Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Wilder was connected to a powerful network of theater friends by this time, and he used it to benefit the eighteen-year-old Welles, who often gave Wilder credit for discovering him. Wilder gave Welles a letter of introduction to the illustrious, influential Woollcott, who took Welles under his wing and immediately gave him a new wardrobe as well as introductions to Katharine Cornell and her husband, Guthrie McClintic, who quickly cast Welles in three of their productions—Candida, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and Romeo and Juliet. Wilder and Welles were later connected by other strands and threads: In 1940, as Welles worked on the script for his landmark film, Citizen Kane, he openly borrowed a pivotal idea from Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner, telescoping time when he wrote the breakfast scene between Kane and Emily in which they traverse the history of their entire marriage as they sit at the breakfast table.46

  In March 1935 Wilder, nearly thirty-eight, formed one of the pivotal literary friendships of his life when Gertrude Stein, just turned sixty-one, and Alice B. Toklas, fifty-eight, her companion-lover-amanuensis, arrived to stay in his apartment in Chicago. After Bobsy Goodspeed had introduced him to Stein and Toklas in November 1934, Wilder had written to Mabel: “Gertrude Stein has been in town giving some beautiful lectures. I have met her over and over again, but usually with a throng about her. I told her and Miss Toklas what I felt about Taos, my affection for you and the beauty of the place.”47

  This message would not have entirely pleased either Stein or Luhan, for the two were rivals as well as friends. They had known each other since the spring of 1911 in Paris, and, by some accounts, had been so attracted to each other that there was infatuation and flirtation during a time when Gertrude, then thirty-seven, was already in her relationship with Alice, and Mabel, then thirty-three and widowed by the first of her four husbands, was in the midst of one of her many love affairs, this time with her son’s twenty-two-year-old tutor.48

  On February 24, 1935, Gertrude and Alice settled into Wilder’s comfortable apartment at 6020 Drexel Avenue for two frenetic weeks at the University of Chicago. While his guests took over his apartment, Wilder occupied the Visiting Preacher’s Suite in Hitchcock Hall at the University of Chicago, where he had stayed before and felt “perfectly at home.”49 Gertrude was to deliver four public lectures to audiences limited to five hundred, and, in a special course, Narration, lead a series of two-hour “conferences,” as Wilder described them, in which she “amplified the ideas contained in these lectures by means of general discussion with some thirty selected students.”50 The university students were handpicked by Wilder, and according to him, there were ten conferences in all. In Everybody’s Autobiography Gertrude acknowledged that Thornton made all the arrangements, including choosing the participating students.51 Wilder wrote to Les Glenn, “At present I am the secretary, errand boy-companion of Gertrude Stein who is teaching here for two weeks—a great, sensible, gallant gal and a great treat.”52

  Delighted by the American custom of “drive-yourself” cars, Stein rented a Ford and drove all over the city. (“Gertrude with the wheel of a car in her grasp was like Jehu with the steering reins of a racing chariot,” said her friend Fanny Butcher. One evening in Chicago Gertrude was arrested for driving erratically—and without a license—but managed to prove that she had a license at home in France and to intimidate the police into believing that she was in Chicago as a guest of the government and therefore had diplomatic immunity.)53 Looking back on her sojourn in Chicago, Gertrude wrote that piloting the “drive-yourself” car around the city was the most exciting aspect of the experience.54

  In addition to keeping up with Gertrude and Alice and his teaching schedule, Wilder welcomed two other special guests to Chicago, and the flurry of social events intensified. March 4 marked the arrival of Alexander Woollcott, whom Gertrude had met in New York, and on March 9, Isabel Wilder came to town to promote Heart Be Still, her second novel. The Wilders, Fanny Butcher, and her husband, Dick Bokum, joined Stein and Toklas for a festive lunch in Wilder’s apartment, no doubt prepared by Alice, a notable chef. (Alice would leave Wilder’s refrigerator full of gourmet treats when she and Gertrude vacated the apartment.)

