Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  He managed to work wherever they were: “I slowly write Andros and read a lot about the Grk tragedians for my college course,” he said in a letter to Isabel from Oxford.31 “I have been working well mornings in all these cities, making so many changes and insertions that I have to start copying the novel into a new cahier,” he wrote from Munich.32 But the two travelers missed the home folks, Wilder reported: “We pine after you often . . . and say what’s Pa doing? And what’s Isabel doing? And what’s Amos doing? And is Janet happy? We’re not perfect travelers because we adore the folks at home.”33

  By late November he and his mother had returned to New Haven. “This restless soul got back in due time and entered the Harbor with all sorts of swelling Whitmanesque emotions,” Wilder wrote to a new friend in London, Sibyl Colefax, well known as a hostess and later as an interior decorator. “I get drunk on New York and go striding about as though the city were named after me and the Hudson River rolled slowly to please me. But after a few hard knocks and a few hotel bills I retired to my favorite university town and subdued myself to work.” At times he was uncertain that his exotic new novel would speak to readers. He was assessing the contemporary American literary scene, concluding that “the American flowering, the American maturity is drawing nearer and nearer, though the evidence is all in works imperfect in themselves, like Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, Cozzens’s The Son of Perdition and La Farge’s Laughing Boy. The surest evidence lies in the audiences; the reading public is developing beyond all anticipation.”34 Wilder believed, however, that the theater was “in an awful turmoil,” with dozens of “bad plays” running each week and “then being folded in the warehouse.” Most theaters had “lost the courage to be adventurous,” Wilder contended. He hoped that he might write something to counteract that.35

  ON DECEMBER 18, 1929, Wilder signed a contract with the Boni firm for the publication of The Woman of Andros, the manuscript to be delivered on March 1, 1930, although he actually transmitted the final pages during the first week of January. Under Dwight Dana’s supervision, Wilder’s contract allowed him to keep the motion picture, serial, and dramatic rights, as well as the rights to publish a collection of his novels. Dana acted as his agent and attorney-in-fact, and Isabel began to act as his representative for translation rights.

  Wilder was determined to avoid what he viewed as the undignified publicity events that had surrounded The Bridge. He still regretted the public hoopla about his trip with Gene Tunney, as well as the flashy exposure of the Hearst newspaper serialization of The Bridge of San Luis Rey—flamboyant headlines accompanied by cartoon illustrations in newspapers around the country. These two events undoubtedly helped sell his books, but Wilder insisted that “because of the very subject matter” of The Woman of Andros, there should be “no faint color of Hearst-Cosmopolitan” elements in the publicity for the new book. “I say as I did for the other book that as little publicity as possible is welcome to me,” he wrote to Albert Boni.36

  Nor was Wilder happy about the 1929 movie version of The Bridge—part silent, part sound, starring Lili Damita and Don Alvarado, and promoted by MGM as a spectacular romance. Wilder had no hand in the film, which focused on the Perichole and her “tawdry indiscretions.” The novel came through “the movie mill with the usual bruises and abrasions,” according to the movie critic Frederick James Smith, who was not surprised that Hollywood “switched” Wilder’s novel into a “hot story of a rampageous dancer,” and twisted “the study of why God cast five people in eternity into a peppy portrait of a heartless gamin[e].” Nevertheless Smith gave the movie three stars out of four.37

  As Wilder worked on his new novel he was immersing himself in Greek drama and philosophy, spending time in ancient Greece in his imagination, his reading, and his preparations for the lectures he would give at the University of Chicago. He was rereading Aeschylus and Euripides, and he wanted to learn Greek. He was exploring the concept that Greek religion was divided into two parts: ethics, having to do with the violation of rights; and the mystic, the identification with the gods.38 In his journal he drew comparisons between Greek religion and religion as articulated in the Old and New Testaments, writing that the Old Testament conveyed the logic of passions, and the New Testament the logic of grace. One journal entry examines the parallels between concepts in Aeschylus’s Orestian trilogy and precepts expressed in the Old Testament, reflecting one of the basic questions in the novel: What did the noblest type of person in pre-Christian paganism have to cling to in life’s extremest difficulty?39

  The Woman of Andros was drawn in part from an incident said to have taken place before the opening scene of the Andria, a comedy by the Roman playwright Terence (ca. 190–158 BC).40 Terence had based his drama on two plays by the Greek dramatist Menander (342–291 BC)—Andria and Woman of Perinthos, or Perinthia. Out of the raw materials Terence and Menander provided, Wilder fashioned a tragedy rather than a comedy. Terence’s play focused on the relationship between a father and a son, but in Wilder’s novel the story is more complex. His heroine, Chrysis, is a beautiful courtesan, cultured and intelligent, an outsider, a stranger on the island, surrounded by the “stray human beings” she shelters and protects. She and her younger sister, Glycerium, are both in love with Pamphilus, the handsomest young man on the island, whose bride has already been chosen by their families. Pamphilus and Glycerium carry on an idlyllic secret love affair that leaves her pregnant. The rest of the cast of characters includes two worried fathers, a contemplative priest of Apollo, some suspicious islanders, a battle-worn sea captain, and an avaricious pimp, all caught in a compelling concoction of myth, fable, and fantasy.41

