Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  for two of my compelling preoccupations: man seen in all his history; mind seen as a force struggling out of the biologic undergrowth—to say nothing of the secondary preoccupations: woman as instigatrix; narrations as the means of depicting the scientific process; and so on.49

  But the idea for the novel faded as quickly as it had materialized, and soon Wilder was back in the United States, busily looking outward at events, instead of inward at the bothersome questions that had surfaced in his journal soliloquy, now pushed aside as he began to prepare in earnest for his year at Harvard. He spent part of August playing the Stage Manager in Our Town at the Wellesley Summer Theatre in Massachusetts—the twelfth company with whom he had performed the role. He advised every playwright, he wrote to the Laurence Oliviers, “to get somehow somewhere that side of the footlights,” for there were certain lessons a playwright could learn only by putting his feet on the floor of a stage.50

  As a citizen and a former soldier, Wilder was deeply concerned that summer about the prospect of war in Korea, writing lengthy passages in his journal about the nature of war, about wars of aggression versus wars of liberation. On July 8 he wrote that the Korean War was “about here in part due to this mixture of relief, alerted self-protection and outraged responsibility. Tragically, it is also due to the fact that in our time we are accustomed to war, and custom is almost habit and habit is almost appetite.”51

  In his journal that summer Harry Truman and Korea shared space with Goethe, Palestrina (the sixteenth-century composer whose liturgical music Wilder had studied for years), and Kierkegaard, and then with American literary figures as Wilder moved closer to the beginning of the Harvard year. By August he was almost as engrossed in analyzing Thoreau’s Walden as he had been in analyzing the work of Lope and Joyce—and that earlier experience and those skills and tactics proved immensely useful as he built his Harvard lectures. As he embarked on detailed examinations of the work of Whitman, Poe, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Melville, what began as scholarly analysis soon transformed into a deep absorption in the sort of research that he called high adventure. Soon Wilder was making significant discoveries about the American experience, the American character, the American time sense, and the American language—the “syntax of freedom.”52

  He also wrote in his journal about the loss of people he loved. Shortly before he arrived in Cambridge to begin the Norton year, he received the news of the death of Sibyl Colefax. He had spent time with Sibyl in London in March 1950, finding her thin and fragile, bent with arthritis, and often confined to bed—but still full of spirit, curiosity, hospitality. He visited her on three consecutive afternoons, and her house, as always, was full of company, including that week T. S. Eliot and Noël Coward. She died at home September 22, 1950. She was for Wilder an irreplaceable friend and an indefatigable listener, witness, encourager, and adviser. In his journal he mourned the loss:

  It is as though with the death of Gertrude and Sibyl and the removal by distance and situation of others I have been left not only high and dry of objects [of friendship] but that the very faculty itself has cooled. I accept the condition within myself . . . with a theoretical concern, for have I not always believed emphatically that all and every derivation of Eros is the sole fount of energy?53

  AS WILDER’S residency at Harvard began on October 1, 1950, he settled into his quarters at Dunster House and tackled his lectures with excitement. He also agreed to teach, although he was not obligated to do so. He very soon found himself overextended, with a jammed schedule. As he explained later,

  every time the phone rang I said “yes”—not to “social” events (I made the rule never to cross the River Charles) but to speak; and the forums and discussion groups and hospital benefit committees and Harvard Dames clubs and so on are legion.54

  From the outset of his Harvard year, however, he tried to concentrate on his Norton lectures, outlining them in detailed pages in his journal. In November he worked on “The American Writer as a Speaker and to a Multitude,” a title he would change, and on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Foretopman, as well as Thoreau’s life and work. In December he concentrated on the nature of a work of art, especially literary forms, drawing examples from the work of Walt Whitman, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, and Benjamin Franklin.55 The first of the three eventually published Norton lectures explored the evolution of the American language, with special attention to Melville; the American loneliness, focusing on Thoreau; and American loneliness and individuality in a rich biographical discussion of Dickinson and her work. Whitman, Poe, and Melville were Wilder’s subjects for the other lectures.56

  He delivered the first Norton, “Adapting an Island Language to a Continental Thought,” to an audience of eight hundred in Harvard’s New Lecture Hall on November 8. Next, on November 15, came “Thoreau, or the Bean-Row in the Wilderness,” followed by “Emily Dickinson, or the Articulate Inarticulate” on November 29, and “Walt Whitman and the American Loneliness” on December 6. On February 20, 1951, Wilder devoted his fifth Norton lecture to Edgar Allan Poe. His sixth and final lecture, “Melville: The Real and the Forged Ambiguities,” was given May 16. All the lectures were laced with observations about the evolution and significance of the fundamental American characteristics Wilder identified: First, the evolution of the American language—the transformation, especially by nineteenth-century American writers, of “an old island language into a new continental one.”57 Second, the fact that “Americans are still engaged in inventing what it is to be American.”58 Third, the idea that Americans “are disconnected. They are exposed to all place and all time. . . . They have a relation, but it is to everywhere, to everybody, and to always.”59 Next, the view that for the free, independent, and individualistic American, there is a “loneliness that accompanies independence and the uneasiness that accompanies freedom.”60 Finally, the observation that it is not easy to be an American, and that American writers offer various solutions to this difficulty. These key characteristics are also descriptive of Wilder’s own work—his transformation of the American vernacular into a continental language; his attention to what it means to be an American; his sense of the connections of everyone to every place and every time; his awareness and his experience of the American loneliness; and his appreciation for the varieties of expression in American life and literature.

