What is left of Thornton Wilder, our only writer to have won a Pulitzer Prize for both drama (twice) and fiction, and at one time a kind of semi-official cultural spokesman for America? The Library of America has devoted three volumes to his work—sometimes the kiss of life, sometimes the kiss of death. “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” is still being assigned to teen-agers in school (it sells about seven thousand copies a year), though what they make of it is beyond my imagining. And, of course, “Our Town” goes on and on and on and on. Is there a high school in America that hasn’t staged it? I myself, in my senior year—back in 1948, when the play was only ten years old—was attempting, against the odds, to be New Englandy as the Stage Manager.
And now Wilder has inspired a very long, thorough, and somewhat misguided biography, “Thornton Wilder: A Life” (HarperCollins), by Penelope Niven, who has produced comparably exhaustive tomes about Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen. Niven gives Wilder her all, and it’s both too much and not enough. Too much, in that the detail is too undifferentiated. (Do we really need to know, for instance, that his sister Isabel, in England in her early twenties, “studied Old English embroidery and design at the Oxford City-County Council School, and audited a ‘celebrated course’ in Restoration drama at Lincoln College as well as an English literature course at Christ Church”?) Too little, in that she ignores (or doesn’t recognize) disturbing complexities in Wilder’s nature and slides past episodes and relationships that are less than attractive.
And yet she gets a good deal right, beginning with her understanding that family—his family—was at the core of Wilder’s existence, and that his father was the overpowering presence in his psyche. “There are times,” he wrote to his brother when he was twenty-eight, “when I feel his perpetual and repetitive monologue is trying to swamp my personality, and I get an awful rage.” Much of Wilder’s work echoes, however subliminally, his struggle to break away from Amos Wilder’s unrelenting need to dominate his life, his ideas, even his soul. The touching scene in “Our Town” where Dr. Gibbs gently admonishes his adolescent son, George, for selfishly failing to chop wood for his mother may remind us of the sentimental father-son talks between Lewis Stone and Mickey Rooney in the “Andy Hardy” movies (of the same period), but it’s hard not to think of it as a kind of wish fulfillment—this was certainly not the tone of the encounters, early and late, between Thornton and the father who, although sympathetic, was also overprotective, over-proscriptive, and overcritical. It comes as no surprise that the most violent moment in “The Skin of Our Teeth” is a near-fatal physical blowup between Mr. Antrobus and the nasty young Henry, the aggression coming from the son, or that the central action of the late novel “The Eighth Day” involves a son murdering his father. When, after a long, debilitating illness, Amos Wilder finally died, Thornton was the only one of his five children who didn’t make it to the funeral.
Mr. Wilder was a man of rigid principles and strong abilities that were ultimately frustrated—at various times, he was a newspaper editor, a columnist, a renowned public speaker, and the American consul-general in both Hong Kong and Shanghai. (Thornton attended a mission school in northern China; his fellow-students included Henry Luce, with whom he went on to have a complicated lifelong relationship.)
The first Wilder child was named Amos, after his father, and he was the ideal son—handsome, serious, a California tennis champion who became a theologian and minister. Thornton, born in 1897, came next (there was a stillborn twin). The oldest girl was Charlotte—sensitive, a poet, passionately independent, and a victim of severe depression and schizophrenia, in and out of institutions for most of her adulthood. The next girl was Isabel (after her mother, Isabella), also a writer, who was Thornton’s closest connection through much of their lives. The last of the Wilders was Janet, almost an afterthought, who escaped the crushing attention of her father and went on to a fruitful—you might say, normal—life. She was the one who got away.
As for Mrs. Wilder, she was attractive, clever, nurturing, and trapped for most of her life in a marriage that she obviously regretted. Niven says that Isabella “often told her husband that their wedding day was ‘the worst day that ever befell either of us.’ ” The Wilders disagreed about most things, including the children. (Their father, Isabel later remarked, “recognized Thornton’s talents, but to him they had to be protected; to our mother, they had to be fed.”) Her life was spent in accommodating and challenging her difficult husband, and coping with an eternal and exhausting lack of money.
