Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  CPL. THORNTON WILDER was discharged from the Coast artillery on December 31, 1918. Cpl. Amos Wilder received his discharge orders on June 12, 1919. On June 14, 1919, in the town of Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven, citizens gathered to welcome 150 returning soldiers, all hometown men. The homecoming parade—“the most spectacular parade ever held in Hamden”—was followed by speeches and songs, and a spirited address by Dr. Amos P. Wilder.80 There was a banquet that evening, followed by a grand march and dancing. For the Wilder family, the Great War, finally, was over.

  12

  “HIS OWN TUNE”

  Thornton is light-hearted; I am pleased. Of course he studies not at all; yet is bright enough to “get by” as do many less bright. . . . On him too is the Puritan mark less affirmative than in you and me but let each singer choose his own tune.

  —AMOS PARKER WILDER TO AMOS NIVEN WILDER,

  April 25, 1919

  Connecticut and Italy (1919–1921)

  Military service leads to a man’s asking questions of himself,” Thornton wrote in an unpublished article titled “Student-Life at Yale Since the War”—a personal assessment of the unprecedented postwar challenges facing his generation, as well as a statement of his own discontent. He had reluctantly returned to Yale for his junior year after his discharge from military service. Yale men came back from the war “not only with a sheaf of particular problems,” Thornton wrote, “but with the determination of acquiring in general, something of the power of clear thinking and the wide reading that would of [sic] helped them in the days they needed it most.” He noted that while Yale seemed to be returning to the normalcy of prewar days, “Post-War Curriculum must take into account” that students returning from wartime service in the spring semester of 1919 were “restless” and “curious” about “knowledge in a very real, and in almost a new sense.”1

  His own restless prewar desire to go to New York to write, or to travel in Europe, had intensified, but his father objected to the first plan and was unable to implement the second, even though he was sympathetic. Amos, Isabel, and Janet had spent long periods of time in Europe but Thornton and Charlotte had yet to cross the Atlantic. For the time being Thornton resumed his classes at Yale. Meanwhile Charlotte was finishing her last semester at Mount Holyoke, where she would receive her B.A. in June 1919, a year ahead of her brothers at Yale.

  She had been lobbying for more than a year to go to Europe. “Father does not talk much of your going to Italy,” Thornton wrote her. “He lives in terror of Mother’s dissuading you. Mother (who is averse to the trip as you know) has suddenly burst into a brilliant acquaintance with the distressing economic condition of lower Europe; she can tell you the national debt down to a lira, and is full of disturbing intimations of panics, revolutions and wars.”2 Finally, thanks to their aunt Charlotte Niven, now one of the national YWCA secretaries in Italy, plans were made for Charlotte to work for the YWCA.3 By August 1920 she was in Paris, awaiting her assignment to a YWCA youth hostel in Milan.4

  Amos was still in Europe in the spring of 1919, on duty with the Allied Army of Occupation at Bendorf and Coblenz, and then taking courses at the American Army School Detachment at the University of Toulouse.5 After his discharge on June 28, he spent the summer decompressing and attending a Workmen’s Educational Institute at Balliol College at Oxford University in England, followed by Oxford’s regular summer session. Finally, after three years away, he came home to the family and to Yale, where he and Thornton roomed together in Connecticut Hall throughout the 1919–20 school year, both finishing their senior-year courses.

  Thornton had lived in his brother’s shadow at the Thacher School and at Oberlin. At Yale he stood out on his own. Reginald Marsh, one of Thornton’s friends and classmates, aspired to be an artist, was already moving in that direction while he was at Yale, and would carve out a distinctive career as a painter associated with the Social Realism movement. In 1919 he sketched a solemn portrait of a bespectacled Thornton—pensive eyes, cleft chin, sensuous mouth, dark hair combed slightly forward because he was starting to go bald. Thornton was beginning to be taken quite seriously as a writer. The legendary Yale professor William Lyon Phelps, who had known Thornton since he was a child, noted that he “showed remarkable versatility” as a Yale student. “He composed and played music on the piano, he wrote plays and short stories, he wrote professional dramatic criticisms for the newspapers.”6 However, at least one Yale professor looked askance at some of Thornton’s work, observing of one of his proposed Lit pieces that he needed to learn grammar and spelling.7