  The young man Pamphilus expresses some of the fundamental questions in the novel, questions that are the subtext if not the core of much of Wilder’s work: “How does one live? What does one do first?” As Wilder himself further explained it in a letter, “What is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it? In other words: When a human being is made to bear more than a human being can bear, what then?”42

  His Greek studies also led to observations in his journal about the fundamental nature of literature. In one entry he wrote that “mere literature” is simply a “distraction from life,” while “Good literature is observation of life: pictures of its delightfully varied appearance. Great literature is the explanation of existence and suggestion of rules of how to live it. Great literature is the Didactics of life made perceptible to the heart.”43 This last principle expressed his intention for The Woman of Andros.

  His journal provides details about the logistics of his work: the time and place, even the conveyance—ship, or train, or a walk in the woods—where he wrote. Wilder had long been fascinated with aphorisms, and they abound in the novel, and in lists he kept in his journal and among his notes. He gave some of these lines to Chrysis, the hetaira—the Woman of Andros—writing to a friend that she was “developing into a sort of Dr. Johnson.”44 Pages of his journal record his ongoing critique of his novel in progress, details large and small: “Wish I could make up my mind as to whether the chastity sentence in the characterizing of the Priest is valuable or nonsense; also whether the opening nocturne is false or not,” he wrote in Munich on October 5, 1929. The lyrical “opening nocturne” in The Woman of Andros, first drafted in his journal, was true enough to stay—and later to be frequently quoted as one of the most beautiful passages in American fiction: “The earth sighed as it turned in its course: the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness.”45

  He indicated that there were autobiographical traits within three characters in the novel—Chremes, one of the leaders and fathers of Brynos; the young priest of Aesculapius and Apollo; and the Woman of Andros herself. He did not expound on the traits, but to speculate, Chremes resembles Wilder (as well as the narrator in The Cabala and in a later novel, Theophilus North, and the stage managers in Wilder’s plays) in providing expos
ition and interpretation. Chremes also expresses forthright opinions in hopes of guiding or even engineering the actions of others.

  The mysterious priest of Aesculapius and Apollo is an often-detached observer of events, and the occasional confidant of inhabitants of the island, as well as a healer and a celibate (by choice—or by repression or constraint?). There are echoes here of Wilder’s own disillusionment about emotional and sexual intimacy. Not only was Wilder the product of an upbringing that left its intimidating mark on his emotional and sexual life as well as the lives of his brother and two of his sisters, but the heartbreaks that wounded him in the 1920s had made him a cynic, wary of intimacy, full of doubts about himself and distrust of others. Against that background Wilder’s words about the priest take on more resonance. The priest foreclosed options of true physical and emotional intimacy and channeled his life force into his work. Such a choice could empower the priest—or the artist—at the expense of the man, sheltering and at the same time isolating him from the “unstable, tentative” sons or daughters of men.46

  Wilder explored the harsh consequences of unrequited love and forbidden love in his early fiction—Alix’s unrequited love and Marcantonio’s incestuous love in The Cabala; the doomed love of Pio for the Perichole and Manuel for the Perichole in The Bridge of San Luis Rey; and the tragic, illicit love of Chrysis and her sister Glycerium for Pamphilus in The Woman of Andros. The heart and spirit pay a great price for loving where love is not returned, or for loving where love is forbidden. Best to deny, restrain, reroute the love, he seems to say; best to pour the love instead into art or religion or selfless service to humanity.

  Like Wilder, Chrysis, the Woman of Andros, expresses her view of human experience “in fables, in quotations from literature, in proverbs and in mottoes.” Like Wilder during the years he was working on The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Chrysis “regarded herself as having ‘died’ ” and she reflects that “the only thing that troubled her in her grave was the recurrence, even in her professional associations, of a wild tenderness for this or that passerby, brief and humiliating approaches to love.” She becomes acutely aware that she is alone, and that this loneliness is an essential part of the human condition. “Why have I never seen that before? I am alone,” she wonders, adding. “The loneliest associations are those that pretend to intimacy.”47 Wilder, like Chrysis, believed in the supreme importance of the life of the mind. She says,“I no longer believe that what happens to us is important. . . . It is the life in the mind that is important.”48 The omniscient narrator reflects that “the most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.”49 Perhaps from his own private experience, Wilder scripts a lesson that Chrysis passes along to Pamphilus in her “strange command” to “praise all life, even the dark.” As a result, Pamphilus “too praised the whole texture of life, for he saw how strangely life’s richest gift flowered from frustration and cruelty and separation.”50

