Penelope Niven
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Unfortunately he had little time to write, giving himself up to the school routine and the demands of his students, finding teaching to be easier in the second year than in the first, but still feeling intensely “burdened with more administrative trifles”—keeping attendance and tardy rolls, and rewards and punishment records for Davis House, being called “hither and thither” until he had “the illusion of being a Secretary for Foreign Affairs or a Wall Street magnate.”21 In addition to all his other duties, Thornton joined his parents in trying to keep the far-flung Wilders apprised of each other’s activities. Amos was still writing poetry and studying theology at Oxford, and taking rigorous bicycle trips through Italy on his vacation. During the 1921–22 academic year he had lived with his mother, Isabel, and Janet in a rented house on Chalfont Road in Oxford. Then Amos moved into an apartment and Isabella and the girls moved on to London. Isabella had been living in England since 1921, and wanted to spend some time in Italy and France, but in the spring of 1923, her husband urged her to return to the United States to care for her mother, whose health was beginning to fail. Besides, he teased in a letter to Charlotte, “Mt. Carmel must begin to wonder if it is really true that I hit her over the head with a talking machine and have a wife in Puxatawney [sic].”22
Isabella dreaded giving up her comparative freedom and going back to the drafty old “tumbledown house” in Mount Carmel where they had been living, with its wallpaper coming off “in ribbons,” its wooden beams and floors “powdering into decay,” and its frequent invasion by a “migration of ants.” Never mind that the house was surrounded by blooming hydrangeas in the spring and summer—it was a nightmare to keep up. The family called it alternately Hydrangea House and the Sleeping Giant, and Dr. Wilder and Thornton promised Isabella that if she would come home she would never have to live there again.23
Dr. Wilder, meanwhile, traveled, made speeches, and held down his editorial post in New Haven, sharing with the family letters “from unknown or prominent readers of his editorials who have been struck or touched by certain passages,” Thornton reported to his mother. He was always eager for news from London and pictures of his sisters. Eleven-year-old Janet was growing tall, and showing a strong interest in science and in horses. With all her brothers and sisters writing and publishing, Thornton teased, he would not be surprised if Janet wrote a book of reflections of a horse lover, calling it Yeas and Neighs.24
Isabel, now in her early twenties, studied Old English embroidery and design at the Oxford City-County Council School, and audited a “celebrated course” in Restoration drama at Lincoln College as well as an English literature course at Christ Church. She also took an acting course at the Ben Greet Acting School in London, run by the famous British Shakespearean actor-director whose company toured popular productions of Shakespeare’s plays in the United States. Isabel played a “walk-on part for two weeks when the Ben Greet Company played a 2-week tour” in Oxford.25 She studied typing and shorthand in 1922–23 in London, worked on a novel, and wrote at least two plays—a one-act called The Empty-Handed and a play in two acts entitled At Dusk, for which Thornton filed copyright protection on her behalf. He praised his sister’s efforts, and began to send her books on playwriting, as well as advice about plays to study.
In a long letter to Thornton, Isabel confided that for a year she had been “unpardonably, insanely in love” with a man who was “attractive, clever, charming—an incredible combination of everything.” He pursued her, wanted to make love to her, wanted to marry her. But they had come to “an understanding” because Isabel couldn’t make a commitment to marriage, and she couldn’t give in to her passionate desire for an affair with this man—“he wants you & you need him terribly, awfully, but there is the Puritan background, feminine cowardice (oh the courage of a prostitute) and modesty & a bit of ignorance.” She knew, she told her brother, that she had given up “one of the biggest things I’ll ever have” because of “that ever lastingly drilled in ‘Thou shalt not.’ ” She asked Thornton not to “enlighten” their mother about it because “of all this Mother knows little.”26
Isabel was casting about for a purpose in her life. There was writing, but she found that “oh, so tiring,” and besides, she was “too young for that—it is passive—I want to live myself. Then I will know my powers.” Isabel told her brother that she knew she would “never be satisfied . . . until I have married and thoroughly explored sex.”27 Thornton observed that the Wilders were “nervous and contrary” and would “probably marry often and late.”28 And he wrote to a friend, “Both of my sisters send me long accounts of MEN they meet, asking me whether I find them ALL RIGHT and as an old schoolmaster I have a passion for spreading advice.”29
Amos, now nearly twenty-eight, was still a graduate student in Mansfield College, Oxford, and was also playing tennis regularly as a member of the Oxford University team.30 He was also publishing an occasional poem in literary journals. Thornton was “elated” by his brother’s “great success” in getting a poem, “Ode in a German Cemetery,” published in the Hibbert Journal and reprinted in the Literary Digest. He wrote to his mother, “In a sense the Ode is your first grandchild, Mrs. Wilder.” He went on to praise his mother for this accomplishment by “one of the little school” she “reared so significantly.”31 Thornton thought his brother’s poetry was fine literature and recognized in it the influence of the cadences and verse of the hymns of their youth.
