Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  By the end of March he was confined to bed in a military hospital in Italy. On March 29, 1945, Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer, “I’m mortified to say that I’m in a military hospital bed!!! For the first time in my life in two wars. A deep-lodged cold not improved by two trips to Jugoslav moved into one ear. However I will be discharged in a day or two. My, I’m ashamed; my record of perfect health is broken.”54 Since boyhood he had been prone to painful ear infections, and as he grew older, they recurred and often left him temporarily deaf in the affected ear. Apparently it was a painful abscess of the inner ear that forced him to be hospitalized. While he was in the hospital, Wilder amused himself reading Plato’s Republic, Moby-Dick, and various detective stories. He also mulled over the themes of three plays that, he said, were “ready and waiting to be written.” However, he reflected, “Now that I’m old they don’t come so spontaneously; they’re built and calculated more carefully, and weighed from all sides.” Yet he felt that “their dramatic form seems to get bolder and more adventurous all the time.”55

  When he was well enough to leave the hospital, Wilder spent the rest of April awaiting his discharge from the army and his final instructions from the State Department about the Paris assignment. He took a few days’ leave at an air force rest camp on Capri, wrapped up his duties at Caserta, and began to say good-bye to friends and colleagues. He was still in Caserta when the news came of President Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945. The president had looked gaunt and haggard when he posed for photographs during the Yalta Conference in the Crimea February 4–11, 1945, and was too ill by late March to carry the burden of wartime responsibilities. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. “We’re having a memorial service for the President this morning,” Wilder wrote to his family from Caserta April 14. “His death had a tremendous effect in this headquarters.”56

  Wilder was still there when the Germans signed a surrender agreement on April 29 at Caserta. By V-E Day, May 8, 1945, he was back in the United States, awaiting discharge orders in Miami. The paperwork was delayed by one bureaucratic snafu after another. “I’m in such a mess of red tape as has never been seen,” he wrote to Harry J. Traugott, his clerk in North Africa and Italy, describing the convoluted reassignment process.57

  Wilder had served in the war with distinction, confirmed by the award of the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. He received an honorary membership in “The Military Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” for his “ability, enthusiasm and indefatigable energy together with painstaking accuracy,” and the official citation noted that his work had “contributed materially to the efficiency and success of air operations.”58 (“Hah! Everybody laughed when little Thornton entered the Army,” he wrote.)59

  He received the news of the MBE in 1945, although the final paperwork was issued in stages by the British War Office and the U.S. War Department in 1946 and 1947, and his receipt of the actual Bronze Oak Leaf emblem that accompanied the MBE was delayed for more than two years because of the postwar “scarcity of supplies and material necessary to manufacture the British insignia.”60 But that summer of 1945, awaiting his discharge orders, Wilder wanted Sibyl Colefax to be “among the first to know” about the Military Order of the British Empire. “That with my Legion of Merit brings my three years of the war to a happy close,” he wrote to her. “There are few satisfactions greater than knowing you have the approval of your superiors in a job which involved their responsibility as well as your own. When I heard of this, I thought of my favorite Britisher in the world: ‘Sibyl will be pleased,’ I said.”61

  He did not regret a moment of his service, but he was eager for the war to be over. “Some of my colleagues are cynical when I talk of how wonderful the day of peace will be,” Wilder reflected. “I’m not; it’s wonderful enough to know that conscious death dealing has come to an end; the difficulties beyond may be formidable, but I am grateful enough for that cessation.”62

  WILDER SPENT more than four months in limbo, in Miami, New Haven, Hamden, and Washington, waiting in vain for his military discharge to come through. As for the assignment in Paris, he was simply physically unable to fulfill it, and had to notify Archie MacLeish that his doctors would not allow him to take it on. “It’s all off,” Wilder wrote Stein and Toklas in July. “The doctors say I must take 6 months’ to a year’s rest. . . . What’s my sickness? I don’t know. Everything and nothing. . . . There’s nothing organic the matter. There’s nothing that a revolver won’t cure. So as soon as I get out of the Army I’m going to Colorado to write plays.”63

