Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Thornton spent several days with his family, listening to their pleas that he not abandon Princeton and civilization and life in general. Somehow he left New Haven in better spirits, and set about making some practical changes in his life: dropping the course he hated at Princeton and substituting a course “worthy of a human’s time”—Old French; promising his parents he would finish the academic year; meeting with his publishers in New York to see the book jacket and blurbs for The Cabala. While he was in New York he had a brief visit with the actor Glenn Hunter, he told Amy, describing Hunter as someone he used to know in the army, “long before he was famous.”60

  That winter Thornton and Amy waged a tug-of-war over their relationship. She idealized him, he told her, and described him in “rosy-tinted phrases” as if she had “invented someone.” Here was the reality, he wrote to her: “There is a graduate student, harassed, prematurely aging, lazy, talkative but ill-informed, too analytical for many friendships, always hankering for friendships he can’t have etc etc.” She had simply transformed him into a fantasy, “with all the ‘colors’ ” of her “beautiful nature.”61 Undeterred, she wanted to see him, and they met occasionally for lunch or dinner—but Thornton was increasingly uncomfortable about the secrecy of their meetings. They should not make any clandestine plans, for the “very implication” of secrecy had in it “the power to pain other people.” Perhaps they should “work towards a kind of resignation to not seeing one another for a while,” he wrote to her.62 “I would like nothing better than to see you often,” he wrote in late February; “to come and go naturally in your home. But that is only possible if I am a friend of the group. I want to be liked and understood and welcomed by Mr. Wertheimer, and the children and the neighbors.”63 He wanted their friendship to last but he rebelled “at anything that faintly looked like subterfuge,” especially because it could ruin their “lifetime friendship.”64

  He was “in a bad way” emotionally and intellectually that winter, desperate for “some repose somewhere,” he told her:

  My inner life is so exciting that it refuses to take rests: the book, the next book, my hatred of the classes, my discouragement with myself, the high-pitched table conversations. I sleep pretty well, but every now and then there are hours when I stare into the darkness and my crazy mind goes on jangling, not thinking but merely running over its cheapest gramophone records. My friends tell me I am getting nervous twitches around the eyes and mouth. I must calm down, somehow.65

  Thornton kept up his correspondence with Rosemary Ames throughout the spring of 1926, in large part because she was an antidote to the burdens of his schedule and the demands other people made on him. He signed his letters “affectionately” and “Ever devotedly,” asked for her photograph, and teased her about the “host of knights” and “scores of elegant young men” who admired her and surrounded her wherever she was.66 “Just when I, through drudgery, and disappointed literary hopes, and divers cares, was stumbling into a premature middle age,” he wrote to her, “you came along and made me make one more attempt to be simple and healthy and carefree.”67

  He gave her advice about her future, which she largely ignored. Despite his criticism of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts as a school that turned out “good slick competent Broadway actors” rather than “actors that work from within from a long painstaking experimental technique,” Rosemary enrolled in the academy and went on to a modest stage and film career.68 Their relationship gradually became a comfortable friendship, with Thornton, more often than not, giving avuncular advice whenever she asked him for it.

  He hoped to spend Easter of 1926 in New Haven, staying for about six days and seeing “almost no one” so that he could rest, take long walks, wait somewhat apprehensively for the “first reviews of an outgrown book,” and work on a new one.69 The “outgrown book” was The Cabala; the new one, still in its early stages, was The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He had made an inventory of all the plays he had “ever completed—eight full length plays in all, plus all the three-minute playlets.70 Novels and plays aside, he had to carry on his graduate work at Princeton. He enjoyed his literature course with “dear” Louis Con, distinguished author, scholar, and professor of French literature, who appreciated Thornton’s work in return.71 It was in Professor Con’s class that Thornton had the idea for one of the first scenes in The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

  IN LATER years Thornton was frequently quoted as saying that of his generation of writers, he was the only one who didn’t go to Paris. Actually he went to Paris before many of the others but stayed a shorter time, yet still managed to find that favorite literary haunt, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, and to meet Joyce, and to begin his first novel in a shabby hotel room in the summer of 1921. In Paris he had set out to re-create the Rome of his recent experience, fused with the Rome of his classical studies and his rich imagination. He had worked on the emerging story in fits and starts over the next five years, carving out time when his teaching, his summer work, and his other writing permitted, “but always with the sinking feeling that nowhere a publisher or friend would read it,” he confessed to Professor Wager.72 The Bonis and Lewis Baer had proved him wrong.

