The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II

by Thornton Wilder

  January 23, 1954

  Saturday

  Now at last I think I’m advancing. The things that put me on the right track were seeing: (1) That the present Third Scene—the Employment Office—must all represent the terrible urgency of getting into the G. and S. —not only my hero’s distrustful curiosity, but the whole world’s urgency; and (2) That in the next scene Laurencia is but an episode-figure. She now has a different characterization: she is a limited little goose, but with streaks and intimations of belonging to the Great Sisterhood (young exemplar therefore of Mrs. Antrobus); now we see, with the help of the preceding scene, that John’s passionate advances are a devouring urge to capture the Emporium-secret in her; and now I can show it without (or almost without) having to say it.

  This probably means that I now discard the Boarding-House Scene (though Ruth [Gordon?] was so wild about it), unless some other use for it can be found other than developing a consecutive Laurencia-story. What I would love to do now is to introduce another girl—perhaps Ermengarde Craigie—who must be played by the same actress who has just played Laurencia—which device will be all the more lively and theatric now that we have made Laurencia an extreme-character part. And how greatly form and pattern will be enhanced if we have our Young Actress also appearing in several roles and only John himself throughout the play.

  To be sure, I now know less than ever where I am going next, but I feel less anxious about that with each new addition of a solid brick in the pavement that is leading there, and I feel pretty sure now that these first four scenes are solid and permanent bricks.

  January 24, 1954

  Sunday

  Now I’ve been able to move on to Scene Four, Laurencia an episode-girl in this scene alone. Allusions to the fact that John has been hanging around girls in the other departments, too. All the John-tone is new, too—now he is boastful. He will some day own and reform the G. and S.

  Walked into town this evening: teased by a large audacity. Laurencia is an early stage, of course, in the life of Mrs. Foster—of the Mrs. Graham. How about showing that all these characters are stages in the lives of four characters? That Mr. Foster once kept an Employment Office for the G. and S.; that Mr. Dobbs (present—unsatisfactory—name for our Employment Officer) will move on to head the Orphanage. That Bertha [Bernice], the cleaning woman, was once a farmer’s wife (name not given); that Laurencia will leave the G. and S. to marry a young farmer named Graham!! In which case, shall we say that she will change her name to Gertrude? That Mr. Hobmeyer will retire to take over an Employment-Agency job? —Yes, yes, yes, it would woefully confuse the audience—but when they get the point, isn’t it a prodigious point to make? And what are we to make of the end of John’s life? —Is he to be a successful or unsuccessful G. and S. man? If the latter, couldn’t we thus indicate that he will be following the Hobmeyer-Dobbs-Foster plan?

  There’s a cyclic drama for you. And reinforcing that image that is now stirring: department stores with their endless buying and selling are like leaves replacing leaves on trees, are like people who have children who have children; but that the G. and S. has something else and something more.

  January 26, 1954

  Tuesday

  Walked into town. Yes, yes, I think it can be done. Writing a letter Monday to [X], I tried to describe what I now see to be the direction of the play and my efforts to describe it to him continue to operate in my mind. It is about the Wheel of Being; the endless repetitions of the life-forms; but the Emporium is, precisely, the evidence of pressures from Elsewhere to introduce a qualitative change into the mechanical repetitions. The wheel therefore is one of the images of the play: Craigie’s is the wheel of repetitions, and in the scene of Craigie’s Anniversary Party I must put (droll) emphasis on the Niagara of intake and outgo. And now I must find ways of adumbrating this into the Orphanage Scene: those children (the Orphanage is “associated” with, sponsored by G. and S.) are the effort to alter and “redeem” the wheel. This wheel-motif, therefore, will give me the atmosphere in which to play this other game: the repetition of lives in my characters: Laurencia will grow up to be Mrs. Graham, etc.

  Now I come up against another “enlargement” of my scene: the Emporium Girls. Dare I venture again (as in the Orphanage Scene) the roll-call of great names: of great women who have been able to get their men into the Emporium? Oh, how I hate “symbols” and bookish allusions—but how in my plays I cannot escape them. Here it is doubly difficult, because the names are not so current in the average audience’s field of allusion. I thought (on the walk) of such a passage as this:

  HOBMEYER: Do you imagine for a moment that these girls can get you a job in the Emporium?

