Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  “Your wonderful many-sided letter has been in my head all day like a dazzle,” Thornton wrote to Wager in January 1918.4 He shared, in turn, an account of his own recent adventure in New York. Thornton had so avidly followed newspaper accounts of Gareth Hughes’s rising career that he felt he knew the actor as well as he knew anyone of his age, “and better.”5 When Thornton made his own trip into Manhattan to go to the theater, he decided on an impulse to call Hughes and make an appointment under the pretense that “some of the boys of the Yale Dramatic Association would like to have me discuss his appearing with them in ‘Everyman’ about Easter time.” Hughes agreed to meet Thornton at four thirty in his apartment on Waverly Place near Washington Square.6 Eagerly Thornton walked through “a bitter cold early evening” and climbed four flights of dark stairs to Hughes’s rooms.

  Gareth Hughes surpassed Thornton’s expectations. Starstruck, he described Hughes to Dr. Wager: “He is Ariel, but more pathetic than Ariel. He is sheer genius and poetry. And, when his glasses are off, the divinest thing to look upon that I have ever seen. He was calling the comparatively gloomy and stone-like visitor ‘Thornton dear’ within three-quarters of an hour.”7 Soon Thornton found himself playing Welsh hymns on the piano, and staying for supper, and playing with the dog, Juba. Hughes told Thornton that he was “a peasant, the son of a Welsh singer,” and that he ran away with a Shakespearean theater company when he was about fifteen. Hughes hated life, he told Thornton, except when he was in a good play, but he found theatrical people especially hateful and disgusting. Thornton learned that his hero knew Shakespeare “up and down,” and that he was “very poor.” Even so there was a manservant, whom Thornton met that night—a “whimpering, Irish ‘decayed’ actor.”

  Thornton stayed until one “talking excitedly” with Hughes. “He didn’t want me to go even then,” Thornton reported to Wager, “and assured me it was the nightingale and not the lark I heard.”8 The next evening Thornton took Gareth to meet Isabella, who was visiting friends in the city. “He was perfectly wonderful in company,” Thornton wrote to Dr. Wager. “Talking not only of his experiences with famous actors, but telling old Welsh legends and quoting. My mother was delighted with him as were they all; no one can take his or her eyes off of him.”9 After Thornton returned to New Haven, a letter came from Hughes: “It is so grey here today and it has been so cold and cheerless and I am steeped in poverty and starving but soon the sun will shine. Oh it is so grey! I wish you were here to talk to me for I am lonely indeed.”10

  Thornton was enthralled and infatuated with Gareth Hughes, whom he had admired from afar for so long. He was even more determined to write plays for Hughes. (As it turned out, Hughes’s burgeoning career as a silent movie star superseded his theater career through the late twenties. Hughes did not succeed in the “talkies,” however, and tried to reestablish a stage career in the thirties. In the early forties he became known as Father David, and became a lay missionary to the Paiute Indians in Nevada.)

  IN 1918 Thornton was simultaneously relishing his brief acquaintance with Gareth Hughes and worrying about some of the women in his life. He thought he understood women thoroughly because he was so close to his mother and sisters; nonetheless, at times he was baffled by them. He was shocked to learn secondhand of the engagement of Agnes Gammon, the cousin of his China Inland Mission School and Oberlin College friend, Theodore “Ted” Wilder. Agnes was a young woman whose company he had occasionally enjoyed, and he considered it “a model of womanly delicacy and fine feeling” that she did not send him “the embittering news herself.” “I never could quite make out whether I was on the point of being engaged to Agnes or Nina Trego,” he wrote to Ted Wilder.

