Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  While recognizing the force of the Department’s argument as a working rule of administration, as regards myself, it is more important that I be true to the light I have on this question than that I should fall in with the conventions of government. The conventions of government always lag behind the convictions of the few, and if the few who think they have new light accepted as unchanging the policies of the day, civilization would have no advances to record.32

  Once again he offered to resign, and once again he was permitted to stay on. In later years Thornton wrote to his brother, Amos: “It’s not hard to imagine Taft’s enormous bulk shaking with laughter as he remembers ‘Amos’ of the Skull and Bones days going through an agony of spirit on the matter, and answering with affectionate indulgence.”33

  Wilder and Taft had enjoyed a brief reunion in Hong Kong in October 1907 when Taft visited China as secretary of war. The two old friends were photographed in silk hats and frock coats. Wilder had ordered a reinforced sedan chair for Taft, who was portly, to say the least, and under whose weight, on a previous visit to China, a sedan chair had collapsed. The Chinese merchant who built the ornate red chair at Consul Wilder’s behest invoiced: “Special sedan chair for great American giant.”34

  In Dr. Wilder’s new post the grueling social schedule very quickly exhausted Isabella. There were dinners, luncheons, parties given by others, and a procession of hundreds of Chinese and foreigners—residents and tourists—into and out of the Wilders’ home. In addition Isabella received a dozen to sixty guests on her “day at home” each Saturday.35 Try as she might, she was not adjusting any more readily to Shanghai than she had adjusted to Hong Kong. She had not regained her full health, energy, and spirit after the last pregnancy. Both she and her husband were unhappy with the German school in Shanghai, the only local option for their older children. With help from Nurse Donoghue and the Chinese staff, Isabella could manage the three girls at home awhile longer, but precocious Thornton, now nearly fourteen and missing his brother’s companionship, needed more education, more supervision, and more stimulation. While Dr. Wilder was “much pleased with Thornton’s cheery temperament and innocence,” he worried about his son’s strong artistic tendencies. When his head was not in a book, Thornton was dreaming up stories or playing music.36

  Thornton’s parents decided that he must go away to boarding school. Some thought was given to sending him to join Amos at the Thacher School in California, but an alternative lay 450 miles north of Shanghai, in Chefoo (today Yantai, in Shandong Province). The China Inland Mission School at Chefoo was a well-established English-style boarding school for children of missionaries and other foreigners, founded in 1881 for “the education of the children and the recuperation of missionaries suffering from ill-health.”37 Western missionaries braved the hazards of travel to get to the school compound for sanctuary and renewal, many of them leaving their children there to be educated and, it was hoped, stirred to become missionaries themselves. The curriculum was rigorous, the environment was safe, and the tuition was reasonable. Amos and Isabella decided that this would be the best place for Thornton, and plans were set in motion to enroll him for the spring term of 1911.

  “I have just got permission to admit Thornton to the Chefoo School,” Dr. Wilder wrote to Amos in late March, adding that the school was “on the sea, the physical line is strong, the influences good. . . . There is a hearty, out-door, wholesome flavor to an English school that I think will build Thornton up—make a man of him. He has some strong sides—much good sense and is not a weak fellow, as some might infer.”38

  The school sat on the shore of the bustling treaty port and resort town of Chefoo, overlooking the Bohai Sea as it flowed into the Yellow Sea. The climate and the inviting convergence of hills and sea drew travelers and tourists from all over China for rest and recreation. Native Chinese intermingled with a growing population of foreigners engaged in commerce, missionary work, and occasional warfare. Chefoo was a thriving business center, at any given time exporting exquisite embroidery and other Chinese crafts, along with such crops as peanuts, apples, and opium.39