  He was, in fact, badly run down, and his “long torpor” and “paralysis of the will” dragged on.64 In those post–World War II days, long before post-traumatic stress disorder was given its clinical name in 1980, “gross stress reaction” was the formal diagnostic term applied to problems such as those Wilder and other World War II veterans experienced. The profound aftereffects of war had been called combat fatigue or shell shock after World War I, and “soldier’s heart” after the Civil War. For Wilder there seemed then to be no cure but rest and time. His family alternately rejoiced in his return and worried about his health, and Isabel alerted friends to the seriousness of Wilder’s problems: He had come home “an exhausted, grey-green, limp image of his own former self,” she wrote to Sol Lesser.65 After eight weeks in the United States, he was “just beginning to show signs of being himself,” she wrote. Physically he was plagued by lingering ear trouble, occasional deafness, and “a fatigue so great that he will be many more months overcoming that and being in good enough shape to overcome the deafness and head congestion. He is weary to some inner core of being; ill to a point that it is a physical, nervous and with him, spiritual, illness too.”66

  After years of helping to make life-or-death decisions in the war, Wilder couldn’t seem to make the simplest decisions at home. He was restless and distracted, as if civilian life were too much for him. After a few days of driving the Green Hornet, he stripped the gears, but fortunately, spare parts for the expensive repairs were available in a nearby town. He had come home from the war “hungry and thirsty for music,” Isabel said, and he spent a great deal of time at the piano with an “unconscious sweetness of touch” although he didn’t always hit all the right notes. He seemed to take “infinite pleasure and comfort” from the portable Victrola they bought to replace the ones Isabel and her mother had given away to the prisoner-of-war drive.67

  As the summer wore on, Wilder would occasionally travel in to New York to see his theater agent, Harold Freedman, and his wife, or the director and producer Arthur Hopkins. When Thornton was up to company, Isabella and Isabel invited a few friends at a time to quiet luncheons or dinners at Deepwood Drive—Elia and Mollie Kazan, and Montgomery Clift, who was sometimes invited to spend a couple of days with the Wilders. Thornton had “discovered a most rewarding and happy friendship in Monty Clift, surely our rising great actor, only 24 now,” Isabel wrote.68 The bond between the two men grew stronger when Wilder learned that Clift was also a twin, and they talked at length about the significance of twinship.69 “I have a new friend—one T. N. Wilder—novelist—playwright,” Clift wrote in July 1945.70 He claimed Wilder as his uncle and his mentor.

  Wilder and his mother and sister hoped that writing might help to restore his health, and he began working again on The Alcestiad.71 Later in the summer Jed Harris traveled to Hamden for lunch and an afternoon of intense conversation that stimulated and even agitated Wilder. After Harris departed, Isabel wrote, Wilder “paced up and down the terrace” and not only delivered long scenes of The Alcestiad “in full dialogue, but acted out the parts, described the setting, even the props, the costumes.” He had shared parts of the play before, but as he walked and talked that sultry summer night, the whole play seemed to come clear to him. Isabel marked his return to writing as a turning point in her brother’s homecoming.72 Now Wilder went into his study each morning and came out energiz
ed and excited.

  More than thirty years later Isabel remembered that while her brother was “in a camp near Boston” waiting to be separated from the Army Air Forces, “his papers were lost” and that the commanding officer granted him a three-day pass to go to the Boston Public Library, “where he drowned himself once more in the Golden Age of Greece.”73 Wilder was at Camp Devens in Massachusetts in September 1945. On July 23, however, Isabel wrote to Sibyl Colefax that Thornton had lost the manuscript of the “almost completed first act,” but “doggedly and courageously he began again, from memory and also from beginning again.” The exact circumstances are unclear, but the fact remains that at some point Wilder lost his only copy of the working draft of his play, and reconstructed parts of it from memory, at the same time creating new versions of certain scenes. His own note about the loss does not record exactly when it happened, but the title page of the 1945 draft among his papers reads “THE ALCESTIAD/A PLAY OF QUESTIONS.” On the back of the page are Wilder’s brief annotations:

