Penelope Niven
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All in all during that first year of movie assignments, Wilder worked more than two weeks for RKO, six weeks for Samuel Goldwyn, and two weeks for William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions—and the work was lucrative: Wilder earned $11,500 for ten weeks of work in Hollywood in 1934, more than double his half-time teaching salary, and five times the fees he earned out on the lecture circuit.16 He needed the money as the Depression economy gnawed away at lecture fees, lowering them dramatically. Keedick found extra dates for him whenever possible, usually at reduced fees. “So many states have declared a bank moratorium that lecture committees everywhere have become frightened,” Keedick informed him, explaining why some lecture dates had fallen through. “This country is in a deplorable state due to our wretched banking laws which were passed years ago when, I imagine, bankers controlled the government even more completely than now.”17 As if to fit the emotional atmosphere of the time, Wilder notified Keedick that lectures would “be a shade more serious from now on: I offer the Titles: ‘Novel, Allegory and Myth’ or ‘The Novel versus The Drama.’”18
Wilder wrote to an old friend on October 13, 1934, “I work in Hollywood a few months every year. I am very interested in the movies as a form; I am working very hard at its peculiar technique and after a few years of apprenticeship I hope to be allowed a chance to write one that is all myself and all deeply felt. Besides it has fallen upon me to sustain several members of my family and the earnings out there are a great help.”19
In a demonstration of his serious interest in movies as an art form, Wilder later sent Lee Keedick a synopsis of a lecture he planned to give. “Motion Pictures and Literature,” he called it, and it concluded with the prediction that the motion picture could become an independent art form and take its place as a form of literature.20
Wilder’s love affair with Hollywood lasted for several years. He wrote to Dwight Dana from Hollywood in August 1938: “You will be interested to know that Columbia offered me $5000 a week to finish off the script of ‘Golden Boy’ and De Mille today wanted me to do some work on ‘Union Pacific.’ ”21 He found a certain security in knowing that earning money in Hollywood was an option. He could pay the medical bills for his father’s “protracted invalidism.”22 He could provide certain luxuries for his family—sending his mother and Janet to Scotland, for instance—and certain necessities such as a new suit for himself, since his clothes were “falling to pieces.” However, he assured Dwight Dana, overseer of his budget, except for an occasional dinner in a “dazzling” Hollywood restaurant, not a dollar he spent was wasteful.23
PART OF Wilder’s discipline as a writer grew out of his pervasive sense of the artist’s responsibility to his art, to his subjects, to his world, to himself. Bound up with that was his often-frustrating inability to create works of fiction or drama that lived up to his visions for them. He wrote to Aleck Woollcott in 1938, “Success is accorded to a work of art when the central intention is felt in every part of it, and intention and execution are good.” As he endeavored to articulate his artistic intentions to readers—friends and strangers alike—who challenged him with questions, he was continually refining his ideas about the purpose of literature and art generally and his own creative endeavors specifically.24 In particular Wilder found himself devoting a significant amount of time and energy in the thirties and afterward to clarifying for himself and his readers his intentions for Heaven’s My Destination, as well as explaining the literary techniques he employed in the book.