  JOHN [Sullenly]: They are sure that they can.

  HOBMEYER: Maybe it has happened once or twice. I don’t say that it’s impossible. In the Emporium we can never say that a thing is impossible—eh. For instance, do you know that Eyetalian girl that works in the dress-fabrics department, Beatrice her name is—calls herself Beatrice—or those other two Eyetalian girls, Laura and Vittoria. Couldn’t they perhaps bring a man to himself? And that way, somehow, get him a job here?

  I shrink, but maybe I must do it. And follow it by a catalog:

  HOBMEYER: Oh, we have some fine girls here: Monica and Aspasia, that Greek girl, and Teresa and Clara and Magdalene and [blank space] —oh, I won’t say they couldn’t bring a man into the G. and S. if he were ripe for it.

  Digression: Several things about these developments have an almost comical effect upon me. I have been writing this piece on the theatre for Rosamond Gilder and the European anthology on décor (weeks behind on it, as usual) and toward the close I have been trying to describe what the play of the future might be like, and I have (in my notes—it may not appear in the final draft) described just such a play as this: the realism in the specific detail subtended by the largest arcs of time and place and custom. Secondly, I see that this play which took its point of departure from Kafka’s Castle is drawing into itself more and more modalities of Finnegans Wake. Maybe this play will have originality, will be original. It has always been quite clear to me that the other two [Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth] were not. The other two were calqués.* It may be possible that by now my possession of my time concepts, my human-situation concepts is so deep-digested and so all-permeating that I may be permitted to write a really original play—original not in the sense that it is filled with novel devices, but that it makes people see for the first time things that hitherto they had known without being aware that they knew them.

  February 9, 1954

  It’s all in a ferment. But I see that out of my Member of the Audience seated on the stage I must derive elements still lacking from my play: there must be fear and awe and—somewhere there must be melodrama. And yet every nerve of me revolts at introducing any more of those devices that erupt in the Second and Third Acts of The Skin of Our Teeth. Oh, Heaven help me not to have to make the dramatis personae emerge from their roles, or members of the audience, further, intrude themselves into the play. And yet! —when the play is about Everybody, isn’t it legitimate and functional that Everybody should be drawn into the unfoldment of the play? So if I have to do it, Heaven help me to make it irresistibly real and spontaneous.

  Now what is the active enemy of the Emporium? Not Craigie’s, which merely rages impotently and enviously. There are two enemies: for those “in it” there is doubt; for those outside it (in addition to doubt), there is the thing that prevents them entering, the deference to the opinion of the market place, the inability to think alone. (I have just written that into Laurencia’s Scene, groaning because I had to state it so explicitly.) So the Journey of John is the journey to self-as-authority; and the stadia are: (1) His outburst at the Employment Office; (2) His revolt and final acquiescence before the charges of Bertha [Bernice]; and (3) His consciousness that Craigie’s is precisely the servile adherence to the market place and his release. But where can I get melodrama into that? And
how introduce my sitters-on-the-stage? Well, I shall take a walk into town in an hour and see what the walk can bring me.

  February 13, 1954

  Well, nothing came of that walk into town. Then I went to New York.* Another lacuna in the play has been glaring me in the face: I haven’t found any way to express what it is in the G. and S. that has been attracting John. So far I have merely stated it in the shape of that he is puzzled by it: and that’s not enough. While I had the so-called dreamed episode, the former “Prologue,” I could convey sufficiently to the audience that he belonged there by divine inheritance. Now, I have nothing but Mrs. Graham’s assertion. So the elements I must bring up and coalesce are the magnet-pull, the Schaudern, and the audience seated on the stage.

  I have been phantasizing long scenes in which the actress playing Bertha (ossia Bernice) recognizes among the actors-on-the-stage some old long-lost friend—or enemy. And some such thing may well develop, but the whole raison d’être of such an encounter must be that it illustrates an aspect of the Emporium; and also that it contributes to our matrix-form of repetitions. Say she recognizes Mrs. Frisbee (of the Veteran Department-Store Workers):

  BERTHA: What are you doing here?! And what are you doing as an actress?