Like Thornton, Amos got no affirmation from their father. Amos was vindicated, however, when Battle-Retrospect and Other Poems, his book-length collection of war poetry, was chosen for publication in 1923, the sixteenth volume in the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets—making him the first of the five young Wilders to achieve such distinguished national publication of a book.
All things considered, this was a remarkably happy and productive period for the Wilder family, scattered as they were. Thornton shared with the family in England the news that, up in Boston, independent Charlotte, now a writer and assistant editor for The Youth’s Companion, had “changed from alpha to omega; she rushes out to call on people, and is ill unless people are calling on her; she wants me to give her address to any boys I might know in Boston; she scolds me for repaying her the money I owed her from Paris; is taking the part of Mary Magdalene in a church pageant.”32 He was very proud when his sister published an essay in the Atlantic Monthly in 1923, and he bragged that she was writing sonnets “that will make you hold your breath.”33
Thornton urged Charlotte to be good to their father because, he wrote, “I’m not, very, these days; I can’t send him enough money for him to deposit to my account, and he’s afraid I’m incorrigible.”34 In letters to his mother and to Charlotte, Thornton affirmed his faith in Charlotte’s future as a writer. “You and I must lie low in darkling obscurity perhaps for many years yet, knowing thousands of people and studying thousands of classics, until the hour or our emergence strikes,” he wrote to Charlotte.35 As he had for Isabel and her plays, he predicted that if Charlotte kept on writing she might “discover herself as something of a very high order.”36 He often praised his mother for her role in the accomplishments of her sons and daughters: “What is the secret, madam,” he wrote to her, “of having astonishing children?”37
In February 1923 Thornton could report to his mother:
Great long stretches of my Roman Memoirs are now done, and I’ve a good mind to group together the Society sections and try and send them out into the world first, under the title: Elizabeth Grier and Her Circle. To many readers they will seem . . . too gossipy and feminine. Many passages however are of a valuable mordant satire, and others drenched with restrained pity; I am not ashamed of it. You would be a great help, but I cannot send my forlorn unique text across the ocean.38
He promised himself that he would teach one more year, and then concentrate on writing. He would earn some additional money working in a summer camp, and then he would go to New York, live on his savings, and write.39 He w
ould give himself a year, and if that plan did not work, he would “creep back into teaching.” Meanwhile, he told his mother, he hoped that “the Memoirs I keep touching may in fourteen months have been finished and have found a haven.”40
He announced his plans to his father in angry response to a birthday note in which Dr. Wilder wrote that he was resigned to the prospect that he could not expect any significant achievement from Thornton. In return Thornton chastised his father for his “moral pessimism,” and announced: “I am fully decided now that next year is my last in teaching (if I live through it). I am going to move into the foremost city in the world, and do a little writing, tutoring, and, perhaps, acting. I’m not going to shatter into bits my prodigious mind for any number of boys or dollars.”41
