Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  In June, Thornton reported to friends that his English publisher was “setting up” to publish both his translation of Paulina 1880 and The Bridge.33 He had promised to have both manuscripts ready so Isabel, who was traveling to England on June 15, could deliver them in person to his publishers in London, but this was another deadline he did not meet.34 By July 25 Thornton was writing to Baer at the Boni firm that the translation of Paulina would be ready within “a few weeks,” and offering to sell it for three hundred dollars.35 Then the project apparently lapsed unfinished, for reasons that are not clear. Any vestiges of Thornton’s manuscript have yet to be found.

  NO MATTER how overwhelmed with work he was, Thornton was first of all a brother, a son, and a friend. Therefore it was not only the financial and professional imperative but also his sense of responsibility to his parents and sisters, as well as to his Lawrenceville friends, that led him to return to the Lawrenceville School for the 1927 fall term. Clyde Foresman, the Davis housemaster, was critically ill, and Dr. Abbott offered Thornton that position, which he declined, agreeing instead to return as the assistant housemaster. But after Clyde Foresman’s death on July 14, 1927, Dr. Abbott telegraphed Thornton, pressing him to accept the leadership of Davis House. Amos Parker Wilder begged his son “not to refuse,” adding that “it would do a great deal to ease some of the problems in the family also.”36 Thornton gave in. (Abbott’s telegram passed through their father’s hands, Thornton told Isabel, and Dr. Wilder in turn sent his son “a series of pathetic telegrams begging me not to turn down four or five thousand bucks and residence. So I’ve accepted. Responsibilities and discipline and red tape galore—but I wouldn’t write much anyway.”)37

  He explained his decision to return to Lawrenceville in other terms to Nichols: There was the “rueful thought that altho The Bridge is a much better book than The Cabala, it is a much less gaudy one” and an “undeniably sad” one, and he had “better not count on too many dividends.”38 He could not risk his family’s well-being on the faint hope that he could earn any money as a writer. In fact he was finding it difficult to collect the money his first book had already earned. He wrote to Baer at Boni in July about the delays in the publishing house: “I have always been very grateful and loyal to you for having discovered me. . . . But my loyalty is being thrown away, if you cannot be normally considerate of me these early difficult years. You have not yet caught up to the January statement; you promised me some of the Spring royalties; and surely some of the Advance on a book of which four-fifths are set up.” He asked Baer to send him his “five-hundred” so they could keep their association “cordial.”39

  Thornton felt it was his responsibility to help provide for his parents and two younger sisters. He wrote to his friend Leslie “Les” Glenn that “with a dear vague impractical family group like mine I don’t dare stake on the margin of risk. If something happened to Father. . . . . [sic] etc.” But his return to Lawrenceville would be just for a year, he insisted, and “In one more year I should be able to find a real niche somewhere.”40 He also wrote to explain his decision to Foresman’s widow, Grace, encouraging her to continue to feel a part of Davis House.41

  Now he would have a house with seven rooms and a study and a housekeeper, as well as a large garden and a garage. He wished that his mother could live with him. She wouldn’t have to run the house, he told her—just be there, and be herself, although he doubted she would agree. She was already begging off, mainly because there was Janet to consider.42

  Because he was going to be a housemaster, stepping into a demanding full-time job, Thornton absolutely had to finish writing The Bridge of San Luis Rey, no matter how little faith he had in its prospects for success. He went for “a spell” to the MacDowell Colony, where he found Mrs. MacDowell seriously ill. Edwin Arlington Robinson was there as usual; the “dean” of the colony, Thornton called him.43 New acquaintances that summer included DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, who were on the way to the New York opening of their play, based on DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy (his collaboration with George Gershwin on Porgy and Bess would begin in 1933); and the writer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, who had been sent to Paris to cover World War I for the New Republic. She had been gravely wounded on the battlefield, an experience she reported in Shadow-Shapes: The Journal of a Wounded Woman, October 1918–May 1919, published in 1920.44 There was “much talk” at the MacDowell Colony that summer about Glenway Wescott’s new novel, The Grandmothers (1927). “I’m jealous,” Thornton wrote to Marie Townson. “My only satisfaction is that the 3 musketeers aged 30 = Ernest Hemingway, Glenway Wescott and I may puncture the inflated rep’s of the previous fashions: the Sherwood Andersons, Cabells, Cathers, what not. You’ll scold me for that, but by dint of being modest most of the time I allow myself a little party of conceit every now and then.”45

