Edward Weeks in The Atlantic Monthly spoke for many when he said that Ides was “incomparably the richest reading experience I have enjoyed this winter.” Fanny Butcher, the influential book critic of the Chicago Tribune, was no less rhapsodic, hailing it as “combining classical knowledge with true creative experimentation,” and calling it “one of the really great books of our generation.” The Cincinnati Enquirer had a point of view about the results of Wilder’s experimentation: “History,” wrote Frederick Yeiser, “may be only gossip even when reconstructed, but fantasy often is iron truth.” Few reviews give the Wilder family more pleasure than Clarence W. Mendell’s words in the New Haven Register. Mendell, the Sterling Professor of Latin Languages and Literature at Yale, offered this tribute to the city’s famous son:
[Wilder] is a classical scholar in his own right. He does nothing that can rightly offend the professional classicist. And he brings to the presentation of his Cleopatra, his Cicero, his Clodia, the understanding and penetration of a poet—wherein he has an advantage over most professional classicists.
Negative or mixed reviews (in the minority with Ides) typically granted points about the book’s virtuosity, but found the novel “cold,” “cerebral,” “pedagogical,” and “contrived.” Orville Prescott’s New York Times daily review found much to admire, but concluded that “Like a Roman portrait bust, it is cold, precise, artful and quite lacking in the divine fire that glows about a major work of art.” Inevitably, there were the learned who nitpicked: the incorrect way Wilder treated Roman cognomens and the liberties he had taken with his translation of the lines from Goethe are two examples. Notwithstanding Wilder’s clear message in his preface that historical reconstruction was not his primary aim—a kind of authorial truth-in-advertising statement—some reviewers faulted him for playing games with the historical record. “Why be so preposterously, pretentiously, and aimlessly wrong?” wrote a Canadian reviewer in Toronto’s Saturday Night. The London reviewer Phillip Toynbee in the World Review damned with faint praise when he wrote: “an interesting, a sympathetic, a rather weary book: the pleasing tour de force of a serious writer resting on his oars.”
What did Wilder think of his reviews? A month after publication he wrote his close friend Lady Sibyl Colefax that the reviews were “almost uniformly bad-tepid to bad,” although a month later he reported to her that some reviews were “all but a spoiled boy could ask for.” Wilder did not brood over failures or crow over success, but it is clear that he was disappointed by the quality of attention given a book he was unusually proud of, one he had told his attorney in April 1946 was “like nothing else” and would stir up a “considerable shindy.”
In his heart of hearts, did Wilder hope that Ides as a story and as a study in form would cause the same kind of ruckus that the experimental Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth had caused? For example, would it ignite a lively debate about the use of history for fiction (art)? Probably. But in 1948 that ruckus was reserved for Norman Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead. And yet, even Mailer’s novel could not top the number-one choice of the reading public, a book that upset nobody: the fabulously comfortable historical novel The Big Fisherman by Lloyd C. Douglas. Whatever the critics said, Ides was widely read in 1948 and remained on bestseller lists for many weeks, although it was not among the top ten at the end of the year, as his last three novels had been. The author was always proud that it was popular with Latin teachers.
Until it drifted out of print in the 1990s, Ides had sold some half-million copies in hardback and four paperback editions in the United States, the last of which was the Harper & Row Perennial Library edition published in 1987. Wilder would have been proud to know that HarperCollins reissued the novel in 2003 with a thoughtful Foreword by Kurt Vonnegut, and no less so with this 2020 Thornton Wilder Library Edition with an Introduction by a voice of a new century, Jeremy McCarter.
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As a firm rule, Wilder was opposed to the live dramatization of his fiction. But because The Ides of March was so deeply anchored to a theatrical sensibility, he broke his rule and offered actor and playwright Jerome Kilty the chance to adapt it for the stage, even helping him with several scenes. Wilder had known Kilty as a student and greatly admired his successful 1960 Broadway hit Dear Liar. Despite some success in Berlin with a distinguished German cast in 1962, the play failed in London in 1963 with John Gielgud as Caesar and Irene Worth as Clodia.
