Penelope Niven
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On the back of his letter is a draft in Isabella’s hand of an unfinished sonnet—words and lines crossed out and some of them illegible—but the gist of the poem is a reflection on motherhood.46 Even in adulthood her children still valued her advice and wisdom, and depended on her steady presence at the heart of family life.
TWO OF the very few people in Wilder’s life who seldom made any demands and who gave him as much as they received from him were Aleck Woollcott and socially ambitious, largely self-educated Sibyl Colefax, the wife of the London barrister Arthur Colefax, who was knighted in 1920. Sibyl Colefax turned Argyll House, their home in Chelsea, into a notable salon where she gathered writers, artists, actors, composers, politicians, war heroes—people who were “interesting, interested and sincere,” according to the British diplomat and author Harold Nicolson in Lady Colefax’s obituary. She entertained Virginia Woolf (who did not much care for Sibyl), Vita Sackville-West (Harold Nicolson’s wife and Virginia Woolf’s lover), Max Beerbohm, H. G. Wells, George Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, Cole Porter, Laurence Olivier, Somerset Maugham, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Bernard Berenson, and Woollcott and Wilder, among countless others. While three of his other chief female correspondents—Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Amy Wertheimer—were more often than not asking Thornton to give advice or do a favor or read a manuscript or arrange an event or an introduction, Sibyl Colefax never asked him for anything. She only gave—ever the kind and generous hostess, the thoughtful conduit to people Thornton might enjoy, and, most important of all, his attentive listener.
Wilder seldom discussed his own literary challenges and work in progress in his letters to Stein. His role was to listen to her, to read and comment on her manuscripts, and to do literary errands for her in the United States. Their correspondence was largely about Gertrude. Her letters to him usually centered on herself and her own activities; his to her usually centered in turn on her and her activities, with occasional passages of lively gossip or entertaining accounts of his travels and adventures.
In contrast Wilder frequently entrusted some of his own concerns and worries to Mabel, and he could write at length and in depth to Sibyl about his teaching, his lecturing, his writing, his family. She was a willing, perceptive listener and encourager, and he could be frank with her, as he could be with Mabel. He poured out his pervasive doubts about his creative work in long letters to Sibyl; she responded with encouragement and sound advice. After the death in 1936 of her husband of thirty-five years, Wilder had an opportunity to reciprocate, serving as a “lifeline” as she coped with her loss, and had to sell her house and go to work full-time as an interior decorator.47 Some of Sibyl’s friends and acquaintances dropped her as her fortunes declined, but Wilder remained her correspondent and devoted friend—his words—until she died in 1950.
“BETWEEN CORRECTING papers & preparing poor undigested lectures at the University of Chicago,” Wilder could report that his resignation from his university post was official, effective in September 1936. He wrote to tell Mabel about it on July 1: “Then I shall be that dreadful thing: a writer. Without visible duties; without fixed appointments; without residence.”48
He was abruptly called back to the family residence in Hamden the next day, however, for his father died July 2. Dr. Wilder’s obituary ran on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal, which he had edited for so many years. He was hailed as “the dean of Connecticut newspaper editors” for, it was noted, his journalistic life had begun and ended in New Haven. “Mr. Wilder, before attaining his outstanding record as a diplomat, was a forceful editorialist, a republican [sic] whose writings attracted attention of the party not only in Wisconsin but in Washington. He was also an effective and entertaining public speaker.”49
“Did I tell you that my revered papa died? Yes. . . . . . . Yes. . . . . . . All of us five children were back,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas.50 Over the years Amos, the eldest of the five, retreated into his studies and his writing, keeping the peace with his father largely through acquiescence to his father’s wishes, or with occasional passive resistance to them, or the reinterpretation or rationalizing of events. Thornton and Charlotte, the most forthright with their father and, as young people, the most openly rebellious, had as adults come to at least an affectionate truce with him. Isabel still harbored a deep anger that often surfaced years later in her letters and interviews. Janet, the youngest Wilder, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Mount Holyoke and now a “single-minded biologist” with her M.A. degree in biology from Mount Holyoke, was still enrolled in the Ph.D. program in zoology at the University of Chicago. Janet knew her father the least, and therefore suffered the least from his strong-willed, often overwhelming love and ambition for his five children.51
Thirty-one years after his father’s death, on hearing of the death of Harry Luce, Wilder reflected on one of his enduring themes, especially in Our Town—the significance of the family. He wrote that he, his brother, Luce, and Bob Hutchins were