  An alliance with the former would have been exhilarating, and the quarrels would have been fine, vigorous and tonic as [a] sneeze. With Nina life would be close-centred, nervous, with only oases of serenity and the quarrels would have been silent, repressed, dark and intense. In considering a possible wife—and this is a real ipse dixit, Ted—choose her in the light of her quarrels. Ascertain her style of argument, her method in animosity. But I hear you laughing at me.11

  “AMOS HAS won the Croix de Guerre,” Thornton wrote Dr. Wager in January 1918.12 To the end of his long life, with his usual modesty and self-deprecation, Amos reflected that the honor he received on October 28, 1917, was “a roll of the dice in the lottery with which our French division chose to honor several drivers of our departing Section 3, many of whom were more worthy than myself.”13 All in all 101 Yale men received the Croix de Guerre in World War I.14

  Thornton won his own honor in the spring of 1918, far more modest than Amos’s Croix de Guerre but significant in the Yale sphere nonetheless. His short story “Spiritus Valet” won the John Hubbard Curtis Prize given annually by the Yale English Department for an outstanding literary work by an undergraduate.15 Thornton’s prizewinning story, published in May 1918 by the Yale Courant, is an early example of a catalytic encounter between the writer’s rich imagination and his copious reading. Thornton not only thought deeply and analytically about what he read but often posed hypothetical questions about a particular character, theme, or plot that captured his attention. “What if?” he seemed to ask. Wilder had steeped himself for several years in the writings of Henry James, and the echoes of plot and theme suggest that when he composed “Spiritus Valet,” he thought about James’s story The Aspern Papers. James’s romantic tale of loss, greed, and intrigue is based on actual accounts of romantic letters written by Lord Byron to two of his mistresses. The letters and the mistresses survived Byron, and James had put his imagination to work on these facts to create a tale of an old woman living out her days in a shambles of a Venetian palace, holding fast, despite the efforts of others, to the love letters written to her long ago by an esteemed American poet, and to the life, love, and memories embodied in them.

  In “Spiritus Valet,” Thornton wrote of a fictitious poet, Sebastian Torr, whose life was full of “strange silent periods during which the poet seems to have entirely disappeared”—particularly a few years when “the only evidence of the poet’s continued existence issued in the shape of the seven short but matchless lyrics to the ‘golden-haired lady.’ ”16 Torr’s biographer seeks to illuminate the “dark ages” of his life, and embarks on a quest to identify the “golden-haired lady” and, he hopes, to obtain from her “many facts, letters, and perhaps poems.” He locates Mrs. Judith Manners, who had indeed briefly known the great poet. She soon falls victim to a fusion of forces: She feels her youth slipping away; she is bored with her life; the biographer is beseeching her to turn over letters that do not exist, for she is not the lady in question, and the poet never wrote poems or letters to her, much less loved her. “I have no letters; I have no secrets,” she protests honestly to the determined biographer. But he persists, and, finally, “starved” of excitement, Mrs. Manners wonders, “What harm would it do if I encouraged the rumor a little. . . . Why, that would be Romance. I might even, if I dared, write the letters myself.”

  She begins to think, defiantly, Why not? She proceeds to invent the letters, not attempting to forge the poet’s handwriting, but copying the imaginary epistles “into an old diary, using diluted ink,” under the ruse that “she had carefully copied the letters as they came, into a very private diary, and then had destroyed them.”17 So this polished, smoothly written, thoroughly intriguing tale unfolds—Thornton’s variation on Henry James’s extrapolation of a true story. What if there were letters? James asked. What if there weren’t? Thornton seems to have wondered. It was a fascinating challenge, creating a fictitious world out of fragments of reading or memory or fancy—or an amalgam of those—and then animating that world with vividly imagined form, plot, characters, setting, and theme.