To his father, Thornton, though clearly brilliant, was also a weakling, a dilettante. Every summer, well into his twenties, his father sent him off to do physical labor on farms, thereby “ridding him of his peculiar gait and certain effeminate ways.” He insisted that, rather than go to his own alma mater, Yale, Thornton should go to Oberlin; its manners and morals were more appropriate. He arranged for Thornton, returning from a post-college stay abroad, to teach French at the Lawrenceville School, near Princeton—a job that lasted four years. He criticized Thornton’s writing: as late as 1935, when Thornton was almost thirty-eight years old and a world-famous writer, Amos wrote to Charlotte about the novel “Heaven’s My Destination”: “I suspect Hawthorne and Geo. Eliot would handle certain aspects differently and shall tell Thornton so though I have not read it in full.”
An American, Wilder wrote in his journal, “is a man who has outgrown his father,” and Thornton slowly distanced himself from his, prevailing on the central issue of how to spend his life—he would be a writer, no matter what his father might have preferred. Even more basic, perhaps: “My father was a man of religious conviction. [My religion] was gone before I missed it, like a coat left in some railway station. Even in my Oberlin days I had formulated for myself the phrase: religion is the emanation from an extinct star.” But though he might have abandoned God, he never fully recovered from the bedrock Puritanism that was his father’s defining quality.
Long before high school, Wilder was dashing off playlets and skits, and when, after two years at Oberlin, he was finally allowed to go to Yale he was working on full-length plays as well as writing stories and essays. He got in on the end of the First World War, enlisting in the Coast Artillery Corps, then going back to Yale to finish up. In 1920, after graduating, he took up an eight-month residency as a prospective archeologist at the American Academy in Rome, followed by a brief sojourn in Paris before returning home to take up his duties at Lawrenceville.
The time he spent in Rome widened his intellectual vision and sharpened his social skills. When he wasn’t writing plays and sending them off (only to be rejected) to producers like the Theatre Guild, he was palling around with other young graduate students and artists. But he also got caught up in a world of elderly society women, whose gossipy stories he listened to avidly while they fed him tea and dinner (his funds were desperately low). He was in danger, he acknowledged, of becoming “a confirmed little brother of the rich,” informing his mother that he “never paid a more than languid attention” to the young girls. At the same time, his activities as an archeologist—particularly an encounter with a trove of family paintings discovered in an ancient tomb—were suggesting to him the continuity of human existence and the universality of human experience.
Around this time, he suffered a severe emotional crisis—a love affair that went devastatingly wrong when the person he fell in love with rebuffed him. “I loved with all the exaggeration one can imagine,” he wrote to a close friend, “but I was not only not loved so in return. I was laughed at.” Wilder never named the person he was in love with, but it’s clear that it was a man. (His interest in women was unshakably nonsexual.) His homosexuality—his sexuality—was kept a dark secret. Young men appear and disappear in his life: a handsome young actor who, as Niven puts it, “told Thornton he had loved being with him ‘that night,’ more than he could know”; a boy from an “imposing New York family” he encountered in Naples in 1920—thinking he was a soldier, he reports to his family, “I ran back and spoke to him, inviting him to have an ice cream with me.” They then spent several days together, exploring Pompeii and climbing Vesuvius.
The only unambiguous account we have of Thornton Wilder’s sexual life comes from a young man named Samuel Steward, whom Gertrude Stein had befriended and sent to visit him in Zurich, in 1937. Steward wrote in his autobiography that after the two men went to bed together there they met for the same purpose on various occasions in Paris and Chicago. In an interview Steward gave in 1993, when he was eighty-five, he concluded that Wilder was “afraid of sex,” elaborating, “Thornton always went about having sex as though it were something going on behind his back and he didn’t know anything about it.” Niven ties herself in knots in her discussion of Wilder’s confusing sexuality, looking for the bright side and eventually finding it:
Asked once why he had never married, Wilder answered, “Well—y’know—I’m not one very much for passion.”