THORNTON DEVOTED every possible free moment to writing during the spring of 1923. He flirted briefly with Dadaism: “I’m going slightly Dada—you may have noticed it, and am trying to extract beautiful effects from an adroit use of nonsense,” he wrote to his friend Norman Fitts, editor of S4N. He also proposed a publishing project: “I would like to consider laying down perhaps more than fifty dollars (would that go any distance?) towards making a pamphlet of my more radical and subtle tapestry pieces.”42 But after Fitts replied that he was willing to print such a book, Thornton begged off and apologized: He had “only four items ready for it,” he wrote. “When it comes to actually getting a booklet out,” Thornton told Fitts, he would draw on his savings to do so. Meanwhile, he wrote, “I must have had a rush of dreams to the head.”43 Although it went nowhere, the proposal signified Thornton’s ongoing experimentation and his new determination to make his work visible. He also reported to Fitts that he was “turning to long plays,” and if he had freedom to write, he believed he could “write four stunners a year.”44
Thornton was soon the beneficiary of some helpful networking. Through Stark Young he was in touch with Edith Isaacs, editor and publisher of the influential Theatre Arts Magazine. He sent her The Trumpet Shall Sound, urging her to take her time reading it, and then, “When reckoning comes do not spare me: I learn meekly.” Besides, he told her, this play came from a “closed chapter; after them came Dada.”45 When they met, she was quite taken with the shy, friendly, erudite young man. He had brought along portions of his Roman memoirs, and, at her invitation, read them aloud to her, bringing the characters to life with his animated reading. She praised his fiction, thought it had theatrical qualities, and was impressed enough with two of his plays to send them to director Richard Boleslavsky at the American Laboratory Theatre.
On May 2, 1923, Thornton went to Philadelphia to see the Moscow Art Theatre Company production of The Cherry Orchard, and to meet one of his theater icons. For years he had followed the theater career of Austrian-born producer and director Max Reinhardt. Coincidentally Thornton had read in the New York Times that Reinhardt planned to attend the very same performance for which he had already bought a ticket. Also providentially, Rudolf Kommer, who had befriended Thornton at Monhegan Island, was working with Reinhardt as his agent and interpreter. When Thornton spotted Kommer and Reinhardt, who was accompanied by “a gloriously beautiful actress setting off her face with the waftings of a huge feather fan in Paris green,” he pushed his way through the crowd at intermission to speak to them.46 As he had hoped, Kommer remembered him and introduced him to Reinhardt—whom Thornton found “astonishingly young and homely, but with bright eyes, and with a pretty, deferential manner.”47 He had dreamed for years about writing a play that Reinhardt would direct, and he was now many steps closer to turning that into a reality, however distant in the future.
To his surprise, Thornton had somehow set in motion this chain reaction of acquaintances who were impressed with him and his work. Through Kommer he met Reinhardt. Through Stark Young he met Edith Isaacs and then Boleslavsky. As he turned his eyes beyond Lawrenceville to New York, Thornton was becoming his own best advocate. His father might doubt his future, but Thornton was enormously encouraged by these connections with professionals in the theater.
In May 1923, he began keeping a letter book, copying by hand his outgoing correspondence and occasionally recording the text of letters he received. The contents of his letter book document the range of his friendships, as well as his plans to relinquish teaching and move to New York. But as the spring term drew to its close, Thornton had to concentrate on school duties, including overseeing final preparations for his students who were taking College Board examinations. He was offered a new contract, with a raise to two thousand dollars for the coming year. The last days of the semester were crammed with teaching and house duties, and he tutored to earn extra money, ran two miles on the cinder path of the track every morning, and practiced playing jazz on the piano to prepare for his job as entertainment director at the camp where he was employed for the summer.