His new novel traveled an unorthodox road to its publication in the United Kingdom on December 3, 1934, and in the United States on January 2, 1935. Wilder’s original publishing agreement with Albert and Charles Boni had called for the publication of his next three books after The Cabala. The Bonis published The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Woman of Andros, but, lacking faith in the market for Wilder’s early plays, they had declined to publish, as the third book, The Angel That Troubled the Waters. That left Heaven’s My Destination committed to the Boni firm. Wilder’s secret 1928 agreement with Harper was still in place, however, and he stayed in touch with Harper’s Cass Canfield, reporting to Dwight Dana in 1934 that Canfield “moans about, hoping that something will happen that will bring the text to him. If Boni’s can’t pay a just advance etc.”25
By July 1934 Canfield’s hopes were realized when the Bonis decided they did not like Heaven’s My Destination well enough to publish it, and sold the rights to Harper & Brothers. A letter from Canfield to the Bonis on August 29, 1934, laid out the conditions of the sale: Four thousand dollars changed hands between the publishers, along with an agreement that the Bonis would receive a percentage of royalties for the book, along with proceeds from any serial sale transacted by June 1, 1935, and certain proceeds from any book-club sale.26 By September 29, 1934, Wilder and his novel in progress were officially in the fold at Harper & Brothers.27 In November, Wilder had the first inkling that Heaven would do well in the literary marketplace when the Book-of-the-Month Club bought the rights to the novel for the princely sum of ten thousand dollars—roughly the equivalent of $163,598 in 2010 dollars.28
Wilder had finished writing the novel in the fall of 1934 under Mabel Dodge Luhan’s “humorous and disciplinary eye” at her ranch compound on a shady plateau on the edge of Taos, New Mexico. He had promised Mabel that he was working “furiously” to finish his assignments with Goldwyn so he could visit her in the “glorious air” of Taos and write the last chapter of his novel, which his publishers were clamoring to receive.29 They had met through letters when Mabel wrote to praise his first two novels and to invite him to come to Taos.30 Before her life there, she had been married three times, had befriended Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, had presided over a bohemian literary and political salon in Greenwich Village, and had been the mistress of the radical John Reed. In Taos in 1923 Mabel married her fourth husband, the charismatic Tiwi Indian Tony Luhan, who had become her spiritual counselor, and then, pitching a tepee in front of her house, had courted Mabel, despite the fact that he had a wife in the nearby Pueblo community.
Like other writers (including D. H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, Thomas Wolfe, and Edna Ferber) and visual artists (Paul Strand, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others), Wilder gravitated not only to Mabel’s generous hospitality at her comfortable ranch, and the stimulating company she attracted there, but to flamboyant Mabel herself—her energy, her “bracing” analysis of his work, and the “wonderful and rich resources” of her intellect and spirit.31 During the day Wilder retreated into his work on the novel, but broke away gladly in the late afternoon to take long drives with Mabel at the wheel, expertly navigating the narrow roads twining up and down the hills of Pueblo County. The two friends could talk about everything and everybody in the world—including Gertrude Stein, whom Wilder had yet to meet. He knew Stein’s work well enough to write a wicked parody of it for Mabel. His subject was Taos:
There is something that you find—Throwing away is finding but there is no beginning to it.
There is a house but here is a current of air. Looking does not do anything. You go away and then you come back and so you are there. Nothing is black that is black only a waiting. You have lost a thinking, but you did not know you had a thinking until the throwing away became a finding.32
Wilder’s letters to Mabel over the years were remarkably candid in his assessments of his own work, especially his anxieties about it. He hated to write, he told her. He was too lazy. As he worked to finish Heaven’s My Destination, he was still stung by Jed Harris’s critique of The Woman of Andros. Harris had pronounced the novel “so soft that wherever you touched it, it caved in like uncooked dough. I was all ears and all eager docility,” Wilder told Mabel, “but he couldn’t tell me why or where, so I merely went sadly away.”33
AS ALWAYS, vivid strands and threads from Wilder’s reading fed his imagination and were woven, subliminally or intentionally, into the pages of his work. He wrote that Nietzsche had been
his “great discovery” in 1932—“my meat and drink.”34 Nietzsche’s cautionary philosophy echoes in Heaven’s My Destination in George Brush’s rigid morality and his determination to live by a prescribed ethic, in his endeavors to improve himself, and in his efforts to rectify his errors by seeking to do good after he has done harm. (“If you have done harm,” Nietzsche wrote in The Wanderer and His Shadow, “see how you can do good.—If you are punished for your actions, bear the punishment with the feeling that you are doing good—by deterring others from falling prey to the same folly.”)35
Also entwined in the novel are the strands of Wilder’s personal discovery of America—his sojourn at the University of Chicago, his visits to the world’s fair, and his travels on the lecture circuit. There are memories of his father, his brother, and himself; his longtime fascination with the picaresque as a literary form, which intensified as he taught Don Quixote in his university classes; his “years among the missionaries in China”; his two years at Oberlin College; his friendship with Gene Tunney, who was part of the inspiration for George Brush; and Wilder’s periodic sojourns in Hollywood. (If there was to be a movie version of the novel, Wilder wanted Frank Capra to direct and Gary Cooper to play George Brush.) He even transferred to Brush his concept of “Voluntary Poverty.”
