Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  His father had in the past, half in jest, cautioned his brilliant children about carving cherrystones when they were writing. Dr. Wilder may have had in mind the intricate, minuscule carvings some Asian and Western artists wrought on actual cherrystones, or he may have been thinking of certain metaphorical references to literary figures. One of his favorite writers, Samuel Johnson, had observed that John Milton was “a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock but could not carve heads upon cherry stones.” 59 Depending on how one regarded a carved cherrystone, such an art could be a boon or a handicap. Thornton was carving some cherrystones, he confessed to his father that July of 1922, and he owed it to Lytton Strachey, sending along an example from his novel in progress. The passage, slightly revised, would appear in print that September in a new literary journal, the Double Dealer, published in New Orleans from January 1921 until May 1926. The magazine published the early work of William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, and Ezra Pound, as well as Thornton Wilder. He sent off a short piece to the Double Dealer almost before the ink was dry in July, and the magazine—which he had never even seen—published it in September. Titled “Sentences,” and inspired by Rome, Dante, and Lytton Strachey, this one-page appearance marked Thornton’s first published work after Yale.60

  Just as Thornton’s three-minute playlets were finger exercises in drama, these “Sentences,” stimulated by his reading of Strachey, were finger exercises in prose, part of Thornton’s intensive practice in the craft of fiction. He liked the immediate gratification of publication, as well as this advance exposure for his emerging novel.

  He sent part of the flourishing manuscript off to the Dial in August. In a brief letter he offered the editors the first book—“ten to twelve thousand words”—of The Trasteverine, the current title of his “series of imaginary memoirs of a year spent in Rome.” He added a disclaimer: “These give the appearance of being faithful portraits of living persons, but the work is a purely fanciful effort in the manner of Marcel Proust, or at times, of Paul Morand.”61 Thornton read Morand in French, and was no doubt drawn to his eccentric, often hedonistic characters, as well as his vivid imagery.

  The editors of the Dial declined Thornton’s offering because, they told him, they needed to see the whole. “Well, I can hardly send them books seven and eight,” he told his mother ruefully, “when I have not yet begun Book Two. And I am unwilling to kill myself with the composition of an interminable Book Two without still greater assurance of their using it.”62 Still, this was an encouraging response from a prestigious literary journal.

  Near summer’s end Thornton returned to New Haven to fill in for his father at the Journal-Courier for two weeks so that Dr. Wilder could enjoy a vacation in Maine. During his short tenure at the newspaper, Thornton stepped into his father’s shoes and wrote editorials headed “The Preparatory School versus the High School,” “Preparing for a Coal Shortage,” “The Theatre in America,” and the “The Shelley Centenary”—which led to an invitation to turn it into a longer piece on the poet’s centenary for the Yale Alumni Weekly. Thornton expanded and polished the piece, in part because he hoped it might impress his Yale professors, and perhaps even help his chances of teaching at Yale someday. Called “The Shelley Centenary—A Notable Exhibition of Shelleyana at the Brick Row Book-Shop,” it ran on October 13, 1922.63

  BACK AT Lawrenceville for his second year, Thornton was set to teach a heavy schedule of twenty-four hours weekly, but he felt much more at home—“settling down and getting so school-masterish,” he wrote to his mother.64 He had thirty-three charges in Davis House that fall, and there were almost a dozen new masters. But even with the added workload, Thornton wrote to his mother, he was “being extremely well paid for being happy.”65

  As was his reflex after all the years of the family separation, Thornton kept up a lively correspondence with his parents and siblings. After years of letters from his father, full of affection and admonitions, advice and reproof, Thornton, nearly twenty-five, composed a parody his father found “very funny,” according to a note scrawled in Dr. Wilder’s hand on the face of the letter. Thornton turned the tables on his platitude-spouting father:

