Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  He went on to Salzburg, where he met Sibyl Colefax for the music and a whirlwind of social events they often attended together—the famous writer, fit and dapper at forty, and the patrician widow, still glamorous at sixty-three. They were “such a success” at one party, Wilder reported to Woollcott, “that we were promptly invited for the next night, too . . . musicale and supper, probably the Crown Princess of Italy.”34 But most of all he enjoyed taking walks with Sibyl, and reading parts of his plays in progress to her, welcoming her thoughtful opinions. Their “big social whirl” in Salzburg and their “tranquil country walks” cemented their friendship, and “I love her very much,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott. He especially appreciated her “long generous letters packed with information”:

  Golly, her knowledge of places and pictures and people and her memory. And under it all, the constant pain of her widowhood. And the grueling distasteful hard work of her shop. . . . She’s a trump and I intend to know her and love her all my life.35

  Before her husband died, Sibyl had worked occasionally as an interior decorator to augment their income, but this became a serious business of necessity when she was widowed. In 1938, with young decorator and designer John Fowler, Sibyl founded Colefax & Fowler, an interior decorating company that came to be lauded as the foremost decorating firm in England in the twentieth century.

  IN LATE August, Wilder the writer and social gadfly was superseded by Wilder the older brother when a letter from Isabel reached him in Salzburg. She was heartbroken over her breakup with the man she had hoped to marry. Wilder immediately cabled his sister and mother to come to Europe. Then he wrote a long letter full of brotherly advice: Isabel and their mother should come to Europe, he reiterated. “Would even help my work,” he contended, as if that might persuade Isabel to make the journey.36

  Isabel had felt “pretty sure” she wanted to marry this workaholic surgeon, she said, although she recognized that it would “not be the marriage one plans and dreams of as a girl. It would not be the kind of companionship one would want.” He was “a restrained, even eccentric man,” a “seasoned bachelor” who didn’t send notes or flowers, although now and then he surprised her with a gift. Yet she had believed he loved her “deeply” and needed her, and would marry her as soon as he was less “harassed and worried.”37 Isabel was thirty-seven, eager to be a wife and a mother—and she had been so confident that this would soon happen that she was cleaning the Deepwood Drive house from top to bottom “so that if I step out, everything will be in order here.” She was also excited that her mother had bought herself a car as “part of her plan for getting used to being without me.”38 But by August the relationship was over, and Isabel was bereft.

  Thornton answered her despairing letter by tackling her worries one by one. She was not “old plain and poor,” as she had described herself in her letter. “Don’t overdo that notion that a woman has nothing to say or be or give unless she’s wife-mother-and-home-decorator,” he wrote. “We’re all People, before we’re anything else,” he told her. “People, even before we’re artists. The rôle of being a Person is sufficient to have lived and died for.” There was “lots of” pathology in the whole business, Wilder wrote. The man who broke Isabel’s heart had a “psychic fear of going thru a thing. He’s ill.” But Isabel had her own problems, her brother told her: “From some deep infantile Father-love-and-hate you brought up a lack-of-confidence in that realm that colored the air without your knowing it. . . . Out of these infantile conditionings we make our strengths as well as our weaknesses.” His prescription for her convalescence? “Better take a trip to Europe. There’s plenty of money.”39

  Isabel and Isabella decided to stay in Hamden, however, and Thornton was soon caught up in the Salzburg Festival, living “entirely for pleasure” before settling down to work in Zurich. From Salzburg he wrote to Stein and Toklas about a night of drinking, first at the Mirabell Bar and then, after the bar closed, in the third-class waiting room at the railway station with the novelist Erich Maria Remarque; the German playwright Carl Zuckmayer; a “wonderful German Archbishop” incognito in civilian clothes; Lucy Tal, the wife of Wilder’s German publisher; and “a Swedish street-walker.”40 But soon he was sober and hard at work in Zurich. He planned to spend some time in the mountains at Sils-Maria, he told Gertrude and Alice. “I must face the fact that I shall be very lonely,” he wrote to them, “but there at the least, in terrifying loneliness, Nietzsche sent out his Zarathustra into the world, the time-bomb that took fifty years to explode and then what havoc.”41 Yet he was “very happy” in Zurich, despite the fact that he had “scarcely spoken a word to a human being in over a week.”42