  MRS. FRISBEE: They didn’t tell me this was about the Gillespie-Schwingemeister. Oh, I won’t stay a minute. I’m going right out to sit in the bus. The G. and S. killed my husband.

  Then big fracas as she tries to draw all her companions out “to sit in the bus.” All that could work—but oh! I cannot, must not, place it there, at the Cleaning-Women’s Scene—can I? I’ll draw up some sketches and see.

  February 15, 1954

  The sketches I then drew up are not final (doubly distressing, since they inevitably overemphasize the aspect of “theatrical tricks,” tiresome Wiederholung of the non-actors’ intrusion into the play, that I must render completely vital and organic or else discard), but they perhaps point the way.

  To encourage myself, let me put the fairest possible face on what I am doing: my “instinct” urges me to do two things (two things at the same time—perhaps more than two—in the simultaneity of several operations is the health and reassurance of the measures), to break up and frustrate any interest in mere anecdote, in mere individual life story; and to make converge upon my action-idea as many and as diversified a series of pertinent elements-of-life as possible. One of the reasons that this play has been so long a-writing is, of course, that I have not been able to make fiercely clear to myself what the Emporium is—what I am saying; the other is that my will-to-work slackens, my faith fades, when the daily task (i.e., the pages I am at work on) do not bristle, sparkle, dance, with representations of life’s diversity, time’s achroneity, and any idea’s Vielseitigkeit. All that is what kept me interested in The Ides of March.* No view of life, then, is real to me save that it presents itself as kaleidoscopic—which does not mean essentially incoherent. (The very children’s toys of that name show us always a beautifully ordered though multi-fragmented pattern.)

  In my plays, and last novel [The Ides of March], there is this constant interruption. The more I seek to exhibit an idea about life, the more I must make sure that the tumult of sheer existences be introduced, pertinent and impertinent (perhaps it is my fault that I do not sufficiently introduce the confessedly absurdly impertinent, as Gertrude Stein does), and the more I start out to give an instance of some character’s individual action, the more I lift it from the specific-unique into the realm of the typical and the idea-expressive. It is natural, therefore, that in a play I should not rest content with the actors moving only in their fictional play: my dramatis personae are characters in the fiction, and representatives of an idea, but they are also men and women engaged in an impersonation. More than that, the members of the audience are not inert intelligences. Since my play is about Everybody, everybody is in my play. Even in The Skin of Our Teeth I went so far (in introducing the captain of the ushers, etc.) as almost to introduce characters who were not intent upon the play. This play is also about the man and woman who are passing by the theatre, in the street outside: why not introduce them?

  So let me reassure myself that there is an organic, legitimate way to introduce these intrusions and interruptions, and when I have found and expressed that way correctly I shall be able to overcome my diffidence. And one sign that I shall be getting it correctly will be laughter—the right kind of laughter: the recognition that it is wildly disproportionate that these members of the audience seated on the stage should be caught up into the fiction, but that that disproportion is not in contradiction with the fact that they move in a real relation to the drama.

  Now to get down to specific instances: what precisely do I want Mrs. Frisbee to carry in this scene? Why—as I said in the previous entry—the magnet-pull, the fascination of the Emporium. And this I can do—as I have done so often—in reverse. She can warn the audience against the fascination. And if through her warnings, I can also intimate the Schaudern, so much the better. It has ruined her life and that of her husband.

  Now let’s go back and try that.

  February 16, 1954

  But what my play above all lacks is passion—which, in all the forms that passion could take, is here the movement of the passion of people seeking the “Right Way.” I feel that it is present in the first scenes, but it slips away, somehow, between the scenes. The figure of John must be a hot-winging arrow that carries the whole play with it. And it seems to me that the reason I’ve lost it is that I haven’t been clear in my head as to what obstacle it is that prevents his being invited to enter the Emporium. I shy away from facing this problem because every side-glance at it seems to lead toward moralizing platement: he lacks humility; he refuses to renounce worldly success, etc.