  Keep fat and well. Drink lots of water. When you’re feeling unwell do as the animals do and eat nothing. Whatsoever things are indisputable, whatsoever things are common knowledge since the reign of Albert the Good so think on these things. If you see a task ahead say to yourself, This one thing I do. . . . Be kindly and impersonal in your relations to people, remember that they have their trials, too; even if a Bishop offers you liquor quietly and firmly turn your glass down. Remember Luther nailing his principles to the door of Wurtenburg [sic] and holding to a diet of Worms. You know how anxious I am about the particular perils that beset your temperament. Love, Thornton66

  ALTHOUGH HE was “caught in the quick-sands of Teaching” in the fall of 1922, Thornton wrote a new three-minute playlet, And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead, set after Judgment Day, when “time comes to an end like a frayed ribbon.” In addition to this dramatic affirmation of the need to protect the self in the face of government, religion, art, and culture, Thornton was caught up in his novel, writing in his few private moments, and reading to research certain details. He was currently engrossed in Pierre de Labriolle’s Histoire de la littérature latine chrétienne.67 He wrote a detailed synopsis of his Roman memoirs for his mother that fall. The second book, he told her, featured a “wealthy maiden lady of ancient lineage,” Mlle. Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine. She and her compatriots, a group of royalists (including a cardinal, a critic, some minor royalty, and an assortment of expatriates), begin to plan an ecumenical council for 1938, although most of them know it will never take place. Thornton was embroidering intricate details of setting and plot into the story, including “interior decorating & culinary.” He sketched the other books, or sections, to come in the novel—“the death of Keats faithfully documented and seen through the veil of ‘my’ dislike and revulsion”; the story of an American utopian experiment, replete with his “views as to the special way of educating boys with gifts”; his play Villa Rhabani; and the story of a “wonder-working Italian woman in the tenement of Trastevere; how at her death her body was sliced for magical relics.” He also envisioned the “deliberate retelling of the strange relations that bound together Cicero, Clodius and his sister Clodia-Lesbia, Catullus, Julius Caesar and his wife, with all the ramifications of sacrilege, incest and every other crime; an incredible novelette lying there to anyone’s hand these two thousand years. Don’t ask me how much reading is behind that.”68 Some of the ideas he had conceived and sketched by 1922 would make it into his first novel, The Cabala, but the “deliberate retelling” of the story of Julius Caesar and company would materialize many years later, in 1948, in the novel he titled The Ides of March.

  But the book he was writing after lights were out in Davis House, and on weekends, and in spare moments here and there, was a hodgepodge—a dazzling, mystifying panorama of a book; a first novel glutted with his intense imaginings, his ambitious artistic impulses, his endless curiosity and prodigious memory, his fascination with history, philosophy, religion, languages, people, and every book he’d ever read. How in the world would he weave it all together into an organic story? He was conceiving this first novel as if he had to pack into its pages all he ever knew, ever thought, ever believed, ever questioned, ever wanted to say. It was hopelessly disjointed, overlarge, obscure, impossible—and he knew it. He confessed as much to his mother:

  From all these eccentrics and madmen and scoundrels—thousands of portraits—is supposed to arise the hot breath of a life more romantic than Jules Verne—an escape from routine and weariness and stenographer’s-anemia, and a reproduction of the feeling that Rome gives you when you’re no longer in it. Of course it is only written to please myself: There is nothing in it except what I am madly curious about; no compromise made for people who do not like the particular forms of strangeness and disorder that I like.69

 
Most of the time Thornton was the teacher and assistant housemaster, doing every duty; endearing himself to students, colleagues, and parents; earning money, as his father had feared he’d never do; and sharing a good portion of it with his family. The rest of the time he was living in the past and in the future—living in Rome—living in his book.