It was from his Roman stay that Wilder fashioned his first novel, “The Cabala,” but this was not the mining of personal experience typical of most first novels. There is indeed a first-person narrator, a young American visiting Rome, but he’s barely characterized and has no real life of his own. Through his archeologist friend Blair, he finds himself in a position of semi-intimacy with a “circle so powerful and exclusive that all these Romans refer to them with bated breath as the Cabala”—from a highly influential Cardinal to the adolescent son of a rich woman who kills himself in a paroxysm of incest and guilt. But the heart of the book is the disastrous relationship between Blair and the dazzling Princess Alix, who falls madly in love with him and is rejected as wantonly and cruelly as Wilder himself had been rejected. Her sufferings ring true; the rest is clever embroidery. (Including the bizarre implication at the end that the members of the cabala are in some way reincarnations of the ancient gods.)
“The Cabala,” published in 1926, received a good deal of attention, most of it positive, and sold a respectable five thousand copies. Nothing about its reception, however, hinted at what would happen when, almost two years later, Wilder published “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” which won the Pulitzer and was the top-selling novel of the year—well over two hundred thousand copies. No one really understood its immense success. Perhaps the book’s intriguing concept was enough. The first sentence reads, “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” At once, a Franciscan named Brother Juniper determines to discover why this happened to these five people: “If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life, surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”
As in “The Cabala,” the individual stories of the main characters, told in separate sections, are the meat of the novel. We have the Marquesa de Montemayor, a sad old woman whose daughter, for whom she has a great passion, dislikes her and has chosen to live in Spain. (This relationship was based on the passion of the great letter writer Madame de Sévigné for her daughter.) With the Marquesa dies her lonely servant maid, Pepita. A poor scribe, Esteban, is also on the bridge; he’s crazed with mourning for his twin brother, who has recently died, nursing a hopeless infatuation for the celebrated actress known as “the Perichole.” Her little boy and her “Uncle Pio,” who nurtured her, trained her, and served her, are the other victims of the accident.
Is there a pattern? The old Abbess of the Convent of Santa María Rosa de las Rosas, who in some ways presides over the novel, has the final words: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” Well, if you say so, Abbess. Presumably this satisfied the quasi-mysticism of many readers of the time.
The follow-up to “Bridge” was “The Woman of Andros,” a short, mannered novel that went even farther back in time—to ancient Greece, and a wise and misunderstood onetime woman of pleasure who has come to live on a remote island, where she dies, saying, “I praise the world and all living. All that is, is well.” The book ends on an arbitrary (and irritating) Christian note: “And in the East the stars shone tranquilly down upon the land that was soon to be called Holy and that even then was preparing its precious burden.”
These three early novels, all carefully crafted and meticulously written, made Thornton Wilder a big name and, incidentally, made him a pile of money. (He quickly built a house for his family in Connecticut, referred to as “the House ‘The Bridge’ built.”) But they also brought down on him the most vicious attack his work ever received, a long snarl of disdain in The New Republic from Michael Gold, the author of the inflammatory “Jews Without Money,” who called him the “Emily Post of culture.” Accusing him of ignoring the conditions of American society and of writing as the “poet of the genteel bourgeoisie,” Gold challenged him to write a book about contemporary America. Wilder’s next novel, “Heaven’s My Destination,” was in part an answer to that challenge.
Wilder’s life in the middle to late nineteen-twenties was highly Eurocentric. In 1926, he found himself again in Paris, where he fell into the literary world, making a good friend of the about-to-be-famous Hemingway; they even considered sharing digs. (To his family: “I’d love to go into the studio with Ernest, but there are no meals with it. He eats around with the enormous and flamboyant Rotonde crowd. And his wife is about to divorce him and his new wife is about to arrive from America, so I think I’d better not try. But he’s wonderful. Its the first time I’ve met someone of my own generation whom I respected as an artist.”)
He also respected Glenway Wescott, whose lovely novel “The Grandmothers” made a big stir in the summer of 1927. “I’m jealous,” he wrote to a friend. “My only satisfaction is that the 3 musketeers aged 30 = Ernest Hemingway, Glenway Wescott and I may puncture the inflated rep’s of the previous fashions: the Sherwood Andersons, Cabells, Cathers, what not. You’ll scold me for that, but by dint of being modest most of the time I allow myself a little party of conceit every now and then.” It would seem that his habitual modesty and geniality, however genuine, masked a large ambition and a strong belief in his powers. As early as 1921, he had written to his father, “I am going to be at a frightful disadvantage for some years, sheepish and put-upon, but when I am discovered things will be vulgarly resplendent; I vend a cake Americans will hug.”