  His short story with an Irish mystical theme was passed over for the 1919 John Hubbard Curtis Prize, which went to Stephen Vincent Benét, then a senior. But Thornton was concentrating on drama, and working hard on The Trumpet Shall Sound, a full-length play that was published in four successive issues of the Lit, beginning in October 1919. His allegorical religious play in four acts, with its interwoven allusions to Plato, Prometheus, and the classics, received the college’s Bradford Brinton Award in playwriting. He revised the play in years ahead until he felt it was strong enough to show to prospective producers. The Trumpet Shall Sound would eventually see the light of day in an off-Broadway production at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York in 1926, directed by Richard Boleslavsky, the theater’s cofounder, with the legendary Russian actress Maria Ouspenskya. Boleslavsky would later try and fail to sell Thornton’s play to the movies.

  In 1928, in the foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, the first published collection of his plays, Thornton wrote that most of his early dramas were religious—“but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer’s concession to a contemporary standard of good manners.” He hoped “through many mistakes, to discover the spirit that is not unequal to the elevation of the great religious themes, yet which does not fall into a repellent didacticism.”8 He had grown up surrounded by religious didacticism—at Chefoo, at Thacher, at Mount Hermon, at Berea, at Oberlin, and in his father’s house, or in his father’s shadow during Dr. Wilder’s prolonged absences from home. Religious didacticism, however well intentioned, offended the young writer’s intellect and his spirit. Thornton wrote in his 1928 foreword, “Didacticism is an attempt at the coercion of another’s free mind, even though one knows that in these matters beyond logic, beauty is the only persuasion.”9 At Yale after the war he was wrestling on paper with questions of spirituality and belief, striving for persuasion, not coercion, and most of all, striving for beauty of expression.

  “AT NEW HAVEN, I frequently visited classes in which I was not enrolled,” Thornton wrote decades later in an unpublished semiautobiographical fragment. “I was never officially a student at Professor Tinker’s Age of Johnson, but I heard all the lectures—many of them twice.” During the first term of his senior year, when Thornton learned that a few very advanced students were being offered a course called The Fragments of the Lost Plays of Aeschylus, he decided to audit it.10 Thornton appreciated the fact that “Yale was a vast emporium of lectures many of which were more tempting than those one was under obligation to attend.”11 Officially he majored in English and Latin, but he took full advantage of the “emporium.”

  During Thornton’s senior year, Steve Benét, class of 1919, returned to Yale as a graduate student after a brief, unhappy stint as a copywriter in an advertising agency. Thornton and Benét were part of Henry Seidel Canby’s advanced English 40 class, Literary Composition—a small seminar with very limited enrollment, and admission based on the submission of examples of the student’s literary work. Canby, Yale class of 1899, had earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1905. He taught at Yale beginning in 1903, and was an assistant editor of the Yale Review from 1911 to 1920. By the time Canby taught Wilder and Benét, his book The Short Story in English, published in 1909, had become a standard college and university text. Canby came to the English 40 classroom as a well-known teacher and editor on the brink of a national literary career: Beginning in 192
0 he would edit the Literary Review, the literary supplement of the New York Post; and in 1924 he became one of the founders of the Saturday Review of Literature.

  Canby remembered that it was a highlight of his teaching career to work with the class that included Thornton, Steve Benét, Walter Millis, William C. DeVane, who later became dean of Yale College, Briton Hadden, and Henry Luce, among others. They gathered around a long table, with Canby at the head.12 Each student—whether an advanced undergraduate or a gifted graduate student—wrote constantly in the genre of his choice. Canby also instructed his students in literary criticism and literary principles. Much of the teaching took place in individual conferences, but the members of the class met weekly to read their work aloud, with lively discussion following. Already, Hadden and Luce were working their way toward their joint conception of the magazine that would become Time, and wrote journalistic prose in Canby’s class. Benét the poet started working on a novel that became The Beginning of Wisdom, published in 1921.13 In 1961, when Wilder scholar Donald Haberman asked Wilder if any of the three-minute plays or parts of The Trumpet Shall Sound were written in Canby’s class, Wilder replied, “No—I vaguely remember a short story,—best forgotten.”14