For the book’s epigraph Wilder chose lines of Midwestern school doggerel that apparently sprang from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation.
Clongowes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation.
From Wilder’s pen the lines read “George Brush is my name; America’s my nation; / Ludington’s my dwelling-place / And Heaven’s my destination.” To follow those lines, Wilder pulled an aphorism from The Woman of Andros: “Of all the forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.” Given some of the questions later surrounding the novel, he wondered if he should have chosen “other phrases from Andros” instead—“How do you live? What do you do first?”36
Heaven’s My Destination is an anomaly among American novels written during the Depression. While Wilder takes an informed, realistic look at the social struggles of that era, he often does so through the lens of farce and high comedy, believing that in dark and perilous times, people need and want the ballast of laughter. George Brush and his sometimes farcical escapades would be, Wilder hoped, the catalyst for such laughter. There are few heroes in American literature more wholeheartedly devoted to a rigid system of ethics—and more comically prone to trouble because of a puritanical conscience. George’s dogged ethical system, enforced by his overbearing conscience, entangles him with evangelists, prostitutes, priests, and reluctant brides; he finds himself seduced, persecuted, misunderstood, arrested, incarcerated, married, and converted. Among Wilder’s targets are evangelists, bankers, predatory women, self-help movements, and certain kinds of Christians and government officials.
Wilder quickly discovered, however, that what he intended as comedy many took for satire. “There’s no satire in it,” Wilder wrote to Dr. Creighton Barker of New Haven. “It’s about all of us when young. You’re not supposed to notice the humor—you’re supposed to look through it at a fellow who not only has the impulse to think out an ethic and plan a life—but actually does it.” He acknowledged that he had made “a lot of mistakes” in the novel, “at the close especially,” and time would tell, Wilder said, whether he had “made a big lapse of artistic judgment in presenting the matter so objectively.”37
To another reader Wilder defended himself against the charge that he was making fun of George Brush. “His instinctive goodness and his instinctive view of what is essential in living is far superior to the groups among which he moves,” he wrote, adding that Brush had been “badly educated—badly educated even in religion.” Wilder believed that the “censorious, literal and joyless” traditions of some Protestant religions were based on “a misreading of the New Testament and a failure to see that most of that tone in the Old Testament is expressly superceded [sic] in the New.” He “meant George Brush to be seen as learning in episode and episode better how to render his instinctive goodness and unworldliness effective. It’s an Education Novel.”38 Wilder told a reader that he must not have written the end of the novel “clearly enough,” and then he reiterated his purpose:
I intended that everyone should find something of his or her self in George Brush,—and of the best of themselves, too. I know that much of my father and my brother and myself is there, and many people recognize themselves in him. I was very glad to get your word to the same effect, and hope a second reading will remove your feeling that I wrote it to make fun of great and good qualities.39
Wilder worried in a letter to Les Glenn that “people are still writing to tell me of their contempt for my book, that I made fun of religion to earn money for myself.” He went on to say, “I didn’t give Geo Brush enough of the intermittent moments of joy and reassurance. They are his due. . . . That was very bad of me; I was so intense about his troubles that I didn’t think of it. SO my next book won’t be harrowing, it will give pleasure . . .”40
DURING THE first months of 1935 Wilder was intensely busy with his heavy teaching load and other responsibilities at the University of Chicago, and his plans to welcome two new friends for an extended visit to Chicago. At Bobsy Goodspeed’s apartment on November 25, 1934, Wilder had been introduced to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas when Stein arrived to lecture at the University of Chicago. It was the international success of her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) that brought her back to her native United States for the first time in thirty years. Since about 1905 Gertrude had written and published (most often at her own expense) fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, and an opera libretto—but this book was her first commercial literary success.
