Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  about people in a white heat of intensity and I no sooner sit down to write it than I am cast into a fever myself and the terrible thing pours out onto the page. It is a terrible play about What Happened in a Cheap French Hotel in a port on the Yangtze-Kiang River. The war broke out and caught all these social and political exiles longing to go back to their countries . . . I bet you that at the close of the Second Act, every one in the audience screams loud and long or else dies of horror.36

  The play not only drew on Thornton’s impressions of China for theme, characters, and plot but utilized a setting he returned to often in his later work—the symbolic lonely boardinghouse, in this case a “Cheap French Hotel.” He sent the finished play off to well-known producer and director Arthur Hopkins—another hero who did not know Thornton Wilder existed. Hopkins kept the manuscript for a long time before sending it back with a polite rejection letter.

  Thornton enjoyed Washington life with Bill Benét and other Yale friends.37 One of them, Bill Taylor, took it upon himself “almost boisterously” to make Thornton come out of his shell, encouraging him to be “more genial and approachable,” and Dr. Wilder thought the experience was good for him.38 All in all, he believed that the Washington experience would make Thornton “a little more confident—perhaps worldly,” he wrote Amos. “I have noted his underlying penetration and poise (he is a leader among such, by reason of his abilities). He smokes some cigarettes frankly—but assures me no drinking and I believe him.”39

  “ARE YOU already laying out itineraries . . . ?” Thornton wrote to his father in June. True to form, various Wilders spent the summer of 1918 in various places. The brothers were doing their part in the war, Thornton in Washington, and Amos with his regiment in reserve after a month of fighting in Château-Thierry/Belleau Wood, and soon to be thrown into the second battle of the Marne. Charlotte was again working at Mount Holyoke for the summer. Dr. Wilder attended the Yale commencement in late June, a ceremony “full of high patriotism,” he wrote to Amos in France.40 Isabel had finished her year at Northfield and joined her mother and sisters for a visit with Charlotte, who was “doing finely,” her father reported proudly. One of his Yale friends who had recently met her at Mount Holyoke wrote to tell Dr. Wilder “without blarney” that Charlotte was “the handsomest, most wholesome young woman he had met for a long time.” Dr. Wilder was delighted, and found it “gratifying to a fond parent to know he is equipping the world with a whole quiver of whales.”41

  IN EARLY July, Thornton received the news that he had been drafted. His father thought it would be good for him to enter the army, but doubted that he could pass the physical examination for combat because of his vision. Dr. Wilder also believed that creative writers—especially poets—seemed to be temperamentally unsuited for combat in any case. Thornton filled out the standard questionnaire supplied by the draft board, noted in the newspaper that his draft number fell within the first two hundred chosen for the next national apportionment, and waited. Despite his vision problems and the heart murmur discovered in his physical examination, he did not ask for an exemption and expected to be called into service.

  On the eve of his regiment’s march to Soissons/Villers-Cotterêts during the second battle of the Marne, young Amos wrote to Thornton sympathetically about “the quandary of the dreamer and the aspiring artist in the nets of public and military hierarchy.”42 Amos felt it himself: “There seems to be a fundamental incompatibility of my temperament and the idea of military organization. One can’t orient himself in any hierarchy of authority without giving a sad farewell to many gentle ways and actions. If I do this can I resurrect them afterwards?”43

  Thornton had made up his mind to serve, however, and his father thought camp life and the military physical training would be good for him, especially “the mingling with men and reality.”44 But his father left matters up to Thornton and the draft board—although he said he would be willing to pull his “last string” to get Thornton into the merchant marine, where Dr. Wilder thought his son would “grow most.” He told Thornton, “I will try to get a ‘waiver’ as to eyes and I usually get things I want where the welfare of my children is concerned.”45

