Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  25

  THE VILLAGE AND THE STARS

  These are but the belated gropings to reconstruct what may have taken place when the play first presented itself—the life of a village against the life of the stars.

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  “A Preface for Our Town,” New York Times, February 13, 1938

  The United States and Europe (1930s)

  With his one-act plays in The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act, and his novel Heaven’s My Destination, Wilder had moved deep into an American odyssey—an exploration of American landscapes, characters, and spirit. However, no matter the literal settings of his plays and novels, he habitually worked with a universal palette. In the one-act plays he launched in 1931, Wilder had in effect practiced for the unique staging and substance of Our Town. Some of these plays can be viewed as prototypes, even dress rehearsals for Our Town—employing stage managers, taking liberties with time and space, stripping scenery and plots to a minimum. On the bare stage welcoming curious theatergoers to Our Town in 1937 and 1938 and afterward, Wilder experimented with deceptively simple subjects and themes. The family had become a powerful symbol in his plays and novels—not only the individual family unit but the vast human family interconnected in their local yet universal “villages.” He peopled the stage with American families whose seemingly ordinary lives at once reflected and transcended the place and the era in which they lived. Simultaneously he contemplated the perennial dramas of ordinary life as they played out again and again on a cosmic stage, one person at a time, one place at a time, throughout the ages.

  He would recapitulate this theme in 1957 in a preface to his major plays:

  Every action which has ever taken place—every thought, every emotion—has taken place only once, at one moment in time and place. “I love you,” “I rejoice,” “I suffer,” have been said and felt many billions of times, and never twice the same. Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions. Yet the more one is aware of this individuality in experience (innumerable! innumerable!) the more one becomes attentive to what these disparate moments have in common, to repetitive patterns.1

  His fascination with the patterns in “many billions” of individual lives had, as noted, been born that autumn day in 1920 when, as a student in Rome, he saw a freshly excavated first-century tomb. By candlelight he and his fellow students had examined the “faded paintings” of the Aurelius family and other remnants of their lives that, after nearly two thousand years, were frozen in time under a busy street in the center of modern Rome, with streetcars clattering overhead. Wilder realized in that moment that two thousand centuries later, his own era could be the subject of such curiosity and speculation—the quest to recapture and understand the very “loves and pieties and habits” that he himself had lived and witnessed in his lifetime.

  “For a while in Rome I lived among archeologists, and ever since I find myself occasionally looking at the things about me as an archeologist will look at them a thousand years hence,” he wrote in a preface to Our Town in 1938. “An archeologist’s eyes combine the view of the telescope with the view of the microscope. He reconstructs the very distant with the help of the very small.”2 In his play Wilder was groping, he said, to reconstruct “the life of a village against the life of the stars.”3 This was his creative compass: the juxtaposition of the village and the stars—one town and the cosmos, one person and the galaxy.

  In his fiction and his plays Wilder continually excavated and resurrected universal, time-defying human dramas, and probed the enduring questions: How do we live—survive, surmount, even transcend the struggles implicit in the human condition? And why?4 As he worked on Our Town he reiterated that the fundamental concepts in the play had been forged in large part during those student days in Rome as he hovered on the edges of archaeological excavations in the ancient city, studying the water systems, the pathways, the architecture, and even the stage designs of the ancient Romans—and the repeating patterns of human existence despite differences in cultures, civilizations, and eras. In the twenties, after his discoveries in Rome, Wilder wrote in a manuscript fragment:

  We bend with pitying condescension over past civilizations, over Thebes, Ur and Babylon, and there floats up to us a murmur made up of cries of war, cruelty, pleasure and religious terror. Even as our civilization will some day exhale to its observers the same cries of soldiers, slaves, revellers and suppliants.5

  These exhalations, at once ephemeral and eternal, empowered his work. This fragment also foreshadows the words the Stage Manager speaks in the first act of Our Town:

  Y’know—Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ’em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts . . . and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney—same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real lives of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.6

  With these reflections the Stage Manager confirms the crux of Wilder’s play—and at the same time affirms the historic importance of the theater as a mirror of life in any given time.

  In the 1930s Wilder created twentieth-century incarnations of the Aurelius family in the American family—the Bayards in The Long Christmas Dinner; and then the Harrisons in Pullman Car Hiawatha; and then the Kirbys in The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. Late in the decade Wilder pulled his audience into the theater again to witness, with the help of the Stage Manager, the growing up, marrying, living, and dying of members of the Webb and the Gibbs families in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, their mythical American yet thoroughly universal hometown. In a handwritten note, most likely dating from the sixties, Wilder further explained himself as a dramatist as he defined Emily’s discovery in the last act of Our Town:

  She learns that each life—though it appears to be a repetition among millions—can be felt to be inestimably precious. Though the realization of it is present to us seldom, briefly, and incommunicably. At the moment there are no walls, no chairs, no tables: all is inward. Our true life is in the imagination and in the memory.7

