Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Wilder had spent two years in a fruitless search for subject and form, and now his play emerged full force from the firestorm of war. The world war compelled him to confront the universal sweep of human experience. He was writing a play “in which the protagonist is [a] twenty-thousand-year-old man and whose heroine is [a] twenty-thousand-year old woman and eight thousand years a wife.”12 He tried to describe it to Max Reinhardt: “All I can say of the play is that it is about the sufferings of the human race—including the Ice Age, and the Flood—told in riotous low comedy, with a pathos that never comes to the surface.”13

  Why comedy, for such a tragic subject? Like Joyce, Wilder would have to invent a style that would do justice to the subject. “Happier ages than our own could do it—or some aspects of it—in the purity of the lyric, the morality play, or in the relative simplicity of the Prometheus Bound and the Oedipus,” he wrote in his journal, “but in this century and above all, in these times, there has been added to the difficulty that of avoiding the pathetic, the declamatory, and the grand style. The only remaining possibility is the comic, the grotesque, and the myth as mock-heroic.”14

  This play was in many ways the most difficult creative work he had ever undertaken—but in the process he was discovering essential lessons about his craft. Heretofore he had often begun writing a novel or play only to abandon it when it didn’t go well. Then he had come to recognize that the half-born or stillborn projects in his notebooks had, for the most part, not wasted his creative energy but redirected it. Now he was so committed to this new idea for a play that he felt he could not give up on it even if he was “writing it all wrong.” He wrote in his journal, “It presents problems so vast and a need of inspiration so constant that all I can do is to continue daily to write it anyhow in order to keep unobstructed the channels from the subconscious and to maintain that subconscious in a state of ferment, of brewing it.”15

  Throughout his writing life he had “been convinced of the fact that the subconscious writes our work for us, digests during the night or in its night the demands we make upon it, ceaselessly groping about for the subject’s outlets, tapping at all the possibilities, finding relationship between all the parts to the whole and to one another.”16 He was even more sure of this one night when he was “turning over the play in feverish insomnia,” and suddenly saw the resolution of his dilemma about a particular scene. “A few more such revelations,” he wrote, “and I shall be building a mysticism of the writing process, like Flaubert’s: that the work is not a thing that we make, but an already-made thing which we discover.”17

  He wanted to infuse his play with pure, genuine emotion—no “false pumped-up emotion—or an anemic emotion which ekes out itself in whimsical fancies. In fact, it’s not so much a matter of emotion at all,” he concluded, “as it is of seeing, knowing and telling.” He applied that formula to his play in progress: “In so far as I see, know, and tell that the human race has gone through a long struggle (Act One) it is legitimate that I cast the consideration in the form of modern man and his home; and precisely to avoid false heroics—in this time, of all others—that I cast it in comic vein.” He hoped, he said, that “at least, I bring to it my sense of making the whole stage move and talk, and my characteristic style, which weaves back and forth between the general and the particular.”18

  By mid-July, when Wilder packed up his journal and manuscript and left the MacDowell Colony to return to New Haven, he had finished the first act of The Skin of Our Teeth.19

  “EARLY FALL, I was busy talking and broadcasting and signing manifestos for the British, etc., and for Roosevelt,” Wilder wrote to a friend. “Then I retired from the whole whirlpool and went to Quebec for two months—work, long walks and reading the papers.”20

  “I love it here, but it’s not reciprocated,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott from Quebec in October 1940.21 He had driven his Chrysler to Canada in pursuit of solitude and a “working hermitage” where he could immerse himself in the new play.22 He could see the steep streets of Old Quebec and the glistening St. Lawrence River from the window of his comfortable room in the Château Frontenac—a far cry from the tourist camps where he stopped overnight en route to Canada. He had barely gotten settled, however, when he was summoned to the local post office. “My family carelessly forwarded to me a magazine edited in Zurich,” Wilder explained to Woollcott:

