Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Looking back on these plays in 1974, he told an interviewer, “My earlier one-act plays, before Our Town, were free of scenery too and things went back and forth in time. . . . In my plays I attempted to raise ordinary daily conversation between ordinary people to the level of the universal human experience.”29

  ONCE The Woman of Andros and his one-act plays were launched, Wilder forged ahead with his fourth novel. In 1930 he had made a list of writing projects that were already under way on paper or in his imagination, some of them dating from 1929 or even earlier. Near the top of the list were two ideas for picaresque novels, for he had been reading Casanova, teaching Don Quixote, and ruminating on the picaresque form. Item three on the list in his journal on June 27, 1930, was “Picaresque: Baptist ‘Don Quixote.’ Selling education textbooks through Texas, Oklahoma, etc.”30

  That would be his next creative project. Edmund Wilson and others speculated that Wilder’s decision to set some of his new one-act plays and his fourth novel in the United States came in response to Michael Gold’s attack. Isabel Wilder perpetuated that idea many years later when she wrote that Heaven’s My Destination was her brother’s “riposte to the accusation from some quarters that he was refusing to deal with native American subjects,” and that “Crossing the United States on several lecture tours had given him the material that he needed in order to write it.”31 But such motivation alone did not govern Wilder’s creative choices. First, he had always chosen his subjects out of his deep-rooted artistic interests—characters who fascinated him; questions and themes he wanted to probe; literary challenges, including forms he wanted to tackle; stories he could not resist telling. He did not write for the marketplace or for money or for a particular audience—especially not for critics. Furthermore, like many American writers in the postwar twenties, Wilder had been thinking for some time about what he called the “flowering of America,” especially American literature and culture.

  He was soon absorbed in the picaresque form, and in his picaresque hero—his Baptist Don Quixote. This novel would be wildly different from its three predecessors in form, setting, and characterization, but it would be all of a piece with the major questions and themes that always engaged him; How do we live? How do we love? How do we cope? How do we bear the unbearable? Where do we turn for solace and survival? In The Cabala he gave us a decaying society and a declining religion—and in our last glimpse of the protagonist, we see him bound “eagerly toward the new world and the last and greatest of all cities.”32 The Bridge of San Luis Rey takes readers back two centuries before The Cabala, but despite the stark differences in place and time between the two novels, The Bridge treats many of the same themes and questions—and the characters who question orthodox religion in The Bridge are not treated kindly by the church or the society they inhabit. The Woman of Andros moves still farther back in time, long before the birth of the religion that has become stagnant and repressive in Wilder’s first two novels. In Andros he searches the pagan soul for answers to his enduring questions. In the novel he decided to call Heaven’s My Destination readers are catapulted to the American heartland in the 1930s to accompany George Brush, a tragicomic everyman, on his dogged journey to practice what his religion preaches, no matter the consequences.

  From Lake Sunapee in the summer of 1932, Wilder wrote to Bill Nichols that he was “20,000 words advanced in [a] stunning new novel—Don Quixote—travelling salesman idealist; picaresque; Arkansas and Texas. Funny; vulgar; hotbreaking [sic]. From Baptist fundamentalist to sad tolerant wisdom in three years.”33 Hemmed in as he was with teaching and lecturing, Wilder had to work sporadically on Heaven’s My Destination—but the story grew like yeast-rising bread even when he wasn’t putting words on paper. Of necessity during the decade of the Great Depression, Wilder traveled the American landscape as a professional lecturer, hawking his ideas and his books—but in the process he was exploring the American vernacular and the American mind and spirit. Through his teaching and his travels, especially in the American heartland, he was seeing Depression hardships close-up, and witnessing countless variations of American despair, grit, and ingenuity. One by-product of the experience was the promise of gleaning rich material with every mile he traveled on the lecture tour, every person he met along the way, every conversation he shared or overheard in diners and bars and hotels and railroad cars.

