Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  He made “friends-til-death” everywhere he went. When a copy of the movie of Our Town was discovered in “far-off Cartagena” it was “air-posted” to Bogotá, where Wilder and thirty friends watched the film at 11:30 one night in early April. “I spoke. They spoke. We separated at 1:30 with embraces and tears and promises of return,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott.33 In a letter to Ruth Gordon he described the landscapes and terrain: “Everywhere mighty peaks . . . eternal snow . . . Cotopaxi . . . Chinborazo . . . El Misti.” In Colombia, a country split by great mountain ranges, “you visit the other cities either in an hour by plane, or in a month by donkey back.” In Peru, which he had visited in his imagination in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, he saw, instead of foot travelers on a bridge, “a handful of Spaniards or almost Spaniards driving Rolls Royces through a myriad Indians.”34 He wrote to Stein and Toklas that he wished the Inca had won.35 He pronounced Ecuador the “most beautiful country in the world.”36

  As the journey came to an end, Wilder believed he had “done pretty well” what the State Department had sent him to do. He had lectured in English and in Spanish, given radio interviews, and met people from all walks of life. Two of the writers he met along the way dedicated books to Wilder—the Colombian novelist Fernando González Ochoa and the Brazilian author Erico Verissimo. “I have been made an honorary member of the chief ‘cultural’ society in Quito [the Sociedad Jurídico-Literaria], and am first names with all the poets and novelists in sight,” he wrote Stein and Toklas.37 He hoped that his success in South America would lead to a similar assignment in Europe.38

  At the outset Wilder had made it clear to the sponsors of his trip that he would not write about it. “Writing’s only fun when you can tell your truth,” he told Ruth Gordon, “and my truth about these countries is winning, appealing, complex, aching, frustrated, hopeful and dejected.” Nevertheless Wilder wound up writing twenty-one pages advocating measures for better cultural understanding and attacking “the majority of the devices which they [the State Department] are employing as propaganda.”39 He wrote to Stein, “It was from you I learned that no souls are won by flattery, argumentation or coërcion; that description paints no pictures and that purity is the only propaganda.”40 He might also have given his own ideas credit, for his 1940 journal documents his ongoing ruminations about the dynamics of “Propaganda and Anti-Propaganda.”41

  Wilder’s densely packed schedule in the fall of 1940 and the spring of 1941 apparently accounts for the fact that he stopped writing in his journal in Canada in November 1940 and did not resume until May 23, 1941, in Peru. That day he wrote a “Sketch for a Portrait of Tia Bates”—“for forty years the famous, kind, roaring, strongwilled, childhearted mistress of the best inn on the west coast of South America.” Wilder called her “tía,” Spanish for “aunt,” but her first name was Anna. Her husband was a mining engineer, “and she could tell wild stories of gaiety and dangers of the ‘Wild-West’ days of early Bolivia and Peru.” She was reported to have “adopted and settled in life” scores, even hundreds of “children abandoned or orphaned by unfortunate gringos; to have ‘set right’ financially and morally a host of shipwrecked persons; to have refused payment from a large number of her guests. The Truth is better.”42 Wilder stored Anna Bates away securely in his journal—the only person he encountered in all his travels in South America to merit such attention—and he filed her in his memory. Twenty years later he would pull her out into the light of day, name her Mrs. Wickersham, make her the proprietor of the best hotel in South America, and set her down in his novel The Eighth Day.

  The last journal passage Wilder had written in November 1940 was titled “On Happy Endings, and the Pessimist.” There, thinking about his play, and the year, he had contemplated the catastrophes of nature, the preponderant “dark” character of human experience, the “pessimism” in Christianity, and the omnipresent knowledge of the brevity of life and the inevitability of death. In that context Wilder found it interesting, he declared, that there are “no great works of literature that assert this pessimism.”43 If there could be optimism and a happy ending in his play about “the War and the situation of the eternal family under successive catastrophes,” he was determined to find it and express it.44

