Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  “There will be a change of happiness for the coming year, won’t there?” he wrote to his father.59 Thornton would be at Oberlin; Amos would be at Yale; Charlotte would be at Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The first of the so-called Seven Sisters colleges, it traditionally offered a serious, rigorous education for women. With three family members in college, Isabella, Isabel, and Janet would move to New Haven to join Dr. Wilder, although Isabella had tried to persuade her husband to let her move with the younger daughters to Claremont, where her husband owned a rental house, now vacant.60 “It will apparently convulse her to come to New Haven against her will,” he wrote to Amos.61 In the end, however, he convinced his wife that the move east had to be made.

  Thornton wrote his father, “And you with your sheaf of plans won,” and he began to worry about how his mother would fare in New Haven in a rented house, on a very limited budget.62 Life was hard enough in Berkeley, he said, and his mother’s daily duties were “beyond an ordinary woman as it is, but Mother has the energy for mopping floors and brushing corners in the mornings and organizing Red Cross chapters and meeting for speakers from European hospitals—and bazaars and teas and performances and sewing-circles and hospital kits all afternoon and darning our stockings in the evenings.”63

  Thornton had many more interests outside school than in school that term, he confessed to his father. “I’ve been doing worse and worse in School but better and better out,” he wrote as his high school graduation ceremony approached. He was very glad that the final months of school had brought him “more friends [than] the previous twelve.”64 He was ashamed of himself that he could not seem to sustain friendships the way his brother could. Amos was “so much the real thing with the testimonial from everyone,” Thornton reflected. “I don’t seem to know anyone or to hold anyone long.”65

  Amos Parker Wilder’s victorious “sheaf of plans” called for Thornton to give in to one more assignment: He had arranged for Thornton and Amos to spend part of the summer working on a farm near Dummerston Station in Vermont. Thornton bristled at their paltry compensation for unremitting, seemingly unappreciated hard work. “It’s kind of cheap to work for money,” he grumbled to his father, “but it’s worse to work for board—it means that they don’t regard your services as up to much and [you] can never tell which part of the board they are grudging you as unearned.”66 Imperviously, Dr. Wilder encouraged his boys to “keep speculating as to how you would manage your own farm to make it go; we may have one sometime.” They could not have been happy to learn that their father was thinking that the three of them might buy or lease a farm someday and actually “make it pay,” as Dr. Wilder wrote to them.67 While Thornton was the most unlikely farmer of the trio, not one of the Wilder men was in any way suited for farming as a profession.

  For Thornton life on the Vermont farm was a source of incessant misery. One week he was almost unable to write the obligatory letter to his father, he complained, for he was exhausted and the palms of his hands were covered with “a little gallery of blisters.”68 He was cutting hay, cleaning horse stalls, washing milk pails, doing dishes, sweeping, mopping, feeding chickens, emptying swill pails, bundling oats, gathering blackberries “from the wilderness of wolves and foxes to the south of us,” picking currants for a pie, and hoeing beans. Try as he might, he did not do well enough at cow milking to be called on to do it again, but he worked industriously at the other chores. All in all, he complained, “I almost walked to my grave.”69

  7

  “LITERARY DEVELOPMENT”

  If I show any signs of expressing real feeling sentimentally please tell me because it’s very important I should know before I go any farther in my literary development.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO HIS MOTHER

  [1915?]

  Oberlin, Ohio (1915–1916)

  Amos Parker Wilder firmly believed that “the earnest reverent life of Oberlin” would provide “a fitting environment” wherein his sons would inevitably mature. He had written to the president of Oberlin from Shanghai in 1913 to tell him that Amos would be coming to Oberlin in the fall, and to express his hopes that the president and the dean of the college would “help me to build this boy up perhaps to large things. I want him first to be a man of firm Christian character; to this I would add sense, a wholesome cheer and all possible attainments.”1 He had the same aspirations for Thornton—heightened by his anxiety about Thornton’s academic readiness, his maturity, and his affection for theater and other seemingly extravagant, impractical interests. Before his sons entered the more sophisticated and more expensive world of Yale, his alma mater, Dr. Wilder wanted them to have this grounding in the sheltered, structured academic and social life at Oberlin. He greatly admired the Oberlin tradition of social service, coupled with a rigorous liberal education grounded in Christian idealism.