  IN JUNE 1937 Wilder traveled again to the MacDowell Colony for his first sojourn there in five years. Time in “that deep pine-wood is what I need most of all,” he wrote to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. “I have an Arabian Night play-subject that’s a house-afire, and I could only grasp it and devour it in the Green Isolation up there.”8 Gratefully, he settled into the “long hours in the cabin in deep woods,” where he soon had several new plays in “well-advanced stages,” including the one he was still calling “Our Village.” 9 When he was not writing he was reading—finishing “all 925 pages of the unshortened edition of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans,” which Wilder pronounced “the greatest American book since Leaves of Grass.”10

  By this time Wilder had publicly announced more than once that from now on he was going to be a playwright first and foremost. No more novels. Only plays. He gave Woollcott a progress report:

  My darts thrown at perfection are being whittled, feathered and pointed in many tranquil hours in these woods. . . . I always think of Our Village as yours. It is intended to give you pleasure. The Happy Journey is no longer a part of it. The last act in the cemetery will be prodigious, and it will no longer remind you of Spoon River. Nobody tells their life story. In fact, I have received “guidance” to the effect that the dead are no longer interested in the doings on this painful planet.11

  Years of living and writing led Wilder to create Our Town, and he sometimes had little patience when readers quizzed him about the how and why of his work. He believed there were no definitive answers to such questions imposed on the work of an artist.12 He tried to discourage a proposed thesis by Dorothy Ulrich (Troubetzkoy), one of his former students at the University of Chicago, and n
ow a graduate student exploring influences in his novels:

  Lordy! My influences—Saint-Simon, La Bruyère, Proust, Morand—all kinds of things in all kinds of languages and literatures—and in the final count so unimportant. So far-fetched and elusive are they that it would seem as though they were unobtainable and unguessable unless I sat down and made a list of them: page by page and paragraph by paragraph; and I do hate to do that. . . . You are up against an author who hates to look backward at former work, ever to think of it—indifference, boredom and even repudiation have a part in that.13

  Wilder drew from an amalgam of sources as he worked on Our Town—Ibsen and Nestroy, Dante and Molière, Gertrude Stein and Alfred North Whitehead, Alexander Woollcott and Mabel Dodge Luhan, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on the movie screen, his mother and his father, Rome and New Hampshire, Paris and Zurich. Themes in the play, already evident in his earlier work, emerged first from his own thought and spirit, shaped in part by writers whose work he found resonant—Dante, Goethe, Balzac, and Nietzsche among an ever-expanding company of others. He credited The Oxford Book of Regency Verse for helping him give the last act its “ultimate affirmative Ring.”14 But most of all the play emerged from his own vivid imagination and memory.

  Gradually the play evolving as Our Town overshadowed his homage to P. G. Wodehouse and the Arabian Nights and even his farce about a matchmaker and money. He began to focus on the ordinary lives of ordinary people in the mythical village he had created as their habitat. Some events in the plot of Our Town came from his own family life—his brother’s wedding, his father’s illness and death, his and his sisters’ yearnings and joys and disappointments, his mother’s anchoring presence in the family and her own unfulfilled dreams. Fragments of dialogue were sparked by conversations, in person and in letters, with his parents, his brother and sisters, his friends—Stein, Luhan, Colefax, Woollcott, Sheldon, and Freud, among others. (“That’s the way blackbirds make their nests,” Wilder told Sibyl Colefax.)15 Always listening and observing, Wilder found the idioms and cadences of the American vernacular in snatches of conversation on ships and trains; in bars, boardinghouses, shops, university classrooms, and the civic and cultural meeting halls across the country where he gave his lectures; and in the voices of the citizens of Peterborough, New Hampshire, where he had often retreated to work in the summer.

  He was writing Our Town in 1937 against the daunting backdrop of the Depression (one-third of the nation, said FDR in his second inaugural speech, was “ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-nourished,” and unemployment stood at 14.3 percent nationwide) and the expanding conflict in Europe, led by Hitler and Mussolini. As Wilder worked on the play, he went for a second time to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time. He found inspiration in the movies to feed his creative work—not only his choice of an American subject but his concerns over what he saw as the impending decline of Europe. He wrote to Mabel an “amorphous defense of the still-amorphous possibilities of greatness in the American people.”16 He realized that as the Depression and the looming war threatened to fracture the world as they knew it, Americans needed diversion and some kind of hope. He believed that the American art form of the motion picture could help to provide both. “In Austria or France go to see a Ginger-Rogers-Fred-Astaire movie,” Wilder wrote:

  Watch the audience.

  Spell-bound at something terribly uneuropean—all that technical effortless precision; all that radiant youth bursting with sex but not sex-hunting, sex-collecting; and all that allusion to money, but money as fun, the American love of conspicuous waste, not money-to-sit-on, not money-to-frighten-with. And finally when the pair really leap into one of those radiant waltzes the Europeans know in their bones that their day is over.17

  Even in its seeming frivolity, Wilder suggested, this American film was a cultural harbinger of a shift in world influence from Europe to the United States.

