In Rome he visited the American Academy, where he was warmly welcomed by the director. “The book has been read by all with a sort of scandalous delight,” Thornton wrote to his family. “Even old Romans take it as the hot stuff from the secret circles!”50 He also had a reunion with Lauro De Bosis, who talked to Thornton about Mussolini, whom he knew well. To Thornton’s great pleasure De Bosis had read his novel and understood that it was “preposterous” to regard The Cabala as realism. Thornton was sensitive to criticism from friends and critics when he felt that they failed to grasp his intentions in The Cabala. “I am mortified that you thot [thought] I put STYLE first,” Thornton wrote to Nichols after they had discussed The Cabala, which was being published in England that fall by Longmans, Green. “I suppose you are right; but the next book . . . [sic].”51 He appreciated a letter from his friend Harry Luce, and wrote to thank him with some illuminating lines about The Cabala and The Bridge:
Your remark that my C-b-la is more than style puts oil on an old bewildered wound. I thought the book was all about great natures in pain; but most of the reviewers tell me it is about eccentrics in ludicrous situations, and lean heavily on the style. I have buried a barbed sentence in my next book for them: “The Conde enjoyed the Marquesa’s famous letters, but he [thought] that when he had admired the style he had extracted all their richness and intention missing (as most people do) the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.”52
With only slight changes, this passage about the “purport of literature”—the “notation of the heart”—may be found in The Bridge of San Luis Rey in part 2: “The Marquesa de Montemayor.”53
BY EARLY November, with London, Paris, Rome, and Naples behind them, Thornton and Andy were making their way by train from Florence to Munich. Wherever they went Thornton was the adventurer, imbibing the scenery and sunshine, walking the hillsides (Andy especially disliked walking), visiting with “friendly peasants” in the villages, savoring the food, and attending plays and concerts.54 He wrote to his father from Berlin:
By some curious chance we found the one boy in the United States who was equipped to get just NOTHING out of a European trip. He liked England immensely because he could ignore it and sit indoors drinking whiskey with some friends. There are no friends to drink whiskey with in France, Italy and Germany so for the most part he sits in his hotel room, reads the foreign editions of the American papers, and smokes.55
Throughout the whole trip Thornton was waiting “with clenched fists” until he could get back to work on The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The desire to write was “tormenting the life” out of him, he complained. “Oh god for independence and silence!”56 He sent fragments of the manuscript to Andy’s mother, Marie, who was fast becoming one of Thornton’s bevy of women friends taking a great interest in his work. Mrs. Townson expressed some doubts about the book. “I am still hoping that when I finally get it out smooth, you will like it more than the C-b-la,” Thornton replied:
It is going to be much longer and so varied that there will be parts that will appeal to all moods. You will be surprised to hear that even on the trip I have been able to do some work on it—on trains, at meals, late at night, or on my walks, all sorts of notes, and anecdotes, and notions keep pushing up to my attention in spite of myself, and I am like to finish several blank books of odds and ends of suggestion before I can finally settle down to work hard.57
He wrote Amy that he hoped to be free “to attack my book in almost as much earnest as it’s been attacking me. The Peruvians keep visiting me at the most unexpected moments and I am filling quite a large notebook with their doings and sayings and fretting and pining to settle down and hug them and put them down masterfully on paper. Perhaps the ferment and delay is even good for them.”58
He was learning to be an objective, attentive editor of his own manuscripts, whose pages teemed with words and lines and even whole passages stricken or completely rewritten as his hand worked busily over the pages. Because Thornton had the novelist’s eye and the dramatist’s ear, a vital part of his revision process had long been to read his plays and his fiction aloud—to friends if possible, but otherwise to himself. The ear often catches problems in syntax, cadence, or vocabulary that the eye overlooks. And whether he accepted or ignored the critical opinions of family and friends he trusted, their reactions could be provocative. They made him think and rethink the story growing on the page. For instance, when he shared portions of the Bridge manuscript with some New Haven friends in Capri, they told him that the account of Brother Juniper and the accident “had the air of scoffing” instead of the “humorously tender” effect Thornton intended. He revised accordingly.59
