Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Mrs. Antrobus has Sabina’s number early in act 1: When Sabina chastizes Mrs. Antrobus for not understanding her husband, she whips out a response:

  Oh, Sabina, I know you. When Mr. Antrobus raped you home from your Sabine hills, he did it to insult me. He did it for your pretty face, and to insult me. You were the new wife, weren’t you? For a year or two you lay on your bed all day and polished the nails on your hands and feet. . . . But I knew you wouldn’t last. You didn’t last.41

  In the second act, not long after Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus celebrate their five-thousandth wedding anniversary, it appears that Sabina, alias Miss Fairweather, will have another chance at wifehood. She has successfully alienated George Antrobus’s affections, with considerable collaboration from George. He tells his forbearing wife that he is “moving out of everything. For good.” He is going to marry Miss Fairweather. He will provide generously for the first Mrs. Antrobus and their children. She will come to see that “it’s all for the best.”

  Maggie Antrobus responds with eloquent dignity to this news. “I didn’t marry you because you were perfect,” she says, according to Wilder’s stage direction, “Calmly, almost dreamily.”

  I didn’t even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage.

  Soon she throws into the Atlantic Ocean a bottle containing a letter she has written about “all the things a woman knows”—secrets never before told, she claims. “We’re not what books and plays say we are,” she declares.

  We’re not what advertisements say we are. We’re not in the movies and we’re not on the radio. We’re not what you’re all told and what you think we are: We’re ourselves. And if any man can find one of us he’ll learn why the whole universe was set in motion. And if any man harm any one of us, his soul—the only soul he’s got—had better be at the bottom of that ocean,—and that’s the only way to put it.42

  George Antrobus’s decision to abandon his family for Miss Fairweather coincides with his five-thousandth wedding anniversary—and the occasion in Atlantic City when, as president of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans, he presides over their six-hundred-thousandth anniversary convocation. Antrobus has proclaimed as the year’s watchword for the organization, “Enjoy Yourselves.” Mrs. Antrobus warns that this is “very open to misunderstanding.” Her watchword for the year is “Save the Family.” “It’s held together for over five thousand years,” she says. “Save it!”43

  And what new vision of woman and her role emerges from the catastrophes and cataclysms the human race has survived? Sabina sums it up for Mrs. Antrobus, now reunited with her husband:

  And he’s got such plans for you, Mrs. Antrobus. You’re going to study history and algebra—and so are Gladys [the daughter in the Antrobus family] and I—and philosophy. . . . To hear him talk, seems like he expects you to be a combination, Mrs. Antrobus, of a saint and a college professor, and a dancehall hostess, if you know what I mean.44

  THE PLOT of The Skin of Our Teeth can be condensed to man and woman at war—individually and collectively—with each other, with nature, with time, with social and political forces. It was the most difficult challenge Wilder had ever undertaken as a playwright—“the most ambitious subject I have ever approached,” he wrote in his journal on November 1, 1940. He worked with the heavy knowledge that “the theatric invention must tirelessly transform every fragment of dialogue into a stylization surprising, comic, violent or picturesque. Here lies the increased difficulty over the writing of Our Town where the essence of the play lay in the contrast between the passages of generalization and those of relaxed and homely tone.”45

  Interwoven in The Skin of Our Teeth are strands and threads of sources and allusions, biblical, classical, and contemporary: Moses, Adam and Eve; Cain and Abel; Noah’s ark; Homer, Spinoza, and Plato; Wilder’s talks with Freud and his studies of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. There are autobiographical threads as well: conventions and conventioneers from Wilder’s recent sojourn in Atlantic City; exiles from the war; FDR’s reelection campaign; the Wilder children’s complicated relationship with their father and his paternal expectations of perfection; and snippets of rare but vivid dreams recorded in Wilder’s journals. The play is infused with inchoate, dreamlike, often nightmarish events. As he was working on The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder speculated that “the dream is the true vital norm of our intellectual experience, to which waking is but an incoherent and comparatively ‘uninteresting’ life. Perhaps what art does for us is to remind us of the true absorption of our life, the nightly life in dream.”46

  In this most imaginative of all Wilder’s works, drama or fiction, he manipulates subject and form, time and space, confronting the audience watching the play and the actors performing it with surprises that test and tantalize the imagination. This is a cosmic play, defying time by demolishing its normal constraints and sequence, and then reinventing it. The characters are vibrant figures in an engaging farce—on the surface the pejoratives Wilder described in his journal—but underneath multidimensional, deeply moving figures in a universal drama.