  Worried that he would not be accepted in the regular army, Thornton took the necessary examinations in Washington in early August. He was directed to take a special eye exam, and the doctor predicted he was likely to be inducted in a “lower class” but would no doubt be accepted because of the high demand for fighting men. “I took my Advisory Board Exam. and probably passed it. But this is not certain,” Thornton wrote his father August 14. “So I went today to the office of the Coast Artillery and put in my application for induction into that service. IT ONLY TAKES MEN WHO ARE IN GENERAL MILITARY SERVICE OF THE DRAFT (and of course general enlistments.) And Men who have had at least one year of College.” Thornton had investigated all the options, and concluded that his best avenue of service would be the army’s Coast Artillery Corps, writing to his father, “They take you as you come from the draft board and ask no questions.”46

  As of September 14 he was accepted and assigned to work as an office orderly for the 1st Coast Artillery Corps at Fort Adams outside Newport, Rhode Island, on Narragansett Bay. There would be a training period in September, followed by one or two months of training camp, which could result in the rank of second lieutenant. Then off to France to deal with “the very heaviest artillery, the Big Berthas etc.” If all went well, Thornton expected to be in France before Christmas. He was eager to let his brother know that he would be in the artillery, too, even though it was, Thornton said, “the unskilled emergency-rush section of it.”47

  Their father was very proud of Amos’s service in France, and saw to it that passages from many of his letters were published anonymously in the newspaper.48 By late August, however, after nearly two years in the war zone, Cpl. Amos Wilder was suffering what he described as “a kind of chronic anguish”—“some kind of radical depletion, made up of battle fatigue, sleeplessness, and nervous strain”—demonstration that post-traumatic stress disorder affected combatants long before it received an official name.49 This was the first recorded indication that Amos had ever experienced even a short period of depression, and his war journals reveal his efforts to analyze the source of his disability and to cope with it.50 To further complicate Amos’s recovery, military orders dictated that he, like thousands of other young men on active duty during World War I, should undergo a “minor operation”—circumcision—to diminish the possibility of venereal disease. Circumcision at birth was still relatively rare early in the twentieth century, except for Jews and members of some other religious groups. During the war, however, military doctors in the field began to make up for lost time, operating on a generation of young army and navy men. Amos’s procedure was performed on August 30. Afterward he found himself being carried to a hospital in a “speeding, swaying ambulance,” just as he had transported so many soldiers earlier.51

  Throughout September and October, Amos would be hospitalized in various convalescent camps and field hospitals, depressed, wondering if he would ever regain his strength, thinking himself “on the point of insanity once or twice.”52 One September day he was allowed to get out on a baseball field at a convalescent camp, and after the exercise he felt more nearly himself than he had for two years. In mid-October he was declared well enough to make the seven-hundred-mile journey back to join his battery—a trip made miserable by freezing rain, cold victuals, and cramped, crowded conditions (the men in Amos’s compartment would awaken “every hour” with foreheads “frozen from the window pane, or neck warped, or a leg paralyzed”).53 By October 20, 1918, Amos was back on the Western Front.

  THORNTON WAS haunted by the tragic story of another hero—French flying ace Georges Guynemer, who died on September 11, 1917, at the age of twenty-three. Just as Thornton vividly imagined his own death in the trenches, he could graphically envision Guynemer’s fatal plunge to earth in the Vieux Charles, his feisty SPAD, one of the ex
perimental airplanes he had used as deadly weapons in fifty-three heroic sorties against the enemy. Guynemer was immortalized in the Panthéon in Paris.54 On lined sheets of notebook paper, Thornton wrote a three-character playlet as his own tribute to the young French hero. “The scene is laid upon a medal, struck in honor of the aviator,” the playlet begins, offering one of Thornton’s most original settings. The characters: the Victory, the Horseman, and the Man.55

  Sometime in the summer or fall of 1918 Thornton wrote a second playlet on the same subject, entitled In Praise of Guynemer, this time with only two characters—Senex and Juvenis, the classical old man and young man. Juvenis describes his initial idea for a tribute to Guynemer—an idea that echoes Thornton’s first draft of the playlet—but, Juvenis explains, “the idea suddenly lost all its color.” Senex then gives the young man directions about how to write his tribute: Above all, he must feel deeply about his subject. Senex predicts that “in after time Guynemer shall rise, like Hector undoubtable, from a mythic war.”56 This playlet was published in the December 1918 issue of the Lit, and Thornton’s classmates liked the piece well enough to include an excerpt as one of five reprints from the Lit in the History of the Class of Nineteen Hundred Twenty.57