  In at least two instances the novel foreshadows Our Town, the play Wilder would complete in 1937. Chrysis entertains and instructs her banquet guests with the story about the Greek hero who begged Zeus to permit him to return to earth after death for just one day. Like Emily in Our Town, the hero discovers that “the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure.” He then kisses “the soil of the world that is too dear to be realized.”51 Second, near the end of the story, Pamphilus, the young protagonist, climbs to “the highest point on the island to gaze upon the moon and the sea.” His reflections foreshadow Wilder’s Our Town: “Pamphilus thought of the thousands of homes over all Greece where sleeping or waking souls were forever turning over the dim assignment of life. ‘Lift every roof,’ as Chrysis used to say, ‘and you will find seven puzzled hearts.’ ”52

  ABOARD THE SS Lapland October 24, 1929, traveling home to the United States, Wilder made a fair copy of his book. Afterward he expressed his lingering doubts in his journal:

  From time to time the whole book seems mistaken. Is it drenched I ask myself with the wrong kind of pity? Have I let myself go again to a luxury of grief? I remember this haunted me through the writing of The Bridge and I am still not sure whether that is the way the world is. Already I have begun to reduce some of the expressions. This perpetual harping on the supposition that people suffer within. Am I sufficiently realist?53

  For Wilder the act of writing was an organic fusion of artistic endeavor and personal quest, as revealed in the last lines of his introspection, when he reflected that without effective irony, the book “must run the greater danger in committing itself to anguish & to the profoundest inner-life—if it fails artistically it will be all the more instructive to me, not only as a writer, but as a person.”54

  WILDER HAD been working on The Woman of Andros for nearly two years, and as he had done with the first two novels, he delivered the final manuscript to his publisher in stages. By the time he signed the official contract most of the manuscript was in his publisher’s hands. He finished the book in early January 1930 at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, while he was lecturing in California. Soon afterward he made a side trip to the Thacher School in Ojai to keep his promise to Sherman Thacher to speak to the students at his old school.

  Wilder sought his mother’s help when it was time to read galleys for the book because he had to stay on the lecture circuit until March 10. “I begin to think I know why I am doing it,” he wrote to Sibyl Colefax in February 1930. He was lecturing, he said,

  partly of course to assemble money to pay for the new house and its Steinway; partly to buy the thirty-five volumes of Saint-Simon in the edition grands écrivains de France. All that is true but only vaguely felt by me. I know now that the tours are Preparation. I don’t know quite what they prepare for: I prepare and Circumstance fulfills. . . . At all events I am burning out a host of awkward adolescent fears and maladjustments. I am actually serener. And the more people I meet the more I like people. I know America down to every absurd Keep Smiling Club, every gas station, every hot-dog stand.

  He told Sybil he would begin teaching April 1 at the University of Chicago—“ ‘Tradition and Innovation—Aeschylus to Cervantes,’ 40 lectures (including Dante) with the students writing a 6-minute paper every morning to prove that they read the long assignment for homework. It’s absurd, but is very American and is exactly what I want.”55

  LEE KEEDICK had no trouble persuading Wilder to take on another ambitious challenge when he proposed that Wilder debate the popular British novelist Hugh Walpole, also a Keedick client, on the question of whether fiction or nonfiction “throws more light on experience.”56

  “Yes, I’d like to debate Mr. Walpole,” Wilder replied: “Resolved: that reading great fiction and drama throws a better light on experience than reading great history and biography. Would be willing to attack either side.”57

  A telegram from Keedick confirmed the plans: “Walpole accepts debate takes fiction side.” Keedick tried, without success, to persuade Gene Tunney to preside at the debates, originally scheduled for February 16, 1930, in New York; February 23 in Chicago; March 2 in Boston; and March 4 in Detroit.58 Wilder soon began to have second thoughts, however. After nine months of heavy-duty travel and lecturing, he was worn out and unwell. The schedule was “cruel,” he complained to Keedick, and asked that the February 16 date be pushed forward at least a day so he could be in “smart condition” for the “ordeal” of the debate.59 It was difficult to find time to prepare for the debates as well as hone his lectures.

  Concerned about Wilder’s health and stamina, Keedick rearranged his tour schedule to minimize travel, and gave up the idea of debates in Chicago and Detroit. The “easier” itinerary he arranged for Wilder was still daunting—from California to Calgary to Chicago to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to lecture, and then to New York, where Wilder and Walpole would debate on February 16, with th
e second debate set for Washington the next day. The debates turned out to be hugely successful. A “record audience” attended the first, at the Selwyn Theatre in New York.60 In Symphony Hall in Washington there was a crowd of four thousand. “It looked like a football game,” Wilder said afterward. “It was not a very good debate,” but the crowd “scarcely coughed, while our humble little abstract ideas advanced and retreated in a very sedate combat.”61

  21

  “VARIETY, VARIETY”

  My life has variety. The other night I had supper (4 am) as the guest of Jack McGurn (Capone’s chief representative and lieutenant) and Sam [Hunt] the golf bag killer. Tonight I dine at Mrs. Rockefeller McCormick’s off the gold plate that Napoleon gave Josephine. Variety, variety.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO J. DWIGHT DANA,

  January 18, 1932