  Just as Thornton was preparing for his first sea voyage from Shanghai to Chefoo to enroll in the school, word reached his father that the port of Chefoo was quarantined because of the epidemic of severe pneumonic plague then sweeping through Chinese cities. It was Consul General Wilder’s duty to monitor the tragedy in Shanghai and telegraph detailed reports to Washington and to the International Red Cross. “Hundreds a Day Dying of Plague,” ran an Associated Press news story based on accounts from Dr. Wilder and other diplomats in China. In Wilder, the diplomat and the journalist now merged to give a graphic account of the ordeal: “Dread Disease Is Spreading in Many Parts of China Very Rapidly. 65,000 Have Died. Thousands of Bodies Are Being Burned and Many Homes Destroyed.”40 In some places frozen ground made it impossible to bury the victims, and “half a mile of coffins are visible. The people have finally consented to cremating of 4,000.” Officials feared that the number of casualties would double before the crisis was over.41

  By late April the danger of plague had subsided enough to permit the port to reopen, and soon afterward, fourteen-year-old Thornton joined a shipload of students bound for Chefoo and the tightly structured school experience that would influence him profoundly.

  After two rough days and nights plowing northward through the East China Sea to the Yellow Sea, Thornton’s ship—an old coastal steamer he described as “crowded, begrimed, smelly”—reached Chefoo.42 Students traveled under the care of a schoolmaster and schoolmistress sent down from Chefoo to chaperone the journey. The ship put in at several ports along the way, dropping off mail and supplies and picking up passengers, including more students—from homesick eleven-year-olds to cocky teenagers who were “old boys” or “old girls” at the school. Most of the students were children of missionaries and had already traveled hundreds of miles from missionary outposts in the interior, some as far away as the border of Tibet, many knowing that because the journey was so long and expensive, it might be two years or more before they saw their parents again.43

  While about 50 percent of the children enrolled at the Chefoo school came from China Inland Mission families, another 25 percent came from other Christian mission programs in China, and the remaining 25 percent were children of Western diplomats such as Amos Parker Wilder, or American, British, or European businessmen in China. Dr. Frank McCarthy was headmaster from 1895 until 1930, and “directed the school through many crises—the Japanese war of 1895, the Boxer Rising of 1900, the plague year of 1911, the uncertainties of 1912 when China ended the rule of emperors who had held sway for more than 2,000 years and became a republic”—and on through World War I and the 1920s.44 The China Inland Mission School did an excellent job of educating boys and girls, and a remarkable job of protecting them. Amos Parker Wilder knew he could entrust his son’s safety as well as his education to the Chefoo staff.

  “Thornton is at a big English missionary school at Chefoo,—two days north,” his father wrote to a friend in June 1911 from Shanghai. “It is a very economical place and the out-door life, sports, etc., are doing him good. He needs a little virility to keep him on the ground. He was soaking himself in medieval drama and like nonsense and I am delighted to have him playing cricket and swimming in the sea which lies in front of the school.”45 While he was at Chefoo, Thornton was required to write at least one weekly letter to his family, and his many surviving letters, penned often under duress each Sunday afternoon, provide vivid snapshots of his Chefoo experience. He wrote about his boyhood in China in detail decades later in “Chefoo, China,” the unpublished manuscript that blended history, memory, and imagination, and in another unfinished manuscript entitled “Chinese Story,” a fragment of a projected fictionalized version of his life in China. When those later manuscripts are juxtaposed with letters, diaries, and other documents actually written during the time, there is proof that his memory was remarkably reliable. Whether rooted in
literal fact or in emotional truth, what survives in the patchwork of these two manuscripts is an impressionistic story about a pivotal time in Thornton Wilder’s boyhood—a time he felt compelled to revisit late in his life.

  As his letters confirm, Thornton was terribly homesick at Chefoo at first, even though the Wilders’ fractured family life was by then habitual. Most of his classmates were the children of missionaries, including young Henry Luce, born in 1898 to American Presbyterian missionary parents, and enrolled at the China Inland Mission School from the time he was ten until he was fourteen. Compared with the frontier mission homes many of the students had grown up in, the school was luxurious. Most of the neo-Gothic buildings had been constructed in 1896. The Boys’ School building with its archway and tower, complete with weathercock, overlooked the shore of the bay, dotted with boathouses and bathhouses, and stood adjacent to well-groomed playing fields. School terms were organized with “clockwork regularity,” but during the summer months children could “ramble at will” on school playgrounds or go to the beach.46 With supervision, they could climb the nearby mountains overlooking the school grounds.