a very special breed of cats. Our fathers were very religious, very dogmatic Patriarchs. They preached and talked cant from morning til night—not because they were hypocritical but because they knew no other language. They were forceful men. They thought they were “spiritual”—damn it, they should have been in industry. They had no insight into the lives of others—least of all their families. They had an Old Testament view (sentimentalized around the edges) of what a WIFE, DAUGHTER, SON, CITIZEN should be. We’re the product of those (finally bewildered and unhappy) Worthies. In Harry it took the shape of a shy joyless power-drive. And like so many he intermittently longed to be loved, enjoyed, laughed with. But he didn’t understand give-and-take. Bob and Amos and I—bottom of p. 148!52
Wilder was referring to words spoken by the character John Ashley in a passage in his novel The Eighth Day, published in 1967. Ashley realizes that he has “formed himself to be the opposite of his father” and that his life has been “as mistaken as his father’s.” Then he wonders, “Is that what family life is? The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one’s own errors impoverish and cripple one’s children? Such is the endless chain of the generations?”53
IN THE fall of 1936, after completing the summer quarter at the University of Chicago and satisfying himself that his mother and Isabel were reasonably rested and settled at home, Wilder set off for St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Castries, St. Lucia, in the British West Indies, among other ports of call. He told Mabel that as soon as his classes were over he “left with the speed of light to become a shaggy rum-soaked West Indian.”54 He would spend six weeks there in sun and solitude. “It’s beautiful here,” he wrote Janet from Castries, but it was so hot he couldn’t take his long walks and the water was tepid.55 He was homesick: “I miss Chicago and the campus, honey, and you in the middle of it,” he wrote. “Whatjadooin? Are you well? Are you heart-whole? I feel a thousand miles away.”56
But he loved the solitude, he wrote to Woollcott. “Of course the wonderful part of it for me is the aloneness. . . . I enjoy it so. No ill-digested speeches to make, none of the wild grasping at approximations which is conversation. And I’m improving at it every day. What is Art? What is Religion? I’m writing, too, but that’s still a secret.”57
The solitude spawned introspection: He could be “pretty contented” when he visited foreign places. He was not a born traveler, he said, “But Travel I shall and travel I must.”58 He left the West Indies “a new fellow,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas, “remade by solitude, by the long straight lines of the sea, and with my notebooks full of projects.”59 Wilder concluded that “there are only two things in the world that are fresh, unpredictable, and inspiriting, and the beauties and marvels of nature, nor the customs and conditions of foreign peoples are not among them. The only two things in the world that are rewarding are: The masterpieces of the fine arts, and one’s friends.”60
“There are some members missing from our family circle,” Wilder wrote to Bobsy Goodspeed on Christmas Day. “Father. And Janet whom I saw last week, however, well, and violently occupied over her microscopes, and not pining. And Amos who could not leave his bride about to present us with another Wilder.” The Christmas tree was surrounded by the “bright-colored wrapping paper” that had adorned the gifts, and the aroma of roasting turkey filled the house.63 The New Year brought a new family member: Amos and Catharine’s daughter, Catharine Dix “Dixie” Wilder, was born January 31, 1937. Thornton told a friend that she became “her grandmother’s joy as well as everybody’s.”64
WILDER’S Our Town was shaped by his imagination and memory, his experiences with family and friends, his love of country, his concern about world events, and his passion for theater. He had fallen in love with the theater the first moment his mother took him to see a stage play all those years ago in Wisconsin, and had avidly followed the theater world ever since. By the thirties, however, something significant was changing: “I no longer get much pleasure out of theatre-going, but I never get tired of the atmosphere about theatres,” he wrote to Sibyl in 1936.65 He shared that view with Stein and Toklas as well: “I no longer get much real pleasure from going to a play, but I get more and more from hanging around theatres.”66
He had been hanging around theaters since boyhood, when he had been so infatuated with the Greek Theatre in Berkeley that he would sneak in or climb a tree to watch rehearsals or performances. When he started writing his own plays as a teenager, he dreamed about casting them with his favorite movie stars, stage actors, and directors. Now thirty-nine and a playwright with a few modest credentials, he was not only hanging around theaters but partying after the performances with luminaries—Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic; the “brilliant and waspish” Aleck Woollcott; Raymond Massey; Pauline Lord; Helen Hayes and her husband, the playwright Charles MacArthur; the “insolent and brilliant” Jed Harris and his mistress and mother of his child, the “sublime” Ruth Gordon. Harris and Gordon’s son was now seven, and a “wonderful vivid” little boy, Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas.67 He became a surrogate uncle to little Jones Harris, who remembered him warmly as one adult he could count on. Wilder called Jed Harris “the bat out of Hell.”68
Wilder especially loved Ruth Gordon and was probably in love with her.69 Wilder shared with Sibyl some of Gordon’s history: She had employed her “intelligence, will and character” to triumph over “a host of disadvantages. The disadvantages,” Wilder went on,
were voice, appearance, lack of a sense of “dress,” undependable taste arising from her environment when a girl, and the heart-wrenching and career-blocking association to Jed. All New York giggled fifteen years ago when she forced a doctor to break her knees in order to straighten her legs; well, it’s a sample, anyway, of the incredible determination. Fortunately, on top of it she has genius and intelligence. Within five years she’ll be the first actress here.70