  Riding the tide of his celebrity as a Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling novelist, Thornton Wilder the man began to outgrow the shy awkward boy who, during his earlier years, had stood on the outside of society, looking in. He still worried, he said, that he grew “more like Uncle Pio every day, all onlooker, all uncommitted participant,” yet more and more often he was less the observer and more the active participant who actually belonged in the social group.34 Now he was more often viewed as the handsome, dapper bachelor with impeccable manners, an engaging wit, and an infectious ebullience for all his erudition—and he had become one of the most famous American writers in the world.

  His name even seeped into Chicago gossip columns: “The columnists in town are linking my name with a certain xxxxxx xxxx [sic]; think nothing of it,” he wrote jauntily to Isabel in May 1933. He was also openly enjoying the company of new friends such as the flamboyant actress and speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan, then in her late forties. Wilder told Isabel, “I had a fine evening with Texas Guinan; we rejoice in one another.”35 Guinan’s colorful career included rodeos, more than two hundred silent movies, two talkies, several Broadway musicals, and a series of gigs as a popular speakeasy hostess, beginning at bootlegger and racketeer Larry Fay’s El Fay Club in New York. In and out of trouble with the law, the glamorous Guinan starred in her own revue in the early 1930s. When she was forbidden to stage it in France because it was too risqué, she named the show Too Hot for Paris and took it on the road in the United States and Canada, where it enjoyed a roaring if scandalous success.

  “My life has variety,” Wilder wrote in a letter that must have at least momentarily alarmed its recipient, staid Dwight Dana back in New Haven. “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.”36

  As Wilder’s professional life expanded during the thirties, his personal world widened to encompass a variety of new friendships. Of course he still valued his longtime friends—Bill Nichols; Les Glenn; and Gene Tunney, who asked him in 1930 to consider another joint trip through Europe, although they couldn’t make their schedules jibe this time. He enjoyed the company of a younger crowd of Chicagoans, among them some of his own writing students—Gladys Campbell, a poet and teacher; the budding playwright Robert Ardrey; the fiction writer Charles Newton.37 “Lately I have been going up to New York a little and seeing people,” he wrote to Sibyl Colefax in November 1932. “My best friends there (Chicago holds my real ones) are Jed Harris and Ruth Gordon. Lately Edward Sheldon. . . . Alex. Woollcott is a real pleasure too.”38

  Sheldon, the well-known playwright, was bedridden and crippled by a rare form of arthritis, and particularly savored lively company and letters. Alexander Woollcott, ten years older than Wilder, was the nationally known author and critic famous (and often feared) for his biting wit and his controversial commentary. (Woollcott’s friend Harpo Marx claimed that the portly Woollcott resembled something that got loose from the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.) Woollcott would become one of Wilder’s closest friends. In New York, Wilder sometimes played poker with playwright Noël Coward. He became a frequent guest at Woollcott’s island retreat in Vermont, and Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne’s country home on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, where Wilder, the Lunts, Katharine “Kit” Cornell, Woollcott, and other weekend guests “lived practically Nudist, eating wonderful things, playing anagrams and falling on the floor in coils” as Woollcott held forth on a variety of topics.39 The lake evoked poignant memories o
f Wilder’s boyhood on the shores of Lake Mendota, Wisconsin, and he took solitary walks just past daybreak, loving the “early mist and horizontal sunlight and dew on the cobwebs” and “the lake’s smell, and the particular seaweed moss on the stones at the water’s edge and the cray-fish holes beside the piers: that was my boyhood, too.” He had known lakes in England, China, and Austria, he said, and others in the United States, but none of them shared the nostalgic light and the air and the “particular bundle of smells” of the Wisconsin lakes.40

  There were other fascinating new friends and acquaintances: “Mary Pickford wants me to write a play with her,” Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon in the summer of 1933.41 He told his family that Pickford asked him to collaborate with her on a stage play for Lillian Gish and herself. “She outlined the plot. . . . The same night I pushed Edna Millay in a ricksha for a mile at the World’s Fair. When do I get my school work done? You ask?”42