  It was not surprising, all things considered, that Wilder found himself “a little shaken in health” during that hectic time or that he had AN ODD LITTLE UNIMPORTANT NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, as he described it in a telegram to Stein on April 2.55 Actually, he was totally exhausted and very worried about his health. Encouraged by the book royalties coming in, Wilder requested a year’s leave of absence from the University of Chicago in 1935. He was still “very proud of the university and the wunderkind president.”56 He wrote to Les Glenn:

  The University has now given me one year off—April to April. Maybe with plays on Broadway or something other I shall not return. But I don’t know any reason now why I shouldn’t, except that I teach worse and worse in the classroom itself—tho’ if I do say it, I get better and better as a “campus character” in general circulation, accessible to all comers. Some mornings I rise up and swear that I shall never teach again, that I must go away and become a writer etc. Other days I rise up and love it . . . the classes, the tumult on the stairs of Cobb Hall.

  What a silly pathless creature I am.57

  He was also mentally and physically exhausted, as he confided to Amy Wertheimer. “I was in a strange state ever since Christmas,” he wrote to her from Hamden.

  I was working like mad: eight classroom lectures a week; lectures outside; the long rehearsals of Xerxes; the gregarious social life; endless conferences over MSS with novelists, dramatists, etc., many of whom were not even connected with the University; and finally Gertrude Stein’s [two-week] visit for which I was guide, manager and secretary. Naturally nature could not stand this any longer and I was suddenly brushed by light warnings of a nervous breakdown. I began fainting for apparently no reason in public and found that after any conversation an hour long my hands began to tremble and I was filled by an irresistible desire to run away. I saw the warning and immediately changed my life; day before yesterday I came home here and my family is putting the last touches to my convalescence.58

  Free of his university commitment, and with money in the bank (and, like his hero George Brush, with a history of attributing other people’s illnesses and “nervous breakdowns” to psychogenic roots), Wilder decided that the only path to his own renewed good health and vigor and the essential time to write led to one destination: Europe. He had not been there for three years, and he was determined to embark on that journey in early July 1935. However, he was caught in the web of family concerns about his father’s rapidly declining health. Dr. Wilder had been a virtual invalid for several years, and although Thornton believed that his father’s illness was almost entirely psychogenic, he suffered from seizures and strokes and intermittent paralysis.59 Thornton dutifully paid the mounting medical bills, along with the other family expenses. He had been the family’s dependable financial father since 1930, and, with Dwight Dana’s guidance, planned to continue that support indefinitely. While Wilder was in Europe, Dana would oversee financial matters and serve as liaison between Wilder’s literary interests and his publishers, past and present. His Hollywood agent, Rosalie Stewart, was working on “the possible sale of the movie rights” to Heaven’s My Destination. Playwright Marc Connelly had entered negotiations for the rights, and then withdrawn, but Stewart had hopes—eventually dashed—of making a sale.60

  “I feel like a cad to be going abroad,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas, who hoped to entertain him at their country home at Bilignin in the south of France. His “women-folk” were “standing by,” he said, “attending the protracted exasperating unlovable death of my father. I pass through the house having come—in their eyes—from a brightly lighted gay life in Chicago en route to a life of pleasure and glamor in Europe.”61 One roadblock to his journey was averted when Amos and his bride-to-be, Catharine Kerlin, offered to move their planned September 1 wedding to late June so tha
t Thornton could be there “and usher in striped trousers and a camellia.”62 He reluctantly agreed—how could he not? But he was “really not well,” he mused. “I have funny moods. I have to withdraw when there are large groups of people, etc. . . . What fetishes there are about us. This notion that one must be present at weddings and funerals.”63

  “THERE ARE some new notes to report to you on the Wilder saga,” Wilder wrote to Mabel in the summer of 1935 after the landmark family event. “Wednesday we got Amos married on a sunny lawn.”64 Catharine and Amos were wed on June 26, 1935, in the garden of the Kerlin home in Moorestown, New Jersey, with Thornton as the best man and Isabel as a bridesmaid. It was on his brother’s wedding day that Thornton discovered the custom that the groom was not allowed to see his bride until the ceremony—a detail that would later show up in Our Town. Amos was “marrying a fine girl,” Thornton reported to Mabel, “and we’re delighted for him.”65