The most important chapter of the novel’s history in the past half century has been its success abroad. In all, Ides has been translated into some twenty-three languages, second only among Wilder’s novels to The Bridge of San Luis Rey’s more than thirty translations. Over the years many foreign editions have, of course, gone out of print. But it is interesting to note that in addition to England and the United States, since 1990, new editions have appeared in China, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Russia with AST publishing a Russian language edition in five countries of the former Soviet Union, as well as a separate Hungarian edition. Additionally, the book has never been out of print in Germany since 1948. A complete radio version was broadcasted there in 1957, rebroadcasted and released on CD in 1998, and will be rebroadcast again in 2020. These statistics suggest that Wilder’s take on a figure who stands mythically and timelessly at the crossroads between power and ethics has a special resonance in countries where memories of hard times endure or governance questions remain concerning.
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ENVOI
The nephew who heard his uncle’s asides on the discomfort of living in tents read the following passage from The Ides of March at Thornton Wilder’s Memorial Service in New Haven on January 18, 1976:
The mind is easily wearied and easily frightened; but there is no limit to the pictures it makes; and toward those pictures we stumble. I have often remarked that whereas men say there is a limit beyond which a man may not run or swim, may not raise the tower or dig a pit, I have never heard it said there is a limit to wisdom. The way is open to better poets than Homer and to better rulers than Caesar. No bounds of have been conceived for crime and folly. In this also I rejoice and call it a mystery. This also prevents me from reaching any summary conclusion concerning our human condition. Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.
—LXIX Caesar’s Journal—Letter to Lucius Mamilius Turrinus on the Island of Capri shortly before Caesar’s assassination (pages 238–239, The Ides of March)
Tappan Wilder
January 2020
READINGS
Wilder’s Best (1950)
“The pretense of the historical novel is particularly difficult to swallow.”
This introductory note, published in its entirety, accompanies a passage from The Ides of March that appeared in the collection The World’s Best (1950), to which 105 authors contributed short examples of their work. As his contribution, Wilder excerpted Document VIII, Number 977, one of Caesar’s letters to Lucius Mamilius Turrinus (found here). Wilder takes the opportunity to all but indict the tradition of the omniscient narrator, a point he had been making in interviews, lectures, and essays after 1935—here explicitly aimed at the historical novel. Samuel Richardson (1689—1761) was the author of Pamela, a romantic tale that created the epistolary novel.
During the nineteenth century the novelists seem never to have been troubled by the claim to omniscience which is at the base of their art. First signs of discomfort in regard to it appeared in Flaubert and Turgenev. It became acute in Henry James and now in some form or other undermines the self-confidence of all storytellers. Are readers believing that our stories are “true” and in what sense do we believe them ourselves?
This is the crisis of the novel. Writers for the stage are not confronted by it.
The assumption of omniscience is no less present in writing for the theatre, but once the action is passing upon the stage we are not aware of the narrator who is presenting it to us. A novel may be described as “everything pertinent to our understanding of an a
ction or a series of actions” and throughout a novel we are aware that an all-knowing intelligence is recounting to us this pertinent matter. On the stage, however, it is always “now”; no intervening editorial voice is present; and in a very dramatic sense our seeing is believing.
In The Ides of March I tried to dispense with the fictional narrator. When one purports to recount the thoughts of a Caesar, a Cicero, and a Catullus, the claim to omniscience becomes doubly preposterous. All art is pretense but the pretense of the historical novel is particularly difficult to swallow. I therefore moved the pretense over to a different terrain: I pretended to have discovered a large collection of letters and documents written by these notable persons. I attempted to coerce belief by submitting a sort of apparatus of historical method and scholarship. It all “looks” more credible than if I had written a running narrative full of such phrases as “Caesar remembered their first meeting” and “Cleopatra concealed her anger.” But more important from the point of view of credibility was the fact that I had approached the effect of the theatre. Each of the letters and documents is in the present tense; no narrator is heard describing the whole action as having taken place in the past. As on the stage each speech rises from the actor in an immediate spontaneity—as their “time” on the stage becomes our “time” in the audience—so in a novel-in-Ietters each document tends to give the impression of a speech, a cry, at which we are present.