  He had a gift for friendship, and his coterie in Chicago included the city’s foremost hostesses, such as the eccentric Edith Rockefeller McCormick. Wilder enjoyed a much deeper friendship with Chicago hostess and arts patron Mrs. Charles Goodspeed. Widely known as Bobsy Goodspeed, she was a personage in her own right—glamorous, intelligent, and passionately interested in the arts. She invested much of her husband’s wealth and her own energy as a patron of Chicago arts and culture, and served as president of the Arts Club of Chicago. She was especially interested in music, arranging for Vladimir Horowitz to give a private concert, entertaining Arthur Rubinstein in a “quiet home dinner,” giving a tea for George Gershwin. The Goodspeeds’ apartment was the center of many congenial gatherings, and it was there that Wilder’s friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas would begin.

  Robert and Maude Hutchins also paved Wilder’s way to some of his Chicago friendships. The handsome couple had made a splashy entrance on the Chicago scene, although Maude Hutchins quickly demonstrated that she would not be the typical college president’s wife. Tall, stylish—and charming when she wanted to be—she was also an artist and wanted to spend much of her time working on her often-controversial sculptures in the skylit studio on the top floor of the president’s house. To the detriment of her husband’s career, she did not have the patience or grace for large social events, and many university people joined other Chicagoans in considering her aloof and snobbish. But she liked intimate gatherings, and came to think of Wilder as one of the family. He proved to be one of the most loyal friends and supporters of the Hutchinses as their tenure in Chicago grew more difficult and controversial.

  Wilder mingled with faculty intellectuals and countless students at the University of Chicago—traditional and nontraditional students of all ages and all walks of life. At first there was some faculty resentment of his appointment, not so much because of Wilder as because of Hutchins’s determination to transform the university, and his propensity for bringing in his friends to help him do so. In time, however, Wilder won over the skeptics, and Chicago rapidly became his hometown.43 When he was young, poor, anonymous, and aspiring, Wilder had fallen in love with Rome, New York City, and Newport, Rhode Island—but when he was famous and sought after, and living in the heart of the city, he fell in love with Chicago. He carried on a love-hate relationship with Paris and Los Angeles, charmed by some facets of those cities, repelled by others. He felt at home in certain German cities, especially Munich and Berlin, and the Swiss-German city of Zurich. There were towns and villages, he loved—New Haven and Hamden, Peterborough, Juan-les-Pins, Martha’s Vineyard, Monhegan Island. But all in all, there was probably no city he loved more than he loved Chicago when he lived there during the thirties.

  In part he was glad to be reunited with the Midwestern landscapes of his childhood, but he especially loved the unique look of Chicago—the lake, the architecture, the sky. He wrote to a friend, “Every morning I wake up and see something very beautiful indeed. There lies the Midway looking like the Great Prospect at Versailles and there is the procession of towers of the University of Chicago, silver-gray and misty and ready for business.”44 But people, including his students, were at the heart of it all. Wilder enjoyed the company of Chicago Tribune literary editor Fanny Butcher and, for a time, met quietly and regularly in a writers’ group with Butcher and five other Chicago writers—Dorothy Aldis, Kate Brewster, Arthur Meeker, Jr., David Hamilton, and Marion Strobel. Butcher recalled that they gathered twice a month in the home of one of the group,

  had a bang-up dinner, and then got down to the business of listening to and criticizing what we had written in the interim. We called it our writing class. Thornton’s role, he insisted, was as another writer, not as teacher, but his comments were the ones we all craved and heeded. At our last meeting he read us the part of Heaven’s My Destination on which he was working. Everybody had the same reaction: “Thornton, it’s very funny.”45

  Wilder entertained a stream of guests during the time of Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress Exposition, otherwise known as the World’s Fair of 1933—a pivotal event in his ongoing exploration of the United States of America. He rambled through the exposition as often as possible, especially during the weekends when he was “worn out with talking in public and reading endless compositions and worn out with eating in the Burton Court Dining Hall and making faintly mechanical conversation.” After slipping away to the sprawling world’s fair he returned to campus “joyous and renewed.”46