  14

  “ALL MY FAULTS AND VIRTUES”

  I’ve been consistent from birth—all my faults and virtues were just as marked in Chefoo and Thacher days as they are now, and by your letters then you seem to have been aware of it.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO AMOS PARKER WILDER,

  February 7, 1923

  New Jersey and Connecticut (1922–1923)

  In his midtwenties—a hardworking, wage-earning schoolmaster and erstwhile writer—Thornton Wilder was still squabbling with his father over money. He was applying for a summer camp job to augment his teaching income, he assured his father. But he still felt like a chastened schoolboy, defensively aware of all his shortcomings.1 He was especially sensitive about his father’s skepticism that he would ever find “a foothold in literature,” but he plowed on.2 He began keeping a new journal on September 4, 1922, while he was still in New Haven filling in at the newspaper for his vacationing father. The journal entries were written sometimes in English, sometimes in French, sometimes in shorthand. For a month he filled pages with notes on his daily activities and reflections on his prodigious reading—more of Morand’s fiction and Flaubert’s letters (which inspired him to write “painstakingly, religiously,” and to compose a paragraph for his novel “describing the fountain at the Villa Pamphily-Doria”).3 He was absorbed in Proust’s recently published Sodome et Gomorrhe, which Thornton called “the strangest book in the world, powerful & terrible.” Thornton praised Proust for daring to “open a whole new continent” in psychology, and marveled that although he was a “pioneer,” he was also the “complete master.”4 Long interested in the study of psychology, Thornton also admired Proust’s perceptive psychological portraits.

  He made a list in his journal of the books he had read or reread during his summer vacation in Newport: Walter De la Mare’s Memoirs of a Midget; Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove and The Awkward Age; four volumes of the letters of Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century English writer and sometime publisher, best known for his copious correspondence and his Gothic horror story, The Castle of Otranto. Thornton also read Racine, George Meredith, the Greek poet Pindar, Jane Austen, and Cicero during those languid summer days in Newport.5 He frequently immersed himself in the letters of Mme de Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal (1626–96). A thousand or more of her letters, most written to her daughter, survive to document her personal life as well as life, art, and politics in seventeenth-century France. Mme de Sévigné’s letters and life captured Thornton’s imagination and would often make their way into his writing.

  He was schooling himself in fiction, but drama was also very much on his mind. Thornton went to the theater in Philadelphia; in Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey; and in New York as often as his schedule and budget allowed. Most often he saw classical drama or new contemporary plays, but with Tom Dickens, a Yale graduate who was the new Lawrenceville football coach, he went to see movies and vaudeville. He was reading Sherwood Anderson and Eugene O’Neill, deciding they both had faults but showed “the same wonderful promise.”6 Most of all he was reading the texts of plays, “seeing” the dramas in his head, carefully analyzing the success and failures of certain writers—and drawing some fundamental conclusions about dramatic technique in the process.

  The playwright who most caught Thornton’s imagination and admiration that fall was the Spanish dramatist and poet Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81). Calderón had been a knight, a soldier, and a priest as well as one of Spain’s greatest playwrights—considered by most as second only to Lope de Vega, who would later absorb Thornton’s avid attention. “I suddenly became possessed of a desire to get hold of a less-known Calderón play and reshape it for the Yale Dramat,” he wrote in his journal September 11.7 Once Thornton was drawn to a writer, his habit was to saturate himself in that writer’s work, reading analytically, rereading a play or novel two or three times, taking notes along the way from the vantage point of the critic as well as the writer. He could dissect a work and then retrieve from its remains the techniques or themes he wanted to try with his own hand. As he plowed through Calderón’s plays that fall, he found “delightful business” in them, but thought they were too “busily contrived” with as many as “thirteen noisy uninteresting plots.”8

  While he could read the work of French and German playwrights in the original language, he had to rely on translations of the Spanish, and disliked having to read a play secondhand. But he grasped enough of the theory inherent in the dramatic work of Lope de Vega and Calderón to decide that “unlike a book, a play must be seen quickly and quick projection in writing counts. Ibsen mulled over [his plays] with his sketches too much. I must never write one again without having a scenario first, as melodramatic as possible.”9