He wrote to Bill Nichols from Rome, “You have no idea how beautiful one’s book [seems] at this stage. The Peruvians whom it treats keep visiting me on trains, in front of pictures, in bed. Anecdotes about them, bits of characterization, sometimes just one adjective comes mysteriously floating to me across a dining-room.”60 He copied on the back of the letter a passage from book 1 of the current draft of his novel—a fragment that, he said, “first came to me when I was reading the inscriptions on the left wall of Christ Church Cathedral” the day he had visited Nichols in Oxford.61 The passage, considerably rewritten, appears in the final section of the finished novel, part 5, “Perhaps an Intention.” Moments of inspiration were outweighed by hours of hard work, however. Thornton wrote to Nichols, “The process of literature seems to be to produce in tears and then rewrite as though in mockery.”62
TO THORNTON’S relief, another Townson brother, Douglas, was coming to Europe to join Andy and Chick. Because Thornton was “bursting with material” for his novel, he began to think about turning Andy over entirely to his brothers, refunding the appropriate portion of his salary, and settling down somewhere in France where living was “ludicrously cheap,” so that he could write full-time.63 The one drawback to that plan, he wrote to his family, was loneliness: “I love you all more than tonguecantell [sic],” he wrote, “and dread even staying alone in the S. of France without somebody.”64
“Andy sails Wednesday and the farce is over,” he wrote to his mother and sisters on November 28, 1926. During that last week Andy had been “prowling around all night with his brother in dress-suits” and Thornton had more time to write. Consequently, he said, “The Bridge is getting along fast and is just filling up with beautiful passages that take your breath away.”65
Now at last he could make his own plans. He imagined one option after another: He could stay in Paris for a month, rent a typewriter, and finish his novel there. Or he might spend a month in the south of France. Or he might share a studio with Ernest Hemingway, who had been living in Paris since 1921, with his first wife, Hadley, and later, their son, John, nicknamed Bumby. Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published by Scribner’s in the fall of 1926.66
When Hemingway wasn’t writing in Montparnasse cafés and bars, he worked in his studio at 39 rue Descartes. “I’d love to go into the studio with Ernest,” Thornton wrote home, “but there are no meals with it. He eats around with the enormous and flamboyant Rotonde crowd. And his wife is about to divorce him and his new wife is about to arrive from America, so I think I’d better not try. But he’s wonderful. It’s the first time I’ve met someone of my own generation whom I respected as an artist.”67
Thornton enjoyed the occasional company of Hadley Hemingway, who was separated from Hemingway at the time. He escorted “the almost-ex Mrs. Hemingway” to a concert in Paris in December. “She is a nice brave little soul,” he wrote to his mother. She looked “very like [movie star] Mae Marsh,” he said, and no one knew how she really felt about “Ernest’s cut-ups.” He thought Hadley was “a brick” and, with other friends, hoped that Hemingway would go back to her and their “beautiful little 3-year old baby.”68 In Thornton’s opinion Ernest was “just a Middle Western ki
d whose genius and health and good looks and success have gone to his head a little,” and Thornton thought (perceptively, as it turned out) that Hemingway’s current mistress and future wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, “was a mess.”69 He managed to sustain friendships with both Hemingway and Hadley, however. He wrote his mother, “I think she has ceased to be particularly in love with Ernest but dreads being alone and divorced and back in America. Fortunately she has the most beautiful little boy in the world and all the royalties of The Sun Also Rises.”70
According to Thornton, Hemingway was “the hot sketch of all time. He bursts with self confidence and a sort of little-boy impudence.”71 Hemingway was working on a play about Mussolini, bragging to Thornton that he had “dabbled in secret service and plots” and “had access to highly secret dossiers,” and that he knew that Mussolini “intentionally planted” attempts on his own life to “create a martyr-legend.”72 While Thornton listened skeptically to these claims, he encouraged Hemingway to “begin to think of a play” for Richard Boleslavsky, and Hemingway finished a one-act play in 1926—Today Is Friday, a drama set on Good Friday after the crucifixion.73