  “The Fair is not serious; but it’s fun,” Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon. “Artistically it’s one big lapse of taste, but on such a big scale that it becomes somehow important. I love it; I trudge all over those bright awkward acres, staring at my fellow-citizens. I see the back side of it: the immense personnel a little frantically earning a living, because scores of my students are selling hotdogs and pushing jin-rickshas and holding information booths.”47 He cheerfully entertained a parade of visitors who wanted to go to the fair during the summer of 1933. “I enjoy the Fair, great silly American thing that it is,” he wrote to a friend. “Scarcely a day goes by without a letter or phone call to the effect that some old friend of mine (or my father’s, brother’s, sisters’) from China, California, Oberlin, Princeton, Lawrenceville, Yale, etc . . . is in town. I can’t take ’em all to the Fair, but I take some. And I enjoy it all.”48

  Texas Guinan telephoned Wilder for a favor that August. She wanted to take over the Dance Ship on the midway of the fair for performances of Too Hot for Paris. The Dance Ship, boasting two dance floors and two orchestras, was anchored in one of the two man-made lagoons gracing the exposition complex, would be the perfect venue for her revue, starring her well-endowed showgirls, but she needed a letter of reference. The fair’s director of concessions was former University of Chicago professor Col. George Moulton, who wanted to know, Guinan told Wilder, “if I’m all right, if I keep an eye on my girls—and you know, Thornton, if they were my own daughters I couldn’t take better care of them. And all he knows is the worst about me, the headlines and all that. . . . Now if you could write him a letter.” Wilder was happy to oblige, “making an honest woman of Texas Guinan and she got the job.”49 When Alexander Woollcott came to Chicago to see Wilder and the fair, Woollcott delighted in riding “in a Ricksha, his genial stomach pointing to heaven,” and weaving about the grounds. He didn’t care for the exposition at first, but wound up “loving it squarely to the square inch.”50 Wilder, too, loved it to the square inch. He was soaking up the American spirit embodied in the exposition, and it was coloring the atmosphere of his new novel. “The Fair is a great big silly kitsch kitschig thing,” he wrote to Sibyl. “Bad educationally, bad aesthetically, and yet somehow very wonderful, lovable and impressive. . . . I go all the time, bewitched and warmed and almost in a state of gaseous exaltation. You know me—Walt Whitman’s grandson, so sure of the immanent greatness and coming-of-age of the American people.”51

  He was delighted when officials of the exposition asked him to compose the text for a “certificate
or diploma” that visitors might buy to prove that they had been to the fair. Although they asked for something straightforward, Wilder understood what a special event this was in the lives of many people in that Depression era who had saved their hard-earned money and traveled from all over the country to see the fair. He wrote:

  Be it known to my grandchildren, and to their grandchildren that I . . . . . . ( John or Jane Doe) . . . . . . was present at the Century of Progress, an exposition raised in a time of doubt and hesitation by the gallantry of the American spirit; lighted through the genius of man by the rays of Arcturus; and that there I obtained instruction, enjoyment and the sense of wonder.52

  WILDER HAD high hopes for Heaven’s My Destination, a story served up from the delectable smorgasbord of his American experience from 1930 onward—part lecture tour, part world’s fair, part Chicago, part “Variety, variety”—a kind of slapstick defiance of the Great Depression and the classics and, maybe, the critics. For the first time Wilder was out on the American hustings, living on his own. At last, no interference from Papa. He himself had stepped into Papa’s role, building that house for the family, furnishing it, providing the money to run it. Thornton got his womenfolk comfortably and securely settled, and got out of Hamden and New Haven. He made Chicago his city.

  He created his own world there, free from the strictures, no matter how well meaning, imposed by his family or anyone else. Despite that early temperance pledge, he could drink as much as he wanted to during Prohibition; spend his own money and make some more; and consort with people who consorted with Al Capone, or British royalty, or American theater wags, or Hollywood movers and shakers, or a fun-loving Chicago crowd.