Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  The more time he spent in Europe in 1935, the more he began to worry about the world scene: “I guess there’s going to be a War soon,” Wilder wrote to Amos and Catharine from Vienna in September. “Italy had 500,000 men in manoevres [sic] in their northernmost mountains when I was there and now your Geneva is on pins and needles. . . . Amputated, strangled Austria hasn’t money enough to buy a cannon even, so the Austrians sit in cafés all day over one mokka and wax witty about dictators and empires.”12

  But he had to force his eyes away from world issues to read the page proofs of Gertrude Stein’s latest book, Narration, the University of Chicago Press edition of the lectures she had given at the university—and a book whose publication in 1935 in large part hinged on Wilder’s agreement to write an introduction. He could be diplomatically forthright with Stein about her lectures and writings, and sometimes he simply told her candidly that he had no idea what she was talking about. Stein also asked Wilder to read the manuscript of her unpublished Four in America, which she had begun writing in 1932 and finished in 1933. In this treatise on creativity, Stein wrote hypothetical biographical portraits speculating on what Ulysses S. Grant, the Wright brothers, Henry James, and George Washington might have accomplished if they had devoted their lives and creative energies to different professions. Wilder wrote to Stein from Berchtesgaden, Germany, “I am all happy and grateful about Grant; scarcely understand a word of Wilbur Wright; and still have the other two to read—read slowly and aloud.”13 Having read further, he wrote from Vienna, “I cast myself out into the open sea of friendship and hope to be supported and understood. SO: there are long long stretches of the Four in America where I don’t understand a word.”14 Stein thanked him for his observations and hoped that they could talk them over. That manuscript would not be published until 1947, the year after Stein’s death, and Wilder contributed a long introduction that was part literary criticism, part affirmation, and part eulogy for his friend.

  When Wilder wrote introductions to Stein’s Narration (1935) and The Geographical History of America (1936) he not only lent his highly visible name and literary reputation to Stein’s ongoing effort to establish herself firmly with the American audience, but also served as her emissary and intermediary with American publishers, especially Bennett Cerf at Random House. In Wilder’s elucidations of Stein’s work he functioned as her virtual translator, distilling the essence of her often dense and convoluted prose. In the introduction Wilder highlighted some of the ideas he and Stein had explored in their conversations, especially those that had stimulated or coincided with his own thought: The question of how creativity operates. The concept that repetition is a dynamic in all of nature as well as in human life, and, as Wilder put it, foreshadowing Our Town, “Repeating is emphasis. Every time a thing is repeated it is slightly different.” And Stein’s belief, first stressed to him by his parents, that, as Wilder summarized it, “the richest rewards for the reader have come from those works in which the authors admitted no consideration of an audience into their creating mind.”15

  He had to lobby aggressively with Cerf for the publication of Stein’s Geographical History of America. “G. Stein has written a very good book,” Wilder wrote to Aleck Woollcott, who by 1935 was one of the most formidable literary and theater critics in the United States. For years he had written reviews and commentary for the New York Times and the New York World and then, from 1929 to 1934, for the New Yorker in his column, “Shouts And Murmurs.” From 1929 to 1933 he reviewed books on CBS radio, and beginning in 1933 he had his own popular CBS radio show, The Town Crier. It was said that if Woollcott merely mentioned a book it could sell a thousand copies, and he could make or break plays and actors.16 He had promoted the careers of Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, and Helen Hayes, among others. But it was mutual friendship rather than promotion that prompted Wilder’s letter about Stein’s book:

  I don’t know yet whether it’s a very great book. She does. Bennett Cerf says the rewards of her previous ones were so slender that he doesn’t dare publish this one (“The Geographical History of America, or the Relations between Human Nature and the Human Mind”) . . . Gertrude . . . and P. Picasso (and Bennett Cerf) want it to be published with the text on one side and my explanatory marginalia on the other, reproduced in my own handwriting. I don’t want to do that. It’s true that I can clarify many an apparently willful inanity and (with the help of those wonderful conversations show it to be brilliant phrasing and thinking), but there are long stretches I cannot; and it’s those stretches where the pretentious explicator ought to be strong.17