  Early in the composition process he had developed a manuscript titled The Memoirs of Charles Mallison: The Year in Rome, replete with footnotes elucidating references in the story and citing another imaginary memoir, The Boy Sebastian, also by the fictitious Charles Mallison, published by the imaginary “Soochow Press in Soochow, China in 1913 in six unbound folio volumes.”73 There were other tentative titles for the novel along the way, including Notes of a Roman Student, Roman Memoirs, and The Trasteverine.

  “Great long stretches of my Roman Memoirs are now done,” Thornton had written to his mother in 1923. “I am not ashamed of it.”74 He had struggled with form and style, and found it difficult, he wrote, to combine “the real and the fantastic.” At one point he had experimented with a few pages of a new novel “based on the survival of Greek divinities into modern Roman society” but set that aside and incorporated the idea of surviving dieties into The Cabala: One of the novel’s principal characters, Miss Elizabeth Grier, believes that the members of the Cabala are actually reincarnations of Olympian gods.

  Readers of The Cabala have frequently found in the novel traces of Proust or James or Edith Wharton, and Thornton acknowledged Proust’s influence, along with that of Saint-Simon, La Bruyère, Paul Claudel, Ernest Renan, Lytton Strachey, and Mme de Sévigné, who would surface dramatically in his next novel in the guise of one of the main characters. Yet it is significant that during the last year of his work on The Cabala, Thornton was analyzing James Joyce’s Ulysses, struck most by two devices Joyce employed—in form, an intricately, deliberately constructed “architecture,” and in substance, an abundance of free-ranging themes, and allusions to everything under the sun.

  The novel Thornton crafted was held together more by a fragile scaffolding than by the sturdy timbers and beams of structural, architectural design. The intertwined characters and episodes that he imagined play out freely with Rome as the stage, all witnessed by a narrator, a young American known to us only by his nickname, Samuele. The lovelorn Alix, princess d’Espoli, named him after her dog, a “beautiful setter” who “spent all his life sitting around on the pavement watching us with a look of most intense excitement.”75 Why Samuele? Asked that question many years later, Thornton wrote that he thought the choice was connected to the biblical child Samuel: “Speak Lord, I hear.”76

  Ultimately the novel was organized into five books. “First Encounters” introduces Samuele and an American scholar, James Blair, who meet on a crowded train bound for Rome. Through Blair we hear about the members of the Cabala, four of whom warrant their own books within the novel. According to Blair, they are rich, influential, powerful, bored, lonely, and intellectually snobbish, with a hatred and contempt for what is new. “Here’s a group of people losing sleep over a host of notions that the rest of the world has outgrown s
everal centuries ago,” says Blair.77

  The narrator soon encounters the members of the Cabala and begins to form his own relationships with them. There are Elizabeth Grier, a wealthy American spinster, Vassar College trustee, and dominant force in the Cabala; Her Highness Leda Matilda Colonna, duchessa d’Aquilanera, and her young son, the doomed prince Marcantonio, who has “fallen on bad ways”; the cultured Frenchwoman Alix, princess d’Espoli, unhappily married to an Italian prince; the ancient, reputedly wise Cardinal Vaini, who has spent his life on the mission fields of China; and the fervently devout Mlle. Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine. There is even a cameo appearance in the novel by John Keats.