In her 1937 book, Everybody’s Autobiography, she wrote that she did not want to return to the United States until and unless she was a celebrity.41 Stein was feted like the 1930s equivalent of a movie star. Her face had appeared on the cover of Time on September 11, 1933, to mark the publication of her book. Wherever she went on her cross-country tour in 1934–35, she drew crowds, press, and controversy. She and Wilder had spent very little time alone together during her 1934 visit to Chicago—but enough for the mutual recognition that they would like to see more of each other. Learning that Stein and Toklas would return to the university for two weeks in March 1935, Wilder conveyed his pleasure at the prospect, and offered them the use of his apartment. Stein and Toklas took him up on the invitation.
Before they arrived Wilder devoted much of January and February to directing the university’s student production of Handel’s only venture into comic opera, Xerxes, in celebration of Handel’s 250th birthday. The ambitious production ran on February 16 and 17, 1935, and involved the University of Chicago Chorus and Orchesis (an orchestra in this case smaller than the symphony orchestra) as well as the symphony orchestra and dance group. Wilder translated the libretto into a lively English version, directed the opera, and even outfitted himself in a soldier’s uniform—boots, cape, and all—to sing in the chorus in the third act.42 Eager to immerse his audience and his performers in the authentic high Baroque style of the original production in London in 1738, he staged the opera with a raised curtain, so that audience members could watch stagehands finish preparations for the performance—a strategy he had used four years earlier in The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and, to some extent, in Pullman Car Hiawatha, and would employ again two years later in Our Town.
Meanwhile Heaven’s My Destination was doing very well. It was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in the United States and the English Book Society in the United Kingdom, and would rank seventh among the top ten bestselling novels of 1935. The novel yielded $27,000 in royalties that first year (worth about $425,000 in 2010 buying power), and was “selling like pancakes,” Wilder exulted, even though “almost every
body” misunderstood it. Once more he clarified his intention: “It’s no satire. The hero’s not a boob or a sap. George Brush at his best is everybody.”43
Amos Wilder was one of the most appreciative readers of his brother’s book, and wrote a perceptive assessment of it in 1943:
The discerning saw in the hero, George Brush, an attempt on the part of the author to Americanize Don Quixote, and to give him the run of Main Street in the nineteen thirties. . . . George Brush is a Puritan who is under a misapprehension; he is a reformer wandering about in worlds not realized. It is his fate, out of zeal, always to overshoot the mark. In the field of ethics he is always doing the wrong thing for the right reason, and the right thing for the wrong reason. He has an undigested assortment of ideas and revelations from Marx, Tolstoi, Henry George and Gandhi and an outsider’s over-simplifications about the common life. . . . He is not satisfied to hitch his wagon to a star but he must select the most remote and cloudy of all stars, perhaps the nebula in Andromeda or some galaxy entirely invisible to the naked eye.44
WHETHER HE was working in Hollywood or Chicago or New Haven, or traveling, lecturing, and writing throughout the United States and Europe, Wilder sustained an astonishing number and variety of friendships—steady ones, carried on largely through letters, with Alexander Woollcott, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Sibyl Colefax, Les Glenn, Jed Harris and Ruth Gordon, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and more sporadic ones with people he met along the way. In Chicago in 1933, for instance, he had enjoyed a “galvanizing” talk with a discouraged young actor who had left the stage to become a writer, and Wilder gave the young man letters of introduction to friends in New York. He was a “rather pudgy-faced youngster with a wing of brown hair falling into his eyes and a vague Oxford epigrammatic manner,” Wilder had written to Woollcott from Chicago in 1933. “The pose is from his misery and soon drops under a responsible pair of eyes like mine. The name is Orson Welles and it’s going far.”45