I am far from pretending that this affords a solution to the problem of the novel. The novel-in-letters runs into other difficulties, difficulties so great that the form can only be the vehicle for a very limited type of story. Time is a sense in which I did not seriously attempt to cope with them, as Richardson did. I begged the question by surrounding my work with a veil of irony, offering it as a sort of parody of historical scholarship. I begged the question in that I not so much asked the reader to “believe” me as to “play this game” with me.
Facts and the Imagination
“It’s hard to separate the authentic from the imagined.”
Brooks Atkinson (1894–1984), the New York Times drama critic, wrote the lead review of Ides in the Sunday book review on February 22, 1948. As background he had asked Wilder about the materials of his novel, specifically what was authentic and what was imagined. Wilder replied in a letter written December 20, 1947, which is excerpted here. Atkinson used very little of it in his review, but reprinted most of it in the introduction he contributed to Harper’s 1950 Modern Classics edition of the novel.
Dear Mr. Atkinson:
It’s hard to separate the authentic from the imagined. In the prefatory note I indicated the one big liberty I took and the liberties consequent upon it.
I think the best way to orient you as to my relation to sources is to select a sample of the principal persons and events and describe the process:
The invalid on Capri: All imagined and shaped around the image of Ned Sheldon. However, at one moment in the De Bello Gallico the steely objectivity of the narrative is relaxed to recount the death at enemy hands of a friend and long time associate of the author.
Cleopatra: We know no facts beyond her residence there; the antagonism of the populace; and Cicero’s annoyance that he had not received a gift suitable to his tastes. Historians concur that she must frequently have met there Antony at this stage, since he was Consul that last year.
Cytheris: A popular actress; Cicero recounts meeting her at a dinner party; Marc Antony was much criticized for carrying her in a litter even on his military campaigns. She might, however, have been merely a dancing-girl; no evidence that she was a “high” tragic actress.
Catullus: It is Plutarch, I think, who says that Caesar invited him to dinner (after saying that the bitter epigrams would be a “stain on his reputation forever”) and that a reconciliation took place. Toward the end of the nineteenth century a German scholar assembled the material to establish that the famous Clodia Pulcher was identical with the Lesbia of the poems; the view has been adopted by most scholars since.
Clodius and Clodia: We have a great deal of information about them. There is even a portion of Cicero’s denunciation of them in court following the scandal of the mysteries. She was called the Fourpenny Girl by the populace, and the charge of murder and incest was current. It is hard to reconcile Catullus’ tone in the earlier poems with her being a “little” puella weeping over a sparrow and in fear that “old men” would spy on their kisses with the indubitable picture of her elsewhere as an important and ruthless political force and an ostentatiously abandoned hussy.
Aunt Julia: All mine. A glaring breach of chronology. Caesar as a very young man established his political position by delivering her funeral oration.
The Conspiracy: Most historians expatiate on how well kept was the secrecy. And yet,—70 senators! the incurable loquacity of Rome, the account of their nervousness on the morning itself. I may have erred here in depicting it to have [been] partly known by the public and by the victim.
Brutus as the son of Caesar: I laid it before Prof. Hendrickson, Yale’s much-loved Emeritus professor, specialist on the late Roman Republic. “Well,” he said, “we don’t know. May have been. Everybody who died was thought to have been poisoned; and everybody was thought to have been some other man’s son or daughter. All we can say is that the first allusions to its possibility begin two generations later.” But he acknowledged that Caesar undoubtedly had a big love-affair with Brutus’s mother at about the right time.