  Like fine athletes who rise to greater performance in company and competition with other fine athletes, talented writers often profit by a catalytic relationship with other talented writers, especially in the presence of a challenging and skillful mentor. Canby demanded his students’ best work, and Wilder and Benét brought out the best in each other. (To the end of his life, Thornton held on to a signed manuscript that Steve Benét gave him—a parody of Thornton’s three-minute playlets titled “Passing Out.”) Because Canby wanted his students to be able to place and sell what they wrote, he fostered a literary professionalism in them, as well as a practical knowledge of the literary marketplace. As Charles Fenton, another Yale professor and Benét’s biographer, later observed, “Canby’s English 40 was thus in effect a vocational training in the practice of letters.”15

  In 1919 and 1920 an ambitious original magazine made its debut at Yale through the auspices of literary-minded Yale men, energetically led by Norman Fitts of Northampton, Massachusetts, who set out to publish “True art,” which, he wrote, “is unafraid, all embracing, multivarious, self-sufficient.”16 The journal was almost accidentally named S4N—a corruption of the note to the printer to leave “Space for Title,” which evolved into “Space for Name,” then “(S for N),” and, ultimately, S4N. Steve Benét was a driving force in the early years of S4N, along with other Yale men. The magazine—four by six inches for most of its life span—would be published for five years, and its roster included Benét, e. e. cummings, Jean Toomer, poet Ramon Guthrie, Malcolm Cowley, and Thornton Wilder, among other young writers. Three of Thornton’s three-minute playlets appeared in the pages of S4N—Proserpina and the Devil (A Play for Marionettes) in January 1920; The Death of the Centaur: A Footnote to Ibsen in April 1920; and And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead in January–February 1923—and he and Fitts discussed the possibility of a book-length publication of Thornton’s playlets and fiction.

  Thornton was writing prolifically at Yale despite the heavy course load he carried. He also participated actively in campus life. Since his first year at Yale he had been an active member of the Elizabethan Club. He was also elected a member of Alpha Delta Phi, one of the oldest junior fraternities at Yale, founded in 1836; and Chi Delta Theta, founded in 1821 as a literary society whose members were seniors and often involved in the Yale Literary Magazine. He served on the Lit staff, and was elected to the Pundits, an acknowledged group of class wits, serving in 1920 as secretary.17 Thornton and Amos would not approach their father’s status as a big man on the Yale campus, however. Amos Parker Wilder had been elected to that pinnacle of undergraduate achievement, the secret, elitist Skull and Bones, an enigmatic presence at Yale since 1832. But Thornton followed the trail of his keen interests, and in his senior year, when his classmates voted for superlatives, although he did not win, he received votes as “Most Scholarly,” “Most Brilliant” (an honor won by his former Chefoo schoolmate and Yale classmate, Henry Luce), “Most Original,” and “Most Entertaining.”

  “WHEN I graduated from Yale College in 1920 my father was faced with the problem of what to do with me,” Thornton wrote decades later in an unpublished semiautobiographical manuscript titled “SS Independenza.” His father may have had doubts, Thornton recalled, but he himself knew exactly what he wanted to do: write. Dr. Wilder despaired that Thornton would ever be able to earn a living in any profession, much less as a writer. While Dr. Wilder and his wife did not doubt their son’s literary gifts, they thought that the only steady, income-producing profession realistically open to Thornton was teaching, and even this was not very promising. Thornton believed that his father’s deeper concern had to do with his character: “I had been constantly reminded that I lacked concentration and perseverance,” he wrote. “I was a woolgatherer. I was a dilettante.”18 To make matters worse, his father had warned Thornton that he feared that Amos would turn out to be “commonplace” and Thornton, “wayward.”19

  Amos, as usual, was an easier “chess piece” for their father to handle. He had taken one course in the Yale Divinity School in his senior year, and had almost decided to become a minister. He had considered this vocation before the war, but the wartime experience had “crystallized” it somewhat.20 Haunted by his encounter with this twentieth-century apocalypse, Amos was reading the wartime work of French writers, and composing poetry about his own experience, exploring the war’s ramifications in poems that would be published in 1920 in the Yale Literary Magazine.

