Meanwhile he was working on The Ides of March, his “novel-in-letters about Julius Caesar and the scandal of the profanation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea.”12 The Roman “good goddess,” or goddess of fertility, the Bona Dea was worshipped in secret rites by aristocratic Roman matrons and the Vestal Virgins, and at least one ceremony had allegedly been violated by the presence of a man in disguise, said to be the Roman politician Clodius Pulcher. Wilder incorporated the character and the event into the novel he had been thinking about since his first Roman sojourn in 1920–21. He was also filling his manuscript with Caesar’s ideas about leadership, politics, power, and liberty, as well as Cicero’s thoughts on the poetry of Catullus.13
The work was going slowly but he kept at it, dispatching Isabel to New York and then to London in his stead to represent his interests in Jed Harris’s revival of Our Town—an assignment that proved to be a full-time job for Isabel, who welcomed the travel and the excitement, even though Harris was as difficult and demanding as ever. Already Isabel was becoming the historian and archivist of her brother’s work, as well as his proxy and his agent on the scene. When Amos wrote to inquire about how Thornton’s plays were faring, Isabel gave him an accounting: The Italian dramatic company run by Wilder’s friend, the great Italian actress Elsa Merlini, had produced Our Town in Italy in 1939, despite Fascist efforts to disrupt the performances. She was now touring Italy with the play in her repertory. Merlini had told Wilder that while many Italians did not “completely understand Act I and II,” they “adored and understood Act III” and waited patiently to see it.14
Isabel also reported to Amos that Our Town had been performed in Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina, and Hungary, and, in a pirated production, in Spain. Our Town was the first foreign play to be performed in Berlin soon after the occupation, with audiences transfixed as they sat or stood in the rubble of buildings. Plays could be performed only by approval of the occupying powers in each country, and Isabel noted that “the Russian authorities stopped it” in their zone in Berlin after three days, purportedly because the play was “unsuitable for the Germans so soon,—too democratic.” Our Town was successfully performed in Munich, however, and Wilder’s Swiss-based agent, who handled the German-language productions of the play in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, let them know that it was being done all over Germany. Our Town had played during the war in military prison camps, and in a USO performance in Holland. The leaders of a festival to celebrate the liberation of Holland sought the rights to perform The Skin of Our Teeth because, they said, “it speaks for them” and “the whole world at this time rising out of ruins.” Authorities in Japan requested permission to translate and perform Our Town in native Japanese theaters because of its reflection of the “American and democratic way of life and the art and literature it represents.”15 American occupation authorities were already beginning to turn to Wilder as an artistic voice during what would become the Cold War.16
Wilder said to an interviewer in 1948:
One of the greatest gratifications of my writing life has been the reception of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth in Germany. During the run of Skin in New York I was already in the service, but I was astonished at the fact it was never listed among plays dealing with the war, the preoccupation then in everyone’s mind. The Germans not only had no doubt that it dealt with the war, but found that the role of Cain throughout the play, and the third act, had for them all but unbearable actuality.
He noted that the Russians said they banned Our Town because it glorified the family, and Skin because it represented war “as inevitable.” But, Wilder said, “To a half-attentive listener Skin says the very contrary.”17 In those postwar days, when people were hungry for normalcy and hope, Wilder’s plays were establishing him as a familiar voice, American as well as international. In half-destroyed, makeshift theaters around the globe, diverse audiences were finding personal as well as universal resonance in his characters and themes.