  I was called into the Post Office and the words “printed in Germany” were pointed out to me on the third page. It is being carried up to higher and higher authorities who are looking for cryptograms in the pages of Corona whose only fault is that it’s overprecious. I suspect my rooms of being sifted while I’m out. . . . While I take these endless walks—I presume some poor Intelligence Officer is darting behind trees and burning up shoe leather at my heels.23

  Unknown to Wilder as he joked about being under surveillance in Quebec, the FBI was actually investigating him in earnest in the United States. During the summer of 1940, Wilder had crisscrossed New England, driving his Chrysler from New Haven and Hamden to Woollcott’s Neshobe Island on Lake Bomoseen, Vermont, to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, back to Hamden, and then back to Neshobe. He also drove to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for a stint as the Stage Manager in Our Town, a role he had played more than sixty times by early December 1940.24 “I’m acting in my play again,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas. “The world’s weather has done something to the reception of the play—the last act always was sad—now it’s convulsive—Lordy, I never meant that!”25

  On or about July 19, 1940, as Wilder drove from Hamden to Neshobe Island in Vermont, he apparently stopped to visit friends in Keene, New Hampshire, for his car was spotted at an alleged Austrian “Refugee Camp” located on an estate near Keene—“under suspicion as a possible center of operations for a group of German spies.” An FBI agent investigating the rumor of espionage based his information largely on an interview with “a girl who is employed at the Eskimo stand,” an ice-cream shop and dance pavilion near the estate. The proprietor of this enterprise told the FBI agent a hair-raising tale about the supposed goings-on at the alleged spy camp: The Austrian refugees appeared to the Eskimo-stand staff to be engaged in secret activities led by a man they called the “Captain,” who had supposedly commanded a “U-Boat or a destroyer in the World War” and was now “dominating” the “elderly lady” who owned the estate. Some people who sounded as if they were Germans came and went in cars, but the FBI investigator had obtained only one license number for an automobile observed at the camp—Connecticut 1940 License WW-69. The FBI set out to “ascertain all available registration data” on the car, and to “conduct a preliminary investigation to determine the apparent activities and occupation of the person to whom this car is registered.”26

  The culprit who owned the car was Thornton Niven Wilder of Hamden, Connecticut, who, when he was not possibly consorting with alleged spies, was a man of “excellent reputation” and a World War I veteran, according to a subsequent FBI report filed on January 9, 1941. “His occupation is that of a writer and teacher and he has spent a great deal of his time at a writers’ camp in Vermont. No information received would link subject Wilder with any espionage or subversive activities.”

  Another report issued on December 8, 1940, divulged that Wilder had “lived in Hamden a good many years and has a good reputation, no police record and no credit record.”27 It reported details of his World War I service (including the fact that at that time he was five feet nine inches tall, with blue eyes, dark hair, and a medium complexion). The FBI report further noted that Wilder owned his house at 50 Deepwood Drive, that it had an assessed tax value of $25,000, and that he lived there with his mother and sister. While Wilder’s name was on the Republican voting list of Hamden, he had “boosted for President Roosevelt this last election.” Two cars were registered in his name—the green Chrysler that had gotten him into trouble, and a 1937 Plymouth coupe he had bought for his mother and Isabel.

  The H
amden sources also “disclosed that Wilder has an excellent reputation in Hamden and that it was not felt that he is engaged in any activities inimical to the welfare of this government.”28 Even though Wilder was cleared, the refugee camp was the subject of ongoing surveillance—and the FBI file on the matter continued to bear his name. Furthermore, in December 1941 “a source of known reliability” alerted the FBI that Wilder’s name appeared on a list of supporters of the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties in New Haven. The FBI could not substantiate this information, but that organization and others showing Wilder’s name on mastheads, pamphlets, or petitions were later cited by the U.S. attorney general “as subversive organizations within the purview of Executive Order 9835.”29

  With or without Wilder’s knowledge, his name appeared on the roster of numerous organizations—including the National Committee of the American Committee for Struggle Against War (1933), the American Committee of the American League Against War and Fascism (1935), the Second National Congress of the League of American Writers (1937), the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born (1940), and the National Committee for People’s Rights (1941). In addition, the FBI reported, in 1939 Wilder was one of “36 prominent writers” who wrote to Congress urging support of federal arts projects.30 FBI attention to Wilder, as to many Americans, accelerated.