  “I AM a wandering independent,” Thornton wrote to his brother sometime during the spring of 1918, confessing that he often cut his classes to write plays “without end and then tear them up. . . . When someone has flattered me
about something I go around like a bull in a China shop, cutting classes and neglecting duties and calling it Artistic Temperament.”18 He was now a member of the Lit board; was escorting Grace Parker, a young woman from New Haven, to social events; and was resisting his father’s efforts to make him “fit the mould of the practical, diligent, thoughtful American boy and I don’t fit.” Thornton told Amos that if he should be drafted after his twenty-first birthday, he would “very likely ‘pick up and be a man,’ ” as his father urged him to do. He would then “cease writing illuminating dialogue and excited prose, and offer up my whole personality and impulses on the altar of ‘Just-like-the-Other-Fella.’ ”19

  The war was omnipresent in the life of his family and the nation. He was living and writing on a university campus that had become a virtual military installation, in a campus community whose professors and students had stood in the forefront of Americans challenging the country’s isolationist stance on World War I. In 1915 Yale had organized the first artillery battalion of any American university.20 That same year Yale professor Hiram Bingham III, the explorer and archaeologist who discovered Machu Picchu, had offered a silver loving cup as a reward to the class enlisting the most members in military training programs.21 By the time Thornton entered Yale, hundreds of Yale students had gone off to Europe to help in the ambulance service or fight in military service, and one by one, the remaining men, Thornton among them, considered what role they should assume in wartime.

  The published history of the Yale class of 1920 devoted an entire section to the war. “After all, there were some four hundred and fifty of us, in France, on the ocean, in training camps, in all the services and under all sorts of conditions,” wrote Walter Millis, a member of the Class Book Committee and managing editor of the Lit, who went on to become a journalist, military historian, and author. “When you say that Nineteen Twenty, being a good average Yale class, did just a little more than good average service in a time of stress, you have really summed up the whole matter,” Millis reported.22 Many Yale men, like Amos Wilder in the class of 1917, served in the ambulance corps. Amos was the only member of the class of 1917 to receive his Yale degree with the class of 1920, as he had served in the war longer than any of his classmates.23 Official records documented the Yale men who had served in the war—6,257 in the army, 1,431 in the navy, 65 in the marines, and 1,119 in foreign armies.24 The official army and navy death lists included 186 Yale men, of whom at least six were members of the class of 1920. The class could also claim flying aces, captains in the balloon service, officers and enlisted men in the field artillery, two men in the “Tanks,” one man in “Chemical Warfare,” and a number of men wounded.25 Those left behind at Yale drilled, marched, and took part in summer military camps.

  Thornton was not the only aspiring writer wrestling with the question of how to join in the war effort, especially now that he was twenty-one and eligible for the draft. Ernest Hemingway, another unknown young writer with poor vision, was memorizing the army eye chart out in Kansas City, Missouri, so he could pass the examination. Closer to home, Steve Benét, now editor of the Lit, considered it an embarrassment and indignity to have to do military service behind the lines in some sort of clerkship. He had been afflicted with scarlet fever during his childhood, and the illness left him with impaired vision. Nevertheless Benét, the son of a career army officer, was determined to enlist in the army in July 1918. He, too, contrived to memorize the army eye chart because his eyes refused “to read the nice little black letters on the card.”26 He passed and was inducted into the army, serving for three days before an alert sergeant saw him peeling potatoes by holding them so close to his eyes that he risked stabbing himself in the nose. Benét was ordered to repeat the eye test, this time with a different chart. He failed and was immediately discharged from the army.27 He got a job at the State Department in Washington, writing to a friend that he was relegated to “a legion of the halt, blind and heart-diseased.”28

  Meanwhile, Thornton had his own worries about being rejected because of his eyesight, a concern shared by Dr. Wilder. Unbeknownst to Thornton, his father was writing to Amos, urging him to save money “with remorseless care” because, he feared, “in the years to come you will have not only yourself but some of these others, especially hopeless Thornton, to finance.”29 Dr. Wilder pulled strings in Washington to land Thornton a civilian job for the summer of 1918 doing clerical work at the War Industries Board, the government agency set up in 1917 to mobilize industry to support the war effort and to protect the peacetime economy. Thornton’s typing classes were finally going to pay off—to the tune of a desk job at a salary of thirty-five dollars a month. He headed to Washington, where at first he roomed with Yale men Benét and John Carter, but quickly grew uncomfortable in the “atmosphere of Perpetual Carousal” and the noise “created by that perpetual competition of cleverness which constitutes the relation of Steve and John.”30 By then he and Benét had established a respectful if wary friendship, not so much an overt rivalry as a quiet competition that may have served from time to time as motivation for both writers.