Returning from Paris, he rooted himself firmly in America. Robert Hutchins, an old friend from Yale, induced him to come to Chicago to teach at the university he led, and for some time Wilder centered his life there—far, we may note, from his family in the East. He had already begun making solitary explorations, by car, of the south and west of the country. By 1930, he could write to a friend, “I know America down to every absurd Keep Smiling Club, every gas station, every hot-dog stand.”
This immediate and fond contact with the realities of his time and place, as opposed to the bookishness of his first three works of fiction, gives “Heaven’s My Destination” an extraordinary vitality and ease. Here is a book that provides total pleasure—a picaresque contemporary “Candide” or “Don Quixote,” written with both affection and a gimlet eye, about a young, earnest textbook salesman (territory: Oklahoma and Texas), George Brush, who doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and doesn’t believe in unmarried sex, and who blunders into one ludicrous situation after another through his honesty and naïveté. He’s thrown into jail for refusing, on principle, to accept interest on the money a bank is holding for him. He mistakes the girls in a small-town whorehouse for nice working girls (and insists on taking them all to the movies). He tries to convince people of the soundness of his views. (“I don’t see how a fine girl like you can believe that the Bible tells lies and that we come from monkeys, and that it’s all right for girls to smoke cigarettes. What becomes of the world if we let all those ideas into it?”) He’s beaten up and betrayed, and he grows demoralized and ill as the realities of life slowly break in on his shining, ridiculous rectitude. But he recovers, and continues on his slow journey toward . . . Heaven.
Some readers took “Heaven’s My Destination” as a satire on Christianity and the Midwest, but today it reads like a loving comedy. Isabel told Glenway Wescott that George Brush was a mixture of their father, Thornton himself, his friend the boxing champion Gene Tunney, and Candide. Wilder said that he meant Brush “to be seen as learning in episode after episode better how to render his instinctive goodness and unworldliness effective. It’s an Education Novel.” Not a surprise: Wilder was always an educator at heart. His years at Lawrenceville and the University of Chicago were only the professional manifestations of his need to instruct. Kenneth Tynan put it this way, in a profile he wrote for the London Observer in 1955: “Wilder is perpetually aflame with ideas, and his true vocation is that of cultural evangelist. Faced with the variety of human knowledge, he licks his lips, eats omnivorously and transmits his delight in letters and lectures to fellow-writers all over the world. Few men learn more hungrily or teach more generously.”
It was in Chicago, in 1934, that he first encountered the woman who was to be his most stimulating literary inspiration. “At present,” he wrote to a friend, “I am the secretary, errand boy-companion of Gertrude Stein who is teaching here for two weeks—a great, sensible, gallant gal and a great treat.” They remained close until she died, and he enthusiastically shepherded and promoted her work in America. On her death, he wrote to Alice Toklas, “WASN’T IT WONDERFUL TO HAVE KNOWN AND LOVED HER? What glory! What fun! What goodness! What loveableness. . . . Long after you and I are dead she will be becoming clearer and clearer as the great thinker and the great soul of our time.”
That same year, he was also making forays into Hollywood, working for Samuel Goldwyn on a script based on Tolstoy’s “Resurrection”; on an aborted “Joan of Arc” for Katharine Hepburn; on a proposed version of “Twelfth Night” for Marion Davies. A telegram to his mother: “Was offered and turned down solo job on next Garbo picture stop Roller skated with Walt Disney.” Hollywood, he wrote to a friend, is “a mixture of very hard work and the industrious contrivance of untruths.” (His one significant film venture was writing, years later—for and with Hitchcock—the script of “Shadow of a Doubt.”)
Through the mid-thirties, he was again making trips to Europe, the high point of one them a series of meetings with Freud, who, he tells Stein, said to him, “My daughter Anna will be so sorry to have missed you. You can come again? She is older than you—you do not have to be afraid. She is a sensible reasonable girl. You are not afraid of women? She is a sensible—no nonsense about her. Are you married, may I ask?” To which he appends three exclamation points and the remark “Really a beautiful old man.”