His predictions about her career were right, and he would have a hand in making that happen. For the time being, however, he was seeing plays with less and less satisfaction. It was gratifying that his one-act play Love and How to Cure It was being staged in London in 1937, directed by Tyrone Guthrie at the Globe Theatre and starring the movie and stage actress Ann Harding, who also played the lead in George Bernard Shaw’s Candida at the Globe. This double bill of Shaw and Wilder marked the first professional production of a Wilder play abroad.71
While he grew ever more convinced that the theater was “the greatest of all the arts,” Wilder believed that “something had gone wrong with it” in his time, and “that it was fulfilling only a small part of its potentialities.”72 He complained to a friend that there were “only about 3 good plays in every five years.”73 As the Depression wore on and as ominous clouds gathered over the political landscape in Europe, Wilder was searching for positives in the theater and in the world around him. To Stein and Toklas in Paris, Wilder wrote from Oklahoma, “The newspapers over here read very threatening about your peace of mind over there.”74 He expressed his concern about the impending war in Europe in a letter to Mabel early in 1937: “The rush to the abyss is visible all over the world.”75
AS OF April 1, 1937, lectures and classes done, Wilder was a free man. He spent April and May working in his study in New Haven, looking after his family, and stepping into his fatherly role one more time. With their mother’s knowledge, he conspired with Amos to fund “legacies” for his sisters that, Thornton said, “Father might have but did not leave them.”76 Apparently Dr. Wilder had left money from his modest estate to his wife and sons, but not to his daughters. Thornton insisted that he should contribute twice as much as Amos to this “legacy” for their sisters, since his brother had a wife and child to support, and he let Amos know that their mother wanted to participate. “Ma is going through protests that she wants to contribute also from her thousand,” Thornton wrote, “but, Lordy, she must keep what was coming to her from so long and money-worried a married life.”77 Before he knew it, however, “Ma got hysterical—generous and disobeying me and behind our back sent off a cheque for $300.00 to Charlotte. . . . So now there’s $300 to be placed for the other two.”78 By this loving subterfuge Isabella and her sons rectified Amos Parker Wilder’s final oversight.
“THE NEW life’s begun. Taught my last class. Delivered my last lecture,” Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer. His new life was “wonderful and alarming,” he said as he “plunged jubilantly into work.”79 He poured his energy into his plays, working simultaneously on three of the manuscripts in progress in his briefcase. “My first play on my new life-plan is almost done,” he wrote Amos about the farce he first called Stranger Things Have Happened and then The Merchant of Yonkers. “Have spliced a brilliant scene from Molière right into the middle of the 1st Act. . . . The whole play is based on the 1st two acts of an Austrian classic—Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen.”80 Then there was The Hell of the Vizier Kabäar, also titled at various times Haroun al-Raschid, The Prince of Baghdad, The Diamond of Baghdad, and Arabian Nights—a play he considered at one point to be better than Our Town.81 He told Amos, “The second play will be about Haroun Al Raschid—in love and in government only the concession of free will to the beloved and the governed can bring any satisfactory rewards.”82
He made steady progress on Homage to P. G. Wodehouse, and on M Marries N, which he renamed Our Village and then Our Town. He was writing that play, he told Amy, “in the style of Happy Journey & Long Xmas Dinner,” and it was “all planned out,” along with “several more” plays.83 At times during the late thirties he also made notes for The Fifty Dollar Play, which would trace the progress and history of a certain sum of money as it changed hands.84
Soon he was ready to share the draft of the first three acts of his farce with discerning listeners, first of all his old fri
end the playwright Ned Sheldon, blind and paralyzed from ankylosing spondylitis, a severe, chronic, crippling form of arthritis that can also affect the eyesight. Sheldon was known not only for his successful career as a dramatist but for the astute advice he generously offered to playwrights and actors. Imprisoned in his body, confined to bed in his penthouse quarters, totally dependent on the care of servants, nurses, and physical therapists, Sheldon received a daily parade of visitors, mainly personages in the theater who came to cheer and bolster him—and went away cheered and bolstered themselves. As Wilder put it in 1948 in the dedication of his novel The Ides of March, Sheldon “though immobile and blind for over twenty years was the dispenser of wisdom, courage, and gaiety to a large number of people.”85 Wilder trusted Sheldon’s theatrical sensibility and his vibrant sense of humor, and Sheldon praised the draft of the play. “Oh, it’s a darlin’ play,” Wilder joked to Woollcott. “And it has all the shades of wit: savage, graceful, grotesque, fanciful, and tender.”86 By the end of May, however, Wilder’s farce had “suddenly gone stale.” He invited some Yale friends to a reading of the play but at the last moment found he just couldn’t do it. Instead he read “the First Acts of Play No#3 and Play No#5, namely ‘Our Town’ and ‘Homage to P. G. Wodehouse.’ ” They were enthusiastically received. Wilder wrote to Woollcott afterward, “I know that Hell is paved with good first acts, but I think I’ll be able to finish ’em.”87