  Wilder discovered a particular affinity for Emily Dickinson, writing that while she was “in all appearance the loneliest of beings,” she “solved the problem in a way which is of importance to every American: by loving the particular while living in the universal.”61 As Wilder explored these American characteristics and their manisfestations in nineteenth-century American literature, he drew on the lives of the authors to provide context for their work, constructing insightful biographical portraits, especially of Dickinson. There are autobiographical echoes in his analyses as well, especially in his discussion of father-daughter relations in Emily Dickinson’s life—dynamics that reflect the experiences of his own sisters, and of his brother and himself. Dickinson, Wilder wrote, was the daughter of “a very grim patriarch” who had, as she herself said, a “lonely life and lonelier death.”62 What daughter and father both desired was to win from each other “love, attentive love, and the sense of one’s identity rebounding from some intelligent and admired being.” Knowing all too well the dynamics of his parents’ marriage, Wilder observed that a patriarchal father may also have “long since quenched any spontaneous femininity in his wife. (Unquestionable authority is an offense against love, as it is against anything else, and it is ever seeking new territories to overwhelm.)”63

  WILDER WAS an enormous hit at Harvard, but he wore himself out in the process. On Monday, March 1, he awoke to sharp pains in his back, thigh, and left leg. He managed to hobble to his ten o’clock class, but the pain grew so intense that he was taken to the Stillman Infirmary, and from there, to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was treated for a strained or displaced sacroiliac. Wilder would be hospi
talized for a month—a time of “immobile days and largely wakeful nights.” He was unable to sit up even to write in his journal. His mind, sharpened by pain and by the drugs he was given, was “very active,” so much so that in two and a half weeks he had reread Moby-Dick, Great Expectations, and War and Peace, among other books. He longed to write in his journal about his reading, as well as about pain, and the “professional formation and deformation of nurses,” but he had to postpone writing anything at all so as not to arouse “the slumbering sciatic nerve.”64

  He believed that his “whole illness has been obviously a retort of offended Nature against my excessive exertions.”65 He enumerated them in his journal when he could safely write again: the Norton lectures; his two classes; his correspondence, more than twenty items a day; his ongoing literary work; the engagements he agreed to undertake, sixteen classes and lectures in less than a month in February alone.66 Gertrude Stein used to warn Wilder that every individual possessed a “quotient of solitude and gregariousness” and if those conditions were not in balance, illness could result. That was exactly his plight, Wilder wrote in his journal. “My requirement for solitude is high and I was leading a flagrantly gregarious life.”67 He was paying a steep price for it.

  During that period of recuperation and enforced rest, Wilder’s desire to write in his journal soon overcame his incapacity. He refused to mark time. Unable to sit or stand to write, he stretched out facedown in his hospital bed and filled page after page for what he now thought of as his Norton book. He was released from the hospital at the end of March and moved to the Hotel Continental in Cambridge to continue his recuperation. His left leg still ached “faintly” and writing was still “very awkward” because he still could not sit comfortably. Nevertheless, he managed to write long accounts of past experiences, an extended analysis of George Bernard Shaw, a passage on Dr. Schweitzer, and new assertions about the American experience: Americans “are inventing a new kind of human being—a new relationship between one human being and another—a new relationship between the individual and the all.”68

  He grew to love the idea of the Norton book, but, he insisted, he was not an essayist, not a critic, “not a ‘non-fiction’ man.” He was an experienced lecturer and public speaker, however, and thus understood that there is a great difference in speaking to the ear and writing “for the eye.” Because he believed firmly that his lectures could not be published as they had been spoken, he set to work rewriting them with that in mind.69

  FOR WILDER the decade of the fifties was a period of unfinished business—chiefly the Norton book and The Emporium and other plays he wanted to write. For several years he would carry around the Norton manuscript, saddled with guilt because he had not finished it, somehow could not finish it. As he often did, he envisioned a project much vaster than he could accomplish, or was obligated to deliver. Rather than write down his lectures, already brilliantly presented from the podium, he conceived a book of elegantly crafted essays on American literature, coupled with profound essays on world literature. He was ultimately thwarted by his own grandiose expectations.

  Even so, Wilder’s most important work in the decade of the fifties was accomplished not as the playwright or as the novelist, but as the lecturer/scholar, the teacher, the public citizen. For the next five years he often turned to his journal in the ongoing effort to articulate, craft, and test his ideas about American characteristics as revealed in nineteenth-century literature and applied in twentieth-century life. He was driven in part by the obligation to ready the Norton lectures for publication, but even more, as a writer and a citizen, he wanted to understand the national experience, to interpret it, to speculate about its implications for the future.