  BY EARLY June he was at home in Hamden, immediately caught up in the efforts to understand and treat Charlotte’s condition. To Thornton fell the sobering legal responsibility of signing commitment papers in case his sister would not voluntarily make the recommended move to the Payne Whitney hospital in White Plains—although she agreed to make the change and was moved to Westchester. By this time, Isabella told Amos, Charlotte “is not writing to anybody anymore and no doubt is blaming the family for her detention.”45 She seemed to adjust well enough to her new surroundings, however.46 The hospital director reported that if Charlotte continued to cooperate, she would soon be moved to a convalescent wing and “be able to have her typewriter and papers as she so longs to do.”47

  Charlotte periodically underwent standard electric shock therapy, which worked briefly but “did not hold,” and insulin shock therapy, which was not effective.48 She wrote to her mother after one electric shock treatment that she was greatly improved. “If it is sustained I am on the road to recovery and we all certainly hope it is,” Charlotte wrote, adding that she was “shocked” at the expense of her long stay in the hospital. “I can’t bear to think how big it must be,” Charlotte told her mother,

  and however slow I shall have to be to return it, shall always consider it my debt, and pay back in installments. Also I must insure vacations and more conventional living when I next go to New York. I shall put that first—building a career as editorial assistant is something I am experienced in by now—and should charge well for it. I won’t ever again go as bohemian as I did; and I wouldn’t have if I dreamed it would run me into this charge on the family.49

  By this time, however, her doctors believed that “Charlotte would eventually recover but would never be able to live on her own again or do a regular responsible job.”50

  ONCE THORNTON had done all he could to help arrange Charlotte’s treatment for the coming months, and to relieve his mother and Isabel from some of their anxiety and stress, he had to pack his bags and his briefcase in the Green Hornet and head west to keep his commitment to teach ten weeks of summer classes at the University of Chicago—and to try to get back to work on The Skin of Our Teeth. He would live in the apartment he had rented before, and earn four thousand dollars for the summer’s teaching. Every dollar was welcome now that Charlotte’s medical expenses were mounting, with no end in sight. Now there was also a pressing financial imperative to finish his play and get it into production.

  In Chicago the academic work was intense, the hours were long, and Wilder felt he was teaching “worse and worse.” He got into his car on hot summer weekends and drove to Michigan or Wisconsin in search of a cool, quiet place to work on the third act of The Skin of Our Teeth. “It is hard to sit in remote hotel rooms, the perspiration rolling down one’s naked sides, and write pages of world-embracing gaiety,” he complained in a letter to Stein and Toklas. During the school week Wilder was up at six, preparing to teach his classes from ten until one—Homer, Sophocles, Dante, and Don Quixote, Part One. Then he took an afternoon nap. In the evenings he dined with the Hutchinses or drove uptown to “get a good dinner and get the least bit drunk.” Then it was another hour of work and early to bed. Two afternoons weekly he held office hours, “crowded with all Chicago’s hall-bedroom poets, waiting their turn as in a dentist’s waiting room.”51 In late July he hosted a spaghetti supper in his apartment for the “Chicago Chapter of the Society of the Friends of Gertrude Stein,” as he described it in a letter to Stein. Present were Wendell Wilcox and his wife; the painter Gertrude Abercrombie and her husband, Robert Livingston; the writer and teacher Gladys Campbell; and Sam Steward.52 By then Wilder was exhausted from teaching, and from weekends devoted to the third act of The Skin of Our Teeth.


  Wilder had somehow managed to set aside his animosity toward Jed Harris by this time, and had shown him the first two acts of his new play, in hopes that Harris would direct it. Despite the history of hard feelings associated with the production of Our Town, Wilder had no doubt that Harris was the director most likely to do justice to his innovative drama. “Jed Harris has begun casting the new play The Skin of Our Teeth even before the last act is finished,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas from Chicago on July 28.53

  Wilder still counted University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins among his closest friends and one of the greatest influences in his life. Nevertheless Wilder was distressed by Hutchins’s very public anti-interventionist position on the war, believing it was “badly argued” and “deeply sentimental.” After Hutchins made an NBC radio address titled “America and the War” in January 1941, Wilder had conveyed his disagreement directly in a letter to Hutchins: “As I see the matter of our relation to the War I hold exactly opposite views . . . but I hold my tongue, listen with unprejudiced mind to all views, eagerly accord others the reasoned statement of their positions, and continue to cultivate my own garden.”54 He concluded, “Let the world ail. . . . Til the last bomb I shall unpenitently hold that the masterpieces of literature are the highest concretions of life and that nothing in the world has priority over the conditions of friendship.”55