  Gertrude wrote in early September to tell Wilder he had left a vest in Bilignin, and sent him a postcard shortly thereafter to say she was sending it to him via a young writer and college professor who would be passing through Zurich. He was Samuel Steward, twenty-eight, a native of Ohio and the author of a controversial novel entitled Angels on the Bough (1936). Gertrude liked him and hoped Wilder would have time to see him. Because Wilder knew “scarcely anyone in town,” he was eager for company. He left a note at the American Express office in Zurich inviting Steward to visit him at the Carleton-Elite Hotel.43 According to Steward, this “began the casual acquaintance with Thornton Wilder that lasted through the war years and beyond, ending sometime in 1948.”44 Also according to Steward, he and Wilder had sex in Zurich.

  Opinions diverge as to whether a writer’s sex life is a legitimate field for public examination unless it serves as subject matter and/or thematic matter for the artistic work, or unless it has, with the writer’s complicity, emerged into public view as a defining force in the life and work. A very private man who often saw his fame as an intrusion into his personal life, Thornton Wilder seems to have studiously kept to himself the details of his sexual experiences, whether homosexual or heterosexual or both.

  Five years after Wilder’s death, and forty-three years after they met, Sam Steward published his first account of a sexual experience with Wilder, and then included the account in a memoir in 1981.45 Several years later Steward talked about Wilder in interviews that linger in the public record. The surviving documentary evidence seems to give only a partial record of exactly what transpired between the two men, and when, and where, especially since some of Steward’s later recollections do not always coincide with his letters written at the time.

  Letters of the period document the fact that Sam Steward called on Wilder on September 10, 1937—an unexpected stop on the unorthodox literary pilgrimage Steward undertook in what he called the “Magic Summer” of 1937 in his memoir, Chapters from an Autobiography, published in 1981. Steward had begun a correspondence with Gertrude Stein in 1933 when he wrote to notify her of the death of a mutual friend. As their correspondence grew he got the idea of writing to other authors he admired—Thomas Mann, Carl Van Vechten, A. E. Housman, Eugene O’Neill, Sigmund Freud, André Gide, W. B. Yeats, Somerset Maugham, and others. Steward hit on a letter-writing strategy that worked: He commented on the author’s work, and he never asked for a thing—no questions, no autographs, no request for a reply.

  Steward had set out on his unique literary pilgrimage after he heard Hamlin Garland mention in a lecture that he had known Walt Whitman and had actually touched him. Steward said that this “electrified” him.”46 He wanted to touch the man who had touched Whitman, to be physically “linked in” with Whitman. That moment of contact inspired him to write to Lord Alfred Douglas, who had been Oscar Wilde’s lover. Steward was now “linked in to” Whitman by the touch of a hand. Perhaps he could be “linked in to” Oscar Wilde by going to bed with Lord Alfred Douglas, who was then sixty-seven and not especially attractive, Steward mused in his autobiography. Nevertheless, Steward wrote, if he wanted to “link” himself with Oscar Wilde more directly than he was “linked” to Walt Whitman, it had to be done.47 With the help of generous quantities of gin and bitters, Steward accomplished his mission.


  After Steward’s first meeting with Stein and Toklas in France, he headed for the next stop on his “pilgrimage”—his scheduled visit in Switzerland with Thomas Mann. But first, at Stein’s behest, he would deliver Wilder’s errant vest. Steward had met Wilder in 1929 and asked him to autograph a copy of The Angel That Troubled the Waters, but he was sure Wilder would not remember him. He agreed to call on Wilder in Zurich because Stein asked him to deliver the vest, but Wilder was not on the itinerary for Steward’s amorous literary pilgrimage. In fact, Steward’s opinion of Wilder’s work had declined after Michael Gold’s 1930 criticism of The Woman of Andros.