  It was the intent of parents and school officials alike to “shield” the boys and girls at Chefoo school from the “harmful” influences of the Chinese “heathen” whom their parents risked health and life and family solidarity to convert, but the children were still served by them. Chinese boatmen looked after the school boathouse on the beach, and carried the boats into the water. Chinese servants cooked the meals, cleaned the buildings, and maintained the cricket pitch on the school grounds. Chinese groundskeepers “dug, prepared, rolled, and marked” the tennis courts, and Chinese workers quarried local stone and labored to construct school buildings.47

  Students were safe and sheltered inside the school compound every day but Sunday, when they marched into Chefoo “two by two” to attend Church of England services. “Sunday is not a day of rest for the Chinese,” Thornton remembered. “The long procession was often held up in the narrow streets by a blockage of one kind or another. There we saw on either side: the goitres, the tumors, the abscesses, the flaking white stumps of a leper’s arms and legs, the blind, the skeletal children.”48

  According to the picture he painted in his manuscripts years later, Thornton was bristling with concern and curiosity, longing to explore Chefoo and its narrow streets crowded with foot traffic and rickshaws, its colorful markets and shadowed alleys with the omnipresent beggars. He wanted to talk to the Chinese inhabitants of nearby high-walled villages or the small farms spread neatly throughout the countryside. He was not as comfortable as most of his peers with the school’s emphasis on sports—not only soccer and cricket but tennis, swimming, and boating—or on religion, the “constant ‘barrage of prayer’ ” as one former Chefoo student described it. Thornton wanted instead to try to see and understand “the human multitude in China.”49 While the Western missionaries worked among that multitude, the European and American expatriates, the diplomats and the businessmen, were more insulated. Yet even they, Thornton wrote years later, “could not long remain entirely unaware of the ocean of suffering around them.”50

  As his letters reveal, Thornton soon discovered that at the China Inland Mission School, the boys were regularly expected to play cricket and soccer, two sports he did not play well and therefore did not enjoy. He tried, however: “The other day I played but they play a different game,” he wrote in a letter to his family. “In this one they touch it only with their feet, backs and heads. And I play the little that I know of Rugby and take it in my hands and make a foul. It is something to unlearn.”51 He soon sought and received special permission to enjoy cross-country runs “through fields of monumental Chinese graves.” As he remembered it, Thornton “contrived too—though less ambitiously—to leave the bounds” of the school compound and, as he put it, to “go to China.”52

  Most weekdays the boys were required to play cricket or soccer, but on Wednesdays they were allowed to choose their exercise, and that is why Thornton could run cross-country alone in the alluring landscape beyond the school and the city. “This privilege was open only to older boys of proven reliability,” he wrote, “but it was accorded to me, probably because of my father’s position. I gave my solemn promise not to linger in the villages, not to fall into conversation with the ‘natives,’ not to touch the offerings on the graves—simply to complete the three-mile course and return to the school.”53 As he relived them in memory years later, he delighted in those solitary treks, running out of the Boys’ School grounds past the tennis courts and the walls enfolding the Girls’ School, onto the country road that wound through lush farm fields, past farmhouses and tombs. “These were upright inscribed slabs, graceful stelae,” he wrote. “At the base of many of them were small altars or thrones, some of them in the shape of primitive houses surrounded by offerings in bright colored paper and festooned with streamers invoking the dead.”54 It was at the midway point in his run that he entered the “Grove of the Ancestors,” where ancient sycamores and gingko trees encircled a group of “noble tombs.”55

  He loved the “solitary and ruminative” experience of the Wednesday afternoon runs. He had already decided that he was going to be a writer. “It is well known that writers require long stretches of time alone—to think,” he reflected in his manuscript decades afterward. “I thought throughout the entire course, but I thought best in the Grove.”56 His habit was to sit in the grove, leaning comfortably against a tree, and to think or, sometimes, to sleep before he ran down the hill back toward the school. He took advantage of any opportunity to try to talk with Chinese people he encountered on the way.