In 1936, Wilder resigned from the University of Chicago, determined to give up writing fiction in order to focus on becoming a successful dramatist. He began a number of plays, including “Our Town,” which he worked on at the MacDowell Colony and, eventually, in an isolated hotel outside Zurich—for a while, he was the only guest. As he once wrote to his man of business, “I hate being alone. And I hate writing. But I can only write when I’m alone. So these working spells combine both my antipathies.” (In the sixties, on one of his long swings around the country, his car gave out as he was driving into the small town of Douglas, Arizona, and he stayed there by himself for a year and a half, working on “The Eighth Day.”)
It took more than two years for “Our Town” to reach Broadway, but it was a triumph when it finally did, its immediate impact stemming from its unusual stage techniques: the figure of the Stage Manager speaking directly to the audience, explaining, philosophizing; the stripped-down, practically bare stage. (In fact, Wilder had used these techniques earlier, in his still popular one-act plays “The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden” and “Pullman Car Hiawatha.”) From start to finish, the play suggested—and the audience grasped—that, despite the sweetness and sadness of the particulars, what was taking place was intended to be Universal.
When “Our Town” was filmed (with Martha Scott, repeating her stage role of Emily and nominated for an Oscar, and William Holden as George, in one of his earliest roles), the movie that emerged proved to be an unfortunate hybrid—film is too specific, too concrete, to adjust for “Our Town” ’s folksy abstractions. Equally unfortunate was a 1955 TV musical starring Frank Sinatra (“Love and Marriage”), with Eva Marie Saint and Paul Newman as Emily and George. (Almost fifty years later, Newman played the Stage Manager both on Broadway and on television.)
The success of “Our Town” transformed the public perception of Wilder. He was now not merely a successful writer but a sage, a spokesman—a role that he seems to have relished, or at least tolerated. As a writer, he paused: Glenway Wescott called such lapses in his creative life “mysterious lulls.” He travelled; he worked on aborted plays; he appeared as the Stage Manager in at least a dozen productions of “Our Town”; he became an official representative of the State Department, of PEN. And his crowd became more and more a celebrity crowd—Alexander Woollcott, the acerbic actress Ruth Gordon. On the subject of his friends, an earlier, disenchanted biographer, Richard Goldstone (who had conducted a Paris Review interview with Wilder in 1956), put it this way: “A sustained friendship for him was all but an impossibility lying beyond his emotional means. All he could afford were Ruth Gordons, Alice Toklases, and miscellaneous other older ladies scattered over America and Europe who cost him nothing—and gave him nothing.” There are many probing, even indiscreet, moments in Goldstone’s 1975 book, subtitled “An Intimate Portrait.” A typical passage: “Clearly there exist beneath the surface of high spirits, frustrations and anxieties, sorrows and suspicions, psychic wounds, creative blocks, and resentments: the entire apparatus of spiritual woes that afflicts man in general and writers in particular.” No wonder that the ultra-private Wilder was uncharacteristically angry at this “intimate portrait.”
Niven virtually ignores Goldstone’s work, although much of it is startling and revelatory. His book acts as a corrective to her near-hagiography.
When the Second World War broke out, Wilder began thinking about the play that became “The Skin of Our Teeth”; its subject was, essentially, the history of mankind—talk about Universal! (He was obsessed at this time with Joyce’s all-encompassing “Finnegans Wake,” recently published—there was a mini-scandal when several scholars accused him of pilfering from it for his play.) However, by 1942, when “The Skin of Our Teeth” was being mounted, he was far from Broadway, having joined, at the age of forty-five, the Army Air Force. For the most part, he left it to sister Isabel to monitor the rehearsal progress, a toxic nightmare of rivalries and treacheries involving the director, Elia Kazan, and the stars—Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, as Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus, and Tallulah Bankhead as the irrepressible Sabina, who, in the course of the ten thousand or so years covered by the action, appears as a housemaid, a beauty queen, and a camp follower. (The young Monty Clift played the Antrobus son.) The minefield, predictably, was Tallulah. (Kazan: “I’ve hated only two people in my life. One was Tallulah Bankhead.”) But, despite the blood, sweat, and tears of getting the play on, it was a critical and popular triumph, winning Wilder his third Pulitzer.