ISABEL WILDER stood at a crossroads in the 1940s as she took on more and more of the responsibility for overseeing her brother’s literary affairs, as well as Charlotte’s medical treatment. In 1939 Isabel had entered into a publishing agreement with Coward-McCann, which held the option to publish the novels she hoped to write after Let Winter Go. For an advance of three hundrd dollars, she agreed to deliver a new novel in the fall of 1939, a deadline later postponed to September 1, 1940. During that time Isabel also worked on a play, and while she did deliver the novel in 1940, she withdrew it just before it went to the printer, recalling that she did so because of “the outbreak of the War.”18 Tim Coward had earlier admonished Isabel to make prudent decisions about her own literary career. “You have got to get going with your own development or you never will,” he chided. “I know this business of the theatre is fascinating and can eat up the years. If you want to be a sort of general advance agent, stage manager, and go-between for Thornton, that is all right, if you do it with your eyes open. But you are not going to do much creative stuff yourself as long as you do the other.”19
Isabel kept trying to write after the war, but gradually set aside her own creative work and concentrated on Thornton’s. During the war, with her brother far away, Charlotte hospitalized, and her mother growing older, Isabel had become the family’s official “stage manager”—orchestrating Charlotte’s care, Thornton’s literary business, her mother’s daily life. Whether these duties served as the reason or the excuse, they increasingly consumed her attention and energy, and Isabel set aside her own writing—with some relief, it may be speculated, for she had always found writing hard work. She could never be certain that she hadn’t ridden her brother’s coattails to her first publishing contract with one of her brother’s publishers. Marriage and a home of her own had eluded her, but now she had a brother, a sister, and a mother who needed and depended on her, and she devoted her energy to them.
Charlotte, meanwhile, faced her own battles throughout the forties, still declining, for the most part, to acknowledge that she was or ever had been physically or mentally ill, still refusing to cooperate with her doctors and nurses, alternating between lethargy and depression, and periods of aggression and hostility—toward her family, her caregivers, and her fellow patients. Sometimes she spent hours writing poetry or prose, or letters, some cogent, some irrational, to friends, relatives, or strangers. Often antisocial and belligerent, she did not want to engage with other patients, or, at times, with her family members when they came to visit. She also began to suffer gastrointestinal and other serious physical health problems.
While Thornton had moved during the war years from the United States to North Africa to Italy and home again, Charlotte had moved to the Westchester branch of New York Hospital in White Plains, then to Harlem Valley State Hospital in Wingdale, New York, and finally to the Long Island Home, a private psychiatric hospital in Amityville, New York. She was transferred there in January 1945, on the recommendation and referral of Wilder’s friend Dr. Thomas Rennie. By 1944 Charlotte was convinced that there were at least three people masquerading as Thornton Wilder, disguising themselves with makeup, using her brother’s name, and even writing his books and plays. “The Thornton Wilder who wrote The Skin of Our Teeth is not the same man who wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” she told Isabel.20
Charlotte clung to her own dreams of writing. She had not lost her “devotion” to her “expressive needs,” she wrote to Evelyn Scott, but she had no privacy at Amityville, and she felt that her words were “read and returned to her mockingly.”21 In November 1945 Charlotte wrote Evelyn that she had to throw away “about eight months’ work, some of it . . . the most ‘precious’ ” she had ever done. She couldn’t see visitors at Amityville, she said to Scott, “not even you.” When people came to see her they seemed like strangers, she wrote, “some of them nicer than in life; but—the psychiatrist’s ace trump, I suppose, a club. Thornton twelve feet high, without the hat!”22
Charlotte wrote angry, often i
ncoherent letters to her family, including one to her mother on April 15, 1945, about how no one in the family appreciated her poetry, or Isabella’s. Charlotte spoke of her mother’s demands of “impossible perfection.”23 She wrote to Amos in 1946 asking him to return to her the manuscript she called “I Remember,” which she had entrusted to Evelyn Scott, who in turn had given it to Amos for safekeeping. “Could you at, at your convenience, send it to me?” Charlotte asked her brother. “It is so personal in character that I doubt I shall ever offer it for publication: that too, is why I do not suggest that you read it, before sending it, should you feel the inclination to do so.”24 Charlotte chastised Amos: “I am well, not ill, never having been ill, and should be allowed to leave here,” she wrote, blaming Amos, Thornton, and their mother for withholding permission.25
Difficult as it was, the family believed that Charlotte was where she had to be, and they worked closely with her doctors, visited her when the doctors approved, and provided generously for all her personal needs—right down to, later, the pipes and tobacco she enjoyed smoking.