  Many readers have observed that Wilder was influenced by Stein, and he himself acknowledged her influence—but few have noted Wilder’s influence on Stein, as documented in her published work. In The Geographical History of America, which she wrote in the early years of her friendship with Wilder, and which is often called her culminating work, Wilder is a presence, called by name, and a strong voice who sometimes affirmed, sometimes challenged, and occasionally crystallized her own ideas. In one of their conversations Stein talked about inspiration, and Wilder later recalled that she told him, “What we know is formed in our head by thousands of small occasions in the daily life,” emphasizing the importance of all the “thousands of occasions in the daily life that go into our head to form our ideas.” She did not like the word “inspiration,” he remembered, “because it suggests that someone else is blowing that knowledge into you. It is not being blown into you; it is very much your own and was acquired by you in thousands of tiny occasions in your life”—an idea akin to Wilder’s later reflection in his essay on Joyce that a writer’s subject or “myth-theme” is “prepared for him in every hour of his life.”18

  Wilder devoted hours to reading Stein’s manuscripts and commenting on them, and then performing some of the tasks a literary agent would normally do in getting the work to potential publishers. Stein was not alone in seeking Wilder’s advice and support. He read and praised Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Winter in Taos, published to critical acclaim in 1935, one of her seven books published in her lifetime. Later, at Mabel’s request, he responded in detail to the manuscript draft of a novel she was working on in 1936. In that exchange he was the willing teacher in the equivalent of a private tutorial in advanced creative writing. He reminded her, “The greatest idea-men in the world when they really wanted to convey always found themselves moving into a story: think of Plato and his Cave and his Charioteers; think of Christ and his ‘there was once a man who . . .’”19 Mabel apparently gave up on the novel and returned to writing nonfiction.

  In Vienna, Wilder was beleaguered to the point of vexation by “authors, playwrights, stage directors, phone calls and strangers at social gatherings”—everyone wanting some favor from him, seeking to “make an engagement for a good long talk, freighted with self-interest.”20 Some of the hubbub may have been connected to a forthcoming production of Wilder’s one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner. He wrote to Woollcott that the play was “about to be performed in Vienna in a wildly expressionistic fashion. It’s been given 500 times, but for the first time as far as I know they’re going to use those wigs to indicate the passing of time.”21 He was also grateful to Woollcott for including The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, another of his one-act plays, in the bestselling anthology Woollcott’s Reader (1935). “I loved your afterward [sic] to the Happy Journey,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott. “The Reader is going to be under every Xmas tree and I’m proud to figure in it with the best pages I was ever permitted to write.”22

  A WELCOME compensation for all the public attention in Vienna came in the form of an invitation from Sigmund Freud for a private visit in his villa in Grinzing, just north of the city. On the afternoon of October 13 the two men spent an hour and a half together, and Wilder recounted their conversation in a letter to Stein and Toklas. Freud, then seventy, was “Really a beautiful old man,” Wilder wrote.23 They talked of Shakespeare (Freud believed he was rea
lly the Earl of Oxford) and religion. “I am no seeker after God,” Freud said, but he “liked” gods and collected cases full of Greek, Chinese, African, and Egyptian icons. He told Wilder, “Religion is the recapitulation and the solution of the problems of one’s first four years that have been covered over by amnesia.”24 They discussed their work, including Wilder’s novels. Freud liked The Bridge of San Luis Rey, but not The Cabala (in which the cardinal reads Freud) and especially not Heaven’s My Destination. He couldn’t read it, he said, and he threw it away. “Why should you treat of an American fanatic; that cannot be treated poetically,” Freud complained.25

  They also spoke of Freud’s daughter Anna, the youngest of his six children. Anna, then forty, was not at home that October day. “Can you come again?” Freud asked, seeming to have decided that Wilder might be a worthy candidate to marry Anna and become his son-in-law. “She is older than you—you do not have to be afraid,” he told Wilder. “She is a sensible reasonable girl. You are not afraid of women? She is sensible—no nonsense about her. Are you married, may I ask?”26

  By 1935 Anna Freud had established her own international reputation as a psychoanalyst, specializing in the analysis of children. She had been general secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association for seven years, beginning in 1927, and in 1935 was appointed director of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Training Institute.27 There was much speculation that she sustained a long homosexual relationship with her close friend and colleague Dorothy Burlingham, granddaughter of Charles Tiffany, one of the founders of Tiffany & Company. Anna Freud was devoted to her father, was psychoanalyzed by him, and would care for him during the last years of his life when he was suffering from cancer.