  For the time being, however, as an active, concerned, highly informed, true-blue American citizen, Wilder was working hard to help friends and friends of friends who were exiles from Austria and Germany. He was “deep in Austrian exiles,” he wrote, trying to find “teaching posts and pension grants etc., etc., for teachers and writers,” including Freud’s nephew-in-law, Dr. Ernst Waldinger, a poet, essayist, and translator. He was also trying to help Max Reinhardt establish a drama school in New York or in a New England college.31

  During those months in 1940 when the FBI was checking out the information provided by the Eskimo-stand employees and various anonymous sources, Wilder was engaged in a number of patriotic activities, including picnicking with Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt at a gathering of writers and artists at Val-Kill Cottage in Hyde Park, New York. The Roosevelts invited them for a cookout and a discussion of world events, and Wilder and others sat around an open fire cooking hamburgers and hot dogs, and talking about vital issues of the day with the first lady and the president. Mrs. Roosevelt was so impressed by the conversation that she invited some of her guests to speak on September 17, 1940, on an NBC radio program sponsored by the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. Participants along with Wilder were Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Katharine Hepburn, the playwrights Elmer Rice and Robert Sherwood, and the mystery writer Rex Stout, among others.

  Even though she had found Wilder’s Our Town sad and depressing, Eleanor Roosevelt greatly admired Wilder and his work. He inspired the country, she said as she introduced him to the radio audience, with his “true picture of all the ‘Our Towns’ which make up our country,” and with his “deep faith in America.” Wilder spoke on the broadcast about the importance of every single vote—the blood that had been shed to make voting possible, and the significance of each vote in the “slow rising tide of curbs against absolute power.” He had briefly doubted the power of democracy early in the Depression, he said, when the country was “in confusion and distress” and the government seemed “sluggish, timid and self-centered.” He had worried that “it takes the administration in a democracy scores of years to move from any one point to any other point.” Then, he said, President Roosevelt stepped in and showed him that “democracy can move and create and represent us all.” Wilder reminded the radio audience that in a “still larger world of confusion and danger,” Americans must vote “not only with the country, but with the whole world in mind.”32 His afternoon with the Roosevelts at Hyde Park, followed by the radio broadcast, and then a long talk with Woollcott, also set Wilder to thinking about “the nature of the Public Mind and how it can be coerced or persuaded,” and about the dangers of propaganda, whether its purposes were good or evil.33

  “Our country is being rent by the coming election,” Wilder wrote to Sybil Colefax September 26, a few days after his picnic with the Roosevelts. “There is something exhilarating about the very violence of the partisanship. I am fanatically for Roosevelt and of course a large part of my feeling is that more than any man in the country he sees all that we can and must do for the Allies and can put the measures into effect, skillfully driving through the oppositions.” He predicted that Roosevelt would win. “The opponents’ charges that he is usurping autocratic powers, that he is ‘conceited’, that he is buying the people’s votes with public works, that he is inciting to class-warfare, that he is corrupting the American character by creating a dole population—each of these can be answered so easily,” Wilder wrote. He thought this opposition to the president came from “deep visceral resentment envy-grudge against the Superior Man. Roosevelt is not a great man, but he’s disinterested, tireless, and so instinctively active and creative that his bravery about it does not look like bravery; free from fanaticism; without spite or retaliation. . . . The great thing is that he’s always doing things and most of them are good.”34

  IN QUEBEC that autumn Wilder worked steadily on his new play, but there were days when he knew he was “writing it all wrong.”35 He believed he had “one advantage,” however: “the dramatic vehicle as surprise. Again by shattering the ossified conventions of the well-made play the characters emerge ipso facto as generalized beings.”36 As he sculpted his female characters in the play—where “a Woman is so quickly All Woman”—Wilder recorded in the journal his “favorite principle that the characters on the stage tend to figure as generalizations, that the stage burns and longs to express a timeless individualized Symbol. The accumulation of fictions—fictions as time, as place, as character—is forever tending to reveal its true truth: man, woman, time, place.” He reflected that “the operation of such an activity must be recognized: when man and woman are regarded in their absolute character that character is pejorative: man is absurd; woman is sex.”37

