Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  At the time of their attack on Wilder and his play, however, Campbell and Robinson did not have a publisher for their proposed key to Finnegans Wake, having been turned down by Benjamin W. Huebsch, who had published the first American edition of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1916. Huebsch was a pioneer in publishing the work of modernists in the United States, working as an independent publisher before joining Viking Press in 1925. In June 1940 Wilder had written to Huebsch that he and Edmund Wilson were conferring on the “knottier problems of Finnegans Wake,” and that some of them were “mighty dirty.”77 In his reply to Wilder, Huebsch mentioned that Campbell and Robinson had submitted some “good” preliminary material for a proposed key to Joyce’s novel, but that it had been turned down. If Wilder—or Wilder and Wilson—should decide to write about some of their discoveries in Finnegans Wake, (“including the ‘mighty dirty’ ones”), Huebesch said he would be interested.78

  In 1942, working on their proposed key to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Campbell and Robinson attacked Wilder’s play. Without using the term “plagiarism,” they insinuated that Wilder was guilty of it, and that he had appropriated his play from Joyce’s novel. It was no secret that Wilder was studying Finnegans Wake. His tribute on the occasion of Joyce’s death in 1941 had been published in Poetry that March, and his commentary on Joyce and myth-theme in literature would surely have caught Campbell’s attention.

  The ensuing brouhaha drew welcome publicity for Campbell and Robinson and their proposed book on Joyce, and to the Saturday Review, which was trying to build circulation (then about twenty thousand) under the aegis of its founder, Henry Seidel Canby, one of Wilder’s Yale professors, and its new chief editor, Norman Cousins. A long, heated exchange of letters to the editor ensued, most of them defending Wilder. This brought more publicity for The Skin of Our Teeth but some unwelcome notoriety for Wilder, who, on his lawyer’s advice, declined public comment, other than to suggest that people read Joyce’s novel and make up their own minds.79 Perhaps the most spirited defense of Wilder came from Bennett Cerf in “Trade Winds” in the Saturday Review in January 1943: Quoting the opening sentences of Joyce’s novel, Cerf declared that it was “utterly incomprehensible to ninety-nine percent of the literate public,” and that “anybody who can turn that sort of thing into a smash hit on Broadway is entitled to everything he can get.”80

  In his few free hours after his military duties, in response to a telephone request from the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, Wilder drafted a letter documenting his response to the Campbell-Robinson attack. He never mailed the letter, but fortunately it survived among his legal papers, for it provides invaluable insight about how Finnegans Wake did and did not figure in Wilder’s creation of The Skin of Our Teeth. “At the time that I was absorbed in deciphering Joyce’s novel the idea came to me that one aspect of it might be expressed in drama,” Wilder wrote:

  the method of representing mankind’s long history through superimposing different epochs of time simultaneously. I even made sketches employing Joyce’s characters and locale, but soon abandoned the project. The slight element of plot in the novel is so dimly glimpsed amid the distortions of nightmare and the polyglot of distortions of language that any possibility of dramatization is out of the question. The notion of a play about mankind and the family viewed through several simultaneous layers of time, however, persisted and began to surround itself with many inventions of my own. If one’s subject is man and the family considered historically, the element of myth inevitably presents itself. It is not necessary to go to Joyce’s novel to find the motive of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Lilith, and Noah.81

  Wilder went on to say that he had received from Joyce’s novel “the idea of presenting ancient man as an ever-present double to modern man,” but that the “four fundamental aspects” of Finnegans Wake were not to his purpose, nor were they present in his play. Furthermore, he wrote, “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.” Then, echoing his conviction that a literary work often determines its own form, he said, “But principally the play moved into its own independent existence through its insistence on being theatre. . . . I can think of no novel in all literature that is farther removed from theatre than ‘Finnegans Wake.’ ”82

  Wilder’s unsent letter offered a compelling rebuttal of Campbell and Robinson’s contentions about his alleged pilfering from Joyce’s novel. For instance:

  In the most wonderful chapter in the novel, Anna Livia Plurabelle, river and woman, looks for a match to search for some peat to warm her husband’s supper. The authors of the article quote this passage and tell your readers it resembles Mrs. Antrobus and Sabina asking for fuel to warm the household against the approaching glacier. By such devices your authors could derive “Junior Miss” from “Lady Chatterly’s [sic] Lover.” The ant-like industry of pedants, collecting isolated fragments, has mistaken the nature of literary influence since the first critics arose to regard books as a branch of merchandise instead of as an expression of energy.83

  Wilder never did mail his letter, and the controversy eventually died down, but the charges lingered in some academic and critical circles for several years, besmirching Wilder’s literary reputation in some of those venues. In 1943 the influential drama critic George Jean Nathan (who, with H. L. Mencken, founded and edited the American Mercury) persuaded his fellow critics that because of the charges brought against Wilder’s play, and because Wilder had offered no public defense, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play for 1942–43 should go to Sidney Kingsley for The Patriots. Tallulah “Sabina” Bankhead expressed her opinion on the matter a decade later, noting that “Padraic Colum, the Irish critic and friend of Joyce, said Joyce had mined Finnegans Wake from the works of the Spaniard, Lope de Vega, one of the most prolific dramatists of all time. Nathan’s charge was as ridiculous as it would be to denounce Shakespeare because he found some of his material in Hollingshead’s Chronicles and Plutarch. It’s my guess Wilder is more familiar with De Vega than is Nathan with Joyce.”84 Unlike the New York Drama Critics Circle, the Pulitzer Prize committee was undeterred by the Saturday Review flap and awarded Wilder and The Skin of Our Teeth the Pulitzer in drama in 1943.