Caesar: Biographies are either idolatrous or violently vindictive. It has often been remarked, however, that even Suetonius who was trying to write an anti-Julian Caesar political tract could only find the most picayune offenses to denounce him for. No real consideration of him has ever been able to deny the extraordinary clemency; it bewildered its beneficiaries in an age of harbored grudges and political ruthlessness. I lean on it heavily for my view of him; on the idolatry of his soldiers, often attested; on the undoubted poverty in which he lived in his youth while he was manipulating millions and while he was coolly wearing the “widest purple band in Rome” i.e. as a great aristocrat. This Caesar is the most personal expression of mine in the book, and yet I am not aware of running counter to “facts” at any point (save, of course, in the chronology of his wives): the same date has furnished the most varied reconstructions in all the centuries since.
The general background of customs and manners,—I hope I can say that I take my tone from that great sea of Cicero’s letters, and even then their principal reassurance is that human nature was much the same and created its customs and manners by perfectly recognizable extensions; that the worlds moving about Mme de Sévigné and about Horace Walpole were not unlike this. Only occasionally have I returned to the material I studied in 1920–1921 when I was in residence at the American Academy in Rome working in archaeology. Even more stimulating was the year I spent in Italy in this war (an afternoon’s walk from Capua!) under a campagna sun and sky and rain.
At the same time that I largely allowed myself liberties in this “fantasia” I also embedded many scrupulous minor facts into the story, for fun: Caesar and Calpurnia dined with Lepidus on the evening before he was killed (taken by the conspirators as a sign that he was unaware of their plans); Cicero’s wife was at one point jealous lest he fall into Clodia’s nets; Catullus dedicated his verses to his countrymen from N. of the Po, the historian Nepos: Caesar did shave down a part of the Vatican Hill to correct the current of the Tiber, then much faster than now (but the raffish Mime of the Prize of Virtue is mine).
Thornton Wilder Explicates
“There is NO description in this book.”
Drawing on his skills as a dramatist, Wilder was extremely proud of the way he created Caesar’s Rome through endless detail and the avoidance of traditional chronology, all accomplished with impish delight. We see these qualities in this reading, a few of the hundred odd marginal notations, pertaining to source, plots, style, and themes, that Wilder made in an Eng
lish edition of Ides that he presented to Terrence Cather-man, a friend and diplomat. Three of the pages are graphically illustrated here. Readers will find that non-Romans, including a Yale ornithologist and the actress Tallulah Bankhead, get into the act.
[MARGINAL NOTES START ON THE FOLLOWING PAGE]
His notes on this page reveal that Wilder sought expert advice for the augur scene on the first page of the novel. He probably spoke with Professor Stanley C. Ball, who retired in 1950.
Oh, that Wilder’s a perfect devil. He knows about everything. In Yale we have a famous ornithologist; I went to him and asked what internal damage in birds would be likely to be interpreted by the Augurs as “bad omens” for Rome. He gave me this.
The notation to “Thunder‘” reads: “[‘Thunder on the left’ is proverbially a very bad omen—].”
This notation, picking up on invented ceremonies, also includes a swipe at he traditional historical novel.
All inventions of mine—sheer inventions. But presented this way—with machine-gun self-assurance,—the reader can’t help but believe it. I’m building up a solid concrete Rome. Other so-called historical novels are written with pages and pages of very fancy “description.” There is NO description in this book. There are just these functional details—thousands of them. They make the reader SEE Rome, in my opinion, far more vividly.
On this page “Baiae” is revealed to have been inspired by Newport, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay, one of Wilder’s favorite writing haunts and the inspiration for his final novel, Theophilus North (1973). The notes shown as and read:
Now I get my plot (one of my plots) started. A great society-lady plans a GREAT dinner party. Notice how Wilder—damn him—is never vague. He pours on concrete specific details,—hence the reader is forced into believing it.
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