His Air Force career was another success. He spent most of it overseas, first in North Africa, then in Italy. “As a staff officer in the Air Plans division,” Niven writes, “Wilder interrogated prisoners of war, gathered and prepared intelligence, briefed and debriefed Allied pilots, and worked on plans for air attacks.” He rose from captain to lieutenant colonel, winning the Bronze Star. But his health was badly damaged by his experiences in the field, so that when he was discharged, in 1945, he was unable to accept the State Department’s offer to become cultural attaché in Paris.
Instead, he came back home and began work on his first novel in a dozen years: “The Ides of March,” a meditation on Julius Caesar and Caesar’s Rome, ingeniously told in epistolary form. Wilder’s Caesar is a realist—caught up in frightening responsibilities, seeing life more clearly than those around him do, supremely isolated. To some readers, it seemed a masked self-portrait; to others, an existential vision of mankind—Wilder knew and admired Sartre. (Clodia to Caesar: “When I said that life was horrible, you said no, that life was neither horrible nor beautiful. That living had no character at all and had no meaning. You said that the universe did not know that men were living in it.”) “The Ides of March” is best read as an absorbing historical reconstruction, enlivened by such fascinators as Cicero, Catullus, and, of course, Cleopatra. (“The Queen of Egypt is approaching. Missy Crocodile is being fanned across the straits.”) Although it had considerable commercial success, to Wilder’s consternation it failed to engage the attention of a single major literary critic; by now, the establishment was thinking of him as comfortably middlebrow, part of the world of The Saturday Review of Literature and the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Around this time, he began focussing even more compulsively on “Finnegans Wake” and on an attempt to sort out the chronology of the hundreds and hundreds of plays of the great classic Spanish playwright Lope de Vega. These scholarly activities devoured huge amounts of his time, until eventually he realized that they were destructive addictions, sapping his interest in his own work, and he gave them up: “I think that this passion [for Lope] was a useful therapy: pure research has nothing to do with human beings.”
In the fifties, he resurrected his play “The Merchant of Yonkers,” based on a nineteenth-century farce, which had been a failure some years earlier, directed by the famous Max Reinhardt. Reinvented as “The Matchmaker,” a vehicle for Ruth Gordon, it was a substantial hit, first at the Edinburgh Festival, then in London, and, finally, in New York, where it ran for more than a year, though that was nothing compared to the overwhelming success of the musical based on it—“Hello, Dolly!” There were no more financial pressures after that.
His most ambitious novel, “The Eighth Day,” published in 1967, was a best-seller and winner of the National Book Award. It’s a sprawling novel about family—Wilder referred to it as “Little Women” as if it were being “mulled over by Dostoyevsky”—and there are echoes in it of his own family, particularly a daughter who, like poor Charlotte Wilder, lives out her life in a mental institution. It’s about fathers and sons, about Midwestern boarding-house life and life in South American mining camps; about hard work, stoic pride, indomitable energy. And it’s highly readable until, about two-thirds of the way through, its central character dies (offstage) and the book wanders away in various directions, none of them really satisfying. But until then it’s a triumph of narrative and characterization.
Which is more than you can say for his final novel, “Theophilus North,” in which a young man, working over the summer as a tennis instructor in Newport, Rhode Island—scene of Wilder’s First World War service—handily solves the problems, practical and emotional, of an assortment of men and women he encounters there. We’re back to “The Cabala,” with a neuterish hero standing apart from, and rising above, the rich surround. Niven sees this final work as being imbued “with lighthearted vision and deep-hearted wisdom,” but to me it reads like an old man’s self-indulgent and smug fantasy of omniscience and omnipotence—and of youth.
Niven’s almost unmediated admiration for her subject is the most serious blemish on her in-depth and capably organized biography. Hyperbole rules. The “opening nocturne” of “The Woman of Andros” was “later to be frequently quoted as one of the most beautiful passages in American fiction.” “ ‘The Eighth Day’ was a magnet for attention, and a lightning rod for critics.” Clichés abound. “Thornton was in his glory.” “Shakespeare and Company was abuzz with excitement.” And when Niven strays from her immediate subject she can be astonishingly wrong: Proust “had published his last book, ‘The Guermantes Way,’ in May 1921. Thornton was most likely unaware that summer of 1921, as he wrote in his cheap hotel room, that in a cramped fifth-floor apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, the great Proust, fallen on hard times, had put down his pen, never to publish again.” These are all flaws that would have especially mortified Wilder, so scrupulous a researcher, so fastidious and cool a stylist.
