely except for scientific articles, was now a magazine columnist. While Janet and Toby Dakin were well known in and around Amherst for their good works and philanthropy and their proactive citizenship, Janet was also recognized for her scientific and equestrian interests. Since falling in love with horses when she was a schoolgirl in England, she had become a skilled equestrienne and a leading figure in equestrian circles, but she had never raised a foal until Lord Jeff was born to her Morgan horse Bonnie. In December 1952 Janet published the first of a series of popular magazine articles about bringing up Lord Jeff. Her background as a scientist informed her work as she researched and devised training methods. Called “Jeffy’s Journal,” the series ran in the Morgan Horse through April 1956, and was later published as a book, Jeffy’s Journal: Raising a Morgan Horse (1990). Janet wrote about the adventures, good and bad, that she and Jeffy shared over the years, whether he was winning horse shows or bucking her sky-high and tossing her into the snow.38 She dedicated the book to her mother.

  When Thornton read Janet’s first magazine column, he wrote her a fan letter: “I never saw a happier illustration of the deepest rule about writing. Be possessed by your subject—know it, live it—and you will write well.”39

  ACCORDING TO the noted director Tyrone Guthrie, it was Ruth Gordon’s husband, the writer Garson Kanin, who had the brilliant idea for a revival of Wilder’s unsuccessful play The Merchant of Yonkers. Guthrie, Gordon, and Kanin agreed that the most serious obstacle to a successful revival was
that the play “bore the stigma of failure”—something Guthrie suggested was “in present-day America far more damning than a conviction for rape or arson.” Therefore Gordon and Kanin proposed that Wilder revise, update, and rename the play; that Ruth Gordon star as Dolly Levi; and that the production be mounted in London rather than New York, knowing that if they “tried and succeeded in London” the play might then open in New York “cleansed of the guilt of failure, redeemed, restored to a state of grace.”40

  Although Merchant had failed on Broadway, it had often been revived in professional and amateur productions. In March 1952, early in his discussions with Gordon, Guthrie, and Kanin, Wilder decided to withdraw The Merchant of Yonkers from Samuel French representation in England “until further notice.”41 Guthrie easily persuaded the producer Binkie Beaumont, who had successfully produced The Skin of Our Teeth, to present the “new” version of the play, now titled The Matchmaker. Beaumont wrote to Wilder, “I am enormously optimistic that we may be launching something which will eventually be a wonderful success for London and, who knows?—we might even visit New York.”42 Ruth Gordon was set to star in the show, which was soon scheduled as one of the plays in the spotlight at the Edinburgh Festival in 1954, after a tryout in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Wilder, who was usually reluctant to attend the opening nights of his own plays, was present in Newcastle and found it “very heady and exciting.”43 From there The Matchmaker moved to Edinburgh, to open August 23, 1954. If all went well there would be a ten-week tour, including an appearance at the Berliner Festwochen, a drama festival in Berlin, and then an opening in London at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, on November 4, 1954.