All in all he confessed to his brother that he was “right happy” in Lawrenceville: “Teaching is wonderful; I cannot tell whether I like it for itself, or whether my mind is such that in any walk of life I would be thus daily excited, moved, amused, surprised, and frightened.”48
IN LATE May, Elizabeth Lewis Niven, Isabella’s mother, suffered a stroke, which left her with aphasia. Thornton rushed to New York to see her, and he was sure his grandmother recognized him. She spoke in a “musical but incoherent flow of words” and when Thornton and his father made a motion to go, Thornton wrote, she “raised her hand and wrinkled her forehead in a characteristic expression of humorous reproach; so we sat down, until from fatigue or content she had closed her eyes and forgotten us.”49 She died soon afterward. Dr. Wilder and Thornton Niven, Isabella’s brother, planned Mrs. Niven’s funeral. Thornton wrote a sad letter to his mother in England on June 5, 1923, trying to comfort her: “Just a page,” he said, “to supplement the letters Father and Uncle Thornton wrote you about Grandmother’s last days. . . . To you who only received news of it by the cruelty of cablegrams it will seem more tragic than it has been for us who saw an end as gently disposed as is possible among us.”50
In New Haven that June he and his father began to look for a house to lease for Isabella’s return to the United States. Like their father, Thornton, Amos, and Charlotte thought it was time for their mother and their younger sisters to come back to the United States. “I am more concerned about Isabel than even [Mother], although she comes first,” Charlotte wrote from Boston in July 1923:
Isabel [now twenty-three] may or may not have told you her anxieties, but she tells me it is a queer life they live, and I can well believe it. I would love to set Isabel up here, with a job. Of course, she will find an office job confining, but let her find she can do her own work, and stand on her feet and make her own friends, and I think she will be happier. . . . I would take pleasure in giving her many of the things that are simple “fun” that she misses, from lack of money. I shan’t have any myself, but I can always turn out children’s stories etc. and raise a holiday fund, and I can show her how to. We would go to music and swimming parties, and have fudge suppers; all the things she has little of, and ought to have. I don’t know if Mother can spare her, though.51
Amos was returning to the United States that summer as a member of the Oxford-Cambridge Tennis Team to play tennis tournaments with collegiate counterparts in the United States and Canada. The arrival of the Oxford-Cambridge team received national news coverage, and with most of his passage to the United States paid by the team, Amos told his family he was coming home to stay and to enter the Yale Divinity School in the fall. With this news Isabella began to think seriously about taking Isabel and Janet home to Connecticut. Thornton, meanwhile, set out for Litchfield, Connecticut, to begin a summer job that would, in some ways, be more frustrating and challenging than the strenuous farm labor that had defined so many of his earlier summers.
“THIS IS a noisy vexatious camp and I was a fool to come,” he wrote his father from Sagawatha Lodge on Bantam Lake near Litchfield.52 He had signed a contract to spend the sum
mer of 1923 there as a counselor, and was immediately dismayed to learn that as entertainment director, he was actually expected to “sing and tell pirate stories and teach swimming, and other crosses.”53 He very quickly decided he had made a mistake when he took the job, but there was nothing to be done but see it through, which he did with humor, entertaining his family and friends with the comedy of his adventures. He wrote to his mother, “The whole problem of these camps is to keep the urchins amused on five acres for fourteen hours a day; nothing more difficult. They are pursued by boredom and fretfulness and homesickness.” He found that “only story-telling can enthrall them long, and I hold that monopoly here, sitting on a piano-stool and narrating with my wiry hands and the changing horrors of my face. Two months of this and I see where I’ll get thinner yet.”54
Actually, there is probably no more difficult audience for a writer than a gaggle of rambunctious ten- and eleven-year-old boys, and Thornton’s imagination got a vigorous workout that summer as he labored not only to subdue but to mesmerize his charges. Somehow, although he was on duty twenty-four hours daily, with only one day off a week, and even though he was sleeping in a log cabin with six boys, alternately listening to and tuning out their incessant chatter and their “perpetual nagging of one another,” he was managing to read—Proust and Mme de Sévigné in French; Henry James’s The Ambassadors; Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution; James Bryce’s Holy Roman Empire; and the poet Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories, American fairy tales written for his daughters. “Carl Sandburg is a Chicago vers-librist who writes a beautiful poem fifteen times out of a hundred,” Thornton wrote to his mother; “his bright nonsense stories though are all delightful and very important because they are purely American.”55