  Undergirding everything in the drama is the war itself. Wilder opened the first two acts of the play with a montage of lantern-slide images and an announcer narrating “News Events of the World”—a world riven by ice, flood, war, and other catastrophes. Wilder was living in such a world, and he devoted the pages of his 1940 journal to his ongoing struggles with his play and his profound anxiety about the war. When he heard from Woollcott that Robert Sherwood, Averell Harriman, and others were forming a Defense of Democracy League, Wilder laid out in his journal detailed suggestions for such a body, based on the assumption that the war would last for five to ten years. “The frightened, the misguided, and the ignorant cannot be directed without a certain element of fear also,” he wrote. “How [can we] employ this without ourselves falling into the Fascist model?”47

  His concern about the incoherence of wartime political thought and discourse was an extension of his preoccupation with the insufficiency of his own thought. On November 1 he wrote that his play seemed “—as is being said of the Italian army in North Africa these days—to have bogged down again, halted in irresolution and a sense of lacking any vitality.” He was revising, reshaping, doing away with “whimsical digressions,” inspecting the manuscript for contrivances or insincerity. He concluded that if he was “bogged down, the reason is not far to seek: my mind’s daily thinking for twenty years has not been of sufficient largeness to prepare me to: rise to the height of this Argument.”48

  As he worked, Wilder was obsessed with the daily papers, reading several editions for the latest news of the war and the U.S. presidential election, ashamed that he sometimes viewed the war and the election “as a game in which one is emotionally immersed, wishing, deploring, pushing, despairing.”49 Yet to his surprise, despite the “omnipresence of the War” and the doubts about his work, Wilder was “singularly happy” in his self-imposed solitary life in Quebec in the autumn of 1940. He endured “periods of great doubt and even despair about accomplishing” his intentions for his play. He put up with the “perpetual vexation of solitude, the choosing of places to eat,” and the inevitable self-consciousness of “forever reappearing alone.” He missed good music, good bookstores, good theater. Countless people who knew or thought they knew Wilder, who valued his company, who admired his brilliant lectures and conversation, would most likely have been stunned to learn that he regarded himself “unfailingly inept at the social relation.” He confessed in his journal:

  It is not only the gaffes that I make—and which worry me far less than they used to; even when things are going well, when a congeniality or friendship is well established as that with Aleck or Bob H. [Hutchins] I am never free of a sense of inadequacy; I feel that I am forever dry when warmth is called for, and warm when
judicious impersonality is called for, and this inadequacy is primarily represented in the spoken word.50

  He confessed to a “mortified condemnation of the quality of my mind particularly in its expression in social life and public life. Hence my loathing for my lectures; hence my eagerness to be gone from any place I have been staying, my carefully concealed delight at goodbyes.” Perceptive as he was about others, Wilder seemed to have little idea about the impression he actually made on friends, colleagues, and strangers who beheld and appreciated the articulate, eloquent, learned man who knew how to listen as well as to speak, elucidate, and entertain. Instead, Wilder wrote, it was “as though I were haunted by the idea that the spoken word should be as precise as the written, and that the encounters of friends should have the character of a work of art.”51

  Unable to live up to the burden of this unrealistic if not neurotic expectation of himself and others, Wilder chose the “luxury” of silence—“that is = absence.” That “luxury” was an escape that could also result in loneliness—the absence of sustained close companionship, the absence of intimacy, perhaps the absence of a lover. It was a “luxury” that carried the risk of repression, denial, isolation. The innate loneliness that was a reality in his personal life was both a necessity and a consequence in his literary life. He was fond of quoting Gertrude Stein’s observation that “the business of living was to make a solitude that wasn’t a loneliness,” and he could keep himself company, as he did in Quebec, through daily pleasures, such as the beauty of a place.52 “I seem to be seeing landscape for the first time; perhaps the silence is a therapeutic element bringing me to the present state of unprecedented well-being in which the eye particularly profits.” He found congenial and stimulating company in books and music, as he always had done, and in his writing. He believed, he wrote in the journal, that “one of the elements” in his happiness that fall was

  the play and that even during these last three days when it seemed to me that what I had written was all wrong, that there would be no “right,” even then my subconscious knew that the play would come out all right. All I can say about that is that through it all my “happiness” has been unshaken, my gratitude for the effects of morning and evening light on the river and its shores no less spontaneous, my mental health no less béat [blessed], and that the work done on the play today has been more encouraging.53

  He gave himself a weeklong change of scenery in November, driving out to Lac Beauport and taking a tiny room at the Manoir Saint-Castin. He was getting so distracted in Quebec by “the glorious sweep” of the St. Lawrence River and its boat life that he could “scarcely continue” with his work. The evergreen forests near Lac Beauport reminded him of Switzerland, and he enjoyed walking along the “wide brimming streams” with their cascading waterfalls. For the first time in his life he actually wanted a camera—an instrument he had always believed before to be “incapable of telling a truth.” He wrote to his mother and Isabel that his play was “wonderful”—that it had “come out of its ‘bogging down’ of last week.” He had rewritten the opening over and over, and believed he had written some “stuff” that would “lift audiences out of their chairs.”54 He had briefly considered having the women’s parts played by men, but had discarded that notion. He had no idea when he would finish The Skin of Our Teeth, for he wanted to get as near to perfection as possible.55