  There was no escaping the strict academic regimen of the school, or the “great deal of corporal punishment, from the teachers on the students, and from the students on one another,” Thornton wrote in 1929. As he recalled it, he quickly learned from painful experience that the three students with the lowest grades on any class quiz “received three sharp blows on the hand with a ruler and could watch for hours the rising blue welts.”57 “I had many occasions to compare my rising welts with those of my fellow-students,” he wrote in his Chefoo manuscript.58 This was a practice of which his parents disapproved. His father had written to his children that “in the English schools children are punished a good deal; while boys sometimes need a little thumping, I believe that plenty of love will do much the same. At all events, we are bringing you four up on that basis—though now I am absent, the responsibility is great on you all.”59

  The rigorous curriculum, designed in part to prepare students to take the Oxford entrance examinations and in part to produce a new generation of Protestant missionaries in China, included classes in biblical scripture, British history, world geography, English composition and literature, mathematics (including Euclid), science, Latin, music, and drawing, as well as courses in bookkeeping and shorthand. Thornton quickly realized that American boys, himself included, had certain obstacles to surmount. The English boys were far better educated. Furthermore the American boys “gave the impression of being stupid, ill-educated and uncouth,” Thornton wrote, looking back. “There was little possibility of our ever, ever growing up to be gentlemen.”60

  He informed his father that he had been placed in a class “much higher than I ever expected and there is some doubt of how long I will stay. Im [sic] already tackling the six major declentions [sic] in a Latin grammar and the rudiments of Algebra.” He issued a warning: “My marks will be awfull [sic] ( just a little over half the Max, most of them) 65s and 68s.” He begged his father not to show the grades to Amos, who was a very good student. “Wait another term. I am getting into the hang of it.”61 Even music, which Thornton loved, presented new complications. “The boys all learn by the Sol-Fa System,” Thornton reported in a letter, “and the music-books look like Hiroglyphics [sic].”62 He enjoyed the religion class taught by “the young and bounding Mr. Taylor,” who managed to make it fun to memorize passages from the New T
estament.63

  Although one of his nicknames at home was Todger, Thornton was called Towser at Chefoo—or, more formally, Wilder Minor, since there were other Wilders (unrelated) in the student population. He wrote later, “Wilder Major and Wilder Tertius were to be my best friends among my fellow students, as well as five years later at Oberlin College.”64 These two were sons of Dr. George Wilder, a medical missionary in Peking.

  In June 1911 Thornton was elated to learn that his sister Charlotte would soon be coming to Chefoo. His father wrote to a friend on June 10, 1911: “Let me add confidentially, that Mrs. Wilder may go to Europe soon, leaving Charlotte at Thornton’s school in the hope that with the minimum cares she [Isabella] may pick up her strength and fire.”65 Isabella’s doctor recommended the change of scenery, and once again plans were under way to split the family. She was “run-down and depleted,” her husband knew, and she needed “change—change, newness” as well as “freedom from care.”66 Dr. Wilder, of course, had to remain in Shanghai. Young Amos would stay at the Thacher School in the United States. Isabella would travel to Europe, as she had longed to do for years, first to Switzerland, and then to join her sister, Charlotte Niven, and her now-widowed mother in Florence, Italy, where Charlotte worked as one of the national secretaries of the YWCA in Europe. Isabella would take the two little girls with her—Isabel, now ten; and Janet, just a year old. And that left Amos in California, and Thornton at his boarding school in Chefoo.

  But what to do with Charlotte? It was decided that she would join Thornton in Chefoo. The school was good for him, his parents believed, and they hoped it would be so for Charlotte. “She’s a girl full of power,” her father wrote to Amos, “if she can get it under control.”67 He had other concerns about Thornton, which he shared in July in a letter to Amos: “Thornton will go through life radiating good nature, I hope, but unless he gets more ‘practical’ I guess you have to support him!—tho these dreamers sometimes surprise one.”68