  By the end of July, Thornton had finished his novel at last, and he moved on to spend a couple of days in August with old friends at the Sunapee summer tutoring camp at Blodgett’s Landing in New Hampshire before returning to New Haven. As had happened before, however, he was asked to stay on and tutor at the Lake Sunapee summer school. “The usual crazy thing happened: I love it,” he wrote to Isabel. “I take twelve mile walks almost every day; I swim over a mile; I’m brown-black and roaring with health.”46 Amy Wertheimer was in residence across the lake for the summer, and Thornton saw her once a week. “She’s resigned and wistful,” he told Isabel. “She always has house guests so that there isn’t much occasion etc.”47 But there was occasion to visit Rosemary Ames, and he took advantage of it. She was the “star pupil” at the nearby Manarden Theatre Camp in Peterborough, and he went to see her. They were still affectionate pen pals: “Such letters—quite turn my head,” he told his sister.48

  NOW THAT he had delivered The Bridge of San Luis Rey, what would he “write next, by slow stages at the Davis? Plays, I suppose,” he said. “Another letter from [producer] Charles Wagner wanting to see some and all that. But I have no burning ideas.”49 August brought word from Thornton’s publishers that his new novel had caused a crisis in his publishing house. “We are in a quandary,” Lewis Baer wrote to Thornton on behalf of Albert and Charles Boni August 18. “The page proofs of The Bridge just arrived, and the book only comes to 195 pages. We’ve announced it as a $2.50 book , and really should follow up The Cabala with a book of the same price, but we’ve explained to you the booksellers’ stupid feelings on this subject. They’ll take a book, say, Humph, only 195 pages, and immediately raise H.”50 There were two alternatives, Baer wrote: “To cut the price, which may be bad; or to put in 6 or 8 illustrations, which gives it in the booksellers’ eyes anyway an added distinction and cuts down on his objections. What do you think? Do you believe the book would lend itself to illustrations.”51

  Thornton wrote to Isabel what he truly thought: “Boni is revolted that [the novel] isn’t long enough to keep up the fraud of a 2.50 book. He wants six to eight illustrations, and the Canadian and Esquimaux [Eskimo] rights. I begin to see a lit. agent to keep Bonis quiet.”52

  The book would ultimately sport illustrations—ten plates, including the frontispiece, by the popular illustrator Amy Drevenstedt. Albert Boni wrote Thornton on August 30, 1927, to let him know that the exact publication date of the novel would be left open until they heard decisions from the Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in 1926, and the newly formed Literary Guild, started in 1927, as acceptance by either might postpone publication until December or January.53 Harry Scherman, the founder of the Book-of-the-Month Club, had been Albert and Charles Boni’s partner in the Little Leather Books enterprise (an endeavor that had yielded more than 40 million books in its time), and Henry Seidel Canby, Thornton’s creative-writing professor at Yale, was on the Book-of-the-Month Club board, which selected the books to send out to more than 46,000 members.54 These connections were not enough, however, for club acceptance of The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

  “The hurrying up of the last pages of the Bridge and the new arrange
ments of Lawrenceville were a lot to assimilate,” Thornton wrote to Marie Townson as he juggled the responsibilities of the novelist and the schoolmaster.55 In a later letter to Mrs. Townson, Thornton hinted at the ordeal of reading proofs for his books: “My mother has long been in despair over my spelling and even my grammar,” he wrote, “and insists on 3 literate persons reading all my proofs after me.”56 By that time the fall term was well under way at Lawrenceville School, and Wilder the novelist had set aside his work in favor of Wilder the schoolmaster.