  Thornton’s maternal great-grandfather, with his brother, Lewis Tappan, had helped to found and endow the historic liberal arts college in 1833 as Oberlin Collegiate Institute, to train Christian teachers, missionaries, and other professionals. The town—or “colony”—of Oberlin was established at the same time, named for John Frederic Oberlin (1740–1826), a minister and social reformer who believed in universal education. From the first, Arthur and Lewis Tappan had insisted that “the broad ground of moral reform, in all its departments, should characterize the instruction in Oberlin.”2 The institution was renamed Oberlin College in 1850, and in the 1890s was the site of the establishment of the Anti-Saloon League, solidifying a long tradition of temperance—another one of Amos Parker Wilder’s fundamental causes.

  Thornton had wanted to go to Harvard, and if not Harvard, Yale, and in the end, he gave in to his father—but not without demanding and receiving a written promise that after only one year at Oberlin he could transfer to Yale. He was one of 151 men in the freshman class of 1915, joined by 181 women, to make up what was then the largest freshman class in the college’s history. As Thornton had anticipated, the student body was more provincial than cosmopolitan, with most students coming from Ohio. Dr. Wilder was optimistic that Thornton would conscientiously apply himself to absorbing all that Oberlin College could offer, and believed he would be safe there from the distracting influences of alcohol, theater, plays, and actors. Dr. Wilder was about to be disappointed, however, for Thornton quickly discovered to his great delight that Oberlin was rife with opportunities for writing and acting, and he lost no time in taking advantage of these pleasures.

  Thornton arrived at Oberlin bent on majoring in English, but quickly grew disenchanted with the course content and requirements of the department. He spoke to his professor and to the department chairman about choosing psychology as a major instead. “They see very much why I don’t want to take their English major highroad,” he announced to his father. “It’s not made for me. It’s made for people who have to be talked to for two whole years before they know what to look for in Elizabethan poetry or Ruskin etc.”3 Dr. Wilder was determined that Thornton would come out of college equipped to earn a living—and he did not believe that a psychology major would prepare his son to do that. But there were possibilities of teaching the subject in a college, Thornton countered, adding with a college freshman’s overconfidence and authority that his friends at Oberlin did not think he would have any problem earning a living with his writing. Besides, he pointed out, Oberlin considered psychology such an important subject that all juniors were required to take a yearlong psychology course.

  But was Thornton suited to study psychology? his father wondered. “I don’t know,” Thornton wrote. “I know that I’m interested as I can be in all the points of it that come my way, and that I’m speculating on sides of it in my own mind all the time.” He acknowledged that there would be “drudgery” in studying the physiology of the brain and taking the required zoology course. But he insisted that he could not major in English “as it’s taught at Oberlin College, and that I believe myself suited to the study of Psych.”4

&n
bsp; Unlike Thornton, Amos had quietly accepted the fact that his father sent him to Oberlin to ensure that he would receive a “sound biblical and religious formation,” and to study with trusted professors such as Charles H. A. Wager, the English Department chair and classics professor, who listened, no doubt with forbearance and amusement, to Thornton’s assessment of the fitness of the department to facilitate his education.5 But Thornton found opportunities all around him—and created others—for the development of his literary aspirations. At Oberlin he was a prolific writer, turning out plays, short stories, essays, and even an occasional poem, and sharing them widely with family, friends, and professors—anyone who would read or listen. Especially trusting his mother’s advice, he wrote to her, “If I show any signs of expressing real feeling sentimentally please tell me because it’s very important I should know before I go any farther in my literary development.”6