  He was reading Alfred North Whitehead during those months, and found Whitehead’s “Christian-Platonic” philosophy provocative. “I think you’d be pained and shocked to hear my views on international affairs,” he wrote Mabel:

  They’d seem to you an optimism too easily arrived at in the light of the daily news; but more and more (under the shadow of Whitehead’s philosophy—Christian—Platonic) I see a long-time, a planetary curve and that I cling to. . . . I have decided that the human race as a whole can be given the benefit of the doubt; and the set-backs of one year and one decade and one century no longer completely obscure the sky. But I hate Hitler and the Spanish rebels.18

  As Wilder the citizen gave his fellow human beings the benefit of the doubt, Our Town was taking deeper root and seeds were being sown for a later play—the one he would call The Skin of Our Teeth.

  “THE FAMILY’S fine,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas from Hamden in the spring of 1937. “Ma loves having two chillun in the house; she darns my socks; listens avidly to all radio news-reports, detective stories and serial dramas. I lie on my stomach on the floor playing solitaire and listen to the concerts.”19 Isabel was at home on Deepwood Drive, in love with a New Haven doctor and hoping for a marriage proposal. She had just finished Let Winter Go, her third novel. According to Thornton, it was “a light novel that may run serially in one of the woman’s glazed-paper magazines and make her an heiress.”20 As the reviews of her novel came in, Wilder proudly shared the good ones with his friends.21 Amos, Catharine, and their baby daughter lived in Newton Center, Massachusetts, where Amos was still teaching at the Andover Newton Theological Seminary. Charlotte, meanwhile, was still writing her poems and her novel, supporting herself by working on the WPA Federal Writers’ Project in New York. Her poems appeared, along with work by Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, and other struggling writers, in American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose & Verse by Members of the Federal Writers’ Project with Sixteen Prints by the Federal Art Project, published in 1937.

  Wilder left Hamden hoping to spend most of the summer of 1937 sequestered at the MacDowell Colony, hard at work on his plays (“June and July would bring real work from me, reluctant writer that I am,” he wrote to Woollcott), but he changed his plans to accept an unexpected and irresistible invitation.22 He was asked to attend the Paris conference of the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle of the League of Nations as the American delegate, substituting for Frederick Paul Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation. The Second General Conference of National Committees for Intellectual Cooperation would take place in Paris July 20–26, with sessions to be led by the philosopher and Symbolist poet Paul Valéry on “The Immediate Future of Letters.” Wilder wrote to Mabel, “This is the first time there has ever been an American delegate and he’ll have to defend the charge that the U.S. is corrupting the world.”23

  Because his round-trip fare would be paid, he planned to stay on in Europe after the conference. “It’s about decided I shall spend eight or nine months in Zurich next year,” he had written to Stein and Toklas that spring. “I’m in no doubt about my country and countrymen being the best there are, but I got to get away from them for a while.”24

  Once the conference was over, Wilder planned to go to Salzburg for the festival, and then settle in Zurich for a few months away from “the whole overinsistent hammering American scene,” and temporary “immersion in old wise tired Europe.”25 As much as anything, he needed to get away from Deepwood Drive and the family he dearly loved in order to find peace and solitude for writing.

  Wilder’s speeches at the 1937 Paris conference marked his first appearance as an American emissary and a spokesperson for American literature and culture.26 When he arrived he was intimidated. “It’s all a little alarming for a provincial little intellectual,” he wrote to Stein. “The stenographic report of our conversations is being published by the League of Nations.”27 He had prepared “about six little speeches” on various topics—and in his typical generous way, gave Stein credit for some of the pivotal ideas he contributed to the co
nference discussion. “Yes, defense of the American’s right to remake himself a language from the fabric of the English language, with a diagram of the difference between the American and English minds. All Gertrude.”28 At the same time he was reading the 1936 edition of H. L. Mencken’s classic, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. In their catalytic hours of conversation over the years, Stein and Wilder shared numerous ideas and theories, and Wilder was careful in his attribution—sometimes verging on overstatement—if he elaborated on her thoughts.

  After the Paris conference Wilder spent two weeks with Stein and Toklas in Bilignin at the house they rented in the country. “It’s lovely here,” he wrote to his mother and Isabel. “Drives, calls on neighboring gentry, walks, Conversation and wonderful meals.”29 That summer Stein begged Thornton to collaborate with her on a novel, and they discussed the idea at length.30 He told Stein and others that he didn’t fully understand her concept of the novel and ultimately said no, and Stein wrote several drafts of Ida A Novel before it was published in 1941.

  Gertrude was “a heady drink of water,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott, but he appreciated her “heroic” laughter and her “sense of enjoyment,” and her ability to talk “like an inspired being.”31 Wilder loved the view from Stein’s terrace—the lush valley in the lap of the hills of Ain, with Mont Blanc etched on the horizon. He prized their lively conversations. That summer he read the manuscript of Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, in which he himself appeared. “You will be enchanted by the description of me in the New Book!” he wrote to his mother and Isabel.32 He devoured the exquisite meals prepared by Alice and worked in her garden every morning, bare shoulders and chest soaking up the sun. “Mama, every morning I garden for Alice,” he wrote. “I take off shirt and undershirt and hoe obstinate weedy paths and I like it and so I’ll do it for you someday.”33