  Many years later, after Wilder’s death, Clark Andrews, one of his former students, reminisced about Wilder the teacher—“incurable insomniac, inveterate walker, fanciful conversationalist, friend.” He described Wilder as a

  tall, thin man, about six feet, with an owlish face, a pencil mustache and brown tortoise-shell glasses which partly hid his darting, inquisitive blue eyes. . . . He was a nervous man—a very nervous man, constantly looking at his watch. His head jerked back and forth, his eyes jumped around as if he expected to see the unexpected happen at any moment.57

  When Wilder entered the French classroom on the first day of the fall term, Andrews remembered, he wrote on the blackboard “in a neat, precise hand, MY NAME IS THORNTON WILDER. I AM YOUR TEACHER. THIS IS A COURSE IN CONVERSATIONAL FRENCH. AFTER TODAY, NO ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE.”58

  According to Andrews, Wilder made Conversational French “the most popular class at Lawrenceville.” He was popular out of class as well, inviting students on weekend afternoons for tea and conversation (perhaps in the mode of the Elizabethan Club), sessions his students referred to as meetings of the Thornton Wilder Literary Society. Wilder usually concluded these gatherings with the dramatic recitation of a poem on the order of Robert Service’s “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” declaiming every word by heart. (He had been required to learn that particular poem as a boy, he said, as “a punishment.”)59

  THAT FALL, Thornton began to suffer intense pain that led him to fear—correctly, as it turned out—that he was showing symptoms of appendicitis. His father’s physician, Dr. William Francis Verdi, performed an appendectomy in New Haven in October. “The appendix was lifted out three weeks ago tomorrow,” Thornton wrote to Marie Townson from New Haven on November 9. His surgery and recuperation kept him away from his school duties for three and a half weeks.60

  He was back at Lawrenceville, still healing from his operation, when he began to realize that his harried life of the schoolmaster was about to change. On October 27, 1927, he had signed a contract with Longmans, Green & Company, Ltd., for the British publication of his second novel. The North American edition of The Bridge of San Luis Rey was published on November 3. To offset the brevity of the book, Albert and Charles Boni had chosen 235 pages of thick stock set with a generous-sized font and wide margins, accompanied in the first edition by the ten pen-and-ink drawings by Amy Drevenstedt. They added a map of Peru and Ecuador on brown endpapers. (A 1929 edition of the novel would be illustrated by wood engravings by the artist Clare Leighton; a special limited edition published in 1929 contained three-color lithographs by Rockwell Kent.) To the amazement of the author and the publishers, those advance proofs must have worked, for there were immediate enthusiastic reviews in the United States and in England, and The Bridge was successfully promoted for the Christmas trade. By the end of December the novel was in its seventh printing in the United States, and by January 6, 1928, Baer wrote to Thornton, the publishers would be “wildly busy getting ready the eighth edition of the Bridge.”61

  WHEN THE Lawrenceville School closed for the Christmas holidays, Thornton traveled to Florida and to Cuba to rest and continue his recuperation—but most of all, to recover from the excitement and stress of the year. From the Columbus Hotel in Miami, he wrote to Marie Townson that his novel was “selling like catnip . . . I’m almost getting RICH. But mind you I refuse to buy a car. A swimming pool, all right, a gold tooth, all right, but no CAR.”62 He didn’t like Cuba, he told his mother, but in Miami he spent quiet, restful days in the sun. “Already I’m turkey-red,” he wrote, “and I sleep nights for a change. And I have a friend in Town, oh what a friend! as the hymn says. And that’s Gene Tunney.” Thornton explained to his mother how they met:

  I wrote him a note asking for an hour’s talk and telling him I had messages from Ernest Hemingway. He phoned back at once that he was delighted, would I please come to dinner Friday night, that right there on his table was The Cabala which had been highly recommended to him and which he was going to read as soon as he finished Death Comes to the Archbishop. I warned Father last October that I would get to know the champion and he made a disgusted face. Explain to him that now-days there are prizefighters and prizefighters.63