  Steward and Wilder immediately began a “whirlwind of talk” covering a wide range of topics. As Steward reconstructed their visit in Zurich forty-three years later, some of his facts were slightly askew. They spent “six or seven” afternoons and evenings together, Steward wrote in 1980.48 Their letters to Stein and Toklas give a different account, however: “Steward was here two days and a half and he’s a fine fella and it was a pleasure,” Wilder wrote to Stein on September 13, 1937, just after Steward’s departure.49 Steward wrote to Stein and Toklas on September 15, “I did see Thornton in Zürich, and Thornton was charming, and we talked like madmen for two days (because, he said, he hadn’t talked to anyone in English for ten) and anyway, I always like to talk or listen.”50

  According to Steward, that rainy night in Zurich marked the beginning of another “lengthy literary pilgrimage” for him.51 He wrote in his autobiography that Wilder lectured him about religion and about how to handle his homosexuality—among other things, urging him to “study the lives and careers of the great homosexuals from the beginning down to the present day—Leonardo and Michelangelo to Whitman and beyond.” And then, Steward wrote, he and Wilder “climbed into bed together,” Steward “half-drunk” as he said he had to be “in those days to have an encounter.”52

  In what appears to be the only published account of an instance of Wilder’s sexual intimacy, Steward described an inhibited man with a “puritan reluctance” who “could never forthrightly discuss anything sexual,” and for whom “the act itself was quite literally unspeakable.” Nothing happened between them that “could be prosecuted anywhere,” Steward wrote, and “there was never even any kissing.”53 He and Wilder met for sex in Chicago, Stewart wrote in his autobiography. He told others that they also met in Paris. In 1973 Steward sold letters, Christmas greetings, and postcards he had received from Wilder between 1937 and 1948 (an average of slightly more than two items per year), and they were sold in turn to the Beinecke Library at Yale University, repository of the Wilder papers. Wilder’s last extant letter to Steward was written September 14, 1948. Steward published the article about his relationship with Wilder in The Advocate in May 1980, and edited it for inclusion in his Chapters from an Autobiography in 1981.

  In a 1993 interview with the columnist and author Owen Keehnen, Steward, then eighty-five, mused that Wilder “was afraid of sex and unfortunately I was put in the position of outing him but I never did it until after he had died.” Steward did not explain why he was “put in the position” of outing Wilder, but went on to say, “We were lovers in Zurich. He was very secretive about his homosexual inclinations but they were definitely there. We had quite an experience. Thornton always went about having sex as though it were something going on behind his back and he didn’t know anything about it. He was more than a little afraid of it I think.”54

  In his 1980 and 1981 account of events, Steward moved from the subject of sex, which was for Wilder a very private matter, to the subject of literature, which was a very public matter. Steward said that Wilder told him that he “wouldn’t dare criticize anything” Stein wrote, but the Wilder-Stein correspondence and Wilder’s letters and commentary reveal his forthright public and private questions and concerns about her work. According to what Steward wrote forty years later about what Stein and Toklas told him, his need for an umbrella on a rainy night in Zurich inspired Wilder not only to write the third act of Our Town—but to write the entire third act in one morning after their meeting.55 Wilder’s letters, however, contradict this second- or thirdhand observation. They document that act 3 was well under way at least as early as June 1937, before Wilder and Steward met, and that the text of the play, including act 3, would not be completed until December, with more revisions done in January 1938.56 Wilder’s correspondence documents the progress of his play, and it includes a letter he wrote to his mother and Isabel shortly after Steward’s departure from Zurich revealing that he had just finished the second act of Our Town and written the opening of the third.57