  WILDER CONFESSED to his family that fall that at last he loved his car. “Yes, I just love the perfect motion of it and the quietness and obedience of it.” It even had a name, given to it by a group of admiring little boys, who said, “Oo-oo-ou! The Green Hornet!”56 There were many miles ahead to travel in the Green Hornet, many pages to write and revise before The Skin of Our Teeth would be finished, but Wilder had regained his momentum. He wrote to Woollcott,“The play exceeds a dreamer’s dream.”57 He felt confident enough to read the manuscript to Ned Sheldon in New York. “He thinks well of it,” Wilder told Woollcott, “and has refired my furnace—soon after the new year, I retire into the cell that Archie MacLeish has offered me in the Library of Congress. Until that moment everything is impediment and obstruction.”58

  He was going to Washington in January 1941 for two reasons: The Roosevelts had invited him to attend FDR’s inauguration; and, prompted by the librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish, Secretary of State Cordell Hull had asked Wilder to embark on a three-month-long goodwill visit to South America—Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. “The emphasis is not on lectures,” Wilder said, “but ‘just live there; get to know them and let them get to know you.’ ”59 He would receive no salary, just a modest expense account, but he relished the opportunity to travel to these new countries—especially to pay his first visit to Peru, the setting for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. MacLeish had offered Wilder a “cell” at the library so that he could bone up on South American history, read the work of South American writers, and improve his Spanish. Woollcott shared the news with Lynn Fontanne: “Thornton is being dispatched by the State Department to South America where his name, thanks to ‘The Bridge,’ is the most potent of all American writers,” he wrote, adding that Wilder could already think in Spanish.60

  Wilder joined other inaugural guests at a buffet luncheon at the White House, where he had “protracted conversations with such pillars of our commonwealth” as Dorothy Thompson; Charlie Chaplin, who “lectured us on the Brotherhood of Man,” Wilder said; Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; Nelson Eddy; Felix Frankfurter; Raymond Massey; and Wilder’s old friend Les Glenn and his wife. In 1940 Glenn became the rector of Washington’s Saint John’s Episcopal Church, known as the Church of the Presidents.61 Throughout all the inaugural events, the first lady was a fine hostess, “dizzyingly capable and yet always human in that ocean of people,” Wilder wrote to Sibyl Colefax.62

  He was spending eight hours daily at the Library of Congress, working on the third act of his play and reading the novels and essays of the writers he would meet “in Bogota, Quito, Lima and other cities.” He showed a young Brazilian novelist around Washington, met with Colombian officials, and on his private walks delivered, “not silently either, long lectures in Spanish.”63

  THE WILDER family celebrated some happy news in January 1941 with the announcement of Janet’s engagement to Amherst native Winthrop Saltonstall Dakin, who practiced law in nearby Northampton. “She has already received a large diamond and a string of pearls and bland dreams of parasitism drift through the other Wilders’ minds, like cats dreaming about firesides,” Wilder joked to Woollcott.64 Janet was teaching at Mount Holyoke, and she and “Toby”Dakin began planning a June wedding. Thornton would be home from South America by then, and could give her away, with all the Wilders on hand for the celebration.

  Before his departure Wilder spent time with the family in Hamden, enjoying the long-standing family Sunday tradition—eating ham and eggs for breakfast, reading the newspapers, and writing letters. Then he was off to Washington and New York, planning to sail February 28 for his three-month assignment in South America. Hoping to have lunch with Charlotte a couple of days before he sailed, Wilder went to her Greenwich Village apartment twice but did not find her at home. He left a note on his calling card: “Dear Sharlie—Called at 1:10 1:45 Will stroll around neighborhood and call again at 2:10.”65 When he couldn’t reach his sister, he wrote a note inviting her to go with him February 27 to a private, late-night screening of Orson Welles’s new film, Citizen Kane. Although the movie would not have its New York premiere until May 1, Welles was eager to show it to Wilder before he left the country. “Whether I see you or not, lots of love for the present,” he told his sister, “& see you at Janet’s wedding circa June 15.”66

  Once again Wilder looked forward to a sea voyage and to adventures in new landscapes, filling his briefcase with the manuscript drafts of The Skin of Our Teeth, his journal, and novels and essays by some of the South American writers he would be meeting. He hoped he could speak Spanish “with complete ease.” His budget would be tight, and he pr
edicted that Dwight Dana would “shake his head sadly” as Wilder spent his own money to pay for “dinners for the writers and professors and students and flowers for their wives.”67

  29

  “THE ETERNAL FAMILY”

  The germ of my play, once started, began to collect about it many aspects which had nothing to do with Joyce. It fixed its thoughts on the War and the situation of the eternal family under successive catastrophes.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO ISABEL WILDER,

  December 17, 1942

  The United States and South America (1940s)

  Isabella, Isabel, and Charlotte Wilder planned to meet Thornton at the West Sixteenth Street Pier in New York at noon on February 28, 1941, to see him off on the SS Santa Lucia for his official goodwill tour of South America.1 At the last minute Isabel was ill with a bad cold and stayed at home, and without explanation, Charlotte failed to appear.The Wilders were concerned when she did not join them as planned. Isabella stayed at the pier until Thornton boarded ship, and then went directly to her daughter’s apartment in Greenwich Village. When Charlotte finally answered the door, her worried mother found her in her nightclothes, “bewildered, but quite gentle, and entirely normal most of the time.”2