  The two men met again on October 23—and it may have been at this meeting that Wilder talked with Freud about Charlotte.28 He and their family had begun to worry about Charlotte’s mental and emotional health. Years later Wilder explained that during one of their visits he had told Freud about his “several brilliant brothers [sic] and sisters—and of this invalid sister.” Freud had reflected that in “every lively family there is one who must pay.”29

  The trip to Europe that fall of 1935 was a tonic for Wilder—a much-needed rest, and an abundance of stimulating company—from Stein and Toklas to Max Reinhardt, Freud, and Pablo Picasso. On October 31 Stein took Wilder to Picasso’s house to hear the painter read the poetry he had begun to write that spring. Picasso read his poems, some in French and some in Spanish, and after a time looked up at Wilder and asked if he could follow them. Wilder told him he could, and he found the poems interesting.30 Later, in private, Stein and Wilder agreed that Picasso’s poems were definitely not poetry, but they also agreed not to tell Picasso.

  “SOMETHING’S HAPPENED to me. I’m crazy about America, and I want to go home,” Wilder wrote to Stein in October. “Yes, I’m crazy about America. And you did that to me, too. . . . My country tis of thee. I always knew I loved it, but I never knew I loved it like this.”31 Stein did not deserve all the credit for Wilder’s patriotism, however. Earlier in the decade he had called himself Walt Whitman’s grandson, and had emphatically articulated his love for the United States. Stein, the longtime expatriate, had embarked on her rediscovery of America in 1935, sharing with Wilder her new vision of the country of her birth. Together they explored the American language and the American spirit, both of them energized by the exchange of new ideas and perspectives. Stein returned to the United States in the thirties and then went back to her life in France. Wilder went to Europe in the twenties and thirties and afterward, but always returned to the United States. “I’m a citizen by God’s inscrutable grace of the greatest country in the world,” he wrote to Woollcott, “and I don’t like to be out of it for long at a time, esp. not out of it to wander in those great aching echoing museums that are the countries of Europe.”32 He wrote to Stein and Toklas, “The trouble with me is that I can’t be soul-happy outside of my beloved U.S.A. and that’s a fact.”33

  Something more than Wilder’s love of country and his innate restlessness pulled him back to Connecticut that autumn, however: By December, Amos Parker Wilder was “in extremis, surrounded by nurses.”34 He had suffered a series of strokes and major surgery for an intestinal blockage. The family needed Thornton—not just the ever-growing sums of money he paid for his father’s care, but his ebullient, reassuring presence. His mother and Isabel were exhausted from caring for Dr. Wilder, even with the help of nurses. “I came back to discover my father very ill indeed,” Wilder wrote to Gertrude and Alice from Connecticut in late November. “While I was on the ocean he had a major operation and now we call on tiptoe through the ranks of nurses. There’s nothing anybody can do, so I invent activities for the girls who have been under tension for three years over this matter. . . . I could a tale unfold re papa’s illness.”35

  Wilder returned to a family whose lives at that time ran the gamut of issues and emotions: a dying father; a weary mother; happy newlyweds beginning a life together; one sister—Janet—thriving in her life and work; and two sisters—Charlotte and Isabel—struggling in theirs. Exhausted and despondent, Isabel was at work on her third novel, but now she was her mother’s primary aide and supporter during Dr. Wilder’s long illness. Charlotte was still living in New York and now working as a journalist for the WPA Writers’ Project. Her first book of poetry, published in 1936, was corecipient of the prestigious Shelley Memorial Award, given by the Poetry Society of America. Charlotte occasionally shared a few poems in progress with her mother, but sheltered most of her work from the eyes of her literary family, working largely in secrecy, striving for creative as well as financial independence from those who loved her most and wanted to be of help to her. When her book came out, Thornton telegraphed his praise: DEAR SHARLIE I THINK ITS SPLENDID POWERFUL AND GLORIOUSLY ORIGINAL HAVE NO QUALMS HOMAGE AND CONGRATULATIONS.36