  As a college freshman, Thornton did not confine himself to his “literary development,” however. He took English composition and the required course in the Bible, and studied Latin and classical literature, as well as German language, history, and literature. He struggled with geometry. He was required to take a gym class, and participated halfheartedly in the annual Sophomore-Freshman Tie-up—a boisterous ritual in which the two classes lined up on the designated evening on either side of a bonfire on the college athletic field and, at the sound of a pistol shot, rushed together to “try to tie hand and foot as many of the opp. class as possible and carry them to their goal.” On the way home, “tired as a sack of old bottles,” Thornton made up a short story about the experience.7

  He auditioned for the choirs at two Oberlin churches, and was accepted in both. He auditioned for the college’s Musical Union chorus, and was chosen—no small accomplishment in a school with a fine conservatory. But Thornton was a gifted musician, at home in the literature of classical music. He loved to sing in choirs and chorales, as he had done since his Berkeley days, when he was excused from the Congregational Sunday school five minutes early so he could run a couple of blocks over to Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, don a white surplice, and join the processional, “singing joyously,” Isabel remembered.8 He played piano, organ, and violin skillfully, and was particularly fond of the organ, having volunteered as a boy in Berkeley to pump the organ at the Congregational church while the organist practiced.

  Thornton was also enthusiastic about Oberlin’s growing art collection, which, he marveled, he could see and “get as used to as I like.” And there was theater: He’d have given anything, he said, to audition for the Dramatic Association’s production of Shaw’s Candida, writing home, “I’d rather play the Poet in Candide [sic] than the Harp in Heaven! But with rage and horror I see the paper says that Freshmen are excluded.”9 He was frequently organizing and often writing and staging after-dinner entertainments at Dascomb Cottage, where he lived.10 For fun he composed a one-act melodrama titled The Primrose Path: The Wicked World Viewed from an Oberlin Cloister, which enjoyed its debut performance in Dascomb on Thanksgiving Day, 1915. He submitted some of his manuscripts to the Oberlin Literary Magazine. One was, he said, “a story of the Suddenly Spiritual in the Mundanely Modern, like my others, but it was about the Campus and so vitally autobiographic that I had to send it in confessedly anonymous.”11

  It may have been music more than theology that drew Thornton to Oberlin church services and vespers, but he went, reporting in letters to his family on lectures and sermons but most of all on music. At vespers one Sunday, he “almost expired” because the music was so beautiful—a passage from Brahms’s Requiem, followed by a cappella choral responses “pulled right out of the Russian Church Service and so noble and dignified” that he held his breath. Then he listened to the church organist’s postlude, a skillful performance of a motet by Orlando di Lasso that, Thornton wrote, “I’ve been trying to make sound right on our Berkeley piano since ever so long.”12

  Thornton was now the Wilder living farthest away from the family. In New Haven, Dr. Wilder was overseeing the work of the Yale-in-China Association. Coincidentally, from his office in White Hall, he could keep a vigilant eye on Amos, now a junior. Dr. Wilder traveled often to speak on behalf of the program, fund-raising along the way. Occasionally he took time off to check in to the sanatorium at Battle Creek on his perennial quest to restore and maintain good health.

  Isabella Wilder cared for her husband and two younger daughters in a drafty old colonial house on Whitney Avenue in Mount Carmel, Connecticut, six miles on the streetcar route from the heart of New Haven. Months before her arrival, without consulting his wife, Dr. Wilder had rented the house from New Haven friends. It had steam heat, he told her in a letter, and a bathroom (which, he did not tell her, he was installing at his own expense). There were “open fireplaces of the grand New England type,” he wrote, and six acres and a storage shed. The streetcar ran right past the door and it was only a thirty-minute jaunt into New Haven. If she wanted to move closer to the Yale campus after a year, they could “finance a city home.” 13 Isabella made the house as charming and comfortable as possible, and began to form friendships in the community, as well as within the Yale circle, as she had done at the universities in Madison and Berkeley. Isabel, fifteen, and Janet, five, attended local public schools, and Charlotte was happily engrossed in her freshman studies at Mount Holyoke, despite her anxiety that she was not fully prepared. She feared that her “whole education” was in danger of “toppling on a foundation of scrappy instruction,” and did not want to be pushed to get her college degree.14 Her father had tried but failed to arrange for her to study in Italy before beginning college. He wrote to Amos that Charlotte was “full of power and will get it harnessed in time.” 15 She quickly found her footing at Mount Holyoke, where she would thrive and excel.