  Wilder had very little uninterrupted time for writing in 1935, but by July 2, soon after his brother’s wedding, he started a draft of a play he titled M Marries N, clearly a forerunner of the first two acts of Our Town. A stage manager takes on the role of a minister and tells the audience that “M. . . . marries N. . . . millions of them.” 66 The stage manager oversees “an American village,” in which two young people are in love. The intertwining threads of courtship, love, and marriage lingered in Wilder’s mind that year: When his friend Fanny Butcher married Dick Bokum in February 1935, Wilder had discussed the “awe-full character of the Marriage Service” with Gertrude Stein. It was “one of the best written scenes in all drama,” Wilder said. “I wish I’d thought of it first.”67

  “EAGER TO get abroad; the correspondence over that blame book swamps me,” Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer.68 By June 28 he was bound for Europe aboard the RMS Ascania, with George Brush tagging along. Wilder took with him letters from his readers—pages full of questions and complaints about Heaven’s My Destination, and occasional praise. Wilder’s actual traveling companion on the crossing was Robert Frederick Davis, one of his University of Chicago “children” as he called the group of talented scholars and writers he had taken under his wing, including the playwright Robert Ardrey and the artist John Pratt.69

  Wilder had taken a special interest in Robert Davis, a “grave yet turbulent” philosophy major who had just received his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago. “Don’t be mad,” Wilder had written to Dwight Dana in the spring of 1935, explaining that he wanted to invest in the future of this “very brilliant student” by funding a year’s study abroad, since the university’s graduate school was at that time “very poor in Philosophy.” Davis was from a large family in Chicago, where his father worked for the Swift meatpacking company. Wilder had discussed with Davis’s parents his offer of six hundred dollars to subsidize a year abroad for Davis to study philosophy, psychology, and German, and the funds were accepted.70

  After Davis left the ship at Plymouth for a tour of Scotland, Wilder went on to Paris, and then he and Davis went to Bilignin to see Gertrude and Alice. He described their eight-day visit in a letter to Mabel:

  Automobile trips in the environs; an intense preoccupation with two dogs; Alice B. Toklas’s sublime housekeeping; and Gertrude Stein’s difficult magnificent and occasionally too abstract and faintly disillusioned alpine wisdom about the Human Mind, identity, the sense of time and How we Know. I am devoted to both of them, but in the presence of Gertrude’s gifts one must occasionally scramble pretty hard to realize one’s self, collect it, encourage it, and trust it.71

  After some “splendid Tyrolian hiking and some great music at Salzburg,” Wilder moved on to Vienna, where he craved solitude and long walks in the woods. He would be a “surly hermit” for a while, he explained to the poet H.D.72 When he was ready he would settle down to work again. “My head is hot with three fine fiction subjects and three for non-fiction,” he wrote to Mabel. “I keep jotting down notes toward all six and finally one of them becomes more insistent than the other and that will be my task.”73

  24

  OUR LIVING AND OUR DYING

  Well, people a thousand years from now, this is the way we were—in our growing-up, in our marrying, in our doctoring, in our living, and in our dying.

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  early draft of Our Town

  The United States, the Caribbean, and Europe (1930s)

  In the midthirties an eclectic array of subjects filled the pages of Wilder’s working notebooks—a drama about a caliph in the Arabian Nights; an homage to the British humorist, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter P. G. Wodehouse; a farce about an exuberant matchmaker; and a quiet play about life in a mythical New Hampshire village. Ultimately this last drama emerged from the cluster of Wilder’s plays in progress to claim his energy and attention. Our Town was years in the making, and he wrote much of it in transit, in American and European towns. He was a perpetual traveler, habitually living “in two suitcases and a brief-case,” a mark of his transient lifestyle as well as the relative ease with which he could transplant himself from one place to another.1 This time he had gone abroad to rest and recover from the strenuous months of overwork in Chicago and on the lecture trail—and then to make serious progress on the unfinished manuscript drafts packed in his briefcase.