  Sketches up to and including the Tiresias scene of Act One had been made before the War and lost. Draft One of the first act, May and July 1945. Draft Two, begun July 8, 1945. This Draft Three begun (after the Completion of the First Drafts of Act II and half of Act III) on Dec [sic].74

  At last Thornton was again finding joy in writing.75 It seemed to his family that word by word, page by page, day by day, the act of writing was “restoring him.”76 There were flashes of his sense of humor in the few letters he wrote that summer of 1945. “In a word I have psycho-physico-somatic-hypsobybalic symptoms, and am enjoying them very much,” he said.77 Two activities were helping him: He was reading Kafka, and he was reading Kierkegaard. He wrote facetiously in a letter, “Just read twice Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and know that I haven’t got religious faith, that nobody ever has had it, and that it need not concern us.”78

  WHEN HE heard the news on August 14, 1945, that the war was over, Thornton was having dinner with his sister Janet in Washington, where his brother-in-law, Toby Dakin, was still stationed in the International Law Branch of the Judge Advocate General’s Office. They “wandered around among the crowds until two a.m., and gazed at the front of the White House,” Wilder wrote.79 He was “full of thoughts about the Atomic Bomb,” Wilder told Bill Layton. Those thoughts were going to “explode in the play I do when I’ve finished The Alcestiad, namely The Hell of the Vizier Kabäar; about the necessity of finding a non-religious expression for the religious (The Alcestiad); and always, always, about the War: and the millions of aspects there are to it.”80

  By August 20 Wilder was back in Miami again, still waiting for his official discharge. As he had often done in the past, Wilder wrote to Sibyl in detail about his work in progress. He hoped the acclaimed actress Elisabeth Bergner, an Austrian refugee, would star in his Alcestiad because she had the range to play the young Alcestis in the first act, the “golden young matron” in the second act, and the “agéd slave, water-bearer in her own palace, with scenes of tragic power and mystical elevation” in the third. “And all to be played,” Wilder wrote, “against that crazy atmosphere of the numinous that is possibly hoax and the charlatanism that may be divine. And the preposterous-comic continually married to the shudder of Terror.”81 The play was very difficult, if not impossible, to write, for it “must be subtended by one idea,” he said, “which is not an idea but a question (and the same questions as the Bridge of San Luis Rey!). . . .”82 He was keenly aware as he wrote that every scene must be “balanced just so,” and not resort to “dazzling theatrics.”83

  His other play in progress(The Hell of Vizier Kabäar, as he now referred to it) would be even more difficult, “but in a different way,” Wilder reflected.

  That will require the good old-fashioned plot-carpentry that I’ve never done; the joiner’s art that must be then rendered invisible, as though it were perfectly easy. . . . The danger of the Alcestiad is that the effectiveness may be greater than the content (to which Jed replied, quoting an old Jewish exclamation: “May you have greater troubles!” But what greater trouble could an artist have?) The Hell of . . . can’t run into that danger. Its content is not a hesitant though despairing question.84

  WILDER LEFT Florida with more manuscript pages in hand, but still no discharge orders. “From other people’s stories, I judge that postponements are the order of things in the Army,” his mother had written to him. After all, she observed, millions of men had had to be gotten into the army in “record time” and it was predictable that it would take time and some occasional “muddling” to get them out.85

  Lieutenant Colonel Wilder, soldier and playwright, finally received his separation papers at Camp Devens in Massachusetts on September 19, 1945.86

  32

  “POST-WAR ADJUSTMENT EXERCISE”

  [The Ides of March] was, in fact, my post-war adjustment exercise, my therapy. Part almost febrile high spirits and part uncompleted Speculations on the First Things.