  Thornton soon gave up on the “Perpetual Carousal” and moved into quieter quarters in suburban Chevy Chase, Maryland.31 He set aside solitary time in the evenings to work on a new play, Vecy-Segal, which he wanted to share with Steve Benét’s older brother, the poet and editor William Rose Benét, whom he had gotten to “know very well.”32 Bill Benét, eleven years Thornton’s senior, had received his Yale degree in 1907, and in 1924, with Yale professor Henry Seidel Canby, would establish the Saturday Review of Literature. When he and Thornton met, Benét was associate editor of The Century Magazine, and had published four books of poetry, with another in the offing. He would become an influential editor, critic, and poet, and would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1942. He was in Washington in the Aviation Reserve that summer of 1918, and took an encouraging interest in Thornton and his work, praising his playlets “extravagantly,” and leaving Thornton with a “renewed enthusiasm” to get ten of them revised, typed, and off to the Yale University Press, in hopes of publication.33

  To do that he had to stay at his office after hours to use a typewriter. The combination of daily office work, surrounded by people, and nighttime literary work in the solitude of an empty office agreed with him. Thornton felt himself “engaged on really big things in my writing-self,” and he relished putting in hours of “refreshing blessing work. Something new has come into my idea of what it is all about and I now take joy and solace in my work as though it were something warm and caressable,” he wrote. In his plays he was striving for a “touch of acid” amid the idealism, so that there would not be even a “remote taint of sentimentalism.”34

  One of the playlets he was crafting that summer was entitled Centaurs, later called The Death of the Centaur: A Footnote to Ibsen. Into the compact intensity of his familiar three-minute, three-character format, Thornton deftly brought together Shelley and Ibsen, and Hilda Wangel, the young woman who worships the hero in Ibsen’s play The Master Builder. This playlet foreshadows some of the devices to come in Thornton’s more mature work: He takes liberties with time (Shelley died in 1822, six years before Ibsen was born); characterization (two historical figures interact with a fictional creation); and setting (“Miss Fosli, will you kindly push forward the wicker settee from the last act?” Hilda says, addressing another of Ibsen’s characters who is not visible in Centaurs, and “A wicker settee suddenly appears.”) The play’s premise is that just before his death by drowning, Shelley was about to write a poem to be called “The Death of a Centaur.” Hearing this, Ibsen says, “And I claim that I wrote it. The poem hung for a while above the Mediterranean, and then drifted up toward the Tyrol, and I caught it and wrote it down. And it is The Master Builder.”

  Shelley responds, “Well, it is not a strange idea, or a new one, that the stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed with words.”

  He goes on to speak
of the universal creative impulse, and the eradicating impact of war:

  It is a truth that Plato would have understood that the mere language, the words of a masterpiece, are the least of its offerings. Nay, in the world we have come into now, the languages of the planet have no value: but the impulse, the idea of “Comus” is a miracle, even in heaven. Let you remember this when you regret the work that has been lost through this war that has been laid upon your treasurable young men. The work they might have done is still with you, and will yet find its way into your lives and into your children’s lives.35

  That summer of 1918, Thornton was continually aware of “the work that has been lost through this war”—and the work that might yet be lost, especially his own. There was solace in finishing, at least, this small play.

  HE SPENT most of his summer evenings plowing through a draft of The Breaking of Exile, set in China, the new three-act play he was crafting from the novelette he had begun at Berea in 1917. He would compose for half an hour or so, and then pause to type what he had just written. He gave his mother a rousing synopsis of the play, which involved roles he had written expressly for John Barrymore and Gareth Hughes. It was, he said,