  DR. WILDER and his wife carried a burden of worries about their sons—brave Amos suffering in France, inept Thornton embarking on military service, full of his strong “writing passion” and writing plays that were “certainly on a high plane.”58 Thornton had also reviewed a play he saw in Washington and sold the article to the Boston Transcript. His father found it “unquestionably full of promise” with its “sure touch in the use of words and formations.” Thornton was “certainly a writer,” Dr. Wilder told Amos. “His judgments are penetrating and close; when one recalls that he is but 21 and has been his own teacher, I am impressed.”59

  Even so, like the father Polonius to his son, Laertes, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Father Wilder lavished advice on Thornton, often in the form of platitudes. He had done so all Thornton’s life; he saw no need to desist just because his son was twenty-one, a Yale student, a budding writer, and now a military man. “Live economically as becomes your circumstances, otherwise your dignity will suffer, you will be unfitted to live modestly later, as you must; and you will be worried,” Dr. Wilder admonished Thornton that summer. “Wars, Washington experiences come and go; but character and obligation to God abide.”60 And in another letter: “I am praying that the decadence in high-minded youth I know so well may not be yours. You can’t keep your enthusiasms and fine, irresistible fun and confidence in the goodness of life if you drag your mind and soul thro’ the sloughs of comic opera and the like.”61 And still another: “Let us have a true man, a patriot, a Christian, a gentleman, Thornton dear, and all else shall be added.”62

  Dr. Wilder, the son of a dentist, knew that dental problems could be a detriment to good physical health. He warned Thornton to take good care of his teeth—apparently in the wake of reports about trench mouth, a common and painful affliction for military personnel in the trenches during World War I, deprived of even basic sanitary conditions.63 Brush your teeth, Dr. Wilder cautioned his son, even though he was laboring far from the trenches. “Public work is barred those whose dentality is a poor, stuffed, faulty thing. Such are put on other work, perhaps ushering or moving chairs. Poor Amos is far from a dentist; his teeth and those of millions of men must go as a sacrifice.”64

  In the midst of these admonitions, Dr. Wilder also praised Thornton’s Centaur, and asked if he could submit his son’s work to the Atlantic. No, Thornton replied. He was “very happy” to have his father’s words, but he doubted the magazine would be interested in such “an extravaganza-fantasia.” But his father’s appreciation had “stirred” him, Thornton said, and “I cannot write a line in the two bigger plays I am at work on without asking myself whether you would be disappointed by it.”65

  PVT. T. N. WILDER was hard at work as an office orderly at historic Fort Adams, Rhode Island, in September 1918. His uniform didn’t fit, and he was afraid he had the flu, but he enjoyed his morning and evening walks by the bay to and from his office. “Last evening I was there when the sudden noisiness and swishiness came that denotes the turn of the tide,” he wrote to his mother. “I hadn’t heard that since Chefoo. Knives of joy went through me.”66

  His duties over for the day, Thornton had time to write, and he was engrossed in a “big flaming character study” based on the legend of the pagan heroine Hypatia. He was working on an increasingly larger “stage,” broadly expanding his vision of the dramas he could create. In fact, he confided to his mother, he had written “a magnificent fierce love-scene,” and was “almost frightened at the size” of his “canvas” and the explosive nature of his “dramatis personae.” If he could only transfer his vision to paper, it would be “the most brilliant play” on his list.67 The play would “ferment” in his mind “like sodium in water—explosions,” but if he ever finished it, no copy survived.68