  As the year wore on Hutchins got “a good deal of unpleasant notoriety” for his views, which he would change only after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.56 Wilder had a great deal of sympathy for the private “war” Hutchins had been going through, and tried to befriend both Hutchins and his wife as their marriage was clearly unraveling. “I summarize it by saying that Maude’s going crazy and in such a way that one is torn between pitying her for a desperately sick mind and hating her for a vulgar pretentious tiresome goose,” Wilder had written to Stein and Toklas. “Such dances as she leads Bob, with tantrums, caprices, changes of mind and talk, talk, talk. . . . And the effect of it on the two daughters!”57

  DURING THAT summer in Chicago, Wilder decided he should live in New Haven during the coming fall. The State Department was already pressing him to go on a goodwill tour of Argentina, but he resisted. With any luck his play would be finished and in rehearsals by fall, and he could spend intervals in New York as necessary. But the rest of the time he wanted to be close to the family as they kept an anxious vigil over Charlotte. They still hoped she would be well enough in a few months to come home to Deepwood Drive.

  “I have a good mind to move into my study and release my bedroom to our enlargening family. What do you think?” Thornton wrote to his mother. “Yes, ma’am. There’ll be poaching of eggs in your kitchen at 6:15 a.m. but I’ll clean up so you’ll not know anyone’s been there. If Sharlie’s home by that time, we’ll find diversions for her.”58

  For decades the resilient, resourceful Wilders had survived any number of catastrophes. With imagination, fortitude, and devotion to each other, they had managed over many years to withstand extended separations, Dr. Wilder’s illness and death, and the perennial anxiety about money. But Charlotte’s illness was a crisis beyond their capacity to resolve. No one had the power to make Charlotte well again, and she would live most of the remaining years of her long life in psychiatric institutions.

  Thornton was now solely responsible for supporting his mother, Isabel, and Charlotte. For the rest of his life he worked to sustain his family and to put aside money in trusts for Charlotte and for Isabel that would provide for them even after his own death. Reams of medical, financial, and legal records document the long, hard journey of Charlotte’s lifetime of illness, and the family’s unflagging efforts to provide the care and support she needed. For nearly forty years, until her death in 1980, family members paid Charlotte visits when her doctors allowed them to; tried to facilitate her independence; wrote her affectionate letters; bought her clothes, typewriters, and television sets; took her home for birthdays, holidays, and vacations; and secured the best treatment and the best doctors in the best institutions. Together the family formed a compassionate circle around their Sharlie, even when she was unaware or, as she often was, bitterly resentful and difficult. For the Wilders this was simply what family did—the eternal family, bound by blood and history, by love and pain.

  WILDER THE cultural emissary could not resist an invitation to join John Dos Passos, best known then for his USA trilogy, in serving as the two American delegates to the 17th International Congress of PEN in London in September 1941. (This international association of writers was originally called Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, but had expanded over its twenty years of existence to include dramatists and writers in other genres.) When Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish realized that he himself could not attend the conference, he had recommended Wilder, writing, “No one can speak for American writers with more authority and understanding than Thornton Wilder.”59

  He was eager to make the journey, not only because of the congress, which would consider the theme “Literature and the World after the War,” but because he could witness the impact of the war firsthand. He would be in London for three weeks, spending time with Sibyl Colefax and other friends, and would gain a graphic understanding of the wartime perils of daily life and nightly blackouts in London. He had spent “four days in Washington and NY wading through bolts of red-tape,” he wrote Stein and Toklas. He had “begged and hammered” the State Department for a visa for France without success, and was terribly disappointed not to be able to see them.60

  He was a highly visible American abroad that fall. As a speaker at and delegate to the PEN congress, he wound up as one of four international authors appointed to the organization’s presidential committee, along with H. G. Wells, Denis Saurat of France, and Hu Shih of China. Wilder served on the committee until 1947. At the 1941 congress, along with Rebecca West and E. M. Forster, he opposed the British author Storm Jameson’s proposal that during the war, PEN members devote themselves to writing Allied propaganda. Wilder had expressed in his journal his strong aversion to writing propaganda rather than art, believing that pure art was a far more powerful force than propaganda. He articulated his convictions persuasively in London. His voice was also heard on BBC broadcasts, at meetings in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and at a luncheon in his honor given by the English-Speaking Union in London.