  In a preface to an edition of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker in 1957, Wilder wrote that Skin was “deeply indebted to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake,” and went on to say, “I should be very happy if, in the future, some author should feel similarly indebted to any work of mine. Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs.”85

  Wilder had alluded to that torch race in 1940 in a playful letter to playwright and screenwriter Zoë Akins, telling her about his “thefts” from Molière and Francis Bacon in The Merchant of Yonkers. “I’m like a woman I heard about who was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting,” Wilder wrote. “Her defense was ‘I only steal from the best department stores, and they don’t miss it.’ ”86

  31

  “WARTIME”

  Entering the Army in wartime is like getting married: only the insecure feel called upon to give the reasons for their decision.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS,

  June 16, 1942

  The United States, North Africa, and Italy (1940s)

  At Hamilton Field as the intelligence or planning officer at various times for the 324th, 327th, 328th, and 329th Fighter Squadrons, Captain Wilder had bonded with his men, especially the fighter pilots who were assigned not only to defend San Francisco Bay but also to train for overseas battle. Wilder soon discovered that wartime casualties could hit hard close to home. He happened to be Officer of the Day when “everything happened that can tax the resources of an Officer of the Day,” he wrote to his mother: a major general arrived at the post unexpectedly; an officer accidentally shot
another officer (“fortunately not badly”) while cleaning his gun; and, worst of all, one of the pilots in Wilder’s squadron crashed to his death on a training mission six miles north of Hamilton Field. It was Wilder’s job to go to the scene of the accident to help investigate the tragedy.1

  He had written to Amy Wertheimer that fall, “My writing life has been set aside for the duration, and very willingly,” a message he had shared with other friends and associates, as well as with family.2 But he was “aching to get back to my Fighter Group, and to hell with military bureaucracy,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott December 8, 1942. At that time he was ordered to serve on a team inspecting Air Force bases and operations all over the United States, and in twenty days, Wilder traveled on military business to “Spokane, Tampa, Los Angeles, Fort Worth and many other places,” he wrote. “Often grounded by bad weather but never by priorities.” 3 While he bristled with impatience at the assignment, he acknowledged that he “should be grateful for having seen the U.S. once more, though once over lightly.”4 Wilder took pride in doing his job well—so much so that he had been crestfallen the day he received his first U, for “unsatisfactory,” on a written test. “I went out with some other U’s and got doleful-drunk,” he reported to Woollcott.5

  By December he was stationed in Washington and assigned “extra chores”—writing a chapter of a training manual—and other jobs he was not at liberty to describe in detail, but “so far outside the type of any writing I have ever done that I think (in spite of every effort of my own) I won’t be assigned any more,” he wrote to his mother on January 1, 1943. By then Wilder was careworn, not only from work, but from concern over the family. With Isabel often in New York preoccupied with The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton worried that his mother was alone so much of the time. “This d——d war and that damned play have blown some solitary hours through Deepwood Drive,” he wrote to her. “Let’s hope that the former is short and the latter’s long.”6

  During the fall his mother had been very ill but had refused to see a doctor. He had to “get administrative” about family affairs, he scolded her roundly in a letter: “I still shake my head helplessly when I think of your illness. . . . I suspect that you should not only have called a doctor, but ordered yourself firmly to a hospital as well. I share with you the delusion that if you don’t recognize illness it won’t increase, but we’re both wrong and we can both punish ourselves needlessly and punish those about us by holding to any such nonsense.”7

  His mother was not the only person in his life who could be heedless of personal health. Aleck Woollcott, his longtime friend, confidant, and champion, had suffered multiple heart attacks in the past two years and had been in and out of hospitals. He underwent major heart surgery in 1942, but despite cautions from his doctor, Woollcott insisted on resuming a schedule that by his own acknowledgment would overtax five or ten men. He had barely convalesced before he was traveling; lecturing; doing radio broadcasts; writing magazine articles about, among other topics, The Skin of Our Teeth; and editing As You Were, a “portable library of American prose and poetry intended for the nourishment and entertainment of men in the armed forces and the merchant marine.”8 He wanted to include Wilder’s Happy Journey, along with the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and excerpts from the work of Mark Twain, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Oliver Wendell Holmes, O. Henry, Dorothy Parker, and others.9

