“Are you happy, Connie?”
“I’m happy enough.”
“What are the three things that you want most in the world?”
She thought. “Can I ask for four?”
“Yes.”
“Papa to come back. To live near where you are. To go to school. And to know . . . ? to know hundreds and thousands of people everywhere.”
“Well, I’ll tell you a secret.” Roger remembered that dolls and secrets played a large part in young girls’ lives. He told her about the money from their father’s inventions. That money would be used to send her and Anne Lansing to college. He would make sure that it would be a college near where he lived. He told her that those famous names Scolastica and Berwyn Ashley would surely bring word from their father. “Why do you want to know so many people?”
“I keep a list of the people I know. I know one hundred and four people. That doesn’t include all the boarders. I have another list for them—the ones that I only say ‘good morning’ to when I’m waiting on table and cleaning their rooms. I think about people—don’t you?—and the more you know the better you think. Roger, can I ask you some questions?”
“Yes, Connie. Fire ahead.”
The questions! Are more people happy in a big city like Chicago than in Coaltown? Are most men happier than women? Are girls who don’t get married ever happy? Does it hurt a lot when a person dies? Is it wrong—no, is it a bad thing to be born a girl?
“Listen, Connie. You write me every Thursday and put five questions in the letter. And I’ll answer you on Sunday.”
“Can I ask you one more?”
“Yes.”
“Do people change any—while they’re growing up?”
“Yes! I’ve changed—haven’t I? And Lily’s changed; you remember that she didn’t notice anything. Today I learned that your best friend Anne Lansing has changed.”
“Has she?”
“I’m going to pay a call at the Lansing house. Would you like to come with me now?”
“Oh, Roger, yes.”
“Good! You go off somewhere and talk with Anne. I have to talk with her mother. And I’ll tell you a secret: I think they’ve had some bad news today—almost as bad as we had when Papa—you know!”
They walked up to the door of “St. Kitts.” Suddenly Constance threw her arms about her brother and cried, “I love you! I love you! I love you!”
Roger lifted her up, and said, “We’re going to love each other a long time.”
Félicité approached them from the shadows of the yew trees. She kissed Constance. To Roger she whispered: “George has gone. He told everything to Miss Doubkov. He’s written out the whole story.”
“And your mother?”
“Now I know she’s known for a long time.”
They entered the house.
“Connie,” said Roger, “give Mrs. Lansing the cookies.”
Eustacia came forward as though borne up on some extraordinary happiness. “Dear Roger! Dear Constance!”
Constance said, “Mama sent these and hopes that you’ll have a very merry Christmas.”
Soon Roger was sitting beside Eustacia. She was explaining to him about the money from his father’s inventions. She was explaining to him that her son George would never have run away from his father’s trial. . . . ?
Hills beyond hills, plains and rivers.
Eustacia went to Los Angeles. She got a job as housekeeper in a house of correction for delinquent girls. She didn’t fully enjoy the work and it was not in sight of the sea. There was a privately owned Boys’ Ranch at San Pedro, then a small tuna-fishing port. She became housemother.
Hills and clouds. Rise high, rise higher.
Roger’s and Félicité’s Johnny has run away from his home in Washington for the third time. It is early 1917; a war is imminent and his father is burdened with work. Félicité has been sent to the hospital for a delivery that might prove difficult. The police of five states have been alerted to search for the child. The boy’s best friend, his Grandmother Lansing, has been sent for. A week passed. Finally he was found in Baltimore asleep in a bed with two other boys of his own age. The family that harbored him read no newspapers; they assumed that he was a vagrant orphan of their own people. At one in the morning Eustacia knocked at their door and asked for a cup of tea. Johnny heard his grandmother’s voice and climbed on her lap. He was now the dearest thing in the world to her. She scarcely touched him. To herself she said, “We only have what we give up.” His later story was a long lamentable self-destruction.
History is one tapestry. No eye can venture to compass more than a hand’s-breadth. . . . ?
Constance suffered a series of strokes in her middle forties. She sat on the terrace of her house overlooking Nagasaki Harbor. The members of her family took turns reading aloud to her. Delegations from far places called on her. Calls of adulation were limited to five minutes; she pretended she was tired. But visitors who could tell her how “the work” was going were urged to stay an hour. On her birthdays, the Emperor sent a flower and a poem.
There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some
AFTERWORD
OVERVIEW
My brother, Thornton Wilder, left in late May to spend two years or more in retirement in the Southwest. His health was beginning to show the strain of too many outside activities and responsibilities and his own work was years in arrears. He receives little mail except from the family and has no telephone. He sees few people except in the daily necessities and is not yet ready to make arrangements with friends old or new.
—Isabel Wilder to Celeste Holm, December 30, 1962
As noted in the biographical sketch in this volume, Thornton Wilder could spend as many as two hundred days a year away from his home in Hamden, Connecticut, seeking locations that “provided the stimulation and solitude he needed for his work.” One of the places where he worked well in the 1930s, and where he got to know and adore the vistas and striking profiles of mountains against desert and sky, was the area in and around Tucson, Arizona.