  He gave his final Norton lecture on May 16, 1951. As his Harvard year wound to its close, Wilder expressed a hope and a promise in his personal quest for the right way: “I shall yet produce a work—a work and a self—which in its relative and limited proportions will be its justification.”70 He thought of himself as “an observer and an onlooker,” he wrote to Howard Lowry, president of the College of Wooster in Ohio. During the Harvard year Wilder made an earnest effort, he wrote, to “belong, to be in and of a community. Well, by the time I left I knew every third person I passed on the street—I sure was a citizen of Cambridge—but it was the most difficult year of my life.”71

  He found it “very gratifying” to receive an honorary doctorate at the Harvard commencement, and agreed to address the Harvard alumni reunion that day—an event, he said, that “many people throng to; they expect 8000 in Harvard Yard. . . . Damn, damn, I can never talk in general matters on America Whither, or our Age of Anxiety, or the Destiny of the New World. Damn. I’ve been working on it all morning.”72 He titled his address “Thoughts for Our Times,” and framed his remarks as a comparison of the “thought-worlds” of students when he himself had been one in 1917–20, and those he had known as a teacher in the thirties at the University of Chicago and at Harvard in 1950–51. Students in the fifties, he observed, were living in stormy times—the “Age of Upheaval” and the “Age of Anxiety,” as the period had been called. He was optimistic about the future because modern young people understood that “the things that separate men from one another are less important than the things that they have in common.”73 Wilder concluded:

  All the languages in the world are but local differentiations of one planetary tongue. These concepts are very full of something frightening, but they are also full of promise. Oh, it is a lonely and alarming business to feel oneself one in the creation of billions and billions, and especially lonely if one’s parents seem never to have felt that sensation at all, but it is exciting and inspiriting to be among the first to hail and accept the only fraternal community that finally can be valid—that emerging, painfully emerging, unity of those who live on the one inhabited star.74

  In that Cold War era, while many writers and artists turned their attention away from the concerns of the world community, Wilder was articulating a bold global view in a cynical and suspicious time. On international stages in South America and in Europe, he had interpreted American characteristics for people from other countries and cultures. During his watershed year at Harvard, Wilder interpreted the American experience for the American audience in a nation seeking to redefine its identity in a postwar world. Masterful teacher and lecturer that he was, Wilder had learned a great deal, he said, from his “young friends in Cambridge” that year, and it gave him hope for the future. He told his audience in Harvard Yard that these young people had shown him “over and over again that to them it is as simple as breathing that all societies are but variants of one another . . . and the human adventure is much the same in all times and all places.”75

  34

  KALEIDOSCOPIC VIEWS

  No view of life, then, is real to me save that it presents itself as kaleidoscopic,—which does not mean essentially incoherent. (The very children’s toys of that name show us always a beautifully ordered though multi-fragmented pattern.)

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  “Notes Toward the Emporium,” February 15, 1954

  The United States and Europe (1950s)

  Wilder was so exhausted by his Harvard experience that he told Isabel he would never forgive the university for the way he had aged in just that one year. “As far as Harvard is concerned,” he said, “the phrase is unjust; it is myself to blame. . . . Now it remains to be seen, not whether I can recuperate to the extent of being an adequate 54, but whether I can enter into the rights and privileges of being a good 60.”1 He promised himself and his lawyer that for at least a year and a half he was going to “withdraw from all that speaking-teaching-bowing-smiling racket—even if I have to dig into capital for it.”2

  He spent most of the summer of 1951 outlining and writing passages for his Norton book. He was expanding his theories of the American sense of time and place, the American transformations of the English language, and the “American Disconnectedness,” and he con
sidered developing a section on American religion. He continued to explore the work of Poe, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Henry James with much the same fervor he had given to Joyce and Lope de Vega. He decided that Hawthorne was not truly an American writer. He found Emerson “repugnant,” writing to Malcolm Cowley: “Isn’t he awful? Yet how that colossus bestrode the world for so long! His ideas basely, soothingly, flattering all that is facile and evasive in the young republic. . . . Melville’s copies of [Emerson’s] Essays are in the Harvard Library and it’s a joy to see how Melville dug his pencil into the page in scornful attention.”3 Wilder sketched out a “chapter” on Poe tantalizingly called “How Literature Can Be Made out of Necrophilic Sadism.”4

  He polished an essay titled “Toward An American Language,” which was published in the July 1952 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, with a photograph of Wilder on the cover. Because the journal would serialize only three of the six Norton lectures, Wilder set to work cutting and “making a sort of cuisine of passages robbed from the other chapters.” He worried that there might be a “sort of ‘incoherence in application,’ ” but believed that would be smoothed out in the Norton book he was determined to write.5 In August the Atlantic Monthly published Wilder’s essay “The American Loneliness,” with a focus on Thoreau, and in November, “Emily Dickinson,” which turned out to be the last publication of any of the Norton material in Wilder’s lifetime.