  During what proved to be the last month of his life, Woollcott went to the Saturday matinee of The Skin of Our Teeth, and was disappointed to find an understudy standing in for Florence Reed, who was very ill. He was afraid to go backstage to inquire about Reed, Woollcott wrote to Wilder, “because of Tallulah who played the first act like a female impersonator.”10 On Saturday, January 23, just four days after his fifty-sixth birthday, Woollcott suffered a heart attack while he was on the air on a broadcast of “The People’s Platform” at CBS radio, discussing with Rex Stout and others the question “Is Germany Curable?” Woollcott was rushed to the hospital, where he died that night. For more than a decade Woollcott had been one of Wilder’s closest friends. Wilder had dedicated Our Town to Woollcott, and in their prolific, multilayered correspondence there are intimations of the conversations they enjoyed over the years, at Neshobe, in New York and Chicago, and wherever they met. The letters brim with mutual affection.

  As a letter writer Wilder usually tailored his voice to fit the recipient of the letter. In his copious correspondence with his family, he often shielded them from bad news, editing himself and his own needs and concerns out of his consideration for their needs or worries or expectations. Wilder exchanged many letters with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas but was, for the most part, Gertrude’s witness, listener, and encourager. During his long, rich correspondence with Sibyl Colefax, she was, most often, Wilder’s witness, listener, and encourager. In his letters to Woollcott, Wilder could be completely himself, confiding the details of what he was doing, seeing, thinking, feeling, writing. He counted on Woollcott for forthright advice; lively and sometimes wicked gossip; private counsel and public support. Woollcott was at times Wilder’s mentor, at times his critic, and very often his advocate. They had great fun together, in person and on paper, and had many friends in common—Ned Sheldon, Ruth Gordon, Sibyl Colefax, and Orson Welles among them.

  Years later, in 1951, Wilder would agree to write about Woollcott, the friend and correspondent, in “Five Thousand Letters to Alexander Woollcott” an essay unpublished in his lifetime, but intended for the Harvard University Bulletin to commemorate the deposit of Woollcott’s letters and papers in Harvard’s Houghton Library. Woollcott enjoyed a gregariousness “not primarily of talent or brains, but of the heart,” Wilder wrote. Woollcott believed in maintaining, cultivating, and defending his friendships. He was a “born letter-writer” who knew how to communicate one-to-one. Woollcott had been engaged all his life, Wilder said, in

  constructing for himself a persona, a façade-characterization, by virtue of which he was able to live with such buoyancy and such intensity among his fellow beings. . . . Woollcott’s persona was delightful, clamorous for attention, exasperating, sentimental, moralizing, and could have strains of rigorous moral elevation. . . . It combined the elements of being a kindly and indulgent uncle with those of being a willful, crotchety domestic tyrant.11

  A decade before Woollcott died, Wilder wrote to thank him for “sitting at your desk, loyally refusing to believe your ears while I try to disentangle my foolish thoughts, loyally listening to my character and not my words, loyally editing me.”12

  CAPTAIN WILDER was promoted to major April 15, 1943, and assigned to the 12th Air Force intelligence section in Constantine, Algeria, attached to the Army Air Forces Mediterranean Theater of Operations headquarters. “I felt no yearnings for advancement,” Wilder wrote to his brother, “except for one thing: a Captain at my age level is not allowed to go overseas. Now I can and shall soon. (But would it be fun to see Father’s and S. D. Thacher’s face on receipt of the news.)”13 He echoed that sentiment in a letter to Dwight Dana: “Picture my father’s face if he’d been told that Thornton had been advanced to a Major and in a HQ Department called Management, Control, Organizational Planning.”14

  Before he departed for overseas duty Wilder wrote to his brother, “First sign of old age is the often warned and often pooh-poohed one that bachelorhood is less a single blessedness the older you grow. All my colleagues at the office here have fine wives and children, and I confess to the first signs of envy. Yours are the best, and give ’em my love.”15

  ONE OF the pleasures Wilder drew from military life was that he could concentrate on one job, rather than juggle dozens of matters, as he had to do in his complicated civilian life. The Skin of Our Teeth had been running on Broadway for six months, and problems behind the scenes mounted rather than subsided. In a very short time Wilder, Isabel, and Montgomery Clift had formed a friendship that would last over the years, so that Wilder was far more worri
ed about Clift than the play when illness had forced him to drop out of the cast in March 1943. Wilder’s relationship with Michael Myerberg was anything but cordial, however, and Wilder’s last deed before going overseas was to write a stern letter of advice to Myerberg about his mishandling of The Skin of Our Teeth. With their standard six-month contracts running out, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, and Tallulah Bankhead were leaving the play. Wilder blamed their departure on Myerberg, who had “locked up” his mind “in a steel brace,—and transferred the operations of the reason over to sheer blocked unlistening will.” He urged Myerberg to do his best to safeguard the production.16