  Samuele, who is in Rome to study ancient history, charms his way into the inner circle of the Cabala, some of whose members enlist his help in solving seemingly insoluble problems. The duchessa d’Aquilanera implores Samuele to help reform her sexually promiscuous, self-destructive teenage son, Marcantonio, who ultimately commits incest and then kills himself. The unhappily married princess Alix d’Espoli turns to Samuele in hopes he can help her win the affections of the indifferent, unavailable James Blair. Alix confronts “that cavern of horror in her nature: she seemed always to be loving those that did not love her,” Samuele observes.78 He takes an almost prurient interest in Alix’s despair: “I was trembling with a strange happy excitement, made up partly of my love and pity for her, and partly from the mere experience of eavesdropping on a beautiful spirit in the last reaches of its pride and suffering.”79 She considers suicide in the thrall of her hopeless, unrequited passion for Blair, but Samuele tries to set her on the road to redemption.

  Into the imaginative fiction of The Cabala are woven strands of Thornton’s own experiences with unrequited love, helping to explain why he devoted such detailed attention to Alix’s rejection by Blair. Whereas Samuele narrates the stories of the other Cabalists from a more distant, third-person point of view, he paints a close-up portrait of Alix’s unhappiness and her doomed efforts to seduce Blair. In doing so Thornton delineates characteristics that illuminate his own experience. He reflects that “while we are in love with a person our knowledge of his weaknesses lies lurking in the back of our minds and our idealization of the loved one is not so much an exaggeration of his excellences as a careful ‘rationalization’ of his defects.” Through Samuele he observes that “the mere fact of being loved so, whether one could return it or not, put one under an obligation.” In the concluding incident of Alix’s chapter, the author demonstrates how deep and lingering such a wound can be.80

  Samuel’s next adventure involves the earnest Mlle Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine, an elderly woman defined by her absolute belief in the teachings of the church, and her conviction that only a return to the doctrine of the divine right of kings can ensure the future of European civilization. She hopes that Samuele can help her present her case to the cardinal, who so blatantly disappoints and disillusions her that she tries to kill him. Fortunately he is saved, only to die en route to China, where he had lived for many years, and where he had hoped to rediscover his own spiritual balance.

  The final chapter of The Cabala, “The Dusk of the Gods,” is a mystical and at times mystifying culmination of the novel. Samuele goes to Marcantonio’s grave. He writes notes of appreciation and farewell, closes out his apartment, gives his dog to a friend. He has a long visit with Elizabeth Grier, who has pronounced Samuele the reincarnation or at least the avatar of the god Mercury—the messenger. On his voyage back to the United States, Samuele invokes the presence of the poet Virgil, who appears to give him the message that Rome cannot be the Eternal City because “Nothing is eternal save Heaven.” Virgil goes on to say, “Romes existed before Rome and when Rome will be a waste there will be Romes after her.”81 In lines that foreshadow later work—The Woman of Andros and Our Town—Virgil mourns the earthly life he loved:

  When shall I erase from my heart this love of [Rome]? I cannot enter Zion until I have forgotten Rome.—Dismiss me now, my friend, I pray thee. These vain emotions have shaken me. . . . (Suddenly the poet became aware of the Mediterranean:) Oh, beautiful are these waters. Behold! For many years I have almost forgotten the world. Beautiful! Beautiful!—But no! What horror, what pain! Are you still alive? Alive? How can you endure it?82

  As the ghost of Virgil “faded before the stars,” Samuele’s voyage continued “toward the new world and the last and greatest of all cities.”83

  The Cabala is more than an entertainment, more than a young novelist’s first and sometimes affected display of talent and promise. There are glib, overwrought passages, some strained characterizations, and a smattering of esoteric literary allusions that verge on ostentation. But overall there is glittering style, replete with lyrical descriptive passages; metaphors deftly woven from musical terms; occasional comedy and parody; witty, sometimes biting irony—and, as Thornton described it, “mordant” social satire.84 There is also high drama, at times farce, at times melodrama, at times tragedy. On one level the book can be read as a tragicomic allegory. The reader can laugh with and at Samuele and the Cabalists and at the same time pity them. As Samuele, at their instigation, becomes embroiled in the lives of the Cabalists, he sometimes witnesses and sometimes precipitates events, including tragedies—the suicide, the unrequited love affair with a desperately unhappy ending, the shattering crisis of faith.