  EVERYWHERE THAT autumn there were rumors of peace. On November 11, 1918, at eleven o’clock in the morning, U.S. time, the armistice was signed to mark the beginning of the end of World War I. In France, Amos spent the days following the armistice trying to sort out fact and rumor, and translating the French communications that came into the radio room at Beaumont, on the Meuse above Verdun. Thornton, back at his desk at Fort Adams, was promoted to corporal on November 12. He struggled with stacks of paperwork and criticized the circus atmosphere in the United States following the armistice news, when France was left “mortally weakened” and England “dreadfully awakened.”69

  Amos longed for home, and Thornton longed for normalcy. The Wilder boys were not going home anytime soon, however, for there was army work remaining to be done, and then the long, unpredictable mustering-out process. Thornton would not get home for Christmas, and he hoped Santa Claus would send him something to wear on his head because, he said, “I’m getting abjectly Bald. Not a day goes by without some colleague suddenly noticing and exclaiming, ‘You’re losing hair man!’ ”70

  Father Wilder was tempted to try to pull strings to get his boys home, but Thornton warned him: “Nothing on earth can get me out of the Army that doesn’t originate in this very building so please don’t try.”71 He believed he would be out in January for sure, so that he could return to Yale to begin the new term. He was not enthusiastic about resuming his college work, however. His father thought he must get his college degree, but Thornton did not believe there was anything more for him at Yale. “Last year he slurred the work and his credits are low,” Dr. Wilder worried in a letter to Amos. There had been a possibility that Thornton would flunk out of Yale, but he had managed to pass his courses. His father pointed out that “the college is good to heroes” and if Thornton could return to Yale in January, he might be admitted to the junior class.72 As for Amos, he would have his father’s support, financially and otherwise, if he wanted to stay in Europe to study for a year.

  Dr. Wilder wrote to ask for Amos’s help with Thornton:

  You surely will not encourage any talk of quitting study now, tho you may feel that you need not get into the dispute very deeply. Mother admires his genius so much that she thinks Yale has nothing further for him, etc. If he does stop now it means a cheap room in N. Y. and hanging about newspaper offices with an occasional interview with a celebrity etc. However, I am not pressing him—“merely suggesting”; and it will work out all right.73

  FOR THORNTON, dreading the return to Yale and longing for the freedom to write, there was another interlude of hero worship. “Forgive this long silence,” began a letter he received in December 1918. It came from another handsome young actor who had caught Thornton’s interest and imagination. He was Glenn Hunter, age twenty-four, and, like Thornton in 1918, struggling to find his way in the theater. Born in New York City in 1894, three years before Thornton, Hunter was beginning to appear regularly in productions mounted by successful producers Marcus Klaw and Abraham Li
ncoln Erlanger, in casts headed by the leading actors Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, George Arliss, and Helen Hayes, among others. The two men apparently met in Rhode Island during the war. By 1922 Hunter was the star of a Broadway hit, Merton of the Movies, and the film that followed it in 1924.74 But in 1918 Glenn Hunter and Thornton Wilder were kindred spirits, dreaming of big careers in the theater, Glenn as an actor and Thornton as a playwright. They also dreamed about working on projects together. Glenn was reading Thornton’s playlets as well as synopses of plays he planned to write, and predicted that Thornton would have a great career as a playwright.75 He hoped Thornton would write a big play just for him, and promised he would “work like hell” to be ready for such a role.76

  Thornton’s letters to Glenn Hunter have not been located, but the handful of Hunter’s surviving letters to Thornton hint of infatuation, if not intimacy. Hunter wrote that December that he hoped their relationship could grow through letters.77 There was an invitation to Thornton to come and live in New York, to rent rooms on the floor of his apartment building so that they could be together.78 On December 26 Hunter wrote to Thornton that he wished for a long talk so that he could share his dreams and hopes. He told Thornton he had loved being with him “that night,” more than he could know.79

  For years there would be speculation about Thornton Wilder’s sexuality and his sex life, but he left behind little evidence of that very private matter. There has surfaced no other record of the nature of his relationship with Glenn Hunter, or what it meant to Thornton, except for these saved December letters, printed in Glenn Hunter’s distinctive holograph, full of dreams and ambiguity.