  Charlotte dedicated the book to the two women closest to her—the novelist Evelyn Scott and Ernestine Friedmann, who had been an industrial secretary of the YWCA and had worked for years on behalf of women’s rights—especially education and equality for working women. Because of the erotic textures of some of the poems, especially five “Monologues of Repression,” Charlotte felt compelled to offer “Words of Annotation”—four pages of prose at the end of the volume. This disclaimer defended the “subjective implications” of the book, which, she wrote, “may not be taken as constituting the record of an actual life.”37 The apparent record of her “actual life” was the subject of a novel she was writing and shielding from would-be readers, especially her family members.

  In spite of everything, the Wilders gathered for a “Very happy” Thanksgiving, with Amos and Catharine joining them at the house on Deepwood Drive.38 From Hamden just before Christmas, Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas, “My father with the tenacious physique of an exemplary life amazes the doctors and nurses by surviving strokes and convulsions and paralyses.”39

  As the chief breadwinner of the family, Wilder had to get back to work soon after Christmas. He had lecture and teaching commitments to fulfill in 1936—two months booked out on the lecture circuit—and then classes to teach at the University of Chicago through the spring and summer. “The tour is an ignoble affair: I no longer believe what I say, no longer ‘hear’ what I say,” wrote Wilder, now seven years into the contract he had signed with Keedick in 1929. There were compensations, as he told Sibyl Colefax: He was getting to know American cities firsthand—on one trip, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Salt Lake City, Utah.40 “I’ve seen an oil well, and an old Creek Indian—from that tribe the Americans transported from Louisiana with such graft and blood,” he wrote to Alice and Gertrude. “In Salt Lake City a granddaughter of Brigham Young told me a set of appalling stories of grandfather. In Hollywood Walt Disney showed me five of his masterpieces that I happened to have missed and I danced at the Trocadero. At Tucson I dined at a tuberculosis sanatarium and wearied a few patients back to life.”41

  With a co
ntract to honor and a family to support, he plowed on. As his father’s health waned, his medical expenses soared. “My father continues to linger in the expensive luxury of a bravura hospital,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas, who understood what it was to worry about money. As the lecture tour wound to its close, Wilder felt more than ever that his lectures were “nullenvoyd,” and wished he could get out of his contract.42 He could not escape the lecture commitments for another year, but by April he had decided it was time to resign from the University of Chicago. He told Mabel, “I was five years at Lawrenceville and I’ve been five years at the University and that seems to be my unit-measure of giving and getting any vitality.” He didn’t know what he would do next, or where he would live. “Perhaps first thing in the Fall I’ll have to go to Hollywood and make some money,” he mused.43

  Unfortunately he was not engaged for any Hollywood projects in 1936, so he had to rely on the teaching, the lecture fees, and his royalties. And all the time, despite classes to teach at the university, there were pressing family matters to tend to. “Father’s still outliving the predictions of science with a State-of-Maine tenacity,” Wilder wrote to a friend after a trip to Hamden. “I go to cheer the onlooking womenfolk up. They’re wonderful.”44 Back in Chicago, Wilder tried to bolster the flagging spirits of his mother and sisters by mail. He had returned from Connecticut armed with advice from his mother about how to prepare his own meals in Chicago, apparently to save money. He obliged and sent her the menu (complete with footnotes) for three meals he prepared for himself on Monday, May 25: muffins purchased at a nearby Irish bakery; creamed spinach; broiled ham (“Brown, not pink; candied edge, with cloves”); and fresh tomatoes with Heinz mayonnaise, with a Scotch Highball to accompany his lunch (“What fun men do have,” his footnote for this item read).45