  “Marcantonio,” the second episode, can even be viewed as a paradoxical allegory about the dangers of intemperately advocating temperance (echoes of Amos Parker Wilder’s tendencies). Book 3, “Alix,” dramatizes the intense suffering of unrequited love, and the compensations the rejected lover seeks. Book 4, “Astrée-Luce and the Cardinal,” depicts the crisis when religious faith is challenged, and explores the impact of the loss of spiritual belief, as well as the harm that can be done when clergymen disillusion their most faithful followers.

  “Who can understand religion unless he has sinned? who can understand literature unless he has suffered? who can understand love unless he has loved without response?” the cardinal says to Samuele.85 These are the three central questions posed in The Cabala.

  17

  “MY REAL VOCATION”

  Dear Master, I cried, how shall I know If this be my real vocation? . . . I was told that destiny herself was the mother of decision, and that my vocation would be settled by events not by consideration.

  —SAMUELE TO SAREPTOR BASILIS, THE SEER,

  in Thornton Wilder’s The Cabala

  New Haven, New York, and Europe (1926–1927)

  The Cabala was published on April 20, 1926, by Albert and Charles Boni, and to Thornton’s chagrin, many pages were marred by careless errors. Most of them were not his fault, he wrote his brother, but some critics would pounce on them, blaming the author whose name, after all, was on the text. “The final proofs were perfect, I feel sure. But at that stage the firm suddenly decided that the book was too short and began expanding it by all the devices known to the trade. In the respacing of lines therefore many must have been broken and crazily repatched by the typesetter: but a few of the errors remain my maxima culpa!” He reported to Amos that almost no one liked the last section of the novel, book 5, “The Dusk of the Gods.” “I should have ‘prepared’ it more consistently thru the earlier. Well—all in all, I have learned lots of lessons.”1 He was preparing himself for the possibility that the book might receive “a brief and decent” burial.2

  The Bonis waited for the reviews, not planning to advertise the book until “some blurbs begin.” Even if his book failed to reach an audience, Thornton consoled himself that at least he could earn his living “elsewhere” and find “elsewhere” his “real pleasures.”3 He was all too aware of his shortcomings as a novelist, he told Amos: “I am too young and too undedicated a person to achieve a restrained Grand Style (which I pretend after)—notes of burlesque, smartalecisms and purple-rhetoric creep in and are only discovered when it is too late. Let me promise you tho that tons of bunk were deported in the suc
cessive readings of the proof. Hope for the best.”4

  As it turned out, Thornton and the Bonis were pleasantly surprised by the reviews, which were mixed but overwhelmingly positive. Theodore Purdy, Jr., at the Saturday Review found the novel disorganized and the writing at times “imitative,” but still he called The Cabala a “sophisticated extravaganza,” and numerous critics praised Wilder’s style.5 Thornton’s Yale friend John Farrar, writing in the Bookman, enthusiastically endorsed the book in a review headlined “Brilliant, Bitter, Imaginative,” noting that even while Wilder’s imagination was “bizarre,” it was “restrained.”6 Some critics praised the book as charming, witty, authentic, brilliant, mature, beautiful, ironic, irresistible; others dismissed it as esoteric, strange, disorganized, imitative, inaccurate in its depiction of the Catholic Church, and full of inexcusable mechanical errors. Agnes Repplier in the Catholic journal Commonweal charged that Thornton Wilder did not “know the Church of Rome.”7 She said some “very harsh things,” Thornton wrote to a friend. “Some of them are true and some are extravagantly unjust.” Nevertheless he wanted to share the review with friends so they could, “for completeness’ sake,” read “the enemy’s point-of-view”—one of the few times in his career that he would ever comment on a review.8