  Thornton spent a fascinating evening with the movie-star-handsome world heavyweight champion, and wrote to Marie Townson about their meeting:

  I don’t know what to say. . . . Most of the times, he’s wonderful, as likable and naïf as the best Lawrenceville boy—and (don’t quote me) exactly mental-age of 17. Then in the distance you hear a faint sound of brass. Perhaps I imagined it. Heaven forgive me. Anyway I’m sure of this: his famous aspiration after culture is perfectly sincere, only he doesn’t get 3 consecutive minutes to do anything with it. I wish someone would engage me as his tutor. Anyway, I shall see more of him.64

  Thornton would indeed see more of Tunney—but before then, he would come to know firsthand what it was like not to have three consecutive minutes to do what he needed or wanted to do. The retreat to Florida proved to be the calm in the eye of a hurricane of totally unexpected literary success and acclaim, unrelenting public visibility, and incessant demands on his time and energy—as well as a barrage of mail. More and more people, Thornton wrote to Yale professor Chauncey Tinker, were wondering why he didn’t “leave the little chicken-feed duties of the housemaster and teacher and go to Bermuda, for example, and write books as a cow gives milk.” He didn’t know how to answer, except to say that he felt “(though with intervals of misgiving) that this life is valuable to me and, I dare presume, my very pleasure in my routine can make me useful to others. Anyway no one, except you and I, seems to believe any longer in the dignity of teaching.”65

  Thornton shared with Tinker some revealing details about himself and his work: “As for your questions, oh, isn’t there a lot of New England in me; all that ignoble passion to be didactic that I have to fight with. All that bewilderment as to where Moral Attitude begins and where it shades off into mere Puritan Bossiness. My father is still pure Maine—1880 and I carry all that load of notions to examine and discard or assimilate.”66 Had Thornton been to Peru? Tinker wondered. What were his sources for the novel?

  “No, I have never been to Peru,” Thornton replied. “Why I chose to graft my thoughts about Luke 13–4 upon a delightful one-act play by Merimée, Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement [sic], I do not know. The Marquesa is my beloved Mme de Sévigné in a distorting mirror. The bridge is invented, the name borrowed from one of Junipero Serra’s missions in California.”67

  Tinker told Thornton that certain pages of The Bridge of San Luis Rey had made him weep. “It is right and fitting that you cried for a page of mine,” Thornton replied, with gratitude. “How many a time I have cried with love or awe or pity while you have talked of the Doctor [Samuel Johnson], or Cowper, or Goldsmith. . . . Between the lines then you will find here all my thanks and joy at your letter.”68

  19

  “THE FINEST BRIDGE IN ALL PERU”

  On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  The Bridge of San Luis Rey

  New Jersey and Europe (1928)

  Thornton Wilder’s second novel made its bow to the world without the mechanical errors that had marred pages of The Cabala. His novel may have been short, but thousands of readers got their money’s worth in story and substance. Like The Cabala before it, The Bridge
of San Luis Rey pulls the reader into an intriguing narrative composed of interlacing stories and characters—and, in the process, confronts the reader with universal questions. In his second novel, however, Wilder was far more at home in his craft, more skilled in characterization, more assured in style and voice.

  His journal and his surviving manuscript drafts and letters reveal the evolution of the novel and the emerging habits of the writer. For part of his inspiration Wilder gave credit to Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement (The Coach of the Holy Sacrament), a comedy by the French dramatist Prosper Mérimée (1803–70), whose novella Carmen was the source of the popular opera. Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement was based on a supposed incident in the life of Micaela Villegas (1748–1819)—the Perichole—a great Peruvian actress and courtesan. For a time she was the mistress of the Viceroy of Lima, Andrés de Ribera, and she bore him three children.1 Wilder was fascinated with the legendary Perichole, but except for a few details, the complex character who emerges in the novel is Wilder’s fictional creation—and a tragic figure rather than Mérimée’s comic, even farcical one. Wilder transforms the Countess Montemayor, a minor figure in Mérimée’s play, into the Marquesa de Montemayor, one of the three most important women he creates in his novel.