WHILE THORNTON was witnessing the breakdown of the Hemingways’ marriage, he was facing the possible end of his own relationship with Amy Wertheimer. She was pursuing him in transoceanic letters, so much so that he considered ending their correspondence and their friendship once and for all. “I have always told you that I could only be a friend, but in the most valuable senses of the word,” he wrote to her November 30. If she were divorced and single, he told her, they would have to see each other even less frequently because he did not “care to appear” to their friends as a “careless pilferer in other people’s happiness.” He told her he hoped for long years of “rich work” ahead, and a “steady honorable single-minded life.”74 Two weeks later he wrote to tell her that he was “very discouraged” about their correspondence, and the “dramatic” and “stormy” letters that arrived had left him “dejected” and unable to work. “I don’t even go to see people: I must wander around looking in shop windows and feeling mad at a life in which you should decide to make a matter of suffering out of what should be a matter of delight.”75
Perhaps there was nothing to do but to “cease writing: a painful measure,” he wrote, “and the only one fair to your children, your husband and your friends.” Yet intentionally or not, he kept them both in limbo, for Thornton couldn’t bring himself to do it: “I think I had better try and see what one year’s silence can do. However I won’t begin the silence yet.”76
“THIS CRAZY journey is drawing to a close and I may show up in Paris one of these days and drag you out to help me find a room,” Thornton wrote to Ernest Hemingway.77 All things considered, however, Thornton had decided by late November that he’d best leave Paris. “Between you and me,” he wrote to his mother and sisters, “I don’t like Paris. I never did. If I had somewhere to go in America I’d come straight home, but I don’t want New York and I couldn’t park with you adorable people in New Haven and that’s that.”78
He stayed on into December, however, feeling more at home now that he was free of Andy and the expensive hotels and restaurants the Townsons had paid for. Now Thornton was staying in a cheap pension in Montparnasse, taking his meals in cafés where writers and artists gravitated for cheap food and wine and lively company. He was making friends with his “motley crowd” of neighbors in the “dreadful pension”—impoverished Polish musicians, one “rich and famous and charming” Polish pianist who was hiding from a princess, “impecunious Russian composers and painters . . . a thickness of local color that would stagger Balzac.”79 Thornton loved it.
Another reason for lingering was that he was making plans to spend Christmas at Juan-les-Pins on the Riviera with Coleman Walker “(football star, U. Of Va. and ex-Lawrenceville master, and Rhodes scholar)” and a “whole horde of Oxonians,” including Bill Nichols and a “pack of Rhodes scholars.”80 They swam, talked, and lolled about in springlike weather, Thornton wrote, finding “the air very fragrant but with a faint trace of spirits, explained by the fact that Sinclair Lewis and the Scott Fitzgeralds had passed through in the Fall.”81 Thornton wanted to stay in France and write, for he had been “frozen over” with his work on The Bridge of San Luis Rey, afraid that he’d never finish it, and he had just broken through again. The inspiration was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He went to a performance and was so moved that he returned to the pension and wrote “the pages you will someday know as the death of Manuel,” he reported to his mother, going on to say, “and the next morning I wrote Doña Maria’s visit to Cluxambuqua and I’ve been writing evenly ever since.”82
He applied for a 1927 Guggenheim Fellowship to support a sojourn in Munich and Vienna to “learn the theatre from the inside out,” especially the theater of Max Reinhardt and Rudolf Kommer, but he doubted he would get it—and he didn’t. He was brimming with confidence in his novel now, however. He told his mother it was “going to be a riot. Every twenty pages there’s a tremendous emotional situation and between times its as lyrical and beautifully written as . . . . . . . [sic] It will help you build the most adorable little Engl. house and put a maid in it too. And then I’ll never travel to Europe again but will sit reading aloud to you while you punch rugs. Sweetest lady in the world, au revoir.”83
CAUGHT UP as he was in the new novel, Thornton spent little time thinking about The Cabala as it made its way into British and French bookstores, but occasionally he wondered when The Trumpet Shall Sound would actually open in New York, and how it would be received. He feared the worst, for he could now see many flaws in his play, and as he anticipated, his debut as a novelist proved to be far more auspicious than his debut as a dramatist.