  “I saw plenty,” Wilder wrote to Bob and Maude Hutchins. “Brickdust heaps and Achilles-airmen reserved for death; old working women bombed out of three successive homes and duchesses in becoming uniforms.”61 From Bristol he wrote graphic accounts to Woollcott:

  The nights of fury brought wide destruction. There is no stretch of ruin as large as you will see in Moorgate, north of St. Paul’s, London. But there are whole blocks of ploughed brick and riven iron. Halves of great warehouses from which all the interiors have been burned out and which resemble, with their regular rows of windows, a Roman viaduct, or the baths of Caracalla.

  Wilder marveled at the “resilience of the city” and the “orderliness that the British nature can impose even on a ruin, and the distinctness with which a store or hotel or church spared can go about its normal business next to a yawning edentate hole.”62

  He welcomed his time with Sibyl and his visit with his aunt Charlotte, who was in London training YWCA workers for wartime work with refugees, especially women and children. Charlotte, who had served as World General Secretary of the YWCA from 1920 until 1935, was still active in the organization as a teacher and speaker, and toured the United States speaking on the role of the YWCA during the war. “Can silk stockings be assembled for Aunt Charlotte and Sibyl?” Thornton had asked his mother once he knew he would be making the trip to England, and it may be assumed that if they could be, they were.63 He would also have shared with his aunt Charlotte the full details of her namesake’s illness.

  After Wilder’s return from England and Scotland, Rex Stout interviewed him about his impressions of wartime England and Scotland o
n “Speaking of Liberty,” an NBC radio program broadcast on October 30. Wilder reported that the war was “being waged directly against every man, woman, and child.” He observed: “As a result, everyone is filled with their resistance and their resolve. It gives new meaning and new weight to everything they do.” He could see that much of the blitz and the bombing was directed at the civilian population rather than at military targets. He was profoundly moved by the “powerful sense of community responsibility, the responsibility of each individual to his neighbor,” which he called “the finest thing a democracy can show.” He concluded that “the Nazi spirit with its contempt for the human being as anything else but a tool has clarified for all of us just what a democracy is. A democracy has greater things to do than to organize itself towards a total war. But when it sees itself threatened with extinction, it can do that too.”64

  In December 1941 the Yale Review published “After a Visit to England,” Wilder’s account of his journey. He paid particular tribute to the “total magnificent achievement of civilian defense in Britain under the unheard-of conditions of the air raid,” and the “unity and resolution exemplified in the self-imposed restraint and the co-operation of all citizens in the emergency.” He observed that the British made it clear that what the Germans “effected, first with rhetorical oratory, and finally with threats and coercion, a democracy can achieve with composure and free will.”65

  THE JAPANESE attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m. local time on December 7, 1941, transformed allegiances, politics, and policies around the world, in a fiery instant sweeping away the opposition of anti-interventionists and galvanizing the American war effort. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Wilder joined the multitudes who decided to volunteer to go to war. Before the attack on Pearl Harbor, American men twenty-one to thirty-one years of age were being drafted. Beginning on February 16, 1942, however, men from twenty up to forty-four were required to register for the draft and were eligible for active service as needed. On April 27, 1942, men forty-five to sixty-four had to register, although they were not liable for military service. Wilder was eager to serve, and he would turn forty-five on April 17, 1942, ten days before his eligibility for active duty expired. He was determined to enlist before then, and he swore he would not be content to write propaganda or to sit in an office in some safe place. He wanted active overseas duty, and he believed his “first command” would be to “learn the Japanese language.”66