  At Lawrenceville School that fall, the necessary pleasures of reading and writing were quickly subsumed by the duties of reading student themes, grading papers, monitoring examinations, preparing for classes, and participating in community life. The journal entries ended abruptly on October 2, 1922. From that time on, Thornton’s fall schedule was so intense that he began to suffer physically. “I haven’t been awfully well for a number of days—nothing localized. Too late up nights and the nervosity of teaching,” he wrote in his journal.10 Some days he met five classes, with his “slightly difficult” third-formers just before lunch, and his “really dangerous” fourth-formers at the end of the day.11 During his rare private hours he tried to relax, in company and in solitude. He went to the theater in New York and read plays in his spare time, often daydreaming about translating and adapting work by others—such as Pirandello. Though he had deemed the playwright’s work “wonderful” since he had first seen it in Rome, he concluded that some of Pirandello’s plays were “unadaptable.”12

  For physical relaxation he took long walks with colleagues or students, but most often by himself. Deep in the nearby woods, a fallen tree lay across a stream. The broad trunk was sturdy enough to hold a grown man, and Thornton liked to lie down on it and listen to the woods and water, or to nothing at all. When he needed solace or escape, he turned to music. As a boy in Berkeley, he used to sit “by the hour” to listen as the mother of one of his school friends played the scores of Puccini operas on the piano.13 Although since childhood Thornton had studied piano, violin, voice, and organ, his lessons had been sporadic, often haphazard, except for his training at Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music. It was a mark of his talent that he played and sang as skillfully as he did, all the while studying music history and musicology on his own. Occasionally he composed lyrics and melodies—“lilts,” he called them.14 He followed the work of contemporary composers, went to concerts, loved playing four-hand piano, savored spending a private hour playing—the piano score of Mozart’s Così fan tutte on one day, and on another, trying to find “almost in vain, the beauties that are universally reported to lie in the Slow Movement of the [Bach] Italian Concerto.”15 After Charlotte had visited Thornton in Rome in 1920, she wrote to her mother about his erudition: “If he goes on being educated much longer, there won’t be anyone left in the world of sufficient prestige in his eyes, to give him his ‘come-up-ance.’ ”16

  He had his faults and virtues, Thornton knew—and he regarded his faults with an anguish even greater than that provoked by his father’s letters. He knew he was a dilettante, knew he was self-absorbed, knew he could focus single-mindedly on his interests and enthusiasms at the expense of other people, knew he could impose those enthusiasms on other people, knew he could be so excessively, reflexively polite that he could seem hypocritical and insincere. He knew he had a history of poor understanding and management of money, but he was working earnestly on
that fault, and was stretching his salary in order to help his family. And he was in a frequent ferment about religion—pulled to the mystics and classical Catholic literature and liturgy, open to philosophy, rebelling against the conventional Christianity of his youth, searching for a spiritual compass. He had come to believe that “Christianity has already strangled itself with its own inherent poisons and will have to be born again in a new quarter.”17

  As for his virtues, he believed that he was loyal, faithful, trustworthy, generally honest, eager for love and approval—and dutiful to a fault. He was trying to become a better teacher, and did not need his father’s advice about that. Dr. Wilder hoped Thornton would leave his spiritual mark on each boy. He did not want his son to be “the graceful figure, cigarette in hand, to whom the little mutes, frightened, hopeful, nevertheless come in the holiness of childhood—only to go down the corridor empty!”18 Thornton in his midtwenties understood that his father’s “scandalized air” in reprimanding his children could be “pretty much assumed for our improvement.”19

  Most of all Thornton was determined to become a better writer. He searched earnestly for what he later described, in reference to James Joyce, as “his own subject, his myth-theme, hidden from him, but prepared for him every hour of his life, his Gulliver’s Travels, his Robinson Crusoe.”20 Faults and virtues aside, Thornton was at twenty-five an educated man, cultured, informed, highly civilized. His parents had certainly done their part in that process, as had Sherman Thacher; Charles Wager; Canby, Tinker, Phelps, and a few others at Yale; his experiences in Rome and Paris; and the countless books he consumed over the years. Yet Thornton had always been his own best teacher.