  More serious by far, Steward circulated the erroneous story that Wilder stole from novelist Wendell Wilcox the plot for The Ides of March (1948). Wilcox had published short fiction, and his only published novel was Everything Is Quite All Right, which appeared in 1945. Wilder was by then the author of four novels; was the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes, one in fiction; and was one of the best-known American writers in the world. He would generously mentor Wilcox, Steward, and other writers in Chicago and elsewhere. Documents clearly confirm that Wilder did not appropriate a plot from Wendell Wilcox. Wilder told a journalist in later years that he first thought of the plot of The Ides of March while he was in Rome in 1920–21.58 More significantly, Wilder’s correspondence confirms beyond question that he began conceiving and planning the novel as early as 1922, soon after his first trip to Rome. On November 5, 1922—twenty-six years before the novel’s publication and long before Wilder met Steward or Wilcox—Wilder had written to his mother about his idea for a “retelling of the strange relations that bound together Cicero, Clodius and his sister Clodia-Lesbia, Catullus, Julius Caesar and his wife.”59

  As has been noted, Wilder was steeped in Latin language, history, and literature from an early age. He had long been fascinated with Catullus, Caesar, Cleopatra, and company. His strengths and background in Latin and classical literature had led him to study at the American Academy in Rome in 1920–21. In 1931 Wilder had written to the classicist and translator Sir Edward Howard Marsh about his idea for the “conversation-novel” he wanted to write someday, “turning upon the famous profanation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea—with Clodius, Clodia, Catullus, Caesar and Cicero.”60 In 1935 he listed among his projects “The Top of the World—(Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Clodius, Clodia),” and by 1939 he was writing about the novel in his journal, still calling it “The Top of the World.”61

  Steward did not know the facts of the matter in the late 1940s or in 1980 and 1981, when he spread the untruth about Wilder and his novel. Steward also wrote that many of Wilder’s friends in Chicago “disappeared or grew cool or distant” as the story “gained wider circulation,” and that he ended his friendship with Wilder at this time. If Wilder himself or his host of close friends in Chicago or elsewhere made any reference to such an event, that evidence has not been found.62

  Wilder’s longtime friend Glenway Wescott, openly homosexual and the author of novels with homosexual subjects and themes, recalled in 1957 that Steward gave him “an amusing, resentful little account of his having sex with Wilder passingly in Paris some years ago; no one else ever told me any such thing.”63 Other gay men who knew Wilder over the years agreed that whether they believed Wilder was homosexual or heterosexual or bisexual or asexual, his personal life was intensely private, seemingly impervious even to rumor.64 A case can be made that Wilder was bisexual in his emotional affinities, celibate by choice or circumstance more often than not, and private about his sexual relationships. Other than Sam Steward’s posthumous outing of Wilder, no evidence has surfaced to reveal whether he consummated physical relationships with women, especially the women who loved him, or with other men he knew in Rome or New York or Chicago or Paris or Zurich or elsewhere.

  Wilder’s private writings suggest sexual constraint, repression, sublimation, and at times, self-imposed celibacy, but he did not leave definitive answers. It is clear, however, that th
rough his ongoing intellectual, philosophical, and intuitive inquiry, Wilder was keenly attuned to the subliminal forces in life and in art, that he thought deeply over a number of years about sexual implications for art and the artist, and that he affirmed and even celebrated sexual energy as a vital life force that can fire and empower the creative life. He discussed issues of human sexuality with Freud, studied them in the work of Jung and Henri Bergson and others, and reflected on them over the years in passages in his journals. Wilder’s study of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville in the 1950s sheds light on his own evolving views on love and sex and “harmonious sexual adjustments.” (He wrote in his journal on July 20, 1953, for instance, that “the term sublimation is misleading: it implies only a higher transference of the sexual drive.”)65

  In 1940, as he worked on The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder considered plans to insert “jokes about sex” at regular intervals in the play. He was thinking about women in general and actresses in particular as he considered the “vast phenomenon” of sex, writing this revealing passage in his journal while he was “mildly drunk on a quart of Bordeaux”:

  Laughter is not itself sexual, but how closely it is allied to that same censor that holds guard over all the confusions, the humiliations, and (to state the more positive side) the unspoken, unspeakable gratifications of life. . . . Sex is a vast phenomenon, a maw seldom pacified, never circumvented, and perpetually identified by the subconscious mind with the refractory exasperating, not to say unappeasable, character of external circumstance itself. . . .