Boleslavsky had asked for revisions, which Thornton provided, but the director had no quarrel with the substance of the play. To the contrary, he praised the young playwright in a long letter to a colleague in June 1926, noting that Wilder’s “point of view on life and art” was interesting, and adding, “He doesn’t divide them—they are fused together—they are divine in his understanding—he looks for mystery in realism and realism in mystery.” Boleslavsky called Thornton’s drama “one of those realistic and common life plays at the first reading, and on the tenth reading it becomes a deep, rich confession of blind human souls, seeking for light and unable to find it, the eternal fairy tale of the Prometheus flame.” He thought Thornton depicted “the lowest and the highest elements of the human soul in strange and unresolved relationships.” This international veteran of the theater believed that the early work of this unknown playwright was far ahead of its time.84
Long before The Trumpet Shall Sound opened on December 10, 1926, Thornton was geographically and emotionally far removed from the play. “I feel awfully remote from the news about The Trumpet, though of course it’s exciting,” he wrote to his family. Thornton was “horrified” to learn in a telegram from Boleslavsky that he was going to have an actor in the play read the Lord’s Prayer, and wired back immediately: “Please no prayer.” Boleslavsky had telescoped the third and fourth acts; Thornton considered this a mistake, but he didn’t care, he wrote to his family. “It’s all sort of remote to me. If it’s well-done or ill done, or successful or unsuccessful, it’s all one to me: it’s there on paper and someday when I’m older I’ll revise it and get the ideas sound.” He went on to critique his play objectively: “Its scenario is too pretentious. If Dante had gone into the theatre he couldn’t have carved himself a more ambitious subject. On the eve of performance I shall telegraph the company my thanks and go to bed.”85
Thornton’s play was one of four on the American Laboratory Theatre’s 1926–27 repertory calendar. (One of them, Clemence Dane’s Granite, was so successful it went on to Broadway.)86 “New American Play Is Quite Fantastic,” read the New York Times heading December 11. The reviewer wrote that “Mr. Wilder is a novelist, best known for ‘The Cabala,’ a book which, one gathers, caused not a little waltzing
in certain of the town’s thoroughfares. It seems hardly likely that such definite indications of approval will follow the production of the play.” The event was deemed a “rather murky evening among the better known symbols,” however, and the plot was said to be derivative, predictable—a “rehash” of other works “from Ibsen to Sutton Vane.”87
Years later, in his last novel, the semiautobiographical Theophilus North (1973), Thornton referred to the source of his first full-length play:
While I was an undergraduate at college I had written and printed in the Yale Literary Magazine a callow play called The Trumpet Shall Sound. It was based on a theme borrowed from Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist: Master departs on a journey of indefinite length, leaving his house in charge of faithful servants; servants gradually assume the mentality of masters; liberty leads to license; master returns unannounced and puts an end to their riotous existence. Lively writer, Ben Jonson.88
In his play Thornton transposed the action to a mansion in New York’s Washington Square in the 1870s, and drew on the King James Version of 1 Corinthians 15:51–53 for his title: “for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” As the New York Times critic described the play, there was a “motley, ragtag, bobtail assemblage” of characters, “each with his or her petty faults and vices . . . a woman of the streets . . . a sea captain who has ‘got religion,’ a wealthy Swedish matron who goes through life pretending to be a pauper, and a lunatic pyromaniac.” There is also Flora, the young servant girl who has rented the house to provide a temporary home and some money for the “swaggering young sailor whom she loves,” and who kills herself when she discovers his love is false.89 And there is Peter Magnus, the owner of the mansion, who comes home to discover the sins of his servants, and to dispense justice and mercy.
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