  —THORNTON WILDER TO GLENWAY WESCOTT,

  April 7, 1948

  The United States, Mexico, England, and France (1940s)

  It is not only work which has kept me silent and interrupted my correspondence with even my best friends,” Wilder apologized to Eileen and Roland Le Grand in March of 1946. “It is a sort of post-war malaise which I won’t go into further lest I give the impression of self-pity or misanthropy or melancholia. It’s none of those things. Call it out-of-jointness, and forgive me. I think I’ve recovered now.”1 He was too optimistic, however, for his postwar adjustment and recovery would take far more time and effort than he anticipated, and he was only slowly “reacquiring habits of concentration and perseverance.”2 Another factor, no doubt, was that a military intelligence officer’s life is governed by the persistent protocols of secrecy—and prolonged enforced secrecy can exacerbate the isolation of an already intensely private man. In 1947 Wilder wrote to British friends June and Leonard Trolley, whose wartime wedding he had helped to arrange in Rome in 1945, “I had a sheltered life during the War and have no right to talk of post-war maladjustment, but that uprooting in my middle age did have bad after effects on me. One of them was a relapse into melancholia, lethargy and unsociableness. . . . What I needed was to work and in order to work, solitude.”3

  His work was his therapy, he said, and he threw himself into it, drafting scenes in his plays, working on the novel that would become The Ides of March, and taking up a “compelling” new enthusiasm—trying to establish the chronology of the estimated five hundred plays of Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635), the great playwright of the Spanish golden age. At times Wilder devoted ten-hour days to researching Lope de Vega in the Yale University Library, and traveled to other libraries as well to examine additional sources and collect new data. “I think this passion was a useful therapy,” he wrote; “pure research has nothing to do with human beings.” When he realized that this quest to date Lope’s plays could be a “Life-work” and that it was an escape from rather than a solution to his problems, he “willed” himself to “quit it,” but couldn’t stop.4 Instead, when he was supposed to be writing, he was often preoccupied

  all day and far into the night on the chronology of the plays of Lope de Vega (but out of the 500, only those between 1595 and 1610). Passion, fury and great delight. Yes, a compulsion complex. Sherlock Holmes as scholar. . . . It is perhaps my harbor from the atomic bomb. In the meantime, letters mount up, duties neglected.5

  The time was not entirely wasted, however, for Wilder actually found a kindred playwright in Lope who, as his essay “The New Art of Writing Plays” (1609) reveals, believed in departing from the traditional stage treatment of time and place, and suffusing his plays with both comedy and seriousness of purpose, contending that whether he was writing comedy or tragedy, a playwright could entertain an audience and at the same time communicate a moral purpose.6

  Lope soon had to make way for another of Wilder’s enthusiasms—existentialism, an inte
rest that had fallen on already seeded ground. He had been reading Kierkegaard and Kafka since before the war, and now turned in earnest to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, who lectured at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton, as well as at Carnegie Hall in New York on his 1946 visit to the United States, his second such tour. Wilder was absorbed, he said, “by Existential philosophy and its literary diffusion, especially in France.”7 Sartre and Wilder met on February 24, 1946, when Sartre gave two lectures at Yale, and they saw each other often that year. Later Sartre invited Wilder to translate Morts sans sépulture, his controversial new play, which would open in Paris that November. Sartre did not give Wilder a copy of the play until two years later, but he described it. “Jean-Paul Sartre has given me the American disposition of a play he’s written that would freeze your gullets,” Wilder wrote to Ruth Gordon and her new husband, the writer Garson Kanin. “Will any American manager produce it? Five French Maquis are variously tortured and raped by some Pétain militiamen. But it’s not about the Resistance movement; it’s about the dignity of man and the freedom of the will.”8

  By March 1946 Wilder believed he had almost finished The Alcestiad.9 He told his brother that the play was “about how Alcestis had real Kierkegaardian despair”—the despair born out of the struggle over whether and how to realize and connect to the Self, and to become the Self “grounded transparently in the Power which constituted it.”10 Wilder doubted whether Alcestis could resolve this dilemma by the time a three-act play was over.11