IN HAMDEN, Isabella and Isabel collaborated long after Thornton came home from the war to buffer him from stress and shield him from people he did not want to see. They entertained friends whose company would be good for him, however. “Our house is honored this weekend by two Golden Guests, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh,” Thornton wrote to Amos in May 1946. “Larry, the greatest English actor in 200 years, says he is using the drive down here to study Lear which he brings to London in the Fall!”26 He called Olivier and Leigh “the Dioscuri” because he said, “I like to think of happy married couples as twins.”27
Thinking that rest by the sea would be good for Thornton and his work, Isabella and Isabel decided they should spend part of the summer of 1946 on Nantucket. It was there, near the end of June, that Isabella finally acknowledged to her children that she was very ill and needed help. She had cancer and had been trying to conceal the gravity of her illness from the family, including her sister, Charlotte. “She was suddenly taken ill last Thursday and we lost her Saturday morning,” Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer. “During the illness all her dear traits were before us in a new light—her self-effacement, her unwillingness to be a subject of concern, her Scots independence—her wanting to go through it all in her own way—all unforgettable and finding its way into the book I’m working on.”28 He wrote to his longtime friend William Rose Benét, “Henceforth the big things and the small things of life lose half their force because we cannot share them with her.”29 A poet to the end of her life, Isabella wrote about death in what was to be her last poem, found on the table next to her bed after she died. It began, “This earth is my favorite heaven! / Oh do not bid me go hence.”30
When Isabella died Wilder lost an encourager and a trusted critic as well his mother and the center of his family life. Facets of Isabella’s personality and character are etched into the mothers Wilder portrayed onstage and in the pages of his fiction, especially in the dreams that they nurtured in their children. After his mother’s death Wilder immediately set out to reconfigure his family life. He relinquished plans to go abroad, in order to stay at Deepwood Drive with Isabel, at least until Christmas, “finishing the novel and sort-of re-establishing a home. Important for Isabel is the feeling that she is needed and useful somewhere; otherwise—you can see—she seems to hang in mid-air.”31
FOR WILDER 1946 was a year of continual losses, his mother’s death first of all. Charlotte was growing worse. His friend and confidant Ned Sheldon died April 1. Gertrude Stein died July 27, after undergoing cancer surgery. In the fall Wilder wrote to Alice B. Toklas of “the several Gertrudes”—of “the Gertrude who with zest and vitality could make so much out of every moment of the daily life,” of her capacity for friendship and “intellectual combat,” and the “giant-Gertrude” who “broke the milestones behind her.”32 He would understand if she had chosen someone else to be her literary executor, he said. In fact, in a clause in her will written just before her surgery, Stein had put her longtime friend Carl Van Vechten in charge of decisions about her unpublished work. Wilder offered Toklas his assistance with Stein’s papers at Yale in any case, especially since he had persuaded her to deposit them there originally, and had recently “interested the editors of the Yale University Press in a possible publication of Four in America.”33
When Yale University Press published Four in America in 1947, Wilder provided in the introduction a clear summation that probably endowed Stein’s work with more clarity than it actually possessed. Her work was unorthodox, Wilder emphasized, encouraging readers to “relax your predilection for the accustomed, the received, and be ready to accept an extreme example of idiosyncratic writing.”34 He paid special note to a question that had fascinated him long before he met Stein: He thought that it could be said “that the fundamental occupation of Miss Stein’s life was not the work of art but the shaping of a theory of knowledge, a theory of time, and a theory of the passions. These theories finally converged on the master question: What are the various ways in which creativity works in everyone? That is the subject of this book.”35 Twenty years later Wilder would pose the question in his own way as a motif in The Eighth Day: “Nothing is more interesting than the inquiry as to how creativity operates in anyone, in everyone: mind, propelled by passion, imposing itself, building and unbuilding.”36
WILDER SET aside the manuscript of The Ides of March so that he could take care of matters at home after his mother died. Once he felt he could leave Isabel, he drove without mishap to the Gulf Coast. In Biloxi and Pass Christian, Mississippi, and in New Orleans, Wilder forged ahead with his novel, doing “some fascinating Cleopatra-Caesar business,” and then moving back to the Catullus story and the Clodius conspiracy. “My narrative interest is threatened by too much colorful digression,” he said.37 Wilder spent most of the winter at Mérida on the Yucatán Peninsula. “The novel’s going fine. It talks to me all the time,” he wrote to Isabel. “Last night it woke me up just as The Skin used to do in Quebec.”38