There, in 1934, he completed his fourth novel, Heaven’s My Destination, and four years later, in 1938, did significant work on his major drama, The Merchant of Yonkers (later revised and known as The Matchmaker). So it is perhaps no surprise that by the late 1940s, when he began to dream about the place in the United States where he could hide out for a longer period of time than his usual sojourn of a few weeks to a few months, Wilder focused more and more on Arizona. By the early 1960s, the dream had become all but an obsession, although reported amusingly in an April 1960 letter to his friend, Richard Goldstone, who had written to congratulate Wilder on his sixty-third birthday:
More and more I am haunted by the idea that I must move to a little house on the desert near Tucson—surrounded by my Finnegans Wake apparatus and Shakespeare. Maybe a cat and dog. Maybe I’ll see people from time to time, but never at meals. As I never drink alone I’ll probably go to town from time to time and close the bars but of course there’ll be no one but me there who talks literature or arrrrt. I suspect that I’ll have to consult the University of Arizona Library occasionally, but I’ll have to scuttle fast before a courteous librarian wishes to ask me my opinion of the latest Eliot or Ionesco.
Pretty soon. Pretty soon, I’m retiring. Not as misanthrope. And not at all as pilgrimage-hermit. Merely as a contented Mute. I love to listen but I hate to talk—I’m weary to death of what I say.
A year later, Thornton Wilder, heavily honored American playwright and novelist, announced a major lifestyle change in a mighty public way: In an AP story headlined THORNTON WILDER PLANS BUM’S LIFE IN DESERT, datelined March 2 from Frankfurt, Germany, he was quoted a
s saying, in part: “I’m headed out into that Arizona desert to be a bum for two years. . . . ? As soon as I get back to the states it’s going to be two years without neckties, without cultivated conversation.” He added that he “had wanted to ‘slip away to the wild beauty of that desert’ for the past thirty years but had only recently decided to take the step.”
The story had predictable results: Eager to snare a big catch for their community, realtors and chambers of commerce inundated Wilder’s Hamden, Connecticut, mailbox with a small avalanche of promotional material, especially from the Patagonia, Arizona area, which he had made the mistake of mentioning more than once as his destination. (He had selected it because he liked the name and not-too-close proximity to Tucson.)
Wilder did not end up in Patagonia; for a man determined to hide, it was now his last-place choice. Therefore, when he left his home in his blue T-bird convertible on May 20, 1962, he had only somewhere in Arizona in mind. As she had for years, Isabel Wilder (1900–1995), his sister and first deputy, remained at her post in the family home in Hamden, Connecticut, protecting her brother by typing the epigraph above in scores of letters.
After a ten-day trip that brought Wilder from Texas into Arizona along Highway 80, he came to ground on May 28 in the U.S.- Mexican border town of Douglas, Arizona (population 12,820 in 1960), 120 miles southeast of Tucson. In 1962, Douglas was in a golden age in its history as a Phelps Dodge Company Company Town (all capitalizations deserved), a status symbolized by that firm’s Copper Queen smelter located two miles outside Douglas, one of the world’s great copper smelters. Wilder, in short, had landed in the middle of a mining town in a boom period of its history. Here he stayed for nearly twenty months—the first several in the landmark Gadsden Hotel, and after August 1962, in an efficiency apartment he rented at 757 12th Street, about a six-minute walk from the Gadsden and a mile from the border with Agua Prieta, Mexico.
With the prospective birth of The Eighth Day in mind, we must imagine Wilder’s small three-room second-floor apartment, with no telephone or television. Each day he worked at his card table desk, read, napped, and listened to music on a record player he bought at the end of 1962. While he purchased no dog or cat and left his beloved Finnegans Wake material behind in Connecticut, he did take up the culinary arts and learned to make his own lunches, with nutritionally challenging results, as these two reports to Isabel Wilder attest:
Slowly, slowly I’m widening my repertory on the stove. I extended it to frankfurters, but they aren’t good. I split ’em down the middle; I cook ’em in boiling water; I fill ’em with tomato-paste sauce.
—November 11, 1962
Yesterday I made my first hard-boiled eggs (after a failure of several months ago). So successful I repeated them today. Two pieces of bread—barely toasted, just crisped—sliced tomatoes—trimming of cream cheese; mayonnaise; the eggs. A glass of milk. Perfect.
—August 7, 1963
At night, he would dine out in Douglas and then often close out the evening at the Gadsden Hotel bar or other watering holes on either side of the border. Because he loved the thrill of the desert and the local restaurants left something to be desired, he often roamed further. To close friends Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon he wrote in September, “Every other evening I drive to Tombstone or Sierra Vista or Bisbee and have a real meal (devouring other guests too . . . ?) unspeakable grandeur of the ride, an hour in the book of Genesis.”