  But we decided—didn’t we?—that the qualification of the Emporium-worker was that he could “do a thing alone”—nay, that nothing worthwhile was done save unaided (whereby G[ertrude]. S[tein]. enters the play). There too all the pitfalls of eupeptic moralizing lurk, but less flagrantly; this introduces, rather, the pitfalls of the sentimental and pathetic. So that John can be represented as desiring the G. and S. and yet incapable of seeing that success, etc., are forms of dependency. Now it would seem that for this we need a raisonneur or raisonneuse, probably several.

  Let me return now to the text and see what I can do.

  Walked downtown.

  Now it seems to me that we can follow this line: Scene One: Orphanage; Scene Two: The Graham Farm; Scene Three: First Floor of the Emporium; Scene Four: The Employment Office; Scene Five: First Floor of the Emporium (terminating with John’s dream).

  Certainly very dangerous seems the plan for placing two scenes in the same Emporium corridor; but out of our dangers let us make us successes. In this way, I can make ever more serré the inner intensity of John’s “hunt”—hunter and hunted. I want John (and the audience) to get into their consciousness that Laurencia-Hobmeyer dialogue about the vast traditions of the G. and S. before we see the scene at the Agency. I want a first stage of a flirtation with Laurencia, and I want a complete first picture of Hobmeyer kicking John out of the store. All this, too, will give me more space in which to develop all the other motifs which have been developing.

  In this new layout, do I have the Cleaning-Women’s Scene in the first or the second of the Emporium scenes? And can I give Mr. Hobmeyer four big scenes in a row: Hobmeyer-Dobbs (the Employment Officer)—Hobmeyer-Dr. Abercrombie? Or should I assign Mr. Dobbs (as a feeble member of the G. and S. community) to the actor who has just died offstage as Mr. Graham?

  Both the Emporium scenes begin in the same way: floorwalker’s injunction to the customers to leave the store.

  Let’s write at it all and see what happens. (I now can restore that first entrance of John into the store: “Fifth-rate store—air bad—no doors.”)

  February 18, 1954

  Yes, it’s going forward. I’m pretty sure it’s on the right tack. And seve
ral of those boldest tricks with time seem to have found their way with naturalness into the text; and I’ve found a place to insert the figure of the Wheel. Of course, it’s all just first draft still. The best sign that it is moving correctly is that it is beginning to indicate its further development; but more of that later.

  What I want in it now is richness, not as ornament, but as expressive force. And one of these richnesses is more humor—precisely because it is so heaven-reaching a subject—hence, a disconcerting humor. I want [it] in Laurencia; her role is so important because it shows us that the G. and S. does not mean an intellectual élite. A few of my touches so far relate her to Sabina [in The Skin of Our Teeth], but she is not a Sabina, she is a Mrs. Antrobus at twenty-one. I don’t want much more humor from the Ex-Department-Store Workers; they are in danger of being too funny as it is. Then, too, I want a sort of splendor in Scene Five—the material’s all there, but I want it better: Laurencia’s cry for more life; the love scene; the Cleaning Women; the dream. Oh, I must have John threaten not only to stay in the store all night, so as to glimpse the Higher-Ups (that I have already), but his threat “to go up to the offices on the fifth and sixth floor”—an echo of Kafka (K. to the Innkeeper’s wife: “Was fürchten Sie also? Sie fürchten doch nicht etwa . . . für Klamm?”). Somehow I must get into that scene—at the climax; it is the close of Part One, preceding the only intermission—a big rebellion or reaction from the persons seated on the stage.

  Now as to the impediment in John: my Mr. Hobmeyer must again serve as raisonneur. Here so hard not to bore us with the moralizing-didactic. It is John’s craving for success, and his boasting; to which Hobmeyer points out—how? How avoid the most abysmal sententiousness? —the craving for success is a dependency. John’s surprised answer. Can I somehow swing it up into the splendor? Can I give [it] to the cleaning woman as laughing derision?