Thornton Wilder may have had mysterious lulls in the work he produced for the public, but he never stopped writing. There are as many as ten thousand letters, and Niven tells us that “the pages in his surviving journals, added to his surviving Joyce and Lope de Vega notes, yield an estimated total of at least 1,250,000 words.” And she’s absolutely right when she says that the journals “contain some of his most important creative work.” It is in the journals and letters that we can follow his most interesting thinking as he distills and reports his literary reactions and tastes. Here is the Wilder who reveres Molière and Cervantes, Gogol and Kafka, Nietzsche and Lady Murasaki. And Jane Austen: “How seldom readers seem to remark on all that contempt for the whole human scene that lies just under the surface”; her “only resource and consolation is the pleasure of the mind in observing absurdities.” (Is he talking about Austen or about himself?)
In his writings on drama, he speaks wonderfully about Shakespeare, “one of the few writers in all literature who could present a young woman as both virtuous and interesting. He fashioned nine of them and they continue to affect the spiritual weather of the world.” And he’s similarly sympathetic and telling about Shaw, about the Greeks.
Yet he doesn’t always live in such a rarefied world. He’s funny and malicious about both the French and the Irish. And in 1937 he writes to Mabel Dodge Luhan about “Swing Time,” “In Austria or France go to see a Ginger-Rogers-Fred-Astaire movie. Watch the audience. Spell-bound at something terribly uneuropean—all that technical effortless precision; all that radiant youth bursting with sex but not sex-hunting, sex-collecting; and all that allusion to money, but money as fun, the American love of conspicuous waste, not money-to-sit-on, not money-to-frighten-with. And finally when the pair really leap into one of those radiant waltzes the Europeans know in their bones that their day is over.”
He also airs his dislikes, usually of narrow-minded or highfalutin writers. About Emerson (in a letter to Malcolm Cowley): “Isn’t he awful? . . . The very syntax breathes 3 meals a day with hardworking maids in the kitchen preparing them while the Seer entertains these messages and promptings from the Over-Soul.” About Thoreau: “Only a basically idle woodsman like Thoreau could indulge in lyrical states of gratitude to all-beneficent Mother Nature; and could despise his neighbors who wrestled with her.” About “The Cocktail Party”: “No, sir, life is not restricted to two choices only—dreary inconsequentiality or absolute sainthood. No, sir. T. S. Eliot does not like people; he is in some stung quivering revulsion against our human nature.” The religiosity, the puritanism of Hawthorne, of Mauriac, of Gide, of Graham Greene (and of his father) constantly offend him. First, last, and always, Wilder is a humanist.
The journals and letters are also where we get our strongest sense of Wilder’s view of himself. The glimpses are fleeting. At twenty, he writes to his grandmother, “I am a personality peculiarly isolated.” In a letter to Scott Fitzgerald, whom he had just met: “It is wonderful to have been liked by you and to have been told so, for the self-confidence I have exhibited toward my work I have never been able to extend to my person”—he’s thirty. From his journal: “I am never free of a sense of inadequacy; I feel that I am forever dry when warmth is called for, and warm when judicious impersonality is called for”—he’s forty-three. “Oh, it’s my father’s hand still on me—casting over my social relations not the pale cast of thought, but the pale cast of an inhibited deference to an unexamined undiscriminating ‘niceness’ toward everyone”—he’s fifty-seven. In a letter to a friend: “I’m one of the most extreme goers-alone I ever came across”—he’s closing in on sixty.
And so he registers self-doubt, self-distaste. Yet he could also declare, “I’m no moper.” Indeed, the record demonstrates that he was gregarious, friendly, and endlessly generous to others. A newsweekly once quoted him as saying, “On my grave they will write: Here lies a man who tried to be obliging.” There are worse things to be. In a letter to another friend of Wilder’s, Alice Toklas says, “I have just seen The New Yorker with the review of Thornton’s ‘Ides’—how little they like him—I was quite aghast—when it’s so much easier to like him than not.” ♦