  It was no accident, he noted, “that since the beginning of the theatre the actress has been regarded as the courtesan.” His Perichole in The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a classic demonstration of that historical fact. Behind his journal reflections on women in the theater, there is a glimpse of the psychic history of a forty-three-year-old bachelor who had been badly hurt by a mysterious lover some two decades earlier, and who had retreated into himself, despite his loving friendships with numerous women—many of them unavailable because they were married, or in other relationships, or a generation older, or a continent away. He wrote in his journal:

  Woman lives in our minds under two aspects: as the untouchable, the revered, surrounded by taboos (and a taboo is a provocation-plus-veto); and as the accessible, even—in spite of the mask of decorum and dignity-indignity—inviting. To maintain the first of these two roles all the buttresses of society and custom are necessary: the marriage institution, the prestige of virtue, the law, and custom. A woman on the stage is bereft of these safeguards. The exhibition of her bare face in mixed society, for money, under repetition, speaking words not her own, is sufficient. But far more powerfully is she delivered into the hands, into the thought-impulse life, of the audience by the fact that she is on the stage—that realm of accumulated fictions—as Woman, as prey, victim, partner and connivance—that is, as bird-of-prey, hence attacker,—and as willing victim, that is piège [trap]. Under those bright lights, on that timeless platform, all the modesty of demeanor in the world cannot convince us that this is not our hereditary ghost, the haunter of our nervous system, the fiend-enemy [or friend-enemy? Wilder’s writing is murky here] of our dreams and appetites.38

  Private man that he was, Wilder kept to himself his own hereditary ghosts, his dreams and appetites, making his disclosures—if he disclosed anything at all—in his novels, plays, and essays. He would revisit the theme of
women with and without “safeguards” from another angle in fiction many years later in Theophilus North (1973). In that instance Theophilus has a conversation with Sigmund Freud about a man who “in the presence of ‘ladies’ and of genteel well-brought up girls . . . is shy and tongue-tied, he is scarcely able to raise his eyes from the ground; but in the presence of servant girls and barmaids and what they are calling ‘emancipated women’ he is all boldness and impudence.” Freud pointed out the “relation of the problem to the Oedipus complex and to the incest-tabu under which ‘respectable’ women are associated with a man’s mother and sisters—‘out of bounds.’ ”39

  Wilder created conventional women—traditional wives, mothers, and daughters—in Our Town, and the infectiously unconventional Dolly Levi in The Merchant of Yonkers, although Dolly was as eager as the next woman of her era for a man to support her financially. The women in The Skin of Our Teeth, foreshadowed in Wilder’s journal, are far more complex, however. Just as the play breaks the mold of traditional theater, Mrs. Antrobus and Sabina step out of the gender stereotypes and turn them upside down. First, however, they and their creator tease the audience. On first meeting, Mrs. Antrobus is the traditional wife, “the charming and gracious president of the Excelsior Mothers’ Club.” She is “an excellent needlewoman” and, like her husband, an inventor, although on a different scale. While he invents the alphabet and the wheel, she invents the apron, the hem, the gore, the gusset, and “the novelty of the year,—frying in oil.” Most important, over thousands of years she keeps the home going.

  Sabina, the maid in the Antrobus household, is, also on first meeting, the standard unconventional woman. In fact, she is the traditional fallen woman—a would-be actress, working as a maid as she waits for better times in the theater, not averse to seducing another woman’s husband. She takes on roles an audience would expect of an actress, the ones Wilder described in his journal—woman as “prey, victim, partner and connivance—that is, as bird-of-prey, hence attacker,—and as willing victim, that is piège.” Sabina plays several parts in the play: a reluctant servant; a beauty queen (Miss Fairweather, Miss Atlantic City of 1942); a siren and seductress as she seduces George Antrobus; a Napoleonic War camp follower—“la fille du régiment.”40