  He liked railroad stations, especially in Austria, he wrote to Gertrude Stein from Salzburg in late August 1935. Wilder rose early every morning and walked to the Salzburg railway station for “a pre-breakfast,” which he especially enjoyed on Sunday mornings when the station was packed with people attending mass in the second-class waiting room, or singing folk songs in four-part harmony in the third-class restaurant, or embarking on a day trip to the mountains.2 When he was not dining with the crowds in the railroad station, he was socializing with such luminaries as the director Max Reinhardt, whom he had revered since his boyhood in Berkeley, and the German novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann, introduced to Wilder by Reinhardt at a midnight supper he and his wife hosted at their castle after a performance of Faust at the Salzburg Music Festival.3 That night Max Reinhardt offered Wilder the directorship of the theater school he hoped to establish in Los Angeles, but Wilder turned it down.4

  Wilder seesawed between convivial hours spent with friends new or old, and solitary hours sequestered in his work—indulging his gregarious self until he tired of company, and then retreating into his writing self until weariness or frustration or fulfillment drove him away from his desk and manuscripts to socialize once more. He saw his aunt Charlotte Niven in Innsbruck, and in Salzburg spent time with Bobsy Goodspeed, Sibyl Colefax, Katharine Cornell, and the violinist Fritz Kreisler, as well as Reinhardt, one of the cofounders of the Salzburg Festival. Wilder and Robert Davis immersed themselves in the festival—Toscanini and the Vienna Philharmonic, Reinhardt’s lavish version of Goethe’s Faust, and Bruno Walter’s Don Giovanni. During the festival, for fun, Wilder and Bobsy Goodspeed took a class in symphony conducting from the Austrian composer and conductor Felix Weingartner.5

  Throughout, Wilder was serving as patron or mentor to a variety of friends and acquaintances. As his friendship with Sibyl Colefax flourished, they exchanged long letters, and he began to confide in her about his writing projects. In person or in correspondence, he was a confidant and literary adviser for Mabel Luhan in New Mexico and Gertrude Stein in France, sometimes even acting as Stein’s publishing agent. He was both patron and mentor to Robert Davis, paying his way to Europe, funding his year of study there, seeing to it that he had German-language lessons, and introducing him to people who might be helpful to him. An inveterate walker and hiker, Wilder insisted that Davis accompany him on hikes through the wild splendor of the Dolomites. They bought “leder-hosen and complete rig,” and posed for a photograph that Wilder sent to Stein and Toklas.6

  Before long, however, Wilder was “cranky from travelling, from not being in one place more than two days at a time” and “from having to speak and thi
nk in French, German, and Italian and English (every now and then I have amnesia and can’t remember one word in any).”7 He was eager to focus on writing, and he needed “silence and solitude” and long walks. He found them in nearby Kobenzl, at the Schlosshotel, where he began a “new life”:

  On a hilltop—nobody near. Long walks through woods stretching on every side of the hotel, with great prospects of the city in the distance with St. Stephen’s tower, the Danube winding about the plains that stretch toward Hungary.

  And the hours falling like leaves.

  At last I shall hear myself and when the inner monologue gets too loud I can go into town.8

  At the same time Wilder was reading, traveling with a book in hand. He gave up on eighteenth-century dramatist Carlo Goldoni’s realistic comedies because the Venetian dialect was too difficult, but he devoured Der Zerrissene and other farcical comedies by Johann Nestroy, Austria’s popular nineteenth-century playwright. He read Voltaire’s Zadig and Goethe’s Faust twice, the plays of the great nineteenth-century Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer, and the fiction of the nineteenth-century Austrian novelist Adalbert Stifter.9 Wilder’s German was improving so steadily that he could “tear up and down Goethe and Thomas Mann and Freud like they was English,” he wrote to his brother and sister-in-law.10 He reported that his farce-comedy was “shaping up” in his mind; this was an early stab at The Merchant of Yonkers, influenced by Nestroy’s work, which Wilder had been reading for several years.11 He would base his Merchant on Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen (On the Razzle, or “He Just Wants to Have Fun”) with a little help from a scene from Molière’s The Miser.