Wherever he went, it is clear from his letters that Wilder was moving among a sea of mining and civil engineers and the world they inhabited; this included daily encounters with Spanish, one of the languages he knew well. But above all, he was delighted to report, he was living among people who did not read many books, had no interest in “arrrrt,” and did not treat him as a celebrity—and he could not have been happier. His situation allowed him to do what he wanted and needed to do: listen. “I’ve got one big talent,” he wrote to his family; “I listen to what’s said to me. It’s ra-a-a-re.” He practiced this trade in Douglas, along the way learning a vast amount about mining in general, copper mining in particular, and life in good times and bad times in a Company Town. In December 1962, he put the whole business on a higher plain in this letter to his nephew:
The sense of the multitude of human souls affects every man in a different way. It renders some cynical; it frightens many; it made Wordsworth sad; me it exhilarates. I must go back and submerge myself in it from time to time or I go spiritually sluggish. What I have fled to the desert from is not the multitude but the coterie.
Wilder did not imprison himself in Douglas and its surrounding area: For banking, books in the university library, phonograph records he enjoyed, and still better food, he made periodic trips to Tucson, a two-hour drive away, and occasionally even to Phoenix, four hours away. He spent Christmas 1963 in Santa Fe and Taos, and early in his stay, spent ten days visiting an old friend in Guaymas, Mexico. Once he slipped back East for a week. But wherever he went, he attempted to remain incognito, and more often than not he succeeded. When the painter Georgia O’Keefe got wind of his presence in Taos and invited him to stop by, he declined. “So now you have evidence that I really am of a retiring nature,” he wrote to his niece, Catharine.
Wilder, Inc., meanwhile, was a busy enterprise in the early 1960s. As needed, he called his sister Isabel from a public phone to discuss production or publication matters, even the idea for a musical based on The Matchmaker (crazy, he thought). And once a week, with the delight of a born letter writer, he would write his sister a “duty” letter about the life and times of the “hermit of Arizona.”
Where his own work was concerned, in the fall of 1962, after a breather, Wilder began working again on his plays-in-progress, on The Seven Deadly Sins and The Seven Ages of Man. This was no surprise. Building on a passionate love of theater traceable to his early boyhood years, Wilder had started his ascent in the professional world of drama in 1930. Over the next twelve years he wrote short plays, translations, and adaptations; tried screen writing and acting; and taught, lectured, and performed as a goodwill ambassador for his country. Even those last three endeavors were forms of theater for Wilder. With the spectacular success of Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), he had reached the top of the theatrical world by 1942 when he entered military service.
Upon returning to civilian life three years later, he translated a play by Jean-Paul Sartre and wrote his first novel in thirteen years, The Ides of March (1948). He then put fiction aside and returned to his first love, drama, but this time encountered creative defeat. Wilder did complete two major plays after World War II, The Matchmaker (1954) and The Alcestiad (1955), but both works had their taproots in the 1930s. The Matchmaker was a touch-up job on his unsuccessful The Merchant of Yonkers (1939) and The Alcestiad was a recovery of a play he had also conceived and worked on in the prewar era. In contrast, he failed at writing a significant “new” piece of theater after the war.
Wilder kept plenty busy in the 1950s on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as teacher, lecturer, cultural attaché without portfolio, librettist, author of essays, letter writer, obliging friend, and manager of his fame, to start a long list of how he occupied his time. He was always busy, but always frustrated that he could not bring off theater, his own theater. “My days fritter away in that occupying business of being obliging and agreeable,” he wrote his older brother Amos in 1958, in words that can stand as an epitaph for the period 1949–1962.
In 1956, seeking to regain his dramatic footing, Wilder began writing a series of short plays for the arena stage, or theater in the round. The project grew into the ambitious attempt to write two cycles of plays depicting the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Ages of Man that Wilder came to view as an artistic summing up, and he was so quoted in the press. “It reflects the tendency of the mature artist in all ages to forge a definitive statement of his crystallized philosophy,” he told New York Times reporter Arthur Gelb in a story carried on page one of that paper�
�s edition of November 5, 1961. Three of the plays had a successful Off-Broadway run in 1962,but the rest of the story proved another theatrical defeat; during his lifetime he completed and released only six of the projected fourteen plays and withdrew two of these after a single performance.
By the late fall of 1962, in his letters to Isabel, Wilder suddenly ceased mentioning his Sins and Ages—or anything about drama. What was he doing with his time? His March 10, 1963 letter sounded a drum roll:
This week almost no letter. Because I’m exhausted, happily exhausted.
Next week I’m going to have some exciting news for you.
Marriage? No.
Com’ng east? No.
Having a baby? You’re getting warmer.
True to his promise, a week later he reported he had in hand perhaps ninety pages of a new novel. He described it as “Little Women being mulled over by Dostoevsky,” adding that a boardinghouse run by a “family, reduced and ostracized” figured in the story; that it was set in a mining town in Southern Illinois around 1902; and that it dealt with “how a great love causes havoc (the motto of the book could be ‘nothing too much’), how gifts descend in family lines making for good, making for ill, and demanding victims.” He added that “the action jumps about in time,” yielding a form that he thought was “just original enough to seem fresh; it’s not really like usual novels.” Finally, he had this to say about the likelihood that he would see this project through:
All this since Christmas. I didn’t venture to mention it earlier because project after project has wilted away. But I’m damn well certain now that this is here to stay. I think it was the record-player that set things in motion, some Mozart and some organ works of Bach. Nothing I’ve written has advanced so fast, but it doesn’t worry me. Between the lines there’s lots of “Wilders.”
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