All his writing life Wilder craved solitude, the long, unstructured blocks of time that were essential for unfettered imagination, and then the patient work of creating the story and the characters and rendering them on the page. But the solitude often came with a price of loneliness and renunciation. While he often hated the solitude, he found it was “the only way to work.”39 In Mérida he quickly settled into a daily routine of work, breaking about five in the afternoon to “go over to the ruins until dark, taking the best guide with me or some learned treatise from the hotel’s library.”40 He was fascinated with the Mayan ruins at Mérida and Chichén Itzá. “The ruins are overwhelming,” he wrote to the poet and translator Leonard Bacon:
Were life 200 years long I’d love to set aside 5 to “fix” the infinitely complex symbolism of Gods and forces on the sculptures. . . . I feel in my bones the archaeologists are wrong,—as they were wrong in Greece for a hundred years. Those dandruff-covered library mice, the savants, are not the men to interpret the violence and fear-haunted imagination and the ceremonial magnificence of a race like Maya-Toltec.41
His explorations of the Mayan ruins provided an evocative parallel to his literary explorations of the ruins of Caesar’s Rome, as he interpreted in his novel the “violence and fear-haunted imagination and ceremonial magnificence” of Caesar’s empire and era. By late March 1947 in Mérida, where it was “hot as hell,” Wilder was thinking about returning to New Orleans—although he hated to move just then, he wrote Isabel, “because the daily novel-writing thing is going fine.” He had written some “new stuff” and “some more that’s very wicked and very funny. The book’s yelling with life.”42
He was back in New Orleans in April 1947, and then in Washington through May, reading Roman history and literature at the Library of Congress, and settling once and for all on the title of the novel. In late July he was at Saratoga Springs “working like a beaver” because he had promised to deliver the
text of The Ides of March to Harper by August 1, 1947, “a wild and irresponsible engagement that I cannot live up to.”43
As his absorption in finishing the novel grew, his attention to The Alcestiad had declined. Once more he gave up his work on the play, in part because of his postwar “malaise,” but mainly, he wrote to the Trolleys, because “my ideas about life had changed and I felt it to be sentimental. Instead I’m working on my novel about Julius Caesar, told in letters exchanged between the characters—and such characters!! Caesar, Cicero, Catullus and Cleopatra!!”44 He came to this subject naturally, having grown up reading the classics at home and at school. From his early teens he was especially intrigued with Caesar and Cleopatra. The idea for The Ides of March, as has been noted, took root when he was a student at the American Academy in Rome in 1920–21, and he had sketched the plot in a letter to his mother in 1922.45 Over the years he explored the concept in his journal, as in this entry in February 1939:
Suppose I wrote The Top of the World and prefaced it with this note: “in this novel I have put into Julius Caesar’s mouth words gathered from many authors in many different ages. The discourse to Catullus on nature is a paraphrase of Goethe’s ‘Fragment’ of 1806. The arguments on the immortality of the soul in the conversation with Cicero are from Walter Savage Landor and he in turn was indebted for several of them to Plato and Cicero.”46
He had been gathering sources for The Ides of March for more than twenty-five years, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes intentionally. He was “deep in the politics of 44 B.C.,” he had written to Stein and Toklas from Austria in 1937 when he was reading a “very good and frightening book called Der Kampf um Caesar’s Erbe by Ferdinand Mainzer.”47 In 1942, on his cultural mission to South America, he had discovered a “new enthusiasm” in the figure of the legendary Venezuelan general Simón Bolívar (1783–1830). “I read the thousands of letters by him and laugh all the time at the contemplation of such gifts,” Wilder wrote.48 He was so drawn to Bolívar’s combination of despair and hope that he modeled his Caesar in part on the general: “For a Caesar I was richly fed by a great admiration for the thousands of pages of Simón Bolivar’s correspondence: a lofty smiling half-sad unshakenness in the face of the betrayal of friends and beneficiaries.”49 Wilder also immersed himself in the letters of Cicero. He acknowledged the influence of other writers, such as his longtime affinity for Goethe; his deepening knowledge of the work of Kierkegaard, thanks in part to his brother Amos, and to their friend Walter Lowrie, a noted Kierkegaard scholar and translator; and his reading of Sartre and his translation of Sartre’s play. The Ides of March was also shaped by Wilder’s talks on leadership with Gertrude Stein, and his own wartime encounters with military leaders and the politics and propaganda of military and civic power.
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