  Letters flew back and forth from Connecticut to Ohio to Massachusetts, with Papa conducting his patriarchal oversight of his older children by mail. As young Amos later recalled, “There was a running fire of letters to every one of us [children] for years and years, with admonitions and inquisitions and affection and suggestions and warnings, all sorts of things.” Their father was “a very intensive parental planner for his children,” Amos said. “Father’s democratic sympathies and his belief in the common people made him afraid we would become eggheads. Of course all of us did. Thornton and I and my sisters!”16

  AT OBERLIN, Thornton was making friends more readily than he ever had before. He already knew Theodore Wilder, a Chefoo classmate, and because Amos had left his mark as scholar and Ohio collegiate tennis champion, Thornton was introduced to “scores and scores” of Oberlin juniors and seniors.17 While he was making new friends, he also kept track of old ones. In Berkeley he and his family had met the young ballet dancer Hubert Jay Stowitts, who studied at the University of California from 1911 to 1915, and was discovered by the great Russian dancer Anna Pavlova when he danced at the Greek Theatre. A handsome gay man who lettered in track at the university, Stowitts also excelled in painting and design. “I certainly am living in a dream,” he wrote to Thornton in November 1915, reporting that Pavlova had invited him to do a solo performance with her troupe. Stowitts was also designing costumes and sets for the Russian Ballet.18 He urged Thornton, who was five years his junior, to write to him.19 Stowitts’s letters suggest an overt interest in the Thornton of the vivid blue eyes; the brilliant, seeking mind; the witty, sometimes sarcastic speech; the great zest for life. If so, Thornton appeared to be innocently unaware.

  He was paying a good deal more attention to the young ladies at Oberlin, who eagerly read or listened to his plays, wanted to look after him when he was sick, and invited him to parties. He was making his own mark at the college, and he was studying, he informed his parents—“hours at a time about every other day.”20 He told his parents that “except for worries about you people and occasional fears about my German preparation, I’m as happy as the day is long.”21

  Once more the family budget prohibite
d the train trip home to Connecticut for Christmas, and his father suggested that Thornton spend the Christmas holidays working on a nearby farm. “Oh, let me stay where I am,” he begged his father. “Quite a few other boys are staying here for me to get to know; and Mrs. Duncan [one of the proprietors of Dascomb] has offered me to earn my room-rent if I tend to the furnace . . . I don’t want to go away; I’ll be good; I’ll be good.”22 His father relented, and Thornton spent Christmas of his freshman year at Oberlin.

  CHARLOTTE SENT her brother a pocket diary for Christmas, and he used it, he told her, to record “memorandums of the original work I do.” The second semester of his freshman year was a fertile time for him. He discovered that he could “think out” scenes for his plays and plots for his stories on long walks, and he established what would become a lifelong habit of walking for miles at a time, clearing his head, wrestling with ideas, composing passages of plays and stories—and sometimes, the musician taking over, even creating lyrics and melodies. The pocket diary went with him everywhere that winter of 1916, and documented the writing he began, the pieces he finished, the ideas he dreamed up and then discarded. There was a note about the rehearsal for his experimental play, The Last Word About Burglars, which would be performed by “The Strollers” for “The Dascomb Family and Friends” on May 9, 1916, at the Men’s Building at 6:45.23 Oberlin gave Thornton the stimulation and at least some of the free time he needed to write, and the diary documented his literary endeavors.24