  As he had before the war, Amos loved being on the tennis court; there he found a great outlet for energy and stress. Furthermore he was a highly skilled player. In June 1920 he and his partner, Lee Wiley, won the National Intercollegiate Doubles championship in lawn tennis.21 That summer, for once, he had ample time to play tennis because his father did not dispatch Amos, now almost twenty-five, to work on a farm. Instead, said Amos, “He put me in a Wall St. bank in New York.”22 Then it was back to Europe, for Amos received a Hoover Fellowship to study at the University of Brussels.

  “Various strange plans are unfolding for my support next year,” Thornton had written Charlotte the previous spring.23 Professor Canby was preparing to launch his “rather grand Literary Review for the New York Evening Post” and asked Thornton to write some book reviews. He hoped a job might materialize.24 He almost accepted a position teaching Latin in “a boy’s boarding school in New Jersey,” his mother reported to a friend. “In fact,” she said, “he had several to choose from and always Latin as one of the subjects.”25

  But other opportunities intervened. First Dr. Wilder sent Thornton, now twenty-three, to work for six weeks on a farm near Litchfield, Connecticut. Then, wonder of wonders, Thornton, who had never laid eyes on Europe except in his imagination and in books, was actually going to spend a year in Italy. He wrote gratefully, looking back, that his allies in finally achieving this exciting plan were “Luck; an old family friend; and my mother’s perspicuity.”26 As Thornton recorded events years later, this time Isabella set in motion the events that carried him to Rome. She regularly read the New Republic, and noticed with interest “some travel letters from Rome by Stark Young.”27 Discovering there that the currency exchange rate was advantageous for Americans, she decided to talk to Latin scholar and professor George Lincoln Hendrickson of Yale, the Wilders’ friend since the early days in Wisconsin. Dr. Hendrickson, formerly director of classical studies at the American Academy in Rome, told Isabella about foreign study opportunities for college graduates at the academy. Might this be just the opportunity for Thornton? He could travel to Europe, as his parents felt he deserved the chance to do, and simultaneously, he could study Latin and better equip himself to teach.

  When Clarence W. Mendell, Thornton’s Yale Latin professor, assured Dr. Wilder that Thornton “was
the boy in his classes who [would] get the most out of a year” at the academy, “the great project was launched,” Isabella wrote.28 Thornton was accepted as a visiting student in the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome. “So now the plan is for him to sail September first by the Fabre line steamer ‘Providence’ to Naples and attend the American Classical School at Rome for a year,” his mother wrote. “He is going to study Latin, Italian and the usual local archeology.”29 Thornton was elated.

  Even his father was pleased. The Rome experience would surely strengthen Thornton’s credentials to teach Latin and, consequently, his ability to support himself. The experience might even lead to a master’s degree. Besides, the foreign-exchange rate was attractive, and Dr. Wilder thought that Thornton’s Italian year could be financed with nine hundred dollars—which he would not put into his son’s “careless” hands all at once.30

  “During my years in New Haven,” Thornton recalled nearly half a century later in his semiautobiographical sketch, “my father was a stone’s throw [from] my successive rooms in the dormitories. I was very much under his eye. I was in constant contact with many of his oldest friends, Dean Stokes, Dean Jones, Professor Hendrickson, who were like extensions of himself.”31 For Thornton and Amos Parker Wilder, the father-son relationship was a tangle of love and resentment, admiration and dismay, submission and rebellion. “In a son’s eyes—and this is more true of this relationship than any other,” Thornton wrote many years after Yale,

  a father carries with him like a pack on his back their total life together, not remembered in every daily [detail] but remembered as an uninterrupted presence. To the infant he was that tall stranger of unpredictable moods—alarmingly affectionate at times, alarmingly authoritative always. To the boy he was the one who punished or who rewarded (two faces of the same coin). To the youth he was the one who could give or withhold the money that could purchase those sine qua non that a youth’s heart so passionately desires (decent clothes, tennis rackets . . .) To the full-grown man the father is the one who is felt as seeing, also, the total life of that son, all the foolish things he’s ever done.32